Dostoevsky on Modern Conservatism

On the advice of a friend, I have revised and updated a short 2009 essay on Fyodor Dostoevsky and modern conservatism. Translation is mine.

At first glance the U.S. Presidential Inauguration might seem another empty media spectacle. After all, the Commander-in-Chief is anointed by the infallible People, but he attains power ultimately to carry out the interests of globalist oligarchs. Yet the inauguration ceremony also serves as an affirmation of America’s true religion, liberalism. In his 2013 inaugural address, Barack Obama articulated quite clearly that “We, the People” shall lead humanity’s progress toward ever greater liberty and equality.

“Conservative” opposition to leftist political programs and figures, no matter its seeming intensity, is simply a matter of partisanship and policy choices. Republicans, constitutionalists and libertarians all share the same vision of the United States that Obama outlined:

We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names.  What makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’

Not a nation in any traditional sense, America is a social experiment, a self-willed construct proclaimed to embody the destiny of all mankind. The United States is a triumphant herald of modernity, and modernity is the spiritual impoverishment of being. Blood, faith and heritage are to be abolished by liberty, i.e. the vicissitudes of market forces. The fanciful notion of “unalienable rights” simultaneously disintegrates society while strengthening elite control. In his own second inaugural speech of 2005, Republican George W. Bush saw the drive toward global democracy as “a fire in the minds of men” lighting a path toward a New Order of the Ages.

The man who first spoke of this fire burning through civilization was none other than the brilliant 19^th-century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky in his work The Possessed. In typical fashion, Bush had warped Dostoevsky’s image, holding the noxious revolutionary flame aloft as a liberating force. Never would the man from St. Petersburg have supported this obvious contagion; the forces of subversion must be utterly routed at every level of national life.

Fyodor Dostoevsky has rightly been called a prophet of the modern age. With a depth of vision unrivalled, he saw that cultural, political, and economic disorder have their main source in a crisis of the spirit. Dostoevsky then foresaw how man’s rebellion against the Transcendent would progressively accelerate into full-blown anarchy. This idea became a central theme of The Possessed, his great counter-revolutionary novel. Within the book particular attention was drawn to the spiritual corruption of the ruling class, the so-called conservative elements of society.

Dostoevsky wrote about Russia, but he was also deeply sensitive to the West’s descent into secularism. By the 19^th century “enlightened” European man had hurtled headlong into apostasy, abandoning Christ for the worship of self; his first act of regicide was the murder of God within his heart. Without sacral authority, power was said to derive from the perfect will of “We, The People,” guided by moneyed manipulators and their technocrats. Parties like the GOP and the Tories have done nothing to arrest the decline of our societies because they ultimately share the same radical, anti-traditional principles of the Left. For evidence, look no further than Britain’s rapid transformation into a crime-ridden, multicultural surveillance state, where the ruling Conservatives advance homosexual “marriage” as a matter of moral legitimacy.

The ideals of modernity, manifested in progress, equality, democracy, total individual autonomy, etc. form a counterfeit religion. So long as the self-proclaimed Right holds fast to any of these fantasies, opposition to liberalism is meaningless and purely cosmetic. Rhetorical nods to cultural consolidation, i.e. “family values,” are articulated within the corrosive framework of Enlightenment rights ideology, and only for the purpose of grabbing votes. Does anyone seriously contemplate that the Republican leadership will attempt anything meaningful against institutionalized infanticide? Lest we forget, over 50 million unborn children have been slaughtered in the United States since abortion was made legal by the Supreme Court in 1973. It is now a point of pride that American men and women fight for these storied liberties from the Hindu Kush to the Maghreb.

With the traditional West devastated and hierarchy inverted, there is precious little to conserve besides one’s faith and lineage, the necessities for survival and resurgence. But modern conservatives reject the divine-human and heartfelt essence of culture, thereby serving as the liberal order’s most ardent defenders. How easy it is to cheer the next war, demographic dissolution or crass popular amusements, all acts in the founding of a Garden of Earthly Delights, what Dostoevsky imagined as a glorified anthill. The conservative movement knows what’s really important: generous contributions from the financial and defense industries to maintain policies of corporate centralization and overseas empire.

The mainstream Right has led the West to systemic cultural collapse in full collusion with the slightly more radical Left. Dostoevsky's The Possessed reveals the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of this long process and the malevolent spirit behind it. A conversation between the story’s provincial governor, Von Lembke, and the nihilist revolutionary Peter Verkhovensky nicely encapsulates the mentality and path of conservatism in the modern era.

“We have responsibilities, and as a result we also serve the common cause as you do. We are only holding back what you loosen and what without us would scatter in various directions.

We’re not your enemies; hardly so. We’re saying to you: go forward, make progress, even shatter, that is, everything that is subject to alteration; but when needed, we will keep you within the necessary boundaries and save you from yourselves, because without us you would only send Russia into upheaval, depriving her of a proper appearance, and our duty is to look after proper appearances.

Understand that you and I are mutually necessary to each other. In England Tories and Whigs also need each other. Now then, we’re Tories, and you’re Whigs…”

“Well, however you like it,” murmured Peter Stepanovich. “Nevertheless you are paving the way for us and preparing our success.”

Strip away the concern for proper appearances, and it becomes clear that modern conservatism is the handmaiden of revolutionary nihilism.

Our More Perfect Union

Every third week of November, Americans gather to celebrate the annual feast of Black Friday, a high holy day dedicated to the acquisition of various products cranked out by Chinese slave labor. On the eve of this festival, a time once known as "Thanksgiving", citizens will habitually watch football on television and engorge themselves unto nausea. Then, with nightfall and the ritual about to commence, it is time to hurry off to shopping malls and big-box department stores, veritable temples of consumption that can be found in practically every corner of the country. Here at the temple doors they form lines, crowd and wait impatiently until that moment of climax. Unfortunate employees draw back the gates to be immediately slammed by the ecstatically furious oncoming mob. Through the store the shoppers swarm like locusts, grasping at anything marked a "bargain", clawing at each other in desperation over the latest piece of electronics that supposedly renders meaning to existence. The news media is dutifully on hand to broadcast any deaths or incidences of violence, sacrifices in their own way, as well as imprint the frenzy into the public psyche.

Viewing footage of the Black Friday rite, we must conclude that it is one phenomenon among many uniting Americans of the most diverse ancestry into a common cause- the cult of Mammon. Look into the consumer throngs: here can be seen the uprooted children of Africa, Meso-Americans, Asians and the sad descendants of the Indo-Europeans. As editorial writers have informed us upon President Obama's re-election, the United States has entered "a new normal" of cultural and demographic transformation. The old holiday of Thanksgiving simply did not extract the necessary profits desired by the corporate-financial priesthood, and so it was re-formulated to fulfill their wishes. In the same way the U.S. population has been subjected to several decades of Cabalistic processing through every available means: psychological warfare waged by the media-entertainment complex, indoctrination in academia and so many of the churches, and waves of immigration from alien lands. Black Friday marks the perfection of mass man, the "individual" consumer wholly divorced from generations of his faith, ethnic heritage and family, a slave to debt, technology and base impulses.

"Where did America go wrong?" many will ask, searching out some terrible error from the recent past in the hope of applying a remedy. An observer might feel as if he has been sucked into an absurd alternate reality similar to the narratives of popular science fiction. In the second installment of the Back to the Future films, hero Marty McFly finds his hometown, the quaint HillValley, in a state of anarcho-tyranny under the control of idiot-villain Biff Tannen. Marty's antagonist managed to make himself a wealthy national icon through time travel and ruled his empire from the casino Biff's Pleasure Paradise. Today we recognize the Pleasure Paradise as our own society, as large swathes of the country resemble a crime-ridden theme park of strip malls featuring taxpayer-funded Goodwill centers, massage parlors, liquor stores and check-cashing outlets. Yet there is no readily convenient culprit to accuse, no Biff to confound in order to make things right again. The elites of Washington, Wall Street and Hollywood are villainous to the core, but their ascent was guaranteed by the very tenets of American civic religion.

Degeneration is America's destiny; no other outcome is possible when a polity embraces the toxic, nation-destroying ideals of liberty and equality. For this reason we must look past the accelerated implosion of the past decade, the entirety of the 1960s or the Federal Reserve Bank's incorporation in 1913. The United States was created as a rationalist republic and beacon for the progress of humanity, and its driving ethos has always been secular-pluralist.

The time has come to discard any lingering delusions relative to America's religious mission. All the florid entreaties to some generic Providence by the Deist-Masonic Founders were but rhetorical cover for man's grand experiment in self-transfiguration and the re-ordering of the world according to his supreme will. This is revolution par excellence, the usurpation of divine sovereignty in the name of "We the People", an amorphous and alienated mass useful in legitimizing oligarchic power. No less than the Declaration of Independence, that treasured document so matter-of-factly pronouncing all men created equal, was authored by an immeasurably proud intellect who wrote Christ's divinity out of the Gospels. Why, then, should there be any surprise that America's Gospel is the Book of Mammon? Our land is ordained "the last, best hope on earth", so that every nation may enjoy democracy, usury, pornography and abortion.

Behold our more perfect union! We witness humanism's final revelation: an engineered and entertained sub-humanity is to be governed by inhuman predators who fancy themselves gods. And throughout this chaos, many well-intentioned Americans continue to call for a restoration of the Constitution, the ultimate Enlightenment project, a bloodless abstraction held sacred and infallible. Never do they see how the operation of this artificial regime, administering "rights" and "liberties" held by autonomous self-creating wills, has led directly to the Babylonian nightmare we inhabit at present. This, too, shall perish from the earth: after the orgy there is no freedom, just entropy and death. A people committed to survival, especially survival in eternity, will hold liberal conceits like the social contract in contempt.

Even Locke's disciples, the revered Founders of the United States, would be shocked and horrified by today's America, yet it was they who laid its ideological cornerstone. Brilliant statesmen the calibre of John Adams knew well of the inevitable slide toward decadence and despotism in democracy, but they considered their republic of reason to be a sublime enterprise. The common-law traditions of the Anglo-Saxons were pressed into the service of an arrogant, disembodied rationalism that subverted what the human heart always held dear: loyalty to God, an organic notion of authority and solidarity with one's kin. Because of this the Constitution in its essence was a suicide pact. European man turned away from Christ the Savior and rejected his blessed patrimony to worship at the altar of reason, that prostitute to infernal passions. The 20th-century Serbian scholar and monk St. Justin Popovic apprehended what fate awaited a West glorying in its own apostasy:

In the world of man there is no even approximately equivalent value that could in any way replace the God-Man Christ. In all spheres of human life He is absolutely irreplaceable. All genuine values derive from Him and find completion in him. If human reason wishes to resolve any problem without Him or aside from Him, it will inevitably collapse into abysses of nihilism or the chaos of anarchism. And because in Western Europe the God-Man is supplanted by man, namely because of this European humanity dwells in chaos. Revolutions, anarchy, tyranny, massacres, cannibalism and murders serve as the only way out. That which is not built upon the God-Man is in itself destroyed. Full of the superman's proud spirit of megalomania, mined with a virulent element of self-proclaimed 'infallibility', the body of Europe must explode and disintegrate into dust and ash.

Daily the Black Mass of the triumphant moderns is celebrated in rebellion against God, and the world cannot but wish its own destruction. The murderous vanity of the Novus Ordo Seclorum will not go unpunished. And what shall become of the ruined West? According to the desires of the materialists, it would be cast into darkness and utterly forgotten. Yet hope still resides in the few men who conquer through prayer and repentance, combatants who will be sanctified in struggle. Salvation is attained not in any temporal kingdoms, but only in our Heavenly Fatherland.

Shock Troops of Dystopia

On the eleventh anniversary of the September 11th attacks, America learned that the country’s ambassador in Libya had just been killed in the line of duty. On business in Benghazi, J. Christopher Stevens, two contract security men and an information specialist had sought refuge in a U.S. consular villa from rampaging mobs when they were overrun, lynched and dragged through the city’s streets.

The Obama Administration, thoroughly embarrassed by such a major security failure, has clamped down tightly on media coverage while constructing an unconvincing narrative of the asphyxiated and almost-dead Stevens “rescued” by goodhearted locals. Nonetheless, it has become evident that an Al-Qaeda affiliate carried out the ambassador’s assassination. A poorly-made internet video, shot from Los Angeles and negatively depicting the Muslims’ prophet Mahomet, served as pretext for the attack. Yet this, too, was no isolated action; incensed throngs of urban fellaheen would swarm Western embassies across the Islamic world in a near-simultaneous motion.

Ambassador Stevens will be remembered as a professional diplomat with inside knowledge of the Arab street, though not enough to save him. Stevens was no innocent abroad; in March 2011 he was sent to Benghazi by Washington to coordinate the Libyan revolution and in this capacity played a key role in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi. A picture published by an Iranian news outlet shows what appears to be none other than Stevens kneeling in triumph over the slain leader, as a big-game hunter might after bagging a prize kill. What was the ambassador thinking as he stared into Gaddafi’s lifeless, shattered face? Surely not that he would share the same fate within a year’s time, that he too would be murdered and his corpse defiled by the very “freedom fighters” he helped unleash.

After the disastrous occupation of Iraq, the United States pursued a new Middle East strategy incorporating special operations, NGO-style covert action and selectively applied air power. Especially over the last few years, U.S. foreign policy has manipulated currents of popular discontent in Dar-al-Islam with the goal of regime change. While Western television audiences are treated to live interviews from Tahrir Square with fashionable young bloggers eager for elections and IKEA, America also channels jihadist forces to remove any potential opposition to dominance of the region and its energy resources. Al-Qaeda and associated formations have proven not so much sworn enemies of the West as an invaluable asset in undermining uncooperative states like Libya and Syria. The misery that follows provides a ready-made excuse for further U.S.-NATO intervention. In this context Stevens’ death can rightly be viewed as the collateral damage of an Arab Spring largely engineered by CIA and the State Department.

Russia’s response to the consulate attack was pointed- blowback is a cruel and all-too predictable consequence of the disorder wrought by an arrogant imperium. The bloody Soviet experience in Afghanistan, itself the last decisive theater of the Cold War, is barely a generation past, but the U.S. continues to employ mujahedin in operations against Russian interests and allies to this day. Yevgeny Satanovsky, head of Moscow’s Middle East Institute, dispensed with diplomatic niceties and exposed the utterly obtuse assumptions behind the Freedom Agenda:

You are trying to distribute democracy the way we tried to distribute socialism. You do it the Western way. They hate both…They lynched Qaddafi – do you really think they will be thankful to you? They use stupid white people from a big rich and stupid country which they really hate.

This severe rebuke is unfortunately well-founded. Most Americans evince neither knowledge nor concern over the story of Ambassador Stevens; they save their outrage for faulty calls by referees in NFL football games. And why should the body politic of the world’s most successful democracy even pretend to care about a murder in the Maghreb or the pacification of Afghanistan? What need is there to establish the true horror of a Pashtun wedding feast incinerated by a Reaper drone, or of the deaths of valiant men for an ignoble lie? It is enough to know the price of freedom- “the troops” and nameless natives perish so that we may vote and consume. Our duty on the home front is to enjoy- to enrich, engorge and entertain ourselves into oblivion, for there is no call higher than our own desire.

Desire for power drives globalist oligarchs and their front men in public office, and unlike the dazed masses, they know exactly what they inflict upon nations. Their model for “progress” is achieved through studied practice of the Hegelian dialectic. For this reason the Middle East is subjected to a strategy of polarization. Phasing out secular dictators like Tunisia’s Ben-Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak, Washington now bestows largesse upon both liberal activists and the Muslim Brotherhood. Whatever political synthesis is reached after some period of instability, the new regimes are well aware that their financial well-being is fully dependent on the gracious goodwill of the IMF and World Bank. Should a ruler with an independent streak, a Gaddafi or an Assad, resist the march of liberty, he will be destroyed by a NATO-sponsored rebellion and humanitarian airstrikes, snuffed out to the merriment of the Secretary of State. Yet no one is supposed to notice when corrupt Gulf potentates facilitate the bloodshed and Salafist fighters kill U.S. diplomats.

America’s methods for controlling the Middle East are also used against geopolitical rivals, foremost among them Russia. The nuclear-armed Russian state will not be intimidated with no-fly zones and sanctions, but its people must be broken. Hence the steady flow of Afghan heroin into the country, U.S. missile defense infrastructure on Moscow’s frontiers and semi-official encouragement of regional and ethnic separatism. The most sinister aspect of this offensive, however, is of another nature entirely. Russians are targeted for indoctrination through liberal media organs and Western-funded NGOs; the goal of the campaign is to corrode and eventually abolish Orthodox, Slavic identity and the traditional family, to replicate the spiritual desolation that long ago seized Europe and the United States.

Thus while the Arab street is rocked by riots, the Empire of the Tsars is treated to Pussy Riot, a feminist punk-rock band seemingly created in a FrankfurtSchool laboratory. Pussy Riot is less any sort of music ensemble than a neo-Marxist cult that has performed an orgy in a museum and other obscene acts for propaganda purposes. When four masked members of the group broke into Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior and enacted a blasphemous ritual with journalists recording, they were arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for their creative endeavor[1]. Immediately international news networks launched an intensive assault against the Russian Orthodox Church and government; “human rights”, editorial columnists and talking heads bemoaned, were under threat from the autocratic Vladimir Putin and religious obscurantism.

The Pussy Rioters, already canonized as martyrs to the inverted liberal faith, have received not only their ideological inspiration from the West, but cash and information support as well. Their parent organization, the deviant “art collective” Voina (War), is tied to the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy through the leadership of the NED-bankrolled Russian-Chechen Friendship Society. What this managed melodrama signifies is another flashpoint in the ruthless psychological war prosecuted by forces of the Postmodern Empire. Russia’s recovery and resurgence must be thwarted at all costs, and devastating her culture through the projection of “soft power” is a sure means to that end.

Indeed, the entire point of democracy’s progression is not freedom, but the destruction of culture and leveling of once-proud and noble races into demographic material for exploitation by a global market system, the tyrannical WorldState. As the White émigré writer George Knupffer explained,

The teaching of Liberalism and Socialism, the ideas fostered in certain Masonic lodges, and the theses propounded by some of the various sects which appeared like mushrooms in so many lands, all pretended to serve some lofty and exalted cause. But all, in fact, served only the cause of the usurers, of the materialistic messianists, whose march towards world domination was furthered by these falsehoods.

U.S. policymakers, servants to financial elites and the heirs to rapacious Athens, decree that the strong do what they can, but the weak must suffer no longer- rather, they shall celebrate their enslavement as the universal reign of equality, an achievement of the ages. Under the new dispensation avant-garde perverts are venerated as saints, and jihadists as conquering heroes. Vive la guerre eternelle, and hail the shock troops of dystopia. Soon, we are told, only a criminal or madman would deny the magnificence and justice of this ancient dream made manifest. Reject the coming New Jerusalem, hopeless reactionary, and the powers of this world will move swiftly to crush you. Ready your soul for suffering and combat.

[1] The Cathedral of Christ the Savior was demolished by the Bolsheviks in 1931 and a swimming pool eventually built in its place. The church was restored and consecrated in 2000. Unlike the Communists, the liberal order seeks to destroy Christianity not with explosives and wrecking balls, but through social neglect, mockery and the all-encompassing subversive influence of news and entertainment media.

New Dawn Fades

“It’s just a movie”, we so often hear in response to any criticism of a film’s suggestive power over the mass psyche. Thus propaganda emanating from Hollywood is made to appear a harmless diversion rather than the agent of social control and transformation it actually is. When a black-clad killer stormed the theater premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado on July 20^th and proceeded to rake the audience with gunfire, the exact same scenario was transpiring on-screen before them in a preview of the upcoming picture Gangster Squad. For victims of the massacre and the American public at large, reality and fantasy have been fused in an alchemical wedding; it is in this realm that phantasms and flickering simulacra deceive men and lure them to destruction. Here, too, death is master. [1]

As the final installment of the Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises is more than a movie, just as its hero Bruce Wayne sought to overcome limits imposed upon mere mortals. Director Christopher Nolan has crafted a film of grand and sinister sweep, though his cinematography provides only the backdrop to an explicit and inescapable theme: the ruin of the West, its reduction to ashes. Even standard liberal convention, special effects and pulverizing violence in the screenplay cannot conceal the apocalyptic vision that unfolds before us.

While Nolan’s story might be seen as a template for varied interpretations, certain symbols attain clear meaning within its plot. Gotham is not any imaginary city or simply a representation of New York, but the archetypal Western polis in its terminal stage of development. Modern man, with his technological wonders, his “rights”, his endless desires and entertainments, has liberated himself from all transcendent authority and stands in obedience to his passions alone. And one dream in particular never seems to leave him- the total organization of earthly happiness, an ideal justifying even the slaughter of innocents. Global civilization celebrates progress with ever-increasing fervor, seemingly oblivious to its descent into a subhuman state of anarchic savagery. As Gotham collapses, so, too does the American pluralist experiment- flimsy Enlightenment abstractions of liberty, equality and popular sovereignty are crushed by the exertion of a superior will.

The decadent polis is easy prey to oligarchs, bandits and utopian radicals. Gotham, built on lies and ruled by corrupt sociopaths, will soon be in the hands of violent psychopaths. Emerging from the underground, the ruthless mercenary Bane dons the mantle of Spartacus and carries out a revolutionary coup. In the name of “the people”, the deracinated mob, the arch-villain and his men unleash a reign of terror, replete with another storming of the Bastille and Jacobin-style tribunals presided over by the deranged Scarecrow, a latter-day De Sade. Yet amidst the chaos of proletarian dictatorship, we spot a noteworthy point of intrigue: Bane’s operation was bankrolled by none other than a capitalist. Looking to acquire the resources of the Wayne business empire, plutocratic rival Roland Daggett set the uprising in motion. Such details have their origin not in comic books, but historical context: the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution, along with the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, was facilitated by international finance.

Bane’s true mission is neither enrichment nor insurrection; he has been tasked with eliminating Gotham entirely. Behind the machinations of capital and spasms of “people power” stands the League of Shadows, the secret society that has sentenced the city to death. Charged with this assignment, Bane acts not only as Gotham’s executioner, but as the good doctor who assists in its suicide. As Plato saw tyranny to be the logical culmination of democracy, so Bane proclaims revolution as “a new era in Western civilization”, knowing full well he is accelerating its self-destruction. An image of the nihilist, postmodern West, Gotham is a land seemingly beyond redemption, and it is no more than Bruce Wayne’s noblesse oblige to its inhabitants that brings him to their defense. Beyond this intimation of moral scruple, the duel between Batman and Bane is purely a brutal combat between opposing wills, the protector and the predator. The new era has dawned, and its supermen are wrathful beasts.

Even if Gotham City were delivered from criminal gangs and external threats, it would still implode from despair. Contemporary society is relentless in pursuit of material gain and sensory pleasure, for it seeks to obliterate any trace of the eternal, raising a tower in defiance of the heaven it denies. Warriors, poets, artists and ascetics who knew Truth in the heavenly kingdom and struggled for it were but fools and psychotherapy cases- they were hung up about a lack of sex or didn’t have television to occupy their time, you see. Today’s hedonist consumers frantically proclaim themselves so much happier in self-worship. Yet everywhere the modern spirit dominates, we witness the wreckage of our vain endeavors in the race toward annihilation; suicide and madness are rational responses to a pointless existence. The early 20^th-century expert on conspiracies and subversion Nesta Webster warned of a future imperial system single-mindedly committed to the death of the soul:

Now that civilization is world-wide the dream of a return to nature and the joys of savagery conjured up by Rousseau and Weishaupt can never be realized. Yet if civilization in a material sense cannot be destroyed, it is nonetheless possible to take the soul out of it, to reduce it to a dead and heartless machine without human feelings or divine aspirations. The Bolsheviks continue to exist amidst telephones, electric light, and other amenities of modern life, but they have almost killed the soul of Russia. In this sense then civilization may pass away, not as the civilizations of the ancient world passed away, leaving only desert sands and crumbling ruins behind them, but vanishing imperceptibly from beneath the outward structure of our existing institutions. Here is the final goal of the world revolution.

Christopher Nolan made The Dark Knight Rises both ominous and captivating, but there is no catharsis to complete the work. Its continuous foreboding reflects our own subconscious anticipation of the next great war, the next market crash, the next cataclysm and the end of all things. And what is Gotham but the depraved and dying polis, corrupted spiritually through transgression? The city nonetheless still awaits its redeemer. Having rejected salvation in Christ, Western man has murdered God in his heart, replacing the divine image with that of the beast[2]. He seeks an earthly kingdom and joyfully will welcome superman, the new god who is Antichrist. No political movements or military actions in themselves could stave off this day, but only a counter-revolution of love and repentance.

---

[1] Gangster Squad was promptly pulled by studio chiefs and a more appropriate trailer rolled out. Django Unchained, a sure Quentin Tarantino masterpiece set for Christmas, features Jamie Foxx as an escaped African slave-turned-bounty hunter in the antebellum South. When asked how he feels about his new profession, Django replies, “Kill white folks and they pay you for it? What’s not to like?” Needless to say, this elicited a laugh-track response from many in the audience. And why should anyone be concerned over such incitement to murder? After all, it’s just a movie.

[2] 19^th-century Russian thinker Ivan Aksakov gave a brilliant summation of the prideful self-will so characteristic of our age:

Progress that denies God and Christ ultimately becomes regression; civilization ends in savagery; liberty in despotism and slavery. Casting from himself God’s image, man will inevitably strip away, as he already is doing, his human image to manifest that of the beast.

Martyrium

When he called the people unto Him with His disciples also, He said to them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it.

Mark 8:34-35

On May 23^rd 1996, his 19^th birthday, Private Evgeny Rodionov hung from the wrists in a dark and filth-ridden cell outside of a village called Bamut. The young man could hardly have imagined such ill fortune just a year earlier upon his induction into Russia’s armed forces. A native of the Moscow region, Rodionov joined the border troops and was sent to the North Caucasus for duty at an outpost near mutinous Chechnya. With three comrades he manned a checkpoint along a desolate smuggling road on February 13^th; as if to illustrate the outrageous negligence of the Yeltsin-era Russian military, they were not provided rifles or even radios. And so within a matter of hours these teenage conscripts, raw youth on alien and hostile terrain, were captured by a dozen well-armed Chechen fighters riding in a commandeered ambulance. Despite hearing screams for help, officers nearby simply wrote their men off as deserters.

Rodionov and his comrades would then spend three months in confinement, undergoing 100 days of torture, beatings and starvation. Kidnapping to extract payment was both time-honored custom and a burgeoning cottage industry in North Caucasus republics like Dagestan, Ingushetia and Chechnya[1]. In the 1990s Chechen gangsters and rebels could obtain well-publicized million-dollar sums for businessmen, journalists and government officials. Yet ordinary Russian soldiers, prisoners of war rotting in dungeons or forced into slavery, were considered to be almost worthless by both sides. An 18-year-old private might just as likely be shot and cast into a ditch as ransomed.

Aside from their mothers, no one evinced concern for the fate of such men; they were the cannon fodder of a criminally inept and venal ruling class in Moscow. And like other mothers, Liubov Rodionova would travel to the Caucasus, braving the chaos and war of Chechnya in an attempt to rescue her child. When she approached Private Rodionov’s superiors, they showed little interest in the matter, and “human rights” activists informed her that as a Russian soldier, her son was a killer of innocent civilians. She nonetheless had come within mere miles of Evgeny at the time of his death on May 23^rd.

On this day Rodionov would seal his destiny. A bid to escape had proven futile, and he now stood between two paths. His captor, Chechen field commander Ruslan Khaikhoroyev, was willing to concede him his life[2]. All that was required of Evgeny was to renounce his baptismal faith and join the ranks of the Muslim fighters. If he would abandon Jesus Christ and swear allegiance to Allah, freedom was his. Among the mountaineers there was a chance for survival, refuge and perhaps one day a wife and progeny. A handful of prisoners had taken up these offers before; they could be seen in rebel propaganda videos- fair-haired Slavs among darker Caucasians, all brandishing weapons and chanting the Islamic war-cry. If Zhenya would only remove the small silver cross from his neck and submit, new possibilities would open to him- brotherly acceptance, women and even martial distinction against his own kinsmen. Should he refuse, the Chechens would slaughter him like a ram at one of their feasts.

There wouldn’t be any return to the familiarity of home, to family and friends. Zhenya would die a martyr’s terrible death or live, but as an apostate and traitor. His entire scope of existence had narrowed to this grave moment. Conflict raged within his heart, and its outcome would determine the trajectory of his soul. Yet such cruel trials can purify and temper those who endure, from unassuming soldiers to mighty sovereigns. Six centuries before young Rodionov contended against the abyss, another man was choosing in similar stark fashion between the temporal and eternal. On the eve of battle with the invading Turks in 1389, it is said that Tsar Lazar of Serbia received a vision from the prophet Elijah. This messenger from the divine throne told the prince that in his forthcoming duel with the Ottoman sultan, he could win earthly power or heavenly glory, but not both. We witness Lazar’s brief and forceful deliberation in the Kosovo epic cycle:

‘Dear God, what shall I do and how shall I?

Which kingdom shall I choose?

Shall I choose the earthly kingdom?

Or shall I choose the heavenly kingdom?

If I decide to choose the earthly kingdom,

The earthly kingdom lasts only for a brief time,

But the heavenly kingdom always and forever.’

So the Tsar chose the heavenly kingdom

Rather than the kingdom of this world.

Serbia’s great prince chose salvation over the world not merely for himself, but on behalf of his countrymen. With this decision must have come an almost unbearable agony, as the Serbian nation would be conquered and enslaved under the Turkish yoke for 500 years. Why would God allow these evils to be wrought against His people, and how could He ever bring renewal to them after such darkness and devastation? At Kosovo Field the tsar and his valiant knights would ride to their doom, and the Serbs would be subjected to an age of Ottoman tyranny. But through this privation they stood fast in their faith to attain interior freedom, the spiritual quality that ennobles a race. And then they would rise again, as “a nation’s destiny, its preservation or its fall, is decided according to the spirit within its people”.

Rodionov defied his executioner and faced death with humility and an iron will, bearing his cross unto the very end. A son of Russia, he would not tread the path of the coward, and never would he bow before the god of Mahomet. Over the course of an hour that May 23^rd, the butcher Khaikhoroyev decapitated Zhenya with a rusted saw, and then murdered his three comrades Andrei, Igor and Aleksandr[3]. Even in our era of hegemonic usury, global automated war and electronic seduction, heroes fight and perish in blood-testimony to restore their people. Through struggle they are sanctified.

For love of Christ the heavenly Tsar, Zhenya Rodionov suffered and died; for loyalty to his heavenly fatherland, he would be rewarded the red crown of martyrdom[4]. May we be graced with the strength to share in his immortal victory. Glory to the soldier-saints named and unknown; glory to the martyrs ever faithful and true.

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[1] Abductions are a recognized national pastime, but only practiced outside one’s clan (teip). To do otherwise would be to risk endless blood-feud within the clans.

[2] Then-assistant prosecutor of the town Malgobek, Ingushetia, Magomed Evloev, had met and spoken with Khaikhoroyev in the middle 1990s. Khaikhoroyev’s group had already kidnapped and killed three geologists in 1995. Evloev called the zone under this bandit leader’s command a “total hell”.

[3] Andrei Trusov was also beheaded, while Igor Yakovlev and Aleksandr Zheleznov were shot.

[4] Khaikhoroyev first ransomed the location of Rodionov’s body to his mother. He then charged her another fee in order to recover her son’s head, buried elsewhere. In addition to the Koran’s Sura 8:12 ("I will instill terror in the hearts of the unbelievers, smite ye above their necks”), Chechens have long harbored the superstition that if a man beheads his enemy, the victim cannot return from the afterlife to haunt him.

The Will to React

In an 1849 letter to a friend, Juan Donoso Cortes, Marques of Valdegamas and noble son of Spain, touched upon the essence of Christendom:

After the cult owed to God, there is nothing more beautiful than the cult of our ancestors.

With this casual observation, Donoso was able to express traditional Europe’s hierarchy of values and discern the contingent from the Absolute. The heritage of our fathers is accorded veneration, and to the God of our fathers we render all worship. Each nation, a communion of generations- the dead, the living and those yet to be born – is called to glorify Him in its own unique and unrepeatable way. Herein is found the true greatness of a culture.

Today European culture is in ruins, and our master class has enshrined new ideals to replace the ancient faith. So forget your fathers, for they were unenlightened barbarians unworthy of even your memory, fools who from heathendom came to believe in the promise of divine love and salvation after death. Liberated through reason, we have evolved past such childish fairytales. As free and equal supermen, we attend to the total organization of happiness on earth.

The quest to build the Brave New World is a war without limits; proclaiming freedom to every nation, the forces of Revolution amass power unprecedented and lay claim to our very souls. In addition to the farce of voting, perversion, infanticide, and universal consumerism are sacraments of the new, militant cult, defended at home and promoted abroad through any means necessary. Western troops shredded by IEDs in Afghanistan and elsewhere perish not merely for energy routes, poppy fields or geopolitical position, but for the birth of a global civilization. Their patriotism and valor are employed to advance a society that holds such virtues in contempt. Blessed are those who kill for Chevron, Goldman Sachs and Two and a Half Men; blessed are those who die for democracy.

“Civilization” has become a macabre, pornographic Disneyland writ large, expanding across the planet to envelop disparate peoples and tribes and subordinate them to its model, the only permissible model, of political economy. Our sacred liberty succinctly translates to pleasure and material well-being, the bourgeois values of the oligarchs who dominate the liberal order. Should you reject this proposition, should you insist upon your culture freely forging its own destiny, fighting the predatory banking cartels and social engineers, demographic displacement and moral corruption, you must be an accursed and intolerant retrograde, an enemy of progress, a fascist.

Far from the actual ideology of twentieth-century interwar Europe, “fascism” in the postmodern age is just a nasty label reserved for the programs of political opponents. In the American context, established pundits left and right label their targets as fascists with regularity, thereby devaluing the term to another form of cheap invective in liberal discourse. Contemporary society in the West does indeed share some commonalities with popular notions of fascist praxis, from corporate-state fusion and militaristic triumphalism to the pervasive indoctrination and surveillance of mass man. Yet these are general features of modern totalitarianism irrespective of doctrine^[1].

Within several currents of interwar fascism, one can find inspiration in the will to react- meeting the powers of subversion head-on in battle to defend what remained of the West. Along with this readiness to combat both Bolshevism and liberal plutocracy, there was restored an ethic of heroic sacrifice for the national community. Conservative-Revolutionary Arthur Moeller Van den Bruck flew the black flag of revolt against Weimar decadence and foreign exploitation, and the Falange were among the first to crash through Communist lines and free Spain during that country’s savage civil war.

While the ethic of struggle is to be upheld in a just hierarchy of values, certain rightist movements, particularly National Socialism, fell prey to the seductions of self-worship, what Russian White émigré Ivan Ilyin saw as “national megalomania”[2]. And from state, race or a leader of dubious inspiration, they crafted cruel idols commanding universal dominion and the enslavement and murder of other peoples. Today’s Europe, controlled by a U.S.-backed alliance of international capital and cultural Marxists, is largely the dialectical outcome of Adolf Hitler’s failed gamble for Weltmacht. Never is power, even over all the kingdoms of the world, worth the price of a man’s soul.

Physical survival is only the visible level of this contest. What we face, men and nations alike, is spiritual war, where neutrality is no longer possible. Let us take to heart this fervent appeal from the Captain of Romania’s Legionaries, the fearless and tragic Corneliu Codreanu:

The final aim is not life but resurrection. The resurrection of peoples in the name of the Savior Jesus Christ…There will come a time when all the peoples of the earth shall be resurrected, with all their dead and all their kings and emperors, each people having its place before God’s throne. This final moment, “the resurrection from the dead”, is the noblest and most sublime one toward which a people can rise.

Overcome self and sin; rise and conquer. Through struggle we are called to the highest honor- to become loyal companions of the Savior, He who trampled death underfoot. Babylon shall be razed, and the West resurrected.  

 

 ***

On Fascism

Essay by Ivan Ilyin, 1948. Taken from the collection “Nashi Zadachi” and translated by Mark Hackard.

Fascism is a complex phenomenon: it is multifaceted and historically speaking, far from exhausted. Within it one finds elements of health and illness, old and new, protection and destruction. Therefore in an evaluation of fascism fair-mindedness and equanimity are needed. But its dangers must be considered in full.

Fascism arose as a reaction to Bolshevism, as a concentration of power guarding sovereignty from the Right. As leftist chaos and totalitarianism advanced, this was a healthy phenomenon, as well as necessary and unavoidable. And such a concentration will come about henceforth, even in the most democratic states: in an hour of national danger the more vigorous forces of the people will always rally to the defense of sovereignty. Thus it was in ancient Rome and the new Europe, and so it shall be hereafter.

Standing against leftist totalitarianism, fascism was correct, as it sought just socio-political reform. This quest could be successful or unsuccessful: solving such problems is difficult, and first attempts might not have made any headway. But to meet the wave of socialist psychosis- through social and consequently anti-socialist measures- was imperative. These measures had long been imminent, and waiting any further was out of the question.

Finally, fascism was right since it derived from a healthy national-patriotic sensibility, without which a people can neither lay claim to its existence nor create a unique culture.

However, along with this fascism committed an entire range of grave and serious errors that defined its political and historical physiognomy and lent its very name that odious pallor which its enemies never tire from emphasizing. Therefore for future social and political movements of a similar cast, another self-designation is necessary. If someone gives his movement the former name (“fascism” or “National Socialism”), this will be interpreted as the intent to restore all the faults and fatal mistakes of the past. These faults and mistakes comprised the following: 

Irreligiousness: a hostile attitude toward Christianity, religions, faith and churches in general.

1. The creation of right-totalitarianism as a permanent and supposedly “ideal” system.
2. The establishment of a party monopoly and the resultant corruption and demoralization that sprang from it.
3. Withdrawal into extremes of nationalism and militant chauvinism (national megalomania).
4. Mixing social reforms with socialism and the slide through totalitarianism to a state takeover of the economy.
5. The fall into idolatrous Caesarism with its demagoguery, subservience and despotism.

These errors compromised fascism and set against it entire religions, parties, peoples and states, ultimately leading it to an unwinnable war and destruction. The cultural and political mission of fascism failed, and the Left flooded in with ever greater force.   

1. Fascism should not have held a position hostile to Christianity and any religiosity in general. A political regime that attacks the Church and religion brings schism into the souls of its citizens, undermines in them the deepest roots of justice and begins to claim its own religious significance, which is mad. Mussolini soon understood that in a Catholic country, state power needs an honest concordat with the Catholic Church. Hitler, with his vulgar godlessness, behind which was concealed equally vulgar self-deification, unto the end never recognized that in anticipating the Bolsheviks, he walked the path of Antichrist.
2. Fascism could have not created a totalitarian system: it could have satisfied itself with an authoritarian dictatorship sufficiently strong to a) uproot Bolshevism and Communism, and b) provide religions, the press, academia, art, sectors of the economy and non-communist parties freedom of judgment by virtue of their political loyalty.
3. Never and nowhere can the establishment of a one-party monopoly lead to anything good: the best men will depart the stage, and the worst will flock to the party in droves. For the better men think independently and freely, while the worse are ready to adjust to anything in order to make a career. For this reason the monopolist party lives by self-deception: beginning “qualitative selection”, it demands “party consensus”. Making this the condition for work in any legal and political capacity, it calls men to absurdity and hypocrisy; in so doing it opens the doors wide to all manner of imbeciles, dissimulators, impostors and careerists. The qualitative level of the party breaks down, and pretenders, crooks, predators, speculators, terrorists, yes-men and traitors come to power. As a result all the shortcomings and errors of political partisanship reach in fascism their highest expression; the party monopoly is worse than party competition (a law known in trade, industry and all the creation of culture). Russian “fascists” did not understand this. If they manage to entrench themselves in Russia (God forbid), they will compromise healthy ideas of sovereign power and fail in ignominy.
4. Fascism did not at all have to fall into “political megalomania”, despise other races and nationalities, and proceed with their conquest and extermination. A sense of one’s own dignity is not in the least arrogant hubris. Patriotism does not call for the subjugation of the Universe; to liberate your people does not at all imply overtaking and wiping out your neighbors.
5. The line between socialism and social reforms has a deep, principal significance. Stepping over this line would mean the ruin of social reform. For we must always remember that socialism is antisocial, and justice and liberation in society tolerate neither socialism nor Communism.
6. The greatest fascist error was the restoration of idolatrous Caesarism. “Caesarism” is the direct opposite of monarchism. Caesarism is godless, irresponsible, and despotic; it holds in contempt freedom, law, legitimacy, justice and the individual rights of men. It is demagogic, terroristic and haughty; it lusts for flattery, “glory” and worship, and it sees in the people a mob and stokes its passions. Caesarism is amoral, militaristic and callous. It compromises the principle of authority and autocracy, for its rule does not prosecute state or national interests, but personal ends.

Franco and Salazar recognized this and are attempting to avoid the aforementioned errors. They do not call their regime “fascist”. We shall hope that Russian patriots will also reflect in full upon the mistakes of fascism and National Socialism and not repeat them.

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[1] An excellent post-war analysis of Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism in practice is Julius Evola’s Critique of Fascism from the Right (Russian translation). Evola wastes no time in bringing to light fascism’s proletarian and Bonapartist inclinations, as well as the quintessentially modern social mechanization and racial materialism of the Third Reich.

[2] In the early 1930s Ilyin, living and writing in exile in Berlin, had supported the Nazis for halting Germany’s bolshevization, yet he would later come to realize that their plans were not traditional-authoritarian in nature, but totalitarian. Harassed by the Gestapo, he left for Switzerland in 1938, where he resided until his death in 1954.

Open Society or Survival

Of all the idols of our age, none has demanded so much blood sacrifice and the dissipation of resources as that of democracy. From the Hindu Kush to our television screens, the liberal order betrays its totalitarian nature. We send armies and airborne robots into Asia’s wastelands to kill for the universal rights of man. Mass democracy can never be recognized for the deviant political philosophy it is, nor can it be restricted to the West alone; equality must reign everywhere unchallenged. Modern man is infallible, and in his militant faith he pursues no less than the entirety of the world subjugated to his will. How else may a New Jerusalem of pleasure and profit be realized, if not through the monumental force of a united humanity?

Eurasia remains the key to fulfilling this mad dream. Even as the United States continues its grinding and bloody counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and across Dar al-Islam, Washington has found the cash to promote “civil society” and “the rule of law” in Russia. The Obama Administration is looking to apply $50 million to NGOs and similar initiatives in Moscow and other regions throughout the country. Thus stated Ambassador Michael McFaul:

We have proposed to the US Congress to create a new civil society fund for Russia. We proposed that 50 million dollars in a neutral way, by the way, in terms of new money. That’s what I hear in Moscow that when you talk to real human rights organizations and what they really need, they need that kind of support.

While $50 million would be negligible in sustaining the Pax Americana’s military operations, it makes for a tidy sum when directed toward political subversion. (Among other projects, expect a new stream of nauseating parades and Pussy Riot church provocations.) Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term will begin this spring, but U.S. policy planners have been emboldened by a recent surge in opposition activism in Russia. Along with continuing pressure on Moscow’s peripheries, their strategy is still centered on creating the infrastructure for revolution, the most cost-effective way that an embattled Third Rome could fall to American power. After all, the United States seeks to destabilize Russia with an ultimate view to her dismemberment and exploitation by the lords of international usury.

The Freedom Agenda grants Washington carte blanche to undermine sovereign nations on whim in the name of “human rights” and a long-term mandate for global governance. Exporting to the world its model of social chaos, the United States aims for the establishment of a unified, market-driven Open Society across the earth. Should some insolent tribe refuse the imperial model, it must prepare for the inevitable assault- if not by bombardment or sanctions, then at the very least through intelligence operations and psychological warfare.

Peoples who would defy postmodern Mammonism must have a clear ideological framework for resistance. In the case of Russia, such a basis for thought and action is conspicuously absent among ruling elites. Popular legitimacy can only derive from the quantitative “will of the people”- the Kremlin carries out elections in imitation of Western stage-management and assiduously tracks approval ratings from the middle class. Putin and his assorted clans will have nothing to counteract a deadening reductive-materialist worldview if they share it with their geopolitical adversaries.

Russia spent a century enacting the social experiments of the modern West; she can afford neither lives nor time for yet another ruinous undertaking. Babel and its missionaries must be repudiated. War for the national soul begins at the visceral level of shared faith and kinship, for these values form the traditional organic state, guardian of sacred heritage and culture. And there is no greater weapon in this struggle than the loyal heart.

Rendering judgment on democracy, the White émigré leader Ivan Ilyin gave us a principled and articulate rejection of the liberal dispensation and its incipient totalitarianism. It is no accident that today’s Free World is on the fast track to tyranny. The bloodless abstractions of liberty and equality bequeathed to us by Locke, Rousseau and their disciples have birthed mechanisms of control undreamt of by ancient despots. “Government by the people” has in fact served to corrupt and dissolve whole peoples according to the design of an antitheist and anti-human Money Power. Is escape from the democratic Panopticon even possible? Yes, though it demands of us a fateful choice: the slide toward oblivion in the Open Society, or our arrival at the harsh conclusions necessary to chart a future.

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On Formal Democracy

Essay by Ivan A. Ilyin. Taken from the collection “Nashi Zadachi” and translated by Mark Hackard.

There are two different understandings of the state and politics: the mechanistic and the organic. The mechanistic asserts instinctive man and his private interests; it measures life quantitatively and formalistically. The organic derives from the human spirit and ascends to national unity and its common interests; it is qualitative, searching out spiritual roots and solutions.

We shall first examine the mechanistic view.

It sees in man first and foremost the instinctive individual with its “desires” and “needs”: every person wishes to work less, enjoy himself more and relax; procreate and accumulate; maintain his irresponsible opinions and express them without hindrance; to find the like-minded and associate with them wherever they may be; to depend upon no-one and wield as much power and influence as possible. After all, men are born “equal”, and hence each of them must be provided equal rights for the assertion of their desires and needs: these are the inalienable rights of liberty which cannot abide restriction. Therefore every person should have an equal voice in affairs of state. For so many people there will be so many equal voices. Whatever a man may fancy is to be affirmed, and let there be no interference in this. Allow like-minded men of all nations to unite freely; let the votes be counted; the majority will decide…

As to the quality of the desires, plans and enterprises of all these men of one mind, and especially the motives and intentions of voters, no-one may concern himself. All of this is protected by inviolable “freedom”, equality and the secret vote. Every citizen as such is considered already reasonable, enlightened, well-intentioned and loyal, incorruptible and honorable; each man is given the opportunity to discover his “valor” and veil all his designs and schemes with words about “the common good”.

Until he is caught, this man is not a thief; until taken red-handed, he demands complete respect. He who has not been implicated at the scene of a crime (for example, treason, foreign espionage, conspiracy, bribes, waste, fraud, call-girl rings, counterfeiting) – is considered a political “gentleman” independent of his profession and a full citizen. Most important are liberty, equality and vote-counting. The state is a mechanical equilibrium of private (personal and group) agendas; the state is built as a compromise of centrifugal forces, played out in the performances of political actors. And politics should move according to the results of mutual distrust and competing intrigues.

Unfortunately this view (as much as I know) is nowhere expressed in such a frank and precise form. It is not a doctrine; it is simply an unspoken political dogma, rooted in the world and taken as the self-evident essence of democracy. All men are formally free; all men are formally equal and contend with each other for power, for the sake of their own interests, yet under the pretense of a common benefit.

Such a formal and quantitative conception of the state renders its fate dependent on whom, how and what shall fill a vacuum of content, as well as that indifferent-drifting quality people afford themselves through formal “liberty”. State and government are but a mirror or arithmetic sum of what is made in the soul of the human mass and its sense of justice. Something stews within this at once opaque and unassailable cauldron: any interference is forbidden as “pressure”, and any constraint or action is denounced as “an infringement upon freedom”. Every citizen is secured the right to crooked and deceptive political paths, to disloyal and treasonous designs, to the sale of his vote, to base motives for voting, to underground plots, unseen treachery and secret dual citizenship- to all those crudities which are so profitable to men and so often tempt them.

The citizen is given the unlimited right to temptation and the corruption of others, as well as the subtle transactions of self-prostitution. He is guaranteed the freedom of disingenuous, lying, and underhanded speech, and the ambiguous, calculated omission of truth; he is granted the liberty to believe liars and scoundrels or at least pretend to believe them (in self-interest simulating one political mood or its complete opposite). And for the free expression of all these spiritual seductions he is handed the ballot. Motivations for voting must be free; the formation of parties tolerates no constraint; to limit political propaganda is to exercise coercion.

To judge and condemn for “political views” is not permitted: this would signify an assault upon another’s “conscience” and persecution of his beliefs (in German, Gessinungsjustiz). Freedom of opinions should be total; government officials will not dare infringe upon this or attempt its curtailment. And the most stupid, most harmful, ruinous and foul “opinion” is sacrosanct, already by virtue of the fact that there is a destructive fool or traitor who has proclaimed it, all the while hiding behind its inviolability. Is it possible to make him only passively hold his beliefs? How are we to keep him from putting these thoughts into action, through whispers, conspiracy, secret organizations, and the covert accumulation of arms?

It is understood that all of this immediately disarms the state before enemies and subversives; at the same time it guarantees these enemies and subversives total liberty and impunity. The government is obliged to secure the people the freedom to be seduced, while revolutionaries and traitors are assured the freedom to seduce. It is natural that another election’s results will show the success of this guaranteed seduction. And so the regime will continue until the seduction undermines the very idea of voting and readiness to submit to the majority (for according to the recently stated revolutionary formula of the Belgian Spaak: “The minority is not required to submit to the majority”). Then voting is replaced by rebellion, and the organized totalitarian minority seizes power.

This means that the formalistic-quantitative concept of the state opens the doors wide open to every political adventure, coup and revolution, as we observe from year to year in South America, for example. And in truth, the scoundrels of the world would have to be complete fools if they did not notice and exploit this excellent opportunity for the seizure of power. Admittedly, American gangsters did not reach this point and kept their atrocities out of politics, and the Sicilian Mafiosi have also been satisfied with private income. But to arrive at such a conclusion is not at all difficult. Nature abhors a vacuum; as noble motives (religious, moral, patriotic, and spiritual) weakened and withered in human souls, into the empty space of formal liberty would inevitably surge ridiculous, evil, perverse and avaricious plans advanced by totalitarian demagogues of the Left and Right.

Formal liberty includes the freedom of secret treason and overt destruction. From the very beginning the mechanistic and arithmetical competition of private desires prepared within people’s hearts the possibility of blind escalation and civil war. As long as centrifugal forces agreed to moderate their demands and find a compromise, the state could maintain balance over the chasm; but the prophets of class struggle rebelled and brought upon us the moment of civil war. How can the formal-mechanistic conception of the state oppose them? By the urging of great persuaders? Cries over our perishing freedom? Or ideas of sentimental humanitarianism, forgotten conscience and trampled honor? But this would mean “interference”, thereby denouncing formal liberty and the mechanistic conception of politics! This would entail a loss of faith in political arithmetic and a fall into pure democratic heresy!

For formal democracy does not allow any doubt as to the good intentions of the free citizen. Jean-Jacques Rousseau once taught that man by his nature is rational and good, and the one thing he lacks is freedom. We need only to not hinder him in drawing from his good-natured heart the guiding “general will”, wise, unerring and salvific…Just don’t bother him, and he shall draw it forth!

People came to believe this two centuries ago. The French Encyclopedists and revolutionaries believed, and after them anarchists, liberals and proponents of formal democracy around the world. They believed to such a degree that they even forgot about their faith and its dangers: it was decided that this system is the truth most undoubted, and that in politics it demands veneration before liberty, a respectful formalism and an honest count of the votes. And now two centuries of this practice have set contemporary politicians before the greatest political earthquake in world history…

What can they do? Curtail formal liberty? Reject the mechanism of private desire? Abolish the arithmetic of voting? But this would mean to doubt the sacred dogmata of modern democracy! Who shall risk such a feat? Who will disavow himself? And how will he oppose totalitarians from both the Left and the Right?

If this is a dead end, then what next? Assent to the deformations and atrocities of a totalitarian regime?! Impossible!

Spectacle in Babylon

As the West disintegrates, its frenzy of self-affirmation becomes more grandiose and grotesque. Our elites, the manufacturers of what passes for culture, arrange mass rites that attest to their greatness and benevolence. The people stand in awe, and just as critically, they are entertained. Nowhere in the United States is this more evident than at the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl is not simply a profit bonanza for casinos and network television or mere proletarian distraction; it embodies a potent means of social control. Played in the first week of February, the National Football League’s championship game sets the tone for advertising and entertainment in the coming year. It is also a useful platform to propagandize and condition a population of 300 million. America clearly enjoys its indoctrination, as all too many revel in this spectacle’s base nature. People who have not the slightest interest in football will excitedly gather around billboard-sized TV screens to watch the unveiling of a new commercial for erectile dysfunction pills.

Beyond its heavy dose of social programming, the Super Bowl functions as a pseudo-religious festival, one that only a degenerated civilization could produce[1]. Our cultural controllers offer cheap knock-offs of Transcendence. Where the ancients once held games to honor the gods, denizens of the Brave New World now pay obeisance to “freedom”, the oligarchic regime that administers it and a pantheon of celebrities. Glorification of corporate packaging, the physical prowess of the human animal or some deviant pop star is a mindless attempt to stave off the crushing absurdity of life without meaning. Death still looms over us unvanquished, and in its shadow men prefer desolation and nothingness to God. Fr. Seraphim Rose traces the logical course of Western man’s turning away from Christ, the universal and eternal Logos:

Men have rejected the Son of God Who, even now, desires to dwell in men and bring them salvation; and finding intolerable the vacuum this rejection has left in their hearts, they run to madmen and magicians, to false prophets and religious sophists, for a word of life. But this word, so readily given, itself turns to dust in their mouths when they try to repeat it.

Surrogate deities rise from the void and demand worship. At times these gods assume patently ridiculous forms, if only to accentuate our abasement. Such has been the case with Madonna, the Super Bowl XLVI halftime show sensation. Madonna Ciccone is a 53-year-old woman who in any healthy society would be relegated to its more sordid undersides. In this degraded age she is crowned songstress to the world, a tawdry prefiguration of the scarlet harlot from St. John’s Apocalypse. A veteran perpetrator of three decades of cultural subversion, Madonna executed yet another lewd, insipid musical extravaganza before a global audience. And while execrable in its exaltation of this “goddess”, the show seemed to fulfill another very specific purpose.

Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime performance projected a barrage of occult and Masonic imagery. The arcane symbols seen during the concert cannot be consigned to the realm of fantasy; indeed, they were blatant enough to be easily spotted by astute observers. Vigilant Citizen, a website covering the interplay between occultism and popular culture, published a rather convincing exposé on the esoteric undercurrent of the whole spectacle. Perhaps it’s tempting to dismiss such claims as conspiracist paranoia, yet Madonna’s wardrobe and set art, as well has her very biography, suggest more than a passing acquaintance with secret societies.

Having built her fortune on blasphemy, Madonna is also a high-profile practitioner of Kabbalah, Judaic magic rooted in the mystery schools of Babylon and Egypt. One reason among many for Hollywood’s suspension in unreality is that “the industry” has an extensive history with cults, so it should come as no surprise that a number of stars and their handlers might be participants in such activity. How remarkable that Madonna, the Material Girl, devotes herself to contact with unseen forces from the astral plane! The more refined work of radicals past, particularly the invocations of Bakunin and Proudhon, confirms that atheist materialism soon enough begets demonolatry, implicit or overt.

So if the media-entertainment complex has been embedding occult symbols into the popular consciousness, what exactly has been the point of it all? Vigilant Citizen and other commentators would speculate that the Illuminati, a globalist cabal of banking clans, are now revealing themselves to the stupefied herd they rule.

Revelations or no, serious mention of the Bavarian Illuminati is a sure ticket to ostracism from polite society. This revolutionary sect, founded in 1776 by Jesuit-educated Adam Weishaupt with suspected Rothschild family backing, did indeed operate in the late eighteenth century, but attempting to verify its continued existence in our time is a journey through the looking glass. We can, however, assert that sociopathic financial elites dominate the international political economy, do engage in all manner of predation and war profiteering, and quite possibly adhere to occult doctrines that underlie and justify their drive to a unitary world-state. One could, for example, easily imagine former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn at a ritual orgy of the kind depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut.

Incontestable in the debate over any hidden hand in history is the triumph of Illuminism, the ideology that defines the modern West. From the Enlightenment to the present day, we have witnessed “progress” in regicide, the near-total devastation of the Church and the institution of liberal democracy. The very blood-memory of Christian Europe must be wiped from the face of the earth, and in its place equality will reign in a cosmopolitan market system. The family is to be liquidated, and human identity, man made in the image and likeness of his Creator, will be perverted and destroyed through Promethean desire and technology. Divine love shall be banished from paradise.

Planning for the overthrow of the Old Order, the Illuminatus Weishaupt called for infiltration and control of media, education and the arts to comprehensively shape the worldview of the populace. In this directive we find perhaps the true purpose of occult propaganda, to bring the masses, in C.G. Jung’s formulation, under the power of oppressive archetypes. The result of such a program in America is both ludicrous and sinister; the 2012 Super Bowl halftime show resembled a bizarre hybrid of Lucifer Rising and Idiocracy.

What, then, would be the grand secret behind a campaign to initiate the nations into occultism? Certainly the powers of this world aren’t looking to share any special knowledge they’ve acquired- rather, they conduct ruthless psychological warfare against us. In manipulating the collective subconscious, the plutocracy sets out to engineer a deracinated, hedonistic and irredeemable sub-humanity. Their more perfect union is our perfected enslavement. Yet this reality must not serve as a temptation to despair. In his rebellion against Logos, even Satan is no more than the ape of God, and can fashion only vapid counterfeits to authentic Being and salvation.

[1] In his excellent work In Tune with the World, Catholic philosopher Fr. Josef Pieper writes regarding the phenomenon of the pseudo-festival:

Wherever in the course of history we encounter artificial holidays, we may conclude that they point to a particular interpretation of man’s being: to the claim that man, especially in the exercise of political power, is able to bring about his own salvation as well as that of the world. Proof of such lofty powers can always be simulated, provided political propaganda tries hard enough. The semblance can even be kept up, at any rate for a while. And on the basis of it artificial festivals, likewise for a time at least, can thrive or even exert a more or less convincing spell- especially if the combined powers of the pseudo-arts, entertainment, sensationalism, and manipulated illusion are brought to bear, and if in addition the political rulers command and control such ‘spontaneous festive gladness’.

Pleasure-Dome Police State

“We should expect tyranny to result from democracy, the most savage subjection from an excess of liberty”.

-Plato, Republic, Book VIII, 564 a

This December, as many Americans attended to their rituals of shopping, spectator sports and celebrity voyeurism, the 2012 fiscal year’s National Defense Authorization Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. It has now been signed into law by President Obama. This legislation has attracted some controversy, if characteristically muted, thanks to one of its provisions in particular. The U.S. military will be granted the power to detain citizens on the soil of the Land of the Free for indefinite periods of time. All that’s needed to do away with due process is the suspicion of involvement with “terrorism,” an activity elastically defined[1].

Well-meaning commentators have expressed some shock at the passage of an act that enables martial law and interminable vacations to Guantanamo. America was founded on the concept of inalienable rights! Critics and opponents of the liberal order, however, are in no way surprised at this development, for it was decades in the making. With the NDAA, our policy elites have appropriated a mask of legality to manage the chaos they themselves engineered. The rights once upheld as inalienable were ultimately a fanciful construct, a fiction employed in the service of enlightened government.

As Western democracy evolves and extends its power across the world, its ascendance must be secured and made absolute. Serious resistance abroad and at home will surely be crushed. With hearty approval of the new act, Senator Lindsey Graham remarked that America had now assumed its place as a segment of a much larger battlefield for freedom. Old fairy tales of civic virtue have outlived their usefulness in an age of globalism; the new narrative of universal terror assures us liberty and equality forever. A CIA officer-turned-security consultant explains the need for ubiquitous surveillance and government intrusion into all spheres of life:

If we watch – in the United States, in Germany, Sweden, the U.K. – things are constantly at a low boil and we always need to be on our guard…This can take place just about anywhere.

Terror and tyranny are inevitable byproducts of democracy, the one legitimate form of rule permitted by Washington to the tribes of humanity. Our struggle for the rights of man must by necessity incur some casualties, but such bloodshed waters the tree of liberty. Tabulated (or not) as collateral damage, Pashtun villagers are ripped apart by Hellfire missiles launched by drones so that one day girls from that very community may go to an NGO-run school and learn about voting and contraception. Yet when a Pakistani who has taken U.S. citizenship attempts to blow up Times Square in revenge, no one in America’s political and media establishment seems the least bit curious as to his motives. The entire affair is written off as business as usual in the Open Society--after all, it could have taken place anywhere. This regime is the culmination of liberalism’s logic; it is what U.S. forces patrolling the Hindu Kush and all other corners of the earth defend. We fight them over there to invite them over here, for peace and unity in our world must first be enforced through universal war.

Violence and dysfunction shall be distributed over every country and clime; Danes and Minnesotans will experience the horror of Somalia's strife in a most personal and painful manner. To question this sublime experiment or (even worse) to oppose it would be an unpardonable sin against democracy, the creed of our greatness. And what is the secret of democracy, this gospel to liberate and empower all mankind? It is the political expression of our modern faith, self-worship. Just below the rationalistic assertion of rights and equality is the abyss of desire, the wish to ultimately recognize no authority higher than one’s own will made divine. Faith, ethnos and culture must be annihilated by egalitarianism and market forces, thereby giving rise to the New Man. From spiritual disorder springs social anarchy. In the contemporary West, a nation is no longer itself, but a mass of atoms, sovereign in their frenzied quest for profit and pleasure, mere demographic material for the plutocrats’ global Babylon. As surely as the laws of nature, chaos will then necessitate further manipulation and control from above.

It is illustrative that as Congress passed the NDAA to facilitate military incarceration of U.S. citizens, A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas was playing in movie theaters across America[2]. Having built their model society on the primacy of base desire, our master class is also subject to its compulsions. An electronic carnival of cultural sewage is supplied to the proletariat while the elites treat themselves to global conquest, highbrow orgies and financial bailouts. Repressive measures like the Patriot Act and NDAA can be employed to protect the oligarchy should events ever deviate from script. “Rights” serve as a convenient vehicle for the will to power; they are not immutable and can be fabricated or disposed of as circumstances permit. Herein we discover the bankruptcy of humanism: reason works as an eloquent prostitute for passions that would enslave us all. The Pleasure Dome is a police state.

When the democratic principle is exalted beyond the suitable level of local institutions, it flattens all qualitative distinctions between individuals and peoples, leaving destruction, mediocrity and token tasteless amusements in its wake. As the modern West pursues the ideals of liberty and equality to their final outcomes, it draws ever nearer to a nightmarish despotism and dissolution. Immanent universal brotherhood can only be diagnosed as the fever-dream of a diseased imagination, which in its turn is seduced by a malicious deceiving spirit. In Fedor Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, the revolutionary theoretician Shigalev cursorily explains the dialectic of liberation:

Setting out from limitless freedom, I bring about an unlimited despotism.

Tyranny is not democracy’s tragic demise, but the logical consummation of its progress. Only by returning to an organic conception of man and the state, with humility and a record of lessons learned, can we gather strength for renewal and reaction. Life in this fallen world is struggle--toward Transcendence and eternity. Accordingly, politics must be conducted in fidelity to the moral law, whose Author is supra-natural. All power derives from God, and to Him shall it be consecrated.

---

[1] As a recent Homeland Security video made clear, anyone might be the enemy, most especially men whose ancestors hailed from Europe.

[2] For those fortunate enough not to know of the Harold and Kumar films, suffice it to say that they center around the respective sons of Indian and Chinese immigrants who consume fast food and go on adventures trying to “get high” and “get laid.” Truly, it's yet another heart-warming way the American Dream has been brought to the silver screen.

This is Sin

“This is sin”, said a bloodied Muammar Gaddafi to his tormenters in a last moment of humiliation. “Do you know right from wrong?” After NATO airstrikes destroyed his convoy and forced him to flee on foot through Sirte, Libya’s deposed leader was seized from a drainage ditch. Footage off of a captor’s cell phone shows a howling rebel mob parading him along the dusty city blocks of his birthplace. Beaten, pistol-whipped and sodomized with a knife, Gaddafi was then summarily executed with a gunshot to the temple. His body was displayed as a trophy of war, and his secrets were effectively buried, never to be revealed at another farcical international tribunal in The Hague.

U.S. policymakers weren’t likely planning on the mass release of a Gaddafi snuff film. In their jubilation and braggadocio, the Libyan “freedom-fighters” ruined the enjoyment of a private viewing session available only to a chosen few within the Beltway. And so an eccentric dictator with a terrorist past and delusions of pan-African grandeur evoked unforced human sympathy as he suffered and died before a world audience. Colonel Gaddafi knew grave sin well; this was the man who ordered the passengers of Pan Am 103 blown out of the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. He had since come to terms with the West, paying restitution to the victims’ families and scrapping his nuclear weapons program in favor of restored diplomatic and commercial ties eighteen years later. Yet when Benghazi and the rest of Cyrenaica rose up against the regime in early 2011, Washington, London and Paris smelled blood in the water.

Gaddafi’s murder and the violation of Libyan sovereignty cannot be understood as merely the settlement of an old vendetta from the Reagan years or as another selfless humanitarian endeavor that happened to incorporate satellite-guided munitions. The so-called Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) enshrined in U.S. foreign policy provides convenient cover for the actions of globalist predators. Why, after all, were the tenets of R2P not applied to Bahrain’s suppression of its Shia majority within the same timeframe? The answer might have something to do with the basing rights of the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet and control of the Persian Gulf oil supply. Libya’s energy wealth certainly played a role in its fate, since the Jamahiriya state kept around 150 tons of gold in its vaults and had avoided subordination to the Bank of International Settlements, as well as dependence on the dollar. U.S. Africa Command has now carried out an intervention through minimal expenditures, an undeniable success in the race with China for the Dark Continent’s natural resources.

The removal of Gaddafi is limited in its strategic significance, but it is highly symbolic in other ways. Whether or not documentation of the ordeal was intended for public consumption, his rather gruesome demise illustrates graphically to every nation the cost of resistance to the Postmodern Empire. Enemies of Rome were once dragged through the city by the triumphator and jeered by throngs of plebeians before facing death. In our own age, the enemies of democracy and human rights are made to star in productions not unlike the horror-porn so fashionable among anaesthetized American moviegoers. When Gaddafi’s last cameo proved unbearable to watch for the non-depraved, U.S. President and Nobel Peace laureate Barack Obama set the record straight on a popular late-night comedy show:

Well, this is somebody who, for 40 years, has terrorized his country and supported terrorism. And he had an opportunity during the Arab spring to finally let loose of his grip on power and to peacefully transition into democracy. We gave him ample opportunity, and he wouldn’t do it. And, obviously, you never like to see anybody come to the kind of end that he did, but I think it obviously sends a strong message around the world to dictators that…people long to be free, and they need to respect the human rights and the universal aspirations of people.

Revolutionary tyranny is enacted on a worldwide scale, and the threat to any power outside of Washington’s orbit is by now quite explicit- from the set of Jay Leno, no less. “The universal aspirations of people” have been divined by the high priests of our policy elite; it is they who will administer the blessings of liberty and equality to the grasping masses. Libyans, too, have a right to insurmountable debt, pornography, shopping malls and hip-hop, whether in Dar-al-Islam or the alluring chaos of the West.

This Garden of Earthly Delights is impossible to maintain, however, without daily rites of sacrifice. Every class of victim performs a special function. Americans sent to Afghanistan and blown apart by IEDs protect “our freedoms”, while on the home front unborn children are slaughtered to affirm individual autonomy and “empowerment”. Our cities are the havens of savages who in rapine and murder appease the cruel gods of the Open Society. And when an independent-minded despot like Gaddafi is executed, we rejoice in the downfall of another villain who temporarily frustrated humanity’s progress toward a more perfect union.

Four days after Gaddafi’s death, the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace released a white paper on international financial reform. The document has gained certain notoriety with its call for a world Authority and the birth of a new global society, a process shown to be already well underway. It speaks of solidarity and subsidiarity, brotherhood and charity, yet not once is there mention of the word sin. Who today would dare speak of such antiquated superstitions? Not the cardinals of the Holy See, but the brutal and bizarre Muammar Gaddafi, who in final agony would identify the nature of Leviathan’s works.

Transgression is virtue in the age of apostasy, and the new religion self-worship. Man ascends as a perverse and bestial god to re-order creation according to his will, a vision manifesting in a kingdom of death. This is the ancient hope and our Brave New World, the Novus Ordo Seclorum. This is sin.

Dark Hero

Not in vain is Russia heir to the traditions of Byzantium; intrigue, secret diplomacy and espionage are integral to the Third Rome’s strategic culture. Over the past decade Vladimir Putin has proven a consummate practitioner of statecraft in this fashion, as well as an able defender of the national interest. Yet where is he leading Russia? The answer remains a mystery. His formidable will and predisposition to action are impressive, but only in the service of a higher principle will these gifts signify greatness.

Barring any extraordinary surprises or disasters, Putin will again be president of the Russian Federation by spring of next year. His liberal protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, is slated for a return to the premier’s seat (now occupied by VVP, as he is referred to in Moscow), thereby flipping the leadership “tandem” back to its natural state. Titles in contemporary politics carry limited meaning. It’s clear that Putin was and is the Gosudar’, Russia’s ruler; he’s a Byzantine emperor, Petersburg technocrat and KGB veteran all at once. And his operating methods today still reflect the formative years he spent in Soviet intelligence.

Stories of interactions with Putin are telling in this regard. He has been known to inject some dark humor into his dealings with opponents, often with an acute eye to psychological advantage. Before a trip to Moscow, a senior U.S. State Department official made a series of press statements condemning Russia’s security services for the usual “human rights violations” and persecution of dissidents. Upon the diplomat’s arrival in the country, Putin invited her to a party at a compound on the outskirts of Moscow. Only after stepping out of her motorcade and into the sumptuous dacha would she discover that it was a birthday celebration for FSB heavyweight Nikolai Patrushev.

A significant element of Putin’s mystique has been his ability to confound and punish enemies. When he began his first term as president in 2000, oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky expected to control the Kremlin as they did under Yeltsin. Stripping Russia of her resources and impoverishing her people had proven a wildly lucrative endeavor. Instead, when Putin moved against their empires in his quest to rebuild the state, they were lucky to escape with their ill-gotten gains to more hospitable accommodations in London and Tel Aviv. Since American-supported Open Society magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky refused to take analogous hints, he ended up in a prison cell. Meanwhile the Kremlin waged brutal war against Chechen rebels and largely arrested Russia’s disintegration toward regional and ethnic separatism.

It is most notably in the realm of international competition that Putin has shown himself a statesman. He maneuvered Russia back to primacy within her Eurasian sphere of interests and worked to effectively reverse the tide of Washington-generated “color revolutions” from Ukraine to Kyrgyzstan. The August 2008 war with Georgia, provoked by the unstable U.S. client Mikheil Saakashvili, served as Moscow’s unsubtle warning to the West that certain red lines need not be crossed. Putin has at the same time engineered a fruitful economic partnership with Germany, with this year marking the inauguration of the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline across the Baltic. Should Berlin ever come to rethink its current cultural and geopolitical orientation, a Russo-German entente would field enormous strategic potential.

Western media commentators have been uniform in their expressions of dismay at the return of “Batman”, as Putin was crowned in a State Department cable, to his subterranean throne beneath the Kremlin. Such despondency from the manufacturers of opinion is somewhat encouraging; it could be taken as a sign that Russia’s once and future president has made some remarkable achievements in safeguarding his country. Orthodox Patriarch Cyril recently thanked him for preventing its collapse. Nonetheless, Putin stands before several daunting challenges.

Like the rest of Europe, Russia must undertake radical action if it is to have a future. Modernity in its Bolshevik iteration laid waste to the Slavic lands. Post-Soviet demographic decline will demand the expansion of pro-natal policies that Putin has at least begun to implement[1]. The energy-based economy he was content to promote during the past decade must be diversified if Russia is to attain dynamism and infrastructure commensurate with a talented and well-educated population base. In the Muslim North Caucasus, instability, crime and clan warfare are systemic, having already swallowed enormous federal resources and spread to Moscow itself. Ordinary Russians are fatigued by ubiquitous corruption, and the price of bribes keeps rising - from those required for government and business services to university admissions and traffic stops. All this transpires as the Pentagon deploys its missile-defense infrastructure- a new ring of “containment”- ever closer to Russia’s western frontiers.

As Putin enters his third presidential term, his task – the restoration of Russia – will require no less than the exertion of a Peter the Great. The feuding clans that comprise the power structure will not make this any easier (Putin is their main arbiter). It would be unwise to rely so heavily on “political technologists”, confidence men who reduce ideologies to mere marketing campaigns and breed only cynicism. Replicating the silly manipulations practiced by Western politicians in the pay of financial elites is beneath the dignity of a sovereign state with a thousand-year history of rule. Russians have long valued representative institutions like the zemstvo at the local and regional levels; they’ve also understood from experience that issues of national survival depend upon the will of the autocrat. As the poet Alexander Pushkin once expressed, “supreme power does not tolerate a weak hand”.

Putin could be the autocrat Russia needs, though it still remains to be seen whether he will explicitly formulate and lead a cause of national salvation. He certainly has earned admiration from Russian conservatives and some traditionalists in the West for his positions against U.S. hegemony, not to speak of his very style. Yet the Putin who delivered the 2007 Munich speech against NATO encroachment also delegated Dmitry Medvedev and his liberal advisors presidential power the following year. In addition, the Kremlin has worked to marginalize sincere and articulate Russian nationalists. These men have not shied away from opposing massive immigration flows from the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as the moral and spiritual degradation of society wrought through the media. Their analysis of Russia’s predicament is part of a wider reaction against anarcho-tyranny regnant throughout the whole of European civilization.

European peoples are the target of a campaign aimed at their dissolution. Were Putin to affirm the Great Russian ethnos and its right to an independent existence as Tsar Alexander III did before him, he would in one stroke create a basic framework of resistance to the global democracy offensive. An astute populist like Putin should recognize this. But at the rhetorical level, he often still employs liberal semantics. His new proposal for a Eurasian Union, a geopolitically sensible project, is publicly justified with a call for open borders and open markets- tools for the erosion of national identity.

In his work The Counter-Revolution, Thomas Molnar analyzed the phenomenon of the counter-revolutionary hero, a charismatic figure who will use supportive rightists for certain objectives, only to betray them at a later time. This type of actor might possess certain counter-revolutionary sentiments, but concludes that to retain power he must cooperate with the revolutionary media and cultural establishment, thus ultimately furthering their program of subversion. Charles De Gaulle, who after a triumphal return to power abandoned the colons in Algeria and surrendered French society to the leftists of May 1968, embodied for Molnar this projection of false hope:

“If one examines this phenomenon from all sides, one cannot but conclude that what impressed them in De Gaulle were the imponderables of his personality, what I called repeatedly style. An absolute rigor, the cult of loneliness, the iron will, the sense of mission, all this created an image that overwhelmed the counter-revolutionaries even though they were aware of his past record. Objectively examined, De Gaulle was the last person they ought to have trusted…”

One could rightfully say that Putin is no De Gaulle, as he has deftly neutralized dissent and potential uprisings, which are in turn often sponsored by a network of Western NGOs (and the governments that coordinate them). At the same time, propaganda to insurrection against traditional order enjoys a wide bandwidth in Russia- it is potent and nearly omnipresent through television and other electronic media. Pornography, for example, can be viewed on state channels. Through the business ventures of Wall Street and Hollywood, Washington holds means other than force to subdue its foes; weapons like MTV shatter national morale as no barrage of cruise missiles ever could. If Putin is truly serious about protecting Russia, he will prosecute a cultural counter-revolution[2]. To defy the Brave New World requires the discipline of repentance.

The struggle for renewal is fought in depths unseen; it is spiritual in nature. From Communist rule and genocidal wars to the seductions of a free and equal consumer paradise, Russia walks her Way of the Cross. Her unknown fate has been charged to the ruthless and enigmatic Vladimir Putin. May he come to be not a De Gaulle, but a Constantine, and rally against the forces of postmodern Mammonism a sacral empire.

[1] Ending the abomination of infanticide, known euphemistically throughout the developed world as abortion, would be a major step in demographic recovery among Russians. While the rate of abortions has been declining, there were still 74 for every 100 births in the country in 2009. Only through the resurgence of Orthodox culture and its hierarchy of values can this phenomenon, as well as alcoholism and drug addiction, be effectively curtailed.

[2] In this regard, Brazilian Catholic traditionalist Plinio Correa de Oliveira wrote: “It also must be recognized that if a person managed, for example, to put a stop to immoral or agnostic movies or television programs, he would have done much more for the Counter-Revolution than if, in the course of the everyday proceedings of a parliamentary regime, he had brought about the fall of a leftist cabinet.”

The Assassination of Pyotr Stolypin

After a series of pogroms tore through Russia in 1886, the young philosopher Vladimir Soloviev would exercise his prophetic impulse. Neither a slave to social fashions nor a stranger to controversy, Soloviev was a friend to the Jews out of sincerity rather than any calculation. Two years prior, he had published an article asserting the intertwined destinies of Christendom and Jewry as part of his greater vision of a “free theocracy.”¹And so in the pogroms’ aftermath, Soloviev wrote in a letter to his acquaintance, the Talmudic scholar Feivel Getz:

What are we to do with this disaster? Let pious Jews pray intensely to God, that He set Russia’s fate in the hands of religious and also sensible and brave men, who would want and could dare to do good for both peoples².

Such a man would be granted to Russia, if only for a time. As the Romanovs’ empire was swept into a ruinous war with Japan and the 1905 Revolution, Pyotr Arkadievich Stolypin would stand against the maelstrom. Stolypin was ruthlessly suppressing rebellion as governor of Saratov oblast when he was called by Nicholas II to national duty. Within months, the new prime minister would proceed to re-establish order in Russia and undertake challenging political, economic and agricultural reforms. Just as Soloviev had hoped but would never see, Stolypin also attempted to improve the acrimonious Russian-Jewish relationship at the level of nationalities policy. This premature effort, however, was unlikely to satisfy any interested party, much less radicals of any persuasion.

Stolypin would resign in March of 1911 from the fractious and chaotic Duma after the failure of his land-reform bill. His peace in this world would be short-lived, though; he was assassinated at the Kiev Opera House on September 14 in the presence of the emperor. Upon being shot, Stolypin stood and declared his willingness to die for the Tsar, whom he then blessed before collapsing. In a eulogy for the fallen, the conservative monarchist Lev Tikhomirov would praise his nobility and strength of heart, all of which he devoted to the service of his fatherland:

The blood of his ancestors spoke in him, and his soul was deeply Russian and Christian. He believed in God as the Lord may grant belief to the servants before His altar…In such a way did he believe in Russia, and in this we can only admire him. And from this faith he drew vast power³.

Stolypin’s killer was 24-year-old Dmitry Bogrov (Mordechai Gershkovich), a leftist revolutionary who had also moonlighted as a provocateur for the Okhrana, Imperial Russia’s secret police. The otherwise unremarkable Bogrov harbored a burning animosity toward the autocracy, and as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn will show in the following passage, his sentiments were shared at the time by many other Russian Jews. With moral, political and financial support from the Diaspora (especially in America), the Jewish community was radicalizing to unprecedented degrees, and Russians were bristling back. There would be no reduction of inter-ethnic tensions. Bogrov acted “extravagantly,” as he put it, to prevent Stolypin from instigating pogroms, but in doing so he murdered perhaps the one man capable of implementing some measure of a just peace between Russians and Jews⁴.Too often in history the victim narrative is a convenient pretext for aggression. Chauvinism and hatred cut both ways, and the atrocities they inspire can wreak consequences far beyond what their initiators might have imagined.

Pytor Stolypin may well have been mistaken in the formulation of key policies. Tikhomirov had earlier criticized the prime minister for his adherence to a failed Western-style parliamentarianism, and urged him to first uphold the integrity of the Great Russian ethnos and its culture before tackling any other “national questions” within the empire. It would be better, said Tikhomirov, that subject peoples prove themselves worthy of the rights bestowed them by the Tsar.

Yet Stolypin was also an adept statesman with unmatched force of will. Had he eluded his assassin’s bullet, he quite possibly could have guided Russia intact past the next catastrophic round of war and revolution that awaited her. In his work 200 Years Together, Solzhenitsyn dedicates considerable space to Stolypin’s death and its implications. Step by terrible step, the drama unfolds as his murder at the Kiev opera will facilitate revolutionary tyranny over Russia. The curtain only descends upon our witness to the most “extravagant” effect of Bogrov’s exploit, the enslavement and near-extermination of both Jewry and the Slavic tribes.

***

Text taken from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together, Chapter 10: In the Time of the Duma (pp.462-467).

Translated from Russian by Mark Hackard.

The first Russian premier who faithfully set and carried out the task of Jewish equal status, despite the will of the Tsar, died—was this History’s mockery?—at the hands of a Jew…

There had already been seven attempts to kill Stolypin by entire revolutionary groups of varied composition; none had succeeded. And then a loner would ingeniously manage it.

Still young and of immature mind, Bogrov himself could not grasp in full Stolypin’s public significance. But from childhood he had seen the everyday degrading sides of political inequality and was inflamed, for his family, colleagues and himself, to hatred of the Tsarist power. And clearly in Kiev’s ideologically progressive Jewish circles, there would be no softening toward Stolypin for his attempts to remove anti-Jewish restrictions. Among the well-off, the scales were tipped by memory of his energetic suppression of the 1905 Revolution and displeasure over his efforts toward the “nationalization of Russian credit,” i.e. open competition with private capital. Among groups of Kievan Jewry (and those of Petersburg, which the future killer also frequented), was active the ultra-radical Field, where the young Bogrov considered himself right and even obligated to kill Stolypin.

So strong was the Field that it permitted such an arrangement: the capitalist father Bogrov ascends and prospers under the monarchical system, while Bogrov the son commits to the destruction of that system. And the father, after the assassination, expresses pride in such a son. It turns out that Bogrov wasn’t so alone: he was quietly applauded by those in well-to-do quarters, those who had earlier remained unconditionally loyal to the regime.

And the gunshot that struck down Russia’s recovery could have been directed against the Tsar. But Bogrov thought killing the Tsar impossible, because (in his words) “this could have provoked persecution of the Jews” and “brought about constraints on their rights.” By murdering only the prime minister, he foresaw correctly that such a thing wouldn’t happen. Yet he thought—and was bitterly mistaken—that this act would favorably serve the fate of Russian Jewry…

And what happened in “Black Hundred Kiev,” populated by a great number of Jews? Among Kievan Jews in the very first hours after the murder, there arose a mass panic, and a movement to abandon the city began. “Terror seized the Jewish population not only of Kiev, but also of the most remote localities of the pale of settlement and inner Russia."⁵ A club of Russian nationalists sought to collect signatures to deport all Jews from Kiev. (It wanted to collect them, but didn’t.) There came to pass not the slightest attempt at a pogrom. The chairman of the youth organization “Double Eagle” Golubiev called for the storm of the Kiev Okhrana section that failed to stop the assassination and for beatings of Jews; he was reined in immediately.

The newly sworn-in prime minister Kokovtsov at once called Cossack regiments into the city (all these forces were on maneuvers and far away) and sent all governors an energetic telegram: prevent pogroms by all means, including force. Units were deployed to an extent not done against the revolution. (Slizoberg: If pogroms broke out in September 1911, “Kiev would have witnessed a slaughter not seen since the times of Khmelnitsky.^"6)

And not a pogrom took place in Russia, not one, not in the least. (Although we often read dense volumes how the Tsarist government dreamt only of arranging Jewish pogroms and was always seeking a way to do so.)

It stands to reason that the prevention of disorder is a direct duty of the state, and in successfully carrying out this task, awaiting praise would be inappropriate. But after such a shocking event and on such grounds—the murder of the prime minister!—the avoidance of expected pogroms could be noted, even if in passing. But no—no one heard that intonation, and no one mentions that.

And what’s even difficult to believe—Kiev’s Jewish community did not issue a denunciation or an indirect expression of sorrow over the murder. Just the opposite—after Bogrov’s execution many Jewish students, male and female, brazenly dressed in mourning.

Russians at the time noticed this. It has now been published that in December 1912 Vasily Rozanov wrote: “After [the murder of] Stolypin, I’ve somehow broken with them [the Jews]: as if a Russian would dare kill a Rothschild and more broadly one of their great men.”⁷

From the historical viewpoint there come two substantial thoughts on why it would be folly to write off Bogrov’s deed as the “action of internationalist forces.” The first and central of these: it wasn’t so. Not only Bogrov’s brother in his book, but also various neutral sources point out that he had reckoned to assist Jewry’s fortunes.⁸ The second thought: to take up what is inconvenient in history, to think it over and to regret is responsible, while to disavow a matter and wash one’s hands of it is shallow.

However, the disavowals and hand-wringing began almost immediately. In October of 1911, the Octobrist faction requested an inquiry on the murky circumstances of Stolypin’s murder. And at that moment parliamentary deputy Nisselovich protested: why did the Octobrists not conceal in their request that Bogrov was a Jew?! That, he said, was anti-Semitism!

I’ve also become familiar with this incomparable argument. After 70 years I received it from the American Jewish community in the form of a most severe accusation: why did I not conceal, why did I also say that Stolypin’s killer was a Jew? It does not matter that I described him as fully as I could. And it wasn’t important what his Jewish identity meant in his motives. No, non-concealment on my part—this was anti-Semitism!!

Deputy Guchkov with integrity would answer at the time:

“I think that a much greater act of anti-Semitism lies in Bogrov’s very action. I’d propose to State Duma member Nisselovich that he addresses his ardent words of admonition not to us, but to his co-religionists. Let him convince them with the power of his oratory to stay further away from two shameful professions: service as informants in the Okhrana and service as agents of terror. By this he would render a much greater service to his tribe.^9"

But what is that worth to Jewish memory when Russian history has permitted this assassination to be wiped clear of its memory? It has remained some insignificant, collateral blemish. Only in the 1980s did I begin to raise it from oblivion, and for 70 years it was unacceptable to remember that murder.

As the decades recede, more events and their meanings become visible to us. I’ve often fallen to thinking over the capriciousness of History and the unforeseen consequences it visits upon us, the consequences of our actions.

• Wilhelmine Germany loosed Lenin upon Russia to demoralize her; 28 years later Germany would be divided for a half-century.

• Poland would facilitate the strengthening of the Bolsheviks in their most difficult 1919 for a quick defeat of the Whites—and received in return 1939, 1944, 1956 and 1980.

• How zealously Finland would help the Russian revolutionaries, and how she could not abide her advantageous liberty as a component of Russia. She received from the Bolsheviks 40 years of political debasement (“Finlandization”).

• England in 1914 thought to crush Germany as a global competitor, but tore itself from the ranks of the great powers as all of Europe was crushed.

• The Cossacks in Petrograd were neutral in February and October [1917], and in a year in a half would reap their own genocide (and many were even those very Cossacks).

• In the first days of June 1917, the Left Social Revolutionaries gravitated to the Bolsheviks and gave them the outward appearance of a “coalition” and a widened platform. A year later they were squashed in a way that no autocracy could have managed.

Foresight of these long-term consequences is never granted to us or anyone. And the only salvation from such blunders is to be guided by the compass of God’s morality. Or in simple folk-language: “Don’t lay traps for others—you’ll fall into them.”

So it was with the murder of Stolypin—Russia endured brutal suffering, but Bogrov didn’t help the Jews. However others may see it, it is here I sense the gigantic steps of History, the results striking in their unexpectedness. Safeguarding Kiev’s Jews from persecution, Bogrov killed Stolypin. Had he survived, Stolypin would soon have been dismissed by the Tsar, but without question would have been called again into the leaderless musical chairs of 1914-16. Under him, Russia would not have come to such a shameful end, neither in the war nor in the Revolution. (If we would have even entered that war under him.)

Step 1: A murdered Stolypin meant shot nerves in the war, and Russia fell under the jackboots of the Bolsheviks.

Step 2: The Bolsheviks, for all their savagery, turned out to be even more incompetent than the Tsarist government, and in a quarter-century would quickly give away half-Russia to the Germans, including Kiev.

Step 3: Hitler’s forces easily entered Kiev and then destroyed the city’s Jewry.

The same Kiev, also in September, and only 30 years after Bogrov’s gun blast.

_____________

Notes

1 -- Toward the end of his life, Soloviev would come to repudiate his hopes for a free theocratic state. His last work, A Short Tale of Antichrist, reflects his disillusionment with the possibility of a perfected temporal order. Soloviev models the Antichrist’s earthly kingdom upon his earlier ideal.

2 -- Mochulsky, Konstantin. Gogol, Soloviev, Dostoevsky. Respublika. Moscow, 1995.

3 --  Tikhomirov, Lev. “U Mogily Petra Stolypina”. Moskovskie Vedomosti. 1911. No. 207

4 -- During the Second World War, Orthodox theologian Father Sergei Bulgakov wrote on the world-historical struggle between Judaism and Christendom: “Israel’s form in this state is fateful and terrible. On the one hand, it is persecuted namely by Christian peoples, and this persecution takes from time to time cruel and ferocious forms- oppression and hate to the point of extermination; such are Jewish pogroms to this day. On the other hand, Israel itself remains the overt or hidden persecutor of Christ and Christendom to the point of its direct and dire oppression, as in Russia.” In accordance with Church tradition, the tragedy will only be resolved at the end of time with Christ’s Second Coming, when through a holy remnant “all Israel shall be saved” (Romans XI: 26).

5 -- G.B. Slizoberg, Volume III, p. 249

6 --G.B. Slizoberg, Volume III, p. 249

7 -- “Correspondence of V.V. Rozanov and M.O. Gershenzon”. Novyi Mir, No. 3, p. 232

8 -- Bogrov, Vladimir. Dmitry Bogrov and the Murder of Stolypin: Exposing Secrets True and False. Berlin, 1931.

9 -- A. Guchkov. Speech in the State Duma on 15^th October 1911 [inquiry into the murder of Chairman of Council of Ministers P.A. Stolypin] // A. Guchkov in the Third State Duma (1907-1912): Collection of Speeches. St. Petersburg, 1912, p. 163

The Descent of Man...

History has ended in the postmodern West, and humanity’s future burns brightly. Nothing will impede inexorable progress toward the perfect harmony envisioned in Coca-Cola’s hilltop commercial, prophesied from Rome 40 years ago:

I'd like to teach the world to sing (Sing with me)

In perfect harmony (Perfect harmony)

I'd like to buy the world a Coke

And keep it company (That's the real thing)

Indeed, the great dream draws ever closer to realization as democracy is enshrined as religion, labor flows erase borders, and the political economy is globalized. Enjoy a Coke! And think nothing of your demographic displacement by alien cultures, of rape and other atrocities, of riots, looting and twitter mobs—just turn to another channel on your flat-screen.

This proud technical civilization is assumed the apex of human development. Poverty and inter-tribal war will be abolished by proper social engineering and consumption for all, and our longing for transcendence numbed by any manner of surrogate narcotics, from sex, drugs and shopping to every possible electronic amusement.

Yet postmodern ecstasy is soon interrupted by rough beasts emerging from the haze of a false order. In everyday life, we witness the criminality and savagery loosed upon us by multiculturalism and the egalitarian idea. In works of popular culture, monkeys show up to ruin the party. This summer’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes takes the Coca-Cola hilltop sing-along and subjects it to marauding chimpanzees and a doomsday plague.

Monsters like King Kong are not simply primeval invaders; rather, they arise from anarchy of our own making. The massive gorilla that rampaged through 1930s New York City and scaled the Empire State Building to bat at airplanes was brought to America for the purpose of profit and entertainment. In the same way, the super-primates depicted in the new prequel to Planet of the Apes are none other than our creation.

Rise may be a product of Hollywood, society’s indoctrination powerhouse, but the nightmare it evokes stems from the politically incorrect subconscious. Whatever the intentions of its director, Rupert Wyatt, the movie serves as a pop-culture indictment of modernity. Valueless freedom, equality and utilitarianism are all proven utterly bankrupt.

Alongside other science-fiction stories, Rise conveys a not uncommon yet worthwhile theme—the quest to achieve mastery over nature, having no higher end than to draw power from knowledge, ends in a backlash of chaos and death. Bay Area scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) works relentlessly to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but instead unleashes both a simian rebellion and a pandemic to wipe out humanity. In the course of the plot, there are also pointed reminders that NASA has embarked on a flight to Mars. Man sets out to conquer the red planet, and apes inherit the earth.

It is in the details of Rise that the liberal project is discredited. The story’s plot is set in San Francisco, a city rivaled perhaps only by Amsterdam as a symbol of Western decadence. Rodman’s workplace, a cutting-edge biotech company, is impeccably “diverse,” as is his choice of mate. The Open Society proposes the equality of individuals, uproots and dissolves peoples and flattens culture into a commodity. Nothing is sacred but a very specific kind of tolerance, the act of voting and the purchase of consumer goods. We recoil in fear and bewilderment when the primitive and the savage reassert their rights with ever greater violence. Yet why the surprise, if man is only an intelligent ape with no soul or higher purpose but the satisfaction of desire and the glorification of self?

The dystopia in Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not the ape society, but the civilization that through titanic hubris would write its own death sentence. In Fedor Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, the mad mystic Kirillov hopes to achieve transfiguration through suicide. He converses with the narrator:

History will be divided into two eras: from the gorilla to the destruction of God, and from the destruction of God...

...to the gorilla?

Kirillov would go on to tell of a new, divine man, a god beyond good and evil. The narrator’s preemptory response rings more true, though. Man divorced from the sustaining Transcendent is not even a gorilla, but a beast more wretched and absurd, for he has relinquished the human dignity that once ennobled him. We have been called to struggle toward a nature much higher.

Right Action

Fellow Alt-Righter Matthew Parrott was kind enough to offer his thoughts on my response to the recent atrocity in Norway. His criticisms deserve a hearing, and so I would like to provide an answer to them. Mr. Parrott first asserts:

You’ve essentially dichotomized the Greater War and the Lesser War, broadly condemning bold action in defense of the West as inferior to authentic Christianity.

The spiritual combat is indeed the Greater War. Yet if history is our teacher, physical defense is also required for the survival of a people and culture. Pacifism is out of the question. In no way would I condemn ‘bold action in defense of the West’—the action simply must be justified and ethical. Breivik’s deed was certainly bold, and he perceived it in defense of the West. But beyond that, it was the murder of unarmed civilians, no matter their destructive worldview and political program. Were White Russian agents to massacre a Komsomol camp of future apparatchiks in the Stalinist USSR, such an operation also could not be justified. Killing Stalin and attacking the NKVD would be. To cite Ivan Ilyin once more, resistance to evil with force is necessary, and this notion itself derives from the spiritual principle.

Without your presenting a credible roadmap for defending and preserving the Christian West, you’ve only helped confirm the suspicions of the skeptics among us that we authentic Christians will shrink from the challenges we face, squirting the sort of squid ink this essay amounts to while our ancient faith and homeland perish.

To compose ‘a credible roadmap for defending and preserving the Christian West’ is a heroic task for anyone, let alone a circle of like-minded men. It is of extreme importance, as Parrott says, that strategic-level planning be done. All the same, the priority of my article was to emphasize resistance to evil and all its seductions. I don’t consider this to be in vain. Breivik could have been a hero had he applied his intelligence and capabilities to righteous struggle, but instead he chose evil as his good. Never should men of the West stand idle as their lands and religion are brought to ruin. Let us remember our ancestors who would repulse aggressors like the Saracens and Turks time and again—they knew their duty. We can show ourselves worthy of them by first ennobling our everyday behavior and overcoming fear. Greater endeavors follow logically from there. Mr. Parrott is an activist, and he needs no instruction in this.

Faith without works is dead, is it not? If you believe the Christian faith entails coiling into a priestly asceticism while our throats are cuts [sic], please say so more directly. If you don’t, then please explain how ABB’s [Anders Behring Breivik’s] actions could have been altered to prove compatible with what you’re selling.

Faith without works is indeed dead, just as works without faith pave the road to nowhere. European tradition and culture must be defended, through force when necessary. Alfred the Great, Charles Martel, Richard the Lionheart, Don John of Austria, Jan Sobieski, and Eugene of Savoy would all agree. In my article, the Knights Templar were cast as exemplary defenders of the West, as they were men who united and embodied both the ascetic and warrior ideals.

If Anders Breivik had rejected the temptation to mow down leftist youth, might he have brought those formidable planning skills to bear in a more just and creative undertaking—such as realizing his idea for a rightist youth organization to counter the totalitarian “antifa”, alternative media, or creating local networks to protect Norway’s women from (overwhelmingly Muslim) sexual predators? He could have gained a platform to address and confront the demographic threat to the West by these means instead of committing murderous propaganda of the deed. All such efforts are still worthwhile and could form a stepping stone to Counterrevolution well before 2083.

If you’ve actually developed a plan for our temporal salvation, please direct me toward it. You’re a great writer and I’m sure it would be insightful. If you haven’t, then what moral authority do you have to demand that men like ABB stop trying to figure it out for themselves?

Plans for temporal salvation tend to create hell on earth rather than any millennial kingdom. I appreciate Mr. Parrott’s earnestness, but I wouldn’t demand that men concerned with the fate of their peoples ‘stop trying to figure it out for themselves’. I write to point, however imperfectly, to an authority and Truth higher than the angels and anyone of us, so that the peoples of the West may live nobly to glorify God. To engage in the self-realization of Breivik’s sort, to achieve self-will and rebel against divine law, is shown to be the path of nihilism. In such a case existence becomes pointless—everything is permitted and death is absolute. Each one of us has been granted freedom and a unique calling; each one of us also has a duty- to seek Truth with love in our hearts and resist evil, in word, thought and deed.

The Highest Combat

In the desperate war for the soul of the West, we witness another atrocity. And this time the perpetrator was neither a Bolshevik nor a disciple of Mahomet. Last week Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian, gunned down 68 unarmed Labor Party youth activists on an island camp outside Oslo after bombing government offices (where eight died). The deed, he announced, had been wrought in the name of traditional Europe. Breivik’s massacre seems designed to inflict maximum damage to the European cause, but at this point it looks to be the well-planned and executed work of a dedicated madman.

Breivik claims to have acted on behalf of Christendom, and so appropriated its heroes and imagery in his propaganda. In this we uncover the tragedy of his recourse to murder, as well as an element of the diabolical. Speaking on the inversion of symbols, the great French traditionalist René Guenon would warn:

“It sometimes so happens that people who imagine that they are fighting the devil, whatever their particular notion of the devil may be, are thus turned, without any suspicion of the fact on their part, into his best servants!”

There is no better current example of this phenomenon than Breivik’s claim of kinship with an order of long-departed warrior monks, the Knights Templar. With the support of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, this “new knighthood” struck camp in Jerusalem in 1119, and for nearly two centuries would provide security for pilgrims and defend Christian outposts in the Holy Land. The men of the order held a faith in Christ, the Hero-God, both deep and sincere; it sustained them in unforgiving combat with the Saracens, even unto death.

It was not faith that sustained Anders Breivik, but death. The living God is conspicuously absent from his esoterically atheist Europe of the future. When Christianity is mentioned in his manifesto, it is but a folkway or a construct employed for utilitarian purposes. The mainstay of the Norwegian killer’s actual ideology was unremarkable right-liberalism grounded in the Enlightenment, and as such it could offer no serious alternative to the democratic-hedonist society he opposed[i]. Breivik instinctively rebelled against the Brave New World and with keen perception would catalogue its many revolting manifestations. Yet he was a man adrift in a Cosmos emptied of meaning. Seeing the ruin of the West before him, he only descended further into its abyss.

Breivik correctly identified Western elites’ doctrines of multiculturalism as an abomination. He would also warn of the catastrophe resulting from Muslim immigration to the Continent. The fate of European peoples was Breivik’s reason for action, but the action he took in their defense was evil. Death is the ultimate currency of any culture that has abandoned Transcendence, and Breivik reminded self-congratulatory, bourgeois Norway of this cruel truth. But by visiting death upon his nation, the young Norwegian did not fight against nothingness - he willed it. Nor could Breivik escape the desolation of radical autonomy—he heralded its dreadful consequences. Another massacre fades from the news cycle, and postmodernity still careens toward annihilation.

External chaos will always threaten in a fallen world, but we must first steel ourselves for battles within. The Templars knew well that our greatest adversary resides above the material plane. With the flowering of the military orders in the Middle Ages, spiritual resistance would become the crowning principle of European chivalry, and so it must be again. In noble struggle against our baser passions may we be sanctified, and with grace and wisdom may we see past the seductions that would lead us further toward hell. Even the best of men can succumb to powerful temptations, from that of prideful self-worship to utter despair. Fall not to the enemy’s provocations; and if a serpent of wrath should move to strangle you, cut it down. The Counterrevolution will be a sword of justice.

As Russia’s philosopher of cultural renewal Ivan Ilyin wrote, resistance to evil through force is morally vindicated and in some cases necessary. Yet we must never partake in wickedness to achieve an ostensible good. Ilyin describes the terrible vanity of one who traffics in evil:

He does not become the man he is potentially called to be; and he cannot become the man he is in his unrealized mystery. His personality is composed of a deadened spirit and a tensely alive anti-spirituality, of vanishing love, coldly indifferent cynicism and burning malice.

If the survival of Europa’s tribes in their own lands is non-negotiable in an incipient Reconquista, then even more so must be the integrity of our souls. Persecution in various forms may very well intensify over the coming years, but suffering and sacrifice, concepts alien to the ruling anti-culture, form the basis of any worthwhile victory. Knightly virtue lends no occasion for cheap hipster irony; loyalty, charity and honor descend upon our hearts and run in our blood.

Reject all murder and lies. We stand fast not for what we despise, but for what we actively love, and what we join to eternity. He who would lay down his life for a friend wields a weapon that conquers death itself. Love, be Thou our strength.

[i] It should also be noted that Breivik was a freemason and a supporter of the State of Israel. What role, if any, these factors may have played in his action remains unclear.

Glitter Imperialism

This past June Rome’s Circus Maximus, where chariots were once raced in honor of emperors, was the site of the Europride-2011 festival. The Continent’s annual celebration of homosexuality also featured a special performance by a disturbingly popular entity known as Lady Gaga, a vocal supporter of the gay agenda[1]. The show was doubtless a hit with the million-strong crowd, and the carnival deemed a success, if only to remind the Vatican it operates in enemy-held territory. Yet Mme. Gaga wasn’t originally on the Europride billet- she needed some special persuasion from behind the scenes to make her grand appearance.

As it turns out, we can thank U.S. diplomacy for another round of last-minute heroics in the defense of freedom. American Ambassador to Italy David Thorne was ‘instrumental’ in bringing Gaga to the event, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed. But the Rome concert only serves as a symbol of the U.S. campaign to normalize homosexual practices throughout the world. In her address to the organization GLIFAA (Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies) last week, Clinton enumerated State’s achievements on this front, from U.S. embassy employees helping organize a ‘pride’ march in Bratislava, Slovakia, to new gay-friendly UN resolutions and specialized aid for LGBT (in commissariat-speak, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered) refugees and sex workers. She then rallied the troops with this St. Crispin’s Day barn-burner:

I’ve always believed we could make progress because we were on the right side of equality and justice. Life is getting better for people in many places, and it will continue to get better thanks to our work. So I ask all of you to look for ways to support those who are on the front lines of this movement, who are defending themselves and the people they care about with great courage and resilience. This is one of the most important human rights struggles of all times. It’s not easy, but it is so rewarding.

Justice for homosexual victims of repression or abuse, actual or alleged, is incidental to wider U.S. aims. Washington seeks to enforce its writ through a universal human rights regime, and a tried and tested method of control is the institution of deviance. Over the course of a few generations or less, the war against the family undermines and subjugates entire societies; the evidence, of course, surrounds us in the modern West. In this sense U.S. foreign policy is inseparable from its ideological underpinnings, for the reign of equality is both means and end. American globalism’s road to power has always been inspired by democratic ideals.

While Clinton’s speech acknowledged U.S. promotion of gay rights in Africa and Latin America, State’s primary focus is Eurasia, not coincidentally the center of the Pentagon’s geostrategy. Eastern Europe and the former Soviet space have yet to be fully enlightened to current Western cultural standards, and so Orthodox nations like Serbia, Belarus and Russia are the target of U.S. information operations and well-funded human-rights NGOs. Along with subverting Moscow’s sphere of influence at this most intimate level (with adequate help from some Russian elites), Washington continues to assist the EU in the leveling of what was once Christendom. In every significant sense, from ethnic identity to religion and culture, European peoples have been marked for oblivion. Regardless of the contradiction to its homosexual agenda, U.S. policy also sponsors the growth of Muslim power on the Continent; both programs work toward the destruction of traditional Europe.

With regard to Islamic societies, it is notable that U.S. pressure for gay rights is largely absent, both in Clinton’s speech and in everyday diplomacy. Homosexuality in Dar-al-Islam is a widespread yet confusing phenomenon, with pederasty and severe punishments for it dually accepted as social norms. Washington first seeks to liberalize the Middle East politically and attain a degree of control over Muslim cultures not yet enjoyed before it embarks upon marshaling pride parades in Mecca. Besides, it needs Persian Gulf oil, so Secretary Clinton will leave a Lady Gaga tour of the Arab world to her successor.

In the gay liberation project, U.S. power, the lights of pop culture, media conglomerates and NGOs converge to enact the liberal dream of a global marketplace populated by free and equal human electrons, true only to their own desires. Yet desire unjust and unrestrained does not liberate; it enslaves. This brings us nearest to the essence of the postmodern empire, the tyrannical and all-consuming libido dominandi. The brazen lie of egalitarianism shows its bitter fruits in fashions ever more extreme and depraved. Through centuries of progress, Winthrop’s prophesied shining city on a hill has finally been realized. Its name is Sodom.

[1]Among other matters, Gaga, born in New Jersey as Stefani Germanotta and without noble title, is singer of a paean to Judas Iscariot. Small wonder she’s a darling of the media-entertainment complex!

Empire at Sunset

Who today remembers the once-mighty Warsaw Pact? Not the punk rock group, of course, but the Soviet Bloc’s formidable answer to U.S.-led NATO. Twenty years have now passed since it was peacefully dismantled in what was a finishing touch on the collapse of Communist power and the end of the Cold War. Yet unlike the Warsaw Pact, the North Atlantic alliance did not disband; it steadily pushed east toward an exhausted Russia and then metastasized. Like any successful multinational, NATO went global.

Largely through its role in NATO, the United States had applied generations of resources and manpower in containing the Soviet threat, and its investment paid off. America’s triumph against such a dangerous peer competitor was total and unambiguous- the one state that spanned the length of Eurasia had fractured into fifteen. The End of History was at hand, and with Marxist management practices discredited only one contender for humanity’s future remained. A democratic-capitalist world system, already organized in the post-war years, could now be fully implemented under Washington’s benevolent aegis.

One Cold War veteran who can well recall the course of this vast transformation is Robert Gates. After all, he operated behind the scenes and at the highest levels of power during critical moments of the U.S.-Soviet struggle. A career CIA analyst, Gates was National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s staff aide when the Carter Administration launched a covert action program to aid the Afghan mujahideen in 1979. The White House signed off on the order six months before the Politburo in Moscow committed to an invasion of its southern neighbor, along with a disastrous occupation that would cripple the USSR.

When Lenin’s creaking inheritance did disappear in the chaos and corruption of post-Soviet Russia, Bob Gates had served George H.W. Bush ably enough to earn the top slot at Langley. Brought back to head the Department of Defense in the waning days of Bush II and staying on under Obama, Gates is known in Washington policy circles as a realist with a certain grasp on the limitations of American power. He initially opposed this year’s Libyan intervention, but has also shown himself a pragmatist and team player. Attacking Tripoli apparently wasn’t a misdeed that merited resignation.

Gates’ last major speech before retirement would seem to confirm his realism. In a valedictory address in Brussels, the Pentagon chief expressed frustration with European contributions to NATO campaigns in Afghanistan and Libya, and made clear his doubts on the future relevance of the transatlantic partnership.

The benefits of a Europe whole, prosperous and free after being twice devastated by wars requiring American intervention was [sic] self-evident. Thus, for most of the Cold War U.S. governments could justify defense investments and costly forward bases that made up roughly 50 percent of all military spending. But some two decades after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. share of NATO defense spending has now risen to more than 75 percent – at a time when politically painful budget and benefit cuts are being considered at home.

The context of Gates’ dissatisfaction is important. U.S. complaints over a lack of European defense contributions to NATO, due to the priority of welfare state expenditures, have been sounded off regularly for several decades. Yet ultimately Washington has been willing to pick up the tab as the Continent’s security guarantor, for a weak, decadent and soft Europe maximizes U.S. strategic influence. Feeble coalition efforts in Afghanistan are a small price to pay for the absence of a great-power rival that could potentially challenge the American agenda for Eurasia. Accordingly, European military budgets have continued to recede for the past 10 years while the Pentagon’s had expanded by 81 percent to $698 billion by 2010.

What has changed is the U.S. fiscal position - Gates recognizes that America’s previously unquestioned financial wherewithal to maintain the alliance will degrade considerably in the coming years. The United States likely faces a second wave of economic crisis in the near-term future, and every round of quantitative easing enacted by the Federal Reserve can only delay, rather than cancel, this date with destiny. Meanwhile, Washington’s pretenses to reign in over $14 trillion in national debt are met with growing incredulity among foreign creditors. As Gates intimated, NATO has become an unsustainable enterprise. The mailed fist of American globalism is on its way to joining the Warsaw Pact as a relic of recent history.

Aside from its use in Brave New World-style police actions, the entire point of NATO for the past two decades has been to prevent the emergence of any alternative to liberalism in Europe. Europeans have constructed a fool’s paradise of spiritual and social chaos jealously guarded by the project’s co-founder, the United States. U.S. bases in Germany, Britain and elsewhere carry out official functions of training and logistics, but their presence is also an implicit guarantee of regime stability for Continental elites. The sooner this arrangement crumbles, the better the chance to interdict and reverse the dissolution of the West.

NATO or no, the Empire continues to expand as if by the sheer power of its programming. The Pentagon isn’t just maneuvering to remain in Iraq and Afghanistan. In quick succession come announcements of a permanent U.S. Naval Station in Singapore, a detachment of F-16s for Poland to augment missile defense architecture running from the Baltic to the BlackSeas, and the presence of hunter-killer drones patrolling the skies over Yemen. And so the quest for dominance will grind on until the moment of implosion.

When Bob Gates headed CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence in the mid-1980s, he had already viewed provocative analyses speculating on Soviet collapse. But like most experts, he simply could not conceive of that event until it actually transpired. The end of the Pax Americana will prove a shock of even greater magnitude.