The death of the nation-state

by Patrick J. Buchanan

© 2006 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Yugoslavia is gone, forever. The country that emerged from World War I and Versailles as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, land of the South Slavs, has passed into history.

In 1991, Macedonia peacefully seceded. Slovenia and Croatia fought their way out, and Bosnia broke free after a war marked by the massacre at Srbenica and NATO intervention. Bosnia is itself subdivided into a Serb and a Croat-Muslim sector.

After the 78-day U.S. bombing of Serbia by the United States and the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the province in the wake of the NATO war, Kosovo is 90 percent Muslim and Albanian. Loss of this land that was the cradle of the Serb nation seems an inevitability.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia, the second partition of Czechoslovakia and the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 nations – many of which had never before existed – seem to confirm what Israeli historian Martin van Creveld and U.S. geostrategist William Lind have written.
The nation-state is dying. Men have begun to transfer their allegiance, loyalty and love from the older nations both upward to the new transnational regimes that are arising and downward to the sub-nations whence they came, the true nations, united by blood and soil, language, literature, history, faith, tradition and memory.

Imperial and ideological nations appear, for the foreseeable future, to be finished. The British and French, greatest of the Western empires, are long gone. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, the Irish, though its sons had fought to erect and maintain the Victorian "empire on which the sun never set" – and defend it in World War I – fought relentlessly to be free of it. They wanted, and in 1921 won, a small nation of their own, on their own small island.
The Irish preferred it to being part of the British Empire.

The call of ethnicity, nationalism, religion, faith and history pulled apart the greatest of all the ideological empires, the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union, that "prison house of nations."
Transnational institutions, the embryonic institutions of a new world government to which the elites of the West and Third World are transferring allegiance and power, include the United Nations, the EU, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the International Seabed Authority, the Kyoto Protocol, the IMF and the World Bank.

The sub-nations, or ex-nations, struggling to be born or break free include Scotland, Catalonia and the Basque country of Spain, Corsica, northern Italy and Quebec in the West. Iraq, as we have seen, is a composite of peoples divided by tribe, ethnicity and faith – as are Iran, Pakistan and India. Jordanians are Palestinian Arabs, with a minority of Bedouins.

Lind argues that not only are nations subdividing, losing their monopolies on the love and loyalty of their peoples, but they are being superseded by "non-state actors" that are challenging the monopoly on warfare enjoyed by the nation-state since the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War.

Among the more familiar non-state actors are the Crips and Bloods, Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, the Zapatistas of Chiapas, the racial nationalists of MEChA, the white supremacists of Aryan Nations, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah, the Maoists of Nepal and the Tamil Tigers.

Among the central questions of our time is a central question of any time: Who owns the future?
Of late, the transnational vision has lost its allure. Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and most of Latin America reject the NAFTA vision of Bush and Vicente Fox. The French and Dutch voted down the EU Constitution, which now appears dead. The Doha round of world trade negotiations is headed for the rocks. Hostility is rising to bringing Turkey into the EU.

Arabs and Turks in Europe identify more and more with the Islamic faith they have in common and the countries whence they came, not the one in which they live and work.

So, too, do millions of illegal aliens in the United States. They march defiantly under Mexican flags in American streets demanding the rights of U.S. citizens – while an intimidated political class rushes to accommodate and appease them, assuring itself this is but the latest reincarnation of Ellis Island.

As the Old Republic trudges to its death, less and less do we hear that incessant blather about the American Empire, "the world's last superpower" and "our unipolar moment."

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50338

Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Now a political analyst for MSNBC and a syndicated columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of seven books.

Who, Whom? (1944)

by F.A. Hayek

'The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom'.

Lord Acton

IT is significant that one of the commonest objections to competition is that it is "blind." It is not irrelevant to recall that to the ancients blindness was an attribute of their deity of justice. Although competition and justice may have little else in common, it is as much a commendation of competition as of justice that it is no respecter of persons.

That it is impossible to foretell who will be the lucky ones or whom disaster will strike, that rewards and penalties are not shared out according to somebody's views about the merits or demerits of different people but depend on their capacity and their luck, is as important as that, in framing legal rules, we should not be able to predict which particular person will gain and which will lose by their application.

And this is nonetheless true, because in competition chance and good luck are often as important as skill and foresight in determining the fate of different people.The choice open to us is not between a system in which everybody will get what he deserves according to some absolute and universal standard of right, and one where the individual shares are determined partly by accident or good or ill chance, but between a system where it is the will of a few persons that decides who is to get what, and one where it depends at least partly on the ability and enterprise of the people concerned and partly on unforeseeable circumstances.

This is no less relevant because in a system of free enterprise chances are not equal, since such a system is necessarily based on private property and (though perhaps not with the same necessity) on inheritance, with the differences in opportunity which these create. There is, indeed, a strong case for reducing this inequality of opportunity as far as congenital differences permit and as it is possible to do so without destroying the impersonal character of the process by which everybody has to take his chance and no person's view about what is right and desirable overrules that of others.

The fact that the opportunities open to the poor in a competitive society are much more restricted than those open to the rich does not make it less true that in such a society the poor are much more free than a person commanding much greater material comfort in a different type of society.

Although under competition the probability that a man who starts poor will reach great wealth is much smaller than is true of the man who has inherited property, it is not only possible for the former, but the competitive system is the only one where it depends solely on him and not on the favors of the mighty, and where nobody can prevent a man from attempting to achieve this result.

It is only because we have forgotten what unfreedom means that we often overlook the patent fact that in every real sense a badly paid unskilled worker in this country has more freedom to shape his life than many a small entrepreneur in Germany or a much better paid engineer or manager in Russia.

Whether it is. a question of changing his job or the place where he lives, of professing certain views or of spending his leisure in a particular manner, although sometimes the price he may have to pay for following his inclinations may be high, and to many appear too high, there are no absolute impediments, no dangers to bodily security and freedom, that confine him by brute force to the task and the environment to which a superior has assigned him.

That the ideal of justice of most socialists would be satisfied if merely private income from property were abolished and the differences between the earned incomes of different people remained what they are now is true.

What these people forget is that, in transferring all property in the means of production to the state, they put the state in a position whereby its action must in effect decide all other incomes. The power thus given to the state and the demand that the state should use it to "plan" means nothing else than that it should use it in full awareness of all these effects.

To believe that the power which is thus conferred on the state is merely transferred to it from others is erroneous. It is a power which is newly created and which in a competitive society nobody possesses. So long as property is divided among many owners, none of them acting independently has exclusive power to determine the income and position of particular people-nobody is tied to any one property owner except by the fact that he may offer better terms than anybody else.

What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. If all the means of production were vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of "society" as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us.

Who can seriously doubt that a member of a small racial or religious minority will be freer with no property so long as fellow-members of his community have property and are therefore able to employ him, than he would be if private property were abolished and he became owner of a nominal share in the communal property. Or that the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work? And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?

It is pathetic, yet at the same time encouraging, to find as prominent an old communist as Max Eastman rediscovering this truth:

"It seems obvious to me now--though I have been slow, I must say, in coming to the conclusion--that the institution of private property is one of the main things that have given man that limited amount of free and equalness that Marx hoped to render infinite by abolishing this institution. Strangely enough Marx was the first to see this. He is the one who informed us, looking backwards, that the evolution of private capitalism with its free market had been a precondition for the evolution of all our democratic freedoms. It never occurred to him, looking forward, that if this was so, these other freedoms might disappear with the abolition of the free market."

It is sometimes said, in answer to such apprehensions, that there is no reason why the planner should determine the incomes of individuals. The social and political difficulties involved in deciding the shares of different people in the national income are so obvious that even the most inveterate planner may well hesitate before he charges any authority with this task.

Probably everybody who realizes what it involves would prefer to confine planning to production, to use it only to secure a "rational organization of industry," leaving the distribution of incomes as far as possible to impersonal forces.

Although it is impossible to direct industry without exercising some influence on distribution, and although no planner will wish to leave distribution entirely to the forces of the market, they would probably all prefer to confine themselves to seeing that this distribution conforms to certain general rules of equity and fairness, that extreme inequalities are avoided, and that the relation between the remuneration of the major classes is just, without undertaking the responsibility for the position of particular people within their class or for the gradations and differentiations between smaller groups and individuals.

We have already seen that the close interdependence of all economic phenomena makes it difficult to stop planning just where we wish and that, once the free working of the market is impeded beyond a certain degree, the planner will be forced to extend his controls until they become all comprehensive. These economic considerations, which explain why it is impossible to stop deliberate control just where we should wish, are strongly reinforced by certain social or political tendencies whose strength makes itself increasingly felt as planning extends.

Once it becomes increasingly true, and is generally recognized, that the position of the individual is determined not by impersonal forces, not as a result of the competitive effort of many, but by the deliberate decision of authority, the attitude of the people toward their position in the social order necessarily changes. There will always exist inequalities which will appear unjust to those who suffer from them, disappointments which will appear unmerited, and strokes of misfortune which those hit have not deserved. But when these things occur in a society which is consciously directed, the way in which people will react will be very different from what it is when they are nobody's conscious choice.

Inequality is undoubtedly more readily borne, and affects the dignity of the person much less, if it is determined by impersonal forces than when it is due to design. In a competitive society it is no slight to a person, no offense to his dignity, to be told by any particular firm that it has no need for his services or that it cannot offer him a better job. It is true that in periods of prolonged mass unemployment the effect on many may be very similar.

But there are other and better methods to prevent that scourge than central direction. But the unemployment or the loss of income which will always affect some in any society is certainly less degrading if it is the result of misfortune and not deliberately imposed by authority. However bitter the experience, it would be very much worse in a planned society. There individuals will have to decide not whether a person is needed for a particular job but whether he is of use for anything, and how useful he is. His position in life must be assigned to him by somebody else.

While people will submit to suffering which may hit anyone, they will not so easily submit to suffering which is the result of the decision of authority. It may be bad to be just a cog in an impersonal machine; but it is infinitely worse if we can no longer leave it, if we are tied to our place and to the superiors who have been chosen for us. Dissatisfaction of everybody with his lot will inevitably grow with the consciousness that it is the result of deliberate human decision.

Once government has embarked upon planning for the sake of justice, it cannot refuse responsibility for anybody's fate or position. In a planned society we shall all know that we are better or worse off than others, not because of circumstances which nobody controls, and which it is impossible to foresee with certainty, but because some authority wills it.

And all our efforts directed toward improving our position will have to aim, not at foreseeing and preparing as well as we can for the circumstances over which we have no control, but at influencing in our favor the authority which has all the power. The nightmare of English nineteenth-century political thinkers, the state in which "no avenue to wealth and honor would exist save through the government," would be realized in a completeness which they never imagined-though familiar enough in some countries which have since passed to totalitarianism.

As soon as the state takes upon itself the task of planning the whole economic life, the problem of the due station of the different individuals and groups must indeed inevitably become the central political problem. As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power. There will be no economic or social questions that would not be political questions in the sense that their solution will depend exclusively on who wields the coercive power, on whose are the views that will prevail on all occasions.

I believe it was Lenin himself who introduced to Russia the famous phrase "who, whom?"-- during the early years of Soviet rule the byword in which the people summed up the universal problem of a socialist society. Who plans whom, who directs and dominates whom, who assigns to other people their station in life, and who is to have his due allotted by others? These become necessarily the central issues to be decided solely by the supreme power.

More recently an American student of politics has enlarged upon Lenin's phrase and asserted that the problem of all government is "who gets what, when, and how." In a way this is not untrue. That all government affects the relative position of different people and that there is under any system scarcely an aspect of our lives which may not be affected by government action is certainly true. In so far as government does anything at all, its action will always have Borne effect on "who gets what, when, and how."

There are, however, two fundamental distinctions to be made. First, particular measures may be taken without the possibility of knowing how they will affect particular individuals and therefore without aiming at such particular effects. This point we have already discussed. Second, it is the extent of the activities of the government which decides whether everything that any person gets any time depends on the government, or whether its influence is confined to whether some people will get some things in some way at some time. Here lies the whole difference between a free and a totalitarian system.

The contrast between a liberal and a totally planned system is characteristically illustrated by the common complaints of Nazis and socialists of the "artificial separations of economics and politics" and by their equally common demand for the dominance of politics over economics. These phrases presumably mean not only that economic forces are now allowed to work for ends which are not part of the policy of the government but also that economic power can be used independently of government direction and for ends of which the government may not approve. But the alternative is not merely that there should be only one power but that this single power, the ruling group, should have control over all human ends and particularly that it should have complete power over the position of each individual in society.

That a government which undertakes to direct economic activity will have to use its power to realize somebody's ideal of distributive justice is certain. But how can and how will it use that power? By what principles will it or ought it to be guided? Is there a definite answer to the innumerable questions of relative merits that will arise and that will have to be solved deliberately? Is there a scale of values, on which reasonable people can be expected to agree, which would justify a new hierarchical order of society and is likely to satisfy the demands for justice?

There is only one general principle, one simple rule which would indeed provide a definite answer to all these questions: equality, complete and absolute equality of all individuals in all those points which are subject to human control. If this were generally regarded as desirable (quite apart from the question whether it would be practicable, i.e., whether it would provide adequate incentives), it would give the vague idea of distributive justice a clear meaning and would give the planner definite guidance.

But nothing is further from the truth than that people in general regard mechanical equality of this kind as desirable. No socialist movement which aimed at complete equality has ever gained substantial support. What socialism promised was not an absolutely equal, but a more just and more equal, distribution. Not equality in the absolute sense but "greater equality" is the only goal which is seriously aimed at.

Though these two ideals sound very similar, they are as different as possible as far as our problem is concerned. While absolute equality would clearly determine the planner's task, the desire for greater equality is merely negative, no more than an expression of dislike of the present state of affairs; and so long as we are not prepared to say that every move in the direction toward complete equality is desirable, it answers scarcely any of the questions the planner will have to decide.

This is not a quibble about words. We face here a crucial issue which the similarity of the terms used is likely to conceal. While agreement on complete equality would answer all the problems of merit the planner must answer, the formula of the approach to greater equality answers practically none. Its content is hardly more definite than the phrases "common good" or "social welfare."

It does not free us from the necessity of deciding in every particular instance between the merits of particular individuals or groups, and it gives us no help in that decision. All it tells us in effect is to take from the rich as much as we can. But, when it comes to the distribution of the spoils, the problem is the same as if the formula of "greater equality" had never been conceived.

Most people find it difficult to admit that we do not possess moral standards which would enable us to settle these questions-if not perfectly, at least to greater general satisfaction than is done by the competitive system. Have we not all some idea of what is a "just price" or a "fair wage"? Can we not rely on the strong sense of fairness of the people? And even if we do not now agree fully on what is just or fair in a particular case, would popular ideas not soon consolidate into more definite standards if people were given an opportunity to see their ideals realized?

Unfortunately, there is little ground for such hopes. What standards we have are derived from the competitive regime we have known and would necessarily disappear soon after the disappearance of competition. What we mean by a just price, or a fair wage is either the customary price or wage, the return which past experience has made people expect, or the price or wage that would exist if there were no monopolistic exploitation.

The only important exception to this used to be the claim of the workers to the "full produce of their labor," to which so much of socialist doctrine traces back. But there are few socialists today who believe that in a socialist society the output of each industry would be entirely shared by the workers of that industry; for this would mean that workers in industries using a great deal of capital would have a much larger income than those in industries using little capital, which most socialists would regard as very unjust.

And it is now fairly generally agreed that this particular claim was based on an erroneous interpretation of the facts. But once the claim of the individual worker to the whole of "his" product is disallowed, and the whole of the return from capital is to be divided among all workers, the problem of how to divide it raises the same basic issue.

What the "just price" of a particular commodity or the "fair" remuneration for a particular service is might conceivably be determined objectively if the quantities needed were independently fixed. If these were given irrespective of cost, the planner might try to find what price or wage is necessary to bring forth this supply. But the planner must also decide how much is to be produced of each kind of goods, and, in so doing, he determines what will be the just price or fair wage to pay.

If the planner decides that fewer architects or watchmakers are wanted and that the need can be met by those who are willing to stay in the trade at a lower remuneration, the "fair" wage will be lower. In deciding the relative importance of the different ends, the planner also decides the relative importance of the different groups and persons. As he is not supposed to treat the people merely as a means, he must take account of these effects and consciously balance the importance of the different ends against the effects of his decision. This means, however, that he will necessarily exercise direct control over the conditions of the different people.

This applies to the relative position of individuals no less than to that of the different occupational groups. We are in general far too likely to think of incomes within a given trade or profession as more or less uniform. But the differences between the incomes, not only of the most and the least successful doctor or architect, writer or movie actor, boxer or jockey, but also of the more and the less successful plumber or market gardener, grocer or tailor, are as great as those between the propertied and the propertyless classes.

And although, no doubt, there would be some attempt at standardization by creating categories, the necessity of discrimination between individuals would remain the same, whether it were exercised by fixing their individual incomes or by allocating them to particular categories.

We need say no more about the likelihood of men in a free society submitting to such control-or about their remaining free if they submitted. On the whole question, what John Stuart Mill wrote nearly a hundred years ago remains equally true today:

"A fixed rule, like that of equality, might be acquiesced in, and so might chance, or an external necessity; but that a handful of human beings should weigh everybody in the balance, and give more to one and less to another at their sole pleasure and judgement, would not be borne unless from persons believed to be more than men, and backed by supernatural terrors."

These difficulties need not lead to open clashes so long as socialism is merely the aspiration of a limited and fairly homogeneous group. They come to the surface only when a socialist policy is actually attempted with the support of the many different groups which together compose the majority of a people. Then it soon becomes the one burning question which of the different sets of ideals shall be imposed upon all by making the whole resources of the country serve it. It is because successful planning requires the creation of a common view on the essential values that the restriction of our freedom with regard to material things touches so directly on our spiritual freedom.

Socialists, the cultivated parents of the barbarous offspring they have produced, traditionally hope to solve this problem by education. But what does education mean in this respect? Surely we have learned that knowledge cannot create new ethical values, that no- amount of learning will lead people to hold the same views on the moral issues which a conscious ordering of all social relations raises. It is not rational conviction but the acceptance of a creed which is required to justify a particular plan.

And, indeed, socialists everywhere were the first to recognize that the task they had set themselves required the general acceptance of a common Weltanschauung, of a definite set of values. It was in these efforts to produce a mass movement supported by such a single world view that the socialists first created most of the instruments of indoctrination of which Nazis and Fascists have made such effective use.

In Germany and Italy the Nazis and Fascists did, indeed, not have much to invent. The usages of the new political movements which pervaded all aspects of life had in both countries already been introduced by the socialists. The idea of a political party which embraces all activities of the individual from the cradle to the grave, which claims to guide his views on everything, and which delights in making all problems questions of party Weltanschauung, was first put into practice by the socialists. An Austrian socialist writer, speaking of the socialist movement of his country, reports with pride that it was its "characteristic feature that it created special organizations for every field of activities of workers and employees."

Though the Austrian socialists may have gone further in this respect than others, the situation was not very different elsewhere. It was not the Fascists but the socialists who began to collect children from the tenderest age into political organizations to make sure that they grew up as good proletarians. It was not the Fascists but the socialists who first thought of organizing sports and games, football and hiking, in party clubs where the members would not be infected by other views.

It was the socialists who first insisted that the party member should distinguish himself from others by the modes of greeting and forms of address. It was they who by their organization of "cells" and devices for the permanent supervision of private life created the prototype of the totalitarian party. Balilla and Hitlerjugend, Dopolavoro and Kraft durch Freude, political uniforms and military party formations, are all little more than imitations of older socialist institutions.'

So long as the socialist movement in a country is closely bound up with the interests of a particular group, usually the more highly skilled industrial workers, the problem of creating a common view on the desirable status of the different members of society is comparatively simple. The movement is immediately concerned with the status of one particular group, and its aim is to raise that status relatively to other groups.

The character of the problem changes, however, as in the course of the progressive advance toward socialism it becomes more and more evident to everyone that his income and general position are determined by the coercive apparatus of the state, that he can maintain or improve his position only as a member of an organized group capable of influencing or controlling the state machine in his interest.

In the tug-of-war between the various pressure groups which arises at this stage,, it is by no means necessary that the interests of the poorest and most numerous groups should prevail. Nor is it necessarily an advantage for the older socialist parties, who avowedly represented the interests of a particular group, to have been the first in the field and to have designed their whole ideology to appeal to the manual workers in industry. Their very success, and their insistence on the acceptance of the whole creed, is bound to create a powerful countermovement-not by the capitalists but by the very large and equally propertyless classes who find their relative status threatened by the advance of the elite of the industrial workers.

Socialist theory and socialist tactics, even where they have not been dominated by Marxist dogma, have been based everywhere on the idea of a division of society into two classes with common but mutually conflicting interests: capitalists and industrial workers. Socialism counted on a rapid disappearance of the old middle class and completely disregarded the rise of a new middle class, the countless army of clerks and typists, administrative workers and schoolteachers, tradesmen and small officials, and the lower ranks of the professions.

For a time these classes often provided many of the leaders of the labor movement. But as it became increasingly clear that the position of those classes was deteriorating relatively to that of the industrial workers, the ideals which guided the latter lost much of their appeal to the others. While they were all socialists in the sense that they disliked the capitalist system and wanted a deliberate sharing-out of wealth according to their ideas of justice, these ideas proved to be very different from those embodied in the practice of the older socialist parties.

The means which the old socialist parties had successfully employed to secure the support of one occupational group - the raising of their relative economic position-cannot be used to secure the support of all. There are bound to arise rival socialist movements that appeal to the support of those whose relative position is worsened. There is a great deal of truth in the often heard statement that fascism and National Socialism are a sort of middle-class socialism-only that in Italy and Germany the supporters of these new movements were economically hardly a middle class any longer. It was to a large extent a revolt of a new underprivileged class against the labor aristocracy which the industrial labor movement had created.

There can be little doubt that no single economic factor has contributed more to help these movements than the envy of the unsuccessful professional man, the university-trained engineer or lawyer, and of the "white-collared proletariat" in general, of the engine driver or compositor and other members of the strongest trade-unions whose income was many times theirs. Nor can there be much doubt that in terms of money income the average member of the rank and file of the Nazi movement in its early years was poorer than the average trade-unionist or member of the older socialist party-a circumstance which only gained poignancy from the fact that the former had often seen better days and were frequently still living in surroundings which were the result of this past.

The expression "class struggle a rebours," current in Italy at the time of the rise of fascism, did point to a very important aspect of the movement. The conflict between the Fascist or National Socialist and the older socialist parties must, indeed, very largely be regarded as the kind of conflict which is bound to arise between rival socialist factions. There was no difference between them about the question of its being the will of the state which should assign to each person his proper place in society. But there were, as there always will be, most profound differences about what are the proper places of the different classes and groups.

The old socialist leaders, who had always regarded their parties as the natural spearhead of the future general movement toward socialism, found it difficult to understand that with every extension in the use of socialist methods the resentment of large poor classes should turn against them. But while the old socialist parties, or the organized labor in particular industries, had usually not found it unduly difficult to come to an understanding for joint action with the employers in their particular industries, very large classes were left out in the cold. To them, and not without some justification, the more prosperous sections of the labor movement seemed to belong to the exploiting rather than to the exploited class.

The resentment of the lower middle class, from which fascism and National Socialism recruited so large a proportion of their supporters, was intensified by the fact that their education and training had in many instances made them aspire to directing positions and that they regarded themselves as entitled to be members of the directing class.

While the younger generation, out of that contempt for profitmaking fostered by socialist teaching, spurned independent positions which involved risk and flocked in ever increasing numbers into salaried positions which promised security, they demanded a place yielding them the income and power to which in their opinion their training entitled them. While they believed in an organized society, they expected a place in that society very different from that which society ruled by labor seemed to offer. They were quite ready to take over the methods of the older socialism but intended to employ them in the service of a different class.

The movement was able to attract all those who, while they agreed on the desirability of the state controlling all economic activity, disagreed with the ends for which the aristocracy of the industrial workers used their political strength.

The new socialist movement started with several tactical advantages. Labor socialism had grown in a democratic and liberal world, adapting its tactics to it and taking over many of the ideals of liberalism. Its protagonists still believed that the creation of socialism as such would solve all problems. Fascism and National Socialism, on the other hand, grew out of the experience of an increasingly regulated society's awakening to the fact that democratic and international socialism was aiming at incompatible ideals.

Their tactics were developed in a world already dominated by socialist policy and the problems it creates. They had no illusions about the possibility of a democratic solution of problems which require more agreement among people than can reasonably be expected.

They had no illusions about the capacity of reason to decide all the questions of the relative importance of the wants of different men or groups which planning inevitably raises, or about the formula of equality providing an answer. They knew that the strongest group which rallied enough supporters in favor of a new hierarchical order of society, and which frankly promised privileges to the classes to which it appealed, was likely to obtain the support of all those who were disappointed because they had been promised equality but found that they had merely furthered the interest of a particular class.

Above all, they were successful because they offered a theory, or Weltanschauung, which seemed to justify the privileges they promised to their supporters.

http://www.word-gems.com/wealth.hayek.who.html

The Essence of Archaism

by Guillaume Faye

[Guillaume Faye, born in 1949, was, along with Alain de Benoist, one of principal organizers of GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d'Etude sur la Civilisation Européenne) and of the New Right, which he left 1986, reproaching his former colleagues for their increasing timidity and sterile intellectualism. Preferring to follow his own path as agitator and Nietzschean provocateur, he has recently published in rapid succession L'Archéofuturisme (1998), La colonisation de l'Europe (2000), and Pourquoi nous combattons (2001).

In Archéofuturisme Faye envisages, sometime within the next two decades, a large-scale civilizational crisis, provoked by what which he calls a "convergence of catastrophes." For the post-crisis world Faye proposes, in terms that at times recall the Italian Futurists of the early twentieth century, the construction of a European Empire founded on essential, archaic values and on a bold, aggressive exploitation of science and technology: hence the concept of "archeofuturism," the re-emergence of archaic social configurations in a new context.]

It is probable that only after the catastrophe which will bring down modernity, its world-wide saga and its global ideology, that an alternate vision of the world will necessarily impose itself. No one will have had the foresight and the courage to apply it before chaos erupted. It is thus our responsibility -- we who live, as Giorgio Locchi put it, in the interregnum -- to prepare, from this moment forward, a post-catastrophic conception of the world. It could be centered on archeofuturism. But we must give content to this concept.

It is necessary, first, to return the word "archaic" to its true meaning, which, in its Greek etymon archê, is positive and non-pejorative, signifying both "foundation" and "beginning" -- that is, "founding impetus." Archê also means "that which is creative and immutable" and refers to the central concept of "order." To attend to the "archaic" does not imply a backward-looking nostalgia, for the past produced egalitarian modernity, which has run aground, and thus any historical regression would be absurd. It is modernity itself that now belongs to a bygone past.
Is "archaism" a form of traditionalism? Yes and no. Traditionalism advocates the transmission of values and, correctly, combats the doctrines of the tabula rasa. But it all depends on which traditions are transmitted. Not every tradition is acceptable -- for example, we reject those of universalist and egalitarian ideologies or those which are fixed, ossified, demotivating. It is surely preferable to distinguish from among various traditions (transmitted values) those which are positive and those which are detrimental.

The issues that disturb the contemporary world and threaten egalitarian modernity with catastrophe are already archaic: the religious challenge of Islam; geopolitical contests for scarce resources, agricultural land, oil, fisheries; the North-South conflict and colonizing immigration into the Northern hemisphere; global pollution and the physical clash of empirical reality against the ideology of development. All these issues plunge us back into age-old questions, consigning to oblivion the quasi-theological political debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which were little more than idle talk about the sex of angels.

Moreover, as the philosopher Raymond Ruyer, detested by the left-bank intelligentsia, foretold in his two important works, Les nuisances idéologiques and Les cents prochains siècles, once the historical digression of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has finally closed, with egalitarianism's hallucinations having descended into catastrophe, humanity will return to archaic values, that is, quite simply, to biological and human (anthropological) values: distinctive sexual roles; the transmission of ethnic and popular traditions; spirituality and sacerdotal organization; visible and supervisory social hierarchies; the worship of ancestors; initiatory rites and tests; the reconstruction of organic communities that extend from the individual family unit to the overarching national community of the people; the deindividualization of marriage to involve the community as much as the couple; the end of the confusion of eroticism and conjugality; the prestige of the warrior caste; social inequality, not implicit, which is unjust and frustrating, as in today's egalitarian utopias, but explicit and ideologically justifiable; a proportioned balance of duties and rights; a rigorous justice whose dictates are applied strictly to acts and not to individual men, which will encourage a sense of responsibility in the latter; a definition of the people and of any constituted social body as a diachronic community of shared destiny, not as a synchronic mass of individual atoms, etc.

In short, future centuries, in the great pendulum movement of history that Nietzsche called "the eternal recurrence of the identical," will in some way revisit these archaic values. The problem for us, for Europeans, is not, through our cowardice, to allow Islam to impose them on us, a process which is surreptitiously occurring, but to reimpose them on ourselves, while drawing upon our historical memory.

Recently, an important French press baron -- whom I cannot name, but known for his left-liberal sympathies -- made to me, in essence, the following disillusioned remark: "Free-market economic values are gradually losing out to Islamic values, because they are exclusively based on individual economic profit, which is inhuman and ephemeral." Our task is to ensure that the inevitable return to reality is not imposed upon us by Islam.

Obviously, contemporary ideology, hegemonic today but not for much longer, regards these values as diabolical, much as a mad paranoiac might see the features of a demon in the psychiatrist trying to cure him. In reality, they are the values of justice. True to human nature from time immemorial, these archaic values reject the Enlightenment error of the emancipation of the individual, which has only ended in the isolation of this individual and in social barbarism. These archaic values are just, in the Ancient Greek sense of the term, because they take man for what he is, a zoon politicon ("a social and organic animal integrated into a communatarian city-state"), and not for what he is not, an isolated and asexual atom fitted out with universal but imprescriptible pseudo-rights.

In practical terms, archaism's anti-individualist values permit self-realization, active solidarity and social peace, unlike egalitarianism's pseudo-emancipating individualism, which ends in the law of the jungle.

Excerpted from L'Archéofuturisme (Paris: L'Aencre, 1998). Trans. Irmin. The original French text is online at the Faye archive. Ellipses in the online text have been removed.

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: A Sociological View of the Decay of Modern Society

Alain de Benoist, Mankind Quarterly, 34 (1994), 263ff. The text is based on an original essay by Alain de Benoist, translated and interpreted by Tomislav Sunic.

Peaceful modern societies which respect the individual evolved from age-old familistic ties. The transition from band-type societies, through clan and tribal organizations, into nation-states was peaceful only when accomplished without disruption of the basic ties which link the individual to the larger society by a sense of a common history, culture and kinship. The sense of "belonging" to a nation by virtue of such shared ties promotes cooperation, altruism and respect for other members. In modern times, traditional ties have been weakened by the rise of mass societies and rapid global communication, factors which bring with them rapid social change and new philosophies which deny the significance of the sense of nationhood, and emphasize individualism and individualistic goals. The cohesion of societies has consequently been threatened, and replaced by multicultural and multi-ethnic societies and the overwhelming sense of lost identity in the mass global society in which Western man, at least, has come to conceive himself as belonging.

Sociologically, the first theorist to identify this change was the Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), who emphasized the tendency for mass urban societies to break down when the social solidarity characteristic of tribal and national societies disappeared. Ibn Khaldun saw dramatically the contrast between the morality of the nationalistic and ethnically unified Berbers of North Africa and the motley collation of peoples who called themselves Arabs under Arabic leadership, but did not possess the unity and sense of identity that had made the relatively small population of true Arabs who had built a widespread and Arabic-speaking Empire.

Later it was Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1936) who introduced this thought to modern sociology. He did so in his theory of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887). This theory revealed how early tribal or national (gemeinschaft) societies achieved harmonious collaboration and cooperation more or less automatically due to the common culture and sense of common genetic and cultural identity in which all members were raised. This avoided major conflicts concerning basic values since all shared a common set of mores and a common sense of destiny.

However, as history progressed, larger multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies began to develop, and these Tonnies described as being united by gesellschaft ties. These were not united by any common set of values or historical identity, and collaboration was only maintained due to the need to exchange goods and services. In short, their existence came to depend on economic relations, and as a result of the diversity of cultural values, the lack of any "family feeling," and the emphasis on economic exchange and economic wealth, conflict over wealth and basic values was likely to disrupt the harmony of such societies at any time. In political terms, liberalism developed to eulogize the freedom of individuals from claims to national loyalty and support for national destiny, while Marxism grew out of the dissatisfaction felt by those who were less successful in achieving wealth and power, which now came to represent the primary goals of the individuals who were left at the mercy of the modern mass gesellschaft society. Nationalism and any sense of loyalty to the nation as a distinct ethnic, kinship unit came to be anathematized by both liberals and Marxists.

"A specter is haunting Europe—a specter of communism" wrote Marx in the preface of the Manifesto. A century later this specter became a mere phantom, with liberalism the dominant force. Over the last several decades, liberalism used communism as a scarecrow to legitimize itself. Today, however, with the bankruptcy of communism, this mode of "negative legitimation" is no longer convincing. At last, liberalism, in the sense of the emphasis on the individual above and even against that of the nation, actually endangers the individual by undermining the stability of the society which gives him identity, values, purpose and meaning, the social, cultural and biological nexus to which he owes his very being.

Fundamentally, classical liberalism was a doctrine which, out of an abstract individual, created the pivot of its survival. In its mildest form it merely emphasized individual freedom of action, and condemned excessive bureaucratic involvement by government. But praiseworthy though its defense of individual freedom was, its claim that the ideal system is that in which there is the least possible emphasis on nationhood leads to situations which in fact endanger the freedom of the individual. In its extreme form, classical liberalism has developed into universal libertarianism, and at this point it comes close to advocating anarchy.

From the sociological standpoint, in its extreme form, modern internationalist liberalism defines itself totally in terms of the gesellschaft society of Tonnies. It denies the historical concept of the nation state by rejecting the notion of any common interest between individuals who traditionally shared a common heritage. In the place of nationhood it proposes to generate a new international social pattern centered on the individual's quest for optimal personal and economic interest. Within the context of extreme liberalism, only the interplay of individual interests creates a functional society—a society in which the whole is viewed only as a chance aggregate of anonymous particles.

The essence of modern liberal thought is that order is believed to be able to consolidate itself by means of all-out economic competition, that is, through the battle of all against all, requiring governments to do no more than set certain essential ground rules and provide certain services which the individual alone cannot adequately provide. Indeed, modern liberalism has gone so far along this path that it is today directly opposed to the goals of classical liberalism and libertarianism in that it denies the individual any inalienable right to property, but still shares with modern liberalism and with libertarianism an antagonism toward the idea of nationhood. Shorn of the protection of a society which identifies with its members because of a shared national history and destiny, the individual is left to grasp struggle for his own survival, without the protective sense of community which his forebears enjoyed since the earliest of human history.

Decadence in modern mass multicultural societies begins at a moment when there is no longer any discernable meaning within society. Meaning is destroyed by raising individualism above all other values, because rampant individualism encourages the anarchical proliferation of egotism at the expense of the values that were once part of the national heritage, values that give form to the concept of nationhood and the nation state, to a state which is more than just a political entity, and which corresponds to a particular people who are conscious of sharing a common heritage for the survival of which they are prepared to make personal sacrifices.

Man evolved in cooperating groups united by common cultural and genetic ties, and it is only in such a setting that the individual can feel truly free, and truly protected. Men cannot live happily alone and without values or any sense of identity: such a situation leads to nihilism, drug abuse, criminality and worse. With the spread of purely egotistic goals at the expense of the altruistic regard for family and nation, the individual begins to talk of his rights rather than his duties, for he no longer feels any sense of destiny, of belonging to and being a part of a greater and more enduring entity. He no longer rejoices in the secure belief that he shares in a heritage which it is part of his common duty to protect—he no longer feels that he has anything in common with those around him. In short, he feels lonely and oppressed. Since all values have become strictly personal, everything is now equal to everything; e.g., nothing equals nothing.

"A society without strong beliefs," declared Regis Debray in his interview with J.P. Enthoven in Le Nouvel Observateur, (October 10, 1981), "is a society about to die." Modern liberalism is particularly critical of nationalism. Hence, the question needs to be raised: Can modern liberal society provide strong unifying communal beliefs in view of the fact that on the one hand it views communal life as nonessential, while on the other, it remains impotent to envision any belief—unless this belief is reducible to economic conduct?

Moreover, there seems to be an obvious relationship between the negation and the eclipse of the meaning and the destruction of the historical dimension of the social corpus. Modern liberals encourage "narcissism"; they live in the perpetual now. In liberal society, the individual is unable to put himself in perspective, because putting himself in perspective requires a clear and a collectively perceived consciousness of common heritage and common adherence. As Regis Debray remarks, "In the capacity of isolated subjects men can never become the subjects of action and acquire the capability of making history" (Critique de la raison politique, op. cit. p. 207). In liberal societies, the suppression of the sense of meaning and identity embedded in national values leads to the dissolution of social cohesion as well as to the dissolution of group consciousness. This dissolution, in turn, culminates in the end of history.

Being the most typical representative of the ideology of equalitarianism, modern liberalism, in both its libertarian and socialist variants, appears to be the main factor in this dissolution of the ideal of nationhood. When the concept of society, from the sociological standpoint, suggests a system of simple 'horizontal interactions,' then this notion inevitably excludes social form. As a manifestation of solidarity, society can only be conceived in terms of shared identity—that is, in terms of historical values and cultural traditions (cf. Edgar Morin: "The communal myth gives society its national cohesion.")

By contrast, liberalism undoes nations and systematically destroys their sense of history, tradition, loyalty and value. Instead of helping man to elevate himself to the sphere of the superhuman, it divorces him from all 'grand projects' by declaring these projects 'dangerous' from the point of view of equality. No wonder, therefore, that the management of man's individual well-being becomes his sole preoccupation. In the attempt to free man from all constraints, liberalism brings man under the yoke of other constraints which now downgrade him to the lowest level. Liberalism does not defend liberty; it destroys the independence of the individual. By eroding historical memories, liberalism extricates man from history. It proposes to ensure his means of existence, but robs him of his reason to live and deprives him of the possibility of having a destiny.

There are two ways of conceiving of man and society. The fundamental value may be placed on the individual, and when this is done the whole of mankind is conceived as the sum total of all individuals—a vast faceless proletariat—instead of as a rich fabric of diverse nations, cultures and races. It is this conception that is inherent in liberal and socialist thought. The other view, which appears to be more compatible with man's evolutionary and socio-biological character, is when the individual is seen as enjoying a specific biological and cultural legacy—a notion which recognizes the importance of kinship and nationhood. In the first instance, mankind, as a sum total of individuals, appears to be "contained" in each individual human being; that is, one becomes first a "human being," and only then, as by accident, a member of a specific culture or a people. In the second instance, mankind comprises a complex phylogenetic and historic network, whereby the freedom of the individual is guaranteed by the protection of family by his nation, which provide him with a sense of identity and with a meaningful orientation to the entire world population. It is by virtue of their organic adherence to the society of which they are a part that men build their humanity.

As exponents of the first concept we encounter Descartes, the Encyclopaedists, and the emphasis on "rights"; nationality and society emanate from the individual, by elective choice, and are revokable at any time. As proponents of the second concept we find J.G. Herder and G.W. Leibniz, who stress the reality of cultures and ethnicity. Nationality and society are rooted in biological, cultural and historical heritage.

The difference between these two concepts becomes particularly obvious when one compares how they visualize history and the structure of the real. Nationalists are proponents of holism. Nationalists see the individual as a kinsman, sustained by the people and community, which nurtures and protects him, and with which he is proud to identify. The individual's actions represent an act of participation in the life of his people, and freedom of action is very real because, sharing in the values of his associates, the individual will seldom seek to threaten the basic values of the community with which he identifies. Societies which lack this basic sense of national unity are inherently prone to suffer from repeated situations wherein the opposing values of its egotistical members conflict with each other.

Furthermore, proponents of nationhood contend that a society or a people can survive only when: a) they remain aware of their cultural and historical origins; b) when they can assemble around a mediator, be it individual, or symbolic, who is capable of reassembling their energies and catalyzing their will to have a destiny; c) when they can retain the courage to designate their enemy. None of these conditions have been realized in societies that put economic gain above all other values, and which consequently: a) dissolve historical memories; b) extinguish the sublime and eliminate subliminal ideals; c) assume that it is possible not to have enemies.

The results of the rapid change from national or tribal-oriented societies to the modern, anti-national individualism prevalent in contemporary "advanced" societies have been very well described by Cornelius Castoriadis: "Western societies are in absolute decomposition. There is no longer a vision of the whole that could permit them to determine and apply any political action ... Western societies have practically ceased to be [nation] states ... Simply put, they have become agglomerations of lobbies which, in a myopic manner, tear the society apart; where nobody can propose a coherent policy, and where everybody is capable of blocking an action deemed hostile to his own interests." (Liberation, 16 and 21 December, 1981).

Modern liberalism has suppressed patriotic nationhood into a situation in which politics has been reduced to a "delivery service" decision-making process resembling the economic "command post," statesmen have been reduced to serving as tools for special interest groups, and nations have become little more than markets. The heads of modern liberal states have no options but to watch their citizenry being somatized by civilizational ills such as violence, delinquency, and drugs.

Ernst Junger once remarked that the act of veiled violence is more terrible than open violence. (Journal IV, September 6, 1945). And he also noted: "Slavery can be substantially aggravated when it assumes the appearance of liberty." The tyranny of modern liberalism creates the illusion inherent in its own principles. It proclaims itself for liberty and cries out to defend "human rights" at the moment when it oppresses the most. The dictatorship of the media and the "spiral of silence" appear to be almost as effective in depriving the citizenry of its freedom by imprisonment. In the West, there is no need to kill: suffice it to cut someone's microphone. To kill somebody by silence is a very elegant kind of murder, which in practice yields the same dividends as a real assassination—an assassination which, in addition, leaves the assassin with good conscience. Moreover, one should not forget the importance of such a type of assassination. Rare are those who silence their opponents for fun.

Patriotic nationhood does not target the notion of "formal liberties," as some rigorous Marxists do. Rather, its purpose is to demonstrate that "collective liberty," i.e., the liberty of peoples to be themselves and to continue to enjoy the privilege of having a destiny, does not result from the simple addition of individual liberties. Proponents of nationhood instead contend that the "liberties" granted to individuals by liberal societies are frequently nonexistent; they represent simulacra of what real liberties should be. It does not suffice to be free to do something. Rather, what is needed is one's ability to participate in determining the course of historical events. Societies dominated by modern liberal traditions are "permissive" only insofar as their general macrostability strips the populace of any real participation in the actual decision-making process. As the sphere in which the citizenry is permitted to "do everything" becomes larger, the sense of nationhood becomes paralyzed and loses its direction.

Liberty cannot be reduced to the sentiment that one has about it. For that matter, both the slave and the robot could equally well perceive themselves as free. The meaning of liberty is inseparable from the founding anthropology of man, an individual sharing a common history and common culture in a common community. Decadence vaporizes peoples, frequently in the gentlest of manners. This is the reason why individuals acting as individuals can only hope to flee tyranny, but cooperating actively as a nation they can often defeat tyranny.

http://www.geocities.com/integral_tradition/society.html

The Thoughts That Guide Me:
A Personal Reflection

by Keith Preston

I regard the progression of my life over the years and decades to be, first and foremost, a struggle against two things: foolishness and weakness. It has always seemed that no matter where I found myself at any particular moment, no matter the particular demographics involved, there has never been a shortage of the kinds of folks whom Nietzsche described as "untermenschen", that is, mediocrities and inferiors. This is to be expected, of course, given that to be average is to be normal and to be normal is to be mediocre. It has been said of H.L. Mencken that he "held most of mankind in sterling contempt" and this characterization would provide an apt description of my own outlook as well. In short, I am a cynic if not an outright misanthrope, a charge to which I would plead guilty but proud.

I am an individualist, but I am not so much interested in all individuals as much as a particular type of individual. Lawrence Dennis has been described as an "exponent of...the dissenters, the rebels and non-conformists". So am I. Though I am a political anarchist, most so-called anarchists strike me as mush-minded conformists who would likely be less than worthless in a real-world martial struggle with the powers that be. Perhaps what I champion is not so much the anarchist as much as the "anarch", the superior individual who, out of sheer strength of will, rises above the herd in defiance and contempt of both the sheep and their masters. The self-directed individual whom Max Stirner characterized as an "egoist", the one who chooses to be governed only by himself rather than to be governed by religion, morality, law, justice, ideals, ideologies, conformity, respectability, humanity and other false and hollow pieties. It would appear that the type of person that might be characterized as an "egoist" or "anarch" transcends boundaries of culture, ideology or race. I have far more respect for someone whose politics, cultural identity or aesthetic interests are diametrically opposed to my own, but whom I recognize as a superior individual, than I do for someone ostensibly in my own camp who is weak, foolish, cowardly, mealy-mouthed, pious or uninspiring. As Nietzsche said: "The errors of great men are still greater than the truths of lesser men".

The first bit of weakness and foolishness I went to war with was religious superstition. Some have asked me why I eventually renounced my religious upbringing. It wasn't really a matter of choice. I did not "choose" to outgrow ignorance and slavishness anymore than I "chose" to outgrow diapers and training wheels. The light simply went on in my head and that was it, or as Saint Paul ironically put it: "When I was a child I did as children do, but when I became a man I put away childish things." The truly religious have always struck me as the most pathetic and pitiable of creatures, as those who have traded away their birthright of independence and reason for the mess of pottage of superstition and fantasy. My contempt for them is limitless. I probably could have gone into the ministry. Hell, I probably could have been a televangelist. But who wants to be a shepherd of a flock of fools and mediocrities?

The next bit of foolishness I attacked was the state. I became a militant anarchist revolutionary at the age of twenty-one, or at least that's how I liked to perceive of myself at the time. In those days, I was basically an "anarchist" of the bourgeoise-reject leftoid variety, and I now consider that time to be the diapers and training wheels period of my political and intellectual development. Ultimately, there is only one political question: Who has the most power and what are they going to do with it? It was Machiavelli and his disciple, Hobbes, who were the first to boldly proclaim the true nature of politics. Profound though the works of Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Augustine and Aquinas may be, a certain blindness accompanies the ideas of the classical thinkers, for in these we see an irrational fixation on subjective "virtue", whereby the values of the Greco-Roman ruling classes or the later Church authorities are assigned some sort of metaphysical quality, conveniently uplifting the self-interest of existent power-holders into the realm of scientific truth. But it was the geniuses of the later Renaissance period who were the first to fully expose the true nature of human political life.

It is really quite easy to understand how real-world politics actually works. A few simple ideas really summarize the whole game. Individuals are self-interested creatures. They form alliances with other individuals with similar or common interests. These alliances then go to war with other alliances representing different or conflicting sets of individual or collective interests. Clausewitz remarked that war is the continuation of politics by other means. The flipside of this is that politics is the continuation of war by other means. Indeed, we might think of "war" proper as a type of high intensity warfare with politics being a type of low intensity warfare. In all wars, there are winners and losers with the winners simply being those who acquire the greatest capacity for physical force. Upon acquiring power, any sensible group of power-holders recognizes that the first order of business is to buy the loyalty of the subjects through the provision of protection from the insecurity that accompanies chaos or disorder. Security is the primary human instinct. The ordinary human type will trade the universe for it. In this respect, the state works no differently from an extralegal protection racket. The only difference is that the state is more formalized in its structural foundations.

Once the people are pacified through the provision of order, the next step is the inculcation of the "values" (i.e., self interests) of the ruling class into the people. This is done through the creation of an ideological superstructure constructed in such a way as to depict the subjective values of the ruling class as objective "truth". This ideological superstructure is then conveyed to the people through the dissemination of propaganda through established outlets of communication and education controlled by the ruling class (schools, mass media, intermediary institutions connected to the state, etc.) Being a creature of the herd obsessed with security and identity, the average human type quickly absorbs and internalizes such propaganda, however logically flawed and even contrary to one's own rational interests it may be. Rationality is but a mere quaternary feature of the human psyche. The final phase of this process is also the most important one. A scapegoat must be identified and attacked. There must always be some nebulous or demonic force, whether inside or outside the host society (preferably both, from the perspective of the ruling class), that can be held up as the most mortal of enemies against whom the subjects are being protected by the power elites. These can be genuine social ills (like crime or poverty) or mere phantoms (like Jews, drugs or Satan), but the simple truth is that such official Enemies must be eternally attacked for the sake of the continued empowerment of the ruling class and the state. Perpetual war for perpetual peace and all of that.

It is also of the utmost importance to recognize that those who obtain the upper hand in the ongoing power struggle will almost always be the most ruthless, cunning and merciless of the competitors. The wolves will always win out over the sheep. Within this bleak framework of a perpetual war of each against all, there from time to time arises the exceedingly rare individual whom Nietzsche referred to as the "ubermensch". This is the individual of superior will, strength, mind, spirit, discipline, intelligence, intuiton, perceptiveness, shrewdness, wisdom, creativity, inventiveness, generosity and other such characteristics that set the human species a half step above the other animals. It is this individual who becomes the "anarch", the "egoist", the one who rises above the perpetual fog in which both the sheepish people and their vicious masters dwell. Such a person can come from any political camp or even be a common criminal by conventional standards, whatever those may be at any given time. It is persons such as these who carry with them the seeds of cultural and civilizational growth. For any sort of human existence to emerge beyond that of the merely animalistic, this type of individual must thrive. Otherwise, the species would be nothing more than a collection of talking apes with slightly greater mechanical abilities than those of the simian realm. Where would the species be if there had never been a Plato, Confucious, Da Vinci, Newton, Jefferson or Edison? It is the legacy of Promethean spirits such as these alone that elevates the homosapiens above the neanderthals.

The first purpose of any politics or ethics beyond the purely material or defensive must be the protection of the Promethean spirit and the cultivation of socio-political environments where these can thrive. Not because this value is "true" in a metaphsyical sense, but because it embodies the natural expression of the sovereign anarch's will to power. It is apparent enough that the political framework most conducive to the advancement of the anarch is some sort of anarchism. The anarch must be able to thrive free of the shackles of smothering powerlust of the type typically displayed by the wolves who herd the sheep. Against power we might counterpose the will to power, the aspirations of the anarch or what we might call the "wings of civilization". The story of civilization is the story of the struggle against power manifested in the will to power. It might be argued that the only true class struggle is the permanent battle between the disciples of Prometheus and the disciples of Mammon.

The third enemy I came up against was the conceited deceit of modern liberalism. Indeed, one of the reasons I eventually broke with the mainstream of the anarchist movement and went off in my own direction was the realization on my part that most of modern "anarchism" is in reality nothing more than the countercultural wing, or court jester wing, of progressive liberalism. What are the core ideas of liberalism? Egalitarianism, democratism, therapeutism, multiculturalism, materialism, legalism, universalism and humanism. Every one of these is rooted in fundamentally flawed assumptions. Yet each of these delusions is so prevalent that each of the political factions with any access to mainstream society whatsoever exhibit them. Political debate is restricted to the varying factions of liberalism, whether they be right-wing liberals (like the US Republicans), moderate liberals (like the US Democrats) or left-liberals (like the US Greens or the American academic Left). How can so-called "anarchists" expect to lead a "revolution" when they share the fundamental values of the liberal-bourgeoise elite, varying only in questions of detail or degree?

A consistent application of political anarchism, seeking as it does to achieve the reign of the sovereign anarch, requires that the greatest concentrations of political power be the first to be attacked by insurgent forces. The emerging New World Order holds as its ideological foundations a synthesis of bourgeoise-consumerism, egalitarian multiculturalism and therapeutic statism fused together into a general program of totalitarian humanism of the type presciently warned against by the anarchist Aldous Huxley. That the historic Left has either expired its historical utility or been incorporated into the Establishment is obvious enough. If the Left is dead, then a new radicalism is required. From where will opposition to this new totalitarianism come? In the East, the vanguard of the resistance comes from the remnants of the Old Order, the sectors of Islamic civilization least impacted by post-Enlightenment intellectual culture. In the West, a number of intellectual traditions form a type of linear chain leading up to the potential for a new ideological paradigm. Classical Jeffersonian application of Enlightenment radicalism, combining a healthy balance of agrarian populism and aristocratic individualism, blends nicely into the classical anarchism of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin, with these in turn foreshadowing the modern critique of the state developed by the libertarian Murray Rothbard. Lastly, there is the cultural critique of modern liberalism developed by the European New Right, with its counterpositioning of particularism against imperialist monoculturalism. Perhaps the appropriate foundation for the new radicalism is a libertarian/third-positionist synthesis (where Rothbard meets Benoist) within a broader framework of Proudhonian-Bakuninist class struggle rooted in the lumpenproletariat, neo-peasantry and petite bourgeoise. No ideology or intellectual paradigm is greater than the spirit that accompanies it. A new radicalism must purge from its consciousness any residual influence of liberalism.

On this question, I can only describe those priniciples that I have found to be a useful guide for my own actions and outlook. The classical Stoic emphasis on indifference to suffering and pain and devaluation of luxury and comfort affords one the mental and emotional discipline required for a persistent commitment to martial struggle. This is obviously a far cry from the pathetic attachment to "sensitivity" exhibited by liberalism is its present ultra-degenerated form. The concept of honor found in medieval chivalry or in the Bushido warrior code of the Samurai likewise offers an inspiring counterpart to the "health and wealth" consumerism and therapeutism that has infected virtually all of the First World, its so-called "radical" elements included. The Bushido rallying cry of "Death before Dishonor", whereby an individual warrior can attain no greater honor than to battle one's enemies to the death, serves as a magnificent counterpart to the pervasive cowardice found among the inhabitants of modernity. While such ideas may serve well as a guide to individual conduct, there remains the question of what outlook best serves to inspire the masses and to energize the shock troops in the struggle against the common enemy. The "conservative revolutionary" figure Carl Schmitt regarded politics in its highest form to be two polarized opposites prepared to battle one another to the death. Such is the attitude we must seek to cultivate among those who would resist the New World Order. This is obviously the diametical opposite from the liberal pieties of "peace", "reconcilitiation", "non-violence", "universal brotherhood", "common humanity" and other abominations which can lead only to crushing defeat. As Victor Anduril so beautifully puts it:

"When a lion catches a gazelle, it exercises the natural authority of a predator over its prey, and no amount of rationalising can overcome the fact - or the consequences, in nature, that might is right. The only reason this principle is not fully active, for the animal Homo sapiens sapiens, is because he has disjoined himself from nature with the imposition of Rule. Anarchists, therefore, as those seeking to abolish this rule, and re-institute the authority of Natural Law, should be the most aware of the implications. As Francis Bacon said: “Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.” The childish and rationalist ideas to be read in most Anarchist publications are no less than an attempt to moralise nature, “the lion shouldn’t kill because it isn’t right; it is an infringement of the gazelle’s liberty”. From a child this is a cute rationalisation, from a self-proclaimed revolutionary, it is quite pathetic."

But the glorification of the childish and the pathetic is the hallmark of liberalism. A century ago, anarchism was an international mass movement, comprised millions upon millions of people, that struck fear in the hearts of the ruling classes and state functionaries everywhere. In a relatively short period around the turn of the last century, anarchists assassinated the heads of state of virtually all major countries. Indeed, anarchists were to that time what the Islamic fundamentalists are to our time. It is time for anarchists to reclaim their historical legacy and heritage, and to position themselves as the perfect Western counterpart to their Islamic revolutionary brethren in the East. The classical anarchists positioned themselves as the most radical wing of the international labor movement, the preeminent struggle of their era. What is the proper orientation for anarchists in the modern world? As Anduril notes:

"The utopian ideals of Marxism have been attractive to weak Anarchists unwilling to face the real implications of having to ensure their own survival and well-being. The Marxist ideal paints the “either/or” fantasy, either there will be rules to protect those incapable of protecting themselves, or the entire globe will become one big Anarchic community with no one taking advantage of another. Such thinking is for Marxist cowards, not Bakuninist Anarchists. A “global community” will never become a reality, and it would never last if by some miracle it did. The truth is, there will always be the “other”, some body which does not accept our views and is therefore a potential enemy. Laws are not over war, war is over laws. Without the limitations of either laws or authority, the “other” will take what you have, rape your women, steal your children for slaves, and so on. That is Anarchy without the natural authority which alone maintains order. Therefore, Anarchists need to get to grips with the dynamics of Natural Law - in fact with all modern science - and only then will the positive aspects of Natural Law enable them to create the Anarchic state they dream of. As was said by the nineteenth-century American Anarchist Benjamin Tucker, editor of Liberty: “The ways of science, however devious and difficult to tread, lead to solid ground at last. Communism belongs to the Age of Faith, Anarchistic Socialism to the Age of Science...

...It is because of the Marxist utopian pipe-dreams which have been continuously injected into Anarchist thought that such a noble ideal as anarchism has not been taken seriously, since World War Two, as a viable alternative. True anarchism, purged of all alien Marxist concepts, requires a realistic recognition and acceptance of science - including Natural Law - which alone gives it the perspective of the powerful Cornerstone of Anarchic philosophy - the social nature of man...Anarchists must therefore cease all the amateurish moralising - fighting against all the concepts this society and Marxism have programmed them to oppose - and stand against those in power. Anarchists need but one state from which to fly the banner of the Noble Cause, and therefore any entity, no matter what its beliefs or doctrines, is a potential ally if it opposes those in power. “My enemy’s enemy can be my greatest ally” is a realpolitik axiom that has come last to Anarchists...

...The entire globe is presently dominated by the most powerful rule-imposer in world history. This degenerate regime will utilise every means at its disposal to maintain its totalitarian “One World Order”. That means not only conventional forces of unimaginable strength, but also blockaded or destroyed food or water supplies, chemical agents, biological serums, and finally - but assuredly - nuclear holocaust. There are hundreds of groups struggling for a piece of autonomy apart from this one-world regime, and plenty of room on the planet for each to have its share. Among all these groups - so diverse and even ideologically opposed - lies the one promise for the future, and that is their mutual desire to destroy those in power. As Friedrich Nietzsche said: “The state wants to be absolutely the most important beast on earth; and it is believed to be so too!”...

...How can Anarchists oppose this Beast when they already oppose every “ism” on the planet? When Marxists tried to persuade the anarcho-socialist Jack London to join their crusade against natural borders, he rejected their propaganda as irrelevant to the Cause. When the feminist Emma Goldman tried to gain Kropotkin’s support for “sexual equality”, he rejected her propaganda as irrelevant to the Cause. It was in fact the father of Italian fascism, Benito Mussolini, who translated Kropotkin’s books into Italian in 1904, and Kropotkin once wrote of Mussolini - who did not operate in Kropotkin’s sphere of activity - “I am delighted by his boldness.” When the Russian Anarchist revolutionaries took the position of hostility towards all non-Anarchist groups and ideologies, Kropotkin declared this attitude as impractical, and contended: “We cannot be against it. Our business is not to fight with them, but to bring into existing revolutionary ferment our own ideas, to widen the demands which are made.” And the International Anarchist Congress at Amsterdam in 1907, called on all revolutionaries to oppose the ruling regime in unison:

The Anarchists, the integral emancipation of humanity and the absolute liberty of the individual, are naturally the declared enemies of all armed force in the hands of the state - army, navy, or police. They urge all comrades, according to circumstances and individual temperament, to revolt and refuse to serve (either individually or collectively), to passively and actively disobey, and to join in a military strike for the destruction of all the instruments of domination.They express the hope that the people of all countries affected will reply to a declaration of war by insurrection.

...As third way Anarchists, it is our special duty to serve as a link between all these scattered elements of insurrectional potential with a single cause - to destroy those in power. The true Anarchist can therefore have but one true battle cry: Revolutionaries of the world - unite!"

Amen, brother!! Let the Battle begin!!!

Copyright 2005. Keith Preston. American Revolutionary Vanguard. All rights reserved.

Blood and Soil
Revolutionary Nationalism as the Vanguard of Ecological Sanity

By Troy Southgate

WHILST the modern world appears to be in a state of great disarray, the perpetual relevance of Nature both as a guide and a source of inspiration continues to invite our utmost respect and admiration. Sadly, however, the vast majority of people have become alienated from their origins, detached from their racial and cultural heritage, and cut off from their roots.

Even as far back as 1833, Wiliam Cobbett had rightly announced to the world that English folk had become 'deserters from the plough'[1]. As if by magic, the smoking chimneys and windowless factories of the Industrial Revolution had arrived to force people away from the fields and into the expanding towns. Meanwhile, however, as Howard Newby suggests, even today the countryside offers its stubborn resistance to 'reassure us that everything these days is superficial and transitory; that some things remain stable, permanent and enduring'[2]. Indeed, the glory of rural life sanctions the status quo. Not the status quo of the Establishment or the bland sterility of modernism, on the contrary, the great tenacity our our forests, clifftops and dales are a lasting reminder that man can return to his ancestral sanctuary whenever the futile quest for scientific infallibility has run its inevitable course and he has finally begun to withdraw from the hedonistic negativity of the burgeoning metropolis. So what is meant by blood and soil, and why is it so vital in the shift towards a decentralised proliferation of small village communities?

The term originated in Germany during the early-1920s and was first coined by August Winnig, an ex-Social Democrat who had resigned from the centre-left SPD due to its obsession with internationalism. In 1927, the Transylvanian exile, Georg Kenstler, launched his 'Blood and Soil' magazine as a means of safeguarding the 'integral link between the tribe and the land, to be defended by blood, if necessary.'[3] For rural Germans, therefore, blood and soil became 'a code word implying the protection of a real personality. It stressed the kinship element, and the peasant's demographic role. City-dwellers did not breed - peasants did. They were the life-blood of the nation in a literal sense as well as its spiritual and cultural basis.'[4] But the very notion that a race is somehow rooted to a territory which has been drenched in the pioneering blood of its ancestors, is something that goes far beyond the terminological inventiveness of Weimar Germany. In a similar vein, it would be extremely unwise to dismiss blood and soil as a phenomenon which simply accompanied the emergence of National-Socialism, or even to suggest that twentieth-century romantics like the German Youth Movement and various nudist colonies had merely revived the medieval spirit of Aryan yeomanry for their own amusement. Not so! In fact the image of the heroic farmer and his devoted spouse extends far beyond the trappings of Teutonic legend, and blood and soil each represent inextricable components of the natural order and should not be estimated in historical terms alone. To those who aspired to such an ideal, it became a living testimony to the Nordic soul, an 'unwritten history of Europe, a history unconnected with trade, the banditry of the aristocracy, and the infinite duplicity of church and monarchy.'[5] Indeed, throughout the centuries the growth of materialism has become enshrined within a capitalist-marxian axis, leading to an inexhaustible plethora of ideological variants which come and go like empires founded upon sand. Meanwhile, of course, the self-appointed lords of the manor have forcibly extracted their financial dues from the sweating brow of many a broken and bitter serf.

Revolutionary Nationalism, on the other hand, or what in some circles is described as National-Anarchism, is more than a political ideology. It is able to recognise and understand that the relationship between a community and the land is something both immeasurable and spiritual. But, as Dr. Anna Bramwell has explained, blood and soil 'is implicit rather than explicit'[6] and, in practical terms, can often be seen today in 'European nations such as Greece and France, and several states in the United States of America, [where] farm purchase by non-nationals is either forbidden or tangled up with so many booby-traps as to be made extremely difficult. The position in the Third World is much more exclusivist and racialist.'[7] In short, to fully appreciate blood and soil one must come to terms with the fact that it is far more than just a political concept. As long as future attempts to initiate a blood and soil renaissance take this fact into account, however, the process will remain as natural and organic as possible.

Few people would doubt that Hitler's Reichsbauernfuhrer, R. Walther Darre, was primarily a political animal, but he was also intelligent enough to realise that if Germany was to retain her fine rural tradition the incoming National-Socialist government had to ensure that the existence of the peasantry was not in any way undermined. Indeed, Darre did not wish to see the vocational heritage of the country's agricultural backbone reduced to a fleeting plaything of the urban escapist or become the profitable sideline of exploitative fatcats. But Darre was an idealist, and never likely to be taken seriously by an opportunist and a politician like Hitler.

On March 6th, 1930, the National-Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) published its 'Official Party Manifesto on the Position of the NSDAP with Regard to the Farming Population and Agriculture'. This document claimed that the 'Maintenance of an efficient agricultural class, increasing in numbers as the general population increases, is a central plank in the National-Socialist platform'[8]. Furthermore, the Partly rightly acknowledged that the German peasantry was under attack from several quarters, namely 'the Jewish world money market - which really controls parliamentary democracy in Germany . . . the competition of foreign agriculturalists, who work under more favourable conditions . . . the extravagant profits made by the large wholesale middlemen, who thrust themselves in between producer and consumer . . . [and] . . . the oppressive rates the farmer has to pay for electric power and artificial manures to concerns mainly run by Jews.'[9] In place of this exploitation the NSDAP proposed that, amongst other things, land ownership be exclusively available to German citizens, that such land be made inheritable property (enabling peasants to become rooted to the soil), and that large areas be set aside for colonisation by an expanding German population. But whilst such policies were understandably attractive to ordinary peasants and back-to-the-land enthusiasts alike, when the Hitler government finally came to power in 1933 they were never put into practice. In 1940 Otto Strasser attacked the regime's Patrimonial Farm Law for the simple reason that it extended only to a portion of the peasantry and 'created three kinds of agricultural entrepreneur: peasants whose holdings were so small as to be unviable; middle and great peasants who are tenant-farmers; and great landowners who run their estates on purely capitalist lines.'[10]

Meanwhile, Walther Darre (who did not actually join the Party until 1930) had acquired a reputation as a man of great principle after resigning from his post in the East Prussian Trakhener Stud (Warm Blood Society), an animal breeding centre where he had come into direct conflict with his superiors. In 1926, Darre had writen an article condemning those who were seeking to revive plans for a colonial German empire, regarding the idea as 'inimical and destructive to the concept of a German homeland.'[11] Darre, therefore, seemed an unlikely figure for a Party which unashamedly advocated the forcible colonisation of occupied land for German settlement. Several years later, when Hitler ordered the seizure of Moravia and Bohemia from the Czechs, Darre recorded an entry in his diary claiming that, by creating an empire at the expense of her own national interests, Germany was repeating the errors made by England. Nevertheless, when Hitler had realised that Darre's immense popularity could provide him with the rural vote the NSDAP needed in order to obtain power, the latter rose to the challenge and vowed to use his new position in the government to defend the interests of his beloved peasants.

Modern ecologists would do well to emulate the honesty and integrity of men like Walther Darre. Sadly, however, unlike their National-Socialist predecessor most of them are too frightened to accept that Race has a great part to play in the restoration of the natural order. As far as Darre was concerned, the peasantry constituted 'a homogenous racial group of Nordic antecedents, who formed the racial and cultural core of the German nation.'[12] In 1929 Darre published 'The Peasantry as the Key to Understanding the Nordic Race', in which he concluded that 'kind providence laid a gift in the cradle of the Nordic race out of which grew perhaps its most significant characteristic. It is to the innermost need of the Nordic to place his life at the service of a cause and to develop inner moral principles for himself out of the necessities which determine this work'.[13]

Initially, Darre did little more tha reduce peasant interest rates to a maximum of 2% on farm loans and ensure that rural families retained their ancient right of hereditary ownership. However, once Hitler had made it perfectly clear that he had no real intention of honouring the original agricultural principles outlined in the 'Twenty-Five Points of the NSDAP', Darre realised that he had to use his time as constructively as possible in order to stave off the rising challenge of his closest rival, arch-technocrat and Hitlerian sycophant Herbert Backe. At Goslar, an ancient medieval town in the Harz Mountains, Darre established a 'peasants capital' and launched a series of measures designed to regenerate German agriculture by encouraging organic farming and replanting techniques. His 'dream was to make Goslar the centre of a new peasants' international; a green union of the northern European peoples. Here he made speeches condemning the fuhrer-princip and attacking imperial expansion. Visitors flocked to him. Organic farming enthusiasts from England welcomed Darre's plans and admired the hereditary tenure legislation. Representatives from Norwegian and Danish peasant movements joined the conferences on blood and soil.'[14] But Darre's overall strategy was even more radical, and he intended to abolish industrial society altogether and replace it with a series of purely peasant-based communities. In his view, '[c]apitalism and industry would soon wither away (a view held by many people in the Depression era) and with it the age of mass urbanisation and mechanisation. an urbanised society was incapable of survival. As it collapsed - helped by farmers blockading the cities - it would be replaced by a new society formed from a core of healthy, sound peasants'.[15] Darre realised, therefore, the extent to which cities have to rely upon extracting their sustenance from the rural periphery. He knew, in other words, that by encouraging German peasants to deprive the country's blood-sucking industrial regions of their agrarian lifesource, it was possible to hasten the self-destructive process of capitalism itself.

Needless to say, the leaders of the NSDAP were eager to claim these magnificent achievements for themselves and, by August 1937, Darre became completely disgusted with a statement made by Hermann Goering at the International Dairy Conference, during which the overweight usurper had declared that '[n]o country can withdraw today from the world economic system. No country can ever say again, we decline the world economy and are going to live and produce for ourselves alone.'[16] By April 1939, Goering's Four-Year Plan for the industrialisation of Germany in accordance with a total war economy had taken young people away from the land and into cramped munitions factories in the cities. This led to Darre attacking the Nazi regime for its 'economic imperialism, which makes one anxious for blood and soil ideals'[17]. In 1942, Darre was demoted from his ministerial position and inevitably replaced by the odious and far less dangerous Herbert Backe. From that moment on he had no doubt whatsoever that Hitler had cruelly betrayed the German peasantry. In the words of the aforementioned Dr. Bramwell: 'Hitler found Darre a useful theorist and organiser for a period of crisis, but when he kept faith with his vision he was, like many other revolutionary ideologues, discarded.'[18] More importantly, however, whilst Darre was far too modest to concede the fact, the Fuhrer had deprived Germany of her finest ecological pioneer; a man who is truly the patriarch of the modern Greens.

But Darre was not the only radical in the NSDAP. On the contrary, he was just one of many disaffected anti-capitalists who attempted to make the Party more radical by working from within. In this sense, at least, Darre surpassed most of them because the likes of 'Feder and Strasser did not see their ideas carried into effect.'[19] But, despite his agrarian radicalism, Darre never fully realised the futility of his association with the NSDAP until it was too late. On the other hand, if Darre had not been appointed Agricultural Minister in the first place he would not have been able to implement his blood and soil policies at all. This does not validate the gradualist strategy of those who continue to put their trust in the System, however, it merely demonstrates that - despite the legacy passed down to us by Darre and his closest followers - it is only possible to achieve a certain amount within the context of the existing governmental framework. Indeed, by 1942 Darre would have said the same thing himself, believing, as he did, that only a Green Revolution can sweep away the old Establishment and pave the way for a New Agrarian Order.

Darre's concern for the environment was also shared by Corneliu Codreanu and the Romanian Legionary Movement (Iron Guard), mainly due to the fact that prior to the Second World War the Romanian peasantry made up some 90% of the total population. The defiant streak of anti-urbanism which characterised the green-shirted fighters of Europe's most spiritual bastion of National Revolutionary struggle to date, is epitomised by the slogan 'up above, we will defend the life of the trees and the mountains from further devastation. Down below [in the towns], we will spread death and mercy.'[20] This view obviously concords with those in contemporary National-Anarchist circles and their commitment to destroy capitalism from within whilst creating a brand new order from without. Codreanu was a man who often sought release from the tortures of self-doubt by wandering into the wilderness, eagerly savouring the comfort and solace offered by the beautiful Romanian mountains. In his moving and emotional autobiography, 'For My Legionaries', Codreanu describes his self-imposed experience of solitude thus: 'It was getting dark. Not one living soul around. Only trees with vultures shrieking around the barren cliffs. I only had with me my heavy coat and a loaf of bread. I ate some bread and drank some water springing from among the rocks.'[21] Codreanu undoubtedly appreciated the spiritual realities of his ancestral homeland. Another example of the vast importance the Iron Guard attributed to the notion of blood and soil can be found in the Legion's symbolic commitment to Romania in terms of the country's physical and spiritual immortality. In 1927, twenty-seven legionaries made a solemn vow to defend their fatherland by distributing between themselves small leather sacks conatining Romanian earth. But whilst some may view this ceremony as a purely theatrical affair, as Codreanu himself rightly notes, such earth was representative of the very soul of the nation, which, in turn, means 'not only all Romanians living in the same territory, sharing the same past and the same future, the same dress, but all Romanians, alive and dead who have lived on this land from the beginning of history and will live here in the future.'[22]

In Spain, however, the concept of blood and soil was not at all shared by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera's Falange. In fact the Nationalist leader 'stringently attacked the blood and soil gut patriotism typical of Romanian and German National-Socialism, together with Romantic Nationalism and its emphasis on the pull of the land'[23]. According to Hugh Thomas, '[p]atriotism had to be anchored, not in the heart, but in the mind'[24]. But despite the worthy idealism of the Falange prior to its involvement with self-important reactionaries like General Franco in the 1936 Civil War, the Movement's attitude towards agrarian issues was woefully inadequate. Jose Antonio wanted his country to dominate the world stage and, therefore, failed to appreciate the fact that a naturally-rooted peasantry is far from 'backward' or 'anachronistic'. Unfortunately, many of his 'economic and social policies followed the modernising path of Mussolini and the aims of Mosley.'[25] On the other hand, the Spanish leader was extremely critical of those who wallowed in the contaminating decadence of city life: 'Our place is in the fresh air, under the cloudless heavens, weapons in our hands, with the stars above us. Let the others go on with their merrymaking. We outside, in tense, fervent, and certain vigilance, already feel the dawn breaking in the joy of our hearts.'[26]

But whilst capitalism is chiefly responsible for the destruction of the natural world, Marxism does not even take it into consideration. As one of the great modern pioneers of organic farming and self-sufficiency, John Seymour, has explained: 'Karl Marx, who spent most of his life in the reading room of the British Museum Library, probably came as little into contact with nature as it was possible to do and still stay alive. The result was that his philosophy ignored everything not human absolutely completely. He was aware (just) that food came from the country. He was aware that there must be some people out there somewhere who grew it. It was his object to rescue these imaginary people from what he called 'the idiocy of rural life'. What is that to the idiocy of spending all your life in the British Museum Library?'[27]. Since then, of course, the practical implementation of this individual's philosophy in Eastern Europe has proved beyond any doubt that Marxism is opposed to ecological order. One ridiculous consequence of Soviet agrarianism led to Russia - the greatest continuous wheat-growing area in the world - being forced to import its grain from abroad. If this is an example of Marxist state-planning in action, it is hardly surprising, therefore, to learn that Stalin eventually condemned millions of peasants to misery, squalor and mass starvation. The Red dictator's agricultural incompetence was soon hurriedly obscured by diverting the world's attention towards the steady industrialisation of Russia. Marxism, it seems, relies far more upon blood than soil.

Returning to the present, until those involved in ecological struggle can learn to appreciate the spiritual reality which binds man to his environment, reactionaries, liberals and leftists alike will continue to delay the replenishment of the natural order. We revolutionaries can only revitalise and reclaim the natural world from the clutches of capitalism once we have discovered that which lies within ourselves. It is vital for us to come to terms with the fact that, by springing from the very soil of which we have always been a part, we are inevitably destined to return to it at the end of our brief sojourn upon this earth. This is summed up very beautifully by Knut Hamsun, the great Norwegian storyteller who, in a poem entitled 'My Grave', wrote the following emotive words:

Oh Lord, I pray thee do not let me die In a bed with sheets and blankets piled upon And with dripping noses about me. Nay, smite me someday without warning, That headlong I fall into the forest some place Where no one will come around nosing. I well know the forest, I am its son, It will not deny my humble request To die on its cranberry bog. Thus will I give back without word of complaint My mighty cadaver to its creatures all, To the crows, the rats and the flies.[28]

So without a recognition of our inherent racial qualities and the ancestral territory that determines our nationhood, we will remain as much a threatened species as the white rhino, the giant panda and the large blue butterfly. As Europe and North America struggles to cope with the catastrophic results of inner-city habitation and suicidal race-mixing, National Revolutionaries must never forget that we humans are the natural guardians of the soil and our extinction would be possibly the greatest ecological disaster of all. This is why we must seek to re-establish ourselves in the heart of the rural countryside, so that one day we can proudly declare that, in the words of Walther Darre: 'Here is anchored the eternalness of a racial stock of unique character.'[29]

For notes, please visit http://www.rosenoire.org/articles/bloodandsoil.php