RSS
Olivier Echeinlaub (ed.), Pour un Réveil européen: Nature – Excellence – Beauté (Paris: La Nouvelle Librairie).
In Europe today, it is easy to fall into permanent numbness amidst the omnipresent falsehoods, frivolousness, and slouching. That makes it all the more remarkable when one encounters some who resist, some who hold to an ethos, to the legacy of an entire civilization . . . an invigorating oasis in the most sterile spiritual desert.
Thus I came across this remarkable little book by the Iliade Institute, “For a European Awakening,” with contributions from over a dozen French activists fighting for the cause of indigenous Europeans and their exceptional civilization. The book is part of Iliade’s growing collection of attractive paperbacks for the European wishing to reconnect with his roots and look to the future without flinching, covering issues as varied as European identity, poetry, demonization by the media, the Middle Ages, and the European dimensions of Shakespeare and Nietzsche.
The authors include a wide variety of contributors from the French identitarian cultural ecosystem, including teachers and university professors, historians, book and magazine editors, PhD students and graduates, and the occasional high civil servant and corporate manager. Among them we have the philosopher Alain de Benoist, Iliade co-founder Jean-Yves Le Gallou, and the young Thibaud Cassel, an alumnus of the European institutions.
The book represents an ethical synthesis, almost a manifesto, of what we might indeed call the Iliadic or Vennerian school of French identitarianism. The collection seeks to give intellectual and practical answers to the question: How is a self-respecting European to behave today? The work is organized according to the three Iliadic slogans:
- Nature as foundation.
- Excellence as goal.
- Beauty as horizon.
The result is an impressive medley of essays on topics as varied as economics, urban development, environmentalism, spirituality, work, and political philosophy.
The Iliadic school emphatically affirms the spiritual continuity of European civilization, from the ancient Greeks through the Romans and medieval Europeans right up to the moderns. One can rightly ask: Is there really such a Tradition – and not a fundamental instability – in European history? And anyway what of this survives among the rapidly declining, sad, and squishy Europeans of today? What commonality is there between the Greek explorer-pirate and citizen-soldier, the Roman farmer-legionnaire, the Christian knight or monk, the early-modern scientific and world-conquerors and . . . the European of today – the less said about which the better? What is really left of the mos maiorum, the ancestral traditions that sustained our societies?
Iliade does not propose a return to any particular tradition – Stoic, Christian, or other – but a kind of general elevated ethos drawing from Europe’s varied spiritual roots. One may deem it post-Nietzschean or neoclassical. At bottom, it is an elitist, aristocratic ethos challenging us to achieve individual excellence within an organic community, guided by the Hellenic trifecta of Nature, Excellence, and Beauty.
In terms of politics, there is a muscular rejection of the social contract, in favor of an Aristotelian vision of flourishing grounded in human nature, that of, inter alia, a social, spiritual, unequal, intergenerational, and hereditary animal. Hence a decidedly particularistic and biocentric worldview: “Ethos does not mean for the Greeks a universal morality founded on the opposition between good and evil: ethics is the way in which beings bear themselves in the face of the world over the course of their usual sojourn. The ethos of a people draws its roots from a tradition and rests on transmission” (147).
The basic fact of continuity with ancestral tradition lies in human nature. Indeed, we need “a realistic conception of human nature . . . based on the teachings of ancient wisdom bolstered by the discoveries of modern European science” (p. 31). Iliade happily integrates the latest biological science – the Anglo-Americans have long had a much stronger empirical tradition – into a very French intellectual tradition of deep knowledge of history and philosophy. Indeed, the reader gets something of a crash course in Greek and Roman ethical terminology, with ample references not only to French authors, but also and especially to great German thinkers (Schmitt, Jünger, Hölderlin, Heidegger . . .).
The historian Henri Levavasseur admirably sums up the insane hubris of the blank-slatist emancipatory project against human nature:
In the name of the struggle against all forms of discrimination, the advocates of the “blank slate” are determined to deconstruct the classic anthropological categories. They want to definitively impose, first through media and social pressure, then through judicial and State coercion, a “fluid” model of identity, meant to replace “natural” families and nations, entities considered to be oppressive or outdated. In this view, the sovereign individual must be able to choose its identity in complete autonomy: the social order has no other role than guaranteeing the existence of this free choice. . . . This deathly ideology however is crashing against the wall of reality . . . (p. 32)
This vision applies naturally to nations – considered as nothing more than contractual economic spaces – and, in horrifyingly surreal fashion, to biological sex itself. The result however of going so brutally against the grain of human nature is merely ugliness, sickness, and chaos, as witnessed by the perpetual ethnic strife of multicultural nations.
The revolt against identity – the last constraint – seems to flow quite naturally from the general collapse of behavioral standards since the Second World War, what we might call the Great Slouching:
Though it may seem difficult to establish objective criteria of “conduct” [tenue], everyone can instinctively define what must be rejected: unkemptness, vulgarity, slackness. The latter takes various forms: slackness of the body (flabbiness or exhibitionism), of behavior (lack of self-control, neglect of rules of courtesy), of the spirit (intellectual laziness, conformism), or of the soul (loss of a sense of honor, lack of courage or lack of faithfulness to one’s principles). (p. 152)
This ethical collapse naturally coincided with and entrenched Europe’s cultural and geopolitical collapse. The historian Philippe Conrad observes: “The ‘dark Twentieth Century’ witnessed global power’s center of gravity move to North America, itself bearing a new model of civilization, initially inspired by Wilsonian universalism and liberal illusions” (p. 8). Europe’s decline was aggravated by societal liberalism, most spectacularly expressed in France with the May ‘68 protests, a decline only partially masked by ongoing technological progress.
Today, Europe is in a position somewhat similar to France in the nineteenth century: riding on her past glories and facing rapid decline relative to other powers. France, once Europe’s cultural hegemon and leading power, became a highly vulnerable second-tier great power. So Europe, once mistress of the world, is now a mere trade bloc – having lost all military or cultural preeminence – and a rapidly declining one at that. If the United States long was able to sustain a dynamic symbiotic relationship between political liberalism and national power, few today remain optimistic about that hyper-polarized non-nation’s medium-term prospects. We risk a rude awakening.
Perhaps the book’s most important passages are those suggesting practical actions each of us can undertake to lift ourselves out of this morass. The European may elevate himself through a self-conscious and demanding ethic and way of life. Thibaud Cassel urges us (citing Dominique Venner): “to cultivate a close relationship with nature, through hunting or hiking . . . to practice a martial art, in order to cultivate a concrete virility and to gather the individuals who still have a lively taste for effort . . . to write often, and to reread ourselves, so as to cultivate consciousness of our action” (p. 84).
The Iliade Institute graduate Alix Marnin writes of the need for well-spent leisure or otium, “free time dedicated to study and reflection . . . as the necessary condition for all action, distinct from agitation and busyness, that is negotium. The accomplished man does not distinguish action from contemplation, and has the will to develop himself intellectually” (p. 88). Indeed, private and professional life should not be “balanced” as antagonistic poles of one’s life, but form a unified and harmonious whole (p. 91).
Levavasseur himself presents an alternative to the postwar anti-ethos:
To seek excellence as a goal means to keep to moral elegance, to practice a certain self-restraint, to cultivate demands upon oneself; it means to fight to harmonize thought and action, being and appearance, to tend towards overcoming, rather than seeking, hedonistic “fulfillment”; to submit to freely consented discipline rather than demanding total freedom; it is to know that one is “a link in the chain,” to serve others rather serve oneself, to be demanding in choosing one’s peers while being able to face solitude; finally and especially, it means transmitting this collection of demands through example, to never deny oneself by way of ease, comfort, and security. The surest way of achieving this is to build an “inner citadel,” through daily meditation, reading, but also through the discipline of the body. (p. 153)
In short, the European must not live as he has recently learned to, at random. Rather, he will live in such a way that he may, as a Roman did, proudly inscribe on his tomb: “My manners have enriched the virtues of my race. I have begotten descendants, I have sought to equal to the exploits of my father. I have deserved the praise of my ancestors, who rejoiced to see me born for their glory. My honor has ennobled by lineage” (p. 149).
Reading this book, I could not help but feel inspired and renewed. I thought to myself: here is a work which merits translation, into German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, and . . . why not, English! Europe needs a new elite which feels for her as our common motherland. We need dissenters from globalism who will not be sidetracked by certain sterile petty-nationalist or conservative culture-war obsessions. The preservation and resuscitation of Europe as a distinct, sovereignly animated, and living human community will serve genuine human diversity: “As a tree cannot survive without roots, so the universal only exists as a polyphonic extension of specific identities” (p. 31).
Admittedly, not all will be convinced by some of these essays in the detail. The philosopher Rémi Soulié makes the case for the “golden thread” of European mysticism – Pythagoras, Plato, Master Eckart, Mircea Eliade . . . (p. 24) – and one is left wondering how to practice this outside any particular tradition. (The glory of Zen and Orthodoxy as living traditions, as Plato might well have conceded.)
Jean-Philippe Antoni, a professor of urban and territorial development, rightly asks: What exactly may be deemed “natural” in the age of GMOs and synthetic biology (p. 45)? This in fact means no discrediting of the notion of biological nature, but merely that it must be thought in a futurist spirit, one which understands that ancestral wisdom and traditional notions of excellence must indeed be recast as and when our technology comes to transform, not merely the conditions of life, but life itself. This century will indeed witness more perfect beings and perfect monstrosities.
I wholeheartedly endorse this fine collection and invite Europeans across the world to read and translate its contents. We are, decidedly, living in a time of greatness, of a sort. The authors readily refer to the famous demographic Great Replacement, but also to the cultural Great Effacement, the Great Confinement of the past year, the Great Upheaval that these represent, and ultimately the Grand Ressourcement. An expression I cannot adequately translate, but which means something like “the Great Return to Our Roots.”
Jean-Yves Le Gallou rightly observes that European history is made up of rises and falls punctuated by rebirths (96). Thus if we work and carry on the torch we may rightly hope, in our lifetimes or the next, for another transformation: the Great Renaissance.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
This excellent movement has all the hallmarks of a species of pan-European National Socialism. It reminds me especially of that political venture’s roots in the German ‘agrarian romanticism’ that emerged from the 1850s, based on the writings of figures such as Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, and reflected in Wagner’s epic works based on Norse mythology (Der Ring des Nibelungen) and the Arthurian legends (Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal). Riehl argued that the peasantry represented the foundation of the German people. Country life came to be seen as not only healthier but also more ‘German’. It became popular for urban families to send their children to work in the countryside, on farms and with traditional crafts, in order to give them a grounding in rural life. This renewed spirit of nationalism had seen the birth of the ‘Second Reich’, with German unification in 1871, a feat for which Bismarck and the associated cult of militarism could lay claim.
The idea of a Third Reich had first emerged when Arthur Moeller published Das Dritte Reich at Hamburg in 1923. This work formed the germ of the idea of a ‘Third Reich’ and was a major source of National Socialist thought. The racial question was no more than a realistic attempt to confront problems that had beset great societies since at least the fall of Babylon in the sixth century BCE, and which – to an extent that is little known today, especially among classical ‘scholars’ – was largely responsible for the decay of the Western Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. As Revilo Oliver remarked:
‘The urge to minimize or conceal biological and even cultural differences is related to the practical problem that has confronted every ruler and statesman since Sumerian times: the need to create a state (which is necessarily territorial) by inducing some cohesive unity among the more or less diverse peoples who are residing in that territory at the time and whom it is not expedient to expel. This was an acute problem throughout Europe, including Germany, where the proverbial differences in temperament between the typical Prussian and the typical Bavarian could seem as great as a difference between major races to a population that had, for the most part, little contact with non-Aryan races except the chameleon-like Jews with their racial ability to simulate the manners of other races when it is profitable to do so.’
All in all, a most timely and commendable development, and one that I (as a resident of France) shall closely follow.
Preserving one’s land, culture and people and striving for excellence has NOTHING to do with ‘national socialism’. In fact, the citizens of every single nation that fought against the Nazis or was victimised by them would have easily agreed with all/most of this without being Nazis. All these ideas were normal back then. Nothing to do with Naziism.
Durocher: “This in fact means no discrediting of the notion of biological nature, but merely that it must be thought in a futurist spirit, one which understands that ancestral wisdom and traditional notions of excellence must indeed be recast as and when our technology comes to transform, not merely the conditions of life, but life itself.”
The problems of the modern world generally and the white race in particular derive especially from the unintended consequences of technological “progress”, whether the topic is the falling birth rates and the ascendance of feminism due to the widespread availability and use of birth control and abortion, the mixing of the various continental races that have been brought into increasingly close contact with one another through technology, or even the self-determination of biological sex as seen in transgenderism. What’s more, it’s easy to see that these problems will only intensify with continued technological “advances”, which are rapidly making the natural human divisions of sex and race obsolete. “Progress” aims to overcome Nature, to create an artificial world with which to replace it, so there is no way to reconcile the two. In the end, the artificial world under construction will demand artificial, raceless, sexless “people” to inhabit it. That’s the transhumanist project.
To me, it is criminally shortsighted that nationalists on the continent are have not made aggressive recruitment of White immigration from Latin America a prominent piece of their platform. I know that taking a strictly anti-immigration line—a position that is therefore not explicitly racial—is more palatable politically in the short-term, but Europe is a dying continent; it needs a shot-in-the-arm of fresh blood to have any hope of preserving itself. To have any hope of preserving itself in the face of its low birth-rate, against the non-White immigrants it already has, and as the native population declines and ages the economic pressure to admit still more immigrants will grow more and more.
Of course, the idea of a racialized immigration policy would get a lot of push-back, but it’s not exactly an impossible sell either, especially if it were massaged in terms of cultural compatibility. The non-Whites immigrating to continental Europe are not exactly the cream-of-the-crop (those sorts are almost exclusively sucked-up by the Anglosphere), and they are radically foreign culturally. It shouldn’t be that daunting of a task to convince Italians, for example, that spending a few extra bucks recruiting young Italo-South Americans instead of the Libyans and Senegalese is a better deal for them in the long run. There are well over 100 million South American Whites whose per capita income is but a fraction of the European average. Invest in recruiting them to Europe, and millions of them will come. (They could probably attract a decent number of North Americans too.)
Romantic ideologizing is all well-and-good, but it’s difficult not feel gloomy about the prospects for the race on the continent when its nationalists lack the imagination to articulate this relatively straight-forward policy position.
Actually this has been proposed by Nationalists in Italy and Croatia, To prioritise South Americans of European descent rather than Africans and Asians. That is preferable.
Kool-Aid anyone?
I agreed with your post, but it should be noted that the idea of cultivating a pan-European identity, as well as giving it political form, would not have seemed “normal” back then. It would have struck people as strange, unnecessary, unworkable, and I dare say only a few farsighted types would have comprehended the need for or the benefit of it.
If you really think it through, I think you’ll understand why it’s virtually as a hard as sell as straight up WN itself. The first obstructionist move would be to force them to define who is white. That’s hard enough even within Europe; it’s even harder in Latin America. Would they accept self-defined “whites,” or would they subject people to certain tests? That sort of thing makes people very uncomfortable, and it’s hard to see how the immigration restriction movement would benefit from having to answer to such questions in addition to all the questions it already has to answer.
I call this the “roundabout solution”
Test them, but not for blood or ancestry, but their intellect and abilities. Since most of those who would score high on those are white, they’re fine.
If some mestizo or something passes through, good for em. Though bad for their mother country. Robbing people of human capital is kinda cringe because it will just drive up the amount of trash who will want to go to your country later.
Global eugenics, the only thing that can make all the races more or less equal, and functional, is the only solution to the immigration problem
That’s true, but there are ways around that. They could base it on ethnic ancestry (Italy recruits Italo-South Americans, Germany recruits German-South Americans, etc.). For Germany and Italy, mixed racial ancestry is not so much of a problem as their South American diasporas have remained fairly genetically European (if not strictly German or Italian). For the other two European countries with large Latin American diasporas—Spain and Portugal—mixing is more of an issue. For Spain, the solution could be to target the (Whiter) southern cone countries more aggressively than the rest of the continent. I do think it is better to cast-a-wide-net, and that they should be aiming at South American Whites in general, but they could do both at once. Italy can simultaneously advertise, “Italy welcomes its Italian sons home,” and “Italy welcomes its Latin American European brothers home.”
I know a lot of European countries already have right to return policies (though I think in many cases it is limited to people whose grandparents were European nationals), but my point is leaving the door open is not enough. They should make major investments in recruiting South American Whites, including everything from well-financed “come home” ad-campaigns to relocation subsidies.
Of course I would prefer the latter, but the former is probably good enough. I think a simple “European brothers come home” campaign drive would net a largely White immigrant population. Even if they get something like 75% White, 25% Mestizo, that’s still a lot better than what they’re getting now. Hell, 50-50 would be better than what they’re getting now. Even as many as a couple million Mestizos in places like Italy and Iberia would disappear within a couple generations into the Mediterranean bloodstream (particularly if supplemented by an even larger number of White immigrants), and they’re certainly far-more culturally compatible than the immigrants those places are getting now.
That’s a very good idea. One problem with implementing it though is that South American countries with a large White component, mostly those in the southern cone (Uruguay, Chile and Argentina) are rather nice places to live and prosper if you are smart and industrious, so it gonna be difficult to attract them in good numbers and quality to Europe.
Another reallly thought provoking article.
I was a scholastic varsity Fencer (Epee), which is scored both individually and as a team.
By my Sophomore year we began to realize that, even in tournament competition, it was always the same group of us, across all the participating schools, that ended up in the final tier to fight it out.
It was not only a matter of physicality – some of the final pool of combatants were short and fast, some were tall and strong, some were non-de script, but technically proficient. There were varied paths to excel, that relied on a variety of skills, techniques and traits, but no single profile alone was a guarantee of victory.
If you go back to the first crusade, Tancred, Bohemond, Godfrey, etc.. are exposed on countless occasions to seemingly suicidal combat, but continually emerge to fight another day. Most of the general mass of unprepared foot soldiers fail to survive in large numbers by the end of the campaign, and a constant recruitment effort is required to sustain the Frankish states even for their abbreviated lifetimes.
Its estimated that no more than 10,000 of these Franks and Normans at any given time were present in the Norman-controlled Italian peninsula, which had long resisted conquest by far larger military forces and far better supplied and financed would-be conquerors.
I think one major difference acting as an influence upon the vigor of these Europeans was that a Tancred or Bohemond actually had to go out and put themselves physically in harms way, and prevail, meaning that even as an aristocratic ruling class, they had won their place by absolute merit.
In modern Europe, and American, it is in modern times generally a rule by the “stay-behinds”. The Machiavellian conspirators who plot control from the safety of boardrooms and risk nothing, requiring no merit or experience, only malevolence and avarice.
This transfer from ‘rule by merit’ to ‘rule by merkel,’ was sped-up by the advent of mechanized warfare that reduced the survive-ability of the bravest, most competent and fearless leadership candidates to beneath that of the meekest enlistee crouching behind a machine gun site.
The prime side effect of mechanized warfare was that the bravest, strongest, technically proficient, studious and honorable tended to die in mass quantities rather rapidly, since they were being exposed to a type of unprecedented mass slaughter.
The most plentiful leadership candidates who as a result become the best positioned to access positions of power become the ‘4F’ stay-behinds who see the nation and people as a commodity for their own enrichment, and.. having never risked their own safety, see no value in the nation or its people.
Rude awakening? That would be a good thing. No, people will continue to sleep.
All this talk about “ethos” is a bit pointless.
Meanwhile, in the real Europe, people are accepting “vaccine passports” and “lockdowns” and “forever masks”… White birth rates have plummeted even more in 2020, in some countries now such as Germany and Italy there’s negative population growth (and what there is, it’s more from migrants).
Maybe WNs are part of the problem, with their Nazi fetish and their Greek-Roman LARPing and their empty talk… It’s hopeless… Utterly hopeless…
But we’re fully entering the “Transhumanist Era” now… Microchips in your skull, mRNA vaccines, DNA modifications… Perhaps the “white men technology” is not our friend…
Sorry to bust people’s bubble, but I don’t see a solution this way. But yes, by all means let’s “cultivate our garden”… While they don’t turn us into walking GMOs.
May God have mercy on Europe and on the former Christendom.
This is the reason I am wary of using “brain drain” as an anti-immigration argument. It is true that “robbing” other countries of their best people hurts those countries, however, if our domestic lefties – who are arguably the most determined immigration-boosters – ever came to understand precisely why it hurts those countries – ie because IQ matters and is heritable – then I’m sure they would insist that we only take in the third world’s useless trash people. You just can’t win with leftards, they will always find some reason to fuck you over, ’cause “muh equality” demands it or something.
You’ll struggle to find a more avid eugenicist than me, but any realistic eugenics program would take so long to work that it can in no way be considered a solution to immigration in the short-term. Even if eugenics were implemented today, it would still take, say, thirty years before the first generation to grow up under that regime began to make an economic impact, and even if that first generation alone were to (almost magically) cause GDP to grow at triple the rate of today, most of the third world is so far behind that it would still take decades for them to catch up. That leaves plenty of time for immigration to continue wreaking havoc.
Interesting article, then I figured to do some research of the mentioned institutions and writers. Turns out the institut-iliade.com is only available in the French language. A few other sources seem so far French only too. The only article in the English language I found so far on institut-iliade.com is this very article.
Another issue, the comments here are decidedly political. And some of the mentioned sources are political: “Jean-Yves Le Gallou, a former French high civil servant, author, and identitarian activist.”
Politics is not culture. As long as people are obsessed with politics and the formation of labyrinths of political organizations, we can forget culture. Such efforts are destructive to culture. It is the surest way against the building of an ‘inner citadel’. People who are building an “inner citadel” don’t want ‘identitarian activists’, there are plenty of them.., They need inspiring cultural ideas from rare and brilliant men. It has always been brilliant men who lead culture, not democratic activists in the mess and continuous war of democratic politics. At best the politically active can aid to form a cultural narrative for the ordinary folk, for a part of the democratic masses, but not for a sensible elite.
The so called cultural section of unz.com is a laughing stock, it is decidedly political mixed with a bit of culture, which is buried often in tedious political articles.