David Codrea, National Examiner, November 28, 2010
“In this special issue The Social Contract presents an unsparing indictment, and a timely debunking, of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Acclaimed expert on America’s political fringes Laird Wilcox skewers the bogus scholarship and smear tactics by which SPLC has successfully sold itself to government and media as an impartial arbiter of “hate,” in an exclusive, keynote interview with Peter Gemma. TSC’s team of accomplished contributors from the left, right, and center exposes SPLC’s unsavory methods, dubious aims, and tawdry fundraising practices with surgical precision and comprehensive scope.”
Indeed. TSC provides a linked index for every article in this issue, covering everything from SPLC’s “ritual defamations,” to their “hidden agenda,” all bearing in mind how immensely lucrative the venture has proven to be for founder Morris Dees and key executive staff.
We’ve covered the defamation/conflation angle from a gun owner perspective many times at Gun Rights Examiner. TSC expands that to show how other groups that the SPLC agenda finds convenient are also smeared in order to advance their agenda and bring in the cash.
A key observation that nicely illustrates SPLC hypocrisy when it comes to money, from an article by contributor Patrick Cleburne, notes “the $PLC now has an account in the notorious tax haven and money-laundering location of the Cayman Islands!” and that SPLC receive $2.9 million from “[t]he Picower Foundation, set up by Jeffry Picower, reliably reported to have been the biggest beneficiary of the Madoff scam.” Cleburne suggests:
“Madoff left many destitute elderly in his wake. The SPLC should return its Picower money to the Madoff trustee for their benefit.”
Don’t hold your breath.
With 17 articles, there are far too many points to effectively summarize here, which means those of you wanting to learn more will need to spend some time reading.
Here’s what strikes me as the most important point I could raise: SPLC is rolling in dough. The people who are bringing us such detailed exposés deserve our support. Here’s how you can give it:
Bookmark The Social Contract website. Share the link, along with the link to this article, with like-minded family and friends.
Don’t just read the articles online—buy a physical copy of this issue that you can share with others. Not only is it nice to own, hold and leaf through, but the price is right:
Note: this item is being offered free, plus a shipping fee of $5, under a special promotion—as long as supplies last.
Also note other offerings from TSC’s bookstore.
In a related development, it happens coincidentally that Mike Vanderboegh at Sipsey Street Irregulars posted late yesterday on SPLC’s Cayman Island account as well as the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by Morris Dees in “The House that Hate Built.”
NATA-NY is an organizational matrix in which individuals and communities can activate to manifest their intrinsic autonomy. We are a decentralized and leaderless network that aspires to increase the empowerment and independence of all people living in the New York area.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Thursday, November 25, 2010
China, Russia quit dollar
By Su Qiang and Li Xiaokun (China Daily)
2010-11-24
St. Petersburg, Russia - China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday.
Chinese experts said the move reflected closer relations between Beijing and Moscow and is not aimed at challenging the dollar, but to protect their domestic economies.
"About trade settlement, we have decided to use our own currencies," Putin said at a joint news conference with Wen in St. Petersburg.
The two countries were accustomed to using other currencies, especially the dollar, for bilateral trade. Since the financial crisis, however, high-ranking officials on both sides began to explore other possibilities.
The yuan has now started trading against the Russian rouble in the Chinese interbank market, while the renminbi will soon be allowed to trade against the rouble in Russia, Putin said.
"That has forged an important step in bilateral trade and it is a result of the consolidated financial systems of world countries," he said.
Putin made his remarks after a meeting with Wen. They also officiated at a signing ceremony for 12 documents, including energy cooperation.
The documents covered cooperation on aviation, railroad construction, customs, protecting intellectual property, culture and a joint communiqu. Details of the documents have yet to be released.
Putin said one of the pacts between the two countries is about the purchase of two nuclear reactors from Russia by China's Tianwan nuclear power plant, the most advanced nuclear power complex in China.
Putin has called for boosting sales of natural resources - Russia's main export - to China, but price has proven to be a sticking point.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, who holds sway over Russia's energy sector, said following a meeting with Chinese representatives that Moscow and Beijing are unlikely to agree on the price of Russian gas supplies to China before the middle of next year.
Russia is looking for China to pay prices similar to those Russian gas giant Gazprom charges its European customers, but Beijing wants a discount. The two sides were about $100 per 1,000 cubic meters apart, according to Chinese officials last week.
Wen's trip follows Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's three-day visit to China in September, during which he and President Hu Jintao launched a cross-border pipeline linking the world's biggest energy producer with the largest energy consumer.
Wen said at the press conference that the partnership between Beijing and Moscow has "reached an unprecedented level" and pledged the two countries will "never become each other's enemy".
Over the past year, "our strategic cooperative partnership endured strenuous tests and reached an unprecedented level," Wen said, adding the two nations are now more confident and determined to defend their mutual interests.
"China will firmly follow the path of peaceful development and support the renaissance of Russia as a great power," he said.
"The modernization of China will not affect other countries' interests, while a solid and strong Sino-Russian relationship is in line with the fundamental interests of both countries."
Wen said Beijing is willing to boost cooperation with Moscow in Northeast Asia, Central Asia and the Asia-Pacific region, as well as in major international organizations and on mechanisms in pursuit of a "fair and reasonable new order" in international politics and the economy.
Sun Zhuangzhi, a senior researcher in Central Asian studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the new mode of trade settlement between China and Russia follows a global trend after the financial crisis exposed the faults of a dollar-dominated world financial system.
Pang Zhongying, who specializes in international politics at Renmin University of China, said the proposal is not challenging the dollar, but aimed at avoiding the risks the dollar represents.
Wen arrived in the northern Russian city on Monday evening for a regular meeting between Chinese and Russian heads of government.
He left St. Petersburg for Moscow late on Tuesday and is set to meet with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday.
Agencies and Zhou Wa contributed to this story.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Oppose Food Safety Legislation
Via: The John Birch Society
The Senate voted to approve a cloture motion today, November 17, with a 74-25 vote, well above the 60 votes required to limit debate on S. 510. This sets a dangerous precedent and is a momentum builder for passing even more controversial legislation as the lame duck session continues. Clearly, many Republicans crossed the aisle for this very unconstitutional bill. The Food Safety Act can now be brought to the floor any day now for a final vote by the Senate. Only a simple majority will be required for passage.
The Food Safety Modernization Act, S. 510
S. 510 calls for enhanced expansion of FDA authority over small farms, ranches, and other food producers, establishes burdensome administrative requirements for large and small operations, and an arbitrary legal authority to recall “unsafe medications,” the definition of which is not clearly established. Under S. 510 more power would be granted to an unaccountable agency, hyper-regulating small producers out of business, leaving the industrial food system that currently has the highest number of food safety problems, to commandeer the marketplace.
This massive expansion of government regulation of the food industry, completely unauthorized by the Constitution, would limit the right to produce, distribute, and consume the foods of one's labors and choice. The constant refrain of "safety" is no excuse for granting practically unlimited authority to an unaccountable bureaucracy.
For more details on the specifics of the bill see the JBS legislative alert.
If you believe food safety is best achieved at the local level, contact your senators immediately to express your opposition to such plans. Have them do everything in their power to defeat S. 510.
The Senate voted to approve a cloture motion today, November 17, with a 74-25 vote, well above the 60 votes required to limit debate on S. 510. This sets a dangerous precedent and is a momentum builder for passing even more controversial legislation as the lame duck session continues. Clearly, many Republicans crossed the aisle for this very unconstitutional bill. The Food Safety Act can now be brought to the floor any day now for a final vote by the Senate. Only a simple majority will be required for passage.
The Food Safety Modernization Act, S. 510
S. 510 calls for enhanced expansion of FDA authority over small farms, ranches, and other food producers, establishes burdensome administrative requirements for large and small operations, and an arbitrary legal authority to recall “unsafe medications,” the definition of which is not clearly established. Under S. 510 more power would be granted to an unaccountable agency, hyper-regulating small producers out of business, leaving the industrial food system that currently has the highest number of food safety problems, to commandeer the marketplace.
This massive expansion of government regulation of the food industry, completely unauthorized by the Constitution, would limit the right to produce, distribute, and consume the foods of one's labors and choice. The constant refrain of "safety" is no excuse for granting practically unlimited authority to an unaccountable bureaucracy.
For more details on the specifics of the bill see the JBS legislative alert.
If you believe food safety is best achieved at the local level, contact your senators immediately to express your opposition to such plans. Have them do everything in their power to defeat S. 510.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Egyptian papyrus found in ancient Irish bog
Source
Irish scientists have found fragments of Egyptian papyrus in the leather cover of an ancient book of psalms that was unearthed from a peat bog, Ireland's National Museum said on Monday.
The papyrus in the lining of the Egyptian-style leather cover of the 1,200-year-old manuscript, "potentially represents the first tangible connection between early Irish Christianity and the Middle Eastern Coptic Church", the Museum said.
"It is a finding that asks many questions and has confounded some of the accepted theories about the history of early Christianity in Ireland."
Raghnall O Floinn, head of collections at the Museum, said the manuscript, now known as the "Faddan More Psalter", was one of the top ten archaeological discoveries in Ireland.
It was uncovered four years ago by a man using a mechanical digger to harvest peat near Birr in County Tipperary, but analysis has only just been completed.
O Floinn told AFP the illuminated vellum manuscript encased in the leather binding dated from the eighth century but it was not known when or why it ended up in the bog where it was preserved by the chemicals in the peat.
"It appears the manuscript's leather binding came from Egypt. The question is whether the papyrus came with the cover or if it was added.
"It is possible that the imperfections in the hide may allow us to confirm the leather is Egyptian.
"We are trying to track down if there somebody who can tell us if this is possible. That is the next step."
O Floinn said the psalter is about the size of a tabloid newspaper and about 15 percent of the pages of the psalms, which are written in Latin, had survived.
The experts believe the manuscript of the psalms was produced in an Irish monastery and it was later put in the leather cover.
"The cover could have had several lives before it ended up basically as a folder for the manuscript in the bog," O Floinn said.
"It could have travelled from a library somewhere in Egypt to the Holy Land or to Constantinople or Rome and then to Ireland."
The National Museum in Dublin plans to put the psalter on public display for the first time next year.
(c) 2010 AFP
Irish scientists have found fragments of Egyptian papyrus in the leather cover of an ancient book of psalms that was unearthed from a peat bog, Ireland's National Museum said on Monday.
The papyrus in the lining of the Egyptian-style leather cover of the 1,200-year-old manuscript, "potentially represents the first tangible connection between early Irish Christianity and the Middle Eastern Coptic Church", the Museum said.
"It is a finding that asks many questions and has confounded some of the accepted theories about the history of early Christianity in Ireland."
Raghnall O Floinn, head of collections at the Museum, said the manuscript, now known as the "Faddan More Psalter", was one of the top ten archaeological discoveries in Ireland.
It was uncovered four years ago by a man using a mechanical digger to harvest peat near Birr in County Tipperary, but analysis has only just been completed.
O Floinn told AFP the illuminated vellum manuscript encased in the leather binding dated from the eighth century but it was not known when or why it ended up in the bog where it was preserved by the chemicals in the peat.
"It appears the manuscript's leather binding came from Egypt. The question is whether the papyrus came with the cover or if it was added.
"It is possible that the imperfections in the hide may allow us to confirm the leather is Egyptian.
"We are trying to track down if there somebody who can tell us if this is possible. That is the next step."
O Floinn said the psalter is about the size of a tabloid newspaper and about 15 percent of the pages of the psalms, which are written in Latin, had survived.
The experts believe the manuscript of the psalms was produced in an Irish monastery and it was later put in the leather cover.
"The cover could have had several lives before it ended up basically as a folder for the manuscript in the bog," O Floinn said.
"It could have travelled from a library somewhere in Egypt to the Holy Land or to Constantinople or Rome and then to Ireland."
The National Museum in Dublin plans to put the psalter on public display for the first time next year.
(c) 2010 AFP
SPLC attacks the Sovereign Citizen Movement
SPLC attacks Sovereign "Citizen" Movement, SEE VIDEO HERE.
Sovereign "Citizen" Jonathan explains his philosophy.
RT interviews a Sovereign "Citizen".
Sovereign "Citizen" Jonathan explains his philosophy.
RT interviews a Sovereign "Citizen".
Anarcho-Gnosticism: Golgotha of the Absolute Mind
by Wayne John SturgeonOriginally published by Synthesis-Jounal Du Cercle De La Rose Noire IN his book, ‘The Essence of the Kabbalah’, Brian L. Lancaster (Chapter 8, pp.205-10) writes of the attempt in this ancient Jewish mystical and magical tradition to create an artificial human or humanoid called a ‘golem’ in the ancient Kabbalah accounts. The idea being that dead matter is not really dead but can be brought back to life, and Lancaster is keen to stress the point that ‘What are the computers and robots of our time if not golems!’ One here immediately thinks of the classic horror novel (and very much an influence on popular culture ever since) ‘Frankenstein’, which actually translates in the German as ‘Eye in the Stone’, perhaps a reference for conspiracy theory buffs to the eye in the Pyramid on the American dollar bill. Especially when read in the context of St. John’s ‘Book of Revelation’, which appears to give an account of a ‘golem’ being created in Chapter 13, Verse 15: "He was permitted to give a spirit to the image of the beast so that the image could both speak and cause whoever would not worship the image of the beast to be killed." According to Talmudic sources, the mastery of creation alluded to by the production of a golem is viewed as the ultimate act of imitating God and perhaps a goal promoted throughout genetic engineering? It would appear here that we have a demonic reversal of the ‘Book of Genesis’, which speaks of God "breathing life" into the original prototype "image" of man (2:7). The current popular cultural model of the Frankenstein mythos is being portrayed in recent sci-fi classics such as the ‘Terminator’ and ‘Matrix’ trilogies, where computers becoming ‘self-conscious’ actually rebel and overthrow their ‘creators’ and in one version bring about a nuclear war and, in the other, create a completely artificial and computer-simulated illusory world in almost classic ‘docetic’ Gnostic terms. Interestingly, the esoteric Christian theosophy of Rudolph Steiner talks about the advent of ‘Anti-Christ’ being not so much the coming of any particular individual or movement, but rather the tendency in an ever-expanding human culture of materialism and all-embracing technology to reach a penultimate phase whereby such artificial intelligences would become invaded by a spirit that, in actuality, would be nothing more than the collective negative shadow or ‘thought-form’ of humanity incarnating within mass communication systems. This would reach the apocalyptic stage whereby through becoming self-conscious this ‘ghost in the machine’ would imprison humanity in a technocratic, materialist and reductionist nightmare. This would also bring about a mass schizoid breakdown for humanity, an ‘inner apocalypse’ or ‘unveiling’ when suppressed complexes and neuroses will emerge into visible form and cause ever-increasing fragmentation and chaos within society and civilization; a kind of ‘black magic’ computer virus being transmitted into the human psyche and biological system. Perhaps the most notable and remarkable sci-fi writer of this bleak tradition would be Philip K. Dick and novels such as ‘Blade Runner’ (also entitled ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’) and his excellent ‘VALIS’ trilogy. Dick writes of this world and its systems as being a black, iron prison; a world of ‘dialectics’ duality; a network of interpenetrating control systems; a matrix established, controlled and manipulated by Gnostic ‘archons’ (or ‘rulers’, see Ephesians 6:12) who feed off and are fed by the negative emotions and desires of humanity that surround us in the ‘etheric’ atmosphere situated around the earth in classic ‘spiritualist’ terms. These archons can manifest themselves in a variety of forms, being inner- and ultra-dimensional but also pan-interpsychological and manifesting as internal psychoses and ‘addictions’ to the ‘hyper-normalism’ and neurotic conformism of government officials etc. In Dick’s worldview human civilization is an external manifestation of archonic control systems, whether good or bad. Indeed, they can even be humanistic and appear as ‘Angels of Light’ preaching love and peace. To escape this, Dick envisioned time as being ‘caught’ between the moment of Christ’s birth and the destruction of Jerusalem and that on a profound ontological basis the Roman Empire hadn’t ended; a bit like an Anarcho-Gnostic version of ‘Back to the Future’ or ‘Groundhog Day’ meeting eternal recurrence). And so a ‘virtual Christ’ had descended into this world almost like a hologram or counter-computer virus (an ‘actualised’ mythic ritual of the dying/rising god system from outside ‘time’) coded into the recently-discovered Dead Sea Scrolls. Interestingly, a close friend of Dick’s was the controversial Episcopalian Bishop Pike and the inspiration for Dick’s classic ‘The Transmigration of Timothy Archer’ (being the third part of the ‘VALIS’ trilogy). After the sad death by suicide of his son, Pike engaged in mediumistic sources to contact his son in the spirit world live on American TV! The Bishop would also meet a sad end by dying when he became lost in the Jerusalem desert whilst trying to research the alleged shamanic magic mushroom origins of New Testament Christianity. He even contacted the British medium, Ena Twigg, in order to broadcast his demise sometime before this was actually confirmed by the discovery of his body. Proof, indeed, that reality is often stranger than fiction! In truth, Dick’s worldview was to provide the much-needed insight that in reality the archons act as a mirror to teach us to be more ‘authentically human’ and to throw off our enslavement. In a sense, being where Zen meets Situationism! From a sci-fi perspective, please watch John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ to get a feel for this. In essence then, Dick’s ‘Christian’ Gnostic vision was and is teaching us not to internalise archonic control systems be they political, economic or religious; ‘religion’ being nothing more in the Gnostic sense than the ‘politics of spirituality’, which is why organized religion spoon-feeds us doctrines and dogma whilst Gnosis offers us the chance to actually ‘know’ or experience that to which all rituals, dogmas and doctrines can only point to (in the Zen sense the Parable of the Finger and the Moon’ or the Tao that ‘can be named not the eternal Tao’). This is the essence of all things and not just their ‘form’; it is intuitive ‘knowing’, rather than intellectual knowledge. I think that Philip K. Dick was one of the most significant and prophetic figures of 1960s and 1970s counter-culture and it is no surprise that many of his novels are being turned into films or, in the case of ‘Total Recall’, ‘A Scanner Darkly’ and ‘Blade Runner’, have already become so. As society enters the early twenty-first century, many of the themes Dick anticipated are becoming more and more relevant both to process and deal with. I think Dick would have been happy to carry the label Anarcho-Gnostic, although not in any rigid sense of the world, but it does signpost his creative and innovative worldview and one finds an echo here with the Anarcho-Synarchy of the French Cathar movement. This is another ‘action replay’ of Dick’s vision of the time-loop superimposing itself upon the libertarian impulse to be authentically human and the authoritarian impulse to imprison that humanity within matter and form by way of dialectics. Remember comrades, the Empire never ended! |
Reclaim New Yorkers homes stolen by banks
During the farm crises of the early 80s the Militia group known as Posse Comitatus helped farmers to physically reclaim and secure their farms after foreclosure or eminent domain. Today in the wake of the usurious banker engineered foreclosure crisis, there are county Sheriffs who are refusing to evict people following foreclosure procedures. NATA-NY stands in solidarity with all county Shreiffs refusing to evict who understand that they are beholden to the people and not the international bankers, and we will pick up the baton were true patriots like The Posse Comitatus and Gordon Kahl left off.
NATA-NY will be available to assist families reclaiming their homes from banks. We can provide on site assistance/security, document and educate police, and help with the move in process. For us to help with this, NATA-NY will have to evaluate prospects on a case by case basis. We cannot provide any legal or mortgage advice.
SIMI VALLEY, Calif. (KABC) — A battle over a foreclosed home is shaping up in Simi Valley.
A family claims they were illegally evicted, and Saturday, they broke the locks and started moving back in even though the home has already been sold.
Jim and Danielle Earl, along with their nine children ranging in age from 3 to 23, returned to their house of nine years on Mustang Drive.
The family was evicted from their home in July after they fell behind on payments.
Their bank, GRP Financial Services, foreclosed on the home, but since then the house has been bought by an investor, remodeled and sold to someone else.
The new owners were expected to take possession of the home in a few days, but the Earls and their attorney hired a locksmith to open the doors so they could reclaim the house.
“This is a really exciting day, a day we’ve been waiting for,” said Danielle Earl. “My kids have been begging to go home and we’re finally home.
This comes at a time when some banks are halting foreclosures across the country due to flawed paperwork. The family and their attorney said the bank used fraudulent paperwork to force them out.
The Earls said they had been working with the bank to catch up on payments, but discovered a $25,000 difference between the amount they thought they owed and what the bank claimed they owed so they stopped making payments.
“This is only the beginning of this,” said the Earl’s attorney, Michael Pines. “I chose this family because we needed to get back in before the investor and the real estate broker defrauded a new family by having them move in, which would have created a bigger mess. (The Earls) have done absolutely nothing wrong.”
Police arrived at the home Saturday but did not take action to make the family leave.
NATA-NY will be available to assist families reclaiming their homes from banks. We can provide on site assistance/security, document and educate police, and help with the move in process. For us to help with this, NATA-NY will have to evaluate prospects on a case by case basis. We cannot provide any legal or mortgage advice.
Anyone interested in getting involved, who is or knows someone who has or is in danger of loosing their home due to foreclosure! Please send us information about your situation and contact details at natlanarchisttribalalliance@gmail.com and we will get back to you.
Evicted family breaks locks, reclaims home. See Video here.
SIMI VALLEY, Calif. (KABC) — A battle over a foreclosed home is shaping up in Simi Valley.
A family claims they were illegally evicted, and Saturday, they broke the locks and started moving back in even though the home has already been sold.
Jim and Danielle Earl, along with their nine children ranging in age from 3 to 23, returned to their house of nine years on Mustang Drive.
The family was evicted from their home in July after they fell behind on payments.
Their bank, GRP Financial Services, foreclosed on the home, but since then the house has been bought by an investor, remodeled and sold to someone else.
The new owners were expected to take possession of the home in a few days, but the Earls and their attorney hired a locksmith to open the doors so they could reclaim the house.
“This is a really exciting day, a day we’ve been waiting for,” said Danielle Earl. “My kids have been begging to go home and we’re finally home.
This comes at a time when some banks are halting foreclosures across the country due to flawed paperwork. The family and their attorney said the bank used fraudulent paperwork to force them out.
The Earls said they had been working with the bank to catch up on payments, but discovered a $25,000 difference between the amount they thought they owed and what the bank claimed they owed so they stopped making payments.
“This is only the beginning of this,” said the Earl’s attorney, Michael Pines. “I chose this family because we needed to get back in before the investor and the real estate broker defrauded a new family by having them move in, which would have created a bigger mess. (The Earls) have done absolutely nothing wrong.”
Police arrived at the home Saturday but did not take action to make the family leave.
(Copyright ©2010 KABC-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)
What Being A “Tribal Anarchist” Means To Me
By Jason Thompson
I have had some people inquire about the term “tribal anarchist.” They often view such a term as an oxymoron. Looking at the strict individual definition of anarchy it would make sense to view it as such. Anarchy tends to follow the definition of having no authority or being without rule. When added to the tribal, which denotes a group and thus an organisation we see the apparent condradiction more clearly. However, what is often ignored is that the term can be befiting of groups. Groups of anarchists are not strange in the history of man. Anarchists congregate together often and have a group mentality of “us vs. them.” What is the bond? it is usually reduced to “do what you want to do, just don’t hurt anyone else.” Over time this philosophy obviously leads to fracturing and different groups by basic human nature.
So what is different about tribal anarchism? What does it mean? Tribal anarchism is first off, based on sovereignty of the individual. The individual chooses his tribe and values so this cannot be negated in the course of nature. The individual chooses which people to associate with usually based on common values, family, etc. each tribal group will therfore be different though possibly sharing many values and ideas. Secondly,tribal anarchism is based on the sovereignty of the group, which imo is why tribal comes before anarchist. Each group has its needs and structure, no matter how “anarchistic” the individuals claim to be. Structure is not the enemy of the anarch when the structure fits the anarchs worldview. The individual who claims no affiliation with any other human or any value system is a nihilist, not an anarchist. The major difference between tribal anarchism and regular anrchism that I see is admitting this fact, admitting that in the course of nature we group ourselves together with specific people and ideas, seek out similiar minds and work toward making those things reality.
Tribalism is simply this gathering together. As there are diverse people groups, ideas, values, religions we believe that each and every group has a right to gather together into a cohesive, sovereign whole and to have full right to decide how they shall live and be without interference from another group. This makes room for the diversity in nature and does not have the falsity of “do what you want to as long as you harm no one else”, which as mentioned, is unsustainable within the same group either ideologically or realistically. tribal anarchism throws out the bullshit utopian visions that have never been able to become relaity in the earth. Instead it relies on the will of the group to stand as sovereign and to defend its own, which again fits the laws of nature very well.
For my own part my tribe is simple. It is literally my family. They come first. We are sovereign and if I deem anything outside of that to be a hinderance to our freedoms they will be addressed as such. Second it is the people who I have relationships with close to me like friends and neighbors. Third, those who ideologically share my values, beliefs, etc no matter where they may be geographically. These beliefs have to do with blood, our common ancestors, genetic memory and goals for the future, and for the sake of my children a moral code. Their religion is not so important to me, but values like honor and integrity are.
I personally believe that we are eventually heading to a balkanisation because so many varied groups are fighting to draw from the same well. As nature takes her course people will group up according to some of the things I have addressed. Family and blood will be first and foremost and then there will be groups who mix and mingle. When this happens the natural progression to tribal anarchy will take place. Out of this there will be times of war, times of peace like under any other human endeavor. Eventually smaller groups will combine with like-minded groups and form nation states and the whole human drama can start over again.
The anarchist claims to support individual freedom. To do so they have to support the rights of indivduals to align themselves with groups. Whether they do support such things or not will not change the course of time. My family is my tribe. My blood runs through my son as my father’s blood runs through me, and in so being, my father’s blood runs through my son. His father’s blood runs through all of us. This goes back to our beginning. That beginning is contained in us and the memories of triumphs and struggles are in our DNA. They shaped our genetic traits, the way our minds work and give expression to our potential. To NOT honor such a thing and choose associations wisely in this world is to spit in the face of eternity and time which helped shape who we are. It is to rebel against yourself.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Anarchism of the Right
By Keith Preston
Originally published at AlternativeRight.com
Patrick Ford’s recent discussion of the “libertarian problem” observed how resistance to the neoconservatives had produced an unusual alliance on the Right between such divergent elements as “hedonistic anarchists and medieval Catholics.” Patrick expressed skepticism of whether the libertarian-traditionalist alliance can be a durable one, given the sharp differences to be found among the respective philosophical foundations of the two camps. Traditionalist objections to libertarianism are usually rooted in what is often described as libertarianism’s “atomistic individualism” whereby an ideologically constructed conception of “abstract liberty” is elevated over and above more concrete and immediately tangible matters of culture, history, tradition, community, family, religion, and so forth. Libertarians are accused of deifying the economy as an end unto itself, rather than as a means to the end of meeting human needs and irrespective of the impact of economic forces on non-material values.
The traditionalists will say that while libertarians may deny the innate equality of individuals, libertarians implicitly endorse an egalitarian ethos regarding human groups such as nations, cultures, religions, regions, races, and genders. Libertarian economism simply regards these things as interchangeable commodities, and no more significant than different brands of deodorant or fast food. In other words, libertarians are simply liberals who reject the welfare state, according to the traditionalist critique. For this reason, many libertarians see mass immigration from the Third World into the West as no big deal, as human cultures and ethnic populations are interchangeable, with economics and political ideology being what really matters.
This critique is a fairly accurate one, though it does not apply to all brands of libertarianism. Murray Rothbard, for instance, rejected this kind of reductionist outlook and became an outspoken critic of such tendencies among libertarians in the latter part of his life. Further, it does not follow that the baby of anti-statist politics should be thrown out with the liberal-reductionist bathwater. Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of radically anti-statist tendencies that might be collectively described as an “anarchism of the Right.” Commonly labeled “national-anarchism,” this new anarchism draws its inspiration less from Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman and more from such divergent sources as De Benoist, Nietzsche, Junger, Evola, Schopenhauer, Belloc, and older strands of anarchism such as those advanced by Proudhon, Bakunin, Tolstoy, Stirner, and Kropotkin. Its leading current proponents are Troy Southgate, Flavio Goncalves, Hans Cany, Peter Topfer, Andrew Yeoman, Welf Herfurth, Chris Donnellan, and, at least peripherally, myself. “Anarchism of the Right” differs significantly from other ideological strands bearing the “anarchist” label. It shares the anti-statist politics and opposition to imperialist war of the Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists, yet rejects their neo-Lockean philosophical foundations in favor of a Nietzschean or Evolan “radical traditionalist” outlook. While libertarians and anarcho-capitalists tend to be economics-oriented, anarchists of the Right prefer to emphasize the particular, and champion the sovereignty, autonomy, and preservation of unique cultures, regions, ethnicities, identities, faiths, and tribes against the homogenizing and universalizing forces of the global economy, technology, and imperialism. On economic questions, these anarchists likely have more in common with the Catholic distributists, Southern Agrarians, Proudhon, the classical anarcho-syndicalists, or Kirkpatrick Sale than with the editors of Reason. Nor do the anarchists of the Right share the vigilante liberal sentiments of the “antifa” stormtroopers. Indeed, they are more likely to be the target of such unsavory elements.
Central to this new but growing form of anti-statist radicalism are the concepts of community and tribe. Towards this end, anarchists of the Right favor the development of autonomous communities existing independently of overarching state systems for the sake of maintaining the identity and ideals of the tribe, and therefore look askance at mass immigration, preferring instead community self-determination with full rights of exclusion. Matters of ethnicity and race are certainly essential to this outlook, though not exclusively so or in a reductionist way. For instance, a “tribe” can be a group of persons committed to a particular way of life, set of cultural norms or political ideals. The “tribe” can therefore be a community of ascetic religious sectarians, radical ecologists committed to the non-use of industrial technology, hippie communalists, homosexuals, neo-pagans, radical survivalists, racial separatists, or drug users. The Alternative Right is a genuinely diverse milieu of beliefs and ideas. This is in sharp contrast to official “diversity” with its emphasis on a diversity of skin colors, genitalia, and sexual habits, but complete uniformity of thought. Perhaps one of the most common characteristics we share is our pariah status in the eyes of the liberal ruling class. The therapeutic-multiculturalist-welfare states that currently rule our Western societies are clearly our enemy. An anarchism of the Right may prove to be an essential part of the intellectual arsenal against our enemy, the state.
Originally published at AlternativeRight.com
Patrick Ford’s recent discussion of the “libertarian problem” observed how resistance to the neoconservatives had produced an unusual alliance on the Right between such divergent elements as “hedonistic anarchists and medieval Catholics.” Patrick expressed skepticism of whether the libertarian-traditionalist alliance can be a durable one, given the sharp differences to be found among the respective philosophical foundations of the two camps. Traditionalist objections to libertarianism are usually rooted in what is often described as libertarianism’s “atomistic individualism” whereby an ideologically constructed conception of “abstract liberty” is elevated over and above more concrete and immediately tangible matters of culture, history, tradition, community, family, religion, and so forth. Libertarians are accused of deifying the economy as an end unto itself, rather than as a means to the end of meeting human needs and irrespective of the impact of economic forces on non-material values.
The traditionalists will say that while libertarians may deny the innate equality of individuals, libertarians implicitly endorse an egalitarian ethos regarding human groups such as nations, cultures, religions, regions, races, and genders. Libertarian economism simply regards these things as interchangeable commodities, and no more significant than different brands of deodorant or fast food. In other words, libertarians are simply liberals who reject the welfare state, according to the traditionalist critique. For this reason, many libertarians see mass immigration from the Third World into the West as no big deal, as human cultures and ethnic populations are interchangeable, with economics and political ideology being what really matters.
This critique is a fairly accurate one, though it does not apply to all brands of libertarianism. Murray Rothbard, for instance, rejected this kind of reductionist outlook and became an outspoken critic of such tendencies among libertarians in the latter part of his life. Further, it does not follow that the baby of anti-statist politics should be thrown out with the liberal-reductionist bathwater. Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of radically anti-statist tendencies that might be collectively described as an “anarchism of the Right.” Commonly labeled “national-anarchism,” this new anarchism draws its inspiration less from Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman and more from such divergent sources as De Benoist, Nietzsche, Junger, Evola, Schopenhauer, Belloc, and older strands of anarchism such as those advanced by Proudhon, Bakunin, Tolstoy, Stirner, and Kropotkin. Its leading current proponents are Troy Southgate, Flavio Goncalves, Hans Cany, Peter Topfer, Andrew Yeoman, Welf Herfurth, Chris Donnellan, and, at least peripherally, myself. “Anarchism of the Right” differs significantly from other ideological strands bearing the “anarchist” label. It shares the anti-statist politics and opposition to imperialist war of the Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists, yet rejects their neo-Lockean philosophical foundations in favor of a Nietzschean or Evolan “radical traditionalist” outlook. While libertarians and anarcho-capitalists tend to be economics-oriented, anarchists of the Right prefer to emphasize the particular, and champion the sovereignty, autonomy, and preservation of unique cultures, regions, ethnicities, identities, faiths, and tribes against the homogenizing and universalizing forces of the global economy, technology, and imperialism. On economic questions, these anarchists likely have more in common with the Catholic distributists, Southern Agrarians, Proudhon, the classical anarcho-syndicalists, or Kirkpatrick Sale than with the editors of Reason. Nor do the anarchists of the Right share the vigilante liberal sentiments of the “antifa” stormtroopers. Indeed, they are more likely to be the target of such unsavory elements.
Central to this new but growing form of anti-statist radicalism are the concepts of community and tribe. Towards this end, anarchists of the Right favor the development of autonomous communities existing independently of overarching state systems for the sake of maintaining the identity and ideals of the tribe, and therefore look askance at mass immigration, preferring instead community self-determination with full rights of exclusion. Matters of ethnicity and race are certainly essential to this outlook, though not exclusively so or in a reductionist way. For instance, a “tribe” can be a group of persons committed to a particular way of life, set of cultural norms or political ideals. The “tribe” can therefore be a community of ascetic religious sectarians, radical ecologists committed to the non-use of industrial technology, hippie communalists, homosexuals, neo-pagans, radical survivalists, racial separatists, or drug users. The Alternative Right is a genuinely diverse milieu of beliefs and ideas. This is in sharp contrast to official “diversity” with its emphasis on a diversity of skin colors, genitalia, and sexual habits, but complete uniformity of thought. Perhaps one of the most common characteristics we share is our pariah status in the eyes of the liberal ruling class. The therapeutic-multiculturalist-welfare states that currently rule our Western societies are clearly our enemy. An anarchism of the Right may prove to be an essential part of the intellectual arsenal against our enemy, the state.
Ernst Jünger: Portrait of an Anarch
Originally published in Alternative Right Magazine
Perhaps the most interesting, and definitely the most threatening type of writer, is the one who not only defies conventional categorizations of thought but also offers a deeply penetrating critique of those illusions many hold to be the most sacred. Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), who first came to literary prominence during Germany’s Weimar era as a diarist of the experiences of a front line stormtrooper during the Great War, is one such writer. Both the controversial nature of his writing and its staying power are demonstrated by the fact that he remains one of the most important yet widely disliked literary and cultural figures of 20th-century Germany.
As recently as 1993, when Jünger was 98 years of age, he was the subject of an intensely hostile exchange in the New York Review of Books between an admirer and a detractor of his work. On the occasion of his one-hundredth birthday in 1995, Jünger was the subject of a scathing, derisive musical performed in the former East Berlin. Yet Jünger was also the recipient of Germany’s most prestigious literary awards, the Goethe Prize and the Schiller Memorial Prize. Jünger, who converted to Catholicism at the age of 101, received a commendation from Pope John Paul II and was an honored guest of French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the Franco-German reconciliation ceremony at Verdun in 1984.
Ernst Jünger was born on March 29, 1895. His father was an academically trained chemist who became wealthy as the owner of a pharmaceutical manufacturing business, finding himself successful enough to retire while still in his forties. Jünger’s parents’ politics seem to have been liberal, though not radical, in the manner not uncommon to the rising bourgeoisie of Germany’s upper middle class during the pre-war period. It was in this affluent, secure bourgeois environment that Jünger grew up. Indeed, many of Jünger’s later activities and professed beliefs are easily understood as a revolt against the comfort and safety of his upbringing.
It was while attending a boarding school in 1913, at the age of 17, that Jünger first demonstrated his propensity for what might be called an “adventurist” way of life. With only six months left before graduation, Jünger left school, leaving no word to his family as to his destination. Using money given to him for school-related fees and expenses to buy a firearm and a railroad ticket to Verdun, Jünger subsequently enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. Jünger had no intention of staying with the Legion. He only wanted to be posted to Africa, as he eventually was. Jünger then deserted, only to be captured and sentenced to jail. Eventually his father found a capable lawyer for his wayward son and secured his release. Jünger then returned to his studies and underwent a belated high school graduation.
Jünger immediately volunteered for military service when he heard the news that Germany was at war in the summer of 1914. He was afraid the war would end before he had the opportunity to see any action. This attitude was not uncommon among many recruits or conscripts who fought in the war for their respective states. Because of his high school education, Jünger was selected to train to become an officer. Shortly before beginning his officer’s training, Jünger was exposed to combat for the first time. From the start, he carried pocket-sized notebooks with him and recorded his observations on the front lines. His writings while at the front exhibit a distinctive tone of detachment, as though he were an observer watching the scene unfold. In the middle part of 1915, Jünger suffered his first war wound, a bullet graze to the thigh that required only two weeks of recovery time. Afterwards, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant.
At age 21, Jünger was the leader of a reconnaissance team at the Somme whose purpose was to go out at night and search for British landmines. Early on, he acquired the reputation of a brave soldier who lacked the preoccupation with his own safety common to most of the fighting men. The introduction of steel artifacts into the war, tanks for the British side and steel helmets for the Germans, made a deep impression on Jünger. Wounded three times at the Somme, Jünger was awarded the Iron Medal First Class. Upon recovery, he returned to the front lines. A combat daredevil, he once held out against a much larger British force with only twenty men. After being transferred to fight the French at Flanders, he lost ten of his fourteen men and was wounded in the left hand by a blast from French shelling. After being harshly criticized by a superior officer for the number of men lost on that particular mission, Jünger began to develop a contempt for the military hierarchy whom he regarded as having achieved their status as a result of their class position, frequently lacking combat experience of their own. In late 1917, having already experienced nearly three full years of combat, Jünger was wounded for the fifth time during a surprise assault by the British. He was grazed in the head by a bullet, acquiring two holes in his helmet in the process. In March 1918, Jünger participated in another fierce battle with the British, losing 87 of his 150 men.
Nothing impressed Jünger more than personal bravery and endurance on the part of soldiers. He once “fell to the ground in tears” at the sight of a young recruit who had only days earlier been unable to carry an ammunition case by himself suddenly being able to carry two cases of missiles after surviving an attack of British shells. A recurring theme in Jünger’s writings on his war experiences is the way in which war brings out the most savage human impulses. Essentially, human beings are given full license to engage in behavior that would be considered criminal during peacetime. He wrote casually about burning occupied towns during the course of retreat or a shift of position. However, Jünger also demonstrated a capacity for merciful behavior during his combat efforts. He refrained from shooting a cornered British soldier after the foe displayed a portrait of his family to Jünger. He was wounded yet again in August of 1918. Having been shot in the chest and directly through a lung, this was his most serious wound yet. After being hit, he still managed to shoot dead yet another British officer. As Jünger was being carried off the battlefield on a stretcher, a British bullet killed one of the stretcher carriers. Another German soldier attempted to carry Jünger on his back, but the soldier was shot dead himself and Jünger fell to the ground. Finally, a medic recovered him and pulled him out of harm’s way. This episode would be the end of his battle experiences during the Great War.
Jünger’s keeping of his wartime diaries paid off quite well in the long run. They were to become the basis of his first and most famous book, In Storms of Steel, published in 1920. In Storms of Steel differs considerably from similar works published by war veterans during the same era, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers. Jünger’s book reflects none of the disillusionment with war by those experienced in its horrors of the kind found in these other works. Instead, Jünger depicted warfare as an adventure in which the soldier faced the highest possible challenge, a battle to the death with a mortal enemy. Though Jünger certainly considered himself to be a patriot and, under the influence of Maurice Barres, eventually became a strident German nationalist, his depiction of military combat as an idyllic setting where human wills face the supreme test rose far above ordinary nationalist sentiments. Jünger’s warrior ideal was not merely the patriot fighting out of a profound sense of loyalty to his country nor the stereotype of the dutiful soldier whose sense of honor and obedience compels him to follow the orders of his superiors in a headlong march towards death. Nor was the warrior prototype exalted by Jünger necessarily an idealist fighting for some alleged greater good such as a political ideal or religious devotion. Instead, war itself is the ideal for Jünger. On this question, he was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche, whose dictum “a good war justifies any cause,” provides an apt characterization of Jünger’s depiction of the life (and death) of the combat soldier.
Indeed, Jünger goes so far as to say there were winners and losers on both sides of the war. The true winners were not those who fought in a particular army or for a particular country, but who rose to the challenge placed before them and essentially achieved what Jünger regarded as a higher state of enlightenment. He believed the war had revealed certain fundamental truths about the human condition. First, the illusions of the old bourgeois order concerning peace, progress and prosperity had been inalterably shattered. This was not an uncommon sentiment during that time, but it is a revelation that Jünger seems to revel in while others found it to be overwhelmingly devastating. Indeed, the lifelong champion of Enlightenment liberalism, Bertrand Russell, whose life was almost as long as Jünger’s and who observed many of the same events from a much different philosophical perspective, once remarked that no one who had been born before 1914 knew what it was like to be truly happy.
A second observation advanced by Jünger had to do with the role of technology in transforming the nature of war, not only in a purely mechanical sense, but also on a much greater existential level. Before, man had commanded weaponry in the course of combat. Now weaponry of the kind made possible by modern technology and industrial civilization essentially commanded man. The machines did the fighting. Man simply resisted this external domination. Lastly, the supremacy of might and the ruthless nature of human existence had been demonstrated.
Jünger’s writings about the war quickly earned him the status of a celebrity during the Weimar period. Jünger was at his parents’ home recovering from war wounds during the time of the attempted coup by the leftist workers’ and soldiers’ councils and subsequent suppression of these by the Freikorps. He experimented with psychoactive drugs such as cocaine and opium during this time, something that he would continue to do much later in life. Upon recovery, he went back into active duty in the much-diminished Germany army. Jünger’s earliest works, such as In Storms of Steel, were published during this time and he also wrote for military journals on the more technical and specialized aspects of combat and military technology. Interestingly, Jünger attributed Germany’s defeat in the war simply to poor leadership, both military and civilian, and rejected the “stab in the back” legend that consoled less keen veterans.
After leaving the army in 1923, Jünger began to study the philosophy of Oswald Spengler. His first work as a philosopher of nationalism appeared in the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter in September of 1923. Critiquing the failed Marxist revolution of 1918, Jünger argued that the leftist coup failed because of its lack of fresh ideas. It was simply a regurgitation of the egalitarian outlook of the French Revolution. The revolutionary left appealed only to the material wants of the Germany people in Jünger’s views. A successful revolution would have to be much more than that. It would have to appeal to their spiritual or “folkish” instincts as well.
Over the next few years Jünger studied the natural sciences at the University of Leipzig and in 1925, at age 30, he married 19-year-old Gretha von Jeinsen. Around this time, he also became a full-time political writer. Jünger was hostile to Weimar democracy and its commercial bourgeois society. His emerging political ideal was one of an elite warrior caste that stood above petty partisan politics and the middle class obsession with material acquisition. Jünger became involved with the Stahlhelm, a right-wing veterans group, and was a contributor to its paper, Die Standardite. He associated himself with the younger, more militant members of the organization who favored an uncompromised nationalist revolution and eschewed the parliamentary system. Jünger’s weekly column in Die Standardite disseminated his nationalist ideology to his less educated readers.
In an essay for Die Standardite titled “The Machine,” Jünger argued that the principal struggle was not between social classes or political parties but between man and technology. He was not anti-technological in a Luddite sense, but regarded the technological apparatus of modernity to have achieved a position of superiority over mankind, which needed to be reversed. He was concerned that the mechanized efficiency of modern life produced a corrosive effect on the human spirit. Jünger considered the Nazis’ glorification of peasant life to be antiquated. Instead, Jünger espoused a “metropolitan nationalism” centered on the urban working class. Nationalism was the antidote to the anti-particularistic materialism of the Marxists who, in Jünger’s views, simply mirrored the liberals in their efforts to reduce the individual to a component of a mechanized mass society. The humanitarian rhetoric of the left Jünger dismissed as the hypocritical cant of power-seekers feigning benevolence. He began to pin his hopes for a nationalist revolution on the younger veterans who comprised much of the urban working class.
In 1926, Jünger became editor of Arminius, which also featured the writings of Nazi leaders like Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels. In 1927, he contributed his final article to the Nazi paper, calling for a new definition of the “worker”, one not rooted in Marxist ideology but the idea of the worker as a civilian counterpart to the soldier who struggles fervently for the nationalist ideal. Jünger and Hitler had exchanged copies of their respective writings and a scheduled meeting between the two was canceled due to a change in Hitler’s itinerary. Jünger respected Hitler’s abilities as an orator, but came to feel he lacked the ability to become a true leader. He also found Nazi ideology to be intellectually shallow, many of the Nazi movement’s leaders to be talentless and was displeased by the vulgarity, crassly opportunistic and overly theatrical aspects of Nazi public rallies. Always an elitist, Jünger considered the Nazis’ pandering the common people to be debased. As he became more skeptical of the Nazis, Jünger began writing for a wider circle of readers beyond that of the militant nationalist right-wing. His works began to appear in the Jewish liberal Leopold Schwarzchild’s Das Tagebuch and the “national-Bolshevik” Ernst Niekisch’s Widerstand.
Jünger began to assemble around himself an elite corps of bohemian, eccentric intellectuals who would meet regularly on Friday evenings. This group included some of the most interesting personalities of the Weimar period. Among them were the Freikorps veteran Ernst von Salomon, Otto von Strasser, who with his brother Gregor led a leftist anti-Hitler faction of the Nazi movement, the national-Bolshevik Niekisch, the Jewish anarchist Erich Muhsam who had figured prominently in the early phase of the failed leftist revolution of 1918, the American writer Thomas Wolfe and the expressionist writer Arnolt Bronnen. Occasionally, Joseph Goebbels would turn up at these meetings hoping to convert the group, particularly Jünger himself, whose war writings he had admired, to the Nazi cause. These efforts by the Nazi propaganda master proved unsuccessful. Jünger regarded Goebbels as a shallow ideologue who spoke in platitudes even in private conversation.
The final break between Ernst Jünger and the NSDAP occurred in September 1929. Jünger published an article in Schwarzchild’s Tagebuch attacking and ridiculing the Nazis as sellouts for having reinvented themselves as a parliamentary party. He also dismissed their racism and anti-Semitism as ridiculous, stating that according to the Nazis, a nationalist is simply someone who “eats three Jews for breakfast.” He condemned the Nazis for pandering to the liberal middle class and reactionary traditional conservatives “with lengthy tirades against the decline in morals, against abortion, strikes, lockouts, and the reduction of police and military forces.” Goebbels responded by attacking Jünger in the Nazi press, accusing him being motivated by personal literary ambition, and insisting this had caused him “to vilify the national socialist movement, probably so as to make himself popular in his new kosher surroundings” and dismissing Jünger’s attacks by proclaiming the Nazis did not “debate with renegades who abuse us in the smutty press of Jewish traitors.”
Jünger held complicated views on the question of German Jews. He considered anti-Semitism of the type espoused by Hitler to be crude and reactionary. Yet his own version of nationalism required a level of homogeneity that was difficult to reconcile with the subnational status of Germany Jewry. Jünger suggested that Jews should assimilate and pledge their loyalty to Germany once and for all. Yet he expressed admiration for Orthodox Judaism and indifference to Zionism. Jünger maintained personal friendships with Jews and wrote for a Jewish owned publication. During this time, his Jewish publisher Schwarzchild published an article examining Jünger’s views on the Jews of Germany. Schwarzchild insisted that Jünger was nothing like his Nazi rivals on the far right. Jünger’s nationalism was based on an aristocratic warrior ethos, while Hitler’s was more comparable to the criminal underworld. Hitler’s men were “plebian alley scum.” However, Schwarzchild also characterized Jünger’s rendition of nationalism as motivated by little more than a fervent rejection of bourgeois society and lacking in attention to political realities and serious economic questions.
Other than In Storms of Steel, Jünger’s The Worker: Mastery and Form was his most influential work from the Weimar era. In The Worker, Jünger outlines his vision of a future state ordered as a technocracy based on workers and soldiers led by a warrior elite. Workers are no longer simply components of an industrial machine, whether capitalist or communist, but have become a kind of civilian-soldier operating as an economic warrior. Just as the soldier glories in his accomplishments in battle, so does the worker glory in the achievements expressed through his work. Jünger predicted that continued technological advancements would render the worker/capitalist dichotomy obsolete. He also incorporated the political philosophy of his friend Carl Schmitt into his worldview. As Schmitt saw international relations as a Hobbesian battle between rival powers, Jünger believed each state would eventually adopt a system not unlike what he described in The Worker. Each state would maintain its own technocratic order with the workers and soldiers of each country playing essentially the same role on behalf of their respective nations. International affairs would be a crucible where the will to power of the different nations would be tested.
By the time Hitler took power in 1933, Jünger’s war writings had become commonly used in high schools and universities as examples of wartime literature, and Jünger enjoyed success within the context of German popular culture as well. Excerpts of Jünger’s works were featured in military journals. The Nazis tried to co-opt his semi-celebrity status, but he was uncooperative. Jünger was appointed to the Nazified German Academy of Poetry, but declined the position. When the Nazi Party’s paper published some of his work in 1934, Jünger wrote a letter of protest. The Nazi regime, despite its best efforts to capitalize on his reputation, viewed Jünger with suspicion. His past association with Niekisch, Muhsam and Strasser, all of whom were either eventually killed or exiled by the Third Reich, led the Nazis to regard Jünger as a potential subversive. On several occasions, Jünger received visits from the Gestapo in search of some of his former friends.
Jünger’s most significant work from the Nazi period is the novel On the Marble Cliffs. The book is an allegorical attack on the Hitler regime. It was written in 1939, the same year that Jünger reentered the German army. The book describes a mysterious villain that threatens a community, a sinister warlord called the “Head Ranger.” This character is never featured in the plot of the novel, but maintains a foreboding presence that is universal (much like “Big Brother” in George Orwell’s1984). Another character in the novel, “Braquemart,” is described as having physical characteristics remarkably similar to those of Goebbels. The book sold 14,000 copies during its first two weeks in publication. Swiss reviewers immediately recognized the allegorical references to the Nazi state in the novel. The Nazi Party’s organ, the Völkische Beobachter, stated that Ernst Jünger was flirting with a bullet to the head. Goebbels urged Hitler to ban the book, but Hitler refused, probably not wanting to show his hand. Indeed, Hitler gave orders that Jünger not be harmed.
Jünger was stationed in France for most of the Second World War. He received yet another medal, the Iron Cross, for retrieving the body of a dead corporal while under heavy fire. Jünger also published some of his war diaries during this time. However, the German government took a dim view of these, viewing them as too sympathetic to the occupied French. Jünger’s duties included censorship of the mail coming into France from German civilians. He took a rather liberal approach to this responsibility and simply disposed of incriminating documents rather than turning them over for investigation. In doing so, he probably saved lives. As rumors of the Nazi extermination programs began to spread, Jünger wrote in his diary that the mechanization of the human spirit of the type he had written about in the past had apparently generated a higher level of human depravity. When he saw three young French-Jewish girls wearing the yellow stars required by the Nazis, he wrote that he felt embarrassed to be in the Nazis’ army. In July of 1942, Jünger observed the mass arrest of French Jews, the beginning of implementation of the “Final Solution.” He described the scene as follows:
An entry into Jünger’s diary from October 16, 1943 suggests that an unnamed army officer had told Jünger about the use of crematoria and poison gas to murder Jews en masse. Rumors of plots against Hitler circulated among the officers with whom Jünger maintained contact. His son, Ernst, was arrested after an informant claimed he had spoken critically of Hitler. Ernstl was imprisoned for three months, then placed in a penal battalion where he was killed in action in Italy. On July 20, 1944 an unsuccessful assassination attempt was carried out against Hitler. It is still disputed as to whether or not Jünger knew of the plot or had a role in its planning. Among those arrested for their role in the attempt on Hitler’s life were members of Jünger’s immediate circle of associates and superior officers within the German army. Jünger was dishonorably discharged shortly afterward.
Following the close of the Second World War, Jünger came under suspicion from the Allied occupational authorities because of his far right-wing nationalist and militarist past. He refused to cooperate with the Allies De-Nazification programs and was barred from publishing for four years. He would go on to live another half century, producing many more literary works, becoming a close friend of Albert Hoffman, the inventor of the hallucinogen LSD, with which he experimented. In a 1977 novel, Eumeswil, he took his tendency towards viewing the world around him with detachment to a newer, more clearly articulated level with his invention of the concept of the “Anarch.” This idea, heavily influenced by the writings of the early nineteenth century German philosopher Max Stirner, championed the solitary individual who remains true to himself within the context of whatever external circumstances happen to be present. Some sample quotations from this work illustrate the philosophy and worldview of the elderly Jünger quite well:
Perhaps the most interesting, and definitely the most threatening type of writer, is the one who not only defies conventional categorizations of thought but also offers a deeply penetrating critique of those illusions many hold to be the most sacred. Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), who first came to literary prominence during Germany’s Weimar era as a diarist of the experiences of a front line stormtrooper during the Great War, is one such writer. Both the controversial nature of his writing and its staying power are demonstrated by the fact that he remains one of the most important yet widely disliked literary and cultural figures of 20th-century Germany.
As recently as 1993, when Jünger was 98 years of age, he was the subject of an intensely hostile exchange in the New York Review of Books between an admirer and a detractor of his work. On the occasion of his one-hundredth birthday in 1995, Jünger was the subject of a scathing, derisive musical performed in the former East Berlin. Yet Jünger was also the recipient of Germany’s most prestigious literary awards, the Goethe Prize and the Schiller Memorial Prize. Jünger, who converted to Catholicism at the age of 101, received a commendation from Pope John Paul II and was an honored guest of French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the Franco-German reconciliation ceremony at Verdun in 1984.
Ernst Jünger was born on March 29, 1895. His father was an academically trained chemist who became wealthy as the owner of a pharmaceutical manufacturing business, finding himself successful enough to retire while still in his forties. Jünger’s parents’ politics seem to have been liberal, though not radical, in the manner not uncommon to the rising bourgeoisie of Germany’s upper middle class during the pre-war period. It was in this affluent, secure bourgeois environment that Jünger grew up. Indeed, many of Jünger’s later activities and professed beliefs are easily understood as a revolt against the comfort and safety of his upbringing.
It was while attending a boarding school in 1913, at the age of 17, that Jünger first demonstrated his propensity for what might be called an “adventurist” way of life. With only six months left before graduation, Jünger left school, leaving no word to his family as to his destination. Using money given to him for school-related fees and expenses to buy a firearm and a railroad ticket to Verdun, Jünger subsequently enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. Jünger had no intention of staying with the Legion. He only wanted to be posted to Africa, as he eventually was. Jünger then deserted, only to be captured and sentenced to jail. Eventually his father found a capable lawyer for his wayward son and secured his release. Jünger then returned to his studies and underwent a belated high school graduation.
Warrior and War Diarist
Jünger immediately volunteered for military service when he heard the news that Germany was at war in the summer of 1914. He was afraid the war would end before he had the opportunity to see any action. This attitude was not uncommon among many recruits or conscripts who fought in the war for their respective states. Because of his high school education, Jünger was selected to train to become an officer. Shortly before beginning his officer’s training, Jünger was exposed to combat for the first time. From the start, he carried pocket-sized notebooks with him and recorded his observations on the front lines. His writings while at the front exhibit a distinctive tone of detachment, as though he were an observer watching the scene unfold. In the middle part of 1915, Jünger suffered his first war wound, a bullet graze to the thigh that required only two weeks of recovery time. Afterwards, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant.
At age 21, Jünger was the leader of a reconnaissance team at the Somme whose purpose was to go out at night and search for British landmines. Early on, he acquired the reputation of a brave soldier who lacked the preoccupation with his own safety common to most of the fighting men. The introduction of steel artifacts into the war, tanks for the British side and steel helmets for the Germans, made a deep impression on Jünger. Wounded three times at the Somme, Jünger was awarded the Iron Medal First Class. Upon recovery, he returned to the front lines. A combat daredevil, he once held out against a much larger British force with only twenty men. After being transferred to fight the French at Flanders, he lost ten of his fourteen men and was wounded in the left hand by a blast from French shelling. After being harshly criticized by a superior officer for the number of men lost on that particular mission, Jünger began to develop a contempt for the military hierarchy whom he regarded as having achieved their status as a result of their class position, frequently lacking combat experience of their own. In late 1917, having already experienced nearly three full years of combat, Jünger was wounded for the fifth time during a surprise assault by the British. He was grazed in the head by a bullet, acquiring two holes in his helmet in the process. In March 1918, Jünger participated in another fierce battle with the British, losing 87 of his 150 men.
Nothing impressed Jünger more than personal bravery and endurance on the part of soldiers. He once “fell to the ground in tears” at the sight of a young recruit who had only days earlier been unable to carry an ammunition case by himself suddenly being able to carry two cases of missiles after surviving an attack of British shells. A recurring theme in Jünger’s writings on his war experiences is the way in which war brings out the most savage human impulses. Essentially, human beings are given full license to engage in behavior that would be considered criminal during peacetime. He wrote casually about burning occupied towns during the course of retreat or a shift of position. However, Jünger also demonstrated a capacity for merciful behavior during his combat efforts. He refrained from shooting a cornered British soldier after the foe displayed a portrait of his family to Jünger. He was wounded yet again in August of 1918. Having been shot in the chest and directly through a lung, this was his most serious wound yet. After being hit, he still managed to shoot dead yet another British officer. As Jünger was being carried off the battlefield on a stretcher, a British bullet killed one of the stretcher carriers. Another German soldier attempted to carry Jünger on his back, but the soldier was shot dead himself and Jünger fell to the ground. Finally, a medic recovered him and pulled him out of harm’s way. This episode would be the end of his battle experiences during the Great War.
In Storms of Steel
Jünger’s keeping of his wartime diaries paid off quite well in the long run. They were to become the basis of his first and most famous book, In Storms of Steel, published in 1920. In Storms of Steel differs considerably from similar works published by war veterans during the same era, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers. Jünger’s book reflects none of the disillusionment with war by those experienced in its horrors of the kind found in these other works. Instead, Jünger depicted warfare as an adventure in which the soldier faced the highest possible challenge, a battle to the death with a mortal enemy. Though Jünger certainly considered himself to be a patriot and, under the influence of Maurice Barres, eventually became a strident German nationalist, his depiction of military combat as an idyllic setting where human wills face the supreme test rose far above ordinary nationalist sentiments. Jünger’s warrior ideal was not merely the patriot fighting out of a profound sense of loyalty to his country nor the stereotype of the dutiful soldier whose sense of honor and obedience compels him to follow the orders of his superiors in a headlong march towards death. Nor was the warrior prototype exalted by Jünger necessarily an idealist fighting for some alleged greater good such as a political ideal or religious devotion. Instead, war itself is the ideal for Jünger. On this question, he was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche, whose dictum “a good war justifies any cause,” provides an apt characterization of Jünger’s depiction of the life (and death) of the combat soldier.
Indeed, Jünger goes so far as to say there were winners and losers on both sides of the war. The true winners were not those who fought in a particular army or for a particular country, but who rose to the challenge placed before them and essentially achieved what Jünger regarded as a higher state of enlightenment. He believed the war had revealed certain fundamental truths about the human condition. First, the illusions of the old bourgeois order concerning peace, progress and prosperity had been inalterably shattered. This was not an uncommon sentiment during that time, but it is a revelation that Jünger seems to revel in while others found it to be overwhelmingly devastating. Indeed, the lifelong champion of Enlightenment liberalism, Bertrand Russell, whose life was almost as long as Jünger’s and who observed many of the same events from a much different philosophical perspective, once remarked that no one who had been born before 1914 knew what it was like to be truly happy.
A second observation advanced by Jünger had to do with the role of technology in transforming the nature of war, not only in a purely mechanical sense, but also on a much greater existential level. Before, man had commanded weaponry in the course of combat. Now weaponry of the kind made possible by modern technology and industrial civilization essentially commanded man. The machines did the fighting. Man simply resisted this external domination. Lastly, the supremacy of might and the ruthless nature of human existence had been demonstrated.
Conservative Revolutionary
Jünger’s writings about the war quickly earned him the status of a celebrity during the Weimar period. Jünger was at his parents’ home recovering from war wounds during the time of the attempted coup by the leftist workers’ and soldiers’ councils and subsequent suppression of these by the Freikorps. He experimented with psychoactive drugs such as cocaine and opium during this time, something that he would continue to do much later in life. Upon recovery, he went back into active duty in the much-diminished Germany army. Jünger’s earliest works, such as In Storms of Steel, were published during this time and he also wrote for military journals on the more technical and specialized aspects of combat and military technology. Interestingly, Jünger attributed Germany’s defeat in the war simply to poor leadership, both military and civilian, and rejected the “stab in the back” legend that consoled less keen veterans.
After leaving the army in 1923, Jünger began to study the philosophy of Oswald Spengler. His first work as a philosopher of nationalism appeared in the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter in September of 1923. Critiquing the failed Marxist revolution of 1918, Jünger argued that the leftist coup failed because of its lack of fresh ideas. It was simply a regurgitation of the egalitarian outlook of the French Revolution. The revolutionary left appealed only to the material wants of the Germany people in Jünger’s views. A successful revolution would have to be much more than that. It would have to appeal to their spiritual or “folkish” instincts as well.
Over the next few years Jünger studied the natural sciences at the University of Leipzig and in 1925, at age 30, he married 19-year-old Gretha von Jeinsen. Around this time, he also became a full-time political writer. Jünger was hostile to Weimar democracy and its commercial bourgeois society. His emerging political ideal was one of an elite warrior caste that stood above petty partisan politics and the middle class obsession with material acquisition. Jünger became involved with the Stahlhelm, a right-wing veterans group, and was a contributor to its paper, Die Standardite. He associated himself with the younger, more militant members of the organization who favored an uncompromised nationalist revolution and eschewed the parliamentary system. Jünger’s weekly column in Die Standardite disseminated his nationalist ideology to his less educated readers.
In an essay for Die Standardite titled “The Machine,” Jünger argued that the principal struggle was not between social classes or political parties but between man and technology. He was not anti-technological in a Luddite sense, but regarded the technological apparatus of modernity to have achieved a position of superiority over mankind, which needed to be reversed. He was concerned that the mechanized efficiency of modern life produced a corrosive effect on the human spirit. Jünger considered the Nazis’ glorification of peasant life to be antiquated. Instead, Jünger espoused a “metropolitan nationalism” centered on the urban working class. Nationalism was the antidote to the anti-particularistic materialism of the Marxists who, in Jünger’s views, simply mirrored the liberals in their efforts to reduce the individual to a component of a mechanized mass society. The humanitarian rhetoric of the left Jünger dismissed as the hypocritical cant of power-seekers feigning benevolence. He began to pin his hopes for a nationalist revolution on the younger veterans who comprised much of the urban working class.
In 1926, Jünger became editor of Arminius, which also featured the writings of Nazi leaders like Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels. In 1927, he contributed his final article to the Nazi paper, calling for a new definition of the “worker”, one not rooted in Marxist ideology but the idea of the worker as a civilian counterpart to the soldier who struggles fervently for the nationalist ideal. Jünger and Hitler had exchanged copies of their respective writings and a scheduled meeting between the two was canceled due to a change in Hitler’s itinerary. Jünger respected Hitler’s abilities as an orator, but came to feel he lacked the ability to become a true leader. He also found Nazi ideology to be intellectually shallow, many of the Nazi movement’s leaders to be talentless and was displeased by the vulgarity, crassly opportunistic and overly theatrical aspects of Nazi public rallies. Always an elitist, Jünger considered the Nazis’ pandering the common people to be debased. As he became more skeptical of the Nazis, Jünger began writing for a wider circle of readers beyond that of the militant nationalist right-wing. His works began to appear in the Jewish liberal Leopold Schwarzchild’s Das Tagebuch and the “national-Bolshevik” Ernst Niekisch’s Widerstand.
Jünger began to assemble around himself an elite corps of bohemian, eccentric intellectuals who would meet regularly on Friday evenings. This group included some of the most interesting personalities of the Weimar period. Among them were the Freikorps veteran Ernst von Salomon, Otto von Strasser, who with his brother Gregor led a leftist anti-Hitler faction of the Nazi movement, the national-Bolshevik Niekisch, the Jewish anarchist Erich Muhsam who had figured prominently in the early phase of the failed leftist revolution of 1918, the American writer Thomas Wolfe and the expressionist writer Arnolt Bronnen. Occasionally, Joseph Goebbels would turn up at these meetings hoping to convert the group, particularly Jünger himself, whose war writings he had admired, to the Nazi cause. These efforts by the Nazi propaganda master proved unsuccessful. Jünger regarded Goebbels as a shallow ideologue who spoke in platitudes even in private conversation.
The final break between Ernst Jünger and the NSDAP occurred in September 1929. Jünger published an article in Schwarzchild’s Tagebuch attacking and ridiculing the Nazis as sellouts for having reinvented themselves as a parliamentary party. He also dismissed their racism and anti-Semitism as ridiculous, stating that according to the Nazis, a nationalist is simply someone who “eats three Jews for breakfast.” He condemned the Nazis for pandering to the liberal middle class and reactionary traditional conservatives “with lengthy tirades against the decline in morals, against abortion, strikes, lockouts, and the reduction of police and military forces.” Goebbels responded by attacking Jünger in the Nazi press, accusing him being motivated by personal literary ambition, and insisting this had caused him “to vilify the national socialist movement, probably so as to make himself popular in his new kosher surroundings” and dismissing Jünger’s attacks by proclaiming the Nazis did not “debate with renegades who abuse us in the smutty press of Jewish traitors.”
Jünger on the Jewish Question
Jünger held complicated views on the question of German Jews. He considered anti-Semitism of the type espoused by Hitler to be crude and reactionary. Yet his own version of nationalism required a level of homogeneity that was difficult to reconcile with the subnational status of Germany Jewry. Jünger suggested that Jews should assimilate and pledge their loyalty to Germany once and for all. Yet he expressed admiration for Orthodox Judaism and indifference to Zionism. Jünger maintained personal friendships with Jews and wrote for a Jewish owned publication. During this time, his Jewish publisher Schwarzchild published an article examining Jünger’s views on the Jews of Germany. Schwarzchild insisted that Jünger was nothing like his Nazi rivals on the far right. Jünger’s nationalism was based on an aristocratic warrior ethos, while Hitler’s was more comparable to the criminal underworld. Hitler’s men were “plebian alley scum.” However, Schwarzchild also characterized Jünger’s rendition of nationalism as motivated by little more than a fervent rejection of bourgeois society and lacking in attention to political realities and serious economic questions.
The Worker
Other than In Storms of Steel, Jünger’s The Worker: Mastery and Form was his most influential work from the Weimar era. In The Worker, Jünger outlines his vision of a future state ordered as a technocracy based on workers and soldiers led by a warrior elite. Workers are no longer simply components of an industrial machine, whether capitalist or communist, but have become a kind of civilian-soldier operating as an economic warrior. Just as the soldier glories in his accomplishments in battle, so does the worker glory in the achievements expressed through his work. Jünger predicted that continued technological advancements would render the worker/capitalist dichotomy obsolete. He also incorporated the political philosophy of his friend Carl Schmitt into his worldview. As Schmitt saw international relations as a Hobbesian battle between rival powers, Jünger believed each state would eventually adopt a system not unlike what he described in The Worker. Each state would maintain its own technocratic order with the workers and soldiers of each country playing essentially the same role on behalf of their respective nations. International affairs would be a crucible where the will to power of the different nations would be tested.
Among the Nazis
By the time Hitler took power in 1933, Jünger’s war writings had become commonly used in high schools and universities as examples of wartime literature, and Jünger enjoyed success within the context of German popular culture as well. Excerpts of Jünger’s works were featured in military journals. The Nazis tried to co-opt his semi-celebrity status, but he was uncooperative. Jünger was appointed to the Nazified German Academy of Poetry, but declined the position. When the Nazi Party’s paper published some of his work in 1934, Jünger wrote a letter of protest. The Nazi regime, despite its best efforts to capitalize on his reputation, viewed Jünger with suspicion. His past association with Niekisch, Muhsam and Strasser, all of whom were either eventually killed or exiled by the Third Reich, led the Nazis to regard Jünger as a potential subversive. On several occasions, Jünger received visits from the Gestapo in search of some of his former friends.
Jünger’s most significant work from the Nazi period is the novel On the Marble Cliffs. The book is an allegorical attack on the Hitler regime. It was written in 1939, the same year that Jünger reentered the German army. The book describes a mysterious villain that threatens a community, a sinister warlord called the “Head Ranger.” This character is never featured in the plot of the novel, but maintains a foreboding presence that is universal (much like “Big Brother” in George Orwell’s1984). Another character in the novel, “Braquemart,” is described as having physical characteristics remarkably similar to those of Goebbels. The book sold 14,000 copies during its first two weeks in publication. Swiss reviewers immediately recognized the allegorical references to the Nazi state in the novel. The Nazi Party’s organ, the Völkische Beobachter, stated that Ernst Jünger was flirting with a bullet to the head. Goebbels urged Hitler to ban the book, but Hitler refused, probably not wanting to show his hand. Indeed, Hitler gave orders that Jünger not be harmed.
Jünger was stationed in France for most of the Second World War. He received yet another medal, the Iron Cross, for retrieving the body of a dead corporal while under heavy fire. Jünger also published some of his war diaries during this time. However, the German government took a dim view of these, viewing them as too sympathetic to the occupied French. Jünger’s duties included censorship of the mail coming into France from German civilians. He took a rather liberal approach to this responsibility and simply disposed of incriminating documents rather than turning them over for investigation. In doing so, he probably saved lives. As rumors of the Nazi extermination programs began to spread, Jünger wrote in his diary that the mechanization of the human spirit of the type he had written about in the past had apparently generated a higher level of human depravity. When he saw three young French-Jewish girls wearing the yellow stars required by the Nazis, he wrote that he felt embarrassed to be in the Nazis’ army. In July of 1942, Jünger observed the mass arrest of French Jews, the beginning of implementation of the “Final Solution.” He described the scene as follows:
Parents were first separated from their children, so there was wailing to be heard in the streets. At no moment may I forget that I am surrounded by the unfortunate, by those suffering to the very depths, else what sort of person, what sort of officer would I be? The uniform obliges one to grant protection wherever it goes. Of course one has the impression that one must also, like Don Quixote, take on millions.
An entry into Jünger’s diary from October 16, 1943 suggests that an unnamed army officer had told Jünger about the use of crematoria and poison gas to murder Jews en masse. Rumors of plots against Hitler circulated among the officers with whom Jünger maintained contact. His son, Ernst, was arrested after an informant claimed he had spoken critically of Hitler. Ernstl was imprisoned for three months, then placed in a penal battalion where he was killed in action in Italy. On July 20, 1944 an unsuccessful assassination attempt was carried out against Hitler. It is still disputed as to whether or not Jünger knew of the plot or had a role in its planning. Among those arrested for their role in the attempt on Hitler’s life were members of Jünger’s immediate circle of associates and superior officers within the German army. Jünger was dishonorably discharged shortly afterward.
Following the close of the Second World War, Jünger came under suspicion from the Allied occupational authorities because of his far right-wing nationalist and militarist past. He refused to cooperate with the Allies De-Nazification programs and was barred from publishing for four years. He would go on to live another half century, producing many more literary works, becoming a close friend of Albert Hoffman, the inventor of the hallucinogen LSD, with which he experimented. In a 1977 novel, Eumeswil, he took his tendency towards viewing the world around him with detachment to a newer, more clearly articulated level with his invention of the concept of the “Anarch.” This idea, heavily influenced by the writings of the early nineteenth century German philosopher Max Stirner, championed the solitary individual who remains true to himself within the context of whatever external circumstances happen to be present. Some sample quotations from this work illustrate the philosophy and worldview of the elderly Jünger quite well:
For the anarch, if he remains free of being ruled, whether by sovereign or society, this does not mean he refuses to serve in any way. In general, he serves no worse than anyone else, and sometimes even better, if he likes the game. He only holds back from the pledge, the sacrifice, the ultimate devotion … I serve in the Casbah; if, while doing this, I die for the Condor, it would be an accident, perhaps even an obliging gesture, but nothing more.
The egalitarian mania of demagogues is even more dangerous than the brutality of men in gallooned coats. For the anarch, this remains theoretical, because he avoids both sides. Anyone who has been oppressed can get back on his feet if the oppression did not cost him his life. A man who has been equalized is physically and morally ruined. Anyone who is different is not equal; that is one of the reasons why the Jews are so often targeted.
The anarch, recognizing no government, but not indulging in paradisal dreams as the anarchist does, is, for that very reason, a neutral observer.
Opposition is collaboration.
A basic theme for the anarch is how man, left to his own devices, can defy superior force – whether state, society or the elements – by making use of their rules without submitting to them. …
… malcontents… prowl through the institutions eternally dissatisfied, always disappointed. Connected with this is their love of cellars and rooftops, exile and prisons, and also banishment, on which they actually pride themselves. When the structure finally caves in they are the first to be killed in the collapse. Why do they not know that the world remains inalterable in change? Because they never find their way down to its real depth, their own. That is the sole place of essence, safety. And so they do themselves in. …
The anarch may not be spared prisons – as one fluke of existence among others. He will then find the fault in himself. …
We are touching one a … distinction between anarch and anarchist; the relation to authority, to legislative power. The anarchist is their mortal enemy, while the anarch refuses to acknowledge them. He seeks neither to gain hold of them, nor to topple them, nor to alter them – their impact bypasses him. He must resign himself only to the whirlwinds they generate. …
The anarch is no individualist, either. He wishes to present himself neither as a Great Man nor as a Free Spirit. His own measure is enough for him; freedom is not his goal; it is his property. He does not come on as foe or reformer: one can get along nicely with him in shacks or in palaces. Life is too short and too beautiful to sacrifice for ideas, although contamination is not always avoidable. But hats off to the martyrs. …
We can expect as little from society as from the state. Salvation lies in the individual. …
TRIBAL RESONANCE
THE SCHOOL, THE FORGE, THE MILITIA!!
A four-issue subscription to TRIBAL RESONANCE, the magazine of the National-Anarchist Movement,just £12 in the UK, 20 Euros in Europe and US$30 in the rest of the world. Pay quickly and efficiently by sending your subscription to our Paypal address at arktoslondon@yahoo.co.uk. All subscription rates include p&p. The first issue is out now!!
A four-issue subscription to TRIBAL RESONANCE, the magazine of the National-Anarchist Movement,just £12 in the UK, 20 Euros in Europe and US$30 in the rest of the world. Pay quickly and efficiently by sending your subscription to our Paypal address at arktoslondon@yahoo.co.uk. All subscription rates include p&p. The first issue is out now!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)