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Introduction to the National Socialism pages from the Gnostic Liberation Front This web page with its collected essays on National Socialism represents National Socialist authors who are in sync with our understanding of National Socialism as in its purest, idealistic form. If some articles express anti-Semitic or racist opinions, we ask our readers not to be offended. Our aim is strictly to make material for the understanding of National Socialism available to those interested in the historical evaluation of National Socialist philosophy, especially in its relationship to modern Gnosticism. It should be very interesting for our readers to gain an insight into National Socialism as represented by these writer who obviously are or were part of the movement. This web page is not brought to you for propaganda purposes, but for your understanding on the quest for truth.
Gregor Strasser on right later executed on Hitler's orders in 1934
"From the Right we shall take Nationalism which has so disastrously allied itself with capitalism, and from the Left we shall take Socialism, which has made such an unhappy union with internationalism. Thus we shall form the National Socialism which will be the motive force of a new Germany and new Europe." "We are 'socialists' and not mere 'social reformers' and we do not hesitate to say it although the Marxians have so painful distorted the meaning of the former term." ON CAPITALISM . . . "The capitalist economic system with it exploitation of those who are economically weak, with its robbery of the workers labour power, with its unethical way of appraising human beings by the number of things and the amount of money the possess, instead of by their internal values and their achievements, must be replaced by a new and just economic system, in a won by German socialism." ON MATERIALISM . . . "The most deplorable legacy of the capitalist economic system is that it has taught us to judge all things by the standards of money ownership, possession." ON TAKING POWER . . . "Everything which is detrimental to the existing order of things has our support because we want catastrophe . . . in a word we are pursuing a policy of catastrophe because only catastrophe, that is, the collapse of the liberal system, will clear the way for those new tasks which we National Socialists name everything which hastens the beginning of catastrophe in the present system, thus, for example, every strike every governmental crisis, every erosion of state power, every weakening of the System . . . is good, very good for us . . . and it will always and constantly be our endeavour to strengthen such difficulties . . . in order to expedite the death of this system." --- -----------------------------------
The following Document/Statement of Otto Ohlendorf at the Nuremberg Trials, 20 November, 1945 is a fascinating Document of a man dedicated to the left-wing of National Socialism. Document UK-81
Otto Ohlendorf
[Appendix "A" I..1 to Affidavit sworn by Otto Ohlendorf at Nurnberg, 20 November, 1945.] After 'I joined the NSDAP in May 1925, I participated in all tasks which arose in the young and numerically small Party organization. I was at the same time Ortsgruppenleiter, treasurer and organizer of meetings. I distributed newspapers and leaflets, spoke in discussions at public meetings of other parties and served in the SA. Besides this, I, with three other Party members, were ordered to the SS service in 1926. However, at that time I did not engage in any SS activities because shortly thereafter I left my home town and was removed from the list of the SS. Therefore, I did not receive any SS identity card and learned of my then SS number 880 first in 1936 when, with reference to my early membership in the SS, I was again enrolled in the SS under my old number. Until 1936 I had no connection with the SS. During 1929-31 I spoke independently and on my own initiative at numerous Party meetings of the competent Gau Party Leadership at Hannover. At that time I studied at Goettingen and from there I worked especially in the town and area of Nordheim according to my own plan for the Party. I organized training courses and spoke at numerous evening discussions and public meetings. Despite my activity I remained a simple Party member as I avoided a too close connection with the official Party organs. Because of my own opinion at that time I was already separated from the real and personal ways of a Number of the leading Party members. After my first legal State Examination in 1931, I went to Italy as an exchange student for one year. My reason therefore was to become acquainted with a movement which supposedly was parallel to National Socialism, and which had had ten years of practice and unlimited possibilities to develop. I became acquainted with Fascism in theory and practice. I became thoroughly acquainted with its organization and leading personalities. I arrived at the conclusion that in the case of Fascism, it was not a question of a new conception of people and state which further developed the individualism, but that it was another system of absolute power which was formed around the person of Mussolini. The human beings and people in Fascism had no values in themselves, but were objects of the State and derived their value and recognition from the State as the sole reality. From this fact originated the irreconcilable contrast National Socialism, which is founded on the reality of the value of life in the individual human beings and the people, and, therefore, in contrast to Fascism subordinated the State to the needs of the people. After my return from Italy I stayed away from Party work until the assumption of power. I received no positive answer to the reports on Fascism which I sent to the Party Leadership and wanted first to become oriented on further development of the Party within the Reich. Furthermore, it was my definite resolution to continue my own life independently of the Party. After the assumption of power I, therefore, remained in legal training. At the meetings I mostly spoke on the theme of Fascism and National Socialism in order to point out the dangers which threatened National Socialism by copying the Fascist organizational forms and the insufficient differentiation from the Fascist program. I considered Fascism the primary opponent of National Socialism. In other European countries there already existed Fascist movements and Fascism conducted a continuous and purposeful propaganda all over Europe. Therefore, I considered the offer of Professor Jens Jessen to become his assistant at the Institute for World Economy at Kiel, to serve my purposes, especially because I could found a section for Fascism and National Socialism and in that way have a good opportunity to fight against the plans of introducing Fascism into National Socialism. Between 1933 and 1938, I attempted to obtain a total picture of the complete literature in German and Italian which concerned intellectual, cultural, sociological or economical themes, as well as State theories. Both this literature and the National Socialistic policy in practice showed after the assumption of power that the still immature National Socialistic ideology was diverted from the principles of its original world picture. Theorists, as well as responsible leaders in Party and State, believed that they could conquer temporary difficulties in State and economy, education and culture, only by use of old methods belonging to past stages of civilization. At this time, it was my greatest wish to write an analysis of the spiritual and formative impulses in the National Socialistic work of the present time in order to draw the attention of the leading National Socialist circles and young scientists to the spiritual principles which they used as supposedly National Socialist. However, foreign tendencies became increasingly stronger especially at first in the food economy and later on during the Four Year Plan in the rest of the economy, in communal politics, and in the complete field of science. Therefore, I accepted an offer in 1936, again from Professor Jessen, which gave me the opportunity by means of the SD des Reichsfuehrer's SS to report to the highest leader posts in Party and State and in such way advance my plans based on observation of the theoretical and practical development of people and State. As many personal and essential matters made this task difficult, I grasped this opportunity to participate in the execution of the original National Socialist principles with special satisfaction. These principles advocated, as the foremost goal of National Socialism, to develop the best characteristics of the people and to form them into a community of equality and to furnish the best possible spiritual and moral existence for the individuals of the people. I undertook the task with heart and soul when I worked in Reich Group Commerce and when I was Ministerial Direktor and permanent deputy of the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Economy, I understood together with many others, that a necessary phase within the evolution would be strong controversies with the Party and State. Only against strong opposition of the old spiritual forces could the goal be achieved which would make the welfare and dignity of man the real conception of politics; also to achieve in the economy that man should become basis and decisive subject of the measures of the political economy, this especially because the economy is the most important and preponderant molder of man's destiny. National Socialism seemed to be the first attempt to find a natural synthesis between the free, intended to be independent man of individualism and the actual bonds life compels on him in the community in which he finds himself. In order to achieve this synthesis, National Socialism ought to signify self consciousness, and the inner freedom of man, from which the laws for the natural order of the people's community could be recognized and accomplished. with conviction. This idea did not, however, find a period of calm in which it could be developed spiritually and in active daily life. The collapse of the National Socialist system in Germany has shown that the forces favoring highly developed human communities were not strong enough to carry through to this goal.
Reproduced From:
A LEFT-WING MOVEMENT
by Povl H. Riis-Knudsen For far too many years it has been widely accepted that National Socialists are extreme right-wingers, and only rarely have they hesitated to refer to themselves as such. It can be argued, however, that National Socialism does not fit into the pattern of "right" and "left" and instead ought to be considered as standing above this distinction. This argument most certainly is a step in the right direction, but at this time and within the context of the current struggle it might be a good idea to reconsider the whole question of political wings and make a few points clear concerning the meaning of the terms "right" and "left" and their applications to today's political scene. Historically, the words "right" and "left" in reference to political views originated in pre-revolutionary France, where those who wanted to preserve the system of government more or less as it was sat to the right in the National Assembly, and those who wanted more radical changes sat to the left. Hence, the terms "right" for the reactionaries and "left" for the revolutionaries--terms that have since become universally known and used. Neither the word "reactionary" nor the word "revolutionary," however, says anything universal about the particular views in question. They are both relative and receive their specific meanings only within a given historical context. For instance, the revolutionaries of former times, the European National Liberals of the 19th century, do not seem very revolutionary today--quite the contrary--just as today's reactionaries would have been considered very revolutionary 200 years ago. When the Communists took over Russia in 1917 they did so as revolutionaries out to overthrow an ineffective and corrupt regime; but from the 1920s to the collapse of the Soviet Union seven decades later they represented the reactionary establishment. In our time the traditional left wing has been predominantly Marxist, even to such a degree that the very term "left wing" has been thought to be synonymous with the word "Marxism." This, of course, has no basis in reality. Any revolutionary is a left-winger--it is just that the Marxists have had so little competition that they have been able to appropriate the term. On the other side of the political spectrum we have the right wing, consisting of reactionaries who want to preserve the present society and the so-called Christian civilization of the West with its materialism and capitalism. The right-wingers stand up for traditional patriotic values: They are good Christians and good citizens who defend the constitution and are loyal to their country and their monarch, if they have one. They are willing to go to war against any other nation to assert the greatness of their own--even if it means waging a nuclear war against another White country if they think its system of government threatens their own domestic order, no matter how corrupt and degenerate it may be. They are for an economy based on unrestricted free enterprise, regardless of the consequences, but they usually resent the Liberal trend in politics as well as immigration and racial integration because they fear any changes that could upset the order to which they are accustomed. Where National Socialists are to be found in this spectrum seems quite clear: WE ARE LEFT-WINGERS, NO DOUBT ABOUT IT! We do not want to preserve the present system or any part thereof! We do not believe in the foundations of a system that has led our people into the misery of the present time! We do not want to support any institution which is responsible for drug abuse; two world wars between White nations as well as countless minor wars; nuclear rearmament; the pollution of the environment; unemployment; the total disillusionment of young people, who have lost all faith in the future; pornography; and all the other forms of complete degeneracy which are displayed today. We National Socialists want the most radical change of all: We want the complete overthrow of the entire Old Order! Whereas Marxism shares a basic equalitarian philosophy with the Old Order and defines itself as a materialistic movement aiming at the mere redistribution of material goods, National Socialism seeks to build an entirely New Order based on idealism and a profound respect for the laws of Nature in all aspects of life. This, definitely, is the most revolutionary idea of this century, and thus very much left wing! It certainly is not Marxist! Compared to National Socialism, Marxism is nothing but a pseudo-revolutionary idea upheld by Liberal Democracy. If all people are created equal, why should not all wealth be distributed equally among all people? Seen in this light, Marxism is simply part of the Old Order we want to destroy. If National Socialism is, in its essence, a left-wing movement, it is of course paradoxical that National Socialists should have devoted so much time and energy to catering toward traditional right-wing attitudes, whereas they have shunned all openings to the left. Is it any wonder that all attempts to create a National Socialist movement on this basis have been utterly unsuccessful? The first precondition for creating anything in this world is that one has a clear idea of what one wants to achieve and how one can possibly achieve it. A sculptor who wants to create a work of art starts out with a mental concept, and then sets out to realize it in his chosen material. He does not just dabble around casually with his chisel on a piece of marble and wonder what the final result will be. Thus, it is crucial to realize that National Socialism is not merely a form of extreme rightism. Anybody within our ranks who still has such notions should devote himself to studying the idea of National Socialism to find its true meaning and significance. Or, if he doesn't have the energy or ability to do so, he should find another outlet for his activities. This Movement does not have room for frustrated haters or religious dreamers, but only for devoted National Socialist revolutionaries! Let us face reality: The right wing is mostly a pitiful conglomerate of people with very unclear ideas. They realize that something is wrong, but they refuse to leave the Old Order. Instead, they cling to it with all their might and wish to revert to the situation as it was 75 or 100 years ago, thinking that this will solve all their problems. They simply fail to see that the mess we are in today is a logical result of the system we had 100 years ago, that the foundations of that system were not good and stable enough to safeguard us from the present developments. It is a historical fact that nothing good has ever come out of the right wing. If it had not been for such revolutionaries as 16th-century philosopher Giordano Bruno and astronomers Galileo, Nicholas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, we would still believe that the earth is flat and the center of the universe. When capitalism developed, the establishment made no attempt to solve the social problems resulting from the industrial revolution but went on to exploit the new working class mercilessly, thus giving rise to revolutionary thoughts as expressed in Marxist ideology. All the necessary and just social improvements we have seen during the past 100 years have been introduced only after hard pressure from the left wing, with right-wing conservatives in constant retreat, pitifully trying to preserve as much as possible for themselves. This does not mean, of course, that any effort to overthrow an established system is, per se, good. If man succeeds in creating a new natural order which does not fossilize but remains a living organism and develops within the boundaries of natural law, adopting new scientific and philosophical insights into the nature of life without clinging to outdated conceptions, it would, indeed, be a most serious offense to try to uproot that order and revert to egoistic materialism or any other unnatural philosophy. What is good and bad can be judged solely on the basis of natural law; the closer to it the better. It is almost universally accepted that there is a gulf between National Socialism and Marxism. By the same token, however, National Socialists are certainly not right-wingers. The only common ground National Socialism seems to have with the right wing is the racial issue. But here, too, there is an extreme difference in the outlook. The right-wingers believe being White holds an absolute value in itself, which elevates the Aryan race over all other living organisms and gives it a right to do with the world what it wants to do. As National Socialists, however, we are not merely concerned about the life and immediate well-being of our own race. We see the White race as part of the whole natural order of the universe, and our wish to preserve it is linked with our wish to preserve the entire natural environment--including other human races--out of a deep respect for the inscrutable wisdom of nature. No doubt, our race has great possibilities in its intellectual capacity, but its abilities have absolutely no value as such if they are not put to the right use in accordance with the laws of Nature. For much too long we have joined in the chorus claiming "White Power" and ignored the sad fact that our race has had the absolute power for at least 2,000 years. And it is exactly this power that has led to the kind of society we have today. Thus, we do not share the right-wing belief in continuous technological and economical expansion, which already has led to the pollution of air and water and has made huge areas of the world unfit to live in for all species--a development which means that the ozone layer in the atmosphere is systematically destroyed so that coming generations are going to be exposed to life-threatening radiation; that tropical forests, which supply us with oxygen and medicinal plants, are cut down to make room for industrial growth; and that the deserts are irrigated so that the ground-water level sinks in fertile areas, which become deserts in turn. All of this is the result of Aryan genius. This genius has not been put to work to build a better world for our children and grandchildren, but only to satisfy the human greed of the moment and to secure a pleasant life now without regard for the future. This fatal trend, which by the standards of natural law has most certainly turned industrialized White countries into a far more degenerate state than any primitive society of the so-called Third World, is violently supported by the right wing, which seems to think that everything would be just fine if only the Blacks, Jews and Boat People were expelled. We know that, in itself, this would change very little. Our aim is a complete spiritual rebirth. It is our immediate goal to define and build the foundations for this rebirth, which is the only thing that can give the racial struggle any meaning. This struggle should not be understood as a struggle against other races, but as a relentless fight against the decadence of our own race. The isolated appeal to race as the basis of a new society is meaningless unless we can overcome this decadence and find our way back to natural values. If our race can survive only within the context of the present system, we do not want it to survive, because then it would represent nothing but the grossest form of anti-natural degeneracy. The claim for "White Power" can gain meaning only if, by that, we mean the wish to reactivate the power of Nature as it rests latently in the genius of the White man, whose duty it is to put this power to use in order to uphold the very principle of life. Of course, this does not mean that we are in favor of any kind of multiracialism. Race is one of the cornerstones of the natural order and thus must be defended like all other natural principles. It certainly does not mean that the white color of one's skin is necessarily a hallmark of human quality. The White race has allowed the world to slide to the brink of disaster, and unless it can be brought to realize that the quality of life can be improved by replacing the materialistic consumer society--which is the supreme goal of both Marxism and Liberalism--with natural and spiritual values, it is doomed and will destroy the whole planet in the process of its absolute decline. Naturally, we National Socialists do not think that we should go back to Stone Age caves, but we do think we should never take more out of Nature than we put back into her. The quality of life should mean more to us than the quality of material goods. In today's disillusioned society, growing numbers of people realize this and, what is more, they protest against the ruling order. They do not become National Socialists, however, for one simple reason: They are not aware that National Socialism--and only National Socialism--can solve today's crucial problems. Instead, they allow their protest movements to be taken over by the Marxists, who are better at selling their product than we are, despite the fact that no Marxist government has ever made the slightest attempt to tackle these issues. That's because the very concept of Marxism is materialistic and at no point concerned with natural values. The Marxists merely use popular dissatisfaction with the establishment to promote Marxism. The dissatisfied individuals themselves are not at all Marxists to begin with. While National Socialists run around trying to win over small fringe groups of traditional right-wingers with all their political and religious hang-ups, their notorious megalomania and their lack of commitment to a cause, the Marxists get a foothold among concerned citizens who renounce unlimited materialism out of an idealistic concern for the future of our planet. For the most part, these people do not realize that preservation of the natural order calls for more far-reaching measures than the control of pollution and the abolition of nuclear energy and the atomic bomb. They do not see that it also demands racial separation and a general spiritual revival that can lead Man back to the sources of life. They can learn this, however--or, rather, they cannot help but see it--if they are provided with the necessary information and insight and not left exposed to the exclusive influence of asinine Marxist teachings. These people are idealistic and for Nature, and thus they really belong to us. They generally are far more valuable as fighters than a good many disillusioned youngsters who call themselves National Socialists in an attempt to boost their egos and hide their personal problems and insecurity behind a self-styled uniform and ludicrous ranks and titles. But the environmentalists are not attracted by storm-troopers, hate propaganda or so-called skinheads, all of which confirm their negative impressions of National Socialism. Nor does it help to talk to them about the significance of race, because they have not yet come so far in their development that they can see the relevance of the racial issue. They must be approached where they are and on issues that concern them here and now. To do this, it is necessary to produce good material on environmental problems as seen from the National Socialist point of view and to go into the groups where these people gather in protest against nuclear weapons, pollution and warfare. We cannot expect the environmentalists to come to us, because they have no way of knowing what National Socialism is all about. And if we fail to get in contact with them, they will be lost to the Marxists, in whose hands they are never going to realize the full consequence of their own attitudes. These new protesters are hostile to us simply because of decades of enemy propaganda, which has not only alienated sound and intelligent people from any kind of movement which overtly expresses National Socialist ideas, but which has also succeeded in attracting a large number of individuals to our movement who suit this propaganda image of National Socialism only too well and who come to us simply because they want to live up to this image. Too many people attracted to National Socialism want to be the murderous, bloodthirsty beasts they have come to know from countless Hollywood productions and yellow-press accounts of the "terrible Nazis." For far too long we have welcomed such psychopaths into our ranks and for far too long we have failed to dissociate ourselves from other organizations which do the same. Just because some people might call themselves National Socialists and wave the Swastika does not make them our comrades! Many organizations still do not realize this, and as long as they fail to do so they are doomed; unfortunately, so are we if we do not take every opportunity which offers itself to denounce them in public. It often has been said that we should not "wash our dirty linen" in front of the enemies and that all "internal strife" should be kept within our own walls. But this is not our linen and it most certainly is not "internal strife." Instead, it is a necessary cleaning operation, and it must be carried out in public. (PART TWO SHOULD BEGIN: Our worst enemies are not the Jews or the Communists, but the very people who while calling themselves National Socialists...)
From: http://reportersnotebook.com/newforum/indexforum.html
The
Controversy
Reading this thread it is apparent to me yet again that all but a few Americans have no idea what so ever regarding the nature of National Socialism. National Socialism began in the 1890's (with it's economic and societal ideals rooted in a rejection of the Spirit of 1789) and evolved into numerous, widely divergent ideological strains throughout the Eastern and Western portion of the Occident in schools and movements far to numerous to cover in even a cursory fashion here. Americans presume that socialism equals state ownership of industry or extensive regulation of capital and the abrogation/destruction of property. This view holds that socialism comes in two principle variants: the Social Democratic welfare states of Europe which is typically seen comparable in spirit to New Deal/Great Society style welfare states and the totalitarianism of the old CCCP, the PRC, Cuba, North Korea etc. This view also holds that the more pervasive laissez faire capitalism (often expressed in terms of so called "negative rights" by anti statists from Nocke to Rothbard) retards the growth of statism (which is viewed as synonymous with socialism) justifying a doctrinaire glorification of atomistic individualism. Typically, the moral, as opposed to the economic, justification for this notion goes by the term "libertarian" which was appropriated by Ayn Rand in ?60s to describe a radical notion of laissez faire which was unrelated to anarchism and related tendencies which comprised the dominate wing of socialist thought on the left prior to the rise of Marxism to which the term once applied. In a similar fashion, the Marxist - Leninists appropriated the Term "Soviet" which referred to sydicalist formations promoted by the anti-statist left of the era. After roughly 70 years of Jewish propaganda it seems that even the right (genuine and other wise) in the states mistakenly think of National Socialism as an innovation created by Hitler that mixed Soviet style collectivism with racism. I have even had the misfortune of seeing self labeled National Socialists in America state that socialism means the nationalization (i.e. state ownership) of industry and that because Hitler did as much (factually wrong) they promote a similarly illogical, strategically and tactically unwise prescription for America now. Despite the numerous and serious flaws that exist in Hilterian National Socialism he at least realized that his ideology was not intended for export but rather that it was suited for Germany alone during his era. Equally odd and senseless are Americans that refer to themselves by the derogatory term "Nazi" while at the same time aping a unrestrained form of capitalism. I have viewed such confused blather on numerous American sites that often exhibit a morbid fetishism associated with Hollywood style depictions of the Third Reich. One will also find foul mouthed rants replete with psychopathic calls for genocide and libertine sentiments on even the largest so called "white power" news site in the states showing that their understanding of Hitler and National Socialism in general is as non-existent as is their prescription for a post Jewish America while demonstrating an adherence to an immorality as wantonly perverse as the jews they dream of destroying in the most macabre fashions possible. Hitler wrote, "The [Nation-] State in itself, has nothing whatsoever to do with any definite economic concept or a definite economic development. It does not arise from a compact made between contracting parties, within a certain delimited territory, for the purpose of serving economic ends. The State is a community of living beings who have kindred physical and spiritual natures, organized for the purpose of assuring the conservation of their own kind and to help towards fulfilling those ends which Providence has assigned to that particular race or racial branch ." From this statement one can reasonably infer that socialism in the nationalist context does not entail state directed economic collectivism as does the modern leftist derivatives of Bolshevism even when viewed from the overly statist perspective of the Third Reich. What is important here is that socialism should not be viewed as an economic or governmental system but rather, to paraphrase DeMan, as an ethic in which the egotistical is subordinated to the altruistic in the interest of preventing societal discord that arises from what Marx termed "alienation from the means of production". This ethic was best described by the syndicalist Arturo Labriola in his book "Beyond Capitalism and Socialism" as the spirit that animated ancient communialism, the guilds of old, Thomas Moore, Tommaso Campanella and numerous modern manifestations of societal altruism and as such has no relation to capitalism. DeMan was correct that "ideas are created by people and are not the result of a parallelogram of social forces" which in turn causally entails that a dialectic view of historical evolution is wrong and that socialism is a morality that is applied to social phenomena whose principles are derived from contemporary beliefs and historically rooted problems. As such, socialism in the national context is not deterministic or predictive and therefor it is not scientific but an image of societal solidarity and advancement for the purpose of securing the existence of an organically conceived nation in a hostile, anarchic world. An ideology derived from class interests rests upon a symbolism, in the Sorelian sense, that is destructive in that it fails to understand that the commonality of interests between all classes of the nation organic depend upon the ability of society and state to meet external challenges in order to secure the existence of the folk. Entrusting the articulation of the vision of socialism by a class or by the state entails the simple imposition of a narrowly construed set of materially based interests being imposed upon society which in turn produces a culture that is not folkish but statist and contrived. As such, if one is to advocate genuine National Socialism one must promote a state that not only recognizes and secures the existence of the nation organic but also provides for the institutionalization of societal interests and their representation in a syndical, corporative or distributalist form. As such, National Socialism demands that the state not dominate society. State ownership or domination of property is every bit as destructive to societal cohesion in the long term as is the economic centralization and alienation resulting from unrestrained capital imposing itself upon society. The establishment of a National State and a folkish society means a rejection of both statism and laissez faire capitalism in favour of societal control of the economy which is best served by syndicalism or distributalism applied in accordance with historical circumstance and indigenous tradition. Reproduced from: http://reportersnotebook.com/newforum/indexforum.html
By Michael Walker Talking about the state we are confronted from the start with a great paradox: never in history has the state enjoyed such extensive and intrusive powers whilst simultaneously being the near universal subject of suspicion, indifference and scorn. Few are those who trust the state yet fewer still are those who openly challenge its legitimacy. With the contested exception of Antarctica, there is not an acre of land on the planet neither owned by a nation state nor acting as inaccessible buffer between two nation states. No woman in the western or communist world may give birth without being obliged, under threat of sequestration, to register her newborn with the authorities of "her" nation state. The state exercises the right to take what property it so wishes, to send its subjects into wars it has declared in their name, to tax its subjects as much as it chooses and to exercise a total monopoly of all money in use. Many nation states do not allow parents to educate their children at home but order that all children attend a school which the state deems acceptable, indeed, in many cases, notably where communists or social democrats fix the political agenda, all or nearly all schools are state schools. The state may claim a monopoly of whatsoever it pleases, be it communications, police, foreign relations, the legal process, religion, legal tender currency, every decision of life and death. Nothing is theoretically out of bounds, for the state, whatever its claims to the contrary, has always represented the subjugation of the individual to itself. While it may claim, and the "liberal democratic" theory of the state leads it to so claim, (in contrast to socialist and fascist theories of the state which dominated so much of political philosophy in the earlier part of this century), that the state exists to serve the individual, not the individual the state, yet the brutal fact remains that the individual counts as nothing compared to the state. This is so regardless of the ideology of the state and can not be otherwise, for by definition the state exists only to the extent that it exercises that very power which defines it: to be more than a sum of individuals. When such power ceases to exist the state itself ceases to exist. Its power is expressed in authority but the authority is no more than the endorsement of its legitimacy. It is the actual source of that authority, of the legitimacy of a given state, which has been the principle point of contention concerning the the state down the centuries. This brings us to the second aspect of the seeming paradox which we have referred to. At a time when the authority of the state, in the West at least, is ignored by all and sundry in matters of detail at every opportunity, the orders of the state and its intentions circumnavigated and flouted by nearly all the subjects of the state whenever possible, yet the legitimacy per se of the modern state is hardly challenged at all. Put another way: the modern state is sacred in the eyes of hardly anyone yet legitimate in the eyes of nearly all. Challenged incessantly in particulars, the right of the nation-state to exist in more or less its present form is taken for granted. While every government and every nation is the subject of the most intense scrutiny, analysis and criticism, the legitimacy of the state as such, or in other words the source of its authority is unquestioned. So far as it exists at all, the debate about the nature of the modern state pivots on the capitalist-anarchist or "libertarian" challenge to the very right of any state to exist. Fabian and Keynesian economic theories having fallen out of fashion, the temptation to return to the "pure milk of Adam Smith" (Viscount Stansgate), has been strong. According to this (anarchist) analysis, the state is the ultimate tool of collectivism, quintessentially reactionary, because it hinders the "natural" outcome of the struggle among free men for the benefits of existence. The choice, then, seems to be between either accepting the state as the legitimate source of ultimate administrative authority or seeking to abolish it in toto; for all differences as to what kinds of laws should be passed are differences which exist within the consensus that the state is the source of power by means of which government decisions are made effective. The state is the medium of governmental power. But what is this creature "state" which is omni-present and yet which today seems to have lost all sense of purpose other than survival, but which survival seems to depend on its perpetual growth and extension of power, a power not challenged in principle by subjects who nevertheless habitually deprecate its every single initiative? The word "state" comes from the Latin status which word itself comes from the Greek istanai signifying that which endures, what is permanent in the flux. The state has indeed always been seen as something representing permanence and stability in opposition to the instability of government and politics. But what is the legitimization of this permanent structure in the affairs of men? Does the state originate in the word of God, is it established by custom, is it the embodiment of a contractual agreement, or simply the legal embodiment of the reality of power in a given society? Or does it have a deeper significance than that? What is the relation today and what should be the relation, of the state to society, to the economy, to the nation? Is the state the name we give to the sum of all these or is it something more than the sum of all these things? While suspicion of too much state power as "potentially totalitarian" is widespread among the theorists of limited government (where the government is seen as the officer of the state), no notion of what the state ideally should be exists in modern Western society at all. The state simply is, something opaque; if defined at all, then as a "guard dog" over human social affairs, but then a veritable monster hound so dangerous as to require regular sedation in the form of "human rights" "state rights", "checks and balances", constitutions, et al so that it does not break loose and establish itself as an omnipotent and cruel divinity living like Moloch on the blood of youth. For all but the most uncompromising admirers of power and pomp, the state has something fearful about it. Its potential power seems limitless. Despite this fear, the state is generally accepted as a "necessary evil", a kind of glorified insurance company, as Hobbes and Locke viewed it. Certainly the state exists to protect or secure but where the modern state has become ambiguous is in its no longer being able to clearly define whom or what it is supposed to secure and why. Despite this ambiguity, the nation-state of the West has become a norm in most people's eyes, the basis for progress and development throughout the world. In mainstream political debate throughout the Western world, the Western model of the state is sacrosanct, its power not open to question, its legitimization taken for granted, the consensus from which all "sensible" political debate proceeds. Governments may come and go, even nations may come and go, but the state, which tends us from the cradle to the grave, she goes on for ever, yet the purpose of the modern state is a matter which the majority of pundits and creators of opinion give no thought to. Change government by all means. Condemn the administration and the country's leaders? Fine. But challenge the contemporary state? That is subversion! On the left, especially since the collapse of widespread belief in Marxism, subversion is now devoid of any attempt to conceptualize an alternative vision of the state. The decadence of modern leftism is shown in the inability to think about, let alone try to work towards, the socialist state. The great body of "left-wing" politics today is an unthinking fulfillment of what it perceives to be moral obligations, organized around hostile reaction to initiatives which threaten the political or economic well- being of "good" persons. The old rhetoric is dragged out of the cupboard for ceremonial demonstrations of righteousness, maybe a sticker against one of the endless "dangerous" right-wing parties of the day or a demonstration against immigration controls, but always the action is in response to an initiative. The left today has abandoned all ability to champion a positive vision of another society or another state. Issue 44 of Elements (January 1983) was devoted to the subject of the state. In a riveting article entitled Contre L'Etat Providence Guillaume Faye and Alain de Benoist distinguish two fundamental ideological influences, as they see it, present at the birth of the modern state in the sixteenth century. What is meant here by "modern state" is really "nation state", although the writers do not say this in so many words, for their entire thesis is indeed that the nation should be the political expression of the nation. (The writers confine themselves to the genealogy of the modern state in practice; of course notions of the ideal state which have influenced the two ideologies the writers describe go back to much earlier times.) The modern state has often been named the "nation state", according to which the nation is made manifest only by the state: the nation was not realised so long as it was "stateless". Faye and de Benoist subscribe to this view wholeheartedly and deplore the trend away from "nation state" to "welfare state". It has become fashionable, they point out, to always blame the state for every social problem, be it inflation, crime, unemployment, the Social Security deficit, bureaucracy, rampant collectivism. The radical hostility to the state which had characterised early classical liberal thinking has been given a new lease of life with the popular fear of the "all invasive state". Faye and de Benoist also point to the paradox that, as they put it, "if the critique of the state is flourishing, statism is doing even better." Of the two influences which Faye and de Benoist set at the heart of their discussion of the state, they identify one as classic, inspired by the Roman notion of the Imperium, a notion of the state defended by Machiavelli and later by Hobbes and in modern times by Mussolini or more philosophically by Julius Evola. This is a pragmatic, and even brutally "realistic" notion of the state, one that seeks to restore or maintain the respublica which had been lost, Faye and de Benoist argue, in the Middle Ages. The state in this case represents a will which transcends private wills and gains a life of its own (some, like Spengler, would say "destiny") in history. When Louis the Fourteenth uttered the famous claim L'etat, c'est moi, he was expressing this notion of the state as concentrated in the figure of one man, the king, source of all legitimacy and guardian of the destiny of all that pertains to the state, the state made flesh, so to speak. The second influence at work, according to Faye and de Benoist, is based not on a political conception of the state but on a juridical one. Here the state represents neither a people nor a nation, but a society of interests with the function not of directing, but administering. According to Faye and Benoist, this notion of the state reduces the multiplicity of associations and bonds which form the organic tissue of society, for in its role as administrator, the state withdraws from its role as the perpetrator of historical initiatives and becomes simply a reactive force which makes decisions concerning the administration of public welfare. (In a recent interview given to the Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger, the Hungarian writer Gyorgy Konrad expressed exactly this view of the role of the state, saying that the ideal state should be "like an electric company...offering service but without having authority"!) It may well then increase its influence in laws concerning the economy and the private lives of its citizens (and Faye and de Benoist argue that it is indeed doing so in modern times) but at the cost of losing its political initiative to the economists and managers. The state in this situation is gradually replaced by the economy; that is to say, it is the economy which acquires a life of its own and represents permanency in the affairs of men, economics becomes all important in a nation's affairs, replacing the proper business of the state: politics. Politics becomes subordinate to the economy and is ultimately absorbed in it. Omnipresent, the modern state nevertheless looses all power to initiate or mobilize. It becomes the insurer or regulator of the economy and the economy is raised to the supreme level of society. In this and many other articles writers of the French New Right argued the case that the nation, where it is dominated by this second notion of the state, the state as an economic compromise, is doomed to disappear. Certainly the ambiguity of the notion of the modern state rests in the fact that it represents an admixture of two conceptions, one of the state as an authority above society, the other of the state as an element within society, one hierarchical the other egalitarian, one the former of values the other the reflection of values. The conflict between the two roles of the state was resolved in the theoretical writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who saw the state as both supreme authority and guardian of freedom, justice and equality. Faye and de Benoist, however, do not see this ideological antithesis as being reconcilable. It lies at the heart of the modern identity crisis and decadence of the state. They blame the triumph of the non-political view of the state for the decline of the state. Liberalism, anarchism, Marxism, all characterised, according to Faye and de Benoist, by a view of the state firmly anchored in the second historical tradition, ultimately intend that the state should wither away in the wake of ever increasing human material prosperity. The era of managers replaces the era of Caesars. Knowledge replaces power as the arm of the state, the hallmark of its legitimacy. Administration replaces government, society replaces the state, the politician is no longer a statesman but an administrator. Finally, "It is notable that, whatever the differences of government all Western societies are evolving in the same direction. The reason is that they have submitted to three elements over which political parties have no hold: the weight of bureaucracy in the social and economic sphere, the internal logic of technical administration and an implicit ideology which has become common to the whole world. This is the fulfillment of the movement which began with the liberalism of the eighteenth century. The public domain has come to "produce" the private domain, in organizing its "culture", its consumer habits, its very daily life, all the more effectively for not being immediately perceptible. The supposed "liberation" of the individual, his emancipation from "servitude" linked to organic attachments, has changed to a total dependence of society on a multiform technicial structure. The transitory phase of the central statist administration is now in the process of being accomplished.... The state makes way for statism, then it is the turn of society itself, which exists less and less as a living whole,....which is more and more a mass, "acted upon", "produced" "in-formed", by techno-economic uniformity...the coerciveness exercised by the modern state leads....to fossilization, implosion, ultimately the disintegration of the social...the societies administered by the welfare state are ultimately based on a legitimacy of the lowest common denominator....the state, which now regulates daily life, and which becomes confused with society, is reduced to being a system; as such it is taken for granted by the de-politicised masses, for whom the election of a government has ever less significance. (op cit. p.12) This critique seems to me in large part timely and valid. The ideological split which existed at the inception of the modern state as described by Faye and de Benoist certainly plays a major role in the history of the state and in the different forms the state has taken. Nevertheless this is not the only ideological divide which exists concerning theories of the state and to imply that it is is to suggest that the only alternative to the modern welfare state and its accompanying "statism" be either a total rejection of the state, as favoured by libertarians and seen by Faye and de Benoist as nothing more than classic liberalism in modern clothes, or a return to the ideological roots of what Evola called the "true state", the political state, the nation state as conceived by de Gaulle or indeed the Imperium Romanum. This means raising the authority of the state to a point of absolute authority. Less inclined to intervene in the economy, the state compensates for its loss of weight here by subordinating economics to politics and vigorously asserting its political prerogatives while also reserving the right to intervene in economic affairs whenever the interests of the nation as a whole are deemed (by the state of course) to be at stake. Seen from the perspective of two rival theories of the state, one "statist" the other "Caesarist", one economic and individualist, the other political and national, the closest to a "pure" realisation of the latter concept took place in the fascist-Imperialist tradition, according to which the state claims absolute political and ultimate economic prerogative, the state being embodied not in the law but in the "strong man" the "Caesar", the "Leader", who has been chosen by the Heavens to accomplish not so much a task as a destiny and this takes priority over rationalism, utilitarianism and materialism in affairs of state. If the raison d'etre of the liberal state is Progress, that of the fascist state is War. What both perspectives share is a belief in growth, be it growth in material prosperity or growth in political might, through, respectively, economic or military aggrandizement. This view of the state is Spengler's. For Spengler, man, a beast of prey par excellence affirms himself by the affirmation of his avidity, of which his technical achievement is the means and the symbol. But is this the only fundamental ideological division concerning a theory of the state? The political State versus "statism"? Faye and de Benoist imply as much. This obliges us when discussing theories of the state to class together liberalism, libertarianism, anarchism and Marxism, by virtue of their common rejection of the sovereignty of the state and their faith in individual betterment. This is what Faye and de Benoist do. They claim that this contractual ideology of the state produces not the desired withering away of the state but on the contrary an expansionist "statism". Notably absent from this theory (of the ideological antithesis running through the genealogy of theories of the state) is any reference to the theocratic state, to the relationship of state to tribe and to nation, to the notion of the ideal state or "Utopia", and, perhaps most significantly of all, to theories of the relationship of the state to Nature. The antithesis between "classical" and "welfare" state certainly exists but it is not the only way of classifying theories of the state. In their article Faye and de Benoist do not mention two important ideological or theoretical divides which also exist in theories of the state and which cut across that of "classical state" versus "statism". Firstly, there is the division between notions of the state in which Man is deemed to possess some kind of immutable "human nature" which can be realised, retrieved or lost by the state, against a theory of the state based on a belief in individual human progress, in which the role played by the state is one of either improving Man or spoiling him, enabling him, (in optimal circumstances) to achieve ever greater rationality, sapience and ultimately happiness, thanks to the civilizing process of such societies as flourish in the well managed state. Is there an immutable "human nature" or is there not? The view that there is generally produces a broadly politically "reactionary" or "conservative" attitude to the state. It is this that which we find in Plato, Aristotle, Thomas More (Utopia), Edmund Burke down to the anti-scienticism of Theodore Roszac and the modern Greens. It is a moral theory because it postulates the notion of a pre-existing, non-relative and immutable "good" in the light of which the state must be judged. It would include the Islamic conception of the state, too, in which the state is only legitimate when it is the legal tongue and arm of Al Haqq, 'the Truth-in-Faith' of revelation. It would include the Catholic notion of the state as exemplified in Saint Augustin's Civitas Dei and implied in the Roman Pontiff's claims down the centuries to represent God on earth, and would also include Calvin's Geneva, which, in the subordination of the secular to the ecclesiastical authorities, bore close resemblance to the Islamic notion of the true state. According to this conception, the state should represent the highest good possible on earth and strive to fulfill that good, which is God's will and therefore "true destiny". Men may only be united in the one vision, the one faith. According to such a view of the state, taken to an extreme (which extreme separates the theocratic from merely conservative and religious state), the exploitation of the power of the state for personal aggrandizement is an intolerable "decadence" of the state to which the only solution is revolution. While obedience to the "true" state is unconditional, it is the duty of man to do his utmost to overthrow a decadent or "illegitimate" state, the state being "true" where and when it follows the path laid down by God/the Heavens and "illegitimate" where it has become the tool of personal ambitions. For Western theories of the state this has made it itself felt through the strong influence of the Bible and the notion of a purity in public affairs which can be won back through revolution. The desired "cleansing" of the body politic, whether racial or ideological in inspiration, has decidedly religious overtones, to say the least. The "progressivist" "relativist" view aligned against this would include socialism, (except for Marxism, which includes something of both elements being at once progressivist yet ultimately religious) liberalism and strange as it may seem, fascism, as distinct from racialist or national-socialist conceptions of the state. There is a third important ideological antithesis, namely between the perception of the state as an organic phenomenon, originating naturally and fulfilled when most closely reflecting the harmony of nature, most "decadent" when divorced from that harmony, against a theory of the state as something inorganic, in which the state is on the contrary, seen as an improvement upon nature. One may also designate these two conceptions of the state as respectively cultural and contractual. One may prefer to consider this third antithesis as a version of the second, for (2) and (3) are closer to one another than either is to the ideological distinction noted by Faye and de Benoist. There is however, an essential difference, (between the second and third antitheses) and that is that the one is a conflict between two notions of the human individual, the other is a conflict between two notions of human society. The third antagonism would place on the one hand all notions of the state as something introduced to society opposed to all views of society and the state as integral aspects of human intercourse. The latter view would be especially suspicious of all moves away from social harmony and towards social mobilisation, be it under economic or political constraint. What the two sides of the argument concerning the state share in the Faye de Benoist paradigm, is a belief in the necessity of change. What both sides share in the second paradigm is a belief in absolute good and evil. What both sides share in the third paradigm is a striving towards an idea of what is the optimal political association for any given group of human beings. The upsurge in libertarian-inspired hostility to the state as such has been accompanied by very persuasive arguments, which most socialists and proponents of the welfare state generally have been conspicuously unwilling to seriously discuss, contenting themselves with disingenuously pointing out the failures of certain libertarian/monetarist experiments in practice (the "failure of Reaganism" the "failure of Chile" etc). But if the "proof of the pudding" is to be the argument, then the champions of the "Nanny State" have a record even worse than their free-market opponents. Everywhere that wide scale nationalizations have been introduced, not to speak of collectivization of industry and agriculture (associated, not without reason, with state organized genocide in countries like China, Cambodia and the Ukraine) economic mayhem has followed. The total "Nanny State", the state which affirms its prerogative to determine the political and social destiny of the nation from A to Z while at the same time claiming legitimacy in a "scientific" theory (dialectical materialism) in a word, Marxist-Leninism, has been totally discredited. But libertarianism shares with its "statist" foe a disbelief that there is ultimately any higher good than the individual. Here Faye and de Benoist rightly point to the association of all currents of thought which make individual man and his welfare the highest aim of the state. To criticize the state which places the individual at the centre of the world stage and the end of all political and economic endeavour is not to say that the state should be unconcerned with the welfare of its subjects. As an individual I am directly concerned with the satisfaction of personal wants and to ignore them or sacrifice them for some greater good requires a supreme effort. To impose total and permanent sacrifice on human who have a high level of consciousness of their individual personality is unnatural and cruel. But we all know that "no man is an island" and that it is inconceivable for Homo sapiens to achieve anything (even the perpetuation of the species) behaving as if he were. Libertarians know this of course, but their notion of the state, founded in Locke, and to a lesser extent in Hobbes, is that social association is first and foremost useful rather than natural. The difference is one of emphasis but nevertheless very important. If the state is useful rather than natural, then it is inorganic, it can be traced back to a hypothetical contract, the result of a negotiated agreement between free men. According to this theory of the state the ultimate authority is the law and the state has no right to impose any form of imperative which conflicts with its contractual obligations as established by precedent or law. Proponents of this contractual notion of the state have always been quick to warn of the dire consequences of falling back into a state of anarchy or lawlessness on the one hand or too much state power on the other. In this respect, there is a difference between democratic socialists and their free-market opponents, for while both believe in law as a necessary protection against injustice, the one believes that the state should be the prime mover of laws, the other believes that contracts at the level of the individual are preferable to laws administered by the state. But common to both and common to fascism too, is faith in science. (Scratch an anti-scientific "fascist" and you will invariably find another ideological creature not far below the surface. Instinctive hostility to science and instinctive admiration for fascism are wholly incompatible). The captain of industry, like the captain of the state, imposes his private will on matter, for that is the imperative of his existence. He is "beyond Good and Evil". An excellent example of such a figure in literature is Gerald Crich in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love who takes over the mining concern from his utilitarian farmer. His life is his will, the will to dominate, but it is a blind will. It involves the submission of nature to the machine. This is the "new man" of Stalinism and fascism and his destiny is realised in the new state. Culturally it was expressed in Futurism, where Bolshevism and Fascism become indistinguishable in their lust for the new, the clean, the technical. The state then must work like a factory, indeed the state is a factory and the Captain of State and the Captain of industry become indistinguishable. The state is centralized, for the structure of the state resembles the structure of a factory. Everything must have its exact place and exact role. Everything is compartmentalized. Democratic socialism and liberalism have historically accepted less ruthless versions of precisely the same attitude towards the state. Where they differ is in rejecting the theoretical ideal "Man" in favour of the "Voter". The citizen is replaced by the consumer but the sterile and contractual notion of the state is the same. Now, the citizen is the customer of the state, the state being not unlike the "Closed Shop" of British Unionism. Membership is compulsory, but all will benefit from such enforced solidarity. Who should be favoured by the state? Here we have another division, the socialists and liberals favouring the support of the weak by the imposition of the strength of the state. Opposed to this is the belief that the state should do the very opposite, either by "letting nature take its course" or by favouring the support of the strong by the imposition of the strength of the state. Thus the submission of the weak to the will of the strong in a Darwinian struggle of the fittest links anarcho-liberalism to fascism. (This was the theme of Jack London's famous novel The Iron Heel.) But libertarians do not believe that the state can improve upon the "natural course of events" in this respect. Libertarians, who tend to condemn all restraint as inherently "fascist" (other than the restraints of fortune and ability of course, which are "natural") seek to dismantle the state to remove the danger of one individual imposing his power in a manner which is liable to interfere with the "freedom" which is the basis, as they see it, of economic efficiency. In other words, it is not in their view of human nature that they differ from those who believe in the strong state, but in their views as to the purpose of association. For the libertarian it is efficiency and progress of the free contract holder. (The fascist is little interested in contracts!) In both cases however, the name of the game is power. "Do what Thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Shall the doing be accomplished with the iron heel or the irrevocable contract? Therein lies the essential difference. In respect of the state absolute antagonists, but in respect of their view of the driving force of human life, and therefore their attitude to those who favour a state in which Man is humble before Nature, the fascist and libertarian are hard to differentiate. "Nature", Rousseau tells us, "does not lie" and it is to nature that theoreticians of the state turn when propounding their beliefs as to what the state should be. Rousseau sought to establish the essential nature of man by considering man divested of all the accoutrements of civilization. The much ridiculed "noble savage" which Rousseau used as the point of departure for his investigation of the origins of social inequality, was not, as been often suggested, modeled on savages observed in the state of nature in his day; Rousseau explicitly insists that such savages had already been "corrupted" by various social attributes. Rousseau's "noble savage" is a hypothesis, the first man, "Adam" in the Garden of Man, in this case a Garden of Eden without God. The role of the state, for Rousseau, is to restore so far as possible, the pre-lapsian joy of man in his "natural state". Laws were the first stage in the progression of institionalised inequality, whereas in nature each man is socially the equal of his brother. (Rousseau, unlike Marx, was very careful to distinguish between social and natural inequality.) Strength in the course of time is transformed into "right" and obedience into "duty". Man is neither "naturally" good nor evil. Here Rousseau parts company with Hobbes, who also began from a model of man in the condition of nature but for whom the natural condition was so dire that to save himself from himself and the nature "red in tooth and claw" into which he is originally born, man does well to submit by contract to the protective strength of an omnipotent sovereign. In both cases, though, the role of the state is to protect man from himself. But who decides what the state decides? Rousseau's insistence that man should be "forced to be free" has for many, distinctly ominous overtones in the wake of our experience of certain modern states. Hobbes may be taken as the supreme example of the defender of the strong state. His view of man recalls that of Stirner and Nietzsche: we are possessed by a restless desire for power and domination but are equipped with very different faculties for the fulfillment of our ambitions. Our more "gentle passions" as Hobbes called them, such as love, grow weaker to the extent that anarchy prevails in society while our violent passions grow correspondingly stronger. In view of certain historical experiences, such as the Thirty Years' War, where the state more or less ceased to exist over large parts of Germany, and the most ghastly misery was the result for nearly the entire population, Hobbes' view that only an omnipotent sovereign ruler can save us from ourselves had much to be said for it. The fear of a "breakdown of law and order" which haunts the "law abiding citizen" in modern societies stems from this and such "Hobbesian" fear of anarchy was and could be in the future the springboard for popular support for the man with the iron fist. But Hobbes' theory of the state, like that of Locke or any believer in majority rule is contractual. The state is the guarantor that each man will adhere to obligations which are advantageous to the individual only provided that everyone adheres to them. The state is there to foresee and ensure that each person does keep his obligations and to do so the state must be the ultimate authority in all matters (except in the arbitrary taking of life, in which situation the citizen could defend himself but given that the Hobbesian state would invest the ruler with the right to deprive a citizen of his livelihood, this can hardly be described as a significant limitation of state power). The state has supreme authority so that it has no interest to protect or represent and justice can be seen to be done. This is an important point, for it is precisely a point of crisis in the modern state, that this kind of justice is not seen to be done. A simple example: as a user of a public transport system I am able to see the sense of paying for my ticket but I shall become progressively less inclined to pay for my own ticket the greater the number of passengers whom I notice who do not pay for their ticket and get away with it. Obedience to the law and ultimately respect for the state itself is to a large extent determined by the extent to which it is perceived that such obedience and such respect is the norm. From this it can be seen that the decline of state legitimacy tends to be self perpetuating. The more Mr. H. Citizen sees others being dishonest or "cutting corners" and not being caught, the more his sense of a bond between himself and the law, and ultimately the state, is weakened. This has reached an especially dramatic level in the modern state in the matter of paying taxes. The evasion of tax payments has become socially acceptable to the point that honesty is abnormal, and would, if practiced, lead many citizens to ruin, for the modern state now invites tax evasion as a natural part of business life and includes tax fraud as a norm to be taking into account when assessing fair taxes. A surer indication of the decadence of the modern state can hardly be imagined. Hobbes made no attempt in his writings to distinguish between the qualities of human desires. He merely noted that they were there and that they compelled human beings to act in certain ways. This materialist, thoroughly unreligious view of society and the state was was also to be that of Bentham and Spencer. The belief that "might is right" takes two directions so far as theories of the state are concerned. Where this belief dominated a view of the state as having a primarily political function we move towards fascism, but where the view of the state is primarily economic we move towards laissez-faire liberalism. In both cases there is the rejection of the belief that authority or "right" can exist outside the facts of the relationship of power which exists between individuals in society. To be fair, most libertarians would assert the right to life and property, as originally laid down in the writings of John Locke, but this is not an organic "right" but the result of an original contract. Whether a man has the right to sell himself into slavery is a ticklish one for the libertarian, but the tendency would be to conclude that he did. A problem here is that when one take the argument to the literal deduction that all government and all state which can appeal to the contractual authority of the popular vote is legitimate, a popularly elected fascist government may not be legitimately opposed, unless by appealing to "rights" which are not contractual, but that of course, begs the question: where do such natural "rights" originate? From the same grim view of human nature we thus arrive at two possible views of the state as diametrically opposed as it is possible to be: veneration or repudiation of the very principle! The best known champion of the repudiation of the welfare state was Sir Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Spencer wrote at a time of immensely significant geological and biological discoveries (Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, were published only about 40 years before his own famous Man Versus the State) in 1884. Religion, ethics, principles at odds with human reason were characterised by many thinkers of the time as fraudulent. In Spencer's mischievous phrase, "There is no God but the Unknowable and Herbert Spencer is his profit." Society is a never ending progress of discovery. Organisms naturally tend to diversify, therefore evolution is natural and to be welcomed in society. The state is replacing the Church as the force of reaction, according to Spencer, for with its misapplied charity towards the unsuccessful, it impedes the natural evolution of man. Theories which gave comfort to the believers in the state were so many fancy ways of enslaving men. But evolutionist theories do not necessarily involve an immediate rejection of the state. For Marx, also a materialist evolutionist, the state has to be first controlled (by means of an international dictatorship) before it can be, sine die, abolished. Both Spencer and Marx, however, believed in the ultimate dissolution of the state. Their ideal of the free man was man free of the state, free of everything which in human history has made the state necessary. For one this was to be accomplished by the dictatorship of one class within the state for the time it would be necessary to extirpate the source of the division of labour, for the other, the best way to defeat the state was simply to dismantle it and let nature take its course. By an ironic twist of fate these two champions of Progress and Evolution lie side by side (I do not say rest) in Highgate cemetery. Is individual variety desirable or not? This question is crucial to any approach to the state. For thinkers such as Plato and Rousseau and indeed all thinkers whose view of the state was "contractual" and this includes Hobbes (of whom Rousseau wrote enigmatically that he was praised for where he should have been condemned and condemned where he should have been praised) and views based on a state founded on a "covenant" between God and Man or between men, the answer must be "No". The driving force here is the eradication of differences, collective or individual, which threaten to undermine the stability of the state. Homogeneity is the aim, not heterogeneity. The highest virtues of the statesman are simplicity and virtue: we find this in Plato's Guardians, in the citizens of More's Utopia, in Rousseau's noble savage, in the "incorruptible" Robespierre, the leaders of Iran, themselves influenced by the French Revolution, the idealism of socialists like Nasser and so on. Here the notion, implied by evolutionist theories of the state, that "might is right" is a kind of tautology, is emphatically rejected. The state may certainly be in the wrong hands and in our corruptible world very often is in the wrong hands. The supreme ruler is a "guardian" (cf. Plato), a shepherd (cf. More) or the "voice of the general will" (cf. Rousseau). Supreme powers are claimed by the individual in the name of the people. Needless to say, it is not always easy to distinguish between genuine belief, cant and cynical manipulation of doctrines. It is said that both Lenin and Mussolini were avid readers of Machiavelli, whose writing is characterised by a refining of the art of statecraft to the survival of the fittest devoid of any presuppositions concerning the purpose of it all. Another notion of the state which needs to be mentioned at this conjuncture is that of "progressivist Imperialism" according to which a dictatorship is necessary for certain peoples at a certain stage of evolution towards a "higher level" of civilization. Most black African states operate on just this principle, although how far this is truly a principle and how far a convenient justification for dictators whose only understanding of state legitimacy is indeed that of "might is right", is a point of interpretation which is likely to play an important (and bloody) role in African politics for many years to come. Rousseau's theory of the state was also one in which the aim is seen as homogeneity, virtue, simplicity imposed by state authority. But in contrast to Hobbes or Plato he believed there was a crucial distinction to be made between the subject and the citizen. The individual should be simultaneously subject and citizen, that is to say a part of the General Will but also subject to its decisions. In a despotism those who lived within the range of the power of the state were subjects but not citizens, that is to say, they did not share in the formation of the will of the state but were subjected to it. This fundamental notion of what constituted an illegitimate state was echoed in the cry of the American rebels, "no taxation without representation!" Rousseau begins with the hypothesis of an ideal state of nature which should be the guiding light of the state, even though that state is only a hypothesis and can never be retrieved in any case. The religious quality of such a theory of the state is obvious and Rousseau's theory is arguably little more than a secular adaptation of the the Christian or Islamic "city of God"; thus the Iranian and French revolutions and their ideal of the state are in many ways identical. The state of Nature can never be achieved again, says Rousseau, but we do the best we can with a state on earth in which interests are subjected to the General Will, which is more than the Will of all. The greatest good, for Rousseau, as for Marx, consisted in two things, freedom and equality. But Rousseau's theory of the state was not internationalist as Marx's was. Freedom and equality for Rousseau were to be attained in "each country according to the local situation and character and history of the inhabitants". So far as the forms of government are concerned, Rousseau is astonishingly pragmatic. He saw a direct relation between form and size, noting well before anybody had thought of a "Fourth World" that "democracy is best suited to the small state, aristocracy to the medium and monarchy to larger states". Montesquieu, whose face currently adorns the French 200 Franc note, noted in L'esprit des Lois that "since freedom is not a fruit that governs in all climates, it is not within the reach of all people." Such relativism did not characterize either the French or Russian revolutions, for whom "exporting the Revolution" was a major preoccupation from the Year Zero. Rousseau was also a romantic, and as such entirely at odds with the view of the state with which he is generally associated. In his novel La Nouvelle Heloise the hero says, "I am never less alone than when I am alone. I am only alone in the crowd." In other words, solitude is not a matter of physical isolation but moral isolation, a matter of empathy. No wonder that many leftists regard Rousseau with deep suspicion. Diderot's Le Fils Naturel points to the moral dangers of just such an attitude as this. Certainly there was little notion of the rights of the individual vis-a-vis the citizenry once the French Revolution was in full swing. It is a characteristic of the modern state that it abhors unfilled space, the incomplete and the aberrant. It is the fate of all romantics to be torn between the poles of virtue and liberty, the one inclining them towards the state, the other driving them away. Rousseau is a consummate example of this dichotomy. In his attitude to science and progress Rousseau departed from the Enlightenment school entirely. His hostility to learning verged on fanaticism; his attitude to science was as reactionary as it is possible to be. He had no notion of a "universal right", since he believed, or at least wrote as though he believed, that the structure of the state must be adapted to natural and geographical circumstances. For Rousseau, the optimal state was a small state and he signalled out Corsica and the Swiss cantons for especial favour. At the same time he believed that the surest sign of the health of the state was the rate of increase in its population. He seemed unaware of any potential conflict between the small state and the need of said state to expand if it were enjoying a rapid population growth, as according to Rousseau it necessarily would be. But many theories of the modern state, many aspects of the modern state itself, would have been unthinkable but for the massive population growth of the last three centuries. Ignorance, innocence and poverty are the great virtues championed by Rousseau. Contrary to what some writers have suggested, Rousseau's views are clearly not dominant today and it hardly makes sense to call the champion of the small state and individual solitude, the "father of leftism", which appears to have been the view of Professor Revilo Oliver, among many others. His ideals more closely correspond to those of Savanorola or any number of religious thinkers and in more recent times the Greens. The notion of the state as incorporated in the American Constitution bears the mark of Rousseau more surely than the French Revolution, even down to the contradiction between love of the great outdoors and the hope to vastly increase the population. George Washington's deep distrust of parties and factions certainly bears the mark of Rousseau's condemnation of factionalism in Le Contrat Social. Of course it was not long before party and faction came to dominate American political life. Where the American Constitution (the Declaration of Independence is another matter) differed in its model of the state from anything Rousseau had ever propounded was in its fanatical belief in evolution and progress, a belief which was to have murderous consequences both for raw nature and for the indigenous population and for those settlers who wished to preserve a feudalistic, non-progressivist way of life. The ideal of the American revolutionary was Benjamin Franklin, scientist and statesman in one, of whom Turgot said "(he was)... the modern Prometheus...who snatched lightening from the heavens and scepters from kings." The evolutive view of the state is the official orthodoxy of our time, characterised by the worship of science. As the bill is run up however, notably in the destruction of the non-human part of the planet in order to make way for Jeremy Bentham's "greatest happiness of the greatest number" regardless of any criterion for judging the value of that number, this rational utilitarianism, the "consensus of values" which underlies parliamentary democracy and the modern notion of the omnipotent welfare state which it serves, is coming under attack. It is under attack from all those whose view of the state is not progressivist, inorganic, contractural or utilitarian. I have argued that it is simplistic to reduce opposition to the modern state to a conception of the state which is "political" as opposed to "economic". Similarly, the paradigm of "left" and "right" in political theory, and especially where notions of the state are concerned, are wholly inadequate. The very term "liberal" so often used by the champions of the strong state to describe those who favour a weak state or no state, is glib and unworthy of the intellectually discriminating, for "liberal" must here serve to cover at least three different attitudes towards the state. What might be termed traditional liberalism consists of an "open ended" attitude to the state and its development opposed to the conservative tendency to rely on tradition. There is not necessarily an unbridgeable gap here. Both believe in a limited state and both believe that the whole is more than the sum of the parts but that the parts themselves are not worthless nor expendable, other than in exceptional circumstances, such as war. In recent times the German thinker Othmar Spann (1878-1950), in opposition to the Vienna Circle as characterised by Rudolph Carnap, emphasised the totality of all being and preached "small is beautiful" at a time when all political leaders from Hitler to Rooseveldt to Stalin, were set on the opposite, expansionist, course. In arguments recalling Edmund Burke's detraction of the French Revolution, Spann emphasizes that a state founded on revolution is invariably bad, since it cuts man's links with the past which links make society and ultimately the state function well in the first place. The role of the state is to protect and not to destroy the roots of society. The state emerges through a desire to cooperate, not as Hobbes maintained, through fear. Here in both conservative and liberal notions of the state, some notion of an immutable good towards which the state and citizen should strive, and by which both can be measured, is adhered to. The negative side to this is a tendency towards a universalist model of the state and right and wrong in general, a tendency towards a universally applicable model of the ideal society and the ideal state. "Patriotic" Americans today are enthused with this faith in the timeless and placeless "just" state which also had an importaant influence on European Imperialism in the last century and the assumption of the so-called "white man's burden". This is not that "liberalism" which, in the context of their paradigm of a fundamental antagonism between "political" and "economic" theories of the state, Faye and de Benoist associate with Marxism, (on the grounds that both look forward to the emancipation/alienation of the individual through the abolition or withering away of the state). This is libertarianism, which like anarchism and Marxism, but unlike classical liberalism, does not believe that the power of the state should be a matter of compromise because of the weaknesses of human nature. The state has no right to try to train human nature, according to the Anarchist and the libertarian, while for the Marxist the very notion that human nature even exists independently of the prevailing mode of production protected by the state is a class determined value judgement. For the Marxist and the libertarian then, the power of the state is the expression of a certain relationship between various power interests and nothing more. The notion of permanent values and therefore of a permanent state is quite alien to this perspective. The state is seen as ephemeral and not an integral element of human association. Thus Benjamin Constant in his critique of Rousseau in Principes de politique insisted that there were certain "human rights" which exist prior to and independently of the state. But it is John Locke whose works first articulated what is today an influential current of thought. The preservation of property is the chief end of man's association in the commonwealth. ( Second Treatise of Government p.124 Bantam ed.) When all is said and done this means that society and every kind of behaviour is "ideally" dominated by one element: money. This is epitomised by the hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged making the "sign of the dollar" over the prosperous land of her capitalist Utopia. The role of the politician decreases as this notion of the state is realised. Increasingly politicians are obliged to ape the sales promoters and advertisers whose activities dominate the social scene. This is the kind of society which increasingly prevails in the West today. To some extent it is fair to characterise "right/left" political debate today as nothing other than a dog fight between Locke's principles of the sanctity of property on the one hand and Benthamite utilitarianism on the other. Liberal attitudes to the state can be yet further divided between the pragmatic economic liberalism of the school of Locke and Mill, which saw the abolition of the state as an un-realizable ideal, and libertarianism pure and simple which does not view this as an ideal but as a desirable and attainable end. The state is here associated with theft and serfdom. For the out and out libertarian, the state should be abolished, and the sooner the better. Modern theorists of this school of thought include the much admired Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises; the latter has gone so far as to claim that the very notion of solidarity is an indication of, as he puts it, "failure in the game of life." Taxation, in the words of one writer for the Libertarian Alliance, is "highway robbery", (Income Tax, be it noted, was first levied in England by a Liberal administration) economic theories are hocus-pocus, state laws for the regulation of the economy and protection of worker or customer incipient slavery. If the state has any function at all, it is to dismantle the edifices and laws created by the state! Like Marxism to socialism, so libertarianism to traditional liberalism and radicalism: compromise with the enemy is death of the ideal. The notion that the state should intervene to counteract social injustice is anathema to the libertarian, yet state measures such as "positive discrimination" are widely conceived as being liberal initiatives. The reluctance of writers like Faye to make any sensible distinction between such radically different attitudes to the state as those of the libertarian and the "liberal democrat", labeling them all "liberals", constitutes a very misleading oversimplification of the matter indeed. The same sloppy semantics occurs among the coiners of the term "liberal capitalism" used especially by those who are hostile to tolerance and internationalism. Do such persons wish to say they are in favour of "illiberal capitalism" or "liberal socialism", whatever such creatures may be? To be blunt, the use of the blanket term "liberal" in this context serves the end of bracketing together many diverse theories of the state in order to champion a theory of the state which is dynamic, progressive and amoral, for the only aspect of their attitude to the state which liberal, libertarian, Green, Anarchist and religious theorist do have in common is a hostility to an amoral admiration for the state for the sake of its power alone, regardless of ulterior values. A Tito or an Attaturk are thus more worthy of admiration than a Che Guevera or General de Rivera. Ideology is only a tool of power. This is the view of the state which was dominant in Marxist-Leninism and constitutes the essence of fascism. The state is admired in so far as it strong, the stronger the better. The use of strength is an indication of fidelity to the ruthless amorality of nature. The state and with it, human life itself is endowed with no higher meaning than the opportunity to affirm the will to power of the strong over the weak. The way is thereafter open for the affirmation of the strong sovereign state based on the spiritual strength of tradition or religion and the physical strength of technics, but both are made to serve the individual will being nothing more than instruments in the attainment and maintenance of power. An uncompromisingly anthrocentric view of the world this, its ideal state exploitative, collectivist, scientific, irrational. This notion of the sovereign state, irrational but taking full advantage of every discovery of science, has no notion of even the question "is this state to the advantage of the individual"? The question is meaningless in such a perspective, because to the extent that the state is realised the individual as we know him ceases to exist. The state serves itself and the individual is little more than fuel to the Moloch of Blood and Iron, so, if liberal fears of the Moloch state are frequently exaggerated, they are nevertheless not unfounded. Of course, torture, exploitation and oppression are not unique to the state (as anarchists and libertarians sometimes seem to believe) nor on the other hand simply the consequence of weak rule (as Hobbes and many conservative inclined writers since him have tended to believe). For those for whom the strong state is in itself desirable, the inadequacies of "liberal" theories of the state may be a pretext for arguments, superficially pragmatic, in favour of "tough measures". These "tough measures" may then be more concerned with moving towards the strong state than to the solution of the given problem which calls them into being. A fascination for the strong man has lead many who are liberal with their head to be illiberal with their heart: the Stalin cult, often paraded by its Western liberal adherents as an indication of intellectual generosity, was a case in point. The national-socialist Savitri Devi in her book The Lightening and the Sun expressed admiration for Stalin, an admiration which can hardly be interpreted in any other way. Discipline, terror, duty, have a "clean" beauty all their own, both for those who seek in them a model to imitate (the would be future leader) and those who lust with admiration for what they themselves entirely lack. The cynical adulation of the state by the fascist is not so very far from the cynical rejection of the state by the libertarian, as we have seen. The national-socialist attitude, however, contrary to what is generally believed, showed in its brief history tendencies at marked variance with its predominant fascistic adulation of the state for the state's sake. Indeed, national-socialism, in its attitude to the state, is far from being purely fascist at heart, although it was largely fascist in practice. The notion of the organic community of the Volk, rooted in nature, is ultimately incompatible with the modernistic fascist notion of the technocratic super-state. The respect for nature which existed within the national-socialist world view was entirely at odds with the devotion to the will to power in man to dominate and mould nature. The belief in the goodness and virtue of a Volk is ultimately incompatible with the worship of strength and success for their own sake. The discrepancy between the apologia for peace and the rural idyll on the one hand and the glorification of war and conquest on the other in the history of the national-socialist state can hardly be overlooked, but historians generally interpret this as proof of the cynicism of fascism in general and Adolph Hitler in particular and do not see it for what it was: evidence of a breach between two theories of the state, one organic and one inorganic, which struggled for the soul of national-socialism. Inevitably perhaps, the latter, truly fascist, view of the state came to dominate the entire spectrum of state activity in Germany. "Gerald Crich" turned the state into a frenzied factory. Man is now the supreme Raubtier of creation, the state his head and technics his claws. The technical, I should say "inorganic" notion of the state, be it "fascist", "socialist" or "liberal" by its nature consumes anything which falls within its grasp as it pursues the course of self propelled growth. All inorganic notions of the state, that is to say, a belief that the state does not emerge from nature but is imposed upon it, are inherently more destructive than constructive. In most cases the concept of the inorganic state is also a concept of a contractual state. There is a covenant between ruler and ruled. The leader will lead the people to glory, fame and conquest. If he fails then the state has failed. Or, there is an agreement between politician and citizen: the politician produce the goodies or if he fails to do so the voters vote him out. In each case, responsibility is based upon performance according to a list of promises. This is true also of religious based concepts of the state. Here the people or the state have made a covenant with God not man, but the same notion of the state being the vehicle by means of which the promises are kept, applies in both cases. The modern voter, the fascist militant, the chosen tribes of Israel, the religious revolutionary of every kind, they are all fuelled on promises, very material promises in most cases. Their spokesmen promise them a reward, namely the material benefits of power. In every case, the state is ultimately the fulfillment of a contractual agreement, or, as the New Testament puts it, "covenant". But is it for the state or for the market to be the arena of the struggle of life? "The state", says the fascist; "the market" says the libertarian. "They are ultimately one" , says the Marxist. "Both are subordinate to the folk", says the believer in the organic state, for whom the state is neither made nor destroyed by the makers of contracts. In the West the rule of modern "Caesars" predicted by Spengler as dominating the state in the declining epoch of "Faustian" culture appeared only for a short while. Collectivity under the direction of just one man or group of men has given way to the collectivity of the welfare state. No limits seem to be set to the power of the universal welfare state. Economically, all nations are locked in one system. Economic nationalism has proved much harder to maintain than political nationalism. The socialisation of the means of production, introduced by the state with no prior establishment of a prior feeling of nationhood and organic loyalty to the state (Marxist ideology of course, rejected such "irrationality" out of hand), turned out to be a flop at the best, at worst a murderous fiasco. On the other hand, despite the failure of socialist theories of the state when put into practice, the alternative cut-throat view of society favoured by the libertarian rejecters of the state has found little favour in societies whose members associate, rightly or wrongly, their standard of living and even more their security, with the watch-dog state. But as the modern state has advanced its powers and increased its financial demands inexorably, whatever the political colour of the government, it has become clear that power in the modern state is more a matter of economics than politics. Burnham's managers ( The Managerial Revolution) not the titled heads of state seem to determine the course of events in the modern state, especially the economic course. (Compare Mrs. Thatcher's success in going to war with the Argentine with her failure to stop the move towards European economic union. Heads of state enjoy more political than economic power.) Political parties are now hardly distinguishable from interest lobbies. As the world becomes more like one city every day, the state retreats into what has been called the "corporate elite" of decision makers. The politician is an insurance salesman. Freedom and equality coexist in the modern state in a relationship of uneasy tension. A total lack of civic spirit paralyses society, yet the state is omnipresent today. Now within Leviathan so to speak, we are no longer able to make out the outlines of the state within which we are immersed. The state effectively receives its tribute thanks to its opacity. but events in Eastern Europe have shown that the nation is still a potential factor in the destiny of the state. The state as it exists in Western societies is inorganic, contractual, utilitarian and progressivist. Loyalty in the form of premium payments (i.e. taxes) is conditional upon the state providing the "cover" expected of any respectable insurance company. The pressure on the nation state to "merge" corresponds to the pressure in the business world on businesses to grow or perish. But the increasing anonymity which modern society engenders makes the state ever more reliant on material prosperity to maintain broad acquiescence. Disillusionment with the modern state however is increasing. All over the Western world, while group after group of sundry alternative political initiatives shatter on the democratic rock of the establishment, the tide water of abstensionism inexorably rises. In many Western countries over half those eligible to vote do not do so. As the economic and ecological cost of supporting an ever increasing world population with ever increasing expectations increases, the challenge to the economic sovereignty of the modern state will become louder. Whether it is tax strikes against a war, the protest by Green Peace against tax-break company car owners, the libertarian protest against income tax, the near universal rejection of the inherent morality of paying tax to the modern state, the rampant and growing dishonesty of modern society, whether it is the never ending unrest in the face of the migration of peoples from the "third World" to the West, the consequence of an "open door" policy towards the nation-state, which is as much as to say the state as enemy of the nation, whether it is the growing cynicism towards all politicians involved in what is called the "democratic process", whether it is the growing unhappiness in an ever more alienated, ugly and soulless society, everywhere the writing is on the wall: the days of the modern state, the state which worships growth and science for their own sakes and preaches utilitarianism without even attempting to arrive at a plausible notion of happiness, the state which has permitted the huckster to pock his way into every nook and cranny of the sacred heart, the state which has abandoned power to technocrats, the ultimately nihilistic state, has been judged and found wanting. But in the name of what does the state of the future arise? There are many who would gladly re-impose the theocratic state if given the chance. Racialists in America belonging to the Sons of Islam the Church of the Creator and sundry other religiously inspired organizations are waiting in the wings for the collapse of state authority in the United States to introduce their own dictatorships of Mullah or Priest, (and then God help the infidel!). What this view of the state shares with the statism which currently determines political life, for all its differences, is that it too is an imposition upon nature not a branch of nature. But should not the state be, as its name suggests, a condition of permanence in the affairs of men? If we reject the permanence offered by God, in what then do we find it? Without Christianity or Islam is it possible to envisage a state not subject to the vicissitudes of arbitrary rule, the worship of power or growth or both? The answer lies in the acceptance of the state as representing constancy and it does so by leaving an inheritance to succeeding generations in society. Inheritance is not the prerogative of one political doctrine. It is partially conceived in conservatism (inheritance of wisdom) national- socialism (inheritance of race) traditional liberalism (inheritance of justice) traditional religion (inheritance of mores) socialism (inheritance of rights). It is customary for these doctrines to oppose, harass and seek to destroy each other but for the organic state, each element of a tradition in these doctrines is transcendent, precious. Our divisive societies with their competing doctrines are incapable of grasping this. Inheritance assures permanency within the flux which characterizes nature. An organic notion of the state sees the role of the state as ensuring the maintenance of an inheritance. Characteristic of inorganic notions of the state, be they Marxist, fascist or liberal, is their contempt for inheritance and their will to extirpate attachment to what is permanent. If the state does not protect an inheritance, what can? In this sense Rousseau pointed the way to a valuable truth. Human society has taken man out of the state of raw nature for ever-whether this is "good" or "bad" is neither here nor there. That being the case, man tends to seek to destroy what he has inherited in the course of his inevitable breaking of the constraints of nature (it is, so to speak, "in our nature" to break the rules of nature: this is not say that is a "bad" thing for ethics in this case are meaningless unless we believe in a Good and Evil which predates nature, in which case we necessarily believe in a state which approaches as near as possible the will of whatever God it is we believe in). The state in this case seeks to restore that permanence, that consistency. For this reason, the more primitive and simple the race or society of man, the less complex state structures need to be. Indeed, imposing a sophisticated state on a primitive people is tantamount to ethnocide. Not one model of the state is inherently superior, what matters is that the state fulfils its organic role as guarantor of inheritance. The state is a means to an end, namely the preservation and advancement of a community. Here we arrive at a more profound antagonism than that between a "political" and "economic" concept of the state, or between an "absolute" and "limited" state. On the one hand a state for which all is flux and change and power, a state where the end does not extend beyond the personal ambitions of those who profit from it, a state on its own terms fated to fall into contempt, a state whose legitimacy is simply a matter of its being in place or in power. On the other hand is the state as symbol of continuity, which by the inheritance which it guards, reminds even the boldest of its subjects that he is neither more nor less than a link in some great chain. Religion, wisdom, justice, rights and race and not least the home is the inheritance men receive from that true and sacred institution, the organic state. Reproduced From: http://www.stormloader.com/thescorpion/15state.html
Savitri Devi, whose birth name was Maximiani Portas, was one of the most compelling figures to emerge from the wreckage of post-War National Socialism. More than any single figure, it was Devi who would carry the torch of occult National Socialism through the grim period following World War II. Through her writings and her personal example, she would inspire a new generation of National Socialists to explore the occult byways of racial mysticism that were once blazed by such 19th century German figures as Guido von List and such Third Reich figures as Heinrich Himmler. Originally a French citizen, Devi was born on 30 September 1905 of Greek and British parents. Educated in France and in Greece, Devi earned masters’ level degrees in philosophy and science in France in the 1920s, and received a Ph.D. in chemistry on the basis of her dissertation, La Simplicité Mathématique in 1931. Mathematics and science however, held less allure to Devi than did contemporary politics, religious speculation, and of greatest import, the Aryan philosophical and religious traditions of ancient India. India in fact would be her home for much of her life. Before embarking on her spiritual quest, however, Devi took an active interest in politics. Even as a young girl, she was much attracted to Germany and to the German philosophical and intellectual traditions. Appalled by the betrayal of Germany at Versailles following the First World War, as well of the treatment of Greek refugees in the same period, Devi determined to learn more of what she instinctively felt were the deeper realities which determined the seemingly chaotic course of world events. It was during this youthful quest for hidden and suppressed knowledge that Devi acquired her life-long aversion to Judaism. Devi’s anti-Semitism was fed by several currents. First, there was the Bible, and in particular, the Old Testament which she felt was rife with examples of Jewish perfidy. This feeling would be considerably reinforced by reports of Zionist actions in Palestine in the 1920s. In 1929—the year of Arab riots and the killing of a number of Jews in Hebron—she visited Palestine and confirmed for herself the truth of these reports. Her studies brought her into contact with the intellectual anti-Semitism that was the common coin of the realm in the French academy, and this too seems to have been a factor. In this, the work of the intellectual anti-Semite Ernst Renan would be an important influence both in confirming her dim view of the Jews as racial and cultural outsiders and in fixing India and the Aryan myth of origins as the central interest of her life. Of considerable importance too was what she perceived to be the malign role of the Jews in the defeat of Germany in the First World War. This latter stream would come to dominate Devi’s view of the Jews as her admiration for Hitler and the Third Reich grew in the 1930s through the Second World War. Here, Devi seems to have been one of the select few who to actually read Alfred Rosenberg’s verbose and turgid 1930 opus The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Even the Führer would confide that, although he displayed this book prominently on his bedside table, he found it unreadable. Devi however, was enchanted. In the 1930s Devi moved to India and undertook what would prove to be a lifelong study of the classic Indian texts—the Vedas and the Upanishads. From these sources, and from their contemporary manifestations in the caste system, Devi felt that she had found the true sources of the once and future greatness of the Aryan race. In 1940, Devi married a pro-Nazi Indian nationalist named A. K. Mukherji. This gave her a British passport and the possibility of deepening her work for the Third Reich. In Calcutta, the Mukherji home became something of a salon for Allied diplomats and military officers, and whatever intelligence which could be gathered quickly found its way to the German consulate. Devi felt her greatest service to the cause, however, would be in her ongoing research and the book which she was writing which would set out a blue print for the new Aryan religion which she believed would be instituted in Germany after the inevitable Nazi victory. In the event of course, Germany was defeated. Devi’s dream of a global Aryan racial paradise would now never be realized, but through considerable adversity, she held fast to her ideals until her death in 1982. She returned to Europe in 1945, settling in England where her book on the religious heritage of Ancient Egypt, A Son of God, was published and well received in British intellectual and occult circles. It was the work that followed however, the Impeachment of Man, which was finished in London and published in 1946 that stands as a classic in the current world of National Socialism. Radical environmentalism, amounting indeed to a religion of nature, has always been strong in National Socialist thought, and with the wartime defeat, has become as much a trademark of the movement as anti-Semitism and racialist thought. The Impeachment of Man remains the strongest statement of the National Socialist nature religion that may be found today. Opening with epigraphs from Alfred Rosenberg (“Thou shalt love God in all things, animals and plants”) and Josef Goebbels who in a diary entry quotes the Führer’s resolve to create a post-war society that would eschew the eating of meat, the book is a passionate treatise on the rights of animals and of plants, as contrasted with man’s egocentric consumption and destruction of the natural world. The argument is couched in religious terms and the proof texts are drawn from the Aryan Golden Age. The book, long out of print, underwent a revival with a new Noontide Press edition which appeared in 1991. In 1946, Devi moved from England to Iceland. There, the ancient Norse pantheon joined the ancient Indian heritage as a source for Aryan religiosity. Here too Devi anticipated by decades Odinism’s popularization of the Norse/Germanic pantheon as a fitting Aryan racial religion in the post-War movement. Two years later, Devi undertook a more open pro-Nazi course of activism, traveling to occupied Germany and distributing propaganda leaflets. This resulted in her incarceration in 1949. While in jail, Devi expanded one of her leaflets into the book which she considered her magnum opus, Gold in the Furnace. Gold in the Furnace is at once an auto-biography and a dreamy meditation on what could have been. In it, she states explicitly that which until 1948 she had never dared to publicly utter: …I love this land, Germany, as the hallowed cradle of National Socialism; the country that staked its all so that the whole of the Aryan race might stand together in its regained ancestral pride; Hitler’s country…. Because for the last twenty years I have loved and admired Hitler and the German people…I was happy—oh so happy!--thus to express my faith in the superman whom the world has misunderstood and hated and rejected. I was not sorry to lose my freedom for the pleasure of bearing witness to his glory, now, in 1948. Devi was released from prison after six months, and then entered her most productive literary period. The autobiographical Defiance appeared in 1950. Devi’s example served as an inspiration to a new generation of National Socialists when a portion of the book was published in the Winter 1968 edition of the National Socialist World. Gold in the Furnace came out in 1952, followed by another memoir, Pilgrimage in 1958 (although some sources place the publication date as early as 1953). Her most important work, The Lightening and the Sun, appeared in 1956 and a condensed version was published in the premier edition (Spring 1966) of William Pierce’s American Nazi Party intellectual journal National Socialist World. The Lightening and the Sun is a remarkable exposition on occult National Socialism which explicitly deifies Hitler as the savior of the Aryan people. The first words of the book read: To the godlike individual of our times; the Man against time; the greatest European of all times; both Sun and Lightening: ADOLF HITLER. The Lightening and the Sun ranges through the ages, suggesting a religious and political history in which the Third Reich is the apex and the natural culmination of Aryan development. The book ends with at once a cry of despair and an affirmation of hope: Kalki will lead them through the flames of the great end, and into the sunshine of the new Golden Age. We like to hope that the memory of the one-before-the-last and most heroic of all our men against time—Adolf Hitler—will survive at least in songs and symbols. We like to hope that the lords of the age, men of his own blood and faith, will render him divine honors, through rites full of meaning and full of potency, in the cool shade of the endless regrown forests, on the beaches, or upon inviolate mountain peaks, facing the rising sun. As if to belie the heroic tones of her National Socialist dream, the 1950s was an empty time for Devi. While she could escape into the world of her literary dreams, and while she traveled intensively in these years, there remained a terrible void in her life. The man against time and his iron heroes were gone—many were dead, others living in hiding, still others captured and brought to the bar of allied justice. It was not until the 1960s that Devi could allow her hopes of a National Socialist revival to live again. Through the jungle telegraph linking European Nazis, Devi soon got wind of a rising young star on the American scene, George Lincoln Rockwell. Rockwell, who founded the American Nazi Party in 1959, began to correspond with Devi in 1960. It was Devi who introduced Rockwell to the man who would quietly become something of a mentor, the unreconstructed German National Socialist Bruno Ludke. Together with Britain’s Colin Jordan, the three became the core of the World Union of National Socialists—an organization which sought with little success to link together the far-flung National Socialist tribes from throughout the world. The high point of the effort was the 1962 meeting at Cottswald in England which resulted in the Cottswald Agreement, the World Union of National Socialists’ founding document which served as a theoretical blueprint for the revival of a global neo-Nazi movement. Cottswald, in which Savitri Devi served as the representative of France, was the first and last time that Devi and Rockwell would have the opportunity to meet. By all reports, Rockwell was mesmerized by Devi. Here was a living link to the original font of National Socialism—Nazi Germany—and here too was a visionary whose religious vision of National Socialist revival immeasurably deepened and enriched Rockwell’s more narrowly political conception of the movement. Moreover, the fact that Devi was the only woman in the upper echelons of National Socialism at that time was no small matter either. In the end, it mattered little. The World Union of National Socialists never rose above the level of squabbling ‘leaders’ more engaged in internecine plotting than in serious thought of revolutionary change and the institution of a neo-Nazi New Order. Worse, but five short years after Cottswald, Rockwell was dead, felled by bullets from the gun of a disgruntled former follower. The World Union of National Socialists soldiered on for decades, but as a mere shell of the organization envisioned by Rockwell, Ludke, Devi and Jordan. Devi’s remaining years were bleak. Much of it was spent back in mother India with her husband, writing, corresponding and marking time. She was an early convert to the field of holocaust denial, and it was under her influence that such well-known holocaust revisionists of the present day as Ernst Zundel were introduced to the field. Indeed, Devi’s chief contributions to the movement to which she had dedicated her life in the 1970s was through her tireless correspondence to true believers throughout the world. Her personal circumstances did not fare so well, however, and at her death in 1982 was reportedly penniless. In the course of her life, Devi’s achievements, if measured on the scale of her dream of the recreation of a National Socialist revival, were meager. At her death, the world of explicit National Socialism was, if anything, more fragmented and powerless than ever before. But her writings, and the powerful dream of a religio-mystical Aryan Golden Age which they so eloquently convey, are having a powerful impact on the movement, and indeed, beyond the narrow confines of the radical right and into the realms of radical ecology and New Age thought. See also: American Nazi Party; Hitler, Adolf; Jordan, Colin; Ludke, Bruno; Odinism; Pierce, William; religion of nature; Rockwell, George Lincoln; World Union of National Socialists. Further reading: Savitri Devi, “The Lightening and the Sun (A New Edition),” National Socialist World 1 (Spring 1966); Savitri Devi, “Gold in the Furnace,” National Socialist World 3 (Spring 1967); Savitri Devi, “Defiance,” National Socialist World 6 (Winter 1968); Savitri Devi, Impeachment of Man (Costa Mesa, CA: Noontide Press, 1991); Nicholas Goodrick-Clark, Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Occult Neo-Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Fritz Nova, Alfred Rosenberg: Nazi Theorist of the Holocaust (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1986); Phillip Rees, Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990); Frederick J. Simonelli, American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).
Savitri Devi Introduction
To the godlike Individual of our times; the Man against time; the greatest European of all times; both Sun and Lightning: ADOLF HITLER.
The idea of progress — indefinite betterment — is anything but modern. It is probably as old as man's oldest successful attempt to improve his material surroundings and to increase, through technical skill, his capacity of attack and defense. Technical skill, for many centuries at least, has been too precious to be despised. Nay, when displayed to an extraordinary degree, it has more than since been hailed as something almost divine. But apart from the incredible feats of a handful of individuals, the ancients as a whole distinguished themselves in many material achievements. They could boast of the irrigation system in Sumeria; of the construction of pyramids revealing, both in Egypt and, centuries later, in Central America, an amazing knowledge of astronomical data; of the bathrooms and drains in the palace of Knossos; of the invention of the war chariot after that of the bow and arrow, and of the sand clock after that of the sundial — enough to make them dizzy with conceit and overconfident in the destiny of their respective civilizations. Yet, although they fully recognized the value of their own work in the practical field and surely very soon conceived the possibility — and perhaps acquired the certitude — of indefinite technical progress, they never believed in progress as a whole, in progress on all lines, as most of our contemporaries seem to. Whether Hindus or Greeks, Egyptians or Japanese, Chinese, Sumerians, or ancient Americans — or even Romans, the most "modern" among people of antiquity — they all placed the Golden Age, the Age of Truth, the rule of Kronos or of Ra or of any other gods on earth — the glorious beginning of the slow, downward unfurling of history, whatever name it be given — far behind them in the past. And they believed that the return of a similar age, foretold in their respective sacred texts and oral traditions, depends not upon man's conscious effort but upon iron laws, inherent in the very nature of visible and tangible manifestation, and all-pervading; upon cosmic laws. They believed that man's conscious effort is but an expression of those laws at work, leading the world, willingly or unwillingly, wherever its destiny lies; in one word, that the history of man, as the history of the rest of the living, is but a detail in cosmic history without beginning or end; a periodical outcome of the inner necessity that binds all phenomena in time. And just as the ancients could accept that vision of the world's evolution while still taking full advantage of all technical progress within their reach, so can — and so do — to this day, in the very midst of the over-proud industrial cultures, a few stray individuals able to think for themselves. They contemplate the history of mankind in a similar perspective. While living apparently as "modern" men and women — using electric fans and electric irons, telephones and trains and airplanes, when they can afford it — they nourish in their hearts a deep contempt for the childish conceit and bloated hopes of our age and for the various recipes for "saving mankind" which zealous philosophers and politicians thrust into circulation. They know that nothing can "save mankind," for mankind is reaching the end of its present cycle. The wave that carried it for so many millennia is about to break, with all the fury of acquired speed, and to merge once more into the depth of the unchanging ocean of undifferentiated existence. It will rise again, some day, with abrupt majesty, for such is the law of waves. But in the meantime nothing can be done to stop it. The unfortunate — the fools — are those men who, for some reason best known to themselves — probably on account of their exaggerated estimation of what is to be lost in the process — would like to stop it. The privileged ones — the wise — are those few who, being fully aware of the increasing worthlessness of present-day mankind and of its much-applauded "progress," know how little there is to be lost in the coming crash and look forward to it with joyous expectation as to the necessary condition of a new beginning — a new Golden Age, sunlit crest of the next long-drawn, downward wave upon the surface of the endless ocean of life. To those privileged ones — among whom we count ourselves — the high-resounding "isms" to which their contemporaries ask them to give their allegiance are all equally futile: bound to be betrayed, defeated, and finally rejected by men at large, if containing anything really noble; bound to enjoy, for the time being, some sort of noisy success, if sufficiently vulgar, pretentious, and soul-killing to appeal to the growing number of mechanically conditioned slaves that crawl about our planet, posing as free men; all destined to prove, ultimately, of no avail. The time-honored religions, rapidly growing out of fashion as present-day "isms" become more and more popular, are no less futile — if not more: frameworks of organized superstition void of all true feeling of the divine, or — among more sophisticated people — mere conventional aspects of social life, or systems of ethics (and of very elementary ethics, at that) seasoned with a sprinkling of outdated rites and symbols of which hardly anybody bothers to seek the original meaning; devices in the hands of clever men in power to lull the simpletons into permanent obedience; convenient names, round which it might be easy to rally converging national aspirations or political tendencies; or just the last resort of weaklings and cranks: that is, practically, all they are — all they have been reduced to in the course of a few centuries — the lot of them. They are dead, in fact — as dead as the old cults that flourished before them, with the difference that those cults have long ceased exhaling the stench of death, while they (the so-called "living" ones) are still at the stage at which death is inseparable from corruption. None — neither Christianity nor Islam nor even Buddhism — can be expected now to "save" anything of that world they once partly conquered; none have any normal place in "modern" life, which is essentially devoid of all awareness of the eternal. The exponents of the belief in "progress" put forth many arguments to prove — to themselves and to others — that our times, with all their undeniable drawbacks, are, on the whole, better than any epoch of the past, and even that they show definite signs of improvement. It is not possible to analyze all their arguments in detail. But one can easily detect the fallacies hidden in the most widespread and, apparently, the most "convincing" of them. All the advocates of "progress" lay enormous stress upon such things as literacy, individual "freedom," equal opportunities for all men, religious toleration, and "humaneness," progress in this last line covering all such tendencies as find their expression in the modern preoccupation for child welfare, prison reforms, better conditions of labor, state aid to the sick and destitute, and, if not greater kindness, at least less cruelty to animals. The dazzling results obtained, of recent years, in the application of scientific discoveries to industrial and other practical pursuits, are, of course, the most popular of all instances expected to show how marvelous our times are. But that point we shall not discuss, as we have already made it clear that we by no means deny or minimize the importance of technical progress. What we do deny is the existence of any progress at all in the value of man as such, whether individually or collectively, and our reflections on universal literacy and other highly praised signs of improvement in which our contemporaries take pride, all spring from that one point of view. We believe that man's value — as every creature's value, ultimately — lies not in the mere intellect but in the spirit; in the capacity to reflect that which, for lack of a more precise word, we choose to call the divine, i.e., that which is true and beautiful beyond all manifestation; that which remains timeless (and therefore unchangeable) within all changes. We believe it with the difference that, in our eyes — contrarily to what the Christians maintain — the capacity to reflect the divine is closely linked with man's race and physical health; in other words, that the spirit is anything but independent from the body. And we fail to see that the different improvements that we witness today in education or in the social field, in government or even in technical matters, have either made individual men and women more valuable in that sense, or created any new, lasting type of civilization in which man's possibilities of all-round perfection, thus conceived, are being promoted. Progress? — It is true that today at least in all highly organized (typically "modern") countries, nearly everybody can read and write. But what of that? To be able to read and write is an advantage — and a considerable one. But it is not a virtue. It is a tool and a weapon; a means to an end; a very useful thing, no doubt; but not an end in itself. The ultimate value of literacy depends upon the end to which it is used. And to what end is it generally used today? It is used for convenience or for entertainment, by those who read; for some advertisement or some objectionable propaganda — for money making or power grabbing — by those who write; sometimes, of course, by both, for acquiring or spreading disinterested knowledge of the few things worth knowing, for finding expression of or giving expression to the few deep feelings that can lift a man to the awareness of things eternal, but not more often so than in the days in which one man out of ten thousand could understand the symbolism of the written word. Generally, today the man or woman whom compulsory education has made "literate" uses writing to communicate personal matters to absent friends and relatives, to fill forms — one of the international occupations of modern, civilized humanity — or to commit to memory little, useful, but otherwise trifling things, such as someone's address or telephone number, or the date of some appointment with the hairdresser or the dentist, or the list of clean clothes due from the laundry. He or she reads "to pass time" because, outside the hours of dreary work, mere thinking is no longer intense and interesting enough to serve that purpose. We know that there are also people whose whole lives have been directed to some beautiful destiny by a book, a poem — a mere sentence — read in distant childhood, like Schliemann, who lavishly spent on archaeological excavations the wealth patiently and purposely gathered in forty years of dreary toil, all for the sake of the impression left upon him, as a boy, by the immortal story of Troy. But such people always lived, even before compulsory education came into fashion. And the stories heard and remembered were no less inspiring than stories now read. The real advantage of general literacy, if any, is to be sought elsewhere. It lies not in the better quality either of the exceptional men and women or of the literate millions, but rather in the fact that the latter are rapidly becoming intellectually more lazy and therefore more credulous than ever — and not less so; more easily deceived, more liable to be led like sheep without even the shadow of a protest, provided the nonsense one wishes them to swallow be presented to them in printed form and made to appear "scientific." The higher the general level of literacy, the easier it is for a government in control of the daily press, of the wireless, and of the publishing business — these almost irresistible, modern means of action upon the mind to keep the masses and the "intelligentsia" under its thumb, without their even suspecting it. Among widely illiterate but more actively thinking people, openly governed in the old, autocratic manner, a prophet, direct mouthpiece of the gods, or of genuine, collective aspirations, could always hope to rise between secular authority and the people. The priests themselves could never be quite sure of keeping the people in obedience forever. The people could choose to listen to the prophet if they liked. And they did, sometimes. Today, wherever universal literacy is prevalent, inspired exponents of timeless truth — prophets or even selfless advocates of timely, practical changes, have fewer and fewer chances to appear. Sincere thought, really free thought, ready, in the name of superhuman authority or of humble common sense, to question the basis of what is officially taught and generally accepted, is less and less likely to thrive. It is, we repeat, by far easier to enslave a literate people than an illiterate one, strange as this may seem at first sight. And the enslavement is more likely to be lasting. The real advantage of universal literacy is to tighten the grip of the governing power upon the foolish and conceited millions. That is probably why it is dinned into our heads, from babyhood onward, that "literacy" is such a boon. Capacity to think for one's self is, however, the real boon. And that always was and always will be the privilege of a minority, once recognized as a natural elite and respected. Today, compulsory mass education and increasingly standardized literature for the consumption of "conditioned" brains — outstanding signs of "progress" — tend to reduce that minority to the smallest possible proportion; ultimately, to suppress it altogether. Is that what mankind wants? If so, mankind is losing its raison d'être, and the sooner the end of this so-called "civilization," the better. What we have said of literacy can roughly be repeated about those two other main glories of modern democracy: "individual freedom" and equality of opportunities for every person. The first is a lie — and a more and more sinister one as the shackles of compulsory education are being more and more hopelessly fastened round people's whole being. The second is an absurdity. One of the strangest inconsistencies of the average citizen of the modern, industrialized world is the way in which he criticizes all institutions of older and better civilizations, such as the caste system of the Hindus or the all-absorbing family cult of the Far East, on the ground that these tend to check the "liberty of the individual." He does not realize how exacting — nay, how annihilating — is the command of the collective authority which he obeys (half of the time, unknowingly) compared with that of traditional collective authority, in apparently less "free" societies. The caste-ridden or family-ridden people of India or of the Far East might not be allowed to do all that they like, in many relatively trifling and in a few really all-important matters of daily life. But they are left to believe what they like, or rather what they can; to feel according to their own nature and to express themselves freely about a great number of essential matters: they are allowed to conduct their higher life in the manner they judge the wisest for them, after duties to family, caste, and king have been fulfilled. The individual living under the iron and steel rule of modern "progress" can eat whatever he fancies (to a great extent) and marry whom he pleases — unfortunately! — and go wherever he likes (in theory at least). But he is made to accept, in all extra-individual matters — matters which, to us, really count — the beliefs, the attitude to life, the scale of values, and, to a great extent, the political views that tend to strengthen the mighty socioeconomic system of exploitation to which he belongs (to which he is forced to belong, in order to be able to live) and in which he is a mere cog. And, what is more, he is made to believe that it is a privilege of his to be a cog in such an organism; that the unimportant matters in which he feels he is his own master are, in fact, the most important ones — the only really important ones. He is taught not to value that freedom of judgement about ultimate truth, aesthetical, ethical, or metaphysical, of which he is subtly deprived. More still: he is told — in the democratic countries at any rate — that he is free in all respects, that he is "an individual, answerable to none but to his own conscience" ... after years of clever conditioning have molded his "conscience" and his whole being so thoroughly according to pattern, that he is no longer capable of reacting differently. Well can such a man speak of "pressure upon the individual" in any society, ancient or modern! As for "equality of opportunities," there can be no such thing anyhow, really speaking. By producing men and women different both in degree and in quality of intelligence, sensitiveness, and willpower, different in character and temperament, Nature herself gives them the most unequal opportunities of fulfilling their aspirations, whatever these might be. An overemotional and rather weak person can, for instance, neither conceive the same ideal of happiness nor have equal chances of reaching it in life, as one who is born with a more balanced nature and a stronger will. That is obvious. And add to that the characteristics that differentiate one race of men from another, and the absurdity of the very notion of "human equality" becomes even more striking. What our contemporaries mean when they speak of "equality of opportunities" is the fact that, in modern society — so they say — any man or woman stands, more and more, as many chances as his or her neighbor of holding the position and doing the job for which he or she is naturally fitted. But that too is only partly true. For, more and more, the world of today — the world dominated by grand-scale industry and mass production — can offer only jobs in which the best of the worker's self plays little or no part if he or she be anything more than a merely clever and materially efficient person. The hereditary craftsman, who could find the best expression for what is conveniently called his "soul" in his daily weaving, carpet making, enamel work, etc ..., even the tiller of the soil, in personal contact with, Mother Earth and the sun and the seasons, is becoming more and more a figure of the past. There are fewer and fewer opportunities, also, for the sincere seeker of truth — speaker or writer — who refuses to become the expounder of broadly accepted ideas, products of mass conditioning, for which he or she does not stand; for the seeker of beauty who refuses to bend his or her art to the demands of popular taste which he or she knows to be bad taste. Such people have to waste much of their time doing inefficiently — and grudgingly — some job for which they are not fitted, in order to live, before they can devote the rest of it to what the Hindus would call their sadhana and the work for which their deeper nature has appointed them; their life's dedication. The idea of modern division of labor, condensed in the oft-quoted phrase "the right man in the right place," boils down, in practice, to the fact that any man — any one of the dull, indiscriminate millions — can be conditioned to occupy any place while the best of human beings, the only ones who still justify the existence of the more and more degenerate species, are allowed no place at all. Progress .... There remain the "religious toleration" of our times and their "humaneness" compared with the "barbarity" of the past. Two jokes, to say the least! Recalling some of the most spectacular horrors of history — the burning of heretics and witches at the stake, the wholesale massacre of "heathens," and other no less repulsive manifestations of Christian civilization in Europe and elsewhere — modern man is filled with pride in the "progress" accomplished, in one line at least, since the end of the dark ages of religious fanaticism. However bad they be, our contemporaries have, at any rate, grown out of the habit of torturing people for such "trifles" as their conception of the Holy Trinity or their ideas about predestination and purgatory. Such is modern man's feeling — because theological questions have lost all importance in his life. But in the days when Christian churches persecuted one another and encouraged the conversion of heathen nations by means of blood and fire, both the persecutors and the persecuted, both the Christians and those who wished to remain faithful to non-Christian creeds, looked upon such questions as vital in one way or another. And the real reason for which nobody is put to torture, today, for the sake of his or her religious beliefs, is not that torture as such has become distasteful to everybody, in "advanced," twentieth-century civilization, not that individuals and states have become tolerant, but just that, among those who have the power of inflicting pain, hardly anybody takes any vivid, vital interest in religion, let alone in theology. The so-called "religious toleration" practiced by modern states and individuals springs from anything but an intelligent understanding and love of all religions as manifold, symbolical expressions of the same, few, essential, eternal truths. It is, rather, the outcome of a grossly ignorant contempt for all religions; of indifference to those very truths which their various founders endeavored to reassert, again and again. It is no toleration at all. To judge how far our contemporaries have or have not the right to boast of their spirit of toleration, it is best to watch their behavior toward those whom they decidedly look upon as the enemies of their gods: the men who happen to be holding views contrary to theirs concerning not some theological quibble, in which they are not interested, but some political or sociopolitical ideology which they regard as "a threat to civilization." Nobody can deny that in all such circumstances, and specially in war time, they all perform — to the extent they have the power — or condone to the extent they have not, themselves, the opportunity of performing — actions in every respect as ugly as those ordered, performed, or tolerated in the past, in the name of different religions (if indeed the latter be ugly). The only difference is, perhaps, that modern, cold-blooded atrocities only become known when the hidden powers in control of the means of herd-conditioning — the press, the wireless, and the cinema — decide, for ends anything but humanitarian, that they should be, i.e., when they happen to be the enemy's atrocities, not one's own — nor those of one's "gallant allies" — and when their story is, therefore, considered to be good propaganda, on account of the current of indignation it is expected to create and of the new incentive it is expected to give the war effort. Moreover, after a war, fought or supposed to have been fought for an ideology — the modern equivalent of the bitter religious conflicts of old — the horrors rightly or wrongly said to have been perpetrated by the vanquished are the only ones to be broadcasted all over the world, while the victors try as hard as they can to make believe that their high command at least never shuts its eyes to any similar horrors. But in sixteenth-century Europe, and before; and among the warriors of Islam conducting jihad against men of other faiths, each side was well aware of the atrocious means used, not only by its opponents for their "foul ends," but by its own people and its own leaders in order to "uproot heresy" or to "fight popery" or to "preach the name of Allah to infidels." Modern man is more of a moral coward. He wants the advantages of violent intolerance — which is only natural — but he shuns the responsibility of it. Progress, that also. The so-called humaneness of our contemporaries (compared with their forefathers) is just lack of nerve or lack of strong feelings — increasing cowardice, or increasing apathy. Modern man is squeamish about atrocities — even about ordinary, unimaginative brutality — only when it happens that the aims for which atrocious or merely brutal actions are performed are either hateful or indifferent to him. In all other circumstances, he shuts his eyes to any horrors — especially when he knows that the victims can never retaliate (as is the case with all atrocities committed by man upon animals, for whatever purpose) and he demands, at the most, not to be reminded of them too often and too noisily. He reacts as though he classified atrocities under two headlines: the unavoidable and the avoidable. The unavoidable are those that serve or are supposed to serve modern man's purpose — generally: "the good of humanity" or the "triumph of democracy." They are tolerated, even justified. The avoidable are those which are occasionally committed, or said to be committed, by people whose purpose is alien to his. They alone are condemned, and their real or supposed authors — or inspirers — branded by public opinion as "criminals against humanity." Surely modern man does not "uphold" slavery; he denounces it vehemently. But he practices it nevertheless — and on a wider scale than ever, and far more thoroughly than the ancients ever could — whether in the capitalistic West or in the tropics, or (from what one hears outside its impenetrable walls) even in the one state supposed to be, today, the "workers' paradise." There are differences, of course. In antiquity, even the slave had hours of leisure and merriment that were all his own; he had the games of dice in the shade of the columns of his master's portico, his coarse jokes, his free chatter, his free life outside his daily routine. The modern slave has not the privilege of loitering, completely carefree, for half an hour. His so-called leisure itself is filled with almost compulsory entertainment, as exacting and often as dreary as his work, or — in "lands of freedom — poisoned by economic worries. but he is not openly bought and sold. He is just taken. And taken, not by a man in some way at least superior to himself, but by a huge, impersonal system without either a body to kick or a soul to damn or a head to answer for its mischief. But more cowardly and more hypocritical, perhaps, than anything else, is "progressive," modern man's behavior toward living nature, and in particular toward the animal kingdom. Primitive man — and, often, also man whose picturesque civilization is anything but "modern" — is bad enough, it is true, as far as his treatment of animals is concerned. One only has to travel in the least industrialized countries of southern Europe, or in the Near and Middle East, to acquire a very definite certitude on that point. And not all modern leaders have been equally successful in putting an end to age-old cruelties to dumb beasts, whether in the East or in the West. Gandhi could not, in the name of that universal kindness which he repeatedly preached as the main tenet of his faith, prevent Hindu milkmen from deliberately starving their male calves to death, in order to sell a few extra pints of cow's milk. Mussolini could not detect and prosecute all those Italians who, even under his government, persisted in the detestable habit of plucking chickens alive on the ground that "the feathers come off more easily." There is no getting away from the fact that kindness to animals on a national scale does not ultimately depend upon the teachings of any superimposed religion or philosophy. It is one of the distinctive characteristics of the truly superior races. And no religious, philosophical, or political alchemy can turn base metal into gold. This does not mean to say that a good teaching cannot help to bring the best out of every race, as well as out of every individual man or woman. But modern, industrial civilization, to the extent it is man-centered — not controlled by any inspiration of a superhuman, cosmic order — and tends to stress quantity instead of quality, production and wealth instead of character and inherent worth, is anything but congenial to the development of consistent, universal kindness, even among the better people. This is the age in which falsehood is termed truth and truth persecuted as falsehood or mocked as insanity; in which the exponents of truth, the divinely inspired leaders, the real friends of their race and of all the living — the godlike men — are defeated, and their followers humbled and their memory slandered, while the masters of lies are hailed as saviors; the age in which every man and woman is in the wrong place, and the world dominated by inferior individuals, bastardized races, and vicious doctrines, all part and parcel of an order of inherent ugliness far worse than complete anarchy; the age which the Hindus have characterized from time immemorial as Kali Yuga — the Dark Age, the Era of Gloom. This is the age in which our triumphant democrats and our hopeful communists boast of "slow but steady progress through science and education." Thanks very much for such "progress"! There are no cruelties in ancient history — no Assyrian horrors, no Carthagenian horrors, no old Chinese horrors — which the inventiveness of our contemporaries of East and West, aided by a perfected technique, has not outdone. But cruelty — the violence of cowards — is merely one expression of violence among many, though admittedly the most repulsive one. Aided and encouraged by more and more staggering scientific achievements, which can be put to use for any purpose, man has, throughout history, become more and more violent — and not less and less so, as people fed on pacifist propaganda are often inclined to think! And, which is more, it could not have been otherwise; and it cannot be otherwise at any period of the future, until the violent and complete destruction of that which we call today "civilization" opens for the world a new Age of Truth; a new Golden Age. Until then, violence, under one form or another, is unavoidable. It is the very law of life in a fallen world. The choice given us is not between violence and nonviolence, but between open, unashamed violence, in broad daylight, and sneaking, subtle violence — blackmail; between open violence and inconspicuous, slow, yet implacable persecution, both economic and cultural: the systematic suppression of all possibilities for the vanquished, without it showing; the merciless conditioning of children, all the more horrible that it is more impersonal, more indirect, more outwardly gentle; the clever diffusion of soul-killing lies (and half lies); violence under the cover of nonviolence. The choice is also between selfless ruthlessness put to the service of the very cause of truth; violence without cruelty, applied in view of bringing about upon this earth an order based on everlasting principles, that transcend man; violence in view of creating, or maintaining, a human state in harmony with life's highest purpose, and violence applied to selfish ends. The more disinterested be its aims and the more selfless its application, the more frank and straightforward violence is. While, on the other hand, the more sordid be the motives for which it is in reality used, the more it is itself, hidden, even denied; the more the men who resort to it boast of being admirers of nonviolence, thus bluffing others and sometimes also themselves, acting as deceivers and being deceived — caught in the network of their own lies. As time goes on and as decay sets in, the keynote of human history is not less and less violence; it is less and less honesty about violence. But violence is not a bad thing in itself. True, it set in as a necessity only after the world had become, to a great extent, "bad," i.e., unfaithful to its timeless archetype; no longer in keeping with the creative dream of the universal Mind, that it had once expressed. Yet, violence cannot be judged apart from its purpose. And the purpose is good or bad; worth its while, or not. It is worth its while when those who pursue it do so, not merely unselfishly — with no primordial desire of personal glory or happiness — but also in keeping with an ideology expressing timeless, impersonal, more-than-human truth; an ideology rooted in the clear understanding of the unchanging laws of life, and destined to appeal to all those who, in a fallen world, still retain within their hearts an invincible yearning for the perfect order as it really was and will again be. Any purpose which is intelligently, objectively consistent with the war aims of the undying forces of light in their age-old struggle against the forces of darkness, i.e., of disintegration — that struggle illustrated in all the mythologies of the world — any such purpose, I say, justifies any amount of selfless violence. Moreover, as the era of gloom in which we are living proceeds, darker and darker and fiercer and fiercer year after year, it becomes more and more impossible to avoid using violence in the service of truth. No man — no demigod can bring about, today, even a relative amount of real order and justice in any area of the globe, without the help of force, specially if he has but a few years at his disposal. And, unfortunately, the further this world advances into the present age of technical wonders and human abasement, the more the great men of inspiration are submitted to the factor of time, as soon as they attempt to apply their lofty, intuitive knowledge of eternal truth to the solution of practical problems. They just have to act, not only thoroughly, but also quickly, if they do not want to see the forces of disintegration nip their priceless work in the bud. And whether they like it or not, thoroughly and quickly means, almost unavoidably, with unhesitating violence. One can say, with more and more certainty as the dark age goes on, that the godlike men of action are defeated, at least for the time being, not for having been too ruthless (and thus for having roused against themselves and their ideas and their collaborators the indignation of the "decent people"), but for not having been ruthless enough — for not having killed off their fleeing enemies, to the last man, in the brief hour of triumph, for not having silenced both the squeamish millions of hypocrites and their masters, the clever producers of atrocity tales, by more substantial violences, more complete exterminations. From all this it is quite clear that to condemn violence indiscriminately is to condemn the very struggle of the forces of life and light against the forces of disintegration — struggle, all the more heroic and all the more desperate, also, as the world rushes on toward its doom. It is to condemn that struggle which, at every one of its age-long, varying phases, and even through temporary disaster, has been securing for the world, beyond its deserved doom, the glorious new beginning, which the few alone deserve. Within the bondage of time, specially within this kali yuga, one cannot be consistently nonviolent without contributing, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, to the success of the forces of disintegration; of what we call the death forces. As for that violence which is used to forward the war aims of the death forces, it is, and has always been, twofold: directed on one hand against life itself — first, against the whole of innocent, living Nature, then, against the vital interests of higher mankind, in the name of "the common man" — and, on the other, against those particular men who, more and more conscious of the tragic realities of a darkening age, put up a stand in favor of the recognition of life's eternal values and of the restoration of order upon its true, eternal basis. In the attempt to bring about the triumph of the worthless and the slow but steady disintegration of culture, in fact, less and less violence is needed. The world evolves naturally toward disintegration, with accelerated speed. It might have been, once, necessary to push it on along the slippery path. It has no longer been so, for centuries. It rolls on to its own doom, without help. In that direction, therefore, the champions of disintegration enjoy an easy task. They only have to follow and flatter the vicious tendencies of the increasingly despicable majority of men, to become the world's darlings. But in their war against the few, but more aware and practical exponents of the higher values — the upholders of the natural hierarchy of races; the worshippers of light, of strength, of youth — they are (and are bound to be) more and more violent, more and more relentlessly cruel. Their hatred grows as history unfolds, as though they knew — as though they felt, with the sharpness of physical perception — that every one of their victories, however spectacular it be, brings them nearer the final, redeeming crash in which they are bound to perish, and out of which their now persecuted superiors are bound to emerge as the leaders of the new age. Their hatred grows, and their ferocity too, as the redeeming crash draws nigh, and, along with it, the dawn of the universal new order, as unavoidable as the coming of spring. They are in a hurry — not, as the heroic elite, out of generous impatience; not out of any longing to see the age of truth re-established before its time, but out of feverish lust; out of the will to snatch from the world, for themselves, all the material advantages and all the satisfactions of vanity they possibly can, before it is too late. And as time goes on, their hurry amounts to frenzy. The one obstacle that stands in their way and still defies them — that will always defy them, till the end — is precisely that proud elite that disaster cannot discourage, that torture cannot break, that money cannot buy. Whether consciously or unconsciously, whether they be, themselves, thoroughly wicked, or just blind, through congenital stupidity, the workers of disintegration wage war upon the men of gold and steel, with unabated, hellish fury. But theirs is not the frank, unashamed violence of the inspired idealists striving to bring forth, speedily, a lofty sociopolitical order too good for the unworthy world of their times. It is a sneaking, creeping, cowardly sort of violence, all the more effective that it is, outwardly, more emphatically denied, both by the scoundrels who apply it or condone it, and by the well-meaning fools who actually believe that it does not exist. It is prompted by such feelings as one cannot possibly exhibit, even in a degenerate world, without running the risk of defeating one's own purpose: by bare hatred, rooted in envy — the hatred of worthless weaklings for the strong, for no other reason than that they are strong; the hatred of ugly souls (incarnated, more often than not, in no less ugly bodies) for the naturally beautiful ones; for the noble, the magnanimous, the selfless, the real aristocracy of the world; the hatred of the unhappy, and, even more so, of the bored -- of those who have only their pockets to live for, and nothing at all to die for -- for those who live, and are ready to die, for eternal values. Such is, more and more, the widespread violence of our times, less and less recognized, in its subtle disguise, even by the people who actually suffer through it. The ancients knew better than our contemporaries who were their friends and who were their enemies. And this is natural. In a world rushing to its doom, there is bound to be increasing ignorance — ignorance precisely of those things one should know the best, in order to survive. The ancients suffered, and knew whom to curse. Modern men and women, as a rule, do not know; do not really care to know; are too lazy, too exhausted, too near the end of their world to take the trouble to inquire seriously. And clever rascals, themselves the authors of all the mischief, incite them to throw the blame of it upon the only people whose unfailing wisdom and selfless love could have saved them, had they but wanted to be saved; upon that hated elite that stands against the current of time, with the vision of the glorious new beginning beyond the doom of the present-day world, clear and bright before its eyes. Thousands of well-meaning and foolish people, who take for granted whatever they are given to read and inquire no further, have no idea of the horrors perpetrated by their compatriots in other people's countries as colonists or as members of occupying armies, no idea of what goes on in their own country, behind prison bars, in torture chambers for political investigation, and in concentration camps. Indeed, in England and in other democratic nations, many are under the impression that their government never tolerated such things as concentration camps and torture chambers for human beings. Only "the enemy" had them — so they believe. Years ago, they would have thought nothing of admitting that "everybody has them"; must have them; that one cannot run a war without those unpleasant but extremely woeful accessories. But now hypocrisy concerning violence has reached its pitch. Never has there been, in the world, so much cruelty, allied to such a general attempt to hide it, to deny it, to forget it, and, if possible, make others forget it. Never have people been so willing to forget it, in externally "decent" and kindly surroundings — houses and streets in which no torture of man or beast can be seen or heard — provided, of course, it is not "the enemy's" cruelty. Reproduced From: Racial Nationalist Library
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