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by Tomislav Sunic
Morphine is said to be good for people subject to severe
depressions, or even pessimism. Although the drug first surfaced
in a laboratory at the end of the last century, its basis,
opium, had been used earlier by many aristocratic and
reactionary thinkers. A young and secretive German romantic,
Novalis, enjoyed eating and smoking opium juice, probably
because he had always yearned to alleviate his nostalgia for
death. Probably in order to write his poem Sehnsucht nach dem
Tode. Early poets of Romanticism rejected the philosophy of
rationalism and historical optimism. They turned inward to their
irrational feelings, shrouding themselves in the pensive
loneliness which opiates endlessly offer.
Once upon a distant time we met Homer's Odysseus, who was
frequently nagged by the childish behavior of his pesky sailors.
Somewhere along the shores of northern Africa, Odysseus and his
sailors had strayed away into the mythical land of the lotus
flower. As soon as his sailors began to eat the lotus plant,
they sank into forgetfulness, and immediately forgot their
history and their homeland. It was with great pain that Odysseus
succeeded in extracting them from artificial paradises. What can
be worse for a nation than to erase its past and lose its
collective memory?
Unlike many modern wannabe conservatives and televangelists,
Greeks and Romans were not hypocrites. They frankly acknowledged
the pleasures of wine and women. Sine Cerere et Bacco friget
Venus - without food and wine sexual life withers away, too.
The escape from industrial reality and the maddening crowd was
one of the main motives for drug use among some reactionary
poets and thinkers, who could not face the onset of mass
society. The advent of early liberalism and socialism was
accompanied not only by factory chimneys, but also by
loneliness, decay, and decadence. If one could, therefore, not
escape to the sunny Mediterranean, then one had to craft one's
own artificial paradise in rainy and foggy London. The young
English Tory Thomas De Quincey, in his essay Confessions of an
English Opium Eater, relates his Soho escapades with a poor
prostitute Anna, as well as his spiritual journeys in the
aftertaste of opium. De Quincey has a feeling that one
life-minute lasts a century, finally putting an end to the
reckless flow of time.
The mystique of opium was also grasped by the mid-19th century
French symbolist and poet Charles Baudelaire. He continued the
aristo-nihilistic-revolutionary-conservative tradition of dope
indulgence via the water pipe, i.e., the Pakistan huka. Similar
to the lonely albatross, Baudelaire observes the decaying France
in which the steamroller of coming liberalism and democratism
mercilessly crushes all esthetics and all poetics.
When studying the escapism of postmodernity, it is impossible to
circumvent the leftist subculture and its pseudo-intellectual
sycophants of 1968. The so-called sixty-eighters hollered out
not only for liberty from all political authority, but also for
free sex and drugs. Are these leftist claims not part of the
modern religion of human rights? At the beginning of the 60's,
the musical alter egos of the Western left, the Rolling Stones
and Bob Dylan, called out to millions of young people throughout
America and Europe, telling intruders to "get off of my cloud"
and concluding that "everybody must get stoned."
Predictably, the right-wing answer to the decadence of liberal
democracy was nihilistic counterdecadence. The main difference,
however, between these two is that reactionary and rightist
addicts do drugs for elitist and esoteric purposes. By their
temperament and literary style they reject all democracy-
whether it is of a socialist or liberal brand. When in the 20th
century the flow of history switched from first gear into fifth
gear, many rightist poets and thinkers posed a question: What to
do after the orgy? The French right-leaning author Jean Cocteau
answered the question this way: "Everything that we do in our
life, even when we love, we perform in a rapid train running to
its death. Smoking opium means getting off the train."
Hashish and marijuana change the body language and enhance
social philanthropy. Smoking joints triggers abnormal laughter.
Therefore hashish may be described as a collectivistic drug
custom-designed for individuals who by their lifestyle loathe
solitude and who, like Dickens' proverbial Ms. Jellyby, indulge
in vicarious humanism and unrepentant globalism. In today's age
of promiscuous democracy, small wonder that marijuana is inhaled
by countless young people all over liberalized Europe and
America. In the permissive society of today, one is allowed to
do everything-provided one does not rock the boat, i.e., "bogart"
political correctness. Just as wine, over the last 2,000 years,
has completely changed the political profile of the West, so has
marijuana, over the last 30 years, completely ruined the future
of Western youth. If Stalin had been a bit more intelligent he
would have solemnly opened marijuana fields in his native
Transcaucasia. Instead, communist tyrants resorted to the
killing fields of the Gulag. The advantage of liberalism and
social democracy is that via sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, by
means of consumerism and hedonism, they function perfectly well;
what communism was not able to achieve by means of the solid
truncheon, liberalism has achieved by means of the solid joint.
Indisputably, Western youth can be politically and correctly
controlled when herded in techno-rap concerts and when welcomed
in cafes in Holland, where one can freely buy marijuana as well
as under-the-table "crack," "speedball," and "horse." Are these
items not logical ingredients of the liberal theology of human
rights?
Cocaine reportedly induces eroticism and enhances the sex act.
The late French fascist dandy and novelist Pierre Drieu La
Rochelle liked coke, desiring all possible drugs and all
impossible women. The problem, however, is that the coke intaker
often feels invisible bugs creeping from his ankles up to his
knees, so that he may imagine himself sleeping not with a
beautiful woman but with scary reptiles. In his autobiographical
novels Le feu follet and L'homme couvert de femmes, La
Rochelle's hero is constantly covered by women and veiled by
opium and heroin sit-ins. In his long intellectual monologues,
La Rochelle's hero says: "A Frenchwoman, be she a whore or not,
likes to be held and taken care of; an American woman, unless
she hunts for a husband, prefers a passing relationship... Drug
users are mystics in a materialistic age. Given that they can no
longer animate and embellish this world, they do it in a reverse
manner on themselves." Indeed, La Rochelle's hero ends up in
suicide-with heroin and revolver. In 1945, with the approaching
victory of the Allies, and in the capacity of the intellectual
leader of the defunct Eurofascist international, Pierre Drieu La
Rochelle also opted for suicide.
The English conservative and aristocrat Aldous Huxley is
unavoidable in studying communist pathology (Brave New World
Revisited) and Marxist subintellectual schizophrenia (Grey
Eminence). As a novelist and essayist his lifelong wish had been
to break loose from the flow of time. Mexican mescaline and the
artificial drug LSD enabled him new intellectual horizons for
observing the end of his world and the beginning of a new,
decadent one. Apparently mescaline is ideal for sensing the
colors of late impressionist and pointillist painters. Every
drop on Seurat's silent water, every touch on Dufy's leaf, or
every stone on the still nature of old Vermeer, pours away into
thousands of billions of new colors. In the essay The Doors of
Perception, Huxley notes that "mescaline raises all colors to a
higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine
shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is
completely blind." His intellectual experiments with
hallucinogenic drugs continued for years, and even on his
deathbed in California in 1963, he asked for and was given LSD.
Probably to depart more picturesquely into timeless infinity.
And what to say about the German centenarian, enigmatic essayist
and novelist Ernst Jünger, whom the young Adolf Hitler in Weimar
Germany also liked to read, and whom Dr. Joseph Goebbels wanted
to lure into pro-Nazi collaboration? Yet Jünger, the
aristocratic loner, refused all deals with the Nazis, preferring
instead his martial travelogues. In his essay Annäherungen:
Drogen and Rausch, Jünger describes his close encounters with
drugs. He was also able to cut through the merciless wall of
time and sneak into floating eternity. "Time slows down. . . .
The river of life flows more gently... The banks are
disappearing." While both the French president François
Mitterrand and the German chancellor Helmut Kohl, in the
interest of Franco-German reconciliation, liked meeting and
reading the old Jünger, they shied away from his contacts with
drugs.
Ernst Jünger's compatriot, the essayist, early expressionist,
and medical doctor Gottfried Benn, also took drugs. His medical
observations, which found their transfigurations in his poems "Kokain"
and "Das Verlorene Ich," were collected by Benn as a
doctor-mortician in Berlin of the liberal-Weimarian Germany in
decay. He records in his poetry nameless human destinies
stretched out dead on the tables of his mortuary. He describes
the dead meat of prostitutes out of whose bellies crawl
squeaking mice. A connoisseur of French culture and genetics,
Benn was subsequently offered awards and political baits by the
Nazis, which he refused to swallow. After the end of the war,
like thousands of European artists, Benn sank into oblivion.
Probably also because he once remarked that "mighty brains are
strengthened not on milk but on alkaloids."
Modern psychiatrists, doctors, and sociologists are wrong in
their diagnosis of drug addiction among large segments of
Western youth. They fail to realize that to combat drug abuse
one must prevent its social and political causes before
attempting to cure its deadly consequences. Given that the crux
of the modern liberal system is the dictatorship of well-being
and the dogma of boundless economic growth, many disabused young
people are led to believe that everybody is entitled to eternal
fun. In a make-believe world of media signals, many take for
granted instant gratification by projecting their faces on the
characters of the prime-time soaps. Before they turn into drug
addicts, they become dependent on the videospheric surreality of
television, which in a refined manner tells them that everybody
must be handsome, rich, and popular. In an age of TV-mimicry,
headless young masses become, so to speak, the impresarios of
their own narcissism. Such delusions can lead to severe
depressions, which in turn can lead to drugs and suicide. Small
wonder that in the most liberal countries of the West, notably
California, Holland, and Denmark, there is also the highest
correlation between drug addiction and suicide.
If drug abuse among some reactionary and conservative thinkers
has always been an isolated and Promethean death wish to escape
time, the same joint in leftist hands does more than burn the
fingers of the individual: it poisons the entire society.
Tomislav Sunic is the author of Against Democracy and Equality;
The European New Right (1990).