Phoenix Rising: Yockey, Salter, and the Future of the West.

Posted by Søren Renner on March 19, 2006, 04:50 PM | #

I have been meaning to read Yockey’s Imperium. Two days ago a copy came into my hands, just in time, that is, for Mr. Holliday’s essay. My reaction—partial reaction, since I haven’t read the whole book yet—is about the same as his: Yockey is wrong about so many things, but—

Malcolm Lowell’s idea of a European racialist empire (Imperium) seems Yockey-inspired.

Posted by Søren Renner on March 19, 2006, 08:59 PM | #

Reaching Liftoff

Once people (in the West) become warlike and religious, as they will when the coming crisis arrives, the masses will become susceptible to spontaneous self-organization. We can’t push that, or speed it up. What we can do is to prepare ourselves, and gather an elite to ourselves—also self-organization, but a little ahead of the masses. Mr. Maulsby’s comment is in itself evidence that hope for such an elite to make itself known is not in vain.

Posted by JW Holliday on March 19, 2006, 10:20 PM | #

Soren, I believe you are referring to this Norman Lowell.

Lowell seems to be a fine fellow, but a bit too overly optimistic about the short-term possibilities for western nationalism.

That he wishes to “moderate” his party I think is good; knowing Lowell “moderation” will not mean compromising principles, but, probably, merely toning down rhetoric and emphasizing local issues a bit more.

I believe that guys like Lowell should really hammer at the free speech issue, which seems to be a “wedge issue” to use against the anti-west, as it could in theory have attraction to nationalists, libertarians, and classical liberals.

Also, from what I’ve heard, some of the techniques Lowell has used to teach his martial arts students have been quite, let us say, challenging.  He seems to live his life according to his principles; even though I don’t agree with him on everything, I can certainly respect that.

Posted by Rowlings on March 19, 2006, 11:39 PM | #

JW Holliday - Who is the “hero of the Second World War” to whom Yockey dedicates his book?

Posted by Søren Renner on March 20, 2006, 12:00 AM | #

Mr. Holliday: Norman Lowell, not Malcolm. You are correct. Interference from “Malcolm Lowry”—author of Under The Volcano.

Mr. Rowlings: Do you ask in earnest? Mail me and I’ll tell you if you really don’t know. Or look up “Savitri Devi’.

Posted by Rowlings on March 20, 2006, 12:37 AM | #

Oh… nm. Duh.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on March 20, 2006, 12:47 AM | #

Indeed, the mental image of the Phoenix is one which is truly inspiring and which provides a very suitable symbol for regenerating the West.

Agreed.  I’m surprised I never thought of it myself - I’m into stuff like that.

Posted by JW Holliday on March 20, 2006, 04:16 PM | #

If the more moderate bloggers and readers of MR would excuse the source, here is Lowell in his own words.

Posted by Guessedworker on March 20, 2006, 04:28 PM | #

From JW’s Lowell link: ‘equality’ bigots.

That I like and will use.

Posted by mike on March 21, 2006, 05:54 PM | #

I think Yockey (like Evola, Spengler) were more concerned with the metaphysical nature of our struggle bacause things like racial differences/group competition were so obvious and noncontroverisal back then. Also of what these writers are responded are what we would call “subraces” today not the worlds major races, so keep that in mind. Yockey’s writings presuppose that whites had a strong sense of racial identity vis-vis other major races, as was case when he wrote his book in the 40’s. Yockey was mainly reacting to excessive racial-materialism of the nazis which reduces race to mere mitochondria/dna and forgots about the spiritual/culture dimension more relevant to our cause. He was trying to dissaude against things like nordicism, subracialism and splintering european group into tiny meaningless subtypes like “alpine”, “nordic”, “baltid” and such. By doing this he was trying to foster a sense of Pan-European identity which for the first time needed to exist due to the exigencies of other races/civilizations. Yockey (and Evola) wanted to to go beyond the physical and make race more relevant then leaving it to the mere material level like the subracialists did. I think he was tring to warn against just seeing as race in terms of eye/hair color, head breath, facial features and halogroups.  And yes Yockey’s book is deeply inspiring and a brillant exposition of what political and cultural necessities we must have to make phoenix rise from the ashes.

Posted by slinker, sailer, toldya, sly on March 22, 2006, 09:20 AM | #

mike, glad you liked the post, but you won’t be seeing anything like this here again.

If, however, you’re interested in NAMBLA-oriented defenses and pro-immigration arguments, this is certainly the blog for you.

Posted by JW Holliday on March 22, 2006, 11:09 AM | #

mike,

I understand the points you are make.  Unfortunately, Yockey, Spengler, and Evola went “overboard” with their anti-biological ideas.  They reacted to one unproductive extremism by going into another unproductive extreme direction (note, the Nazis didn’t have any ideas about DNA, the structure of which was discovered in the early 1950s). 

If one were to ignore everything Yockey says about race and Darwinism, and understand that the “pessimism” is not set in stone, much in Imperium is right on the money.

Unfortunately, that is a lot to disregard.  People should read the book nonetheless.  It is possible for someone to come to the right conclusions based on some wrong premises; Yockey is one such person.

Posted by slinker, sailer, toldya, sly on March 22, 2006, 11:32 AM | #

Then again, you have people who come to the wrong conclusions even when they have all the premises spoon-fed to them.

Posted by Robert ap Richard on August 02, 2007, 01:37 AM | #

A fine post, Mr. Holliday, thank you.  I share your outlook and desire.  I have ordered _The Enemy of Europe: The Enemy of Our Enemies_ and look forward to its arrival with lively anticipation.

I wonder sometimes if we aren’t going about the search for “the way” in the wrong way.  It would seem wiser that we should not so much search for a solution to our problems as we should rather first find out what is cosmically true and then apply it to our situation.  Just a thought.

“Equality bigots”—what an excellent appellation!

Posted by Robert ap Richard on August 02, 2007, 01:44 AM | #

Oh, thinking of whatcanwedonow solutions, has anyone here any firsthand knowledge of the Russian “Nashi” youth organization?

Posted by wintermute on August 02, 2007, 08:57 AM | #

As long as a people exist, and that people have ability, it would seem that permanent civilizational death is not inevitable.  My, and Oliver’s, view is that either a) the Classical and Western civilizations are one, with ups and downs (the same for the Chinese?), and thus, as long as the peoples of the West survive, another upturn is possible, or b) the cultures are indeed different, but this merely demonstrates that some groups are capable of creating multiple civilizations, so that the exhaustion of our present one need not mean our permanent demise

I am radically convinced of the continuity of Western European culture. Spengler’s pessimism is occasioned by two errors: first, he uses a biological metaphor - an organism - but has a limited knowledge of biological reality. When he says ‘organism’, what he means is an individual man and individual men die. But other kinds of organisms exist with lifespans of varying duration; some very long indeed. In addition, some organisms incorporate long periods of quiescence with periods of high metabolic activity. It never seems to have occured to Spengler to really investigate his very suggestive (and to me, useful) concept of civilizations as organisms fully.

Secondly, his proposed discontinuity between Apollonian and Faustian culture is too overemphasized, he gets carried away with his intellectual breaktrough. As the discoverer of Civilization as Organism, he, like the new Adam, is entitled to name whatever his eye falls on. If it led to some happiness in an otherwise dour existence, I am glad for it. But as Spengler is dead, we are free to examine the solidity of his names and concepts for ourselves. I - and I am not alone in this - see the outlines of three broad subdivisions in what is now called Western history. One, the Classical. Another, corresponding to Spengler’s ‘Faustian’ culture begins in the Renaissance in Italy, and contains the usual suspects: the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Liberalism, etc.

However, as many Catholic scholars - and others - have pointed out, it is neither fair nor helpful to pretend that nothing happened between the fall of the Roman Empire in the West and the Renaissance. It is even less fair to lump it all together as the “Dark Ages” and stamp it “Here There Be Dragons”. There is an distinct civilization - Catholic civilization - which includes both those centuries which are rightfully called Dark, but also the stunning flowering of the High Medieval, in which the groundwork for the Renaisssance as we know it was laid. Trade, theology, architecture, music and art of this period are organically connected to the preceding Dark centuries, but bring them to an unexpected conclusion: in the winter of culture, they bloomed. Evidence that we are dealing with a hardy perennial indeed.

The Renaissance, and the world which followed, which Nietzche, probably correctly, recognized as an abortion of all the potentialities present in that springtime, was a distinct but not radical discontinuity. It is more convincing to make the case for radical discontinity for Classical and Modern culture, as I define them here, when you assume that the connective period was not in itself, defined by certain unquestioned axioms that were lived out in every mode of life. You can’t read a work like The Germanization of Medieval Christianity or even Boethius without being deeply impressed by the unities that transcend the ebb and flow that fill history books concerned with events.  The literalists and the easily confounded will angrily refuse to believe that butterflies come from caterpillars until you show them cocoons. Even then, many will still scoff, but some will go away with something to think about.

The Roman Empire, Catholic Civilization, and the civilization that proceeded from the Renassance, all begin in Italy. I am convined that the Italians actually did offer us all a new beginning in twentieth century, by means of a system that contained the energies of Capital without reducing its population to drones. This model was almost instantly picked up by the Germans, and depending on your point of view, improved upon. In this view, a fourth civilization was proceeding from the traditional matrix when development was interrupted. We may or may not be able to pick up the thread, but the European experience during Catholic civilization indicates to me that recovery to vital activity after catastrophe and almost total cultural obliteration, is in fact possible. You offer China as another example, and India could be added to that. The Jews, likewise, seem to effortlessly defy Spengler’s death sentence. Why should Europe be the one culture that has reached its Hayflick limit?

There’s a lot more to be said on the topic of your post. I don’t think in terms of combining Yockey with Salter, but the basic synthesis you are proposing should not tax our capacities. When I find that a interesting or useful thinker has a blind spot, I just read past it. Yockey’s unsoundness on biology has never bothered me as much as his “Russia shall be the salvation of the West” idea, which is wholly groundless.

On the other hand, nobody else at the time understood that America was in fact, the enemy of biocultural survival for our kind. That’s a major act of prophecy which I feel we are bound to respect. It speaks to Yockey’s ability to separate himself from his more parochial attachments.

Another major contribution of his is the term ‘race-culture’. Salter cannot explain why it is not in my interest to have, say, lots of copies of my genes inside of Muslim carriers. Rather a non-adaptive oversight for a sociobiologist, I would say. There are two points here: first, that what is being preserved is a race and a culture, and that secondly race and culture are a single informational system, a feedback loop. And the race culture I want to preserve is the Western European one, to which I am devoted, but also Russia and Eastern Europe, though I am equally convinced that they form their own - closely related - race culture. If the West had a greater consciousness of their convergence of interests with the East as recently as six hundred years ago, there would not now be Turks in Asia Minor. More betrayals of fellow Europeans, as Ango-America betrayed Germany to a savagely Judaicized Russia, will result in further weakening. I do know pretend to know what the possible life span of a people and their culture is, but I can give a good guess of where chauvanistic solipsism leaves us: at the mercy of the Jews.

There’s more to be said here, especially about Christianity, but I just wanted to give you a yes to your big question. Consider your optimism greenlighted.

Posted by NeoNietzsche on August 02, 2007, 01:49 PM | #

================
“I am radically convinced of the continuity of Western European culture.”
================

It pains me, my dear friend, to again take issue with you on this point.

Saul brought his fire-water to the natives and made them drunk and intemperate.  There ends the *culture* of Classical Civilization - the culture of moderation and the Golden Mean.

And the impudent rejection and denigration of reality begins.

Megalomania, paranoia, martyrdom, monasticism, hermitic seclusion, inquisition, heresy, crusade, dogma, intellectual infantilization - “Judea” for gentiles who can’t hold their liquor.

“Rome versus Judea” - Judea versus Rome”

Vergessen Sie nicht.

Posted by NeoNietzsche on August 02, 2007, 02:10 PM | #

And when Renaissance and Enlightenment threatened to sober the natives, Progress ideology and Marxism were devised to meet the demand for spirits.

Posted by Guessedworker on August 02, 2007, 02:26 PM | #

Salter cannot explain why it is not in my interest to have, say, lots of copies of my genes inside of Muslim carriers.

You are reading him much too narrowly.  Salter explains that there is no loss to genetic interests if outbreeding occurs among other peoples.  The loss, expressed in child equivalents, when it occurs within-race is minutely explained.

Posted by Maguire on August 02, 2007, 02:31 PM | #

“Oh, thinking of whatcanwedonow solutions, has anyone here any firsthand knowledge of the Russian “Nashi” youth organization?”

A little.  They’re very similar to a combination Young Republicans & Boy/Girl Scouts group, adjusted for Russia. 
Nashis are the kids of New Russians, plus Old Russian officers in the FSB, Ministry of Defense and some of the professoriate.  iow, they’re the kids of Putin’s political base.

I’ll put it this way; if you want to go into the rougher parts of a Russian city, you’re infinitely safer traveling with a group of Neos and Skinheads.  There has never been, and there will never be, a group of Nashis who can face Russian WNs or non-Russian ethnics without the militia and Omon providing close support.

It will be necessary to organize middle class pro-white adults before trying to organize a pro-white Nashi style youth organization.

“Maguire”

Posted by Guessedworker on August 02, 2007, 02:41 PM | #

WM,

I agree with your model of the three broad Ages of the West.  Are we still, though, in the rationalist, post-Catholic era?  How far do we have to die exactly, and how visible does our Leviathan executor have to be, before we are willing to acknowledge the transmission to a Fourth Age?

Also, I worry that always and in everything you inwardly plan to raise up in our estimation, and to place upon a pillar of Absolute Truth, the value and betrayed promise of your beloved, defeated, downtrodden uniform-politics of 1930s Germany.

Before that idea could even be considered by we non-Germans the small warts on the face of Mr Hitler’s ambitions for his neighbours must be addressed, I think.

Posted by NeoNietzsche on August 02, 2007, 04:57 PM | #

================
Before that idea could even be considered by we non-Germans the small warts on the face of Mr Hitler’s ambitions for his neighbours must be addressed, I think.
================

Yes - the Senate must consider whether, for the sake of Roman survival, it is willing to risk its freedom from kings and tyrants by placing the military in one man’s hands.

And should Europe submit to a Hitler and the hegemony imposed by one of its own nations upon all the rest - for the sake of its survival?

For that is the only way - a federal nation or empire is a pretense - as was found to be the case in North America, mid-Nineteenth Century.  Resisting the barbarians and ending civil war requires an Empire, and empires are achieved by the conquest of all by just one of the “Contending States”.

So it should have been with Hitler, Germany, and Europe (as attempted by Napoleon and France). The irony of the complaint against Hitler is that he did *not* plan or prepare for the Imperium of Europe.  He just wanted another colonial acquisition in the East and wanted to share policing of respective colonial territories with the English.

Posted by Tabula Rasa on August 02, 2007, 06:42 PM | #

However, as many Catholic scholars - and others - have pointed out, it is neither fair nor helpful to pretend that nothing happened between the fall of the Roman Empire in the West and the Renaissance. It is even less fair to lump it all together as the “Dark Ages” and stamp it “Here There Be Dragons”. There is an distinct civilization - Catholic civilization

Well, that’s what you get for listening to Catholic scholars; the Catholic Church is not synonymous with civilisation. It’s very clear, for instance, looking at the art and architecture of pre-schism Western Europe that you are, from a Spenglerian perspective, dealing with a fellah stage. Fellahdom does not preclude “art” or “culture” in the bourgeois sense (i.e. something external, something to be consumed or copied), and I would never suggest the Dark Ages were as dark as is made out, but clearly the period up to the Great Schism is not part of the formative matrix of what we call “the West”. The art forms and architecture are primitive (i.e. indistinct copies of external forms) and are mostly Romanesque. There is cultural continuity, as there is in the use of the Latin language with previous eras, but the drive, the essence, the mission is entirely absent. The West may not be dark at that point, but it was not a living entity; culturally it simply reflected Byzantine forms. Aachen is a good example of this.

Whatever our laments may be concerning our current condition it is folly to flee into various romantic fantasies about the durability of culture. The West is alive, although sick. If we allow it to die as it is we will be destroyed by the barbarians. We will be destroyed because we will have lost our internal organising principle and thus disintegrate: ashes to ashes. That is simply a fact. Again, we are cursed with bourgeois pre-conceptions that somehow “life” means an epicurean pursuit of pleasure or that we can “choose” how to live or that if we leave the barbarians alone they will leave us alone to go fishing or do as we like. No. We are not on this earth for our own pleasure either as individuals or as members of a civilisation and High Culture’s cannot simply be wished into existence at our own behest; nor will the dead (barbarians) cease envying and hating the living (westerners). They wish us dead, it is not obvious at this point because we are acquiescing in our demise; their animus will become obvious if we struggle for life again. We must remember that any living thing is here not for itself but for a reason if we reject that reason, we die. The West has an existential purpose and if we do not make that purpose the telos of our existence we die. Mass immigration is an external sign of necrosis, rather than its cause. It’s cause is a loss of connection to superior mission and to the genuine life-giving centre: God or Tradition. The proximate problem is rebuilding that connection and discovering that purpose; if it can be done all other problems will fall away. If not it is Bolshevism and death. Those are our choices.

I am radically convinced of the continuity of Western European culture. Spengler’s pessimism is occasioned by two errors: first, he uses a biological metaphor - an organism - but has a limited knowledge of biological reality. When he says ‘organism’, what he means is an individual man

Yockey likens a culture to a plant rather than a man, in that it continues to grow even if its growth path is distorted. I do not recall Spengler using a specific biological analogy but I suspect he was drawing, as Hegel did, from alchemy in which case the organism would be partly spirit and partly matter; we would say that the West had a solar phase (medieval Catholicism) and a lunar phase (protestantism) (Spirit vs. matter: Christ vs Adam: God vs the Devil) and that the problem is the reintegration of these two with the solar triumphant giving thus the Final Man or the imperial final form or, if you like, the Christ-Civilisation, the Resurrection Culture ( that may or may not necessitate Christianity, I am unclear on this). The problem for the West is that, given our position in larger cycles, the lunar phase is grossly out of proportion to our solar (hence the existence of a monstrosity like the Great Satan), and our solar phase, as demonstrated in the investiture disputes was not particularly solar. I doubt the Catholic Church in its current condition could act as such a vehicle for reintegration. Twice in the twentieth century solar Germany failed to triumph over lunar England, and that means simply that Germany was not in possession of the superior principle. We must find that principle for I believe it is around us at this time waiting to be tapped into and only our gross materialism prevents us from feeling its pull.

And thus we come back to the current conundrum which is at heart a religious one and nothing to do with DNA.

Posted by wintermute on August 02, 2007, 06:42 PM | #

Are we still, though, in the rationalist, post-Catholic era?

No, that era has ended. A competent overview is available in Jacques Barzun’s “Dawn to Decadance: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life “. My private opinion is that the 1450 - 1950 civilization, Modernity, was supposed to be replaced by something along the lines of what the Italians and Germans were working on, but miscalcuations regarding the distorting power of Capital and hostile ethnies by all parties involved resulted in our current pass.

Whatever philosophies or umbrella of philosophies we end up travelling under, the two tasks before us are solving for the problems listed above. Re-inculating racial self-regard I think will be easier than expected, as proved by the fact that our opposite number must work night and day, at the very limits of intelligence and determination, to prevent outbreaks. You will also note the amount of violence - which in politics we call Terror - that is required to maintain the current state of affairs by our opponents. This also implies to me that the alleged European ‘loss’ of instincts for healthy self-preservation are wholly artificial.

More on this later.

Posted by wintermute on August 02, 2007, 07:05 PM | #

And when Renaissance and Enlightenment threatened to sober the natives, Progress ideology and Marxism were devised to meet the demand for spirits.

N,

If you re-examine my post, you’ll see that I include Nietzsche’s estimation of post-Renaissance culture as having been aborted by the Reformation.

Please do not worry about my soundness regarding the whole ‘Rome v. Judea’ affair. You may sleep soundly knowing that it informs all of my thinking.

As for the Interregnum, after the natives were given from the Cup of Forgetfulness to drink, they did pretty well considering what had been foisted upon them. The High Medieval period preceding the Renaissance is unfairly excluded from the short list of the great periods of human achievement. To those who would dismiss completely what occured between the fall of the Empire in the West and the bright dawn of Ficino and company, I suppose there is only one word: Chartres.

Posted by Guessedworker on August 02, 2007, 10:52 PM | #

Tabula Rasa: The West has an existential purpose and if we do not make that purpose the telos of our existence we die. Mass immigration is an external sign of necrosis, rather than its cause. It’s cause is a loss of connection to superior mission and to the genuine life-giving centre: God or Tradition.

If one intends to discuss purpose, “the West” is not really a useful term to begin with.  Purpose implies an organism, and the West is not a defined living organism.

Look, the purpose of all living organisms is the transmission of information.  Everything in the body of Man, including the behavioural products of his mind, is selected because at some time in his evolutionary past it bestowed a gain in fitness.

The capacity for faith is just such a selected phenomenon, probably due to its commonalisation of trust at an extremely high value.  It is not coincidental that belief and brotherliness cohabit.  Reciprocity trumps treacherous individualism in the effort to survive to pass on one’s genes.

As a group, like any group, our telos is reciprocated genetic interest.  This doesn’t mean that cultural forms cannot be important and even give the appearance of leading the way.  But they must clothe and serve this interest.  For if they do not, the results will be maladaptive from an evolutionary perspective and utterly negative from a general political one.

I enjoyed reading your comment, and much of what you say is true.  But you are taking up the cudgels against something greater and more wholly of us than religion or culture.

Posted by NeoNietzsche on August 03, 2007, 01:19 AM | #

===============================
N,

If you re-examine my post, you’ll see that I include Nietzsche’s estimation of post-Renaissance culture as having been aborted by the Reformation.

Please do not worry about my soundness regarding the whole ‘Rome v. Judea’ affair. You may sleep soundly knowing that it informs all of my thinking.

As for the Interregnum, after the natives were given from the Cup of Forgetfulness to drink, they did pretty well considering what had been foisted upon them. The High Medieval period preceding the Renaissance is unfairly excluded from the short list of the great periods of human achievement. To those who would dismiss completely what occured between the fall of the Empire in the West and the bright dawn of Ficino and company, I suppose there is only one word: Chartres.
===============================

I would add, to the other side of the ledger:

1) The ‘Faustian Pacts” with the Whore, abnormally empowering the Norman Duchy and the HRE,

2) One of which Pacts facilitated the Norman Conquest, resulting, ultimately, in the English Civil War,

3) And which, in the instance of the HRE, was illustrated by the destructive Investiture Controversy and the ridiculous episode at Canossa.

4) The paranoiac ethical dualism and irrationality manifest in witch-burning, crusading, and inquisition.

5) The general allegiance to, and influence of, an international institution with its own agenda. 

6) Thus the eventual reign of an Innocent III as literally the emperor of europe, moving combatant armies over Europe to the ends only of the Papacy.

7) Dogmatic Scholasticism and the requirement for Islamic academic intrusion to advance the sciences.

8) The Hundred Years’ War, further product of the Norman Pact, as an utterly wasteful, vastly premature attempt at Imperium.

I could continue with further “words” - and their implication seems to be that the racial temperament of those involved was somehow generally served by these manifestations of anti-Classical irrationality.  I find it difficult to attribute this cultural context altogether to the influence of the Asiatic intoxicant.  The European synthesis of barbarians and the residue of Rome continue to strike me as lacking the Classical combination of strength and intellect in its personnel.  You will recall my thesis of old as to “the Weenies and the Morons” - the smart-but-weak and the strong-but-stupid, too few of us combining the virtues in their persons.  Thus I find too much to which to object in the thesis of continuity, Ancient to Modern, of the “Roman” element.  There’s way too much “Judea” - or something radically non-Classical - in the Interregnum, in my sense of the context.  And the Modern period has seen Jewry readily replace the Papacy as the seemingly indispensable hegemonic “international institution with its own agenda”.