Majorityrights Central > Category: Political Philosophy

Speech given by Dr. Tom Sunic at the “Nordic festival,” Gothenburg, Sweden, 30th August, 2008

We start to wonder about our identity at the moment when we are about to lose it. Our fathers and our grandparents never asked questions about their identity; they never worried about it. They took for granted their affiliation to a given religion and to a given tribe or a people. It is with the rising tide of globalization, multiculturalism and multiracialism, along with the waning of the traditional nation-state, that we start asking a question about who we are. The minute we raise the question of identity we start thinking about national identity.

But is this still really so today? How do we define our modern identity? Let us propose a couple of modern definitions that are onerous to Europeans.

First, we must mention the “substitute” identity, or ersatz identity, or identity by proxy. It is no accident that along with the loss of their own identity, white Europeans resort to ersatz identities. For instance they espouse the Palestinian or Tibetan identity or some other distant Third World identity as if it was their own. They spot some lost Indian tribe in the Amazon forest and then, with all their passion, strive to protect and preserve it. But when it comes to defining and preserving their own identity they remain silent. To say aloud “I am proud of being European,” let alone “I am proud of being a Swede,” or “proud of being a Croat,” smacks of nationalism. It must be avoided in modern discourse.

So which is the defining factor of identity today? Here in this place, you and I can talk about primary identity, secondary and tertiary identity. Does our local national identity today, in the epoch of globalism, precede our secondary European identity? I may have many more things in common in terms of my identity here with young Swedish identitarians than with my fellow Croat nationalists. But in a multicultural and multiracial society it changes. I may find common bonds even with my former enemies, the Serbs, who may also have difficulties identifying themselves with non-European residents coming to their shores.

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“We were enraptured by war.  We had set out in a rain of flowers, in a drunken atmosphere of blood and roses.  Surely the war had to supply us with what we wanted; the great, the overwhelming, the hallowed experience.”

This quote is by Ernst Jünger (1895 - 1998), and it is taken from his memoir of the 1914-18 war, Storm of Steel.  The sense one gets here of an intoxicating, Volkish unity shot through with a destiny of greatness is everything that is unstable and unsatisfactory about nationalist sentiment, and which the enemies of European Man exploit to our eternal disadvantage.

Yes, Jünger’s setting-out was the German nation going to war, and young men will be filled with a fearful optimism at such times.  But there is no hint here of the defence of mothers and sisters, hearth and home, which lends justice to the waging of war.  Jünger is pointing to something quite different.  Somewhere in the Gemeinshaft, that community of simple and natural human relations, there stirred a yearning for the realisation of the national heroic.

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I have been sent the URL for a site new to me, assembled by an NZ scholar - and strict dialectician - named Kerry Bolton.  I am impressed with the work Dr Bolton has put into his site thusfar, which includes an extensive catalogue of study resources and a page on a periodical, Restoration Magazine, which I guess he is editing.  This latter, it appears, might be a worthwhile addition to that small group of intellectual English-language publications serving our range of interests, of which Occidental Quarterly and Michael Walker’s (soon to be rescusitated) Scorpion are the finest exemplars.

Efforts like Dr Bolton’s, which go beyond the usual “protest website” and offer paths to understanding for anyone motivated to tread them, deserve our attention and support.  I note with interest that this effort includes a Commentary page with just one entry todate: a more detailed and considered obituary to the great Solzhenitsyn than the one I knocked out!

I shall watch the development of the Renaissance Press project closely, and commend you to do the same.

Troy Southgate has posted links on his NR Forum to online pdf editions of two of the three principle works of the Sicilian nobleman, neo-pagan and tradionalist philosopher, political activist and soldier Baron Julius Evola.

I have not previously read Evola.  He is a little too Tolkienesque in his mysticism for my taste.  And to be frank, I am a little put off by the accent on the spirit of race, and on the decision for cultural restoration - as opposed to racial or ethnic preservation - which that triggers.  Nonetheless, as one of Nature’s more irredeemable lateral thinkers and someone who regards the European sociobiology as philosophically inevitable, I have to take an interest in a thinker who “seeks to restore the order, not of 100 or 200 years ago, but of literally thousands of years ago” (see below).

Revolt Against The Modern World

From a brief review by John Reilly:-

“Revolt Against the Modern World” is usually cited as the best general introduction to Evola’s thought. Generically, Evola’s ideas are an adaptation of René Guénon’s philosophy of Tradition. In this context, the Tradition in question is not so much the historical heritage of the West, or of any particular society, but rather of the archetypal forms of society, the state, and spirituality. Evola uses particular histories and particular myths chiefly to illustrate these ideal forms.

Evola claims to have little use for “apocalypticism,” which he regards as an example of spiritual degeneration that is both demotic and demonic. He also has little use for the principle of historical determinacy; for him, whatever happens in history is at least proximately the result of someone’s will. Nonetheless, one cannot help but notice that this book describes a model of history in which the modern world is at the very end of a dark age, the Kali Yuga. He offers the hope, though not the assurance, that an elect might come through the final collapse.

The book is divided into two parts: “World of Tradition” and “Genesis and Face of the Modern World.” The first is chiefly concerned with describing the archetypes that inform the world and history. The second describes how these forms have decayed over time, but with occasional revivals of “tradition” that interest the author keenly.

Men Among The Ruins

From Wikipedia:-

Evola argues for a radical restructuring of society based on his view of Tradition. Evola takes as his jumping off point Italian Fascism and to a lesser degree German National Socialism and describes the ways that the two failed to achieve his ideal. As in Fascism and Nazism, Evola champions a powerful state unified under a rigid code and caste system.

Despite similarities, Evola’s ideas differ dramatically from those of the fascists and, while preserving an appreciation of militarism, focus less on modernity than tradition, less on the technological than the spiritual, less on the masses than the person (which Evola distinguishes from the individual). In this work, Evola develops his radical reactionary philosophy. Reactionary is an important word for him, one that he seeks to own. In fact “reactionary” could be seen as an understatement in his case as he seeks to restore the order, not of 100 or 200 years ago, but of literally thousands of years ago.

This work constitutes Evola’s only attempt at a book-length explicitly political work and, as such, he regarded it as a failure.

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Having passed up the opportunity to acquire an education at the proper time and, anyway, never having been very willing to submit to the tyranny of other men’s minds, I’ve been glad of the theoretical minimalism that inhabits Conservatism.  It is a visceral politics, and might even be a politics of Nature, or as close to it as any politics addressing a complex society is likely to get.  It is certainly a politics of practical men only too inclined to draw a veil across the philosophical obscura of this, our Postmodern Age.

For example, just the other day I happened across a short passage authored in 1999 by the post-Marxist agony aunt Chantal Mouffe.  She was agonising over the crisis in liberalism.  Liberal intellectuals, you should know, are an anxious lot.  They have been tearing their rational hair out over crises in the Enlightenment Project for well over a century (you would think that would tell them something, but no).

Mouffe, while not a neon-light left intellectual like Michael Walzer, Slavo Zizek or Chomsky, has about her the quality of a weather-vane.  She points not so much to her own body of thought as to the theoretical horizon.  Theoretically, Pomo is the undoing of Everything, even rationalism, in the belief that Something must succeed it.  Well, in 1999 Mouffe sensed that it already had, but saw signs of danger everywhere.  “New antagonisms have emerged,” she wrote, “not only in advanced societies but in the Eastern bloc and in the Third World.”

This was certainly true.  Neither the British Multicultural nor French Integrationist models were uniting the rainbow peeps that were the “new West”.  Russia was about to plunge into an ice-pool of seriously anti-liberal New Kremlinism.  And in the Dar al Islam, a dangerously aggressive and expansionist Wahabbism was rising.

The Project, which in its broadest terms is the bringing together of humanity (otherwise known as peeps) in freedom and justice, was heading nowhere but into the history file.  The future would hold no reverential memories of the ironic Fathers of the present.  There would be no la-la land of liberal values.  And probably, caught dancing too soon in the charnel house, the Jewish value of nihilism, Enlightenment’s one enduring gift, would stand naked and shivering, awaiting the inevitable, messy denouement.

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One of the two great mysteries synonymous with the Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s revolutionary contribution to portraiture, is claimed to be resolved. 

... experts at the Heidelberg University library say dated notes scribbled in the margins of a book by its owner in October 1503 confirm once and for all that Lisa del Giocondo was indeed the model for one of the most famous portraits in the world.

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I am more of a Schopenhaurian than a Nietzscheian, and more of a Darwinian than a Schopenhaurian.  But the following two-part, 24-minute video by Alain de Botton is a populist introduction to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche.  It comes with Norman Lowell’s approval, so it has to be worth a post here.

Part One

Part Two

and, with thanks to skeptical ...

Paert Three

On September 30th the left-wing Croatian daily Novi List ran a feature on the European New Right, concentrating in large measure on the figure of Tomislav Sunic.  Tom has translated the page for me, and I’m pleased to publish it below.

Fair treatment by and regular exposure in the mainstream media is still a distant goal for most thinkers and activists on the radical right.  Here is one only too rare example of it.

NEW RIGHT-WINGERS DO NOT TOLERATE TALES ABOUT EQUALITY

The basic attitude of New Right-wingers is anti-egalitarian, i.e. the contention that all people cannot be the same, which is the main differential political and cultural point between the Left and the Right.  They are hostile to Marxism, Liberalism, and on their list of enemies are also the Church, the USA and Israel …

by Neven Santic

When two weeks ago the media made public that David Duke, the former chief of the infamous KKK, visited Croatia in order to conduct an interview with Dr Tomislav Sunic, whose book Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age was recently published in the USA, many became intrigued by Sunic himself, and by the ideas he advocates.  This was especially so when the word spread that Sunic’s house-guest for a few days was sociobiologist Richard Lynn, known for his research of IQ among different nations.

Prof Richard Lynn (left) with Dr Sunic

Tomislav Sunic obtained his doctorate in the USA, and his doctoral theme was framed in his book “Against Democracy”,  in which he criticized American democracy.  For some time he was a professor in that country, and after his return to Croatia he devoted his time to writing and publishing.  In Zagreb he published the book “Ameri?ka ideologija,” in which he attempted to lay bare the American way of life.  Over the last 15 years he has written numerous articles for specialized journals promoting conservative ideas.

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