Majorityrights Central > Category: Books

by Graham Lister

In the Anglophone world, in particular where it has been picked up by cultural studies, the term ‘body’ is a fairly reliable warning of hot air to come: a flashing sign for the sensible and time-poor to stay well away. But there are exceptions. One of which might well be The Coming of the Body by Hervé Juvin, in which premonitions of a new and radical regime of individualism under the aegis of the human body, as life distends and capital mutates to meet it, emerge (somewhat incongruously) from the French insurance industry.

Social agendas in the West are in flux, as new kinds of issues gain salience - pension provision, immigration policies, reproductive rights, marital arrangements. Juvin’s contribution belongs to the genre concerned with such issues; illustrated with an abundance of striking data, and delivered with an intellectual mordancy and crisp literary style that remain, even today, peculiarly French. The author might also be regarded as a very particular and local phenomenon. In the Anglophone world business and culture are typically strangers, yielding at best, earnest middle-brow apologetics at the level of Adair Turner’s “Just Capital”; but in France the intellectual executive is a not unfamiliar or strange figure. Operating within the insurance world, Juvin writes without any overt political attachments.

“The Coming of the Body” announces a time when the human body has started to pre-empt all other measures of value in the West, separating the experience of contemporary generations from that of all predecessors, and the rest of the world. The basis of this sea change lies in the spectacular transformation of life expectancy. When the Revolution broke out in 1789, the average span of life in France was 22. By 1900 it was just under 45. Today, it is 75 for men, and over 83 for women, and continually increasing. Quoting Juvin; “We have every reason to hope that one girl out of two born in France since 2000 will live to be a hundred years old”. This prolongation of life is “the present that a century of blood and iron has left us - the present of a life that has doubled”. It amounts to “the invention of a new body, against need, against suffering and against time; against the world too - the world of nature, which was destiny”. The gift is restricted to the rich. “An entire generation will soon separate Europe from its neighbours to the south, when the median age of its population passes 50 (towards 2050), while that of the Maghreb remains under 30”. If we were from the developing world we too would be desperately doing everything within our powers to make it to the West.

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Drew Fraser speaking to an audience in Stockholm in August this year about his essay on “the bio-cultural evolution, present predicament, and future prospects of the invisible race.”

For the last week I’ve been attending to my occasional occupation as a Telegraph thread contributor, sometimes in company with my colleague and friend Lurker.  The older I get the more single-minded I have to be, I’m afraid, and so I’ve been neglecting MR, my post-bag, my duty to comprehend messers Hegel and Heidegger, and lord knows what else.  Hope it was worth it, but of course there’s no way to tell.

One of the neglected mails in my inbox was from Alexander Merow, the author of the Prey World series.  My apologies to Alexander.  His mail announced the translation into English of the second instalment in the series, Organized Rage.

This time the narrative of resistance is set in Japan.  The ebook can be read in PDF form here.

In the foreword Alexander and his translator Thorsten Weber again appeal for a native English-speaker to cooperate with them in the task of making the translation easy on the ear:

This is the English version of the second book of Alexander Merow`s “Prey World” series. The novel was translated by Thorsten Weber and the writer. It is still no professional translation and the translator is still no “native speaker” or English teacher. He is just a guy, who loves science-fiction and dystopias. So don`t laugh about some translations, or the wrath of a real freak will come over
you! And Mr. Merow and his friend are really some kind of “freaks”.

The author has already found a lot of interested readers all over Germany, and we hope that he will also find some new readers in the English-speaking countries. Furthermore, we would be glad, if a “real” mother-tongue speaker would edit this English version one day.  Now the fight against the World Government and the New World Order goes on. By the way, soon the fourth part of the “Prey World” series will be published in Germany. And we will also translate the third part, Prey World – Organized Rage, in the next months. Anyway, have fun with this book and start thinking about the world we live in. We are sure,that you will find a lot of similarities to reality

If anyone fancies that undertaking, please let me know.

by Graham Lister

It is my opinion that Michel Houellebecq should be on the reading list of any committed non-liberal - assuming, of course, this paragon of nationalist virtue is interested in culture. And I think people who are seriously interested in understanding the grotesque spectacle of post-modern, ultra-liberal, hyper-modernity should be so interested. Cultural values are at the core of self-conception and define the contours of the political imagination.

The malaise facing the West goes far deeper than PeeCee and multiculturalism, even if they can be regarded as the most egregious symptoms of our total embrace of liberalism (that is, liberalism as the foundational paradigm for politics, culture, economics et al, rather than a secondary “corrective” ideology which is how classical liberalism arose).

Unfortunately no-one has a positive agenda to rebalance the West upon a sustainable course. There are of course some excellent critiques of the problems but, as yet, no really credible, putative solution has coalesced into a substantive form.

A comments elsewhere on the blog mentioned the spurning of Houellebecq, and I want to return to that. It strikes me that American nationalists in particular have a very narrow range of “cultural resources” that they bring to their politics. This also is true of many ‘nationalists’ across the board. How many times have the virtues of institutional religion (typically in the ‘Jesusland’ style) been offered as the “solution”, or indeed some bizarre “new”  version of fascism offered up? Pardon the paradox but both are deeply trivial non-answers (for rather obvious reasons). The exhaustion of the already exiguous political and cultural imagination of nationalists is palpable (neo-Nazi techno anyone??? - Jesus wept). There is, sadly, a lack of genuine radicalism or innovative thought – in the true sense of thinking about these issues both deeply and widely, and in being ruthless in the analysis of old assumptions and outdated or discredited shibboleths.

Returning to Houellebecq, he is deeply anti-American in outlook, and this animosity is not without very good reason. It seems that, in general, Americans - nationalists often included - completely fail to understand that their own nation is the most profoundly liberal nation in history. America was conceived as an inorganic “social experiment” in terms of Enlightenment-derived individual liberty. Individualistic liberalism is the true American ideology/religion. To be sure, it is not the only theme in American life but the others have been peripheral to the cardinal (liberal) impetus animating American culture and society. I have encountered very few American non-liberals (a Hayekian liberal who thinks he is a conservative is still a sub-species of the liberal genus). The axiomatic and defining role of liberal philosophy in American society is something that the overwhelming mass of American people, even self-described conservatives and nationalists, have a very hard time understanding. Collectively, America has drunk from that particular (liberal) well more deeply, and for longer, than any European society.

Of course, all of the West has caught the liberal disease which is deeply corrosive to the collective well-being of ordinary Europeans – truly, we are Voltaire’s bastards. To be sustainable, any society must balance the collective interests - those unifying forces that build cohesion and social capital - and the legitimate individual impulses that invariably tend to differentiation and fragmentation. Equally, a balance must exist between the interests and desires of the present generation and those to whom we will bequeath our collective life and national community. That is why post-liberal politics is actually the “radical centre”. It is a fulcrum conceptualised, for me, in more Aristotelian terms. It is not simply the centre as conceived in the conventional political spectrum, which presently represents only relative variations of liberal political philosophy.

A final thought on American nationalist thinking. I note that the ideal of white Zion has been floated on the blog. Nothing ... nothing illustrates the difference being the inorganic, propositional societies of the New World and the organic ones of “old” Europeans. The idea that whites should move to one place is the ultimate in white-flight fantasies, and is a council of despair. No European patriot could possibly think that abandoning our ancestral homelands represents anything other than the nadir of complete and humiliating defeat. 

Why should the British tribes (the Anglos and the Celts) give up our homelands? When I am in the beautiful Highlands of Scotland I reflect on all those generations that lived in this land before me and bequeathed it to us, and I feel deeply connected to the past. What right do we have to surrender our inheritance? Do we really want to run off like cowards scared into self-destruction when faced by some uppity Africans and Pakistanis? Our American friends must try to solve their own problems in a way they judge is appropriate to their situation. However as a European patriot, I for one, will never surrender – anything else is little short of traitorous.

P.S. So we have Houellebecq as a dissector of liberal cultural values, and I would also suggest Ballard and Coetzee in this regard also. But who else might be on the “contemporary literature” reading list for the by no means narrow-minded non-liberal?

Is there a prospective literary editor with a bit of time on his hands out there?  Or, at least, someone who fancies shaping-up a translation from the German of the first volume of Alexander Merow’s Prey World series.

Prey World is a dystopian fiction series currently standing at three volumes with a fourth in progress.  To quote Merow, only a fool would think it nothing more than fiction.  The narrative opens in 2027 and concerns the efforts and sacrifices of people and peoples in Europe and the East to free themselves from a totalitarian new order - a global state sustaining an elite of a clearly Jewish and Masonic character above peoples bound to a life of kafkaesque greyness, poverty and official brutality.

Merow is a thriller writer, not a creative artist.  But he is not writing for the reader with a developed aesthetic taste.  He is writing for the mass audience.  Here is what the translator (I presume) has to say about his work:

“Prey World” is no ordinary book and no easy entertainment. There is enough “easy entertainment” in our times – far too much. On the other hand, there are not enough books like “Prey World”. Books that make you think about the world we live in. And it is important that people begin to think.
The author has found yet a lot of interested readers all over Germany, and we hope that he will find also some readers in the English-speaking countries. Furthermore, we would be glad, if a “real” mother-tongue speaker would edit this English version one day.

Editing the translation is, I feel, less than it really needs.  I found myself less offended by the translator’s understandable and admitted shortcomings than by the author’s evident refusal to pause and really finish each paragraph he has written.  At the close of this first volume there is a passage in which the World President dismisses his secretary’s concern over a brutally put-down rebellion in Paris.  I’ve corrected both the grammar and word selection and also completed the artistic portrait.  The latter, of course, is well outside the task of Anglicisation requested by the translator, and would probably ruffle the authorial feathers.  Nonetheless, it’s what the narrative needs to make it attractive to a game publisher and a wide readership - and it is a wide readership that the message deserves.

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The publisher Arktos Media has circularised details of Prof Andrew Fraser’s new book, The Wasp Question.  Andrew, whose travails in 2005 at Macquairrie University were followed closely at MR, and who was twice interviewed for MR Radio, is an expert in legal history and constitutional law.  His book, however, also treats of the ethnogenesis of the Anglo Saxon people and of their religious expression.

Frank Salter has written the customary blurb, describing The Wasp Question as:

... a groundbreaking contribution to the project of synthesizing Anglo-American constitutional and legal history with the evolutionary biology of ethnicity and a Christian ethno-theology. Fraser adds a new aspect to the modern ethno-pathology that now infects the Anglo-Saxon bioculture: “Civic patriotism cannot be sustained in multi-racial societies.” His radical critique of American constitutionalism exposes a major threat to the ethnic interests of America’s founding race—the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who have since degenerated into an “invisible race” of deracinated WASPs.

Anglo-Saxon constitutionalism and its modern deconstruction are intertwined with excursions into history and genetics. Fraser explores the religious dimension of ethnic group strategies in a plausible historical and evolutionary frame. Evolutionary biology lends this book a magisterial view looking back to ethnogenesis in the England of Alfred the Great, and looking forward to a world made human by postmodern tribal solidarity, including that of the scattered Anglo-Saxon nation. The result is a fresh analysis of the ethno-religious foundations of the English people.

The WASP Question is valuable for focusing attention on the plight of Anglo-Saxon societies assailed by runaway materialism and imposed diversity. The book articulates a role for national religions in defending populations of ethnic kin. For Anglo-Saxons, that role is fulfilled by the orthodox Christian doctrine of nations. Fraser’s appeal to a patriot king who can restore Anglo-Saxons’ biocultural identity and ethno-religious autonomy is a provocative alternative.

Agree or disagree with Andrew Fraser’s prescriptions, his combination of originality and scholarship deserves to find a place in literature dealing with ethnicity, nationalism, constitutional history, biosocial science, and advocacy for Anglo-Saxon ethnic identity and biocultural continuity. Be prepared to read, reread and ponder.

Structure and chapter titles:

Introduction: The Anglo-Saxon as Pariah

I. Ethnogenesis: Toward a Biocultural History of English Constitutionalism
1. Comitatus: Kingship and Covenant in the Evolution of Anglo-Saxon Bioculture
2. Republica Anglorum: Religion and Rulership in Old England
3. Metamorphosis: The Peculiar Character of the Early Modern Englishman

II. Pathogenesis: Anglo-Saxon Identity in the Novus Ordo Seclorum
4. Homo Americanus: A Post-Mortem on the First “White Man’s Country”
5. Divine Economy: The Modern Business Corporation and the Lost Soul of WASP America
6. Political Theology: How America’s Civil Religion Fosters Anglo-Saxon Ethnomasochism

III. Prognosis: The Return of the Repressed
7. Archeofuturism: Of Patriot Kings and Anglo-Saxon Tribalism in the Twenty-First Century
8. Palingenesis: The Postmodern Rebirth of Anglo-Saxon Christendom

I received an email yesterday informing me that Michael Whitehouse, author of a fast-paced new novel about a prolonged and deadly-violent attack on the British Establishment by a terrorist cell of nationalist persuasion, has placed the opening three chapters on-line for your perusal.  You can view them here.

By way of a taster, this is the style of the writing:

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Arktos.com has put out a review call for the new translation of Faye’s 278-page book Pourquoi Nous Combattons.  The paperback edition appears in three days and the hardback on 5th May.

Arktos describes the book thus:

The book contains a manifesto for European political action against liberalism, ethnic self-hatred and what Faye terms Islamic ‘colonisation’, as well as an ‘Ideological Dictionary’ of 177 key terms which he believes are essential for all members of the ‘European resistance’ to comprehend and adopt in their own approaches to the problems at hand. Faye argues for the creation of a ‘Eurosiberian Bloc’ - a new, federalist Europe based on traditional, anti-globalist values which will incorporate all nations from Ireland to the farthest reaches of Russia and make itself independent of American hegemony. Faye also levels criticism against his former comrades from the European New Right, who he believes have retreated into the realm of pure theory and academic respectability.

This edition was translated and an original Foreword was added by Michael O’Meara, the famed author of New Culture, New Right, the most extensive overview of the European New Right to appear in English to date. The book also includes additional material and a Foreword by Pierre Krebs, the chairman of Thule-Seminar, one of the most prominent New Right groups in Germany.

If you are interested in writing a review for MR, please let me know.  I will arrange for a review copy to be forwarded to you.