A homage to Alexander Solzhenitsyn This is the first in what I hope will be a series of postings translated by Fred Scrooby from Robert Steuckers’ interesting and important Synergies Européennes site. Steuckers, interviewed here by the New Right journal Synthesis, is a heavyweight figure in the philosophical background of European nativist politics. Synergies Européennes exists to gather and circularise not Steuckers own thought particularly, but all contributions of interest to the movement. This first quite brief translation, A homage to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was initially published a year ago and appeared on Altermedia - though untranslated. Steuckers chose to repost it this month, and Fred and I hope you find it a little more instantly readable now and of interest. Finally, I want to thank Fred publicly for undertaking this task. He is MR’s premier polyglot, and talent like that just can’t be allowed to go to waste! GW Slavic languages specialist Barbara de Munnynck, who is Flemish, devotes two full pages in the Flemish newspaper De Standaard (December 8, 2006) to enthusiastically paying homage to Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. She retraces and analyses his whole body of work and writes this very fitting conclusion:
Barbara Munnynck’s reflections allow us to draw a few general conclusions: It becomes ever more clear that our turbulent, agitated, unbridled-capitalist age needs to be judged based on criteria that stand outside of time. Man’s great works and his equilibrium presuppose long duration; nothing great and lasting can emerge out of the infernal parade of bizarre novelties that strike societies such as ours. Men require long-term trail-markers and find themselves in trouble if these disappear. Beyond this or that religion, presented here a priori as the source of Solzhenitsyn’s inspiration, it is this attitude of respect in the presence of long memory, in the presence of all manner of continuity, that we must recover. Coming up with alternative ideologies presented as panaceas that will straighten everything out serves no purpose or can only lead to new catastrophes. In order to recover this sense of long duration or long memory, other works than those of Augustine or Thomas Aquinas are necessary. It amounts to taking the fascinating inventory of mankind’s great spiritual productions. The disinterest in Solzhenitsyn is the result mainly of two things: in a famous speech at Harvard University he scourged Westernism and Americanism; in the wake of communism’s collapse he didn’t applaud Russia’s westernization. Thus did he distance himself from the boilerplate repeated ad nauseam in the great global media, centered around opinion-forming American press agencies and leading us in every way to believe americanism is history’s happy, splendid final stage and that Russia’s westernization, despite the failures, is a magnificent opportunity being offered to Russia’s peoples. Translation from the original French by Fred Scrooby Comments:2
Posted by Amalek on Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:16 | # Financiers were behind both the ideology of liberal, managed, etatiste welfare capitalism and its Bolshevik variant in the Russia of 1917. The October revolution and aftermath was a crash course in catching up with the West and rendering a treasure house of natural resources, already becoming the fifth or fourth largest industrial power under the Tsar, fully fit to take its place within a globalised framework of exploitation. The USA had already undergone a similar post-monarchical “processing” for future globalistic and pseudo-imperialistic tasks through the Mexican Wars and the War Between the States. Hence the eagerness of American bankers to finance the Russian Revolution, and the readiness of joint stock corporations, particularly American ones, to co-operate with Lenin when the NEP kicked in. This co-operation survived the partial dismantling of the NEP itself, even the Great Terror (despite the Metro-Vick show trial) and was easily re-activated once the USSR needed materiel in WW2. However, by then the industries installed during the first two Five Year Plans, with western knowhow, had proved adequate to furnishing the sinews of war which broke the Wehrmacht between late 1941 and early 1943. It was revelatory how as WW2 raged on American propagandists, up to FDR, came to think that communism was just the local froth and that Soviets were really “pretty like us”, state capitalists mutating into proper ones. Stalingrad and Kursk, among other things, were the fruits of long if generally sub-rosa collaboration. Ever since Henry Clay and the mercantilists began to advocate a state monopoly of money, the USA has been in the vanguard of aggressive, often militarised and always subversive, assaults on national sovereignty and ethnic identity: at first within its own borders versus indigenes and against the Spanish Empire nearby, but eventually against pretty well the whole planet outside China. It may now have overreached itself. The Cold War victory robbed it of a plausible external threat to keep the American consumer helotry huddled fogether, so may prove pyrrhic. And Solzhenitsyn has experienced all the ways his people were at the sharp end of political machinations: a “child of October 1917” birthed into chaos, a victim of Allied collaboration with Stalin when “the man with the moustache” felt safe purging his internal critics anew from 1944, previously a conscripted foe of the multinational Teutonic variant of globalisation (the “Neues Ordnung”) and at last a prophet of communism’s inanity within Mother Russia. The sage may yet live to see the collapse of the NWO as directed from Wall Street, the illegitimate father of the Soviet Union. It would be a fit reward before the one Solzhenitsyn will get in Heaven. He deserves canonisation as the greatest son of Russian Orthodoxy since the wayward Tolstoi. Nevertheless Marx’s diagnosis and prognosis, if not his ultimate Nirvana, have been verified by the last 150 years. Boirgeois capitalism has indeed turned out to be the most potent dissolvent of ethnic, religious, cultural, national identities. The dollar sign which Ayn Rand hailed as the successor to the Cross has had considerable success in warping and smothering older foci of loyalty. Creative destruction has done its best and worst. But not when it comes to the crunch of fighting and dying: men still, as in August 1914, march off to war under national and religious, not class or ideological banners. Perhaps more than ever now. The mavens are trying to fashion a Holy War of the secular versus the Muslim to keep the profit pot boiling, since the Chinese won’t be aggressive enough. The poor morale of the USA, now it is meant to be combating “Islamofascism” for an indefinite period, indicates that the universal appeal of consumer capitalism—gussied up as the “freedom” which “they hate us for”—may be fading even for its longest and most fervent practitioners. It inspires them far less than potentially post-global-capitalist, or at any rate pacific, anxieties. How to save the planet from its inhabitants, live more simply and informally with less stress, carve newer and more sovereignties out of old ones (nearly 200 now) and suit them to the inhabitants’ embedded proclivities. Such rising trends in politics and governance since 1945 have been swinging away from sabre-rattlong imperium and consumerised uniformity. The Vulcans are alarmed by the infection of American liberals and cognitive elites by these debilitating fashions from “Old Europe”. Neoons moan that the boobs just don’t have the right stuff to fight wars for chickenhawks any more: has addling brains and muddling morals, to stop folks thinking and keep them guzzling and borrowing, worked too well for the ultimate good of the NWO cause? After 9/11 Bush Jr had to tell the armies not to panic but carry on shopping. Few need any urging. By now they fret more about their debts than Osama bin Laden. Ron Paul’s importance is as a fully expanded critic of America’s course since its Founding: he links the necessity of abolishing the Federal Reserve and its monopoly of fiat currency (in the service of a cabal of bankers, as Clay would have wished) with its futile and ruinous campaigning far from home. Paul’s policies are logically connected. Deprive the World State in embryo of its power to raise funds, and disarm it. Money for war is no newer than the Parliamentary controversies of the 1630s in England; but America is neither amenable to coughing up ship money for the Middle East nor to letting majors-general govern their private lives. Neither a quasi-regal president working for the military industrial complex nor the rule of Global Protector Al Gore, wagging a puritanical finger, seems likely to rally Americans. The fount of finance capitalism’s malign flood is drying up, but so is the USA’s idea of itself as chosen people in a shining city, entitled to arrange the earth’s affairs. As long as there are natural-born bullies, meddlers and people trying to compensate for the vacuum in their own soul, the battles have to be fought by the rest of us—whether they meddle in the name of freedom-loving free enterprise or that of liberal humanitarianism. Passive resistance is auspicious. The fat oaf on the sofa, engrossed in the TV and deaf and blind to his interests, may exasperate us. He may be our best hope. 3
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:18 | # Very nice analysis by Amalek. I’ll say only (as GW once said of Fjordman) that Amalek’s a culturalist. He doesn’t see race. As if any of what he just discussed there can continue even remotely according to the “old rules,” the “old analysis,” once the race has changed. I have news for Amalek: it can’t. And it won’t. So wake up, Amalek. Stop applying 1950s rules-of-the-game to a race-replaced world (a race-replaced Eurosphere, at any rate: the Chinese and the others are way too smart for that) — those rules won’t work. It’s a new game now — so get with the pogrom, as the expression goes. You’ve got to start thinking like a mulatto. Or mestizo, muzzie, desi, whatever. Put on your people-of-color thinking cap and recast that analysis for everyone. (Or spend some time thinking about how to head off the need for it.) 4
Posted by Matra on Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:55 | # The disinterest in Solzhenitsyn is the result mainly of two things: in a famous speech at Harvard University he scourged Westernism and Americanism; in the wake of communism’s collapse he didn’t applaud Russia’s westernization Solzhenitsyn didn’t play the assigned role of a Russian dissident. He was snubbed by every US president, including Ronald Reagan, and in the dying days of the USSR it was Andrei Sakharov - more palatable from a deracinated Western perspective - who got most of the media attention. The triumphalism of the Cold Warriors was somewhat understandable when goading the Soviet excuse-makers of the Left but they had to go and demand that Russians themselves accept their worldview: Democracy and free markets had won out once and for all. Solzhenitsyn refused to go along with that. Russians are as suspicious of Western-style free market capitalism as most of us seem to be of Russia’s more spiritual traditions. Though he is not a Russian chauvinist (unlike Constantin’s National Bolshevik friends) he is a patriot who understands that a nation is a living organism, not merely individuals acting out of their own self-interest. Following the downfall of the Soviet Union Solzhenitsyn, instead of apeing all things American, preferred to quote Dostoevsky’s comment that equal universal suffrage was absurd. In his book Rebuilding Russia, which was released within a year or so of the end of the USSR, Solzhenitsyn pointed out that human beings are not equal in their abilities, life experience and, importantly, their rootedness to their community and nation. For neocons and Western chauvinists it’s hard to think of a more objectionable worldview. But it gets worse. For Solzhenitsyn it was the assasination of Pyotr Stolypin in 1911 that led to the Russian tragedy of the 20th century. I haven’t read The Red Wheel but apparently he dwells a little too much on Dmitri Bogrov - Stolypin’s assassin - and his Jewishness. Combine Solzhenitsyn’s awareness of Jewish ethnocentrism (though he is not someone who blames Jews for communism) with his hostility to hyper-capitalism and democracy and it is not at all surprising that he seems to have been largely ignored by the Western media. 5
Posted by Friedrich Braun on Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:44 | # Here’s my short review of Solzhenitsyn’s study of Russian Jews. To my surprised, it provoked 76 comments and was linked by various blogs (most notably by Dr. Duke) and web sites. *** I just finished reading the French translation of Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together (2003) on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772 in two volumes (still no English translation available…”are we powerful or what?”). It’s both a quick and fascinating read; among other things, we learn that not only the October 1917 Revolution (really a just a well-organized, well-carried out Jewish coup) was dominated by Jewish agitators (a documented fact) but so was the 1905 Revolution (something I didn’t know). We also learn from the grand old man the awe-inspiring extent of the Jewish domination of the Soviet Union during its first two decades of existence, including its ruthless and murderous internal security system: Tcheka, OGPU, NKGB, and NKVD. A Russian in the hands of the Tcheka, etc. was almost certain to be in the hands of Jewish torturers and executioners. The litany of Jewish crimes committed against the long-suffering Russians (and other Slavic peoples: Ukrainians and Belarussians) and coldly listed by the author is simply nauseating and one should approach both volumes on an empty stomach. To this day there has been no acknowledgment on the part of international Jewry of Jews overwhelming support of the Bolshevik dictatorship during its first two decades. No asking for forgiveness. No reparations paid out to Russians. No chest-beating. No calls for repentance. No nothing…how un-Jewish that would be! Those few, rare Jewish voices who dared to speak about the Jewish role in the establishment of the communist terror machine in Russia were inevitably greeted with hostiliy and enmity by other Jews and told to shut their “self-hating” mouths. Another interesting aspect brought up by the author concerns the so-called era of “National Bolshevism” (a real misnomer) allegedly inaugurated by Stalin. Solzhenitsyn points out that Stalin was as much hostile to Russian interests as Lenin and Trotsky. How many millions of Russian peasants and Russian Orthodox clergy perished under Stalin? To speak of a Russian nationalism on the part of Stalin is simply laughable when one considers the the slaughter accompanying Stalin’s and Kaganovich’s collectivisation and religious persecutions. Additionally, Jews continued to be overrepresented at all levels of the Soviet bureaucracy (including their overwhelming participation in the administration of the Gulag system) during Stalin’s years at the helm. Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn speaks of his personal contacts with Soviet Jews and their typical detached relativism on all issues, including communist crimes with their tens of millions of victims. However, all that cool, intellectual relativism and reluctance to see the world in black and white terms would disappear in the blink of an eye as soon as Hitlerism was mentioned. Another example of Jewish hypocrisy highlighted by the author concerns the Jews admonishing of Russians (namely Solzhenitsyn) to reject global generalisations regarding Jews and aspects of the Jewish character at the same time that they would form and propagate the most negative opinions on the Russian character and how it was the Russians’ fault that the fundamentally noble communist experiment failed. Expressing generalisations about Russians while demandind from them that they abstain from seeing in Jews some distinct personality traits is very Jewish and pure chuzpah. Nothing is ever the Jews’ fault. It’s always someone else’s fault. One standard for the Jews, another standard for the goyim. http://www.thecivicplatform.com/2007/11/17/alexander-solzhenitsyn-and-the-jews/ 6
Posted by DavidL on Tue, 18 Dec 2007 02:23 | # Fredrich I had read about Solzhenitsyn’s book and the article said it was doubtful Sad how we know so little truth about our past ( both US and Europe) 7
Posted by Maguire on Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:36 | # “He has many great things to say.” The three volumes of the Gulag Archipelago are still the most relevant. People who haven’t read these yet really need to. They still explain the nature of current social conditions better than anything else published. Never think Gulag speaks only of ancient Soviet history. The same extended Jewish genotype that created and ran the NKVD - Gulag apparatus is busy creating and operating another one in North America. Their goals never change and rarely do their methods. The word labels are the only difference. 8
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:59 | # Bullseye by Maguire, just above. Very important comment. 9
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:17 | # The U.S. “Sixties,” a Jewish movement, were prefigured by the “Sixties” in the Russian Empire — the eighteen-sixties, that is. The Jewish shennanigans in Russia started in earnest in that decade in ways very similar to the Jewish shennanigans of the nineteen-sixties in the U.S.: hippie-style college students (hippie-style in their manner of dress and personal grooming, their personal and group habits such as rejection of traditional sexual mores, “there’s no difference between men and women,” etc.), radical “leftist” student movements for which Jews were primarily responsible, and so on — when one reads about what was going on back then in Russia, all the absolutely unmistakable Jewish signs and hallmarks were there. It was because of the huge number of Jews residing in that empire, some four or five million at the time, I believe, numbers not far short of those of the sixties U.S. From the 1860s onward in the Russian Empire, radical movements whereof Jewish participation was indispensable at all levels from leadership to “footsoldiers” continued their deadly-serious attacks on the Russian government and society, including numerous high-level assassinations, culminating in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. That decades-long fundamentally Jewish attack on Russia was what the novel “Crime and Punishment” was about in reality. 10
Posted by Top on Wed, 19 Dec 2007 05:35 | # I am currently reading the book ‘Stalin - The court of the Red Tsar’ by Simon Sebag Montefiore - which I highly recommend for anyone who wishes to learn more about Soviet communism. It clearly depicts Soviet Russia during the 20s, 30s, and 40s but it focuses on the Soviet leadership and their personal lives. It quickly becomes clear that this leadership was mostly non-Russian and that it ran Russia like a mafia would run its back hood. Stalin was the man at the top, and most the people under him were non-Russian - with Jews being the biggest movers. Stalin can best be compared to a Tony Soprano - a sociopath without any morality but that of power - who brilliantly manipulated all those around him. The Jews respected him because he seemed to out-evil them in the game they played. Stalin never got his hands dirty directly - he left that to the secret sevice - which was ran by guess who… Beria was the most notorious Jew under Stalin. He ran the NKVD and all the other counter-revolutionary outfits. That means he got to kill lots of people - mostly via the Gulags and starvation, but also via direct executions - sometime in his own little private dungeon (yes he had his own little torture chamber, that is the type of sickness we are talking about). While Stalin and his court Jews drank and feasted at parties during the night, they would butcher ordinary, starving Russians during the day. All in the name of progress of course. I kind of got down on the book after a while and had to stop reading. The scariest thing about the book is how it depicted Stalin and his court Jews separating the emptiness of their party slogans and the reality of violence that governed it all. These people did not feel they were doing anything wrong because in their heads they were good fathers and providers for their families, and that they were representing the way of the future. Thus they had no problem signing off murders of whole villages or whole families. This is another theme explored in the Sopranos - where Tony and his friends feel they are not doing something morally wrong as long as they provide for their families and pay tribute to some hypocritical and shallow morality. Jews are so brilliant at separating their actions from their stated intentions that it is impossible for them to admit any wrong. It is therefore impossible to have real dialogue with them - which is the sad part. Unfortunetly the only Euros the Jews listen to and respect are the sociopaths. And we call this progress! 11
Posted by Fr. John on Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:07 | # It was forged under trying circumstances and has certain things in common with the Christian humanism of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Edmund Burke.” Munnynck’s writing clearly misses the point, if not the WHOLE of what AS is about. As an Orthodox Christian, the entire Weltanschauung of Orthodoxy is in complete CONTRAST to the egalitarian, rationalist, top-down bureaucracy of the Papist West. (sorry, RC’s no other word pulls it all together like that old slur, ‘papist’) Poster David L had it correct, when he opined: “Sad how we know so little truth about our past ( both US and Europe) because of these gatekeepers.” The US and most of the West is now a ‘judaized society’ and even the old Anglo-Saxons morals about business are as antiquated, as Sabbath-keeping. You can thank Boas and the cultural Bolsheviks for that. But, even were that not so, even still, as Farrell wrote in his massive, “God, History, and Dialectic” there is a world of difference in how the West views herself, and the world, and how the Orthodox, and the “Byzantine/Rus” (again, for lack of a better term) view the world, government, etc. That Russia is not acting completely true to form, can be (again) laid at the feet of the Bolsheviks, for whom they have first hand knowledge of what the Obamanation or Hitlery might foist on us, in 2008. AS is misunderstood by most, and only dimly appreciated by even fewer, most of whom are those who fear what his World and life view would mean, if what HE knows, ever becomes Common Knowlege- thus the censoring of an English version of “2oo years of hell” - amore apt title for that new book…. 12
Posted by Baltasar on Mon, 28 Jan 2008 05:05 | # It does seem STRANGE- that a book by a Nobel Prize winner of the stature of AS- remains unpublished in English- doesn’t it? Especially - considering the fact billions of trees are cut down just to publish mountains of unspeakable tripe that fills the shelves of many a bookstore throughout Europe and North America. Censorship by ommission?....Oh that doesn’t happen in OUR part of the world (sarcasm)! In the meantime- it has been made available in German, and more recently in Italian. I would urge readers with some reading knowledge of French to avail themselves of the French version - which is available through Amazon France. There is also a new DVD available “Dialogues with S…” by Russian director Alexander Sokurov…also available through Amazon (US). Post a comment:
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Posted by Alex on Mon, 17 Dec 2007 02:01 | #
The Russians are fortunate to have Solzhenitsyn as one of theirs. He has many great things to say.