17th century English coins, from an entry on coin-clipping at Collectors Universe forum

We nationalists have a lot to say about many things.  But the freedom of the individual is not generally one of them.  We do, of course, necessarily reject the liberal philosophy as the ruling Idea of our age.  Famously “beyond left and right”, nationalism exists in a state of permanent and total hostility to it, which posture is fully reciprocated by the liberal Establishment.  In consequence, our focus is only really group-based.  That natural and inevitable individuality which so characterises our race becomes altogether too much identified with the liberal pursuit of individual-ism, and all possibility of a fitting identitarian paradigm is lost.  One can’t help but wonder whether, in consequence, our politics is fatally weakened and incomplete.

That said, let us agree that human freedom is a lodestar of the mind, and a primary value of the European mind and thus the European sociobiology.  Obviously, there is no denying the uplifting and inspiring effect of its clarion call.  Of course, there are clarion calls and clarion calls.  At the ethnic and/or national level, the principles of independence (ie, a negative freedom) and autonomy (positive) are valid even when, at an intermediate, constitutional level, principles such as pluralism (negative) and democracy (positive) are absent.  At both levels (ie, national and constitutional), the various principles are valid even when, at the level of the individual man or woman, personal liberties are absent.  A captive or slave society might, therefore, still be ethnically and/or nationally independent and autonomous.  Equally it might be, to a greater or lesser extent, pluralist and democratic.  Even while Stalin’s Terror was in full flood, elections were held to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.

From this we may ascertain that, notwithstanding all the noise that national liberation struggles create, and the noise about “liberal democracy”, secret ballots, and so forth, freedoms at the collective levels have a clear universality to them that goes beyond the specifics of the liberal philosophy.  Among other races with other evolutionary strategies and, perhaps, more naturalistic political systems, those freedoms may even be sufficient unto the day.  The individual’s needs may be met in the main elsewhere, by non-political culture and religion.  But the European evolutionary strategy of individuality injects a different energy at the level of the individual.  It accentuates the value of the individual life, and imbues our truths and meanings.  It cannot be contained, but bursts forth as the political.  It is no small part of what we are.  Its action in us is responsible for the whole of the liberal analytic since its mid-17th century inception.

Historically, then, the liberal individual has been the self-evident self, a political form overlaid upon the sociobiological reality.  It is the self which thinking nationalists conceive as debased and probably confected; and would love to be swept away in its entirety.  Historiographically, however, European nationalism has only really worked at the ethnic and/or national level.  It has been too lightly conceptualised to bestow upon us a complete three-category action, as really befits a whole system of thought about living.  Then, of course, nationalism is so much given to the concerns of the group, it seems digressive to incorporate any concerns of the individual at all.  The 20th century effusions of revolutionary nationalism simply ignored the individual life except to hawk around the ideological corset of a hero’s Nietzschean life of greatness, alongside a no less idealised but rusticated man and wife in Nature.  But we are individuals, and we are concerned for our own freedom and that of our family members.  Play-acting naturalism and a bit of cod Nietzsche does not cover off the quiet, ineffable reality of our individual lives.  That must have expression through the system for living which nationalists create.  That work remains to be done.  Where, then, to break the ground and begin?

Let us entertain the enticing and revolutionary possibility that human freedom does not, in fact, ensue from liberalism’s great, post-Christian exultation of self-authoriality (or radically personal choice, if you prefer).  After all, liberalism began as a secular interpretation of the Christian doctrine of salvation by the grace of the Judaic god.  Absent the capricious grace of said key personage, there was always bound to be some radical in-filling.  In the event, the liberal canon substituted the old boy for Man the Creator striving to exercise his own godlike power over Self and World and Nature.  Accordingly, he could be granted not eternal life by the grace of god but liberation from all bounds by his own act of will.  “He”, of course, is merely our enworlded, socialised self, and always remains such.  But the lying secular faith that is liberalism vouchsafes if not Christianity’s blissful eternity of life after death then the living estate of the subject without confines.  As such, not only any and every socially-imposed constraint is to be over-stepped, which is already not conceivable, but the very bounds of Nature, too.  The reality is that the stubborn and uncooperative facts of Nature in Man have to be denied completely and as a matter of ideological purity.  In that creative spirit it took until the middle of the 20th century for Jacques Derrida to develop the pulp fiction of Everyman in permanent transition, passing through a landscape devoid of objective truth and moral reference points.  Forty years later his kinswoman Judith Butler followed the logic to its unnatural, unsexed conclusion: to be racially European is to be fluid in every significant respect.

Even without the god of the Jews in situ this is all foundationally Judaic.  It’s not that Chosen-ness itself lacks the ontology to parse the fundamental of male status-seeking from the fundamental of presence-to-being.  But it makes the former – an evolutionary strategy serving mate selection by the females of the tribe – its only god.  The latter is a more general evolutionary strategy not restricted to sexual selection.  It is cognitive in character and, therefore, serves not the fitness and continuity of the tribe, as does sexual selection, but the survival of the organism (and only by accretion the tribe).  Conflating these separate and distinct fundamentals radicalises Chosen-ness away from any basis it might once have had in selection for fitness, and drives it towards its corollary of relentless out-group dismissal.  The radicalising focus identifies the competing out-group as the problem to be solved, which solution presents in different ways in different historical periods.  But always the aforementioned ancient conflation of power and cognition works itself out as obscuring the out-group’s natural cognition of Self and World.  In its place stands the proposition for the denatured, a-casual gentile at the Judaic End Time.  That’s the mechanics of it.

Exactly when and exactly how such thinking made its appearance among the Israelite tribes is unknowable now.  But it could easily be that the sheer ferocity of tribal competition in 13th century BC Transjordan is its evolutionary parent.  In any case, it must have appeared by the Second Temple period.  Five centuries on it manifested in the mission of Paul and the writers of the Synoptic Gospels.  It was there in Constantine’s Rome, at the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, on the scaffold erected in Whitehall for beheading an English king and, a century and a half later, another in La Place de la Concorde for beheading a French one.  It was in the contemplations of those good Christian gentlemen, the Enlightenment philosophers.  It was in the wars and revolutions that went after them.  It was at Gettysburg when Lincoln declared that the American nation was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”.  It was there in the Ipatiev House when the Romanovs were butchered.  It was in the “rugged individual” of Manifest Destiny and the not so rugged individual of Woodstock.  It was in Berlin when the Wall came down.  Ultimately, it arrived in our time in the hubris which is western globalism.

For this entire history its millenarian substance has survived, an ancient and alien DNA embedded and expressing in our religious, intellectual, social, cultural, and economic phenotypes.  It was told to us in Matthew 5:17-20 in the form of Christ’s fulfilment of the law and of the prophets:

17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

The carefully constructed faith-narrative of Christians glosses over these critically important verses.  They do not like to think that theirs is a religion of another tribe’s millenarian interests.  They don’t want to know that obediently seeking eternal salvation from the “sin” of insufficient faith in G-d is precisely the method by which our tribal identity and defence is abandoned and that other tribe’s supremacy secured.  For centuries, Christian intellectuals disparaged Judaism for its tribal nature, but by that means became advocates for universalism.  In no small measure, the tribalism of Europeans was put beyond use.  A moral regimen hostile to nationalism was instilled, out of which our current exclusion was fashioned.  We Europeans have become passengers in history … receivers not creators of the life we live.  And here we are at the end of the liberal epoch, inheritors of the fullness of that ancient tribal stratagem: mass estrangement and atomisation, confection and artifice, disorientation, and ethnic replacement and deracination organised with great efficiency by our own vain and venal, uncomprehending politicians.

With that we will end for this first part of the essay.  Part 2 will move on, refine and deepen our focus on the alternative to a human freedom that issues from the liberal proposition (for it is no more than that).  That natural alternative is the optimally human estate of attentive being.