Any novel and genuine politics of change must possess a set of interlocking core principles derived from a theory of Man’s reduced condition and a countering and inspiring vision of what he properly is.  That latter must be reflected in the ultimate value advanced by these politics, and the whole must be eminently communicable, indeed politically virulent; and for that people have to know that it is true.  One shortfall in any of these respects and historical purchase will not be possible, even when the prevailing system is grown stale and unproductive, and the people yearn for a relevant and fresh, hopeful way forward.

So poorly mapped out is ethnic nationalism, so poorly has it been served by thinking nationalists, and so unsympathetically, oftimes deceitfully, by liberal academics, that all three of these necessities - structure, ultimate value, and truth - are scarcely addressed at all in any formal sense.  Properly resolved they would advance our nationalism considerably towards becoming the holistic and original philosophy we desire it to be. 

But they are not the only unresolved issues.  The problem of becoming, or human purpose, and the problem of the individual and his freedom also cast a long shadow, as does the problem of the sheer scale of the revolutionary endeavour.  With all that in mind, then, we will now try to make some progress, or at least some useful observations, commencing in this essay with the problems of structure and of becoming.  Value, truth, and the individual must await a part four, and even five.

The problem of structure

As explained previously in this series, we routinely profess ourselves to be ethnic nationalists, espousers of a communicable philosophy.  Really, though, the most that can be said of us is that we are nativists.  Nativism at least has a structure to it.  It is defensive and survivalist.  It is the politics of the place of arising ... home, the source of the people, the parent of their distinctiveness.  It is important.  But it can never rise to the station of a positive, organising system for living ... never get beyond defence of the people’s life and land.

Descriptively, a nationalism of ethnicity must be holistic, naturalistic, existential, authenticising, universal (in the sense of true of all peoples), defensive before it is expansive, and preserving before it is conserving.  As the political expression of the native principle, it is the politics of ethnic genesis on the soil and so of the natural right ... the native right ... to defend kind and home.  It is, then, the active politics of genetic interests, of the kin relation.  As the politics of all settled peoples it is the politics of peace and the complete antidote to liberalism’s post-Christian and anti-European universalism.  It is the politics of consciousness of being.  It is the politics of the authentic in us individually and, therefore, collectively, because consciousness in a people, like natural wisdom in a crowd, is accreting. 

But what are the principles underpinning all this?  How do they articulate socially?  The following (tentatively proposed) structural scheme may take things forward:

It exhibits a rather extensive collection of base principles and, in the upper range, a row of states leading to triads of active processes.  All are arrayed across three distinct but interlocking dynamics, shown here as rising columns.

The bottom row of principles, which are difference, continuity, confine are the ground for the dynamics, respectively, of essence (which opens to identity), blood (ethnicity, peoplehood), and home (nativism).  The native soil is the very earth of Man, indeed of the organic, for Man lives within an ecology of which the local physical environment is the true progenator.  But it is his essence and his blood which make the whole enterprise something greater politically than nativism ... first, as difference from the inorganic and difference, therefore, as the principle of life’s origin; but then, rightward on this table, as Life’s will to continuity in the face of the action of the mechanical universe as it ceaselessly drags this life back towards discontinuity and disintegration, and the cold state of mechanics.  It is essence and blood which ultimately grant the possibility that a politics of ethnicity will have substance, scale and meaning.

It is not my intention here and now to write at length about the internal features and relationalities of each of the twenty-three component principles.  That will come later (and, because this is very much a work in progress, may involve some modification).  But we can note one or two things.  First, for the most part the three dynamics proceed station by station in small, sometimes very small, increments.  Some internal influence between the dynamics is indicated.  But I think in reality the three grow towards one-another ... perhaps towards a principle of Man, which the table does not (and, currently, cannot) show.  The dynamic of essence, on the left of the table, is the most unfamiliar to nationalists for the reason that it has rarely been part of European nationalism’s philosophical language.  However, it is obviously fundamental to a politics of existence, which ethnic nationalism must be.  So it is mete for us to understand something of foundation and Man’s essence, to which end I quote again from the MR article linked above:

Integration necessarily has locality and therefore confines, for confinement alone gifts separateness from the prevailing All.  In separateness there is necessarily resistance to the claim of that which is separated from, which is a claim to absoluteness.  In resistance there is the tendency and leaning towards continuity; and in that leaning already lay the seeds, at least, of a “something” which is essentially different, and which preserves its difference only as long as it engages in a Manichean struggle with the blind and profane, homogenising forces without.  But that engagement limits homogeny’s realm and the priorness of existence is universal no more. Within its own bold confines essence is now prior, for so long as essence differentiates itself existence is made contingent upon and a function of it.

That quote addresses not just the disposition of forces at life’s origination on our rocky world but, because those forces are boundless and immutable, also its disposition today and tomorrow and for as long as life pertains, which is to say (in metaphysical terms) exactly as long as essence is prior to existence.  By dint of its singular self, the essential principle defies the universal and homogenising, and pours forth specificity and multiplicity.  It goes, therefore, to Man’s ipseity: the brain’s inhering capacity to ascribe that particular subjecthood “I”.  Its multiplicity connects to the principle of relation, and by relation to the native principle, lending Man his collective ipseity: the greater subjecthood “we”, quite literally grounded in place and kind.  And so everything emerges under the hand of this natural and benign identitarianism.

Its onward development, principle to principle, leads to the condition of a people living freely and out of its nature and consciousness, which is why it does not require authoritarianism; and also why it is absent (and proof against) the abusive desiderata of Western “leaders” today or the usual designs of hostile entities in the land.  Ethnic consciousness has its white blood cells in that respect.  Obviously, such an estate we may consider not so much an historical rarity as beyond the historical record entirely.  But it is only the manner in which peoples would choose to live and be, if they could; and it has been denied to Europeans for many, many centuries.

By definition this human norm has to be a sincere, emergent estate ... an existential standing cleared of obstacles and detriments, and not a confection like the Nietzschean hero (who is, of course, imposed from above by propagandists and is only ever simulated by the naive).  As such, it is constituted as the authentic life (grace) freely lived with commitment to kin, in cogniscence of shared natural interests, especially that of the homeland (vigilance).  Grace, commitment, and vigilance are the respective outcomes of all the prior action and effect of the lower principles, and the collective properties of a fit life of the people.  Each of these three principals (and, indeed, all those in this model) will only deepen in import over Time, and the whole kin-structure will strengthen with the people’s own refining genetic specificity on the land (always allowing that politically-generated gene-flow is first regulated, obviously).  The kin-group becomes generationally ever more distinctive, ever more itself, its connection to the land ever greater and filled with meaning.

Notwithstanding the great good in all that, this estate is not the final stage or product of this structure.  There is one further possible development.  But to describe that we first have to examine the relationship of ethnic nationalism, as a politics emerging from the very being of the people, to the telos.

The problem of becoming and the empirical gap

Unique among the races of Man, Europeans are questing and adventurous, extraordinarily creative peoples.  It is why our life possesses the beauty and brilliancy the rest of humankind strives, after its fashion, to emulate (or to experience by migrating to it).  Nationalists speak of this endowment as the creative and promethean fire at the heart of Western civilisation,.  A more prosaic interpretation is that it is the sociobiological gift of the long barren months which winter brings to the northern hemisphere, and which only a certain inhering intelligence can survive. 

This, of course, is a view of the European life and Mind predicated on the principle of the emergence of properties.  It is perfectly consistent with a nationalism of ethnicity, which is a nationalism of commonality and of specificity ... of what abides and expresses in the generations of the people.  Such essentialism is completely compatible with an existential focus, for existence is “contingent upon and a function of” essence.  But existence has a static and near horizon.  It can never flow beyond that and into the telos, into the realm of dreams and idealism.  There is a void between them (which formerly I termed the empirical gap).  In so much as the ordinary but obviously important human attributes such as hope, faith, purpose, aspiration, inspiration open to the act of becoming, a nationalism of ethnicity may not adequately keep hold of these things, and may in consequence simply lack the motive power to change the course of history.

It cuts both ways.  The continental nationalisms of the first half of the 20th century were almost exclusively reliant upon the dreams and idealism of young men; and one could certainly argue that the absence of a grounding and moralising existential point of reference facilitated the weaponisation of German youth and planned wars of aggression.

Perhaps the question mark over ethnic nationalism’s agency can be resolved or, at least, ameliorated by determining how far an existential politics can travel towards that mirage telos before it hits the limit of the concrete ... how far before its method of the observation and proof of emergent properties ceases to apply to the idealised forms and untethered beliefs and inventions of the world of the spirit?

In his Rectoral Address at Freiburg on 27 May 1933, Martin Heidegger made some politic gestures towards National Socialism (he had joined the party on 1st May, Hitler having been sworn in office as Chancellor only four months earlier).  He spoke of “the Volk”, which he never otherwise did, and spoke of the Volk’s destining.  He spoke of spirit, which was not at all a term from his own lexicon (in Being and Time he used it in criticism of Hegel).  He spoke of self-assertion.  Indeed, the very title of the Address is The Self-Assertion of the German University.  He spoke of the people’s strengths and of greatness - again, concepts perfectly alien to his prior thinking.  One not untypical passage runs:

... the spiritual world of a people ... is the power that most deeply preserves the people’s strengths, which are tied to earth and blood, and as such it is the power that most moves and most profoundly shakes its being (Dasein).  Only a spiritual world gives the peoples the assurance of greatness.  For it necessitates that the constant decision between the will to greatness and the letting things happen that means decline, will be the law presiding over the march that our people has begun into its future history.

It is generally assumed that Heidegger ignored his own, so to speak, strict dietary rules here and supped with the metaphysical devil (metaphysics in his specific, technical interpretation of an ontically reductive study of what appears in the world).  His general reputation, of course, never entirely recovered from his time as a party member.  But for his intellectual peers it was this prostitution of his groundbreaking, “anti-metaphysical” ontology (which had made him such a key figure in German philosophy in only six years) that was most troubling, bringing into question not just his personal judgement but his scholastic integrity.

But is that really fair?  If we examine that quoted passage we see how the trigger words “spiritual”, “strength” and “greatness” are little more than adornments.  They seem to be signalling something vaguely nazistic, but they are never allowed to slip their earthly bounds and escape into teleological thinking.  So, the spiritual is a world belonging to the people, tethered to the people’s consciousness, which is at one crucial remove from them belonging to some higher Idea than their own Being.  Naturally, then, strength is preserved by this spiritual world, not licenced to aggrandise itself and impose itself on the weak.  Rather, strength is “tied to earth and blood”.  It is for the defence of life and land.  Far from being National Socialism this is nativism, ie, it belongs to the right hand column in the figure above.

However, Heidegger’s further statement that “only a spiritual world gives the people the assurance of greatness” goes beyond nativism.  He speaks of a formal binary opposition between “the will to greatness” and a life of supinity, decline and dissolution, and that opposition presents human beings with a “constant decision” between the two.  “The spiritual world” is this existential divide between the wilful intent to transcend and the will-less submission to external power and Fate, and which at all times is the reality of Man’s consciousness.  Heidegger does not say how the decision for transcendence “assures” the people of greatness.  One would think that an over-statement, and there can never be assurance of anything - the possibility of everything, perhaps, since regression and the possibility of nothing always hovers near.  But the estate of greatness is, it would seem, the final prize.  What can he mean by it?

Well, we are definitively in a more bracing nationalist paradigm.  Detachment from the immersive power of the world, consciousness of Being and kind, and self-ownership and autonomy are ahead of us, and perhaps something great beyond that.  All hinges on Heidegger’s “constant decision” at the fulcrum:

                       
The fulcrum or turning point of the Ontological Transit and
the site of Heidegger’s “constant decision between the will to
greatness and the letting things happen that means decline.”

Aside from fitting key words from National Socialism to his philosophy of an emergent authenticity, Heidegger re-cast the fruit of a life of authenticity not as we might, as grace (ie, in the left-hand column, of Essence, in the table of principles above) but as some sub-Nietzschean greatness.  This was pure opportunism and not remotely honest.  But, as he stated after the war, he had hoped to open the way for a “conversation about Being”, and this was an offering to that end.  The conversation never happened.  After conflict with his superiors in the educational ministry in Berlin the following year, he resigned his rectorship and fell out of favour with the Party.  We do, though, have the Rectoral Address to show how he planned to approach the empirical limit of his nationalism, across which lay the near-religious faith in der Führer and the rampant idealism of Ayran supremacy.  He could never bridge the gap, of course, because his use of Nietzsche’s notion of greatness never departed the nature of the people, while that of the National Socialists was a heroism and glory that could be put-on and paraded and, finally, demonstrated through a bombastic display in the capitals of Germany’s defeated neighbours.  But the sage of Todnauberg did limn the edges of the void, and so may we.

We have already seen that, in itself, grace is the estate of a self-appropriated life, yes, but a life of one who has matured and penetrated to the centre and abides there, in his own (Heidegger would say “ownmost”) house of Truth over which he has full propriety.  It is a peace of a kind once anticipated under the guardianship of the god over the doorway, who looks forward and backward.  Going out and coming in, and all other things, are marked equally by it.  In the way of the individual it is sublime but difficult of attainment, and as ever easily surrendered to the subtle and unseen return of mechanicity.  But although in the way of the people its attainment is lower and its reward less, its surrendering is difficult, its gentle gifts certain, and as long-lasting as the politics of authenticity which father them.

Long-lasting they may be, but of itself grace is inert.  It does not lead automatically onward to another, more agentive station or principle in the line.  But it happens that there is a station in the neighbouring line, the centre of the three, which connects to it and gives impetus and development to it.  That station is an active commitment to kind by which men are recognised not by social class or education, or culture or political beliefs or even by personal temperament and sympatico, all of which reconfigure as intra-ethnic bases for discrimination.  Nothing can make an Other closer to oneself than the blood that is shared, or further away than the blood that is not shared.  There are just these two positions.  One may reasonably equate the knowing of them to the red-blooded nationalist characteristic of racial awareness.

Out of this union of grace and racial thinking comes a state in the essential (identitarian) line of self-actualisation.  Actualisation implies not an end to the naturalistic processes which have preceded it but an augmentation of them with the taking on of such philosophical and/or religious predicates and values that accord with them.  With this we have arrived, finally, at the “actual” process of internalising the new revolutionary thought-world.  It is how a fit and nurturing philosophical and religious life is made a public good giving of the psychological health and wholeness of the people.

If self-actualisation is the seventh and crowning station of the essential dynamic, that of blood is self-assertion, which is also a product of racial thinking.  In effect, it is racial/ethnic activism in the physical world, by that means remaking it.  A well-known but for us, of course, 100% negative example of this is the practise of tikkun olam, a Mishnaic concept developed in the 19th century by non-Orthodox Jews to commend “perfecting” the world (ie, the rest of humanity) into a “unity”.  So the goal, as ever, is the manufacture of the amorphous, raceless gentile of the End Times.  Ethnic nationalism’s activism would tend in the precise opposite direction, for the enthronement not of Jews but of the human essence, the continuity of blood, and the native principle.  Doubtless, that end would necessarily oppose and duly suppress Jews’ efforts to erase human difference and human nature.  But the example of activism by which the immediate world becomes of the people, and not the other way round, stands.  As it may befit them, our people, and all true peoples, come into the realm of power.

So we arrive at the limit of the empirical, as the antithesis of faith, and such purpose that can abide in ethnic nationalism.  The final station, open to creative self-expression in ever more insightful and productive philosophical and religious forms, open to the evolutionary future of increasing fitness and specificity, open to the poetic and mythic expression of the land and the deeds of our ancestors, is the culmination that is destining.  It is a constant bringing forth of what is within the people, and it is a journeying, a felicitous path into the people’s future.  It is still imbued with the will to difference and continuity with which it all began.  It is eternal, unstrained, and it is as far as Martin Heidegger, in his one, maligned attempt to open up debate on the matter, could take us, short of leaping the gap into faith and dreams.