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Feb. 10, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:20:40
Seeking the Essence of Western Man
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Left, Right, and White.
I am your guest host, Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
And I have a guest guest, so to speak.
That is to say, he is ordinarily the host, none other than Gregory Hood.
And ordinarily he is the host, but he has graciously given me control of the microphone, at least for a few seconds here.
Thanks very much for this opportunity, Mr. Hood.
I'll probably take the mic back soon, so you know how I am.
I'm sure you will.
We decided to talk today about Dominic Venner.
Really a remarkable Frenchman, probably not nearly as well known even in Conservative and enlightened circles in the United States as he should be.
He was a Frenchman who was born in 1935.
A prolific historian and essayist, he had a particular interest in weapons and hunting.
He grew up in Paris and his father was a distinguished architect.
This gives you an idea of what sort of man he was, but he joined the French Army in 1953, the very first day he was eligible, that is to say on his 18th birthday.
This was at the height of the Algerian War.
He served as a paratrooper for three years fighting the insurgency.
In 1956, after three years of combat, he came back to France.
And following the violent suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, he participated in the ransacking of the office of the French Communist Party on November 7th, 1956.
He was definitely a man of action.
He had been furious that the communists were supporting the FLN, the Front Libération Nationale, of the insurgents in Algeria.
And so this is his way of expressing his political views about that.
He became a member of the OAS, the Organisation Armée Secrète, that was a French paramilitary organization that was prepared to use force and even terrorism to change French policy on Algeria and keep it French.
Dominic Venner took part in the attempted coup against the French government when Charles de Gaulle, in Venner's view, Betrayed France by supporting independence for Algeria and he served a prison sentence of 18 months.
As he said later on, it is total immersion in action with both its most sordid and noble aspects that has forged me and given me the ability to understand history from the inside As an initiate and not as a scholar or as a spectator.
In other words, he believed that his understanding of history was forged in the fires of making it and certainly attempting to make it.
And he wrote for a positive critique which is fortunately available now in English translation from Arctos during his time in prison.
Later, when he got out in January 1963, he created, along with Alain de Benoist, the movement called GRESS.
The English of the acronym is Research and Study Group for European Civilization.
That's really been the seedbed for the new right, both French and European.
And he was with it from its beginnings until the 1970s.
But in 1971, He really stopped all political activity and he focused on professional history as a historian.
He wrote a book actually on the Battle of Gettysburg.
That was in 1995.
He wrote about the Whites and the Reds during the Russian Revolution in 1997.
He wrote a history of the collaboration.
Those are the collaborationists with the Nazi occupiers during the Second World War.
That was in 2000.
A history of terrorism.
And he also wrote a very distinguished history of the Red Army.
That is the Soviet Red Army for which he won a very prestigious award from the Académie Française.
That was in 1981.
He also, and this is an important book that's never been translated into English, he wrote something called History and Tradition of the Europeans, in which he set out what he believed to be the common cultural basis of European civilization.
And he was a practicing pagan, but also an admirer of Christian civilization.
As is well known, he committed suicide in 2013 right before the Great Altar of Notre Dame Cathedral.
And he did write in his suicide note, I chose a highly symbolic place that I respect and admire.
And only a few hours earlier, he left a post on his blog about the forthcoming protests against the legalization of same-sex marriage, which he thought was an abomination.
He also approves of the demonstrators' outrage at what he called this infamous law that was going to make that possible, but he also expressed doubts as to the efficacy of street protests to affect social change.
He also, he rebuked the demonstrators for ignoring the threat of Afro-Maghreb immigration.
Maghreb, of course, is North Africa.
Africans and North Africans, which he predicted would lead to a total replacement of the population of France and of Europe.
And I think, I believe it's part of that part of his suicide note.
He also wrote, peaceful street protests will not be enough to prevent it.
It will require new, spectacular, and symbolic actions to rouse people from their complacency.
We enter into a time when words must be backed up by action.
So, that's a somewhat lengthy introduction about the man himself, and then let's get into some of the things that he wrote.
Now, you have read all three of the books we're discussing, have you not?
We're going to have a positive critique, the shock of history, and a handbook for dissidents.
Right, and a handbook for dissidents is the one that has most recently been put out and probably the one that's the most relevant, I would say, right now.
Well, you know, I think the...
Well, I think they're all pretty good.
For Positive Critique, its subtitle is Biomilitant for Other Militants.
And just to say a few things about it, he wrote some things at that time in the 1960s that I think are remarkably prescient.
This is the way he describes the liberal regimes of the West.
He says, they hold a monopoly over political and economic power.
They control most of the media and are the masters of thought.
They are protected by vast police forces.
They've turned their people into obedient sheep.
Only controlled opposition is tolerated.
Any critical thought, any personal opinion is destroyed.
The moment those key words that trigger their conditioned reflexes is uttered, all reason is thrown out the window.
Written down in the 1960s I think was pretty remarkable.
Right, and that's the idea of the media-run state as opposed to the state-run media.
Yes, yes.
And at that time, I mean, a lot of people thought that the 1960s, this was a time of great freedom of expression, all the hippies and the anti-war protesters and the demonstrators, the 1968 revolutionaries, so-called, they all thought they could really operate.
I think he pegged it with remarkable perspicacity at that time.
May 68, of course, is, I think, the defining line where he thinks it went into a terminal stage.
Where it's going to take something very dramatic to pull out because one of the things they wrote in the dissidents handbook is that they went from counting of Maoism streak in May 68 and then they immediately turned around into the empire of dollars led by the United States because at the end of the day it was all about self-indulgence and there was nothing really formidable there.
So he did have a certain, he engaged with these ideas of May 68 but at the end of the day he thought there was nothing there and had a certain contempt for it.
Yes.
And also, none of these people ever sacrificed anything.
None of these people ever faced opposition in their entire lives.
I mean, they went out there and rioted, and then they were the establishment after that.
And he blames de Gaulle, actually, for allowing this to take place.
De Gaulle was completely flustered by it.
He described the whole thing as incomprehensible.
He couldn't make head or tails of it.
But by then, what, he was in his 70s, maybe 80 years old.
It was just beyond him.
But it's interesting that this is right at the height of the Cold War, and only a few independent thinkers saw that liberalism, so-called, could be just as totalitarian as Marxism.
But he got it pegged, and now we see this so much more clearly.
He hated Marxism, but he despised all the Westerners who couldn't hear the clanking of their own chains.
And I think that's very much a picture of the United States today.
Democracy in the West, he saw it as a delusion that made it possible to believe we're free.
Right, and I think a lot more people are coming around to that point of view now.
Yes, but to have said, to have seen that in 1964, I think that's pretty remarkable, just coming out of prison.
This is a great quotation from him.
Liberalism and Marxism have taken different paths which have brought them to oppose each other, but which lead to the same result.
The subjection of people misled by democratic myths.
Democracy is the new opiate of the masses.
And it's the most insidious kind of slavery because it gives you the delusion of self-rule.
But when you ask, like, what freedoms you actually have, it's actually very hard to think of what we actually get to do that we wouldn't get to do under any other system.
I mean, if you say, well, you have freedom of speech and you have freedom of speech on certain things, you have the freedom of speech to promote the ruling cultural values, but that's true under any system.
And if you look at what's happening now, In terms of the deconstruction that neoliberalism enabled.
And it's important to point out, he blames the United States for this.
And I find this is very common among the European New Right, where they see the United States and the Soviet Union as sort of these two powers that are like devouring Europe from either side.
That neoliberalism breaks down a people Perhaps even more completely than Marxism.
Well, I think almost the advantage of an out-and-out, self-avowed dictatorship is that you know where the enemy is.
Right.
We are victims of censorship, but we can't point to the guys with the red stars on their peaked caps.
Whereas under the Soviets and in Eastern Europe, everybody knew, everybody knew the government was a bunch of liars.
Now we are surrounded by people who are conveying things that we know not to be true, but we can't point to a specific power.
They're all brainwashed.
Right.
I think that's one of the big It's something I've gotten a lot of criticism for, but I actually have always said that so-called authoritarian governments are in many ways more free because you at least know who's to blame.
That's exactly right.
You at least know what palace to storm.
You at least can conceive of a possibility of change.
Whereas in a democracy, so-called democracy, you may actually have less control Over your own life than you do under a so-called dictatorship, where at least some dictatorships will, as long as you don't mess with the political system, they'll essentially leave you alone.
Under our system, everything becomes a public concern because in theory we rule ourselves, but also there's no possibility of ever making change.
I mean, to go back to May 68, after de Gaulle regained his nerve and came back and denounced the He won a crushing electoral victory soon afterward where the center-right consolidated its power.
A lot of the intellectuals were so disgusted by this.
I think one famously said, I am no longer French because, you know, only a fascist would vote for De Gaulle and everything else.
But that election victory didn't lead to anything.
People still look at May 68 and see that as the point where the left took Total power.
Total cultural power in Europe.
Unquestionably.
As you say, these so-called revolutionaries.
It was the same in the United States.
The people in the 1960s thought that they were brave, radical revolutionaries.
They're the guys who are growing fat in the universities right now.
People of my age.
They probably still think they're revolutionaries, and they're continuing to destroy the country almost as energetically as they were then.
Maybe more so.
Right.
But I'm not completely given up on the idea of some kind of political change.
I think it's possible, not necessarily easy to imagine.
I think it would have to happen at a local level.
Nothing can change the central government.
Nothing can change the federal government in any substantial way, I don't think.
I think in France it might be a little different.
Obviously you have more personal experience with France than I do.
I'm thinking about the United States.
Yeah, but I think with France, I mean, we're looking at a relatively short period of time where you've seen multiple regime changes, monarchies, different dynasties, occupation.
So you could imagine, and also there seems to be Well, kind of a fun tradition of mass street protests actually leading to revolutionary change in France, where it doesn't quite work that way in the Anglosphere.
No, no.
You know, it was amusing to me when I was going to school in France.
This is from 1976 to 1978.
from 1976 to 1978.
They used to joke about how the United States is such a young country.
I said, well, okay, you can call us a young country, but we've had the same constitution the whole time.
You can brag about being the same country, but you've been a monarchy, you've been an empire.
You're on your fifth constitution now.
Who's young?
Who's more solid?
Now, I don't mean to pretend that the United States is any kind of paragon, but they like to think they've been around for so long.
But as you say, they've gone through some remarkable changes, rather more remarkable than the United States, all things considered.
But I've been following the elections coming up in France, and they have such a vastly more interesting political panoply going on.
They've still got a communist who's running for president, as well as this Algerian Jew who's the most French candidate.
He really wants to stop the Great Replacement, that's his number one platform, and everything in between.
So, yes, things are more likely to change in some interesting way in France.
Certainly, a greater openness to debate on fundamental issues, whereas I think what he talks about with the idea of a certain words are said and then there's a conditioned response among the masses.
I find that's worse in English language media, which is why, you know, I wasn't totally joking when I said that the European Union, none of the Brits are out there should Mandate Latin as the language.
I mean, the number one thing you can do to protect your cultural sovereignty is basically ban the English language media.
It's nothing but poison.
Oh, I agree.
I think that's one of the reasons why, for a long time, Brazil didn't seem to be so horribly poisoned.
It's a multiracial society that is only now beginning to talk about affirmative action and racial awakening among the blacks.
I think the fact that they speak Portuguese, that was really something that saved them for a long time.
But to continue to talk a little bit more about for a positive critique and as I say the subtitle is by a militant for a militant even at that time he was talking about revolution and some of the things he had to say about it I thought were really quite relevant, very relevant today.
He says there has to be a clear coherent doctrine.
This motivates activists and wins over waverers.
The doctrine must be simple and convincing.
And he writes that activists failed to act in union because their doctrine is not clear.
Revolutionary unity is impossible without unity of doctrine.
The development of new doctrine is the only answer to the divisions between activists.
I think that increasingly among dissidents in the United States today, at least those who see things in racial terms, we're approaching a kind of unity of doctrine.
We're getting closer, although in that book, I think for positive critique, kind of assumes that the doctrine has already been established.
I even think he has sort of a throwaway line where he says, We don't need to discuss it too much because all these other thinkers have laid out what nationalism looks like.
To me, it's not quite that clear.
I think you almost sidestepped the question.
I noticed that as well.
He talks about we need this clear, crystal clear doctrine.
Well, what is it, Dominic?
Right, right.
Uh-oh, uh-oh, no.
We don't we don't hear about that.
But also I think he's another thing he says that is absolutely relevant for anybody who's serious about any kind of serious movement is talking about the people that you have to have in a movement.
And he's adamant that any incompetence and defectives and psychopaths, you've just got to ruthlessly eliminate them.
He says, they scare away the healthy elements and prevent the recruitment of quality militants.
Militants is a word for activists.
It's got a bit of a different connotation in the European tradition than it does here.
He says, the cranks must be pitilessly pushed aside.
He says, dressing up in uniforms and gratuitous violence are infantile practices and that revolutionaries should never appear outlandish.
Extravagance and expression and the promise of apocalypse have never helped us.
On the contrary, the enemy finds easy arguments, people avoid men who appear like dangerous fools, partisans become discouraged or become deformed in their turn.
All very wise.
To some extent I think it It sort of begs the question, though, because he's presupposing, and this is true of the entire book, that there's a specific organization and that there's some sort of central command that's going to be pushing this revolution.
And I can see that in the French revolutionary tradition.
I mean, how was the first republic founded?
It was a centralized movement, arguably the first professional revolutionaries in history who did this.
The question of whether you can do that from the right is totally different because The other side controls the means of communication and until you get around that if you say okay, well, we're going to have
A centralized opposition.
We're going to purge all these people.
Who gets to make the calls?
Who's the number one guy who gets to be in charge?
What is the doctrine?
These questions are still floating.
Well, I'm not sure that just because it's on the right makes it impossible.
But it's true.
He does have a situation.
He paints this picture that is almost starry-eyed romantic in terms of a single organization that's got its people infiltrated into all the key places of the army and the universities.
I mean it's the way the Communist Party would operate in the 30s and everything else where you actually did have spies in all these different places, you had people in high positions who would Take commands from the party, but would not make it public that they were members of the party.
And it sort of says, well, why don't we do the same thing?
Now, keep in mind, this was written a long time ago.
So it was based on these things.
But I mean, how else?
That is assuming that you're going to have a change right at the top or from the top of the central government.
Again, which again, I think in France is much more realistic than here.
Exactly.
I just don't think it's where our country is too big.
The feds are Two out of this, this octopus that's really, really hard to go after.
I think if anything happens, it's gonna have to happen locally in the United States.
But even so, I think he also talks about, he scoffs at any idea that some great man is going to come save us.
He says, success comes from the quality of comrades and methodical, well-reasoned struggle.
I like this line, too.
A nationalist does not need followers, but militants who are defined by their doctrine, not in their relation to a man.
The militant does not fight for a pseudo-savior, but for the savior who is found within himself.
Those who take the helm can disappear or make mistakes, and they're replaced.
An organization must be a community of militants, not someone's personal property.
You know, that really rings true for so many of these conservative or so-called right-wing initiatives.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, I think, was guilty of that.
Some of the people... The National Front or the National Rally, whatever they call themselves now, is kind of the Le Pen family brand.
Yes, it's the Le Pen family brand.
And some of the people in Austria, who's that guy?
The guy died in the automobile accident, the homosexual...
Yes.
It's a difficult thing because you have one charismatic guy who starts a movement and people rally to him and then when he's gone, the thing tends to fall apart.
As he says, you've got to have people who are not following a pseudo-savior.
But this is all ideal.
Well, I also think that this is another example of the difference between the European and American political situation.
And one thing that I think a lot of our European friends should understand about the American system is that a political party doesn't really mean anything.
In the United States because there's two parties, two parties that matter anyway, and they're so big and so they don't fit together.
You can find anything you want in either one of these parties.
And so it really does come down to personality.
The reason that the Republican Party is different among the grassroots, if not among the elected officials, the reason why the Republican Party, the Republican base is different now is because of Donald Trump.
Full stop.
If you didn't have that A candidate who started a whole movement behind his person, even if it led to things which he didn't necessarily support, you still needed that personal push, because that's the only way things get done in the American system.
It's always about a particular candidate.
It's always about a particular personality.
Whereas in Europe, you have parties, they have, first of all, there's usually more than two, and they have very well thought out doctrines, and the heritage of these parties goes back Centuries, in some cases.
And they tend to be something that's passed on almost from generation to generation.
That's true of the established parties.
But the ones that come up, the ones that really want to change things, the ones that come up from the right, the nationalist right, they tend to be sort of Trumpian in the sense that they are the creation of a person.
And then without that person, they tend to lose their way.
One could argue that's what's going on with the Reconquest Party in France right now.
Yes, yes.
I mean, without him, it's nothing.
Without him, it's nothing.
Well, the same with Emmanuel Macron.
Yeah, that's true.
Macron came out of nowhere.
He came out of nowhere.
And you begin to get this, I mean, I hate to get conspiratorial, but you begin to wonder about somebody like Macron, where they obviously anticipated a nationalist challenge, the center-left Basically seem dead.
The far left has been, I mean all their core voters have already defected to the nationalist right.
And here's this guy who sort of comes out of nowhere with media backing and he's the respectable guy who's going to save the republic from Le Pen.
And the thing with Macron, too, is whatever your position is on something, you can find some quotation by him and say, ah, he's really one of us.
And this is something that For Positive Critique also talks about, where he says, You cannot be fooled into thinking that there is somebody part of the established system who is secretly on your side.
He's got this line where he says, everybody has their good gallist or everybody has, there's a guy in the military who's secretly on board with us.
And at the crucial moment, he's going to step up and everything else.
And I think you saw a lot of that.
Fantasy with QAnon and things like that where people assumed that there was some mysterious force within the power structure itself which was just waiting for some secret signal and then it would rise up and we would win without actually having to do anything.
Yes, crazy stuff.
Another thing Venner warns about, which is almost the reverse problem, And this is the sort of thing you find in political parties in Europe, where you do have nationalists who have organizations, who actually get elected.
But then once they're in office, they tend to think that staying in office is the most important thing.
This is what happens to practically all politicians, no matter where.
And they begin to think that, okay, my staying in office is more important than pushing an agenda.
He says, watch out for those guys.
Get rid of them as soon as you can.
Well, it's ultimately a question of whether you're for or against the system.
That was the biggest takeaway I had for positive critique.
And I think sort of the remainder of that title should be for a positive critique of the system.
Because when you're saying, what is it that you're opposed to?
You're not saying this particular official, this particular party.
And it's not even, oh, we're going to win an election, we're going to do this thing.
A complete tearing down of that which exists and creation of something new.
He's writing at it from that point in history in the 60s though.
But for him already he saw it as important that Europeans wake up.
Yeah.
He saw that as the really important thing.
This is sort of a trope among our movement and I think this goes back pretty much everything where We always assume that our side is quote-unquote asleep.
And it's just a question of waking up.
And can't you see what's happening before you?
And of course Marxists would just say, would have the same sort of thing, only they would say it's a false consciousness.
They would express it a little differently.
But I think that the reason why our trope is actually true is because the other side has media power, which is the crucial thing.
And so when you talk about waking up, it is in the sense waking up from a dream that's being pushed on you by people who do not have your best interests at heart.
And it is certainly not the case that by snapping your fingers, people come out of the trance.
Not at all.
They've been told these things for so long, they end up genuinely believing them or finding it very, very difficult to claw their way out of them.
At the same time, though, what we're being told is unnatural.
And in that sense, once all of these pressures are removed, it's easy to imagine people waking up, so to speak.
And we've seen that, though.
We've seen that.
I've long believed that people are as—and we can get into left and right later—but People are as right-wing as they're allowed to be.
And if we say, if we define the right, if we define the right as the defense of your own interests, as defining your own hierarchy, your own nation, your own people, they're going to, it's essentially militant common sense.
And he gets into this in the Handbook for Dissidents, unless somebody is pushing a message of, Morally, you're not allowed to feel this way because here's some doctrine of guilt I just invented which you need to believe.
You also shouldn't believe this because we're going to get you fired from your job and put social pressure on you through media campaigns.
Also, we might threaten you physically and therefore you shouldn't be allowed to think these things.
If those pressures are removed, even for a second, if the boot is off the neck for even a second, you get what you saw in 2016 where you just had this explosion that the system essentially had to Well, it certainly had to go through and systematically weed out all these dissidents, which it did not hesitate to do.
No, it didn't.
But if you said six years ago that YouTube would be taking down such-and-such a video because of political... Even leftists would have said, well, we have this norm of free speech and this is what it is.
Nobody believes that anymore.
Every single article from the media is about how this person should be denied a platform, how we need to deprogram people, how we need to make sure everybody's believing the same thing.
And at a certain point when they start saying things, well, what is the threat to our democracy?
Well, what democracy?
What liberalism?
What freedoms?
And seeing through the rhetoric is something that he really brings home to you, and that's why I think for a positive critique it's brief, it's not a slog, and it's not going to provide all the answers to your questions, but at least it's going to get you to ask the right questions.
Yeah, I think it talks about, it doesn't talk about the destination necessarily, but it talks about process, the thing with the way we have to approach these things, the kind of discipline we have to have, the sort of mental landmarks we have to have, if not, I mean, in terms of a practical way, here's a guy who, as you said, tried to make history.
And so he sees it from the inside in that respect.
Right.
So I think in all those respects, it's a very useful, and it's really short.
I've got a copy of it here.
How many pages, really?
It's only, what, 50 pages?
Yeah.
It's a very quick, easy read.
You've got like an hour, yeah.
Yes.
If that.
One of the things, not to skip ahead too much, but one of the things he said in the Handbook for Dissonance, because obviously there's a lot of retrospective of his own life in this, is he says that he is Given himself the right to judge because he's paid the price, because he has taken action, because he has been in prison, because he has participated, he has fought as a warrior.
When you talked about he enlisted as soon as he could, he actually tried to do it even before that.
At 15, he tried to join the Foreign Legion.
and his friend basically wimped out at the last second and ratted him out.
And he was prevented from doing so.
But from the beginning, he wanted to be in all the way.
And it was after going through that, it was only after that, then he said,
okay, now I'm going to write as a historian.
But he had already dedicated himself to an ideal first.
Yes, yes. It's remarkable.
Although, I don't know of any evidence as to just what sort of intellectual framework he had at age 15 or 16.
I do know, the only thing that's very clear, he very clearly thought that France was Algerian.
And France had to stay Algerian.
And anybody opposed to that, as you said, the communists were opposed to that.
And I think that was probably the beginning of his intellectual orientation, or at least an understanding that France comes first.
And anything that opposes France is the enemy.
Aha, these commies.
So, yeah, we'll get into the importance of Algeria a little bit later.
But that is critical to understanding that the what he calls the horizon of war is fundamental to his worldview.
Yes, you know that the book you have in your hands, I think one of the very first words, aren't the very first words, only fighting yields happiness on earth.
Yes, that's right at the beginning.
That's pretty austere.
The love of the struggle, essentially.
Yes, that's pretty austere.
But let's talk briefly about his other book that I've read.
The shock of history.
As I say, I've not read any of his histories.
I'd be very curious to see a Frenchman's take on the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, or this book that he really won such praise for on the Red Army.
It's never been translated in English.
I imagine it's really a fascinating analysis, given that guy's perspective on war, his interest in weapons, tactics, and what makes men, men.
Well, he sees history in a certain way.
One of the things that he said, and again, this is from Handbook for Dissidents, he says France essentially left history when it abandoned Algeria.
Because even though there was still some Gaullist posturing and some vague diplomatic independence from the United States, France as a collective entity that it was going to impose its will on the world, history with a capital H, that was gone.
And now we're just going to be part of a consumerist society and we, essentially, people who live in the country are ripped of any identity other than that of consumers.
So when he says the shock of history, it really does mean being brought into a larger historical process where you're actually trying to Impose a destiny on a collective body of people, which is not, which is, again, it sounds scary to some people.
It's not rhetoric that really feeds into the liberal democratic vocabulary that we discuss politics in today.
But if you take a step back again, if you look at the historical experience of France, Multiple regime changes, De Gaulle who basically came to power because of the threatened coup, and then had to face down a coup from the right, and then essentially was, even though you can disguise it with winning that last election, he essentially was
Driven out by May 68, at least as far as a meaningful historical movement.
Psychologically, he was over.
He was broken, yeah.
Yes, yes.
Well, The Shock of History, of course, is written considerably later.
I believe that was, well, it's a collection of maybe 1990s or maybe even early 2000s, but that's another book that's put out by Arctos.
Thank goodness for Arctos for making these things available in English.
But he talks about the shock of history.
We live it neither knowing it nor comprehending it.
And that is an absolutely capital subject for people who want to affect it.
I think that's how you could best say what's the difference between being asleep and waking up.
It's recognizing that you were a part of this thing.
That is what it means to wake up.
Yes, yes.
Well, But people wake up and there are a lot of people who think they are part of something big and important but who are completely opposed to us.
So we have to wake up to the reality of what's going on.
Not just the one that we're fed all the time.
There are all kinds of very dedicated hard-working people on the other side.
Right.
Of course none of those people to me and I don't mean to be entirely dismissive of them but It's just very hard for me to take it seriously, because I don't think any of these people have ever paid a real price.
I mean, even the most extreme group, and this goes for France as well as America and everything else, you do whatever you want.
No matter how violent, no matter how destructive, you're going to get You're going to get the best paid lawyers provided for you for free.
You're going to get at least sympathetic media coverage.
You can even be a Black Panther.
You can even be cop killers.
They'll make movies about you and how great you are and everything else.
And so when you see other people saying, on the left I mean, We're opposing the system, we're taking revolutionary action, we're doing this, we're doing that.
It's like, well, what exactly are you doing that's actually challenging the system?
Well, exactly.
And I think that's where Venner is different because, again, he's trying to break conservatives, nationalists, Gaullists, out of this idea that we are defending the existing system from a leftist threat.
And he is instead saying, no, the system itself is the problem.
The people who you think are defending your interests are a controlled opposition.
You have to get serious about this.
But of course, then if you say, okay, well, what is the core doctrine?
That's where it all breaks down.
Because if you say, okay, we need a revolutionary doctrine.
Great.
What is it?
If you get 10 people, you're going to get 10 different opinions.
By the time he gets the shock of history, he's got it figured out.
It's the survival of Europeans as a people.
That is the fundamental question.
It's the same in the Handbook for Dissonance.
He's got a very vivid sense that Europeans have to take immediate action to survive.
And he also points out that you can go to war, and so long as the country's behind you, you may risk your life, but you're going to come back to glory.
The real revolutionaries, it's much, much more difficult.
As you say, you are sacrificing.
You are despised.
People are thwarting you at every turn.
It's not like being a soldier in a war.
Much more difficult.
Yeah, the force has to come from within.
Yes, and for a guy who wore a uniform and who was engaged in combat and decorated, for him to say it's much more difficult to be a revolutionary and a dissonant, I believe him.
It's not easy.
Of course, by the time you're at the shock of history, I think this is a very important thing he said, that people, you cannot understand any people or culture unless you completely reject universalism.
He says, men exist only by what distinguishes them.
Clan, lineage, history, culture, tradition.
There are no universal answers to the questions of existence.
And he says, universalism, Stunts our ability to comprehend that other men do not feel, think, or live the same way we do.
That's such an obvious indictment of the way Americans seem to think.
Including the American right, particularly neoconservatives, where you say our mission is to spread universal human rights to the entire world.
That's right.
We're supposed to turn Somalis and Afghans into good little Jeffersonian Democrats.
Which of course is actually insulting to Somalis and Afghans.
Yes, yes, yes.
I mean how we just saw how that played out in Afghanistan where you saw I mean it's not funny but you can't help but laugh but it's a very bitter laughter when you see these videos of gender studies professors trying to teach Afghans about The glorious of contemporary art and you see the camera pan over to these people and they say these people are insane and
It's no wonder they welcome back the Taliban.
A month before the Taliban marches in, the U.S.
Embassy is proclaiming gay rights and flying the Homo banner.
Good grief!
What do you think a traditionalist Islamic society is going to say about this?
But then he says, how are we going to save ourselves?
He says, Europeans, they've got to get rid of this idea that everybody's the same.
And they have to steep themselves and their traditions because without our own traditions, without understanding who we are, we are fated to become nothing, to disappear into the chaos of a world dominated by others.
After having colonized other peoples in the name of universalism, Europeans are now in the process of being colonized in the name of the very same principles against which they do not know how to defend themselves.
I think that's really well put.
I mean, if we're all the same, we went out, we're going to, the French had this expression, mission civilisatrice, the civilizing mission of France.
They were going to go out and teach the Africans and the Muslims to be good little Frenchmen.
Well, the Africans and the Muslims are now coming to us.
Are they all universalists?
On what basis can we tell them no?
So by the time he wrote The Shock of History, he understood absolutely clearly that it's a fight for survival.
And of course, it's interesting.
I don't quite know what to make of it.
I guess I don't place quite the value on Homer that he does.
But over and over, he talks in this book in particular, The Handbook for Dissonance, Homer.
Homer is where it starts.
Homer is where all our values, our distinctly European values spring.
The founding poem of our civilization, he calls it.
Yes.
And a lot of people would say, if you wanted to take a civilizational view of history, and you said that there's not one shared global story, but there are different civilizations that are self-contained, a lot of people would say that a civilization usually begins with an epic poem of some kind, some kind of founding mythos.
To him, it's Homer.
Yeah.
Going into this book.
He also, interestingly, Occasionally he refers to Hyperborea and this more distant idea that the European peoples came from a primordial homeland that's lost to us and we've come down.
Evola talks about this.
It's very romantic.
There's not a lot of evidence, but how could there be?
But there are these myths and there are these ideas that you see playing out in poetry and philosophy from the ancients, which suggests that there might've been something there.
And for him, Homer is where It kind of crystallizes into a unique form that defines us to the present day.
Well, that's right.
He calls them his holy texts, the Iliad and Odyssey.
They're his scripture, his holy texts.
And he talks about how Homer is the best teacher for those looking for the decisive categories of the European soul, those of action.
Knowledge, beauty, excellence, and tragic wisdom.
I mean, think of those qualities.
Those are qualities precisely lacking in all the people that we're supposed to be looking up to today.
The idea of action, knowledge, beauty, excellence, and tragic wisdom.
I mean, everything, everything that our rulers are not, he finds in Homer.
I think one of the interesting things that he makes, the points he makes in the Handbook for Dissonance, he says, well, yes, it's mostly about men.
But there is a woman's idea too.
Quite a few in fact.
Yes, Penelope particularly.
Penelope is the great heroic character of a woman.
But as I say, there is a real austerity about that book.
And I wonder, and perhaps it's true, he seems to think that greatness is possible only if there is some sense of battle.
He says, at least without a horizon of war, the possibility of war, people fall into decadence and they lose their martial qualities and become soft.
There may be some truth to that.
Juvenal, the Roman satirist, is supposed to have said that luxury is more ruthless than war.
Luxury will destroy you in a way that war will not.
War will make you stronger.
Right.
And he makes it very explicit that A civilization needs a horizon of war.
Horizon is probably the wrong word.
It's more of the idea of a frontier, I think, would be the best thing.
And he actually does comment on the United States, talking about, I mean, this is essentially the frontier thesis, that America was created by the experience of conquering the West, the American West.
And once that was lost, something essential to the American character died.
Perhaps the American character itself died in some ways.
And he refers to the Iron Belt of all the French fortifications in the era of Louis XIV and everything else.
And now they just seem as crumbling ruins and we can't even understand what it is they were defending.
This is also why I think he centers on Algeria as not just a small defeat.
Again, one could make an argument when I reviewed the book on de Gaulle.
You could make the argument that de Gaulle made the right move, the more identitarian move, because he was saying these Algerians are not French.
And if you are going to try to keep this area to be part of the Republic, you're going to have to give these people citizenship.
It would have had to have been an apartheid system.
The French Israel solution where basically the North would have been European.
Now I think and I'm gradually coming around to his point of view that to deliberately create a frontier, to deliberately create a zone of struggle is almost required for a civilization to defend itself because you need some way to distinguish between us and them.
Because once it becomes a universal thing, once it becomes essentially a country as just a market, or it's just a social contract where we try to make money and respect property and things like that, then you're not really part of a people.
And you really don't have a reason to care about anything beyond what your bank account is.
Like so many new right French writers, he talks about the reduction of human beings simply to consumers.
And he blames America for it.
Which, as an American, I say not without justification.
But let us not deny the fact that the French sure took to it like ducks to water.
They didn't resist for very long.
No.
No, they didn't.
They ate their hamburgers and they watched their Disney movies.
But, as you say, there is a seriousness to their political culture.
Even now, there's a seriousness to their political culture that is lacking.
You know, I must say also, when I was going to school in Paris, in graduate school, this was 1976-78, as I said, I was impressed by the level of political sophistication, the level of political debate.
And this wasn't just among intellectuals.
You talk in a cafe to some guy.
He had a real interest in the implications of policy and whose policies were going to make a difference in what way.
Now, I understand that today in France, young people don't care about politics the way they did when I was a student, a university student.
I've seen, I listened to a number of French podcasts.
They go around, they interview students, university students, and they say, huh, the elections?
Oh, yeah.
When's that going to be?
Next year sometime?
They're coming up in May.
They don't care.
This is shocking to me.
They've become domesticated in a way that the students that I went to school with were not.
Well, there's a question of whether this is something inherent to democracy itself, in that it's a system that you think you have control, but it's actually a system that prevents change.
And I think this is a certain cynicism that a lot of Americans have.
Certainly on the right, after you had the most unlikely presidential victory of all time, and what changed?
Really nothing.
And I think we all kind of Except that in the West now where we say, all right, liberal democracy is the end of history, we are told.
And it's actually something, if you think there is an alternative, you're actually, unless it's just a more democratic version of it, democratic socialism or whatever else, but if you start thinking of alternatives, you're actually something of a threat, almost an ideological terrorist.
Oh, of course you are.
Yet, when it comes to solving the real problems, the existential problems that are facing us, liberal democracy seems to have run out of answers.
And when there's no alternative possible, not even theoretically, why should you pay attention to politics?
I mean, in a way, I actually find it a little bit more refreshing when people say, well, it doesn't really matter because the same things are going to happen no matter who gets elected.
That's more mature than getting really worked up about whether the center-left party or the center-left-left party gets elected and whether the GDP gets moved this way or that way.
On the other hand, to move back to France, whether the person sitting in the Élysée Palace is Éric Zemmour or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is an out-and-out super lefty, that does make a difference.
Now, the fact is, each of them has a possibility, but a very small possibility.
Probably the guy who's going to be left over is Macron, the guy who's there right now.
Right.
But still, for university students to be completely uninterested, that surprises me.
They had a real problem in the last regional elections with young people just not bothering to vote.
This is a real concern.
But I think it does reflect what you say.
Their attitude seems to be, doesn't make any difference who's in power.
Doesn't make any difference.
And in a very profound way, it doesn't make a difference.
And yet, those people are the ones who swallow the ideas about contemporary society and probably think, well, who needs for it to change anyway?
The only change I would vote for is more money in my pocket.
That's all it boils down to.
Nothing heroic, or beautiful, or tragic.
The kinds of things that Dominic Venner is telling us that we need to think about.
Well, to get... I think we should move on to A Handbook for Dissidents because it...
It's the last book, but it's also really the first in a way because after this career, both as a fighter and then as what he called himself a meditative historian, he essentially comes to the spiritual problem.
And this is where I'm sure the comments section is going to be very spicy as we get into this, because he's got a lot to say about Christianity and he's got a lot to say about the lack of an identitarian religion.
At the same time, It is not true to say that he simply despises Christianity or thinks it needs to be ripped out.
Not at all.
He's very clear that he considers that part of the story, but he says that, particularly France where Catholicism is held to be emblematic of capital T Tradition.
That's what it means to be a traditionalist.
He says that everything that manifested From the Christian tradition in the European context, the idea of heroic knights, the idea of a sacral hierarchy, the idea of kings who came from divine blood and everything else.
This all came from essentially European pagan traditions, and a lot of these Christian elements were essentially grafted on.
And if you actually look at it, As a historian and try to say, well, how does this so-called Christian element fit in with the Bible and everything else?
The answer is, well, it doesn't.
And you can play whatever games you want and you can, you can talk around it and you can say, well, the Pope this and that, but it's, it's not true.
He gives a credit to Pope Benedict XVI, who pointed out that Greek philosophy and biblical theology centered in Europe created A conversion movement that swept the world and changed history, and so it is still meaningful to talk about Christendom.
But at the same time, and this is Vennari, he says that what Christianity did, and specifically the doctrine of the City of God and the City on Earth, is that it took people's loves And perverted them because you're supposed to love your enemies, which of course you can't really do, except in a kind of vague spiritual sense.
And he makes an argument which I'd never heard before, which is that Catholicism actually allowed you to indulge your bad habits because you were essentially forgiven for them.
Yeah.
At the same time, you were still saddled with this guilt because your instincts and your values and what you recognize as the highest goods in a temporal sense were also held to be evil in a spiritual sense.
And so you're always constantly at war with yourself.
And I think he sees this as the fundamental problem.
It's notable that the subtitle to this is he calls himself a samurai of the West.
And what does that tell you?
Right off the bat, Even after this entire career of fighting for Europe and everything else, we can't define it in our own terms.
We have to go looking for a foreign example to say, if only we could have a Western version of what they have here.
Quite frankly, I was extremely disappointed by that title.
Yeah.
I don't like that.
Why a Samurai of the West?
Why can't we be Knights of the West?
Especially when the very beginning of the book is about the ideal of knighthood and about the ideal of stoicism.
He does come up with some semblance of a religious answer where he proposes a kind of neo-stoicism and he contrasts good and evil as the mantle for morality.
Instead it would be something Akin to noble and unworthy.
Yes, I don't know if you want to call that religion per se.
I think if it is more philosophical.
But he quotes Epictetus and he quotes the emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Yes, he clearly has huge admiration for them.
I was rather shocked by a selection from Celine that he quoted on Christianity.
Oh, yeah.
Boy, I mean, I'll read this here.
He talks about Christianity as spread among the virile races.
The hated Aryan races, the religion of Peter and Paul, performed its duty admirably.
It reduced the subjugated peoples to poor and submissive subhumans.
Starting from the cradle, it sent out these hordes, confused and stultified, Of course, now he's quoting somebody else.
literature on quests for the Holy Shroud and magical hosts.
It made them forsake forever their blood gods, their race gods. Here's the sad truth.
Aryans never knew how to love or worship, but other people's gods never had their own religion, a white religion.
Of course, now he's quoting somebody else.
That's not, no, but me of all people defending it, but I to defend Christianity a bit more, I would say he's
He identifies the problem here, but that's not that new.
Other people have said that.
No, I mean, you can go back to Nietzsche.
Nietzsche expressed it more or less in almost... Or the Emperor Julian, for that matter.
Yes, ferocious terms, that's right.
But then he does say, he does say, I do not scratch out the Christian centuries at all.
Chartres Cathedral is as much part of my world as is Stonehenge or the Parthenon.
This is the inheritance we must receive.
Right.
He also talks about certain columns that were found underneath Notre Dame which appealed to certain Celtic religious ideas and everything else.
And this is something that I think the core historical takeaway from this book is that the conversion of Europe was not really a conversion.
It was the creation of something new.
Because if you look at the way Europeans were converted to Christianity, essentially they just took the pagan holy sites, they didn't destroy them, they didn't annihilate them, they put churches on top of them, they essentially co-opted them.
And as he points out again and again and again, almost every generation, there's sort of a movement back toward paganism, if only in an artistic sense, And we're going to try to express these values.
And there's this sort of never-ending push and pull between the church and the deeper traditions of European civilization.
And again, he does propose a concrete solution.
He says, the aim is to extract their timeless meaning, the revivified reading of our founding poems.
Again, Homer.
Far from a scholarly or scholastic reading of Homer, The One I Undertake aims to rediscover hidden wisdom and living principles.
Nature is its foundation.
Excellence is the end goal of life.
Beauty is its horizon.
One of the earliest books that I read when I was getting involved in certain spiritual things was Alain de Benoist's On Being a Pagan.
He makes an identical argument, which is that in the pagan conception, the gods are not apart from nature.
Because if you look at the Bible, there is nothing and then God speaks the world into existence.
So already you have kind of this alienation from creation, this abstraction.
Whereas with paganism, or at least as he would see it, and certainly with the Homeric ideas, The gods create a certain order on nature, but they're not apart from nature, and therefore... They're subject to it as well.
Yeah, to seek the divine, you actually have to go into the wilderness, to some sense.
This is actually one of the bits of practical guidance that he gives you at the end, is to go for walks in the woods and everything else the way the Germans do.
And he also says, go into a church.
Yes.
Let the holiness, let the quietness, now he doesn't use the word holiness, let the quiet dignity enter your soul.
Interestingly, he says that if you look at Greco-Roman temples, he posits that these are based on sacred groves, which were sort of where these things came from, which is a beautiful way to look at it, I think.
And this is why Notre Dame He claims it as a place of European importance, not simply a place of Christian importance or even just Catholic importance.
I think he's 100% correct.
All the architecture in it, all that statuary, all the workmanship.
You know, I was just reading Gibbon, of all things, on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
He has a very interesting passage on Islam.
And he said, if Muhammad himself were to come back and attend a worship service in a mosque, he would recognize everything.
He wouldn't recognize the building, but the service, the ideas, it's all there.
But if Jesus or the apostles were to come back and show up in St.
Paul's, he wouldn't recognize anything.
The rig out of the people, the things that they're saying and singing, all of that would be completely alien.
And certainly the churches, as he points out, the church was the last imperial institution remaining after the fall of the empire in the West.
And so the way it moved in and the way it ordered social life during the middle ages and during late antiquity, It really had more to do with what was happening in the West at that time than what the Bible itself said, because frankly, as again, as he points out, most people had no idea what the Bible said.
And the cults of certain Local spirits, the idea of the Virgin Mary kind of co-opting certain goddesses of the sacred feminine, a lot of the cults of the saints obviously built on pagan ideas and everything else.
Well, you know, one of the guys who's very much on our side, Jim Russell, have you read his book?
Yeah, I was one of the most influential books on my lot.
The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity.
Yes, really quite an excellent book.
I think one of the most striking things he says is the idea that here we had original Greek and Roman religion that was sort of life-affirming.
It was part of our lived life, whereas Christianity is life-denying.
It denies this world in the hope of something better, something in the future.
Here's what I would say, though, and again, it's kind of funny that I'm going to be the one defending Holy Mother Church here, but here we go.
It wasn't just the Bible that came in and swept all before it.
There was this Greek thought and the idea of universalism, the idea of cosmopolitanism.
These ideas existed in Western intellectual life before The Bible.
And so we can't just pin it on Christianity.
And we also need to think of ourselves, we also need to ask ourselves the question of, well, why did it take?
Why did it speak to something so fundamental in our soul?
Now you could say, look, it was sold as a life-affirming warrior religion.
People have said that the conversion process in Northern Europe was sort of a competition between Thor and Christ, which Christ won.
But the Christ that won was not the crucified Savior.
It was the dragon-slaying warrior who was performing a duty out of guilt to his Lord and all this kind of stuff.
But even that, that's pushing things on ahead.
The question is not, why did Northern Europe convert?
Because they changed the doctrine.
The question is, why did it take In Greece and Rome.
Because it took there first.
And I would argue that a lot of the intellectual foundations for a lot of these trends that he doesn't like, they were already there, even before.
Russell says that the Roman Empire at the time of Constantine was very much in an anomic state.
Right.
Things were in flux, people were confused, nothing was the way it was.
Preventer says that this religion is exactly what a multi-ethnic Disintegrating empire we need where you exactly now you have a community of faith doesn't matter what yeah, if you're coming from a particular Heritage, it doesn't matter if you're coming even from a particular area of the world.
That's right.
We now have a doctrine We have one faith.
We have one Emperor.
We have one church and of course Constantine when he Essentially forced the early church to come up with a coherent doctrine the I guess vendors You gotta have doctrine before anything else.
It was done as a political thing.
I mean, I don't think the emperor thought very carefully about these theological issues, nor did he particularly care what these bishops had to say.
He essentially locked him in a room and said, no, come up with something.
I don't care what it is, but it has to be one thing.
That's right.
No, it was a very useful political tool and it worked, but anyway.
I think that when he proposes specific solutions, and particularly where he talks about Homer, it may sound unrealistic to us and it may sound, well, it's just this one thing and it's not that the classics are dead and everything else, but We should take a step back and think of how important Homer was in European history.
First of all, for the Olympics, for a very long time, reciting Homer from memory was considered one of the events.
That was just something you did.
This existed for thousands of years, where people would memorize this, and you would recite it, and this was part of not just entertainment, but also a spiritual experience.
Alexander the Great, of course, famously.
He was tutored by Aristotle, but he slept with the Iliad under his pillow.
And this idea that you are part of a tradition where the divine is still expressing itself in your own actions, where you are actually aspiring to be like the gods, where you're not so much bringing the divine down to you, but you're bringing the human up to the divine.
That sense.
It's very life-affirming.
It's very interesting.
It gets you excited about being involved in activism and being involved in certain cultural or spiritual movements.
But then you have to take a step back and say, well, what does this mean to the masses?
Because if you are trying to build a mass movement, if you're trying to get people to wake up, step one is not to insult their ancestral religion, particularly when That's what seemed to be under attack by the ruling system of the day.
I mean, at this point, particularly in the American context, Christianity is probably one of the last things holding back the flood.
I would think he would argue, and I would argue along with him, that it being overcome is essentially inevitable.
And that unless we can rework it or unless we can build something genuinely new, It's just going to end up being a support to the larger movements coming from the top.
One of the things he talks about is the frustration of Catholics who do love their country, who do love their civilization.
And then constantly being undermined by the institution they're trying to defend.
Even from just a theological sense, if it is very important to you, if you truly believe that the Catholic Church is the key to salvation, if you truly believe that there is no salvation outside the church, it's very hard to argue that the Islamization of Europe is a good thing.
If you really believe this stuff, you're essentially damning In the very literal sense, everybody in Europe and all their descendants forever to hell, but yet the Pope seems very happy about this.
And so the question is, they used to say, well, is the Pope Catholic?
I would say probably not.
No, certainly a Pope who does not defend the necessity of the Church.
If all these ecumenical ideas are correct, then why not be?
Why not be a Buddhist?
Why not be a Muslim?
It's all the same.
We're all sort of going to end up in the same place.
No, that is not the doctrine of the Church.
And it's shocking to me that any Pope, any self-respecting Catholic would take that view.
Right.
And in any spiritual doctrine, You can say all you want about the Kingdom of Heaven and whatever else, but Christianity took root because it was politically useful and because it was able to take advantage of certain destructive trends within the collapsing Roman Empire.
And I'm not faulting Christianity.
I actually believe that it saved what could be saved.
The idea that temporal power is going to be somehow separated from religion is nonsense, because especially if you're saying that there's, and even for Protestants, if you say, okay, well, we don't need a particular institution, well, you still need belief, which means that you need to have people who can preach the gospel, who can hear the message, who can learn about it, who can read it.
All that's going to be driven out, too, if this demographic change continues.
And so even if you really believe that what happens, because this is one of the things that he argues about here, is that if you're always looking toward the next life, and this life is just something to be endured, and not even something very important, even from a Christian viewpoint, I think that's wrong, because if you're a Catholic, you believe you have to be in good standing with the Church.
If you're a Protestant, you have to believe the right things.
And if you're denied those opportunities, everybody's sentenced to eternal damnation.
Where are the religious leaders who supposedly believe in this stuff?
They're nowhere to be found.
The only time we ever see them Is when we try to do something and they come out and start waving their arms around about how it doesn't actually matter what you believe.
Well, if it doesn't matter what you believe, then why should we even listen to you?
Yes, yes.
So the fundamentalists will say, anybody who is not on our side is damned sure enough to hell.
But they are a dwindling breed.
But, well, no, I take it back.
It's the ones like the Methodists, and the Baptists, and the mainstream Presbyterians.
It's those people who are dwindling.
The ones who think it's all just an alpine sky.
It's the ones who do say, you're with us, you're saved.
You're not with us, you're damned.
Those are the ones that are actually attracting people.
Yeah.
The Great Commission that Christ gave to the Apostles and everything else is It presupposes certain conditions existing in this life on this earth that have to be there for it to work.
And if you're not even willing to defend that, then if Christians aren't even willing to defend that, then frankly, I'm not going to take their spiritual beliefs seriously because they don't take it seriously.
No, no.
And it's clear that they don't.
But I've always said that the movement today, my movement, what I believe is our movement, is essentially centered on our people, our race.
And you can be Christian, you can be pagan, you can be agnostic, you can be atheist.
What really matters is that you recognize that you are a member of Western civilization, something that is much greater than we are individually.
Each of us will die, but our purpose is for our civilization to live on, and that's what we care about.
No, that sounds big.
I'm a bit more of a mystic, so I guess I've got more stranger beliefs on this kind of stuff.
But one thing which, and this is, I totally agree with, and again, I'm looking at this from sort of a Navolian perspective, but this is him.
When he talks about the erasure of our European memory and its recovery through the revolution of tradition, tradition with a capital T, nothing to do with the multiple traditions in the current sense of the term, nothing to do with the backward looking nostalgia either.
Tradition is not the past, it is that which never passes.
Behind the composite appearances of our tradition, Greco-Roman above all, Celtic, Germanic, Christian, or finally Secularist, we will uncover the hidden perennity of our founding tradition, the ultimate recourse against the disorders of spirit and of behavior.
Now the question is, did he succeed in this mission with this book?
This was essentially the last thing he did, other than his suicide.
And keep in mind, his suicide, it divided a lot of traditionalist Catholics, because on the one hand, suicide is a mortal sin, but he was doing it to protest this bill which, if you're a traditionalist Catholic, you have to see it as an abomination.
Yes, the same-sex marriage.
Right.
And as he points out, the idea of a legal partnership for gay couples, that already existed in France.
So it wasn't about civil rights or anything else.
It was about the idea of deconstructing the family as such, as deconstructing the idea of having children as such.
I am skeptical of the idea that, I mean, stoicism has become somewhat popularized at this point.
And I don't think that a doctrine of tragic pessimism is quite enough, particularly for the youth.
And I don't think that a doctrine of tragic pessimism is quite enough, particularly for the youth.
And I think that the idea that we're going to, in a very abstract way, fight for our civilization, or we're going to
fight for this vague idea of beauty or something like that, I think it has to be something more concrete.
And I think he doesn't do enough to really bring home what primordial tradition is.
It's not just homework.
It actually goes back before him.
And I think that you could even talk about the West existing Before that.
I mean, I think he misses an opportunity when he makes a throwaway reference to Hyperborea and then just doesn't really return to it, even though he talks about it as being very important.
And he quotes, of course, Nietzsche's declaration, we are Hyperboreans, let's look each other in the face.
But you do have to have something authentic.
You do have to have something that gets people Approaching life, not just through the lens of reason, but through the lens of belief.
No question about that.
You gotta have the idea of fighting for something sacred.
And that is what was glorious about Christendom.
One of the great lines, and I think it's in a footnote too, is the first use of European that he can identify in the Battle of Tours, where Charles Martel defeated the Muslim invaders.
And interestingly enough, it is not referred to as a battle between Christians and Muslims.
It is referred to as a battle between the Europeans and the Arabs.
It's in racial terms, not religious terms.
Right.
And so there is something, because again, even if to return to Islam for a second, the largest Muslim nation in the world is Indonesia.
It's not, it's centered on, certainly the Arabs have a certain privileged status within the religion because the only authentic translations of the Quran have to be in Arabic.
You face Mecca, all that.
But it's more universalistic than Christianity.
Catholic Catholicism, certainly, as the way it's historically been expressed.
And for a lot of traditionalist Catholics, if you like the hierarchy, if you like the history, if you're not willing to apologize for the history of the Church, if you're not willing to apologize for the Crusades, at a certain point you have to come to terms with the fact that a lot of the things you like aren't coming from the Bible, they're coming from European, indigenous, spiritual traditions.
And the fact that they were Given this Christian veneer, maybe that was necessary.
Maybe that made people operate at a higher level.
But if you're trying to defend it on theological grounds, it's going to be very hard for you to do.
Certainly true.
That's certainly true.
But in terms of what people are fighting for today, I think that my impression of the activists and the people who are really leaders in the movement, there is a sense that it is, first of all, biological.
We're fighting for a people, our people.
We are a brotherhood, a world brotherhood.
And if that is not enough, then simply to talk about the magnificent cultural creations of our people and the way we are despised, the kind of faith that we can look forward to.
I don't think you have to get explicitly religious, but you can almost make a religion out of our people and its achievements and the great things we have done together in the past and the great things our descendants will do together in the future.
If not a religion, certainly a sense of life.
One of the things that he talks about is, there was a quotation from a regime media figure, that we are nothing.
He was claiming to speak for the French.
We are nothing.
We are simply, we have no culture.
And this is not a unique proclamation.
There was a Swedish minister who said the same thing.
Oh, we have no traditions, but like the immigrants do, we have no culture.
We're nothing.
And the thing is, for so long, the West has defined itself It is technology, it is production, it is capitalism, and if that is what you are, you are going to hate yourself because if your civilization is a bunch of plastic junk that's not what you want.
I would say that he does provide a solution when he refers to Homer, or at least a way toward a solution, in that this idea of looking at morality from the viewpoint of what is noble and what is unworthy.
Looking up, looking toward greatness, looking toward excellence as the purpose of life.
That gives you a direction because it is bigger than just racial terms at this point because now this idea of tearing down whites has seemingly expanded beyond Whites.
I mean, now we're even reading articles about how you don't even need to be white to be a white supremacist.
And it's become almost an idea of an attack on beauty standards as such.
An attack on property as such.
An attack on hierarchy as such.
And it's, no, we need to defend these things because that's what makes life worth living.
And that's also what makes, it's something greater than life.
Well, weren't you not suggesting that we close by reading his suicide note?
Are you prepared to do that at this point?
Yes, yes.
I think this is worth reading.
So this is his farewell testament on the altar of Notre Dame.
Is this the document that he placed on the altar?
Yes, this is the actual document he placed on the altar.
I am healthy in body and mind, and I am filled with love for my wife and children.
I love life and expect nothing beyond, if not the perpetuation of my race and my spirit.
However, in the evening of my life, facing immense dangers to my French and European homeland, critical there, I feel the duty to act as long as I still have strength.
I believe it necessary to sacrifice myself to break the lethargy that plagues us.
I give up what life remains to me in order to protest and to found.
I chose a highly symbolic place, Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, which I respect and admire.
It was built by the genius of my ancestors on the site of cults still more ancient, recalling our immemorial origins.
While many men are slaves to mere life, my gesture embodies an ethic of will.
I give myself over to death to awaken slumbering consciences.
I rebel against fate.
I protest against poisons of the soul and the desires of invasive individuals to destroy the anchors of our identity, including the family, the intimate basis of our multi-millennial civilization.
While I defend the identity of all peoples in their homes, I also rebel against the crime of the replacement of our people.
The dominant discourse cannot leave behind its toxic ambiguities, and Europeans must bear the consequences.
Lacking an identitarian religion to moor us, we share a common memory going back to Homer.
I would say further.
Repository of all the values on which our future rebirth will be founded once we break with the metaphysics of the unlimited, the baleful source of all modern excesses.
This is the idea of growth.
Perpetual consumption.
Right.
I apologize in advance to anyone who will suffer due to my death, first and foremost to my wife, my children, and my grandchildren, as well as my friends and followers.
But once the pain and shock fade, I do not doubt that they will understand the meaning of my gesture and transcend their sorrow with pride.
I hope they will endure together.
They will find in my recent writings, intimidations, and explanations of my actions.
I want to pause here just to note one last thing.
He talks a lot about The samurai tradition in Japan and specifically the idea of a willed death.
And he suggests that the idea of putting honor above life and contempt for death, which he also sees in the knightly code.
Well, the Romans also.
The Romans too, yes.
That's almost the first step for us.
That you have to have that idea and that a willed death is more virtuous, a death for something, than an accidental death.
Now, I think a lot of people would take issue with that, but I think that I would close by saying that as significant it is to die for something, it's actually more impressive and more important to live for something.
And whatever you think about the morality of his last action, I think everything he did up to that point should be enthusiastically endorsed.
I will close it with that.
Excellent.
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