Alt-Reich: The Black Hole of Modernism

Zippy Catholic put up a good post the other day, This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things. I've reproduced the pertinent illustration.

Now, while I disagree with Zippy on many things, I do agree with him wholeheartedly with this post. And it's a post I believe has relevance with respect to the the emergent Alt-Right.

There has much talk about Hillary Clinton's denunciation of the Alt-Right but I think a few definitions are in order here in order to clarify thinking for the confused. Many of the alt-Right believe that that Hillary's denunciation was specifically targeted at the Richard Spencer Alt-Reich but I think that they are mistaken.

For Team Hillary, the Alt-Right are ALL those opposed to them who don't fit into the Libertarian or mainstream Conservative classifications. Monarchists and Neo-Nazi's are therefore all grouped together as Alt-Right. Given the intellectual tradition of the Left this is to be expected yet anyone with a thimbleful of intelligence will realise that there are large ideological differences between the two. George Hawley has written an extremely good book surveying the wide variety of thought that makes up the dissident Right. Much of the thought, it needs to be pointed out, is fundamentally mutually incompatible and its only commonality is that it is neither mainstream conservative or overtly Left wing.

Hawley takes the defining principle of the Left as being a belief in radical equality. Now I have some quibbles with this definition but it's a good starting point and the Alt-Right clearly falls into this category.  However,  Traditionalist Christians and the Aryan brotherhood  are clearly lumped together under  Hawley's taxonomy but to Christians at least, this state of affairs is deeply disturbing and intuitively wrong, hence, there are problems with a system which puts us in the same political space.

This intuitive unease, in my opinion, is well founded, since I believe that that large part of the failure of the Right in the 20th Century has come about by failing to recognise who are its allies and who are its enemies and a good deal of its problems have come about through making allies with pseudo-Right groups which effectively undermine its cohesion and co-opt the it's transient political and cultural successes to the service of the Left. The problem is not one of equality, it's a problem of metaphysics.

A good example of this failure came about during the Regan Revolution when the Right finally achieved enough political power to dismantle the managerial state. However the result was a failure and the managerial state was larger and more coercive at the end of the Regan era than it its beginning. It was a failure which bothered Sam Francis quite a lot.

His analysis of the failure highlighted two shortcomings or the Right. Firstly, there was failure of effective leadership which misunderstood the nature of the beast it was dealing with, resulting in its effective decapitation. Secondly, the infiltration of Neo-Conservatives into positions of power and influence ultimately undermined Reagan legacy and enabled the expansion of the managerial state which ultimately furthered the Left's aims. . Sam Francis intuitively hated the Neo-Conservatives but I never got the impression that he was really able to identify what was the ideological difference between him and them, apart from the fact that neo-Conservatives were OK with government intervention while he was not. In my opinion, Francis was never fully able to grasp the poison of the Neoconservatives because of his own ambivalence with regard to Christianity.

Like it or not, Christianity, was the dominant force in the culture of the West for the last 1900 years and anyone who attempts to explain away the role of Christianity in Western phistory is quite simply an idiot or intellectually dishonest. Christianity permeated every aspect of life including political and social theory and the underlying metaphysical assumption of European civilisation was Christian Realism.

By Christian realism, I mean, the belief in a material and "spiritual world", the belief in reason and human nature and a a value system which was ultimately upheld by God and a belief in the existence of evil. There may have been differences in the understanding of the particular points by the three main strains of Christianity but they shared this commonality. Traditional Western Conservatism had Christian Realism as its bedrock from which the rest of the social and political theory was built upon.

European civilisation was doing very well with this approach. The great turning point in Western History comes about at the end of the 19th Century and really picks up steam after the First World War. It is about this time when the 'people that matter" start ditching Christian Realism and start embracing Materialism/Positivism as their underlying metaphysic, and thus Modernism was born.

Now it's important to understand that Modernism and Christian Realism are fundamentally opposed to each other. Indeed, once you fall into the Modernist "black hole", Christian realism is beyond the event horizon and therefore cannot be reached.  Modernism, intrinsically, denies the existence of God, or his practical relevance and thus, on a fundamental level,  is cut off from traditional western culture. In the same way that Christianity marked a epochal break from pagan pre-Christian Europe.

The thing to note, though, is just as Christianity was able to incorporate such pagan traditions such as it's art, architecture, Roman law and Greek thinking, it was able to do so and remain Christian because it retained it's Christian Realist metaphysics. The modern "Right" on the other hand rejects this Christian Realism and dresses up its modernism in Christian European drag. Thus it remains modern even though looking "traditional" and lures the cognitive-lite into its fold.

One example of Modernism in "Christian Drag" was Nazism. "Got mitt uns" was stamped on every German soldiers' belt and yet the same regime persecuted Christians when convenient and behaved in a way which completely dishonored the Christian ethic. Hitler was profoundly anti-Christian yet he recongised it's importance in keeping the "sheep" under control. Germany was a profoundly religious and by-the-large stupid country and Germans were easily tricked into thinking Hitler was Divinely Providential as long as he called on Christ whist gassing the Yids. (In many ways they resembled today's Evangelicals) It needs to be understood that while the relationship between Christians and Jews as always been rocky,  "no final solution" was ever practiced or promulgated prior to modern times. Christians may have hated the Yids but they would have to answer to God for their murder. The modernist "Christian" has no such qualms.

The other example is Neoconservatism. Neoconservatism was a conservatism based on a rejection of Christian Realism, hence its appeal to (((Non Christians))) who were smart enough to see that the mainstream left was suicidal. By dressing themselves up in strong foreign policy positions, sound finances, and a belief in the traditions of America (minus their intellectual underpinnings) the sheeple of America were easily convinced that there was a continuity between its beliefs and theirs. And yet as time marches on, the metaphysics assert themselves, and we find that the Neoconservative Right more and more resembles the Left. That's because they have the same genetic/intellectual lineage.

The (((irony))) is that the Spenceresque alt-Reich shares the same intellectual lineage as Neoconservatism, and thus over time, from the point of view of Christians, will resemble the Left. In the end it will poison any "right resurgence" from the inside, much like Neoconservatism did, because it shares its metaphyiscal underpinnings with the Left. It might look different to the Left but it's made of the same stuff. The wrong stuff.

For those who are stupid, I'm not saying that the Alt-Reich doesn't have some good ideas, it's just that its ideas when formulated through the metaphysics of Modernism leads to modernist outcomes. i.e. failure or progression of the Left. Ethno-nationalism, needs to be formulated through a Christian Realist framework in order for it not become self destructive or ultimately further the Left. There's is no way to restore the glories of the past because as long as the black hole of Modernism is embraced you're trapped it event horizon from which you cannot escape.

Neoreaction, Not Alt-Right.

Today, Vox put up a post explaining what the alt-Right is.

To quote Vox;

"This is no longer true, assuming it ever was. The great line of demarcation in modern politics is now a division between men and women who believe that they are ultimately defined by their momentary opinions and those who believe they are ultimately defined by their genetic heritage. The Alt Right understands that the former will always lose to the latter in the end, because the former is subject to change."

No, the line of demarcation was defined long ago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Live not by Lies.

Truth is the only stable foundation of any political, moral, religious or social order.

My last few posts have dealt with some of the writings of Sam Francis. Francis was an implacable foe of the Neoconservatives whom he felt had poisoned the Right. Francis, despite his considerable analytical skill was quite vague as to why he found NeoConservatism so objectionable simply stating that it contained the "essence of Liberalism."

As far as I can tell, Francis felt that NeoConservatism was Liberalism in disguise.  And it's my opinion that the Alt-Reich is pretty much the same.

At it's heart, it still bases itself on Genetic Calvinism which is ultimately a rejection of the Christian basis of Western Civilization.  And while it definitely does not resemble the current beta liberalism, an alpha liberalism is liberalism just the same.

Sam Francis on Masculinity.

It is all very well to blame the politicians, managers, media wizards, and incumbents who profit from this system, but the truth is that it is the citizens themselves who permit it to flourish and endure. It is a universal characteristic of modern mass organizations that they encourage dependency and passivity, that most of the individuals who are members of these organizations cannot possibly understand or acquire the highly technical skills that enable the organizations to exist and function, and that the role of most of their members is entirely passive and subordinate while power and responsibility is centered in an elite that does understand and perform their technical operations. Lacking any real power or responsibility, the members merely do their jobs and behave as they are told to behave. This is why you usually receive such terrible service in government offices and larger stores (it's not the clerks' store, and it makes little difference to them whether the customer is satisfied or not), why so few customers complain about it (they are told not to expect courtesy or help because the store is "self-service"), and also why television sitcoms have to play recorded laughter to let the mass audience know when something funny has been said or done (the members of the audience are also passive and will respond to whatever signal is sent to them). In mass politics, the role of "citizenship" is largely confined merely to passive voting for whichever of the two organizational monoliths the citizen has been enticed to support. Comparatively few citizens even do that today, and the number who hand out petitions or work for candidates or run for office themselves is a minuscule part of the population. 

The result of this inculcation of passivity is that even populist revolts such as that of the Perot movement last spring and summer cannot survive apart from manipulation and managed leadership. Despite all the enthusiastic support Mr. Perot's phantom candidacy attracted, no sooner had he withdrawn from the race than the whole bubble popped, usually in tears and whining at the "cowardice" and "betrayal" of the leader, and the only question asked of his followers, the only question they seem to have asked themselves, was which of the other two candidates would they support. It never occurred to any of them to assert active leadership of the movement themselves and fill the void that the Texas billionaire had pretended to create and fill. [ED]

Indeed, the inculcation of passivity by the managerial system and its elite is an essential foundation of its power, not only on the political level but also on the social, economic, and cultural levels as well. The entire structure of the system depends upon manipulating its members into believing (or not challenging the assumption) that they are not capable of performing the simple social functions that every human society in history has performed as a matter of routine. It is the constant instruction of the propagandists of the system that we are not capable of educating our own children, taking care of them without brutalizing them, providing for our own health or old age, enforcing our own laws, defending our own homes and neighborhoods, or earning our own livings. We are not capable of thinking our own thoughts without ubiquitous and self-appointed pundits to explain to us what we see and hear nor of forming our own tastes and opinions without advice from experts nor even of deciding when to laugh when we watch television.

What is really amazing about American society today is not that there is so much violence and resistance to authority but that there is so little[ED], that there is not or has not long since been a full-scale violent revolution in the country against the domination and exploitation of the mass of the population by its rulers. A people that once shot government officials because they taxed tea and stamps now receives the intrusions of the Internal Revenue Service politely; a society that once declared its independence on the grounds of states' rights now passively tolerates federal judges and civil servants who redraw the lines of electoral districts, decide where small children will go to school, let hardened criminals out of jail without punishment, and overturn local laws that are popularly passed and have long been enforced. 

Is it any wonder that the two political parties and all their repulsive leaders, managers, speechwriters, image-makers, officials, fundraisers, vote-catchers, and candidates are frauds who are less convincing than street-corner card sharks? Why should they not be frauds? Who is there to expose their racket and hold them to account? "If God did not want them sheared," says the bandit leader in the movie "The Magnificent Seven" about the Mexican peasants he is robbing and killing, "he would not have made them sheep." The peasants in the movie prove they aren't sheep not by hiring the seven gunfighters to protect them but by finally taking up arms themselves. Sheep don't fight back; they wait for others to fight for them. If there remain today any Americans who are not sheep, they'll stop trying to hire phony populist gunfighters to save them from the wolfish bandits who run the country, and in the next four years they'll start learning how to shoot for themselves. [ED]*

Sam Francis, Revolution from the Middle.

Recently, whilst on holidays, I had the opportunity to read Sam Francis', Revolution from the Middle, and, Shot's Fired. Both are good books and have deepened my appreciation of Francis. I have some arguments with Francis, some of which I plan to expand on later on, but I'm in broad agreement with him on many matters. Reading though his works, I definitely got the impression that he was dismayed at the impotence of the socially corrective forces in the Anglosphere, an impotence which I believe he felt was due the the social conditioning bought about by "managerialism" but personally, I feel that it's malady lays much deeper.

Recent articles in the Web have noted that despite living in an age of sexual libertinism  the incidence of sexual activity amongst millennials is going down.  Religious types may celebrate but  Bacchus is not being displaced by the active belief in a Christian God. Logically, this would indicate that Eros is asleep on the job. Furthermore, recent strength tests show that millennials are physically weaker than their fathers and sperm counts are falling. What's going on?

I'm not sure, but all the "signs" seem to point towards a failure of "masculinity". A failure which I believe is due to multiple causes and therefore not really reducible to one overarching explanation. But it's a failure which I believe is going to have profound social and  political consequences for Western Civilisation unless it is rapidly repaired. Quite simply, the Left is winning because the Right lacks "Men".

Recently, Roissy made a call to the alt-Right (Riech) to reclaim game. I think NRx should take note. It's not simply about how to organise a society, but it's also about the type of people that form the constituency of that society. Any society, when faced will existential threat will wither, if its defence is based upon the bravery and motivation of eunuchs.

*(Disclaimer for the retarded and NSA) Francis wasn't did not advocate, nor do I, picking up a gun and shooting people. He felt the primary battle to be fought was cultural, not physical. The Right needs smart men, not Anime-Gun twitching-Eunuchs.

Sam Francis on Globalism.

"But in fact globalism is not at all the same thing as imperialism. In imperialism, at least the historic versions of it we know, a particular political and cultural unit expands and imposes itself and its power on other particular political and cultural units, as when Rome, Great Britain, or the United States conquered and controlled other countries and other territories. Up to a point, imperialism is a perfectly normal and natural (though not necessarily harmless) result of any successful state. If a state keeps winning its wars, if its subjects or citizens are economically successful, then sooner or later the state and its people will wind up with an empire, and typically the state then sends out some of those people to govern the empire, exploit it, and bring back lots of swag and ego-gratification for those remaining at home.

Globalism is rather different. Under globalism, the political and cultural unit that is expanding is not the city-state, nation, or people that expands under imperialism; indeed, the dynamic of globalism works to submerge and even destroy such particularities. What expands under globalism is the elite itself, which progressively disengages itself from the political and cultural unit from which it originated and becomes an autonomous force, a unit not subordinated or loyal to any particular state, people, or culture. In the globalist regime that is writhing to-ward birth today, the transnational elite that runs it does not even claim to be advancing the material or spiritual interests of the nations it uses; the elite has only contempt for national identity, regards national sovereignty as at best obsolete and at worst a barrier to its aspirations, and believes (or affects to believe) that nationality and all its characteristics are on the way out. "