by Greg Johnson
Out for the good of us all. What we got
Was this: a world we helped to kill, but not
Because we would have wanted to, no, but
Because we never knew what was at risk
Until it started to stink. Sure, we’d put
Our minds to fixing it back, the thing is,
We can’t undo it now, can we? All this
Dun-colored world of the future that they
Sold to us continues. Happy birthday.
EINARHJAR—SIBERIA 1947
“With unforgettable dishonor it threw millions of
Western soldiers to the Russian savages, to disappear
forever into the unmarked graves of Siberia.”
—Francis Parker Yockey
You have no graveyards, no markers, no names.
We must invoke your memories to do
You honor, since we have no other way.
But, then, it makes no difference: the same
Blood moves inside our veins as moved in you;
The same black sun shone then that shines today.
We need no monuments, no headstones placed
To sanctify your loss. However lost,
Your graves make holy ground from shallow holes,
And you and they can never be disgraced
By lying undisclosed amid the frost
Of that deep frozen foreign land. Your souls
Can never fall away from us—you are
Not truly lost forever, Einarhjar.
MEIN GOLDENER SCHATZ IST VERLOREN
(DIE BERLIN-MUTTER SPRICHT, 1946)
Oh yes. He is gone. And we all know where.
Shot? Not yet, perhaps. Beaten? Starved? Surely . . .
And thin and cold and so very young. He,
With his shy smile, his blue eyes, and his hair—
Once golden, but grown dull from war and cold
Dead hope. The world’s gone cold and dead around
Him: all barbed wire, hunger, snowy ground,
A sickly sun and clothes that cannot hold
Back the cut of frost or the bite of wind,
And nothing, nothing ahead but death. That
And nothing else. A quick-step—rat-a-tat!!—
To a hole in the snow. Predetermined
But not recorded. He will lie out there . . .
Smile gone, eyes shut, blood in his golden hair.
SILLY RABBIT
I was never asked to memorize the
Sonnets of Barrett, nor state—even
In general—the years that Crimea
Was a theatre of British war. Seven
Pillars of Wisdom? Nine Noble Virtues?
May as well have never existed for
All that I’ve been told about them. The truths
That lay unfathomed at my feet are more
Than the truths that were ever revealed by
Way of lessons, books, and socialized cant.
Windswept vistas painted by artists I
Could not suppose to name, (face it Rembrandt
Is more associated with toothpaste
Than with oils), hint at other meanings and
Layers I am not expected—shamefaced,
Realizing an ignorant lack—to stand
Back and try to conceive of. I am not
Enlightened enough to notice, really.
For what is considered a sufficient
Education, the ancient mysteries
Of Pythagoras himself could be dumb
And the universal music of the
Spheres fall silent, for all that has not come
Down of them by the time they’ve come to me.
For my generation has not been taught
To care for those sort of things. Because my
Generation has had other things, brought
In bright shiny ways that preoccupy
Us while we learn them so that we keep them—
Deep and whole—without knowing that we do.
Four score and twenty years ago, mmmm mmmm
Good, ask any mermaid you happen to
Meet . . .
How do you get to Sesame Street?
SIREN SONG
This form is an Ovillejo (“tangled ball of wool”) from South America
Why do some of you resist?
We insist
On planning and then manning your defeat.
It will be sweet,
Once you’ve all been re-taught
To be naught,
And you let us dictate culture, form, and thought.
When everything’s distorted, retarded, canned,
Just like we’ve always planned,
We insist it will be sweet to be naught.
BRITTAS BAY
Our time will come to pass again. Slowly,
As cycles turn in natural spirals
That do not consider generations.
Your time must wait, for now. Today, only
Other writers who don’t rock cultural
Boats can have their say, for the distortion
Of our way, our world, has made elements
Of alienation that wreck weak souls
Through the insides of their own heads. Secret
Forces forge destiny, though. We are meant
To survive this soullessness, to be whole
Again, although the others will fight it
Because “no age submits quietly to
The spirit of the coming age” (quote you).
Counter-Currents/North American New Right,
June 15, 2010
INTERVIEW WITH
ALAIN DE BENOIST
BRYAN SYLVAIN
_____________________
TRANSLATED BY GREG JOHNSON
Editor’s Note
In 2005, Alain de Benoist gave an interview to The Occidental Quarterly, which was published as “European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 7–27.
The interview was lengthy, however, and the decision was made to cut it. Thus Benoist’s critical discussions of Christianity and the human sciences were removed. Benoist gave me a copy of the French original, and I am translating the “lost” portions here for the first time.
The questions fall naturally under the headings “On Christianity” and “On the Human Sciences,” but these designations, as well as the arrangement of the answers, are my own. The questions are reverse-translations from French.
ON CHRISTIANITY
According to the Manifesto of the Nouvelle Droite, the five main characteristics of modernity are individualization, massification, desacralization, rationalization, and universalization. The ND traces the roots of modernity to a secularized form of Christian metaphysics. It is also known for rejecting another product of Christianity: egalitarianism. What then are the “aristocratic values” that the ND intends to promote, and how can they counterbalance each one of these destructive tendencies? And how could everyone adhere to aristocratic values?
To describe egalitarianism as the mere “product” of Christianity is a shortcut that for my part I would no longer take. Things are a little more complex than that. What one can say, on the other hand, is that the advent of modernity can be understood and analyzed only in light of the vast process of secularization that characterizes it. That means that a certain number of themes that were formerly expressed in theological terms have been transferred to the secular sphere.
In the ideology of progress, for example, the promise of salvation in the beyond is transformed into the promise of happiness in the future. The very notion of “progress” is part of the linear vision of history (in opposition to the cyclical or spherical vision of history) privileging the future that was introduced by biblical thought.
The concept of equality (which one should distinguish from egalitarianism) finds its origin in the Christian assertion of an equal relationship of all human souls with God.
The technological enth
rallment of the world (das Gestell, to use Heidegger’s term)—which beginning with Descartes imposes a new perception of the cosmos as entirely available for human control, while consciousness begins to be reduced to an object of natural science—finds its first legitimation in Genesis (so that, as Heidegger saw quite well, technology can be regarded as the completion of metaphysics).
Jean Bodin’s theory of the absolute sovereignty of the prince with respect to his subjects is a transposition of the absolute sovereignty of God in relation to creation. This is how Carl Schmitt could say that the principal concepts of modern politics are secularized theological concepts. This process of secularization was also studied in a remarkable way by Karl Löwith.
The New Right, moreover, does not defend “aristocratic” values but the values of any traditional society, i.e., any society not yet conquered by modernity. From the traditional point of view, aristocratic and popular values are about the same. These are all the values inherent in an ethics of honor. In opposition to economic and commercial values, they are also the values of disinterestedness and generosity, as expressed in the system of the gift and the counter-gift.
To the great deontological moral systems, of which Kant is the paradigm, one can still oppose Aristotle’s virtue ethics: to pursue personal excellence by practicing the “virtues.” In such a system, the good necessarily takes precedence over the just, as Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor very justly argue against John Rawls. Here one returns to Hegel’s critique of Kant, i.e., the opposition of Sittlichkeit to Moralität.
What is your view of the truth of the Christian faith? What is your view of Christian apologetics? A Christian could ask you to offer proof of the falsehood of the Resurrection, since if that were given, Christianity would crumble. How do you answer this challenge?
Strange question. I do not have to “prove” that Jesus was not resurrected any more than I have to “prove” that God did not give the Tables of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai or that Elvis Presley is not alive and selling pizzas in Brooklyn! The reason is that one cannot prove a negative; one cannot demonstrate non-existence. It is the Christians who have to give proof of their claims, proof that they have not managed yet.
Could you say something about the violent way in which Europe was Christianized? To what extent did the Christianization of Europe rest on fraud?
Christianity was gradually established in Europe by using all available means. Its diffusion was sometimes peaceful, sometimes forcible. The struggle between Christianity and paganism, the history of which has been retold a thousand times, of course included many bloody episodes: forced conversions of whole populations, persecution of pagans, “crusades” internal and external, etc.
However, the Church does not owe its success to force as much as to the skill with which it took over the ancient pagan rites and religious inclinations and twisted them to suit its own purposes. Because it was unable to completely uproot paganism, it got busy “Christianizing” it by giving it new contents.
Churches were built on the sites of old temples, the liturgical calendar was based on the pagan one (Christmas replaced the old festivities of the winter solstice, Midsummer’s Day that of the summer solstice, etc.), the legends of the saints took over the powers ascribed to local divinities, many places of pilgrimage were preserved, and the worship of Mary compensated for the absence of a mother goddess, etc. Christianity was thus partially “paganized,” becoming at the same time more acceptable to the masses.
But this “paganization” remained superficial, because it touched only the external forms of worship. Nevertheless, it makes it possible to understand the difference that has always existed between popular Christianity and institutional Christianity and its specific theological system.
Is Christianity a foreign religion for Europeans? Does the fact that Christianity was the carrier of a non-European culture, Judaism, which thus became a part of the European heritage, constitute a problem? A whole tradition, according to which the Church is the “New Israel,” makes Christians “spiritual Semites.” Does it follow from this that the Jewish tradition belongs to the Western tradition?
My critique of Christianity, which is primarily intellectual and philosophical, has nothing to do with the fact that it was born historically outside of Europe. I feel sympathy for certain Eastern religions or spiritualities, like Zen Buddhism or Shintoism, which are not strictly European at all. On the other hand, I am completely hostile to many ideologies that were born in Europe. The provenance of an idea is not a criterion of truth, and the surplus of identity is not reducible to its origin.
Jesus was a Jew of the 1st century of our era who was most likely regarded as a prophet, but who never intend to create a universal “Church,” much less a new religion. Convinced of the imminent arrival of the “kingdom of God” (Olam haba, “the world that is to come”), it was in the name of the Torah that he opposed the dominant, institutional current of the Judaism of his time. “I was sent only to the lambs of the house of Israel,” he says very clearly in a passage of the Gospels (Matthew 15:24) which completely contradicts the words added later found at the end of Mark (16:15) and in Matthew (28:19).
It was only after his death that some who thought he was the Messiah came to see him as the “son of God” come to save all men. Christianity as we know it is above all the work of Paul, and it is in the Mediterranean world, then the Western, that what is essential to its history unfolded.
The concept of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” is, moreover, quite ambiguous. In all rigor, one can speak of Judeo-Christianity only in two precise senses: first historically, to indicate the very first “Nazarene” communities in Palestine which, under the direction of John, vigorously opposed the “Helleno-Christians” led by Paul; then theologically, to indicate the common theological beliefs of Jews and Christians (belief in single god, the distinction between created being and uncreated being, etc).
After the destruction of the Temple in the year 70, the two religions separated completely: the Christians were expelled from the synagogues, and the Tannaim, the chief rabbis who then reorganized Judaism based on the Pharisee current, instituted the birkat-ha-minim, which curses the partisans of Jesus. For its part, the incipient Christian Church adopted explicit anti-Judaism, which first appears in the Gospel of John, the last of the four canonical Gospels.
Christianity did not become less dependent on its Old Testament roots, but over the centuries it came to adhere to the theology of substitution, which claims that the Church incarnates the true Israel, excluding the Jews while preserving their metaphysical identity (obviously an unbearable claim for the Jews themselves). This rift between its origin and its history is characteristic of Christianity.
But one can grasp the whole of Christianity only by ceasing to regard it as a unitary bloc: early Christianity is different from medieval Christianity, which is not the same thing as Counter-Reformation Christianity, modern Christianity, etc.
How can Celsus, who published polemical writings against the Christians around 178, be used as a guide for the 21st century?
Celsus was a neoplatonic philosopher, the author of an anti-Christian book, the True Discourse, the text of which is known to us today only through the attempts to refute it by the Fathers of the Church (this is also the case with the treatises of Julian, Porphyry, etc.). I can’t really see how one could make it a “guide for the 21st century.” Reading his book—the text of which has been reconstructed by specialists—does, however, help us to better understand the ancient pagan polemics against Christianity.
Does Christianity constitute a viable vehicle for the perpetuation of the European people and their culture, or does it lead to a non-European future because of disappearance of the “Germanic” element that had transformed it in the Middle Ages, as James C. Russell shows so well in his book The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)? Do you think that there is
a reason to preserve Christianity? Can it play a positive role in European culture?
All told, I do not think that one should be pleased by the appearance of Christianity and its development. The pre-Christian ages of Europe were not spiritually deficient in any way. What is good in Christianity isn’t new, and what is new in it isn’t good. But as I have just said, Christianity is not a unitary bloc. St. Francis of Assisi and Torquemada gave the same Church quite different faces! There is nothing wrong with preferring the former. I have written a book entitled On Being a Pagan, but that has never prevented me from appreciating Catholic authors like Léon Bloy, Charles Péguy, Georges Bernanos, and Gustave Thibon, or from feeling agreement with certain aspects of the social teachings of the Church.
To answer your question more precisely, I do not think that Christianity is a “viable vehicle for safeguarding the European people and their culture.” But above all, I believe that it should be well understood that we already no longer live in a Christian society. The dominant public discourse certainly remains impregnated with themes of Christian or biblical origin, but behaviors have changed. There as elsewhere, individualism has taken the lead.
The Churches, just like the parties and the trade unions of the traditional type, are passing through a deep crisis. In France, less than 8% of the population goes to mass or Sunday worship, the number of ordained priests continues to drop year after year, and nobody obeys the pope any longer regarding sexual morals or manners.
It is different in the United States, where religious belief and practices remain incredibly more widespread than elsewhere. In continental Europe, there is no equivalent of the “creationists” and “born-again Christians,” the “Moral Majority,” or the ridiculous American “televangelists”! Even in the United States, however, it is no longer possible to speak about a “Christian society.” And that is what constitutes the postmodern version of secularization.
