by Greg Johnson
Describing himself as a “Greater European Jacobin,” he wanted to build a united nation and advocated the “fusion state,” centralized and transnational, the political, legal, and spiritual heir of the Roman Empire, which will give all its inhabitants European omni-citizenship. In 1989, he summarized: “The main axis of my politico-historical thought is the unitary state, the centralized political state, and not the racial state, the nostalgic state, the historical state, the religious state.” Nothing is more foreign for him than the “Europe of a hundred flags” of Yann Fouéré or the “Europe of the carnal fatherlands” dear to Saint-Loup.
Thiriart’s nationalism is based solely on geopolitical considerations. According to him, the only nations that have a future are those of continental scale like the United States, the USSR, or China. Petty traditional nationalisms are obstacles, even anachronisms, manipulated by the great powers. Thus to return to grandeur and power, Europe should be unified.
Unification would take place under the aegis of a European Revolutionary Party, organized on the Leninist model of democratic centralism, which would organize the masses and select the elites. A historical party—following the example of Third World experiments like the FLN in Algeria or the NLF in Vietnam—would be an embryonic state developing into the united European state. It would have to carry out the national liberation struggle against the American occupation, its dedicated collaborators, thousands of “Quislings” from the System parties, and the colonial troops of NATO. Thus Europe would be liberated and unified from Brest to Bucharest, 400 million strong, and would then be able to conclude a tactical alliance with China and the Arab states to break the American-Soviet condominium.
In spite of their geopolitical lucidity, Thiriart’s theses, rationalist and materialist to the extreme, are perplexing in their eminently modern character. As the Traditionalist Claudio Mutti, a former militant of Giovane Europa, stressed:
. . . the limit of Thiriart consisted precisely in his secular nationalism, supported by a Machiavellian worldview and deprived of any justification of a transcendent nature. For him, historical confrontations were resolved by brute power relations, while the state is nothing more than incarnated Nietzschean Will to Power in service of a project of European hegemony marked by an exclusivist, blind, and conceited pride.251
On the economic plane, Thiriart offered, as an alternative to “the profit economy” (capitalism) and the “utopian economy” (Communism) an “economy of power,” whose only viable dimension is European. Taking as a starting point the economists Fichte and List, he recommended “the autarky of great spaces.” Europe would have to leave the IMF, adopt a single currency, protect itself by tariff barriers, and work to preserve its self-sufficiency.
FROM YOUNG EUROPE TO THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY PARTY
After 1963, dissensions in connection with South Tyrol caused a radical schism, which led to the birth of the Europa Front in Germanic countries like Germany, Austria, and Flanders.
However, the year 1964 marks the militant apogee of the movement, which played a leading role, thanks to Dr. Teichmann, in the strike of Belgian doctors opposed to the nationalization of their profession, and took part in communal elections in Quiévrain. Its working class members organized themselves as the Syndicats communautaires européens (SCE—European Community Trade Unions). In August 1964, the journalist Emile Lecerf and Dr. Nancy resigned because of ideological differences with Thiriart. Lecerf went on to head the Révolution européenne group, more or less aligned with the positions of Europe-Action in France, a “nostalgic” and “literary” movement according to Thiriart. The departure of this historic leader, followed in December 1964 by that of Paul Teichmann, caused the militant decline of the organization.
In 1965, Young Europe became the Parti communautaire européen (PCE—European Community Party). Doctrinal concerns then distracted it from militant activism. The theoretical review L’Europe communautaire came out monthly while the Jeune Europe weekly became semi-monthly. After October 1965 the party’s Cadre Schools took place across Europe, Thiriart having worked out a “physics of politics” based on the writings of Machiavelli, Gustave Le Bon, Serge Tchakhotine, Carl Schmitt, Julien Freund, and Raymond Aron.
Moreover, the party published, between 1965 and 1969, a monthly magazine in French, La nation européenne, and Italian, La Nazione Europea, which offered a counter-current to the traditional extreme Right by placing the continental unit above the nation, opposing NATO and promoting the autonomous deterrent force wanted by De Gaulle, denouncing America as the new Carthage, viewing the regimes of Eastern Europe as a kind of national Communism, and taking an interest in the liberation struggles of the Third World to the point of describing Cuba, the Arab countries, and North Vietnam as allies of Europe! The magazine, distributed by the Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne in France, had 2,000 subscribers and printed 10,000 copies of each issue.
In June 1966, Jean Thiriart met in Bucharest with the Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai on the initiative of Ceausescu. Beijing then spoke about a “tri-continental” struggle. Thiriart advocated a “quadri-continental” struggle, proposing to foment a Vietnam within Europe. For that, he envisaged creating “European brigades” on the Garibaldian model, which, after having fought in the Middle East or in Latin America, would return to fight a war of liberation in Europe.
It should be noted that following this discussion, the Italian militants of Giovane Europa carried out united actions with local Maoists, unified by a minimal common program of hostility to the two superpowers, rejection of the Yankee occupation of Europe, anti-Zionism, and support for Third World liberation struggles.
This collaboration was not without consequences. Various National European cadres ultimately joined the Maoist ranks. Thus in 1971 Claudio Orsoni, nephew of the fascist leader Italo Balbo and a founding member of Giovane Europa, would create the Center for the Study and Application of Maoist Thought. In 1975, Pino Bolzano, the last director of La Nazione Europea, went on to lead the daily paper of the extreme Left group Lotta Continua (The Struggle Continues). Renato Curcio would join the Marxist-Leninist Italian Communist Party before founding . . . the Red Brigades!
Young Europe had supporters in certain countries in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Thus, on August 1, 1966, Thiriart published an article in Serbo-Croatian, entitled “Europe from Dublin to Bucharest,” in the official diplomatic review of the Yugoslav government, Medunarodna Politika. Ferociously anti-Zionist, the Belgian leader was in contact with Ahmed Shukeiri, predecessor of Arafat as the head of the PLO, and the first European to fall with weapons in hand at the side of the Palestinians was a French engineer and member of Young Europe, Roger Coudroy.
Thiriart also had ties to Arab secular-socialist regimes. In the autumn of 1968, he made a long voyage to the Middle East at the invitation of the governments of Iraq and Egypt. He had discussions with several ministers, gave interviews to the press, and took part in the congress of the Arab Socialist Union, the party of Nasser, whom he met on this occasion. Disappointed by the lack of concrete support from these countries, in 1969 he renounced militant combat, causing the breakup of Young Europe.
THE EURO-SOVIET EMPIRE
He would continue, however, his rich theoretical reflections. When Washington approached Beijing in the 1970s, he suggested a Euro-Soviet alliance against the Sino-American axis, in order to build a “very large Europe from Reykjavik to Vladivostok,” which he thought was the only way to resist the new American Carthage and billion-strong China. This is what led him to declare in 1984: “If Moscow wants to make Europe European, I preach total collaboration with the Soviet enterprise. I will then be the first to put a red star on my cap. Soviet Europe, yes, without reservations.”252
Thiriart’s dream of a Euro-Soviet Empire, which he described as a “hyper-nation state equipped with a de-Marxified hyper-communism,”253 merges with Eurosiberia: “Between Iceland and Vladivostok, we can join together 800 million men . . . and fin
d in the soil of Siberia all our strategic and energy needs. I say that Siberia is the economically most vital power for the European Empire.”254 He then worked on two books: The Euro-Soviet Empire from Vladivostok to Dublin: After-Yalta and, in collaboration with José Cuadrado Costa, The Transformation of Communism: Essay on Enlightened Totalitarianism, which remained on the drawing board because of the sudden collapse of the USSR. He left his political exile only in 1991 to support the creation of the Front européen de libération (FEL—European Liberation Front). In 1992, he went to Moscow with a delegation of the FEL and died of a heart attack shortly after his return to Belgium, leaving a controversial but original body of theoretical work, which inspires to this day Guillaume Faye, the preacher of Eurosiberia, and Alexander Dugin, the prophet of Eurasia.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right,
September 20, 2010
TOWARD THE WHITE REPUBLIC
MICHAEL WALKER
_____________________
Michael O’Meara
Toward the White Republic
Edited by Greg Johnson
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2010
Toward the White Republic is a collection of essays and talks by Michael O’Meara, who has been active in recent years translating works by European New Right authors and writing for The Occidental Quarterly. The succinct Foreword to this collection of essays lays out the author’s purpose very clearly. In his words:
Since falling victim to that brood of vipers, the Judeo-capitalist elites, the country [the USA] has been redesigned as a “universal nation.” . . . The essays here address the trifold character of this assault: (1) describing the nightmare world the elites are creating, (2) suggesting a politically feasible alternative to it, and (3) alerting whites to various false flags raised by conservatives, philistines, and others. Common to all these essays is the author’s intent to make whites more conscious of their destiny as a people—and to remind them, thus, of what needs to ensure the continuation of their kind, unique gift of Europe’s blood and spirit.
My first and immediate quibble, or more than a quibble if I am honest, is with the comparative term “more conscious.” For whom is this book intended? Those who are already conscious, the readers for example, of The Occidental Quarterly? Or for whites who are somewhat conscious, but not enough? Judging by the contents of the book, I should say that the writer is addressing the already converted, in which case there is no need to make such readers “more conscious” of their destiny as a people. They are very conscious already. The question for them is not consciousness but guidelines as to what they should do about it, not awareness but solutions.
Awareness is an issue for the millions of whites who are not conscious of their destiny, but for such people far too much is taken as read in this book, starting with the assumption that the reader will not blink at the expression “brood of vipers, the Judeo-capitalist elites.”
In fact—and I suspect Dr. O’Meara would concur with me on this—a racial group only becomes aware of its ethnicity when dramatically and materially placed in juxtaposition with the ethnicity of others. Neither nationalism nor racial consciousness are created by intellectual or scientific idealism or discoveries of any kind; they are the creations of experience.
To an extent the writer shows he is aware of this, yet like the majority (or all?) writers on the subject, he has no time to discuss how consciousness through experience can be raised or channeled constructively. The hypothesis, the primacy of the white race and its impending demise, are taken as a “given” and not discussed. Appealing to a captive and known audience, these essays argue the case for radical nationalism, secession and the abandonment of any other course or approach.
O’Meara insists that attempts to save the white race by reforming or winning control of the United States of America are doomed to failure. The USA is far too far down the path of racial mongrelization, says O’Meara, to be saved by a transfer of power within currently existing political structures. One essay, a friendly but firmly critical essay on the late Sam Francis, underlines this argument and insists that the only option open to the white race, at least in the United States (the line between the fate of the white race as a whole and specifically in the USA is not clearly drawn in these essays) is secession. Drawing inspiration from the nationalist movement of his Irish ancestors, Michael O’Meara looks forward to the creation of an independent White Nationalist state set up upon the soil of the North American continent.
O’Meara despairs of the failure of even racially aware whites to understand this. “Almost as depressing as the thought of our people’s extinction is that of the white opposition to it” he begins one essay revealingly entitled, “Against White Reformists,” first published on the Vanguard News Network in 2007, noting what he calls the “Sisyphean activities” of “racial conservatives” who seek the restoration of a hierarchy within an existing order that is alien and has long been alien to the Aryan spirit of our ancestors. In other words, the system in its entirety is the enemy and not some part of it.
What O’Meara therefore pleads for is not reform but revolution. We are not told whether constitutional rights will be guaranteed in the White Republic, nor what liberal values are to be kept and which to be abandoned, a more than academic point. Many racial activists tend to denounce liberalism in general but become very liberal when their own rights to free speech or a fair trial are at stake.
The despised system has to date been kind enough not to throw Dr. O’Meara into jail for voicing these opinions, because the USA is still blessed with a liberal, yes a liberal Constitution. It is my own view that freedom is indeed under threat in the land of the free but that Dr. O’Meara is not living in the worst of all possible worlds so far as his constitutional rights are concerned.
The danger of rejecting “the system” in toto and proclaiming that one is engaged in a battle to the death with it, is that said system might agree and throw off all restraint as per the motto “if they damn me for telling tales they may as well damn me for murder.” The fact that Dr. O’Meara can still write and The Occidental Quarterly still publish is surely proof that the system remains subject to some restraint. Should all restraint be abandoned and revolutionaries and elite face each other with “no holds barred”? Is this what O’Meara wants? If it is what he wants, why does he continue to write?
The clarity of Dr. O’Meara’s intent creates a considerable gulf between the writer of these essays and the major part of those in the USA who think of themselves as right-wingers. The recent Tea Party movement there, apart from being ridden with contradictions, is wedded to the idea of restoring the United States to some former “pre-Lapsarian” state of capitalist innocence.
As many have observed, the Tea Party movement is overwhelmingly white, but unlike Black Panthers or members of La Raza, entirely ignores the racial element of its own instinctive protest. It has become practically a truism to point out that whites are the only racial group lacking in widespread ethnic self-consciousness. Like so many writers before him, O’Meara hopes for the advent of racial self-awareness among white people. He believes that the way to this is not through reform but via separation, a complete break with the government of the United States.
Although hardly mentioned, the spirit of the American Revolution and what Stonewall Jackson called “America’s Second Revolution” of 1861, loom large in these pages. Recalling the spirit of the American revolutionaries of the 18th century or explicitly the Irish nationalists of the 20th (“Sinn Fein”—we alone), O’Meara claims that American racial nationalists should seek to “pursue their destiny without interference” while in no way seek to restore the Confederacy or the Third Reich, as Leftists claim.
The underlying notion of “we alone,” of a group of comrades/revolutionaries pursuing destiny without interference, characterizes these essays. The explicit rejection of a comparison with the Confederacy or the Third Reich is bewildering, because it is exactly those two his
torical precedents to which O’Meara seems emotionally attached, and the very notion of secession on American soil calls Fort Sumter to mind.
The call to the tradition of revolution, in this case the Irish and American revolutions, is problematic. Both revolutions had clearly international aspirations and appealed to a brotherhood of man. The Irish tricolor was based on the tricolor of French republicanism, a Masonic and universalist movement. The Masonic roots of the American Revolution are well-known, indeed they are still carried on the back of the one dollar bill.
The claim, made here, that America was defined in racial terms, is not borne out by the facts. The American Republic was indeed created by white men alone, and it can be argued their understanding of the world was that of white men. Their being white men, however, was not the motivation of their rebellion and was not provided as a guiding principle of that revolution, and it was not mentioned at all in any of their revolutionary tracts. Neither the American Constitution nor the Bill of Rights is explicitly (is it even implicitly?) racial, and it is as easily interpreted as a charter of universalism as one of nationalist revolt.
In marked contrast to the Irish Declaration of Independence, which O’Meara likewise admires, the American Declaration of Independence specifically appeals beyond the limit of the land: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These lines have been taken as the beacon and inspiration of universalism and understandably so. White racialists provide every kind of convoluted argument to insist that the words “all men” do not really mean all men at all, but the simplicity of those words and their universal application cannot be shaken.
