Tomislav Sunic
Postmortem Report
Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity
Second Edition
Foreword by Kevin MacDonald
Arktos
London 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Arktos Media Ltd.
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ISBN
978-1-912079-77-3 (Paperback)
978-1-912079-75-9 (Ebook)
Editing
Martin Locker
Cover and Layout
Tor Westman
Foreword
This collection of articles and essays, previously published in a variety of journals and delving into topics ranging from race to literary criticism to philosophy of history, is most welcome. Tom Sunic is an important intellectual — all the more so because there are so few intellectuals, especially in Europe, who are willing to dissent from the standard views of the left that have dominated intellectual discourse on issues related to race, multiculturalism, and World War II.
There are several qualities of his writing and his personal talents that I think are noteworthy. As an American, I greatly appreciate his European view of things. Every time I read one of his essays, I am introduced to a large number of authors who are unfamiliar to American audiences. Like most Americans, one of my (several) vices is that I am restricted to the English language. Sunic has read widely in French and German, and Croatian. This is a huge advantage in developing a broad perspective on European history and culture as a whole. So many intellectuals are confined to one little area — I think because they are afraid to be criticized by resident experts if they cross-disciplinary boundaries. The towering egos of so many intellectuals and their desires to defend their little territory against interlopers are huge barriers to progress.
Add to that his personal experience: The vast majority of Americans, myself included, have no experience of anything remotely resembling the brutal history of Europe’s recent past. Sunic grew up in Croatia under Communism and is personally acquainted with some of the darkest phenomena of the twentieth century. His family was persecuted by the communists and he clearly has a deep sense of the tragic aftermath of World War II when the communists slaughtered many thousands of Croat nationalists as well as nationalists in other Eastern European countries that came under communist domination. He discusses “The Aristocide of Bleiburg and other communist killing fields” — the point being that the communists murdered a considerable percentage of the Croatian elite. Indeed, he proposes that the murderous actions of the communists probably had a dysgenic effect on the population as a whole. As he points out, this murderous hostility toward the intelligent, the talented, and the physically gifted is the common denominator of the political left. Armed with theories of radical environmentalism (“the thesis that the social-economic environment engenders miracles”) — what some have called “left creationism,” and impervious to scientific facts and logic, Communism has had devastating effects wherever it has come to power. Sunic is what has been called a “race realist” — someone who is not reticent in discussing the importance of race in human affairs based on scientific evidence and common sense. From ancient times, people have understood the importance of good breeding, and their perceptions of physical beauty and health have been adaptive in an evolutionary sense. The misshapen faces of gargoyles, on the one hand, and the ideal human forms in much of Western art tell the story of normal, healthy attitudes for much of our history. And it says much that the triumph of the left in World War II resulted also in the triumph of the abstractions and down-right ugliness of modern art. This is art that becomes established as high culture not because it naturally pleases the eye but because it pleases a corrupt, hostile, hyper-intellectualized, ethnically alien and politically motivated cultural establishment.
As Sunic reminds us, the defeat of National Socialism had devastating effects on the culture of the West — transforming it into a culture of suicide. In one of his most interesting essays, he shows that the art in Germany during the National Socialist period had strong classical themes. Whatever its faults — and they were many — the record shows that one strand of National Socialism was to preserve the traditional culture of Europe.
With historical hindsight, it is not too much to suggest that, unless there is a change of direction, the destruction of National Socialism represents the death knell of the West. This is because the culture of the post-World War II West idealized White people with no allegiance to their people or their traditional culture, with no understanding of their own history. The books were burned and whatever was left of the old culture was anathematized.
Sunic writes that “the whole purpose of classicism and neoclassicism, particularly in plastic art, but also in philosophy and literature suggested that Europeans had to abide by the cosmic rules of racial form and order. Whatever and whoever departs from order brings in decadence and death.” The obvious implication is that to abandon this aesthetic is to accept death. The culture of the West has become the culture of Western suicide, and indeed there can be little doubt that that is exactly where we are headed.
Sunic goes where very few post-WWII intellectuals dare to tread: The idea that people of other racial backgrounds look up to Whites and behave accordingly. There is an envy and a desire to mimic Whites: “The Western heritage, regardless of whether it is despised or loved by non-Europeans, is viewed either consciously or subconsciously as the ideal type and role model for all.”
This envy is also an aspect of the peril of European peoples. The ideology of the victors of World War II has placed Europeans in a situation where their official ideology has as its central feature the moral imperative of cultural and demographic suicide. The racial resentment against the Western “Other” that has often resulted in mimicry and emulation can also lead to violent retribution when the balance of power has shifted. Whites who fail to see all the signs of festering hostility among non-Whites who have been welcomed into Western countries under the aegis of wildly optimistic ideologies promulgated by hostile elites are simply not paying attention. It was the festering hostility of a large, deeply aggrieved Jewish population in the Soviet Union that led to the darkest horrors of the 20th century.
Sunic understands the importance of race, but he does not think of the White race as a genetically homogeneous group. Far from it. He rightly emphasizes that central Europe has been a melting pot of different racial subgroups. Sunic points out that even during the Third Reich, the Germans did not think of themselves as a pure Nordic race but as a mixture of European racial sub-types. They recruited many different racial sub-types into high positions in the military, including a great many Slavs. As Sunic notes, the result was that the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS did not represent a very narrow racial type but included a great many Slavs and other peoples. The result was what he calls a “united European” fighting force. This departs quite radically from the received wisdom, and should have a major effect on how we think about World War II.
Sunic also brings up things about World War II that most of us are somewhat aware of but which are very painful to read about. The psychopathic slaughters of civilians perpetrated in Dresden and other German cities at a time when the outcome of the war had been decided are a monument to the viciousness of the allies. The same can be said about the brutal treatment of German soldiers and civilians after the war, at least some of which was the result of Jewish influence. Indeed, it is a
pparent that if powerful Jews like Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (Secretary of the Treasury in the Roosevelt Administration) had had their way, many millions more Germans would have been murdered.
Sunic is one of those rare Western intellectuals who is willing to discuss Jewish influence openly and honestly. The real winners of World War II were not the allies, including even the Soviet Union whose domination over Eastern Europe ultimately lasted less than 50 years. The real winners were the Jews.
Jewish power increased dramatically after World War II. Israel was established in 1948 over the strong objections of the non-Jewish foreign policy establishment of the United States. Israel is now a regional power that is using its military capability and alliances with the United States to increase its territory.
After World War II, anti-Jewish attitudes declined rapidly in the United States and throughout the West. There was a corresponding upsurge of Jewish wealth, political power, and cultural influence in the media, the arts, and the academic world. And a major facet of Jewish cultural power is that even by the 1940s Jewish influence became a taboo topic for anyone wishing to avoid social ostracism and penury.
Sunic presents a rational, unbiased assessment of Jewish influence that is refreshingly free of the usual inhibitions without resorting to wild accusations and unverifiable assertions. In other words, Jewish influence should be discussed in the dispassionate manner of a social scientist just as it is with every other identifiable group. As Sunic points out, the only people who are allowed to discuss Jewish influence at all in the mainstream media are Jews. On the other hand, many Jews have achieved a great deal of influence as historians and critics of Western culture. The implicit attitude seems to be that Jewish history and Jewish influence are topics to be discussed, if at all, only within the Jewish community. It is a dialogue among Jews that non-Jews have no part in. This is an inherently unfair situation, which has always had a tendency to lead to paranoia among non-Jews. Europeans who have any allegiance to their people and culture cannot stand by and accept this state of affairs. We are approaching an endgame situation in the West. In the United States, people of non-European descent will be the majority in just a few short decades, and the same will happen throughout Europe and other societies established by Europeans since the dawn of the Age of Discovery. At that point, the centuries old hostilities and resentments of non-White peoples toward Whites that Sunic discusses will come to the fore, and the culture and Europe will be irretrievably lost. We must confront this impending disaster with a sense of psychological intensity and desperation. Reading Tom Sunic’s essays will certainly provide the background for understanding how we got here and perhaps also for finding our way toward the future.
Prof. Kevin MacDonald
Long Beach California September 23, 2009
Note on the Text
The essays presented in this volume have been collected from a number of original sources. These sources are as follows: Marx, Moses, and the Pagans in the Secular City first appeared in CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History, Vol. 24, No. 2, Winter 1995; Monotheism vs. Polytheism in Chronicles (A Magazine of American Culture), in April 1996; History and Decadence: Spengler’s Cultural Pessimism Today in CLIO, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 51–62, Fall 1989; “Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft”: A Sociological View of the Decay of Modern Society in Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, 1994; Emile Cioran and the Culture of Death in Planet Cioran, in 2004; The Right Stuff (Drugs and Democracy) in Chronicles of American Culture, in 1996; The Beauty and the Beast: Race and Racism in Europe in The Occidental Observer, as a five-part series, between 9 August and 22 September 2009; Art in the Third Reich: 1933–1945 in Autonom, as a three-part series, between 19 and 24 November 2006; The Destruction of Ethnic Germans and German Prisoners of War in Yugoslavia, 1945–1953 in the Institute of Historical Review website, in June 2002; Democracy Revisited: The Ancients and the Moderns in The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2; Liberalism or Democracy? Carl Schmitt and Apolitical Democracy in This World (An Annual of Religious and Public Life), Vol. 28, 1993; The Liberal Double-Talk and Its Lexical Consequences Historical Dynamics of Liberalism: From Total Market to Total State in Empresas Políticas. No. 10/11, 1st/2nd Semester 2008; America in the Eyes of Eastern Europe in World and I Magazine, November 2001, Vol. 16, No. 11, pp. 292; The Decline and Splendor of Nationalism in Chronicles of American Culture, January 1992; Woodrow Wilson’s Defeat in Yugoslavia: The End of a Multicultural Utopia in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, Fall 1994; A Global Village or the Rights of the Peoples? in Chronicles, January 1991.
The texts were written using the American spelling system and, save for occasional punctuation and typographical corrections, have been left unaltered.
Part I: Religion
Marx, Moses, and the Pagans in the Secular City
With the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity, the period of pagan Europe began to approach its end. During the next millennium the entire European continent came under the sway of the Gospel — sometimes by peaceful persuasion, frequently by forceful conversion. Those who were yesterday the persecuted of the ancient Rome became, in turn, the persecutors of the Christian Rome. Those who were previously bemoaning their fate at the hands of Nero, Diocletian, or Caligula did not hesitate to apply “creative” violence against infidel pagans. Although violence was nominally prohibited by the Christian texts, it was fully used against those who did not fit into the category of God’s “chosen children”. During the reign of Constantine, the persecution against the pagans took the proportions “in a fashion analogous to that whereby the old faiths had formerly persecuted the new, but in an even fiercer spirit.” By the edict of A.D. 346, followed ten years later by the edict of Milan, pagan temples and the worship of pagan deities came to be stigmatized as magnum crimen. The death penalty was inflicted upon all those found guilty of participating in ancient sacrifices or worshipping pagan idols. “With Theodosius, the administration embarked upon a systematic effort to abolish the various surviving forms of paganism through the disestablishment, disendowment, and proscription of surviving cults.”1 The period of the dark ages began.
Christian and inter-Christian violence, ad majorem dei gloriam, did not let up until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Along with Gothic spires of breathtaking beauty, the Christian authorities built pyres that swallowed nameless thousands. Seen in hindsight, Christian intolerance against heretics, Jews, and pagans may be compared to the twentieth-century Bolshevik intolerance against class opponents in Russia and Eastern Europe — with one exception: it lasted longer. During the twilight of imperial Rome, Christian fanaticism prompted the pagan philosopher Celsus to write: “They [Christians] will not argue about what they believe — they always bring in their, ‘Do not examine, but believe’…” Obedience, prayer, and the avoidance of critical thinking were held by Christians as the most expedient tools to eternal bliss. Celsus described Christians as individuals prone to factionalism and a primitive way of thinking, who, in addition, demonstrate a remarkable disdain for life.2 A similar tone against Christians was used in the nineteenth century by Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in his virulent style, depicted Christians as individuals capable of displaying both self-hatred and hatred towards others, i.e., “hatred against those who think differently, and the will to persecute.”3 Undoubtedly, early Christians must have genuinely believed that the end of history loomed large on the horizon and, with their historical optimism, as well as their violence against the “infidels”, they probably deserved the name of the Bolsheviks of antiquity.
As suggested by many authors, the break-up of the Roman Empire did not result only from the onslaught of barbarians, but because Rome was already “ruined from within by Christian sects, conscientious objectors, enemies of the official cult, the persecuted, persecutors, criminal elements of all sorts, and total chaos.” Paradoxically, even the Jewish God Yahveh was to experience a sinister fate: “he would be convert
ed, he would become Roman, cosmopolitan, ecumenical, gentile, goyim, globalist, and finally anti-Semite.”(!)4 It is no wonder that, in the following centuries, Christian churches in Europe had difficulties in trying to reconcile their universalist vocation with the rise of nationalist extremism.
Pagan Residues in the Secular City
Although Christianity gradually removed the last vestiges of Roman polytheism, it also substituted itself as the legitimate heir of Rome. Indeed, Christianity did not cancel out paganism in its entirety; it inherited from Rome many features that it had previously scorned as anti-Christian. The official pagan cults were dead but pagan spirit remained indomitable, and for centuries it kept resurfacing in astounding forms and in multiple fashions: during the period of Renaissance, during Romanticism, before the Second World War, and today, when Christian Churches increasingly recognize that their secular sheep are straying away from their lone shepherds. Finally, ethnic folklore seems to be a prime example of the survival of paganism, although in the secular city folklore has been largely reduced to a perishable commodity of culinary or tourist attraction.5 Over the centuries, ethnic folklore has been subject to transformations, adaptations, and the demands and constraint of its own epoch; yet it has continued to carry its original archetype of a tribal founding myth. Just as paganism has always remained stronger in the villages, so has folklore traditionally been best protected among the peasant classes in Europe. In the early nineteenth century, folklore began to play a decisive role in shaping the national consciousness of European peoples, i.e., “in a community anxious to have its own origins and based on a history that is more often reconstructed than real.”6
The pagan content was removed, but the pagan structure remained pretty much the same. Under the mantle and aura of Christian saints, Christianity soon created its own pantheon of deities. Moreover, even the message of Christ adopted its special meaning according to place, historical epoch, and genius loci of each European people. In Portugal, Catholicism manifests itself differently than in Mozambique; and rural Poles continue to worship many of the same ancient Slavic deities that are carefully interwoven into the Roman Catholic liturgy. All over contemporary Europe, the erasable imprint of polytheist beliefs continues to surface. The Yule celebration represents one of the most glaring examples of the tenacity of pagan residues.7 Furthermore, many former pagan temples and sites of worship have been turned into sacred places of the Catholic Church. Lourdes in France, Medjugorje in Croatia, sacred rivers, or mountains, do they not all point to the imprint of pre-Christian pagan Europe? The cult of mother goddess, once upon a time intensely practiced by Celts, particularly near rivers, can be still observed today in France where many small chapels are built near fountains and sources of water.8 And finally, who could dispute the fact that we are all brainchildren of pagan Greeks and Latins? Thinkers, such as Virgil, Tacitus, Heraclitus, are as modern today as they were during the dawn of European civilization.
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