Titans are in Town

by Tomislav Sunic

  Pauline: “Oh, leave illusions! Love me!”

  Polyeucte: “Thee I love/ Far more than self, but less than God above!” (Polyeucte: Act IV, Scene III.)

  Moreover, Polyeucte does not hesitate to desecrate the statues of ancient heroic Gods in a Roman temple — a very serious political offense in the pagan Roman Empire. Polyeucte, like other early Christian heroes or would-be saints/martyrs, could not, however, anticipate that his self-serving heroic deeds on behalf of his newly discovered superhero Jesus Christ, would, over the next thousand years become a pattern for incessant inter-Christian, inter-White wars, Inquisitions and barbarism. At the moment when Corneille was in the process of finishing his play Polyeucte, a gigantic inter-Christian, inter-White carnage, known as the Thirty Years War, was taking place in the heart of Europe, resulting in millions of German dead. Well, what counted for the poet Corneille was cozying up to his pious protector, the Christian King Louis XIII, and thus securing his literary fame on the winning side of the theological and political barricades in Europe.

  The morale one can deduce from Polyeucte’s iconoclastic behavior, irrespective of his love for his hidden Semitic mentors Yahweh and Jesus, may be a lesson for all contemporary self-proclaimed “White heroic leaders” tapping incognito on their computer boards, waiting for a miracle to happen without incurring any personal risk. Their alibis must be always ready. If a White hero hopeful goes viral with the display of his heroic insignia, his mama can raise hell, his lady can ask for divorce, or worse he may get fired, or even much worse his mugshot can be posted at a local police precinct. The seventeenth-century author Pierre Corneille was on the safe ground with his narrated hero Polyeucte, being himself already on secure Catholic turf in France. This was not the case with his cherished Christian hero model, the early third-century Polyeucte who had dared to rock the boat of political correctness and paid a heavy price for it in the pagan Roman Empire.

  A bit later, in the eighteenth century, with conventional Christian heroes going slowly out of literary and political vogue, Polyeucte would no longer be considered a model for heroes. He would have likely ended up as a fanatical hero, as his counterpart from the Middle East, the Muslim prophet Muhammad did. Muhammed was described as such by the very anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic author Voltaire in his play, Mahomet:

  Mahomet: “On every side inglorious; — let us raise/ Arabia on the ruins of mankind:/ The blind and tottering universe demands/ Another worship, and another God.” (Mahomet; Act II, Scene V.)

  With cultural mores changing, the notion of hero changes too. Today, in multiracial France, staging Voltaire’s Mahomet is already causing official concerns and increasing demands for its ban. Modern racial diversity oblige — even if it requires the System to clamp down on free speech.

  Hero’s Genie Unbottled

  With all heroes’ Gods and home-grown spirits being well stored and secured, nobody can guarantee a hero that his invisible ghostly protectors may not take a sudden revenge on him. Even if a hero is absolutely devoid of hubris and truly thinks of himself as a man of character, his unbottled spirits may act out in an unpredictable fashion. And then the hell breaks loose — which can last for eons. Even his best insights into the secrets of the stars, which the Habsburg warlord Albrecht von Wallenstein excelled at during the Thirty Years War in Europe, could not prevent him from getting assassinated by the very same people who days earlier had pledged to protect him from all political vagaries.

  In fact, good spirits, if invoked by a hero too often, can speed up mayhem and chaos, as witnessed recently in European history. Different was the self-perception of nationalist heroes in Europe in 1933 from that in 1943. Conjuring up one’s good White nationalist spirits, as many White nationalists often do, can easily lapse into the deadly opposite, with the White ghosts no longer wishing to return to the bottle or getting stored away in the back of Pandora’s Box. In Goethe’s poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the much-invoked magic spell of the enchanted broom, designed initially to help the young hero apprentice in his domestic chores, after a period of fun time turns the whole world upside down:

  Flow, flow onward / Stretches many / Spare not any / Water rushing / Ever streaming fully downward / Toward the pool in current gushing.

  Can I never, Broom, appease you? / I will seize you / Hold and whack you, / And your ancient wood / I’ll sever / With a whetted axe I’ll crack you. (transl. by E. ZEYDEL, 1955.)

  The hero is frequently invoked during times of extreme emergency. In real life his profile is elevated in times of war. He will forever be the subject of mutually exclusive beliefs, and the final assessment of his deeds will hinge on the spirit of different times. Some past historical hero may appear to future generations either as an idiotic individual or as a man of exceptional intelligence. Once upon a time, thousands of great European intellectuals were swayed by the hero model as put forward by the earlier Marxist mystique and its subsequent political institutionalization in Bolshevik Russia. By the late twentieth century, after the collapse of communism, few would take those heroes seriously today and even less people would bother reading Marx’s books now.

  Similar is the case with thousands of American and European intellectuals who thought that heroic life could be best achieved by embracing National Socialism or Fascism. Many outstanding authors projected their own autobiographic examples on a future world-improving hero. Many of those White writer heroes could masterfully handle both the pen and the gun. The authors George Orwell and Ernst Hemingway are still viewed by many liberal and leftist commentators as outstanding heroes who combined the soldier’s prowess with literary talent in their fight against what were alleged to be the fascist dark ages. Conversely, the ideal of the heroic man was equally a trademark of thousands of talented nationalist writers and warriors, such as Léon Degrelle or Ernst Jünger, with each in his own peculiar way, depicting the coming end times of the European White man.

  A renowned communist, the French novelist Henri Barbusse, the author of the novel Inferno, is an outstanding visionary source for a better understanding of the spiritual drama faced by a young couple on the treadmill of a merciless capitalist system. Barbusse, with his former soldier’s skill and his literary background placed therefore high hopes in the communist super hero Stalin:

  This is an iron man. His name depicts him: Stalin — steel. He is as unflinching and as adaptable as steel. His power is his formidable good sense, the extent of his knowledge, his amazing internal skill of sorting things out, sharpness of passion, his relentless consistency, his swiftness, his self-assuredness, and intensity of his decision, as well as his constant obsession to choose the right people.20

  Amidst thousands of perceptive European and American thinkers who had embraced the figure of the nationalist hero, one must single out Kurt Eggers, a poet, an acclaimed essayist in National Socialist Germany, a political activist, but also a Waffen SS soldier who had chosen to die on the Eastern front. Eggers sees military combat as “the father of all things” — i.e., the ultimate purpose of life, as opposed to the nothingness of bourgeois life that deprives White man of all sense of purpose:

  Placid life creates its own standards of unreality: what brings pleasure is viewed as good; what causes unease is considered evil. [Man] is keen to wish away reality and through his wishful thinking he bans from his life: struggle, the sense of the tragic, bleakness and pain.21

  How then to figure out in our forthcoming Titanic future the right role model of the hero? The self-perception of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or the characters in the killing spree of his Titus Andronicus, or the behavior of the real historical Stalin or any historical or mythical hero, is often at variance with contemporary public perception of their former deeds. Prime examples are the many modern nationalist sycophants or “Hollywood Nazis” — or for that matter, a number of cultivated White nationalist scholars and heretics in the USA and EU who are inclined to mimic their historical heroes not along the pa
tterns of how those heroes actually were, but rather on the surreal patterns of how they wish to see those heroes behave today. Hypothetically speaking, and provided that the White nationalist hopeful hero was given power on a golden platter by the System, nobody can reassure us that all Whites will be happy thereafter. White mythical heroes or White real historical heroes have always been far keener about killing their own kind, starting with their own family members, than killing off non-European invaders. Civil wars among Whites, starting with the siege of Troy all the way to World War II, have been far bloodier than any single war fought by Whites against non-White intruders. Whites are rightfully concerned today about the big and scary racial replacement taking place in Europe and the USA. Yet they need to offer a more persuasive answer as to how to achieve their unity in front of the common threat.

  Chapter VII: Friedrich Georg Jünger: The Titans and the Coming of the Titanic Age

  Below is my translation of several passages from the last two chapters of Friedrich Georg Jünger’s little known book, Die Titanen (The Titans, 1944).22 Only the subtitles are mine. F. G. Jünger was the younger brother of Ernst Jünger and wrote extensively about ancient Greek mythology. His studies on the meaning of Prometheanism and Titanism are indispensable for a better understanding of the devastating effects of the modern belief in progress and the role of technology in our postmodern societies. Outside the German-speaking countries, F. G. Jünger’s work remains largely unknown, although he had a decisive influence on his renowned brother, Ernst Jünger. Some parts of F. G. Jünger’s other book, Griechische Götter (The Greek Gods, 1943), with a similar topic, and containing also some passages from Die Titanen, were recently translated into French (Les Titans et les dieux, 2013).23

  In the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche and along with hundreds of German philosophers, novelists, poets, and scientists, such as Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Ludwig Clauss, and Gottfried Benn, whose work became the object of criminalization by cultural Bolsheviks and the Frankfurt School after World War II, F. G. Jünger can also be tentatively put in the category of “cultural conservative revolutionaries” who characterized the political, spiritual, and cultural climate in Europe between the two world wars.

  Ancient European myths, legends, and folk tales are often derided by some scholars, including some Christian theologians who claim to see in them gross re-enactments of European barbarism, superstition, and sexual promiscuity. However, if a reader or a scholar immerses himself in the symbolism of the European myths, let alone if he tries to decipher the allegorical meaning of diverse creatures in the myths, such as the scenes from the Orphic rituals, the hellhole of Tartarus, or the carnage in the Nibelungenlied, or the final divine battle in Ragnarök, then those mythical scenes take on an entirely different meaning. After all, in our modern so-called enlightened and freedom-loving liberal societies, citizens are also entangled in a profusion of bizarre infra-political myths, in a myriad of weird hagiographic tales, especially those dealing with World War II victimhoods, as well as countless multicultural hoaxes enforced under penalty of law. Therefore, understanding the ancient European myths means, first and foremost, reading between the lines and strengthening one’s sense of the metaphor.

  There persists a dangerous misunderstanding between White nationalists professing paganism versus White nationalists professing Christian beliefs. The word “paganism” has acquired a pejorative meaning, often associated with childish behavior of some obscure New Age individuals carrying burning torches or reading the entrails of dead animals. This is a fundamentally false conception of the original meaning of paganism. “Pagans,” or better yet polytheists, included scores of thinkers from antiquity, such as Heraclitus, Plato, Seneca, who were not at all like many modern self-styled and self-proclaimed “pagans” worshipping dogs or gazing at the setting sun. Being a “pagan” denotes a method of conceptualizing the world beyond the dualism of “either-or.” The pagan outlook rejects all dogmas and looks instead at the notion of the political or the historical from diverse and conflicting perspectives. Figuratively speaking, the plurality of Gods means also the plurality of different beliefs and different truths. One can be a good Christian but also a good “pagan.” For that matter, even the “pagan” Ernst Jünger, F. G. Jünger’s older brother, converted to Catholicism and had a very Catholic burial in 1998.

  When F. G. Jünger published his books on the Titans and the Gods in 1943 and in 1944, Germany lay in ruins, thus ominously reflecting F. G. Jünger’s earlier premonitions about the imminent clash of the Titans. With the Gods now having departed from our disenchanted and desacralized White Europe and White America, we might do well to have another look at the slumbering Titans who had once successfully fought against Chaos, only to be later forcefully overthrown by their own divine progeny.

  Are the slumbering Titans our political option today? F. G. Jünger’s book is important insofar as it offers a reader a guide for understanding a likely reawakening of the Titans and for decoding the meaning of the new, fast approaching chaos:

  The Titans; Custodians of Law and Order

  The Titans are not the Gods, even though they generate the Gods and relish divine reverence in the kingdom of Zeus. The world in which the Titans rule is a world without the Gods. Whoever desires to imagine a kosmos atheos, i.e., a Godless cosmos, that is, a cosmos not as such as depicted by natural sciences, will find it there. The Titans and the Gods differ, and, given that their differences are visible in their behavior toward man and in view of the fact that man himself experiences on his own as to how they rule, man, by virtue of his own experience, is able to make a distinction between them.

  Neither are the Titans unrestrained, power hungry beings, nor do they scorn the law; rather, they are the rulers over a legal system whose necessity must never be put in doubt. In an awe-inspiring fashion, it is the flux of primordial elements over which they rule, holding bridle and reins in their hands, as seen in Helios. They are the guardians, custodians, supervisors, and guides of the order. They are the founders unfolding beyond chaos, as pointed out by Homer in his remarks about Atlas, who shoulders the long pillars supporting the heavens and the Earth. Their rule precludes any confusion, any disorderly exertion of power. Rather, they constitute a powerful deterrent against chaos.

  The Titans and the Gods match up with each other. Just as Zeus stands in for Cronus, so does Poseidon stand in opposition to Oceanus, or for that matter Hyperion and his son Helios in opposition to Apollo, or Coeus and Phoebe in opposition to Apollo and Artemis, or Selene in opposition to Artemis.

  The Titans against the Gods

  What distinguishes the kingdom of Cronus from the kingdom of Zeus? One thing is for certain; the kingdom of Cronus is not a kingdom of the son. The sons are hidden within Cronus, who devoured those he himself had generated, the sons being now hidden in his dominion, whereas Zeus is kept away from Cronus by Rhea, who hides and raises Zeus in the caverns. And given that Cronus comports himself in such a manner, his kingdom will never be a kingdom of the father. Cronus does not want to be a father because fatherhood is equivalent with a constant menace to his rule. To him fatherhood signifies an endeavor and prearrangement aimed at his downfall.

  What does Cronus want, anyway? He wants to preserve the cycle of the status quo over which he presides; he wants to keep it unchanged. He wants to toss and turn it within himself from one eon to another eon. Preservation and perseverance were already the hallmark of his father. Although his father Uranus did not strive toward the Titanic becoming, he did, however, desire to continue his reign in the realm of spaciousness. Uranus was old, unimaginably old, as old as metal and stones. He was possessed of iron-like strength that ran counter to the process of becoming. But Cronus is also old. Why is he so old? Can this fluctuation of the Titanic forces take on at the same time traits of the immovable and unchangeable? Yes, of course it can, if one observes it from the perspective of the return, or from the point of view of the return of the same. If one a
ttempts it, one can uncover the mechanical side in this ceaseless flux of movement. The movement unveils itself as a rigid and inviolable law.

  The Infinite Sadness of the Titans

  How can we describe the sufferings of the Titans? How much do they suffer anyway, and what do they suffer from? The sound of grief uttered by the chained Prometheus induces Hermes to derisive remarks about the same behavior which is unknown to Zeus. Insofar as the Titans are in the process of moving, we must therefore also conceive of them as the objects of removal. Their struggle is onerous; it is filled with anxiety of becoming. And their anxiety means suffering. Grandiose things are being accomplished by the Titans, but grandiose things are being imposed on them too. And because the Titans are closer to chaos than the Gods are, chaotic elements reveal themselves amidst them more saliently. No necessity appears as yet in chaos because chaos has not yet been measured off by any legal system. The necessity springs up only when it can be gauged by virtue of some lawfulness. This is shown in the case of Uranus and Cronus. The necessary keeps increasing insofar as lawfulness increases; it gets stronger when the lawful movements occur, that is, when the movements start reoccurring over and over again.