Titans are in Town

by Tomislav Sunic

  We can illustrate this changing masquerade of history repeating itself when observing the mindset of modern opinion makers. People have always wished, by means of different allegories, to transcend their cursed reality and make frequent excursions into the spheres of the hyperreal, the unreal, or the surreal — in order to offset the absurdity of their existence. It is natural that they resort to religious and ideological devices, however aberrant or criminal these allegorical devices may subsequently turn out to be.

  Accordingly, the motor of religious mass mimicry, which Schopenhauer describes, is again our objectified will. Consequently, the whole course of human life is patterned along the principle of imitation, where even the smallest thing in our perception is borrowed from that role model who is viewed now as a path-breaking innovator or a new messiah. Mimicry is the powerful motor of the will, the theme which was later expanded by Schopenhauer’s disciples, such as Gustave Le Bon.31

  Intelligent individuals amidst our modern rootless masses realize that some beliefs are fraudulent and harmful, but for the sake of social conformity they accept them. They will rather listen to others than trust their own head. As Schopenhauer writes, the bad thing about all religions is that instead of being able to admit their allegorical nature, they conceal it. Absurdities form an essential part of popular beliefs.

  Schopenhauer’s teaching on religions, including his denunciation of the will to political power, was borrowed from the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. He has good words for Catholicism though, which for him is a religion of pessimism.32 But it would be a serious error, based on a fragmentary reading of his work, to conclude that he was rejecting one religion at the expense of the other. Although Schopenhauer may be described as an atheist or agnostic, his sense of spirituality was very strong. Of all religions, Judaism is the worst religion, noted Schopenhauer in his famous book Parerga und Paralipomena.

  The genuine religion of the Jews … is the crudest of all religions (die roheste aller Religionen.) The ongoing contempt for Jews, amidst their contemporary peoples, may have been to a large degree due to the squalid (armsälig) qualities of their religion. … In any case the essence of any religion consists, as such, in its persuasion that it provides for us, namely that our actual existence is not only limited to our life, but that it remains timeless. The appalling (erbärmlich) Jewish region does not fulfil this; indeed, it does not even try to. … Therefore, this is the crudest and the worst of all religions consisting only in an absurd and outrageous (empörend) theism. … While all other religions endeavour to explain to the people by symbols and parables the metaphysical significance of life, the religion of the Jews is entirely immanent and furnishes nothing but a mere war-cry (Kriegsgeschrei) in the struggle with other nations.33

  Some of Schopenhauer’s words about the power of the blind will can easily be applied to our postmodern times — for example, how the will to believe in something has been hijacked by liberal political elites.

  The Hyperreal: The Denial and its Double

  We can now jump over to the 20th and 21st century and observe how Schopenhauer’s ideas provide a good fit to the mass illusions accompanying the rising tide of the democratic mystique. How does the will objectify itself in the political arena today? As I wrote in my essay, Vilfredo Pareto and Political Irrationality, politicians are inclined to project their perception of the real world into its embellished Double.34 Example: None of us is entirely happy with his looks; no political theorist is happy with the world as it is. We all strive to be someone else; we all wish to project either our physique or the present political order into its loftier, distant, and more romantic substitute. As a result, the masses, but also our politicians, assess values and objective reality not as they are, but rather as they’d like to see them. Our passionate need for a change, as a rule, results in inevitable disappointments and feelings of betrayal.

  Following Schopenhauer’s logic, it is a serious error to assume that some contemporary politician in the US, the UK, or in Croatia is a liar or a crook just because we feel or think that we are being cheated or oppressed by him. More likely, such wicked political leaders are themselves the victims of self-delusions. Their manic desire for world improvement is based on honest and self-proclaimed “scientific,” “reasonable,” and “truthful” wishful thinking, which they benevolently wish to share with us or with their subjects or constituents.

  To illustrate the will for self-delusion, one may observe contemporary leftists and antifascist militants within Schopenhauer’s framework of analysis. What they say is already based on their prior self-persuasions, which are the reflections of the prevailing beliefs of their time. Pareto, as a valiant disciple of Schopenhauer’s methods, notes that “many people are not socialists because they have been persuaded by reasoning. Quite the contrary; these people acquiesce to such reasoning because they are (already) socialists.” Their will, however aberrantly it may objectify itself in the ravings for some communistic mystique, defies any empirical argument.

  Schopenhauer is of paramount importance in understanding our perception of postmodern reality, or our hyperreality, as some authors call it. The surreal world of the liberal dogma — that is, the world in which we live — perfectly fits Schopenhauer’s teaching on the flawed perception of the real. Moreover, Schopenhauer’s work is a useful tool for deciphering liberal mendacity, which has become today the cornerstone of the new world order. The postmodern West is enveloped in the virtual reality of the electronic age (the “videosphere”) and media make-believe, which incessantly turn every real political event into a virtual image.

  How does the liberal mystique or, to use Schopenhauer’s word, “allegory,” operate today? The process that started with the abstraction of the objective, as a result of the mass media, has ended now in integral reality, as the postmodern author Jean Baudrillard writes that the virtual itself is “negationist,” or denial-prone. The virtual takes away the substance of the real.35 Disbelief reigns everywhere, even if there are solid and empirical proofs of the opposite. No longer is some historical or political event perceived as “real” or truthful. For instance the memory of the Holocaust functions today as the largest civic religion of the West. The Holocaust is a system of belief serving not only a commemorative goal; it is also a cognitive paradigm for interpreting all aspects of our contemporary society. The issue, however, is no longer the body count of people who died in the Holocaust; rather, the issue is the fact that the postmodern virtual world by definition minimizes or maximizes the hyperreal at the expense of the real.

  This rule of the hyperreal or the Double applies now to all grand narratives, especially those teeming with victimological themes. Even honest historians or social theorists can no longer be taken as real. Why? The big postmodern question will immediately start hovering over their heads: What if that guy is telling the lies? What if he does not tell the truth? Victimologies, and victimhoods no longer sound persuasive as they have found their media hyper-substitutes, which either reenact, or deactivate the real past crime.

  Therefore, the modern media and politicians must make post-prophylactic political decisions in a desperate attempt to dismantle the previous real, i.e., the previous bad decision, the previous inaction by making it up to the real victim with an overkill of repenting rhetoric and post-prophylactic decision making (massive security checks at airports, always new mass commemorations, etc.). If the lives of the masses of people who perished cannot be restored, let us restore their memory by the hyperreal media! Why resuscitate the living, when the resuscitation of the dead is a far better business?

  One can analyze the postmodern wars, the so-called Gulf War in 1991 and the war in Bosnia in 1995 using the concepts of the hyperreal and the double. When these wars were televised and commented on by talking heads on TV screens, their real and horrible reality was cancelled out. Spectators were therefore much more likely to support these wars.

  Neither can our history writing be a m
atter of academic discussion any more. Historical narratives about real or surreal fascist crimes or White man crimes or the current mantra on White man guilt have attained a grotesque level of psychological saturation, to the point that for politically conscious Whites they soon sink into oblivion — and laughter — as they are deconstructed. Even if some past mass crimes are empirically verifiable, the masses will start reconstructing its negative Double — after first deconstructing its real antecedent.

  The Age of Postmodernity is basically the age of deconstruction, where no single verity can hold sway for a long time. Here is the vicious circle of the hyperreal. If one is encouraged to deconstruct the real world and denounce political beliefs as a passing allegory, as Schopenhauer did, why not deconstruct new contemporary civic religions, such the monotheism of the capitalist market or the civic religion of victimhood?

  Spectral Verities, Viral Lies

  We all live the hyperreal, as the French philosopher Rosset writes; we all crave for the Double — be it in its negative or the positive form. We all wish to be something we are not; to duplicate ourselves.

  “Each non-tragic thought is inevitably an intolerant thought; the more it moves away from its tragic perspective, the more it becomes inclined towards a particular form of “optimism,” the more it becomes cruel and oppressive … Generally speaking, the tragic thought sees in each form of philosophical optimism a certified source of intolerance.” In place of the world as it is, we invent a “duplicate” or a “double,” a parallel universe which functions as a phantom rival to the existing world.36

  The disadvantage of living in the real world is that life in it is drab, frightening, or boring; the advantage of the “doubled” life lies not only in the fact that such life does not exist, but that such life doesn’t even have to exist in order for us to believe it to be true and real! In other words, this desire for a spectral world is not so much a desire for something different, as it is a desire to get rid of the real world.

  Who are the new paradigms or role models of our hyperreal postmodernity? Once upon a time the role model for Western man was a rugged individual, a Prometheus unbound, a war hero, a conqueror like Cortés, Columbus, or General Robert E. Lee. Today the will for the hyperreal requires his double or his denial, or better yet the “doubled denial.” As a result, the new role models for the West are the degenerates, the retards, the non-Whites, the pederasts, the pathetic and the perverts … “where the energy of the public sphere, the energy which creates social myths and dogmas is gradually disappearing, the social arena turns obese and monstrous; it grows like a mammal and a glandular corpse. Once it was illustrated by its heroes; today it refers to its handicapped, its weirdos, its degenerates, its asocial persons — and all of this in a gigantic effort of therapeutic maternity.”37

  But these degenerate role models are in turn subject to deconstruction, especially by proud, psychologically healthy White people who are being victimized by the legitimization of these role models. Granted, we are witnessing the end of the big narratives, such as antifascist victimology. However, the unresolved work of mourning the real (or hyperreal) victims of fascism or racism is in full swing. In other words, the antifascist, antiracist war (with all its political, media and legal prohibition) continues unabated. Even if real racism and fascism are dead and gone, they need to be resurrected in a negative doubled manner in order to give the mourners an opportunity to repent for the failed duty to prevent it from happening. Never again, never again! — this is a new war cry of our hyperreal discourse.

  This strategy of the hyperreal “never again,” is directed not only at preventing similar events from happening again in the future — as expressed in the forms of a myriad of memorial centers commemorating the Holocaust. It is also meant to be a tool of unraveling, in a vicarious and imaginary way, of the real past historical disaster that befell the Jews or the non-Whites. Likewise, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are waged today as the post-prophylactic Double; indeed, they are not just the wars for stopping the terror; they are the wars for removing the past sins of the political class, which led to the real terror of the dreadful 9/11! The goal is now to retroactively cancel out the inflicted national disgrace and humiliation of the ruling elites. This is why the actual wars and our public discourse all over the West are “non-events.” Never again, never again!

  And this is why the hyperreal or the Double are pure illusions. They cannot last. The violent and the objective real is waiting in the wings and it will soon take the upper hand. Is it for real?

  Chapter IX: Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Europe and Modern Politics

  When discussing myths we must first agree on the meaning of words and expressions we intend to employ. We must also certify that we assign to those words an appropriate meaning regardless of our own individual approach to this subject. The word “myth” has a very specific meaning when we deal with the ancient Greek tragedies, or when we study the early Greek theogony or cosmogony. By contrast, the fashionable expression today, “political mythology” has a very subjective meaning, often laden with strong value judgments and derisory interpretations. A verbal construct such as the “myth of modernity” may be interpreted by many of us as something legitimate when denouncing the political and historical lies of the System we live in. Yet to a modern self-proclaimed supporter of the System, enamored with system-supporting myths of permanent economic progress and the like, speaking of the “myth of economic progress” or the “myth of democracy” is an egregious political insult. It is viewed as a sign of someone’s undemocratic behavior — a word used by an undemocratic opponent not worthy of residing in the modern democratic system. How does one dare mention such a sacrilegious locution as “the myth of modern democracy,” or “the myth of contemporary historiography,” or the myth of progress” without being punished?! Modern political mythology is usually enforced against free thinkers by means of social ostracism at the best, or penal codes and imprisonment at the worst.

  In hindsight when we study the ancient Greek myths with their surreal settings and hyperreal creatures, few of us will accord them any historical veracity or any empirical or scientific value. However, few of us will reject those ancient European myths as an outright lie. Why is that? In fact, most of us enjoy reading those ancient European myths because most of us are aware not just of their strong symbolic nature, but also of their didactic message. This is the main reason why the ancient myths and sagas are still so popular among White Europeans. Those ancient myths of ours thrive in timelessness; they are meant to go beyond the historical timeframe; they defy any historicity. They are open to anybody’s “historical revisionism” or interpretation. Hence the reason that ancient European myths or sagas can never be dogmatic; they never require the intervention of the thought police or a politically correct enforcer in order to make themselves readable or credible.

  The prose of Homer or Hesiod represents not just a part of our European cultural heritage but is also the prime focus of our subconscious. In fact we could describe our ancient myths as primal allegories where every stone, every creature, every God or demigod, let alone each monster, acted as a role model, or represented a symbol of good or evil. When we were young boys, Hercules, a demigod, was our hero. Whether Hercules historically existed or not, is beside the point. He still lives in our memory. He was the real symbol, the real role model for all of us young White males. Moreover, who among us did not dream about making love to the Goddess Aphrodite? Or at least make some furtive passes at Daphne? Apollo, a God with a sense of moderation and beauty was also our hero as was the pesky Titan Prometheus, always trying to surpass himself with his boundless intellectual curiosity. Prometheus unbound is the prime symbol of the White man’s irresistible drive toward the unknown, toward the truth, irrespective of the name he carries in ancient sagas, modern novels, or political treatises. The English and the German poets of the early nineteenth century, the so-called Romanticists, frequently invok
ed the Greek Gods and especially the Titan Prometheus. I do not think, however, that the expression “Romanticism” is appropriate for that literary time period in Europe because there was nothing romantic about that epoch or for that matter about the prose of authors such as Coleridge or Byron, or Friedrich Schiller, who often referred to the ancient deities:

  WHILST the smiling earth ye governed still,

  And with rapture’s soft and guiding hand

  Led the happy nations at your will,

  Beauteous beings from the fable-land!

  Whilst your blissful worship smiled around,

  Ah! how different was it in that day!

  When the people still thy temples crowned,

  Venus Amathusia!

  Die Götter Griechenlandes (The Gods of Greece), transl. by E. A. BOWRING.

  Most Romanticists were political realists and not daydreamers, as modern schoolbooks try to tell us, and all of them had a fine foreboding of the coming Dark Ages. Most of them can be described as thinkers of the tragic. Many of them ended their lives tragically. Many, who wanted to arrest the merciless flow of time, ended up on drugs. A poetic drug of choice in the early nineteenth-century England was opium and its derivative, the sleeping beauty laudanum.

  Modern Religions and Bewitched Hoaxes

  Myth and religion are not synonymous, although they are often used synonymously, depending again on the mood of the modern storyteller, the interpreter, or the word abuser. There is a difference between religion and myth — a difference, as stated above, depending more on the interpreter and less on the etymological differences between these two words. Some of us will disparagingly argue that the miracles performed by Jesus Christ were a series of Levantine myths, a kind of Oriental hocus pocus designated to fool the rootless, homeless, raceless, Orientalized, multicultural masses in the dying days of Rome. Some among us, who are Christians, will of course reject such statements. If such anti-Christian remarks were uttered loudly today in front of a big church congregation, or in front of devout Christians, it may lead to public rebuke. How dare one say that Christianity is a myth! In this context Christianity must be rather called a religion, with no pun intended.