tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-136075572024-03-07T09:51:24.258+01:00TeKoS-BerichtenConservatief-revolutionaire actualiteit en berichten aangaande de Vzw Delta-StichtingUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger75125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1165266546557535132006-12-04T22:05:00.000+01:002008-01-30T22:53:54.931+01:00Over conservatisme door KC op Nationalisme.info, 4 december 2006.<strong><em>Enkele maanden terug zakten een groot aantal NSV!?ers en sympathisanten naar Brussel af om er een vormingsavond van de plaatselijke NSV!-afdeling bij te wonen. Dit had ongetwijfeld veel te maken met de spreker van die avond. Professor Dr. Mathias Storme onderhield ons in een stemmige zaak op een ongedwongen manier over “het conservatisme”.</em></strong><br /><br /> Niemand die vertrouwd is met de vele invullingen die dit begrip de laatste twee eeuwen kreeg zal beweren dat dit een doorzichtig onderwerp is. Professor Storme verduidelijkte aan het begin van zijn referaat dat hij ons enkel een inleiding tot de thematiek wou geven. Een andere aanpak zou bovendien niet stroken met de houding van de conservatief ten opzichte van zijn ideologie. In tegenstelling tot het wereldbeeld van heel wat vooruitgangsdenkers1, laat de levensinstelling van de conservatief zich niet inkapselen in vastgelegde doctrines. Karakteristiek is net de bijna Cartesiaanse methodologische twijfel.<br /><br /> De conservatief stelt zich sceptisch op tegenover allerlei revolutionaire “waarheden”. Zijn houding is er dan ook één van behoudensgezindheid, om het tautologisch te verklaren. De belangrijkste vraag is dan natuurlijk wat hij wil behouden, en hierin schuilt het onderlinge verschil tussen conservatieve “stromingen”. Professor Storme verwijst naar de basisprincipes waar niemand buiten kan die zichzelf “conservatief” wenst te noemen. Dit zijn principes als generatieverschil en natuurlijke gegevenheid, en die dienen gerespecteerd te worden. Onze spreker gaf te kennen dat hij door Hannah Arendt leerde begrijpen dat dit een houding van “dankbaarheid” impliceert. Die dankbaarheid moeten we dan begrijpen als een fundamenteel respect voor onze identiteit, in zijn ruimste interpretatie. Dit heeft namelijk niet altijd een nationalistische connotatie, want een conservatief hoeft niet noodzakelijk een nationalist te zijn, maar wel één van respect voor oorsprong.<br /><br /> De vooruitgangsdenkers geloven dat het verleden iets is wat gecorrigeerd moet worden door het heden. Het is een verzameling menselijke dwalingen, waar we ons van weg bewegen. De vooruitgang van een generatie kan bepaald worden aan de hand van de graad waarin ze zich afzette tegen de vorige. Hierbij is men blind voor de aard van die zogenaamde vooruitgang. Een technologische innovatie hoeft bijvoorbeeld geen morele innovatie te impliceren. Hier moeten we opmerken dat heel wat evoluties in de wetenschap werkelijk heel wat kwalijke gevolgen hebben gekend. Dit wil echter niet zeggen, zoals de tegenstanders van het conservatisme met hun typische boutade verwoorden, dat de conservatief “terug naar de Middeleeuwen” wil. Hoewel hij niet zonder kritiek alles wat nieuw is als een geschikt alternatief voor het oudere zal nemen, is dit uiteraard pertinent onjuist. Heel wat nieuws kan overgenomen worden zonder dat het de maatschappij vergiftigt.<br /><br /> De conservatief beseft dat hij niet tabula rasa in de wereld komt. Een mens wordt geboren binnen een bepaalde structuur, met een bepaalde natuurlijke gegevenheid. Hij is uiteraard een vrouw of een man en heeft bepaalde sterke punten. Dat zijn de riemen waarmee hij een fortuinlijke of onfortuinelijke toekomst tegemoet moet roeien. Progressievelingen proberen deze natuurlijke, nochtans onontvluchtbare principes uit de weg te gaan. Zo probeerden ze om de verschillen tussen man en vrouw, waarvan ze niet kunnen snappen dat die geen waardeverschil inhouden, compleet weg te cijferen. Eveneens proberen ze op kunstmatige wijze iedereen dezelfde kansen te geven in het leven, wat vaak negatieve gevolgen heeft, omdat niet iedereen tegen elke taak opgewassen is. In tegenstelling tot de conservatief met zijn karakteristieke twijfel zijn ze erop uit om de waarheid aan utopische maatstaven te toetsen, en zo mogelijk de werkelijkheid te vervormen tot ze eraan beantwoordt. Dat dit soms tot rampen leidt heeft de recente Europese geschiedenis maar al te vaak bewezen. De doctrines leiden namelijk snel een eigen leven, en zo wordt de vooruitgangsdenker de grootste dogmaticus van allemaal. De maatschappelijke principes die iedereen zouden moeten bevrijden worden dan gehanteerd om de tegenstanders van het regime vogelvrij te verklaren. De conservatief behoudt zich het recht om een kwaad onbestraft te laten als het bestraffen ervan een groter kwaad inhoudt. De lijn dient per casus apart getrokken te worden, en steeds na een degelijk proces. Iedereen heeft dezelfde rechten, ook al onderschrijft hij “de waarden van het moment” niet.<br /><br /> Professor Storme sloot zijn vertoog af met een zeer geslaagde metafoor. Hij verduidelijkte de conservatieve levenshouding door haar te vergelijken met het schip van Odysseus. Elke keer wanneer het schip op één of andere manier averij opliep, werden bij wonder de beschadigde stukken van het schip vervangen. Toen het vaartuig in de haven aankwam, leek het als nieuw, maar het was nog steeds het oude schip van weleer.<br /><br /><em>KC</em><br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://www.nationalisme.info/2006/12/04/conservatisme-en-moderniteit/">Nationalisme.info vormingscel van Nationalistische Studentenvereniging (NSV)</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-53785300755052994172007-04-17T20:09:00.000+02:002007-04-17T20:12:39.040+02:00Conservatives, Neoconservatives, Paleoconservatives: What Next? door Paul Gottfried op V-Dare, april 2007.<strong><em>Professor Gottfried delivered these remarks at a March 20 conference in honor to mark the publication of </em></strong><a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://shotsfired.us/"><strong><em>Shots Fired</em></strong></a><strong><em>, a collection of the writings of the </em></strong><a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/pb/050216_sf_obituary.htm"><strong><em>late</em></strong></a><strong><em> Sam Francis.</em></strong><br /><br />Reviewing my <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/product.aspx?isbn=1403974322">summary for an advertisement of a book</a> on the conservative movement soon to be published by Palgrave-Macmillan, [VDARE.COM note: You can pre-order it <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FConservatism-America-Making-Sense-American%2Fdp%2F1403974322%2F&tag=vdare&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325">here</a>] I was struck by how contemptuously I had described my subject. My work shows how the conservative movement has descended from any semblance of high moral purpose into a mishmash of <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/roberts/perils.htm">think-tanks</a>, <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript209.html">media outlets</a> and <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/misc/050922_lamb_events.htm">publications</a>, which seem unrelated to anything that is historically recognizable as conservative.<br />This agglomeration of intersecting, heavily-funded operations was the eventual but not necessarily intended creation of a <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.townhall.com/">journalistic clique,</a> one that in the years <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/internment.htm"> following World War Two</a> cobbled together a movement that would be called "<a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/piatak/070208_francis.htm">conservative</a>." This "conservative" creation had then moved leftward; and it made alliances, into which eventually it would be swallowed up, with <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/gottfried/041104_kirk.htm">neoconservative ideologues</a> and <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/gottfried/lowry.htm">Republican operatives.</a><br />My book does make distinctions between the postwar conservative movement, which for several decades marched behind <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-q=%22national+Review%22&sp-a=sp0a298a00&sp-advanced=1&sp-p=all&sp-w-control=1&sp-w=alike&sp-d=custom&sp-date-range=-1&sp-start-month=0&sp-start-day=0&sp-start-year=&sp-end-month=0&sp-end-day=0&sp-end-year=&sp-x=any&sp-c=">National Review</a>, and the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/neovsreal.htm">neoconservative colonization </a> of the same movement, a process that was <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://novaemilitiae.squarespace.com/periodic-musings-blog/2006/7/11/the-traditionalist-conservatives-revolt-against-modernity.html">well underway by the 1980s.</a> On a wide range of issues, the first was clearly more traditionalist than the second.<br />Postwar conservatism at least on occasion adhered to <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp_q=%22William+F.+Buckley%22&sp_a=sp0a298a00&sp_f=iso-8859-1&sp-advanced=1&sp-p=all&sp-w-control=1&sp-w=alike&sp-d=custom&sp-date-range=-1&sp-start-month=0&sp-start-day=0&sp-start-year=&sp-end-month=0&sp-end-day=0&sp-end-y">William F. Buckley</a>’s stated plan for his new fortnightly in 1955 to stand "athwart history, yelling Stop," In addition to their persistent anti-Communism and their calls for <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/roberts/reagan.htm">dealing firmly with the Soviets</a>, post-World War II conservatives took emphatically rightwing positions. They were critical of the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/gottfried/mlk_day.htm">civil rights movement</a> and its <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/050226_king_holiday.htm">leaders</a>, and they did not welcome the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/060905_race.htm">political mobilization of American blacks,</a> which they viewed as a force that would drive the federal and state governments toward the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/history.htm">social Left.</a><br />These self-described conservatives also expressed some of the same skepticism about the welfare state characteristic of the interwar Right. In the 1950s and 1960s, before their publication began its long journey leftward, they attacked the belief in equality as contrary to both human nature and limited government.<br />By contrast, <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp_q=neoconservatism&sp_a=sp0a298a00&sp_f=iso-8859-1&sp-advanced=1&sp-p=all&sp-w-control=1&sp-w=alike&sp-d=custom&sp-date-range=-1&sp-start-month=0&sp-start-day=0&sp-start-year=&sp-end-month=0&sp-end-day=0&sp-end-year=&sp-x">neoconservatives</a> celebrate the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried94.html">democratic welfare state.</a> They believe in democratic equality, what they describe as <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried24.html">"moderate feminism,"</a> and the march of social progress.<br />They also believe that it is the mission of the American people, indeed its <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=13064&R=112A8830F">"national purpose"</a> to bring their liberal, secular, and egalitarian values<a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/feminism.htm"> to other societies.</a> Those who resist this vision are not only mean-spirited but are seen as <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60615FA3E5D0C738DDDAE0894DD494D81&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/E/Engelberg,%20Stephen">"flirting with fascism."</a><br />Since the neocons’ foreign policy focus heavily on the geopolitical interests of the Israeli nationalist Right, those who oppose it, for whatever reason, were lumped together as "anti-Semites." This kind of negative judgment is basic to how neoconservatives view their critics on the Old Right. White Southern traditionalists are dismissed as racists, particularly if they refuse to condemn the Confederacy or fail to appreciate Martin Luther King sufficiently. Up until the mid-eighties when an <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://jewsonfirst.org/howjewsseefp.html">alliance came</a> about with the ultra-<a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/gottfried/zionists.htm">Zionist</a> Religious Right, the leading neoconservative publication Commentary featured <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?article=com.commentarymagazine.content.Article::5575&search=1">articles</a> about how the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/passion.htm">New Testament</a> had contributed to the Holocaust.<br />My book draws an extended comparison between today’s <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/mainstream.htm">"movement conservatives"</a> and those who had once joined the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/coulterkampf.htm">American Communist Party. </a> On the whole, these would-be conservatives seem intellectually and even morally less appetizing than their Communist counterparts.<br />Unlike contemporary movement conservatives, who parrot party lines without giving much indication of cognitive life and who are ready to turn their backs on those who displeased their neoconservative masters, many old Communists had spent years painfully reconsidering their partisan engagement. They had balked at the about-faces in party policies they had seen take place; and the disenchanted had splintered into sects that exemplified their versions of an uncorrupted <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/000101.html">Marxism</a> or of a pristine <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/gottfried/first_universal_goldberg.htm">Marxist-Leninism.</a> They also typically did not earn money by working for Communist <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/roberts/cato.htm">think-tanks</a>; nor would they have been able to appear on Communist news channels, an option that did not exist at that time. Most of these Commies accepted poverty as the price of their commitment; and those who bought Sunday suits looked far more dignified than the overweight popinjays, those whom <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.takistopdrawer.us/2003/march/article_2003-March-29.html">Taki</a> calls chicken-hawks smoking their fathers’ cigars, who continue to <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvNV_IZUDMQ">pop up on TV</a> with disgusting regularity.<br />Even assuming that these former Communists had lunged rightward, it is unlikely that they would have declared <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/050226_king_holiday.htm">Martin Luther King</a> first, to be a womanizing <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/hart/070114_mlk.htm">Communist dupe</a> and then in response to further instruction, have proclaimed him to be the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.nationalreview.com/weekend/holiday/holiday-clegg011902.shtml">quintessential conservative thinker</a> or even a latter-day Thomas Aquinas.<br />People who do this are either abysmally stupid or <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/051002_bennett.htm">egregiously unprincipled,</a> but many American Communists were neither one nor the other. Communists back then also thought that they were rallying to an oppressed working class that was <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/EM735.cfm">destined to triumph.</a> Unlike our postwar conservative movement, they imagined that they spoke for a class that was the instrument of revolutionary change.<br />In contrast, today’s movement conservatives base their claim to lead on being Republican Party shills and on being able to offer constantly updated packages of "values," e.g. democracy for everyone, or some ready-to-wear human rights imperatives.<br />This claim to be for "values," which originated among postwar conservatives, has taken the place of standing for real historical groups, that is, for groups that a genuine Right might be interested in championing. Indeed it was the destiny of <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/onprin/v2n4/rusher.html">postwar conservatism</a> to have supplanted such a Right, which had once prevailed among opponents of the New Deal and Wilsonian internationalism.<br />But the postwar movement had something supposedly better: anti-Communism, which it combined with windy affirmations about being for the "West." The <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_020501.htm">long-term result</a> was a situation in which the "values" that defined the movement moved steadily leftward. And this went on in accordance with, among other things, the building of useful friendships with media potentates and a vigilant eye toward jobs, salaries, and social acceptability.<br />The assertions by <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.nationalreview.com/11oct99/ponnuru101199.html">Ramesh Ponnuru,</a> <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/pb/goldberg.htm">Jonah Goldberg</a> and other Solomonic intelligences, that conservatism is not about one’s "nation" or "tribe" but about human rights, underscores the drifting and shifting of their employer, National Review. What is described as conservatism is precisely its opposite: namely, an unmistakably leftist posture invoking universal equality and <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/comp_conservatism.htm">competing with the political Left</a> for who is further to the left ideologically.<br />The role of this postwar conservative flagship publication as a willing advocate of neoconservative politics speaks volumes about whither the movement has gone.<br />It also tells much, or so I would contend, about the shifting sands on which the movement was founded. It first usurped an older Right, which was built on the loyalties of a mostly small-town, Protestant America, and its choice of New York and later, Washington as the focal points for conservative activities was indicative of the alliances that this movement would build for itself.<br />Postwar conservatives then caved in during the 1980s, before a swaggering neocon occupation force; and this affected the entire movement, save for a principled remnant, part of which is still present in this room. Further, the aforesaid cave-in was truly massive—and, unlike what I suggest in the first edition of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FConservative-Movement-Social-Movements-Present%2Fdp%2F0805738509%2F&tag=vdare&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325">The Conservative Movement</a> it involved a wholesale flight into the neoconservative camp.<br />At the time I could not believe what was taking place. It still staggers the mind that a relatively small sociological group, New York liberal Democrats who had come out of an Eastern European Jewish radical tradition and who carried all kinds of cultural baggage, would walk in and occupy the largely Christian, anti-New Deal Right. They would not only occupy but <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp_q=%22pre-purge+national+review%22&sp_a=sp0a298a00&sp_f=iso-8859-1&sp-advanced=1&sp-p=all&sp-w-control=1&sp-w=alike&sp-d=custom&sp-date-range=-1&sp-start-month=0&sp-start-day=0&sp-start-year=&sp-end-month=0&sp-end-day=0&s">purge</a> and reconstruct it, and the new masters of the house would be able to count on those who were there to do their bidding.<br />Note that the representation of this process, as the building of bridges, entirely belies what transpired. What I witnessed was a cave-in—and not the integration of marginal groups into a rightwing mainstream.<br />While it may be hard in this case to tell the chicken from the egg, the conspicuous ease with which the neocons took over may have enhanced their effectiveness as fundraisers. This seems as plausible as the alternate hypothesis, namely, that everyone and his cousin kissed up to them because they came with deep pockets. Those pockets could have been rendered deeper by the friendly neocon takeover of the conservative movement and its considerable assets, a fiefdom that fell into neoconservative hands or under neoconservative control in only a period of several years.<br />At this point I would note a distinction borrowed from my longtime friend <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/index.htm">Sam Francis</a>, which I have subsequently tried to develop. It is between conservatism, which is an archaic and by now spent force belonging to the nineteenth century, and the Right, which is the home of everyone in this room.<br />Unlike conservatism, the Right is a continuing, creative reaction to the Left, a defiant response from an already weakened Christian bourgeois society that is in the process of being liquidated.<br />Sam was also on to something when he insisted that any attempt to combat the multicultural Left must begin as an explicitly reactionary endeavor. The Right, properly understood, does not seek to be the true interpreters of leftist shibboleths, in the manner of global egalitarians who are quibbling about some aspect of affirmative action or like those who are sympathetic to gay marriage but who want to introduce it slowly. Rightists oppose the Left as the source of social and moral confusion, and they seek to neutralize those political institutions that serve its purposes.<br />In The Conservative Movement, I labeled this tendency “paleoconservatism”. Because opposing the Left is not what the misnamed “conservative movement” has been doing, or what its would-be presidential candidate <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-a=000a298a-sp00000000&sp-q=giuliani&sp-p=all">Rudolph Giuliani</a> would likely do, if the neocons and their hirelings manage to get him elected.<br />One noteworthy reason that the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/zmirak/speech.htm">neoconservatives have ascended to power,</a> a situation that even their incitement of an <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/sailer/061105_iraq.htm">ill-fated foreign war</a> cannot do much to weaken, is their association with the postwar conservative movement. Their success in occupying its heights has provided them with undeniable cachet. They have become the successors to the project which Bill Buckley had launched in the 1950s and had then handed over to his badly-chosen New York friends. Despite their <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/neos.htm">scornful comments</a> about the anti-Semitic, racist rightwing fanatics who had shaped that movement before they came on the scene, once the mass defection occurred, the neocons could point to their succession to conservative leadership.<br />They have prevailed, moreover, with loads of assistance from the liberal establishment. Whenever the neocons go after someone on the right as an "extremist," the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, and other <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/misc/archive00/fair_abraham.htm">likeminded publications</a> jump and fetch. The attack must be true since presumably it came from serious sources on the serious Right. Those who disagree with the neocons from the right, we are urged to believe, are not to be taken seriously, except as cranks whom responsible conservatives <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/gottfried/right_left.htm">have had to marginalize</a>.<br />In 2005, when William Buckley <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/gottfried/061123_buckley.htm">attained his eightieth year</a>, leftist journalists, led by E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post, slobbered all over him for having saved us from the "wing nuts." Dionne confessed to having had a longtime, presumably metaphorical, "illicit love" for Buckley, for having toned down a movement once animated by prejudice. [<a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/10/AR2005101001204.html">Buckley: The Right's Practical Intellectual</a> by E. J. Dionne Jr. Tuesday, October 11, 2005; Page A17]<br />Such an effusion of gratitude goes back at least as far as a column published by Suzanne Garment in October, 1985 in Wall Street Journal, hailing Buckley as a champion against nativism and anti-Semitism. Although "you can still hear an echo of the Right’s more distasteful origins" in the pages of National Review, said Garment, Buckley and his successors had "pried conservatism loose from the fingers of its more demented followers." [There's Nothing Like a Libel Trial For an Education, By Suzanne Garment; The Wall Street Journal; Oct 11, 1985]<br />Please note Ms. Garment’s lingering concern about the rightwing extremism in a magazine that even then was in the hands of neoconservatives and of those who kowtowed to them. I suppose that one can’t be energetic enough about resisting rightwing bigotry.<br />This brings me to the most controversial part of my analysis of the neoconservatives’ empire, the role that the media establishment has played in promoting this expansionary endeavor. It is not by accident that left-of-center national newspapers feature neoconservative columnists or that TV channels present pasty-faced, neocon popinjays as esteemed analysts of current events. It is also far from a random occurrence that neocon TV and neocon publications and institutions readily invite liberals to jabber with them but keep us at a distance.<br />Everyone here might have perceived, just as I have, the refusal of the media Left to reach out to the antiwar Right, despite the fact that the Left claims to be ardently against the invasion of Iraq. One could not have guessed from either the NYT and WP or network TV that a large chunk of the Old Right was opposing the military engagement as vehemently as was the Left. One needed to be truly obtuse to miss this fact, given the ferocious rightist opposition that could be found in widely-visited websites and in widely distributed publications. But this was not the kind of fact that the Left wanted to publicize, not even after NR devoted a cover story to <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/frum.htm">"Unpatriotic Conservatives."</a><br />The point to be made is that the neocons and the liberal establishment both wish to keep our side from entering the political discussion. And until now they have managed this well. The question is whether we can come up with a plan to break the cordon sanitaire; and if we can, what can be done.<br />The first thing to be done is to abandon the silly idea that we have pals on the left, who would embrace our side, if only they knew how we feel. For those who continue to nurture this infantile illusion, let me assure them the Left knows exactly what we’re about and they are delighted to talk to the neocons and to keep us off the radar. The Left can easily come to terms with the neocons on most social issues, as long as the neocons are permitted to push their global democratic mission.<br />In fact the liberals and the Left should adore the neocons if only for how thoroughly they have cannibalized our side. That could not possibly displease our <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2006/10/29/guilt-by-association/">leftist adversaries. </a><br />Why would the NYT’s editorial board feel anger that the neocons prevented old-time Southern states rightist, <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/pb/051113_debate.htm">M.E. Bradford,</a> from <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/bennett.htm">becoming Director of the NEH i</a>n 1981? <br />And why would the Left feel uncomfortable that Commentary rages <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/printArticle.aip?article=com.commentarymagazine.content.Article::10136">against Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran</a> as “anti-Semites”. It engages in <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/12233/edition_id/235/format/html/displaystory.html">exactly the same smears</a> itself.<br />As painful as the idea might seem to some, the left-of-center media community is overjoyed with their talking partners. And they’re not likely to exchange them for us, because of the relatively trivial fact that the neocons have <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/peacenik.htm">pushed W</a> into starting a <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/awall/050223_memo.htm">Near Eastern war.</a><br />Imagine how great our pleasure would be if we were able to select our talking partners on the left! Wouldn’t that be preferable to having to face such opponents as <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/roberts/column101501.htm">raging</a> feminists, <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/sailer/contra_contreras.htm">inflamed advocates for Mexican illegals</a> and <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_121806.htm">hypersensitive gays?</a><br />The second proposal is that we start looking for megabucks and if we find them, we should buy our own newspapers and TV channels. But even if we achieve both goals, we should count on hostile name-calling from the other side. Neocons and liberals would work nonstop to keep us from crashing their party. They would do exactly to us what the conventional leftist and the leftist-by-another name parties have done in <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/fulford/flemings.htm">Belgium</a> and <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/buchanan/070402_eu.htm">France</a> to such rightwing populists as the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://blog.vdare.com/archives/author/kevin-carter/">Vlaams Belang</a> and <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/sutherland/le_pen.htm">Front National</a>. They would scream we are fascists, and they would forbid their multitudinous dependents from associating with us. Nothing would change in this relation, even if we had the means for acquiring and running TV channels and newspapers.<br />Contrary to Irving Kristol’s empty boast in <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/000tzmlw.asp">The Neoconservative Persuasion,</a> Europe does not lack this “new kind of conservative politics”, which it would do well to adopt. Rather we and the Europeans have taken over the same faux conservatism, whose objective function is to make sure that a real Right never gets to challenge the current PC hegemony.<br />Our neoconservatives and Republicans at home, and the leftward-moving center-right in Western Europe, perform this critical role by waging mortal combat against our side and by embracing the Left’s social positions while pretending to have to yield to the inevitable on social and immigration questions.<br />Actually it is not the Europeans but we who must learn from our transatlantic counterparts. Rather than trying to connect to movements which treat us as non-persons, we must strive to mobilize our own structures and resources. This meeting today may be seen in the context of this renewal but obviously a lot more must be done to give us a chance to break through the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/taylor/050913_crime.htm">wall of silence</a> and the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/mcconnell/firing.htm">social ostracism</a> that the two intertwined Lefts have used against us.<br />Like European rightwing populist movements, we must present ourselves not as the other conservatism but as the only residual opposition to the Left.<br />Note that the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/french_election.htm">Front National</a> and <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/misc/belien_050120_bush.htm">Vlaams Belang</a> do not pretend to be part of the system that their adamant opposition has forged. They continue to insist that they stand outside of the "bande des partis" the "party gang" that has corrupted their country or region by encouraging multicultural invasions and radical cultural reconstruction.<br />This is the adversarial position that we too must take in our war against the combined forces of the Left. It naturally goes without saying that absent the necessary resources for crashing the political discussion, we shall not be able to succeed.<br />But not being captive to despair, I believe that in a country with the wealth of our own, it is still possible to open this desperately-needed front. And it is still possible to draw political personalities, who lean in our direction, into alliances. Such personalities can act as spoilers, particularly in the Republican Party, by making sure that candidates who take neoconservative phrases too seriously lose elections.<br />If we alone cannot build a party organization that will be in a position to win electoral races, particularly in view of accelerating, politically-abetted Third World immigration, we might still work to retard the further march of the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/republican_self_destruction.htm">Stupid Party</a> leftward.<br />Even better, we might contribute to planting the seeds that could eventually lead to a party of the Right. Although unlike the Europeans, we cannot <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/misc/osullivan/august_17,_2000.htm">take advantage of a pluralistic system</a>, in which an <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/sailer/pim_fortuyn.htm">unmistakably rightist party</a> can find parliamentary representation, we can still aim at putting pressure on the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/pb/contra_costa_times_article.htm">national parties.</a><br />For those who call for the decentralization of power, <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/francis/witch_hunters.htm">national borders</a> that have ceased to be porous, and a true counterforce to the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_040207.htm">multicultural Left</a>, their course of action must be directed toward the future. And this means an avoidance of the impulse to look back at now broken friendships.<br /><a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.bartleby.com/68/71/4371.html">Pace</a> my delusional acquaintances, the <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/roberts/brownshirting.htm">Heritage Foundation</a> and <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/misc/070321_cleburne.htm">National Review</a> are not panting to have us back. It is undignified as well as futile to nurse the hope that we can patch up our dispute, perhaps if we hire a conflict-resolution expert.<br />We must erect our own opposition, and this daunting task will have to be approached from outside of a <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/gottfried/goldbergism.htm">closed establishment.</a><br />And as a very first step, we would do well to discard encumbering allegiances to a movement in which some of you grew up, but one that deserves to be consigned to the dustbin.<br />Its rushing into the arms of bizarre leftist invaders suggests its deplorably weak convictions. <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/epstein/070402_summit.htm">Its recent examples</a> of timidity, venality, and the abandonment of <a style="COLOR: blue; TEXT-DECORATION: underline" href="http://www.vdare.com/carter/060907_race.htm">traditionalist principle</a> stand before us as something we should never in any circumstances allow ourselves to follow.<br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://www.vdare.com/gottfried/070412_next.htm">V-Dare</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com81tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-40267612963897661002007-04-17T19:26:00.000+02:002007-04-17T19:31:32.173+02:00France: Nationalists Have Won the Battle of Ideas door Michael O’Meara op Vanguard News Network, 17 april 2007.<div align="justify"><em><strong>After years of economic stagnation, labor unrest, and<br />increased international marginalization, French elites<br />had hoped the presidential campaign of 2007 would help<br />re-educate and thus help prepare the French for the<br />economic reforms needed to complete their country’s<br />transition to globalization. Instead, the campaign<br />has turned into a red, white, and blue debate on<br />national identity. All the leading candidates are<br />presenting themselves as critics of the established<br />System, highlighting their commitment to the national<br />heritage and their opposition to globalism’s<br />ultra-liberal assault on national institutions. As<br />one nationalist puts it: “Our ideas are everywhere.<br />Every candidate criticizes Europe, every candidate<br />talks about immigration and law and order, every<br />candidate suddenly sings ‘La Marseillaise’.” Jean<br />Marie le Pen claims that “all the candidates are<br />running after me.”</strong></em><br /><br />1. The “Lepénisation” of the Presidential Campaign<br />Though Nicolas Sarkozy of the “Cohnservative” UMP,<br />Ségolène Royal of the socialist PS, and François<br />Bayrou of the centrist UDF have taken up themes<br />borrowed from Le Pen’s National Front and now pay<br />lip-service to nationalism’s anti-globalist agenda,<br />they remain creatures of Parisian financial-media<br />interests, having spent their entire lives serving the<br />Judeo-liberal System that seeks the nation’s<br />destruction. That they have re-packaged themselves as<br />outsiders solicitous of native French concern and done<br />so in Le Pen’s populist anti-System rhetoric — what<br />the mainstream media (MSM) refers to as the<br />“lepénisation des esprits” — says, of course, less<br />about their conversion to the nationalist cause than<br />it does about the current malaise and what it takes in<br />this period to win the electorate.<br /><br />Thus it is that Royal, who began the campaign as a<br />Blair-style modernizer, has recently taken to wrapping<br />herself in the tricolor, offering a more palpable<br />version of Sarkozy’s neocon nationalism, with its<br />counterfeit recuperation of Le Pen’s ideas, while<br />Bayrou talks of rejecting the “party pigsty” of<br />right-left divisions for the sake of national unity.<br />Issues relating to patriotism, national identity,<br />sovereignty, and other themes which globalists and<br />Eurocrats not so long ago relegated to the garbage<br />heap of history have also become major speaking points<br />in their campaigns. More shamelessly, each candidate,<br />after having prominently supported the EU Constitution<br />which went down to a stunning defeat in the referendum<br />of 2005 now pays homage to the “no” vote, promising<br />(with crossed fingers) to uphold it against German<br />efforts to surreptitiously impose it.<br /><br />The campaign’s nationalist turn not only bucks current<br />European and North American trends, it reverses<br />decades of established politicking. Since the<br />National Front’s founding in 1972, Le Pen has been the<br />“Bête Immonde,” the filthy beast, of the political<br />class that has spawned Sarkozy, Royal, and Bayrou.<br />That this class’s unscrupulous representatives –<br />after ruining and plundering the French — now<br />addresses nationalist issues associated with the<br />National Front and opportunistically renounces much of<br />what they previously stood for, twisting and turning<br />their convictions for the sake of electoral advantage,<br />testifies to the fact that Le Pen’s nationalist ideas<br />speak, as no others do, to the burning questions of<br />the age, having been borne out by the course of<br />events.<br /><br />If polls are any guide, two-thirds of all Frenchmen<br />identify globalization with outsourcing and job loss<br />– and thus with economic decline and popular misery.<br />With the acceleration of Europeanization, following<br />the signing of several treaties that augmented the<br />EU’s powers in the period immediately following the<br />Cold War’s end, France began restructuring her<br />economy. For the majority of the white population,<br />this has meant escalating unemployment rates,<br />pervasive job insecurity, a lowering of living<br />standards, and a feeling that it has been abandoned by<br />its elites. Whole sectors of the economy have, in<br />fact, been dismantled or abandoned. Unemployment is<br />officially at 10 percent (though actually higher) and<br />14 million workers are classified as impoverished,<br />while more than a million of the country’s recent<br />university graduates have emigrated to Britain,<br />Ireland, and Germany. At the same time, the state has<br />buried itself under a 2.5 trillion euro debt<br />(proportionally equivalent to the astronomical debt<br />accumulated by the Likudists in the White House) and<br />done nothing to extricate itself from its failed<br />policies. The social-economic devastation this has<br />wrought, combined with corruption and scandal at the<br />highest reaches of the state, has set off a general<br />anti-System revulsion in broad layers of the<br />population.<br /><br />This revulsion comes, though, not just in reaction to<br />the System’s depressing social-economic effects, but<br />even more from the rising tide of color that is<br />sweeping through the European heartland. In a country<br />which criminalizes such thought, the degree of this<br />revulsion is reflected in the fact that a majority of<br />the population now views immigration as an unmitigated<br />disaster, a third openly labels itself “racist,” and<br />an equal number no longer sees the National Front as a<br />party of “extremists.” Le Pen argues that the<br />System’s loss of legitimacy is such that it has<br />shifted all responsibility to the EU — for the EU can<br />do whatever it wants without electoral consultation.<br /><br />In promoting the mass population transfers of the last<br />thirty-five years, the System’s “ideology of<br />consummate meaningless” (that is, its Judeo-liberal<br />dismissal of the meaning inherent in Europe’s<br />genetic-spiritual heritage) has waged an unrelenting<br />war on the national aspect of the nation-state it<br />governs. In this spirit, the economic, media, and<br />bureaucratic elites the System serves (and are served<br />by) endeavor to demote everything native to the French<br />people, repress all perceived expressions of racism<br />(unless it’s anti-white racism), criminalize deviant<br />thought, encourage the emasculating forces of feminism<br />and homosexuality, establish preferences for<br />non-natives, leave the nation’s borders undefended,<br />and refuse to tame the violent, crime-ridden<br />communities of non-whites squatting outside France’s<br />ancient cities.<br /><br />The consequence of all this is intruding more and more<br />into popular life, helping reshape political<br />sensibilities. The authorities have accordingly been<br />especially anxious to keep the lid on ethnic violence<br />(Le Figaro, 3-23), which is the nationalists’ greatest<br />recruiter. But the collective thuggery of France’s<br />Negro-Arab population refuses to subside. The recent<br />race riot at the Gare du Nord on March 27 — a riot in<br />which a black-brown horde rampaged through a key<br />transportation hub because one of its own was<br />apprehended for not paying his fare — again reminded<br />French France of the darkness into which it is<br />descending.<br /><br />In itself there was nothing unusual about this latest<br />riot, except that it happened in the center of Paris,<br />was caught on camera, and broadcast on TV. In the<br />immigrant suburbs of metropolitan France, the<br />conquered territories, where the “Albanians” of<br />France’s Kosovo have settled, such violence is endemic<br />– though police and state officials there rarely<br />apply the same standard the native French are obliged<br />to uphold.<br /><br />The petits blancs caught up in the nihilistic rampage<br />at the Gare du Nord, and those who later saw it on TV,<br />witnessed something they would probably have preferred<br />to not to have seen — something suggesting that they<br />were not only loosing their country (which, after all,<br />is an abstraction of sorts), but loosing the prospect<br />of living out their lives in the safe, trusting<br />environment native to peoples of European descent.<br /><br />This riot, though, did more than revive the themes of<br />insecurity and immigration which Le Pen has worked for<br />decades, it intensified the resentment that comes with<br />the increasingly irrefutable recognition that the<br />newcomers have not just invaded their public spaces<br />and made them unsafe and inhospitable — but that they<br />are now openly asserting their domination over the<br />petits blancs powerless to resist them.<br /><br />This has long been the case in the conquered<br />territories, where a simple identity check or a<br />transportation control has the potential to set off<br />violent clashes. The colored hordes of the great<br />housing estates, the “cités,” have, in fact, made it<br />virtually impossible for the state to apply its law in<br />them. Since January 2007 there have been at least<br />1,400 organized attacks on the police by the ethnic<br />gangs controlling the cités. One police union likens<br />the situation to the West Bank Intifada and has<br />requested armored cars to patrol the estates. The<br />rate of these attacks continues to increase in<br />frequency and in violence, often taking the form of<br />armed ambushes on police or emergency workers entering<br />the cités. Such incidents, in another sign of the<br />times, are generally treated as un-newsworthy, given<br />the MSM’s unwillingness to bring grist to the<br />nationalists’ mill.<br /><br />The petits blancs — white workers, small shopkeepers,<br />retirees — who are on the frontlines of multicultural<br />France are consequently becoming more and more<br />alienated from the reigning powers. And this<br />alienation threatens to take political form. Even the<br />mainstream media grudgingly acknowledges its depth.<br />A recent story in Le Monde (4-4), for example, reports<br />that the white inhabitants of Creil, a small town 30<br />miles north of Paris, now live as if they are under<br />constant siege by the Maghrebians and Sub-Saharan<br />Africans housed in the nearby cités. Many complain<br />that they can’t even take public transport without<br />fear of being assaulted. Every public experience thus<br />poses a threat to their safety. Relatedly, few of<br />these petits blancs have any respect for the leading<br />presidential candidates, realizing as they do that the<br />System these candidates represent has reduced the<br />native French to pariahs in their own land. But in<br />addition to the pervasive threat of violence, the<br />petits blancs are daily humiliated, forced to bow<br />their heads and change their behavior at the approach<br />of the black-brown gangs in baggy pants and hooded<br />sweatshirts, who swagger down French streets as if<br />they own them. The System in their view indulges the<br />“poor immigrant,” utterly indifferent to their own<br />plight. Le Pen, Le Monde alarmingly notes, is the<br />receptacle of their resentment.<br /><br />The electoral weight of white alienation has yet to be<br />measured at the polls, but it’s already making itself<br />felt in the nationalist ideas dominating the<br />presidential campaign. The System is obviously<br />worried. For as Marine Le Pen says, “The ideological<br />victory always precedes the political victory.”<br /><br />2. The Lepénisation of the Nationalist Movement<br />The prominent nationalist Bruno Mégret argues that<br />three conditions are necessary for a political<br />upheaval favorable to the nationalist cause: 1) the<br />general situation in the country has to be critical,<br />2) the political class has to be impotent,<br />incompetent, and divided, and 3) nationalist ideas<br />have to achieve currency in response to the crisis.<br /><br />To one degree or another, all three conditions now<br />exist in France.<br /><br />Le Pen’s growing support in the polls, especially in<br />the popular milieu, has to be seen, though, from two<br />perspectives. At the mass level of the electorate,<br />where image prevails, voters are attracted to the<br />National Front as an anti-System party that resists<br />invaders. However, at the militant level, where<br />program, action, and analysis count, there is in<br />nationalist ranks a spreading discontent with Le Pen.<br /><br />Le Pen, in other words, is gaining at the mass level,<br />but retreating on the second. Indeed, the political<br />propitiousness of the current situation comes at a<br />very unpropitious time in the history of the National<br />Front. For nationalists may have won the battle of<br />ideas, but they now risk losing their movement.<br /><br />On numerous occasions (at this site and elsewhere), I<br />have emphasized not only what is remarkable about the<br />National Front, but what’s unacceptable from a<br />(racial) nationalist perspective. Given that<br />practical politics follows a logic different than that<br />of political theory, my tendency has been to emphasize<br />the positive — except in cases when the negative<br />betrays the movement’s core principles. The National<br />Front, I believe, is rapidly approaching this<br />unacceptable point.<br /><br />Unlike the largely computer-generated “movement” in<br />the United States, France’s nationalist movement has a<br />long history, with several tens of thousands of<br />militants, fifteen distinct political parties, and<br />hundreds of associations and networks. Indeed, the<br />very diversity of the movement poses many of its most<br />intractable problems. This is especially problematic<br />given that the French are a highly individualistic<br />people (Spengler uses the term “anarchistic”)<br />resistant to collective organization.<br /><br />Historically, one of the National Front’s most<br />remarkable achievements was its earlier success in<br />keeping revolutionary nationalists, Catholic<br />traditionalists, racial identitarians, national<br />libertarians, regionalists, neo-fascists, and others<br />within a single political formation. Combined with Le<br />Pen’s charisma and the successful social-populist<br />strategy of the party’s greatest organizer,<br />Jean-Pierre Stirbois, this broad front of diverse<br />nationalist tendencies imbued the party with an<br />exceptional reach. It also imbued it with a<br />propensity for scission.<br /><br />The worse of these occurred in 1998 (a decade after<br />Stirbois’ mysterious death), when a large part of the<br />party, discontent with Le Pen’s autocratic management<br />style and his strategic failings, split to form the<br />Mouvement National Républicain of Bruno Mégret. In<br />many respects the NF has never recovered from this<br />split, which saw the loss of 60 percent of its<br />membership, 70 percent of its cadre, 60 percent of its<br />elected officials, and two of its four municipalities.<br />As a result, it is no longer a mass organization of<br />militants.<br /><br />Marine Le Pen has since entered the story. Le Pen’s<br />youngest daughter was trained as a lawyer, but for<br />most of her twenties (she’s now 39) she was less known<br />for her contributions to the nationalist cause than<br />for her night clubbing and her defense of illegal<br />immigrants. Then, in late 2003, in a blatant act of<br />nepotism, Le Pen appointed her to several prominent<br />party positions. She has subsequently become a NF<br />member of the European Parliament, a party<br />vice-president, personal adviser to her father, and<br />his campaign director — with all the amenities,<br />perks, and power that comes with such positions. In<br />effect, she’s being groomed to succeed her father.<br /><br />Given that the children of great men rarely inherit<br />their father’s genius, Marine’s performance in her<br />entrusted roles has been something of a<br />disappointment, even though the old man, the “Menhir”<br />as he is called, continues to promote her as his<br />successor. Worse, Marine views the National Front in<br />ways that are not only unlike that of the movement’s<br />old guard, but unlike that of her father.<br /><br />Le Pen is essentially an old-fashioned nationalist,<br />whose 19th-century references are remote to those of<br />racial nationalists. Historic nationalism and white<br />nationalism are nevertheless kindred movements,<br />sharing many of the same concerns. His career as the<br />foremost champion of the nationalist cause in postwar<br />Europe has thus been one that has attracted much<br />sympathy from white nationalist ranks — in France and<br />worldwide.<br /><br />Le Pen, moreover, is a remarkable individual. He rose<br />from humble beginnings to become a larger than life<br />public figure. He possesses great physical and moral<br />courage in a world alien to these ancient Aryan<br />traits. He’s a charismatic personality, the greatest<br />French orator since Degrelle, and arguably the<br />greatest European nationalist of the last half<br />century.<br /><br />Whatever his political failings, it’s impossible not<br />to admire this man who has repeatedly and publicly<br />belittled the mightiest of the System’s scoundrels;<br />who has described the alleged “gas chambers” as “a<br />detail in the history of the Second World War” and the<br />German occupation of Vichy France as “relatively<br />benign;” who alone among European politicians opposed<br />both the First and Second American Wars on Iraq; who<br />once advocated quarantining HIV carriers; who called<br />Jacques Chirac, the president, a hireling of the Jews;<br />who leans toward Russia, favoring a “Europe of<br />nations” stretching from Brest to Vladivostok; who<br />resists the one-worldism of American elites and the<br />Atlantism of the European ruling class; and who has no<br />hesitation pointing out that Sarkozy, the son of a<br />French Jewess and a Hungarian father, is not really<br />French.<br /><br />By contrast, Marine Le Pen did not grow up in a poor<br />Breton fishing village, where house floors were made<br />of dirt and there was no indoor plumbing or<br />electricity. She is the daughter of a famous public<br />figure bequeathed a fortune. As a consequence, her<br />social references are more those of High Society than<br />of the pre-Semitized people who were her father’s role<br />models. She may therefore share many of her father’s<br />criticisms of the System, but to her it’s still not<br />the alien imposition that Le Pen instinctively feels<br />it to be.<br /><br />Like Nick Griffin of the British National Party and<br />Gianfranco Fini of the Alleanza Nazionale, Marine also<br />realizes that the established parties have so<br />discredited themselves that a “modernized” National<br />Front — minus its “racist, xenophobic, and<br />anti-Semitic” trappings and minus its ideological<br />debts to the revolutionary nationalism of the interwar<br />years — has a real possibility of becoming a<br />governing party (nevermind that these trappings are a<br />large part of what has made the NF a nationalist<br />party). In this spirit, she’s shown a greater<br />interest in achieving power within the System than of<br />destroying it.<br /><br />Under her direction, the National Front has gotten a<br />major face-lift, which, admittedly, has not been<br />entirely negative. For instance, she’s done a good<br />deal to transform the NF’s image from that of a mere<br />protest party into that of a governing party. In this<br />spirit, early in the campaign, she had her father<br />deliver a comprehensive series of policy talks that<br />outlined the party’s position on the various issue<br />likely to face a prospective Le Pen government,<br />thereby enhancing the party’s standing as a viable<br />alternative to the established parties. She also<br />altered the Menhir’s style, curbing his propensity for<br />improvised street-fighting rhetoric and substituting<br />the measured prose of the prepared public statement.<br /><br />As a consequence of her various softening activities,<br />Le Pen has gained unprecedented access to TV and the<br />print media — and thus to the electorate. Although<br />now 78, with his powers beginning to fail, his<br />grandfatherly appearance on the electronic jew has had<br />a reassuring effect on voters, just as his obvious<br />superiority (in intellect, language, and character)<br />over all the other candidates has mollified the sting<br />of his numerous detractors. All this has made it<br />increasingly difficult for the System to marginalize<br />his candidacy.<br /><br />Marine’s innovations, however, have come at the cost<br />of diminishing (perhaps abandoning) the NF’s<br />nationalism. Let me mention just two of the most<br />important areas of changes. The first relates to the<br />burning question of our age: Race. For the left, Le<br />Pen is “le vieux facho.” Its mantra is: “‘N’ as in<br />‘Nazi’, ‘F’ as in ‘Fascist’.” In the MSM’s less<br />politicized discourse, he’s a “racist, a xenophobe,<br />and an anti-Semite.” In actuality, though, he’s<br />neither a fascist, a racist, a xenophobe, nor an<br />anti-Semite — but simply, as said above, an<br />old-fashion nationalist. A major part of Marine’s<br />effort to modernize the party has thus aimed at<br />dissociating it from its image as an explicitly<br />racial-national formation, putting greater emphasis on<br />the social-economic implications of its anti-globalist<br />critique and less on its core national values.<br /><br />This effort got underway last September at Valmy, when<br />Le Pen formally announced his candidacy. A<br />much-discussed section of his Valmy discourse focused<br />on “French people of foreign origin” — i.e., on<br />non-whites. True to the spirit of Marine’s<br />modernization, the Valmy discourse proposed a creedal<br />notion of the nation in which colored immigrants<br />willing to learn French and adopt French ways (that<br />is, willing to assimilate) would be considered<br />“French.”<br /><br />Though the NF has always been reluctant to define the<br />nation in specifically racial terms, the party’s<br />thirty-five year opposition to Third World immigration<br />and its insistence on “national preference” (whereby<br />native French are given priority in employment,<br />housing, and social services) usually implied an<br />ethnic-racial definition. But now, in step with his<br />daughter’s modernization, Le Pen (who was once fined<br />10,000 francs for acknowledging “the inequality of<br />human races”) leans backward to prove that he’s not a<br />racist and that his vision of the nation welcomes the<br />black-brown hordes legally residing in the European<br />heartland.<br /><br />Just last week Le Pen made an unannounced visit to the<br />Paris banlieue — the “abandoned territories” — where<br />the racial skirmishes of November 2005 originated. In<br />an obvious appeal to the immigrant vote and in direct<br />opposition to everything the NF historically<br />represented, he characterized the black and beur<br />(Arab) youth of the cités (who white nationalists, if<br />ever they were to achieve power, would immediately<br />ship back to their godforsaken homelands) as “part of<br />the nation” — a part which a NF government would help<br />assimilate — making no mention of the destructive<br />impact they have had on French life or the fact that<br />they are responsible for making the banlieues the<br />dangerous, wretched places they’ve become. He also<br />had not a word to say about the banlieue’s<br />Islamization, which is making large parts of France<br />more like the Middle East than Europe.<br /><br />Though Le Pen continues to criticize the System’s<br />failings and its criminal immigration policies, the<br />assimilationist, anti-racist principles of Marine’s<br />modernization have had the cumulative effect of<br />repudiating the ethno-racial concept of the nation,<br />redefining it in terms compatible with the creedal<br />conception of liberals, Jews, and other race-mixers.<br />In this spirit, Le Pen joins our enemies in denouncing<br />identitarians as “racist extremist;” he’s taken to<br />cavorting with black and beur celebrities willing to<br />indulge his Jacobin fantasies; he talks of zero<br />immigration but neglects all mention of repatriation;<br />he concentrates his attacks on the System’s social and<br />economic failings, while ignoring Islam and the<br />civilizational clash presently dividing French<br />society; finally he’s refused to rally what Saint-Loup<br />called “le patrie charnelle” — the nation that lives<br />in the blood and breathe of its people and is the<br />heart of every true nationalism.<br /><br />But there’s another, equally disputable aspect to<br />Marine’s modernization. Prior to the devastating<br />split of 1998, the National Front was still largely a<br />party of militants — not simply an electoral<br />connivance. Under Marine this too is changing.<br />Instead of using the presidential campaign to rebuild<br />the party she’s opted for a strategy centered almost<br />exclusively on the System’s media. This, of course,<br />has given Le Pen greater access, but at the cost of<br />suffocating the life of the nationalist movement. At<br />the same, the party’s veteran leaders have been<br />marginalized, as Marine and her creatures monopolize<br />almost all the party’s public functions, hoping thus<br />to ensure her succession to the party’s presidency<br />after the election. There have also been no mass<br />demonstrations, no street mobilizations, and no effort<br />to circumvent the System’s established media. Most<br />grievous of all, Marine and her modernizers have<br />refused to form a united front with other nationalists<br />and thus to use the campaign to rally them in a<br />movement that will survive the election. In fact,<br />she’s done a great deal to scatter and disperse the<br />nationalist movement.<br /><br />3. The Movement Is Everything<br />The polls presently put Le Pen fourth in the campaign,<br />anywhere from 4 to 14 percentage points behind the<br />leading candidates. But the polls (whose veracity is<br />widely disputed) are almost certainly wrong — as they<br />have been in pass campaigns. Moreover, a large part<br />of the electorate, more than 40 percent, is still<br />undecided. The French remain highly skeptical about<br />almost all the candidates, though the election is<br />being closing followed, political programming has<br />drawn record TV audiences, and voter registration is<br />up 50 percent over 2002. Anything is possible on<br />April 22.<br /><br />Yet even if the impossible should occur and the NF<br />wins, it’s doubtful if it would be allowed to take<br />power — for the postwar System has no intention of<br />re-enacting Weimar’s fate.<br /><br />That said: The presidential election is still<br />important as a national forum to define and articulate<br />who we are and why it is important to defend our<br />unique genetic-spiritual heritage.<br /><br />Elections, in other words, may be charades, but<br />they’re also ideal organizing opportunities –<br />opportunities which make it possible to awaken in a<br />people the political or ideological consciousness of<br />what it means to be a nation.<br /><br />The overriding imperative for white survival in this<br />highly politicized and volatile period is thus to<br />prepare the nationalist movement to become a<br />counter-hegemony, in the Gramscian sense — to become<br />that conscious agent ready to rise from the ashes of<br />the present System, once the convergence of its<br />cascading catastrophes comes to a point and it<br />collapses of its own internal failings.<br /><br />It is in not meeting the great rendezvous that the<br />presidential election was to be that the Le Pen<br />campaign has most failed us. For at a time when<br />nationalist ideas dominate the political debate and<br />increased numbers of Frenchmen are uncertain of what<br />lies ahead and are looking for leaders, it has<br />neglected the nationalist opposition, failing to<br />consolidate and energize it as a movement.<br /><br />The big question now is not about who will win the<br />election: Le Pen might possibly come in first on the<br />first round of the balloting (no one can predict at<br />this point), but he hasn’t a prayer on the decisive<br />second round (where he’ll have to garner 50+ percent<br />of the vote). The big question for all who struggle<br />in defense of the white race is thus not the question<br />of who will win the presidency, but of who will win<br />the movement — for it alone can lead us to power. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-58128405685842561902007-04-06T18:41:00.000+02:002007-04-06T19:03:18.227+02:00Guillaume Faye Speaks in Moscow, The Civic Platform.com<em><strong>Translator’s note: The following talk was given in Moscow on May 17, 2005 and recently posted, in French, on the Russian site Athenaeum.</strong></em><br /><br />For at least three reasons, I think it deserves the widest possible<br />circulation in White Nationalist circles. The first is one which<br />more and more English speaking nationalists are beginning to<br />realize: Guillaume Faye is today the most interesting, if not<br />pertinent spokesman for the genetic-cultural heritage associated<br />with the White Resistance. All that he says or writes on the subject<br />of who we are, what we are fighting for, and where the main battle<br />fronts will lie are worth thinking about. In France, Belgium, the<br />Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and now Russia, his ideas have<br />touched the leading debates (even, in some cases, descending to ad<br />hominem issues, which seem the least important of our concerns). <br /><br />The second reason this article deserves attention is metapolitical.<br />Faye is a veteran of the first major effort to practice a “Gramscian<br />of the Right” — that is, to wage a cultural war against the<br />ethnocidal principles of the dominant liberal culture. Not<br />unrelatedly, he stands out among anti-liberal nationalists, creative<br />force that he is, in having developed a language and a discourse<br />that reaches beyond the narrow confines of our movement, yet at the<br />same time serves as a radical alternative to the anti-White language<br />and discourse of the existing System. <br /><br />The third reason is that this talk is a succinct and eloquent<br />synthesis of the ideas — the vision — Faye has developed in the<br />seven books (and countless articles) he’s produced in the eight<br />years since the appearance of his path breaking “L’Archéofuturisme”<br />(1998). However provisionally sketched, these ideas aim at helping<br />us through what promises to be the worst storm of our collective<br />existence. At the same time, these ideas speak to something more<br />primordial. As an earlier student of our historical destiny<br />writes: “All that is great stands in the storm” (Plato). What is<br />coming will undoubtedly determine if we have any greatness left in<br />us. The Whitemen of the West, the men of the Evening Lands<br />(Abandländer) , having gone under before, have, though, a long<br />history of recognizing that it is only in resolutely opening<br />themselves to the dangers bearing down on them that they stand a<br />chance of weathering them and, in doing so, of rediscovering what is<br />still great within themselves. Faye, I believe, is one of the seers<br />calling us to return to ourselves and to the greatness inherent in<br />who we are. — Michael O’Meara<br /><br /><strong>************ ********* ********* ********* ********* *****</strong><br /><br />Not since the fall of the Roman Empire has Europe experienced such a<br />dramatic situation. It faces a danger unparalleled in its history<br />and doesn’t even know it — or rather refuses to see it. <br /><br />It’s been invaded, occupied, and colonized by peoples from the South<br />and by Islam. It’s dominated by the United States, which wages a<br />merciless economic war on it. It’s collapsing demographically, as<br />its population ages and it ceases to reproduce itself. It’s been<br />emasculated by decadent, nihilist ideologies cloaked in a facile<br />optimism, and it’s been subjected to an unprecedented regression of<br />culture and education, to primitivism and materialism. Europe is the<br />sick man of the world. And its political classes, along with its<br />intellectual elites, are actively collaborating in this race<br />suicide. <br /><br />The argument I’m making is not, though, just about immigration, but<br />also about a colonization and an invasion that is transforming<br />Europe’s biological and ethno-cultural stock; it’s about not giving<br />way to despair; about seeing that the struggle is only just<br />beginning; and knowing that the closely related peoples of Europe<br />have no alternative but to unite in their common defense. <br /><br /><strong>THE DESTRUCTION OF EUROPE’S ETHNO-BIOLOGICAL STOCK</strong> <br /><br />The demographics of the non-White invasion of France and Europe is<br />terrifying. In a recent work, “France africaine” (African France), a<br />well known demographer predicts that if present trends continue,<br />more than 40 percent of the French population will be Black or Arab<br />by 2040. Twenty-five percent of school children in France and<br />Belgium today and more than 30 percent of infants are already of non-<br />European origin. Of France’s present population of 61 million, more<br />than 10 million are non-European and have a far higher birth rate<br />than Whites. Every year 100,000 non-Europeans are naturalized as<br />French citizens and another 300,000, most illegal, cross our<br />undefended borders. The situation is not much different in the rest<br />of Europe and signals the virtual end of our civilization, though<br />the political classes have apparently yet to notice it. <br /><br />Worldwide, including the United States, the White race is in steep<br />numerical decline. It’s often said that our technological<br />superiority will compensate for this disparity, but I don’t think<br />so: The only meaningful forms of wealth and power are in human<br />beings. For a civilization is based primarily on what the Romans<br />called “germen,” that is, on the ethno-biological stock, the roots,<br />that nourish a civilization and culture. <br /><br />The non-European invasion of Europe that began in the 1960s was<br />largely self-engendered, provoked: By left and right-wing<br />politicians contaminated with Marxist and Trotskyist ideas; by an<br />employer class greedy for cheap labor; by Jewish intellectuals<br />demanding a multiracial society; by the ideology of human rights<br />that had sprung from the secularization of certain Christian<br />principles. <br /><br />In France and in Europe, the collaborators abetting the invasion<br />have established a system of preferences for the invaders that<br />native Whites are obliged to pay for. Illegal immigrants are thus<br />not only rarely repatriated when caught, they continue to receive<br />the lavish social welfare benefits handed out to them by the anti-<br />White forces in control of the state. At the same time, “anti-<br />racists” have introduced a host of discriminatory laws that protect<br />immigrants from normal social restraints, even though they are<br />largely responsible for the on-going explosion of criminality (more<br />than a thousand percent in the last 50 years). <br /><br />The invasion is taking place as much in the maternity wards as it is<br />along our porous borders. Combined with the demographic decline of<br />the White population, immigration has become an economic disaster<br />for Western Europe. It’s estimated to cost $180 billion per year (if<br />the growing insecurity, as well as the innumerable forms of social<br />assistance benefiting immigrants, including illegals, is figured<br />in). This, in turn, creates new lures for the invaders: It is simply<br />far more interesting to be unemployed in Europe than to work in the<br />Third World. While the educated and creative segments of our<br />population are beginning to flee, mainly to the United States, they<br />are being replaced by Africa’s refuse, which has to be fed and<br />supported by us and hasn’t anything in the way of skills or<br />intelligence to offer. <br /><br />All these facts suggest that the 21st-century European economy will<br />be a depressed, Third-World one. <br /><br /><strong>ISLAM’S THIRD MAJOR OFFENSIVE </strong><br /><br />In addition to this mass, non-White invasion, Islam is again on the<br />offensive. With single-minded persistence, its totalitarian and<br />aggressive religion/ideology seeks the conquest of Europe. We’ve<br />already suffered three great assaults by Islam, which today<br />stretches from Gibraltar to Indonesia. The first of these offensives<br />was halted at Portiers in 732 by Charles Martel; the second in 1683,<br />during the Ottoman siege of Vienna; the third [in the form of the<br />present invasion and colonization] is now underway [and virtually<br />unopposed]. Islam has a long memory and its objective is to<br />establish on our continent what [the leader of Iran’s Islamic<br />Revolution, the ayattolla] Khomeiny called the “universal<br />Caliphate.” <br /><br />The invasion of Europe has begun and the figures [testifying to its<br />extent] are alarming. The continent, including Russia, is now<br />occupied by 55 million Muslims, a number that increases at a 6<br />percent annual rate. In France, there are at least 6 million. Like<br />those in Belgium and Britain, these French Muslims are starting to<br />demand a share of political power. The government, for its part,<br />simply refuses to take seriously their objective of transforming<br />France into an Islamic Republic by the year 2020, when the<br />demographic weight of the Arab/Muslim population will have become<br />determinant. Meanwhile, it is financing the construction of Mosques<br />throughout the country in the hope of buying social peace; there are<br />already more than 2,000 in France, nearly double the number in<br />Morocco. Islam is at present the second largest religion in France,<br />behind Catholicism, but the largest in the numbers of practitioners.<br />[The republic’s president] Jacques Chirac has even declared<br />that “France is now an Islamic power.” Everywhere in the West there<br />prevails the unfounded belief that there’s a difference between<br />Islam and “Islamism,” and that a Western, secularized, that is,<br />moderate, Islam is possible. There’s no such thing. Every Muslim is<br />potentially a jihadist. For Islam is a theocracy that confuses the<br />spiritual with the temporal, faith with law, and seeks to impose its<br />Shari’a [Islamic law] on a Europe whose civilizational precepts are<br />absolutely incompatible with it. <br /><br /><strong>THE ADVENT OF RACE WAR </strong><br /><br />The criminality and delinquency in Western Europe caused by mass<br />immigration and the collapse of civic values have reached<br />insupportable levels. In France in 2004, more than a 100,00 cars<br />were torched and 80 policemen killed. Every week race riots erupt in<br />the banlieues [the “suburbs” housing the immigrants masses]. In the<br />public schools, violence is endemic and educational levels have<br />almost collapsed. Among youth under 20, nearly 20 percent are<br />illiterate. While racist assaults on Whites are steadily rising,<br />they are routinely ignored in the name of the anti-racist vulgate,<br />which holds that only Whites can be racists. At the same time, an<br />arsenal of repressive legislation, worthy of Soviet communism, has<br />imposed “laws” whose purely ideological and subjective intent make<br />no pretence to fairness, let alone objectivity. All criticism of<br />immigration or Islam is prohibited. I myself have been tried several<br />times and levied with an enormous fine for having written “La<br />colonisation de l’Europe” [The Colonization of Europe]. <br /><br />A race war is foreseeable now in several European countries, a<br />subterranean war that will be far more destructive than “terrorism.”<br />The White population is being displaced, a sort of genocide is being<br />carried out against it with the complicity or the abstention of the<br />ruling class, the media, and the politicians, for the ideology these<br />collaborating elites uphold is infused with a pathological hatred of<br />their own people and a morbid passion for miscegenation. <br /><br />The state’s utopian plan for “republican integration” has<br />nevertheless failed because it assumed peaceful coexistence between<br />foreigners and natives, non-Whites and Whites, was possible in a<br />single territory. Our rulers haven’t read Aristotle, who taught that<br />no city can possibly be democratic and orderly if it isn’t<br />ethnically homogenous.. . European societies today are devolving into<br />an unmanageable ethnic chaos. <br /><br />I’m a native of Southwest France, of the area along the Atlantic<br />coast [a Gascon?], and speak not a word of Russian, but I feel<br />infinitely closer to a Russian than to a French-speaking Arab or<br />African, even if they happen to be “French” citizens. <br /><br /><strong>THE MORAL CRISIS AND ARCHEOFUTURISM </strong><br /><br />The present situation can be explained, almost clinically, as a sort<br />of “mental AIDS.” Our present afflictions come from the virus of<br />nihilism, which Nietzsche foresaw, and which has weakened all our<br />natural defenses. Thus infected, Europeans have succumbed to a<br />feverish self-extinction. They have voluntarily opened the city<br />gates. <br /><br />The primary symptom of this disease is “xenophilia: ” a systematic<br />preference for the Other rather than for the Same. A second symptom<br />is “ethnomasochism, ” a hatred of one’s own civilization and origins.<br />A third is emasculation [dévirilisation] , or what might be called<br />the cult of weakness and a preference for male homosexuality.<br />Historically proven values associated with the use of force and a<br />people’s survival — values associated with honor, loyalty, family,<br />fertility, patriotism, the will to survive, etc. — are treated<br />today as ridiculous shortcomings. This sort of decadence owes a good<br />deal to the secularization of Christian charity and its egalitarian<br />offshoot, human rights. <br /><br />Europeans may take inspiration from certain values still upheld in<br />Russia: For example, the consciousness of belonging to a superior<br />civilization and of maintaining a “right to distance” from other<br />peoples. We need to break with all forms of “ethnopluralism, ” which<br />is simply another kind of egalitarianism, and reclaim the right<br />to “ethnocentrism, ” the right to live in our own lands without the<br />Other. We also have to reclaim the principle: “To each his own.”<br />Besides, only Westerners believe race-mixing is a virtue or envisage<br />the future as a melting pot. They alone believe in cosmopolitanism. <br /><br />But the 21st century will be dominated by a resurgence of ethno-<br />religious blocs, especially in the South and the East. Francis<br />Fukuyama’s “end of history” will never happen. Instead, we’re going<br />to experience an acceleration of history with the “clash of<br />civilizations. ” Europeans also need to break with the “presentism”<br />in which they are sunk and learn to see themselves again (as do<br />Muslims, Chinese, and Indians) as a “long-living people,” bearers of<br />a future. The mental revolution needed to bring about this change in<br />European attitudes is, though, only possible through a gigantic<br />crisis, a violent shock, which is already on its way and which I<br />will say a few words about below. <br /><br /><strong>THE NEW AMERICAN IMPERIALISM </strong><br /><br />Europeans also have to come to terms with what I called in my last<br />book “the new American imperialism, ” an imperialism more heavy-<br />handed than that of the Cold War era, but one that is also more<br />blundering. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, American<br />administrations seem to have lost all sense of measure, becoming<br />even more hubristic, as they embark on a fantastic quest for world<br />domination, dressed up in the simulacre of a new Roman empire. Much<br />of this, of course, is explainable in terms of neoconservative<br />ideology, linked with Zionism, but it’s also driven by a messianic,<br />almost pathological, sense of having a “divine mission.” <br /><br />What are the goals of this new American imperialism? To encircle and<br />neutralize Russia, preventing any meaningful alliance between her<br />and Europe (the Pentagon’s worse nightmare); to deflect Europe’s<br />challenge to its hegemony by making Islam and Muslim Turkey a part<br />of it; to subjugate the Eastern and Central European parts of the<br />former Soviet empire; to wage a relentless economic war on the<br />European Union and do so in such a way that the latter doesn’t dream<br />of resisting. Everywhere, the crusading spirit of this new American<br />imperialism endeavors to impose “democracy”, especially on Russia’s<br />periphery. “Democracy” has come to mean “pro-American regime.” <br /><br />But we shouldn’t complain of these American ambitions, which accord<br />with the country’s geopolitical and thalassocratic desire for<br />domination. In history, everyone is responsible only for oneself. <br /><br />That’s why I oppose the “obsessional and hysterical anti-<br />Americanism” so prevalent in France, for it is counter-productive,<br />self-victimizing, and irresponsible. <br /><br />A people or nation must learn to distinguish between its “principal<br />adversary” and its “principal enemy.” The first tries to dominate<br />and undermine, the second to kill. We shouldn’t forget Carl<br />Schmitt’s formula: “It’s not only you who chooses your enemy, it’s<br />more often your enemy who chooses you.” America, specifically its<br />ruling class, is Europe’s and Russia’s “principal adversary” at the<br />level of geopolitics, economics, and culture. <br /><br />Europe’s “principal enemy” is the peoples of the South, increasingly<br />assembled under the banner of Islam, whose invasion of the continent<br />is already well underway, facilitated by a political class and an<br />intelligentsia who have opened the gates (to Washington’s delight)<br />and who seek a miscegenated, non-European Europe. <br /><br />Like Atlanticists, the hysterical anti-Americans overestimate the<br />United States, without understanding that it is only as strong as we<br />are weak. The Americans’ catastrophic and counter-productive<br />occupation of little Iraq, to which they have brought nothing but<br />chaos, makes this all indisputably evident. In the 21st century, the<br />U.S. will cease to be the premier world power. That will be China —<br />or, if we have the will, what I call “Euro-Siberia” — a federated<br />alliance between the peoples of the European peninsular and Russia. <br /><br /><strong>THE CONVERGENCE OF CATASTROPHES</strong> <br /><br />I’ve postulated the hypothesis that the present global system,<br />founded on a belief in miracles, a belief in the myth of indefinite<br />progress, is on the verge of collapse. For the first time in<br />history, humanity as a whole is threatened by a cataclysmic crisis<br />that is likely to occur sometime between 2010 and 2020 — a crisis<br />provoked by the on-going degradation of the ecosystem and climatic<br />disruptions, by the exhaustion of fossil fuel sources and food<br />producing capacity, by the increased fragility of an international<br />economic order based on speculation and massive indebtedness, by the<br />return of epidemics, by the rise of nationalism, terrorism, and<br />nuclear proliferation, by the growing aggressiveness of Islam’s<br />world offense, and by the dramatic aging of the West’s population. <br /><br />We need to prepare for these converging catastrophes, which will<br />mark the transition from one era to another, as their cataclysmic<br />effects sweep away liberal modernity and bring about a New Middle<br />Age. With such a convergence, there will also come an opportunity<br />for rebirth, for every major historical regeneration emerges from<br />chaos. This is especially the case with a civilization like our own,<br />whose very nature is “metamorphic. ” <br /><br /><strong>EUROSIBERIA</strong> <br /><br />The Europe of the future must no longer be envisaged in the mushy,<br />ungovernable forms of the present European Union, which is a<br />powerless Medusa, unable to control its borders, dominated by the<br />mania of free-trade, and subject to American domination. We need to<br />imagine a federal, imperial Grande Europe, ethnically homogenous<br />(that is, European), based on a single autonomous area, and<br />inseparably linked to Russia. I call this enormous continental<br />bloc “Euro-Siberia. ” Having no need to be aggressive toward its<br />neighbors because it would be inattackable, such a bloc would become<br />the premier world power (in a world partitioned into large blocs),<br />self-centered, and opposed to all the dangerous dogmas now<br />associated with globalism. It would have the capacity to practice<br />the “autarky of great spaces,” whose principles have already been<br />worked out by the Noble Prize winning economist, Maurice Allais. The<br />destiny of the European peninsular cannot be separated from<br />continental Russia, for both ethno-cultural and geopolitical<br />reasons. It’s absolutely imperative for America’s mercantile<br />thalassocracy to prevent the birth of a Euro-Siberian federation. <br /><br />This is not the place to speak of the Israeli state. Only a word:<br />For essentially demographic reasons, I believe the Zionist utopia<br />conceived by Hertzl and Buber and realized since 1948 will not<br />survive any longer than Soviet communism did; indeed, its end is<br />already in sight. I’m presently writing a book on “The New Jewish<br />Question,” which I hope will be translated into Russian. <br /><br /><strong>CONCLUSION </strong><br /><br />Fatalism is never appropriate. History is always open-ended and<br />presents innumerable unexpected caprices and turns. Let’s not forget<br />the formula of William of Orange: “Where there’s a will, there’s a<br />way.” The period we are presently living through is a one of<br />resistance and of preparation for the even more threatening events<br />to come, such as might follow the juncture of a race war and a<br />massive economic downturn. We need to start thinking in post-chaos<br />terms and organize accordingly. In closing, let me leave you with a<br />favorite watchword of mine: “From Resistance to Reconquest, From<br />Reconquest to Renaissance. ” <br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://www.thecivicplatform.com/2007/04/05/guillaume-faye-speaks-in-moscow/">The Civic Platform</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1169411773609296592007-01-21T21:31:00.000+01:002007-01-21T21:36:13.923+01:00Verlichting: redding of ondergang in Opinio, nr. 1, 20 januari 2007.<strong>ANDREAS KINNEGING</strong>: De gedachte dat onze beschaving op de Verlichting is gebaseerd, is een gotspe. Met de Verlichting begint juist de óndergang van de westerse beschaving, een proces waar wij midden in staan. De Verlichting verwerpt namelijk de klassieke gedachte dat er universele en eeuwige maatstaven van goed en kwaad<br />bestaan en is daarmee het geboorteuur van het relativisme – de gedachte dat ‘goed’ niets anders betekent dan ’goed voor mij’ of ‘goed voor ons’. We kunnen met andere woorden het meest banale leven leiden, maar niemand kan ons voorhouden dat dit niet goed zou zijn. We kunnen de meest verschrikkelijke misdaden begaan, maar niemand kan zeggen dat datgene dat wij willen, slecht is. Met de verrotte erfenis van dit denken zitten we nog steeds.<br /><br /><strong>PAUL CLITEUR</strong>: Maar van één notie van de Verlichting verwacht ik veel, zo niet alles, voor de toekomst: morele autonomie. Onze samenleving heeft dringend behoefte aan een universele morele taal. Universeel, dat wil zeggen: moraal losgekoppeld van de godsdiensten die het morele discours versplinteren. Alleen wanneer het ons in Europa gaat lukken moraal los te koppelen van godsdienst, zal de Europese cultuur kunnen overleven.<br /><br />Morele autonomie betekent dat moraal niet gerechtvaardigd kan worden door te verwijzen naar een religieuze positie. In die zin begint met de Verlichting ook een regeneratie van de Europese cultuur.<br />Kinneging: De gedachte dat het goede niet afhankelijk is van Gods wil, stamt niet uit de Verlichting, maar uit de klassieke oudheid. Je kunt je dus beter op Plato beroepen dan op de Verlichting.<br /><br /><strong>Cliteur</strong>: Zeker, de gedachte van morele autonomie is te vinden in Plato’s Euthy-phro, waarin Socrates de vraag stelt of iets goed is omdat de goden het willen, of dat de goden iets willen omdat het goed is. Volgens Socrates is het laatste het geval. Socrates koppelt de moraal zo los van de goddelijke wil. Daarom noemt de classicus J. V. Luce het Athene van de vijfde eeuw v. Chr. de periode van de ’Griekse Verlichting’. De verlichters van de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw hebben deze traditie hersteld en tegenover de godsdienstig gefundeerde moraal verdedigd.<br />Voor de toekomst van Europa is het van groot belang dat we die autonomie van de moraal kunnen revitaliseren, want Europa zal in de toekomst multicultureel en multireligieus zijn. Als religie dan nog steeds de basis van de moraal is, zullen we geen gedeelde moraal meer hebben. De autonomie van de moraal is ook de enige manier om het relativisme van de religieuze moralen te boven te komen. Een almachtige God schrijft ons via religiestichters en profeten de goddelijke wet voor. Wij mensen hebben slechts te gehoorzamen. Een autonome ethiek is uiteindelijk niet te verzoenen met een ethiek als deze, die het goede definieert als de wil van God. Daarom hebben grote denkers als Spinoza, Nicolai Hartmann en Sartre scherp aangegeven dat een (mono)theïstische ethiek onverenigbaar is met autonome moraal.<br /><br /><strong>Kinneging</strong>: Volgens jou is de kloof tussen Athene en Jeruzalem, tussen rede en religie, onoverbrugbaar – waarbij je gemakshalve alle religies over één kam scheert. Volgens mij is dat niet juist. Augustinus en Thomas van Aquino wisten de christelijke godsdienst en de Griekse filosofie te combineren. Zij stelden dat het goede dat God wil, hetzelfde is als het universele en eeuwige goede waarover Plato en de andere Griekse filosofen het hadden. Maar hoe je hier ook over denkt, het verschil tussen de Grieks-Romeinse en de joods-christelijke traditie valt hoe dan ook in het niet bij het verschil tussen het denken vóór en het denken ná de Verlichting.<br />De Verlichting veroorzaakte een radicale breuk in ons denken over goed en kwaad. De Grieks-Romeinse filosofie en de joods-christelijke traditie hebben namelijk iets heel belangrijks gemeen: beide gaan er van uit dat er zoiets als objectieve maatstaven voor goed en kwaad bestaan. Maar volgens verlichtingsdenkers als Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume en Bentham bestaan deze maatstaven niet. De mens noemt volgens deze denkers simpelweg datgene ‘goed’ waarnaar zijn begeerte uitgaat. Datgene dat hij vreest, noemt de mens volgens de verlichtingsdenkers ‘slecht’. Dat is het begin van het relativisme waar we nu zo’n last van hebben.<br /><br /><strong>Cliteur</strong>: Jodendom, christendom en islam hebben gemeen dat zij krachtens hun uitgangspunt moeilijk verenigbaar zijn met autonome moraal. Binnen een dergelijk denkkader heb je ook geen verweer tegen de religieuze terrorist die met een beroep op Gods wil geweld gaat plegen. Men ziet bijvoorbeeld het doden van ongelovigen (of andersgelovigen) als een religieuze plicht. Men doodt een abortusarts omdat men denkt dat de Bijbel dat voorschrijft. Men begint een oorlog omdat men op religieuze gronden een stuk land claimt.<br />Gelukkig heeft het overgrote deel van de gelovigen geen enkele affiniteit met religieus terrorisme. En gelukkig roepen heilige geschriften niet alleen op tot geweld, maar ook tot naastenliefde. Maar het probleem vormt die kleine minderheid van teksten die radicaal kan worden uitgelegd door een kleine minderheid van extremisten. ‘Terrorism requires only a few,’ zegt de arabist Bernard Lewis fijntjes. Het beste antwoord op dat probleem is naar mijn idee de erkenning dat moraal niet met een beroep op religie gerechtvaardigd kan worden.<br /><br /><strong>Kinneging</strong>: Het opvallende is dat de afgelopen eeuw niet alleen de eeuw van het meeste ongeloof is geweest, maar ook van alle eeuwen de meest moorddadige. Dit komt juist door het wegvallen van het oude geloof in een transcendente God. Dit geloof legde de menselijke heersers aan banden. Als God bestaat, staat er immers altijd nog iemand boven de heerser. De wet van God staat boven de wet van de mens. De Verlichting heeft het geloof in een transcendente God vernietigd. Niet langer staat de wet van God boven de wet van de mens. In de totalitaire, moordzuchtige regimes die uit de Verlichting zijn voortgekomen, valt God samen met de wereldlijke heerser.<br /><br /><strong>Cliteur</strong>: In de jaren dertig van de twintigste eeuw vormden seculiere ideologieën een groot gevaar, maar die situatie is drastisch veranderd. We hebben niet meer te maken met communisme, nationaal-socialisme en fascisme, maar met religieuze ideologieën. Het gevaar gaat ook niet zozeer uit van heersers van staten (zelfs niet van dictatoriale staten) die geen God meer boven zich weten, maar van religieus bevlogen groepen en individuen, zoals duidelijk is gebleken uit de aanslagen in New York en in Londen, en uit de moord op Theo van Gogh. De transcendente God houdt het geweld niet meer binnen de perken, zoals Voltaire dacht, en op grond waarvan hij God wilde ‘uitvinden’, maar hij verleent een bovennatuurlijke sanctionering aan de apocalyptische fantasieën van een Ahmadinejad of van informele terroristische netwerken.<br /><br /><strong>Kinneging</strong>: Nazisme, fascisme, communisme en islamisme verschillen niet zo sterk van elkaar. Het zijn politieke religies die zich ten doel stellen om de hemel op aarde te realiseren, en dat is iets wat voortvloeit uit de Verlichting. Nadat de Verlichting de transcendente God om zeep had geholpen, kwam de Romantiek namelijk de hemel op aarde beloven. Om de hemel op aarde te realiseren, zijn alle middelen toegestaan. Maar het werkelijke probleem is niet dat er mensen zijn die dergelijke moorddadige ideologieën aanhangen. Het grote probleem is onze reactie hierop. Omdat we dankzij de Verlichting nergens meer in geloven, behalve in ons eigen kleine leventje, zijn we niet meer bereid om ergens voor te vechten, laat staan te sterven. Het relativisme dat de Verlichting heeft voortgebracht, maakt onze verdediging onmogelijk. Want als we niet kunnen bepalen wat goed is, dan is er niets waardevols om voor te strijden.<br /><br /><strong>Cliteur</strong>: Over één ding zijn we het eens: dat het relativisme een groot probleem is in onze tijd. Het multiculturalisme komt eruit voort: de gedachte dat alle culturen evenveel waard zijn. Die gedachte verwerp ik, net als jij trouwens. Maar de enige manier om dat relativisme te boven te komen, is autonomie van de moraal en moreel universalisme. De religieuze moralen kunnen die functie eenvoudigweg niet meer vervullen.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.opinio.nu">Opinio</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com66tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1165867348833863032006-12-11T21:02:00.000+01:002006-12-11T21:02:29.110+01:00Europese rijksgedachte door Robert STEUCKERS in Synergon, december 2006.<strong>Inleiding</strong><br /> <br />Geopolitiek is een studie van geschiedenis en aardrijkskunde en dus van ruimte en tijd. Geopolitiek is een verzameling disciplines (niet één discipline) die een goed beheer van ruimte en tijd beoogt. Geen macht kan immers overleven zonder de noodzakelijke continuïteit van tijd en ruimte. Vanuit een niet-lineaire (cyclische of sferische) tijdsopvatting is het verleden nooit een afgesloten hoofdstuk. Zo is de rijksgedachte nog springlevend voor Hongaren en Serviërs. In de geopolitieke geschriften van de heer Steuckers speelt de Balkan bijgevolg een zeer belangrijke rol en zo ook in deze lezing. Als men spreekt over spirituele decadentie, dan betekent dat volgens hem evenzeer dat men zijn eigen aardrijkskundige milieu niet meer correct begrijpt. Julius Evola spreekt immers in Révolte contre le monde moderne van de numena[1], de krachten uit de natuur of uit de fysische gegevens, die de spirituele mens niet kan loochenen. Tot slot: een onontbeerlijk hulpmiddel in de geopolitiek van de rijksgedachte zijn historische atlassen, zoals die van Colin McEvedy. Zij behandelen de menselijke geschiedenis immers vanuit culturen en beschavingen, volkeren en rassen. Kortom, vanuit een organische zienswijze.<br /> <br /><strong>1. De oudste bronnen</strong><br /> <br />Elke rijksgedachte heeft drie dimensies: een symbolische, een geografische en een praktische. Het gaat dan respectievelijk om een spirituele bron, een politieke ruimte en een communicatiemiddel. In de 19de eeuw hadden vooral Groot-Brittannië en Duitsland een belangrijke filologische traditie. Niettemin was het Frankrijk dat met betrekking tot het onderwerp van deze lezing een belangrijke filoloog voortbracht: Arthur de Gobineau. Filologen zochten de bronnen van de Indo-Europese beschaving in de vergelijkende taalwetenschap, meer bepaald die van het Grieks, het Latijn en het Sanskriet. Het was gemeengoed onder de humanisten van die tijd om de wortels van de Europese Beschaving in het Oude Griekenland te zoeken. Maar welk Griekenland? Ons moderne beeld van het Oude Griekenland is immers herleid tot iets intellectualistisch en sofistisch. De grote verdienste van Gobineau, oud-ambassadeur te Teheran, is dat hij als eerste Europeaan erop gewezen heeft dat de oudste bronnen van de Indo-Europese beschaving Iraans (Arisch) waren en niet Grieks. Zijn werk zou later een grote invloed hebben op dat van Léopold Sédar Senghor en Henri Corbin.<br /> <br /><strong>1.1 De Iraanse</strong><br /> <br />De oorsprong van de rijksgedachte leidt ons naar de protohistorie. Er is in dezen geen strikt onderscheid tussen prehistorische, historische en metahistorische feiten. Elk rijk heeft vooreerst een stichter. In de Indo-Europese traditie (Indo-Iraanse) traditie is dat de mythische figuur van de zegevierende koning-held Rama (ook Yama of Yima genoemd). Hij moest in een ver verleden zijn noordse oerheimat verlaten na de komst van een “eeuwige winter” en zijn volk zuidwaarts leidden naar de Kaukasus, de Oeral en de Hindoekoesj. Met andere woorden: van Rusland naar Afghanistan, Europa, Iran en India[2]. Volgens Colin McEvedy mag de Indo-Europese bakermat niet worden herleid tot een klein gebied. Hetzelfde geldt eveneens voor de Afro-Aziatische en de Elamitisch-Dravidische bakermat. Er wordt te weinig rekening gehouden met de grote beweeglijkheid van die volkeren. De oerheimat van de Indo-Europeanen bestreek volgens McEvedy het hele gebied van de Noordzee tot de Kaspische Zee. Hij treedt aldus de Duitse archeoloog Lothar Kilian bij.<br /> <br />De Indo-Europeanen verwierven in het Midden Oosten naam en faam als ruitervolk. Zij leenden zelfs ruiters aan Semitische en Elamitisch-Dravidische volkeren. Omstreeks 1800 v. Chr. veroverden de ruitervolkeren de Elamitisch-Dravidische beschaving in Iran. Ze vormden er een ruiteraristocratie bij Dravidische volkeren (bijv. Kassieten) of bij Kaukasische (bijv. Hoerrieten). Die laatste werden militair georganiseerd door de Indo-Europese Mitanni. Tussen 1600-1400 v. Chr. vielen de Indo-Europese Tocharen China binnen en legden er de grondslagen voor de latere Chinese rijken. Omstreeks 1275 v. Chr. bezetten drie verschillende Indo-Europese (Indo-Iraanse) takken in het Midden Oosten[3]: de Cimmeriërs-Scythen, de Iraniërs en de Indiërs. <br /> <br />In 714 v. Chr. wierpen Cimmerische en Scythische legers het Hoerritische koninkrijk Oerartoe omver en ze vestigden zich in Anatolië. In 705 v. Chr. versloegen zij de Assyriërs. Tot de komst van de islam zouden er geen Semitische rijken meer in het Midden Oosten zijn, maar wel Scythische, Cimmerische, Medische, Perzische, Griekse, Macedonische, Parthische of Romeinse. De Perzen, een kleine stam uit Zuid-Iran, namen in 539 v. Chr. de leiding van het geheel over van de Meden. De leer van de religieuze hervormer Zoroaster of Zarathoestra kon zich aldus over het hele Midden Oosten verspreiden en een belangrijke Indo-Europese stempel drukken op de wereldgeschiedenis en de wereldgodsdiensten. Cyrus de Grote stond ook na de verovering van Babylon en Mesopotamië bekend als een edelmoedige veroveraar. De Romeinse keizers Trajanus en Julianus zagen het belang in van de Perzische Golf als een venster op de Indische Oceaan. Mesopotamië zou later nog dikwijls het strijdtoneel worden van Oost en West… <br /> <br /><strong>1.2 De Romeinse</strong><br /> <br />Het einde van de Derde Punische Oorlog in 146 v. Chr. luidde het einde in van de Romeinse Republiek, zoals zij tot dan toe had bestaan. Het leger werd voortaan het instrument van een rijk dat het Iberische schiereiland, Noord-Afrika en Turkije omvatte. Die expansie vereiste een sterkere militaire organisatie van de onbestuurbaar geworden Republiek. Er brak een burgeroorlog uit tussen optimates[4] van de “conservatieve” Sulla en de populares[5] van de “progressieve” Marius. Marius voerde verschillende belangrijke hervormingen door. Zo werd het huurlingenleger bestaande uit boeren vervangen door een beroepsleger bestaande uit legionairs. Marius versloeg in 102 v. Chr. de Teutonen bij Aquae Sextiae (Aix-en-Provence) en in 101 v. Chr. de Kimbren bij Vercellae (Vercelli), nadat geen van de vorige consuls erin geslaagd was de Germaanse opmars naar Rome af te slaan. Marius werd zelfs beschouwd als “derde stichter van Rome” (Plutarchus) en zou uiteindelijk zeven keer consul worden. De figuur van de zegevierende generaal herinnerde onder anderen aan Rama, maar dat zou later evenzeer gelden voor Julius Caesar en Otto de Grote. <br /> <br />Consul Gaius Julius Caesar – nog geen caesar of keizer – trad later met zijn veldtocht door Gallië in de voetsporen van Marius. Nu volgt de geopolitieke dimensie: Marius besefte dat het Italische schiereiland bij de Rhône moest worden verdedigd. Caesar ging nog verder en besefte dat de Rhône, de Sâone en de Doubs één geheel vormden met de Rijn. Het was die laatste die door de Sequanen te hulp werd geroepen tegen Germaanse invallers (Sueven of Zwaben). Caesar werd na zijn Gallische veldtocht “dictator voor het leven”. Hij werd door zijn tijdgenoten niet alleen gezien als een zegevierende generaal, maar eveneens als een heerser over de rivierbekkens. Rivierbekkens bepaalden de territoriale organisatie van het Romeinse Rijk, niet volk of taal. De latere keizers moesten door de verdere uitbreiding van het Rijk bovendien niet alleen de bekkens van de Rhône en de Rijn, maar ook die van de Donau beheersen. De beheersing van het Donau was niet alleen toen van groot strategisch belang voor Europa, maar is het nu nog steeds. De beheersing van de Donau is hét doel van de NAVO in de Balkan (cf. Edward Luttwak, Zbigniew Brzezinski). <br /> <br />In 105 n. Chr. voltooide keizer Trajanus Caesars geopolitieke strategie door Dacië – de enige Romeinse provincie ten noorden van de Donau – te veroveren. De controle over de Balkan verleende hem toegang tot de Zwarte Zee en zelfs Anatolië, Armenië en Mesopotamië (113-117 n. Chr.). Hij was de eerste Europese keizer die de Perzische Golf bereikt had. Zijn opvolger keizer Hadrianus achtte het wijselijk om zich strategisch terugtrekken achter de Eufraat (uit Assyrië en Mesopotamië). De frontlinie tegen de Parthen was immers te lang geworden. De duurzame vrede in het Romeinse Rijk die daarvan het gevolg was, liet een culturele en economische bloei toe.<br /> <br />De Ottomanen konden Mesopotamië slechts veroveren in de 16de eeuw, nadat ze eerst de controle over de Balkan hadden verworven. Zo was de Slag op het Merelveld of Kosovo Polje (1389) al het voorspel van de Val van Constantinopel (1453). Moskou zou na Constantinopel het Derde Rome worden. Wat ooit voor de Ottomanen gold, geldt nog steeds voor de Amerikanen. Zij brachten vanaf 1999 stelselmatig hun Brzezinski-strategie in de praktijk. Een eerste stap in die strategie was de inplanting van grote militaire bases in de Balkan, waarin ze pas echt geslaagd zijn na de bombardementen op Servië. Een tweede stap waren Afghanistan en Oezbekistan. Een derde stap was uiteindelijk Mesopotamië (Irak). De Amerikanen werpen zich ten aanzien van Europa (Rusland incluis) op als de verdediger van de Ottomaanse erfenis. De strategie van de Britse en later de Amerikaanse zeemachten is al oud en houdt onder andere in dat geen enkele Europese landmacht controle over de Perzische Golf – het venster op de Indische Oceaan – mag hebben. De organisatie van de economie of de infrastructuur in het Midden Oosten door Europeanen of allianties van Europeanen willen ze te allen prijze verhinderen.<br /> <br /><strong>Geopolitiek = Hydropolitiek</strong><br /> <br />Het Romeinse Rijk had het Middellandse-Zeegebied als kerngebied, maar het Heilige Roomse Rijk der Duitse Natie kon nooit een gelijkaardig kerngebied vinden. De waterwegen van Midden Europa leiden naar de Noordzee, de Baltische Zee of de Zwarte Zee, maar zonder een onderlinge verbinding. Van de rivierbekkens van Frankrijk en Rusland gaat een middelpuntzoekende kracht uit: vanuit respectievelijk Parijs of Moskou kan men het hele land beheersen. Van de rivierbekkens in Duitsland gaat echter een middelpuntvliedende kracht uit: de rivieren lopen immers veelal evenwijdig met elkaar. De Karolingers dachten net zoals de Romeinen in hydropolitieke termen. Ze zagen al de noodzaak in om het vrije verkeer op de Donau te herstellen en om een continentale rivierverbinding te graven tussen Rijn en Donau (Fossa Carolina). De opdeling van het Frankische Rijk met het Verdrag van Verdun (843) gebeurde eveneens volgens de rivierbekkens. <br /> <br />De as Boedapest-Wenen-Belgrado was steeds de achilleshiel van de Romeinse verdediging. Er waren tien legioenen gestationeerd, omdat de Pannonische/Hongaarse vlakte (Poesta) een bres vormde in een natuurlijke bergachtige verdedigingslinie. De ruiterij bestond vooral uit huurlingen[6]. Na de inval van de Aziatische Hunnen verwierven die laatste de controle over het centrale Donau-bekken. De Hunnen konden echter niet ingeschakeld worden als ruiterij. Er ontstond aldus een machtsvacuüm voor een tijdsspanne van ongeveer 500 jaar. In Europa bestond ook vóór 814 (de dood van Karel de Grote) steeds een zeker heimwee naar het Romeinse Rijk. Niettemin moet het beleid van Karel de Grote als een geopolitieke mislukking worden beschouwd. Hij slaagde er immers niet in de controle over het Donau-bekken te heroveren. De Donau was en is van cruciaal en vitaal belang voor Europa’s eenheid (vrede, orde, bloei). <br /> <br />De NAVO-strategieën – zoals geformuleerd door onder anderen Brzezinski en Luttwak – beogen Europa’s opdeling tussen Old Europe en New Europe, respectievelijk moeilijke en gemakkelijke VS-vazallen. De strategen van het Pentagon beseffen beter het belang van de Balkan en de Donau dan hun Europese collega’s. Een anti-imperialistisch regime zoals het Servische van Milosevic paste dan ook niet in hun strategie. Wie echter zegt dat de Europeanen kort van geheugen zijn, dat de rijksgedachte dood is, vergeet de duizenden Serviërs die zich in 1999 op en rond de bruggen van Belgrado en Novi Sad verzamelden om een levend schild te vormen tegen de misdadige NAVO-bombardementen. Onder NAVO-vlag hebben Europeanen toen Europeanen gebombardeerd! Het maffieuze UCK kreeg zowel de steun van de NAVO als van Al Qaeda. De bombardementen op de bruggen over de Donau hadden – evenmin toevallig – economische gevolgen tot in Oostenrijk. <br /> <br /><strong>De Karolingers</strong><br /> <br />In 800 herstelde Karel de Grote, koning der Franken en Longobarden, de orde in Rome, zodat de weggejaagde paus Leo III kon terugkeren. De paus verleende hem daarvoor de keizertitel. Noch Karel de Grote noch de Frankische adel namen echter die titel ernstig. (Hij wou liever zichzelf kronen.) Karel de Grote zag immers zichzelf in overeenstemming met de traditie als mainbour[7]. Een eerste gevolg was de ontluikende investituurstrijd, een tweede het tweekeizersprobleem. De paus verwachtte van Karel de Grote dat hij ten strijde zou trekken tegen de Byzantijnen, terwijl die laatste terecht alleen in de Saracenen een gevaar zag. Een toenadering tussen het Frankische en het Byzantijnse Rijk was mogelijk geweest door een gearrangeerd huwelijk, maar – hoe stom het ook moge klinken – Karel de Grote wilde zijn dochters liever bij zich in de buurt hebben. In 812 erkende het Byzantijnse Rijk dan toch het Frankische Rijk. De Duits-protestantse interpretatie van Karel de Grote als de eerste grote keizer is dus vals. Karel de Grote heerste slechts over de Rhône en de Rijn. Het Westen en de Atlantische Oceaan stelden toen nog niets voor. De Donau en de Middellandse Zee waren belangrijk. Als gevolg van die geopolitieke zwakte had het Frankische Rijk af te rekenen met invallen uit alle windrichtingen: o.a. Magyaren[8] uit het oosten, Saracenen[9] uit het zuiden, en Vikingen[10] uit het noorden. De opvolger van Karel de Grote, keizer Lodewijk de Vrome, was op zijn zachtst gezegd géén referentie voor de rijksgedachte.<br /> <br /><strong>De Ottonen</strong><br /> <br />Hoewel imperium en imperialisme niet met elkaar mogen worden verward, heeft elk rijk een (geestelijke) natie als drager. Zo was er sprake van de Senatus Populusque Romanus[11] (SPQR) en het Heilige Rooms Rijk der Duitse Natie. De translatio imperii ad Germanos[12] bepaalde dat de keizer van Germaanse afkomst moest zijn. De eerste grote keizer was zoals gezegd niet de Frank Karel de Grote, maar wel de Saks Otto de Grote. Hij was de stichter van de Ottoonse dynastie en tevens van het Heilige Roomse Rijk der Duitse Natie. Otto de Grote dankte zijn keizertitel aan de belangrijke zege die hij behaalde tegen de Magyaren in de Slag bij Lechfeld (955). Als gevolg van die zege “bekeerden” de heidense Magyaren zich tot het christendom. Die bekering hield in dat de nieuwe Magyaarse khan Arpad I plechtig trouw zwoer aan de Christenheid, de Europese Beschaving. Arpad I schakelde zich anders dan de Hunnen wél in in de grensverdediging en liet geen nieuwe stammen toe in zijn land. De Magyaren moesten met andere woorden hun geopolitieke koers 180° draaien. De imperiale dynamiek die de overwinning van Otto de Grote teweegbracht, zorgde in heel Europa voor economische en demografische groei. Na de Val van Constantinopel (1453) deed paus Pius II[13], oud-kanselier van keizer Frederik III, de Ottomanen een gelijkaardig voorstel, maar hun sultan wees dat af. Het zou trouwens geen loze eed blijken voor de Magyaren (Hongaren), want tot 1945 kwamen er geen invallen meer uit het oosten. Tijdens de Hongaarse Opstand van 1956 herinnerden de nationalistische opstandelingen opnieuw aan de eed van Arpad I. <br /> <br />Het rijk werd geopolitiek hersteld, omdat Pannonië/Hongarije geen doorgangsweg meer was voor Aziatische nomadenvolkeren. Het hele Donau-bekken werd bijgevolg hetzij Rooms-Germaans, hetzij Grieks-Byzantijns. In 1919 vernielden de vijanden van Europa met het Verdrag van Versailles (voor Duitsland) en het Verdrag van Trianon (voor Oostenrijk-Hongarije) wat de rijksgedachte had beoogd in de Balkan en ze herstelden de oude vetes uit donkere tijden. Langs de Donau werden zoveel mogelijk kunstmatige en vijandige staatjes uitgetekend met sterke (Hongaarse) minderheden. De oorlogen in ex-Joegoslavië hebben aangetoond dat de Balkan een zone van permanente instabiliteit is. Alleen het lange heugen, de rijksgedachte, kan ons opnieuw tot subject – en niet object – van ons eigen lot maken. De lineaire of progressieve tijdsopvatting leidt tot geheugenverlies. Ze maakt van Europa een macht zonder wil.<br /> <br /><strong>De Kruistochten</strong><br /> <br />De opvolgers van Otto de Grote waren zwakke figuren. Over de Ottoonse dynastie werd bijgevolg niet verder uitgeweid in de lezing. De volgende grote dynastie was de Koenradijnse. Het was de verdienste van Koenraad II dat hij Bourgondië en Provence (de rivierbekkens!) als Duitse provinciën organiseerde. Een ramp voor Europa was echter wel de investituurstrijd tussen het pausschap en het keizerschap, evenals de verschillende schismata tussen Oost en West (vanaf 1054). Onder paus Urbanus II kwam er verbetering, omdat hij de ridders en ridderorden nodig had voor de Kruistochten. Die onderneming vereiste een bundeling van de politieke, de militaire en de spirituele krachten. De scheiding van die krachten – of beter van macht (potestas) enerzijds en gezag (auctoritas) anderzijds – is een belangrijke oorzaak van het verval van de Europese Beschaving. De Europese ridderorden belichaamden als “gewapende priesters” een kortstondige heroïsche restauratie van de Europese Beschaving. In het Midden Oosten herontdekten zij bovendien de Indo-Europese (Indo-Iraanse) bron van de ridderlijke ethiek en spiritualiteit. Een spiritualiteit van de ridderlijke actie, tegenover een van de priesterlijke contemplatie. Een gevolg van die herbronning was dat de Tempeliers in 1314 na een schijnproces van “ketterij” werden beschuldigd en op de brandstapel gezet. De Franse koning en de Roomse paus spanden om uiteenlopende laag-bij-de-grondse motieven samen in dezen. De middeleeuwse kroniekschrijvers vertelden dat de laatste Grootmeester van de Tempeliers, Jacques de Molay, die gedurende zijn schijnproces had gezwegen, beiden vervloekt had van op de brandstapel. Alleszins zijn zowel de paus als de koning datzelfde jaar nog gestorven en stierf na één generatie de lijn van Filips de Schone uit (begin van de 100-jarige oorlog tussen Engeland en Frankrijk).<br /> <br /><strong>De Staufers</strong><br /> <br />De laatste grote dynastie was de Zwabische van Hohenstaufen. Naast Frederik I Barbarossa, is vooral Frederik II bekend. Frederik II was als keizer zijn tijd ver vooruit, in de positieve zin welteverstaan. Hij trachtte het Mare Nostrum te herstellen met Sicilië als kerngebied. Als Sicilië met in het verlengde Triëste en Boedapest strategisch verenigd waren, dan had Europa alle invallen van woestijn- en steppevolkeren kunnen trotseren. <br /> <br />Door de voortdurende investituurstrijd liep zijn poging uit op een tragische mislukking. Sinds de voltooiing van het Rijn-Main-Donau Kanaal in 1992 is pas een nieuwe rijksvorm mogelijk. Er is nu immers één waterweg tussen de Noordzee en de Zwarte Zee, die de commerciële en culturele krachten van Midden Europa toelaat de landen van de Zwarte Zee en de Kaukasus te bereiken. Degenen die een goed historisch geheugen hebben, herinneren zich de rol van de kusten van de Zwarte Zee in de geestelijke geschiedenis van Europa: op de Krim werden verschillende oude tradities – zij het Heidens of Byzantijns – in grotten bewaard door monniken. Zo kan Europa opnieuw aanknopen met zijn oudste wortels, met de waarden van de oudste ridderlijkheid uit de wereldgeschiedenis. Dat kan de ontwikkeling van gelijkaardige geestelijke krachten in Midden- en West-Europa gunstig beïnvloeden.<br /> <br />Frederik II had eveneens het Midden Oosten nauwkeurig geobserveerd en kwam tot het besluit dat de moslims grotendeels werden overheerst door Koerden en Perzen. Hij besefte – anders dan zijn tijdgenoten – terdege dat die laatste Indo-Europese volkeren waren en dat met hen wel te praten viel. Hij zette daarom een eigen keizerlijke diplomatie op, niet tegen de paus maar wel buiten diens medeweten. Frederik II bewonderde niet zozeer de islam, als wel de Arabisch-Perzische kunst om een duurzaam rijk op te bouwen. In 1229 leidde zijn diplomatieke en geopolitieke talent tot de Vrede van Jaffa en de vreedzame herovering van Jeruzalem. Frederik II was tevens voorstander van een eigen keizerlijk hospitalen- en scholennet en van een arme Kerk in overeenstemming met beginselen van Sint-Franciscus van Assisi. Hij joeg aldus weliswaar de Rooms-katholieke Kerk tegen zich in het harnas, maar hem daarom “verlicht” of “verdraagzaam” noemen is onzin. In 1240-’41 leidde de voortdurende investituurstrijd tot nieuwe Turks-Mongoolse invallen in Oost-Europa.<br /> <br /><strong>De Habsburgers</strong><br /> <br />Het Heilige Roomse Rijk der Duitse Natie naderde zijn einde, het officieuze in 1648 (Vrede van Westfalen) en het officiële in 1806 (oprichting van de Rijnbond). Een laatste grote keizer was de Habsburger en Gentenaar Karel V. Opnieuw wordt zijn bewind gekenmerkt door een verstandshuwelijk tussen een Franse koning (Frans I) en een Roomse paus (Clemens VII). Eigenaardig genoeg was opnieuw de keizer en niet de paus in dezen de grote verdediger van het katholieke Europa. Door zich met de Fransen tegen de keizer te keren, kreeg de paus er immers een Ottomaanse “bondgenoot” bij. Karel V moest dus op meerdere fronten vechten, maar slaagde er niettemin telkens in het belegerde Wenen te ontzetten. Een Franse nationalist kan zich vandaag de dag onmogelijk tegelijk beroepen op Karel Martel – nota bene een man uit onze contreien – én op ronduit anti-Europese koningen als Filips de Schone, Frans I en Lodewijk XIV. De Rooms-katholieke Kerk keerde zich deels bezorgd om haar geestelijke gezag, deels om haar wereldlijke macht (de Pauselijke Staten) liever tegen de keizers. Een rampzalige geopolitieke stommiteit. <br /> <br />Onder paus Innocentius XI werden nieuwe kruistochten georganiseerd, maar dan in Europa. De Ottomanen rukten op door de Balkan in de richting van Wenen. Zij wilden eveneens de Donau veroveren, maar dan vanuit hun geopolitieke perspectief. De paus steunde met grote sommen geld de kruisvaarders, voornamelijk van Poolse afkomst (bijv. Jan van Sobieski). Tijdens het Tweede Beleg van Wenen (1683) waren het vrouwen en studenten (voorlopers van de Burschenschaften) gekleed in juten zakken die de kanonnen bedienden en de beroemde Janitsaren, de elite van het Turkse leger, tegenhielden. De ontzetting van Wenen door de Poolse koning Jan van Sobieski en diens Heilige Alliantie was het startschot voor de bevrijding van de Balkan en de Krim door prins Eugène van Savoye en diens gelijknamige alliantie. Die laatste verbeterde voorts onder andere de verdediging van de Pannonische/Hongaarse bres en nam een Donau-vloot in gebruik. De Europese geschiedenis dient véél meer te worden beschouwd in het licht van dergelijke continentale allianties.<br /> <br />In de 18de eeuw werden de Zuidelijke Nederlanden een deel van dat zegevierende Oostenrijkse Keizerrijk. In de Franse en Napoleontische tijd (1794-1815) waren onze contreien overwegend anti-Fransgezind, maar wel rijksgezind. Getuige daarvan de Boerenkrijg pro aris et focis[14]. Zo werden de brigands in Brabant geleid door een oud-officier van het Oostenrijkse leger, Charles-François Jacqmin alias “Charlepoeng”. De gilden die na de Napoleontische tijd opnieuw de aansluiting vroegen bij het Oostenrijkse Keizerrijk – maar met méér zelfstandigheid – vormen volgens de heer Steuckers het bewijs dat het rijk voldoende volkse legitimiteit bezat.<br /> <br /><strong>Organisatie en communicatie</strong><br /> <br />De heer Steuckers haalde tot slot Tijl Uilenspiegel van Charles De Coster aan om het belangrijkste organisatiebeginsel toe te lichten, namelijk het subsidiariteitsbeginsel. Die volksheld van de Lage Landen die zich verzet tegen de Spaanse overheersing wijst ons op het verschil tussen enerzijds het traditionele koningschap en anderzijds het absolutistische koningschap en zijn moderne varianten. De rijksgedachte beoogt geen gelijkschakeling (naar beneden) maar een ordening (naar boven). De moderne ideologieën zijn in wezen totalitair, want ze vloeien voort uit de tabula rasa van het absolutisme en het jacobinisme. Dat absolutisme-jacobinisme wilde een organische eenheid (de edelen, gilden, standen, provincies, talen) vervangen door een abstracte mechanische eenheid (de ene en ondeelbare republiek). <br /> <br />Naast het subsidiariteitsbeginsel heeft elk rijk een communicatienetwerk nodig voor culturele en commerciële uitwisseling. Dat is een eerste voorwaarde voor een lange geschiedenis. Sommige traditionele rijken steunden op postboden (Iran), andere op waterwegen (Egypte, Mesopotamië, China) of op landwegen (Rome). Aangezien de geschiedenis niet stilstaat, mag men vandaag de dag de ontwikkeling van de vliegtuigbouw (cf. Boeing versus Airbus) en de satellietbouw (cf. Echelon versus Galileo) zeker niet uit het oog verliezen. Door het mislukken van het Galileo-project is er tot op heden echter géén onafhankelijk Europees communicatienetwerk. Het Amerikaanse communicatie- en spionagenetwerk Echelon heeft er een slaafse Europese “klant” bij.<br /> <br /><strong>Besluit van de censor</strong><br /> <br />Ons nationalisme van de 21ste eeuw moet een opbouwende Europese kracht zijn. Oude vetes en broederoorlogen hebben Europa gedegradeerd tot de speelbal van buiten-Europese machten. We kunnen geen nationalisten zijn, zonder continentalisten te zijn. Laten we dus het voorbeeld van Europese Synergieën volgen en nieuwe banden smeden onder (jonge) Europeanen en Europese nationalisten. Ideologische bloedarmoede, geopolitieke en historische bijziendheid zijn slechts enkele katjes die het nationalistische kamp te geselen heeft. <br /> <br /> <br /><br /><br />--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />[1] “Gedurende praktisch twee eeuwen beeldden de Romeinen hun godheden niet af – hoogstens werden zij voorgesteld door een symbool. Het ‘animisme’ zelf – de idee van ‘ziel’ aan de basis van een algemene voorstelling van het goddelijke en de krachten van het universum – komt niet overeen met het oorspronkelijke stadium. Wat ermee overeenkomt, is eigenlijk de idee of de opvatting van zuivere krachten, waarvan de Romeinse opvatting van het numen een van de meest geschikte uitdrukkingen is. In tegenstelling tot de deus (zoals hij daarna werd begrepen) is het numen geen wezen of een persoon, maar een naakte kracht die zich definieert door zijn vermogen om effecten voort te brengen, te handelen, te verschijnen. Het gevoel van de werkelijke aanwezigheid van die krachten, van die numena, zoals iets transcendents en immanents, wondermooi en geducht tegelijk, vormde de kern van het oorspronkelijke ‘heilige’”.<br />Vertaald uit: EVOLA, J., Révolte contre le monde moderne. L'Age d'Homme, Lausanne, 1991, p. 84.<br />[2] Er splitste zich toen ook een groep af die naar Europa trok en later zou uiteenvallen in Germaanse, Keltische, Italische, Slavische en Baltische stammen.<br />[3] Meer bepaald de ruimte van de Zee van Azov tot aan China; van het Aral-meer tot Perzië (in het westen) en India (in het oosten).<br />[4] De “volkspartij” die onder andere streefde naar uitbreiding van het Romeinse burgerschap tot de provincies, kwijtschelding van schulden en landherverdeling.<br />[5] De “senaatspartij” die bestaande orde wilde bewaren en uitbreiden naar de provincies. Het stemgedrag werd bepaald door de fides (trouw) tussen patronus en cliens, waardoor “ideologie” van weinig belang was. Er woedde onder de verschillende adellijke families die de senatoren leverden wel een strijd om de patronus van nieuwe clientes (uit de provincies) te worden.<br />[6] O.a. Roxolanen en Jazygen. Ze waren eveneens van Indo-Europese (Indo-Iraanse) afstamming.<br />[7] De beschermheer van de Christenheid.<br />[8] Tot in Rijnland.<br />[9] Tot aan de Alpen.<br />[10] Door keizer Arnulf van Karinthië in Leuven. <br />[11] De Senaat en het Romeinse Volk.<br />[12] De rijksoverdracht van de Romeinen aan de Germanen.<br />[13] “In een vorig leven als Italiaanse humanist vertaalde hij De Germania van Tacitus en ontwierp hij een geopolitiek project: De Europa. Daarin argumenteerde de latere Paus Pius II dat Europa alleen kon overleven, als het Bohemen en Brabant stevig in handen had. Ergens kunnen we Pius II als een soort oervader van het Duitse en Vlaamse nationalisme beschouwen. Van Tacitus nam hij de idee van de ‘hogere kwaliteit’ van de Noordse volkeren over”. In: “Turkije behoort niet tot de EU!”. <br />In: CLAES, K., BRANCKAERT, J., 2004. Branding sprak met Robert Steuckers (Synergies Européennes, Vouloir): “Turkije behoort niet tot de EU!”. Branding. 27 (1). p 11. <br />[14] Voor outer en heerd.<br /><br />Bron: <a href="mailto:steuckers_robert@yahoo.fr">Robert Steuckers</a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/eurasia" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/eurosiberia" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Reich+Europa" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/EU" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Heartland+Theory" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Halford+Mackinder" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nieuw+rechts" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/paleo-conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatief-revolutionair" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nouvelle+droite" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Marcel+Ruter" rel="tag"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1165614844161483682006-12-08T22:49:00.000+01:002006-12-08T22:54:04.900+01:00What the Heck is a Paleoconservative and Why You Should Care door Dan PHILLIPS op Intellectual Conservative, 8 december 2006.<strong><em>Paleoconservatism is informed by certain philosophical presumptions that differ markedly from the presumptions of neocons and most modern conservatives.</em></strong><br /><br />Have you ever noticed how enthusiasts of all sorts frequently speak a language that is completely unintelligible to the rest of us? For example, computer geeks . . . err . . . enthusiasts have their own language as do gear heads . . . err . . . hot rod enthusiasts. Wonkish political obsessives like me are guilty of the same thing, I am afraid. I don’t know a gigabyte from RAM or a header from a flathead, but I can rattle off the various shades of conservatism in Rainman-like fashion. <br /><br />I was reminded of this tendency recently when I published an article on paleoconservatism and abortion. The article was originally published at Intellectual Conservative, and later published at several mainstream, GOP-oriented conservative websites. It made some very controversial assertions so I expected to get feedback. Well I did. Most of it was positive. Some of it was not. But what surprised me was that most people weren’t taking issue with my controversial assertions. Instead, many seemed to be unfamiliar with the term paleoconservative. I was surprised because my article appeared on conservative oriented political websites. I assumed paleoconservative would be a term familiar to those who frequent such websites. Well you know what they say about assuming. I was also disappointed. That many conservative internet surfers didn’t know what a paleoconservative is is an indication that my side seriously needs a marketing campaign.<br /><br />As a result, I have decided that a little Conservatism 101 is in order. I will attempt to explain the origin and history of the movement now called paleoconservatism, and how it differs from “regular conservatism,” for lack of a better term. But perhaps more importantly, what does this movement have to offer us that regular conservatism does not?<br /><br />First of all, this is a topic about which a book could easily be written, and some have. It is not my intention to be exhaustive or to reinvent the wheel. For a more exhaustive treatment, see the Wikipedia entry on paleoconservatism. I know Wikipedia can be a bit hit and miss, but the paleoconservative entry is fantastic. (No I did not write it.) It was updated recently, and the first half is particularly well done. Several other books and magazines have been written that address this subject, and I will provide internal links to helpful resources.<br /><br />Since most readers will be familiar with the tenants of “regular conservatism,” it may be easiest to describe paleoconservatism by how it differs from the more mainstream variety. First a little history.<br /><br />Prior to World War II, there existed a coalition often referred to now as the Old Right. The Old Right was a collection of traditionalist and libertarian politicians, writers, businessmen, scholars, etc. who composed the loyal opposition to the Left which was ascendant at the time. The ascendant Left was represented most obviously by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. Perhaps nothing resembling a “movement” as we know it today existed back then, but the Old Right did what it could given the tenor of the times. The Old Right differed from the modern conservative movement in that it opposed foreign military intervention and favored a policy often derisively referred to as isolationism. The Old Right opposed American entry into World War I and World War II. On that note, the most prominent organization of the Old Right was the America First Committee (AFC) which was organized to prevent US entry into WW II. (The AFC was populated by a lot of anti-war leftists as well.) The conservative argument for opposing foreign intervention and entanglements is that it is not America’s responsibility to be a global policeman. Foreign adventuring necessitates big government, big spending, the sacrificing of liberties at home, and of course places American troops in harm’s way.<br /><br />The Old Right also opposed, generally with limited political success, FDR’s New Deal. They believed his New Deal programs were wasteful, not authorized by the Constitution, and ineffective and counterproductive to reviving the depressed economy.<br /><br />Some elements of the Old Right also opposed what they saw as a trifecta of insults to freedom and the Constitution that took place in 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment which authorized the Income Tax, the Seventeenth Amendment which mandated the direct election of Senators, and the creation of the Federal Reserve. (Tax protestors don’t scold me. I am aware that many believe the Sixteenth Amendment was not passed appropriately by the States and/or doesn’t authorize an individual income tax. That debate is beyond the scope of this article.) <br /><br />After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and American entry into the War, non-intervention fell out of favor. When the hot war ended, America was faced with a Cold War attempting to halt the global expansion of Communism and Soviet influence. The “modern conservative movement” (MCM) as it is often called arose after WWII and after the start of the Cold War. Unlike the Old Right, the MCM supported a strong internationalist foreign policy as a means of combating the Soviet menace. Some recognized foreign intervention as inconsistent with the traditional conservative support of small government, but felt the Soviet threat warranted a temporary alteration in principles. A small contingent on the Right, led by Murray Rothbard among others, continued to resist the call for an aggressive foreign policy to contain Communism, but they were in the minority. (The merits of their argument deserve an additional column as well.) <br /><br />You might wonder, “If the Old Right is characterized as pre-WWII, then would it not be accurate to designate the post-war alternative as the New Right instead of the more cumbersome modern conservative movement?” There is a related movement called the New Right but it is not an entirely analogous term. The MCM is generally conceived as originating and coalescing in the 50’s especially around the issue of the Cold War. Seminal events in its genesis would be the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind in 1953 and the founding of National Review in 1955. The New Right refers to that coalition that flourished after the Barry Goldwater campaign. Perhaps I am splitting hairs, but the term MCM seems to better encompass the decade or so before what is usually conceived of as the official beginning of the New Right. For the purposes of this article the MCM will indicate the post-war conservative movement that is to be distinguished from the Old Right. <br /><br />Another element of the post-war anti-Communist, anti-Soviet forces were ex-leftists who had grown disillusioned with the excesses of Soviet Communism. Beginning in the 70’s they started to leave the Democratic Party in frustration over the emergence of radical liberalism, especially the counterculture, the perceived direction of the party with the McGovern nomination, and the perceived weakness of the Democrats on foreign policy. This group included Irving Kristol and others frequently associated with the advent of neoconservatism, a term I suspect the average reader is more familiar with.<br /><br />Since they were ex-liberals, the neoconservative element of the MCM was generally supportive of a broad social safety net. They were comfortable with New Deal programs such as Social Security and FDR’s economic interventions. Most were supportive of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the Civil Rights movement, although most opposed quotas.<br /><br />The Old Right was, as I already pointed out, hostile to Roosevelt and the New Deal. Some of the conservative elements that made up the original MCM did not support the New Deal or economic intervention either. This was true of both the traditionalist elements and the libertarian elements of the fledgling MCM. But by the mid-50’s it was generally assumed by most conservatives that the New Deal was a fait accompli, so serious opposition to it was dropped. This was partially based on pragmatic political concerns, but it was also felt that opposing the Soviets was the paramount issue, and they should not waste political capital or alienate potential allies with less urgent issues. A pragmatic consensus quickly arose that opposing settled leftist gains such as Social Security was a political loser, so they were essentially taken off the table. <br /><br />The transformation from isolationist Old Right to interventionist modern right has been much observed and commented on. The de facto adoption of political pragmatism over rigorous adherence to principles as a defining component of modern conservatism has been less commented on, and I will devote a future article to discussing the far reaching implications of that decision.<br /><br />So the neoconservatives were pro-intervention, supported a social safety net, were comfortable with some government intervention in the economy but supported free-trade and liberal immigration policies and were generally socially conservative. While the depth of their commitment to social conservatism has been questioned by some, they were clearly anti-counterculture which they saw as a radical and anti-American threat.<br /><br />A question: does what the neoconservatives supported initially sound familiar to anyone? It actually sounds very much like the agenda of the MCM and the GOP of today. More on that later.<br /><br />The MCM has always been a coalition of rather diverse elements who were united in their opposition to the radical Left as much or more than they were united in their common goals and philosophy. One element was the traditionalists personified by Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver. Another element was the economic libertarians personified by Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. Traditionalists placed less faith in free-markets and rejected economic reductionism. They denounced the libertarians as hidebound ideologues. The libertarians denounced the traditionalists as too friendly to the state and rejecters of reason. But both factions opposed federal government expansion although perhaps for somewhat different reasons, and both opposed the economic and cultural collectivists on the Left. The fusionists, whose main spokesmen at the time was Frank Meyer of National Review, tried to chart a middle course. Fusionism is described by Donald Devine of the American Conservative Union as advocating “libertarian means to traditional ends.” Whether fusionism was a coherent intellectual philosophy or just an attempt to reconcile a diverse coalition is a matter of much debate among partisans on all sides.<br /><br />But whatever fusionism might have lacked as a coherent philosophy, you could argue that the MCM that emerged was generally fusionist in its orientation, socially and culturally conservative but libertarian on economics. All sides supported limited government, tax cuts, minimal government intervention in the economy, and a strong national defense. (Actually it could be argued that a strong national defense is neither traditionalist nor libertarian nor fusionist, but its support by most was a product of the Cold War times.)<br /><br />Also holding the movement coalition together was near unanimous agreement on the strategy of political pragmatism mentioned above with the GOP as the chosen vehicle, and a fear of the Democratic Left. The near unanimous consensus that the GOP should be the vehicle of choice was facilitated by the slow but sure shift of once conservative Democrats in the South to the GOP starting with the Goldwater campaign in ’64.<br /><br />So what the heck is a paleoconservative and where do they belong in this grand scheme? Many paleos, whose beliefs coincide largely with the Kirk-style traditionalists, would gripe that they were really a barely tolerated part of the coalition from the beginning, but there was at least a general civility. The late paleocon, Sam Francis, claimed that the neocons were at first welcomed into the movement as useful allies, but tensions between the traditionalists and the newly grafted neocons soon rose. The traditionalists charged that the neocons were still unrepentant leftists. The neocons charged that the traditionalists were backwards looking reactionaries.<br /><br />Things really came to a head at the start of the Reagan administration, as the spoils were being divvied up. Traditionalists, who had been a part of the MCM from its inception, expected a piece of the pie. The Johnny-come-lately neos were accused of trying to get all the spoils for themselves. Things really got ugly concerning the appointment of Mel Bradford to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. Mel Bradford was a traditionalist extraordinaire. He was also a proud Southerner. One aspect of the traditionalist element has been respect for the inherent conservatism of the Southern tradition. Russell Kirk recognized it, Richard Weaver recognized it, and Mel Bradford recognized it. The Southern Agrarians, who had been an element of the Old Right, had eloquently articulated it in their book I’ll Take My Stand. These men recognized that the South had always served as a traditionalist brake on the grand designs of Northern progressives. The neos did not want Dr. Bradford to get the job. To them he was hopelessly behind the times. Their choice was William Bennett, so they set out in a rather nasty way to tarnish Bradford’s reputation. They especially focused on his veneration of the South and his traditional Southern view of the merits or lack thereof of Lincoln. Of course accusations of racism were hurled, and this was an early harbinger of things to come. (Note the hysterical and hyperbolic reaction of the neocons to Trent Lott’s Strom Thurmond remark.) This incident among others confirmed to the traditionalists that their suspicions had been right from the beginning; the neocons really were a type of leftist instead of a type of conservative, since free and easy accusations of racism are too often the first recourse of the left. <br /><br />The term paleoconservative was coined around this time by either Thomas Fleming and/or Paul Gottfried originally as a joke. Paleo, as a prefix meaning old or ancient, was to designate the opposite of neo meaning new. Even though it was initially coined as a joke, the term caught on. Some paleos have objected to the term, suggesting it invokes images of dinosaurs. It may well be true that the term was embraced and used by the paleos' enemies because they saw it as unflattering. At this point we are probably stuck with the term. It is now routinely used by both its proponents and its detractors. Personally, I kind of like the term. As a proud traditionalist, I am perfectly comfortable with a word that invokes ancient or old as opposed to a word that invokes the new. Such an attitude I’m sure appalls the progressives.<br /><br />In the 80s, the term paleoconservative was still mostly used in-house by conservatives “in the know.” It began to be used by a broader audience during the lead up to the first Gulf War. The MCM had been characterized by support of foreign intervention in the struggle against the Soviets. With the Soviet threat diminished or eliminated, the paleos sought to revert back to the traditional conservative position of avoiding foreign intervention. The neos, however, saw America, as the lone remaining superpower, as having an international opportunity/responsibility to shape the world in America’s interests and ostensively in a way that would benefit all.<br /><br />The paleoconservative movement as we know it today synthesized and galvanized around opposition to the first Gulf War. For the paleos, that war was not our fight. American foreign policy should focus on safeguarding America and protecting American’s vital national interests, not punishing acts of aggression around the world.<br /><br />The most prominent paleoconservative public face was Pat Buchanan. He articulated for the masses the three areas where paleos are most commonly recognized as differing from “regular conservatives.” They were early strong opponents of immigration, a position which is now becoming in vogue. They were skeptical of the benefits of free-trade, and favored a policy of “economic nationalism.” They were particularly weary of free-trade deals that they believed sacrificed our national sovereignty such as NAFTA and GATT. And of course, they opposed most foreign intervention.<br /><br />You can see how paleoconservatism came to be largely defined by its positions on issues where it was at variance with the neocons and the rest of the conservative movement and the GOP, especially on the triad of issues mentioned above. The paleocons believe the conservative movement has been nearly entirely co-opted by neocon ideology or “neoconized,” if you will. The less flattering characterization that is often used is that the movement had been “hi-jacked” by the recent interlopers. As far as the “official position” of the conservative movement, they are correct, although many grass-roots conservatives support the paleoconservative positions. They just lack an organized or effective voice. This is especially true on immigration, where the Establishment’s support of “comprehensive” (read “guest workers”) immigration reform and reluctance to support an enforcement only policy, is very much at odds with the conservative base.<br /><br />In my paleoconservative article that inspired this follow-up, I wrote:<br /><br /><em>While paleos are often distinguished by their opposition to foreign intervention, immigration, and free trade, what really sets them apart from other conservatives is much deeper than just policy. They differ on significant underlying philosophical presumptions. One helpful way of looking at this difference is to ask where paleoconservatives draw the “it has all been down hill since then” or alternatively the “those were the good ol’ days” line in the historical sand. Paleos generally reject the Enlightenment in whole or in part. They reject Lockean “contract theory” and the concept of “natural rights” out right.</em><br /><br />This essay has been an attempt to place paleoconservatives in a historical context, and to focus on how they differ from other conservative on important policy issues. In this light you can see that paleoconservatives are a continuation or recovery of the traditionalist element of the Right that has been there from the beginning. In many ways it has more in common with the Old Right, especially the Southern Agrarian element, than it does with the modern right. Many commentators have noticed this commonality.<br /><br />However, as I stated in the passage above, the underlying differences are much deeper than mere differences on certain issues. Paleoconservatism is informed by certain philosophical presumptions that differ markedly from the presumptions of neocons and most modern conservatives. It is a hard concept to initially get your arms around for the uninitiated, but once you understand the presumptions the positions on issues naturally follow. It is not just a hodge-podge of policy differences. Likewise, the neocons have their own different set of underlying philosophical presumptions. While the modern Right generally takes positions on the issues similar to the neocons, it is not at all clear that all conservatives entirely understand what philosophy they are buying into.<br /><br />It will be through trying to illustrate these core philosophical differences, not just debating the merits of free-trade vs. fair trade, that a broader understanding will be fostered of how the sides differ and what each has to offer with regard to addressing the problems we face as a nation today, and where we went wrong in the past.<br /><br />I will leave the complicated and perhaps cumbersome discussion of each side’s underlying philosophy for later essays. I hope this essay has adequately laid the historical framework.<br /><br /><em>Dan Phillips</em> <br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/what-the-heck-is-a-paleoconservative-and-why-you-should-care/">Intellectual Conservative</a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nieuw+rechts" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/paleo-conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatief-revolutionair" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nationalisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Fortuynisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nieuwe+politiek" rel="tag"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1164349958368876412006-11-24T07:24:00.000+01:002006-11-24T07:32:42.406+01:00The rise and decline of the neo-cons door Jim LOBE en Michael FLYNN in AsiaTimesOnline, 22 november 2006.<em><strong>Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, an influential, neo-conservative-led pressure group called the Project for the New American Century issued a letter to the president calling for a dramatic reshaping of the Middle East as part of the "war on terror". </strong></em><br /><br />Although many of the items on the neo-conservatives' agenda, including ousting Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, were eventually adopted by George W Bush's administration, the group's remarkable string of successes has gradually given way to a steady decline, culminating most recently in the president's decision after this month's mid-term elections to replace defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, an important erstwhile ally of the neo-conservatives, with Robert Gates. <br /><br />This essay examines the rise and decline of the neo-conservatives and their post-Cold War agenda. We conclude that although the neo-conservatives and their allied aggressive nationalists, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, retain sufficient weight to hamper efforts to push through major reversals in US foreign policy, the increasing isolation of this political faction coupled with recent political events in the United States point to the potential emergence of a more cautious, realist-inspired agenda during the final two years of the Bush presidency. <br /><br />On September 20, 2001, a mere nine days after the al-Qaeda attacks in the United States, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a then-obscure neo-conservative-led think-tank in Washington, DC, located in the same building as the better-known American Enterprise Institute (AEI), published an open letter to Bush advocating a number of steps the administration should take in its newly proclaimed "war on terrorism". <br /><br />The letter, published in the Washington Times and The Weekly Standard, urged military action to oust the Taliban in Afghanistan and to "capture or kill" Osama bin Laden, both recommendations widely supported by virtually all US political leaders. <br /><br />But the group's suggestions did not stop there - in fact, PNAC had an ambitious number of additional targets in mind, which had little or no connection to the actual terrorist attacks. Most notoriously, the letter called for regime change in Iraq, "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack". The letter also proposed taking "appropriate measures of retaliation" against Iran and Syria if they refused to comply with US demands to cut off support for Lebanon's Hezbollah; argued that Washington should cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority unless it immediately halted the ongoing intifada against Israel's occupation; and called for a "large increase" in defense spending to prosecute the "war on terror". <br /><br />Some of the letter's signers - notably, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey and editor-at-large of the neo-conservative Commentary magazine Norman Podhoretz - were soon calling this new war "World War IV". Supporting this breathtaking agenda were nearly 40 other influential policy elites and public figures. The group consisted of mostly neo-conservatives, but also included a leader of the Christian Right, some aggressive right-wing nationalists and some pro-Israel liberal interventionists associated with the Democratic Party. <br /><br />A little over six months later, PNAC released a follow-up letter on April 3, 2002. This second letter focused largely on US policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. PNAC chairman William Kristol, Weekly Standard editor and prominent neo-conservative scion, collected the signatures of 34 like-minded power players, including a good slice of the membership of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB). <br /><br />One notable signatory was Richard Perle, who in addition to being the DPB chairman, an AEI resident fellow and the chief Washington sponsor of Ahmad Chalabi, is one of the most powerful neo-conservatives of his generation. <br /><br />The letter urged Bush to sever all ties with the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO's) Yasser Arafat and to "lend full support to Israel as it seeks to root out the terrorist network that daily threatens the lives of Israeli citizens". Said the letter: "Mr President, it can no longer be the policy of the United States to urge, much less to pressure, Israel to continue negotiating with Arafat, any more than we would be willing to be pressured to negotiate with Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar." It added: "Israel's fight against terrorism is our fight. Israel's victory is an important part of our victory." For good measure, the letter reiterated PNAC's call "for removing Saddam Hussein from power". <br /><br />A little over a year after the publication of these letters, PNAC's agenda seemed to be rapidly advancing. Not only had the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies been ousted from Afghanistan by December 2001, but the Bush administration had in June 2002 reversed long-standing US policy and severed all contact with the PLO's Arafat, declaring that Washington would only deal with Palestinian leaders who were "not compromised by terror". Washington, in effect, was aligning itself fully behind the Likud government in Israel led by prime minister Ariel Sharon. <br /><br />By early April 2003, the US military had conquered Baghdad. On May 1, Bush declared the end of major hostilities in Iraq in his memorable "Mission Accomplished" speech. Senior administration officials and their neo-conservative associates at the DPB, AEI, PNAC and elsewhere soon began publicly warning that Syria and Iran were next on their list. <br /><br />"The liberation of Iraq was the first great battle for the future of the Middle East," wrote Kristol in the Standard in early May 2003. "The next great battle - not, we hope, a military battle - will be for Iran. We are already in a death struggle with Iran over the future of Iraq." <br /><br />Within two weeks, the administration had spurned an unprecedented offer from Iran to negotiate all outstanding differences between the two nations, including its nuclear program and its support for armed anti-Israel groups, in exchange for security guarantees. The Bush administration also broke off all diplomatic contacts with Tehran, including until-then fruitful talks on stabilizing Afghanistan, after accusing Iran of harboring al-Qaeda militants allegedly linked to a series of bombings in Saudi Arabia. The neo-conservatives were euphoric; their agenda had not only become policy, but their vision of a "new American Century" seemed well on its way to becoming reality. <br /><br />The euphoria lasted through most of that summer, until it became increasingly clear that the administration's optimistic assumptions about its lightning military victory in Iraq and its consequences on the rest of the Middle East - and on the rest of the world - proved profoundly mistaken. In a book released in late 2003, Perle and co-author David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, recognized that the neo-conservative agenda had lost momentum and was increasingly under threat. <br /><br />But the difficulties, in their view, were a result not so much of the actions of foreign actors, such as the effective and totally unanticipated Sunni insurgency, but rather attempts by the "realists" in the State Department and the CIA, and by senior retired and active-duty military officers, to change the approach in Iraq and elsewhere in the region. Perle and Frum lamented: "We can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington; we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of complacency and denial." [1] <br /><br />Within a few short years, the neo-conservatives, [2] a small group of self-described "public intellectuals", and their allies among aggressive nationalists and the Christian Right had succeeded in setting a radical new foreign policy agenda, inaugurating a new era in US relations with the rest of the world. And then they began to stumble.<br /><br /><strong>From the Gulf War to September 11</strong> <br />The ostensible "success" of the PNAC agenda through mid-2003 represented a union of two distinct, though mutually reinforcing, agendas that had been laid out by the neo-conservatives and their various supporters during the decade before the first presidency of George W Bush. <br /><br />Shortly after the end of the Cold War, neo-conservatives began developing a number of ideas aimed at keeping the US militarily engaged and dominant in the world. The emerging ideas supported a hegemonic global strategy that had at its core two main elements: ensuring global US preeminence, and radically altering the Middle East to ensure a particular vision of Israel security. <br /><br />These ideas were initially spelled out in two documents, one drafted by senior Pentagon officials in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, the other by a small group of hardline neo-conservatives with close ties to Israel's Likud Party. The first, a draft of the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), which was leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post in the spring of 1992, offered a blueprint for maintaining US solo-superpower status, prompting one Democratic critic, Senator Joseph Biden, to criticize it as "literally a Pax Americana". <br /><br />The second, a 1996 report entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," was a short memorandum prepared for incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It laid out an Israeli strategy toward the Middle East that could dramatically shift the regional balance of power in Israel's favor, allowing it to "break away" from the Oslo peace process and effectively impose whatever terms it wished for a final settlement with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors. While much of the paper focused on the destabilization of Syria, the first step in the proposed strategy called for the ouster of Saddam and his replacement by a pro-Western government. <br /><br />These two strategies were ultimately embraced by the same coalition of hawks (neo-conservatives, aggressive nationalists and the Christian Right) that later coalesced around PNAC in the late-1990s. In turn, the strategies helped to set the course of US foreign policy immediately after September 11, when a US president with virtually no international experience or curiosity was grasping for an appropriately dramatic - perhaps even messianic - response to the trauma that had just befallen the nation. <br /><br /><strong>1992 Draft Defense Planning Guidance</strong><br />The DPG is a regularly updated classified Pentagon policy document that outlines US military strategies and provides a framework for developing the defense budget. After the Gulf War, the task of developing the new DPG, the first since the end of the Cold War, was given to then-under secretary of defense for policy Paul Wolfowitz and his chief aide, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, two of the few neo-conservatives who had held posts in the administration of the elder president Bush. <br /><br />Their draft guidance called for a post-Cold War world in which the US would act as the ultimate guarantor of peace and security and commit itself to "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". (Other contributors included influential Pentagon officials Zalmay Khalilzad, J D Crouch and Andrew Marshall, as well as Perle and RAND Corporation founder Albert Wohlstetter.) <br /><br />The draft guidance called for a global order in which US military intervention would become a "constant fixture" and Washington would rely on "ad hoc assemblies" (later known as "coalitions of the willing") to enforce its will, rather than on the UN Security Council. (Despite having authorized US military action in the first Gulf War, the Security Council was not mentioned in the draft guidance.) <br /><br />These ad hoc coalitions would be directed above all at preempting - either through co-option or confrontation - potential rivals from challenging US hegemony and at preventing rogue states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD), particularly in "regions critical to the security of the United States and its allies, including Europe, East Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia and the territory of the former Soviet Union". <br /><br />When the draft DPG was leaked to the press, it provoked a storm of controversy. Democrats charged that the strategy would bankrupt the nation and transform it into a "global policeman", involving it in wars without end. Other top officials in the realist-dominated administration of George H W Bush, endeavoring in the wake of the Gulf War to reassure the world that Washington would accept constraints on its freedom of action, quickly disavowed its contents. According to some reports, Wolfowitz and Libby were nearly fired as a result of the controversy but were rescued by their boss, then-secretary of defense Dick Cheney, who agreed to substantially tone down the document in its final form. <br /><br />But the draft DPG and its core ideas did not entirely disappear. Cheney himself was impressed by the document, reportedly commending Khalilzad, the draft's principal author, for "discover[ing] a new rationale for our role in the world". Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer was also impressed. "What's the alternative?" he asked. "The alternative is Japanese carriers patrolling the Strait of Malacca and a nuclear Germany dominating Europe." <br /><br />For Krauthammer and other neo-conservative cadre, the DPG's vision of a "unipolar" world not only made sense, now that the Soviet Union was history, but also constituted a strategic and moral necessity - one that was elaborated several years later by PNAC. The draft DPG would ultimately come to serve as the broad framework for forging a new consensus embraced by neo-conservatives (like Libby and Perle), aggressive nationalists (like Cheney, Rumsfeld and John Bolton), as well as key allies among the Christian Right, and even some liberal interventionists within the Democratic Party. <br /><br />An early reaffirmation of some of the ideas contained in the draft DPG came in 1996, when William Kristol and Robert Kagan published a notable essay, entitled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy", in Foreign Affairs magazine. Kristol and Kagan, both second-generation neo-conservatives (William is the son of neo-conservative founder Irving Kristol and Robert the son of Donald Kagan), extolled a philosophy of "national greatness" and called for the United States to exercise nothing less than "benevolent global hegemony". <br /><br />US hegemony, the authors boldly asserted, would be "based on the understanding that [America's] moral goals and its fundamental national interests are almost always in harmony". The essay, which was aimed primarily at countering a growing isolationist trend that had developed in the Republican-led Congress, called, among other things, for Washington to pursue an overall strategy for "containing, influencing and ultimately seeking to change the regime in Beijing", reflecting both the chronic neo-conservative need for an enemy against which to mobilize public opinion and the growing consensus among foreign policy hardliners that China (not Japan or a German-dominated Europe) represented the greatest threat to US hegemony in the post-Cold War era. <br /><br />In their call for unabashed hegemony, the authors were clearly inspired by the draft DPG, an inspiration which was made explicit in the early publications of the Project for the New American Century, founded by the two authors the following year in an effort to institutionalize the ideas espoused in their essay. <br /><br />PNAC was founded in 1997 with the issuance of its "Statement of Principles", which pledged "to make the case and rally support for American global leadership". Highlighting what it called "the essential elements of the Reagan administration's success", namely "a strong military" ready to meet "present and future challenges", the statement declared: "A Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the success of this past century and ensure our security and greatness in the next." <br /><br />Among PNAC's 25 charter signatories were eight people who would become senior members of the future administration of President George W Bush, seven of whom - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, Khalilzad, Peter Rodman and Elliott Abrams - would play key roles in fulfilling PNAC's agenda five years later. Most of the others - notably Christian Right leader Gary Bauer; former education secretary William Bennett; DPB member Eliot Cohen; and Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney (as well as Kristol and Kagan)- would work closely with these administration insiders in making the public case for aggressive action, first against the PLO's Arafat and Saddam, and then against Syria and Iran. [3] <br /><br /><strong>'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm'</strong><br />Around the same time that Kristol and Kagan were developing their ideas and creating an institutional umbrella (PNAC) for like-minded hawks, a task force of pro-Likud neo-conservatives led by Perle at AEI and organized by the Israel-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies was working on a strategy to liberate Israel from the Oslo peace process and the "land-for-peace" formula that had been US policy since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. <br /><br />Drafted by David Wurmser with the support of a coterie of neo-conservative consultants, including Perle protege (and later under secretary of defense for policy) Douglas Feith, the "Clean Break" paper focused primarily on persuading incoming Israeli premier Netanyahu to "destabilize and roll back" the Ba'ath government in Syria as the key to transforming the regional balance of power. That goal would be more easily achieved, the paper emphasized, if Saddam was replaced by a pro-Western government: "Removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq [is] an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right." Wurmser, who under Bush has held key posts in the Pentagon, State Department and since late 2003 has served as one of Cheney's main Middle East advisers, later developed this theme at length in subsequent publications. <br /><br />PNAC effectively incorporated the "Clean Break" group's Mideast regional strategy into its early public statements. In 1998, PNAC fired off two open letters regarding Iraq: one to president Bill Clinton in January, and several months later, another to the Republican leadership of Congress. The missives argued that the containment strategy against Iraq was neither effective nor sustainable. "The only way to protect the United States and its allies from the threat of weapons of mass destruction [is] to put in place policies that would lead to the removal of Saddam and his regime from power," argued the second letter. <br /><br />Among the signatories to these letters were Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rodman, Abrams, Khalilzad, Bennett, Perle, Bolton, Woolsey and a pair of realist-oriented foreign policy elites, Richard Armitage and Robert Zoellick, who would later come to regret their association with the neo-conservatives. The two open letters on Iraq became part of an intense neo-conservative-led lobbying effort for change there - both Perle and Wolfowitz played major roles in this endeavor - which resulted in congressional passage later that year of the Iraq Liberation Act, making "regime change" in Iraq official US policy. <br /><br />During the years leading up to the election of George W Bush, PNAC produced a number of other sign-on letters and book-length publications on a wide range of topics, including everything from the defense of Taiwan to the need to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic, which seem in part to have served as tools for reaching out to other elements of the US political landscape. Like PNAC's first open letters, they were selectively supported by a diverse collection of political elites. These alliances helped legitimize PNAC's agenda-setting activities and proved critical in drawing support for the neo-conservative agenda in the wake of September 11. <br /><br /><strong>Bush and September 11</strong><br />In the run-up to the 2000 election, PNAC published "Rebuilding America's Defenses" and Present Dangers, a paper and a book designed to create a foreign policy platform for the Republican presidential candidate. When George W Bush won the Republican primary, however, PNAC and its neo-conservative leaders were disappointed: Bush had campaigned on the idea that the US should be a "humble" global power. That view was cultivated in candidate Bush by Condoleezza Rice, a protege of former national security adviser and arch-realist Brent Scowcroft. <br /><br />In a 2000 article for Foreign Affairs, Rice wrote: "The reality is that few big powers can radically affect international peace, stability, and prosperity." This perspective was very much at odds with the neo-conservative agenda. As William Kristol has said: "We didn't have great hopes for Bush as a foreign policy president." <br /><br />But as Bush's early appointments made clear, the neo-conservatives had little reason to despair. His obvious deference to Cheney gave the hawks an unusually influential perch from which to operate, particularly after Cheney chose Libby to be chief of an unusually large national security staff. It was at Cheney's suggestion that a second PNAC charter member, Rumsfeld, was selected as secretary of defense. Similarly, it was at Cheney's urging that Wolfowitz - rather than secretary of state Colin Powell's candidate, Armitage - was named deputy secretary of defense. With strong lobbying by Perle, Feith was given the Pentagon's policy brief - an exceptionally influential post in the run-up to the Iraq war - while Rodman was tapped to be assistant secretary for international security affairs. <br /><br />As the first month of the new presidency evolved, the key question was, whom would Bush, a foreign policy novice, ultimately listen to? The realists, presumably led by his father's favorites, Rice and Powell, or the hawks, Rumsfeld, Cheney and their mainly neo-conservative advisers? <br /><br />That there was a deep split within the administration soon became abundantly clear. This rift surfaced perhaps most starkly in early March 2001 at the time of a visit from South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, when Bush publicly contradicted Powell's explicit support for Kim's Sunshine Policy toward North Korea as well as for Clinton's 1994 Agreed Framework. <br /><br />The division again emerged after the April 2001 Hainan incident, a collision between a Chinese jet fighter and a US spy plane that resulted in the detention by Beijing of the US crew for 10 days on Hainan Island. In response to Bush's statement of regret to China for the death of the Chinese pilot, whose craft crashed, and for the emergency landing on Hainan, neo-conservatives loudly berated the president for supposedly appeasing Beijing. <br /><br />Writing in the Weekly Standard, Kristol and Kagan charged that the entire episode was "a national humiliation" and that diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis led by Powell, whom they singled out for blame, "represented a partial capitulation, with real-world consequences". <br /><br />Though Powell and the realists prevailed in that crisis - as they generally have with respect to relations with China since then - September 11 would tilt the balance of power in the administration definitively in favor of the hawks. More than any other political faction in the US, the neo-conservatives had prepared themselves for just such an earth-shattering event, allowing them to respond quickly in a way that would suit their agenda. <br /><br />As previously discussed, just nine days after September 11, PNAC issued its most provocative letter, calling on the president to overthrow Saddam "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack". <br /><br />But PNAC was not alone in its idea that September 11 could be used as a springboard to Mideast change. Indeed, within hours of the attacks, Rumsfeld suggested to an aide that September 11 could be used to justify going after Saddam, according to declassified notes. Yet the most vociferous proponent of going after Iraq was Wolfowitz, who pressed the case repeatedly at Camp David meetings during the first critical week after the attacks. <br /><br />Meanwhile, Perle convened the DPB for its own meeting to recommend policy options. Extraordinarily, he invited Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi to take part in the highly classified proceedings. It appears that after September 11, the network of hawks and neo-conservatives that had coalesced around PNAC's founding agenda had mobilized in a highly coordinated way to fashion the administration's response to the terrorist attacks and rally the public behind their new agenda. <br /><br />Many of the initial steps made by the administration on the global level during the weeks after September 11 showed the hallmarks of the draft DPG. Deployments of US forces were remarkably widespread - to the Philippines, Georgia and Djibouti - considering that the main target of the "war on terror" was billed as Afghanistan. <br /><br />And although securing access to military bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan appeared substantially more relevant to routing the Taliban from power and hunting down al-Qaeda leaders, it also served the larger geopolitical purpose of establishing a potentially permanent military presence in the heart of Central Asia, close to both China and Russia. Washington's effective spurning of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its declared preference for a US-led "coalition of the willing" were both recognizable features of the draft DPG. <br /><br />Ideas from the draft guidance also made their way into administration rhetoric shortly after September 11, including the administration's preoccupation with efforts by "rogue states" to acquire WMD, which was repeated by Bush in his January 2002 State of the Union address, when he famously declared that Iraq, Iran and North Korea were an "axis of evil". <br /><br />Preemption also crept into the speech; the president warned that the United States would "not wait on events as dangers gathered" or if other countries were "timid in the face of terror". Just one year after September 11, key concepts of the draft DPG became official US policy with the publication of Bush's first National Security Strategy in September 2002. <br /><br />The hawks' regional-level plans also began to get under way shortly after September 11, as indicated by Rumsfeld's immediate reaction to the attacks and Wolfowitz's exhortation during the meetings at Camp David a few days later. Active planning for an Iraq invasion began - at the latest - in early 2002. Without an "off-the-shelf military plan" about how to respond to an attack like September 11, as reporter Bob Woodard put it in his 2002 book Bush at War, the administration was susceptible to ideas that appeared to have little connection to September 11 - including ideas from "A Clean Break". <br /><br />Writes journalist George Packer: "The idea of realigning the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam Hussein was first proposed by a group of Jewish policy makers and intellectuals who were close to the Likud. And when the second President Bush looked around for a way to think about the unchartered era that began on September 11, 2001, there was one already available." [4] <br /><br />Regime change in Iraq, if achieved in a sufficiently dramatic and decisive fashion, would not only transform the regional balance of power, the thinking went, but would also assert US power in the very heart of the Middle East, demonstrating to both "rogue states" like Iran and rivals like China that it could intervene unilaterally in a resource-rich region on which their own economies and military power depended. <br /><br />While the neo-conservatives provided the substantive policy agenda, they depended heavily on Cheney and Rumsfeld - both aggressive nationalists who had close and long-standing links to the neo-conservatives going back to the Gerald Ford administration - to manipulate the process by which the agenda could be translated into policy. <br /><br />That effort was greatly enhanced by Rice's failure, as national security adviser, to ensure the integrity of the traditional interagency policymaking process, with the result that decisions taken at meetings of the National Security Council were often circumvented or simply ignored, particularly by the Pentagon. As a result, the State Department often found itself marginalized by what Powell's chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, later called a "cabal" led by Cheney and Rumsfeld (who in turn were supported and advised by key neo-conservatives like Feith, Wolfowitz and Libby). <br /><br />The same network worked to manipulate the intelligence process - both by establishing offices to collect or review selective raw intelligence that was sent unvetted by professional analysts directly to the White House and by harassing and pressuring the official intelligence community, notably the CIA, to come up with analyses that were consistent with the PNAC agenda. <br /><br />Meanwhile, administration insiders and the DPB used sympathetic or credulous media outlets - notably the Weekly Standard, Washington Times, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page - and reporters (such as Judith Miller of the New York Times) to selectively leak intelligence and threat assessments to help rally the public behind the war. <br /><br />The rapid progress made in fulfilling the PNAC agenda reflected the degree to which hawks and their neo-conservative collaborators effectively dominated US foreign policy decision-making after September 11. Virtually overnight, Powell and the realists had been marginalized, while fence-sitters like Rice gradually acquiesced or passively enabled the process to be hijacked. By May 2003, shortly after the invasion and just as the insurgency in Iraq had begun to assert itself, the neo-conservatives had reached the zenith of their power. It was unclear, however, how long they could stay on top.<br /><br /><strong>In decline?</strong><br />By mid-2003, it had become clear, particularly to the military on the ground in Iraq, that the Bush administration and its neo-conservative allies had fundamentally miscalculated the nature of the war that they had pushed the country into. Instead of being seen as the liberators of Iraq, the US military and its allies quickly became perceived as an occupying force that was challenged by a bitter and deeply entrenched insurgency, fueled in part by the de-Ba'athification program long advocated by neo-conservatives and overseen by their key partner, Chalabi. <br /><br />The situation had so deteriorated by autumn 2003 that Rice, whose lack of resistance to the neo-conservative agenda deeply disappointed Powell and other realists, created the Iraq Stabilization Group (ISG), centered in the National Security Council, which aimed to reduce the Pentagon's control of key aspects of Iraq policy. The establishment of the ISG, which provoked a rare public tiff between Rice and Rumsfeld, launched a process in which the State Department and the uniformed military (as opposed to the Pentagon's civilian leadership) gradually assumed ever-greater control of Iraq policy. The ISG's creation, in fact, marked not only the beginning of the decline of the hawks' unquestioned dominance, but also of the neo-conservatives' influence, which continues to fade. <br /><br />The most significant reason for this decline has clearly been the growing debacle in Iraq, for which even Perle and other hardline neo-conservatives now admit regret, although - predictably - they blame administration realists and erstwhile allies like Rumsfeld for botching the war's implementation, rather than the original decision to go to war. [5] By late 2004, it had become crystal clear that the assumptions and justifications they used to promote the war were unfounded, if not fabricated. Not only did the United States find no operational ties of any kind between Saddam and al-Qaeda (let alone September 11), it also found no evidence that Saddam had been developing WMD. <br /><br />In addition, the notion that Saddam's ouster would bring to power moderate, pro-Western secularists was increasingly discredited. Also debunked by reality were several of the neo-conservatives' other pre-war assurances, including the idea that winning in Iraq would be a "cakewalk", as DPB member Ken Adelman had put it; that Washington would be able to rapidly draw down its troop strength to just 30,000 by the end of 2003; and that reconstruction would be essentially self-financing through projected increases in oil export earnings and the end of UN sanctions. <br /><br />Just as importantly, the hawks' insistence that "shock and awe" in Iraq would send a message to Iran and North Korea was quickly undermined by the inability of US and allied forces to defeat or even contain the growing insurgency. US hegemony not only failed to be "benevolent", it was also proving to be an illusion, one that the rest of the world - "rogues" included - did not fail to notice. As stories about the growing violence in Iraq, including on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the siege of Fallujah, were broadcast, anti-Americanism exploded throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds. Even Israel's hawkish prime minister, Ariel Sharon, sensing that the Iraq war had failed to enhance his country's security as promised by the neo-conservatives, committed himself to ending Israel's nearly 40-year occupation of Gaza, splitting his own Likud Party. <br /><br />These failures produced debilitating tensions - both within the hawks' coalition and among neo-conservatives themselves - which indirectly strengthened resurgent realists based at the State Department. Indeed, Kristol, Kagan and PNAC's secretariat began attacking Rumsfeld, accusing him of being insufficiently committed to serious "nation-building" efforts in Iraq and to expanding the size of US land forces, especially the army, commensurate with its growing global responsibilities. <br /><br />While the PNAC core eventually demanded his firing, other hardline neo-conservatives - like Perle and Gaffney - defended the Pentagon chief. Iraq wasn't the only issue that PNAC was dismayed over regarding the administration. <br /><br />On China, where the realists had held a tenuous advantage since the Hainan incident, hardliners were infuriated at Bush's late 2003 public rebuke of Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian's call for a "defensive referendum" demanding that China dismantle its missiles aimed at the island. According to PNAC's Kristol, Kagan and Gary Schmitt, the president was guilty of "appeasement of a dictatorship". <br /><br />Just as Sharon's disengagement plan split the Likud Party, it also drove a wedge between the PNAC-led coalition. Hardline neo-conservatives and leaders of the Christian Right, who believed in a Greater Israel, found themselves at odds with more pragmatic neo-conservatives, like Kristol and Kagan, as well as some of their aggressive nationalist allies. <br /><br />The split presaged a later one that developed during 2005 and 2006 regarding the post hoc justification for the war - democratization of the Middle East. As elections in Iran and the Arab world - notably in Egypt, Iraq and Palestine - confirmed the popularity of Islamist and anti-American movements across the region, a new debate eventually broke out between those neo-conservatives who had championed the democratization drive, and others, including Perle - not to mention Sharon's government - who believed that free and fair elections in a region radicalized by the Iraq invasion would prove detrimental to Israel's long-term security. <br /><br />Although clearly in decline, the neo-conservatives and other hawks were by no means completely sidelined, particularly after Bush's reelection in November 2004, which they regarded as a public endorsement of the agenda they had so successfully promoted after September 11. Also seeming to augur well for the hawks was the unceremonious exit of Powell immediately after the election and his replacement by the more malleable Rice, a trend that continued with the appointment of Porter Goss as the new CIA director, which was interpreted as part of an effort to overhaul an agency that had long been at loggerheads with the neo-conservatives and their allies. <br /><br />Adding to their confidence was Bush's soaring pro-democracy rhetoric in his 2005 inaugural and State of the Union addresses, both of which drew heavily from Natan Sharansky's then recently published book, The Case for Democracy. Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident, was a key right-wing leader in Sharon's Likud government and a favorite of the neo-conservatives. Reports that his book had become "required reading" at the White House were lauded by neo-conservatives. "A president who tells his advisers to go read Sharansky is way ahead of his advisers," Perle told an audience at the Hudson Institute. <br /><br />Moreover, events in the Middle East seemed to be going their way, at least during the first few months of Bush's second term. The unexpectedly smooth Iraqi elections in January 2005, the outbreak of the "Cedar" revolution in Lebanon (and other "color revolutions" in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan), and the subsequent isolation of Syria all were claimed by neo-conservatives as proof that America's bold demonstration of force in the Middle East was actually transforming the region, if not the world. <br /><br />But things were not as rosy as they seemed. While still jubilant over Powell's departure, the neo-conservatives suffered a number of setbacks on the personnel front shortly into Bush's second term. Within six months of the inauguration, Wolfowitz had left for the World Bank, while Feith, whose key roles in both the manipulation of pre-war intelligence and failures in post-war planning were by then receiving growing attention in Congress and the media, was bound for a teaching post at Georgetown University. <br /><br />By far the biggest blow to the neo-conservatives, however, was the loss of Libby as Cheney's chief of staff. Arguably the most powerful neo-conservative in the administration, Libby was indicted in October 2005 for lying to a grand jury about his role in leaking the identity of a covert CIA officer, whose husband had publicly accused the administration of manipulating pre-war intelligence about Iraq. Describing the impact of Libby's departure, Bob Woodward writes in his most recent book, State of Denial: "Cheney was lost without Libby, many of the vice president's close associates felt. Libby had done so much of the preparation for the vice president's meetings and events, and so much of the hard work. He had been almost part of Cheney's brain." <br /><br />As secretary of state, Rice was proving to be much more assertive than neo-conservatives had anticipated. From the outset of Bush's second term, she stressed that her main concern was mending frayed alliances, particularly with "Old Europe" - for which the neo-conservatives had little but contempt - even if that meant serious compromises on issues ranging from Iran to North Korea. "This is the time for diplomacy," she vowed in her confirmation hearings. She soon put her rhetoric into action by publicly committing the United States to the European Union-3 in its negotiations with Iran. It became clear that, unlike Powell, Rice had influence with the president that was at least on par with Cheney. <br /><br />Rice's appointments also indicated a return to her realist roots. Not only did she resist Cheney in declining to appoint Eric Edelman or Bolton (whose subsequent failure to gain Senate confirmation as UN ambassador highlighted the hawks' declining political fortunes) as her deputy, but her selection of Zoellick, a lifelong Atlanticist and former top adviser to former secretary of state James Baker, suggested that she resented the pressure put on her by the hawks. <br /><br />She also appointed former NATO ambassador Nicholas Burns as under secretary of state for policy and Philip Zelikow as her counselor, both committed realists. Burns in particular has proved to be a constant thorn in the side of the hawks, who blame him for a number of what they call "weak" policy moves, including Rice's mid-2006 announcement that the US would be willing to negotiate directly with Tehran if it abandoned its uranium-enrichment program, spurring howls of protest from neo-conservatives. <br /><br />Another concern of the hawks, particularly the neo-conservatives, was Bush's decision early in his second term to appoint John Negroponte to the new post of director of national intelligence, with the assurance that he would replace the CIA director as the daily intelligence briefer of the president. A retired career foreign service officer and former deputy national security adviser under Powell, Negroponte was widely regarded as a tough-minded realist and bureaucratic operator who was not afraid to speak his mind. <br /><br />At the CIA, Goss was replaced earlier this year by Negroponte's deputy, General Michael Hayden, who quickly reinstated or promoted a number of senior intelligence officers who had been disillusioned with what they saw as Goss' efforts to politicize the agency. <br /><br />As a result of personnel changes over the past two years, the network of allied hawks and neo-conservatives has degraded significantly, and along with it their ability to control the various processes - like intelligence vetting - involved in foreign policy decision-making. Likewise, their credibility among the uniformed military and bureaucratic insiders has suffered a tremendous blow due to incompetent and costly handling of the Iraq war. Although some prominent neo-conservatives have joined Democrats in denouncing the administration's execution of Iraq policy, their efforts to push the country into war, as well as their role in promoting disreputable personalities (like Chalabi) and disastrous policies (like de-Ba'athification) are unlikely to be forgotten any time soon. <br /><br />Indeed, some former neo-con allies - such as the well-known academic Francis Fukuyama (a signatory of the September 20, 2001 PNAC letter), Newsweek columnist George Will, and former secretary of state Alexander Haig - now publicly blame them for the misadventure in Iraq. <br /><br />In spite of all those blows, neo-conservatives over the past nearly two years remained a factor in the power equation both in and outside the administration, with Cheney serving as their principal champion and protector. John Hannah, who once served as a liaison between the vice president's office and Chalabi, was promoted to Cheney's national security adviser after Libby's departure, while David Wurmser remains his Mideast adviser. In the National Security Council, meanwhile, Abrams heads the Middle East desk from which, during the recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict, he helped frustrate Rice's efforts to persuade Bush to initiate contact with Damascus and even reportedly encouraged Israel to extend the conflict to Syria. He has also led the charge within the administration against EU and Arab League pleas to take a more flexible position with respect to the Hamas government in the Palestinian territories. <br /><br />While their numbers in the senior ranks at the Pentagon have been reduced, neo-conservatives have retained an active presence there, too. In a particularly ominous turn of events earlier this year, the Defense Department established an "Iranian Directorate", an office staffed and overseen by the same individuals that ran the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which "cherry-picked" and "stove-piped" raw and questionable intelligence about Saddam's supposed ties to al-Qaeda and WMD programs. <br /><br />There is no doubt that the top foreign policy priority for neo-conservatives in the final two years of Bush's presidency will be to goad him into attacking Iran's suspected nuclear facilities, if ongoing diplomatic efforts to contain or roll back Tehran's nuclear program stall or fail. Wrote Joshua Muravchik, an AEI scholar, in the November 2006 issue of the influential magazine Foreign Policy: "Make no mistake, President Bush will need to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities before leaving office." <br /><br />Until recently, it appeared that the remaining two years of Bush's presidency were likely to conform to the pattern set by the previous two. While the realists have made gradual and incremental gains in pushing the administration toward engagement and diplomacy with US foes, the hawks have retained enough strength to limit their room for maneuvering and effectively prevent substantive changes in policy. <br /><br />The State Department, for example, persuaded Bush to offer enough in the six-party talks to coax North Korea into the September 19, 2005, joint declaration on denuclearization, but it was unable to get White House permission to accept the North's invitation to send Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill to Pyongyang for informal talks last May. <br /><br />In the Middle East, the State Department recommended a more forthcoming position on the provision of humanitarian and other assistance to the Palestinian Authority after Hamas' victory in last January's elections, but was unable to prevail at the White House. Similarly, State Department officials reportedly favored a more flexible US position on negotiating security agreements with Iran, as urged by Washington's European partners, if Tehran agreed to freeze its uranium-enrichment activities, but hardliners succeeded in vetoing that, too. <br /><br />While continued internal conflict appeared as the most likely prospect as of the mid-term elections, the capture of both houses of Congress by the Democrats, followed by Rumsfeld's resignation and the nomination of Robert Gates as his replacement, point to a potential triumph of the realists in the two years that remain in the Bush presidency. <br /><br />While the Democrats have yet to forge a unified position on key policy issues, their leadership in the new Congress appears poised to push hard for engagement with North Korea and for "redeploying" US troops out of Iraq as quickly as possible, even if that means engaging Syria and Iran to expedite that process. At the same time, Gates' background in developing alternative policies regarding hotspots like Iran and Iraq suggests that he and other like-minded administration officials such as Rice have an opportunity to forge a new consensus between Republicans and Democrats that could sound the death knell of neo-conservative influence on the administration. <br /><br />A favorite of both George H W Bush and his national security adviser, Scowcroft, Gates has shared their realist approach to US foreign policy and shown little patience with neo-conservatives. As recently as two years ago, Gates co-chaired a task force sponsored by the influential Council on Foreign Relations with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser and one of the Bush administration's most trenchant critics, which called for a policy of diplomatic and economic engagement with Iran. The report was immediately and loudly denounced by leading neo-conservatives. <br /><br />Gates, who according to some sources privately expressed strong reservations about the Iraq war from the outset, was also, until his nomination last week, a member of the bipartisan, congressionally appointed Iraq Study Group, a task force co-chaired by Baker that has emerged, particularly since the elections, as the most likely mechanism for devising an "exit strategy" from Iraq. <br /><br />A consummate realist and the Bush family's longtime counselor who, unlike Scowcroft, has retained good ties with the younger Bush, Baker has already suggested that one of the key recommendations likely to emerge from the study group's work is US engagement with both Iran and Syria - he has met with senior officials of both governments - as part of any viable solution in Iraq. <br />"It's not appeasement to talk to your enemies," he asserted in a popular Sunday television news program in what appeared to be a calculated rebuke of the hawks, particularly the neo-conservatives. Many analysts, including some neo-conservatives, believe it was Baker who helped engineer Rumsfeld's replacement by Gates as part of a larger strategy to tilt the balance of power in the administration decisively in favor of the realists. Indeed, without Rumsfeld, Cheney, the neo-conservatives' main champion and protector within the administration, now appears more isolated than ever. <br /><br /><strong>Notes</strong> <br />[1] See Richard Perle and David Frum, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, Random House, 2003. <br />[2] For a description of the history and worldview of the neo-conservatives, see Jim Lobe, "What's a Neo-Conservative Anyway?" Inter Press Service, August 12, 2003. See also, Jim Lobe, "From Holocaust to Hyperpower," Inter Press Service, January 26, 2005. <br />[3] Ironically, virtually the only signatory who has not played a leading role since the letter was released has been Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who in 1997 apparently looked to Kristol and Kagan as more presidential than his brother George. <br />[4] See Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2005). <br />[5] See David Rose, "Neo Culpa," Vanity Fair online, November 3, 2006. <br /><br />Jim Lobe is the Washington, DC bureau chief of the Inter Press Service; Michael Flynn is the director of the Right Web program (rightweb.irc-online.org) at the New Mexico-based International Relations Center and a doctoral candidate in international relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva. This paper was presented at the Institute of American Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing on November 17. <br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HK22Aa01.html">AsiaTimesOnline</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1163943683019569922006-11-19T14:38:00.000+01:002006-11-19T14:41:23.563+01:00Europese Rijksgedachte door Frederik RANSON op Nationalisme.info, 17 november 2006.<strong><em>Inleidende tekst van Frederik Ranson bij de vormingsavond van NSV!-Gent op 15 november.</em></strong> <br /><br />Vanavond is Robert Steuckers onze gast. Hij is een van de bezielers van Europese Synergieën, een conservatief- en nationaal-revolutionaire denktank met vertakkingen in heel Europa (België, Frankrijk, Duitsland, Italië, Spanje en Rusland). Hij zal beginnen met een historische uiteenzetting van de rijksgeschiedenis als uitgangspunt voor een Nieuw Europa. Hij zal ons enkele axioma’s meegeven die we als Vlamingen, Nederlanders en Europeanen steeds voor ogen moeten houden. Na de uiteenzetting is er de mogelijkheid om vragen te stellen. <br /><br />Waarom de rijksgedachte? Alleszins niet uit een of andere vermeende reactionaire nostalgie. Lapidair kunnen we stellen dat een eerste Dertigjarige Oorlog (1618-1648) de opgang inluidde van de natiestaat en een tweede (1914-1945) de neergang ervan. Economische en financiële structuren beheersen sindsdien onze politiek en onze levens. De Europese Beschaving verkeert in een diepe algemene crisis. Niettemin vertoont de Amerikaanse wereldorde barsten: meer en meer landen staan op – zoals het dorp van Asterix – tegen de unipolaire wereldorde. Staan we aan de vooravond van een nieuwe multipolaire wereldorde? Het huidige Europa lijkt alleszins niet bij machte te zijn om zich te bevestigen in die nieuwe wereldorde. <br /><br />De vraag “waarom de rijksgedachte?” is dezelfde als “waarom Europa?”. Luc Pauwels antwoordt: “Als Europa geen macht wil zijn, zal het de macht van een buiten-Europese staat ondergaan – de macht van de USA”. Nationaal-revolutionair zijn betekent zich niet opnieuw te laten vangen door de (neoconservatieve) polarisatie tussen Oost en West. Europa moet opnieuw een derde weg, een derde macht en een derde beschaving tussen Oost en West zijn, een totaal alternatief voor de opgelegde American way of Life. <br /><br />Alleen Europa kán de waarborg zijn van de vrije Europese volkeren. Het lot van álle Europese volkeren wordt getekend door de globalisering, waarvan de Europese Commissie niet meer dan een slaafse agent is. Méér dan 60% van onze nationale wetgeving is niet meer dan de omzetting van opgelegde supranationale wetgeving. Dat geeft stof tot nadenken. <br /><br />De rijksgedachte vereist van ons een moeilijke evenwichtsoefening tussen het “Europa van de volkeren” en het “Europa van de macht”. De rijksgedachte nodigt ons uit na te denken over de zelforganisatie van de Europese volkeren en over de installatie van een échte Europese elite. Zowel de maçonnieke staat “België” als de maçonnieke superstaat “Europese Unie” moeten voor ons verdwijnen. Wij willen geen jacobijnse, centralistische staten en evenmin een jacobijnse, centralistische Europese Unie. Geen zielloos en klein Europa van Markten en Banken, maar een bezield en groots Europa van Volkeren en van Beschaving. <br /><br />Tot slot een citaat van Guillaume Faye dat ik steeds weer aanhaal met betrekking tot dit onderwerp. “De enige positieve opvatting van het Rijk is degene die het niet tegenover de idee van Natie stelt. Het Rijk is dus een federatie van etnisch verwante volkeren, een soort Grote Federale Natie […] Het Rijk is een gedecentraliseerde Federatie voorzien van een sterk centraal gezag, maar volgens het subsidiariteitsbeginsel beperkt tot de belangrijke interventiedomeinen: buitenlandse politiek, bescherming van de grenzen, grote economische en ecologische regels enz. […] Zijn samenstellende delen zijn zelfstandig en kunnen op verschillende manier georganiseerd worden door het voeren van een eigen binnenlandse politiek (gerecht, instellingen, fiscale autonomie, onderwijs, taal, cultuur enz.)”. <br /><br />De middeleeuwse legende vertelt ons dat de geest van keizer Frederik Barbarossa rust in het Kyffhäuser gebergte en dat op een dag een adelaar zal uitvliegen om de raven te verdrijven en de geest van de keizers te wekken. Na Rome, Byzantium en Moskou op naar het Vierde Rome!<br /><br /> <strong><em>Frederik Ranson </em></strong><br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://www.nationalisme.info/2006/11/17/europese-rijksgedachte/">Nationalistische Vormingscel</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1160301601709172532006-10-08T11:53:00.000+02:002006-10-08T12:04:07.153+02:00"THE OLD RIGHT" IN DE LAGE LANDEN ? door Tom POTOMS op Open Orthodoxie, 6 oktober 2006.<strong><em>Bij het zoeken naar waardevolle gesprekspartners voor de conservatieven loop je al snel op tegen het fenomeen libertarisme. In de Verenigde Staten zijn het conservatisme en het libertarisme bondgenoten. Zou zoiets ook mogelijk zijn in de Lage Landen?</em></strong><br /><br />In de Verenigde Staten en in de Angelsaksische wereld in het geheel is het gangbaar dat traditionele conservatieven en paleolibertariërs een alliantie vormen, maar is die ook toepasselijk voor de Lage Landen, kunnen wij conservatieven met traditionele libertariërs een alliantie vormen?<br /><br />Om te voorkomen dat men allerhande sociologische en politiek-ideologische termen doorheen begint te halen zou ik eens een duidelijke omschrijving willen geven van libertarisme algemeen en paleolibertarisme in het bijzonder.<br /><br />In Vlaanderen hebben we welgeteld één paleolibertarische politicus, en dat is Jean-Marie Dedecker, hij zal dat wel ontkennen maar als je zijn boek “Rechts voor de Raap” hebt gelezen zul je snel wel kenmerken van dat (paleo-)libertarisme vinden. Dedecker kent echter zijn ideologische afkomst bitter weinig, en zijn potentiële bondgenoten nog minder. Zo schrijft hij in de inleiding van zijn boek: "Conservatief zijn in werkelijkheid diegenen die zich vastklampen aan de macht." <br /><br />Je begint al te bibberen bij het lezen van deze woorden. Je denkt haast dat Dedecker de filosofische betekenis van denkers als Burke, Weaver, Nisbet, Kirk en Voegelin naar beneden haalt. Maar dan bemerk je dat hij conservatief enkel op de letterlijke betekenis naar beneden haalt: "ze (de conservatieven) gebruiken een vals argument van progressiviteit op politiek, cultureel en intellectueel vlak." <br /><br />Het is duidelijk dat hij de theorie van Wittgenstein, van de verschillende interpretaties van woorden in verschillende situaties (“woordspelletjes”) staaft, als hij conservatief letterlijk vertaalt als ‘behoudend’ en niet in de filosofisch-politieke zin van het woord - namelijk datgene wat de bovenvermelde denkers en wij aan het verdedigen zijn. Ik kom persoonlijk vaak in contact met libertariërs. Ik merk dan op dat we op veel gebieden in hetzelfde vaarwater zitten. Maar ik merk ook dit: de verschillen tussen conservatieven en libertariërs zijn in ons taalgebied veel groter dan bijvoorbeeld in de Verenigde Staten. Hoe komt dat toch?<br /><br /><strong>Belangrijke verschillen tussen conservatisme en libertarisme</strong><br />Waarschijnlijk moeten we de oorzaak zoeken in het feit dat we hier op het West- Europese continent een beetje achterlopen op de filosofische debatten in de Verenigde Staten, waar men duidelijk een hoogstaand intellectueel debat tussen ‘conservatives’ en ‘liberals’ kan voeren. Hier, en zeker in Vlaanderen, is het woord “conservatief” echter een scheldwoord en een zelfvernietigend begrip geworden. <br /><br />Het is goed om in te gaan op de inhoud van het libertarisme, en de goede en de slechte kanten van haar te belichten, evenals de geschiedenis van de ‘conservative-libertarian alliance’ in de Angelsaksische wereld en het eveneens bestaande verschil tussen paleo- en neolibertariërs.<br /><br />Libertarisme uitleggen is, net zoals het conservatisme uitleggen, een zeer moeilijke opdracht. Libertarisme is namelijk een zeer breed en abstract begrip dat aan enorm veel misinterpretatie onderhevig is. Een eerste misstap is dat men libertarisme gelijk stelt met de levensfilosofische libertijnse vleugels van denken over het dagelijkse leven, wat helemaal fout is.<br /><br />Ik zocht voor een goede quote van libertariërs die zichzelf omschreven, en zo vond ik op de site van libertarian.nl een mooie bewoording onder de titel ‘wat is libertarisme’: "Het libertarisme is een politieke filosofie die een maatschappij nastreeft waarin individuele vrijheid centraal staat. In een libertarische maatschappij gaan personen betrekkingen aan op basis van vrijwilligheid. Het initieren van geweld, dwang en fraude is niet toegestaan. Dit betekent dat overheidsingrijpen in de vrije markt en het persoonlijk leven van de burger niet is toegestaan. Het libertarisme volgt deze principes consequent."<br /><br />Libertariërs bezien het leven dus als een product van iets in het verleden, dat eens je het bezit het volledig van jou is en waar niemand beslag mag opleggen. Omgekeerd mag een individu ook geen beslag leggen op andermans leven (=bezit).<br /><br />De maatschappij bekijken zij, in de traditie van Rousseau en Locke als een vrijwillig contract tussen individuen, waar in principe geen al te grote, praktisch geen, staatsinterventie mag plaatsvinden, eens het contract niet meer voordelig is voor een van de beide partners, valt het contract weg; ik zou mijn eerste kritiek op dit denken al eens weergeven, en ik citeer hiervoor Andreas Kinneging: “als alles in de maatschappij een puur mutuaal positief contract moet zijn, valt elke relatie binnen de week omver, want een relatie zou dan implimenteren, in de libertarische denkwijze, dat er enkel een wederzijds genot, zonder gebreken mag zijn(seksualiteit), dat is misschien van toepassing in het begin, maar eens die seksuele emoties uitdoven en de relatie geen eenzijdig genot voor beide partners kan opleveren, valt dit contract uiteen(echtscheiding), wat voor een conservatief natuurlijk het wegvallen van een belangrijke, zoniet het belangrijkste fundament van de maatschappij.<br /><br /><strong>Klassiek-liberalisme en libertarisme</strong><br />Libertariërs worden vaak verward met klassiek-liberalisme, terwijl er toch een aantal fundamentele verschillen zijn, want zoals al gezegd, zijn de libertariërs vaak ultra-individualistisch, terwijl klassiek-liberale denkers meer Burkeaans zijn in hun ‘fabric of society’, ‘the civil society’. Maar ze hebben heel wat gemeenschappelijkheden en over het algemeen kunnen we zeggen dat het libertarisme een doorgetrokken klassiek-liberalisme implementeert, maar om een Vlaams voorbeeld te geven: Boudewijn Bouckaert van de Vlaamse klassiek-liberale denktank Nova Civitas is absoluut niet volledig gelijk te stellen met Jean-Marie Dedecker.<br /><br />Frank S. Meyer, een bekende ‘fusionist’ (iemand dat een samenwerkende fusie/coalitie tussen conservatieven en libertariërs voorstaat), zocht dan ook naar gemeenschappelijke wortels tussen het traditionele conservatisme en het libertarisme via de gemeenschappelijke klassiek-liberale kern, zo wordt Edmund Burke, de ‘Founding father’ van het conservatisme ook klassiek-liberaal genoemd.<br />Het grootste probleem met de denkwijze van libertariërs is dat ze toch verlichtingsfundamentalisten zijn, een beetje zoals Paul Cliteur (neoconservatief-neolibertariër). Ze geloven toch in een atomisch-utopische maatschappij en verdedigen een egoïstisch- hedonistische cultuur, zonder respect voor traditionele waarden en fundamenten(het gezin, etc.).<br /><br />Om een duidelijk verschil tussen conservatieven en libertariërs aan te duiden is het goed te luisteren naar James Kalb, die in Frequently Asked Questions About Conservatism het volgende zegt: <br /><br />"In het algemeen beklemtonen libertariërs de kleine staat meer dan conservatieven en geloven ze dat de bescherming van eigendomsrechten tegen dwang en fraude het enige legitieme doel van de regering is. Daarom beschouwen ze wettelijke beperkingen op zaken als immigratie, drugsgebruik en prostitutie als onrechtmatige schendingen van persoonlijke vrijheid. Veel (maar zeker niet alle) libertariërs nemen een positie in die kan worden omschreven als economisch rechts (anti-socialistisch) en cultureel links (gekant tegen wat culturele verdrukking wordt genoemd, racisme, seksisme, homofobie etc.) en voegen aan overheidsingrijpen de overleving toe van zaken waarvan cultureel links tegenstander is. In meer abstracte termen kan worden gezegd dat het libertarische perspectief de markt de positie toewijst die conservatieven toewijzen aan de Traditie als de grote accumulator en integrator van de impliciet kennis van een gemeenschap. Sommige schrijvers, zoals F.A. Hayek, proberen de twee perspectieven op dat punt te verzoenen. Daarbij tenderen libertariërs naar een strikt methodologisch individualisme en naar absolute en universeel geldige mensenrechten, terwijl conservatieven zich minder gebonden voelen aan het eerstgenoemde, en rechten begrijpen in samenhang met de vorm die ze in specifieke maatschappijen aannemen."<br /><br />Men zegt hier wel bijna dat alle libertariërs de traditie verachten, het zou een leugen zijn om dat te beamen, en ik moet dus wel wat nuanceren. Velen plaatsen bijvoorbeeld Friedrich von Hayek bij het libertarisme, hij schreef zelf een pamflet: Why I’m not a conservative. Hierin probeert hij een duidelijke krijtlijn te trekken tussen beide ideologieën. Maar behalve de libertarische insteek heeft ook een Hayek onmiskenbare conservatieve trekken. Hayek was bijvoorbeeld een verdediger van het conservatieve ‘feilbaarheidsbeginsel’, en hij geloofde, net zoals conservatieven, in de traditie van Burke, namelijk dat de mens en vooral, zijn ratio, feilbaar was, en dat daardoor tradities moesten beschermd worden. Ook gebruikte hij dit conservatieve principe om zijn kritiek op het communistische planningssysteem te bestrijden (hij noemde die kritiek het ‘calculatieprobleem’, vanwege de feilbaarheid van het menselijke rationeel denken, kan een gepland systeem door mensen nooit werken, men kan het noodzakelijke niet berekenen cq. calculeren).<br /><br />Hayek kan dus eerder als een paleolibertariër beschouwd worden dan als een loutere libertariër. Maar wat houdt de term "paleolibertariër" in? En wat is dan het verschil met de andere libertariërs: de neolibertariërs waarvan in Nederland en Vlaanderen zo dikwijls sprake van is?<br /><br /><strong>Paleolibertarisme</strong><br />Paleolibertariërs zijn ontstaan uit een ruzie in de libertarische beweging rond het onderwerp van de ‘New Deal’-politiek van de Amerikaanse regering rond de jaren ’40 en ’50. Dit onderwerp werd een echte splijtzwam voor ideologieën, zeker op het rechtse spectrum. Verscheidene klassiek- rechtse denkers binnen het conservatisme en het libertarisme namen de ‘New Deal’ scherp onder vuur als een verraad aan de Amerikaanse klassiek-liberale traditie van een kleine overheid. Men zag dit als een soort linkse overname. Andere nieuwe conservatieven (ex-trotskisten en linkse intellectuelen) en nieuwe libertariërs zagen wel iets in die nieuwe politiek van een ‘bigger governement’ en verraden zo hun eigen achterban. Zo krijgen we enig zicht op de wortels van het hedendaagse neoconservatisme en neolibertarisme. Op hetzelfde moment kregen we een soort van alliantie van klassieke denkers binnen de conservatieve en libertarische beweging.<br /><br />De paleolibertariërs namen een aantal punten van het traditionele conservatisme over, vooral met betrekking tot cultuurkritiek. Een ander gemeenschappelijk punt met het conservatisme was het anti-centralisme in hun staatsopvatting en een sterk gevoel voor decentralisatie. De belangrijkste vertegenwoordigers van de paleolibertariërs zijn of waren Murray Rothbard en Lew Rockwell. Een wat radicalere afsplintering van de paleolibertariërs vinden we terug in de groep anarcho-kapitalisten, waar men vaak professor Hermann- Hoppe toe rekent.<br /><br />Door de sterke overeenkomsten en het formen van één front tegenover progressieven en liberalen spreekt men in de Verenigde Staten dan ook over deze conservatief-paleolibertarische alliantie als de ‘Old Right’- alliantie – vrij vertaald: klassiek-rechts. Is zo’n conservatief-libertarische alliantie ook hier, in de Lage Landen, mogelijk?<br /><br /><strong>Naar een "Old Right" in de Lage Landen?</strong><br />Het was dapper van de Edmund Burke Stichting om vanuit de (Nederlandse) toestand van (bijna) tabula rasa te proberen een conservatieve alliantie te implanteren naar Amerikaans model van conservatieven en libertariërs. Dat is niet het succesverhaal geworden waar men waarschijnlijk op gehoopt had. Daarom moeten we ons hier bij Open Orthodoxie de vraag stellen of het wel niet beter is om rustig stapje voor stapje een basis voor een conservatieve beweging te leggen, om daarna verder te gaan.<br />We moeten geen conservatieve revolutie of nieuwe orde gaan installeren. We moet rustig het (paleo-)conservatisme ingang doen vinden bij de bredere lagen, onze filosofie verspreiden en dan zien wat de verdere uitbreidingsmogelijkheden zijn.<br /><br />Hier in de Lage Landen zijn de ideologiën nog redelijk elementair; ze zijn nog redelijk pasgeboren en hebben het conservatisme of het libertarisme nog pas (her)ontdekt. Sommigen zijn nog bezig de wijsheid van de 18de en 19de eeuw terug te vinden. De Nederlandse en Vlaamse libertariërs zijn dan ook aan het zoeken waar ze naartoe willen, welke structuur ze willen en op welke persoon ze hun filosofie op willen richten. Velen zoeken dus nog hun richting en zijn aan het zweven in de wazige ruimte tussen het klassiek-liberalisme en het libertarisme. <br /><br />Maar meer en meer Nederlandse en Vlaamse conservatieven zijn zich aan het oriënteren op het paleoconservatisme. En ondanks onze weinige middelen hebben we als Open Orthodoxie toch een sterk statement kunnen maken.<br /><br />Maar wie het rechtse (conservatieve en libertarische) landschap in ogenschouw neemt, en de prille fase ziet waarin beide bewegingen zich in de Lage Landen bevinden, moet constateren dat een verregaande samenwerking tussen conservatieven en libertariërs niet voor de hand ligt. En misschien is het beter zo. Want libertariërs zijn vaak soms sterke dromers en zien enkel en alleen, net zoals de verlichting, een los individu en een grote staat En ze willen nogal dromerig die grote staat bestrijden door de maatschappij te individualiseren. En daar verzetten wij, conservatieven, in de traditie van Robert Nisbet en anderen, ons sterk tegen. Wij geloven namelijk in een sterk intermediaire structuur voor de maatschappij, waar gezin en familie de belangrijkste van uitmaken. En zolang de libertariërs in de Lage Landen zich niet meer gaan oriënteren op hun paleolibertarische voorbeelden in de Verenigde Staten is een alliantie tussen conservatieven en libertariërs in ons taalgebied een hopeloze zaak.<br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://www.openorthodoxie.nl/">Open Orthodoxie</a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Eurabia" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/paleo-conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatief-revolutionair" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/identitair" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/islamisering" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Fortuynisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nieuwe+politiek" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/identiteit" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/gemeenschapsdenken" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Multikul" rel="tag"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1160301112675870592006-10-08T11:49:00.000+02:002006-10-08T11:51:52.986+02:00Colloquium Delta-Stichting: Europese waarden: Weggooien, vervangen of koesteren ? 11 november 2006<a href="http://img48.imageshack.us/img48/5131/tekos11november0611bd5.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px;" src="http://img48.imageshack.us/img48/5131/tekos11november0611bd5.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://img78.imageshack.us/img78/2982/tekoscolloquiumdeel2zonderrander4.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px;" src="http://img78.imageshack.us/img78/2982/tekoscolloquiumdeel2zonderrander4.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1158691209536072922006-09-19T20:39:00.000+02:002006-09-19T20:58:12.020+02:00Het democratisch tekort door Erik van GOOR op Open Orthodoxie, 19 september 2006.<strong><em>Er komt een onderzoek naar de weerbaarheid van onze democratie. Daarmee wordt de belangrijkste vraag overgeslagen: is een democratie wel weerbaar? Of is de democratie misschien zelf het belangrijkste probleem, en komen wij daar nu pas achter?</em></strong><br /><br />Het was te verwachten dat Donner een boetekleed aan zou trekken. Van meet af aan stond immers vast dat geen haar op het hoofd van Donner erover dacht zich positief over de Sharia uit te laten. Hij had slechts een theoretisch voorbeeld willen geven. Dit zij zo. Wat wel merkwaardig is, is dat Donner instemde met een onderzoek naar de weerbaarheid van onze democratie [1]. Was dit volgens hem niet iets voor "bange mensen"? Is Donner nu zelf ook bang geworden? We weten het niet. Wat we wel weten - wat we kunnen verwachten - is: een wassen neus. Want het is niet te verwachten dat dit onderzoek grondig en eerlijk zal verlopen. Niet de inzet bij de "weerbaarheid" is kenmerkend, maar die bij de "democratie". En daarmee is de vraag naar de weerbaarheid van de democratie an sich meteen onder tafel geschoffeld.<br /><br />Ondanks de secularisatie in Europa is "het heilige" nog steeds springlevend in de Westerse cultuur. "Het heilige" - dat is de democratische rechtsstaat, met alles wat daarbij hoort: gelijkheid, antidiscriminatie, staatsneutraliteit, emancipatie, etc.etc. Alles mag gelasterd en gezegd worden. Alles valt onder de vrijheid van meningsuiting, zolang het maar gericht is op de afbraak van de pre-democratische zekerheden - waar we later in dit artikel op terug zullen komen. Maar van één ding moet men afblijven: dat is de democratische rechtsstaat zelf. <br /><br />Nu is het met democratie vreemd gesteld. Op de keper beschouwd stelt het niets voor. Het is niet moreel en niet immoreel; het is een maniertje om beslissingen te nemen - dat maniertje is "de helft plus één". Daar is niets mis mee als andere middelen om een beslissing te nemen, falen. Als er geen concensus bestaat en er toch een beslissing genomen dient te worden, is het democratische maniertje een handige manier om snel door te stoten.<br /><br />Problematisch wordt het als democratie wordt verheven tot "een zedelijk goed in zichzelf", verweven met dat andere "zedelijk goed in zichzelf": de Staat. Dit laatste zien we nu gebeuren in de moderne democratieën: het democratische proces wordt een legitimatie op zichzelf. De moraal is het product van een democratisch proces dat is ingebed in een publiek debat. Met andere woorden: de volgorde wordt omgedraaid.<br /><br />In plaats van dat er eerst een orde is van waarden, rechten, instituties en gemeenschapsvormen en het democratische middel slechts daar wordt toegepast waar het geen kwaad kan, maar zelfs nuttig kan zijn, is de volgorde nu omgedraaid. Het democratisch proces bepaalt de rechten, de vrijheden en haar inhoud, de waarden en de institutionele en communautaire vormgeving van de samenleving. En dat nu is een uiterst kwalijke zaak.<br /><br />Want daarmee verlaat de democratie het terrein van de beproefde werkelijkheid en begeeft ze zich op het terrein van de illusie. De illusie om door middel van macht een maatschappelijke orde te bewerkstelligen en de illusie dat macht de legitimiteit verschaft om de menselijke persoon om te kneden naar de nieuwe maatschappelijke orde, creëert weliswaar een maatschappij die zelf in en bij deze illusie leeft - men aanvaardt namelijk de macht als legitimatiegrond -, maar leeft ondertussen in een kunstmatige omgeving die van binnenuit klopt en sterk lijkt, maar van buitenaf illusionair en zwak is.<br /><br /><strong>Pat Buchanans gronden van weerbaarheid</strong><br /><br />De vraagstelling rond de weerbaarheid van de democratie fixeert op de zogenaamde werkelijkheid van de democratie, maar verzwijgt categorisch - als we de discussie mee in aanmerking nemen - de werkelijke weerbaarheidsfactoren. Patrick Buchanan noemt enkele van deze weerbaarheidsfactoren in zijn nieuwste boek State of Emergency: taal, geloof, etniciteit, cultuur, grond en geheugen (memory) [2]. <br /><br />Buchanan poneert de ingrediënten van het volgens hem noodzakelijk patriottisme, tegenover de moderne tendens van progressieve liberalen en neoconservatieven, om de natie - i.c. de Amerikaanse natie - te laten bepalen door "creed" - een idee of ideologie. De idee van de natie zou dan verwoord zijn in zaken als "Grondwet", "democratie", en "gelijkheid". Buchanan zet in bij datgene dat "pre-constitutioneel is. Buchanan grijpt daarom terug op de "unwritten constitution": "America existed in the hearts of the people. The Constitution did not create the nation; the nation adopted the Constitution." Wat was deze "natie"? Buchanan: "... a particular nation and (to) kinfolk with whom they shared ties of blood, soil, and memory". Zoals Samuel Huntington zegt in zijn boek Who Are We?: "America is a founded society created by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers, alomost all of whom came from the British Isles. ... They initially defined America in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, and most importantly religion.". De natie wordt dus bepaald door zaken die dieper en verder reiken dan abstracte idealen als democratie en gelijkheid: zaken als afkomst, geloof, grond en taal.<br /><br />Deze zaken zijn de werkelijke constitutuerende factoren die een natie vormen en bepalen, niet de geschreven grondwet of de democratische idealen. Voor de democratie is er de natie. En voor de natie is er de cultuur en de natuur die de natie bepalen; en die daarin de politiek c.q. de democratie dienen te bepalen. Buchanan noemt verschillende voorbeelden van staatslieden van staten die weliswaar met de mond beleden dat hun land een "nation of creed" was en niet van "race and ancestry" (F.D. Roosevelt), maar die als het er op aan kwam hun eigen "creed" loochenden en om de natie te redden grepen naar nationalisme, geloof, patriottisme en cultuur. <br /><br />In 1942 interneerde Roosevelt vele Amerikanen van Japanse afkomst, ongeacht zijn eigen woorden. Toen Duitsland het communistische Rusland van Stalin binnenviel, greep Rusland terug op "Moedertje Rusland" en zelfs naar het Orthodoxe geloof; priesters die enkele jaren daarvoor nog massaal werden afgeslacht, zegenden toen opeens de "Grote Patriottische Oorlog". Hetzelfde valt te zeggen van Frankrijk dat zich presenteert als de ergenaam van Revolutie en Verlichting, waarvan Buchanan treffend zegt: "If the French cease to be the dominant tribe, adherence to Englightenment ideas will nog save France".<br /><br />Over het hedendaagse Amerika zegt Buchanan: "Should America lose her ethnic-cultural core and become a nation of nations, America will not survive. For nowhere on this earth can one find multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual nation that is not at risk. Democracy is not enough. Equality is not enough. Free markets are not enough - to hold a people together. Without patriotism, a love of a country and countrymen not for what they believe of profess but for who they are." En Buchanan citeert aansluitend hierop Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."<br /><br /><strong>Democratie als leugen</strong><br /><br />Wie de recente Amerikaanse politiek heeft gevolgd, weet hoe waar de constaterigen van Buchanan zijn. Net als de Fransen, Franklin Delano Roosevelt en Stalin zagen ok de neoconservatieven van de Bush-administration in dat hun ideologische programma niet voldoende was en is om het Amerikaanse volk warm te krijgen voor een oorlog en hun zonen hiervoor op te offeren [3]. Ook de neoconservatieven weten dat mensen niet bereid zijn hun levens te offeren voor democratie en vrije markt - to make the world safe for democracy. Het grijpen naar leugens en halve waarheden moest een sfeer oproepen van een levensbedreigde natie die daarom in moest grijpen in Irak. Zelfs de mensenrechten van miljoenen Irakezen, en de dood van twee miljoen van hen, was namelijk geen (!) grond voor Amerikaanse en Britse jongens hun eigen levens op te offeren. Democratie, mensenrechten en vrije markt moeten het namelijk altijd afleggen tegenover lijfsbehoud, patriottisme en de verdediging van bloedverwanten en eigen grond.<br /><br />De machthebbers van de Verenigde Staten en van andere landen wisten het, en maakten (en maken) dan ook misbruik van de werkelijke gronden voor weerbaarheid door de werkelijke motieven - die van Verlichting, democratie en vooruitgang - te vervangen door die van patriottisme, geloof en verdediging van grond en bloedverwanten.<br /><br />Eenzelfde voosheid is er te bespeuren bij hen die de Amerikaanse oorlog in Irak ondersteunen omdat Amerika de hoeder is van de waarden van de Verlichting en de democratie. Deze geluiden zijn menigmaal te horen uit de mond van de vertrokken Hirsi Ali, Sylvain Ephimenco in Trouw, Michiel Mans op HetVrijeVolk en Leon de Winter in Elsevier. Ook wijlen Theo van Gogh had er een handje van. De strijd voor een seculiere liberale staat in het Midden-Oosten is volgens hen een prijzenswaardige strijd, want een strijd tegen een achterlijke, religieuze en orthodoxe dreiging. Dat het vooral Amerikanen zijn die deze oorlog vechten, maakt hen ogenschijnlijk tot bondgenoten van dit land, maar schijn bedriegt. Amerika is een door en door religieus land waarvan de militairen zo mogelijk nog religieuzer (orthodox christelijker) zijn dan hun gemiddelde landgenoot.<br /><br />Het vreemde is nu dat men Amerika prijst om de oorlog en de offers die men brengt, maar dat men hen die werkelijk vecht en offert - de veelal religieuze Amerikanen hartgrondig haat. Men verafschuwt het fundamentalistische Amerika, dat bereid is te vechten. Maar men is bereid om er als parasieten van te profiteren. En daarmee is ook iets merkwaardigs aan de hand. Onder het Nazisme werden tal van bevolkingsgroepen als parasieten bestempeld die weggevaagd dienden te worden. Genoemde scribenten leven nu open en bloot als parasiet op het bloed van christelijke en joodse Amerikanen en Israëli's om deze later bij het slagen van hun missie weer af te danken en op de vuilnisbelt van de geschiedenis te zetten; de "bruinhemden" hebben dus ook hun lesje geleerd.<br /><br />De leugens omtrent de werkelijke motieven bij de neoconservatieven, de haat tegen de werkelijke motieven bij de libertijnse dwepers met het Amerikaanse beleid - het geeft aan in hoeverre de moderne democratische mens leeft in een schijnwereld van leugen, haat en bedrog. Men heeft de mond vol van democratie en gelijkheid, maar ondertussen gelooft men niet dat deze begrippen ons kunnen redden - en moet men zoals de neocons in Amerika grijpen naar leugens - en is men niet bereid ook maar iets te over te hebben om deze begrippen te redden - zoals onze libertijnse columnisten met hun seculiere missie.<br /><br /><strong>Democratie is niet genoeg</strong><br /><br />Het verzwijgen - en zelfs misbruiken - van de werkelijke gronden voor weerbaarheid is een constante in de democratische politiek. De voorbeelden tuimelen over elkaar heen voor wie de krant openslaat. Donner kon dan wel zo mooi democratisch en theoretisch doorredeneren en zijn hoop in het democratisch proces voorop stellen, ondertussen bleek dat veel Nederlanders niet zo'n sterk geloof in het democratisch proces hadden als Donner het had. En zelfs Donner zag zich genoodzaakt bij te draaien. Democratie is één ding - maar het is niet genoeg.<br /><br />Dit tekort van de democratie werd nog eens versterkt door drie acties die (toevalligerwijze?) op hetzelfde moment plaatsvonden als de discussie rond de uitspraken van Donner: ten eerste het aannemen van een wetsvoorstel door de Tweede Kamer dat de corrigerende tik van ouders verbiedt [4]; ten tweede de presentatie van het Manifest van kunstenaars voor de vrijheid van meningsuiting [5]; en ten derde het voorstel van het CDA om staatsgevaarlijke partijen te verbieden [6]. <br /><br />Alledrie de gebeurtenissen illustreren het feit dat de democratie bezig is schromelijk tekort te schieten. Op de één of andere manier blijkt er iets te zijn verdwenen dat onze democratie weerbaar maakte en daar niet mee samenviel; want dat wat ons weerbaar maakte, is er niet meer, maar de democratie is er nog wel. Het gevolg van het verdwijnen van het extra-democratische dat ons sterk maakte is niet dat men op zoek gaat naar het verloren gegane extra- of pre-democratische, maar dat men ondertussen de democratie zèlf dicht timmert.<br /><br />Men probeert alle mogelijke zwakke pleken van een democratie dicht te timmeren door bijvoorbeeld potentieel gevaarlijke partijen - gevaarlijk voor het democratische systeem - te kunnen verbieden. Deze pogingen zijn van verschillende aard. Recente pogingen zijn onder meer de presentatie van het manifest De vrijheid van meningsuiting is net zo ononderhandelbaar als de gelijkheid dat is opgesteld door filmmaker Eddy Terstall en de cabaretiers Hans Teeuwen en Diederik Ebbinge. De doelstelling van het manifest is het rechts op godslastering en het beledigen van godsdienstige groeperingen. De absolute vrijheid die het manifest voorstaat is dus verbonden aan de abolute onvrijheid anders te denken over gelijkheid van alles en iedereen en de absolute politiek-maatschappelijke plicht alle restanten van oude voorkeuren en tradities terzijde te stellen. De politiekcorrecte lafheid spreekt alleen al hier uit: men zal nooit het absolute recht opeisen om antidemocratisch te mogen zijn, voor geweld, tegen de rechtsstaat, etc. Het manifest is de keerzijde van een dichtgetimmerde democratie waarin het systeem zelf nooit en te nimmer ter discussie dient te staan.<br /><br />Een andere soortelijke poging kwam uit een geheel andere hoek: het voorstel van het CDA om staatsgevaarlijke partijen aan te pakken. Dit voorstel, dat werd ondersteund door partijen als de SGP en de PVV, wil de mogelijkheid creëren om partijen die principes hanteren die onverenigbaar zijn met de democratische rechtsstaat te verbieden, zoals sharia-partijen en neo-fascistische partijen. Volgens het CDA is er in onze samenleving geen plaats voor partijen waarvan de ideeën onvermijdelijk leiden tot strafbare feiten of ertoe leiden dat onze democratische rechtsorde terzijde wordt geschoven. <br /><br />Een voorbeeld van andere aard is het verbod op "de pedagogische tik". Door dit verbod probeert de overheid haar geweldsmonopolie zo absoluut te maken zodat het ouderlijk tuchtrecht er aan moet geloven: zelfs een eenvoudige tik op de billen van je ongehoorzame kind mag straks niet meer. Met name dit laatste punt is exemplarisch voor wat er gaande is. Door het schrappen van het ouderlijk tuchtrecht wordt het laatste restje burgerlijke rechtshandhaving afgeschaft. Het ideaaltype van de geweldsloze mens is fundamenteel weerloos ten aanzien van een staat en ten aanzien van zijn vijanden.<br /><br /><strong>De aanval van de democratie op de ziel van de mens</strong><br /><br />Door het schrappen van het ouderlijk tuchtrecht laat de democratie zien dat haar einddoel de weerloze en overgeleverde ziel is van elk mens. De mens die vreemd is van elke vorm van geweld, maar wel voortdurend wordt geconfronteerd met de latente machts- en geweldsexpositie van de democratische rechtsstaat raakt door en door murw geslagen. Waar het ouderlijk tucht de ziel van een kind vertrouwd raakt met een ingeslepen rechtsbesef en tegelijkertijd oefent in de soms noodzakelijke werkelijkheid van het geweld om het recht te handhaven, is de boodschap van de overheid deze: onder elke omstandigheid, zelfs die van de totale rechtsverkrachting, dient de burger zich ten allen tijde te onderwerpen aan een almachtige staat die het absolute geweldsmonopolie bezit.<br /><br />Behalve het feit dat het elimineren van elke potentiële opstand ook een eliminatie van het recht van opstand betekent en daarmee een directe aanval is op de ontstaanswijze van onze natie in de zestiende eeuw, is het schrappen van het ouderlijk tuchtrecht een regelrechte aanval op de predemocratische werkelijkheid die aan elke democratie vooraf gaat. Deze predemocratische werkelijkheid gaat namelijk uit de familie die zelf recht spreekt en orde handhaaft zonder bemoeienis van een staatsmacht. <br /><br />Net als elke vitale institutie, houdt het instituut "familie" van nature zichzelf in stand. De kracht en de weerbaarheid van de instituties is hierin gelegen dat men zelf in staat is voor zichzelf op te komen en het gemene goed te verdedigen. Democratie is een directe aanval op deze notie. De democratie keert de rug naar de instituties door het vormen van een cultuur van afhankelijkheid. Alle factoren die een mens sterk maken, en hem eventueel bereid maken ervoor te offeren, plaatst een democratie buiten haar centrum. Familie, kerk, wapenbezit, gemeenschap, huwelijk, grondbezit, bloedband - alle zaken die ooit het sterke fundament van onze maatschappij vormden, worden door de moderne democratische rechtsstaat ontmanteld en/of buiten werking gesteld.<br /><br />De democratie minimaliseert als het ware de weerbare maatschappij, maar daarentegen maximaliseert de democratie zichzelf. Door uit te gaan van de generale volkswil annexeert ze per definitie elke persoonlijke verantwoordelijkheid met de mogelijkheid deze op te heffen en buiten werking te stellen. De generale volkswil bepaalt dat democratisch genomen besluiten door het volk zijn genomen, en dus door iedereen worden gedragen en derhalve door iedereen gehoorzaamd dienen te worden. De democratie maakt elk mens medeverantwoordelijk voor elk potentieel immoreel besluit; de morele zuiverheid van de ziel wordt door de democratie per definitie buiten werking gesteld. Dat de innerlijke weerbaarheid van de mens hierdoor op losse schroeven komt te staan, interesseert de democraten niet. De democratie verdraagt geen sterke burgers met sterke zekerheden en rechten. De discussie rond de grondrechten laat zien dat zelfs deze "onvervreemdbare" rechten "in beweging" zijn - op zichzelf al een contradictio in terminis.<br /><br /><strong>A Republic, not a Democracy</strong><br /><br />Is er een alternatief voorhanden voor de democratie? We hebben verschillende malen verwezen naar de Amerikaanse situatie en naar de grondwet - the Constitution - van dit land. Het is opmerkelijk dat de opstellers van deze Constitution zich ook over de vraag hebben gebogen: een democratie of een republiek. De Founding Fathers kozen toen bewust voor de republiek en tegen de democratie omdat deze laatste regeringsvorm op den duur altijd tot tirannie zou leiden. Van alles haalde men uit de kast om maar te ontkomen aan de tirannie van "de helft plus één" en een dictatuur van de massa. Door middel van scheiding der machten, een stelsel van kiesmannen, de "State Rights", enz. enz. ontwikkelden zij een systeem dat radicale en directe democratie zou voorkomen en zodoende de vrijheden van de burger zou waarborgen. Met "A Republic, not a Democracy" is Amerika - meer dan Europa - in staat gebleken de weerbare en sterke burger te handhaven, ondanks de vloedgolf van democratie, modernisme en massacultuur die - net als over Europa - ook over dit land heen is gespoeld.<br /><br />Maar voor de machthebbers in Europa heeft de weerloze, immorele, eigenschapsloze, offerloze democratische mens teveel voordelen om los te laten. Weerloze, onverschillige mensen zijn ongevaarlijke mensen voor de gevestigde orde. Ze slikken alles, consumeren alles en lopen in de pas van elke verandering. Het werkt uitstekend. Totdat er externe dreigingen optreden: dreigingen vanuit de echte, harde werkelijkheid waarin mensen zich moeten weren en naties weerbaar moeten zijn om te overleven. Dan blijkt hoe door en door ziek het democratisch systeem is. Ze keert zich dan namelijk niet in de eerste plaats tegen de werkelijke vijanden, maar tegen de eigen burgers. Dreiging veroorzaakt onrust en onrust veroorzaakt de dreiging van weerbare (of om weerbaarheid roepende) burgers. Onvervreemdbare grondrechten blijken dan opeens niet meer te bestaan. Oude instituties en waarden dienen dan opeens in versneld tempo opgeruimd te worden. Elke vorm van weerbaarheid moet uit het besef van elke burger gewist te worden, tot en met de simpele pedagogische tik.<br /><br />De Britse staatsman Winston Churchill zei eens: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." De geschiedenis heeft laten zien dat Churchill maar deels gelijk had. Veel regeringsvormen zijn slecht gebleken, maar de democratie doet er ondertussen niet meer voor onder. Wie de geschiedenis van Engeland na de Tweede Wereldoorlog ziet, ziet een geschiedenis van een land in verval. Die ziet Churchill op decadente wijze zijn levensdagen slijten aan de Franse Rivièra met cocktails en die ziet in onze dagen een moraal vervallen maatschappij die op instorten staat. De democratie heeft het niet gered. En we moeten zelfs concluderen: het was en is nooit de democratie geweest die het Westen sterk en weerbaar maakte. Het was iets anders. Het was iets wat een land als Amerika (nog wel) in staat stelt om te vechten, maar ons niet.<br /><br />Een onderzoek naar de weerbaarheid van de democratie zal zich dus op dit "andere" moeten richten: de instituties, de onvervreemdbare rechten (en plichten), de rol van het geloof, van de bloedverwantschap, de taal en traditie, de eigen grond, de weerplicht van de burger, etc. Zo'n onderzoek zou moeten concluderen dat de democratie de pre- en extrademocratische werkelijkheid heeft verwaarloosd en zelfs heeft afgebroken. De alternatieven zijn voorhanden. Het belangrijkste is de republiek. Een land als de Verenigde Staten laat zien dat een republiek, meer dan een democratie, in staat is geweest de extra- en predemocratische elementen te bewaren: familie, grond, bezit, wapenbezit, etc. Maar een land als de Verenigde Staten laat ook zien dat zelfs door - bij machte van - democratische mechanismen deze oude, beproefde en sterke basis wordt vernield. En dat er uiteindelijk (neoconservatieve) machthebbers gekozen kunnen worden die door misbruik te maken van de oude waarden mensenlevens verspillen aan een democratisch experiment aan de andere kant van de wereld. <br /><br />Hoeveel mensenlevens moet de democratie nog kosten voor we in de gaten krijgen hoe voos dit systeem eigenlijk is? En hoeveel vrijheden en rechten moeten er sneuvelen voordat we te laat constateren dat we zitten opgescheept met een weerloze burger? De fundamentele weerloosheid van de democratie maakt van elke democratische staat een failed state; d.i. een staat die niet in staat is om voor de primaire veiligheid van de eigen burgers te zorgen. En dat is logisch. Want alles wat voor veiligheid zorgt is per definitie niet democratisch. En wie daar democratie op los laat, vernietigt vroeg of laat elk restje weerbaarheid. En dat is vervelend. Want daar bevinden u en ik ons straks middenin.<br /><br /><strong>Noten</strong><br />[1] Weerbaarheid democratie onderzoeken in Algemeen Dagblad d.d. 14/09/2006.<br />[2] Patrick J. Buchanan, State of Emergency - The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, New York, NY, 2006.<br />[3]Zie voor een kritische analyse van de neoconservatieve agenda het belangwekkende essay van Claes G. Ryn: Leo Strauss and History: The Philosopher as Conspirator in Humanitas Vol. XVIII, Nos. 1 & 2, p. 55.<br />[4] "Ook een pedagogische tik op de billen mag straks niet meer": in Trouw d.d. 14/09/2006.<br />[5] "Manifest van kunstenaars voor vrijheid van meningsuiting": in Trouw d.d. 14/09/2006.<br />[6] CDA wil verbod op shariapartij en pedopartij op nu.nl d.d. 14/09/2006.<br /><br /><em>Erik van Goor</em><br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://openorthodoxie.literatesolutions.org/Members/administrator/folder.2006-03-07.7968657947/document.2006-09-15.4539033316/view">Open Orthodoxie</a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nieuw+rechts" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/paleo-conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatief-revolutionair" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nationalisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Fortuynisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nieuwe+politiek" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://nl.novopress.info/"></a><a href="http://grafmonumentenzorg.blogspot.com/"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1158689989824708432006-09-19T20:19:00.000+02:002006-09-19T20:19:50.656+02:00CARL SCHMITT door Tom POTOMS op Open Orthodoxie, 19 september 2006.<strong><em>Van de conservatieve denkers is Carl Schmitt misschien een van de meest omstreden denker. Velen zullen hem dan ook markeren als wegbereider en ideoloog van het nazisme. Anderen kennen de persoon en zijn werk niet zo goed en anderen hebben nog nooit in hun leven van Carl Schmitt gehoord.</em></strong><br /><br />Ik zal in dit stuk eerst de persoon en het leven van Carl Schmitt situeren en beschrijven, daarna zal ik overgaan op een begrip dat hij onderschreef, namelijk de zogenaamde “conservatieve revolutie”. Hierna richt ik me op de fictie en feiten over de verhouding tussen Carl Schmitt en het conservatisme, en in het bijzonder die met het nazisme. Wanneer ik over het laatste wat zeg, zal ik tevens een tussenstop in Italië maken.<br /><br /><strong>Leven en werk Carl Schmitt (1888-1985)</strong><br /><br />Schmitt werd geboren op 11 juli 1888. De datum van 11 juli heeft voor mij als Vlaming een extra toegevoegde waarde, maar goed. De plaats waar hij werd geboren was het Duitse Plettenberg, in Westfalen. Hij studeerde politieke wetenschappen en rechtsleer in de universiteiten van Berlijn, München en Straatsburg. Hij behaalde zijn diploma aan het toen nog (1915) Duitse Straatsburg. <br /><br />In 1921 werd hij professor aan de universiteit van Greifswald, waar hij zijn eerste belangrijkste essay: Die Diktatur schreef. In Die Diktatur beschrijft hij de toestand van de toenmalige ‘Weimarrepubliek’ en zijn ideeën hieromtrent. In 1919 was hij al in aanraking gekomen met de chaos en anarchie dat het uiteenvallen van het Duitse keizerrijk na de Eerste Wereldoorlog impliceerde. Toen was hij tijdelijk als staatsambtenaar in München actief, toen juist de communistische staatsgreep in Beieren en München plaatsvond, die uitmondde in de zgn. ‘Rätterrepubliek’. Revolutionaire volksbendes bestormden omliggende kantoren en gebouwen en schoten willekeurig officieren, juristen en ambtenaren neer. Carl Schmitt overleefde het, maar het liet toch een serieuze angst voor verzwakking in orde en ‘rule of law and order’ bij.<br /><br />Schmitt maakt in het essay begrip van een “legale en wettelijke dictatuur, zoals hij zag bij de dictators in Rome, en verschillend van "de autoritaire dictatuursvorm". Als jurist verdedigde hij maar al te vaak, ook in dit werk, artikel 48 van de nieuwe Weimarrepubliek. In artikel 48 staat namelijk dat de president in tijden van instabiliteit en incohensie in de politieke organen, zelf decreten zonder de legislatieve tak mag goedkeuren en laten uitvoeren. <br /><br />In 1922 werkte hij aan de universiteit van Bonn als universitair medewerker; hier publiceerde hij een tweede belangrijk essay: Politische Theologie. Wie in dit werk een uitgebreide theologische en filosofische behandeling verwacht, komt verraden uit. Schmnitt geeft namelijk in de eerste plaats vooral een uitgebreide behandeling van de Franse contra-revolutionaire schrijvers, zoals Louis De Bonald, Joseph De maistre en de Spanjaard Donoso Cortés. Een jaar later komt hij met zijn Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus waarin hij een duidelijk pessimistische instelling t.o.v. de partijpolitieke democratie weergaf. Hij beargumenteerde dat een parlementaire democratie staat of valt met rationeel denken, en dat in realiteit de uitgevoerde democratie vaak wordt bevochten op irrationele elementen, en vaak met onredelijke akkoorden, afgesloten in “rokerige ruimten, met sigaar en pint”. <br /><br />Vrijheid is in zijn visie enkel en alleen mogelijk via christelijke, in zijn ogen, katholieke wegen en een christelijk-katholieke moraal. Vrijheid kan niet door politici of door democratie verkregen worden, zoals hij zei: "Bei politischer Scheingleichheit muss ein anderes Gebiet, auf welchem die substanziellen ungleichheitensich dann durchsetzen, heute z.B das Ökonomische, die Politik beherrschen."<br /><br />Speciaal in zijn essay is ook zijn strikte scheiding van de ideeën van het liberalisme(scheiding der machten) en democratie in de zin van een natuurrechterlijke democratie, waar gehoorzaamheid en standen toch bestaan, en nog eens verwijst hij naar het voorbeeld van de Romeinse Republiek, waar een aantal geclassificeerde personen de macht uitvoeren en de andere groepen gehoorzamen, een soort van ‘balances of standing’ (evenwicht der standen). <br /><br />En weer bleef Schmitt bij verschillende universiteiten de revue passeren, eerst, in 1926, werd hij professor rechtsleer bij de Hochschule für Politik in Berlijn en in 1932 was hij in Cologne aan het lesgeven. <br /><br /><strong>"Het begrip politiek"</strong><br /><br />In deze stad – Keulen - werd zijn belangrijkste werk “Der Begriff des Politischen”(het begrip politiek) gepubliceerd. In dit werk geeft hij zijn anti-liberale en anti-modernistische opstelling een nog radicalere toon. Hij kan in dit werk zelfs de meest hedendaagse en dus met een sterk liberaal-modernistische overtuiging, doen twijfelen aan de morele basis van de democratische denkbeelden. Schmitt heeft het in dit werk ook niet alleen maar over het liberalisme als vijand, maar de gehele modernistische opvatting. Hij geeft de staat een aantal taken en benoemt deze ‘het politieke’; het is vergelijkbaar met wat de kerken van autoriteit op vlak van religie.<br /><br />In het boek geeft hij een weergave van hoe hij denkt dat de geschiedenis in zijn werk gaat, onder andere door zijn theorie van de “opeenvolging der tijdperken en kerngebieden”, in de middeleeuwen ligt de nadruk op de theologie (sofisme); de moderne maatschappij is dan overgegaan op de metafysisca en dan, in de 19de en 20ste eeuw, krijgen we een rare combinatie van romantiek-esthetiek en een economisch-technische tendens. Het is in deze laatste overgang dat Schmitt de negatieve kanten van de moderne maatschappij beschouwt: <br /><br />"Want de weg van het metafysische en morele naar het economische gaat over het esthetische, en via de nog zo sublieme esthetische consumptie en het nog zo esthetische genot loopt de zekerste en gemakkelijkste weg naar de algemene economisering van het geestelijke leven, en naar een mentaliteit die productie en consumptie als de centrale categorieën van het menselijke leven beschouwt."<br /><br />Een ander argument tegen de moderne maatschappij en de liberale democratie is dat deze twee principes: een politieke democratie en de verlichtingsideologieën helemaal vanuit een andere grondslag werken en functioneren, politiek is in essentie het streven naar collectieve gemene goed, terwijl de verlichting uitgaat van een individuele wil. In zijn gedachtegang kan een liberale geest op een zuivere politiek alleen maar geminimaliseerd worden tot een strijd tussen economische en technische factoren. Uiteindelijk leiden deze discussies volgens hem tot een ‘gepalaver’ en daardoor heeft niemand nog de moed of de wil om op te komen en te sterven voor het ideaal van ‘de politiek’. <br /><br />Een belangrijk gegeven in het werk van Schmitt is zeker ook zijn verhouding met de denkwijze van Thomas Hobbes, die bekend is geworden vanwege zijn denkwijze van een seculiere staat waarin de staat de vrede en orde absoluut moet controleren. Schmitt en Hobbes staan op dezelfde lijn wat betreft hun idee van ‘de politiek’. En dat is dat het allemaal te maken heeft met de ‘natuurtoestand’ (de ‘status naturalis’). Maar in het erkennen van de politiek als reflectie van de natuurtoestand duikt al een eerste verschil tussen Hobbes en Schmitt op. Hobbes beschouwt de politiek als een noodzakelijk instrument om die natuurtoestand, wat hij beschouwt als een eeuwigdurende strijd tussen individuen, te bestrijden. Bij Schmitt gaat het om een vriend-vijand-distinctie die exclusief verwijst naar kleine gemeenschappen. Bij Hobbes staat een staat voor het bedwingen van dood en strijd omwille van het beschermen van individuen, terwijl bij Schmitt de ware aard van politiek en de essentie van een politiek doel juist is dat mensen er voor willen vechten en strijden. En indien dat niet zo is betekend dat, volgens Schmitt, dat het politieke systeem geen vertrouwen heeft. En als dat gebeurt heeft politiek geen zin meer, want dan gaat men over naar de meest extreme anti-politieke stellingnames.<br /><br />Het vriend-vijand-principe van Schmitt is het kenmerk van zijn gedachtegoed, zoals hij zei: "en als dus zelfs de eventualiteit van een onderscheiding van vriend en vijand ophoudt te bestaan, dan is er alleen nog politiek-vrije wereldbeschouwing, cultuur, beschaving, economie, moraal, recht, kunst, amusement, enzovoort, maar geen politiek en geen staat meer."<br /><br />Als we deze woorden lezen lijken ze veel actueler en belangrijker dan dat het toen geschreven en gepubliceerd werd. Het visionaire in zijn denken is voor mij echt fantastisch en spreekt mij het meeste aan zijn werk. Schmitt verafschuwt dus duidelijk een wereld die zich oriënteert op het amusement en die voortdurend geneigd is om elk conflict te neutraliseren. Deze gedachtegang vinden we ook bij Edmund Burke terug, en in grote mate is het werk van Schmitt, zeker zijn interpretatie van genot en pijn, sterk beïnvloedt door de grote visionair en boegbeeld van elke moderne conservatief, namelijk Edmund Burke.<br /><br /><strong>Conservatieve revolutie</strong><br /><br />Ondertussen groeide de inpopulariteit van het Weimar-regime en groeide de bewegingen op de extremen van de politiek-ideologische as. Een groepje Duitse intellectuelen begon zich meer en meer te radicaliseren en af te zetten tegen het politieke bewind. De filosoof Armin Mohler verzamelde een heterogene coalitie van nationalisten, anti-verlichtingsdenkers, anti-parlementaristen, monarchisten, en meer rechts-liberale tot conservatieve intellectuelen. <br /><br />Een echt programma hadden de conservatieve revolutionairen niet en in feite was het maar een mooie verzamelnaam voor een grote groep van sterk uiteenlopende karakters en afkomsten en bovenal ideeën. Het belangrijkste wat hun bijeenbracht was hun afkeer voor het Weimarregime, maar waarom of wat er in de plaats gebracht moest worden, waren ze het allemaal niet eens. Sommigen die onder de brede noemer geplaatst werden, zoals Stefan George, waren dichter, anderen, zoals de elitaristisch-nihilistische Ernst Jünger, waren schrijver. En weer anderen waren militairen, filosofen, arbeiders, enzovoort.<br /><br />Men zegt vaak dat deze conservatieve revolutionaire denkers wegbereiders waren van het nazisme, maar dan komt rechtsstreeks de vraag: wat is nazisme en fascisme? In Italië is het fascisme ontstaan uit een uiteenlopende groep van Italiaanse intellectuelen, arbeiders en militairen die vanwege de economisch slechte toestand een manier zochten om beter te worden; aanvankelijk waren de toplui van het fascisme (o.a. Mussolini zelf) socialistisch, zelfs marxistisch ingesteld, maar uit ongenoegen van de socialistische partij stapten ze eruit en richten ze, onder leiding van Mussolini een nieuwe fascistische partij op. Naast oud-socialisten kwamen er ook conservatieven, liberalen en nationalisten bij, dit werd het begin van het fascisme in Italië.<br /><br />In Duitsland kan men ook het nazisme als een brede waaier beschouwen, vele toplui uit de NSDAP waren afkomstig uit linkse hoek, of zeer apolitieke hoek, meestal ging het om gefrustreerde mensen die iets wilden doen om hun leven te verbeteren. Economisch gezien waren de nazi’s ook enorm uitgebreid in stellingname; sommigen waren laissez-faire kapitalistisch, anderen corporatistisch ingesteld. Veel conservatieven zagen in de NSDAP een schuilhaven om toch iets te kunnen doen, zo werkten vele monarchisten mee met de nazi’s, terwijl de meeste lieden uit de nazi-top absoluut republikeins waren ingesteld.<br /><br />Conservatieven werden misleid en verleid door de nazi’s, en sommige prachtige boeken, zoals Het Spinnenweb, van de vroegere conservatieve Oostenrijkse schrijver Joseph Roth geven dit goed weer. Later zouden de meeste conservatieve denkers toch tot inzicht komen, en werden de meesten anti-nazistisch, en werden ze een kern van het Duitse verzet tegen Hitler en de nazi’s, onder andere Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, Poppitz, Von Beck, Olbricht en natuurlijk Stauffenberg werden de vertegenwoordigers en uitvoerders van de anti-nazistische staatsgrepen, vooral bekend is de aanslag op 20 juli 1944. <br /><br />Carl Schmitt werd ook verleid door de nazi-beweging en werd lid in 1933, toen hij in Berlijn doceerde, en toen de nazi’s aan de macht kwamen. Ook bezag hij aanvankelijk Hitler als zijn gedroomde ‘Romeins-legalistische’ dictator, en zo verdedigde hij ook, in zijn positie van jurist, de houding van Hitler met betrekking tot de interne putsch binnen de nazi-beweging op de ‘nacht der lange messen’(1934). Schmitt begon zich meer en meer te radicaliseren, en stelde zich voor als een harde anti-semitisch denker, later werd hij echter door een publicatie van een SS-blad in een slecht daglicht geplaatst omdat hij een opportunist, en bovenal, een katholiek was; hij verloor zijn publiekelijke functies, maar bleef toch nog professor aan de universiteit van Berlijn.<br /><br />In 1945, op het einde van de Tweede Wereldoorlog werd hij door Amerikaanse troepen gevangen genomen en weggevoerd naar een interneringskamp, waar hij tot 1946 bleef. Hierna keerde hij terug naar zijn geboortestad Plettenberg. Hij werd later wat vergeten en was zijn positie in de intellectuele top van toen wat kwijt gespeelt, toch bleef hij in de jaren ’50 onderzoek doen en doceren rond internationaal recht, en hij ontving verschillende persoonlijkheden uit de Duitse en buitenlandse intelligentsia. Op 7 april 1985 overleed Carl Schmitt.<br /><br /><strong>Besluit en conclusie</strong><br /><br />Carl Schmitt staat nog steeds bekend als een van de meest controversiële denkers in de geschiedenis, vooral met betrekking tot zijn verhouding met het nazisme. Voor conservatieven is hij een beetje een vergeten persoonlijkheid, en velen zijn hem totaal vergeten; in zijn denken vinden moderne conservatieven, en ik spreek voor mezelf, veel inspirerende dingen, die ook een Burkeaans tintje hebben, vooral met betrekking tot zijn denkwijze rond pijn en genot.<br /><br />Anderzijds vind je als conservatief ook heel wat totalitaire trekjes in zijn denken, het feit dat hij, ondanks hij het niet eens is met Hobbes, maar toch door deze denker werd gefascineerd, zegt al genoeg. Zijn theorie van natuurtoestand heeft hij gewoon van Hobbes overgenomen en dan een wat conservatievere cultuurkritiek bij geplaatst, maar toch blijft ook hij draaien in een modernistisch discours en kan hij niet echt raken aan de fundamenten van het modernisme.<br /><br />Carl Schmitt is niet anti-revolutionair, maar contrarevolutionair, en dat is wel degelijk een verschil, Burkeaanse conservatieven en traditionele conservatieven zijn sowieso tegen een revolutie, omdat dat de maatschappij nooit goed kan doen, vanwege de feilbaarheid van de kennis en ratio van de mens. Contrarevolutionairen slagen er vaak niet in om de basis van revoluties te bestrijden. Ze slagen er niet in om de fundamenten waarop het is gebouwd neer te halen, en reageren nogal machiavellistisch als ze zelf gebruik willen maken van de modernistische uitvoeringen en middelen zoals revoluties, radicale omwentelingen. En daar zijn anti-revolutionairen sterk bevreesd voor. Want een revolutie in de ene of andere zin is, in analogie met Edmund Burke, nooit goed voor een ‘civil society’.<br /><br />Een conservatieve invulling van traditionele entiteiten vind je ook minder sterk bij Schmitt terug, omdat hij als jurist teveel aandacht heeft over de werking van de staat, en daardoor verloor hij zijn grootste vijand, al conservatief, een beetje uit het oog.<br /><br />Vele zaken in zijn denken zijn echter zeer goed, maar ik ben geen anti-democraat; ik geloof in een democratie. Ik geloof niet in de onfeilbaarheid van dat systeem, zoals Churchill ook al zei: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” Ik steun hem volledig in zijn bewoording: democratie is de minst slechte vorm, maar zeker niet de beste en perfecte. Die kan trouwens nooit bestaan. Ook Andreas Kinneging legt in zijn boek Geografie van goed en kwaad het falen en de negatieve kanten van een democratie uit, vooral met betrekking tot het meerderheidsprincipe waar onlangs ook minister Donner duidelijk laat zien waar een ultra-democratisch denken gevaarlijk kan zijn.<br /><br /><em>Tom Potoms</em><br />Bron: <a href="http://openorthodoxie.literatesolutions.org/forum/document.2006-09-19.9559874509/view">Open Orthodoxie</a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nieuw+rechts" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/paleo-conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatief-revolutionair" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nationalisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Fortuynisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nieuwe+politiek" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://nl.novopress.info/"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1157839198872994522006-09-09T23:54:00.000+02:002006-09-09T23:59:59.133+02:00'Can the West defeat the Islamist threat? Here are ten reasons why not' door David SELBOURNE in TimesOnLine, 9 september 2006.<strong><em>LET US SUPPOSE, for the sake of argument, that the war declared by al-Qaeda and other Islamists is under way. Let us further suppose that thousands of “terrorist” attacks carried out in Islam’s name during the past decades form part of this war; and that conflicts that have spread to 50 countries and more, taking the lives of millions — including in inter-Muslim blood-shedding — are the outcome of what Osama bin Laden has called “conducting jihad for the sake of Allah”. </em></strong><br /><br />If such war is under way, there are ten good reasons why, as things stand, Islam will not be defeated in it.<br /><br /><strong>1)</strong> The first is the extent of political division in the non-Muslim world about what is afoot. Some reject outright that there is a war at all; others agree with the assertion by the US President that “the war we fight is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century”. Divided counsels have also dictated everything from “dialogue” to the use of nuclear weapons, and from reliance on “public diplomacy” to “taking out Islamic sites”, Mecca included. Adding to this incoherence has been the gulf between those bristling to take the fight to the “terrorist” and those who would impede such a fight, whether from domestic civil libertarian concerns or from rivalrous geopolitical calculation. <br /><br /><strong>2)</strong> The second reason why, as things stand, Islam will not be defeated is that the strengths of the world community of Muslims are being underestimated, and the nature of Islam misunderstood. It is neither a “religion of peace” nor a “religion hijacked” or “perverted” by “the few”. Instead, its moral intransigence and revived ardours, its jihadist ethic and the refusal of most diaspora Muslims to “share a common set of values” with non-Muslims are all one, and justified by the Koran itself. <br /><br />Islam is not even a religion in the conventional sense of the term. It is a transnational political and ethical movement that believes that it holds the solution to mankind’s problems. It therefore holds that it is in mankind’s own interests to be subdued under Islam’s rule. Such belief therefore makes an absurdity of the project to “democratise” Muslim nations in the West’s interests, an inversion that Islam cannot accept and, in its own terms, rightly so. It renders naive, too, the distinction between the military and political wings of Islamic movements; and makes Donald Rumsfeld’s assertion in June 2005 that the insurgents in Iraq “don’t have vision, they’re losers” merely foolish. In this war, if there is a war, the boot is on the other foot. <br /><br /><strong>3)</strong> Indeed, the third reason why Islam will not be defeated, as things stand, is the low level of Western leadership, in particular in the United States. During the half-century of the Islamic revival, it has shown itself at sixes and sevens both diplomatically and militarily. It has been without a sense of strategic direction, and been unable to settle upon coherent war plans. It has even lacked the gifts of language to make its purposes plain. Or, as Burke put it in March, 1775, “a great empire and little minds go ill together”. In this war with Islam, if it is a war, the combination bodes defeat. <br /><br /><strong>4)</strong> Next is the contribution to the disarray of Western policy-making being made by the egotistical competitiveness, and in some cases hysterics, of “experts” and commentators on Islam. They include hyperventilating Islamophobes as well as academic apologists for the worst that is being done in Islam’s name. On this battleground, with its personalised blogsites to assist self-promotion, many seem to think that their opinions are more important than the issues upon which they are passing judgment; and amid the babel of advisory voices, policy has become increasingly inconsistent. <br /><br /><strong>5)</strong> The fifth disablement is to be found in the confusion of “progressives” about the Islamic advance. With their political and moral bearings lost since the defeat of the “socialist project”, many on the Left have only the fag-end of anti-colonial positions on which to take their stand. To attribute the West’s problems to our colonial past contains some truth. But it is again to misunderstand the inner strength of Islam’s revival, which is owed not to victimhood but to advancing confidence in its own belief system. <br /><br />Moreover, to Islam’s further advantage, it has led most of today’s “progressives” to say little, or even to keep silent, about what would once have been regarded as the reactionary aspects of Islam: its oppressive hostility to dissent, its maltreatment of women, its supremacist hatred of selected out-groups such as Jews and gays, and its readiness to incite and to use extremes of violence against them. Mein Kampf circulates in Arab countries under the title Jihadi. <br /><br /><strong>6)</strong> The sixth reason for Islam’s growing strength is the vicarious satisfaction felt by many non-Muslims at America’s reverses. Those who feel such satisfaction could be regarded as Trojan horses, a cavalry whose number is legion and which is growing. For some, their principle — or anti-principle — is that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. Others believe their refusal of support for the war with Islam, if there is such a war, is a righteous one. But the consequences are the same: Islam’s advance is being borne along by Muslims and non-Muslims together. <br /><br /><strong>7)</strong> The seventh reason lies in the moral poverty of the West’s, and especially America’s, own value system. Doctrines of market freedom, free choice and competition — or “freedom ’n’ liberty” — are no match for the ethics of Islam and Sharia, like them or not. Yet in the “battle for hearts and minds” the US First Cavalry Division saw fit to set up “Operation Adam Smith” in Iraq to teach marketing skills, among other things, to local entrepreneurs. There can be no victory here. Or, as Sheikh Mohammed al-Tabatabi told thousands of worshippers in Baghdad in May 2003: “The West calls for freedom and liberty. Islam rejects such liberty. True liberty is obedience to Allah.” <br /><br /><strong>8)</strong> The next indication that Islam’s advance will continue lies in the skilful use being made of the media and of the world wide web in the service both of the “electronic jihad” and the bamboozling of Western opinion by Muslim spokesmen. It is also a political enterprise in which Muslims and non-Muslims can now be found acting together in furthering the reach of Islam’s world view; the help being given by Western producers and broadcasters to al-Jazeera is the most notable instance of it. <br /><br /><strong>9)</strong> The ninth factor guaranteeing Islam’s onward march is the West’s dependency on the material resources of Arab and Muslim countries. In April 1917, Woodrow Wilson, recommending to the US Congress an American declaration of war against Germany, could say that “we have no selfish ends to serve”. American levels of consumption make no such statement possible now. The US is, so to speak, over a barrel. It will remain so. <br /><br /><strong>10)</strong> Finally, the West is convinced that its notions of technology-driven modernity and market-driven prog- ress are innately superior to the ideals of “backward” Islam. This is an old delusion. In 1899, Winston Churchill asserted that there was “no stronger retrograde force in the world” than Islam. More than a century later, it is fondly believed that sophisticated hardware and Star Wars defences will ensure Western mastery in this war, if it is a war. <br /><br />But as the Saudi “scholar” Suleiman al-Omar declared in June 2004: “Islam is advancing according to a steady plan. America will be destroyed.” As things stand, given the ten factors set out here, he is more likely to be proved right than wrong. <br /><br /><br /><em>David Selbourne</em> is the author of The Losing Battle with Islam, which was published in the United States in November last year<br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2349195,00.html">TimesOnLine</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1157652034051672732006-09-07T19:58:00.000+02:002006-09-07T20:00:34.446+02:00Voor de markt, tegen vermarkting: Een Paleo-Economie door Tom POTOMS op OpenOrthodoxie, 7 september 2006.<em><strong>Een paleoconservatieve visie op de economie geven, is niet makkelijk. Toch is het nodig. Zonder visie op economie is elke werkelijkheidsbeschouwing onvolledig. Ook die van de paleoconservatief. Paleoconservatieven denken echter niet allemaal hetzelfde over markt en economie. Waarin denken ze anders en waarin hetzelfde? Ikzelf neem Wilhelm Röpke als voorbeeld van een paleoconservatieve econoom waarin de belangrijkste inzichten bij elkaar komen.</strong></em><br /><br />Velen weten niet goed wat een paleoconservatief over de economie denkt, is een paleoconservatief een kapitalist of een collectivist? Proberen een paleoconservatief denken op economische thema’s samen te vatten is dan ook niet makkelijk. Want conservatieven zijn anti-utopisch, en aangezien het conservatisme, in tegenstelling tot de verlichtingsideologieën van het liberalisme en socialisme, een breed denkwerk toelaat aan haar ‘volgelingen’.<br /><br /><strong>Voor de markt, tegen vermarkting</strong><br /><br />In het kader van mijn studie moet ik vaak nadenken over wat de economische bedrijvigheid het beste kan stimuleren. Mijn interpretatie van “stimulering van de economie” is enkel en alleen bedoeld om de markt goed te laten werken. Dat wil nog niet zeggen dat ik dan ook als conservatief denk van “meer!, meer!”. Nee. Mijn economische kennis vertelt mij wat het beste is voor de markt en voor de economie. Maar mijn conservatieve ziel en geest zegt mij dat meer en meer niet altijd goed is. Of zoals een andere Vlaamse conservatief, Matthias Storme, het zegt: “ik ben voor de markt, maar tegen vermarkting.”<br /><br />Met mijn economische kennis ben ik voor een vlaktaks, lage belastingen, hogere indirecte lasten, een strak monetair en budgetair beleid, vrijhandel, enzovoorts. Maar zijn dat nu dé kenmerkende ideeën van een (paleo-) conservatief? Nee, zeker niet altijd. Daarin ben ik het eens met prof. Storme: “voor de markt, maar tegen de vermarkting”.<br /><br /><strong>Een ander paleoconservatief geluid</strong><br /><br />De bekendste vertegenwoordiger van het Amerikaans paleoconservatisme, Patrick (Pat) Buchanan, is een echte tegenstander van vrijhandel. Uit cultureel oogpunt moet ik hem, als niet-econoom, gelijk geven. Maar economisch gezien mist zijn visie, mijns inziens, elk doel. Want het alternatief voor vrijhandel, protectionisme, breekt de eigen binnenlandse werkgelegenheid en bedrijfsinvesteringen alleen maar af door hogere binnenlandse prijzen, hogere intrinsieke waardes, en bijgevolg hogere inflatie. Met weer als gevolg hoge interestvoeten, wat er weer voor zorgt dat investeringen uitblijven (investeringen zijn interestgevoelig). Uiteindelijk veroorzaakt protectionisme dus verlies aan werkgelegenheid. <br /><br />Maar zoals al gezegd, Pat Buchanan is niet de enige paleoconservatieve denker. Vele paleoconservatieven zijn vrijhandelsgezind. Het is dus al te makkelijk – zo niet onmogelijk – om paleoconservatisme zomaar te linken aan protectionisme.<br /><br />Mijns inziens zijn paleoconservatieven voor de vrije markt. We onderstrepen nog eens de noodzakelijkheid ervan. Tegelijkertijd staan we kritisch ten opzichte van de vermarkting en atomisch- utopische wereldbeeld van het liberalisme die de markt en het hedonistische ‘pursuit of happines’ als het hoogste doel ophemelen. Vandaar is het dus ook moeilijk om bijvoorbeeld om iemand als Paul Cliteur, die daar ook voor staat, een échte conservatief te noemen. Hij is meer een neolibertariër; een verlichtingsfundamentalist met wat neoconservatieve trekjes, maar niet echt een traditioneel conservatisme. (Ik spreek trouwens persoonlijk niet graag van paleo- versus neoconservatisme, eerder van conservatisme versus neoconservatisme.)<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>Als Burkeanen zijn we tegen de uitbuiting die soms ontstaat door de vrije markt. Denk maar aan Burke zijn kritiek op het beleid van de Britse gouverneur in India en zijn pleidooi voor totaal vrije, en dus eerlijke handel, geen semi-protectionistische monopolies op de handelswegen. Maar zoals op alle thema’s zijn conservatieven altijd breeddenkende realisten; we weten ook dat een overmatige vrije markt-denken een vermarkte samenleving veroorzaakt waar lusten zomaar ingewilligd worden, en waar het gezins- en familieleven ontregeld raakt.<br /><br />Want hoe je het ook wendt of keert: de markt speelt nu eenmaal in op de menselijke lusten en op de oerdriften in de mens. En dat zorgt ervoor dat men snel verslavingen krijgt. Want elke lust zorgt voor een chemische reactie in de hersenen. En eenmaal geproefd van de verboden vrucht, en men weet waar ze zit, gaat men altijd achter die vrucht aan. En het is juist naar aanleiding van dit inspelen op de menselijke driften dat Schopenauer sprak over ‘de wil’ waar een vrije markt op inspeelt.<br /><br /><strong>Conservatieve versus communistische kritiek op marktutopie</strong><br /><br />Maar dan komen we bij de vraag naar de alternatieven. Net zoals Richard M. Weaver (de schrijver van Ideas have Consequences) neem ik hier, samen met alle conservatieven, radicaal afstand van het marxisme. Dit marxisme gaat een totaal nieuw en utopisch, economisch model waarbij de staat alles regelt. Het marxisme behelst een totalitarisme dat beslist wat en hoeveel men mag produceren en consumeren. De gevolgen zijn bekend. De bekendste is wel de corruptie. Want aangezien de menselijke lusten sterk zijn, gaat de mens naar alle middellen grijpen om ze toch te bevredigen. Met andere woorden: er wordt gegrepen naar omkoping en corruptie door diegenen die verantwoordelijk zijn voor de controle op de samenleving: de ambtenaren en de bureaucraten. <br /><br />In een (kapitalistische) competitieve markt daarentegen, is het veel moeilijker om fraude en corruptie uit te voeren. Omdat je het risico hebt dat, aangezien er concurrentie bestaat, de consument wegstapt naar diezelfde concurrentie. En in een vrije markt is er openlijke en transparante armoede. In een communistisch stelsel niet; aangezien iedereen in hetzelfde armzalige schuitje zit. Verdoken armoede noemt men dat ook wel.<br /><br />Conservatieven gaan geen nieuw economisch of politiek systeem zoeken, wij pleiten ook voor vrije markt-kapitalisme, maar zoeken in die vrije markt geen ideaal voor de gehele samenleving, en proberen om een totale decadente vermarkting tegen te gaan, in een traditioneel conservatieve cultuurkritiek. Voor ons blijft cultuur dominant, niet de populaire cultuur van de markt, maar de traditionele wortels van onze beschaving, onder andere het christendom.<br /><br />In tegenstelling tot het marxisme en het kale liberalisme, zoekt het conservatisme echter naar moraliteit, ook op economisch gebied. Als we dus een logica volgen moeten we concluderen dat wij conservatieven voor een morele, vrije markt zijn, los van elk utopisch denken, noch in onze kritiek, noch in onze steun aan de vrije markt. <br /><br /><strong>Wilhelm Röpke en morele marktdenken</strong><br /><br />Een econoom die het goede voorbeeld was van een ‘conservatieve econoom’ was Wilhelm Röpke. Als econoom gaf hij toe dat enkel en alleen een kapitalistische markteconomie kan werken. Hij zette zich af tegen elke vorm van kritiek op de werking van die markt. Röpke zag, net zoals zijn neoliberale collega’s als Carl Menger, Friedrich von Hayek en Ludwig von Mises dat het communisme nooit een goed economisch systeem kan zijn, omwille van het ‘calculatieprobleem’. Het calculatieprobleem is een term dat het best kan worden weergegeven met het beeld van: “een centraal comité ver weg in een hoofdstad, zonder enige controle op hun orgaan, kan niet weten wat de noden en capaciteiten van alle consumenten en producenten in het gehele land is, en aangezien ze geen ‘check of power’ hebben, kunnen ze snel belangenvermenging meemaken.”<br /><br />Röpke verfoeide en bestreed elke vorm van politieke en economische centralisatie. Maar hij wist wel dat dit enkel en alleen uit economisch en politiek perspectief is geredeneerd. Sociaal en moreel is hiermee nog niet aan elke belangrijke basisvoorwaarde voor gezond denken en redeneren voldaan. En hier komt de conservatieve denker in Röpke naar boven.<br /><br />Maar eerst wat over Wilhelm Röpke zijn leven. Wilhelm Röpke werd in 1899 in het Duitse Hannover geboren. Hij werd opgevoed in een ruraal-agrarische samenleving en omgeving. Röpke heeft door zijn simpele en plattelandse opvoeding altijd zo verbonden gevoelt met de oude agrarische traditie van rust en kalmte, iets dat ook in zijn economische denken zou door dringen.<br /><br />Wilhelm Röpke ontpopte zich al snel tot een uiterst intelligent persoon. , Hij werd al op 25-jarige leeftijd professor aan de universiteit van Jena. In 1930 werd hij lid van een adviescommissie die de Duitse regering hulp en advies moest bieden om de economische crisis van ‘The Great Depression’ tegen te gaan. In 1933 namen Hitler en de nazi’s de macht in Duitsland over en vestigden al snel een totalitaire dictatuur; een totalitarisme dat zich ook uitte op socio-economisch vlak. <br /><br />De nazi’s probeerden zoveel mogelijk de economie onder staatscontrole te brengen. Een Keynesiaans economisch stelsel van ‘deficit spending’ en overheidsinvesteringen in wegen, militaire industrie zorgde weliswaar voor een stijgende werkgelegenheid, maar zorgde ook voor hyperinflatie. Röpke was, ondanks dat men hem dat vaak niet toeschrijft, één van de eerste economen dat openlijk kritiek leverde op het Keynesiaanse economische stelsel, en daarmee op de nazi-politiek. Hij nam echte kapitalistische posities in en hij bleef een zelf-regulerende vrije markt verdedigen. Maar de nazi’s verboden hem om nog in het openbaar te spreken of om les te geven. In 1937 emigreerde hij naar Zwitserland, waar hij ging les geven aan de universiteit van Genève. Dit bleef hij doen tot zijn overlijden in 1966.<br /><br /><strong>Decentralisatie</strong><br /><br />Zoals al gezegd bestreed Röpke elke vorm van politieke en economische centralisatie en bepleitte een sterk gedecentraliseerde politieke en economische werking. Waarmee Röpke geen utopist was zoals vele neoliberalen en sommige (neo-)libertariërs. De neoliberalen vonden een totaal vrije markt het hoogste doel om ook het morele leven van alle burgers evenwichtig en goed te houden. Röpke wist als anti-utopist en conservatief wel beter. Hij wist dat een vrije markt noodzakelijk was, maar dat een denken vanuit louter en alleen de vrije markt het morele besef van de maatschappij zou beschadigen. Aangezien een markt inspeelt op de donkerste en gevaarlijkste gevoelens van een mens: zijn lusten.<br /><br />Om dit in check te houden moest ten allen prijze een vermarkting tegen gegaan worden, een gezonde conservatieve cultuurkritiek moest toegevoegd worden aan de marktwerking. Hij liet de wetten van vraag en aanbod alleen maar gelden op de puur economische aspecten. Hij huiverde van het idee om deze vraag-en aanbod wetten te laten gelden in de deugden van een maatschappij; een maatschappij waar, zoals Roger Scruton eens opmerkte: "zelfs deugden te koop staan".<br /><br />De markt mocht ook niet een vervanging zijn van sociale activiteiten, zoals het gezins- en familieleven, het geloof, enzovoort. Eigenlijk hanteerde Röpke een scheiding van het economische en socio-morele, een andere vertaling van “geef caesar wat caesar toekomt en god wat god toekomt”, in Röpke zijn gedachten: “laat de economische wetten gelden voor het economische, en de morele wetten van natuurrecht voor mens en maatschappij”, die strikte scheiding van de economische mens en de morele mens is de centrale gedachte van Röpke, en van het gehele conservatisme, en het is juist dat waar liberalen, socialisten, communisten en fascisten allemaal de fout ingaan, zij beschouwen een economisch systeem onmiddellijk ook als een blauwdruk voor een moreel rechtvaardige samenleving, wat natuurlijk totaal niet klopt.<br /><br />Een economisch systeem moet volgens Röpke 1. goed werken en 2. welvaart voor de maatschappij brengen. 1. kan, zoals Röpke zegt, aleen maar worden ingevuld in de klasssieke vrije markt- economie. En 2. kan - in analogie met 1. en van de klassieke Schotse denkers als Adam Smith, David Hume en J.S. Mill - ook alleen maar uit een vrij ondernemerschapsklimaat ontstaan, en kan dus niet utopisch worden gegenereerd door de staat. <br /><br />Röpke wist evenwel dat meer en meer welvaart de menselijke geest gevangen zou nemen in een ideologie dat nog alleen maar de lusten bevredigt, waar natuurlijk gezinsvervreemding ontstaat. En dat was volgens hem niet de bedoeling van een economie. In feite heeft de economie niets te maken met de harmonie van een gezin. Als de economische wetten van vraag en aanbod ook in gezinnen van toepassing zouden zijn, zouden vele gezinnen uiteen vallen. Want vaak zijn deze wetten tussen mensen niet in evenwicht. We bedoelen dan het zogenaamde vraag en het aanbod dat mensen elkaar onderling in huwelijksrelaties zouden aanbieden. Doordat de moderne maatschappij merkwaardig genoeg wel in staat blijkt te zijn deze wetten toe te passen op de relatiesfeer heeft schadelijke effecten. Door een term als “behoeftebevrediging” op het gezinsleven en op het huwelijksleven los te laten, zorgt dit fenomeen voor gezinsverbrokkeling waardoor de hedendaagse maatschappij meer en meer atomisch wordt. Naar analogie van wat Richard Weaver en Robert Nisbet al zeiden. <br /><br /><strong>Besluit en conclusie</strong><br /><br />Wat nu al wel duidelijk is geworden voor de lezer van dit stuk, is dat wie een uitgebreid economisch programma had verwacht nu wel een beetje teleurgesteld zal zijn. Er bestaat namelijk geen (paleo-)conservatief economisch programma. Het enige waar paleoconservatieven voor staan is een vrije markt, zonder nieuwe systemen, zoals bijvoorbeeld het Keynesianisme, eraan toe te voegen. <br /><br />Het is waar: op veel punten lijkt de culturele kritiek op de vermarkting van de paleoconservatieven op de economische kritiek van het marxisme. De kritische gedachte van de “vervreemding van arbeid” vind je terug in de werken van Karl Marx, maar is ook te vinden bij de Southern Agrarian-conservatief Richard Weaver in zijn boek Ideas have Consequences. Maar het moge duidelijk zijn dat de aard van deze kritiek vanuit paleoconservatief oogpunt verschilt van die van het marxisme.<br /><br />De marxisten proberen een nieuw economisch systeem uit te werken om zo de gehele maatschappij tot hun utopisch mensbeeld te schapen. Ze gaan dus, net zoals liberalen, socialisten en fascisten, uit van een economisch systeem om hun maatschappijbeeld te verwezenlijken en om de maatschappij te verbeteren. Conservatieven zoals Weaver geloven in de werking van de vrije markt en weten dat een utopie nooit haalbaar is en dat morele en culturele problemen zeker niet via een economisch systeem kunnen worden opgelost. Want iemand als Richard Weaver heeft, net als Wilhelm Röpke, niet alleen kritiek op de werking van de vrije markt, maar ook op de vermarkting - en levert dus een culturele kritiek. <br /><br />Daarmee komen we weer op de tegenstelling neoconservatisme versus paleoconservatisme. Wat zijn de economische verschilen tussen neo- en traditionele conservatieven?<br /><br />Neoconservatieven gaan, net zoals alle andere verlichtingsutopisten, uit van een economisch programma gecombineerd met interventionisme om de gehele wereld en maatschappij te herschapen en verbeteren. Zij steunen, net zoals traditionele conservatieven de vrije markt. Maar in tegenstelling tot de paleoconservatieven zien zij hier een middel tot verbetering en verandering van de samenleving in plaats van een fenomeen dat inherent is aan een gezonde zichzelf regulerende samenleving waar een staat vanaf moet blijven. Dus ook hier weer zijn neoconservatieven vaak utopische dromers die hun linkse trotskistische roots, of streken, nog lang niet verloren en verleerd zijn.<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nieuw+rechts" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/paleo-conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatief-revolutionair" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nationalisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Fortuynisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nieuwe+politiek" rel="tag"></a> <br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://www.openorthodoxie.nl">Open Orthodoxie</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1151180458892206292006-06-24T22:17:00.000+02:002006-09-06T23:54:49.866+02:00In Theory door John GRAY in The Nation, juni 2006.<strong><em>It is difficult to think of a time when liberal political thought has been as remote from political practice as it is today. There are many reasons for this situation, including the near-complete rout of liberal forces by the right. But a part of the reason lies in the development of liberal thought itself. Liberal thinkers, in the universities where they have retreated, appear to believe their main task is to specify the basic liberties of individuals and the principles of distribution for other social goods, in the conviction that once these have been identified they can be embodied in law and interpreted by courts. In this now conventional view the principles of justice can be derived from an underlying moral consensus that is embodied in modern democratic societies, and since these will be principles that all reasonable people can accept, there will be no possibility of radical political conflict. No doubt there will still be some need for political activity, but not in order to protect liberal values. Liberal values will not be at risk, since they will be enshrined in law.</em></strong> <br /><br /><br />The currently dominant version of liberal theory is a species of legalism in which politics takes second place to the judicial interpretation of rights. If this view of liberalism is now commonplace it is largely due to the impact of John Rawls's theory of justice. Rawls revived a version of social contract theory that has shaped the way political philosophy is practiced in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Britain and other European countries. It is a feature of contract theories that they look to agreement on principles of justice to avoid conflict over religious beliefs and moral ideals. There have been many such theories--Locke's account of what justice demands is quite different from that of Hobbes, and Rousseau's is different from both--but that has not diminished the appeal of the idea that government can be seen as embodying some sort of contract. The vision expressed in contract theory is of a society in which the murky compromises of politics are replaced by the rule of law, and people with widely different beliefs and values can live together under a regime of justice that all can accept. <br /><br />It is a seductive vision, but there has always been something unreal in the view that law can achieve such a feat. People differ as much in their conceptions of justice as they do in their religious beliefs and moral values, and the idea of an overlapping moral consensus, which Rawls's theory invokes, scarcely reflects the condition of contemporary democratic societies. It is true that the language of justice and rights is pervasive, but it conceals vast divergences in moral outlook and world-view. What do gay activists and homophobic fundamentalists, liberal feminists and right-to-life fanatics, Green defenders of the natural environment and those who see the planet as a resource to be used by humans have in common? They may have some shared beliefs or values, but these are hardly sufficient to generate agreement on which human liberties are most important or on how other social goods are to be distributed. The fact is that contemporary democratic societies lack any deep consensus on values, hence the peculiarly fractious quality of contemporary politics in the "liberal" West. <br /><br />That Rawls's theory has little to say on many of the issues that are currently most politically contested has not prevented his heirs from trying to extend his work to precisely these questions. Martha Nussbaum's most recent book, Frontiers of Justice, is the latest such effort. She aims to widen the reach of Rawlsian theory by addressing questions it has thus far largely neglected, such as the role of distributive justice in international relations, the claims of disabled people and the moral status of nonhuman animals. Nussbaum's resourceful and imaginative exploration of Rawls's work displays a command of the longer tradition of political philosophy that matches and even surpasses that of Rawls, along with a notably richer sensitivity to the history and variety of constitutional arrangements. The result is a notable contribution to philosophical inquiry that merits the most careful study by all who try to think seriously about public policy. <br /><br />Still, a puzzle remains as to why Nussbaum has chosen to view the issues with which she is concerned through the lens of Rawlsian theory, when she could--perhaps more profitably--have examined them in the light of her own views. As she is fully aware, applying Rawls's theory to these areas is no easy matter. His vision of a scenario in which principles of justice are adopted is an idealized version of rational choice by competent human adults. Since the theory makes no reference to disabled persons, children or nonhuman animals, it is hardly surprising that the principles that emerge from it give no clear guidance as to how they are to be treated. Again, Rawls's theory was constructed to apply within modern states. It was never meant to be a charter for global redistribution. In later work he tried to develop some account of morality in international relations, but he was clear that his conception of justice reflected a moral consensus that exists (so he believed) within nation-states and could be implemented only by nation-states. When Rawls failed to apply his theory to the issues Nussbaum raises, it was not an oversight. It was because the structure of the theory he constructed precluded it from being applied in these ways. <br /><br />Thus, in order to extend Rawls's account of justice to such issues, Nussbaum has to make major alterations in the theory. One can't help but wonder why she takes the trouble to make these elaborate adjustments, especially as she concedes that many of Rawls's conclusions can be reached through other types of argumentation. Why does she force her deliberations into the Procrustean mold of Rawls's contract theory? The reason may be the canonical prestige of Rawls's theory. Nussbaum's attitude toward Rawls's work is one of piety, and this leads her to accept aspects of his theory that critical reflection might have led her to question. She writes of Rawls's theory that its <br /><br /><br /><em>principles themselves, or something very like them, are good principles--not only for those cases to which Rawls applies them, but for other cases concerning which he advances no principles at all. Moreover, the ideas of fairness and reciprocity that these principles embody and render concrete are themselves deeply attractive ethical ideas.... It would be good to extend those principles and those ideas to our unsolved problems of justice.</em> <br /><br />As these remarks show, Nussbaum does not question the idea that the problem areas she identifies for Rawls's theory concern issues of justice. But why should this be assumed? Nussbaum mentions the alternative view presented in Utilitarianism in which it is the promotion of well-being and the avoidance of suffering rather than any idea of justice that is fundamental--only to reject it as being obviously inferior to Rawls's Kantian approach. It is true that Utilitarianism has many problems, some of them insoluble. At the same time it does seem to me to have one large advantage over Rawls's approach, which is that it is not a reiteration of received opinion. <br /><br />Rawls's method in moral theory is a process of "reflective equilibrium" that involves clarifying our moral intuitions and shaping them into a coherent whole. In its nature this method can do no more than turn the moral beliefs expressed in current opinion into something like a system. In contrast Utilitarianism appeals to features of the world that stand outside our moral beliefs, and that could compel us to revise them. In this respect Utilitarianism seems better equipped to deal with a number of difficult moral issues, particularly those arising in our relations with other animal species. Once again, Nussbaum is fully aware of this difficulty: <br /><br /><br /><em>The whole idea of a justification that looks for a reflective equilibrium and uses the idea of overlapping consensus is an anthropocentric idea. The holism in ethics that Rawls and I share may be contested at this point by a reasonable Benthamite, who will insist that what justifies changes in our treatment of animals is not the coherence of a family of human theories and judgements, even bolstered by reasonable agreement and overlapping consensus; it is, instead, a fact utterly external to the human point of view, namely animal suffering.</em><br /><br />I am not a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, but it was Bentham who observed that it is not whether animals can think that matters but that they can suffer. Those who oppose animal experimentation--as I do myself--do so not because it cannot be fitted comfortably into a theoretical reconstruction of prevailing moral attitudes but because they believe these attitudes to be defective. If Bentham had aimed only to systematize the moral beliefs of his day he would not have been one of the first Western thinkers to give animal suffering proper attention. With all its difficulties Utilitarianism allows a critical distance from received opinion that Rawls cannot provide. <br /><br />The trouble with Rawls's theory is that it aims to stay on the surface of things and very largely succeeds. Instead of digging into the metaphysical and epistemological questions that have preoccupied philosophers in the past, Rawls seeks to avoid them. Its goal is not truth but agreement, which he believes can be achieved through a systematic reconstruction of current moral beliefs. But which moral beliefs are allowed into consideration, and how is this decided? As a method in moral theory, reflective equilibrium has the fatal flaw of intuitionism. It has no way of addressing those who stand outside the charmed circle of people whose intuitions are viewed as relevant. <br /><br />As a way of doing political theory it is prone to a corresponding failure of realism. The data that are used to construct the theory of justice are the moral intuitions of the liberal academy, but these are no longer widely shared in the larger society (if they ever were) and have little leverage on political practice. Anti-liberal forces such as ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism have come to shape much of contemporary political life. Yet, like Rawls, Nussbaum barely mentions this fact. She notes that just institutions of the kind envisioned in Rawls's theory "do not come into being unless people want them, and they can cease to be if people stop wanting them, something that the demise of New Deal-style social democracy in the United States has shown all too clearly." She does not ask how the rights and liberties she believes ought to be enshrined in law can survive when the larger political culture is indifferent or hostile to the values they express. <br /><br />In a curious convergence liberal theory has given up on politics at a time when liberal values have become marginal in practice. Instead of trying to understand the forces that shape political life--as John Stuart Mill did in his writings on socialism and nationality, for example--contemporary liberal thinkers have constructed a legalistic edifice from which politics has been excluded. Nussbaum is aware that this rickety structure shuts out a great deal that is important, and in Frontiers of Justice she tries to let in some light. If she achieves less than she might it is because the giant shadow of Rawls stands in her way. <br /><br /><em>John Gray is Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. His most recent book is Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (Granta).</em><br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060605/gray">The Nation</a><a href="http://grafmonumentenzorg.blogspot.com/<br />"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1154360819993696142006-07-31T17:46:00.000+02:002006-09-06T23:53:47.713+02:00Fukuyama's Second Thoughts door Jonah GOLDBERG in National Review Online, 31 juli 2006.<strong><em>When Samuel P. Huntington, author of the famous “clash of civilizations” thesis, was accused of being too simplistic, he pled guilty as charged. But, he countered, any serious attempt to explain complex phenomena — never mind the grand sweep of world history — would have to be simplistic. “When people think seriously,” he said, “they think abstractly; they conjure up simplified pictures of reality called concepts, theories, models, paradigms. Without such intellectual constructs, there is, William James said, only ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.’”</em></strong><br /><br />Since the end of the Cold War, no one has made a greater name for himself — save for Huntington himself — in sorting out the confusion than Francis Fukuyama. In his famous National Interest essay, “The End of History?” (and in the subsequent book The End of History and the Last Man), Fukuyama offered the first Big Explanation of Everything after the Berlin Wall fell. Breathing new life into Hegel — and by extension Marx — Fukuyama argued that history is purposive, and that over time the world must move in the direction of modernity and democracy, because modernity and democracy are the systems best equipped to satisfy the diverse longings of mankind. Fukuyama has deflected some subsequent criticism by arguing that he was not prescribing a blueprint for hastening the end of history, but rather saying that his thesis was misunderstood by conservative “Leninists” seeking to accelerate history by imposing democratic norms on less advanced societies. The End of History was about modernization and materialism, he insisted, not democracy and idealism. “What is initially universal,” he now writes, “is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern society, with its technology, high standards of living, health care, and access to the wider world.”<br /><br />This is somewhat understandable, considering how unkind the post-9/11 world has been to his original thesis. The rise of Islamism was hardly sudden, but America’s realization of the scope of its challenge was. In The End of History, the Islamist threat was at most an opponent to liberalism, not a competitor, since Islamism, according to Fukuyama, could not offer an ideological challenge to liberal democracy (an odd dismissal, by the way, if idealism doesn’t matter). <br /><br />The September 11, 2001, attacks seemed to refute his thesis, however, and validate Huntington’s. The latter argued that history was far from its end, but that global conflicts would continue so long as the world was divided into greater “civilizations” such as the West and Islam. After 9/11, this darker vision seemed to sort out the new reality better than did Fukuyama’s faith that all the great arguments had been settled. According to Huntington, culture matters more than prosperity, and culture by definition involves the bad and the good sides of human nature. “It is human to hate,” wrote Huntington. “For self-definition and motivation, people need enemies.” <br /><br />In his new book, America at the Crossroads, Fukuyama now undertakes not an analysis of the world so much as an effort of self-redefinition — and indeed, he does so by finding his own new enemies. This requires some difficult juggling, since he does not actually seem to disagree with them all that much.<br /><br />Fukuyama argues that neoconservatism, the school of thought with which he has been most closely associated, needs to be saved from “the neocons,” by which he means the younger generation of foreign policy hawks and democratic idealists — people like William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Paul Wolfowitz — who generally go by that label, as well as others who get called “neocons” whether they like it or not. According to Fukuyama, these neocons internalized the wrong lessons from the cold war and are now applying them to today’s world, in effect becoming right-wing Leninists dedicated to speeding up the wheel of history the way they did in hastening the demise of the Soviet Union. While the original neoconservatives were defined by their skepticism of utopian projects, he argues, the new generation concluded from the West’s victory in the cold war that sweeping social engineering can in fact work. To support his point, he quotes Hoover Institution fellow Ken Jowitt: “The Bush administration has concluded that Fukuyama’s historical timetable is too laissez-faire and not nearly attentive enough to the levers of historical change. History, the Bush administration has concluded, needs deliberate organization, leadership, and direction. In this irony of ironies, the Bush administration’s identification of regime change as critical to its anti-terrorist policy and integral to its desire for a democratic capitalist world has led to an active ‘Leninist’ foreign policy in place of Fukuyama’s passive ‘Marxist’ social teleology.” To which Fukuyama adds: “I did not like the original version of Leninism and was skeptical when the Bush administration turned Leninist.” <br /><br />In order to make this case, Fukuyama rehearses the origins of the neoconservatives, including their relationship with the political philosopher Leo Strauss. And on this score, Fukuyama should be congratulated for offering one of the most thoughtful treatments of the subject in recent years. Indeed, the twin serums of “Straussianism” and “neoconservatism” have generated more concentrated middle-brow stupidity than virtually any other subject in recent memory. And, when served in the poisoned chalice of anti-Bush polemic, these already heady brews form a grog so toxic that even recreational use usually ends in a kind of drooling paranoid dementia. Fukuyama correctly notes that most everything written in recent years about neoconservatism “is factually wrong, animated by ill will, and a deliberate distortion of the record of both the Bush administration and its supporters.” <br /><br />The story of the original neoconservatives started with a handful of young, mostly Jewish, Trotskyist intellectuals who gathered in a U-shaped stall called Alcove 1 at New York’s City University in the 1930s: Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Lipset, and a handful of others formed in opposition to the much larger conclave of Moscow-loyal Stalinists in Alcove 2 (whose membership included Julius Rosenberg). The rift between Stalinists and Trotskyists intensified until it was finally punctuated by an ice pick in Trotsky’s skull in 1940. Over time, as one could only expect given the spectacular moral and economic failure of communism, the ranks of disillusioned intellectuals swelled. In the 1970s, the combined hangover from the 1960s, the Vietnam war, and the increasing tendency toward accommodation and appeasement of the Soviets shook loose even more former liberals and leftists, chief among them Norman Podhoretz but also many non-Jewish intellectuals such as William Bennett, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard John Neuhaus, James Q. Wilson, Glenn Loury, and Michael Novak. <br /><br />Contrary to those who believe that neoconservatism is first and foremost a foreign policy doctrine best summarized as Zionist warmongering, most of these intellectuals were more likely to stand opposed to the domestic folly of campus radicalism and Great Society overreach as they were to communist aggression. Fukuyama rightly identifies this as a crucial point. “If there is a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques carried out by those who wrote for The Public Interest,” he writes, “it is the limits of social engineering. Ambitious efforts to seek social justice, these writers argued, often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted organic social relations… or else produced unanticipated consequences.” This, writes Fukuyama, is what linked the first wave of neoconservatives to the later converts in the 1960s and 1970s: “Both American liberals and Soviet communists sought worthy ends but undermined themselves by failing to recognize the limits of political voluntarism.”<br /><br />In other words, neoconservatism was never fully an “-ism.” These were heterodox intellectuals making arguments that often contradicted those of other card-carrying neocons. Nonetheless, Fukuyama identifies four basic unifying ideas or principles fundamental to neoconservatism: First, the aforementioned folly of sweeping social engineering; second, the belief that America is a force for good in the world, possibly uniquely so, and thus American moral instincts should not be constantly second-guessed; third, that international institutions cannot be reflexively trusted to protect American interests or substituted for American action; and fourth, that the internal nature of regimes has a bearing on their moral stature, which in turn should inform how America treats them. This last point was neoconservatism’s rejection of Nixonian realism.<br /><br />In Fukuyama’s telling, neoconservatism arose as a cultural reaction, first against Stalinism and later against domestic radicalism. The answer to the question “Who are your enemies?” in the 1970s was probably a far better determinant of whether you were a neoconservative than the answer to “What do you believe?” This continued to be the case when the second generation of neocons emerged — those who had never migrated from Left to Right but had instead grown up within the movement. They received important staff-level positions in the Reagan administration and served as some of the most effective shock troops for Reagan’s foreign and domestic policies. <br /><br />These younger conservatives, however, fell prey to their own success. “During much of the cold war,” Fukuyama writes, “neoconservatives became used to being a small, despised minority…. The foreign policy establishment — the people who ran the bureaucracies at the State Department, the intelligence community, and the Pentagon, as well as the legions of advisers, think-tank specialists, and academics — was largely dismissive of them. Neoconservatives were also used to having the Europeans look down on them as moralistic naïfs, reckless cowboys, or worse.” But, he continues, “the sudden collapse of communism vindicated many of these ideas and made them appear mainstream and obvious after 1989. This naturally did a great deal to bolster the self-confidence of those who had held them, a self-confidence that strongly reinforced the us-versus-them solidarity that characterizes all groups of like-minded people.”<br /><br />In short, Fukuyama is saying, the neocons got cocky. Their explanation for the most important conflict of the previous half-century — the cold war — had been vindicated. And, as far as they were concerned, they were best suited to explain the post-cold-war confusion as well.<br /><br />So the great irony is this: In Fukuyama’s telling, the new neoconservatism of Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan emerges as in many respects the opposite of the old neoconservatism of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. This younger generation, which never went through a disillusionment-migration cycle from Left to Right, simply never internalized the lessons of being deeply wrong about something truly important. <br /><br />In the 1990s The Weekly Standard embodied the new attitude. Its editorials rattled sabers at China and Iraq. It aggressively supported military intervention in the Balkans. And, with David Brooks taking the lead, it championed something called “National Greatness” conservatism, which turned the skepticism of the previous generation on its head; the connection to foreign policy was made clear in that the patron saint of National Greatness, according to Brooks, was Teddy Roosevelt. As Fukuyama notes, “National Greatness inevitably manifests itself through foreign policy, since foreign policy is always a public matter and involves issues of life and death.” If the old neoconservatism was defined by skepticism and trepidation, Fukuyama argues, the new neoconservatism flirted with hubris on a grand scale.<br /><br />Whatever its faults — and there are many — this explanation provides far more analytical heft than the run-of-the-mill nonsense we so often hear about warmongers and Straussian cultists. Vice President Cheney was never a neocon. Nor was Donald Rumsfeld, or most of the senior war planners. But they were most certainly battle-scarred veterans of the Reagan years and subscribers to what Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, has called the “Reagan synthesis.” Reagan’s success had many fathers and by no stretch of the imagination were they all neocons, but with the aid of a media and academic establishment always eager to discredit traditional conservatism, the storyline that the humane and intellectual facets of Reaganism were “neoconservative” stuck. Indeed, prior to 9/11 it was standard practice in academic writing to label all remotely legitimate conservative ideas “neoconservative” rather than simply “conservative,” because the latter had long since been spoiled as a synonym for the racist, sexist, and vaguely fascist. <br /><br />In this sense, Fukuyama’s criticism of the neoconservatives is broader than he allows. If the folks at The Weekly Standard were guilty of hubris, so were those at National Review. While Fukuyama claims to be debunking much of the “nonsense” about neoconservatism as an elite Zionist cowboy cabal, he is to a certain extent reinforcing it by treating neoconservatives as a more distinct and unified group than is really the case. In other words, he is still saying it was the neocons’ fault — just not for the wacky and sometimes anti-Semitic reasons we’ve heard from the paranoid, ignorant, and hysterical.<br /><br />The failures of Fukuyama’s analysis, however, extend beyond taxonomy. Much has been made of Fukuyama’s alleged hypocrisy in attacking a school of thought of which he was, until recently, an important adherent. He signed the various letters and petitions of the Project for the New American Century. He wrote op-eds affirming the “irrefutable logic” of Bush’s Axis of Evil doctrine and he supported invading Iraq until very late in the game. Former kindred spirits such as Charles Krauthammer have accused Fukuyama of being a fair-weather supporter of the war who only repudiated the effort when public opinion turned against it. <br /><br />On this score, Krauthammer and others have a strong case. But this has overshadowed an even more important point: If Fukuyama’s supposedly more authentic neoconservatism could not spot the folly in the new National Greatness “neoconservatism” until very recently, the differences between the two outlooks cannot be that significant. Even if Fukuyama’s criticisms are entirely in good faith and his critics are completely wrong, the fact that he walked out of the movie just minutes before the credits started to roll — and that he does not admit to any kind of real revolution in his thinking — suggests that we are talking differences in degree, not in kind. This is reflected in most of the discussion about his book, as even supporters of the administration’s policies tend to find his proposals sensible. “Neither his old arguments nor his new ones,” writes a sympathetic Paul Berman, “offer much insight into this, the most important problem of all — the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them.” <br /><br />Indeed, Fukuyama’s specific criticisms suggest that he has come up with his theory first and then selected the facts necessary to support it — precisely the criticism he levels at the Bush administration. He berates Vice President Cheney and his clique for ignoring contrary voices. But Fukuyama himself agreed that those contrary voices were wrong regarding the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs. More importantly, he claims that the war planners’ arrogance led them to ignore warnings about the war’s aftermath. But with the possible exception of General Shinseki’s admonition about the need for more troops to occupy Iraq, such warnings were almost nonexistent — and were certainly not forthcoming from Fukuyama. Indeed, as Lowry and others have argued, the real intelligence failure wasn’t the much-ballyhooed weapons of mass destruction foul-up, but the failure of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to appreciate the extent of Iraq’s social decay. Critics of the invasion essentially made the same mistake that advocates of it made in assuming that Iraq was a functioning nation, and some critics, after the fact, have gone so far as to claim that Iraq has been made even less functional by U.S. intervention. The reality was that it was, to use Kanan Makiya’s phrase, a Republic of Fear. When the United States removed the fear, the whole place imploded. But, again, this does not mean that what happened was widely foreseen: The doom-and-gloom forecasts from bureaucratic opponents of the war were, in the final analysis, at least as wrong as the “cakewalk” talk on the other side — for example, what happened to the refugee crisis the invasion was supposed to create?<br /><br />Fukuyama criticizes the Standard for downplaying the importance of civil society and culture to rebuilding Iraq, which is fair to a point. But he also notes that “The Weekly Standard has turned against Donald Rumsfeld and called for his resignation, its chief criticism of him remains his failure to provide enough troops to secure Iraq, rather than the multiple other dimensions of nation-building where U.S. policy fell short.” But is it really true that the Standard’s editors would oppose the “multiple other dimensions of nation-building” if Iraq were secure? On the contrary: They call for Rumsfeld to be replaced by Senator John McCain, a bold Rooseveltian type who would, in their view, “make the Pentagon a full partner in the building of a stable, self-governing Iraq and… re-engage the American people in the importance of the pursuit.” Those who advocate more troops do so with the sensible assumption that a pacified Iraq would allow the conditions in which building everything from courts to soccer fields becomes possible.<br /><br />Fukuyama writes that the new neoconservatives learned the wrong lessons from the cold war and are hence determined to use military might in circumstances ill-suited to force. “No one was opposed in principle to the use of soft power,” he writes, “they simply hadn’t thought about it very much. As the saying goes, when your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like nails.” <br /><br />But Fukuyama has this exactly backwards. The United States has a lot of tools, the military being only one of many. He claims that America “has become steadily less generous” and says that the U.S. ranks 21st out of 22 leading developed nations in foreign giving. But as John Fonte has pointed out, on this count Fukuyama is simply wrong. The U.S. ranks 11th of 22 among leading donor countries, and government foreign aid has doubled between 2000 and 2004, increasing as a percentage of gross national income as well. President Bush committed America to massive increases in spending on aids, for example, and has dedicated funds to a host of soft-power measures. In reality, the nations that have only a single tool in their belts are our “allies” in the “international community.” With the exception of Great Britain, the European nations have virtually no ability to project military power abroad, and combined with their tendency to be seduced and corrupted by the talky-talk of the UN and EU and intimidated by large and restive Muslim minorities, it’s no wonder that every problem they see looks like a job for diplomacy.<br /><br />Fukuyama is director of the International Development Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and something of an international academic celebrity. Perhaps thanks to this experience he is better suited to make sensible suggestions about how to use the levers of diplomacy and aid instead of the hammer of military might. But his calls for a new era of “horizontal accountability” and an “agenda of multiple multilateralisms” seem to suggest that he has become deeply ensconced in the world of transnational elites endlessly talking about talking in places like Davos and Geneva.<br /><br />Fukuyama is certainly correct that political and intellectual movements cannot be separated from their historical and geographic contexts. Each age makes what it will of the confusion that is the world. And it should be no surprise that what seems to explain things pretty well in one moment will fail to do so in the next. But Francis Fukuyama, the author of The End of History, is a man constitutionally determined to find the permanent theory of everything. It seems, however, that America at the Crossroads represents less a serious theoretical exegesis than a momentary crisis of confidence by one of the smartest observers around. It is a snapshot taken at a moment of maximum neoconservative despair stemming from confusion over the Iraq war and the nature of the Islamist threat. In a Huntington age, he is unwilling to relinquish the vision of a Fukuyama world. As such, this book offers useful insights into the internal contradictions within and among conservative policymakers, but ultimately it creates more bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion than it dispels.<br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTBiZjBmMDJjZWM1NzAwYWNiOWZjY2E4ZjYzODg3YTg=">National Review Online</a><a href="http://grafmonumentenzorg.blogspot.com/<br />"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1154535747592778592006-08-02T18:19:00.000+02:002006-09-06T23:52:13.660+02:00Interview Faye mogelijk leugen !<strong>Hoax : fausse interview de Guillaume Faye par France-Echos</strong><br /><br /><strong><em>On nous signale que plusieurs sites internet, dont forum.subversiv.com et fr.altermedia.info, ont publié une « Interview de Guillaume Faye » où l'intéressé répondrait à des questions posées par « France-Echos ». C'est un hoax : Guillaume Faye n'a JAMAIS été interviewé par un quelconque rédacteur de notre site qui n'a JAMAIS publié la moindre interview de Guillaume Faye.</em></strong><br /><br /><a href="http://www.france-echos.com/actualite.php?cle=9791">France-Echos</a><br /><br /><strong>Opération de désinformation contre Guillaume Faye </strong><br /><br /><strong><em>Depuis quelques jours, plusieurs sites internet (dont le forum.de subversiv.com) publient une interview de Guillaume Faye dans laquelle l’intéressé, répondant aux questions du site france-echos.com, défend une ligne politique étonnement pro-sioniste. Faye en profite pour régler ses comptes avec certains anciens amis de la Nouvelle Droite. Sous le titre « Guillaume Faye avoue », Altermedia.info s’est immédiatement fait l’écho de cet entretien en présentant l’interviewé comme «l’idéologue en chef de Terre et peuple et de la mouvance mongolo-identitaire.» (sic !) Bien entendu, on imagine les réactions pour le moins épidermiques qui s’en sont suivies. Rien que de très classique…</em></strong><br /><br />Zie verder: <a href="http://fr.novopress.info/?p=5623">Novopress France</a><br /><br /><strong>En opnieuw Michael O'Meara over het Faye-interview</strong><br /><br />On July 30, I wrote “Guillaume Faye and the Jews,”which was posted at VNN on July 31. This shortarticle was based on an interview that Faye allegedly gave to the Zionist site “France-Echos” and which appeared on the web in the forum of subversive.com.<br />The latter is an unreadable site I never visit, but it was announced at and apparently vouched for by the credible AMI France (fr.altermedia.info). Based on<br />these sources, my article reported that the ardent anti-Islamism of Europe’s foremost ethnonationalist seemed to have morphed into an equally ardent form of<br />Zionism, for in the alleged interview Faye not only depicted the Hebrew state as Europe’s geopolitical pivot, but the Jews as an integral part of Europe’s<br />biocivilization. Such a stance constituted a flagrant contradiction to everything Faye had previous stood for and was a shock to myself and to all who saw Faye<br />as our most brilliant light.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/?p=890">Vanguard News Network</a><a href="http://grafmonumentenzorg.blogspot.com/<br />"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1156628286325280902006-08-26T23:36:00.000+02:002006-09-06T23:51:33.713+02:00’Onze vrijheid is op hol geslagen’ door Yoram STEINin Trouw, 24 augustus 2006.<strong><em>,,Filosofen spelen onmiskenbaar een belangrijke rol in het publieke debat’’, zegt Ad Verbrugge. Dat is misschien de reden dat hij komende zondag als eerste filosoof in Nederland is uitgenodigd om een televisieavond samen te stellen bij ’Zomergasten’ van de VPRO.</em></strong><br /><br />Waarom filosofen zichtbaarder in de media aanwezig zijn? Het heeft volgens Ad Verbrugge alles te maken met de tijdgeest. De jaren negentig waren de jaren waarin Nederland onder het paarse kabinet van Kok ’de ideologische veren had afgeschud’. De twee aartsvijanden van weleer – socialisten en liberalen – waren tot een compromis gekomen dat beide partijen leek te bevallen. Over morele vraagstukken werd niet al te moeilijk gedaan. Euthanasie, abortus, prostitutie: het moest allemaal kunnen. Tolerantie was het toverwoord, de multiculturele samenleving het paradijs waar de mensheid in al die eeuwen naar op zoek was geweest. Voor filosofische reflectie over maatschappelijke vraagstukken leek weinig noodzaak te bestaan. Alleen voor levensfilosofie leek er een markt te zijn.<br /><br />Ook internationaal was door het einde van de Koude Oorlog de indruk ontstaan dat het tijdperk van de hevige religieuze, ideologische en morele conflicten achter ons lag – wat door de Amerikaanse filosoof Francis Fukuyama kernachtig is omschreven als ’het einde van de geschiedenis’. <br /><br />Maar in het nieuwe millennium werd duidelijk dat dit alles slechts schijn was. Elf september liet zien dat er nog steeds felle religieuze, ideologische en morele strijd bestond, en dat de geschiedenis niet voorbij was. <br /><br />Verbrugge: „Pim Fortuyn bracht de sluimerende onvrede in de Nederlandse samenleving met betrekking tot het multiculturele ideaal naar boven. Vooral in de confrontatie met de islam werden veel Nederlanders met de neus gedrukt op de vraag waar zij eigenlijk voor stonden. Waar geloven wij dan in? Is er voor ons ook iets heilig? Het is vanwege deze vragen dat filosofen een belangrijker rol zijn gaan spelen in het publieke debat.’’<br /><br />In het antwoord op deze vragen wordt één waarde bijzonder vaak genoemd: vrijheid. Dat lijkt een van de meest bepalende richtinggevende idealen van onze cultuur te zijn. In onze politiek, in onze zogeheten vrije markt, in ons rechtssysteem, in ons onderwijsstelsel, in de media, en in onze persoonlijke levenssfeer laten wij ons sterk door dit beginsel van de vrijheid leiden. Verbrugge denkt daarom dat het belangrijk is om een beter begrip te krijgen van wat vrijheid ’eigenlijk’ betekent. Het idee van de persoonlijke vrijheid is in onze cultuur volgens hem namelijk ’ontaard’. <br /><br />Verbrugge: „Het punt is dat idealen er op papier prachtig uit kunnen zien, terwijl ze in de praktijk niet werken. Dat was bijvoorbeeld het geval bij het reëel bestaande communisme. Nu zie je dat ook met betrekking tot het vrijheidsideaal in onze consumptiemaatschappij.’’<br /><br />Hoe wordt het ideaal van de vrijheid namelijk doorgaans gedefinieerd? Als het niet door anderen belemmerd worden in je keuzes, als iets negatiefs, als ongebondenheid, als het vermogen om je ongehinderd over te kunnen geven aan je verlangens. Om te beginnen wordt daarbij vergeten, zegt Verbrugge, dat de eigen verlangens zo groot kunnen worden dat het de vraag is of je niet beter van verslaving dan van vrijheid kunt spreken. „Exemplarisch hiervoor is de figuur van de junk. Waarom zeggen we dat de junk ’depersonaliseert’? Hij doet toch wat hij wil? Hij bevredigt toch zijn eigen behoeften? Kennelijk is dat niet zo. Zo’n leven spat uit elkaar door zijn eigen consumptie. De junk is een dramatische uitvergroting van wat er met mensen in de consumptiemaatschappij kan gebeuren.’’<br /><br />Verder is het zo dat bij het populaire vrijheidsconcept de nadruk te sterk op het ’ik’ alleen ligt, vindt Verbrugge. „Mensen vergeten dat individuele vrijheid onmogelijk is zonder een gemeenschap die mij die vrijheid geeft, ook in juridische zin. Het woord ’vrijheid’ is etymologisch verwant aan de woorden ’vrijen’ en ’vriend’. Het aspect van de gezamenlijkheid is heel erg van belang. Maar weinig mensen voelen zich werkelijk vrij op het moment dat zij volkomen genegeerd worden door anderen. Je hebt dan wel de ruimte om alles te doen wat je wilt, maar die vrijheid is een leegte. Je verschijnt niet in de ogen van anderen, behalve dan als een toevallig object. Om werkelijk vrij te zijn, moet je ook door anderen erkend worden. Mensen willen niet alleen formeel erkend worden als voor de wet vrij en gelijk. Zij willen erkend worden omwille van datgene wat ze presteren, en ze willen erkend worden als de unieke persoon die zij zijn. Dat laatste is de reden dat veel leerlingen wegkwijnen in anonieme leerfabrieken en veel bejaarden in onpersoonlijke verzorgingstehuizen. Het verdwijnen van persoonlijke verhoudingen is dodelijk voor mensen.’’<br /><br />’Belevingssolipsisme’ noemt Verbrugge de schijnvrijheid die het ik losmaakt van de maatschappelijke context, waarin het ik zich enkel nog richt op eigen verlangens. Het individu sluit zich dan als het ware op in een isolement – iets wat je bijvoorbeeld ziet bij jongeren die zich door middel van een koptelefoon afsluiten voor de rest van de wereld. <br /><br />Tegenover deze ’gevangenis van de eigen beleving’ staat volgens Verbrugge ’de ruimte’ die voor een belangrijk deel gecreëerd moet worden door middel van goed onderwijs. <br /><br />,,Goed onderwijs is bedoeld om je te verruimen’’, stelt de voorzitter van de vereniging Beter Onderwijs Nederland (BON). „De docent is daarbij een soort gids die voor de leerlingen een wereld doet opengaan en hen objectieve vormen van kennis en kunde bijbrengt, ook door hen bij de les te houden. Hij neemt daarbij verantwoordelijkheid en loopt vooruit op de ontwikkeling van dat kind. Een kind weet namelijk zelf nog niet goed waartoe hij in staat is, en wat de rijkdom is die hij kan verwerven. Daar moet een docent hem bij helpen. In plaats van aansluiten bij de belevingswereld van de leerlingen, probeert de goede docent leerlingen juist te bevrijden uit hun subjectieve belevingswereld, en ze de diepte en de betekenis van een gemeenschappelijk vormgegeven wereld te laten zien. Een wereld die niet bestaat uit atomistische individuen, maar uit ’gedeelde vormen’.’’<br /><br />Verbrugge: „Voor opvoeding en onderwijs zijn gedeelde vormen noodzakelijk. Denk aan omgangsvormen of aan spelregels. Je kunt alleen zelfstandig opereren binnen die gedeelde vormen. Op het moment dat die gedeelde vormen verdwijnen, wordt het niet alleen vrijwel onmogelijk om mensen nog te vormen, maar ook om erkenning te krijgen en ergens in thuis te zijn. Wanneer ben je geslaagd of doe je iets echt goed? Zonder dergelijke vormen zijn er geen objectieve criteria meer, en dat maakt mensen richtingloos.’’<br /><br />Met BON hoopt Verbrugge aandacht te vragen voor de volgens hem ’deplorabele staat van het onderwijs’. „Ook in het onderwijs wordt nu namelijk gedacht dat kinderen vrij en ongebonden hun eigen leerproces moeten vormgeven. Ze moeten het ’leuk’ vinden, zoals ze het ook ’leuk’ vinden om te worden vermaakt door de consumptiecultuur. Daarbij moeten ze vooral niet te veel opgedrongen krijgen van anderen – van de docent met name. Dat zou immers een inbreuk op hun individuele vrijheid en zelfstandigheid zijn, en dat mag je ze natuurlijk niet aandoen.’’ <br /><br />De docent die van zijn vak houdt wordt al sinds enige jaren weggezet als ’een vakidioot’, zegt Verbrugge. ,,Als iemand die te veel waarde hecht aan kennis die er voor leerlingen eigenlijk niet toe doet. Waar het om zou gaan, is de individuele leerling. Maar daar ging het deze bevlogen docenten natuurlijk altijd al om, waarschijnlijk meer dan bij de vele onderwijshervormers het geval is. Gedegen vakkennis staat, mede door deze hervormers, niet meer centraal in het onderwijs, en daar worden generaties leerlingen de dupe van. Dat ook de docent altijd nog moet leren, wordt gebruikt als een argument om ongekwalificeerde mensen voor de klas te kunnen zetten. Inderdaad is het zo dat een leraar levenslang blijft leren, maar het is toch ook niet zo dat Johan Cruijff nog moet leren voetballen? De leerlingen hebben door deze jarenlange aanval op de vakdocent geen voorbeeld meer voor de klas staan van mensen die uitmunten.’’ <br /><br />Verbrugge pleit daarom samen met de BON voor een herwaardering van de vakdocent. Maar het is de vraag of dit niet een te idealistisch streven is. Er zijn geen wis- en natuurkundedocenten meer te krijgen voor het vwo. Voor Frans en Duits ziet het er niet veel beter uit. Moeten we niet accepteren dat het tijdperk van de hoogopgeleide, kwalitatief goede vakdocent voorbij is? <br /><br />„Je moet je eerst afvragen hoe het komt dat er in Nederland nauwelijks nog academici te krijgen zijn die het onderwijs in willen. Waarom is het in Finland geen probleem? Als kinderen één vak van binnenuit hebben gezien dan is dat het vak van leraar, en op basis van wat ze gezien hebben, besluiten ze: dát wil ik dus nooit! <br /><br />Bovendien gaat het hier om het formuleren van een ideaal van wat goed onderwijs is. Wij willen goed opgeleide, gekwalificeerde en bezielende docenten voor de klas. Maar ik weet ook wel dat wat in decennia is afgebroken niet binnen een paar jaar weer opgebouwd kan worden. Daarvoor staan onze eigen gecorrumpeerde opvattingen van wat vrijheid is ons te zeer in de weg. Het is namelijk makkelijker om instituties, zoals het onderwijs, onder het mom van het vrijheidsstreven kapot te maken dan om ze weer op te bouwen.’’ <br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://www.trouw.nl/deverdieping/religie_filosofie/article428024.ece/Filosofie_Onze_vrijheid_is_op_hol_geslagen">Trouw</a><a href="http://grafmonumentenzorg.blogspot.com/<br />"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1157318881191541432006-09-03T23:15:00.000+02:002006-09-06T23:50:40.433+02:00De Über-liberale samenleving:Hyper van de hypes door Roland Danckaert op Het Vrije Volk, 2 september 2006.<strong><em>Hypes zijn in de mode. Deze trend vaart wel bij het aangeboren kuddegedrag der mens. Hypernerveus word ik ervan!</em></strong><br /><br />Breng een dansprogramma met BN-ers op televisie en heel Nederland walst door de ballrooms. De danscursussen zijn niet aan te slepen. De vraag is groter dan het aanbod. Heeft de moderne mens dan helemaal geen eigen denkvermogen en geen eigen wil meer? Het lijkt erop van niet. Alles moet worden voorgekauwd en men voelt zich blijkbaar alleen nog veilig op de platgetreden paden der meute. Wat Fred Astaire niet is gelukt, daar is John de Wolf in een paar afleveringen wél in geslaagd: de hele wereld danst (naar de pijpen van de dansers). Nu de sterren op het ijs dansen, zal de massa wel massaal de schaatsen onderbinden in de disco en in de ijshallen…<br /><br />Tuinkabouter Rob Verlinden is er verantwoordelijk voor dat heel Nederland al jarenlang op zaterdag en zondag in de tuin zwoegt. Er wordt geen genoegen meer genomen met een ordentelijk grasveldje voor het huis, nee, er moet een ingenieus tuinontwerp aan ten grondslag liggen. Dankzij de groene televisiepraatjes van Verlinden zijn de tuincentra als viooltjes uit de grond gerezen en heeft het hele land groene vingers. Vroeger hielden bloemen van mensen, maar nu houden mensen echt van bloemen. Ofschoon, ik zie maar heel weinig mensen echt genieten van hun tuintje. <br /><br />Het is eerder een schoonheidsrace: wie heeft de mooiste tuin. En dan constateren dat het gras aan de overkant niet alleen groener is, maar ook veel duurzamer. Afmattend hoor, al die grasmatten leggen keer op keer… Plotseling hebben veel tuinmannen zich trouwens bekeerd tot de herenliefde, net als hun grote voorbeeld RV. We doen wat de ander doet, want anders vallen we uit de toon en weten we ons geen raad met onze vrije wil…<br /><br />Joop van Ellende besmette ons land met het musicalvirus en daar zijn we nog steeds niet van genezen. Alle onderwerpen en alle legendes zijn al eens de leidraad geweest van het muzikaal toneelspel. Straks komt er geheid een musical over Joop zèlf! Het zal wel aan mij liggen, maar al deze hypes zijn totaal niet aan mij besteed. Ik ben geloof ik een alleenstaande Nederlander als het gaat om musicals. Ik heb er ééntje gezien ('Hair' en ik kreeg er inderdaad haaruitval van) en sindsdien weet ik dat ik op de vrijdagavond liever een potje mikado speel met de kinderen. Alleen sta ik daarin, want om mij heen vliegt iedereen naar De Musical. Mensen schijnen thuis tegenwoordig tegen elkaar te zingen in plaats van te praten: het musicalvirus maakt van alle mannen een replica van Ben Cramer en van alle huisdames een kloon van Mariska van Kolck. <br /><br />Slordig zou het zijn van mij als ik de reiki zou vergeten. Wie nog niet op een reiki-cursus is geweest of geen reikibehandeling heeft ondergaan, hoort er echt niet bij. Het rijk der reikimasters is onbegrensd. Wie een beetje zweverig is aangelegd en geen bron van inkomsten heeft, laat zichzelf inwijden tot reikimaster. Hup, een bordje naast de deur is zo in elkaar geflanst en je mag patiënten gaan genezen met je Japanse energie. Geef mij maar een bordje sushi, daar knap ik veel meer van op. Daarna een portie Japanse sm-porno met stokjes en Rolandje kan weer de hele wereld aan. <br /><br />Wijn, lieve mensen. Wat een cultus hangt daar ineens omheen! Wijn, de godendrank die we jarenlang hebben ondergewaardeerd. Plotseling praat en doet iedereen over wijn alsof het de kutsap is van de Engel des Levens. Jezus, ik word er niet goed van hoe decadent zelfs de bouwvakker tegenwoordig doet over de wijn die hij heeft geproefd. Het is net alsof Nederland zonder een dagelijks flesje wijn weinig meer in de melk te brokkelen heeft. Waar die wijntik vandaan komt, Joost mag het weten, maar het is een feit dat we nog nooit zo creatief zijn geweest met kurk…<br /><br />Verre reizen maken, dat 'moeten' we ook al een tijdje. Heb je in Zuid-Afrika nog geen wijncursus gevolgd, dan word je bijkans ons land uitgezet. En elkaar maar overtroeven: vertel je dat je in Canada een wilde beer hebt gezien, gaat een andere pseudo-Boudewijn Büch eroverheen door te melden in Ecuador te zijn opgevreten en naderhand te zijn uitgekotst door een orka. Ook de vakantiebestemmingen zijn onderhevig aan hypes. Lieten de Nederlandse tienermeisjes zich decennia lang aflikken door geile Spaanse beren, tegenwoordig stroomt de studio van 'All you need is love' vol met Turkse jongens die hun Nederlandse vriendin komen opzoeken, om vervolgens door te vliegen naar Zweden, Duitsland, Italië, België, Noorwegen en Engeland om ook daar hun vriendinnetje bij de landelijke Robert ten Brink in de armen te sluiten.<br /><br />We doen en praten elkaar na alsof we volwaardige imitators zijn. Het wordt ons allemaal kant en klaar door de media voorgeschoteld en we vreten het met z'n allen van één groot bord op. Waar is de individuele authenticiteit gebleven? Ik zal wel teveel Einzelgänger zijn om dit gedrag te kunnen begrijpen. Een papegaai, dàt is misschien iets voor mij: eindelijk eens een levend wezen dat mij na gaat praten en na gaat doen!<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nieuw+rechts" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/paleo-conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatief-revolutionair" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nationalisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/liberalisering" rel="tag"></a><br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://www.hetvrijevolk.com">Het Vrije Volk</a><a href="http://grafmonumentenzorg.blogspot.com/<br />"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1157484607394252282006-09-05T21:29:00.000+02:002006-09-05T21:30:08.023+02:00Third World Invasion & Conquest of America by Patrick Buchanan: A Book Review door Frosty WOOLDRIDGE op NewsWithViews.com, 4 september 2006.<strong><em>Pat Buchanan, former U.S. presidential candidate, stands as the preeminent leader in America’s worst hour of crisis since the Civil War. What is that crisis? Americans wilt under an invasion of the United States by millions of dispossessed migrants from Third World countries. They break all rules by coming to America illegally. With allegiances emotionally divided, Americans allow 12 million high school dropouts from Third World countries–who refuse to speak English– into the mainstream of their fading First World country.</em></strong><br /><br /><br />Buchanan explains how social chaos spreads across America. The impacts at every level of American society explode with accelerating consequences by the day. Schools cannot teach America’s kids because Third World children do not speak English, lack educational fundamentals and separate into enclaves of an underclass. <br /><br />America’s hospitals suffer unpaid services for millions of illegals. In California, 86 hospitals and ER wards bankrupted in the past four years. MS-13 gangs stampede across America. Over $100 billion in drugs cross from Mexico into America annually. Prisons explode with 29 percent convicted illegal alien felons at an annual cost of $1.6 billion.<br /><br />Meanwhile, the myth that all illegal aliens comprise “nice, hard-working people” continues unchecked as we move toward lower and lower incomes, and erosion of the tax-base required for infrastructure upkeep. <br /><br />Americans lose jobs to an underpaid 21st century slave class. As America’s working poor stagger to unemployment lines–regular blue collar jobs of every description fall illegally into the hands of uninvited aliens. <br /><br />Diseases like tuberculosis, hepatitis and leprosy— once extinct in America— returned in the past 15 years because 12 million illegal aliens, many estimates exceed 20 million, didn’t undergo health-screening at the border. Buchanan exposes horrific disease consequences pouring into our hospitals. In North Carolina, one illegal alien suffers from a case of AIDS and tuberculosis. His cost to American taxpayers exceeds $1,600.00 daily. He’s one of 16,000 new cases of TB brought into the United States. Tuberculosis kills two million worldwide annually. <br /><br />What’s causing this national nightmare?<br /><br />Whether speaking on television to American citizens or battling oblivious leaders at the highest levels, Pat Buchanan sharpens his mighty quill in his blockbuster book titled: “STATE OF EMERGENCY: THE THIRD WORLD INVASION AND CONQUEST OF AMERICA.” <br /><br />Buchanan writes, “America has a government too morally flabby to act as Eisenhower did to remove from our national home those who have broken in and have no right to be here. How many American women must be assaulted, how many children molested, how many citizens must die–25 Americans die daily, at the hands of illegal aliens–before our government leaders do their duty?” (Source: U.S. Representative Steve King of Iowa, quoting a recent GAO report to the U.S. Congress.) <br /><br />With electric clarity, coupled with anguishing facts, Buchanan educates readers to America’s dilemma: “Mexicans retain their language and loyalty to Mexico.” <br /><br />Buchanan dispels the “Myth of the Indispensable Alien” that does the job that no American would do. When employers pay a living-wage, with reasonable benefits, U.S. citizens work with honor. “What we’re creating,” Buchanan writes, “are two Americas; separate and unequal.” The two largest minorities, American Blacks and alien Hispanics, compete violently amongst themselves and dropout from school with achievement levels three to five grades behind white and Asian students. This causes a polarized society.<br /><br />Buchanan quotes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who warned, “There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in that society, who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don’t ‘own’ it, they want to destroy it.”<br /><br />While the rich may think it’s safe to live in gated communities in places like Madison, Wisconsin and Loudoun County near our nation’s capital—how acceptable would it be to live an upper middle class life once millions of illegal aliens recreate their squalid surroundings of the Third World imported into America? <br /><br />Buchanan quotes from Jean Raspail who wrote, “Camp of the Saints” a prophetic novel 30 years ago warning France not to import millions of incompatible cultures and poor people into its heartland. As an armada of desperate immigrants set sail from Calcutta, one of the figures said, “You don’t know my people, the squalor, superstitions, the fatalistic sloth they’ve wallowed in for generations. You don’t know what you’re in for if that fleet of brutes ever lands in your lap. Everything will change in this country of yours. They will swallow you up.” <br /><br />Case in point, Muslim immigrants grow faster than their French hosts. While they are French citizens, they are not French–but left in a nether world of mixed and incompatible cultures. As Theo Van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn of Holland discovered, when you upset certain Muslim factions, they kill you. When you upset enough of them, as in Paris, France in December, they fire bombed 10,000 cars while rioting for three weeks. Both Spain and the United Kingdom suffered train and subway bombings by citizen immigrants. Welcome to Eurabia!<br /><br />While Buchanan’s book rivets a reader’s sensibilities, a growing depression and frightening realization pervades any American’s sense of well being. What happens in Europe repeats itself in America.<br /><br />In the past 40 years, immigration drove the U.S. population from 194 million to 300 million in October 2006. That’s 106 million people added in four decades. Latest predictions show another 100 million by 2040; the Hispanic-Latino illegal-alien cohort doubles every four years. The catastrophic consequences portend irreversible crises and unsolvable problems as to environmental impact, global warming, species extinction, nonrenewable resources, crowding, grid-locked thoroughfares, loss of quality-of-life and downgrading of the American standard of living. <br /><br />“By 2050 or sooner, America will become a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural conglomerate—a Balkanized 420 million, a Tower of Babel, a replica of the Roman Empire after the Goths and Vandals invaded,” Buchanan said in his sobering Last Chance chapter at the end of the book. <br /><br />Buchanan understates our growing population dilemma. Demographic experts expect 600 million by 2065, or sooner.<br /><br />What must be done? Buchanan says America needs a 10 year moratorium on all immigration. It’s our only chance for assimilating those here today. After that, we allow less than 100,000 immigrants annually for a sustainable future for all races, creeds and colors. Other countries and their citizens must solve their own problems. Build a wall along 2,000 miles of the Mexican border. Secure it forever! The $8 billion cost would easily be offset by savings in welfare, health care, education and incarceration of illegal aliens. Stop the 350,000 anchor babies annually. End duel citizenship. Either you’re an American or you are not! Stop all chain migration. Stop the magnet jobs for illegals. Deport? Don’t have to! “Attrition through enforcement” works quickly and easily. Eisenhower did it and so can Bush.<br /><br />Buchanan ‘sees’ our dilemma. When the rate of immigration exceeds the rate of assimilation—it is a recipe for the breakdown of any civilization. The United States rushes toward a fate similar to Rome, France, England and Holland. <br /><br />The most sobering ramifications of Buchanan’s book stems from the sheer numbers of immigrants. Name one advantage of adding 100 million people in 34 years to the United States of America. <br /><br />This book represents the most important book you’ll read in your lifetime. It exposes the future of America if this invasion continues. It illustrates what your children face if you don’t take action. Conviction without action is worthless; conviction coupled with action changes history. Let’s get busy! <br /><br />Buchanan finished, “In our hearts we know what must be done. We must stop the invasion.”<br /><br /><em>Frosty Wooldridge</em><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nieuw+rechts" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/paleo-conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatief-revolutionair" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nouvelle+droite" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conservatisme" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Marcel+Ruter" rel="tag"></a><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Eurabia" rel="tag"></a><br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=84">Patrick J. Buchanan - right from the beginning</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1155578363057727932006-08-14T19:55:00.000+02:002006-08-14T19:59:23.580+02:00Welcome to Neo-Fascism 101 door Andrew BOSWORTH op Virtualcitizens, 14 augustus 2006.<strong><em>Neo-conservatives decided that World War III is to be waged against “Islamic-Fascists” or “Islamo-Fascism.” </em></strong> <br /><br />Who is reading from the new script? William Kristol, Bill O’Reilly, Christopher Hitchens, Michelle Mankin, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Nick Cohen, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Daniel Pipes, Glenn Beck, Oliver North – even George W. Bush, prompting legitimate complaints from Muslim-Americans. <br /><br />Middle Eastern powers include pan-Arab socialist dictatorships (Syria), monarchies (Saudi Arabia), constitutional theocracies (Iran), and assorted fundamentalist movements. None are “fascist.” For three decades of political scientists, “fascism” is a phenomenon of industrialized societies and exhibits features alien to the Middle East. <br /><br />Classical fascism was evident in inter-war Italy, Germany and Japan, and full-blown fascism exhibits three dimensions: economic, political and cultural.<br /><br />1. Economic fascism is based a merger of big business and big government. Sometimes, a formal corporatism emerges; other times, the private sector (monopolies and oligopolies) simply pass over into the public sector (as in the US), capturing the state and using it to wage that most profitable of activities: war. This later scenario is what happened in the United States, and the incestuous relationship between Big Business and Big Government ushered in a new Gilded Age of cronyism and corruption. Benito Mussolini was clear: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power.” <br /><br />For the Middle East, the preconditions of mature capitalism (and thus fascism) simply do not exist.<br /><br />2. Political fascism normally includes, as it did for Italy and Germany, a retreat from already-existing democratic practices – an erosion of democracy. The political class begins to express a disdain for human rights and international treaties, lashing out at pillars of civilization like France. Power is increasingly centered on the executive branch, and elections become less transparent, even fraudulent. Civil liberties are restricted, and constitutions are ground under the hobnailed boot. <br /><br />Political fascism always depicts dissent as treason, and there is an obsession with scapegoats and plots. There are frequent mixed messages about the enemy: the enemy is strong, then weak; the enemy is important; then irrelevant. Today, the Party depicts Hezbollah as having unlimited funds from Iran and, simultaneously, selling pirated DVDs and fake Viagra in your town. <br /><br />Political fascism is based on militant nationalism, pseudo-populism and an adoration of military power. As Huey Long said, former Governor of Louisiana: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.” For different reasons, these values tend to resonate among economic elites at the top and the lower middle class at the bottom. In the United States, however, it appears that the lower and working classes are now questioning their leadership – or losing themselves in End of Empire entertainment: pan y circo (bread and circus).<br /><br />In its advanced stages, political fascism depends upon mass surveillance and, more crucially, eternal war. Italy’s mad adventures in Ethiopia and Germany’s insane and unwinnable two-front war were nursed by the ideology of eternal war. <br /><br />The only ingredient of classical political fascism missing in the United States is a charismatic leader – but not for lack of trying. In Red States, billboards of George W. “Our Leader” arose, and fundamentalists synchronized Morning Prayer to those of the White House.<br /><br />Middle East powers – particularly the movements neo-cons describe as “Islamofascist” – are emerging in non-democratic systems. They are also pushing for more, not less, political democracy because the popular classes will catapult them to power and keep them there. <br /><br />Hamas, for example, won in an election. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood would very much like to go to the polls in more transparent elections. Shia Muslims in Iraq are also keen on voting. Iran’s president won an election handily. And when the dust settles in Lebanon, the next sure winner at the ballot box will be Hezbollah, when Lebanese Christians, Sunnis and Druze will surely wait in lines for hours to endorse this radical Shia group. Democracy, it seems, is about to flourish in the Middle East – it’s just not yielding the puppet regimes hoped for in Washington, London (Airstrip One) or Tel Aviv. Tony Snow claims “they hate democracy.” Don’t be snowed.<br /><br />Islamic fundamentalist groups compete at the national level, but Islamic fundamentalism is a transnational movement inherently opposed to the pseudo-nationalism necessary for fascism. <br /><br />3. Cultural fascism is based on a reaction against science, modernity, the arts and intellectualism. It distorts science to accomplish political aims. Cultural fascism always includes strong doses of homophobia. <br /><br />In the US, for every person with legitimate objections to immigration (objections based on public policy), there must be three people objecting to it based on race, and for them “illegal” becomes a euphemism for “Mexican.” Xenophobia is basic to cultural fascism. <br /><br />Cultural fascism, in the West, tends towards anti-Semitism. For now, American anti-Semitism has an anti-Arab face. In linguistics and ethnology, the term “Semitic” includes “Arabic” and “Arabs.” A Marriam-Webster definition of “Semite” is clear: “A member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs.”<br /><br />Thus, when neo-con pundits, politicians and even the President employ the term “Islamo-Fascist” they are being anti-Semitic. <br /><br />Middle Eastern and Islamic movements can be reactionary, but these are reactions to external powers and not to the core dimensions of their own societies, which remain traditional. <br /><br />So the economic, political and cultural prerequisites of fascism do not exist in the Middle East – but they do exist in the United States. Our post-WWII, Information Age neo-fascism is much like the inter-war classical fascism but softer, lighter, friendlier. Today, instead of marching, we ritually demonstrate our political will on touch-screen pads, a ceremony organized by Party-backed corporations with secret software on private servers. <br /><br />It’s a race: Will the future look like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where a “dictatorship without tears” is founded upon psychotropic drugs, false religion and biological-sexual engineering? Or will it be a world of brute force like George Orwell’s 1984? “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.” It will be both: A Brave New World for those who conform and 1984 for those who don’t. American fascism will both smile and grimace.<br /><br />Neo-con pundits follow a clever strategy of deflection. They employ the term “Islamo-Fascism” when “theocracy” or “dictatorship” or “fundamentalist movement” would be more historically accurate. Why do they do this? Their political epithets are inspired by a subtle conditioning campaign. <br /><br />Perhaps it’s subconscious projection. “Projection,” of course, is a defense mechanism that kicks when someone is threatened by, or afraid of, their own impulse. So they attribute these impulses to someone else. Do not be neo-conned. How can you help? <br /><br />First, always replace the term “neo-conservatism” with “neo-fascism.” <br /><br />Second, always charge those who use the term “Islamo-fascism” with anti-Semitism (because Arabs – most of whom are Muslims – are technically “Semitic,” too).<br /><br />Third, remind people who use the term “Islamo-Fascism” that the term is historically inaccurate and that the main ingredients of classical fascism – 1) monopoly capitalism; 2) erosion of democracy; and 3) militant nationalism – are coming together in the United States like a Perfect Storm.<br /><br />It’s not fair to perform a vivisection of the Bush regime without pointing to what a healthier body politic might look like – a “post-crisis” body politic.<br /><br />1) The restoration of the checks and balances, and limited government, of a democratic republic. This includes voter protections and a pencil-paper-box voting system.<br /><br />2) The restoration of foreign relations to open diplomacy (as envisioned by the Founders) – to the power of persuasion - unless attacked, upon which military force will be restricted to the forces demonstrably responsible. This means no foreign aid, no weapons sales, no forward bases, and no committing political adultery by dividing loyalties between the people of the United States and any foreign power. The American people can express their solidarity with people around the world with short-term disaster relief.<br /><br />3) Challenging both Israel and Arab powers to follow the letter of international law. Compliance means full participation in an international economy and community (the carrot); and resistance invites the atrophy of embargoes, travel restrictions, and blockages (the stick). Under UN Resolution 181, Israel secures its right to exist according to the 1948 borders, with protection from the United Nations. Simultaneously, Israel withdraws all of its settler colonies from the West Bank, illegal under Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” And Jerusalem becomes the international city as intended in 1948.<br /><br />4) Challenging the world’s people and states with a transformative proposal: universal nuclear disarmament. If states do not disarm, take the proposal to their peoples. Inspired, motivated and determined, masses of people will quickly sideline both foot-dragging politicians and terrorists. The best weapon against terror is not the US Army; it is civilized men and women everywhere. The world is ready to make nuclear weapons - and then war - extinct.<br /><br />Thomas Paine: “We have it in our power to make the world new again.”<br /><br />Bron: <a href="http://www.virtualcitizens.com">Virtual Citizens</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1154536234972945772006-08-02T18:24:00.000+02:002006-08-02T18:30:35.126+02:00The Rebel: An Interview with Dominique Venner door GAËTAN op JI Séquanie, 2006.<strong>TRANSLATOR’S NOTE</strong>: <em>It’s testament to the abysmal state of our culture that hardly one of Dominique Venner’s more than forty books have been translated into English. But everything he writes bears directly on us — “us” here referring not specifically to the anglophone world, but to the European world that exists wherever white men still carry on in any of the old ways.<br /><br />Venner is more than a gifted historian who has made major contributions to the most important chapters of modern, especially 20th-century European history. He has played a key role in both the development of the European New Right and the “Europeanization” of continental nationalionalism.<br /><br />It is his “rebel heart” that explains his engagement in these great struggles, as well as his interests in the Russian Revolution, German fascism, French national socialism, the U.S. Civil War, and the two world wars. The universe I’ve discovered in his works is one that reminds me of Ernst von Salomon’s “Die Geächteten” — one of the Homeric epics of our age.<br /><br />The following interview is about the rebel. Unlike the racial conservatives dominant in U. S. white nationalist ranks, European nationalism still bears traces of its revolutionary heritage — opposed as it is not merely to the alien, anti-national forces, but to the entire liberal modernist subversion, of which the United States has been the foremost exemplar.</em> -<strong><em>Michael O’Meara</em></strong><br /><br /><strong>Question: What is a rebel? Is one born a rebel, or just happens to become one? Are there different types of rebels?</strong><br /><br />Dominique Venner: It’s possible to be intellectually rebellious, an irritant to the herd, without actually being a rebel. Paul Morand [a diplomat and novelist noted for his anti-Semitism and collaborationism under Vichy] is a good example of this. In his youth, he was something of a free spirit blessed by fortune. His novels were favored with success. But there was nothing rebellious or even defiant in this. It was for having chosen the side of the National Revolution between 1940 and 1944, for persisting in his opposition to the postwar regime, and for feeling like an outsider that made him the rebellious figure we have come to know from his “Journals.”<br /><br />Another, though different example of this type is Ernst Jünger. Although the author of an important rebel treatise on the Cold War, Jünger was never actually a rebel. A nationalist in a period of nationalism; an outsider, like much of polite society, during the Third Reich; linked to the July 20 conspirators, though on principle opposed to assassinating Hitler. Basically for ethical reasons. His itinerary on the margins of fashion made him an anarch, this figure he invented and of which after 1932 he was the perfect representative. The anarch is not a rebel. He’s a spectator whose perch is high above the mud below.<br /><br />Just the opposite of Morand and Jünger, the Irish poet Patrick Pearse was an authentic rebel. He might even be described as a born rebel. When a child, he was drawn to Erin’s long history of rebellion. Later, he associated with the Gaelic Revival, which laid the basis of the armed insurrection. A founding member of the first IRA, he was the real leader of the Easter Uprising in Dublin in 1916. This was why he was shot. He died without knowing that his sacrifice would spur the triumph of his cause.<br /><br />A fourth, again very different example is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Up until his arrest in 1945, he had been a loyal Soviet, having rarely questioned the system into which he was born and having dutifully done his duty during the war as a reserve officer in the Red Army. His arrest, his subsequent discovery of the Gulag and of the horrors that occurred after 1917, provoked a total reversal, forcing him to challenging a system which he once blindly accepted. This is when he became a rebel — not only against Communist, but capitalist society, both of which he saw as destructive of tradition and opposed to superior life forms.<br /><br />The reasons that made Pearse a rebel were not the same that made Solzhenitsyn a rebel. It was the shock of certain events, followed by a heroic internal struggle, that made the latter a rebel. What they both have in common, what they discovered through different ways, was the utter incompatibility between their being and the world in which they were thrown. This is the first trait of the rebel. The second is the rejection of fatalism.<br /><br /><strong>Q: What is the difference between rebellion, revolt, dissent, and resistance?</strong><br /><br />DV: Revolt is a spontaneous movement provoked by an injustice, an ignominy, or a scandal. Child of indignation, revolt is rarely sustained. Dissent, like heresy, is a breaking with a community, whether it be a political, social, religious, or intellectual community. Its motives are often circumstantial and don’t necessarily imply struggle. As to resistance, other than the mythic sense it acquired during the war, it signifies one’s opposition, even passive opposition, to a particular force or system, nothing more. To be a rebel is something else.<br /><br /><strong>Q: What, then, is the essence of a rebel?</strong><br /><br />DV: A rebel revolts against whatever appears to him illegitimate, fraudulent, or sacrilegious. The rebel is his own law. This is what distinguishes him. His second distinguishing trait is his willingness to engage in struggle, even when there is no hope of success. If he fights a power, it is because he rejects its legitimacy, because he appeals to another legitimacy, to that of soul or spirit.<br /><br /><strong>Q: What historical or literary models of the rebel would you offer?</strong><br /><br />DV: Sophocles’ Antigone comes first to mind. With her, we enter a space of sacred legitimacy. She is a rebel out of loyalty. She defies Creon’s decrees because of her respect for tradition and the divine law (to bury the dead), which Creon violates. It didn’t mater that Creon had his reasons; their price was sacrilege. Antigone saw herself as justified in her rebellion.<br /><br />It’s difficult to choose among the many other examples. . . . During the War of Succession, the Yankees designated their Confederate adversaries as rebels: “rebs.” This was good propaganda, but it wasn’t true. The American Constitution implicitly recognized the right of member states to succeed. Constitutional forms had been much respected in the South. Robert E. Lee never saw himself as a rebel. After his surrender in April 1865, he sought to reconcile North and South. At this moment, the true rebels emerged, who continued the struggle against the Northern army of occupation and its collaborators.<br /><br />Certain of these rebels succumbed to banditry, like Jesse James. Others transmitted to their children a tradition that has had a great literary posterity. In the “Vanquished,” one of William Faulkner’s most beautiful novels, there is, for example a fascinating portrait of a young Confederate rebel, Drusilla, who never doubts the justice of his cause or the illegitimacy of the victors.<br /><br /><strong>Q: How can one be a rebel today?</strong><br /><br />DV: How can one not! To exist is to defy all that threatens you. To be a rebel is not to accumulate a library of subversive books or to dream of fantastic conspiracies or of taking to the hills. It is to make yourself your own law. To find in yourself what counts. To make sure that you’re never “cured” of your youth. To prefer to put everyone up against the wall rather than to remain supine. To pillage in this age whatever can be converted to your law, without concern for appearance.<br /><br />By contrast, I would never dream of questioning the futility of seemingly lost struggles. Think of Patrick Pearse. I’ve also spoken of Solzhenitsyn, who personifies the magic sword of which Jünger speaks, “the magic sword that makes tyrants tremble.” In this Solzhenitsyn is unique and inimitable. But he owed this power to someone who was less great than himself. To someone who should gives us cause to reflect. In “The Gulag Archipelago,” he tells the story of his “revelation.”<br /><br />In 1945, he was in a cell at Boutyrki Prison in Moscow, along with a dozen other prisoners, whose faces were emaciated and whose bodies broken. One of the prisoners, though, was different. He was an old White Guard colonel, Constantin Iassevitch. He had been imprisoned for his role in the Civil War. Solzhenitsyn says the colonel never spoke of his past, but in every facet of his attitude and behavior it was obvious that the struggle had never ended for him. Despite the chaos that reigned in the spirits of the other prisoners, he retained a clear, decisive view of the world around him. This disposition gave his body a presence, a flexibility, an energy that defied its years. He washed himself in freezing cold water each morning, while the other prisoners grew foul in their filth and lament.<br /><br />A year later, after being transferred to another Moscow prison, Solzhenitsyn learned that the colonel had been executed. “He had seen through the prison walls with eyes that remained perpetually young. . . . This indomitable loyalty to the cause he had fought had given him a very uncommon power.” In thinking of this episode, I tell myself that we can never be another Solzhenitsyn, but it’s within the reach of each of us to emulate the old White colonel.<br /><br /><strong>French Original<br /><em>“Aujourd’hui, comment ne pas être rebelle?”</em></strong><br /><br /><a href="http://www.jisequanie.com/blogs/index.php?2006/06/18/13-entretien">JI Séquanie</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1154441611579838692006-08-01T16:09:00.000+02:002006-08-01T16:15:19.480+02:00Reactie van Michael O'Meara in VanguardNewsNetwork op Faye's interview, 31 juli 2006.<strong>By Michael O’Meara</strong><br /><br /><strong><em>Few postwar thinkers in my view have played a greater role in ideologically resisting the forces assaulting Europe’s incomparable bioculture than Guillaume Faye. This was publicly evident at the international conference on “The White World’s Future” held in Moscow in June of this year, which he helped organize. It’s even more evident in the six books he’s written in the last seven years and in the innumerable articles, interviews, and conferences in which he’s alerted Europeans to the great challenges threatening their survival.</em></strong><br /><br />In this spirit he has developed an “archeofuturist” philosophy that takes its inspiration from the most primordial and Faustian urgings of our people’s spirit; he has incessantly warned of the threat posed by the Third World, specially Islamic, invasion of the former white homelands; he has promoted European collaboration with Russia and made the case for a white imperium stretching from Dublin to Vladivoskov;<br />he privileges biopolitics over cultural or party politics; he’s developed a theory of the interregnum that explains why the existing system of subversion will soon collapse; and he’s successfully promoted anti-liberal ideas and values in a language and style that transcends the often ghettoized discourse of our movement.<br /><br />Zie voor het gehele <a href="http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/?p=841">artikel op Vanguard News Network</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13607557.post-1154199885550433092006-07-29T20:37:00.000+02:002006-07-29T21:04:45.943+02:00Interview met Guillaume Faye in France-Echos op Subversive.com, 27 juli 2006.<strong><em>Origineel interview in het Frans op: <a href="http://forum.subversiv.com/index.php?id=190644">Subversiv</a> vertaald naar het Engels, onder voorbehoud van mogelijke vertaalfouten.</em></strong><br /><br /><strong>1 Franche-Echos</strong>: <em>Mister Faye, what was your part in the founding of the New Right or GRECE?</em><br /><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: From 1970 to 1986 I was first an adherent, and then one of the directors of the association, GRECE, which was reputedly one of the intellectual centres of the "New Right" or the "extreme right" depending on the names given to it by the journalists involved, although I would prefer the term " European identitarian nationalism". I was even GRECE's number two, as "Secretary for Study and Research", at the time. Today, this so-called "New Right", and GRECE, are no more than the shadows of their former selves and have abandoned the identitarian struggle. They have abandoned any idea of defending the European identity and<br />become fake rebels, avid to be recognised by the system (though vainly so), totally aligned with the positions of the left wing and of Monde Diplomatique, positions such as : islamophile, pro-third-world, silence in radio broadcasts concerning immigration (the avoidance strategy - avoiding above all anything that might shock anyone), anti-capitalism, ineffective anti-americanism, hate-filled anti-zionism, etcetera.<br /><br /><strong>2 France-Echos</strong>: <em>Besides, you were a great humorous journalist, notably in the Filipacchi Group ... in the eighties, then you vanished. Is it true that your comrades in GRECE had something to do with your demonisation?</em><br /><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: It was a mixture of things ; between 1980 and 1986 I published a number of political and ideological books (1). The situation was quite different from what it is today and my ideas have evolved considerably. Then, from 1986 onwards, seized by what the Romans called the vis comica, I plunged into show business : radio, TV, cinema, music, specialist press, etc. I did all this under pseudonyms, obviously. I also wrote some rather light books (2). This period<br />taught me a lot, because, unlike the Paris intellectuals who see everything through their readers' clubs, I got into the habit of going to the heart of things. In 1998, driven by some internal demon ... I went back to the task of writing my ideological books and giving conferences. Then, in 1999, some little ill-wishers, who could only have come from the old milieu in which I had been previously, discreetly told my employers who I really was, purely out of jealousy. These latter then stopped giving me any work. One mustn't, after all, feed the Devil ... To get away from all this I founded my own review, I Have Understood All - which in its new format is now called Alarm Signal - and like a stakhanovite I multiplied my books, articles, and ideological conferences.<br /><br /><strong>3 France-Echos</strong>: <em>Since your return to the centre of debate in the circles of right wing thought you have not ceased denouncing the pro-Arab, anti-Semitic, pro-Islamist, even Third-World-ist, turn of the New Right and of your erstwhile friends in GRECE.<br />What is it all about?<br /></em><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: I parted company with GRECE and the New Right in 1986, because even then I could quite clearly perceive this ideological development. Since then polemic with them has never ceased. One important detail : most of the original guiding spirits of GRECE eventually came to the same conclusions as I had, and left the organisation, which is nowadays reconstituted solely around the writer Alain de Benoist and his court, whose positions are absolutely the same as those of Dieudonné and the insane Iranian Mullahs. I note that the aforementioned Alain de Benoist, forgetting all concepts of honour, has gone so far as to describe me in the Italian press as a "super-racist" (Area, Review, May 2000) ... He has chosen his camp, that of the politically correct, the vulgar herd, the poor man's analysis, the tactics of the courtesan (?) And the poor fellow doesn't even get invited to Paris salons or readers' clubs. It seems to me - and I shall return to this - that these people have the mentality of collaborators. As if they are anticipating the arrival of their future masters. They have the mentality of dhimmis, of "submitters".<br />Nowadays, I work in close association with the old members of the New Right who quit, like me, and who have created their own networks and circles of cultural and ideological influence, throughout Europe, in Russia, in Portugal, in the USA, and in Canada. And I work, of course, on new books.<br /><br /><strong>4 France-Echos</strong>: <em>Have you found, in these new circles with which you work, or in the Front National, which has invited you on various occasions to give speeches, any<br />hostility against the Jews, any remnants of anti-Semitism?</em><br /><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: No, that isn't really the problem. Anti-Judaism (to use a term I prefer to 'anti-Semitism') melts like snow in the sun across a great part of what is known as the "extreme right". Of course, there are significant pockets of resistance ; one cannot defeat the long anti-Jewish tradition in a day. And there is also a segment of this "extreme right", to which GRECE belongs, which has turned to a violent anti-zionism, coupled with an acute Palestinophilia (I shall return to this). However, this ideological current has become more and more isolated in the movement I am speaking of, quite simply because of the massive threat posed by immigration into France ... Under these conditions, anti-Judaism is forgotten, the Jew no longer seems like a menace at all. In the circles in which I move, I never hear any anti-Jewish invective. I even come across people (as one did in the sixties) who approve and support the "Israeli Right". I have tried to understand (and my conclusions regarding this are finally, little by little, becoming shared) that anti-Judaism is a politically obselete, useless, overtaken position, even when it is disguised as anti-zionism. We are no longer living in the times of the Dreyfuss Affair. Besides, the anti-Judaists have never escaped from their own terrible contradiction : they seem to despise the Jews, yet pretend that these latter control the world. So, does this mean that<br />they think the Jews are a superior race, or not? Anti-Judaism is a form of political schizophrenia, a sort of inverted philo-Semitism, the expression of a ressentiment [envy, inferiority complex - RB]. I don't judge anti-Judaism from a moral point of view ; after all, one can be frustrated and detest whomever one likes. I never mix the moral and the political. But my position is the same as Nietzsche's : hating the Jews serves no purpose, it is a politically stupid and unproductive passion.<br /><br /><strong>5 France-Echos</strong>: <em>A number of small extreme right groups who have read your work accuse you of being prejudicially pro-American and "neo-zionist". Why is that, do you think?</em><br /><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: Those people are hemiplegic, in addition to being professional liars. To begin with, I have never been "prejudicially pro-American" . One has only to read my essay "Global Coup d'État, an Essay on the New American Imperialism" (which deconstructs the ideology of the neo-conservatives) to see that. My position, being strategic rather than manichean, is incomprehensible to these fanatics. I am neither an anti-American nor a pro-American, but a European nationalist. The USA is in no way the Great Satan, the number one enemy, but, depending on circumstances and according to its strategy as a state, it may be an adversary,<br />a competitor, or even one day an ally. The anti-American dogma (which I call OHAA, "obsessional-hysterican anti-Americanism") is impolitic, like all dogmas. I'm sorry, but I prefer McDonalds' to mosques, pom-pom girls to shuttered, battered, violated women, American universities to obscurantist Islamist madrassas, etcetera.<br /><br />Regarding zionism, these people who call me a "neo-zionist" are labelling me like this quite simply because I am not hysterically anti-zionist, as they are, and because I can feel no sympathy nor interest in the "Palestinian cause". How can I defend a Muslim people (who claim to be being "martyred", though I dispute this), at the very moment that Islam undertakes the conquest of Europe? In what way does the "zionism" of the Jewish state threaten Europe? It is my fierce, defensive opposition to Islam, and to the Arabo-Muslim strategy, which explains<br />why these people, who have become infatuated Arabophiles and Islamophiles, call me a "neo-zionist".<br /><br />They cannot bear the fact that I refuse to give the requisite free passage to their "anti-zionism". How can I be a "zionist" when I am not Jewish? And how could I become an "anti-zionist" when at no time has the zionist ideology (unlike Islamism, communism, leftism, rights-of-man-ism, or masochistic post-conciliar christianism) attacked or threatened either directly or remotely<br />the idea I defend, which is the maintenance of European identity? In what way would the disappearance of Israel help my cause? To think of the Jewish state as an enemy is geopolitical idiocy for European identitarians.<br />The current GRECE of Alain de Benoist (which has nothing in common with the original GRECE) the little "national-revolutionary" groups inspired by the fanatical Christian Bouchet, and the camarilla of "extreme right" militants who have converted to Islam, all of these being closely interconnected, are really totally aligned to the positions of the Iranian government, which fascinates them as a snake fascinates sparrows. For them, I am obviously the absolute<br />enemy.<br /><br />This is how I interpret their tortured reasoning : to begin with, there is a visceral hatred (which needs psychoanalytic explanation) for everything Israeli, American, or zionist. (Note, I have not claimed that in every case this is a camouflaged form of neurotic anti-Judaism, analogous to the paranoic and dream like anti-Judaism of the Third Reich, but in the last analysis, in some cases,<br />it is so). Secondly, given their obsessional anti-zionism and anti-Americanism, they arrive through the force of passion and simplistic thinking at Islamophilia, Arabophilia, and pro-immigrationism. They finish up aligning themselves with the views of Dieudonné (whom they are actively courting), and in the circles of the pro-Arab extreme left. Add to this, a third-world-ist, anti-capitalist rhetoric, derived entirely from the neo-marxist vulgate, of which Alain de Benoist has been for a long time the exemplar on the "extreme right". What I find really tragic in these intellectual contortions, is that these pseudo-European identitarians, because of their anti-zionism (and in some cases, anti-Judaism) completely sacrifice their defense of the European identity and hurl themselves into the arms of Islam, pro-Arabism, and third-world-ism.<br />They focus all their fire on zionism, blinded by their hatred. The destruction, through immigration, of Europe? For them, this is inevitable anyway, and of secondary importance. The essential thing is the struggle against the hydra of zionism and the American Satan, shoulder to shoulder with militant Islam. They masturbate in ecstacy over the declarations of Ahmadinejad.<br /><br />The problem is that their new "friends" regard them as collaborators, and despise them as traitors. I do not envy their future lot. I suspect they look forward to the Islamisation of Europe, its "future". They want to be on the winning side. They would love to be cosseted dhimmis ("submitters"). But they won't be. Another thing, these people hope to conveniently forget their<br />politically incorrect pasts and to forge for themselves phony passports as "anti-racists" (they hope in vain, though) - they hope to appear as the greatest friends of Islam, of the Arabs, of the Palestinian cause, of the poor third world, oppressed by the "American-zionist capital bloc". All this isn't just intellectually bankrupt, it needs one term above all - cowardice.<br /><br /><br /><strong>6 France-Echos</strong>: <em>What does zionism mean to you?</em><br /><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: Zionism is the affirmation of the re-installation of a people in a land which they consider to be their own. Zionism is also a highly composite ideology : it talks of aliya, which means the "return" of the dispersed Jews, but also, and right from its inception, it talks of a new form of society. I know this subject quite well because I am preparing a work, which will make a<br />certain amount of noise in the "milieu", which will be called "The New Jewish Question". Zionism, which is a very recent element in Jewish history, theorised at the end of the nineteenth century by Herzl and Buber (who did not arrive at the same positions, hence the "Israeli compromise") is the attempt (successful, uniquely in history) to reconstitute a Jewish state, in fact the mythical Kingdom of David, starting from the Diaspora, in order to escape from<br />persecution and renew the post-Mosaic tradition.<br />One should note that the religious Jews were against this project (and this opposition still exists) because it seemed to envisage the construction of a profane state entity. The zionist project is an absolutely unique case in the annals of "archeofuturism" (this is the name of one of my books,<br />"Archeofuturism"), that is to say, the reconstruction, the renaissance, the resurrection and the projection into the future of a political form past but not forgotten. The reconstitution of the national and state language, Hebrew, has no historical parallel. It is a major act of political voluntarism. The zionist movement has a "saga" which, from my point of view as a non-Jewish observer, corresponds to the values which I defend : attachment to a land, to the lineage<br />of one's people, to its traditions, to its historical perpetuation, to fidelity to one's lines of descent, to ethnic homogeneity and collective will. Zionism therefore constitutes an example of the creation of a political and state form for a people, which is new, and which should inspire the re-founders of European identitarianism. However, let it be understood, although I applaud its<br />principles, zionism is not my own cause, because I do not belong to the Jewish people. Quite simply, I cannot see what phantasm should cause me to oppose it...<br /><br />Now, I think (and I take no pleasure at all in this) that the zionist project and the existence of Israel are menaced by the demographic balance, in favour of the Muslims, also by the extension of a terrorist war which might provoke the flight of the élites, and also probably a reduction in international support for Israel. The great mistake that was made, was to grant Israeli nationality to the Muslim minority which remained after 1948, instead of organising a clear and<br />thorough-going partition. This mistake was the result of the "humanistic" notions of Buber, and of his famous book "I and Thou". One last thing : people constantly parrot to me the official line, that the Jewish state has conducted itself in an ignoble, persecutory manner towards the unhappy "Palestinians".<br />Even if this were true, it isn't my problem. However, in addition, I think it is an extreme exaggeration. It is in the political interest of European identitarians that the state of Israel survives. I shall talk about this in my forthcoming book. My position will shock the retarded ones. So much the worse for them.<br /><br /><strong>7 France-Echos</strong>: <em>Is it true that you have spoken at Senate conferences, at the invitation of the very influential zionist club of Jean Mandelbaum, a circle which has also invited speeches from Chirac, Spiner, and most of the more famous French zionists?<br /></em><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: Absolutely true. In particular, I explained to them that the Jewish intellectuals and political men who have welcomed immigration and Islamisation, in the name of a delirious vision of "anti-racism", have been irresponsible. The public agrees with me. I respond to all the invitations I receive. I have spoken before the FN, the MNR, the Rotary Club, the PS branch of the 15th arrondissement, the Republican Party in Washington, the Rodina Party in the Moscow Duma, the Breton Party Adsav, the University of St Petersburg, and many French, Belgian, German, Italian, and Spanish cultural assocations, and other circles in France, Germany, Italy, etcetera. I am a free electron, I affirm my own ideas without any complexes. I have even been invited by certain Islamist circles, who wanted to know the thinking behind my anti-Islamist positions. I spoke alongside old friends from the "New Right" who had converted to Islam, and alongside obsessional anti-zionists. I sensed that the Muslims had a lot more respect for me than they had for these obsequious, cowardly converts. I explained to them that they were in the process of invading Europe, that I was not fooled by their strategy, that my duty was to fight them, and that - I am sorry to have to say - I have succeeded in completely cutting the threads of their propaganda for the "Palestinian cause" and their fable of "Islam, religion<br />of peace". I explained to them that my task was to oppose their Jihad, that I was not deceived by their Qur'anic hypocrisy, that they could do what they liked in their own homelands but not in mine, that they should not take me for an idiot by talking about the "zionist menace", etc. They heard me out very courteously, in complete silence, quite discomforted, attentive, and, at the end, an Algerian intellectual told me with a big grin, "Luckily for us, most of the French do not possess your lucidity, and don't know us the way you do."<br /><br /><strong>8 France-Echos</strong>: <em>Do you accept the label "extreme right", and how do you explain your sulphurous, extremist image?</em><br /><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: The expression "extreme right" is blurred and lacking in rigour, in terms of political semantics. My case is a bit special. I created my own ideology, which rather upsets everyone, because it offends the conformist Islamophiles and the prejudiced anti-zionists, both pro-US and the anti-US, even in the area of economics and geopolitics.<br />I have tried to create a new ideology. I wish people would read me, and study my texts, before leaping to conclusions. In fact, I discomfort all camps, I offend their senses of etiquette. I am above all myself, but the fact that people treat me as an "extreme right ideologist" doesn't bother me at all. I am not like those old crabs which try to hide themselves behind their own claws (?) So why my sulphurous "extremist" image? Quite simply, because I attack frontally, in my writings and my public conferences, the Islamisation of Europe, the invasive immigration, the neo-totalitarianism of the ruling ideology, the reduction in freedom of expression, and the general decadence of this end-of-cycle civilisation. And because all this has brought me certain lawsuits and condemnations, it is normal that the bien-pensants should consider me an<br />"extremist". The term "extremist" today means the same thing it meant in Stalin's USSR : a dissident who speaks the truth.<br /><br /><strong>9 France-Echos</strong>: <em>You have probably heard about the scandal unleashed by the astounding article written by an old GRECE member who has now apparently become politically correct, Joseph Macé-Scaron, now a journalist for Marianne, promoting a sulphurous, hate-filled book which calls all the thinkers of the right, like Alexandre del Valle and Guy Millière, who are allies of the Jewish community, or of rightist zionist Jews like Goldnagel or Kupfer (Likud) - "Fachos". What do you make of this, and what can you tell us about this astonishing accuser, Macé-Scaron?</em><br /><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: With regard to this article in Marianne signed by Mr. Joseph Macé-Scaron, one passage of which claims or suggests that Mr. Alexandre Del Valle belonged to the aforementioned movement or was ideologically close to it, I can state, quite independently of my opinions of Mr. Del Valle, and even given a certain disagreement with him, that he never belonged, either closely or even remotely, to the "New Right", or to GRECE, or to any "extreme right" organisation at all, nor did he ever take part in any of our meetings during the relevant period. I would have known of anything of this sort, since I was right at the centre of this family of thinkers, and I knew every one of its "intellectuals" perfectly.<br />Mr. Del Valle was never involved with us, nor was he ever asked to debate on our behalf, nor to write for us. On the contrary, at the conference cited by Macé-Scaron, he provoked some lively reactions in the chamber when he violently attacked the ideas put forward on behalf of GRECE by his opponent on the right, whose name as it happens was Champetier (a man who has himself, moreover, since left that organisation himself). I attest that, like Taguieff, who has since been lynched for similar reasons in Le Monde, del Valle argued against and not for the New Right, which changes the whole context, since debating against someone in no way suggests that one shares his ideas or solidarises with him.<br /><br />Whenever Del Valle has appeared in debate against the intellectuals of the neo-pagan New Right, whether they are from GRECE or not, he has always vehemently attacked the "anti-semitism and anti-zionism" of the obsessional pro-Arabists in this movement, of whom I spoke earlier. I can attest to the truth of this, which is completely different to the allegations of this inferior journalist, Macé-Scaron - I take no positions on Mr. Del Valle himself.<br />On the other hand, the accuser, Joseph Macé-Scaron, who it seems, wants to make us forget his own past when he accuses certain others of having taken part in conferences with people supposedly close to the New Right, is in a very poor position to attack, especially, Goldnagel or Del Valle, since he himself was well and truly an adherent of, a partisan for, GRECE, and in fact one of its most fervent militants and directors between 1978 and 1985! Macé-Scaron worked<br />during this entire period (in a "permanent" capacity) in the "press corps" of the New Right (GRECE) after having been initiated, in the company of his friend the journalist Thierry Deransart, according to the pagano-christian right of chivalry (??? - RB), during a conclave at which I myself was present, along with various others. His sponsor and initiator, who is still one of my best friends and will certainly support my statement, is now a cadre of the MNR (ex-FN).<br />Another of my close friends, who was at the time secretary-general of GRECE (and who left the organisation for reasons similar to my own) could equally bear witness against the grave accusations of Mr. Macé-Scaron. There could be no more astonishing accuser than Mr. Macé-Scaron, who was himself a product of the "school of journalism" that we created within GRECE, which at the time allowed us to infiltrate Figaro Magazine, two of whose successive editors, Mssrs. Valla and Plunkett, were also members of the directorate of GRECE, and which employed in addition a significant number of other members of our association and our<br />movement. I recall perfectly how, within the framework of this "school of journalism", I helped to form the ideology, the writing skills, and the propagandist capacity of Mr. Macé-Scaron, who was a very apt pupil ; he started his virtuoso career in journalism by going to work for Figaro Magazine, entirely thanks to GRECE.<br /><br />Subsequently, like many other journalists who, thanks to GRECE and the New Right, began their professional careers at Figaro, at Valeurs Actuelles, or elsewhere, he has tried to make us forget this inconvenient geneology and has - publicly - changed his views. This is human enough, who can blame him for it, in a time when one needs to show a white paw [this is a French idiom related to proverbs about rabbits - RB] to pursue one's career?<br /><br />Having said all that, the ideas circulating within GRECE today, I repeat, are not at all the strong identitarian positions (what the journalists call "extreme right" ideas) which it held when Mr. Macé-Scaron was a member and "young hopeful".<br />What is unacceptable is that Mr. Macé-Scaron, like a common informer, lyingly accuses others of being members of a movement in which he himself took part, and proceeds to demonise this family of thinkers, which itself put his foot on the stairway to success ... I should add that I am perfectly willing to give details to support my testimony, if need arises ... and other directing spirits from the GRECE of the period should be equally ready to confound Mr. Joseph Macé-Scaron.<br /><br /><br /><strong>10 France-Echos</strong>: <em>Did Joseph Macé-Scaron maintain and secret relationships with the extreme rightists, neo-pagans, or New Right?<br /></em><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: How should I know? My guess would be, no. He must have needed to do everything possible to regain his political virginity and conceal his "traceability". Just like many others, now well ensconced in the media and in business, thanks to our movement, whose entryism, at the time (1975-1985), was extremely effective. But I don't reproach him for this break with his past, not at all, as I say again.<br />Everyone has the right to change. Ingratitude is blameworthy, but it is not unforgivable. On the other hand, Mr. Macé-Scaron has committed a very serious error (a stupidity?) in howling with the wolves and soiling the name of this family, which once was his, and which helped him so much.<br /><br />You see, I know this scene by heart. I could give you a list of at least thirty people of both sexes who were deeply involved with the New Right and GRECE in its heyday (and even after that) whom we formed, helped, found places for, to a greater or lesser extent, or who were our militants, whom we regarded as permanent members. They are all kept nice and snug in my records, which are extremely well maintained. They all have splendid careers, some very celebrated by the media. But I shall never reveal their past lives, this would be a dishonourable betrayal. On the other hand ... if one (male) of them, or one (female) of them, starts spitting in the soup, spitting on our ideas, spitting on our movement and demonising us in public, or tries to harm us by any other means, I shall only be putting things back in their proper perspective if I<br />reveal their pasts. I do not ask of them courage, but merely silence. As for the struggle, I vow that I shall continue it.<br /><br /><strong>11 France-Echos</strong>: <em>Regarding the central question of revisionism : is it true that GRECE and the New Right in that period were by a large majority, revisionist, and/or anti-Semitic? This seems to have shocked Joseph Macé-Scaron at the time.<br /><br /></em><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: I left GRECE in 1986. Revisionism was never the order of the day. In fact, no anti-Judaism could have been expressed then. Simply, from a sociological or socio-historical point of view, that whole milieu was saturated by an atmosphere which clearly was not favourable to the Jews, even though quite a few members of GRECE were of Jewish origin. One must recall that the Jewish-zionist right was very hostile to us. In 1979 at the Palais des Congrès de Paris our annual conference was attacked by the OJD, the Jewish Defense Organisation, which resulted in a great many injuries on both sides. This did not happen by accident. The ideology we were expressing (and the ideological climate was very different from today's) greatly displeased these Jewish circles, in particular Betar. The reasons for this hostility were not especially serious or coherent, but anyway this was the period in which Mr. Macé-Scaron belonged to GRECE, and he could hardly not know the grounds on which the Jewish circles opposed us.<br /><br /><strong>12 France-Echos</strong>: <em>There are rumours that Joseph Macé-Scaron, who never ceases to assert that his grand-mother was Jewish, made this genealogy up in order to offset the effects of his sulphurous past and his right wing "facho" friends like Deransard. What do you say to that? </em><br /><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: I never give any credence to "rumours". In any case, at the time that Mr. Macé-Scaron was a member of GRECE, he never mentioned this mysterious "Jewish grand-mother". Had he done so, this would have been no obstacle to his membership. In parenthesis, I find the term "facho" polemical and without any socio-political validity. Consider my own case : the body of ideological thought I have put together over the last thirty years has no relationship to "fascism", for the simple reason that I am not acquainted with fascist political doctrine, and thus cannot be inspired by the thought of the period. I build upon new and contemporary principles. To return to Mr. Macé-Scaron, one thing is certain : he is trying, like a hunted hare, to make us forget about his past involvements. He would do better to keep quiet. You know the Chinese proverb : "Don't pull the tail of a sleeping tiger."<br /><br /><strong>13 France-Echos</strong>: <em>On a related issue, can you confirm that a good many media personalities a lot more sulphurous than you have been favoured, even though they spent time in more right wing circles than you did? Is it true that not speaking of immigration, and not attacking Islam, are the secrets to this sort of favour? Could one single out Karl Zéro in this connection?</em><br /><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: This isn't the secret of getting ahead, but it helps. Karl Zéro was never a GRECE member, but he wrote some articles and did some comic strips which were politically incorrect in the satirical review "Jalons", run by his brother Bruno Thélène, in the '80s. [Jalons are poles used as landmarks - RB]. As it happens I also wrote for this review, which had an "ultra-rightist" editorial committee.<br />Now this media star never ceases denouncing his old friends and the "extreme right" in general, in order to clear himself. I suspect him of being one of those who tried to get me into trouble and get me fired from the "mainstream media". His case is similar to that of Macé-Scaron. He lost a court case against an old member of GRECE whom he had accused in the press of being what you call a "facho". I have all this in my files. In any case, Karl Zéro isn't a very luminous personality.<br /><br /><strong>13 France-Echos</strong>: <em>Karl Zéro wasn't a member of GRECE, then? Are there any other anti-semites or fachos who are now getting ahead, and who are they?</em><br /><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: I repeat, Karl Zéro was never a member, although he was part of the New Right "movement", the "outer circle" if you like. He came to informal gatherings, soirées. He rapidly realised he had to steer clear of us. Once again, I would not accuse anyone who was part of this movement at the time of having been an "anti-semite". The question simply never came up! Those (female) and those (male) who are now "singled out for stardom" are so because they have managed to "show the white paw" [see above - RB], to espouse the vulgate of the hegemonic ideology, and - above all - because they have carefully camouflaged their dissident pasts. This past will never be revealed to their masters, by either me or my friends, unless, obviously, the parties concerned give themselves up to campaigns and calumnies against us.<br /><br /><strong>14 France-Echos</strong>: <em>What do you think about Israel, its future, and the future of Europe in the face of islam?<br /></em><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: I have already answered these questions. Israel is principally endangered by its own demographic weakness in the face of the hostile Muslims - much more by this than by the projected Iranian atomic bomb. I do not consider the state of Israel to be hostile or dangerous and I think that "anti-Israelism" is a grave geostrategic error for European identitarians. One of the strengths of Israel, among others, is its very high level of science and research (4.9 % of its GDP is devoted to research and development, the highest percentage in the world).<br />For Europe, an "alliance with the Arabs" is a dramatic non-starter, and, like all "third-world-ism", supremely naïve. As for Islam, Europe is now facing the third attempt, historically, since the eighth century - and doubtless the most serious attempt - on the part of this "religion-civilisation" to conquer it and transform it into Eurabia. Europe is at the same time confronted by an uncontrolled wave of immigration which is practically exchanging its population for another. To divert one's attention onto a fantasmatic anti-zionism, and a primary anti-americanism, is the worst possible mistake one could make in politics, which Macchiavelli condemned : allowing oneself to be ruled by one's passions rather than by cold and clear reason.<br /><br /><strong>15 France-Echos</strong>: <em>Is the USA an adversary, or an enemy, or rather an ally, of Europe, in the face of this Islamic colonisation? </em><br /><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: The USA is not a single homogeneous entity, this is something neither the anti-Americans nor the pro-Americans seem to comprehend. Certain forces in Washington (the "neo-cons") have tried to play the Islamic card to weaken both Europe and Russia. Unhappily for them, they have stirred up and attracted Islamic terrorism and have allowed themselves to fall into the trap of Iraq.<br />Washington's current policies are stupid and unskillful. However, from their own point of view, the directing intelligences of Washington have always tried to obstruct the continental unity of Europe and Russia (what I call "Eurosiberia").<br />Meanwhile, there are new ideological forces in the USA, with which I am in close contact, who consider the restoration of European power indispensable, and who believe completely that we are at the onset of a clash of civilisations which will oppose the North to the South, globally (to put it schematically, and whether we welcome it or not) - even if this view shocks the intellectuals of the system, who mistake their wishes for realities. These new forces also<br />consider (even those who are anti-Jewish Americans) that a historic compromise and a fundamental alliance with the Jewish élites is necessary, to bring under control both uncontrolled immigration and Islamism. They are finally beginning to understand (like their counterparts in Europe) that the anti-Jewish aversion is a complete non-starter.<br /><br />I have always written, and I write today, that the USA may be an adversary but it is not an enemy. It is essential to convince the American élites of the need for an ethno-political alliance of all the peoples of European origin. I should add that the arrogance and imperialism of American rulers has but one cause : the weakness, the renunciation, the softness, of the European rulers. As for the Jews, even if they are "a people apart", they manifestly constitute a people in their own right, and they should be members of this alliance. Clearly, they need to make efforts on their own behalf. I would use a term, which I repeat , "historic compromise".<br /><br /><strong>16 France-Echos</strong>: <em>You who made your mea culpa to have said Arab Europe-World formerly even combat, would you say Israel-Occident-Europe today even combat?<br /></em><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: Carl Schmitt, the famous German political scientist, whom Raymond Aron has made known and translated for the French, said that it is not you who choose your enemy, but it is your enemy who chooses you as his enemy, whether you like it or not. The fact that the Islamist ideology (which benefits from the enormous sensationalism of its approach to the masses and which does not trouble itself with the subtleties of the Parisian intelligentsia) talks of "Crusaders and Zionists" as its principal enemy, should make us reflect. I shall answer your<br />question and my answer will draw its inspiration from my master, Niccolo Macchiavelli. First off - I do not like the term, "the West", because it apparently excludes Russia, and because of its superficiality (why "the West"?) The realpolitik of the twenty first century will have to attempt to regroup all the peoples of European origin, whose interests are convergent and who confront<br />the same menaces, whatever their continent of settlement may be. The Jewish state should join this regrouping, and should place itself under its protection, integrated without being assimilated, but without pretending to a leading rôle - with an absolute guarantee that anti-Judaism is an obselete sentiment, and a counter-productive one, which will be allowed no further influence. In any case, to deny to the Jews their place within European civilisation (as understood in its large-scale, multi-continental sense) has always seemed to me to be the<br />purest delirium, a result of ignorance and of bad faith. In the twenty first century, Israel will no longer be at the centre of the world's preoccupations, because the world will be less and less "Western-centred". (The Chinese and the Indians have very little historical sense of a "Jewish Question"). Many Jews consider themselves to belong to a "central people", the famous "salt of the earth". This sentiment needs to be toned down a bit.<br /><br />All the same, Israel is today one of the primary locations for the struggle against the common enemy. I consider the Internet texts of the neo-rightist pro-Islamist groups which exalt the "martyrdom" of a Belgian of European descent, who converted to Islam and blew herself up in Israel, taking various innocents with her, to be absolutely pathetic. In terms of first principles,<br />what do I have to do with this war between Jews and Muslims, between Israelis and Palestinians? Who is right, who is wrong? It is not my problem, except that ... yes, except that in my opinion the perpetuation and strengthening of the state of Israel is a vital priority for all Europeans. The destruction of Israel would present Islam with an open door to the conquest of the whole of Europe. In brief, I entirely support the state of Israel, while deploring the clumsiness and soft-heartedness of certain of its current rulers (contaminated by the<br />humanitarianism of Buber). If I were in their place, I wouldn't wait for American permission before hitting the Iranian nuclear sites.<br /><br /><strong>17 France-Echos</strong>: <em>The positions you express here may provoke an earthquake in your own circle? People might call you a "Jew-lover"?<br /></em><br /><strong>Guillaume Faye</strong>: I am absolutely not a "Jew-lover". I think of the Jews as allies, as partakers<br />in European civilisation, with a very particular and original status as "people apart" (this does not mean "superior"), and all this is something very different from being a "Jew-lover". But I have always felt a certain repugnance for anti-Judaism ; not because it seems to me "immoral", but because it seems to me quite simply useless, debauched, infantile, politically self-contradictory, and out of date. My whole purpose is to cause earthquakes, to make people think, to dislodge their prejudices, and to make their minds evolve. To free my milieu from counter-productive anti-Judaism and anti-zionism - with which it is still imprinted - seems to me to be a strategic necessity. This fact should be taken into account, dispassionately. To me, the Jews are themselves, proud of their interior truth, guardians of their own secrets. The Jewish community ought to reflect actively on the pertinence of my theories, and ought to decide upon its own ideological evolution. My forthcoming essay, "The New Jewish Question" will clarify a lot of obscure aspects of all this. I am engaged in digging holes in the ground, in order to bring about the eruption of volcanoes.<br /><br />NOTES:<br />Works written between 1980 and 1986 : "The System For Killing The Peoples" (translated into Italian), "The New Ideological Joys", "Organic Man", "The New Consumer Society", "Sex And Ideology", "The West As Decline", "New Discourse On The European Nation".<br /><br />Works written between 1986 and 1999 : "The Guide To Invective", "The Abbreviated Guide To Seduction", "Extraterrestrials From A To Z".Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0