4um: Alain de Benoist’s preface to the Croatian edition of Sunic’s "Against Democracy and Equality"

Title: Alain de Benoist’s preface to the Croatian edition of Sunic’s "Against Democracy and Equality"
Source: Majority Rights
URL Source: http://majorityrights.com/index.php ... ion_of_sunics_against_democra/
Published: Mar 22, 2009
Author: Guessedworker
Post Date: 2009-05-24 07:55:47 by Deasy
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Keywords: Doc Martens, Yugoslavia
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Alain de Benoist’s preface to the Croatian edition of Sunic’s “Against Democracy and Equality”

Tomislav Sunic’s first book, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, has just been released in a Croatian language edition. It carries a lengthy preface by Alain de Benoist, which sets out the background and principle positions of the ENR. I reproduce it in English here, as translated by Tom.
GW

In 1990, as a current of thought under the name “European New Right” (ENR) had began to celebrate its twenty-first birthday, a Croatian friend of mine, Tomislav Sunic, published in English the first edition of his book on the New Right. This was originally the text of his doctoral dissertation, defended two years earlier at the University of California in Santa Barbara, (1). Having acquired a very good knowledge of French during his studies at the University of Zagreb, Sunic was keen to probe into the ENR very early on. Moreover, he also had the opportunity to read ENR works in the original French language. Unlike many other commentators who spoke of the ENR on the basis of hearsay and formed judgments from second hand sources, he demonstrated the ability to go right to the core of the issue. He demonstrated a sympathy for the ENR which plainly distinguished him from those commentators.

It was also plain that his book’s interest derives from something more than sympathy. Its importance is due to its pioneer character. Certainly, in the late 1980s several books (but also a number of scholarly works) had already been published on the ENR. But they were almost all published in French. Tomislav Sunic’s book was one of the first to appear abroad (a privilege he shared with some Italian authors). Presenting the history and main ideas of the ENR to a public who had never heard of it before was not an easy task. Thanks to his informed mind, his sense of synthesis, but also his knowledge of the readers he addressed, there is no doubt that Sunic succeeded immediately in his endeavor.

In hindsight, what I find most remarkable is that Tomislav Sunic’s book was written in English, especially given that the author resided at that time in a country - the United States - that he knew from the inside-out and which he viewed in a very critical manner (as evidenced by his latest book, Homo Americanus).

When addressing the English-speaking audience, Tomislav Sunic faced difficulties that an Italian, Spanish or a German author would have never encountered. The first of these difficulties is due to the lack of interest shown generally in the Anglo-Saxon world in the debate of ideas. The English, and even more the Americans, pretend to be “pragmatic.” In philosophy, they adhere mostly to the school of empiricism and positivism, if not to a purely analytical philosophy. In their craving for “facts” they forget that facts cannot be dissociated from hermeneutics, i.e. from a given form of interpretation. The famous distinction made by David Hume between judgmental facts and value judgments (indicative and imperative, being and must-be) can only have relative value. As to the usage of a political theory, with few notable exceptions - especially in America - this attempt on their part often boils down to practical considerations that steer the projects of the ruling class. This explains why intellectuals over there are looked down upon, and why they have never held the role of moral arbiters, as is the case in other countries, notably France.

The expression “New Right” presented another difficulty. There was already the English New Right and the American New Right. But such “New Rights,” far from being schools of thought related to the ENR, represented their very opposite. They combined religious fundamentalism and moral order with a mish-mash of Atlanticism and “Westernization”, and functioned in defense of capitalism and the ideology of free market. Such Anglo-American New Rights were in fact everything that the ENR has always been critical of— and this in a very radical manner. Sympathizers of these New Rights, who might otherwise have been intrigued by Tomislav Sunic’s book, were surely mightily disappointed.

In general, and irrespective of all the misunderstandings that may have been caused by such a label (I will come back to that later), it must have been very arduous on the other side of the Atlantic to come across the equivalent of the ENR. What one dubs in America “the right” consists, in fact, of two main currents. One is mainstream, moderate, and middle-class, corresponding to “conservative” circles (which themselves are divided into numerous chapels and clans) and whose main characteristic is the eulogy of the economic system, i.e. capitalism, and which, to top it all, destroys everything that it stands for. On the other hand, there is another current, spearhead by a few radical individuals, and often embodied by small extremist groups describing themselves as “racialists” and whose ideology boils down to across-the board-nationalism spiced up with xenophobia. For its part, not only has the ENR never identified itself with any of its Anglo-Saxon New Right chapels or residues, but has consistently fought against their principles and their premises.

One must add to this another ambiguity - the one related to the vocabulary. I will take one example only. In the realm of ideas the ENR has consistently targeted liberalism as one of its chief adversaries. The word “liberal” has a radically different meaning in Western Europe from that in the USA. On the other side of the Atlantic, a “liberal” is a man leaning to the center-left, and defending a form of social policy, and also being an advocate of a redistributive state. He is also easy-going in terms of social mores and tends to be a great proponent of the ideology of human rights. We call him in France a “progressive.’ By contrast, on this side of the Atlantic, a liberal is primarily a spokesman of individualism, a supporter of free trade, and opponent of the state (and also a supporter of America). If one asks a Frenchman to quote a name of some well known liberal politician the names of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher would immediately come to his mind. In other words, what we call “liberal” corresponds to a large extent to that what the Americans call a “conservative” – and, therefore, a foe of a “liberal”!

This difference has historical origins: the Americans have retained the original meaning of the word “liberalism” which, when it first appeared as a doctrine in the eighteenth century, stood actually for a “leftist” current of thought, being the main heir to the philosophy of Enlightenment. In Europe, by contrast, the Liberals were gradually pushed to the rightist specter by incoming Socialist and Communist currents of thought, to the point that the Liberals, as of the late nineteenth century, began to identify themselves with the conservative bourgeoisie (sometimes called “Orleanistes” in France). We can see right away what kind of scorn could such a book be subject to in America, a book representing an anti-liberal current of thought” and provoking, in addition all kinds of “false cognates.”

Finally, there is no doubt that criticism of the United States and of the Americanization of the world, which has resulted from gradual assertion of American hegemony, and which has been a standard topic of ENR discourse, could hardly seduce Americans who perceive their country not only to be the “Promised Land” and the incarnation of the best of all the worlds, but also, and precisely for that reason, as a role model that merits export worldwide. It is significant that very few texts by ENR authors have been translated into English although they have been translated into fifteen other languages. This seems to be an aspect of “old Europe” (or of this ‘rest of the world”) which will never be fully comprehended across the Atlantic - the only condition on which comprehension is available being its total Americanization. The ENR remains terra incognita for the vast majority of Americans (2).

The English edition of Tomislav Sunic’s book carries the title Against Democracy and Equality; The European New Right. I suspect the author chose this title out of sheer provocation, for it is a title that I have always considered inappropriate! It must be emphasized that the ENR has never held positions hostile to equality and democracy. It has been critical of egalitarianism and has highlighted the limits of liberal democracy - which is quite a different matter. Between equality and egalitarianism there are roughly the same differences as between freedom and liberalism, between the universal and universalism, between the common good and communism. Egalitarianism aims at introducing equality where there is no place for it and where it does not match with reality, as for instance when somebody argues that all individuals have the same skills and same gifts. But egalitarianism also aims at apprehending equality as a synonym for “Sameness,” that is, the opposite of diversity. Yet the opposite of equality is inequality and not diversity. Equality of men and women, for example, does not obliterate the reality of the difference between the two sexes. Similarly, equal political rights in democracy do not presuppose that all citizens must be identical or have the same talents; rather they must have the same rights based on their belonging to the same polity of equal citizens.

The ENR has always denounced what I have named the ideology of Sameness, i.e. the universalistic ideology which, under its religious or profane veneer, aims at reducing the diversity of the world (i.e. the diversity of cultures, value systems, and rooted ways of living) to one uniform model. The implementation of the ideology of the Same leads to the reduction and eradication of differences. Being fundamentally ethnocentric and despite its universalistic claims, it has never stopped legitimizing all forms of imperialism. In the past, it was pursued by missionaries who wished to convert the entire planet to one God; later, in the same vein, by colonizers who, in the name of the “sense of history” and the cult of “progress”, wanted to impose their way of life on ‘Indigenous peoples’.
Today it disports itself under the sign of the Capitalist system (‘forme-capital’) which, by subjugating the symbolic imaginary to mercantile values, turns the world into a vast and homogeneous marketplace where men are reduced to the role of producers-consumers, and soon become commodities themselves, destined to adopt the mentality of homo economicus. Insofar as it seeks to reduce diversity, which is the only true wealth of mankind, the ideology of the Same is itself a caricature of equality. In fact it creates inequalities of the most unbearable kind. The contrast with the principle of equality becomes clear whenever the latter needs to be defended – and receives an honest defense.

As for democracy, whose main tenet is equal political rights, the ENR, which has never had any taste for despotism or dictatorship, and even less for totalitarianism, has always considered it, if not the best possible regime, at least the one that best meets the requirements of our times. But we must first understand its exact meaning. Democracy is the regime in which sovereignty resides in the people. But in order to be truly sovereign, the people must be able to express itself freely, and those whom it designates as its representatives must act in accordance with its wishes. That is why true democracy is participatory democracy, i.e. a democracy which allows people to exercise their sovereignty as often as possible and not just during the elections. In this sense, universal suffrage is only a technical means to assess the degree of the agreement or the consent between the government and the governed. As understood by the ancient Greeks, democracy, in the final analysis, is a system that allows all of its citizens to participate actively in public affairs. This means that liberty in democracy is defined as an opportunity to participate in activities that are deployed in the public sphere, and certainly not as liberty to become oblivious of the public sphere, or to withdraw oneself into the private sphere. A purely representative democracy is, at best, an imperfect democracy. Political power must be exercised at all levels, and not only at the top. This is only feasible by means of implementing the principle of subsidiarity, which means that the people make as many decisions as possible on issues of concern, and relegate to a higher level of decision-making only matters that concern larger communities. In an age when political representatives are more and more cut off from the people, and where power of the appointed and the co-opted prevails over those who were elected, and where a politician is stripped off his decision-making on behalf of some “governance” whose only goal is to mold the government of the people along the blueprints of business management or corporate managements, then the priority must be to resuscitate participatory democracy – a grass-roots democracy, a direct democracy, as well as to revive the active public sphere which alone is capable of upholding the social bond and guaranteeing the exercise of common values.

Obviously, when his book came out in 1990 Tomislav Sunic was not able to take into account what has happened since that time. Over the last eighteen years, in light of the fact that numerous works have been published in the field of social critique, the objectives of the ENR have become more focused. However brief it could be, I do not intend to write a summary of it, given that this is the raison d’etre of Sunic’s present book. But I am glad that the annex of his book contains the full translation of the Manifeste pour une renaissance européenne, published 2000, which proposes an orientational synthesis for the dawn of the twenty-first century. To date, it has been translated into Spanish, Italian, English, German, Hungarian and Dutch. The reader can thus keep track of everything the ENR has written over the past two decades about social science, Europe, postmodernity, federalism, the contrast between the nation-state and the Empire, the critique of the ideology of labor, the Capitalists system, “governance”, the decline of the political, the crisis of democracy, the question of identity, environmental threats, criticism of “development”, new prospects opened by the theory of economic decline, and so on.

Nonetheless, I’d like to focus on some important issues. To start with I’d like to mention the continuity of work undertaken and implemented by the ENR since 1968. The ENR is exactly forty years old today. The main journals that are part of our current of thought have shown their longevity: Nouvelle Ecole was launched in 1968, Elements in 1973 and Krisis in 1988. Even if duration and continuity are not sole qualities that one takes into account, one must agree however, that there are few schools of thought that have been active for a such an extended period of time. Therefore, the ENR is primarily a story. But it is also an itinerary. Over the last forty years, the ENR has published a considerable number of books and articles; it has organized countless conferences, symposia, meetings, summer schools, etc. In doing so, it has abandoned some tracks that it had wrongly judged promising at the beginning while continually exploring new ones, and thus remained faithful to its “encyclopedic” inspiration from the very beginning of its itinerary.

I must also point out that, from the very beginning, the ENR has viewed itself as a school of thought and not as a political movement. This school of thought has by far exceeded its organizational structure as an association, which was first known in 1968 as le Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE), or in English, Research group for the studies of the European civilization. With its publications, the ENR has been engaged in a metapolitical work. What does metapolitics mean? Certainly not a different way of doing politics. The issue of metapolitics was born out of conscience with respect to the role of ideas in history and out of the conviction that some type of intellectual, cultural, doctrinal and ideological work is always a prerequisite for political action. This is something that activists who, to safeguard themselves from any in-depth reflection, constantly argue about “urgency”, or who simply prefer a reactive mode of action to a reflective mode, have great difficulty in understanding. To sum it up in a simple formula: the Enlightenment came to birth before the French Revolution, but the French Revolution would not have been possible without Enlightenment. Before any Lenin, there must always be some preceding Marx. This is what Antonio Gramsci very well understood when he addressed the issue of “organic” intellectuals. He stressed how the transformation of the political and socio-historical structures of a epoch requires that this epoch must already initiate within itself a vast transformation of values.

The ENR was founded in the late 1960s by young people who, in their majority, had some experience as political activists and could therefore measure the shortcomings and limitations thereof. In an effort to lay the foundations for a political philosophy, and in order to develop a concept for a new world, they wanted somehow to start from scratch and were ready to give up illusions about any immediate political action.

By that time, however, they had become aware of the simplistic and obsolete cleavage between left and right. They knew that each society is in need of both conserving and changing. They were ready to critically examine the tradition and identify its operating and living principle, while also tackling the major problems of their time from a truly revolutionary perspective. Undoubtedly, this explains their interest in, among other things, the “conservative revolution” in Weimar Germany. In general, they rejected false alternatives. They adhered to the logic of “the included-third.” They did not claim: “we are neither on the right nor on the left” - which means nothing. Rather, they decided to be both “on the right and on the left.” They wanted to make clear that they were determined to examine the ideas they viewed as the best, regardless of the labels that those ideas had acquired. As far as they were concerned, there were no “rightist ideas” vs. “leftist ideas,” but only false ideas vs. just ideas.

Their convictions were justified by the historical evolution of recent decades. Having been born with modernity, the left-right divide is in the process of going into the past with modernity. This does not mean that in the past the labels ‘right’ and ‘left’ were devoid of meanings. But these meanings were equivocal, given that there have always existed not just the “ontological” right and left, but rather a large variety of different “rights” and “lefts”. The range was so large that there is no doubt that some of these lefts and some of these rights were closer to each other than they were when seen separately from other rights and other lefts. This also explains why certain issues like regionalism, ecology, federalism, the ideology of progress, and so on, have, in the course of time, drifted from the right to the left and from the left to the right. The ideology of progress, if one were to mention only one of these issues, has clearly moved into the “rightist” camp, to the point that it is the liberals now who have become its avid supporters, whereas a significant part of the “left” remains radically critical of it, as part of its fight against industrialism and its defense of the ecosystem. Notions such as right and left have become meaningless today. They only survive in the field of parliamentary politics, after becoming obsolete in the fields of ideas. Let me stress one important fact: all major events in recent decades, far from resurrecting the left-right cleavage, have, on the contrary, revealed new dividing lines, which only indicates the degree to which the political and ideological landscape has been completely reconfigured. For example, the two Gulf wars, the European construct, the Balkan conflicts, have split up the traditional left and the traditional right, thus confirming the anachronism of this dichotomy.

The preceding lines will help us understand why I am reluctant to use the denomination “the New Right.” It should be recalled that at the beginning this expression was never used as a self-portrayal. In fact, this label was invented by the media in 1979 to depict a school of thought and an intellectual and cultural current, born eleven years earlier and which until then, had never attached this label to itself. However, in view of the fact that this expression had become so widespread, it had to be more or less adopted thereafter. But it was never without apprehensions and this for several reasons. The first is that this label is reductive in a twofold manner: it suggested that the ENR was essentially a political organization, which has never been the case, and it enclosed our school of thought into a denomination (the “Right") against which our school of thought has always taken the field. The second reason is that it facilitated - and unjustifiably suggested - links to movements, in several countries, using this label themselves. I have already given the example of Anglo-Saxon New Rights. Other parallels, equally significant, could also be drawn. In Italy, our friends from the “Nuova Destra” have renounced this expression long ago. We did the same in France. I happen to define myself as a “man of right-left”, i.e. as an intellectual who simultaneously refers to the ideas of the left and the values of the right.

What is equally important is the fact that the ENR has never claimed any predecessors. It has never claimed to be pursuing a road paved by others before. It has greatly benefited from numerous readings, but it has never attached itself exclusively to one single author, or a single current of thought. The eclecticism of its references has sometimes been criticized – wrongly in my opinion. Based on a hasty and fragmentary reading, some were quick to conclude that the ENR lacks coherence. The diversity of its approaches prompted many who observed the ENR, whether in a sympathetic or a hostile manner, to voice false ideas about the ENR. Quite to the contrary, the approach of the ENR has always been strictly consistent. But this approach cannot be understood unless one realizes that the leading figures of the ENR always utilize a dynamic perspective: their goal has never been to repeat slogans or utter preconceived ideas, or even dish out small and dogmatic catechisms set once and for all times. Instead, they have always striven to move forward, in order to open up new vistas of analysis and to put their ideas into action.

It is precisely for this reason that the ideas of the ENR, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, are more apposite than ever before. Why? Because we have now entered a world different from the one that prevailed at the end of the Second World War. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet system and the rise of globalization we are witnessing not only the end of the twentieth century, but the end of a great historical cycle of modernity. We have entered an era of postmodernity, which is characterized by flows and refluxes of communities and networks, i.e. an epoch of major civilizational and continental logic. Certainly, this mutation, which is still in process, is not over yet. We are in a period of transition, and like all periods of transition, it is especially rich in uncertainties, in new projects and new syntheses. One could characterize this epoch as Zwischenzeit, or an interregnum. In such an epoch it is, more than ever before, indispensable to be aware of the historical moment we live in. But we cannot analyze this historical moment and everything new it brings about (as harbingers of future developments) by referring to the images of the past and, especially, by using old references and obsolete conceptual tools. It is precisely because the ENR has never turned away from evolving and renewing its discourse that it can now provide the necessities for carrying out orderly critical thinking to matches the reality of our time.

When Soviet communism collapsed, an American, Francis Fukuyama, ventured to predict the “end of history”. What he meant by that was that after the fall of communism, capitalism and liberal democracy had lost their major competitor, and that from now on all peoples on Earth were called to adopt, more or less in a long term manner, the “Western” or, short of that, the American model.

This thesis was subsequently criticized by Samuel Huntington who assumed the role of a theoretician of “the clash of civilizations.” Both visions were wrong. Instead of the end of history we have, in recent years, been witnessing the return of history. How, indeed, can history ever come to a stop? Human history is always open to a plurality of possibilities, and such plurality can never be defined in advance and with certainty. History is unpredictable because the characteristic of human being - precisely because of its fundamentally historical nature - is always unpredictable. If history became predictable, it would no longer be human history. It would not be history at all. It is striking that none of the major events that have occurred in the world over the last decades have been predicted by specialists of futurology. Huntington, for his part, was right in his argument against Fukuyama’s day-dreaming, noting that humanity is not a unified whole. But his mistake was to believe that “civilizations” can become full-fledged actors in international politics, which has never been the case.

Samuel Huntington’s thesis was obviously designed to legitimize Islamophobia, which is inherent to hegemonic views of the United States of America (which quickly found a “spare devil” in a caricature of Islam, badly needed after the disappearance of the Soviet “evil empire”). It is quite revealing that in order to perpetuate or consolidate the “Atlantic” mentality, Huntington does not hesitate to cut Europe in two, placing its Western part into the camp of America, while throwing its Eastern part over to Russia and the Orthodox world.

The ENR, however, has never lost sight of its main reference: Europe. Europe is conceived in its dual historical and geopolitical dimension. First, in its historical dimension, because nations of Europe, apart from what separates them (which is not negligible), are heirs of a common cultural matrix at least 5000 years old . Then there is also a geopolitical dimension. As we enter the era of “large spaces,” mentioned by Carl Schmitt, those large groups of culture and civilizations will be tomorrow’s factors of decision-making within a globalized world. To address globalization at the time when nation-states are too large to meet the expectations of their citizens and too small to meet global challenges of our time, becoming every day less powerful, requires first and foremost to think in terms of continents.

The ENR has also been in favor of a federal Europe, because the full-fledged federalism is the only way to reconcile the necessary unity of decision at the top with all due respect for diversity and autonomy at the bottom of the pyramid. Undoubtedly, federalism follows the tradition of the Empire, rather than that of the nation-state. Europe would indeed be meaningless if it were to be built on the false model of centralization inherent to Jacobinism, from which France has suffered for such a long period of time. Hence the need for the principle of subsidiarity which I mentioned above.

The construction of Europe, which we are witnessing today, is the very opposite of that principle. From the outset, this construct went against common sense. It gave priority to trade and economy instead of politics and culture. It was built from the top, starting with the European Commission, which soon became omnipotent although devoid of any democratic legitimacy, instead of trying gradually to build itself from the bottom. It embarked upon a hasty enlargement to countries wishing to join the European Union solely in order to receive financial help and move closer to America and NATO, instead of having the goal of an in-depth strengthening of its political structures. Thus it has condemned itself in advance to powerlessness and paralysis. It has been built without the will of its peoples while trying to impose on them a draft of the constitution, without ever raising a question as to who constitutes the constituent power. Moreover, it has never been clear enough regarding the finality of its own endeavors. Should one first construct a vast free trade area with unclear borders that would serve as a side-kick for America, or rather should it first lay the foundations for the genuine European power, with borders demarcated by geopolitics and which could simultaneously serve as an original model of civilization and a pole for the better regulation of the globalization process? These two projects are incompatible. If we were to adopt the first one, or have as a goal the second, we will live tomorrow in a unipolar world, subjected to American power. By contrast, with multipolarity we can preserve the diversity of the world. This is the alternative most Europeans face: to be the architects of their own history or to become the subjects of the history of others.

When Tomislav Sunice wrote his thesis on the ENR he could not predict the tragic events that would accompany the break-up of former Yugoslavia, and war with their horrific bloodshed in his own country as well as in neighboring countries. I myself witnessed those events with a broken heart. For a very long time I have had Croat and Serb friends, as well as Slovenian and Bosnian friends - friends who are Christians and friends who are Muslims. For me that conflict meant a failure of Europe, and especially a sign of its impoverishment. Each time that European peoples fight each other it is to the benefit of political and ideological systems that yearn for the disappearance of all peoples. Adding insult to injury, it was humiliating to see the U.S. military air bombardment of a European capital, Belgrade, and this for the first time since 1945.

I know about the historical roots of all these disputes, which too often resulted in wars and massacres in Central and Eastern Europe. I know well the positions of all sides. These disputes still feed upon ethnic nationalism, religious intolerance and irredentism of all sorts. Not wishing to stand with either side - since I do not wish to elevate myself to the title of a supreme judge - I nevertheless believe that these disputes must be overcome. Many hark back to times that are definitively over. Irredentism, in particular, makes no sense at the present time. Once upon a time borders played a significant role: they guaranteed the continuation of collective identities. Today, boundaries no longer guarantee anything and do not stop or halt anything. Flows and fluxes of all kinds are the hallmark of our time, making borders redundant. Serbs and Croats, Hungarians and Romanians, Ukrainians and Russians, watch the same movies, listen to the same songs, acquire the same information, use the same technology, and are subject to the same influences - and in a same way are similarly subject to Americanization. I know that past antagonisms are difficult to overcome. But my deepest belief is that the identity of a people will be always less threatened by the identity of another neighboring people than by the ideology of the Sameness, i.e. by the homogenizing juggernaut of globalization, by the global system for which any collective identity whatsoever is an obstacle that needs to be erased.

Once the noose loosened, countries that were once part of the Soviet and Communist glacis believed to have found in the West the paradise they had so long dreamed of. In reality they exchanged one system of coercion for another system of coercion, different but both equally fearsome. One can argue, based on our experience, that global capitalism has proved much more effective than communism in dissolving collective identities. It proved to be much more materialistic. In a few years it managed to impose on a global scale a model of homo economicus, i.e. a creature whose main reason to exist in this world is reduced to the role of production and consumption. As shown by liberal anthropology this being is selfish and only dedicated to the search of his best interest. It would be frightening to see in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe only two categories of people: on the one hand the Western liberals, on the other, chauvinistic nationalists. There is also a fascination in observing former apparatchiks reinventing themselves, as if possessed of a new virginity, so they can prostrate themselves in front of America. And this with the same alacrity they once used to bend over in front of the communist system. The countries in which they now live were yesterday’s satellites of Moscow. Today, they are only too eager to become vassals of Washington. In either case, it is, once again, Europe which is the loser.

The ENR makes a great effort to identify its real enemy. The main enemy is, on the economic level, capitalism and the market society, on the philosophical level, individualism, on the political front, universalism, on the social front the bourgeoisie, and on the geopolitical front, America.

Why capitalism? Because, contrary to what communism preached, capitalism is not only an economic system. It is first and foremost an anthropological system, based on values that colonize the symbolic imagination and radically transform it. It is a system that reduces everything of value to the value of the market, and to exchange value. It is a system that considers secondary, transient or non-existent everything that cannot be reduced to calculation in the terms of quantity, i.e. money. Finally, it is a dynamic system whose very structure forces it to a frantic flight ahead of itself. Karl Marx was not wrong when he wrote that capital considers any limitation as an obstacle. The Capitalist System consists of the logic of ‘always more “- more trade, more market, more goods, more profit – in the belief that ‘more’ automatically means better. It imposes the “axiom” that infinite material growth is only possible in a finite world. It is l’arraisonnement of the whole Earth - the Gestell as mentioned by Heidegger - by the values of efficiency, performance and profitability. It means transforming the planet into a giant supermarket and a giant civilization of commerce.

I first met Tomislav Sunic in Washington in June 1991, in the company of Paul Gottfried. At the end of March 1993 we participated together at a symposium organized by the Chicago magazine Telos, which was attended by the late Paul Piccone, Thomas Molnar, Gary Ulmen, Tom Fleming, Anthony Sullivan, and so on. Since then, we have been meeting frequently in Paris (in June 1993, in January 2002, in October 2003, in March 2006, etc), in Flanders and elsewhere. This book enables us to meet again, but this time in his homeland. I am very pleased with that.

1. Defended in 1988, this thesis was first published by Peter Lang (New York) in 1990, then reprinted by Noontide Press of Newport Beach (California) in 2004, with a preface by Paul Gottfried and a foreword by David J. Stennett.

2. Let us acknowledge the special issue of the magazine Telos (New York), New Right - New Left - New Paradigm?, 98-99, Autumn-Winter 1993, as well as the book by Michael O’Meara [Michael Torigian] New Culture, New Right. Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe, First Books, 2004 Bloomington. I would add that criticism of the United States by the ENR has never slipped into ‘americanophobia.’ Quite the contrary. The ENR has welcomed a number of writers and thinkers from the USA - few in number, perhaps, but not without importance. Let me also refer to the theorists of communitarianism, such as Michael Sandel, the Canadian Charles Taylor, the Englishman Alasdair McIntyre, and especially Christopher Lasch, a theorist of “populist socialism”, the name which calls to mind the great George Orwell whose ideas have also been popularized by Paul Piccone in his magazine, Telos.

Comments:

Posted by Armor on March 22, 2009, 07:22 AM | #

Once you have read the whole preface, you take a sheet a paper, and you try to sum up, in 5 lines, what the French new right is about.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on March 22, 2009, 08:49 PM | #

What one dubs in America “the right” consists, in fact, of two main currents. One is mainstream, moderate, and middle-class, corresponding to “conservative” circles [...]. On the other hand, there is another current, spearhead by a few radical individuals, and often embodied by small extremist groups describing themselves as “racialists” and whose ideology boils down to across-the board-nationalism spiced up with xenophobia. For its part, not only has the ENR [European New Right] never identified itself with any of its Anglo-Saxon New Right chapels or residues, but has consistently fought against their principles and their premises. (—from the log entry)

Everyone see what I mean about Alain de Benoist? Check out what’s high-lit in blue. This man is NOT enlisted on our side in the war against the forced race-replacement of the European peoples. Not only that, he says the side he’s on has consistently fought against us in this struggle.

The ENR [European New Right] was founded in the late 1960s by young people [...]. In an effort to lay the foundations for a political philosophy, and in order to develop a concept for a new world, they wanted somehow to start from scratch [...]. By that time, however, they had become aware of the simplistic and obsolete cleavage between left and right. [...] They did not claim: “we are neither on the right nor on the left” - which means nothing. Rather, they decided to be both “on the right and on the left.” They wanted to make clear that they were determined to examine the ideas they viewed as the best, regardless of the labels that those ideas had acquired. As far as they were concerned, there were no “rightist ideas” vs. “leftist ideas,” but only false ideas vs. just ideas. Their convictions were justified by the historical evolution of recent decades. Having been born with modernity, the left-right divide is in the process of going into the past with modernity. [...] Notions such as right and left have become meaningless today. They only survive in the field of parliamentary politics, after becoming obsolete in the fields of ideas. Let me stress one important fact: all major events in recent decades, far from resurrecting the left-right cleavage, have, on the contrary, revealed new dividing lines, which only indicates the degree to which the political and ideological landscape has been completely reconfigured. For example, the two Gulf wars, the European construct, the Balkan conflicts, have split up the traditional left and the traditional right, thus confirming the anachronism of this dichotomy.

Very good but it’s disappointing he doesn’t include immigration and the Eurospherewide crisis of government-enforced race-replacement of whites along with the other “events of recent decades that have revealed new dividing lines, reconfiguring the political landscape.” But of course this is Alain de Benoist we’re talking about, and he assigns low priority to forced race-replacement in the overall scheme of things. (He must not understand biology — must be one of these people without an instinctive grasp of biology who think “everything human is cultural; nothing human is biological.")

Now, look at the following passage: what’s wrong with the following passage is de Benoist takes everything that’s happening in the world today, everything that’s going horribly wrong, at face-value as an inevitable evolution, the sort of the “force-of-nature” kind of change the race-replacers try to make us accept we can’t do anything about so we might as well not question it and, instead, deal with it. de Benoist seems, for example, to have no conception of the Jews, one would say. And no conception of crony capitalists like Bush. He thinks it’s all happening by itself. A small proportion of it is; the major portion isn’t but can be changed. He does not to see that, that there are interests out there pulling strings to make most of these things happen a certain way. It’s plain as day. He appears credulous, as if naïvely swallowing everything, the whole concocted story line, every bit of Jewish propaganda the Jewish mainstream media have spoonfed him, without seeing any of the glaring contractions that normally jolt a person out of his stupor and make him say, “Wait a minute, something’s not right here, this doesn’t make sense. I see patterns that shouldn’t be there. Something’s controlling this, it’s not happening by itself.” No, he’s buying it, buying the whole Jewish/communist/crony-capitalist shooting match.

Here’s the passage (not the only one) where he’s astonishingly credulous:

we have now entered a world different from the one that prevailed at the end of the Second World War. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet system and the rise of globalization we are witnessing not only the end of the twentieth century, but the end of a great historical cycle of modernity. We have entered an era of postmodernity, which is characterized by flows and refluxes of communities and networks, i.e. an epoch of major civilizational and continental logic. Certainly, this mutation, which is still in process, is not over yet. We are in a period of transition, and like all periods of transition, it is especially rich in uncertainties, in new projects and new syntheses. One could characterize this epoch as Zwischenzeit, or an interregnum. In such an epoch it is, more than ever before, indispensable to be aware of the historical moment we live in. But we cannot analyze this historical moment and everything new it brings about (as harbingers of future developments) by referring to the images of the past and, especially, by using old references and obsolete conceptual tools. It is precisely because the ENR has never turned away from evolving and renewing its discourse that it can now provide the necessities for carrying out orderly critical thinking to matches the reality of our time. When Soviet communism collapsed, an American, Francis Fukuyama, ventured to predict the “end of history.” What he meant by that was that after the fall of communism, capitalism and liberal democracy had lost their major competitor, and that from now on all peoples on Earth were called to adopt, more or less in a long term manner, the “Western” or, short of that, the American model.

Those interpretations which he got from newspapers, newsmagazines, talking heads on TV spouting from scripts handed to them and from teleprompters, and popular books written by collaborating journalists and left-wing professors — those boilerplate interpretations are all made up, all invented by the usual suspects to calm the easily-led so rebellions by white people don’t erupt in the streets. And as for Fukuyama, does he actually believe Fukuyama was a legitimate self-created phenomenon who actually generated his own “fame” through the “soundness” of his “ideas”?????? Fukuyama was a pure Jewish media creation exactly the way Gunnar Myrdal was, Susan Sontag, was, Gloria Steinem was, and hundreds of others were who constituted major portions of “the revolution” he so credulously talks about as if it has happened all by itself.

Samuel Huntington’s thesis was obviously designed to legitimize Islamophobia, which is inherent to hegemonic views of the United States of America (which quickly found a “spare devil” in a caricature of Islam, badly needed after the disappearance of the Soviet “evil empire”).

Again, he doesn’t see the Jews at work. French thinkers believe the Islamic threat is something that is hyped by the Americans as a replacement for the now-vanished Soviet-Russian threat. It’s not. The Islamic threat and Islamophobia are mainly the work of the Jewish-controlled mainstream media, for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with a supposed American need to “invent a bogey man to replace the now-defunct communist threat.” de Benoist needs to get out more.

Many hark back to times that are definitively over. Irredentism, in particular, makes no sense at the present time. [Scroob note: by “irredentism” he means flat refusal to accept the new race-replacement status quo; he’d call MajorityRights.com an “irredentist” site, for example.] Once upon a time borders played a significant role: they guaranteed the continuation of collective identities. Today, boundaries no longer guarantee anything and do not stop or halt anything. [Yes and why is that, Monsieur de Benoist? Who, what forces, have brought that about?] Flows and fluxes of all kinds are the hallmark of our time, making borders redundant. [One-hundred percent clap-trap, Monsieur, je regrette.] Serbs and Croats, Hungarians and Romanians, Ukrainians and Russians, watch the same movies, listen to the same songs, acquire the same information, use the same technology, and are subject to the same influences - and in a same way are similarly subject to Americanization. [Ahhh, so the problem isn’t race-replacement immigration but Americanization. Riiiiiiiiight. Typically French. This is the typical superficial French intellectual you see in action here, in this “thinker.”]

The problem is Alain de Benoist turns out to be a second-rate thinker.

Posted by Dasein on March 22, 2009, 10:55 PM | #

Excellent analysis, Fred.

The following is an empty promise:

It is precisely because the ENR has never turned away from evolving and renewing its discourse that it can now provide the necessities for carrying out orderly critical thinking to matches the reality of our time.

I agree with de Benoist that this is a poor title for the book, though de Benoist’s refusal to forthrightly address race replacement is an instance of going against the popular will- but I doubt this is what Sunic has in mind.

Just glancing at the cover (and not speaking Croatian), I would guess that de Benoist is the author.

More comments:

Posted by Armor on March 24, 2009, 03:27 AM | #

At this point I don’t think what we need are more schools of thought or political movements (important as they may be). (—the Narrator...)

We need at least a few highbrow books dealing with today’s race-replacement problem. Those books have probably already been written, but their authors need to be given more publicity through the Internet. For the moment, people are still reading old books written by Francis P. Yockey (1917–1960), Julius Evola (1898–1974), and even Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). I’m sure they were intelligent and perceptive authors, and they were able to describe the beginning of our troubles. We may feel more at home with them than with today’s crazy, treacherous, state-paid, leftist, phony intellectuals. But they could not possibly have guessed that the Western world would turn so crazy! So, we need fresh analysis of what is going on today, and how we can turn things around. Benoist may have interesting things to say, but apparently not on the central question.

The other side is an extremely loose federation

But they hold every institution, and the police.

But we need those leaders to come forward.....

Maybe thanks to the internet…

If a tide reversal occurs and white people massively start opposing race-replacement, I wonder who will come first to our side: police chiefs? low level politicians? economists? farmers? doctors? technicians and engineers? Or maybe immigrants will riot one time too many in France or Britain, and the army will seize the pretext?

I think the Soviet Union unraveled from the top down. In the West, the administration is more flexible and will resist. I expect the rebellion will come from the bottom. By the way, who can recommend a good book about the fall of communism in Eastern Europe? Maybe we can learn a few lessons from the experience of Eastern Europe. I think the western media have not given us a proper analysis of what happened there more than twenty years ago.

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As a practical American, those lawyerly distinctions strike me as fundamentally dishonest in practice.