In order to speak about a “crisis of the Right”,
it is important to be clear about what the “Right” is. The division
into Right and Left was brought about following the French Revolution. Prior to
that there was no division; there were only those “principles …
that … every well-born person considered sane and normal,” (Evola
in his “Self-defense”). The position Evola defends is
“traditional and counterrevolutionary.” Evola includes Maistre
among such sane and normal men.
So to understand what the “Right” is, it is
necessary to hold to those principles considered sane and normal prior to 1789.
It would seem that Mr. Faye’s principles are not those principles. In
particular, the Europe he wants to “save” is the Europe of free
speech, secularism, women’s liberation, in sum, the Europe of the
Enlightenment. Yet that is precisely the problem, not the solution, and Mr.
Faye is not suggesting a homeopathic remedy with a highly diluted
enlightenment.
The fundamental issue is that the Enlightenment claimed to
have discovered “man”, man as rational, man as freely entering into
contractual relations, man free to believe or not believe, man equal to every
other man, man “without qualities” and independent of every
hierarchy and organic relationship which are viewed as evil restrictions on
man’s liberty. But the saner and normal Maistre, a careful observer of
the human condition, wrote in “Considerations on France”:
“The Constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, was
made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I
have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even
know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my
life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.”
A healthy organism has an identity and strives to protect
it. A Frenchman at Poitiers knew he was not a Moor. A European at Lepanto knew
he was not a Turk. We witness a soft echo of this still in the struggle for
Belgium. Yet the men of today, infused with Enlightenment values, literally
cannot see a Frenchman, an Italian, a Russian, a Maghrebian … he can only
see “man”. Any attempt for any group to assert its identity against
another must be, for him, a return to some dark period of history, which must
be overcome. So if there are only “men”, then there is no identity
to protect.
Mr. Faye turns to science and biology for answers, again a
solution rejected by Evola on principle. An animal never acts against his
nature since it is determined by biology, but a man is a spiritual being and can
act either in accordance with or against his nature. Thus there is no
“gene” for religion. Maistre rightly asserted that man is both a
social and religious creature. But that belongs to man as spirit, not man as
animal. Socially, he can live in an hierarchical, organic society or in a
contractual, egalitarian one. Similarly, his religion can support the solar
spirit – at least for the higher elements – yet provide coherence
and order for the lower classes.
Mr. Faye also invokes Rousseau’s General Will, which
Faye believe would rise up and support ethnic identity, were it not for the
efforts of the rulers to suppress it. But what of value and worth can rise up
from the bottom? Remember Vendée and the Gulags. In a “democracy”,
with one man, one vote, a woman’s vote counts the same as a man’s,
a Frenchman’s the same as an Algerian’s … how can a General
Will arise from that?
The “Future of the Intellectual”, as Maurras saw
… there is great financial success and fame today to write about the
decline of the West. Everyone from Oriana Fallaci (who preferred America) to
Pat Buchanan and now many across Europe are getting in the game. But they only
want to save the wrong Europe. The “crisis” of the Right is that
there is no Right. There are only those on the Left traveling downhill, and
those on the Left trying to put the brakes on.
There must be a “rejection of the French Revolution
and all that arises directly or indirectly from it.” There must be a
rejection of Bolshevism. There must be a rejection of the Enlightenment and
Liberalism: individualism, materialism, the dominance of science, secularism,
false ideals of freedom, egalitarianism, sexual libertinism. That will end the
crisis and then there will only be the right moment.
From:
evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com [mailto:evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com] On
Behalf Of G
Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2007 3:20 AM
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [SPAM][evola_as_he_is] Crisis of the contemporary Right
I do not know how much this will be
appreciated, but I would like to
share two video interviews which give an insight into the current
crisis of the Right.
Guillame Faye (French language. Dutch subtitles)
http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=-2514650272578459190
Horst Mahler (German language. Dutch subtitles)
http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=7139330172930782102
The interviews are done by Alfred Vierling, an ex-member of both the
Dutch Centrum Partij '86 (Centrum Party '86) and the Centrum
Democraten (Centrum Democrats).
Zum Schluss: I would like to make clear that posting these hyperlinks