Between metapolitics and apoliteia

Di Roger Griffin (*)  -  Altri Testi -  16/07/2005

Stampa articolo

Between metapolitics and apoliteia: the New Right’s strategy for conserving the fascist vision in the ‘interregnum’
By Roger Griffin

Part One: The Conceptual Foundations of Nouvelle Droite Metapolitics


Taxonomic conflicts


The very title of this article is enough to set hackles rising among the metapolitical sentinels of the French Nouvelle Droite (ND) and its European outposts, most of whom are adamant that their prolific diagnoses of the ailments of the modern world have nothing to do with fascism. Its most authoritative spokesman, Alain de Benoist, has repeatedly condemned Le Penism, and in a letter to me expressing his outrage when a sample of his world-view from the late 1970s was included in my anthology of fascist writings he declared `Not only have I been publishing since more than 25 years books and articles against almost all the ideas historically connected with fascism (racism, anti-Semitism, Führerprinzip, totalitarianism, imperialism, colonialism etc.), but I have constantly denounced the myth of the Nation-State, and nation(alist) obsessions etc.’ Similarly Marco Tarchi, former MSI intellectual and now luminary of Italy’s Nuova Destra, has publicly distanced himself from any party-political or extra-parliamentary activist movement with a Fascist pedigree, and was equally insistent in e-mail correspondence with me that his name should in no way be associated with fascism or the right.

Caution is all the more imperative when approaching this topic, given the chorus of voices sounding from the pages of Telos (hardly right-wing in its original conception) which condemned the vitriolic campaign conducted against the ND in the French press in 1993. The high point of this campaign was an ‘Appeal to Vigilance’ published in Le Monde on 13 July signed by forty intellectuals. It was followed a year later by a revised statement endorsed by 1500 more signatures which drew attention to ‘the resurgence of anti-democratic currents in French and European intellectual life’ (an unmistakable reference to the ND) which were ‘creating the conditions for a new fascism’. Paul Piccone attacked such allegations as part of a ‘McCarthyite-style inquisition’. Franco Sacchi judged ND thought to have ‘absolutely nothing to do with the old world of neo-fascism’. Mark Wegierski was equally convinced that ‘under no circumstances can the European New Right be characterized as a ‘neo-fascist residue’.

Particularly sobering for an outsider venturing into this debate was the stern caveat issued by none other than Pierre-André Taguieff, the world’s leading authority on the French New Right, who has not only meticulously documented the genesis of the ND from currents of French neo-fascism, and stressed the structural parallels of ND ideology in the 1970s and 1980s with the version of neo-fascism promulgated in the 1960s by Maurice Bardèche, but has had no qualms in indicting the ND’s allegedly anti-racist ‘differentialism’ of being a convoluted variant of racism. In the Telos special issue, however, he had harsh words for those who ‘demonized’ the New Right as a threat to democracy, referring specifically to appeals to vigilance as being ‘cast in petrified (neo)anti-fascist language and put forward by minds that are always small or blind and always lazy, and reminding those obsessed with the resurgence of the ultra-right that ‘neither ‘fascism’ nor ‘racism’ will do us the favour of returning in such a way that we can recognize them easily.’ Elsewhere he has pronounced the verdict that when the high priest of the New Right founded a new ‘revue d’idées et de débats’ in 1988, he left the political arena altogether: ‘Alain de Benoist and his review Krisis no longer belong to extreme right-wing space’.

The atmosphere of French intellectual life is highly charged compared with Britain to a point where it is not unknown for academics to be successfully sued for imputing a fascist mind set to an established writer. It is thus with some trepidation that anyone should set out, even from the comparative safety of an Anglophone publication, to beat a path across what clearly constitutes a semantic and political minefield. Doubtless what follows will incur the wrath (whether feigned or sincere) of New Rightists of every hue, and provoke the disagreement of many ‘neutral’ political scientists as well. Undeterred, this article makes the case, in a spirit which is hopefully not small-minded, fanatical, or superficial, for accepting that a particular definition of generic fascism, whose main empirical basis is writings by self-styled fascist ideologues, corroborates Taguieff’s conclusion that the core ideological assumptions still involved in the genesis of the Nouvelle Droite were in fact fascist. Moreover, and in contrast to his analysis, it demonstrates that these assumptions continue to inform its cultural production, no matter how remote from the values of inter-war Fascism and Nazism much of its ethos and immediate political goals not only appear, but genuinely are. Indeed, what should also emerge is that it is precisely by highlighting some crucial differences between the inter-war and post-war contexts in which radical right ideology has had to operate, that it is possible to appreciate the central importance to the latest phase of New Right thought (and to its generally successful concealment of a continuing fascist agenda) of a stance which has received very little attention from ‘orthodox’ political analysts, whether Marxist or ‘liberal’, namely apoliteia.

I might add that since some New Rightists have declared a ‘cultural war’ against liberalism and all its institutions, I actually welcome the idea of this article being seen less as a mortar shell than as a reconnaissance flare launched from the liberal camp over ‘enemy lines’ in an ongoing ideological skirmish. It is a border dispute over ‘visions of the world’ whose historical significance, far from being epochal, is actually too trivial to be dignified with the term ‘war’, whatever the intellectual warriors of the ND fondly imagine when carrying out their metapolitical manoeuvres on the front-line of Judeo-Christian ‘linear’ time. Clearly the definition of fascism with which this tiny missile is loaded will determine its range, accuracy, and luminosity, and hence the light it throws on those who see themselves as enlisted in a spiritual ‘trenchocracy’ dug in for the duration in the battle to renew European culture.

The intellectual world it briefly lights up is highly complex, and in its own way sophisticated, subsuming voluminous erudition in the autodidactic register of those bent on creating meta-narratives which is familiar to anyone who has perused Spengler’s Decline of the West. To do justice to a topic whose ins and outs are not only highly intricate but arcane to many ‘Anglo-Saxon’ readers, it has been decided (thanks to the generosity of the editor) to devote a sustained, two-part article to it. This first part establishes the core concepts of metapolitics and apoliteia, and demonstrates how inextricably linked they are to the ideology of generic fascism. The second will show that these two concepts are not only crucial to an understanding of the ‘cultural discourse’ used by the ND and its foreign counterparts since the 1970s, but that together they provide a thread of Ariadne with which to trace even the most apparently apolitical forms of contemporary ND publicism in an unbroken line of continuity back to its origins in fascism’s abortive inter-war revolution. In short, the ND is revealed as a modern permutation of fascism peculiarly adapted to survive in the inhospitable climate of post-war Europe. .


Fascism’s core revolutionary myth and the changing historical contexts of its realization


Despite the emergence in the 1990s of a partial consensus that sees fascism as a revolutionary form of nationalism, the term is still highly contentious and its application to post-war phenomena fraught with conceptual difficulties and confusions. It is little wonder, therefore, if the 1990s have seen a trend for political scientists to avoid it altogether in their analyses of the contemporary radical right. While understandable, this tendency is unfortunate when it obscures demonstrable areas of organizational or ideological continuity between inter-war fascist and contemporary radical right phenomena. It is especially unfortunate when it contributes to a general failure to recognize the radical right pedigree of discourses which deliberately set out to seem to the uninitiated purely ‘cultural’, and light years removed from the politics of historical fascism.

One key to turning the nebulous term ‘fascism’ into a useful heuristic device is to adopt Michael Freeden’s schematization of all generic political concepts. This distinguishes between their ‘ineliminable’ conceptual cores and the logically and culturally ‘adjacent’ and ‘ephemeral’ or ‘peripheral’ ones with which these are associated at a particular stage of their evolution or in a particular historical context. However, Freeden stresses that ideologies have cores which are ‘ineliminable’ only in the sense that ‘an empirically-ascertainable cultural consensus ascribes to them some minimal element or elements’. In other words, we are dealing not with Platonic essences, but with the conventional usage of language, of prevailing discourse. It is at this point that students of fascism come up against a serious problem, namely that insufficient cultural consensus exists concerning the meaning of fascism to allow any of the concepts associated with it to be treated as ‘ineliminable’ on the basis of common usage. As a result, the hunt for a concise definition of fascism has been open season ever since the 1920s, leading to an extraordinary proliferation of rival interpretations.

What nearly all theories have had in common over the years is that they bear deep marks of the trauma left on the historical imagination by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The several variants of the Marxist conceptualization of fascism as the tool of capitalism, or even its ‘terrorist’ essence, once it found itself desperately staving off a Bolshevik Revolution, were forged in the seismic events which unfolded in Europe between 1917 and 1939. Neil O’Sullivan’s stress on fascism as the culmination of an ‘activist style of politics’ launched by the democratic and demogogic energies which exploded with the French Revolution is based on the spectacular way the Fascist and Nazi parties acted as charismatic channels for the energies of the masses in the 1920s and 1930s. Both Renzo de Felice and Stanley Payne treat as definitional features the military values, mass mobilization, and the leader principle, the political ‘style’ which made such an impact on the popular imagination with the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. Moreover, most scholars outside the camp of Marxists (who see fascism as a global and ever present-danger intrinsic to the survival of capitalism), focus on fascism as a phenomenon exclusive to inter-war Europe, or at least surviving only in crudely mimetic or nostalgic forms ever since.

In contrast, the ideal type of fascism which I have proposed identifies as its ‘ineliminable core’ an exclusively ideological element, one which can be shown empirically to be a common denominator not only of the many permutations of thought and theory which constituted Fascism, but of a number of other movements of the extreme right both inter-war and post-war, European and extra-European, and of one regime, the Third Reich. This fundamental ideological element, or ‘mythic core, is conceived as a compound of two components. The first is ‘populist ultra-nationalism’. This is a highly flexible concept which embraces a wide range of organic and hence anti-individualistic, anti-rational, anti-liberal, and above all, anti-egalitarian and anti-universalist concepts of the nation-state or the ethnic community as a primordial unit of social, cultural, and political reality. Moreover, it can embrace federal, imperial, trans-national, and supra-national, (but not international or universal) schemes of alliances between ‘nations’ or ethnies.

The second component is the myth of ‘palingenesis’ or rebirth, which specifically denotes the vision of a process of rebirth or regeneration destined to put an end to a process of decline, decadence, or dissolution, and which can admit a vast array of diagnoses of the causes of decline and the sources of renewal. The ‘palingenetic ultranationalism’ which results is profoundly anti-rational and mythic in its thrust, seeking to inspire revolutionary action rather than static contemplation, and as such is highly eclectic and syncretic in its tendency to absorb elements from a vast number of potentially contradictory ideologies and historical phenomena. In short, there are many different permutations of fascism, and (as Taguieff indicated) it is highly misleading to use a particular historical example (e.g. Fascism, Nazism) as a template by which to evaluate a particular phenomenon’s fascist credentials, especially in the post-war era.

An immediate consequence of the exclusive concentration on a mobilizing myth of national/ethnic rebirth as constituting the ineliminable core of fascism, is that such features as militarism, charismatic or ritual politics, or the leader cult come to be seen as ‘adjacent’ or even ‘ephemeral’ elements, along with some of its other recurring traits in the inter-war period such as corporatism, authoritarianism, territorial imperialism, or totalitarianism. It is particularly obfuscating to identify it with the organizational form taken by Fascism and Nazism to seize power, namely hybrid movements consisting of an electoral party with a mass base and a uniformed paramilitary formation, and led in overtly demagogic style by cadres drawn from outside conventional politics. Even the highly chauvinist nationalism based on the historically constituted nation-state, and the overtly xenophobic and anti-Semitic racism which was a feature of many fascist movements can then be seen as ‘signs of the times’, rather than as definitional features. From this perspective it becomes possible to conceive that the very idea of fascism as a political ideology is erroneous, and that it is instead to be approached as a ‘world-view’ with profound political and militaristic, but equally profound social and cultural implications.

In short, our sparse ideological definition allows the external forms taken by ‘actually existing fascism’ in the inter-war period to be seen as conditioned to an extraordinary degree by the rise of 19th century nationalism, the entry of the masses onto the historical stage, the success of the Russian Revolution, but above all, the First World War, which nationalized, militarized, and uniformed the masses on an unprecedented scale. It also normalized a number of ideas which flouted the entire Enlightenment and positivist tradition: the celebration of myth, instinct, and violence as vectors of revolutionary change, the cyclic vision of history, the decadence and imminent collapse of Western civilization, the irrelevance of the individual and importance of the supra-individual community in the face of history, the need of every people to have strong leaders and healthy, young, virile populations to survive in the clash of nations and empires, the right of the state to intervene massively into every sphere of society. Nearly all the features highlighted in the ‘check-list’ definitions of fascism which have been so common in encyclopaedias and the social sciences then turn out to have been ‘accidental’, contingent on the way the vision of the total politico-cultural renewal of the ‘people’ was conceived in the unique conditions of inter-war Europe.

The defeat of the Axis Powers in 1945 ushered in an entirely new historical situation: Europe was divided into a liberal democratic (some would say capitalist and Americanized) West which witnessed growing stability and prosperity, and a Soviet East which became the arena for a vast experiment in an imperial (per)version of the socialist planned society. Not only did both areas preclude in very different ways the initial conditions of crisis and instability in which revolutionary nationalism could gain a mass appeal, but the horrendous destruction, the untold number of military and civilian deaths, and the sheer scale of the unimaginable human atrocities caused directly and indirectly by Nazism permanently destroyed for the vast majority of citizens in the Westernized world the emotive appeal and mass-mobilizing potential of fascist ultra-nationalism. In particular, the mythic potential of discourses which celebrated militarism, imperialism, chauvinism, master races, authoritarianism, and eugenics was exhausted. .

If post-war fascism was denied political space in the Communist East, in the West it had to change radically to adapt itself to the profoundly altered climate which soon prevailed in capitalist democracies. The generalized sense of imminent socio-cultural breakdown and the prospects of renewal in a ‘new order’ had evaporated. It was to be an age of Cold War, decolonization, mass immigration, consumerism, leisure, television, video-games, adverts, personal computers, and cellular phones. The charismatic mass movements of what came to be known as ‘fascism’ had originally coalesced out of a wide range of radical right wing elements in the crisis conditions of the 1920s and 1930s. Post-war fascism still embodied the longing for national/ethnic rebirth in a spirit which saw Enlightenment humanism and the ‘immortal principles of 1789’ as a source, not of progress, but degeneration. But now, rather like atoms breaking up into their primary components in the bubble-chambers of research centres, fascism now not only lost its mass base, but broke down into its three basic constituents: ‘respectable’ right-wing democratic parties with an anti-democratic, illiberal subtext; minute groupings of violent activists and self-styled cadres harbouring and sometimes carrying out revolutionary fantasies; dispersed intellectuals and artists who spurn activism and confine themselves to a ‘purely’ cultural or theoretical role as contributors to study circles and periodicals.

To accommodate these last two manifestations of fascism, a myriad organizations, groupings, and groupuscules sprang up, many highly ephemeral, representing numerous dialects of revolutionary ultra-nationalism which now found no Mussolini or Hitler capable of fusing them into a lingua franca. It is in this profoundly altered context that two theoretical diagnoses of the current state of the West assumed a seminal importance for the strategy adopted by intellectuals to keep alive an ultra-nationalist vision of palingenesis against the grain of post-war history. To be more precise, it is in this context that a German and an Italian intellectual offered two complementary analyses of the prospects for total cultural rebirth in the wake of the Axis defeat which were to have considerable impact on what came to be known in France as the Nouvelle Droite.

It should be noted that the protagonists of this strategy would reject the term ‘intellectual’ out of hand, since it connotes a sterile, decadent, ivory-tower cleverness, the very opposite of the organic, gnostic, prophetic wisdom which they believe can alone disclose the spiritual insights and eternal truths needed to bring about a total cultural metamorphosis. The term is used here merely to indicate that we dealing neither with party-political ideologues or paramilitary activists, but autodidacts free from the trammels of ‘decadent’ and ‘sterile’ academic rigour, and who can thus devote themselves single-mindedly to refining their own life-bringing ‘visions of the world’.


Armin Mohler: the metapolitics of the Conservative Revolution in the interregnum


The first analysis to be considered is that elaborated in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War by a young German student, Armin Mohler, and published in 1950 under the title Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932. Starting out as a doctorate supervised by the philosopher Karl Jaspers, Mohler’s book came to take the form of a catalogue raisonné of the several main currents and many hundreds of writers, thinkers, poets great and small who made up the groundswell of anti-democratic thought during the Weimar Republic. He presents them collectively as constituting ‘The Conservative Revolution’ (CR). This was clearly no ordinary postgraduate thesis. Mohler made no secret of the fact that he sees all those included in his inventory as having been the ‘Trotskyites of the German Revolution’. In other words, they were preparing the ideological ground for the healthy transformation of German (and hence Western) culture. Hitler’s Third Reich was as much a perversion of the nationalist revolution which they were working for as Stalin’s Russia was of what Trotsky envisaged as the ‘socialist revolution’. Nor does Mohler conceal his aim to publish a work which will contribute directly to the eventual realization of the Conservative Revolution (i.e. the European revolution necessitated since the defeat of Hitler by the decadent forces of liberal and communist imperialism): its subtitle is a ‘handbook’, and the extensive introduction makes it abundantly clear that it is conceived as a manual for those who do not wish to lose their spiritual bearings in the present age.

Central to the vision which underpins Mohler’s wide-ranging survey is the assumption that change is no longer imminent:

The old structure of the West as a synthesis of classical culture, Christianity, and the impulses of peoples entering history for the first time has broken down. A new unity, however, has not yet emerged. We stand in this transitional period, this ‘interregnum’ which leaves its mark on every spiritual activity. The Conservative Revolution is conditioned by it, and at the same time sees itself as an attempt to overcome it.

He goes on to argue that the typical form of expression of the interregnum is the ‘Weltanschauung’, or ‘world-view’, which, unlike academic philosophy, mixes thinking, hoping, feeling, willing, and provides the conceptual and imaginative tools for destroying the old structures. It does not take long to realize that the world-view that is embodied in the CR is, in terms of our ideal type, made up almost entirely of non-Nazi varieties of German fascism. Not only does Mohler’s own conceptual framework acknowledge that Nazism was an integral part of the CR, albeit in a travestied form, but at the heart of that Revolution lies the image of a rebirth rooted in a specifically national/ethnic way of feeling and being.

An extended section of Mohler’s introduction is devoted to expounding the centrality to CR thought of a rejection of Judeo-Christian ‘linear time’ in favour of a cyclic, or rather spherical, concept of time which means that at any moment history can be rolled in a direction which places ‘eternal’ values back at the heart of society. Using abundant quotations from CR authors, notably Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger, Mohler evokes the idea that humanity is approaching a magic ‘point zero’ after which the age of decadence induced by egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, materialism, individualism, rationalism, and the levelling principles of the French Revolution will give way through a sudden reversal (‘Umschlag’) to an entirely new culture based on organic, hierarchical, supraindividual, heroic values. The Great Midday which Nietzsche glimpsed beyond nihilism will become a reality.

In other words, Mohler deliberately set out in his handbook to weld a myriad disparate German writers with a broadly anti-Weimar, anti-democratic, anti-Enlightenment cast of thought into the image of a single ‘movement’. The Conservative Revolution which resulted is essentially a mythic construct, an ‘ideal type’ artificially created, not to increase knowledge as a heuristic device would, but to inspire belief and action. It is so in three senses. Firstly, profound differences exist in the values and ideals which many of its writers express in their works. Secondly, a good number of them were in fact directly involved with the Third Reich, so the boundary between Stalinism and Trotzskyism is actually fuzzy to say the least. Thirdly, the very purpose of Mohler’s idea of the CR is not to contribute to German studies, but to mobilize minds to resist the equally mythic construct of ‘an age of egalitarian decadence’. The Conservative Revolution is not an investigation, but a manifesto. In Popperian terms, it is an outstanding example of the ‘historicist’ imagination at work. A febrile scholarly passion has conjoined with a fertile mythopoeia to give birth to an internally consistent cosmology and teleology which offers a total explanation of history’s shape and purpose. However, since every historicist scheme is founded on a set of premises about reality which are essentially irrefutable, the meanings and values it generates have no scientific validity, however much empirical data is adduced to corroborate it. It is this very irrefutability, however, which lies at the heart of historicism’s mythic power and existential significance for those who believe in one of the ‘systems of thought’ it gives rise to. It should by now be clear that what Mohler calls a ‘Weltanschauung’ is by definition a form of historicism. What he created with the Conservative Revolution was a totalizing mythic project offering its believers an explanation of the world and a revolutionary mission which has no empirical basis other than wishful-thinking, no matter how impressive the catalogue of serious artists and thinkers cited to substantiate it.

Such objections would be rejected by the protagonists of the CR itself as a symptom of the rotten fruit of positivist rationalism or sterile intellectualism which starves the present age of higher meaning and purpose. They are irrelevant in a much more important sense, however, for with Die Konservative Revolution Mohler succeeded, practically undetected, in launching one of the most important mythic projects of the post-war extreme right, albeit with a twenty year time-lag. The practical effect of Mohler’s act of syncretism, no matter how ignored in academic circles, has been to make a major contribution to the creation of an entire new post-war fascist discourse, one which confines itself solely to cultural matters and yet offers those with fascist mind sets a sophisticated strategy for staying true to their principles. It tells them that, now that the revolution from the right, which seemed so imminent between the wars, has been postponed indefinitely and the forces of nihilistic modernity have re-established themselves, the time is no longer ripe for direct assaults on the citadels of state power, especially those carried out by Nazi-style para-military elites, mass-movements, and demagogues who were in any case symptoms of the travestying of ‘German’ or ‘positive’ (i.e. palingenetic) nihilism. Rather it is a time for thinkers and visionaries to diligently prepare the ground for the transformation of cultural power which will happen spontaneously once the present age of decadence has, like a terminal illness, run its course.

The radical implications of Mohler’s analysis for the rethinking of fascist tactics in the post-war era were not lost on one extreme right-wing intellectual, Giorgio Locchi, when he set out to express the ‘essence of fascism’ in the early 1980s. He criticized Mohler’s neglect of the seminal importance of Wagner’s attempt to found in Bayreuth a practical project for the transformation of society, in marked contrast to Nietzsche’s purely theoretical exposition of the ideals of the ‘superman’. Yet his analysis confirms the broad lines of Mohler’s vision by presenting the Conservative Revolution as the manifestation of a revolutionary movement in the history of ideas which will eventually bring about the rebirth of the West. Locchi sees fascism as ‘the first political manifestation of a vast spiritual and cultural phenomenon which can be called ‘superhumanism’, a profound rejection of the democratic, universalist, egalitarian conception of human nature and of the belief in linear progress which has created the modern world. He claims that it was in the late 19th century that this principle started to constitute the central mythic component or ‘mytheme’ of a new ‘epochal tendency’, i.e. a world-view and total system of values which, once enacted institutionally, would create a new type of society and a new historical era. Since the new ‘superhumanist’ world-view has not yet broken through sufficiently to be hegemonic (i.e. the fascist revolutions of the inter-war period failed), and the egalitarian world view continues to produce nothing but decadence and decay, contemporary history is a spiritual no-man’s land:

The interregnum is installed whenever a new epochal tendency rises up against the dominant epochal tendency: it is the period in which the ‘reign’ is contested, the period in which the old dominant tendency gets ever closer to realizing its own ultimate end and in which nonetheless a new contrary trend wants to assert its own ‘first principle’ at the cost of that ultimate end.

Lacking the basis of a hegemonic value system, fascism’s project of a total transformation of Western values cannot help but give rise to tentative and ultimately doomed experiments in attempting to reshape history so that it conforms to a world-view which for the time being remains essentially mythic and utopian:

‘Fascism’ wants to create a ‘new man’, but this is precisely because this ‘new man’ does not exist yet macrosocially and exists microsocially as a ‘possibility’ only within the superhumanist minority. The fascism which took over power or could do so once more still has to contend with a social reality which has been created over two thousand years by the egalitarian tendency, a reality which could be changed only by virtue of an action which is progressively deconstructive and in a quite different sense progressively reconstructive at one and the same time. In the interregnum ‘ and we are still in the interregnum ‘ the fascist social project cannot help but be ‘provisional’, directed in the first place to creating the social material which will one day provide the building blocks for the true ‘community’ in accordance with the true project, which will become realizable only once the prospect of this happening have been opened up by the definitive transformation of the ‘social material’, in other words by the socio-political annihilation of the egalitarian tendency.

Locchi’s book is refreshingly candid about the fact that the CR is indeed profoundly linked to historical fascism and constitutes an attempt to create the conditions in which it can eventually triumph (Note that Locchi implies that fascism is the external political manifestation of ‘superhumanism’ as an epochal force, whereas according to my strictly ideological ideal type of fascism, this epochal force and the CR are fascist as well). The book also provides an eloquent testimony to how successful Mohler has been in providing intellectual fascists trapped in an interminable post-war era with a strategy for sustaining their faith. It shows how unreasonable it would be to expect fascism to break through in a few decades of the twentieth century. After all, historical fascism was just the contingent and provisional political expression of something much more powerful: an irresistible, ‘superhumanist’ epochal tendency which is locked in conflict with a decadent, and ultimately doomed, egalitarian world-view which has dominated the West for two millennia. We are dealing not with a mere change of government, but of the transition from one aeon to another, or as Ernst Jünger once said: ‘We stand at the turning point of two eras, one of the same order of significance as the change from the stone-age to the bronze-age.’ Thus the failure of fascism’s many inter-war movements to break through, the defeat of its two regimes (fascists themselves generally recognize only Fascist Italy and the Third Reich as fascist regimes), and the acute marginalization which it has suffered in every parliamentary democracy since 1945 whenever it does not water down its revolutionary claims, are lost battles in a war which it one day must win. In the meantime it is important to uphold those eternal values which now fly in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy, secure in the knowledge that however degenerate the modern age becomes, its decline is leading inexorably to rebirth: ‘Putrefaction does not happen in the essential core...Our hope is attached to everything which remains.’


Julius Evola: the place of the Tradition in the kali-yuga


The other figure whose response to the defeat of the Axis powers has had a major impact on post-war fascism is Julius Evola. Having already been close to the avant-garde circles striving for the renewal of Italy before the First World War, in the 1920s he became Italy’s first Dada artist before gravitating towards the intellectual cosmos of several German writers deeply disaffected with the prevailing ‘spirit of the age’, Bachofen, Spengler, Nietzsche, Moeller van den Bruck, and Ernst Jünger (the last three figures central to Mohler’s Conservative Revolution). But whereas the basic orientation of Mohler’s mythic project was ‘nominalist’ in the spirit of Nietzsche and Jünger, the philosophy of history which Evola synthesized to find a mental escape from the ‘wasteland’ of 1920s was strongly influenced by a prolonged journey through Western occultism and oriental mysticism, which gave his pessimism about contemporary history a markedly idealist quality. His rejection of the decadence of the modern world focused not on its lack of heroic vitalism or ‘active nihilism’, but (and here the influence of the French occultist René Guénon is as strong as Spengler’s and Nietzsche’s) on its (literally) soul-destroying materialism, secularism, and rationalism. This he ascribed to the progressive erosion ‘ one lasting over two thousand years, except for some brief reprieves, such as the Ghibelline phase of the Holy Roman Empire or flashes in the dark such as the Knights Templars ‘ of Europe’s roots in the primordial ‘Tradition’.

The Tradition is yet another outstanding example of ‘historicism’. For Evola, the hall-mark of a ‘Traditional’ society was that all its institutions and culture were pervaded by the belief in a sacred, metaphysical order, and governed by a ruling elite made up of warriors and priests, so that the temporal and the eternal constantly interacted. Another feature of these ‘healthy’ societies is that they give rise to an ascetic militaristic ethic in which aspects of the warrior and priest fuse (e.g. Spartanism, the Samurai bushido, and the principles of the kshatriya, the Hindu military caste). Evola’s belief in the cyclic decay and rebirth of cultures means that he saw the decadence of the modern world, whose symptoms are the same for him as for Mohler (secularization, individualism, rationalism, the rise of the masses, Americanization etc.), as the sign that we are in what Hindus know as the kali-yuga, the black age, which must eventually give way to a new golden age when the Traditional forces reestablish themselves as the basis of the state, society, and culture.

For a time Evola clearly believed that Mussolini’s bid to transcend the era of ‘demo-liberalism’ was radical and serious enough for it to be the vehicle for the Traditionalist rebirth of the West, and in a steady stream of books and articles in the Fascist press he fought his own intellectual campaign to establish his world-view as the ideological basis of Fascism (he had a special animus against Gentileanism). In 1934 there appeared the most exhaustive exposition of his cyclic philosophy of history, La rivolta contro il mondo moderno (1934), a Traditional equivalent of Spengler’s Decline of the West. After this Evola turned to refining his own ‘spiritual’ theory of racism. This proves to be on closer inspection an idiosyncratic variant of Nazi Aryanism in which scientistic assumptions are replaced by the revelations of the primordial Tradition. The result was the celebrations of the Italians as a superior branch of the Aryan tree to the Germans, and a rejection of the Jews as deficient in one of the three essential components of a healthy racial constitution, the soul. Evola, incidentally, wrote the preface to the Italian edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Though ignored by the general public, his two books and several articles dedicated to racial issues are held by some experts to have influenced the wording of the Fascist race laws of 1938, as well as Mussolini’s own ideas on the subject.

By this time Evola had long been an ardent admirer of the deeply anti-liberal blood running through the veins of much German culture, and had come to admire the Spartan militarism of the SS, which he saw as closer to the spirit of the Tradition than anything Italy had to offer. He had made several visits to the Third Reich before 1939, making contact with Nazi study groups and some leading ‘Jungkonservative’, a ‘metapolitical’ circle treated by Mohler as part of the Conservative Revolution. In 1942, after reading the writing on the wall for the Fascist regime, he moved to Berlin. He was sufficiently well known and connected in the Third Reich to be in the welcoming party for Mussolini in Munich after he was rescued by the SS in 1943 from his hotel-prison in the Abruzzi, and was working in Vienna in the SS archives on occultism and Freemasonry towards the end of the war. Overall, however, despite his Herculean propagandistic activities on behalf of the Tradition, Evola remained ideologically marginalized from both regimes. His time was yet to come.

Evola had no difficulty accounting for the defeat of the European Axis powers. Both regimes had made excessive concessions to the forces of decadent modernity, in other words to the ‘age of the masses’. Consequently he had found it impossible to create an organic, hierarchical, ruthlessly supra-individual state founded, not a narrow nationalism, but on eternal spiritual principles carried by a new aristocratic caste and a new kshatriya imbued with a sense of mission to establish a new imperial culture embracing the Aryan races. The first detailed assessment of the damage which the Allied victory had inflicted on this project was Gli uomini e le rovine (1953), which still held out the prospect that a new order could be brought about in Italy within the ‘ruins’ of the modern world through a rallying of all the spiritually aristocratic and militaristic forces of the right. This text, its preface written by the commander of the Fascist anti-partisan death squads in the Salò Republic, Prince Valerio Borghese, inspired the formation of neo-fascist paramilitary groups, notably Pauli Rauti’s Ordine Nuovo (1956), founded ‘to transpose Evola’s teachings into direct political action’, and Stefano delle Chiaie’s Avanguardia Nazionale (1960). These groups, along with other black terrorist squads based on Evolian principles, such as Terza Posizione and Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, played a crucial role in launching the ‘strategy of tension’ which culminated in the Bologna bombing massacre of August 1980.


Apoliteia


As post-war Italy moved ever further into the era of political stability and ‘economic miracle’, so Evola’s pessimism about the prospects even of ‘saving what can be saved’ deepened. By the early 1960s the prospects of imminent change had plunged to the depth of cultural despair which had inspired Mohler to formulate the theory of the interregnum over a decade earlier. The result was Cavalcare la tigre published in 1961, a Traditional equivalent of Pius IX’s ‘Syllabus of Errors’ of 1864, indicting every aspect of the liberal ‘nihilism’ whose malevolent thrall over ‘the modern world’ now embraced such new phenomena as existentialism, youth culture, drugs, and ‘modern music’. The man of the Tradition now has no legitimate structures or causes to which to belong. There is no true (i.e. organic) state, no true sovereigns, ‘no monarchs ruling by divine right capable of holding aloft the sword and the sceptre’, no real leaders or ruling class. The regimes of Germany and Italy which undertook to counteract democracy and Marxism had unleashed a ‘potential for enthusiasm and faith which once inspired great crowds sometimes to the point of fanaticism’, but it has now ‘faded away without leaving a trace’. The levelling effect of the ‘immortal principles of 1789' have reduced the world to vulgarity, mediocrity, and barbarism, and the premises for ‘rectifying’ the situation are non-existent.

In such a situation what course of action is open to the spiritual outsider, the natural aristocrat, the man (and Evola means ‘man’) who instinctively feels homeless in the world of the kali-yuga because he ‘really’ belongs to the invisible world of the Tradition? He has no option but to cultivate ‘disinterest, detachment from everything that today constitutes ‘politics’. His principle will thus be what the Greeks knew as apoliteia.’ This profound detachment from a world which contains absolutely nothing ‘worthy of one’s own true self’, does not necessarily mean ‘practical abstention’ i.e. renouncing politics or even acts of violence, as long as it is done in a spirit of ‘love of action in itself’ to cultivate ‘impersonal perfection’ (though he adds ‘one could just as well smuggle arms or work in the white slave trade’!) That Evola has not abandoned his cyclic vision of history, however, is implicit in the title of the book. By withdrawing into quietistic or activistic apoliteia the ‘man of the Tradition’, or the ‘differentiated man’ (as opposed to those presumed to have been homogenized by the levelling forces of democracy), is not just refusing to give into the modern world, but actually hastening its collapse: he is ‘riding the tiger’ in the knowledge that, even if it is after his life-time, it will one day collapse and a new cycle will begin.

The creed of apoliteia proved immensely attractive to a new generation of fascists in Italy and abroad. After all, it was the fruit of a total world-view which confirmed basic fascist values and which had been refined over half a century in an extraordinary prolific and multifaceted output of articles and books by someone who had lived through Fascism and Nazism, whose warnings had been largely ignored by both of them, and who had survived to provide a coherent diagnosis of their defeat. Evola’s reputation as a seer was enhanced by his solitary, Spartan life-style and the loss of the use of his legs as the result of a British (‘enemy’) air-raid at the end of the war. But above all it was the subtle ambiguity of the creed itself which secured its success. It justified not one but two quite different strategies which could be adopted by fascists in the post-war era. One was to continue the black terrorist tactics deducible from ‘Man and the Ruins’, but now with no hope of changing anything. Instead it was a matter of using violence gratuitously to assert one’s spiritual independence and purity in the swamp-land of modern democracy, and as a reassuring signal to the rest of the invisible community of those in exile from the Tradition. The result was ‘armed spontaneism’, a leaderless, anarchic form of terrorism with no coherent goal other than a symbolic one: semiotics carried by bombs. In other words, to be an Evolian meant it was possible to be a fascist activist not only with a clear moral conscience, but without ever being demoralized at how little was achieved by any attack (massacre) in practical terms to overthrow the hated ‘system’.

The other ‘reading’ of Riding the Tiger was one which gave profound encouragement to those who had become converted to Mohler’s project of using the Conservative Revolution as an ideological Trojan Horse with which to smuggle fascism into the citadel of Western culture. It was equally reassuring for fascists who had, independently of Mohler, come to their own conclusion that the precondition to a successful fascist revolution was to establish the cultural domination of ultra-nationalist and ‘superhumanist’ ideas before attempting to erect a political system based on them.. The spread of cultural Evolianism was a major factor in the intense publicistic activity of a number of Italian intellectuals in the 1970s to find the bases of a ‘right-wing culture’ which would in turn revitalize an MSI which was proving stubbornly incapable of breaking out of the political ghetto. In practice it only succeeded in doing this in the 1990s, once it had been turned into the Alleanza Nazionale, a ‘democratic fascist’ party with a highly superficial and contradictory ‘world view’ when contrasted with Evolian Traditionalism.

A useful summary of the spirit of apoliteia, and a symptom of how it continues to influence Europe’s intellectual fascists, is provided by the Internet (at least it was when this article was being researched!), a medium which is proving invaluable to all those disaffected with the prevailing ‘world system’ and who want to forge an electronically imagined community with their ideological soul-mates. In the Summer of 1998 the bilingual (German and English) Website headed ‘Kshatriya’, and subtitled ‘Apoliteia as the Revolt against the Modern World’, invited surfers to read a text by Evola about ‘the Tradition and the Third Reich’, and obtain information about the ‘warriors against the modern world’ (kshatriya). It reminds us that ‘Nietzsche, the late [not deceased, but post-Nazi!] Ernst Jünger, and Evola were not committed to any modern political system’ because ‘they saw through the illusions of the terminal state of liberal democracy, and of ‘the last men’ who know no goal beyond themselves’. As such they were not ‘fascists, nationalists or national socialists or democrats or liberals’ [all of which by working to change the system are absorbed into it]. If the anonymous group running the Website republish Evola’s writings ‘it is not to awaken nostalgic feelings’ but ‘because it is worth avoiding the errors...of the 30s’ [i.e. when Nazism lost its way and betrayed the ‘true’ Conservative or Traditional revolution]. The rule of inner detachment applies as much to the past as the present since what matters is ‘connection with an eternal tradition’: ‘we live from what is eternally true and thus eternally right, and hence on the right’.

The authors then condemn two abortive right-wing strategies, ‘two demons’, reformism and extremism. Reformists may be able cure the ‘flu of the present system but not its cancer, while extremists can plant bombs, but they have no impact on the status quo. Both are guilty of being attached to the external appearance of the age, without understanding its inner nature. Instead the main task of the true right-winger, the representative of the Tradition ‘is to survive the self-induced collapse of the system’, which means ‘withdrawal from political sphere as the result of an inner withdrawal: the creation of an inner divide between the system of modernity and us.’ It goes on:

All spiritual refuges in the external world are long gone: there may be some traces of them left in initiatic centres, but it is an illusion to undertake a restoration of all things. Only the ‘inner Tibet’ can act as a refuge in a world to which we do not belong. A world which consists of nothing but an orgy of sensuousness, force, and vulgarity. A modernity, whose decadence we must turn against itself if we want to stay inwardly pure. We pursue the purificatio by throwing back the filth that assails us. We despise the ascetic, pious behaviour if it covers up an inner quagmire. We celebrate the outer appearance of belonging to a decadent world, as rock-musicians, pimps, or even politicians ‘ if it conceals our inner detachment and protects us from the hate of the world. It is not for us to hate the materialistic decadent world. We turn its hate, which was originally the diabolical hate of the rebel against the Tradition, the divine order, against itself.

A life outside modernity is no longer possible, not here in the heart of the beast, of the ‘civilized Western world’, and any attempt to live such a life will only rebound back on us, causing the mud of modernity to engulf us just as the Red Army overran Tibet. Given this situation, the only thing worth doing is to promote the inner realization of those forces of the Tradition which are still active: promote the absolute primacy of spirit over matter.


Metapolitics or apoliteia?

Such a text suggests that Mohler’s mythic project, conceived in the late 1940s, of the Conservative Revolution, with its submyths of the interregnum, spherical time, the primacy of a Weltanschauung, and the strategy of withdrawal into metapolitics corresponds closely to Evola’s mythic project of the Tradition, with its submyths of the kali-yuga, cyclic time, the primacy of a ‘vision of the world’, and (by the late 1950s) the strategy of withdrawal into apoliteia. They can seen as two dialects of the same ‘metapolitical’ discourse, one which allows the acutely marginalized or isolated fascist intellectual to feel part of an ‘imagined community’ of ‘warriors against the modern world’, whether in the cast of Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger or of the Knights Templars and the kshatriya. The essential difference lies in the degree of optimism they allow for. Mohlerian withdrawal into metapolitics is certainly prompted by profound pessimism about the current state of the world and the irrelevance of all existing party-political or extra-parliamentary movements, but it is tempered by two convictions: first that to focus on the cultural sphere is the only way to create the preconditions for the ‘Umschlag’ or ‘svolta’, the long-awaited transformation from nihilism into the new era; second, that there is no predetermined time-table for the metamorphosis, since the ‘spherical’ nature of time means it can take place at any moment.

To take refuge in Evolian apoliteia, however, has few such consolations. True, it allows for gratuitous acts of ‘spontaneist’ violence, and not just contemplation, but the mood is different. This is clearly understood by one of his disciples Adriano Romualdi who combined both aspects of Evolian politics. A university lecturer who was one of the first Italians to write on the Conservative Revolution (his book was published posthumously in 1981), Romualdi also exerted considerable influence on the militant interpretation of apoliteia applied by terrorist groups such as Ordine Nuovo. In his brief biography of Evola he writes:

There is no contradiction between Cavalcare la tigre and Gli uomini e le rovine or the previous books. Evola’s conception remains the same: only the perspective changes. This perspective is no longer social, but individual, not optimistic, but pessimistic. Cavalcare la tigre is the breviary of someone who must live in a world to which he does not belong without allowing himself to be overwhelmed by it, strong in the consciousness of his invulnerability. In this sense it is reminiscent of the manuals of a Seneca, an Epithetus, a Marcus Aurelius, which were written in the same climate of decadence and bore the same spiritual stamp of stoic indestructibility.


But both Mohlerians and Evolians can imagine themselves as belonging to an invisible community, a spiritual elite, a secret brotherhood whose membership is the possession of a particular temperament and world-view. Its function is, remote from the irrelevant ‘current affairs’ of a degenerate world, to be the custodians of ‘higher’, eternal values whose day will dawn at the end of this dark night of the western soul.

‘The international of free and sovereign spirits constitute an Order, but an Order which is cut off as much from the world as it is from itself. An Order which exists in secret ‘ the exact opposite of a secret Order ‘ which can only exist in the depths of being.’ ‘The closer one cycle gets to its end, the closer we are to the beginning of a new cycle. Nothing resembles the dawn as much as a sunset: only the freshness of the air can tell us which it is.’ ‘The European revolution ‘ basically an essentially spiritual and gnostic revolution ‘ is called upon to create its own vision of the world, its own language, its own object even.’ But these words are not from Jünger, Mohler, Evola, or Locchi, but were written in April 1979 by the leader of the French New Right, Alain de Benoist, and have been translated from an Italian edition of his writings, edited by Marco Tarchi, the leader of the Italian New Right, which appeared in 1983.


The Politics of Nouvelle Droite Metapolitics


In the second part of this article we will consider how deeply indebted the French New Right and its foreign counterparts were to Mohler’s Conservative Revolutionary project in their overtly palingenetic, ‘metapolitical’ phase typified in such pronouncements. We will then proceed to show how even the most apparently apolitical, pessimistic, and anti-fascist publications of the sort produced by some strands of the European New Right since the late 1980s reveal, once seen in the light of Mohlerian metapolitics and Evolian apoliteia, the unmistakable hall-marks of a neo-fascist conception of the modern world which would have drastic political and human implications if an attempt were ever made to turn it from a spiritual into a material reality.

This is not to suggest that the editors and authors of New Right publications do not genuinely dissociate themselves from Fascism and Nazism, which they see as two historically contingent and largely misconceived attempts to implement an anti-egalitarian (‘superhumanist’), anti-Enlightenment (mythic), and anti-linear (cyclic) vision of the world. What it does suggest, though, is that indignant claims by New Rightists to have dedicated a whole intellectual life to fighting ‘almost all the ideas historically connected to fascism’ are as disingenuous as assertions that Evola ‘wrote a very interesting critique of nationalism and fought violently against any form of biological racism’. Historiographical inquiry (as opposed to historicist mythopoeia) informs us that Julius Evola did indeed attack nationalism, but only as yet another rotting fruit of a decadent modernity, insisting instead that the creation of the healthy supra-individual community in Europe could only take place within the framework of a spiritual Empire made possible by a renewal of the Tradition, a harbinger of which he saw in the initiatic militarist ethic of the International Brigades of the SS! As for Evola’s non-biological, or ‘spiritual’ racism, it was not so far removed from Nazi racism that it prevented him from publishing an article in 1938 expressing his admiration for Codreanu, the leader of the extraordinarily violent and racist Iron Guard, and citing with approval his assertion that ‘Mussolini, who has destroyed communism and free-masonry, has implicitly declared war also on Judaism’. He went on in the same text to comment that the ‘new anti-Semitic turn of Fascism [i.e. the racial legislation of 1938] has completely vindicated Codreanu’s claim.’

As for the academic industry which has grown up around the ND, the data assembled in part two of our investigation should cumulatively demonstrate that those who simplistically accuse it of posing a fascist threat to democracy or of being in cahoots with racist or neo-fascist parties certainly need to do a bit more homework before they rush into print. By the same token, those who dismiss out of hand such allegations or see the contemporary ND as no longer belonging to ‘extreme right-wing space’ might be encouraged by our findings to reconsider their position. It is thus necessary to turn our attention in the concluding part of this article to the ND itself, focussing, not on the public arena of assertion and counter-assertion, but on something which all too often gets left out of account in interviews with the putative extreme right, namely statements made in black and white in its own publications.

Between metapolitics and apoliteia: the New Right's
strategy for conserving the fascist vision in the
interregnum'
Roger Griffin
Part Two: The Persistence of Fascist Metapolitics in the Contemporary
New Right'
 

The emergence of the ND as heirs of the Conservative Revolution
It has been established in the first part of this article that Mohler and Evola offered two distinct
but complementary conceptual frameworks (though they would prefer the term
Weltanschauung' or visione del mondo') within which to adapt fascism's core values to the
inauspicious climate of the post-war era. In particular, they both made it possible: I) to uphold
fascism's core belief in the basic decadence of socialism and liberal democracy as ideological
forces; ii) to account for the defeat of the Rome-Berlin Axis by portraying the two regimes as
having travestied the type of new order called for as a solution to the crisis of the modern age,
firstly through their demagogy (which meant they were insufficiently based on a new spiritual
elite), and their myopic nationalism (which made them insufficiently European in scope); iii)
thereby to dissociate themselves from the calculated destructiveness and inhumanity of those
regimes (in particular the Nazi programmes of euthanasia and attempted genocide), and; iv) to
explain both why any sort of anti-egalitarian revolution' was no longer imminent while at the
same time vindicating the hope that it would ultimately triumph.
By celebrating the primacy of culture over politics as the premise to a revolution in the
spirit of right-wing Gramscism', and by identifying spiritually' with the Conservative
Revolution (CR) or the Tradition rather than the programme of any political party or terrorist
group, right-wing intellects who longed for the transformation of the entire system' could now
take refuge in metapolitics with a clear conscience. Not only were they secure in the knowledge
that they avoided being tarred with the brush of fascism in the conventional usage of the term
based on inter-war externals such as paramilitarism and the leader-cult, but they could feel that
they were actually doing more crucial work than any activist in or outside democratic politics by
preparing the ground culturally' for the radical rupture with the Enlightenment tradition
necessary for society and culture to be regenerated.
Pierre-Andr??? Taguieff has meticulously documented the process by which this
exclusively metapolitical, Europeanist, and apparently (and in many cases genuinely) anti-Nazi/anti-Fascist approach to pursuing fascism's revolutionary agenda played a formative role
in determining the nature of what came to be known as the Nouvelle Droite. He shows how in
its pre-history it started out as a response to a deep sense of crisis within French fascism in the
wake of the Algerian War which led to calls, notably from Dominique Venner in his article Pour
une critique positive (1962), for a French ultra-nationalism to be rooted in a Europeanist
framework and provided with a new ideological rationale. This in turn was influenced by
Maurice BardŠche's Qu'est-ce que le fascisme? (1961), which celebrated fascism's bid to create
a healthy new type of society in various European nations in the inter-war period, and identified
as its central mission in the post-war era the creation of a new Europe freed from the pernicious
influence of the USA and Soviet Empire, a project that he claimed had already emerged in the
last phase of the war. Taguieff shows that from 1962 to 1971 the writings of those who would
form the core of the ND and GRECE (notably Alain de Benoist himself) embrace Europeanism,
but still in the key of biological Aryanism associated with the overtly neo-Nazi `Message of
Uppsala' and the publication of Europe Action (1962-7). It is between 1972 and 1979 that the
ND proper emerges when biological determinism is replaced by a cultural discourse whose main
themes are the rejection of egalitarianism (expressed in terms of a Nietzschean assault on Judeo-Christianity and Enlightenment humanism), and a call for the rebirth of Europe to be brought
about through a revival of Indo-European values'. A crucial moment in this process was the
formation of the think-tank GRECE in 1968 to elaborate the conceptual tools for the coming
transformation, leading to its publication in 1978 of an anthology of key articles with the
significant title Dix ans de combat culturel pour une renaissance. It was also in this period that
De Benoist became intensely concerned with Mohler's theories. Having written books on the
Indo-Europeans (1966), Rhodesia (1967), and the Gestapo (1971), he now published Morale et
Politique de Nietzsche (1974) and was to dedicate another to Moeller van den Bruck or the
Conservative Revolution ().
In March 1978 a right-wing journalist, Gilbert Comte, published in Le Monde a series of
articles under the title Une nouvelle droite?' and the phrase quickly caught on. Soon the ND was
at the centre of a flurry of attention in the serious' press which peaked in 1979. It was at this
point that Taguieff identifies the beginning of a new ideological phase (1979-1983) when the
ND evolves the doctrine of differentialism' and of a radical relativism which rejects the idea of
any intrinsic cultural or racial superiority. This he sees as being followed by a third phase, from
1984-1987, when the emphasis shifts to encompass third-worldism, the revival of the sacred, and
the mission to keep all cultures alive. It is during the 15 years of intense ND ideological activity
between 1972 and 1987 that Mohler's diagnosis of the post-war world became crucial to the
elaboration of a new fascist discourse in France. Both his myth of a conservative revolution'
which had been interrupted and postponed since the Nazi seizure of power, and his stress on the
continuing relevance to understanding the present stage of history of authors such as Ernst
Jnger, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt now became absolutely central to a crusade against
the alleged constituents of actually existing' modernity. The principal components which are
singled out for attack are mechanistic' democracy, universal' human rights, technocracy,
egalitarianism, globalization, materialism, individualism, the Americanization and Sovietization
of world, the decay of Europe into a spiritual wasteland. These are to be combatted by regrafting
its culture onto the alleged tap-root of a pre-Christian, Indo-European (Aryan) cosmology,
transcending the dichotomy between left and right, operating the spherical' conception of
history, and spreading the awareness among the spiritual revolutionaries who have survived with
their idealism and vision intact that are living in an interregnum' of finite duration.
It is in this phase that Evola too starts being discovered' by French New Right
intellectuals, thanks to the availability of translations of such key works as Les Hommes au
Milieu des Ruines and Chevaucher le Tigre. This contributes to the increasing importance of such
themes as an anti-modern and spiritual' imperialism, the organic state, the sacred, the theory of
cultures as organic life forms, and the disparagement of mass democracy and culture in the name
of heroic militaristic values. Evola's impact also reinforced the idea that any true vision of the
world' is necessarily rooted in a substratum of primordial (pagan) wisdom (a version of the
Tradition') which can only be understood by those who are spiritually attuned to it, and remains
opaque to merely academically trained minds or those brainwashed by the clich???s of one-worldism'.
 
 
The Metapolitics of Alain de Benoist
Two anthologies of Alain de Benoist's reviews, articles, essays, and lectures produced between
1970 and 1979, Vu de droite and Les id???es … l'endroit, published just before and just after the
French media and orthodox' intelligentsia had started recognizing the existence of the ND as
a new political and cultural force, confirm that throughout the decade its most influential thinker
had been remarkably prolific in disseminating the new discourse. Attuned to the interregnum,
it was an exclusively metapolitical one which brilliantly answered Venner's original call for a
drastic overhaul of an outdated fascist orthodoxy whose roots in inter-war Nazism were too
apparent and which had proved of minimal mobilizing potential in the post-war climate. The
ND's new metapolitical' Weltanschauung effortlessly translated palingenetic ultra-nationalism' into a new revolutionary analysis and strategy which convincingly made charges
of fascism' look specious, hysterical, and ill-informed. In striking contrast to the (would-be)
charismatic uniformed movements which attempted to storm the citadels of state power in inter-war Europe using a combination of electoral and paramilitary force, its assault was to be an
exclusively cultural and publicistic one. What was now conceived as the main weapon in a war
of attrition against all the forces which inter-war fascism had set out to destroy was the regular
appearance in quality newspapers and academic press of its disquisitions on a vast range of issues
relating to the political, social, anthropological, philosophical, scientific, ethical, and
metaphysical assumptions which either underpin the West' in its current form or allow another
to be conceived based on an anti-egalitarian', anti-materialist', anti-universalist', anti-individualistic' world-view
The core myth which gave unity to the torrent of eclecticism which this strategy
unleashed was that of Europe's coming metamorphosis into a federal empire, its spirituality and
core identity regenerated through the revival of its pagan roots and ethnic cultures. In its new
form it would finally be emancipated from the alien values of Soviet Russia and the USA, as well
as the decadent economism promoted by the European Union, an agent of globalization and
levelling whose concept of integration is in ND terms deeply un-European' and hence decadent.
The primary components of the new Europe would not be nation-states, though they might
continue to exist, but rather homogeneous regions or ethnies, reservoirs of authentic values,
rootedness, and community which would serve as the bulwark against both capitalist and
communist one-worldism and materialism, and able to participate organically' in the epic
historical destiny which lay in store for a reborn Europe.
Vu de droite was published in 1979 by the ND's own publishing house, Copernic, and
grouped under various headings a selection of 120 of de Benoist's essays and reviews written
over the previous decade. It immediately won the coveted Prize of the Acad???mie Fran‡aise. The
jacket notes are revealingly candid. The book is a vast panorama of the "ideas which are leading
the world". For Alain de Benoist the cultural revolution is preparing for the political revolution
of our days...With this essential book, Alain de Benoist establishes himself as the most lucid
representative of the new right and the "conservative revolution"'. One feature of the book is its
extraordinary syncretism, which ranges across Indo-European civilizations, the philosophy of
culture, cosmology, biological science, ethnology, psychology, pedagogy, political systems and
theory, religion, debates about ideologies and epistemology, as well as assessments of individual
thinkers and writers, and perspectives on France and the modern world.
The introduction stresses that the aim of the book was to awaken a certain sensibility'
and open up culture to a third way' which would break out of the sterile critiques of the status
quo which were being offered both by the Marxist left and by the traditional right, thus laying
the basis for a new right'. The terms in which this aim is expressed makes the debt to the CR
clear. We are told that the main threat today is the progressive disappearance of the diversity of
the world', the reduction of all cultures to a world civilization based only on what is common'.
We are living in the blocked society' established by Yalta (i.e. dominated by the USA and the
USSR), one characterized by a failure of nerve, a lack of will to resolve the crisis which has
always been the condition of humanity. What is needed is a new discourse, corresponding to a
new way of being in the world, a new form of humanity.' The basic conflict is between different
ways of apprehending the world: universalist and differentialist, anti-egalitarian and egalitarian,
organic and mechanic. De Benoist quotes Ernst Jnger's statement: There is no original creation,
but it is possible for each age to catch fire in its own way,' commenting I still believe we will
be able to "catch fire"'.
Some of the pieces have a special resonance in the light of the CR analysis of the present
world system. Foundations' contains an essay on Nietzsche's spherical' conception of the
historical process whose importance to the CR was originally stressed by Mohler, and which
means that at every moment there remains a possibility for the regeneration of time'.
Interestingly de Benoist refers the reader to an article on the subject in the ND review Nouvelle
cole by none other than Giorgio Locchi, the co-author of Le Mal Am???ricain who was to publish
his insider view of the essence of fascism' two years later. There are essays on Wagnerism, on
the ambiguity of Hitler's abortive attempt to bring about a new creation', and on military
novelist Ernst von Solomon who as a Freikorps member saw himself fighting for an invisible
Germany, one which did not yet exist'. There is also a piece on the distinction between (organic)
culture and (mechanical or decadent) civilization popularized by Spengler, and on Gramsci's
theory of cultural hegemony'. This theory stresses the way states dominate society not just
through political power, but also through cultural power', that is by establishing an ideological
hegemony which assures that minds are imbued with a conception of the world which
consolidates and justifies it.' The role of organic intellectuals' who want to create the premises
for a revolution is thus to win the cultural war'. Put in these terms Gramscism leant itself
perfectly to theoretically underpinning the importance which Mohler attached to the role of the
Trotskyites' of the German Revolution in the post-war era.
Perhaps more revealing for the influence of Mohler's concept of the interregnum on de
Benoist are some passages tucked away in articles on less familiar figures. One is a commentary
on the work of Raymond Abellio which draws attention to the way he felt he was, above time'
with a detachment towards himself which is a form of fulfilment'. He cites Abellio's
observation that I call evil what tends towards the levelling, the homogenization of nature and
man. There is natural entropy and also social entropy'. Another significant quotation is that I
have the profound feeling that my life, from the moment I was born, has been like a drawn-out
process of dying, with at the end of it an unknown rebirth, just like the life of Europe for the last
60 years'. There is an equally revealing passage in an article on Jean Cau, a novelist whose
admiration for Mishima is reflected in works which attacked egalitarianism and democracy,
notably Le temps des esclaves (1971) and Les ???curies de l'Occident (1973). De Benoist's final
comment is Before his stables were cleaned, Augias lived for thirty years in filth. The "stables
of the West"....are still awaiting their Hercules.'
But Evola's influence is also apparent in Vu de droite. The article devoted to him focuses
on his organic theory of the West, which underpins the thesis expounded in The Revolt against
the Modern World (1934) that we are in the final phase of a cycle. The reign of the machine, the
spread of materialism, pervasive egalitarianism are its evident signs. European culture is
squeezed in the the vice of Bolshevism and Americanism, both based on an economist
conception of life. We live in the black age of ancient Indians (kali-yuga), what the Greeks called
the age of iron, and the age of the wolf of Nordic myth. The Tradition is lost...Only a return to
a Traditionalist spirit to a new unitary European consciousness can save the West.' De Benoist
goes onto to discuss Evola's post-war book Gli uomini e le rovine, stressing its themes of
empire' in the Traditionalist sense, the militarist ethic as the expression of a higher, supra-individual calling, and the spiritual aristocrats who carry within themselves the idea of
regeneration', and who, having crystallized' in history always remain standing irrespective of
what goes on around them. The reference to the invisible spiritual elite holding out against the
decadence of the modern world not only corresponds to Mohler's theory of the interregnum' but
also anticipates the theory of apoliteia explored in Riding the Tiger, even if de Benoist does not
actually discuss it.
One reason why de Benoist does not dwell on Riding the Tiger may well be that he is still
under the spell of the optimistic image of spherical time proposed by Mohler which holds out the
prospect that at any moment an Umschlag' or sudden reversal can take place allowing anti-egalitarian, organic values to (re-)gain the ascendancy, so bringing to an end the interregnum. In
the late 1970s de Benoist still felt he was actively preparing for a transformation: not just
stoically riding the tiger', but accelerating its exhaustion. This guarded optimism is brought out
in his next book, Les id???es … l'endroit published in 1980, which reprints a number of extended
essays on such basic building blocks of the ND vision of the world' as the political right, the
errors of liberalism, totalitarianism, (which of course concentrates on liberal egalitarianism'),
differentialism, cultural hegemony, and Europe. An important article, for example, expounds de
Benoist's nominalist' position on the world, specifically rejecting as implicitly determinist both
the dominant linear conception of history allegedly bequeathed by Judeo-Christianity, and the
cyclic alternative to it promoted by Evola. Instead, de Benoist proposes the spherical concept of
time which he claims allows human beings, as animals which autonomously create rather than
discover' metaphysical meaning in the world, to change history through a collective act of will
to project a new significance and a new order onto the essentially meaningless and chaotic
cosmos. Another essay contains a clear allusion to Evola when it refers to those who speak of
an esoteric Tradition, which is often nothing other than the fruit of their imagination'. In other
words, it is the Conservative Revolution rather than the Tradition which provides the central
premises of de Benoist's metapolitics in the 1970s.
An important section in Ideas Put in their Right Place' sets out the ND's position on
Europe. One article welcomes the defeat of the USA by the Vietcong in 1975 as a blow struck
for cultural difference and the right of peoples: Vietnam for the Vietnamese, Algeria for the
Algerians, France for the French, Europe for the Europeans'. It concludes:
Between the materialism of the West and the materialism of the East, between the
America of vulgarity and the mercantile spirit and the Russia of Gulags,
oppression, prisons and concentration camps, there now exists a void. This void
is Europe. Occupied Europe: to the East by barbarity, to the West by decadence.
The worst thing that could happen to it is for people to end up thinking that one
occupation is preferable to the other. As far as I am concerned, I am not disposed
to dress up either as a cossack or in Levi's. Between Moscow which kills bodies
and Washington which kills souls, I am waiting for Europe to come once more
into being.
Another article from 1976, while once more attacking the superpowers raises the question of the
possible future of Europe and its rebirth', asserting that the real Europe stretches from the
Atlantic to the Urals' and must become European once more', its inhabitants the subjects of its
own history and not just objects'. This involves the creation of a third way', and a third force'
the key to which is renewing contact with the cultural values of which the nations are the sole
heirs', so that in a decadent Western world Europe can become a sort of new Empire of the
Middle' (a Heideggerian phrase). The principle behind this is imperium' (as we have seen, an
Evolian concept), which is a matter of will-power, not economics or force. In another hint of
nostalgia for a charismatic leader capable of marshalling the forces of regeneration (cf. the
hankering for a new Hercules earlier), de Benoist writes To be the distant subjects or
mercenaries of a new Rome would not be so bad. But America is not a new Rome. It is a new
Carthage. And we, brave Graeculi, in the absence of a European Fichte, await a new Cato'.
A third essay, written in April 1979, shows de Benoist synthesizing the nominalist'
conception of time with the vision of a new Europe. Europe, we are told, still remains the centre
of the world, its heartland. Europe has culture' while the superpowers only have civilization'.
Europeans can grasp the meaning of history whereas the superpowers can only understand the
externalities of cause and effect. What is needed is the birth of a new conscience, of a new
understanding of historical time', one which subsumes the transfiguration in the full actuality
of the three dimensions, the three perspectives on time, past, present, and future.' De Benoist
refers approvingly to Nietzsche's vision of a new caste united by a single will which would
enable Europe to pursue a goal for thousands of years, so putting an end to the reign of petty
democratic and dynastic purposes, of small-time politics' and of economic man'. Only a reborn
Europe could give life to a decadent West, and this means grasping the fact that time is spherical
rather than linear and moving towards a millennial synthesis' in which all dualisms merge: faith
and reason, body and soul, past and future, time and space, the individual and the collective,
Myth and History, thus giving birth to a New Man. The true European is being born out of the
decay of the present age. An old era is closing and a new one opening. In a passage deeply
indebted to Mohler, de Benoist cites Nietzsche's comment in The End of Nihilism that Our
country has lost its gods and not found new ones'. He concludes: Here we are in the
interregnum... in the hour, as Hofmannsthal says, in which those who have been able to keep
watch during the long night meet those who appear in the new morning.'
This brief sortie into the world of ND metapolitics in its formative phase underlines how
deep the debt is to Mohler's myth of the Conservative Revolution and its function as the
custodians of a revolutionary Weltanschauung for the duration of the interregnum'. At this point
the ND is resolutely nominalist', i.e. Nietzschean/Jngerian, rejecting cyclic theories of culture
with their implicit determinism (for which Spengler too was criticized by the Nazis) for a
voluntarism' which sees it as possible for History to be regenerated through the injection of
sufficient mythic energy by an enlightened elite. This is not the kali-yuga, but the interregnum,
which can be terminated at will' thanks to the magic properties of spherical time'. Yet Evola's
influence can already be detected in the ND's concept of an imperial' Europe, and his radical
stand against the modern world' has made him an honorary member of the CR. If this phase is
implicitly recognized by Taguieff as still belonging to extreme-right wing space' it is not only
because his own research leaves no doubts about its origins in unadulterated post-war fascism,
but because the attack on the decadence of the Western liberal-democratic-socialist-materialist
system' is still associated with clearly expressed hopes for a total rebirth' which will sweep it
away. In other words, the palingenetic mythopoeia which is so central to the fascist mind set is
still palpable. Its protagonists still see themselves as pro-actively preparing the cultural premises
for the political revolution' and have not withdrawn into the quietistic hibernation of apoliteia'.
It is interesting in this respect to consider a passage in L'essenza del fascismo in which
Marco Tarchi, de Benoist's Italian translator and the person most responsible for introducing ND
metapolitics into Italy in the 1980s, is interviewing Giorgio Locchi, co-author with de Benoist
of an opuscule attacking American cultural imperialism, Il male americano (1978). In it Tarchi
expresses surprise that Locchi, who identifies fascism with a superhumanist' revolt against
egalitarianism, does not locate the ND within the fascist camp'. Locchi explains that the ND has
hitched itself to the bandwagon' of Val???rie Giscard d'Estaing, leader of the centre-right Union
pour la D???mocratie Fran‡aise, as a result of which Figaro-Magazine is prepared to publish the
increasingly anodyne' writings of de Benoist. For him the ND is a sort of awkward prefascism'
or even a dishonest attempt to elaborate an updated form of demo-liberalism'. This is an
extraordinarily aberrant judgement, which it is tempting to dismiss either as the fruit of some
personal enmity, or as a deliberate ploy to throw potential anti-fascists off the scent. There is
nothing demo-liberal' about the ideas presented in Les Id???es … l'Endroit. Hence Tarchi's
surprise.
Certainly the ND at the time was itself anti-fascist in the sense of its deliberate, radical,
and sincere rejection of Nazism, which Mohler regards as the Stalinist' travesty of the
Conservative Revolution. However, it is equally sincere in its embrace of what Mohler called a
German' or positive' nihilism directed against the prevailing system' which it is bent on
destroying so as to replace it with a superior, superhumanist' one, a project which fully
corresponds to generic fascism understood ideal-typically as palingenetic ultra-nationalism'. It
is this structural correspondence which explains why several of the CR's original Trotskyites'
for a time projected their fantasies of a new order onto Nazism itself (notably Gottfried Benn,
Ernst Jnger, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger), and why all of the groups identified by Mohler
as its constituents, notably the V"lkische, the Jungkonservative, and the National Revolutionaries,
were fully absorbed into the Third Reich after 1932, the cut-off date so significantly chosen as
the termination of the CR in the title of the handbook'. Following a different path Julius Evola
attempted in vain to make his Traditionalism the ideological orthodoxy of Fascism (and Nazism
too!) until the bitter end, but went on to become the main inspiration of post-war Italian neo-fascism, terroristic, cultural, and, in the case of the MSI deputy Pino Rauti, party-political as
well. Another indication of how naive it would be to take at face value ND spokesmen's
indignation at being associated with fascism or Locchi's disingenuous denial of its fascist
pedigree is the way its ideas were being received abroad.
New Right palingenetic metapolitics outside France
The main exponent of the New Right in Germany is Pierre Krebs, founder of the Thule-Seminar,
which now has a Website, the Thule-Netz. In the publications of the German New Right the
radicalness of the animus against the West and of the palingenetic thrust of the metapolitics
seems less prone to be euphemized through complex intellectual ratiocinations, or through
simply reviewing texts which help undermine the totalitarianism' of liberalism and one-worldism. Die europ???ische Wiedergeburt (1982), for example, is a sustained diatribe against the
egalitarianism perpetuated by Judeo-Christianity, Marxism, Liberalism, and against the American
way of life' which is promoting an ethnic and cultural miscegenation whose effect is to destroy
peoples' (V"lker). Globalization is laying waste the land of Isolde, Faust, and Mozart, and
replacing the diversity of cultures with the totalitarianism of homo dollaris uniformis'. The
Thule-Seminar's declared goal is to take over the laboratories of thinking' in a cultural war'
against mechanistic modernity', the outcome of which will be the establishment of organic
humanism' and organic modernity' as the basis of European rebirth and a new dawn. We are
assured that The 21st Century will be European' (though presumably only for Europeans). The
intellectual heroes of this revolution include Nietzsche, Spengler, Evola, Dum???zil (author of
works on Indo-European culture), Jnger, Benn, Heidegger, and Schmitt.
Krebs edited another seminal contribution to the German New Right under the title Mut
zur Identit???t [The Courage to Have an Identity] which appeared in 1988. This took the form of
an anthology of essays by French and German New Right authors (including a broadside against
universal human rights by Alain de Benoist), and is reminiscent of Vu de droite in its pyrotechnic
display of syncretism and multi-disciplinarity. It again underlines how far Krebs is from the
(qualified) cultural pessimism of Evola's Man and the Ruins, let alone from his total despair in
any initiatives stemming from the present state of the world expressed in Riding the Tiger:
An old, still established political era is ending: the era of the non-organic politics
of egalitarian theory. A new political era, which will have a legitimate claim to
power, is imminent. Against the established totalitarianism theory an alternative
is gradually being articulated which will connect the old, unexpressed freedoms
of man (contained in the respect for their differences and guaranteed by the right
to difference') with the new responsibilities of the approaching century (in the
context of the new humanism of the rights of peoples' as opposed to the
humanitarianism of the rights of man'.
A few pages later the prospects of revolution suddenly seem to have receded, as Krebs surveys
the advanced stage of modern decadence. The American way of life' has replaced
Mephistopheles. Zarathustra has fallen silent. The inhabitants of cosmopolis' are living in the
moment, cut off from their historical origins. With Heidegger' we know we are in a midnight
world, spiritless, Godless, rootless, Being-less. The cultural dynamic left in Germany is a
consumerism breeding massification and mediocrity, proof that America has infected Germany
with its cancer trying to turn it into a huge California under the sway of Homo Occidentalis'.
What will save Germany is that its true image is being preserved by a small elite with an
uncontaminated vision, safeguarded as a secret inner Reich'.
Such passages, with their unmistakable allusion not just to the Evolian concept of
imperium' but to the Third Reich (and their even more uncanny parallels with Ernst von
Salomon's idea of an invisible Germany'), emphasize the fact that, despite the New Right's
preoccupation with regenerating Europe and with restoring the homogeneity of ethnic or regional
peoples' rather than of nation-states as such, its palingenetic mythopoeia still sometimes
expresses itself in terms of an organic or ultra-nationalism, so underlining its fascist pedigree.
It is also worth pointing out that inter-war Fascism and Nazism also contained important seams
of Euro-fascism' and that some fascist intellectuals, such as Drieu la Rochelle and Robert
Brasillach in France, Julius Evola and Asvero Gravelli in Italy, and Martin Heidegger and
Christoph Steding in Germany, within their different visions of the world' habitually presented
inter-war fascism as a pan-European project to regenerate the West as a whole, an essentially
cultural (metapolitical) phenomenon in which, naturally, their nation was destined to play an
important role.
In a concluding essay Krebs seems to have returned to the sense of an imminent
Umschlag' when he portrays the modern age in familiar New Right (and fascist) terms as one
of crisis, evoked, not in the restrained, abstract intellectual register which dominates in ND
publications, but with the militancy and lurid imagery familiar from eschatological fantasies. The
Thule-Seminar is meeting the challenge of the crisis through launching a cultural battle, which
means total war fought by the living forces of our ideas against all totalitarian manifestations of
the doctrine of equality, the Kraken which brings a gentle, invisible, odourless death in the name
of humanism and happiness; this Kraken which multiplies its tentacles like a cancerous tissue
spreads its metastases.' (It is curious that Krebs' means cancer' in German).The German New
Right along with all anti-cosmopolitans and anti-oneworlders who from left or right reject
cultural decay and racial dissolution', are attacking the society' of comfort' in the name of
founding a new culture, a new Heimat, a new Europe'. This will come about through the
creation of a third force' which will reverse the progressive destruction of cultural roots and
destroy the pincer movement of American and Soviet imperialism.
The aim is a new Empire (Reich) based on a new alliance (Axis!?) of healthy energies
spreading throughout Europe: a certain flame which 15 years ago flared up once more in the
heart of France [i.e. when the ND was formed], which races through Italy, Greece, Belgium,
Spain, Portugal, England and Austria, is now burning fiercely. The rise of the New Culture of
Europe is now a reality which frightens the sorcerer's apprentices of egalitarianism.' Eventually
the concentration camps of the uniform world society' will be opened up by a new order'
ushered in by the cultural renaissance of Europe'. We can lead the fate of our peoples into new
paths', because on our side we have myth', which is the highest legitimation of our struggle'.
It is not difficult in such passages to feel the proximity, not just of inter-war fascist ideology, but
the misplaced utopianism, anger and fanaticism which generated it. We should thus not be
surprised at the fascist ethos which emerges from a first-hand report on a Thule-Seminar meeting
held in Munich in 1989 and attended by Himmler's daughter, Gudrun, a familiar figure in
extreme right-wing circles in Germany. It then seems less of a coincidence that the society from
which the DAP (then the NSDAP) originally grew was called the Thulegesellschaft.
To take one more example of a form of ND with a palpable link to fascism, the British
New Right publication The Scorpion (formerly National Democrat which by chance was the
name of an electoral neo-Nazi party in post-war Germany) was founded in the early 1980s by the
English counterpart to Pierre Krebs, Michael Walker, formerly of the neo-Nazi National Front
until its demise in 1979, when the French New Right was just taking off'. The themes to which
entire issues are dedicated are the familiar ND ones: the racism, totalitarianism, and nihilism of
multi-cultural, capitalist society, the degeneracy of the USA, the need for the revival and
protection of regional cultures, the importance of rediscovering an organic conception of the
world, and so forth. Predictably much space is devoted to Mohler's mythic project, the
Conservative Revolution, but, in distinction to de Benoist's publications, also to the ideas of
Julius Evola's Traditionalist', anti-nominalist interpretation of modernity. This may well reflect
the direct influence of the links between former NF ideologues and some spontaneist' terrorists
from Italy who took refuge in London in the early 1980s (Evolian concepts had a major impact
on the theories of English Third Positionism in the same period).
Issue 9 (1986) of The Scorpion was dedicated to the topic When Europe awakes' and
based on 3 international conferences organized by the New Right on this theme in Geneva, Paris,
and London in 1985, bringing together Michael Walker with, among others, Alain de Benoist,
Guillaume Faye and PierreVial of GRECE, Robert Steukers of Belgium, and Pierre Krebs of the
Thule-Seminar. The palingenetic imagery which predictably concludes the editorial takes the
form of a quotation from Tolkien: From the ashes a fire shall be woken. A light from the
shadows shall spring. Renewed shall be the blade that was broken. The crownless again shall be
king.' The theme of the various articles, which includes some conference papers, but also some
other pieces, notably one by Julius Evola, is the rebirth of a Europe which has at last found its
spiritual destiny' (Walker) inspired by heroic values transfigured and resplendent hailing a new
dawn' (Faye), has revolted against an American Westernization' which is destroying everything
that is specifically European', and has finally turned itself into an Empire ruled by an aristocracy
of the intellect' (Evola).
What the historical background to The Scorpion and its editor illustrate is that once it
broke through as a high-profile cultural' force in France in the late 1970s, the Nouvelle Droite
exercised an immense appeal to intellectual fascists all over Europe who were frustrated with the
systematic marginalization and ghettoization of nostalgic' or mimetic' neo-fascism, whether
party-political, terrorist, or publicistic. In a way reminiscent of the Body Shop franchise system,
the ND offered fascists who would otherwise have remained ideological small-fry a chance to
open a local branch of a flourishing supra-national enterprise. Henceforth they could not only feel
part of a new, prestigious school of thought', but effortlessly (that is after a crash course in ND
Newspeak) repackage fascism's ideology and update its revolutionary strategy without
compromising its fundamental values or goals, and, most important of all, without despairing in
the eventual realization of their palingenetic vision. In a way which directly parallels the
transformation of the recognizably neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano into the post-fascist'
Alleanza Nazionale, the ND's achievement was to have changed the discourse, image, and
logo' of 1960s Euro-fascism and so turn it into a product sufficiently beguiling to attract the
serious attention (and sometimes direct collaboration) of unsuspecting non-fascists and anti-fascists in its critique of the system', while still transmitting a fascist message to the initiated.
Since the collapse of Communism cultural Euro-fascism has spread to the outer limits of the
European imagined community. Should anyone wish to see for themselves how profoundly the
ND transmission of CR and Traditionalist ideas has influenced the peculiar dialect of Russian
fascism embodied in Alexander Dugin's Eurasianism, they need only look up the Website
Arctogaia on the Internet.
But it is Italy which provides the most fascinating, significant, and best documented
case-study in the process of fascism's make-over through the imaginative use of the original ND
franchise. Under the guidance of Marco Tarchi, at the time one of the MSI's foremost
intellectuals, a major attempt was made in the 1980s to inject new life into the movement through
the creation of a right-wing culture', one which naturally drew on the Evolian legacy to a far
greater extent than its French counterpart True to the spirit of right-wing Gramscism, Tarchi went
on progressively to withdraw from party politics altogether to become one of Italy's foremost
experts on the history of the MSI history and its AN reincarnation, as well as being the author
of an authoritative work on the role played by a crisis of collective identity in the rise of Fascism
and Nazism. He is now associate professor of political science at the University of Florence.
Under his editorship the review Diorama letterario became and continues to be a major forum
for ND ideas, though, as in most other countries receptive to it, Italy also produced its equivalent
of l???ments, Elementi (subtitled for a European rebirth'). Both publications extensively mirrored
the evolution of the parent company', initially with a heavy emphasis on the Conservative
Revolution as well as the theory of differentialism, and then including such new themes as
solidarity with the Third World (Third Positionism), ecology, and more recently,
communitarianism. Under Evola's influence the Italian New Right has always been less
nominalist and voluntarist than the ND, and more concerned with the revival of the sacred, and
of festive time', though this theme too was being be taken up by the French ND in the mid-1980s.
 
The new' New Right
We are now in a position to evaluate Taguieff's contention that Alain de Benoist's metapolitics
since 1988 no longer belong to extreme right-wing space'. One source of evidence is provided
by pieces published in the originally leftist political science review, Telos, which seems to fully
accept his distance from any extremism of the right. Yet in The Idea of Empire' published in the
special issue on the New Right in 1994 (nos. 98-9) we find him predicting the emergence of a
new world order', which will be under the banner either of man-machine, the computer-man',
or of a diversified organization of living people.' He asks will the earth be reduced to
something homogeneous because of deculturalizing and depersonalizing trends for which
American imperialism is now the most cynical and arrogant vector?' The solution he puts
forward is the possibility of Europeans becoming citizens of an idea in the imperial tradition',
specifically citing Evola. A key role in a European empire would be a federalism which
accommodates the differentialist principle of respect for the identity of others, thus allowing
every group to defend its own identity against a global system which tries to destroy it'. De
Benoist's conclusion that it is necessary to assert the imperial principle', though metapolitical
(and hence intrinsically nebulous) about the manner and the time-scale for its realization, is still
profoundly rooted in conventional ND neo-fascism.
Even in the three interviews with de Benoist which are published in the same issue, there
are unmistakable allusions to Mohler's hardly apolitical myth of the interregnum'. Though he
is at pains to establish his distance from inter-war fascism, Le Penism, neo-Nazism, and the
Eurasianism' of the overtly fascist Russian New Right, some of his comments strike familiar
chords. One is his fleeting reference in his discussion with Le Monde (May 1992) to the fact that
we are living in a transition period' (p. 173). Even more candid are his comments to none other
than Armin Mohler himself, in an interview originally published in the German New Right
periodical Junge Freiheit and in Diorama letterario (neither ideological bed-fellows of Telos!)
that while modernity comes to an end, and with it all mega-narratives through which it was
legitimated, it is replaced by a hegemony of non-thinking', and that confronted with the
destruction of mind, the disintegration of society, the destruction of real democracy, today the
New Right has above all the duty to struggle for the revitalization of a collective life committed
to generosity, decision and solidarity'. He also refers later to its will to form the future' (pp. 183-5). He tells the staff of Telos that the main problem addressed by the ND was to find the cultural
and political means to resist the technological, economic, and mass-media driven
homogenization of the world' (p. 192).
Three years later Telos, whose staff clearly felt de Benoist had passed their ideological
drugs test, published his article Confronting Globalization', a sustained invective against what
he sees as a form of cultural totalitarianism on a planetary scale. The commodification of world
culture promoted by American capitalism deprives people of a vision of the world' and creates
a backlash in the form of xenophobia, racism, and irredentism. The globalization of exchange
and the universalization of signs through CNN, jeans, and Coca Cola' acts as a tidal wave
erasing all differences and values. The only defence against the homogenization and loss of
identity this will bring is the creation of a truly sovereign Europe', and, more broadly, the
regionalization of a number of large continental ensembles.' This is a sophisticated, scholarly,
erudite essay. There is no eschatological rhetoric about an imminent new order', no excursi on
spherical time or closing cycles, no specific allusions to the Conservative Revolution. Yet it
confirms that, far from abandoning the core fascist vision of the world, de Benoist is still driven
by the urge to expose the spiritual bankruptcy of the prevailing system with a view to preparing
for its transformation. The difference is that he does so here in a strictly analytical register which
avoids journalistic venom about contemporary decadence or flights of fancy about a new age and
a new man brought about through an unexpected lurch in spherical' time. To all intents and
purposes this is a moderate' piece of sober political analysis. Nevertheless, any attempt to turn
into practical political proposals the metapolitical' (in other words, conveniently utopian) notion
of a sovereign Europe' with culturally revitalized regions acting as a bulwark against the
universalization of signs' would soon reveal how extreme-right it is.
By publishing de Benoist, Telos seems to take at face value the ND's claims to be beyond
left and right. This is disconcerting to say the least, since what takes place in books such as Vu
de droite is the appropriation of left and centre by what is, in terms of its historical roots and
political subtext, still the extreme right. Incidentally, when ND thinkers such as Alain de
Benoist or Pierre Krebs call for the transcending of the left/right dichotomy, they are
following in the steps of Mohler, who sees the thrust towards a synthesis of left and right as an
integral part of the inter-war Conservative Revolution tradition. (This is doubtless why Zeev
Sternhell's theory of fascism, summed up in the title of his book on French fascism Neither Right
nor Left has been the object of intense interest for ND intellectuals ever since it was published.
) The synthesis of elements taken from the left and right of the spectrum has historically always
been a feature of fascism. Yet when it leads to ND articles being published in left-wing
periodicals or to left-wing theoreticians publishing in ND periodicals, such a confusion of left
and right can also be seen as an impressive piece of sleight of hand by the ND which disguises
its extreme right-wing identity. The recurrent New Right preoccupation in both France and Italy
with the right', with right-wing Gramscism', and with the extreme right-wing Conservative
Revolution' should make scholars realize that the break-down of the left-right divide for ND
thinkers is always seen from the right' in the spirit of a radical anti-egalitarianism and anti-Marxism. As the kshatriya' Website (referred to in part one) reminds us, those in the
Nietzschean/Jngerian/Evolian tradition live from what is eternally valid, what is eternally right,
and hence is on the right.'

The tension between metapolitics and apoliteia in contemporary ND periodicals
Given Alain de Benoist's retention of the essentials of the CR cosmology, albeit in a less
eschatological key than in the 1970s, it is hardly surprising to find ND publications still
perceptibly occupying an extreme right-wing space' today. If we take the ND's most accessible
periodical l???ments (pour la civilisation europ???enne), on whose editorial board Alain de Benoist
still sits (under the pseudonym Robert de Herte), for example, it soon becomes clear that all its
issues have been devoted to themes consistent with the concept of metapolitical revolution: e.g.
French and European regionalism' (no. 12); the Conservative Revolution and "right-wing
Gramscism"' (no. 20); Indo-European studies' (nos. 21-22); the return of the Gods' (no. 27);
the right to difference' (no. 33); let us have done with Western civilization' (no. 34); the trap
of human rights' (no. 37); Nietzsche or Socrates' (no. 45); Third Worldism and the cause of
peoples' (nos. 48/9); European myths' (no. 51); liberalism, the enemy of peoples' (no. 68); the
new American order' (no. 69); danger: USA' (no. 70); ecology against the market' (no. 79);
paganism' (no. 89).
As for some recent issues, no 90 (November 1997) on Asia's awakening' asked whether
Asia can resist globalization; praised Japan, where we are told each individual exists as part of
a collective destiny and time-honoured traditions are maintained alongside modernity; explored
the racial heterogeneity of China (and Nazi racial hygiene); and reviewed a recent book on
Spengler, L'Europe ou le d???clin de l'occident, which pays homage to his organic conception of
culture, but attacks his naturalist fallacy which leads to determinism. Particularly revealing is an
article on Evola the awakener', declaring that his work is indispensable light in the midst of a
world in darkness'. This issue also advertizes Dossier H: Julius Evola, a collection of essays by
such authors as De Benoist, Raymond Abellio, Gottfried Benn, Charles Champetier (editor in
chief of l???ments, Mircea Eliade), and Ren??? Gu???non.
Issue 91 (March 1998) is dedicated to the multi-cultural challenge', to which it naturally
proposes a differentialist solution. It is especially interesting for its interview with the leader of
the Austrian New Right, Jrgen Hatzenbacher, who edits its journal Zur Zeit and has also written
Querdenker presenting right-wing thinkers unfamiliar to most German-speakers, such as Evola,
Drieu la Rochelle, and Alain de Benoist. The same issue contains an article defending the
brilliant novelist but notorious anti-Semite and collaborator C???line from the charge of Nazi
sympathies. The main topic of issue 92 is an attack on the totalitarianism of Nazism and
Stalinism, which is entirely consistent with Mohler's attack on Hitler as the Stalin' of the
German Revolution. Its most revealing article in the present context, however, is on former
GRECE intellectual Guillaume Faye (whom we encountered in the context of The Scorpion), the
preamble to which talks of our fin-de-siŠcle' and ends with the phrase Welcome to the
interregnum'. In Faye's opinion the purpose of soci???t???s de pens???e' like GRECE is to produce
resources for the "after-chaos"', i.e. the new era. Issue 93 (October 1998) is devoted to the
victory of women' and contains several articles exploring gender differences. The metapolitical
subtext comes through in the comments that The age of equality has had its day. We are entering
the age of difference', and that Women are crucial to the great mutation'. There is also a
celebration of Nasser's stand against the West in the Suez Crisis (an example of ND Third
Positionism), an attack on conformism, or obligatory thinking', in the intellectual and cultural
sphere, a fleeting reference to spherical time in the thought of Henri Montaigu, and the
announcement of the coming renewal of metaphysics which will challenge the victory of
liberalism. In short, to judge from l???ments there is little to suggest that ND metapolitics has
changed its spots especially when we note that The Scorpion's Michael Walker is still on its
editorial board.
What, then, about Krisis, Alain de Benoist's own review, and whose foundation in 1978
marked for Taguieff his vacation of extreme-right wing space? In the light of the preceding
discussion, it is worth quoting de Benoist's own presentation' of the first issue:
Nowadays there are only impossible beliefs. Society is simultaneously
homogeneous and chaotic. The Western world is undergoing a process of spiritual
impoverishment, and it is this impoverishment-in-abundance that it is now
threatening to export to the whole world. The notion of decadence which is so
often invoked is not in itself adequate to describe this situation. This terminal
phase, this phase of generalized dissociation and dissolution, is also one of
fruition. It is the fruition of a protracted process of forgetting. Forgetting origins,
forgetting history, forgetting as finitude and dereliction. Stavrogin in
Dostoievsky's The Possessed takes his own life having experienced the measure
of his own strength without knowing what to use it for. Another state of
humanity?
Interregnum.
Such a passage leaves no doubt that de Benoist, far from giving in to cultural despair, has
remained steadfastly loyal to the CR vision of the world and its dream of bringing an age of
nihilism to its conclusion. Yet, if we take the issue on The Future?' (nos. 20-21, 1997) as a
sample of what the new journal offers in concrete terms, what stands out is the fact that there is
no overt reference to the CR cosmology or any of its leading thinkers. Instead we have essays
by leading scientists in their field, most with impeccable non-fascist credentials: Thomas Molnar,
professor of religious philosophy at the University of Budapest, Jacques Dupƒquier
(demographer, but also former Resistance member and ex-communist) on population trends,
Jakob Segal (immunologist as well as Auschwitz survivor, and author of a specialist text on Nazi
medicine) on AIDS, Edward Goldsmith (proponent of Lovejoy's Gaia' hypothesis) on the
coming ecological crisis. There is also a text from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Certainly
we are light years away from the world of Europe Action, or even Les Id???es … l'Endroit.
Yet to someone familiar with the ND's vision of the world, the signs of ideological
kinship and continuity with the CR are unmistakable. The journal's title expresses the perception
that our age is in crisis, a recurrent ND topos (e.g. in the introduction to Vu de droite) and
Munch's The Scream which graces the cover has clearly been chosen as an emblem of the
psychic distress of modern man' in a world of chaos' and ruins'. Moreover, the themes that
the non-fascist experts address are all well-established in ND discourse: the down side of the
information society' and the impersonality of the communication age, the growing ecological
and demographic crises, the ungovernability of France, the totalitarian horrors of Stalinism
(compared directly to Nazism), the otherness' of the Islamic world.
Two pairs of articles are particularly resonant with traditional ND connotations. The first,
on the USA's end of millennium', concludes that its present ambition is to complete the
conquest of the planet for its own benefit so as to prevent all conflict with another power. With
its eyes firmly fixed on this project, it hardly gives a thought to the intrinsic fragility of imperial
constructions'. The second asks whether the future will be American. Its answer is that only
a conjunction of internal and external factors along with the appearance of new potential rivals
could really deal a blow to American hegemony', and that a serious challenge to it will be
mounted much later than many observers think, fear or hope'. The other pair of articles is on
the decadence of modern art. One is a vitriolic indictment by Claude Karnoouh (expert on
modern Romania and author of a book entitled Goodbye to Difference: Essays on Late
Modernity) of how the planetary cult of money' has combined with the omnipresence of a new
conformism' (which belies the apparent infinity of aesthetic freedom') to lead to the universal
commodification of culture and the consequent destruction of genuine art. The second, by Kostas
Mavrakis, philosophy lecturer in Paris-VIII and expert on Trotskyism and Maoism, sees the
current crisis of art as the reflection of the crisis of society, but suggests that the current
barbarity' in aesthetics is only a phase, promising to explain in another text how the conditions
could be created for the renewal of art'.
The strategy of Krisis should by now be clear. It sets out to publish articles by
individuals, preferably major experts in their field, many of whom are as far removed as possible
from extreme right-wing space, but whose analyses in one way or another corroborate the ND
diagnosis of the decadence of the interregnum. The rationale for the inclusion of an excerpt from
Brave New World is now obvious. The West' is a dystopian, and insidiously totalitarian society
in urgent need of a total renewal which can only start once the hegemonic world-view has been
transformed. Thus it is no coincidence if on page 80 we come across an advert for de Benoist's
Empire Int???rieur, published in 1996, which elaborates the Telos article referred to earlier. It calls
for a new Europe, one rooted in genuinely European (non-Judeo-Christian) ideas and culture, and
reorganized according to the federal principle of Empire. This will ensure the vitality and
diversity of its unique ethnies, and hence make it capable of resisting the globalizing forces of
American civilization. It stresses that the premise for this revolutionary transformation is the
realization of the truth of Evola's insight that imperium is first and foremost an ethical, inner
force, a myth, not to be confused with the modern perversions of it which have proliferated since
the decay of the Holy Roman Empire. To return to the clarity of myth would mean for man the
experience of a revolution the like of which has never been seen'. It is a book which shows de
Benoist still deeply indebted to both Armin Mohler and Julius Evola, still hankering after a
radically different type of European, and hence world order, still fulfilling his duty as a latter-day
kshatriya'.
Conclusion: differentiating extreme right and radical left in the face of modernity
Krisis does not announce de Benoist's departure from extreme right-wing space. Instead,
published in association with the Centre National du Livre and carrying adverts for Telos, it can
be seen to signal the apogee of his success in normalizing the ND's diagnosis of modernity
within liberal democratic space, and in turning social scientists and thinkers from outside it into
the unwitting mouthpieces of its ideas. Were the socio-cultural analysis of Krisis to become the
norm (instead of only being appreciated by a minute readership), then the ND would indeed have
realized its goal of transforming the prevailing cultural hegemony, and taking over the
laboratories of thinking'. As it is, the deeply pessimistic overall tone of the issue of Krisis we
have considered suggests that de Benoist may himself have moved away from a form of
metapolitics which retained the excitement of palingenetic expectations of the imminent
Umschlag rhapsodized about by Mohler. By the same token, even if he does not refer specifically
to Evola's concept, he has, wittingly or not moved, perceptively towards embracing the stoicism
of apoliteia advocated by the late Evola, which dictates that all the awakened one' can do while
the kali-yuga/interregnum persists is to keep the faith and stay true to the vision, without any
hope that it can be realized in his life-time.
The inference to be drawn from our analysis is that the ideology (sorry, vision of the
world') of the new', 1990s New Right, as expressed in the critiques of contemporary society
contained in l???ments reflect an unresolved tension between its optimism of the 1970s and
1980s, and a new mood of resignation to the prospect that the creation of the new order has been
postponed for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, the nihilism which the prevailing system'
induces in the NR continues to be in Mohler's terms a positive' one, a German' one, and, in
terms of our ideal type at least, a fascist' one.
This analysis is confirmed by considering the publications currently edited by de
Benoist's Italian translator and close collaborator, Marco Tarchi. The Nuova Destra of which he
is still the most authoritative representative, operates in a situation where even the Tangentopoli
crisis of the early 90s, the sizeable electoral support which now exists for the democratic fascist'
Alleanza Nazionale and considerable personal prestige enjoyed by its leader Gianfranco Fini,
who has put behind him an unequivocally fascist past as the head of the MSI Youth Front, and
the country's growing immigration crisis, have apparently brought Italy no closer to a fascist
government of any description, let alone to the end of the interregnum. So what evidence can be
gleaned from its principal forum, Diorama letterario, that it has given up the struggle and
vacated the political realm altogether. If we take issue 186 of March 1996 as a random sample,
the first thing that stands out is that the cover indicates that its theme is the duty not to take
sides', a phrase that we can safely infer communicates not apolitical disinterest, but the disdain
for the whole system of contemporary politics cultivated by apoliteia. This impression is
confirmed when we read Tarchi's editorial which concludes by asking whether it is:
a utopia to believe that it could be possible to create a space of reflection outside
the sphere of everyday politics and its subterfuges in which to bring together the
energies of those who do not think that in the dialectic right/left/centre the
answers can be found to the great questions which confront us, such as the
defence of the quality of life, the search for adequate solutions to the problems
posed by multi-ethnic societies, the reconstruction of a concept of common good
that can be shared by all?
He adds Those who think so have the right not to be classified on the basis of prejudices and
categories which have had their day', a phrase which points to a sensitivity to the charge of
fascism emanating from some quarters of Italian media and academia (notably from Franco
Ferraresi) which has inspired some scathing repudiations in the pages of the periodical. However,
the contents of this issue hardly dispel the impression that Tarchi's periodical has vacated
extreme right-wing space' any more than de Benoist's. It includes advertisements for the ND's
l???ments; a book on Ernst Jnger; an anthology of Julius Evola's writings for the Fascist
periodical Lo stato (1934-45) in which he outlined the type of state he hoped would emerge from
a Fascist and Nazi victory ( neither totalitarian nor organic, but based on the spiritual
differentiation which lies at the core of state and imperial authority'); a review of the book
Cosmopolis, which attacks the idea of a world government as a totalitarian project to impose a
single cosmology like a planetary Leviathan'; a call for the protection of regional collective
identities; and the review of a biography of Carl Schmitt. (Schmitt was the Crown Jurist and
Professor of Law under the Third Reich who, on the basis of an anti-liberal, non-mechanistic'
theory of justice which attracts ND mentalities, declared the R"hm Blood Purge to be the
highest form of administrative justice' and the Nuremberg race laws the constitution of freedom'
.)
The `book offers' in this issue of Diorama letterario include Enzo Erra's The Roots of
Fascism; two works on Giovanni Gentile and one on literature under Fascism; Ezra Pound's
Jefferson and Mussolini; Carlo Mazzantini's The Balilla went to Sal•; a biography of Nicola
Bombacci (who drew up the programme of the Republic of Sal•); works by Drieu La Rochelle,
C???line, and Knut Hamsun (Under the Stars of Autumn); books on Hitler and Stalin, on
intellectuals of the Iron Guard', and on Tenchu (a Japanese form of extreme right which
flourished from 1868 to 1936); three studies of the Alleanza Nazionale; three books on Carl
Schmitt; books on Tolkien, the sacred (including one by de Benoist), and Julius Evola. A
prominent advert on the back cover promotes yet another book on Ernst Jnger, The Fascist
Temptation by Tarmo Kunnas, and Mohler's The Conservative Revolution. One wonders what
Diorama letterario would be like if it were political!
Ample corroboration of the ND's fidelity to the fundamentals of the world-view of
Mohler and Evola is provided by Tarchi's own periodical Trasgressioni (transgressions, that is,
against the orthodoxies and sacred cows of a decadent age). There is no handy theme, journalistic
editorials, or book offers' to signal its political orientation. It contains many articles from
thinkers who are in no way to be directly associated with the CR issue 10 even contains one
by Taguieff himself on The return of decadence'. Yet it is not difficult to infer, not just from the
recurrence of pieces by Alain de Benoist, but from significant phrases which repeatedly leap out
of the page from the densely argued, and often highly scholarly, articles and reviews it contains.
Thus we encounter in Issue 15 (Summer 1992, p. 90) the call for a new world order to put an end
to Westernization, one which would re-root peoples, and no longer see man as a case-study in
market forces, if not the shadow of Spengler will start to haunt us in the decay of a winter
landscape'. Further on (p. 107) Tolkien is celebrated for his contribution to the restoration of
myth in a desacralized world'. Since modern man needs to inhabit a world based on the
principles of a metaphysical Tradition, in times like ours the fantastic universe of Tolkien is in
reality a message of hope, that, sooner or later, Mordor will be destroyed and the future of the
world can be less dark'. The article ends with Tolkien's own prognostication that For the
moment there is mugginess and rain but the outlook is good'.
Issue 18 (Spring 1994) contains a long exegesis by de Benoist of the relevance of Ernst
Jnger's The Worker and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of Being' to understanding the
nihilism' of the present age. It is a time when the Gods have departed leaving the field open to
the Titans, and prophecies with' Heidegger that The gods will once more confront the Titans
to put an end to the chaos. The fall of the Titans will happen. The interregnum will finish. There
will be a new beginning' (p. 57). Of all the favourite thinkers of the CR, Heidegger and Jnger
would appear those with whom de Benoist identifies with most totally (de Benoist has since
devoted an entire monograph to Jnger). At the end of an essay entitled Does Europe still exist'
(no. 19, of May-December 1994, p. 88), we find this stirring evocation of the task of today's
spiritual warriors, in which the pessimistic tones of Evolian apoliteia are unmistakable:
It is to us, homeless men of late modernity, that falls the task of conceiving this
new world, without nostalgia for a past to be restored (all too often mystified
thanks to the narrative distortions of historical reconstruction), but also without
ingenuous illusions or small-minded self-interest about the possibilities of
providing it with a transcendental basis which, at present, is nothing other than
the disturbing or seductive mask of the domination of immanence, or, in other
words, the domination of nihilism.
In other issues an analysis of Max Stirner (no. 21) and a text by Pitrim Sorokin (no. 25) are used
to evoke the darkness of the interregnum and the need for a total cultural transformation.
The murky fascist subtext of such an analysis is briefly transfigured into radiant text' in
issue 20 (Jan.-August 1995) by Horacio Cagni's lengthy investigation of The absence of God
and tragic vitalism in fascism'. Rejecting the assumptions of most scholars, notably de Felice,
that fascism was a solely inter-war phenomenon, he stresses the importance of Huizinga's insight
that myth is a force which mobilizes the people to concretize the longing for happiness and a
better order'. Inter-war fascists wanted to escape materialism and desperately give a meaning to
their lives by belonging to a transcendent idea. The new nationalism at the heart of this idea
embraced modernity. Its goal was the appearance of a man projected into the future, a new man',
one suspended in the speed of time which he accepted with amor fati, and in love with conflict
and action. Fascism and Nazism certainly conceived this new human archetype differently.
However the common substratum, which can be nuanced by the various national cultures but
is always present, is a longing for transcendence, the repulsion felt for a reality judged
inadequate, a restlessness of the soul exorcized through an aesthetic of action and violence, a
desire to give shape to a myth'. The aim of fascism is to create what D'Annunzio saw dawning
on the horizon, namely a new world era of beauty, youth, value, sacrifice, joy, far-off goals and
profound newness.'
Cagni argues that every fascism takes up a mythic stance' starting out from the analysis
of decadence and disintegration of the European world. He proceeds to illuminate this diagnosis
with reference to Mohler and Jnger, stressing the deep gulf which separates the inter-war
generation which was prepared to sacrifice itself instinctively to higher goals, and the total
disaffection and fecklessness of today's youth. He points out that Traditionalists have argued
that Fascism and Nazism did not have a true sense of the sacred, and were thus devalued
manifestations of the warrior principle of the kshatriya. Unfortunately the present age is so far
removed from any source of spiritual radiance that a real recovery in the Traditional sense is
absolutely impossible. Jnger's generation was in its death throes: this generation sleeps in the
rubbish bin.' This, then, is the world of the last man: just an enormous market with no faiths, no
ideologies. Cagni invokes Fukuyama's insight that the only resistance to globalization in the
twentieth century has been mounted by European fascists, imperial Japan, and Bolshevism. His
motive for writing the article has been the hope that it might help in case other societies outside
Judeo-Christianity and globalization might feel the impulse once more to transform a myth into
reality and choose to love and not only to exist.'
Cagni's article is practically a panegyric to Mohler and Evola, and comes perilously close
to being an apologia for inter-war fascism. An article by Franco Cardini (no. 15, Summer 1992)
goes even further down the revisionist path, praising Hitler for his realization that:
humanity needs myth, and that myth even when it is called upon to serve the
most infamous causes is never in itself negative. It is true that for this reason he
believed in the reign of violence, of terror, and, at the end, of the gas chambers:
but he preached patriotic fraternity, the need to put an end to private egoisms, the
beauty of work and sacrifice for the sake of common good, the constructiveness
of civic virtues, the dignity of an austere way of life; and he even knew how to
present the segregation [sic!] of the Jews as a painful but indispensable
precondition for achieving these ends, which served above all to realize a mythic
goal: collective regeneration, the return to the purity of origins.
Cardini, whose works on sacred time' have been influential within the Nuova Destra, goes on
to lament the fact that the desacralization of the world has reached such depths that it is precisely
the myth of regeneration which can no longer strike a chord any more.' As a result, today's youth
is deprived of the hope of climbing back up the slope of a movement that, now the myth of
progress is spent, seems to be leading humanity down a path at the end of which lies annihilation,
and in the not too distant future.'
Clearly it would be absurd to suggest that the articles which New Right editors like de
Benoist and Tarchi accept for publication faithfully reflect their own views. Nevertheless, it
would be equally absurd to deny that passages of the sort we have cited do not point to the
persistence of extreme right-wing elements in the assumptions which lurk behind even the most
apparently apolitical New Right publications. They offer glimpses of what lies just under the
surface of its non-party-political, uncommitted' cultural analysis, revealing instead its deep
commitment to the myth that a new edifice must one day be built on the present ruins if the
interregnum is not to become an indefinite regnum, so that the prevailing type of humanity turns
out to have been indeed the last man'. If my diagnosis is fundamentally flawed, then New Right
editors should go to greater lengths to dissociate themselves from texts by writers such as Cagni
and Cardini which express undisguised nostalgia for aspects of inter-war fascism, and from the
publicistic ventures of individuals such as Walker and Krebs whose connections with neo-fascism past or present are all too readily documentable.
A `Bad Godesberg' of the New Right would be the formal renunciation of the very
concept of the interregnum. This would mean the recognition that the regeneration of history'
is not just indefinitely postponed but is a utopian myth, and hence the acceptance that any change
to the present world system can only take place through complex processes enmeshed within the
fabric of our' historical time, not through its dramatic transcendence within some qualitatively
different time which will open up after a magic reversal' or epochal turning-point' when
humanity finally reaches a mystic Zero Point' in the evolution of Western culture. Only after
unequivocal disavowals of a world-view which our ideal-type classifies as permutations of a
fascist philosophy of history would it be possible to take at face value indignant claims to have
spent years writing books and articles against almost all the ideas historically connected with
fascism', or to have nothing to do with' any existing formations of the political right. Unless
proof is adduced to the contrary, such repudiations smack of little more than sophistry, or what
existentialists (i.e. proponents of what Mohler has called French' as opposed to German'
nihilism) used to call bad faith'.
Finally, those who have been deluded by the ND's political leger-de-main into thinking
that in a post-communist world there is no longer anything to distinguish left and right on basic
issues concerning the state of contemporary society are invited to read a genuinely leftist
periodical such as The New Internationalist. Its editors are just as convinced as any modern
kshatriya of the moral corruption and practical unsustainability of the present system, and of the
urgent need for it to be replaced by a new world order which must be preceded by a revolution
in values. Its themes are uncannily similar to those treated in some issues of l???ments: ecology,
mass media, the information age, the gender divide, the horrors of urbanization, human rights,
racism, the Third World, secularization, the erosion of cultural differences, the loss of traditions,
consumerism, cartelization, globalization, the totalitarianism of the Western myth of freedom.
The issue of December 1998 (no. 308), for example, was devoted to The Mousetrap: Inside
Disney's Dream Machine', with articles on Disneyfication', how Western culture demobilizes
the world's poor', and cultural identity in Bosnia'.
As a genuinely leftist periodical, though, The New Internationalist is addressed not as an
arcane missive to a silent brotherhood of disaffected intellectuals and ideologues looking to a
revival of paganism, mythic roots, and eternal metaphysical truths to save Europe. Instead it is
addressed to a vast network of activists and NGOs the world over working hard on practical
projects in a myriad contexts and specialisms in order to preserve ethnic communities, sustain
human dignity, protect native economies and cultures, improve the lot of women, raise standards
of health-care and justice, stop human evils such as torture, and defend fragile ecosystems, using
techniques and methods informed by experience, local knowledge, science, and compassion.
They are not content to ride the tiger of modernity to death in the prospect of some Godot-like
rebirth', but attempt to harness its energy so that in down-to-earth terms of the quality of human
life it does not deplete and degrade, but nourishes and enriches.
The pages of The New Internationalist are redolent of a visionary idealism which does
not lead to a visceral hatred of reality, but the urge to eliminate those aspects of it which make
it ugly or intolerable. Its articles display empathetic intelligence and concern, rather than
penetrating intellect and faith. They may lack the erudition of organic humanists', but the myth
which mobilizes those who contribute is that it is possible to leave the world which exists a more
human place to live in, rather than further impoverished one. This certainly constitutes a
significant difference between the metapolitical extreme right and the non-party-political radical
left. One worth struggling to conserve, interregnum or no interregnum. Vive la diff???rence!
12282
Total: 22,000
ENDNOTES