Tidehverv and a Possible New Christianization
Rather than a Christian, I might be a pagan believing in Christ.
— Don Colacho
Jung showed in his time that without religion, Europe is living dangerously. This is probably something many would agree with. The connection between religion and asabiyya is strong, as is the connection between religion and meaning in existence. Atheism and science seem not to suffice as alternatives, no matter how useful they may be in other contexts. North American social thinker and immigration critic Lawrence Auster identified in this spiritual vacuum the root cause of the West’s second problem:
We must look inward and realize that the third worldization of our society is only the external symptom of a disease in our own soul—the rejection of the religious beliefs, moral truths, and the cultural loyalties that once made us a nation rather than just a collection of economic factors.
Nature despises a vacuum, and the void has therefore been filled with post-Christian ersatz-religions, such as liberalism and ethnomasochism. Prior to that, impossible long-term attempts to make race, “art for art’s sake,” or the class into ersatz-religions have also failed. Auster said that a society dies without its soul, and that its body then gets taken over by strangers. Whether we are believers or not, it is obvious that he has a point here. Atheists also do not conceive that many children, and their capacity for self-defense is small. Peter Turchin reminds us in War, Peace and War, about the link between asabiyya, meta-ethnic borders and religion. The groups on the various sides of the meta-ethnic border are often united by a shared religion; it is also shared religion that makes them fearless of death and urges them to gladly sacrifice their lives in the fight against the unfaithful. “I lead those who love death as you love life,” as Khalid ibn-Walid expressed it. History will reveal if strong asabiyya is possible without the religious factor; so far, it does not look too promising.
At this point, we encounter something that can be called the “Maurranian dilemma.” Charles Maurras was one of the most historically significant French nationalists. He was Catholic but not Christian. In that way, he was a champion of the Church but could not believe himself. Many people today find themselves in a similar situation. Several attempts have been made to fill the spiritual void Jung described. Under other demographic conditions, parts of the radical Right converted to Islam, among them Guénon, Clauss, and Mutti. An interest in Hinduism and Buddhism has not rarely been combined with anti-liberalism. The pre-Christian traditions have experienced several renaissances in the 20th century, especially in the early 1900s and after the 1970s. Julius Evola explored both the Roman and the hermetic tradition, and, like Herman Wirth, sought “the light from the north” rather than “the light from the east.” Since the 1970s, a second pagan renaissance has slowly emerged, including the Icelandic Ásatrúarfelagiđ, founded in 1972, and the Asatru Folk Assembly, founded by Stephen McNallen in 1972 (under the name the Viking Brotherhood). This was one of the best aspects of the motley legacy since 1968. The Pagan Renaissance still forwards its positions, even though it is now mostly quiet.
But even in Christian circles, valuable attempts to meet the modern world are ongoing, in spite of worrying starting points. During the 20th century, Christianity has largely degenerated and been influenced by liberalism, political correctness and 1968-ideas. This has, in particular, been facilitated by what is called churchianism in the United States, a term describing many believers’ strong need to identify with a certain church even when it transforms. Their loyalty is to an organization rather than to God and Christ. But there have been examples of the opposite even in Lutheran circles. The Danish Tidehverv, founded in 1926 by theologians with inspiration from Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, later also from Grundtvig, is a good example. The Danish nation is shaped at least as much by the Church as by the state, largely thanks to the inheritance of Grundtvig, his joyful Christianity and his interest in the Danes’ roots.
Grundtvig and Oehlenschläger are reminiscent of the Swedish Göticisterna in the sense that they were interested in the myths and tales of their own people, and successfully popularized them. But Grundtvig, in particular, is reminiscent of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis insofar as he created a synthesis of the pagan and the Christian, adding a homely and patriotic touch. Obviously, Grundtvig was more successful than his Swedish counterparts. Tidehverv has evolved into a think-tank, delivering a critique of the modern world in a style similar to the New Right and Evola. The intellectual level is often high, with references to Schopenhauer, Weber, and Ellul. The perspective combines the popular, the holy, the philosophical, and the political into a whole. In the vein of New Right, Tidehverv has developed a sharp critique against the ideology of human rights and the demonization of Russia, and like Evola, they have described the history of the modern world as a story of demonic humanism.
The Church and the People
Cult and culture have always been closely interconnected—a truth we will learn again in Denmark and in the Western world.
— Christian Langballe
In Christian thought, there has often been a focus on preaching the message to the “people”; and the people, subsequently, form folk-churches. In politically correct “Christianity,” this is diminished or denied, but for Tidehverv it is still important. The definition of people is not linked to race, but at the same time it is not temporary or something you can change randomly. To assimilate into a people takes time—something which should be of importance for immigration policy. At Tidehverv, we find a significant interest in Islam, which is depicted as a potential threat; aside from a small secularized Muslim elite, the majority of Muslims cannot become Danish. Moreover, people, Church, and state are also not synonyms. Tidehverv has criticized the therapeutic State that is trying to force political correctness and other forms of politicization down the throat of the Church. Tidehverv is also strongly family-centered, and in Denmark, the EU resistance is largely a right-wing phenomenon, and includes Tidehverv representatives.
Grundtvig can be compared to Tolkien and Lewis in two ways: interest in our ancestors, and a deeper Christian faith. Here, Tidehverv also reminds us of the British professor and culture critic—as well as another Christian—Bruce Charlton. Charlton is a venerable civilization critic in his own right, and has, among other things, written on how the media makes us “addicted to amusement,” and also on political correctness. He also writes with John Fitzgerald and William Wildblood on the blog Albion Awakening. The starting point is close to Tidehverv’s: it is about rediscovering the British myth. C. S. Lewis described the history of the kingdom as the battle between Logres and Britain: “After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell.” Charlton finds expressions for Deep Britain—Albion—for example, in William Blake—“Albion’s only poet-prophet”—in the Arthur myth, and in the so called Inklings (Tolkien, Lewis, among others). Tolkien and Lewis mediated the myth in the form of, among other things, The Lord of the Rings and Narnia to generations of Brits. Each people has a similar myth, but there is also a struggle between the good sides of heritage, and the less good sides—a struggle between Milton and Cromwell. We are doing well to seek our own deeper Swedish heritage, the life-giving sources from which we can return to our contemporaries with new interpretations of the myths, truths and archetypes, so desperately needed among our people.
The War Against the Multidimensional Man
Commerce has since the beginning appeared as the enemy of imagination.
— Brooks Adams
Tolkien’s goal was a “mythology for England.” Charlton emphasizes the role imagination played for the Inklings; Tolkien regarded it as something closely connected with divine creation. At the same time, the modern world, including all its distraction and entertainment, appears to be an enemy of imagination. This includes what social scientist Wright Mills described as sociological imagination, which also is lacking in the today’s man: a human without imagination cannot imagine a world other than the late modern that he or she lives in, and therefore has difficulty criticizing it other than at a superficial level. Here Charlton joins a retinue of ancient civilization critique, with several representatives: Klages turned away from the fact that the modern world reduces the importance of dreams, of the oneiric, of fantasy and of magic; Lovecraft wrote his short stories about the Dreamlands; the narrative of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman also touches the destiny of the oneiritic in the modern world; Brooks Adams believed that the modern world is characterized by a loss of imagination.
This is linked to a broader anthropological criticism of the modern world, where we lose touch with important aspects of our humanity. Marcuse talked about the fact that man becomes one-dimensional, and although the process was described better by others, it is an accurate concept. C. S. Lewis partially corroborated the loss of thumos when he set courage as the principal virtue. Courage is not just one virtue among others, but the form every virtue takes when tested in a trying situation. Without courage, we can neither be honest nor helpful when it really matters. “Pilate was merciful until it became risky,” as Lewis summarize it.
This reminds us of the loss of the thumotic dimension in our own society. German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has developed this notion further in the book Zorn und Zeit (Fury and Time). Sloterdijk addresses the focus of psychoanalysis on desire and sexuality, but sees an equally central driving force in thumos. Thumos is what lies behind the pursuit of glory, the will to surround oneself with honorable friends, and the desire to avoid shame. But thumos is also what can make a man furious. At regular intervals, Achilles let loose his fury, to the great demise of cities and heroes. Sloterdijk is aware that there are negative forms of thumos, or “dark thumos” as he calls it. But politics that does not take thumos into account is based on a dangerously erroneous anthropology. Indeed, a person who experiences the violation of his dignity is driven more by thumos than by “desires”; he can not be bought; every attempt to bribe him will only exacerbate his fury. This is one aspect of the relationship between the ghettos and majority communities. But our society has forced thumos out—it even has difficulties in understanding the difference between positive thumos and “dark thumos.” This permeates everything from politics and debate to popular culture and economics. When our society is described as “unmanly,” it is often the lack of thumos that is referred to. Sloterdijk reminds us of how a thumotic policy and a thumotic economy can look like. Politically, it is based on the recognition of groups, similar to the thoughts of de Benoist and Eichberg. Economically, Sloterdijk connects thumos to Bataille and generous billionaires like Carnegie. A man driven by thumos can both pay off debts and donate to long-term projects and needs. But he or she also has felix meritis, pride in his success. In short, Lewis and Sloterdijk remind us that our society has lost a central dimension by demonizing thumos; it tries to reduce its citizens to children.
Overall, Tidehverv and Charlton remind us of the possibility of a deeper Lutheran criticism of the modern world. As such, this criticism cannot avoid the link between cult and culture, between people and Church. It should also pick up the link between the imagination and the divine, as well as the meaning of courage and thumos. In this sense, we are dealing with a genuine Deep Right, which means that the elements of Tidehverv’s and Charlton’s projects and perspectives should be able to inspire even pagans and others.
***
The Great Worsening, and the Internet as a Refuge
Uneasy and fractional people, having no center
But in the eyes and mouths that surround them
Having no function but to serve and support
Civilization, the enemy of man,
No wonder they live insanely, and desire
With their tongues progress; with their eyes pleasure; with their hearts death.
— Robinson Jeffers
The late 1900s witnessed the intensification of what we have called the Great Worsening, and the degeneration to accompany it, which among other things meant the emergence of a new human material, shaped almost entirely by ersatz-religions and the pop-culture industries. Each year the universities continue to mass produce new hordes of easily offended, intolerant and ignorant individuals ready to infiltrate and co-opt everything from environmentalist organizations and Wikipedia, to atheism and role-playing games—often to the great chagrin of the original members of these groups, but with the whole choir to back them up in event of any conflict. This human type has been characterized with several different designations, the favorite of many being the SJW, for “Social Justice Warrior.” Most often this is used in an ironic, derogatory manner, as the individuals to which it refers are neither warriors nor do they care about any genuine justice. Quite the opposite, they are rather motivated by a diffuse sense of ressentiment: underneath their veil of “anti-racism”, one usually finds a profound hatred of, for example, “white cis-males” (“cis-males” referring to actual males, in contrast to “trans-males”, who have “transitioned” from their native male form).
Marxist metapolitical thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s and later Louis Althusser emphasized the importance of controlling non-governmental as well as governmental institutions, to shape the conception-of-the-world and “common sense” of a society. In the late 1960s German student activist Rudi Dutschke, inspired by these thinkers, formulated a revolutionary strategy which he called the long march through the institutions. Thousands upon thousands of leftist baby-boomers emerging out of the various counter-cultural movements of 1968 later made their careers within said institutions, fulfilling Dutschke’s plan. Recruiting the SJWs from the younger generation to gradually replace them, the marchers consolidated their power. By the end of the century these conquerors were dug in deep in the mainstream media as well as academia, and they had no intention of tolerating any challengers to this position. Another long march to counter the one completed by the leftists was thus not an option. Simultaneously however, a new institution had without much notice by those in power rapidly grown in importance: the Internet. The Internet was becoming, to speak with Althusser, a crucial ISA, an “Ideological State Apparatus”; and moreover one which the Right had an actual chance to conquer. Right from the start discussion forums and trolling played a major part: Internet-based environments sprung up where people freely discussed every thinkable aspect of reality in a manner elsewhere considered far too politically incorrect.
***
Roosh and Neomasculinity
When you live below your means, you begin to see that most people are unnecessarily living above theirs. That leads to the conclusion that they were trained to live a life of excess by corporations with the complicit help of a government that wants to keep society in a never-ending state of indebtedness and distraction, so that they ignore everyday injustices while losing any will or desire to fight the establishment.
— Roosh Valizadeh on adopting a minimalist lifestyle
Another important sphere consisted of men who were fed up with the recommendations of the official ideology to “be themselves” and with the promise that “women like nice guys.” Their conclusion was that none of it worked, that they felt confused, and they needed new, useful advice. Ultimately this was caused by the generational conflict: youths no longer received advice from their parents but were forced to try to explore the world on their own. The advice they got from their teachers and television was too rooted in politically correct feminism and was part of the process of demasculinization.
The sphere created by these men was termed the manosphere. The men within the manosphere discussed the ways in which men and women function. It was initially largely focused on how to bed women, but gradually developed a more obvious interest in politics, culture and ideology, as well as a natural opposition to feminism. Several sub-spheres emerged—some consisting of men who turn their back on women completely, like MGTOW, Men Going Their Own Way, and the zealous virgins at Wizardchan (it is, of course, widely known that a male who is still a virgin at thirty turns into a wizard). Among the more familiar figures of the manosphere are Roosh Valizadeh and the more secretive talent behind the blog Chateau Heartiste; with time, both became increasingly politicized.
Bit by bit at, with Roosh’s project Return of Kings, a conception-of-the-world crystallized, and was given the name Neomasculinity. What had begun with juvenile travel guides like Bang Poland—How to Make Love to Polish Girls in Poland, developed into interests in traditional gender roles, spirituality, anti-socialism, and defending of our civilization against the looming cultural collapse, feminism, and mass immigration. Roosh explains his concept of cultural collapse:
… the decline, decay, or disappearance of a native population’s rituals, habits, interpersonal communication, relationships, art, and language… Cultural collapse is not to be confused with economic or state collapse. A nation that suffers from a cultural collapse can still be economically productive and have a working government.
The phases of cultural collapse Roosh identifies as the loss of religion, the elimination of traditional gender roles, decline in family formation, decreasing nativity, mass immigration, and natives becoming marginalized within their own country. Consequently, it is reminiscent of our civilizational perspective. Roosh has also developed a minimalist philosophy, in which he for instance expresses the view that full-time employment, college education and “entertainment” are hindrances to the discovery of truth, reminding us of earlier critiques of proletarianization and culture-industry; Roosh is not seldom an interesting cultural critic himself. Further, Roosh has adopted the traditionalist concept of inversion to describe modern society: all old values have been turned upside-down. What was once looked upon as beauty is now seen as ugliness, what was once seen as desirable is now considered harmful, and so on. This inversion affects every aspect of human life—from family formation to art.
Roosh and the RoK collective are not necessarily part of the Alt-Right, but multiple aspects of the neomasculinist project overlap with the views of the Alt-Right—possibly with greater emphasis on self-improvement and less on ethno-nationalism. One writer from the manosphere who today is part of the Alt-Right is the man, or men, behind Chateau Heartiste. The blog now combines advice on how to attract women with political commentary. The language used is far from politically correct but rather quite vulgar—globohomos and shitlibs are derided, and mudshark psychology explained. The page has many visitors and, along with much else, has provided an analysis of how Donald Trump won the presidential election. From Chateau Heartiste also stem pithy expressions like “Diversity + Proximity = War” and ”Physiognomy is real,” often in conjunction with scientific studies which confirm their veracity, demonstrating that Lombroso and L. F. Clauss were right all along.
The manosphere is a phenomenon which often conjoins analyses of psychology and society with vulgar commentary on and scantily veiled ressentiment toward the female sex. It is reminiscent of Don Colacho’s observation that while “feminists are ridiculous, the anti-feminists are vulgar.” As Roosh exemplifies, though, there is a tendency among its better participants to mature with time. This tendency may be facilitated by the study of Jung, Illich, Ludwig Klages, and others, all of whom offer a more nuanced picture of the sexes and the differing shapes they take. These can be valuable to explore for those who want to avoid imitating a non-Nordic misogyny. Such misogyny is, to reconnect with Günther, as artfremd as pop culture and its hatred of European masculinity.
The Trolls
If hackers were an ethnic group, the UN would be declaring a humanitarian crisis.
— Weev, on the repression of hackers
It is doubtful whether the anti-feminist environment that is the manosphere would have been able to sprout without the Internet. However, HBD geeks and pick-up artists were in no way alone in finding their asylum online. On the web forum 4chan a distinct environment also sprouted, particularly on the sub-forum /pol/, Politically Incorrect. On 4chan free and anonymous debate flourished, and countless images of varying entertainment value were created and posted as an integral part of the discourse. Many users felt sick to death of the SJW types and their grasp on society, and took to ridiculing them and their conception-of-the-world. Some of these users were trolls, and they carried out veritable raids on the surrounding web. A distinct, irreverent attitude emerged, as did a do-it-yourself culture permeated by memes and obscure jargon.
Within this sphere of trolls and hackers we find Andrew Auernheimer, known online as Weev. Auernheimer started out as an inventive hacktivist, but following a fundamentally questionable prison sentence he came out as a pagan and a National Socialist. His interests include “computing’s lack of will to power” and the treatment of hackers by the United States government. The Right Stuff as well as the Daily Stormer trace much of their roots back to Chan culture. Both are highly visited initiatives employing irreverent humor in the service of undermining hegemonic ideas and taboos. The mercurial boundaries between irony and gravity, person and persona pose something of a problem. For instance, The Right Stuff found themselves in a massive quarrel about betrayal when it was revealed that one of the headmen was married to a Jewess. Evidently, many participants equated the Alt-Right with National Socialism rather than utilizing the latter as a tool to ridicule and troll politically correct power-holders.
The troll mindset was also prevalent within the manosphere, in which bloggers caught attention with articles that crossed ethically as well as politically correct boundaries by, for instance, arguing for the legalization of rape and the how and why of slapping women. While patently distasteful, such bait attracted droves of readers and, to much delight, successfully enraged the despised politically correct crowd. These spheres often overlapped with each other as well as neighboring spheres: some within the HBD sphere were attracted by the realistic view of the men-women-relations promised by the manosphere, and some combined their interest in HBD with a more politically inclined race realism. Commonly, seeing through one part of the official ideology, such as feminism or the myth of no significant genetic differences between races, naturally leads to the questioning of other parts. With reference to the Matrix movies, this process of questioning and discovery is often called taking the red pill. The choice of whether to take or not to take a certain red pill is not necessarily an easy one to make, as leaving a world of cozy lies and convenient illusions comes at its cost. To seekers of inner freedom, however, it is difficult to abstain from the taking of red pills.
**
Meme Magic and Private Language
If you control the memes of a society, you control that society.
— Lawrence Murray
A key success factor is the Alt-Right’s use of memes: shareable pictures and text, referencing various aspects of politics and pop culture. Such memes are a defining characteristic of the late postmodern era in which pop culture has become constantly self-referential. On 4chan, memes have long been an everyday occurrence, and through a collective, organic process the swarm of users has created a multiplicity of new memes, while existing ones are constantly recreated. This process involves an element akin to the natural selection of genes; depending on their properties, some memes proliferate and become ubiquitous, while most quietly sink into oblivion. The apparent connection between this selection process and the collective unconscious is still uncharted territory, not least of all since it involves processes which are massively collective and largely anonymous.
The postmodern era is sometimes described as borderline illiterate; people lose their reading ability while sounds and pictures battle for their attention. Memes are an expression of this development, which in turn is at its core a step in the Great Worsening. At the same time this opens new possibilities to dodge the gatekeepers of the collective unconscious, bypass the official ideology and the taboos of the ersatz-religions. A picture of a band of orcs with a speech bubble containing the phrase “where are the White women” and the caption “immigration is rape culture” can be just as effective as a more elaborated text, which at any rate is almost exclusively read by those already in the loop. Here memes act as a tool for rapidly establishing novel associations. Many memes convey various aspects of the modern world and modern man. This entails tragic figures and situations, like the “Forever Alone” meme, the “Foul Bachelor Frog,” and the superficially expressionless, actually uncannily suggestive face of Wojak. In several characters the lack of self-respect and discipline is obvious, as is the type Evola spoke of as fickle, and void of a sovereign within. The banality of the modern world and its general degeneration are expressed incisively by the Foul Bachelor Frog: “Fell asleep in yesterday’s clothes, woke up in today’s clothes.” Similarly the ever lonely Forever Alone character expresses the collapse of dating and the atomization following in its wake.
The meme lords of the Alt-Right have utilized several memes portraying the modern world and poking fun at anything from political correctness to African-American culture. However, one soon detects a will to something else—a struggle for another, distinct anthropology. Man, though void of a sovereign within, consciously struggles by way of memes to regain control. During Trump’s presidential campaign elaborate Trump memes were created, in which the candidate appeared as a Roman emperor as well as the “God Emperor” from the science-fantasy board game Warhammer 40K. These memes joined a heroic, regal, and masculine aesthetic—something for which our time is unconsciously longing—with optimism and faith in the “Trumpquake.” We have already dealt with the cuck meme earlier in this chapter. A “normie” or “normfag” is any outsider to the Alt-Right or Chan culture. Many within the Alt-Right also adopted the Harambe meme, in memory of the silverback gorilla which was shot dead when a black child fell down into the gorilla’s pen. Initially mocking Afrocentrists who assert that all civilization originated in Africa, the “We Wuz Kangz” meme was created, and has later been used to mock, among others, Whites who believe everything of value in the world originated in Europe. White genocide, woke, and “the current year” are other often encountered memes. The latter is a scornful reference to liberals who unironically might use a phrase like “after all, this is 2017,” as if it were an argument. The Memescape quickly shifts, meaning that by the time you read this new memes and mutations will surely already long have out-replicated the memes mentioned here.
Most memes are entertaining, not rarely using absurd and tongue-in-cheek undertones. Meanwhile, memes are as self-referential as other pop culture, and eagerly combine elements of African-American culture, historical National Socialism, Hollywood productions and Japanese anime. The Alt-Right, their tweeters and trolls in particular, are associated with the politically incorrect. This comprises everything that most bothers the politically correct; their sorest points, what they hold most sacred. This is often done ironically, in an attempt to trigger the politically correct. One idea within metapolitics is that this tactic is necessary to drain politically correct demons and accusations of their meaning. Every troll posting pictures of a Hitler-saluting Pokemon is not necessarily a Nazi—many times this is just irony. Add the generational aspect: those who take the trolls seriously simultaneously betray themselves as being what in 1968 would have been called bourgeois or a square. Today, it is more likely normfag. The irony can have several layers. Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer has spoken of “unironic Nazis disguised as ironic Nazis.”
The Alt-Right also has a close relation to anime—Japanese animated cartoons. These are intently used in meme-making, for instance by letting female anime characters express various politically incorrect statements. There is a logic behind this. Western entertainment has gone through a radical degeneration and politicization, which more often than not makes it part of the problem. Japanese entertainment, anime included, has rarely gone through this process, and can with some exceptions be seen as sound and exciting. Unsurprisingly, Japanese cartoonists like Kentaro Miura and Makoto Yukimura with Berserk and Vinland Saga captured the essence of our Nordic archetypes and legends significantly better than current European cartoonists. The Japanese aesthetics also express striving toward self-discipline and beauty in ways rarely seen in Western pop culture. Lawrence Murray writes on the current state of “Anomie, Anime and the Alt-Right” in a worthwhile article with the same title first published on The Right Stuff. Murray notes, among many other things, how anime is still based on archetypes and characters struggling to reach some kind of goal, while much of the most popular Western entertainment productions seem to have strayed from this tried and true formula, replacing the hero’s journey with “the coastal progressive agenda.” The Alt-Right has nicknamed such politicized entertainment poz, after gay slang meaning “HIV positive.”
Joakim Andersen
No comments:
Post a Comment