The Tyranny of Human Rights - Kerry R. Bolton

Foreword   By Dr. Tomislav Sunić   

Kerry Bolton’s book might just as well carry the title The Decline of the West, Part 2, or short of that, it can be catalogued as a sequel to Oswald Spengler’s work. By using a descriptive and theoretical approach in his heavily footnoted prose, the author describes the endtimes of what was once known as Western civilization. The only problem is that each passage of this book could easily evolve into a separate volume. Each page of the book is replete with dozens of proper names and names of a variety of political organizations to the point that the reader must take a break and read each passage twice.

Moreover, given Bolton’s usual custom of providing a massive amount of bibliographic references, the following pages aren’t designed for an ad hoc perusal or some passing right-wing coffee shop entertainment. This is a very serious piece of scholarly work which requires from a reader of the following pages at least some background in different fields of social science. For those lacking time or patience, or those who might find the book too heavy-handed, it may serve as a good reference for studying the rise and fall of the West.

Bolton is at his best when providing the causal nexus leading up to the catastrophe unfolding now in the West. The Sovietization of the Western politics, the resurgence of primal mannerism among masses of Westerners, the primitivization of conduct in citizens’ mutual relationship, the brutalization of the English langue—all these new social pathologies did not drop from the moon. Neither are these signs of the ongoing decay a product of a single special interest group. The chapters of the book trace the historical origins of this chaos. The merit of the author is his willingness to demolish the myth of the much-lauded social contract theorists, the founding fathers of the modern replacement mystique: Jean Jacque Rousseau, John Locke, and their future liberal-leftist fellow travelers. Their daydreams of an expendable man, man as a blank slate, man as a tabula rasa creature, waiting to be perpetually reborn in an imaginary Lalaland, was bound to give birth to what came to be known first as the Lysenkoist-Bolshevik experiment and which we know today under the name of multicultural SJW, BLM, Antifa, LGTB, including hundreds of other outlets of “world-improvers” in the West. In fact, the communist Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s because its own egalitarian multiracial aspirations had been better achieved in practice in the Western liberal global village. The chapters dealing with the distortion of language are particularly important, all the more as language generates political concepts and the way how we communicate with each other. The much used abstract expressions, such as “human rights” or “humanity,” having originated during the American and French revolutions, are critically analyzed by the author. Similar upsurge in lexical imprecisions, such as the expressions “ethnic sensitivity training,” or “affirmative action,” being now part of the US legalese, are directly borrowed from the now defunct Sovietspeak. A separate book could be devoted by Bolton to his brief passage on Alice behind the Looking Glass and her encounters with the polysemic Humpty Dumpty. The Orwellian double-talk used by Humpty Dumpty had its natural outcome somewhat later in the Soviet Union—albeit not as a nursery rhyme but as a deadly legal procedure against wrong-thinkers.

Other than providing a theoretical framework for his analyses Bolton prods into chapters of daily politics and illustrates his prose with the description of current Western movers and shakers. Chapters that follow read often as detailed police reports on the moral corruption, coupled with self-denial of the political class in the West. New Zealand, a country of the author’s actual residence, is also briefly discussed as a small tip of the melting iceberg. The old Rousseauistic imagery of the “noble savage” transpires now in the general self-abnegation process by New Zealand Whites toward the Māori people. The “noble savage” in the Pacific Rim must be treated now as a new superego of Whites; he must be hailed as a new deity guiding the sinful White into the glorious future—regardless whether his or her name is Nelson Mandela or George Floyd or Nanaia Mahuta. In fact, even the so-called great replacement in the West, that is, storms of Afro-Asian migrants on their way to Europe, is a logical process that perfectly ties in with the doctrine of liberalism and its twin brother communism.

In hindsight one may wonder whether the political heavyweights mentioned in the book and their disciples sitting now in DC, London, and Brussels are engaged in a deliberate process of lying, or whether they are just unwilling subjects of their own self-delusion. Whichever way they have chosen, the whole course of Western civilization appears nevertheless to have been, over the last two hundred years, a patent exercise in Western self-destruction. 

Dr. Tomislav Sunić

Count Potocki Of Montalk

“The course of my life is an indictment of the whole 

dishonest racket which calls itself democracy.”

—Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk 389

 

Geoffrey Potocki was one of the generation of the Golden Age of New Zealand literati, which included Potocki’s friend and fellow poet Rex Fairburn, Allen Curnow, R. A. K. Mason,  D’arcy Cresswell, and others. As one would expect, most of those who were politically inclined during this inter-war period turned to Marxism. Like Ezra Pound, 390 however, Rex Fairburn rejected Marxism in favor of Social Credit, 391 and also like Pound he even considered fascism, 392 albeit briefly. 393

Potocki, on the other hand, turned unequivocally to the Right. Among bohemian eccentrics, he was surely the most noticeable in the London literary milieu in which he spent a significant amount of his life. 

Potocki emerged from a New Zealand that was very much a British cultural outpost. Depression-era New Zealand afforded the country the opportunity to forge a sense of national and cultural identity that was something other than an imitation of Britain, while striving for its own level of excellence. Such was not to be the case, however, and what developed instead was a parochial form of Americanization, and consumer culture, particularly as the period following the Second World War saw the eclipse of British authority in favor of U.S. commercial banality.

Potocki, Fairburn, and even Marxists such as Mason were acutely aware of their responsibility to forge a “new civilization” in the antipodes, and some, such as Potocki in particular, self-exiled to Britain and elsewhere in the hope of finding a more fruitful cultural environment. Disgusted at the cultural climate, Potocki had left New Zealand and persuaded Fairburn to join him in London. As Potocki put it, New Zealand prevented them from doing what they were born there for, “to make and to mould a New Zealand civilization.” 394

However, in Britain, neither Fairburn nor Potocki were impressed with bohemian society, although Potocki dressed and conducted himself as an eccentric bohemian par excellence. 395 Nor were they impressed with the Bloomsbury intellectuals, who were riddled with homosexuality, for which both Potocki and Fairburn had an abiding dislike. 

 

FORMATIVE YEARS

Potocki was born in Remuera, Auckland, New Zealand, on October 6, 1903. His description of his birth, related to Greig Fleming in 1993, consists mainly of astrological correspondences, showing his lifelong mystical inclination. 396 Potocki also speaks from the beginning about his own “heathenism,” a problematic tendency for the claimant to the throne of Poland and Hungary, mentioning elsewhere that he “hated and despised Christian morality.” 397

Potocki, ever flamboyant, was not inclined to modesty, describing his countenance from childhood as one of great nobility which appeared “fabulous in comparison to the low level of New Zealand in that regard,” one that indicated a person destined for talent and brilliance. 398

Potocki began writing poetry at the age of eight, and decided from then that he was to be a poet. 399 Having lost his mother at an early age, and living with a step-mother who was unsympathetic, the life of Potocki and his brother became hard, including frequent starvation when his father, an architect, had financial difficulties. 400A Renaissance Man out of his time (a “man against time”? 401), Potocki was fluent in French, Provencal, Latin, Greek, Polish, Hungarian, Italian, German, and Sanskrit, and in the last years of his life was learning Maori (he considered the Maori to be superior to the common run of New Zealanders). 

Known for his outspokenly pro-fascist and pro-Nazi sentiments—an outspokenness not dampened by the war and life in wartime England—Potocki was, however, more than anything a traditionalist and a royalist, a neo-aristocrat who in some respects can be compared to another mystic, Julius Evola. Potocki was profoundly conscious of his identity and his lineage, and New Zealand—which prides itself on being the egalitarian society par excellence—could do nothing but repulse such a man. Potocki was to reminisce of his native land: “Life in New Zealand is a wonderful training for a future King—a superb lesson in ‘How a nation ought not to be governed.’” 402His appearance was that of another era. In London, he sported flowing hair, a billowing cloak, large beret, and sandals. In later life, including his years back in New Zealand, he adopted the appearance of a large-bearded, robed magus, a style that during and immediately after the war was also supplemented by a self-designed “uniform” in the manner of the Polish army. 

Potocki’s claim to Polish royal linage was legitimate enough, despite being dismissed as an “embarrassment” by his New Zealand family. 403 Count Joseph Wladislas Edmond Potocki de Montalk dispensed with his title and reduced his name down to de Montalk upon migrating to New Zealand from France in 1868, as befits a land without noble traditions other than those of the Maori. 404 The Potocki family is of ancient royal lineage, and is prominent in the history of Poland, being one of the oldest families of the nation. 405

 

EARLY MUSINGS

Potocki’s family moved to Nelson, in the South Island, in 1917. He did well at High School, winning a prize for excellence in English, French, Latin, and history, and was regarded by the headmaster as having a very personable character. 406 Moving to Wellington in 1918, Potocki continued to excel at school. 407 In 1919, at only 16, he became a teacher and privately studied Greek at Victoria University College. In 1921, he returned to Auckland with the aim of studying law and entered the employ of a law firm as a clerk. 

By 1923 Potocki had entered the literary scene, and had met R. A. K. Mason. Despite being a newcomer, a literary group formed around him, which saw itself as a “poetic aristocracy” 408 which would revitalize English poetry. Potocki still had faith that New Zealand, as a colony, had not been infected by the decadence of the “old world.” He published his first collection of poems as a four-page leaflet. 

Potocki then dropped law and entered a seminary to study for the Anglican priesthood, not because he felt he had a divine calling but because he was attracted to the ritual and liturgy. This did not leave him in his later years, as he would attend Evensong at the Anglican Cathedral in Wellington for the same reason as he had done in his youth at the Christchurch Cathedral, despite his continued adherence to paganism. It was in seminary that he learned about missionary printing in the 19th century, and this prompted his own lifelong interest in self-publishing limited editions of his works on antiquated presses. 

Potocki was briefly married in 1924. It was perhaps predictable that he could not settle down to family responsibilities. He tried to work as a milk vendor, although he could not compel himself to demand the money owed him by poor families, nor did he have an interest in money-making per se, surely itself a sign of innate aristocracy. He returned to Christchurch with his family and re-entered law for a short time, but continued with his real passion, poetry. 409

In 1926 Potocki received a letter from Rex Fairburn, whom he had briefly known at primary school, and a life-long friendship ensued. Potocki assumed the role of mentor, as the more worldly-wise of the two. 410 At Easter 1927, Potocki published his first collection of poems, Wild Oats, which he dedicated to Fairburn. 411

Not surprisingly, given the Left-wing character of much of the literary milieu, Fairburn was flirting with communism as a means by which the artist could become economically independent to pursue his profession. However, he was not by temperament a rationalist or a materialist, and was also drawn to a spirit of aristocratic feeling that did not settle easily with socialism. Others of an artistic or literary calling who turned to the Right around the same time, men such as Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and Wyndham Lewis, did so for similar reasons, fearing that a cult of the proletariat or of mass, undifferentiated humanity, as much democratic in spirit as communistic, would result in the drowning of all real individual excellence. 

Fairburn asked his royalist friend Potocki to read Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 412 to show him that the aristocratic spirit and the creative genius could be accommodated under socialism. 413 However, in 1931 when Fairburn met A. R. Orage, editor of the New English Weekly, 414 he discovered that such freedom for creativity could not only be maintained but also enhanced by the economics of Social Credit. (Orage’s magazine was from 1932 on discussing new social and political ideas, with a focus on Maj. C. H. Douglas’ proposals.) 415 Fairburn had in 1930 already read and been heavily influenced by Spengler’s Decline of the West, 416 so his rejection of Marxism was a natural development. 

Fairburn was avid in promoting Social Credit and in opposing usury, whereas Potocki’s perspective must be discerned from more meager sources. For example, in his pamphlet on New Zealand race relations written in 1987, Potocki stated: “But as far as I am concerned the present financial system busy plundering and misgoverning the world is in its higher reaches a criminal anti-human conspiracy.” 417

Stephanie de Montalk writes of the significance of Potocki and his contemporaries of this period:

 

Although Wild Oats collected the writings of youth and, in keeping with a young man’s follies, contained moments of extravagance and grandeur, it was nonetheless one of the starting points in the development of New Zealand’s poetic identity. It placed Potocki among the generation of writers who would lay the basis of New Zealand literature as it developed in the 1930s. 418

 

This was the Golden Age of New Zealand culture, and one which Fairburn, Potocki, Mason, Curnow, and others of the time wanted to see flourish. However, unlike what might be called the New Zealandist commitments of the rest, including Marxists such as R. A. K. Mason, and above all Potocki’s protégé Fairburn, Potocki was not foremost a New Zealander but a royalist and a traditionalist. 

While Fairburn and others achieved wide recognition in New Zealand, Potocki left, and only returned much later in life. He was keeping the commitment he had made to Fairburn when Wild Oats appeared, that his first collection was a “test” which, if it failed to gain a good response in New Zealand, would prove that the country was not fit for Potocki and he would have done with the place. 419 Potocki got mixed reviews, partly because of the bias against someone who was “in the process of dissolving his marriage.” Fairburn too had had enough of New Zealand, and Potocki wrote to him that poets are treated badly there, in “this land of white savages and All Blacks” while “they are feted, laurelled and crowned in Merrie England.” In October 1927, he left for England.

By 1931 Potocki was earning sufficient money to devote himself to writing and was being published regularly back home in the Auckland and Christchurch newspapers as a feature writer. 420 It was his imprisonment in 1932 on “obscenity” charges in relation to poetry, together with his actions during the Second World War, that were to block his path to the sort of success achieved by Fairburn, Mason, and others. 

By 1930, Potocki’s poetic vision was already showing aristocratic and elitist traits. That same year Surprising Songs was published, in the foreword to which Potocki condemns “Christianity and democracy,” against which he “raises the banner of the aristocratic gods, and their sons, the kings and the poets.” He describes New Zealand as “Hell” from which he had fled as soon as he could. In both mystical and traditionalist tenor Potocki states that poetry is the expression of the “great spirit, the outrider of the hordes of men, the king proclaiming his kingdom, the avatar bearing in his own being a light against the darkness.” 421 This and other volumes were favorably, even enthusiastically, reviewed from Europe to New Zealand.

Fairburn too now arrived from New Zealand, as disheartened by the low cultural level as Potocki, and seeing the hope of establishing a “native literature” as unlikely. However, to Potocki’s disappointment, Fairburn, the quintessential New Zealander, was more interested in pub-crawls than in cathedrals. 

 

ENGLISH LITERATI & PRISONS

At this time, Potocki was learning more about his lineage and began a tentative claim to Poland’s throne, the main obstacle as he saw it being that he was not a Catholic. The claim was strengthened several years later when, in Poland, he found that the Potockis had married into the Piast family, which had reigned over Poland until the mid 17th century. 422

By now a rather well-established poet, Potocki embarked on a controversial publication that was to end his acceptance among mainstream publishers. Here Lies John Penis was a collection of poems, including translations from Rabelais and Verlaine, and some explicit verses in an account of some sexual misadventures by Rex Fairburn. It was intended only for distribution among friends, and was to be printed by Potocki himself on his small press. 423

Potocki’s efforts to get the type set by  Leslie de Lozey resulted in the MS being taken to the police. Potocki’s room was raided, and he was arrested, along with fellow New Zealand expatriate Douglas Glass. 424 Both were remanded in custody in Brixton Prison. At trial Sir Ernest Wild warned three women jurors that “this was a very filthy case indeed,” two of whom excused themselves from service. 

Potocki’s refusal to swear on the Bible caused some consternation in court, and there was the question as to whether a pagan’s oath would be acceptable. 425 The oath he swore in court was to Apollo, raising his right arm “in the Roman salute,” “like Julius Caesar or Benito Mussolini,” he was to later recount. 426 The verdict was “guilty.” Justice Wild had not only made it very clear how the vote should proceed, he had not even allowed the jury leave to deliberate. Potocki was sentenced to six months in Wormwood Scrubs. 

The case was widely reported and commented upon, generally with sympathy for Potocki. Among those who tried to help financially were W. B. Yeats, J. B. Priestly, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, and Augustus John. 427 Leonard and Virginia Woolf organized a campaign for Potocki, and questions were asked in the House of Commons for the case to be reviewed. 428 In the end, actual support from his well-wishers turned out to be meager. 429 The appeal heard in March 1932 was rejected.

Potocki was to relate much later to his cousin and biographer Stephanie that he believed his predicament, which ended his success as a recognized poet, 430 had actually been the result of Douglas Glass muttering unfavorable remarks about Jews in front of de Lozey when they had taken the proofs to the publisher for typesetting. Potocki had not known de Lozey was Jewish and did not understand Glass’s references at the time. Potocki was informed after trial by the publisher Knott that de Lozey had taken exception to Glass’s comments, and wanted him arrested, which could not be done other than by also having Potocki arrested. Potocki opined that it was really Glass that the police had been after, because he was a petty thief and a swindler. 431 These experiences in Britain left Potocki embittered towards both the justice system and the British class system. An antagonism towards Jews also emerged at that time. 432

Some, such as the Woolfs, assumed that Potocki would go “Left,” like the common run of Bloomsbury. But it is evident from his general character and outlook that Potocki was, like his contemporaries Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Roy Campbell, and others, innately and indelibly of the “Right.” His royalist sympathies were manifest at an early age, and well prior to his escapades with the British Establishment. 

In a chapter called “Quack, Quack” in his Social Climbers in Bloomsbury, 433 Potocki was to record his one meeting with the Woolfs in which Virginia sought agreement on her belief that her husband’s race was much more civilized than the English and had been since ancient times. Potocki replied that, to be frank, he did not at all agree. 

After his release from prison, Potocki assumed the style he was to retain throughout his life: medieval robes and a crimson cloak, modeled after the clothing of Richard II, with sandals, a velvet beret adorned with the Polish royal eagle and the Potocki coat of arms, and waist length hair that he had first allowed to grow out while in jail. 

He set off for Poland in 1933, where he was welcomed by the literati and obtained employment as a translator of Polish poetry and prose into English. He was greeted with celebrity status by the press, which recognized his royal pedigree—despite the ill-informed denigration it had received from the Court in England—and remarked upon his aristocratic character and bearing. 434

Stephanie de Montalk hypothesizes that his “anti-Semitism” might have been galvanized in Poland, having been seeded by experiences in England. However, at that time there was little need to visit Poland to draw conclusions about Jews, given on their conspicuous roles in communism and the “Left” in general. That was how Jews were widely perceived among well-informed and high-born quarters since the time of the 1917 Revolution.

 

THE RIGHT REVIEW

The outbreak of the Civil War in Spain in 1936 polarized the intelligentsia and literati. Some, such as Potocki and in particular Roy Campbell, 435 identified with the rebel cause. In 1935, Potocki returned to England in 1935. The following year, with funds from Aldous Huxley and Brian Guinness, Potocki bought a printing press, and began publishing his long-running literary and political journal TheRight Review. TheRight Review, like all of de Potocki’s works, was printed as limited editions but did garner the adverse attention of John Bull and the positive reaction of the reviewer for The New English Weekly and T. S. Eliot’s Criterion. 

Potocki’s editorial in the first issue, which appeared in October, cogently describes his position: 

 

It is our aim to show that the Divine Right of Kings is the sanest and best form of government. . . .

We are as much opposed to Capitalism, if by that term is meant Plutocracy, as any communist could be—but we are not opposed to capitalists so long as they function without damaging the interests of the whole State. . . . 

Neither do we consider Fascism as anything but a very bad form of government, being as it is based on demagogy, but we point out that it is a natural reaction, based on a thoroughly justifiable instinct of self-protection, whereby nations rid themselves of the socialist and communist plague. . . . 436

 

Thus, Potocki’s support for fascism was critical and conditional. Fascism is a populist movement, and elitists such as Potocki were suspicious of such movements, in whatever form they took, whether Left or Right. Others of similar opinion were Evola and Wyndham Lewis.

His views on Jews did not constitute the common sort of “anti-Semitism,” where Jews are generally placed in a no-win position no matter what they do. Potocki saw certain actions of many Jews as detrimental to humanity as a whole due to their own ethnocentricity and support for communism. “Aryan racialism,” which presumably means Hitlerism, was therefore seen also as a “reaction” to Jewish exploits since the time of the Old Testament. Nonetheless, in disagreeing with both fascists and communists on the question of race, Potocki stated “men are to be judged by their worth as members of the human race as a whole—by their beauty, breeding, wisdom, and good will.” This applies “even to Jews,” but there was a duty to be “very suspicious of a race” which itself “invented inhuman racialism” to the detriment of non-Jews. 437With TheRight Review being published on a rudimentary press in small numbers, Potocki nonetheless started to become known among the British “Right,” and he met both Sir Oswald Mosley and Mosley’s propaganda chief, William Joyce, 438 the later “Lord Haw Haw” for whom Potocki’s affection never wavered. Potocki seems to have retained his aristocratic suspicion of fascist demagogy, but he did undertake printing for the British Union of Fascists. 439

As we shall see, whatever Potocki’s suspicions regarding fascism and Hitlerism before the war, it was after the war that Potocki (in contrast to many others, such as Wyndham Lewis, who had supported fascism before the war) became an avid supporter of National Socialism and fascism. Perhaps he felt obliged to make a commitment as both a diehard rebel against the democratic status quo, and in realization that the post-war world was one of global democratization and Sovietization. At any rate, his sympathies after the war became more radical, rather than moderate. 

The abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 was the occasion for what Potocki calls his “first political manifesto,” 440The Unconstitutional Crisis. Accompanied by the writer Nigel Heseltine, who assisted with editing TheRight Review, and the artist George Hann, who provided the woodblock illustrations for Potocki’s publications, they distributed large quantities of the pamphlet supporting the King in Whitehall, “at the very moment the arch-traitor Baldwin was announcing the abdication.” 441 He and Heseltine were later arrested for obstruction and briefly held at Buckingham Palace. At court, Whitehall tried to intervene and have Potocki charged on the text of the pamphlet, but the judge refused, and minor fines were imposed for obstruction. 442In 1939 Potocki set up The Right Review Bookshop in his flat, barred to “communists and racial enemies.” 443 During the late 1930s he also elaborated on his pagan religious views, stating in Whited Sepulchers that he opposed Puritanism, Calvinism, Democracy, Christianity, and appealed to fellow pagan avengers of “the great Apostle of Paganism, Divine Julian.” 444 Potocki’s primary deity was Apollo and remained so throughout his life. He was by now also in the habit of greeting friends with the “Roman”—fascist—salute, a gesture that was surely part of his rebellious nature. 

 

KING OF POLAND

In 1939, Potocki crowned himself “Wladilsaw 5th, King of Poland, Hungary and Bohemia, Grand Duke of Lithuania, Silesia and the Ukraine, Hospodar of Moldavia, etc., etc., etc., High Priest of the Sun” in a Rite of the Sun. 445

In 1940, he and his wife Odile were jailed for two months and one month, respectively, for resisting arrest, having barricaded their flat against the police, on a “black-out offence.” 446 Their occupations were entered in the register as King and Queen of Poland.

Potocki’s effort to register as a conscientious objector was unsuccessful, but he did succeed in evading military service. He founded the Polish Royalist Association and exchanged his robes for a military style uniform adorned with the Polish eagle and Potocki coat of arms. In the midst of war, a photograph of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley adorned Potocki’s cottage in Surrey, which belonged to a member of Arnold Leese’s Imperial Fascist League.

 

KATYN 

Apart from his escapades connected to the controversy surrounding Here Lies John Penis, Potocki was most proud of being the first person in England to expose the Katyn massacre of Polish officers by the USSR. The Soviets insisted (until quite recently) that Katyn was a German war crime, and the British authorities tried to suppress knowledge to the contrary during the war lest it reflect badly on the British-Soviet alliance. 

As claimant to the throne of Poland, Potocki was of course interested in Poland’s future after the war. He regarded the USSR as the greatest threat to Poland’s nationhood, and foresaw the likelihood of a Soviet Poland emerging from the war. 447 He put his printing skills to work for Polish exiles, which included reports that were censored in the British press. He believed that occupation by Germany was preferable to that of the USSR, despite his liking for Russians as individuals. 448 Potocki’s contempt for Britain was increased by its failure to come to Poland’s aid when the USSR invaded, and his support for fascism and Hitlerism in this context became more pronounced, particularly when the USSR and Britain became allies in 1941. 449In 1943, hearing rumors of Soviet atrocities among the Polish community, Potocki sought the help of the Duke of Bedford, an opponent of the war and an avid proponent of banking reform, which the Duke—like Potocki 450—saw as a major aspect of the Hitler regime, and incidentally as a cause of war. The Duke in correspondence with Potocki also alluded to the rumors he had heard about the massacre of Polish officers by the Soviet Union. 451In May 1943 Potocki was asked by Poles in London to expose the atrocity to the British public, and so he wrote the Katyn Manifesto. This was distributed by the thousands with the help of the Polish-government-in-exile. It was a “Proclamation to the English, the Poles, the Germans and the jews [sic],” 452 from the King of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, etc. Potocki spelled out the basic facts behind Katyn and called for a negotiated peace with the hope that Germany would recognize a united Poland and Hungary, that the “jews” would be helped “if they will even at this late hour repent and behave themselves,” the Tsar to be restored to Russia, and the King to France. 453

Potocki was placed under surveillance, questions were asked in Parliament, and Potocki was attacked by the press, including the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, which described the manifesto as “poisonous filth,” 454 calling Potocki a “crazy Fascist Count.” It was at this time that Potocki was jailed for “insufficient black-out,” his wife Odile having left him for fear of his anti-government views during the war. 455 After release he was ordered by the Ministry of Labour to serve six months in an agricultural camp in Northumberland, which he attended in preference to conscription, adorned with his royal attire. After a month, he bade a “Heil Hitler” to the camp manager and left. 

 

POST-WAR ENGLAND & PROVENCE

During another four years in England, Potocki maintained himself by printing and translations for the Polish-government-in-exile. 456 After seeking help from the Duke of Bedford for the renewal of his passport, Potocki left for France. Seeking employment at an Indian University, Potocki wrote that he had had problems with the English because of his “violently pro-Axis” outlook during the war, an attitude that would not have been necessarily offensive to an Indian given that India continues to maintain esteem (probably about equal to that held for Gandhi) for the pro-Axis Subhas Chandra Bose. He also wrote to the American Ambassador offering his services to the USA against the USSR, his naiveté concerning the USA presumably being the result of judgment clouded by his hatred of the Soviet Union. 457

In 1949, Potocki settled in Provence, which would be his home for much of the remainder of his life, apart from sojourns in New Zealand in later years, now thoroughly “hating” the “english” (sic), 458 a word that he never seems to have capitalized. Before he was able to leave, however, the British legal system had one last go at him, charging him with assault on a female admirer after he pushed her out of his flat when she attempted to prevent his departure. 

Before being fined £2, he had been assessed for several weeks at a psychiatric ward, but was found to be “perfectly healthy in every respect, both in body and mind.” The authorities had expected to find a New Zealand-born claimant to the throne of Poland to be mentally unsound, but the psychiatrist was instead treated to a lucid exposition of the possibility, albeit unlikely, of Potocki becoming King on the basis that in the event of confrontation between the USA and USSR the Americans would be looking for someone who could be trusted by both Germans and Poles. 459

Potocki settled into an old cottage in the Draguignan countryside, bought for him for £100 by the Countess de Bioncourt. Chris Martin, who knew Potocki, writes of this period:

 

The Count spent his later years living in a beautiful farmhouse surrounded by olive trees in Provence. He was accompanied by a variety of lady friends and continued to work on his press. Driving around in a Citroën 2CV, flying the Polish Royal Standard he was a well-liked local figure. He also produced a translation of  Adam Mickiewicz’ Dziady, or Forefathers, which is the Polish national epic and the translation of which is now a standard text in a large number of American universities. The irony, if one should look for one, is that this same standard text, beautifully produced, comes with an introduction by a Jewish professor. 460 The work was—characteristically—the subject of a prolonged legal tussle between the Count and the Polish Cultural Foundation, at whose instigation the work had been translated. (It is, in passing, worth mentioning that parts of the work were recited by the translator at a concert at Leighton House, West London, together with a recital by the Count’s compatriot, the pianist  Richard Bielicki.) 461 

Stephanie de Montalk states that by 1958 there was a renewed interest in Potocki as part of a general interest in the literati of the 1930s and 1940s, and there was again media reportage, and his publications—mostly limited, small-run, hand-bound editions—became collectors’ items, as they still are, fetching high prices. 462

 

POST-WAR FASCISM

Directly after the war Potocki was not only defiantly pro-fascist but also expressed overtly pro-Nazi sympathies. His 1945 Christmas card To Men of Goodwill had the “X” of “Xmas” printed as a swastika, and included a six-verse poem including the words “to save his life, our William Joyce.” This was at the time when Joyce, the infamous “Lord Haw Haw,” was hanged for treason for his wartime broadcasts to England from Germany. It clearly shows the nature of Potocki’s contempt for the era of democracy. Equally as rebellious is his 1946 four-page leaflet, The Nuremberg Trials, including the words “Hitler und Goering Sieg Heil.”

Not surprisingly, then, it was Potocki who printed Savitri Devi’s 11,000 swastika-emblazoned leaflets and posters that she distributed throughout war-ravaged Germany, throwing them from the back of a train and surreptitiously posting them on walls, an action that not surprisingly resulted in her detention by the Occupation Authorities. Savitri had met Potocki in England in 1946 463 and also spent time with Potocki when she returned to London in the early 1960s. 464

In 1959, Potocki obtained a hundred-year-old platen press and started The Mélissa Press. He now resumed his special editions, and had maintained friendships with a number of prominent literary figures, in particular Richard Aldington, who admired his efforts. Aldington wrote to Potocki that his creative work is “the only answer to the lavatory-seat wipers of literature who naturally don’t recognize a poet and a gentleman when by chance they meet him.” 465Despite his disgust at England he nonetheless commuted between Provence and Dorset, set up a press there, and issued a pamphlet advising residents of A New Dorset Worthy, who was “opposed to virtually every movement or line of thought triumphant at present,” but that was to be expected of a “genius.” 466 Among his publications was Two Blacks Don’t Make a White: Remarks about Apartheid, published in 1964. He also printed The National Socialist, the journal of Colin Jordan’s British National Socialist Movement. 467Remarks about Apartheid begins with lines from fellow Right-wing (but Catholic) poet Roy Campbell, expressing a cynicism in regard to humanitarianism as a façade for ignoble purposes: “The old grey wolf of brother love / Slinks in our track with slimy fangs.” Secondly, from William Blake: “One law for the lion and for the ox is oppression.” 

Potocki’s outlook on South African Apartheid was based decidedly on the general inferiority of the blacks to whites, insofar as they had not, and could not, make a civilization. However, Potocki did not extend this white supremacy to other races, for he considered the Japanese, Chinese, and Hindus equals. In the case of white New Zealanders, he considered the Maori to be a superior race, deserving cultural and language accommodation as well as land compensation—the illiberal Potocki being far ahead of the liberals in his pro-Maori outlook. 468

Attacks on Apartheid, Potocki claimed, were the result of the post war era of “universal humbug,” the product of a coalition of Christians, communists, and democrats. He pointed to the selective hypocrisy of the liberal conscience, which was silent about communist dictatorships, and to the record of the British Empire in their treatment of colored colonials. He drew heavily on South African Government publications citing the services that had been rendered to the blacks under Apartheid, pointing out that the Afrikaners did not dispossess indigenous blacks, but had met the Xhosa while both were migrating from opposite directions. He believed that whites should react against “racial hatred” from fellow whites “whether in South Africa, Rhodesia, Smethwick or in the Deep South.” 469 According to Stephanie de Montalk, the authorities in England placed an injunction against the sale of the pamphlet. 470In 1966, Potocki took up the cause of Rhodesia. His solution to the crisis was for “Sir Ian Smith” (sic) and the Rhodesian people to proclaim Rhodesia a Kingdom and to “offer the Crown to His Grace the Duke of Montrose.” 

 

In this way the Rhodesians will set the whole world a good example, take the wind out of the sails of the minority of piratical hypocrites in England, & provide a turning-point for the Good in the history of the world, at a time when it never needed it more. This would also be a piece of poetic justice, whereby the Grahams would be rewarded for their courage and loyalty during the disgraceful wars which England waged under the criminal Cromwell against Scotland and against the true interests of humanity. 471 

Potocki then outlined the genealogy of the Duke to legitimize claims to royal blood, suggesting that Rhodesia adopt the Montrose Arms as its own, which would make the country “the first of the (ex) British colonies to acquire a blazon which is a decent piece of heraldry and not an offence against good taste as e.g. the so-called coat of arms of New Zealand. . . .”

In regard to Queen Elizabeth II, Potocki declared himself to be “a pious Legitimist” and that the only lawful King of England and territories is Albrecht, “de jure King of Bavaria,” and suggested that the Duke of Montrose might even be ahead of Elizabeth in royal succession, through Baden. Nonetheless, Potocki considered Elizabeth “an intelligent and honest girl” who should be “liberated from her servitude to her humbugging inferiors & allowed to use Her Own words as She sees fit.” 472 Hence, Potocki remained as ever foremost a Royalist.

In 1977 Potocki returned to Southern African themes, namely:

 

Let The Rhodesians Not

Be surprised that England should try and sell them down the river to a gang of bolsheviks and other terrorists.

For after having plotted the most gigantic blood-bath and world-wide flood of misery that the world has ever seen, and carried it through by fiendish means (Dresden etc.) backed up by Hellish lies (six millions etc.) on the pretext of safeguarding the independence and territorial integrity of Poland, England shamelessly sold that great country (once the largest kingdom in Europe) to the wickedest terrorist of known history, calling himself Stalin. England has Holy Joes enough, proclaiming that “your sins will find you”—but even more surely the crimes of your country, connived at by you, will find you out. Nemesis is completely impartial. 473 

In 1987, the Count addressed New Zealand race relations, pre-empting much of what the liberals and Maori activists have subsequently sought and obtained. Potocki’s plan was to restore authority to the traditional chieftains, and with the setting up of land tribunals to address grievances, to place compensated resources under the trusteeship of the Maori Sovereign. Potocki was concerned about outside interference and subversion utilizing the Maori radicals, and the likelihood of United Nations meddling in such matters or supranational law courts, which would mean that New Zealand would be “muzzled and hamstring by all the odious humbug she herself has gone in for about South Africa.” Once again, he was prescient. 

He regarded the Maori as having genuine grievances, which he did not accord to the Blacks in South Africa, as they had not settled that region prior to the Afrikaners, and furthermore he had an altogether higher regard for the racial qualities of the Maori than for either the Africans or for the pakeha. 474 He believed that a racial clash was coming, and that in the long run the pakeha might get the worst of things. He advocated Maori language programs and held that “they should become an integral part of the social and political organization of Aotearoa.” He also sought to remind New Zealanders that he was the most high-born individual who had ever been conceived in New Zealand. 475In the arts, he predictably saw little to praise and considered that a cultural renaissance could still be launched from New Zealand, with his assistance. 476 This optimism is surprising, since he had left New Zealand at what now transpires to have been the country’s Golden Age of culture, dominated by his friends such as Rex Fairburn and R. A. K. Mason. Certainly, it reflects a degree of optimism and idealism that also accounts for it “not being impossible,” given the circumstances of the post-war world, that he could have been named king of Poland.

Unsurprisingly, as part of the New Zealand literati, his cousin and biographer Stephanie de Montalk agonizes over Geoffrey’s “bigotry.” Yet she recalls his avid support for Maori, the genuinely warm manner with which he mingled with students of all races at Victoria University, and his enthusiastic interest in their cultures. Students for their part were impressed by his learning and his personality, Indian students by his knowledge of Sanskrit. 477

 

NEW EUROPEAN ORDER

In 1969 Potocki received an “amiable invitation from the Secretary General of the New European Order to attend the biennial Assembly of the Order at Easter in Barcelona, as Polish delegate.” 478 Potocki was skeptical, having had bad experiences with “English Fascist, semi-Fascist & pseudo-Fascist organizations,” which he considered, at least among the leadership, to have been police agents and agents provocateurs. He was particularly scathing of Colin Jordan’s’ British National Socialist Movement, but regarded as genuine William Joyce’s National Socialist League.

The New European Order had emerged as a radical faction from out of the European Social Movement, or Malmo International, founded in 1951 at the suggestion of Swedish fascist Per Engdahl, and including support from the British Mosleyites, the Italian Social Movement, Germany’s Socialist Reich Party, etc. The leaders of the New European Order were the Frenchman Ren Binet, and the Swiss Guy Amaudruz, 479 who continues to publish a bulletin of that name. 

Potocki replied to the invitation by writing that his attendance was conditional on Colin Jordan not being there, and that he could propose a motion “recognizing the nullity of the Partitions of Poland (18th century) and Hungary (20th century).” The acceptance of his conditions gave Potocki “a very good opinion of the honorableness of the New European Order.” 480 Potocki recounts: “I was elected enthusiastically Delegate for Poland, and my motion passed unanimously.” 481 The motion reads:

 

Poland and Hungary

The Assembly did not believe a new order can be based on the domination of another European nation, and recognizes the invalidity of the partitions of Poland (late thirteenth century) and Hungary.

The meeting considers that an understanding between the peoples directly concerned is desirable and is awaiting proposals based on the agreement of representatives of nations touched by this problem.

 

Potocki mentions that a few days after the congress the Croatian Delegate, General  Vjekoslav Luburić, was murdered on what Potocki believed to have been the orders of Tito. He states that Luburić was “sincerely friendly to Poland and Hungary and spoke fluent Hungarian. PRAISE BE TO HIS NAME.” 482

Potocki also moved another resolution calling for recognition of “any human freedom” so long as it does not harm the citizen or the state, stating that some social and moral changes are irreversible and there can be no return to the 19th century. “Mindful also of a renaissance of European culture, the New European Order recognizes that ‘a state of rigid disciplinary spirit could harm the development of the arts.’” The resolution deplores the political consequences of Puritanism, starting with the Cromwellian revolution. Potocki, as an advocate of aristocracy and traditional hierarchy, also considered the rebirth of high culture to be predicated on the freedom from the burden of work by the culture-bearing stratum, and the necessity of “a leisured class as useful to the culture.” 483

 

RETURN TO NEW ZEALAND

Potocki returned to New Zealand in late 1983, after an absence of fifty-six years, accompanied by some media interviews and commentary, and the publication of his Recollections of My Fellow Poets. 484 His respect among certain sections of New Zealand intelligentsia endured, however, and he was given access to an old platen press at Victoria University. Traveling to the South Island, he stopped off at Christchurch Cathedral and expressed dismay at the modernization of Anglican procedure there. 

He also visited the University of Otago. The Otago Daily Times described Potocki as “vigorous, learned and cosmopolitan,” “an avowed royalist and an enemy of democracy.” Potocki was reported as stating: “The whole thesis upon which democracy is based is totally unjust . . . like one man, one vote. The biggest idiot can have a vote whereas a valuable person also has one vote.” The undimming of his aristocratic views in the aftermath of the victory of democracy might be accounted for by the Times comment that, “he said he did not care about public opinion because the public were stupid.” 485 With such views, it is clear enough why he had not been in New Zealand, the epitome of democratic and egalitarian values, for 56 years, “where no creative life exists except in animal form, and where all the loveliness of European civilization exists only in a weird state of caricature.” 486 An interesting and worthy account of his life was produced and aired on the Tuesday Documentary of Television One in 1984, entitled The Count—Profile of a Polemicist. 

Spending the summer in Provence in 1985, he returned to New Zealand later that year, and moved into a friend’s house in Hamilton, a city of loathsome pseudo-academics and charlatans with an equally loathsome university administration. 

Dr. F. W. Nielsen Wright, an energetic poet, critic, and chronicler of New Zealand culture, describes Potocki as “the all time bad boy of Aotearoa letters.” 487 Wright, a notable figure in New Zealand literature, and former professor of English at Victoria University, also involved in the obscure and short-lived Communist Party of Aotearoa, states that “nobody else comes close to Potocki,” and that he was “treated as a pariah by New Zealand academics 488 without exception to the day of his death.”

 

Potocki should long ago have been awarded a Doctorate of Letters for his translation into verse . . . of the Polish classic, Forefather’s Eve, a romantic verse play by Adam Mickiewicz. This translation has a higher standing internationally than any other piece of New Zealand verse. 489

 

In 1990, Potocki travelled to Poland at the invitation of Dr.  Andrzej Klossowski of Warsaw University and the Polish National Library and gave well-attended readings of his poetry. 490 In 1993 Fleming’s collection of interviews and writings by Potocki was launched. That same year, Potocki returned to Provence despite declining health. 

Potocki died on April 14, 1997 at Draguignan. His grave was marked by a simple granite slab etched “G. Potocki de Montalk 1903–1997.” 491

Wright states that on Potocki’s death in France of “extreme old age” his personal papers were shipped back to New Zealand. This caused protest from the French Government which regarded them as a French cultural treasure. To Wright it was Potocki who was 

 

. . . the leading figure in a group of Aotearoa writers who in the 1920s asserted the value of poetry and challenged their fellow countrymen and women to give them recognition and honor as poets. . . . All felt that the country in fact rejected them and all went into external or internal exile. But their claim remains true. They are the most outstanding group of poets so far in our literature in English.

He has never been forgiven in New Zealand for espousing fascism, even though other literary figures who went the same way have long since been rehabilitated and count as honored writers: people like Knut Hamsun in Norway, Maurras in France, Ezra Pound in the United States, and P. G. Wodehouse in Britain. 492

 

“A GOOD EUROPEAN”

In pondering the Count’s character, Chris Martin wrote: 

 

How best to describe the Count? Whilst possessed of opinions with which I personally often disagreed, he was a small and handsome figure, extremely attractive to the ladies, exceptionally well-spoken (to the extent of correcting my own English), obviously extremely talented but, equally obviously, an embittered victim of the English judicial system, and what in 1932 passed for reality. His nephew Peter Potocki described him as “Uncle Nero.” I can state personally that the Count was an extremely interesting person to know; his position in literary history is pretty well irrefragable. However, I will say that he was most interesting company and one of the most informed people one has met about virtually any aspect of European history. For a person born in New Zealand in 1903, the Count was what, with Nietzsche, we might term “a good European.” 

 

Counter-Currents/North American New Right

August 14–16, 2010

Culture as play

 

With the 1953 notes on “Culture,” Yockey develops a theme that repudiates rationalism, positivism, and other such 19th-century materialistic philosophies, presenting the post-rationalist era of History as the unfolding of a great drama that is beyond rational or scientific interpretation, because Life and hence History, shaped by the “higher man,” is itself part of a mysterium.

Here Yockey incorporates his previous themes of the “higher man,” or what has been termed “heroic vitalism” as a foundation of History, and his doctrine of polarity as a post-Hegelian dialectic. The foundations of Life and History are shaped by irrational forces, and the actors, the great men of History, follow a script according to Historical laws, rather than writing their own. They must act within the theme of the drama according to how their epoch the Zeitgeist—has scripted it as if by Divine or Unseen Hand.

Here we might also recall the concept of the “Myth” as the motive-force of History, explicated by Georges Sorel; although Yockey has recourse not to Sorel, but to German scholar Hans Vaihanger and the great Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón.

We might also be reminded not only of Shakespeare’s often quoted opening lines “all the world’s a stage,” but the entirety of the bard’s lines, which poetically antedate the morphology of History of Spengler and Yockey:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.[1]

Culture as play—the thought is not precisely new, but it is immensely important, and has not been see in its fundamental significance. The “let’s pretend” of the child is the proto-human asserting itself: similarly with savages—they too “pretend” that this action is sacred, will bring favourable consequences, while the other action is evil, will bring disaster. But children growing up in a culture-atmosphere are already vastly above savages, for they KNOW they are playing, while the savages—except for the witchdoctors, the medicine men, the proto-priests—actually believe in the collection of totems and tabus which make up their primitive culture.

***
Francis Parker Yockey on Culture

The drama is the pretense that the artificially arranged events on the boards are real. All of us accept this pretense, most obviously during the performance, and—literature and conversation show—even to a great extent thereafter.

***

Music presupposes the attitude: “Let’s pretend the world of sound is orderly, pleasing, and beautiful—like this: . . .” The inner-world of symbols is then projected into sounds.

***

Religion is the pretense: “We can understand the totality of things, so completely that we can even assign with perfect security that which we cannot understand to an orderly place, under the heading: “Mystery.” Every religion can make everything come out without remainder, because the will-to-play (here, the will-to-believe) is stronger than any mere intellectual weapons—logic, contradiction, etc. —that can be brought against it. Philosophy is religion—except that the compartment for “mystery” is smaller, and progressively less respected. Science is mere fact-ordering until the will-to-play abates to the point were it becomes world-outlook, and then it is the pretense that the sum total of things is nothing but the things themselves.

***

Ethics is the pretense: “We can be as perfect as our play-ideas of perfection if we just observe the right rules.” Thus describes both types of ethic, that aiming at goodness, and that aiming at beauty.

***

Painting is the expression of the play-feeling: “Let’s pretend that landscapes, people and things, really look like this.”

***

Vaihinger’s Philosophy of As If was an early form of the idea of Culture as play.*

* Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933) a scholar of Kant, considered in his primary work Philosophy of As If the vital role of “fictions” —what he called “fictionalism” —in both individual and collective life. Hence the world was not governed by “truth” but by the impact of an idea. For example, we might say that the “value” of Darwin’s evolutionary theory is not that it has been “proven” but that it served the Zeitgeist of 19th-century materialism and English economic theory.

Yockey’s reference to Vaihinger was written in by hand in what seems to have been an after-thought. One might conjecture that he read Vaihinger’s work after having typed the MS, and that it was closely in accord with the idea of life-as-drama that Yockey was propounding.—Ed.

***

The dying out of culture is the dying out of the will-to-play, and its attenuation ever-cruder games. The 19th century society said to itself: “Let’s pretend that we are clockwork figures, and create our codes our buildings, our dances, our inner lives accordingly.” The 20th century says: Let’s pretend we are gangsters”—but what is the gangster—a crude individualist, a savage desocialized, without the tabus of the savage. That is to say, for mere man to pretend to be a savage is no pretense, the game is thin. Almost the only play-element left in the gangsters’ code is the insistence on courage to be observed in the ideal gangster.

***

The 20th century finds the Baroque and the Gothic orientation in architecture silly. It stresses instead the “Principle” that “function must govern form.” This is the ideal also the aborigines of Australia and the Congo. This is the aggressive and deliberate declaration of war on culture. In this architecture is not isolated. In the realm of morale a doctor-quack like Freud, or a prurient statistician like Kinsey can find a hearing as an ethician in the 20th century. Instead of Kant’s magnificent Categorical Imperative, which tells us how we should act, quite regardless of how anyone else does act—again, the will-to-play—we want to know how most people do act, with the latent idea already there: if this is the way people act, then I too can act this way.

***

In warfare, the 19th century—to say nothing of the 18th—still treated war as a game with strictly permitted and forbidden measures, of which the fundamental principle was: civilians are excluded form warfare, both actively an passively: they must not fight, nor may they, as such, be made the object of warfare. This was still culture-warfare. Its last appearance was in the German conduct of the Second World War, and in that same war, it was brought to an end by American primitivity. American fliers, en masse and individually, made war solely against civilians as such, and individual fliers were instructed to murder even isolated civilians. In pursuance of these orders, American fliers murdered civilians fleeing form railroad trains, running in the streets, in parks, working in the fields. From this, there is now way back to culture-warfare.
*

Rousseau is the break with the will-to-play which is synonymous with Culture. With his idealization of the savage, the peasant, the shepherd, the milk-maid, he expresses, on the cultural plane, Culture’s fatigue with itself, Society’s fatigue with the demanding and exhausting game, the ever-intellectualization of the game, and, on the individual plane, the outburst of the jealous and inferior individual with moral indignation and moral hatred directed against that to which he is not equal. In a previous century Rousseau would not have burst out, nor he have been heard. There are always Rousseaus—there is one in every class-room.
*
We today can no longer feel the immensely strong play—urges of Gothic men, the culture-bearers of their time. These knights errant were ready at any time for a significant trifle, to risk their lives. Granted, no actual Parsifal ever lived. Yet the Parsifal ideal was present in generations of knights, rulers and warriors, and worked there formatively, just in our day literary-gangster ideals work formatively. Some respond more than others to ideals, to the Zeitgeist—all respond to some degree.
*
Children play, but know that they play. Culture-man plays, and does not know it. Civilized man consciously revolts against play, but here is still a great deal of historical necessity, i.e., unconscious play, still latent in him, and this he will play out, whether he wants to or not, whether he knows it or not.
*
Play not only makes magic—it is magic. The theatre always works magically: every successful theatrical piece contains the polarization between that which the players instinctively would like to do, and that which for any reason, they feel they should, or should not do.
*
All great men, all higher men, affect us magically. Polarization attracts us, but so does diffusion. We are drawn to the polarized man by our own higher desires, our own wish to do something with our lives above the plane of the proto-human; but so also does the kindly, gently, diffuse man attract—he is soporific, and is as pleasant as the green, sunlit meadow. But the higher man is like the snow-covered mountain peak.
*
Selected from
https://counter-currents.com/2013/09/culture-december-1953/

Julius Evola

 Evola’s political, philosophical and historical teachings were motivated by his traditionalism as a manifestation of what he termed the “revolt against the modern world”. While adhering to the cyclic conception of history Evola added to this the concept of a duality of civilisations categorised as traditional and modern. Evola saw the end cycle of Western civilisation, the beginning of which he ascribed to the Late Medieval period, as the start of the super-cycle of the modern. All those civilisations that had come and gone before were still within the context of the traditional. Evola wrote of the cycles of decline:

“Recently in contrast to the notion of progress and the idea that history has been represented by more or less continuous upward evolution of collective humanity, the idea of a plurality of the forms of civilisation and of a relative incommunicality between them has been confirmed. According to this second and new vision of history, history breaks down into epochs and disconnected cycles. … A civilisation springs up, gradually reaches a culminating point, and falls into darkness and, more often than not, disappears. A cycle has ended….” 118Evola considered this revived cyclic approach to history as “a healthy reaction to the superstition of history as progress”, which was a product of Western materialism. He offered this added dualist dimension however, and cautioned that Spenglerian cyclicism did not offer the entire story. In addition to “a plurality of civilisations”, an historical “duality” should be recognised. “Modern civilisation stands on one side and on the other the entirety of all the civilisations that have preceded it.” For the Western civilisation he put the end of the traditional phase and the beginning of the modern super-cycle as the “late Middle Ages”, when the point of rapture with tradition was complete. Since that time, “modern civilisation” has completely cut itself off from the past. “For the great majority of moderns, that means any possibility of understanding the traditional world has been completely lost”.119In 1938 Evola wrote a synopsis on the traditional approach to history, where he defined traditional and modern civilisations:

“On the one hand there are the traditional cultures… The axis of these cultures and the summit of their hierarchical order consist of metaphysical, supra-individual powers and actions, which serve to inform and justify all that which is merely human, temporal, subject to becoming and to ‘history’. On the other hand there is ‘modern culture’, which is actually anti-tradition and which exhausts itself in a construction of purely human and earthly conditions and in the total development of these, in pursuit of a life entirely detached from the ‘higher world’”.120

While Evola joined the debate over the meaning of “race” in Fascist Italy, when racial zoology suddenly gained momentum as official policy with the publication of the “Manifesto of Race” in 1938, ironically the same year he wrote in a German (that is, “Nazi”) publication an article explaining the traditionalist approach to the question of why civilisations decay. He contended that the “degeneration” of civilisation is not caused by race-crossings, which Hitlerism regards as axiomatic, but rather through the spiritual corruption of the culture-hierarchy from the top down.121Evola begins by repudiating the modernist idea of “progress”, stating that man is not ascending (evolution) but descending from a primordial higher state. One does not go from lower to higher forms. Hence, as we have seen, the widespread belief – or memory - across times, places, and cultures, in the “fall” of man from a mythic “Golden Age”, ascribed to the arrogance of man in defying the Godhead.

“Anyone who has come to reject the rationalist myth of ‘progress’ and the interpretation of history as an unbroken positive development of mankind will find himself gradually drawn towards the world-view that was common to all the great traditional cultures, and which had at its centre the memory of a process of degeneration, slow obscuration, or collapse of a higher preceding world. As we penetrate deeper into this new (and old) interpretation, we encounter various problems, foremost among which is the question of the secret of degeneration”.122Of the theories that have been considered Evola, writing for the Germans, alludes to the classic work of Comte Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of the Human Races, pioneering the doctrine that civilisations collapse through race-mixing. Evola quickly disposes of this by giving a passing nod to the theory, proceeding with a consideration of “a higher order of things” than blood admixture. Evola in reality does more than “expand” de Gobineau’s race-theory with “a few observations”; he disposes of it by pointing out that race-impurity does not explain the unremarkable state of present day Nordic states that have retained their race-purity:

“We can thank the Comte de Gobineau for the best and best-known summary of this problem, and also for a masterly criticism of the main hypotheses about it. His solution on the basis of racial thought and racial purity also has much truth in it, but it needs to be expanded by a few observations concerning a higher order of things. For there have been many cases in which a culture has collapsed even when its race has remained pure, as is especially clear in certain groups that have suffered slow, inexorable extinction despite remaining as racially isolated as if they were islands. An example quite close at hand is the case of the Swedes and the Dutch. These people are in the same racial condition today as they were two centuries ago, but there is little to be found now of the heroic disposition and the racial awareness that they once possessed. Other great cultures seem merely to have remained standing in the condition of mummies: they have long been inwardly dead, so that it takes only the slightest push to knock them down. This was the case, for example, with ancient Peru, that giant solar empire which was annihilated by a few adventurers drawn from the worst rabble of Europe”.123On the other hand there are cultures that Evola refers to as being outwardly motivated by modernism, yet retaining their inner traditional substance. Japan remains the prime example of such a state. One might also say that of Israel. There are also certain Buddhist states in South-east Asia that have materially prospered through the adaptation of modern techniques but have maintained a traditional nexus, as has India, despite these cultures having gone through the full cycles of rise and fall. A remnant lives, and might yet re-enter history in symbiosis with a post-Western civilisation.

Evola sees history unfolding within the great cosmic ages or yugas over vast expanses of time, and all the civilisations known to modern man as only decaying remnants of a long lost primordial civilisation. Hence, the history we know today is that of the fall of man over cycles of decline, interrupted by civilisations that have sought to maintain the cosmos connexion, but still subject to cyclic decay. Hence there are cycles of rise and fall within a great cosmic cycle; wheels within a great cosmic wheel. This outlook differs from the historical morphology of Spengler and others who work within more ordinary time-frames, yet both have broad features in common.

Evola sees “the whole of history as degeneration”, repudiating the notion of both historical and biological evolution, and the chimera of “progress”. Rather, the course of history is one of “involution”:

“From the standpoint of the latter, the whole of history is degeneration, because it shows the universal decline of earlier cultures of the traditional type, and the decisive and violent rise of a new universal civilization of the ‘modern’ type. A double question arises from this.”

“First, how was it ever possible for this to come to pass? There is a logical error underlying the whole doctrine of evolution: it is impossible that the higher can emerge from the lower, and the greater from the less. But doesn’t a similar difficulty face us in the solution of the doctrine of involution? How is it ever possible for the higher to fall? If we could make do with simple analogies, it would be easy to deal with this question. A healthy man can become sick; a virtuous one can turn to vice. There is a natural law that everyone takes for granted: that every living being starts with birth, growth, and strength, then come old age, weakening, and disintegration. And so forth. But this is just making statements, not explaining, even if we allow that such analogies actually relate to the question posed here.”

“Secondly, it is not only a matter of explaining the possibility of the degeneration of a particular cultural world, but also the possibility that the degeneration of one cultural cycle may pass to other peoples and take them down with it. For example, we have not only to explain how the ancient Western reality collapsed, but also have to show the reason why it was possible for ‘modern’ culture to conquer practically the whole world, and why it possessed the power to divert so many peoples from any other type of culture, and to hold sway even where states of a traditional kind seemed to be alive (one need only recall the Aryan East).”

“In this respect, it is not enough to say that we are dealing with a purely material and economic conquest. That view seems very superficial, for two reasons. In the first place, a land that is conquered on the material level also experiences, in the long run, influences of a higher kind corresponding to the cultural type of its conqueror. We can state, in fact, that European conquest almost everywhere sows the seeds of ‘Europeanization,’ i.e., the ‘modern’ rationalist, tradition-hostile, individualistic way of thinking. Secondly, the traditional conception of culture and the state is hierarchical, not dualistic. Its bearers could never subscribe, without severe reservations, to the principles of ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ and ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ For us, ‘Tradition’ is the victorious and creative presence in the world of that which is ‘not of this world,’ i.e., of the Spirit, understood as a power that is mightier than any merely human or material one”.124Although Evola was writing in 1938, this “modern world” is now a global hegemony, reaching every corner of the globe. The World War which came a year later resulted in the triumph of decadence over the remnants of tradition. Now we see the present “clash of civilisations”, as it has been called by American geopolitical theorists, where the remnants of a long fellaheen – historically passé - Islam trying to resist encroachments on what remains of their cultures. As we shall see near our conclusion, American policy-makers are overt in seeing America as having a world-mission in destroying all vestiges of tradition in the name of “progress”.

“This is a basic idea of the authentically traditional view of life, which does not permit us to speak with contempt of merely material conquests. On the contrary, the material conquest is the sign, if not of a spiritual victory, at least of a spiritual weakness or a kind of spiritual ‘retreat’ in the cultures that are conquered and lose their independence. Everywhere that the Spirit, regarded as the stronger power, was truly present, it never lacked for means - visible or otherwise - to enable all the opponent’s technical and material superiority to be resisted. But this has not happened. It must be concluded, then, that degeneracy was lurking behind the traditional facade of every people that the ‘modern’ world has been able to conquer. The West must then have been the culture in which a crisis that was already universal assumed its acutest form. There the degeneration amounted, so to speak, to a knockout blow, and as it took effect, it brought down with more or less ease other peoples in whom the involution had certainly not ‘progressed’ as far, but whose tradition had already lost its original power, so that these peoples were no longer able to protect themselves from an outside assault.”125The Late Western perspective of history is that of a line of evolution from primitive to modern, culminating in the “end of history” when the world adopts liberal-democracy and free trade. The traditional perspective sees history as the waxing and waning of civilisations, each self-contained, going through analogous life-cycles of rise and fall. The two outlooks are reflections of differences in perceptions of time; the “modern” linear, the traditional cyclic. Traditional societies are premised on maintaining a connexion with the divine. The modern outlook sees this as superstition, but “progress” has become as much a religion as any form of mysticism. The “modern” road to “utopia” is through universal happiness achieved by material prosperity, and man need look for no higher purpose, state apologists such as Fukuyama. The traditional society saw human purpose not as the achieving of an elusive “happiness” based on fads but the fulfilment of one’s cosmic duty (dharma) as an integral part of a holistic order.

Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Kerry Bolton 

Kerry Bolton - The Value of Tradition

 

Our “progressive” obsessions for change neglect to consider consequences. Change is demanded for the sake of a fad or a slogan: “equality”, “democracy”, “reproductive rights”... Even a word of caution is damned as “reactionary”, “old fashioned”, or “fascist”. Traditions, customs, beliefs, are regarded as being as transient as the planned obsolescence of computers. Carl Jung made the point that Western man’s psyche is not keeping pace with his technology. The levels of our unconscious are multi-layered, reaching back to primordial existence, yet Western technology has exponentially leaped ahead leaving behind any anchorage of tradition. That is called “progress”. Jung wrote of this:

“Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The ‘newsness’ of the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no place in what is new. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in things that have just come into being. We are certainly far from having finished with the middle ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless we have plunged into a cataract of progress which sweeps us into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it take us from our ranks. The less we understand of what our forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts”. 154Konrad Lorenz, the father of the science of ethology, the study of animal instinct, gave a warning from an ecological viewpoint, that the abandonment of customs and traditions is steeped with dangers which are likely to be unforeseen. Culture is “cumulative tradition”.155 It is knowledge passed through generations, preserved as belief or custom. The deep wisdom accrued by our ancestors, because it might be wrapped in the protection of religions and myths, is discounted by the “modern” as “superstitious” and “unscientific”. Lorenz referred to the “enormous underestimation of our nonrational, cultural fund, and the equal overestimation of all that man is able to produce with his intellect” as factors “threatening our civilization with destruction”. “Being enlightened is no reason for confronting transmitted tradition with hostile arrogance”, stated Lorenz. Writing at a time when the New Left was rampant, as it is today under other names, Lorenz observed that the attitude of youth towards parents shows a great deal of “conceited contempt but no understanding”.156 Lorenz perceived a great deal of the psychosis of the Left as a pathogen in the social organism, as it remains today: “The revolt of modern youth is founded on hatred; a hatred closely related to an emotion that is most dangerous and difficult to overcome: national hatred. In other words, today’s rebellious youth reacts to the older generation in the same way that an ‘ethnic’ group reacts to a foreign, hostile one”.157What is of interest is that Lorenz saw this as a youth subculture that was tantamount to a separate, foreign ethnos, when a group forms around its own rites, dress, manners and norms. In the biological sciences this is called “pseudospeciation”. With this new group identity comes a “corresponding devaluation of the symbols” of other cultural units.158 The obsession with all that is regarded as “new” among the youth revolt was described by Lorenz as “physiological neophilia”. While this is necessary to prevent stagnation, it is normally gradual and followed by a return to tradition. Such a balance however is easily upset.159 Fixation as the stage of neophilia in the psychology of individuals results in behavioural abnormalities such as vindictive resentment towards long-dead parents.160This lack of respect for tradition is aggravated by the breakdown of traditional social hierarchy, mass organisation and “a money-grabbing race against itself”161 that dominates the Late West.

Since Lorenz wrote of these symptoms of Western decay during the 1970s the Western social organism has increasingly fractured. There are now the presence, vastly greater than in Lorenz’s time, of actual ethnoi that have no attachment to the West, but maintain a great resentment. There is also further pseudospeciation among women in terms of radical feminism and “gays”, possessing their own manners, rites, dress, terms of speech, and even their own flags and other symbols. They are united in their hatred of the West, which is often denigrated as “white patriarchy”; with its symbols being torn down162 and its heroes ridiculed as “dead white males”.

154 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 235-236.

155 Lorenz, 61.

156 Ibid., 64.

157 Lorenz, 64.

158 Lorenz, 64-65.

159 Lorenz, 69.

160 Lorenz, 69-70.

161 Lorenz, 73.

162 Such as the destruction of Confederate monuments in the USA, as this is being written.

From: The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by

Dr Kerry R Bolton

Degenerative Culture or that the Jewish culture-organism is foreign to the Western culture-organism should be axiomatic and stated without accusations of “anti-Semitism”

“You’d have to be a recent immigrant from Outer Mongolia not to know of the role that people with Jewish names play in the coarsening of our culture. Almost every American knows this. It is just that most gentiles are too polite to mention it … The sad fact is that through Jewish actors, playwrights, and producers, the Berlin stage of Weimar Germany linked Jews and deviant sexuality in all its sordid manifestations just as surely as Broadway does today. Much of the filth in American entertainment today parallels that of Germany between the wars”. — Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Toward Tradition, January 2005. 47

One thinks of a “hero” in terms of Thomas Carlyle’s study on the role of the heroic individual in shaping history,48 what has been called “heroic vitalism”. In former generations the hero was typically a saint, soldier, empire builder, someone who lived or died for a higher purpose than the self. The definition is that of transcendent self-sacrifice.

The state of cultural decay is indicated by the types who are elevated into the status of today’s “role models”, especially for the young. They are Anti-Heroes. The definition is the antithesis of the Hero. The Anti-Hero one of lives for him or herself alone. Hedonism is the lifestyle, narcissism the temperament. The outlook benefits consumer capitalism, as it translates economically into a never-ending thirst for acquisition. This situation is concomitant with the general degradation of social morality, where self-indulgence is elevated into virtue, and immediate gratification is expected.

Paradoxically, this heralding of selfishness as the path to “happiness” as the purpose of life has resulted in a contagion of drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide, and mass medication and therapy for psychiatric disturbances. The self-quest for happiness has resulted in nothing but dissatisfaction and unfulfilled searches for meaning. The most discontented, the drug, pill and alcohol ridden, neurotic and narcissistic, are heralded as role models who symbolise and epitomise “success” in the Late West: the movie and music “stars”. It is no coincidence that they also happen to be overwhelmingly “liberals”, eagerly jumping on the bandwagon of every transient “feel-good” cause, while Hollywood has from its founding been one of centres for the spread of global spiritual-syphilis.

Hollywood has for generations defined “American culture”, which through globalisation has long become synonymous with “Western culture”. However, “Western culture” has been deconstructed and redefined by a foreign culture-organism. Hollywood is what Jewish commentators have referred to as “their empire”, where Jewish movie moguls were from the start of the motion picture industry able to define the “American Dream”.49 In the realm of music Sumner Redstone’s Viacom and MTV are at the apex.

The character of the USA was redefined by Emma Lazarus, whose poem, “The New Colossus” (1883) adorns the Statue of Liberty, to greet “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore”, and by Israel Zangwill with his play “The Melting Pot” (1908). Both were ardent Zionists who did not endorse multiculturalism among Jews. That is for Western consumption.50

Such influence is not a “conspiracy”; it is a natural occurrence when one wilful, vital culture exists within another, whether it is the British in India or the Spanish in Peru. Whether such an influence is positive or negative, symbiotic and complementary or destructive, depends on the culture organisms involved. Gumilev regarded the Jewish culture-organism as a perennially foreign element51 whose influence causes the “zig-zagging”, or distortion, of a culture’s life-path.

The Jews as a nomadic people, albeit unified across the world by a traditional axis mundi (Jerusalem) and religion, have been a catalyst for the breakdown of national consciousness among other peoples. Their nomadism makes them natural agents for internationalist ideologies, whether of the capitalist or socialist varieties. Other nomads, such as the steppes peoples of Russia and central Asia, have an ecological niche and have the potentiality to form nations and empires. Jews do not have an ecological niche, and remain wanderers, which is not to say that Jews per se are innately incapable of being absorbed into Western culture. Such absorption however has been fanatically resisted by the rabbinate and more recently by Zionism, as explained by the heretical Jewish scholar Dr. Israel Shahak.52

Degenerative Culture

“You’d have to be a recent immigrant from Outer Mongolia not to know of the role that people with Jewish names play in the coarsening of our culture. Almost every American knows this. It is just that most gentiles are too polite to mention it … The sad fact is that through Jewish actors, playwrights, and producers, the Berlin stage of Weimar Germany linked Jews and deviant sexuality in all its sordid manifestations just as surely as Broadway does today. Much of the filth in American entertainment today parallels that of Germany between the wars”. — Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Toward Tradition, January 2005. 47

One thinks of a “hero” in terms of Thomas Carlyle’s study on the role of the heroic individual in shaping history, 48what has been called “heroic vitalism”. In former generations the hero was typically a saint, soldier, empire builder, someone who lived or died for a higher purpose than the self. The definition is that of transcendent self-sacrifice. 

The state of cultural decay is indicated by the types who are elevated into the status of today’s “role models”, especially for the young. They are Anti-Heroes. The definition is the antithesis of the Hero. The Anti-Hero one of lives for him or herself alone. Hedonism is the lifestyle, narcissism the temperament. The outlook benefits consumer capitalism, as it translates economically into a never-ending thirst for acquisition. This situation is concomitant with the general degradation of social morality, where self-indulgence is elevated into virtue, and immediate gratification is expected. 

Paradoxically, this heralding of selfishness as the path to “happiness” as the purpose of life has resulted in a contagion of drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide, and mass medication and therapy for psychiatric disturbances. The self-quest for happiness has resulted in nothing but dissatisfaction and unfulfilled searches for meaning. The most discontented, the drug, pill and alcohol ridden, neurotic and narcissistic, are heralded as role models who symbolise and epitomise “success” in the Late West: the movie and music “stars”. It is no coincidence that they also happen to be overwhelmingly “liberals”, eagerly jumping on the bandwagon of every transient “feel-good” cause, while Hollywood has from its founding been one of centres for the spread of global spiritual-syphilis. 

Hollywood has for generations defined “American culture”, which through globalisation has long become synonymous with “Western culture”. However, “Western culture” has been deconstructed and redefined by a foreign culture-organism. Hollywood is what Jewish commentators have referred to as “their empire”, where Jewish movie moguls were from the start of the motion picture industry able to define the “American Dream”. 49In the realm of music Sumner Redstone’s Viacom and MTV are at the apex. 

The character of the USA was redefined by Emma Lazarus, whose poem, “The New Colossus” (1883) adorns the Statue of Liberty, to greet “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore”, and by Israel Zangwill with his play “The Melting Pot” (1908). Both were ardent Zionists who did not endorse multiculturalism among Jews. That is for Western consumption. 50

Such influence is not a “conspiracy”; it is a natural occurrence when one wilful, vital culture exists within another, whether it is the British in India or the Spanish in Peru. Whether such an influence is positive or negative, symbiotic and complementary or destructive, depends on the culture organisms involved. Gumilev regarded the Jewish culture-organism as a perennially foreign element 51whose influence causes the “zig-zagging”, or distortion, of a culture’s life-path. 

The Jews as a nomadic people, albeit unified across the world by a traditional axis mundi (Jerusalem) and religion, have been a catalyst for the breakdown of national consciousness among other peoples. Their nomadism makes them natural agents for internationalist ideologies, whether of the capitalist or socialist varieties. Other nomads, such as the steppes peoples of Russia and central Asia, have an ecological niche and have the potentiality to form nations and empires. Jews do not have an ecological niche, and remain wanderers, which is not to say that Jews per se are innately incapable of being absorbed into Western culture. Such absorption however has been fanatically resisted by the rabbinate and more recently by Zionism, as explained by the heretical Jewish scholar Dr. Israel Shahak.52

When traditional dynastic states were broken down and capitalism arose, eroding the authority of the landed aristocracy and the Church, Jews became “harbingers of political and economic change”. 53 The “court Jew” became a feature of the rulership of Europe. There were “several hundred”, who shaped the emerging capitalist economies, according to Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz,54. The Reformation and the English Revolution accelerated the process. Of the latter, Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, leader of Jewish community in The Netherlands, addressed an appeal for the re-admission of the Jews to England to Oliver Cromwell, whose Puritans had established their tyranny in the name of “liberty”. England would gain by Jewish migration because of “Profit”. “It is a thing confirmed, that merchandizing is, as it were, the proper profession of the Nation of the Jews”. Because God had taken the Jews from Israel, as a “chastisement”, and they were a people without a land, their protection was in their “Riches and possessions”, which they could put at the disposal of a nation’s ruler. 55From Italy, Germany, Holland, Poland, Turkey, Egypt, etc., the Jews had profited those places through their international commerce. Hence the Jews are “a Plant worthy to be planted in the whole world, and received into Populous cities…” 56The Jewish people thrive during the Late civilisation epochs where Money and City have displaced Faith and Land. While Jews, despite allegations throughout history to the contrary, are not the cause of this culture-crisis, it is the Late epoch during which they are positioned to take advantage, which is why we see Jews in prominence especially in the USA, reshaping politics, economics and culture as a people of four thousand years duration amidst a state of 240 years duration.

That the Jewish culture-organism is foreign to the Western culture-organism should be axiomatic and stated without accusations of “anti-Semitism”. Theodor Herzl founded Zionism precisely on the assumption that Jews are unable, and indeed must not, assimilate into Western society, or any other. Although the Old Testament shows that foreign culture-organisms assimilated into the Hebrew this was undertaken entirely on Israelites terms, as conquerors. No “zig-zagging” of the Israelite culture-mission and identity was tolerated. 

As an unassimilated foreign body the Jewish intelligentsia deconstructs Western culture. When Carl Jung broke with his mentor Sigmund Freud, this was a conflict between antithetical world-views: the Western and the Jewish. Laurens van der Post wrote of the breach:

“Sex, however important was only part of the story. From there arose his [Jung’s] first great and ineradicable difference with Freud. To illustrate it at its most immediate and simple level, he could no more see a great Gothic spire, soaring above the finest of medieval cathedral achievement’s, as merely a phallic symbol, than mistake a horse for a mule”. 57Eminent Jewish historian Dr. Howard Sachar, wrote that the primary motivation of pioneer Freudians was,

“the unconscious desire of Jews to unmask the respectability of the European society which closed them out. There was no more effective way of doing this than by dredging up from the human psyche… sordid and infantile sexual aberrations… Even Jews who were not psychiatrists must have taken pleasure in the feat of social equalisation performed by Freud’s ‘new thinking.’ The B’nai B’rith Lodge of Vienna, for example, delighted in listening to Freud air his theories …” 58

When the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in Weimar Germany synthesised Freud with Marx into the “sex-pol” (“sexual politics”) ideology and were sponsored as Jewish refugees from Hitlerism to re-locate to Columbia University, and to the Institute of Social Research, New York, their doctrine under various permutations promptly became a primary method for the deconstruction of Western culture, and particularly of Western man. 59

47 Daniel Lapin, “Jews have Debased American and Jewish Culture”.

48 Thomas Carlyle, 1840.

49 Neal Gabler, 1988.

50 K. R. Bolton, Babel Inc. , 135-147.

51Lev Gumiliev, Dreviania Rus’ I veliaia step’, 2004. See Mark Bassin, The Gumilev Mystique, passim.

52 Israel Shahak, 1994.

53 Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (ed.) 1980, 7.

54 Ibid.

55 Menasseh ben Israel “To His Highnesse the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland (1655)”; in Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, 9.

56 Menasseh ben Israel, Ibid., 10.

57 Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time.

58 H. Sachar, 1991, 400-401.

59K. R. Bolton, “‘Sex Pol’ Ideology: The Influence of the Freudian-Marxist Synthesis on Politics and Society”, 329-355.

From The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by

Dr Kerry R Bolton

"Pathocracy" - Bolton on Lobaczewski’s Political Ponerology

 

The Polish clinical psychologist Dr Andrew M Lobaczewski adopted a Greek term ‘ponerology’ (poeneros =evil)[69] to name his psycho-historical study of the affects of psychopathy on society, history and politics. Ponerology therefore appears to be analogous to Psychohistory developed in the USA. Lobaczewski along with a team of psychologists covertly studied the role of psychopaths in Communist Poland. 

Lobaczewski’s Political Ponerology

Lobaczewski’s manuscript for the book Political Ponerology

 went through a circuitous process before being published in the 1980s in Canada. Lobaczewski destroyed the first draft after he was warned a few minutes before a search by State authorities. The second draft was given to an American tourist for delivery to a Vatican dignitary, but Lobaczewski was not able to discover anything further of it. Statistical material and case studies were thereby lost, and the third draft had to be written by Lobaczewski from memory in general terms when he arrived in the USA. [70] Then there were problems finding a publisher in the USA, and Lobaczewski was surprised by the extent of the influence of the American Left.[71]

Lobaczewski came to the same conclusions as Max Nordau and Lothrop Stoddard: 

To individuals with various psychological deviations, the social structure dominated by normal people and their conceptual world appears to be a ‘system of force and oppression’. Psychopaths reach such a conclusion as a rule. If, at the same time, a good deal of injustice does in fact exist in a given society, pathological feelings of unfairness and suggestive statements emanating from deviants may then be easily propagated among both groups[72] although each group has completely different reasons for favoring such ideas.[73]

Leftist political doctrines serve as a means of recreating the world after the image of the psychopath, in the name of ‘justice’, while overthrowing those normal social laws, rules and morals that the psychopath regards as insufferable oppression.

In the psychopath, a dream emerges like some Utopia of a ‘happy’ world and a social system which does not reject them or force them to submit to laws and customs whose meaning is incomprehensible to them. They dream of a world in which their simple and radical way of experiencing and perceiving the world would dominate, where they would, of course, be assured safety and prosperity. In this Utopian dream they imagine that those ‘others’, different, but also more technically skilful than they are, should be put to work to achieve this goal for the psychopaths and others of their kin.[74]

Lobaczewski points out that psychopaths quickly realise the effects of their personalities in traumatising normal people, and they are able to use this as a means of reaching goals through terror.[75] This explains why such small groups of psychopaths can lead vast multitudes of normal people through the imposition of terror. ‘Subordinating a normal person to psychologically abnormal individuals has severe and deforming effects on his or her personality: it engenders trauma and neuroses.[76] 

On an individual basis, one might observe the effects on a normal person living with a sociopathic spouse: that normal individual will probably eventually suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, or other forms of neurosis that can be severe. When psychopaths assume total rule over an entire nation, or even over a small group, the negative influence of the psychopath is thereby extended using politics or religion as a control mechanism. This influence is readily observable in a cult, but the same factors are at work in politics.

Among the categories that Lobaczewski describes is pathological egotism, in which the individual represses anything of a self-critical nature. Lobaczewski relates this to deformities or injuries of the brain, as a symptom of prefrontal characteropathy.[77] He ascribed this condition to Lenin. As we shall see, the condition relates as well to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Leon Trotsky, et al.Ponerogenic Associations

Lobaczewski was describing the effects of individual psychosis on groups and entire states, with ideologies used as a mask for psychotic aims. This involves the formation of movements and the fermentation of revolts or riots in the name of some high sounding ideal. Lobaczewski writes of this:

It is a common phenomenon for a ponerogenic association or group to contain a particular ideology which always justifies its activities and furnishes motivational propaganda. Even a small-time gang of hoodlums has its own melodramatic ideology and pathological romanticism. Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one’s consciousness and critical faculties, whether one’s own or those of others.

If such a ponerogenic union could be stripped of its ideology nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive. [78]

The ponerogenic association and the doctrine that is developed to justify it is formulated and supported by individuals who sublimate their own psychological failings and free themselves from the need to abide by normal moral principles[79] The process was at work in the terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany and the Weather Underground in the USA, who undertook criminal actions in the name of ideology. Andrea Baader was a common criminal before adopting communist doctrine to enhance his life as a sociopath. Donald DeFreeze, the founder of the 1970s communist terrorists in the USA, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), was a violent criminal before intellectualising his criminality with communist doctrine. He started his criminal career at the age of 14 as a gang member in New York, and was serving a sentence in Soledad Prison, California, for armed robbery, when he adopted Leftist doctrine. He had once robbed a prostitute of $10 and had turned a friend into the police. Those who knew him in prison regarded him as an unimpressive thug. DeFreeze escaped from Vacaville Prison in 1973, and while a fugitive founded the SLA.[80] 

Despite its ideological pretensions, SLA continued serving as little more than a gang of bank robbers and kidnappers behind the mask of fighting for ‘equality’. One of the first actions of the SLA was to murder Oakland School Superintendent Marcus A Foster in November 1973 because of his endorsement of mandatory student identification cards to control juvenile crime.[81] To a sociopath such as DeFreeze such measures would indeed represent ‘injustice’, and the killing of an authority figure could be rationalised as the elimination of an oppressor. 

Considering the premises established by Lobaczewski, Nordau and Stoddard, and the techniques of both Ponerology and Psychohistory, most forms of Leftism over the past several hundred years can be seen as the sublimated masks for individuals who would in other circumstances be thieves, rapists, sadists, and murderers. With the extremist notion that the ‘end justifies the means’, and, for example, that lying and any type of deceit are justified in the pursuit of the ideal, the psychopath is given a heroic and noble sanction. Such documents as The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, or Mao’s Little Red Book and the multitude of high-sounding manifestoes issued by the Baader-Meinhoff Gang or Weather Underground are the declarations of a psychopathic war against society, or what Lothrop Stoddard called the ‘revolt against civilisation’. In this credo of the Left, morality, religion and truth are regarded as nothing more than the props of the bourgeoisie. Lobaczewski maintained that gangs, mafias and mobs[82] are of the same type as a communist group.A phenomenon common to such groups is the loss of the individual member to perceive psychotic traits in their leaders; or the ‘atrophy of natural critical faculties’. Psychotic behaviour becomes interpreted as heroism.[83] One might think immediately of the heroic qualities bestowed upon charismatic psychopaths such as Jim Jones or Charles Manson, yet the same process is at work in glorifying the actions of certain political leaders and ponerogenic associations.

Pathocracy

Lobaczewski chose[84] the word pathocracy to describe a state that is run by psychopaths:

I shall accept the denomination of pathocracy for a system of government thus created, wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people. The name thus selected, above all, emphasizes the basic quality of the macrasocial psychopathological phenomenon, and differentiates it from the many possible social systems dominated by normal people’s structure, custom, and law.[85]

Lobaczewski ascribes the origins of pathocracies to ‘a disease of great social movements’ that infects ‘entire societies, nations, and empires’.[86] The origin of pathocracies and ponerogenic associations among those of a common psychopathic mentality explains their similarity through history.[87] 

The ponerogenic doctrine expounds the ‘end as justifying the means’, and such rationalisations for extreme actions of a psychopathic character open the way for psychopaths to enact their tendencies in the name of ideals. An ideology thereby becomes ‘useful for the purposes’ of liberating the psychopath ‘from the uncomfortable pressure of normal human custom’. Every great social movement can thereby become ‘a host upon which some pathocracy initiates its parasitic life’. Hence a great social movement might have been marked by psychopathic traits from its start, or might have been subsequently taken over by psychopaths. [88] An example of this is the original Labour movement that began with noble and necessary aims, which was taken over by Marxist and other ponerogenic doctrines and associations. 

From: The Psychotic Left

From Jacobin France to the Occupy movement

by Kerry Bolton