The Ideology of Sameness

   ‘I regard the history of the world, and that of societies, as being fully interpretable in accordance with two major principles: the principle of equalisation and that of differentiation (i.e. the propensity for similarity and the tendency to be different), which are always connected through constant relations of re-balancing, (genuine, fake, symbolic or real) compensation, or consolation’, writes sociologist Paul Yonnet.16 

I personally share this point of view, which is why I think that, lurking behind the egalitarian rhetoric, one must actually distinguish something else: a rising aspiration for homogeneity, for the resorption of all differences — the rise of what one could term the ‘ideology of Sameness’.

The ideology of Sameness unfolds from what all men have in common. In fact, it unfurls by only taking into account their commonalities and interpreting them as being the Same. In the absence of a precise criterion allowing it to be assessed in a more specific manner, equality is but another way of referring to Sameness. The ideology of Sameness thus presents universal human equality as being equality per se, remaining disconnected from any concrete element that would actually make it possible to ascertain or invalidate such equality. To put things more simply, the ideology of Sameness surfaces as soon as equality is (wrongly) posited as a synonym for Sameness. It is an ideology that is allergic to anything that specifies, one which interprets any distinction as potentially devaluing and considers all differences to be incidental, transitory, inessential or secondary. Its driving force is the notion of the Unique, with the latter defined as anything that cannot bear otherness and that aims to reduce everything to a state of unity: one God, one civilisation, and one line of thought. Nowadays, the ideology of Sameness remains largely prevalent, acting simultaneously as the fundamental norm (in the Kelsenian sense of the Grundnorm17  ) — i.e. as one from which all the others stem — and the unique norm of a norm-less era refusing to experience any other norms.

This ideology is meant to be both descriptive and normative, since it presents the fundamental identity of all men as both an established fact and a desirable and achievable objective — without ever (or rarely) questioning the origin of the gap that separates the existing state of affairs from future reality. It thus seems to proceed from what actually is to what should be. In reality, however, it is on the basis of its own normativity, of its own conception of what should be, that it postulates an imaginary unitary being, a simple reflection of the mentality that inspires it.

Insofar as it emphasises the fundamental identity of individuals, of course, the ideology of Sameness comes up against everything that, in real life, actually sets them apart. It thus finds itself compelled to explain that these differences are but secondary and fundamentally insignificant specifications. Men may well differ in appearance, but are nonetheless essentially the same. Essence and existence are thus disconnected, as are the soul and the body, spirit and matter, and even rights and duties (the former stemming from the attributes of ‘human nature’ and the latter only performed within a social relationship and in a specific context). Concrete existence is then nothing more than a deceptive embellishment, one that prevents you from perceiving the essential. It thus follows that the ideology of Sameness itself is not unitary in its postulate at all. Heir to both the Platonic myth of the cave and to the theological distinction between the created and the uncreated, it is dualistic in terms of structure and inspiration, in the sense that it can only convey the perspective of Sameness by relying on something that is foreign to diversity or that actually transcends it.

To eradicate diversity and guide humanity back to political and social unity through its profane formulations, the ideology of Sameness usually resorts to theories that identify the social superstructure, the effects of domination, and the influence of upbringing or the environment as the very source of the distinctions that it regards as a transitory and temporary evil. (Note, in passing, that the theories in question identify the immediate causes of the state of affairs that they deplore, without ever wondering about the cause of these causes, that is to say, about their original source and the reasons why they never cease to re-emerge). Evil (fons et origo malorum18  ) is thus said to be external to man, as if the exterior were not, most and foremost, a product of the interior. By modifying the external causes, one could thus alter man’s inner core, or even bring out his true ‘nature’. In order to achieve this, one alternatively makes use of authoritarian and coercive methods, social conditioning or counter-conditioning, and ‘dialogue’ and ‘appeals to reason’, never achieving better results in one case than in the other and with failure always attributed not to erroneous starting assumptions, but to the ever-insufficient character of the means employed. The underlying vision is that of a pacified or ideal society, or, at the very least, that of a society rendered ‘just’ as soon as one has removed the external contingencies that impede the advent of Sameness.

The ideology of Sameness was initially formulated on a theological level, surfacing in the West through the Christian notion that all men, regardless of their personal characteristics and of the specific context of their actual existence, are endowed with a soul as part of an equal relationship with God. All men are thus, by their very nature, equal when it comes to the honour of having been created in the image of the one single God. And that is precisely why Christian society, no matter how diverse it may have managed to remain over the ages, revolves around a specific ideal, namely that of the Oneness of the collective body (and power). Hence this observation made by Hannah Arendt:19 

Such is the monotheistic representation of God — of God, in whose image man is supposed to have been created. Hence only man can exist, men only being, after all, a more or less successful repetition of the Same.20 

The corollary, which was developed in great detail by Saint Augustine, is that of a humanity fundamentally defined as one single whole, all of whose elements are said to be destined to advance in the same direction by achieving an ever-increasing convergence. This is the Christian root of the notion of progress. When applied to our world on earth through the slow process of secularisation, this idea gives birth to that of a rationale that is common to all (‘one complete whole in every one of us’, Descartes would say), one that every man would partake in as a result of his very humanity. ‘Thanks to this representation of a single world history’, writes Hannah Arendt once again, ‘the multiplicity of men is melted into one single human individual known as humanity.’21 

This here is, of course, not the right place for us to analyse the very manner in which the ideology of Sameness has given rise, within Western culture, to all those normative/repressive strategies described by Michel Foucault.22  Let us simply bear in mind that over the course of its historical development, the nation-state has always been less concerned with integrating than with assimilating, that is to say, with the purpose of further reducing differences by standardising society as a whole. This process was taken further and accelerated by the French Revolution of 1789, a revolution which, ever faithful to geometrical logic, decreed the abolishment of all the intermediary bodies that the Old Regime had allowed to exist. Henceforth, one was merely willing to acknowledge the existence of humanity and, simultaneously, that of a citizenship whose very exercise is conceived of as one’s participation in the universality of public affairs. Jews thus became ‘citizens like any others’ and women ‘men like any others’. Whatever defined them specifically, be it their belonging to a given gender or to a given people, was deemed non-existent or required to be kept invisible by remaining confined to the private sphere. Marcel Gauchet23  remarks:

Spawned by the age of heteronomy, the configuration of Oneness would hence be destined to govern even the most extreme versions of autonomy. The preeminent commitment that the future will be imbued with is thus that of the restoration or establishment of collective unity … From this angle, the primary ideological concern can be summarised as follows: to find a way to generate the collective Oneness once produced by religion using non-religious means.24 

The main modern ideologies would, in point of fact, alternatively fantasise about the unification of the world by means of the market, about a ‘homogeneous’ society purged of all ‘foreign’ social negativity, and about a humanity that is at peace with itself, having at long last rediscovered all that defines its essence. The political ideal would thus be rooted in the gradual erasure of all those borders that arbitrarily separate men: we would thus call ourselves ‘citizens of the world’, as if the ‘world’ were (or could ever be) a political entity — which it is not.

The ideology of Sameness, however, did more than just lay the theoretical foundations of egalitarianism. Indeed, it also enabled the emergence of colonialism (in the name of the right of the most advanced ones on the road towards human convergence to bring about the ‘progress’ of those that were lagging behind on the path to progress), while simultaneously legitimising, within different states, the use of repression against all kinds of individuals that allegedly deviated from the ‘general’ standards. In the age of modernity, this tendency towards homogeneity was taken to the extreme in totalitarian societies by a central power asserting itself as the only possible source of legitimacy. And in Western post-modern societies, the same result has been achieved through the universalisation of the logic of profit and global commodification. It is a gentler yet more effective process: indeed, the degree of homogeneity characterising present-day Western societies greatly exceeds that of the totalitarian societies of the previous century.

The universalist ambition, which tends towards unity, always correlates with individualism, which, in turn, leads to separation and dissociation. The ideology that strives the most for the unification of the world is therefore also the very same one that triggers the greatest possible disunion. Such is the most flagrant contradiction engendered by the ideology of Sameness. The universalist aim is thus inevitably linked to individualism, as it can only present humanity as one fundamental whole by envisioning it as a composite of individual atoms, all of which are viewed as abstractly as possible, that is to say, completely out of context (‘soil-less’) and beyond all mediation, thus ultimately defined as both substitutable and interchangeable — which is why it aims to bring about the disappearance of all that separates the individual from humanity, namely popular cultures, intermediary bodies, and differentiated lifestyles. One thus readily understands the importance of not confusing the notion of difference with that of division. It is by eradicating differences and destroying the latter’s very source, namely flexible structures (which also differ, and within which these differences fall), that the ideology of Sameness extends its hold. Targeting any differences organised in accordance with an organic principle, it simultaneously arouses fragmentation and division. In the absence of any integrative framework, the feverish excitement surrounding the ambition of Oneness leads to the dissolution of social cohesion.

It is thus perfectly logical that the rise of individualism, which liberals are ever so pleased with, has brought about the advent of the welfare state, whose emergence they now lament. The more community structures collapsed, the more the state had to take charge of people’s protection. Conversely, the more it guaranteed their protection, the more it exempted them from ‘maintaining family-related or community-related ties that had previously been the source of indispensable protections’,25  thus fostering assistantship and irresponsibility. A dialectical movement and vicious circle thus ensue: on the one hand, our differentiated society is now unravelling, and on the other, the homogenising state is advancing at the same pace as individualism itself. The greater the number of isolated individuals, the more uniformly they are treated by the state.

In constant competition and opposition with each other, the great modern ideologies have, as a result of their clashes, further aggravated the divisions and dissociations triggered by the spread of individualism. This paradoxical result has, however, only served to stimulate them in their ambition: faced with the spectre of ‘anarchy’ and ‘social dissolution’, with class struggle, civil war and social anomie, they argued with even greater ardour in favour of present alignment and future levelling. Once again, Marcel Gauchet remarks:

Even those who strive to highlight the very scope and inexpiable character of the antagonisms plaguing their contemporary societies do so in order to emphasise, by means of contrast, the promise to resolve the contradictions held by the future. This is typical of Marx. Bearing witness to the convulsions and heartbreaks of the present thus only strengthens one’s faith in, and hope for, the coming unity.26 

The problem is that the ideology of Sameness is bound to demand the radical exclusion of all that cannot be reduced to such Sameness. Irreconcilable otherness thus becomes the primary enemy, one that must be eradicated once and for all. Such is the motivation of all totalitarian ideologies — the elimination of all those ‘redundant men’ who, owing to their very existence, impede the advent of a homogeneous society or unified world. Whosoever speaks in the name of ‘humanity’ inevitably excludes his adversaries from it.

The contradictory logic espoused by both universalism and individualism is not the only contradiction that shapes the ideology of Sameness. In its argumentations, for instance, the latter either proceeds from the idea of ‘human nature’ (one that has been reconstructed in accordance with its own postulates, of course) or from the assertion that all natural characteristics are secondary and that man could never embrace his own humanity more faithfully than by freeing himself from these incidental characteristics. Not only do these two statements contradict each other, but the second is also at odds with scientistic ideology, according to which man can be entirely regarded as any other natural object, so much so that ‘there is nothing about him which natural sciences could, one day, fail to unveil’.27 

The corollary of abstract equality is the principle of non-difference. The logical consequence is that if all men are equal, all their opinions are equally valid — hence contemporary relativism and the liberal theory of the necessary neutrality of the state with regard to all that pertains to values and purposes (the ‘good life’ defined by Aristotle). This neutrality can only be apparent, however, because the mere fact of choosing to be neutral is, in itself, not neutral at all. In addition to this, it is obvious that liberals do not recognise antiliberal theories as having the same value as liberal ones. And obviously enough, the opinion according to which all opinions are equal does not prevent anyone from rallying against certain opinions, beginning with the one according to which not all opinions are equal.28 

There is, of course, a contradiction between planetary homogenisation and the fact of championing the cause of all peoples, which implies the recognition and preservation of their plurality. We cannot, therefore, defend both the ideal of a unified world and the right of all peoples to shape their own destiny, as there is nothing to guarantee that they will shape it in accordance with this very ideal. Similarly, one cannot advocate pluralism — defined as the legitimisation and recognition of all differences — while arguing in favour of equal conditions, which would result in the reduction of these differences. Last but not least, if the earth is indeed only populated by people who are ‘equal to each other’, what is the use of asserting the inalienable rights of each and every individual? How can one praise both what makes us unique and irreplaceable and what is said to make us virtually interchangeable? One could, admittedly, evade the issue through various slogans involving mental pirouettes, as in ‘equality in difference’. Such an expression, however, makes no sense at all, for it only refers to non-differentiating ‘difference’. One cannot support people’s right to be different while simultaneously believing that that which unites men in Sameness is fundamentally more defining with regard to their social identity than what distinguishes them from one another. Pietro Barcellona29  was thus absolutely right when using the expression ‘the tragedy of equality’ to describe the paradox according to which one can, by resorting to the notion of equality, simultaneously invalidate all forms of hierarchy and guarantee ‘diversity or what makes individuals unique’.

Alain de Benoist

Hitler: A German Fate by Ernst Nieksich

 From Alain de Benoist’s Preface 

“There are two questions to which the Germans of 1945 would respond to in all likelihood with a distraught mimicry or a shrug of the shoulders. The first would be: who was the last great Prussian? The other: who was the real adversary of Hitler in Germany? One can hesitate a long time and propose, to see, various names that one will reject all the same. But to finish, one will find the only good response to these two questions.” 

“Ernst Niekisch” 

“Who was Ernst Niekisch? Out of a hundred Germans, it is not likely to find more than one who would say it. Born in Silesia in 1889, Ernst Niekisch died in Berlin in 1967; his enterprises having failed, he died in obscurity. But he was one of the great Germans of the 20th century, and his failure is perhaps a part of and a reflection of the Germany’s failure, the obscurity of his name a symptom of the loss, among the Germans, of a historical consciousness and of self awareness.” 

These lines of Sebastian Haffner, will, without a doubt, surprise more than one reader. Niekisch is a mystery, maintained also in part by himself, and the work that he devoted himself to has not been entirely elucidated to date. Within the Conservative Revolution, Niekisch was without a doubt the most remarkable of those who are frequently called “the left men of the right.” He was also the major exponent of “National Bolshevism,” a problematic expression in many respects. How can we clarify this mystery of Niekisch, except by bringing his works to public knowledge and retracing the major stages of his biography? (...)

At the same time, Niekisch also met Ernst Jünger, whose influence was also equally large on the Bündisch milieu. In 1930, Ernst Jünger would become the co-editor with Werner Lass of the “überbündisch” weekly, Die Kommenden, founded in 1925 and very quickly diffused through most Bündisch groups. It was in the autumn of 1927 that Niekisch and Jünger met for the first time. The contact was decisive, and the close links that were established between the two men were to quickly manifest themselves by active collaboration. Jünger would publish 18 articles in Widerstand between April 4th, 1927 and the 8th of September 1933. At the same time Niekisch became close to the brother of Ernst Jünger, Friedrich Georg, and with his circle: Richard Schapke, who was the future leader of Die Kommenden, the anti-Christian ideologue Friedrich Hielscher, and through contact with Jünger by the intermediary of Winnig, Franz Schauwecker, etc. Contrary to what is sometimes written, Jünger would never be a National Bolshevik, but he provided the National Bolsheviks with some of the essential elements of their conceptual cadre. And it was under the influence of Jünger, “the man of vision”, Niekisch said, that the editors of Widerstand would radicalize their ideas on the nation and extol a “new aristocracy” inspired by a Jüngerian “heroic realism.” 

(...)

Revelatory in this respect was the polemic that, in 1931, opposed Niekisch by Wilhelm Stapel, co-editor of the new conservative magazine Deutsches Volkstum. This magazine, however, was not fundamentally hostile to him. It sometimes even published texts by him and his other co-editor, Albrecht Eric Günther, in which one could read the articles in Widerstand, which followed closely in 1919-1920 the experience of “Hamburg National Communism.” In 1931, listing Entscheidung, the book published by Niekisch in the proceeding year, Stapel was nonetheless very worried about the emergence of a “German National Communism.” The book, he affirmed, belonged to the category of “either-or books,” that is to say, it merely, in Manichean fashion, addresses two brutal alternatives, as if there did not exist a third solution: “All of the German social universe, for example, is divided for Niekisch into “peasants” or “bourgeoisie.” The peasant is all that is pleasing to him (and pleasing to me), the bourgeois all that is displeasing to him (and displeasing to me). But this dichotomy is purely arbitrary. Reality is not like that.” Accused of multiplying the oppositions between “phantoms,” Niekisch also saw himself accused of “Romantic” Prussianism and opposition to the idea of Empire 

(Reichsgedanke). To conclude, Stapel declared that if the ideas of Niekisch were to be realized politically, it would simply be “the end of the German people.” Niekisch would respond to him in Widerstand in July 1931. 

With the National Socialists, the clash was more brutal. It would also be more determinant. Niekisch was, in effect, without contest, the one man in the Conservative Revolution who denounced, from very early on and with the most vigor, the Hitlerist movement. Around 1927, he accused Nazism of engaging itself in an dead end and only being motivated by “resentment” against the Jews and the November Revolution. Two years later, he systematized his critique in a new article dedicated to Hitlerism. 

This would culminate in the celebrated booklet published in 1932: Hitler – ein Deutsches Verhängis. 

The opposition between Hitler and Niekisch evidently first holds from the rigorously opposed judgments that they both had on the Soviet Revolution and the nature of Bolshevism. Not only did the NSDAP profess a fanatical anticommunism, but it inherited the Russophobia of Paul Lagarde, and in a very general fashion, the racial anti-Slavism then common in the Völkisch milieu – it only envisioned Ostorientierung in the expansionist and imperialist sense. For the National-Socialists, was neither “national,” and even less “Prussian,” since it was essentially internationalist and “Jewish.” Niekisch drew the conclusion that the “socialism” which Hitler claimed was a pure facade and that his irreducible anticommunism betrayed, despite all that he could say, his affinities with the Western, liberal, bourgeois universe. From 1929, this critique reinforced the theme of German protest against the “Roman” world. While in 1926, Niekisch then attributed Italian Fascism the merit of sharing “The intellectual structure of Bolshevism: autocracy, hatred of liberalism, use of force,” three years later, far from opposing the “modernist” ideology of Fascism to the “archaic” National-Socialism, as certain authors of the Conservative Revolution did, it is, on the contrary, primarily because the fascist movement was “Roman” and “Occidental” that he pronounced a condemnation of Hitler without appeal. In the same epoch, Ernst Jünger also affirmed: “Indubitably, Fascism is nothing other than the late form of liberalism … a brutal shorthand of the liberal regime.” Niekisch therefore takes as his rival, not the name of liberal democracy, but on the contrary, the detested liberal and bourgeois universe. From there the arguments successively cascade. Niekisch recognized that at its beginning Hitlerism could have embodied the German protest against the Diktat of Versailles, but around 1923, he added that Hitler betrayed his mission and succumbed to the Roman and Catholic solicitations to which his Austrian origins predestined him: “He who is Nazi will soon be Catholic!” Hitler’s ideology, which made “race” the universal explicative factor and the “Jew” the scapegoat par excellence, was not German, but Bavarian, “Southern,” and reactionary. Like a Roman potentate, Hitler maintained around his personality an “oriental” cult, and, to do this, appealed to the masses, whom he basely flattered. He was the opposite of the Prussian homo politicus, inspired by Protestantism and Frederick the Great. His “Third Reich,” then, was less a political project than a “religious hope.” Not only was Hitler not a true revolutionary anti-capitalist, his “socialism” only being a lure to use radicalized petit-bourgeois, but in searching for the good grace of Italy, England, and France – that Niekisch denounced under the name of “BritoGermania,” the Anglophilia of the “Hitler-Hess line” – it placed him “on the terrain of Versailles,” which showed that he had taken the role of “the gendarme of the West” by launching a “crusade” against Bolshevism. And Niekisch risked this prophecy: If Germany misguidedly gives itself to Hitler, it will surely go towards disaster. “It will remain an exhausted people … without hope, and the order of Versailles will only be stronger than ever.” 

Beginning in 1932, Niekisch made a new appeal to “the protesting Germans against fascism.” “The cohorts of Hitler,” he wrote, “find themselves on German soil as Southern European occupying troops!” To Goebbels, who he wanted to convince, he retorted one day, “You pretend to be National-Socialists, but is there anything national in your movement? Your salute is Roman, your flag equally so, the color of the uniforms of your troops makes one think of a Balkan occupation arm, your military parades of Catholic high masses! No, the German nation is another thing, it was not born in the fever of Bavarian beer halls! It was born in the protest against Rome, with the clear breeze of Protestantism and of the Prussian spirit.” Shortly after, Niekisch presented his proofs in his pamphlet, Hitler – ein Deutsches Verhängis, to Ernst Jünger, who had returned to visit Berlin in the company of Carl Schmitt and Arnolt Bronnen. The text completes his premonition of a final catastrophe in the East. Jünger would say: “Niekisch gave me the effect of a man in the middle of making a leap; I could not dissuade him from publishing the book.” Illustrated with the striking drawings of A. Paul Weber, the pamphlet attained a circulation of 40,000 readers in that year. The NSDAP struck back by launching a press campaign against Niekisch. At that date, Widerstand was already regularly cited in the monthly press review (Pressebericht) of the Reichsführer SS as one of the “principal adversarial organs” (Hauptorgane der Gegner). 

Around 1930, explained Sebastian Haffner, “Hitler and Niekisch were antipodal to each other, the two being the most irreconcilable you could find in Germany. The only thing they had in common, was their declared hate for the Weimar Republic, their firm will to make it fall such that it would fall in every manner and to be the heir of the deceased. For the rest, their programs were opposed to each other, point by point: Hitler would want vengeance on the “criminals of November;” Niekisch would want the triumph of the November Revolution; Hitler would want a Fascist counter-revolution, Niekisch would want a socialist revolution; Hitler, the anti-bolshevik crusade and the colonization of Russia with the tacit complicity of the West, Niekisch, the alliance with Bolshevik Russia against the West. Hitler throught in the terms of “race” and “space,” Niekisch in terms of “class” and “state.” Hitler would want to win the crowds so he could lead them to capitalist and imperialist politics, Niekisch would want to win the crowds so he could lead them to Prussian socialism and ascetic politics.” Jünger would declare on his part: “Niekisch was then in a bit of a situation where we find the Greens today. He was quite on the right path, and if I could express myself thus, he would have been capable of influencing the evolution towards the left: and that would have gained him a stronger consensus, particularly in the East. Compared to him, Hitler did cheap work, and that bought him this monstrous popularity.” 

In the Spring of 1932, on the occasion of the presidential elections, Niekisch tried to submit his candidacy, with the double title of the National-Revolutionary movement and of the Landvolkbewegung, whose leader, Claus Heim, of the Peasant revolt in Schleswig-Holstein, found himself imprisoned then. But, the other National-Bolshevik groups had already taken a position in favor of Thaelmann (the communist candidate), Claus Heim, who had already given his accord, reversed his support and the project failed. Some months later, Niekisch participated, beside twenty academics and researchers, in a voyage to the Soviet Union organized, from August 23rd to September 14th, by the Working Group for the Study of the Soviet Russian Planned Economy (Arplan). This group created on the margins of the activities of Vörkampfer by the economist Friedrich Lenz, for the First Secretary Arvid Harnack, who served in the same Freikorps as Friedrich Hielscher and who was to later become famous within the celebrated “Red Orchestra” espionage network. The Arplan delegation was received in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov. Niekisch, whose sojourn would be cut sort by illness, encountered Karl Radek on this occasion. On his return, he published in Widerstand a resounding article, in which he gave tribute to the Soviet plan, as a means to surmount and instrumentalize modernity, affirming that the Russian people had adopted an attitude “heroism singular in the world,” forming a veritable “army of labor” and that “nothing would be easier than to transform it into a revolutionary army.” The Russians, added Niekisch, had even managed to dominate technology. It was not inevitable that it would “devour man” and that confronted Niekisch with an idea, which he had advanced a year earlier, that “collectivization is the form of social existence that the organic will must don if it wants to affirm itself in the face of the murderous effects of technology.” In this positive revaluation of technology, one notes the new influence of Jünger, who published Der Arbeiter in the course of the same year. 

Like many of his compatriots, Niekisch was completely overtaken by the National-Socialist rise to power. In the first issue of Widerstand in January 1933, Hitler was then described as “the man without talent” (Talentlose) par excellence. In February, Niekisch published in his journal an article entitled: “The Epoch of Class Struggle.” There he declared: “Never has there been in Germany a cabinet so reactionary as that which we have now … Does the event of January 30th represent a national revolution or not? … Hitler is chancellor: that is for him without a doubt a personal success. He is the chancellor of a bourgeois reactionary cabinet: that is certainly not a success for nationalism.” 

But the hour of repression was already at hand. The first organization forbidden by the new regime, on February 4th 1933, was the Black Front of Otto Strasser. On the night of 8th to 9th March, Niekisch was arrested with his wife by a group of SA, then released a few days later. His apartment was searched. Moreover, in March, the weekly Entscheidung was banned, after publishing 23 issues. Widerstand, in contrast, continued its publication for some time. In January 1934, the magazine adopted a new symbol on the first page, drawn by A. Paul Weber: on a black colored background, an eagle, in its claws a sword and a sickle, its chest bearing a hammer. At the end of July 1933, it published articles by the philosopher Hugo Fischer. Yet, in August 1933, it was still a question among official milieus regarding a ban on Widerstand, which was finally pronounced on the 20th of December 1934. Niekisch would then accuse one of this former collaborators, the philosopher Alfred Baeumler, of having played a role in this ban. 

Sebastian Haffner said that Niekisch “would spend four years in the Third Reich during which he was the last known and openly declared enemy of Hitler.” Pressured by his friends to leave Germany – Jünger, notably, advised him to seek refuge in Switzerland – Niekisch chose to make an “interior emigration.” Between 1933 and 1937, he would continue to write and tentatively constitute in secret his “Resistance Movement”, which henceforth merited this name more than ever. Though under constant surveillance by the police, he also made a number of trips abroad, thanks to the support of some patrons like Alfred Töpfer. Previously, he had almost never left Germany, now he traveled widely to Switzerland, Holland, France, Belgium, England, Scandinavia. In the summer of 1935 he even sojourned to Italy, where he met emigres … and Mussolini. 

In 1933, Niekisch worked on a project for a book which was titled, Deutsche Mobilmachung, echoing Jünger’s essay on “total mobilization.” There he repeated his critiques of National-Socialism and described Lenin as the all time heir of Luther, of Frederick II, of Fichte, of Hegel, of Nietzsche, and of Marx! The manuscript, sent to Joseph Drexel, would be seized by the Gestapo. But it was mainly in his two essays of 1934, Die Dritte imperiale Figur and Im Dickicht der Pakte, published in the following year, that begins a new turn, a turn then stillborn by the political conjuncture and the following events. 

Distributed as Privatdruck, in a confidential fashion, Die Dritte imperiale Figur, a mythic work and virtually untraceable, is perhaps the most important of Niekisch’s books, at the same time the draft of an unfulfilled vision. Niekisch no longer reasoned in terms of immediate politics. Like Jünger, and without a doubt under his influence, he reformulated his ideas in an idealist language which gave the notion of Figur, Figure, (Gestalt in Jünger’s terms), a fundamental role. The history of Europe, according to him, is before all the history of confrontation between grand Figures, each having a ratio, that is to say a spirit involved in a particular metapolitical project. The two great Figures of the past are the “Eternal Roman,” supporting the Western political project, at the same time Catholicism and Fascism, and the “Eternal Jew,” whose ratio was strictly economic and embodied in global liberalism. Faced with these two enemy Figures, both issuing from the Mediterranean and Roman space, Niekisch no longer believed in the “provincial” Figures of the Soldier, Peasant, the Germane, which he had previously praised and who risked being manipulated by the dominant Western ratio. He wish to greet the advent of another emblematic Figure, the Third Imperial Figure, that of the Worker, master of the “technical space,” who must establish on a global scale a new order, at the same time organic and technical, socialist, and proletarian. The technical ratio was then called to supplant the economic and metaphysical ratio. The Worker, “the New Barbarian,” engendered by the “new force” of the “Russo-Asiatic element” would liquidate the West, and its reign would permit the establishment of an Empire extending upon a world totally rid of bourgeois values, and at the same time it would correspond, Niekisch remaining in the Hegelian tradition, to the reign of the Spirit. 

The kinship of the Third Imperial Figure and of Jünger’s Worker was obvious. They were not totally dependent on each other. For Niekisch, the old socialist, the collective worker is closer than the individual worker, in the strict sense, it is a less abstract Figure, resulting in the metamorphosis of the proletariat itself, redefined in an idealist manner. The Worker was also the embodiment of the “Bolshevik.” In 1935, Niekisch would then say he placed Jünger “between Spengler and Marx.” But the most important consequence of this new vision was the abandoning of the all reference to nationalism. Jünger, who, at that time, had already begun to distance himself from politics (in 1932-1933 he only published three articles in Widerstand), lead the way in this domain. Around 1929, Jünger would write: “The word nationalism is a flag, very useful to clearly fix the original combat position of a generation during the chaotic years of transition; it is by no means, as is believed by many of our friends and also our enemies, the expression of a superior value; it designates a condition, but it is not our goal.” For Niekisch, the reference to the nation would become problematic since he would call for the formation of a Germano-Slavic “great space” – from Flessingue to Vladivostok! – and would multiply his acerbic criticism against Southern Germany and the “Bavarian miasma.” Contrary to other National-Bolshevik groups, who continued to see the nation as the absolute and final value for them, Niekisch, in the the Die Dritte imperiale Figur then perceived the nationstate as a bourgeois creation from the epoch of the French Revolution. “When the bourgeoisie celebrate the cult of the nation,” he wrote, “they secretly sacrifice to the their true idol, the god Mammon.” The nation was then no longer an unsurpassable reference. The state itself was no longer an absolute, but a simple means for the accession of the Figure. Niekisch rallied to the idea of imperial idea that he had condemned some years earlier, but he gave to it a somewhat planetary resonance. The unification of the “Russo-German great space” was only a prelude to the “ultimate empire” (Endimperium) that would extend across the entire earth. “If the nation is overtaken in the long term,” observed Louis Dupeux, “it is for reasons that hold neither for the economy, nor for any universalism, but to accomplish the accession of the Figure to the imperial rank.” 

Niekisch also used the notion of empire to criticize anew Hitlerian racism: “No empire is a community of blood: it’s a community of faith and more generally a community of spirit.” He defended himself from falling into antisemitism. The Figure of the “Eternal Jew,” he said, belonged to the past. “To engage in antisemitism, it’s to revolve around the Jew.” Dignity required he challenge Nazi antisemitism, which was a “bourgeois German” antisemitism. Niekisch also gets to the Völkische and the “romantics,” who wanted to return to the past (“that is not the way back to the roots”) and he would propose that they “flee to countryside.” He finally renewed his attacks on National-Socialism, which he continued to consider as a bourgeois movement, even exclusively bourgeois, which he compared with insistence to Bonapartism: “Caesarist Democracy of the masses should become a major coup for the capitalist bourgeoisie.” 

Im Dickicht der Pakte develops this critique with the angle of foreign policy. Niekisch contested that the world was divided into three camps: the communist camp, the capitalist camp, and the fascist camp. There were only two camp, he said, from the fact of “Hitlerian betrayal.” Germany found itself once again attached to the Western camp. It was the reason for which, he added, the game of the democracies consisted of dragging Hitler into a “thicket of pacts.” Niekisch then reproached the Third Reich for legitimizing the bourgeois order by making a defense of private property, and for the first time, “not wanting to go beyond the national state” and rejecting “imperial ambition.” But this book, for the first time also, put equally into doubt the revolutionary capability of Russia. Russia’s admission to the League of Nations in effect scandalized Niekisch, who spoke of a “voyage to Canossa” and demanded if the USSR, “by renouncing its savage mission of global revolution,” wouldn’t become one a day “a Western European power with State capitalism.” 

On the 22ndof March 1937, at seven in the morning, then preparing for a journey to Czechoslovakia, Niekisch was arrested by the Gestapo and then incarcerated. Simultaneously, a dragnet permitted the questioning of 70 other members of the Widerstand Circles, including Joseph Drexel and Karl Tröger. The archives of the movement and the correspondence of the publishing house, concealed by Drexel in a seat of an insurance company in Nuremberg, were also seized. No organ of the press would not be seized. 

The proceedings only opened two years later. On January 3rd1939, Ernst Niekisch, Joseph Drexel, and Karl Tröger appeared in secret before the Volksgerichthof, presided over by Dr. Thierack. The clandestine activities of the Widerstand Circles, together with most of the texts published by Niekisch since 1933, were retained as evidence and figured in the accusation file. After a week of debate, on the 10thJanuary, Niekisch was condemned for “preparations for high treason” and violation of the law banning political parties to life in prison, the confiscation of his property, and the forfeiture of all his civil rights. His companions were also condemned to prison time: three years and six months for Drexel, one year and nine months for Tröger. The integral text of the judgment, discovered after the war at the American Documentation Center in BerlinDahlem, would only be published in 1978. In Switzerland, the trial was discussed at length by Adolf Grabowsky in the Nationalzeitungof Bâle. Fourteen authors were charged, including Niekisch’s wife, who would be judged starting on the 17thof February and condemned to various penalties. Ernst Jünger, who saw Niekisch for the last time at the start of 1937 in Goslar, would write in his notebooks on the date of September 1st1945: “Ernst Niekisch is among these exceptional beings who, in the Civil War, had courage. I could not have imagined, before the events, that this courage would be astonishingly rare … I saw how one man such as Niekisch stood in his refusal to capitulate. Dead silence all around.” In prison, where he was incarcerated in particularly painful conditions, Niekisch developed a system of self discipline, that Sebastian Haffner described as “the last product, the supreme product, inspired by all of the Prussian spirit known to history.” He held conferences before an imaginary public and imposed upon himself a rigorous use of his time. “I would invent a system of physical and intellectual hygiene that I would rigorously observe,” he recounted in his memoirs, “I would stretch myself to use my time well. The first hour, I would work on philosophy, the second hour sociology, then I would reflect on a book I projected to write. After a meal, I would continue my intellectual exercise. History of literature, economic sciences, sometimes mathematics, aesthetic problems, those were the subjects on which I concentrated myself at present …” His friends, they were trying to survive. Certain ones among them, during the war, found themselves in the service of counterespionage. Joseph Drexel, imprisoned in Amberg, then freed after having his sentence expunged, would be arrested again after the attempt of July 20thand sent to the camp in Mauthausen with the reference “R.U.” (“Rückkehr unerwünscht”, “no hope of return”). However, he would be liberated in January 1945. Karl Tröger, who enrolled in the Wehrmacht after his sentence, the penalty of prison having been converted to preventative detention, would die of a cerebral congestion due to overwork, on the 25thof March 1945 in Schmerze, in the environs of the town of Brandenburg an der Oder where his friend Niekisch was then detained. 

The 30thof September 1945, Jünger wrote in his notebooks: “Gerd also taught me that Niekisch had escaped alive from prison when they began to massacre the detainees. He had become blind and near paralyzed, and would try to reconstruct his publishing house in Berlin.” Ernst Niekisch was liberated by the Red Army on the 27thof April. He left the prison of Brandenburg-Görden near blind and incapable of walking. He had since returned home on the 5thof May. 

***

The political career of Niekisch did not end in 1945. But the man that the Russians had taken from his cell was evidently not the same man that, ten years earlier, announced the advent of the “Third Imperial Figure.” He affirmed democracy and “progressivism.” He stayed faithful to a number of his intuitions, and maybe the Soviet occupation of the Eastern part of Germany had also convinced him that the “Prussian-Bolshevik” synthesis which he had dreamed of, in part or less, had come to pass. Around August 1945, he joined the German Communist Party (KPD), and simultaneously took charge of the Volkshochschule Wilmersdorf, which found itself in the British sector where he continued to live. In Autumn he found himself in the director’s bureau of the Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany (Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands) and the Society of German-Soviet Friendship. We would become a member of the SED starting in April 1946. At the start of January 1946, Jünger wrote maliciously “It seems that Niekisch is completely oriented to the East right now.” The interested party responded to him not to simplify things… in 1947, thanks to the support of the historian Alfred Meusel, Niekisch became the professor charged with contemporary political and social problems at the Humboldt University of East Berlin. He would be tenured the following year. In 1949, member of the presidium of the national council of the National Front, director of the Research Institute on Imperialism, he also sat in the People’s Chamber (Volkskammer) and he found himself closely associated with the creation of the GDR. But his independent spirit would rapidly earn him hostility, and near the end of 1949, he seemed to have encountered some difficulties expressing himself. In 1951, his Research Institute on Imperialism was brutally closed. The following year, the publication of his book entitled Europäische Bilanz, which he composed most of mentally in the course of his imprisonment and which he wrote immediately after his liberation (“I noted in four short months that which had slowly matured in eight years”), attracted violent attacks on him on the part of Wilhelm Girnus, one of the party ideologues, who accused him of utilizing Marxist terminology to spread “nonscientific” ideas marked by idealism, irrationalism, and pessimism, and who designated his book as having everything of an “American edition of Spengler!” At the start of 1953, Niekisch publicly declared that the leadership of the GDR had lost all contact with the population. After an uprising on the 17th of June, he worked with the Soviets against Walter Ulbricht, resigned from the SED and definitively returned to the West. In his memoirs, he would say, “Liberty, which was opened to myself again, revealed an impenetrable thicket of new stifling subjugation.” 

This same year of 1953, Niekisch published Das Reich der niederen Dämonen. There he underlined the bankruptcy of the middle classes and their lack of moral resistance in the face of Nazism: “The bourgeoisie had the government they deserved.” Put on sale in the GDR in 1958, the book would be withdrawn from libraries there after a few weeks. Yet, Niekisch had not converted to the West! In his articles, he denounced the young Federal Republic as a “plutocracy,” taking a position in favor of neutrality and considered Adenauer to have continued the “Western” ideas of Hitler. In 1956, his text on the Figure of the “Clerk” (der Clerk), which he described as a “modern fellah” – a term apparently borrowed from Spengler – in the service of the techno-bureaucracy, raised a certain disturbance. In parallel, in his works, since Deutsche Daseinsverfehlung (1946) until the first volume of his memoirs, Niekisch rewrote his personal history and assured that it was only for tactical reasons that he frequented nationalist milieus before the war. Finally, he began, against the authorities of the Federal Republic who, under the pretext of his sympathies with the East, obstinately refused to pay the pension as a victim of Nazism as what his right, a judicial battle that would last no less than 13 years. In the judiciary proceedings, which would be obscured for some years after, Niekisch would be supported by jurists like Fabian von Schlabrendorff, and mainly by his friend Joseph Drexel, who managed after 1945 to become head of a veritable press empire in Franconia (he was notably the founder of Nürnberger Nachrichten). It was only in 1966, a few months before his death, and after the intervention of the European Commission on Human Rights, that Niekisch would finally obtain 30,000 marks of reparations and the promise of a monthly payment of 1,500 marks! 

Ernst Niekisch died in Berlin, alone, the day of his 78 birthday, May 23rd 1967. His remains were cremated in the presence of Drexel, A. Paul Weber, Schlabrendorff, and Jünger, who would later say: “I assisted at his funeral. One saw the old militants there, who seemed to have all come right from the Joseph Conrad novel, The Secret Agent, some basket cases, and some old friends. It was a dismal funeral.” 

Niekisch died apparently forgotten. The years following 1968, there appeared the first deep studies dedicated to him, a certain number of groups on the right and left would rediscover his thought and reclaim for themselves certain positions of his. Small journals like Neue Zeit, Rebell, Ideologie und Strategie, Der Aufbruch, Wir selbst, organizations like “Sache des Volkes” and the “Solidaristiche Volksbewegung”, militants and young theoreticians like Alexander Epstein, Klaus Herrmann, Armin Krebs, Henning Eichberg, Siegfried Bublies, Wolfgang Strauss, Marcus Bauer, etc, who affirmed themselves under various titles as the representatives of a new “national-revolutionary” current. Certainly, times had changed. The national-revolutionaries of the “second generation” affirmed democracy and did not retain the apology for Bolshevism nor the project of an alliance with Soviet Russia from 

Niekisch. But they did willingly support his advocacy of refusing the Western bloc, ethnopluralism, the defense of collective identities, the antiimperialist struggle, and the cause of peoples. They reclaimed German reunification in the name of decolonization and the right of the people to guide themselves, and combated the liberal West on the basis of “national liberation” (Befreiungsnationalismus). One of their watchwords was “National identity and international solidarity.” In October 1976, young national-revolutionaries from the organization “Sache des Volkes” affixed to the house of Niekisch a commemorative plaque struck with this inscription: “We will be a revolutionary people, or we will no longer be a free people.” In 1977, Rebell and Neue Zeit gave Niekisch as an example to show that “nationalism consequently leads the antifascist struggle,” while Wolfgang Venohr declared in the magazine Wir selbst, “National liberation and anti-fascism cannot and should not be opposed.” The influence of Niekisch was equally felt in certain tendencies of the “national left” (Bernt Engelmann, Peter Brandt, Herbert Ammon) who opposed themselves to Hans Matthias Kepplinger or Arno Klönne, and those who strove to unite nationalism, neutrality, ecology, and pacifism, and affirmed that the division of Germany was the principal factor of insecurity in Europe. The drawings of A. Paul Weber, who pursued, after the war, his career as a graphic designer in left wing milieus, were particularly popular among the Greens. And while many of the Niekisch’s books were reissued by the anarchist press ADHE, Helios publishing, of Mayence, lead by Karl-Heinz Pröhuber and Peter Bahn, published, starting in 1985, reprints of the great “classics” of NationalBolshevism. “Ernst Niekisch prepared his resurrection,” wrote Sebastian Haffner. “The historical and political works that he left had no equal in the Germany of the 20th century. For this moment, it’s something like a hidden treasure, jealously guarded by a handful of old comrades in struggle and grateful disciples. But when one opens his books … one sees sparks flow as if they were electrified.” 

“If on January 28th 1933,” wrote Walter Lacquer, “the president of the Reich Hindenburg had entrusted in Ernst Niekisch the responsibility to form a new cabinet, and if this cabinet was comprised of Friedrich Hielscher (Minister of Foreign Relations), Otto Strasser (Interior), Ernst Jünger (Culture Minister), Karl O. Paetel, Werner Lass, Hartmut Plaas, and some others, the task of the historian who writes the history of German National-Bolshevism today, would have been simpler than it is in reality.” But the task of the historian is never simple, and on the subject of Niekisch the most opposed opinions abound today. For Sebastian Haffner, he was “first and foremost a revolutionary socialist”; for Armin Mohler, “the most radical nationalist of all times.” Hans Matthias Kepplinger treated him as a Linkfaschist. Louis Dupeux, who did not hold him in esteem, considered him a “sonorous cretin,” and the liberal authors rested on his case to enunciate the “horseshoe theory”: the extremes touch. However, many saw in him as a premier author and thought, like Jünger, that he could have played “an important role in German history.” 

These contrary opinions fed symmetric legends. The first of which was the “Niekisch-Orthodoxy” (Mohler). Maintained after 1945 in his self interest, with the support of Joseph Drexel, it formed the basis of the biography he dedicated to Friedrich Kalbermann. Niekisch was always a man of the left, who had only made tactical concessions with the terminology of nationalism to regroup the misguided youth. It was in this spirit that Schüdderkopf could write that Niekisch was “during all of his life a man of the left, who would think as a National-Communist, but never as a Nationalist.” The inverse thesis was supported by Louis Dupeux, among others: a man “of the right and even of the extreme right,” at least from 1926, Niekisch would be employed in shuffling the cards in giving into revolutionary pathos and his massive usage of the rhetoric of the extreme left was only a “reclamation.” The two theses actually appear to be unconvincing, one way or the other. Armin Mohler and Uwe Sauermann did not do justice to the first: it suffices, to refute it, by referring to his texts. About the second, one can oppose to it the itinerary of Niekisch – like the other National-Bolsheviks – after 1933: at the hour of decision, no longer intellectual but living, existential, the least we can say is that they did not pass to the side of “reaction.” 

These two theses, equally suspicious, both rest on the theory of a “mask”: the mask of nationalism in the first, the mask of revolutionary Bolshevism in the second. The common presupposition is that he couldn’t have a socialism of the right or a nationalism of the left, and that one cannot be right and left at the same time. Such presupposition, which gives the leftright dichotomy a quasi-ontological bearing, has yet to be demonstrated. The history of ideas, in truth, rather seems to deny it. From one epoch to another, the “ideas of the right” and the “ideas of the left” are rarely the same. Is it truly impossible to use one as another to make, in the proper sense, their opposition insignificant? Niekisch appears to us, to have been a man of the right and of the left at the same time. 

What no one disputes, however, is the extreme radicalism of his positions. While, if the evolution of Niekisch appears today so “aberrant” according to current political ideological categories, maybe it is because it obeys a logic which, for the most part, has become incomprehensible. “Those who don’t want to think it through could never begin to do it,” said Friedrich Lenz, while Louis Dupeux wrote: “Only the National-Bolsheviks went through with the discussion and they boldly dreamed of a truly “total” revolution for strictly national reasons.” Niekisch strove to think “through”, and it is in this by which his path exemplifies in the extreme, the greatest cross pollination of contemporary ideas. Also, with that, his thought, while bearing the imprint of many well known influences, stayed perfectly original. Niekisch, who had the nature of Cassandra, would want “realism” in a country where politics was frequently enmeshed with morality, and yet he was also unrealistic, maybe, precisely by an excess of logic and realism. He would want to give the right the ideas of the left, and the left the ideas of the right. Throughout his life, he navigated between the fronts; throughout his life, he scaled the heights. The result was a long series of setbacks, ruptures, failures, maybe even disillusionment. Niekisch was imprisoned under Weimar, imprisoned under Hitler, rejected by the authorities of the GDR, detested by those of the Federal Republic. That did not prevent him, with the social democrats, as with the councils, the “old socialists,” with the nationalists and the communists, from always affirming himself as a revolutionary that nothing could ever break. Moreover, he was in revolt, a rebel, a resistant. The word Widerstand, chosen as the title of his journal and his publishing house, has strong paradigmatic value: Niekisch was able to resist. What remains today of the ideas of Niekisch? Maybe more than one believes, and not because here and there small groups occasionally reclaim them. Since it is significant that the majority of Communist Parties in the West have rallied today to an implicitly Lassallian conception, where the proletariat that was defined by Marx has been replaced by “the immense majority of the people.” The reinterpretation of the class struggle in national terms, which lead the National-Bolsheviks to qualify Germany as an oppressed nation compared to a “bourgeoisie” constituted globally by the Western countries, also knew new fortune with the diffusion of the term “proletarian nations.” Uwe Sauermann wrote that Niekisch could well have been the prophet of all the nationalism which expressed itself in this century under the red flag, indeed those who express themselves today under the green flag of Islam. Sebastian Haffner also saw him as a precursor of decolonization. “The fundamental political idea of Niekisch”, he wrote, “is that national liberation and socialist revolution are one in the same thing, that they are two sides of the same coin. This idea, is it another thing than the common maxim of the actions of Mao and of Ho Chi Minh, of Fidel Castro, of Che Guevara, and of Khomeini? The anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist, anti-Western revolutionary parties of the Third World all bear the same name: National Liberation Front. The socialist revolution everywhere bears the nationalist flag. As implausible that this could appear, that true theoretician of universal revolution that is on the march today is not Marx, nor even Lenin. It’s Niekisch.” 

Niekisch had without doubt many illusions about the nature of Russian communism, and his apology for “Bolshevism” could scandalize us today. Then it is necessarily to place it in context, to remember the immense hope which would sustain the Revolution of 1917 in the worker’s movement – and do not forget any more the Soviet delirium which seized, in the following decades, a large part of the global intelligentsia. The paradox is that Niekisch would admire the USSR for the same reasons that its adversaries would detest it and for the opposite reasons of those who would admire it as its partisans! Yet, if we disregard value judgments, Niekisch in his analysis, is it so wrong? In seeing the Soviet Union as an authoritarian regime of “Prussian” inspiration, alternatively Spartan, in the fashion of Niekisch, or in imagining it as the draft of “society without classes” and as the “workers’ paradise”, in the fashion of so many intellectuals of the epoch, who was more in error? And the affirmation according to which Lenin and Stalin had practically “liquidated the old Marx,” the affirmation according to which Soviet Communism had always been, in part or less, a properly Russian phenomenon, hadn’t, in a certain measure, been confirmed? Many disappointed Marxists would probably be ready today to agree that Stalinist Russia was never anything other than “National Bolshevik.” The difference according to Niekisch, it is that they would derive from this finding, the opposite conclusions. They would also willingly distinguish “Russian” Bolshevism from “Occidental” Marxism, but they would then value the second to the detriment of the first. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it was in the ranks of the Conservative Revolution, and singularly in the National-Bolshevik milieus, that this distinction, received as banal today, was made for the first time. 

As to the great book of the Germano-Russian alliance, who can say today, that he was not called, in the future, to add a few more chapters?

Hitler: A German Fate 

Ernst Nieksich 

Translated by: Eugene Montsalvat from the French volume of Ernst Niekisch’s “Hitler – une fatalité allemande” et autres écrits nationauxbolcheviks 

At: 

https://niekischtranslationproject.wordpress.com/

To confiscate the word humanity, has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human ...

 From ‘Regulated War’ to the Return of the ‘Just War’

‘Statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies,’ writes Irving Kristol, one of the principal American neoconservatives in the journal of his son William, The Weekly Standard.[29] Carl Schmitt would not have disagreed with this statement; neither in its descriptive aspect nor in its normative aspect. The very essence of politics consists, according to him, not so much in the fact of hostility as in the possibility of making a distinction between public friends and public enemies — not when a conflict has already materialised, but in respect of potential conflicts. Politics, in other words, implies conflict: a strictly pacific vision of social life is an unpolitical vision. Consequently, the uncertainty of the identity of the enemy constitutes one of the greatest dangers in politics. Schmitt, however, does not maintain the famous formula of Clausewitz, according to whom war is only the continuation of politics by other means. On the contrary, he emphasises that ‘its meaning for the understanding of the essence of politics is thereby still not exhausted.’[30] War is itself, just like the state of emergency of which we shall speak again below, a border concept (Grenzbegriff). It is incontestably an extension of politics because politics implies hostility, but it cannot be reduced to this because it has its own essence. Schmitt emphasises that war has its own perspective and its own rules, and that the latter ‘all presuppose that the political decision has already been made as to who the enemy is.’[31] In supporting the view that politics, even in peacetime, possesses a conflictual dimension, Schmitt adopts a position close to that of Clausewitz, but which should not be confused with it; it tends rather to complete it and to go beyond it. Clausewitz sees what is political in war, Schmitt what is conflictual in politics.

Schmitt posits at the same time a political conception of hostility. The enemy must, according to him, be regarded politically: he must remain a political enemy, that is, an adversary that one must fight, certainly, but with whom one can one day make peace. In the perspective of the jus publicum europaeum,[32] peace clearly remains the aim of war: every war is naturally concluded by a peace treaty. And, as it is only with an enemy that one can make peace, that implies that the belligerents mutually recognise one other. Such a recognition (of the Other, both in his similarities and in his differences) is the very condition that makes peace possible, for only a belligerent whom one has previously recognised can be invited to conclude a peace treaty. This is why Schmitt affirms that an absolute war, a total war, would be a disaster from a strictly political point of view since, by attempting to annihilate the enemy, it eliminates the element which constitutes politics.[33]

Of the ‘regulated war,’ characteristic of the Westphalian order founded on the jus publicum europaeum which replaced the old respublica christiana,[34] Carl Schmitt says that it is a war where the belligerents ‘respect each other at war as enemies and do not treat one another as criminals, so that a peace treaty becomes possible and even remains the normal, mutually accepted end of war.’[35] War conducted according to the old law of nations follows rules governing, for example, the conduct of troops towards prisoners and civilians, the respect for neutral parties, the immunity of ambassadors, the rules of surrendering a stronghold, and the modalities of concluding a peace treaty. It almost never aims at overthrowing a sovereign or changing the government of a country, and is usually fought simply to achieve territorial objectives. Finally, it is an exclusively inter-state reality. The state enjoys at the same time a monopoly of legitimate violence (Max Weber) and a monopoly of political decision (Schmitt), meaning that private wars and family vendettas are forbidden (a prohibition that was gradually extended to the duel). This means that individuals can only be public enemies as members or citizens of a state, and not individually in themselves. In the Westphalian order each sovereign’s jus ad bellum[36] is recognised, for it is part of the liberties or rights constitutive of state sovereignty. Such a system excludes the very idea of ‘international police.’ It also recognises the legitimacy of the neutrality of third parties.

In the eyes of Schmitt, the great merit of the jus publicum europaeum has been to substitute for the Medieval doctrine of the ‘just war,’ with its moral origin, a political doctrine of the ‘war within protocols’ or ‘war in due form’ (Vattel).[37] This new doctrine was introduced when the sovereign states asserted themselves, notably in relation to the Roman Church (as a result of the ‘neutralisation’ of the religious wars that had divided and devastated Europe). This development led first to the recognition of the sovereign character, and equal sovereignty, of states, then to the emphasis no longer of jus ad bellum (the rules governing when a war can be lawfully started) but of jus in bello (the rules governing how a war, once begun, should be conducted). From then on, it is no longer the war that is accepted when it is declared ‘just,’ but the enemy who becomes ‘just’ insofar as he is recognised. War between states is thus a fundamentally symmetrical war. It is modelled on the duel, in which the adversaries mutually recognise each other’s equality and both observe the rules of the same code. Thanks to the formal concept of the justus hostis,[38] of the recognised enemy, international law makes war a regulated confrontation between sovereign states that are formally equal, basically amounting to ‘a duel between cavaliers seeking satisfaction.’[39] 

(...)

After the First World War, a persistent current continued to fight for the suppression and criminalisation of war. It is this mistaken position, and also the persistent ideal of a world where war has been eliminated forever, which leads today to the reappearance of the concept of the just war, and to the legitimation of war by a moral doctrine based on the ideology of human rights. This makes possible once again the war of annihilation, while technological progress permits the development of more powerful weapons than ever before. It is no longer a question of just war in the Medieval sense, which still recognised certain limitations, but the just war conducted in the name of ‘humanity,’ of ‘freedom’ and of ‘right.’ Already, with the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, it is not so much war in itself which was condemned as the right of nations and states to wage it. In this way, wars based on national interest were decreed to be unjust, whereas international war, war conducted in the name of humanity, became the new ‘just war.’ The danger of this development ‘is that it […] imposes on politics the mortal snare of a perpetual peace that has every likelihood of transforming itself into endless war.’[54] It is summarised in the formula, ‘Perpetual war for perpetual peace.’

According to Carl Schmitt, ‘The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe.’[55] The reason for this is that humanity is either a biological category or a moral category; it is not a political concept. Schmitt cites here the famous phrase of Proudhon: ‘[W]hoever invokes humanity wants to cheat.’ ‘When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity,’ he explains, ‘it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent.’[56] ‘The concept of humanity,’ he adds, ‘is an ideological instrument especially useful to imperialist expansions. Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet. The concept of humanity excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being — and hence there is no specific differentiation in that concept. […] To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolise such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.’[57]

In France, on 7 August 1793, the deputy Garnier de Saintes, had already proposed to the Convention[58] that the English statesman William Pitt should be declared ‘the enemy of mankind,’ in order that everybody may have the right to assassinate him. To fight in the name of humanity in fact means that one places oneself in the position of decreeing who is human and who is not. That is the paradox: all discussion that claims to efface the boundaries between men to extend the notion of ‘us’ to the totality of the human species ends in recreating in the midst of humanity itself a line of division and exclusion more radical than the ones preceding it. ‘Only when man appeared to be the embodiment of absolute humanity did the other side of this concept appear in the form of a new enemy: the inhuman,’ writes Schmitt.[59] War in the name of morality is thus the very model of the most inhumane warfare. Abstract universalism makes absolute enemies of its adversaries and transforms ‘humanitarian’ wars into wars of extermination.

Following the example of revolutionary France, the United States has never stopped proclaiming that the causes which it defends are consistent with the interests of humanity. ‘[The American] flag,’ said Woodrow Wilson already, ‘is the flag not only of America but of humanity.’[60] ‘We are rapidly becoming a nation of humanitarian crusaders,’ noted Irving Babbitt in 1924.[61] ‘This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind,’ George W. Bush stated in a speech on 11 September 2002, one year after the attacks in New York and Washington.[62]

Instead of ‘humanity,’ Schmitt could just as well have spoken of ‘freedom.’ In the course of history, freedom has also constantly been cited by the United States to justify its enterprises of conquest or annexation. It was by the concept ‘empire of freedom,’ theorised by Jefferson, that it justified its first territorial conquests at the expense of Spain (in Cuba) and Mexico (in Texas). The intervention in Vietnam was also conducted in the name of ‘freedom.’ The same goes for the war on Iraq, which plunged that country into civil war and chaos. In his State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003, George W. Bush proclaimed, ‘The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to humanity.’

From this perspective, it is no coincidence that the epoch in which human rights have been proclaimed most forcefully is also that in which the wars fought have proved to be the most inhumane. This observation, according to Carl Schmitt, is not at all paradoxical since it is when fighting in the name of humanity that one is justified in considering one’s enemies as inhuman. Proclaimed humanism ends in actual dehumanisation. The Kosovo War, conducted in the name of ‘human rights,’ resulted in a systematic violation of the rights of the Serbs, as well as a good amount of ‘collateral damage.’ The war conducted against Iraq in the name of ‘freedom’ ended in what General Tommy Franks characterised as a ‘catastrophic success.’ Another reason is that there cannot be timeless fundamental rights, for what is fundamental is always determined by a specific epoch or culture.[63]

Total war marks not only the return to the ‘state of nature’ as Hobbes imagined it. The wars where the enemy is considered as a criminal or an outlaw thereby betray their theological or religious character. Like the crusades, the wars of religion or wars conducted against the heretics or pagans, these are wars without limits, wars taken to extremes, because they come under moral categories between which there can be no reconciliation. ‘It goes without saying,’ notes Norbert Campagna, ‘that evil cannot enjoy “equality under the law” with the good side: the forces that fight for “the good” lay claim to all of the rights, while the forces that are ranged on the side of “evil” find themselves, for their part, deprived of all rights, for it is inconceivable to let the forces of evil enjoy any rights whatsoever [...] The “good” can drop bombs on civilian populations; the “bad” have no right to do so [...] If the cause for which one fights a war is just [then] all hostile acts one commits in it are intrinsically just, however little care one takes to wage it according to the rulebook.’[64] The fight in the name of good authorises not only the interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states (in the name of humanitarianism, freedom, democracy or human rights) but also the restriction of freedoms, the opening of camps that permit the internment of prisoners without any legal status, the bombing of civilian populations, the destruction of industrial infrastructure, the recourse to torture, the use of napalm or white phosphorus, depleted uranium projectiles, cluster bombs, anti-personnel mines, and so on. In a public debate on CBS in 1996, the former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was questioned by Leslie Stahl on the necessity of establishing a blockade against Iraq, thereby bringing about the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children (‘We have heard that a half-million children have died [in Iraq]. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?’). Albright’s reply was unequivocal: ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.’[65]

The consequences of equating the enemy with a criminal who should be punished, are therefore considerable. ‘That ends,’ writes Jean François Kervégan, ‘in the transformation of international law into an annex of the penal code, and war into a police action aimed at repressing the guilty.’[66] The repression of crimes and offences being traditionally under the jurisdiction of the police, the military gradually assumes the character of a police force. Already in 1904 Theodore Roosevelt declared that in the future the United States could indeed find itself forced to ‘exercise [the power] of the international police.’[67] In the period between the wars, at the time of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), the ‘prohibition of war’ would lead belligerents to redefine their interventions as so many international police actions in order to avoid the criminalisation of their enterprises. Today, notably in the context of the war on terror, we are witnessing a revealing blurring of the distinction between police and army: while the police are increasingly made to ensure internal order by military means, the army undertakes wars which are regularly presented as international police actions.

In much the same way, the boundary between domestic and foreign politics, that is, between international conflicts and civil wars, is breaking down. As Claude Polin observes, ‘The new wars are and can only be universal (world-wars), merciless (without quarter), unlimited (total) and without rules (these are international civil wars).’[68] Carl Schmitt emphasises on many occasions that the just war inevitably leads to civil war by virtue of the fact that it can be conducted without consideration of the rules of the jus in bello. One of the essential rules of the ‘war in due form’ is the distinction between combatants and non-combatant, between soldiers and civilians. This distinction is automatically effaced in the just wars of modern times, where one tends to consider that the entire enemy population is guilty. The recourse to indiscriminate aerial bombardment, with its destructive power and at the same time anonymous and ‘cold-blooded’ character, is one of the logical consequences of this development.

Today, we also see the proliferation of non-state actors (non-governmental organisations, private and multinational foundations, financial interests, lobbyists, etc.) in all the domains of international life. This evolution has redefined the relationships between the public and the private spheres, and between the civilian and military sectors. Whereas soldiers become more and more ‘technicians’ or ‘civilians in uniform,’ we simultaneously see an accelerated privatisation of all that relates to security (or to preventing insecurity). The privatisation of war does not result merely from the fact that, in many theatres of operation, the belligerents are civilians who have taken up arms, or from the fact that certain criminal organisations now have recourse to veritable private armies, as is the case with drug-traffickers. Another notable fact is the reappearance of private mercenary armies, notably in the United States, where in the absence of conscription, enrolment in the regular army is relatively small in relation to the total population.

The private military companies, or PMCs, independent or not of the military-industrial complex, today occupy a rising position in the architecture of the American military and national security (especially since their use compensates for the reluctance of Congress to put in regular troops on the ground). The turnover of such companies, in some cases listed on the stock market, is constantly growing. The best known are DynCorp Inc., Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), Kellogg Brown & Rott (KBR), Blackwater Security Consulting, Erinys, Sandline, Titan and Caci International. KBR, which belongs to the Halliburton multinational, where several members of the Bush government hold personal interests, signed a 200 million dollar contract with the Pentagon on 13 June 2003. The security company Blackwater has itself deployed almost 50,000 mercenaries around the world. These private companies, which are always looking for new markets related to defence and security, have been pivotal in the redeploying American power in the Persian Gulf. Today, they are especially active in Iraq, where nearly 20,000 mercenaries provide logistical support for the regular forces, without any excessive care of the choice of means (and without their deaths being counted among the losses suffered by the American military). These auxiliary combatants, who are sometimes paid as much as 1,000 dollars per day, are not subject to any rules, conventions or regulations. Their status is eminently paradoxical for, although legally employed by the United States, under international law they are considered illegal combatants.[69] ‘The private military companies employed by the Pentagon (sometimes at unreasonably high costs),’ writes Sami Makki, ‘have become essential for a new interventionist strategy based on the capacity to rapidly deploy forces anywhere in the world.’[70] The mercenary ‘market’ is today estimated at 100 billion dollars a year.[71] Concomitantly, but in an opposite direction, we see a militarisation of humanitarianism, due to development and humanitarian aid themselves becoming auxiliary instruments in the fight against asymmetric threats, as well as in the expansion of influence on the international scene.

The effacement of boundaries between the classical categories of aggression culminates in the confusion of the notions of war and peace themselves. When the enemy is set up as a figure of evil, it is no longer possible to make peace with him, for to make peace would be to compromise with evil. In the old law of nations (jus gentium), defeat was considered sufficient ‘punishment.’ Now, one has to impeach before tribunals those whom one stigmatises as ‘responsible’ for the war. The indefinite pursuit of war, even in times of peace, then becomes a moral imperative. Carl Schmitt saw that the Treaty of Versailles and the Kellogg-Briand Pact created an intermediate state between war and peace in which peace became a sort of pursuit of war by other means.[72] This situation has not ceased to evolve ever since, ending up as near-indistinguishability. The ‘just war’ of modern times no longer ends in a peace treaty in good and due form, but is pursued in peace under other forms. Once the guns have fallen silent, the guilty should still be punished, while the enemy population should possibly be ‘reeducated.’ The wars no longer end: they become interminable, for it becomes much more difficult to put an end to them when they are pursued also in peace. ‘Cold war’ or ‘hot war’: aggression becomes, under different forms, a permanent condition. It is at the same time an eradication of the border between the exception (which is war) and the norm (which is peace). Finally, given that according to Carl Schmitt, politics implies the recognition of the enemy, Clausewitz’s classic formula that war is the continuation of politics by other means is reversed: war becomes instead ‘the destruction of politics by every means.’[73]

This erosion of the border between war and peace is much more damaging to the concept of peace than the concept of war. There are two reasons for this. First, because the concept of peace cannot be interpreted in as many ways as the concept of war (there is at most only one form of peace while there are numerous forms of war). And second, one wages war to obtain peace and not peace to obtain war, and the end should always be more clearly defined than the means of arriving at it.

Alain de Benoist

Carl Schmitt Today

Terrorism, ‘Just’ War, and the State of Emergency

Jean Cau - quotes

 

Jean Cau used to reproach his friends for their lack of adjustment:
Formerly, capitalism was a matter of having children work in mines. Nowadays, it is defined as compulsory school attendance until the age of 16. Capitalism was once synonymous with the presence of slums, of a sixty-hour week without a single day off; nowadays, it is Club Med. It’s time the Left understood this.
[The Left, however, clearly failed to understand, and Jean Cau left.]
*
Look at them! Look at them, will you? Behold our politicians’ horrible languid maws (keep smiling!); the courtier-like faces of department managers. They are indeed salesmen, for the very power of nations is measured in relation to their own mercantile activity. The moist glow of submission to the crowd, the mass, and the majority is what flickers in their eyes. Where has the exemplary face gone to? Where is the severe and exemplary voice? Where are the harsh words that drive the best people to gather among the crowd as the latter, now tamed, finds itself possessed by a sense of will, instead of being agitated by a gloomy sort of fever?
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I used to be a member of the assault platoon and part of the leftist intelligentsia, but the years of service that I dedicated to them had me in a state of permanent scepticism, of often derisive contemplation. One reproached me for having such an attitude and unjustly equated it with a crime… Well, let it be my crime, then!
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To this very day, socialism and liberty have failed to prove that they can be united in matrimony without having one of them — eek! — strangle the other.
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It will have taken me years of reflection and lucidity before I finally dared to question — and express in the form of questions — the sacrosanct egalitarianism which had, up until recent years, been my milk and honey.
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Let us state the facts both harshly and clearly. It takes more than a thousand tendencies to create a will. With a thousand currents, what you have before you is not a river but a maze of streams that follow the craziest directions. And I say to you: a thousand heresies do not equal a Church, nor do a thousand desires result in love. What would you do with a thousand soldiers that lack the leadership of a captain? Or of children that have neither father nor master? And what would a million words be worth without stylistic organisation, or millions of men that do not constitute a people? One might as well call it all a magma.
*
This century has gone mad, losing its mind to all the cowardice, resignations, lies, deceptions and ugliness; and what one has labelled its “civilisational crisis” is, in fact, nothing but the fearful rejection of all grandeur.
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Going against the grain or, idea-wise, against all that the prevailing intellectual utopianism whispers or shouts in our ears, I state, in all tranquillity, that decadence is perfectly combinable with scientific progress and that our societies are not necessarily experiencing ascension and good health just because they conduct heart transplants, land on the moon, break the wall of sound and align Nobel prizes in onion rows: Euclid, Archimedes, Theophrastus, Hipparchus, Herophilus, and a hundred others rose to the very firmament of science at a time when both Athens and Greek power sank into the depths.
*
For when the day comes for people to be astounded by our failures, our grand-nephews must, after all, be made aware of the fact that there were at least a few soldiers who refused to put down their weapons and raise their hands in surrender.
*
What is valuable is not life itself, but what one does with it. […] There are a few destinies, and the rest are just lives that lack any and all interest: nothing but the stuff of women’s novels, idle rumours, the crackling of bubbles rising from the sludge of a pond when stirred, and cinematographic tales.
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For valour has no need of recompense.
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Your invincible dialectics, quibbler’s discourse, massive treatises and computers stand helpless in the face of all that, within me, burns your words to ashes.
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Let us make love, not war, but where exactly shall we do so? In the Sargasso Sea. And how shall we make love? Through a sorry mixture of psychedelic orgies. To do so is to forget that love and war have not always been in a state of enmity.
In a world devoid of enemies, there are no friends either: one only loves insofar as one is also able not to love. And when everything is of equal value, everything is worthless:
War used to result in young people’s deaths. True enough. Sustained peace, however, kills and drains youth. Furthermore, war singles out the Others. The enemy. I am only an individual to the extent that Others exist and my very being is exasperated all the more strongly and intensely when this Other chooses to object and espouse self-denial. Enemies are a necessity: they hold me to my own definitions, force me to embrace myself, and compel me to draw the line that demarcates me from the rest and within which my difference is very much alive.
*
Every mother who brings a child into this world believes herself to be giving birth to a king. Looking at his own child, every father considers it to be the Lord of the Earth. All of this is very well and good, very powerful and very sweet, and very un-democratic. An ever-indignant and masochistic mother, democracy demands equality for all her children, even at the cost of their resulting worthlessness. Should any one of them break free and raise himself above the latter, the wicked mother proceeds to scold him and says: “Be like your brothers! Be their equal!”
*
It is impossible, by definition, to equal others from above, which accounts for the fact that egalitarian societies are necessarily pervaded by tedium or despair. Love supposes the presence of a Master. Once there are no longer any genuine Masters, the entire society is one of slaves. Those slaves, however, are all sad and hollow. In this kind of society, the bourgeois is nothing but a promoted and shameful slave.
*
The morality of the bourgeoisie is that ‘it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion’, which is the equivalent of forgetting that the dog will eventually die as well and that ‘before his death, the lion was indeed alive; and lion-like’. In ancient times, ‘both aristocrats and peasants were willing to come to terms with having their sons led to their deaths. The bourgeois, on the other hand, “harbours” his children because neither courage nor heroic obedience are part of his legacy. The aristocrat says: “If my son is a coward, he sullies my good name”; as for the peasant, he states: “If I fail to defend my land, my enemy will claim it”. By contrast, this is what the bourgeois says: “If my son is killed, who will be my heir and succeed me in running the business?”’.
*
How does one define politics? Is it the fact of governing people? I, for one, say that this is not the real issue and that it is a matter of providing them with reasons to live and to die, of bestowing self-forgetfulness upon them. And people’s reasons to live have always been identical to their reasons to die. To remove either lot is to collapse the other.
*
My very origin has determined my belonging to the people. My ancestors have been peasants since the dawn of time, and the very nobility of my lineage and race is epitomised by the fact that we have never bought nor sold anything. Our hard work, yes indeed — for what we give is our own blood.
*

Any show of power leads to finger-pointing and is soiled with spittle. Children, women, delinquents, criminals and madmen loudly protest their own “oppression” and disarm the hand that either beat them or protected them. And the more one’s head is gnawed at by the termites of weakness, the more one’s body is disintegrated by violence. Echoing the pace at which our laws grow ever weaker, the criminality in our walls gains in strength, manifesting its presence with the loud sound of solicitor-like chattering. Such is also decadence: the death of laws, the proliferation of jurisprudences and the confusion of thoughts.
*
Just imagine a President of the Republic who would declare: “Should France be attacked, either by conventional means or using an atomic bomb, I solemnly swear that it would rather choose death than submission!”. Such a president would render our country invulnerable. “Let us abstain from attacking these madmen”, the enemy would say, “they are capable of sacrificing their lives to the very last man in the name of honour”. I invite the one who would seek this supreme office to ask himself: will he, or will he not, pick liberty over life and death over slavery? His response to this single question should decide which direction our votes take. My own voting slip would bear the name of anyone who would say: “I promise you death over dishonour”. Admittedly, of course, my candidate might end up only securing two votes: his own and mine.
*
Where am I? I am where I choose to be, in the place where I feel free and unclad, in the crisp air that immerses me and strengthens me with the knowledge of harsh and therefore perfectly untimely blatancies.
*
In France, the leftist adventure through our cultural regions is an absolutely hilarious one. The Mandarin culture has approached the people with a facial expression akin to that of a modern clergyman on his way to a brothel, and the result was almost instantaneous: only the middle and petty bourgeoisie proceeded to treat itself to the cultural revolution one celebrated in some temples. On their part, the people simply went to the Châtelet, on a fishing trip or calmly turned on their TV sets.
*
In the name of God, it is all too late. In the name of man, it was and still is mere utopia. For both these reasons, let us approximate and declare that it is the irrational that awaits us next, just around history’s corner.
Prior to the cleaning of his stables,  spent thirty years living in the most unpleasant conditions. And it is now the ‘stables of the West’ that await… Hercules’ coming.
*
from the book View from the Right, Volume III
by Alain de Benoist