Category Archives: Age of Treason Radio

Yockey on Culture and Race – Part 6

795px-Darwin's_finches_by_Gould

More on Yockey’s critique of Darwinism, consciousness, evolution and life.

Yockey saw everything in terms of Grand Dichotomies, anthropomorphized forces utterly opposed. He saw Darwinism as an outgrowth of Rationalism, like Liberalism, and thus felt compelled to deconstruct Darwinism using sophmoric strawman arguments.

Imperium, page 70:

The easiest refutation is the palaeontological. Fossil deposits — found in various parts of the earth — must represent the possibilities generally. Yet they disclose

71

only stable specie-forms, and disclose no transitional types, which show a species “evolving” into something else. And then, in a new fossil hoard, a new species appears, in its definitive form, which remains stable. The species that we know today, and for past centuries, are all stable, and no case has ever been observed of a species “adapting” itself to change its anatomy or physiology, which “adaptation” then resulted in more “fitness” for the “struggle for existence,” and was passed on by heredity, with the result of a new species.

This is denial, not refutation. The palaeontological record is incomplete, full of holes, yet even a puzzle missing pieces can convey information.

Darwin’s theorizing was inspired by his observations of living “transitional types”, the beaks of Darwin’s finches. Science has uncovered copious evidence of speciation. For example, Population Genomics Reveal Recent Speciation and Rapid Evolutionary Adaptation in Polar Bears: Cell.

Calling Culture-man a “higher” animal still treats him as an animal. Culture-man is a different world spiritually from all animals, and is not to be understood by referring him to any artificial materialistic scheme.

Yockey rejected the reality that man is animal. What he identifies as spirit can be just as well understood as consciousness, awareness. Culture-man is conscious-animal. Culture springs from consciousness.

If this picture of the facts were correct, species ought to be fluid at the present time. They should be turning into one another. This is, of course, not so. There should actually be no species, but only a surging mass of individuals, engaged in a race to reach — man. But the “struggle,” again, is quite inconclusive. The “lower” forms, simpler — less fit? — have not died out, have not yielded to the principle of Darwinian evolution. They remain in the same form they have had for — as the Darwinians would say — millions of years. Why do they not “evolve” into something “higher”?

Yockey rejected speciation, the name and details of the theory were irrelevant. Thus the silly strawmen. Individual species appear stable, the whole is in tumult.

The utilitarian aspect of the picture is also quite subjective — i.e., English, capitalistic, parliamentarian — for the utility of an organ is relative to the use sought to be made of it.

The naive, tautological, doctrine of utility never asked “Utility for what?”

Utility for survival, of course. “Fitness”, in an evolutionary sense, is defined as objectively as possible, in terms of survival. Yockey, however, seemed determined not to see it this way.

The soul of the lion and his power go together. The hand of man and his brain go together. No one can say that the strength of the lion causes him to live the way he does, nor that the hand of man is responsible for his technical achievements. It is the soul in each case which is primary.

This primacy of the spiritual inverts the Darwinian materialism on the doctrine of utility.

Yockey asserted the “primacy of the spiritual”, placing his own mysticism over and above material reality. It’s far easier to assert the primacy of material reality, because whatever anyone has to say, it’s right there just waiting to be probed and tested – this is the rationalism we call science.

The whole grotesquerie of Darwinism, and of the materialism of the entire 19th century generally, is a product of one fundamental idea — an idea which happens also to be nonfactual to this century, even though it was a prime fact a century ago. This one idea was that Life is formed by the outer.

Evidently, Yockey also denied external agency.

And yet, in a purely factual sense, what is Life? Life is the actualizing of the possible. The possible turns into the actual in the midst of outer facts, which affect only the precise

74

way in which the possible becomes actual, but cannot touch the inner force which is expressing itself through, and, if necessary, in opposition to, the outer facts.

“Life is the actualizing of the possible” sounds Darwinian, e.g. adaptive radiation.

Life is the unfolding of a Soul, an individuality.

Darwinism, to Yockey, was of a kind with two jewish intellectual movements, Marxism and Freudianism.

Darwinism was the animalization of Culture-man by means of biology … Marxism, the animalization of man through economics

Page 88:

As Socialism [i.e. Spengler’s Prussianism, Aryanism, National Socialism] creates the form of the Future, Marxism slips into the Past with the other remnants of Materialism. The mission of Western man is not to become rich through class-war; it is to actualize his inner ethico-politico-Cultural imperative.

There is another view of life and evolution which embraces a rational, Darwinian understanding of reality, rather than rejecting it. In his July 2014 broadcast, William Pierce: Cosmotheism’s Hard Way, Kevin Strom quotes Don Kaiser’s Life is Evolution:

THE SOLE CHARACTERISTIC that ultimately distinguishes living from non-living matter is classical Darwinian evolution. Life is simply matter that evolves.

Evolution is the sole feature that differentiates living matter from non-living matter.

Life is evolution.

The two are inseparable. Given the fact that all life forms die, how do they persist through time and changing environments? Every environment harboring life forms must change, simply because of their existence, so evolution is the only way life forms can persist through time. Not only did Charles Darwin discover what makes life possible despite the fact that all life forms eventually die, he unwittingly discovered the sole feature that distinguishes living from non-living matter. Charles Darwin defined life.

Life is Evolution.

Strom notes:

To the Cosmotheist, Nature is God. And science, logic, observation, reason, and the deepest stirrings of our race-soul are the means of apprehending God … Mathematics, physics, and genetics are the real words of God.

Cosmotheism asserts that we are matter and energy become conscious — and, more than that, that we are the Universe become conscious, that we are Nature become conscious of itself and all that that implies. It further shows us that we have reached a radically new stage in the evolution of the Universe — as significant, perhaps, as the evolution of non-living matter into living beings — as significant as the first rise of consciousness itself – as significant as the faltering steps of the first amphibians on the surface of the Earth. This new stage has come only recently, when European man first grasped the concept of evolution, and discovered the principles of genetics and heredity. It is the stage of conscious evolution — of the ability of living beings to direct, and vastly accelerate, the future course of their own evolution.

To the extent jews have outcompeted Whites it is by being more conscious of themselves and their survival as a people. In contrast, and in large part due to the efforts of jews, Whites have been relatively unconscious. Thus we seek to awaken, to inform and educate ourselves and others. The study of previous attempts, like Yockey’s, is part of this process.

Yockey on Culture and Race – Part 5

Darwin_Ape

A hallmark of Yockey’s world-view is his anthropomorphization of concepts and abstractions. He spoke of them as if they were Greek Titans, with thoughts and goals of their own, distinct and set in opposition to one another.

At the root of it all Yockey saw two titanic ideas. From Imperium, page 115:

Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men.

But the greatest opposition of all has not yet been named, the conflict which will take up all the others into itself. This is the battle of the Idea of the Unity of the West against the nationalism of the 19th century. Here stand opposed the ideas of Empire and petty-stateism, large-space thinking and political provincialism.

Yockey’s Ideas are not ideas, but have agency and causality. His intangible immaterial mystical philosophizing is “organic”, while man and his rationalism is “inorganic”.

Yockey’s twisting of the meanings of words goes beyond poetic license, beyond an honest attempt to describe the indescribable. He verges into mysticism, detached from reality and facts, and in some cases to the contrary.

Nationalism and racialism are related, connected, complementary. Not opposites.

As Northside commented previously:

Yockey exalts telos (ultimate purpose or state) in his cosmology, constructing his envisioned universe such that an “organic” causal life force (existential source or basis of existence) operates unilaterally upon the mean, “inorganic” stuff of observable experience, which he debases.

Do ideas drive men, or do men drive ideas? The truth, I think, is not one or the other but both. Yockey arrogated telos (and causality, agency) to Ideas, while denying it to people. But Yockey himself was a man driven by ideas, to promote his ideas.

What constitutes organic? The organic is the inorganic plus something else. Yockey might have described this something as Ideas. I say the something is consciousness, awareness, agency. Consciousness is what distinguishes human life from inhuman, not to mention non-life, the inorganic.

Returning to Yockey’s critique of Darwinism, page 69:

The human soul itself — known as the “brain” in the 19th century — is only a tool by which a certain type of monkey advanced himself to man ahead of his fellow-monkeys. Teleology again: man became man in order that he might be man.

Yockey, like many critics of Darwinism, was apparently disturbed by the fact that man and monkey are biologically related, distant cousins. Similar like apples and oranges, the difference is consciousness – communication, coordination, history, culture.

It is understandable that Englishmen were the primary “social Darwinists”. Instrumental in deciphering the mechanics of life, of evolution, they naturally envisioned themselves as the result, the pinnacle of the process. This is more anthropic principle than anthropomorphism.

As a world view, Darwinism cannot of course be refuted, since Faith is, always has been, and always will be, stronger than facts. Nor is it important to refute it as a picture of the world, since as such it no longer influences any but day-before-yesterday thinkers. However, as a picture of the facts, it is grotesque, from its first assumptions to its last conclusions.

Yockey’s argument is even more applicable to his own faith in Ideas. Darwinism is based on science, a system farther from faith and closer to fact than any other man has yet devised.

In the first place, there is no “Struggle for existence” in nature; this old Malthusian idea merely projected Capitalism on to the animal world. Such struggles for existence as do occur

70

are the exception; the rule in Nature is abundance. There are plenty of plants for the herbivores to eat, and there are plenty of herbivores for the carnivores to eat. Between the latter there can hardly be said to be “struggle,” since only the carnivore is spiritually equipped for war.

The capitalistic mentality, engaged in a competition to get rich, quite naturally pictured the animal-world also as engaged in an intensive economic contest. Both Malthusianism and Darwinism are thus capitalistic outlooks, in that they place economics in the center of Life, and regard it as the meaning of Life.

Yockey anthropomorphized capitalism, though it is defined and driven by men. It does not have an existence or will of its own. Such things are constrained and shaped by the same forces, the same reality as the life from which it springs.

The “struggle for existence” is only a conscious struggle in man, who naturally projects his own awareness onto the unaware. Yockey does it himself when he imagines carnivores “spiritually equipped for war”.

The competition in nature is over limited resources. The rule in nature is feast and famine. The rabbits boom, then the coyotes boom, then the rabbits crash, and then the coyotes crash. Darwinism is an observation of the rules of the reality of life. Not just how the environment shapes and molds life, but also how various forms of life shape each other. This involves not only competition/predation, but also cooperation/symbiosis.

Natural selection was the name given to the process by which the “unfit” died out to give place to the “fit.”

Fitness, in evolution, is not a moral or aesthetic value judgement. It is an objective metric: survival. Life fits its environment like clothes fit a body.

I suspect that Yockey’s lame arguments against Darwinism were based on by his misunderstanding and thus revulsion toward “survival of the fittest”. He was perhaps unwilling to face the fact that the jews have out-competed Whites, rule us, and are slowly killing us. The problem, as I see it, is not with Darwinism, or rationalism, or any philosophical clash, but the simple fact that Whites, relative to jews, are not conscious.

Yockey on Culture and Race – Part 4

plato_and_aristotle

In Yockey’s view the crisis of the Western Civilization was caused by the conflict between “the 19th century outlook” and “the 20th century outlook”.

Imperium, page 62:

But the strength of the organism, even in crisis, is too great for a few intellectuals and their mobs to destroy it, and it goes its way. In the Western Civilization, the expansive tendency reached the point where by 1900, 18/20ths of the surface of the earth was controlled politically from Western capitals [by jews]. And this development merely brought an aggravation of the crisis, for this power-will of the West gradually awakened the slumbering masses of the outer world to political activity.

Before the inner war of classes had been liquidated, the outer war of races had begun. Annihilation-wars and World Wars, continuous internal strain in the form of unrelenting class-war, which regards outer war merely as a means of increasing its demands, the revolt of the colored races against the Western Civilization — these are the forms which this terrible crisis takes in the 20th century.

The peak of this long crisis exists now, in the period 1950-2000, and possibly in these very years will be decided forever the question whether the West is to fulfill its last life-phase. The proud Civilization which in 1900 was master of 18/2Oths of the earth’s surface, arrived at the point in 1945, after the suicidal Second World War, where it controlled no part whatever of the earth. World power for all great questions was decided in two outer capitals, Washington and Moscow. The smaller questions of provincial administration were left to the nations-become-colonies of the West, but in power-questions, the regimes based in Russia and America decided all.

The phrase “revolt of the colored races against the Western Civilization” evokes the theme of Lothrop Stoddard‘s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) and The Revolt Against Civilization (1922).

The significance of Yockey’s use of “18/20ths”, rather than 9/10ths or 90%, is unclear.

Yockey identified “the enemy” as “a few intellectuals and their mobs”. A bit further on he refers obliquely to the jews and other non-Whites:

The 20th century outlook is synonymous with the Future of the West, the perpetuation of the 19th century outlook means the continuation of the domination of the West by Culture-distorters and barbarians.

Skipping farther ahead, to page 115, Yockey fleshes out the two conflicting outlooks in his typical form, as a series of Grand Dichotomies:

In complete contradiction to our instinct, feelings, and ideas, the 19th century sits leering upon the throne of Europe

The conflict is far-reaching; it affects every sphere of Life. Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the Rule of Money; Order to Social Chaos, Hierarchy to Equality, socio-economico-political Stability to constant Flux; glad assumption of Duties to whining for Rights; Socialism to Capitalism, ethically, economically, politically; the Rebirth of Religion to Materialism; Fertility to Sterility; the spirit of Heroism to the spirit of Trade; the principle of Responsibility to Parliamentarism; the idea of Polarity of Man and Woman to

116

Feminism; the idea of the individual task to the ideal of “happiness”; Discipline to Propaganda-compulsion; the higher unities of family, society, State to social atomism; Marriage to the Communistic ideal of free love; economic self-sufficiency to senseless trade as an end in itself; the inner imperative to Rationalism.

But the greatest opposition of all has not yet been named, the conflict which will take up all the others into itself. This is the battle of the Idea of the Unity of the West against the nationalism of the 19th century. Here stand opposed the ideas of Empire and petty-stateism, large-space thinking and political provincialism. Here find themselves opposed the miserable collection of yesterday-patriots and the custodians of the Future. The yesterday-nationalists are nothing but the puppets of the extra-European forces who conquer Europe by dividing it. To the enemies of Europe, there must be no rapprochement, no understanding, no union of the old units of Europe into a new unit, capable of carrying on 20th century politics.

As we see here, Yockey tended not only to think in polarized terms, but to anthropomorphize, imparting human-like agency to inhuman, inanimate, intangible concepts and abstractions. Rather than seeing Hierarchy and Equality, for example, as ideals given life and driven by man, Yockey argued as if they exist outside man and drive themselves.

Here, near the beginning of Yockey’s book, even before his critique of “liberalism”, he attacks Darwinism. Several of his arguments are simply wrong, and there are disturbing similarities to what anti-“racist”/anti-White critics of “social Darwinism” and “scientific racism” have argued.

Contra such criticism, my previous series of podcasts on Race and Genetics lays out the biological basis of race and a rough history of racial science.

Page 65:

The great foundations of the old outlook were Rationalism and Materialism. They will be completely examined in this work, but here it is proposed to treat only three thought-systems, Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, products of materialistic thought, all of which were the focus of great spiritual energy in the 19th century, and which, continuing to have a vogue in the early 20th century, contributed greatly to lead Europe into its present abyss.

Page 68:

The basic idea of Darwinism — evolution — is as little novel as the particular theories of the system. Evolution is the great central idea of the philosophy of the 19th century.

Darwin’s basic idea was to explain the mechanics: evolution = modification/mutation + selection.

Darwin’s system has two aspects, of which only one is treated here, for only one was effective. This was Darwinism as a popular philosophy.

I discussed “Darwinism as a popular philosophy” and Herbert Spencer in Race and Genetics – Part 2 and Part 3.

Page 69:

The system shows its provenance as a product of the Age of Criticism in its teleological assumptions. Evolution has purpose — the purpose of producing man, civilized man, English man — in the last analysis, Darwinians. It is anthropomorphic — the “aim of evolution” is not to produce bacilli, but humanity.

This is the kind of argument that the race-denying jew Stephen Gould used to make.

Yockey on Culture and Race – Part 3

jewish_culture_in_europe

Feedback at the Daily Stormer:

Schlockey – This is mental masturbation. No solutions from this tanjewful.

Such thoughts have occurred to me and to a degree I concur. Philosophy is not my cup of tea. At times it seems to amount to name-checking and pretentious navel gazing. Analysis is reactionary, descriptive rather than proscriptive, more like a post-mortem or obituary than a manifesto. If nothing else however, Yockey provides a springboard for those who are curious to learn more about European history and the thoughts of prominent European thinkers.

In order to propose sensible solutions to a problem you must first identify and understand the problem. As I described when I started this discussion, the claim has been made that Yockey’s Imperium has done just that. I want to believe, but I am skeptical. I would like to understand Yockey’s understanding.

Unlike many other analysts, Yockey relatively clearly identifies the jews. He also quite correctly describes the jews and the nature of the jewish problem as parasitic. Unfortunately, as I begin to come to grips with in this installment, Yockey had an iconoclastic attitude about race. He regarded soul/spirit/culture above and before people/biology/genes/materialism.

I began this second series to focus on Yockey’s view of what he described as “vertical race”, which he associated with the 19th century and looked down upon, and “horizontal race”, which he associated with the 20th century and advocated in favor of. It occurs to me now however that he provides a worthwhile introduction and synopsis of his views in the very first pages of Imperium. At page 10 he describes the thesis of his book – problem and solution:

The great crisis of the West set in forcefully with the French Revolution and its consequent phenomena. Napoleon was the symbol of the transition of Culture into Civilization — Civilization, the life of the material, the external, of power, giant economies, armies, and fleets, of great numbers and colossal technics, over Culture, the inner life of religion, philosophy, arts, domination of the external life of politics and economics by strict form and symbolism, strict restraint of the beast-of-prey in man, feeling of cultural unity. It is the victory of Rationalism, Money and the great city over the traditions of religion and authority, of Intellect over Instinct.

11

We had seen all this in the previous high cultures as they approached their final life-phase. In each case the crisis had been resolved by the resurgence of the old forces of Religion and Authority, their victory over Rationalism and Money, and the final union of the nations into an Imperium.

Yockey’s vision tends toward dichotomies. Behind everything he anthropomorphizes opposing forces, names capitalized, distinct and at odds. With Culture, however, he waves his hands and describes the literally inorganic as organic:

The High Cultures belong at the peak of the organic hierarchy: plant, animal, man. They differ from the other organisms in that they are invisible, or in other words, they have no light-quality. In this they resemble the human soul. The body of a High Culture is made up of the population streams in its landscape. They furnish it with the material through which it actualizes its possibilities.

Since a Culture is organic, it has an individuality, and a soul. Thus it cannot be influenced in its

12

depths from any outside force whatever. It has a destiny, like all organisms. It has a period of gestation, and a birth-time. It has a growth, a maturity, fulfillment, a down-going, a death.

So, what crisis? Organisms live and die. If this is natural, where is the crisis? Skipping ahead to page 62 we get the impression that what disturbed Yockey was the sort of realization that disturbs many of us, even those who are less intelligent and knowledgable:

The proud Civilization which in 1900 was master of 18/2Oths of the earth’s surface, arrived at the point in 1945, after the suicidal Second World War, where it controlled no part whatever of the earth.

In 1900, the State-system of Europe reacted as a unit when the negative will of Asia thought, by the Boxer rebellion, to drive out the Imperialism of the West from China. Western armies from the leading States moved in, and smashed the revolt. Less than half a century later, extra-European armies are moving freely about Europe, armies containing Negroes, Mongols, Turkestani, Kirghizians, Americans, Armenians, colonials and Asiatics of all areas. How did this happen?

Quite obviously, through the inner division of the West. This division was not material — material cannot divide men if their minds agree. No, it was spiritual division that brought Europe into the dust. Half of Europe had a completely different attitude toward Life, a different valuation of Life, from the other half. The two attitudes were respectively the 19th century outlook, and the 20th century outlook.

Yockey here describes the What, not the How. The How, in a word, is jews. Jews were the masters of “the proud Civilization” even before what Yockey describes as a sudden change in control. Control did not actually change – it simply became clear that Whites were not in control.

Yockey refers to his solution as “The Idea”:

The first step in action is thus the liquidation of the spiritual division of Europe. There is only one basis on which this can be done; there is only one Future, the organic Future. The only changes that can be brought about in a Culture are those which its life-stage necessitates. The 20th century outlook is synonymous with the Future of the West, the perpetuation of the 19th century outlook means the continuation of the domination of the West by Culture-distorters and barbarians. The task of the present work is the presentation of all the fundamentals of the

64

20th century outlook necessary as the framework for comprehending and thorough action. First is the Idea — not an ideal which can be summed up in a catchword, or one which can be explained to an alien, but a living, breathing, wordless feeling, which already exists in all Westerners, articulate in a very few, inchoate in most. This Idea, in its wordless grandeur, its irresistible imperative, must be felt, and thus only men of the West can assimilate it. The alien will understand it as little as he has always understood Western creations and Western codes. In his victory parade in Moscow in 1945, the barbarian exhibited his Western captive slaves to the jeering crowds of his cities, and made them drag their national flags behind them in the dust. If any Westerner thinks that the barbarian makes nice distinctions between the former nations of the West, he is incapable of understanding the feelings of populations outside a High Culture toward that Culture. Tomorrow the captive slaves offered up to the annihilation-instincts of the Moscow mobs may be drawn from Paris, London, Madrid, as well as from Berlin. A continuation of the spiritual division of the West makes this not only possible but absolutely inevitable. Both the outer forces are working for the continued division of the West; within they are helped by the least worthy elements in Europe. This is addressed however to the only people that matter — the Westerners who can feel the Imperative of the Future working within them.

Our action-task is dictated for us by the fact that the soil of our Civilization is occupied by the outsider.

Yockey’s warning was prophetic. Today every major city of the West has a majority non-White population. Never mind jeers, the remaining Whites are robbed, raped and murdered.

The Idea, or at least a comparable ideal, has since been summed up in the catchword we know as The 14 Words:

We Must Secure The Existence Of Our PEOPLE And A Future For White Children

Unlike Yockey, David Lane and contemporary White nationalists have emphasized the importance of the PEOPLE over ideology.

Image source: Culture Jamming Street Artist COMBO Stages Topless Spectacle in Paris.

Yockey on Culture and Race – Part 2

Napoleon_stellt_den_israelitischen_Kult_wieder_her,_30._Mai_1806

We make here a brief digression to provide some context for Francis Parker Yockey’s quotes from Napoleon.

First, we’ll consider an explication provided by Eric Voegelin. Who is Voegelin? Eric Voegelin and Ancient Israel:

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) has been described as a political philosopher and a philosopher of history. His magnum opus Order and History is regarded by partisans in terms of scientific scholarship combined with theological insight.

He watched the Austrian and German republics fall in the 1930s when the Nazis gained power. Voegelin loathed the irrationality and racism of Nazism, and eventually lost his admiration for Nietzsche, of whom he was very critical in some of his later writings. However, it was not merely the “will to power” that aroused his disdain. Although a Lutheran in his upbringing, Voegelin came to distrust the ecclesiastical establishment. During the 1930s, all except one of the Christian clergy he knew were Nazis. (3)

He exposed himself to danger in being unwilling to align himself with Hitler’s cause. In 1938, he was dismissed from his professorial post at the university of Vienna, and narrowly escaped from the Gestapo. Fleeing from the Nazi environment, Voegelin moved with his wife to America, where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming an American citizen.

Any opinion-shaper Lawrence Auster approved of must be regarded with suspicion:

Auster revered Eric Voegelin, another epic-level falsifier of reality. Voegelin was the source of most of Auster’s stupid ideas about “gnosticism”. Voegelin claimed that gnosticism was responsible for Marxism.

Voegelin’s discussion of Napoleon is part of a broader examination of Auguste Comte:

Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (19 January 1798 – 5 September 1857), better known as Auguste Comte (French: [oɡyst kɔ̃t]), was a French philosopher. He was a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism. He is sometimes regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.

Comte’s social theories culminated in the “Religion of Humanity“, which influenced the development of religious humanist and secular humanist organizations in the 19th century. Comte likewise coined the word altruisme (altruism).

Thomas Huxley described Comte’s religion as “Catholicism minus Christianity”.

The following excerpt is taken from Voegelin’s History of Political Ideas: Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man, the section titled The Apocalypse of Man: Comte, p. 204:

Napoleon – Russia and the Occidental Republic

More specifically, the political program of [Auguste] Comte is related to the ideas of Napoleon. This is a question of which Comte is strictly reticent; Napoleon appears in his work only in order to be condemned as the “génie rétrograde” [retrograde engineering]. Nevertheless, the relation exists. In particular Comte’s conception of the Occident is hardly conceivable before the consolidation of the Occidental idea through Napoleon’s struggle with the new Orient, that is, with Russia. Let us pass in review a few utterances of Napoleon: “There are only two nations in the world. The one lives in the Orient, the other occupies the Occident. The English, French, Germans, Italians, and so on, are governed by the same civil law, the same mores, the same habits, and almost the same religion. They are all members of one family, and the men who want to start war among them, want a civil war.” 43 The means for abolishing this state of Occidental civil war would be the political unification of the West. “There will be no peace in Europe except under a sole chief, under an emperor who has kings as his officers and distributes kingdoms to his lieutenants.” 44 The political should be followed by the institutional and civilizational unification. “All the united countries must be like France; and if you unite them to the Pillars of Hercules [at the Straight of Gibraltar, southern tip of Spain] and to Kamchatka [far-eastern Russia, a pennisula jutting into the Pacific ocean], the laws of France must extend everywhere.” 45 And in retrospect: “Why did my Code Napoléon not serve as the basis for a Code européen, and why my Université impériale not as the model for a Université européenne? In this manner we would have formed in Europe one and the same family. Everybody, when traveling, would have found himself at home.” 46 This Occident is a unit not only because of its internal history and coherence; it is forced toward a still more intense unification because of its defensive position against Russia.

Napoleon elaborates this problem on the occasion of the Russian plans with regard to Turkey. The ideas of the tsar revolved around the conquest of Turkey. “We discussed several times the possibility and eventuality of its partition, and the effect on Europe. At first sight the proposition attracted me. I considered that the partition would extend the progress of civilization. However, when I considered the consequences more coolly, when I saw the immense power that Russia would gain, and the great number of Greeks in the provinces now subject to the sultan who then would join a power which is already colossal, I refused roundly to have a part in it.” The principal difficulty was Russia’s design on Constantinople, for “Constantinople, c’est l’Empire du monde.” [is the Empire of the world] It was obvious that France, “even if she possessed Egypt, Syria, and India, would be nothing in comparison with what these new possessions would make of Russia. The barbarians of the north were already much too powerful; after this partition they could overrun all Europe. I believe this still.” 47 In another mood he sees this danger present even now. “If Russia finds an emperor who is courageous, impetuous, capable, in brief: a tsar who has a beard on his chin, then Europe is his. He can begin his operations on the German soil itself, at a hundred leagues from Berlin and Vienna, whose sovereigns are the only obstacles. He enforces the alliance of the one, and with his help he will defeat the other. From this moment he is in the heart of Germany.” At this junction, Napoleon puts himself in the place of the conqueror, and continues: “Certainly, if I were in this situation, I would arrive at Calais according to a timetable in moderate marches; and there I would find myself master and arbiter of Europe.” Then, in the conversation, the dream of the conquest of the Occident separates from the Russian problem. He is now himself the conqueror who is master and arbiter of Europe. And he addresses his interlocutor: “Perhaps, my friend, you are tempted to ask me, like the minister of Pyrrhus asked his master: And what is all this good for? I answer you: For founding a new society and for the prevention of great disasters. Europe waits for this relieving deed and solicits it: the old system is finished, and the new one is not yet established, and it will not be established without long and violent convulsions.” 48 Let us, finally, recall that Napoleon also dreamed of making Paris the seat of the spritual power of the Occident as of its temporal power. With the pope in Paris, the city would have become “the capital of the Christian world, and I would have directed both the religious world and the political. . . . I would have had my religious sessions like my legislative sessions; my councils would have been the representation of Christianity; the popes would have been only its presidents; I would have opened and closed these assemblies, approved and published their decisions, as it had been done by Constantine and Charlemagne.” 49

43. This and the following quotations are taken from the collection Napoléon, Vues politiques, introduction by Adrien Dansette (Rio de Janeiro: Amérie-Edit, n.d.). The original edition is Paris, 1839. The passage quoted is from September 1802, p. 340.

44. “A Miot de Mélito,” 1803, in ibid.

45. “Au conseil d’état,” July 1805, in ibid., 341.

46. “A las cases, Sainte-Hélène,” in ibid.

47. “A O’Meara, Sainte-Hélène,” in ibid., 339 f.

48. “A las cases, Sainte-Hélène,” in ibid., 337 f.

49. “A las cases, Sainte-Hélène,” in ibid., 181 f.

Roman Bernard’s Nation-States, the European Union and the Occident (1/3) asks, “how we get from stato-national feeling to Pan-Occidental awareness”:

Western European nations originate from the Carolingian Empire, which was shared out in 843 A.D. between the three grandsons of Charlemagne.

From the dislocation of the Western Empire, as it was then named, emerged thus three states. These were Francia Occidentalis (which would become France) and Francia Orientalis (later the Holy Roman Empire, which was Germanic). Lothair kept an awkwardly-shaped strip in the middle, including all the regions European powers would seek to conquer up to WW2: what would later become the Low Countries, Rhineland, Alsace, Switzerland, Northern Italy.

Francia Orientalis, AKA East Francia, comprised most of contemporary Germany, Austria and Croatia.

A comment on the previous installment from Marcus linked Napoleon I: Visionary Racial Nationalist:

In the bolded quote, Napoleon makes the right case for ethnonationalism, in contrast to many White Nationalists of today who look to moral or scientific justifications for their ideology.

“Years later, questioned by his friend Truguet about what he had done in Saint-Domingue, an enraged Bonaparte declared that, had he been in Martinique during the Revolution, he would have supported the English rather than accept an end to slavery. “I am for the whites because I am white; I have no other reason, and that one is good,” he said. “How is it possible that liberty was given to Africans, to men who had no civilization, who did not even know what the colony was, what France was? It is perfectly clear that those who wanted the freedom of the blacks wanted the slavery of the whites.”

This is a moral justification based on a particularist, group-centric understanding of right and wrong.

Napoleon and the Jews, at Wikipedia, describes the jews’ positive regard for Napoleon and his candid expressions of his negative regard for them:

Napoleon Bonaparte of the First French Empire enacted laws that emancipated European jews from old laws restricting them to ghettos, as well as the many laws that limited Jews’ rights to property, worship, and careers.

The net effect of his policies, as a result, significantly changed the position of the Jews in Europe, and he was widely admired by the Jews as a result. Starting in 1806, Napoleon passed a number of measures supporting the position of the Jews in the French Empire

This attitude can be seen from the letter he wrote on the 29th of November 1806, to Champagny, Minister of the Interior:

[It is necessary to] reduce, if not destroy, the tendency of Jewish people to practice a very great number of activities that are harmful to civilisation and to public order in society in all the countries of the world. It is necessary to stop the harm by preventing it; to prevent it, it is necessary to change the Jews. […] Once part of their youth will take its place in our armies, they will cease to have Jewish interests and sentiments; their interests and sentiments will be French.

Privately, in a letter to his brother Jerome Napoleon dated 6 March 1808 he makes his views explicit:

I have undertaken to reform the Jews, but I have not endeavoured to draw more of them into my realm. Far from that, I have avoided doing anything which could show any esteem for the most despicable of mankind.

Napoleon’s indirect influence on the fate of the Jews was even more powerful than any of the decrees recorded in his name. By breaking up the feudal trammels of mid-Europe and introducing the equality of the French Revolution he effected more for Jewish emancipation than had been accomplished during the three preceding centuries.

Whatever the reason, from his presumption that they could be assimilated or changed it is apparent that Napoleon misunderstood and underestimated the jews. The results have been disastrous for European man.