We live in astonishing times. Although ever since we collectively dropped down the COVID rabbit hole in 2020, evil, insanity, and stupidity have seemed to dominate the leadership of most countries, in varying proportions according to the given nation. One hardly knows where to begin. Sir Keir Starmer and his two-tier policing cum attempts at Orwellian thought control? Macron and his all-party Union Desacree against the nefarious Mlle. Le Pen? Kamala Harris’s decidedly undemocratic replacement of Biden as Democratic presidential candidate, while Trump struggles to reinvent himself as a pro-abortion candidate? The Brazilian judiciary’s suppression of Elon Musk’s social medium? On and on it goes, and the hits just keep on coming.
Of course, the insanity has not gone entirely unnoticed by the great voting public. The Traffic Light Coalition ruling from Berlin (so-called from its Odd Couple-like troika of Socialists, Liberals, and Greens) has been so ridiculous as to push the recent elections in the German States of Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg into the hands of the Alternative für Deutschland, an allegedly ‘far-right’ party on account of its deplorable support for the German nation and its people. As with Macron’s stooges in France regarding the Rassemblement National, all ‘respectable’ parties dropped their supposed differences purely to keep the AfD out of power. But they are now the biggest party in Thuringia, and second in Saxony and Brandenburg.
Throughout Europe, there has been squawking on the part of various governing cliques about the need to crack down on ‘far-right extremists,’ and those who hold ‘undemocratic ideas.’ What is lacking is a clear definition of what those words actually mean, to say nothing of a sense of irony. If suppressing freedom of speech in the name of freedom is not an amusing idea, then comedy has lost its edge. How can a governing class that claims the right to such untrammeled powers for itself even pretend to know what ‘democratic’ might mean? If they refuse to deal with a majority-winning party, surely they are the ones opposing democracy?
In the end, however, it really comes down to the exercise of power. Those who have it in Europe and the rest of the developed world are afraid of losing it due to an increasingly incensed populace for whom they have little sympathy and less respect. Economic woes and rising crime linked to massive immigration (especially that which brings Islamist militants); sheer ignorance on the part of the elites as to how to operate governmental machinery effectively; the continuing conflict with Russia; an increasingly visible double standard between ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ as regards law enforcement and civil services; destruction of traditional family and gender roles; the accelerating erosion of social bonds; lethal population policies—all of these are part of a witches’ brew of malice and incompetence that characterize most national and international leadership in the world to-day. Since these policies comprise a huge part of that leadership’s self-image, they are as incapable of changing or abandoning it as the National Socialists could their racial policies or the Soviets their economic ones. To do so would be to make them other than what they are, and that they cannot be.
But what of their ‘far-right’ opponents? Here we have a bit of difficulty, because for decades, the educational establishment in Europe and America have lumped together any believer in sanity with fascists and Nazis. Of course, there is a delicious irony here, because the bulk of the resistance during World War II would have been similarly accused, were they alive to-day. There can be no doubt that men like Stauffenberg would face governmental assaults on their assets and communications ability were they still around. The problem, however, is that relatively few young Europeans and Americans really know much about what went on then.
So it is that when professors blinded by Marxism, gender ideology, and general ignorance maunder on, linking normality with fascism and oppression, the stupider accept it at face value, and join Antifa, BLM, and similar cults. There they exercise their youthful energy in whatever mayhem is permitted at the moment by the regime, and so enjoy what mankind has ever reveled in: feeling morally justified in committing evil. Truly, the Hitler Youth and Antifa have more in common than one would like to admit.
But the smarter kids realized that they were being fed drivel. The problem was and is that they had no base of information to contradict it with, or to evaluate what was true and what was not. It is an easy to understand temptation. If Professor Schmutz says a) a husband-led household is fascism, and b) fascism was evil, the uninformed youth—especially if cursed with Generation of ’68 parents—could easily conclude that fascism was indeed good. What he cannot realize is that Professor Schmutz is far closer to fascism in his first principles than he is to normality. For our young student, being ‘on the Right’ becomes merely a matter of what is to be opposed, rather than upheld—and he may well acquire some dangerous heroes, again thanks to the professor.
It is this lack of fundamental principles that characterizes many of those on the Right in Europe; but it is a lack, ironically once more, that is the result of the dominant liberalism’s own vacuity. It may be the elites’ most dangerous gift to its feared opponents: an inability to escape the Weltanschauung of the regime. In America, for example, our Mr. Trump has drop-kicked the pro-life issue into next week. It is explained that he must do this in order to be elected. Possibly, although alienating one’s own base for the sake of trying to conciliate irreconcilables rarely works. But even if it were true, what does it say for the people of the United States of America if accepting infanticide really is the price of power over them? The unkind might say that in that case perhaps they deserve the kind of leadership they already have.
Some of what is considered ‘right-wing’ to-day are young—and often clever—internet mavens who have amassed a wide, if not always deep, collection of ideas from the mass of concepts routinely attacked by their elders. From this we find apologists for all or part of the National Socialist project, neo-pagans, and sundry other exotic folk. There are would-be ideologues and—as the young put it—‘grifters,’ as well as sincere seekers after truth who have no firm foundation from which to begin their search for useful ideas. It is to such as these that traditional conservatives need to present a coherent message: rooted in reality, and adaptable to specific circumstances.
In any case, we are left with a terrible problem. Many, if not most of us, still inhabit the mental universe constructed by our elites and their predecessors, even if we are all too aware of the evil of those elites in practice. One of the first things we have to understand is that they, like the Communists, National Socialists, and fascists of yore, as men of the Left, have a certain vision. It is degenerate, and generally poorly expressed, but it is real. There is no God, or if there is He plays no role in human affairs. Power in itself grants legitimacy and authority, and those who hold it have the right and duty to remold their fellow-men according to whichever design is in their own heads—indeed, those fellow men and their beliefs and traditions are only important to the degree that they can be reconciled with that vision. Human beings as such have no inherent value, save as they are ‘useful.’ Tradition, religion, and the rest may be retained, so long as they can be used, not taken seriously by their practitioners, and discarded whenever deemed necessary. If whoever replaces the current set of jackals-in-charge has a similar worldview, then we shall have only exchanged one set of criminal dictators for another, as happened in the Soviet Bloc after 1945. As conservatives, our task is to reject not only the day-to-day policies of the radical utopians whom we oppose, but also the fundamental view of the human person and his place in the cosmos, as described above, from which their menacing schemes ultimately derive.
What, then, is to be done? Well, the shared beliefs of the traditional European Right—altar, throne, subsidiarity, solidarity, and a transnational identity stemming from the shared inheritance of Athens. Rome, and Jerusalem—must be resurrected and spread about. Faith may be a gift; but the sort of cultural Christianity that does not believe in Christ or His Church may well be enough with which to oppose Islamism; it is not enough to give a true animating principle to Europe or its nations. In a word, at bottom, for Europe and the West to escape the trap they are in they must return to the religion that made them. The great irony is that this religious revival must be done for the sake of personal salvation of individuals, not as a political ploy—or it won’t work. That in turn requires a clerical hierarchy imbued with Apostolic zeal, and a laity responding properly.
Such revival aside, it is absolutely essential for the young to be taught true history in any medium possible—alternative educational institutions, the internet, anything. They must learn thereby the real nature of the foe they are facing—and that simply embracing an alternative but allied ideology may solve a few immediate problems, but will leave the basic sickness intact—even as happened in 1945. The true heroes of the resistance in every country—against the National Socialists before and during the war, and the Soviets then and after—must be explored, and their various policies and beliefs examined in a sympathetic light. This not only to see what principles they were fighting and dying for, but how they might be of use in constructing alternatives to our current system. Propagandistic terms such as ‘Austrofascism’ and ‘Clerico-Fascism’ must be exploded, and the collaborationist careers of men like Karl Renner exposed.
The same is true of the great conservative and right-wing thinkers of every European (and a number of settler) countries of the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries upon which those principles were based. Mostly forgotten, often dismissed with a single word like ‘reactionary,’ from the Miguelistas and Integralistas of Portugal to the Russian Solidarists, the writings need to be resurrected and re-examined. This huge body of work, often filled with contradictions and obscurities, is nevertheless far more realistic than the efforts of those whose heirs dominate us to-day. Nor am I speaking here solely of the great anti-revolutionary writers of those times, but of such as the opponents of Bismarck and Cavour, especially those from Prussia and Sardinia. Many of their observations of society and political nature remain valid—they have been horribly borne out by the bloody occurrences which shaped the nightmare in which we find ourselves.
When the new regime comes—and please God, may that day be peaceful—the free circulation of such a body of thought among its leaders shall make it far more humane, at least in the long run, than what it replaces. Violence begets violence, and if the partisans of the current structure attempt to suppress their successors in that manner—or else use the system peacefully, albeit oppressively and selectively—to keep themselves in power, it shall be a terrible day of reckoning. It will be that much worse if the victors, instead of seeing themselves as attempting to carry out the will of a God Who will judge them at death as justly and mercifully as He shall their opponents, share those opponents’ basic worldviews. In that case, may He protect us all!
