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| © Copyright Peter Crawford 2014 |
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| © Copyright Peter Crawford 2014 |
If an understanding of history implies an understanding of the present and a feeling for the future, then the work of the historian Arnold Toynbee is of great importance, for from his study of civilizations, and with the help of some of Oswald Spengler's insights, it is possible to construct a model of history that is fully in accord with scientific methodology, and which predicts the future of the West.
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| Oswald Spengler |
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| Arnold Toynbee |
These features include a 'Time of Troubles', schism in the body social, a 'Universal State', and a 'Universal Church'.
According to Toynbee, a civilization arises from either a physical or a social challenge, that is, civilization is man's successful response to a particular geographical or social challenge.
If the challenge is geographical, then the civilization is, as a rule, unrelated to any other, while, if the challenge is social (usually resulting from the disintegration of a previous civilization), then the new civilization is related to an older one.
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| Pyramids of Gizeh |
Each civilization declines, and produces what Toynbee called a 'Universal State'.
This state, which is usually an Empire, heralds the end of the 'Time of Troubles', and lasts for approximately 400 years.
For instance, the Universal State of the Hellenic civilization was the Roman Empire (31 BC - 378 AD), and its 'Time of Troubles' from the second Peloponnesian War (431 BC) until the establishment, by Julius Caesar, of the Empire.
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| Julius Caesar and Empire |
Those free to create art, science, and philosophy.
However, Toynbee's study of history, which took over forty years to complete, has been attacked by a number of historians for widely differing reasons.
Yet all of Toynbee's critics attack him for personal, not historical, reasons.
Like Collingwood, they object to Toynbee's approach simply because they do not personally believe that history should be approached in such a way.
Their criticism and approach is hardly scientific.
In contrast, one has only to axiomatize Toynbee's conception of civilization, constructing thus a model in accordance with the scientific method, to realize how revolutionary it is.
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| Sir Isaac Newton |
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| Charles Darwin |
Any scientific model or theory must be logically consistent, employ the minimum of postulates, and give predictions, which are capable of verification by either observation or experiment.
For instance, Newton used his theory of gravity and his three laws of motion to predict the motion of Halley's comet and to predict that the Earth (and the other spinning planets) would be slightly flattened in shape.
All his predictions were verified by observation, and his theory of gravitation, for instance, has been not only confirmed by such verifications but used to predict with great success the orbits of satellites and other spacecraft.
The method of testing a theory by appeal to predicted observations has become the basis of modern science, and there exists no reason, other than a stubborn prejudice, why it cannot be extended to the less empirical areas of knowledge such as the study of history.
In his study of civilizations, Toynbee has found similarities in both overall structure and in detail, and if one approaches his work scientifically, the only questionable element is the criteria used to define a civilization.
However, if the model of a civilization derived from Toynbee's analysis is logically consistent (as it is), employs the minimum of postulates (as it does), and gives predictions not only concerning the future but (more importantly, from a strictly scientific point of view) also the past, then the criteria Toynbee has used to define civilization must be accepted if the predictions are verified by observation.
To do otherwise is to reject the scientific method, and with it all of modern science.
Axiomatically, Toynbee can be stated as: civilizations admit of a morphology, that morphology being inherent in a civilization by its nature; within each civilization there exists a creative minority who give the impetus to the continuing challenge facing a civilization.
The concept of the creative minority need not concern us here since it in no way affects the predictions that result from Toynbee's model or theory.
Regarding the future, the model predicts: Beginning of the Western Universal State in the 21st Century.
This Empire should last well into the twenty-third century.
Further, it is possible to deduce from the model not only the nature of this Empire of the West but also how and where it will be created.
However, before this is done it is necessary to consider the work of Spengler, whose insights into the nature of what he termed cultures enable the scientific model of history to be completed in detail.
The Decline of the West (German: Der Untergang des Abendlandes), or The Downfall of the Occident, is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler, the first volume of which was published in the summer of 1918. Spengler revised this volume in 1922 and published the second volume, subtitled Perspectives of World History, in 1923. The book introduces itself as a "Copernican overturning" operating as a paradigm shift involving the rejection of the Eurocentric view of history, especially the division of history into the linear "ancient-medieval-modern" rubric. According to Spengler, the meaningful units for history are not epochs but whole cultures which evolve as organisms. He recognizes eight high cultures: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican (Mayan/Aztec), Classical (Greek/Roman), Arabian, Western or "European-American." Cultures have a lifespan of about a thousand years. The final stage of each culture is, in his word use, a 'civilization'.
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| Goethe |
Outwardly, this soul is represented, according to Spengler, by the culture's art, science and mathematics.
For the West, for instance, this soul can be said to be expressed by Goethe's Faust 'a will to power, or a questing for what is new and unknown'.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German writer and politician. His body of work includes epic and lyric poetry written in a variety of metres and styles; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour; and four novels. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000 letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings by him are extant. A literary celebrity by the age of 25, Goethe was ennobled by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Carl August in 1782 after first taking up residence there in November of 1775 following the success of his first novel, 'The Sorrows of Young Werther'. He was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German writer and politician. His body of work includes epic and lyric poetry written in a variety of metres and styles; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour; and four novels. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000 letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings by him are extant. A literary celebrity by the age of 25, Goethe was ennobled by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Carl August in 1782 after first taking up residence there in November of 1775 following the success of his first novel, 'The Sorrows of Young Werther'. He was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement.
Thus Spengler calls the West the 'Faustian culture'; for him, the Faustian soul is evident in the supreme art of the Gothic cathedral, with its vaulted arches seeking to represent the infinite. Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936) was a German historian and philosopher of history whose interests included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book 'Der Untergang des Abendlandes', published in 1918 and 1922, covering all of world history. He proposed a new theory, according to which the lifespan of civilizations is limited and ultimately they decay. He wrote extensively throughout World War I and the interwar period, and supported German hegemony in Europe. His other writings made little impact outside Germany. In 1920 Spengler produced Prussiandom and Socialism (Preußentum und Sozialismus), which argued for an organic, nationalist version of socialism and authoritarianism. Some National Socialists held Spengler as an intellectual precursor.
Further, each culture is subject to metamorphosis: From Spring through Summer and Autumn and then, finally, Winter, when comes the megalopolis, the second religiousness and the Age of Caesarism, which finally decays.
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Spengler
© Copyright Peter Crawford 2014
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In this stage, heroism has succumbed to the power of money.
The common man has precedence.
When one compares the work of Spengler and Toynbee, large areas of agreement are found.
What differences appear turn out to be, in fact, difference of terminology and approach.
For example, Spengler's 'second religiousness' is identical to Toynbee's 'Universal Church', and the advent of of 'Caesarism' is Toynbee's 'Universal State'.
Each analysis enriches the other - Toynbee concerns himself mainly with historical events and the people involved in them, while Spengler approaches his cultures mainly through their art, philosophy and science.
However, one difference does exist between the two approaches.
This concerns what Spengler actually means by culture.
Since our objective is to produce a model of history that is in accord with scientific methodology, it is necessary to consider again what the identification mark of a civilization, and how a civilization, as defined by Toynbee's definition, might be said to possess what Spengler has termed a soul (or, if one prefers, a distinctive style).
Once this is done, we shall be in a position to finally formulate a model of history to explain the rise and fall of civilizations; a model that will enable not only a detailed understanding of the West to be achieved but will also show what its future will be.
HE FAUSTIAN SPIRIT
The ethos of the West has been described as Faustian, and to understand the West and its future, it is important to understand why it is called the Faustian civilization.
Western civilization is affiliated to the Hellenic.
From the Greeks derive, as Nietzsche, Heidegger and many others have realized, the values which created, and gave inspiration to our civilization.
The legal system, for instance, derives from Roman Law, whose own inspiration was the Greeks.
In art, the debt is even clearer.
For Example, the Renaissance in Europe was Hellenic in character, and it is no coincidence that artists like Raphael (1483-1520) captured the classical splendour of the body in painting just as Michelangelo (1475-1564) did in sculpture.
Western art, at its best, is classical insofar as it represents that physical splendour, that purity and nobility associated with the Greeks.
Yet this is not to say that the ethos or spirit of the West is a copy, an imitation of the Hellenic.
For the spirit of the West makes itself most manifest in two areas-indeed, one can go so far as to say that these two areas identify the ethos of the West.
They are science, and the practical application of science as technology.
Western science is essentially the search for truth, and its method lies in finding ways of discovering that truth by observing the patterns and processes of Nature.
Thus, for science, truth is what is observed, not what is presupposed or assumed by belief, as in religion.
In this respect for facts lies, perhaps, the greatest liberation any civilization has ever known.
Technology rests on science - and science, as we know it in the West depends for its very existence on a certain political freedom.
Only when the West, through people like Galileo, broke the dogmatic chains of the Church was free experiment, and thus science, possible.
Science, with its emphasis on experiment and fact, freed the Western civilization from superstition and the tyranny of ideas, and it is no coincidence that the greatest achievements of science occurred when the dogmatic authority of the Church no longer ruled men's lives.
The search for truth which created modern science derives, however, from another trait peculiar to the West: the desire for exploration.
Western civilization is characterized by this desire for exploration.
Other civilizations have conquered, for power or wealth, but no other civilization, except our own has explored the world (and latterly the planets and space itself) purely out of curiosity.
This burning desire to know what is over the sea, and under it, this energy is, above everything else, the ethos of the West.
No other civilization has produced men who climbed the highest mountain just 'because it is there' - no other civilization has produced men who sailed across great oceans just to see what was on the other side, and no civilization has produced men who ran, swam, cycled or walked over a measured distance as fast as they could just to see if they could do it.
But perhaps the greatest and surely the most noble expression of the truly Faustian will-to-knowledge is space-travel.
Space-travel exemplifies the West because space-travel successfully combines the three elements that are so ineluctably Western: Science, technology, and the desire to know.
IMPERIUM OF THE WEST
According to Spengler 'At the beginning, where Civilization is developing into full bloom (today), there stands the miracle of the 'Cosmopolis'.
It draws within itself the being-streams of the now impotent countryside, - human masses.
Here, money and intellect celebrate their greatest and their last triumphs.
In the form of democracy, money has won.
There has been a period in which politics were almost its preserve.
But as soon as it has destroyed the old orders of the Culture, the chaos gives forth a new and overpowering factor that penetrates to the very elementals of Becoming - the Übermensch.
Before them money collapses.
The Imperial Age in every Culture alike, signifies the end of the politics of mind and money.
The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship.
Race springs forth, pure and irresistible - the strongest win.
The Imperium of the West would be imposed, from its European country of origin, first by force of arms and then by force of Destiny on its neighbours.
The Imperium would have its spiritual origins in the Nordic civilization whose ethos bore a clear resemblance to the Hellenic.
This return is not one to the schism of Christianity, but to the paganism which existed in the West before its introduction, and which was partly absorbed by Christianity, as a force which shaped men's lives, before it was destroyed by the Church.
This return, however, will not be slavish imitation, nor the recreation of long dead rituals and forms.
Instead, it will be a resurgence of the attitude that gave rise to the Nordic civilization and which brought about the myths of Valhalla, Odin and Thor.
It will possess, as a guiding force, the same power that drove the Norsemen.
That this will be so is because Christianity does not now represent, nor has ever represented, the ethos of the West.
In its origin, Christianity is, as both Toynbee and Spengler have shown, a product of what Toynbee called the Babylonic civilization and Spengler the Magian.
Christianity, in its approach to life and the world, is essentially Judaic, and stands in complete contrast to the Hellenic, as Nietzsche made quite clear in his 'The Anti-Christ': 'Christianity robbed us of the harvest of the culture of the ancient world'.
What the West has achieved - its science, technology, and its conquest - has been achieved not because of Christianity, but in spite of it, and anyone who sees Christianity as somehow essential to the West, or as part of its ethos, has completely misunderstood what Christianity is, and what is the true ethos of the West.
However tame Christianity may have become in most of the West, it is essential to realize that as an attitude of life Christianity is the antithesis of all that is healthy, noble and instinctive.
Christianity exhorts the virtues of the slave-meekness, forgiveness, and guilt - and even in its ultimate symbol, the crucified Christ, is a symbol of rejection of life.
In contrast, the Western spirit, exemplified by the Nordics, rejoices in life and in its vitality.
Its symbol is driving energy - the prow of a Viking ship, the spacecraft hurtling into space.
Christianity, for the West, must vanish.
It is by its very nature incompatible with a Western Imperium, whose goal is conquest, first of Europe and then of space itself.
For only this latter form of conquest, with the technological development that would result, will provide a challenge sufficient for the Western spirit and enable that Faustian child, technology, to grow to full maturity.
His philosophy of life will be similar to that expounded by Nietzsche in his 'Thus Spake Zarathustra', and his practical fulfilment will be in the institutions and organizations the New Order of the Imperium will create in order to carry through its policies of not only external conquest but also upward breeding to ensure quality as well as nobility.
The paganism of the Übermensch will not be the destructive type beloved of Christian writers, but will instead be a new Zeitgeist - a Zeitgeist that functions within the framework of the New Order.
The values of this New Order will not be 'inhuman', but most certainly will be anti-humanitarian, in the sense that the Greeks and Romans were anti-humanitarian.
Without these new values, there can be no Western Imperium just as, for instance, the Roman Empire would not have been possible but for an unconscious emulation of earlier Greek values (witness Virgil's attempt to make them more conscious in his Aeneid).
The New Order, and all we have said above concerning it, follows naturally from a 'Time of Troubles' it is a consequence of all the forces acting within the civilization, and in this sense may be said to be the Destiny of the West, for the Empires of all higher civilizations derive their impetus from an earlier part of their civilizations' history.
Their forms exist in embryo early in their history and, in regard to the West, Spengler was able to perceive this clearly.
However, the New Order of Imperium may never exist, despite being the Destiny of the West.
It may never be more than an institution in most, or a vision for a few, because the West has been gradually undergoing, in its ethos, a transformation whose consequences may forestall the creation of Imperium.
All higher civilizations hitherto have ended in an Empire whose ethos derived from the ethos which gave rise to that civilization itself.
The West, however, has been subject to a process of distortion: a distortion, or deformation of its ethos, that no other higher civilization, before the onset of its Universal State or Empire, has been subject to.
This deformation has already changed the imperative of the West, and even Spengler, for all his insight, saw aspects of the deformation as what he assumed to be the logical outcome of the West's metamorphosis.
This deformation of the Faustian soul or ethos has occurred on two levels-the spiritual and cultural separated in time by some eight hundred years.
On the spiritual level, the West has been deformed by the religion of Christianity.
The West is not ready for the old age that sometimes follows an Imperium, and to which a world-negating religion is more suited.
The West should be full of vitality, sure of itself and its mission, as the Roman Empire at its best did, the youthful instincts of honour, duty and valour.
Christianity has made the West prematurely old.
On the cultural level, the deformation is even less well understood - that is, hardly at all, although some of the effects of this deformation have attracted attention.
This cultural deformation amounts to a revolution in Western Art, aesthetics, literature, music, and thought, and it is already undermining science as well as contributing to the decline of the quality of life.
This deformation, moreover, is increasing, and its only possible outcome will be to forestall the creation of a Western Imperium, creating in its place another type of Empire, world-wide in scope, whose ethos would be violently opposed to the ethos of the West.
To see why this is so, it is necessary to examine in detail the nature of this cultural distortion as well as explain why it is a distortion of the ethos of the West.
THE DISTORTION OF THE WEST
Outwardly, the distortion of the West was obvious by 1848 - the year of the publication of the 'Communist Manifesto' by Marx and Engels, and the 'year of revolutions' in Europe.
The Communism that was given form by Marx is, in spirit, at variance to the Faustian ethos.
Marxism, of whatever form, be it derived from Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, or Marcuse, transforms what the German philosopher Heidegger calls 'geist' - spirit to mere intelligence, it emasculates it: - Europe lies in a pincers between Russia and America, which are metaphysically the same, namely in regard to their world character, and their relation to the 'spirit'.
In all its implications, the materialism that has come to dominate the present century, and which is exemplified by America, does not differ from Marxism or socialism - both represent, despite outward appearance in terms of the type of government, the same approach to the 'spirit' or ethos of the West.
Both emasculate that 'spirit', as Heidegger well understood.
For Marxism is not, as Spengler assumed, the logical outcome of the Faustian will-to-power: rather, Marxism is the ultimate contradiction of the Faustian.
It returns the spirit to earth, to material concern, and reduces everything to that which is common.
It is totally opposed to the 'heroic idealism', which is one of the Faustian qualities.
The concern of the Faustian is more 'will-to-knowledge', more mastery through the use of a myth or mythos, which is at once both numinous and archetypal.
Marxism has never been, and can never be, 'numinous' in the sense that Goethe's Faust is numinous, or Nietzsche's Zarathustra.
Marxism, by its very nature and aims, seeks to destroy what is numinous and archetypal - as, for example, in art, where everything is reduced to either political propaganda or 'social realism'.
Marxism, is based on the lowest common denominator; the ethos of the West seeks to raise everything up to a higher level through conquest, exploration and the challenge of knowledge.
Marxism, and, of course, the Communism which derives from it, uses for its own benefit, Faustian technology and techniques - but only as a means.
It is never imbued with the slightest trace of Faustian ideals.
The whole of the philosophy of Heidegger - as well as the earlier one of Nietzsche - is a revolt against the material distortion of the West.
It represents a desire to return to the 'numinosity' which, for Heidegger, is captured in poetry, and, for Nietzsche, in a revaluation of all values, in a new type of man.
Practically, this amounts to the difference between acting and thinking instinctively, with the blood, and acting from a position of materialism, with cerebral intelligence.
The former is Faustian, the latter is what Spengler described as Magian - indeed, the last possible metamorphosis of the Magian soul.
It is no coincidence that this Magian way of thinking is best exemplified by the precepts contained in the Babylonian Talmud - for the origins of the Magian ethos lies in the Babylonic civilization.
The most important religion of that civilization, as Toynbee showed, was Judaism.
Yet the distortion of the West is much more than the distortion of Marxism.
In the realm of music, it is the atonal, or 12-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) the triumph of supposedly 'clever' intelligence over that Faustian will, which found its most numinous expression in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, its most dynamic in Beethoven, and its most expressive (as a premonition of Imperium, perhaps) in the music of Wagner and Richard Strauss.
In the realm of thought, the distortion is expressed in the psychological theory of Freud (1856-1939) with its emphasis on sexuality and materialism, as well as in the positivist theories of Carnap, A. J. Ayer, and Thomas Kuhn.
Art has been distorted - moved away from the Hellenic-derived respect for physical beauty - by movements such as abstract art, Dadaism, and the 'Pop Art' of Warhol and Segal, and the 'Nouveaux Realistes' of Klein.
Aesthetically, these movements have eroded the vitality of the Faustian, and destroyed with their cults of ugliness the beauty inherent in Western art; they have replaced spirit with mere childish experimentation and anarchy.
They are completely lacking in any positive values whatsoever.
It cannot be denied that the movements in art mentioned above, the theories of Freud, Carnap, Ayer, and others, the atonal music of Schoenberg and his followers, as well as Marxism in its many forms, have significantly changed not only the cultural orientation of the West, but also (as witness Marxism) the societies composing the West.
Of Schoenberg, for instance, it has been said: 'Schoenberg has exercised a far-reaching and profound influence on the music of the twentieth century, not only through his compositions but also through his work as a teacher and his intellectual stature as a philosopher and interpreter of his age.'
Furthermore, several new studies (often erroneously described as 'sciences') have come to dominate Western life, both within institutions of learning and without.
The cumulative effect of these studies has been to change the course of the West, since the people most affected by them - those in institutions of higher education - tend to come to dominate the educational life of the West, its media and the cultural sphere in general by virtue of the positions of authority and control obtained through their educational opportunities.
As a consequence, social changes have resulted from both government policy and non-governmental pressure.
A new 'Zeitgeist' has arisen, and a consensus of opinion created and maintained throughout all the societies of the West.
These new studies - apart from being but complementary to Marxism and the psychological theories of Freud and Adler - are sociology, social anthropology, social studies, and linguistics.
Some of these movements or studies have as their aim direct political action of a revolutionary kind.
Of the Marxist ideas of Marcuse it has been said, by an established British philosopher: 'the ideas of Marcuse and the Frankfurt school have come to dominate some Social Science Departments in various universities in Europe, and through them to have a continued and important influence on some of the most intelligent young people of the West.'
Sociology is regarded by sociologists as having its origin in the work of Emile Durkheim.
Durkheim's work was further developed by his nephew Marcel Mauss.
Social anthropology began with the work of Franz Boas and was developed by his student Ruth Benedict.
It flourishes today under the guidance of Levi-Strauss.
Levi-Strauss draws very heavily on Durkheim, Marx, and Freud - his Marxism only makes sense if we see it as highly Durkheimianized, and his Durkhemian positivism only if blended with something from Marx.
All the rest is Freud.
Linguistics derives from Boas, Bloomfield, and, more recently, Noam Chomsky.
Of Chomsky, it is generally said that 'he speaks with unrivalled authority'.
From these studies have come others - like 'race relations' and 'women's liberation.'
Prominent among the latter are Betty Freidan and Bella Abzug.
All these subjects, movements, and schools, as well as the so-called 'liberation movements' that derive from them have profoundly changed the spirit of the West, and profoundly altered both its inner and outer structures.
In fact, the ethos of the West has been changed over a period of some one hundred and fifty years from a dynamic Faustian assertiveness to a neurotic guilt, and an obsession with sexuality, materialism, and change.
That this change has occurred is no coincidence.
What all these movements and theories have in common, apart from the fact that they all, directly or indirectly, contradict the ethos of the West, is their common origin.
They are all the creations of Jews - the last representatives of the decayed Magian soul. Marxism, with its apocalyptic visions, is a modern manifestation of Judaism, just as: the theories of Freud represent the Jewish concern with sexuality (evident in the Talmud26).
Jews themselves understand this.
No people gave more to its political ideas than the Jews.
Even the 'counter-culture' of the sixties and early seventies, which did so much to change the ethos of the younger generation by spreading among them the ideas of anarchism, drug abuse, and pacifism, owes its origins to Jews, such as Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Marcuse.
Among the leading representatives of this 'drug and pop culture' were Allen Ginsburg and Abe Hoffman.
That all these movements are a distortion of the ethos of the West is evident if one considers, not only what was representative of the West before these movements began, but also what kind of art, philosophy, and politics should have been produced by the natural process that transforms a higher civilization into an Imperium (for the West, from about 1900).
Fundamentally, there is a transition from money-based politics to force politics, under the aegis of Empire builders like Cecil Rhodes.
These men, while they may differ in many things, are united insofar as they represent quite deliberately the conquering and civilizing spirit that is one of the marks of the Imperium to come.
That is, they are foremost men who have undergone what Toynbee called 'withdrawl and return' and because of this character-building process they are possessed of charisma - like Scipio Africanus and Scipio Aemillianus in the time before Caesar.
Such figures are also heroic, in the Homeric sense.
However, after a few of these men had arisen, there was in the West a return to money-based politics and the creative minority who provide the impetus for advance for every civilization became neurotic and guilt-ridden.
Instead of 'Caesar-men', the West produced what Colin Wilson has called 'Outsiders' - creative people whose spirit has suffered a distortion: 'Our civilization', says Wilson, 'has grown steadily closer, in its everyday life, to the Marxian attitude. That is why we are producing Outsiders.'
For a higher civilization, this transition period before the beginning of Imperium is marked, in art, by a short period of natural decline after what Nietzsche called the Dionysian breaks out and overtakes the purity and serenity achieved, by the artists of that civilization, of the Apollonian.
For the West, this Apollonian form was achieved in music by J. S. Bach, while in the later Mozart (K385, The Haffner and K551, The Jupiter) the Dionysian passion that marks the music of Beethoven is already evident.
After Beethoven, music could never be the same - in his music there is suffering, strife and reconciliation, whereas in Bach there is purity, purpose and an ordered image of the cosmos.
It is with Beethoven that the person 'his condition and emotions' come to the fore, before the cosmos.
Man, after Beethoven, is no longer for music simply an aspect of the gods.
He is an individual.
With Bruckner there is the natural return to the Apollonian, and the concern with timelessness and the cosmic.
But this return of Bruckner is a personal return, the aspiration of the individual toward the cosmos through the instrument of music as in Bach.
With the master, Wagner, this personal attempt to reconcile the Dionysian and Apollonian reaches it climax - the attempt to fuse, through, the projection of the archetypal images in operatic form (Siegfried as Hero, Hagen as shadow, etc.) the personal and the divine.
This attempt does not entirely succeed, however, despite the sublimity of the music, and the grandeur of the story of 'The Ring', because Wagner used the form of the Opera.
As an art form, opera was already dying by Wagner's time - it no longer spoke, with the fire of passion, to the people - only to a segment of them.
This segment (mostly bourgeois) was already living with the trappings of decadence.
Moreover, Wagner's attempt, through his 'Music Drama', could not entirely succeed because it was too early.
The epic poetry capable of both moving and involving the audience did not exist. Such poetry (and such a union of the divine and man as Wagner wished to achieve through his music) are possible today, at the beginning of Imperium - and are only possible today.
This epic poetry involves the struggle to create Imperium - the battles, the aspirations, the victories, and the defeats.
Only this struggle possesses, for the West at this moment of its history, the power to inspire as Homer's 'Iliad' inspired the Greeks and Virgil's 'Aeneid' the Romans.
Because of this, only such epic poetry has any meaning for the West - all other poetry, of whatever style and dealing with any other theme, is worthless.
The fact that no such epics are being created now is clear evidence of how distorted the art of the West has become.
Indeed, not only are there no such epics celebrating those who struggled to uphold the Faustian values and who lived and died upholding the values that will create Imperium, but there are no attempts to express these values or their spirit in any form of art.
There is, in short, nothing that anticipates the Art of Imperium (as it should be anticipated at this time) as Johann Froberger and Frescobaldi anticipated Bach.
There are only the merest intimations of this in some of the music of Ligeti - but nothing that should parallel the beginnings of Imperium, with the possible exceptions of Orff, Richard Strauss and Pfitzner, whose impact is purely Faustian, bursting with joy and full of the energy of the creators of the West.
There is, instead, atonality, serialism, the influence of the Negro and the anarchic.
These certainly are not expressive of the transition of the art of music from a 'Time of Troubles' to an Imperium - they bear no resemblance at all to the supreme music of Beethoven, the numinosity of some of Sibelius, or the music of Vaughn Williams.
But above all, the music that today dominates the West – represented on the one hand by the Negro-influenced 'pop' and so-called 'rock music', and on the other hand the cerebral banality of electronic noise in which Stockhausen excels - does not reach toward the future with an originality based firmly on tradition and with a new insight that is both numinous and accessible.
The new music that heralds Imperium is neither the preserve of a few very clever and self-indulging critics, nor totally at variance with the whole tradition of Western Music, from its beginnings in Gregorian chant to the great symphonic writing of Beethoven.
What is significant about this distortion is that the technology of the West, as well as its more material resources, have been harnessed not only to propagate all aspects of the distortion but also to root it so firmly in the soil of the Western psyche that what is truly Western has very little chance of surviving at all, so chocked would its flower be by these weeds.
These influences which have so profoundly changed the attitude of the West and so drastically changed its art are all decadent.
By 'decadent' we mean spirit as a mere tool in the service of others: - a tool the manipulation of which can be taught and learned.
Whether this use of intelligence related to the regulation and domination of material conditions (as in Marxism), or in general to the intelligent ordering and explanation of everything that is present and already posited at any time (as in positivism), the spirit as intelligence becomes the impotent superstructure of something else.
What is lacking in intelligence is the numinous - that quality which art at its very best expresses.
The process of intelligence dominating spirit in this way - the origin of the decadent in art and philosophy - is usually the fate of an Imperium, not the transition to an Imperium from a 'Time of Troubles'.
What moulds the creativity during this transition (and well into the Imperium itself) is the image of the civilization's past.
This gives form and authority to the Imperium and its institutions - it is the channelling of the spirit or ethos of the civilization into the forms and images appropriate to Imperium and in art becomes not a constriction but a new challenge.
Thus, before the Roman Empire, the vigour and imagination of Ennius (239-169 BC) had given way to the image of the past (The Greek) achieved by Lucretius (98-55 BC) in his 'De Rerum Natura'.
Finally, there is Virgil (70-19 BC) whose art captures the 'Destiny of Rome', and makes possible the Imperial advance, rooted as it then was in the Greek past.
An expression similar to Virgil's should exist in our time, and in those art-forms which the West has created.
Only such art-forms, which express by the very fact of their creation in our civilization, part of our ethos, possess the ability to inspire on a large scale, the people of the West.
Such artforms are film, music of a symphonic kind, and painting.
Primary among these is the artform of the film.
An expression of the past of the West and a numinous intimation of the future (Imperium) should exist in these art-forms - particularly in film.
Film is one art-form that could successfully realize Wagner's dream of the 'Music Drama' and Scriabin's Mysterium.
Scriabin hoped to create a type of music which, when joined with colour and fragrance, would unite man with the gods.
However, in film there is only (and always has been since the very creation of the medium) entertainment, intellectual cleverness, social realism, and obsession with sexuality.
There is nothing mystical in the sense of looking back to the achievements of the West, or a looking forward to the triumphs of Imperium.
There is nothing vital which possesses the nobility and purity we associate with the Greeks - nothing which attempts to inspire.
No positive, Western ideals.
In the whole history of the art-form of the film there have only been three attempts - three attempts out of the thousands of films which must have been made.
The history of the film - the most valuable art-form the West has created - affords sufficient evidence of both the distortion of the ethos of the West and the way the creations of the West have been used as instruments of the distortion.
Indeed, of all the art-forms indigenous to the West, the film is the one where those champions of everything material against everything Faustian - the Jews - have the most direct control.
Thus even 'The Times Literary Supplement', a much respected journal, could say: 'Hollywood was founded by a band of buccaneering Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.'
The film has become, thanks to this control and and influence, a medium for those values which the Jews have foisted upon our civilization - the values represented by Marxism, sociology, positivism, obsession with sex, and the racial inter-mixing that derives from the dogma of social anthropology.
One exception to all this is the very early, silent film of D.W. Griffiths, 'Birth of a Nation' (1912).
However, no one has even attempted to use the film in the manner Wagner conceived for his 'Music Drama' or Scriabin his 'Mysterium'.
Only in Japan have films been made as they should have been made in the West - the films of Kurasawa (Seven Samurai, Kagemusha, etc.) express the ethos of Japan beautifully, and are masterpieces of the art-form.
Nothing comparable to them exists in the West to express the Western ethos.
The distortion of the West we have been discussing was recognized, poetically, by T. S. Eliot.
His 'The Waste Land' shows the poverty of Western society in Eliot's time.
Yet his poetry remains pessimistic, providing neither a solution nor an understanding of the forces which produced that poverty in the first place, and as such cannot be Faustian poetry.
It lacks the feeling for life - the joy of life - that is Faustian.
Further, for all his insight into the spiritual decay of the West, for all his brilliant style, Eliot found comfort (cf. 'The Four Quartets') in Christianity - that contradiction par excellence of the ethos of the West.
HE FAUSTIAN SPIRIT
The ethos of the West has been described as Faustian, and to understand the West and its future, it is important to understand why it is called the Faustian civilization.
Western civilization is affiliated to the Hellenic.
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| Heidegger |
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| Nietzsche |
From the Greeks derive, as Nietzsche, Heidegger and many others have realized, the values which created, and gave inspiration to our civilization.
The legal system, for instance, derives from Roman Law, whose own inspiration was the Greeks.
In art, the debt is even clearer.
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| Michelangelo |
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| Raphael |
Western art, at its best, is classical insofar as it represents that physical splendour, that purity and nobility associated with the Greeks.
Yet this is not to say that the ethos or spirit of the West is a copy, an imitation of the Hellenic.
For the spirit of the West makes itself most manifest in two areas-indeed, one can go so far as to say that these two areas identify the ethos of the West.
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| Raphael - 'Galatea' - Detail - 1506 |
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| Michelangelo - 'David' |
Western science is essentially the search for truth, and its method lies in finding ways of discovering that truth by observing the patterns and processes of Nature.
Thus, for science, truth is what is observed, not what is presupposed or assumed by belief, as in religion.
In this respect for facts lies, perhaps, the greatest liberation any civilization has ever known.
Technology rests on science - and science, as we know it in the West depends for its very existence on a certain political freedom.
Only when the West, through people like Galileo, broke the dogmatic chains of the Church was free experiment, and thus science, possible.
Science, with its emphasis on experiment and fact, freed the Western civilization from superstition and the tyranny of ideas, and it is no coincidence that the greatest achievements of science occurred when the dogmatic authority of the Church no longer ruled men's lives.
The search for truth which created modern science derives, however, from another trait peculiar to the West: the desire for exploration.
Western civilization is characterized by this desire for exploration.
Other civilizations have conquered, for power or wealth, but no other civilization, except our own has explored the world (and latterly the planets and space itself) purely out of curiosity.This burning desire to know what is over the sea, and under it, this energy is, above everything else, the ethos of the West.
No other civilization has produced men who climbed the highest mountain just 'because it is there' - no other civilization has produced men who sailed across great oceans just to see what was on the other side, and no civilization has produced men who ran, swam, cycled or walked over a measured distance as fast as they could just to see if they could do it.
But perhaps the greatest and surely the most noble expression of the truly Faustian will-to-knowledge is space-travel.
Space-travel exemplifies the West because space-travel successfully combines the three elements that are so ineluctably Western: Science, technology, and the desire to know.
IMPERIUM OF THE WEST
According to Spengler 'At the beginning, where Civilization is developing into full bloom (today), there stands the miracle of the 'Cosmopolis'.
It draws within itself the being-streams of the now impotent countryside, - human masses.
Here, money and intellect celebrate their greatest and their last triumphs.
In the form of democracy, money has won.
There has been a period in which politics were almost its preserve.
But as soon as it has destroyed the old orders of the Culture, the chaos gives forth a new and overpowering factor that penetrates to the very elementals of Becoming - the Übermensch.
Before them money collapses.
The Imperial Age in every Culture alike, signifies the end of the politics of mind and money.
The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship.
Race springs forth, pure and irresistible - the strongest win.
The Imperium of the West would be imposed, from its European country of origin, first by force of arms and then by force of Destiny on its neighbours.
The Imperium would have its spiritual origins in the Nordic civilization whose ethos bore a clear resemblance to the Hellenic.
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| Pagan Runes © Copyright Peter Crawford 2014 |
This return, however, will not be slavish imitation, nor the recreation of long dead rituals and forms.
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| Valhalla |
It will possess, as a guiding force, the same power that drove the Norsemen.
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| Odin © Copyright Peter Crawford 2014 |
That this will be so is because Christianity does not now represent, nor has ever represented, the ethos of the West.
In its origin, Christianity is, as both Toynbee and Spengler have shown, a product of what Toynbee called the Babylonic civilization and Spengler the Magian.
Christianity, in its approach to life and the world, is essentially Judaic, and stands in complete contrast to the Hellenic, as Nietzsche made quite clear in his 'The Anti-Christ': 'Christianity robbed us of the harvest of the culture of the ancient world'.
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| 'Golgatha' - 1933 Johann Kluska - (1904 - 1973) digitally restored © Copyright Peter Crawford 2014 |
However tame Christianity may have become in most of the West, it is essential to realize that as an attitude of life Christianity is the antithesis of all that is healthy, noble and instinctive.
Christianity exhorts the virtues of the slave-meekness, forgiveness, and guilt - and even in its ultimate symbol, the crucified Christ, is a symbol of rejection of life.
In contrast, the Western spirit, exemplified by the Nordics, rejoices in life and in its vitality.
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| Spaceship |
Christianity, for the West, must vanish.
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| Viking Ship |
For only this latter form of conquest, with the technological development that would result, will provide a challenge sufficient for the Western spirit and enable that Faustian child, technology, to grow to full maturity.
The conquest of space, the colonization of planets in our system and other star systems, will be the official expansionist policy of Imperium, and will create its own myths, its own epic poetry as well as producing - because of the nature of the challenge - the Übermensch.
This Übermensch will have his origins in the struggle to create Imperium.His philosophy of life will be similar to that expounded by Nietzsche in his 'Thus Spake Zarathustra', and his practical fulfilment will be in the institutions and organizations the New Order of the Imperium will create in order to carry through its policies of not only external conquest but also upward breeding to ensure quality as well as nobility.
The paganism of the Übermensch will not be the destructive type beloved of Christian writers, but will instead be a new Zeitgeist - a Zeitgeist that functions within the framework of the New Order.
The values of this New Order will not be 'inhuman', but most certainly will be anti-humanitarian, in the sense that the Greeks and Romans were anti-humanitarian.
Without these new values, there can be no Western Imperium just as, for instance, the Roman Empire would not have been possible but for an unconscious emulation of earlier Greek values (witness Virgil's attempt to make them more conscious in his Aeneid).
The New Order, and all we have said above concerning it, follows naturally from a 'Time of Troubles' it is a consequence of all the forces acting within the civilization, and in this sense may be said to be the Destiny of the West, for the Empires of all higher civilizations derive their impetus from an earlier part of their civilizations' history.
Their forms exist in embryo early in their history and, in regard to the West, Spengler was able to perceive this clearly.
However, the New Order of Imperium may never exist, despite being the Destiny of the West.
It may never be more than an institution in most, or a vision for a few, because the West has been gradually undergoing, in its ethos, a transformation whose consequences may forestall the creation of Imperium.
All higher civilizations hitherto have ended in an Empire whose ethos derived from the ethos which gave rise to that civilization itself.
The West, however, has been subject to a process of distortion: a distortion, or deformation of its ethos, that no other higher civilization, before the onset of its Universal State or Empire, has been subject to.
This deformation has already changed the imperative of the West, and even Spengler, for all his insight, saw aspects of the deformation as what he assumed to be the logical outcome of the West's metamorphosis.
This deformation of the Faustian soul or ethos has occurred on two levels-the spiritual and cultural separated in time by some eight hundred years.
On the spiritual level, the West has been deformed by the religion of Christianity.
The West is not ready for the old age that sometimes follows an Imperium, and to which a world-negating religion is more suited.
The West should be full of vitality, sure of itself and its mission, as the Roman Empire at its best did, the youthful instincts of honour, duty and valour.
Christianity has made the West prematurely old.
On the cultural level, the deformation is even less well understood - that is, hardly at all, although some of the effects of this deformation have attracted attention.
This cultural deformation amounts to a revolution in Western Art, aesthetics, literature, music, and thought, and it is already undermining science as well as contributing to the decline of the quality of life.
This deformation, moreover, is increasing, and its only possible outcome will be to forestall the creation of a Western Imperium, creating in its place another type of Empire, world-wide in scope, whose ethos would be violently opposed to the ethos of the West.
To see why this is so, it is necessary to examine in detail the nature of this cultural distortion as well as explain why it is a distortion of the ethos of the West.
THE DISTORTION OF THE WEST
Outwardly, the distortion of the West was obvious by 1848 - the year of the publication of the 'Communist Manifesto' by Marx and Engels, and the 'year of revolutions' in Europe.
The Communism that was given form by Marx is, in spirit, at variance to the Faustian ethos.
Marxism, of whatever form, be it derived from Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, or Marcuse, transforms what the German philosopher Heidegger calls 'geist' - spirit to mere intelligence, it emasculates it: - Europe lies in a pincers between Russia and America, which are metaphysically the same, namely in regard to their world character, and their relation to the 'spirit'.
In all its implications, the materialism that has come to dominate the present century, and which is exemplified by America, does not differ from Marxism or socialism - both represent, despite outward appearance in terms of the type of government, the same approach to the 'spirit' or ethos of the West.
Both emasculate that 'spirit', as Heidegger well understood.
For Marxism is not, as Spengler assumed, the logical outcome of the Faustian will-to-power: rather, Marxism is the ultimate contradiction of the Faustian.
It returns the spirit to earth, to material concern, and reduces everything to that which is common.
It is totally opposed to the 'heroic idealism', which is one of the Faustian qualities.
The concern of the Faustian is more 'will-to-knowledge', more mastery through the use of a myth or mythos, which is at once both numinous and archetypal.
Marxism has never been, and can never be, 'numinous' in the sense that Goethe's Faust is numinous, or Nietzsche's Zarathustra.
Marxism, by its very nature and aims, seeks to destroy what is numinous and archetypal - as, for example, in art, where everything is reduced to either political propaganda or 'social realism'.
Marxism, is based on the lowest common denominator; the ethos of the West seeks to raise everything up to a higher level through conquest, exploration and the challenge of knowledge.
Marxism, and, of course, the Communism which derives from it, uses for its own benefit, Faustian technology and techniques - but only as a means.
It is never imbued with the slightest trace of Faustian ideals.
The whole of the philosophy of Heidegger - as well as the earlier one of Nietzsche - is a revolt against the material distortion of the West.
It represents a desire to return to the 'numinosity' which, for Heidegger, is captured in poetry, and, for Nietzsche, in a revaluation of all values, in a new type of man.
Practically, this amounts to the difference between acting and thinking instinctively, with the blood, and acting from a position of materialism, with cerebral intelligence.
The former is Faustian, the latter is what Spengler described as Magian - indeed, the last possible metamorphosis of the Magian soul.
It is no coincidence that this Magian way of thinking is best exemplified by the precepts contained in the Babylonian Talmud - for the origins of the Magian ethos lies in the Babylonic civilization.
The most important religion of that civilization, as Toynbee showed, was Judaism.
Yet the distortion of the West is much more than the distortion of Marxism.
In the realm of music, it is the atonal, or 12-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) the triumph of supposedly 'clever' intelligence over that Faustian will, which found its most numinous expression in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, its most dynamic in Beethoven, and its most expressive (as a premonition of Imperium, perhaps) in the music of Wagner and Richard Strauss.
In the realm of thought, the distortion is expressed in the psychological theory of Freud (1856-1939) with its emphasis on sexuality and materialism, as well as in the positivist theories of Carnap, A. J. Ayer, and Thomas Kuhn.
Art has been distorted - moved away from the Hellenic-derived respect for physical beauty - by movements such as abstract art, Dadaism, and the 'Pop Art' of Warhol and Segal, and the 'Nouveaux Realistes' of Klein.
Aesthetically, these movements have eroded the vitality of the Faustian, and destroyed with their cults of ugliness the beauty inherent in Western art; they have replaced spirit with mere childish experimentation and anarchy.
They are completely lacking in any positive values whatsoever.
It cannot be denied that the movements in art mentioned above, the theories of Freud, Carnap, Ayer, and others, the atonal music of Schoenberg and his followers, as well as Marxism in its many forms, have significantly changed not only the cultural orientation of the West, but also (as witness Marxism) the societies composing the West.
Of Schoenberg, for instance, it has been said: 'Schoenberg has exercised a far-reaching and profound influence on the music of the twentieth century, not only through his compositions but also through his work as a teacher and his intellectual stature as a philosopher and interpreter of his age.'
Furthermore, several new studies (often erroneously described as 'sciences') have come to dominate Western life, both within institutions of learning and without.
The cumulative effect of these studies has been to change the course of the West, since the people most affected by them - those in institutions of higher education - tend to come to dominate the educational life of the West, its media and the cultural sphere in general by virtue of the positions of authority and control obtained through their educational opportunities.
As a consequence, social changes have resulted from both government policy and non-governmental pressure.
A new 'Zeitgeist' has arisen, and a consensus of opinion created and maintained throughout all the societies of the West.
These new studies - apart from being but complementary to Marxism and the psychological theories of Freud and Adler - are sociology, social anthropology, social studies, and linguistics.
Some of these movements or studies have as their aim direct political action of a revolutionary kind.
Of the Marxist ideas of Marcuse it has been said, by an established British philosopher: 'the ideas of Marcuse and the Frankfurt school have come to dominate some Social Science Departments in various universities in Europe, and through them to have a continued and important influence on some of the most intelligent young people of the West.'
Sociology is regarded by sociologists as having its origin in the work of Emile Durkheim.
Durkheim's work was further developed by his nephew Marcel Mauss.
Social anthropology began with the work of Franz Boas and was developed by his student Ruth Benedict.
It flourishes today under the guidance of Levi-Strauss.
Levi-Strauss draws very heavily on Durkheim, Marx, and Freud - his Marxism only makes sense if we see it as highly Durkheimianized, and his Durkhemian positivism only if blended with something from Marx.
All the rest is Freud.
Linguistics derives from Boas, Bloomfield, and, more recently, Noam Chomsky.
Of Chomsky, it is generally said that 'he speaks with unrivalled authority'.
From these studies have come others - like 'race relations' and 'women's liberation.'
Prominent among the latter are Betty Freidan and Bella Abzug.
All these subjects, movements, and schools, as well as the so-called 'liberation movements' that derive from them have profoundly changed the spirit of the West, and profoundly altered both its inner and outer structures.
In fact, the ethos of the West has been changed over a period of some one hundred and fifty years from a dynamic Faustian assertiveness to a neurotic guilt, and an obsession with sexuality, materialism, and change.
That this change has occurred is no coincidence.
What all these movements and theories have in common, apart from the fact that they all, directly or indirectly, contradict the ethos of the West, is their common origin.
They are all the creations of Jews - the last representatives of the decayed Magian soul. Marxism, with its apocalyptic visions, is a modern manifestation of Judaism, just as: the theories of Freud represent the Jewish concern with sexuality (evident in the Talmud26).
Jews themselves understand this.
No people gave more to its political ideas than the Jews.
Even the 'counter-culture' of the sixties and early seventies, which did so much to change the ethos of the younger generation by spreading among them the ideas of anarchism, drug abuse, and pacifism, owes its origins to Jews, such as Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Marcuse.
Among the leading representatives of this 'drug and pop culture' were Allen Ginsburg and Abe Hoffman.
That all these movements are a distortion of the ethos of the West is evident if one considers, not only what was representative of the West before these movements began, but also what kind of art, philosophy, and politics should have been produced by the natural process that transforms a higher civilization into an Imperium (for the West, from about 1900).
Fundamentally, there is a transition from money-based politics to force politics, under the aegis of Empire builders like Cecil Rhodes.
These men, while they may differ in many things, are united insofar as they represent quite deliberately the conquering and civilizing spirit that is one of the marks of the Imperium to come.
That is, they are foremost men who have undergone what Toynbee called 'withdrawl and return' and because of this character-building process they are possessed of charisma - like Scipio Africanus and Scipio Aemillianus in the time before Caesar.
Such figures are also heroic, in the Homeric sense.
However, after a few of these men had arisen, there was in the West a return to money-based politics and the creative minority who provide the impetus for advance for every civilization became neurotic and guilt-ridden.
Instead of 'Caesar-men', the West produced what Colin Wilson has called 'Outsiders' - creative people whose spirit has suffered a distortion: 'Our civilization', says Wilson, 'has grown steadily closer, in its everyday life, to the Marxian attitude. That is why we are producing Outsiders.'
For a higher civilization, this transition period before the beginning of Imperium is marked, in art, by a short period of natural decline after what Nietzsche called the Dionysian breaks out and overtakes the purity and serenity achieved, by the artists of that civilization, of the Apollonian.
For the West, this Apollonian form was achieved in music by J. S. Bach, while in the later Mozart (K385, The Haffner and K551, The Jupiter) the Dionysian passion that marks the music of Beethoven is already evident.
After Beethoven, music could never be the same - in his music there is suffering, strife and reconciliation, whereas in Bach there is purity, purpose and an ordered image of the cosmos.
It is with Beethoven that the person 'his condition and emotions' come to the fore, before the cosmos.
Man, after Beethoven, is no longer for music simply an aspect of the gods.
He is an individual.
With Bruckner there is the natural return to the Apollonian, and the concern with timelessness and the cosmic.
But this return of Bruckner is a personal return, the aspiration of the individual toward the cosmos through the instrument of music as in Bach.
With the master, Wagner, this personal attempt to reconcile the Dionysian and Apollonian reaches it climax - the attempt to fuse, through, the projection of the archetypal images in operatic form (Siegfried as Hero, Hagen as shadow, etc.) the personal and the divine.
This attempt does not entirely succeed, however, despite the sublimity of the music, and the grandeur of the story of 'The Ring', because Wagner used the form of the Opera.
As an art form, opera was already dying by Wagner's time - it no longer spoke, with the fire of passion, to the people - only to a segment of them.
This segment (mostly bourgeois) was already living with the trappings of decadence.
Moreover, Wagner's attempt, through his 'Music Drama', could not entirely succeed because it was too early.
The epic poetry capable of both moving and involving the audience did not exist. Such poetry (and such a union of the divine and man as Wagner wished to achieve through his music) are possible today, at the beginning of Imperium - and are only possible today.
This epic poetry involves the struggle to create Imperium - the battles, the aspirations, the victories, and the defeats.
Only this struggle possesses, for the West at this moment of its history, the power to inspire as Homer's 'Iliad' inspired the Greeks and Virgil's 'Aeneid' the Romans.
Because of this, only such epic poetry has any meaning for the West - all other poetry, of whatever style and dealing with any other theme, is worthless.
The fact that no such epics are being created now is clear evidence of how distorted the art of the West has become.
Indeed, not only are there no such epics celebrating those who struggled to uphold the Faustian values and who lived and died upholding the values that will create Imperium, but there are no attempts to express these values or their spirit in any form of art.
There is, in short, nothing that anticipates the Art of Imperium (as it should be anticipated at this time) as Johann Froberger and Frescobaldi anticipated Bach.
There are only the merest intimations of this in some of the music of Ligeti - but nothing that should parallel the beginnings of Imperium, with the possible exceptions of Orff, Richard Strauss and Pfitzner, whose impact is purely Faustian, bursting with joy and full of the energy of the creators of the West.
There is, instead, atonality, serialism, the influence of the Negro and the anarchic.
These certainly are not expressive of the transition of the art of music from a 'Time of Troubles' to an Imperium - they bear no resemblance at all to the supreme music of Beethoven, the numinosity of some of Sibelius, or the music of Vaughn Williams.
But above all, the music that today dominates the West – represented on the one hand by the Negro-influenced 'pop' and so-called 'rock music', and on the other hand the cerebral banality of electronic noise in which Stockhausen excels - does not reach toward the future with an originality based firmly on tradition and with a new insight that is both numinous and accessible.
The new music that heralds Imperium is neither the preserve of a few very clever and self-indulging critics, nor totally at variance with the whole tradition of Western Music, from its beginnings in Gregorian chant to the great symphonic writing of Beethoven.
What is significant about this distortion is that the technology of the West, as well as its more material resources, have been harnessed not only to propagate all aspects of the distortion but also to root it so firmly in the soil of the Western psyche that what is truly Western has very little chance of surviving at all, so chocked would its flower be by these weeds.
These influences which have so profoundly changed the attitude of the West and so drastically changed its art are all decadent.
By 'decadent' we mean spirit as a mere tool in the service of others: - a tool the manipulation of which can be taught and learned.
Whether this use of intelligence related to the regulation and domination of material conditions (as in Marxism), or in general to the intelligent ordering and explanation of everything that is present and already posited at any time (as in positivism), the spirit as intelligence becomes the impotent superstructure of something else.
What is lacking in intelligence is the numinous - that quality which art at its very best expresses.
The process of intelligence dominating spirit in this way - the origin of the decadent in art and philosophy - is usually the fate of an Imperium, not the transition to an Imperium from a 'Time of Troubles'.
What moulds the creativity during this transition (and well into the Imperium itself) is the image of the civilization's past.
This gives form and authority to the Imperium and its institutions - it is the channelling of the spirit or ethos of the civilization into the forms and images appropriate to Imperium and in art becomes not a constriction but a new challenge.
Thus, before the Roman Empire, the vigour and imagination of Ennius (239-169 BC) had given way to the image of the past (The Greek) achieved by Lucretius (98-55 BC) in his 'De Rerum Natura'.
Finally, there is Virgil (70-19 BC) whose art captures the 'Destiny of Rome', and makes possible the Imperial advance, rooted as it then was in the Greek past.
An expression similar to Virgil's should exist in our time, and in those art-forms which the West has created.
Only such art-forms, which express by the very fact of their creation in our civilization, part of our ethos, possess the ability to inspire on a large scale, the people of the West.
Such artforms are film, music of a symphonic kind, and painting.
Primary among these is the artform of the film.
An expression of the past of the West and a numinous intimation of the future (Imperium) should exist in these art-forms - particularly in film.
Film is one art-form that could successfully realize Wagner's dream of the 'Music Drama' and Scriabin's Mysterium.
Scriabin hoped to create a type of music which, when joined with colour and fragrance, would unite man with the gods.
However, in film there is only (and always has been since the very creation of the medium) entertainment, intellectual cleverness, social realism, and obsession with sexuality.
There is nothing mystical in the sense of looking back to the achievements of the West, or a looking forward to the triumphs of Imperium.
There is nothing vital which possesses the nobility and purity we associate with the Greeks - nothing which attempts to inspire.
No positive, Western ideals.
In the whole history of the art-form of the film there have only been three attempts - three attempts out of the thousands of films which must have been made.
The history of the film - the most valuable art-form the West has created - affords sufficient evidence of both the distortion of the ethos of the West and the way the creations of the West have been used as instruments of the distortion.
Indeed, of all the art-forms indigenous to the West, the film is the one where those champions of everything material against everything Faustian - the Jews - have the most direct control.
Thus even 'The Times Literary Supplement', a much respected journal, could say: 'Hollywood was founded by a band of buccaneering Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.'
The film has become, thanks to this control and and influence, a medium for those values which the Jews have foisted upon our civilization - the values represented by Marxism, sociology, positivism, obsession with sex, and the racial inter-mixing that derives from the dogma of social anthropology.
One exception to all this is the very early, silent film of D.W. Griffiths, 'Birth of a Nation' (1912).
However, no one has even attempted to use the film in the manner Wagner conceived for his 'Music Drama' or Scriabin his 'Mysterium'.
Only in Japan have films been made as they should have been made in the West - the films of Kurasawa (Seven Samurai, Kagemusha, etc.) express the ethos of Japan beautifully, and are masterpieces of the art-form.
Nothing comparable to them exists in the West to express the Western ethos.
The distortion of the West we have been discussing was recognized, poetically, by T. S. Eliot.
His 'The Waste Land' shows the poverty of Western society in Eliot's time.
Yet his poetry remains pessimistic, providing neither a solution nor an understanding of the forces which produced that poverty in the first place, and as such cannot be Faustian poetry.
It lacks the feeling for life - the joy of life - that is Faustian.
Further, for all his insight into the spiritual decay of the West, for all his brilliant style, Eliot found comfort (cf. 'The Four Quartets') in Christianity - that contradiction par excellence of the ethos of the West.
THE DEFINITION OF CIVILIZATION
It has long been recognized that one of the attributes of a civilization is its art.
Another may be said to be the deeds of the people.
For instance, the Hellenic society produced a type of art that we describe as classical, and this art is very different from, say, that of the Japanese.
When we look at a Greek vase, we are aware of a Greek style, just as when we study a painting by the Japanese artist Sesshu, we are aware of a different style.
While it is possible for a non-expert to confuse Japanese and Chinese art of approximately the same period, studying a painting my Mi Fei (1051-1107 AD), would attribute it to any Western or Hellenic school of art.
His 'Misty Landscape' is ineluctably Chinese, not because it used the technique of brush and ink, nor even because of the type of scenery depicted, but because it is representative of a certain style which was unique to China (and from there transported to Japan).
This style flourished in China during the Sung Dynasty (9601278 AD).
The art of any society is shaped not only by the techniques and technology of the time in which the artist lives but also by what we may term the ethos of the age in which he finds himself.
This ethos is what holds communities together, and part of its expression involves not only a belief in the Destiny of that community but also a myth or story concerning the origin of that community itself as, for example, for the Greeks, in the story of Homer's 'Iliad', or, for the Japanese, the Shinto belief of Divine origin.
Often, however, the most obvious externalization of this community bonding is language.
This ethos, which binds communities, is perhaps best exemplified by the attitude of the people composing the community or communities towards the world - more particularly their religious orientation or view of the world.
For the Greeks, this orientation encompassed two views: what Nietzsche, in his 'Birth of Tragedy', described as 'Apollonian and Dionysian'.
Both of these attitudes are truly representative of the Greeks.
The former may be said to have manifested itself in sculpture and the other arts, while the latter is evident in both the festivals (such as the great Olympic Games) and the Greek mastery of the craft of war.
As representative of the Apollonian we have the great sculptor Praxiteles of Athens; while perhaps the greatest representative of the Dionysian spirit was Alexander, the Macedonian King.
What we understand as the Hellenic ethos arose from the tension and interplay of these two opposites - the Hellenic joy of life, their enjoyment of physical beauty, their awareness of man as almost divine, their passion for both thought and war.
All these form the identification mark of the Hellenic civilization - a mark so evident in their art, philosophy and conquest.
A study of other civilizations shows that of the twenty-six listed by Toynbee only eight possess what we have termed this identification mark - that is, they possess an ethos which is not only distinct (and represented by art and philosophy) but also clearly possess that bifurcation of identification.
This bifurcation - the clash of apparent opposites - may be said to be the force which creates great art and philosophy, and its effects are easily recognizable.
For the Japanese civilization, for instance, this bifurcation, by the writer Yukio Mishima, has been called 'Sun and Steel'.
By philosophy is meant a unique way of observing man and his relation to the cosmos.
A philosophy is not a religion; a religion implies a set of principles, usually dogmatic, which are laid down and usually become unalterable articles of faith.
In contradistinction, a philosophy is essentially the product of thought and is subject to dispute; it relies on understanding or wisdom and not, like religion, on revelation.
But perhaps the most crucial distinction between them is one of attitude - a religion predetermines thought and action while a philosophy seeks to describe reality (and man) via thought.
For this reason, Buddhism, like Taoism, is considered to be a philosophy and not a religion.
Those civilizations, as defined by Toynbee, that are the result primarily of a physical challenge and which produce a distinct philosophy we may term 'higher civilizations.'
These 'higher civilizations' - the only ones to produce a philosophy - possess what we, following Spengler, may call a soul: that is, a distinctive ethos resulting from a bifurcation of identity.
For example, his Magian culture is not designated a higher civilization because it is not the result of a physical challenge (it resulted from the social challenge of the disintegrating Syriac civilization) and never produced a philosophy.
What Spengler called the Magian soul is not original or distinct in the sense that, say, the Hellenic or Japanese are distinct.
The Magian owes much to both the Babylonian and the Hellenic, and Toynbee even gives the Magian Imperium as Syria - the Arab Caliphate, 640-969 AD.
Spengler, in defining the Magian, seems to have confused two civilizations - the Syriac and the Islamic.
This detail in no way diminishes Spengler's analysis of the Hellenic or Western civilizations, and we shall retain his term 'Faustian' to describe the ethos of the West.
The seven higher civilizations - the Sumeric, Egyptiac, Hellenic, Indic, Sinic, Japanese, and Western-enable a scientific model to be constructed, a model which enables the future of the West to be determined as well as an understanding of the forces involved to be achieved.
All the higher civilizations end in Empire - as will the West, whose Imperium will not only be global in scale but should, due to the technology the Faustian will-to-power has created, extend into space.
CHRISTIANITY AND IMPERIUM
Few would dispute the Jewish origins of Christianity, although there would be many who would dispute the Nietzschean claim that, despite pagan influence, Christianity has remained essentially Jewish in spirit - an expression, like Judaism, of the Magian ethos, just as Marxism is Magian.
From Judaism have come two religions: Christianity and Islam.
It's third and latest child has not been a religion but an ideology: Marxism.
According to Nietzsche, 'In Christianity all of Judaism attains its ultimate mastery as the art of lying in a holy manner. The Christian is the Jew once more.'
Christianity, as explained earlier, supplanted the Hellenic values and thus distorted the West.
According to Nietzsche, 'The Jews are the strangest people in world history - out of themselves they created a counter-concept to natural conditions: they turned religion, cult, morality, history, psychology, one after the other, into an incurable contradiction to their natural values.'
Even today the Christian can feel anti-Jewish without realizing that he himself is the ultimate Jewish consequence.
Marxism, sociology, and all the long etcetera of Jewish grown studies like Freudian psychology, all distort natural values, and reduce everything to the most basic and base.
For the West to create Imperium it is necessary for it to replace the god-feeling Christianity with one born from the ethos of the West.
This feeling would, as outlined above, be essentially pagan and involve a return to the idealism exemplified by heroism.
As Kenneth Clarke has said: 'suppose that this quality, which I may call heroic, is not part of most people's ideas of civilization. It involves a contempt for convenience and a sacrifice of all those pleasures that contribute to what we call civilized life. It is the enemy of happiness. And yet we recognize that to despise material obstacles, and even to defy the blind forces of fate, is man's supreme achievement.'
Such an attitude contradicts the materialism rampant in the West, and is incompatible with Christianity and every other manifestation of the Magian.
The Western reaction which is to come - and which must come if Imperium is to be created - will be unmistakably a reaction against both Christianity, and the decadence and materialism of the Magian.
This reaction and return to older and truly Western values (rooted as they are in the Hellenic) will be turned into a fruitful resurgence with the coming of the Übermensch, the one who avenges. He, and he alone, will be instrumental in creating Imperium.
The Übermensch is the creative force whose response to the challenge of Western decline and distortion will inspire and make possible the Imperial advance and the creation of a New Order.
The Imperium he founds will, in time, expand far beyond the boundaries of the Earth.
With the Übermensch, the materialism of capital and the materialism of Communism will have ended, and a New Order will arise.
The Übermensch is the Destiny of the West, and the force that will create Imperium.
That this is so is not in doubt, as the model of higher civilization has been the creation of such a figure - the West - will be no exception.
What will be unique to the West, however, is the manner in which Imperium will, and must be, created because of the distortion the ethos of the West and, consequently, the societies of the West have suffered.
The Übermensch can only create Imperium by force of arms.
The Übermensch, the creator who avenges, must come.
He is a natural force, like lightning and sun, and he is awaited not only by those of the West who yearn for the nobility and purity the New Order will create, but also by those, like the representatives of the Magian who, consciously or unconsciously, uphold and propagate ideas and values contradictory to the West.
These representatives of the Magian - be they Jews or those upholding Magian values against Western ones - fear him, for they know that his emergence dooms them and the world they hope to create.
Their world would be one where Magian values and ideals - like Communism ruled, where everyone was levelled down, and where those who did not conform, in thought, word or deed, would be broken by the techniques created to pacify.
Already this kind of terror exists.
However much the Übermensch may be the Destiny of the West, Imperium will only be created by those prepared to fight and die for it: the opponents of Imperium and the New Order will use every means at their disposal to maintain the power and influence they have, and there will and must be a great deal of suffering and death on both sides.
Imperium cannot simply be thought or wished into existence - it has to be fought for, and its creation will demand the type of heroism immortalized by the battle of Thermopylae, where Leonidas and his few hundred Spartans held out until death against the whole army of Xerxes.
Such heroism would return that spirit essential to Imperium, and enable both a spiritual and an artistic renaissance of a magnitude unsurpassed by any previous civilization.
In contradistinction to the destruction of personality which is the inevitable outcome of all forms of socialism and Marxism, the New Order of Imperium would, because its ethos would be genuinely Western, ensure the greatest possible diversity of personality.
Indeed, once travel in space became commonplace (as it would under the New Order, where Western energy and inventiveness are channelled to Western goals), an era of individualism unique in the history of the civilizations would occur.
This era, by its nature (colonization of planets and star-systems) would also ensure the survival of Western civilization beyond the normal four-hundred year span of Imperium.
Were anti-Western forces to triumph (as they might, given the slothful character of much of the West and its nearly total absorption of Magian ideas), then the civilization of the West will have failed through its own weakness.
The triumph of the Magian would mean the end of civilization, a rapid decline followed by a period of barbarism and terror far greater than any known hitherto.
An interregnum of several thousand years would result as a consequence of the costly experiment - a period without any recognizable civilization; no art, little technology, and certainly no science.
In short, anti-Westernism would have negated with its triumph and the inevitable collapse over four thousand years of evolution.
It would have tried to eradicate the two things on which civilization depends - individuality and challenge.
The choices available to the West are not choices over any parochial form of politics or between contenting states.
There is only the choice between Imperium and its New Order and the triumph of the Magian.
All other conflicts are meaningless and doomed to vanish.
One is either for the Imperium-idea, or against it; there is no longer any possibility of a middle-way.
THE RESURGENCE
It seems at first singularly unfortunate that an examination such as we have conducted (a rational and non-political examination, it should be noted) between the effects of the Faustian and the Magian souls on the West during its transition toward a Universal State or Imperium, should today be anathema, insofar as the majority of the peoples of the West are concerned.
That this is so, however, is natural - given the extent of the distortion that has occurred and which we have briefly uncovered.
Yet there is one aspect of this distortion, above all others combined, which makes this possible.
This aspect we would most assuredly seek to avoid were we seeking the approval of those in authority, who have a vested interest in the triumph of the Magian because their positions depend on their acceptance of or acquiescence in the Liberal/Socialist notions prevalent in the West.
This aspect has been avoided almost without exception by other writers, like Heidegger, who have understood the drift of the West.
To avoid this aspect, however, is impossible, for on its correct evaluation the Destiny of the West depends, and without an understanding of this aspect it is impossible to visualize, let alone fight for, the Imperium.
This aspect is, of course, National Socialist Germany.
National Socialist Germany stands condemned today on three counts.
First, that Hitler and the Philosophy of National Socialism were responsible for the extermination of some six-million Jews during the years 1942-1945;
Second, that Germany was directly responsible for the Second World War.
Third, that National Socialism is simply 'evil'.
Hitler, after 1933, enjoyed the support of at least 80% of the German people; he was far more popular among his people than any leader in the so-called democratic countries has ever been.
He was greeted with spontaneous enthusiasm wherever he went. National-Socialist Germany was not a parliamentary democracy, and it never pretended to be one.
All the National-Socialists asked was that Germans put the interests of the volk and their country first; only if someone acted against the German interest was the force of law invoked. This meant that decadent activities were forbidden; crime was dealt with severely.
The National-Socialist state was of the kind that Greeks would have understood and admired, and National-Socialist Germany was, in essence, the re-creation of the type of society found in Athens during the period of Athenian greatness.
Careful research by historians such as Werner Maser and Dietrich Orlow, among others, is gradually changing the accepted picture of National-Socialist Germany and the rise to power of the NSDAP.
These researchers show that National-Socialist Germany had no intention of going to war at all.
On this question of German aggression and the origin of the Second World War, the consensus among historians is gradually changing.
Indeed, according to Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, the Allies were more responsible for the war than Germany, and recent evidence, bears this out.
Of Hitler, Dr. Norman Stone had said: 'when the march to war started, quite often it was Hitler's opponents, and not Hitler, who began the various crises; Hitler clearly did not want war in September 1939 with the British and the French; and when war began, Germany got on by bluff and improvisation until 1942-1943.
Hitler did not even mean to bomb London, and when he did, it was because he wanted to retaliate against the British, who had bombed Berlin first.
The idea of Germany bent on conquering Europe, with Germans part of one vast war machine, is an invention of Allied war propaganda, and no historian today takes it seriously.
Hitler simply wanted all Germans to be part of one state; the Versailles Treaty of 1919 cut Germany in two by the creation of the Polish Corridor, and took from Germany land to create a part of a new state called Czechoslovakia.
The British government, urged on by world Jewry, who had declared war on Germany in 1933, saw a strong Germany as a threat.
In order to weaken Germany, and to strengthen its own hand in Europe, it formed alliances with Poland and France.
It was, in effect, these interfering alliances which brought about the start of the Second World War.
In its relation to what we have called the ethos of the West, National-Socialism, from its very beginnings in Munich in 1919, stands as an embodiment of that ethos.
National-Socialism was a resurgence of basically Faustian values over and above the cultural dominance of the Magian, and were it not for the three myths listed above, their impact and consequences, there is no shadow of a doubt that the followers of this particular world-view would today be near the creation of the Western Imperium.
Everything about National-Socialism confirms this: its vitality, the Spartan joy of its followers, its attitude to all forms of degeneracy.
National-Socialism represented the one serious attempt to come to terms with the process of distortion; it urged a return to Western values, and it is no coincidence that National-Socialist Germany chose as its official sculptor Arno Breker.
Breker worked from Nature, and his inspiration was Greek.
His 'Dionysis' is perhaps the greatest sculpture since Michelangelo.
Adolf Hitler was a type of Caesar-figure, and his achievement in obtaining power (he was totally unknown as a politician in 1919) through his will-power and charisma is an astonishing achievement, as even his detractors are forced to admit.
The modern world has seen nothing like it.
Even today, nearly forty years after his death, he continues to exert an enormous attraction.
For nigh on forty years the world's writers have been pouring out their amalgam of lies and half truths about the Hitler.
National Socialism, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, was an attempt to restore, within the body of a modern state, the values of heroism, individuality and above all the healthy virtues exemplified by the Hellenic civilization.
It was the triumph of spirit over intelligence - spirit is expressed by a healthy body and a noble attitude; intelligence resides in clever books and the people who make them their occupation.
The National Socialists enjoyed life, not ideas and books.
This whole attitude was foreign to the majority of the peoples of the West, reared as they had been in decadent societies, where cleverness was elevated above everything else, where spirit came second to mere intelligence.
We find it difficult to admit that National Socialist Germany embodied the concept of a civilization bearing no relationship at all to our own.
And yet it was just that, and nothing else, that justified this war, one of the very few known to history in which the cause at stake was really vital.
It was essential that one of the two opposing visions of man, Heaven and Earth, the humanist or the magical, should triumph.
Coexistence was out of the question, although one can well imagine Marxism and Liberalism coexisting, because they are based on the same kind of ideas, and belong to the same Universe.
As it was, the Faustian vision was defeated.
In general, therefore, we may conclude that National Socialism was an expression of Faustian resurgence and nothing is more indicative of the influence of the Magian ethos, and nothing shows the power of those representatives of this ethos par excellence, the Jews, better than the fact that National Socialist Germany perished after only twelve years of existence because of a war that neither Hitler nor the German people wanted.
This war resulted in the enslavement of half of Europe to Communism, destroyed the British Empire, and left the world divided between the materialism of America and the materialism of Soviet Russia.
1945 was a turning point for our civilization; the old values which created the West and which inspired the National Socialist movement began to disappear from the hearts and minds of Europeans.
Pride of nation and race, respect for tradition and family, the honour paid to craftsmen - all these and many more became lost under the deluge of crass materialism.
All Western values were inverted.
Women, who had been a figure of chivalrous respect for many centuries, became objects of artificially created sexual desire; mass pornography began to flood the media.
The German nation (and Europe) that had fought to the music of Beethoven and Wagner was replaced by the Germany pollute by Negro 'jazz'.
Nothing provides more evidence for the distortion of the ethos of the West than the fact that National Socialism, Adolf Hitler, and Germany, have been subject to a massive propaganda campaign centring around the accusation that National Socialist Germany was responsible for the extermination of some six million Jews.
The sickness of some of this propaganda is incredible and says more about those who created it than anything else.
This propaganda, some aspects of which we have touched on very briefly, has achieved astounding results, and the sheer fact that it has been believed by the vast majority says something both about the weakness of the West and the power of the propagandists.
People have only to think for themselves, or investigate the real facts of history, to see the propaganda for what it is: the brainchild of a minority totally opposed to Faustian values, ideals and goals.
This propaganda has hypnotized several generations, and all but paralysed their will to resist the inverted values of Marxism and its brotherhood of degeneracy.
This propaganda has made everything anti-Western acceptable: Negro Music is preferred to the Western tradition of 'classical', the literature of Dante, Goethe, and the Icelandic Edda is replaced by the neuroticism of Kafka, and the modern disposable novel whose plot revolves around money and sex.
Indeed, even Western folk music has become corrupted.
No longer does it preserve folk traditions; instead it is the preserve of a minority dedicated to pacifism, racial degeneracy, and crypto-Marxism.
This propaganda has allowed the West to become dominated by the psychology of the Magian - the psychology of Freud, Fromm, Klineberg, and Maslow.
This psychology has defined National Socialism and similar expressions of the Faustian ethos, as perverted.
People who uphold National Socialist views are, therefore, sick and require 'treatment'.
According to this view, anti-Jewishness, for instance, is based more largely upon factors in the subject, and in his total situation than upon actual characteristics of the Jew.
This inversion is not only clever in Heidegger's sense, it also totally inverts reality: the psychological idea of the causes of anti-Jewishness come before any knowledge of Jewish actions or the facts of history.
It cleverly does away with everything that might contradict the theory, and has paved the way for the acceptance, in the West, of the ideas of racial equality.
What could not be achieved through propaganda (for there would always be some who would perceive the truth), could be achieved through terror - by the suppression of National Socialism.
Of course, this terror would be in the name of 'humanity' or 'human rights' - these terms would be sufficient to justify anything, as they did during and after the Nuremberg Trials.
Many Western states have gone further and made it illegal, a criminal act, to uphold or propagate National Socialist views.
The acceptance of the dogma of racial equality (a creation of the Magian doctrines of sociology and social anthropology) has led many states to pass legislation making it illegal to incite racial hatred: that is, to criticize the crypto-Marxist policy of racial integration, whose ultimate result can only be the creation of a docile, racially mixed mass who, with their acceptance of all the 'benefits' of racial integration.
The West in general has become besotted by the pursuit of material well-being and 'entertainment', and its people so brainwashed by the dogmas of sociology and social anthropology that they, under the guidance of their 'leaders' are allowed to fight for, and in the name of, the decadence of the present and a Magianinduced vision of the future where 'world-order' reigns for the benefit of some abstraction called 'humanity'.
In the name of this 'vision', and the 'harmony and peace' which allegedly goes with it, most of Europe has surrendered its national sovereignty through the European Economic Community and NATO has accepted the destruction of its people through racial intermixing.
National and racial differences are still acceptable - provided they are harmless or contribute somehow to entertainment or that twentieth century disease, 'tourism'.
The people of the West - the descendants of the Vikings, Saxons, Franks, Romans, and Angles - the Aryans - have allowed this to happen.
They have allowed National Socialism, and similar expression of their own spirit to be denigrated and smeared and made to appear, through propaganda as 'evil'.
They have accepted the liberalism and the socialism which will destroy them and their civilization, and they have acquiesced in decadence.
They have allowed the Magian ethos to dominate the West, and have accepted in place of a vital, noble, healthy, and expanding culture true to its spirit of conquest, the fossils of the past and the degeneracy of the present.
Under the present regime of magian ideas, the only alternative to capitalism is socialism and Marxism.
Both are decadent according to the ethos of the West.
To pretend that National Socialism or Adolf Hitler is not important for the West is absurd:
National Socialism cannot be ignored, and any movement, political or otherwise, which has as its aim the creation of a Faustian Imperium, will never succeed as long as it ignores the importance of this philosophy for the sake of temporary and, finally, illusory gains.
Adolf Hitler is as central to Imperium as Caesar was to the Roman Empire, and while the founders of the Imperium may not call themselves National Socialists, or use as their symbol the swastika flag, they will nevertheless be the heirs of National Socialism.
In this bond lies the key to the creation of Imperium.
Philosophically, National Socialism represents the revaluation wished for by Nietzsche - a return to Nature (the physis of the Greeks) as an unfolding in the sense of the pre-Socractics.
Heidegger's philosophy is another expression of this, and it is no coincidence that Heidegger never renounced his National Socialist affiliations, despite the many attempts to coerce him.
Such a returning is a return to the dynamic paganism that pre-dated Christianity.
But National Socialism is much more than a philosophy, a way of thought: It is a way of life, concerned with practical realities.
It recognizes the harmony that exists through a unity of man with nature, and which is exemplified in one way with the yeomen or small-holders who earn their living from the land and who are thus attuned to the rhythms of rural life, and who are aware of natural change and struggle.
National Socialism is founded upon the basic realization that man is part of, and subject to, the laws and processes of nature.
He is not above it, although he can, providing he works with these laws, change it to a certain extent.
Perhaps the most fundamental example of this, for man, is race: the recognition of not only difference and differing aptitudes between races - but also of individuals in each race.
There is in National Socialism a desire to preserve identity, to foster quality over and above quantity, as well as encourage, through individual responsibility, the diversity which alone ensures cultural creativity and thus civilization.
Science has demonstrated the reality of racial differences, particularly with respect to intelligence, and the ability to create higher civilizations.
The dogmas of Marxism and sociology, insisting as they do on equality of races, stand violently against this most fundamental truth.
Through and because of such identity (and the pride which is part of it - a pride which is never 'hate', as the propaganda of the Marxists and their sociological allies would have us believe) there arises in both society and civilization, a harmony:
In music, for instance, as in architecture.
There is, in a society founded in these natural values, a beauty of form, but above all a vitality that strives to add to a civilization.
Such a society is itself harmonious because it is built upon common identity - that is, race - and common traditions - that is, nation - and not upon a cosmopolitanism which destroys the rootedness in the past so essential for health and vitality and which, through its racial diversity, encourages mediocrity.
There exists in such a harmonious society a nobility of life, something impossible in a materialistic society and unrealisable through cosmopolitanism.
Goals are natural goals, not artificial ones created through material desire to sell goods or commodities, as in capitalism, or ones created by an abstract ideology and abstracted social forces, as in Socialism and Communism.
The goals of National Socialism are founded on archetypal symbols, which have as their origin the aspirations of a race.
For the Imperium that is yet to come, the numinous symbol grounded in the aspirations of the West is the conquest of outer space.
Imperium has to be created, by struggle, and cannot merely be wished into existence.
For Imperium to be created in the West, it will first be necessary to destroy the myths about National Socialism which the propaganda of the Magian had foisted upon us.
Until this is done Imperium will not be possible.
Few would dispute the Jewish origins of Christianity, although there would be many who would dispute the Nietzschean claim that, despite pagan influence, Christianity has remained essentially Jewish in spirit - an expression, like Judaism, of the Magian ethos, just as Marxism is Magian.
From Judaism have come two religions: Christianity and Islam.
It's third and latest child has not been a religion but an ideology: Marxism.
According to Nietzsche, 'In Christianity all of Judaism attains its ultimate mastery as the art of lying in a holy manner. The Christian is the Jew once more.'
Christianity, as explained earlier, supplanted the Hellenic values and thus distorted the West.
According to Nietzsche, 'The Jews are the strangest people in world history - out of themselves they created a counter-concept to natural conditions: they turned religion, cult, morality, history, psychology, one after the other, into an incurable contradiction to their natural values.'
Even today the Christian can feel anti-Jewish without realizing that he himself is the ultimate Jewish consequence.
Marxism, sociology, and all the long etcetera of Jewish grown studies like Freudian psychology, all distort natural values, and reduce everything to the most basic and base.
For the West to create Imperium it is necessary for it to replace the god-feeling Christianity with one born from the ethos of the West.
This feeling would, as outlined above, be essentially pagan and involve a return to the idealism exemplified by heroism.
As Kenneth Clarke has said: 'suppose that this quality, which I may call heroic, is not part of most people's ideas of civilization. It involves a contempt for convenience and a sacrifice of all those pleasures that contribute to what we call civilized life. It is the enemy of happiness. And yet we recognize that to despise material obstacles, and even to defy the blind forces of fate, is man's supreme achievement.'
Such an attitude contradicts the materialism rampant in the West, and is incompatible with Christianity and every other manifestation of the Magian.
The Western reaction which is to come - and which must come if Imperium is to be created - will be unmistakably a reaction against both Christianity, and the decadence and materialism of the Magian.
This reaction and return to older and truly Western values (rooted as they are in the Hellenic) will be turned into a fruitful resurgence with the coming of the Übermensch, the one who avenges. He, and he alone, will be instrumental in creating Imperium.
The Übermensch is the creative force whose response to the challenge of Western decline and distortion will inspire and make possible the Imperial advance and the creation of a New Order.
The Imperium he founds will, in time, expand far beyond the boundaries of the Earth.
With the Übermensch, the materialism of capital and the materialism of Communism will have ended, and a New Order will arise.
The Übermensch is the Destiny of the West, and the force that will create Imperium.
That this is so is not in doubt, as the model of higher civilization has been the creation of such a figure - the West - will be no exception.
What will be unique to the West, however, is the manner in which Imperium will, and must be, created because of the distortion the ethos of the West and, consequently, the societies of the West have suffered.
The Übermensch can only create Imperium by force of arms.
The Übermensch, the creator who avenges, must come.
He is a natural force, like lightning and sun, and he is awaited not only by those of the West who yearn for the nobility and purity the New Order will create, but also by those, like the representatives of the Magian who, consciously or unconsciously, uphold and propagate ideas and values contradictory to the West.
These representatives of the Magian - be they Jews or those upholding Magian values against Western ones - fear him, for they know that his emergence dooms them and the world they hope to create.
Their world would be one where Magian values and ideals - like Communism ruled, where everyone was levelled down, and where those who did not conform, in thought, word or deed, would be broken by the techniques created to pacify.
Already this kind of terror exists.
However much the Übermensch may be the Destiny of the West, Imperium will only be created by those prepared to fight and die for it: the opponents of Imperium and the New Order will use every means at their disposal to maintain the power and influence they have, and there will and must be a great deal of suffering and death on both sides.
Imperium cannot simply be thought or wished into existence - it has to be fought for, and its creation will demand the type of heroism immortalized by the battle of Thermopylae, where Leonidas and his few hundred Spartans held out until death against the whole army of Xerxes.
Such heroism would return that spirit essential to Imperium, and enable both a spiritual and an artistic renaissance of a magnitude unsurpassed by any previous civilization.
In contradistinction to the destruction of personality which is the inevitable outcome of all forms of socialism and Marxism, the New Order of Imperium would, because its ethos would be genuinely Western, ensure the greatest possible diversity of personality.
Indeed, once travel in space became commonplace (as it would under the New Order, where Western energy and inventiveness are channelled to Western goals), an era of individualism unique in the history of the civilizations would occur.
This era, by its nature (colonization of planets and star-systems) would also ensure the survival of Western civilization beyond the normal four-hundred year span of Imperium.
Were anti-Western forces to triumph (as they might, given the slothful character of much of the West and its nearly total absorption of Magian ideas), then the civilization of the West will have failed through its own weakness.
The triumph of the Magian would mean the end of civilization, a rapid decline followed by a period of barbarism and terror far greater than any known hitherto.
An interregnum of several thousand years would result as a consequence of the costly experiment - a period without any recognizable civilization; no art, little technology, and certainly no science.
In short, anti-Westernism would have negated with its triumph and the inevitable collapse over four thousand years of evolution.
It would have tried to eradicate the two things on which civilization depends - individuality and challenge.
The choices available to the West are not choices over any parochial form of politics or between contenting states.
There is only the choice between Imperium and its New Order and the triumph of the Magian.
All other conflicts are meaningless and doomed to vanish.
One is either for the Imperium-idea, or against it; there is no longer any possibility of a middle-way.
THE RESURGENCE
It seems at first singularly unfortunate that an examination such as we have conducted (a rational and non-political examination, it should be noted) between the effects of the Faustian and the Magian souls on the West during its transition toward a Universal State or Imperium, should today be anathema, insofar as the majority of the peoples of the West are concerned.
That this is so, however, is natural - given the extent of the distortion that has occurred and which we have briefly uncovered.
Yet there is one aspect of this distortion, above all others combined, which makes this possible.
This aspect we would most assuredly seek to avoid were we seeking the approval of those in authority, who have a vested interest in the triumph of the Magian because their positions depend on their acceptance of or acquiescence in the Liberal/Socialist notions prevalent in the West.
This aspect has been avoided almost without exception by other writers, like Heidegger, who have understood the drift of the West.
To avoid this aspect, however, is impossible, for on its correct evaluation the Destiny of the West depends, and without an understanding of this aspect it is impossible to visualize, let alone fight for, the Imperium.
This aspect is, of course, National Socialist Germany.
National Socialist Germany stands condemned today on three counts.
First, that Hitler and the Philosophy of National Socialism were responsible for the extermination of some six-million Jews during the years 1942-1945;
Second, that Germany was directly responsible for the Second World War.
Third, that National Socialism is simply 'evil'.
Hitler, after 1933, enjoyed the support of at least 80% of the German people; he was far more popular among his people than any leader in the so-called democratic countries has ever been.
He was greeted with spontaneous enthusiasm wherever he went. National-Socialist Germany was not a parliamentary democracy, and it never pretended to be one.
All the National-Socialists asked was that Germans put the interests of the volk and their country first; only if someone acted against the German interest was the force of law invoked. This meant that decadent activities were forbidden; crime was dealt with severely.
The National-Socialist state was of the kind that Greeks would have understood and admired, and National-Socialist Germany was, in essence, the re-creation of the type of society found in Athens during the period of Athenian greatness.
Careful research by historians such as Werner Maser and Dietrich Orlow, among others, is gradually changing the accepted picture of National-Socialist Germany and the rise to power of the NSDAP.
These researchers show that National-Socialist Germany had no intention of going to war at all.
On this question of German aggression and the origin of the Second World War, the consensus among historians is gradually changing.
Indeed, according to Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, the Allies were more responsible for the war than Germany, and recent evidence, bears this out.
Of Hitler, Dr. Norman Stone had said: 'when the march to war started, quite often it was Hitler's opponents, and not Hitler, who began the various crises; Hitler clearly did not want war in September 1939 with the British and the French; and when war began, Germany got on by bluff and improvisation until 1942-1943.
Hitler did not even mean to bomb London, and when he did, it was because he wanted to retaliate against the British, who had bombed Berlin first.
The idea of Germany bent on conquering Europe, with Germans part of one vast war machine, is an invention of Allied war propaganda, and no historian today takes it seriously.
Hitler simply wanted all Germans to be part of one state; the Versailles Treaty of 1919 cut Germany in two by the creation of the Polish Corridor, and took from Germany land to create a part of a new state called Czechoslovakia.
The British government, urged on by world Jewry, who had declared war on Germany in 1933, saw a strong Germany as a threat.
In order to weaken Germany, and to strengthen its own hand in Europe, it formed alliances with Poland and France.
It was, in effect, these interfering alliances which brought about the start of the Second World War.
In its relation to what we have called the ethos of the West, National-Socialism, from its very beginnings in Munich in 1919, stands as an embodiment of that ethos.
National-Socialism was a resurgence of basically Faustian values over and above the cultural dominance of the Magian, and were it not for the three myths listed above, their impact and consequences, there is no shadow of a doubt that the followers of this particular world-view would today be near the creation of the Western Imperium.
Everything about National-Socialism confirms this: its vitality, the Spartan joy of its followers, its attitude to all forms of degeneracy.
National-Socialism represented the one serious attempt to come to terms with the process of distortion; it urged a return to Western values, and it is no coincidence that National-Socialist Germany chose as its official sculptor Arno Breker.
Breker worked from Nature, and his inspiration was Greek.
His 'Dionysis' is perhaps the greatest sculpture since Michelangelo.
Adolf Hitler was a type of Caesar-figure, and his achievement in obtaining power (he was totally unknown as a politician in 1919) through his will-power and charisma is an astonishing achievement, as even his detractors are forced to admit.
The modern world has seen nothing like it.
Even today, nearly forty years after his death, he continues to exert an enormous attraction.
For nigh on forty years the world's writers have been pouring out their amalgam of lies and half truths about the Hitler.
National Socialism, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, was an attempt to restore, within the body of a modern state, the values of heroism, individuality and above all the healthy virtues exemplified by the Hellenic civilization.
It was the triumph of spirit over intelligence - spirit is expressed by a healthy body and a noble attitude; intelligence resides in clever books and the people who make them their occupation.
The National Socialists enjoyed life, not ideas and books.
This whole attitude was foreign to the majority of the peoples of the West, reared as they had been in decadent societies, where cleverness was elevated above everything else, where spirit came second to mere intelligence.
We find it difficult to admit that National Socialist Germany embodied the concept of a civilization bearing no relationship at all to our own.
And yet it was just that, and nothing else, that justified this war, one of the very few known to history in which the cause at stake was really vital.
It was essential that one of the two opposing visions of man, Heaven and Earth, the humanist or the magical, should triumph.
Coexistence was out of the question, although one can well imagine Marxism and Liberalism coexisting, because they are based on the same kind of ideas, and belong to the same Universe.
As it was, the Faustian vision was defeated.
In general, therefore, we may conclude that National Socialism was an expression of Faustian resurgence and nothing is more indicative of the influence of the Magian ethos, and nothing shows the power of those representatives of this ethos par excellence, the Jews, better than the fact that National Socialist Germany perished after only twelve years of existence because of a war that neither Hitler nor the German people wanted.
This war resulted in the enslavement of half of Europe to Communism, destroyed the British Empire, and left the world divided between the materialism of America and the materialism of Soviet Russia.
1945 was a turning point for our civilization; the old values which created the West and which inspired the National Socialist movement began to disappear from the hearts and minds of Europeans.
Pride of nation and race, respect for tradition and family, the honour paid to craftsmen - all these and many more became lost under the deluge of crass materialism.
All Western values were inverted.
Women, who had been a figure of chivalrous respect for many centuries, became objects of artificially created sexual desire; mass pornography began to flood the media.
The German nation (and Europe) that had fought to the music of Beethoven and Wagner was replaced by the Germany pollute by Negro 'jazz'.
Nothing provides more evidence for the distortion of the ethos of the West than the fact that National Socialism, Adolf Hitler, and Germany, have been subject to a massive propaganda campaign centring around the accusation that National Socialist Germany was responsible for the extermination of some six million Jews.
The sickness of some of this propaganda is incredible and says more about those who created it than anything else.
This propaganda, some aspects of which we have touched on very briefly, has achieved astounding results, and the sheer fact that it has been believed by the vast majority says something both about the weakness of the West and the power of the propagandists.
People have only to think for themselves, or investigate the real facts of history, to see the propaganda for what it is: the brainchild of a minority totally opposed to Faustian values, ideals and goals.
This propaganda has hypnotized several generations, and all but paralysed their will to resist the inverted values of Marxism and its brotherhood of degeneracy.
This propaganda has made everything anti-Western acceptable: Negro Music is preferred to the Western tradition of 'classical', the literature of Dante, Goethe, and the Icelandic Edda is replaced by the neuroticism of Kafka, and the modern disposable novel whose plot revolves around money and sex.
Indeed, even Western folk music has become corrupted.
No longer does it preserve folk traditions; instead it is the preserve of a minority dedicated to pacifism, racial degeneracy, and crypto-Marxism.
This propaganda has allowed the West to become dominated by the psychology of the Magian - the psychology of Freud, Fromm, Klineberg, and Maslow.
This psychology has defined National Socialism and similar expressions of the Faustian ethos, as perverted.
People who uphold National Socialist views are, therefore, sick and require 'treatment'.
According to this view, anti-Jewishness, for instance, is based more largely upon factors in the subject, and in his total situation than upon actual characteristics of the Jew.
This inversion is not only clever in Heidegger's sense, it also totally inverts reality: the psychological idea of the causes of anti-Jewishness come before any knowledge of Jewish actions or the facts of history.
It cleverly does away with everything that might contradict the theory, and has paved the way for the acceptance, in the West, of the ideas of racial equality.
What could not be achieved through propaganda (for there would always be some who would perceive the truth), could be achieved through terror - by the suppression of National Socialism.
Of course, this terror would be in the name of 'humanity' or 'human rights' - these terms would be sufficient to justify anything, as they did during and after the Nuremberg Trials.
Many Western states have gone further and made it illegal, a criminal act, to uphold or propagate National Socialist views.
The acceptance of the dogma of racial equality (a creation of the Magian doctrines of sociology and social anthropology) has led many states to pass legislation making it illegal to incite racial hatred: that is, to criticize the crypto-Marxist policy of racial integration, whose ultimate result can only be the creation of a docile, racially mixed mass who, with their acceptance of all the 'benefits' of racial integration.
The West in general has become besotted by the pursuit of material well-being and 'entertainment', and its people so brainwashed by the dogmas of sociology and social anthropology that they, under the guidance of their 'leaders' are allowed to fight for, and in the name of, the decadence of the present and a Magianinduced vision of the future where 'world-order' reigns for the benefit of some abstraction called 'humanity'.
In the name of this 'vision', and the 'harmony and peace' which allegedly goes with it, most of Europe has surrendered its national sovereignty through the European Economic Community and NATO has accepted the destruction of its people through racial intermixing.
National and racial differences are still acceptable - provided they are harmless or contribute somehow to entertainment or that twentieth century disease, 'tourism'.
The people of the West - the descendants of the Vikings, Saxons, Franks, Romans, and Angles - the Aryans - have allowed this to happen.
They have allowed National Socialism, and similar expression of their own spirit to be denigrated and smeared and made to appear, through propaganda as 'evil'.
They have accepted the liberalism and the socialism which will destroy them and their civilization, and they have acquiesced in decadence.
They have allowed the Magian ethos to dominate the West, and have accepted in place of a vital, noble, healthy, and expanding culture true to its spirit of conquest, the fossils of the past and the degeneracy of the present.
Under the present regime of magian ideas, the only alternative to capitalism is socialism and Marxism.
Both are decadent according to the ethos of the West.
To pretend that National Socialism or Adolf Hitler is not important for the West is absurd:
National Socialism cannot be ignored, and any movement, political or otherwise, which has as its aim the creation of a Faustian Imperium, will never succeed as long as it ignores the importance of this philosophy for the sake of temporary and, finally, illusory gains.
Adolf Hitler is as central to Imperium as Caesar was to the Roman Empire, and while the founders of the Imperium may not call themselves National Socialists, or use as their symbol the swastika flag, they will nevertheless be the heirs of National Socialism.
In this bond lies the key to the creation of Imperium.
Philosophically, National Socialism represents the revaluation wished for by Nietzsche - a return to Nature (the physis of the Greeks) as an unfolding in the sense of the pre-Socractics.
Heidegger's philosophy is another expression of this, and it is no coincidence that Heidegger never renounced his National Socialist affiliations, despite the many attempts to coerce him.
Such a returning is a return to the dynamic paganism that pre-dated Christianity.
But National Socialism is much more than a philosophy, a way of thought: It is a way of life, concerned with practical realities.
It recognizes the harmony that exists through a unity of man with nature, and which is exemplified in one way with the yeomen or small-holders who earn their living from the land and who are thus attuned to the rhythms of rural life, and who are aware of natural change and struggle.
National Socialism is founded upon the basic realization that man is part of, and subject to, the laws and processes of nature.
He is not above it, although he can, providing he works with these laws, change it to a certain extent.
Perhaps the most fundamental example of this, for man, is race: the recognition of not only difference and differing aptitudes between races - but also of individuals in each race.
There is in National Socialism a desire to preserve identity, to foster quality over and above quantity, as well as encourage, through individual responsibility, the diversity which alone ensures cultural creativity and thus civilization.
Science has demonstrated the reality of racial differences, particularly with respect to intelligence, and the ability to create higher civilizations.
The dogmas of Marxism and sociology, insisting as they do on equality of races, stand violently against this most fundamental truth.
Through and because of such identity (and the pride which is part of it - a pride which is never 'hate', as the propaganda of the Marxists and their sociological allies would have us believe) there arises in both society and civilization, a harmony:
In music, for instance, as in architecture.
There is, in a society founded in these natural values, a beauty of form, but above all a vitality that strives to add to a civilization.
Such a society is itself harmonious because it is built upon common identity - that is, race - and common traditions - that is, nation - and not upon a cosmopolitanism which destroys the rootedness in the past so essential for health and vitality and which, through its racial diversity, encourages mediocrity.
There exists in such a harmonious society a nobility of life, something impossible in a materialistic society and unrealisable through cosmopolitanism.
Goals are natural goals, not artificial ones created through material desire to sell goods or commodities, as in capitalism, or ones created by an abstract ideology and abstracted social forces, as in Socialism and Communism.
The goals of National Socialism are founded on archetypal symbols, which have as their origin the aspirations of a race.
For the Imperium that is yet to come, the numinous symbol grounded in the aspirations of the West is the conquest of outer space.
Imperium has to be created, by struggle, and cannot merely be wished into existence.
For Imperium to be created in the West, it will first be necessary to destroy the myths about National Socialism which the propaganda of the Magian had foisted upon us.
Until this is done Imperium will not be possible.
to be continued
