“We should expect tyranny to result from democracy, the most savage subjection from an excess of liberty”.

-Plato, Republic, Book VIII, 564 a

This December, as many Americans attended to their rituals of shopping, spectator sports and celebrity voyeurism, the 2012 fiscal year’s National Defense Authorization Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. It has now been signed into law by President Obama. This legislation has attracted some controversy, if characteristically muted, thanks to one of its provisions in particular. The U.S. military will be granted the power to detain citizens on the soil of the Land of the Free for indefinite periods of time. All that’s needed to do away with due process is the suspicion of involvement with “terrorism,” an activity elastically defined[1].

Well-meaning commentators have expressed some shock at the passage of an act that enables martial law and interminable vacations to Guantanamo. America was founded on the concept of inalienable rights! Critics and opponents of the liberal order, however, are in no way surprised at this development, for it was decades in the making. With the NDAA, our policy elites have appropriated a mask of legality to manage the chaos they themselves engineered. The rights once upheld as inalienable were ultimately a fanciful construct, a fiction employed in the service of enlightened government.

As Western democracy evolves and extends its power across the world, its ascendance must be secured and made absolute. Serious resistance abroad and at home will surely be crushed. With hearty approval of the new act, Senator Lindsey Graham remarked that America had now assumed its place as a segment of a much larger battlefield for freedom. Old fairy tales of civic virtue have outlived their usefulness in an age of globalism; the new narrative of universal terror assures us liberty and equality forever. A CIA officer-turned-security consultant explains the need for ubiquitous surveillance and government intrusion into all spheres of life:

If we watch – in the United States, in Germany, Sweden, the U.K. – things are constantly at a low boil and we always need to be on our guard…This can take place just about anywhere.

Terror and tyranny are inevitable byproducts of democracy, the one legitimate form of rule permitted by Washington to the tribes of humanity. Our struggle for the rights of man must by necessity incur some casualties, but such bloodshed waters the tree of liberty. Tabulated (or not) as collateral damage, Pashtun villagers are ripped apart by Hellfire missiles launched by drones so that one day girls from that very community may go to an NGO-run school and learn about voting and contraception. Yet when a Pakistani who has taken U.S. citizenship attempts to blow up Times Square in revenge, no one in America’s political and media establishment seems the least bit curious as to his motives. The entire affair is written off as business as usual in the Open Society--after all, it could have taken place anywhere. This regime is the culmination of liberalism’s logic; it is what U.S. forces patrolling the Hindu Kush and all other corners of the earth defend. We fight them over there to invite them over here, for peace and unity in our world must first be enforced through universal war.

“This is sin”, said a bloodied Muammar Gaddafi to his tormenters in a last moment of humiliation. “Do you know right from wrong?” After NATO airstrikes destroyed his convoy and forced him to flee on foot through Sirte, Libya’s deposed leader was seized from a drainage ditch. Footage off of a captor’s cell phone shows a howling rebel mob parading him along the dusty city blocks of his birthplace. Beaten, pistol-whipped and sodomized with a knife, Gaddafi was then summarily executed with a gunshot to the temple. His body was displayed as a trophy of war, and his secrets were effectively buried, never to be revealed at another farcical international tribunal in The Hague.

U.S. policymakers weren’t likely planning on the mass release of a Gaddafi snuff film. In their jubilation and braggadocio, the Libyan “freedom-fighters” ruined the enjoyment of a private viewing session available only to a chosen few within the Beltway. And so an eccentric dictator with a terrorist past and delusions of pan-African grandeur evoked unforced human sympathy as he suffered and died before a world audience. Colonel Gaddafi knew grave sin well; this was the man who ordered the passengers of Pan Am 103 blown out of the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. He had since come to terms with the West, paying restitution to the victims’ families and scrapping his nuclear weapons program in favor of restored diplomatic and commercial ties eighteen years later. Yet when Benghazi and the rest of Cyrenaica rose up against the regime in early 2011, Washington, London and Paris smelled blood in the water.

Not in vain is Russia heir to the traditions of Byzantium; intrigue, secret diplomacy and espionage are integral to the Third Rome’s strategic culture. Over the past decade Vladimir Putin has proven a consummate practitioner of statecraft in this fashion, as well as an able defender of the national interest. Yet where is he leading Russia? The answer remains a mystery. His formidable will and predisposition to action are impressive, but only in the service of a higher principle will these gifts signify greatness.

Barring any extraordinary surprises or disasters, Putin will again be president of the Russian Federation by spring of next year. His liberal protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, is slated for a return to the premier’s seat (now occupied by VVP, as he is referred to in Moscow), thereby flipping the leadership “tandem” back to its natural state. Titles in contemporary politics carry limited meaning. It’s clear that Putin was and is the Gosudar’, Russia’s ruler; he’s a Byzantine emperor, Petersburg technocrat and KGB veteran all at once. And his operating methods today still reflect the formative years he spent in Soviet intelligence.

It was my discovery of the European New Right that finally convinced me that one could be both a serious intellectual and a political rightist. My initiation came when I discovered Alain De Benoist’s and Charles Champetier’s manifesto for the French New Right eleven years ago. I had never seen rightist ideas presented in such a way before and I knew I had come upon something powerful. Previously, I had been more or less a left-wing Chomskyite. I had long found the left dissatisfying, particularly its victimological ressentiment and its PC bluenoses. Yet, when I looked at the bulk of the American right and saw the jingoist flag-wavers, Bible-bangers, Israel-firsters, plutocratic apologists, conspiracists, and knee-jerk militarists, I would wonder why would anyone could possibly want to be associated with that, for God’s sake? Murray Rothbard’s championing of the legacy of the “Old Right” notwithstanding, I considered the right to be an intellectual wasteland. Fortunately, the European New Right rescued me from such a narrow perception. It was from the European New Right that I learned one could be a progressive without being an egalitarian, a conservative without succumbing to vulgar economism, and a traditionalist without being a yahoo.

A major problem with bringing ENR ideas to North American audiences has been the fact that much of the scholarship produced by ENR writers has yet to be translated into English. For instance, De Benoist is the leading intellectual of the ENR and one of its founding fathers, yet only only two of De Benoist’s dozens of books, On Being a Pagan and The Problem of Democracy, have undergone an English translation and the latter appeared in English only this year thanks to Arktos Publishing. Two original English works surveying ENR thought have also appeared. One of these is by Tomislav Sunic and the other is by Michael O’Meara. If you are a college student and you want to shock and offend your politically correct professors and peers, then the distribution of copies of these works on campuses would certainly be an easy way to do so.

Because of the efforts of Arktos, more and more works of the ENR are gradually being made available in English as well as older works originally written by long-forgotten conservative revolutionary figures of the interwar era. Arktos also makes available works by leftist thinkers offering genuine insight and other writers whose ideas fall way outside the paradigm of what passes for “the right” within the context of U.S. style “conservatism.” Suffice to say we will not be seeing any of the plutocrat-funded and neocon-managed publishing houses of America’s “conservative movement” issuing the works of Lothrop Stoddard, Antonio Gramsci, Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt, Michael Cremo, Andrew Fraser, or Pentti Linkola. Arktos has also issued an English version of Ernst von Salomon’s It Cannot Be Stormed. Salomon was a conservative revolutionary author whose success continued well into the post-WW2 period and earned the denunciation of TIME magazine in the process. I’m still waiting for English translations of Ernst Junger’s Der Arbeiter and of the works of Ernst Niekisch (hint, hint).

Several contemporary works by leading ENR writers, such as De Benoist, Sunic, and Guillame Faye have been given extensive review on Brett Stevens’ website. (See here, here, and here.) Sunic’s Against Democracy and Equality is particularly helpful not only as an introduction to ENR ideas on a more abstract level, but as a source of critical insights that shed extensive light on the realities behind some of the more important political and cultural phenomena of our time. As Stevens observes in his review of Sunic:

Liberalism dehumanizes its adversaries. According to Carl Schmitt as channeled through Sunic, the left abhors war — so it phrases every political action as a police action. The bad guys become inhuman because they are immoral, not nice, not egalitarian, etc. and thus can be exterminated not in a war but in the right-thinking people detaining or removing the bad ones.

De Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy subjects the most sacred of all modern pieties, the ideal of liberal mass democracy, to rigorous and unrelenting criticism. The only other contemporary work that I am aware of that offers such a thoroughgoing assault on modern democracy is Hans Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed. I gave Hoppe’s work an extensive review when it first came out ten years ago. The twentieth century’s two leading critics of modern liberal democracy, with its tendencies toward mob rule, were arguably Carl Schmitt and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Schmitt attacked liberal democracy from the perspective of a traditional conservative in the mode of Hobbes or Burke, while Kuehnelt-Leddihn offered a critique rooted in a synthesis of Catholic traditionalism and a monarchist variation of classical liberalism reminiscent of Lord Acton.

Hoppe’s work is clearly influenced by and somewhat derivative of Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and employs arguments one might expect a conservative Catholic and liberal monarchist to make. De Benoist’s observations on democracy more closely resemble and are influenced by those of Schmitt. While Hoppe and Kuehnelt-Leddihn defended classical eighteenth and nineteenth century liberalism against modern egalitarian democracy and its social democratic manifestation, De Benoist like Schmitt before him sees liberalism as the root of the problem. De Benoist offers not classical liberalism but classical democracy as conceived of by the Greeks as the answer to the “problem of democray” in its modern form. Whereas Hoppe postulates the concept of a society ordered completely on the basis of private property as the alternative to modern democratic institutions, De Benoist offers suggestions that at times resemble the notions of “participatory democracy” or “direct democracy” advanced by certain strands of the Left. These contrasts should make for interesting dialogue and debate on the alternative right.

Guillame Faye’s Why We Fight differs from much of the literature of the ENR in that while Faye incorporates the essence of the broader New Right philosophy into his analysis, he also demonstrates a greater concern for on-the-ground practical politics, strategic formulations, and particular policy prescriptions in a way that is atypical of ENR thinkers with their general focus on arcane theoretical abstractions, historical interpretations, or “metapolitics.” Faye’s geopolitical outlook in some ways resembles a melding of the “Eurasianist” idea advanced by Alexander Dugin and the anti-Islamism of Western European euronationalism. This puts Faye at odds with other strands of the ENR which leans towards at least a tactical solidarity with the Third World and regards Islam as a potential traditionalist ally against globalization and Americanization.

I am inclined to regard Faye’s view as appropriate for Europeans and the latter view as more relevant to North Americans. Islam is geographically far removed from North America, and poses no immediate demographic threat. Islamic terrorism directed towards the United States and its allies is for the most part the inevitable “blowback” generated by U.S. foreign policy or, more specifically, the exercise of Zionist influence (whether Jewish or Christian) over American foreign policy in the Middle East. An alliance with Russia against both Americanization and Islamication may serve the interests of Europeans, but America would be best served by a simple renunciation of globalism and a return to old-fashioned isolationism. Indeed, domestic U.S. Muslims may well be valuable allies against domestic Zionism.

The European New Right clearly has much to offer to ordinary conservatives looking for ideas of infinitely greater substance than what is typically found on talk radio, FOX News, or the subcultures of American right-wing populsim. But the philosophy of the ENR might well prove to be the bridge that also helps many disaffected leftists to eventually find their way to the alternative right. The thinkers of the ENR have developed a critique of globalization, imperialism, and Americanization every bit as thorough and radical as that offered by neo-Marxists like Immanuel Wallerstein, indeed even more so. Likewise, the ENR possesses a critique of consumerism, recognition of ecological issues, anticlericalism and critique Christianity that avoids the shrill bigotry of the “new atheists” that at times resembles but is more substantive than that offered by the Left. The ENR emphasis on the sovereignty and self-preservation of all peoples might even appeal to non-white nationalist, separatist, or autonomist movements.

Writers of the ENR have also advanced an intelligent and sincere but measured social and cultural conservatism that lacks the “homosexual-atheist-abortionist-under-every-bed” hysteria of the American right-wing. ENR thought upholds masculine and feminine identities without sinking into crass misogyny, and De Benoist has even controversially called for solidarity with Third World nationalism against US imperialism in a way that resembles a rightist version of Chomsky, and advocated a federated European “empire” of autonomous ethnic, cultural, and national identities that is reminiscient of the Holy Roman Empire (which, as Voltaire said, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire). Meanwhile, the ENR-sympathetic Telos journal has postulated a critique of the modern liberal-managerial “new class” that greatly resembles Bakunin’s early critique of Marxism.

If we are going to build a rightist opposition in North America that is worthy of the legacy of Nietzsche, Pareto, Schmitt, Mencken, Ortega, and Junger, and is not merely a movement of useful idiots for the neoconservatives, military-industrial complex, and right-wing of the U.S. ruling class as so-called “movement conservatism” often is, then it would appear that the ideas of the European New Right are thus far the best thing going.

This past June Rome’s Circus Maximus, where chariots were once raced in honor of emperors, was the site of the Europride-2011 festival. The Continent’s annual celebration of homosexuality also featured a special performance by a disturbingly popular entity known as Lady Gaga, a vocal supporter of the gay agenda[1]. The show was doubtless a hit with the million-strong crowd, and the carnival deemed a success, if only to remind the Vatican it operates in enemy-held territory. Yet Mme. Gaga wasn’t originally on the Europride billet- she needed some special persuasion from behind the scenes to make her grand appearance.

As it turns out, we can thank U.S. diplomacy for another round of last-minute heroics in the defense of freedom. American Ambassador to Italy David Thorne was ‘instrumental’ in bringing Gaga to the event, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed. But the Rome concert only serves as a symbol of the U.S. campaign to normalize homosexual practices throughout the world. In her address to the organization GLIFAA (Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies) last week, Clinton enumerated State’s achievements on this front, from U.S. embassy employees helping organize a ‘pride’ march in Bratislava, Slovakia, to new gay-friendly UN resolutions and specialized aid for LGBT (in commissariat-speak, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered) refugees and sex workers. She then rallied the troops with this St. Crispin’s Day barn-burner:

I’ve always believed we could make progress because we were on the right side of equality and justice. Life is getting better for people in many places, and it will continue to get better thanks to our work. So I ask all of you to look for ways to support those who are on the front lines of this movement, who are defending themselves and the people they care about with great courage and resilience. This is one of the most important human rights struggles of all times. It’s not easy, but it is so rewarding.

Who today remembers the once-mighty Warsaw Pact? Not the punk rock group, of course, but the Soviet Bloc’s formidable answer to U.S.-led NATO. Twenty years have now passed since it was peacefully dismantled in what was a finishing touch on the collapse of Communist power and the end of the Cold War. Yet unlike the Warsaw Pact, the North Atlantic alliance did not disband; it steadily pushed east toward an exhausted Russia and then metastasized. Like any successful multinational, NATO went global.

Largely through its role in NATO, the United States had applied generations of resources and manpower in containing the Soviet threat, and its investment paid off. America’s triumph against such a dangerous peer competitor was total and unambiguous- the one state that spanned the length of Eurasia had fractured into fifteen. The End of History was at hand, and with Marxist management practices discredited only one contender for humanity’s future remained. A democratic-capitalist world system, already organized in the post-war years, could now be fully implemented under Washington’s benevolent aegis.

One Cold War veteran who can well recall the course of this vast transformation is Robert Gates. After all, he operated behind the scenes and at the highest levels of power during critical moments of the U.S.-Soviet struggle. A career CIA analyst, Gates was National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s staff aide when the Carter Administration launched a covert action program to aid the Afghan mujahideen in 1979. The White House signed off on the order six months before the Politburo in Moscow committed to an invasion of its southern neighbor, along with a disastrous occupation that would cripple the USSR.

In last week’s address on U.S. Middle East policy, President Obama finally unveiled his radical plans to betray Israel. Thankfully, Republican leaders and their AIPAC handlers are onto the administration’s game. They’ve sounded the alarm that Obama is throwing “our only democratic ally in the region” under a runaway bus packed with freedom-hating Islamo-Nazis. So what are the details of this malefic design? The president’s speech outlines the main elements:

• Reaffirmation of “unshakeable” U.S. security guarantees to Israel.
• Warning the Palestinians against a bid for statehood at the UN General Assembly in September.
• The two-state solution: “Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people”.
• A challenge to Fatah on bringing Hamas to the negotiating table and White House insistence that the new Palestinian state be non-militarized.

Under these conditions, it’s only a matter of time before Iranian panzers make their final drive to the shores of the Mediterranean! Of course, the greatest point of contention in the matter was Obama’s call for Israel and the Palestinians to establish borders circa 1967. There is nothing terribly new about this demand, as both the Clinton and Bush II administrations conducted talks under the same basic framework. Washington’s support for Israeli-Palestinian frontiers roughly matching those before the Six Day War has merely become more explicit.

It is fitting that the initial phase of the U.S. attack on Libya was overshadowed in the media by college basketball finals, popularly and quite appropriately known as March Madness. Wars, akin to dated sitcom reruns, have no hope for ratings share considering the competition. And a company like Sony won’t pay to advertise its new Playstation game Kill Zone 3 during scripted and predictable news of another desert intervention. Perhaps the press should have just phoned in coverage of the action by playing clips from the films G.I. Jane and The American President, both depicting a conflict with Tripoli. The public would doubtless be comforted that Commander-in-Chief Michael Douglas has sent Demi Moore and her fellow-SEALs to teach the Libyans a lesson in democracy.

Our absurd fantasy state reflects the approach of a monstrous reality- a world empire, declaring itself the embodiment of universal good, moves to subjugate any points of opposition to its rule. From this chaos emerges a counterfeit order, and before us appears a premonition of Yeats’ rough beast, “with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”.

Western traditionalists might feel an affinity for certain aspects of Vladimir Putin’s drive to restore the Russian state. Such sentiments are often justified. Putin is unapologetic in his defense of actual national interests and has deftly reclaimed the Kremlin’s sphere of influence in Eurasia. In the August 2008 war with Georgia over South Ossetia, he delivered the Russian response to Washington’s creation of the Kosovo client state and stood firmly against American globalism. Open Society NGOs were expelled from Russia on his orders, and oligarchic influence curtailed, if only to an extent. The current Prime Minister has also initiated pronatalist campaigns to reverse post-Soviet demographic freefall and strengthened the Orthodox Church’s social profile. While Putin may be credited for carrying out these policies, other aspects of his rule betray the ideological indifference of a technocrat and myopic opportunism.

Putin’s liberal tendencies are first and foremost evident in his chosen successor to the presidency, Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev might style himself a reformer in the spirit of Tsar-Liberator Alexander II, but his pretensions fall flat. The president’s worldview is shaped by the same empty liberalism that has arrested Russia’s post-Communist cultural recovery from the 1990s to today. His closest advisers are virtually indistinguishable from the official front-men of financial elites in the West—their modernization projects are intended to strengthen the primacy of the oligarchs, and they hail mass immigration from the Caucasus and Central Asia as a disposable labor resource and political dependency. In the typically bourgeois formula of Calvin Coolidge, the business of Russia Inc. is business—production, consumption and profit. For the global civilization that Russians are entreated to join, there is no value higher.

Russia rises from its knees, only to stand again at a crossroads. The country must choose its guiding idea, the transcendent value that will define the fate of its culture and people. Under President Dmitry Medvedev, the liberal segments of the ruling elite are again emboldened. They speak ceaselessly of modernizing- not only industries but the population at large, to form a “civil society” in accordance with Western norms. All of this is ostensibly for competitive advantage at the international level. For Russia not to fall behind, Medvedev’s advisors intimate, it must fully integrate with the U.S.-led market order.

Such is the assertion. It is readily apparent that Russia must diversify an economy dependent on energy revenues, yet what the Kremlin liberals propose is no more than the imposition of the latest variant of Western materialism in the manner of the Bolsheviks and post-Soviet “shock therapists”. Men like Igor Yurgens, head of the Institute of Contemporary Development and the acknowledged architect of the modernization schemes, have shown little but contempt for the actual, historical Russian nation. They welcome the massive influx of Central Asians and Caucasians into Moscow and other cities as cheap labor, upholding EU-style multiculturalism as a model for imitation. These policies inevitably generate further friction between Russians and ethnic groups known (in some cases not unfairly) for their criminal tendencies.