In an 1849 letter to a friend, Juan Donoso Cortes, Marques of Valdegamas and noble son of Spain, touched upon the essence of Christendom:

After the cult owed to God, there is nothing more beautiful than the cult of our ancestors.

With this casual observation, Donoso was able to express traditional Europe’s hierarchy of values and discern the contingent from the Absolute. The heritage of our fathers is accorded veneration, and to the God of our fathers we render all worship. Each nation, a communion of generations- the dead, the living and those yet to be born – is called to glorify Him in its own unique and unrepeatable way. Herein is found the true greatness of a culture.

Today European culture is in ruins, and our master class has enshrined new ideals to replace the ancient faith. So forget your fathers, for they were unenlightened barbarians unworthy of even your memory, fools who from heathendom came to believe in the promise of divine love and salvation after death. Liberated through reason, we have evolved past such childish fairytales. As free and equal supermen, we attend to the total organization of happiness on earth.

Of all the idols of our age, none has demanded so much blood sacrifice and the dissipation of resources as that of democracy. From the Hindu Kush to our television screens, the liberal order betrays its totalitarian nature. We send armies and airborne robots into Asia’s wastelands to kill for the universal rights of man. Mass democracy can never be recognized for the deviant political philosophy it is, nor can it be restricted to the West alone; equality must reign everywhere unchallenged. Modern man is infallible, and in his militant faith he pursues no less than the entirety of the world subjugated to his will. How else may a New Jerusalem of pleasure and profit be realized, if not through the monumental force of a united humanity?

Eurasia remains the key to fulfilling this mad dream. Even as the United States continues its grinding and bloody counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and across Dar al-Islam, Washington has found the cash to promote “civil society” and “the rule of law” in Russia. The Obama Administration is looking to apply $50 million to NGOs and similar initiatives in Moscow and other regions throughout the country. Thus stated Ambassador Michael McFaul:

We have proposed to the US Congress to create a new civil society fund for Russia. We proposed that 50 million dollars in a neutral way, by the way, in terms of new money. That’s what I hear in Moscow that when you talk to real human rights organizations and what they really need, they need that kind of support.

As the West disintegrates, its frenzy of self-affirmation becomes more grandiose and grotesque. Our elites, the manufacturers of what passes for culture, arrange mass rites that attest to their greatness and benevolence. The people stand in awe, and just as critically, they are entertained. Nowhere in the United States is this more evident than at the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl is not simply a profit bonanza for casinos and network television or mere proletarian distraction; it embodies a potent means of social control. Played in the first week of February, the National Football League’s championship game sets the tone for advertising and entertainment in the coming year. It is also a useful platform to propagandize and condition a population of 300 million. America clearly enjoys its indoctrination, as all too many revel in this spectacle’s base nature. People who have not the slightest interest in football will excitedly gather around billboard-sized TV screens to watch the unveiling of a new commercial for erectile dysfunction pills.

“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.

As a resident of the Philippines, I would be lying if I did not entertain thoughts of immigration at some point in time. One of the deepest desires of Filipinos is to stop being Filipinos in the Philippines, and instead become Filipinos in [insert wealthy country of your choice]. I personally don’t like this mentality, but that is how things are. I seriously doubt most non-Whites who immigrate to Western Nations want Whites to become a minority. I doubt most of them fully understand what multiculturalism, anti-racism, or political correctness, not to mention their consequences. For the most part, what people want from immigration is the ability to earn cash and cease living in poverty.

However, the question of immigration is not just about immigration per se. It is also about identity. Immigrants to Western Countries—by implication—want to be American, European, Australian, etc... That is to say, there is an implied desire among Non-White immigrants to become “Westerners” (since, you know, they can’t be White).

I personally don’t hold this desire. I may be inclined to visit other nations, study in them, and meet people from other cultures, but looking at the bigger picture, I rather like being a Filipino, despite all the problems and issues that go along with it. There is a subtlety and depth to my particular identity that is essential to how I perceive the world, and how the world perceives me. And besides, I rather like being a darkie!

Of particular relevance to this topic is an old cinematic masterpiece called Ganito Kami Noon... Paano Kayo Ngayon (This is How We Were Then...How Are You Now?). The setting of the movie was around the end of the 19th century, when Spain’s grip over the Philippine islands was weakening, and the fury of nationalism was getting stronger with each passing day.

Among the most important elements of the movie was the theme of identity, and in this case, Filipino identity. “Filipino,” during the Spanish colonial era in the Philippines, was a term reserved exclusively for Spaniards born in the Philippines. In other words, “Filipino” was an identity which was reserved exclusively for people of a specific ethnicity.

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.

Every year, Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe hosts a conference of his Property and Freedom Society at the Hotel Karia Princess in Bodrum, Turkey, which happens to be owned by his wife. Richard was one of the speakers at last year's conference and has written about his experiences there and about Hoppe, his organization, and ideas. Every year Sean Gabb of the U.K.-based Libertarian Alliance diligently films the events of the PFS conference and makes the footage available online. This year was no exception and Sean's video record of the 2011 conference can be viewed here.

I would invite readers of AltRight who are understandably turned off by libertarianism and associate it with globalist, plutocratic, or open borders nonsense to check out the writings of Dr. Hoppe and Dr. Gabb. In the tradition of Nietzsche, Schmitt, or Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Hoppe ranks alonside Alain De Benoist as one of the the fiercest contemporary critics of modern liberal democracy, albeit from a different theoretical premise. I wrote a review of Hoppe's landmark work on the democracy question some years ago which is still available online. Meanwhile, Sean Gabb has emerged as one of the U.K.'s leading critics of Political Correctness and has produced a highly valuable book on the subject which he distributes online for free. It might be said that Sean is for England what Paul Gottfried is for this side of the Atlantic. Suffice to say that Sean Gabb and Hans Hoppe are not your garden-variety U.S.-style libertarians obsessed with conspiracy theories, drugs, and science fiction novels. Indeed, I've always thought that the libertarian movement from outside the United States is of much higher quality than what we Yanks have on our side of the pond, probably due to its smaller size. Quantity often comes at the cost of quality. The Property and Freedom Society and the Libertarian Alliance are the leading lights of non-U.S. based libertarianism and, in my opinion, two of the very best libertarian groups anywhere in the world.

Meanwhile, I would particularly recommend this video of Dr. Gottfried's talk at this year's PFS gathering. What I find personally interesting about Professor Gottfried is that while he originates from the traditional conservative, Buckleyite Right and I came from the Chomskyite Left, we have reached a virtually identical analysis and conclusion concerning the state of our civilization and what the most viable solution to the crisis might be. For those who find Gottfried's speech at PFS interesting, I would also like to suggest this talk given last year by my National-Anarchist colleague Welf Herfurth, a native of Germany who was an activist in German far Right politics in the 1980s and who now resides in Australia. Welf has likewise come to a position not dissimilar to that of Paul Gottfried and myself.

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.