I am a child of the Cold War, so I spent most of my life in an epoch where the 'Year 2000' was synonymous with ‘The Future’—a time when, provided we averted a thermonuclear apocalypse, people would be wearing silver spacesuits and bases would have been long established on the moon.

When the year 2000 finally came, however, it was anti-climatic: I spent New Years Eve in the company of investment executives, whose host never cared to keep track of the time in order to witness the year change at its precise moment. I was the only one to notice the stroke of midnight while sitting at the dinner table. When the date changed, I elbowed my neighbour to point out that we had entered the year 2000, but she only gave me a brief, distracted, half-lidded glance and an indifferent “Ah, yea… Hm.”

Twenty years earlier I would have been exasperated, but by 1999, amidst the hype surrounding the so-called “millennium” (which was not due until the following year anyway, since there was no year zero), I had began to think about the dating system we currently use in the West.

Stephen McNallen takes us through the 12 Days of Yule, in word and deed.  

Days two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve.  

From Stephen McNallen, speaking in 2008, for those who follow this festival:

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.

Stephen McNallen returns to AltRight Radio to discuss the comic-book movie Thor, as well as Pagan archetypes in popular culture across the decades.

The official website of McNallen's Asatru Folk Assembly can be visited here.

The AFA's webpage on "The Real Thor" can be visited here.   

Heimdall by way of Detroit is not the main problem with Thor. It’s one thing to turn a heathen war god into a comic book. It’s another to turn him into a social democrat.

Kenneth Branagh’s Thor was obviously meant to be a desecration, and it’s already passé to point this out. The casting is so deliberately clumsy that it becomes ironically racist. Idris Elba as the “whitest of the gods,” Heimdall, had no purpose other than to deliberately undermine both European lore and even the comic. Elba’s defensive retort that “Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra” is hardly convincing. (If anything, Taylor’s casting was mistaken because she was probably far swarthier than inbred product of a blonde haired Ptolemaic ruling caste).

Beyond Elba, Branagh’s Asgard looks like some fruity multicultural Steampunk nightmare, with Thor accompanied by Asian warriors whose speech is barely comprehensible (one human even refers contemptuously to an Asian-Asgardian as “Jackie Chan.”) The movie constantly appeals to heathen lore, but then casually rips it apart. For example, Sif (Thor’s golden haired wife) is reinvented as a raven-haired grrl warrior out of G.I. Jane. Her place as Thor’s love interest is taken (inevitably) by Natalie Portman. Portman is (of course) an astrophysicist—she took the role to inspire girls to be scientists and fight stereotypes—and does her best to channel a less sexy version of Denise Richards as nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones. As always though, Natalie Portman essentially plays Natalie Portman.

The Wicker Man (1973) is widely regarded as the best British horror film ever made, and has earned the dubious compliment of having been the sub­ject of a Hollywood remake starring Nicholas Cage. Whether one agrees with this analysis or not, few would dispute that it is the best film ever to feature Christopher Lee, Edward Woodward or Britt Ekland.

The Wicker Man’s cult status is appro­priate – because it is about what might happen in an isolated community that reverts to pre-Christian practices. Lord Summerisle (Lee) is the hereditary laird of a Scottish island. His deceased father persuaded the islanders of his genera­tion to reject Christianity, and return to (or reinvent) Druidic paganism. Summerisle has therefore inherited not just ownership of the island, but also the mantle of the island's religious leader—a potent combination.

Enter police sergeant Neil Howie (Woodward), a devout Christian, after he receives anonymous reports that a young island girl has gone missing. The film begins with Howie’s plane pass­ing over a gleaming archipelago to the accompaniment of a haunting score by Paul Giovanni. One of the film’s great­est strengths is its plangent music, in­cluding some reworked folk tunes and Robert Burns poems, performed by the ad hoc band Lodestone.

From the moment he arrives, Howie is met with polite obfuscation, and every­where confronted with what are to him appalling blasphemies – naked women in unkempt graveyards, un-roofed churches with posies, impaled birds and libations instead of crucifixes on the al­tar, very young children saying “penis” and being given magic lessons, naked girls dancing in circles and jumping over fire, and the clientele of the island’s only pub (where Howie is compelled to stay after his plane malfunctions mysteriously) singing along lustily to a rib­ald song called The Landlord's Daughter (Willow, played by Britt Ekland)—“0, nothing can delight so / As does the part that lies between her left toe / And her right toe!” the respectable-looking lo­cals (including Willow’s twinkling-eyed father) bellow joyously, while Willow wriggles lasciviously. Later that night, a nude Willow dances in her room, which is adjacent to Howie’s, drum­ming on the dividing wall and calling to him to come to her (“Heigh ho I am here / Am I not young and fair?”), while he prays, perspires and wraps the pillows around his head to drown out her song. (He has vowed not to have sex until he is married.)

Howie is predisposed to dislike the islanders, and becomes increasingly convinced that the missing girl has been abducted, and that the islanders, from the unhelpful Lord Summerisle down, are complicit in a cover-up. Not only that, but he fears she will be used as a human sacrifice in a magic Mayday ceremony—in an outlandish but insu­larly consistent attempt to improve the island’s failing (and economically essen­tial) apple crop.

He tries frantically to find her while the island is fizzing with anticipation for the big festival—ornate costumes being made, special breads and cakes being baked, shop windows being decorated with sexual symbols, songs and dances being practiced in dark corners, furtive conversations stopped when they see him coming, giggling children play­ing him tricks, costumed conspirators glimpsed for a split second down dark alleys. Exhausted, he lies down in his room for a while—then jerks awake to the repulsive sight of a smoking narcotic ‘Hand of Glory’ (a dead man’s hand), on the bedside table, seemingly left there by Willow. He dashes it to the floor in horror, and rushes into the streets, to find the islanders all grotesquely customed and dancing out of the village. He knocks out the landlord and purloins his Fool costume so he can infiltrate the procession. Eventually, they arrive at the place of sacrifice—whereupon Howie discovers that his ‘disguise’ had fooled no-one, and he has been trapped. The missing girl comes running laughingly from where she has been hiding, while a stunned Howie struggles to comprehend.

Summerisle explains with bland charm that he had been specifically targeted to come to the island, because his Christian faith and sexual abstinence mean that he will be an especially powerful offering to gods. Even as Summerisle is talking, the pinioned Howie is being dragged along the top of the cliffs to see—terror of terrors—a huge wicker semblance of a man filled with caged chickens, pigs, goats and combustible material. “Come” says Summerisle—“it is time to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man”. Howie alternately tries to reason with Summerisle, prays and screams as he is carried up the ladder and tied in his place, and as the flames rise and the dying animals squeal—while the arm-linked, swaying islanders smile gratefully, even kindly, up at him and sing “Summer is icumen in, Loude sing cucu”. The howling flames rise to the head and the screams stop; the flaming head falls into the sea and left behind on the horizon is a wintry orange sun sinking in the boundless West, where the Celts believed lay Tír na Nóg, the Land of Eternal Youth.

As well as Paul Giovanni’s soundtrack, the acting is impeccable. Edward Woodward later recalled that he had momentarily felt real terror when he first saw the Wicker Man set up on the cliff. There is also stunning Dumfries & Galloway scenery and a driving sense of impending disaster expertly created by Frenzy screenwriter Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy’s assured direction. But what makes The Wicker Man unique and also much more disturbing than most horror films is the way in which uncomprehending cruelty and the bas­est superstition are so deftly interwoven with domesticity.

The kindly sweetshop owner, the no-nonsense schoolmistress, the cheer­ful landlord, the joking fishermen, the tweed-wearing pensioners, the shy chil­dren—all wearing normal clothes, liv­ing in normal Victorian and Edwardian houses, holding down normal positions in society—such people could be found almost anywhere. Except that when peo­ple everywhere else are going to church or the superstore, these perfectly believable and even likeable people are harking back to a time not just before Christianity but before rea­son, when all of Nature was populated by demanding daemons and everything was ‘explained’ through sprites instead of science.

It was a real past—Hardy and Shaffer researched the rites from James George Frazer’s magisterial 1890 survey of European magical practices The Golden Bough, while the Romans recorded the Celts immolating animals and men in giant wicker figures. That remote time and sensibility in many ways have never left us, with ‘old religion’ symbols and sites co-opted but not captured by Christianity, and retaining a coherence of their own. Pagan place names and topography persist in hundreds of thou­sands of wells, woods, waters, henges, forts and mazes. Green Men, wild men, fantastical monsters and Sheela-na Gigs look down on us from cathedral roof bosses or pub signs. Ancient iconogra­phy is seen again by holidaymakers idly watching the Padstow Hobby Hoss or the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. Pre-rational reasoning is found in perenni­ally popular astrology columns, New Age healing, ‘deep ecology’ and people who have been exposed to centuries of science still being afraid of the night-time. Much of our folk-music is immeasurably old, containing melodies and sentiments that have recurred over centuries (“Summer is icumen in”, for example, supposedly dates from the early 1200s). And perhaps paganism may even make a comeback as Christian belief goes down in the West like the sun in the last frame of the film. It is our sense of the persistence, and the strange familiarity, of our pre-Christian past which makes The Wicker Man so plausible, so powerful and possibly even predictive.

When I hear Leftists rail against the "reactionary" Catholic Church, I find myself wishing, praying that it were so! Unfortunately, with the exception of a very few traditionalist parishes, the Catholic Church, from the pope on down, has contracted the liberal bug and is dying from it. I know because I was a Catholic for many years and traveled across the entire spectrum of the church, from the liberal extreme in Berkeley (where I grew up) to a traditionalist, schismatic group in San Diego. There certainly were priests and laity at the right end of the spectrum who were aware of what was happening to the church (even Pope Paul VI, who himself was in large part responsible for the disaster, said the "smoke of Satan" had entered the church), but these good right-wing folks had -- it became clear to me -- lost their church. They were like decent relatives in attendance at the Old Woman's funeral.

There’s not room here to explain how I made my way to the Russian Orthodox Church, but I will try to explain briefly why I think pagans -- at least the sort of pagans that are likely to visit AltRight -- are no threat to the Orthodox and are a potential source of wisdom. As I'm sure you know, both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church oppose the doctrine of "Sola Scriptura" by upholding both Scripture and Tradition. Both Orthodox and Catholics assert that, in order to be Christian, one has to immerse oneself within the traditions of the Church of which Scripture is but a part. Obviously, I accept this teaching, but it has become clear to me that this is insufficient in the current crisis. There is a third dimension, in addition to Scripture and Tradition: the larger culture in which any believer must take part. And that third dimension has collapsed around us.

There are all kinds of ideas and behaviors that are essential to the Christian life that were never made explicit in either Scripture or Tradition (more specifically, for the Orthodox, the teachings of the Church Fathers). Up until very recently, there was no need to make these ideas explicit, because they were a part of the larger culture, which had both pagan and Christian roots. I am thinking in particular of the relations between the sexes, but it is larger than that. It's the replacement of all hierarchical thinking and practice with that "net-like structure" that Mark Hackard mentioned in his most recent piece. It was in great part the collapse of that third dimension of Christian life that brought down the churches. The best of them had their creeds and their liturgies and so forth, but the attack this time didn't come in the form of armies outside the city walls or angry leftists pounding on the church door. Instead, the larger culture changed suddenly (after long gradual change). The culture, which was the very medium of existence, the water in which clergy and laity swam, became fundamentally opposed to traditional Christianity. Thus, except for the tiny minority that sensed what was happening and acted, Christians absorbed sentiments, prejudices, imaginations, etc. that were utterly antithetical to Church teaching, and in what was, historically speaking, the twinkling of an eye -- maybe a decade -- they ceased to be Christians. Some of them still recited the Nicene Creed and attended Mass, but their heads were full of thoughts utterly incompatible with traditional Christianity.

Traditional Orthodox parishes do stand in firm opposition to the larger culture, and priests such as our own are acutely aware that the Church is like an ark on stormy waters. But the Church has yet to face the threat fully and to articulate its response clearly and forcefully. The Church Fathers were men who faced the threats of the early centuries and articulated a response. Their defense of the essentials truths built much of the present Church; we still hear their words in the creeds and see the truths they articulated in the liturgy and in the icons and architecture. They built defenses that withstood the enemy for many centuries, but a new enemy has arisen. And so we need new Fathers.

The new Fathers will have to be men who are firmly grounded in both church and secular life. They will have to be immersed in church life, but also in current intellectual currents. They will have to understand the enemy thoroughly and formulate a forceful counter attack, which will take the form of polemics, creeds, and quite possibly literature. The new defense that these Fathers raise will have to be woven throughout Church life -- into the liturgy and into Holy Tradition. This will probably be the work of centuries, but it needs to begin now. I believe it is beginning.

And this is why I welcome the neopagans. They did not poison the culture (and thus the churches), but are in fact enemies of that culture. Much of what they oppose in "Christianity," I, too, oppose. I find that they are more clear sighted than many Christians, even traditionalist Orthodox, about what is ailing us. And so I welcome them as allies against a common enemy; and where they truly differ, I welcome them as worthy opponents who will help Christians to hone their own thinking and thus help them to prepare for the real battles that lie ahead.

This video also contains some interesting material on the "Russification of Medieval Christianity." 

Stephen McNallen joins Richard Spencer to discuss the rites, rituals, and broader significance of the "indigenous religion of Europe."