The New Inquisitors: Heretical Scientists Purged from Academia

                           By Kerry Bolton

       

Detail from a painting by Pedro Berruguete on the life of Santo Domingo de Guzmán depicting Dominican friars burning heretical books

The Stalin and Hitler regimes were both noted for their repression of scientists and intellectuals who did not toe their respective party lines.

Many Left-wing academics, centered on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, were sponsored to leave Germany and emigrate to the US, where they took over the social sciences and created a virtual totalitarianism of their own in American academia.[1] This has often been referred to as “cultural Marxism” but has come to be popularly termed “Political Correctness.”[2] Ironically, those who fled a totalitarian regime laid the foundations for a system that is intolerant of views that do not accord with their central dogma, namely that man is shaped by environment rather than genes and is thus infinitely malleable; therefore, all men are potentially equal.

Essentially the same position was insisted upon in the USSR, to the extent that Mendelian genetics was banned as heretical and replaced by the neo-Lamarckian doctrine of a charlatan, Trofim Lysenko, an obscure plant breeder from Odessa who almost brought Soviet agriculture to collapse by his insistence that new stains of crops could be created by environmental conditioning. Lysenko claimed that one species of wheat could be converted to another by subjecting it to external influences, a process he called “vernalization.” Thereby, winter wheat could be transformed into spring wheat by subjecting it to cold, which would shock it into germinating another variety. Those Soviet scientists who rejected Lysenko’s ideas were removed from their positions. In 1940 N. I. Vavilov, first president of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, whose team proved that Lysenko’s notions on wheat breeding were fallacious, was arrested, and he died of a heart attack in solitary confinement in 1943. Mendelian genetics was smeared as “Nazi,” and the Seventh International Congress of Genetics, which was to be held in Moscow in 1937, was cancelled.[3]

Western Repression

Nonetheless, while the USSR eventually freed itself from the Lysenko dogma, its Western equivalent, the cultural anthropology of Franz Boas[4] et al., and the sociology of the Frankfurt School of Theodor Adorno, et al.[5] has remained dominant in Western academia. Those who challenge these dogmas are smeared and purged.

Repression of heretical scientists in the West might be more subtle (but not invariably so), such as the denial of funds if research does not accord with orthodoxy. It was the imposition of such biases in funding that prompted the formation of the Pioneer Fund in New York in 1937, “to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences,” by providing grants to institutions for specific studies that are unable to obtain money from “‘government sources or from larger foundations.” Recipients have included H. J. Eysenck, Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, Ernest van der Haag, and J. Philippe Rushton.[6] Most or all of these scientists have been subjected to verbal and physical assaults for their research in a situation that shows that the bounds of scholarly inquiry in the West are very limited. The Pioneer Fund comments on this situation:

Some of those who strongly oppose behavior genetic and psychometric research have sometimes made bizarre and false charges against scientists who conduct these studies, subjecting them to harassment, including dismissal and threats of dismissal, stalled promotions, mob demonstrations, and threats of physical violence, even death. Some physical attacks have actually occurred. These politically motivated attacks on the Pioneer Fund and its grantees are documented in The New Know-Nothings by Morton Hunt, and Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe by Roger Pearson.[7]

The following are some examples of scientists who have endured the stigma of heresy.

William Shockley

Shockley, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, applied science to the question of Negro and Caucasian IQ discrepancies and supported eugenics. Hence the great scientist suddenly became a “broken genius.”[8] Dr. Shockley was reduced to appearing at lectures holding a placard upon which he wrote a couple of basic points about race and IQ, or writing a few points on a blackboard, as frenzied Leftists did not give him the opportunity to speak.[9] Ed Brayton,[10] a liberal commentator who agreed that Shockley should have been opposed, yet was troubled by some of the methods, wrote:

After he won the Nobel Prize he became interested in eugenics and became one of the leading voices of racism in the US. Wherever he went, he was the object of fierce protests – as well he should have been.

But in many places those protests did not merely register their disagreement and disgust with Shockley’s views, they also tried – and often succeeded – in preventing him from speaking. They did this in a variety of ways, from drowning him out with bullhorns to storming the stage to intimidating the groups that invited him to withdraw their invitation. This was especially true on college campuses.

. . . In 1973, Shockley was invited to speak at Staten Island Community College but was unable to do so because a group of students, predominately white, made it impossible for him to be heard.

. . . The following year, Shockley was scheduled to debate Roy Innis of the Congress on Racial Equality at Yale. Once again, protesters managed to prevent the event from being held. The head of the Progressive Labor Party at Yale declared freedom of speech to be a “nice abstract idea used to enable people like Shockley to spread racism.” A local minister in New Haven called for a demonstration to take place that would be “as peaceful as possible and as violent as necessary” to prevent Shockley from speaking.

With such threats of violence and disruption, the Yale Political Union decided to withdraw the invitation to take part in the debate. A second campus group stepped in to extend an invitation, but they too ended up withdrawing under the intimidation of threats of violence from those on campus. A third potential sponsor likewise withdrew under pressure, and the debate never took place.[11]

Frank Ellis

A lecturer in Russian and Slavic studies at Leeds University, Ellis was pushed into early retirement in 2006 after being suspended earlier that year, pending disciplinary proceedings. He had opined that Black IQ scores are lower, surely a matter that is not in contention, regardless of the reasons. Ellis’ heresy is that he had stated in a BBC 5 Live interview[12] that he supported the views in the book The Bell Curve,[13] by eminent American psychologists Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray.[14] Ellis had expressed private views that had not been associated with Leeds University, stating that he had become interested in the way issues are suppressed after studying Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.

Leeds University Secretary Roger Gair said that Ellis had the right to express his opinions but not the right to discriminate against students and colleagues, although the latter was never in question. Ellis’ harassment by the University seems to have been a matter of acceding to Left-wing troglodytes.

James Watson

The co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, for which he jointly won a Nobel Prize in 1962, Watson was, at the age of 79, harassed into a publicly humiliating retraction after stating that Black Africans lack creative intelligence. In an apology reminiscent of Galileo’s apology to the Inquisition for his comments about heliocentricity, Watson stated:

I am mortified about what has happened. More importantly, I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways they have. To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.[15]

Despite his back-pedalling, London Science Museum cancelled a sold-out lecture Watson was to give. The Federation of American Scientists said it was outraged that Watson “chose to use his unique stature to promote personal prejudices that are racist, vicious and unsupported by science.” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, New York, removed Watson as Chancellor.

Yet while Dr. Watson took fright and claimed he could not understand how he made such a statement, he had not long previously written in his autobiography:

There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.[16]

His latter views are consistent with Watson’s political evolution. Starting as a Leftist professor at Harvard, where he was among the faculty who declared themselves for America’s withdrawal from Vietnam,[17] Watson rejected the Left because of its fundamental opposition to the genetic foundations of human behaviour. He stated in 2007: “I turned against the left wing because they don’t like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.”[18]

Francis Crick, another of the three Nobel Laureates who discovered the DNA double-helix, had expressed views similar to those of Watson. Crick was combative, and during the controversy of American psychologist Arthur Jensen’s paper in the Harvard Educational Review on IQ differences among races, Crick threatened to resign as a Foreign Associate of the American National Academy of Sciences if steps were taken to “suppress reputable scientific research for political reasons.” He supported the research of both Shockley and Jensen.[19] Crick’s correspondence[20] shows he had a significant interest in eugenics and the question of IQ hereditability. For example he wrote to Dr. John T. Edsall of the Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, in discussing Shockley and Jensen, that:

As to your point about the I. Q. results on American Indians being mainly due to their cultural tradition, this may be so, but personally I doubt it. How do you explain the relatively poor I. Q. performance of the children of middle-class American Negroes?[21]

In particular in 1969 in a talk on the “Social Impact of Biology,” broadcast in shorted version by the BBC, Crick stated, as he described it to Lord Snow:

As far as I remember I said that the biological evidence was that all men were not created equal, and it would not only be difficult to try to do this, but biologically undesirable. As an aide I said that the evidence for the equality of different races did not really exist. In fact, what little evidence there was suggested racial differences.[22]

Hence, when poor old Watson was stating that he did not know of anything in science that would induce him to believe that IQ differences were inherited, we may read this in the same light as Galileo’s retraction to Inquisition.

Chris Brand

Brand lectured in psychology at Edinburgh University for nearly thirty years (1970–1997). During the 1980s he served on the UK’s Council for National Academic Awards. His book The g Factor was published in 1996 where he stated that there are inherited differences in IQ between races.

As a result of his views in The g Factor, Brand’s lectures were disrupted by the Trotskyite-run Anti-Nazi League, in typical Trotsky-Troglodyte manner, and his book was withdrawn by John Wiley and Sons. Hence the merits of scholarship were – again – determined by thuggery.

After a complaint from the Chaplain of Edinburgh University, who was a supporter of the riotous Anti-Nazi League, Brand was suspended then dismissed for bringing the university into “disrepute,” that is, discussing issues that fall outside the de facto limitations of inquiry imposed on academia by intellectually-questionable, politically-motivated, self-serving “elites.”

After his removal from Edinburgh University, Brand ended up working as a waiter during 1998–1999 (while he was also Director of the California-based Institute for the Study of Educational Differences), which seems reminiscent of the way Germany’s intelligentsia became menial laborers under the post-1945 process of “de-Nazification.” Brand writes in summation:

The case was to go before a Scottish Employment Tribunal in 1999; but Edinburgh University offered a settlement of the maximum that any UK court could have offered for “unfair dismissal,” saying it was paying out “to prevent the airing of Brand’s opinions and views at public expense” (Times Higher 5 xi ‘99, p. 2) – a surprising attitude for a university. I accepted this settlement since to have proceeded to a trial would probably have been deemed “frivolous” by the Tribunal and put me at risk of paying what would have been the University’s enormous costs.[23]

The real reason for Brand’s removal from Edinburgh was his book The g Factor. The circumstances include the following:

Despite very favourable reviews (e.g. in ‘Nature’), “The ‘g’ Factor” fell foul of “political correctness” about race and IQ. In press interviews, Brand freely agreed there was a Black-White IQ difference, that the difference was substantially genetic, and that he was (qua supporter of the London School) what Kamin et al. had for years been allowed to call a “scientific racist” — or a “race realist.” On April 17, 1996, “The ‘g’ Factor” was withdrawn as ‘repellent’ by Wiley & Sons (New York and Chichester). Wiley followed up their modern version of censorship by refusing to publish a new book on ‘g’ by Berkeley’s Emeritus Professor Arthur Jensen — a proposal which Wiley had had under consideration for nine months.[24]

So much for the credibility of Wiley as a scholarly publisher. As for Edinburgh University, Principal Sir Stewart Sutherland felt obliged to emphasize to the media that he regarded Brand’s research as “false and personally obnoxious.”[25] The methodology of the inquisitors in academia is to meet any challenge with moral outrage not counter-evidence. They are often backed up by inane commentary from the news media and the delirious antics of the Western equivalents of Mao’s Red Guards.

Andrew Fraser

A lecturer in law at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, Fraser was prevented from teaching after having written a letter to the local press criticising immigration from Black Africa.[26] For this crime against humanity, “University vice-chancellor Professor Di Yerbury responded with a three-page memo to staff announcing that Professor Fraser would not teach until further notice . . .”[27] A report in The Weekend Australian stated:

Professor Fraser yesterday rejected an offer by the university to buy out his contract and launched a bitter attack on Vice-Chancellor Di Yerbury, describing her as an “intellectual coward.” Professor Yerbury responded by suspending Professor Fraser from teaching, citing a report in The Australian yesterday in which he claimed a group called Smash Racism was planning to disrupt his classes. . . . “We have a duty to act decisively to protect his safety and that of others on campus,” she said. Professor Yerbury told The Weekend Australian late yesterday that she would seek legal advice if he made further unauthorized public statements. . . . Yerbury said she was not bothered by Professor Fraser’s personal attack on her. “I will wear that as a badge of honour,” she said. “I made the apology because I was distressed and ashamed he had associated the university with views which so fundamentally contravened its position.”[28]

Two points here: (1) Apparently writing the letter to a suburban newspaper should have first been approved by the university; (2) Again the inquisitors in academia work in tandem with sociopathic Marxist rioters to repress freedom of expression and inquiry.

In September 2005, the law journal of Deakin University was directed not to publish Professor Fraser’s peer-reviewed paper “Rethinking the White Australia Policy.”[29]

Nicholas Kollerstrom

A physicist and historian of science specialising in astronomy, Kollerstrom was an honorary research fellow in Science and Technology Studies at University College London (UCL). In 2008 his fellowship was terminated after he had written articles for the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) critiquing aspects of Auschwitz the previous year. Dr. Kollerstrom appears to be a left-liberal belonging to the Green and Respect parties and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but that did not save him. A press release from UCL curtly stated:

UCL has been made aware of views expressed by Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom, an Honorary Research Fellow in UCL Science & Technology Studies.

The position of Honorary Research Fellow is a privilege bestowed by departments within UCL on researchers with whom it wishes to have an association. It is not an employed position.

The views expressed by Dr. Kollerstrom are diametrically opposed to the aims, objectives and ethos of UCL, such that we wish to have absolutely no association with them or with their originator.

We therefore have no choice but to terminate Dr. Kollerstrom’s Honorary Research Fellowship with immediate effect.[30]

According to The London Jewish Chronicle, there had also been disquiet at UCL regarding Kollerstrom’s “conspiracy theories” involving the 9/11 attacks, and other issues.[31] How these views impacted on Kollerstrom’s credibility as a physicist has not been explained.

Greg Clydesdale

Greg Clydesdale of Massey University,[32] New Zealand, was declared heretical in 2008 by Members of Parliament, the news media, the Race Relations Conciliator, and academia for having written a paper that documented the blatantly obvious: Polynesians are an economic underclass in an economy whose manufacturing base has long since been wrecked.

Pointing out with statistical data the continuing underachievement of Polynesians educationally and professionally is analogous to the boy who cried out “the emperor has no clothes.” Yet, the head of the “Pasifika” department, Sione Tu’itahi, at Clydesdale’s own university, castigated his colleague. The banal reaction was featured on Massey’s website lest the university be mistaken as having endorsed empirical evidence rather than emotion-laden dogma on such matters.

Furthermore, the university demonstrated its malice against Dr. Clydesdale, commenting: “Massey University has welcomed the announcement by Race Relations Conciliator Joris de Bres that he will investigate Dr. Clydesdale’s report. It is expected that several Massey academics and other staff will be pleased to participate in any review.”[33]

Dr. Clydesdale was obliged to forego the presentation of his paper to an academic conference on economic development in Brazil: New Zealand’s false image as a multicultural utopia could not be exposed to the outside world, any more than negative aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain could be exposed to outside scrutiny.

* * *

Several decades ago Wilmot Robertson, a scholar of the Right and author of The Dispossessed Majority, had a regular feature in his magazine, Instauration, entitled “Cultural Catacombs.” In the dark age of this civilization the catacombs seem to be where real scholars will be increasingly driven.

An alternative was offered by another genuine scholar, Dr. Clyde N. Wilson:

I fear that the academic situation is here the same as you describe it there–corrupt and substandard. It is normal to complain about the reign of Political Correctness, but not enough attention has been given to the sheer incompetence and lack of genuine scholarly vocation among the professoriate today. I see no remedy for the universities except unlikely revolution. The fact is that all genuine intellectual life for the foreseeable future will have to take place outside the formal institutions.[34]

Notes

[1] Gary Bullert, “Franz Boas as Citizen-Scientists: Gramscian-Marxist Influence on American Anthropology,” The Journal of Social, Political & Economic Studies, Washington, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2009.

[2] Frank Ellis, Political Correctness and the Theoretical Struggle: From Lenin and Mao to Marcuse and Foucault (Auckland, New Zealand: Maxim Institute, 2004).

[3] Zhores A. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), inter alia.

[4] Bullert.

[5] K. R. Bolton, “‘Sex Pol’: The Influence of the Freudian-Marxian Synthesis on Politics and Society,” Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall 2010.

[6] The Pioneer Fund, “About Us,” http://www.pioneerfund.org/

[7] “Controversies: Setting the Record Straight,” http://www.pioneerfund.org/Controversies.html

[8] Joel N. Shurkin, Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age (Macsci, 2006).

[9] “Students Protest Shockley’s Racist Theory,” NBC News, 20 November 1973, http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/5112773857_s01.do

[10] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ed_Brayton

[11] Ed Brayton, “William Shockley and Free Speech,” 5 February 2008, http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2008/02/05/william-shockley-and-free-spee/

[12] “Tutor Defends ‘Racist’ Stance,” BBC News, March 8, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4785574.stm

[13] R. Herrnstein and C. Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: The Free Press, 1994).

[14] “Racism Row Lecturer Retires Early,” BBC News, 21 July 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/west_yorkshire/5174010.stm

[15] “DNA Discoverer Apologizes for Racist Remarks,” Fox News, October 19 2007, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,303432,00.html

[16] J. Watson, Avoid Boring People: Lessons in a Life of Science, cited by Fox News, ibid.

[17] “Faculty Support Grows For Anti-War Proposal,” The Harvard Crimson, October 3, 1969.

[18] Esquire Magazine, October 19 2007, http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/ESQ0107jameswatson

[19] Jensen letter to Shockley, April 18 1969.

[20] See: http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/browse/ResourceBrowse/CID/SC/p-sort/chron/TYPE

[21] Crick to Edsall, March 29, 1971.

[22] Crick to Lord Charles Percy Snow, April 17, 1969.

[23] C. Brand, “Brief Curriculum Vitae,” 2004, http://bussorah.tripod.com/brandbio.html

[24] “Christopher Brand: Race, Sex, Psychology and Censorship,” http://www.cycad.com/site/Brand/index.html

[25] Ibid., http://www.cycad.com/site/Brand/index.html

[26] Andrew Fraser, “The Path to National Suicide,” letter, Parramatta Sun, July 29 2005,http://www.ironbarkresources.com/articles/fraser2005pathtonationalsuicide.htm

[27] Tamara Mclean, “Outspoken Academic banned from teaching,” News.com.au, July 29, 2005.

[28] Greg Roberts, “Lecture ban for ‘racist’ professor,” The Weekend Australian, July 30 2005.

[29] “Professor Drew Fraser: A Short Biography,” http://www.ironbarkresources.com/articles/fraserbio.htm

[30] “Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom,” UCL News, April 22 2008, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0804/08042202

[31] Daniella Peled, “College Rejects Shoah Denier,” The Jewish Chronicle, April 24 2008, http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/college-rejects-shoah-denier

[32] Clydesdale is with the faculty of Management and Business at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.

[33] “Massey’s Pasifika,” Massey University, 2008.

[34] Clyde N. Wilson to K. R. Bolton, May 30, 2009.

 

A Mexican Lesson for Americans: An Excerpt from Jose Vasconcelos, A Brief History of Mexico

                        By Jose Vasconcelos

   

Father Miguel Hidalgo leading the multi-racial Mexican populace in rebellion against Spain (Mural by Juan O'Gorman)

Translated by César Tort

Translator’s Note:

The following excerpt is taken from the chapter on “Independence” in A Brief History of Mexico (Breve historia de México, [México, D.F.: Ediciones Botas, 1944, first edition 1937], pp. 255–60). The author, José Vasconcelos, one of the most celebrated Mexican intellectuals of the 20th century, wrote: “El desprecio de la propia casta es el peor de los vicios del carácter” (Contempt for one’s race is the worst of character flaws).

Americans who have visited their southern neighbor or observed Mexican immigrants in California and Texas and observed their overwhelmingly Indian phenotype might find difficult to imagine that in the early 19th century — just before the War of Independence in New Spain, the country that would retake its ancient Aztec name, “Mexico” — whites constituted one-sixth of the population. In modern Mexico, because of low white and high non-white birthrates, pure whites are almost on the brink of extinction. Thus the history of this nation should serve as a warning to the Americans against open borders, miscegenation, and affirmative action.

The independence of the Latin American nations is the result of the disintegration of the Spanish empire. None of the nations of Latin America had, by a process of natural growth, reached the maturity required for emancipation. . . . . In the colonies, the men of clearer vision and greater patriotism, for example, the bishop Abad y Queipo, gave Mexico up for lost, and rightly so, after he saw that the independence was inevitable. . . .

Mexican whites: An endangered species

From the beginning, the war was supposed to destroy the Spaniards, who represented the force and culture of the country, in the same way that later a fight against the criollo was developed, and today against the mestizo—all under the pretext of freeing the Indian—in order to uproot Spanish culture and replace it with American.

The two lands most imbued with Spanish influence, Mexico and Peru, resisted independence, which happened through foreign intervention. Peru was freed by Colombians and Argentines. . . .

In the United States, the independence movement was not a race war. For Morelos, for example, to be comparable to Washington, it must be assumed that Washington had decided to recruit blacks and mulattoes to kill the English. Instead, Washington disdained blacks and mulattoes and recruited the English of America, who did not commit the folly of killing their own brothers, uncles, and relatives, only because they were born in England. Quite the contrary, each participant of the American Revolution felt pride for his British ancestry and hoped for the betterment of the English. This should have been the sense of our own emancipation, to transform New Spain into an improved Spain, better than that of the peninsula but with its blood, our blood. The whole later disaster of Mexico is explained by the blind, criminal decision that emerged from the womb of Hidalgo’s mobs and is expressed in the suicidal cry: “Death to the Spaniards!”

The absurd idea never crossed the mind of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, or any of the fathers of the Yankee Independence that a redskin should be the President or that blacks should occupy positions held by the English. What we should have done is to declare that all the Spanish residents in Mexico were to be treated like Mexicans.

The idea that independence would tend to devolve power to the Indian was not an Indian idea. The emancipation, as already said over and over again, was neither devised nor consummated by the Indians. The idea of stirring up the Indians appears in the leaders of the emancipation who had not found positive reception for their plans from the educated classes. They resorted to the dangerous decision of starting a caste war because they were unable to carry out a war of emancipation. Not even Bolívar escapes this charge, since in Colombia he stirred up blacks against the whites in order to recruit his armies. For the people of the North, such procedures would have seemed insane, as they were.

It was therefore a crime: stirring up the underdogs against the top brass without any social improvement, merely to have soldiers. In fact, the idea of putting the Indian in front of the insurrection was an English idea. One of the first people to speak of confederating the Hispanic continent under the rule of a descendant of the Incas was Miranda. This idea was given to Miranda by the two biggest enemies of the Spanish in America, namely the French and the English.

If, during the US War of Independence, an agitator had said that the country should be ruled again by the redskins, surely he would have been shot by patriots as a traitor. But among us, talk of returning the country to the Indians is greeted with smiles. The English originators of this propaganda knew well that the Indians would not even her it, but they counted upon the unseriousness, the vanity, and the folly of the criollos and mestizos, both of whom took sides against the Spanish. Once the Spanish were destroyed, these countries could be easily divided and thus fall prey to a new form of domination. Undoubtedly, a Mexico ruled by Indians and becoming Aztec again would be as easy prey as it was for Cortés.

Even if the Indians deserved this restoration, which is absurd to imagine, it is obvious that people do not go back three hundred years—much less in the case of Mexico, where the race itself, apart from the customs and ideas, had been transformed. Contempt for one’s race is the worst of character flaws.

Seeing The Forest

                          By William Pierce

                               Free Speech 
                              October 1999
                        Volume V, Number 10

                         

Every week I receive a number of letters from listeners who believe that I blame the Jews too much for the destruction of our society. I’m not referring now to the letters from crazed Christian fundamentalists who rave at me about the Jews being “God’s chosen people” and therefore entitled to do whatever they want without criticism. These pitiful souls tell me, “God’ll get you if you say anything bad about the Jews. Don’t you know that Jesus was a Jew?”

And I also am not referring to the letters from lemmings, who simply parrot back the Politically Correct party line they’ve learned from watching television, to the effect that Jews are just like everybody else, except better, and that the only reason I speak critically of them in my broadcasts is that I’m jealous of their success. They tell me that I’m an embittered loser who lives in a trailer, has bad teeth, and never got an education, and that I spend most of my time getting drunk and doing intimate things with my female relatives, because the media have taught them that all people who live in West Virginia are like that.

Anyway, I never waste time arguing with people about their religion, whether it is Christian fundamentalism or Political Correctness. Unless people have a reasoned basis for their beliefs, a reasoned argument with them is pointless. The believers I want to argue with today are those who believe that I am incorrect in imputing bad motives to the Jews as a whole. Some of them tell me, it’s not the Jews per se who’re destroying our race and our civilization; it’s the rich people, Jewish and non-Jewish. It’s the greedy billionaires, who keep our borders open to the Third World because they want a steady supply of cheap labor. It’s the crooked lawyers, Jewish and non-Jewish, who run our legislatures and our courts to enrich themselves rather than to give us good laws and justice.

And of course, the people who tell me this are correct—up to a point. It is true that Gentile billionaires do tend to put their further enrichment at the top of their list, and they do tend to go along with the Jewish billionaires in many things. They seldom see any profit to themselves in opposing the Jews, even when they don’t agree ideologically with them. Billionaires are more inclined to go with existing trends and try to profit from them than to buck those trends and risk losing money. It has been truly said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to… do anything which might diminish his fortune. And it also is true that most lawyers chose their profession not with the aim of serving their people or because they are interested in law, but rather because they see it as a way to personal wealth and power. And it also is true that we have a lawyer-ridden society. We should have people other than lawyers setting policy.

More generally, it is true that if one looks into every destructive institution in our society, if one looks behind every destructive policy, one finds non-Jews as well as Jews. The ruinous immigration policy we have now in the United States is favored by some Gentiles as well as by virtually all Jews. The 1965 immigration law which shifted the flow of immigrants into this country from mostly European to mostly non-European was pushed primarily by Jews, but Senator Ted Kennedy was a co-sponsor of the law. The Jews may be taking over organized crime in America, but there still are some Italians involved in it. The most active legislators in the Congress pushing for the curtailment of our right to keep and bear arms are Jews, but many Gentiles also are involved. If we look into the destructive exploitation of our natural environment, the cutting down of our forests and the strip-mining of our land and the polluting of our rivers, we probably will find greedy and short-sighted Gentile profiteers more often than we will find Jews. And even in the mass media, one can still find some non-Jewish media bosses who promote essentially the same party line as the Jewish media bosses: Rupert Murdoch is an example.

All of that is true. So, then, why don’t I just complain about the plutocrats or the lawyers or the businessmen? Why do I single out the Jews? The answer to that is that if we don’t look at the Jews specifically, if we don’t try to understand them as Jews, then we can never really understand what is happening to our race and our civilization. And if we don’t understand what’s happening, we’re much less likely to be able to change things for the better. We need to understand the process, and in order to understand the process we need to understand the Jewish role in it—because it is the key role.

Let’s back off a bit and just ask ourselves, what is the single most powerful and influential institution in American life today? What institution, more than any other, is promoting the worst and most destructive trends in American life? Is it professional basketball? That’s certainly a noxious influence—but it’s not the most noxious. Is it the Internal Revenue Service? No. It isn’t even the Clinton government of which the Internal Revenue Service is a part, because the Clinton government itself is only a creature of the most powerful institution, and that most powerful institution is made up of the mass media of news and entertainment which together shape public opinion and control public policy. And these media in turn are dominated by Jews.

I won’t go into all of the names and organizational relationships today, because I’ve done that a number of times in past broadcasts, and the details are all in a pamphlet I publish and update regularly, it’s called Who Rules America?, and if you send $2 to the sponsors of this broadcast they’ll send you a copy. But just a quick summary: the three giants in the electronic media are Disney-ABC, headed by Michael Eisner; Time Warner-CNN, headed by Gerald Levin; and the new Viacom-CBS conglomerate, headed by Sumner Redstone. Eisner, Levin, and Redstone are all Jews, but it’s not just the men at the top who’re Jews; these media giants are staffed by Jews from top to bottom.

In the print media the country’s three most influential newspapers are the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. All three of them are owned or controlled by Jews. The only three widely read weekly news magazines in the United States are Time, which is owned by Gerald Levin’s Time Warner-CNN; Newsweek, which is owned by Katharine Meyer Graham’s Washington Post Company; and U.S. News & World Report, which is owned by Jewish real-estate developer Mort Zuckerman. The story is the same in the Hollywood film industry and throughout the rest of the mass media of news and entertainment.

Now, there are people who will tell you with a straight face that this almost total domination of the most powerful institution in our society by the Jewish minority, which makes up only 2.5 per cent of the U.S. population, is just a coincidence, that it has no sinister significance. It just as well could have been Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses who happened to rule the media. What difference does it make?

When grown men say something like that, you can safely bet that there’s something other than reason at work. Usually it’s fear: not so much a conscious fear as a conditioned avoidance reflex, the product of a long-term program of media conditioning of the public never to say or even think anything negative about Jews, lest one be labelled an “anti-Semite” or a “Nazi.” Really, the proper name for this sort of conditioning is “brainwashing.”

Think about it for a minute.

Imagine yourself in a group of yuppies, at a restaurant, say, or a cocktail party: a fairly sophisticated and irreverent sort of crowd. You can make a joke about the Pope, and even the Catholics in the crowd will laugh. You can say something smutty about Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King without objection. You can express your dislike for homosexuals or feminists. Some of those present may argue against you, but they are not likely to get uptight about it. But if you want to stop the conversation cold and give everyone present a bad case of heartburn, just say something unfriendly about the Jews: either about a specific Jew or the Jews as a whole. Say, for example, something like, “Well, now that that Jew Sumner Redstone has grabbed CBS, there’s hardly any part of the mass media that the Jews don’t own. I think that’s not good for America.” Say that, and then smell the fear in the air as your friends choke on their martinis.

Perhaps I exaggerate a bit, but not much. The Jews do get special treatment, and that is no more a coincidence than their control of the mass media. It has been planned. It is has been engineered.

Now, I am sure that, having said that, the minds of many of my listeners have just locked gears as the conditioned reflex forbidding them to think any unfriendly thought about Jews kicks in. But you know, it is possible to overcome this conditioning, this brainwashing—unless you’re a lemming, that is. Lemmings can’t overcome it because they don’t want to overcome it. They don’t want to think any disapproved thought, any thought that everyone else isn’t thinking. But if you’re a person who wants to think clearly about this matter, all you have to do is begin looking at the facts. Take your time. Study the facts carefully: not just the facts I offer to you, but also everything else you can dig up on the subject. Think about the implications. Reach your own conclusions. You can overcome the conditioned fear—and as a responsible adult, as a responsible American, as a responsible member of your race, you should.

And when you no longer are afraid and you finally are able to look the truth squarely in the face, you no longer will believe that it is a coincidence that the Jews have elbowed their way into virtually every position of control in the mass media. You no longer will believe that the Jews do not use the power consciously and collectively that this media control gives them. I’ll say that again: the Jews use their control over the mass media, not as individual capitalists, the way the few non-Jews in the media do, but they use it collectively and cooperatively to advance Jewish interests. That is why you can see a common propaganda agenda throughout all of the controlled media. They all promote the image of the Jew as a victim, never as a predator or aggressor; they all promote the image of the Jews as sensitive and creative and sympathetic, not as the sort to plan and organize a bloody Bolshevik revolution and butcher tens of millions of innocent Russians and Ukrainians or to run the White-slave business and force thousands of young European girls into a life of prostitution every year—or as the sort to elbow their way into the key positions of media control and then to help their fellow Jews do the same thing.

And they also all push interracial sex. They all push the lie that most interracial crime is White on Black. They all suppress any news which contradicts that lie. They all try to persuade us that homosexuality is normal and acceptable, just an alternative life-style. They all propagandize for multiculturalism and for more diversity and for keeping our borders open to the Third World and for scrapping the Second Amendment—all of them.

Now, let’s back up for a moment, because I’ve just said something extremely important, and I want to be sure that it sinks in: that I have convinced you. I think that most perceptive and responsible people, once they have made up their minds that they want to know the truth, can accept the fact of Jewish media control; that fact is really undeniable. I think that most of them can then take the next step and conclude that this Jewish media control is not just a coincidence: they can conclude that the Jews deliberately and cooperatively set out to achieve this control and then to use it to advance their collective interests.

People can understand that in terms of the sort of group behavior with which they already are familiar. The members of other groups also cooperate in order to achieve group power and then use this power to advance their group interests. And so it should not be surprising that the Jews in the media collaborate to create a favorable image of themselves in the public mind. Most people can persuade themselves that it’s not “anti-Semitic” to believe that Jews behave like many other groups do in order to advance their group interests.

It’s the next step that is difficult for many people: it is recognizing that the propaganda agenda of the Jewish media bosses goes far beyond promoting a favorable image of themselves; it also promotes everything which is unfavorable to the non-Jewish majority. And this destructive propaganda is not a coincidence either; it is the product of a planned, deliberate, collaborative effort.

Reaching this conclusion is a big step, a difficult step, for many people—even for people who want to understand, who want to know the truth. It’s a big step because it separates the Jews from every other special-interest group. It sets the Jews aside from the rest of humanity and identifies them as a uniquely hostile, destructive, and deceptive group. It identifies them as a group which is uniquely dangerous to our people. And it leaves anyone who takes this step open to the charge of “anti-Semitism.” Certainly, if you take this step—if you reach this conclusion—and you announce your conclusion publicly, you will be denounced as an “anti-Semite” by the media bosses—and probably by the lemmings too.

And so I don’t want you just to take my word for this very important conclusion about the nature of the Jews as a uniquely hostile and dangerous group. I want you to study the facts. I want you to think about the evidence and reach your own conclusion. But I don’t want you to stop short of a conclusion because of fear, because of brainwashing. I want you to overcome your fear and examine the evidence objectively.

I will make a few more observations about this conclusion and its implications now, however. Let me tell you, it really is the key to understanding many other things: the history of the Jews in Europe—and elsewhere—for example. Why were the Jews always picked on and persecuted far more than any other group? Why did everyone else always hate them? Why have they been kicked out of virtually every country in Europe during the past thousand years: out of England and Spain and Portugal and France and Sweden and Germany and a dozen other countries and told never to come back, only to sneak back in and then be kicked out again? The Jews will tell you that it was Christian bigotry. But Christian bigotry cannot explain why the Egyptians threw them out of Egypt more than a thousand years before Christ, and it cannot explain why the pagan Greeks and Romans hated them. I used to wonder about these things. And even after I began to suspect that the socially and racially destructive activities of the Jews were planned and deliberate, I didn’t know why. It didn’t make sense to me that the Jews would deliberately seek to destroy a society in which they were riding high—that they would deliberately drill holes in the bottom of a boat in which they were passengers. I couldn’t figure it out—until I understood the nature of the Jews.

And that nature really is unique. At some time far back in the prehistoric period, certainly more than 3,000 years ago, the Jews developed a unique mode of survival as predators and parasites. Whereas other races, other tribes, sought either to live alone among their own kind—or to conquer other tribes militarily and take their land or require them to pay tribute—the Jews sought to invade the territory of other races by stealth and then to subvert them, to undermine their morale, to break down the order and structure in their societies as a concomitant to controlling them and exploiting them.

In the beginning, thousands of years ago, this may have been only a novel plan for gaining control of a particular neighbor, but eventually it developed into a way of life. It became part of their religion, and eventually it got into their genes. I believe that today they really can’t help themselves. And as I said before, you do need to think carefully about this. You need to study the facts. It’s difficult for many people to understand the Jews because they really are different from every other ethnic group.

One aspect of the Jewish problem which adds to the difficulty many people have in coming to grips with it is that the Jews are not just a scheming and sinister kehillah of adult male media bosses. They are a complete community, with women and children and many members on the fringes: part-Jews, dissidents, and so on—even a few anti-Jewish Jews. There are approximately six million Jews in the United States, by their own count, and they can’t all be film studio owners or newspaper publishers or promoters of “rap” music or Hollywood scriptwriters. Most of them live and work in a way which gives them relatively little personal opportunity for damaging our society. They are simply teachers and businessmen and merchants and lawyers and doctors, earning a living more or less like everyone else—but not quite.

You must back off a bit in order to see the forest rather than just the trees. The essential thing about the forest is that it is destroying our world. It is a parasitic forest. It is injecting spiritual and cultural poison into our civilization and into the life of our people and sucking up nutrients to enrich itself and grow even more destructive. Perhaps only 10 per cent of the trees in this Jewish forest have roots deep enough to inject their poison into us, and the other 90 per cent play only supporting roles of one sort or another. It is still the whole forest which is our problem. If the forest were not here we would not have had to endure the curse of Bolshevism. If the forest were not here America would not be growing darker and more degenerate by the year. It is the whole forest, not just a few of the most poisonous trees in it, which must be uprooted and removed from our soil if we are to become healthy again.

The essential point again is this: not every Jew has a leading role in promoting the evils which are destroying us, and not every person is a Jew who is collaborating with the leading Jews who are promoting evil, but it is only because the Jews as a whole are among us that the evils they always promote are overwhelming us. If the Jews were not present we could overcome the evil men of our own race. The evil men of our own race may seek their own profit at the expense of the rest of us, but they do not seek to destroy our race. Only the Jews seek that.

The Jewish Problem

By Chechar 

Today I removed from my watchlist all counter-jihad blogsites from my computer bar, including the Brussels Journal. Yes: since 2008 I had been an avid reader of the counter-jihad literature online that covers news about the Islamization of Europe that are taboo for the treasonous mainstream media. But I am fed up of counter-jihadists. These people just don’t want to see the elephant in the sitting room: the Jewish Problem.

Below I include the subheadings of the preface of Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique, originally published in 1998 by Praeger. Prof. MacDonald’s continuing efforts to expose the most conspicuous object in the sitting room, the amazing power of the Jews in our civilization, an hostile minority, move me to consider him as probably the most important academic of the western world, and I thank him for allowing me to republish his Preface. 

I will divide the long Preface in ten entries. However, since in blogs the oldest entries are read last, in inverse order as we read a book, for convenience I will be linking them in this entry, a sort of Contents Page:

Preface to the First Paperback Edition [opening paragraphs]

The Decline of Ethnic Consciousness Among European-Derived People in the U.S.

The Evolutionary Origins of European Individualism

The Evolutionary Origins of Jewish Collectivism and Ethnocentrism

Jewish Involvement in Communism and the Radical Left

From the Culture of Critique to the Culture of the Holocaust

Jews and the Media: Shaping “Ways of Seeing”

Jewish Organizations and Censorship of the Internet

The Question of Bias

Conclusion

We Are All Born Unfree and Unequal - Will Durant

                              By Chechar 

                    

It took Will Durant more than three decades to write the monumental The Story of Civilization. After finishing the ten volumes of the Story, it followed the essay The Lessons of History, which reflects both Durant’s erudition and his accumulated wisdom. I read The Lessons of History in 1996 and would like to quote some excerpts from one of the chapters, “Biology and History”. 

No ellipsis added between unquoted paragraphs:

So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. We are all born unfree and unequal. Nature loves difference. Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave man free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteen-century under laissez-faire.

Utopias of equality are biologically doomed.

The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use of organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly. She has a passion for quantity as prerequisite to selection of quality. She does not care that a high rate has usually accompanied a culturally low civilization, and a low birth rate a civilization culturally high; and she sees that a nation with low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group.

It is amusing to find Julius Caesar offering (59 B.C.) rewards to Romans who had many children, and forbidding childless women to ride litters or wear jewelry. In the United States the lower birth rate of the Anglo-Saxon has lessened their economic and political power. So the birth rate, like war, may determine the fate of theologies; just as the defeat of the Moslems at Tours (732) kept France and Spain from replacing the Bible with the Koran.

There is no humorist like history.

Magic Battles for the Mind: Escaping the Dark Cave of Political Sorcery

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” ― George Orwell, 1984 

The mental mass hysteria on display during this American Presidential election has become unbearably stomach turning. Blocking oneself off from television news and mainstream printed media is no longer sufficient shielding from the cult of State idolization. Daily visits onto any social media platform showcase the new micro-dosed forum for propaganda. Served in the form of memes, video links of paid shills or the platitudes and screeds of would-be Party delegates – conditioning and normalizing the behavior and actions of sociopaths is a role embraced by the masses at large.

Big Brother has never been only the State and all it's propaganda arms. Big Brother is your friends, your family, your co-workers, your neighbors. Social media has unleashed a complicit public to work on their behalf at no charge. Not that the government is looking to abandoned their paid efforts at conditioning, but certainly men and women sitting in important offices are smiling at the efficiency of this new wing of public messaging.

prop·a·gan·da

ˌpräpəˈɡandə/

noun

1. 

derogatory

information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

Not an hour goes by without an average citizen feeling compelled to browbeat their "friends" into supporting their chosen political God, along with the threat of banishment from their circle for insubordination. The amazing thing is how predictable it all is. People who embrace a certain mold, think and say exactly what they are expected to say. Unvaryingly. They wear their mass media influences proudly on their sleeves. They have to let you know at all times which famous pundit or celebrity they agree with. In fact, in most cases they wait to express a view until someone of stature within their circle of influence says or writes it first. A simple share with some obligatory "here's what I've been thinking all along" statement attached is as far as their arguments go. 

"The more a man's life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater the individual immorality." - Dr. Carl Jung

These are people who went to college. Who were supposedly educated to think critically. But were they really? While some of us embraced the college lecture halls as places to break out from under the suffocation of consensus belief and messily forge individuated thoughts – its easy to recall the majority who continued to "go with the flow" and ride the most popular bandwagons. It's hard to blame them, the bandwagon ride is made comfortable and leisurely by those at the helm. 

Outsider ideas and minority opinions are shamed and ridiculed at ever stage of life from birth to death. Facebook is just the newest hall of peer group shaming and pressures to get in line. Just today I read a post that said he "must"vote for a  particular candidate despite said candidate being obviously in contradiction to many of the person's core values. Such a post not only illustrates their own abandonment of principle (a drastic compromise if not total abandonment) but the implication that we too, the readers, should do the same. 

"We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will. " - Gustave Le Bon,  The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

This sense of obligatory participation in an utterly corrupt, shambolic process typifies the conversation around elections. Setting aside not participating, one can't even participate safely on the fringes of Third-Party politics without being subjected to contemptuous ridicule. Ridicule, in the form of peer-to-peer social media lambasting and from the mass-media talking heads that formulate their opinions.

in·doc·tri·nate

inˈdäktrəˌnāt/

verb

teach (a person or group) to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.

 

"broadcasting was a vehicle for indoctrinating the masses"

These efforts to single out non-compliers or alternative choice supporters are gleefully taken up by friends and neighbors. To what end? These people seem ready to lay down their lives to protect the images of their beloved Party figures. They are the Defenders of the Court. While the Court Jester snickers off to the side. Governments have become so core to the identities of most Americans, the suggestion of disrupting their grip on all the control levers must seem like a death-threat. 

"...[T]he two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy..." ― Dr. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope

A death of self is just what's needed. If a person's identity is largely structured around a political label, party or ideology, I dare say they have wittingly or unwittingly joined a cult. It certainly does them no favors to be obliged to agree with and defend indefensible policies in conflict with their own ethical principles. Ethical principles, which they believed to be the basis of their affiliation with said group or idea. That's how the game works. They tell them want they want to hear in order to keep them believing what they want means something. Their compliance is locked in from there. Believing that they have a voice, they continue to provide their consent. 


In cases when the power elite senses disloyalty brewing, a threat is summoned, sending critical thought back into the closet. It's all so sad and formulaic. It's like watching a bad movie based on borrowed plot lines. Watch how fear sends foamed-mouthed masses into their respective corners even with the string pulling in plain view. Daily barrages of leaks and whistle blows undermining the entire system do little to nothing to hamper the wild-eyed crowds shouting for their team to defeat the "other." There is always an "other."

hyp·no·sis

hipˈnōsəs/

noun

the induction of a state of consciousness in which a person apparently loses the power of voluntary action and is highly responsive to suggestion or direction.

Is there a more overt example of sorcery at work in modern times? The effectiveness of the State's indoctrination magic is profoundly clear when observing the comments of your average citizen on any given day. The sorcery works best during major crisis events, times of trouble or war. The cult of government far outshines the next best thought control operation executed by organized religions. At this stage in the game people seem utterly willing to accept any act of evil as long as they are perpetrated by their cult of choice. No war crime, no amount of dead children, no corporate sell-out, no abuse of nature, no imperialist meddling, no lie, no loss of rights, no loss of privacy is beyond rationalization or defense in the minds of the entranced. It is an equally amazing and horrifying thing to bare witness to. 

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?” ― George Orwell, 1984

trance

trans/

noun

1. 

a half-conscious state characterized by an absence of response to external stimuli, typically as induced by hypnosis or entered by a medium.

Even the most obedient and mind controlled among the masses have some inner inkling that we are facing a decline. That a threat to our humanity looms. Sadly, their only recourse is to support the very system of corruption that is itself the threat. The notion that there is a vastly opposing set of agendas among the two Parties in Washington D.C. is at the heart of this mental illness. Recalling Einstein's description of a psychosis in doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result is especially vivid. That the die-hard Party adherents see a marked difference between the Bush regime and the Obama regime is proof postive that rhetoric and theatre is what really counts in the minds of the masses. 

The seven countries the US has bombed, high civilian death-tolls, record-setting international arms sales, runaway militarized police, record deportations, heightening Cold War propaganda, the criminalization of journalists and whistleblowers, the expansion of pipelines and fracking, the lack of prosecution of Wall Street scammers, no meaningful shift away from the drug war, continued indefinite detentions, no punishments for exposed torture tactics, on and on the list goes. This has all gone on in unbridled fashion under a so-called liberal establishment. And not a one of these horrors against freedom and humanity gives pause to many of those considering their next vote. They simply fall in line like the conscripted soldiers they have become.

"Human sickness is so severe, few can bear to look at it. But those that do will become well." - Vernon Howard 

The escapees from the control grid are rare and are worthy of great applause. Discovering the keys to our own minds can be a difficult task, when they've been so long hidden from our sight. It begins with facing the realities notated above and recognizing their complete violation of ethical values and principles at a fundamental level. It requires taking a look back over one's personal history of indoctrination going back to grade school. Seeing exactly how the shackles are put on us, ever so slyly. It's not to say the methods of the elite aren't impressive, because they are. The level of unquestioning obedience and outright reverence they've managed to enact, largely without direct force is incredible. Seen in that light, it is not too hyperbolic to evoke black magic sorcery as their source of power. Is it any coincidence that Sidney Gottlieb, CIA mastermind of mind control Project MKULTRA, was referred to as "the Black Sorcerer?"

sor·cer·y

ˈsôrs(ə)rē/

noun

the use of magic, especially black magic.

Operation Mockingbird, brainchild of another CIA black magician, Allen Dulles, was an out an out  CIA usurpation of the mass media to propagate a crafted narrative of current events. You can decide for yourself if this project ever actually came to an end. It's no secret that six major conglomerates operate almost every major news media outlet that furnishes public opinion. When a small group of insiders can call upon powerful forces to do their biding to affect a public consciousness alteration – that isfucking magic. 

Magic is a real thing and its concerns are the directed efforts to create changes to the mind and to outward reality. A white magician does this work upon themselves to reach higher states of spiritual consciousness and create a net positive for the world about them. The black magician on the other hand, works magic for 

the purpose of self-advancement by an any means necessary. Without distinction between right and wrong and working from a disposition of moral relativism, this dark magic can be used on others without their consent or regard for damages. 

We live in a world of magical forces. Forces that can be harnessed for ill or good. The world's power players in business, politics, war and finance are not standing passivly by. They and their cohorts are working with psychic magic on a 24/7 time-cycle to create the reality that best serves their Will. 

     Thomas Cole, The Garden of Eden, Amon Carter Museum

The question for the individual is what reality can they manifest for themselves? What changes can they bring about in their own minds or the minds of others? How can esoteric techniques be used to reclaim sovereignty over personal thoughts and actions? The first step is to admit there is a problem. Following that up with a powerful renunciation of mental and emotional commitment to the establishment is the next logical choice. 

What one chooses to do from there to make peace with themselves is unlimited and variable to the individual, then freed to make choices. It's a long road out of the dark cave constructed by dark sorcerers. Each individual journeying out may make their own unique paths to the light. We should not expect conformity on the outside any more than we could accept the forced conformity of the cave. 

There ought to be many flavors of freedom and many varieties of spiritual liberation. Whatever those may be, the simple act of taking back control over one's mind and seeking a new Truth, is just the sort of light magic we need to combat the dark. We have our work cut out for us and should expect to be met with daily resistance by friends and loved ones, still clinging to the false security and forced order of the cave. 

If my experience stands for anything, it tells me that despite the difficulty of rejecting consensus reality, once having seen the light, it is nearly impossible to turn back to the darkness of programmed ignorance. This places one squarely in an undefined and exciting new territory. A garden of possibilities, unmolested by wicked gardeners, planting their evil seeds of destruction. A personal Eden of limitless terrain. A fertile ground for the planting of new seeds, issued from pure, divine inspiration. That is of course, if one chooses to pick up the magic tools of light, in order to banish the insidious bastards right out of the their seats of influence, once and for all. 

Julius Evola: A Radical Traditionalist

Source: 

Pravda.Ru

Troy Southgate examines late Italian philosopher Julius Evola’s Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist. PRAVDA.Ru will present this summary as a series.

6. WORK: THE DEMONIC NATURE OF THE ECONOMY

When Evola discusses the "demonic nature of the economy," we are instantly reminded of the capitalist free market and communism’s deterministic assessment of man as economic unit (homo economicus). In the modern age economic forces have become the new gods of Mammon, creating a dangerous and cataclysmic antithesis to the spiritual aspirations of the ancient world. We have already examined how Evola warns against the lack of hierarchical authority, and in this chapter he demonstrates how both capitalism and Marxism have completely subverted the organic nature of our whole existence: "as long as we only talk about economic classes, profit, salaries, and production, and as long as we believe that real human progress is determined by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, and that, generally speaking, human progress is measured by the degree of wealth or indigence - then we are not even close to what is essential." Thus work and the modern economy are depicted as the penultimate goals of human endeavour, rather than man accepting that his natural interests must lie ultimately in the satisfaction of his own material needs. This is not to suggest that food, clothing and shelter are the most important facets of human existence, simply that they are the most basic prerequisites of all. Man also needs to be satisfied both spiritually and as part of a structure which: "neither knows nor tolerates merely economic classes and does not know the division between ‘capitalists’ and ‘proletarians’; an order solely in terms of which are to be defined the things worth living and dying for. We must also uphold the need for a true hierarchy and for different dignitaries, with a higher function of power installed at the top, namely the imperium." But this vision is hardly being fulfilled today. Everything is geared towards economic production and, inevitably, wage-slavery. Evola does not believe in the formulation of a new economic theory, instead he explains that the current obsession with economic matters can only decline once people change their attitudes completely: "What must be questioned is not the value of this or that economic system, but the value of the economy itself." This is a fundamental part of National-Anarchist thinking, too, a total rejection of the Left-Right spectrum which, once again, ever since the French Revolution has imposed upon us a wholly superficial antithesis between two allegedly opposed economic ideologies. Those so-called "backward" nations which, thus far, have avoided economic development are said by Evola to "enjoy a certain space and a relative freedom." By seizing upon the issue of class, Marxists have deliberately obscured the components of the ancient world by smearing them with an economic grime. In traditional societies, of course, the economy was simply one area within an all-encompassing hierarchical structure. Terms like "capitalist" and "proletarian" did not exist and class struggle was redundant: "Even in the domain of the economy, a normal civilisation provides specific justification for certain differences in condition, dignity, and function." Marxism, says Evola, did not come about due to the need for a resolution to the social question, on the contrary, Marxism itself has exacerbated the problem by creating the myth of the class system. In traditional societies "an individual contained his need and aspirations within natural limits; he did not yearn to become different from what he was, and thus he was innocent of that Entfremdung (alienation) decried by Marxism." Leninists, Trotskyists and other advocates of the class struggle will recoil in horror at this statement, but Evola is denouncing the materialist desires of the common economic agitator rather than supporting the aspirations of the "ruling class." Indeed, economic determinism is considered to be unhealthy and detrimental because "it can legitimately be claimed that the so-called improvement of social conditions should be regarded not as good but as evil, when its price consists of the enslavement of the single individual to the productive mechanism and to the social conglomerate; or in the degradation of the State to the ‘State based on work’, and the degradation of society to ‘consumer society’; or in the elimination of every qualitative hierarchy; or in the atrophy of every spiritual sensibility and every ‘heroic’ attitude." There is little doubt, therefore, that the appliance of the economic worldview comes at a great cost. Evola implores us to express our real selves and to unleash our true potential. Each of us has a different function and a unique position to fulfil. Class conflict, therefore, is a diversion which has been thrust in the path of the unitary and the organic. In terms of the way in which we approach work, Evola tells us that an American attempt to extract more labour from a Third World workforce by doubling their wages, was met with "a majority of the workers cutting their working hours in half." Compare this traditionalist attitude with that of the modern-day office or factory worker who perpetually competes for overtime with his colleagues. Indeed, whilst traditional societies are merely interested in satisfying their basic needs, those in the West endure increasingly long hours, exhaustion, bad diets and severe health problems in their pursuit for computers, televisions and cars. Evola notes that, prior to the rise of the mercantile economy and the gradual evolution of capitalism, "the acquisition of external goods had to be restricted and that work and the quest for profit were justifiable only in order to acquire a level of wealth corresponding to one’s status in life: this was the Thomist and, later, the Lutheran view." Work was always designed to satisfy man’s basic needs and provide him with the time he needed in order to pursue more worthy and meaningful pursuits. But when the acquisition of wealth becomes such an obsession that it imprisons the individual within an economic straightjacket, something is clearly very wrong indeed. Success, therefore, is not determined by the credit in one’s bank account or the growth of industry and technology, it relates to the way in which an individual is able to progress in a more spiritual sense. Living in accordance with one’s own intrinsic nature (dharma) is far preferable to pushing oneself beyond the boundaries of normal behaviour through greed and materialism. This trend is epitomised by the restless nature of the capitalistic economy and its exploitative pursuit of new global markets. In the knowledge, of course, that once it has run its inevitable course the lack of available resources will herald its total collapse.

The emergence of capitalism has often been equated with the Protestant work ethic, and is here dismissed by Evola for the simple reason that labour has been transformed from a means of subsistence to an end in itself. It is not only the Right who are obsessed with work, of course, it is the Left too. One thinks of endless marches organised by the likes of Militant Labour and the Socialist Workers Party, during which the only objective is to enslave the proletariat to the employment system: "The most peculiar thing is that this superstitious and insolent cult of work is proclaimed in an era in which the irreversible and relentless mechanisation eliminates from the main varieties of work whatever in them still had a character of quality, art, and the spontaneous unfoldment of a vocation, turning it into something inanimate and devoid of even an immanent meaning." Evola sees this process as the very proletarianisation of life itself. There are certain parallels here with Richard Hunt’s advocation of the "leisure society," in which man can rediscover the natural and qualitative values of his existence. But Evola warns his readers that we must not "shift to a renunciatory, utopian, and miserable civilisation," but rather "clear every domain of life of insane tensions and to restore a true hierarchy of values." But whilst the individual is inadvertently eroding his own freedoms by viewing work as the ultimate goal in life, the State is also endangering its own existence through the encroaching scarcity of resources to which increasing productivity leads. Evola argues that the way forward lies in "autarchy," and that "it is better to renounce the allure of improving general social and economic conditions and to adopt a regime of austerity than to become enslaved to foreign interests or to become caught up in world processes of reckless economic hegemony and productivity that are destined to sweep away those who have set them in motion." On this point, however, Evola is perhaps forgetting that the decline of capitalistic economies is inevitable and therefore it is futile to postpone their collapse by implementing a policy of protectionism. This strategy may indeed enable a country to stave off the effects of an impending economic catastrophe, but given that all capitalist systems rely on the internationalist system, this simply would not work in the long term.

Julius Evola: The True Antithesis

Nowadays it is possible to speak of ademonic nature of the economy,because in both individual and collective life the economic factor is the most important, real, and decisive one. Moreover, the tendency to converge every value and interest on the economic and productive plane is not perceived by Western man as an unprecedented aberration, but instead as something normal and natural, and not as an eventual necessity, but as something that must be accepted, willed, developed, and praised.

As I have said before, when the right and primacy of interests higher than those of the socioeconomic plane are not upheld, there is no hierarchy, and even if there is one, it is only a counterfeit; this is also true when a higher authority is not accorded to those men, groups, and bodies representing and defending these values and interests. In this case, an economic era is already by definition a fundamentally anarchical and antihierarchical era; it represents a subversion of the normal order. The materialization and the soullessness of all the domains of life that characterize it divest of any higher meaning all those problems and conflicts that are regarded as important within it.

This subversive character is found both in Marxism and in its apparent nemesis, modern capitalism. Thus, it is absurd and deplorable for those who pretend to represent the political "Right" to fail to leave the dark and small circle that is determined by the demonic power of the economy—a circle including capitalism, Marxism, and all the intermediate economic degrees.

This should be firmly upheld by those who today are taking a stand against the forces of the Left. Nothing is more evident than that modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical; both of their ideals are qualitatively identical, including the premises connected to a world the centre of which isconstituted of technology, science, production, ''productivity'' and ''consumption.'' And as long as we only talk about economic classes, profit, salaries, and production, and as long as we believe that real human progress is determined by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, and that, generally speaking, human progress is measured by the degree of wealth or indigence—then we are not even close to what is essential, even though new theories, beyond Marxism and capitalism, might be formulated.

  Das Eisenwalzwerk, Adolph Menzel (1875)

The starting point should be, instead, a firm rejection of the principle formulated by Marxism, which summarizes the entire subversion at work today: The economy is our destiny. We must declare in an uncompromising way that in a normal civilization the economy and economic interests—understood as the satisfaction of material needs and their more or less artificial appendices—have always played, and always will play, a subordinated function. We must also uphold that beyond the economic sphere an order of higher political, spiritual, and heroic values has to emerge, an order that neither knows nor tolerates merely economic classes and does not know the division between "capitalists" and "proletarians"; an order solely in terms of which are to be defined the things worth living and dying for [...]

But where is the battle waged today in these terms? The "social question" and various "political problems" are increasingly losing any higher meaning, and are being defined on the basis of the most primitive conditions of physical existence, conditions that are then made absolute and removed from any higher concern. The notion of justice is reduced to this or that system of distribution of economic goods; the notion of civilization is measured mostly by that of production; and the focus of people's attention tends to be on topics such as production, work, productivity, economic classes, salaries, private or public property, exploitation of the workers, and special-interest groups. According to supporters of capitalism and to Marxists, nothing else exists or matters in this world […]

All this is proof of the true pathology of our civilization. The economic factor exercises a hypnosis and a tyranny over modern man. And, as often occurs in hypnosis, what the mind focuses on eventually becomes real. Modern man is making possible what every normal and complete civilization has always regarded as an aberration or as a bad joke—namely, that the economy and the social problem in terms of the economy are his destiny.

Thus, in order to posit a new principle, what is needed is not to oppose one economic formula with another, but instead to radically change attitudes, to reject without compromise the materialistic premises from which the economic factor has been perceived as absolute.  What must be questioned is not the value of this or that economic system, but the value of the economy itself. Thus, despite the fact that the antithesis between capitalism and Marxism dominates the background of recent times, it must be regarded as a pseudo-antithesis. In free-market economies, as well as in Marxist societies, the myth of production and its corollaries (e.g. standardization, monopolies, cartels, technocracy) are subject to the ''hegemony'' of the economy, becoming the primary factor on which the material conditions of existence are based. Both systems regard as "backward" or as "underdeveloped" those civilizations that do not amount to "civilizations based on labour and production"—namely, those civilizations that, luckily for themselves, have not yet been caught up in the feverish industrial exploitation of every natural resource, the social and productive enslavement of all human possibilities, and the exaltation of technical and industrial standards; in other words, those civilizations that still enjoy a certain space and a relative freedom. Thus, the true antithesis is not between capitalism and Marxism, but between a system in which the economy rules supreme (no matter in what form) and a system in which the economy is subordinated to extra-economic factors, within a wider and more complete order, such as to bestow a deep meaning upon human life and foster the development of its highest possibilities. This is the premise for a true restorative reaction, beyond "Left" and "Right," beyond capitalism's abuses and Marxist subversion. The necessary conditions are an inner detoxification, a becoming "normal" again ("normal" in the higher meaning of the term), and a renewed capability to differentiate between base and noble interests. No intervention from the outside can help; any external action at best might accompany this process [...]

The pure homo economicus is a fiction or the by-product of an evidently degenerated specialization. Thus, in every normal civilization a purely economic man—that is, the one who sees the economy not as an order of means but rather as an order of ends to which he dedicates his main activities—was always rightly regarded as a man of lower social extraction: lower in a spiritual sense, and furthermore in a social or political one. In essence, it is necessary to return to normalcy, to restore the natural dependency of the economic factor on inner, moral factors and to act upon them.

Once this is acknowledged, it will be easy to recognize the inner causes in the actual world (which have the economy as their common denominator) that preclude any solution that does not translate into a steeper fall to a lower level. I have previously suggested that the uprising of the masses has mainly exist between mere economic classes and by the fact that under the aegis of antitraditional liberalism, property and wealth, once free from any bond or higher value, have become the only criteria of social differences. However, beyond the strict limitations that were established within the overall hierarchical system prior to the ascent of the economy, the superiority and the right of a class as a merely economic class may rightly be contested in the name of elementary human values. And it was precisely here that the subversive ideology introduced itself, by making an anomalous and degenerative situation into an absolute one and acting as if nothing else had previously existed or could exist outside economic classes, or besides external and unfair social conditions that are determined by wealth alone. However, all this is false, since such conditions could develop only within a truncated society: only in such a society may the concepts of "capitalist" and "proletarian" be defined. These terms lack any foundation in a normal civilization, because in such a civilization the counterpart constituted by extra-economic values portrays the corresponding human types as some-thing radically different from what today is categorized as "capitalist" or "proletarian." Even in the domain of the economy, a normal civilization provides specific justification for certain differences in condition, dignity, and function.[...] 

I am not espousing an "obscurantism" for the benefit of the "ruling classes"; as I have stated previously, I dispute the superiority and the rights of a merely economic class living in a materialistic fashion. Nevertheless, we need to side against the idea or myth of so-called social progress, which is another of the many pathological fixations of the economic era in general, and not the legacy of leftist movements alone. To this effect, the eschatological views of Marxism do not differ very much from the "Western" views of prosperity: both Weltanschauungen [worldviews] essentially coincide, as do their practical applications. In both Marxism and free-market economies we find the same materialistic, antipolitical, and social view detaching the social order and people from any higher order and higher goal, positing what it is "useful" as the only purpose (understood in a physical, vegetative, and earthly sense); by turning the "useful" into a criterion of progress, the values proper to every traditional structure are inverted. In fact, we should not forget that the law, meaning, and sufficient reason for these structures have always consisted in references for man to something beyond himself and beyond the economy, wealth, or material poverty, all these things having only a secondary importance. Thus, it can legitimately be claimed that the so-called improvement of social conditions should be regarded not as good but as evil, when its price consists of the enslavement of the single individual to the productive mechanism and to the social conglomerate; or in the degradation of the State to the "State based on work," and the degradation of society to "consumer society"; or in the elimination of every qualitative hierarchy; or in the atrophy of every spiritual sensibility and every "heroic" attitude. Hegel wrote, "Happiness is not to be found in the history of the world [in the sense of material comfort and social prosperity]; even the few happy periods found here and there are like white pages." But even at an individual level, the qualities that matter the most in a man and make him who he is often arise in harsh circumstances and even in conditions of indigence and injustice, since they represent a challenge to him, testing his spirit; what a sad contrast it is when the human animal is granted a maximum of comfort, an equal share in a mindless and bovine happiness, an easy and comfortable life filled with gadgets, radio and TV programs, planes, Hollywood, sports arenas, and popular culture at the level of Reader's Digest.

Again, spiritual values and the higher degrees of human perfection have nothing to do with either the presence or the absence of socioeconomic prosperity. The notion that indigence is always a source of abjection and vice—and that "advanced" social conditions represent its opposite—is the fairy tale told by materialistic ideologies, which contradict themselves when they up-hold the other myth, according to which the "good guys" are on the side of the people and the oppressed workers and all the "bad guys" are to be found on the side of the wealthy classes, which are corrupt and exploitative. Both of these are fairy tales. In reality, true values bear no necessary relation to better or worse socioeconomic conditions; only when these values are put at the forefront is it possible to approximate an order of effective justice, even on the material plane. Among these values are: being oneself; the style of an active impersonality; love of discipline; and a generally heroic attitude toward life. Against all forms of resentment and social competition, every person should acknowledge and love his station in life, which best corresponds to his own nature, thus acknowledging the limits within which he can develop his potential; and should give an organic sense to his life and achieve its perfection, since an artisan who perfectly fulfils his function is certainly superior to a king who does not live up to his dignity. Only when such considerations have weight will this or that reform carried out on the socioeconomic plane be conceived and implemented without any negative consequence, according to true justice, without mistaking the essential for the accessory. Unless an ideological detoxification and a rectification of attitudes is carried out, every reform will be only superficial and fail to tackle the deeper roots of the crisis of contemporary society, to the advantage of subversive forces.

It has been reported that in a non-European country, which could boast an ancient and rich past, an American company, upon realizing the scarce participation of local inhabitants who had been hired for a certain project, believed that the right way to motivate them consisted in doubling their pay. The result was that a majority of the workers cut their working hours in half. Believing the initial pay was enough to satisfy their natural and normal needs, those people thought it was absurd to spend more time than necessary to procure their pay. It has also been reported that Renan, after visiting an industrial exposition, left, saying: "There are so many things in life that I can do perfectly well without!"

Compare these two views with contemporary Stakanovism economic "activism," "civilization of wealth," and "consumer society" and its applications. These two examples, better than any abstract consideration, supply us with the criteria to distinguish between two fundamental attitudes, the former healthy and normal, the latter deviant and pathological.[...]
 

                      Sharing Stakhanovite Experience, A. P.                  Levitin (1951)

Prior to the advent in Europe of what textbooks call ''mercantile economy'' (the term is very appropriate, because it describes the tone given to the entire economy by the figures of the merchant and the moneylender), from which capitalism rapidly developed, the fundamental criteria of the economy were that the acquisition of external goods had to be restricted and that work and the quest for profit were justifiable only in order to acquire a level of wealth corresponding to one's status in life: this was the Thomist and, later, the Lutheran view.

The ancient corporative ethics shared this perspective: in this ethics the values of personality and quality were given priority, and the amount of work was always in relation to a specific level of natural needs and to a specific vocation. The fundamental idea was that work was meant not to bind man, but to free him and allow the pursuit of worthier interests, once the demands of existence were satisfied. No economic value was cherished enough to sacrifice one's independence to it, nor was the quest for the means of subsistence deemed worthy to consume one's entire life. Overall, the above-mentioned truth was acknowledged—that human progress must be defined not on an economic and social level, but rather on an inner plane; in other words, progress does not consist in leaving behind one's ranks "to become successful," or in increasing the amount of work in order to gain a position that one is not qualified for. At a higher level, the formula substine et abstine ["keep back, but stand firm"] was an axiom of wisdom that echoed through the Classical world; one of the possible interpretations of the Delphic saying "Nothing in excess" could also be applied to this order of considerations.

Therefore, all these were Western views too: they were the views of European man when he was still healthy, before he was bitten by the tarantula, so to speak, or not yet dominated by an insane restlessness that was destined to distort every criterion of value and to lead to the paroxysms of contemporary civilization. The "demonic nature of the economy" has developed from this distortion, following a chain of processes: thus, morally speaking, the responsibility falls squarely on the shoulder of the individual. The turning point was the advent of a view of life that, instead of keeping human needs within natural limits in view of what is truly worthy of pursuit, adopted as its highest ideal an artificial increase and multiplication of human needs and the necessary means to satisfy them, in total disregard for the growing slavery this would inexorably constitute for the individual and the collective whole. The limit of this deviation consists of the inner situation out of which the forms of industrial capitalism have developed: here the activity aimed at profit and at production has turned from a means to an end, ensnaring man's heart and soul, condemning him to a nonstop race and an unlimited growth of frantic activity and production. This race is imposed from the outside, because to stop, in the economic system, means to regress or even to be undermined and swept away. In this race, which is not "activism" but pure and senseless restlessness, the economy puts thousands of workers in "chains" just as it does the ambitious entrepreneur, the ''producer of goods, and the ''owner of the means of production,'' occasioning concordant actions and reactions that in turn generate increasingly wider spiritual destruction. The background of the "selfless" love of that American politician who put as the basis of his international political program the "economic improvement of the most underdeveloped countries of the world" can be seen in this light: its meaning consists of completing the new barbaric invasions (the only ones worthy of this name), and generating an obsession with economic concerns in some peoples whom so far have been spared the "tarantula's bite"—all this because the growing amount of capital seeks to be utilized and invested and the degenerated productive mechanism seeks wider and new markets for its overproduction. Lenin saw clearly through all this and how, in such upheavals, one of the traits of "dying capitalism" consists of digging its own grave, being forced by the mechanism it set in motion to unleash (through industrialization, proletarianization, and Europeanization) forces that eventually will react against it and against the white man's societies: the representatives of "progress" are not aware of it, and so the process snowballs. In the socialist systems that claim to be the rightful heirs of a capitalism doomed to perish because of its inner contradiction, the enslavement of the single individual is reaffirmed rather than alleviated; it is sanctioned no longer simply de facto, but de jure as well. In socialist regimes this enslavement obeys a collective imperative. If the great entrepreneur devotes his entire self to economic activity, turning it into some kind of drug that has a vital importance to him—the consequence of an unconscious self-defense mechanism, for he suspects that if he ceased the activity he would see the emptiness surrounding him and feel the utter horror of a life devoid of meaning—in the ideologies of the opposing side an analogous situation is made to correspond to an ethical imperative. This imperative is also accompanied by anathemas and repressive measures against those who intend to raise their heads and reclaim their freedom from everything that is work, production, productivity, and social ties.

 At this point it is necessary to denounce another pathological fixation of the economic age, or one of its fundamental slogans: I am referring to the modern superstition of work that has become common to both left-wing and right-wing movements. Just like the notion of "the people," "work" too has become one of those sacred cows and intangible entities that modern man dares only to praise and exalt. One of the characteristics of the economic era, considered in its most plebeian and shallow aspect, is this kind of self-inflicted sadism that consists of glorifying work as an ethical value and as an essential duty, and in conceiving every form of activity as some kind of work. A future and perhaps more normal mankind will regard the notion in which the means becomes an end as a peculiar perversion. Thus, work ceases to signify something that is imposed only in view of the material needs of existence, and to which no more room should be given than is required according to the individual and the status of his rank; on the contrary, work is absolutized and seen as a value in itself, and is associated simultaneously with the myth of paroxysmal and productive activity. Moreover, we come to a real inversion. The term work has always designated the lowest forms of human activity, those that are more exclusively conditioned by the economic factor. It is illegitimate to label as "work" anything that is not reduced to these forms; rather, the word to be used is action: action, not work, is what is performed by the leader, the explorer, the ascetic, the pure scientist, the warrior, the artist, the diplomat, the theologian, the one who makes or breaks a law, the one who is motivated by an elementary passion or guided by a principle. But while every normal civilization, thanks to its upward orientation, intended to bestow a character of action,creation and ''art'' even upon work (see, for instance, the corporations in the ancient world), exactly the opposite is happening in the present economic civilization: even action (or what-ever is still worthy of the term) is increasingly attributed the character of "work (i.e., an economic and proletarian character), almost out of a masochistic pleasure in degradation and contamination.[...]

The proletarian spirit, the quality that is spiritually proletarian, subsists when no higher human typethan the "worker" is conceived; when one describes "the ethical character of work"; when one praises "society" or the "State based on work"; when one does not have the courage to take a resolute stand against all these new contaminating myths.

   

An ancient image, taken from a Buddhist text, is that of a man running breathlessly under the burning sun. At a certain point this man may ask himself: "Why am I running? What if I were to slow down?" and then, walking more slowly, he asks: "Why am I walking in this heat? What if I paused under a tree?"—and in doing so he may come to see that his previous running was caused by a foolish and feverish state of mind. Such an image indicates the inner transformation, or metanoia,required to strike at the heart of the "hegemony" of work and to regain inner freedom: this, however, not in order to shift to a renunciatory, utopian, and miserable civilization, but in order to clear every domain of life of insane tensions and to restore a real hierarchy of values. 
 

Here the fundamental point is to be able to recognize that there is no external economic improvement or social prosperity worthy enough (and the temptations of which should not be absolutely resisted) when its counterpart is an essential limitation of freedom and of the space necessary for everyone to realize his possibilities beyond the dimension conditioned by matter and by the needs of ordinary life.

Moreover, this does not apply only to the single individual, but to the collective whole and the State as well, especially when its material resources are limited and foreign economic forces are pressuring it. Here autarchy may be an ethical precept, because what weighs more on the scale of values must be the same for a single individual and for a State: it is better to renounce the allure of improving general social and economic conditions and to adopt a regime of austeritythan to become enslaved to foreign interests or to become caught up in world processes of reckless economic hegemony and productivity that are destined to sweep away those who have set them in motion.

The overall contemporary situation is naturally such that my considerations mean nothing less thanswimming against the current; while this does not affect their intrinsic value, it must nonetheless be acknowledged that the single individual cannot react and subtract himself from the overall mechanism of the economic era other than in a restricted and limited way, and also given certain more or less privileged conditions. A general change may occur only if a super-ordained power intervenes. After acknowledging the fundamental principle of the primacy and sovereignty of State over economy, the State can then produce an action of limiting and ordering the economic domain; this action will be able to facilitate what derives from the essential and unavoidable factor, that of the detoxification, the change of mentality, and the return to normalcy for people who have learned anew what is sensible activity, right effort, values to he upheld, and loyalty to oneself.

Only on such a basis can one simultaneously be a “protester” in an integral and legitimate sense and an “achiever” in a higher sense.

I will again discuss the relationship between State and economy. Here I want to recall Nietzsche's words as a parting shot regarding the social question: "The workers shall live one day as the bourgeois do now—but above them, distinguished by their freedom from wants, the higher caste: that is to say, poorer and simpler, but in possession of power.'' A differentiation on this basis will act as the principle for the rectification of the inversion I have lamented, and as the principle for defence of the idea of the State and for the resurgence of a different type of dignity and superiority. Such dignity and superiority must be consolidated and validated beyond the world of the economy, through a continuous struggle, both innerand outer, through the confirmation of one's being and the conquest of each moment.

[From Men Among the Ruins, chapter six 'Work - The Demonic Nature of the Economy', Julius Evola, 1953.  English translation by Guido Stucco for the 2002 edition published by Inner Traditions]