Posted on 06/16/2013 1:25:22 PM PDT by annalex
Oh, yes, absolutely. Britain, and Russia, are changed nations because they lost their nobility almost completely.
You’re a good egg, anna ;)
Who is Anna?
Alex
Ping.
We also know that any market power turns people into slaves and consumers of the goods, but these are truths to keep to ourselves. In the manner of a huge clear-cutting bulldozer, the system leaves Europe with empty shell of States having abdicated much of their sovereignty to the global power of financial predators.
Maybe he's not against all trade, but he's really got something against modern capitalism or hypercapitalism. I can understand the argument that speculators and predators have too much power in today's world, but when people go on about the evils of the market too much I do start to wonder or worry.
Venner's admiration for the old Middle European aristocracy is of a piece with his unease with markets. One of the big sellers of 1915 was Haendler und Helden, or Merchants and Heroes. The British and French were supposed to be mere tradesmen, and the noble Germans heroes who disdained mere commerce.
Heroism, duty, service, are admirable qualities, but one has to find a way to fit them into the world we live in -- commercial, democratic, or whatever you want to call it. Otherwise, people looking for glory can do real damage.
With respect to Venner, he doesn't quite get that aristocracy wasn't about duty or service alone. There were other qualities that distinguished the aristocracy or nobility from the dutiful servant or peasant classes, and those qualities -- the drive for distinction and glory, say -- didn't always have wholesome or constructive results.
This is what Francis Fukuyama, and before him, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, were going on about: the role of "thymos," that is, spiritedness or ambition, in a commercial, democratic order that expects such forces to be narrowly channeled into money-making activity and middle class life.
It's also the problem William James was getting it back then when he tried to find "the moral equivalent of war," something that could satisfy the desire for service and self-sacrifice apart from wars that might be senseless or destructive.
One can't blame all of what happened on the old nobility, of course -- the professional politicians and businessmen were pushing in the same direction -- but the nobility were the people who saw the greatest change in their fortunes in the era Venner is talking about and perhaps the people who were positioned to serve as a break on destructive tendencies that they didn't resist.
In the current toxic environment, yes, perhaps. It is still more accurate to say that he's got something for spirituality, aristocracy, service. There is a patient: overweight, diabetic, blind, who eats nothing but copious amounts of pasta and naps the rest of the time. The doctor says,-- Keep that truth to yourself: you are killing yourself surer than if you let a bulldozer run over you. The patient responds -- You've really got something against spaghetti!
Heroism, duty, service, are admirable qualities, but one has to find a way to fit them into the world we live in -- commercial, democratic...
Man lives for heroic service; that is our purpose. Yes, the world has got to change; that is what the article is about. The virtues do not have to change, and they cannot. A nation without virtue has no identity and soon experiences a death. If I lived in France today, I would not worry so much that a drive for distinction might turn out unwholesome.
Back to America, it is not true that we are intrinsically hypercapitalistic. We are also a soldier nation, a frontier nation, a nation of farmers, of pilgrims and of preachers. This is why we seem to be surviving better than Europe; at least Venner counts us among victors. Hypercapitalism is the caricature of ourselves that we let the world develop. Venner, by the way, understood that: he knew, I think, that American digests commercialism in ways Europe cannot.
Less religion in Europe. Less rising to the military challenges of the Cold War. Less economic competitiveness, and that wasn't replaced by a more active political life, but by a welfare state administered from above by unelected Eurocrats. So Europe was closer to the passive, timid, apolitical, risk-averse, consumerist "Last Man" that Nietzsche and Fukuyama feared.
On the other hand, that model really isn't "hypercapitalist" or "turbocapitalist" either. "Hyperconsumerist," maybe, in some countries. But France, say, isn't likely to make much trouble for China's rising economic and industrial might. Also, nowadays people like Venner who express some admiration for the ideologies of the 1930s have to diverge somewhere to avoid being accused of actually being fascist, so what he said may or may not be exactly what he really thought.
Except Fukuyama -- correct me if I am wrong on that -- largely celebrated the "end of history" while for Venner, and, I think, for any right-thinking person the "democratic, commercial, technological form of society" is a dying society, coasting on its past cultural treasure toward oblivion.
"Ideologies of the 30's" were diverse, ranging from the wisdom of Franco, -- who, I would argue, was the only wholly successful national leader of the 20th century,-- to maniacality of Hitler. Venner is correct in seeing them as an attempt to restore the aristocratic idea. No leader ever emerges by saying "I will plunge my country and all Europe along with it into war and misery, kill innocent people by the million, and then kill myself chased into a bunker", --nor by believing so even inwardly. A good historian understands the reasoning and the motivation of the historical forces behind the propaganda and a caricature. We need more like him.
I never heard of Venner till his tragic act either. That is not surprising, as right wing thinking is demonized everywhere. We probably don’t know our own venners.
I'd have to read his book again (for the first time), but as I recall, Fukuyama wasn't all celebration. There was some uncertainty about whether the culture of "the last man" could perpetuate itself. Also a feeling that Europe was further along that road than the US.
"Ideologies of the 30's" were diverse, ranging from the wisdom of Franco, -- who, I would argue, was the only wholly successful national leader of the 20th century ...
That whole Spanish tragedy looks like a great bloody detour to get where the country would have gotten anyway if its leaders had had enough sense not to destroy the country.
I don't know what the answers are, but sometimes the solutions that get proposed don't seem likely to solve anything. Young Venner fighting to keep Algeria French when De Gaulle had already had enough of the war -- was that really a wise course? What brings me back to Fukuyama -- and behind him Strauss -- is Venner's celebration of what they called "spiritedness." You might call it the fighting spirit. It's what he admired in the old Central European nobility.
Venner was fortunate in being young enough not to have to make the tough decisions Frenchmen had to make in 1940. And he was fortunate enough that the Cold War gave a more or less acceptable form to his likes and dislikes, strivings and aversions. With the end of the Cold War, he still had that fighting spirit but apparently wasn't sure what to direct it against or what to put in service of, what the goal was or what the hope of success was. In that he wasn't so very different from many other people.
I disagree on Franco. He crushed the Communist International, and kept the country free and away from the war. He succeeded in defending Spanish national interest where all other European leaders of the time failed. Spain should be missing him sorely now that the pseudo-European International has got its way with their country.
Remember, too that Algeria was to the French much more than a colony; at the time it was, too, defense of France itself. And why should De Gaulle be a yardstick of wisdom?
The young Venner wanted to see a Leninism of the nationalist right. You can google his "For a Positive Critique" and see. I have to wonder what the point of that would be. All the talk of mobilizing society for some great national goal: freedom is better than all that organizing and conspiring and struggling and obeying.
If there is an actual enemy and war is necessary, fine, but the young Venner's desire for combat, glory, duty, service led him to go looking for fighting organizations or forming them, when what was necessary was living together peacefully in society.
Since 1947, the French army fought to defend overseas territories, was victorious in the field, and forced into successive capitulations by the group of political and economic forces that constitute the régime. It was necessary to wait until the month of April 1961, fourteen years, for a tiny number of cadres to discern their true enemies. An enemy who was not so much in the field, under the guise of a Viet or of a fellagha, but rather in France itself, in the boards of directors, the banks, the editorial offices, the assemblies, and the ministerial offices. This hostile sentiment was against a mythical decadent Metropolitan France rather than the reality of the régime. This limited realisation was short-lived.I find nothing to disagree with. To offer Lenin as an example of a successful revolutionary is not reflecting poorly on Venner. I think, his big thought, that a national revolution could succeed, possibly starting with France and OAS in the early 1960, possibly enveloping the rest of Europe, and no longer can succeed due to the immersion into the universal leftwing intellectual environment today, -- is correct and goes a long way in explaining his despair. Why was all that desperate struggle necessary? Why, look at France today: a nation of tired cheeseaters incapable to support their 30 hour workweek, wine lunches and two-month vacations other than at the cost of erasing their national and religious identity. What kind of "freedom" or "living together peacefully" is that? Glory, duty, service have consequences both in their presence and in their absence. Now we have absence, and nations die.[...]
France and Europe must accomplish their nationalist revolution in order to survive. Superficial changes will not strike what is evil. Nothing will be done until the germs of the régime are extirpated to the last root. For this, it is necessary to destroy its political organisation, overthrow its idols and its dogmas, eliminate its official and secret masters, show the people how much it had been deceived, exploited, soiled. Then, reconstruction. Not on paper constructions, but on a young and revolutionary élite, imbued with a new conception of the world. Can the action that must impose this revolution be conceived without the direction of a revolutionary doctrine? Certainly not. How can you oppose an adversary that is armed with a well-tested dialectic, rich with long experience, powerfully organised, without ideology, without method?
[...]
The editor of France-Observateur, the functionary of the SFIO, the communist, all have the same ideology in common: Marxism. Their doctrinal reference is therefore the same, their conception of the world is similar. The words they use have the same meaning. They belong to the same family. Despite their profound divisions in action, they all concurrently impose the same ideology.
[...]
The ethic of honour is opposed to the slave morality of liberal or Marxist materialism. It affirms that life is a battle. It exalts the value of sacrifice. It believes in the power of the will over events. It bases the relationship between men of the same community on loyalty and solidarity. It confers on work an importance independent of profit. It recovers the sense of the true dignity of mankind, not granted but conquered by permanent effort. It develops in the European man the consciousness of his responsibilities in relation to the humanity of which he is the natural organiser.
If they're dying now, it's at least in part because of the orgy of violence back then unleashed by people Venner admired. Nobody there wants to go back to those days.
Which brings me back to my original point: how to include the things he claimed he believed in -- duty, honor, service -- without tearing the world apart in wasteful conflicts that give those values a bad name.
You need some enemy to set such a "national revolution" into motion. That might be a foreign invader or an internal totalitarian enemy or a state of chaos. To look for some "Leninist" revolution of the right in a peaceful and wealthy country is just to stir up unnecessary trouble.
If Venner's complaint was that France or Europe was too fat, lazy, cowardly, and comfortable, I'd say, just wait. Such a condition probably isn't likely to last too long. Better do what you can to keep things from falling apart totally than to push the country into the abyss.
Nah, I'll keep the tagline I have LOL!
A strong thinker here, thanks.
From the article:
Indeed, on the eve of 1914, the European system was in crisis. But it is not the order that caused the war, but rather the oblivion and denial of the order. Since the end of the first Thirty Years War in 1648, the so-called European concert between states was based on the awareness of belonging to the same family of nations between the wars which were to remain limited and subject to "the rights of nations". The Concert of Europe was based on the civilizational values common to all the ruling elites.
When you have a civilization: a culmination of national cultures, you have both peace and strength. Undermine the civilization by devaluing nations, mocking religion, tearing down culture, and you get the animal farms of today, -- and indeed, nobody want to go back to civilization anymore.
You need some enemy to set such a "national revolution" into motion.
We don't need an enemy, we have one. Who do you think invents the 50% taxation levels, state as a surrogate parent, homosexuality as model behavior, IRS/NSA in every Internet router, third world labor force here feeding government employees so that they can retire at 50, and third world thug armies at their homes, under our no-fly-zone umbrella?
Is it Venner's fault that a government that works in the national interest has become a revolutionary idea?
Dumb sluts from your tagline were not born dumb nor sluts. The enemy (who some think does not exist) made them dumb sluts.
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