← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · PaleoconAvatar
Thread ID: 14510 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2004-07-11
2004-07-11 21:12 | User Profile
Traditionalism Impacting New York Times Jews
"Only in the total destruction of democratic individualism and liberal humanism [can] the lost wisdom be restored."
7/10/2004 8:27:36 PM New York Times
Book Review -- [Bill: The Jews love "democracy" "individualism" and "humanism" because they are ideologies of amorality and satanic destruction. What's interesting is that we have reached a point where the New York Times notices us. Now if they start notiving the intersection between Evola's Traditionalism and Devi's "Hitler Faith", they may be able to catch up with the cutting edge. When all become unfaithful, we remain faithful.]
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/10/arts/10CONN.html[/url]
New York Times
July 10, 2004
CONNECTIONS
Those Who Were Inspired to Hate the Modern World
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
The Western world is decadent. Its emphasis on individualism is corrupt. Its materialism is dangerous. Its vision of modernity reflects not progress but regress. The West will destroy itself. But if it doesn't, its destruction should be helped along. True salvation can be found only by returning to ancient disciplines and beliefs.
Such views may not seem totally unfamiliar. Similar doctrines are held by Islamist terror groups and by those finding common cause with them. Writers like Paul Berman [Jewish critic of life and order] have already shown a connection between Islamist ideas and 20th-century Western Fascism, with its own atavistic hatreds of modernity. Some of these ideas have emerged on the political left, as well, appearing in Marxist thought and inspiring the anti- globalization movement. Their impact on the political and religious landscape has been profound.
But how did such ideas develop? One surprising source turns out to be a little-known group of 20th-century European intellectuals. They passed these ideas on to small groups of ardent followers, but their books and pamphlets gradually shaped a worldwide subculture of belief and devotion. Their loose- limbed movement, which began in the 1920's, has been called traditionalism.
[Bill: And is linked to revolutionary conservatism, a la Spengler, which whom Rothstein is probably not familiar.]
The pioneers of traditionalism are not well known, but are now the subject of a new book by Mark Sedgwick, a historian of Islam who teaches at the American University in Cairo. He began writing "Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the 20th Century" (Oxford), thinking that it would be a study of Islam in the West, since many traditionalist figures were converts to Islam.
[Bill: Traditional Islam is also pagan Islam, and thus is not acceptable to many of the Eastern sects of the Islamic faith. I have worked with a number of Muslim activists who find my views on Islam and pre-Islamic paganism heretical to the point where, while liking me personally, they do not want to discuss religion.]
But he found that these conversions - many done in secret - were associated with broader religious theories. As he searched Web sites, sought reluctant interviewees and probed an esoteric culture, he also came upon traditionalism's intersection with Fascism, the influence of traditionalism on American religious studies and the influence of traditionalism on Islamic thought. The careers of its original advocates also turned out to be elaborately eccentric: magic and sorcery mixed with Hinduism and Sufism; scholarship mixed with calls for revolution; devotion mixed with cult.
[Bill: Magic is simply the manipulation of hidden forces. In a sense, all politics is magic -- as is all human history.]
Mr. Sedgwick's history of traditionalism, the first scholarly effort by an outsider, also sheds light on contemporary passions.
While the book is flawed by awkward organization and the need for more systematic examination of traditionalist ideas, it also makes clear how important this neglected movement is. On his Web site ([url]www.traditionalists.org[/url]), Mr. Sedgwick lists more than 200 traditionalist organizations and Web sites in 34 countries. Even the arts now reflect traditionalist influence. The British composer, Sir John Tavener, whose seven- hour work, "The Veil of the Temple," will receive its United States premiere on July 24 as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, writes religious minimalist music and praises traditionalist writers, describing one, Firthjof Schuon (1907-98), as he "in whose mystical presence I live."
One of the central documents of traditionalism is a relatively brief book, first published in 1927, "The Crisis of the Modern World." Its author, René Guénon (1886-1951), born in Blois, France, to Catholic parents, had been a student of mathematics but soon turned to theosophy, Masonry, medieval Christianity, Hinduism and, finally, Islam. Guénon moved to Cairo and later seemed to retreat into solitude, fearing evil sorcery.
[Bill: Didn't Anarchy! magazine serialize Guenon?]
His philosophy was, as Mr. Sedgwick acknowledges, "not especially original." [Bill: Don't you love how people who have never written anything original criticize the originality of others?] But he had a charismatic impact. In the 1920's, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, the curator of the Department of Indian Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, wrote that "no living writer in modern Europe is more significant" than Guénon. In the 1940's, André Gide believed that if he had read Guénon earlier, his life would have been changed.
Guénon's argument was that the 20th-century West represented the final stage of a final age, the apotheosis of worldly decadence, in which materialism was emphasized over the spirit, individuality over community. The Renaissance, he proposes, was not a rebirth but a death; science, rationality and humanism were products of delusion. A cure - or at any rate, a refuge - could be found in the primordial truths that underlay all religions before modernity's distortions. Guénon scorned democracy; he believed in hierarchical religious elite and saw himself as one of its elect.
[Bill: Hear! Hear!]
He was right about one thing: there was something revolutionary about the notion of the individual that developed after the Renaissance. He was right, too, that religious and aesthetic compromises were required in a democratic culture with its beliefs in rights and liberties. But he could not imagine any way for a democratic culture of religion to develop: his religious truth left no room for reason or autonomy. The Reformation, for him, was a deformation. These views are what traditionalism shares with varieties of Islamic fundamentalism.
[Bill: Well, not exactly. Islam incorporates Traditionalist notions of caste, social organization, right and wrong, virtue and personal honor. I have written on this before in length; I will not go into it again here.]
They are also what led it to flirt with various leadership cults and, ultimately, with Fascism, most obviously in the work of an Italian traditionalist, Julius Evola (1898-1974), who was inspired by Guénon. Evola wrote about the Holy Grail, about esoteric belief and magic, but in the 1920's and 30's he tried to influence both Italian Fascism and German Nazism. Mr. Sedgwick suggests that Evola even visited SS headquarters in Germany, urging the organization to supplement its vision with his.
[Bill: Evola did more than that. He worked for the SS researching Freemasonry in the latter part of the war, and was injured and got his wheelchair when the home he was using in Austria was bombed. Evola tried to bring Italian fascim under German national socialism in a reuniting of the Holy Roman Empire, but had a falling out with the top of the SS because he was not working-class oriented.]
Evola wanted Fascism to be "more radical" and Nazism to be less bourgeois. In his 1934 book, "Revolt Against the Modern World," Evola wrote: "What is really needed is a total catharsis and a radical `housecleaning.' " One method was to spur on "the most destructive processes of the modern era." It was a message hailed by right-wing Italian terrorist groups in the 1960's and, in different ways, by the left-wing terrorists who followed.
[Bill: Traditionalism is not about spurring on the destructive processes of the world. There is the belief that the world is being destroyed and that we cannot have a good world again until the current world kills itself. However, it is also part of Tradition that one cannot hurry that process along or even affect it -- just (now merging with Devi) stand against it and stand firm in the face of your inevitable destruction -- knowing you will be reborn to fight in the final battle and that your soul will live on in the new Golden Age.]
In a less blunt way, such tendencies were even evident in the early work of the Romanian scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade, who was influenced by both Ev ola and Guénon in the 1920's and 30's. He later developed what Mr. Sedgwick calls a "soft traditionalism," devoting his career to studying archaic religions and their views, an interest that influenced the course of academic religious studies in the United States. But in his earlier traditionalist days, when he hailed "a nationalist Romania, frenzied and chauvinistic," Eliade was lured by the attractions of Romanian Fascism and the Iron Guards, a past that came to light only after his death in 1986, leaving an indelible blot on his reputation.
[Bill: Only a Jew can think loyalty to your people is a blot on your reputation. I am not familiar with Eliade but I may have to become so.]
This doesn't mean that all traditionalist belief is fascistic or that its restless quest for lost religious truth is inherently problematic; indeed, much of value has come out of traditionalist examinations of art and religion. But its anti-modern and anti-democratic polemics can have disturbing consequences. And Mr. Sedgwick shows that inscribed in its origins is the belief that truth could only be attained by overturning the modern world and its Western host; moral considerations and human consequences are treated as irrelevant.
Traditionalism declared a war in which modernity itself was the enemy. Only in the total destruction of democratic individualism and liberal humanism could the lost wisdom be restored. In some arenas, that is the battle still being fought.
[Bill: The emergence of the individual as separate from the larger social whole is part of the disintegration of society into chaos. At the end of time, the Jews, the agents of chaos, will destroy all of society, then the heavens will open up, the warriors will ride from Valhalla, the earth will be burned, the Jews will be annihilated, and from the ashes the new world will arise. The Third Reich and the Second World War was a prelude to this.]
Emailed to you by:
Libertarian Socialist News ATTN: Bill White, Editor
Post Office Box 12244 Silver Spring, MD 20908
[url]http://www.overthrow.com[/url] [email]bwhite@mail.overthrow.com[/email]
2004-07-11 22:47 | User Profile
Bill White is not only politically nuts; he also sounds like a death cultist:[B]...the heavens will open up, the warriors will ride from Valhalla, the earth will be burned...[/B]
No, thanks. Btw, Evola was also deeply into the occult. Count me out on Evola, too.
'Traditionalist' in the White/Evola sense is [I]not[/I] referring to any [I]Christian[/I] tradition. :thumbd:
2004-07-11 22:52 | User Profile
The Jews are the owners of the NY Times.
2004-07-12 03:32 | User Profile
PaleoconAvatar,
Great post! I would love to see the American Right become more European in out look. I would love to see more Evola style Traditionalism.
:cheers: :cheers: