Ernst Jünger and the domination of the world by the Worker – Joachim de Brescia – PHILITT – May 12th 2020

08 Wednesday Jul 2020

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2020, Ernst Jünger, Joachim de Brescia, Philitt

In The Worker (1932), Ernst Jünger wrote, “The peasant who begins to work with horse power instead of horses no longer belongs to any ‘estate’. He is a worker in particular conditions” Henceforth the peasant on his tractor, or the soldier using his machine gun no longer belongs to any “estate.” They personify the seizure of power by a new type of man: the Worker.

The Worker is a piece that the German author never reworked, contrary to his habits. He would agree to re-release this piece for the first time in 1964, but he added “complementary notes” to it, which would form the volume Maxima-Minima, an update comparing the Figure of the Worker to that of Titans like Antaeus, Prometheus, and Atlas. The Worker appeared in this piece as a telluric and mythic figure, a son of the earth and an enemy of the gods. Thirty years later, Jünger noted the irrefutable character of his analyses: the contemporary world henceforth solidified the domination of the Figure of the Worker.

By “Figure” Jünger means a spiritual reality reality that confers a meaning. The Figure is “a whole that encompasses the sum of its parts.” By assuming the Figure of the Worker, the individual inserts himself into a great hierarchical order of Figures. He becomes a symbol, a representative of a superior order, of a vocation, and of a destiny. The notion of Figure is a resurgence of the Platonic “Idea”, a kinship that Martin Heidegger would address during a seminar in 1940. Jünger, who didn’t appreciate this comparison, preferred to compare his Figure to Leibniz’s monad, or Goethe’s “Urpflanze” [Translator’s note: archetypal plant].

“Technology is the art and the manner by which the Figure of the Worker mobilizes the world”, Jünger notes in The Worker. It’s not a neutral power. Technology inevitably delivers the means of power that permits the domination of the Worker, the only Figure capable of utilizing it. The replacement of the lamp by the perpetual presence of the electric light-bulb highlights a universe henceforth foreign to religion. The writer remarks accurately that the instinct of Christian preachers to equate the empire of technology with the empire of Satan is far from lacking sense.

This new domination leads to the replacement of the “individual” by the “type.” The “worker” is not irreplaceable. Actually, every dead one can be immediately replaced by another “worker.” Bourgeois constitutions are replaced with a “work plan”, liberal democracy replaced with the democracy of labor or the state. Total mobilization renders the distinction between wartime mobilization and peacetime mobilization moot, like the distinction between “combatant” and “non-combatant.”

Jünger also notes in a striking manner the change in the physiognomy of his contemporaries, whose faces assume the appearances of masks, devoid of traits and giving a metallic impression. “The bone structure thrusts markedly forth, the features are sparse and taut. The gaze is quiet and fixed, trained in the contemplation of objects that are captured in situations of high speed.” He also notes the increased role of masks in daily life, whether it’s masks protecting the face in sports and from high speeds or protective masks for people working in zones that have become too dangerous.

The replacement of the bourgeoisie by the Figure of the Worker

In The Worker, Jünger mentions the replacement of the bourgeois by the Worker. The Great War constituted a decisive experience, accelerating the advent of new type of man, a new Figure. The resurgence of deep, telluric forces, in the deserts of fire in the material war permitted the advent of a new human type, whose mode of action was “total mobilization” of life through technology. This new type no longer belonged to an association or a party, but to a group of partisans. He forms a New Order, silent and invisible, a new aristocracy whose slogan is “heroic realism.” For him, the sacrifice of life is the ultimate good, and the supreme art of command “consists of showing purposes worthy of this sacrifice.”

In the epoch of mass revolutions, crowds of individuals flowed into the streets, followed by determined commandos, seizing the vital centers of cities with precise technology. The targets are no longer the personal representatives or individuals of the state, but communication centers, broadcasting antennae, or factory warehouses. If the mass is no longer capable of attacking, nor defending itself, the police henceforth effectively possess sufficient means to crush a revolutionary crowd in a few seconds.

The Worker is distinguished by a new relation to the elementary. The term “elementary” designates profound forces, those of faith, struggle, and passion, but also the four original elements: fire, water, earth, and air. The combatant youth experienced the elementary on the front, thanks to the extreme proximity with death, fire, and blood. They experienced the pleasure of absolute offerings, the maximal satisfaction of action. They passed through anarchy, through the destruction of old bonds. They crossed the zone of combat without being destroyed itself, and consequently possessed a new power. There is an ideal continuity uniting the combatant youth of the Great War with the figure of the Worker.

On the contrary, the bourgeois appears as someone who tries to escape danger by seeking refuge in a would be utopian security, that of glass walls and asphalt. The bourgeois forms the race of the defeated, the race that believed elementary power could be mastered by the old order, excluding it from danger in fortified enclosures, its secured citadels. Its slogans like “order and peace” or “pacifism” are equally slogans reflecting its weakness withing the new order.

New aristocracy or the terminal phase of civilization?

According to Julius Evola, the advent of the Worker is not the advent of a new aristocracy, but it further symbolizes a phase of leveling and dissolution. In the traditional model, spiritual aristocracy, warrior aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie correspond to different types, different “estates” and the Worker doesn’t escape this rule. Jünger’s Figure confirms the “Fourth Estate’s” seizure of power and the suppression of other castes by a new form of civilization.

In this twilight world that is the ultimate stage of advanced civilizations, all human activity is effectively transformed into “work.” Within this landscape of work sites, Jünger admits that generations of Workers will not leave behind savings or monuments, but only “a certain level, like a tide-mark of mobilization.” Nevertheless this Figure, who henceforth possesses an unequaled technical arsenal of surveillance, repression, and propaganda in its service, is more redoubtable than ever.

In The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), Guénon reminds us that he who invokes the brutal forces of matter must necessarily perish by these same forces, forces of nature or forces of the human masses. It is always the laws of matter that crush anyone who believes he could dominate them without elevating himself beyond matter. It is written in the Gospel: “Any house divided against itself cannot stand”; this quote perfectly applies to the world forged by the Worker, which can only, in essence, incite conflict ad division everywhere.

In the Treatise on the Rebel, Jünger mentions two other figures who will come to add themselves to the first. Firstly the unknown soldier, bearing the burden of the sacrifice of his life on the front, to the benefit of the Worker’s domination. Finally, the Figure of the Rebel, the Figure of resistance to the domination of technology, and the refusal to accept its consequences. He is someone who holds his own against the propaganda forged by fear, particularly fear of death. The Rebel is consequently capable of overthrowing giants, whose strength is terror.

If the twilight Figure of the Worker can justifiably provoke fear in some people, it is interesting to reread these lines from the philosopher and jurist Walter Schubart: “It’s not in the balance of the bourgeois world, but in the thunder of apocalypses that religions are reborn.” (Europe and the Soul of the East). Actually, according to René Guénon, everything indicates that we are henceforth in the final phase of the Kali-Yuga, in the darkest period of this “dark age.” If a restoration must happen, it will not be a simple recovery, but a total renewal, a rebirth.

Source: https://philitt.fr/2020/05/12/ernst-junger-et-la-domination-du-monde-par-le-travailleur/

Can We Define A Geopolitics of the Coronavirus? – Robert Steuckers – Strategika.fr – May 23rd, 2020

03 Wednesday Jun 2020

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2020, Can We Define A Geopolitics of the Coronavirus?, Robert Steuckers, Strategika

Robert Steuckers, born in Uccle in 1956, graduated from the Institut Maria Haps, associated with the University of Louvain, where he obtained his Master’s in English and German languages. He directed a translation agency in Brussels for twenty years before devoting himself to various tasks teaching languages. He created the think tank “Synergies européennes” in 1994, which has organized summer universities in France, Italy, and Germany. He manages, with others, the site Euro-Synergies which has posted nearly 17,000 feature articles, available to everyone. He also has a Twitter account Robert Steuckers (@RobertSteuckers) updated daily. Robert Steuckers is the author of numerous books and essays, notably the trilogy Europa, a truly complete work on the identity and history of European peoples as well as La révolution conservatrice allemande and Sur et autour de Carl Schmitt.

A first remark: nothing is clear in media discourses, remotely controlled by American outfits for the most part. Contradictions follow each other and overlap: is this virus natural (a more pernicious variant of the seasonal flu) or has it been released, intentionally or unintentionally, from a Chinese laboratory? Is the practice of confinement useful or totally useless as the Swedish experience proves? Other projects seem to graft themselves on to this pandemic: the ruling powers’ project of further controlling human masses clustered in the major megapoles; the project of planetary vaccination that would largely benefit “Big Pharma”, a hypothesis apparently confirmed by Bill Gates’ past and present declarations; furthermore such generalized vaccination would grant it a stranglehold on funds accumulated by the social policies, socialist and Keynesian, of Europe’s industrialized countries. Moreover, the unpreparedness of states and the instances of mismanagement regarding the purchase and distribution of protective masks, the quarrel over medication in France whose principal protagonist Dr. Didier Raoult prescribed a simple chloroquine treatment, a very recent hypothesis contesting the validity of treatments chosen to counteract the illness, fatal abuse in the distribution of Rivotril in nursing and retirement homes, pleads in favor of the (conspiracist?) hypothesis of a planetary staging, aiming to create and amplify panic: in this sense, the political – media system, dominated and subsidized by high finance, the pharmaceutical lobbies and GAFA [Translator’s Note: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple], would play its role in the scenario dictated to it, to prepare the masses to accept vaccines, confinement, and other extraordinary and unprecedented police measures, even compared to regimes considered as the most repressive. The French television channel LCI nevertheless just revealed that the elevated levels of lethality and contagiousness of the virus were considerably exaggerated following alarmist and apocalyptic speeches by WHO representatives. Confinement, against which German and Dutch public opinion fought back with vehemence, was thus totally useless or the pretext to implement unprecedented police control technologies, imitating those in the future (but very near) Chinese “smart cities,” among which we can especially cite facial recognition technologies. Whatever hypotheses we can formulate about the effects, real or fabricated, of the present pandemic, we must admit that the upheavals occurring on the international political chessboard, especially Eurasian, will not be stopped by the pandemic: much to the contrary, outfits of strategists actively prepare for the world comes after the virus crisis. This pandemic evidently can camouflage an ensemble of shifts beneficial to the hegemon, despite the weaknesses it seems to show, in its industrial decline, in the decay of its society, or in the technical failures of its health-care system. The vigilance of all those who desire to see the often smothering grip of this hegemon loosen is thus in order.

Firstly, the zone of conflictual turbulence seems to have shifted from the Ukrainian – Syrian and Iraqi complex towards the South China Sea. China seems to have become the principal enemy of the hegemon, very clearly, although from 1972, China was “the enemy of my enemy” against the USSR, before becoming a major economic partner permitting the implementation of the neoliberal practice of relocation towards Asian zones with low price labor. China, within the complex that certain geopolitical thinkers named “Chinamerica”, was the workshop of the real economy, the producer of physical goods, while the hegemon reserved the service industry for itself and henceforth practiced a virtual and speculative economy, which it tried to portray as entirely sufficient while the present crisis demonstrates its glaring insufficiencies: one cannot dispense with the real economy paired with a good “political” dose of planning or regulation. The middling powers of Europe, subservient to the Americanosphere, imitated this disastrous practice inaugurated by the hegemon from the moment where China, although “communist” in the ideological scheme, became its “enemy of my enemy” against Soviet Russia. In this context, Europe progressively abandoned its planned economic practices or what Michel Albert called “(paternalistic) Rhine capitalism”: it’s the Germany self-destructing, described by Thilo Sarrazin, or the France committing suicide, explained by Eric Zemmour. The coronavirus crisis has notably proved that France, and even Germany, no longer produce small elementary consumer goods in sufficient quantities, like protective masks, henceforth manufactured in countries with cheaper labor. All the errors of delocalizing neoliberalism have appeared in broad daylight, against the background of the latent economic crisis ongoing from autumn 2008.

China accumulated a colossal mass of currency after having accepted this role of planetary workshop. Nevertheless the planetary workshop should secure maritime and terrestrial routes of communication to send finished products to their places of destination, in Europe as in Africa or South America. When China was “the enemy of my enemy” of the Americanosphere during the Cold War, and even during the one or two decades after the end of this virtual conflict, it had no maritime vocation and its continental / telluric tasks were limited to consolidating its frontier fringes in Manchuria, its border with outer Mongolia, and zone of Chinese ex-Turkestan, which had fallen under Soviet influence in the time of Chinese misfortune. This zone, once coveted by Stalin, is today Xinjiang, populated by a native Uighur minority. Thus China practiced a policy of “containment”, that also (and especially) served the interests of the United States. A tacit peace was then established on the Taiwanese maritime front and the two Chinas even envisioned a reconciliation lato sensu [Translator’s note: Latin for “in the broad sense”], perhaps even leading to a rapid reunification, similar to German reunification. The Chinese Communist Party and the Taiwanese Kuomintang could have ironed out their differences in the name of an effective planist and productivist ideology.

The imperative necessity of securing the maritime routes beyond the Chinese coasts themselves, in the context of the South China Sea and extending to the Singapore choke-point, progressively changed the situation. New Chinese pursuits in the South China Sea imply a further and quite predictable step of projecting itself far beyond Singapore towards India (which itself aims to establish its sovereignty over increasingly vast portions of the Indian Ocean) then towards the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea to reach to the Mediterranean: in short, a re-actualization of the Ming dynasty’s policy that supported Zheng He’s expeditions in the 15^th century before ceasing any support for this oceanic policy in order to focus on hydrological projects, very costly, in continental China. Xi Jinping, as the great Eurasian and Sinophile geopolitical specialist Pepe Escobar explains in a recent article, doesn’t seem to want to repeat the strictly continentalist error Emperor Yong Le opted for.

Actually, the gigantic project of China today is to create new silk roads on the great Eurasian continental mass and, simultaneously, open maritime routes towards the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and Mediterranean, by building on a terrestrial link starting from continental China towards the Pakistani port of Gwadar, then opening, with the assistance of Russia, a second maritime silk route across the Arctic in the direction of Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Antwerp. This colossal Eurasian project constitutes a major challenge to the hegemon which intends to pursue the thalassocratic containment policy of the former British Empire and, obviously, sabotage any initiative aiming to develop terrestrial communications, via railroads (like the Transiberian in 1904) or waterways, which could counter-balance or reduce the importance of ocean communications (the “Highways of Empire”). The Chinese henceforth show themselves to be disciples of Friedrich List, the economist of development, more than Karl Marx. List was also one of the great inspirations of Sun Yat-Sen, whose objective was to extract China from the “century of shame.” The United States, in order to counter this large scale project, already suggests an alternative, equally “Listian”, in the middle of the coronavirus crisis: block China in front of Singapore and suggest to Russia the exploitation of the terrestrial routes and railway infrastructure of Siberia, even the Arctic route, which would couple, via the construction of a bridge over the Bering Strait, similar routes on the North American continent. Which would also permit it to control the space designated as the “Greater Middle East,” encompassing the Muslim ex-Soviet republics and situated under the strategic command of USCENTCOM, still effectively underpinned by the possession of the small island of Diego Garcia, an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Without any valid projection towards the Mediterranean and Central Asia, Russia will only retain its role as a “bridge” between Europe and China, whose maritime policy alone will be tolerated so long as it is only limited South China Sea, on one hand, and the North American continent on the other. Thus the final plan of the new Deep State policy will be: contain the maritime inclinations of China, encircle Russia in a Siberian / Arctic project where China cannot intervene, and control the Greater Middle East, without which neither China nor Russia can have any control over this space and market.

The sudden irruption of the coronavirus and the culpability for the pandemic, which the Deep State caucus attributes to China and the Wuhan laboratory for propaganda purposes, allows it to deploy every strategy and tactic to contain China in the waters of the Pacific and only let it directly control the waters in immediate coastal proximity, preventing it from turning the Philippines into a satellite, and, in addition, consolidating Vietnam as a permanent threat on China’s southern flank through American aid. The site “Asia Times,” based in Thailand, remind us, today, that the Islamic State seizes locations in the Philippines, to the great chagrin of the Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte, angered with the hegemon and an advocate of rapprochement with China: in short, the usual scenario …

Pepe Escobar sketches the major themes of the first two sessions of the 13^th National People’s Congress, the third session of which would have been held March 5^th 2020 but was postponed due to the coronavirus crisis. One can already imagine that China will broadly accept the recession that it will be the victim of and it will understand the austerity measures that it’s been asked to accept. For Escobar, the conclusions of the 13^th Congress convey a response to the plans concocted by the United States and laid down on paper by Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster. This Pentagon soldier describes a China that constitutes three threats for the “free world” with: 1) The “Made in China 2025” program targeting the development of new technologies, notably concerning the firm Huawei and the development of 5G, indispensable for the creation of the “smart cities” of the future, and where China, apparently, enjoys a very long head start; 2) with the “silk routes” program, through which the Chinese are creating client states, including Pakistan, and reorganizing the Eurasian continental mass; 3) with the “military/ civil” fusion, the coagulation of List’s and Clausewitz’s ideas, where, through mobile telephony, China will prove itself capable of developing large espionage networks and cyber-attack capacities. Since May 2020, Washington has refused to export components to Huawei; China retorted by placing Apple, Qualcomm, and Cisco on a list of “unreliable enterprises” and threatened to stop purchasing American made commercial aircraft. All of this, and Escobar doesn’t mention it in his recent article, in a situation where China has 95% of the rare earth metal reserves. These reserves allowed it, until now, to score points in the development of new technologies, including 5G and mobile telecommunications, the principal objects of American hostility towards Beijing. In order to confront the Chinese advance this domain, the hegemon must find other sources to supply these rare earth metals: hence Trump’s indirect proposal to buy Greenland from the kingdom of Denmark, formulated last autumn and reformulated in the middle of the coronavirus. China is present in the Arctic, under the guise of a set of mineral exploration companies in a highly strategic zone: the so-called “GUIK” gap (Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom) was extremely important during the Second World War and during the Cold War. The entire Arctic space will become a highly strategic zone again, and in an intensified manner, in light of the resources that it conceals, including the rare earth metals that the United States is seeking to appropriate, and because the Arctic passage, freed from ice by nuclear powered Russian ice breakers, will become the shortest and more secure route between Europe and the Far East, between the Antwerp/ Amsterdam/ Hamburg port complex and Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ports. So the hegemon has a double interest in its Greenlandic projects presently being articulated: to move in and profit from Greenland’s geological assets and sabotage the exploitation of the Arctic route. The coronavirus crisis hides this geopolitical and geo-economic issue that concerns Europe foremost!

Returning to the 13^th National People’s Congress of May 2020: it prioritized future development of the Western regions (Xianjiang and Tibet), a reinforcement of links with ex-Soviet republics that border these regions, and, among other things, the construction of deep water ports, and an augmented ecological policy based on “clean coal.” The problem of the silk routes initiative (“Belt & Road Initiative”) was at the back of the line behind new priorities, which constitutes a distressing setback in itself.

The hegemon seems to be lessening the pressure a bit on Ukraine, Syria, and Iraq, but Iran remains an enemy to eliminate or, at least cause it to implode through sanctions. The rigor of the hegemon’s repressive measures increases while Europeans focus on the effects of COVID-19, though they recently demanded a relaxation of the sanctions and invented a ruse to circumvent the American embargo which in no way serves their commercial and geopolitical interests. Iran remains a major target, despite the centrality of its territory in a zone entrusted to USCENTCOM or “the Greater Middle East”: in order to control this space, which was once the space of “Iranian civilization”, Washington seeks to implode the center. The reason for this tenacious anti-Iranian ostracism, particularly aggressive, has two essential causes: one highlights a very old strategy, the other is defined by the very existence of oil based capital that Iran can use to establish a limited regional hegemony. The very old strategy, today articulated by the United States, seeks to forbid any power for exercising itself between the territory of the ancient Parthian Empire and the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean. The United States is actually posing, according to the historian – geopolitical expert Edward Luttwak, as the heir of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires in the Levant and Mesopotamia. Roman policy, from Trajan to the collapse of the Byzantines in the region following the strikes of Muslim armies after the death of the Prophet, was to keep the Persians separated from the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. The coronavirus crisis permits it, in the shelter of the media limelight, to further demonize Hezbollah in Lebanon, this Shi’ite party being an Iranian antenna on the banks of the Eastern Mediterranean and also a solid rampart against the official Sunni Islamist enemy (but in reality ally), represented by ISIL, and it permits Netanyahu and his new heterogeneous coalition government to annex the West Bank, reducing to near annihilation the reliquae reliquarum [Translator’s note: Latin for “remnants of the remnants”] left to the Palestinian Authority, henceforth weakened and discredited. With the background of indescribable chaos that persists between Syria and Iraq, the hegemon consolidates the Zionist state, actually qualifiable as “Judeo-Herodian” in the sense where the Herodian kings were pawns of the Romans, in order to make Judea – Palestine an uncrossable barrier against any Persian penetration. Europe, fixated on the invisible and perhaps fictive coronavirus, only turns a very discreet eye towards this problematic mutation happening in the Eastern Mediterranean. Washington’s other pawn in the region is Saudi Arabia, whose politics were shaken up a bit in the course of these past months, without anyone being able to say that the understanding created on the bridge of the USS Quincy in 1945 between King Ibn Saud and President Roosevelt has been fundamentally altered, as shown by Western support for the bellicose and genocidal policies that the Saudis practice in Yemen, where Colombian and Eritrean mercenaries intervene, in the midst of the coronavirus: the hegemon and its allies advance pawns in this highly strategic region while the media fills the public opinion of the Americanosphere with frightening stories of a coronavirus that won’t disappear with the summer heat and will return to the attack at the first frosts of autumn. The Palestinian writer Said K. Aburish recalls, in works that are practically never cited in polemics revolving around the Israeli – Palestinian conflict, the constantly pro-Western role of the Saudis, tacit allies of the Zionist project since the First World War, of the project envisioned by the Protestant Biblicist Sykes.

The capital that Iranian oil can constitute for the Islamic Republic, as it once was for the Shah, could fuel a Euro-Iranian economic pole, without damaging Russia, which the hegemon would never allow, the hegemon has no desire to see any (peaceful) European or Russia or even Indian and Chinese intervention in the territorial heart of “the Greater Middle East” that it reserves entirely to itself for the next gamble, in order to make it a territory with a “penetrated economy” with more exponential demographic growth than the rest of the world (although Iran is experiencing a certain stagnation in birthrate). The “Greater Middle East” is not only a reserve of hydrocarbons but a space where the gigantic cotton production of the former USSR remains, which interests the American textile industry.

Trump – despite his electoral promises and the hopes he excited among millions of naive people, who believed that he alone would vanquish the Deep State totally composed of “neocon” coteries – hasn’t prevented the recruitment of a new generation of neocons into the intricacies of his government and within the American ministry of foreign affairs: thus for the Middle East, Simone Ledeen, daughter of the muscular neoconservative Michael Ledeen, will shape the contours of future American policy in this region of great turbulence. She is the author, with her father, of a book entitled, How We Can Win the Global War, where America is portrayed as an empire of Good, well intentioned but besieged by a certain number of pernicious enemies, of which Iran is the principal instigator, the center of the anti-American plot in the world. This new promotion of a neoconservative dame of the purest type, a part of the machinery of neoconservative foreign policy since 2003, was enacted during the period of the coronavirus crisis.

Finally, the planetary coronavirus crisis camouflages the present maneuvers of the hegemon in its own hemisphere, seeking to destroy the quadricontinental dimension the BRICS assumed when Brazil was a part of it and when Argentina sought to become closer to it. Today, in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, the United States multiplies the pressure against Venezuela, interfering in the Caribbean where it deploys its fleet, reacting against the Islamic Republic of Iran’s naval escort of Iranian oil tankers, although nothing, according to international law, could criminalize bilateral commercial relations between two countries boycotted by the United States and, in turn, by the entirety of the Americanosphere. At the same time, Trump, who was elected to counter the machinations of the Deep State but who has henceforth promoted them in his own way, declared the withdrawal from “Open Skies” Treaty, which permitted the signatories to observe each others military movements, in hope for transparency and pacification. With the American withdrawal from the treaty concerning the Iranian nuclear program, we have the premises for a new Cold War, premises that Russia deplores, which are deliberately erased from the preoccupations of the masses in Western Europe, panicked by the real or imagined progression of the coronavirus, glued to their screens recording the dead, preoccupied with the purchase of masks or hand sanitizers or hoping for the release of a vaccine on the pharmaceutical market. During these mundane disturbances, generated by the soft power and the technologies of four dimension warfare, the pawns of the new Cold War have advanced, rooted in strategic reality.

Thus the crisis has not frozen the dynamics of global geopolitics, it has hidden them from the view of the masses; it has allowed the media to flood us with more or less artificial alarming news, while the protagonists of “large scale politics” hone their arsenals and prefect strategies to apply in the third decade of the 21^st century.

Source: https://strategika.fr/2020/05/23/peut-on-definir-une-geopolitique-du-coronavirus/

The Geopolitics of Coronavirus – Interview with Robert Steuckers – Strategika -April 6th 2020

01 Friday May 2020

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2020, Robert Steuckers, Strategika, The Geopolitics of Coronavirus

In the midst of a global crisis unprecedented in its extent, Strategika offer the clarity of thinkers and analysts recognized in their domain of expertise. We’ve asked each one a series of questions focusing on different aspects of this veritable crisis of civilization as well as its political, geopolitical, and social repercussions.

Today Robert Steuckers responds.

Robert Steuckers, born in Uccle in 1956, graduated from the Institut Maria Haps, associated with the University of Louvain, where he obtained his Master’s in English and German languages. He directed a translation agency in Brussels for twenty years before devoting himself to various tasks teaching languages. He created the think tank “Synergies européennes” in 1994, which has organized summer universities in France, Italy, and Germany. He manages, with others, the site Euro-Synergies which has posted nearly 17,000 feature articles, available to everyone. He also has a Twitter account Robert Steuckers (@RobertSteuckers) updated daily. Robert Steuckers is the author of numerous books and essays, notably the trilogy Europa, a truly complete work on the identity and history of European peoples as well as La révolution conservatrice allemande and Sur et autour de Carl Schmitt.

Strategika – We read many contradictory elements according to different sources of available information or opinions of health professionals. What is the effective reality of this pandemic according to you?

We cannot exclude a natural origin of the pandemic (though I remain skeptical regarding the fable of eating pangolin or bat) but we should also agree to discuss another hypothesis: the hypothesis of an act of bacteriological war directed against China, Iran, and Europe, the three principle hosts of the malady. The mutant virus, as it seems to have mutated, could also have escaped from a Chinese laboratory or somewhere else but then why did it strike the principal rivals of the hegemon, nearly to the exclusion of other regions of the globe? If the hypothesis of a bacteriological war is accurate, we can establish the following scenario: the nerve center of China is hit, its industry, boosted by neoliberal relocations elsewhere in the world, especially Europe, is slowed, which has an effect on its currency, capable of supplanting the dollar in the intermediary term. Moreover, this slowdown or sabotage stifles the establishment of the famous “silk roads.” Iran, the enemy number one of certain neoconservative circles, was struck in turn, as it easily could become the principal supplier of hydrocarbons to China and a very important commercial partner with Europe, as it was during the end of reign of the last Shah, notably with the EURATOM accords. This is the thesis of Houchang Nahavandi, a former minister of the Shah and author of very important books on the recent and ancient history of Iran, which I highly recommend reading.

In Europe, calamities batter the weakest links and the principal motor of the European economy, Germany. Greece must confront the refugee crisis on its Thracian border, while its economic and financial health has wavered for a dozen years, following the 2008 crisis. It has still mostly escaped the coronavirus but … Wait and see … Italy, recall, signed special accords, making it China’s springboard into the EU. Spain also received the full brunt of the pandemic crisis as it is also a fragile economy that risks ruining the European project, promoted by the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, then judged competitive and deemed, notably by the Clinton Doctrine, as “alien,” that is to say as a potential enemy, if not a declared enemy. France was struck too, even if, officially, it is considered an ally since Macron, the president was intellectually shaped by an American school. It is progressively emptied of its industrial flagships (Alsthom, Latécoère,…) and slowly infested by the coronavirus, quite simply because the hyperliberalism that has weakened it since Sarkozy’s presidency, has slashed through the non-mercantile sectors, including medical. Without a strong medical sector, robust, capable of predicting all forms of pandemic, including those which could be unleashed through a bacteriological strike, a country is an ideal target for this type of operation.

The “De-Gaullization” of France, from Sarkozy onward, constitutes the dismantling of a state that had Clausewitzian reflexes, desired by the soldier De Gaulle, at least in his theoretical writings, in the influence that Raymond Aron, the great specialist on German strategy of the 19th century, exercised on him, and in his original praxis in the 1960s, which could be described as a “third way” model between the two Cold War blocs. It was a response to the inabilities of the Third Republic, lambasted by Simone Weil in London before her death in 1943, and the political mismanagement and vacillation of the Fourth. These types of regime manage shortsightedly and foresee nothing, which leads to the incapacity to decide at opportune moments or confront unforeseen catastrophes, like a pandemic. The “French suicide,” described by Eric Zemmour is precisely this progressive dismantling of the Clausewitzian state – with all its mechanisms put in place that always predicted the worst – which the Fifth Republic sought to be at its proclamation and especially in the years 1963 – 69.

The moral of this is that any state or state group, must imperatively, if it wants to survive the intrigues of its enemies (there’s always an enemy as Julien Freund said), retain its industrial assets and refuse relocations and mergers with foreign firms, preserve solid medical infrastructures and a competitive academic / university system.

In Germany, the expected mechanisms for a pandemic have been retained, which explains their superior management of the coronavirus crisis. Nevertheless, the future of Germany isn’t rosy: the flows of refugees who’ve settled on their territory are ruining their exemplary system of social security which was established in the post war era and generate ceaseless disorder in streets of towns; today the principal partner of German industry is China but this dependency is fragile, the Chinese always end up producing what they need for themselves, notably automobiles. German industry has wagered too heavily on the export of its excellent automobiles, without imagining that this flow could dry up one day. Furthermore, the German – Russian gas partnership is in the hegemon’s sights: European enterprises that contribute to the completion of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline are directly threatened with trial by American “justice” or the confiscation of their holdings in American banks. The affair of Frédéric Pierucci, the Alsthom executive, illustrates well what this risk is, notably in the testimonial book this executive drafted after his imprisonment in the United States: The American Trap.

Finally, Germany is experiencing a political crisis unparalleled in its post-1945 history. The parties which have been the standard-bearers of the Federal Republic since the economic miracle and the reunification following the disappearance of the Berlin Wall, are in free fall. The socialist SPD is only a shadow of itself; the CDU, the real pillar of the country, is experiencing problematic downturns and is in depression in all Länder of the former GDR. This downturn or decline is not an exception in Europe: the Italian Christian Democrats disappeared from the stage long ago; the Spanish PPE is in liquefaction, which allows a false left, despite labels, to poorly govern the country in crisis and face the pandemic; the two Belgian Christian Democratic parties are also on the way to disappearance. The erasure of the Christian Democrats and Socialists raises an issue: another political normality is being constructed but we do not yet know what form it will take. Only Orban keeps his Hungarian form of Christian Democracy in a functional state, simultaneously obtaining a certain consensus in his country but lambasted, even ostracized by Eurocratic bodies who are pressing for him to be excluded from everything.

German decline is inevitable, contrary to what we generally believe in France today, where certain circles stir the specter of offensive Pan-Germanism again. Beyond the Rhine, literature protesting the system is flourishing and it’s no longer limited to margins of the left or right but henceforth comes from the highest economic and intellectual spheres. We must refer to it because the arguments advanced by these critics would combine very well with the critiques of Eurocracy in vogue in France. It’s an excellent theme for Strategika!

If the pandemic strikes the United States, whose hospital system leaves much to be desired, one could argue that the hypothesis, which is only a hypothesis, which I sketched here is erroneous because the hegemon, accused unleashing bacteriological war, would be exonerated of this accusation, seeing that it is struck by the pandemic itself. But the first victim can easily throw it back and spread the disruptive agent back to the sender, every bacteriological operation has this particular feature.

Strategika – Does this pandemic precede an economic and systemic collapse?

I think so. Firstly, confinement slows down industry in a system that tolerates no pause. For Carl Schmitt, the world globalized through Roosevelt’s will in the 1930s and 1940s, highlighting the element of “water,” because the hegemony erected by this American president is an ideologically liberal thalassocracy: so we navigate this immense symbolic ocean on the flows of merchandise and communications controlled from the start by American naval power: which quite simply treads water against a flowing background as Carl Schmitt wrote in his Glossarium (not yet translated). Finally, I always thought that the crisis of 2008, much deeper than we believed until today, was not really resolved: they plugged breeches on an ongoing basis through all sorts of artifices, they delayed its consequences twelve years. These patch-up maneuvers are coming to an end. And they will blame the virus for the definitive implosion of the system so that people don’t seek to name the guilty.

Strategika – More than three billion people on earth are being asked to confine themselves. For the first time in history, humanity seems to have succeeded in coordinating themselves in a unitary manner against a common global enemy. What does this situation make you feel?

This situation is frightening because if there is a pandemic, it has doubtlessly not been much more explosive than habitual seasonal flus, at least until now. The virus is certainly more virulent than other flu viruses, more resilient once expectorated from a human body and more aggressive towards the respiratory system of the weakest patients, whose immune systems are weakened by other pathologies. We’re facing a situation comparable to the situation in 1968 and 1969-70 where a flu virus killed, at times, up to 4,000 people a week in France alone! In 2018, from February 26th to March 4th, 2,900 people died from the seasonal flu in Belgium, in one little week!

The hypotheses that say the dominant circles orchestrate panic in order to establish a dictatorial, panoptical system, the vector of universal and ubiquitous surveillance, should be taken seriously. The sheep-like comportment of citizens is astonishing in such a context, when it’s obvious that it’s in the interest of the ruling spheres to promote such a system: the Italy of Salvini or even post-Salvini Italy is an unpredictable country that must be subdued; the France of the Yellow Vests that rejects the hyperliberalism they wish to impose on it deserves, in their eyes, severe punishment; and the Germany that boos Merkel at each of her public appearances should also be chastised, so long as it heats itself with Russian gas and runs its industry, automobile or otherwise, with these Putinian hydrocarbons.

We’ve entered into the era of planetary “monitor and punish” which Europe will be the principal victim of, as the Chinese and the Iranians are more willing to accept the human costs and possess capacities for resilience superior to ours, they can draw on Shi’ite or Confucian religion or the corrected and revised communist ideology, which more resembles the constructive projects of Friedrich List in the 19th century and the projects that he inspired among the ideologues of the Kuomintang, militants of a Chinese renaissance after the “century of shame,” where the Celestial Empire had fallen into a deep decline.

Strategika – Will this pandemic force humanity to endow itself with a global government as Jacques Attali predicted during the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009?

At least Attali formulates the project and there are traces of this messianic vision in a good number of his earlier writings. Furthermore, in a work dealing with the world as seen by the CIA, a dozen years ago, Alexandre Adler mentioned a pandemic as an accelerator of globalization, amplified if not definitive. Nevertheless I don’t see Xi Jinping’s China or Putin’s Russia embarking on such a project. Without speaking of Iran …

Strategika – Still in 2009, Jacques Attali explained that “History teaches us that humanity only significantly evolves when it is really afraid.” What do you think about this idea?

This idea is a general idea. Almost a truism. But if Attali, promoter of the globalizing project in progress, mentioned it in 2009, he’s referring to the idea that well orchestrated social and media engineering could create, if need be, the fear needed to bring a project such as the one he’s dreamed of for a long time to fruition. This creation of a global panic is what we’re witnessing today. But Attali is henceforth an old guru, the same age as all those he wishes death upon so that hyperliberal governments don’t have to pay for their retirement. However, the new global guru is named Yuval Noah Harari, famous for two bestsellers that we find in every language in every bookshop in the world, especially in large train stations and airports, where those who adopt nomadic lives, on big or small scales, pass. March 20th 2020, this Harari published a long article in the Financial Times, where the globalizing project in progress was presented in a pleasant and attractive fashion, as usual: we can’t criticize Attali or Harari for having a boring style, incapable of keeping their readers’ attention. Harari notes that with coronavirus, there is an emergency and every emergency “fast forwards historical processes.” Then, I cite: “Decisions that in normal times could take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours. Immature and even dangerous technologies are pressed into service, because the risks of doing nothing are bigger. Entire countries serve as guinea-pigs in large-scale social experiments.” Harari then evokes a world where there will only be online work and especially online teaching: the confinement, which we are subjected to, then seems to be a preparatory step to this future of complete reclusion, concocted in the highest ruling spheres. Harari then mentions the global monitoring of humanity, matched with punishments for the recalcitrant. He waxes lyrical saying that today, governments are stronger than the Soviet KGB as they now have “ubiquitous sensors and powerful algorithms” at their disposal. The coronavirus, he adds as if he wants to add grist to our mill, has already permitted the deployment of such an arsenal unseen in the history of humanity, notably in China where the state constantly manifests itself through the smart-phones of its citizens, using facial recognition technology on a wide scale and it can determine the health of each Chinese person through tools designed to determine if someone has a fever, that any policeman can carry and use on public streets. The following step is also revealed to us by Harari: feelings, like anger or joy, are biological phenomena like fevers or coughs: so we can detect them and manipulate them with the same instruments that they use to identify potentially “corona virus infected” fever patients in the streets of China. Finally, Harari unveils the final objective, quasi-Messianic, in short the Second Coming of the future: “global cooperation”, the only lifeline against the virus that should induce us all to opt for “a globalist mindset”, rendering local or national impulses useless. In other terms, Harari opts for a radically different humanity than the one Claude Lévi-Strauss advocated for in his time: Lévi-Strauss desired as many models of humanity as there were on the planet when he devoted himself to his ethnological research, he desired to promote an “ethnopluralist spirit” so that man had numerous available models to imitate or absorb in case of the stagnation or the collapse of the model to which he previously belonged, in which numerous generations of his ancestors had lived. Humanity must be plural according to this Lévi-Straussian ethnopluralism. For Attali and Harari, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I am nostalgic for Lévi-Strauss’ project, I’m not hiding it from you.

Strategika – How do you view the evolution of the pandemic and its political and social consequences in the weeks to home?

I think that it will incite panic at least until mid-May, until the moment where the slowdown of European industries will have irreversible consequences and the crisis will be quite palpable, with an incalculable number of failures among SMEs (small and middle sized enterprises). The social crisis in France will be accentuated and the Yellow Vests movement will regain vigor and continue with enhanced intensity. The other European countries will follow, Germany included. Next, confinement will end up agitating even the most patient natives and provoke unrest in risky neighborhoods as Ramadan starts at the end of April and extends until the end of May. There is something more serious: globalization aims to eradicate European culture, of which the clearest and most spectacular symbol was the burning of Notre-Dame de Paris. Confinement has sabotaged the implicit liturgy of our civilization: Easter vacations and paschal festivities, including the Spanish semana santa, were canceled for the first time in centuries, as well as the spring season in May, with religious festivals and communions, pretexts for familial celebrations that unite society. Following this sacrilege, as it must be called such, the summer vacation season will quite likely be disrupted, although it is a secular tradition, also punctuated by festivities. The humanity of our sub-continent will be deeply disturbed, psychologically undermined, with both somatic and psychological effects. It’s the most frightening short term risk as once the sacrilege to smash our millennium old liturgy has been unleashed, there will always be the risk of repeating it. But even by itself the yearlong rupture of the liturgical cycle, inherited from Rome, heralds catastrophes: they’ve never dared to do it before.

Strategika – Does a political solution to the situation you just described exist and what form could it take according to you?

A political solution, truly political in the sense meant by Carl Schmitt and Julien Freund, is only possible through an act of force, a cruelly conflictual ordeal. Through an upheaval equivalent to the Russian Revolution of 1917. But we are no longer in the 1920s or 1930s where millions of soldiers were returning from the front and didn’t fear being wounded or dying confronting the bullets of regime supporters or political adversaries. Moreover, today we can’t bring down a regime with simple rifles fitted with bayonets anymore. States are endowed with more sophisticated weapons, that one cannot purchase at the corner store, not even in the United States. They have “ubiquitous sensors and powerful algorithms” at their disposal, to paraphrase Harari. In our days, there are drones, cameras, centers hidden so well that it no longer suffices to seize the General Post Office as in Dublin in 1916, or, confronting Yeltsin’s armor in 1993, the Moscow radio tower. Our humanity is much too weakened by decades of “liberalism” (or the ideology of pleasure-seeking [Translator’s note: festivisme – see Philippe Muray’s work on the “Homo festivus”, a characteristic figure of contemporary Western modernity whose primary focus is to keep himself entertained]) to dare such an adventure.

The only form that a reaction could take would be a slide towards illiberalism in the manner of Orban or Putin, without duplicating the stupid left-right divide, as the enemy of both is the same: the hyperliberalism brought about in our societies by the Thatcher-Reagan duo from 1979 onward. But on the left, they retain heavy hostile reflexes towards the political, on the right, there’s still a tendency to sink into one form of liberalism or another. These are pitfalls to avoid, by making an appeal to a metapolitical imagination that can fuse opposed bodies into a new synthesis, where the principles of social justice and suum cuique [Translator’s note: Latin for “may all get their due”] are respected.

Strategika – How do you link the present crisis to your domain of expertise and your field of research?

I’m not an expert but an engaged observer. For me, the present crisis is the culmination of the restrained crisis of 2008 and, I could be fooling myself, a well targeted act of force, perpetrated through an act of bacteriological warfare that aims to annihilate European economic power (the only form of power that remains on our sub-continent), annihilate the Chinese challenger, and ruin the “silks roads” project, with the continued support of planetary media orchestration. We are engaged in hybrid wars or fourth generation wars, that is to say wars where they no longer line up armies of tanks and infantrymen but where they skillfully apply indirect strategies. Europe, as certain observers already noted in the 1990s and 2000s, was the least well prepared handle the media and cultural tools of this new dimension of warfare: that’s extremely true and it’s paying the consequences heavily today. If Europe’s project was Clausewitzian instead of neoliberal, it wouldn’t be in this situation …

Source: https://strategika.fr/2020/04/06/geopolitique-du-coronavirus-v-entretien-avec-robert-steuckers/

Eduard Limonov: The death of a dissident and a writer – Revue Éléments – March 17th 2020

10 Friday Apr 2020

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Sergei Shargunov announced the death of the writer and dissident Eduard Limonov today, at the age of 77, on the Russian opposition site mediazona, an announcement confirmed by a brief communique from the political party Drugaya Rossiya (The Other Russia), founded on July 10th 2010 by Eduard Limonov, after the ban on the National Bolshevik Party, in 2006. “Today, March 17th, Eduard Limonov died in Moscow. All details will be given tomorrow,” the party explained in a messaged published on its Internet site.

Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko, better known as Eduard Limonov was born on February 22nd 1943, in Dzerzhinsk in the USSR. A journalist, we discovered him, about thirty years ago through his prodigious punk reports in the late Jean-Edern Hallier’s L’Idiot international. Then he returned to Russia. To attempt a coup d’etat, which he failed. He succeeded at other exploits. Limonov experienced everything. Prison and great books. An old fellow traveler of Éléments, the Russian writer came to greet the editorial team during his last Parisian trip, in June 2019, on the occasion of a report on the Yellow Vests. Limonov came to Paris to meet them, see them, learn directly from them. “There is a “left-right” mixture with them that pleases me,” he confided to us in his last interview, published in September 2019, which we publish below.

ÉLÉMENTS: What has Putin done to make you hate him so much? Has he not accomplished more than the author of “The Manifesto of Russian Nationalism” could hope for? Has he stolen your dream: the restoration of Russian power?

EDUARD LIMONOV: For his first term in 1999, Vladimir Putin was an altogether classic liberal politician, of which we’ve had far too many, who surrounded himself with liberal playboys like Berlusconi or your president Sarkozy. So I had every reason to be against him. And no, he didn’t steal my dream because our social and economic system still remains deeply liberal. Putin should settle this contradiction. Today, Russia is a more unequal country than India! 1% of the population possesses more than 60% of the national wealth. In the United States, not an especially egalitarian society, the richest 1% only possesses 35% of the national wealth. So long as that’s true, the National Bolshevik Party will defend the idea of a less unequal society. That said, Putin has changed. He has aged. He has become wiser, more serious. There was evidently a turning point after Dmitri Medvedev’s shift as president. I don’t detest Putin. My opinion on him has evolved. As chief of state, he’s better than Boris Yeltsin. But he remains the leader of a bourgeois state where the oligarchs have all the rights and the citizens have very few. Nevertheless we must recognize that, in the present cold war against the West, he holds patriotic positions.

ÉLÉMENTS: One has the impression that your opinion on the Soviet Union has changed. Before the fall of the regime, you didn’t spare it your criticisms, but it was different when it collapsed: you started to miss certain aspects and show a certain nostalgia. Was it your opinion that evolved or instead should we view it as a way of remaining faithful to your status as an opponent of both regimes?

EDUARD LIMONOV: I’m much less nostalgic than any other political reader! I never dwell on figures like Stalin, in order to keep him to myself. I never considered the Soviet model in model terms. I’m not really nostalgic, my soul is too practical. I think to the future instead.

ÉLÉMENTS: Are you the leader of a party or the leader of a literary school?

EDUARD LIMONOV: Alas I consider myself a failed politician! I reminded my country of a few important ideas, like patriotism, in an era when the government was completely under the liberal scythe.

ÉLÉMENTS: Would you prefer a coup d’etat to succeed instead of your books?

EDUARD LIMONOV: Certainly for a coup d’etat to succeed. I was forced to hide myself behind my books.

ÉLÉMENTS: Physically, you’re often compared to Trotsky. What’s your opinion on this personality who, according to you, succeeded with his coup d’etat?

EDUARD LIMONOV: Trotsky was an important personality in the Russian Revolution, perhaps more important than Lenin, a brilliant tactician, founder of the Red Army. Malaparte was right to say that he was the genius of the coup d’etat. But these comparisons with personalities from the past are very approximate and ultimately reveal nothing about me. It’s been fashionable since Emmanuel Carrère’s novel: one day I’m a Russian Jack London, then the next a sort of “Soviet Barry Lyndon.” Ultimately that means nothing.

ÉLÉMENTS: What became of the National Bolshevik Party? Why the split with Alexander Dugin? Is it because you do not share his great Eurasian dream? To be honest, for us readers of authors in the National Bolshevik galaxy, it’s rather mysterious. We imagine you’re a hundred times closer to Zakhar Prilepin and Alexander Dugin, but you admittedly followed Gary Kasparov, a liberal, for a time. Why?

EDUARD LIMONOV: Firstly, Kasparov is an idiot and a coward. Secondly, the reasons for my split with Alexander Dugin have no importance in my opinion. He’s a estimable thinker, but not the leader of a political party. As for the rest, I’m not interested in origin mythologies. It’s certainly interesting in the world of ideas, but politically speaking, the Eurasian idea is no more defensible than Pan-Slavism for example. Eurasianism was a dream of a few politicians and exalted savants, who failed in Prague.

ÉLÉMENTS: What memories do you retain from your Parisian visit in the 1990s.

EDUARD LIMONOV: Principally, the meetings of the editorial team of L’Idiot international at the place des Vosges, in Jean-Edern Hallier’s big apartment. For the first time in France, writers of the left rubbed shoulders with writers of the right. I met Alain de Benoist there for the first time too…

I remember one day, while we waited for Jean-Marie Le Pen, the boss of the FN, and Henri Krasucki, the boss of the CGT, Philippe Sollers was at the piano playing L’Internationale. Curious, no? The France of that time wasn’t accustomed to such a “red-brown” salad in the same dish.

ÉLÉMENTS: Since the death of Jean-Edern Hallier, is there still something to do in France?

EDUARD LIMONOV: Ah Jean-Edern, I miss him! He wasn’t courageous, a bit weak, his head was always somewhere else, but I miss him. Of course, there is always something to expect from the French people, the Yellow Vests for example. They represent a hope, an example for us Russians. I came to Paris to meet them, see them, learn from them directly on the spot. There is a “left-right” mixture with them that pleases me, a bit like the National Bolshevik Party that we created in 1992, with Alexander Dugin. We were early. Today France is catching up with us.

ÉLÉMENTS: How do you view the “great Western hospice”? More than ever as a nursing home, a holiday resort club, a tomb?

EDUARD LIMONOV: Curiously, I was more pessimistic for Western Europe at the time than today. I thought Europe was lost. I crossed the whole of Paris with an enormous crowd of Yellow Vests, which reminded me of the great demonstrations in Moscow in the 1980s. I was impressed by the crowd. I follow every act of the Yellow Vests and I reported on them this Sunday in Russian papers and websites.

ÉLÉMENTS: You were also close to the writer Patrick Besson at the time …

EDUARD LIMONOV: A lot of talent, but always a bit timid politically. He became a sort of bourgeois writer, no? Big and fat with bourgeois thoughts that go with it. He always thought in terms of bourgeois success, too sarcastic and ironic to have a political mind. One day, he came to Moscow for an article. He was only preoccupied by useless details of life and his translator’s eyes. Typically bourgeois. Like his reactions. He thought that politics was a “side” career for me, “not serious.” Hold on Besson, we have seventeen dead! I was condemned to four years in prison. And you say that politics isn’t serious! Every year, I go to the cemetery for my comrades.

ÉLÉMENTS: Where do you situate yourself politically? Are the red and the brown still your trademark colors?

EDUARD LIMONOV: I’m still a radical. I still say to my friends that we must be more radical now than we were twenty years ago. I even predict: “Your children will be worse off than you!” Furthermore, it’s an ordeal to wrench them from their computers!

ÉLÉMENTS: Is violent action still on the agenda? Do you continue to read chapters of the Nobel Prize biologist Konrad Lorenz’s “On Agression,” and celebrate raw force, vital spirit and energy? The barbarians? The Golden Horde?

EDUARD LIMONOV: Violence is more necessary than ever. Aggression is political.

Interview published in the August 2019 issue, Éléments n°179

Source: https://www.revue-elements.com/edouard-limonov-mort-dun-dissident-et-dun-ecrivain/

Farewell Comrade Limonov! – Rébellion – March 17th 2020

22 Sunday Mar 2020

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With an immense sadness, Rébellion’s editorial team has just learned of Eduard Limonov’s death at the age of 77. A writer and combatant, he embodied for us the model of a trouble-maker in a world of tranquil fools. Farewell comrade!

Eduard Limonov did us the honor of according an interview to our magazine in April 2004. On Limonov’s demand, Sergei Fomchenkov, a member of the Central Committee of the National Bolshevik Party, presented the organization. The writer then mentions his first imprisonment and his political ideas.

Could you present to us the ideology and objectives of the National Bolshevik Party?

The National Bolshevik Party is a political organization with a ten year old history of struggle, which counts around 12,000 members, more than 50 regional sections in Russia. The party members are youth (15 to 30 years) for the most part. All social classes are represented, as well as different ethnicities and religions.

Our ideology is based on the writings of the theorists of National-Bolshevism like Ustryalov, Agursky, on Eduard Limonov’s works. We also borrow relevant ideas from Lenin, Mussolini, Mao, etc.

Our goal is the seizure of power in Russia by means of a National Revolution. We demand the establishment of national and social justice in Russia, the complete change of the ruling class, the adjustment of the power of public officials, of the old bureaucratic elite, the redistribution and nationalization of property. We also fight for the vital space of Russia, for the alteration of Russia’s borders by means of the annexation of traditionally Russian territories. The short term objectives, more vital, are the fight for civil rights and freedom in the Russian Federation, and the protection of the rights of Russian and Russophone populations in the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent State, the Baltic countries, and Asia.

What tactic has the NBP chosen in Russia? What is the attitude of the authorities towards your activities?

Our tactic of combat is dictated by the political situation in Russia itself. The Russian Federation today is an aggressive police state with a hard repressive system. The Constitution (adopted in 1993) and the Criminal Code (1999), give the penal and judicial system practically limitless possibilities to combat the radical opposition forces. That’s why our methods are on the margins of the law. On one side of this margin, we have years of rotting in prisons and the reduction of the party to an illegal existence; on the other side of the margin a docile existence as respectable opposition. In the present stage of our struggle we employ acts of peaceful, non-violent, protest, like the occupations of the tower of the Marine Club of Sevastopol (Ukraine) under the slogan “Sevastopol is a Russian city!”, the Moscow – Kaliningrad train (a protest against the introduction of a visa regime), the rooftops of the Ministries of Justice in Moscow and other regions, and many others. A variety of these actions are called “velvet terrorism,” which was started by comrades Bahur and Gorchkov, who threw eggs at Nikita Mihalkov. This tactic could be called a “precision shot,” that is to say a strike at a weak point of the system. We chose a symbolic figure as a target and the action itself is a sort of political execution. Firstly, it’s a means of openly expressing the crimes committed by one or another person against the people, secondly it helps destroy the myth of invincibility and inviolability of people who are surrounded with a halo of power or popularity. They soon acquire concrete physical traits, showing their true face. Some start to turn on us in derision, responding to us with cowardly accusations, which doesn’t succeed without a text prepared in advance, for example, Zhirinovsky lowered himself with vulgar insults addressed to the executors of an action and orders to beat them up, which would suit a 19^th century innkeeper. “Velvet terrorism” actions attract enormous attention on the part of mass media, stimulating interest in the Party, its work, its opinions on the present political situation. We receive sympathy and support from the part of society who are also discontented with situation within the state but who do not dare or who are not capable of radical actions.

Moreover, the organization of similar political actions is good entertainment for people.

We try to remain on the margins of legality (our actions could be qualified by the law as administrative infractions or minor delinquency), unlike the authorities who fight against us. It’s not for nothing that one of our slogans is “We’ll teach you to love the Constitution!”

The authorities’ attitude towards us is also demonstrated by the fact that in many regions, the regional departments for the fight against organized crime “concern themselves” with the NBP. The explosions in Moscow, the fight against Chechen and international terrorism announced by the president have also become a pretext for the reinforcement of the police regime.

They’ve refused our registration as a political party on Russian territory four times, the last time directly before Duma elections, on made up bureaucratic “red tape” grounds. Against the National Bolsheviks they use illegal detentions, during mass events and during arrests – severe blows, threats, blackmail, torture of the detained and accused – standard operating procedure of the organs of “law keeping.” In the apartments of NBP sectional leaders and activists everywhere in Russia they’ve proceeded with searches, illegal confiscations of literature and party material. The special services do not hesitate to use such methods as kidnapping (a recent example – the kidnapping of Central Committee member Dmitri Bahur, who was savagely beaten by FSB agents who tried to convince him to “collaborate”), trumped up by planting drugs or weapons for them to “discover” much later during the search and also … murders which will probably never be proved.

Presently the Party counts four political prisoners. Among them, the last victim of judicial and bureaucratic sloppiness is the 27 year old activist from Belgorod Anna Petrenko, a single mother, senior teacher at a local university, social science diploma holder. Anna was thrown behind bars (she was accused of having planted an alarm clock inside a cake box in front of the Belgorod regional administrative building, which the FSB and the Prosecutor deemed a “mock explosive device”), her child was transferred to a youth home.

All these ignoble methods of combat against our party demonstrate the attitude of the authorities towards us as a powerful political force that threatens the criminal Russian Federation, the bureaucracy and police. And these very methods discredit its power before the people, stimulating only contempt and distaste for it among them.

What are your relations with other political parties in Russia?

In ten years of existence, the NBP has called for cooperation with political organizations many times. We’ve always called people, whatever their particular ideology, nationality, religious affiliation, or anything else, to rally together in the struggle against our common enemy – the system. But if such alliances form, our allies soon betray us, like what happened with Anpilov’s Labour Russia for example. Political parties don’t want to cooperate with us, either because our radicalism frightens them while they want to provoke sympathy among voters through their moderation, or they’re afraid of disappearing in our wake from their outmodedness, their dogmatism, the inertia of their ideology and the inadequate modern political situation in the country and world. We could give these political forces a real active life, the result of our success. They could give us their support, for example as official registered sympathizer parties, who have a certain status in relation with and an influence in the eyes of the population and authorities, a material support.

Today, on the eve of presidential elections in the Russian Federation, we call once more for political organizations independent of their ideology and left-right orientation as well as all citizens of Russia to rally together to boycott this crime organized amidst the people.

We calmly accept the short duration of such alliances. We have our goal and there only remains the means to attain it. Those who understand the advantage of collaboration with us on the path of struggle with the authorities presently in place will come to us on their own, because nobody else really fights with them in Russia now.

Recently a split happened between Labour Russia and its youth movement, the Vanguard of Red Youth (AKM), created on the model of the NBP, under Udaltsov’s direction. At the moment, the AKM has asked us to collaborate and of course we’ll try to meet them.

Do you have contacts with other National Bolshevik organizations outside of Russia? Do you desire to develop your political links on the international scale in the future?

Yes, we have contacts with National Bolsheviks in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Venezuela, Belarus, Israel, Sweden. We are striving to develop political links on the international scale. Presently, we’re actively working on the Anglophone version of the principal internet site of the NBP and the translation of the program into other languages.

According to Western European opinion, Putin’s policies lack clarity. How do you evaluate his policies? Are they different from Yeltsin’s policies?

This Western European opinion is not surprising. Putin tries to maneuver between the West and the United States. Having spent a few years in Germany, Putin idealizes Europe, endeavoring to join the European Union, not understanding that even if that happened, Russia would be a sort of economic “black hole” for Europe. Putin tries to construct relationships with Germany and France but soon betrays their interests under the pressure of the United State.

There is probably no radical difference between Yeltsin’s policies and those of Putin. Yeltsin made all his decisions under the secret influence of the United States or other Western states. Putin however, under the pretext of the fight against international terrorism after September 11^th has openly declared his pro-American position. Putin’s Russia calmly returns it’s spheres of influence to the Americans: American troops are based in the former republics of the Soviet Union – in Uzbekistan, Kirghistan, Tajikistan, they landed troops in Georgia and Kazakhstan and also started construction of radar detection systems for their anti-missile system in Azerbaijan according to the entente with the Kremlin and Baku. The Baltic countries have become NATO members. The Putin regime depends entirely on its principal patrons, it plays no autonomous role in the global arena.

The internal political situation of Putin’s Russia is characterized by the fact that power is concentrated in the hands of bureaucratic functionaries, former members of the Communist Party. Neo-liberals and oligarchs who received many liberties under Yeltsin are now completely sidelined from power and clearly losing in the competition with the bureaucrats.

Despite optimistic declarations on television, the facts don’t speak in favor of Putin at all. In four years the Russian population has decreased two million. On the map of the Russian Federation about nine hundred inhabited points have been crossed out, small towns in Siberia and the Far East where any prospect of life disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the Kaliningrad – Moscow route a visa regime was introduced, the situation of the Russophone population in the countries of the CIS and Baltics has worsened. On Putin’s account there’s the sunken submarine “Kursk”, the houses blown up in Russian cities, the interminable bloody butchery of the war in Chechnya, the collapse of the remains of the old Soviet army, the “Nord-Ost” theater hostage crisis in Moscow … and many other shameful and irreparable missed opportunities.

Presently, on the eve of presidential elections, our party is organizing the social movement “Russia without Putin” whose president is Eduard Limonov. The movement’s activities are directed towards preventing the reelection of Putin for a second term by means of boycotting the elections.

How do you evaluate the results of the last parliamentary elections in Russia?

I deem the elections that have taken place as well as their results an organized crime that was conducted against the citizens of the Russian Federation. The terms of the pre-electoral competition were unequal from the start. Gigantic administrative resources (that is to say means issued by the state for pre-electoral expenses) were at the disposal of the “United Russia” party that received the absolute majority of votes. Long before the official start of the pre-electoral campaign, “United Russia” positioned itself as the “ruling party” and insolently used its privileges. The key media platforms, practically monopolized by the state have become the loudspeaker of their obsessive propaganda. From independent observers of electoral precincts and simple citizens in many regions of the Russian Federation we’ve received information of the most glaring infractions during the elections, the violation of voters’ civil rights. For example, we know of employees being coerced by many companies, professors threatened with dismissal or non-payment to vote for “United Russia” in the presence of management. In the electoral precincts they throw supplementary ballots with votes for “United Russia” in the ballot boxes. Directly under the eyes of observers, who are forcibly thrown out if they try to stop the malfeasance, under the pretext, for example, of invalid identification papers. The same falsifications also occur during the counting of votes.

What attitude can we have regarding such elections?

Such elections are predictable but they surpassed even our expectations. The government has become so arrogant that it “massacred” the entire opposition – not only the Communist Party which has been politically dead for a long time, but also the miserable “Yabloko” and “The Union of Right Forces” that could have been put there as camouflage at least. The parties that displease the government, the NBP among others, were quite simply ignored: by refusing us registration the Ministry of Justice declared an active organization of thousands of people quite simply nonexistent. The others were neutralized by the 5% barrier, which only allows parties who surpass it to obtain seats in the Duma according to our laws.

What conclusion can we draw from the experience of the Soviet years?

We, the National Bolsheviks of Russia presently make the following conclusion: the revolution of 1917 was not as radical as various historians and the mass media present it. Under the influence of external factors and harmful Russian traditions the project named “revolution” fell. Since the end of Stalin’s rule, the decomposition of a passable project of a Russian state had already begun. The conclusion is quite pessimistic – there was never socialism in Russia, just as there’s not capitalism now (it’s described in Limonov’s book “The Other Russia” in more detail). And the positive conclusion is that Lenin evidently created the precedent for such a situation and we hope that it will be possible again in one or another form. That’s why we fight and rot in prisons.

The following questions are addressed to Eduard Limonov

Recently you were freed from prison. What caused your imprisonment?

Firstly they arrested me because of Karyagin’s testimony, accused under article 222 (illegal purchase, possession, and transport of weapons) (Dmitri Karyagin, arrested in March 2001, resident of the town of Balashov in the Saratov region – ed.). And then the FSB started weaving the spider web and it was only August 31^st that they subjected me to charges under article 205 (terrorism) and 208 (creation of illegally armed organizations). In October they added article 280 too (calling to overthrow the constitutional order).

Everyone present at the trial can confirm it was a matter of literary texts. It was a matter of three documents named “NBP-info”, and some other articles, the prosecutor even asked to add a request to ban the “Limonka” newspaper to the case. The newspaper would be banned because of my articles, chapters of a book already written in prison. Only the third charge, article 222, has any relation with reality: real sub-machine guns, real weapons. They spoke of text, paragraphs, who was the author of this text, who was the author of another, etc. This links my trial with that of Chernyshevsky. It’s the same, as bizarre as it seems. I studied him a lot and I know that he was arrested on August 7^th 1862 for a proclamation entitled “To the Lord’s Peasants”, this proclamation wasn’t even written by him. It was written by Mihailov. Then there was the provocateur Kostomarov who supposedly was going to print this proclamation via letterpress. There was a letter, seized at the border, by Herzen, addressed to Serno-Solovievich, in which Chernyshevsky was mentioned. It was about the publication of “Le Contemporain” in Geneva or elsewhere else in the West. We also have a letter intercepted at the border by the French citizen Morignac. It’s surprising and striking that 140 years later there’s practically the same precedent. After the Soviet government, after the Great October Revolution, 70 years of the dictatorship of the proletariat , we suddenly see our brave secret services turn towards 140 year old methods. In the Chernyshevsky affair there were 130 police reports about external surveillance. He had been tracked since autumn 1861. He was kept in the Petropavlovskaya fortress, where he wrote his famous “What Is to Be Done?” and then was sentenced to 20 years in a penal colony. The state practically destroyed him. Moreover he wasn’t just anyone, he was a revolutionary democrat as Lenin called him. He was one of the most brilliant men of his time. And so we discover 140 years later exactly identical methods.

I was confronted with the monstrous cruelty of the state, moreover with a cruelty so stupid and blind that it destroys everything completely. It’s surprising that during the course of the trial the prosecutor affirmed more than once that he agreed with our ideas. If he agreed, then what were we being judged for? For methods, as the prosecutor said. But we couldn’t have even applied our methods, we weren’t given this chance. And yet we’re judged for intentions, even if they cannot judge intention. Despite that, such is this monstrous cruelty.

What were the conditions of your detention in prison?

Prison is as difficult as camp. I went to three prisons and one camp. Of course it’s difficult, obviously. That is to say the idea of the Russian prisoner as martyr remains true because the traditions of executioners in Russian society have been preserved. You’re put in the hands of power – it presses you, it eats you up like a dog, and it’s satisfied. It chewed me up for two years and some of a third – they proved nothing and spit me out.

I can only compare the conditions in the SIZO [Translator’s note: detention center, следственный изолятор ] of Saratov with the Lefortovo prison, I suppose for Russian conditions, I was treated decently. Three people in a cell for 4 – around nine meters. My fellow detainees were there for robbery and banditry, from what I know. Coincidentally, they read some of my books. We were allowed to walk outside once a day, outside packages in a practically unlimited quantity. They gave me books from the library as I asked: the letters of Lenin, Herzen, and others. In the cell I had a television, sent by Viktor Alksnis. I suppose if I was an ordinary detainee the conditions would have been a bit worse.

As a writer, do you have relationships with cultural milieus in Russia?

Eduard Limonov maintains relationships with cultural milieus in Russia but very selectively, because even after they charged him with the most odious accusations, numerous personalities in Russian arts kept silent when he was in prison. Also, even before that, he maintained relationships and was friendly with people who were close to him in spirit, and those are few in number. We have numerous party members in cultural circles who are poets and musicians. Natalia Chernova, who attacked prime minister Kasyanov, is a poet and painter. Lukovnokova, who attacked the governor of St Petersburg, is a well known poet.

How do you evaluate the existing anti-globalist movement? Do its echoes reach Russia?

I would say right away that in Russia there is not and cannot be anti-globalists of the type that exists in Europe. It’s not relevant. Of course there are small groups under the leadership of the Communist Party. Habitually they only meet for a conversation around a cup of tea. With us, to survive as a political force it is necessary to have a party and not only a party but a living organism. People must be devoted to ideas, fanatics. Willing to sacrifice themselves if they must. And obviously, less words and debates on theory, but more action. As Eduard Limonov said one day: “There is no longer any left or right, there is the system, and the enemies of the system.” While we discuss who had more correct policies, Lenin or Stalin, Castro or Mao – the faceless anti-national system of global bureaucracy rules us, destroys us. Of course, compared with our struggle (we have around 10 dead and more than 50 people have spent time in prison) the demonstrations of many thousands of well fed anti-globalists makes us smirk. Because this quantity of people could easily organize a revolution and no police could stop them. Hope remains that the ideas of National-Bolshevism will be accepted by the turbulent youth of Europe and more serious and more malicious organizations will appear.

Do you believe that Russia will still play a role in Europe’s future?

Of course. If we happen to change the present course of Putin and the ruling class then Europe can also expect an outbreak of radical movements. It happened once in 1968 after Mao’s famous operation. The youth of France were lit up by ideas of a social revolution. Although the opposite reaction would also be possible because the mass media will necessarily blacken our movement. But if the policies of Putin and his gang continue (and he wants to lengthen the presidential term to seven years, this new tsar) then there is a possibility of Russia’s disintegration. With this option the consequences for Europe would be disagreeable.

Source: http://rebellion-sre.fr/adieu-camarade-limonov/

Institute for National Revolutionary Studies

Tag Archives: 2020

Ernst Jünger and the domination of the world by the Worker – Joachim de Brescia – PHILITT – May 12th 2020

Can We Define A Geopolitics of the Coronavirus? – Robert Steuckers – Strategika.fr – May 23rd, 2020

The Geopolitics of Coronavirus – Interview with Robert Steuckers – Strategika -April 6th 2020

Eduard Limonov: The death of a dissident and a writer – Revue Éléments – March 17th 2020

Farewell Comrade Limonov! – Rébellion – March 17th 2020