1. 'Neo-Nazism' - the fortunes of a word
When I meet fellow members of the Far Right in person for the first time, I like to characterise my politics as 'Neo-Nazi'. I do this for two reasons: one, the word possesses shock value (and I confess that I like to shock) and two, usage of the term helps you get down to brass tacks fairly quickly - your position will not be be confused with that of one of the other disparate factions of the Right, e.g., the conservative. It is true that when you use the word 'Neo-Nazi', you are wielding a blunt instrument, and by calling yourself it, you run the risk of lumping yourself with some of the more unpleasant and embarrassing factions of the Far Right, namely the skinheads and the Rockwellians. But upon meeting you, your fellow Far Rightists will quickly see that you are not to be classified with Ian Stuart or George Lincoln Rockwell so long as you a) wear longish hair and b) do not wear a homemade Stormtrooper uniform. A normal hairstyle and set of clothing will suffice, by themselves, to make you appear in Far Right circles a sophisticated and genteel man.
Unfortunately, 'Nazi', as a word, has become perverted and distorted by the American Far Left. As we all know, after Trump's election, the Far Left went on a witch hunt against Trump voters and sought to smear them as 'Nazi'. The word no longer referred to the NSDAP (a German political party which had ceased to exist in 1945) nor to someone attempting to revive the NSDAP's doctrines: it was transformed into something polemical and became part of an invective aimed not at Germans or even Europeans, but Americans - in fact, any American to the Right of Hillary Clinton.
The American Left has performed this act of appropriation in the past. The American left-wing journalist Eric Norden wrote a novel in 1973 called The Ultimate Solution, a fantasy (much like Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle (1962)) which projects a German victory in WWII and an Axis takeover of America. In the novel, Norden turns the 'Nazis' into - Americans:
The book is criticized as being too "farfetched", as many subjects in the book contradict real-life Nazism and some find it hard to believe that America could be occupied so easily. In the view of some critics, Norden – a radical opponent of the Vietnam War and other aspects of official US policies – might have meant to present to fellow Americans their reflection in "a very dark mirror" rather than portray a realistic alternate scenario of how World War II might have ended.
In support of the latter view can be cited such features as that except for one German appearing briefly in the first chapter, all Nazis in the book are Americans, including the members of the SS and Gestapo, the concentration camp guards and commanders etc. Specifically, the commander of the extermination camp where the New York Jews were killed is presented as a kind of "All-American Boy", universally regarded as a hero, and who did it "not for hatred of Jews, but because it was a job which needed to be done". Further, these Nazis use typical colloquial American expressions while on their Nazi business; members of the New York Police Department use the term "The Feds" when referring to the Gestapo; and they are proud of the Reich's space program and of having landed the first man on the Moon.
One can surmise that Norden was mainly targeting Americans, not Germans, with his absurd and grotesque propaganda screed. The past was altered to suit the needs of the present, politically speaking. Today's American leftists operate in much the same manner as Norden.
Similarly, communists in the period of the Cold War reworked the concept of 'fascism'. Communists used it to refer to, not to the Far Right regimes which flourished in Europe from 1922 to 1945, but to any political position which was both conservative and actively anti-communist. By this feat of legerdemain, communists in their polemics turned even mild and inoffensive figures such as Nixon and Reagan into 'fascists'. (Communists speak in code and use certain words and concepts (such as 'bourgeois', 'working class', 'fascist', 'racist', 'white supremacist') differently from the layman, and as a result, the uninitiated will find the communist oeuvre difficult to understand).
The contemporary misuse of the word 'Nazi' makes me inclined to cast about for a better, more appropriate word when describing my beliefs, and I wonder to myself: would the word 'fascist' serve me better? The answer to that is both yes and no. The layman takes 'fascism' to mean a loosely-bound collection of right-wing ideologies which held sway in the first half of the twentieth century and which comprised both German National Socialism and Italian Fascism. After the war, 'fascism', in lay-speak, refers to any regime - in the First World or the Third - which is right-wing and authoritarian. All well and good, but certain factions of the Right (the Counter-Currents faction, for example) which are opposed to Hitler and German National Socialism use 'fascism' as a means of distinguishing between 'good' leaders such as Franco and Mussolini from the 'bad' leader Hitler. (One must remember that up to the outbreak of the war, Mussolini was feted in the same Anglo-Saxon countries that Hitler was reviled).
As Francis Parker Yockey observed, the word 'fascist' is a loaded one. In Imperium (1948), he chronicles how America applied it throughout the 1930s and 1940s to a) any regime that America disliked and b) any country that enjoyed friendly relations with Hitler's Germany at the time (both a) and b) were commensurate).
This suggests that the much-mishandled term 'fascism', like that other nebulous term 'democracy', eludes precise definition and will forever do so. Much ink has been spilled on this by intellectuals who have attempted to come up with the 'fascist minimum', a bullet-pointed list of the key tenets of the 'fascist' doctrine. Others have taken a different route, arguing that 'fascism' should be understood not as a set of axioms but as an aesthetic.
If the latter is the case, one has to ask: which nation, in the twentieth century, led the way in setting the tone for the 'fascist' aesthetic style? The answer is, naturally enough, Germany. What France did for women's fashions, Germany did for men's. The Germans in the first half of the twentieth century transformed politics into a visual medium, and this 'fascist chic' was rooted deep in German - and Prussian - history and culture. It is mainly for this reason that one cannot separate 'fascism' neither from the Germany of the Hitler years nor from the Germany of the hundreds of years before Hitler (both Yockey and Spengler lauded Mussolini as a honorary 'Prussian').
Perhaps, following Yockey and Spengler, one can speak of a German Idea. Before WWI, this Idea was called 'Pan-Germanism'; at the outbreak of WWI, 'Prussianism', 'Prussian Militarism'; in the Weimar Years, the 'Conservative Revolution' (see Armin Mohler's famous book of the same name); in the Hitler years, 'National Socialism', 'Nazism', 'Hitlerism'; in the years immediately after WWII, 'Prussian Socialism', 'Prussian Ethical-Socialism' (at this historical juncture Yockey revived Spengler's term for it); in more recent years, 'German nationalism', 'Deutscher Nationalismus'. The last of these names for the Idea gives rise to the impression that the Idea is to be restricted to Germans only - an impression strengthened by Hitler's famous pronouncement that 'National Socialism is no article for export'. But this is contradicted by the fact that the Germans did a good deal of exporting of the Idea in both WWI and WWII. And today the Germans are being accused of wanting to do the same - by the British nationalists and conservatives who fought for Britain's departure from the European Union. (The EU, in the minds of British conspiracy theorists, is laying the foundations for a 'Fourth Reich', a 'European Super-State' dominated by Germany).
After this brief sojourn through the history of an idea, the reader will agree, I think, that the concept 'Prussian Socialism' is beginning to take shape; an outline of it is beginning to form. We can now look at the arguments for and against. I intend here here to look at some of the objections made against it in my own article, 'The Metalstorm'.
2. Argument the first: 'The masses don't want it'
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the masses of Germany - and the nations of Europe and its colonies (including America and Australia) - do not want 'Prussian Socialism' in any shape or form: one can make the rebuttal, quite cynically, that their wants and desires do not, in the last analysis, come into the question. After all, the masses did not want the tidal wave of non-white immigration that came to their shores after WWII, but they got it anyway; likewise, they did not want Greta Thunberg; nor did they want 'gender-neutral' toilets... The view of our reigning elites is: the will of the masses can be disregarded, and when important matters are being considered, it should be disregarded on principle.
Ironically enough, 'democracy', the bane of the Far Right in the thirties and forties, allows the masses to indulge their right-wing predilections and vote down, at every turn, communists running in elections: see the electoral defeats of the Far Left (which has hijacked the parties of the Center Left) in Britain, Germany, Sweden, France, Australia...
From that one may draw the pessimistic conclusion that the masses, in the West anyway, are content to stay within the bounds of 'normal' politics: that is, they will never vote for the Far Right, only the Center Right. The argument is that the masses want pragmatism. Even an economic calamity will not force them to move. Over the past few decades, we on the Far Right have taken up the Marxist thesis that economic collapse always brings about political collapse, a thesis which has been disproved by the example of Venezuela. Maduro may have ruined Venezuela, but he is still standing strong, and the peoples of Venezuela would rather flee than overthrow him (and fled they have, in the millions). The German economy at present is experiencing a downturn, but this will not translate into Germany's going 'fash', because of Germany's traditional resilience.
The Germans, for the past 75 years, have put up with an onerous tax - the Holocaust tax - which has been imposed upon them by America and international Jewry. While the Germans, deep down, may not believe that Germany during WWII exterminated the six million Jews, they are prepared to make obeisance to the Holocaust idea for the simple reason that their prostration makes them respectable. Economically, submission to Holocaust Exterminationism - and anti-anti-Semitism - allows Germany to survive: it grants them entry into European and world markets. But in the past five years, a new tax has been imposed by Merkel and German (and European) elites: the Muslim tax. (It is Germany's destiny, or curse, to be burdened - politically, economically, morally, socially, culturally - by the Semitic peoples). Will the mass invasion of Muslims finally budge the Germans? Time will tell.
The recent pseudo-scandal in Thuringia raises some interesting questions. In a minor piece of parliamentary horse-trading in a provincial legislature, the Far Right nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) joined with the conservatives to deny a communist, Bodo Ramalow, the state premiership. This has caused an uproar in Germany and elicited a disproportionate response from Germany's ruling class.
In the German media, the AfD are forever being compared to the NSDAP, co-operation with them to co-operation with Hitler in the Weimar years, but the reality is that the AfD only takes the same positions as Merkel's 'conservative' CDU twenty years ago. The sustained and violent emotional reaction has led me to ask, Freudian-style, if some deeper desire - in the unconscious? - stands behind it. Could it be that the German political establishment is in denial and secretly wants the Nazis back? This would constitute an example of one the favourite themes of Hegel's philosophy, and that is of an idea that brings forth its own opposition before uniting with it in a synthesis.
The German communists spent forty years in office, the National Socialists, twelve: but no-one in the German establishment treats a return of communism as an impending danger, and the former east German communists, who have rebranded their party as Die Linke ('The Left'), are allowed to go about their business unmolested by the German state. The German establishment lacks confidence in the efficacy of 75 years of Allied and Jewish brainwashing: it takes a catastrophist view of 'Prussian Socialism' and sees Germany as always standing on the verge of a National Socialist comeback. This proves to me that in Germany, at least, that 'Prussian Socialism' is a live idea, not a dead one. The corollary of this is that the Germans, as a people, have not yet been beaten down and worn out.
3. Argument the second: 'No-one wants war'
Anti-German propaganda from 1914 onward portrays Germany as a nation of maniacs who worship war and death. Anyone under the sway of such propaganda would conclude, naturally enough, that a reappearance of 'Prussian Socialism' in Germany would inevitably lead to another European and fratricidal war, and even if you do not yourself subscribe to anti-German propaganda, you must concede that plenty of powerful opinion-makers and politicians do, and that the mere presence of the anti-'Nazi' politicians in the governments of Britain, America, Russia, France, Poland, alone is enough to guarantee war. And this no German - not even the most ardent 'Neo-Nazi' - wants.
One must concede that 'No-one wants war' is an effective argument. Its simplicity conceals its profundity. On the surface of it, it looks like a repeat of the hundred-year-old German war guilt thesis, but a closer inspection reveals that it contains something deeper.
The first of its hidden implications is that warfare has changed since the start of the 21st century. We probably never will see the large scale conventional battles, in the style of WWI and WWII, on European soil ever again. The future success of 'Prussian Socialism' presupposes a strong German - or pan-European - conventional standing army, but at the end of WWII, the centuries-old institutions of the German Army and the General Staff were destroyed and with them 'Prussian Militarism'. In 1933, Spengler wrote that 'Caesar's legions are returning to consciousness', which at the time was a true statement: Caesar had his legions and Napoleon his Grande Armée, and Hitler was about to have his Wehrmacht. But the traditional 'Prussian Militarism' shows no signs of coming back, and - fortunately for the cause of European peace - neither the British, German nor French armies in their present condition demonstrate the capacity to wage war against one another. At first sight, then, history has shown that Spengler's predictions did not come true - neither Spengler's nor Yockey's. In his last essay, 'The World in Flames' (1960), Yockey meditates on the possibility of the Cold War turning hot, and he attempts to anticipate what would occur were this war to break out. He held that it would be a war of both conventional armed forces and nuclear weapons and one waged between the USA and the USSR with Europe stuck in the middle. He believed that such a war was just around the corner, and he was quite reasonable, given the circumstances, in thinking so, but luckily for us, he turned out to be wrong.
But a careful distinction must be made here. A war in Europe in the 21st century cannot be ruled out, as after all, two countries on the border of Europe - Russia and Ukraine - have been warring on one another for the past six years. The difference between 21st and 20th century wars lies in the fact that the style of war has changed. Steve Sailer points this out in his article 'The Dregs of War'.
So it could be that the 'dregs', and not conventional armies, will be doing the bulk of fighting in Europe's future wars. And because of the 'dreg' quality of these soldiers, one can speculate that the wars will be fought, not against the armies of America and Russia, but against the Muslims and Africans of Europe.
The second implication of the 'No-one wants war' argument is: the Germans do not want to live through another war (which, throughout WWII and at the end of WWI, was waged against the German civilian population), or defeat in that war, or the inevitable humiliation and punishment after that war. The Germans have by now gotten it into their heads that they cannot win a conventional war of tanks, planes, submarines and battleships, and they know that if they were to elect a nationalist government, international Jewry - and probably the British - would be clamoring for war the next day. A scratch force of French, British and Polish troops would be assembled in record time, and Germany would be invaded so that 'democracy' could be restored - even if the German nationalist party had won an electoral majority fair and square. (Perhaps an invasion force would not be needed, as the American soldiers garrisoned in Germany could be used to depose the nationalists). And would the Germans put up a fight? The more pessimistic among us will answer no: the Germans would fold straight away.
But here the pessimist is relying upon two assumptions. The first is that Germany's potential enemies would be implacably united in the face of a resurgence of 'Prussian Socialism', when it is equally possible that they could be hopelessly disunited - as the French were when Germans reoccupied the Rhineland. The second assumption is that the German nationalists will attain office in a traditional manner when, for all we know, history could take an unexpected turn. It is possible that the Germany of tomorrow could, say, tread the same path as the Cuba of 1959. Castro came to power after waging a guerrilla war as part of a 'united front' anti-Batista coalition only partially controlled by the communists, and after taking office, he hid his communism from the Americans for the better part of two years. (By the time the Americans found out, it was too late). One must admire Castro for his cleverness and guile. Nationalists - in Germany or any other Western country - could learn from him.
4. Argument the third: 'But Prussia is dead'
In Spengler's theory, each Culture understands the word 'nation' in a different way. In the Islamic-Magian-Semitic Culture, a 'nation', properly understood, consists of religious believers; in the Classical, citizens of a city-state, such as Athens or Rome; in the Western, the embodiment of an Idea. To Spengler, only five countries - Italy, England, Germany, Spain, France - are to be considered 'nations'. Four out of the five possess an Idea; Italy, peculiarly enough, does not. Spengler does not explain this inconsistency: perhaps he meant to say that Italy boasts a unique style, but is not possessed of an Idea, which is among other things a concept which can be expressed in a tangible political form.
Now, the Idea of Germany can be summed up as 'Prussianism', or 'Socialism', or 'Prussian Socialism', and that means that the Idea of 'Prussian Socialism' is grounded in the reality of a particular state - Prussia, or East Prussia. But that state was wiped out after 1945, and from this it is to be surmised, quite reasonably, that the 'Prussian Idea', 'Socialism', was wiped out in turn. And that would explain why it is that the Germans, since 1945, have displayed very little in the way of 'Prussian' or 'Nazi' characteristics. Yockey, Spengler's disciple, may have believed up to the time of his death in the inevitable return of 'Prussian Socialism' in Germany - and Europe - but he died in 1960, and did not live to see the Germany of 75 years after the war, a Germany which is (to use the Alt Right term) wretchedly 'pozzed'.
In response to this, I could embark on a careful, scholarly exegesis of Spengler and make the argument that no, 'Nations' and 'Ideas' in Spengler do not work quite the same way as described above. But I will take a different tack and move to untether the concept of Socialism from the actually-existing nation-state of Germany.
Since the war, the only place 'Prussian Socialism' has been revived is in popular culture: that is where the depictions of it (or as the unthinking Left would call it today, 'Neo-Nazism') have been made. I am not speaking here of the portrayals of the historical German National Socialism from the period of 1919 to 1945, but the fantasy National Socialism set in a far-flung future or alternate reality. The really vivid, powerful depictions of a renewed 'Prussian Idea' turn up in science-fiction, and this is how - these days - that 'Prussianism' of any sort manifests itself. So how does this relate to Spengler and Yockey? The answer is that, in their non-fiction, both men wrote a science fiction which belongs in the dystopian or post-apocalyptic genre. Their work is best understood when it is situated in a cultural context - the context of Dune novel series, the Warhammer 40,000 game, the Star Wars movie franchise... One cannot separate Yockey and Spengler from the popular culture and myth of the 20th century. (One has to ask: does the Empire in Star Wars incarnate the Spenglerian concept of Imperium?)
'Prussianism' in popular culture appears in these story-forms:
1) The Axis victory. In this genre, the Axis have won WWII, and now rule America. Best example: Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle (1962)
2) Travel into the future. German National Socialism is transposed into another world, another time, a setting which is far in the future. Best example: the Star Trek episode 'Patterns of Force' (1968)
3) The time loop. WWII never ends, mankind is perpetually stuck in the early 1940s, and the Axis armed forces are making better headway than they did historically and have nearly conquered England and America. Best example: the Star Trek Enterprise episode 'Storm Front' (2004).
4) The allegory. Characters (always the villains) in a future setting display typically 'Prussian' and 'Nazi' traits in their dress, mannerisms, attitudes, but have no connection to the actual German National Socialists. Best example: the Empire in the Star Wars movies, also the 'evil' version of the Voyager crew in the Star Trek Voyager episode 'Living Witness' (1998).
It is the last of these, the allegory, which helps us understand Prussian Socialism the best, as it presents us with a clean, uncluttered picture of the typical 'Nazi' and 'Prussian' attributes. It reveals the Platonic Ideal of 'Nazism', a pure symbol of 'Nazism' which is not weighed down by references to German history.
One could be forgiven for thinking that contemporary politics and popular culture each exist in their own spheres, neither of them communicating with the other. But this is not the case. Anyone who watches YouTube has been made aware of a recent scandal in popular culture, and that is the subversion of classic franchises such as Star Wars, Star Trek and Doctor Who by 'Social Justice Warriors', left-wing activists who have politicised present-day myths and sagas and ruined them thereby. A legion of YouTube commentators regard this politicisation as an attack on the foundations of present-day Western culture or at least an assault on the pleasant memories of their boyhood. Oddly enough, these commentators - and their hundreds of thousands of followers and viewers - did not pay much attention to politics before the SJW movement began its long march through the institutions. The question of whether or not Trump or Corbyn would win the election meant little to them. Most aficionados of popular culture devote all their energy to manga, anime, action figures, comic books, movies, TV shows, and have little left over for politics or any of the other pursuits of the 'real world'. But they have been hit where they live by the takeover of their beloved pop culture franchises by Cultural Marxist and SJW takeover. Their values, what they believe is the most important thing in their lives, have come under attack.
So 'Prussianism' today may be confined to the level of the mythical, Jungian underworld. But as the 'SJW Star Wars' phenomenon shows, a corridor exists between the dream world of popular culture and the waking world of contemporary politics.
5. Argument the fourth: 'Everything good in modern life will be taken away'
In my 'Metalstorm' article, I gave two reasons as to why we wouldn't see a resurgence of 'Prussian Socialism'.
The first reason was that the fascist, historically, ranges the heroic values of the fascists against the unheroic values of the bourgeoisie: as Orwell said (in his essay on Mein Kampf), most politicians offer their followers comfort and security whereas Hitler offers heroism and death. But what, in the late 20th century, was the more preferred: hedonism or heroism?
The question answers itself. After the fall of communism and the beginning of the 1990s we had reached - so the argument ran at the time - the 'end of history'. And in that decade, we saw the cessation of all violent ideological conflicts. The possibility of a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR, as foreseen by Yockey, was closed. And Yockey's dreams of a neofascist pan-Europe emerging from the wreckage of the Cold War were not to come to fruition. After 1991, the ideologies of eighties-era Russia and America - Marxism-Leninism and anti-communist, free-market conservatism - had canceled one another out, and with the demise of Soviet and Eastern bloc communism, Reaganism and Thatcherism could no longer find a justification for their existence. And so we slipped into an era of consumerism, hedonism and anomie - as summed up by the symbol of the American shopping mall. And this was good. What rational person would not prefer the nineties over the forties? Fascism may have been uniquely suited to the thirties and forties, and apologists for German National Socialism have long argued (and correctly) that without it, Europe would have been overrun by Russia. But by 1990, Germany (and Europe, and the West) had put the dark days of the 1930s and 1940s behind it - and breathed a collective sigh of relief for having done so. And that was the healthy, normal, rational reaction.
The second reason is related to the first. If we are to look at politics from the viewpoint of utility, profit and loss, what does one gain from being part of the Far Right movement today? The dissident Right - which has become increasingly negative through the Trump years - offers nothing but 'black pills' (in Alt Right parlance). To listen to it, Americans (and other Westerners) live on a hell planet. Because of non-white immigration, state repression and general 'pozzedness', the walls are closing in white people, and whatever oases of goodness and enjoyment they might find will soon be wiped out. But like the advocates of a fascist revival after the war (that is, Yockey and Evola), the dissident Right today finds itself increasingly out of step with the times. The Far Right's misanthropy isolates it from the world: like Nietzsche's ascetic priest, the Far Right repudiates the world, and then becomes nihilist. Nietzsche said that the nihilist repudiates the material world but, being an atheist and a modern, can no longer believe in the spirit world - the world of the spirit, which, in religion, saves and redeems mankind from the world of matter. A parallel can be drawn between this process and the dissident Right's intellectual wanderings. Like Marxism and fascism, the dissident Right opposes itself to the contemporary political reality, but unlike Marxism and fascism, it offers no way out. (The reader may be surprised as to the extent the dissident Right has spurned Mussolini and Hitler's project - especially in the Anglosphere). And so after a period of time, any intelligent and self-aware person who has joined the Far Right must ask themselves why it was that they did - what do they get out of it, exactly? They may receive wisdom from it, perhaps - but it is a bitter wisdom.
To look at each of the two arguments - one against fascism of old, the other, the Far Right of today - in turn. The first says that fascism does not fit in with the modern era, or more accurately, the postmodern era and the era of the end of the Cold War (a time in which postmodernism reached its zenith). Now, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union may have taken place thirty years ago, but even so, those events seem closer to us - in time and in spirit - than the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War...
A debate exists as to whether or not we still live in the postmodern era. Some say that postmodernism ceased to exist in 2001, the year in which 9/11 happened, the year which inaugurated the Bush '43 era and the War on Terror, the year which saw the birth of a new seriousness which stood in sharp contrast to the vapid and comparatively carefree nineties. The counterargument to this point of view is that postmodernism, with its jokiness, irony and kitsch, survived - or perhaps reared its head again - through the medium of the Alt Right and chan culture.
Whatever the answer to the question, 'Did postmodernism survive the end of the 1990s or not?', it is correct to say that fascism, or neofascism of the Yockey type, is not so far removed from postmodernism. The latter owes a huge debt to Nietzsche, as does Spengler. Nietzsche anticipated most of postmodernism - especially with his theory of perspectivism. Nietzsche (and Spengler) only disagree with the postmodernists on a few points, namely, postmodernism's sense of irony and detachment, its recycling and commodification of past styles, its juxtaposition of those styles. As an example of postmodernism in action, take the commodification of communism in the nineties - the faces of Lenin, Mao and Stalin appearing on bottles of wine. That would have been something neither Nietzsche, Spengler nor Yockey would have approved of.
Two movies - Blade Runner (1982) and The Matrix (1999) - serve as the bookends of the postmodern era. In response to critics of Spengler, who allege that his work is old hat - redolent of the bygone decades of the 1920s and 1930s - I contend that many of themes of Blade Runner match those of Spengler. One could write a dissertation on how the concordances of themes of Blade Runner and Decline of the West: for instance, the city of Los Angeles as portrayed in the movie gives us an example - a shocking, fantastical one - of what Spengler calls the Megalopolis. In that vein, the offshoots of Blade Runner - the novel Neuromancer (1984) and the yet to be released game Cyberpunk 2077 - conform to Spengler's vision as well.
Spengler anticipated modern developments in the realm of culture, and it may be that he may anticipated the coming developments in the realm of politics. Perhaps Caesarism, the fall of liberalism, the end of the rule of money, etc., all the phenomena foretold by Spengler, lurk around the corner. One cannot write off what Yockey calls the 'Resurgence of Authority' yet.
Here I have finished with the argument against neofascism. What of the argument against the contemporary Far Right, and all the alienation and pessimism its world view induces?
The Far Right consistently rejects the modern world and the more grotesque appurtenances of modern consumer culture. It longs for a return to nature, or at least something more authentic. Often the more conservative of the white nationalists want to turn the clock back to a time when the world was more white and more wholesome. Southern Nationalists, for example, look nostalgically back to the 19th century, whereas others misinterpret German National Socialism and posit that it is a pagan 'back to nature' doctrine. In this Americanised version of National Socialism, all the 'Prussian Socialism' is stripped out. The National Socialist becomes an advocate for a healthy lifestyle - and needless to say, a pure, organic, natural lifestyle. The 'return to nature' is held up as a contrast to the inorganic, artificial world of the shopping mall and Wal Mart, Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2077 (a computer game which depicts a future world bereft of children, families and old people).
But as Spengler records, the West's progression into the era of the Megalopolis cannot be turned back. Some things are forever lost - high rates of fertility, for example. Spengler tells us that the Roman emperor Augustus tried to turn around the decline in the Roman birth rate by the expedient of cash prizes to large families - but all for naught. Yockey, unlike Spengler, believes that fertility can be and ought to recovered, but on this point, he diverges from his master. Spengler may have died in 1936, but his work has proven to be - in comparison to Yockey's - to be more in tune with the modern era. Today's dissident Right could use some of Spengler's realism.
The dissident Right favours the past and rejects the present, and this attitude entails, oddly enough, a form of puritanism - puritanism which is rejected by most 'normies'.
Audiences react with ambiguity towards sci-fi dystopias such as Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2077. On the surface, we feel distaste towards these portraits of the Megalopolis, but deep down we find them familiar - and thereby comforting. Those of us who belong on the dissident Right are likewise torn in two directions when it comes to Retrowave, a new musical genre which recreates, in an uncannily accurate fashion, the sounds of eighties synthesiser pop. (These recreations sound more eighties than eighties: another instance of Baudrillard's 'hyperreality'). The genre, in its video clips, uses the imagery of eighties TV shows, movies and movie posters, and looks back on the eighties with love. But nearly all dissident Right activists condemn, like puritans, like moralists, that decade (Ronald Reagan looms large in American dissident Right demonology). From this, one conclusion to be drawn is that the adopting the positions of the dissident Right means renouncing what the 'normie' sees as some of the good things in modern life: it is almost as if one cannot be on the Far Right and at the same time a 'normie' who enjoys the Megalopolis, the shopping mall, the nostalgia for the eighties in the Retrowave genre...
I regard this as the most compelling argument against the Far Right. But it can be refuted by an iteration of Spengler's thesis that we in the West have advanced, too far, down the path to Civilisation and the Megalopolis. There can be no turning back, no 'return to nature'. We cannot give up shopping malls, artificiality, postmodernism, anomie, 'modern vices'. Any Resurgence of Authority will not see a return to the West's primeval past, to the Gothic Age, to the days of the Holy Roman Empire. We should not confuse Spengler's Imperium with Evola's 'Revolt against the modern world'. The Spengler Imperium will lack any return to the Evola 'Tradition'; its leaders will not possess the mystic corona that Evola detects in the Emperors of the Dark Ages. And if this inability to turn backwards to (what Spengler calls) the West's Gothic Age represents the 'Decline of the West', so be it.
Spengler does not make a fetish the past: he propounds a doctrine of change and evolution. But then, the NSDAP did the same. They revived 'Prussianism' but gave it a modern twist, and they pruned it of any the detritus that it had accumulated over the course of the 19th century. This refinement of the German Idea suggests that in coming years, 'Prussianism', 'Socialism', 'Prussian Socialism', can be pared down to their essentials even further (and as noted earlier, this task has already been accomplished in science fiction).
Spengler and Yockey regard the downfall of the Rule of Money, Liberalism, Rationalism, and Materialism, and the rise of the age of Caesarism and 'Prussian Socialism' as an inevitability. But one should not be led astray and regard this inevitability as being of the same class as the old Marxist thesis of the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism, the revolt of the working classes, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Marxists believed that history, and all of humanity, was converging upon a certain point: communism. But correctly understood, 'Prussian socialism' should be seen as one contending perspective, Nietzschean-style, among many. We live in - to use modern jargon - a multi-polar world. We should not see victory, in the sense of a 'Prussian Socialist' perspective thrusting out all others, as an imperative.
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