I.
Politically speaking, nothing matters more at the time of writing than the electoral fraud of the 2020 American presidential election - that and what those on the Far Left will do to us on the Far Right if they assume absolute power. So my writing on what is a purely theoretical question will appear to some to be an evasion. But in my own defence, in the last analysis one has to let the Americans - and Trump - fight their own battles. The Western nationalism that exists outside of America will survive 2020, albeit under straitened circumstances, and it will after 2020 face an uphill battle no matter who becomes US president, as it must contend with a Left which is in near-complete control of the media, popular culture, the Internet...
So let us look at a subject close to home. In my article, 'The Aussies and the Nazis', I defended the NSN (National Socialist Network) against that the charge that their National Socialism was un-Australian; my argument was that in fact the most prominent Australian nationalist group of the 1930s and 1940s (the Australia First Movement) did have close ties with the German National Socialists, as did most other nationalist groups (the ones that mattered anyway) in Europe. Today a Slovenian or Belgian or Swedish or Portugese anti-Nazi and anti-fascist may take the gambit of declaring German National Socialism to be un-Slovenian, un-Belgian, un-Swedish, etc., but that will not pay off, and we can see why from looking at the historical record, which is one of Nazi sympathising and even collaboration.
A charge which is far more difficult to refute is that the ideas of German National Socialism do not bear upon the present era, that they are not pertinent to it; they have no relevance. They are a finished historical product, bound to their particular place and time; their importance, their meaning, does not extend past the 1930s and 1940s.
The line of attack does hit home, and it is all the more powerful because any discussion resulting from it will bring up some thorny and profound philosophical disputes, one of them being the following: the Russian philosopher Kojève, when examining various Western philosophical world-views (or Weltanschauungen, as Hitler would call them), asks the important question, are these world-views ever-lasting or are they ephemeral? Are they are grounded in eternal truths or the fleeting notions of the day? Those who take the latter view argue that ideas, like popular music, are subject to fashion; they can be in one day, out the next. In this they follow the same course as any cultural fad. (Take the Emo subculture, for example, which was popular in the 2000s and then vanished without a trace in the 2010s, having went the way of the platform shoes and disco music of the 1970s).
Kojève regards this historical relativism as false, and furthermore, pernicious, and he compares it to the doctrine of the
Sophists. Nevertheless, my view is that its charges must be answered, especially when they are raised against a political ideology.
It is a fact that the passage of time, which leads to a distance in time, does bring with it a certain objectivity. We recognise, at once upon encountering them, what exactly the fashions of the 1970s and 1980s were, but we do not recognise, at least with as much precision, the distinctive attributes of the fashion of 2010s or even the 2000s; in the former case, much time has passed (hence the instant recognition) since those decades, in the latter, too little. Historical distance and the flow of time make the past a finished product, a closed book, and thereby give us an understanding of what a thing essentially is. This is what Hegel meant when he said that the 'Owl of Minerva [the goddess of wisdom] spreads its wings only with the coming of dusk'.
Was there a point in time after the war when we in the West understood what National Socialism was and viewed it with a degree of objectivity? Yes: in the 1960s. Given that politics is a visual medium - a thesis Hitler would surely agree with - my argument is that one means of getting to grips with a political idea is to see it. In the 1930s and 1940s, we grasped politics through newsreels and newspaper photographs; in the 1960s and 1970s and after, through popular culture - that is, movies, TV shows, comic books. Put that way, we see that a great deal of change in the popular depictions of National Socialism occurred over the past six decades. For one, by the time of Schindler's List (1993), the National Socialists (and the German people themselves) in popular culture had been transmogrified into a race of demons. A cynic would remark that such extreme ugliness in the portraiture of National Socialism always could be expected, but my contention is that it was not always so. Ernst Zündel remarked (in the 1990s) that whereas once the hero of the American war movie once raced against time to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima, he now races to liberate the concentration camps; popular culture, in portraying the war, had by the 1990s begun to favour the European theater at the expense of the Pacific and show signs of an obsession with the Holocaust. A shift had occurred, and I identify the turning point as the 1960s. In Rat Patrol (1966-68), Twelve O'Clock High (1964-1967), Combat! (1962-67) (the TV action shows devoted to the Western theater) the Germans are portrayed with (as Zündel observes) grudging respect, and in The Producers (1967) and Hogan's Heroes (1965-71), the subject of comedy. Undoubtedly the writers, directors and actors who served up this fare were attuned to the desires of the audience, a large proportion of which was made up of ex-servicemen, and this segment of the audience knew, from first-hand experience, that the Germans were not the monsters Allied wartime propaganda made them out to be. And so, perhaps, there was a pending reconciliation of sorts between the Germans and the Anglos? Whatever the case, the point is moot, because as Zündel remarks, by the 1970s the Holocaust had stepped in and nipped any rapprochement in the bud.
Time heals all wounds, and by the 1960s, enough distance had been gained from the war for it to be represented with a reasonable degree of objectivity, or near enough to objectivity - as close as Hollywood could be expected to get. But that brought with it its own dangers. When you turn National Socialism into a not-so-serious TV show or movie or board game, you are showing a high level of detachment from it - you are not feeling a sense of involvement, politically, emotionally, spiritually or otherwise. This is what happens when National Socialism, and the war, become part of the past: the pages written on them have become closed in the book of history. For you, a member of the audience of Hogan's Heroes and Dad's Army (1968-77) and who lived through the 1930s and 1940s, the realities of that time are unpleasant to recall, especially when you compare them to those of the present, the present being distinguished by its peace and prosperity; but the fact that you enjoy these comedies reveals that you do not feel much in the way of trauma regarding the recent past, as it is water under the bridge. You have achieved closure. In this state of mind, one can look at the battles of WWII with nearly as much detachment as one would at the battles of the Napoleonic Wars or the Wars of the Austrian Succession. But that means you are approaching postmodernism, and with it, postmodern apathy and irony.
What does that entail? In the past year, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been engaged in a war over a disputed territory called Nagorno-Karabakh. The Far Right, the Western nationalist movement, does not have a stake in the war; it has not pronounced, by and large, that one side is more 'based' than the other (as it did in two of the wars of the last decade - the Syrian Civil War and the Russo-Ukrainian War). If members of the Far Right were called on to play a wargame based on conflict, or role-play as soldiers in re-enactments of key battles, they would feel a sense of non-involvement; they would feel detachment. And no doubt they would utter witticisms while role-playing as the Armenian or Azerbaijani soldiers, witticisms which would express their ironic detachment. This is one of the key themes of postmodernism: a feeling of irony when one is re-enacting or repeating a past which one cares nothing about.
Perhaps the first person on the Far Right to act as a postmodernist was George Lincoln Rockwell. His politics exhibited a dual nature: on the one hand, he took his brand of racialist conservatism extremely seriously; on the other, he treated National Socialism as a prank, a joke (that was the subtext of his actions - had he been confronted about it, he would have denied it furiously and declared that he was a sincere and committed 'Nazi'). Fifty years later, we come to Rockwell's spiritual successors - the pranksters of 4Chan who ironically espouse National Socialism and fascism.
In a way, it was Jewish activism in the 1970s that saved National Socialism from descending into postmodern irony. As stated before, in the previous decade, the National Socialists were treated as objects of gentle ridicule in TV comedies such as Dad's Army and Hogan's Heroes, worthy opponents in action movies such as Battle of the Bulge (1965) and Anzio (1968). They were depicted as bad, but not evil. But then Jewish activists thrust the Holocaust story to the forefront of the public consciousness. No doubt the movie and TV audiences of the 1970s began to feel pangs of guilt at laughing at the antics of Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz. By the time of the 1980s - the time of Sophie's Choice (1982) and Shoah (1985) - audiences had stopped laughing altogether. The Holocaust onslaught was well and truly underway, and audiences were being deluged by hundreds - no thousands - of Holocaust novels, movies, comic books, plays, ballets, education classes, documentaries, museum exhibits... National Socialists were no longer to be laughed at, they were to be taken seriously, extremely seriously: the war was painted as a primordial clash between good and evil. (It is no coincidence that at this time the governments of Europe began to introduce serious penalties for denying the Holocaust, penalties which included fines and imprisonment, whereas only ten years before, the same governments did not actively seek to punish Holocaust denial - one could then write a Revisionist work and travel through Europe a free man).
Oddly enough, Holocaustism reached a fever pitch in the 1990s, the decade which represented the high-water mark of postmodernism. The postmodern-themed TV show, Seinfeld (1989-98), poked fun at Schindler's List, but that was the exception; 1990s popular culture for the most part treated the Holocaust with the utmost gravity. And the postmodernist, post-structuralist French intellectuals, who espoused a sturdy scepticism towards all 'grand narratives' (and the Holocaust, being part of Judaism and Zionism, is nothing if not a grand narrative), were taken in by the Holocaust like everyone else; hence their rote denunciations of the French Revisionist Robert Faurisson. I must confess that I was taken in at the time as well - not having access to any of the Revisionist works on the Internet - and I, too, viewed the Germans as a race of monsters. But then, when all your intellectual peers are declaiming with absolute certainty that a certain event actually did happen and that an ideology (and the country that gave to birth to it) responsible for it are evil to the core, you tend to believe them - it is human nature.
By turning the National Socialists into creatures of evil - akin to vampires, warlocks, witches, werewolves - the Jewish activists reanimated National Socialism; they gave the corpse new life - a strange, unnatural life, but a life nonetheless. In order to kill National Socialism, to deprive it of life, they would have been better advised to mummify it, to make it a thing of the past, something which could be handled as a relic, a curio. The 1990s was the ideal decade to accomplish this. In a 1992 work which was perfectly in accord with the times, Francis Fukuyama, inspired by Kojève, pronounced the End of History. What Fukuyama and Kojève meant by the idea was that history could be conceived up as an epic with a beginning, middle and end; and once the epic had come to an end, there was nothing left for the protagonists to do - no great feats to accomplish, no high ideals to die for. At the conclusion of the original Star Wars trilogy (1977-83), the Empire is defeated and the heroes Han, Luke and Leia resume their normal lives - lives which to us in the audience would have seemed dull and listless had they been put up on the big screen, as they would have been bereft of heroic exploits. Kojève's contention was that Man had arrived at the same point: the end of the story. Henceforth, Man would live an uninspired, base, even animal existence; he would be what Nietzsche called a Last Man, Spengler a Fellahin. And being situated at the end of history, he would look at the great and significant preceding events - for example the 30 Years War, or the War of Austrian Succession, or the Napoleonic Wars, or even the First and Second World Wars - with detachment. And with detachment, comes irony... One can see how this sense of historical distance lends itself to the anti-Nazi argument 'It's not the 1930s any more' - that is, while German National Socialism and Italian Fascism suited the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps, they do not the current year. And as it so turns out, Jewry in the 1990s could made effective use of that Kojèvean argument but instead it promulgated the Holocaust tale for what was mostly a religious purpose.
But I must emphasise, again, how damaging the 'It's not the 1930s any more' line of argument can be. Leon Degrelle writes in his memoirs how terrible it was in his post-war exile in Spain to read through the morning newspapers every day and not see his name mentioned; as a man accustomed to notoriety, this was a cross to bear. In the same memoirs, he makes the passing remark, with a sniffing condescension, that anti-tank weapons in WWII did not work the same way as they they are shown in the movies today. One can speculate that it must have been an alienating experience for Degrelle, once a soldier, now a spectator, to watch the war movies of the 1950s and 1960s in a Spanish cinema. Degrelle would no doubt have felt that he had been left behind by history. Which raises the question, what would he have thought of today's cultural developments? Only a few weeks ago, the bestselling computer game Cyberpunk 2077 was released. The game pays tribute to the Cyberpunk movie genre and hacking subculture of the 1980s and 1990s, and boomers (the children of Degrelle's generation) have a hard time making sense of these. Given that, what would Degrelle and his fellow post-war fascists Otto Remer and Otto Skorzeny, have made of them? They would have no doubt felt consternation and confusion. And this lends weight to the accusation that Degrelle was an old fuddy-duddy and that his wartime fascism today smells rather musty.
II.
Before anti-Nazi readers start congratulating themselves, I will make the point that, at some juncture in our lives, we all grow old; and for those of us who have political careers, at some juncture, we all become yesterday's hero. The aged and declining despot Ghaddafi of 2011 (the year he was overthrown) presents a sad contrast with the young and exuberant reformer Ghaddafi of 1969 (the year he came to power).
As a man goes, so does a civilisation: this thesis underlay Spengler's monumental work, The Decline of the West (1918-22). Kojève took much from Spengler, who anticipated his idea of the 'historyless man' (a phrase Spengler uses repeatedly), that is, the man left over after the end of the history of a civilisation; but Kojève's borrowing has never been acknowledged by scholars.
But Spengler contradicts Kojève on when it is that history, at least history in the West, comes to an end. Kojève says it was in the year 1806, when Hegel saw Napoleon on horseback in the town of Jena and subsequently conceived The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), an ambitious work which aimed to encapsulate all of philosophy, all of thought ('Spirit') up that time. Hegel therein concluded that, after Napoleon, Man had reached the last stage in his progress, the terminus of his historical evolution. Spengler differed in that he believed that there was no history of Man as such, only the history of the eight High Cultures, seven of which had died long ago - today only the Western Culture is left standing. And that Culture would not reach the end of its natural life until three hundred years (or thereabouts) after the writing of the Decline. For Spengler's prediction was that by the 23rd century, Western Man will enter the last stage in the West's historical cycle and will become 'historyless', a Fellahin, a Last Man. He will look back on all that has gone before in the history of his race without any emotional connection, without any emotional involvement, and he will devote himself to animal pleasures. His vast empire - which he had built in the preceding centuries - will go to rot and ruin, and he will become the prey of newer, younger, more 'barbarian' races. In other words, the West will suffer the same fate as ancient Rome, India and China.
Unlikely as it seems, it is here that Spengler rides to the rescue of the National Socialist (or as Spengler would call it, 'Prussian Socialist') idea.
Spengler's maudlin and frightening vision of a fading West, if it is to come true, will only come true hundreds of years in the future. According to Spengler's prediction, the 21st century shall see no Fellahin and no pacifism, only dangerous political struggle. Politics in that time will be taken extremely seriously, as it was in the time of Caesar and Augustus. And after the time of struggle is a time of peace - a peace imposed by the new Imperium. As to whether or not in this period the German Idea (which Spengler called 'Socialist') would ultimately triumph, Spengler hedged his bets; suffice to say, he did not foresee a liberal future, and indeed, he prophesied that in the 21st century the system of ballot-box electoralism would come crashing down. (And I would argue of that of this the events of 2020 give us a portent). (In order to avoid misunderstanding Spengler on this point, it should be made clear that is not the case that such political systems simply stop functioning; it is that they fail to maintain the confidence in them that they had enjoyed before). Taking all of Spengler's predictions into account, then, one can infer from them, as Spengler's disciple Yockey did, that in the new century Spengler's 'Socialism' does indeed stand a chance.
III.
My intention here has been to make vivid a contrast that exists between two different historical periods and their accompanying Weltanschauungen.
Spengler and Yockey published their work in what was undeniably a most dangerous and unpleasant time in Western history; Fukuyama revived Kojève's ideas in a time which was not dangerous and not unpleasant. Given the choice, any Western European (or North American or Australian) would prefer to live in the latter period over the former. And he would prefer, one over the other, one of the two ethics that accompanied each of the two periods. What are these ethics? We find them in our four authors. Spengler and Yockey praise the martial virtues (self-sacrifice, renunciation, discipline, courage, sternness...) whereas Kojève and Fukuyama reject them - in the world view of the latter pair, Man is to become a contented cow or sheep, a creature which poses no threat to anyone, a 'herbivore'. It goes without saying Western Man, c. 2020, prefers the latter ethos over the former. And it is this preference which has placed an obstacle in the path of all Western nationalism for the past seventy-five years. The nationalist believes that the West, and the entire white race, are in danger of extinction, but upon becoming a political activist and commencing a crusade to defend the West, he quickly discovers, to his frustration, that Western Man, because of complacency or stupidity, will not fight to save himself.
Discussions of this subject in nationalist polemics often lead to speculations as to what the breaking point, the last straw, for Western Man will be. And such a breaking point exists, for every nationality; September 1939 and December 1941 showed that even the most stoic and patient of peoples, once goaded beyond endurance, can snap.
Western Man has for the last hundred years been forced to shoulder a number of burdens. These are political and are in effect taxes which have been imposed upon him. They could be thought of as the price he pays for participating in normal society; if he does not pay them, he will be punished. A comparison could be drawn between them and the protection money paid to a gangster.
The rate and number of these taxes has been steadily mounting since the end of WWII. Taking America as an example, Americans, by the 1960s, had laboured under what I call the negro tax for hundreds of years, and the rate of that tax was dramatically increased at the time of the race riots and the new desegregation laws; by the 1970s, whites had been ethnically cleansed from some of the great cities of the North-East - for example, Detroit. Around the same time came a new tax, a new levy - the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which abolished the whites-only immigration system which had been in place for forty years. Hart-Celler led to a massive immigrant invasion, the largest in history. Following this tax - which should be called the Great Replacement tax - Americans had to put up with an additional one, the mandatory Holocaust education and indoctrination tax, which took effect in the 1970s and 1980s. Forty years later, new taxes were introduced: the Social Justice Warrior (SJW) tax, the transsexual tax, the 'Woke Capital' tax, the Greta Thunberg tax, the '#MeToo' tax, the deplatforming tax, the cancel culture tax... The year 2020 saw a Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa riot tax, and one of the most devastating taxes of all - the Great Reset tax, which has led to the vexations of social distancing, mask mandates, contact tracing, lockdowns, house arrests, curfews, forced unemployment, forced closure of businesses and perhaps, in the future, the introduction of a compulsory (and potentially lethal) vaccine. The Great Reset has engendered, as we know, pathological social phenomena on a stupendous scale. And in case one thought that things could not get any worse, the year 2020 concluded with the Joe Biden electoral fraud tax, which will exacerbate tensions between the Left and Right to an alarming degree and could eventually lead to a sundering of the American republic.
Economic theory posits the hypothesis of what is called the Laffer Curve: this is the proposition that past a certain point additional tax hikes will see a diminution, not an increase, in revenue. Diminishing returns apply to tax collection. The same holds true to the burdens, impositions, outlined above. Past a certain point, the last straw will have been reached for American (and Western) Man; he will refuse to pay these levies.
The Western nationalist's tolerance for these impositions is low, the normie's is high. The British nationalist, for instance, finds the Great Replacement tax (which was first levied in England seventy years ago) outrageous, and thinks that the British normie should be outraged by it too; he cannot understand why the normie is not outraged and was not even outraged after the Pakistani grooming gang scandal came to light. But the truth is that when it comes tolerance and endurance of burdens and impositions, different sections of the populace have different thresholds. We activists are all familiar with the somnolent type of normie who feels nothing but complete indifference towards politics and indeed any of the higher fields of human endeavour; prior to 2020, none of the taxes mentioned made the slightest impression on him. One is inclined to suspect that the political establishment, being aware of his notoriously high tolerance, imposed the Great Reset in order to test his limits; and in doing so, that establishment was possessed of a certain impishness and malice - like a child who teases an animal so as to make it bite.
Looking past the somnolent and insensate type of normie, we come to others who are more promising. There is the conservative boomer, who was accepting of all the taxes levied up to 2000 or so, but has been baffled and confused - and angered - by the new SJW, transsexual, Greta Thunberg, etc., taxes, and wants things to go back to where they were. Another nostalgic is the popular culture-obsessed normie, who often belongs to either the boomer generation or Generation X. He lives in a dream world, a bubble, which is filled with popular culture - computer games, anime, comic books, movies, TV shows, action figures, role-playing games... Unfortunately for him, the late 2010s saw the infiltration by the extreme Left into popular culture, and as a result, his beloved franchises (among them Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Marvel and DC, James Bond) have been ruined by SJW politicisation. Like the conservative boomer, he instinctively holds to reactionary views and wants life to return to where it was in 1990 or 2000 or even 2010 - when the impositions were not as pronounced. He is prepared to pay some taxes, but not others. The negro tax and the Great Replacement tax do not bother him, as he is not a white nationalist by any description; the Holocaust indoctrination tax does not bother him, as he has been trained to hate all Germans, 'Nazis', by Hollywood; but 'SJW Star Wars' - that he will not abide. One consequence of his displeasure is that he has produced literally thousands of YouTube videos containing hundreds of hours of intricate analyses of Lucasfilm, Disney, Kathleen Kennedy, The Mandalorian (2019-), etc.
Now, he can be chided for not spending his time on more worthy, serious subjects; but he could counter this attack with the question: after he comes home tired at the end of the working day, what is there for him but escapism? In his judgment, he feels he has the right to lose himself in the world of heroic myth. It means something spiritually higher to him, something he needs - man does not live by bread alone.
IV.
The pop-culture obsessed normie is closely related to the bug man, who is in turn related to Nietzsche's Last Man and Spengler's Fellahin. The bug man, a conformist by nature, accepts nearly all of the aforementioned taxes, much like the somnolent, insensate and bulletproof type of normie.
The Western nationalist will castigate the bug man: the bug man does not engage in a revolt against the modern world (Evola), lament the passing of the great race (Grant), hanker after the Imperium (Yockey); he is politically inactive and perfectly content with the way things are. But I envy him to a certain extent. To be obsessed by nothing but computer gaming, for example - that would be a life (I imagine) of uninterrupted bliss.
This is where Cyberpunk 2077 comes in.
The computer game was based on a pen and paper role playing game, Cyberpunk: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future which was published in 1988 and set (amusingly enough) in the far-flung future of 2013. The original game portended, as one could expect, a dark, dystopian future for the West, like all the works in the cyberpunk genre; but paradoxically, the genre makes urban dystopias look exciting, glamourous, seductive. It prettifies the urban science-fiction hellscape and turns it into something beautiful. And this has real world implications. The Los Angeles of the movie Blade Runner (1982), the Chiba City of the novel Neuromancer (1984) and the Night City of the game Cyberpunk 2077 seem strangely familiar to us, as they resemble cities in which we live - Sydney and Melbourne, for example - and because of this, Cyberpunk 2077, an aesthetically pleasing game which beautifies the modern city, makes us appreciate our cities all the more.
It is no exaggeration to say that for some, the game made 2020 worth living. The game had been in development for eight years (!) and the release date for 2020 had been slated for April, and then it was pushed back to November, and then December. The delay only increased the anticipation. The release of Cyberpunk 2077 was eagerly awaited by gaming fandom, and even those on the Far Right were swept up by the enthusiasm. On 4Chan, a common slogan was, 'Still buying Cyberpunk 2077': that is to say, despite all the negative political developments of the year 2020, I am still looking forward to playing this game which, I have been assured, will be a masterpiece.
All this has an unlikely sequel, but before I detail it, I should be point out that the audience for cyberpunk is meant to react with revulsion, and not pleasure, at the prospect of the West turning into a dystopia filled with cyborgs, low-lifes, and servants of evil corporations ('corpos';); and it goes without saying that the white nationalist or National Socialist is meant to react negatively as well. (Read what Alfred Rosenberg, in The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), has to say on the evils of city life). On that, the cyberpunk dystopia presents a reverse mirror image of what Far Rightists, traditionalists, fascists of all stripes value. Peasants, cosy cottages, clean and healthy country living, beautiful landscapes, 'Aryan women standing in wheatfields': these occupy the most prominent place in white nationalist iconography, not corpos, low-lifes, urban squalor, smog, neon signs and cyborgs. You can find these typical white nationalist icons on display at the Renegade Tribune website; Renegade travels down the Rosenberg route, and goes even further, endorsing homeopathy and veganism.
But all this raises the question: which of the two - the cyberpunk urban dystopia or the National Socialist eco-utopia - is the more modern and the more real? Reluctantly, I have to say, the former; perhaps we could have lived more close to nature, as Rosenberg wanted, over a hundred years ago, but not now.
Another difficult question. The video for the song 'Yesterday's Hero' by John Paul Young is set in the all-white city of Melbourne of 1975. Supposing that you could go forward or back in time, would you travel to the Melbourne of that year or to the Melbourne of some hundred years after (say, the year 2077)? The pop culture-obsessed normie would choose the future: he operates under the assumption that the future will not only be more technologically advanced, but more exciting, which is one of the reasons why he likes Star Trek, Star Wars, so much.
That type of normie accepts much of the existing political order, and modern technology, and modern urban living, as does the bug man. The underlying philosophy of these types of normie was first outlined in Fukuyama's essay 'The End of History?' (which appeared in the summer of 1989, right before the fall of the Berlin Wall). Fukuyama here expounded upon two propositions which many commentators found objectionable: the first was that we live in the best of all possible worlds, the second, that our existing political arrangements could scarcely be improved upon. Many on the Far Left took umbrage with Fukuyama, as could be expected, but so did many on the Far Right who are forever denouncing capitalism and consumerism. When I am in one of my less charitable moods, I am inclined to say that those the Far Right who adopted this position did so only because they are (like their counterparts on the Far Left) killjoys and moreover, people who are stuck in a distant past. The bugman, and the pop-culture obsessed normie, would agree. And they would venture that Fukuyama could have been right. Perhaps it is the case that a society which produces a work of beauty such as Cyberpunk 2077 cannot be all that bad. Why not, then, kick back and enjoy this marvellous world of supermarkets, shopping centers, and computer games - the world which our forefathers shed their blood, sweat and tears to build? Throw out your dusty volumes of Spengler, Yockey, Evola, and stop obsessing over race, immigration and Holocaust Revisionism. Become a postmodernist. 'It's not the 1930s any more'...
But there is a twist in the tale when it comes to Cyberpunk 2077. The game sold millions on the day of its release, but after playing it, gamers discovered that it suffered from glitches and other shortcomings; the sad truth was that it had been released before it was ready. The most hyped and anticipated game of the year - if not the century - had turned into a failure. The producers of the game, CD Projekt Red, took the unprecedented step of offering refunds to Playstation and XBox users. Disappointment was followed by fury; CD Projekt Red, are now facing a class action law suit from disgruntled investors.
One moral of the story is, perhaps, that those wanting a more authentic cyberpunk experience would have been better advised to stick to the pen and paper games. But more than that, the story illustrates the ultimate failure of bugman-ism and normie-ism. The bugman could only justify Western liberal society and its economic system throughout 2020 with the following argument: despite the collapse brought about by the Great Reset, despite the scandal brought about by the Biden fraud, we in the West still live in a time which is unparalleled for its prosperity, luxury, technological advancement - and what better proof of this is Cyberpunk 2077? Even those on dissident Right, says the bugman, must acknowledge the truth of this argument, and they did acknowledge the truth of it, through their actions (but not their words), as the excitement the game caused led the 'Alt-Rightist' to drop his anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist pose. Anticipation for the Cyberpunk 2077 masterwork broke down all social and political barriers. Both Mark Zuckerberg - the king of the bugmen - and the anonymous 4Chan poster who coined the 'Still buying Cyberpunk 2077' phrase stood side by side in the queue outside the game store on the morning of December the 10th, the day of the game's release. And to paraphrase the Bible, Zuckerberg saw this, and behold, it was very good. For Zuckerberg wants nothing more for a member of the 'Alt-Right' than to become like him; he wants that 'Alt-Rightist' to buy a computer game, adopt postmodernist views, be content with the existing social order and take an Asian wife.
But, as we know, things did not work out that way. 'Truth will have its revenge', as Carl Schmitt used to say, and perhaps, in 2020, 'Alt-Right' politics, white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, Far Right Populism were in accordance with the times after all, and were the truth.
It is a fact that the passage of time, which leads to a distance in time, does bring with it a certain objectivity. We recognise, at once upon encountering them, what exactly the fashions of the 1970s and 1980s were, but we do not recognise, at least with as much precision, the distinctive attributes of the fashion of 2010s or even the 2000s; in the former case, much time has passed (hence the instant recognition) since those decades, in the latter, too little. Historical distance and the flow of time make the past a finished product, a closed book, and thereby give us an understanding of what a thing essentially is. This is what Hegel meant when he said that the 'Owl of Minerva [the goddess of wisdom] spreads its wings only with the coming of dusk'.
Was there a point in time after the war when we in the West understood what National Socialism was and viewed it with a degree of objectivity? Yes: in the 1960s. Given that politics is a visual medium - a thesis Hitler would surely agree with - my argument is that one means of getting to grips with a political idea is to see it. In the 1930s and 1940s, we grasped politics through newsreels and newspaper photographs; in the 1960s and 1970s and after, through popular culture - that is, movies, TV shows, comic books. Put that way, we see that a great deal of change in the popular depictions of National Socialism occurred over the past six decades. For one, by the time of Schindler's List (1993), the National Socialists (and the German people themselves) in popular culture had been transmogrified into a race of demons. A cynic would remark that such extreme ugliness in the portraiture of National Socialism always could be expected, but my contention is that it was not always so. Ernst Zündel remarked (in the 1990s) that whereas once the hero of the American war movie once raced against time to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima, he now races to liberate the concentration camps; popular culture, in portraying the war, had by the 1990s begun to favour the European theater at the expense of the Pacific and show signs of an obsession with the Holocaust. A shift had occurred, and I identify the turning point as the 1960s. In Rat Patrol (1966-68), Twelve O'Clock High (1964-1967), Combat! (1962-67) (the TV action shows devoted to the Western theater) the Germans are portrayed with (as Zündel observes) grudging respect, and in The Producers (1967) and Hogan's Heroes (1965-71), the subject of comedy. Undoubtedly the writers, directors and actors who served up this fare were attuned to the desires of the audience, a large proportion of which was made up of ex-servicemen, and this segment of the audience knew, from first-hand experience, that the Germans were not the monsters Allied wartime propaganda made them out to be. And so, perhaps, there was a pending reconciliation of sorts between the Germans and the Anglos? Whatever the case, the point is moot, because as Zündel remarks, by the 1970s the Holocaust had stepped in and nipped any rapprochement in the bud.
Time heals all wounds, and by the 1960s, enough distance had been gained from the war for it to be represented with a reasonable degree of objectivity, or near enough to objectivity - as close as Hollywood could be expected to get. But that brought with it its own dangers. When you turn National Socialism into a not-so-serious TV show or movie or board game, you are showing a high level of detachment from it - you are not feeling a sense of involvement, politically, emotionally, spiritually or otherwise. This is what happens when National Socialism, and the war, become part of the past: the pages written on them have become closed in the book of history. For you, a member of the audience of Hogan's Heroes and Dad's Army (1968-77) and who lived through the 1930s and 1940s, the realities of that time are unpleasant to recall, especially when you compare them to those of the present, the present being distinguished by its peace and prosperity; but the fact that you enjoy these comedies reveals that you do not feel much in the way of trauma regarding the recent past, as it is water under the bridge. You have achieved closure. In this state of mind, one can look at the battles of WWII with nearly as much detachment as one would at the battles of the Napoleonic Wars or the Wars of the Austrian Succession. But that means you are approaching postmodernism, and with it, postmodern apathy and irony.
What does that entail? In the past year, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been engaged in a war over a disputed territory called Nagorno-Karabakh. The Far Right, the Western nationalist movement, does not have a stake in the war; it has not pronounced, by and large, that one side is more 'based' than the other (as it did in two of the wars of the last decade - the Syrian Civil War and the Russo-Ukrainian War). If members of the Far Right were called on to play a wargame based on conflict, or role-play as soldiers in re-enactments of key battles, they would feel a sense of non-involvement; they would feel detachment. And no doubt they would utter witticisms while role-playing as the Armenian or Azerbaijani soldiers, witticisms which would express their ironic detachment. This is one of the key themes of postmodernism: a feeling of irony when one is re-enacting or repeating a past which one cares nothing about.
Perhaps the first person on the Far Right to act as a postmodernist was George Lincoln Rockwell. His politics exhibited a dual nature: on the one hand, he took his brand of racialist conservatism extremely seriously; on the other, he treated National Socialism as a prank, a joke (that was the subtext of his actions - had he been confronted about it, he would have denied it furiously and declared that he was a sincere and committed 'Nazi'). Fifty years later, we come to Rockwell's spiritual successors - the pranksters of 4Chan who ironically espouse National Socialism and fascism.
In a way, it was Jewish activism in the 1970s that saved National Socialism from descending into postmodern irony. As stated before, in the previous decade, the National Socialists were treated as objects of gentle ridicule in TV comedies such as Dad's Army and Hogan's Heroes, worthy opponents in action movies such as Battle of the Bulge (1965) and Anzio (1968). They were depicted as bad, but not evil. But then Jewish activists thrust the Holocaust story to the forefront of the public consciousness. No doubt the movie and TV audiences of the 1970s began to feel pangs of guilt at laughing at the antics of Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz. By the time of the 1980s - the time of Sophie's Choice (1982) and Shoah (1985) - audiences had stopped laughing altogether. The Holocaust onslaught was well and truly underway, and audiences were being deluged by hundreds - no thousands - of Holocaust novels, movies, comic books, plays, ballets, education classes, documentaries, museum exhibits... National Socialists were no longer to be laughed at, they were to be taken seriously, extremely seriously: the war was painted as a primordial clash between good and evil. (It is no coincidence that at this time the governments of Europe began to introduce serious penalties for denying the Holocaust, penalties which included fines and imprisonment, whereas only ten years before, the same governments did not actively seek to punish Holocaust denial - one could then write a Revisionist work and travel through Europe a free man).
Oddly enough, Holocaustism reached a fever pitch in the 1990s, the decade which represented the high-water mark of postmodernism. The postmodern-themed TV show, Seinfeld (1989-98), poked fun at Schindler's List, but that was the exception; 1990s popular culture for the most part treated the Holocaust with the utmost gravity. And the postmodernist, post-structuralist French intellectuals, who espoused a sturdy scepticism towards all 'grand narratives' (and the Holocaust, being part of Judaism and Zionism, is nothing if not a grand narrative), were taken in by the Holocaust like everyone else; hence their rote denunciations of the French Revisionist Robert Faurisson. I must confess that I was taken in at the time as well - not having access to any of the Revisionist works on the Internet - and I, too, viewed the Germans as a race of monsters. But then, when all your intellectual peers are declaiming with absolute certainty that a certain event actually did happen and that an ideology (and the country that gave to birth to it) responsible for it are evil to the core, you tend to believe them - it is human nature.
By turning the National Socialists into creatures of evil - akin to vampires, warlocks, witches, werewolves - the Jewish activists reanimated National Socialism; they gave the corpse new life - a strange, unnatural life, but a life nonetheless. In order to kill National Socialism, to deprive it of life, they would have been better advised to mummify it, to make it a thing of the past, something which could be handled as a relic, a curio. The 1990s was the ideal decade to accomplish this. In a 1992 work which was perfectly in accord with the times, Francis Fukuyama, inspired by Kojève, pronounced the End of History. What Fukuyama and Kojève meant by the idea was that history could be conceived up as an epic with a beginning, middle and end; and once the epic had come to an end, there was nothing left for the protagonists to do - no great feats to accomplish, no high ideals to die for. At the conclusion of the original Star Wars trilogy (1977-83), the Empire is defeated and the heroes Han, Luke and Leia resume their normal lives - lives which to us in the audience would have seemed dull and listless had they been put up on the big screen, as they would have been bereft of heroic exploits. Kojève's contention was that Man had arrived at the same point: the end of the story. Henceforth, Man would live an uninspired, base, even animal existence; he would be what Nietzsche called a Last Man, Spengler a Fellahin. And being situated at the end of history, he would look at the great and significant preceding events - for example the 30 Years War, or the War of Austrian Succession, or the Napoleonic Wars, or even the First and Second World Wars - with detachment. And with detachment, comes irony... One can see how this sense of historical distance lends itself to the anti-Nazi argument 'It's not the 1930s any more' - that is, while German National Socialism and Italian Fascism suited the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps, they do not the current year. And as it so turns out, Jewry in the 1990s could made effective use of that Kojèvean argument but instead it promulgated the Holocaust tale for what was mostly a religious purpose.
But I must emphasise, again, how damaging the 'It's not the 1930s any more' line of argument can be. Leon Degrelle writes in his memoirs how terrible it was in his post-war exile in Spain to read through the morning newspapers every day and not see his name mentioned; as a man accustomed to notoriety, this was a cross to bear. In the same memoirs, he makes the passing remark, with a sniffing condescension, that anti-tank weapons in WWII did not work the same way as they they are shown in the movies today. One can speculate that it must have been an alienating experience for Degrelle, once a soldier, now a spectator, to watch the war movies of the 1950s and 1960s in a Spanish cinema. Degrelle would no doubt have felt that he had been left behind by history. Which raises the question, what would he have thought of today's cultural developments? Only a few weeks ago, the bestselling computer game Cyberpunk 2077 was released. The game pays tribute to the Cyberpunk movie genre and hacking subculture of the 1980s and 1990s, and boomers (the children of Degrelle's generation) have a hard time making sense of these. Given that, what would Degrelle and his fellow post-war fascists Otto Remer and Otto Skorzeny, have made of them? They would have no doubt felt consternation and confusion. And this lends weight to the accusation that Degrelle was an old fuddy-duddy and that his wartime fascism today smells rather musty.
II.
Before anti-Nazi readers start congratulating themselves, I will make the point that, at some juncture in our lives, we all grow old; and for those of us who have political careers, at some juncture, we all become yesterday's hero. The aged and declining despot Ghaddafi of 2011 (the year he was overthrown) presents a sad contrast with the young and exuberant reformer Ghaddafi of 1969 (the year he came to power).
As a man goes, so does a civilisation: this thesis underlay Spengler's monumental work, The Decline of the West (1918-22). Kojève took much from Spengler, who anticipated his idea of the 'historyless man' (a phrase Spengler uses repeatedly), that is, the man left over after the end of the history of a civilisation; but Kojève's borrowing has never been acknowledged by scholars.
But Spengler contradicts Kojève on when it is that history, at least history in the West, comes to an end. Kojève says it was in the year 1806, when Hegel saw Napoleon on horseback in the town of Jena and subsequently conceived The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), an ambitious work which aimed to encapsulate all of philosophy, all of thought ('Spirit') up that time. Hegel therein concluded that, after Napoleon, Man had reached the last stage in his progress, the terminus of his historical evolution. Spengler differed in that he believed that there was no history of Man as such, only the history of the eight High Cultures, seven of which had died long ago - today only the Western Culture is left standing. And that Culture would not reach the end of its natural life until three hundred years (or thereabouts) after the writing of the Decline. For Spengler's prediction was that by the 23rd century, Western Man will enter the last stage in the West's historical cycle and will become 'historyless', a Fellahin, a Last Man. He will look back on all that has gone before in the history of his race without any emotional connection, without any emotional involvement, and he will devote himself to animal pleasures. His vast empire - which he had built in the preceding centuries - will go to rot and ruin, and he will become the prey of newer, younger, more 'barbarian' races. In other words, the West will suffer the same fate as ancient Rome, India and China.
Unlikely as it seems, it is here that Spengler rides to the rescue of the National Socialist (or as Spengler would call it, 'Prussian Socialist') idea.
Spengler's maudlin and frightening vision of a fading West, if it is to come true, will only come true hundreds of years in the future. According to Spengler's prediction, the 21st century shall see no Fellahin and no pacifism, only dangerous political struggle. Politics in that time will be taken extremely seriously, as it was in the time of Caesar and Augustus. And after the time of struggle is a time of peace - a peace imposed by the new Imperium. As to whether or not in this period the German Idea (which Spengler called 'Socialist') would ultimately triumph, Spengler hedged his bets; suffice to say, he did not foresee a liberal future, and indeed, he prophesied that in the 21st century the system of ballot-box electoralism would come crashing down. (And I would argue of that of this the events of 2020 give us a portent). (In order to avoid misunderstanding Spengler on this point, it should be made clear that is not the case that such political systems simply stop functioning; it is that they fail to maintain the confidence in them that they had enjoyed before). Taking all of Spengler's predictions into account, then, one can infer from them, as Spengler's disciple Yockey did, that in the new century Spengler's 'Socialism' does indeed stand a chance.
III.
My intention here has been to make vivid a contrast that exists between two different historical periods and their accompanying Weltanschauungen.
Spengler and Yockey published their work in what was undeniably a most dangerous and unpleasant time in Western history; Fukuyama revived Kojève's ideas in a time which was not dangerous and not unpleasant. Given the choice, any Western European (or North American or Australian) would prefer to live in the latter period over the former. And he would prefer, one over the other, one of the two ethics that accompanied each of the two periods. What are these ethics? We find them in our four authors. Spengler and Yockey praise the martial virtues (self-sacrifice, renunciation, discipline, courage, sternness...) whereas Kojève and Fukuyama reject them - in the world view of the latter pair, Man is to become a contented cow or sheep, a creature which poses no threat to anyone, a 'herbivore'. It goes without saying Western Man, c. 2020, prefers the latter ethos over the former. And it is this preference which has placed an obstacle in the path of all Western nationalism for the past seventy-five years. The nationalist believes that the West, and the entire white race, are in danger of extinction, but upon becoming a political activist and commencing a crusade to defend the West, he quickly discovers, to his frustration, that Western Man, because of complacency or stupidity, will not fight to save himself.
Discussions of this subject in nationalist polemics often lead to speculations as to what the breaking point, the last straw, for Western Man will be. And such a breaking point exists, for every nationality; September 1939 and December 1941 showed that even the most stoic and patient of peoples, once goaded beyond endurance, can snap.
Western Man has for the last hundred years been forced to shoulder a number of burdens. These are political and are in effect taxes which have been imposed upon him. They could be thought of as the price he pays for participating in normal society; if he does not pay them, he will be punished. A comparison could be drawn between them and the protection money paid to a gangster.
The rate and number of these taxes has been steadily mounting since the end of WWII. Taking America as an example, Americans, by the 1960s, had laboured under what I call the negro tax for hundreds of years, and the rate of that tax was dramatically increased at the time of the race riots and the new desegregation laws; by the 1970s, whites had been ethnically cleansed from some of the great cities of the North-East - for example, Detroit. Around the same time came a new tax, a new levy - the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which abolished the whites-only immigration system which had been in place for forty years. Hart-Celler led to a massive immigrant invasion, the largest in history. Following this tax - which should be called the Great Replacement tax - Americans had to put up with an additional one, the mandatory Holocaust education and indoctrination tax, which took effect in the 1970s and 1980s. Forty years later, new taxes were introduced: the Social Justice Warrior (SJW) tax, the transsexual tax, the 'Woke Capital' tax, the Greta Thunberg tax, the '#MeToo' tax, the deplatforming tax, the cancel culture tax... The year 2020 saw a Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa riot tax, and one of the most devastating taxes of all - the Great Reset tax, which has led to the vexations of social distancing, mask mandates, contact tracing, lockdowns, house arrests, curfews, forced unemployment, forced closure of businesses and perhaps, in the future, the introduction of a compulsory (and potentially lethal) vaccine. The Great Reset has engendered, as we know, pathological social phenomena on a stupendous scale. And in case one thought that things could not get any worse, the year 2020 concluded with the Joe Biden electoral fraud tax, which will exacerbate tensions between the Left and Right to an alarming degree and could eventually lead to a sundering of the American republic.
Economic theory posits the hypothesis of what is called the Laffer Curve: this is the proposition that past a certain point additional tax hikes will see a diminution, not an increase, in revenue. Diminishing returns apply to tax collection. The same holds true to the burdens, impositions, outlined above. Past a certain point, the last straw will have been reached for American (and Western) Man; he will refuse to pay these levies.
The Western nationalist's tolerance for these impositions is low, the normie's is high. The British nationalist, for instance, finds the Great Replacement tax (which was first levied in England seventy years ago) outrageous, and thinks that the British normie should be outraged by it too; he cannot understand why the normie is not outraged and was not even outraged after the Pakistani grooming gang scandal came to light. But the truth is that when it comes tolerance and endurance of burdens and impositions, different sections of the populace have different thresholds. We activists are all familiar with the somnolent type of normie who feels nothing but complete indifference towards politics and indeed any of the higher fields of human endeavour; prior to 2020, none of the taxes mentioned made the slightest impression on him. One is inclined to suspect that the political establishment, being aware of his notoriously high tolerance, imposed the Great Reset in order to test his limits; and in doing so, that establishment was possessed of a certain impishness and malice - like a child who teases an animal so as to make it bite.
Looking past the somnolent and insensate type of normie, we come to others who are more promising. There is the conservative boomer, who was accepting of all the taxes levied up to 2000 or so, but has been baffled and confused - and angered - by the new SJW, transsexual, Greta Thunberg, etc., taxes, and wants things to go back to where they were. Another nostalgic is the popular culture-obsessed normie, who often belongs to either the boomer generation or Generation X. He lives in a dream world, a bubble, which is filled with popular culture - computer games, anime, comic books, movies, TV shows, action figures, role-playing games... Unfortunately for him, the late 2010s saw the infiltration by the extreme Left into popular culture, and as a result, his beloved franchises (among them Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Marvel and DC, James Bond) have been ruined by SJW politicisation. Like the conservative boomer, he instinctively holds to reactionary views and wants life to return to where it was in 1990 or 2000 or even 2010 - when the impositions were not as pronounced. He is prepared to pay some taxes, but not others. The negro tax and the Great Replacement tax do not bother him, as he is not a white nationalist by any description; the Holocaust indoctrination tax does not bother him, as he has been trained to hate all Germans, 'Nazis', by Hollywood; but 'SJW Star Wars' - that he will not abide. One consequence of his displeasure is that he has produced literally thousands of YouTube videos containing hundreds of hours of intricate analyses of Lucasfilm, Disney, Kathleen Kennedy, The Mandalorian (2019-), etc.
Now, he can be chided for not spending his time on more worthy, serious subjects; but he could counter this attack with the question: after he comes home tired at the end of the working day, what is there for him but escapism? In his judgment, he feels he has the right to lose himself in the world of heroic myth. It means something spiritually higher to him, something he needs - man does not live by bread alone.
IV.
The pop-culture obsessed normie is closely related to the bug man, who is in turn related to Nietzsche's Last Man and Spengler's Fellahin. The bug man, a conformist by nature, accepts nearly all of the aforementioned taxes, much like the somnolent, insensate and bulletproof type of normie.
The Western nationalist will castigate the bug man: the bug man does not engage in a revolt against the modern world (Evola), lament the passing of the great race (Grant), hanker after the Imperium (Yockey); he is politically inactive and perfectly content with the way things are. But I envy him to a certain extent. To be obsessed by nothing but computer gaming, for example - that would be a life (I imagine) of uninterrupted bliss.
This is where Cyberpunk 2077 comes in.
The computer game was based on a pen and paper role playing game, Cyberpunk: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future which was published in 1988 and set (amusingly enough) in the far-flung future of 2013. The original game portended, as one could expect, a dark, dystopian future for the West, like all the works in the cyberpunk genre; but paradoxically, the genre makes urban dystopias look exciting, glamourous, seductive. It prettifies the urban science-fiction hellscape and turns it into something beautiful. And this has real world implications. The Los Angeles of the movie Blade Runner (1982), the Chiba City of the novel Neuromancer (1984) and the Night City of the game Cyberpunk 2077 seem strangely familiar to us, as they resemble cities in which we live - Sydney and Melbourne, for example - and because of this, Cyberpunk 2077, an aesthetically pleasing game which beautifies the modern city, makes us appreciate our cities all the more.
It is no exaggeration to say that for some, the game made 2020 worth living. The game had been in development for eight years (!) and the release date for 2020 had been slated for April, and then it was pushed back to November, and then December. The delay only increased the anticipation. The release of Cyberpunk 2077 was eagerly awaited by gaming fandom, and even those on the Far Right were swept up by the enthusiasm. On 4Chan, a common slogan was, 'Still buying Cyberpunk 2077': that is to say, despite all the negative political developments of the year 2020, I am still looking forward to playing this game which, I have been assured, will be a masterpiece.
All this has an unlikely sequel, but before I detail it, I should be point out that the audience for cyberpunk is meant to react with revulsion, and not pleasure, at the prospect of the West turning into a dystopia filled with cyborgs, low-lifes, and servants of evil corporations ('corpos';); and it goes without saying that the white nationalist or National Socialist is meant to react negatively as well. (Read what Alfred Rosenberg, in The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), has to say on the evils of city life). On that, the cyberpunk dystopia presents a reverse mirror image of what Far Rightists, traditionalists, fascists of all stripes value. Peasants, cosy cottages, clean and healthy country living, beautiful landscapes, 'Aryan women standing in wheatfields': these occupy the most prominent place in white nationalist iconography, not corpos, low-lifes, urban squalor, smog, neon signs and cyborgs. You can find these typical white nationalist icons on display at the Renegade Tribune website; Renegade travels down the Rosenberg route, and goes even further, endorsing homeopathy and veganism.
But all this raises the question: which of the two - the cyberpunk urban dystopia or the National Socialist eco-utopia - is the more modern and the more real? Reluctantly, I have to say, the former; perhaps we could have lived more close to nature, as Rosenberg wanted, over a hundred years ago, but not now.
Another difficult question. The video for the song 'Yesterday's Hero' by John Paul Young is set in the all-white city of Melbourne of 1975. Supposing that you could go forward or back in time, would you travel to the Melbourne of that year or to the Melbourne of some hundred years after (say, the year 2077)? The pop culture-obsessed normie would choose the future: he operates under the assumption that the future will not only be more technologically advanced, but more exciting, which is one of the reasons why he likes Star Trek, Star Wars, so much.
That type of normie accepts much of the existing political order, and modern technology, and modern urban living, as does the bug man. The underlying philosophy of these types of normie was first outlined in Fukuyama's essay 'The End of History?' (which appeared in the summer of 1989, right before the fall of the Berlin Wall). Fukuyama here expounded upon two propositions which many commentators found objectionable: the first was that we live in the best of all possible worlds, the second, that our existing political arrangements could scarcely be improved upon. Many on the Far Left took umbrage with Fukuyama, as could be expected, but so did many on the Far Right who are forever denouncing capitalism and consumerism. When I am in one of my less charitable moods, I am inclined to say that those the Far Right who adopted this position did so only because they are (like their counterparts on the Far Left) killjoys and moreover, people who are stuck in a distant past. The bugman, and the pop-culture obsessed normie, would agree. And they would venture that Fukuyama could have been right. Perhaps it is the case that a society which produces a work of beauty such as Cyberpunk 2077 cannot be all that bad. Why not, then, kick back and enjoy this marvellous world of supermarkets, shopping centers, and computer games - the world which our forefathers shed their blood, sweat and tears to build? Throw out your dusty volumes of Spengler, Yockey, Evola, and stop obsessing over race, immigration and Holocaust Revisionism. Become a postmodernist. 'It's not the 1930s any more'...
But there is a twist in the tale when it comes to Cyberpunk 2077. The game sold millions on the day of its release, but after playing it, gamers discovered that it suffered from glitches and other shortcomings; the sad truth was that it had been released before it was ready. The most hyped and anticipated game of the year - if not the century - had turned into a failure. The producers of the game, CD Projekt Red, took the unprecedented step of offering refunds to Playstation and XBox users. Disappointment was followed by fury; CD Projekt Red, are now facing a class action law suit from disgruntled investors.
One moral of the story is, perhaps, that those wanting a more authentic cyberpunk experience would have been better advised to stick to the pen and paper games. But more than that, the story illustrates the ultimate failure of bugman-ism and normie-ism. The bugman could only justify Western liberal society and its economic system throughout 2020 with the following argument: despite the collapse brought about by the Great Reset, despite the scandal brought about by the Biden fraud, we in the West still live in a time which is unparalleled for its prosperity, luxury, technological advancement - and what better proof of this is Cyberpunk 2077? Even those on dissident Right, says the bugman, must acknowledge the truth of this argument, and they did acknowledge the truth of it, through their actions (but not their words), as the excitement the game caused led the 'Alt-Rightist' to drop his anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist pose. Anticipation for the Cyberpunk 2077 masterwork broke down all social and political barriers. Both Mark Zuckerberg - the king of the bugmen - and the anonymous 4Chan poster who coined the 'Still buying Cyberpunk 2077' phrase stood side by side in the queue outside the game store on the morning of December the 10th, the day of the game's release. And to paraphrase the Bible, Zuckerberg saw this, and behold, it was very good. For Zuckerberg wants nothing more for a member of the 'Alt-Right' than to become like him; he wants that 'Alt-Rightist' to buy a computer game, adopt postmodernist views, be content with the existing social order and take an Asian wife.
But, as we know, things did not work out that way. 'Truth will have its revenge', as Carl Schmitt used to say, and perhaps, in 2020, 'Alt-Right' politics, white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, Far Right Populism were in accordance with the times after all, and were the truth.
