The Way of the Bugman

 

I.  Introducing the Bugman

Beginning in 2020, the Covidians revived a science I call applied or practical political psychology. Of all the ideologies on the Left, Maoism went furthest in applying political psychology, Maoism being the ideology that gave us 'thought reform' and the 'washing of the brain', and this was pertinent to Covidianism, because starting its life in China, Covidianism used many of the brainwashing techniques of Maoism. Cults, too, avail themselves of the same techniques, and both Maoism and cultism operate on the same principle, which is: Change a man's thoughts, change a man. Over the course of three years, we saw the principle put into practice across the globe, and the result of the Covidians' employing it was that millions of people allowed themselves to be persuaded that masking could 'stop the spread'; that lockdowns, shutdowns, forced closure of businesses, forced unemployment, contact tracing, etc., were all necessary to combat the virus; and that the 'vaccines' were 'safe and effective'. Those caught up in the mass hysteria were cajoled by the media, the 'health professionals', the politicians, and the promptings of their own consciences. Most important of all, the last of these was worked to the utmost in a typical cult-like fashion. Cult leaders seeking to indoctrinate a person appeal to his conscience and exploit his natural tendency to persuade and monitor himself. The conscience, when the leader's manipulating it is attended with success, helps the leader tighten his grip on the minds of his followers, and eventually the directed conscience places the recruit under the leader's complete control. After the first round of brainwashing takes hold, the recruit becomes a devotee, and he remains so on his own initiative and without external compulsion. One consequence is that even if he is taken out of the cult environment - to be sent on canvasing and hawking missions, for example - he can be trusted to return to it. Physically he can leave the cult, mentally he cannot. 

One can use methods of auto-suggestion for purposes that are not sinister and destructive; indeed, one can use them to improve one's life. But doing so takes one away from politics, as we shall see. 

The principle of 'Changing a man thoughts, changing a man' is put to beneficial use in pop psychology and self-help; there, the right thoughts can overcome any obstacle, and in the doctrine of Norman Vincent Peale and Mary Baker G. Eddy, a thing cannot be evil, only thinking makes it so. Such a view is far removed from all politics. For in politics, the world is always incomplete, lacking, and while the world exists in this state of privation, it is bad, even evil. To complete it and make it whole, something external is needed - something only the politician can bring about. In order to make the world better again, a politician may propose a Bolshevik revolution, a Greater East Asian Prosperity Sphere, a Third Reich. Today we regard these goals as vague and ethereal, but at the time politicians promulgated them, they were always within reach; that is, they were feasible. And as a matter of course, the canny politician understands the usefulness of practicable ideals. He will posit simple, discrete, achievable objectives, knowing that if he demands the impossible from his followers, they will desert him. (For that reason, the crusade against global warming will eventually fail, seeing that the end goal of reducing carbon emissions and then stopping them altogether can never be achieved). His realism means that Political Man differs from Self-Help Man. It means he differs from New Age Man as well, 'New Age Man' being the type who follows a Rudolf Steiner or Helena Blavatsky. A spiritual thinker, New Age Man desires to comprehend the nature of reality from the vantage point of mysticism. Moreover, he strives to accept reality without qualm. In other words, he wants to make peace with the world as it is. Nothing could be more unpolitical. 

This topic brings us to another unpolitical type: the Bugman. The Bugman is a subset of the 'normie', and like the normie, he approves of the existing social, political,  and consumerist order. When it comes to politics, the Bugman may hold political opinions that he regards as non-conformist, but at bottom these are only commonplaces and half-baked notions. Fundamentally he agrees with the existing order, and this agreement makes him apolitical. 

During the lockdown years, I became fascinated by the Bugman. In the first year, I believed - mistakenly, as it  turned out - that the indignities heaped upon the  normie population would cause it to revolt. And in that time of turmoil, even a Bugman could show revolutionary gumption. But over the course of three years, the Bugman followed the diktats of the Covidians unquestioningly and took all the outrages in stride. In 2020, only one thing excited him: the release of Cyberpunk 2077. 

I must admit that in those years, I envied the Bugman, especially the Bugman who enjoyed his leisure after being made unemployed by the lockdowns and shutdowns. To be laid off from one's job, and then to while away one's time sitting on a couch, smoking dope, eating junk food, playing 'vidya' games: that seemed to me to be a pleasant life, albeit not a virtuous one. 

Moreover, I envied the Bugman's naivete. The contentedness of the Bugman neared the state of those characters in The Matrix (1999) who chose forgetfulness and oblivion over knowledge and truth. In the movie, the 'red pill' gives knowledge and the 'blue pill' takes it away, and those who swallow the blue pill are made as innocent as Adam and Eve before the Fall. 

The question to be considered here is whether or not political psychology holds true for the Bug Man. Does the Bugman confirm the hypothesis of the Maoists, the cultists, and the Christian Scientists in its essentials, that is, does the Bug Man's innocence and passivity come about from his ideas? If so, this brings up the possibility that we ourselves can become Bugmen. To do so, we need only change our ideas to match his. 

II. The Politics of Anti-Politics

I mentioned the game Cyberpunk 2077 because its subject matter does bear upon politics: one of the reasons why I never became a fully-fledged 'National Socialist' or white nationalist was because I liked the cyberpunk genre too much. The denizens of Blade Runner (1982) live in a dark, smooty, grimy Los Angeles in the year of the future 2019, and the futuristic and grim milieu befits the central theme of cyberpunk, which is 'High tech, low life'. In keeping with the anti-natural tendencies of the genre, many characters are cyborgs or (in the case of Blade Runner) artificially-grown human beings, that is, homonculi. Cyberpunk shares a theme with postmodernism, and that is the distancing and isolating of man from nature. Urban living, modern thinking, perception, thought, language - all of these form a wall between man and the natural world, man and the absolute truth, man and the spiritual. As such, white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, and blood and soil ideology must by definition repudiate cyberpunk. Blade Runner is un-völkisch. But as someone who has seen Blade Runner a dozen times and will probably watch it a dozen times more, my response is: so much the worse for völkischness. 

In a time when the term had not yet been invented, I was once a Bugman. In my youth, I was dissatisfied with my own life but well-satisfied with life at large, by which I mean the prevailing political, cultural, and economic order, an order to which no alternative existed, the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc having collapsed a few years before. In that period, I may have disliked certain political parties, journalists, intellectuals, and opinion-makers, and disliked them intensely; but I never questioned the existing order's underlying precepts, rules, and assumptions. In the same way, one may become aggravated by other drivers when caught in a traffic jam, but such a judgment, which takes place during an instance of a temporary and fleeting emotion, does not entail one's rejecting cars and driving in general. The driver abides by the rules of the game, and so does the Bugman. And like the Bugman, when it came to politics, I prided myself on my political insight and sophistication, but I held opinions that were only a confused heaping of fashionable Left and Right ideas, neither of which I committed to. In the last analysis, I was, just like the Bug Man, apolitical. 

The question is whether or not apoliticism is itself political in a covert and subterranean fashion. It may be that, perversely, the act of choosing not to choose constitutes an political ideology in itself. Carl Schmitt thought so: see Political Romanticism (1919). 

This intellectual attitude of mine, which was akin to political romanticism, was reinforced by my reading a textbook on the contemporary postmodern age. The book was divided up into three parts: the first was written on art history, the second on the French post-structuralist thinkers (Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, Baudrillard, et al.), and the third on postmodern culture and life. The third section struck a chord with me. It resonated, because it held up a mirror to my life. The author here made mention of Blade Runner, Robocop, Silence of the Lambs, Total Recall, and other famous films of the period, and also Nike sneakers, Madonna (then in her 'Vogue' phase), virtual reality, Disneyland, McDonalds, karaoke. The author deplored all of it, but I found his depiction of modern popular culture, capitalism, and postmodernism to be wonderful: it captured the essence of what it was that made life worth living. For every weekend, me and my friends would pile into a car, commute to the city, and drive around without pause, and on those trips, I felt a tremendous sensation of freedom; I understood what it was like for an Eastern European who had lived in a communist country for forty years and who all of a sudden was allowed out to travel and shop in the West. In those fast-paced, frenetic years, I spent long hours at the nightclub, the shopping mall, the fast food restaurant, the petrol station, and the 24/7 convenience store, and I treated all these abodes as though they were sacred, that is, houses of worship.  

My exalted feelings in response to this 'capitalist' and 'postmodern' existence may have only been a preference of mine: they may have been only feelings, and as such, merely subjective. But perhaps they owed their origin to a distinct intellectual idea. The ideas of Thomas Hardy, which are gloomy, fatalist, and pessimistic, hold much in common with those of Schopenhauer. Even though it is uncertain whether Hardy had ever read Schopenhauer, it is certain that Schopenhauer could have supplied the intellectual justification for Hardy. In the nineties, I asked myself if there was a philosopher who could give a voice and a name to the feelings that I had - feelings that were as positive as Hardy's were negative. 

At first I thought that I had found that philosopher in Baudrillard. Of all the French thinkers, he seem to be the one who was most in touch with the present - what academics called 'modernity'. He did own a television set after all. Unlike him, other French intellectuals seemed mired in the first half of the 20th century, when modernism held sway; witness their obsession with Freud and Joyce. 

Something that could be said in the favour of the French post-structuralists was that all of them repudiated Marx; they held to an anti-Marxism that bordered on anti-communism. The anti-Marxism was symptomatic of the political struggle in French intellectual circles of the sixties and seventies. Then, Marxism rode high, and the post-structuralists sought to prove their intellectual superiority to it. They wanted to make their own thought distinct, and in hindsight, they chose wisely, for after the fall of communism, the Marxists were left looking foolish. 

On closer examination, Baudrillard turned out to be something of a disappointment. In the first half of his career, he wrote on the subjects of consumerism, shopping malls, TV advertising, consumer credit. All these formed part of the experience of someone living in the modern world, and Baudrillard's according these subjects importance gave his thought an air of timeliness and immediacy. But at root, Baudrillard disdained consumerism, he considered it fake and unreal, and he sought after the more honest, pure, natural. In the second half of his career, his work lost clarity. As could be expected from a French thinker, he obscured and mystified. Much has been written on the French intellectual's habit of putting up walls of verbiage, and putting up these walls is what Baudrillard did. Some critics suggest that these walls were built in order to mask Baudrillard's true political opinions. Like the Bugman, Baudrillard's attitude is one of passivity and assent, and perhaps deep down Baudrillard really did approve of the existing order. When he is forced to confront it, he feigns helplessness and passivity; it is all so terrible, but what can one do. 

I moved on from Baudrillard and looked to conservative thinkers such as Hayek. If one affirms capitalism, consumerism, surely one is affirming the market order Hayek speaks of? And in turn, if one does so, one is surely classifying oneself as a neoliberal or (to use the American term) libertarian. But I resisted designating myself as such, and while I recognised the greatness of Hayek's endeavour, I saw Hayek himself as something of a relic. He was a man who belonged to the era of the eighties, that is, of Reagan, Thatcher, the New Right, and the Cold War. 

A prominent conservative thinker of post-Cold War era was Francis Fukuyama, the author of 'The End of History?' (1989) and The End of History and the Last Man (1992), both, unusually enough, conservative and at the same time nihilistic (the 'Last Man' is taken from Nietzsche's Zarathustra). Fukuyama was influenced by the Russian thinker Alexandre Kojève. Years after I first came across a mention of Kojève, I stumbled on Jan-Werner Müller's adequate summarising of Kojève's ideas in A Dangerous Mind. Carl Schmitt in Post War European Thought (2003). My subsequent exploring of the twists and turns of Kojève's thought led me to a paradox worthy of Fukuyama. This was the hypothesis that what I had affirmed in the carefree years of my youth was not capitalism but communism; the truth was that I had been a Marxist. 

III. Kojève

Kojève called himself a Marxist and even a Stalinist, and he was joking, but only half-joking. When the body of his work is considered as a whole, we are tempted to discount his so-called Marxism as a mere instance of his typical Kojèvean irony and facetiousness.  But we would be mistaken to do so. The truth of the matter is that he did promote Marxism, but that he departed from the orthodox interpretations of Marx. 

Before the nineties, this Marxism could have been dismissed as  the doctrine of a dilettante, but after nineties, it could not. For intellectuals had established unorthodox Marxism as the reigning orthodoxy in the last remaining Marxist superpower in the world - China. 

After the death of Mao, the Chinese turned away from Soviet-style Marxism. Whether or not this reflected an expediency, or a growing influence of 'capitalist roaders' in the Chinese Communist Party, or a recognition that Soviet methods simply did not work, or all three, one cannot say. What we do know is that by the late seventies and early eighties the Chinese communist intellectuals were forced to devise, and devise quickly, apologia for Deng Xiaoping's new course. In their attempts to do so,  they undertook the task of squaring the circle. Capitalist and communist policy were being implemented at the same time. How could one argue that this was Marxist?  

The effort led to the re-examining of the now-dusty and moldy works of Marx and Engels; the Chinese intellectuals scoured these in a search for different path to socialism, one that did not terminate in the Russian model. The discussions of what the Chinese call the 'initial stage of socialism' make for some interesting reading, if one finds Marxism interesting, and certain passages of the Wiki summary are striking. One intellectual puts forward the notion that the new Chinese version of Marxism contradicts orthodox Marxism when it suggests that 'History was unilinear rather than multilinear'. 'The problem facing the CPC [the Chinese Communist Party] was that a unilinear view of history meant that China could not adopt socialism because [China] had skipped the capitalist mode of production, but a multilinear view meant that China did not need to adopt socialism because it was not a specific "stage in human evolution"'. 

This implies that a non-socialist country such as China may still qualify either as socialist or as being on the road to socialism. Kojève concluded likewise. 

Marx and Engels wrote their main works in the mid to late nineteenth century, and their writings often seem more bound to that particular time more than the writings of other thinkers of that period; if these works could be said to have an odour - and Nietzsche believe that certain writings had a distinctive 'smell' - then they are redolent of the antiques store. The opponent of Marx must Marx's portrayal of Victorian-era capitalism and in order to use it against Marx, he must choose between two avenues of attack.

The first is that Marxism was not only wrong and it had always been wrong; nothing Marx writes of factory conditions, for example, is true. Conservatives such as Hayek take this route, and this type of anti-Marxist is inclined to revisionism: 'Was 19th century England as bad as Marx said it was?'. 

The second is that Marxism was once right. Marx did describe the social and economic conditions of his time accurately, he was right, but the caveat is that he was right for his time only. This line recommends itself to the anti-Marxist taking it because it presents him with one singular advantage, which is that a good many Marxists agree with him. After WWII, the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School and the New Left asked how it was that Marxism could still hold true. Had not Western Europe moved beyond the Victorian-era smoke-stack capitalism and the attendant phenomena of children being chained to workbenches? Most certainly it had. And so one asks how it is that in such a Europe that Marxist revolution is possible. 

Kojève looks to the same questions in one of the most famous of his post-war lectures, 'Colonialism from a European perspective', which was held at a business club in Düsseldorf in 1957. 

Without naming them, Kojève dismisses the Lenins, Trotskys, Maos, as 'Romantics' who 'distorted the Marxist theories in order to apply them to noncapitalist relations, i.e., precisely to economic systems Marx did not have in view'. This touches upon a salient point, one that is brought up by many a non-Marxist. Communism took root only in agrarian, semi-capitalist, and semi-feudal countries such as Russia and China; industralised countries such as Germany and England resisted its blandishments. But Marx devised his theories precisely for the industrialised countries. This is a leak in Marxist theory, and one that Marxists beginning with Lenin attempted to patch up. 

Kojève proceeds with the 'Marx was true, but true only for his time' line of argument. Expanding upon it, he makes an extraordinary assertion: the greatest Marxist of the 20th century was Henry Ford. 

[The capitalists] rebuilt capitalism in a Marxist way. 

To put it briefly, the capitalists saw exactly the same thing as Marx saw and said although independently of him, and with some delay. Namely, that capitalism can neither progress, nor even exist, if the 'surplus value' produced through industrial technologies is not divided between the capitalist minority and the working majority. In other words, the post-Marxist capitalists understood that the modern, highly industralised capitalism of mass production not only permits, but also requires, a constant increase in the income (and of the standard of living) of the working masses. And they behaved accordingly. 

In brief, the capitalists did exactly what they ought to have done according to Marxist theory in order to make the 'social revolution' impossible, i.e., unnecessary. This 'Marxist' reconstruction of the original capitalism was accomplished more or less anonymously. But, as always, there was a great ideologue here, too. He was called Henry Ford. And thus we can say that Ford was the only great, authentic Marxist of the 20th century. 

Those who lived in the West after 1991 and who shared in its prosperity and comforts were living in societies that were post-Marxist in two ways. The first of these was that we who lived in those societies lived in a world in which there was no Soviet communism; the second, that after the reforms by the likes of Ford, we lived in a political, social, and economic order that had deliberately forestalled the Marxist revolution. 

IV. America as communist

None of the above quite captures the spirit of the post-1991 age, however. 

Marxism traditionally concerns itself with capitalism that has gone wrong, never with capitalism gone right. To use the jargon of economists, it is contraction that preoccupies the Marxists, not growth. Now, Western countries such as Australia and America experienced  contraction in the early nineties, as did the countries of the former Eastern bloc, and the post-communist countries experienced the worst of it after their abrupt shifting-over from communism to capitalism. In Yugoslavia, the currency became worthless, and the resulting economic disruption brought about break-up and war. But unlike the Easterner, the fortunate Westerner in that period could know poverty and at the same time good living; poverty did not bar the way to the enjoying of the fruits of consumerism. 

When we think of consumerism and growth, we think of America; the country seems to embody both. Kojève agreed. In a famous passage in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, we find:

One can even say that, from a certain point of view, the United States has already attained the final stage of Marxist "communism," seeing that, practically, all the members of a "classless society" can from now on appropriate for themselves everything that seems good to them, without thereby working any more than their heart dictates. 

Now, several voyages of comparison made (between 1948 and 1958) to the United States and the U.S.S.R. gave me the impression that if the Americans give the appearance of rich Sino-Soviets, it is because the Russians and the Chinese are only Americans who are still poor but are rapidly proceeding to get richer. I was led to conclude from this that the "American way of life" was the type of life specific to the post-historical period, the actual presence of the United States in the World prefiguring the "eternal present" future of all of humanity.

What Kojève is referring to in the last sentence is his notion of the end of history: there shall be no history after a certain point, that is, no great historical events, and thereafter humanity will continue to live in time but not in history. That living will be for the day and not the morrow. 

Derrida attempts to clarify the passage in Specters of Marx (1994). 

Why and how was Kojève able to think that the United States had already reached the "final stage" of "Marxist 'communism'"? What did he think he perceived there, what did he want to perceive there? Answer: the appropriation, in abundance, of everything that can respond to need or desire, the cancellation of the gap between desire and need suspends any excess, any disadjustment, in particular in work. It is not at all surprising that this end of the disadjustment (of the being "out of joint") "prefigures [an] eternal present". 

Derrida here is florid and French, that is, typically Derrida. But we get his meaning. 'The end of disadjustment' implies an end of conflict and the reaching of a resolution. Thereafter, one can appropriate 'in abundance', of everything that can respond to need or desire'; 'the gap between desire and need' has been cancelled. 

Derrida has put his finger on what capitalism is and paradoxically, what communism is. For this abundance, this growth, this 'cancellation of the gap', was promised to us by Marx and the Marxists of the first half of the 20th century. We find these themes in the writings of Lenin and Trotsky, and even of Stalin and Khrushchev. In the form given to it by Kojève, the communist idea may have won me over in my youth. Perhaps, had I encountered it, I would have declared myself to be a communist. 

V.  In conclusion: Hegel and Christian Science

The idea of the reconciliation and the unity of opposites stands at the center of Hegel's philosophy, and I will explain it in non-philosophical language and how it bears on the subject of the discussion. 

In our reading of Hegel, we see that his account of the self, or consciousness, or soul, is a narrative proceeding through stages. In the narrative's first half, the inner self and the outer world stand opposed to one another. That is to say, one is dissatisfied with the world because it does not live up to one's expectations, it does not conform to the ideal one may have of it. But then a change takes place, and the situation improves. Suddenly - and the transition can be quite abrupt - the outer world and the inner become the one and same. One's fond imaginings become reality; the world of one's heart's desire, and the world as it really is, become identical. Thus, the 'gap is canceled'. This is Hegel's Absolute Idea. 

How did the improvement come about? From Hegel, we can deduce two answers, one contradicting the other. The first is that the outer world was brought closer to one's heart's desire by a deliberate effort: one worked to make the ideal real. The second is that perhaps the reality of the outer world matched the ideal of one's inner all along: the outer world does not need any improvement, it has already met one's heart's desire, it already stands there complete and perfect. And we fail to recognise its completeness because our consciousness is defective. Here Hegel begins to sound like Peale and Eddy. 

Now, as stated at the outset, Positive Thinking does not sit well with the politically-minded. In particular, it meets with a violent reaction from the Marxists, who are a perpetually dissatisfied people. To repeat, the political activist is someone who wants something that is not there, that is, he wants something that is missing; he detects a privation in the world and he wants ameliorate it. And the more radical he is, the more completion he wants. He invites his audience to inspect the existing state of affairs and find it wanting, which is why he often meets with the accusation that he wants to induce a state of discontent. 

Usually in the narrative put forth by the rabble rouser a fix can be achieved through a simple means: a vote for Trump, a Marxist revolution. But if the remedy is not close to hand, then one is made to feel discontented and for nothing. One then arrives at the sad truth that lofty goals cannot be attained in this world, only in the next. When the normie realises that he has been backed into such a corner, he drops out of politics, and after the experience, he is a little wiser and a little more discontented than before. 

Under the direction of the demagogue, the masses are to turn away from what little sources of satisfaction there in their lives, and they become worse off as a result. The normie then rues his dabbling in politics and his allowing himself to be seduced by what Spengler calls 'subverters, rhetors, and fantastics'. Perhaps he would have benefited from the ideas of Peale and Eddy. 

The standard objection to Peale and Eddy is that evil does exist in the world and that it exists objectively; it is not a trick played upon oneself by one's own mind. But Peale and Eddy, and Hegel before them, were striving for a mystical insight that is detached from everyday perception. The man who secures the insight stands far above. His view of human existence is (in language of cinematography) a bird's eye view as opposed to a worm's eye. In one of his most famous poems ('Lapis Lazuli', written in 1936), Yeats, after climbing to the top of a summit from which he looks down upon on mankind, acquires the bird's eye view. 

One has to ask if the political activist today can stand on that plane; if the activist can reach that mystical objectivity; and to reach it, if he must be made of the same stuff as a Taoist sage or a Buddhist monk. 

To arrive at an answer, we need understanding of what it is that distinguishes the right-wing mind from the left-wing, seeing that we are on the Right, and that we must know our own politics, for inability to know it could stand in the way of our apprehending the truth, which is  what Hegel calls the Absolute Idea. 

The conservatives who claim that radical leftists are mentally ill (that is, insane - 'mental illness' being a euphemism for insanity) are correct: discontent lies at the heart of the leftist's being, and this is a discontent that makes him unhinged, a discontent that will always be there, a discontent that will always finds it justification in whatever the ideology he comes across. 

Unlike the man of the Left, the man of the Right started off his life as contented, not discontented, and he was fortunate enough to experience only recently a way of life that was good and proper. The life in that past compares favourably to life in the present, for at some point in the recent past society took a wrong turn; now life gets worse every year. Henceforth the rightist devotes himself to the task of stopping the rot and preserving what is good, true, and sane. 

The thought of almost every radical rightist from Hitler to Trump progresses in such a manner. In the time of his innocence, the intelligent and distinguished man who has not yet entered politics may lean towards a nationalism and patriotism that are mundane and everyday. His opinions may be so widely shared, and so ordinary and commonsensical, such that he may define himself not as a radical or a conservative but as a moderate; he may incline towards liberalism, even socialism. But then a catastrophic event intervenes, the old certainties vanish, and the world as he knows it is turned upside down. But while it changed, he stayed the same. And by his clinging to what was once previously regarded as the norm, he is abominated as a reactionary. The Left considers him to be dangerous. 

He could be either Hitler or Trump: Hitler once knew a Vienna that was supreme and good before the catastrophe, Trump once knew a Manhattan. In the first half of the essay, I lauded the past like a Hitler or a Trump would have, and it would be easy to build a conservative, even reactionary, position upon that past, setting off the good past against the bad present. This conservatism would point out the undeniable truth that the West of twenty and thirty years ago compares most favourably against the West of 2023. 

Such a position would be right-wing and reactionary; at the same time, it would be something of an evasion. For the likes of Hegel, Eddy, and Peale reached a mystical objectivity that looms far above the populism of a Hitler or a Trump. 

When faced with a choice between those two perspectives, to which one should we ourselves strive towards: the mystical or the political? Our first instinct is to respond, the political. This is because we find it difficult to escape the prosaic and the everyday; we lack the detachment of a Hegel, who wrote the Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) when the French and Prussian armies were coming to blows in Jena a few kilometres away. 

Of course, the privations experienced by Europeans in the Hegel's exceed those of ours. Everyday wisdom says: compare and contrast the bad times against the good, and count your blessings. But platitudes miss the point. According to his interpreters Koyré and Kojève, Hegel understood that a fundamental change had occurred at the turn of the 19th century, a change which, in Kojève's view, was for the better. And its beneficial effects were such that they would not have disappeared one to two hundred years later; that is, they would not have been negated by Biden, transsexuals, Black Lives Matter, wokeness, inflation, Covidianism, LGBTism, and race-swapping Disney movies. 

The detachment of Hegel approaches that of a Buddhist sage, and clinging it to it through circumstances as adverse as those endured by Hegel requires determination and grit; we can infer that Hegel himself practised a daily mental self-discipline and made a habit of shutting out of his consciousness the Napoleonic Era's cholera, starvation, economic disruption, and corpses. 

As profound as it was, the truth of Hegel did not differ overly much from the truth of the Bugman. But whereas Hegel came to that truth by means of logic, the Bugman came to it by dint of his existence. The Bugman  understands Hegel's Absolute Idea only instinctively, and he cannot put it into intellectual form. 

We have, then, come full circle, and if we are to take the Bugman as an exemplar, we must follow Bugman law. We must live according to his precepts. And what are these? Sit on one's couch, play 'vidya', eat junk food, and smoke dope.  Live the life that I did thirty years ago: frequent the convenience store, the fast-food restaurant, the shopping mall, the comic book shop, and treat those places as sacred sites.   

An alternative to the Bug Man does exist, that alternative being the political in Carl Schmitt's sense. Reading between the lines in Kojève, we almost detect Kojève and Schmitt, who were good friends, exchanging views. Here one thinker who is apolitical confronts another who is political. 

In the present, the Apolitical Man stands on top; but Political Man, long suppressed, may erupt to the surface. For now, he stands in abeyance, and if we are to decide between the two, we must come down in favour of the Apolitical. When taking all the evidence of the past three years into consideration, we must render the verdict that the Political has not delivered, and that our hankering after it has caused unneeded mental strife, friction, and turmoil. In order to ameliorate our condition, we must seek something else. And perhaps that something else is the way of the Bugman. 

A Farewell to Normiedom? On the 1990s, the End of History, American White Nationalism and German Neo-Nazism

 I. 

Before Christmas, I commiserated with some of my friends in the movement and swapped stories about life under the lockdowns and mandates. I raised eyebrows when I declared that the past two years were perhaps the worst in Australian history. My argument was that one could point to, say, the Great Depression as being on the face of it a worse time, but even the Great Depression did not deprive one of freedom - the freedom to enjoy small pleasures and be a normal human being. Back then, if one could afford it, one could smoke and drink in a bar without a capacity limit, for instance - a bar in which one did not have to 'check in' with a QR code, present a 'digital passport' to the publican, or wear a surgical mask... When I put it this way, my friends agreed.

Given that we on the Far Right are living in a time of great crisis, we should be expected to scent an opportunity in it; surely we should be excited over our prospects? One cause for optimism is that many of those attending the Freedom marches are 'normies' who had been 'red-pilled' by recent events. But the evidence suggests to me that the answer to the above question is no: for at present the Far Right seems demoralised and despondent. 

And as to why, I think the answer lies in the fact that politics often disappoints - Far Right politics especially - but up until now the Far Right activist could always escape any discouragement and disappointment and seek passage from the 'red-pilled' world to the 'blue-pilled', from the world of radical Right politics to the world of 'normiedom'. But after 2020 that avenue has been closed off; the gateway to 'normiedom' has been shut, perhaps permanently. And perhaps, once the Covidians are through with them, the 'normies' will have been done way with altogether. 

II.

Usually around this time of year, I re-read Yockey's Imperium (1948), and I re-read this work, a profoundly spiritual one, so as to renew my faith. But this year I feel a reluctance to read it: I feel that it belongs to a past age - the age of dramatic politics - and that the difference between the past age and the present has become too large to ignore.

Imperium was written in 1947, and the 1940s, perhaps Europe's most tragic decade in a millenia, saw a great deal of drama. Some politicians (such as Stalin) seem to thrive in such a dramatic environment: they have an endless appetite for crises, confrontations, wars; for their politics is the politics of what Carl Schmitt calls the exception. 

After Stalin's death, the leadership of the Soviet Union and the communist world was handed to Khrushchev, a much duller man than Stalin - certainly a less confrontational one - and by the middle of the 1950s the countries of the Eastern and Western bloc had settled down to the task of peaceful economic development. They sought to rebuild their countries, many of which had been laid waste to by deprivation and war. But Mao rejected any politics of compromise and conciliation and he stood as an odd man out: privately the other communist heads of state were appalled by his extremism and immoderation. For in that period, non-dramatic politics held sway and Western leaders followed the same path as Khrushchev. The result of it was that, when one looks back on history the East and West in the 1950s, one spies at once on its surface a patina of dullness - even if one takes all the Cold War hysteria, nuclear-saber rattling, wars in the former Western colonies, etc., into account. Daniel Bell drew a similar conclusion in his The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960): the sharp opposition between Left and Right had been muted; the politics of confrontation had been replaced by the politics of technocracy. 

It took time, but even Yockey came to acknowledge the truth of Bell's thesis. He had spent most of the decade building a post-war fascist international with links to the non-aligned regimes of the Third World - an international like that depicted in Frederick Forsyth's  far-fetched novel The Odessa File (1972). WWII veterans filled the ranks of these European organisations which perhaps in truth were nothing more than old soldiers' clubs. The members belonged to another time and one can intuit a recognition of this fact - at least at the subconscious level - in Yockey's writings as the decade drew to a close. His last essay, 'The World in Flames: An Estimate of the World Situation' (1960), does not exhibit as nearly as much a sense of self-assurance and grandeur as Imperium; Yockey here hovers at the edge of great world events; he is an onlooker, not a participant. In its undertone of ironic detachment I find an anticipation of postmodernism. And indeed, a connection exists between the sleepy 1950s and the postmodern 1990s - both of them decidedly dull decades from a political standpoint - and this explains in part why it was that the postmodernists alternatively paid homage and made fun of the 1950s.  

Yockey felt out of place in the 1950s and hated it. Nowadays we in the movement view the 1950s in a different light. Many white nationalists, race realists, immigration skeptics, et al., do not understand Yockey's objection to the America of the 1950s, for example: they see the America of that time as a white man's paradise and that decade as a golden age. To the white nationalist, statistics bear both these contentions out. William Pierce often remarked in his radio talks that America in 1950 was 90% white - something to be proud of. The Americans in this time kept both immigrants and negroes under wraps, and while it is true that desegregation began in earnest in the 1950s, many of the great cities in the north of America were majority white and remained so for the next two decades. 

Another reason for the divergence between the views of Yockey and the white nationalists is that the white nationalists show a pronounced tendency to laud the past at the expense of the present. In a review of the film House of Gucci (2021), Trevor Lynch writes that the film is a 'Meticulous, nostalgia-infused reconstruction of another era, this time the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, a time that seems impossibly glamorous, wholesome, and white compared with the present'. It is at this point that Pierce would take exception to Lynch; Pierce depicts America in the era of the 'Late 1970s to the mid-1990s' as a dystopian hellscape (he published the Turner Diaries, the ultimate dystopian novel, in 1978) but was forever waxing lyrical over the greatness and whiteness of America in the 1950s: a decade can be one white nationalist's hell and another's heaven. 

I agree with Lynch and disagree with Pierce. In part, this is because at the time of writing I would prefer to live in any decade except for the 2020s - I would even be prepared to travel back in time and live in the 1940s: one, I imagine, could live a good life then, provided one was able to dodge all the bombs and bullets. But the main source of my disagreement with Pierce is because I have for the past few months been watching episodes of a famous American daytime TV soap from the time of the late 1990s, and this delving into the recent past - even if it is a mythical and fantastical past - has prompted me to ask myself what possibly could have been wrong with the 1990s. An objective view of the decade would reveal in that decade we had it all. 

III. 

Unlike the 2020s, the 1990s were characterised by an absence of politics. Electoral politics was relegated to the background: the three presidential elections in that time (1993, 1996, 2000 (the 1990s as a decade came to an end, in my judgment, on September 11, 2001)) were dull affairs, and more or less, you could take or leave mainstream politics - it did not interfere with your life in any appreciable manner. 

This state of affairs came about because of the collapse of the Left in the years 1989 to 1991. For hundreds of years, the Right had functioned as a response, a reaction, to the Left; but with the disappearance of the Left came the disappearance of the Right. And that in turn led to the cessation of the political. 

After the end of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, the Left was decimated. The old school communist parties (including the Australian) were wound up for the most part. As for the other sectors of the Left - the anarchists and antifa - they lived at the fringes of society: there was no mainstream acceptance or even awareness of them. And as for Black Lives Matter, social justice warriors (SJWs), 'woke' capital - they did not exist. So: thirty years ago we lived in a world which was blessedly free (mostly) of leftism. 

But a serpent did dwell in this garden of Eden: academic neo-Marxism (known by many as 'cultural Marxism'). Critical Race Theory (CRT), Postcolonial Theory, Black Studies, Queer Studies, Gender Studies began to rear their  heads. Generally, though, this new tendency - labeled 'political correctness' by hostile conservative commentators - was confined to academia. And on occasion it was mocked and not feted (as it is now) by the media. 

By and large, the Left had been forgotten and what really stung the Left was the speed with which it had been forgotten. Only a few months after the dissolution of the USSR, race war was to take precedence over class war.  Ethnic wars broke out in the former Soviet republics and Yugoslavia - wars which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives - and intellectuals such as Bell pronounced these to be portents of the wars to come: wars henceforth were to be motivated not by ideology but ethnicity. This seemed to be an accurate assessment given that the move away from Marxism was permanent and irrevocable. Botched privatisations, IMF 'shock treatment', etc., may have plunged the economies of Eastern Europe and the former USSR into chaos, but there was never any question of a return to communism. 

It is this rather peculiar set of circumstances which explains much of the apoliticism of the period. On a personal note, at the time I took politics - mainstream politics - seriously. I read a number of books written by authors of the mainstream Left and Right (so as to be 'even-handed' and 'objective') and following the lead of my baby boomer parents, I read the newspapers, listened to the radio news and watched the TV news every day so as to keep up with current events. But at the same time, I had no fixed political convictions. I clung to a rather confused and incoherent collection of Left and Right ideas. Had I been pressed, I would have admitted that I was more interested in hobbies and popular culture than politics. In this, I was a typical 'normie'. I have since discovered how typical I was from reading Carl Boggs' classic work The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (2000): 

Why do so many Americans feel that politics has become irrelevant to their daily lives? Why is there so little public discussion of important social issues, despite unprecedented access to mass media and new communication technologies? This book delves beneath the sound bites and news headlines to explore the ongoing process of depoliticization in the United States. Attuned to the many contemporary trends eroding the public sphere, Carl Boggs illuminates the American retreat to an eerily privatized landscape of shopping malls, gated communities, new-age fads, rural militias, isolated computer terminals, and postmodern intellectual discourse. Yet Boggs maintains hope that current trends can be reversed, issuing an eloquent call for revitalizing politics, culture, and civic society. The paperback concludes with a new postscript on the movement against corporate globalization and the tumultuous presidential election of 2000.

IV.

In the nineties, the Far Right prospered and the Far Left did not, and in response to the burgeoning popularity of the Far Right, Boggs wrote a chapter on the proliferating Far Right movements of the decade. He regarded these as 'apolitical' - apolitical in the sense of being detached from civic society (and by that definition he was correct). 

What was my view of these 'apolitical' Far Right movements? For most of the nineties I was blissfully unaware of William Pierce's National Alliance, Richard Butler's Aryan Nations, Jared Taylor's American Renaissance, Tom Metzger's WAR. I was not exposed to their ideas; I was perfectly 'blue-pilled'. Perhaps for that reason I could enjoy with a clean conscience American TV shows such as Seinfeld, The X-Files, The Simpsons, Melrose Place (and lesser-known action TV shows such as Renegade, Pointman, M.A.N.T.I.S. and Fortune Hunter) like the rest of the sheep. 

I can imagine a white nationalist objecting to my consumption of this fare. The white nationalists would ask me in an accusatory tone: was I not aware that these TV shows were decadent garbage - and Jewish? Did I not know that David Duchovny, the star of the X-Files, was a Jew, that Mark Frankel, the star of Fortune Hunter, was a Jew? That the cast of Seinfeld were all Jews? (This is the standard white nationalist debating tactic; to pronounce something to be Jewish is to refute it, whether it is Jewish or no). 

Had I encountered these scolding white nationalists in the time of my innocence, I would have recognised them at once for what they were: killjoys. Pierce made America in the 1990s out to be unlivable when it was not. Pierce could always be counted on to bring the dark side of American life to your attention; he would always be regaling you with gruesome accounts of black on white atrocities such as the Wichita Massacre and the Knoxville Horror. But no rational American could be expected to live their lives in constant fear of being robbed, raped or murdered. But that was the outcome that Pierce and Taylor (author of The Color of Crime (1999)) apparently wanted. 

This is not to say that Pierce and Taylor did not provide value: of course they did. The question concerns what economists call opportunity costs: what would have benefited the average 'normie' c. 1995 - 'blue-pilling' or 'red-pilling'? The benefit of one cancels out of the other: this is the opportunity cost. 

The price paid for 'red-pilling' is that the 1990s-era state of mind - which was one of contentment and complacency - would have been spoiled for good. Pierce, a proponent of dramatic politics to be sure, opposed this 1990s mood, and surprisingly enough, he would have half-agreed with Fukuyama, who argued in an essay (and then a book) that while it is true that the the summit of human achievement had been reached by the 1990s, the peak had been attained only at the expense of foregoing of all heroism, risk and adventure. 'The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands'. [Francis Fukuyama, 'The End of History?', The National Interest, Summer 1989]. To this, Fukuyama expressed reservations and Pierce, full-blown opposition. For what mattered to Pierce more than anything else was the 'Fame of a dead man's deeds' - the remembrance through the ages of a life heroically lived. 

V.

Fukuyama built his argument on Hegel - and Marx, a fact which outraged the Left. History, Fukuyama says, results from Man's 'thinking things through': Man only explores the full implications of an idea - such as Bolshevism - by living through an idea. After 75 years of living the Bolshevist idea, Man had come to the conclusion that the idea did not work: hence the end of socialism in Eastern Europe, China and the Soviet Union. In this Hegelian discourse, the operative word is 'end': Fukuyama takes up the Hegelian thesis that history is a story with a beginning, middle and end, and as such it cannot be properly understood until the end is reached. Hegel writes, 'The owl of Minerva [the goddess of wisdom] spreads its wings only with the coming of dusk'. 

One should not overestimate the influence of intellectuals: they do not determine all that goes on in the culture of a particular period of time (e.g., the 1990s). All the same, credit must go to where credit is due to Fukuyama and the French postmodernist thinkers. In the decade of the 1990s they alone succeeded in capturing the essence of the age. It should be not forgotten that thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard - all outcasts from the French Left - opposed Marxism for most of their careers and so naturally enough their ideas suited the post-Marxist era. 

Thirty years later, one intriguing possibility is that the ideas of Hegel and Fukuyama could serve as a means of illuminating one way out of our predicament. Covidianism has been forced upon humanity, much like Bolshevism, and is the product of a plan years in the making, much like Bolshevism; so Covidianism could be overturned, once Man has 'thought it through', that is, lived through the implications right to the end, much like Bolshevism. 

VI. 

The coming year will see a battle - perhaps the final battle - between what I call Covidian Man and what Fukuyama calls (after Nietzsche) the Last Man. I believe that the Last Man would win any such battle as he is in accord with nature whereas Covidian Man is not - Covidian Man is decidedly unnatural. 

Like any Far Right political activist, I have often come to lose my patience with the Last Man, the 'normie': his slothfulness and contentedness at times have made me despair of him so much so that I at have often considered dropping out of politics altogether. In one such dark period I was rescued from the slough of despond by re-reading Spengler and Yockey. I came to the realisation that the 'normie' had existed in every Culture prior to the Western. The 'normie' was with us in the days of ancient Babylon, Egypt, China, India; he is with us today; and he will be with us in the future. After our Western Culture perishes - like all the Cultures that preceded it - he will preponderate. The ruin of Western Culture will be inhabited by Nietzsche's Last Man, Spengler's Fellahin.

(It is this prediction of Spengler's that warranted, in the eyes of many, charges of pessimism). 

At the beginning of this essay, I intimated that that the Far Right activist occupies two worlds - the world of the 'red-pilled' and the world of the 'normie'. The cause of the activist's recent despondency is that our activist much likes the world of the 'normie' and he is sorry to see it go - he mourns its demise at the hands of Covidianism. On a personal note, my friends and I have many fond recollections of many happy hours spent in the bars and restaurants in the bohemian and 'normie' quarter of the city I live in; we spent those hours discussing politics and ideas while enjoying food and wine in a carefree and convivial atmosphere - like normal humans. All of these pleasures have been taken away by the Covidians. Are they gone for good? The Covidians say yes. According to them, the masks, hand dispensers, capacity limits, digital passports, QR codes, social distancing, working remotely, coerced injections, contact tracing, nasal swab tests, lockdowns, prison camps, etc., will stay in place forever and ever; certainly we cannot foresee any abeyance in the new year. No wonder then that so many in the movement have been driven to despair; the ground - the 'normie' ground - has disappeared beneath us. 

VII.

Something that is missing from today which was present yesterday is trust - trust in politicians, journalists, health officials, intellectuals, our peer group in other words. Only a few years ago we believed that the globalist elites - the Davos men - did not want to kill us or make us sick; we believed there was a lack of animus on their part towards us or at the least a lack of interest; and we believed that they were content to leave us alone. 

That trust can only exist if you believe that the universe is benevolent and means well by you. We find that optimism in evidence in many of the movies representative of the 1990s - one in particular being the  negro comedy Friday (1995). The movie is set in the suburb of South Central Los Angeles, but surprisingly enough, the suburb is not portrayed as a hellhole rife with gang shootings, etc.: the producers originally wanted a violent film but were persuaded by one of the stars, Ice Cube, to downplay any violence - a violent (and exciting) film, Ice Cube argued, would not have been true to life. In the completed movie, South Central LA comes across as a sunny, prosperous, happy place,and perhaps a little dull - certainly a place in which the Last Man lives. 

Spengler writes of the Cosmopolis - the World City - the city which appears with the onset of the old age of a Culture and which devours and incorporates all the suburbs, towns and countryside around it, making it all urban. The World City spawns copies of itself everywhere. This is why the suburb of South Central LA - in the 1990s, at least - resembles the outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne; and in much the same way, the fictional Mid-Western town portrayed in the daytime TV soap I mentioned earlier resembles any town in rural and regional Australia. The World City is omnipresent. 

One can criticise the Cosmopolis for its ubiquity, its homogeneity and its universality, but one must concede that in it, one could lead a life of freedom, one could enjoy the fruits of a consumer society and one could enjoy these - following the collapse of Marxism - without guilt. How life has changed today! By 2022, the World City had been turned into a giant prison. 

Perhaps - and this is a pessimistic line of thought - the free life of the World City contained the seeds of its own destruction. The cults and secret societies run by egalitarians, republicans, technocrats, intellectuals, free-thinkers, et al., only appear towards the end of a Culture's life and not its beginning. Furthermore, they only appear in the cities. Perhaps, then, it is the World City which bears the burden of guilt for giving us Klaus Schwab, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, George Soros... 

VIII.

Even so, who is it that shoulders the ultimate responsibility for the granting of the Schwabs and Faucis power - absolute power - over us? The answer is the 'normie'. 

Covidianism has met with a great deal of resistance - it has not had things all its own way - and a common theme in the polemics against it is the stupidity of the sheep who allowed, step to step, the Covidians to take over their lives. All activists against Covidianism have run up against the obstacles of 'normie' stupidity, gullibility and the rest; the 'normie' seems impervious to facts. When the 'normie' is told that the mask he wears everywhere looks stupid, and worse, is useless in protecting him against Covid, he shrugs - all that matters is that his peer group endorses it and makes it compulsory; likewise, when he is presented with proof that the injections will kill or incapacitate a fifth or third or half of their recipients, this means nothing to him, he will not be deterred at all from lining up for his seventh or eighth booster shot. But of course he will be the first to complain that he was not sufficiently warned should it finally be acknowledged, by the political and health establishments, that the injections are almost guaranteed to cause a compromised immune system, strokes, heart attacks and even death. 

In short, his conditioning has proven to be extremely strong and effective. Supposing that the Covidians were overthrown tomorrow, at least 50% of the population would continue to wear their masks. This really should not surprise us, seeing that that the former members of a cult have a difficult time shrugging off the cult's beliefs and practices. Exiting a cult physically is one thing, exiting it mentally is another; the latter can take years. 

The above does seem to go against my earlier contention that the 'normie', seeing that Covidianism is unnatural and destructive, rise up against it. But the contradiction can be resolved if we accept that yes, the 'normie' will revolt, but only after a period of time. And how long would that period be? It took Eastern and Central Europe forty years to do away with communism (another unnatural doctrine); earlier revolts, such as those in Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, were brutally crushed. But we should not speculate: we can scarcely tell if the anti-Covidian revolution will take four years or forty.  

Two lessons emerge from the two revolts in Hungary in the last century, that is, the revolt of 1956 and the revolt of 1989. The first lesson is that the Left does not change; the second lesson, that the Right does. As an example of the former, consider the fact that the revolts against communism in 1956 and Covidianism in 2021 were regarded by the Left to be at both times the work of a neofascist conspiracy. This shows that the Left has hardly changed its tune in the past 65 years. In contrast, the Right has changed its tune. A prime example is Viktor Orbán: this is a man who in his youth fought for freedom as an anti-communist activist; this a man who became one of the heroes of the 1989 revolution; but this is also a man who has now joined the ranks of the Covidians; this is a man who no longer fights against totalitarianism but throws in his lot with it. The Orban case shows that Covidianism corrupts and corrupts absolutely. One could hypothesise that other anti-communists activists from the eighties, activists who at the time were the darlings of the conservative Right, men such as Václav Havel and Lech Walesa - would have been corrupted by Covidianism as well. 

In his anti-communist days, Orban would have believed, along with Fukuyama and Fukuyama's mentor Kojève, in Hegel's 'cunning of reason'. This is the idea that Man possesses enough logical capability to arrive at the correct conclusion after 'thinking things through'. Following Hegel, anti-communist liberals such as Orbán and Havel in the 1980s took an optimistic view of human nature: they believed that Man was smart enough to see through Marxism and so would be smart enough to reject it. 

But to paraphrase Keynes, in the long run we are all dead, and the Covidians could, up until the time that they meet the same fate as the Eastern European communists in 1989, cause tremendous damage - and they have done so already. 

Besides which, some of us in the movement do not believe in the 'cunning of reason'. The dark thought has crossed our minds that perhaps the 'normie' cannot be relied upon to make decisions in his own best interest. As proof, we only need look at the history of the past two years. 

IX.

I have written here on the travails of the Far Left in the 1990s, and now I will touch upon those of the Far Right. 

Ironically, by the 1990s, German nationalism had become a victim of its own success. As a thought experiment, let us suppose that we were to take an old-school German National Socialist - one who had lived through the war - from 1955 and transport him in time to 1995. We would see at once that the man was an anachronism; the events of 1989 to 1991 had put him out of business. Deeply disturbed, he would be asking himself a number of discomforting questions. With the reunification of Germany and the destruction of communism, what use was there for National Socialism? Why should he continue to be a National Socialist? Why would his fellow Germans want to become National Socialist again? 

Perhaps our time-traveller would knuckle under and resign himself to life as a German 'normie'. He would learn to amuse himself by watching American trash television, dancing at the Berlin Love Parade and shopping at the Bonn malls. The last activity should occupy an important place in his new political world-view, for in Fukuyama's interpretation of Hegel's concept of freedom, freedom means freedom to shop. Acceding to this thesis, in the months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the communist government of East Germany relented: it allowed Berliners from the Eastern half of the city to cross into the Western in order to shop. 

Our hypothetical National Socialist would, under the compulsion of events, be forced to navigate his way back to 'normiedom'. But I can imagine that many of the old fascists of his generation, men who knew and respected Hitler and lived through National Socialism - men such as Otto Remer, Otto Skorzeny, Léon Degrelle, Hans-Ulrich Rudel - would have objected. I would have found it interesting to debate post-communist politics with these men while they were in full possession of their faculties. To that end, a time machine would be necessary to pluck them out of the past and from a past in which they were young and vigorous - and hungry for political power.  

Debate matters here. In this modern age, we no longer believe in the divine right of kings and we expect politicians - even the most firmly entrenched ones - to argue the case for their legitimacy. Why should such and such a politician rule over us? The politician has to give reasons why and he must win over any sceptics and doubters. Even a politician who seizes through power through force of arms must devote  an inordinate amount of time and energy to persuasion and speech-making. See Castro, for instance, who like every successful communist revolutionary, won power not through the ballot box but a successful military campaign. Castro, a former lawyer, had to argue his case in the court of public opinion constantly. All politicians labour under similar constraints, even Neo-Nazi ones. So if we were to transport into the early nineties the young and vigorous Otto Remer of the early fifties, what arguments would he make for his being elected to office? Why should Germans vote for his Socialist Reich Party? My guess is that Remer's arguments would have fallen short; the sudden and abrupt changes in Germany and Eastern Europe would have revealed him to be a relic. 

This touches upon the question of the relation of the 'new' National Socialism to the 'old'. In a conversation fifteen years ago with a German nationalist who had met Remer, I argued that Remer's positions in the 1950s represented a departure from 'classic' National Socialism.  My friend dismissed the notion and referred to Remer condescendingly as an 'Old Nazi', and reflecting later and looking at photos of Socialist Reich Party rallies (which looked a lot like 'old' Nazi rallies) I came to the conclusion that my friend was right. 

Up to the 1970s, the German nationalist movement was filled with old Nazis who had new obsessions; these were Holocaust and WWII Revisionism. It is a knowledge and agreement with these that constitutes 'red-pilling': unless one is accordance with Remer's views on these, one is not 'red-pilled'. 

The great obstacle that the German nationalist - and we in the movement outside Germany - encounters when attempting to 'red-pill' the 'normie' is not hostility but indifference. He is not interested in the correct view of WWII or the Holocaust because he feels - rightly or wrongly - that the events of eighty years ago do not affect his life. And that is especially true today after two years of lockdowns. Why should he want to know the truth about the Holocaust when he has been unable to get a haircut for three months? 

The 'normie' often cannot see the wood for the trees. We can set ourselves the task of educating him, and in this educating him on the connections between the Covidians of today and the Masons of old; but it is more important that we exploit the openings that the Covidians have given us. They have made a rift in the social, economic and political structure. 

Like a good many observers, I find the behaviour of the globalist elites perplexing. Up until 2020, everything was going their way - the Great Replacement was proceeding along nicely, for example - and whatever they did met with the assent of the population. But in 2020, they undertook two actions that would endanger their position. The first of these was the ouster of an American president in a left-wing coup, the first in America's history; the second, the imposition of Covidianism across the entire world. In both instances, the elites broke with normality - and perhaps with the 'normie' as well. To judge by their actions of the last two years, it is as if the globalist elites, the neo-Masons, et al., have a political death wish: they want the 'normie' to turn against them - and terminate them with extreme prejudice. To that end they are doing everything possible... 

In 1969, Lord Russell of Liverpool published Return of the Swastika? The Rising Threat of Resurgent Nazism in Germany; Russell was one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes 'trials', and twenty five years after the war, he finds that the Germans are not behaving to his satisfaction. Russell is filled with suspicion and rage; he excoriates the Germans - for their obduracy and also for their attitudes. He does not give one inch on the Holocaust story (and why should he, given the instrumental role he played in building it) and he rakes the Germans over the coals. What is interesting here is that both Russell and Covidians perceive their enemies in exactly the same way, their rhetoric takes the same tone. Reading Russell, we half-expect him to denounce the Germans for fomenting (to use a favourite pejorative term of the globalists) 'conspiracy theories'. In the parlance of 4Chan, too large a sector of the German population was 'based' and 'red-pilled' - that, in Russell's eyes, was their crime. 

The war crimes 'trials', the Morgenthau Plan, etc., and even Russell's propaganda were inflicted upon the Germans with the intention of continuing the war after the war. We in 2022 are approaching a state of war; abiding by Carl Schmitt's Friend / Enemy distinction, the globalists now see a large sector of the population as the Enemy. If Remer or any of the other 'old Nazis' were to return to the present, they would see that as a positive development; at last their Enemy has given them something to work with. 

Yesterday's Hero: on post-war prosperity, postmodern apathy, pop Nazism and punks (cyber)

 

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.