The United States and Eurasia

An interesting on-line debate between Alexander Dugin and Olavo de Carvalho (both pictured below) has been going on since March elsewhere on blogspot.

Dugin requires no introduction to readers of this blog; de Carvalho does require some introduction. He is a Brazilian journalist, columnist and philosopher now living in the United States, where since 2009 he has been heading an Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought. According to this institute's website, "the keynote of his work is the defense of man's innermost consciousness against the tyranny of collective authority," and he believes that "the most solid shelter for individual consciousness against alienation and reification can be found in widely varying degrees in the ancient spiritual traditions."

And Dugin, of course, represents another form of Traditionalism, similar and yet different--as the two photographs above, chosen by de Carvalho, indicate. And as the development of the on-line debate, entitled "The United States and the New World Order" and focusing on Eurasian-Atlantic relations, has also indicated.

Worth looking at.

Heidegger and Traditionalism

Reposting from John J. Reilly's article on Martin Heidegger's Being and Time

Parallels can be found in the similarities between elements of Heidegger's system and that of esoteric Tradition, principally though not exclusively as represented in the philosophy of Heidegger's contemporary, Rene Guenon. Both were convinced that Plato roughly marks the point where Western philosophy departed from the contemplation of Being in order to gossip about the eternally expanding vacuum of mere ideas. Both had a horror of mechanism and quantification, and of what the modern world's embrace of these principles meant for the future. (Guenon's apocalyptic masterwork, remember, is called The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times.) Parallels show up even in the details of their work, such as their insistence that time and space are meaningful in a way that geometry and clock-time simply caricature. Both were oddly fond of the adjective "primordial," at least if their translators are to be believed.

And then, of course, there is Julius Evola, sometime ideologist for Fascist Italy, and by most accounts the black sheep of the Traditional family. His system almost seems like Heidegger re-expressed in alchemical terms. Evola's formula for immortality involved not just resolution towards death, but the resolution to actually die. His late work, Ride the Tiger, is about the cultivation of the authentic self in a world where history is breaking down. By any reasonable reading, it is a form of existentialism, with only residual esoteric content.

Mohamed Omar and the Swedish radical right

Guest post

In addition to the recent post about Mohammed Omar and the 'Ivan Aguéli Study Group,' it is worth noting that there exist several interesting connections between Omar and the people around him, and groups connected to the Swedish right. These connections have caused a lot of internal discussion among Traditionalists and Swedish nationalists about Islam and its potential as a threat or ally--a debate that originates in an international discussion on the Right spurred by the publication of Guillaume Faye's controversial La Nouvelle question juive (The New Jewish question), which proposes an alliance with Israel against Islam.

The Swedish right has in several steps approached and adopted Traditionalist and New Right ideas, with the blogging collective www.motpol.nu being the prime example, with several self-proclaimed 'Traditionalist' bloggers.In 2009 Mohamed Omar interviewed the Swedish Right Wing, Traditionalist and New Right blogger 'Oskorei' (see here).1½ years later, in December 2010, Oskorei in turn interviewed Omar on Motpol (here). Recently, in January 2011, an extremist and anti-traditionalist but radical nationalist blog/newspaper, Nationell.nu accused the people behind Motpol of being 'Traditionalist' and 'pro-Muslim', and a 'danger to Swedish nationalism' (here).

In late February 2011 Omar planned to attend a New Right/Identitarian gathering in Sweden (www.identitet.org), although he did not show up. He notified his friends on facebook of the meeting (due to it having traditionalist/'anti-zionist' speakers), which in turn spawned a lengthy (87 posts and counting) debate on a nationalist forum (here) where the relationship between Traditionalism, Islam and Swedish nationalism is discussed and put into question.

Finally it is worth noting that Lars Adelskogh, a former speaker in the Aguéli Study Group, is also a collaborator with Omar on an Islamic Publishing house, islamiskaforlaget.se. Adelskog has several ties to the Swedish Right Wing scene. Besides having translated Guénon's The Reign of Quantity, Adelskogh has also written the book En tom säck kan inte stå: myten om "förintelsen i gaskamrarna" i Auschwitz (An empty sack can not stand: The myth of the "gas chamber Holocaust" at Auschwitz), a revisionist book that questions the scope of the Holocaust. This book was published in 2002 by Nordiska Förlaget. He has also translated Kevin MacDonald's The Culture of Critique (as Kritikkulturen: en evolutionär analys av judiskt engagemang i 1900-talets intellektuella och politiska rörelser), which is considered a key text in the contemporary Right Wing scene, and likewise published on Nordiska Förlaget.

Swedish nationalists have in previous year been observed at pro-Palestinian Al Quds demonstrations, but it is probably still too early to evaluate the exact extent and potential future developments of Islamic and New Right relations in Sweden.

Jacob Christiansen Senholt, Aarhus University

Simone Weil?

An anymous comment (which I post undedited) runs as follows:

Simone Weil was progressive and she too spoke of a need for roots. Dont know whether she fits into Traditionalism or not. But some elements of her work would be highly compatible with traditionalism.

"What makes an impression first is the distinction drawn by Weil between rights and obligations. Weil did not dispute the significance of rights, but she put them, it might be said, in their place. She viewed rights as 'subordinate and relative' to obligations: the exercise of a right did not depend on the demands of the individual possessing them, but on the recognition by others of their obligations....

...Weil insists that a progressive concerned with the promotion of just order must be able to speak about more than economic advancement, the expansion of rights, or the pursuit of individual happiness through restless scientific advance. Weil believed that progressives need to speak, too, to the need for 'roots,' understood as a basic—even spiritual—need. They should be able to speak of love of country, not only of submission to the State. Their language should be that of obligation, not only of rights, informed by morality even before it appeals to law...." (from book review by Bob Bauer on More Soft Money Hard Law website)

Book review: "This is one of those books which ought to be studied by the young before their lesiure has been lost and their capacity for thought destroyed; books the effect of which, we can only hope, will become apparent in the attitude of mind of another generation." T. S. Elliot


More here

http://www.ou.edu/cas/psc/bookweil.htm

Hellenic Eurasian movement opens website

The Hellenic Eurasian movement now has a blog (at http://eurasiagr.blogspot.com/) with translations of Dugin.