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Winter Oak

Winter Oak
6 Nov 2024 | 9:48 am

1. The stench of the system: propaganda


by Paul Cudenec

Something is smelling decidedly 'off' in today's world, with nauseating levels of corruption, mass murder, lies, hypocrisy and repression. These three essays are based on three books I happen to have recently read, each of which provides fascinating but necessarily limited insights into the reality of contemporary society. Placed alongside each other, however, they can help us to identify the source of the odour.

Eric Hazan, the French writer and publisher who died this summer at the age of 88, goes out of his way in his 2006 book LQR: La propagande du quotidien ('LQR: Everyday Propaganda') to insist that he is "obviously not equating neoliberalism with Nazism". [1]

This is a rather puzzling thing for him to have written, since not only is neoliberalism very similar to Nazism and Fascism, as I have often pointed out, but this fact is also strongly confirmed by his book!

Moreover, the equation that he denies making even lies behind the book's title, as he explains in the opening pages.

A German-Jewish academic Victor Klemperer kept note of the newspeak rolled out by the Hitler regime and in 1947 published his observations, using the term LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii, Language of the Third Reich, to describe the phenomenon. [2]

Hazan (pictured) thus uses LQR, Lingua Quintae Republicae, Language of the Fifth Republic, to refer to the newspeak of contemporary (neoliberal) France.

The notable continuity between Nazi Germany and today's "democratic" world is something I have mentioned on a number of occasions.

In 2021, in Fascism Rebranded, I discussed Johann Chapoutot's 2020 revelations about a corporate Management Academy in Germany that was run from 1956 by a certain Reinhard Höhn, who had been a prominent protégé of Heinrich Himmler and a shining light of the SS. [3]

The post-war continuity was not just in the personnel – Höhn was not the only Nazi involved – but also in the authoritarian industrial mindset behind both National Socialism and business management.

As Chapoutot writes: "It transforms each person into a thing (res), an object, which must be useful in order to have the right to live and exist. The Germanic individual becomes a tool, a raw material (Menschenmaterial) and a factor – a factor of production, of growth, of prosperity". [4]

Then in 2023 I pointed out how Emmanuel Macron's government in France was intent on replacing "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" with the new slogan of "Work, Order and Progress".

I remarked: "Try that out in German and see how it feels: 'Arbeit, Ordnung, Fortschritt'. Hmmm…" [5]

The similarities in outlook and language keep cropping up. Earlier this year, a pro-government journalist said on French TV that "conspiracy theorists" were like "cockroaches" that had to be "got rid of". [6]

For some years now, the French state has been using the strange term "dérives sectaires" – "sectarian excesses" – to describe thinking it doesn't like, such as that of those very same "conspiracy theorists". [7]

Where did they get this term from? It is a striking coincidence that the Nazi party in Germany also described dissident opinion as "sectarian" and staged training programmes for state employees so as to steer them away from ideas deemed unacceptable, including those of the anti-industrialist Ludwig Klages. [8]

In Klemperer's book, he says that the Third Reich forged only a very few new words, but rather "changed the value of words and their frequency… subjected language to its terrible system, used it as its most powerful, public and secret means of propaganda". [9]

Hazan writes that the contemporary French equivalent of this Nazi language relies on people not noticing that it is being deployed: "Above all else, it must not be seen for what it is". [10]

He says it "is managing to spread without anyone, or hardly anyone, apparently noticing its advance", hence his attempt "to identify and decipher this new version of the banality of evil". [11]

Some of the examples he gives are specific to France, but others will be familiar to those living in the English-speaking world.

"Governance" is used instead of "government"; [12] "equity" instead of "equality"; [13] "reform" describes any acceleration of neoliberal "modernisation", [14] while attacking an enemy for no good reason is a "pre-emptive" strike [15] aimed at ensuring "security". [16]

There is, of course, "zero tolerance" for any challenge to "l'ordre républicain" [17] – known elsewhere as "law and order" or "the rule of law" – and, as we have noted, such a necessary companion to "work" and "progress".

And no greater fear stalks the nightmares of a LQR-speaker than "the end of authority". [18]

The parallels which Hazan finds are not just with Nazism but also with Soviet Communism, a slightly different model of 20th century industrial-authoritarianism.

He quotes one Vadim Zagladine as writing in 1989: "According to current Soviet thinking, security can only be assured through the joint efforts of all members of the global community". [19]

That's a turn of phrase that could have come straight out of Davos!

And Hazan notes the curiously close relationship between "neoliberal theories of 'human capital'" [20] and the pronouncements of Stalin, who declared in 1931: "We must finally understand that of all the precious capital in the world, the most precious capital, the most decisive capital, is human beings". [21]

For reasons which will quickly become clear, the language of the Fifth Republic seems to stigmatise one ethnic group in particular, using terms such as "arabo-musulman" [22] and "islamiste" – the latter, unlike "islamique", having "the advantage of rhyming with terroriste", as Hazan observes. [23]

These people represent a threat that has to be "eradicated" (according to academic Gilles Kepel) and the places where they live "jet cleaned", as former president Nicolas Sarkozy (pictured) put it. [24]

Hazan records that one of the after-effects of 9/11 was a change in the language used in France.

"Hatred of Islam was now being expressed in social circles, reviews and institutions that one would have imagined impervious to racism, or at least to its open expression". [25]

As this taboo was lifted, others were imposed. Hazan cites one French journalist's 2004 warning that criticism of neoliberal George W. Bush indicated a "resurgence of Americanophobia", [26] while "expert" Alexandre Adler insisted that same year that "anti-Americanism is a fascistic emotion which in fact has an affinity with the 'Muslim fascism' propagated by the islamists". [27]

Needless to say (particularly for anyone who has read the first essay in this short series), the greatest outpourings of outrage are reserved for instances of alleged "anti-semitism", which somehow seems to be perpetually on the rise.

Hazan records the melodramatic reaction of the political class to a 2004 fire at a Jewish social centre in Paris, which later turned out to have set by a Jewish man with mental health problems. [28]

Jacques Chirac, president at the time, expressed his "profound indignation", "strongly" condemned "this unspeakable act" and insisted on the "absolute determination" of the authorities to track down the culprits. Presidential determination is usually either "absolute" or "unwavering", remarks Hazan. [29]

Bertrand Delanoë, Mayor of Paris, warned of a "nasty dangerous atmosphere", while politician Jack Lang (pictured) called for "action" instead of "fine words and crocodile tears", although, as Hazan points out, he did not indicate what kind of action he had in mind. [30].

Hazan, who was himself Jewish, also points to a book, nearly 1,000 pages long, on the subject of "planetary Judeophobia", written by Pierre-André Taguieff in a totalitarian style he regards as typical of LQT.

"He is not content with just insulting his enemies; they are exposed to public condemnation in a work whose 15-page index reads like a proscription list". [31]

Hazan also does not shy away from making a key connection, related to the meaning of "terrorism".

He notes that French TV news described a 2004 Palestinian resistance attack on an Israeli fort in Rafah, in the south of Gaza, as a "terrorist attack". [32]

This, he says, mirrored the application of the same term to the wartime French Resistance by Philippe Henriot, Secretary of State for Information in Petain's Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime. [33]

Henriot was assassinated in April 1944 and the day after his funeral a statement was printed in Combats, the journal of the pro-Nazi paramilitary police force, the Milice.

It said: "Philippe Henriot, we renew our promise to you to fight to win, to rid France of these gangs of looters which are terrorising our provinces". [34]

An obfuscation, nay inversion, of the relative moral standing between the system and its opponents is central to the language of contemporary power.

In a society run by "the politico-financial oligarchy", [35] says Hazan, the official vocabulary thus never speaks of profit, but of a "return on investments" [36] and, as he explains, there can be no room for old-fashioned notions such as exploitation or oppression.

"These words would effectively imply that there is such a thing as exploiters and oppressors, which is a bad fit with the announced end of class relationships.

"However, a way had to be found of designating those who live in misery, now too numerous to be simply rendered invisible.

"The experts have found the name: they are the excluded. The replacement of the exploited by the excluded is an excellent move for the proponents of consensual pacification, since there are no identifiable excluders to be the modern equivalents of the exploiters of the proletariat". [37]

Contemporary non-exploiters in the business and financial world are presented to the public as "sensitive souls" [38] with "noble sentiments". [39]

Hazan illustrates this with regard to the way the media presented the 2004 arrival of financier Edouard de Rothschild (pictured) as leading shareholder of Libération, a supposedly "left-wing" daily newspaper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1971.

One newspaper editorial gushed: "His investment in Libération will be his first step as a patrician concerned about public debate and for the irreplaceable role of the daily press". [40]

Rothschild himself has declared: "At certain moments one has to know how to charm; and at others to impose oneself". [41]

Hazan remarks that this kind of language "presents 'the ruling elite' as a sort of collective good papa, severe but benevolent. Firmly determined to uphold the rule of justice for the happiness of the population". [42]

Sometimes the most important insights into any subject matter turn up at the intersection of two different sources.

This is the case with the word "ensemble" – together – which Hazan presents as part of his Language of the Fifth Republic, deployed everywhere in an apparent bid to give the impression of national unity and thus to maintain order.

In official messaging and advertising alike, people are urged to keep the pavements clean ensemble, to take care ensemble on the Paris Metro, to respect the environment ensemble. [43]

There are also warnings that "extremists" – including those ever-lurking "anti-semites" – are threatening democracy and people's capacity to live ensemble. [44]

In Jacob Cohen's "fictional" account of Zionist influence on French society, which I wrote about in the first of these essays, he describes an advertising campaign featuring the slogan "Ensemble, éclairons le monde" – 'Together, let's light up the world' – with a photo of a Menorah (seven-branched candelabrum) and the name of the Jewish religious festival Hanukkah.

The purpose of this is explained thus: "Hanukkah must become a familiar notion. A universal message of peace, symbolising freedom and linked to the history of the Jewish people. The identification with Israel will happen naturally". [45]

A decade after both Cohen and Hazan wrote about the political deployment of the word ensemble, it became, in 2021, the name of the coalition of parties supporting President Macron, [46] a former Rothschild banker [47] who is said to still be very close to the famous Jewish family.

Hazan says that LQR first appeared "during the course of the 1960s, during gaullo-pompidouism [the governments of General de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou], that brutal modernisation of traditional French capitalism". [48]

As I explained in Enemies of the People, Pompidou was the director general of the Banque Rothschild, who initially ran de Gaulle's staff office for six months. [49]

There he revised the constitution so that the Fifth Republic of 1958 (that lent LQR its name) would allow more presidential power over elected representatives – a power which has also been very useful for Macron in recent years.

Pompidou returned to the Rothschild bank, before going back into politics as de Gaulle's second Prime Minister between 1962 and 1968, then becoming president from 1969 until his death in 1974.

During that period there was much social unrest in France, including the famous uprising of 1968.

One group, La Gauche Prolétarienne (The Proletarian Left), formed in 1970, was particularly known for its direct action attacks ("terrorism" for some) on the ruling class and the ultra-rich.

Its theoretical journal, J'Accuse, included among its contributors and editors André Glucksmann, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Godard, Gilles Deleuze, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Explains journalist and author Francis Wheen: "They also published a newspaper, La Cause du Peuple, and when its editor was arrested Sartre himself took over – though his efforts went largely unnoticed, since the police confiscated every issue.

"Only two years after les évenements of May 1968, the Pompidou government was taking no risks: it also banned the Cuban journal Tricontinental, the left-wing review Le Point and Carlos Marighella's Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla". [50]

Is it mere coincidence that the fascistic Pompidou (pictured) was, like Macron, a career Rothschild banker?

Is it coincidental that, as I related in Enemies of the People, the Rothschilds funded, via their Wall Street fronts, Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism and German Nazism, with the aim of advancing their industrial-authoritarian agenda?

Hazan's book, especially when taken together with Cohen's, paints a disturbing portrait of the hidden reality of contemporary French society.

And, of course, that reality is mirrored in other countries, as will be confirmed in the third and last of these insights.

[Audio version]

See also:

The stench of the system: sayanim

[1] Eric Hazan, LQR: La Propagande du quotidien (Paris: Raisons d'Agir Editions, 2006), p. 18. All translations are my own. Thanks to Karim for the recommendation!
[2] Hazan, p. 11.
[3] Paul Cudenec, Fascism Rebranded: Exposing the Great Reset (2021), pp. 280-84.
https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/fascism-rebranded23web.pdf
[4] Johann Chapoutot, Libres d'Obéir: le management du nazisme à aujourd'hui (Paris: Gallimard, 2020), pp. 65-66.
[5] Paul Cudenec, Converging Against the Criminocrats: Essays and Talks for the New International Resistance (2023), p. 73.
https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/convergingagainstthe-criminocratsweb-1.pdf
[6] https://juste-milieu.fr/alba-ventura-et-les-cafards-complotistes-que-fait-larcom/
[7] https://www.miviludes.interieur.gouv.fr/quest-ce-quune-d%C3%A9rive-sectaire
[8] Paul Cudenec, 'Life philosophy: beyond left and right'.
https://winteroak.org.uk/2024/10/14/life-philosophy-beyond-left-and-right/
[9] Victor Klemperer, LTI, la langue du IIIe Reich, carnets d'un philologue, trad. Elisabth Guillot (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), pp. 38-39, cit. Hazan, p. 12.
[10] Hazan, p. 121.
[11] Hazan, p. 14.
[12] Hazan, p. 29.
[13] Hazan, p. 33.
[14] Hazan, p. 31.
[15] Hazan, p. 29.
[16] Hazan, p. 18.
[17] Hazan, p. 76.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Pour la restructuration et l'humanisation des relations internationales (Moscow: Novosti, 1989), p. 80, cit. Hazan, p. 37.
[20] Hazan, p. 44.
[21] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin
[22] Hazan, p. 84.
[23] Hazan, p. 87.
[24] Hazan, p. 88.
[25] Hazan, p. 90.
[26] Hazan, p. 93.
[27] Hazan, p. 94.
[28] Hazan, p. 79.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Hazan, p. 96.
[32] Hazan, p. 39.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Jacques Delperrié de Bayac, Histoire de la Milice (Paris: Fayard, 1969), p. 503. cit. Hazan, pp. 39-40.
[35] Hazan, p. 20.
[36] Hazan, p. 29.
[37] Hazan, p. 107.
[38] Hazan, p. 80.
[39] Hazan, p. 75.
[40] Hazan, p. 75 FN.
[41] Hazan, p. 75.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Hazan, p. 111.
[44] Hazan, p. 111 FN.
[45] Jacob Cohen, Le Printempts des sayanim: Récit (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2010), p. 126.
[46] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensemble_pour_la_R%C3%A9publique_(France)
[47] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Macron
[48] p. 12.
[49] Paul Cudenec, *Enemies of the People: The Rothschilds and their corrupt global empire (2022), pp. 44-45.
https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/enemiesofthepeopleol.pdf
[50] Francis Wheen, *Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia* (London: Fourth Estate, 2010), p. 88.

Winter Oak
4 Nov 2024 | 8:46 am

2. The stench of the system: sayanim


by Paul Cudenec

Something is smelling decidedly 'off' in today's world, with nauseating levels of corruption, mass murder, lies, hypocrisy and repression. These three essays are based on three books I happen to have recently read, each of which provides fascinating but necessarily limited insights into the reality of contemporary society. Placed alongside each other, however, they can help us to identify the source of the odour.

"The French government has been totally captured by Israel. The president behaves like a Zionist agent. The mass media are controlled… I am astonished by the power of the Jewish lobby. It practically dictates the Middle East policies of France and of Europe". [1]

"Here are people who control most of the mainstream media, who have at their disposal intermediaries in the highest spheres of the state, not to speak of considerable financial clout, and they cannot tolerate the existence of a little rebel group… These people have decided to attack all forms of pro-Palestinian expression. They are everywhere, they are powerful and above all are diabolically efficient. They must certainly be working with intelligence services". [2]

The two statements above are fictional. Or rather, they are fictional in that they have been put into the mouths of fictional characters in a work presented as a fiction.

However, author Jacob Cohen clearly does not want his readers to imagine that the contents of Le Printemps des Sayanim ('The Sayanim Spring') bear no relation at all to real life.

He chooses to describe his book as an "account" (récit) rather than a novel and his double-edged disclaimer declares: "Despite the troubling proximity to reality of the related facts, all resemblance to existing persons would only be the product of a coincidence". [3]

One such coincidence concerns the central fictional character Youssef El Kouhen, the history teacher of Moroccan background who becomes involved in Freemasonry in France and whose support for Palestine provokes reprisals from the Zionist sayanim who play a leading role in the organisation.

No connection here, obviously, to Moroccan-born Jacob Cohen (pictured), with a degree from Science-Po in Paris, author of a book exposing the activities of those same networks.

Cohen's "fiction" begins with a page of non-fictional quotes describing the existence and activities of the sayanim, a volunteer force of millions of Jewish Zionists across the world who are deployed by Mossad to defend and advance Israel's interests.

Here former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky states that this is the Israel intelligence service's key asset – whereas a branch of Russian intelligence in any given country might need a staff of at least 100 people, Mossad can function with six or seven, the rest of their personnel being from civilian sayanim. [4]

Cohen has his fictional alter ego muse over the psychology of these fanatic Zionists, for whom Israel is the most wonderful country in the world.

"El Kouhen wondered what kept them in their legal homeland [France]. Having the keys to paradise, and staying outside, was not the least of the paradoxes of the 'chosen people'". [5]

He describes how on the one hand the sayanim feel an exaggerated pride and confidence in their role, with one of them seeing himself as belonging to "an army of the shadows, with tentacle-like branches capable of reaching any target anywhere in the world. With formidable efficiency". [6]

But on the other hand there is a constant sense of being in existential danger which maintains a certain desperate urgency in the sayanim mind.

He has one character declare: "You know, Israel gives this impression of being an indestructible force. Which is good, because we are strong. But the threat is permanent. Our enemies are increasingly determined. They will seize any opportunity to hurt us, to finish us off. The war will not only be won on the military front. Our only chance of survival resides in our unity, the unity of the entire Jewish people. Without that, it's the beginning of the end… We are at war. It's us or them". [7]

El Kouhen/Cohen expresses a certain scepticism regarding his co-religionists' depiction of themselves as perpetual victims.

"They had suffered a lot. But all the same! The scales were truly tilted in their favour. Jews now occupied a prime place. Sympathies at the highest level of the state. The top dogs of France standing to attention at the annual dinner held by CRIF [Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France]. To the point of developing a feeling of impunity, tinged with arrogance…" [8]

Zionist meetings, in the book, receive VIP treatment from certain politicians in Paris, with the town hall of the 16th arrondissement providing, for free, not only a meeting room but also a lavish buffet.

"An unconditional supporter of Israel, and of the Jewish organisations which represented it, the mayor pulled out all the stops". [9]

And Paris St-Germain's Parc des Princes football stadium, in the same arrondissement, is made available by the fictional owner for a Zionist-organised event.

He declares at a B'nai B'rith meeting: "The sandwiches and the drinks will be on the club. We will also be laying on the TV coverage. The full works. Long live the friendship between France and Israel!" [10]

The same event also attracts a grant of 60,000 euros from the EU and financial backing from TV channel ARTE. [11]

The principal weapon deployed by the agents of Zionism operating both in French Freemasonry (Grand Orient) and in the pseudo-masonic Jewish B'nai B'rith is to "reduce critics of Israel to silence by likening them to the worst anti-semites". [12]

"A terrible sword of Damocles was hanging over the head of those who still believed in the equality of states under international law.

"The supreme accusation, the ultimate insult. In the end, through media hype, they got it accepted as self-evident. All 'exaggerated' criticism of Israel amounted to anti-semitism". [13]

One of the volunteer sayanim, a doctor, is sent to an international medical conference at which a prominent Scottish cardiologist is known to be planning a resolution in support of Palestinians, condemning Israeli war crimes.

The Zionist agent gives a speech evoking the holocaust, the rise of anti-semitism and the existential threat to Israel which leads to the resolution being narrowly defeated. [14]

Cohen's 2010 fictional account also refers to a very real episode in recent French political life, namely the sayanim campaign against Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala (pictured), a well-known comedian who started to poke fun at Israel and Zionists.

He writes that the Zionists, very present in show business, set out to discredit Dieudonné by all possible means.

"Accused of 'anti-semitism', he was blacklisted and boycotted by the media. Schemes were devised to get his touring shows cancelled. A pre-planned professional death. The message to other artists could not have been clearer. Forbidden zone". [15]

Cohen evidently had some fun inventing names for his fictional characters – I know enough German to have laughed out loud at "Claude Arschlokhovitch", for instance. [16]

A key fictional character in the book is a well-known public figure called MST, which in French stands for "maladie sexuellement transmissible" (sexually transmitted disease, STD).

I can only think of one real-life public figure in France who is known by three initials and that is Bernard-Henri Levi, aka BHL, (pictured) but any superficial resemblance is no doubt another of Cohen's mere coincidences.

MST is depicted as being the most important Zionist agent in France, "worth more than a hundred sayanim". [17]

An Israeli diplomat enthuses: "This man has incredible networks in the most influential circles in Europe and America. He can call Sarkozy [French President, 2007-2012] whenever he wants – or the king of Morocco, or the president of the European Commission". [18]

"MST has a special relationship with the Mossad. It's the Mossad who took care of his protection in Pakistan, when he carried out his inquiry into the murder of the American journalist. Otherwise he wouldn't have gone. It's too dangerous. No other secret service would have been capable of protecting him". [19]

This telegenic Zionist agent, known for his "open-neck white shirts, dandy ways and abtruse intellectualism", [20] leaps into action every time Israeli interests need defending.

"A sociologist previously above suspicion had dared to draw a parallel between the Israeli occupation and other historical occupations. MST immediately launched a petition which gathered the usual support.

"The major newspapers opened their columns to him. He was invited on to TV chat shows. Canal+ invited him on five times. You could almost imagine him as an intrepid and irreproachable knight, in immaculate white livery, pursuing evil-doing enemies". [21]

MST argues that to compare the Israeli occupation with other occupations was "to delegitimise the existence of Israel and thus pave the way to a new Holocaust. It was the expression of a historical and visceral anti-semitism, which didn't dare speak its name, the same anti-semitism which had wrought devastation in Europe.

"These new anti-semites didn't know, or pretended not to know, that the Jewish army was the most moral in the world". [22]

The secret of MST's success in sounding convincing is that he is known for his public criticism of Israel.

Revelation of his true role is a mind-blowing experience for Gilles, a relatively recent Zionist agent, who had previously assumed that MST was not totally on their side.

"What a strange world! He had already benefited from some confidential information – those tasty but unimportant little secrets which announce your arrival in the circle of the initiated.

"But the revelation about MST was of another nature. For the first time, he grasped the complexity of the hidden connections and of the illusions within which ordinary mortals live". [23]

One of MST's key catchphrases is his call for "peace" in the Middle East and this term is used a lot by the sayanim in the book.

To this PR end, they arrange an Israel-Palestine football match in Paris – the event I mentioned earlier.

One of them explains: "We have to give the impression that things are moving and that peace can be achieved. And that, because we are on the right road, all forms of resistance can only delay the process". [24]

To help promote this narrative, the sayanim are closely involved with SOS Racisme (a real-life organisation) whose black or Arab "leaders" are little more than a front for "the Jewish Community". [25]

Cohen's Muslim characters condemn SOS Racisme as "sell-outs", "darlings of the system", involving "the right of the Socialist Party, Jewish and Zionist organisations and even pro-Americans". [26]

You could hardly think otherwise "when you know who it was that created them!" [27]

This "anti-racist" body is thus just a Zionist means of capturing the moral high ground, of deflecting criticism of Israeli imperialism [28] with empty talk of "peace" and warnings of a rise in anti-semitism.

It is part of what Cohen describes as "the hidden side of things, the possibilities for manipulation, the telephone calls to the media and the arranged interviews, the invisible web of imposed truths". [29]

[Audio version]

See also:

The stench of the system: propaganda

[1] Jacob Cohen, Le Printemps des sayanim: Récit (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2010), p. 65. The translations are my own.
[2] Cohen, p. 165, p. 167.
[3] Cohen, p. 2.
[4] Cohen, p. 5.
[5] Cohen, p. 16.
[6] Cohen, p. 31.
[7] Cohen, p. 47.
[8] Cohen, p. 17.
[9] Cohen, pp. 43-44.
[10] Cohen, p. 55.
[11] Cohen, pp. 72-73.
[12] Cohen, p. 17.
[13] Cohen, p. 66.
[14] Cohen, p. 51.
[15] Cohen, p. 78.
[16] Cohen, p. 25. Arschloch means 'arsehole'.
[17] Cohen, p. 26.
[18] Cohen, p. 26.
[19] Cohen, p. 27.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Cohen, p. 38.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Cohen, p. 27.
[24] Cohen, p. 73.
[25] Cohen, p. 77.
[26] Cohen, pp. 63-64.
[27] Cohen, p. 64.
[28] Cohen, p. 66.
[29] Cohen, p. 74.

Winter Oak
1 Nov 2024 | 7:57 am

3. Vote for Nobody!


People's Choice – 20 x 32 inches (51 x 81 centimeters), Oil on Canvas, by Jordan Henderson

Nobody cares.

Nobody is on your side.

Nobody tells the truth.

Nobody will defend your freedom.

Nobody is truly independent.

Nobody will end the wars.

Nobody will stop arming Israel.

Nobody will restore power to the people.

Nobody will challenge the power of the central banks.

Nobody will stop the systematic theft of your collective wealth.

Nobody will defy the evil global criminocracy.

Vote for Nobody!

Winter Oak
30 Oct 2024 | 8:36 am

4. Towards a Sexual Eschatology: The Divine Sophia in Esoteric Christianity


Following our publication of Paul Cudenec's series of essays on "The Spirit of Sophia" in September, long-time UK reader Wayne John sent us a well-informed essay he wrote around the same subject, which we are delighted to be able to share here.

The central Christian confession of faith is the proclamation that 'God is Love' (1 John 4.8). Far from any hint of modernist sentimentalism in this Creedal witness is the basic understanding that the 'Godhead' is relational. That is to say, God is more than a Unitarian being of one 'person' but rather, a form of communality.

God is a community in communion, which is to say that he must be defined as being in relationship. The basic Christian experience of God is to know God as a Trinity: the Father is the unbegotten, the Son is the begotten, the Holy Spirit is he who proceeds. All three are one and are uncreated, but the mutual love that they share is the created logos that is the 'divine wisdom', otherwise known in esoteric Christianity as the 'Divine Sophia', the soul of the world both in creation, redemption and the consummation at the end of time.

The Hebrew Old Testament speaks of the 'Shekinah', a theme very much developed in the wisdom tradition such as that portrayed in the Book of Proverbs (Pro 8.22.35). As Old Testament biblical exegesis, the interpretation is understood in Christian tradition as representing a 'veiled prophecy' – it is important to understand how the New Testament is latent within the Hebraic scriptures awaiting fulfilment and transcendent 'orthopraxy' through the Greek scriptures of witness to Christ Jesus, the uncreated Logos.

In the central mystery of the incarnation, there was a replay of the manner in which the Holy Spirit existed from all eternity in the bosom of the Father. In a celestial prototype of marriage, developed in the creation account of the Book of Genesis, the Son leaves the Father to seek a bride. The bride becomes a wife and is 'lost' in her husband to become 'one flesh' in the body of her bridegroom, forsaking her maiden nature. Therefore, as Eve 'the Mother of all Living' (Gen 2.21-25, 3.20), the Divine Sophia was created from within the 'rib' of the Triune Godhead/Holy Trinity as a manifestation of its common life and love in relationship, both understood as the beginning, process and goal to be realized in all creation. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky once wrote, "Beauty will save the world".

The Divine Sophia, or wisdom, is the first created being – and while older than the rest of creation, is yet younger than God although not co-eternal with God. C.S. Lewis, the famous Anglican theologian, Christian apologist and fantasy writer, once remarked that towards God, "all of creation is feminine" in that, while God acts and initiates, creation is thus receptive and responds. This receptiveness is an image of the church as the bride of Christ, destined to 'disappear' into the body of Christ in consummation, as echoed in the words of the Virgin Mary when, in reply to the Angel Gabriel, she says in willing submission, "Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word." (Luke 1.38).

Thus, as well as consenting to be the Mother of God (theotokos) in co-operation with the Holy Spirit (synergy), the Virgin Mary actually becomes 'the new Eve', according to biblical typology, just as Jesus becomes 'the new Adam' by way of his incarnation, and together through their union they undo the sin of the original Adam and Eve. In his love for Eve, Adam – in actually following her in transgression – identifies himself with her sin, and in doing so actually prefigures Christ in his crucifixion. Equally, while Eve brings forth children in sorrow (Gen 3.17), Mary as a type and personification of the church brings forth her children through the waters of baptism and the bread and blood/wine of the Eucharist.

This is developed further in the Book of Revelation (Rev 12 1–16) where the great sign in heaven of a 'woman clothed with the sun' reveals the theotokos further as partaking of, and manifesting, the divine wisdom; 'the moon being under her feet' proclaims her pre-eminent role over the creation, again typifying the Divine Sophia as being created before the foundation of the world. Thus the 'woman', or Mary/Sophia, being symbolic of the hope and mission of 'Israel', finds her consummation and is lost in the body of her bridegroom: the Church as Bride of Christ. She also fulfils the proto-evangel of Gen 3.15.

We therefore find the theotokos in Catholic and Orthodox theology, embracing all three of the 'pagan goddess' aspects. She is virgin, mother and crone, personified in there also being three Marys at the Cross (John 19.25). As both man and woman equally share in the divine image, the creator must therefore embrace a duality of feminine and masculine attributes while at the same time transcending both of them, being also progressively revealed as both immanent in creation while also transcending it, in a manner akin to the richness inherent in the Taoist concept of yin and yang. Sometimes, theologians have described this relation with the term 'panentheism' (God is in all things and all things are in God). Some mystics of the 'apothatic' way describe God as therefore both 'personal' and yet completely beyond 'personality', embracing both light and darkness (i.e. the 'via negativa' way as contrasted with the 'via positiva' way).

In eastern orthodoxy, particularly of the Hesychast tradition (which is normative for the eastern Greek and Russian traditions), one should always distinguish between God as manifested in his 'essence' and God as experienced in his 'energies'. While we will never know God in his 'essence', being creatures, we can know God in his energies, which can lead to actual deification, 'being partakers of the divine nature' (2 Pet 1.2-5).

In his Epistle to the Ephesians, St. Paul further develops this whole theme when addressing the union of a man and woman as being symbolic of that between Christ and the church, calling it a 'great mystery' (Eph 5.22-32). This 'great mystery' hints at a form of 'sexual eschatology', mystically realized in marriage and prefigured in the Hebraic Song of Songs, which Christians have always interpreted as being an allegory of Christ's love for his bride, or 'Israel universalised', in the church. This allegorical exegesis of 'The Song of Songs' suggests that, at its highest expression, human sexual love is a gateway to – and revelation of – the divine purpose in creation. The early church father, Origen, speculated that even in heaven, 'exclusive' relationships might be manifested, although these would not be expressed through physical sexuality.

As the Divine Sophia in the esoteric Christian tradition is not 'fallen', as she is portrayed in Gnosticism, her manifestation in the theotokos has already anticipated and experienced the full resurrection of the body as understood in the Orthodox teaching relating to The Dormition (or falling asleep) of the Holy Theotokos, where it is believed she has already been received into heaven in a perfect unity of body, soul and spirit before the day of resurrection, thus also personifying a 'realized eschatology' within the creation.

This is also expressed in the iconography of the Orthodox church by the iconostasis, or iron screens, which separate the altar from the congregation in the layout of the church, and manifest scenes from the life of Mary, along with those from the life of Christ, starting with the Nativity of the Virgin and her presentation in the temple, and ending with The Dormition. In the Roman Catholic tradition, this is a dogma called The Assumption of the Virgin Mary.

Carl Jung was very highly sympathetic to the event of this papal dogmatic proclamation. He was much influenced by alchemical and Gnostic traditions, suggesting that this was the most outstanding theological development since the Reformation, as it implied a veneration of the earthly principle of the feminine. This aspect of humanity had now been taken into the very Godhead, and transfigured in light. Thus, it bridged the gap between the separation of spirit from nature to embrace a holistic, theocentric conception of divine humanity, alien to any hint of a reductionist dualism. As the prophet Isaiah says, "Behold a woman shall encompass a man" (Jeremiah 31:22).

Therefore if humanity is called to be both a co-creator with God, being made in his image, and then to be fashioned later into his likeness, what of the final consummation of the redemptive purpose in creation?

Some mystics of all religious traditions have suggested that divinity wished to reflect itself in creation as in a mirror, similar to the Hindu concept of 'thou art that'. In this sense, perhaps the Divine Sophia is that mirror, 'the morning dream of eternity past', which prophetically reveals as a prototype the blueprint for the whole creational process that all are called to realize in themselves, through grace in the Holy Spirit. The Divine Sophia is therefore the Spiritus Mundi or world soul and matrix of all life, and God creates Sophia as the mirror in which to behold God's idea of creation. Latent within this perception and discernment are the contemplative ingredients for a revived and renewed 'nature mysticism' that could even provide the basis for a prophetic Christian re-engagement with ecology and sexuality.

For wisdom is more mobile than any motion because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the power of God and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty, therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the workings of God and an image of his goodness. Although she is but one, she can do all things and while remaining in herself she renews all things, in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God and prophets for God loves nothing more so much as the person who lives with wisdom. She is more beautiful than the sun and excels every constellation of the stars. Compared with the light she is found to be superior for it is succeeded by the night but against wisdom evil does not prevail. She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other and she orders all things well.

(Wisdom of Solomon 7.24-8.1)

Winter Oak
28 Oct 2024 | 10:23 am

5. The Acorn – 97


Number 97

In this issue:

  1. Industrialism is a manifestation of Evil
  2. Grenfell Tower: a chemicals cover-up
  3. 9/11 and Covid: weapons of mass manipulation
  4. Jacques Camatte: an organic radical inspiration
  5. Acorninfo

1. Industrialism is a manifestation of Evil

by Paul Cudenec

Nature, in the organic radical tradition, is regarded as the manifestation of Good.

Whether seen as the self-realisation of divinity or as its precious creation, it represents all that is sacred to us: life, authenticity, beauty.

But what about the other side of the coin? How might we regard the abstract notion of Evil as manifesting in our world?

It would have to take the form of everything that opposes the force of Good we have already identified, everything that impedes its thriving, blocks its divine light.

Within the human mind, we could identify this as the ego, the little self who is only interested in his own narrow desires and thus, like soul-selling Faust, puts himself at the service of Evil.

But when a world is dominated by individuals who have deliberately embraced selfishness, unashamedly and even jubilantly, this germ of inner Evil will then expand to assume a social and physical form.

Certain apologists for the current industrial system like to claim that the enormous social and environmental problems associated with it are the result only of the specific way in which our society is being run at the moment.

The technology, or Technik, involved, they insist, is itself "neutral" – it is merely the way in which it is used which is problematic.

However, to fairly assess this so-called "neutrality", we need to consider what lies behind the industrial impulse.

While the official narrative insists that its aim has always been to relieve people of the need for manual labour, to lift them out of poverty, to elevate humankind to greater cultural and civilisational heights, this is just window-dressing for something much less worthy.

Industrialism is about profit.

Labour-saving machinery has always been about saving the costs of human labour for the machine's owners and thus increasing their profit margins.

Increases in scale, in productivity, in efficiency, in quantity and in speed are likewise all aimed at increasing profit.

Those who "invest" in the latest "innovations" are doing so in the hope of extracting the greatest possible financial profit.

Property development is about making profit from destroying our countryside and sustainable development is about continuing to profit from the pillaging of the living world while pretending to be "green".

Industrialism, from the First Industrial Revolution of steam engines and factories through to the proposed Fourth Industrial Revolution of transhumanism and nanotechnology, has always been – and always will be – a means of making money.

This, in itself, is damning.

Christian teaching tells us that "the love of money is the root of all evil" and this understanding is part of traditional human wisdom.

But when we look at the effects of this industrialist money-love on our world, the force fuelling its advance becomes even more obvious.

While nature is beautiful, industrialism is ugly, on the inside and the outside.

For centuries it has been ravaging, raping and defiling the sacred place to which we belong.

Rivers poisoned, air blackened, seas polluted, forests felled, landscapes desecrated.

Factories, pylons, motorways, airports, phone masts.

Plastic, concrete, chemicals, fumes, radiation.

And at the same time generations of human beings have been ripped from their native soil, shipped all over the world and shovelled into the jaws of the Machine.

Human capital. Fodder for the investors. Sacrificial victims for Moloch.

Industrialism is, in fact, a physical manifestation of Evil, as many have seen.

William Blake did not speak lightly of "dark Satanic mills" blighting England's green and pleasant land and neither was Mohandas Gandhi exaggerating when he declared: "Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilization; it represents a great sin".

Ludwig Klages, too, described how "the will that emancipates itself from life, and imperiously enslaves it, brings forth evil (the despicable, the satanic)", warning of "this Mammon which is taking hold of humankind as a tool with which to eliminate every form of terrestrial life".

It is true that Evil also becomes real and physical in certain actions of human beings unrelated to industrialism.

But the sheer scale of the industrial Evil puts it in a different league to the little incidences.

After all, what could be more evil than an all-out assault on life itself?

Industrialism is the negation of divine nature in all its living beauty and authenticity.

Of course, the Evil One is an expert in both deception and temptation and has succeeded in persuading the majority that his malevolent works are to our advantage.

Rendered helplessly dependent on his devilish inventions, people can no longer imagine a life without his little luxuries, without his artificial light, without his constant supply of hell-heated water, without the flickering hypnotic images of his "entertainment".

And all the time they force themselves not to be able to see where all this is heading – where it was always heading.

Perhaps in the 19th century people could be forgiven – despite all the child labour and industrial disease – for imagining that technological Progress was a real thing, that one day it would come good.

But today there is no excuse. We have seen all too well what industrialism has done to us and we have heard all too clearly what it wants to do to us next.

The Covid moment and the announcement of the Great Reset, aka the Fourth Industrial Revolution, was a wake-up call to which we urgently need to respond.

We face a future of genetically-modified embryos grown in artificial wombs and sold to de-sexed, de-natured, de-humanised locked-down smart-city couch-consumers whose data is harvested, whose lives are tracked, traced and traded, whose illnesses are a source of profit and whose deaths are medically accelerated, bringing to a premature end an existence that has been meaningless, virtual, sterile and soulless.

The trees will all have to be chopped down to generate more electricity to fuel the Matrix, with fields and hills smothered with industrial solar panels and wind turbines before these fall apart and have to be buried elsewhere in Mother Earth's defiled flesh.

We will be trapped inside a world plunging towards a choking, toxic death, while everyone is forced to put on a synthetic smile and pretend that we are heading upwards towards a glorious gleaming future.

Is that what we want?

Do we want industrialism to continue its cancerous growth until it has killed everything and everyone?

Do we want the Evil of artifice and destruction to prevail over the Good of nature and life?

Or is it time to think again, to dare to imagine a quite different future?

[Audio version]

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2. Grenfell Tower: a chemicals cover-up

The government Inquiry into one of Britain's worst recent tragedies, the Grenfell Tower fire, has ignored the real cause of deaths, according to a whistleblower.

The lethal role of flame retardant chemicals in furniture, imposed by legislation in the UK, is not mentioned in the September 2024 findings, says former civil servant Terry Edge.

He asks: "Is the reason for the Inquiry's failure to address the massive influence of the failed furniture regulations on Grenfell fire toxicity because of their huge profitability as they stand and the fear that there could be huge financial repercussions once the entire population learns they are being poisoned in their own homes and at huge risk of death in a fire for no good reason other than profit?"

The deadly blaze that broke out in west London in June 2017 was the worst UK residential fire since the days of the Blitz in the Second World War.

Seventy people died at the scene and two later in hospital, with many other suffering serious long-term effects.

And it seems that behind the cover-up lies the British state's complicity with the global chemicals industry.

Terry (pictured), who worked on the British government's review of furniture and furnishings regulations, highlighted the scandal in our special report in The Acorn 80, in January 2023.

He warned that the Grenfell Tower disaster was just the tip of the iceberg.

Thousands of adults and children could be suffering from cancers and other serious illnesses, Terry told us.

"It is something the government had the means to put right more than ten years ago. But weak-willed and corrupt civil servants caved into industry pressure and are delaying vital safety changes".

The toxic flame retardants in home furnishing not only poison people in their homes on a daily basis, with children particularly vulnerable, but they also worsen the overall effects of fires.

They do little to slow down the spread of a blaze and create highly toxic smoke.

Given the influence of those behind the global chemicals industry – our 2023 report reveals that this is the usual Vanguard/BlackRock mafia – Terry was not expecting great things from the official Inquiry.

But the reality was "worse than I predicted", he says, with the crucial omissions "a terrible indictment on the Inquiry's many years (of expensive) work".

He explains: "The combination of upholstered furniture and flame retardant chemicals was probably the greatest contribution to the toxic fire gases that this report says were responsible for all the deaths (other than those who jumped from the tower). Yet this is not even mentioned in the report".

The final Grenfell report states that "we can safely find that death was due in each case to the inhalation of [chemical] asphyxiant gases… including carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide" – though it points the finger at the cladding on the building, rather than at the chemically-treated furniture inside.

So, although the Inquiry found that all the deaths were due to the gases that are in abundance when furniture burns, there was, remarkably, not a single reference to either flame retardants or furniture in its final report!

UK authorities have, up to this point, always denied the chemical dimension to the fire. Terry points out that the Government and Kensington & Chelsea Council have consistently asserted to Grenfell survivors and local residents that a) the fire was not toxic and b) they are not ill from the toxicity of the fire.

He asks: "Will they now admit they were wrong, apologise and finally tell Grenfell people the truth about their illnesses?"

A 2023 report for the Fire Brigade Union revealed that firefighters are contracting cancers at rates high above the norm, almost certainly from fire toxicity.

At least 12 firefighters who attended the Grenfell fire have been diagnosed with terminal cancers (and it's expected there will be more to come).

Asks Terry: "Given the Inquiry has concluded that the deaths were due to fire gas poisoning, will Grenfell survivors/residents not be tested for fire gas poisoning?"

The scope of corruption behind this scandal is enormous – our 2023 report details links to the tobacco industry and to Israel.

For the ruling criminocracy, the focus of attention provoked by tragedies like Grenfell Tower risks opening the door to a broader understanding of the vile nature of their global industrialist system.

We all have a responsibility to do as Terry Edge is doing – to stick out a dissenting foot and make sure that the door of truth cannot be slammed back shut.

More info on Terry's website, www.toxicsofa.com.

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3. 9/11 and Covid: weapons of mass manipulation

The following is an extract from an article by academics Piers Robinson and Kevin Ryan, published in September 2024 by the International Center for 9/11 Justice under the title 'A Plausibility Probe of 9/11 and COVID-19 as "Structural Deep Events"'. The authors explain that the term "Structural Deep Event" (SDE) has been developed by Peter Dale Scott to describe "the instigation or exploitation of a real-world event by powerful actors, ones both internal and external to a state's formal governance structures, in order to advance political-economic agendas that have structural implications for society".

Both 9/11 and COVID-19 exhibit key features of an SDE.

Structural-level agendas that provide plausible explanations for the manipulation of both events can be clearly identified.

In the case of 9/11, the pre-existing plans to initiate a series of 'regime change' wars in order to shore up US hegemony in the 21st century are well evidenced with official documents and insider testimony, and provide a clear rationale for the instigation of a 'manufactured war trigger' or 'false flag'.

For COVID-19, the linkages with structural-level agendas are, at least to date, less clear cut but the fact that major policy drives — the 'Great Reset', the 'Going Direct' plan and a wider biosecurity agenda — existed in parallel with the COVID-19 'pandemic' response is highly suggestive the event was, at the very least, exploited in order to advance these agendas.

Deep state actors can be identified in both cases.

With respect to 9/11, specific individuals associated with earlier 'deep events' played key roles whilst, with respect to COVID-19, multiple defence and security agencies were involved with this purported 'public health' crisis.

Furthermore, in addition to the involvement of national security state 'deep state actors', the COVID-19 event can be linked to a wide range of supranational and global-level actors, such as the WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, all of whom are democratically unaccountable and who possess multiple conflicts of interest.

In terms of the events themselves, both involved rapid reactions by authorities.

This was most obvious in the case of 9/11, in which the US president had attributed responsibility to al-Qaeda and set out the necessary policy response — a global war on terror — literally on the same day the attacks occurred.

The COVID-19 response evolved over a slightly longer period of time but still involved rapidly taken major policy decisions, including the declaration of a health emergency and pandemic in the absence of substantive scientific evidence.

Once underway, public perceptions regarding both events were maintained through the manipulation of science and official investigations.

This is documented most extensively in the 9/11 case, in which fraudulent investigations of the building 'collapses' in New York have now been overturned by a body of unrefuted research and evidence supporting the hypothesis the buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition.

In the case of COVID-19, mis-application of PCR tests, fraudulent counting of deaths, and absence of scientific evidence for the existence of a particularly dangerous pathogen all point towards science being corrupted in the service of power.

In support of official narratives, propaganda and mainstream media bias is evident in both cases and, especially with respect to COVID-19, propaganda has involved overt and aggressive approaches to censoring dissenting voices.

Finally, foreknowledge of both events is in evidence.

In the case of 9/11, the existence of insider trading is particularly compelling evidence that the attacks were in no way a surprise whilst, for COVID-19, the existence of table-top exercises, including the remarkably prescient Event 201, as well as actions by multiple actors prior to the 'outbreak', indicate foreknowledge that a supposedly unexpected catastrophic pathogen event was about to strike.

These findings support the hypothesis that 9/11 and COVID-19 were SDEs and, in terms of an initial 'plausibility probe', demonstrate that further detailed analysis and research is warranted.

The default dismissal of such arguments as conspiracism — irrational, poorly evidenced or pathological argumentation — is clearly not warranted in light of the evidence.

The full article can be found here.

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4. Jacques Camatte: an organic radical inspiration

The latest in our series of profiles from the orgrad website.

"Revolution will make itself felt in the destruction of all that is most 'modern' and 'progressive'"

Jacques Camatte (1935-) is a political philosopher who rejects both marxism and industrial capitalism and has influenced the green anarchist movement in the USA.

Writes Alex Trotter, who edited a collection of his essays: "Camatte advocates regeneration of nature through the end or radical curtailment of civilization and technology, and a new way of life outside the capitalist/socialist mode of production". [1]

Camatte himself insists: "The human being is dead. The only possibility for another human being to appear is our struggle against our domestication, our emergence from it". [2]

Originally involved with the International Communist Party, and influenced in particular by Amadeo Bordiga, Camatte has over many decades forged a very particular philosophy.

Notably through the review Invariance, he has kept his thinking distinct from what might appear to be the similar strands of thought from the Situationists or the Frankfurt School, although he does refer approvingly to organic radical inspiration Ferdinand Tönnies. [3]

Like many in France, Camatte started to question marxism about the time of the 1968 worker-student uprising, explains Trotter. [4]

He came to see that the much-idolized proletariat was very much part of capital's all-embracing system, as were the various "radical" political groups.

Writes Camatte, with Gianni Collu: "All forms of working-class political organization have disappeared. In their place, gangs confront one another in an obscene competition, veritable rackets rivaling each other in what they peddle, but identical in their essence". [5]

Even informal groups become rackets, he says, with recruits inevitably conforming to an agenda and outlook set by influential individuals.

"What maintains an apparent unity in the bosom of the gang is the threat of exclusion. Those who do not respect the norms are rejected with calumny; and even if they quit, the effect is the same". [6]

"Each gang of the left or the right carves out its own intellectual territory: anyone straying into one or the other of these territories is automatically branded as a member of the relevant controlling gang". [7]

"The critique of capital ought to be, therefore, a critique of the racket in all its forms… The theory which criticizes the racket cannot reproduce it". [8]

For Camatte, hope lies not in political revolution but in deserting the system: "We must abandon this world dominated by capital, which has become a spectacle of beings and things". [9]

Humans in the West have been "domesticated by capital" [10] since the 19th century, he says, and we need a deep-rooted turning away from its full-spectrum control.

"Our revolution as a project to reestablish community was necessary from the moment that ancient communities were destroyed". [11]

He envisages "the destruction of urbanization and the formation of a multitude of communities distributed over the earth", [12] with the creation of "a world where all the biological potentialities can finally develop". [13]

Camatte writes: "A species in harmony with nature is needed". [14] "The global human community can only exist on the basis of multiple and diverse communities, founded upon the specific historical and geographical foundations of each zone". [15]

All this requires a vision vastly broader that the narrowly-restriced ideological terrain usually defined as acceptable by the left.

"The reader should not be astonished if to support this amplitude we refer to authors classically tagged religious, mystical, etc" [16] he writes, in view of the fact that "capital is fundamentally a profanation of the sacred". [17]

He argues that "the left-right dichotomy" has ceased to matter because "in one way or another they each defend capital equally". [18]

"All the movements of the left and right are functionally the same inasmuch as they all participate in a larger, more general movement toward the destruction of the human species". [19]

Camatte identifies the way in which the ongoing encroachment of capitalist development needs to destroy the barriers represented by "traditional social relations and previous ways of life, including previous ways of thinking". [20]

"The species is being restructured in order that the despotic community of capital can be imposed and realized". [21]

And he has particularly condemned marxist enthusiasm for industrial drudgery, the "capitalization of human beings" [22] in which people are "all slaves of capital" [23] and accordingly reduced to the dehumanised status of "workers".

Trotter explains that, for Camatte, "when human beings are seen primarily as producers and laborers, they become nothing but the activity of capital". [24]

Camatte warns that marxism is, in fact, "a theory of development", [25] aiming for a mere "transition" [26] into "a new mode of production where productive forces blossom". [27]

"Communism was affirmed in opposition to bourgeois society, but not in opposition to capital". [28]

He says that with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the limited "revolt of the proletariat" ultimately "aided capital in its movement toward real domination" [29] by reshaping – resetting! – society to suit the needs of its own production.

"We have got to remember that capital, as it constantly overthrows traditional patterns of life, is itself revolution.

"This should lead us to think again about the nature of revolution and to realize that capital is able to take control of social forces in order to overthrow the established order in insurrections directed against the very society that it already dominates". [30]

In a key passage very much representing the organic radical outlook, Camatte writes: "Revolution can no longer be taken to mean just the destruction of all that is old and conservative, because capital has accomplished this itself.

"Rather it will appear as as a return to something (a revolution in the mathematical sense of the term), a return to community, though not in any form that has existed previously.

"Revolution will make itself felt in the destruction of all that is most 'modern' and 'progressive' (because science is capital).

"Another of its manifestations will involve the reappropriation of all those aspects and qualities of life that have still managed to affirm that which is human". [31]

Decades before the full emergence of the "woke" phenomenon, Camatte identified a "disintegration of consciousness" on the left caused by a splintering of any overall critique of the system into narrow campaigning for particular minority causes.

Notes Trotter: "All of these movements grouped around partial demands have lent themselves easily to recuperation by capital's material community". [32]

In the 1970s Camatte was already condemning leftists who supported "progressive" technology such as artificial reproduction, the precursors of today's transgender/transhumanist cultists.

"They are unable to see that a scientific solution is a capitalist solution, because it eliminates humans and lays open the possibility of a totally controlled society", he said. [33]

"These people seem to believe in solving everything by mutilation. Why not do away with pain by eliminating the organs of sensitivity? Social and human problems cannot be solved by science and technology. Their only effect when used is to render humanity even more superfluous". [34]

He astutely warned in 1973, long before online education was possible: "Teachers and professors are, from the point of view of capital, useless beings who will tend to be eliminated in favour of programmed lessons and teaching machines". [35]

Although Camatte has declared it "increasingly imbecile to proclaim oneself a marxist", [36] one of the elements he has retained from Karl Marx's thinking is the term Gemeinwesen, meaning the human essence, the common being of the human species, similar to the idea of "withness".

He writes: "The separation of the human being from the community (Gemeinwesen) is a despoliation. The human being as a worker has lost a mound of attributes that formed a whole when he was related to his community". [37]

"The human being is an individuality and a Gemeinwesen. The reduction of the human being to his present inexpressive state could take place only because of the removal of Gemeinwesen, of the possibility for each individual to absorb the universal, to embrace the entirety of human relations within the entirety of time". [38]

Video link: Entretien avec Jacques Camatte: Errance de l'humanité, 2022 (2hrs 44 mins)

[1] Alex Trotter; 'Introduction', Jacques Camatte, This World We Must Leave and Other Essays, ed. Alex Trotter (New York: Autonomedia, 1995), p. 9. All following page references are to this work.
[2] Jacques Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity' (1973), p. 88.
[3] Camatte, 'Against Domestication' (1973), p. 96.
[4] Trotter, 'Introduction", p.8.
[5] Jacques Camatte & Gianni Collu, 'On Organization' (1972), p. 26.
[6] Camatte & Collu, 'On Organization', p. 29.
[7] Camatte, 'Against Domestication', p. 96.
[8] Camatte & Collu, 'On Organization', p. 32.
[9] Camatte, 'The World We Must Leave' (1976), p. 170.
[10] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 48.
[11] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 71.
[12] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 66.
[13] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 70.
[14] Camatte, 'The World We Must Leave', p. 156.
[15] Camatte, 'Echoes of the Past' (1980), p. 204.
[16] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 73.
[17] Camatte, 'Echoes of the Past', p. 197.
[18] Camatte, 'Against Domestication', pp. 94-95.
[19] Camatte, 'Against Domestication', p. 95.
[20] Camatte, 'Against Domestication', p. 111.
[21] Camatte, 'Echoes of the Past', p. 207.
[22] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 40.
[23] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 68.
[24] Trotter, 'Introduction', pp. 13-14.
[25] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 77.
[26] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 77.
[27] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 86.
[28] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 47.
[29] Camatte, 'Against Domestication', p. 112.
[30] Camatte, 'Against Domestication', pp. 112-13.
[31] Camatte, 'Against Domestication', p. 113.
[32] Trotter, 'Introduction', p. 12.
[33] Camatte, 'Against Domestication', p. 94.
[34] Camatte, 'Against Domestication', p. 93.
[35] Camatte, 'Against Domestication', p. 111.
[36] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 70.
[37] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 64.
[38] Camatte, 'The Wandering of Humanity', p. 69.

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5. Acorninfo

"When art is skilfully executed, it can speak more directly to the higher self or the soul, ultimately inspiring self-revelation. The revelation actually occurs within the individual, prompted by the art. That's when art becomes sublime and ecstatic—because there's an inner realisation of some greater truth that's symbolised by the art, which serves as a signpost for something real and true". A great interview with Lubomir Arsov on the Lies are Unbekoming website.

* * *

"I clearly see the parallels between the Italian-American 'Civil Rights Movement' and the Zionist lobby in the U.S., Canada, and other countries," writes Crow Qu'appelle in a thought-provoking historical piece revealing how in 1970 the Italian mafia harnessed what we would now call "woke" politics in an attempt to stigmatise any exposure of their criminal activities as "discrimination" against their community.

* * *

In a useful video, Ben Rubin of Rise UK and UK Column exposes cynical UN propaganda aimed at turning young people against their elders and in favour of the globalist agenda.

* * *

"Change incessantly, this is the new mantra, change sex, body, family, bonds, places. Eternally dissatisfied, unstable, insecure, anxious. Everything must be transient, interchangeable, changeable, protean. Everything must become artificial". So writes Italian dissident Silvia Guerini in a new article on the Resistenze al Nanomondo site.

* * *

Winter Oak contributor W.D. James hosted an enlightening video conversation with Jennifer Bilek on the transgenderism/transhumanism industry and its war on women, life and reality.

* * *

Are the global criminocrats systematically placing paedophiles and their victims in power, so they can control them? And is there a link to the Rothschilds? This is a very good video from Candace Owens.

* * *

"It is not difficult to see that the BRICS+ is a Great Reset of the world's economy. The West is being intentionally left behind… The real culprit is the monopoly capitalists who are the architects of this Great Reset". Spot-on observations from the World Not Enough website, which also asks "Why do all these international think-tanks have the same interior decorator? You'd almost think they are part of the same club, like a club of sociopathic interior decorator/global takeover freaks…"

* * *

"BRICS supports the leading role of the IMF in global finance. BRICS supports the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. BRICS supports the World Health Organization and its central coordinating role in strengthening the international pandemic prevention, preparedness and response system". Anyone still cheering on the multi-polar new world order should look at this post on the Edward Slavsquat blog, citing official accounts of the 2024 BRICS gathering in Kazan.

* * *

The Global Infrastructure Hub, close to the World Bank, has said in a report that government needs to assist private entities to take over public infrastructure by "de-risking" investments and giving public funds to private corporations. Kate Mason continues to expose the criminocratic agenda as it is rolled out in Australia.

* * *

"Through entertainment, material wealth, and shallow pursuits, they create an illusion of happiness and prosperity while people remain ignorant of the forces behind their gradual enslavement". The "shadow oligarchy" are nicely described on the BC1984 site.

* * *

If you've never seen the documentary film Human Resources- Social Engineering in the 20th Century, we highly recommend it. As filmmaker Scott Noble says, it is about "the rise of mechanistic philosophy and the exploitation of human beings under modern hierarchical systems".

* * *

"The whole point of being in nature is to slow down and experience the Earth in her natural state", writes Elisabeth Robson in a thoughtful October 17 2024 article entitled 'There is a place too far'. Meanwhile, Franklin O'Kanu reveals on his Unorthodoxy blog what he learned about life and society after his Florida home town was hit by Hurricane Milton: "It was humbling to experience this moment with no electricity, just taking in the beauty of the natural world".

* * *

"Zionist-funded US think tanks financed and ran key elements of the European 'Counterjihad' movement, including the English Defence League. This illustrates how the fostering of the Counterjihad movement was part of a Zionist attempt to transform the far right, to co-opt it to advance the objectives of Greater Israel". A very good October 25, 2024, report from David Miller.

* * *

In a special October 22 edition of Geopolitics & Empire Podcast, host and producer Hrvoje Morić was joined by Etienne de la Boetie² of the Art of Liberty Foundation, Anton Bueckert (Crow Qu'appelle) of Nevermore Media and our own Paul Cudenec. They discussed the potential overlap of anarchism and voluntaryism as forms of resistance against the criminocratic, oligarchic, and kleptocratic globalist tyranny we all now face.

* * *

Acorn quote:

"Technological optimism is the snake oil of urban-industrialism". Theodore Roszak.

(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)

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Winter Oak
25 Oct 2024 | 10:48 am

6. Can Bigfoot Save Us? A reflection and Halloween movie recommendation


by W.D James

During the first few months of this year I watched between 50 and 100 low budget Bigfoot (and related creatures) movies, some of them multiple times.

Now, even allowing for my previously confessed penchant for low budget horror films in general (and I watched quite a few other films in that category during the same period), that fact may raise some eyebrows. Why would a person do this? What does the fact that they did so say about them as a person? Is the fact that they admitted it publicly in an essay some sort of call for help?

Rather than take the safe approach of trying to come up with some reasons to justify why a sane, well-adjusted person with a relatively meaningful life might choose to watch that many Bigfoot movies, I'll take the more audacious route and suggest that there is little better we could be watching.

In fact, I think the sub sub (sub?) genre of low budget Bigfoot films deals provocatively with many of the most important questions our civilization is dealing with and that it represents one of the few bright spots in our culture. Well, ok, that might be overselling them a tad. Or, maybe not.

In what follows I'll outline four of these questions that are absolutely central to any notion of a Bigfoot film and recommend what, overall, I think is the best out of the set I have watched (though at least 20 or 30 of them are well worth watching).

Localism

Locale is central to any Bigfoot film. This is true of the other creatures I group with Bigfoot as well. There are the ones that are strictly variants on Bigfoot himself: the Yeti, the Sasquatch, the Abominable Snowman, the Skunk Ape, and the Bog Man. That he has different names for where he is found already reinforces the idea that locality is important. The same is true with the Pine Devil of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the Wendigo of the Northeast or Northwest, the Chupacabra of the Southwest and Mexico, the Mothman of West Virginia, England, or Hungary (the only real one is the one in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, by the way).

On the one hand, the 'monster' is closely bound to the place he lives. In some real sense, he is a manifestation of that place just as a scorpion might be a manifestation of a desert or subtropical place. So, the people who encounter him are also necessarily encountering an aspect of this place.

That the 'monster' is always 'hidden' or 'endangered' suggests the place is too. And that is how it is in our modern world: places become extinct to be blended into the overall geography of nowhere.

The encounter with a Bigfoot raises questions of what place is this? Who are we who are here in this place? How are we related to this place? What does this place, and the 'monster,' mean?

One of the best films to bring out this aspect of the genre is Creature From Black Lake from 1976. It follows two anthropology students from the University of Chicago, Pahoo and Rives, as they search for the creature in the Louisiana bayou country. Pahoo and Rives are typical northern boys who find the backwoods culture of Louisiana to be as foreign, mysterious, and elusive as the 'monster' they are searching for.

Tradition

Of all the genres of horror, the Bigfoot horror flick is quite self-aware of what it is and the tradition it exists within. Horror in general is better at this than many other genres of film. So, Bigfoot movies play off of many of the themes and anti-themes of horror in general (does the 'black character' die first? Is that character aware of this trope and refer to it in the film? Do they say something like, 'I'm a black man, there is no way I'm going out in the woods with a bunch of hillbillies looking for Bigfoot, I know what happens'?). Further, low budget Bigfoot movies are low budget, so they come with all the plusses and minuses of low budget horror in general: low production values, all the actors are probably friends of the director who may still be a film student, and on the other hand, doing the most with what you have, the opportunity to be way more creative than anything produced in Hollywood.

Specific to the Bigfoot variety, there are a whole set of well-established touchpoints that must usually be addressed. What is Bigfoot (ape creature, alien, spirit animal, guardian, science experiment, government secret weapon, monster)? You need to work in a character taking castes of his big footprints and note that he smells really bad. Is he more a sexual predator or more a family man (this is actually one of the more important decisions the filmmaker will make – see The Problem of Nihilism below)? What is his connection to local and indigenous lore? What to say about the iconic Patterson-Gimlin film?

Any Bigfoot movie has to take these factors into account, as well as the question of whether the film will be a documentary or fictional portrayal (in the Bigfoot genre this line is maximally porous). Hence, to enter into the watching of Bigfoot films is to enter into a living tradition where each new instance is organically bound up with all the films that came before and all the films yet to come. This magnifies the meaning latent in each one and orients us as to where we are in the tradition and to the more subtle messages the director or writer is sending.

A film that does an exemplary job in this regard is Willow Creek (2013), directed by Bobcat Goldthwait – you got to love that! It follows Jim, a true-believer, and his skeptical girlfriend Kelly, as they visit the tourist attractions in 'Bigfoot Capital of the World,' Willow Creek, CA. They discuss most of the tropes listed above as they first document the cultural phenomenon of Bigfoot (including interviewing a singer-songwriter who specializes in Bigfoot songs) before moving on to their encounter with the creature.

Nature

Then there is the whole question of nature: Bigfoot lives in nature, after all. What is it and what is our relationship to it? Is it essentially the survival-of-the-fittest variety that orthodox Darwinism pictures for us? Or is it more a Kropotkin-like web of mutual interdependence? Is it materialism all the way down, or is there a spiritual aspect? Are we essentially a part of it or essentially alienated? Is nature 'savage' or 'endangered'?

A film that takes this on is the 1985 classic Boggy Creek II (a follow-up by the same director who had made the super classic docu-drama The Legend of Boggy Creek in 1972). After a professor from the University of Arkansas and his students finally track down the creature, they decide it is best to not tell anyone so as to preserve this 'endangered' species; very 80's environmentalish there.

Belief

Of course, the central questions to any Bigfoot movie are does he exist and do you believe he exists? Does reality still harbor mysteries or not? This reflects back on some of the issues discussed above. What do we believe about nature? What about supernature? Does our locale actually exist and matter? What makes it this place and not some other place (and what makes we who have formed a settlement here a particular 'people' and what kind of people are we)?

Primal Rage (2018) approaches this set of questions especially interestingly. A solid subplot develops around the relationship between a wizened sheriff and his young deputy. Both are members of some unspecified indigenous people. The whole connection of Bigfoot to native lore is an issue in itself. In this case, the older sheriff is (seemingly) thoroughly modernized and secularized. It is his young deputy who believes, or at least says he is trying to believe, in his people's traditional ways. The whole thing of having the young be more interested in the 'old ways' than the old are is perceptive. Eventually both end up reluctantly going to the local medicine woman and participating in a ceremony involving hallucinogenics. As it turns out, the old sheriff may not have been as skeptical all along, but may be one who recognized there were dangers in 'the old ways' that he was not wanting to get into. I'll try not spoil it, but let's just say the 'old ways' are quite alive and powerful in the world of Primal Rage.

The Problem of Nihilism

Horror, by its nature, deals with dark things. Metaphysically, one of the most important aspects of a horror film for me is: does the dark win? From the 2000s forward, and really speeding up in the 2010s, horror producers were increasingly willing to give us worlds that were dark all the way down (though H.P. Lovecraft had pretty much worked off that assumption back to the 1920s and 30s). No good guys, no monsters defeated, no light at the end of the tunnel, no redemption.

There are movies which follow this path which are good as films, but which I see as symptomatic of negative developments in our culture. We may be to the point where any film (book, painting, etc…) which does not show us a world that is meaningless and futile will be seen as unrealistic, utopian, or sentimental.

I was not systematically tracking this as I watched through those 50-100 films in no particular order. However, it may have started with Willow Creek. The 'it' that started is portraying Bigfoot as a sexual predator. Here I can't avoid some spoilers. Skip to the next section where I make my big recommendation if you want to avoid them.

Willow spends a good bit of time developing the likable characters at the center of the story and their positive relationship, though we get foreshadowing as to what is to come throughout: posters of missing local women, humorous comments about the size of Bigfoot's anatomy. The film seems to end with Jim being killed and Kelley sexually enslaved ,along with at least one of the previously alluded-to missing women.

Other films pick up this thread. Primal Rage addresses this development but mostly chooses to evade this nihilistic conclusion (though it is pretty darn dark). However, I think Hoax (2019) pushes things in this direction the furthest (so far). The Hoax is basically any idea that reality or people are at all decent. We get the Bigfoot as (probably) a sexual predator thing which is being investigated by a cynical and ruthlessly self-interested down-and-out reality TV star looking for a comeback with inbred hillbilly cannibals who are definitely sexual predators (I kid you not) thrown in for good measure, just in case you thought there was any hope of salvation. Actually one of the better produced and acted Bigfoot movies, but, oh my.

On the life-affirming side of things (vs. nihilistic), but still with plenty of contemporary horror edge are Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012), Exists (2014), and Monstrous (2020).The latter film, written by a woman, actually pulls off a pretty decent deconstruction of some of our contemporary gender theory.

Recommendation:

So, having done all that work, what do I think is the best all-round Bigfoot movie? I'm going to go with American Bigfoot (2016). I will try very hard to avoid any spoilers. It is definitely in the low, low budget category of horror films.

It takes place in a locale I am very familiar with: the town of Nelsonville and the surrounding Hocking Hills region in southeast Ohio. The film talks about 'the mine closing' and the social fragmentation and alcoholism that ensue. Here is a complex place: naturally beautiful, socially damaged; messed up people with good hearts. While the people portrayed might be somewhat stereotyped, they are pretty likable, and the more eccentric ones are actually believable if you're used to actual rural America.

Unlike in most horror films, we are shown the 'monster' pretty early on (so I don't take this to be a spoiler). I think that is very intentional. This 'monster' maybe isn't so monstrous (though it kills people). A major decision for low budget Bigfoot movie makers is how much of their budget to put into the costume/makeup for the 'monster' and for special effects? That's usually a lot of what horror fans want to see. The producers of this film decided to put about $19.99 into those things. The 'monster' has some sort of shaggy costume and then basically a made-up human face. I admit that turned me off at first. I stopped watching this movie about 10 minutes in, the first two times I tried it. Glad I went for a third attempt. In addition to budget constraints, I think the film makers were intentionally saying something in this choice as well.

As to nature? Here, Kropotkin beats out Darwin. This movie is about dealing with hardship and taking care of those you love. It's not just the humans who are in that situation. If there is something to believe in, maybe that's a good place to start.

Happy Halloween and let me know if you spot Bigfoot anywhere!

Winter Oak
23 Oct 2024 | 10:23 am

7. Natural Complexity (Reviving Federalism, Part 3)


by W.D James

How can a large, complex society be natural?

We can clearly see how a relatively simple tribal type of social structure would be an organic or natural form of social organization. Aristotle gives us a classical philosophical account of organic development from the family to the village to the self-sufficient city state (of say ten to twenty thousand inhabitants). From our contemporary perspective within the complex modern centralized state, a return to any of these forms may seem romantic or undesirable. Short of a societal collapse that necessitates a return to these small-scale structures, it is hard to imagine us choosing them or figuring out how to devolve society to such levels in an orderly way.

Modern anarchists of various stripes have provided accounts of federalism to theorize well-attenuated, complex societies, built from the bottom up. Some of these emphasize organization at the level of labor unions forming into labor cartels and others focus on the associating of local entities into national and even global structures. However, these theorists had largely given up, or thinned down, the pre-modern metaphysical understanding of 'nature' characteristic of the Aristotelian tradition. Johannes Althusius' Politica (1603), in addition to being the first systematic modern counterthrust at the developing theory of the centralized state, provides a fully Aristotelian (anti-modern) account of a large, complex federated society.

Hence, I believe his theory can provide an appealing theoretical vision for contemporary proponents of liberty. No doubt, establishing an Althusian federal republic would itself necessitate huge changes. However, those changes may well lie within the scope of a realistic revolutionary politics. To pick up the American theme from the first essay, the United States from 1781 to 1789, under The Articles of Confederation, was clearly a large federal republic (though not on an Althusian model). Even under the Constitution, until the time of the Civil War, the local elements were much more prominent in our actual political culture and it is still not meaningless to speak of us having a federalist form of government.

The Althusian federal republic

The building blocks of Althusius' federal structure are the family, the collegium, the city, the province, and commonwealth (republica). As a legal theorist, he spends a lot of time going into detail about how each level of association would be formed, its legal criteria, the exact nature of its relationship to higher and lower levels of association. Here, we will just focus on the overall structure he outlines.

The family

Althusius distinguishes between the family, what we might think of as a household, and the larger kinship group of extended family members. In both cases, the link between natural relationship and shared interest is primary in distinguishing the family as the basic unit of association in the overall federative structure. The family employs primarily agreement and love in its formation and operation.

The collegium

The collegium is a "spontaneous" and voluntary association. For Althusius, it is formed when the head of a household goes into the public world to carry out public business. The collegium represents the formation of guilds, corporations, and other civil associations. Essentially, such organizations are based on necessary social functions. The society needs bakers, so there are bakers, and they would form themselves into a baker's guild both to regulate their own businesses and to relate to larger elements in the federative structure. The collegium operates mainly through agreement and mutual aid.

The collegium thus communicates the interests and needs of bakers up the ladder and communicates the needs society has of bakers down the ladder back to the membership. Any group of people with a shared interest would organize themselves into such groups. Though he gives much attention to ecclesiastical governance, he largely avoids the issue of state-church relationships by including churches as collegia: one can imagine guilds of clergy and other associations to carry out the business of the churches; charitable organizations, colleges, etc…

That Athusius chooses to emphasize the 'communication' aspect of Aristotle's koinonia (association, community, sharing) is significant. This communication up and down the levels of association, as well as vertically between them, serves as the life-force of his federal republic. This provides the organic, living, connections between all the different associations and allows them to be a genuine social body, not a social machine as the centralized modern state is usually conceived of, such as with Hobbes' Leviathan. It is this continual and pervasive communication that allows the social body to function harmoniously and develop, grow, and adapt to changes and challenges. This develops Aristotle's emphasis on political participation in a unique direction that accounts for Althusius' ability to theorize a large and complex society as still natural.

The city

The city represents the level of association where all the social functions and their representative associations, the collegia, are integrated. It is the first genuinely 'public' association and constitutes the 'community' proper. Althusius observes that "human society develops from private to public association by the definite steps and progressions of small societies."i Within nature, the big comes from the small.

This constitutes a political order. "Political order in general," Althusius asserts, "is the right and power of communicating and participating in useful and necessary matters that are brought to the life of the organized body by its associated members."ii The city consists of "many families and collegia" and will appoint what he terms a "superior" to administer the public business of the community. This superior may be either a single person or a council. The superior exercises their delegated authority only with the consent of the members of the community and only with the strictly defined limits of their authority. Althusius sees a separate Senate existing alongside the superior to check the superior's abuse of power. The Senate is itself a collegium formed by the various families and collegia of the community.

The province

For Althusius, the province is an intermediary unit linking communities to the "universal" level of association. It has many ecclesiastical functions, which is not our focus in this examination. As a Calvinist, this is where he sees the local, largely autonomous, churches associating in Presbyteries. There are also civil functions. For instance, the province is where he sees preparations for defense primarily occurring. He foresees a continued "order of the nobility" in his republic, charged primarily with organizing defense of the province from foreign violence. What I think, perhaps looking back at the American example, is this replaces a national standing military. Lacking a 'nobility' we could, as with the whole civic republican tradition, easily envision local volunteer citizen militia organized up to a regional level.

The commonwealth

The ultimate level of association recognized is that of the "commonwealth." The social bond constituting this association is "a tacit or expressed promise to communicate things, mutual services, aid, counsel and the same common laws to the extent that the utility and necessity of universal social life in a realm shall require."iii

Althusius is careful to point out, since he is arguing against the centralized state theory of Jean Bodin, that this higher association is only formed from below. One could observe, with the anarchists, that federalism just is the bottom-up method of establishing a complex society. This affirms the people as the ultimate source of sovereignty.

He notes that this sovereignty can be organized as a monarchy, a "polyarchy," or as a democracy.

By way of a sidenote, Kentucky, though defined by the US Constitution as a 'state', recognizes itself as a commonwealth. It may be long submerged, but there is a reason for that.

Tyranny

Althusius defines tyranny as "the contrary of just and right administration."iv The tyrant (he recognizes this could be one person or a group of people, a whole administration) is the destroyer of the organicity of the social body. "A tyrant is there one who," he explains, "violating both word and oath, begins to shake the foundations and unloosen the bonds of the associated body of the commonwealth."v

A tyrant may have come into power by one of two means. They may have been legitimately constituted as the "supreme magistrate" via proper means or they may be a usurper extra-legally setting themselves up in a position of power. In the latter case, the matter is legally straightforward for Althusius: every private citizen or association of citizens has it absolutely within their right to kill such an external invader of the social body.

In the case of a legitimately appointed magistrate who becomes tyrannical, it is legally more complicated. Althusius can be seen as operating in the Chrisitan 'resistance to tyrants' tradition and supports the dominant position within that tradition of his time that only the 'lesser magistrates' may resist a justly appointed entity that turns tyrannical. So, the people would expect their delegates at the city and provincial levels to take care of the problem.

Althusius does not make this explicit, but I think we can see a big part of why that organization for defense occurred at the provincial, not the national, level. Those lesser magistrates have their armies or organized militias. Those can be directed internally to provide proper attention to tyrants just as well as they can be directed externally against invaders.

Who knows how the governors actually think of it, but the US has actually maintained this structure. The state governors are 'lesser magistrates' and they each command a citizen militia in the form of their state national guard. Of course the national government has a much larger military, but it was not until after World War Two that Americans abandoned their fear of a large standing national military in peace time. This was a central principle of the federalist and civic republican traditions of preserving liberty. In fact, the President is elected not by the individual citizens of the US but by the states in the electoral college. These are all echoes of a more genuine federalist past. So, when one political tendency actively seeks to abolish the electoral college and makes maneuvers to subsume the state military forces directly under national control, doesn't that have the look of 'tyranny' about it? In the US, those structures of federalism have been progressively drained of power. Yet they have not yet been dismantled. They may prove useful to the cause of liberty yet.

Natural complexity

Althusius has provided us a solidly Aristotelian way of thinking about a complex modern society. It preserves the normatively natural, or organic, conception of social functioning aimed at promoting human flourishing via seeking the common good embodied in Aristotle's original theory. The federation naturally grows from the bottom up.

Our modern world has become thoroughly anti-Aristotelian. But there was Althusius, right at the beginning, going – 'hey, there is another option than that centralized state thing.' If we were to tap back into some of the wisdom of our premodern ancestors I think Althusius can be quite useful in helping us think through how to reincorporate the Aristotelian bits of that wisdom.

Further, I think we should add him to the Pantheon of modern defenders of liberty. He was one of the very first in that tradition and it would probably serve us well to recapture an understanding of his insights in continuing to develop that particular tradition.

As we saw earlier, Gustav Landauer had called for a federal system as 'a republic of republics of republics.' If we think of a political ideal being a 'federal republic' and emphasize the deeper meaning of each of those terms (with Althusius informing our understanding of the former), we could formulate a vision which embodied these salient features:

  • An organic, bottom-up, federative structure;
  • Motivated by the natural human social forces of agreement, mutual aid, and love;
  • Which supports a large and complex society which is at the same time thoroughly decentralized;
  • This would represent the plethora of naturally-formed social associations, each aimed at performing a function in our overall quest to live good, flourishing, human lives;
  • Which, hence, embodies the natural telos (purpose or aim) of human nature;
  • A robust conception of the 'common good' as the consolidated common vision of these locally rooted associations;
  • A republican emphasis on individual and citizenly virtue, prioritizing the common good over particular socially destructive interests;
  • Incorporating a republican understanding of liberty as 'non-domination', both politically and economically;
  • A citizenry which is extremely jealous of its liberties both individually and within the civil association they form;
  • And which is structurally and culturally resistant to tyranny.

i Johannes Althusius, Politica, edited and translated by Frederick S. Carney, Liberty Fund, 1995, p. 39.

ii Ibid. p. 39.

iii Ibid. p. 67.

iv Ibid. p. 191.

v Ibid. p. 191.

Winter Oak
21 Oct 2024 | 8:10 am

8. Life philosophy: against the destructive will of Mammon


by Paul Cudenec

It is today not considered possible by our culture for a sane and serious person to be entirely opposed to the modern world, to its infrastructure and to its thinking.

So many intellectual and cultural taboos have been built to block such a perspective from being voiced and shared, that it has become more or less inaudible and invisible.

Even – or should I say especially? – the so-called environmentalist movement works hard to banish any such worldview, constantly repeating the lies that technology is neutral, that development can be sustainable, that economic growth can be green.

This has not always been the case though, and – before the disaster of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich – there was an important wave of anti-industrial feeling in Germany.

Explains Gilbert Merlio: "In the last quarter of the 19th century, criticism of modern civilization was fuelled by a rapid and brutal industrial revolution.

"Alongside anti-Enlightenment traditionalists there emerged particularly here a "life philosophy" (Lebensphilosophie) which saw spirit or reason as destructive of the 'world of life'.

"In parallel there appeared in Germanic lands a nebula of social movements which voiced their protest against the harm caused by industrialisation". [1]

Merlio adds that Ludwig Klages, whose ideas I presented in my last two essays, was part of that tradition and indeed was the participant "who expressed with the most vigour the anti-rationalism and the hatred of progress that all shared". [2]

In his 2013 book on Klages, Nitzan Lebovic charts the evolution of the philosopher's anti-industrial outlook.

He says that initially "Klages's voyage to the end of the night did not go beyond a metaphorical view of decline, not much different from the familiar fin-de-siecle atmosphere of a world rotten to the core and in need of revolutionary change". [3]

"From 1896 onward, he wrote a number of poems, gathered and titled 'Runen' (runes), literally a reference to old Nordic alliterative dialects, but which he often also used as an allusion to 'Ruinen' (ruins).

"These allusions convey the destruction of reality and, more than that, the destruction of signification as a whole. Light gives way to the long night of chaos; reason is destroyed with its names and comprehension.

"The modern world becomes a place devoid of interpretation and interpretability. In a
place where nature has been destroyed by the polluting force of modernity, there is no more true signification: when 'the fog rises, the world is far away'". [4]

"During the 1920s Lebensphilosophie became a political philosophy that resisted all political systems. It used its radical potential, as one neo-Kantian critic put it, 'to overcome every element of thinking that has served philosophers up to now'". [5]

The political aspects of Klages's thought were, of course, closely enmeshed with the philosophical aspects described in my previous article.

Thus the narrow, egotistical "spirit" that he identifies as the enemy of true soul is at the core of the threat facing us and our world.

Merlio explains that, for Klages, "when spirit frees itself, its reifying action, which sees nature only as rationally-exploitable matter, cuts human beings off from their cosmic roots and becomes dangerous for the species. This is what is happening in modern industrial civilization". [6]

Klages himself writes: "Who could still doubt that a curse is lashing down on humankind and, like an insatiable moloch, swallowing humankind's images of itself, the gifts to its most divine hours!" [7]

Merlio says that for Klages our tragedy is "a tragedy of uprooting, with the links broken between human beings and the maternal earth". [8]

From this perspective, he adds, all that is left for the degraded individual is the bread and circuses of industrial civilization – "Progress alienates everything, both nature and humankind". [9]

As I mentioned in the first of these essays, Klages was well aware of the financial forces lurking behind the slaughter of the First World War.

Even at the time, in 1915, he saw through the deluded rhetoric of those who imagined that there was something noble to be found in that murderous industrial-militarist nightmare.

In response to a poem embracing the war by the Austrian writer, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer (1878-1962), Klages declares: "No 'gods' are present in this war, and never before have 'gods' drunk blood in such a way". [10]

For Klages, modern warfare is just another aspect of the reduction and mechanization of human beings under the industrial system and he reflects that "nobody can foresee whether a completely mechanized humankind will last for decades or for centuries". [11]

The work in which Klages most clearly sets out his critique of the modern machine-world is Mensch und ErdeHumankind and Earth.

This was originally a speech he wrote for a gathering of young people in the Wandervogel movement, which took place at Hohe Meissner in Hessen on October 11 and 12, 1913.

Writes Lebovic: "This coalition of youth movements pleading for a return to nature, freedom, and emancipation from the norms of a declining bourgeoisie greatly influenced Klages.

"And, contrary to some scholarly evaluations, the liberal segments as well as the nationalistic segments of the youth movement immediately embraced Klages's ideas". [12]

"The youth movement was for him another expression of radical thinking, propelled into existence by the decline of the state.

"In 1913 Klages still thought about the movement as a vehicle for his philosophy, not as a political phenomenon". [13]

Lebovic says the meeting at Hohe Meissner, at which Klages's message was read out, became one of the most important moments in the German revolt against the modern world.

"It was there that the notion of industrial progress was challenged most forcefully, and there that an imminent and radical change seemed most compellingly announced". [14]

He adds that, for Lebensphilosopher August Messer, the most urgent message of the youth movements was "Lebensreform, the admiration of nature and its symbols, the emphasis on the organic, the contempt for materialism and scientific rationalism". [15]

In the speech, later turned into a widely-read book, Klages warns of "the terrible consequences caused by the dominant doctrine of 'progress'". [16]

He looks back to our traditional relationship with nature, pointing out: "When the Greeks built a bridge across a river, they begged forgiveness of the god of the river for this initiative and offered him sacrificial drinks; the sacrilegious felling of trees was punished with blood in ancient Germany". [17]

But now "a devastating orgy with no equal has taken hold of humankind, with 'civilization' seeming to have an unquenchable thirst for murder and its deadly breath withering the abundance of the Earth. These, then, are the fruits of 'progress'!". [18]

"The connection between human creation and the Earth has been broken, the authentic song of the landscape has been wiped out for centuries, perhaps even for ever.

"These same railways, telegraph wires and high-voltage cables traverse, with crude straightness, forest and mountain ridge, here as in the Indies, in Egypt, in Australia, in America". [19]

Alongside this annihilation of natural beauty, there has been an vicious assault on human living, says Klages.

"What remains of the community festivals and sacred customs, that mighty wellspring which for a thousand years inspired myth and poetry?

"What remains of the disconcerting richness of the traditions by which each people allows the expression of its essence, blended with the image of the landscape?

"What remains indeed of the folk song, that ancient and ever-new treasure which harbours, and mellows under its silver veil, the entire destiny of humankind's becoming and passing?" [20]

"Most people do not live, they merely exist, wearing themselves out as slaves of 'work' like machines in the service of big factories, blindly relying on the numerical delirium of stocks and foundations as slaves of money, to end up as slaves to the intoxicating distractions of the city". [21]

"Without doubt, we are in the era of the decline of the soul". [22]

Klages says that any criticism of this unfolding catastrophe is brushed aside with talk of civilizational advance.

"We are not mistaken in suspecting 'progress' of having an absurd appetite for power and we see that the injurious insanity is not without method.

"Under cover of 'utility', of 'economic development', of 'culture', it in fact aims at the destruction of life.

"It affects it in all its manifestations, by clear-cutting forests, by wiping species of animals off the map, by exterminating primitive peoples, by covering and disfiguring the landscape with the glaze of civilization…

"And at its service is the whole of Technik and the far vaster sphere of science". [23]

Klages says it is obvious that modern advances in physics and chemistry "serve only Capital" [24] and that the same seems to be true in other fields of learning.

He warns of a commanding will "which has sacrificed the radiant chromatic richness of the values of the soul – blood, beauty, dignity, ardour, grace, warmth, maternity – to the conquering value of this conceited power which finds a way to incarnate itself in a measurable way through the possession of money". [25]

Klages says that the word "mammonism" has been coined to describe this phenomenon, but "only a few people have become aware of the real existence of this Mammon which is taking hold of humankind as a tool with which to eliminate every form of terrestrial life". [26]

The life philosopher issues the same powerful warning in other works.

In The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul, he writes that "the earth gives off smoke as never before from the blood of the slain, and all that is apelike struts with the spoils plundered from the shattered temple of life". [27]

And in Language as the Source of Psychology he is even clearer as to what he regards as driving this all-out assault on the living.

"The will that emancipates itself from life, and imperiously enslaves it, brings forth evil (the despicable, the satanic), and the hunger for power that accompanies such a formation of the will in the personal ego – before the will has extinguished the life of its carrier and thereby, of course, itself – is the mask, grown into the flesh of the personality and deceiving it, the mask of a hatred that aims ultimately at the destruction of the world". [28]

It is not hard to grasp why, as we saw in the first essay in this trilogy, Klages's thinking was not appreciated by a Nazi regime whose murderous industrial frenzy was driven by the force against which he is warning us.

It is also not hard to understand why his thinking is not appreciated by our contemporary system, which shares the very same traits.

Contemplating the way in which Klages and his once-influential ideas have today pretty much disappeared from cultural view, Paul Bishop comments: "It was academic-politically and intellectual-strategically opportune for too many to allow Klages simply to fade away of his own accord.

"For he was simply too radical, too utterly opposed to modernity, and too consistent in his critique, to be a successful figure in the post-War environment". [29]

"It strikes me as, in a way, a kind of confirmation of the validity of some of Klages's central arguments that today he is either attacked or ignored…

"One would expect any system to try and neutralise its critics by ignoring, vilifying, or otherwise seeking to dispose of them". [30]

The great irony, of course, is that the cheerleaders for the industrial system who vilify Klages and his ideas, largely do so by trying to associate him with a previous short-lived manifestation of that same industrial system!

My aim in the 2018 article [31] that I mentioned in the opening essay on Klages was to expose this ideological dirty trick, which is designed to make it impossible to express opposition to the dark and destructive evil of "progress" and "development".

I agree with Bishop regarding the importance of making available "the immense philosophical resource of Klagesian thinking" [32] to counter this deceitful manipulation.

Moreover, in my various books and on the organic radicals website, I have been trying to piece back together a tradition of nature-thinking and rooted resistance to power and Technik that the system has long tried to consign to the Orwellian memory hole.

I would invite others to join me and help build an authentic new 21st century life philosophy that can inform and inspire our urgently-needed resistance to the global rule of Mammon.

(The orgrad site now includes a profile of Klages based on these essays)

[Audio version]

See also:

Life philosophy: beyond left and right

Life philosophy: soul, rhythm, magic and love

[1] Gilbert Merlio, 'Préface', Ludwig Klages, L'Homme et la terre (Mensch und Erde), trad. Christophe Lucchese (RN Editions, 2016), p. 8. Quotations from this book are my own translations from French.
[2] Merlio, p. 10.
[3] Nitzan Lebovic, The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 64.
[4] Ludwig Klages, Rhythmen und Runen, Nachlass herausgegeben von ihm selbst (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1944), p. 227, Lebovic, p. 74.
[5] Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen Modestromungen unserer Zeit (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag, 1920), p. 16, Lebovic p. 128.
[6] Merlio, pp. 10-11.
[7] Klages, Rythmen und Runen, p. 528, Paul Bishop, Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life: A Vitalist Toolkit (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 36.
[8] Merlio , p. 19.
[9] Merlio, p. 18.
[10] Ludwig Klages, Letter of January 11, 1915, Hans Eggert Schröder, Ludwig Klages 1872-1956: Centenar-Ausstellung 1972 (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1972), p. 68, Bishop, p. 15.
[11] Ludwig Klages, Die Grundlagen der Charakterkunde, Sämtliche Werke 4, ed. Ernst Frauchiger, Gerhard Funke, Karl J. Groffmann, Robert Heiss and Hans Eggert Schröder, 9 vols (Bonn: Bouvier, 1964-1992), p. 408, Bishop, p. 96.
[12] Lebovic, p. 85.
[13] Lebovic, p. 87.
[14] Lebovic, p. 89.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Klages, L'Homme et La Terre, p. 30.
[17] Klages, L'Homme et La Terre, pp. 59-60.
[18] Klages, L'Homme et La Terre, pp. 39-40.
[19] Klages, L'Homme et La Terre, p. 41.
[20] Klages, L'Homme et La Terre, pp. 45-46.
[21] Klages, L'Homme et La Terre, pp. 48-49.
[22] Klages, L'Homme et La Terre, p. 47.
[23] Klages, L'Homme et La Terre, p. 44.
[24] Klages, L'Homme et La Terre, p. 53.
[25] Klages, L'Homme et La Terre, pp. 53-54.
[26] Klages, L'Homme et La Terre, p. 54.
[27] Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 6th edition (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1972), p. 923, Bishop, p. 93.
[28] Ludwig Klages, Die Sprache als Quell der Seelenkunde, Sämtliche Werke 5, p. 625, Bishop, p. 69.
[29] Bishop, p. 39.
[30] Bishop, p. xix.
[31] Paul Cudenec, 'Organic radicalism: bringing down the fascist machine', Fascism rebranded: exposing the Great Reset (Winter Oak, 2021), pp. 1-71. https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/fascism-rebranded23web.pdf
[32] Bishop, p. 51.

Winter Oak
18 Oct 2024 | 10:26 am

9. Life philosophy: soul, rhythm, magic and love


by Paul Cudenec

As humankind shuffles ever closer to the jaws of the global death-machine, all the magic seems to have gone out of our lives and our thinking.

Reduced to mere units of "human capital" by the usurious slave-masters, hypnotised into dull passivity by their weapons of mass distraction, too many people appear to have no ideas of their own to express and no words of their own with which to express them.

That is why it is so refreshing to have encountered the writing of Ludwig Klages, the beyond-left-and-right critic of modernity whom I described in my last essay.

Not only does he not speak the language of the industrial system, but he does not even use its syntax, to use Guy Debord's terms. [1]

Take this passage for example:

"What in a moment of grace touches a chord in us from nature or from the works of the spring-spirits with a daimonic force is not something intellectually devised and constructed in the imagination, rather it is – born". [2]

Or this one:

"It matters little to know if life reaches beyond the sphere of individuals or not, if the Earth, as the ancients liked to believe, is a living being or whether, as the moderns maintain, it is an inert heap of 'dead matter'; for one thing is clear and this is that, whatever the landscape, the play of the clouds, the water, the profusion of plants and the bustle of the creatures produce a profoundly moving Whole which embraces individuals as if within an arch, embodies them by weaving them into the great cosmic becoming". [3]

Because Klages's philosophy stands so firmly outside the enclosure of modern thinking, it can be difficult to understand and to label.

His overall vision includes graphology – the study of handwriting – and psychology, while his life philosophy, a phenomenology he calls "the science of essences" – Wesenswissenschaft [4] is variously termed "biocentrism" and "panvitalism". [5]

Klages deliberately cultivates what Nitzan Lebovic calls a "mythic, highly codified language", in which he tries to reintroduce deep meaning "extricated from the ancient roots of language itself, before it was classified and organized in modern life". [6]

This idiosyncratic use of certain terms can cause initial confusion – I was surprised, for instance, to see that he attributes negative quality to the word "spirit" – "Geist" in German – to which I, like Gustav Landauer, [7] have always attributed a very positive value.

But further investigation reveals that what he means by "spirit" is what Paul Bishop calls "objectivizing intellect" [8] or what Klages himself describes as "the enslavement of life under the yoke of concepts". [9]

It could be seen as the rational mind, the ego, patriarchy, materialism, the will to power behind the industrial world.

Bishop says that Klages felt our civilisation had gone wrong by having "an exclusive focus on rationality instead of a richer and more holistic approach to life". [10]

And Lebovic explains that he turned the term "logocentrism", a focus on words rather than the reality behind them, into "a popular term hurled against all transparent Western forms of positivist analysis, patriarchalism, and materialism". [11]

In his writing, Klages judges that our "vital plenitude" [12] is being sucked from us by contemporary society.

He sees body and soul as being "poles of the life-cell which belong inseparably together, into which from outside the spirit, like a wedge, inserts itself, in the endeavour to split them apart, to 'de-soul' the body, to disembody the soul, and in this way finally to kill all the life it can reach'". [13]

And he adds that the resulting "unconscious ill will, called narrow-mindedness, can just as little be broken or won round as one could transform the blood of its carrier". [14]

The element that Klages opposes to his "spirit" is "soul", which represents everything that this stifling "spirit" denies.

This is not merely a pole of human living, but also manifests in the form of "the elementary souls" [15] he says, invoking "the souls of the images of light and darkness, warmth and cold, storm and calm, of cliff and tree, river and sea, wood and desert, of sunlight and moonlight, starry sky and daylit heaven, gorge and peak". [16]

From a Winter Oak perspective, it is good to see our totem tree get a special mention.

Writes Klages: "If, in an inspiring moment, the 'psychic' individual is able, instead of perceiving the oak-tree (whether with, or without, 'aesthetics'), to envision its 'primordial image', then, by means of the same object which for us means a tree with such-and-such qualities, a daimonic soul has appeared to him, and this means: he has sensed as overpoweringly real the fluid shudder which mysteriously whispers down from the tree-top". [17]

Sometimes he imagines these souls as gods: "There are gods of water and gods even of particular stretches of water, gods of the plant kingdom as well as of a particular tree, gods of the hearth as well as of the hearth of a particular house, but also gods of the night, of the day, of the dawn, of the light, of the darkness, of the thunderstorm, of the rainstorm, of lightning, furthermore of love, friendship, revenge, reconciliation, of anger, furthermore of death, of sickness, of fertility, finally of prayer, sacrifice, exchange, healing, making war, swearing, warding off evil and so on into infinity". [18]

Klages sees this depiction of elemental essences in a famous painting by Arnold Böcklin, Playing in the Waves (Im Spiel der Wellen), in which the mythological figures represent "the soul of water". [19]

He explains: "The huge, ungainly water centaur, the mermaid in the foreground, the lascivious merman next to her, the person plunging to the depths of the sea behind her, are not least essentially one and the same as the water from which they emerge". [20]

He also describes these gods as "the ancestral souls" and says that "the souls of the past that appear" are the "primordial images" (Urbilder). [21]

This notion of Urbilder – that is to say, archetypes – is central to Klages's thought.

In one context they are the guiding image within life that causes it to take the shape it was meant to take.

He writes: "We could hardly better describe the growth process than with the observation that, in the fertilized cell, the image of the developing body works as a material-shaping power!" [22]

He discusses the nature of this image in the way in which a nut or acorn falls from one tree and grows into a new one.

"If, however, in the new individual neither the old individual nor its matter remains, what is it actually that uninterruptedly persists through thousands and thousands of generations?

"The answer is an image. The image of the oak, the image of the pine-tree, the image of the fish, the image of the dog, the image of the human being recurs in every single individual carrier of the species.

"'Reproduction' means the physically eternally inaccessible process of the handing-on of the primordial image of the species from place to place and from time to time". [23]

In another context Klages suggests that the ancient power of these images, these Urbilder, makes itself apparent in conscious reality through poetry and artistic creation . [24]

The idea of these Urbilder, or archetypes, should not be regarded as suggesting a static, fixed, reality, as everything in the natural world is always moving and renewing.

The rhythms of reproduction, of life and death, of the stars and planets, of the ocean's waves and of human hearts are, for Klages, the pulse of one great living.

But this cosmic rhythm is never restricted to the rigid repetition of a beat, stresses Klages.

"Steam engines, drop-hammers, pendulum clocks function to a beat, but not in a rhythm; a piece of perfect prose has a perfect rhythm, but certainly not a beat.

"Life expresses and manifests itself in rhythms; by contrast in a beat the spirit compels the rhythmic life-pulse to submit to its own peculiar law". [25]

We can access a different dimension of existence by allowing ourselves to follow that life rhythm, says Klages – for example, when, in dancing, we lose ourselves and become part of the pulsating universe.

"The more the dancer is granted the grace of becoming completely absorbed in the dance, the more it is not about movements, not about a change of locations and a measuring of line segments, but about the will-less, indeed almost impulse-less, resonance in the element of a wave-creating motion, which henceforth experiences and, while it is experiencing, at the same time is 'worked and woven'.

"In the rhythmically perfect dance something reaches its consummation as a primordial unique experience which, in the meantime, is experienced only at the sight of falling leaves, passing clouds or the surge of ocean waves: the sense of being carried away by the stream of things in action". [26]

It is here that we might touch ecstasy or Rausch, which Klages defines as "to be outside oneself' (= outside the ego)". [27]

Lebovic explains: "For late romantics, Rausch swept away all thought of boundaries, even the idea that one might transgress boundaries through a conscious decision.

"According to Nietzsche, there was nothing conscious, so no choice, about transgression; rather, the forces of existence itself led back into the primordial, the animalistic roots, a prehistoric source, before the birth of modern civilization". [28]

With Rausch we reach an entirely unmediated primal state of being, normally only accessible to us modern humans when we sleep and dream.

We can hope to taste what Klages hailed as "the magical rotating of a primordial time in which soul and world fused with each other in rhythmically uninterrupted, mutually consecutive embraces". [29]

Klages regards poetry as another means by which we can reach beyond the narrow restraints of our modern being.

He writes: "Although the poet remains an individual, he still remains an aspect of the cosmic flux: he is animal, star, sea, plant; he is the eye of the elements; he is matriarchal and earthly to the core. The praxis by which he expresses his inner vision is magic". [30]

"Let there be no mistake: either the most powerful poetry and art of all times is sheer invention – no, a smoke screen – or it is a magic means of opening up to us real worlds, to which we would on our own no longer find a way, out of our dungeon of believing in facts". [31]

"The praxis of our philosophy is magic, it itself is the theory of magic… It works with images and symbols, and its method is the method of analogy. – The most important names for it are: element, substance, principle, daimon, cosmos, microcosm, macrocosm, essence, image, primordial image, vortex, tangle, fire – Its ultimate formulas are magic spells and have magical power". [32]

At the same time as re-enchanting our world, Klages says his life philosophy aims to "renaturalize the human person". [33]

But then this is probably one and the same process, given Klages's belief in the souls of nature.

Despite Klages's differences with Christian thought, I can't help seeing important similarities with the sophiological outlook I presented in a recent essay series. [34]

Is there fundamentally any conflict between Klages's pagan notion of the "divinity of life" [35] and Jennifer Newsome Martin's "bright and hidden flame of divine presence that permeates the natural world and the human beings within it"? [36]

And is his "knowledge that there is a love which encompasses the whole world in its creative weft" [37] really something different from Martin's gnosis that she says allows us to see by intuition "the glorious invisible that suffuses and illuminates the world"? [38]

As we will see in the third and final essay, Klages certainly joins Michael Martin, editor of The Heavenly Country, in his opposition to "an age of the totalization of the technological and the technocratic, an age of the unreal, the artificial, the illusory, of the simulacra". [39]

Can we not open up a spiritual dimension to the beyond-left-and-right transcendence of Klages's political thinking?

Is it not time for all of us who cherish divine nature and true living – whatever our philosophical or religious backgrounds – to come together to defeat the vile industrial-financial Beast and to restore love, soul and magic to this essentially beautiful world?

[Audio version]

See also:

Life philosophy: beyond left and right

Life philosophy: against the destructive will of Mammon

[1] "He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with; the one in which he learned to speak. No doubt he would like to be regarded as an enemy of its rhetoric; but he will use its syntax. This is one of the most important aspects of spectacular domination's success". Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 38.
https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/guy-debord/
[2] Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 6th edition (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1972), p. 1132, Paul Bishop, Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life: A Vitalist Toolkit (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 81.
[3] Ludwig Klages, L'Homme et la terre (Mensch und Erde), trad. Christophe Lucchese (RN Editions, 2016), p. 40. Quotations from this book are my own translations from French.
[4] Bishop, p. 101.
[5] Gilbert Merlio, 'Préface', Klages, L'Homme et la terre, p. 10.
[6] Nitzan Lebovic, The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 201.
[7] Paul Cudenec, 'Volk and freedom', Against the Dark Enslaving Empire! (Winter Oak, 2024), pp. 155-70, https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/against-the-dark-enslaving-empire-online.pdf
[8] Bishop, p. 91.
[9] Ludwig Klages, Vom Wesen des Bewusstseins, Sämtliche Werke 3, ed. Ernst Frauchiger, Gerhard Funke, Karl J. Groffmann, Robert Heiss and Hans Eggert Schröder, 9 vols (Bonn: Bouvier, 1964-1992), pp. 391-92, Bishop, p. 135.
[10] Bishop, p. 139.
[11] Lebovic, p. 131.
[12] Ludwig Klages, Ausdrucksbewegung und Gestaltungskraft, Sämtliche Werke 6, p. 257, Bishop, p. 139.
[13] Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 6th edition (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1972), p. 7, Bishop, p. xxi.
[14] Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, pp. 799-800, Bishop, p. 87.
[15] Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 1138, Bishop, p. 101.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ludwig Klages, Von kosmogonischen Eros, Sämtliche Werke 3, p. 293, Bishop, p. 148.
[18] Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 202, Bishop, p. 102.
[19] Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, pp. 1127-31, Bishop, p. 83.
[20] Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, pp. 1127-31, Bishop, p. 84.
[21] Klages, Von kosmogonischen Eros, p. 452 & p. 470, Bishop, p. 102.
[22] Ludwig Klages, Die Grundlagen der Charakterkunde, Sämtliche Werke 4, pp. 322-25, Bishop, p. 75.
[23] Ludwig Klages, Handschrift und Charakter, Sämtliche Werke 7, p. 332, Bishop, p. 86.
[24] Ludwig Klages, Vom Traumbewusstsein, Ein fragment (Hamburg: Paul Hartung, 1952), p. 10, Lebovic, p. 155.
[25] Ludwig Klages,Grundlegung der Wissenschaft vom Ausdruck, Sämtliche Werke 6, pp. 626-28, Bishop, p. 128.
[26] Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 1054, Bishop, p. 131.
[27] Ludwig Klages, Vom Wesen des Bewusstseins, Sämtliche Werke 3, pp. 391-92, Bishop, p. 135.
[28] Lebovic, p. 111.
[29] Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 1190, Bishop, p. 168.
[30] Ludwig Klages, Rhythmen und Runen, Nachlass herausgegeben von ihm selbst (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1944), p. 261, Bishop, p. 103.
[31] Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 1185, p. 167.
[32] Klages, Rhythmen und Runen, p. 312, Bishop, pp. 167-68.
[33] Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 1308, Bishop, p. 170.
[34] Paul Cudenec, 'The Spirit of Sophia'.
[35] Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, p. 1424, Bishop, p. 185.
[36] Jennifer Newsome Martin, 'True and Truer Gnosis', in The Heavenly Country: An Anthology of Primary Sources, Poetry, and Critical Essays on Sophiology, edited by Michael Martin (Kettering, Ohio: Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2016), p. 346.
[37] Klages, L'Homme et la terre, p. 60.
[38] Newsome Martin, 'True and Truer Gnosis: The Revelation of the Sophianic in Hans Urs von Balthasar', in The Heavenly Country, p. 346.
[39] Michael Martin, 'Introduction: Sophiology: Genealogy and Phenomenon', in The Heavenly Country, p. 1.

Winter Oak
16 Oct 2024 | 9:11 am

10. Agreement, Mutual Aid, and Love (Reviving Federalism, Part 2)


by W.D James

Three of the most important factors in the emergence, growth, and maintenance of organic social order are free agreement, mutual aid, and love. Typically, a particular thinker will emphasize one above the others. In his foundational political treatise on federalism of 1603, Politica, Johannes Althusius brings them all into play and weaves them together in intricate and harmonious ways. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that he is a great modern thinker and it is a tragedy that he fell into relative obscurity. We need to recover a deeper understanding of federalism as a model of social organization and that means we need to recover Althusius.

In this essay, we will focus in on the opening chapter of that work dealing with "The General Elements of Politics."

Politics

Althusius opens: "Politics is the art of associating men for the purpose of establishing, cultivating, and conserving social life among them."i He is explicitly following Aristotle in understanding politics as a matter of association. In fact, Aristotle provides much of his framework. Politics arises when people "pledge themselves each to the other, by explicit or tacit agreement, to mutual communication…".ii The translator makes clear that Althusius' 'communication' is rooted in Aristotle's 'koinonia', so it should be understood as emphasizing sharing; communing. The first two levels of society will be the family and what Althusius calls the 'collegium' by which he means a guild, corporation, or other organization established to serve the interests of its members and of the society as a whole.

He also follows Aristotle in utilizing a four-fold conception of causation: efficient, material, formal and final. The final cause, or end, to which politics is directed is understood to be "holy, just, comfortable, and happy symbiosis [living together], a life lacking nothing either necessary or useful."iii The efficient cause is the voluntary agreement that establishes the association. In the case of the family, the agreement between the man and woman forming the family. In the case of a collegium, the agreement of the membership.

People are naturally inclined to enter into these voluntary associations because "no man is self-sufficient." Althusius, now bringing in the other major component of his intellectual framework, Christianity, interprets this as an aspect of God's Providence. "God distributed the gifts unevenly among men," he observes, "He did not give all things to one person, but some to one and some to others, so that you have need for my gifts, and I for yours."iv Hence, it is by "mutual aid," as he terms it, that we commune with one another in the "commonwealth" we form.

He refers to the members as "co-workers" and "partners in a common life."v This common enterprise will encompass "communication" of things, services, and "common rights." In short, we will associatively provide things for one another, do services for one another, and this will all be organized under a shared sense of justice we develop amongst ourselves. This sense of justice, embodied in laws, will "distribute and assign advantages and responsibilities among the symbiotes according to the nature and necessities of each association."vi The notion that there would not be a 'one size fits all' approach to different people, and more specifically different groups, will probably sound very foreign to our modern liberal ears, but it is characteristic of all organically developed societies. Further, these rights will always be balanced with responsibilities. Society as a whole will support you as an individual or group to thrive (rights) but then you have obligations to operate in a way that contributes to the overall good (responsibilities).

To take this back to the more literal organic level, we might prune some plants in our garden and not others, we might supply different sorts of fertilizer to different plants, we will pick the fruits at different times and use them for different purposes. The parts of our garden are different and need different things for the garden as a whole to thrive. In turn, having received what they each need, each plant will yield us a unique good. Likewise, in an organic society, different parts do different things and need different things to thrive for the overall good of the whole.

The economic historian R. H. Tawney drew out the significance of this conception by contrasting 'the Functional Society' to 'the Acquisitive Society.' The latter is the sort of society that has grown up in Western Europe in the modern era characterized by the assumption that the foundation of society lies in "rights" divorced from obligations or overall social function; ie, capitalism. "Such societies," he argues, "may be termed Acquisitive Societies, because their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth."vii He argues for a recovery of "purposes" and hence social "functions" in our understanding of industry and production. The essential question is: does society exist to serve the economy or does the economy exist to serve society? If the latter, we must start asking how? To what end? What functions does it perform for us?

Also following Aristotle, Althusius takes that each association in the network of associations would have a leader or governor. How these leaders are to be chosen, the strict limits on their authority, and how you would remove them when they become tyrannical will be examined in future essays. Essentially, he assumes that any organism will have a governing element. In the individual the 'soul' governs the whole body, the head governs the rest of the body. Each social body (each family, each collegium, each city, each province, each nation) needs a head charged with executing the will of that body towards its natural social end.

In structuring these relationships of authority he introduces the third great associative principle, also borrowed from Christianity, love. Following St. Augustine, Althusius holds that to "govern… is nothing other than to serve and care for the utility of others, as parents rule their children…".viii The principle is elaborated as follows: "…just as the soul [or mind] presides over the other members in the human body, directs and governs them according to the proper functions assigned to each member, and foresees and procures whatever useful and necessary things are due each member…," so the role of leadership is to understand what the members of the association need and to coordinate this to serve the common good. This is nothing other than the classic Christian conception of love (agape) as serving the good of the other.

We will need to look at his theory of resistance to tyranny in detail later, but from this opening section of his work, we will note that resistance becomes justified when the "chief" of an association governs "impiously or unjustly."ix

Agreement

It is good that Althusius uses the broader term 'agreement' rather the more narrow 'contract.' Agreement denotes a more genuinely cooperative endeavor. Contract implies cooperation only so far as that remains within my individual self-interest.

This is probably the most general way in which voluntary associations are formed. A family forms when two people agree to be married. Guilds, clubs, business partnerships, institutes, etc form when people agree to work together to form them. Pretty much by definition this preserves individual liberty within cooperative endeavor. No one is forced to be a member of anything they don't want to be. The main exemption would be children not having agreed to enter the families they happen to enter. Too bad, the not yet existent don't get to choose anything until they start to exist (they can always abandon their families later if they choose).

Mutual aid

Althusius interprets mutual aid, following Aristotle, mainly in terms of the shared ends we will pursue. Three centuries later, Peter Kropotkin (pictured) would make mutual aid the centerpiece of his political and ethical theory. He approached it though from an evolutionary perspective, hence what Aristotle would have considered as an element in efficient causation. His main contribution was to highlight how much the cooperative factor of mutual aid played in the 'struggle of the fittest' Darwin had elaborated upon. In his Ethics (1921), he asserts "Mutual aid within the species thus represents the principal factor, the principal active agency in what we may call evolution."x His essential point being that, among social species, the essential thing in determining success against other species or against the harshness of the environment is the degree and effectiveness of the group acting cooperatively.

Further, for Kropotkin, this is the (efficient) cause of morality. He says: "Nature has thus to be recognized as the first ethical teacher of man. The social instinct, innate in men as well as in all the social animals, — this is the origin of all ethical conceptions and all the subsequent development of morality."xi So, from this direction, morality is just formalization of concepts which are necessary to, and which support, human cooperative endeavor. Don't lie. Don't murder. Don't cheat. Don't covet. Don't steal. These are bad because they would weaken mutual aid and, hence, decrease the chances of that community's survival.

In a very real sense, we would not have the opportunity to act in a narrowly self-interested sense if we (and especially our forebears) did not usually and reliably act cooperatively. Cooperation is socially fundamental. Increasing mutual aid is the fuel that allows for social growth and development.

Love

I think love is quite possibly the most neglected concept of politics in the modern world. I think a degree of hierarchy and authority are natural and ineradicable from human societies. This is most inescapable in relation to children. Either parents (or some surrogate) will educate and guide children or the kids are likely to not make it to adulthood and will be ignorant and anti-social if they do. Often, the elderly will need to have decisions made for them when they become too ill or feeble to make decent decisions for themselves.

Even in other social relationships I think this is unavoidable, but abuse of authority will need guarded against. If we're running a manufacturing operation, no matter how co-operative, we're going to need some folks to make day-to-day decisions: we aren't going to all gather together to vote on every minute detail. Hopefully those allotted this role will possess the necessary excellences to make good decisions and that's why we would pick them for that role in the first place. If we form a military to protect ourselves from those mean enslavers across the river who would like to include us as their chattel, we won't operate very well if everything is a voluntary group decision. We will need some leaders. Hopefully brave, smart, civic-minded ones.

At a personal level, I have been in the 'authoritative' role in regard to lots of students as their teacher, my daughter as her father, and lots of co-workers as their supervisor. It is profoundly odd that we would think one human had any sort of 'right' to tell another what to do. I think we are sort of conditioned to not notice how odd that actually is, probably because so much of our hierarchy and authority (really just power much of the time) is actually not legitimate.

We typically rely on contract to solve this problem: you agreed to be ruled, politically, at work, whatever, and so you are subordinate. The obvious problem is that such contracts are usually made under some degree of compulsion. The employee and the employer, for example, do not start from equal positions of power and, hence, the contract typically does not equally represent their interests.

The only thing that I think can fully legitimate a relationship of hierarchy is love. Immanuel Kant put this rather rationalistically as "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end." Jesus put it more succinctly as "Do to others what you would have them do to you." Put in terms I'm most comfortable with, it comes down to: if you claim the right to tell someone else what to do, that can only be legitimated by taking on the responsibility of giving full weight to their good (ie, loving them). There are all sorts of situations in which some sort of hierarchy naturally arises. Parents need to nurture and direct children. The already educated will need to teach the not yet educated. It will be convenient to delegate a coordinating authority to someone or a group of someones: say in building bridges between syndicates to form a cartel, or between cities to coordinate exchange or mutual defense. Each of those sorts of things require tons of day-to-day decisions. It would be very inefficient to involve the whole group in each and every one of them. I see it as natural that such a group, no how democratic or decentralized, would find it convenient to delegate a well-defined authority to set capable people to execute the details in fulfillment of the group's will. When a hierarchy is necessary or desirable, only by being exercised through love can it be legitimated.

Most folks, if they're reasonable, will admit the legitimacy of hierarchy rooted in competence and exercised through love. That is not a tyranny. Lacking either element, I think it starts looking pretty questionable.

i Johannes Althusius, Politica, edited and translated by Frederick S. Carney, Liberty Fund, 1995, p. 17.

ii Ibid, p. 17.

iii Ibid, p. 17.

iv Ibid, p. 23.

v Iibid, p. 19.

vi Ibid, p. 22.

vii R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, Writat, 2022 (1920), p. 20.

viii Op cit., p. 20.

ix Ibid., p. 21.

x Prince (Peter) Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development, translated by Louis S Friedland and Joseph R. Piroshnikoff, Benjamin Blom, 1968, p. 45.

xi Ibid., p. 45.

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