How can one be a rebel today? How can one not! To exist is to defy all that threatens you. To be a rebel is not to accumulate a library of subversive books or to dream of fantastic conspiracies or of taking to the hills. It is to make yourself your own law. To find in yourself what counts. To make sure that you’re never “cured” of your youth. To prefer to put everyone up against the wall rather than to remain supine. To pillage in this age whatever can be converted to your law, without concern for appearance. By contrast, I would never dream of questioning the futility of seemingly lost struggles. Think of Patrick Pearse. I’ve also spoken of Solzhenitsyn, who personifies the magic sword of which Junger speaks, “the magic sword that makes tyrants tremble.” In this Solzhenitsyn is unique and inimitable. But he owed this power to someone who was less great than himself. To someone who should gives us cause to reflect. In “The Gulag Archipelago,” he tells the story of his “revelation.” In 1945, he was in a cell at Boutyrki Prison in Moscow, along with a dozen other prisoners, whose faces were emaciated and whose bodies broken. One of the prisoners, though, was different. He was an old White Guard colonel, Constantin Iassevitch. He had been imprisoned for his role in the Civil War. Solzhenitsyn says the colonel never spoke of his past, but in every facet of his attitude and behavior it was obvious that the struggle had never ended for him. Despite the chaos that reigned in the spirits of the other prisoners, he retained a clear, decisive view of the world around him. This disposition gave his body a presence, a flexibility, an energy that defied its years. He washed himself in freezing cold water each morning, while the other prisoners grew foul in their filth and lament. A year later, after being transferred to another Moscow prison, Solzhenitsyn learned that the colonel had been executed. “He had seen through the prison walls with eyes that remained perpetually young. . . . This indomitable loyalty to the cause he had fought had given him a very uncommon power.” In thinking of this episode, I tell myself that we can never be another Solzhenitsyn, but it’s within the reach of each of us to emulate the old White colonel.
- Taken from an interview with Dominique Venner.
Excerpt From
The Metaphysics of Memory
by
Dominique Venner
“Memory” is a much abused word. But so too is the word “love,” which doesn’t mean it can’t be used in its fullest sense. It’s the force of “memory,” transmitted within the bosom of the family, that enables a community to endure, despite all that seeks its dissolution. It’s the long “memory” of the Chinese, the Japanese, the Jews, and other such peoples that has enabled them to surmount the perils and persecutions to which every people is heir. To their disadvantage, due to the rupture of their history, Europeans have been deprived of their memory.
I am reminded of this rupture every time students ask me to speak about Europe’s future. For whenever the word “Europe” is pronounced, it evokes a host of ambiguities. To some, it evokes the European Union, either positively — or negatively insofar as it’s not a “power.” To avoid confusion, I always specify that the Europe of which I speak is not Europe in its political sense. Guided by Epictetus’s principle of distinguishing between “that which depends on us and that which doesn’t depend on us,” I know that it depends on me to base my life on authentic European values, whereas I have no say on what politics Europe pursues. I also know that without an animating idea, there is no coherent action, [political or otherwise].
Continue reading ‘The Animating Idea’
“The Irish poet Patrick Pearse was an authentic rebel. He might even be described as a born rebel. When a child, he was drawn to Erin’s long history of rebellion. Later, he associated with the Gaelic Revival, which laid the basis of the armed insurrection. A founding member of the first IRA, he was the real leader of the Easter Uprising in Dublin in 1916. This was why he was shot. He died without knowing that his sacrifice would spur the triumph of his cause.
A fourth, again very different example is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Until his arrest in 1945, he had been a loyal Soviet, having rarely questioned the system into which he was born and having dutifully done his duty during the war as a reserve officer in the Red Army. His arrest and then his subsequent discovery of the Gulag and the horrors that occurred after 1917, provoked a total reversal, forcing him to challenge a system which he once blindly accepted. This is when he became a rebel — not just against Communist, but capitalist society, both of which he saw as destructive of tradition and opposed to superior life forms.
The reasons that made Pearse a rebel were not the same that made Solzhenitsyn a rebel. It was the shock of certain events, followed by a heroic internal struggle, that made the latter a rebel. What they both have in common, what they discovered through different ways, was the utter incompatibility between their being and the world in which they were thrown. This is the first trait of the rebel. The second is the rejection of fatalism.”
Taken from an interview with Dominique Venner.
For A New Revolutionary Theory
by
Dominique Venner
Before even thinking of defining anything constructive, this critique of the flaws of the “nationals” is indispensable. Some, for lack of political maturity, will not be able to comprehend it. Those who have drawn the lessons of their own experience, on the other hand, will recognise its necessity. Revolution is not the act of violence that sometimes accompanies a takeover of power. Nor is it a simple change of institutions or a political clan. Revolution is less about the taking of power than its use for the construction of a new society. This immense task cannot be envisaged amidst disorderly thought and action. It demands a vast apparatus of preparation and formation. The “national” combat is stuck in the old ruts of half a century. Before anything else, a new revolutionary theory must be developed.
Excerpt From “For A positive Critique”