Colonize Your Bookshelf

Decolonization is like wallpaper. It has become such a part of the background of life that we notice it like a fish
notices water—we are swimming in an ocean of decolonization. And like the tidal wave it is, it has not only
reached your doorstep but threatens to carry your bookshelf (and you) away with it. The powers that be have taken
aim squarely at both, so you had better colonize it yourself while you still can.

Liberal elites are not stupid. We have a tendency to underestimate the enemy, but they do not own and run
everything for no reason at all. If they don't want you to read old books (and they don't), then they have very good
reason why not. Frank Zappa, unlikely friend to the political right, was a lifelong conservative. We shouldn't
bedgrudge him that; we can all admire a man who makes a career of shitting on hippies. In one of his interviews
he donned his prophet's cap and foretold of the end of days, telling of “Death by Nostalgia”, where the gap
between “The Event” and “Nostalgia for the Event” would continue to narrow until it were so small that the man
in the street could not take a single step without being nostalgic for the previous step, and we would reach a kind
of maximal entropy where all possible states would be exhausted—everything stops.

We could tweak Zappa's end times scenario to where the gap between “The Event” and “Recollection of the
Event” should continue to narrow until we reach a state where one could not remember what happened seconds
before, where the man in the street would have the historical horizon of a goldfish—at this point we have entered
into the mind of the ideological liberal. Perhaps we could call it “Death by Amnesia” in honour of Zappa.
Liberalism can be characterized in many ways, but you won't go too far wrong in thinking of it as simply amnesia
raised to the power of an ideology. Liberalism does not want you to remember the past because a sufficiently long
historical time horizon renders it powerless. Liberals don't want you to read old books because everything they
believe, every argument they make, has been refuted in a manner more or less definitive some 340 years ago by a
man who spoke six languages (two of them dead), has seen more of the world than they have, has read more
widely than they ever will, and probably held a rank or a post beyond what they could ever achieve had they been
alive for all 340 of those years. The only response to such a thorough spanking is to boldly declare we... uhh...
WE'RE DOING IT ANYWAY and then run a rapier through our aristocrat, which is just happens to be the approach
you see both in the streets and in institutes of “higher 'learning'” today.

So you had better colonize your own bookshelf while you still can. This is not rhetorical; the days of the internet-
as-wild-west are well and truly over. Peak “open web” was probably about 2013—resources available even last
year are quickly disappearing. We at Imperium Press know this firsthand, as we have seen multiple online sources
cited in our book Nemesis go up in smoke since publication in Q3 2019 (more on this book later). Hope you got to
them while the getting was good! We've got your back though: we've scrapped actually, you know... publishing
books for the moment to focus on a project of archiving books worth reading while they can still be found on the
web (and some of those have disappeared too since starting this project). You didn't think this was going to be an
academic exercise, did you?

So as a companion to this archival project, we've selected a few key texts that can serve as your maiden voyage in
colonizing your own bookshelf. Let's shove off, shall we?

Robert Filmer: Patriarcha

Filmer is a good place to start because he a) is brilliant, and b) occupies an important position in the development
of liberalism. Most people know Filmer as Locke's target in the first of his Two Treatises of Government, and most
think of him as having been trounced by Locke here. This is because most people have been colonized by
liberalism, which is not unlike having been colonized by cordyceps. So let us colonize the terra nullius of the
liberal mind and perhaps we can civilize the savages there, or at least give them a few warm blankets for the
winter. But first, we must place Filmer in his proper context.

Our standard account is that it was all “divine right of kings” this and “silk slipper on your neck” that from time
out of mind until the stunning and brave Locke stood athwart history and yelled “stop!” with such force that
everyone (or at least everyone who counted) simply could no longer believe that kings should rule, and
spontaneously decided to organize society on the basis of human rights, consent of the governed, and rule of law.
But of course, the reality is somewhat different. Divine right of kings has never been standard operating
procedure, and was in fact something quite new in Filmer's time. Does this come as a surprise? Good thing you
decided to colonize your bookshelf.

Originally, as we shall much later discover, God, king, and country were one, and so sovereignty, such as it was,
was clear and indivisible. The king was necessarily high priest, and so there could be no division between sacred
and secular rulership, no “divine right” of kings any more than there is “wet water”—the kingship being a priestly
office, no one ever thought to ask whether it was filled by divine favour. Later, with the advent of Christianity,
came the first inkling of a sacred vs. secular in the form of Augustine's “City of Man vs. City of God”. The Early
Middle Ages, from the Byzantine Papacy through the Frankish period to about the 11 th century, is the story of
sacred and secular struggling for dominion one over the other.

At every stage in this power struggle, divine right (conspicuously lacking the genitive) was invoked, whether by
Emperor or by Pope, to justify his rule over the other. The struggle reached a tipping point in the
excommunication of the Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Gregory VII, placing himself under no authority but that
of God. Not to be outdone, secular apologists pointed to the Augustinian “City of Man” distinction to justify a sort
of division of labour between papacy and earthly ruler, justifying their attempts to reform the church's “lapsed
standards”. This struggle continued, culminating in the Reformation, which was patronized into existence by
among other secular authorities Frederick III, Elector of Saxony. In response to this blow against the papacy we
see a landmark in the rough beast slouching toward liberalism: we see the rise of consensual theories of
governance.

We should note here that consensual theories are still divine right theories, just not divine right of kings—but
rather of the people. The foremost champions of these consensual theories of governance were Francisco Suarez
and Cardinal Bellarmine, and it is here that Filmer enters the picture, responding to these proto-liberals. Having
spent enough time sketching out the background, I will give you the punchline right up front: popular sovereignty
is idiotic if it is coherent at all; rule of law is worse.

“Rule of law” is a widely misunderstood concept, often taken to mean simply “law and order” rather than, in the
words of Thomas Paine, that “the law ought to be King” instead of that “the King is law”. Paine would have the
law be supreme and sovereign, whether common law, constitution, or otherwise, and that no man can subordinate
it to himself; he must always be subordinated to it. We take this so far for granted today that it is like our
proverbial wallpaper—we can hardly imagine an alternative. And yet, under examination, this lofty idea falls
apart. Filmer leaves the notion of rule of law in tatters by simply pointing out:

It is not the law that is the ‘minister of God’, or that ‘carries the sword’, but the ruler or magistrate. So they that say
the law governs the kingdom may as well say that the carpenter’s rule builds the house and not the carpenter, for the
law is but the rule or instrument of the ruler.

This is the well-worn argument, so familiar to conservatives, that guns don't kill people, people kill people—but
applied to the notion of sovereignty. The law cannot be sovereign because a sovereign is an agent, and an agent
has will. Men are ruled by men, not by a piece of paper. At most the piece of paper can serve the man as a tool, but
it cannot rule by itself any more than Filmer's hammer can cave in someone's skull by itself.

If that weren't enough, Filmer also reminds us that laws were originally unwritten, which seems like a very odd
way to bind kings. How can the highest power in the land be bound by something with no formal existence? It
was not until the time of the lawgivers—Draco and Solon for the Greeks, the decemviri for the Romans—that
these peoples had anything like a piece of paper that could “rule”. And, so as to drive the “sovereign as agent”
point home, Filmer recalls that these laws could not even be formalized without granting to the lawgiver the sort
of absolute power that “rule of law” seeks to limit. Bodin, whose notion of sovereignty-as- maiestas so influenced
Filmer, pointed out that the sovereign can no more bind himself than a hand can hold itself down; the very idea
doesn't even make sense. It seems that law was never meant to bind the ruler, because it can't. Rather, it was meant
to bind the people. Kings are above the laws; the only law they are bound by, according to Filmer, is what he calls
the “natural law of a father”, which leads us to his main thesis: that popular sovereignty makes no sense.

As with rule of law, popular sovereignty is so much a part of the modern scenery that it is almost never justified,
as though such a thing is self-evident. But to the credit of Bellarmine and Suarez, they at least offered arguments
in support of it. Unfortunately their reasoning is as convoluted and tortuous as one might expect, but Filmer, who
quotes them at length, gives them a fair hearing. He then simply points to the natural dependence of children on
fathers, and notes that this dependence is exactly the same for the sovereign-subject relation as for the father-child
relation. As his opponents are concerned to argue for elective monarchy, not democracy, he points out that there is
no scriptural precedent for elective monarchy, no philosophical precedent, no historical precedent, no precedent at
all, really. There is no historical or scriptural case to be made, so the case must be made by way of reason. How is
elective monarchy to work?

Since popular sovereignty turns on the natural right of the people to self-determination, we must first ask
ourselves, what people? Is the whole of humanity the self-governing community in question? Suarez admits that
this is frankly impossible, or, maybe early on this was the case—he's not sure. But perhaps we can bracket this
historical problem and simply ask how the assembly of “the people” should come to any decision. Would it
require a simple majority? A supermajority? Could this done by delegates or representatives? A majority of them?
A supermajority? etc. The law of nature is troublingly silent on whether it's 50% +1 or some other number. We can
agree with Suarez that surely we can't expect all members of the community to be present at the popular
assemblies, but if even one man is missing, we must admit that his tacit approval is legitimate, and if tacit
approval is legitimate, the usurper is legitimate to the extent the people dare not dissent.

Thus far popular sovereignty is not adding up on paper; we can't seem to articulate how things ought to be done
without running into absurdities, but at least we can articulate how things have been done in the past. Let us take
the strongest example of a republic and see if we can't raise a structure around it—let us examine Rome. As it
turns out, Rome's halcyon days as a republic lasted at most 482 years. This sounds impressive to us today, but is
quite short by historical standards. To put it in perspective, the entire Roman Republic lasted half as long as the
Byzantine Empire, less than half the length of the Assyrian monarchy, and almost exactly as long as the Egyptian
New Kingdom alone. And even granting Rome its 482 years, those years were hardly filled with stability and
democratic rule. First we have the consuls, then the tribunes and consuls, then the decemviri, then the tribunes and
consuls again, occasionally dictators, military tribunes, etc. Normally, 5-10% of possible voters took part in
electing magistrates or passing laws in the Centuriate Assembly, and of this number, the knights and first class
alone comprised half the voting units, often making the rest of the vote unnecessary. Moreover, only Rome itself
had “democracy”, with its vassals and provinces excluded from popular assemblies and denied self-determination.
Imperfect though it was, it was at least powerful, no? Let us recall that Rome didn't even gain its imperium under
democracy—this would have to await the principate, which was simply monarchy by another name. And the
greatest Roman endorsement of monarchy? That in her greatest peril, Rome created herself a dictator. This is a
good point to stop because the historical, rational, and scriptural case for democracy and rule of law has
effectively collapsed and there's not really anything left to critique.

The consensus among most political observers is that any political discourse much before the 19 th century—and
especially from the pre-modern period—is more or less a waste of time to anyone except specialists who enjoy
hairsplitting disputes over historical trivia. Now granted, Filmer does spend a fair bit of time in Patriarcha
discussing issues like regal succession from Adam, but he offers a great deal of rational and historical
argumentation which too often goes unremarked upon in favour of the narrative that Locke argued rationally
against a Biblical literalist who confined himself to scriptural exegesis. So we should take with a grain of salt the
Wikipedia entry on Filmer that characterizes him in just this way.

Before we leave Filmer, we would be remiss if we did not mention his quarrel with the Catholic church as the
main force arguing against divine right of kings and for consensual theories of government. This throws into stark
relief the Jouvenelian dynamic whereby centre (e.g. kings) and intermediaries (e.g. church) are locked in a power
struggle in trying to wield the periphery (e.g. “the people”) as a tool, and makes clear Filmer's otherwise
mysterious statement:

Late writers have taken up too much upon trust from the subtle schoolmen, who to be sure to thrust down the king
below the pope, thought it the safest course to advance the people above the king, that so the papal power may more
easily take place of the regal.

It also throws into question the simplistic paradigm of “Catholic redpilled, Protestant bluepilled”, as you will take
great pains to find a more redpilled political observer than Filmer. But so as not to leave our Catholic brethren out
in the cold, we have taken those pains for you, and shall next turn to a good Catholic lad who offers us even
stronger meat than Filmer.

II

Joseph de Maistre: The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions

Filmer is a great starting point for colonizing our bookshelf, but we can at least throw a bone to those who would
prefer something a bit more modern. After all, his writing not only predated liberalism, it predated its first great
conflict: the English Civil War. He certainly never lived to see the French Revolution. Let us now turn to someone
who did—in fact, its greatest critic.

Maistre's reputation doesn't fare much better than Filmer's outside of reactionary circles. His ideal state is
characterized by Nigel Harris in International Socialism No. 28 (whose board interestingly included one Alasdair
MacIntyre—small world): “the organic and hierarchic society, governed with strict authority through one Church
or one nationalist ideology in the hands of an accepted ruling class, uninhibited in its righteous use of violence, its
superiority founded upon blood or birth”, and this paints Maistre as a cartoon Catholic doing little more than
pointing to scripture and saying “see, nothing at all in here about human rights, democracy, equality, separation of
powers, etc”, but this sells Maistre tremendously short. On examination he is in fact extremely radical by the
standards both of his time and of ours—his brand of politics is highly inflammatory even today.

Filmer has mortally wounded liberalism, but do we really have to bring in the executioner? We understand that the
sovereign cannot be bound by law; maybe, with Hoppe, we even understand the superiority of monarchy, but
could we at least have constitutional monarchy? Burke is not going to be pleased with the answer given in
Maistre's Generative Principle of Political Constitutions.

Right off the bat, Maistre recommends himself to us moderns: before the essay even begins—in the preface—he
admits that hereditary monarchy is manifestly stupid; yet he urges us to actually look at the facts of history, and
the fact is that against all reason, hereditary monarchy works. That is, Maistre declares himself to be a sort of
empiricist, a man not altogether out of step with our own thinking. He calls history “experimental politics”, and as
we shall see, a great deal is packed into this phrase. Whatever we might think of hereditary monarchy as an idea,
its track record of achievement is second to none. Our task is to explain why.

His opening salvo sets the tone for the essay:

One of the grand errors of an age that professed them all was to believe that a political constitution could be written
and created a priori, while reason and experience meet in establishing that a constitution is a divine work, and that
 precisely what is most fundamental and most essentially constitutional in the laws of a nation cannot be written.

Thomas Paine (he keeps coming up, doesn't he?) once said that a constitution does not exist until he can put it in
his pocket. Maistre begs to differ. Constitutionalism is not a difficult statue to topple, and Maistre topples it right
away: a constitution is just a law, and a law can't be immutable unless guaranteed by a superior authority. He
might as well have torn a page straight out of Patriarcha—we're back to the old “men are ruled by men, not paper”
chestnut. But Maistre is just warming up. He wants to ask “whence comes the authority behind our piece of
paper?” and in this he goes much further than Filmer.

Surely it does not come from “all”. He has put that one to bed in his earlier Study on Sovereignty, a critique of all
things Rousseau, where he states up front: “They say that the people are sovereign; but over whom? Over
themselves, apparently. The people are, therefore, subject.” Despite having already undone Rousseau's life's work,
he does continue the essay beyond these few sentences, but they are enough for our purposes here. Between this
and Filmer we can put popular sovereignty to one side, and follow Maistre as he treads even more interesting
ground.

Now, this doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't have a constitution. Maistre is a great admirer of constitutions,
just not the one in Paine's pocket. But his main point about constitutions is that they are enduring to the degree
they are short. Wittgenstein begins his Tractatus with the quote “...and whatever a man knows, whatever is not
mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words”, which he surely later regretted as it
made the whole Tractatus into an anticlimax. And Maistre is making the same point: the less one writes, the
stronger the constitution, and the strongest constitution of all is unwritten. Maistre's time saw a profusion of men
writing constitutions; as he says, the 18 th century man of letters basically had to turn in his doctorate unless he
could pull out of his pocket a constitution he wrote himself.

But it gets worse for our 18 th century doctor. Not only should any constitution worth the paper it's not written on
live only in the hearts of a people, it can't even be actively generated by human will. Human will is not the agent,
but the tool shaping a constitution. As a simple example, nobody ever sat down and through some transcendental
deduction arrived at the English constitution, its body of law, its practices and conventions. And yet this
constitution has endured so long that nobody can even be sure just how old it is. Compare this with the French
constitution. Which one, you ask? Good question—there have been 15 of them since the French Revolution. The
English constitution, towering over these bug constitutions, was not the work of 18 th century doctors LARPing at
statecraft, but was, in Maistre's words, “the work of circumstances”. Maybe we want to call this “the march of
history”, maybe we want to call it “God”, maybe we want to call it, with Hegel, “the march of God in the world”...
but a rose by any other name. Maistre mines a classical analogy:

If there is anything familiar, it is Cicero's analogy of the Epicurean system, which wished to build a world with atoms
falling at random in a void. One would rather believe, said the great orator, that letters thrown into the air could, on
falling, have arranged themselves in such a manner as to form a poem.

He clearly does not think that the sort of perfection attained by the unwritten English constitution is an accident.
Men do not act, but are acted upon; they are the instruments wielded in shaping a constitution, because a
constitution is a divine work. The Romans had a word for this: fas. And here it's worth a brief detour to flesh out
this idea.

Fas is usually translated as “divine law”. It is an ancient Aryan concept akin to the Vedic ṛta. Cognate to our
“rite”, ṛta is in Vedic cosmology the essential normative, governing principle of reality, meaning something like
“what has moved in a fitting manner”. Fas takes up a similar role, but the semantic sense of the Latin term is
revealing. The Indo-European root of fas, viz. *bhā-, designates speech, but speech as something independent of
the speaker, an utterance sufficient in itself, related etymologically to “fate” and to “fame”. Maistre did not use the
term fas, but as a Christian would surely have appreciated the idea of a Word which is itself whole and entire, the
speaker and speech act identical. Maistre is among the more interesting Christians, and while he is no heretic, he
is in some ways a spiritual cousin to the classical writers, and has internalized some of their conceptual
framework. He expresses fas in so many words:

Crescit occulto velut arbor aevo [“it grows like a tree with the silent lapse of time”]; this is the eternal motto of every
great institution; hence the fact that every false institution writes much because it feels its weakness, and seeks for
support. From the truth just stated follows the unswerving consequence that no great and real institution can be
founded on a written law, since the men themslves, the successive instruments of its establishment, do not know what
it is to become, and since imperceptible growth is the true sign of durability in all possible orders of things.

Maistre's love of the organic state, grown up through time immemorial, unwritten, the work of no man, prior to all
deliberation, bearing the stamp of the deity, is set in contrast to the ideal revolutionary state, even with every
parameter fine tuned to its advantage—the France of the Revolution. Her confidence? Limitless. Her ancient
government? Extinguished. Her every enemy? Paralyzed. Her affairs? Undisturbed. Now, let this perfectly tuned
revolutionary state run its course, and what do you get? The Terror. Maistre was, mercifully, not around to witness
the fruit of the American experiment, but if he had been, no doubt he would have understood it in the same terms.
Let a country with every imaginable advantage play out as it may, only make it intentional, make it manufactured,
make it liberal: within two centuries it will be immolated by its own hand.

The “generative principle” of Maistre's title is not the will of particular men. This is not at all incompatible with
Filmer, as particular men can be sovereign, can wield the tradition or the constitution as a tool, but Maistre's point
is that the sovereign is himself a tool of Providence. Social orders cannot be constituted by deliberation and active
human will, they can only be constituted by Providence, which works itself through a divine lawgiver. The
lawgiver, much less the man engaged in statecraft, cannot create alone. But when the lawgiver is the spokesman of
Providence he is not alone, but has the universal wind blowing through the whole cosmos at his back. The
lawgiver is not the creator, he is a circumstance; thus any law he pronounces, any name he invokes, is invoked
through him. The real namer is of course for Maistre, God, and in the essay he introduces a theory of names that is
a marriage between Confucius and Plato's Cratylus—the name must carve reality at the joints, but must also be
relative to function and not arbitrary; even naming ultimately belongs to God alone.

We need not feel belittled by this. Man may not be able to name things, but if his creation is great, the name will
be ennobled by it—“the thing always dignifies the name”. For example, take one of the most elevated expressions
man has ever produced: tragedy. The word conjures such titanic figures as Sophocles and Shakespeare, but springs
from a root meaning “goat song”. A thing can have humble origins—in fact, must have humble origins—and yet
still endure. Here we are back to the English constitution. In fact, the more mysterious, the more obscure; in a
word, the more divine a thing's basis, the more enduring it will be. Greatness cannot be planned, deliberated,
calculated, and willed into reality, at least not by men. The law, the constitution of a people, must be the “work of
circumstances”, the impersonal “vox populi, vox dei”. By this we don't mean anything like popular sovereignty: it
is not vox dei because vox populi, but the reverse. So great a thing as a constitution must be sanctioned by the
gods because it is the work of the gods, with man only the instrument. And now we have an answer to our original
question “whence comes the authority of the piece of paper in Paine's pocket?”—the authority comes from fas, the
divine law.

The Generative Principle is classic Maistre, but the reader will gain only a vague impression of the true darkness
of his thought. His belief that any social order's foundation must necessarily be so dark, so mysterious, so
forbidding that one dare not approach it, does not quite come through here. But we must now turn, against his
advice, to gaze on our own foundation (or rather, anti-foundation). We must turn to a different expression of vox
populi vox dei, from fas to the fascis.

We now move into the darkness.

III

Lothrop Stoddard: Into the Darkness

Our civilizational mythos tells us that the darkest point, however, was some time in the early 1940s. We seem
fascinated by it, again on all sides, liberal or no, whether out of enchantment or of horror—we cannot look away.
If Maistre is right, this may prove our undoing. In this midnight hour, a man plunged himself, like Aeneas bound
for Avernus, into the darkness. The descent is easy; the real work is getting back out.

Stoddard is probably lesser known even than Filmer or Maistre, but was still prominent enough in his day to have
worked his way into The Great Gatsby. A Harvard doctor, lawyer and historian, and rabid eugenicist, his
testimony before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization led to the passage of the Immigration
Act of 1924, basically the alt-right's wet dream. In the 1930s Stoddard's books were standard reading at military
colleges such as the Army War College, the Navy War College, and the Army Industrial College, to whom he
regularly lectured. At the end of the 1930s he journeyed into the Third Reich, his views being seen as sympathetic
enough to gain him unusual access to the people and institutions of wartime Germany. The result of this journey
was his 1940 book Into the Darkness.

We are no less a theocracy today than any civilization ever has been. And our mythos today is that WWII was a
titanic struggle between the forces of good vs. the forces of evil, the former triumphing over the latter forever but
also Nazism threatens to rear its satanic head at every turn but also Nazis are both evil and stupid but also we
cannot be too vigilant against this formidable foe. In any case it is obvious to everyone with even a basic
familiarity that Nazi Germany presents several exegetical problems: a) how can the economic miracle be
explained? b) how can the nation of Schiller, Hegel, Goethe etc. have all decided to become barbarians at once? c)
does it not seem even just a little bit coincidental that the greatest evil in history by far just happens to be within
living memory?

It would be an interesting experiment to view Nazi Germany as we might view say, the Mongol invasions—with
some historical detachment. That is of course impossible; we always have an ideology. While anyone claiming not
to have an ideology is not to be trusted, the best thing we can do is to try earnestly to examine things in the light of
more than one ideology.

The great value of Stoddard's book—more than that it is a primary source offering unprecedented access, more
than that Stoddard himself was so formidably learned, more than that his journalism makes today's look like a
middle school book report—is that it is a firsthand account of Nazi Germany not coloured by hostile ideology.
And yet this is no fluff piece. Stoddard is not afraid to paint particular people unflatteringly, describing a regional
party leader as “a distinctly sinister-looking type; hard-faced, with a cruel eye and a still crueler mouth. A sadist, if
ever I saw one.” Alyssa Milano's estrogen-fuelled jeremiads are rarely so scathing. Stoddard also point blank asks
the clerical President of Slovakia about “reports that Slovakia is merely a puppet state of the Reich.” He is not
here to fellate anyone.

Nor is he under any illusions that he is going to get the full story, even in the strictest off the record comments. He
is well aware of the rigorous sanitation process that journalistic statements go through on leaving wartime
Germany and the sort of trouble one can get into on displeasing the government—he details them for the reader.
Summarizing the foreign journalist's situation: “There are quite a few locked doors, and he had best not try and
open them. But at least he knows where he stands, and the rules of the game are made clear to him.” When
interviewing Goebbels he well understands that he's being fed “propaganda of the Goebbels brand.” A summary of
Stoddard's observational powers, in contrast to, well... every journalist in the current year:

Much of what I am about to say is so strange and so repellent to our mode of thought that the reader will very likely
find himself in a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland realm of ideas, wherein almost everything seems upside-down from his
point of view. He will therefore be tempted to dismiss the whole business as either hypocritical camouflage or arrant
nonsense.
 That, however, would be a shortsighted attitude. After months of intensive study and innumerable conversations with
representative Nazis, high and low in the Party scale, I am convinced that the “Old Guard,” at any rate, are for the
most part, fanatical zealots. If the Nazi thesis were a dialectic screen hiding mere lust for power and pelf, it would
never have converted so large a portion of the traditionally honest, idealistic German people. If the Nazi leaders were
just a band of cynical adventurers, with tongue in cheek and wholly “on the make,” it would be far easier to deal with
them.

In the book, we get the impression of a truly corporatist society, one where people could still actually make
sacrifices. This stands in stark contrast to us, for whom a little hardship is unthinkable. Imagine this in a COVID
world:

Another noteworthy point is that the Government made no attempt to ease the people into the war by tactful stages.
Quite the reverse. Nazi spokesmen tell you frankly that they cracked down hard from the start and made things just
about as tough as the civilian population could bear. Indeed, they say that severe rationing of food and clothing from
the very beginning was done not merely to avert present waste and ensure future supplies; it was done also to make
people realize that they were in a life-and-death struggle for which no sacrifice was too great.

He devotes a whole chapter to rationing, cataloguing minute logistical details. Somehow this never manages to
become tedious. The rationing is absolutely Spartan: 1 egg per month, everything rationed right down to thread
and darning-yarn, almost no edible fats and soap. The rationing cards have nothing to do with price; once it is
determined how much meat, milk, cereals etc. the buyer is entitled to buy, they still have to pay for it. A modest
bill of goods would take perhaps an hour to sort out due to the byzantine calculations on both sides of the
transaction. You don't need to be told that this is not a society clamouring to reopen the economy for the good of
the NASDAQ—but privation or no, it is nice to think that in some time and place people weren't utterly ruled by
their wallet. These people don't seem quite like us, and yet not in the way liberals would have us believe; Stoddard
does not exactly paint a picture of rampant xenophobia:

Feeling utterly helpless, I determined to seek information; so I pressed the button to the first floor apartment and as
the latch clicked I went inside. As I walked across the hallway the apartment entrance opened and a pleasant-faced
young woman stood in the doorway. I explained the situation, stating that I was a total stranger. Her face grew
sympathetic, then set in a quick frown.

“You say that taxi man didn’t make sure?” she exclaimed. “Ach, how stupid! The fellow ought to be reported, Wait a
minute and Ill show you myself.” She disappeared, returning a moment later wearing a raincoat.

I protested that I could find my way from her directions, but she would have none of it. “No, no,” she insisted. “Such
treatment to a newly arrived foreigner! I am bound to make up for that driver’s inefficiency.”

And yet this is not a people suffering from Stockholm Syndrome as we are so often told. The man in the street of
Berlin ca. 1940 actually believed to an extent in the racial ideology of National Socialism:

The average German seems disinclined to talk much to the foreign visitor about this oppressed minority. However, I
gathered that the general public does not approve of the violence and cruelty which Jews have suffered. But I also got
the impression that, while the average German condemned such methods, he was not unwilling to see the Jews go and
would not wish them back again. I personally remember how widespread anti-Semitism was under the Empire, and I
encountered it in far more noticeable form when I was in Germany during the inflation period of 1923. The Nazis
therefore seem to have had a popular predisposition to work on when they preached their extreme anti-Semitic
doctrines.

These sketches of life in the Third Reich would be valuable enough, but the core of the book, and what sets it
apart, are the interviews with Nazi top brass. Let me cut to the chase though: the greatest curiosity, his meeting
with Hitler, is something of a letdown. This is no fault of Stoddard's; it is not an interview, but an “audience”—the
force of his word forbade him from publishing the text. He does, however, give a detailed impression of Hitler the
man in terms of presence, which is still interesting. Stoddard shows himself to be an actual journalist in his
interview with Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS. In questioning Himmler about toleration of political dissidents
he refuses to let the question drop until he has a real answer. He asks him about Nazi treatment of Pastor
Niemöller, of the famous phrase “first they came for the socialists...” and Himmler clearly displays discomfort
before saying “if foreign attacks upon us in this affair would cease, perhaps he could be more leniently dealt
with.” The interview with Goebbels is even more revealing. Some of the limitations of National Socialism, which
the Brahmin Stoddard well understood, come into focus here, viz. its oft-noted plebeianism:

“The English,” I remarked, “seem to believe that this is a struggle between democracy and dictatorship.”

“Dictatorship!” shot back Dr. Goebbels scornfully. “Isn't the National Socialist Party essentially the German people?
Aren’t its leaders men of the people? How silly to imagine that this can be what the English call dictatorship! What
we today have in Germany is not a dictatorship but rather a political discipline forced upon us by the pressure of
circumstances. However, since we have it, why shouldn’t we take advantage of the fact?”

This ceding of frame to the enemy conspicuously foreshadows our DR3; apparently the right is not quite done
with it. The Third Reich was indeed a dictatorship and there is nothing wrong with that. If Filmer can sing the
praises of the dictator, why not Goebbels? Stoddard is clearly impressed with Goebbels' rhetorical power though;
you don't get to be Minister of Propaganda for nothing. The class collaboration at the heart of National Socialism
comes across far better than the fetishization of “the people”:

“The new trend [of military fraternization between classes] is due to two causes. In the first place, it is part of the
Nazi philosophy to break down class and caste distinctions, and weld the whole nation into a conscious Gemeinschaft
—an almost mystical communion, as contrasted with the rest of the world. In such a socialized nationhood, the
traditional caste barriers, first between officers and soldiers, secondly between army and civilians, are obviously out
of line. The present German army is undoubtedly more of a Volksheer—a People’s Army, than it ever was before.
This new tendency is also furthered by the fact that with better education, specialization, and technical training of the
rank-and-file, officers and men are more nearly on the same plane. The old Imperial Army, unmechanized and made
up so largely of peasant lads commanded by Junker squires, was a vastly different institution.”

The blut und boden ideological plank is likewise sound. Minister of Food and Agriculture Richard Darré explains
that agrarian policy was not limited merely to food production, but based itself on the obvious fact that that no
nation can prosper without a sound rural population. This involves securing for farmers not only a decent living,
but also respect, and a national culture rooted in the soil. Stoddard details the legislative and institutional changes
made to bring this about: the establishment of the National Food Estate, a gigantic vertical public trust, a
corporation bringing the interests of all involved in food production into alignment; the Market Control Statute
which links all this to the consumer, a vast system of price controls protecting profit but not profiteering; and the
Hereditary Farmlands Law reviving the old Teutonic concept that land ought to be inalienable and the family tied
to an estate of its own. This is only one example, involving agrarian policy—Stoddard offers similar examples in
industrial policy, recreational, educational, and many others.

But Stoddard also underlines some of the deepest errors of the Third Reich, errors which you will not find in
contemporary histories, errors which were far deeper than the strategic ones that doomed it, and which are of far
greater import. Dictatorship—Filmer would call it monarchy—is the mark of a healthy society, but there are some
things into which the absolute sovereign ought not to intrude, for both his own good and that of his people. In
discussing the educational system, Stoddard explains that the Hitler Youth demanded of its members strict loyalty
to the state above loyalty to the family, subverting fatherly power to where it encouraged children to disobey their
parents. This caused the traditional patriarch of the German family to object to the claims of the Hitler Youth on
the home even when they might be in sympathy with the regime. Often children denounced their own parents to
the authorities, leading to many personal tragedies. This underlines the main failure of Nazism, which is also
where it fundamentally dovetails with socialism: its commitment to creating a (National) Socialist Man. In
ignoring man-as-he-is—or more properly, the Teuton-as-he-is—National Socialism unmoors itself from anything
like blut und boden.

There is more. The Reich repeated the civilization-destroying error of the Greek tyrant Cleisthenes (detailed in my
article for the American Sun, “Tyranny and the Modern State Cult” <link?>). Stoddard's take:
 The Federal States have been abolished. In their place are Gauen, or provinces, which designedly cut across State
lines with the avowed intention of making the inhabitants forget their historic local attachments. That was what the
French revolutionists did when they abolished the provinces of royal France and cut the country up into Departments.
This was done so arbitarily that the French Departments have never developed much vitality. The Nazis claim that
they have avoided this mistake by laying out each Province as a logical region based on a combination of history,
geography, economics, culture, and common sense.

The problem here is not the top-down social ontology; the problem is the deliberate sabotage of localism. If the
aim is to weld the people into an organic whole, destroying local, historical consciousness is not the way to do it.
This error was not isolated: as Stoddard details, what was done here with political borders was also done with law.
This innovation and experiment in such ancient institutions as the family, law, and historic local identities
characterizes the fatal flaw in National Socialist ideology: it placed modernism, development, and the principles
of the Enlightenment above the archaic Aryan spirit at the core of its ideology, a spirit which it misunderstood.

This is not the sort of insight available in contemporary histories of the Third Reich, whose analysis is almost
universally shallow and nakedly biased, and it is this that sets Stoddard's work apart. His is not a history, not so
much a narrative but a snapshot of a moment in time. But a picture is worth a thousand words, and can unravel a
narrative, which is why you will find this book conspicuously absent from college reading lists. If it weren't,
students might actually be able to produce sound critiques of National Socialism, critiques that accept its framing
of Germany's historical destiny in terms of the Aryan spirit. And what fun would that be?

It is one of history's great ironies that a glimpse into the Teutonic spirit, by way of the Aryan spirit, lay across the
Maginot Line, in the work of a Frenchman. The Reich needed only consult this seer to have placed its ideology on
the surest of foundations. Let us now cast our iron gaze across the Rhine, and then across the steppe.

IV

Fustel de Coulanges—The Ancient City

Fustel is the least known of our authors, but his book was one of the most respected historical works of his time—
a time when giants roamed the earth, the golden age of historiography: the mid–late 19 th century. And yet it has
fallen into obscurity for reasons which are not clear. Nevertheless in our quest to colonize our bookshelf, even
among the three other towering works this one might stand tallest, and might penetrate deepest into the savage
heart of modernity.

And yet Fustel's masterwork is, on the face of it, not that revolutionary of a book. It is a history of the classical
world, tracing it from its earliest times down through its revolutions, and on to its transition from late antiquity to
the early Middle Ages. But it is far more. The story has been told many times, and in much greater detail, but
never quite like this. The Ancient City is the last great example of traditionalist history. It is a brilliant forerunner
to Jouvenel and the neoabsolutist school. It is a long-dead culture come back to life, the most consequential the
world has ever seen, a dialect of which two in five people alive today speak.

Historians have offered many explanations for the decline of the classical world. Some of the more specious
include economic factors, climate change, abuse of power, and the very pinnacle of modern scholarship, “it's
complicated”, also known as “systemic collapse”, or the convergence of many factors, which is just a thin veil
covering a frank admission of perplexity: “I don't know, a bunch of things I guess?” As though a man dying from
a shotgun wound might be said to be undergoing a systemic collapse, with the causal chain reaching back no
further than the combination of hypovolemic shock, cardiac arrest, the brain denied a blood supply—you know,
it's complicated.

Some of the more cogent explanations have involved moral decline, reliance upon foreign elements, complexity,
and the natural life cycle of civilizations, but what is clear is that nothing is clear. Perhaps we simply don't have
the skeleton key. Or perhaps there is none—perhaps it really is complicated. Fustel's Ancient City enfolds all the
more cogent explanations, identifying the engine driving the classical world as... the Aryan domestic cult of the
ancestors. At least he's original, no?

This religion bears some explanation, since you have no doubt never heard of it. The first of many lessons in The
Ancient City is that the Greeks and Romans were nothing at all like us, at least in terms of their religion. Breitbart
said that politics is downstream of culture. The neoabsolutists tell us that culture is downstream of power. White
nationalists say that everything is downstream of biology. For Fustel, as for Maistre, everything is downstream of
theology, and more broadly, of belief. Speaking of the centripetal force needed to bring together people who dwelt
in relative isolation:

This power was a belief. Nothing has more power over the soul. A belief is the work of our mind, but we are not on
that account free to modify it at will. It is our own creation, but we do not know it. It is human, and we believe it a
god. It is the effect of our power, and is stronger than we are. It is in us; it does not quit us: it speaks to us at every
moment. If it tells us to obey, we obey; if it traces duties for us, we submit. Man may, indeed, subdue nature, but he is
subdued by his own thoughts.

Have we come full circle, back to the “proposition nation”? Is the sacral centre of our society a mere principle?
Do we “hold these truths to be self-evident”, whether or not we are free to modify them at will? Hardly. You will
not find a George Will among the Aryan and his daughter civilizations. These men were formalists to a degree that
seems almost absurd to us. In a discussion of ancient law, Fustel drops this Scaliapill:

These ancient verses were invariable texts. To change a letter of them, to displace a word, to alter the rhythm, was to
destroy the law itself by destroying the sacred form under which it was revealed to man. The law was like prayer,
which was agreeable to the divinity only on condition that it was recited correctly, and which became impious if a
single word in it was changed. In primitive law the exterior, the letter, is everything; there is no need of seeking the
sense or spirit of it. The value of the law is not in the moral principle that it contains, but in the words that make up
the formula. Its force is in the sacred words that compose it.

But this extreme rigor makes little sense until we tap into the root of the religion. This is not easy because we have
seen a religious revolution relatively recently. We have had our faith only about 1,500 years—the man of Cicero's
time practiced a religion that went back at least 4,000 years, and which was quite unlike ours in almost every way.
If we believe at all in the soul today, we believe that it survives death, and that in death the soul and body are
parted; the Bronze age Aryan in the Pontic steppe, along with his Greco-Roman descendants, did not think that
death would part body and soul. This makes all the difference.

Nietzsche, who had impeccable instincts, speaking through the mouth of his awakened Zarathustra, says “body am
I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body.” This is not wholly out of
keeping with Greco-Roman sensibility. What moves the Homeric heroes is not an airy, immaterial soul, nor even
something found in the cosmos, but something in their chests: thumos. It is something quite visceral: lyssa, the
wolf's rage. As for viscera, there is no shortage of it in Iliad; every page is blood-soaked, you are never very far
from a spear-point crashing through someone's eye socket—one gets the impression that, even if some shadowy
soul flits down to Hades, the body is absolutely essential. The last two books of Iliad make no sense without the
importance of the body, but this is shown nowhere better than in Sophocles' Antigone, a play driven by Antigone's
refusal to leave her brother's body unburied, his funeral rites unperformed. For all our Christian patrimony,
something in us simply cannot rest until the body of a loved one is returned to us.

The conjunction of body and soul gave rise to several imperatives at the heart of life for our Aryan. Burial was
absolutely essential, as were the rites to be performed. The dead man must be placed in his family's sepulchre,
which was always fixed to the property. Property was inalienable, simply because leaving one's plot meant turning
countless ancestors into hungry ghosts forever—land and property were wholly sacral. The dead man, keeping his
bodily form, also kept his bodily needs, and from this came the imperative of propitiation. The dead was buried
with the objects dear to him in life, and his family poured wine and placed food on his tomb to feed him; for them
to neglect this was a gross impiety. The Aryan gave his dead a funeral repast where all the ancestors came to seat
themselves beside him—they were forever and constantly present to him. If he did these things dutifully, they
became for him tutelary deities, offering him strength, comfort, and protection; if he did not, they became
wandering shades, phantoms, demons (daimon, lit. “departed soul”) who gave him no peace until the obsequies
resumed. The symbol of all these things was the family hearth, an altar and centre of the Aryan household around
which the family gathered to make the sacrifices, propitiate the ancestors, and cook meals, which were always
sacred in character. This hearth fire was passed down from generation to generation, and might have burned for
thousands of years in a family of unbroken lineage. The family was for our archaic Aryan the ultimate reality, the
centre of life, and the basic unit of society. Nothing could intrude upon it, nothing could break it.

This makes much in the daughter civilizations clear which is otherwise mysterious. Odysseus is offered a life of
pleasure, a royal bride, and even immortality. But he rejects these; he desires above all his hearth fire. The ancient
Greek was the oikophile par excellence—there was for him no place like home. Home was where the hearth was,
where the ancestors were, and these ancestors were worshipped by him as gods, of which he would become one in
turn after death. But unlike the worship of Yahweh, or even of Brahma and Zeus, each god could be adored by
only one family; religion was purely domestic and exclusive. The stranger was forbidden to approach the hearth,
and far from being evangelical, this religion encouraged each family to keep its gods to itself. Why share your
source of power with the enemy?

The dead could be propitiated only by their own relatives, specifically by their male heirs. The eldest son alone
had the right to take up the patrimony, including the worship. The entire family partook of the rites, but were led
by this eldest living son, the House Father. This House Father was a little absolute monarch; the king of his own
castle, he was at once high priest and supreme magistrate. He alone could judge his family, and no one could
intrude upon his sovereignty. He had ius necis ac vitae, the power of life and death: he could put his own wife, his
own son, any family member under his manus (“hand”) to death for any reason at all, or no reason. Spurius
Cassius Viscellinus, a grown man—a consul, even—was put to death by his own father for proposing a land bill
that displeased him. The Aryan House Father recognized no authority higher than himself, save the ancestors
whose rites he dutifully performed day in, day out. Strictly, he was not the sovereign; they were. No external
authority could impugn them:

The pontifex of Rome, or the archon of Athens, might, indeed, ascertain if the father of a family performed all his
religious ceremonies; but he had no right to order the least modification of them. Suo quisque ritu sacrificia faciat
[“let each man make the sacrifices according to his own rite”]—such was the absolute rule. Every family had its
ceremonies which were peculiar to itself, its particular celebrations, its formulas of prayer, its hymns. The father, sole
interpreter and sole priest of his religion, alone had the right to teach it, and could teach it only to his son. The rites,
the forms of prayer, the chants, which formed an essential part of this domestic religion, were a patrimony, a sacred
property, which the family shared with no one, and which they were even forbidden to reveal to strangers.

This worship, this “belief”, in Fustel's rendering, was the constituent principle of the family. A family was not a
voluntary association that could be broken at will, and now we hear echoes of Filmer—or rather, his is a distant
echo of this archaic Aryan household. The family was not principally bound even by blood, as a family could
adopt a son, even an adult son, as a sort of legal fiction to continue its patrimony. While this arrangement would
naturally strengthen the blood tie, the family was above all a religious unit. Hence when the son was born, he was
born into a duty, and when the daughter married, she forever left her birth family, no longer welcome at its hearth,
unable to propitiate her own ancestors—her ancestors were now those of her husband.

The nature of this worship created a deep tie to the soil. Our archaic Aryan had blut und boden running through
his veins. Being bound to the soil, this blood tie bound him to the ancestors and formed an ironclad bond with the
past. He was not only the ultimate formalist and the ultimate patriarch, but the ultimate traditionalist. For him, a
thing was right simply because it was ancient. Hence the Latin term mos maiorum, usually translated as
“tradition”, has connotations this translation misses. Literally it means “way of the elders”, but in the Latin “elder”
is synonymous with “greater”. Tradition for him was the way of his betters. How could he think to question it? We
have no equivalent, but the closest for a modern bugman would be to question science.
This religion seems to us familiar in some ways, and unfamiliar in others. We see in it the sacrosanct nature of the
family, the rites of passage in birth, marriage, and death, and patriarchy, and all this seems intimately familiar. Yet
we also see the worship of the dead, the hearth cult, and the total absence of doctrine (even myth would come
later), and a chill alien wind sends a shiver up our spine. You will get none of this in Sunday school.

This picture forms the first three “books” of The Ancient City. The last two are devoted to the history of Greece
and Rome, viewing them through the lens of this religion, and we discover that at every turn the ancestor cult was
the driving force. The thumbnail sketch goes something like this: the family expanded to where a series of
families all gathered around a common hearth, and worshipped common ancestors—we have arrived at the clan.
This process continued to where a series of clans formed a tribe, and a series of tribes formed a city. And yet at
each stage, men fell outside the sacral order, could not worship at the hearth of the clan, tribe, and city, and
became a resentful underclass. These men—plebeians at Rome and thetes in Greece—were then weaponized by
disaffected elites against the patricians and eupatrids in a dynamic we have come to know as Jouvenelian.

Readers of Zeroth Position will be familiar with Jouvenel through Chris Bond's Nemesis, which Nullus reviewed
last year on its release. <link?> Jouvenel, writing nearly a century after Fustel, likely picked up on this dynamic
from him, as Fustel lays it out clearly and would have been read by any French historian. The dynamic was
mentioned briefly in our review of Filmer, but let us elaborate a little: the centre of the society (official power:
kings, government) allies with peripheral elements (the people: plebeians, often minorities) against intermediary
powers (unofficial power: patricians, a variety of institutions in the modern world) and weaponizes these
peripheral elements against the intermediaries. Each defeat of these unofficial powers results in a greater and
greater centralization of power, until such a degree of centralization is achieved that the whole structure topples.
This is of course what happened in the classical world, after which Greece and Rome were conquered by peoples
they thought of as barbarians, but who were really fairly close ethnic cousins. We should be so lucky.

The Ancient City gives far and away the most plausible account of the decline and fall of the Greco-Roman world,
and does so in ways that are instructive even beyond the subject itself (which is hardly a trivial one).

First, it stands as a paradigm of traditionalist historiography, which is why it has served as Imperium Press'
inaugural release in the Traditionalist Histories series. Its reliance purely on primary sources, and Fustel's
masterful command of them, is precisely how traditionalist writing ought to be done in the modern era. By
confining himself only to the tradition, only to the sources as they have come down to us from the subject in
question, we gain an understanding of the subject according to a logic native to it. We come to understand the
Greeks and Romans though their own eyes, or as near as possible. We enter sympathetically, as we did with
Stoddard, into the object of our study. When we do this, much that is inexplicable becomes plain, and the vastly
superior grasp of the subject that it permits allows us to use our intuition to plausibly fill in gaps where the
research man (as Heidegger characterizes the modern “scholar”) must autistically comb through the secondary
sources in hopes of maybe being able to cobble together some non-trivial thesis. The criticism that Fustel ignores
the secondary sources is made moot by the fact that they have tended to support him.

More importantly, The Ancient City resurrects the spirit of the Aryans, and revives their praxis. This is Fustel's
greatest legacy: it reminds us of things we have long ago forgotten. The cult of the ancestors is the ultimate
particularist, traditionalist, patriarchal religion. We carry in us the imprint of this archaic religion, and cannot
escape it. Like looking at the image of a long dead ancestor for the first time, we see family resemblances so deep
that they may have even been invisible. We can see the source of our Faustianism: the ancestor cult, along with
primogeniture and inalieanable property, effectively guaranteed rampant colonialism among the younger branches
of the paternal line. This religion is at the root of our modern political categories, such as “tyranny”, a Greek idea
whose deep history I have sketched out in the American Sun article “Tyranny and the Modern State Cult”. <link?>
The Aryans have even bequeathed to us our notions of class: we have never fully escaped the trifunctionalism
(priest/warrior/producer) that Dumézil identified as peculiarly Aryan. After thousands of years this caste structure
was obliterated by Christianity, but reared its head again, almost as a sort of inescapable racial memory, in the
Three Estates of the medieval world. This religion can even shed light on our Christian past: it is Aryan man's
need for a concrete god, a flesh and blood man, an immanent, reified deity that ensured Christ's appeal to him
where the abstract Hebrew god proved alien and and remote.

Perhaps most important of all though, this ancient religion bequeathed to us the individual, and here we can make
plain the greatest mystery of all: how right-libertarianism and fascism can be thought of as related apart from in
the TDS-damaged mind of your rank and file antifa.

Rothbard once said that there are no human rights that are not property rights, and this underscores the
libertarian's intense concern with property. This is something the Aryan understands very well, in fact, he goes us
one better: for him, property is actually sacred, the sine qua non of his worship, which is to say, of his life. The
libertarian is also deeply concerned that the social unit, the individual, be thought of as inviolable, sacrosanct.
Here we have a difference with our Aryan, who could not have understood the particular man apart from the
family. But put the family in place of our modern individual, and the categories match up hip and thigh, chapter
and verse: the family cannot under any circumstances be intruded upon, and has absolute sovereignty within its
bounds. Libertarians have an ambiguous relationship to egalitarianism, but certainly place a premium on equality
of rights. If we are unequal in certain ways, we are equal in others, such as under the law, or before the eyes of
God. At the very least, we can observe that equality arose as a virtue only among Europeans. Our Bronze age
Aryan also observed a sort of egalitarianism, but not one that applied equally to all men, but to all House Fathers,
who were effectively the prototype of what is now called the “individual”. The king was not sovereign over the
House Father the way the House Father was over his family—the king was primus inter pares, the first among
equals. Ricardo Duchesne explains this characteristically Aryan ethic in his introduction to Imperium Press'
edition of Iliad:

The Iliad grew out of a prototypical Indo-European aristocratic society, Mycenae, in which the king was first among
equals. Mycenaeans are the first people in human history to have created a true aristocratic civilization in which
“some men,” not just the king, were free to deliberate over major issues affecting the group and free to aspire for
heroic greatness. […] To be worthy of an aristocratic status one had to demonstrate one’s capacity for heroic action,
one’s ability to differentiate oneself from the others as a fighter and a man of the highest honor. This relentless
obsession with their status, with their pride, to be honored by their peers, intensified the natural inclination that men
have to become men.

What we have here in the Pontic steppe—the aristocratic egalitarianism, the sovereign “individual”, the
sacralization of property—is liberalism in embryo. But it is not the liberalism of Paine and Locke, it retains
archaic elements that stop these natural inclinations of the Indo-European from running off the rails and into a sort
of heat death of universalism. Caste, the family as formalized religious unit, the sacralization of property, and
rigorous traditionalism allow for liberty to the degree that liberty can exist without dissolving the society as a
whole. The Aryan household was above all a corporate unit, a body whose members were inseparable, the whole
ontologically prior to the part. It is here that it diverges from liberalism and converges with fascism. Fascism can
be thought of as making the state the fundamental unit of society, and liberalism the individual as fundamental
unit of society. In holding up the family as basic social unit, we reconcile what seem to be opposites, but were
originally one: the family as manifested in the individual House Father, and the family as the building block of the
state cult. The acquisition of universalism has broken these archaic elements, but we still have the libertas of the
House Father running through our veins, except that the natural bulwarks against freedom turning into grey goo
have been removed. And so it is that freedom now is not “free” in the sense of an etymological root shared with
“friend”, thus inherently social, but is now “free” in the sense of “free to expose himself to children during drag
queen story time at the library”.

We still want and need freedom. This is who we are and who we will always be, which is why the National
Socialists undermining the traditional family structure and erasing local allegiances was so self-defeating. And yet
as seen in their impeccable aesthetics, they had good instincts, and never better than in trying to revive the Aryan
spirit through their own Germanic idiom. We can say the same about Filmer in considering the polity as an
extension of the family: this is how it worked for thousands of years for our ancestors, and indeed, is the only way
it can work for us. We can say the same about Maistre's instincts, prizing as he did the unwritten constitution, the
altar erected by the work of circumstances, the tradition hallowed by its antiquity, the rites made sacred by the
impersonal, imperative utterance of the ancestral deity, the truest expression of fas.

On the surface, all these things seem radically different, and seem to bear no relation to “the right” that holds
liberty and the individual as self-evident goods in themselves. But scratch the surface, dig deeper—all the way to
the root—colonize your own deep past, and we find that what is now many was originally one; we find that the
weak, separate rods were once bound into a mighty fascis. The absolutism of Filmer, the traditionalism of Maistre,
the radical corporatism of the Third Reich, were once united in the person of Aryan House Father, standing astride
his dominion, exercising his unimpeachable will, and seeing above it none but the line of fathers in his family
sepulchre, those fathers who animate his very being, who form the unbreakable chain of which he is but a link,
and whom he will one day join in the hereafter. What is now broken was once unbroken, and if any hope remains
to us in this world of broken families, splintered religion, and failed states, it will look at least in outline like what
has sustained us in some form or another for six millennia from the time when all the now scattered branches of
the Aryan family dwelt together in Central Asia.

It is no accident that the snake has figured so significantly in the iconography of Faustian man, especially in the
Gadsden flag and Benjamin Franklin's perfect emblem of fascism, “Join, or Die” <image?>. After all, the snake
was a cultic figure in the Aryan household. We would not be surprised to find one coiled around a swastika in the
Bronze age domus. Perhaps we should not be surprised to find the two entangled today.

Let us place ourselves in thought, therefore, in the midst of those ancient generations whose traces have not been
entirely effaced, and who delegated their beliefs and their laws to subsequent ages. Each family has its religion, its
gods, its priesthood. Religious isolation is a law with it; its ceremonies are secret. In death even, or in the existence
that follows it, families do not mingle; each one continues to live apart in the tomb, from which the stranger is
excluded. Every family has also its property, that is to say, its lot of land, which is inseparably attached to it by its
religion; its gods—Termini—guard the enclosure, and its Manes keep it in their care. Isolation of property is so
obligatory that two domains cannot be contiguous, but a band of soil must be left between them which must be
neutral ground, and must remain inviolable. Finally, every family has its chief, as a nation would have its king. It has
its laws which doubtless are unwritten, but which religious faith engraves in the heart of every man. It has its court of
justice, above which there is no other that one can appeal to. Whatever man really needs for his material or moral life
the family possesses within itself. It needs nothing from without; it is an organized state, a society that suffices for
itself.

Addendum

If this article has fired your imperialist heart, there is much more ground to be tread. In throwing off the
Enlightenment, you will find that whole vistas open up, all of history is now virgin territory lying open to you—
your manifest destiny awaits. Here is a brief roadmap pointing out some other choice destinations:

Jean Bodin – Six Books of the Commonwealth

Bodin is Filmer's Elvis. One of the greatest of all absolutists, Bodin's theory of sovereignty has proven highly
influential, and a line of descent can be traced from him right down to Carl Schmitt, one of the 20 th century's
greatest political thinkers. Bodin's Six Books are a weighty tome though, so it's best to keep to his work on
sovereignty, which has been collected in a Cambridge University edition. Be warned though, as this edition is
highly unsympathetic to him, which is why we at Imperium Press will soon offer our own collection of his
writings on sovereignty, with some additional material and none of the liberal apologetics.

C. A. Bond – Nemesis: The Jouvenelian vs. the Liberal Model of Human Orders

Bond's Nemesis <link> is an Imperium Press release, and has been gaining a substantial following within the
dissident right world since its release last year. In it, the author takes the “high-low vs. middle” dynamic as
formulated by political theorist Bertrand de Jouvenel, rids it of its liberal baggage, and applies it to the
contemporary world. The result is a view of history and politics that can never again be penetrated by liberalism.

Dennis Bouvard – Anthropomorphics: An Originary Grammar of the Center

Another Imperium Press release, Anthropomorphics <link?> takes a Generative Anthropological approach to
problems that beset us today. All societies have a centre, a quasi- (or not so quasi-) theological centre of attention
that grounds our social life. The problem with our centre today is that it is centre-phobic, and so it is self-effacing
and inconstant, which causes no end of problems, as have become painfully obvious in 2020. Bouvard sketches
out several ways to solve this problem, and offers a view of history just as deep and just as illiberal as Nemesis.

Thomas Carlyle – On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History

Thomas Carlyle was a 19th century polymath whose staggering intellect forever changed a broad range of fields. In
this book, probably his most accessible, he explains what makes a hero, taking several test cases throughout
history. One of the landmarks of the Great Man theory of history, Carlyle's writing shines especially brightly in
On Heroes, which is saying something. He also reaches a rather interesting conclusion, pointing to sincerity as the
mark of the hero. This is not nearly as mundane as it sounds, and anyone who knows the thundering, Old
Testament style of Carlyle would expect no less.

J. G. Hamann – Various Works

Hamann was a friend of Kant, but could hardly have been more different. It was Hamann who introduced Kant to
his own Elvis—Hume—but was also his friend's most profound critic. His very approach is a critique of the
Enlightenment: rather than laying out an argument in a logical manner, his essays tend to be dense, allusive,
almost verging on poetry, and demand of the reader an intimate familiarity with his rapid-fire classical and
Biblical references. But this is part of his seductive charm. He tells us that our categories are all hopelessly
embedded, partial, and received, but he doesn't do so on the Enlightenment's syllogistic terms, he shows us in the
form of his writing. Read his Socratic Memorabilia, his Aesthetica in Nuce, and Metacritique on the Purism of
Reason.

Confucius – Analects

The old Chinese philosopher is a name we all know, and yet few of us have read. This is a shame, because
Confucius is not the cornerstone of Chinese intellectual life for nothing. But he is little read in the West because
Analects, the only collection of his sayings, is a rather opaque text without a good annotation—we at Imperium
Press recommend the Penguin edition annotated by Annping Chin. When you dig into the text you will find a
counterpart to our Aryan formalist, a man whose emphasis on praxis over theory is both deep and refreshing.
Much of the advice he gives seems so obvious as to go unsaid, but this is where his true genius lies: “the
beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names” only seems trivial until you try to do it.

Dostoevsky – Notes From Underground

So far everything we've touched on has been non-fiction, but if you're going to read literature (maybe that's all you
should be reading), you will sooner or later come across Dostoevsky. And why not start with one of his punchier
works? You won't be starved of philosophy though; the first third of Notes From Underground is a rant by the
nameless underground man, the ultimate bugman, where he basically follows liberalism to its logical conclusions.
From here we see him spiral into dissolution, and carry out in practice what we in the modern world would not
dare, if only because we are less consistent than him.

Mahabharata
If you're only ever going to read one genre it will have to be epic poetry and it's not even close. Mahabharata tells
the story of a royal family wracked by internal conflict and war, and is basically a Vedic tragedy of cosmic
proportions. This poem is so vast in scope that the Bhagavad Gita, one of the great works of Hindu theology,
makes up one tiny sliver. Worlds are contained in it, and what's more, modern comparative mythology has
revealed that many of its tales go back to Indo-European times. This is the only work in this series that comes with
our Aryan steppe chieftain's illiterate stamp of approval. Read the John D. Smith abridged version, if you're the
true Chad get the unabridged Ganguli translation, or if you're the Gigachad find yourself a bard to follow you
around reciting verses, but this is probably the one book in this series that is required reading before you
gloriously bite the dust from atop your chariot.