In the Bible, Armageddon is the place where a final battle will be fought between the forces of good and evil. Up until now we have not taken the rantings of the Christian Zionists seriously, but we have been aware of their lust for the final battle. Now they have us questioning ourselves. Are they mad? Or will they be allowed to demonstrate the righteousness of their cause by force? Is this what Armageddon looks like?
The brutality of the assault on Gaza is something to behold. We’ve all experienced it in one way or another. The entire offensive has been a message to the people of Palestine. But it has been a message to the global population as well.
This week, Israeli tanks entered the refugee camp at Rafah after the IDF set a large number of refugees on fire. It can be argued that the intentional, public cruelty of this act was meant to taunt the rest of the world. If so, Israel’s message is destructive of human organization on every level. It demands a response.
A Response to Israel’s Latest Outrage
Israel’s behavior represents a double threat to humanity. The Israelis’ willingness and ability to ignore public opinion is a threat for global politics. To trample on public opinion in this way signals the death of peaceful settlements everywhere, and it will have unforeseen consequences. But this pales in comparison to the second threat. When a state calmly broadcasts God’s approval for destruction of life and property, and when its powerful secular allies assist in the carnage, it makes a mockery of religion. The fact that Israel has turned democratic politics into a joke is serious enough; Israel’s religious claims threaten religion itself. This is more serious by far because religion anchors a benign, universal human reality.
Again we question ourselves: do the stories of Old Testament violence represent ancient history, or are they are a recurring part of human reality? Is this drama somehow necessary?
Personally, I don’t think so. Let’s continue with this line of thought.
The Discordant Element in Israel’s Campaign
It is encouraging that there is a major discordant element in Israel’s campaign. The discordant element is that the Israelis and their allies act as if they have nothing to fear, yet they are compelled to broadcast their excuses to the world. Apparently public opinion is democratic. It demands to be assuaged. How strange.
You could say the strangeness of it demonstrates that political and military might have no relation to religious power. In fact, they contradict one another. For example, why bother with propaganda if God is on your side? Does God need human approval? And if the Israelis and their allies are able to depend on military superiority to prevail over their ‘enemies’, what do they need God for?
Where is God in This?
Perhaps God represents permission for military conquest. If so, it’s not exactly God who gives permission, is it? They argue that the Bible ‘, or history, proves’ the Jews have a right to Palestine. And the Holocaust somehow proves it as well. But military superiority is always there in the background. However, leaving aside the biblical and historical claims, military superiority does not really belong to Israel. It is a function of her allies. Her secular allies.
The Christian Zionists deal with this unfortunate fact as follows. The secular nature of Israel’s western allies is actually important part of the story. They point to King Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid Empire, who allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple in 538 BC. And they imagine this history will be repeated in our time, with their help. The fact that Cyrus was not Jewish allows Cyrus to be compared to Israel’s secular allies and specifically, to Donald Trump, who is not religious.
One could ask why Israel needs Trump to be president when anyone in Washington would support Israel just as well. Apparently, it’s the Christian Zionists who ‘need’ Trump. Perhaps they think Trump will bring our secular experiment to an end.
Question: if this is what Armageddon looks like, why bother?
Evelyn Waugh once called America ‘That land of waifs and strays’. Many people who are fortunate to live in the land of their ancestors look at Americans in that way. It’s rude, but mostly because it’s true. America as a country has an abbreviated history. The same can be said for immigrants and their descendants.
It’s rude also because most of the immigrants would have stayed put if they had been given a choice. Many were not wanted where they came from. If they weren’t literally chased out, they left in search of opportunities that were not available to them in the land of their ancestors. This includes aristocratic immigrants to the colonies.
That said, promises were made of liberty and brotherhood, and welcome. And many immigrants benefitted from those promises. For former immigrants and descendants to turn around and deny those things to other people is a betrayal of the idea of America. Likewise, the giving of one’s loyalty to another country while claiming to love this country is a betrayal. This point of view is important if we are to correctly interpret current events.
The Strangeness and Uprootedness of American Life
The writers of the American classics tried to make sense of the strangeness of being transplanted on this continent. They wanted to inspire their readers to create a new culture that did not repeat the mistakes of the old world. But several generations later Americans have forgotten the cause of that strangeness. They have lost the very context in which they exist.
The Threat of Radical Ideas
Losing one’s context is not only confusing, it is dangerous, politically speaking. Radical remedies are always available to people who are experiencing confusion, frustration and anger. It is important to point out that the radical political remedies being promoted today did not originate in the United States. They are actually hostile to the United States.
The European radical Right longs to return to a hierarchical society which actually existed. They want to create a system where ‘everyone knows their place’. Of course, they imagine their place to be somewhere near the top.
The American radical Right longs for something that has never existed on this continent. But they also picture themselves on top. What they both have in common is a contempt for political discourse and a personal desire to rule.
The US Supreme Court thinks it knows what is missing in American society. The conservative justices, or rather their secret backers, have decided that quality life looks and feels like an oligarchic theocracy. There are no precedents for such an arrangement in the United States, but they would like to ignore that fact. Furthermore, this lack of precedents was not an oversight. The Revolutionaries went to quite a lot of trouble to create something different from Europe. Nevertheless, the justices seem to think it makes perfect sense for a country that has never had kings and aristocrats to be ruled by people with pretensions to royalty.
American conservatives in all walks of life claim they are trying to save the republic. Maybe they are, but saving the American republic was never the aim of ‘The Conservative Revolution’.
The Conservative Revolution
In Germany during World War II, ‘Traditional’ elites hoped Nazism would get rid of the Weimar Republic and hand the reins of power back to them. Hitler was to be their front man.1 They never considered the possibility that the Nazis would rule in their own right. In their opinion, Hitler and his type were ‘the worst sort of proletarianized street-rabble’2. But the Nazis quickly secured their own power at the expense of the elites. Elite pretensions were exceeded only by Nazi pretensions.
In the United States today, there are people waiting in the wings to take power. They are not traditional elites. They are more akin to Nazis.
Spengler’s Predictions of Disaster
Frightful predictions of disaster are commonly used to turn up the political pressure. Such predictions made world war seem sensible a hundred years ago. Oswald Spengler was not a Nazi, but he was right-wing. He was a German philosopher of history in the early twentieth century best known for his book, The Decline of the West. He thought the best-case scenario, given Hitler’s takeover, was for Nazism to destroy the communists, socialists, and liberal Weimar democrats. This would clear the way for an aristocratic and intellectual elite. Spengler called his vision ‘Prussian socialism’3, and he saw himself as the new guardian, or philosopher-king.
Spengler’s Differences With the Nazis
To the Nazis’ way of thinking, Spengler was too aristocratic, monarchist, pessimistic, and not anti-Semitic enough. His challenge to Nazi racism was particularly unwelcome. Contrary to Nazi doctrine, Spengler thought Judaism was culturally wrong, not racially wrong. In his opinion, Judaism’s problem was its Magian character. He believed Judaism shared this trait with the late Romans, Mohammedans, and early Christian theologians such as St Augustine.
Spengler identified Judaism as a ‘Magian’ form of society with a cave-like conception of space that was intermediate between the classical Greek (‘Apollonian’) idea of the Gods having human characteristics and the West’s Faustian concept of an infinite universe. Magians were dualists who believed in an unrelenting struggle between good and evil. In such a belief system, the separation of politics and religion was theoretically impossible and intellectually meaningless. The Decline of the West argued that the late romans, Jews, Mohammedans, and early Christian theologians like Saint Augustine were all Magian.
Coogan. pp. 60-61
In addition, Spengler thought the Volk was a kind of ‘Magian’ distortion of the West’s notion of a free, individual, self-willed ‘I’ in favor of the collective herd. This part of his argument was actually aimed at the left, but it earned him the hostility of the NSDAP. Spengler’s death in 1936 solved a problem for the Nazi hierarchy. However, the Nazis continued ‘to glorify him as a German Virgil who had prophesied Hitler’s coming.’
The Fascist Mentality
Spengler’s books, The Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision created a generation of rightist intellectuals in Weimar Germany. This intellectual current has been ‘dubbed’ the Conservative Revolution’,4 and it consisted largely of a hostility to liberal notions of political discourse. But the elites were not supportive of Nazism. Spengler thought people like Hitler were a symptom of decline. The fascists either misunderstood or abused his basic premise.
Or maybe the fault was Spengler’s after all. His description of events seemed to demand some kind of ‘heroic’ response, even as he claimed nothing could be done.
Spengler’s Morphology of History: the Root of the Conservative Revolution
In The Decline of the West, Spengler developed a ‘morphology of history’. The following is his declaration of historical and cultural inevitability.
All the world’s great cultures, from Babylon, Egypt, China, and India up the the modern West, went through the same inevitable process of rise and fall in a series of vast organic historical life cycles. In its ascendent stage a society was best described as a ‘culture.’ this was a time of self-confidence, growth, and optimism, when both art and religion flourished and day-to-day life was infused with a sense of higher spiritual purpose and meaning.
Inevitably, Culture was superseded by a state of decay. This Spengler called ‘Civilization,’ an age dominated by money, greed, materialism, and a wide-spread sense of spiritual exhaustion and ennui. Europe (Spengler’s ‘Faustian culture’) entered the age of Civilization in 1789, the beginning year of the French Revolution. The inevitable last stage of Civilization would ‘Caesarism,’ a time when society becomes increasingly dominated by totalitarian strong men who overcome outworn forms of liberal parliamentary democracy. Given its unstable nature, Caesarism would inevitably lead to a series of horrific wars heralding the extinction of the culture’s life-cycle. Rather than deny or run away from the inevitable, the great challenge facing modern man was how to live a heroic and meaningful life in the violent ‘wintertime’ of the West.
Coogan, pp. 55,56
The next quote is Spengler’s fatalistic conclusion to Man and Technics:
We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. there is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. the honorable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from a man.5
In The Disinherited Mind, Eric Heller elaborated Spengler’s vision: “Caesarism reduced society to ‘a strict and rigid order’ of human ‘molecules’ trapped inside warring totalitarian states. Whether in victory or defeat, these societies would remain as sterile as Rome under the Caesars until this spiritually dead mass finally collapsed.“
Properly understood, this is not a call to battle. It is a set of theories, pessimistic interpretations of events, and predictions of inevitability.
A Banner to Rally Around
Instead of collapse, the fascists dreamed of cultural rejuvenation. Francis Parker Yockey first read Spengler’s Decline of the West while on a school break (from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor). Yockey is a case study of the effects of Spengler’s theories. He maintained a near-religious belief in the vision of Oswald Spengler, but he completely disregarded Spengler’s conclusion.
As Coogan states in his book, Spenglerism is a difficult banner to rally around. Maybe Yockey and others were looking for a banner, but we’ll never know for sure. Francis Parker Yockey ended his life in a jail cell by means of cyanide. He was 42 years old. What we do know is that after reading Spengler, the remaining years of Yockeys life were consumed by his longing for a revival of German fascism.
Yockey operated in an unmapped world, a mysterious Atlantis whose contours are barely visible under every-shifting seas of time and deceit. His was a world of false identity, deep cover, and relentless travel throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, the Middle Ease, and Latin America. Because he was most at home in the twilight land of the fascist diaspora, a careful examination of his life can serve as an Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth-like history of postwar fascism.
Coogan, p. 15
Francis Parker Yockey’s Version of Caesarism
Coogan’s opinion of the fascists in general is that they were incapable of grasping Spengler’s ‘Caesarian skepticism and contempt for humanity, the deep sense of the fleetingness of all phenomena.’ Yockey, for example, chose to believe that the coming of the Caesars, such as Hitler, actually indicated a potential rebirth for the West rather than a decline. In Yockey’s mind, Hitler was Napoleon reborn, and in his book, Imperium, he argued that ‘The Hero’ (Hitler) tried to realize the European Imperium, but like Napoleon, he fell victim to the barbarian Slavs.’ Nevertheless,in Yockey’s mind, ‘both Napoleon and Hitler became Hegel’s ‘history on horseback’.
Yockey’s vision has similarities with the American Right, but Yockey was unique in some ways.
[Yockey’s] attraction to both Spengler and Conservative Revolution theorists like Carl Schmitt made him virtually unique in the American far right. American supporters of Nazi Germany were usually German Americans, crude anti-Semitic nativists, or staunch conservatives who viewed Hitler as a heaven-sent bulwark against Bolshevism. Yockey was none of these. He was ideologically converted to a Nazified version of the Weimar “New right” Conservative Revolutionary current.
Coogan, p. 88
However, both of the far-right factions mentioned in this quote were supporters of Nazi Germany.
Yockey Meets the FBI, the American Legal System, and Reality
The FBI finally caught up with Yockey after years of evasion. Once in jail, he tried to recruit fellow prisoners into a daring escape plan. He also asked one of them to deliver a message to an address in Cuba. However, the prisoners immediately told on him. They didn’t like Yockey because he was ‘anti-U.S., anti-Negro, anti-Jewish, and, basically, anti-everything’. 6
Yockey was desperate to escape. His fear of the legal process was two-fold. In 1943, he had been honorably discharged from the army after being diagnosed mentally ill. After his arrest, it became clear that he was going to have to submit to psychological testing. Yockey believed this would hurt his credibility in the eyes of his clandestine associates. He was also afraid it would reveal who those associates were.
What Could Have Been
Francis Parker Yockey was born on the 18th of September, 1917 in Chicago to Louis Francis and Rose Ellen Yockey. The family was upper middle class and Catholic. Yockey’s mother studied at the Chicago Music College; Francis was a musical prodigy who could have had a career as a concert pianist. He also had a brilliant, photographic memory. Coogan thinks it’s likely that he was attracted to Spengler through his interest in art. (Coogan, p. 14)
Yockey was a cum laude graduate of Notre-Dame’s law school. After a brief stint in the Army during World War II, he served as an assistant district attorney in Detroit. Then, in 1946, he went to Wiesbaden, West Germany, as a U.S. government attorney assigned to the war crimes trials. Disgusted with what he saw, he abandoned his position and journeyed to the south of Ireland. Under the pseudonym ‘Ulick Varange,’ he wrote his magnum opus, Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, in just six months. A massive neo-Spenglerian tome that called for the formation of a new European superpower, Imperium was first published in London in 1948. It is still sold today in right-wing bookstores in Europe and America.
Coogan, p. 14
Yockey’s anti-Americanism may have started when he identified America as the culprit in his father’s collapse and death from alcoholism. But there were plenty of like-minded scholars who were happy to take part in similar activities, up to a point. Unlike Yockey, many of them found a warm welcome in America’s military and educational establishments.
Meanwhile, Back in Europe
Besides Oswald Spengler and Carl Schmitt, Conservative revolutionaries included Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger. The content of their claims was intense and seductive. They speak of the decline and destruction of everything humans hold dear–in short, the inevitable unfolding of the terrible fate of man. Heidegger, for example, said that ‘Place is the locale of the truth of being’. According to David Harvey, in this, [Heidegger] was close to Aristotle, but he took it deeper. He was saying there is a certain truth that attaches to the notion of place, and that truth is essential to being or becoming.
Rene Guenon’s writings about the Kali Yuga are another example of intense content surrounding the fate of man.
What is most remarkable is that movement and change are actually prized for their own sake, and not in view of any end to which they may lead; this is a direct result of the absorption of all human faculties in outward action whose necessarily fleeting character has just been demonstrated. Here again we have dispersion, viewed from a different angle and at a more advanced state: it could be described as a tendency toward instantaneity, having for its limit a state of pure disequilibrium, which, were it possible, would coincide with the final dissolution of this world, and this too is one of the clearest signs that the final phase of the Kali-Yuga is at hand.
Rene Guenon, The Crisis of the Modern World, pp. 37,38
Interestingly, even though these thinkers are talking about events that humans can’t control, the insistence that the end is near is often paired with a political agenda. Guenon is a Traditionalist. Traditionalism is the ideology of Steve Bannon. And this is not the first time Guenon has been used in the service of authoritarianism.
We have seen that certain kinds of thinking can motivate people to pursue any agenda their leaders tell them to pursue. When Donald Trump told his followers that they have to fight or they won’t have a country any more, many of them fought and many of them went to jail.
As if reaching for ultimate shock value, Donald Trump’s campaign recently referenced Nazi Germany. The campaign’s claim to be pursuing a ‘Unified Reich‘ seems almost cartoonish if you ignore the sheer cheek of it all.
The Comparative Sanity of Edward Moor
The following is another way of thinking about the Kali Yuga concept. Edward Moor calls the Kali age ‘the present time’. On that everyone agrees. He goes on to explain that the end is tied to the incarnation of Kalki the Horse, an avatar that is yet to come.
Vishnu, mounted on a white horse, with a drawn scimitar, blazing like a comet, will, as minutely prophesied as to place, time, &c. end the present or Kali age, and renovate the creation with an era of purity. [This] is represented in pictures by an armed man leading a winged white horse…
Kalki, or Calci, (with the C hard) is otherwise called Kalenki, and Aswah; all said to mean a horse. But as Kal is Time, and in several dialects means both yesterday and tomorrow; or, more extensively, the past and future, may not the name Kalki, of this ender and renovator of ages, have some allusion to that idea, rather than be confined to the form in which it is to be manifested?
The Hindus, like most other people, have thus a prophetic tradition of the coming of a punisher and redemer. The Sybilline and Delphic oracles Foretold it. The Chinese, Japanese, Siamese, and other eastern nations, have been taught to expect such an event; an idea that seems to prevail so generally among people so distinct, as to be deducible only from a common source.
The Hindu Pantheon, p. 188
This paragraph seems to be a reference to the Axial Age theory, but in an informative tone rather than prophetic. According to the Axial Age theory, an event took place centuries ago with a universal effect. This event inspired the creation of world religions.
But the Axial Age took place between 800 and 300 BC. On what does Guenon base his assurance that the Kali Yuga will end? Where does Steve Bannon get the idea that it has something to do with Trump? The association of Guenon’s interpretation of the Hindu religion with Donald Trump is not a respectable way to do politics.
The Christian Zionists have their own dreams of end times. Both Israel and Donald Trump are key to Christian Zionist dreams. But this version of religious politics is just as disreputable as Steve Bannon’s Hindu version. The Christian Zionists seem determined to provoke the gory conflagration that their ideology says will result in the return of Jesus. Never mind that Israel is supposed to be Jewish. And secular. Also, that nothing in the Christian Zionist agenda is confirmed by Christian scriptures.
Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of The Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, Autonomedia, Brooklyn, New York, 1999, p. 77 ↩︎
The previous article focused on militant conservatism. But it didn’t go into detail on various types of conservatism, or on the characteristics of conventional conservatism. Nor did it explain how the character of conservatism varies from one nation to another. 21st century progressives are in the process of developing an international outlook, so awareness of ideological and organizational differences is crucial. The concept of conservatism is central to these differences. This article is a review of conservative ideology, politics and principles.
Summary of the Discussion So Far
To summarize the discussion so far, after the end of World War II, social scientists in the United States feared militant anti-communism and its negative influence on the civil rights movement and other campaigns. They believed anti-communist and anti-liberal ideas threatened peace and democracy. Many thinkers in the field of International Relations (IR) tried to create a stronger liberalism as part of their strategy. They believed they could accomplish this by borrowing conservative ‘insights’. The fusion of liberalism and the radical Right was called ‘realism’. Another name for realism is conservative liberalism. Postwar American International Relations developed in this context.
Considering this history, it is not surprising that conventional conservatism has faded into the background. Or maybe it would be more correct to say that conventional conservatism turned into realistic liberalism in the context of International Relations. The same thing happened to liberalism.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr
Thinkers such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr began to reformulate liberalism in a way that muted the radical, progressivist, egalitarian and utopian premises of the Progressive Era, and to talk about ‘original sin’, the inherent irrationality of human nature, and the limitations of political solutions to intractable problems of the human condition.1 At the same time, they denied that the process was distinctly conservative. Another one of IR’s stated aims was to remove utopian elements from liberal politics. According to Eric Goldman, ‘…liberalism gradually turned into a form of conservatism.’ (Cited by Drolet and Williams2)
Militant Conservative Ideas Continue
Militant conservative ideas continued to thrive, however, but not in the mainstream media. They were discussed in a ‘para-scholarly‘, sphere which enjoyed network connections with the political sphere. As a result, radical ideas have spread all over the globe.
In IR’s defense, these thinkers were influenced by the structural reality of American politics. Both Morgenthau and Niebuhr argued that there was no social basis for an ‘authentic’ conservatism in America. And they were right. According to Morgenthau, the great majority of Americans
have never known a status quo to which they could have been committed. For America has been committed to a purpose in the eyes of which each status quo has been but a stepping-stone to be left behind by another achievement. To ask America to defend a particular status quo, then, is tantamount to asking it for foreswear its purpose.
Hans J. Morgenthau, The Purpose of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 296–7.
But, as the RIS article illustrated, the radical Right has already come very close to foreswearing America’s purpose. This will be discussed in more detail in subsequent articles. The purpose of this article is to provide a global perspective on conventional conservatism.
Conventional Conservatism
I’ll begin with the view of conservatism supplied by the RIS article. According to Drolet and Williams 3, conservatism is not a cohesive school of thought. ‘…conservatism is a counter-movement’. It is a collection of ideas, attitudes, and thinkers that oppose historical liberal and socialist ideas.The only time conservative ideology is coherent in a given time and place is when it’s confronted by rival ideological structures. Conservatives are particularly wary of proposals put forward by anyone perceived to be of the Left.
This seems to be how conservatism operates, although conservatives will probably object. The following summary is more neutral by comparison. It is taken from an article on Britannica.com.
Western Europe
Four great imperial dynasties fell in World War I: Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Ottoman Turkey. Those dynasties had been the only remaining representatives of conservatism. Before the war, conservatism presumed monarchy, aristocracy and an established church. After the War, frustrated conservatives created parties to support nationalism in Germany, Italy, and other former allied countries. Then, beginning in the 1930s, the totalitarian Nazi regime either destroyed or coopted conservative parties in Central and Eastern Europe. (This will be explained in another article.)
Dynasties of World War I Credit: Jelle Wesseling
By 1946, socialism had been discredited in western Europe because of its inability to rebuild war-damaged economies. For this reason, many western Europeans returned to conservative politics. Of course, European conservatism no longer had aristocratic associations at this time. Conservative policies were attractive to voters because they promised economic growth, democratic freedoms, and the provision of social services by the state. For the rest of the twentieth century, European conservatism represented liberal individualism, social conscience, and opposition to communism.
Great Britain
The conservative party in Great Britain was very popular at the turn of the twentieth century. However, there was a Liberal interval. The Liberals were victorious in the general election of 1906, but they had already begun to lose trade union and working class supporters to the Labour Party. A Labour victory in 1924 ended the Liberal Party’s political relevance. For the next 40 years, conservatives formed the government. Their strength was largely the result of formerly Liberal, middle-class voters joining the Conservative Party. Today the Conservative Party in Great Britain is a union of Old Tory and Liberal interests combined against Labour.
The Interwar Period in Great Britain
British conservatism after World War I defended middle- and upper-class privileges and opposed socialism. During the 1930s, Conservatives followed a policy of appeasement ( a deal-making commercialist approach) with the Nazis. Appeasement failed and Britain entered the War.
State welfare services were extended after 1945, under the Labour government and mixed economy of Clement Attlee. When Conservatives returned to power in 1951, they left most of these innovations in place. In fact, they claimed they could do a better job than labour in administering the welfare state. They even went so far as trying to outdo Labor’s programs of social spending and the encouragement of new home construction.
This era of Liberal-Conservative accommodation ended with Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s conservatism stressed individual initiative, strident anti-communism, and laissez-faire economics. Her views had more in common with modern Libertarianism than the older conservatism of Burke. When she said, ‘there is no such thing as society‘ she repudiated the organic view of conventional conservatives.
David Cameron (2010-16) and Theresa May (2016-19) had less extreme views of individualism. They brought back some of the communitarian elements of conventional conservatism.
Continental Europe
In western Europe, conservatism was represented by two or more parties ranging from the liberal center to the moderate and extreme right. There are three types of conservative party in western Europe: agrarian (particularly in Scandinavia), Christian Democratic, and the parties allied with big business. These categories are general and may include combinations of these ideologies.
Italy
The Christian Democratic parties have the longest history. They emerged in the 19th century to support the church and monarchy against liberal and radical elements. Since World War I the dominant element in this party has been supporters of business. In Italy, clerical interests remain strongly represented.
The Christian Democratic Party has dominated governments in Italy since 1945. Since 1993, this has been under the name of the Italian Popular Party. The Christian Democratic Party was an alliance of moderate and conservative interest groups. It has formed a long series of government coalitions consisting of smaller centrist parties and the Italian Socialist Party. The Christian Democratic Party has never had a coherent policy and has been increasingly corrupt and politically ineffective, but it managed to exclude the large Italian Communist Party during the Cold War. The Italian Communist Party has been called the Democratic Party of the Left since 1991.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union communism was no longer seen as a threat to Europe, so the Christian Democrats lost much of their support. This coincided with the growth of other conservative and nationalist groups that had formerly been outside of mainstream of Italian politics. These include the Northern League, which called for the creation of a federated Italian republic, and the National Alliance (which, until 1994, was the Italian Social Movement). Many regarded the National Alliance as neofascist. In 1994 a new conservative party was founded by the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi’s party is called Forza Italia (“Go, Italy!”).
Germany
Germany was divided between Roman Catholics and Protestants, so the role of the church in the conservative party was not as significant as in Italy. However, Germany’s political climate has been conservative since World War II. This is illustrated by the fact that the Social Democratic Party of Germany has progressively eliminated the socialist content of its program. They even embraced the profit motive in a party congress at Bad Godesberg in 1959.
However, after 1950, the main Conservative Party, the Christian Democratic Union, adopted a program including support for a market economy and a strong commitment to maintaining and improving social insurance and other social welfare programs.
It was the Christian Democrats who presided over the unification of East and West Germany.
From the 1990s, German conservative ideology has included minimal government, deregulation, privatization, and the reining-in of the welfare state. These policies have been difficult to implement, however. Many Germans continue to support an extensive safety net of unemployment insurance and other social welfare programs.
France
There was no Christian Democratic Party in France to represent moderate conservative opinion. Instead, a large number of French conservatives supported parties like Rally for the Republic. (Rally for the Republic was renamed ‘Union for a Popular Movement’ in 2002, and ‘the Republicans’ in 2015.) This party espoused a highly nationalistic conservatism based on the legacy of Charles de Gaulle, president of France from 1958 to 1969. French conservatives also supported anti-immigration groups such as the National Front, which was led until 2011 by Jean-Marie Le Pen and subsequently by his daughter, Marine Le Pen. The National Front, some argued, was not so much conservative as reactionary or neofascist.
Gaullist Conservatism
Gaullist conservatism emphasized tradition and order and aimed at a politically united Europe under French leadership. Gaullists espoused divergent views on social issues, however. There are a large number of Gaullist and non-Gaullist conservative parties and it is difficult to categorized them. They lack stability and tend to identify themselves with local issues.
The Twenty-first Century
In the early 21st century, French conservatives were united by a number of developments. One was the theme of “law and order.” Law and Order was promoted by interior minister (and later president) Nicolas Sarkozy. Unemployed youths in suburban Paris and elsewhere—many of whom were immigrants or the children of immigrants—engaged in periodic rioting to protest their plight, and were met with stiff (and popular) police resistance.
The perceived threat to French values from immigrants, especially Muslims, also helped unite French conservatives. One of the values allegedly in danger was the conviction that public education should be strictly secular. When young Muslim women insisted on wearing veils to school, the French state reacted strongly. But this may have alienated Muslims from French society more than it reaffirmed French values.
In general, conservatism in Europe has exerted a pervasive political influence since the start of the 20th century. However, it has found expression in parties of very different character. Parties have been characterized by an absence of ideology and often by the lack of any well-articulated political philosophy. They have espoused traditional middle-class values however. They have also opposed unnecessary state involvement in economic affairs, and radical attempts at income redistribution.
Japan
Japan has had conservative rule since the beginning of party politics in the 1880s. The only exception was the military government during the 1930s and 40s.
Extensive social and political changes took place in Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Feudal institutions were abolished at this time, and western political institutions, such as constitutional government, were introduced. But in spite of these innovations, and the dislocations caused by rapid industrialization, politics continued to be shaped by traditional loyalties and attitudes.
The Liberal-Democratic Party
In 1955, the two most important conservative parties merged to form the Liberal-Democratic Party. Both parties had been dominated by personalities rather than by ideology and dogma. Subsequently, the allegiance of conservative members of the Diet was determined by personal loyalties to leaders of factions within the party, rather than commitment to policy. Today, an older Japan continues to influence the values, customs and relationships of Japanese conservatives.
The Liberal-Democratic Party has been linked with big business. Its policies aim to foster a stable environment for the development of Japan’s market economy. To this end, the party has functioned primarily as a broker between conflicting business interests.
Japanese Nationalism
In the early twenty-first century, there was a resurgence of Japanese nationalism. Much of it was centered on how to teach the history of Japan in the 20th century—particularly the period before and during World War II. Conservative nationalists insisted that the Japanese military had done nothing wrong and had acted honorably. They claimed that stories of widespread war crimes were fabricated by Japan’s foreign and domestic enemies. It is not known how pervasive and influential this resurgent nationalism might be.
The United States
Conservatism changed in the United States in response to the New Deal. America’s identity as a liberal country changed as well.
The New Deal Credit: Traveler1116
The New Deal was Not a Liberal Policy
After Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the perception of the United States as an inherently liberal country began to change. The New Deal was the economic relief program undertaken in 1933 to help raise the country out of the Great Depression. This program greatly expanded the federal government’s involvement in the economy through the regulation of private enterprise, the levying of higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and the expansion of social welfare programs.
The Old Right
The Republican Party, drawing on the support of big business, the wealthy, and prosperous farmers, stubbornly opposed the New Deal. While Democratic liberals moved to the left in endorsing a larger role for government, Republicans generally clung to a 19th-century version of liberalism that called for the government to avoid interfering in the market. These staunch conservatives were known as the Old Right. They were powerful enough to prevent the US from entering World War II until after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. However, their policy of fighting the New Deal did not help them at the polls.
In the first decades after the war, the United States, like Britain, gradually expanded social services and increased government regulation of the economy. However, in the 1970s, the postwar economic growth that the United States and other Western countries had relied on to finance social welfare programs began to slacken. This took place just as Japan and other East Asian nations were finally attaining Western levels of prosperity. And unfortunately, liberal policies of governmental activism could not solve the problem. (This article is non-committal about the cause of US stagnation.)
Neoconservatives
At this point a new group of mainly American conservatives, the so-called neoconservatives, arose to argue that high levels of taxation and the government’s intrusive regulation of private enterprise were hampering economic growth. They also claimed that social welfare policies were leading those who received welfare benefits to become increasingly dependent upon government. The neoconservatives generally accepted a modest welfare state. They were sometimes described as disenchanted welfare liberals. But they insisted that social welfare programs should help people help themselves, not make them permanent wards of the state. In this and other respects neoconservatives saw themselves as defenders of middle-class virtues such as thrift, hard work, and self-restraint, all of which they took to be under attack in the cultural upheaval of the reputedly hedonistic 1960s.
An Interventionist Stance
The neoconservatives also took a keen interest in foreign affairs. They adopted an interventionist stance that set them apart from the isolationist tendencies of earlier conservatives. Many of them argued that the United States had both a right and a duty to intervene in the affairs of other nations in order to combat the influence of Soviet communism and to advance American interests; some even claimed that the United States had a duty to remake the non-Western world on the model of American democratic capitalism. Among American political leaders, the chief representatives of neoconservatism were the Republican presidents Ronald Reagan (1981–89) and George W. Bush (2001–09). Its most articulate advocates, however, were academics who entered politics, such as New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan administration.
During the Reagan era (the 1980s), more-traditional conservatives whose viewpoints harkened back to the Old Right remained resentful of neoconservatives for supposedly having co-opted and diluted American conservatism with a false brand of anticommunist “welfare statism.”
Paleoconservatives Try to Take the Party Back
The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) encouraged the “paleoconservatives,” as they were then identified by the conservative intellectuals Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming, to forcefully articulate their opposition to neoconservatism and to advocate new policies inspired by the Old Right’s ideological battles with New Deal Democrats.
Neoconservatives Counter with Accusations of Anti-Semitism, Racism, Isolationism, and Zenophobia.
Neoconservatives countered with long-standing accusations that the paleoconservative celebration of America’s Christian heritage and opposition to immigration from developing countries were indicative of the movement’s underlying anti-Semitism, racism, isolationism, and xenophobia.
The influence of paleoconservatism within the American right arguably reached a high point at the end of the 20th century in Pat Buchanan’s unsuccessful attempts to secure the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996 and in his failed campaign for president as the nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.
Drolet, J.-F., Williams, M. C. 2021. The radical Right, realism, and the politics of conservatism in postwar international thought. Review of International Studies 47, 273–293. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210521000103 ↩︎
In a previous article I wrote about Professor Wen Yang’s YouTube video in which he argued that the Anglo-Saxons are the worst people ever. He said this was the result of the Anglo-Saxons having missed the Axial Age. Interspersed with Yang’s portion of the video was a speech by Jeffrey Sachs. Both men use similar criteria to condemn the United States. Sachs blamed what he believes is a breakdown in Anglo-Saxon culture on the degeneration of Western Philosophy. I have argued that both arguments are flawed, and I refuted their claims in two articles. Sach’s focus on the influence of Niccolò Machiavelli in Western politics was the subject of one article. The other article was about Professor Yang’s claim that the Anglo-Saxons missed the Axial Age. This study led me to ask why they would make such false claims. I have concluded that the criticism of Anglo-Saxon countries is motivated by ideology. This article and subsequent articles will expand on this idea. This article will cover Realists and the Radical Right.
The Radical Right During and After World War II
Misrepresentation may not have been conscious on the part of Yang and Sachs. Currently, the rise of the radical Right is one of the most important challenges faced by the US government, but it is not mentioned in the field of International Relations. The ideologies of the radical Right have been forced underground since World War II, and sometimes its ideology creeps in unrecognized. Realists have tried to guide the conversation away from it, hoping it will go away. As a result, we are all shocked to discover that the radical Right has made a ‘comeback’.
A paper published in 2021 in Review of International Studies (RIS) 1 provides an explanation for this omission. Authors, Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams, explain how and why the discipline of International Relations (IR) eliminated the radical right’s point of view.
This is not a condemnation of realists. It’s hard to argue with the rationale of those who carried out this plan. Social scientists feared the radical Right’s negative influence on the civil rights movement and other campaigns. And they saw anti-liberal ideas as a threat to peace and democracy. This is the context in which International Relations developed.
Today, radical Right ideas have burst into the open, and the realists’ fears have proven to be correct. At this time, it’s important to confront the fact that IR’s origins were framed as a battle between liberalism and realism. The Mearsheimer/Pinker debate, in which Steven Pinker defended liberalism and John Mearsheimer defended realism, is a good example.
The organization of this material
Drolet’s and Williams’ paper is a comprehensive treatment of this problem. It lays out a key part of the history of right-wing ideologies in the United States. It also discusses the people and organizations that fought them. I plan to divide this paper into sections and cover each one in its own article. This article will focus on the men and ideologies of the radical Right, as well as their influence in the United States.
The Failure of International Relations Credit: imaginima
The Failure of International Relations
In the past decade, transnational networks of the radical Right have made gains in Europe, North America and beyond. Governments and political parties with conservative foreign policies have increased as a result. These networks and parties routinely use the ideology of the radical Right to contest prevailing visions of the global order. Their aim is to weaken established forms of international governance.
Drolet and Williams argue in their paper that understanding the intellectual history of the discipline of IR will increase our understanding of right-wing thought, as well as the realist tradition. Their account should also help progressives develop a coherent identity and strategy.
Militant Conservative Ideas in Global Postwar Politics
Right-wing influencers were present in the West both during and after World War II. Much of the literature about these individuals focuses on European thinkers after 1948. Americans remain unaware that a similar influence was present in the United States during the same period. Right-wing ideologues were engaged with international security, geopolitics and Cold War strategy. Their ideology tended to be skeptical or hostile to liberal modernity. They insisted on racial hierarchies, cultural foundations, tradition and myth, as the basis of society.
Drolet and Williams focus on four influential conservative voices in American foreign policy and international affairs. They include Robert Strausz-Hupé; James Burnham; Stefan Possony; and Gerhart Niemeyer. These men were not unified theoretically. However, they were aware of each other’s work and knew each other personally. In addition, they often collaborated with each other and supported the same political causes.
All four men were backed by philanthropic foundations and engaged in Journalism and public debate. They wrote bestselling books and influential columns and lectured at US military and training colleges, and set up training programs based on their ideas. In addition to advising political leaders and candidates, they held government positions or consultancies. Surprisingly, they were also involved in the theory of International Relations. All of this activity took place while they held influential academic positions in leading American universities.
Robert Strausz-Hupé
Robert Strausz-Hupé immigrated to the United States from Austria in 1923. Initially, he worked on Wall Street and as editor of Current History Magazine. He joined the University of Pennsylvania’s political science department in 1940. Strausz-Hupé wrote more than a dozen books, including a book on international politics which he co-authored with Stefan Possony. In addition, both Strausz-Hupé and Gerhart Niemeyer were part of a Council on Foreign Relations study group in 1953 on the foundations of IR theory. In 1955, Strausz-Hupé established the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) at the University of Pennsylvania, with the backing of the conservative Richardson Foundation. He also founded its journal, Orbis. The FPRI quickly established ties to the military, causing Senator Fulbright to denounce them as reactionary threats to American Democracy.
Strausz-Hupé was a foreign policy advisor to Barry Goldwater in his 1964 presidential campaign. He also advised Richard Nixon in 1968, and served as US ambassador to NATO, Sri Lanka, Belgium, Sweden and Turkey.
The Influence of German Geopolitik
Strausz-Hupé’ is remembered today, for his geopolitics. His connections to the radical right come to light in this context. Geopolitical ideas and reactionary politics go together, according to Drolet and Williams.
Geopolitics became linked to organic state theories and global social Darwinism through nineteenth century theorists like Friedrich Ratzel or Rudolph Kjellen. Kjellen, a Swedish political scientist, geographer and politician was influenced by Ratzel, a German geographer. Ratzel and Kjellen, along with Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter, laid the foundations for the German Geopolitik. Later their Geopolitik would be espoused by General Karl Haushofer. Haushofer influenced the ideological development of Adolf Hitler.
Haushofer visited Landsberg Prison during the incarceration of Hitler and Rudolf Hess by the Weimar Republic. He was a teacher and mentor to both men. Haushofer coined the political use of the term Lebensraum, which Hitler used to justify crimes against peace and genocide.2
German Geopolitik’s Political and Cultural Turn
German Geopolitik was inseparable from expansionism, racial or societal international hierarchy, and inevitable conflict. It became more political and cultural through radical conservative thinkers like Oswald Spengler, Moeller van den Bruch, and Carl Schmitt. Culture, race and myth developed as its core, and its urgent focus became the fate of the West.
Spengler insisted Western Civilization was in terminal decline, but Moeller was not so pessimistic. Moeller argued that Germany and Russia were young and vibrant cultures that could escape the decadent Anglo-American Civilizations and flourish in a continental partnership that would dominate the future. Similarily, Haushofer held that Eurasian land power was the geographic pivot of history, and viewed the ‘telluric’ Eurasian land powers as inescapably at odds with the ‘thalassocratic’ Anglo-American sea powers.
Geopolitics in a European and German setting was profoundly conservative and often reactionary. Many of its proponents rejected liberal visions of politics and were especially hostile towards the United States and Britain. German Geopolitik advocated a political geographic determinism opposed to the idea of a Euro-Atlantic partnership. They claimed Europe was the true West. Europe was not part of the Atlantic world, but an alternative to it.
Making America Geopolitical
Strausz-Hupé and other European émigrés taught geopolitics in America. Edmund Walsh, founder of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, joined them in this task. These men taught a version of the Cold War that was a geopolitical critique of liberal modernity. They argued that the Cold War was evidence of a deeper civilizational and metaphysical crisis. These statements had the appearance of analytic objectivity, but the appearance was used to justify a blunt form of power politics.
These men purportedly avoided the German formulation of geopolitics. Unfortunately, Strausz-Hupé’s description of German geopolitik was based on his racial categories and assumptions about European colonialism. He argued that there were two distinct versions of geopolitics. In his version, statesmen used geopolitics to achieve a balance of power. In the Nazi version, geopolitik was used to destroy the balance of power and wipe out all commitments to the shared Christian heritage of Western civilization. German geopolitik had been turned into the doctrine of nihilism and the antithesis of the principles of civilized order because it had given up the trappings of Western Civilization.
Strausz-Hupé Borrows Key Concepts from German Geopolitik
Strausz-Hupé himself doomed this right-wing attempt to distinguish between German geopolitik and American geopolitics. First, he endorsed the German neo-Darwinian vision of international relations as an everlasting struggle for world domination. He proposed that regional systems must be established, each one clustered around a hegemonic great power. Finally, geography and technical mastery designated America as the new epicenter of the West. All the races of Europe would use America’s military capabilities to create a stable world order out of the defeat of the Axis Powers. But there was one condition.
Everything depended on the US leading the fight against Communism and creating an order under which a federated Europe could be subordinated within NATO. Anything short of this, including benign interpretations of the USSR’s motives would be disastrous.
In Strausz-Hupé’s view, liberals failed to recognize that periods of peaceful, competitive coexistence were as much a part of the communist war plan against the Free World as periods of aggressive expansion. Liberalism and containment-focused realists were not capable of sharing Strausz-Hupé’s global vision. Instead, Strausz-Hupé suggested abandoning containment and using superior military power to ‘rollback’ and ultimately destroy communism. The United States must develop a military posture and strategic doctrine that maintained nuclear deterrence, but allowed America to fight limited wars and prepare for the possibility of a total nuclear war.
James Burnham
James Burnham agreed with Strausz-Hupé’s anti-Communism, power politics and attacks on liberal decadence. Burnham was a philosophy professor at New York University from 1929 to 1953. He lectured frequently at the Naval War College, the National War College, and the John Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, and was a co-editor of William F. Buckley’s National Review. Burnham also contributed a weekly foreign policy column to Buckley’s magazine and wrote a number of bestselling books on politics and international relations.
Burnham had started out with the radical left as one of Trotsky’s leading American disciples. But he broke with Marxism. Subsequently, he wrote The Managerial Revolution, predicting that the coming order would be a world-conquering managerial technocracy and run by a New Class of engineers, administrators and educators. These technocrats would wield power through the interpretation of cultural symbols, the manipulation of state-authorized mechanisms of mass organization, and economic redistribution.
Burnham’s Foreign Policy
Similar to Strausz-Hupé, Burnham believed liberalism is incapable of understanding the brutal Machiavellian realities of politics. Also similar to Strausz-Hupé, he borrowed his ideas from Europe. He wrote a book on political theory and practice, entitled The Machiavellians. In this book, he identified a group that had been influential in Europe but almost unknown in the United States. The Machiavellians included Gaetano Mosca, Georges Sorel, Robert Michels and Vilfredo Pareto. Burnham claimed their writings held the truth about politics and the preservation of political liberty.
He argued that all societies are ruled by oligarchs through force and fraud, and that cultural conventions, myth and rationality are all that holds them together. However, a scientific attitude toward society does not permit the sincere belief in the truth of the myths. Democracy itself was a myth designed and propagated by elites to sustain their rule under secular modernity. If the leaders are scientific, they must lie. Liberty requires hierarchical structures, cultural renewal and the primacy of patriotism, all of which were against the liberal consensus.
The Machiavellian World View
Burnham worked on a secret study commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services in 1944 to help prepare the US delegation to the Yalta Conference. In the resulting book, The Struggle for the World, he argued that the Soviet Union had become the first great Heartland power. Therefore, the only alternative to a Communist World Empire was an American Empire. The American Empire would be established through a network of hegemonic alliances and colonial and neocolonial relationships. This was Burham’s response to the revolutionary ideology and continuous expansion of the Soviet Union.
In place of appeasement, he advocated a policy of immediate confrontation. Containing Communism, and overthrowing Soviet client governments in Eastern Europe would be the goal. Intense political warfare, auxiliary military actions, and possibly full-scale war would be the method.
Machiavellianism in Vietnam
This debate extended to the Vietnam War. Burham attacked the ‘Kennan-de Gaulle-Morgenthau-Lippmann approach because it over-emphasized the nationalist dimension of the Cold War at the expense of what he believed was its more fundamental counter-revolutionary character. He said the realists’ analysis seemed plausible, but they failed to grasp the broader geopolitical and metaphysical consequences of a withdrawal–a communist takeover of the Asian continent. He admitted that entering the war may have been a strategic mistake, but it had become America’s ultimate test of will.
Burnham maintained a holistic approach to social theory even though he renounced Marxian theories of universal history. Like Strausz-Hupé, he saw the Cold War as geopolitical and metaphysical. He thought sacrifice was needed for survival, and America’s liberal philosophical and cultural commitments were not up to the task. He expanded on this idea in his book, The Suicide of the West.
Stefan Possony: Race, Intellect, and Global Order
Stefan Possony, also a collaborator of Strausz-Hupé, was also from Austria. He was involved in conservative foreign policy debates in the US for almost 50 years. He held research positions at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, the Psychological Warfare Department at the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Pentagon’s Directorate of Intelligence. In addition he taught strategy and geopolitics at Georgetown. In 1961, he became Senior Fellow and Director of International Studies at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. Also similar to Strausz-Hupé, Possony served as a foreign policy advisor to Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Like Burham, he advocated an ‘offensive forward strategy’ in the Vietnam War. Possony became an advocate for President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s.
Possony’s Theory of Racial Hierarchies
Possony was also interested in racial hierarchy. Racial geopolitics was central to his vision of international order. He co-authored Geography of the Intellect with Nathaniel Weyl. In this work, the authors tried to demonstrate the racial hierarchy and geographic distribution of intellectual abilities and their implications for foreign policy. They argued that world power and historic progress depended on racially determined mental capacities and the ability of an elite to influence society’s direction. And they concluded that intelligence is directly connected to the comparative mental abilities of different races. The people with the largest amount of creative intellectual achievement since the Middle Ages are within the Western political orbit. Hence, the West’s geopolitical dominance.
However, Possony and Weyl argued that Western dominance was threatened by technological advancement and demographic dynamics. This process allowed the less able to out-reproduce the elites. They echoed Spengler with this argument.
As societies reach the peaks of civiization and material progress they face the threat of application of a pseudo-egalitarian ideology to political, social and economic life – in the interests of the immediate advantage of the masses who, for political reasons are told that if all men are equal in capacity, all should be equally rewarded. The resources of the society will be thus increasingly dedicated to the provision of pan et circenes (bread and circuses) – either in their Roman or modern form. Simultaneously, excellence is downgraded and mediocrity must fill the resulting gap. As the spiritual and material rewards of the creative element are whittled away, the yeast of the society is removed and stagnation results.
Page 283 – 284
Selective Genetic Reproduction
Selective genetic reproduction via artificial insemination was proposed as a partial response. This followed Hermann J. Muller’s ‘positive eugenics’. Possony argued that through artificial insemination, a small minority of the female population could multiply the production of geniuses in the world.
Possony and Weyl also argued that America’s aid policies and support for decolonization were misguided. This was similar to arguments proposed by Burnham and Strausz-Hupé. They reasoned that such policies are based on the incorrect assumption that men, classes and races are equal in capacity, and that human resources can be increased by education. These policies have unleashed the forces of savage race and class warfare in Africa and the Middle East. They also force the emigration and expulsion of the European elite. And the European elite is the only elite.
Treason of the Scholars
In addition to these classic tropes, these men argued that the West’s decline was partly due to the ‘treason of the scholars.’ In other words, treason of liberal intellectuals who are guilty of spreading specious egalitarian ideals. Such ideals sow envy, anxiety, dissent and disloyalty among the masses. The treasonous ‘pseudo-intelligentsia’ must be supplanted by a creative minority.
Gerhart Niemeyer
Gerhart Niemeyer was a native of Essen, Germany. Like Burnham, he began his career on the left as a student of the social democratic lawyer Hermann Heller. He emigrated to the United States in 1937, via Spain, and taught international law at Princeton and elsewhere before joining the State Department in 1950. He spent three years as a specialist on foreign affairs and United Nations policy. After two years as an analyst on the Council of Foreign Relations, he became a Professor of Government at Notre Dame University. He remained there for 40 years.
His 1941 book, Law Without Force, was part of a postwar attempt to relate international law to power politics. It was influenced by Hermann Heller’s conception of state sovereignty and by Niemeyer’s despair over ‘the politically naive legalism of the Weimar left’.
Criticism of International Law
Niemeyer believed modern international law was unrealistic by nature and that it was partly responsible for the unlawfulness of ‘international reality’. He claimed that during the nineteenth century, international law had been transformed by the rise of liberalism into a mere instrument for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. It now served the ideal of an interdependent global society of profit-seeking individuals. Subsequently, the rise of authoritarianism had made legal norms obsolete. Since international order is established through law, the law must be renovated based on Niemeyer’s criteria.
The Influence of Eric Voegein, Buckley, Goldwater, and Traditionalism
Niemeyer was influenced by Eric Voegelin, and he became a Traditionalist during his time at Notre Dame University. For decades, he was a friend of William F. Buckley. He was considered an expert on Communist thought, Soviet politics, and foreign policy, and was commissioned by Congress to write The Communist Ideology. This work was circulated in 1959-60. Like Strausz-Hupé and Possony, he worked as a foreign policy advisor on the Goldwater campaign. Subsequently, he served as a member of the Republican National Committee’s task force on foreign policy from 1965 to 1968.
Metaphysical Meaning of the Cold War
Niemeyer believed that political modernity is a uniquely ‘ideocratic’ epoch where dominant ideologies strive for new certainties in order to remake the world. Voeglin called this ‘political gnosticism’. The result is a world dominated by ruthlessness, absolutism, and intolerance in which logical murders and logical crimes made the twentieth century one of the worst in human history.
These convictions led him to a radical vision of the Cold War. In his view, the Cold War became an explicitly conservative metaphysical phenomenon. Liberals failed to see that the Soviet Union was not simply a great power adversary but an implacable enemy drivin by gnostic desires of the ‘Communist mind’. He further argued that the Communist mind was a ‘nihilistic and pathological product of modernity’. So, it was natural for people to fear Liberalism as superficial, ignorant of mankind’s demonic possibilities, given to mistaken judgments of historical forces, and untrustworthy in its complacency.
Niemeyer believed the world is at a spiritual dead end. Political orders rest on a matrix of customs, habits, and prejudices underpinned by foundational myths. So, the solution is a mystical awakening that recognizes the importance of mystery and myth in political life.
What They Had in Common
All four of these thinkers were fixated on space, resources, and national power, but they were also tied to a narrative of the ‘crisis of man’. This last item led to a reactionary critique of liberal modernity. By casting the Cold War in metaphysical terms, they could argue that the USSR was an extreme embodiment of the pathologies of political modernity demanding radical responses. If modern liberalism was not up to the task of fighting the Cold War, radical conservatism would have to take over. Otherwise, the West would be destroyed.
Thinkers in the Field of International Relations Response to the Radical Right
These men were not authoritarians, but they expressed misgivings about democracy and liberal modernism. The thinkers in the field of IR were sympathetic to such concerns, but they did not fear liberal idealism as much as they feared militant conservatism’s foreign policy, including its support for military confrontation and nuclear adventurism. Its sympathy for McCarthyism was another concern.
Some of the IR field’s most important early thinkers took up this challenge. They systematically attacked militant conservatism’s ‘Machiavellian’ politics and geopolitical theorizing. They also used conservative insights to develop what they thought was a liberalism capable of withstanding pseudo-conservative attacks. Unfortunately, this resulted in Conservative Liberalism, which became a key part of realism.
The Battle Lines: Cold War America and The National Review Magazine
The National Review was founded in 1955 by radical conservative William F. Buckley. Buckley aimed to create a movement to address the most ‘profound crisis’ of the twentieth century. He argued that this crisis was a conflict between the Social Engineers and the disciples of truth who defend the organic moral order’.
The National Review was a reaction to the advances of organized labour, racial desegregation, women’s emancipation, and the ‘satanic utopianism of communism’. It was also a response to the conformist conservatism of establishment Republicans. Buckley’s magazine was an important platform for the confrontational style of right-wing politics.
Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams, The radical Right, realism, and the politics of conservatism in postwar international thought, Review of International Studies (2021), 47: 3, 273–293 doi:10.1017/S0260210521000103 ↩︎
There are core philosophical differences between Europe and the ‘Anglo-Saxon nations’ of Great Britain and the United States. Europeans seem to be aware of this, but the American people are not, maybe because the American educational system does not identify America as Anglo-Saxon. Instead, we are encouraged to think of ourselves as a melting pot with a diverse heritage. As a result, I believe we are poorly equipped for dialogue with the rest of the world. On the other hand, I suspect our leaders are aware of their Anglo-Saxon identity. If so, this might explain their recent behavior. Are they operating on the premise of Anglo-Saxons v the World? More importantly, is America’s behavior inspired by hubris, or are Americans responding to a sense of isolation?
I recently watched a video attributing the turmoil in the world to a breakdown in Anglo-Saxon philosophy and politics. In that video, Professor Wen Yang attributed the current turmoil in the world to a cultural and spiritual lack in Anglo-Saxon philosophy. He included the United States in the Anglo-Saxon category because he considers the US an extension of the British Empire.
Yang has issued a challenge that should not go unanswered. If we the people are considered Anglo-Saxons by virtue of where we live or who our allies are, we had better be able to respond to such accusations. The purpose of this article is not to introduce a new cause, but to explore what the Anglo-Saxon label means for conversation and analysis.
Is Anglo-Saxon Culture Uncivilized Compared to the rest of the world?
Credit: duncan1890
In Yang’s opinion, the Anglo-Saxon problem is very old. But while his argument might provide an explanation for the behavior of the United States in recent decades, his premise that the Anglo-Saxons missed the Axial Age can be disputed. Yang specifically attributes the behavior of the US and her allies in the Middle East to a lack of Axial Age influence and a resultant breakdown in Anglo-Saxon philosophy.
The Axial Age is a term coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers. It refers to broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred in a variety of locations from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE. As we will see, Yang’e analysis implies that the Anglo-Saxon nations have remained uncivilized and irreligious while other cultures progressed spiritually and morally. In this context, it might even be racist. Is Anglo-Saxon culture uncivilized compared to the rest of the world? However one answers this question, the Axial Age argument is not useful or even accurate.
The British Contribution to the Debate
Alan Macfarlane, an authority on Anglo-Saxon culture, has a completely different interpretation of the influence of the Axial Age. There is scholarly consensus that it was Japan that missed the Axial Age, and that Japan was the only world civilization to never experience it. Furthermore, the consequences of missing it were not necessarily negative.
Macfarlane explains the Axial Age as follows: for the civilizations that were affected by it, the world they knew was separated from an ideal philosophical world that was held in opposition and tension to that world. This resulted in the creation of world religion. The Japanese never separated their world. Therefore, Japan is not an actual civilization. Japan is an ancient shamanic civilization.
Macfarlane reached this conclusion independently, but he has since discovered that Robert Bellah1 and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt2 discovered it as well.
Apparently, missing the Axial Age does not lead directly to an Anglo-Saxon-type society.
Is America Really Anglo-Saxon?
Now we have to confront the question of whether America really is Anglo-Saxon. According to Alan Macfarlane, the United States does not have a key ingredient of Anglo-Saxon culture: boarding school. Boarding school was so influential in British culture and economics, another explanation would be needed for the presence of Anglo-Saxon characteristics in the United States.
What is an Anglo-Saxon? Origins of Europe and Britain
According to Macfarlane, the origin of the Anglo-sphere was the Anglo-Saxon invasions after the fall of Rome. Anglo-Saxon society had a peculiar family system. They had small, nuclear families, but they sent their children away to boarding school. Public education (the British name for boarding school) is the oldest institution in Britain, and it goes back to the Anglo-Saxon period. In Britain, children were, and still are, sent away between 8 and 13 years old. Macfarlane argues that this custom had the effect of splitting economic and social unity.
Romantic Love and Common Law
The children who are sent away are no longer a member of the unit of production in that household. This practice led to the development of romantic-love marriage, in addition to its economic effects. Romantic love was not inspired by the troubadours. It was a natural result of boarding school. Love was a self-choice.
Boarding school also had common law effects. The development of Britain’s legal system was unique. British law protected the individual, in contrast to law on the Continent, which did not protect the individual. However, Europe has adopted many aspects of British law, so this difference is no longer noticeable.
The British Trust
The trust, is another interesting feature. A trust is a non-government hybrid unit that turns things into people and vice versa. It was devised as a vehicle to get around the king’s inheritance tax. All of the major British economic institutions were trusts. And Anglo-Saxon trusts became a key device for modern capitalist democracy. However, the British trust is not like the corporation on the Continent.
Trusts explain how the Catholic Church can exist in Britain. Religions set themselves up as trusts. Trusts made non-conformity possible.
Trusts also explain the relation of Britain to its empire. First, trusts can be dissolved. The British empire disappeared in 20 years because the empire was a trust. Another an important difference with Continental empires is that in Britain, these relations often continued as part of the Commonwealth after they were ‘dissolved’.
Continental empires on the other hand, were were familistic, relational, and therefore, difficult to break out of. And once a part of the Continental empire broke away, it was out for good.
The Cruel Streak in Anglo-Saxon Culture
Finally we get a suggestion that these cultural practices have had both good and bad effects. On the negative side, there is a cruel streak in Anglo-Saxon culture. British society is based on confrontational, competitive, games, which are formed as clubs. Everything is individualistic and contractual. Parliament is a game, life is a game. And all of the games have teams. The Anglo-Saxon world is unfair in many ways, but it is made tolerable by humor. Humor in capitalist society acts like myth in other societies.
The Need for Understanding
There is tension between the Continent and Anglo-world. However, Macfarlane aims to promote peace by describing the natural characteristics of civilizations. He argues that ignorance of these characteristics can lead to misunderstandings, which are more serious today because a rapid rise in population has resulted in pressure on resources and migration. Several spheres are being mixed together. This has never happened before. These factors, combined with rapid changes in technology, have created a confused world. His books include: How to Understand Each Other3, and China, Japan, Europe and the Anglo-Sphere, a Comparative Analysis4. His point of view is a valuable addition to this discussion.
Conclusion
Anglo-Saxons may have a well-developed sense of humor, but clearly, there is nothing funny about the United States’ behavior in recent decades. Analysis is important, but the Axial Age doesn’t explain what we’re seeing. On the other hand, an understanding of Anglo-Saxon culture might be a good place to start.
I was going to compare Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophy, but I realized the focus should be on the Axial Age. The following papers deal with philosophical differences and might be useful for further exploration:
Two Traditions of Liberalism by James H. Nichols, Jr. This is a review of João Carlos Espada’s book The Anglo American Tradition of Liberty: A View from Europe.
The Anglo-Saxon Conservative Tradition5 by Rod Preece. This book can also be read on JSTOR. Preece argues that the distinguishing mark between old and new conservatism is not between the old world and the new but between Anglo-Saxon nations and others. Anglo-Saxon ideology is best understood as Lockean liberalism.
The Axial Age and Its Consequences, Edited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, Harvard University Press, 2012 ↩︎
EISENSTADT, SHMUEL N. “The Axial Age : The Emergence of Transcendental Visions and the Rise of Clerics.” European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie / Europäisches Archiv Für Soziologie, vol. 23, no. 2, 1982, pp. 294–314. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23997525. Accessed 27 Mar. 2024. ↩︎
Alan Macfarlane, How to Understand Each Other, CAM Rivers Publishing, 2018 ↩︎
Alan Macfarlane, China, Japan, Europe, and the Anglo-sphere, CAM Rivers Publishing, 2018 ↩︎
Rod Preece, “The Anglo-Saxon Conservative Tradition.” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne de Science Politique, vol. 13, no. 1, 1980, pp. 3–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3230084. Accessed 25 Mar. 2024. ↩︎
Considering the agricultural benefits being secured by the EU through its Association Agreement with Ukraine, one wonders if NATO expansion in Ukraine was a bluff. The United States is getting everything it wants with Ukraine’s farmland and infrastructure. The deep state is in Ukraine, and it’s agribusiness. Cargill is a key player in Ukraine and other NATO countries. Cargill may have had something to do with the new members of NATO, Sweden and Finland. It may also have had something to do with Switzerland’s decision to sanction Russia.
Ukraine War and Volatility of Food Prices Credit: simplehappyart
The curious case of Switzerland
On February 24, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, the only remaining neutral countries in Europe were Austria, Ireland, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland. Now there are only three. Finland joined NATO in 2023 and Sweden joined on March 7, 2024. Today, there is support for NATO membership in each remaining neutral country. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is cited as a reason to give up neutrality. But a majority in each country values neutrality. Curiously, Switzerland resisted joining NATO, but it imposed sanctions on Russia. Some say this behavior is not consistent with Switzerland’s neutrality.
The one thing that makes sense of the behavior of both Switzerland and the United States is agribusiness. Cargill has had a presence in Ukraine for more than two decades. Cargill is a private US company, but Cargill International SA is located in Geneva, Switzerland. Maybe Switzerland stands to gain from Ukrainian farmland. NATO expansion in Ukraine may be a bluff, but Ukraine’s real estate market is for real.
Agribusiness is part of the deep state
On January 12, 2014, pro-Western Ukrainians descended on Kiev’s Independence Square to protest President Viktor Yanukovych’s government. On the same day, Cargill paid $200 million for a stake in Ukraine’s UkrLandFarming. Two months later, in March 2014, J. P. Sottile identified the coup in Ukraine as a corporate annexation project. It can also be argued that it was a land grab. Under Yanukovych’s regime, the Ukrainian real estate market had been closed. Volodymyr Zelenskyy opened it in June of 2021.
According to Sottile, agribusiness is part of the deep state. Normally the deep state is associated with the oil and defense industries, but this association ignores America’s heavy subsidization of agriculture. For two decades, the Cold War alliance between corporations and foreign policy has prepared the ground for Ukraine’s break with Russia.
I would argue that companies like Cargill were instrumental in this preparation. This pattern was already established during World War II. In 1942, Cargill began to build ships for the US Navy and towboats for the Army. More recently, in March 24, 2023, Cargill CEO Brian Sikes met with USAID administrator Samantha Power to discuss “areas of collaboration in support of USAID’s efforts to bolster democratic bright spots, support farmers in Ukraine in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country, and galvanize action on climate-smart food systems.”
Business is good in Ukraine
There have been claims of business instability in Ukraine, but these claims are deliberately misleading. Business activity in Ukraine is brisk. However, Morgan Williams, President and CEO of the US-Ukraine Business Council, has been claiming that Ukrainian businesses are not making future plans or expanding operations. He has to know this is not correct. Since 1992, Williams has been advising American agribusinesses on investing in the former Soviet Union. In addition to his position with the US-Ukraine business Council, he is Director of Government Affairs at the private equity firm SigmaBleyzer. Finally, Van A. Yeutter serves with him on the US-Ukraine Business Council’s Executive Committee. Yeutter is the Vice President for Corporate Affairs at Cargill.
The UkrLandFarming investment wasn’t Cargill’s first purchase in Ukraine and Russia. In December 2013, Cargill announced the purchase of a stake in a Black Sea grain terminal at Novorosslysk on Russia’s Black Sea coast. Aside from its ability to scope out and purchase Ukrainian businesses, Cargill and other big agriculture companies, have benefitted from volatility in food prices, a direct result of the Ukraine War. Today, the Cargill family is America’s wealthiest agricultural family.
Where do 21st Century Progressives fit in this picture?
In 2015, I cited agribusiness as a key focus for progressives. I now believe everything that has happened since that time has been a distraction from this focus. When you also consider its nefarious activities in foreign countries, it is clear that agribusiness is a malevolent presence on the earth.
Agricultural policies are central to human liberty, autonomy and survival. Without the ability to grow quality crops, we can’t provide the world’s population with its most basic requirement–sustenance. In addition, we can’t manage land and water resources or address climate change. Finally, we can’t plan community structure, or provide gainful employment for community members. Agribusiness corporations have usurped all of these functions.
It’s good that this focus has become more clear. Unfortunately, now we know that no one is listening to us.
The fire in Lahaina on the Island of Maui was similar in some ways to what we have seen in Gaza, but on a much smaller scale. Was Lahaina a buildup to the genocide in Gaza? In this article I compare the fire in Lahaina to biblical madness in Palestine.
We’ve almost forgotten Lahaina today because of the carnage taking place in Palestine. But Lahaina’s tragedy is ongoing. I will argue that there are similarities between Lahaina and Gaza.
After the Lahaina fire, the coyness of city leaders was suspicious. Those who took part in subsequent press conferences seemed almost proud of the insulting and incomplete answers they gave to the press. Housing for the survivors of the Lahaina fire is still in short supply. And many residents are being evicted from the housing they have. Others have already relocated to other states. The callousness of those responsible and the preventable deaths of family members are also comparable to Gaza. Last but not least is the high dollar value of the land involved in the fire. But Gaza has an additional characteristic.
Likewise, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been flippant and callous in his statements to the press. However, his use of Old Testament references to justify his cruelty sets Gaza apart from Lahaina. Netanyahu’s attitude has been even more smug, conceited, high-handed and pitiless than the leaders of Lahaina.
Humor and restraint are nowhere to be found in Palestine. The behavior of Israel is heavy-handed, cruel, and ugly. And the suffering and death levied on Gaza’s people is ghastly and final. If those responsible are waiting for congratulations, they’ll wait for eternity.
Netanyahu’s behavior does not translate as power. Nor is his behavior compatible with religious belief. It merely demonstrates childish, ignorant pride, and delusions of invincibility.
In Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si’ there is a section on Ecological Conversion. This section was written to encourage Christians to start thinking of their relationship to the world, to ecology and to the environment in a new way. Francis aims to encourage a new spirituality that can sustain us. In that spirit, Fr Peter Knox SJ is offering a Lenten lecture series on ecological conversion. This article is a summary of the first lecture in the series. Fr Knox wants us to leave these lectures feeling empowered to make a significant contribution in caring for our common home. He begins by quoting Pope Francis.
I would like to offer Christians a few suggestions for an ecological spirituality grounded in the convictions of our faith, since the teachings of the Gospel have direct consequences for our way of thinking, feeling and living. …I am interested in how such a spirituality can motivate us to a more passionate concern for the protection of our world. A commitment this lofty cannot be sustained by doctrine alone, without an ‘interior impulse which encourages, motivates, nourishes and gives meaning to our individual and communal activity’.
What is Lent? Lent is a time of Reflection, Repentance, and Reconciliation. It is a process of connecting ourselves with the Son of God suffering with us, and with the broken world. Catholics traditionally focus on prayer, fasting and almsgiving. This was preached in the Gospel of Ash Wednesday: Mt 6: 1-6… 16-18. But this year, Pope Francis encourages us to ‘listen to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor’. In that way we participate in an ‘ecological conversion’. The goal is to develop habits that will remain with us through the rest of the year.
What is Ecology?
What is ecology? Ecology is everything that surrounds us. We are living organisms–not higher than nature or above nature. Pope Francis uses the term ‘integral ecology’ meaning that everything is inter-connected. This includes urban ecology.
What is conversion?
What is conversion? Conversion has an element of repentance. Repentance is being sorry for our actions. There is also the element of making good resolutions to favour a new way of life, with the help of God. Repentance and sorrow is a gift from the Holy Spirit. It is not necessarily a bad thing. We may not feel good, but it is a gift.
Jesus announced: ‘The reign of God is at hand. Repent and believe the Good News.‘ (Mk 1:15) However, apart from Jesus’ many parables, we don’t know exactly what the reign of God looks like. What we do know is what the reign of God is not. It is not division, pollution, poverty, and struggle.
What do we have to repent of?
With this question, what do we have to repent of? Fr Knox addresses Christians in general. He offers a critique of the part Christians and Christian dogma have played in the present crisis. An article by Lynn White: The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis1, accuses Christians of destroying God’s creation. White says this was the result of following the injunction in Genesis 1 to subdue the earth.
The following is Lynn White’s premise, as related by Fr Knox.
As we enter the last third of the 20th Century, (he wrote this in 1967) concern for the problem of ecological backlash is mounting feverishly. …Modern science…modern technology is at least partly to be explained as an Occidental, voluntarist realization of the Christian dogma of man’s transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature…Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt. …What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. …More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one. …[We] shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.
Lynn White
According to Fr Knox, Pope Francis agrees with with this article. The Pope’s term for this mindset is, ‘excessive anthropocentrism‘, the belief that humans are at the center of creation.
Pope Benedict, on the other hand was more cautious about White’s article. Benedict argued that this is not the only way of understanding what’s going wrong with the world.
The World Struggles to Correct Past Mistakes: The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment
In 1972, the UN had the first conference on the Human Environment, the Stockholm Conference. Since then there have been regular UN conferences and protocols relating to the environment. They include Biological diversity; the Ozone layer; Nuclear waste; POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants); LOSC (Law of the Seas); UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Control or change; this is probably the most pressing concern); SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals, where we hope to see all of humanity being able to survive in a sustainable way that doesn’t deplete the environment); Hazardous waste; CITES (Convention on the International Trade of Environmental Species); Watercourses (This is aimed at ending pollution and not blocking watercourses, or allowing water to go through and nourish all the people downstream); High Seas; Biosafety (trying to prevent disease crossing from one species to another–this should have prevented Covid19); Pesticides; Migrant species (birds, whales, fish); etc.
How Bad is it? The Earliest Scientific Analyses
In 1972, the Club of Rome published a book called The Limits to Growth. The club of Rome was a group of scientists based in Chicago. They used numerical modeling to discover whether the earth can continue to sustain growth. It indicated that the earth can’t handle continued growth of populations and continued growth of economies. Since 1972 this conclusion has only become more evident. The earth has a limit to what it can provide, and to the amount of pollution it can absorb.
Planetary Boundary Theory
The year Pope Francis published Laudato Si’, another group of scientists from around the world promoted a theory called Planetary Boundaries. Pope Francis cited at least 6 of these planetary boundaries in Laudato Si’. Much has been written about Planetary Boundary Theory. The basic argument is that the earth can only give so much and absorb so much, and after that point there will be serious problems.
Fr Knox mentions one disagreement with Pope Francis on the subject of planetary boundaries. Francis has argued that concerns about population growth are the result of the unfair distribution of resources. If we could correct the distribution problem we wouldn’t have to limit population. Fr Knox thinks this is an optimistic assessment, and it may not be entirely accurate. However, he adds that Francis is a scientist and scientists sometime disagree with each other. Pope Francis does acknowledge that many of these boundaries are being exceeded.
Which Planetary Boundaries are Threatened and Have Any Actions Been Taken?
The hole in the Ozone layer (Stratospheric Ozone Depletion) was discovered in the 1980s by the Montreal Protocol. In response, countries around the world stopped using chemicals that deplete the Ozone layer. However, there are several other problems that must be dealt with.
Additional problems include atmosphere aerosol loading (dust storms that blow across the Sahara and carry very small particles that get into human and animals lungs and cover the surfaces of leaves); ocean acidification (the Ph of the ocean is decreasing and the acid is dissolving the coral reefs. This makes them unable to sustain the baby fish); biochemical flows (two chemicals in particular, nitrogen and phosphorus, have been used for chemical fertilizer. We don’t know how much nitrates the atmosphere can absorb, but the nitrogen cycle and the phosphorus cycle appear to be out of balance at this time. Too many nitrates are coming into the atmosphere and too many phosphates are flowing into the water).
The most concerning issues at this time are: biochemical flows; fresh water change; land system change; biosphere integrity; and climate change.
Individuals Might Ask, What Can I Do?
Individuals might ask, What can I do? I’m just one small person, I don’t know how to convince people. Fr Knox recommends Christians ask themselves, What would our Lord’s response be in a situation like this?
As an example, he recites the parable of the Wedding feast in Cana. Jesus’ mother comes to him and tells him that the hosts have run out of wine. Jesus seems to say that the wine is not his problem–it is the host’s responsibility. But Mary tells the servants at the feast, Just do what he tells you.
Fr Knox says that’s what we have to try to work out in our ecological conversion. What is Jesus telling us? What do we have to do?
Christianity’s other-world focus
Again, an element of the Christian belief system is implicated in the problem. This time, Fr Knox cites, Christianity’s other-world focus, or a focus on the hereafter. St Paul, for example, said that Christians should set their mind on the things that are above, not on the things of this earth (Colossians 3:2). But that can be problematic.
It’s a problem because we have to live on this earth, to take care of this earth, and to take care of our fellow citizens on this earth. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be accused of being other-worldly focused. We must take responsibility for what is happening in the environment.
The Second Vatican Council addressed Christianity’s other-world focus
This same concern was stated at the Second Vatican Council by over 2,300 bishops from around the world. Christians should not be focused only on eternity. Believers should also be involved in the world order. The bishops urged the Church to promote sustainable development and care for the vulnerable.
The UN was also a subject of importance at Vatican II. Christians should not see the UN as the enemy of the Church. The Church may be on different track than the UN, but they are working for the same goals. The UN, together with people around the world, is trying to develop a sustainable world where people can live together.
Today, the Catholic church has membership status in the UN and is allowed to contribute to the discussion.
Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World
The document Gaudium et Spes was produced at the end of the Second Vatican Council. The title means Joy and Hope, and its focus is the Church in the world. It states that the Church is not living in a bubble or on Planet Mars. Church members should not see themselves as cut off from the world or better than the world. Whoever supports the human community is contributing to the Church.
Moreover, she gratefully understands that in her community life, no less than her individual sons, she receives a variety of helps from men of every rank and condition, for whoever supports the human community at the family level, culturally, in its economic, social and political dimensions, both nationally and internationally, such a one, according to God’s design is contributing greatly to the church as well, to the extent that she depends on things outside herself. Indeed, the Church admits that she has greatly profited and still profits from the antagonism of those who oppose or who persecute her. (LG 44)
…Christians should cooperate willingly and wholeheartedly in establishing an international order that includes a genuine respect for all freedoms and amicable brotherhood between all… Those Christians are to be praised and supported, therefore, who volunteer their services to help other men and nations. Indeed, it is the duty of the whole People of God, following the word and example of the Bishops, to alleviate as far as they are able the sufferings of the modern age. (G+8 88)
Gaudium et Spes
Laudato Si’
Laudato Si’ is an encyclical in six chapters. It follows the pastoral circle, meaning that its basic routine is See, Judge, Act. We see what’s going on in the world. Once we see, we make a faith judgment, or a social judgment from Catholic social teaching. And then we take action. We have to be involved–we can’t leave it to others. To this end, we have to educate ourselves and our children.
We have to change our spirituality. Pope Francis proposes an ecological spirituality. And ecological spirituality will be Fr Knox’s focus in these Lenten lectures. This new spirituality should make practical demands on who we are and how we live in the world.
At the end of the encyclical there are two prayers: A Prayer for our Earth; and a Christian Prayer in Union with Creation. If nothing else you can take these prayers from this lecture. But, if you want to go further, you can undertake an ecological conversion.
Anthropocentrism to Cosmocentrism
Pope Francis is very clear that human beings are at the root of the environmental crisis. And no serious scientist disputes this. It’s true that there are cycles beyond our control, but the present crisis has anthropological roots. We human beings, particularly since the Industrial Revolution, are at the center of the climate change crisis.
The term Pope Francis uses is anthropocentrism, the belief that humans are somehow at the peak of the world, and everything serves man. Women are included because they are somehow below men. Also included are money, oil, mineral resources, animals, robotics, and anything agricultural. We human beings have to change this belief and the resulting behavior, as much as we are able.
Umdenken: Think in New Ways
Instead of anthropocentrism, we have to move to cosmocentrism. Cosmocentrism puts the world at the center of everything–not humans. Human beings are part of a cycle of life. The earth provides for them and they provide for the earth.
Fr Knox acknowledges that since the damage took place on a global scale over the last two hundred years, any contribution we make will seem minimal. But every effort is significant.
Germans use the word ‘umdenken’, meaning to rethink or change our mind completely. Fr Knox considers umdenken an element of conversion. We have to think in new ways.
Lynn White, The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, Science 155 no 3767, 1967 ↩︎
Farmers are protesting across the EU in places like Germany, Greece, Italy, France and Brussels. There are are a number of issues making their livelihoods unsustainable. These include the rising price of animal feed, fertilizer, and energy; cheaper imports from outside the EU, particularly Ukraine; high taxes and red tape; and the impact of climate regulations. Although the EU spends a substantial percentage of its budget supporting farmers, many farmers are still unable to make ends meet. And with elections looming, far-right parties are exploiting the farmers’ protests. Therefore, it’s important to understand the issues affecting the farmers. In a recent panel discussion, members of DEiM25 explain the Plight of European Farmers. Some of the issues addressed are: is there a just transition that curbs emissions while minimizing the impact on farmers? What is the role of the far-right and where are the left-wing parties in all of this?
DEiM25 is the Democracy in Europe Movement. Its goal is to democratize Europe and make the Green New Deal a reality. Panel members taking part in this discussion include Yanis Varoufakis, Karen De Rigo, and Frederico Dolci. Yanis Varoufakis has been the secretary-general of DEiM25 since 2018. He is a Greek economist and politician. De Rigo is the lead German candidate for DEiM25 in the European elections. Dolci is the spokesperson for the associated MERA25 in Italy and activists across Europe. Erik Edman is the political director of DEiM25. He joins from Brussels.
The reality of farming in Europe versus the oligarch’s narrative
According to Edman, the first reality of farming in Europe is that a third of European farmers have disappeared in the last 15 years. The main cause is the takeover of farming by agribusiness. Suddenly in Europe, there are bigger machines, fewer farmers and fewer small farms. This has also been happening to farmers in the United States.
However, in Europe, all of these outcomes are compounded by the way the European Union and member states do policy. The most well-known agricultural policy in Europe is the CAP policy, or the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union. Although CAP is the recipient of the biggest portion of the EU’s agricultural budget, 80 percent of that budget goes to 20 percent of the farmers. Therefore, 80 percent of European farmers are struggling to make ends meet. The reason for this is that CAP payments are based on land holdings, and global multinationals and a few wealthy farmers own 80 percent of the land.
Unfortunately, many of the protesters are being mislead about the cause of their troubles. Hypocrisy and misunderstandings surround the protests. The dominant narrative among farmers and the general population is that Environmental Protection rules are the cause of their problems. But this doesn’t seem likely. The majority of the Environmental rules have not gone into effect yet. They have either not been legislated or the governments are dragging their feet on implementing them. But the fact remains that costs are rising for farmers and consumers. Why is this happening?
Who or what is to blame for the rising costs of farming?
The rising costs of farming have led to a steady fall in income for farmers and everyone else. The costs increased even more after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. This invasion together with the EU’s policy of boycotting Russia is at least partly responsible for the rising costs of fertilizer and energy.
Retailers have added to the problem by taking advantage of the situation. They have raised their prices and blamed it on the rising costs of farming. But farmers are still forced to sell at the prices that were in place before the crisis. Small farmers are hurt by these factors while multinationals benefit from the CAP.
Failing governments over the last 20 or 30 years–mostly right-wing governments–have blamed their failure on environmental rules. This hides the fact that their policies favored multinationals. In addition, they have actually been avoiding environmental policies in the same period, which could have softened the economic burden on farmers. Currently, these right-wing interests are using the farmers’ protests to roll back the few environmental rules that Europeans have managed to pass.
Holland sacrifices its water supply for unregulated pig farming
Right-wing or centrist Dutch governments have become an example of Europe’s short-term thinking about the environment. Holland has resisted environmental directives for so long that its water supplies have been poisoned by nitrates from pig farming. The Dutch government has been warned about this since the late 1990s. The EU even had a directive on nitrate levels that came into effect in the early 2000s. But the government consistently focused on short-term economic goals rather than the long-term threat to the water. As a result, they have been forced to shut down huge parts of their agricultural infrastructure for pig farming, destroying the livelihood of thousands of farmers. Obviously, it would have been better to act in the short-term rather than being forced to implement draconian measures.
The response of DEiM25
Unfortunately, the Green Party has not stepped up on this issue. Nor has the Left addressed it as much as it should have. As a result, farmers alone are bearing the burden of the environmental catastrophe. DEiM25 is trying to correct a lack of awareness on the part of progressives and the Left.
Yanis Varoufakis: the dependence of the European Union on agricultural policies that benefit the wealthy
Yanis Varoufakis explains how the European Union got its start. The EU began in 1950 as a cartel of heavy industry. Initially, it called itself the European Communities of Coal and Steel, and its first members were the steel and coal producing countries: Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Northern Italy. By 1951, they had also coopted car manufacturers and electrical goods companies. At this point, the EU represented the whole industrial sector of Northern Central Europe.
Subsequently, the Treaty of Rome created the European Economic Community. The EEC was a deal between capital, heavy industry and large-scale farmers. Farmers were included because, in order for this cartel to work, it needed free trade with no borders. So, the EEC had to convince the large farmers in the Netherlands, Germany and Northern France to agree to the elimination of borders. The industrialists were able to convince the large farmers by telling them that everyone, was going to make a lot of money by cutting back on production and driving prices up. The farmers were promised a cut of this money. You could say that the CAP was the result of a bribe. And the bribe did not help all farmers.
Class war between farmers
Currently, the EU and EEC represent a class war on a number of levels. On one level is a class war between farmers. Small holders in Sicily, Spain and Greece are not able to take advantage of CAP, so the benefits go to large farmers in the North.
Class war between farmers and the energy cartel
Another class war takes place between the farmers, and the energy cartel. In the first years of the EU, electricity was provided by nationalized public utilities. But Thatcherism privatized electricity generation. As a result, electricity grids became vassals of oligarchs who own the power stations. Soon, energy prices began rising much faster than the price of agricultural commodities. The electricity cartel also benefits from the war in Ukraine.
Class war between farmers and the agribusiness cartel
The agribusiness cartel is all over the world. It is currently poisoning the land in Pakistan, India, and everywhere it operates. Agribusiness forces genetically modified seeds and certain kinds of pesticides on farmers. Once the land is poisoned, the seeds the farmers used before won’t work. In addition, the modified seeds don’t reproduce themselves, so farmers are forced to buy them from Bayer and Monsanto every year.
Class war between North and South Europe
A third kind of class war is between North and South Europe due to differences in climate and productivity in the soil.
Class war between East and West Europe
A forth kind of class war is taking place between east and west. The European Union, the European Commission and member states have pressured Orban and other leaders to allow Ukraine into the EU. But the business model of every farmer in Europe will be ruined if Ukraine enters the EU. Ukraine has more productive capacity for agriculture than Germany, Belgium, Holland and France together. This means that the majority of the CAP money will go to Ukraine. Other countries, such as Poland, will shift from being a net beneficiary of the CAP to being a net contributor. French farmers will be cut off and Greek farmers will be finished.
Already Ukrainian products have been entering Europe in solidarity with Ukrainian farmers. In response, the Polish government, which used to support Zelenskyy, is now vetoing aid to Ukraine.
Class war over who pays for the Green Transition
As for the green transition, if you mention it to farmers in Europe, you will become their enemy. For them the Green Transition is not green and it’s not a transition. It represents certain bankruptcy. This is due to the fact that Bayer and Monsanto will not pay for the transition plans of the EU. The cartel of big business that created the EU won’t pay for it either. The consumers and farmers will pay. The green transition is an intensification of the class war for farmers and the working classes.
Three planks of DEiM25
DEiM25 has three planks. Varoufakis lists them as peace; basic universal income; and making the oligarchs pay for the green transition. But here again, Europe and the United States are similar. The victims of the oligarchs are turning to the right-wing and voting for parties and candidates like Donald Trump who claim to be anti-establishment. Such candidates are not anti-establishment. They are the establishment’s greatest servants. For this reason, they threaten small farmers more than they threaten large farmers. But neither class of farmers is a natural ally of the Left.
Farmers in the North of Europe are not allies of the Left because they are capitalist employers. They support both ultra-right and center-right parties as long as they can avoid environmental legislation, or as long as they don’t have to pay for it. In their opinion, it’s better if the proletariate pays for it.
The small holders of Greece, Italy, and other countries in the south. are more accepting of progressive policies, but they side with anti-immigration parties because they depend on undocumented laborers. Legal immigration would make them too expensive.
The job of DEiM25, according to Varoufakis, is to create a rupture within the agricultural sector and win the support of the victims of the class war, small farmers.
Germany’s protests began earlier and for different reasons
Karin De Rigo provides informations specific to Germany, where the situation is different from the rest of Europe. The protests there started before Christmas, and for a different reason–the government announced a budget deficit. In Germany this automatically required that they immediately cut costs. So they cut the diesel subsidies and the tax rebate on vehicles. These cuts were not life-threatening for the companies, but they sparked protests because they came on top of everything else that was happening. Now, it is feared that the cuts will destabilize the government, so of course, the right-wing parties have taken advantage of the turmoil.
The structure of the German market is also a factor. Germany has an oligopoly. Four corporations own 75 percent of the retailers, including the supermarkets. This means that German farmers have to negotiate with the oligarchs. But the oligarchs have the upper hand. If an individual farmer doesn’t accept their policies, he will be out of the market.
In addition, the big corporations are vertically integrated. Supermarkets for example, own the whole supply chain, and small companies can’t compete.
The true interests behind the protests
Farmers protest are important, but it’s important that they protest for the right reasons. For example, food and job security. Food shouldn’t be a commodity or subject to speculation. It’s a human right. A safe job in the farming sector and a dignified salary is also a human right. Politicians should not be able to control this narrative. The protesters need to control it.
The only path forward is to break the monopoly. CAP needs to be restructured and the system reorganized. This is the platform of DEiM25’s Green New Deal.
The factors leading to these protests are at least 10 years old
Frederico Dolce sees the current protests as a continuation of something that started in the time of José Bové–ten years ago. (Bové is a French farmer, politician and syndicalist, and former member of the EU Parliament.) Today, the protests claim to support anti-green policies, but green policies are not the problem. This is a false narrative proposed by a confederation representing the major firms–the same firms that push aside small farmers and down-to-earth leaders.
An example of this confederation is Arnaud Rousseau. He began his career in commodities trading and then took over his family’s cereal farm. Another example is Danilo Calvani, a producer from Lazio. These people are only interested in more subsidies for large farms.
The Supermarket Revolution
Europeans have a problem matching the Green Revolution with the current agricultural system. They call this the Supermarket Revolution, and it has developed over the last 25 years. Today, 74.5 percent of fresh and packaged food goes through the corporate channels. In Italy, only 13 percent remains with traditional sources.
In the same period, Italian farms have gone from 3 million in 1982 to 1.4 million in 2014. But the number of foreign workers, most of them employed illegally, has increased. Foreign workers account for a third of agricultural wage-earners. Dolce calls this ‘the new system’. Those in charge of the protests do not want to change the new system. They only want to obtain more favorable conditions for themselves.
The real enemies of the agriculture world, according to Dolce, are large distributors, agribusiness industrialists, fake agricultural unionists, and a corrupt CAP system. The Green New Deal not only needs to push for CAP reform, it needs to reform the entire system.
The historical context of the struggle over agriculture: the beginning of corporate farming
Dafne Delkara, based in France, provides historical context. In November of this year, there was a law proposed by DEiM25 to reintroduce floor prices for producers so their minimum production costs would be covered. The measure fell short by six votes thanks to government intervention. Currently, the Left is trying to reintroduce this proposal and call for another vote. But unfortunately, the public is not aware of this effort. The media did not mention it. Instead, they continue to blame Left-wing environmentalists for the farmers’ problems.
Guatemala and United Fruit
Reaching back further in time, Delkara cites Guatemala as an example of how ruthless large corporations and the government can be. In 1952, the Árbenz government planned to distribute land to the peasantry. At that time, United Fruit owned a third of the arable land in Guatemala. To preserve the company’s profitable operation in Guatemala, United Fruit persuaded Harry Truman to overthrow Árbenz. Two hundred thousand Guatemalans died, including 160,000 peasants.
Nixon, Earl Butz, and the end of New Deal farm policies
Another historical moment occurred after the 1973 oil shock in the US. when foreclosures were sweeping the country. The foreclosures particularly devastated small farms. In the same decade, Nixon’s agricultural minister, Earl Butz, ended the New Deal era of farming policies and paved the way for corporate farming.
Ukraine and the IMF after Euromaidan
After Euromaidan, Europe lowered the trade barriers between Ukraine and the EU, and European farmers were priced out. Ukrainian products started flooding European markets and bringing down prices. But the trouble started before that.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a decade of land privatization. During that time, many Ukrainian farms were hoarded by the oligarchic class. In 2001, in order to stop this process, the government introduced a moratorium on the sale of agricultural land.
When Ukraine’s debt began to rise, the IMF stepped in under the condition that land reform would restart and the land market would be reopened. The peasants protested the reopening of the land market. At first, the protests were successful, but then the pandemic hit. Because the people could not leave their houses to protest, the Land Reform measures were passed.
In June 2021, Ukraine reopened its agricultural land market. Current owners include Ukrainian multinationals, trust funds and transfers from the European Investment Bank.
The Black Sea Grain Deal
The Black Sea grain deal was supposed to help low-income countries. But, according to the World Bank’s numbers, only 3 percent of that grain went to low-income countries. The question is, why does the third world, especially Africa, have to depend on imports in the first place? The answer is that overproduction in European markets gets dumped on Africa. This destroys African farming.
Author John P. McCormick argues that Machiavelli was the West’s first Democratic Theorist. He was a forerunner of today’s left-wing populism. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) is often interpreted as a cynic, or as a philosopher of political evil. But according to McCormick, “Machiavelli was a republican idealist whose support for popular rule can inspire struggles against the oligarchies of today.”
This article is a follow-up to a previous post, in which Professor Wen Yang compared Anglo-Saxon societies unfavorably to ancient societies. He argued that Anglo-Saxons did not have the advantage of the Axial Age. Professor Jeffrey Sachs also thought Anglo-Saxon philosophy had lost its way, but not because it missed the Axial Age. Sachs thought their problems began when they broke with the Christian tradition. But both Yang and Sachs agreed that the political philosopher who broke with centuries of Western tradition as Niccolò Machiavelli. However, the fact that Machiavelli was writing about his own Italian Republic is an important omission. His historical context is important too.
Machiavelli’s diplomatic and philosophical career took place during a turbulent time. The French invaded Italy in 1494 and the army of Emperor Charles V sacked Rome in 1527. Machiavelli believed that if the Italians would return to ancient domestic and military orders by rearming the citizens, the citizens could beat back hegemons like France, Spain, and the German emperor.
Of course the Italian Republic’s trouble was nothing new. McCormick says socioeconomic elites always enable oppression of common people, in every time and place. However, there is an important difference in the way ancient republics dealt with corruption. The citizens of ancient republics would have punished their ruling elites much more severely than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were punished.
