It has carried out the most complete perversion of every rational order of things.
The realm of matter, of gold, of the machine, of number, there is no longer spirit, nor liberty, nor light in it.
The West has lost the sense of command and obedience.
It has lost the sense of Action and of Contemplation.
It has lost the sense of hierarchy, of spiritual power, of man-gods.
It no longer knows nature. It is no longer, for Western man, a living body made of symbols, Gods and ritual gestures—a splendid cosmos, in which man moves freely, like a microcosm within the macrocosm: it has on the contrary decayed to an opaque and fatal exteriority, the mystery of which profane sciences seek to ignore by means of their petty laws and their petty hypotheses.
The West no longer knows Wisdom: it no longer knows the majestic silence of those who have mastered themselves, the bright calm of the Seers, the superb solar reality of those in whom the idea has become blood, life, and power. Wisdom has been supplanted by the rhetoric of “philosophy” and “culture”, the realm of professors, journalists, and sportsmen—the plan, the program, the proclamation. It has succumbed to sentimental, religious, humanitarian contamination, and the race of chatterers who run around madly exalting “becoming” and “practice”, because silence and contemplation frighten them.
The West no longer knows the State: the valorous State, the Imperium, as synthesis of spirituality and royalty, as a way to the “supraworld”, as known by the great ancient civilisations from China to Egypt, from Persia to Rome and to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, has been submerged in the bourgeois poverty of a trust of slaves and traders.
What might war be, war willed in itself, as a value superior both to winning and losing, as that sacred path to spiritual fulfilment— for whom the celestial seat of Odin, the Valhalla, is the privilege of the heroes fallen on the battlefield; for which in Islam, “holy war”, jihad, is synonymous with “way of God”; for which in Aryan India, the warrior is side by side with the ascetic and, in classic antiquity, mors triumphalis is conceived of as victory over death—these formidable European “activists” no longer know what such a war is. They no longer know warriors but only soldiers, for them a squabble is enough to terrorise and force them back to the rhetoric of humanism, pacifism, and sentimentalism.
Europe has lost its simplicity, it has lost its centrality, it has lost its life. The democratic sickness and the Semitic poison corrode it in all its roots—right down to its law, sciences, and speculative thought. As for leaders—those beings who distinguish themselves, not by violence, greed for profit, their ability as exploiters of slaves, but, on the contrary, by unwavering and transcendent qualities of life—there are none. Europe is a big anodyne body, possessed and shattered by an anxiety which no one dares to express, whose blood is gold, whose flesh is machines, factories and arms, whose brain is a newspaper page—a shapeless body which tosses restlessly, driven by obscure and unpredictable forces which implacably crush anyone who tries to oppose it or even just to avoid its mechanism.
The highly extolled “civilisation” of the West has been able to do all this. This is the vaunted result of the superstition of “Progress”—beyond Roman imperiality, the Doric Greece, and all the other exemplary forms of the great Aryan primordial civilisations.
And the noose tightens everyday around those who are still capable of great loathing and great rebellion.
- From part 1, chapter 1 of Heathen Imperialism, first published as Imperialismo Pagano, 1928.
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