It is difficult to avoid a smile whilst reviewing these recent events, which are so characteristic of our day. A certain American professor “tweets,” on the eve of Jesus’ birth, his Christmas wish for “white genocide”; many angry voices debouch, denouncing what is a flagrantly racist and inciting, not to say godless, speech; to which the good professor replies, somewhat equivocally but no doubt most candidly, that he was being ironic, was but pricking at various soft-skinned movements of the “far right,” and that his irony is most evident in light of the fact that “white genocide” has never been perpetrated, and so is proved an imaginary menace (a sentiment, to be sure, which he himself contradicts immediately in his subsequent “tweets”). Erupts a general scandal, an uproar and counter-uproar, as some demand the professor’s resignation, or at least swift penal action on the part of his university, and others, who would almost certainly not be so lenient had the color of his statement but differed, vehemently defend his words and his right to say them. The university replies at once that it will inquire into the matter, to see what’s fair in it, and then — nothing more is ever heard of any of it, but the affair is quietly lost to the dark.
Of course, it is no laughing matter, as many will remind me. There are grave questions concealed in this simple debacle, questions regarding the future of the West and the peoples which produced it, questions regarding the freedom of our speech and the nature of our “race relations,” to say nothing of other and equally relevant political issues of our day. But if the good professor can with justice defend his right to his good humor, then with so much greater right so can I: for I say, nothing is more serious than fair mirth, and nothing so frivolous as this bearded, frowning moral indignation which these ultramoderns like so much to wear upon our chins. And really — in the face of such events, what can one do, but sing with Verdi, Ve’, la tragedia mutò in commedia!
We leave that matter where we find it, and do not deign to comment on the rectitude of any of the bickerers involved in this contest — save to observe that certain of them have atimes been even embarrassingly hypocritical, insofar as they cannot with any consistency claim to have fallen on the right side of that “freedom of speech” which they purport above all to cherish and protect. But that is egalitarian politics for you: even while clamoring for “equality” and “equal rights,” one holds oneself to a different set of standards than one’s adversaries, and calls it justice. For the rest, this is a passing event, a mere sideshow, and not even so much as that, to the “current events” of the day.
But no one can deny that it had its moment of incendiary fame; aye, it had hearts pounding righteously on all parts of our politic patchwork, throughout all the many piebald regions of the American territory — and beyond. Nor does one even need to ask why, the answer is so evident: our good professor’s “tweeting” struck so deep a chord for no other reason, than the appearance within it of those three potent little Grecian, essentially un-Greek syllables.
The concept of genocide is so modern that it cannot help but provide a gateway through which one might penetrate some wing of the fortress of contemporary political thought, to see just what if anything those mighty palisades really contain. Indeed, one knows that this concept is vitally important to us for no other reason than this: it is so widely taken for granted, so universally assumed, that no one even bothers to seek upon it any more for where the cracks might lie.
To put the matter somewhat more formally, it is evident that genocide is considered by our contemporary West to be one of the greatest crimes that any individual or any nation may perpetrate, if it is not indeed unqualifiedly the greatest. If one pays careful heed, one will indeed note that our morally dubious, not to say relativist, West has almost altogether abandoned that little word “evil” which once had such great currency in Christian European countries; but that whenever it does in good conscience still use this word, it wields it almost exclusively to decry the crime of genocide. This is significant: all moments in which a society contradicts itself with such “purity of spirit” are significant.
Genocide as a concept can be considered the international analogue of the so-called “hate crime,” another contemporary construct. But genocide is considerably more useful to any seeker who would stab toward the heart of contemporary thought, because the law against genocide is imposed precisely on societies which are not our own, and which do not hold to liberal standards. In the contemporary epoch, when our regime embraces or claims to embrace the principle of “multiculturalism,” by which all other sovereign societies should be permitted to do as they please, it is most telling when this same regime decides either to bend or to outright abandon this rule.
It is not immediately evident why the crime of genocide should be so uniquely loathsome to the contemporary epoch. Few surely will debate its vileness, but one may well ask why mass killings motivated by a will to exterminate a race or an ethnicity should be in any way worse that those motivated, say, by the will to maintain or expand a totalitarian regime by liquidating real or imagined dissidents.
Yet the contemporary West evidently adheres precisely to this view. The symbol in absolute against whom it direct its ire, the one individual whose “evilness” is almost certain to be undisputed in any given segment of any given European or European-derived population, no matter how otherwise “relativist” it might believe itself to be, is Hitler. Not, certainly, because he invaded, say, Poland and France — for he was but the latest in a long and august line of European conquerers to aggress upon a neighboring European state; nor because he by certain historical interpretations had designs on the whole of Europe, for in this case we should similarly demonize Napoleon, who after all got much further in the realization of such grand ambitions. Rather, Hitler is hated because he enacted a systematic program to displace or eradicate a number of ethnic groups within the boundaries of Germany. This, and this alone, renders him (together with a small member of like-minded despots) specially heinous to contemporary liberal sensibilities, in a way that other dictators of the same period were not.
Note well — this is not a question of numbers, it is not a question the extent of his crimes. Stalin and Mao both have far more lives on their historic conscience than Hitler, and under Mao the numbers of the dead at least treble compared with those killed under Hitler. In terms of the proportion of their own population murdered, the Khmer Rouge committed what may be the worst slaughter in history. Nor is Hitler’s special guilt a question of his cruelty; though torture was implemented here and there in the Nazi concentration camps, and though life therein was most desperately tried and in many cases made most cheap, the methods the Germans favored and widely employed are certainly far less ruthless and savage than those employed by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, the Bolsheviks during the revolutionary war, the Ukranians against their own Jews, or the Japanese during the Rape of Nanchang; and the pains of the Nazi concentration camps are easily comparable to those suffered by the “political prisoners” of the gulag or by the prisoners of the Japanese during the Bataan Death March, or — let us at once frankly admit it — the Germans captured by the Americans and the British themselves in the same World War; save of course that the maltreatment of these last came often enough after the war had concluded.
To repeat — it is not immediately obvious why the deeds of a racist or xenophobic dictator, caeteris paribus, should be worse than those committed by a tyrant against his own people, particularly when the tyrant is committing these actions on the grounds of a given ideology. Indeed, argument could be made to the contrary. It is worth mentioning that according to the historicism and scientism now in vogue, violence against a given ethnic group might even be explained as an atavism, some specter arising out of our ancestral or “tribal prehistory,” some unexorcized demon of our deeper “biology” and our eldest “psychology”; while the ideological massacres of the communists in particular are distinctly modern and grow directly from some twisted root in our modern worldview. For that reason, it might be argued, they should trouble us the more. I for one believe that there is something more monstrous in the prospect of a totalitarian despot who has so far severed all human bonds, and so far betrayed the first principles of his humanity in the name of a nebulous ideology, that he may torture or imprison or put to the sword friends, family, sycophants, kinsmen and compatriots alike with an almost perfect arbitrariness and an almost flawless indiscretion. Hitler, at least, was still unambiguously German, and sought still the best for his people; that far at least he still had the fire in his breast. Not so much can be said of the frigid sinister monster Stalin, who was not even any longer recognizable as a human being. All numbers aside, that to my eyes should make the Man of Steel the more chilling and detestable of the two figures.
Yet it is evident that most Westerners feel differently: Hitler is uniquely wicked to the West. Why? First, because he “committed genocide,” as our strange phraseology has it; and second, because he is thought to have been so diabolically successful in his efforts, when compared with all other specifically genocidal despots in history. Then let us finally ask, what is it in the prospect of genocide particularly that strikes us as being so exceedingly vicious and reprehensible, that it merits distinction even amongst the worst crimes of history?
Let us begin by laying bare with full rigor the difficulty inherent in our modern position — for, as we shall soon see, it is not so morally unambiguous as might at first appear to our overly accustomed eyes. Only by opening this matter up to the bone will we begin to sense the skeleton that structures us — necessary precondition to reclothing those naked bones with vitaler flesh.
Genocide, as a concept, was born after World War II, in response very specifically to the German treatment of several ethnicities within the borders of National Socialist territory. Even one-hundred years ago, this concept enjoyed no independent existence, but was subsumed beneath the general category of mass killing or mass violence. Genocide as such contains two specific elements which differentiate it from mass killing: first, that it is the intentional targeting of an ethnic group for extermination; and second, that it includes within its parameters mass sterilization, mass programs of breeding, or generalized or institutionalized economic or cultural oppression, toward the stated or unstated goal of physical destruction of the group in question. These two elements might be reduced to a single one, thus: genocide is the willful attempt to eradicate a given definable ethnic human group by any and all means possible. It is clear then that the idea of genocide is connected with the hostilities of World War II, and withal the liberal society which emerged victorious from its ashes.
Our contemporary democracies are actuated by the ideal of equality, and the ancillary ideal of diversity. We live in pluralistic societies, which ostensibly defend the right of all to live and act as they see fit, within the framework of our liberal law. Yet, as everyone knows, many countries of the world live according to other laws and other ways, and embrace neither equality nor diversity as ideals of society or state. Then we must differentiate between a local or national diversity, which is necessarily constrained within comparatively wide limits by the very tolerant customs, habits, and laws of liberalism, and an international diversity, which might well include forms and manners that are different from and even offensive to egalitarian liberalism.
At first glance, genocide, a crime enshrined in international law, appears to be meant to constrain the actions precisely of such foreign and illiberal countries: it is, as it were, an outward-looking law, and its spirit is decidedly global.
Now, there exists today a dispute regarding the proper stance of liberal countries toward illiberal ones. In recent years the crux of this dispute has fallen between those who hold liberal society to be the good society, and who on the basis of this belief seek to “export democracy” and to liberalize historically very illiberal regions of the globe, and those who object to either the possibility or the desirability of so flagrantly imposing the peculiar vision of the modern West on peoples whose traditions are radically alien to it. We may generally characterize the former view as pertaining to the contemporary right, and the latter to the contemporary left, of our present day political spectrum.
But we note at once that these categories are not exhaustive of all possible political stances, nor even the existing stances within present day democracy. For there are, of course, conservative thinkers who for excellent reasons do not support intervention of the kind mentioned, and there are “progressives” who tend to promote a more aggressive policy, in the interest of protecting specific human rights globally. For all manner of reasons, we of the Deep Right exclude ourselves wholesale from all of these positions.
For the sake of clarity, then, we may cut a hierarchical line of principle through these conventional lateral divisions, by differentiating broadly between those who believe that no right determination of the good society can be attained by human beings, so that it is morally obligatory to leave foreign societies or tribes “sovereign” to live and to reign as they see fit, and those who hold instead that liberal society is the good society or the best possible society here and now, and who consequently conclude that the nations of the world should ideally be liberal (though it may be unfeasible or even hazardous to attempt to convert many of them) since true “sovereignty” derives exclusively from democratic consent. The former position we may call the egalitarian position; the latter, we may call the liberal position.
Liberalism has to its favor a certain clarity of purpose and coherency of logic. In embracing the liberal society as the good society, it avoids many of the snags which catch constantly at the egalitarian’s garb, and so it is free to occupy itself exclusively with the special troubles and contradictions of its own regime.
Egalitarianism, on the other hand, confronts from the very first a number of mishaps. As mentioned, this position is founded, if only tacitly, on a critique of morality, which concludes that objective morality is impossible. Good and evil either do not exist, or exist in an irreducible multiplicity of irreconcilable forms, or exist but are not accessible to human beings. For this reason, the basic rightness of any particular human ways, customs, and beliefs is fundamentally indemonstrable; or, to put the matter positively, each human being, and consequently each human culture, is of identical dignity to the next.
Now, there is perhaps not an egalitarian of this or any stamp alive who would hesitate a single moment before condemning, in the harshest possible terms, the treatment of the Jews by Hitler, or of the Armenians by the Turks, or of the Bosniaks by the Serbs. To the contrary: it seems that it is precisely the egalitarian perspective which insists most importunately on the unique wickedness of these acts and which is the fastest to denounce new cases or threats of genocide. Despite all the very deep differences between the egalitarian and the liberal, there is yet a curious and most fascinatingly universal accord between them regarding the particular and unique atrocity of genocide.
If we are to get to the pith of this agreement, it will be necessary for us to consider the cases of genocide just cited, which are surely among the more nefarious and notorious cases of genocide known to our contemporary Western sensibilities — together, perhaps, with the crimes of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and, lately and to a lesser extent, those of the Hussein regime in Iraq. Surely the European instances have remained more firmly etched in our minds, and those instances occurring at the fringes of Europe (Turkey, after all, has almost been a European state). What is immediately interesting to note in all these cases is the degree to which these acts of politically mandated violence aligned with a fervent and altogether modern attitude called nationalism. They all arose from the action of strong central governments — strong, indeed, to the point of being authoritarian — combined with a powerful military or militaristic stance. And they all occurred in regions near the borders of pre-World War I empires — along the fracture lines of their crumbling.
These observations will carry us a ways toward the resolving of our mystery. “Genocide,” in the first place, seems to be considered a species of international crime committed by the illiberal regimes of the West. Yet not all, nor even most, of the illiberal regimes which came to power in the inter-war period engaged in genocide. The belief in “racial superiority,” however, which in all cases precedes the crime of genocide, was an inextricable part of at least two of the major powers of the Axis — Germany and Japan — while Mussolini’s fascist state toyed with the concept and distanced itself from it by turns. Genocide, by the conventional understanding, is therefore a crime characteristic of those states of the World-War-II epoch which were at once the most illiberal and the most militant: it is a crime characteristic of those World War II states which most immediately menaced the liberal regimes of the West. For this it is yet more anathema.
To be sure, following the war, the Soviet Union became another such enemy to the West; but it was ever a kind of abstract, hypothetic enemy. It was red to the map but gray to the imagination and the battlefield. We liberal Westerners did not expend our blood on the Russians, save but by most questionable proxy. The Soviet Union was, moreover, our ally in the most violent and costly part of World War II, and that complicated our stance toward it. Something similar could be said for China: never did we stand on any field against the men of Mao’s communist hordes, and indeed quite the contrary, for China in the last became to us a kind of tentative ally in our long silent struggle against the Soviet. We invested, however, the lives of our men in Germany, and spent our blood upon its very soil. The National Socialists in Germany, the Fascists in Italy, and the Japanese were our foes in the most visceral way possible. For this, then, it is understandable that we should have demonized their acts with greater vehemence than that which we bring against the juggernauts of the East; it is a question, one might say, of the residual effects of a bygone war.
Now there is no doubt that this kind of feeling plays a role in our sense of genocide: our very laws against genocide, to some extent, are but the echoes of old enmities. But is this really sufficient to explain the matter to us? It is hard to believe that, eighty years distant from the universal atrocities of World War II, the liberal West should continue to flagellate its fallen foes. It is difficult to believe, moreover, that the vehemence at least should not have receded, even if the custom that it once actuated might persist, in ever more etiolate and vestigial a form. The farther that we stand from the heat of the battle, the colder should grow our objectivity; we should be able to weigh with ever greater rationality the balance of the dead, and thus to see the unique monstrosity of a Stalin, a Mao. Another point of complication: when we say “we,” in this context, the term surely implicates as well the same Italians and Germans who were in point of fact on “the other side” during the war. Their statements with respect to those regimes must differ from that of other peoples. May be, of course, that they feel shame at being the sons and daughters of those who drew the blood of the “right side”; but then there is yet another complication in the fact that those on the winning side of the Second Great War feel that same shame for what happened in Germany, in Italy, as if it had been their forebears to commit these crimes. There is a great confusion of motives on both sides, a great confusion of identities, of responsibilities. No simple psychological argument can therefore suffice to get us to the bottom of the question of why the hatred, indeed the loathing, for those regimes has not dwindled, despite all the decades intervening.
The contrary, to be sure, has to some extent occurred. Greater eye is given today to the sins of the communist regimes, many of which have only come to light in the last few decades, and there have even been calls to expand the definition of genocide to include the nominally “economically” or “politically” motivated crimes of Stalin. Yet it is noteworthy how little these suggestions have been given heed. Evidently, there is something in such attempts which damns them from the start.
Now, I would wager that if a survey were taken of the U.S. today, asking which of the great despots of the last century had murdered more human beings, something approaching fifty percent of Americans should respond with the name of Hitler. I would wager more: as many Americans would be prone, albeit in a kind of half-hearted way, to excuse Stalin and Mao ideologically for their crimes, asserting something to the effect that the anarchical utopia these men were aiming for was itself at least a beautiful ideal, no matter the degree to which the political reality of their countries failed it: while no one of the mainstream would dare to pour such tepid water over the reign of Hitler and the National Socialists. Though the men of today are better prepared, to some extent, to acknowledge the crimes of the communists, the animus against Hitler remains sui generis. If anything, the rage against Hitler has grown in the time intervening.
Wherein the cause of this disproportion?
Possible causes will occur to my readers. One in particular: the special groups against which Hitler directed his policies will feel perennially the danger of a recrudescence of the beliefs, attitudes, and actions which led to them; and these groups have a vested interest in seeing to it that these beliefs, attitudes, and actions remain forever taboo. It is indubitable that the Jews in particular have exercised an enormous influence in this direction, for by their native talents they are in a position to do so, and have good reason to ensure that the story of the Holocaust be never forgotten. There is no doubt that they have used the very concept of “genocide,” concept invented by one of their own sons, as a pre-emptive weapon against their hypothetic or even potential enemies by which to affirm eternally again the moral order, and thus protect the “wandering tribes” of the world. Temptation arises then to locate the cause for our notion of “genocide” in a certain ethnic question, and to close the entire matter there.
But I think this does not entirely satisfy. It has all the signs of being a fine description: it is surely partially accurate; it is in many ways superficially adequate; and for that, our suspicious hearts must tell us, does not strike radically enough. It is, we might say, putting the matter differently, merely reactive. For if this idea “genocide” is nothing but a weapon fashioned against dissent, misused then to force men into silence and acquiescence, then it will do us little good to indicate its sharpened edge, as if this should be sufficient to disarm those who wield it. We Occidentals are much enamored of “truth,” and we endow it with great and almost arcane powers; it is enough to bring things squarely into the light of day, we believe, to disperse all ghosts and to cement all accords. That is, speaking politically, neither subtle nor effective of us. Then let us press more deeply. The truth will set us free; but it cannot in and of itself keep us so.
The commencement of that long chain of devastating conflicts to afflict the West from the time of the American Revolution until at least Vietnam (and, it might well be argued, even unto the present day) was coeval with, and in part caused by, a fundamental change in the regimes of the European and later even many non-European states. This change might most colloquially, if inadequately, be described as the birth of Enlightenment liberalism from out of the fragmentation and transformation of older and generally larger hereditary and aristocratic polities. It is not our purpose at present to seek an understanding of this momentous shift, but a single and most relevant facet of it must be brought to light: namely, the alterations it caused in the relations between the ethnoi who peopled these new regimes.
Prior to the rise of our present liberal nation states, the principal political orders of Europe could generally be described as dynasties or empires. In empires there tends to reign a sense of permissiveness as regards the ways and manners of the conquered. All the most successful empires of the world have, save perhaps in their contact with very primitive tribes or illiterate peoples, established a kind of paternalistic structural rule which leaves much of local governance to the governed. They have established the general law applicable to all those living in their territories, but have largely remained indifferent to the peculiar questions of consuetude and religion. The Gauls under the ancient Romans, the Armenians under the Ottomans, the Indians under the British, and the Hungarians under the Habsbergs were compelled to accept the structural forms of governance of their ruling empires, to pay taxes to the same, and to collaborate with their rulers in all matters pertaining to institutional affairs and justice, but they were permitted to maintain all those elements of their original ethos which did not transgress the empire’s laws. Insofar as their traditional usances, their native tongues, and their most peculiar forms of worship and belief were compatible with the greater law of the land, these subsidiary peoples were free to retain them. Their local leaders were generally of the local ethnos, though often educated abroad, and questions of crime and punishment were in most cases left to local judiciaries. There is no question that these colonized or ruled peoples were not in any sense of the word sovereign; there is no question that they underwent profound transformations of custom, language, and creed under the rule of foreign powers; there is no question that their distant rulers sometimes became their violent oppressors, and that they could boast nothing like political liberty. But they generally enjoyed, if we may put the matter thus, a certain ethocal freedom, which the states and territories swallowed by the Soviet Union, the United States of America, or “Imperial Japan” certainly did not.
This oddity of empire is to a great extent explicable with reference to the peculiar exigencies of empires: the wider the liberty an empire can afford to grant to its constituent parts, the less resources it must expend in the ruling of them, the less time and energy it must squander in the determination of a myriad of intricate local questions, and the less it must fear popular uprisings. This is particularly important, the greater the domain of the empire: an empire the size of Great Britain’s in the early years of the twentieth century, or of Rome’s in the first centuries of the Common Era, has need of that flexibility and versatility which can come only from a decentralized scaffolding-like approach to any number of deeply diverse political constituencies.
But there are other causes for this imperial attitude more directly rooted in the customs and the morality that actuate empires. Empires have no need nor certainly much desire to render all human beings homogeneous or uniform within the limits of their rule. To the contrary, there has always been in all empires everywhere a strong tendency, one might even say an imperial instinct, to maintain rigorous clear distinctions between the ruler and the ruled, between the society that governs and the peoples who are governed; and the best way of drawing these lines is along the wrinkles of ethos and ethnos that nature herself has inlaid into the territory and being of organic human societies. Empires in this sense have been the only truly “multi-cultural” societies ever to exist.
Now, the empires of the early twentieth century were built largely on hereditary rule, guaranteed down through the ages — not, of course, without interruptions and periods of civil unrest, but without any fundamental, widespread change in the basic principle of monarchy or aristocracy. The entirely new nation-states that issued from their dissolution had from the first to find other justification for their rule. They could not rely on brute power, for the evident reason that a government built on nothing but the threat of the sword, can easily be overthrown by the same; yet they often enough retained but the most tenuous connection to any kind of traditional legitimacy, particularly because they tended to establish, in the place of traditional or classical or aristocratic rule, modern parliamentary and republican regimes which guaranteed an unprecedented degree of political equality to all members of the nation-state. A new concept of legitimacy had to be invented to accommodate this revolutionary new form of government, and the name for this new concept was sovereignty.
The question of sovereignty in the era of the nation-state is a question like the hedgehog, and we would do well to lay it aside for another moment when we are adequately skinned to handle it. Suffice it here to say that sovereignty throughout modern times has historically been held to require the self-rule of the peoples in question; for which, by natural course, one is led to the question of what precisely defines a “people.” That is a difficult question even today; it was of considerably greater difficulty in the wake of the political rearrangements of the post-World-War-I era. Ethnos was seen then to be the most immediately evident and most clearly natural border subsisting between human groups. Thus, sovereignty would be the principle that distinct ethnic groups have a native right to “self-determination” — another notoriously difficult subject which we leave lay for the moment.
Alas for Europe, alas for the world: but the new nation-states were but political constructs, and their borders did not fall, because they could not fall, coincidentally with the divisions between the intermixed ethnoi then living in those collapsing empires. Not even the most conscientious and “ethnically aware” authors of these changes (and they were in reality few enough in those days, for, as always in times of seachange, everyone was still reasoning according to bygone and increasingly irrelevant standards) would have been able to impose such a structure on the post-war geography. In reality, the nation-states had to contend with a fundamental lack of ethnic consistency, and had simultaneously to build their very legitimacy on that same elusive consistency. This was at first conceived of as a temporary setback, for the new liberal orders were informed by humanistic principles which obscured the centrality of ethnos in human societies. Only gradually have they come to awareness of the real depth of this problem in the form of “identitarianism,” as this clashes with the rather dreamy ideal of “multiculturalism.” Much of our current political and social instability can be characterized as liberalism’s transformation from humanitarian-liberal to identitarian-egalitarian-progressive.
Although it would be foolishly reductive and morally facile to suggest that the ethnic purges of the twentieth century owed their origins to this tension alone, it would also be irresponsible to attempt any explanation of those purges without reference to it. Just as it is well worth our notice, that the three foremost Western states on the side of the Allies — that is, the United States, England, and France — enjoyed from the outset three conditions that were not shared, or not shared so totally, by their enemies in the Axis: they were relatively ethnically homogeneous; their extant demographic diversity was largely segregated and was more or less static in percentages and in quality; and they lay far from the fracture lines of the shattered pre-World-War-I empires.
If this analysis is valid, it is evident that what we today call genocide arose from the “identitarian” conflicts brought about by the unstable formation of new and ethnically undifferentiated nation states. The international and very specific proscriptions against genocide, as opposed to those against, say, despotic mass murder, owe their particular valence and relevance, to this fact. Now, we have stated previously that these laws, as international laws, appear at first glance to constrain the actions of illiberal states, and have their purpose in binding those nations beyond the borders of liberal nations. But we see now that they are intended as much, if not more, to be provisions against a debility inherent in the modern liberal state per se. They are specifics against the great disease of our contemporary politics, which made its true nature so horrifyingly evident in the Second Great War. The degree of our abhorrence for genocide — or indeed for persecution, discrimination, and prejudice — can be explained in part as an instinctive sense of our fundamental political weakness, and an attempt to provide for that weakness through certain complementary hardenings of our customs and our laws.
Let us put the modern position as clearly as we may. No observer of the sociopolitical causes and consequences of World War II, can evade an awareness of the extent to which the precipitous intermixing of ethnoi and diverse customs in one and the same society must produce conflict, leading almost inevitably to bloodshed. Precisely insofar as the great crimes of twentieth century Europe were characterized, not by actions against an external enemy divided from one’s nation by language, custom, and law, but by actions against an internal enemy who shared the language and law of one’s nation, but who was perceived as an enemy precisely to the degree that he differed in ethnoi — precisely this far, it is necessary to take precautions against a novel descent into that chaos. Because the West still fatuously prides itself on its “diversity,” such a precaution can only be effected through the instatement of a subtle moral thread that runs throughout the entirety of our society, binding hearts before minds, an unspoken moral consensus which militates silently against feelings and theories that might renew internal conflicts, sparking once more such hellish fiendishness as was perpetrated during the war.
Our entire position vis-à-vis tolerance, our attitude of openness and open-mindedness, our defense of multicultural diversity, are all instances of our subterranean attempt to neutralize the venom which began to poison Europe one-hundred years ago. This is the first origin of the law against genocide: it is meant to regulate the interior life of liberal nations, as much as to stricture the interior life of illiberal ones.
We are now in a position to inquire into the theoretical underpinnings of our modern notion of genocide — the justifications and the apologetics which attend to it. For there, and there alone, will we begin to perceive in faintest outline the true shape of our worldview.
We have so far given mind to the historical, cultural, aye, the ethnic antecedents for the present-day consensus regarding genocide. This consensus has been revealed, in its first origin, not to be the issue of reason, but rather of a kind of deep unreason, produced by the encounter of our historical vicissitudes with certain debilities of our contemporary politics. Yet the products of the unreason of the flesh have also their theoretical life, a life which is neither determined by, nor altogether divorced from, our physiological beings: a life which interpenetrates that same flesh, binds it with a different fiber, and, over the long course of time, may itself shape and alter it. We are in need of cure for the anti-venom. We must then consider the theoretical meaning of the law against genocide, and its philosophical antecedents and ends; we must give account for it, and through it, for ourselves. Else it and its antecedents and ends are no binding law on us.
To begin, I return us to our original question, phrased now to set us upon our latest course: what rational justification is proposed by the advocates of “genocide awareness” for discriminating morally between the crime of genocide on the one hand, and the crime of mass murder on the other?
In the first place, it is sometimes asserted that genocide is the worst crime in absolute for the way in which it attempts to smudge out the very existence of a human being, or cuts to the existential root of humanity itself. Other political crimes against human beings are generally actuated for political reasons; they are responses to this or that politically relevant action or belief of a human being, whether such be real or imaginary; but genocide alone, as an attack on the human being merely because he belongs to this or that ethnic group, reveals itself as a negation of the existence of the human being as such. It is the epitome of the “crime against humanity,” and therefore deserves special castigation and special punishment.
Such a distinction between a politically motivated crime and an existentially motivated crime, however, dear though it evidently be to our latter-day humanism, disintegrates upon nearest review. The groups that are targeted in genocides are targeted for a predictable canon of reasons: the ethnos in question endangers society by corrupting blood and custom, and by insinuating itself into politics and economics, wherein it presses for the good of its own, as opposed to the good of the whole; or it causes an increase in immorality, or a decrease in public or social standards, by introducing execrable and destabilizing notions into the social order and degenerating art and mores; or it foments rebellions and disaffection in a part of the populace and therefore threatens the general equilibrium. Now, all of these motivations are political in nature; an ethnicity which was not perceived to so vex the commonweal would never be targeted. To say that a genocidal ruler is attempting to strike out the existence of such an ethnos independently of all political considerations is basically ridiculous.
Even to say that such a ruler is motivated more by the existential question than by the political one is utterly unsubstantial from the point of view of law, for it can be claimed equally of any kind of mass killing. Mass killing as such is actuated against a group of human beings, be these members of an ethnicity, members of a social class, members of a particular party, members of a particular town or region. Stalin, for instance, waged an explicit war against the kulaks, or property-owning peasants, and countless individuals lost their lives simply for their putative inclusion in this often vaguely defined category. What makes this any different from Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ exceptionally thorough massacre of all whites (including even mulattos) in Haiti? Was Stalin attacking the humanity of these kulaks, or their socio-economic status? Is it possible to distinguish — particularly if one presupposes Soviet-style communist dogma? It might be rebutted that, say, Hitler’s acts were the more detestable because he made no distinction between adults and children. But did not Stalin do the same? It was just as dangerous in Soviet Russia, and for much longer, to be the son of an aristocrat or a priest, as it was in Germany in the last few years of the war to be the son of a Jew. Or, to take an example nearer our European home, what of the French aristocrats during the Reign of Terror? Is one to say that Lavoisier was murdered for being a political threat to the state, or simply because he was an aristocrat — that is, because his “being” was “aristocratic”? All despotic murders are “political” murders, and all are “existential” murders; therein the very horror of the absolute rule of bad men.
One might counter, as is sometimes done, that genocide is peculiar amongst the crimes against humanity, for being actuated most purely by hate. But what does this finally mean? Are not many if not all the actions of a vicious tyrant actuated by hate? Was not Stalin motivated by an abysmal and inhumanly cold hatred for countless individuals? (Indeed, if Stalin ever “loved” any human being, it was perhaps Hitler.) Or was not the peasant Mao rife with plebeian loathing for everyone who had been born better or better-tended than him? So far as hatred goes, if wars themselves do not begin in hate, do they not commonly end in it? Does that make their endings more atrocious than their beginnings? And how if a tyrant kills out of the love for what he believes he is defending and preserving — would this in any way exonerate him? Or the man who murders his wife’s lover — is that not a crime of hate? Would it be less a crime, if he killed his rival out of bloodlust or boredom, or merely to regain his honor? And in any case — since, to say it again, genocide is a juridical principle — how precisely does one adjudicate with all necessary legal precision, the difference between a mass murder motivated by abstract political reasons, and a genocide motivated by hate?
“Yes, but hate is like a flame upon the kindling; political crimes born in hate quickly spread to more and more actors, claiming more and more victims. On the international scale, hate crimes are abhorrent for this power of theirs to ignite and to escalate, as what began as a small or isolated incident grows quickly to impossible proportions, sometimes consuming entire peoples, entire nations.” Surely! But is this pragmatic argument exclusive to hate crimes? Lust does the same thing, lust for the flesh and lust for the blood; as does greed for material goods and envy for the possessions of others. Religious fervor against non-believers or against men of other faiths has historically made a similar pattern, and is returning today in the menace of Islam. But do we wish to establish an international tribunal to judge the special crimes of lust, greed, or zeal?
These arguments fail to persuade. Then let us return. The law against genocide is surely related to the pluralistic love of diversity, and the consequent praising of the virtue of tolerance, which today characterizes the liberal states of the West. Now, the love of diversity posits a value in all human ways and all human customs. In terms of the law against genocide, we may phrase the issue thus: the law against genocide recognizes that the murder of a group of random individuals on the one hand, and the murder of a group of a given ethnos as ethnos on the other, differ in a fundamental respect: an ethnos as ethnos possesses a special value over and above an undifferentiated mass of individuals, which value resides in its customs and its language, its special physiological and psychological traits, its traditional and habitual ways. The law against genocide, and the special and specially harsh punishments which attend it, exist in honor and in defense of the value inherent to all ethnoi, their special manifestations and social and religious forms. Genocide thus reveals itself as a meta-concept emanating from egalitarianism itself; rather than positing the equality of all human beings, it posits the equality of all human groups. A dictator like Mao who kills indiscriminately destroys human life, and that is terrible; a dictator like Dessalines who kills people of a given ethnos destroys human life and also something else — and that is worse.
This seems a tenable defense, and it is supported by the justification offered by the very inventor of the term “genocide,” one Raphael Lemkin,25 when he states in his “Genocide as a Crime under International Law” that “[the term] mass murder does not convey the specific losses to civilization in the form of the cultural contributions which can be made only by groups of people united through national, racial or cultural characteristics.” For this reason, he saw fit to invent a new term which did recognize these specific losses.
This defense has the added virtue of explaining a fact which our previous arguments could not: namely, why the contemporary world is loath to include attempts at elimination of economic or political classes under the category of genocide. It explains as well why the attempt, say, to destroy all the Christians of the world somehow seems to strike the modern mind as less genocidal than the attempt to obliterate all those who believe in the spirits of the Bushmen. For Christians, or the rich, or royalists, are generic or ecumenical or catholic groups; they are formed by incidental characteristics or intellectual or spiritual attachments which can be adopted by any other human being. If all the affluent people of all the world were suddenly in this moment to be blotted out, that class of human beings could be reconstituted with time. But if a true ethnos disappears, nothing can bring it back again. Just as in the case of murder, a murdered human being cannot be resurrected, so a murdered ethnos cannot arise anew. An ethnos is the product of an inimitable and unreproducible confluence of qualities and characteristics which, once lost, cannot be revived: it is the product and the producer of customs, which are inculcated in human beings from birth by an entire social structure, race, living language, living gods, all linked to a given tradition and a given heritage, a given ancestry, a communal memory. Ethnoi are passed on in the blood and customs of a people. One can, in exceptional cases, become an honorable member of a given ethnos into which one has not been born; but one will never pertain to it in the same way as a person born to it and raised in its care. In this concept of genocide, our modern world addresses, as profoundly as its superficiality will permit it, the deep question of human origins.
But despite this advantage to the explanation in question, we will perceive at once that even it does not save us from our difficulties. The first problem that confronts us is this: the communist dictators, while not being guilty of genocide per se (though Stalin, it should be recalled, did target certain particularly “counter-revolutionary” ethnoi, as the Ukranians, the Poles, and even the Jews), nonetheless must be understood as deracinating, if nothing else, then surely their own peoples, their own ethnoi. They must then be considered every bit as guilty of genocide as any genocidal ruler, if the particular significance of genocide is really to be regarded as the deliberate destruction or dispossession of a people with a will to annihilate its ethnos, its quality as a people.
Yet it may be responded, in good Marxist and even Rousseauan spirit, that Stalin and Mao represented precisely the historical expression of their people, so that they cannot rightly be said to have committed genocidal crimes against their own people. On the contrary — abhorrent as their deeds may appear to us today, yet still in the moment they were but manifestations of a greater “popular will,” the historical and historically determined “self-determination” of the people; therefore their actions are less detestable than Hitler’s, for he targeted groups which included non-German members.
Supposing we find this response detestable, as many of us will: how can we defend this sentiment? For it is not easy to discriminate here between what is a genuine act of a people, and what is a false act of a people; it is not easy to distinguish between what really does emerge from the soil of a people’s ethnos, and what is foisted on it by uncharacteristic or cancerous growths within it or by forces alien to it. And even if we allow this rather cruel defense of the Asiatic dictators, this brings brightly to our attention a new and even more fundamental problem: if it is true that all ethoi are to be respected, despite their differences to our own liberal ethos, then why must we not respect those which hold themselves to be justified in mastering and massacring other peoples?
The modern West is intent on permitting every of what it calls human “cultures” or “sub-cultures” to do as they best see fit and to live as they think it good to live, and it goes very far indeed in defending their “cultural” rights, if not in deed then most certainly in screed. Yet at the same time it evidently believes, and by all evidence quite unanimously, that no “culture” or ethos on Earth can legitimately hold to the proposition, for instance, that it is superior to all others; or that a given ethnos is inferior and so fit for enslavement or subjection; or that there should be no miscegenation between the races, on pain of the penalty of the law; or that religion, or the favor of one’s god, is carried with blood and must be preserved with blood; etc. etc., quite despite the fact that such beliefs have constituted part and parcel of the vast majority of human ethnoi ever to exist.
How are these beliefs compatible with the theory that all human ways are essentially valuable, essentially equal? For are these not human ways, even as, say, the preparing of a trousseau for the daughters of a family, or the initiation of its sons into manhood through a vision quest? Some peoples are warlike; some hold slaves; some refuse to permit intermarriage between members of their clan and the members of other clans; some are cannibalistic, xenophobic, jingoistic. One cannot simply sever these traits from them and expect to “preserve their culture” at the same time. For what would the Vikings or Aztecs or Mongols have been, without their warrior ethic? They would have remained peoples, to be sure, but — the same peoples? What of the ancient Romans? What would they have been, had they not been conquerors and empire-builders, had they restrained themselves to the Seven Hills and satisfied their ambitions on that small tract of the Tiber? (Not to speak of the fact that even to get so far as that they had to overthrow and displace gods know how many local tribes!) Romulus murdered Remus: that is the originating myth of an entire people. How do you expect to strip such a people of its mentality, without stripping it also of some basic aspect of its ethos?
“Yes,” our good egalitarian may hasten to respond, “but these are old stories, atavistic stories, from well before or outside the European Enlightenment — that is, before we knew any better. In those ignorant and dark times the most improbable superstitions and the most naked and animalistic powerhunger ruled the day. Here and now, in our enlightened latter days, one knows better; here and now, one knows to value all human life, no matter to what tribe it belongs, or what shapes and colors it inhabits, or what ways and beliefs it tends. One knows, in short, that if you strip this human being of his costumes and his customs, and flay him of his skin, the results will appear quite the same here, there, or anywhere.”
He really must respond in this vein, to keep any semblance of order amongst his jostling notions. Indeed, even the identitarian, who appears to represent precisely the contrary view, in the end must acquiesce to this: for if he really would posit a “value” in “identity,” such that all “identities” must be preserved against all others, then this certainly means that there is an equality standing amongst these identities, which the moderns above all others in all the history and geography of the world are privileged to perceive. But we must note well just what it is he is claiming: the warlike peoples of the past or present were ignorant, they lived or live in darkness; but any modern peoples of today which hold to their own superiority and by this justify violence, are actually wrongheaded, delirious, mistaken, deluded, evil. The Western liberal view, meanwhile, is the product of knowledge, of light; it is here and now the true and the good view. Western liberalism, far from being one amongst a variety of perfectly equal visions of the world, is here and now the superior vision, and the Western liberal society that it generates is here and now the best society.
This conclusion will be resisted by those progressives who are in particular the latest flowering of that very liberal society, and also by a certain segment of those conservatives who are now as its fallen leaves. These will rebel with all their hearts against any such chauvinism as that implied in what we have just stated; they will object that this is the very position which leads us to act as conquerors and invaders, and not even particularly responsible or competent ones, by tinkering with sovereign nations which we ought by rights leave well enough alone, and attempting to inflict our views on all the world through “state-building” or “regime change” in places which would spew us out. The position that ours is the good society, they will claim, leads of a course to the positions and the policies of the neo-conservatives, and hence to new wars, a new colonialism, and possibly even — God forbid! — new genocides.
But we must beg these conscientious objectors — for it is dearly hard to see how such a thing is to be accomplished — to explain how they expect to address the antinomies we have outlined above, without reference to Western superiority. It does not suffice to bury these ugly contradictions under heaps of pretty bromides; in these troubled times, they will out one way or another. According to the narrow limits of the worldview which presently rules in the West, the possibilities are clear: either the liberal-egalitarian-identitarian position is superior to the ethnocentric conquistador’s, or it is morally indistinguishable from it; if the latter, then the law against genocide is but our peculiar custom, and is no more defensible than an international law prohibiting shoes in mosques, proscribing intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, or permitting voodoo animal sacrifice. And it is no good evasively availing oneself here of “unalienable rights”: for precisely if there are such
rights, then the society which builds itself most coherently upon the respect of those rights, is the best society.
Now, if we cast our glance a moment to the international scene, we are made aware of yet a further ramification of this profound inconsistency in our position. As tolerant and diversity-minded beings, Westerners are much enamored of the multicultural aspect of the globe, the wonderful and most colorful variety of its peoples, nations, and ethoi. The West should most like to preserve this diversity, and its insistence upon the genocide laws is a very great testament to this desire. The West feels that the world is richer with its Eskimos and its Maasai, its Gypsies and its Aymaras. But if the West cannot avoid acknowledging the superiority of its own society, it would seem to follow that all other societies must be ranked according to its standards: that is to say, they must be ranked by the degree to which they meet liberal ideals. The consequence of this in turn is that Westerners must condemn all societies to the exact degree they differ from Western societies — which was precisely the difference they sought most to preserve.
We see this paradox in any number of particular cases in which our liberal mores come most clearly into conflict with the ways of other peoples, as laws mandating burkas in the Middle East, or customs perpetuating the caste system in the Far East, or tribal practices involving genital mutilations and child marriages in Africa. To the degree to which such practices infringe on “human rights,” the West cannot bring itself to abide them; yet it cannot condemn them or seek their eradication without sinning against its own ideal of “diversity” or “identity.” Silence about them is now and then denounced as Western heartlessness and self-infatuation at the expense of the sufferings abroad; yet to attempt to eliminate them is to impinge dangerously on that territory scathingly denounced as “colonialist” or “imperialist” — a territory which is peopled, we are led to understand, exclusively by heartless, ignorant and narcissistic racists. As ever — and most conveniently for the
self-loathing of the contemporary West — we are damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.
And here, precisely in these deepest incoherencies of the contemporary West, all our cackling chickens come home to roost. We return full circle; we come back to “white genocide.”
If one is to posit that each individual ethnos is endowed with a peculiar value which must be preserved; if one is to admit furthermore that a given ethnos cannot be adopted by just anyone (for otherwise we return to the problem that ethnos and ethos become indistinguishable, so that “genocide” really does not exist at all, insofar as an eliminated ethnos, just as an eliminated economic class, could spontaneously reconstitute itself in any given society at any given time); if one is to allow finally that any conscious act to eliminate or to erase a given ethnos by any means whatsoever, be these means political, military, or economic, really is an instance of “genocide” — if one is to grant all of this, which is nothing other than the necessary foundation for the contemporary idea of genocide itself — then there is no way around it, one must acknowledge that the present animus against European civilization is genocidal. The hatred for “white privilege” and the attendant desire to dismantle all the “social structures” and “cultural structures” which uphold that “privilege”; the blithe talk of universal interbreeding to the point that “whites” no longer exist; the tacit and sometimes even explicit denial of the very existence of “white culture,” of the European ethnos; the growing racket of “affirmative action” and similar miscarriages of justice; the preference which is bestowed without the slightest sign of hesitation or embarrassment on everything which emerges from nations abroad, at the expense of our own native histories, traditions, and ways; the unprecedented mass immigration into the West from non-Western societies, which is not only passively permitted but actively encouraged by society and by the powers that be — all of this is nothing but the genocidal urge acting out precisely within our contemporary West. For it will result in, it cannot do other than result in, the final elimination of all European ethnoi from the face of the Earth.
The law against genocide, as any law, is not simply punitive, but is rather and much more emphatically prophylactic: it does not seek simply to punish past wrongs, but to prohibit future ones from ever arising. It is thus imperative that it be used to combat the growing hostility toward European culture which is plaguing the West, before it is too late.
Yet there is a very serious problem concealed in all of this. The primary menace of extinction in our Western societies comes from the intermingling of Western with countless non-Western groups, which intermingling is slowly eroding the character of Western ethnoi. This is occurring thanks to liberalism, egalitarianism, and progressivism. Yet these three braiding currents emerged from nothing other than the European culture itself: they are the products of the European Enlightenment. The European ethnos thus appears to have prepared the ground for its own destruction; the genocide brought against Europeans by non-Europeans is at its essence a mass suicide on the part of the Europeans themselves.
For it is equally undeniable that the Westerners since the close of the Second World War have been beset by shame. They seek to expiate their collective guilt for the genocidal sins ascribed to Hitler and Mussolini by opening their borders and their minds to every practice and custom under the sun, even while shunning our own heritage as a thing scandalous, venomous, violent, malevolent, distorted, distorting, and diluting it to the point of non-existence in the mad cauldron of multiculturalism. They are encouraged in this at every turn, not only by their own perverted and castrated instincts, but also by the authentic will of those who find their own profit in this inner collapse of the West: namely, soulless capitalistic profiteers on the one hand, and a teeming plethora of “minority groups” on the other, particularly those who are granted money, power, or influence by the aforementioned oligarchs. Thus the West is turned against itself; it is brought to suspect itself and fear itself, until it forgets how to stand firm on its own feet. It moves slowly toward that end which is the natural culmination of the “sins” of Europe, that point precisely where these “sins” coalesce with the final dying thrust of a carnalized Christian repentance. A great unconscious urge arises from this confluence: the West immolates itself; it commits genocide — against itself.
This must be regarded as heinous to any Westerner of still vital spirit. Then it would be well to put a few matters in their proper place; it is high time. To begin with, we must be clear as to the nature of the guilt which afflicts us. It is the guilt, not for what we ourselves have done, but for what our “forefathers” have done. It is evidently a guilt, moreover, which cannot be washed away through acts, through deeds, through expiation; it is a sin which evidently runs in the blood, which stains the blood with a stain inexpugnable. But the idea of an ancestral sin irredeemably corrupting all its progeny is not European. The Greeks knew nothing of it; nor the Romans; nor the Celts, the Gauls or the Nordics. The Catholics, in that greatest flowering of high religion yet to arise in the West as West, built their faith even from the first on its innermost and radical denial; the Son of Man is the most arrant repudiation of irredeemable sin imaginable. Its classical exposition is to be found in the Tanakh, in the doctrine of the fall and of its hereditary character: it is a Judaic concept, reimported into the modern West via a modernized and desacralized Christianity, used now to flagellate the sons of that same West into submission.
In all the noble traditions of the West, to be sure, the shame of the father casts its shadow on the son; but that is a shame which by noble deeds can be purged, can be atoned for, can even in a certain sense be brought to augment the halcyon glow of the name it has obscured in the glory of its overcoming. For if the son is of such a mettle as to abye the great shame brought by his father, then he proves himself not only superior to that shame, but capable through his own deeds, together with his those of his forebear, of uniting in a single breast the capacity for great good overcoming the capacity for great wickedness — which is the innermost meaning on the one hand of redemption, and on the other of greatness as the classics understood it. To antiquity, man is born pure: the Occidental idea of salvation through redemption is incompatible with the Hebrew idea of tainted birth or original sin.
Moreover, our modern “Western guilt” is a guilt whose specific weight is not entirely located in our ancestry. We are not guilty merely because we are descended of a European worldview which was capable of culminating in genocidal acts, for instance; for otherwise, we should hardly be alone in our guilt. The Jews themselves keep historical record of their own genocides, against for instance the Canaanites (see Joshua 6–12) and the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15); this record is preserved in no less authoritative a source than their holy scripture. Most every people under the sun has some such blot in its history, either recent or distant: “how much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all good things!” But when one begins really to inquire into the true locus of the guilt that Europe is supposed to bear, one is sure to discover it sooner or later: Europe is guilty, because it gave rise to a society which once attempted to eradicate the chosen people. This is the reason one speaks of the Holocaust as being the slaughter of the Jews; it is why one not infrequently refers to the same event with its proper Jewish name, the “Shoah”; it is why only after the Jews does one perhaps mention the other ethnic groups that suffered in those days (e.g., the Roma, the Slavs, the ethnic Poles, etc.); it is why only specialists or natives know the names that these peoples have given to the same event. It is why the number of Jews that perished in the Holocaust, a number which is moreover of some special symbolic value in the Judaic faith, is common knowledge, while none but the dedicated historian will have any idea how many members of the other groups were killed, even of his own people. The special power of the Holocaust as a historical event, the entire weight and force of its unique terror, is precisely that it was an act against the people of God, against the people of Judea.
Yet the Jews, it should go without saying, are not the chosen people from a European perspective; they are not the “people of God” so far as the West is concerned. Christianity itself, which seems from one perspective to be but the continuation of the Judaic tradition of the West, was nonetheless founded on ecumenicalism, on the inversion of the idea of a chosen people: not the Jews are the chosen people, but whoever is good and God-fearing in his heart; not birth and blood but virtue and grace marks out the “chosen race.” The singular weight which is given to the Holocaust; the idea that it is somehow “unique” in all of history; the controversy it has cast over things which should be perfectly uncontroversial, like the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism (which wished merely to bring to consciousness the crimes of the Soviets, but which threw certain portions of the Jewish community into hysteria for its “false equivalencies” between Soviet and National Socialist crimes) — all of this issues not from a Western view, but from a Jewish view.
This attempt to force the West into subjection to non-Western perspectives indicates two things. First, it indicates that once the men of the West were lords, that we sons of the West have been brought low and made to remain low in order that another might rule over us and in our stead; second, it indicates that we sons of the West are, even to this day, still feared; else the flagellation should not be necessary. One bears the whip before the lion, not before the lamb. The very fact that the West has been subjected to a foreign doctrine and to the implications thereof, that it has been chained by a logic which is not its own and made to bear an otherworldly weight which has no analogue amongst its own traditions, is all unexpected proof that the strength within it has not expired. We are but desperately in need of a way of reawakening that strength and redirecting it. And I say that what has been done by faith or creed can be undone by the same.
All of this is eminently a “question of conscience,” a question of the self-awareness of the West. But beyond this, we must also dispel a certain delusion which has cropped up amongst us in recent years. The belief in the fundamental or present superiority of one’s ways does not perforce lead to militarism, to colonialism, to the invasion of other lands and the infringement on or the reformation of the customs of other peoples. It does so only insofar as it coincides with warlike tendencies existing amongst the broad generality of the people, or with a belief in the universal equality of man which permits one to dream that one’s own ways could become the ways of all the peoples of the Earth. One could well imagine — and there have been, and are today, historical examples — a nation dedicated unabashedly to the protection and preservation of its own higher laws and customs, which yet looks upon all the world from an aloof height, and refuses to become so much as tangentially embroiled in its affairs. Perhaps it even holds a dash of contempt for its neighbors as it goes about its own business with its great cool reserve, and perhaps it even does what it can to maintain all lucidity on the differences between it and those with whom it comes into contact. Thus this contempt, rather than convincing it to invade or enslave the peoples surrounding it, is yet another among the motives persuading it to retract into itself and live according to its own unsullied lights, high upon its hill.
Or perhaps it even revels in the exoticism of what is different from it — so long as this difference is housed firmly abroad — and holds strongly to the principle that these differences, and even the conflicts that they cause, should be, whenever possible, preserved to the world, if for no other reason than the aesthetic; perhaps it puts its hands on the wheel of history every so often, to see to it that the beautiful variety and marvelous painterly heterogeneity of the human planet be perpetuated, or to test its will — but this reasoning and this intervention, too, are nothing but the view from the hill.
How can we explain such a nation? In principle, and quite simply, this nation has never confused morality with universalism; it has never arrived at that most unnatural, unmanly and apolitical supposition, that illness of Western modernity, that all human beings everywhere are in principle identical to one another; it still posits pride in what is its own, and it knows the folly and indeed the disgrace in attempting to make its ways, into the ways of all the world. It maintains its own high remove, it builds its immortal temples, citadels and academes, with a pure imperial instinct. Precisely because its ways are the best, they cannot be everyone’s, and only a fool or a dreamer would attempt to impose the high destiny of such a mountain nation on peoples of the plains.
Let us call this the Occidental view. The problem with such a perspective, of course, is that only nations in unique geographical, sociological, religious, political, or historical conditions can adopt it without having constantly to fear interference of one kind or another. A nation surrounded or infected with hostility and greedy enmity cannot permit itself the luxury of such disdainful isolationism. It must either take up arms against the aggression of its foes, or it must find a way of diffusing that aggression. At times, as we are only too aware, it is even the case that an ethnos within a given nation must defend itself from hostility within its very borders. Such an ethnos needs, then, all the defenses it can muster.
Here we find the highest justification, not just of the laws against genocide, but also and more importantly of the spirit which imbues them in our day. These laws, this spirit, ought perform a twin function; they ought in the first place embody in internationally clarion form the stance of all the Occidental peoples, vis-à-vis a legitimate and legitimating system of sovereignty and diplomacy for all the nations which are Occidental or which have truck with the Occident; in the second place, they ought to regulate as well the internal affairs of these nations, to counteract in them the present Western tendency toward self-loathing suicide. The goal, unspoken and often enough unconscious as it has been, of our stance regarding genocide, has never been to “make the world safe for democracy,” but rather to redeem, defend and prepare the West for the coming of the Occident.