Edgar Julius Jung and metaphysical foundations of the Conservative Revolution

Edgar J. Jung (1894–1934) was the mastermind of the „Young Conservatives“ in the Conservative Revolutionary movement in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Jung’s voluminous work, The Rule of the Inferior (1927/30), in which he outlines his autoritarian weltanschauung, is a radical rejection of democracy and egalitarianism. Instead, Jung evokes the myth of the eternal Reich, the foundations of which he sees not in blood, like the Nazis, but in spirit.

But Jung was not content with giving intellectual guidelines. Quite the contrary, he intended to interfere in politics. Franz von Papen, the German vice-chancellor, for whom Jung wrote political speeches, seemed to be an ideal mouthpiece for Jung’s ideas. In Marburg, on June 17th, 1934 von Papen gave a speech which was of Jung’s making. The so-called “Marburg Speech“ attacked the German government and was meant to break loose a national conservative uprising.

But Jung had underestimated the general well-esteem among the German people of the NS government, and, moreover, bad timing made Jung’s attempt to take over power coincide with the Röhm-Putsch, the failed coup d’état of SA leader Ernst Röhm.

Jung was arrested, and on July 1st, 1934 his body was found shot near Berlin. With Edgar J. Jung one of the outstanding protagonists of the Conservative Revolutionary school of thought was dead.

In this scholarly study in German, the author, Sebastian Maass, traces Jung’s way and puts focus on his radical weltanschauung and thought, as laid down particularly in The Rule of the Inferior. Jung’s intellectual work is portrayed in detail and carefully judged in a non-leftist way. The book has nearly 300 footnotes and the appendix contains the complete text of the infamous “Marburg Speech.“

In his preface, Dr. Karlheinz Weissmann stresses the importance of this thoroughly researched work for the understanding of the Conservative Revolutionary movement.

Die andere deutsche Revolution
Edgar Julius Jung und die metaphysischen Grundlagen der Konservativen Revolution

Author: Sebastian Maass
Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Regin Verlag
Language: German
Product Dimensions: 14,5 x 22,5 cm
ISBN: 978-3-941247-20-8

The book is available through Regin Verlag website.

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Book Description

Julius Evola was a renowned Dadaist artist, Idealist philosopher, critic of politics and Fascism, ‘mystic’, anti-modernist, and scholar of world religions. Evola was all of these things, but he saw each of them as no more than stops along the path to life’s true goal: the realisation of oneself as a truly absolute and free individual living one’s life in accordance with the eternal doctrines of the Primordial Tradition. Much more than an autobiography, The Cinnabar Path in describing the course of Evola‘s life illuminates how the traditionally-oriented individual might avoid the many pitfalls awaiting him in the modern world. More a record of Evola‘s thought process than a recitation of biographical facts, one will here find the distilled essence of a lifetime spent in pursuit of wisdom, in what is surely one of his most important works.

Table of Contents

Foreword

A Note from the Editor

A Note from the Publisher

1. The Path of Cinnabar

2. Personal Background and Early Experiences

3. Abstract Art and Dadaism

4. The Speculative Period of Magical Idealism and the Theory of the Absolute Individual

5. My Encounters with the East and ‘Pagan’ Myth

6. The ‘Ur Group’

7. My Exploration of Origins and Tradition

8. My Experience with ‘La Torre’ and Its Implications

9. Hermeticism and My Critique of Contemporary Spiritualism – The Catholic Problem

10. ‘Revolt Against the Modern World’ and the Mystery of the Grail

11. My Work in Germany and the ‘Doctrine of Awakening’

12. The Issue of Race

13. In Search of Men Among the Ruins

14. Bachofen, Spengler, the ‘Metaphysics of Sex’ and the ‘Left-Hand Path’

15. From the ‘Worker’ to ‘Ride the Tiger’

Appendix: Interviews with Julius Evola (1964-1972)

Additional Information

Title: Julius Evola: The Path of Cinnabar

Author: Evola, Julius

Full Title: The Path of Cinnabar: An Intellectual Autobiography

Binding: Softcover (also avalaible in a hardback edition)

Publisher: Integral Tradition (2009)

Pages: 302

ISBN: 9781907166020

Language: English

Customer review (Source: Amazon.com)

James J. Omeara: Tradition and “The Personal Equation”

The author and translator are both quick to point out that this may be the strangest autobiography ever. Almost completely lacking in clichéd “personal details,” they also both suggest that the book is best regarded as a “guide to [Evola].” As such, this book, long out of print even in Italy, will be self-recommending to the vast and ever-growing crowd of what author and translator jokingly call “evolomaniacs.”

As already noted, Evola provides few if any details of childhood rebellion, love affairs, etc., although there is this cryptic remark: “A spontaneous detachment from … what is generally regarded as normal, particularly in the sphere of affection, emerged as one of my distinctive traits when I was still in my early youth; or rather, it emerged ESPECIALLY in my early youth.” [page 6, emphasis Evola]. In fact, Evola denies any relevance to his environment or heredity, at least in biological terms.

Instead, Evola provides us with his `personal equation,’ a predisposition that he is, indeed, predisposed to attribute to a pre-natal, pre-human existence, taking the form of an thirst for transcendence, what he elsewhere calls “the life which is more than life,” combined with, in Hindu terms, “a kshatriya bent,” manifesting as an hierarchical, aristocratic, and feudal taste.

These two somewhat contradictory features, a “longing for liberation” and an urge for action resulting in self-affirmation, would form his “existential task” and only be reconciled in “my definition of ‘traditionalism’ in my later works.”

Each chapter, then, details the various intellectual and political milieus that Evola found available in the first half of the XXth century, and how he approached, assimilated, and in some cases, most notably the Traditionalist current promoted by Rene Guenon, re-designed each for his own purposes, in accordance with the aforementioned `personal equation.’

Speaking of `tradition:’ Since the ‘evolomaniacs’ will want this book for the content anyway, the only question relevant here is: how well have the publishers `handed on’ [traditio] Evola‘s guide to himself? How well have the translator and editors done their job?

Lacking not only a knowledge of Italian but even the Italian text, I am not of course in a position to offer an authoritative critique of Segio Knipe’s work. However, I can convey my impressions of the result, both as a native speaker of English, as well as a reader with some background in a least one of the many areas of “the Baron’s” expertise.

[Speaking of "The Baron," although the translator, like many others, refers to him as such, there is no evidence in this book, or anywhere else that I have looked, such as the Almanach de Gotha, to show that he was, in fact, an aristocrat -- other than one of the Spirit. Indeed, Evola himself not only never calls himself `Baron,` and slyly says on page 10 that while he never took a university degree because he didn't want to be addressed by some bourgeois title, "I was later to be addressed with all sorts of titles which I do not, in fact, possess." Until proven otherwise, I will insist that his title has the same authenticity as "Baron" Corvo's].

To start with the area of expertise: having been a student of German Idealism in my university days, the chapter I most looked forward to was the one dealing with Evola‘s attempt to master, and then dominate, the [according to him] sorry state of Italian Idealism [Croce, Gentile, etc.] with his own doctrine of Magical Idealism, especially since not even the texts themselves have been translated [other than some lectures available at the Gornahoor site].

Unfortunately, this chapter, the longest in the book, seems to have taken Fichte rather than Schopenhauer as its model, and even someone with the aforementioned scholastic background would find it tough going. Of course, this is Evola‘s fault, not the translator’s; however, the translator has not made things any easier by some idiosyncratic renderings of frequent, and important, terms: most particularly, `placing’ for what is usually translated from German as `positing,’ and `conscience’ in some places for what must be the Italian for `consciousness.’ Although this may reflect some nuance in Italian discussions of Idealism, I think it will needlessly confuse the neophyte, who will have enough problems with Evola‘s Magical Idealism itself.

A few other infelicities: the Fascist publisher Bottai presumably “turned on” Evola, rather than “turned down,” since the articles did appear, but generated a firestorm of protest; and while a `disproval’ is indeed English, it’s an awkward way to `disprove’ something. Otherwise, the translation is quite flowing and idiomatic, even a pleasure to read.

As for the editor’s contributions, these include nearly all of the many footnotes, which provide annotations that go beyond merely filling in names and dates [for which Evola seems to have had an aristocratic disdain, especially English names -- "Mutton' for "Musson,' etc.] to include extensive cross references to books and online resources for further research. I can find no controversial area of Evola studies, from anti-Semitism to National Socialism to sex magic, that the editors have failed to anticipate and provide appropriate guidance.

Of course, one can always find areas of disagreement. The note on page 76 implies that Nietzsche simply “rejected” the antithesis between Apollonian and Dionysian as propounded in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. This is far too blunt; at best, Nietzsche continued to refine the contrast, and Julian Young has argued convincingly that it continued to ground his thought right to the end.

Also, the note on page 17, while containing valuable references to Wasson and Furst, fails to take into account more recent research, by Michael Hoffman for example, which would correct Evola and the editors’ claim that the Greek mystery religions used “wine or other drugs;” Greek wine was no more hallucinogenic than our own, and rather than assuming, as some scholars have, that the Greeks had a different metabolism than our own, we can infer that additional drugs were added to the wine when “mixed” for serving.

Finally, the note on page 151 misleadingly cites a French translation of Hans Bluher as if it were in English; given the almost total lack of English versions of Bluher’s work, despite his influence from the Wandervogel to Francis Parker Yockey, it might have been good to refer the reader to such related works as Hubert Kennedy’s collection, Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany.

The editors have also included translations of six interviews of various lengths, one new, the rest having appeared in the appendix to the Italian edition of Ride the Tiger, totaling 20pp of additional material. Providing clarification on some points, and bringing in Evola‘s views on the contemporary scene, they also provide some charmingly dated slang: “beat girls”? And what on Earth was “the nude look”? Yowsa!

As for the book’s production, the only outright error I can find in the text is `bow’ on page 236, where Evola has already explained that word, appearing in his title, The Bow and the Club, and must now be explaining the `club.’ Also, while there is a beautiful and appropriate cover by Michael Lujan, one wonders whether some of Evola‘s own Dadaist paintings could not have been included as well.

All in all, this is a exceptionally fine edition of an essential book by one of the XXth century’s most essential thinkers. Since the Italian edition is out of print, and given the valuable editorial additions and appendices, this English language version will be the one everyone should get from now on. The publishers are to be congratulated, and above all rewarded with massive sales!

Comment

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Author: Stanislav Maselnik

Denis de Rougemont was a main thinker of the so-called non-conformistes des années trente, a movement of young intellectuals that appeared in France at the morrow of the turbulent 1930s, in opposition to both individualism represented by liberalism and rising collectivism. [1] The main bulk of their work was published between 1930-34 and was concentrated around three separate currents.

• The founders and members of L’Ordre nouveau. An intellectual movement established by the Russian migrant Alexandre Marc (born in 1904 in Odessa as Aleksander Markovitch Lipiansky), its goal was to prepare the conditions for a ‘spiritual rebirth’ of the European culture. Its effort was concentrated on going beyond such dualistic divisions as nationalism-internationalism and capitalism-communism. Its inspirations came, among other sources, from the Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard, the federalism of Proudhon, the great critique of Modernity Nietzsche, or from the historicism of Péguy. The thinkers who were a part of L’Ordre nouveau also included Robert Aron, Arnaud Dandieu, Daniel-Rops, Jean Jardin and finally Denis de Rougemont.

• The Catholic revue L’Esprit of Emmanuel Mounier, founded in 1932. From the beginning it evolved in tight collaboration with L’Ordre nouveau. In reaction to the events of the Second World War it radically shifted to the political left , in order to slowly move back to more moderate positions of the ‘New Left’, under which it still publishes to this date.
• Young thinkers of Jeune Droite, who were mostly dissidents of the French reactionary and monarchistic right Açtion française. These thinkers included Jean de Fabrègues, Jean-Pierre Maxence and Thierry Maulnier.

Furthermore, Ferdinand Kinsky also includes among them those thinkers, from whom the non-conformists drew their inspiration: Stern, Blondel, Buber, Nédoncelle, Karl Barth, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain or Nicholas Berdiaeff.[2]

Although the non-conformists came from different backgrounds and their thinking took on some issues rather opposing positions, they all subscribed to the doctrine of ‘personalism’, and, consequently, to federalism. The non-conformists converged on the point that

‘man was above all not an “individual.” He is a “person,” that is both responsible and free, committed and autonomous, a being in himself, but related to his fellowmen by his responsibility’.[3]

As a person, human being is not a lonely monad, not even a rational being, which could exist outside of society, but a social entity whose nature is fulfilled only by sharing his life in common with others. To live within a society does not mean to be enclosed in a ‘homogeneous’ nation-state, but to be a part of multiple and overlapping ‘intermediary’ communities, which are most naturally formed around family, territory, or profession. For the non-conformists/personalists, these intermediary communities both historically and philosophically ultimately share the common European ‘well’ from which they draw their actual particular ideas and traditions. Europe and its culture for them necessarily precede nations and nation-states. The thinkers such as the Schlegels or Herder constructed the idea of a self-sufficient nation from already present, primordial European philosophical and historical traditions. The English historian Christopher Dawson best summarises this position in his 1932 work The Making of Europe, when he notes that

‘The evil of nationalism does not consist in its loyalty to the traditions of the past or in its vindication of national unity and right of self determination. What is wrong is the identification of this unity with the ultimate and inclusive unity of culture which is a supernatural thing.

The ultimate foundation of our culture is not the national state, but the European unity’.[4]

The nation-state was thus only one realised possibility of the European culture. A peculiar thing about nationalist movements was that they consciously denied the notion of their own continuity and grounding in the common European history and philosophical thought. Martin Heidegger would say this was a perfect manifestation of the ‘metaphysics of subjectivity’ – they picked up one particular set of characteristics out of their European heritage and by intellectual sleight of hand, suppressing the memory of their nations continuity with other European sources,[5] argued for their ‘homogeneity and cultural self-sufficiency’.

The French thinker Alain de Benoist recently argued from the same perspective, when he distinguished our ‘objective’ history as ‘a pile of representations of identity of past times and past protagonists’,[6] from our actual-assumed identity, whose dimension is always political since it is based on the projection of our past towards the future. In other words, our actual identity (in the 19^th and 20^th c., it was that of nations and nation-states), always grounds the collective ‘I’ in the past, based on values and necessities of the present and possibilities of the future. As Alain de Benoist adds, ‘memory screens [our timely, historical identity] and retains what conforms to its idea of the past and to the image it wants to give in order to give it a meaning’.[7]

Diversity of European identities

The purpose of Denis de Rougemont’s book The Idea of Europe is precisely to rip off our identity from the grip of the present and selective memory of nation-states and ground it in the timely and space-bound objective narrative of Europe. Rougemont’s preface to the book also forms the general leitmotif that weaves through the whole work:

‘ Europe is much older than the European nations. Their lack of unity and their ever more illusory claims to absolute sovereignty endanger its very existence. If only they could unite, Europe would be saved, and with it all that remains valuable in its richly creative diversity’.[8]

‘from that time onward the name of Europe and the concept of Europe will recur in even more solemn contexts down to the Carolingian Empire, in apostrophes to the Pope, in ecclesiastical panegyrics, in prose and verse chronicles, and in the lives of the saints’.[12]

The final step was taken with Charlemagne, whose dominium was called ‘Europe vel Regnum Caroli’ and on whom his court poet Angilbert bestowed the titles of ‘head of the world . . . summit [or tiara] of Europe . . . supreme father’.[13] Europe thus becomes a political entity, which is not merely constructed as one of the contemporary three divisions of the map of the world (Europe, Libya or Africa, Asia), it is finally an ‘autonomous entity, endowed with spiritual virtues’.[14]

As we know however, this was a premature spring and the fragmentation of Charlemagne’s empire under his three sons soon followed, as if in the anticipation of the things to come in the period from the 17^th to 20^th century. On 434 pages, Denis de Rougemont continues to recount various conceptualisations of Europe that followed. Nevertheless, what is probably the most intriguing section of the book is part seven,[15] where he tries to mend together various 20^th century historians and thinkers to give us an idea what ‘European identity’ means, if it went through such diverse historical manifestations.

Rougemont’s conceptualisation of European identity

First of all, through his overview of different conceptualisations of Europe, Rougemont lead us to reject the idea that there could be one ‘ true’ atemporal European essence, which could be taken as the lowest ‘common denominator’ of everything European.[16] Europe is above all the totality of its representations – and a European is in the first instance the one who finds in its diversity something that resonates with his ‘present I’. The first step in the formation of any identity is thus conscious self-identification, finding one’s possibilities not by ‘returning to the sources’, but by resorting to the sources in order to discover how do they fit into one’s present and future. It might be therefore said that there are ‘two Europes’, the one which is philosophical and historical, i.e., the one which provides us through its totality with different representations of what it has meant to be a European, and the other which is inherently bound to politics. The latter is dependent on the way one answers the question of what one wants Europe to be – 0n the way how does one ‘chooses’ one’s identity from the possible sources. In other words, in one way Europe (‘unconsciously’) already ‘is’, but in the other way it is still dormant, waiting to be appropriated as a political project – consciously adopted as a part of our own present identity. Only when Europe materialises through the political process as a cultural entity, it will be possible to ‘grasp’ it and built upon it in our social life in new ways.

This idea of ‘two Europes’ is in fact very close to the constitutive or expressivist theory of language of Herder. Its importance was recently recognised by the Canadian communitarian thinker Charles Taylor.[17] Herder, and through him Taylor, argued that the language not only describes the reality (‘what is already there’, on the background), as such theorists as Condillac claimed, but also constitutes and recreates it anew, under a different perspective. For Condillac or Locke, linguistic expression was always linked to some pre-existing content, to the idea that ‘at each stage of [linguistic] process, the idea precede[d] its naming, albeit its discriminability results from a previous act of naming’.[18] Herder, however, adds to the language a new, ‘expressive’ dimension, claiming that the interlocution not only describes, but that ‘it also open[s] possibilities for us which would not be there in its absence’.[19] In other words, by saying something, we do not only describe what is already there, but also shape it to a new dimension. By creating a political Europe, we do not only re-represent what is already there, but we are giving Europe a new dimension by the creative process itself.

Perhaps this was also a reason why Heidegger in his later thought credited the poetry for allowing us to temporally ascend to the ‘authentic’ Being. As one of Heidegger’s interpreters Richard Polt notices, ‘if Heidegger is right, then our most authentic relation to language is poetic. Instead of using language as a tool for representation, we should respect it as a rich source of poetic revelation’.[20] The poet thus represents an authentic existence – instead of using old words and worn out meanings, he ‘appropriates’ the reality in relation to his own person. Does it mean that all great minds who try to build Europe politically are also poets?

This excurse to the theory of language might help us appreciate what Denis de Rougemont is ultimately suggesting in his search for ‘the’ European identity. Although there are undeniable sources of European culture such the ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity, the Celts, or the ancient German tribes, what Europe is for us will in the last instance depend on what do we want it to be. It is true that the most of the European thought arose as the positive or negative reaction to the ancient Greeks, be it the Romans with their sombre gravitas who unsuccessfully tried to emulate the joyous Greek spirit, or the Christians who upheld the rational Apollo at the expense of Dionysos. Nevertheless, in the last instance it always depends on ourselves whether we identify with these sources or not. Paul Valéry for instance felt closest to the Greeks, claiming that

‘what we owe to Greece is perhaps what has most profoundly distinguished us from the rest of humanity. To her we owe the discipline of the Mind, the extraordinary example of perfection in everything. To her we owe the method of thought that tends to relate all things to man, the complete man. Man became for himself the system of reference to which all things must in the end relate. He must therefore develop all the parts of his being and maintain them in a harmony as clear and even as evident as possible. He must develop both body and mind’.[21]

Denis de Rougemont would have certainly agreed with Valéry. One might even argue that personalism itself – with its conception of a person as against the liberal idea of a self-sufficient individual, is the conscious adoption of the Greek heritage on the part of the non-conformists. Rougemont keenly notices that our Greek heritage has become in the recent years more important, arguing that

‘the revival of our interest in things Greek is reflected in the twentieth century by the most varied symptoms: discovery of the pre-Socratic philosophers . . . the vogue for mythology (Freud’s Oedipus complex, the Ulysses of Joyce or Kazantzakis, Spitteler’s Prometheus, Gide’s Theseus, Cocteau’s Orpheus, etc); revival of the themes and titles of Greek tragedy by many playwrights, poets, and composers (“Choephores and Eumenides,” by Claudel and Darius Milhaud, to mention only one example, re-created the sacred thrill of the ancient drama, of which a poet like Racine retained only the plot); rediscovery of the secret of the Doric style; passionate researches into the mystery religions . . .[22]‘.

Philosophically and historically, as Denis de Rougemont shows us in The Idea of Europe, we therefore already are Europeans. Politically and in our memory, some still consider themselves to be enclosed within ‘homogeneous’ national entities and deny their shared European roots. Only the future will shows us, however, whether we will also manage to appropriate our identity politically.

The Laws of the Military Houses

In the Roman Empire and other universal states in the days of their decline, attempts were made to arrest the course of deterioration by “freezing” an existing legal or social situation. The Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan was perhaps unique among universal states in applying this prescription of “freezing” from first to last and in achieving the tour de force of arresting change in the outward forms of social life (though not, of course, in the inward realities) over a span of more than 250 years.

In the domain of law the Tokugawa régime, so far from regarding equality before a uniform law as being a desirable ideal, exerted itself to accentuate and perpetuate a caste division between the feudal aristocracy [daimyōs] and their [samurai] retainers on the one side and the rest of the population on the other which was one of the worst of the wounds that the Japanese Society had inflicted on itself during a foregoing Time of Troubles. The cue was given by Tokugawa leyasu’s predecessor and patron Hideyoshi in an edict of A.D. 1587 (popularly known as “the Taiko’s Sword Hunt”) [Taikō was a title given to a retired kampaku, or adviser to an emperor, and is often applied to Hideyoshi] ordering all non-samurai to surrender any weapons in their possession.

The recently and arduously established central government further sweetened the pill for the feudal lords whom it had deprived of their long-abused de facto local independence by leaving them a very free hand to maintain and develop as they pleased, in all matters that the central government did not consider pertinent to the preservation of its own authority, the variegated “house laws” which the ruling family of each fief had gradually hammered out and enforced, within the limits of its own parochial jurisdiction, during the later stages of the foregoing Time of Troubles, particularly during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era.

The edict entitled “the Laws of the Military Houses” which Tokugawa leyasu promulgated in A.D. 1615, on the morrow of his crushing retort to the last challenge to his absolute authority, “is a document which, like the formularies and ‘house laws’ of earlier times, is not so much a systematic collection of specific injunctions and prohibitions as a group of maxims, in somewhat vague language, supported by learned extracts from the Chinese and Japanese classics.” [This quotation and those that follow are from Sansom, Sir G.: Japan, A Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset Press).]

“This ‘Constitution’ … was regarded by the Shogunate as fundamentally unchangeable. It was re-affirmed by each shogun on his succession, in a solemn ceremony attended by all his vassals; and, though circumstances sometimes forced them to alter it in detail, they never admitted or even contemplated any deviation from its essential principles, and they punished without mercy any breach of its commands.”

This in spite of the edict being vaguely-worded and in spite of the freedom allowed to the feudal lords in particular matters.
It is noteworthy that under this ultra-conservative régime a tendency towards the standardization of local laws did nevertheless declare itself.

“Within their own fiefs the barons enjoyed a very full measure of autonomy. … But the Shogunate, without interfering, used to keep a sharp watch on the conduct of the feudatories, and it was one of the chief duties of the censors (metsuke) and their travelling inspectors to report upon affairs in the fiefs. For this and similar reasons there was a general tendency among the daimyō to assimilate their administrative and judicial methods to those of the central authority, and the legislation in which the Shoguns freely indulged soon began to displace the ‘house laws’ of the fiefs where it did not clash with local sentiment and habit.”

The prestige of the Imperial office in Japan

We have [...] to explain why an Imperial House which exercised effective authority for less than three hundred years after the reorganization of the Imperial Government on a Chinese model in A.D. 645 should have survived for another thousand years in impotence as the sole fount of honour and dispenser of legitimacy. All the de facto rulers of Japan, since the time in the tenth century of the Christian Era when the Imperial Government had lost control, had felt it necessary to do their ruling in the Emperor’s name. At the time of writing, an utterly victorious occupying Power was finding it convenient to administer the country through a native Japanese Government acting in the name of the Emperor of the day.

This extraordinary vitality of the prestige of the Japanese Imperial House had been attributed by the Japanese themselves to their own official belief that the Imperial Family were descendants, in unbroken line, from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. But, though, no doubt, this myth went back to the dawn of Japanese history, the deliberate exploitation of it for a political purpose seemed to be no older than the Meiji Period, when the new masters of Japan, who had wrested the de facto power from the last of the Tokugawa shoguns in A.D. 1868 and had appropriated to themselves the manipulation of the indispensable Imperial puppet under pretence of “restoring” him to the status enjoyed by his forefathers, were concerned to enhance the prestige of the institution in whose name they had to rule.

Moreover, the Emperor Hirohito did not seem to have forfeited his hold on the allegiance of the Japanese people by his public declaration to them, on New Year’s Day 1946, that he was not a god but a man. [Footnote: In his rescript of that date, the Emperor Hirohito declared: “The ties between us and our people have always stood upon mutual trust and affection. They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese people are superior to other races and fated to rule the World” (English text published in The New York Times, 1st January, 1946).] It therefore looked as if there were some firm foundation, other than the Sun Goddess myth, for the immense esteem which the Imperial House had continued to enjoy through all vicissitudes of their fortunes and Japan’s, and this foundation might perhaps be discovered in the historic “reception”, in A.D. 645, of the Chinese Imperial Constitution of that age.

This bureaucratic system of administration was far too elaborate and refined to be practicable under the rude conditions of contemporary Japanese society. Yet its exotic character, which doomed it to a speedy failure in the field of practical politics, may have been the very feature that ensured its age-long preservation as a palladium of the Japanese polity; for the Japanese Imperial Constitution of A.D. 645 was modelled on that of the then reigning Chinese dynasty of the T’ang, and the T’ang Empire had been a resuscitation of the Han Empire, which had been the Sinic Society’s universal state. On this showing, the Japanese Imperial Office in the twentieth century of the Christian Era was living on political capital that had been accumulated by Han Liu Pang in the second century B.C.

Social change under the Tokugawa Shogunate

The Tokugawa régime [1603-1868] set itself to insulate Japan from the rest of the World, and was successful for nearly two and a half centuries [just over two if you reckon from 1641 to 1853] in maintaining this political tour de force; but it found itself powerless to arrest the course of social change within an insulated Japanese Empire, in spite of its efforts to petrify a feudal system, inherited from the preceding “Time of Troubles”, into a permanent dispensation.

“The penetration of money economy in Japan … caused a slow but irresistible revolution, culminating in the breakdown of feudal government and the resumption of intercourse with foreign countries after more than two hundred years of seclusion. What opened the doors was not a summons from without but an explosion from within. … One of [the] first effects [of the new economic forces] was an increase in the wealth of the townspeople, gained at the expense of the samurai and also of the peasants. … The daimyō and their retainers spent their money on luxuries produced by the artisans and sold by the tradesmen, so that by about the year [A.D.] 1700, it is said, nearly all their gold and silver had passed into the hands of the townspeople. They then began to buy goods on credit. Before long they were deeply indebted to the merchant class, and were obliged to pledge, or to make forced sales of, their tax-rice. … Abuses and disaster followed thick and fast. The merchants took to rice-broking, and then to speculating. … It was the members of one class only, and not all of them, who profited by these conditions. These were the merchants, in particular the brokers and money-lenders, despised chōnin or townsmen, who in theory might be killed with impunity by any samurai for mere disrespectful language.

Their social status still remained low, but they held the purse and they were in the ascendant. By the year 1700 they were already one of the strongest and most enterprising elements in the state, and the military caste was slowly losing its influence.” [Square brackets in the original.] [Footnote: Sansom, G. B.: Japan: A Short Cultural History (London 1931, Cresset Press), pp. 460-2. See further eundem: The Western World and Japan (London 1950, Cresset Press), chaps. ix-xi (pp. 177-289).]

If we regard the year 1590 of the Christian Era, in which Hideyoshi overcame the last resistance to his dictatorship, as the date of the foundation of the Japanese universal state, we perceive that it took little more than a century for the rising of the lower layers of water from the depths to the surface to produce a bloodless social revolution in a society which Hideyoshi’s successor Tokugawa leyasu and his heirs had sought to freeze into an almost Platonically Utopian immobility. This social upheaval was a result of the operation of internal forces within a closed system, without any impulsion from outside the frontiers of the Japanese universal state.

The extent of the resultant change is impressive – and the more so, considering that, for a universal state, the Tokugawa Shogunate was culturally homogeneous to an unusually high degree. Apart from a little pariah community of Dutch business men who were strictly segregated on the islet of Deshima, the only heterogeneous element in the otherwise culturally uniform Japanese life of that age was a barbarian Ainu strain that was socially impotent in so far as it was not already culturally assimilated.
But the Dutch were not the only people permitted to trade: the Chinese traded, too, and lived in a special quarter of Nagasaki.
The Tokugawa Shoguns ruled from Edo or Tokyo. The rise of the merchants was the making of the city.
Deshima has since been absorbed by reclaimed land, becoming part of Nagasaki, but the settlement has been restored and can be visited.

The strictest period of isolation (sakoku) lasted from 1641, when Deshima was estabished, to 1853, when Commodore Perry arrived in Edo Bay with his warships. But a considerable branch of learning – Rangaku (literally “Dutch learning”, by extension “Western learning”) – was developed by Japan through its contacts with the Dutch enclave. Dutch learning allowed Japan to keep abreast of Western technology and medicine and was an incubator for the vaster project of learning and absorption which began after 1853 and gained strength after the Meiji restoration. It remained illegal for Japanese to leave Japan until after the restoration.

Originally published in A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

The article was assumed from Synergies européennes.

Zinoviev is now disgusted by the dominant “Westernikism” in the world and cannot accept its haughtiness. He decided thus to leave the West to go back to his Russian homeland. His last work published in Switzerland, La grande rupture (The Big Rupture; ed. L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne) is pushing and assaulting, but without any illusion, full of bitterness and lucidity. A lucidity that will lead him soon to be deprived of his access right to the main media, for having asserted clearly and sharply some truths that aren’t universally accepted. Our correspondent in Paris, Xavier Cheneseau, met ex-Soviet dissident Zinoviev during one of his last stays in the French capital. Zinoviev was attended by his publisher and interpreter Slobodan Despot, who translated into French the Russian answers of the philosopher.

Q.: What do you mean by a “Big Rupture” in your book and which is the central topic of it?

AZ: The Western-European civilization is doubtless the greatest civilization of history. Its apex was incarnated by the development of the main Nation-States as Germany, Italy, Britain and France. At the beginning of the 20th century, the idea appeared of a definitive decay of this civilization, that from then on was perceived as exhausted and mortal. Today one thing is certain: after having allowed the development of a superior organization system, the Western European civilization undergoes history and is not making it anymore. The rupture, that I define in my book, appeared immediately after the Western victory in the Cold War, followed by the crumbling down of the Soviet Block and the transformation of the United States in the only remaining Super-State of our Planet, ruling the entire Western world without any serious challenger.

Q.: According to you, how things evolved towards this situation?

AZ: You can explain it by saying that a new level of an organization that is superior than the one ruling the Western societies, was created, also by the fact that all Western societies were integrated in one single unity, which is a super-civilization, in comparison with the Western civilization, and, endly, by the fact that a World Order was instaured under the leading of the Western world. I was astonished some years ago to state that there was a real and a virtual dimension in every thing. The virtual world is now the dominant culture of nowadays people. In fact, people today perceive the real world through the expedient of this virtual world. They only perceive what the virtual world authorizes them to see. The virtual world doen’t express the world as it is in plain reality.

Q.: According to you, do we still live in a democracy in the context of what you are describing us?

AZ: If you want a democracy to exist actually, you need to accept the possibility of a choice, thus you need plurality. During the Cold World, there was a plurality in the world, i. e. the actual possibility of a democracy: you had the coexistence of a communist system, of a capitalist system and of a group of other countries, which were named the “non-aligned”. The Soviet Block was influenced by the critiques from the West and the West was influenced by the Soviet Union, due to the fact that communist parties were active on the political checkboards of the Western States. Today, you have only one ideology left, which serves exclusively the one-worldists. The belief that the future of human kind doesn’t lay in communism anymore but in americanism (the superior form of Westernikism) is a belief shared by a majority of Westerners.

Q.: Nevertheless in Europe and notably in France, you find, despite of all, political forces that still oppose this general trend…

AZ: The shear existence of those forces is only virtual, it is not real. Look and you will see that this kind of opposition is more and more formal. As a proof, look at the attitude of the European political class during the war against Serbia. Almost unanimously, this political class supported the aggression against this sovereign and free nation.

Q.: Are we then allowed to talk about totalitarianism?

AZ: Totalitarianism spreads itself everywhere because the supranational structure impose its rule and law to all nations. There is a non democratic superstructure, which is giving orders, punishes, organizes blocades, bombs and lets people starve. Financial totalitarianism submitted the political powers. Totalitarianism is a cold ideology. It has no feelings and expresses no pity. Besides, we must accept the fact that people do not resist a bank, but can eventually compel any political dictature to handle or leave power.

Q.: Nevertheless, we can say that the system can explode due to the social situation in our countries…

AZ: Please, don’t display naively illusions. Movements of that sort aren’t possible anymore, because the working class has been replaced by the workless, who are in an extremely weak position, and only aspire to one thing; to get a job.

Q.: If I follow your words, you tell me that our societies aren’t democratic…

AZ: The historical period of the all-pervading democracy of Western style belongs now to the past, because the end of communism introduced us fully in the post-democratic era.

Q.: Which is the role and the power of the media in such a situation?

AZ: The role of the media is that of a very important bolt that can work owing to a genuine sphere, which extends without measure the presence and the activity of the capital and the State’s interests. It’s one of the main pillars on which the Western system settles. The media represent the most powerful instrument to shape the tastes and the forms of knowledge shared by the big mass of people in the world. Today the media represent a real instrument to influence directly the masses. The media interfere in all the sphres of society: sports, everyday life, economics and, of course, politics. Everything becomes an aim for the media. They exert a totalitarian power on the people living nowadays, and even worse, they arrogated for themselves the function of the great arbitrator in the ideological choices.

Q.: How can we in your eyes organize the struggle against this “media-cracy” that surrounds us?

AZ: It’s an historical struggle. We are the witnesses of history but we also take a part in it. We have to take into account the historical time because we have to bring thousands and even millions of people into movement, without having the certainty to win the battle. We have to take into account the fact that millions of people are today the victims of the mediatic contagion. We simply have to take the exemple of the war against Serbia to state that the number of contaminated people is huge. Moreover we must be always on the look-out in order that our attention may not be deviated by the mediatic smoke curtain.

Q.: How do you see the access to power of Vladimir Putin?

AZ: Putin’s access to power is indeed the first sign of an interior resistance against globalization and americanization. But Putin’s success depends in the end and despite of all from factors that are exterior to Russia.

Q.: We hear a lot about a survival of communist ideology in Russia today…

AZ: What do yo mean? Ideas are eternal. The marxist form of communism in Russia has been severely defeated. It survives marginally but isn’t operational anymore. Today you cannot start anything with this ideology. As a proof, I would mention the Russian Communist Party itself, which doesn’t evoke the Revolution anymore. The communists don’t refer to the dictature of the proletariat and evolve even towards liberalism in a certain way.

Q.: Mr. Zinoviev, we thank you for this interview.

(Interview taken for “Synergon” by Xavier Cheneseau and translated into French by Slobodan Despot and into English by Robert Steuckers).