Paul Christensen's Blog - Posts Tagged "folkish"

The Cycle of Nine by Juleigh Howard-Hobson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


'The Cycle of Nine' is an excellent poetic work dealing with cycles, darkness, rebirth, with its titular cycle of nine poems forming the centrepiece of a riveting collection.

The poetess Juleigh Howard-Hobson has a unique gift for feeling inside nature, evoking its inner essences. This is poetry for a time when secrets long hidden emerge into the light of dawn (as is now starting to happen), and even hints at a return of the gods ('Shield Wall').

Recommended for "those who strain to see the rays of the Black Sun."

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The Problem of Democracy by Alain de Benoist

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book seeks to cut through the quasi-religious tone surrounding ‘democracy’ and examine what the word actually means.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, everyone has wanted to be seen as ‘democratic’. Stalin’s Constitution of 1936 even proclaimed the USSR a ‘democracy’.

This wasn’t always the case, though, even among leftists. None of the major French revolutionaries used the term, except Robespierre towards the end of the terror (when it didn’t do him much good!).

‘Democracy’ wasn’t a household word until Toqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’ (1830s). Before that, writers who believed in ‘equality’, such as Rousseau, were admirers of Sparta rather than democratic Athens (ironically, the man who made Athenian democracy famous through the centuries, Pericles, exercised a quasi-royal authority over his city…)

Athenian democracy, in any case, was very different to the modern beast. It was linked to tribe and to place, and thus was very much a blood and soil ideology. Also, the Athenians saw equality (before the law) as a means to democracy, not as something valuable in its own right.

Some thinkers, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, have seen democracy as ‘primitive’, and monarchy as more highly evolved. Alain de Benoist thinks both views, and ‘linear’ views in general, are wrong. In ancient Europe, kings themselves were often elected by popular assembly. Only in the 1100s were most European monarchies hereditary. The vast majority of historical regimes had mixed systems of government.

The working classes were often anti-democratic, as in Medici Florence - because the middle class who favoured democracy would give them less rights than the princes did.

Alain de Benoist thinks the best state is the one that gives the best form to the values of a specific people. (By ‘people’ he means something closer to the French word ‘peuple’ or the German word ‘Volk’, i.e. an ethnic group).

The modern liberal democracy actually distrusts the folk, but de Benoist on the contrary thinks that where there is no folk and only individuals, there can be no democracy.

In chapter IV, de Benoist gives reasons why ‘liberal democracy’ or ‘formal democracy’ (our current system) is indeed a farce.

Among other reasons:

- People elect representatives, but these must delegate their tasks to unelected officials (as portrayed in the classic 1980s satire ‘Yes Minister’).

- Party ‘brands’ mean that candidates aren’t elected for their personal qualities.

- Lukewarm voters are given the same weight as resolute ones.

And so on…

De Benoist’s solution is something he calls ‘Organic Democracy’, involving lots of referenda and plebiscites. This would be folkish, based on fraternity rather than liberty and equality, and thus more similar to the ancient Athenian democracy (something he doesn’t mention, however, is that the democratic faction in Athens fanatically pursued a ruinous fratricidal war with Sparta, whereas the artistocratic faction wanted peace).

His book was written in 1985, and I think things are too far gone now for de Benoist’s folkish democracy to put things right. It could never be implemented under the currect system, anyway. The closest equivalent, populism, has had little real success against the entrenched deep state.

Something more drastic will be required…

But if the crisis Western Man now faces is overcome, a future system of government will evolve organically, and will doubtless contain mixed elements of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy, just as it has throughout our history.





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Black Metal: European Roots and Musical Extremities by Troy Southgate

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It’s hard to remember now, but Black Metal was once an interesting cultural phenomenon

At some point in the 2000s, however, it was infiltrated by New York hipsters, who sucked the life out of it, then tried to rewrite its history as a rebellion against the ‘right-wing, patriarchal church’.

Of course anyone who was around in the ‘90s remembers it was the exact opposite - a rebellion against the stifling left-wing conformity of the Norwegian state church (known in the Scandinavian countries as the Law of Jante, similar to Tall Poppy Syndrome).

Fenriz of Darkthrone recounts a Norwegian swimming race where, instead of the fastest child being the winner, the authorities picked the child whose time was closest to the average. No wonder the Norwegian teenage metalheads rebelled!

At the same time, the best Black Metal bands were more up the volkisch end of the spectrum than the Ayn Rand end.

This book has some interesting essays, and despite being a bit repetitive, is a lot more insightful than the tacky ‘Lords of Chaos’ book.





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