Archeofuturist Reflections Inspired by the Thought of Giorgio Locchi
This is a translation of an essay written by Guillaume Faye in 2002 titled, «Réflexions archéofuturistes inspirées par la pensée de Giorgio Locchi.»
This essay was the preface for a book titled, L'essenza del fascismo , G. Locchi (Arktos, Roma, 1980), reprinted under the title "Espressione politica e repressione del principio sovrumanista", in: L'Uomo libero n°53, March 2002. Any translator notes will be noted as TN. Hyperlinks will be provided to provide additional background information. There are several author notes which are numbered to provide context to what Faye is referring to and they are listed at the end of the essay. Giorgio Locchi was one of the founders of GRECE and was one of the major contributors to the European New Right. His most famous work is “Nietzsche, Wagner e il mito sovrumanista” (Nietzsche, Wagner and the Superhumanist Myth), which has been translated into French but is not available in English yet.
"They will return, these gods for whom you still weep,
Time will bring back the order of ancient days."
I had two main inspirations: Nietzsche and Giorgio Locchi. The first, I never met; the second, I did.
It is certain that I could not have developed certain views and explained a certain worldview in my various works, from 1980 to 1986, and especially since 1998, without the spark that Giorgio Locchi communicated to me through our numerous conversations and the reading of his concise and explosive texts, in which, as with any great master, each word weighs heavily and demands a pause for reflection.
Most of the intellectuals (at the height of the Franco-Italian "New Right," which has practically disappeared today) who frequented Giorgio did not really understand his discourse. Or rather, I think they did not want to understand it. They did not want to cross the Rubicon, to enter that dangerous territory of absolute dissidence. It is not just the legendary Parisian intellectual laziness or the subtle stratagems of the Italian intelligentsia that explain this fact, but a real fear of appearing as an intellectual delinquent.
For Locchi's posthumous position is strange. I have heard many of his "disciples" bestow prestigious laurels upon him, but always shirking when it came to addressing the core of his thought, too burning no doubt. A philosopher? A journalist? A publicist? A thinker? Not enough of any of these. Giorgio Locchi is an awakener and a dynamiter.
I weigh my words: without Giorgio Locchi and his work, which is measured by its intensity rather than its quantity, and which also rested on a patient work of oral formation, the true chain of defense of European identity would probably be broken.
This brief text by Giorgio Locchi, of exceptional conceptual density, of a philosophical richness that many candidates for the status of "thinker" can envy, has the advantage of revealing one of the nerve centers of his analyses. He speaks of "fascism" not as a simple political nebula, but as a totalizing world-conception; not as a phenomenon circumscribed in the past, but as a kind of fire lit in European history and certainly not about to be extinguished. For him, the essence of fascism, its inner engine, is the historical reversal of Egalitarianism in favor of what he calls Superhumanism.
He begins by noting that fascism, militarily defeated, has always been judged from a moral and politically sinful point of view by its victors, but practically never from a historical, philosophical and spiritual angle, ("world vision and spiritual reference" as well as "system of values") which is nevertheless the most important, knowing that "the 'fascist phenomenon' is present above all as a phantasm of its adversaries". For Locchi, one can say that fascism surpasses itself and means much more for the European destiny than the vicissitudes of various political movements. This significance of the "fascist phenomenon" is such a philosophical thunder for today's decomposing Western ethics that it is totally obscured.
For Locchi, as for Adriano Romualdi, the origin of the fascist phenomenon is found in Nietzsche ("the 'matrix' of the fascist phenomenon [is] in Nietzsche's discourse"). Like Nietzsche, who associates pre-Christian ancestral memory with a bold and revolutionary future, fascism, a constituent part of the Conservative Revolution, is both "a retreat to origins and a project for the future".
This analysis by Locchi struck me, as it seemed to me that fascism was very precisely archeofuturist, the name of the neologism I coined to title one of my latest books. Fascism is archeofuturist because it wants to rely on the arche, the pre-Christian founding beginning of Indo-European peoples, in order to construct a worldview and a post-Christian project for the future of our civilization.
For Locchi, fascism is the first incarnate expression of Superhumanism, whose origin goes back mainly to Nietzsche and Wagner, absolute opposition to the Egalitarianism of modern times, the despiritualized product of Christianity and main cause of the decadence of the European oecumene. The fascist movement obviously has nothing materialistic or politicking about it: it aims to establish a new spirituality (therefore communal and popular), a new a-Christian life-form in the future, conforming to the archaic spirit of ancient Greek, Roman or Germanic cults; in radical, absolute, irreconcilable opposition to the great egalitarian cycle begun with Christianity, the beginning of the Semitization of Europe.
One cannot but be struck by the pertinence of these views since it is indeed Christian humanitarian and egalitarian charity, whether secularized in European social democracy or still somewhat religious in modern Christian Churches, which is the main ferment of the degeneration of European identity and will.
Locchi demonstrates that fascism is, on a historical scale, the only revolutionary movement and that Horkheimer, one of the founders of the dissident Marxism of the Frankfurt School, was quite right to assert that "revolution can only be fascist".
Locchi includes National Socialism and other movements of the era in the fascist orbit and does not limit it to Mussolini's "neo-Roman" imperial doctrine; likewise, he believes that, more or less consciously, since Nietzsche and Wagner, with varying degrees of purity and compromise, the general principles of fascism have spread throughout Europe in the first half of the 20th century, in political but also metapolitical and cultural forms.
Locchi thus understands the term "fascist phenomenon" not narrowly as an Italian political movement taken up in other European countries and defeated by the Second World War, but as a global movement of historical scope, as the transfigured, metamorphic return of a world-conception that expresses itself in all human, cultural, aesthetic, philosophical, spiritual, and obviously social, economic, geopolitical and political domains. This world-conception, both radically new and ancestral, is at the same time an absolute rupture with Egalitarianism – judged to be a ferment of decomposition like a virus – and a will to project, to construct in the present if possible, but above all in the future, another world; the latter, unlike the egalitarian utopias (communist, liberal, Christian, etc.) which claim to be "rational" but whose projected worlds are only impracticable chimeras that end in putrefaction and catastrophes, is by no means the fruit of an "irrational" hubris but, through the mobilizing myth, the reappropriation by Europeans in new forms of their forgotten – and not lost – soul. Locchi is the discoverer of this superhumanist myth, a reminder to true Europeans of their deep identity. This ultra-world which fascism aims at is thus both a fantastic historical challenge, but also an achievable aim, unlike the anti-vital vaticinations (and therefore condemned in advance by the Tribunal of History) of all the variations of egalitarian ideology.
Fascism is thus a metamorphic reconstruction of a world-conception and a form of civilization of which Europeans have been dispossessed by the egalitarian virus, century after century, since the Christianization of Rome. Its scope is therefore immense and goes beyond (although it includes) the field of political "programs".
The object of fascism is indeed a change of civilization and not just of regime. It envisions politics as a true form of historical aesthetics, with the sovereign function being responsible for shaping a destiny for the people and a project for their civilization over the long term and for the future.
Fascism – with the ideologies it contains – is the only worldview that diametrically opposes, on all points, in analyses as well as in aims and ideals, all other ideologies, whether Christian, liberal, social-democratic, Marxist, etc.
Locchi demonstrates that these ideologies only diverge superficially but agree on the essential, Egalitarianism, with its known consequences: cosmopolitanism, universalism, individualism, economism, pan-mixism (TN: cultural mixing), etc. They form a true "single party", articulated in pseudopods, innervated by the same "single thought"; and the political, ideological, and philosophical cleavage in Europe since the 1930s does not at all separate the "right" from the "left" (the right being only a moderate left and the left only a disguised right) but explicitly or implicitly opposes all the political families of the hegemonic System and the avowed or unavowed fascist currents. The conflicts between the right and the left are only electoral while the conflict between the latter and fascism is global and concerns all the values and aims of civilization. Alone against all, such is the destiny of fascism. A normal situation since it is the only bearer of a radical counter-project.
Even if it does not always admit it, the System is perfectly aware of this, since from the 1930s until today we often see, at each political crisis, the formation of "anti-fascist fronts", called "Republican Fronts" in France. (1)
And this is indeed - among other causes - what allows fascism to endure; since it benefits from this unique situation of monopoly of opposition, which, despite the demonization of movements suspected of belonging to this cursed and sinful cave, nevertheless confers upon it a prestige and a power of secret attraction (and of recourse, especially in troubled times), which would not have existed if the System had abstained from casting quasi-religious anathemas on everything supposed to be infected by the fascist Evil.
This demonization of fascism finds its primary cause in the atrocities that National Socialist Germany allegedly committed before its military defeat. But the argument is weak since many other ideologies and political systems (communist regimes, the United States, Israel, Islamism, etc.) have perpetrated and committed well-established "crimes against humanity" or "war crimes", this time, and never recognized as such, never sources of demonization. The anathema against fascism actually dates back to the 1930s, before the alleged German "atrocities", and was initiated by the Soviet NKVD, immediately relayed by Western "democratic" regimes. Thirdly, the Mussolini regime was not recognized by the victors as guilty of any satanic exaction, and yet it did not escape excommunication.
So where does this demonization of fascism come from? In reality - and this is the second cause - it comes from its very ideology, in that it radically refutes the axioms of Egalitarianism and especially elaborates a civilizational project considered diabolical and perverse by the System's clergy. It is quite normal for Egalitarianism to be moved and to bring out its heavy artillery against a political and civilizational enterprise that aims at nothing less than ending its more than millennial reign. The world-conception conveyed by fascism is felt by the System's elites not only as a major challenge, as a demonic temptation to which European peoples (intrinsically sinners) could succumb, but - sincerely - as a curse, the incarnation of Evil, barbarism resurrected from the depths of ages. For egalitarian parties, fascist currents are not strictly political adversaries who would play the sympathetic sport of "alternation", but - rightly so - a secular enterprise determined to eliminate them definitively from the historical field; and an enterprise that is declared outside civilization, that is to say outside Western civilization which thinks of itself as the only one worthy of the name. (2)
The explanation is simple: as Locchi detected, all egalitarian currents - even atheist ones - express the values and utopias of Christianity, while, in the lineage of Nietzsche, all currents of fascism - even if they absorb Christian Churches - implicitly intend to return to a pre-Christian European spiritual and philosophical sensibility, updated and hardened. Now nothing is stronger, more crystallizing of hatred than oppositions of a religious or para-religious nature. The demonization of fascist currents by the System is quite exactly similar to the demonization of pagan cults during the Late Empire and the Middle Ages. The object of fascism is more or less consciously felt as an attempt to re-establish a pre-Christian ethic for a post-Christian world to be built; which constitutes an abomination, so much have the values of Christian egalitarianism been integrated, digested, and absorbed by the establishment of European countries and all the "Western" bourgeoisie.
Egalitarianism has perfectly perceived in the fascist phenomenon the absolute enemy; it has well understood that the ambition of fascism was of the same magnitude as its own: to become the new hegemonic world-conception in Europe (by divorcing in a revolutionary way the notions of "Europe" and "West") Locchi does not hide it and perfectly understands this total war waged on fascism, intelligently avoiding complaining about it.
What are the main values shared by all movements of the "fascist sphere" since the 1930s, which send the guardians of the Temple and the gurus of egalitarian prudishness into trances? We can note:
The recognition of inequality of value between men, differentialist hierarchy between peoples, the pursuit of ethnic homogeneity of nations and the rejection of racial mixing (3), economic autarky, the ethic of honor, coded aesthetics as the foundation of art, disciplinary education, the principle of selection based on merit and talent extended to the whole of society, the prohibition of speculative and globalized capitalism, the eradication of social or sexual deviancies and pathologies (not in the name of metaphysics but of principles of biological and ethological hygiene) (4), and finally, more or less consciously formulated, the recourse to the Will to Power, a vitalist principle of inegalitarian transcendence of the human condition, totally incompatible with Christian humanism based on the metaphysical monad of Man or Kant's moral universalism.
Let us also mention the relativization of Good and Evil and the dynamiting of this duality, carried out by Nietzsche, in line with the moral systems of European Antiquity.
Fascism: thought of totality, explains Locchi. For the totality of the citizen's life, in its private, biological and lineage aspects, festive and communal, professional, etc. are gathered into a single force, within the common energy of his People, an entity no longer quantitative and presentist but assimilated to a historical being.
Locchi notes that today the fascist sphere, even if it cannot speak its name, is condemned to media silence, persecutions, and exclusion. The fascist "barbarism" is nothing other than its audacity to commit a crime of lèse-majesté against the roots of egalitarian humanism, against its soteriology and eschatology, a capital sin that communism (the real barbarism, this time) had never dared to commit.
On fascism, continuing Locchi's thought, the Egalitarian Reign of the West has the same view as the triumphant Christians of the 4th century had on the pagan resistance of Julian the Apostate, that the Church had on the Amerindian idolaters, or that the Imams still have on the living polytheism of India: the absolute Evil, the obstinate negationism of the Truth and the sacred and linear-ascending Sense of History, the heresy of rejecting the doctrine of Salvation - directly Christian or "Christianomorphic" and secularized.
Anti-fascism therefore relates very exactly to anathema, which excludes any rational discussion and - by anti-dialectical effect - undermines from within this anti-fascist discourse by conferring in hollow to fascism the legitimacy of contestation, of anti-dogmatism, that is to say the virtues of Greek rationality (not at all incompatible with myth), always tempting for the European soul. The doubt cast by Superhumanism on Egalitarianism, by the fascist sphere on the System, is felt as a shock, a stab, a real profanation. For Egalitarianism had never doubted its triumph. Anti-fascism is therefore not at all a rational political reaction, but a religious and metaphysical reaction.
At this point, two other reflections emerge. First, it is about explaining the reasons why fascism, stemming as Locchi saw it from the Wagnerian and Nietzschean initiation, has, from the start, been fought with desperate and relentless violence by the egalitarian West (whose asymptote was the Western-Communist coalition of the Second World War). It is because, for the first time in its history, since the fall of the authentic imperial Rome, Egalitarianism saw resurge, suddenly, without warning, like a horrible surprise, the absolute Enemy it believed dead and buried. "The Great Pan is back," Montherlant significantly wrote in Le solstice de Juin, in the aftermath of the French defeat of June 1940, in which he saw the victory of the "solar wheel" over "the Galilean"; that is to say, well beyond a military episode (for after all, it was not the first time that France was militarily beaten by a neighbor), the defeat of a "principle" (Locchian term) against another that was believed to have disappeared.
Then, let us ask ourselves why this "fascist sphere" is much more fought against, censored, and criminally prosecuted since the 90s than in the immediate post-war period when the memory of the titanic and mythified struggle against incarnate fascisms was still burning.
First explanation: since the fall of historical communism, the two cloned branches of Egalitarianism form only one, that of capitalist cosmopolitanism. The latter does not consider Islam as the "new main enemy", since it is also egalitarian, universalist, and Semitomorphic (5). So fascism remains, which becomes again the main peril, although no movement claims to be part of it and although the parties suspected of being inspired by it have no grip on European governments.
What is happening today confirms all of Locchi's predictions. From the moment the System no longer has its internal communist enemy brother, in the 90s, fascism is again designated as the absolute danger. Although it is virtual, it is suspected of being able to become real again at any moment, of being able to bite again into the popular public spirit of native Europeans, always held under surveillance, always accused of temptation to heresy, haunted by the return to fascist "barbarism". Some accuse the dominant ideology of "fantasies", but they are mistaken. The dominant ideology is perceptive and it is perfectly right to fear the scenario of a return of fascism, as we will see later.
This is why the constantly reinforced legal arsenal, the sledgehammer of incessant media propaganda, the hammering of guilt-inducing imprecations directed against any trace of fascism in the European Union constitute an imposing apparatus for preventing its return in a new form. We must not take the masters of the System for fools.
And this indicates to us the second reason for the reconstitution of the "anti-fascist front" by the European right-lefts: because in fact, the hegemonic ideology has perfectly detected in the birth and electoral breakthroughs of various identitarian parties and movements in Europe an alarming signal. Marginal, circumscribed, controlled in a microscopic culture broth at the bottom of a carefully rubberized jar until the 80s, the fascist virus, in the eyes of the System, has managed to escape from its sterile and prophylactic prison to reinfect parties and movements that have a storefront and a beginning of access to the media (TV in particular); and this, although said identitarian parties or movements refrain from any explicit reference to pre-war Italian and German political doctrines, and take the precaution in their programs (judged perfectly hypocritical by the masters of the System) of integrating elements of the egalitarian vulgate.
The System, through this increase in anti-fascist provisions and propaganda, also aims to ensure what I call negative legitimation. A government legitimizes itself "positively" when it convinces the electorate of its merits, concrete achievements, improvements in living conditions, etc. The undertaking is difficult today for European governments that can less and less hide that all indicators are in the red: worsening economic situation, growing insecurity, massive migratory colonization, the collapse of indigenous cultural landmarks, various ecological disasters, humiliating submission to the American suzerain, etc.
Governments then frantically attempt (especially in France) to legitimize themselves "negatively": it's us or the flood, it's our good old "democracy" - admittedly imperfect - or the Fascist Hydra, the vile Beast, political and moral pornography, the ransacking of the Temple of Human Rights, in short, Tyranny aggravated by the mortal sin of racist abomination. From its point of view, the System has no other means than this negative legitimization (binomial of moralizing and guilt-inducing propaganda / judicial repression and socio-economic exclusion of Sinners) to maintain its power. By "System," we should understand not only governments and state apparatuses, but also the media, Churches, subsidized associations, unions, the University, judicial power, cultural institutions, the entertainment industry, capitalist firms, financial powers, etc., all united against a peril they rightly consider global: that of a worldview and a historical movement that threatens all of their social positions, their ideals, but also their interests. One hypothesis would have been that Egalitarianism applied to fascism this famous Roman maxim, de minimis non curat praetor, "the praetor does not concern himself with trifles." But it could not, because fascism is not a "trifling matter." Giorgio Locchi explains in his text that it aims at nothing less, in the perspective of the Nietzschean "enigma," than "to regenerate history itself by provoking the Zeitumbruch, the 'break in historical time.'"
In its anti-fascist struggle, the System faces a delicate contradiction: founded on "democracy," it must more or less put its grand democratic principles in parentheses to block the path to a potential neo-fascism. For it is not the bourgeoisie that is suspected of constituting the foundation of fascism, but indeed the indigenous European peoples of the middle and lower classes, renamed the "populace." This constitutes a break with, for example, the analyses of left-wing anti-fascists of the 1930s. Hence a dual strategy: on one hand, concretely abolishing democracy (in favor of technocracy) at the level of the European Union, which already controls 40% of regulations of all kinds; on the other hand, "changing the people," according to Berthold Brecht's formula: that is, submerging the indigenous European middle and lower classes under a flood of migrants, a new electorate that will no longer have the sinful temptations of a "return to origins and identity." A people of mulattoes without memory or projection of the future: this is the clever counter-fire lit by Egalitarianism, this is the counter-poison it has logically found.
This strategy, let's admit, is quite well thought out. The only problem is that it can take time and it's a race against the clock. Yes, a race between reaching a breaking and tipping point where the European masses, still largely in the majority in their own countries, could tip into a post-fascism of internal reconquest, and the moment when a certain proportion of the "people" will no longer be of European origin, thus absolved of any temptation and deprived of any possibility of bringing an avatar of fascism to the throne.
But one might ask: why speak of fascism in the present tense and never in the past, as if it were still alive? Because it is still alive, and more than ever. Locchi states it in the text you are about to read with this enigmatic notion, but fundamentally thunderous in clarity, of catacombs, which I will return to.
For it is truly extraordinary that a movement, crushed by war, forbidden, which has formally disappeared, continues to be so talked about and to frighten the System so much. Could it be a kind of undead, a ghost or ectoplasm ready to rematerialize? A Phoenix rising from its ashes? The specter of fascism haunts the guardians of the Temple. And they are not necessarily wrong... Moreover, its worst enemies have not misunderstood its nature so badly: they have clearly seen that its threat still existed, that the deceased was only asleep in catalepsy, that the heat of the embers was still intact; in the worried doublespeak of the System's priests, both hateful and anxious, this leitmotiv of obvious biblical inspiration has been repeated for more than fifty years: "it is still fertile, the womb of the Vile Beast". This anathema - which assimilates fascism to the Antichrist of the Apocalypse, even among atheist communist thinkers - nevertheless betrays a certain historical lucidity.
For the conditions that presided over its birth at the beginning of the 20th century, far from diminishing, have been exacerbated. The progression of the egalitarian virus has been such in recent decades that the situation of European peoples is approaching what mathematicians who adhere to the "catastrophe theory" (René Thom) call the "tipping point".
The great anxiety of the System is that in the coming years, there will be an explosive cocktail much stronger than in the thirties which, by return mail, will give rise in Europe to the re-emergence of a second fascism, necessarily more ponderous than the first...
This anxiety, totally absent until the 80s, today haunts all ideological debates in Western Europe.
Locchi's tragic optimism, which was confirmed to me upon reading this brief essay, perfectly aligns with the positions I have recently defended. For him, fascism was premature and not ripe because the decomposition of the Western-egalitarian system and its level of decadence (in the Thirties) was nothing compared to what we know today and will experience.
He wonders if "the fascist regimes of the first half of the 20th century [were] not appeared too early, prematurely" and owe their emergence to "fortuitous circumstances which, in appearance and only in it, anticipated the future predicted by Nietzsche." The latter, Locchi explains, believed that his "movement" (Bewegung) of subversion (Umwertung) of egalitarian values "could only assert itself on the ruins of the existing social and cultural system," which was not at all the case in the thirties, because "we know that the egalitarian system was in reality still strong and that, from the Nietzschean point of view, it was far from having exhausted its spiritual and material resources".
Today, with the acceleration of the viral process of degeneration, we perceive that the breaking point of the egalitarian system is perhaps not very far off, what I have several times described as the "convergence of catastrophes". Only at that moment would a true fascism be ripe and could unfold in European History. It would be a response commensurate with the tragedy that we may experience (and that Europe has never faced before), the ultimate and only alternative to the pure and simple disappearance of our civilization.
Of course, a new age of fascism will probably not take this last denomination. And its face will be very different from the movements of the 20s and 30s. But the inspiration and worldview will obviously remain the same.
It may be that the scenario unfolds as I have explained in several of my recent works. In this case, historical fascism or first fascism will have been only a dress rehearsal, a first act, and by no means a twilight of the gods. Locchi: "the extreme position becomes 'positive nihilism' and wants to rebuild on the ruins of Europe a 'new order' by giving life to the 'third man'". This third man would be, according to a movement of dialectical rebound, the metamorphic and superhuman appearance (at least in its elites) of the man of Greco-Hellenic-Germanic paganisms, in surpassing and in negation of the decadent man - and brought down by his own egalitarian viruses, slowly developed in the long maceration of Christianity.
Another point, very untimely but quite current: Locchi, in this essay, believes that "since 1945, the 'fascist' who wants to conduct political action is forced to carry it out under a false flag and must publicly deny the fundamental aspects of the 'fascist discourse', verbally sacrificing to the principles of democratic ideology". This was true until recently. It will be less and less so, given the worsening circumstances. One will be able, more than before, to openly criticize the principles of the System - in full bankruptcy -, provided one has the intelligence not to make explicit references (or worse, folkloric-iconographic) to historical fascist movements.
The times are approaching when one will be able to hold an inegalitarian, superhumanist, revolutionary discourse, rid of all visible attributes of historical fascisms. The System's censorship is much less clever and perceptive than one thinks, because it attaches itself to forms rather than substance, which is no longer mastered.
Another reflection that goes in the same direction: Locchi masterfully detected the profound cause of anti-fascism, which has nothing political, but all philosophical: "[what] commands the egalitarian camp to absolutely repress 'fascism', [is that] the 'fascist' does not want this end of history proposed by egalitarianism and he acts to make it impossible." Indeed, Locchi was the first to highlight what seems banal today to many "identitarian" intellectuals, but was not at all before, namely that the great egalitarian family (Judeo-Christian, liberal, Marxist, leftist and, obviously Muslim) is cemented by its eschatological and soteriological conception of History, the latter being a segmentary line heading towards a final point (last judgment), earthly or metempsychic, where Good will triumph.
Quite the opposite, the superhumanist vision of History, expressed by Nietzsche and felt by fascisms, is random. Locchi is the only one who formulated it as "spherical" (and not "cyclical"), having, alone, understood the Nietzschean notion of "eternal return of the same" - and not of the "identical". Now, the System, with the fall of communism, saw this end of history finally approaching. And the opposite is happening, at the beginning of the 21st century. The argument of demonization of the fascist worldview, accused of historicism, anti-progressivism, and refusal of Salvation, is singularly troubled by observable events, which all invalidate the eschatological angelism (TN: naive idealism) of the System and the egalitarian project: planetary history (re)becomes a witches' cauldron and no longer a long tranquil river flowing towards the sea, Mare Tranquillitatis... The democratic, Kantian wisdom of a pacified, multi-ethnic society, etc., is not forthcoming. Egalitarian rationality reveals itself as an unrealistic utopia and fascist "irrationality" as conforming to reality.
Because this new century is already proving to be in total opposition to all the projects of Egalitarianism; it will be a century of iron, fire, blood, of struggle between peoples and civilizations, of the resurgence of dormant memories into formidable forces (look at Islam...), in short it will corroborate the world-conception and intuition of fascism in the broad sense, let's say Nietzschean, and will render stupid the reveries of the Church Fathers and obsolete those of Kant and his successors of the 19th and 20th centuries (6).
The 21st century will see, in my opinion, the internal collapse of the Western branch of Egalitarianism, as its communist offshoot imploded. A narrow passage will thus be left to European Superhumanism, or to something else that will no longer be European at all, and already threatens... As the proverb says: it passes or it breaks. As a tragic optimist, Giorgio Locchi remarks that the heirs of fascism still live today "in the catacombs", but he suggests that one also comes out of the catacombs, as did in its time the first Christianity... Each in turn.
I ask you to carefully preserve this text by Giorgio Locchi, to read it, reread it, have it read, and ponder over it. This preface, like the introduction and notes by my very dear friend Stefano Vaj (TN: Stefano Vaj is an Italian transhumanist thinker), are merely settings, frames in which the central painting is inserted. For Giorgio Locchi's words are to be listened to or read slowly. One becomes imbued with them, always detecting something unexpected, unsettling, and true. Giorgio Locchi never speaks of the past as such, as a dead object, but he always has this wink towards the future. One discovers in him new lights, as when one carefully looks at a master's painting, glimmers of dawn, reasons to hope. And to fight.
Author Notes
The discourse of these "Republican Fronts" is to designate as "fascist" forces that fiercely deny having any connection with historical fascisms, which is sociologically and philosophically false, but obviously impossible to admit. This is the "funny game" of hide-and-seek and simulacra that has been played since 1945 and which results in the word "fascist" surviving only because its fiercest adversaries maintain it as an indispensable "semantic hat" in order not to lose sight of the mortal enemy. Let's remember that the word "fascism", an Italian neologism, refers to the "fasces of the lictors", bodyguards of Roman magistrates (bundles of wooden rods tied with bands and holding an axe head at the top). This symbol was also present in French republican coats of arms after the Revolution, in reference to the Roman republic. Through this neologism of "fascism", the Italian revolutionaries wanted to signify that the nation now formed only one body, one spirit organically linked, gathered like a bundle of weapons, in a totalizing will and destiny.
Even in political science treatises that aim to be descriptive and objective, the fascist phenomenon is judged in an affective, emotional, religious manner. As an anthology of the genre, here is what we read from the pen of Philippe Nemo (History of Political Ideas, PUF), mixing historical truth and lucidity with metaphysical delusions (underlined): fascisms represent "radically anti-Christian and anti-civic anthropological practices, which are a total rejection not only of democratic and liberal values and institutions, but of Western civilization itself [...] These monstrosities were only viable for a few decades, since, when one intends to recreate the very type of social bond that characterized tribal or archaic societies, one can only regress towards the performance level of the latter. One puts oneself in a bad position to stay in the race for scientific, technological and economic progress, etc." This liberal vision, accurate on the anti-Christian and anti-Western character of fascism, sinks into idiocy and lack of critical sense: for it is precisely in the technical and economic domains that fascisms were more performant and futuristic than Western democracies!
The Parisian "new right" has blurred the lines of the "inegalitarian" discourse it claimed to embody, through the invention of the superficial concept of "ethnopluralism" and through an erroneous interpretation of the notion of "Empire" (imperium), missteps that Giorgio mocked with discreet contempt. "Ethnopluralism" was increasingly understood (and still is) by these intellectuals as the utopian "communitarian" cohabitation of ethnicities from all over the world in Europe. This inevitably leads to what H.S. Chamberlain called ethnic chaos, a dissolving project situated at the very heart of Egalitarianism's thematic. The only acceptable definition of "ethnopluralism" would have been that of "each to their own", and even then, this vision overlooks the idea of qualitative hierarchy between peoples which, whether one likes it or not, is omnipresent in the so-called "fascist" worldview. Similarly, the idea of "Empire" defended by the aforementioned intellectuals (similar to that of the Christianized imperium romanum) refers to an amalgam of heterogeneous peoples without ethnic ties, the exact opposite of the European imperial idea that Giorgio Locchi defended and which, following him, I pursue: a gathering of peoples related by blood ties, history and culture, united by a superior auctoritas in a common destiny. Fascisms, in their idea of ethnic homogeneity, were only applying Aristotle's rational concept of philia: ethno-cultural kinship as the foundation of the City. All these confusions made by the intellectuals of the Franco-Italian "ND" movement were judged by Giorgio Locchi, in the conversations we had - and even before this drift worsened as it has today - as the pathetic effort of people affectively and romantically tempted and marked by certain aspects of "fascism", to recuperate the central concepts of Egalitarianism, which are nevertheless incompatible; and this, with a goal - moreover missed - of political and social propriety. This drift, foreseen by Giorgio Locchi, is now fully evident since the aforementioned Italian and French intellectuals have objectively constituted themselves as an internal and artificial opposition to the System, aligned with the simulated "anti-globalist" positions of the left, silent on migratory colonization and the grip of Islam (or sometimes even slyly favorable), in short, recuperated while still being excluded.
"Racism", in the current sense of a doctrine attributing great importance to biological anthropology in the formation of civilizations and the political pursuit of optimal ethno-biological homogeneity, which we are led to believe was practically the sole doctrinal axis of fascisms, was in fact widespread since the mid-19th century in many currents of all tendencies. Disraeli, Marx, Engels, Renan were perfectly racist in the current sense. We find in Hegel (in Lectures on the Philosophy of History) developments on the inequality of races and the historical impasse of mixtures, and in Voltaire (Philosophical Dictionary) the constant idea of a qualitative hierarchy of races, which seemed perfectly natural to him. Moreover, not to mention Gobineau or Lapouge, it was in France (and not in post-Fichte Germany) that racist theories originated, as a structured corpus. The word "race", in the contemporary sense, was created by François Bernier in 1684 and "racism", as a challenge to the unity of the human species, dates back to the zoologists Linnaeus, Maupertuis and Buffon. In short, all this to say that "fascism", especially in its German version, never doctrinally invented racism - even among authors like Rosenberg and Darré. Bernard-Henry Lévy in French Ideology had seen this very well and the agitated "republican" chauvinists ("The France of Human Rights above all suspicion") had been wrong to contest it. The fundamental concepts of said racism were elaborated (and notably at the beginning of the 20th century, by Drs Jules Souris and René Martial, from the University of Montpellier) by French scholars or theorists, who were in perfect contradiction with the pretentious cosmopolitan and universalist posture of the "Great Nation", but who, it is true, were all atheist anti-clericals and therefore, somewhere, non-Christians... This is the whole ambiguity of the "French ideology". On the other hand, who knows or who says that the ban on mixed marriages was only abolished in 42 States in 1967 by the American Supreme Court? Etc. In short, racial discourse and practice do not constitute the monopolistic originality of the fascist phenomenon but a simple component.
Some believe that Islam is a "green fascism" because it would be inegalitarian. Hence the attraction exerted by this ideological religion on several misguided currents of identitarian movements, and this, for a long time (Siegfried Hunke, Claudio Mutti, René Guénon, etc.). Islam, in fact, subordinates woman to man, subjects the non-convert (dhimmi) to the Muslim, the slave to the master. But this inegalitarianism is perfectly trivial, slavish, mechanistic. One must be inconsistent to see any connection with European Superhumanism. Islam belongs entirely to the great egalitarian current: it aims at universal Caliphate, the homogeneity of humanity in a single "faith", it rigorously advocates the same conception of historical finalism as Christianity, Judaism, Marxism, liberalism, based on the gnosis of Salvation. It also professes belief in absolute Good and Evil.
Here we touch on a great paradox: the Western and communist egalitarian and democratist currents of thought, claiming rationality and wisdom (vast imposture and recuperation of Greek philosophy), have always sunk into historical error, utopian failure, never-realized prediction, the fury of unreason, dogma and ignorance of facts, anthropological and historical observations. While "fascisms", accused of barbaric (shamanism?) and regressive irrationality, have developed principles perfectly observable and consistent with experience: the recurrence of conflicts, the ethno-cultural antagonism of peoples, the inequality of life forms, ethnic homogeneity as the foundation of the permanence of political forms, etc. I may be wrong, of course, but it could be that Giorgio Locchi's intuition was that the fascist "principles", as realistic and serene photographs of the reality of the world, had nothing to fear from the Tribunal of History and that they will necessarily triumph against Egalitarianism. But - for there is a "but" - defeating Egalitarianism is not enough since it risks collapsing on its own, which has already begun, by the way. This does not mean that Superhumanism, the Nietzschean intuition, will triumph in the history of Europeans. Here is the bottom of my thinking: the "fascist phenomenon" will soon have a clear field to impose itself, since its hereditary enemy is exhausting itself, eaten away from the inside by its lack of fuel. Its enemy will be nothing more than its own lack of Will to Power in the face of the genetic and conquering forces of other peoples. I believe we must return to a certain simplicity of principles, beyond good and evil. It is rather difficult for me to say more.