Sunday, June 25, 2017

Precursors of the Alt-Right: What Constitutes a Nation? 1


Important: See #FMA (For Mature Audiences) #Alt_Right

Introduction


“English only!”

Drives me nuts. Drives others on varying degrees of the political middle and left nuts.

But it’s an echo of what Johann Gottlieb Fichte said to his fellow Germans living under the cultural, political, and - with Napoleon - military occupation at the beginning of the 19th century.

It also has echoes of the Maccabees, the devout Jews who faced torture and death under the Seleucids as the successors to Alexander the Great tried to force them to give up the (in their minds, anyway) the God-revealed cultural identity that made them a people obedient to God’s Torah for a homogeneous, empire-unifying Hellenistic culture.

Now… play nice and have fun. :-)


What Constitutes a Nation? (Contemporary)


This manifesto remains the only attempt to date by GRECE, the primary New Right organization in France, to summarize its principles and key concepts. It was written in 1999 by Alain de Benoist, GRECE’s founder, and Charles Champetier on the occasion of GRECE’s thirtieth anniversary. It offers a strong argument in favor of the right to difference among cultures and civilizations, and the right of peoples to defend themselves from cultural homogenization. It also offers a vision of a regenerated Europe which will find its strength in a return to its authentic values and traditions, in opposition to the new imperialism of multiculturalism and the global marketplace. Alain de Benoist (b. 1943) is the primary philosopher of the European ‘New Right’ movement. He attended the Sorbonne, studying law, philosophy and religion. He is the author of dozens of books, including The Problem of Democracy and Beyond Human Rights, published in English translation by Arktos, and gives frequent lectures around the world. He lives in Paris. Charles Champetier (b. 1968) is the former editor of Éléments, one of GRECE’s periodicals. He continues to write on subjects related to the New Right.

Author: Alain de Benoist (1999)



What Constitutes a Nation? (19th Century)


Romantic nationalism (also national romanticism, organic nationalism, identity nationalism) is the form of nationalism in which the state derives its political legitimacy as an organic consequence of the unity of those it governs. This includes, depending on the particular manner of practice, the language, race, culture, religion, and customs of the "nation" in its primal sense of those who were born within its culture. This form of nationalism arose in reaction to dynastic or imperial hegemony, which assessed the legitimacy of the state from the top down, emanating from a monarch or other authority, which justified its existence. Such downward-radiating power might ultimately derive from a god or gods (see the divine right of kings and the Mandate of Heaven).



Fichte made important contributions to political nationalism in Germany. In his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), a series of speeches delivered in Berlin under French occupation, he urged the German peoples to "have character and be German" — entailed in his idea of Germanness was antisemitism, since he argued that "making Jews free German citizens would hurt the German nation."[56] Fichte answered the call of Freiherr vom Stein, who attempted to develop the patriotism necessary to resist the French specifically among the "educated and cultural elites of the kingdom." Fichte located Germanness in the supposed continuity of the German language, and based it on Tacitus, who had hailed German virtues in Germania and celebrated the heroism of Arminius in his Annales.[57]

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