conservatives

"Greece belongs to the West."

"You made me come back on 24 July in order to save the country that was in danger. But if you do not mean to give me the ample majority I need to carry out my mission, then what is the point of having me back?"

"Karamanlis or the tanks"

"Who governs this country?"

"I had often thought of the emotion I should feel when I set foot again on the soil of my country. And I may tell you that the thought brought tears to my eyes in anticipation. And yet never was I calmer, never did I have myself more completely under control, than the moment when I arrived at the airport. And the reason was that my sense of the responsibilities which I was about to undertake was so intense as to stifle, to banish every other thought."

"What Right are you talking about? Am I the Right-winger? And who are the Leftists? Wasn’t it I who, as soon as I took over after the Civil War, stopped the executions and opened the prisons and exile camps? Wasn’t it the centrists who made Law 509, all the anti-communist legislation, the political loyalty declarations, the prisons, the exiles, and the executions? I took office just six years after the Civil War ended. And immediately, I found myself in the middle. On one side were my own people, the right-wingers, who wanted us to crush the communists, and on the other side were the communists, who refused to accept their defeat. So, gradually, I released them from prison; I didn’t carry out any executions, and I safeguarded the democracy of that time. So, I am the right-winger, and they are the democrats, who did all these things, which I found ready-made? And didn’t I also legalize the Communist Party after the dictatorship? Didn’t I withdraw from NATO when it was necessary? Didn’t I nationalize the companies of Andreadis, Onassis, and Niarchos? Didn’t I achieve the smooth and bloodless transition from dictatorship to democracy? Didn’t I contribute decisively to the abolition of the monarchy? Didn’t I guarantee the alternation of parties in power? Didn’t I draft the best Constitution Greece ever had? So what are you telling me now about being the leader of the Right? You all need to understand that the time has come to move away from slogans and labels, and for the parties to stop trapping people in rhetoric, in which they then become entangled themselves."

"Greece is plagued by just one single problem: its politics. The misfortune of our people is caused by the unhealthy nature of the political environment and the defective organization of public life."

"[He is] a special phenomenon: a man of humble origins, unremarkable intellectual endowment, infuriating obstinacy, but with an impeccable honesty, a statesmanlike flair in big issues and an accurate assessment of the needs and the motivations of his fellow countrymen which few politicians in our age have equalled. In the Greek context he was a Churchill."

"As you know, the functioning of democracy– and especially of parliamentary democracy presupposes the existence of parties with [long] traditions, steadfast principles, a program, as well as a leadership inspired by a sense of responsibility. Because political parties [...] have the most decisive role in democracies. In point of fact, one can claim that it is political parties rather than governments that peoples attach to; and that a regime’s fortune is more affected by the number and behavior of [its] political parties than by its formal institutional framework."

"In democracies, prime ministers do not go to prison. They return home."

"In the history of all nations, there are instances in which the crisis of institutions and morals becomes so deep that, in order to save democracy, one should remake it."

"It is our opinion that the misfortunes of our people are mainly due to the imperfect organization and shortcomings of public life [...] The problem is of a political nature [... and it can only be solved with the creation of] a new political force that will become the point of convergence of all progressive and healthy elements of our times [...] a force that will generate a new political and moral ethos."

"If a politician is capable and an honest servant, then it is you who need him and not the opposite. There is therefore no need for him to flatter you so that you vote for him. This is how I understand my relationship with the people."

"My loneliness, which is, as you know, inherent in my character, became almost absolute in politics. In politics it may have proved to be useful, since it freed me from weakness; however, it made my life depressing, because apart from anything else, it deprived me of the opportunity to have friends. Now that I need them it is too late to change, both because of ingrained habit and age."

"Hellas has been transformed to an endless bedlam."

"We are at the end of the Enlightenment. Have you read Charles Maurras?"

"In London and Berlin, at the time when Berlin and London flourished, the government was dynastic; it was so in Paris when Paris flourished. Dynastic succession creates the coherence of all the strength of an empire. Etymology would tell one that, in the absence of history. Not only because dynasty does without the exhausting system of electoral and parliamentary competition, but because it is good and beautiful that the authority of the sovereign authority should not be a force fashioned by human hand, that it should come to us from the most ancient times, and that the centuries should have created it for us and transmitted it to us, named it and imposed it on us ready-made, helped as it were by its legitimacy, that right of the leaders which is based on the fact that they played the major part in the creation of the country."

"These elements in French society were now to be given a lead by a man of genius whose power of argument, of sophistry, of tenacity, served to give an appearance of life to the dead monarchy and who provided a framework of political doctrine within which nearly all the critics of the Republic on the Right were to work and which was not without its influence on some critics of the Left."

"There can be no social peace in the Republic, and social reform is impossible without the king."

"After the Commune, thousands of workers were shot, while the leaders were allowed to escape; a King of France would have punished the leaders mercilessly, but he would have spared the people."

"Official orators have agreed amongst themselves to leave out one essential point: that to undertake the liberation of the fatherland, Joan had to go directly to the Dauphin Charles, acknowledge the right of his royal blood, and have him crowned and acclaimed on the cathedral square of Reims."

"Maurras was no optimist; human life at best was hard; the wise man accepted this fact and adjusted himself to the world as it was and ever would be, a world in which the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong, in which mere sentimental pity was a weakness and an intellectual crime. Like Nietzsche, Maurras despised Christianity and thought its politically dangerous sentiments of "he hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble" order highly noxious. In his early writings he gave free expression to this hostility, but as a realist, a positivist, he had to admit that France had been profoundly marked by the teaching of the Church; and as a practical politician, he had to face the fact that many of his potential supporters were likely to be alienated by the frank expression of his distaste for Christianity. So whatever regrets he had for the old gods, he had to recognize that they were conquered, that the day of the "laurel, the palms and the paean" was over. He accepted the fact that the French tradition was Christian, but, fortunately, Christian with a Roman and Hellenic superstructure."

"Teilhard merely seems to set the problem of man, as the utopian sees it, on lofty heights; yet, his terminology, which mixes archeology, sociology, biology, astronomy, and a vulgarized theology, can, in fact, be translated at every turn into the language of collectivism and of totalitarian polices."

"Passion for equality blinds the utopian to the fact that society, as a whole, is based on inequality of men in two respects: the inventor, the innovator, the exceptional man creates something new and insures continuous progress; the others emulate his work or merely improve their own lot by benefiting from his creativity."

"What are Pavia or Rosbach...compared to Sedan or Waterloo? Revolutions have succeeded revolutions. The state is bankrupt. Three times foreign invaders have occupied Paris. We have had two civil wars. We have witnessed the making of Italian unity and German unity and the enormous expansion of the double Anglo-Saxon empire. Never has political France been so small. And since then she has accomplished her masterpiece of smallness. She has turned herself into a Republic, in other words she has deliberately chosen to be weak and defeated."

"The bourgeoisie does not understand the labour question."

"Comte put to flight the pernicious and artificial doctrine according to which there is an opposition between the interests of the ruler and the ruled, for the latter derives his greatest benefit from being directed and guided... Renan finally made me aware of the service any élite, when it sincerely concerns itself with the highest considerations, renders and must render to the multitude, even unconsciously."

"This pre-existing capital brings men fortune and honour, equips and refines them from the moment they come into the world, without anything having been done about it by these happy animals... Whatever brings together this beneficent capital is therefore a good thing; whatever dissipates it is less good. Work is good, saving is good... It is in the closely knit and stable circle of the home that production, acquisition, conservation have the greatest chance of success, for the personal instinct is there moderated and regulated by immediate affection, and generosity balanced by healthy egoism. Thus strength, duration and hereditary are related and linked; so are also the constitution of great families, the accumulation of vast possessions, the possibility of education and culture."

"That France may live, the King must return."

"There are certain conservatives in France who fill us with disgust. Why? Because of their stupidity. What kind of stupidity? Hitlerism. These French "conservatives" crawl on their bellies before Hitler. These former nationalists cringe before him. A few zealots wallow in dirt, in their own dirt, with endless Heils. The wealthier they are, the more they own, the more important it is to make them understand that if Hitler invaded us he would skin them much more thoroughly than Blum, Thorez and Stalin combined. This "conservative" error is suicidal. We must appeal to our friends not to let themselves be befogged. We must tell them: Be on your guard! What is now at stake is not anti-democracy or anti-Semitism. France above all!"

"The world only hides one thing, says Clément Rosset, and that is that it has nothing to hide. It is sufficient onto itself for its own unveiling. Meaning only appears as the result of the representations and interpretations man may give to it."

"As man has managed to turn himself into a player of the world, the sole thing that can now prevent him from using all his possibilities of playing, is to make him believe that he did not invent the rules of the game."

"Faith and science thus find themselves reconciled, not in the way of the scholastic, who claims to prove the reality of his dogmatic propositions by means of universal reason, but by the assertion of the overall oneness of the real that has no double or reflection."

"If all men are brothers outside of any specifically human paradigm then no one can truly be a brother. The institution of a symbolically universal “paternity” annihilates the very possibility of true fraternity, in such a way that it proclaims itself in the absolute by the very thing that destroys it."

"A connection could be drawn between the secular ascent of biblical values in today's world and the depreciation of beauty that characterizes it on so many levels. Beauty today is often depreciated as monotonous or denounced as a constraining norm, when it is simply reduced to a pure spectacle accompanied by a rehabilitation or even exaltation of deformity and ugliness, as can be seen in many areas. The degeneration of beauty and the promotion of ugliness, tied to the flowering of intellectualism, could be certainly be part of the Umwertung stigmatized by Nietzsche."

"Adam and Eve, placed in the garden of Eden, find themselves forbidden to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). Catholic theologians believe this “knowledge” forbidden by Elohim-Yahweh is neither omniscience nor moral discernment, but the ability to decide what is good or evil. Jewish theology is more subtle. The “tree” of the knowledge is interpreted as the representation of a world where good and evil “are in a combined state,” where there is no absolute Good and Evil. In other words, the “tree” is a foreshadowing of the real world we live in, a world where nothing is absolutely clear cut, where moral imperatives are tied to human values, and where everything of any greatness and importance always takes place beyond good and evil. Furthermore, in the Hebrew tradition “to eat” means “to assimilate.” To eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is therefore to personally enter this real world where human initiative “combines” good and evil. Adam’s transgression, from which all the others are derived, is clearly “that of autonomy,” accordingly, as emphasized by Eisenberg and Abecassis, this would be “the desire to conduct his own history alone in according to his own desire and his own word or law."

"As only God has an absolute value, everything that is not God can have only relative value. To be created means that one’s being is not due to oneself but to something other than oneself. This creates a perpetual sense of self-loss within one’s own state of unfulfillment. It means that one is not self-sufficient but a dependent being—one’s state of existence is caged from the start inside that dependency. Creation therefore does not posit man’s autonomy. It circumscribes it, and by virtue of this, in my opinion, invalidates it. Indeed, man has no right to enjoy this world except on condition of acknowledging that he is not its true owner but at best its steward. Yahweh alone is the owner of the world. “The earth belongs to me, and you are nothing but strangers and guests to my eyes” (Leviticus 25:23)."

"Paganism therefore implies the rejection of this discontinuity, this rupture, this fundamental tear, which is the “dualistic fiction,” which, as Nietzsche wrote in The Antichrist, “degenerated God into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes!"

"Alone of all the animals, man’s actions are not predicated by his membership in a species. In the spirit of Judeo-Christian monotheism, it is thus necessary that he could have “acted” differently. In short, Yahweh would have preferred that man had not emerged from “nature.” This is the meaning of the story told in the first chapters of Genesis. As long as the “first men” were only “natural beings,” as long as their humanization had not truly been achieved, they could not fully display their creative powers. They could not set themselves up as rivals of Yahweh."

"But for man to set himself up as man, means the adoption of a super-nature, a superior nature that is nothing other than culture whose effect is the emancipation of reflective consciousness from the repetitious constraints of the species. What this means especially is that man is given the possibility of going beyond himself and transforming. In other words, to ensure that each “super-nature” obtained is simply a step towards another “super-nature.” Now this project is the equivalent of making man a kind of god — allowing him to participate in the Divine — a perspective the Bible depicts as an “abomination.” Accordingly, the monotheist declaration is first and foremost a solemn prohibition against man establishing himself as a god. The reason for this is that when man has gone beyond his original status (the episode of “original sin”), to one that is fully autonomous he thereby takes on a super-humanity that confirms him as the cause of himself."

"Nor is there any valid reason to reject the idea of God or the notion of the sacred just because of the sickly expression Christianity has given to them, any more than it is necessary to break with aristocratic principles on the pretext that they have been caricatured by the bourgeoisie."

"Paganism sacralizes and thereby exalts this world whereas Judeo-Christian monotheism sanctifies and thereby retreats from this world. Paganism is based on the idea of the sacred."

""One can have a society without God,” writes Régis Debray, “but there cannot be a society without religion.” He adds, “Those nations on the way to disbelief are on the path to abdication.” One can also cite Georges Bataille, according to whom, “religion, whose essence is the search for lost intimacy, boils down to a clearly conscious effort to become entirely self-conscious.”"

"Yahweh accepts that man has a history, but he strives to neutralize it by giving it a purpose, which is precisely the return to the pre-historical state of paradisiacal “innocence.” (Yahweh only accepts history in order to assign it an end.)"

"In fact, it is not a question of going back to the past, but of connecting with it — and also, by that very fact, in a spherical conception of history, to connect to the eternal and cause it to surge back, to have consonance in life, and to disentangle itself from the tyranny of the logos, the terrible tyranny of the Law, so as to reestablish the school of the mythos and life."

"The opposite concept of the Latin religio should be sought in the Latin verb negligere. To be religious is synonymous with responsibility, not neglect. To be responsible is to be free — to possess the concrete means of exercising free action. At the same time, to be free is also to be connected to others by a common spirituality."

"The “theoretical” capital of the Nouvelle Droite was synthesized in Alain de Benoist’s main work, Vue de droite (1977), which he himself described in the introduction as an “anthology,” if not an “encyclopedia,” since a portion of the work had already been published in the form of articles in various journals... In summary, this “anthology” presents itself as a manual listing the themes to be used by the militants of an intellectually revamped and modernized, even rearmed, extreme right; one that is in a direct line of descent from the extreme right movements of the prewar era."

"Gradually, the counter-revolutionaries came to the realization that they were the real revolutionaries in the sense of the word that is compatible with the reaction to the doctrines of the revolution. Bernanos wrote during this period that to be a reactionary means simply to be alive, because only a corpse does not react any more – against the maggots teeming on it. This phrase could have been adopted as the counter-revolutionary motto: it vividly painted what the counter-revolutionaries believed their task to be, namely, to become alive inside an agonizing, no longer reacting body, the State, invaded by a poison-carrying enemy. The counter-revolutionaries were revolutionists insofar as they intended to reactivate this agonizing body, not by calling forth a new political party, but by an appeal to the entire nation in the name of salus populi. Ernst von Salomon, in his Fragebogen (page 238), written after 1945, formulates the mood of twenty-five years before: ‘Unless it were possible to recreate a constructive form of State, Bolshevism must be the natural heir to the obvious and shameful dissolution of all organic strength by the ideological senselessness of the bourgeois-liberal and Social-Democrat wizards.’ This is what was tried almost everywhere in Europe during the twenty-some years separating the two world wars: Horthy in Hungary, Salazar in Portugal, Pilsudski in Poland, Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, and others, with less success, elsewhere, for example in Germany. Between 1919 and 1933, many young Germans adopted as their ideal Moeller van den Bruck’s ‘conservative revolutionary’; this hero figure survived until 1944 among the youthful members of the anti-Hitler resistance who hoped to rid their country both of National Socialism and of imminent bolshevisation."

"Uniformity, therefore, is an essential built-in element of utopian existence, and it is no less important that this uniformity remain permanent."

"When it comes to specifying the values particular to paganism, people have generally listed features such as these: an eminently aristocratic conception of the human individual; an ethics founded on honor (“shame” rather than “sin”); an heroic attitude toward life’s challenges; the exaltation and sacralization of the world, beauty, the body, strength, health; the rejection of any “worlds beyond”; the inseparability of morality and aesthetics; and so on. From this perspective, the highest value is undoubtedly not a form of “justice” whose purpose is essentially interpreted as flattening the social order in the name of equality, but everything that can allow a man to surpass himself. To paganism, it is pure absurdity to consider the results of the workings of life’s basic framework as unjust. In the pagan ethic of honor, the classic antithesis noble vs. base, courageous vs. cowardly, honorable vs. dishonorable, beautiful vs. deformed, sick vs. healthy, and so forth, replace the antithesis operative in a morality based on the concept of sin: good vs. evil, humble vs. vainglorious, submissive vs. proud, weak vs. arrogant, modest vs. boastful, and so on. However, while all this appears to be accurate, the fundamental feature in my opinion is something else entirely. It lies in the denial of dualism."