The Paris Hilton Syndrome - Part 5
by Welf Herfurth
(Other parts of this series can be found under Related Items below)
5. Masculinity in nationalist politics
I was discussing the contents of this article with a friend of mine who is a nationalist intellectual and who writes articles for nationalist publications. I mentioned that I would touch upon the subject of Amazonianism in popular culture. Inevitably, we started talking about a related issue: the subculture of male 憂erds?in the West who are vociferous consumers of American pop culture (especially with a science-fiction or fantasy theme): e.g., films, television shows, comic books, manga, anime, role-playing games, computer games and the rest.
These men, who are often physically out of shape and badly groomed, seem to live in a world of pop fantasy which is completely disconnected from reality. They seem to have little interest in politics or anything else that happens in the real world. They also have little interest in anything which is part of the tradition of æ…¼igh?Western culture (that is, novels, films, plays, operas, paintings, sculpture which is not mass-produced American or Japanese junk). If a film does not have a science fiction or fantasy theme, they will not watch it: trying to sell them on the virtues of classic filmmakers, such as Godard, De Sica, Jean Renoir, for instance, is a futile task.
In the West, the phenomenon of 憂erdism?is ever increasing. From a nationalist standpoint, nerdism is harmful: it is, in fact, a selfish form of consumerism, of liberal individualism, which is about as bad as Paris Hilton, indiscriminate credit-card driven consumerism ?in fact, it is probably the male equivalent. Young, impressionable women waste huge amounts of disposable income on shoes to increase their physical allure; young men, 慦arhammer?figures, to retreat from traditional masculine imperatives like finding a mate. (A young man playing a 慦orld of Warcraft?game can be transformed into a hero ?that is, a hero on the Internet. In this, they are not so different from the 慿eyboard commandoes?of nationalism, who are heroes on the Internet, but politically ineffectual in real life).
Again, I am not being prudish here: games like æ…¦orld of Warcraft?and the like are fun. But these young men are concentrating on these mass-produced entertainments to the point of excluding everything else; and, if they do not concentrate on some of the other problems afflicting our civilisation ?e.g., the demographic threat posed by immigration ?they will, in the end, have no popular culture entertainments left to enjoy. (E.g., the actors in any upcoming fantasy epics will all be non-white; traditional European themes, based on medieval European, and Celtic and Teutonic folklore, will be replaced by Hindu or African ones).
So how do we attract such young men to nationalism? Well, the problem is just that: how to attract them. Why should they want to be nationalists?
The answer is, I think, by appealing to a sense of heroism. Nationalist ideology, at its best, rests on, among other things, confrontations and glorious struggles against our enemies (who are, more often than not, the communists). Nationalist man is very much a heroic, martial man: someone brave enough to march down the street, in a demonstration, and stand side by side with his comrades, waving a nationalist flag and enduring the jeers, screams and provocations of the assembled communist Left who seek to mash fascism?by smashing him, physically. Martyrs in the nationalist canon, like Daniel Wreststré°‰, are glorified ?just like Boromir in æ…™ord of the Rings? (More than a few observers have pointed out the correlation between nationalist ideology and epic fantasy ?in particular, their glorification of daring, heroic feats). Nationalism, too, has a place for the physically slight men who are not street fighters ?men like Goebbels, John Tyndall and William Pierce ?who function as agitators, writing politically provocative speeches and articles, an act which, in our present age of politically-correct anti-free speech laws, carries its own risks. One can say that it takes a certain type of man ?a man with guts ?to want to become a nationalist. And this, I believe, is how one can appeal to the nerds: by offering them, like the army recruiters of old, the prospect of a life of excitement and danger (while hoping, of course, that none of them meet the end of the unfortunate Daniel Wreststré°‰).
6. The Traditionalist rebellion
Fascism, and much of post-war nationalism, has always promulgated the one metaphysical type: the æ…¼eroic? olar?type of spirituality. In Evola writing, the heroic spiritual type as an attempt to regain the primordial Uranian and solar spirituality, lost after the successive waves of distortions and deviations of previous epochs. The heroic epics of Hercules, Gilgamesh and others describe spiritual journeys ?not mere adventures ?which are quests for that lost, solar spirituality. It is masculine ?Evola uses the term virile to describe it ?but not the coarse, phallic masculinity of the Titanic type.
Now, this brand of metaphysics is bound to appeal to men in the current age, which is very much a feminised age. I am not talking here of the proliferation of Amazonianism in pop culture, or Aphroditism, etc., but in the structure of our economy itself.
I once read a statistic (which I am unfortunately able to find again and reproduce here) that most of the hundreds of thousands of jobs created in Australia in the last ten or so years have gone to women. Anecdotally, this seems to be the case: in our everyday dealings with the banks, the electricity companies, government agencies like the educational institutions, the hospitals, social security, the Road Traffic Authority and the like, are staffed by young (20s, 30s) white-collar women, who are (again, statistically) more likely than not to be single. Our lives, in the West, have become bureaucratised, thanks to the proliferation of government red tape, rules and regulations for everything, and most of the bureaucrats one encounters in one daily dealings with the banks, government institutions and the like, are, more often than not, from this class of young white-collar women.
So men are bound to encounter æ…´ureaucrats?of this type, again and again ?dealing with bureaucracy is inevitable in today world ?and certainly, this must have a demasculinising effect on men over the long term, especially given that our conventional morality tells us that it is a man responsibility (and a man alone) to support his wife and his children. That, of course, has changed, with the rise of the single-parent household: but the perception that a man has these moral responsibilities still lingers, and certainly, I know many men still have them. And the question is whether having households without fathers ?in Australia, we have 750,000 people on sole parent benefit, the majority of them being female sole parents ?is, socially, good or not. I myself would say no.
So why are there so many women in employment? The answer is, economics ?or at least, the economics of the post-1970s period. The inflation of the 1970s - following the break-up of the Bretton Woods system of the gold standard and fixed exchange rates ?led to an economic deterioration which was so widespread, and so ruinous, that men were unable to support their wives and children on one wage, as they did in the 1950s and 1960s. So women were forced to go out and work.
The solution to the problem is, of course, economic. In economist jargon, we need to increase the capital-labour ratio in favour of labour: that is, capital, invested in the market, has to become plentiful in comparison to labour. A bidding war for workers, between rival capitalists, will begin, and wages will go up ?which will enable men to support wives and children on one income again. (That is, of course, that single income will be enough to pay for high house prices (for houses located near the city centres) and the modern consumerist lifestyle. Some would say no, and that a two-income household is necessary to meet such demands).
But, of course, such a solution is nowhere insight, especially given that incompetents today are in charge of running the economies of the West, as evinced by declining share market values, inflation, high interest rates and all the other ugly economic phenomena.
In the meantime, until the economy is fixed once and for all (and I myself am convinced that, under the system of liberal democracy, the economy will never be fixed, i.e., it will never benefit the good of the wider population but only to big business and its shareholders). Instead of purely economic solutions, we need nationalism of the kind described above ?one that resurrects the imperial, solar and 憊irile?virtues, in defiance of the present depraved age of Aphroditism, Amazonianism and all the anti-Traditionalist spiritualities. Nationalism becomes an act of rebellion.
Subconsciously, I think, the masses are Traditionalist: the olar?virtues are what the men and women of the West want. So we nationalists must be prepared to give æ…¼eroism? in Evola sense, to them.
–Welf Herfurth is a political activist who lives in Sydney / Australia. He was born and raised in Germany. He can be contacted on:
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