"WE MUST, all of us, be prepared for the most terrible. Is not death, in the midst of humiliation, a way to give oneself even more? Sacrifice admits of neither calculation nor reserve. If I had lied like the rest where would I have landed? Yet, I believe even so, more than ever, only the idealists can change the world. The soul that remains is the soul."
-Leon Degrelle
The great tragedy of the Second World War is that with its conclusion, the States of the world ceased to speak of the soul. Or at least, they stopped to speak of the soul in earnest. The Bolsheviks and their grey appendages denied the soul’s existence while doing their best to snuff it out. The liberal regimes of the West affirmed the soul in so far as it had the freedom to sell itself, to haggle and whore across the various spiritual markets unencumbered and wholly removed from the grip of the state. A freedom of religion and a freedom from religion. The mystery of fascism is that it spoke of the soul in relation to the state, and when Fascism disappeared, so too did talk of this golden bond, this phantom thread of spiritual felicity. The possibility of such a ligament was severed, and no state since has eyed the suture.
One of the defining features of the fascist vocabulary was the talk of a spiritual dimension in the body of the state, of a Heroism to be kindled, a vitality to be awakened in harmony with the impulses of a national volition. The soul, and its latent heroic possibilities, this was a cornerstone of the fascist projects, and a form of exhortation wholly absent in the communist and capitalist regimes of the 20th century.
I remember clearly how the fascist regimes were presented to me as a schoolboy. An unexplainable madness that seized parts of Europe, but seizures of pure vacuity. Fascism was presented as a protean hobgoblin, totally devoid of substance other than a misplaced hate for the other. The ideology of the axis powers was explained to be a kind of void, sans any coherent intellectual or spiritual direction. A troglodyte atheism led by blockheads with a rabid hunger for innocent flesh. The communists were at least presented as rational beings, with an intricate intellectual framework and historical system for perceiving the world. They were propped up as misguided idealists with genuine empathy for the huddled masses, shot out of control by the totalitarian impulses of Stalin and Mao. But the fascists, those monsters could never be understood, they were evil, drunk on power and hatred.
For the majority of my early education, I never read a single primary source or manifesto penned by those “savages.” It was not until I took a course in university that the professor made the grave mistake of assigning the Doctrine of Fascism as a reading assignment. I had read Marx, Lenin, Locke, and Hobbes, I thought I had some semblance of an idea for what constituted the backbone of a political system. I was not prepared for Gentile and Mussolini:
Like all sound political conceptions, Fascism is action and it is thought; action in which doctrine is immanent, and doctrine arising from a given system of historical forces in which it is inserted, and working on them from within. It has therefore a form correlated to contingencies of time and space; but it has also an ideal content which makes it an expression of truth in the higher region of the history of thought. There is no way of exercising a spiritual influence in the world as a human will dominating the will of others, unless one has a conception both of the transient and the specific reality on which that action is to be exercised, and of the permanent and universal reality in which the transient dwells and has its being. To know men one must know man; and to know man one must be acquainted with reality and its laws. There can be no conception of the State which is not fundamentally a conception of life: philosophy or intuition, system of ideas evolving within the framework of logic or concentrated in a vision or a faith, but always, at least potentially, an organic conception of the world.
Thus many of the practical expressions of Fascism such as party organization, system of education, and discipline can only be understood when considered in relation to its general attitude toward life. A spiritual attitude. Fascism sees in the world not only those superficial, material aspects in which man appears as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self- sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.
The conception is therefore a spiritual one, arising from the general reaction of the century against the materialistic positivism of the 19th century. Anti- positivistic but positive; neither skeptical nor agnostic; neither pessimistic nor supinely optimistic as are, generally speaking, the doctrines (all negative) which place the center of life outside man; whereas, by the exercise of his free will, man can and must create his own world.
I was confounded. This talk of a “spiritual attitude” in the context of a modern political system, I had not heard of the soul referred to with such seriousness since Sunday School Catechism classes. What did this talk have to do with the organization of a state? Sure, the Enlightenment era treatises spoke of this nebulous watchmaker divvying up rights, of the rational soul and its voluntary contracts. But never had I encountered a modern political treatise referring to the souls spiritual influence upon the world with such metaphysical dynamism. And yet, as I continued to read, I began to feel a frisson, a static, a stirring in my soul. This vision that was being presented, was alien and exciting, a vista of possibility that I had never dared considering.
Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies; it wants him to be manfully aware of the difficulties besetting him and ready to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle in which it behooves a man to win for himself a really worthy place, first of all by fitting himself (physically, morally, intellectually) to become the implement required for winning it. As for the individual, so for the nation, and so for mankind. Hence the high value of culture in all its forms (artistic, religious, scientific) and the outstanding importance of education. Hence also the essential value of work, by which man subjugates nature and creates the human world (economic, political, ethical, and intellectual).
This positive conception of life is obviously an ethical one. It invests the whole field of reality as well as the human activities which master it. No action is exempt from moral judgment; no activity can be despoiled of the value which a moral purpose confers on all things. Therefore life, as conceived of by the Fascist, is serious, austere, and religious; all its manifestations are poised in a world sustained by moral forces and subject to spiritual responsibilities. The Fascist disdains an “easy” life.
The Fascist conception of life is a religious one, in which man is viewed in his immanent relation to a higher law, endowed with an objective will transcending the individual and raising him to conscious membership of a spiritual society. “Those who perceive nothing beyond opportunistic considerations in the religious policy of the Fascist regime fail to realize that Fascism is not only a system of government but also and above all a system of thought.
This was not a collection of dusty economic theories and regurgitated appeals to God-given rights. No nebulous specters haunting Europe, or liberal masonic moralizing. This was a radical exhortation.
A new way of life, and not merely a new way of economic organization. A vision that put primacy upon the human soul as a concrete entity, which could be tuned into harmony with the spiritual forces of the state. For those modern political thinkers who did consider the soul, it was to keep its dignity far from the state’s grasp, but never to exalt it into the state’s bosom, to integrate it into a higher frequency.
The Fascist State, as a higher and more powerful expression of personality, is a force, but a spiritual one. It sums up all the manifestations of the moral and intellectual life of man. Its functions cannot therefore be limited to those of enforcing order and keeping the peace, as the liberal doctrine had it. It is no mere mechanical device for defining the sphere within which the individual may duly exercise his supposed rights. The Fascist State is an inwardly accepted standard and rule of conduct, a discipline of the whole person; it permeates the will no less than the intellect. It stands for a principle which becomes the central motive of man as a member of civilized society, sinking deep down into his personality; it dwells in the heart of the man of action and of the thinker, of the artist and of the man of science: soul of the soul.
Fascism, in short, is not only a law-giver and a founder of institutions, but an educator and a promoter of spiritual life. It aims at refashioning not only the forms of life but their content — man, his character, and his faith. To achieve this propose it enforces discipline and uses authority, entering into the soul and ruling with undisputed sway. Therefore it has chosen as its emblem the Lictor’s rods, the symbol of unity, strength, and justice.
This was a far cry from the aggressive atheism that was presented to me as a scarecrow in high school history classes. It was instead a deeply romantic appeal to the energies of the soul. To the possibilities of a kind of metaphysical participation with the organs of the state.
What I would like to examine today is this particular aspect of fascism, this exceptional quality that differentiated it from the other two general ideological currents of the Second World War, this remarkable focus on the soul of man and the soul of the state. This insistence on speaking of spiritual currents with the utmost seriousness, of treating Heroism as not just a means to winning a war, but as an existential ideal for the individual citizen.
For it is the metaphysical foundation of Fascism that made it exceptional.
I am not approaching this article from the perspective of either a Fascist or anti-Fascist, but merely as a man intent on probing the mysteries of the last century. To see what pearls of wisdom lay discarded in the sea bed.
This article is not meant in any way to be comprehensive, but instead the starting point of a more ambitious project, to pierce the veil of fascism, to discover the guts of a Geist.
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published a translation that I find myself frequently returning too. It is a memoir penned by Alphonse de Chateaubriant, in which he records his meeting with Adolf Hitler.Hitler famously declared that Alphonse de Chateaubriant was one of the only men to truly understand him. This would imply that there is some moment from this encounter that could shed light on the true kernel of his project, on the ray of intention emanating behind it all…
I believe it is here:
The chancellor says:
“Germany has escaped this death grip. And yet, horrible poverty reigned in her midst, the absence of any outlet for her production, which led to immense lands being emptied of their human substance, condemned her to be of all nations the one which risked the most to be subjugated. And she was about to be. But the German worker understood in time. This is what made it possible to free him from the fatalism that burdened him. We have strived to raise his standard of living, while preserving him from any illusion; it was necessary for this that the value of his work was always equal to his salary, that is to say that any salary and any pay paid in Germany only possessed the intrinsic value of which the work provided presented its equivalent in the form of produced items. Money now only plays an intermediary role here… The situation of the worker is therefore improving more and more, although it is still far from being where we hope to get it. Have you visited many factories?”
Upon my affirmative answer:
“Work is done in an orderly and peaceful manner… I therefore no longer have any difficulty in that regard. If there were “asocials” — we have observed, most of the time that these are individuals with a very long criminal record — the national socialist movement could not hope to have the necessary force for this gigantic struggle, only if it succeeded in awakening in the hearts of its adherents the sacred conviction that political life would be raised above a simple electoral formula and would find itself in the presence of a new philosophical conception of fundamental importance…”
“This task,” I said, “begins today for all people… A great effort of renovation is required of all… But nothing will be possible for them if they do not place before all formulas of economic organization, the spirit of heroism…”
Upon hearing these words, his face lit up. I felt that I had just touched a primary line of thought in him.
Is this the secret, the phrase which led to Hitler’s declaration that the Frenchman understood him?
“This task,” I said, “begins today for all people… A great effort of renovation is required of all… But nothing will be possible for them if they do not place before all formulas of economic organization, the spirit of heroism…”
To reawaken a spirit of heroism that is placed before all formulas of economic organization. Could you imagine a politician today campaigning on such a premise, to stand before a crowd with complete seriousness, and present such a platform? What jeers would such a man be met with? “It’s the economy stupid!” And yet, this spirit of heroism was referred to by certain leaders of this age as a sober ideal, a panacea more important than any tax policy or social contract. A noble Elixir, beautifully simple, childlike, and human.
The heroism of a people is not something that can be polled, it cannot be systematized, it cannot be rendered into a vulgar number, a GDP. No committee can translate it to a bar graph, a percentage to be raised. To grasp it is to grasp gossamer, to touch and probe is to destroy its beauty, it can only be glimpsed from a distance, illumined by the gentle rays of a hidden sun. A phosphorescence visible to the eyes of the soul, and to the eyes of the soul alone.
Communists and Capitalists alike would scoff at such a notion, but a spirit of heroism is just as intangible as a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, or the invisible hand of the market. And it has the benefit of being far older, for heroism is an archetype as old as man. A concept inscribed into the flowery verses of our oldest myths, aeons before whispers of a Proletariat or market forces were ever spoken aloud.
Heroism as an end in itself. This was the radical call of the fascist regimes.
The rhetoric of the Capitalist and Communist states in the 20th century also included calls to heroism, but almost exclusively in the wartime context. It was a pragmatic wartime heroism, and not a call to a perpetual state of heroism in itself. Uncle Sam asked you to heroically fight for your freedom against the Teutonic Huns as your best gal dawned her blue jeans and bandana to play Rosie the Riveter back home. But as soon as victory was achieved this ephemeral vitality disintegrated back into the ash of the nuclear family. Wartime was over. So settle down, buy a Chevy, take it to the levy, and keep your damn passions dry. It was time to revert into Homo economicus once more, for the blood of the heroes has kept the markets lubricated. Nobody needs Heros in peacetime.
Try and imagine FDR, Churchill, or Stalin, speaking the way Mussolini did in Milan in 1922, during peacetime:
You feel, judging by your silent and austere attitude, that if the flesh is corruptible, the spirit is immortal. You feel that here in this little hall this evening the spirits of our Fallen are still with us. They are present; we feel their presence, because the soul cannot die. They fell in the most heroic action yet accomplished by Italian Fascism in the four years of its history.
This visceral call to the immortality of the soul, to heroes who cannot die. Not mere tepid reminders of the “sacrifice of the fallen,” but an immediate insistence that the fallen are still here, walking beside you, joined by the ligaments of the state...
Again, we find the primacy of the soul in the Fascist worldview. Of the spirit of the Hero, not in the form of a somber memorial or mausoleum, but as a concrete reality.
The spiritual ideal that reverberated throughout the flesh of the various authentic fascist movements can be illuminated in the utterances and the personage of Corneliu Codreanu. Julius Evola, upon meeting the Leader of Romania’s Iron Guard, described him as such:
Among all the leaders of the national movements we have met during our journeys through Europe, few, or none, have given us so favourable an impression as Codreanu. We have discovered in speaking with him as perfect an agreement of ideas as with few others, and we have met in few the capacity to rise so resolutely from the plane of the contingent and to relate to premises of genuinely spiritual nature a will of political-national renewal.
In Codreanu’s words, we find the fire of this spirit that animated the fascist projects, the metaphysical vision absolutely at odds with mere Homo economicus.
From this Legionary school a new man will have to emerge, a man with heroic qualities; a giant of our history to do battle and win over all the enemies of our Fatherland, his battle and victory having to extend even beyond the material world into the realm of invisible enemies, the powers of evil. Everything that our mind can imagine as more beautiful spiritually; everything the proudest that our race can produce, greater, more just, more powerful, wiser, purer, more diligent and more heroic, this is what the Legionary school must give us! A man in whom all the possibilities of human grandeur that are implanted by God in the blood of our people be developed to the maximum.
And:
There are moments when masses establish contact with their nation's spirit. These are the moments of providence. Masses then see their nation in its entire history, and feel its moments of glory, as well as those of defeat. Then they can clearly feel turbulent events in the future. That contact with the immortal and collective nation's spirit is feverish and trembling. When that happens, people cry. It is probably some kind of national mystery, which some criticize, because they don't know what it represents, and others struggle to define it, because they have never felt it.
If the Christian mystery, which tends to ecstasy, is contact between Man and God, through, "ascent from human to divine nature", then the national mystery is nothing more than man's contact, or contact of mass, with the spirit of its nation. Not intellectually, for it could be the case with any historian, but live, in their hearts.
In Codreanu we find another truth of the fascist spiritual orientation made manifest. Fascism was not merely a pagan substitution for older forms of spirituality. Codreanu’s Iron Guard was resolutely Orthodox. Just as Mussolini’s Fascist project did not push out the Catholic Church from spiritual life, and nobody would deny the Spanish Falange was resolutely Catholic. The fascist conception of the soul did not exclude the Church. It simply integrated the various spiritual planes within the state. It opened a new mystery, a new mysticism, a new horizon of metaphysical contact. The soul with the nation.
If we are to look at Mussolini’s School of Fascist Mysticism, an institution with a name that conjures a particularly pagan aroma, you would be surprised to learn that its intellectuals were resoundingly Catholic and did not perceive any conflict between the two spheres. But that is a tale for a different day.
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The fascist spiritual impulse would be short-circuited and forced underground with the loss of the war and the destruction of the Fascist states, but the frisson would develop from the shadows, nursed by the next generation of “losers,” maturing into adolescence, but now without a home to assert itself.
One of the most powerful declarations of this all-encompassing vision can be found in a chapter of Franco Freda’s Disintegration of the System. It should go without saying that Freda is a man I vehemently disagree with on several fronts, both in terms of method and expectation. But his chapter entitled The Physiognomy of the Authentic State captures a certain spirit that must be read:
“One day the workers will live like the bourgeoisie but below them, poorer and more simply, there will be a superior caste. That is who will possess power.”
There is still, however, those who do not allow themselves to be possessed by the seductions of the economy and remain firm in the conviction that the primordial task of the state is not to guarantee the acquisition or the maintenance of a fridge, of a washing machine, or greater weekly hobbies. There are those who are convinced, because he believes that the goal of man is not the maintain himself, vegetate, and satisfy himself, that it is another thing: that it is even exactly this other thing that gives meaning and style to existence, and that, precisely from this other thing, it's worth the effort of deproletarianizing himself and de-bourgeoisifying himself, by exhausting the framework of conditioning determined by the existence of physical needs in the parts and the least important regions of the human being.
It is to this truly free race of men - to the ascetics, in the classic sense of the term, of politics - that we propose a dialogue around the true state and the function of the free and just man in the state: with the intention not of presenting a vague and sentimental entity, but orienting towards the subtle intuition of the myth -and even the mystery - of the state.
We do not search for the state on the basis of empirical inquiry leading to the phenomena of the state existing today; we will attempt to seize the state not as a historical phenomenon - the State hic et nunc - from a “phenomenological” point of view, but we want to understand it in the absolute: as a value, that is to say, as reality that holds true pro aeternitate. A reality that, considering in itself, has no need of manifestation, historical support (the existing state), to be valuable. In other terms, we want to seize the essence of the idea of the state that illuminates, judging if these phenomena (the historical states) are better or worse applications in relation to this canon.
The indications that follow do not derive from our personal ideology (by admitting that we have one), they convince us that we have the rigorous truth according to which “an idea cannot be new, because the truth is not a product of the human spirit, but it exists independently of us and all that we have ever known.”
Taking what we have said higher, our myth of the state is not held to be a utopia, if by utopia we mean, in effect, that which cannot be realized or exist, the fruit of overly cerebral and intellectual conception.
The myth of the state is the myth of a political order that, without lowering itself to any particular time and space, “is” eternal, and eternally proposed as true.
The principles of the true state, by recovering the domain of “should be”, assume an eminently normative character and, as such, are not verified by recognition or agreement, by the decided refusal of those who live in the historical world. They issue from a meta-political and meta-historical level consequently autonomous in relation to the forms of empirical political existence: it is on the contrary these forms which, in order not become abstractions, are “forms of something “real,” and should exist by function of these principles.
The meaning of the true state depends on the animating tension that it inspires in the individual microcosm, such that he represents a real center of power and not an inert superstructure. The true state does not propose as its authentic goal economic wealth and well being for all its citizens or a lone social group, but what the ancient Greeks lucidly defined in terms of “felicity” - eudaimonia - of harmony of the different components of the body of the state. “Felicity” in the sense of accomplishment, integration, and participation with the superhuman and divine elements of reality.
In the true state there must be the guarantee of organic unity of the social body, unity that must not be understood as intrusion of the state into the pretend domain of the private interests of the citizen, but as the constitution of a climate of ideal social tension, where each is abiding at his post, following his own inclinations with coherence, fidelity, and liberty. Thus it is not admissible, in this state, that someone commits prevarications and abuses, which amounts to injuring others: on the contrary, it must maintain a will lucid and conscious of following an existence conforming to its proper nature.
Evidently, when we attribute to the state ( or better, when we recognize in the state) the function of fostering this climate that, alone, makes possible a regime of ordered life, we do not want to consider the state as a means of activity generating “virtue” - in the modern and moralistic meaning of the term-as a pure element “functioning” in the soul of man. The true state, on the contrary, must be understood as a reality in contact with all that we propose, in a conditioned fashion, as individual morality, objective, settling into these terms a free ethic of these characters of “virtue” that we attribute today to morality.
The true state is not the fruit of an ideology or an individual political conception, but the responsible realization in terms of the political regime of an impersonal principle, of a norm that we could define “a priori,” leading - as we exactly had said - to this “natural right of heroic races,” where the signification of nature does not end with the functional, physical element, but acquires value by the “normative” word, symbol of all “normal” and integrated conditions of existence. A canon that represents the “internal dressing”, the absolute formula of a lifestyle accomplished with fidelity to that what it really is.
The true state do not constitute a simple structure of positive rights, but is in essence and in function superior: the spirit of the state, the center of the state is represented by a power that transcends the plan that is immediately earthly and simply human.
The true state holds as an organizing principle of a reconquest that man must do: the reconquest of the higher-world, the reestablishment of his heroic dimension. Consequently, the true state represents the necessary element of mediation that provokes the reintegration of the citizen into divine reality: it is only through its intermediary that the citizen realizes exceeding his own individual existence, by opening a reality that, such as it is autonomous, transcends it.
We do not say that this image of the political regime, developed in a final and coherent fashion, can receive the accusation of usurping “religious” qualities and dimensions, by obligating man - who feels this tension towards the divine - to deviate from his own direction - that would be, according to the accusation, the religious direction - to orient him towards the secular direction, indicated by the state (that state, consequently, would constitute the substitute of functions, that legitimately, would not devolve to it.)
The response to the accusation emerges in the clear fashion of the same terms in which it is formulated, deformed: it comes from making a quasi-ontological rupture - the we should refuse in a decided way between the said secular domain of the state and the abstract “spiritual” plan, made autonomous in relation to the first. A rupture by which the intrinsic divine values of the human condition, would become simple moral elements, shadowed in the equivocation of the “world of conscience,” while the human elements, unbound from these divine potentialities, would only become profane and secular.
No gap, on the contrary, should exist between the order of values and the plan of the true state (’), because if we make one a stranger to the other, we break an organically unitary reality: we arrive only at the decomposed results of internalizing, in the emotive and moralist style, ina pretend “human conscience,” in values, and we subtract from the public order these characteristics that can only qualify it and legitimize it.
In the true state we cannot objectively pose terms of the priority of the individual in relation to the state or on the other hand, consider it on him, because the reality of the true state is not separated from the reality of the individual by no difference of structure (more than two realities, we should speak of two coefficients of a unique reality, the two aspects of the same phenomenon, unresolved in substantial continuity). Subsisting solely between them a functional difference of possibility, intensity, given that the state represents the center of “necessary” tension for the citizen to become “happy.”
On the other hand, in the true state there are no longer “individuals”, but men-members of the state; men animated by an ethic of super-personal life, each differentiated by the responsibility of various ranks, a distinct responsibility, a different duty, a degree of various liberty according to organic articulations. These men are engaged as the object of the work of the state and their perfection is the ends to which the order of the state is destined. Only that qualifies the existence of man in the state; only that, in an analogous fashion, constitutes the legitimization of the state that must cultivate, sustain, and support the dispositions of those who are bound to it.
Thus, only in the true state, men participate in the destiny of the state and acquire its power, that is a non human force. They feels its signification, that is supernatural; they nourish themselves in its reality, that is a superior reality. We repeat: it is the true state that determines the direction to follow and “ordains” the moments across which man attains his “authentic goal, that consists of participation in the divine.
In addition, it is the true state that proposes to each man the recognition of his own irreducible function, of his proper place, of his proper nature, the insertion into the just relations of superiority and inferiority: in a word, the recognition of its proper freedom. And that is not negative liberty that manifests itself externally, liberty turned towards utility and “particularity,” that is to say the only liberty that we can conceive today and that, resolving in undifferentiated and egalitarian terms, develops according to the directions of rebellion. But it is a qualitative and differentiated freedom, typical of the person whose value is inherent. Freedom that does not derive, as we said, from abstract facts and simply being elementary man, but that is measured by the stature, by the dignity of each. That is capable of realizing its own possibilities and adhering to its own particular perfection on the interior of the political framework of the state. Ultimately, freedom that means internal discipline and respect of its own qualitatively hierarchical plan.
After these indications we would like to conclude, and in concluding, reaffirm the idea of the state, these processes that tend to penetrate the mystery of the state, cannot unfold according to simply logical values, but by the intermediary of lucid reference to metaphysical values, inherent in the essence of the idea of the state, to its core not belonging to the domain of things subjected to the bonds of becoming.
To reaffirm the reality of that which is sacred and divine and the sacrality of that which is the real political structure should constitute the support of the true state: because if a state, if a political regime is not legitimized by the fact of possessing a spiritual force, by proposing spiritual ends, it represents nothing organic and central: but will only be an inert, materialist, and social structure, resulting from its own rigidity to all organisms without vital forces.
In Freda’s vision, it is the soul’s interaction with the mystery of the state that facilitates the citizen’s reintegration into divine reality. It is only through this intermediary that the citizen realizes his individuality, by tearing open a reality that transcends it.
A vision—a whisper— a possibility beyond Homo economicus.
Regardless of your own political tastes and pretensions, this vision is worth meditating upon.
For all the mistakes made by the fascist generation and the generation of losers who rekindled their ashes, they were the first to probe a new mystery, the first to insert a new dimension between the soul of man and the state.
I will leave you now with the words of Leon Degrelle.
The turmoil that agitates public opinion, the wars that shake up nations, are just episodes.
Partial reforms will do away with such periodic chaos.
To attempt to change people would be a very disappointing work if it were not accompanied by the essential work of changing that which lies deep in the soul, by a transformation of the very foundations of our time.
All the scandals, the decline of honesty and honor, shamelessness in the certainty of impunity, the passion for money which sweeps away conventions, dignity, self-respect, amorality, which has become unconscious, indicate the existence of a deepseated evil which calls for remedies of equal magnitude. It is not suddenly that we lie, that we break all moral laws, supernatural or natural, and, more simply, the laws of the public code. It is not overnight that you work yourself up to bold hypocrisy, to speak truth only with reticence, to lie with virtuous words.
This deformation of consciousness which amazes, which frightens, today, or which puts on an air of sarcastic superiority, is only the conclusion of a long decline in human virtues.
It is the passion for wealth, the will to be powerful no matter what, it is the frenzy to be honored, it is materialism, it is the unscrupulous gratification of instincts, which have corrupted men and, through men, institutions.
The world is more and more preoccupied with banal, material, or simply animal joys. It maintains itself only by the principle of maximizing material wealth. Each man lives only for himself, and allows the domination of life both within his own home and within the country by a constant egoism which has converted men into hateful, embittered, greedy wolves, or corrupt and soulless half-men.
We will come out of this downfall only through an immense moral recovery, by re-teaching men to love, to sacrifice themselves, to live, to struggle and to die for a higher ideal.
In a century when we live only for ourselves, it will take hundreds, thousands of men to live no longer for themselves, but for a collective ideal, accepting in advance all the sacrifices, all the humiliations, all necessary heroism.
All that matters is faith, brilliant confidence, the complete absence of selfishness and individualism, the pulling of the whole being towards service, without promise of reward, in any place, by any means, towards a cause that goes beyond man, asking him everything, promising him nothing.
The only things that count are the quality of the soul, the pulse, the total gift, the will to hoist an ideal above all else, in the most absolute selflessness.
The time is coming when saving the world will require this handful of heroes and saints to make the great Reconquest.