End Notes – Claudio Mutti

Claudio Mutti – End Notes

1 – The revolutionary perspective of the Castroite and Guevarist guerrilla was advanced, according to Ludovico Garruccio by the revolutionary combatants of the national-populist movements like the Bolivian Socialist Falange or the National Revolutionary Movement, active during the 40s: “the young Bolivians officers, the intellectuals of the Falange and MNR came from the same populist, xenophobic, and even racist type as the Romanian Iron Guard and like those, made appeal to nationality, to Bolivianidad for the recovery of the subaltern masses; like them, they always paid a most high tribute of blood and, like the Iron Guard and the Arrow Cross, found a working and popular audience superior to those of the Marxists” (Momenti dell’ esperienza politica latino-americana. Tre saggi su populismo e militari in America Latina, a cura di Ludovico Garruccio, Bologna 1974; Introduction). “Between Guevara and Mishima” – so Garruccio says – “between a South American intellectual who searched for the beautiful death in the trenches of libertadores and caudillos of romantic times and the Japanese writer that claimed, by his spectacular harakiri, the ethic of heroism, there is a common fidelity to traditional values” (ibid)

The legendary prototype of the Latin-American guerrilla, Guevara is the author of this significant phrase that Freda proposed in 1970 in the edition of Evolian writings The Aryan Doctrine of Battle and Victory: “To find the formula to perpetuate in daily life the heroic comportment of the guerrilla is, from the ideological point of view, one of our fundamental tasks… The instrument to mobilize the people must be essentially a moral order.”

General Peron, to whom Guevara sent, with a friendly dedication, his book on the techniques of guerrilla warfare, declared in an interview accorded to Jean Thiriart: “Castro is a promoter of liberation. He supports an imperialism because the neighbors of the other are in danger of being crushed. But the objective of the Cubans is the liberation of the peoples of Latin-America. Their sole intention is to constitute a bridge head for the liberation of continental countries.Che Guevara is a symbol of this liberation. He was great because he served a great cause, as far as embodying it. He was the man of an ideal.” (“La Nation Européene” February 1969).

The national-populist heritage of Peronism and of the guerrilla movement of Cuban inspiration seems to have been reprised today by the Montoneros. This organization, characterized by its bonds with Argentine culture and with the most authentic Peronism, represents today the most valuable revolutionary force among those that struggle in Latin America against the tentacles of American-Zionist imperialism.

[From certain information, without a doubt it is necessary to nuance a bit the altogether favorable judgment towards the Montoneros and consider that this movement has broken into many factions. On one side, the press attracted the attention to the case of the Israeli banker David Graiver, nicknamed the “Banker of the Montoneros”, who had trouble beginning with the Argentine military dictatorship for having financed terrorist activities and for whom his Zionist supporters had triggered a vast campaign of solidarity (cf, “Lectures Françaises”, June 1978, pp. 9-10); on the other side according to a communique published in Beirut and reported in “Le Monde” (9/20/1978), we learned that the “Palestinians furnished arms to the Montoneros” and that “Palestinians and Montoneros, who have been in contact since 1972, are engaged in mutual support in their respective struggles against Israel and the Argentine junta.” (Note of Eric Houellefort)]

2 – This style represented, in the anti-plutocratic struggle of the Vietnamese people, an element irreconcilable with the bourgeois rationalism and pacifism of this Marxist ideology to which the directors of Hanoi verbally referred; thus it is true that, behind the official facade of Marxist-Leninism, it was affirmed and taught that “the spirit continues to be the fundamental factor of relations between man and weapon, because this, so modern in itself, is only an inert object without the intervention of man.” (Giap), The North-American strategy, that ascribes the fate of war to the “machine” factor, and not to the “man” factor, was vanquished in the clash with the Vietnamese people, whose leaders had benefited from the teaching of Hsiao Hoa, director of the political department of the Chinese Army, which had affirmed that the “result of war is decided by man… victory is impossible if we follow the theory according to which arms are decisive.”

3- Not only “anti-Semites” like Wagner and Chamberlain but also Jews like Weininger noted the existence of an analogy between the English type and the Jewish type, if we are to judge by the fortune encountered in England by the “origin myth” that affirms that they are the descendants of the Jews. That would be better to leave the unreal character of views of those, within National-Socialism, filled with illusions on the availability of England (a nation indisputably of the “white race” – but the Jews and the Yankees are as well!) to the appeal of German geopolitical projects.

The fallacious biological categories on which the said illusions are based can uniquely serve – if we utilized them as a foundation of actual geopolitics – to furnish an alibi to North American occidentalism, heir of the cosmopolitan British imperialism. And in fact, certain miserable mercenaries of the West have exactly claimed, above all in the anti-communist crusade, the defense of the “white race”; mercenaries that, alternately, supported French intervention in Indochina, the North-American wars against Korea and Vietnam, the Israeli attack against Egypt and the Anglo-French intervention in Suez, the action of mercenaries in the Congo, the Algerian putsch, and so on, even as far as the Zionist raid on Entebbe and the different white “presences” in Africa: from Portuguese missionaries to the plutocrats of South Africa to the Calvinist merchants of Rhodesia.

4- “In the context of geopolitics and a communal civilization, it will thus be further demonstrated in the unitary and communitarian Europe extending from Brest to Bucharest” Thus Jean Thiriart began his book An Empire of 400 Million Men: Europe (Brussells, 1964), published in Italian translation in 1965. We cannot stop ourselves here on the numerous points where the work of Thiriart has today an incontestable value – although certain theses of the book, linked to contingent historical evens, have been surpassed by writers following the author, above all in the magazine “The European Nation” – we will content ourselves to a single merit of Thiriart: that of having placed clearly, with lucid and realist arguments, the limited perspectives of petty nationalism (“the skimpy petty nationalisms cancel each other … it is nonsense, it is a formal contradiction of pretending to hold a force of addition of frozen and contemptible particularisms”), of the romantic nostalgia of old combatants (“We despise the paralytic patriotism of cemeteries, the vain patriotism of the bearers of ribbons and trinkets”), of absurd national conceptions constructed on biological or linguistic homogeneity (“for our nationalism, it’s the identity of destiny willed in view of a common grand design.”)

But, besides that, the limit of Thiriart consists exactly in his secular nationalism, supported by a Machiavellian conception of politics and deprived of all justification from a transcendent order. The historical clashes resolve themselves, for him, in a relation of brutal forces, such that the state embodies nothing other than a Nietzschean “will to power,” put in the service of a project of European hegemony marked by a smug and blind exclusivist pride (“a type of man, for numerous centuries, has clearly emerged from the magma of peoples and races, that is the European man”; “The Orient was only ever fertile in the domains of metaphysics and mysticism, not particularly constructive activities” (!) ; “The other peoples can only diminish their gap, catching up, in the sole measure where they renounce their culture or they adopt ours, much more fertile.”) (Citations from J. Thirart, An Empire of 400 Million Men: Europe).

It is to the “indifferentist” and problematic “myth of Europe” that the violent critique of Freda is addressed, a critique that does not touch, according to us, the indisputable value of Thiriart on the indispensable continental dimensions of the territory of a state that is understood today to play a determinant role in global history.

5 – We have shown elsewhere (Introduction to Discorsi sull’arte nazionalsocialista d’Hitler, Ed. Di Ar, Padua 1977; trad. fr. In Totalité No 4, Paris 1978) how “totalitarian” revolutions of the 20^th century have pushed for, with a perfect equivalence of terms, bourgeois conceptions of art. What we want to reveal here, that the bourgeois aesthetic, by making art “a voluptuary article destined for parasitic loafers” – to utilize the expression of Lukacs who, as the son of a banker, could affirm by knowing the cause – erected in a system of profane ignorance. “Docti rationem artis intelligunt, indocti voluptatem,” said Quintilien to that effect, opposing the comprehension of artistic symbolism to the appreciation of art in terms of pleasure (from the point of seeing or hearing), of taste, of agreeable sensation.

6 – Herbert Marcuse, a disciple of Freud and Marx and the mentor of the Yankee new left, published in Italian, in 1967, The One-Dimensional Man, a critique of advanced industrial society conducted in the name of the ideal, still more advanced, of the irrationalist “imagination.”

In the The One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse denied the neutrality of science, perceiving in it an instrument proper to rationalize the exploitation of man and nature: “Society is reproduced itself in an technical ensemble conscious of the objects and relations that include the utilization of technology by men (…). Technical-scientific rationality and manipulations are welded together into new forms of social control” (Op. cit. Trad it. Torino 1967, p. 160)

But the denunciation of Freda of the functional character of science in relation to bourgeois progress is attached to a current of thought marked by a sign algebraically opposed to those characterized by the polemic of Marcuse: it is this current of thought that is expressed in the Guenonian opposition between “sacred science” and “profane science,” in the Evolian destruction of the myth of “neutral science” (“many still believe that science is the product of automatic and objective processes”, and recently, in the considerations of a Muslim author, who attaches to the birth of material and quantitative science “ to causes profoundly rooted and to certain limits of theological formulations of Latin Christianity” and demonstrates “the unlimited and blind application of science in the West” from fact that “Christianity is a religion without a Sacred Law” (S. Hossein Nasr, L’uomo e la natura, Milano 1977, p. 139).

7- It is maybe not at all devoid of interest to recall that the massive practice of sports enters among the programmatic points of the famous “Elders of Zion”: “Soon we are going to launch announcements in journals, inviting the people to take part in concourses of every type: artistic, sport, etc.” (C. Mutti, Ebraicità ed ebraismo. I Procolli dei Savi di Sion, Ed. Di Ar, Padua 1976, p. 118). We have already spoken of the high degree of Judaism present in English civilization; because certain people have remarked that “modern sports is for a large part, a donation of England to the world, from which the world learned to use much better than other donations, equally provided by England: parliamentary government and jury trial in matters of penal law” (J. Huizinga, La crisi della cività, Torino 1964, p. 111). It is in effect the Anglo-Saxon world that made from the instrument of sports “the principal and definitive safety valve of bourgeois society.” In the particular case of the American “Promised Land,“ this phenomenon has benefited, incontestably, from the typical infantilism of the Yankees. On this subject, Huizinga remarked that this characteristic “manifests itself in certain American universities, where sport competitions acquire an essential importance, putting intellectual life on the second tier.” In the bourgeois West, infantilism – which, according to Sombart, diffuses in concert with the cult of material wealth included in the capitalist economy – manifests very particularly in the organization of sports activities, in the “excessive importance given to sports activities in the daily press, without talking of specialized journals, as far as becoming the spiritual nourishment of numerous individuals.” (J. Huizinga, Op. cit. p. 112)

8 – “The proletarian reclaims his place in the banquet of life,” proclaims a Marxist writer cited by Sombart, who observes that “socialist proletarian” life, cultivates an ideal that “oscillates between material enjoyment and the desire to ‘live his life,’ ‘of participating in the blessing of culture,’ ‘of developing all the qualities of the individual’ etc.” by always judging fundamentally “for this state of things, dreaming of rich dotage in material goods,” remains completely on the interior of the mental universe proper to the economic era: Marxism, “the shop owners conception of society”, does not know different values from “those of bourgeois civilization, which exactly wants the proletarian to participate in it.” (W. Sombart, Il socialismo tedesco, Firenze, 1934, pp. 113-114).

Céline insulted, with the violence proper to himself, the consumable characteristics of proletarian aspirations: “Tripe will always be to the shame of man, you will never have a moving credo, a title of nobility. The tripe is always an error of the bearer of the bulwarks, the tripe will always be only the greatest ridicule of our easements, the most pitiable of our shit(…). Greedy guts of proletarians against the bourgeois shrunken guts. It’s all democracy’s mysticism… Class consciousness is bullshit, a demagogic convention. Each worker only demands to leave his working class, to become bourgeois, the most individualist possible, as quick as possible.” (L.F. Céline, L’école des cadavres, Paris 1938, pp. 105-128-129).

9- The tendency of bureaucratic-proletarian democracies of Eastern Europe converges towards the same results of exploitation obtained by the partiocratic – labor union – bourgeois dictatorships of the West represents the application of Marxist orthodoxy, not a deviation in relation to it. Already Sombart, in his critic of Marxism affirms that it would like to construct the future world with the material offered by capitalism. “The yet undetermined nature of capitalism” – he wrote – “makes sure that it seems apt to become the producer of desires that animate the spirit of Marx. But, in exactly that, by the fact of confiding in capitalism the task of realizing his own aspirations, Marx shows that from the depths of his soul he loved capitalism…” (W. Sombart, Il capitalismo moderno, Torino 1967, p. 490.) It is this congenital condition of the real guard that gives birth to the inferiority complex from which the Marxists of proletarian democracies suffer from in regard to more opulent bourgeois democracies, the inferiority complex that periodically engenders attempts at adaption (Yugoslav self management, Zionist Prague “Spring,” the progression of technocrats in Poland, etc.)

But it is important to understand that the position adopted by Freda in regards to the bureaucratic-Marxist democracy is of an algebraically opposed sign to those represented by different “dissidents” (Christians like Solzhenitsyn, progressives like Sakharov, Marxists of the “new left” like Hegedüs, various Jews), whose task consists of the acting for the goal of a future alignment of their respective countries – and in the “socialist” camp in general – to the Western model, as far as total integration. The “dissidents” represent in fact the visible and provocative vanguard that the West is in the middle of sending against the “backward” zones of Eastern Europe: it is thus significant that their watchwords (“rights on man” and others) are directed against these aspects of the “socialist” regimes (authoritarianism, single party, military power, etc) that, although submitted to a deviant and deformed orientation, could always represent a point of appeal and and instrument for national-communist tendencies and even national-socialists who exist in certain milieus in the East. And it is in this ideology of certain “dissidents” sincerely faithful to Marxism that manifests the impossibility of an anti-capitalist Marxism. Presenting the book of a Hungarian dissident, A. Jannazzo clarifies for us the doctrinal characteristics of the “new left”: “The anti-capitalism of Hegedüs is entirely on the interior of the modern world: it is deprived of solidarist, populist, or pre-capitalist suggestions… The ‘new city’ of Hegedüs … based on the creation of ‘effective communities’ is as full of humanist sentiments as it is of effort or work…” (A. Hegedüs, La struttura sociale dei paesi dell’Europa orientale, Milan 1977, pp. 7-8). The polemic is evidently directed against these “soldarist, populist, or pre-capitalist” elements whom, in Eastern Europe, have not disappeared and that the pro-Western dissidence, otherwise faithful to the progressive program of Marxism, means to combat and eliminate.

[It seems to us a bit excessive to put Solzhenitsyn in the same bag as the other dissidents. Someone who has known him well wrote: “Without a doubt it would be unjust to accuse Solzhenitsyn of wanting to arouse petty nationalist sentiments among his countrymen. It does not show in the least that he is in harmony with such sentiments instinctively. His own convictions are powered by the most profound Russian experience., that he was never tempered by the civilizing influences of a democratic tradition (sic!). The Soviet leaders are aged and struck with immobility: if one day, following a crisis of succession or conflict with China, elements of the right would arrive in power in the USSR, Solzhenitsyn … could return home in triumph” (Olga Carlisle, L’audience de Soljenitsyne en Occident, in “Le Monde Diplomatique”, Sept. 1978, p. 2) For his part Solzhenitsyn explained that he is opposed to the Soviet regime “not because it is anti-democratic, authoritarian, founded on physical constraint – a man can live in these conditions without any attenuation of his spiritual essence”, but because “outside of physical constraint, it requires from us the complete surrender of our souls.”: (cited by Arthur Schlesinger, in “The Washington Post” of 6/25/1978). After his very maladroit declarations in favor of Pinochet and the American intervention in Vietnam – declarations that were without a doubt made by him from a certain ignorance of the political wings of American imperialism – Solzhenitsyn has recently denounced “the great sympathy of American intellectuals for socialism and communism,” sympathy that comes, according to him, from “materialism and atheism, common sources of the their ideological origins.” He violently attacked the last wave of emigration that “only represents the last link of emigrations towards Israel”, and condemned, without naming them, the Zionists, motivated by “a ferocious hate, not of the Soviet System but of Russia and its people.”; those who, according to Solzhenitsyn, sought to convince the Europeans that a “national renaissance or even the simple existence of the Russian people represents the gravest danger for the West.” (cf. “Le Monde” of 2-20-1979). (Note by E. Houellefort)].

10- It seems exactly that it is necessary, given the objections raised on the subject of communist principles enunciated by Freda. Those who confound communism and Marxist socialism evident ignore that communist programs were enunciated far before Marx and Engels. To remain in the domain of European culture and to refer only to the political thought of the modern and contemporary age, recall Utopia of Thomas More and City of the Sun by Campanella, political projects traced on the model of Platonic Politea; we cite the doctrines of Morelly and Mably, the attempts of Babeuf to install an authoritarian communism, the ideal of the Phalanstery dreamed of by Fourier, the Icarian utopia of Cabet. Apart from of these gambles by individual theories, it is undeniable that certain traditional civilizations – some still remain today, certain “primitive” cultures – were characterized, in the socioeconomic domain, by a collectivist organization. Nevertheless, they will reply, “normal” civilizations that have historically succeeded in the European sphere, during Antiquity and the Middle Ages, attributed a legitimacy to personal property, even if they accorded little importance to the economic side of existence (or, maybe, exactly because of that). We can respond to this objection by affirming that these cycles are definitively closed; it is not obligatory to say that a new traditional form should maintain the economic type that characterized the preceding forms. In addition, Freda brings to light the fact that private property, today, plays a fundamental role in the existence of the bourgeois world, a very different role than in the classical civilizations or in Medieval civilization. “At the origin” – wrote Spengler – we had goods because we were powerful. Now we are powerful because we have money. Intellect reaches the throne only when money puts it there. Democracy means the perfect equivalence between money and political power.“ (O. Spengler, Le déclin de l’Occident). If although the solution proposed by Freda seems a bit strong it is better to understand it as an extreme remedy to an extreme sickness.

11- In similar terms, Malynski contrasted the unity of action between the extreme right and the extreme left to a “historical compromise” which sees its premonitions in the coinciding interests relating big capital and party bureaucracies and labor unions: “Against the bloc of democratic insolence, of financial rapacity, and Jewish domination, there must be the bloc of the extreme right and the extreme left.” The Polish aristocrat did not hesitate to reveal “a certain deep affinity between what we call the extreme right and the extreme left, as strange as it seems, they are precisely the two parties on the contemporary social chessboard between which, if we disregard the superficial, there is not, in reality, any antithesis of aspirations and fundamental interests. On the contrary, this antithesis and irreducibility necessarily exists from both sides regarding the bourgeoisie.” (E. Malynski, L’Empreinte d’Israël, Paris 1926, pp. 38 – 41)

In May 1968 in Italy, the unity of action supported by Malynski quickly emerged. Formations of the extreme right like “Primula Goliardica” and “Caravella” refused visceral anti-communism in the name of the primary requirement to struggle against the system, alongside different groups of the extreme left that saw in the anti-fascist crusades a revisionist maneuver to save the bourgeois system, such that the vanguard “National-Europeans” like “Jeune Europe” and “Lotta di Popolo” both acted to reinforce this attack concentrated against the powers that be. Faced with a new and dangerous situation, the regime mobilized, besides the Special Police of the Carabinieri, the bourgeois henchmen of the PCI and the MSI. Only to cite a few episodes: in Milan, a group of MSI attempted to attack the Department of Arts, under the watchful eye of the police; in Rome, activists of the PCI tried to burn the Department of Architecture; the following day, Tricolor band led by Almirante and Caradonna lead the assault against the Department of Law to “liberate” it from the “communists” (who, it happens, were students of “Primula Goliardica,” “Caravella,” etc.) In brief, the coordinated maneuvers of the anti-communists and anti-fascists broke the unity of action that was in the processes of occuring. In 1977, it seems that ultras of the right had helped to chase Lama – epigone of Caradonna – from the University of Rome, thus they signaled, in the same year, the presence of an “ordonovisti” in the course of clashes that had taken place in Bologna between the autonomists and police.