ARISTOKRATIA II – A REVIEW

Aristokratia II
Edited by K.Deva
Manticore Press, 322 pages 

Reviewed by Colin Liddell

I haven't read the entire contents of the latest edition of this intellectual and deeply esoteric journal. It's simply not that kind of book – i.e. the kind you race through and then dash off a quick review.

No, if you want to dash off a quick review – and I do because this journal deserves wider attention – the only way to do it is to glean what one can from a partially digested reading of this rich psychic and intellectual feast and then string a few sentences together, which is what I have done here. To read it fully and properly will be the work of several years, many rereads, and much contemplation.

Readers of Alternative Right will be familiar with one of the seventeen essays included, namely Gwendolyn Taunton's excellent Nietzsche's Olympian Synthesis. This was initially published here last year to commemorate the anniversary of Nietzsche's birth.

Rereading it on paper, Taunton's analysis is still as fascinating and full of interest as I remember it was when I helped to edit it. In particular Taunton offers insight based on Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman:

"Here, the 'Death of God' is not seen as a victory, but as a mistake. Humanity is not portrayed as Nietzsche's higher type (Ubermensch) who were to become Gods incarnate themselves, but instead as killers whose hands are stained with the blood of Nietzsche's own literary crime. God is dead, but the people are not mentally or spiritually strong enough to be capable of living without the idea of God. With God 'dead' humanity is lost; the premature death of God becomes a murder, transformed into a criminal act against humanity, rather than its salvation. The 'Death of God' morphs from Nietzsche’s original premise of creating the Ubermensch into an act of cruelty, not towards God, but to humanity itself. This is the root of the cultural crisis of the European world."

My reading of this work actually played a key role in my forthcoming Radix essay Judge Dredd: Hero of the Anti-Civilization.

Taunton, who is a fount of seemingly effortless erudition, also contributes very interesting essays on Vedic models of polity (Emperor of the Sun) and Julius Evola's concept of the military Kshatriya caste (The Once and Future King).

Our readers will also know some of the other names contributing essays and book reviews. Brett Stevens, always one of our more controversial and writers at Alternative Right, provides two of the seven book reviews, one which was published on our previous site. This examines Evola's Fascism Viewed from the Right, highlighting an interesting contrast between Fascist and Liberal concepts of the state:

"One of Evola’s more interesting assertions is that while modern liberal governments are motivated by hedonistic compulsions, the fascist society was motivated by eudemonistic ones, meaning that the goal of its individuals was to do well for the society as a whole and thus to receive a collective reward, not simply to “earn” individual rewards by pursuing self-interest. All of us who have watched citizens pass crimes in progress, toss litter on streets, ignore their children or others committing “little sins” might find this vision appealing. Evola ties this to the reason for fascism’s fascination with order and power by pointing out that if a mission is shared by all citizens, these things are no longer threatening but efficient."

James O'Meara and K.R.Bolton will likewise need little introduction to fish who swim in alternative right seas. In The Eldritch Evola, O'Meara, a frequent contributor to Counter-Currents and author of The Homo and the Negro offers a new and refreshing angle on Evola by passing his light through the prism of the 'occultization' of H.P.Lovecraft.

Bolton's essay Corporatism as a Perennial Method of Traditional Social Organisation is a wide-ranging survey of a system that ensures both unity and diversity, although not the pointless cultural diversity of conventional multiculturalism, but rather the much more useful functional diversity of castes and classes geared to specific tasks in society.

The Serbian writer Boris Nad contributes two essays, although as yet I have only read Androgyne. As its title hints, it is an arsenal of ideas to use in the contemporary gender wars, although Nad has an even more profound focus, the nature of the underlying Christian culture on which European civilization is based:

"The Christian tradition of primary Adam's androgyny provides the foundation for later understandings, and one of these is from the Irish mystic Johannes Scotus Eurigena. Eurigena claimed that with the act of resurrection Christ became androgynous, combining genders in their own nature, writing, 'he was neither male nor female, even though he was born and died as a man.' This Christian reactualization can be considered in terms of the aforementioned historical 'antithesis' of Uranian and Chthonic, patriarchal and matriarchal. It is a period of decline for the patriarchal and the revenge of the matriarchal principle, a sort of anti-patriarchal revolution. Genuine Christianity is characterized by an extremely Chthonic, matriarchal character, which will have a decisive role in the further impact of the androgynous symbols and ideology of matriarchy."

The journal also includes an important translation of Emile Faguet's The Cult of Incompetence, a work from 1911 that still resonates today:

"We deplore that democracy surrenders itself to politicians, but from its own point of view, a point of view which it cannot avoid taking up, it is absolutely right. What is a politician? He is a man who, in respect of his personal opinions, is a nullity, in respect of education, a mediocrity, he shares the general sentiments and passions of the crowd, his sole occupation is politic, and if that career were closed to him, he would die of starvation. He is precisely the thing of which the democracy has need."

Another important but less accessible contribution comes from Azsacra Zarathustra, who can best be described as a modern day mystic. The dense prose of Der Ubermensch: A Holy Yes to Life, translated from Russian and packed with terminology from German philosophy is not for the faint-hearted and misunderstandings are sure to abound, but, thoughtfully, the journal also contains two works that serve as a bridge to Zarathustra's work: an interview with the man himself and Gwendolyn Taunton's review of two of his books, Indo-Europe Rising and Atoms of Kshatriyas.

Last and possibly least among this wealth of ideas, insights, and inspirations is my own humble contribution, The King's True Champion. This takes a look at the philosophy of Sir Robert Filmer, an uncompromising monarchist thinker who exposed the weaknesses of that more famous defender of monarchy, Thomas Hobbes.

For Filmer, Hobbes was part of the problem rather than the solution, the problem being the Catholic Church's use of medieval scholastic trickery and classical egalitarianism to wage war against natural patriarchal hierarchies. Filmer is particularly devastating in his critique of social contracts and natural rights:

"I cannot understand how this 'right of nature' can be conceived without imagining a company of men at the very first to have been all created together without any dependency one of another, or as 'mushrooms they all of a sudden were sprung out of the earth without any obligation one to another,' as Mr Hobbes words are in his book De Cive..."

The real choice in our modern age is between those who choose to see mankind as mere mushrooms, and those of us who have a higher and more spiritual concept of who we are. This collection of work clearly caters for those who choose the second path. As for the mushrooms, they will always have the darkness and the crap to feed off.