Broken Arrow

The Border Guard

Erasing national borders does not make people safer or more prosperous.

It undermines democracy and trades away prosperity.

- Donald Trump

A proper political positioning of the patriotic-identitarian movement in the present European predicament of imploding state sovereignty and escalating ethnic replacement requires a constant awareness of its true raison d’être. Its right to exist is fundamentally dependent on its primary function as the ‘border guard’ of the European peoples: at the present height of ‘deconstructive’ postmodernitythis function has devolved on the patriotic-identitarian movement faute de mieux. The postmodern disintegration of all traditional forms of authentic auctoritas results in the fading away of all those borders that were previously recognized as universally appropriate to human experience and endeavour. The primary characteristic of postmodern ‘Culture Nihilism’ - the soixante-huitard ideology of militant secularism, social-darwinism, narcissist hyper-individualism and doctrinaire cultural-relativism - can be described as totalitarian levelling. [1] Driven by the sadomasochistic dynamics of psycho-historical feminisation, Culture Nihilism is gradually undermining and destroying all forms of political sovereignty, economic autarky, national identity, social structure, cultural originality and religious polarity: it is displacing and removing the ancient landmarks of Western civilization.

The only reliable remedy for the downward Umwertung aller Werte resulting from this all-levelling devolution is an ontological and epistemological correction of historically unprecedented scope - realizing this corrective ‘Archaeo-Futurist Revolution’ is the prime objective of the patriotic-identitarian movement.[2]Under the aegis of the contemporary Culture Nihilist ‘New World Order’ only a few fixed power poles and fixed reference points remain available to this movement. Undoubtedly, the most important remaining power pole is the slowly emerging ‘anti-thalassocratic’ block: this conglomerate of anti-globalist nation-states - consolidating itself around Russia, reborn from the ashes of Bolshevism, and China, reborn from imperialist slavery - is currently expanding into the ‘illiberal’ states of Central Europe. Undoubtedly, the most important reference point is the meta-political discourse of (Neo-)Eurasianism, providing an alternative worldview characterized by geopolitical multi-polarity and a Traditionalist reference frame. [3] The Eurasianist School is offering the rapidly expanding Western patriotic-identitarian movement a ‘fixed pole’ in its efforts to achieve a meta-political shift within the heartland of globalist Culture Nihilism: the (Western) European Atlantic Rim and the overseas Anglosphere. Within the same reference frame, this essay aims at pointing out the importance for the Western movement of a recent publication by Eurasianism’s foremost thinker: Alexander Dugin’s ‘The Solar Hounds of Russia’, dedicated to the Traditionalist concept of the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’. Dugin’s essay contains a number of important lessons for the Western patriotic-identitarian movement - the next paragraph will, therefore, introduce a few quotes from Dugin’s text, with some added remarks to elucidate its philosophical and Traditionalist context. [4]

The Guardian of the Threshold

Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark,

which they of old time have set in thine inheritance,

which thou shalt inherit in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee to possess it.

- Deuteronomy 19:14

Dugin starts with a closer inspection of the concept of ‘the border’: The border circumscribes the State. It describes the State. In being its boundary, it determines the State.Every thing [that it] is, ....it [owes] to its borders. After all, it is they that separate it from other thing[s]. This distinction carries the most important meaning of the concept of the border, not just for international law, defence doctrine, or the structuring of a country’s armed forces, but also for philosophy as such. The border is not just an instrument of philosophy, but its essence, seeing as the highest philosophical concept - transcendence, in Latin literally means ‘that what lies on the far side of the border’. Thus, the border may be said to separate the immanent sphere, i.e. what is visible and material, from the transcendent sphere, i.e. from what is invisible and immaterial, because ‘that what lies beyond’ is necessary opaque - alien in the most profound sense of the word. The border externally reflects that which lies inside it, while simultaneously confining the essence of the thing in its confrontation with other things. The border is something sacred. The ancient Greeks knew a special god, Terminus, whose name meant ‘limit’, ‘border’. This was not just the guardian-deity of borders, but a ‘border-deity’, a kind of special, sacred concept that played a central role in the worldviews of the ancient Indo-European peoples. Dugin analyzes ‘the border’ in a doubly philosophical and metaphysical sense. Philosophically, he analyzes ‘the border’ in terms of Heidegger’s specialized time(the bounded time-horizon of Kulturkreisen) and specialized space (the sheltering spatial horizon of Blut und Boden): there, ‘the border’ is an absolute precondition for every authentic form of world-historical culture. Metaphysically, he analyzes ‘the border’ in terms of Traditionalist symbolism: ....there also exists the important concept of the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’, a special being that is located at the intersection of two worlds: the beyond and the present, the vulgar and subtle, that of life and that of death, the waking world and the dreaming world. This is the very same ancient Terminus, with only slight modifications. Terminus separates chaos from order by imposing and enforcing rational structures. As a manifestation of a superhuman, divine principle, ‘the border’ is the foundation of all authentic civilizations - even of all authentic thought systems. In this sense, there the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’ is the archetype of the border guard: [b]order guards are not just a type of soldier, but [rather possessed of] a kind of special, sacred quality. They are the modern adepts of the extremely ancient cult of the god Terminus.

Borders exist at every level: even [a] tribe or lineage has its territorial, cultural, linguistic etc. borders. These borders widen, stretching themselves out to the concepts ‘people’, ‘nation’, ‘state’. Finally, the highest form of a state is the Empire. Its borders are enormous, they include the maximum possible number of natural human organisations: it has a place for tribes, lineages, cultures, religions, nations, ethn[icities], and, in some cases, it can even accommodate likenesses of independent states (provinces, dominions etc.). As a form of state, the Empire is the highest category, comparable to the most sacred and all-encompassing gnoseological concepts such as ‘God’, ‘Truth’, ‘Good’ etc. This is why the concept of the ‘Sacred Empire’ is so durable. ...Based on the direct link between the sacred spirit of Empire and its borders, military units of border guards (warriors who were charged with the protection of the far reaches of the state) were formed in traditional civilisations. This link can be seen... clearly in... [k]nightly [o]rders... [such as] the Templars, warrior monks and bearers of a special, universal knowledge. Such orders ...defended sacred civilisation from streams of decomposition and sickness. It was this that was the goal of Alexander the Great’s ‘iron wall’. The very same symbolism forms the foundation of the Great Wall of China, as well as the [Limes] on the northern borders of the Roman Empire. When the [o]rde[r] of the border guards disintegrates, the foundations of imperial unity are undermined, the forces of chaos infiltrate civilisation, and, finally, a new collapse and [a new] Babylonian mixing of the tongues begin. The fall of the Empire is the catastrophe of the order of the border guards (in the physical as well as magical sense). A symbolic expression of the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’ is found in the Traditionalist symbolism of the dog:Anubis in Ancient Egypt and Cerberus in Ancient Greece. There, the dog symbol is ...tightly linked [to] the idea of the border in a wide sense, including in the metaphysical dimension: The dog guards the house, all the while located at the edge of the internal and the external. This animal is the incarnation of the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’: [it has] an occult character, whose mission is the safekeeping of the self-sameness of [what it guards]. Even as a house is not safe without a dog, so a state is not safe without a border guard.

The fall of Empire is not just a socio-political catastrophe. It is a spiritual disaster. Along with the contraction of the borders, a collapse of the life-giving organic idea takes place. The highest philosophical spheres are struck. The parts lose their understanding of belonging to the whole, fall away from the life-giving centre, die off, and degenerate. The fall of the borders is the fall of concepts, ideas, a mental muddling. The fall signifies blood and the mixing of tongues. It is a deep catastrophe of the holy figure of the border guard. The forces of hell infiltrate the nation; the thief makes his way into the house; strife and numbness assault peoples. ...The chaos of spiritual night descends unto the Empire’s people. ... The end of Empire is evil, manifesting itself in the destruction of borders. ... The fall of the borders is directly provoking a crisis of philosophy. The chaos of the Gog and Magog penetrates the mind. Idiots head the country’s government. The bastion of the spirit has fallen. It is this same terrifying vision that permeates Jean Raspail’s novel Le camp des saints(1973): it describes the final apocalyptic assault of barbarian hordes on the last citadels of Western civilization after the borders of the West are abandoned. Dugin’s vision is undoubtedly inspired by the historical trauma of the recent downfall of the Russian ‘Soviet’ (‘Eastern Roman’) empire - a downfall that seems to eerily prefigure the imminent downfall of the Atlanticist ‘New World Order’ (‘Western Roman’) empire. To those Westerners that are currently living through the Merkel-Macron years of the ‘great betrayal of the borders’ with their eyes and ears still open, Dugin’s concluding sentences are food for thought: The gates of hell are open. Hordes of enemies pour in through the crack in the Great Wal... All is lost. But the abandoned, betrayed, lonely and forgotten border guards of the Empire carry on their duty at far-flung posts. Islands of order lost in chaos, now meaningless guardians of the remains of a once truly Great Wall.

Dugin’s analysis of the double physical and metaphysical postmodern assault on Christian civilization - an assault that he interprets in a double geopolitical and eschatological sense as the ‘Last War of the World-Island’ - is essentially Traditionalist in the sense that it bears a direct relation to the analysis of lacrise du monde moderneby the founding father of the Traditional School, René Guénon. A direct link between the two may be found in Julius Evola’s analysis of laregressione delle caste, which views the rise of the deconstructive forces of Modernity as a function of the decline of the constructive forces of Tradition, i.e. of the fatal weakeningof Tradition. In this regard, it is important to note that Evola predicts the eventual total fading of the Guardian of the Threshold: A highly significant legend in this regard is that of the people of Gog and Magog, who symbolize chaotic and demonic forces that are held back by traditional structures. According to this legend, these people attack when they realize that there is no longer anybody blowing the trumpets on that wall upon which an imperial type had previously arrested their siege and that it was only the wind that produced the sounds they were hearing. [5]

‘Voyage au bout de la nuit’

Mon Dieu ayez pitié de ce pauvre peuple

- William the Silent

For the peoples of the West - here provisionally defined as the peoples of Western Europe and the overseas Anglosphere - the tangible consequences of the fading of the Guardian of the Threshold are now increasingly intruding into all spheres of life. Over the last decades, these consequences have come to affect, first slowly now rapidly, not only public and professional life, but also private and domestic life. Elsewhere, the author has briefly summarized this acceleration for his native country, the Netherlands.[6]Western civilization is approaching its meta-historic ‘event horizon’. The real-time consequences of the invasion of ‘Gog and Magog’ (mass-immigration andUmvolkung) and the descent into demonic chaos (matriarchal-xenophile anarchy and oikophobe-demophobe ‘idiocracy’) are clear for all to see. The direct confrontation with the civilizational abyss that follows der Untergang des Abendlandesis now causing discomfort even within the cognitively-dissonant ‘comfort zone’ bubble of the Western elites. In the Netherlands this discomfort is cautiously translating itself into a neoconservative-libertarian political opposition: ‘alt-light’ spin-off ‘Forum for Democracy’ (Dutch: Forum voor Democratie, FVD) has recently entered the political arena.[7]Over the last decennia, the Western elites have silently accepted the loss of state sovereignty, border control, inner cities and indigenous socio-cultural life forms - these were necessary sacrifices to facilitate their own ‘tactical retreat’ into neo-capitalist privilege. Throughout the West, the hopeless rear-guard action of the ‘common people’ against neoliberal dispossession and ethnic replacement was left to a handful of supposedly ‘extreme right’ and ‘populist’ dissenters. In the Netherlands, these dissenters have maintained an intermittent but significant presence in the parliamentary arena. The failure of the severely persecuted ‘Centre Party’ (Dutch: Centrum Partij, 1980-86) was followed by the meteoric rise of the charismatic leader Pim Fortuyn until his assassination on the eve of the 2002 elections. The mantle of ‘populist’ leadership has since passed to Geert Wilders, heading the Party for Freedom (Dutch: Partij voor de Vrijheid, PVV, since 2006) and standing up for the severely restricted rights of the indigenous ‘common people’ of the Netherlands. At long last, however, the impact of globalist Umvolkung and neoliberal ‘disaster capitalism’ is now also starting to affect (parts of) the Western elites itself: as the deluge of barbarian invasion, societal chaos and matriarchal anarchy reaches the gates of the proud towers of the financial, academic and artistic elites, latent self-doubt and simple cold fear are causing the first cracks to appear in the politically-correct consensus. An instinctive and existential Angstis starting to creep into the elitist bubble of cognitive dissonance - it is this Angst that allows FVD leader Thierry Baudet to cautiously re-visit the long-lost archetypes of the ‘border guard’: he can now openly talk of re-instituting guard houses, gate fences and patrol dogs. But the political value of revisiting these archetypes - hopelessly archaic and anachronistic in the ears of the higher echelons of the globalist elite in any case - does not extend beyond the electoral mobilization of a romantic-nostalgic dissident ‘vocal minority’. A minimum of political instinct and common sense is sufficient to understand that the bourgeois elite will never solve the problems that it has created in the first place: its nihilist materialism, spineless opportunism, existential relativism and narcissist conditioning preclude any positive role for the bourgeois intelligentsia.

The awkward and ineffective combination of long-serving populists and newly-dissident intelligentsia now mirrored in the de facto Dutch parliamentary PVV-FVD alliance will be unable to dislodge the Western political establishment. The ‘alt light’ analysis of the political establishment as a ‘party cartel’ combination of ex-right neo-liberalism and ex-left cultural-marxism is correct, but a diagnosis does not equal a therapy. The political cartel - which in the Netherlands includes not only the half-plus-one governing coalition, but also the entire Social Justice Warrior opposition - is backed by much larger interests: ruthless financiers, greedy bankers, parasitical bureaucrats, cynical asylum profiteers, malignant-narcissist system journalists and comfortable consensus academicians. This ‘hostile elite’, safely entrenched in a matriarchal-xenophile power apparatus of semi-totalitarian proportions and permanently reinforced from a perpetually self-renewing reserve of resentful ‘feminist’, ‘minority’ and ‘gender’ activists, will not simply give up the privileges that it has gained over half a century of globalist ‘open borders’, neoliberal ‘privatization’, feminist ‘emancipation’ and ethnic ‘affirmative action’. The hostile elite’s stranglehold over the electoral balance and the system media virtually precludes the possibility of ‘democratic’ change. The ideological strength of the hostile elite resides in its pathological - sub-rational, even anti-rational - demophobia and oikophobia: its militantly globalist, cosmopolitan and universalist discourse, increasingly openly anti-male, anti-national and even anti-white - allows it to mobilize the forces of ‘Gog and Magog’. The hostile elite can always find new ‘disadvantaged’ groups to assault enemy targets that it identifies as ‘privileged’: women against men, young people against old people, homosexuals against heterosexuals, poor people against rich people, alien populations against indigenous populations, Muslims against Christians and non-whites against whites. At a global level, the hostile elite can draw on an inexhaustible supply of low-against-high resentment - it can mobilize quantity against quality. In the final analysis, this is the reason that the hostile elite is opting for an open Flucht nach vorne, at the national and international level. If its neo-kalergian Umvolkung project can no longer be achieved through disingenuous ‘illegal immigration’, it can simply switch to open legal immigration (‘labour migration’, ‘asylum quotas’). If its globalist superstate project ‘Europe’ can no longer be achieved through subsidy-for-sovereignty bribes, it can simply switch to open blackmail (‘sanctions’ against the Visegrad block, ‘no deal’ for Brexit-Britain). This is why it is highly unlikely that a democratic opposition such as the Dutch patriotic combination PVV-FVD, forced to operate on a hopelessly unequal playing field of ‘cartel politics’, bureaucratic sabotage and trans-national power-transfers, will ever be able to pose a substantial threat to the deeply-entrenched and globally-operating hostile elite. The Culture Nihilist voyage au bout de la nuit of the Western peoples can only end when the rules of the political game are fundamentally questioned - and altered in accordance with the interests and needs of the indigenous peoples of the West. A true and worthy ‘Guardian of the Threshold’ can only effectively exercise its duties if it is properly equipped for these duties, and if these duties are no longer the subject of a politically-correct taboo.

The Night Watc

I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.

My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning.

- Psalm 130:5-6

Thus, the question arises as to who and what can still constitute the ‘Night Watch’ that can save the Western peoples from certain destruction? Who and what can still save them from the dead marshes of globalist Umvolkung, neoliberal debt-slavery and matriarchal-xenophile idiocracy? To answer this question, it is necessary to return to the basic notion of the ‘threshold’ that needs a ‘guardian’: it is necessary to know what needs to be protected before the guardian function can be defined. It logically follows that there may exist a ‘Guardian of the Threshold’ in all spheres of life:

It is the oncologist who carefully calibrates the ultimate chemotherapy for a patient: he guards the border of our health. It is the fireman who puts his life in danger to save a child: he guards the border of our safety. It is the security guard who deters the thief, night after night, in rain and snow: he guards the border of our property. It is the judge who locks up the child killer for life: he guards the border of our justice system. It is the policeman who puts a bullet in the leg of the knife-wielding terrorist: he guards the border of our law. It is the soldier who pursues the terror master into the heart of Central Asia: he guards the border of our civilization. It is the whistleblower who exposes government and corporate corruption at the highest level: he guards the border of our morality. It is the learned biolo gist who writes about ‘inconvenient’ genetic truths: he guards the border of our truth. It is the ‘controversial’ historian who exposes forgotten and hidden facts: he guards the border of our historical consciousness. It is the politician who pays the ultimate price for his patriotism: he guards the border of our nationhood.

In the pre-modern world of the authentic Western Tradition there never existed any doubt as to the identity of the Guardians of the Threshold. The protection of the borders of the realm and the nation was the task of the Monarch and the Nobility: it was their duty to defend them at all cost and with all means at their disposition - they were required to lay down their lives for the realm and the nation that they were meant to defend. Thus, William the Silent, Father of the Nation to the Dutch, paid with his life for his unwavering defence of his adopted people. [8] Throughout the ages, countless other noblemen paid with their lives in fulfilment of their duty: this sacrifice conveniently has been forgotten by those modernist ideologues that scoff at the ‘undeserved privileges’ of the nobility - the highest privilege of the nobleman was to die for king and fatherland on the field of honour. But noble notions of honour and courage are inevitably beyond the grasp of the modern elites - they are incompatible with the experiential conditioning that creates a ‘bonus banker’, a ‘cartel politician’, a ‘system journalist’ and a ‘tenured academician’. Even the most basic sense of social responsibility and professional duty towards tax-paying and law-abiding citizens are lacking in this hostile elite. The neo-liberal cabal that is administering the ex-Netherlands narco-state/tax colony on behalf of the globalist New World Order and the European superstate has now degenerated into a caricature regime on the corruption level of a banana republic dictatorship. Whereas the late 19^th and early 20^th Century ruling class of the Netherlands was bound to keep up a minimum pretence at responsible government in their capacity as ‘patricians’,[9]after the soixante-huitards ’‘long march through the institutions’ political power has been irredeemably compromised at the hands of a ‘counterfeit elite of illusionists’. [10] The last remnants of the Netherlands’ ship-wrecked ‘political consciousness’ are now reduced to the improvised political constructs of the PVV and FVD - these are simply unable to redeem the foundering of the Dutch ship of state. Undoubtedly, the simplistic islamophobia of the PVV and the respectable civic nationalism of the FVD [11] are based on a sincere concern for the predicament of the Dutch people, but they do not offer more than a superficial treatment for mere symptoms – they leave the much deeper disease of Culture Nihilism untreated. Dutch conservative politician Kees van der Staaij [12] was correct in characterizing PVV-leader Geert Wilders as the ‘watchdog of the Dutch farmyard’. Dutch Philosophy of Law Professor Paul Cliteur[13]was correct in supporting FVD-leader Thierry Baudet as an emergency brake on the derailing train of Dutch civilization. But, from the outset, anachronistic - militantly secular, paleo-libertarian - reference frames and compromised parliamentary practices are condemning the political approaches of the PVV and FVD to defeat.

The same applies to all judicial and economic approaches that limit themselves to combating the symptoms of Culture Nihilism: if their cause - the overall societal ‘vision’ and the larger institutional framework of Culture Nihilism - is not addressed, then all well-intended and well-considered treatments are bound to fail. The power of Culture Nihilism depends on two twin pillars: the absolute hegemony of its historical-materialist ‘constructivist’ world-view (which unites its libertarian and cultural-marxist strands) and the absolute power of its ‘progressive’ institutions (which include ‘cartel politics’ as well as the ‘independent judiciary’). If this overall Culture Nihilist framework is left in place, legal and economic stop-gap measures are bound to fail. Thus, mere legal measures - e.g. combating the legal insecurity and inequality caused by ‘discrimination legislation’ or abolishing compulsory ethnic ‘diversity’ in workplace and housing policy - have some merit in themselves, but they fail to address the larger problem of the incompatibility of Western law (based on individual freedom and responsibility) in non-Western cultural setting. Similarly, mere economic measure - e.g. selective immigration according to professional qualification, extra taxes for immigrants, partial exclusion of immigrants from social security - have some merit in themselves, but they fail to address the larger problem of basic correlations such as the link between Western ethnic homogeneity and Western socioeconomic stability and the link between ideologically-imposed multicultural ‘diversity’ and fiscally-enforced inter-ethnic resource transfers. Only a persistent exercise in ‘thinking outside the box’, i.e. corrective thinking that extends beyond the boundaries of the contemporary Western political, judicial and socioeconomic model, and a decisive application of political power, i.e. a suppression of absolutist ‘economic thinking’ and unfettered ‘personal freedom’, can still save the Netherlands - and Western civilization as a whole - from utter destruction. ‘Business as usual’ equals the fire sale of Dutch state authority and the slave auction of the Dutch people. The Netherlands - and the West as a whole - is in dire need of a new ‘Night Watch’.

The changing of the guard

Luctor et emergo [14]

The historical task of the ‘Night Watch’, to guard the peoples of the West through the dark time of the Crisis of the Post-modern West, is now falling to the brand new patriotic-identitarian movement of the West - its inspiration is a vision of a double Archaeo-Futurist and Identitarian Revolution and its power is in an idealistic supra-national alliance against the cynical trans-national forces of Culture Nihilism. There simply is no other candidate for the position of ‘Night Watch’ - nothing and nobody else will come to the rescue of the Western peoples. But the patriotic-identitarian movement is nothing by and in itself: the peoples of the West will have to invest it with the power to represent and lead - and they will have to rely on their own strength to realize the patriotic-identitarian program. A confederative Eurasianist alliance between all European peoples - standing together one for all and all for one - is useful and even necessary, but it will not be enough: the Western peoples will first have to be reborn in a self-surpassing metamorphosis, each one for itself. The only alternative is the destruction of the West - the West is facing a stark choice. A patriotic-identitarian ‘Delta Plan’ [15]- to use a phrase that is symbolically significant in the Dutch context - against the deluge of neoliberal globalism and cultural-marxist Umvolkung requires a historical paradigm shift that breaks with established patterns of thinking and acting. It also requires a historical effort that matches the greatest achievements of the Western peoples. For the Dutch people, this means that must live up to the high standards once set by their brave ancestors, who liberated themselves from physical tyranny and spiritual bondage in a titanic eighty year War of Independence. But if the Dutch people should learn one lesson from their history it is this: Yes, we can...

The exorcism of political correctness

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is 

the first duty of intelligent men.

- George Orwell

An effective functionality in the political sphere requires the new patriotic-identitarian Guard of the Threshold to pursue his priorities with the utmost tenacity. These priorities are simple: the restoration of state sovereignty (i.e. the reversal of trans-national usurpation of power caused by neoliberal globalism, international treaties and European legislation) and the restoration of ethnic stability(i.e. the reversal of ethnic replacement caused by mass-immigration and anti-indigenous anti-natalism). The political prioritization of these two problems requires a direct and open discussion of their historical causes. In the presently dominant Culture Nihilist discourse of ‘political correctness’, however, these causes are still considered taboo (and a taboo is always indicative of where the roots of power are located): they are the intimately related questions of ethnicity and matriarchy.

In the final analysis, the causes of the Postmodern Western problems of loss of sovereignty and ethnic replacement are of a psycho-historical nature: they are a function of the anti-Traditional Culture Nihilist rejection of all forms of authentic authority and identity. Inevitably, the modernist deconstruction of all forms of authentic social identity prioritizes its highestand most complex form: ethnicity. Ethnicity provides the basis for the mightiest collective power in human history: nationalism- the greatest enemy of globalist-universalist Modernity. At the same time, the modernist deconstruction of all forms of authentic social identity derives its success from its all-out assault on its lowestand most basic form: gender. This assault is effectuated by a deregulation, disruption and inversion of the most fundamental polarity of identity in human life: the male-female divide in all its physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions. The end result of this deliberate inversion is social anti-hierarchy and societal chaos: matriarchy. The maintenance of complex higher social identities - especially ethnicity - depends on a fixed foundation of lower social identities - especially gender. The deliberate deconstruction of natural and cultural gender identity endangers the entire social construct, starting with the elementary unit of the nuclear family. The deconstruction of the family means that any long-term project of combined biological reproduction and cultural transmission at the larger collective level is doomed to failure: where there is no family, there can be no people. Thus, matriarchy equals self-annihilation for all peoples that do not exist in the total isolation of the hunter-gatherer tribes that once lived in the wildernesses of the pre-modern world.

Thus, the survival of the Western peoples depends on the (timely) breaking of the psycho-historical taboos on ethnicity and matriarchy. The breaking of these taboos is well served by a rational discussion of the newest scientific insights into the (epi)genetic and (bio)evolutionary aspects of ethnicity. Bio-evolutionary science allows ethnicity to be described as a ‘superorganism’: the overall growth and functionality of this superorganism depend on its inner capacity for production and organization. The necessary coordination of these abilities demands directive functionalities (political authority) and effective specializations (social hierarchy). These features of authority and hierarchy provide the ethnic superorganism with supra-individual synergy and symbiotic excess power. From a cultural-historical perspective, this synergy and this excess power can be interpreted as - largely subconscious - ‘evolutionary group strategies’. It is important to note that the bio-evolutionary superorganisms that are cultural-historically known as ‘nations’ only accept authority and hierarchy to the extent that they are transfused with transcendent inspiration (‘fate’, ‘mission’) and holistic instinct (the sublimated will to survive). It is always the specific - biotopically determined and historically persistent - combination of inspiration and instinct that defines a nation as a nation. But the essential experiential reality of nationhood always has one common denominator: unity.

The bruised reed

A bruised reed shall he not break,

and the smoking flax shall he not quench:

he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.

- Isaiah 42:3

What happens if unity is lacking - when what was once bound together in a sacred bundle falls apart into separate parts? The unbound reed, the unbound twig, the unbound arrow - they are easily bent, bruised and broken. He who stands alone, who has no family, no tribe, no nation - the anonymous, atomised individual of the Postmodern West: he is the unbound reed that is bruised. The bruised reed: the poor pensioner who lacks proper care facilities, while fraudulent ‘asylum seekers’ are given generous housing vouchers. The disabled worker whose meagre allowance is slashed, while returning jihadists are given full social security benefits. The youngster who has to pay back crippling student debt for thirty years, while ‘refugees’ are put in priority queues for ‘targeted’ bursaries and ‘affirmative action’ jobs. The hard-working family that is on a ten-year waiting list for social housing, while foreign criminals move into top-location housing directly upon arrival. The redundant labourer whose benefits are cut-down to subsistence level after some months, while ‘minority’ candidates are preferentially employed in soft-cushioned government jobs. The policeman who is always facing the terrorist threat, while corrupt ‘radicalisation consultants’ are getting fat subsidies for paper ‘citizenship projects’. They are the bruised reeds of the Postmodern West, hopelessly divided amongst themselves by their so-called ‘individual’ problems.

Where there is division, there others can rule: where the people are divided, there the hostile elite can rule. The hostile elite of the West hates the people, it despises the people and it divides the people - to rule over them. It divides them into so-called ‘free individuals’, defined as ‘autonomous citizens’ and ‘calculating consumers’ - it encourages them to indulge in egoistic ‘profit calculus’ and narcissist ‘individualism’. It destroys rural and neighbourhood communities through enforced ‘labour mobility’ as it deprives provincial youngsters of work opportunities and as it forces ‘multiculturalism’ on urban families, causing ‘white flight’. It destroys the Western nations through selectively anti-natalistic policies for culturally vulnerable indigenous peoples (permissive ‘abortion’ laws, single-mother subsidies, preferential tax arrangements for working mothers) and simultaneous ethnic replacement programs (‘labour migration’, ‘refugee’ influx, child benefits) - policies and programs paid for by the indigenous peoples themselves. The hostile elite feels secure and thinks it is now undisputed lord and master over the indigenous peoples of the West - it assumes it has broken them. It sees the indigenous reed bruised - it thinks the light has departed from the eyes of the Western peoples.

‘Yes we can’

Aut viam inveniam aut faciam

- Hannibal Barca

The hostile elite is mistaken - it has miscalculated, as it miscalculated with ‘Brexit’ in Britain and ‘Trump’ in America. It may have won a battle - even many battles - but it has not yet won the war. Still it is possible to re-unite the divided reeds of the West and bind them together into a formidable weapon of war. The name of this weapon is unity.

Now's the time for all good men

to get together with one another.
We got to iron out our problems
and iron out our quarrels
and try to live as brothers.
And try to find a piece of land
without stepping on one another.
...We got to make this land a better land
than the world in which we live.
...I know we can make it.
I know darn well we can work it out.
Yes we can can

- The Pointer Sisters (1973, Barack Obama 12 years of age)

The vision of the new self-surpassing unity that inspires the Dutch patriotic-identitarian movement is not the utterly un-Dutch fasces of bound rods and axes - now less associated with the Roman Imperium than with Italian fascism - but rather the old-Dutch arrow bundle in the sinister paw of the Dutch States Lion.

‘Broken Arrow’

Concordia res parvae crescunt [16]

In a recent speech, the chairman of Working Group IDNL compared the present struggle between the patriotic-identitarian movement and the hostile elite throughout the Western world with the twenty-year Vietnam War (1955-75) - a war in which ‘underdog’ Vietnam managed to inflict a decisive defeat on superpower America. To expand on this theme, and to conclude this essay, it is useful to investigate more closely the decisive role that the factor ‘unity’ played on both sides at a tactical and strategic level.

Instinctively, Western Europeans will sympathise with the American side in the Vietnam War, even if in that war America was on the ‘wrong side’ of history - perhaps not only according to cultural-marxist doctrine, but also in reality (even a stopped clock tells the right time one time per day). During the Second World War, it was America that played a decisive role in liberating Western Europe from Nazi-German occupation - this experience automatically defines America as being at ‘right side’ of history in the eyes of older generations of Western Europeans. Additionally, the Vietnam War is largely known to Western Europeans through the American literary and cinematographic lens. Thus, Western Europeans will tend to be sympathetic to the G.I.’s that bled and died on the other side of the world under the self-denying motto ‘my country, right or wrong’. An interesting movie of a later and less self-hating generation than that of Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) is Randall Wallace’s We Were Soldiers (2002): Wallace’s choice of controversial actor Mel Gibson for the lead role typifies his cultural-historical iconoclasm. We Were Soldiers focusses on the Battle of the Ia Drang, near the Cambodian border but just inside Vietnam - this was the first major direct engagement between America and North-Vietnam (November 1965). There, an American unit of airborne troops, including parts of the (in)famous 7^th Cavalry Regiment (known from Custer’s ‘last stand’ at the Little Bighorn in June 1876), is dropped into a new forward position - it literally becomes the farthest advanced ‘border guard’ of America’s world empire. But the unsuspecting Americans have walked into a trap: their landing zone is located right next to the home base of a numerically far superior North Vietnamese force, hidden in dense jungle undergrowth and an elaborate network of deeply-dug tunnels. Immediately after landing, the Americans find themselves in a life-and-death struggle as furious enemy assaults threaten them from all sides. In the unequal fight they first - barely - manage to maintain their perimeter, but at ten to eight in the morning of 15 November 1965 they are finally overwhelmed by an all-out Vietnamese offensive, characterized by brutal ‘human wave’ attacks and ferocious hand-to-hand combat - surrender is no option because the Vietnamese kill even the unarmed and helpless wounded. At that moment the American commander opts for a weapon of last resort: he shouts the code word ‘Broken Arrow’ into the radio and calls upon the American air force to attack his own perimeter - to bomb his own position in the American equivalent of the Japanese Kamikaze. As hundreds of American bombers intervene over the next hour, a predictable bloodbath ensues: the Vietnamese assault is literally wiped away, together with sections of the American defence - it is the starting point of America’s subsequent ‘body count’ strategy. But by this stratagem, the American outpost is saved at the last moment - over the next days its survivors destroy their decimated enemy and are then safely evacuated.

The lesson of We Were Soldiers for the patriotic-identitarian movement is clear: the struggle of the American advance guard at the Ia Drang illustrates the quintessential task of the ‘border guard’. The border guard is per definition exposed to great danger and he is required to courageously hold his position when he is attacked. He must gain time: sound the alarm and hold on until relieved by the rear guard - in the case of the American advance guard on the Ia Drang it was the American air force that constituted the rear guard. There, the timely coordination of advance guard and rear guard allowed the Americans to win a substantial tactical victory - it was the operational unityof America’s various armed forces that saved them from what seemed to be certain destruction. The lesson of all history - military history, political history, social history - is clear: unity is strength. What is the lesson that can be learnt from this (hi)story by the Western patriotic-identitarian movement? It is this: that it has the historical duty to serve as the ‘border guard’ and advance guard of the Western peoples in their struggle against their hostile elite and that this duty involves grave responsibility and great sacrifice. What, then, is its rear guard in this struggle? The answer to this question is easy: it is the Western population itself - the ‘common people’ of the West. In the Netherlands, this is the Dutch common people. When this people, the same people that brought down the Spanish global empire, humiliated the English navy, fought off the French Sun King, [17] ruled the world’s oceans and created a world empire when they were only two million strong, rises up with twelve million, then no task is too great and nothing will withstand it. Then swift justice will befall terrorists, jihadists, illegals, drug mobsters, ‘lover boys’,[18]asylum fraudsters, social security cheats and street criminals. All throughout the West, the patriotic-identitarian movement must do its duty as an advance guard and a ‘border guard’ - the Western peoples will complete its task.

The Vietnamese side of the Vietnam War also has an important lesson to teach: that whenever and wherever a people rise up as one man against occupation and tyranny, it can not be defeated. This basic instinct of self-preservation and self-defence gives such a people an absolute right and their cause an absolute righteousness, making it unconquerable. This insight is most powerfully expressed in Holy Scripture: If God be for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31). With this truth in mind, it is useful to think about Vietnam’s strategy during the Vietnam War: the strategy of the people’s war. It is a strategy that is not merely military in nature, but also political - it is this political component that should guide the patriotic-identitarian movement in its struggle with the hostile elite.

Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietnam’s greatest strategist, said this: The American soldiers were brave, but courage is not enough. David did not kill Goliath just because he was brave. He looked up at Goliath and realized that if he fought Goliath’s way with a sword, Goliath would kill him. But if he picked up a rock and put it in his sling, he could hit Goliath in the head and knock Goliath down and kill him. David used his mind when he fought Goliath. So did we Vietnamese when we had to fight the Americans.

(*) Notes on the 15 September 2018 presentation of Working Group IDNL [19]