Deep Right Rising

The awesomeness of morality truly exists in an unfathomable region

- Nishida Kitaro

Prologue: the Western New Right as a Global Geopolitical Force

Those for whom Western civilization is not in crisis simply do not belong to it.
They are not the voice of Western civilization.
- Aleksandr Dugin, ‘The Logos of Europe’

If the ‘West’ is geopolitically defined as the western (European, Atlantic) seaboard of the Eurasian ‘World Island’ plus the overseas Anglosphere dominating the ‘Outer Isles’ encircling that ‘World Island’, then this ‘West’  has effectively constituted a unified ‘power pole’ ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. The groundwork for the political unification of Europe as a client state of the globalist-nihilist New World Order was laid in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, only six weeks after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Since then, the European Union super-state project has expanded outward - eastward into the ex-Soviet sphere, even attempting to gain control over the strategically vital Intermarium ‘buffer zone’ between the Baltic and Black Seas. At the same time, however, it has been characterized by a continuing inward void - it has failed to assert any form of ‘European’ identity and it has failed to articulate any substantive vision for Europe’s future. On the contrary: the Brussels bureaucracy has recently been shedding the last pretences at being anything else than an occupation authority at the bidding of globalist ‘high finance’ and the nihilist ideologues of neo-liberal thalassocracy. ‘European international policy’ is no more than a pious fiction: in reality, the EU states have slavishly toed the Washington-line of globalist ‘pyro-politics’ for over a quarter of a century. They have either actively participated in, or cowardly looked away from, the many outrages of globalist pyro-politics, from the ‘humanitarian’ Kosovo and Iraq Wars (1998-99, 2003) to the artificial Libyan and Syrian ‘Revolutions’(2011-present). Perhaps the clearest evidence of the occupation status of most of Europe is found in the fact that none of the ‘European institutions’ has been able to protect Europe from globalist-engineered mass-immigration. On the contrary, the ‘Great Replacement’ of the indigenous peoples of Western Europe has been actively promoted and facilitated by these institutions. Whenever an indigenous fight-back threatened the globalist-engineered ‘ethnic swamping’ project, most dramatically in ‘Visegrad’ and ‘Brexit’, these so-called ‘European institutions’ have consistently proven their anti-European function. These institutions - and the EU project as a whole - have now been unmasked as occupation authorities at the service of the globalist interests of neo-liberal ‘high finance’ and cultural-marxist ideologues. These institutions - and the EU as a super-state project with increasingly totalitarian features - are lynchpins of the unified ‘power pole’ that is the ‘West’. But the strain of globalized ‘disaster capitalism’ and replacement-level mass-immigration is now increasingly starting to create stress fractures within this monolithic power bloc. Beneath the shining surface of ‘business as usual’ of cartel-politics and the politically-correct consensus ‘mainstream media’, great unease and great outrage have been building up for a long time. All over the West, stress symptoms indicate that the carrying capacity of the Western peoples is being tested: ‘Trump’, ‘Brexit’ and ‘M5S’ are merely the outer (political) symptoms of great inner (socio-cultural) strain. Underneath the outer symptoms of the ‘civil nationalist’ reaction (‘populism’, ‘islamophobia’, ‘alt-right’), a deeper movement of ‘ethno-nationalist’ reassertion has been gradually building up. This deeper movement is currently finding explicit philosophical and ideological articulation in the Western New Right. The Western New Right is laying the intellectual foundations for an alternative, non-globalist, Europe. In this sense, it already is a geopolitical force of global importance.

The ethno-nationalist resistance against globalism within the West has also been emboldened by the recent anti-globalist reassertion of state sovereignty and national interests across the Eurasian landmass. Spearheaded by Russia under Putin, Turkey under Erdogan and India under Modi, the ‘earth-based’ and ‘multi-polar’ geopolitical order has proven itself to be a viable alternative to ‘sea-based’ and ‘uni-polar’ globalism. Simultaneously, a viable alternative geopolitical doctrine has been formulated by the Neo-Eurasianist movement led by Aleksandr Dugin: from its very beginning, the Western New Right has incorporated elements of Neo-Eurasianist doctrine into its core values. These include not only the basic principles of authentic state sovereignty and ethnic self-determination but also a consistent anti-liberal line.  In a sense, the Neo-Eurasianist School has offered the rapidly expanding Western New Right movement a ‘fixed pole’ in its efforts to achieve a meta-political shift within the heartland of globalist Culture Nihilism. As the Western public sphere contracts under the impact of silent (self-)censorship, and as the Western political scene shifts towards the neo-liberal/cultural-marxist extreme left, the Western New Right may appear to be increasingly marginalized, but it is also strengthened. These developments effectively confirm the Western New Right as the only authentic and legitimate champion of Western indigenous rights. In the long run, the Western New Right may very well become a ‘default setting’ in European geopolitics, i.e. the necessary starting position in constituting an alternative European geopolitical order.

Thus, Neo-Eurasianist thinkers and policy-makers would be well advised to take factor the Western New Right into the equation of the alternative global geopolitical order that they are striving towards. It may be premature to speak of any ‘strategic alliance’ along these lines, but the historical significance of the Western New Right must be assessed in a correct - and timely - fashion. The following review article is meant to contribute to that assessment. The recent publication by New Right publishing house ‘Arktos’ of The New Prometheans, written by its own Editor-in-Chief John Bruce Leonard, allows qualified and patient readers in-depth insight into the recent development of the Western New Right. The New Prometheans not only establishes Leonard as a political philosopher in his own right but also establishes a foundational reference point for Western New Right as a whole. In The New Prometheans, the New Right is coming of age - it will lend weight to the New Right’s claim to be the true representative of the Western peoples. The New Right’s fight is the same fight that is being fought by Neo-Eurasianism. This is the fight against the nihilist globalism of the ‘New World Order’ -

Za vashu i nashu svobodu

‘Darkness at Noon’

Great Wain, thou brother,
Oh drive me through the meadows
- Martin Lings

The aim of Prometheans is clearly stated by Leonard himself: it is ...to add to the clarity regarding the principles of [a] new worldview, the principles of which will inform all those who subscribe to the New Right. (29) This worldview, which he terms ‘Deep Right’ in the sense of a ‘new vision of human right and justice’ (x), belongs to the enemies of the Enlightenment, i.e. to those pioneers and prophets already inhabiting the ‘wild lands, mad ideals, unendurable and inhuman climes’ (viii) that lie beyond the Enlightenment. Leonard points to the now inextricable link between the ideals of the Enlightenment and all of Modernity’s political philosophies. But even in pragmatically defining contemporary Modernity as the attempt at establishing Enlightenment ideals on Earth (vii), he is well aware of the deeper roots of Modernity as well as Enlightenment in Western history. Leonard dates the formal break between Traditionalist and Modernist political philosophy back to Florentine statesman and thinker Machiavelli (1469-1527). Machiavelli’s pragmatic application of statecraft methodology represents a first break with the dogmatic reference frame of the Western Tradition: it underpins the political emancipation of the lower classes (in casu: the proto-bourgeoisie of the early urban-mercantile West) that defines the political-historical époque conventionally known as the Modern Age. This political emancipation required a seismic shift in political philosophy, moving it into the immanent sphere: it necessitated a radical - albeit initially implicit - rejection of the transcendental reference frame of the Western Tradition. It was only two centuries later, that this rejection found explicit articulation in the Enlightenment: it was only in the Enlightenment that Modernity reached maturity and it is only through the ideals of the Enlightenment that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ of Modernity - what René Guénon termed the ‘reign of quantity’ achieved world dominion. If the Enlightenment is Modernity’s Luciferian ‘one ring to rule them all’, then it logically follows the remedy for the Dark Age of Modernity must be sought outside the sphere of Enlightenment discourse. It is in a larger world of ideas, a world that includes before-referencing Traditionalism as well as after-referencing Futurism, that the remedies for the Crisis of the Modern West are located. 

Leonard’s Prometheans manages to do justice to both: it manages to maintain the ‘golden mean’ between continuity in traditionalist values and appropriation of futurist visions. The true Tradition of the West is the reference point of Leonard’s ‘Deep Right’ deconstruction of the Enlightenment ideals that have led the Western peoples to the brink of catastrophe - and extinction. Leonard succinctly summarizes the Crisis of the Modern West as follows: The Old West is dying; everywhere the ethoi which once constituted and regulated the life of the West are fading, wilting, withering away. ...[T]he death of Old Europe and of the nations that Old Europe seeded in the world is today fertilizing the terrible birth of mass man, that homeless, virtueless, hedonistic humanoid with neither past nor future, neither people nor fatherland, neither love nor hate in his heart and neither god nor devil in his soul, but who seems everywhere to prepare the coming age of the Last Man. (40) Leonard captures this near-victory of what the author of this review has elsewhere termed Post-Modernity’s ‘Cultural Nihilism’ very well, viz. as ...a sudden aching absence of the reverent part of the human soul and society. ...In our, day there is nothing left to revere: and the response of to this enormity has been to extirpate the very need for reverence from the human heart, substituting for it ‘democratic rights,’ or scientism, or gross materialism and the crass contentment with money and status. ...Where once the heart of human life was a kernel of self-renewing virtue, it has now become but emptiness and incipient death... That is the specific form of our nihilism. (27-8) Indeed, Prometheans is pervaded by a presentiment of the approaching crisis of Post-Modernity’s Cultural Nihilism ...there is... a mood which descends upon [our] subtler sensibilities, alerting [us] to the chaos which is coming [and] to which... cleverness and [information] often remain [insensitive]. (3)

These words echo the Traditionalist thesis that Modernity - and Western Modernity most acutely -constitutes a cosmological crisis, in the essential as well as the experiential sense of the word. But Leonard implicitly qualifies the Traditionalist critique of Western Modernity, which tends to focus on its abstract (spiritual, psychological) aspects, by emphasizing its concrete (bio-genetic, socio-cultural) aspects. ...[T]he entire world today is barbaric in the decisive respect... of culture in the noble and pure sense - we Westerners not much less than the least of the tribes of the Earth; for whatever culture we have today is but the shade and memory of past culture, and surely not a living and vital cultural tradition. We can differentiate ourselves from the primitive by our splendid material wealth; but the most powerful of kings is not the equal of the poorest of free man, if the king is a slave to his treasury or his subjects. (59) Leonard’s uncompromising insistence on the fact that the very concrete processes of natural selection and socio-cultural devolution are part and parcel of the Crisis of the Modern West differentiates his analysis from that of the ‘classical’ Traditionalist School - it effectively updates the latter. Leonard operationalizes the Traditionalist critique of Modernity, recognizing it as a valuable - indeed fundamental - part of the New Right’s arsenal: [t]he single valid alternative to the Enlightenment... [is] to castigate the entirety of the Enlightenment with the lash of true Traditionalism, opposing a shamelessly illiberal past to the liberal project... (7) Prometheans shifts the vision of ‘mass man’ and ‘last man’ from the abstract pre-cognition of Traditional School cosmology to the concrete re-cognition of New Right political philosophy. It recognizes the ‘zombification’ of large portions of the Western peoples, it comes to terms with a large loss in terms of authentic Tradition and it proposes to move on: Only those who do not succumb to this fate, only those who by their natures cannot succumb, are any longer of interest. (40)

Prometheans does so from a realization that the impending nadir of the West - what Guillaume Faye termed the ‘convergence of catastrophes’ and what Jason Jorjani terms the ‘World State of Emergency’ - involves not only grave, even mortal risks but also extraordinary opportunities. The New Right is aided beyond hope by the growing global and even Western hostility against the Occident. We cannot underestimate the value of this startlingly broad opposition. We find emerging around us not just a single enemy, but a myriad, who by their diversity and their simultaneous unified aggressiveness toward the original European peoples, accentuate the similarities of all Occidentals over their differences, and permit us to clarify our project. ...For nothing simplifies like the question of life and death, and few things unify like a common foe. (41) Leonard proposes seizing this moment - and this momentum - now that West appears to be in ‘free fall’: a rift has opened up at the very heart of Modernity, due to the tensions within its first principles. (viii) For the first time in half a millennium, a new politics is now possible - supposing there is only the vision, the strength left, to constitute it. ...The way is open now, the way is cleared: ...all is prepared for the rise of a New Right. (28) It this unique moment that the New Right is challenged to turn to its advantage as it seeks to constitute the new ideal of Occidental Man, together with the political forms rightly fit for his special nature (x): it allows the New Right to propose ideals unheard of today. (x) What Leonard’s Prometheans proposes to the New Right is not a prefabricated program of concrete proposals to address specific difficulties, but rather an appropriate attitude. The moth in the heart of the worm cannot describe itself into existence - for what do worms know of moths? It must begin by showing that gross and amorphous body its failings, and have the good instinct to let nature do the rest. (29) Indeed, only a radically open-minded , dogma-free attitude will allow the New Right to grasp the essential or characteristic features of our era... together with the principal form and outline of our own vision... because without such, all specific prescriptions for confronting any concrete problems in our epoch will always have the character of but treading water and idle chatter. (x) Most radically - and most appropriately in respect of its eponymous patron - Prometheans proposes a wholesale abandonment of the entire historical-materialist discourse of the Enlightenment. Leonard rejects the entire artificial discourse of ‘scientific’ and ‘positivist’ proofs, arguments and attitudes up front and out right: as... modern science is the fruit of the modern project - and as the New Right can and will be nothing, if it does not break that worn orbit - ...we are in wont of an... independent form of investigation into political things, which does not reduce to the questionable premises of science - and certainly not to the ‘scientific understanding of man’ which contemporary scientism purports to offer - or presumes to impose. (x) What Leonard asks the New Right to do is nothing less than to cross over the intellectual and psychological Rubicon of the Enlightenment: this requires a decisive break-out from the epistemological and ontological ‘frame’ of Modernity itself. What is required of the New Right is nothing less than an intellectual, psychological and ethical catching up with the new realities of globalist-nihilist Post-Modernity: only thus can the Western peoples earn the right to survive the Crisis of the Modern West. Because:

Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people's level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization. - Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

Tabula Rasa

Lang war mein Schlaf
Ich bin erwacht
- Wagner, ‘Siegfried’, Act III

Perhaps Prometheans’ most remarkable feature is its premise: it assumes a clean slate. This feature indicates that New Right has come of age: it has risen above the morning-after hangover that followed its mid-2010’s ‘red pill’ stage. In Prometheans, the New Right no longer debates its opponents. It recognizes these opponents as the mortal enemies of the Western peoples and it rejects, up-front and out-right, the entire ‘politically correct’ discourse of the globalist hostile elite and its ‘mainstream media’ propaganda machine. It has weighed this discourse - and found it wanting. It has looked beyond rhetorical arguments - and discovered hostile interests. In Prometheans, the New Right has outgrown the dialectic phase - it is now immune to all forms of historical-materialist ideology, scientist reductionism, neo-liberal calculation and cultural-marxist conditioning. The New Right is now emancipated - it is now awake. In Prometheans, many arguments, aspirations and illusions are laid to rest.

Among its enjoyable fresh-breath highlights is a delightful necrology of the conventional ‘liberal-conservative’ right (4-27). This ‘liberal-conservative’ right (a.k.a. the ‘neo-con’ and the ‘cuck-servative’ right) is simply written off as an unhappy mutation of a failed counter-movement (14), now utterly defeated by the - more consistently historical-materialist - extreme progressive left: ...we are approaching... the last stage in the life-cycle of Enlightenment liberalism. (49-50) Prometheans simply sweeps away the entire constructivist-progressivist discourse on which the conventional right as well as the conventional left - and indeed socialism, communism as well as most of anarchism and fascism - are based. Thus, Prometheans consigns the entire contemporary politically correct narrative of universalist ‘humanism’ - the lynchpin of neo-liberalism as well as cultural-marxism - to the dustbin of history. Leonard correctly identifies a key task of the political New Right, viz. to ...transcend the present state of the West, which is built on the back of the unsustainable and unaccountable belief in so-called ‘universal human rights’. (32) Decades of globalist-enforced open-borders ‘diversity’ have forced the West to re-discover and re-assess the survival skill of ethno-realism: Prometheans shows that, at long last, this skill is now finding its way back into Western avant-garde thinking. Not all peoples, races, ethnoi, are the same; the idea of ‘humanity’, as transmitted by Renaissance ‘Humanism,’ is in a certain sense but a necessary abstraction from the concrete and specific human groups which compose it, and these groups themselves are not equal. (221) A given people cannot speak of its ideal as the ideal, the universal human ideal, because no other people in the world has the gifts, qualities, limitations, and defects necessary to realize its ideal. (223) Leonard states the New Right’s principle of non-universalist, ethno- and culture-specific law (‘the ground of law is custom’) with his usual pithy acumen: The law must be fit to the people... If this basic principle is neglected, the resultant legislations shall simply be ignored and scorned, rendered nugatory by the daily actions of their very constituents, while their framers sit like T.H. Lawrence after the fall of Damascus, bewildered and forlorn in abandoned tribunals and parliamentary halls. (56-7)   

Prometheans correctly identifies the strongest ideological force currently fielded by the globalist hostile elite: (neo-)liberalism. The power hold of the globalist hostile elite in the West depends on its neo-liberal credentials: it depends on the supposed (‘evolutionary’, ‘social-darwinist’) ‘realism’ that underpins its indulgence of hyper-materialist borderline-narcissist hyper-individualism among the Western ‘middle class’. Through ‘freedom’ (basically impunity for various forms of parasitic bureaucracy, organized crime and institutionalized fraud) this ‘middle class’, constantly reinforced by ruthlessly hungry-for-success ‘migrants’, is kept (just) sufficiently large for the semblance of a neo-liberal ‘democratic mandate’. Neo-liberalism has become the political ‘default setting’ throughout the West by its ideological (nihilist) and electoral (cartelized) association with the pervasive urban-hedonist stasis of the ‘middle class’. Its basic operating model is an ‘updated’ version of panem et circenses: mass-trash-consumption, digitally enhanced pornification and infantile-idiocratic ‘festivism’. This is how Leonard describes the neo-liberal nadir of the Crisis of the Modern West: The ruinous progressive ideal and its rampant consequences; the moral degradation brought about by ‘consumer society’; the sick and sickening ‘culture’ which pervades our interactions and leers out of every ‘screen’ no matter where we might flee; the abyss of perversion in the heart of so many of our industrial, political, social ‘leaders’; the flaws and corruptions inherent to liberalism and capitalism themselves by which our present societies stand on the brink of a new, more horrendous and insidious totalitarianism than has ever existed... (212-3)

The socio-economic and psycho-cultural order of the Across the West, the New World Order of the globalist hostile elite stands and falls with the neo-liberal ideology that holds it together. In Prometheans, Leonard acknowledges this reality - and he ‘goes for the jugular’ by pointing out the final and utter incompatibility of the liberal project with the ‘diversity’ on which it still appears to thrive. The New Right has perceived the reversal of causation which is implied in the liberal project. The liberal project holds that the prosperity of peoples and the wealth of nations can be brought about by the erecting of liberal institutions; while the New Right counters that the existence of liberal institutions is owed to the existence of liberal peoples. If they are erected over non-liberal peoples, these institutions will inevitably collapse of corrupt. Institutions are the effect, and not the cause, of the true determining force of human societies... The cause, the fundamental constraining and determining factor of human societies, is ethnos. ...Each ethnically distinct people at any moment in time owns an implicit social and political ideal which is most perfectly its own, which is fit for it and for it alone, which can be trained to a higher religious law but which cannot be fully transposed to any other people in the world, save those most like to it spiritually. (221-2) Thus, liberal government is ill-fit if not impossible to non-Occidental races, and is moreover ill-suited to the very Occidental peoples it would rule: for it does not do them justice. (223) Leonard says it right there: (neo-)liberalism is a trans-ethnic, anti-ethnic and therefore anti-Western ideology. Globalist neo-liberalism and the pseudo-democratic institutional practices through which it is politically perpetuated are incompatible with the survival of the Western peoples.

White Genocide Revisited

Sometimes the crime that one is about to commit is so terrible,
that to commit it on behalf nation is not enough -
one needs to commit it on behalf of humanity.
- Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Leonard goes one step further: he exposes the neo-liberal New World Order as an instrument of genocide and ethnocide, deliberately perpetrated on the Western peoples by the trans-ethnic, post-ethnic and anti-ethnic globalist hostile elite. In doing so, Leonard is taking up one of the most explosive - psycho-historically ‘booby-trapped’ - issues in contemporary Western politics: the issue of ‘White Genocide’. Even the mention of these two words amounts to political suicide in the globalist reality of today: perhaps more than anything else, the New Right’s willingness to face the spectre of White Genocide is what sets it truly apart from ‘mainstream politics’. Leonard offers his own, highly original take on White Genocide: he follows the judicial logic behind recent international legislation to prevent genocide to arrive at the psycho-historical roots of the ‘Great Replacement’ and the ‘Strange Death’ of the peoples of the West, roots that reach back all the way back to the post-World War taboo on Western ethnic identity. First Leonard explains this self-destructive taboo as follows: Our entire position vis-à-vis tolerance, our attitude of openness and open-mindedness, our defense of multicultural diversity, are all instances of our subterranean attempt to neutralize the venom which began to poison Europe one-hundred years ago. This is the first origin of the law against genocide: it is meant to regulate the interior life of liberal nations, as much as to stricture the interior life of illiberal ones. (183) By associating any consistent attempt at ethnocentric self-assertion - and even self-defence - with ‘genocide risk’, the globalist New World Order has effectively put the Western peoples on the fast track to perdition. Subject to the ‘open borders’ regime of neo-liberal globalism and unable to assert and defend themselves for fear of ‘repeating history’, the Western Peoples are now facing a ...genocide brought against Europeans by non-Europeans [that] is, at its essence, a mass suicide on the part of the Europeans themselves. (194)

As one of the mere handful of public figures representing the New Right, Leonard bravely takes a stance against this White Geno/Sui-cide, hushed-up by the mainstream media, white-washed by the political establishment and deliberately engineered by an unholy globalist alliance between neo-liberal high finance and cultural-marxist intelligentsia: The hatred for ‘white privilege’ and the attendant desire to dismantle all the ‘social structures’ and ‘cultural practices’ which uphold that ‘privilege’; the blithe talk of universal interbreeding to the point that ‘whites’ no longer exist; the tacit and sometimes even explicit denial of the very existence of ‘white culture,’ of the European ethnos; the growing racket of ‘affirmative action’ and similar miscarriages of justice; the preference which is bestowed without the slightest sign of hesitation or embarrassment on everything which emerges from nations abroad, at the expense of our native histories, traditions, and way; the unprecedented mass immigration into the West from non-Western societies, which is not only passive permitted but actively encouraged by society and by the powers that be - all of this nothing but the genocidal urge acting out precisely within our contemporary West. For it will result in, it cannot do other than result in, the final elimination of all European ethnoi from the face of the Earth. (193) No public figure can be asked to do more for his people than what Leonard has done in Prometheans: to stand up in defence of his nation in the face of mortal danger. In doing so, he sets an example for all Westerners: he shows them that it is a time to rediscover the virtue of self-respect - and the right to nationalist self-assertion. Leonard eloquently states the case for such ‘natural nationalism’: ...[a] nation dedicated unabashedly to the protection and preservation of its own higher laws and customs... [will] never confuse morality with universalism: it... never arrive[s] at that most unnatural, unmanly and apolitical supposition, that illness of Western modernity, that all human beings everywhere are in principle identical to each other; it still posits pride in what is its own, and it knows the folly and indeed the disgrace in attempt to make its ways into the ways of all the world. (198)

Structures and Quotations

We, who stand against democra[tic principles in the arts], will surely and necessarily fail in our task if we do not... attempt... to make aristocratic principles reign once more in the arts. ...There is a parting of ways here, between the writer who is content to flatter, influence or ‘improve’ the public, to have his moment of fame, to be adored an hour in the limelight, ...and the writer who instead seeks higher heights than that. (256-7)

(*) Note: Leonard leaves the larger organizational structures of Prometheans (partially) unspecified and he leaves the quotations heading its parts and chapters untranslated. The following paragraph of this book review gives a provisional interpretation of these structures and quotations for those readers of Prometheans who may occasionally feel overwhelmed by the very ‘classical’ reading and thinking effort that it requires.

Superficially, Prometheans offers a collection of essays on various topics relevant to the metapolitical discourse of the New Right in the widest sense of the word. It does, in fact, include some sections on fairly ‘specialist’ subjects: these include a ‘classic philosophical’ treatise on ethics (Part III, Chapter 3 ‘On self-mastery’), a very original New Right reading of a classic work of high fantasy (Part III, Chapter 5 ‘Lessons from Demonland’) and a deep-digging cultural-historical investigation of the English language as the primary vehicle of new Western thought (Part V, Chapter 3 ‘Politics and the English language’). But these essays all converge on a single axis: in structure as well as direction, Prometheans is geared towards its one single aim: ...to add to the clarity regarding the principles of [an entirely] new worldview, the principles of which will inform all those who subscribe to the New Right. (29). The multi-layered structure of Prometheans merely mirrors its deliberately idiosyncratic set-up in terms of methodology and style.

On the whole, Prometheans may be typified as a learned treatise on the state of the Western commonwealth. Its literary style, slightly anachronistic (with tones of mid-19th Century East Coast book learning), deliciously sophisticated (with many subtle references to Old World literary culture) and sternly aloof (with appropriate distance to the ‘sewer-scape’ of contemporary politics), matches this very ‘classic’ treatise set-up. Prometheans refutes the often-repeated idea of many publicists, both within and without the New Right, that sophisticated style and complex thinking are somehow incompatible with incisive insight and to-the-point statements. The reader may be required to occasionally peruse his long-forgotten dictionary (e.g. meretricious: ‘tastelessly gaudy’), but he will be rewarded for his perseverance with occasional flashes of brilliance and with many memorable aphorisms (some of these are highlighted in a separate paragraph below). In this sense, Prometheans represents a highly unexpected achievement in the political-philosophical as well as the literary sphere: it not only provides an act of intellectual house cleaning but also rises far above the ‘ground zero’ devastation of the ‘dumbed down’ literary landscape of ‘mainstream’ Postmodernity. As such, Prometheans may not be a book for all people within the New Right, but it is a necessary book for understanding it - and for gauging its progress.

Part I of Prometheans, which concerns itself with ‘prospect and retrospect’, may be typified as framing. Here, Leonard sets the New Right movement apart from its (Old Right, Alt-right) ‘predecessors’ and (conservative, neo-con) ‘competitors’ by pointing to its essence as the archenemy of all Enlightenment-based ideologies and of their common project: Modernity itself. In opposing the New Right to Modernity, Leonard frames the historical-materialist ideologies of Modernity (Socialism, Fascism, Liberalism) as now basically anachronistic. Leonard positions the New Right as a doubly archaic and futurist alternative to these outdated ideologies: he points to the fact that its rise heralds the rise of an alternative to Modernity itself. Thus, Prometheans views the New Right as the prophet and pioneer of something entirely new, bound to explore exotic possibilities and uncharted wildernesses. Prometheans is ‘dedicated to... cartological and astronomical work’ (viii), allowing for an unconventional ‘macroscopic worldview’ that includes a unique combination of principles, ranging from radical environmentalism to social conservatism. (ix) Thus, Leonard defines the contemporary New Right as rooted in a deeper layer that he terms the Deep Right, i.e. in a quintessentially Archaeo-Futurist world vision that includes the oldest of all political views, for it takes its bearings by what is old, very old: it is in point of fact the audible or visible portion of the Deep Right. (xi) He implicitly recognizes the Archaeo-Futurist dimension of the Deep Right: that which is eldest brings us ever to that which is newest, as though there were something deep-buried in our very Western soul which mandated and demanded creativity of us - as if the way forward and the way back were somehow one and the same... (228) He points to the extraordinary - revolutionizing - nature of that required creativity, which will require of us, ever more in coming times, the virtue of clairvoyance, clearsight, about the past, the present, the future. ...As we seek to build a city on a hill, [what is] required of us [is an] equal measure of fantasy and realism, of analytic and aesthetic powers. (xii)

Part II of Prometheans, which concerns itself with ‘finding remedies’, may be typified as apotropaic. Here, Leonard firmly ‘grounds’ his counter-globalist argument in the deepest subsoil of Western civilization, i.e. in Western ethnicity. Hence its opening line, from an apotropaic formula found in the oldest work of Western literature: So saying, Argeiphontes gave me the herb, drawing it from the ground, and showed me its nature. At the root it was black, but its flower was like milk. Moly the gods call it, and it is hard for mortal men to dig; but with the gods all things are possible. (Homer, Odyssey X; 302-6)

Part III of Prometheans, which concerns itself with ‘moving boundaries’, may be typified as last-phase iconoclastic. Here, Leonard ruthlessly exposes the poisonous psycho-dynamics that drive globalist-nihilist totalitarianism, i.e. malicious hyper- equalitarianism. Hence its opening line, from a ‘collectivist chorus’ found in the oldest work of Western political science: Do not move the property markers - Plato, Laws III; 684E.

Chapter 3 of Part III, entitled On Self-Mastery, restores the notion of wise ‘moderation’ to New Right political discourse - in recognition of the New Right’s aim of prioritizing government over society, consuetude over credo and state over culture. (105) Hence its opening maxim of classic statecraft: parcere subietis et debellare superbos, ‘(to) show mercy to the conquered, (and) subdue the proud.’ (Virgil, Aeneid)

Part IV of Prometheans may be typified as ground-breaking: here, Leonard decisively moves away - and on - from the entire historical-materialist narrative that has dominated Western political philosophy. It focuses on the New Right’s urgent need for futurist iconoclasm: This would be the moment indeed to ask, with all due urgency, just what we want our Occident of tomorrow to embody, how it must relate to our past, and how we may best arrive there. (26) Here, Leonard work rises to the level of true Archaeo-Futurist vision, rejecting the all-too-human reductive calculations of globalist normative liberalism. Hence the motto that he chose for Part IV, pointing to the surpassing recipe of the prophet of nihilism: Here is hope; but what will you see and hear in it if you have never felt shining, burning and dawning in your own souls? I can only remind you of it - more than that I cannot do! If even stones themselves inspire animals to become humans - what more can be expected from me? But when you are still no more than stones and animals, then you should first find your Orpheus! (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, IV; 286)

Part V of Prometheans, which concerns itself with the metapolitical interface between abstract worldview and concrete politics, may be typified as a departure, i.e. as a final and irrevocable break with the language use, the thought patterns and the existential conditioning of the Modernist - one might say liberal-normativist - socioeconomic and political status quo. Here, Leonard combines an etymological deconstruction of ‘political correctness’ (e.g. by opposing constructionist ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ and ‘sexuality’ to essentialist ‘liberty’, ‘nobility’ and ‘love’) with a philosophic critique of its key concepts (e.g. by juxtaposing historical-materialist determinism with self-imposed responsibility). Here, Leonard’s devastating critique of the Modernist status quo is merely incidental: the political rejection of liberal-normativist consensus simply follows from an existential rejection of liberal-normativist conditioning. For an older generation of sympathetic readers, this radical departure will be highly encouraging: it proves that liberal-normativist Modernity is already dead and buried in the hearts of a younger generation of Westerners. All that now remains to be done is to remove the collapsed and rotting deadwood that still covers the Western body politic.

Chapter 1 of Part V, entitled The Political Dilemma of the New Right, addresses the acute need for the New Right to rid itself of the illusion that politics-as-usual is a viable option at any except the most superficial level. Hence, its opening maxim - from the master of Realpolitik himself: Many have pictured republics and principalities which in fact have never been known or seen; because how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation. (Machiavelli, The Prince - Marriott translation)

Chapter 2 of Part V, entitled The Sword of Damocles, concerns itself with the most acute ‘danger of democracy’ confronting New Right political activism, viz. populism. The razor sharpness of double-edged sword of ‘democratic legitimacy’ is brought into focus in its opening line: It seems ... to those who consider it, a marvellous thing that all those, or the better part of those, who have done very great things in this world, and are excellent among the men of their age, have had their origin and birth low and obscure, or else were by fortune afflicted in some extraordinary way. (Machiavelli, Castruccio Castracani)

Leonard’s explicit rejection of hyper-democratic and collectivist egalitarianism pervades Prometheans in an entirely natural manner. This proves that the New Right - the movement that he contributes to from the Deep Right - has come of age: it has already digested the whole of Western philosophy and it has already purged itself from the whole of Western nihilism. Leaving its enemies far behind, it has grown intellectually and it has matured politically. This is the Deep Right rising.

Definitions and Directions

Let’s look at this thing from a standpoint of status.
What do we got left on this ship that’s still good?
- ‘Apollo 13’ (Howard, 1995)

The most direct use of Prometheans may as a New Right ‘primer’: it provides a basic reference point for people new to the movement - and to post-post-modern thinking. Leonard’s Prometheans is perhaps the first New Right publication that rises entirely over and above the ‘red pill’ stage of statistics, dialectics and polemics: it has moved beyond the stage of iconoclasm and it has moved on to the stage of inventory taking. Prometheans looks at New Right political philosophy and political perspective from the ‘standpoint of status’: it deals with the damage done to the West and explores the options remaining to the Western peoples. Thus, Prometheans focuses on definitions and directions: it will help people new to the New Right to focus - and to make the New Right lighter and sharper. The need for a ‘leaner and meaner’ New Right fits in with Leonard’s statement that the West needs an infusion of ‘new barbarianism’, but from within the West itself (258-9). To give a ‘foretaste’ of the required ‘leaner and meaner’ qualities, the next two paragraphs of this book review will summarize some of Prometheans’ minimalist definitions (*) and aphoristic pearls.

(*) Enlightenment sentiment: The Enlightenment... would be more honestly called revolutionary egalitarianism (21): ...[t]hat which the Enlightenment has sought and must ever crave is the alleviation of human suffering, the equalization of conditions, and replacement of honor, nobility, or virtue with security, comfort, and wealth. (15)

(*) Enlightenment philosophy: Anti-theological ire, more specifically hostility to Christendom. One hears its herald already in Machiavelli; it arrives in a visible form in Hobbes, in a subtler form in Locke; it peeks out slyly from the devious Descartes and is what cost... lens-grinding Spinoza his place in every major religious community of his time. Kant attempted to sublimate it in his noumena, and Hegel concealed it in his historical dialectic. Then, with Marx on the left and with Nietzsche on the right, it makes itself known. (16) Karl Marx is unthinkable without Hobbes, Locke, Smith and Ricardo, Rousseau and Hegel, even Kant; his vision is [secular] radicalization, the [secularizing] extremification, of the political ideals first promulgated during the Enlightenment. (90)

(*) Progressivist dynamics: The impetus of Enlightenment philosophy derives from its ...sense of forward motion, bound up with a peculiar notion of history. From Machiavelli’s original attempt to extract final political lessons from [humanity’s historical] successes and blunders, ...to Darwin’s principle of natural selection as the mechanism of organic development over time; from that sense of the historical failure of past philosophy which actuated Descartes, Hobbes, and Bacon, to Spinoza’s critique of divine revelation as being but a series of historical acts of mere men; from the state of nature of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, to the end of history of Hegel - and beyond: History, that most slippery, most sly, most meretricious and brutal substitute for Logos, peeks out, abyss-like, from all the cracks in modern thought. (22-3) As a result, [m]odern society is ever metamorphosing - and if one seeks the motives for this metamorphosis, one will find them in nothing other than a certain kind of mass discontent: a great hydra of myriad, restlessly self-propagating dissatisfactions. Progressivism is fuelled by this discordant discontent and would be impossible without it. (17-8) It is for this reason that Leonard states that the principles of progressivism - human rights, democracy, freedom, separation of church and state - can never truly belong to the conservative right: they can only belong to the progressive left, precisely because they are opposed to any sense of the higher, Divinely sanctioned order. (26)

(*) Progressivist legalism: Is the mainstay of the progressivist, liberal-normativist order of ...today: it is precisely the most lawful of peoples in the West that [are most at] risk of succumb[ing to globalist liberal-normativism]. These peoples, being naturally obedient and trusting, have acquiesced to their legislation and their lawmakers even unto their own undoing; and now that the law has fallen largely into the hands of vicious and mad and greedy men bent on absolute power and on the eradication of all of Europe’s past, the very law-abiding spirit of the West, once its finest treasure, becomes its most dangerous cage. (57)

(*) Newspeak-ian ‘Hate Crime’: A society’s ...laws reveal, clearly if sometimes unconsciously, precisely where a society perceives its vices and its vulnerabilities to lie. Some of these are more or less, ...as laws against murder or rape, but the more interesting and the more revelatory are those specific ‘crimes’ which are unique to a people. For whatever a people is strong enough to permit without fearing for its well being, ceases to be the stuff of its criminal law. What is the weakness, the illness, which the ‘liberal order’ guards against with its laws on hate crime? ...[I]ts diversity is its weakness. It offers too many surfaces for friction, too many intersecting directions across the face of the porcelain liberal order - too many points at which the entire edifice might just up and crumble under unexpected pressures. In this bedlam of ethnoi and ethoi, of classes and categories, of religions and political ideologies, which ‘forms’ modern society, there is wanting... a safeguard. The hate crime laws are part of that safeguard. And they are the surest sign that this diversity which contemporary Westerners so vaunt and so eagerly embrace and advocate, is in fact a great trial and encumbrance on them. (201-2)

(*) Newspeak-ian ‘Tolerance’: There is hidden hatred in [absolute] tolerance, there is hidden resentment in the shrill preachments of the tolerant moralists. (209) Given that the crime against ‘tolerance’ is deemed to be a crime of hate, it stands to reason that tolerance itself should be a form of love. Yet the word originally bespeaks quite a different attitude. Tolerance originally means abiding what us foreign and unpleasant, ...what one would rather avoid or emend. One tolerates pain, want, cold, heat, deprivations and disease. ...Tolerance [also] implies a breaking point, a degree beyond which one is simply not able to go. (201-2) Older generation tolerance had a threshold, it had ...a breaking point, beyond which the old tolerance not only would not extend, but would be ashamed to reach: in the face of certain views, certain behaviours, certain ideas, the old tolerance would consider itself morally obliged to step up and refuse entry. ...The newer tolerance seems to want to ‘live and let live’ with a perfect indiscriminacy. Yet it must come to terms with the fact that not all worldviews or standpoints, creeds or viewpoints are tolerant, and that a truly open society sooner or later will collide against a truly closed ethos. The burning question then becomes - whether to tolerate the intolerant. (203) ...Yet tolerance as a contemporary political and social virtue is not allowed to possess any limits: one is not permitted to become intolerant, [even if] the conditions of society have become so diversified that one simply can no longer stand them. Tolerance is not discretionary, and its adoption is not a function of the quantity of ethnic or cultural intermixing: it is the very sine qua non of contemporary society and one is not allowed to reject it. (201-2)

(*) Present Neo-Liberal soft ‘Tolerance’: Is weak because it can make no positive pronouncement regarding society or the world; it limits itself to feebly extolling the personal virtues of openness, open-mindedness, and diversity, which fast prove to be but bland and vapid rules of order when confronted with the hard colors of living moralities, and the ethics of peoples who still pronounce on good and bad and remember how to hold the scales of judgment over the ways of other. And it is only a matter of time before the pastel of this meekly tolerant worldview is washed away completely from within, by some more vibrant and barbaric ethos which is not ashamed of taking advantage of an enfeebled enemy, nor of building its home in the rot of a dying tree. (205) There are no boundaries to [this Neo-Liberal] tolerance, therefore it houses its enemies and becomes its own sacrifice. (209-10)

(*) Future Nihilist-Liberal hard ‘Tolerance’: Is committed to ...fanatically root out those that do not conform to its principle of indiscriminate tolerance. ...It is the viewpoint standing behind the so-called ‘antifa’ and contemporary anti-discrimination laws, or laws against ‘hate’. ...it seems it is the destiny of certain parts of today’s West to succumb to the poison of a despotic and statist kind of ‘tolerance,’ which insinuates itself into the private life of all its citizens and manipulates their ideas and their actions through a cunning and shockingly broad range of interventions. Technology... in the form of universal powers of surveillance and new programs for computing enormities of statistical date (thereby producing sophisticated models for moulding the opinion and the action of the herdish masses), will serve it in ways that are impossible at present to even dream. (206) The day of [Neo-Liberal soft] tolerance is at its end, so far as our wider society is concerned. (207)

(*) Final ‘last man’ destination of Liberal-Normativism: The only way of attaining th[e] fantastical project [of modernity] is to discover that which is most common to human beings everywhere and at all times, the ‘lowest common denominator’ of all human action: ...[the] low and mean notion of merest physical and ‘psychological’ comfort and well-being - a disgraced and contemptible economized caricature of a full human life. (216-7) ...[A]ll that will remain is the overwhelming, inescapable fact of gray [sub-human] homogeneity, the masses transformed into bland and self-serving economic units, and indistinguishable swampish morass of [a permanently downgraded] ‘humanity’, enlivened here and there by some dispirited and rootless effort towards [artificial, ‘modern’] self-distinguishment, or some stillborn attempt at disinterment of buried traditions. (207)

Aphorisms and Road Signs
(abbreviated and adapted by Alexander Wolfheze)

‘Equality’

Excellence does not follow deeds, deeds follow excellence. (287)

To accept that all human beings are equal: to reveal the meanness of one’s soul. (72)

One must choose: either equality of opportunity or equality before the law. (101)

Equality of opportunity: high taxes and unjust restrictions for the lords -
free handouts and unearned freedom to the serfs. (102)

The expansion of equality represents a corresponding contraction of freedom. (96)

‘Justice’

Life has no notion of the progressive’s ‘justice’ -
the natural order of society exists in contempt of ‘justice’ and ‘equality’. (165)

Profound inequalities are innate in human beings.
A just society should attempt as much as possible to reflect these inequalities in law,
limiting equality to promote liberty. (98)

Justice: the outward recognition of a natural hierarchy of human beings,
in the composition of the state and the allotment of
offices, powers, honours, duties, privileges and prerogatives. (281)

‘Progressivism’

The old name for the radicalization of liberalism: communism. (49)

Communists are simply radical liberals -
at most, they can demonstrate the inescapable end of liberalism
by presenting those ideals and their political consequences
in their purest and rudest forms. (213)

The single greatest refutation of itself every furnished by man: communism. (49)

‘Freedom’

True freedom is only found in the judgment of a true heart -
it requires a judgment of devotion. (287)

Liberty is inhabited by the few - equality by the many. (99)

The principle of democracy: equality - the principle of aristocracy: liberty. (99)

Classical and aristocratic liberty follows merit and virtue:
it is the expression of merit and virtue.
Modern and democratic freedom can follow liberty,
but only to the extent it maintains its basis in merit and virtue.
Contemporary reality knows no liberty because
it mandates freedom without mandating virtue. (282)

Freedom represents nothing but a possibility, never a capacity.
It represents what one may do, never what one is - it is potential, not power. (98)

The perfected liberty of a single man is worth infinitely more than
the sum total of fragmentary equalized, crippled or crabbed liberty
of all of the world’s masses. (100)

Liberalism: the latest political expression of egalitarianism,
premised on the surrender of liberty. (102)

‘Tolerance’

Tolerance is a virtue for the virtueless:
it is the capitulation to one’s own smallness, doubts and humility,
the easy excuse for all one’s sins, shortcomings, and deficiencies -
a virtue fit for the crumbling of the times. (210)

Tolerance must eradicate diversity - or be eradicated by it. (209)

Tolerance makes one complacent:
it leaves one content merely to let well enough alone - and never test oneself. (210)

New Right Demo-politics

‘Race realism’ is necessary amidst the absurdo-optimistic progressivist-egalitarian ideology which presently strangling our societies.
But while the genetic element is necessary, it is not a sufficient condition
for any given ethos. (80-1)

Western civilization may require a certain physiological grounding,
but it cannot be defined by that grounding alone.
Rather, it requires a new definition of Occidental Man
as an Ethnos, at the intersection of nature and culture:
the common way of life of a people, its traditions and its customs,
its characteristics and traits, its inner and outer manifestations as a people. (80; 72)

Racial bio-determinism cannot aid us in the overcoming of modernity
because it is but the by-product of the same.
It is but ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘democracy’ once again, in disguise:
they are but modernity in wolf’s clothes. (78)

The racial question may have precipitated and hastened the coming of the New Right day and the crisis of immigration may have been the catalyst to its birth,
but, counter to vulgar opinion,
the New Right does not have its vital core in the question of race. (69)

Racial bio-determinism is not science but scientism:
it is the dogmatic attempt to understand humanity
through the lens of science alone and
in the light of what is lower than human. (78)

Racial bio-determinism, so far being the essence of the New Right,
is, in fact, opposed to its very spirit. (79)

New Right Historiography

History is not linear: it is not identical to progress. (230-1)

Unlike the laws of physics,
the laws of human history are not mathematical or deterministic:
human life is multi-layered, multi-causal and multi-effectual. (231)

If history has been consciously forced along certain parts,
it may also be consciously guided along others. (230-1)

‘True Colours’

Shining through
- Cyndi Lauper

The preceding two paragraphs of definitions and aphorisms will have proven the point of this review: Prometheans defines the New Right’s true colours. It defines the battle lines between real right and its enemies. These enemies are all those who insist on whatever is not right for Western civilization and on whatever impinges on the rights of the Western peoples. These enemies are what is left after subtracting the Real Right: they are the detritus of Western civilization and the traitors of the Western peoples - they will be left behind by Western history. The Prometheans has drawn a line in the sand: the line between the Real Right and its enemy - it shows both in their true colours:

Prometheans
(page references)
Left
(-) Right
(+)
based on immanent reference transcendent reference
driven by (164-5) resentment, envy magnificence, generosity
enforced through totalitarian collectivism noble paternalism
aiming at (221) quantity, mediocrity quality, excellence
through (31) secularity & materialism spirituality & virtue
with focus on present (‘Modernity’) past (‘Tradition’) & future
leading to: (31) hedonist ‘progress’ real-world development
(104-5) regressive chaos anagogic discipline
(5, 19) revolutionary anarchy hierarchic order
(9, 221; 6) humanism; human rights ethos; higher duties
(186-7) undifferentiated masses specialized ethnicities
(31; 96-9) democracy; equality aristocracy; identity
(260-7) collectivist ‘freedom’ individualist liberty
(268-71) normative outer law self-guiding inner law
represented by globalist liberalism the New Right
(Traditionalist designation matriarchal devolution,
downward cycle paternalist evolution
upward cycle)

Postscript: the Archaeo-Futurist Revolution

We must make ourselves the children of the flame, the fire (131)

The longest civilizational arc of human history, most acutely thought out, acted out and lived out through, by and in the most modern part of mankind, is about to reach its final destination. Leonard grasps this palpable tension: ...the Occident is not spent yet. Perhaps in truth she has even still to be born, and these marvellous millennia before us were but a gestation of such length that one no longer perceives the birth toward which they have been tending. (291) The highest strung bow of all of human history, charged by the Indo-European project and with Western mankind in its most modern advance guard, is to be aimed at the farthest goal of all. Its highest destiny has now been spelt out by its latest-last thinkers - it is now clearly within reach of its latest-last crusaders. There is exuberance in all this... (29) But as the West is approaching the darkest hour of its decisive midnight, Western mankind now must do or die - the New Right, rightful heir and last guard of the Western Tradition, is duty-bound to reclaim the heritage of the Western peoples. It must prepare for the most unexpected move of all: a decisive retaking of that heritage - of all of its land, all of its splendour, all of its honour and all of its glory. To do so, it will have to aim very high: it will have to aim at the total annihilation of its diabolic enemy. It must achieve these things against apparently impossible odds: this is the course dictated by the great visionaries, thinkers and artists of the West - nothing less will do. Whatever the outcome in the here and now, such a move will earn the heirs and guards of the West eternal glory in a better place - either in this world, in a New West of splendour, or in that world, next to their warrior ancestors. Leonard recognizes the crusading spirit that must be adopted in the face of this daunting challenge: There are conditions under which merely winning a war becomes contemptible and detestable to right minds and elevated souls. It is not sufficient to emerge triumphant: one must be triumphant by one’s own standards. (142-3) The New Right’s aim cannot be anything less than the long-dreamt higher destiny of Western mankind, a destiny that is rooted deep in its most ancient Indo-European heritage. It is either that or total victory for the demonic forces that have been unleashed by globalist nihilism. Of course, to the utter darkness that would follow that victory - to that hell - the enemies of the West are more than welcome. But to its diabolic enemy, the globalist hostile elite, the New Right has only one message: you will end up in that place - one way or the other.

As befitting its bridging function, Archaeo-Futurism has two names for the higher destiny of Western mankind - they are very old and very new at the same time: Parousia and Golden Dawn. Jason Jorjani, Archaeo-Futurism’s new leader and foremost thinker, has already conclusively proven that this doubly archaic and futurist higher destiny is the true developmental end of the three great Indo-European (Western, Persian, Indian) Traditions. Jorjani points to the archetype of self-surpassing nobility that attaches itself to this destiny in all three of these Traditions: the ancient - much abused, much misunderstood - word ‘Aryan’ extends this nobility beyond the mere worldly realm. The worldly workings of this supernatural nobility are reflected in the transcending powers of Evangelion, Nomos and Techne: through these transformative forces, Western mankind has shaped, developed and improved the world. Leonard’s Prometheans recognizes the unique powers of Western mankind as ...the virtue of Occidental Man, the virtue of that ethnic and cultural bloc that derives from Europe or from the societies colonized and seeded by predominantly European or proto-European stock. This virtue thus takes its bearings by the history of the West, by the tradition of the West - a tradition which is second to none in the world, all the more so as it kept faith with the work of the empyrean upon the earth... (33) Jorjani pointed to the eternal expression (i.e. hypostatic abstraction) of the destiny of Western mankind in the archetype of Prometheus and Leonard follows Jorjani in appropriating this archetype for the New Right. As Prometheus was the last of Titans to be deposed by the Olympians, he represents a last link back to the primordial world - a link by which mankind may raise itself back up into primordial spirituality. (118ff.) Leonard defines this spirit as the ‘intellectual and super-intellectual blaze of creative capacity’, an ‘ennobling spark of divinity’ that ‘descended only to the West’ (122): he recognizes it as the ‘sky fire that belongs to the West alone’. (126) As a Promethean project, New Right political philosophy is bound to be of an active and exploratory - even revolutionary - character.

Traditionalism is one of the main ‘anchors’ of contemporary Archaeo-Futurism and it is from the Traditionalist long durée perspective that the Promethean archetype can perhaps best be understood - as a creative force. From the Traditionalist perspective, the ancient archetype of Prometheus represents the perilous principle of active - one might say (word power) ‘magic’ - mediation between the earthly, human life-world and the heavenly, super-human world: it brings heavenly light into earthly darkness. Leonard retains this Traditionalist notion, but he also projects it forward, in the most fully ‘futurist’ sense of the word, thus adding weight and urgency to the case made by Jorjani: We need a new power philosophy, one which however is made immune to the seeds of the modern disease, so that it does not devolve into scientism and Realpolitik. It must oppose the principles of modernity, while adopting its means. The New Right must therefore propose an ideal which is to that extent fundamentally different from any specific tradition it would resuscitate and revitalize. This requires modifying the Western tradition: it requires... inventing a new tradition for the Occident, a new concept of the West as Occident. (35) Leonard explicitly warns of the dangers of reactionary responses to the current Crisis of the Modern West: ...th[e] reactionary element in the New Right cannot be permitted to become the intellectual and vital core or vanguard of the same, for it would seed death and regress into our future. ...We are in dire need of a new, non-reactionary, social and political vision: one informed... by past examples and models, one that is built in... reverence for the achievements of our ancestors and all due awareness of the limits [of] human nature, one that exerts itself in all awareness of... Tradition in its grander sense... but which nonetheless above all moves forward from both past and present, to establish, no longer the mere shadow-forms of an ungovernable yesterday, but a city never built. (165-6)

Coming down on the futurist side of Archaeo-Futurism, Leonard’s New Prometheans is committed to the re-activation of the West’s long-lost (or rather: long-dormant) Promethean archetype. In doing so, Leonard is pulling its Western readership, i.e. its non-collaborationist thinking part - now increasingly finding its way into New Right, for-ward and up-ward to the intellectual, psychological and ethical level at which the re-incarnation of that archetype becomes possible. Once a sufficient critical mass of combined thought and willpower has been achieved at that level, the West will be ready for a quantum leap forward. That will be the moment of the Archaeo-Futurist Revolution - it will augur in the Golden Dawn. The publication of New Prometheans marks great progress towards that unimaginable moment. The New Right may rejoice over New Prometheans’ preview of what lies beyond the present eclipse of the West.

When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy
- Matthew 2:10

Notes