Generation Identity

Written like the great-great grandson of Zarathustra come amidst the rabble of the market place to both declaim against the consuming rabble and their merchants, and shout a rallying call to those among the youth who have had enough of the shallow pseudo-values of that generation, this volume of 100 pages amount to a complete outline of the ‘Identity’ movement.

Older Rightists should not be confused here: This is not the ‘Identity’ spinoff of British Israel, but a European assertion of what the Left has long been touting as ‘identity politics’ for every faction, fraction, and fantasy imaginable, other than that of the European peoples. Each chapter is on average two pages in length, which imposes literary discipline on the author and results in cogency rather than shallowness. Indeed, every sentence might be said to achieve maximum value as to the meaning of what amounts of an existential crisis of Europe and its far-flung outposts. The Identity movement is a phenomenon that is new and that is gaining momentum, regardless or perhaps because of the System’s attempts at prohibition on its speakers and organisers. It is the true youth rebellion: a revolt against every aspect of the modern world, a reassertion of the traditional West against the Late, decaying West, but new because the values of the actual Right are eternally valid, and like an avenging Kalki return again and again when a civilisation stands before the abyss.  

Such is the manner by which the imagination of a new generation has been captured by Identitarianism, that even in the ideological and political backwater of New Zealand such an organisation has spring up as if from a void, unencumbered by aborted or shallow past efforts, the Dominion Movement, [1] like its counterparts overseas, disciplined, articulate, engaged in both mental and physical training. [2] The Identity movement also has its counterpart in the USA: Identity Europa. [3]

The Identity movement was founded in 2002, perhaps most appropriately, like many notable movements of the true Right, in France, home of Jacobinism, as Génération Identitaire. Its first symbolic action was to occupy a Mosque at Poitiers. While the movement is known for its resistance to the Islamic invasion, and it can be seen as the vanguard of the Reconquista, it does not buy into the Islamophobia of the neocons. Identitarianism is antithetical to such notions, because, unlike other varieties of racial ‘identity politics’, it respects differences, and the conflict with Islam in Europe is not of its making. Unlike ‘68ers and their spawn, there is no hypocrisy about it. 

The preface is written by the founder of the movement in France, Philippe Vardon, who states in the first paragraph that the movement emerged from youth ‘abandoned, isolated, atomised, uprooted’, [4] a mass that the global oligarchy wants to remould according to its profit margins. Multiculturalism is a primary means by which the oligarchic ideal of a ‘global village’ [5] and a global marketplace are being established. [6]

I

Phoney ‘Revolt’ of the ‘68ers

The Left has been useless for the task of resisting this globalisation, and of offering something in its place. As Oswald Spengler and Julius Evola stated, the Left is a reflection of the merchant’s zeitgeist, not a transcendence of it. The Left’s ‘youth revolt’ of ’68, although not referred to by Willinger, was as phoney as a two bob watch, a combination of Jewish boys throwing a tantrum against domineering mothers, [7] CIA fronts such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, [8] and stooges such as Gloria Steinem [9] and Timothy Leary. [10] The whole ‘youth rebellion’ of that generation, including the banal  music, [11] psychedelia, [12] drugs, [13] promiscuity, [14] was a stage-managed stunt to move the mainstream into leftward direction under the illusion that they were opting for moderate and even conservative choices. 

In France the riots of ’68 that nearly brought down the De Gaulle government, began when Danny Cohn-Bendit, subsequently a member of the European parliament for the German Green party, instigated a student strike when he invaded the women’s dormitory at the University of Nanterre in the name of ‘sexual freedom’; a suitably banal cause for a banal generation.[15]Around that time a puerile pop group, ‘The Monkees’ released a song whose lyrics included: ‘we’re the young generation, and we’ve got something to say’. The irony is that the generation really had nothing to say. The ‘68ers entered the Establishment, where they naturally belong.  Among the most extreme of that generation, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground, have long been comfortably ensconced in academia, while academics of any Rightist disposition, such as Richard Lynn, recently denied his emeritus status with Ulster University, or Australia’s Andrew Fraser, are vilified and purged. That the youth of the Left still don’t ‘get it’, that they still cannot question why someone such as Dohrn lives comfortably within the System, while someone such as Fraser loses his position for writing a letter to a local newspaper, indicates how befuddled, how seriously dumbed down and mentally atrophied, such youth are; or perhaps it is also a matter of many of these not really having the courage to genuinely rebel? A young Leftist can posture as a ‘rebel’ while not having to actually risk anything in terms of media opprobrium or job dismissal. Horst Mahler, an extreme Leftist with the Baader-Meinhof Group, saw through the phoniness, turned ‘Right’, and experienced real persecution from the ‘Establishment’. Willinger’s book is a ‘declaration of war’ against the ‘68ers. 

II

Europe’s Crisis

Willinger states in the ‘preface’ that Europe’s present crisis is unique. It is not suffering from the carnage of war, but of spirit.[16]This is a reassertion by a new generation of what Spengler stated in 1918 with The Decline of the West. Whereas Spengler stated there is nothing more to live out for Western Civilisation than to fulfil a technological future, and finally succumb to the tragedy of its own Faustian hubris, Generation Identity sees no deterministic reason why the roots of Europe’s spirit cannot be reborn. Rather, Willinger states that the meaning of ‘revolution’ is etymologically a ‘return’. I think it fair to say that Generation Identity is indeed the resumption of the ‘conservative revolution’, and even although both words have been misused for decades, the movement is affirming both their relevance and their truly radical character. What the conservative revolution implies is an ideological and spiritual counter-attack to restore all of those eternal values that the Left from Adam Weishaupt and  Robespierre, Marx and Trotsky, to their ‘68er heirs, and their oligarchic sponsors, have sought to destroy: 

‘The next generation, the ‘68ers hated and condemned everything that had been passed down to them: every tradition, every belief in their own kind, every will toward an authentic identity. This belief that one’s own kind is worthless –that cultures, peoples, and families count for nothing and need to be rooted out – threatens to end Europe’s existence as a continent for Europeans’.[17]

Is it only intellectual rationalisations that resulted in Marx’s doctrine in every way striking at the roots of allof the foundations of Western culture? : family, homeland, religion, all of those bonds that are organic and the product of millennia? Or is there something pathogenic at play? Is it coincidence that an international oligarchy has precisely the same agenda, as openly shown by the manner by which George Soros sponsors the causes that undermine those same organic bonds? While ‘conspiracy theory’ is rubbished out of hand by intellectual sophisticates, if one calls it something else, such as ‘global business strategy’ the result is the same. But even here, oligarchy does not come to the fore until a certain epoch of historical development is reached by a culture. Not only did Spengler discuss this, but so did Plato in his Republic. The West is run by oligarchs. The Left occupied Wall Street but its only plan was to tax the rich. Meanwhile its causes (whether Black Lives Matter, or the sudden arrival of the transgender agenda), are funded by the oligarchy, as they have always been.[18]

In rebellion, Generation Identity stands for human differentiation, genuine differences; diversity. The Left regurgitates platitudes of a double-think nature, formulated in the position papers of transnational corporations, think tanks and tax exempt fountains, where socialist trades unionists, street agitators, veteran government advisers and CEOs meet in congenial accord. When the Left shout for ‘diversity’ what they mean is a nebulous human globule that can be moulded as economics requires. It would be, as the Establishment’s intelligentsia, such as Francis Fukuyama, predict, ‘the end of history ‘, where the limit of human striving is considered to have been reached and beyond which there is nothing more for which to strive: the victory in every nook and cranny of the Earth, of parliamentary democracy and free market economics. The Left marches with banners (increasingly violently) against the Right, declaring ‘no more border’. Fortunecarries an article stating the same – in the name of economic prosperity. [19] The author, Rutger Bregman, a liberal, is feted. His economic determinism sees no room for identities. To this Generation Identity answers: 

‘We search for our identity and find it under the rubble of your destructive rage. We must dig deep to find ourselves again. Our history, our homeland, and our culture give us what you have taken from us. We don’t want to be citizens of the world. We are happier with our own countries. We don’t want the end of history, for our history doesn’t give us cause to complain’. [20]

III

Family and Gender

            As one would surely hope for in a movement of Western restoration, the family plays an important part in their ideology.  There is no more targeted institution than the family. The destruction of the family as a ‘bourgeoisie’ institution features in The Communist Manifesto. Marx claimed that marriage had been reduced to ‘prostitution’ by bourgeoisie males taking mistresses; a very big non-sequitur around which to base a primary element of Marxist dogma. [21] Certainly Marx played out this bourgeois role in siring a son, Freddy Delmuth, to his wife’s maid. 

Did the Marxists propose instead to restore the family by freeing it from capitalistic degeneration? No. Like the other major tenets of Marxist dogma, such degeneration is seen as a progressive – dialectical – step in history. What caused the biggest outrage from Trotsky towards Stalin was the restoration of family life, and the re-establishment of the authority of parents in the USSR. Trotsky lauded the early years of the Bolshevik state when parents were replaced by factory crèches, and the family hearth was replaced by communal factory eating halls. To Trotsky, this more than any other factor in the USSR was the ‘revolution betrayed’. [22] Such Marxists, led by the Trotskyites, entered the ranks of the CIA front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, [23] and they and their offspring became the neocons of the present, the champions of Late epoch Western liberalism and the free market. It is here in particular where the Old Left, the ‘68ers and the oligarchy converged. All agreed that the family is an obstacle to global economic development. It is the most primary organic bond from which the individual must be detached before he can fully enter the free market, just as a century ago the family had to be eliminated before the individual could fully enter the Bolshevik factory production process. Willinger condemns the ‘68ers for claiming that ‘the family was no longer necessary. Father, mother and child are supposedly an outdated model. You leapt gleefully to the task of stamping out the family’. [24]  It is a process of culture-pathology rationalised as ideology and ‘progress’, like all other culture-pathologies in the West. This is not ‘progress’, an illusionary concept, but decay. Sundry agendas are promoted as part of this offensive: abortion (euphemistically called ‘reproductive rights’ by the Soros foundations and others), feminism, and what has become a sliding scale of sexual identity. 

These concepts are promoted, double-think style, as ‘diversity’ and ‘identity politics’, but are aimed at destroying real diversity and identity throughout the world with the aim of creating an amorphous mass. How does one have gender identities for example, when the distinctions are blurred and one is free to change gender? Why does the global oligarchy so avidly promote and fund feminism, abortion, and lately transgenderism? They are open about it: for an ‘inclusive’ global economy. Multiculturalism is promoted for the same reason. The euphemism ‘corporate responsibility’ is used as the façade. ‘Instead of the harmonious union of men and women, you’ve promoted the alliance of queers and transvestites, the union of nothingness’, writes Willinger.[25]Masculine women and feminine men, and in the mix we get again in the name of ‘diversity’ what Willinger calls ‘nothingness’. 

This crisis of the family, this psychotic negation of life in the name of instant ego gratification, ease and comfort, the hedonism that was the motivation of the ‘68ers, had is parallels in civilisations in their epochs of decay throughout millennia, as Spengler detailed in The Decline of the West.  What is today called ‘progress’ has been seen many times before. Such was the depopulation of Rome, the abortions, the buggery and the birth control, that no laws by Augustus could reverse the happy march to death.[26]  However, such a travesty is self-destructive. In destroying the family and the will-to-perpetuity, for short-term gain, there is a demographic crisis in the West that must be solved by alien migration.  Again, Rome sought population replacement by migrants, until there were no Romans, as Willinger reminds us in the chapter, ‘On the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’. [27]  Willinger’s condemnation of the killing of the unborn is among his most scathing. ‘We are the too-few generation of the single children. Therein lies the source of our loneliness. You have slaughtered our siblings. … So spoke your “law”, and if having children was inconvenient, you robbed countless children of their lives to arrange yours more pleasantly. But what could be a greater crime than the murder of unborn children?’ [28]

The oligarchs, like the Soviet commissars a century ago, sought women without bonds to homes and children, to fill their factories and offices, and they promised ‘liberation’ from the drudgery of family life. In return for bondage to the economic treadmill, they promise the global shopping mall – consumerism sustained by debt. ‘We are the victims of your debt-driven politics’. [29]This is what the ‘freedom’ heralded by liberalism delivers; freedom from the bonds of ‘family, culture, country, tradition’, gender, ‘and a thousand other things’.[30]  ‘But we ask, “Free for what?” And our answer is, “Free to find our way back to ourselves”’. [31] Dr. Alexander Dugin asks exactly the same question for Russians regarding the liberalism that the Western oligarchy wishes to impose on his people. [32]  

IV

Multiculturalism as a Tool for Globalisation  

Multiculturalism is one among an array of offensives against the West designed to fracture what remains of it as a culture organism. Concomitant with this is of course immigration. I have quoted Rutger Bregman touting multicultural immigration as an economic advantage. There are many others, and one of particular interest has been the economics journalist and author, G. Pascal Zachary whose book the Global Me lauded the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan individual as the next stage of human evolution, because s/he would be the greatest asset to the global corporations: without bonds and attachments, able to be relocated across the world as corporations require, and instantly being able to conform to a corporate culture. This rootless individual is the ideal of an emerging class of CEOs. Indeed, the book is subtitled ‘The New Cosmopolitans’. [33] These are the types that Willinger is alluding to when he writes of the ‘multicultural society’:  ‘Decades ago you carried the torch for multiculturalism and wanted to implement it at any cost. But what does multiculturalism mean to you? Nothing more than eating pizza and kebabs at the Turkish joint. … Your cheap clichés are our reality’. [34] While this comment might seem to be intended as flippant or metaphorical, it is literal reality. The celebration of the varieties of ‘ethnic food’ enabled by multiculturalism is a serious, primary justification for multiculturalism. It recalls the reference to Esau selling his birthright for ‘a mess of pottage’, [35] in a real sense in the modern West. What is the Identitarian answer? As far removed from ‘race hate’ as one can get: ‘They should hold on to their identities, and let us have ours. We don’t ask more than that which should be obvious: Europe belongs to the European alone. We are the rightful heirs of this continent, and will not give up our inheritance’. [36]

This statement becomes problematic when considering the European diaspora in the former colonies. However, there is a more profound inconsistency and hypocrisy when the ‘indigenous rights’ of Amerindians, Australoids, and Maori are demanded and accorded recognition from every ‘respectable’ individual and institution, although simultaneously when European ethni ask for the same recognition within their native homelands they are vehemently damned as ‘racists’, ‘white supremacists’ and ‘Nazis’, the Identitarian movement itself being a primary example. Might one not suspect that ‘indigenous rights’ are not really about recognising diverse identities so much as another means of inflicting European genocide? Ultimately, in a dialectical manner, the aim is not to assure anyone’s ‘indigenous rights’, but to destroy diversity in the name of diversity, and impose a global uniformity for the sake of economic ‘progress’; a ‘universalism at enforces Late Western models of capitalism and democracy over the entire world. ‘So it is that we understand the peoples that despise you and reject your “progress”’. [37]

Yet how is the Left different from their supposed capitalist ‘enemy’, when they insist on the same Late Western models of feminism and ‘human rights’ for the entire world? In the name of ‘diversity’,

‘there has to be onemarket, you claim. One form of government is the right one. You want to implement one formulation of human rights, which should apply to everyone. We all live in one world. These are your slogans. How is it then that you dare to claim that you stand for diversity, when you hate diversity from the depths of your being?’ [38]  

To the meltingpot that will destroy all real diversity in the name of economic standardisation, and behind the façade of ‘progress’, Identitarians call for ‘ethnopluralism’ on the basis of sturdy borders, which by no means implies contempt for others – to the contrary. ‘Every culture requires its own space…’ [39] When applied to any other species this is surely just basic ecology; something that the ‘68ers claim to champion with Green politics. But when it comes to a niche in the world for European cultures the usual slogans are frenetically reversed. 

The impossibility of liberal ideology is confronted when the multiculturalism demanded for the West includes traditional cultures that abhor Late Western ‘progressive’ notions of feminism or homosexuality that only exist among Western degenerates and those non-Westerners who have succumbed to Late Western pathologies. Indeed, we have been seeing the phenomenon of liberals rejecting multiculturalism in favour of ‘one nation’ assimilation, and the denunciation of ‘Islamofascism’ for its rejection of the universal model of Late Western ‘progress’. Centrist politicians such as Merkel and David Cameron panicked that the crisis of multiculturalism would result in a mass populist reaction and hurriedly reversed their multiculturalism to demand assimilation. The Burqa was outlawed because it affronts feminism. Such is the muddle that liberalism bestows when confronted with the realities of the world. 

What is portrayed by the mass media as the rise of ‘extreme Right’ is often led by ‘gays’ and liberals who see Islam as a danger not to traditional Western values, but to Late Western liberalism.  Willinger condemns this recent trend among the bogus ‘Right’  that is demanding ‘”harder’ integration,’ and aptly asks why increasingly strong communities would join ‘a decadent and dying European culture?’ [40] There was a time last century when the ‘Right’ was often in alliance with Muslim Arabs in opposition to common enemies. Western meddling in the Middle East has caused the ‘refugee’ issue’. U.S. sponsorship of radical Islam against the USSR in Afghanistan is a primary source of the present crises; but the ‘Right’ rejoiced at such bogus ‘anti-communism’. 

V

Islam in Europe: Symptoms and Causes

Identitarians are known perhaps most of all for their stunts in drawing attention to the spread of Islam in Europe. From a strictly pragmatic viewpoint, the migration of Muslims and other alien peoples into Europe has given Europeans a new sense of identity vis-à-vis ‘The Other’.  Again, the ‘68ers carry the seeds of their own destruction. The more diverse peoples are forced together in the same niche the more they insist on divergence, unless they can live symbiotically. Such symbiosis was supposed to be possible through a common attachment to consumerism. Willinger recognises this when he states that ‘You were convinced that the Muslims would modernise and reform their religion. Yet they did the exact opposite’. [41]

The ‘68ers and their oligarchic sponsors thought that Islam could be used within Europe like Islam was used at a distance against the USSR and Serbia. They thought that Muslim youngsters would assimilate under the impress of liberalism, of what neocon geopolitical strategist Ralph Peters approvingly referred to as the pathology of global ‘American culture’ in undermining traditional cultures: fast food, puerile music, pornography, and Hollywood – all the banality of the modern West. [42] U.S. Ambassador to France, Charles Rivkin devised a confidential programme called ‘The Rivkin Project’, which was an extensive subversive strategy to detach Muslim youths from their roots and use them to destroy what the oligarchs consider to be France’s obsessive xenophobia and nationalism; i.e. France’s tendency to act more independently of U.S. foreign policy than the other states of the E.U. Deracinated Muslim youths were considered ideal for the purpose, and they would be indoctrinated with the U.S. hip hop subculture in particular; a programme that continues to be sponsored by the U.S. State Department in a manner reminiscent of CIA sponsorship of Jazz and Abstract Expressionism during the Cold War era. The U.S. hoped to play on France’s Jacobin heritage to fulfil its multicultural agendas. [43] Predictably, the Left is worthless in resisting these globalist agendas because of the commonality they have with capitalism is demanding ‘open borders’, while ‘antifa’ serve as the psychopathic street-whores of plutocracy in fighting any genuine resistance . 

Willinger states that for Europe ‘The question of Islam is one of the great questions of our time.’  However, because Indentitarians are quite unique among much of the post-1945 Right in seeking out causes, rather than just reacting to symptoms, Willinger states that,  ‘we don’t commit the error of many conservatives who declare Islam to be their absolute enemy. We don’t believe that one should try to convert Muslims to so-called “Western values” - quite the opposite! We neither want to disturb the identity of Muslims, nor do we want to launch crusades against the East as you did. We condemn neither Muslims nor Islam. Here we are a thousand more times tolerant than you ever were’. Islam in Europe is not a problem of religion per se, but of the presence of aliens in an imposed multicultural society. [44]

Muslims did not create that situation. It is the culmination of a century of duplicitous Western diplomacy towards the Arabs, support for the most extreme elements of Islam in order to maintain the Middle East in a constant state of destabilisation, in Afghanistan, Serbia, Syria and, as Gaddafi warned, the destruction of Libya which was holding back the floodgates of Africa into Europe. [45]

Willinger sees the conflict in the Middle East between Judaism and Islam as impossible to resolve, and that Europe’s best option is to be neutral. What many cannot conceive is the religious fanaticism involved, because the West has long since lost the spiritual character of its High Culture. Willinger states that neither Israelis nor Palestinians will give up their claims on Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa because it is the centre of their respective identities. [46] It could be added that there are significant factions in Israel that will never renounce the ambition of a Greater Israeli empire stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates rivers, according to the so-called ‘deed of covenant in Genesis. 

Instead of European subservience to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East or anywhere else, there should be a European army to protect Europeans neutrality. Switzerland is evoked as an example. [47] What form the new Europe would take is left open by Willinger; whether as a European Nation [as proposed by Francis Parker Yockey, Sir Oswald Mosley and Jean Thiriart], or a federation of nations. What is not wanted is the continuation of the present E.U. But the idea of European unity remains a primary factor for the Identitarians. [48]   

VI

Renewal

Identitarianism seems to be in the traditionalist mode when the ultimate goal is stated as being the return of  the West to a ‘Golden Age’. Spengler considered that no civilisation can return to past epochs, while conversely Evola held that a young vanguard might wait for the right time, and tend the flame that could one day restore the Golden Age. What Willinger envisions is the return of a world for Europeans in which peoples have mutual respect because they desire to  separate, and develop in their own eco-systems, in which the streams, forests and mountains are again venerated, [49] because the nexus with the spiritual – which Evola saw as the basis of all ‘normal’ civilisations’ has been restored. What Willinger recognises is that no such restoration can begin unless the rule of money is overthrown, and there is indeed a ‘freedom’ from being ‘the slaves of the tiny elite of the wealthy. We’ll free our planet from the deathly grip of capitalism and create a society in which the economy serves culture, and not the reverse… We will demolish the dungeons of the ‘68ers, and this era will become reality’. [50]

Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the ‘68ers by Markus Willinger , Arktos Media Ltd., London, 2013

Reviewed by K R Bolton