After final week’s publication made the case for the wickedness of Stalinism and the virtues of early Chilly Struggle anti-Communism, I assumed I’d get dragged right into a weekend social media debate about Marxism-Leninism. Not so. As a substitute, I managed to entangle myself in an argument a few completely different totalitarianism-related query: whether or not the destruction of Hitler’s Germany was a real and righteous judgment of Almighty God.
That query got here out of two discussions of far-right politics — one occasioned by Graeme Wooden’s Atlantic profile of Bronze Age Pervert, the pseudonymous creator and on-line persona who’s a number one voice of “vitalist,” or Nietzschean, or, for those who desire, merely fascist thought on-line; the opposite by revelations in regards to the author Richard Hanania, who has admitted to (and apologized for) a youthful profession as a pseudonymous scribbler for racist publications.
The type of far-right thought concerned in each tales takes Western decadence as a given, whereas arguing that Christianity is a weak vessel for any form of cultural revival. Its massive thought is {that a} conservatism that appears to classical and pagan sources, and embraces some form of racial identitarianism could possibly be extra, effectively, important in its engagement with the occasions.
A model of precisely this argument floated across the platform X, previously generally known as Twitter, and when somebody demanded a rebuttal, I dashed off a pair of posts:
I suppose one response is to notice that the final try and refound European civilization on the idea of classical-Teutonic heritage and eugenics led to unspeakable atrocities and the whole destruction of the European heartland.
The decay and decadence of Western Christianity makes the return of right-wing Nietzscheanism inevitable. However Christians can say with some warrant that God’s judgment on that challenge is clear already.
These posts are minor entries within the widening debate over what conservative Christians ought to make of an emergent pagan or post-Christian proper — in all its varied kinds, materialist and mystical, populist and mental, from excessive characters like Bronze Age Pervert to extra mainstream figures, like Jordan Peterson, who appear to wobble on the sting of Christian religion. I’ve supplied my very own feedback on our doable pagan futures, together with in an argument earlier this yr about euthanasia with Hanania himself (who I feel stays an exemplar of a pagan libertarianism, no matter you make of his declare to have developed right into a neoliberal), however there’s way more that could possibly be mentioned.
