Archive for » September, 2006 «

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

Caracas, Venezuela, September 20, 2006 —Borrowing a line from U.S. linguist and foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky, Venezuela’s President Chavez told the 61st UN General Assembly that the world currently faces the choice between continued U.S. hegemony and human survival. Chavez also called for the re-founding of the United Nations, so as to avert this danger.

“The hegemonistic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very existence of the human species,” said Chavez, holding up a copy of Chomsky’s book and to the applause of many attendees. Chavez continued, stressing, “We appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our head.”
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Monday, September 18th, 2006

Interview with Al Gore on “Enough Rope”

In his recent book ‘Collapse’, the author Jared Diamond asked the question: “Why do societies destroy the environment around them when they know their actions will ultimately destroy them too?” An example he gives is of the people of Easter Island, who chopped down their last tree on the way to their own extinction. According to former US Vice-President, Al Gore, we might be doing exactly the same thing with global warming.
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Friday, September 08th, 2006

‘…National Socialism is not merely a political and economic upheaval but a social revolution as well. To a very large extent it has brought the lower middle class into power. To be sure, one finds quite a few aristocrats and intellectuals in the Nazi regime. Furthermore, there are plenty of Nazis sprung from peasant or worker stock, some of whom, like the Weimar Gauleiter, would rise in any society. Yet the lower middle class seems to be inordinately in evidence. One does not notice this so much in Berlin, because the ablest elements in the Party tend to gravitate to the seat of power. In the provinces the Spiessbürgertum comes much more to the front.’
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Friday, September 01st, 2006

“The future belongs to those with the longest memory.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

The Third Way

To understand the French New Right, it is necessary to begin with its identitarian philosophy of history. This philosophy, however, is so entangled in an ideological thicket of critical scorn that it is all but impossible to approach with impartiality. Like revolutionary conservatism, national bolshevism, and various expressions of populism and syndicalism, the French New Right seeks a revolutionary course beyond the Left-Right politics it rejects; and, like these other “Third Way” tendencies, it, too, is routinely compared with the most notorious of the Third Way movements: fascism and National Socialism.(n1) While liberalism, social democracy, and communism, as different expressions of the Left, are not similarly equated (and tainted), there is a certain, if tenuous logic to these comparisons in that all Third Way tendencies oppose the modernist order. Less certain still is the inquisitional intent of these comparisons.(n2) Efforts by Alain de Benoist’s GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Europeenne),(n3) the principal French proponent of the Third Way, to challenge the liberal paradigm or to evoke the Indo-European heritage as a spur to cultural renewal, have led to numerous McCarthy-style allegations of Nazism and “Aryan supremacy”(n4) — even though for thirty years Benoist and his Grecistes have denounced Nazism as a “brown Jacobinism” and have characterized racism as an offshoot of the totalizing modernity they oppose. The greatest obstacle to understanding the Third Way may stem, however, from the fact that these comparisons mistakenly assume that ideology, an “outgrowth of modernity” that reduces the world to itself, and philosophy, which is an opening to the world, are analogous, and that, therefore, the philosophical disposition of a school of thought, such as the GRECE’s, can be deduced from its politics.(n5) Since all these stigmatizing comparisons endeavor to delegitimate, rather than to explain such non-conformist tendencies, it is hardly surprising that they also have succeeded in marginalizing them.(n6)
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