Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pikaiana Show
and thank you. This is my thousandth episode. If you
would have told me when I started this that I
would have had a thousandth episode, I would have told
you that you were probably insane and I'd probably be
dead by now or something. But here I am, and
I invited my friend Thomas seven seven seven to come
on the show and do this with me.
Speaker 2: How you doing, Thomas, I'm very well, thank you and
minored to be here for the for the millenerian episode,
I guess. I mean, that's no, it's no small thing.
A thousand episodes. That's a hell of a lot of content.
That's a real milestone. And and it's a milestone that
it's New Year's Eve. This has been a really incredible year.
I mean, everybody says that. I mean that. I don't.
I don't mean it in a corny way. I mean
it really has. And I'm profoundly optimistic for twenty twenty four.
So we're in a good place.
Speaker 1: I am what I am as well. I'm very optimistic
for twenty twenty four. I think if our people really
concentrate on getting things done, taking care of business, this
Year twenty twenty four. At the end, we're going to
be much stronger for it. They will be much stronger
for it too.
Speaker 2: I think there's a historical moment underway. Yeah, definitely. And
I think I'm both old enough and I'm plugged in
enough to the zeitgeist, because I mean, that's frankly, all
I do is try and perceive these things. You know,
I think I can. I think I can read the
proverbial tea leaves more deeptely than some men. So yeah,
these are exciting times. Man, It's good we're here on
New Year's Eve producing content like the busy bees. We
are not not not doing gross stuff for New Year's Eve,
like like dodging pedals of vomit and stepping over like
weeping fit chicks.
Speaker 1: Those days are gone for me. I like being I
like being at home, being at home or being with friends.
So well, what I wanted to do, what I wanted
to ask is well, what I wanted to say is
the reason I chose this to read is because it's
something very different than what I normally read. A lot
of this is poetry, is very poetic. I also think
that I'm pretty sure this is probably the last thing
that mister Degreaul wrote. It seemed definitely seems like it's
probably the last thing that he wrote that it really
meant something to him. I thought we'd open this up
by tell us a little bit about what you know
about Leon de Grell.
Speaker 2: I mean, in the Inner War yors, the girl was
too young to have fought in the Great War. I
think he was born in nineteen o six. He was
born in a five or six like around there, okay,
but he came of age. He was very much marriornate
in the culture of the Inner War years. And one
of the things that's lacking in court history accounts, even
ones that aren't particularly punitive in terms of casting Germany
as being taken swept up by a kind of cultural
pathology that was both against precedent and not really connected
to the spirit of the age other other than in
a kind of contrarian way. But there, you know the
things that were ripping through Germany, you know, very powerful,
intense energies of a constructive and destructive nature, this kind
of confrontation with the future and with the present, which
had all the trappings of a kind of ominous future.
Like this stuff was the stuff was impacting every culture
in Europe, okay, rit large, and I mean that's why,
like we talked about in the Spanish War, Sodes, you know,
there there was a truly on the nationalist side of
the fascist side, which you know is an incomplete characterization,
which is for purpose as a shorthand description. I think
that's at least adequate. You know, like we talked about,
you know, there was the funerals at Vasili Marine and
ion Mota, you know, these Romanian Iron Guard guys, and
you know it was uh you know, Italians, German national socialists,
you know, Hungarians, you know, uh Carlos types in Spain
who supported the crown. You know, like all these all
these all these anti communists, right wing elements, you know,
turned out to literally salute like there this funeral procession.
And similarly, the guys who staffed the ranks of of
these frontline formations in the Spanish War, I mean they
they were guys from all kinds of backgrounds and you know,
all all the nations of Europe quite literally, and you know,
they common bond was you know, a belief in like
you know, in race, you know, like capital r you know,
like a you know, faith in God, you know, a
radically highest commitment to those things, you know. And in Belgium,
there's a lot of high culture that comes from Belgium,
you know, I mean it's it's not just it's not
just this kind of like accidental convergence of German or
Dutch culture and and you know, kind of like a
Francophone state. It it really is a unique place. I
got been there like many years ago. You know, the
girl was the girl was a Walloon? Is it Belgian?
Like a Francophone Belgian. The right wing tendency there that
he was actually instrumental and kind of creating it was
very much I mean it was it was the Rexist Party,
and it was it was very much royalist, you know
in terms of it's kind of in terms of it's
kind of supervisual trappings. But it was very national Socialist adjacent. Okay,
it was very other than me Catholic and openly Catholic
and royalists like it was. I'd say it was more
adjacent to to the national Socialist the culture than any
other and any other of the the the the lesser
access movements, say maybe the the situation in Croatia, but
that's basically the that that's a culture from from where
de Grelle emerged. And initially, Uh, there's a wild Loon
legion that was incorporated into the Wehrmacht. The term legion
was kind of loosely apply, like I think, UH, it
could mean anything from a force that was, you know,
slightly larger than than that company you know in AH
in the US Army or the British Army of the day,
you know, to something that was you know, the size
of a like a battalion and a half, you know,
so it veried. But the well in legion was it
was it was comparatively small, but it was game enough,
and it was it was populated enough by volunteers that
you know, the UH it enjoyed the honor of being
formally incorporated into the Verrimax and then later the Grille
Uh proved himself an incredible an incredibly effective like infantry
combat commander. Okay, first at squad and then platoon and
then you know, company level and beyond. Is a very
young man and all to the wild and legion became
part of the WAFS and that was very much the
Grell's That was much it is behest the Grell believed
in the waf SS, okay, and that's important, Like, it
wasn't just the reason why there was such the look
kind of the delicately and very and powerfully uh evocative
uh like they delicately crafted, and the and the kind
of like the the powerfully evocative in design heraldry of
the SS. Like that wasn't an accident. It wasn't just
because it wasn't just because German artists attached to the
attached to the officer schools were bored or something like.
As an enterprise, it was it was supposed to be
an enduring institution. It was supposed to represent the pan
European idea. And moving forward after n SIG, you know,
there there was gonna be a there was gonna be
a European army, okay. And to what degree they would
have butted heads uh with the Wehrmacht, that's hard to say.
But operational integration on the ast front was actually very tight,
and there was there's a lot of mutual respect between
the here and between the SS that develops. I don't
I don't think it would have been another like not
a long night situation at all. But point being, you know,
de Grelle. He wasn't just this kind of dreamy you know,
pan europeanist to who else would be a war hero
like he? You know, he the culture of the s S.
It was guys like him. It was guys like Jack
and Piper and Kurt panzer Meyer. It was Paul Hauser,
who's who's a non military genius in my opinion. And
he was kind of the big hous was kind of
the big defector from the old sort of army elite,
you know who I mean. He he he signed on
for the s S immediately. And it's not like he
was some It's not like he was a guy, you
know who had problems like some of these early and
S authors did, like who were great comic commanders, but
you know they had a problem with womanizing or brawling
or alcoholism or something like Howser could have done anything
he wanted, you know, but he he believed in the
vafn SS, you know, like as as a proposition and
as an enterprise and to itself that was essential to
you know, what was to become the new order. So
the girl kind of embodied all those things, you know,
That's that's why significant. And then he he he survived
the war. He quite literally crashed landed in Franco Spain
as a wanted man, and he he lived to be
quite elderly. He lived until the nineteen nineties, early nineties
memory serves, I know he lived beyond nineteen eighty eight.
I think he was alive until like ninety three, ninety four.
But you know, he'd show up at IHR events and
like mingle with people, and you know, he he very
much positioned himself as kind of a defender of the
historical record. He never shied from his war record. You know,
up until the day he died, he'd on a formal occasions,
you know, he he'd wear his like war decorations, you know,
and uh he was he was proud of the vafinances
on the day he died. So he was he was
a real man and a real patriot. And especially you
know because my like my generation, our generation, we were
kind of like the last generation of young people you
know who are like around like World War Two veterans.
You know, I uh inappreciable numbers and uh de Grell.
I've talked to a lot of guys who got to
meet the Grell and stuff, you know, mostly European guys,
but some with some of the some of the American
dudes who were active, you know, with in IHR and
and with like liberty lobby stuff, you know, ladies early nineties,
and they who had a chance to meet him, and
they just said he was like an incredible guy, you know,
which I'm sure he was. But that's I mean that
that's a significance and this that's something. Uh, I take
up a peculiar interest in the vaf sss. And as
you know and as the fellows know as well as
you know, the even the casual subscribers. I'm not I'm
not a military guy. Obviously, I'm not like prior service
and like I'm not I'm not a military science guy.
I focus on the vaf SS like I do, like
not just because it's cool, which it is, and I
don't I don't run from the fact that like gravity
towards things just because they're cool sometimes, you know, I
don't think we ever outgrow that if we're intellectually curious.
But it's also like the vaf SS is a model
of European integration. I mean, that's essential, and that was
after NCIGE, that that was the model for how things
were going to be organized. Okay, so these guys like
ian Ian Kershaw and some of these other kind of
just midway court historians are like, oh, German chauvinism and
German in nationalism. It's like, look, nobody there were There
weren't a million like non Germans who signed on to
the fight in the ass because they love the German nationalism.
Like that's not how things work, and that's just not
how this as nine like in you know, by the
mid twentieth century, that kind of thinking was dead anyway,
you know, like you had the whole the entire Raizone
debt for the Third Reich in geostrategic terms and consequently
in cultural terms, the two things can't be extricated. What's
to make Europe a superpower? You know, so a this
uh this kind of like this armed like protection echelon
and like offten shoots staff like it quite literally translates
to like armed protection echelon or like armed like defensive echelon,
you know of kind of like replacing or as like
a or representing you know, kind of a vanguard formation
against uh, the enemies of Europe, racial and otherwise you know,
kind of like a watch on the Rhine, like writ
large that was where like all all the nations of
Europe are represented, you know, and with with heraldic UH signification.
You know that that's something that days so like Crusader era,
you know, like that's that's very deep in the European
kind of cultural like military cultural mind, so that it's
important to you on the fact that it's just cool,
you know. And that's why I was like very much
not like a military type, like spend so much time
with the vass because it's it's got an outsized importance
in UH in the Third Reich and like the worldview
that shaped it. But that's that that maybe that's probably
a little bit outside of the scope, but that's that's
that that was born to consider. We're talking about de
Grill in history and what he represented.
Speaker 1: All right, well, this is UH. I guess once we
start reading this, people will get people will get the
notion that he's looking back upon his life and he's
looking at not only what was, but what could have been.
And there's a lot of that in here. But there's
I think this is something that a lot of people
should hear, So I'm gonna share it and start reading.
All right, there we go, all right Part one, Empty
hearts one, the flame and the ashes stop me anytime,
Thomas to comment on anything here. I am nearly at
the end of my life. I felt almost nothing, I
felt almost everything, knew everything. More than anything I suffered.
I saw dazzled the great golden fires of my youth arise.
Their flames eliminated my illuminated my land. The crowds made
the starry waves of their thousands of faces dance around me.
Their fervor, their eddies existed. But did they really in
fact exist? Wasn't all this a dream? Did I not
dream that thirty years ago a nation called my name?
And that on certain days that the most distant newspapers
of the planet repeated it? Tucked away in my exiled sadness,
I can no longer believe in my past itself? Did
I live those times? Or not know those passions? Raise
those oceans? I walk my terraces, I lean over my roses,
I discern the sense Have I ever been another being
other than this lonely dreamer who vainly clutches at memories
frayed like mountain fogs. Wasn't all this something other than
a hallucination. I cannot see, far away, far away, in
faded lights, their bodies as if from a Greco painting,
growing thinner and thinner. Did these men who have faded
forever from the horizon know me? Did they follow me?
Did I lead them? Did I exist in my memories?
As in my hands. I no longer feel that fleeting wind.
My eyes and what eyes should I have? Eyes of desperation.
My eyes have searched the impassive sky, tried to see
in the depths of the years, in the depths of
the centuries. What did it mean the being that I am?
In what way it is still the being that once
carried my name, who was known, who was listened to,
for whom many have lived, and for whom also many
have died.
Speaker 2: This being?
Speaker 1: What this being? What does it have to do with
the man who walks bitter endlessly alone upon a few
meters of foreign land, rummaging through his past, losing himself
in it, no longer believing in it, wondering if it
is really who he who was tossed one hundred times
in the tornadoes of an implacable destiny, or if this
was no more than a dream So if I doubt
my flesh, my bones, what my public action once forged,
If I doubt the reality of my past and the
part that I took in a few years of building
up the history of men, what can I still believe
of the ideals which were born in me, which burned me,
which I projected, of the value of my convictions at
the time, of my feelings, of what I thought of humanity,
what I dreamed of creating for her. Each human being
is a succession of human beings, as dissimilar from each other,
as the passer adds, the passers by whose desperate faces
we scrutinize in the street. At fifty, how do we
still look like the young man of twenty, whom we
are trying to remember, and whose survival we want at
all costs. Even his flesh is no longer the same flesh.
It is gone, has been remade, renewed, no more than
a millimeter of skin is the skin of those times?
Speaker 2: You know? For context too, It like the girl just
mentioned that he's fifty here and thirty years past the
war hes like in his fifties and around that Yak
and Piper died when he was about sixty but it
the degree to which I mean his politics aside, you know,
it had to be very very strange beyond I mean,
it's it's strange if anyone gets caught up in historical
circumstances as a very young man and that kind of
settles in a normalcy. I mean, that's strange. But particularly
like Piper. You know, Piper went on to a prestigious job,
like with Portia, Like you know, he was like an
incredibly successful guy by like any metric. But he during
like the last interview, gave the Spiegel when he kind
of become marked man again during the kind of resurgence,
and and I fish it's tendencies, you know. He was
like you know, when I was you know, when I
was in when I was in my twenties, I was, uh,
I was leading a tank across the step against the
Red Army, you know, and we were prepared to go
all the way to Moscow, crush it and literally shake
the world, you know, and then uh, you know, like
nothing like like nothing later in life is gonna come
close to that, and everything else is gonna seem this
kind of like mundane. But it's also these guys felt
like prisoners. I mean not just because of like the
the kind of you know, the constant the constant threat,
like a physical and spiritual of the regime that replaced
the one that they fought on behalf of. But you know,
everybody with hostage the Cold War at this time, and
particularly like in Europe. And Piper made that point too,
like when the Spiegel guy was trying to kind of
like impeaches not you know, not it kind of impeaches
moral credibility. Piper is like, well, you know, now we're
that designated battleground of of World War three, Like we're
better off now. You know. It's like basically saying like
these distance we as Europeans live now is crushing the mundane,
punctuated only by like the periodic terror of you know,
a crisis that could resolve in in in the nuclear apocalypse.
You know. It's I mean, so I think gravity of
those things, that's it's a very strange place to be,
you know. And yeah, in Degrell's case, you know, he
personally he was personally decorated by Hitler. He was a
he was a Knights crossholder, you know, he was a
he was a hero of the Third Reich. You know,
he wasn't uh, he wasn't just a run on the
mill kind of war hero looking back on on his
glory d's or whatever, you know, and to to go
from that too in a few years, you know, kind
of having to watch for you travel because you know,
you might be you might you might be you might
be assaulted and detained and find yourself, you know, indicted
in some kangaroo courts in the Hague or Tel Aviv
or the United States. I mean that they had to
be almost kind of surreal, like I think about like
those old TV shows like The Prisoner or something, you know,
like the old BBC show or whatever. It's just it's
a very strange way to live, and like anybody who's
at all thoughtful or psychologically sensitive, as obviously the girl was,
they had to really do a number on them. But
that's that's all I want to do.
Speaker 1: Insinuate what then about the soul and our thoughts, the
feelings that propelled us to action, and the feelings that
passed to us like breaths or fire through the heart.
How many distinct men do we carry with us? Who fight,
who contradict each other, or who even ignore each other.
We are good and we are evil. We are both
the objection, the objection and the dream. We are both
tangled and extricable nets. But it is not here that
the horror of fate laws. The atrocious thing is to
break these nets themselves, to throw your soul overboard. The
horrible thing is to have to say that the essential
in our lives was caricatured, disfigured by a thousand defilements
and a thousand denials. Who has not experienced these debacles.
Some realize their bankruptcy with pain. Others make the observation
with cynicism or with an arrogant smile. Of those who
no longer listen, who are convinced that the knowledge of
man and the superiority of the spirit consist in engaging
in all experiences deliberately exhausting the most perverse pleasures, without
excessive astonishment, and without regret, having found in the use
and in the desecration of everything information, the condescension and
indifference of an ethics of decomposition, free from any spiritual counterbalance,
without a doubt, the world in which we live has become,
to a great extent, the world of these amoral people,
so sure of themselves no doubt those who would persist
in imagining a humanity of high virtues may fancy them
to be anachronistic beings, non evolved, glued to old fads,
living apart from men, apart from their time, apart from fashion,
apart from reality.
Speaker 2: And that's the Catholic. The girl like the Catholic in
comes out a lot, you know, like it's obvious, like
a non Catholic National Socialist wouldn't write this way. I mean,
there's nothing. I'm not putting shade on on on his
tone at all, quite the contrary. But it's it's interesting
because you know they grew the girl. The Catholic and
the girl the National Socialists coexists very in a very
complimentary and seamless way. And like that. The people who
are ignorant of the topic it loved, the mouth off
about it are always claiming like that's not possible, that
some contradictory. But he's he's very much speaking as a
Catholic through much of this memoir. That's all.
Speaker 1: It was here that I arrived. I dreamed of I
dreamed of a century of knights, strong and noble, all
dominating hard and pure. My banners said, I feel unbalanced
with my bundle of old dreams. I know that feelings
like the ones I have tried to express can hardly
be felt anymore, or even seem painful to some. But
I have seen so much, I've suffered so much that
one more bitter thought will not tire me beyond my ability.
So too bad these dreams, well, yes I had them,
These impulses, yes I carried them. This love of others, yes,
it burned me, It consumed me. I wanted to see
in man a heart, to love, to excite, to raise
a soul which, even if it was half exiciated by
the pestilence of its slavery, aspired to find a pure
breath and sometimes only waited for a word or a
look to emerge and to be reborn. Let us be
straightforward to interject, to use others the right to moral
or spiritual consideration these I do not have. I know
this only too well. I have had my share of
miseries alast like so many others. And even if I
hadn't suffered them myself, I've been loaned so many miseries
from others that I can only feel when I analyze myself,
confusion and unfathomable sadness. Yet the spirit of the Ideal
that throws its fire into this book has devoured me
every day of my existence. I should, of course have
left it to others less affected, the care and responsibility
of returning light and song to mankind. But that fire
was burning me down today, suffocated by a relentless spell.
The great fire of yesteryear leaves nothing but ashes. I
come back to it anyway, stubbornly, because these ashes evoke
the moment of fervor in my life, the deepest impulses,
the very spiritual basis of my action. Here they are disarrayed,
delivered to the wind, which will quickly disperse them. These thoughts,
these dreams, are all in disorder. I have not made
a plan.
Speaker 2: It is the height.
Speaker 1: I did not sit at my table like a distinguished
and reasonable writer. I have not written a manual of
the Idealist, chapter by chapter, calculating everything, measuring everything, not that,
nothing like that, what to do? The impulses of the
soul are not graduated like the flow of a gas.
Appliance Hope, passion, love, faith, pain, and shame dictated to me.
The writings that I tossed about at such and such
a time, because I felt them then with great force.
Sometimes it was at the summit of my public action.
Sometimes it was in the abandonment the mud and the
cold of my distant life as a suffering soldier in
the vastness of the Eastern Front. But the soul that
lived these impulses followed a common thread, invisible to many.
It was nevertheless the artery that spiritually nourished my existence. Therefore,
these know are not so much nonsense. They record the
ups and downs of a soul among souls, all of
which have their ups and downs. Certainly, the spirit which
has arrived that the stale wisdom of cynicism can dominate
by its cold smile, can display the icy marble of
its interior tomb and engrave on them its findings with
an impassive pen. But fire, it has many forms. It rises, lowers,
is reborn, starts anew. This book is fire, with the
exaltations of fire, the excess of fire. If only they
could have the beneficent heat, If only the souls could
find this comfort and vigor. As we find them meditating
in the evening near a large, almost silent wood fire,
the waves of its powerful life penetrate, and their radiation
and their contemplation. They offer themselves completely, They deliver themselves completely.
The gift, the real gift, is thus annihilating until the
last brand from me. My fire is dead, my life
has plunged into the abyss, has been submerged by the
black dawn that has smothered everything. But I still want
to believe that these impulses, which animated the action of
a man already dead in the eyes of most, though
he has the misfortune to still live for himself, will
still be able to join spiritually from here to there
in the world. Anxious hearts, I remember these words that
I had deciphered one day on a tomb of black
marble therein dumb in Flanders, in a church of my
lost homeland, at Seymour Tuus. Or it even dead, it burns,
may these pages the last fleeting fire of what I
was burn for a moment, warm for a moment. Souls
haunted by the passion of giving and believing, believing in
spite of everything, in spite of the assurances of the
corrupt and the cynics, despite the sad, bitter taste that
leaves us with the memory of our falls the awareness
of our misery and the immense field of moral ruins
of a world that is certain to have no more
of salvation, which prides itself on it, and which nevertheless
must be saved, must more than ever be saved.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the you know, that's the point. I'm
always drawing a parallel between crusader orders and the waff says,
that's not that's not just ex post facto romantic interpretations,
and it's not just a you know, a way of
superficially drunk a parallel owing to the kind of multinational character.
This is the like the degree to which I mean,
for better or worse, And however anybody feels about the
Third Reich and adjacent regimes, and you know, institutions like
the vaffin As says, which were kind of like the
tie that bound like these regimes together in terms of praxis. Like,
these guys really did view themselves as as crusaders, and
they the the imperatives that they were abiding were very
much metaphysical and and uncompromisingly moral ones like not moral
in the sense of you know, what is morality, but
you know, owing to ah, their their world view was
populated by you know, by by values directed things. You know.
It was not it was it was not conventional kind
of uh, twentieth century politics. Okay. I know that some
people their rebuttal would be the well, this is a
sort of like window dressing for you know, typically crude
power political activity. And yeah, there's always some degree of that,
But these institutions don't just spontaneously develop mythologies to substantiate
you know, the needs of of like a war executive,
even even a messianic type person like get off Hitler.
That just doesn't happen. Okay, this is obviously something that
these men felt very deeply in. Uh, it was very
extant in their in their minds and hearts as it were,
and that they can't be overstated. I mean, yeah, there
was there was a there's there's a radicalism obviously that
animated the communists to do what they did, and that
kind of uh, a kind of reckless indifference to what
the consequences would be, you know, if their revolutionary ambitions
fell short or whatever. But it wasn't the same thing.
You know, it the place from where it emerged in
emotional in the most primitive kind of emotional terms, you know,
might have been the same, but what it uh what
what what it what it's what what its intentions were
and ultimately what populated that kind of worldview was like
very very different, you know. And you it's not just
to Grill who makes these points, you know, like I said,
like if you read what Piper wrote, I mean even
guys except Dietrich, who was a you know very much
kind of a like a like a like a rough
human Bavarian, you know, like he he talked about, you know,
his role as a commanding leaf standard and basically like
religious terms, you know. And that's that's some that's very authentic.
Like whether you believe that it's right or not, that's
not what we're talking about. Like we're talking about what animated,
you know, the men who actually took up our arms
in the service of these institutions, and and the and
the idea that uh, these institutions you know, created to serve.
Speaker 1: All right onward to the agony of the century. Love
Why why Love? Human beings have barricaded themselves behind their
selfishness and pleasure. Virtue has abandoned its natural song. We
laugh at our old rights, soul suffocate. Perhaps they were
already liquidated, the evidence hidden behind the decorum of habits
and conventions. Happiness has become for man and for a
woman a heap of fruit, which they devour in a hurry,
or in which they plant their teeth without more and
reject them pell mell damage, bodies, damaged souls, quick exhausted
by the fleeting frenzy, already looking for other, more exciting
or more perverse fruits. The air is charged with all
moral and spiritual denials. The lungs drawn in vain for
a breath of fresh air, the freshness of a spray
thrown close to the sands. Man's interior gardens have lost
their colors and their bird song. Love itself is no
longer given. And besides, what is love, the most beautiful
word in the world, Reduced to the rank of physical pastime,
instinctive and interchangeable. The only happiness lays in the gift,
the only happiness that consoles, that intoxicates, like the full
fragrance of the fruits and leaves of autumn, happiness only
exists in the gift, the complete gift. His selflessness gives
him the flavor of eternity. He returns to the lips
of the soul with an intangible sweetness. Give to have
seen eyes that shine, to have been understood, touched, fulfilled.
Give feel the grand happy tablecloths floating like dancing water
on a heart suddenly adorned with sun. Give to have
reached the secret fibers that weave the mystery of sensibility,
the mysteries of sensibility. Give to have this gesture which
unburdens the hand, which relieves its carnal weight, which exhausts
the need to be loved. Then the heart becomes as
light as pollen. Its pleasure rises like the song of
the nightingale, a burning voice that lights the darkness. We
pour forth with joy. We have emptied this power of happiness,
which was not to be partaken self fishly, which encumbered us,
which we had to pour out in the same way
that the earth cannot endlessly contain the life of springs
and lets them burst under crocuses and daffodils, or in
the fault of the green rocks. But today, in a
thousand withered wells, the springs of life have ceased to flow.
The earth no longer pours out this gift which swelled it.
She holds back her happiness. She chokes. The agony of
our time lies here. The century does not fail for
lack of material support. Never before has the universe been
so rich, filled with so much comfort, helped by such
productive industrialization. Never have there been so many resources or
goods offered. It is the heart of a man, and
this alone, which is bankrupt. It is by a lack
of love. It is by a failure of believing and
of giving oneself that the world has overwhelmed itself with
murderous blows. The century wanted to be no more than
the century of appetites. This century wanted to be no
more than the century of appetites. Its pride was wasted.
It believed in miracles, stocks, and ingots over which it
would be the master. It believed just as much in
the victory of carnal passions projected beyond all limits, in
the liberation of the most diverse forms of enjoyment, constantly multiplied,
always more degraded and degrading, endowed with a technique which
is after all, generally only an accumulation, without great imagination,
of rather impoverished vices, of emptied beings.
Speaker 2: Even people who are critical of, you know, the fascist
regimes and of the Third Reich. You know, people like
Julius Evil and to some degree Rene Gillone. You know,
they acknowledge that most significant about these movements was that
there was an ambition for something transcendental that was fundamentally
lacking in.
Speaker 1: Not just.
Speaker 2: Opposing ideologies, but in adjacent ones too. And I mean everybody,
everybody who's I mean everybody is at all practically minded,
realizes there's limitations to politics. I mean, as there should be.
You know, you don't you don't swap out religious piety
for politics, and you don't you don't decide that you know,
you know, you know, you don't. You don't decide that
you know, there's a political path, the cultural renewal or
something on its own terms. But there is not an
accident that there's not really you know, you don't you
don't find you don't find communists, and you don't find
guys who uh you know, you don't find tories in
the UK from the epoch core like writing and talking
this way. You know the fact is there's like mid
Hampson said, Hampson, Uh, you know, he got the Nobel
Price for literature and then he essentially like eulogized Adolf Hitler,
and they made a bunch of people really mad. But
he you know, Selene made the same point, you know
that there was a that this was, you know, Europe's
historical moment to try and redeem something of of cultural
life by way of political mechanisms. Like however, however is
a guide that may have been in terms of you
know what an improper instrument instrumentality being employed to that effect.
But that's why, that's why, that's why it's laughable when
people are like, oh, you know, the right is uneducated.
It's like what what what what what do educated people
talk about? You know, like labor and capital paradigms and
like what what people are doing with their genitals? I mean,
that's that's what educated people are into. Like it's i mean,
it's laughable. But you know, to grow obviously, to Gull
is an outlier in the sense of, you know, he
was a he was a remarkable guy, both you know,
as a as a as an infantry commander as well
as like a man of letters and stuff. But it
wasn't it wasn't remarkable that you know, these are the
kind of like this is the kind of like passion
that animated his commitments, you know, and that's important to consider.
Speaker 1: That's all from his conquests, or more precisely, from his mistakes,
than from his falls. Man acquired pleasures that seemed supremely
exciting at first, and which were in fact only poison,
filth and falsehood. For this falsehood, this filth, and this poison, however,
the man and the woman had abandoned, had desecrated through
their dreams and their devastated bodies, Inner Joy, True Joy,
the great son of true Joy. The puffs of pleasure
from possessions matter of flesh, must, being illusory and compounding
in their flaws, sooner or later vanish. What remains is
only the passion for taking, seizing in bouts of anger
that set them against all obstacles and against the stale
orders of decay, Clinging to their ransacked and rotten lives,
vain emptied, their hands dangling, they do not even see
the moment approaching when the artificial work of their time
will collapse. It will collapse because it is contrary to
the very laws of the heart. And let's say the
big word, to the laws of God. He alone, so
strong that we laughed at him, gave the world its
balance directed the passions open to us. The gates of
complete giving and authentic love gave a meaning to our days.
Whatever our happiness and our misfortunes. We can gather all
the conferences of the world, gathered by herds, the heads
of state, the economic experts, and the champions of all
the techniques. They will weigh, they will decree, but essentially
they will fail because they will ignore the obvious. The
disease of the century is not in the body. The
body is sick because the soul is sick. This is
what is essential, whatever it may take to cure the
real the great revolution to be made. Is there spiritual
revolution or the ruin of the century? The salvation of
the world is in the will of souls who believe
Section three. Here is the right path. Those who hesitate
in the face of struggle are those whose souls are numb.
A grand ideal always gives you the strength to overcome
the body, to suffer from fatigue, from hunger, from cold.
What matters sleepless nights, overwhelming toil, stress, or poverty. The
main thing is to have at the bottom of your
heart a great force which warms and which pushes forward,
which revives the loose nerves, which makes the tired blood
beat with great blows, which puts in the eyes that
fire which burns and which conquers. Then suffering is of
no consequence. The pain itself becomes joy because it is
a means of enhancing one's legacy, of purifying one's sacrifice. Yes,
ease sedates the ideal. Nothing writes it better than the
whip of hard life. It makes us understand the depth
of the duties to be assumed, the mission of which
we must be worthy. The rest does not count, health
does not matter. We are not on earth to eat
on time, to sleep on time, to live one hundred
years or more. All this is vain and foolish. Only
one thing matters, having a useful life, sharpening your soul,
improving it at all times, monitoring your weaknesses and exalting
your impulses, serving others, throwing happiness and tenderness around you,
giving your arm to your neighbor to rise all to rise,
all by helping each other. Once these duties are accomplished,
what does it mean to die at the age of
thirty or one hundred years? To feel the fever throbbing
at the hours when the human beast cries out at
the end of its power. Let him get up again.
Despite everything, the ideal appears to give its strength only
at the breaking point. Only the soul counts and must
dominate everything else. Short or long, life is only redeemed
if we have no cause for shame at the moment
we have to give it back, when the sweetness of
the days calls to us, and the joy of loving,
and the beauty of a face, a perfect body, a
light sky, and the call of distant races. When we
are close to giving in to the lips, to the colors,
to this light, to the number, to the numbness of
the relaxed hours, let us tighten in our hearts all
these dreams on the verge of the golden escape. The
true escape is to quit our dear is to quit
our dear, sensitive prey, at the very moment when the
sweet scent invites our bodies to fail. At this hour,
when you must abandon softness and place love above desire,
when everything is painful to the point of cruelty, a
sacrifice really begins to be whole, to be pure, then
we have surpassed ourselves. We are finally giving something before
we looked only to ourselves, and the concern for pride
and selfish glory corrupted what flows out from our souls,
and it was used instead of given. One gives for
good without calculation, because all is given and nothing remains
of the giver only when one kills the love of
the self. This does not come easily, because the human
beast is reluctant. We understand so poorly what can be
learned from bitterness. It is sweet to dream of an
ideal and to build it in your mind. Still, to
tell the truth, this is precious little. What is an ideal?
If it is just a game or a sweet dream,
You have to build it after all. In reality, each
stone must be torn from our comfort, from our joys,
from our rest, from our heart. When despite everything, the
building rises over the years. When you do not stop
along the way, when faced with heavier and heavier stones
to be placed, you continue. Only then does the ideal
begin to live. It lives only to the extent that
we died to ourselves. What a drama deep down that
righteous life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's heavy stuff, and it's also just more generally
not simply related to the epoch and from which you
know de Greel emerged in things that's Demeestra makes those
points too, that there's not there's not this like there's
there's not this you know, intractable tension between you know,
men of action and and people prone to asceticism. You know,
like the latter are the ones who who bleed quite
literally to bring those things into reality, you know. And
I mean it's I mean plus two. I mean that
that those two functions were literally combined, you know, in
the nightly orders that serve the Roman Church. You know,
I mean, I I realize that can be overstated too,
because it's not that was a discreete epoch as well.
You know, it's not like the final statement on soldiering
or on or on piety or whatever. But you know,
this idea, that this idea that these things are fundamentally
at loggerheads and like irreconcilable. It's this nonsense, you know,
And that's not people people draw upon them like the
birth of tragedy and the genealogy of moral as well
as like beyond good and evil like Niche, it's like
trying to flesh out their conceptual biases. That's not what
Niche is talking about. It's far more conceptually nuanced, and
his notion is basically that these it's a self defeating
enterprise because salvation comes in the form of repudiating that
which it sets out to confirm. I mean, that's like
outside the scope of what we're discussing now, but I people, uh,
people have this like very very like literalist and like
rigid idea of you know, oh, like the the soldier
or the partisan is at odds with you know, the
priest or the or the religious person. Like that's not
the case at all. Like not only is that not
the case, but they're they're essentially one and the same.
And unless you understand that, you're not going to understand,
you know, like how how politics as we know it
developed in the West that we're talking about if by
politics we mean you know, not I'm not talking about
the day to day business about like this the village
council figures out, you know, how to keep the water running,
like I'm talking about you know, I'm talking about these
how conceptual horizons develop, you know, and how these things
come to you know, how these things come to embody
like prime symbols of of cultural reference and things, you know,
And that's and in that regard, you know, the the
Third Reich and the s S and the various fascist
movements and and these uh, these difficult that you know,
categorized movements of the Iron Guard. Like on the one hand,
there was not a lot of precedent for that, because
the stroke conditions that created those tendencies hadn't existed before.
But at the same time, the like the the underlying
kind of impulse that gave Riseley's movements like within the
minds of UH or the men who created them, Like,
that's something that that that's something that's not that that's
something that's well well known to the Indo European mind.
And I'd argue it's so ancient as to be primordial.
You know. Yeah, that's that's heavy stuff.
Speaker 1: Excellent. Yeah, all right, we're gonna start getting into some
heavy stuff here, because it's gonna start getting real personal.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Part two, whilst Springs of Life the Land of our Birth.
Part four. As men, we belong always to a people,
a land, a history. We may not know it, we
can try to forget it, but evens eternally return us
to these sources of life. They bring us back first
to the men of our blood shameful or bright. Family
binds us together ever tighter and firmer with time. It
can even be suffocating. We never get rid of it.
Where our blood is concerned, we are bound to it.
Blood comes always before reason. We are one with these ties,
as if our veins were only one organism and the
family had only one heart, a heart that pumps the
same blood in each of us and reminds us of
our vital hearth. The same is true of our homeland.
We cannot escape it. The sight of a yellowed print
of our cathedrals, the memory of the smell of the dunes,
or the gray hue of our hillsides, of the curve
of our rivers, brings up to our throat a love
that stifles us, that makes our voices hoarse. The country's
past is embodied, is embedded in the depth of our
consciousness and our sensibilities. Everything about us is survival, rebirth,
even if unconsciously. The past of a country is reborn
in each generation, as spring returns, always in new sprout.
We may be unburdened traverse the world, lose our mind,
the native soil still sends into our hearts an essence
that we do not create and that dominates us. All
that it takes is the voice of a radio station
picked up in a distant country, brought by imprecise waves,
so that memories, ties, and laws emerge again, real water marks,
indestructibly embedded in the fabric of our tormented days. Part five,
Hearth and Stone. You must have one wandered over the
most distant seas, known the red knights of the tropics,
the cane fires, the songs are the negroes, the deserts,
with their pink sands, their leafless shrubs, the skeletons of
horses bleached by the winds. You must have climbed frozen
lakes and hot snow, picked mimosa flowers from the ruins
of carthage, grapefruits in Havana, a blade of grass near
the fluted pillars of the acropolis. To fully love your homeland,
that which we first saw with the only lucid eyes
in the world, the eyes of a child, it is
necessary to have known other journeys with furniture and clothes, books, tables,
the simple material goods. It is necessary to have bend
this nomad of the anonymous apartments, where one sits as
one sits in a train to know the passion and
the nostalgia. First of the first of all landscapes, of
this place, in the heart that is home, we can
speak without regret of the great joys of foreign lands.
They still gild our eyes the days. The day rises
yellow and silver on the palm trees which skirt the
Sea of the Antilles, Clouds of fog in the olive
trees of the Delphi Valley, fishermen rowing in the clear
blue knights of the Cyclades, the palm grove streaked with
red sun near the red walls of the Marrakesh. But
the memory of wandering journeys in the prisons of our
solace lodging weighs us down and suffocates us. What remains
in our life of these impersonal relays. The walls where
we heartlessly hung and removed, the paintings, the apartment next
door where you were surveilled, the mingled chatter of telephones,
the staircase where we met without knowing each other, the
cell car of the elevator with his double bars. We
look at this decora of life and death with dull eyes,
charged with veritable despair. What do these partitions tell us?
The kitchen opened to a horrible courtyard a few meters long,
without an unexpected nook, without a quirk, with that barren
of natural foliage, without a cozy nest. What's say these
beds and furniture, always awkward and embarrassed, as if they
feel out of place, poor, unhappy, vaguely nomadic. Even furniture
has a soul. The old sideboard that clutters the corridor,
the clockcase that no longer resonates, so as not to
annoy anyone once lived, once knew a real house had
for one hundred years, two hundred years, their place, their touch,
their scent, poor sideboard and poor clock, far from the
polished parquet, from the smell of lavender, the worn and
water stained staircase, the conversation all about it, the salute
of the sun entering suddenly through an open door. We
alienated moderns, dragged from apartment to apartment in soulas cities
feel a little more torn from our hearts each time
we have to cross a new threshold. Light up, the
sterile white corridors. Get used to these handles, these shutters,
this door that does not hold, this gas stove that
flares up too quickly, these buses that pass by with
awful horns that crush the soul. We are silent, but
we forget everything. I'm sorry, that's very much hideger Yeah, yeah,
and man like the old sideboard and the big clock,
motionless looks and sees the land of our birth returns
to life in our memories. Here it is a little
foliage lights up the facade, two blue stone steps, a
large vine encumbered balcony in the gardens. Everything is in
its place, Everything has a meaning, a smell of form.
We go to the cupboard, the cupboard, that beautiful, full
serious word, because it holds our, nourishing bread, so familiar
we can navigate it with our eyes closed. This corner
smells the tobacco. That one the cat who always purred
in the warmest place. That noise is Father rising from
the office chair. The halting footstep is Mother who in
the dining room waters are flowers. These rooms are not
merely places to stop. This one is the room above
the living room. This one is the room above the office.
This one is the room of the little ones, even
when they have become men with heavy thoughts. Each of
these rooms has its history, has known its vigils, its maladies.
We left it one morning, carrying a darling body in
our arms. Ah the horror of our children being born
or dying in anonymous apartments, surrounded by living furnishings since departed,
where other nomads have, in their turn, resumed their awkward
life without soulful memories, not even daring to remember. So
out of place are they. House of yesteryear, with your
poor draperies, your occasional bad taste. This ball on the railing,
These photos of children in a cue Lulu, the grand piano,
the blackfire place, the tin bathtub where people wash one
after the other. These steps that we still scale twenty
years later in memories, The breadths that we hear again
passing close to us, The face of the mother who
appears first in the distance, then right there before our eyes,
almost inscrutable. We feel like children desiring again her soft caress.
Calls of immense tenderness rise with distant sense of flowers
and foliage, Songs of water pass at the bottom of
the garden, the soft sunshine filling our entire world. Everything
we are comes from that time. Unfortunate our children, who
have never had a house of their own, and who
do not collect these memories from which our life flows.
It is the home that forms us into who we are.
How can we have a soul in a faceless house,
one that has changed like a carnival mask. Life is
fixed on hearth and stone. The rest flows away like
broken wood floating on a winter stream. Home our tender fortress.
It takes on a unique face little by little, built
over time, through common hardships and the birth of children.
The walls hold love and dreams. It's furnishings, beautiful or ugly,
are our companions and witnesses. A sweetness rises slowly from
the souls within. It becomes a place of contemplation, rest,
and certainty, rather than a brief stop on the journey
of our existence. Softness, balance points of reference, testimony, self examination.
Without mother and home, tell me, my soul, where would
we be.
Speaker 2: This him?
Speaker 1: You always talking about living historically. It's kind of hard
to live historically when you live a nomadic life.
Speaker 2: No exactly. And it also, you know, epigenetic memory is
you know, what does it crude during people's lifetime times.
There's no reason to believe that that's not passed on
at the biological level. In addition to you know, simple
cultural learning and things. You know, when we talk about
a way of life or quite this is quite literally
what we're talking about, you know, and that kind of
like linear natal experience of of the culture. So not
only is it disruptive, obviously, you know, if if there
if there's literally no rootedness to anybody's life, and you know,
not only every generation who you know, does uh does
the does does the family like up and and moves
you know, to totally strange environs, but even like within
people's lives like in the present epoch, it's it's supposed
to be normal for you to just you know, radically
alter your surroundings and your pattern of life if in
day to day terms, you know, multiple times, And that's
that's crazy. I mean obviously that doesn't lend itself to
psychic or spiritual stability, but it also it makes it
basically impossible to sustain any kind of any kind of
cultural learning over time. But I mean, that's that's that's
that's the point, you know, And the what consciousness is
that's a huge question. But whether it is, you know,
whether he is the Heidegger remains relevant is because he
was finding like fundamentally concerned with the question of consciousness.
You know, we we can't talk about culture as a
as an intergenerational experience without discussing consciousness and the and
the degree to which it is actually like literally transmitted. Okay,
and that's a controversial subject, but nobody would deny that
basic hostulate and to deliberately aim to eradicate that process,
you're basically murdering cultures. Like you're basically destroying people's ability,
you know, not just within their own discreete like individual
life to like, you know, drive meaning and to participate
historically like within their life. You're essentially like removing their
ability to the constitute you know, a component of of
of of an enduring cultural enterprise of phenomenon. And that's
that's that that that's an incredibly evil thing to do,
you know, and I think people detect that, even if
they don't have the knowledge base or the sort of
conceptual signifiers to coherently identify what's underway. I believe that
it's one of the reasons why so many people are
in comparative terms, revolting against you know, the the global regime,
because they're realizing what it's trying to do to them.
I mean not just them personally, but like what it's
trying to do to people and and and kind of
retool the human condition. It is something that you know,
basically doesn't doesn't just render individual lives meaningless, but you know,
like murders cultures, which means that you know, it's basically
basically erasing people's entire peoples from history as if they
never existed. That's like, that's like committing homicide times a million.
But that's probably been outside the scope. But i it's
fundamental to understand that what I just described to understand
where Degreel is coming from. I mean, that's the core
of what national socialism was aiming to address, as well
as you know, the rectist movement that he found himself
at the helm of, as well as any number of
other movements that constituted the resistance to the you know,
to the capitalist Bolshevik paradigm.
Speaker 1: Part six, The breath of Life. Men can debase themselves,
they can live in increasingly frenetic agitation, as millions of
mad men engorged themselves. Yet the nobility of motherhood preserves, preserves,
among thousands of natural and vibrant hearts, its own pale radiance. Today,
the maternal essence moves just as it did in the
days when the first women felt their bodies stirred by
its indescribable thrills. From that hour, women are no longer
the same yesterday They were hurried, their eyes clear, their
souls empty, their lips distracted. The life born in them,
like a hidden flowering, suddenly gives them gravity, confidence, a
great and proud force, the certainty of creating, of giving,
and the emotional charm of the living mystery that will
one day be borne Through their pain. They remain mirthful,
but their gaze becomes deeper. They carry within them a
treasure whose pulses intimately link to their own, Their vigor,
their melancholy, This great ideal, sometimes undeclared, which lifts or
torments them. Thoughts and regrets, joys and desires become one
with its hidden life, ever present for the one who
gives it blood gives its blood and soul. In this
perfect communion of flesh and heart, they are brave and weary,
tired of the overburdened body of their youth, bent like
branches laden heavy with fruit, weary of sun and wind,
yet still valiant, knowing what their knowing, what renewal their
bodies now tenderly contain in this flesh that their most
delicate tremors shape. They know that this flower soul, barely
open in the night, will bloom tomorrow. The innocent heart,
which they cover like the cover, like the night sky,
is filled with sweetness and peace of the stars and
the silence among the clamorous world. They carry this glimmering night.
Their dreamy eyes contemplate these great moonlit landscapes, where a
world known only to them lies dormant, powerful, and immense.
They see blue mountains, black and smooth waters, enchanted skies
studded with fires, set in the jet black of evening,
like ethereal gems. They advance under these nocturnal lights, the
heart taught but unsure. No one walks beside them. The
universe looks elsewhere. They alone watch, They alone have the
eyes to see it. They go on, body heavy, soul,
tents and elevated, as if drawn by the greatness of
this secret night. These months when the flesh blossoms are
their private springtime, when only the shadow, the shadows, and
the scents, the colors and the lights reach their great
love stretched out with arms open to life, like an
orchard of the heart. They will experience the birth of
this new life sundered from the great dream. Then are
faced with constant efforts in the service of these bodies
and these souls which enchant them and which frighten them. Royalty,
trembling and radiant. What will be reborn in these hearts?
Will they keep the song and purity of mountain waters?
Will these naive eyes ever make you cry? Will this
little curly head, the color of the sun and the
stone wall carry good and clear thoughts the Mother's dream
like fiery sword lilies. It is best not to fear
too much to show the straight course, but to leave
it lined with greenery and woodlands, and to let them
travel pure and bright the earth and past the earthen
path of the horizon. The Mother will put in the
hearts of the little ones once again, only what she
will have nourished herself. Their soul will contain what hers
will have contained. The images of her heart will trace
great reflections on them, like shadows advancing in the fields
under the white clouds of the great summer sky. She
can only bear their gaze if her soul is as
clear as theirs. All that is not flesh and pure
astonishes children and leaves a mark on their hearts. They
will not later have strength and renunciation, wisdom and simplicity,
virtue and enjoy unless their spiritual nourishment is as pure
as mother's milk. The faces of mothers are noble, supremely clear,
rejuvenated by the presence of wilfully innocent lives, even though
a thousand even through a thousand days of hardship, women
are greatly blessed by the body that trembles, turn towards
the inner dream, and which dwells the grand secret of
the breath of life. Part seven, the task of happiness.
The more we walk among false smiles, greedy or unclean eyes,
grasping hands, withered bodies, the more we are disappointed by
the mediocrity of existence. We quickly realize that only the
joys put in our hearts when we were young remained
solid and eternal. It is in youth that we are
made happy or unhappy forever.
Speaker 2: If we had a.
Speaker 1: Calm childhood, soft as a big golden sky, if we
learned to love and to give of ourselves, if we
enjoyed when we were very young, the enchantment that the
sky and the light gave us at all times, nature
always within our reach and always changing. If we were
made with a simple heart, naive as the morning, human
sensitive good linked to real and natural affections, then life
will remain for us until the end of our troubled days.
Like the sky are rayed powerful and clear over even
the most treacherous roads. There is a task to happiness.
We either develop it or suffocate it. If we train
children simply in deep but elementary joys, they will advance
in life by keeping in their eyes the light of
their inner life, balanced, persevering. But if we ruin their childhood,
if they have seen too much or heard too much,
if they have caught, if they have been caught in
a whirlwind, if years of calm, tenderness have not strengthened
in them the tender happiness of their innocence, then their
life will be what their childhood was, witnessing disorder. They
will become disordered, having never been made steady in their tastes,
their feelings, their thoughts. They will be at the mercy
of the winds, possessing only illusory joys that will burn them,
and immensurate and emiserate them at the whims of others.
It becomes far more difficult to change. Later, a hardened
tree cannot straightened. One can at most clear the foliage
and cut back branches. But when it was young, full
of sap, we could have straightened it with an agile
finger guided it helped it to flourish. It is at
a time when children simply seem to be playing, watching,
simply observing a sparrow or a lark, spelling words and
giving kisses that they photograph in their hearts and their imagination.
Exactly that which we give them life is just the
development of this photograph, of this photography, the acids of
existence will imprint on them the images beautiful and powerful
or troubled and sad, which we have offered to their
curious little eyes, to their clear hearts, like sheets of
shiny paper. What we deprive them of by our pride
or our agitation, or a last, by our passions, will
be cruelly repaid to us. And seeing them unstable, dissatisfied,
the soul weakened and ravaged by our own fault. You
got anything on that, No, I.
Speaker 2: Mean nothing, I think anything I'd add as addendum would
kind of take away from what I suggested a moment ago.
Not because what I said was so profound, was because
it would you know, detract from the kind of core
yeah message, Yeah, I mean that's we should get more
into without going too far outside the scope. We should
get more into you know, the era in which the
girl was looking back, you know, sixties, seventies, eighties, and
the implications there ran. And that's also when you know,
I mean, Heidiger's last public statement in the former like
an interview was nineteen sixty five, and then there was
But I mean, I this this, this stuff all the
kind of enduring perspective of of dissident traditionalists, you know,
the capital t or unreconstructed national socialist and fascists of
the era, and uh they agree to which that became
like a truly underground tendency which now is somewhat emergent
in ways that was not possible before. But I mean,
this is all important stuff. It's not just you know,
a conversation starter about you know, why, oh why is
the girl interesting to read today? You know? It it
relates to the origins of the movement that de Grell
served and why the stakes became so truly desperate when
Europe was threatened existentially by the kind of twin hydra
of Sovietism and and and Americanism. But uh yeah, I uh,
I'll be more. I'll be more with it too. And
this when we reconvene, I'm getting over another flare up.
But I'm but well, uh, if it's not gonna screw
up what you want to accomplish, we'll we'll deep dive
a little bit into you know, Heideger and and kind
of the Aristotilian aspects of national socialism that also dovetail
with Catholic metaphysics. If that's agreeable to.
Speaker 1: You, Okay, well, part three we're gonna I'm gonna finish
up Christmas Time right here, and then we're going to
take a break and and then when we come back
for part three. Part three is the Misery of Mankind.
It may starting off with what you want to talk
about would probably be a very be a good introduction
to that.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, that sounds great.
Speaker 1: Another page and a half part eight Christmas Time. We
were only little children from the ardends. The snow blanketed
the horizon, piled above the eaves of the roofs, and
packed itself tight into the bottom of the bottoms of
our shoes. We were sure we saw Saint Joseph turn
around the corner of the Rue de Malone. To climb.
The way to the church was tough going in the
midnight darkness. At the last deep slope were resorted to
carrying our shoes in our hands. Suddenly, the night of
frozen darts gave way to the warm smell of the
dazzling naves. Our heads were spinning a bit. The smell
of the incense intoxicated. The Douyene himself was pale. But
from behind the choir screen came a din powerful enough
to drive away the wild boars ten kilometers from our
tangled woods. The organ blower pedaled as if he feared
arriving late. The director brought to the brought the choir
to a wild turbulence. By the time of midnight Christians.
The emotion and the noise had been such that we
were climbing atop the straw of the chairs, expecting to
see the angels suddenly appear above the choir. But the
angels had continued to stand quietly among the candles, with
their large wings at rest. We approached them hands clasped
under our big woolen gloves. We were kneeling on the marble.
The brown ox and the gray donkey were close by.
We were burning to touch them, to see if their
hair would part like a fountain of water. But we
children loved our children even more than we loved animals.
We loved other children even more than we loved animals.
Jesus was lying on the straw. It softened our hearts
to think he must be cold. Nobody had given him
thick stockings like us, no shoes, no scarf to wrap
around his nose, no green woolen gloves to cover his hands.
We looked a little astonished as the father Saint Joseph,
who humbly stood doing nothing to glorify himself, and the mother,
clad in blue and white, so still and so beautiful.
We knew only beautiful mothers with pure eyes in which
we saw everything. We had looked into those eyes so often,
But those of the mother of little Jesus entranced, enchanted
us to the extreme, as if Heaven allowed children to
see more in them than men did. We said nothing
when going down to the coast. When children say nothing,
it is because they have because they much to say.
At home, the smoky chocolate and the big table covered
with cakes never managed to tear us away. On the
return from invisible conversations between the children of human mothers
and the little child of the Mother of Heaven, on
the top of the piano, a crib had been erected,
where we could, standing atop a stool, take the ox
and the donkey in our hands. Little pink and blue
candles were lit every night. Each child had their own
on which they would blow a deep breath at the
end of the prayers. Behind, kneeling near a chair in
the dark, the Mother led our religious impulses, guided us
when it was all over. When we turned to her
in order to obtain the right to put out our
little lights, we saw in her two eyes shining so
much emotional fervor. Paradise comes into the hearts of children
through the examples, through the example of the mother. At
that hour, humble and poignant, the mother knew that little
souls had been marked forever. That we could blow out
the little candles near the manger, but they would never
be extinguished in our hearts. Every winter, when Christmas returns,
the little flames lit by our mothers once again burned
high and bright.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great, that's a great Uh Christmas, steven Man, Yeah,
very timely, and I realized Christmas has passed us, but
on New Year's Eve, I consider it kind of part
of the same un going event, you know, between Christmas
and New Year's So yeah, that very timely and very
very inspiring stuff, very edifying as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I am still saying Merry Christmas to people I
don't care.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I mean that's yeah. I what's like I
said the other day too, like even where I I mean,
I obviously like don't give a fuck about a biting
regime convention, but it's like, what what what other holiday
is on December twenty fifth? I don't know about it.
It's like a competitor holiday, you know. It's yeah, I
you know, yeah, No, that's really uh, really beautiful stuff. Man.
And thanks again. Sorry, I'm I'm uh, I'm dragging a
little bit, but I hope, uh, I hope people got
something out of my commentary on this episode.
Speaker 1: All Right, we're going to continue to part three in
the Burning Souls by Degrel, But Thomas, you want to
talk a little bit about the about the thought and
about the basically what would have been guys like Kim
at the time he's writing this, what would have been
their thoughts, especially looking back upon the war.
Speaker 2: There's a context that's not appropriately addressed when we're talking
about national socialism and fascism and adjacent movements as a
political philosophy. Ironically, some of the only people I know
who've addressed that correctly were Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey
when both through at the University of Chicago. They published
this huge value just a history of political philosophy, and
I highly recommend it. Like, it's not Strauss, it's not
kind Yeah, yeah, it's not Strauss's own. I mean, I
don't generally recommend Strauss to anybody unless they're trying to
I kind of trace the trajector of, you know, the
American right post Nuremberg. But as as an intellectual historian,
he's very useful. And the book I mentioned, it's it's
very it's it's very straightforward, and it's very much correct.
That's there's not there's not polemic in it, and it's
not it's not colored by you know, a stain of
the author's ideological biases, but other than that, there's there's
just not And Carl Lowith too, who obviously my peters
Strauss was inspired by, but who he parted ways with
on unfundamental issues not just of ethics, but uh you know,
ontological ones about kind of the history of European thought.
But you know, there's this idea that and it's it's
it transcends too, just like rationalizations for for dismissing any
merits of of of the movements that animated the countries
that constantly excess powers. It goes beyond just the you know,
the the kind of pragmatic affair of discrediting them. People
honestly believe that these things just emergent as some kind
of stop gap measure to to either prevent revolutionary communism
or to you know, from from dominating the political landscape,
or to rationalize what amount to do a power grab
by a coterie of extremists who who only had a
loosely defined city grievances as uh as they're kind of
political ambitions. That's not true at all. And in fact,
there was the inner warriors the right, whether we're talking
about you know, the fascists, the fascist movement around Mussolini,
whether we're talking about the National Socialist movement post Drexler,
whether we're talking about you know, the Romanian Iron Guard,
all these movements attracted a dispports and amount of intellectuals,
you know, like middle class intellectual type, you know, the
kinds of people who spent a lot of time with
political philosophy and with things abstracted from the kind of
day to day business of politics. And that's one of
the things that within their own dialogue with themselves and
with each other, they were aware of that and lamented
that this tended to be harmful to praxis. Okay, but
if you want to really understand where the rubber meets
the road, you've kind of got to read Heidegger, and
you kind of have to look at these things through
it a wrist Italian lanes, through a twentieth century continental perspective. Okay,
And this can't be overstated. And like generally, like I
wouldn't bring this up in a discussion or reading of
a war memoir, but Lean de Grell is so very
much in that tradition that I don't think it's something
can be overlooked. And it also too, I think Heidiger
some will disagree with me, including up to some of
the guys who who followed Bronze Age pervert. I'm not.
It's not like a slam on him or anything or
or the people I'm disgusting, but they seem to view
heidiger Is like as somebody who sort of like broke
with Nietzsche and like was with some kind of like
neo scholastic That's very misguided and it's incorrect. And what
Heidegger clarified to like what Nietzsche's objection was to Christianity
and like why it was problematic, and it's not. It's not.
It's not because Christianity is proportaly like pacifist, or because
it's Semitic or like anything like that. There's nothing to
do with it at all. The the Heidigerian view and
thus what became the national socialist view. And I'm not
saying this synonymous. I'm saying they share this kind of
ontological view or a view of like political and philosophical
and ontology and common It's that like the beginning of
the West as like a cultural form, you know it, uh,
it began with it began with the pre Socratics, and
it began with a question of being you know, like
what it is to literally be conscious and to exist
in the world. There's an understanding of this as being. Essentially,
it's being a characterized by a certain dynamism and a
tendency towards change and reconstitution and creative destruction. Okay, I'm
trying to condense it as much as possible. But this, uh,
this understanding of being was was superseded by the emergence
of Plato and Platonism, which of course too informs in
indispensable ways, you know, the Christian metaphysics, regardless of your sect. Okay,
being as characterized through the lens of Platonism is an
eternal presence. It's absolutely unchanging. It's accessible by coming and
though if you want to look at this way like
a realm of uh, of perfect existence that can only
be accessed by a difficult dialectical ascent. Now, human beings
can't experience it directly, obviously in the Christian view, you know,
in mortal life. But the only way they can even
come to understand it at all is basically through a
combination of grace and piety like the four of which,
depending on your interpretation and confessional heritage and soteriology, they're
in like is exclusively in the hands of God. But
the crisis of the modern age to people like Heideger
and thus too fascist and national socialists, is that what
modernity did was it created conditions whereby people could no
longer believe in God. Like not that they'd be punished
if they did or something. What I mean is that
just by being in the world as it existed in
the modern age, and it's the scientific and technological perspective
crowded out all other possible ways of knowing it simply
wasn't possible to believe in this in in in this
perfect and mutable the form of being that way that
was God. Okay, Like even if what's set about to
believe in it, you know, they they it'd be it'd
be a it'd be dead on arrivals of proposition, because
like what would you do? Would you would you mathematically
aculate God? Would you would you identify you know, the
essential characteristics of God and then attempt to access those
things discreetly and then you know, through some kind of
like discourse of the learned man, like come to know God?
You know, like obviously I'm being obtuse on purpose. But
the it's it's it's essential understand we're not talking about
something like deliberate turn towards atheism as we think of
atheism today. We're talking about a literal impossibility of holding
a belief in God is understood, you know, from ah
from very very ancient, a very very ancient epoch and
to the present. Okay. The problem with this is that
if you look at the way people exist politically, again
in the view of Heideger and the view really Aristotle
as a you know, accounting for the you know, kind
of modern conditions and the limitations they're in, as well
as you know, possibilities that weren't in the classical world.
What being is it's inextricably related to time and temporal experience.
That's how the human mind structures itself in individual persons
as well as within cultures, in races, any kind of
human organization writ large socially and politically. I mean to
like literally, what your ethnos is is like the experience
of a people and they're being over time, and the
way that that develops is this kind of immediate consciousness
in the mind of any man and woman that they
are in the world, that somebody they will die, that
others around them are like them in some way, and
the language they speak, you know, the physical artifacts they're
attracted to, you know, the things they hold to be sacred,
the things they hold to be profane. You know what
they consider it beautiful, what they consider ugly. You know
what they identify with in intimate capacities and what repels
them similarly and intimate capacities. That's related to, quite literally,
the experience of a people over time that could be
said to be their people in the past, in the future,
and in the present until that person or those people die. Okay,
this is the only way one can say it be
said to experience beating in the world in some capacity
other than an animal. Okay, because this is the only
thing that is facility is to production of culture. The
grave danger of not just the modern age, but specifically
the twentieth century is that the twin kind of hydras
of communism and Americanism. Heideger spoke of Americanism when he
meant what we'd probably say is capitalism. That's not him
like trashing peckerwoods or saying Americans are the almost all
the people. Ever, so don't get upset, And that's actually
accurate what he is. It's more accuracy Americanism than capitalism.
But he said that the enterprise, the whole raizon detra
of these ideologies is to utterly eradicate the ability of
people to exist in time and live historically. It's to
totally eradicate culture so that there's no potential of any
kind of identitarian existence, so that there's no human existence
as we thought of it, heretofore, and instead we can
replace culture with the things that really matter in terms
of eliminating inequities and in managing people in in secular life,
you know, and that is, you know, mastering technology to
bring nature within you know, a productive domain, you know,
so that we can do away with shortages, we can
do away with, you know, inequalities of status and power.
Going to the fact that you know, productive technique can
avail everything in our environment, you know, to to to
and avail it to being marshaled as a consumable resource. Okay,
So as you're talking about the world literally devouring itself
for the sake of keeping humans alive, for the sake
of keeping them alive, you know, you're literally eradicating the
ability of man to exist temporally you know, and that's
a monstrous enterprise. And when you add in the understanding
of the human being as not just inheriting as culture
in some loose metaphysical way, but in a very direct
and biological way, as you know, is becoming clear is
one part of the equation in terms of eptic memory.
That's one of the fascinating aspects of the human genome project,
among many. And I'm not saying that biological process takes
precedent over anything else at all, but I'm saying that
the fact of this discovery of these such things for
the confirms that we already knew, okay, And that is
I realized that that wasn't short when I've just kind
of laid out there. But as a condensed that's the
condensed version of why the right became so radical and
what its enterprise was, and why it's somewhat difficult to define, okay,
Like you ask, like what the communist program was. There
was a certain complexity inherent, because there's a certain complexity
adherent to economics. Even if your economic schema is not
really founded upon falsifiable premises but is basically just you know,
like an ideological statement, you're still drawing upon tremendous valumes
of data. Okay, that is, you know, within the terms
of its own processes and assumptions. It's complicated. Okay, if
you're talking about Americanism. If Americanism is you know, the
capital L liberal tradition I'm talking about in purely, purely
in terms of political philosophy. You know, from Hobbes to
uh to Locke, you know, to Pain and then to
uh you know, Adam Smith and things like that. There.
You know, there's there is a certain complexity there despite
its reductionism. But it's a complexity that can be pretty,
but they can be you know, I described in terms
of very concrete variables and phenomenon. Okay, if you were
a fascist or a national socialist, or today if you're
you know, a capital T traditionalist or a dissident, wherever
you follow in the equation. You know, whether you're you know,
whether you're AH, you know, whether you're a national socialist
in the twenty first century sense. You know, like i'd
say I am in large part, whether you're a CAPITALT traditionalist.
You know, whether you're whether whether you're a view of
things is kind of like that. Guys who you know
servant hes blah or on the other side of the divide,
you know, are you know, serve with these like Musha
Dean groupings on the sunny side. It's difficult. It's not
as simple as saying it's not as simple as stating like, well,
I just believe in my race, or like, well, I
you know, I just I believe in Christ, or well
like I'm a Maslam or you know, well, I believe
in tradition and preserving you know, tradition as an essential
to culture and culture being in inextricable aspect of the
human and the human experience and and the human soul.
You know, there's like you're talking about things a tremendous
significance that also you know, can't can't can't just be
broken down into discreen sentences, you know. So that's I
know that people there are buttle is gonna be like, well,
you're just trying to my mythologize something that's a base
course and as simple as any other political ontology. I
don't think that's the case, okay, And I don't see
how this is arguable. And that's when you're reading a
guy like de Grell or Kadriannu or Francis Yaqui. Those
three men came from very different places, Okay, a very
different background as well. Point the tie that binds is
a commitment to this perspective that I just described and
kind of the condensed version. And uh, these guys aren't
just uh, they don't just love hearing them so they
just love hearing themselves talk or you know, they it's
not like they were getting paid by the words. They
decided to be as you know, voluminous as possible. When
it's not like these guys were literary figures who were
trying to try to capture the perfect sentence or something.
You know, it's because what they were dealing with it
wasn't reducible to the same concrete kind of schema of
a you know, a liberal Americanist or or a communist
or these days, you know, like a secular humanist kind
of statement of rights or like of you know, what
constitutes the dignity of the person or what you know,
what we consider to be, what we can consider to
be you know, due process and in terms of you know,
in terms of the modern state, and uh, you know
what the individual can expect in terms of you know,
his his his intrinsic claims to liberty is a good
in itself, being honored, you know, when confronted with the
great power of that modern state. And i'll, i'll, I'll
end now because I don't want to take up on
the oxygen in the room, but I consider that's to
be very important. And like when we're discussing any of these,
we're discussing this topic just in general terms, you know,
approaching it philosophically, you know, tending to unpack like what
constitutes its philosophical core, but also specifically, when you know,
any any discussion of any author, in part you're going
to be dealing with, like not just the character that author.
I mean when I say character, I don't just mean
moral behavior and stuff that's part of it, but like
what actual like what characteristics are most paramount in his personality,
but also you know, like why, why why he configured
his thoughts the way that he did in terms of
trying to convey to others, you know, what what the
what his experience of of of of life as a
partisan was, So that that's that's all I've got on it.
But yeah, I wanted to get that out.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I think That's important because if you
bring up the names like to Grell and Jacky and
I mean anyone basically from that, from that quadrant, it's
just dismissed as they were evil they yeah, they were
doing this just because they were evil men. And it's
that's a real easy way to dismiss and to promote
what the regime propaganda has been since then.
Speaker 2: It's also just like grossly simple minded. Like I'm always
making the point if you're a per if you're a
guy like then or as now, like the girl, or
like Francis Jacky, or like Kadrian who or like Johann
von Leers, who's like different than all those guys. But
you know, I'm something of an orientalyst myself, so I
take an interest in what he did. If somebody like
really takes an interest in race, you know, like as
not just his own and you know, an interest in
the posterity of his own people, but you're truly interested
in like race, I'm truly interested in politics. You're sure
you're interested in race and interested in the race. You know,
you're interested in in what its origins are, you're interested
in its implications, and you're interested into nuances. So like
you're gonna you'ren you're gonna spend time around like other
people's just because you want to observe them. And I
do that all the time. And I've realized like every
like major national socialist like did that all the time.
So like this idea of like, oh, you know fascists
or guys who just like hate in words and like
don't refuse livings and like segregations, refuse living anything but
the most segregative environments, I'm like, actually, they're like the opposite.
They can say that like people like us like are
looking down on people or like we're reducing people to
you know, these kinds of like non human integers because
we're curious about them. Like I don't accept that if
you can like say that. But this idea of like
that basically like a fascist or like a or like
a contemporary partisan you know who holds you know, similar
sympathies adjusted for epoch is some guy who just quote
hates people and wants to like live in some mall
of America environment where everybody's exactly like him. Like that's
that's really really off base. That's like not at all all,
Like you're basically there's some kind of caricature that's some
kind of combination of a caricature of like of of
kind of like a pussy Reagan Republican and like some
weird communists like this. Like it's not like it's not like,
don't get me wrong. It's not to say that people
like mere people like us. We want some like multicultural
environment around us because it gives us a chance, you know,
to augment our research. But the point is that, you know,
first of all, genuine multiculturalism is is is very robust
and rich when you're talking about exclusively like white people
on deck, because there's many many cultures that constitute a race. Okay. Secondly,
it not what what I think, what I approve of
or don't approve of, like politically relates nothing to do
with like who I like or dislike. Like it's it's
in some ways it's the opposite, you know. I mean,
the tragedy of power politics is that you may have
to kill people individually are at scale who not only
do you not have any problem with, but you might
not even dislike, you know, like this idea that politics
is just some sort of highly scaled expression of crude
human passions of not particularly intelligent people who like don't
like other people like that's that's oddly illiterate, and like
this is not the way humans act, you know, like
uh like at all, like like anywhere. But yeah, so
it's like you know it, uh, it's it's it's really
really really fucking bizarre. But it's also I mean even
people again who have a somewhat more sophisticated take on it,
yet nonetheless you know, erect an endless kind of army,
a straw man to try and tear down the right
as an intellectual tendency. Like they like like they don't
they don't get it either, you know, like the you
can you know, you can say that, uh you can
say that people like Heideger were crazy, I guess, or
you can say that, well, you know, how was just
he was afraid of what he was afraid of a
process that translates approximately to practical transcendence, you know, and like, oh,
for all of us talk about the pre socratics, you know,
kind of like the immediate, the sense, the sensuous presence,
immediate presence of the human individually and at scale. You know,
that's what makes culture for all, for all his talk
of dynamism and change. You know, he really was just
kind of attached like the state forms of the past.
I think that's a gross and deliberate misreading of him.
But like I'll accept that. But just saying that, like
this is all some like elaborate this is all some
sort of like elaborate charade so that people can you know,
go around doing mean or evil things, or so that
you know, they can rationalize the fact that they have
some personal animosity towards like X, Y or Z group
of people. Like that's literally retarded. That that the suggestion
that such things are are the motivations or you know,
constitute the commitments in the minds of the people who
advocate such things or who suggest uh that what it
is described, you know, is a is a matter of
imperative significance to to anybody who you know wishes, which
is for human life to not deteriorate to the level
of peace. But yeah, that I don't again, I want
to I don't want to take up all of our time,
so I will I will shut my mouth and let
you get on.
Speaker 1: With our well, let us uh on that note, Let's
get to part three here, which is the misery of mankind,
I will start reading again, and like I said, stop
anytime you wish to comment on it. Okay, So Part
Part nine. The blind men, the money, the honors, and
the mess of bodies. The eagerness to seize and earthly
happiness which leaks between the fingers and always escapes, has
made it The human heard, a pitiful horde, ruining itself,
tearing itself apart to find a liberation which does not exist.
Only the false laughter rising from the rabble serves to
remind us that it is not a question of herd animals,
but of men. This stampede of the damn seized first
the individual, then the people as a whole. It is
no longer a solitary game in which one is enthralled
by personal passions or vices. Whole communities are sucked in
by the vertigo of impossible desires, the desire to be first,
that is to say, the desire to trample upon, the
desire for purely material power, that is to say, the
desire to suffocate and destroy the spiritual. All will power,
all effort becomes useless in the face of this human dissolution.
And it is here that the spiritual always reappears as
rebuke or as a curse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wanted to insinuate just that's an important point
because as you do, do you believe in the intrinsic
value of high mat or a gamn shoft you know,
blood and like you know, folk community or whatever, even
when when those things are taken away and all you
have basically is you know, it's like if if something
like you know, if something like the Soviet system, like
the you know, is realized as it was you know
in the nineteen twenties, and people basically like you do succeed,
like you being you know, the revolutionary vanguard, you do
actually succeed in transforming you know, what was previously you know,
a community based on ethnos and temporal being in the
world or generations, if you just like reduce that to
a labor camp like people does are tearing each other
apart because it's like, first of all, I gotta look
out for myself and my family. Like second of all,
I want I want to be a chief, not an
Indian or at least you know, like a shot caller,
you know, So I'm I'm going to attack whoever has more,
whether it's cloud or whether it's you know, what passes
for wealth, whether it's proximity to you know, the party apparatus,
Like you're actually like you're you're actually encouraging people to,
you know, to kind of tear out the root even
further and kind of do your work for you, I mean,
which is very mu's by design in my opinion, that's
not some kind of accident, but yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1: This baseness has poured out from the limited circles of
the elites into the extended circles of the masses, tossing
them about on waves of infinite desire, ambition, and pseudo pleasures,
which are just character caricatures of joy. The clear water
of the heart has been clouded to its outer limits.
The river of men now carries a putrid stink. The
disorder of the century has upset this river that was
once light reads and plunging flights of swallows. Men and
peoples regard each other with violent with violent eyes, their
hands seared and bitter by their avarice. Every day the
world is more selfish and more brutal. This is great
hatred between men, between classes, between peoples, between everyone, because
everyone is bent on the pursuit of material goods which
ultimately avail nothing but all abandon the goods proffered to
all of the moral universe and the eternity of the soul.
We run madly, bloody our foreheads, beating our heads against
the walls, on paths of hatred, or of objection, abjection,
or of madness, shouting our passions, throwing ourselves wildly at everything,
desiring to gain that which we can never have. Part
ten the lines of sorrow. There are few hearts that
have not been soiled with villainy, sordid axe, leprous faults,
leaving telltale cracks for those with eyes to see them.
Even hearts washed of the stains of the moral swamp
will still keep a bitter taste of imperfection and ashes.
Cracked porcelain can be fixed, Yet whoever saw it broken
will forever recognize the lines. However, finally repaired of the break,
he knows that the invisible unity of the perfect will
never return, but it is gone forever. The longer one lives,
the more the heart is marked by these lines of sorrow,
imperceptible for all those who have not seen or not
known what made them, but heartbreakingly by all they contain
of broken delicacy, like fine silks, which runs slightly, which
runs silently, happy again, those are who are purified by
invisible suffering. How many others, whatever value vice may have,
strive to convince themselves that this abasement was useful, forever
marked by this burning apparel, which has cooled on their
skin and sticks to it, corrupts their flesh and becomes
one with it. Whose eyes can one meet without trembling?
What are they hiding? Who has not been vile on
one day? Who does not carry within himself worryd's gestures, desires,
shameful abdications, or the mummified corpse of his inner life?
How many men, how many women, do not even hide
the bankruptcy of their senses, their oaths, and the miserable
desecration of their bodies, sometimes with remorse, most of the
time without remorse, or rather even with a touch of
triumph and insolent provocation. In the final account, those who
have liquidated everything, decency, modesty, respect for one's self, for
one's body, for one's word, and God with the rest
are only the results of hundreds of smaller prior denials,
denied or hidden from the start, the whole is destroyed
only when the innumerable fibers of the heart have been
sheared one after the other by lies and ill intent,
followed by multiple abandonments, more and more irredeemable, irre irremediable,
with the conscience assassinated. At the end, disaster SAPs to
mind before spending, before spreading throughout the whole body. The
body does not yield, does not allow itself to be
to debase, trapped and defiled to death until long after
the soul, negligent or intoxicated by the appeal of sin,
has abandoned. The oars, which at the beginning trace straight
paths on pure waters. Part eleven. The Saints check on's
up here?
Speaker 2: Okay, good, all right?
Speaker 1: The Saints varying in intelligence by possessing a heart given
without limits, whom the fallen and corrupt hold in such esteem.
The Saints show us to perfection is that perfection is
open to all. They too were simple men, simple women,
charged with passions, weaknesses, and often faults. They too sometimes
did to tire, give in and tell themselves that they
would never be able to get rid of the smell
of muck and sin that accompanies us. But still they
did not renounce themselves.
Speaker 2: And that's important as visa v what we were talking
about or what I raised in the industry, like about
if you if you're looking for like a fascist practice,
it borrows heavily from the understanding of from the Roman
Church's understanding of martyrdom. And and for this reason is
what the grill just said. And that's you know, the
uh getting you know, the this idea that like well
you know we we we when one one can't come
to know the eternal, one can't come to know providence,
you know, through through dialectic. You know, it's just it's
just completely kind of off and unavailable. So you know,
how how can we how can we partake of you know,
what's essentially godly? Then you know it's like, well, you know,
through martyrdom. That doesn't mean like running out looking for
ways to kill ourselves or like running out and becoming
you know, holy warriors all over. Some men that and
some women too, that is their vocation martyr as uh
are a Roman Catholic. Friends will tell you literally needs witness, okay,
and it doesn't mean that obvious I'm not saying that
fashion The National Socialists somehow corner of the market on
martyrdom in the contemporary age, nor even that you know,
Christian or Catholic concepts are intrinsic to the national socialism
or fascist I'm not saying that at all. But what
I'm saying is that this concern with the UH abandonment
of God and you know, the literal death of God
by way of UH. You know, the the the triumph,
the total and complete triumph of the UH of the
rationalists and and and and scientific perspective, and UH, the
destruction of the ability to live historically. You know, which
UH and and and again, like living historically is simply
the human being individually in at scale, you know, confronting
death and thus, like living in time. You know, the
only way to reconstitute that is through through is through
the practice of religion, you know, whether it's you know,
returning to Catholic UH Catholic practice, whether it's you know,
discovering you know, reawakening the inner witness if you're a Protestant,
or like awaiting you know that the conferring of grace,
you know, through God's will awakening that inner witness, or
you know, if you're like an agnostic national socialist, which
a lot of our comrades are, and that's fine. Nevertheless,
you know, it's uh. It's like the practice of what
we're talking about, of reconstituting the sacred entails murderdom, and
that's hugely important.
Speaker 1: They too, sometimes did to tire give in and tell
themselves that they would never be able to get rid
of that smell of mucking sin that accompanies us. But
still they did not renounce themselves. With each fall, they
straightened up, determined to be all the more vigilant as
their strength failed them. Virtue is not a sudden dazzle,
but a slow, hard, and sometimes very painful conquest. They
had the superhuman joy of finally feeling victorious over their
bodies and their thoughts. Their struggle tells us that happiness
on earth and beyond the earth is within everyone's reach.
Every one of us has a choice to make. Before
the body fails, it is the spirit that triumphs or capitulates.
And even when the body has given way, the spirit
can lift it up or let it corrupt itself even
more than poison itself. Forever we are our own masters.
We can sink into the chasms or stand in them
up to the shoulder, or climb out of them and
over come them. Everything can be avoided, and everything can
be done. Part twelve, The Eternal Crucifixion. Faced with the
contemptuous ironies of Hedonis and skeptics, one hardly dares to
recall that for two thousand years the greatest human drama,
that of the Passion, has been spiritually repeated each spring.
Who will suffer? Who will be there near cavalry? In
these new days of agony? In the desert of time
stands the cross. The mundane, shady, and perverse life of
men flows on like a dull river. Christ will receive
the blows in the thorns. He will collapse to the ground.
The wood of the cross will crush, crush his flesh.
The hammer will strike great blows against the hard beams.
They pierced my hands, in my feet, I can count
all my bones. What will the world know? His blood
will slowly come down on his pale body. His eyes
will seek both his father and our souls. What will
our souls understand about this tragedy? They have not shuddered
or cried, nor even thought about it, nor seen Christ
moves well alone alone, The souls sleep or are sterile
or have committed suicide. While it is to pull them
out of their torpor, mud and death that this body
hangs between heaven and earth in pain. The distress of
this heart mainly launches a launches a cry of despair,
which should freeze the earth and stop the breath of men.
Yet it is because a man's spiritual suffocation that the
world is falling apart. It is hope, charity, justice, humility
that the world needs to find fresh air. We have
received this spiritual life as a gift. We are the bearers.
And our hands are dangling at our sides, and our
eyes are dry, and our lips do not tremble in
fervor and emotion. Our hearts are like dry sand. Our
souls lay lifeless where they died. Faith is worth anything
only as long as it conquers love, as long as
it burns charity, as long as it saves Part thirteen nobody.
A palm tree trembles, the sand slides between the tan
fingers of a child. Lambs marked with blood collide with
stubborn little foreheads. Tiny donkeys' eyes wet come down from
the hill. The easter lands escape, clean and shiny, The
air is still fresh. Daisies are scattered on the hillside.
Why does Christ again suffer the most heartbreaking agony in
these days when fans of mimosa flowers decorate the twisting roads,
These clear, warm roads bring him back every year, silent
in agony, to the nails and thorns, to the blood
and sput them. Lord, we are following you and your
dusty procession, mingled with those rough and cowardly fishermen who
loved you, but who loved you like us with measure,
as if measure was not an insult to your love.
We are like unto them, no worse than others. Our
eyes sometimes beaming with joy in serving you, we dismiss intruders,
We wave the palms. We believe we are very close
to your heart. We think ourselves better than we are
in your sad eyes. It is our vanity that we project,
and in this hour of agony, because our love hung
always by a thread, we will turn away from your wounds,
your blood and sweat, and that great icy cry that
will pierce the earth. Lord, We're coming back to your
blued feet. We clasped this wood of the cross between
our trembling arms. How dare we look up at your
bloody head. We dare do nothing but extend our dismayed
hearts to you. It would have been so sweet to
give our souls to you in a complete act, to
be with you from the garden of olives to this
mound where you hang inert in the evening wind. We
did not even have the fate of the penitent thief,
the one who loved you last, who regarded you as
he fell into heaven. We suffer the overwhelming force of
our weaknesses, our cowardice, our tepidy, our tipidity. Lord, you
brought us to the essential and the eternal, the blood
and the drink, the breath and the sun. You animated
our hearts. You gave us strength. We should have jumped.
We should have jumped light with heart and celebration, freed
forever from all bond all regret, all other hope. Yet
we remained fearful, hidden in the shadow of a doorway
or under the bright olive tree. You went crushed and
overwhelmed with insults. Ah, my God, in these minutes of
pain and salvation, we have not grasped the cross. We
have not kissed your wounds and your thorns, put to flight,
your put to flight. Your executioners broken their whips, refuted
their insults. We did not know how to love. At
the moment of this complete giving, our hearts were lifeless.
My God, there you are abandoned by all, silent and dismal,
stiff limbed, there was nobody. Nobody. We squeezed the dead
wood and depart without raising our heads, laying our defeated
hearts at your feet. You'll return to the light. Lord,
at this hour, have mercy on the destroyed souls. Have
mercy on empty souls. We suffer so much from our
mean and vile sentiments, so imbued with ourselves, so preoccupied
with our selfishness, our ambitions, our vanities. We let you suffer.
We saw your blood flow, saw you plant your cross,
saw the life fade from your face. Will we ever
dare to look upon your open wounds and to meet
your weary eyes? Lord, The hour is near. Your light
will suddenly burst forth upon the hill. We will still
be there, ashamed and sad. Burn our hearts with your
dazzling sweetness. Give us the warmth and purity of this
divine fire from which you will spring. We are overwhelmed
at the threshold of your tomb Lord, make the spark
of the resurrection bloom in our defeated souls.
Speaker 2: Yeah. See, this book is essentially it's probably nine Christian
apologetics and and beatification of the murders by a layman.
And this is a this is like a s S
officer you know who wrote this. And again it I
mean I realized there was very must like a Catholic
moment of a sort in in Francophone Europe underway, which
was the girl's culture. But it you know that, But
this wasn't accidental. And again, you know, the girl wasn't
some outlier. You know, the the understanding of uh, you know,
martyrdom being uh being the essential vocation of the racial
patriot or the holy warrior, and you know, the understanding
of the understanding the ability to live historically being an
extricately bound up to man's confrontation with death, you know,
and and you know, religious faith, you know, being the
only way not just the man comes to terms with that,
but I mean comes to understand it, you know, like
that's really the only like the like the metaphysical discourse
on man's relationship to death is is is his religious confession? Okay?
You know, and again, the girl wasn't. The girl wasn't
just this kind of like random guy you know who
ended up on the Eastern Front or something. I mean,
he had he was a war hero, he had serious cloud.
He'd met Hitler personally, and like he was known to
Hitler personally. You know, he had NCIG been realized, he
almost undoubtedly would have been, you know, one of the
most powerful men in what was formerly Belgium, you know
what I mean, Like he was. He was a guy
with serious cloud, you know, within the kind of the
the greater, the Greater Reich. And and he's also like
in a secondary sense too, which shows you how it
shows you the degree to which, you know, what was
animating the Third Reich was very much becoming a European movement.
I mean, the seeds of that were always kind of
president just doing to geostrategic realities and and kind of
the shrinking of of the world into kind of like
one place, as it were conceptually. But you know, this
idea that like, oh there was this sho there was
this you know, chauvinistic kind of like backward looking nationalist party,
you know, capital and nationalist party in the NSDAP, but
you know, just kind of like out of military necessity,
you knows, came about and some of these European guys
you know, decided they were going to get theirs too,
and you know, kind of forced acknowledgment of of of
their own you know, nations and government. So that's that's
not the case at all, you know, it's you got
to look at national socialist socialism as a European phenomenon,
and you got to look at the Grell specifically as
you know, like an exemplar of you know, kind of
the the European and SS, you know, as as well
as uh, you know, Francophone fascism. But you know, everything, everything,
every everything, every testament. This man ever put the paper
was absolutely inundated with his Catholic faith. You know. Yeah,
I just want to insinuate.
Speaker 1: That perfect part nine or is yeah, where am I at?
Part part?
Speaker 2: Is that? As part fourteen? Yeah?
Speaker 1: How do I? How have I forgotten in my old
age to read Roman numerals?
Speaker 2: They can be confusing? Man?
Speaker 1: Thank you so honest.
Speaker 2: I appreciate it. Just think just think of the Super Bowl.
I think when I'm like, okay, now what is the
ex simple way? Okay?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, is the only time anybody uses the vermneuvererals
anymore as a freaking it's you know, it's.
Speaker 2: Like on the street and shy town, like for ten
dollars worth of drugs, where a ten dollars bill like
street dog is still a saw book because literally like
an X looks like a sawhorse, so like the last
hundred years in the street like a ten or ten
dollars or like a little bit of drugs saw book.
It's like weird that's endured. That's so funny. Yeah, yeah,
all right.
Speaker 1: This is the last part of Part three. Last section
of Part three. Two have loved. In the icy, pale
gold sky, a lark quivered. What was she thinking up there?
She shuddered, She uttered, strident cries, swooning every yeah, swooning
every second, clinging to the sky with a flutter of
wings that passed like a lightning bolt. She loved to
love until broken, Broken with happiness, She felt like a
pebble in a furrow. So does the soul soar she
cries of love. She remains, She remains, suspended in mystical immensity,
only by the wonder of invisible wings support her. She
no longer even knows that she can fall, that the
ground is under her. She is there detached from everything, trembling, pulsating,
as if speaking. The lark swooning upon the warm earth
must also feel, must also feel this great joy of
fulfilled love. The soul is panting. Love returns and waves
and breaks into effort, giving and joy. The great tragedy
of sin, which causes so much suffering, is that on
account of it we give less of ourselves, or give badly,
offering only a portion of what we might have, a
portion with hints of indelible defilement. To love is to give,
and to give is to give everything. The punishment for
falling is the pain of having trampled on your love,
of having reduced the love you might have given. If
only we could remove from our bodies, our hands, our eyes,
these forces that pulse in them at the hours of
weakness and objection, too late, much to our shoes, we
may cry all the tears in the world. No matter what,
we can never recover that which we so carelessly lost
the day of the fall, despite all our repentance and remission,
or remain the black hole into which the good of
the world is eternally lost. We may endeavor to love
thereafter as ardently as we can. Yet we will not
create the lost. We will not recreate the lost purity,
nor regain the most beautiful part of love which was annihilated.
Our love could have been so much greater what we
yet possessed to offer at the hour of the highest
Love will carry whatever we do this terrible mark. This
is why, having profaned his gift of self, makes the
heart which yearns for the absolute suffer until the end
of life. We would like to be God ourselves, to
take back this day or these times, to give them
the freshness of dawn, and to guard them fearfully until
the night. From the first misstep, we know that we
will no longer love as much as we could have.
That is what makes repentance, because it cannot repair a
broken man so heartbreaking. When we have known this pain
of the irreparable, we seek beyond the possibilities of our heart,
so that a few moments of sublime love, seized upon
with great effort, can compensate what fell in the swamps
and in the shadows. Part four, The Joy of Men,
Part fifteen, Strong and Hard. The sun is gone. In
half an hour it will be shade. The birds who
sang madly in the gardens perceive it. There are roses everywhere,
so gorged with light that they will soon perish. The
wood is already sleeping around a few tiled roofs. As always,
the birds now begin to utter their sharp cries and
their pleas. No doubt for the two lovers sitting there, dreamy,
with a huge white hat lying across their knees, all
of life seems condensed here. Nothing lives apart from these birds,
this dog which barks at the end of the world,
and that these two hearts, which steadily beat in the
evening calm, heavy with the vibration of June. How can
one believe in hatred? Has one never seen the last
roses go dim in the light evening silence. We will
have to tear ourselves away from this great country oasis.
Later it will be necessary to take again at the
end of the path, the road where the cars tear
up the ground through a sputtering, relentless rain. There will
be brutal lights, empty faces, soulless eyes. This evening landscape
is so clear, it is given with such a complete generosity,
These dying roses, these bouquets of trees, these oat field
shimmering and gray, these gray fir trees are so pure
and so simple that a childlike wonder arises in our beings.
Near this eternal youth of grasses, trees and flowers, we
cannot hear anything anymore. The night slicks down the roses, and.
Speaker 2: Then in this heighten this Heidegger and Heidegers ontology, like
all over there. You know the the immediately present, the
sensus presence of the immediate. You know human consciousness, you know,
constituting what it is to live. You know historically you live,
You know as a European is as simple as you
know what what? What the grill just described?
Speaker 1: You know in that in that passage, the woods cut
their jaggets silhouette, and the dying gleams. The last singing
bird stops, as if he too, from time to time,
must simply listen to the silence. The two lovers have disappeared,
hands trembling a light wind in their hair. I should
move on. I will go slowly, without disturbing the branches
and the variety of life which slides through the shadows.
I will guess the outline of things. I will feel
the dew blooming at the end of the grass, which
will refresh the sun tomorrow when it climbs the top
of the world, top of the wood, where is the
night of hearts, from which the tender morning would spring.
We will have to renew our sorrows, resume our journeys
through the fields and lost woods among cold hearts. Who
will understand later in the savage glimmers before our trembling eyes,
that we have just left the forest and the wheat fields,
the shade and the silence. But why falter at the
end of the path we watch as cruel life snatches
everything up in wolf's teeth. In wolf's teeth, we no
longer look at anything, We no longer think, We no
longer breathe this air, charged with a sense of passing death.
Put out the lights, Let the night weigh upon our hearts. Tomorrow,
when daybreak reaches the crest of the trees, we will
have before us only the closed horizon of man. We
will have to be strong and hard, joyful through nothing
but the radiance of our souls. Dying evening, silent and
sure of dawn. Give us the peace of awaiting the
light that is reborn renewed from the immense and auspicious night.
The price of life, we must reiterate the price of life.
Life is the admirable instrument put in our hands with
which we forge our wills, raise consciences, and build a
monument of reason and of heart. Life is not a
form of sadness, but joy made flesh. Joy of being useful,
Joy of mastering what could demean or weaken us, Joy
of acting and giving, Joy of loving all that trembles
spirit and matter, because everything under the impetus of a
righteous life rises, lightens, instead of weighing down. You have
to love life. Sometimes in times of weariness and discuss
we nearly lose our love of life. You have to
pull yourself together, straighten up. Too many men are debased,
but alongside, in an opposition to those whose baseness is
a blasphemy to life, there are all those who see
or don't see, who redeem the world and bring honor
to all life. Seventeen disfoliation. Happiness born of ignorance is
not flattering. It is a kind of narrow, vegetative happiness.
Intelligence has nothing to do with it, and neither does
the body. True happiness, happiness.
Speaker 2: Worthy of man.
Speaker 1: That which raises him up is the happiness assured by
the spirit, happiness born by the stripping of the soul.
From the renunciation of the soul in contemplation of human
pleasures is always made or broken by circumstances. Happy is
he who is not a slave to circumstances, he who
knows how to enjoy pleasure as well as privation, as
long as one suffers from such a deprivation, as long
as one suffers. By comparing his material fate to others,
we are neither happy nor free to remain in good spirits,
even to live with one soul apart from the world,
when the exterior universe holds nothing but a yawning void.
To live intensely in this material absence, to live without regret,
master of your desires, having bent them to the complete
domination of the Spirit, marks the victory of man, the true,
the only victory, next to which the greatest conquests and
dominions are merely caricatures of power. Any comparison seems laughable
next to the liberation brought by the mastery of the
Spirit over our possessions, our needs, and our chains. We
are freed from the old rusty chains that rivetted us
to mediocre conformities. We hold destiny in our hands, destiny
clearly discovered in its liberating nudity. Happiness can be borne everywhere.
It comes not from without but from within us, holding
within it infinite possibility. Eighteen. The power of joy. There
are so many things that can bring you joy. Even
when through our strength we are free of our desires,
we are happy. Just the joy of living is itself
so powerful. Joy of having a radiant heart. The joy
of having a sturdy heart, arms and legs as hard
as trees, lungs that draw life and air. Joy of
having eyes that take on colors and shapes in their
soft curves. Joy of thinking, of spending hours drawing out
the straight lines of reason, or feasting on dreams. Joy
of believing, joy of loving, of giving oneself, of striding
through life flexible as water. How can one be unhappy?
It is so simple, so basic, so natural. Through the
worst calamities, happiness always bursts forth like a geyser, which
we try to obstruct in vain happiness in life for
the same thing. To be no longer happy is to
doubt one's body, the warmth of one's blood, the consuming
fire of one's heart. To doubt these great lights of
the spirit which bathe all of existence. Even misfortune still
brings us to joys of the soul, which gives its
own blood, which weighs out its sacrifice, which feels deeply
miss which feels deeply misfortune's bitter sting, a cruel joy
at a higher joy, a joy reserve for the man
who's broken heart understands.
Speaker 2: And that's I I can't emphasize enough if one's looking
for something a little bit less remote to apply to
their own circumstances. That's not to say that once you
read plitical philosophy in order to discern, you know, prosaic
in order to discerain remedies to compare to the prosaic problems.
But there really, there is no such thing as a
bad experience one hundred percent. Like that's not that's that
that's not just a cliche or something that you know,
religious people pull out to, you know, in the phase
of challenges too. You know how one's supposed to negotiate
horror and pain in in everyday life. You know, I don't,
I don't. I don't regret anything that's happened to me
because it brought me to this point. And I mean,
my life now is incredible. I never thought that where
I'm at now would be possible, and I'm just unbelievably blessed.
But you know, I my life was horrible, I mean
for for years, you know, And I don't I don't
regret that, Like, I learned more during that period, and
I came became firmer in my faith during that period
than would have been possible otherwise. And it also, you know,
owing to the proximity of death, because the life style
I was living, it forced me to contemplate it in
very immediate terms in a way that I otherwise probably
would not have because I was quite a bit younger
than you know, And that just kind of whether you
want to or not, you you develop a tendency towards
contemplation of a few ideological principles, you know, and unless
you're truly like a dullart or something like, when you're
within such circumstances. So, I mean, I can't emphasize enough
that there's practical value in reading things like de Grill.
You're not just you're not just doing a credit to
our forebears. If in fact, you know you're you're committed
to these ideological principles like I am, you know you're
also you're you're also you know, contributing to the strengthen
of your own piety and faith by by studying such things.
That's all I wanted to say.
Speaker 1: All right, nineteen to dream, to think. The hours of
dreams are hours of profound life, where all the poetry
that floats in our consciousness gets up and runs and lists.
Then the sun comes, the snowy fog descends, as if
called down by the river, we see before us the bright,
clear sort of water, and reason reorders and assembles this
scattered discoveries sprung from the dream, unifies them under its dominion.
Joy to find, to compare, Joy of giving meaning and direction,
Joy of understanding and of scaling the slopes in the
summits of the true, the beautiful, and the useful. The
mind orders it into clear parallel lines and extracts the
laws revealed within. Man feels then that he is master
of all the elements, master of this disproportionate universe, where
his brain, no bigger than a bird or a fallen fruit,
imposes a comprehensive order and harmony. Whoever does not know
how to enjoy the possibilities of dreaming and thinking offered
to man every second, ignores the nobility of life. We
can always be enchanted, for dreams are secret cellos. One
can always think, that is to say, having the mind
not only occupied, but vibrant, tending towards a domination more powerful,
more exhilarating than the fire of a thousand desires. To
be bored, to give up the dream and the spirit.
Boredom is the disease of empty souls and brains. Life
quickly becomes a horribly dull chore. Love itself is exalted
and amazed only to the extent that the superior being nourishes.
The superior being nourishes Poetry strengthens the impulses of sensitivity.
One must still dream and ponder over their love twenty Patience.
Patience is the first of victories, victory over one's self,
over one's nerves, over one's weaknesses. As long as we
have not acquired it, life is only a cascade of capitulations,
capitulations made in struggle, certainly crying out in what we
perceive to be manifestations of authority, but which are in
fact only an abdication to petty pride. To be patient
is to wait for one's hour finger to the trigger
as one watches for prey. It is to build each
of the day's actions and consideration of order and balance,
laying carefully the foundation stones that will support the building.
Patience delivers the joy of not having given in Impatience
leaves to heart with the reproach of having been exiled
and of having been the author of vanity and vain
agitation twenty one Obedience. No great work is accomplished in
selfishness and pride. Obeying is a joy because it is
a form of gift, of clairvoyant gift. Obeying is fruitful
multiplying the results of efforts tenfold. Obeying is a duty
because the common good depends on the discipline coming together
of many energies. Human society is not formed by a
cloud of fierce and fanciful mosquitoes rushing in the wind
according to their personal interest in their mood. It is
a large, sensitive complex. It is a large sensitive complex
made sterile in made sterile or dangerous by anarchy, to
which order and harmony give unlimited possibilities. A rich people
of millions in population but selfishly isolated and atomized is
a dead people. A poor people. Where everyone intelligently recognizes
their limits and their communal obligations, obeys, and works as
a team is a people with life. Obedience is the
highest form of the use of freedom. It is a
constant manifestation of authority, authority over oneself, the most difficult
of all. No one is really capable of commanding others.
Who is not first able to command himself to tame
in him the proud wanderer who would have liked to
throw himself madly into the winds of adventure. After having obeyed,
one may command not as a brute enjoying the right
to crush others, but because command is a magnificent prerogative
when it aims to discipline unruly forces, to lead them
to the fullness of obedience, to this superior source of joy.
Speaker 2: Twenty two.
Speaker 1: Kindness sometimes a word, a single word, an affectionate gesture,
a look full of sincere friendship can save a man
on the brink of the abyss. By affection and by example,
we can do anything. Shouting and Storming about real rarely
leads to the source of problems. You have to be
good hearted, discover what is going on among the fog
of each heart. Temper the necessary reproach with a friendly
joke that gives hope. Always put yourself in the shoes
of the other, in the soul of the other. Think
of your personal reaction if you had received the observation,
the encouragement, the reprimand instead of addressing it to others.
Most of the men are grown ups, quite vicious, but
still sensitive toward tends towards affection. There are not thirty
six routes to guide them. There is only one, that
of the heart. The other roads sometimes seem easier to take,
but ultimately they do not lead anywhere. Twenty three Happy isolation.
The company of others is most of the time nothing
but restlessness, noise, troubles, revolving around mutual loneliness. To constantly
search for what is called a stimulation is to be
afraid of being in the presence of yourself. It is,
in reality, to take flight morally. How can you confuse
joy with being constantly mixed up in the tumultuous crowd?
Why would one absolutely have to be swallowed up among
other beings to believe oneself happy? One is then only
in contact with the tree bark of others, one enjoys
only their artificial or superficial attitudes. This can obviously give distraction,
temporary pleasure, a kind of breath of wind or fresh air.
But what a gulf between the shallow pleasure and the deep,
essential joy of conversation with yourself, the analysis of one's
own intimate thoughts and one's most secret sensitivity. There we
see everything. We go to the source of everything. To
deny the power the magnitude of this true joy is
to deny whole, the whole inner life. Loneliness is a
wonderful opportunity for the soul to get to know itself
and to keep watch to learn. Only empty heads or
fickle hearts are afraid of remaining silent in front of themselves.
It is at such times that we see if our
feelings are solid or if they were nothing but noise.
High feelings can live alone without physical presence. On the contrary,
isolation purifies and grows them. The joy, the joy that
spreads like a block of granite under the water of
flowing life, the one that never gives up and which
never disappoints, lies in the inner struggle. In the inner exultation,
to watch over oneself, to dominate oneself, to purify oneself,
to rise, to have the courage to think because it
is so simple to be lazy or cowardly in the
face of spiritual work. Have the energy to expand inner
your hidden world. To love intensely, that is to say,
to give oneself silent without reluctance. We prefer to forget
or deny that these fundamental joys exist, to be satisfied
with immediate enjoyments that we believe to be superior to everything,
and after which we have nothing, very often if not
dust in the heart and a wilting of the wings.
The mystics have long known that this constant animation of
the interior life. Were they less happy? Did they have
less joy than we who chatter mingled with faces, where
we only discover appearances fed by words that die with
the echo. The joy of the mystics is just one example.
The same inner joy exists at other stages of spirituality
and sensitivity. The presence of others is not even essential
at all. One can perfectly love be possessed by the
highest joys of the heart in physical distance and even
in death, as long as we have not once freed
ourselves from external elements, as long as we have not
been able to live alone, that is to say, in
the most real come that nothing can disturb we have
not yet reached a very threshold of joy. Instead of
complaining about loneliness, you have to bless it. You have
to take advantage of this unexpected possibility of examining yourself
in silence and dominating yourself lucidly completely, even in your
most contradictory thoughts. Doors closed to the world, wilful termination
of the contract with out of wilful termination of contact
with the outside. So much the better, because it means,
if you like, doors open to the soul, exact contact
with oneself, exhilarating joys of knowledge, spiritual fulfillment, and mystically
the most delicate and complete gift. And this is the
last part. This is part twenty twenty four Grandeur. It
is often by doing this is the last part for
this section here. It is often by doing with maximum
nobility a thousand bothersome little things that you are great.
It is infinitely more difficult to stretch your soul a
thousand times every day without relief than to give a
single grand impulse at the moment of a visionary event,
merit to be given. There is slight. The magnitude of
the fleeting opportunity alone gives us the strength to act
and desire to the desire to astonish, while allowing us
to have the highest opinion of ourselves. You can do
a great thing wonderfully and be far from real greatness.
Greatness is the nobility of the soul, wearing down, dripping
with the desire to give each according to our duties,
especially when they are stripped of those things that give
rise to vanity. For both women and men. Greatness for
a woman is often to give herself hour by hour
to dull even prosaic housework. Yet who will admire it?
Who will know the thousand battles fought in the bottom
of the heart, in laziness, in pride, in singing passions,
in the softness which cause the soul and the body
towards the warm sands of easy life. Who the one who,
despite all this advances, resists, progresses, progresses is great, since
the gift of herself was total, without requiring the vanity
of recognition. So many high status people always complain find
everything unpleasant never know how to rejoice frankly, of nothing.
Everything seems boring to them because they never give themselves up,
because they approach each moment even when it would require
only a small exertion, with the firm intention of delivering
only the bare minimum, and even with that reluctance, everything
is a question of giving freely. Happy people are those
who give themselves. The dissatisfied are those who strangle their
existence with a perpetual retraction, constantly wondering what they will lose. Virtue, greatness, happiness.
Everything revolves around that. Give yourself, give yourself completely all
the time. What you have to do bravely, with maximum application,
even if the object is merely housework without apparent grandeur.
Wherever you are above or below man or woman, the
problem is exactly the same. It is giving that differentiates
clear souls from troubled souls. And that's the end of
that part.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's essential the monastic tradition. I mean there's a
lot there, I mean to the monastic tradition, but you
know the understanding that through silence and through introspection, that's
the way one comes to know God. That's something that
a lot of Protestant congregations have gotten away from and
that's really unfortunate. There's nothing intrinsic to dissenter faith structures
that that makes it axiomatic. Like if anything, I think
that you know, the the understanding, the inner witness you
find in Calvin basically says you should that that's you know,
that's that's basically like the core of of of faith
as as as a practice. But I I really enjoy
being around like people I love and who love me back,
and you know, enjoying that kind of community we've developed
among our peoples, Like it's fucking incredible, you know, Like
and I'm really really lucky. But I I I don't
just like being by myself a lot of the time,
Like I need to be by myself because that's you know,
it's a you're The mind is its own place in
ways that they're both good and bad and like beyond
bead Like that can be terrifying because it can create
an environment that's either not livable or that has been
compromised by by by by evil things. And some of
those things may be entities into themselves. I mean, I
that's a metaphysical question. I don't want to get into
on the tail end of our stream. But and in
the event, a lot of that. That's one of the
ways that people are kept under control by officialdom, you know, Uh,
is this inability of people to really be alone and
and to be alone properly. I mean, people are isolated,
but they don't not truly be alone, you know. That's
why they're always seeking out that. That's why, that's why
social media is like they're standing for you know, actual
social life and things. It's like it also an inability
of people to be alone with their own mind, you know.
And uh, I'm always talking about you know, my mind.
I think of it as an ice cathedral. It's other
things too, but you know that's like the the ice
cathedral is where I would draw into myself and uh.
With then it's perverbial walls. You know, I can I
can go any where, you know, like I not not
like actual projection in a literal sense, but you know,
praggately speaking, you know, I I I go all kinds
of places in my mind. And it's not because you know,
I'm some rarefied case, you know that. I suppose that's
what some people are up on, if they say they're
getting into meditation you know. I mean, it's like, Okay,
if people want to call it that, that's fine. I
think I think there's some hookey stuff attached to those interpretations,
But I'm not going to criticize anybody for, you know,
for welcoming or cultivating an impulse in that direction. Like
guess all I got for that? All right?
Speaker 1: Section five stop me any time, Thomas, I think you
may you may have some some comments on this section,
because this is part five Amand's Duty Notes from the
Eastern Front twenty five The great retreat. To die twenty
years too early or twenty years too late is of
no consequence. All that matters is to find a good death.
Only with this goal in mind can we truly begin
to live as a simple soldier. I would gladly die tomorrow.
The humility life of my lot in life at the
Front reconciled me such an outcome. Not having lived as
a saint, to die as a soldier's soul would be
the most suitable thing. Are my weeks numbered, then it
is best to make the most of these chances to
purify our souls. I once dreamed of dying after a
long illness to better prepare myself for the inevitable. But
such a death necessarily takes place in an atmosphere of
pollution on the front, our preparation takes place, and a
feeling of power in the unfolding of the will I
realize how lucky I am. Perhaps I return alive, more
alive than ever before. Either way, this great retreat, which
life or death will close will have been a blessing.
I enjoy it freely fully, like a nourishing and beautiful son.
Why should I tremble under its fire? The soldier learns
to be great among the most mundane or the most
painful things. Heroism is to stand, to struggle, to be
always alert, happy and strong, and nameless, unrecognized misery of
the front, in the mud, the excrement, the corpses, the
mist of the water and snow, the endless and colorless fields,
the total absence of outer joy. Every day we move
further away from the blissful world of yesteryear? Are we
not already half dead? We who advance, gritting our teeth
through the mists, always look at those who have less
than you, and rejoice in what you have, Never lusting
after ephemeral desires. Life is always beautiful when you look
at it with peaceful eyes, the light of a soul
at peace. We soldiers, we have nothing, and we are happy.
The joy of an unencumbered soul can only flourish when
one has cast off this jumble of mental slavery. War
is not just combat, above all. It is a long,
sometimes exhausting streak, sometimes stretching into tedium, of silent renouncements,
of daily sacrifices without relief. Virtuous forged in the same
way everywhere, the privations endured with humility, waiting patiently for
death's arrival, the giving of oneself. Far from the spotlight,
one plays one's part in an unknown field, in unknown
fields and groves, in this wasteland, far from all human joy,
such as the real war, the one waged by millions
of men who will never know ostentious, ostentatious glory, and who,
if they do not die, will return home with their
faces tight their lips closed, for others would not comprehend
the heartbreaks and renunciations, and their obscure heroism. The crowd
is only struck by heroism when it is bright and loud.
What impresses the public is to brilliance, and not the
painful and slow ascents of souls who rise in silence
and shadow to greatness. But are we ever understood? Do
we hear? Do we see anything other than the superficial?
The bottom of hearts is such an abyss of desires, denials,
sorrows that we prefer not to approach it. It is
simpler more pleasant to stick to the superficial, and, without
thinking too much, to enjoy the words and attitudes that
we have, the tapestry of human drama. We soldiers stand
behind that tapestry. What souls will imagine our journeys? Who
will have the strength to join us spiritually zeal Even
intelligence cannot be enough. To have culture is to have
a balance of mind, illumination, wisdom, which can only be
the result of a long discipline of the higher faculties,
where the only proven method is the application of extensive
contact with the most fundamental works of human intelligence. The
disinterested study of ancient civilizations, mothers of ideas and systems,
the study of philosophy, the study of mathematics, the secret
fabric of all the arts, the comparative study of the
lessons of history. This alone can bring about the harmony
of the human faculties, without which the most dazzling successes
always have a character of miracle and fragility. Intellectual maturity
is not irreconcilable with genius. Maturity makes genius exact and human,
channeling it towards a desirable end. Its strength is not
thereby diminished, only more useful. Richelieu would not have given
France half of the blessings of his genius if he
had been self taught. The origin of our century's mental
debilitation is that it is a century of the self taught.
Their work has a disorderly, inhuman, unstable character. True genius,
or at least beneficent genius, is balanced, which brings happiness,
progress and order. The instinctive genius is stunning, dazzling, but
always at a great cost. When the fireworks fade, the
sky only looks darker than before. The banal and the
vulgar are neighbors of the grandiose and the eternal. Earlier
I watched a pig going to slaughter. He was keen
on life, poor thing, almost bloodless. Still he gasped and moaned.
Beasts and men in the face of death. We are
the same, Yet our honored demands, and we must take
great care to ensure that at the hour of our death,
we have the courage to face it with dignity. Soldiers,
we risk our own skins all the time, and so
we take very simple joy and merely existing. Death is
always right before our face, death is everywhere. Therefore we
understand the greatness of life better than others. If the
soul did not rise straight as the barrel of a gun,
straight as the crosses over the graves, we would quickly
sink into moral decay. Our whole world consists of woods fields, marshes,
striped trees, near which one is on the lookout day
or night, warming his hands with his breath, rubbing his ears,
trampling over ground that today is hard and unforgiving as granite,
where just yesterday it was a sea of mud. In
the evening from four o'clock we watch the shadows. We
must guard our hearts closely so as not to weep
in the face of such an abyss. The soul is
faced with total surrender, and yet she is proud, and
she sings because strip bears in the bygone days of innocence.
She is aware of the gravity of the mission offered
to those who tread this lonely abyss those who will
redeem the cowardice and filth of a world peopled by
empty souls. Here her wings start to beat again, shaking
off the dried mud that once had dirtied them. They
find joy again in the returns of clean air, open space,
distant lines. If we here have made good of our suffering,
we will have achieved our true victory. But will but
will we who suffer be able to remain peer to
the end? Won't we feel ridiculous in our angelic garb
on our return? Well, we have the courage not to
be ashamed when we hear the countless years of those
who have soiled their souls and who insolently believe themselves
to be triumphant something important.
Speaker 2: And you find this again and again inass memoirs. And
there's a peculiar irony. I think at least you know
modern modern infantry elements, the degree to which they owe
not just you know, not just doc trintal things and
atactical preferences to the wafs, but the kind of organizational
spirit and the breaking down of barriers between officers and men.
You know that that all came from the and that
was specifically Paul Hauser, you know, who's kind of like
an unsung uh figure, I think not just because of
his battlefield aptitude, but you know, the kind of organizational
model ad for the Vaines. This wasn't just the Grel
being some romantic and like you know talking about like
oh the you know, the the glory that is, you know,
to be the common soldier or the NCO, you know,
leading the common man, like like Vabina says, officers actually
did lead from the front, you know, and like they
ate with their men and like they you know, there
wasn't I mean, it wasn't just mission oriented tactics, you know. Uh.
And what we almost think of is the precursor to
special operations in some cases, you know, particularly the case
of people like Scorsanese commandos that kind of created a
sort of like egalitarian spirit like that was very much cultivated,
you know. And so it's corny as well as just
you know a lie, you know in these old movies
or even in this kind of more contemporary stuff where
they cast you know, like the Verhmacht or the I
mean they cast the bafan assess and even the Hrmacht
which still had these kinds of class based issues, but
I look at the same degree, but they cast like
any German military forces. It's kind of like these like
cruel like Prussian Martinette types, you know, LIKEU have contempt
for the men and like there's no recourse if you're
a if you're an enlisted man or an NCO, you know,
against an officer read if he's in the wrong. I
mean somewhat it's like a combination of like the worst
of like the way the Soviet Army was with you know,
kind of a caricature of the nineteenth century Royal Navy
or something like. They could not be farther from the truth,
you know, I point there's a reason why, uh, there's
a reason why modern militaries like literally look like the
wafan SS too, from like the rifles they packed to
their helmets, you know, to to uh you know some
of the ways uh they deployed, especially in the early
Cold War, you know, as uh, the distinction between you know,
light medium and heavy light medium and heavy armor was abolished.
You know that they can't be overstated, and that really
comes out in Bigrell because he was obviously like a
man of letters, what a certain there's like a certain
ash and lyricism what he wrote. And finally then we
can move on. You know this this idea that like
wars is horrible. Uh, that's only reasons I object to
all quite in the Western Front, not just because it's
cry baby stuff, but it's just kind of at odds
with you know, the way humans are, like if you're
if you're a if you're an infantryman at war. I've
had guys relay to me that they're big terror, especially
especially guys in Vietnam who are their flyers or on
long range reconnaissance or in long range of continence rolls.
There's a terror of being captured, which made sense. And
there's an ongoing terror hell in the in the mind
of reentrument, of imma treatment of being being wounded, particularly
and I mean not not to be crass, but being
wounded below the waste. But you know, the worst thing
that happens is you die. You don't have anything else
to worry about. You're free, you know, And uh, there's
not any distinction between principle and action. And you know
that the idea that there's some kind of like horrible
hell to like be uh serving the infantry in a
modern war, like compared to what compared to to working
in like a mid twentie century factory. I mean, like
are compared to working in uh, you know, compared to
like having the life of Willy Lowman as like a
nineteen fifty salesman. Like it's there's something really at odds
with reality about it. I mean not just kind of
like puss a fed and coward yellow it's that too,
but just like nakedly at odds with reality. And uh,
I think that that's important. Like a lot of yak
and Piper didn't write any formal memoirs, but what he
did put the paper about what it was like on
the Eastern Front, you know, like he didn't romanticize it
like there. You know, he talked about how awful some
of that kind of duty was. I mean, not just
in what was called for in moral terms, but like
you know, the physical brutalities that the modern infantry man
had to put himself through. I mean it certainly was
not fun, but it but it's profounding was guided when
people act like, you know, there's some like horrible fate
you know, to befall you as a man, like to
be a soldier in war. That's all I want to do.
Speaker 1: In Sinuwait Okay, Part twenty six, The Taming of Horses.
Fleas cling to our uniforms in serried ranks, Mice run
all about. In the middle of the night, I awake
to find a rat nestled against my nose. These companions
strengthen us against vanity and pride, we who cannot escape
even the smallest of beasts, and the most ridiculous and
the dirtiest. But poetry is everywhere in front of our guns.
Thousands of sparrows jump in the hedges, round bellied birds,
slowly dancing about. They listen a meter away to the
little compliments that we offer them. Then they settle in
wild flocks in the rushes. They cry, chirp, and hiss,
as if the silver sky had thrown fistfuls of pure
joy over the frosty landscape. There are also passing ravens,
like black lightning, few and silent. From time to time
they utter their great horse cry no doubt, to remind
us that death awaits us, harsh like them, ravenous like them,
on dark and deadly wings. We strive to always smile
at the singing sparrows at the solemn crows that pass.
But the heart is the heart, and every man, though
smiling with his mouth and eyes, hides underneath the awful
secrets of a suffering animal. We feel that death watches
on every side. Each step exacts a cost. Our steps
grow heavy and must be made light, despite the heavy guns,
the stumbling feet, the fields of overripe grain that scratch
the skin, the massive shell holes in which a misplaced
step could drop one into the abyss without a word.
This is it, the thankless life of a soldier, which
knows neither exhilaration nor glory, where at any time one
can be stabbed, shot, or dragged off as a prisoner
by the enemy. On the other side, you have to
move forward, calmly, meter by meter, even when shots may
ring out suddenly from ten paces away. Shots ring out
in the night between the outposts, a hoarse cry, and
the night rolls on, impervious, frozen, relentless. At these times,
our entire being wishes to rebel. We care for our
lives those of our comrades, the blood coursing powerfully through
their veins. We are beings of the flesh. We want
the light to be reborn with vigor and heat. The
human beast roars and cries out for his will to unfold,
to burn, to resound, to remain huddled, subdued, to remain
in the shadows, ready for the final act, or take
or the final breath. Takes a terrible discipline. It inflicts
terrible injury on our will. But our taste for life
will be even stronger because we have more intensely experienced
the value, the flavor, the burning sweetness of every second
falling like a drop of silence in this great tension
of ready hearts. We love with unchained power, our carnal existence,
the rhythm of our thoughts, the momentum of our senses,
which a single bullet in the night could shatter, our arms,
our legs, our eyes, to surround, to cross, to regard
with passion and domination. All this screams man's right to life,
the right of the animal that wants to run and seize,
the right of the intelligence that wants to enchant and
create life. How beautifully, how beautiful, indescribably beautiful, exhilarating softness
of body, light of midday, ardor of fire. We clenched
this life in our wilful fists, those of silent, attentive,
patient shadow watchers. We have learned to tame ourselves, to
tame the wild horses which ran across the vast fields
of our dreams. But holding them in our hands with
a steel fist, we close our eyes and inhale the
powerful smell of life that gathers above life.
Speaker 2: Life.
Speaker 1: It is so cold that the medicine vials shattered, the
alcohol itself froze in the ambulance. Poor feet, poor ears,
for poor frostbitten noses, mummified in the atrocious, howling, whistling night.
This morning, the order to leave for another combat sector arrived.
We will go where we are ordered, smiling in the snow, which,
since we awoke has been falling in heavy flakes. Our
feet will be cold, our lips will be raw, our bodies,
huddled over against the cold, will be heavy and awkward.
But our inner fire will continue to rise and fill
our eyes with glimmers of the sun. Here our souls
are strained, these low hills, these rows of firs, these
abandoned millstones, watch us go, regarding our lines with shining eyes,
This black sky that I contemplate now for the last time,
I have filled it with the brilliant streaks of tracer bullets,
while the enemy's rounds uttered their chill cries like pouncing
cats all about me. Already my bag is ready. I
look at the crushed straw broken into small pieces on
the spot I habitually rested after returning, tired and frozen
from late night patrols. The smoky little lantern cast a
yellow light over my last daily report. A few more shirts,
a few handkerchiefs freshly washed, already covered with dust, rough
mud walls, the oven that we heated with debris from barracks,
little frozen tiles painted with designs of white ferns. We
picked up, our battered bowls, our canteens, our weapons, emblazoned
with black lightning. No doubt to this place will one
day return plants laden with fruit, Christian icons, a woman
clad in heavy petticoats, and the thick smell of vegetable fat.
But forever gone will be the humble and bustling life
of many young foreign boys lost in the depths of
step who left in the middle of the night with
calloused hands and frozen blood. This miserable, poorly lit square
has been the center of an intense spiritual life, that
life will leave with us and will be reborn at
random from the frozen roads, improvised lodgings, embankments, and trenches
from which we watch for and track down our opponents,
or avoid his blows. We may return to these spots
one day, but the essential character will be gone, and
so we leave at dawn without looking back. Life is ahead,
even if life is death bah. The greater the sacrifice,
the more we give of ourselves, And it was to
give of ourselves that we stood up with radiant hearts.
Take a sip twenty seven the apocalyptic cycle. The wind
blows and biting us, whipping the snow against our skin
like darts. The river is frozen, frozen, its little tributaries
which ran through the crevices, frozen the hills, the thistles
of the embankments, the ruined factories. My heart itself has
caught cold, cold from these months of soul tension, a
withdrawal into inhuman solitude. Cold is these rigid black trees
which the north wind whips to stress in everything. Everyone
feels to chill. We break our cold bread, We scrape
the huge chunks of mud from our clothes. With a knife,
we cut away great clumps of the blackish glue from
our shoes and gaiters. No water, you have to go
three kilometers to obtain a dirty brown liquid filled with
grass clippings. Let us love our misery anyway, as it
uplifts us, prepares us for destinies that call for pure
and strong hearts. The cycle of wars is now apocalyptic.
The waves widen more and more, grow in speed and
force to spread in a fabulous, gyrating movement. Wars have
become universal revolutions. The whole world is caught up in
its whirlwind. Armies collide, economic forces clash, They tear each
other apart. The forces of the spirit engage in a
merciless duel. The universe will have to bleed, struggle, know
the pangs of flight, the agony separation. Thousands of men,
millions of men, will have to look with frozen or
feverish eyes at death, always the same, that is to say,
always cruel, tearing the heart at the same time as
the flesh. This drama was inevitable. Only the blind and
the foolish, that is to say, almost everyone believe that
these were conflicts of rival nations. Conflicts which could be localized. However,
these are implacable pseudo religious wars, quite similar to all
religious wars, but which will take almost limitless proportions, reaching
up to the little to the last little island or
ice flow, so that all people, be Theyia, Tahitians or Laplanders,
will have to choose like everyone else. When how will
this prodigious settling of accounts end? Our skies will long
be crossed by this lightning. Our children will grow up
amid the blinding flashes of falling or triumphaning ideas at
arms entry, where the scale of the drama chills the blood.
But a sorrowful century in which the whole universe is
being remade more by spirit than by iron. Tragedies such
as the world will never know, tragedy such as the
World has never known, so complete, in which we are
all actors. But where it is hearts that play. Millions
of hearts are on the scene, still young and naive,
or old and silent, or ruined and confused. To walk
one hundred meters between the bloody lines. We come back broken,
as if every step took all our strength, nothing to do,
nothing to read. We only have a miserable kerosene lamp
with a small yellowish flame that lights up a square
meter of our shelter. It takes more courage to live
like this, hold up in the mud, than to advance
on the enemy with the machine gun under your arm.
You can feel the temptation, the muffled voices, the demoralizing questions,
what are you doing here? Can't you see you're wasting
your time, your efforts, your sacrifices. Does anyone even remember
that you exist? Shall we leave you alone to rod
away into oblivion? But the soul quickly regains its serenity.
She knows that nothing is more precious than this renunciation,
this silent descent into the depth of consciousness. Can the
real victory, the victory over oneself, be better acquired elsewhere
than in the midst of these humiliations? Welcomed with the
head held high by straightforwardly opposing this hostile environment, the
loneliness of the heart and the cunning of the enemy
which assault the spirit twenty eight Enlightenment. War for US
soldiers is to become among poor companions with grim faces,
men huddled under the frozen earth, defined by dark, suffering
without comfort. It is mud it is a snow, it
is bottomless despair. It is feet torn by the endless steps.
It's the hundred shameful little miseries which surround the life
of the soldier at the front, like a clinging and
fog of sadness. The stifled life ceaselessly calls for the
calling up of energy, the leap of the soul, which
must tear itself out that missed in order to shine again.
This life bears no resemblance to the brilliant ideas that
the public has about the exploits of war. But they
ought not to be disabused of this notion, we would
thereby spoil their beautiful and brightly colored image. Yet I
lie down in exhaustion at the end of each day
with a joy that is a little bit sad, but powerful,
because it is an incomparable lesson in patience, self mortification,
the elevation of the soul. We should never try to
cheat the ordeal of or stifle its voice. If the
lesson were to be useful, if we did not return
as men changed by the experience, there would not be
this wall between on one hand, those who are afraid
of the ordeal, and on the other hand, those who
looked hardship in the eye and learned from it. Life
sinks its fangs into us time after time. I escape
this time, like so many others, with a weary, worried,
chewed up heart. I wish now to return there at peace,
having found innocence and confidence. It is Christmas. I watched
the snowfall tirelessly, and despite its lightness, I feel that
I am suffocating. Soldiers passed bent double against the wind
going quickly around me. Nothing around me, nothing, always the
wind blowing, a man nervously biting his nails, others collapsing
into sleep, exhausted by the knights in the watch. Jesus
could have been born in our little shelter sincerity, the
good animals about the manger, who offered themselves entirely, the
honest hearts of the shepherds, who did not doubt for
a second, did not hesitate, and who immediately gave everything
at their disposal. They only had sheep, and they gave
their sheep, who remembering them, who remembering them, would not
take heart. What counts is not what you give sheep
or great treasures. It is the fervor of the heart
that weighs upon the sun scales. Sometimes life seems too
exhausting to carry, painful even to think about. Today, it
is almost an anguish to forget your own existence, your
screaming soul. What could let us forget? We have spent
a day killing by the dozens, the liights that chew
at our skin, that is all. And yet the soul
must stand tall, proud, steadfast, and it must stay that way.
But great muffled voices deep in the background moan, we
are not men differently built than the others. We too
would like, when we listen only to the calls of
that outer life, to do not but pile up money
earned without labor. All men desire this, whose bodies run hot,
whose eyes are alight with the mixture of desire and pleasure.
The human beast youth that need to dominate rears up
in distress. Are you not wasting your years of radiant
life watched by death every hour? Don't you have any regrets?
Feel the desire to break everything in, to throw yourself
towards pleasure, towards luminous faces, towards beautiful women. As the
other boys of your time, these are times when you
have to stifle your passions, to feed your soul and
your faith at the expense of such human desires that
shine before our eyes like a mirage. We stand guard
on icy parapets, with a touch of bitterness in our hearts,
but supremely happy, yet at the sacrifice renewed every day,
without even knowing if we will be ever if we
will ever be understood. End of the year, I recap
the line of dying days, this year, with its secrets
and its illuminating lights. The secrets that are hidden behind
a smile, but which often bleed like wounds, never close,
and then the light light shone upon our character and
our deeds. There are the lights that we may show others.
These they are the least beautiful, these heroic lights we
show to others. They maintain an air of theatricality and falseness,
even when displayed in modest fashion. It is only with
great difficulty that one can keep a truly naive heart
and yet also take care to avoid an excess of pride.
These lights, these imperfect lights, will remain superficial. But these
glorious lights hurt our eyes. We are blinded when we
leave them, and we are so often plunged from these
brick lights into the shadows of everyday banality or minor setbacks.
I remember those lights. I love them only to the
extent that they illuminated that ideal towards which I walk.
I should only like these lights for this reason, But
I know very well that I have often let myself
be taken in by my own self satisfaction. Finally, these
lights necessary to arouse us to action, sadden me because
they show me that over and over again, I find
myself biting down on the hook of vanity or pride.
And then there are the other lights, the ones that
no one else sees from the outside. They let up
our souls like x rays. Then you know exactly what
you are worth. Caught these lights, we are no longer
very proud. We see ourselves. We see clearly all of
our weaknesses, We see clearly the poverty, the excuses we
have made for one hundred mistakes always the same. But
it is precisely because we know our own mediocrity all
too well that we experience intoxicating joys when the lights
that emerge from the depths of the soul end up
illuminating a heroic work of our own doing. Though it
be only a small act. It was born after so
much secret cowardice, that that first inner smile plunges us
into unspeakable raptures. Twenty nine intransigence who kept us on
their thoughts, the lost boys of the steps, who had
nothing to drink to the new year, but melts it
snow streaked with bits of yellow grass, or a few
steps of artificial coffee that smelled of soap. Miserable details,
humiliating details, the evocation of which seems out of place.
Who else could imagine how the biting cold made a
herculean effort of even minor tasks, For example, the miserable,
inevitable sickness of dysentery. Of course, we had no sewers.
Fifteen twenty times, in just a few hours you would
have to run into the blizzard to relieve yourself, allowing
your body to be cut by a wind as sharp
as a blade, as sharp as a whip. Vanity of
our bodies in which we often took such pride, the
beautiful human beasts, strong, burning with life, must submit to
these humiliations. The body rebels, but must give in the
body that was so satisfied with the pleasant rhythms of
life body which has been caressed, kissed love, and we
heaped such shame upon you. Yet nothing can reach the
mind that is master over itself. If the body is humiliated,
it is because the will has led him into these
whistling snows, to the bottom of these sordid shelters. Yesterday
it was lce. Today the cold claws at our skin.
We willed it to be, so we do not care
that we are scourged by this hostile, ferocious situation. One
day the cral winds will die off with the return
of the leaves to the trees. Our bodies, stretched out
in the waters of the rivers and the sun and
in the winds, will feel life beating more ardently than
ever around their bones, strong as metal under a living
flesh like the flesh of flowers, hard and clean like marble,
but golden, full, vibrant. Having suffered in triumph, we will
open our arms to the sun, and our smooth, powerful
and rough bodies will flow with blood like the sap
of the great virgin trees. Our wills will bring back
to life the beautiful human beast, prancing with life, now tamed,
the whole step caught up in the turmoil might well
crackle whistle rise in gigantic waves. Despite the cold that
scorched us, despite the gusts of hailstones it riddled our face,
I faced a mailstrom a hundred times to fill my
eyes with this grandeur, I felt carried away by the squalls.
I communicated with this epic power, where the white plane,
the sky, and the wind mingled their strength, their leaps,
their icy flames, their long cries springing from the horizon
and howling away at the end of the quivering plane.
What are at such moments the forces which rise up
in us in communion with the great natural outbursts. I
then feel transported, and immense bliss rises from all my body,
as if fabulous correspondences were established between my blood which
runs and the wind which blows, between the life which
boils in my limbs and the savage life which blows
past under the great sky. There is not one of
us soldiers who does not have to be prepared for
the most gruesome endings. But do we give only with reservation?
Death in humiliation isn't a way of giving? Death in humiliation?
Isn't it a way of giving even more? True sacrifice
cannot be calculated, cannot be given with reservation. We listen
to cynics more readily than to the message of righteous hearts.
Yet pure hearts will have victory. Only idealists will change
the world. I am writing near a rusty barrel, at
the bottom of which floats the last bits of step
grass suspended in our icy water. This poverty, this isolation,
we know them because we desired sincerity. And more than ever,
in this solitude, where bodies and hearts feel invaded by
mortal cold, I renew my odes of intransigence more than ever.
I will go straight ahead, without giving in, without rest
hard on my soul, heart, on my desires, heart of
my youth. I'd rather see ten years of cold and
abandonment than one day feeling my soul emptied, voided of
its living dreams. I write these words without trembling, which
nevertheless make me suffer in the hour of our world's bankruptcy.
Souls are needed, which may stand hard and tall as
rocky cliffs, beaten in vain by raging winds. Thirty the cross,
which moment will be our end. Death passes unresponsive and
his hands strangle hearts at random. The machine gun fires
it whizzes, it cracks, or it pierces with its deadly
fingers a young man's body. What to do if not
to have a pure heart, a quiet regard to the
timely sacrifice made freely. If it comes, our eyelashes will
not quiver, and we will leave with the faint, sad
smile of the tender memories to surround our last seconds.
If we come back, even though the warmth of life
will have made us forget this icy breath, our hearts
will forever have the composure of a life that has
not trembled or death. May fate always find us strong
and worthy. You still have to love happiness as you
love the song of the wind, however fleeting it may be,
as you love the colors of the evening, even though
you know they are going to die. For the great
winds are reborn and sing again, and every day the
colors return to the blazing axis of the risen sun.
It is up to us to keep the winds from dying,
or to prevent the sun from fading, but to draw
strength from them while they yet live. Joy is the
fire of indomitable heart, of indomitable hearts, and no reversal
can extinguish or stifle its burning colors. When you see
the waves retreating from the sands, returning to the dark
depths of the sea, think of the great outpouring that
will return a few hours later, white shimmering in the sun,
bold and strong, as if these waves were the vanguard
of an assault on the world itself. To be happy
is to be unselfish. Happiness is just that giving all
of one's self. There are so many mediocre things on earth,
low or ugly, that one day we would be overwhelmed
by them if we did not carry them within our ourselves.
The fire which burns away ugliness, which consumes it and
purifies us. Art is our inner salvation, our secret garden
that constantly refreshes and soothes us. Poetry, painting, sculpture, music,
anything but to escape from the mundane, to rise above
the drying dust, to create something grand instead of submitting
to the small, To let out that sparkle, the extraordinary
that each of us possess, and convert it into a grandiose, devouring,
indistinguishable fire. The dead and dark sentries are those where
souls hesitated before this effort. The luminous centuries are those
which have seen that these great fires souls mark out
dominate the mountains of the spirit. The only true joys
are not those that others give us, but those that
we carry within us, that our faith creates, that fill
us with dynamism. The rest comes from the foam of
the comes like the foam of the sea, shining at
the tip of the waves, quivering for a moment on
the edge of the sand, then quickly dies or withdraws
with the waves. This is the happiness that others bring
us from time to time. The joy that arises from
our passion for life and our will is like the
great force which rumbles and rolls at the bottom of
the sea, which springs up to meet the sun, and
is renewed every second. As if hanging from a boat,
we watch the mighty sea throw its waves like immense
leopard skins, spread out, supple and shiny, standing up like
a silver flame, or like a prodigious spray of white flowers.
This life, this life, constantly returns rebounds. We know that
nothing until the end of the world will stop this momentum.
So it must be our hearts brash, but like this
wonderful rhythmic force, ordered chanted like an eternal song. During
their day we are caught up in pour often trivial concerns.
But at night, the imagination weaves itself through our dreams,
takes us into it, takes us in its fantasies, its
reconstruction or anticipation. Sometimes I'm amazed by the relentless lucidity
of dreams. Of course, the dream is often a wild folly,
of phanfasm, but it is often also for me a
meeting with my conscience and with my first intuitions. I
see myself naturally as I am, when my will is
not there to lock its brakes upon the movement of
my passions. I then know exactly on which points I
doubt myself each time I must say to myself, look here,
you falter. I thus have the almost daily proof that
I can resist a thousand temptations, lead my life with
honor only to the extent that are renewed effort, masters
and restraints. Every day. Deep within myself a wild horse
which can never be fully tamed, and which only the
whip of the will, wielded unceasingly, can contain. If the
world were relaxed, everything would come undone. I see this
in my dreams will the will itself fall asleep. I
awake to feed the dream has cut me adrift. There
is no more decisive examination of conscience for me than
the unfolding of dreams. Dreams lay bare my soul before me,
leaves deep marks upon my thoughts, with the knowledge that
we must always be on guard over our baser impulses.
Because these baser elements do not naturally run towards, but
on the contrary, run from it as soon as they
are tempted by beautiful falsehoods. The soul, freed by the
gift it has made of itself, flies, sores and sings.
Because we hear within us these great songs of serenity,
we know that the work we embark upon will be beautiful,
for the great and the beautiful can only be created
in joy and in faith. If we love virtue only
insofar as it has taken notice of, we defile it
with pride. We are no longer virtuous the moment we
desire the virtue which we believe we have achieved to
be seen and admired. So it is with all virtues.
They are beautif full, soft, radiant if we love them
for themselves, if we cultivate them for the unique pleasure
of having reached them. We come to life without thinking
or caring that we might not be understood by others.
Uncomplicated hearts cannot imagine the complications of others. Fresh hearts
cannot imagine other hearts being hateful or defiled. Suffering is
the most wonderful of companions, pathetic and angelic, washing souls
of all desire, raising them to the heights they had
dreamed of for so long. Defeats, victories, dreams, or material
successes pass away are forgotten fires that shine for a moment,
since swept away by a passing wind. But the essential,
the unique, is for us the great spiritual conflagration, without
which the world is nothing. So long as there remains
a little fire in some corner of the world, all
miracles of greatness remain possible. Everything in life is a
matter of faith and tenacity. Trust cannot be begged for
it has to be won, and the best way to
conquer it. To conquer is to first give of yourself.
We all carry our cross. We must carry it with
a proud smile, so that we know that we are
stronger than suffering, and also so that those who seek
to harm us understand that their arrows reach us in vain.
What does it matter if you suffer, if you have
what did? What does it matter if you suffer, if
you have had a few immortal hours in your life,
at least we have lived.
Speaker 2: It's important, I think, to give particular attention to the
fact that, you know, does a basic dishonesty in the
way warfare is discussed, not just in the abstract, but
in the concrete experience of it, you know, by by uh,
you know, by realistic types as well as you know
liberals and and what remains at least of you know,
Marxist types and academia who you know, assigned productive force determinism,
you know, to their analysis of warfare and its causes
and it's it's systemic function, and you know, kind of
sociological affairs at scale, you know, by the twentieth century
wars of pure ideology, which is what the Grell's getting
at when he talks about, you know, warfare itself being
a revolutionary process, and all warfare by the juncture at
which you know, he and his mentoring the field of battle,
you know, being a theological crusading enterprise. That's that, that's
that's totally accurate. You know. That's one of the reason
that this bizarre. When you hear American academic types, Leather's
strategic forecasting types who've got, you know, their own kind
of conceptual biases, or they're just talking about kind of
you know, court historian types, they always come up short
in describing warfare as a process or as like an
ontological postulate. You know, they're always like grasping at some
sort of some sort of concrete variables, you know, beaut
of an economic nature or or there or or they're
falling back on on, you know, the systemic remedies assigned
by the system that they themselves serve, you know, in uh,
and in kind of you know, referring to warfare in
terms of legalisms, you know, and and bad actors and purportedly,
you know, actors who are abiding what amounts to you know, uh,
a juristic moral precedent. I mean, this is this is
incredibly misguided, even if you issue the fact that it's
it's at odds with you know, kind of the the
human reality of it. You know, nobody like World War
Two wasn't waged because you know, the German arch needed
to capture markets to to to you know, needed to
capture you know, destination markets for for evaluated manufacturers, you know,
and it was it wasn't waves because you know, the
like the British wanted need to guarantee that they could
access their rubber plantations you know that were in Japan's backyard.
Like that's not that's not reality, and uh, I mean
and this endured throughout the Cold War obviously because the
the the Cold War literally was ah the conflict that determined,
you know, what what world order would would be constituted of,
you know, in terms of not just concrete structures that
you know kind of the term and uh the you know,
human life and labors at scale, but also you know,
like what what what values for lack of a better
term to invoke, would would would reign and what and
what kind of what what conceptual horizon would would uh
be triumphant over all others.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: That's why that's why America had such problems in Vietnam,
because it couldn't within within its own intellectual and moral paradigms,
like it couldn't it couldn't rationalize what it was doing
because uh, the war in Vietnam was an ideological war,
as as all twentieth century wars were, and it was
incidental that it took place in Southeast Asia. It was
incidental that, you know, the people who was waived against
we were easiatic and uh, the logic of that body
count wasn't just a performance metric of success. It was
and then in itself, because if you're going to eradicate communism,
you've got to eradicate the standard bearers of it. And
the standard bearers of any of any concept are human beings,
you know, So you're talking about the eradication of human
beings at scale in order to exterminate a concept and
the ability that concepts to exist in the world, let
alone constitute an enemy forced to oppose you like you're talking,
you're talking about the You're talking about the slaughter of
human beings. You know. That's why too people like another Frenchman, uh,
Christian dale MANZERI I'm from Butchering that pronunciation. You know.
He wrote the book The Captive Dreamer, and he joined
Uh he joined the s S late in the game.
I think he didn't go into action until late nineteen
forty four. He fought with Charlemagne, who were incidentally the
among the last defenders of of Berlin. But you know,
in this book he made that point that it was
you know, he heven it was clear that Europe was
going down. You know, He's like, I, I wasn't, I
wasn't gonna not participate in, you know, in in the
crusade to save it from you know, it's it's it's
ideological and racial enemies, and that that that's you know,
that's very much a crusader spirit, and that's really the
only spirit that they can animate people at scale towards
a modern war and in turn, at least in some
of the stakes that were on the table for the
for the Germans and for the Russians. You know, it's
a little more complicated when you deal with America insinuating
off into these wars of choice. But that that's kind
of a different thing. I mean, that's that's born it's
born of a I mean of a purely ideological imperative
as well. But there's there's a complexity there that is
the subject for a different discussion. But no, that's all
I had, That's all I had to contribute right now.
Speaker 1: All right, the final part part six to give completely
Part thirty one the reconquest, the turmoil that agitates public opinion.
The wars of shake up nations are just episodes. Partial
reforms will do away with such periodic chaos. To attempt
to change people would be a very disappointing work if
it were, if it were not accompanied by the essential
work of changing that which lies deep in the soul,
by a transformation of the very foundations of our times.
All the scandals, the decline of honesty and honor, shamelessness
in the in the certainty of impunity, the passion for
money which sweeps away conventions, dignity, self respect, ammorality which
has become uncons unconscious, indicate the existence of a deep
seated evil which calls for remedies of equal magnitude. It
is not suddenly that we lie, that we break all
moral laws, supernatural or natural, and more simply the laws
of the public code. It is not overnight that you
work yourself up to bold hypocrisy, to speak truth only
with reticence, to lie with virtuous words. This deformation of consciousness,
which amazes, which frightens today, or which puts on an
air of sarcastic superiority, is the only conclusion of a
long decline in human virtues. It is the passion for wealth,
the will to be powerful no matter what, it is,
the frenzy to be honored. It is materialism. It is
the unscrupulous gratification of instincts which have corrupted men, and
through men institutions. The world is more and more preoccupied
with banal, material or simply animal joys. It maintains itself
only by the principle of maximizing material wealth. Each man
lives only for himself and allows a domination of life
both within his own home and within the country by
a constant egoism which has converted men into hateful, embittered,
greedy wolves, or corrupt and soulaced half men. We will
come out of this downfall only through an immense moral recovery,
by reteaching men to love, to sacrifice themselves, to live,
to struggle, and to die for a higher ideal. In
a century when we live only for ourselves, it will
take hundreds thousands of men to live no longer for
themselves but for a collective ideal, Accepting in advance all
the sacrifices, all the humiliations, all necessary heroism. All that
matters is faith, brilliant confidence, the come complete absence of
selfishness and individualism, the pulling of the whole being towards
service without promise of reward in any place by any means,
toward a cause that goes beyond men asking him everything,
promising him nothing. The only things that count are the
quality of the soul, the pulse, the total gift, the
will to hoist an ideal above all else, in the
most absolute selflessness. The time is coming when saving the
world will require this handful of heroes and saints to
make the great reconquest thirty two flotilla of souls. Nations
recover rapidly from financial setbacks, they may reconstitute without too
much difficulty a new political framework. All that is needed
is skilled technicians and a willingness to work together. Revolutions
are not political or economic. They are small revolutions, changes
of purely mechanical needs. When the specialists put the pieces together,
when the engines have found their rhythm, and sternfaced foreman
have been set to watch over them, the material revolution
is accomplished. The rest will only require repairs from time
to time, a modification here and there. The machine is
fitted or overhauled, the gears turn most of the work
is done. The real revolution is far more complicated, one
which brings together not the machinery of the state, but
the secret life of every soul. There it is no
longer a matter of automatic review and monitoring. It is
about the vices and the virtues, the impulses towards profundity
and weaknesses, the desperate hopes that are so dear to us.
What is there at the bottom of that gaze, behind
those eyes that remained on us for a long moment,
as if great secrets lie upon our eyelids, A hidden heart,
a soul, its secret crises, its outbursts, its despairs, the
desire of the body, and its indelible decline, the sorrows
that are so difficult to hide or guess at. The
uncertain and troubled struggle towards happiness is the great drama
of men. But there too is the real revolution, bringing
light to spirits caught in the shadows, to aid in
the restoration of failing souls, to relearn that we consist
of more than just a body. To perfect the imperfect,
to rise to heights of virtue, no matter how great
are the efforts required of us, The revolution alone can
be enchancing but terrifying. We all walk through a labyrinth,
that thin bowed head, and that beautiful golden hair, laughter
that bursts too suddenly, that arm that descends ten faces,
ten abysses. Who cheats us, who is mistaken? Who seeks
to deceive us? We only see the deceptive shadows of beings.
Everyone tries to deceive themselves, to deceive others by simplifications
and by more or less skillful artifices. And it is
among these subter futures, however, that we must advance. Our
flames burning white in the darkest night. What is there
to take hold of? What can we do about these beings?
Who are to who? To our impotent eyes appear only mysteries.
Mystery is all the more poignant as we observe their laughter,
vivacious eyes, pale foreheads, this soft caress of flowing hair, which,
with joyful light, oppose all our regrets, anguish, weariness, and corruptions.
We all make our way along distant paths. The bottoms
of our hearts. Alone know our true face, the false
secrets of our soul, its hopes and faults, our true joys,
and our true sorrows. There were so many joys and
so many tears that the others thought they knew, shared
and assuaged. We look, in the hours of solitude, at
our real selves, where no one else alas never go.
This innerself tells us who he loves and to whom
he belongs, what overwhelms him and causes him to stumble,
and tells us what raises up his spirit. Perhaps if
by fortune, the breath of truth brushes aside the invisible veil,
to be this current, this great, warm and long wind,
which rises from the depths of our spiritual horizons, which
gives souls, this first movement. All of a sudden, the
sail undergoes an impalpable swelling, rounding off in the light.
The whole slips across still waters. The inflection of the
white sails gently pushes the air away. We think of
those thousands of motionless sails, waiting for what will give them,
imperceptibly at first, then with quivering forth life and movement,
the joy of moving through air and water, advancing through
the clear line of the horizon in the distance. The
boats are heavy, the water is dark and sluggish, everything
is silent. Be this breath that will come at last,
to rouse these souls, to push them off, clumsy at first,
left after so much waiting and stagnation, then happy and firm.
Is to strength that sustains them, and the life that
revives them is confirmed. Show all these beings that existence
can be beautiful and pure and great, even after all
the weaknesses and all the disenchantments. To bring up from
these drier, numb or perverted hearts, the fountain of renewal.
This is the task, the real one, the hard one,
the necessary task, terrible task. We would like to take
these half dead people in our arms, look deeply into
their eyes, ward off these creeping doubts and hesitations, to
run our trembling fingers through their silken hair. But what
a stir upon meeting those eyes which return the light
of others, those eyes which show us so quickly from
their first lie or their first confession, the confusion that
inhibits us ourselves, how to look at a face without
hearing cruel questions? Are you lying? How shall you fare
under fire? Under privations of the flesh? And what will
remain tomorrow of the hopes and aspirations, painfully suspended buoyed
by this gaze, the source of all redemption lies there, however,
to give life to drifting souls, to calm the storms
which break their masts and tear their sails, to give
them sun and breath, to make serene the seas of men,
to make their horizon clear, free from the shadows and
perils of violent and tormented skies. Breathe resume, believing in virtues,
in beauty and goodness, in love. Feel dancing around you
on the waves, a thousand other sails full of wind,
carried with the same momentum, towards the same call when
the Golden Sea. When the Golden Sea sees these white
sails rush forth, the revolution will be on its way,
carried onwards by this flotilla of souls thirty three summits.
Your road is hard, you come short of breath. There
are times when you would like to throw away this
burden that weighs you down. Let yourself go downhill and
return to those idyllic farms that welcome you back. At
the bottom of the hill, blue streams against the green
and gray backgrounds of meadows and slate roofs. You feel
nostalgic for the quiet waters and the clear rushes, the
ore that lapse against the surface, the flat, effortless path
along the banks. We would like to think of nothing.
Wash away the memories of men from your thoughts, and
with your back against the grass, watch the passing sky,
lightened by flocks of birds. No more weariness. You won't
let go of your bag and your stick. You won't
attend to your bleeding knees. You won't listen to the
clamor of hatred. You won't look at the smiling eyes
and the wickedness they hide. It is to the summit
that you must cast your eyes. Your body should live
only for these twisting paths. Your heart should dream only
of these heights, that you and the others should reach
what lies at the root of your what lies at
the root of your confusion. I thought you would find
immediate joys in climbing this pathole on the sea and
raising this human host. You have often suffered. Sometimes you
feel nauseous. Yet you needed it. You had to learn
that ambition does not pay off, that sooner or later
it tires out the heart it possesses. You know it now.
You know that you should not expect any constant joy
from outside. You have learned to doubt the comfort of men.
Your face is flushed, not from the tenderness they gave you,
but from the blows that you were dealt by them.
Of course, you did not think it, would you imagine
that along the road your hands and eyes would find
what you so feverishly desired. You look back and you say,
I am going back down. No, it is only then
that life becomes noble, when it beats you down, when
you no longer having the enthusiasm to carry on. Do
you remember the early days you wanted a very beautiful climb.
It is true you were leaving this way to free
your soul. You knew that men must always overcome his limitations.
Didn't you believe in this obscure pleasure of honor and discipline?
Are you crying out? You did not think for it
to be like this. You rejected comfort with sincere enough words,
but it still hemmed the edges of your actions, as
to foam borders the edge of the sea. You honestly
thought that you only lived for this threat of light,
beautiful only from afar, on the edge of the sands.
The temptation was there in your heart. You wanted something grand,
something real, But you still had the thought of yourself
near you. You announced your readiness to do your duty,
but you made this silent addition that to fulfill your
duty would bring glory to your name and satisfy your
own desires, would make you golden with pride. It's because
you don't see this phantasm before you anymore, that your
eyes reflect only shadows. You are looking in the dark,
confront it the fact that you loved something false. Those
who have disgusted, those who have disgusted you one hundred times,
with their wickedness and injustice, have carried you more than
your own strength. Are you giving up? You give your
flesh and your breath, your heart, and your mind, and
you think now it is all in vain, in vain?
Why because you no longer give them in service and
your selfish pride. Only now can you start to give
of yourself. That wickedness had to overwhelm you. By the
time you were almost fainting at the end of your effort,
the jeers would rise, and contempt would drive you on.
It was necessary that all your gestures of love be
covered with hatred, that all your impulses be soiled, that
each throbbing of your heart command the new blow to
fall upon your face. You have known so many times,
those exhausting last few meters where you smiled on the
threshold of the gold, despite your sweat and your parlor.
The next moment you were falling among the rocks, betrayed
by your own, overwhelmed by the others. Everything had to
be redone and always, the charming emptiness of the valley
below hailed you. The trembling poplars called you like a
line of ships on the sea of easy days. You
suffered from the harshness of the fighting. You said to yourself,
whatever the victory, the price is too expensive, and I
no longer desire it. You always thought of yourself, Yes,
for you, for the human pleasure of having reached the top.
You made a fool's bargain. But if life had not
slapped you a hundred times, which you ever have understood
that there are other pleasures than pride, than smiles, than glory.
You have felt the hypocrisy of so many faces around you.
You have guessed all the lies, all the gall all
the meanness that is in store for you. Every time
you start climbing again, you are no longer entitled to anything.
You hear the swarm of slithering horrors. You know you
will go through with the objection, and with the objection anyway.
It is at the hour when you have given everything
that you will be said to be greedy. It is
at the hour when your heart will suffer the most
abandonment that will be given the basest of demands. You
turn around with tears that well up in spite of you.
Why are you still thinking of yourself? Do you still
suffer from injustice? Is it all about you? How hard
is it to be free from our humanity? Let them
come crashing down on your life like jackals, Let them
trample your dreams, Let them open your heart to all
the winds. Suffer from being thrown to the beasts of envy, calumny, baseness,
endure above all. And this is what bruises the most.
That at the moment when you cannot take it any longer,
when your knees bend, when your eyes cast about for
a supportive look, your arm search for and ard in
hand support, while you are hanging on a word, a
look that this word falls down to break you, that
look to hurt you, Except that it is those who
are closest to you who finish you off those to
whom you had left everything you love, so naively, without
reserve and without hesitation, your eyes have a bewilderment worse
than tears. Do not cry out. Expect that everything you
suffered yesterday tomorrow will be renewed. Accept this in advance.
Do not even turn around when you hear that step
behind you. Bless the blows received, Love those who will
bring them. They are more useful to you than a
thousand hearts. That love you did you get it you
may find tomorrow, or perhaps you may have found already
that tenderness that comes see you like a breath of
fresh air, or like the scent of a cluster of
country flowers. You are now without weakness in front of them.
You will only enjoy dignity. Dignity to the extent that,
by dints of suffering you have learned to do. Without it,
This you would never have obtained had you not paid
the price one hundred times, hundreds of times, without ever
being sure of receiving anything in return. If one day
this appears to you, enjoy it as a sublime landscape
glimpsed in passing. But it is not for this that
you came. It is the air. It is the light
of the Summit's calling you. You are breathing better already
You will slowly attain true joy at those great peaks
of consciousness, shining unsullied. Think only of this, see only this,
Try to get there, light, pure, radiant, with sunlight. It
is your weaknesses and your faults on which you should
weigh on them alone, your pride, your name. The vain
appeals of the departing men, throw them beyond the rocks.
Did you hear them break as they bounce down the slope?
May it all perish. May bitterness and abandonment instead of rebellion,
keep you on the path. These two howling dogs are
the guardians of the herd of your thoughts. Without them
you would stop, you would pull away. Do not waste
a moment. It is far, and you must reach the summit.
They reach, these pure immensities behind you will be a
great silence. All those who screamed after you, who hated
or trampled you, despite the smiles on their faces, all
those who just to strike at you, followed you on
the road, will suddenly realize that at this game they
have they too, have reached the snows, the new air,
and the horizons cut out in the sky. They will
forget to hate you. They will have wonderfully childish eyes.
They will discover the essential. Their souls will have been
lifted to heights they would never have agreed to reach
if your back, that had received their blows had not
hidden the length of the road. So you will have
it your victory. You will be able, having given the
final effort, suddenly to fall, arms outstretched from the top
of the mountain into the rocks below. You will be done.
You will have one reaching the end of your own
journey by the last effort. Will no longer matter if
the others are there on the brink of the of
the pure immensities of redemption. You are so happy, deep
down you know that only happiness is there. Sing, may
your voice thunder in the valleys, regrets in tears. The
most unremarkable man among you has suffered this, and you
would reject him. The hardest thing is done. Hold on,
clench your teeth, silence your heart, think only of the top.
Speaker 2: Go up.
Speaker 1: And that is the message from mister de Greel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's quite it's a there's a positive tendency I've
discerned there's a lot more people taking an interest in
not just revisionist topics, but you know, real testimony of
of officers and men who who fought for the German
Reich and affiliated adjacent forces. It's not unlike the kind
of renaissance of lost cause of historians in the nineteen eighties,
who uh, that's when Shelby Foot became really kind of popular.
And that's also when The Killer Angels became this beloved book.
And kind of the tail end of that was when
you know, The Killer Angels was made into Gettysburg, which
people have mixed feelings about that movie, but you know,
the very early nineties was kind of the the end
of that sort of tendency, both in in in war
academia as well as in kind of pop culture. But
obviously that that's got profound implications. That's something similar to
underway visa the the German Reich and the experience of
World War Two, and that, I mean, that's very exciting
and it's very much corrective because it's not this this
stuff directly impacts the structure of the world we live in,
you know, conceptually, physically, you know, every every way you
can imagine. So the fact that the fact that you know,
it's it's not ever we got the ability to kind
of fascinate the public imagination to the point that you know,
not only are revisionist perspectives crowded out, but that it's unthinkable,
you know, on in as regards the prevailing morality. For
you know, any any kinntervailing narrative is going to enter
public spaces just perfectly speaking, is or was it the
sea change? But it's very exciting. So yeah, I think
it's important to make people aware of stuff like the
Grill's memoir because again too, Debrill is obviously like a
man out letter isn't very much you know, like a
cultured European type. And you know that's people that even
people are sympathetic to the to the axis cause in history,
they've got a sense of the thet they got a
sense of the Germans is being consessed of a certain
kind of rigidity in their cultural output, which is not
entirely fair, but I understand why they think that. But yeah,
that was great man.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The what it really makes me think is that
those people who are waking up to it, who are
genuinely seeking the kind of enlightenment that someone like mister
de Garrell had, they really need to put aside their
pet causes, especially if their pet causes are divisive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it's also too like these people they're not
you know, like where the rubber meets the road, people
like they grow are they're uh, they're they're ethical plantments
as wellth their ascetic ones were informed pretty much by idealism,
but it's through a filter of concrete political realities. And
like most of these like most of these guys, most
of these guys who are the most kind of stalwart
proponents these divisive pedodiologies, like it's there their creatures who
exist only in the Internet, Like there's nothing remotely concrete
about their ship, you know. And that's one of the
means why they're so inflexible, because it's it's never it's
never been challenged by you know, the the nuances of
of of Warren peace questions. And when I say Warren
peace questions, I mean things that impact anybody of a
partisan mindset, even in day to day life. You know,
like there's a spectrum of war and peace of you know,
on the the most extreme ends are you know, hostas
and Animicus, and on the other end is you know,
a splendid piece where within the confldical space only friends
capital f exists. But you know there's a there's there's
an infinite gradations between one side of the spectrum and
the other. So you know, you're very much you're very
much at war and metaphysical and unfortunately sometimes concrete terms.
Although I certainly don't advocate anybody to undertake violence other
than and defense themselves, their property, to their loved ones.
But you know, people are people are closer to these
processes in a very same winary sense. Then they realize
if they're truly engaged and not just you know, somebody
playing a game, you know, from some anonymous and remote location.
But yeah, that's uh, that's very good man.
Speaker 1: Well, before I have you do your plugs and everything,
we have to thank the I don't believe this was
ever translated into English before Anselope Hill did it.
Speaker 2: So yeah, they were a great publishing house. I'm on
their mailing list and they they they release great stuff. Man,
I can't recommend them enough.
Speaker 1: All right, do your plugs, and once again thank you
for joining me for a thousand episodes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's great. Yeah, you can always find me
at Thomas seven seven seven dot com. That's the one
stop location for links to all my content. It's number
seven H seven seven seven dot com. Substack is going
to continue to be my primary home for podcast content
as well as longer form content. And I'm debating releasing
the third book in my science fiction series exclusively on
on substack now, like you know, the subscribers like Chapter
by Chap, I haven't decided yet, but because I won
my war with Stripe in their effort to d platform me,
for the time being, we're going to remain on Substack.
I'm probably also gonna set up a gum Road account too,
for among other things, like repository for video content which
I'm actively shooting. But that's that's new to me. So
thanks for bearing with me, I mean not I mean
everybody who subscribes. But you can always find me at
substack at real Thomas seven seven seven at subsec dot com.
I'm on Instagram as well. You can link through my website,
and I'm on exit uh real Capital r e A
L Underscore number seven hm as seven seven seven dot com.
That's where we're at right now. I'll be announcing some
of these changes I mean, I have been and will
continue to announce some of these changes on my sub stack.
Things are kind of normalizing and I've got my workflow
locked in now thanks to our dear friend Jay Burden
as well as some of the people you plugged me with.
So yeah, I'm having to report that, you know, I'll
finally be up on you know, fresh content every fourteen
days again, as was as was the case, uh for
most of the last year. That's all I got.
Speaker 1: Excellent, excellent, thank you, thank you so much for doing this, man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: And yeah, just little tease. Thomas and I before where
we started recording this started talking about the next series,
and I think that would be a it's gonna be
of great interest to a lot of people, a lot
of I think a lot of people have already commented that, yeah,
we'd like to see, uh like to see that that
subject covered, but let's not tell them what it is.
Speaker 2: And just no, I'm very excited, and yeah, I appreciate
the guy who suggested it very much. Yeah, yeah, I'm
pretty excited. Man.
Speaker 1: All right, thanks man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, likewise,