(291) Merle

Further Yockey problem (and Evola problem, actually): the idea that Europe needs to become a single empire (just like in Roman days, or the days of the Holy Roman Empire). For Yockey, Evola, and Mosley Rome is Europe—and Spengler thought the West was at the civilisation stage where it needed to be folded into a vast empire (America not yet being, in this schema, a true empire). For these men Rome is Europe—for Evola that’s because he’s Italian (or, as he would doubtless prefer, literally a denizen of the Eternal City), for Yockey it might be because he was Catholic; but Rome is the model one way or the other—with Mosley chipping in with rational economic reasons for why Europe has to be a single block.

Down with petty nationalism—Nietzsche, the original good European, proposed it. I disagree: I think Europe is Greece, it’s lots of small city-states locked in agon. It’s the very fact Europe isn’t “a country that is a civilisation” like China that makes it so powerful and dynamic—all the wars and competition strengthened us, accelerated our technological development. China just had the occasional huge civil war, not lots of little wars that speeded the use of gunpowder and the printing press. The West is best because it combines intelligence with individual genius—and these exist within a context where there is constant competition within polities and between them. Take that away and you’ve got sclerosis (America, now the states have been very beaten down, is now closer to Chinese-style conformity).

So I just don’t agree—and in the age of cheap nuclear weapons and high technology this Napoleonic idea that we need 400M people (plus the Russian oil fields and/or Africa) is just yesterday’s news. Yockey was right that life as lived is irrational and that you shouldn’t cling to your life (i.e. the hero is important), but the grand vision of Europe as single state would destroy what is European about the West.