I glanced at a conversation between Millennial Woes and Martin Lichtmesz—the latter observed that when his countrymen protested against the Covid-19 restrictions the native Austrians paraded through an immigrant quarter in Vienna and were greeted by cheers from the residents there, yet when they passed through the city’s liberal hipster district (white, by definition) they were met with boos and jeers. Similarly, on the Vienna metro, Lichtmesz was alone with a black woman and an Arab Muslim woman as a non-mask wearer (even when restrictions were lifted, all the Viennese wore masks).
What Lichtmesz noticed was that the immigrants are barbarians—in the positive sense, as with Conan the Barbarian; and, indeed, Lichtmesz is himself a barbarian—the radical right is barbarian (yet to be a European barbarian in the contemporary West is to be an oddity). The reason the immigrants are not keen on Covid-19 restrictions is because they come from societies that are either fully tribal or semi-tribal. In these environments, you live by what the village headman says and what tribal taboos and customs say—other than that, it’s up to you; and you may do whatever you want so long as there is no stronger man to stop you—the barbarian uses his own judgement.
Civilised people—in this case, decadent civilised people—do not rely on a village headman, tribal customs, or their own judgement. They were good little girls and boys who went to school, passed their exams, cleaned their fingernails, filled out applications for university, listened to what the lecturers said, received a certificate, applied for a job, said the right things at an interview, filled out forms to do with tax, and now listen to what approved experts say on iPlayer. They’re atomised rule-followers in hock to bureaucrats and journalists. Even if they go to church and their vicar is mad enough to preach an anti-mask sermon, they will defer to the bureaucratic system that trained and formed them (especially Germans and Austrians, since they just love following rules).
This is what civilisation is about—civilisation is about laws; and these laws are administered neutrally—once you became a Roman citizen it didn’t matter if you weren’t originally Roman stock, Roman law still applied to you just the same. The barbarian, by contrast, has a blood code—an unwritten code of honour (his word is his oath, he doesn’t even write it down—he can’t write, for chrissake); such men do not automatically obey a leaflet that comes through the door from the council that says “wear a mask”. Their civilised counterparts, trained since nursery school, see the health department logo and obey—just like the robots they are.
The Empire is civilised: its law applies everywhere, from Ghana to India—its science and technology is universal, it builds the same road types in Britannia and Germania and Campania; even the same language, Latin or English, is spoken by civilised people across the known world (barbarians just go “ba-ba black sheep, have you any wool?”). When the Empire goes decadent, when the administrators in the imperial bureaucracy go soft in the head, the trouble begins—those neatly trained citizens with clean fingernails flawlessly implement the perverted imperial decrees (they wear the masks).
It should be noted that in other circumstances Woes and Lichtmesz might have complained about the barbarism found in immigrants—about unsanitary Halal slaughter, or the way they stab people in shopping malls to protect “the honour of the Prophet” (only barbarians have honour, civilised people take it up with their lawyer—write a letter to Charlie Hebdo; no need to personally avenge your tribe’s honour by stabbing some garlic-infused French cartoonist). Yet, in this regard, they were united in their “barbarism” against Covid-19 regulations—and that was exactly what those hipsters in their masks thought, “Ew, smelly barbarians with their Austrian flags who refuse to follow the Empire’s regulations and have the vaccine—how uncivilised.”
The barbarian stage is synonymous with what Spengler called “the culture stage”; it’s rough and ready but it’s when everything that is interesting happens—it lays the ground for civilisation, it’s Homer and Shakespeare with gouged eyes and bastardry and swords rusted from contact with purple human blood. The radical right wants to escape the decadent civilisation—so perverted it no longer brings the refinement and beauty found in a healthy civilisation, Conan Doyle and Tennyson—and get back to the vital roots; and that means the radical right is barbaric (and that’s a good thing). We need a new barbarism to renew us, to get us in rude and vital health—but we need domestic barbarians, not foreign imports.