The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1407: The Life and Work of Ernst Jünger - Pt. 3 - w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

58 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas continues a series exploring the life and work of Ernst Jünger.Radio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Buy Me a CoffeeThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas' WebsiteThomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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If not, here's a show. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekino show. Thomas is back and we are continuing the series on Ernst Junger. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm not very well. So I think I wanted to address. And very few people address this adequately, this broader subject matter. What came to be known as the National Bolshevik

Tensi, people associated with Edward Liminov. And they almost look at it sort of as a joke. You know, Liminov was almost, he was almost like an Andy Warhol-type figure. You know, famously, Solzhen Eason called him a, quote, Little Insect who writes pornography. I think that was a bit more punitive than deserved, but Liminov really was an eccentric gadfly performance artist, and what he was drawing upon was a real

dialectical tendency that was serious. And it came out of the revolutionary conservative movement, and Younger was very much a standard bearer of it. You know, and that was a schismatic National Socialist Doctrine. People want to learn more about this in a capsule summary sort of way. Our friend Paul Gottfried, he wrote his master's thesis on Otto Strasser and Strasserism, and you can find it on archive, or at least you could,

you can download it for free, and he treats the subject matter seriously. You know, and people have this idea, too, of Strassiter. Oh, well, they were just communists who were ethically anti-Jewish. They were just German nationalists who emphasized the socialist aspect of the 25 points. It's the wrong way to characterize it. It was a real tendency to itself, and there was an intellectual weight behind it. And one of the reasons stood the test of time, at some point I think it would be worthwhile to discuss

in a dedicated capacity, the National Front, the British National Front of the 70s and 80s. Dark Enlightenment and his pal hosted me on their podcast the other day, and we briefly touched on this, and it got me thinking that it warrants a further discussion, or a more complete discussion. What came to be known as the Flag Group, you know, there was a schism in the National Front. one faction of which was very doctrinally white nationalist. There was a very clear line from Mosley to people like Colin Jordan to the mainstream standard their national front. There was a schismatic, and John Tyndall, who I actually,

I mean he's deceased now, but I had a lot of respect for him. And he wrote a really interesting book. There was a schismatic faction that was represented by people like Troy Southgate that were very much into radical traditionalism. I believe Southgate for a time, he was closely affiliated with Roberto Fiore. And Fiore was something of an unusual personage. He was probably plugged into Operation Gladiot type stuff. That's not just some dumb conspiracy theory. you know, during the years of lead and things

he was very much insinuated into those kinds of circles and things of that nature but he also was very much even ascribed to an evolent sensibility and this schismatic tendency within the National Front it became very elitist

they called themselves the political soldier faction because the flag was the National Front magazine or newspaper. Okay. And the political soldier faction, they draft this manifesto, you know, the National Front Political Soldier manifesto. And it drew heavily upon Kudreanus, you know, the bylaws of the Iron Garden things.

And that sort of partisan sensibility. He was one of the first people I know of that, you know, emphasized that there's a holy war tradition within Christianity, you know, and the political soldier faction, mind you, it didn't require people to be Christian, you know, there was plenty of neo-pagans too, but, you know, that Mujaheed sensibility was a constant across, you know, sectarian identity, identitarian lines within that perspective. But, you know, this, we in the, what I think was the new resistance, obviously there's a lot of that proverbial DNA and what in our subcultural tendencies. You know, and just the fact that there are myriad factions and we basically tolerate one another, but we have a very strong base of social capital.

I mean, that itself is very much a stracerous sensibility. You know, much as the Black Front Strasser's faction believed in what we'd consider as Americans to be an overly centralized understanding of economics at scale, they had a very devolved, communitarian understanding of how politics should be organized. It was out of Strasserer who coined that term Europe of a thousand flags, okay? And no, I'd say in some ways, although it's complicated, when you figure in the mandate of the security apparatus and particularly the secure and sites and things, I'd argue that the SS probably had more in common with black front sensibilities than it did the kind of fewer of Prenzip NSDAP mainstream. but to bring it back to a younger and where it's coming from important to the concept of their Valdgang quite literally a lark in the woods a walk in the woods younger really thought of the individual as an agent of history as an individual who

represents or is evolving into the into the archetype of the anarch that type of man who is capable of being a stride history riding the proverbial tiger that man can apprehend the historical

process and he embodies it in essential capacities but he plays a very limited role in his ability to impact it and that's essential to understanding the political autology of younger

and when he developed his political consciousness after, you know, being demobilized and, you know, returning as a war hero to the deeply fractured Weimar Republic, he got to know Georg Lukash and a lot of people involved in the common turn. Heisler, who will be familiar to people. people who, you know, have made it a habit to research strasserism and the Black Front and the peculiar interplay of communists who then became, you know, very strongly oriented towards a rightist and even national socialist resistance element will be familiar with this center play and particularly people like Heisler. And all of these people, Gregor Lukash, some of his associates, a man named Arvid Hanarch, who later went on to become a deep cover agent for Soviet military intelligence.

they belonged to this 1920s Berlin study group called the acronym was our plan, not our plan, ARPLAN. It was short for Arbite Christ for Plan de Vrcheft, roughly working circle for planned economy or planned economics. And they worked closely with the Soviet embassy in Berlin to essentially disseminate Soviet economics and Marxist

Leninist economic ideology into academic culture, which very much took place in the streets and cafes and things in those days, far more so than the classroom, but also in the classroom. And this caused a schism of sorts with the mainstream Social Democrats, the SPD. and to be clear, we think of the Social Democrats as being these milk toast liberals, which they are, but their heritage derived out of the 1848 Revolutionary Tenancy. Okay, so what was thought of as the old SPD was considerably more radical and committed to direct action. Okay, and what we can think of as the new SPD as it existed, you know, when it came to prom. prominence around towards the end of the Great War on 1917 and then at 1918 and then of course under the 20s when it Developed real cachet on the Weimar Street

They made it a point to distinguish themselves from the KPD and from the Bolsheviks They they were very much a standard bearers of parliamentarism Okay, um That's one of the reasons why the SED in East Germany came into existence because of course of course a court of course a court It wasn't the KPD that ruled East Germany, it was the party of socialist unity, which was de facto a forced... They presented as a unification between the social dems and the KPD, when a reality, the KPD and the cadre that they'd... ...maintained during the war, you know, people like Volta Ubrick, like Eric Hanuker, like Eric Milka, they absorbed the raw SPD. under pain of elimination but that's also why the SEDs standard was was the

handshake because that's socialist unity the fact that it was a handshake at gunpoint was was factored out but one of the things that set some of these contemporaries of younger apart is they were very much that the the the SPD faction that was involved in the Short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic and the uprising that created it and What was interesting is that This faction they very much rejected

the Dawes plan the lacarno treaties They believe that a nationalist panumbra, an emphasis on the blood community, was essential to the realization of true socialism. Obviously, they rejected the pacifism of the new NPD, and this led to what became this kind of national Bolshevik faction being formally expelled by the mid-20s. and Nikesh and others joined what was branded the old Social Democratic Party of Saxony because Saxony traditionally was the heartland of revolutionary socialism and later the post-war

National Socialist Resistance, you know like the Socialist Reich Party under Otto Remmer but there's a strong tradition of a nationalist branded socialism there and there was a journal that was focused on this tenancy called Wiederstand resistance and it was through the Wiederstand circle of these old social democratic party political soldiers and Saxon that was when the national

Bolshevik branding was adopted and they viewed it as a dialectical synthesis of you know Soviet economics and militant communism

Russian nationalism and you know the evidence in the blood community and the old sort of military elitism of Prussia their movement's slogan was

Spartan Pastaam Moscow. Sparta being in their mind in this obviously in a very idealized archetypal way, this racial warrior socialism. You know, a true socialism based on the blood community,

but it was an equality between elite specimens of shared blood. You know, and they went on to become very closely affiliated with our plan, again, which was this the Association for the Study of Soviet

planned economics and so Ernst Younger Greg Georg Luchoch Carl Vitfogel Frederick Healscher and a bunch of these luminaries including Carl Haushofer at least for a time they

ended up in this small cadre of national Bolsheviks and this was when Younger produced their arbiter On Payne is Their arbiter of course translates to the worker On Payne is considered Younger's most National Socialist Adjacent treaties

Their arbiter is not incorrectly viewed as its most National Bolshevik-oriented treaties And this was adopted by this R-Plan Wiedersand the Saxony circle of old social democrats come national Bolsheviks as that kind of became their blueprint for a national Bolshevik Germany of the future

and one of their strong points of emphasis was the necessity of a German-Soviet alliance both to free Germany from the oppression of Versailles, and the continued looting of the country by the allies, but also as a bulwark against, you know, Jewish financial power and the bargaining superpower capability of America.

You know, so, and again, their view is that this was dialectically, not just dialectically sound, but that it was historiographically inevitable, that there's this unity of the blood community and an ultra-nationalist sensibility and communism, which they considered to be the inevitable resolution of the modern state.

You know, that this required very little support to advance itself as a structural concept. All that really was required was for dedicated cadres to survive and fighting the streets to you know render certain that the advance of history would not be disturbed and a lot of these guys including younger rejected Hitler

not because he was anti-Semitic this cadre was very very anti-Jewish and not because they considered him to be totalist in the way that the British Social Democrats would lament, however cynically. They felt that Hitler was at base of, you know, something of a provincial burger who was politically sophisticated, naive on matters of high economics. and that he was susceptible to capitulating the demands of industry and the military

because it was geostrategically expedient which I don't agree with that assessment but it's not totally off base either Younger didn't abide this perspective towards Stalin but a lot of the a lot of this national Bolshevik fiction they look towards Stalin as representing a kind of Russian national socialism that under Stalin's tutelage and you know cadre discipline that he imposed from the top down

you know the balance was struck between the demands of industrial development and the realization of socialism to socialism within the blood community. community and how this was reconciled with the purported elitist spirits that younger in particular and people like Haushofer and Nikish himself purported to regard with the ultimate reverence and esteem well again it they could rationalize that based on their view that the historical process is, among other things, a selective mechanism for who is to be providentially identified as a standard bearer of historical tenancy in a vanguardist capacity. Now, predictably, this was a short-lived tendency in terms of its actual ability

to mobilize beyond, you know, narrow and discreet cadre formations within Saxony. And in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire, the political police, you know, the Gestapo, which then was very much under the tutelage of Gehring, the opportunity was taken to harass the national Bolshevik element, including Younger, his house was served, he wasn't detained or anything, but it was very much, it was very much made clear that the national social state and particularly the police apparatus, which had really only then been consolidated, and Saxony was a holdout. That was the last real holdout of resisting. the assimilation of German state police forces into the penumbra of the SS.

And interestingly, Arnold Brunnen, who was close to neck-ish to the National Bolsheviks, as well as being a personal friend of Joseph Goebbels, he tried to act as a sort of impresario and go-between. But then when Nickish Mick Gobles, they had, there was such bad blood developed. They almost came to blows. You know, so whatever, Garibald was interesting. And as we touched on a little bit with Dr. Jacob the other day, um, Gerbils, you know, he came up, he was the galater at Berlin, you know, which was solid KPD territory.

and during the general transportation strike it was Gerbils and the Berlin SA who collaborated with the KPD you know

to make that happen so and that wasn't his Gerbils putting on errors you know he was he was kind of one of he was kind of the last strassarist to survive you know so if

if the national Bolsheviks were going to make inroads it would have been through Gerbils you know that that that that didn't happen obviously quite the contrary but gerbils also he i mean first and foremost he was you know he was unconditionally loyal to hitler you know and um anybody who wasn't truly within the inner circle of the health confer wouldn't have known that you know but it's interesting to it's interesting to contemplate um

And also to the National Bolsheviks, and particularly Brunnan, if we can consider him to be a full-fledged member representative of that Vanguard. You know, they look to Mussolini a lot. I mean, everybody did. Mussolini was the, he was his, he's our equivalent. I mean, I'm thinking myself. I mean, not you or anybody else. but if you think like I do and if you fly the flag I do and like our forebears did, you know, Mussolini is really, he's the right-wing counterpart to Lenin, I think. And it's not my original idea. I mean, that was the view of the fear, that was the view of Serrano Seneer. That was the view of, you know, most partisans who took inspiration, you know, from the example so set

but you know Mussolini was very much a socialist of the Sorrelian type but he Mussolini had far more in common with you know the phelang and the national syndicalists

and the like that he did with you know these somebody like Gearing you know it's not some slam on Gearing but I mean that's that's a fact you know um

and Interestingly, a lot of the Nekich himself butted ahead with Ludenorf, like basically everybody else did, but after the Munich pooch, Lundorf started making what appeared to be tepid gestures

towards what became, you know, the black front. But he became increasingly impossible to deal with and increasingly eccentric and Lundor I think somebody mentioned this during the live stream the other day Lundorf became very very much involved in

this pagan belief structure and he probably crossed paths at some point with the same people that Vofram Sievers had or did and Severs ultimately became the chairman, director of the Annenerbe. And there's all kinds of weird stuff assigned to the Annenerbe, you know, because of stupid Indiana Jones movies and things.

But there's this book that really kind of started all that stuff, and that claims that this National Bolshevik Circle was this circle of occultist and black magicians. and this book also, about the first third of the books about that, but it also has a bunch of nonsense about ancient aliens and this kind of love crafty and a fortian weirdness. It's called Mourning of the Magicians, and that's kind of a soft double entendre, like mourning, like, you know, the day of the magicians, but also like the mourning as in their mourning the loss of something.

But people quite literally cite that book as somehow authoritative, you know, to this day. You just gave an idea of the level of academic rigor in discussing, you know, Nazis and, you know, the national Bolsheviks were, you know, trying to raise Odin and usher in, you know, the 1,000-year reign of, of, um, uh, Stygian darkness or whatever. That's just, uh, a peculiar aside. but ultimately Nickish and some of his associates they ended up incarcerated during the war years none of them were executed to my knowledge but they ended up in the court of Roland Freisler

and Freisler is an interesting case because you know the people's court has always held out as this Nazi kangaroo court run by these deranged racists Freisseler himself was a former communist, and Hitler contemptuously referred him as that old Bolshevik. And Freisler, in addition to being a petty tyrant, he was constantly trying to demonstrate his national social bona fides by, you know, throwing the book at people who were suspected of communist subversion. and Nick ish was sentenced

prison for the duration of the war when Berlin fell to the communists he joined the newly reconstituted KPD which then became the Socialist Unity Party

and he was awarded with a pretty a pretty prestigious position at Humboldt University and he's Berlin. He was the director for what was called the Institute for the Research of Imperialism. And later the... I think he served a term in the folkscomber, which was the unicameral legislature. But he ultimately, after the 1953 uprising, compounded with a general loss of faith in the DDR model of socialism

he ultimately made his way back to West Berlin and was largely able to avoid scrutiny because he fell under the category of a victim of the national socialist regime having served time in prison but he he ultimately became like a lot of his fellows

is something of a a national socialist. His trajectory is not unlike that of horse to Mahler. Although I think Mahler's situation was a little more complicated. But it's a case and point. I'm sure there's those who don't agree with my perspective on

epistemological things and political ontology. But the potentialities as perceived by human minds are dictated by the historical situation, whether people want to acknowledge that or not. And it was even more so in the past

before people could really access information to populate a complete conceptual horizon. Okay, and now you can. I know I'm always... I'm a third of people get tired of hearing that, I think of just some old person saying, like, you should read more books. I don't want to come off like that,

but the fact that you can access potentially, quite literally, anything ever written is a game changer, okay? But we're still bounded by the parameters of what's conceptually possible. I don't mean in physical terms, I mean in historical capacities, and, you know, that's something that doesn't change. But I, it's not, you can't just, you can't just point to these figures like, Maller and some of these lesser Roeth Army Fraction veterans are some of these people who were very insinuated into the DDR Stalinist system, who then became open national socialist. You can't just chalk it up to eccentricity or cynicism or something.

You know, there's a real phenomenon there of a historical and psychological and sociological nature. And yeah, to bring it back to Younger, you know, Younger, he consistently throughout the 20s and 30s, you know, both of his, he praised what he viewed as authentic, proletarian and or peasant uprisings as they occurred. I mean, obviously, he wasn't going out in the street, you know, cheering on Rosa Luxembourg or something. But, you know, again, he, He viewed potentialities as dictated by the historical situation. And, you know, viewed individual men as having a very limited role to play in that, other than, you know, wants to sign some kind of role under their ability to apprehend these occurrences at scale. and their willingness and capability to act within the zeitgeist

and obviously in ways that are determined as well as limited by providence or by the historical process you know and to be clear you've developed a lot of these ideas during the war and if you read Storm of Steel

it's there it's nuanced and it's subtle but it's there and immediately after the war in 1921 or I think he wrote it in 1920 and it was published in 1992 their conf out and there is air litmus the psychology of combat the crux of it is that the essential aspects of war and warfare derive from the human mind Okay, and in purely and truly Hegelian terms, because the advance of history and the dialectical process is it's based and essentially psychological, essentially all of the aspects, the entire architecture, metaphysical architecture of warfare, you know, is contained within every man and woman. So what distinguishes warfare from the seasons

although it arrives like the seasons and it's just as overwhelming and just as impersonal what's different about it is that this reflects the warlike forces and essential metaphysical elements within the human mind

without which you know it's the phenomena wouldn't exist. Okay, so if you can understand politics, you've got to understand warfare. Because whether you accept or reject Klaus Wittes is dictum,

you can't deny that, you know, high politics is so distinguished by that designation is because it's the zenith of political activity. you know, which is power activity. And power activity through organized violence at massive scale is the zenith of that expression.

And that expression, again, derives essentially and wholly from the human psyche. So to penetrate the reality and the nature and the aspects and parameters of warfare, you've got to penetrate the human psyche. and Younger identified the driving element of that process within the human psyche

and individually collectively as vis fatalis, vital energy. This is the quintessential ultimate metaphysical aspect that animates man to

creative destruction in all things. and however devastating warfare may be, with the exception of a truly extinction level event, like a total nuclear war, the unleash of some biological agent that can no longer be controlled and exterminates mankind or makes it impossible for poitists to result in procreation or something, exempting those counterfactual outliers there will always be some

regenerative force that will reassert itself even after something like a devastating plague but what's most remarkable about warfare again is that unlike a plague or unlike an asteroid strike or unlike a tsunami war drives entirely from

vis fatalis you know sure there's contributoring factors within the historical process and within the physical environment but those aren't the driving engine of warfare so warfare is always

it's warfare stands alone and that's why Younger was a big admirer of Georges Batai who wrote some pretty horrible stuff I don't mean horrible as in like bad oh it's horrible

I mean, although arguably that's that too, but he wrote some really disgust, viscerally disgusting and disturbing stuff. He's very much in the vein of DeSad, okay? Although I think he's a lot more with Wild. I don't I don't care to read him again, but there's more there

than there is the DeSod. And if he, Michael Jones, our friend is right, and Desaad was at base a political thinker as he identified himself as, you know, identified himself as,

and he was essentially a man of the revolutionary left and was kind of the ultimate Jacobin, degenerate. George Battai is kind of the decide of the right. Okay? If you're going to look like that. And Younger was sort of fascinated

by some of Batai's work product and particularly the story of the eye. And Younger, Batai supposedly We belong to this cult that would, or there's this discussion group that had cultic aspects that would study human sacrifice and its meaning, and its enduring percentage across unrelated human cultures and things.

And Younger wrote extensively about the symbolic psychological aspects of human sacrifice and how, you know, whether you're talking about ancient Saxons, whether you're talking about Aztecs, whether you're talking about, you know, majority Japanese, this idea of sacrifice and self-sacrifice, you know, being this ecstatic, orgionistic thing, that's the greatest experience and honor of the individual can have, the idea is that in the primitive historical mind,

And, you know, the, in man's ability to perceive Bisfitalis, and a very visceral and sanguinary and, you know, an individual way, intimate way, it's understanding that, you know, through this sacrificial destruction, a direct and proximate participation in, you know, the in rebirth and the regenerative force that will assert itself in the aftermath is that kind of deliverance from all things prosaically human and a way to of you know ascending the you know the the the the the the the side of uh the godhead you know um you know that's an interesting postulate and it's it's uh it's uh it's uh it's uh it's very

youngian in some ways you know and that's it uh and I mean it's the same did younger have correspondence with young that's a good question I speculate so um but yeah that's a good question I they they may have both kept it secret um owing to political concerns I mean young was Younger had a difficult relationship with the Reich authorities, but Hitler held him in tremendous esteem, and vice versa. But that's against a lot of people. That's what's interesting, because people can't get their mind around this,

even people who are reasonably educated. There was a lot of, the National Socialist Party wasn't particularly popular in absolute terms. Adolf Hitler was unbelievably popular, and there were people who viewed the NSDAP with a certain disdain that they kind of viewed government generally. There are people who viewed them as no better than the KPD, but those same people would view to Hitler

as this incredible messianic personage. You know, and Brendan Sims, who's written some awesome autobiography's of Hitler, he gets into that. But yeah, I should look into that. I should know that. I'm not, there's some fascinating stuff about Yonge ridiculously, I don't want to spin this off on a weird esoteric tangent. I mean, I've got anything, I like weird and esoteric thing.

That's not what we're talking about here right now, but I, one of the reasons I stopped writing anything important on, on X or shitter, or like the Rabbi Elon Musk, you know, gay men's, Gloryhole Finder app is I wrote this thing

and said I got to a conversation with some kid who was really into Young which is cool you know and young when he Young died somewhat suddenly

I think he I think he died of a heart attack basically he was doing a lot of experimentation with tarot cards not with those cards like at the start

Ghostbusters he's kind of where they call him he came out of Perzicology like there was like four or five during They were coded the 4-500 symbols, and you're supposed to see how many hits the subject would get. Behavours have used that, too.

I'm talking about actual tarot cards. And that's why in Dune, from Dune Messiah onward, the Dune tarot, which you can buy in Arachus during the Hodge, becomes a subplot. But people are like, why the hell would a, why the hell would a learned guy, and a guy who was, you know, at a background in hard sciences and stuff, like Herbert being a tarot card. Because the same reason Young was,

and Herbert was a huge youngy. And Young's notion was, well, the reason why there's these repeating patterns in tarot cards is because archetypes in almost a neoplatonist way, although we didn't characterize it in terms of that kind of Byzantine mysticism or whatever. Okay, there's these repeating there's these repeating forms,

these familiar forms in the human mind and natural associations are drawn between those forms and things within the human experience. Okay, both a priori and a posteriori. All right. So, if you create a deck of playing cards that contains those familiar archetypal forms and symbols. Subconsciously over time as you play with like solid, that's what a much of

solitary with those cards, you might not realize that you're counting the cards and you're drawing into a pattern, but your subconscious mind does. And depending on the array of those cards and what repeats itself and what doesn't, presumably you're recognizing or discerning things within your environment and your mind is connecting them to these symbolic artifacts, which reflect those things in an associative capacity. So you can learn things about what the subject is detecting is in his environment that doesn't realize yet. And it's got a huge predictive power.

Okay, potentially. I'm not saying that's a falsifiable premise, although it might be, depending on how you were to devise the experiment. But, you know, Young was a serious guy. and the fact that literally a charlatan con man like Freud was considered to be in the same category as him tells you a lot about the state of things and how to be delicate about it the perceptions of otherwise presumably rational people were profoundly worked and manipulated but um forgive me if that was too tangential but uh you know yeah obviously to bring it back Younger's the psychology

of combat, that whole essay the view of Vince Vitalis and the rest of it there's obviously a that obviously relates very strongly to Youngian concepts and again

I mean Younger was first, last and always a man of war but he was very young and also fresh off the experience when he wrote this essay, you know, so I think it, I think you, however it's thought me of changed and matured in later years, I think there's a validity to it that there

wouldn't otherwise be under the subject matter. And that's why people looked at, you know, the Storm of Steel was despised by pacifists. And, progressives and liberals, and to some degree still is. That's why Younger was redacted really from the university curriculum for so long, and that's changed a lot. I mean, the university curriculum has become obsolete

now, but the fact that Younger has made a comeback, especially among youngsters, is just fantastic, but it's, the Storm of Steel is, in a lot of ways, the rebuttal to All Quiet on the Western Front.

And when you can't get away from, Younger wasn't a warmonger or some sort of vulgar braggart or somebody who or a sadist or someone who took pleasure and hurting people. But he did praise war as a process and he did glorify it to some degree because that's when life reaches its most intense pitch as it were. and pure human energies are freed from any physical or social or psychological constraint. But they're not hedonic impulses. They're impulses that serve the historical process and the creative process in the most profound capacities. And in a capacity that's not ordinarily accessible,

because, again, man plays a very limited role in... in the historical dialectic, the exception being, you know, politics, qua politics, but especially high politics, because the awesome power of warfare and its creative energies derive, again, from properties of mind. And the same can't be said, again, of anything else. You know, the deluge didn't derive from, you know, the, you know, the, the mind of Noah and the collective mind of, you know, the collective consciousness of every other man, woman on earth when Noah was, you know. Or if you're one of our neo-pagan friends, you know, Ragnarok didn't occur because, you know, it was, it was willed into existence.

I realize there's a battle at Ragnarok like Armageddon, but Ragnarok happens just because it's determined, it's in the stars and the cosmos. It's not in human minds and ours, to clarify. You know, and that's

and also, I mean, because I think that takes place in purely historical time becomes existence sacred time. You know, and that's one of the, the correspondence, Younger did correspond with Eliotty, and that's well documented. And that's one of the, their idea, it's a Schopenhauer-derived idea,

it's a essential measure. The idea of sacred time and legendary time that exists beyond the past, present, to the future, and it exists in some liminal, spatial and temporal realm. And, you know, warfare is the stuff of legend. Whether people, I mean, just in a value-neutral way, it's not good or bad. You know, you can say, you know, I don't, I'm against the war. That's like saying, I'm against it raining, okay? War doesn't care that you're against it, you know?

In more prosaic terms, it's the same when, you know, it's like, when I hear people say, like, they talk about how they feel about guns. It's like, I can assure you that if the gun's on the table, that gun doesn't care, how you feel about it. You know, I mean, like, nor does it as a screwdriver, you know, and nor it is a, I don't know, nor does a rubber chicken, but obviously the potentialities of the, the gun or the screwdriver are significant than that of the rubber chicken, unless some would disagree. You know, allow the river chicken, you'd be surprised, but that's, uh, I think that's all I got on

this, man. All right. What do you, um, what do you think? is there another episode or two or it's up to you man it's your show literally um i could thought there's always stuff to talk about on younger but um you know whatever whatever you want to do you tell me man um let's do one more let's do one more episode and uh you can do a wrap on it yeah i'll probably talk about i'll probably talk about storm of steel then because that seems appropriate yeah i mean it's your show if you're amenable today oh absolutely yeah i mean

sitting on the shelf right there while red so yeah yeah yeah yeah no that's great and i hope i hope this wasn't too esoteric or we're kind of scared shut oh i don't think so all right um everybody head on over to thomas's substack real thomas seven seven seven at subs um dot substack dot com. That's pretty much the place you can find him now because X is, yeah, I think we talked about this on the live stream, but if people don't listen, if people don't listen or watch the live stream, you know, it's, I don't think it's any coincidence, it's less than 12 hours after you get mentioned on one of the biggest podcasts in the world, your X account goes away. I speculate it was not coincidental, but it's for the best, man. I mean, I need to be doing stuff

what I'm doing here with you, you know, and the stuff I recorded burden, and I need to be working on my long form, man. I don't, I don't need to be fucking around in some dumb platform where I get shadow banned and then, like, band, and I, there's just dumb

conversations all the time. It's for the best, man. And yeah, you can tell my website, if you want to find my Instagram and other stuff, it's, it's number seven, H-MAS-777.com, but yeah, yeah, thanks for hosting you, man, as always. Just to tease, everybody. I was stuck in a waiting room this morning, and I've already read the first part of Thomas's next book,

and I think people are going to enjoy this a lot. Oh, good, yeah, thanks for reading it, man. I don't like to give people homework assignments, but I hope I made it time passed. Yeah. All right, man. Talk to you soon. Thank you.

Yeah, man, thank you.