The Pete Quiñones Show - The Radical Traditionalist School of Philosophy - w/ Thomas777 - Complete

Episode Date: February 22, 2026

3 Hours and 54 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.This is the complete audio to the four episodeson the Radical Traditionalist school, which features thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre, René Guénon, Julius Evola, and Mircea Eliade.Thomas' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas 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.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cignon show. Thomas is here, and we're going to take a little diversion away from the Continental Philosophy series, but as Thomas is about to explain, it relates to it. So take it away, Thomas. Hey, first of all, how are you doing today? I'm doing pretty well, man. Health is better? Yeah, I've been feeling pretty well.

I mean, I still have, like, respiratory symptoms. I can't seem to shake. But, yeah, overall, I feel pretty well, man. I want to talk about the radical traditionalist school of philosophy, which is a discrete intellectual tradition. And a lot of people don't understand that. And those that understand that basic posture with, they don't really understand what it is.

The part of that is because, like, Pop Academe, they claim that everybody from, like, Nietzsche to Alexander Dugan, to Ellen to Benoit to, you know, Edmund Burke is part of this thing called traditionalism. That's not correct. You know, we're talking about a very

discreet body of thought. I'd include Heidegger and Joseph de Maistra in there, too. Although some people probably wouldn't, but the same

imperatives that frame radical traditionalism, it's metaphysical. physics and its ethics and it's partial it's about the human condition translated to a political

theoretical construct you know that that's what de Maistra and that's what Heidegger is and De Maestro also people like Carl Loith and people like Isaiah Berlin they claim he was the progenitor

of what became fascist thought I actually accept that that's true you know, obviously they were suggesting that in punitive terms. Although Loith was not a liberal. You know, he's somebody who's ill-understood, kind of like Leo Strauss is, and they were avid correspondents. When I say ill-understood, I mean, the fact that they were anti-liberal doesn't make them right-wing or, like, didn't make them pro-fascist or something, quite the contrary.

But, you know, so Joseph de Maestro, he's essential to understand the position that I consider to be the the right-wing perspective or aspect of the resistance as it stands contra-globalism. Okay, it's not conservatism, and it's nothing to do with that. Okay, radical traditionalists aren't trying to conserve things.

You know, we'll get into, like, why that's misguided when people suggest that that's their ambition. You know, in the traditionalist view, the entire conservative enterprise. It's it's basically a bourgeoisie liberal tenancy that, you know, holds attachments to certain institutions in their deteriorated modern variant at least, you know, things like the nuclear family or things at least like nominal concepts of private property, you know, but they, but this idea that, you know, there's somehow the standard bearer of some

perennial tradition like that's laughable and it's equally it was guided too for people to act like thinkers like the maestro were conservative like he wasn't at all and um he was a very very very heterodox catholic he was a freemason he defended the Jesuits now admittedly in that era the Jesuits were totally different than the era today but um they were very much at odds with you know the the catholic

leadership and the holy see you know he demysse supported the american revolution wholeheartedly you know um and it's not because you you'll you'll read like modern uh or contemporary scholars were like so he was a friend of democracy of publication no no no no no no the american revolution had nothing to do with democracy like the way he looked at it was this was an aristocratic yeomanry that was exhibiting, you know, this kind of like energetic tenancy towards the creation of a, of a, of a, of a new state based on higher forms and potentialities of human action that were nonetheless based on, you know, transcendent, the principles, you know, both historical and theological and nature. You know, there was, there's nothing egalitarian about this. There's nothing leveling about this, quite the contrary. You know, like, when these, that's one of the really weird things about the current illiteracy of the left. I mean, they've always been pseudo-intellectuals, like, going back centuries. But now it's like they can't make up their mind.

Like, on the one hand, they'll claim that, you know, America was a monstrous enterprise because only this white male warrior Yeomanry. had the franchise but then on the other hand they'll claim that america was basically this kind of like jacob in socialist paradise that wasn't realized yet but that's um you know and um such that people like the maestro when he talked about democracy he was talking about in the actual meaning of the term you know the demos being the subject of it you know when um when regime people invoke democracy, they mean the literal opposite of what the term means. You know, they're talking about this social engineering regime, you know, based on these kinds

of radical humanist postulates, you know, in these anti-traditional conceits and this kind of tradition such that any more it even abides a discreet and intelligible philosophical. tradition they're drawing at people like bentham and stuff okay like they don't this this has nothing in common with um you know uh understanding the held by people like uh you know like um the greeks you know during um they're in um the reign of pericles or whatever which i'd consider to be the zenith of classical democracy but be as it may um um The core thinkers of radical traditionalism, I,

Saeed Osain Nasir, I think he's still alive. He's an Iranian academic. He, uh, was educated at MIT, among other places. You know, unlike Wolfgang Smith. He came up through the hard sciences. But, uh, Nasir had an interesting background. He wasn't jumping around a lot,

but there's no more cogent way to explain this and describe these personages and why they're significant within this school of thought. Nasir, he found himself at odds with Khomeini's revolutionary government, which is interesting, because Nassir was no friend of the shop. And the Shah was actually a terrible individual. I know the internet guys think he was based. he based he was not at all

he was a kleptocratic pimp but um one of the interesting things about the Iranian revolution is that one of the ways Khomeini was able to

when he came back from exile you know he'd been exiled from Iraq for decades okay and um the Shah had a approached um the Iraqi regime

you know this this was a this was basically like in the week of like the bathist descendancy, you know and they'd worked out something of a concord I mean which makes sense because I Iraq along with Iran

as you know like the Shia heartland and Comini had been in Iraq and he was unceremoniously banished but Comani was Comani when he returned from exile the revolution

as it was developing in the street. It was these pious Shia elements who were the core, but they also, there's a bunch of left-wing labor agitators, and Ahmadinejad, for example, is like the legacy of that tendency. That's why you still find these guys in the Iranian government. There were, there were kind of right-wing social nationalists among them. It was this kind of broad coalition, okay? And to Khomeini and to a many elements within the revolutionary cadre. They view the guy like Nassir as like a kind of reactionary. You know, this guy's an elitist, you know, even though he doesn't like the Shah,

and he views it as a corrupt element. He still has no problem with monarchy. You know, he's not the kind of person we should permit, you know, within, you know, the intelligentsia. You know, because people like Kim have a tendency to be able to corrupt revolutionary imperatives and open the door to you know kind of revolutionary activity but Nasir was very much a disciple of René Guillaume

and René Guillain was a Frenchman who was a convert to Islam I don't want to get into discussion as how people feel about those kinds of conversions it's not important but what is important is that Islam especially on the Shia side in my opinion plays a huge role in the traditional school of thought and in terms of praxis their the significance of their participation in the resistance counterglobalism can't be overstated that's one of the reasons why it really really irritates me when stupid people talk about they hate Islam that's

unbelievably ignorant okay and the fact that you don't like some random Pakistani criminal who's deployed the euro up under the auspices of refugee relief when in reality it's part of the Zionist ethnic cleansing efforts declaring that that guy is some instantation of Islam makes you just a complete ignoramus okay one thing is nothing to do with the other okay and the traditionalist school from René Gion to Julius Evela to Murcia Eliotti to Joseph de Maestra is highly ecumenical they're not syncretic they're not saying that all religions are equal. They're not saying that, you know,

um, you should, uh, abandon your own tradition and, you know, worship in a mosque or in an Orthodox seminary or in a Protestant church, because it's all some sort of loose, um, you know, ill-defined spiritualism that, you know, and there's nothing holistic about it. That's not what I'm talking about. That's not what they're talking about.

What they're talking about is that, various permutations of religiosity, like true deep religiosity, are the kind that, you know, shapes the prime symbols of living cultures in a timeless capacity, and that, you know, informs the configuration of institutions, cultural and political and social, and that dictates where people devise their concept of authority and legitimacy they're in and duty and aesthetics and everything else they're saying that like various religious uh um traditions and uh tendencies they're all permutations of this um you know that the the mind of god is received by man okay um and somebody like to mycia would go a step further.

And while he wasn't a racialist in the sense people think of it in the 20th and 21st century capacity, he would say that there's an organic and historically contingent and culturally

dictated basis for how religiosity expresses itself within discrete cultures. So being down on a great civilization like I ran because they're not Presbyterians like me is

really, really, really stupid. Okay? And plus to that itself is a liberal postulate. Because you're saying like basically everybody's the same and should receive you know divine imperatives

and perceive them the same way regardless of race or historical you know historically contingent variables or you know linear memory of an epigenetic

character you know the if you're a real if you take race seriously if you take deep culture seriously you would not only expect

there to be this kind of sectarian diversity but you'd welcome its existence because it's yet another discrete signifier, you know, that demonstrates the insularity of races and cultures, okay? And that kind of thing should be curated, okay, obviously, because the eradication of it is one of the prime imperatives of, you know, the regime social engineering paradigm, because it wants. to reduce everybody to this kind of low humanist, deculturated, deracinated,

sort of a, you know, slave cast, as it were. Okay. So that's what we're talking about. And just to get into just to get into Renegion a bit, you know, because again, I think

the Maestro and Renéant Gion are most important. In terms of praxis, arguably, Julius Evela, particularly some of his later stuff, probably holds more significance to a contemporary partisan. But, you know, theory is paramount, in my opinion, because without theory, there is no praxis, among other things. But the, uh, you know, essentially identified,

He said when we're talking about traditional civilizations, contra modern ones, you know, not modern in terms of technological developmental as a factor, modern in terms of their rejection of metaphysics and their rejection of God. You know, like what we think of as, you know, the conventions of the enlightenment, the ideological conventions of it. you know that's that's synonymous of modernity for purposes of what the eon was talking about you know one of the one of the things that that's done is it's eliminated metaphysical points of reference you know when every civilization prior you know great and small or uh you know dynamic and and and um brilliant or primitive and savage all civilizations were characterized by the recognition of a higher order than man you know even those that exhibited some humanist tendencies you know and their ethics or their aesthetical judgments or their you know what have you um the understanding that you know elites only derive legitimacy from a transcendental mandate and the principles and values necessary and adequate to constitute, you know, the, not just the mandate, but the kind of guiding ethical

disposition of authority, it has to represent some sort of pathway to higher knowledge, at least in terms of its intended structure. And when leadership fails in that regard, traditionally they're understood who have lost their mandate, okay? That gets a bit complex, and we'll get into De Meister's take on that. These will be the French Revolution, because that is the case in point, really. Modern civilization in contrast is the deliberation. opposite of that you know and this isn't accidental there's this mythology that of you know moderns

that well you know the scientific method you know and the enlightenment you know literally bring this out of darkness it just revealed to us that these things aren't true by some sort of splendid accident that's nonsense this was an ideal this was and is an ideological program um to deconstruct um not just the tendency of the body politic to believe in God but to do everything to make higher belief impossible

okay by essentially breaking down the institutions that are suggestive of such things even if they're not you know and obviously the eradication of anything so dedicated you know that's something Wolfgang Smith

used to make the point a lot that you know one of the ways that particularly the anglosphere like handles religiosity is they try and appropriate it in a way not unlike the communists did and just turn it into this kind of goofy almost like going to a bowling league or something you know like oh i'm religious i go to this i go to this building where there's you know it's kind of like a movie theater and this guy you know like joel austin he talks about self-help sorts of things and how to manage my money better you know and then and the And then we go into this big room and drink lemonade together. You know, like, it really, it's deliberately shorn of anything suggestive of the divine or heading towards worship. And I know that there's a trad Catholic, like, trad. It's not traditionalism. It's trad.

And there's a lot of problems with those people. but I know that one of their favorite one of their one of their favorite straw man is you know oh that's Protestantism or this imaginary Protestant church that you know due to its

iconoclasm it did away with you know all the all the edifying aspects of religion and and you know shut the doors of the cathedral so people had no choice but to draw upon

these debased and kind of banal modalities. That's not true. Okay. Radical pietism, basically the force has almost got a monastic degree of introspection vis-a-vis, you know, the inner witness on congregants. Okay, like I'm not, I don't want to start some sort of sectarian beef here, but. But you can't say that, you know, a sectarian orientation that, you know,

suggests that people should be guided at all times by scripture, which quite literally, you know, is supposed to be timeless and resound in sacred time, as Mirzia Elioti described it. You can't suggest that that's something like some secularizing tendency. But moving on. You know, Kiyon, obviously, he was kind of the quintessential orientalist. You know, he married an Egyptian woman. He converted to Islam.

He became very insinuated into a Sufi school of thought. And a Sufi, a lot of people call it mysticism. There are Sufi mystics, and there's aspects of that in some of its permutations. The better way to think of it is metaphysics. like higher metaphysics in Islam derives in large measure from from Sufi philosophies and interestingly

many alaweights who may or may not be occulted Christians that's an open-ended question and I'm not qualified to discuss it in deeper capacities A lot of Aloitites find their way to kind of the study of higher metaphysics through various schools of Sufism. Okay.

The reason why Dion gravitated to Islam was because he believed that in the Orient, he said that there still are pockets of capital T traditional modalities of life. you know they're beleaguered in his mind um they're at risk of being wiped away you know by the triumph of this kind of uh anti-god modernist ideology and its various permutations but it's still extant you know he talk a lot about how you know if you go into like the mountains in india you'll people who are different from the majority racial populations in India, who, in his estimation, were vestiges of the higher racial caste who still practiced the kind of pure, like, proto-Indo-European spiritual, you know, practice.

he believed that you know places were an Islamic way of life still thrived you know obviously not like in the Ottoman court or something which was you know in a lot of ways as debased as as these secular Occidental regimes

but you know nevertheless you know within within the Orient and within the parameters of the Islamic governmental structure. You know, you still could find pure iterations of it. And Osama bin Laden had something of the same sensibility. I'm not saying he was like René Guillaume. There were very, very different kinds of men. but um there's something to this you know so that was guillons that that was kind of what

informed his sensibilities in this regard you know it wasn't just the kind of fetishism of the anthropos the cultural anthropologist or um you know the kind of wandering european who uh you know is kind of able to insinuate himself to do to a combination of cunning and and genuinely curious vigor can like insinuate himself into these alien cultures and kind of master them

from a perspective of, you know, of deep reverence that what, I mean, that obviously those are aspects kind of enduring aspects of the European minus. soul but that wasn't his primary motivation you know and again uh if your entire life's work is you know i need to understand you know how can traditional ways of life and traditional data as wolfgang smith called it how can that thrive and be recognized for what it is like what are the conditions

precedent where that sort of thing can still exist, you know, in a spontaneous way that is psychologically resonant and instinctive, you know, this is totally different than people deliberately trying to resurrect dead forms, mind you. Okay, because any kind of deliberate effort to do that, I mean, that itself is just a sort of modern psychological coping mechanism or thought experiment.

You know, that's the opposite of what we're talking about here. But, you know, if you're somebody like Gion, who wanted to discover, again, like what the conditions were where such you know,

spiritual practices can thrive, you know, that you would find yourself, you would find your way to the kinds of environments that he did. You know, and that, and that would be your frame of reference as a, as a, as a scholar and as a partisan. And Guillain was absolutely both. You know, and the, you know, and the, One of the things, excuse me, one of the ties that binds conceptually of capital T traditionalist thoughts is the concept of primordial tradition or Sophia Parenis. You'll find that phrase a lot in traditionalist writings. You know, it's not, traditional societies didn't really. draw a firm distinction between metaphysical aspects and historical aspects of cultural mind and memory.

There was an understanding, too, that the origin of institutions is somewhat mysterious. You know, and that something really like enlightenment modernity never accounts for. it's just kind of purely horizontal understanding of data you know whether they're talking about you know whether they're talking about biological phenomenon

you know like that Darwin's paradigm it never gets into any sort of horizontal causation or I mean or any kind of vertical causation it's usually horizontal you know it doesn't make any sense anyway but it's okay so matter just created itself

or matter just exists, but then like life got insinuated into matter somehow. You know, you're just supposed to not address that. Because according to Galilean science, which is totally outmoded, by the way, obviously, you know, that we just don't believe in God because there's just not something we believe in. It's like this weird tautology. And interestingly, like, we'll... Gang Smith too, he died if he had his, even in his late 90s, he still very much had his mind about him. You know, and he wrote, his background was in quantum physics. So he specifically write a lot about

how these deep field telescopes and the emergence of, you know, theories of things like black hole cosmology. You know, it's really repudiating everything that was proper. popping up however weekly the kind of scientist perspective you know not scientific but I'm about scientism you know this idea of you know emergent cosmological theories repudiating any any possibility of a divine origin of, you know, matter and time. And that's a totally outmoded way of thinking about things. Like basically if you stop the clock, like the proverbial clock of human knowledge

pre-Einstein and Heisenberg, you could arguably make that case. But, you know, it's laughable these days to see. speak in those terms. You know, I mean, don't get me wrong. That's only part of the equation. You know, like the godlessness of the modern condition. It has to do with, you know, ways of life and historical memory and the ability of people to receive primordial knowledge and to, contextualize those things within a conceptual paradigm that's both historical and metaphysical. It's

not just a matter of, you know, the science, not being hostile to, you know, the theological postulence or something. But it is an important aspect of it because I'm constantly brushing up against people who mean well and aren't stupid, but they're not particularly sophisticated, intellectually. And they act as if the left, is somehow like intellectually sophisticated or something. They're not at all. They're proudly ignorant, you know, and such that they can muster any sort of, like the only thing they have or had was the bully pulpit.

You know, that's one of the reasons why they're so censorship praised, you know, because they have, they literally have nothing to stand on, you know, and that's important, that's not just a flex. I mean, it's important to keep in mind. you know in in terms of understanding how the the kind of prevailing zeitgeist is overton window if you prefer as is shifting but the uh you know in gillon like marcia eliotti and like um evela he believed in a hyperborean tradition um you know he believed in essentially uh a fall within the civilizational cycle, you know, which is tantamount or can be understood is

metaphorically, not unlike, you know, the, the divine right of kings, it's, it's mischaracterized by pop history books. Like, what it derives from is, is that, you know, the king's sovereign lordship over his domain is not unlike God's dominion over the universe, with all that that entails, you know, because that's the transcendental model of, you know, authority and justice and sovereign legitimacy. So the fall of man, you know, quite literally is played out. in temporal capacities, you know, in cycles of civilization, you know, and, um, the Guillen comes back again and again. Obviously, this would have been at the forefront of

his mind because in Egypt, you know, he would have been, and he was very much a man who was, was very respected there, you know, being this, this cultured Frenchman who was a great intellectual who spoke all these languages and had all this wisdom and, You know, he married a woman of a very high standing. You know, so he would have found himself, you know, in Cairo, and, you know, in the midst of these great monuments and these towering necropolis structures and things. it had to be on his mind in a very active sense, you know, like these people I'm among and these men whose ways and, you know, belief structures have made mine own, they can't make things like this anymore, you know, and that's very profound, you know, but that's, obviously, the enlightening perspective is, again, it's like a pure

inversion that like man is someone being elevated from this state of brutishness and ignorance and he's literally mired in darkness which again forces one to kind of blind their eyes to

you know iterations of high culture from the past you know I you know so how if man was mired in darkness you know essentially until um you know the 16th century or whatever like how are there you know how are these grand monuments that this day nobody can divinate how they were built that were erected

5,000 years before christ you know it's nobody can explain these things or i mean how was it that you know people like tolemy were mapping the stars or that uh you know essentially the greatest intellectual traditions came out of Doric Athens and have never been duplicated

you know so I'm supposed to believe that these people were all basically you know a bunch of a bunch of unwashed barbarians and that uh you know Pride Month represents like the the zenith of

of high culture you know, Pericles was an idiot but like Donald Trump is like a great a great leader of men, you know? I mean like obviously being deliberately obtuse, but this idea of like man being uplifted

from, you know, ignorance that that doesn't make logical sense, but it doesn't make metaphorical sense either. You know, that's just not the way and that's not That's not the way, that's not the way human life is.

I mean, that's, that's not the way organisms are. That's not, that's not the way matter is. You know, that something gets more robust and stronger as it ages. I mean, there's good things about aging, obviously, and like, it confirms wisdom and stuff. But, you know, this idea that, you know, this idea that, you know, this idea that, you know, things, that things begin, as a as um

kind of like proto-human and then the end as in some perfected state I mean that doesn't you know it's not just counterintuitive it's at odds with you know the the human experience

if nothing else to say nothing of the metaphysical um you know illogic of it but um you know and that's something that's why you know the traditional is at least the ones who are you know worthy of the moniker they're not anti-science at all like again um you know Nassir Renegh Gioen himself, like these men came from the sciences. You know, Wolfgang Smith made the point.

He said that, you know, moderns will tell you these secular humanist moderns, they'll hold out something like scripture and say, well, scripture informs us that the apostles, they saw Christ raised, you know, from the dead. And he, you know, he was elevated from, the earth and presumably he disappeared into the heavens you know and the Galilean

you know the objection of the Galilean science was well you know space being infinite it has no high or low so there you know even if I accept that such an ascension was possible you know which it's not it's meaningless

because there is no true ascension because there is no up there is no down but I mean like that itself is meaningless if you understand even as a layman you know general relativity you know there very much can be like a heaven or a hell

there very much can be an up and town um distilled down the kind of dummy terms these things can be anywhere okay because it's a matter of perspective and situatedness you know um

Rudolph Boltman the kind of nonsense that he promulgated that underlay a lot of what became sort of the the milk toast sort of Billy Graham kind of Protestantism as well as Vatican 2

his whole mandate as he saw it was to demathologize Christian scriptures like according to Boltman and his intellectual progeny. You know, well, before there was an understanding of true cosmology, you know, there was people spoke in pure metaphors.

Like, nobody really believed in things like, you know, the descent of man or ascension or resurrection. You know, like people actually accepted this garbage, you know, especially like mid-century. Probably, this probably like was earnestly, believed until like the 80s. Like even in sadly even in a lot of you know seminary schools and such environments you know but that's uh but i mean to accept something like that first of all you're you're drawing up on science that is decades out of date at best and arguably centuries

but also you know you don't really understand metaphysics of the human condition you know and you don't really understand what we're talking about in terms of a cosmological presentation. And you don't understand the anthropic principle, which is key to, you know, forwarding an argument for or against this subject matter from a scientific perspective. You know, but the point is this is one of the ways that, you know, the regime and, you know, the regime and, um, but the point is, this is one of the ways that, you know, the regime and, the kind of post-war consensus is drawn upon these enlightenment ideas that are nakedly ideological you know again like it's a one of the big lies of of history by the proponents of these things that well these were just accidental discoveries or something you know no they weren't revelatory at all they weren't discovered

they weren't the subject of a rigorous methodology these are ideological postulates and you know you don't this idea that you can just abolish hermeneutics by appeal to you know an outmoded science I mean that's that's preposterous but that's kind of where this cultural schizophrenia comes from in a place like America because in addition to people not understanding what traditionalism is like when I you know when we use that word the reason why people have a bad, you know, feeling about religion, because to them, like, religion is, you know, some,

some guy like Joel Osteen, or it's Ted Cruz saying illiterate stuff about why he has a kink for pretending to be Jewish and saying things that make no sense. Or, you know, when people think of religion, they're like, oh, my parents have me, go to this bullshit, you know, uh, kind of glorified VFW Hall with this boring guy would talk about how, you know, you shouldn't be racist and, you know, basically give us these kinds of school marmal lectures that were devoid of anything interesting or metaphysical or moral or, you know, but that's, like, people have to understand that it really has nothing to do with tradition. That's some weird, it's some weird social convention that is how, you know, you know, this kind of professional class of academics and commissars, you know, who had some sort of vestigial interest in academic theology,

just kind of like found their way to this role, you know, and that's, because that's like what's the acceptable version of these kind of state forms that, you know, in their true manifestation are considered at best, highly subversive. at worst basically criminal you know so that's when we talk about capital eat traditionalism we're not we're not talking about conservatism we're not pretending it's the 1200s we're not we're not talking about any of that we're talking about religion we're not talking about churchy-anity or uh this kind of lame like boozy stuff or you know this kind of cornball stuff where you know it's it's it's It's people saying, you know, what religion is about, like, you know, having manners and not using bad language and, you know, saying please and thank you like you're in kindergarten or something. Like I, you know, and this is important because, like I said, it's, I mean, don't get me wrong.

The last thing I want to do is to try to convince masses of people the merit of our position. That would be a fool's errand, but that's also not what Vanguard is due. but people otherwise are sophisticated and politically intelligent and stand by their culture and their race and their heritage. This is a hurdle sometimes must be overcome with them because this, you know, this is one of the reasons why, like, abusive languages is such a, it has such a deleterious effect on conceptual life. And that's very deliberate because, you know, then you have to, you kind of have to, you kind of have to, disabuse people of these meanings that they've developed negative associations

with, along to the kind of endless repetition of them by ideological commissars his entire intention and mission is to pervert the plain meaning of these things. But moving on with the time

we got left. And that's why I encourage people to who say like what what's the relevance of all this to the present well again I believe like this is our politics

okay I mean this is my politics like this is the resistance and there is only the resistance contra globalism you know and again it's not a reactionary sensibility

and it's not a return to superstition. Again, like that itself is, you know, an ideological postulate promulgated by, you know, people who abide enlightenment, ideology, and scientism. The superstition such that there is one is this kind of 19th century style materialism that, like, nobody believes in anymore. Like, that's the superstition, you know,

if I behoove people again. I'm very much a layman and, you know, the hard sciences. You know, but read up on what's being realized by way of things like the James Webb Telescope.

Like read up on black hole cosmology and what's being postulated there. Like this is shattering all of this nonsense. You know, like this idea that you know, there's no more mystery and, you know, metaphysics is dead. And, you know, we can explain quantum realities just by like appeal to, you know,

um, nakedly material quantities and, you know, things like that. Like that, if that doesn't, you know, make you a man or woman of faith, I, you're kind of asleep at the proverbial wheel, you know, um, And that, you know, look at, in my own kind of wheelhouse, you know, I'm constantly talking about how, you know, these political scientists quite distinguished from political theorists. Like even some of them occasionally kind of correct conclusions, you know, like Mearsheimer, the guys, it's really something of a simpleton. Like this idea that, oh, well, structures, like the literal structure of political institutions, and states not only are these kinds of late modern structures perennial but the structures themselves dictate clinical events and either generate or mitigate conflict like this is laughable you know the

look at what's underway right now um with the world's situation you know uh warfare arrives like the seasons you know and going to nakedly theological imperatives you know and

even just like the paradigm shift that you know we've witnessed in the last 20 years really I posit that it began around September 11th, 2001, or at least in the aftermath. But, you know, that should give people pause, even people who consider themselves to be secularists. And, I mean, if that doesn't, I mean, if you're your age or my age, like in real time witnessing, you know,

sort of the Marxist-Leninist dogma that literally had shaped the 20th century. and been the catalyst, you know, approximate and arguably ultimate for the most catastrophic conflict in human history, you know, it fell to pieces as the zeitgeist could no longer abide it. You know, if that's not the cunning of reason writ large, I don't know what is. you know so this idea that you know this school of thought is somehow

an arcane curiosity or something of interest only to cloistered economically inclined people you know who have kind of opted to withdraw from

the banality of the day to day and the political that could not be further from the truth, you know. And if you need another example of this phenomenon in action, I mean, consider the degree to which, you know, the resurgent Islamic political consciousness has shaped the last 50 years and continues to do so. Unfortunately, I think many iterations of that are,

perverted. But, you know, that is an aspect of the cunning of reason, too. There's a German phrase, Mer al-Leban, literally more than life. You know, that's what's required for life to have any meaning at all. you know and this idea if you want you know another example of how this relates to

praxis well there you go you know strip strip away metaphysics and strip away anything transcendental you know and let me know how that fair is in terms of posterity

you know the mighty Soviet Union lasted less than a century for that very reason. You know, I was going to get into Reneke, or I was going to get into Joseph de Meister today, and it seems that time got away from me, but I feel passionately about this subject matter. I'll pick up the pace next time, and after part two, we can get back to the linear progression of our continental philosophy series.

I promise. And when we return to that, we'll get into live next Spinoza. And where this subject matter converges with that, we'll get into Fichta, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger. And I know that people will be excited about that because they've been asking me about all that stuff. And I'm looking forward to it, too. And frankly, I think I have more to contribute on that than on some of these thinkers who, I mean, I minored in philosophy. I mean, I can speak intelligently on this stuff, but it's, I can speak a whole lot more intelligently on Schopenhauer and higher than I can, like, Leibniz Spinoza and Kant.

Let me put that one. But I hope people found this worth well. When you get a chance, please give me a reading list because for the, this specific subject, because people are going to ask for that. Yeah, man. Yeah. Yeah, I will do so later. It's late tonight or tomorrow. Okay, sounds good.

All right. Tell everybody where you're at and where they can find you. Yeah, the best place is at my website, which is almost finished being retooled. You can find all my content there is a feed where, like, my new podcast appearances and my own podcast, like, pop up and, like, other stuff. And some of my long form writing and some, like, video stuff. It's number seven, H-O-M-A-S-777.com. Otherwise, hit up my substack. It's Real Thomas 777 on substack.com.

And from there, you can find, like, other places where I'm at, like, Instagram and stuff. But those are the main places to go. And, like I said, I'm in the process of kind of retooling my content just generally. But I'm always active. I'm active every day on Substack, and I try and appear on a few people's pods every week. And I try and do something every day. So, you know, yeah, I'm trying to be a busy beaver, man. All right, Thomas.

So part two. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Peking. You know, show. Thomas is back and do part two of the radical traditionalist school of philosophy. How are you doing today, Thomas? I'm doing pretty well.

I'm enjoying the summertime. I, uh, yeah, I was going to, last time I was going to talk about Joseph de Maestra, and I didn't get to that because we were talking about René Guillaume. And I'm sure some people would like me to talk about Julius Evela too. And some are moving forward, we will. But I kind of want to get back to the main topical emphasis of the series. next time but those the mice is important i mean in my opinion i mean i've got conceptual biases in that regard i mean the meister's probably other than frances parker yaki and um

schopenhauer and uh hegel he's probably most the fingers have the most impact on my own theoretical musings and interpretations of all things related to the subject matter i've dedicated my scholarly life too. But he's ill understood. You know, like Paul Gottfried, who's an insightful guy, he comes close, I think, to kind of defining

his, you know, singer sees of de Maestro in a way that most, you know, reasonably mainstream scholars don't, but, you know, demester was not a conservative. Like, that's just the wrong way to characterize. I mean, it wasn't like the French, Edmund Burke. or something. He wasn't even really French.

You know, he was from Savoy, when, uh, and the Seveillards were interesting people because they were, they were under the rule of the Holy Roman Empire, but they were often in revolt against its political culture. You know, and, uh, they were very much into a devolved, a kind of federalist

type of government. De Maestro himself was an idiosyncratic Catholic. He backed the American Revolution. He said that the Anglo-Saxons, and he viewed the Americans as the true Anglo-Saxons, which the Americans viewed themselves as. They viewed themselves as a Germanic people revolting against Latinate tyranny. Like, that's undeniable. And, like, Hamilton and John Jay came out and said that in the Federalist.

But, you know, that's something that people don't really seem knowledgeable about anymore because they don't really understand the kind of sectarian divide and how much it shaped, you know, American political thought. But DeMaisal also said that he said he was very critical of Frenchmen, you know, and he was very critical of the Catholic Church. You know, he suggested that. this kind of Yale-Mannery

independence streak that the Angles Saxon the Sino embodied had been like Briotti Europeans you know he he believed in a

Republican government with admittedly like a very authoritarian bent he didn't view the way forward for Europe as as some sort of having some sort of like people overlord or something like that you know yet at the same

time he you know he was very very devout and you consider Catholicism to be an essential aspect of you know of European cultural learning as well as kind of

you know like Western metaphysics real large you know and he's a lot of his critics in the 20th century they

in very punitive terms identified the maister as kind of the progenitor of fascist thought that's not really wrong I agree with that. I mean obviously not for the same reasons they do but you know there really

there really weren't fingers of the right who had that who had a significant democratic perspective of a of revolutionary politics. We're both, you know, authoritarian and right wing and valued traditional forms and modalities, you know, but who also had, you know, like a structurally progressive view of government and things. You know, Demeira was really the first.

You know, there was other people who were kind of non-ideological who were hard to categorized. I think Hume actually was one of them a little conservative, like the claim Hume, which I don't really understand. I mean, I've got some idea why it's I think some of these Rockford Institute types who are basically

like liberals with reservations. Like Hume is a a guy in the empirical tradition that they can invoke without feeling like they're betraying conservative principles, but even that is a bit you know

incoherent but you know de maestra taken in total his body of work you know he belongs with people

like Julie Sevela like René Dion you know like some of these some of these Islamic theorists I cited you know

and that should be clear I think to anybody who spends time with the subject matter and um I mean, obviously, like, that's where I fall.

You know, like, I mean, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm very much a Protestant, like, nonconformist. Um, but I've got something of an ecumenical view of faith matters. And that's what the traditionalist school is all about. It's not all being trad or some stupid gay thing like that. You know, it's, it has to do with the way people approach. things like culture, like race, you know, in terms of praxis. But at the end of the day, it's about metaphysics and, you know, we're trying to bring the metaphysical tradition back into, you know, the Western way of life, you know, and, um, Wolfgang Smith would get into this a lot,

especially in some of the stuff he wrote in the 80s and 90s. Like later he got into kind of more complex rebuttals of scientism and things but when he was writing about metaphysics and ethical stuff primarily he'd talk about how you know people talk about

Western things when they're really talking about liberal universalism and stuff which admittedly it is like a product of Western idealism I don't mean colloquial idealism I mean capital I okay but this idea that

oh in the West where this you know where this kind of um you know we we just kind of like value neutral ideas you know on matters of culture and things and you know it's the western tradition is you know the empirical and progressive tradition like that's nonsense that doesn't make any sense you know like that's um that's like saying that's like the claim that like arab culture is mathematics you know like or numbers like it's the conceptual syntax is nonsensical syntax is nonsensical principle. Okay. But like many things related

categorically to the social engineering regime and all the kind of permutations of it, people don't really know how to think outside that box, so they don't have the tools at their disposal, intellectually speaking. You know, and that's important. But then again, I'd also put Heidegger in that tradition. I mean, Hiderer is complicated.

He had, you know, and he was the last true connoe philosopher, in my opinion. I don't think that's disputable, but, you know, in much the same way, I think Demeusia needs to be situated there, too. And like I said, Demeisor should be a brass tax thinker for any right-wing dissident. You know, and obviously, where I fall on that issue, when I talk about dissident, and talking about people who this this is basically a matter of historical imperatives and and then theological belief in metaphysics it's not it's not guys complaining about blacks or like guys who like affirmative action or guys who don't like taxation yeah like i'm not saying there's something wrong with contemplating those things

but it's not we're talking about something totally different okay um and uh that needs to be clarified too. You know, I and I don't blame Normies for not understanding these distinctions, but people who spend time in genuine distant spaces and can't grasp

this, they even need to kind of educate themselves or move on because it's, we're not here to, we're not here to spoon feed them knowledge, like their little kids or something, you know, and I feel very strongly about that. You know, not just because I'm old and cantankerous, but, you know, this is um

you know Gusty Spence always made the point and obviously I mean he was talking about very serious um partisan activity I'm not suggesting people take on

those kinds of commitments and break you know and break the law and stuff but um something one can extrapolate from what Spence was talking about is like you've got to learn

how to answer the question like why am I here you know and why am I doing what I'm doing and why am I committed to these things. You know, you, you've got to be a white man about this. You can't just sit there and decide that, you know, you want people to take on, you know, what should be your intellectual process and, like, feed you the clist notes versions of things.

Like, that's bullshit. And you're wasting our time in your own if you're not capable of, you know, kind of progressing beyond that. Um, but, uh, moving on. I think I got into briefly last time. Can I, um, can I interrupt before we? Yeah, man, go ahead. Um, what, some feedback I got on the first episode was that, um, de Maestro was not particularly a fan of the Republican government here, but basically what, It looks like he supported the revolution.

He had no problem with the abandonment of the crown. But around 1797, he started having questions about how it was operating. And he thought that the revolution was much better than the one that happened in France. But he said he saw too much enlightenment ideology creeping in around that time to. Yeah, that's why Jeffersonism is bullshit. And I don't know why so many white nationalist type guys consider themselves Jeffersonians. Like I think part of that, like that was, and that goes way back. Like even like a bunch of like lost cause types and say, you know, they're Jeffersonian.

It's like why. Like Jefferson was a, Judge Jefferson was something of a cretan. You know, and he was basically, you know, he, he was basically, you know, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he. Nancy himself as this kind of cosmopolitan, like worldly man. And, you know, so it was, like, what he did, like, he was praising the Jagerman cause. It was basically equivalent to like some Hollywood star or something, like pretending he supports, you know, whatever the kind of current thing is. It's really not a good look.

And no, Demoisra was talking about the, you know, the period of active hostilities. and um you know Hamilton uh Jay who was Hamilton's protege and Hamelin was watching this protege these guys were defining what the revolutionary philosophy was and it was an aristocratic secession I mean that's why the Confederates view themselves

is you know we're we're realizing the ideals of the revolution you know uh it had nothing it had nothing to do with in enlightenment imperatives. You know, that's why, that's a point the Canada made, too. Like this, the

kind of dilettante faction among the founding fathers, you know, they decided they want to include this like, asthenine storing language about like, oh, man, being created equal. It's like a meaningless phrase.

And notice how like that doesn't emerge anywhere in the Constitution, because it's meaningless. And that's also, you know, not something that would have gotten past a proverbial veto of, you know, the real Vanguardist on deck. But, you know, the people seem to not understand also. One of the reasons de Maestro took the perspective he did, you know, it's not like the French crown was killing it and doing great things. before 1789. There's a reason why revolutions happen. You know, and De Maestra and the St. Petersburg dialogues, part of this ode to his views on theodicy and metaphysics, you know, he said the revolution, you know, he looked at Jacob and just being

basically subhuman in the scum of the earth, but he also said that like the revolution had to happen, you know, and he's like, the reign of terror was like a punishment against the hubris of sinners who'd made it happen. But also, So because the world, as we know it, in our fallen state is essentially a giant altar of sacrifice. You know, the stuff of history is literally the mass sacrifice of human beings. And this constant agonistic struggle of apoccal forces that leaves a tremendous suffering, including of innocent people and children. Okay.

But you've got to look at the kind of cosmic balancing of fates, as it was, that, you know, what is good and what is godly eventually does come out on top. And you got to look at humanity like in total. They run our actual innocent individuals. Okay. So that's the way that he was looking at it. That's the way that he approached it. And honestly, I don't think there's anybody after 1783 other than in, you know, I,

the immigrant revolution as envisioned failed by the time of the final constitutional convention which is why things like Shave's Rebellion happened which is why the war between the states happened and which is why America's political culture was a mess in the 90 intervening years

but that's kind of a subject for another dedicated episode or series but I the if I can reduce why I believe the Meishu belongs

in the traditionalist camp it's as I can't I can't remember if I raised this last time it's the concept of Sophia Parenis perennial wisdom

you know which is a subject matter that it's It's concerned primarily and essentially in first and last metaphysics. Okay. The understanding that all science, all knowledge, all wisdom that can be said to be perennial and enduring comes from metaphysics. And metaphysics are in fact a reflection of, you know, as our all natural law, as a reflection of the divine principle and the mind and hand. of God. Okay. That's a traditionalist perspective in a nutshell. And the enlightenment and everything that

followed is a repudiation of that principle. It's essentially taking, you know, the same kinds of ideological imperatives that inform Newtonian physics. and, you know, attempting to rebut metaphysics. You know, applying that the same kind of anti-reason, punitive critique to the human condition in ethical terms. You know, and you'll find the traditional view also is that, like, through science

and through empirical practices, you know, that revealed, that doesn't repudiate you know, knowledge of God, it clarifies it. You know, in the Pauline letters, there's this is reflected, same as in the Quran, you know, the idea of the invisible deed to the creator

are clearly seen, you know, in the things that are made. You know, that's Romans. Science in the traditional sense is a matter of what Wolfgang Smith called, quote, reading the icon. You know, really, it was Francis Bacon, who kind of is the progenitor of

scientism in a more direct way than Newton but both need to be kind of considered as constituting the foundations of that particular conceptual

prejudice but like the idea of discovering causal chains and reducing these things to purely physical phenomena on in like atomic matter, you know, that somehow repudiates God, like that, that requires a, I mean, all these things require like a leap of illogic as I think of it, like, same thing with

like Darwinism, okay, but that kind of tautology, that kind of, you know, the kind of Western version of Lysm, I think it's like baconism. And like anytime anybody invokes that, well, nobody believes in God because of science. Like that that's basically a baconian posul. Okay.

And the traditionalist perspective rejects all of that. In contrast to most conservatives who accept that kind of nonsense, you know, and that's I, it's imperative to breach

with conservative thought entirely. You know, if you want to consider yourself seriously and completely informed about the current dilemma like in a partisan capacity.

You know, that's not I think everybody needs to think like I do or people need to you know, prioritize the authorities and theorists that they think are most important in the way exactly like I do, but you're not in the game

if you don't realize that, you know, You're not really taking a partisan position against the kind of pillars of the regime thought unless you, you know, make that sort of leap of, of, of logic. and acknowledge that, you know, the, the aforementioned is totally lacking in intellectual rigor. It's essentially a faith-based enterprise, you know. And that's one of my litmus tests, you know. When I come across people who defend these things, I realize, well, you know, they're not one of us. and that's fine

but I um you know it's it's imperative to not structure your conceptual

life around you know these kinds of arbitrary parameters that reflect the extent power structure um you know and that's

then if you if people are see you know what's the significance of that to press Well, I just gave it to you there. So the scientist perspective, it's a reductionist to

methodology, okay? And methodology without substance, you know, is the absence in metaphysics. And, you know, it becomes a structure without essence, okay?

And like I said at the top of the hour, that's kind of the essence of debate and switch of when people when regime people and regime adjacent people talk about like western that's what they're talking about they're talking about this kind of hollowed out scientism that you know rejects metaphysics has no cultural orientation you know is uh it's basically this you know premise and it's kind of like radical humanism but it's not it's not an active humanism or creative humanism it's

It's a debased humanism that, you know, is essentially anti-culture and, you know, cast cultural activity and the sources of cultural activity in a punitive light. So, you know, it was essentially reduces man to the state of an animal. And that's not accidental, nor is it incidental. But, you know, and as these tendencies are taking shape, as it's, historical phenomenon, you know, De Maestro was like observing them in situ, okay? And, uh, like a lot of theorists, uh,

like FICTA's another one, FICTA's got more it's been, it's had more of an impact on kind of, you know, the, a mainstream academic than De Maister has. But similarly, Ficta was another political theorist who was tremendous, impactful, but who

is not widely read and really hasn't been for generations. Like a friend of mine said certain thinkers like this, they're like the philosophical equivalent of the Velvet Underground. They're like guys who, like, well-known philosophers read, but who, like, most students of these subjects don't know about. You know, just like the Velvet Underground is like a band that, like, a lot of guys

listened to who went on to start bands. I think I think Johnny Ramon might have made that observation, but yeah, that struck me as funny, but it's also happens to be true. I hadn't thought about it like that before.

But, you know, so that's one of the missions of people who abide their traditionalist perspective is you know, to return the structure of West or accidental intelligence.

You know, this idea that there going to be some sort of a cultural perspective that doesn't imply a worldview or a discrete historical orientation, you know, that's nonsense. And it's a kind of sophistry that doesn't stand up to intellectual rigor. But again, it's like really not supposed to because the whole purpose of these things, like by design, it's supposed to take, you know, questions of metaphysics off the table and going to deprive people of the syntax and the conceptual vocabulary required to discuss and structure these things. You know, and that's a very insidious thing, okay, to say the least, but that's part of its purpose. And, you know, if you, uh, if you, uh, if you, uh,

you know, people talk disdainfully about stuff like pop science, I mean, as they should. But, I mean, that's part of the whole point is, you know, a lot of the kind of gatekeepers of scientism, they want to maintain this illusion that there's an esoteric knowledge that, like, very few men can actually grasp, which in the case of the subject matter that they promote, or the absence of subject matter, maybe more appropriately, like, that's a root. it's a canard but um they're trying to maintain some sort of uh appearance of uh elitism it's almost rabbinic you know like i have the key to the inner sanctum you don't you can't possibly understand like how do you criticize this perspective because you can't really understand it you

know um like how people can claim that whose stock and trade is it's trying to like abolish metaphysics and higher thought is who has But again, the whole point is to kind of strip away the layers of meaningful contemplation and beyond that the capability to engage in meaningful contemplation, but moving on A bit of background of the Meister himself. Like I said, he was born in Savoy in 1753. He was born in April and in Creole and in Creole. Basically, I'm finding myself agreeing with Kerry Mullis.

I'm not going to run out and get into astrology, but I'm starting to believe that people's birth order within their family, as well as the month of the year, the calendar they are born, does impact in some way their character and their intellectual tendencies. I find a lot of great men are born in April. And I find a lot of crazy people are born in September, which probably doesn't bode well for me because I'm one of those people. but be as it may.

He was a son of a high court judge who'd been ennobled by the king of Sardinia owing to his work in legal theory and specifically legal reform. This is de Maestra's father, Francois Xavier de Meistre. From Upon completing his early education,

he studied at Turin as soon as he gained his degree he was appointed a public prosecutor in the Senate of the Savoy the Senate of the Savoy was actually a judicial panel of which his father was the president and presiding judge this was in 1774

So the kind of early iterations of Jacob and sentiment were very much jumping off. But Savoy was sort of insular. You know, like I said, it was historically part of the Holy Roman Empire, or I mean under its authority. But it was very much like an island, like figuratively and literally. you know and until 1789 it was pretty much untouched by revolutionary activity and and and political disturbances and convulsions and i think that's one of the reasons why i mean demise was obviously a thoughtful and sensitive and very religious guy you know a legal scholar from a family of intellectuals who had been ennobled so you know it's a background um that's a unique background you know uh on the one hand uh it's middle class and bourgeoisie and professional and upwardly mobile. On the other hand, I mean, it, it was aristocratic, like the lifestyle that he and his family lived. You know, and so like a young guy or a youngish guy by that time period,

by the sand of that time period, you know, something like the 1789 revolution would have really, really disturbed the kind of habits of of somebody like Joseph de Maestro and his entire kind of worldview and would have prompted deep contemplation on the cause of these things in addition to you know more sanguinary and immediate survival concerns

but Savoy was also like a very pious place very very Catholic Demmeister's mother was a very devoted she was some kind of I don't know exactly how the Catholic laity how they figure into church hierarchy his mother was like the equivalent to what in my tradition it'd be like a deaconess okay like a laywoman in Catholicism you know who was a very insinuated into the church okay um but when he returned

home from taking his law degree De Meister joined a Masonic Lodge. The thing is, though, Freemasonry was pretty diverse, especially in its earlier iterations. Some of them were atheistic and positively pro-Jacoban in their sentiments. You know, some were phylo-Semitic in weird ways.

Some were into neoplate. Satanism and things like that. And some were very much into like mysticism. You know, the lodge that De Maestro joined, their patron saint was St. Martin. And, you know, this was well after Freemasonry had been categorically condemned by the Pope. But there was an inner conflict among some of these guys like the Maestra who joined lodges that were not anti-Catholic. And that, in fact, were very much into things we'd probably. consider to be interested adjacent to alchemy and occultism frankly but also Christian mysticism

and stuff in the tradition of Meister Eckert as well was what the kind of stuff that some of these men would be taken in by so the Freemasonry to which the Meister was insinuated it was mystical and occultic rather than enlightened and It could probably be called conservative. It could be called anything. But it was definitely not democratic. It was definitely not reformist. You know, and this wasn't the only lodge like this.

There was others. There were guys who became like arch anti-Jacobans and anti-enlightment partisans who came out of Masonic lodges. So it's complicated. Okay. at any event in the years immediately part of the revolution he was

he was criticized heavily by his fellow senators as well as not a few clergymen in Savoy because he consistently defended freedom of thought especially of aristocrats you know

and his first reaction to the Jacoban Revolution was somewhat of a wait and see position like when I became clear like what was happening and the the megasidal excesses and the

the um the you know the the debased uh and sacralic sentiments you know he became an arch partisan against it you know but again early on you know the french crown was failing France was a losing out in the great power political struggles you know relative to

our rivals and demisius of view was that you know France is a great nation possessed of a great destiny you know if the revolutionary armies are going to return france to their greatness you know uh there's you know that then then you know it's godly you know even if the blood of innocence is going to is going to flow you know because again you know the the process of history is uh it is a sacrificial um process you know which is why and we'll get into this too. Demacher's view is that the most sacred figure in national politics is the executioner. You know, the executioner is a great man, not just because he's singularly terrifying, but he's the distilled essence of sovereignty, because he wields the power of life and death.

And through that, like, monumental power to, like, deliver death to, like, any man or woman, you know, he stands, like, singularly above, um, all uh all who populate the nation you know um he's a high priest of sacrifice you know and and the architect of the historical process and god's will but you know when um but any enthusiasm for the jagoeman cause subsided um you know around the time uh if not before then definitely around the time Savoy was assaulted by the new French Republican army in 1792. But by the time they assaulted, he'd already become this firebrand partisan against revolutionary ambitions and jegamism in general. And a month after French armies entered the Savoyar territory, he fled the country because he was almost certainly going to be executed.

you know, were thrown into some dungeon and left a rot, or drowned on a, you know, like so many tens of thousands were, you know, for counter-revolutionary thought or habits. He returned briefly in 1793 to see if the revolutionary fervor had abated. And tragically, he had a wife and children by this time, and, you know, he wanted to be. with them, but he went to be getting clear that you know, the cycle of killing and revolutionary

um, and the revolutionary cycle like had, you know, was peaking, if anything, it wasn't abating. He he left again. He didn't see his family again for 20 years, although he was in like avid correspondence. And it's true that he, it's clear that, you know,

the truth of the matter is being asserted in his letters to his wife and whatnot. not very much a tragedy and figure but um he established himself uh in sardinia uh and sardinians are interesting people i mean all all italians are but um he became in sconed at lecson and um he was made a former representative of a serdenian crown and then he became an active counterrevement revolutionary in addition to kind of beginning his career as like a prolific writer a lot of what he wrote wasn't widely published to a general literate audience until the 1880s but locally this was very widely circulated among counter-illusionary circles and it played a his work played a huge role in motivated and kind of consolidating counter-revolutionary sentiment,

especially among, because in like Corsica, Cernia, and on the mainland of Italy, there was all kinds of refugees who were like fleeing the terror. You know,

and the book, considerations on France, which is for the first thing published locally in 76, that became kind of the seminal anti-Jacobos, been screed you know and um a couple years later uh he returned to the mainland and eventually settled in venice and he found his way to piedmont around 1799 1800 um then by this time it become kind of

you'd become like literally this itinerant kind of political soldier and writer um and and And that made him amenable to being deployed far and wide as a representative of the Sardinian crown. So he got sent to St. Petersburg in 1802, and he really found a home in Russia. The Russians then is now, you know, they're very welcoming of a certain type of heterodox thinker from the West. You know, that's almost a cliche. you know, whether you're talking about arch right wingers, whether you're talking about Kim Philby and

the Cambridge 7, whether you're talking about snouting, you know, this goes way back. And that's, um, this is his most prolific period and his most intellectually rigorous. That's when he wrote the St. Petersburg

dialogues, obviously. He wrote his essay on the Pope. He wrote, on the generative principle of political constitutions. He wrote his pre-reputiation of the philosophies of Bacon. You know, and he was in Russia throughout, until 18 and 17. So he witnessed the Napoleonic Wars from northern Russia,

which is fascinating. Then in a relatively advanced stage, you know, he finally returned to France. and, you know, all was forgiven, obviously, by that point. But, you know, and along the last, too, he started writing these kind of retrospectives on the revolution. And that's when, you know, he came to, his kind of historicism came full circle.

You know, it was around this time. He started, you know, this was probably his most reactionary period, too. But it was tempered, like I said, by this, this kind of idiosyncratic theology that temperable was otherwise a kind of conservative historicism whereby he's like don't lament the rain of terror it had to happen

it was both a crime and a punishment and an essential aspect of you know France's destiny and the historical process, which is always sanguinary and characteristic of suffering. You know, like he said, too, he's like, had the Revolutionary Army's not been victorious, there would have been no Napoleon, you know, France never would have achieved greatness again,

and then also, like, you know, we wouldn't be this repentant nation that had redeemed itself from decrepitude, you know, and that's actually, that's frankly like a very Protestant view of things. Like, I can't remember who it was. I think it was one of the guys of a countercurrents. He said that Demoishe was like the most, like, Calvinist Catholic whoever lived. I think there was nothing to that.

And that's probably why I found myself receptive to do with theology. Early on, the first thing I read, read by him was the executioner. And I remember this was in the 90s. And that was when even a lot of like supposedly conservative Catholics were pretty milk toast. Even in a place like Chicago was a

Catholic city. And I remember the response was from a lot of these guys. I knew like oh that's that's disgusting. You know like the death penalty is anti-Christ. And even it wasn't, that's idolatrous. I'm like that I'm like, you don't understand.

You know, I'm like, that's also preposterous. You know, and even if, uh, my favorite argument, too, is people like, you know, Christ is wrongfully executed. I'm like, no, Christ had to be executed. And you're not a Christian if you don't get that. You know, like, um, I mean, I don't want to spend this off into, um, this question of deep theology. But I know it's coming either in the comments section or by email. when Christ cried out like you know

adonai why have you forsaken me that's the Hebrew like death prayer he's not saying like oh no I've been condemned to death it's you know

um our friend Andrew is screw I'm sure has things to say on that but um but because it may like I

I um that's one of the things I one of the reasons I maintain that the maestro belongs in the traditionalist category, because that kind of theological syncretism is not accidental. And again, is Freemasonry is a component of that. You know, because there is a theological ecumenism to traditionalism that seems superficially inconsistent with the kind of

racialism that tends to go along with traditionalism, but you know, that it's not inconsistent in the least. You know, the relativism or perceived relativism of capital T traditionalism,

you know, it owes the belief that um you know part of a an aspect of the mind of god in uh the historical process is the development of discrete nations you know and um part of what makes us human and capable of higher reason is uh the historical consciousness that derives from you know linear neutrality and you know the kind of shared experience of uh of um historical existence you know that can only come from you know the the the differences between the races of men and um you know the basis of the congregation obviously too is the fellow feeling derived from the nation and to abolish that is you know to abolish uh

the potentiality of Christian fellowship and in turn to abolish the potentiality of the church, you know, which is the body of Christ on earth, you know. So they shouldn't seem inconsistent. But at the same time, you know, again, even to somebody who's, deniesche is idiosyncratic, even to somebody who's like traditionally Catholic, okay? I mean, they can't be denied. But I'd argue, so is Machiavelli. Machiavelli's model of progressive statecraft was, you know,

Ferdinand and Isabella Spain. You know, and that's not every Catholic perspective in the traditional sense. But moving on, the... But yeah, I mean, interspersed throughout, what is conventionally um precedented and stuff uh

especially like the reflections on France and stuff from the period of self-imposed exile in Russia you know the starting point a demistreous thought and um all traditionalist thought is uh you know God and the divine order of the starting point

of understanding history and society and the reason why the Enlightenment and its progeny, including the Jacob Revolution, were at odds with reason, is because they were at odds with God, you know, and scorning the sacred character of historical processes and perennial institutions, you know, like a monarchy. on its own terms. That doesn't mean, you know, kings are infallible or something. But the scorny of these institutions in categorical terms and essential terms, you know, is a repudiation of the divine order in human affairs. And society and not the individual is a subject of history. You know, and any true kind of science of man or science. of history or theory of politics or ethics for that matter because all ethics touch and concern the political you know the subject matter can never be the individual because the individual is an abstraction

you know um envisioned by social engineers who uh you know in their hubris wish to make themselves the architects of historical processes in lieu of God, or by, you know, people who, in large measure, abide enlightenment conceits and who, despite, you know, claiming to be these conservatives, they, they claim that, you know, individuals are the source of vitality in institutions, and these, like, arbitrary institutions are what needs to be preserved for, you know, pragmatic reasons, you know, or for reasons of familiarity, you know, like, that's not a conservative position. That's an enlightenment, liberal position with certain reservations leading to the progress and timetable of, you know, radical imperatives. But, um, you know, and finally, you know, cultural, uh, aspects, you know, not, not, not, not pure reason abstracted from historical contingencies. That's the only possible approach to reforming a revolutionizing government or social relationships. Because otherwise you're speaking of things as they are not. You know, that's, um, you're talking about like Rawls veil of ignorance.

You know, you're saying like if man and society was not as it is and was perfectly malleable, you know, these kinds of things would be possible because the people's hierarchies of desires and people's motivations and the things that color their passions, it would be, you know, splendidly unrelated to do historical phenomenon. You know, and that doesn't describe anything that actually exists. So even by its own standard, it's, uh, you know, which is supposedly, you know, the rational and empirical. You know, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not those things. You know, you can't, uh, and plus too, like what's good for,

because things like race and because things, uh, you know, like cultural learning of a discrete character, you know, those, those are the things that, um, make it possible for us to develop a higher moral consciousness. You know, you can't claim that those things are somehow at odds with what customary behavior should be and, you know, should not inform the wisdom of the law, you know. because again there's not there's not

there's not there's not some sort of like alternative ethics that's you know purely secular in nature and blind to discrete racial and cultural realities and beyond that even you know like what is good

for in communitarian terms or what is good for a discrete race or nation of people is obviously contingent upon what's going to sustain that racist posterity.

That's the whole point. You know, you can't decide that you're going to remove a population from its cultural trappings and from historical

processes and like identify arbitrary things as the good because supposedly according to some model where humans exist in abstraction you know this is the sentence kind of like guaranteed the dignity of all these abstracted people according to some arbitrary metric

usually relating to like wishful fulfillment and individual desires like that's that's not even sophistry it's just nonsense you know it's um it's like saying you're going to solve a mathematical equation with with letters that don't have a symbolic numeric value you know it's just like if I scribble enough words on the chalkboard I'm gonna solve an equation because I say

so you know because maybe because numeric notation is is is is historically contingent and you know we're we're just limiting ourselves with that it's a lot of the imperfect metaphor but yeah that's what I got into mystra I don't want to spin off on another subject or we'll be your first a minute. All right. Good stuff. I know people are going to like this one. People are interested in hearing more about de maestra. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, people should be reminded that places like Imperium Press are reprinting his works. So go go check it out. He has collected works. His letters on the Spanish Inquisition, which I've read on the show.

Um, so yeah. Yeah, it's top notch. And I'll, at some point, I mean, um, I'll, I'll write some long form stuff on the executioner. Because that's one of my very favorite books. Um, yeah, no, Demiisha's great stuff and highly readable. Um, you know, now I'll put a little theory in. And I say that as somebody who reads, put a little theory all day, you know, but yeah, right.

Right. Just something people should definitely read, man. All right. Where do we find you now? check on my website it's number seven it's uh yeah it's thomas seven777.com number seven h m s seven seven seven seven seven dot com or go to substack like pretty much everything i'm doing is on substack right now or on my website um it's real thomas seven seven seven seven dot substack.com i'm going to start doing more streams and

stuff like live streams you know i've been thinking about that for a minute And I've been working on my manuscript and kind of like chilling this summer, which has been like awesome. But, you know, I'm trying to put out more content. And in my defense, I have been, I don't go more than like five days without dropping something fresh. But I want to start doing some weekly live streams and stuff. So stay tuned for that. In August, we'll kick that off at some point. Awesome.

until the next episode. Thank you, Thomas. Yeah, thank you, buddy. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. How are you doing today, Thomas? I'm doing pretty well. You know, I think I emphasize and I hope I'm not retreading subject matter that I already covered. Please tell me if I am. I made the point that there's a significance beyond one of trivial curiosity.

to the fact that it could very honestly be said from about 1934 onward when the National Socialist Revolution was consolidated, particularly after June 1934. I mean, it was consolidated in a most unfortunate way, but, you know, and as Mussolini really kind of came to the foretimore as, as a major figure in European political life. Even before the Spanish Civil War jumped off, there definitely was an internationalist movement around these access regimes and these movements that were adjacent to them.

And I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I believe, and obviously I've got Hegelian sensibilities, there's a parallel between this and the Islamic awakening in 1979, you know, with the seizure of the Grand Mosque and the Iranian Revolution and this emergence of a truly Islamic zeitgeist and praxis that people didn't think was possible, okay? it was born of some of the same historical pressures, you know, as those that ossified and gave rise to fascism and some of these myriad other movements and national socialism and things. And the basis of that was, you know, what we could think of as a traditionalist praxis, so the capital of T.

and that's one of the reasons why I include a Heidegger in this camp, okay, because he was really the, he was really the first among this intellectual cadre to curate a meaningful revolutionary praxis, or at least try to insinuate such a thing into a burgeoning zeitgeist that had, you know, led to various iterations of, you know, real world politics. And there's evidence to substantiate this beyond, you know, reading the proverbial indicators of historical events. You know, Marcia Eliotty, and we're going to talk about him at length. You know, he served with the Iron Maniard. guard. And later in life, they were trying to indict him on grounds of that. Leo Strauss, who I don't have nice things to say about, I do give him respect because he came to Eliotti's defense pretty

aggressively, you know, when they were trying to deport him and what have you. They were colleagues at the University of Chicago, you know, but Mercia Eliotty, Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Younger, Carl Loweith, it wasn't part of that intellectual cadre, but he was kind of an intermediate, speaking of Strauss, it was kind of an intermediary between them and Strauss and other kind of Jewish intellectuals, a more neutralist event. It's an odd dynamic. Marcoza also reached out to this cadre, and it's interesting because Hydroa had a pretty evident correspondence, but these kinds of things were discussed, like the meaning of, of the politics than the German Reich. And people make a lot of the facts that, you know, O'Julya Sevela was, for example, was it odds with the fascist regime?

I mean, this is what's posited. Or because the SS, specifically the Sykerest, um, that this suggests that somehow, you know, he was some arch ideological opponent of the German Reich and the national fascist regime. That's not, that's preposterous. You know, incidentally, when Otto Scorsini broke Mussolini out of the Alpine prison, he was being held in, you know, Mussolini was scrawled away to Wolfslair. And he sent for Evela and Evela met Adolf Hitler. And Hitler said he wanted to meet Julius Evela.

Like he wanted him there anyways, because Evela was close as Duce and Hitler were. Duce's English was pretty good. His German was not that good. But, I mean, there was any number of people who were fluent, who Hitler would have been comfortable having on deck. He wanted, and there was other Italian fascist intellectuals he sent for too, but, you know, the, uh, especially in 1943, um, as things were, you know, the Ottoman in 1948, Hitler wasn't frivolously

just like meeting people, okay? I mean, like, uh, and just being admitted to Wolfslayer. I mean, that, that's pretty profound. Okay, I mean, obviously, I mean, Yvolo, everyone's his own man, You know, like he didn't cowtow to anybody, and he wasn't somebody who was just impressed by office. You know, he, so it's not like he was, and he was a genuine aristocrat. It's not like he was just starstruck at the prospect of meeting the furor or something. You know, he was his own man, and he definitely had reservations about the regime, but there was also things about it that he considered to be great. you know and that can't be denied but um you know there's always uh and when you're talking about powerful people like men who actually wield great power and you know men who have great

power of intellect you know there's always there's always going to be clashes of ego and you know of of conceptual disparities that that, you know, become very personal in things, you know, so it's important. Yeah, I mean, the access political culture was a house divided, but not intractively so. And I think that's important. But I think I mentioned before and again, call me honest, I'm repeating myself. I'm not going to get offended or something. you know Heidegger

Heidegger's view of national socialism was essentially Aristotelian you know he viewed the West as having been compromised at its core when

the understanding of the experience of being like quite literally intellectual and sensual and present existence receded from, you know, immediate contemplation in both daily life as well as in, you know, intellectual endeavors. You know, of course, Heidegger, and he wasn't the only one viewed the triumph of Platonism, of which he viewed Christianity to be in the same vein in basic subjective terms, viewed being as this eternal presence,

you know, like only that can only be understood and fully experience and access to this dialectical assent, you know, and higher-reviewed Christianity is the zenith of that. You know, Christianity describes satiriology

in terms of this unattainable transcendent. towards eternity, you know, that's in someone's the conceptual opposite of, you know, the immediacy of being that, you know, Heidegger posited was, you know, the basis of, you know, kind of Indo-European metaphysics, you know. And with the death of, you know, and with the death

of God what ushered in the final withdrawal of being from immediate consciousness in the mind of an existence of Western man was the subsumation of all life by technology. Okay. The only thing that came to ground man then was man. himself. You know, man was forced to kind of configure the world around his own kind of debased ontological aspects, you know, which, you know, what proceeded from that was an idea that nothing preceded man, you know, and concomitantly, you know, as a real experience of the world and engagement with it became obscured, you know, through the lens of technological processes,

you know, objects encountered within, life itself, you know, Canada basically just represent, you know, aspects that could be rendered in the service of technology or aspects that, you know, at one time held features of the natural world or, you know, in some way were related to this kind of holistic understanding of reality, but, you know, could only really be experienced and ascertained in, in fractured aspects. You know, they constituted these kinds of technologically rendered things. You know, and that's kind of the final stage of, like, ripping man out of a cultural existence. And that's sort of the final alienation, stage of alienation from historical.

memory. So in a high area's view, like, the only potential over salvation of the West was returning the question of being to immediate consciousness

of, you know, the culture bearing strain, which presumably is, you know, the European or Aryan, if you prefer strain, like, still extant within European races, but at the same time, you know, reconciling that palingenetic understanding of being and that sort of reemergence of cultural situatedness

and historical situatedness with the reality of high technology. You know, Heidegger wasn't some Luddite, He wasn't some reactionary. And it didn't, I mean, you didn't think that was desirable, but he made the point, like, even if people thought it was desirable, it's not, you can't, like, stop knowing things that collectively are known. You know, even if, you know, even if, in his view, like the German people weren't faced with this grand historical challenge, um, that had these, you know, most severe of existential implications. Even if they could kind of like retreat to some sort of, you know, simple, agrarian life, what they'd be doing that in purposely and in dialogue with, you know, a technological existence. You know, so it would be totally contrived, even if it was desirable. You know, so Heidegger's notion, though, too, was that, and this is a problem.

problem in national socialism to traditionalists, okay, all of them, even, even people who, you know, were kind of in, I consider it on the same campus, Heidi Irwin, had very different emphases, you know, like Eliotti, like Julius Subola, like Carl Schmidt to some degree. I mean, Carl Schmidt wasn't really a traditionalist, but he had certain sympathies in that regard. You know, there's limits to political life in terms of party politics. So even if, in height of his view, the National Socialist Party was, you know, doctrinally, you know, the greatest of all possible parties, you can't remedy crises of history by, like, passing laws. Or if you can't just develop some sort of social program, you know, to, to, to, to rejuvenate, you know, Indo-European metaphysics,

obviously. Okay. But at the same time, Party politics is an essential aspect of how people's lives are structured and framed. And in conceptual terms, it wields a huge significance. Okay. Carl Loweith, though I mentioned, I think before I went live, Loeth was an interesting guy. He was kind of this, he was a German Jew. He was married to a Japanese woman, and he taught in Japan. he was a university type and uh obviously after the nirber laws were passed you know as a racial

jew he he wasn't real thrilled to the prospect of returning to the german rike but uh he wasn't some arch zionist and he wasn't he was more of a he had the sensibilities of a lot of jewish burlerners you know like paul godfrey i mean the point is that's his heritage you know loweth was kind of a kind of a German conservative in his viewpoints, but he probably had more sophisticated intellectual leanings than a lot of that coterie, but he and Heidegger had a pretty avid correspondence, and Heidegger in 1936, and again, this was a year that, in my opinion, what we would call a fascist international, had really was kind of ossifying and peaking as a as a truly global movement.

You know, in 1936, you know, he wrote to Lowe with this long letter basically explaining his partisanship, you know, for the national socialist cause. You know, in essence, he said, look, you know, the national socialist, they're the only they're the only political faction that's truly situated in a historical capacity and whose goals constitute like an essential historical philosophy you know he said that they're consciously aware

of the need for a spiritual renewal you know he's like yeah maybe like the bully boys you know who won the streets and the communists have no understanding of this you know and and maybe your average voter, you know, who's, you know, just kind of like a common working man or, you know, northern Rhineland farmer or whatever, like doesn't understand these things, but the, you know, what the Vanguard does. And every aspect of the National Socialist program is tailored towards a spiritual renewal and a return to this kind of immediate understanding of being within, you know, the racial consciousness. And in terms of more conventional praxis, you know, it was, in Heidegger's view, and I agree with this, it was reconciling the social antagonisms that were, you know, availing Germany, Europe, and the Western world to communism.

You know, the potential of a global communist revolution, which had succeeded, would have annihilated what remained of Western Dyssin, which in height of your speak is there being, you know, literally the consciousness of, you know, that immediate ontology that we're talking about and, you know, preclude the regeneration of any cultural productivity or historical situateness. So this was critical, okay? There was an understanding in Haydegu's mind of existential crisis, you know, well before war arrived in a total capacity. You know, he understood the implications to these things, you know. And also, one of the things, the essential decision is of the furor-princip, I mean, this appeal to Heidegger, too. I mean, not just for superficial reasons or kind of cliched reasons of, oh, you know, Teutonic peoples like strong men who give orders.

You know, Evalon Eliotti made the point that, you know, a strong state is the basis of a strong people. But you can't just, like, curate a strong state for its own purposes. And that doesn't mean some total state. That doesn't mean some Leviathan bureaucracy. You know what it means is you need a true Caesar. You need a true Muhammad. You need a true Cromwell. You know, you need some hero of personage who's capable of acting historically and rendering decisionism

and sometimes, you know, the most severe and frightening capacities. You know, you don't get to pick and choose who that man is. You know, that's why I always come back to the point that, you know, people like Hitler are messianic personages, not in theological terms, obviously. I mean, in historical ones. And that's not something that can be cultivated. What is that tendency? I hear it today, people who, you know, they understand that we have an occupation,

that we're occupied, but they only want certain people to speak for them. If like, you know, if like Zog was being exposed by somebody, you know, who isn't in their camp, that person's a gatekeeper, that person is trying to, you know, they wanted to be their guy, or they feel like, what did they feel like they're not winning themselves? What is that? Yeah, I think part of it is that they're basically, it's just kind of decadent moderns

and everything to them is some sort of vicarious ego fulfillment. You know, everything's got to be. subjectively relatable in some kind of simple-minded crude sense or you know i'm always making the point and this is an evelin point too you know conservatives are our enemies and one of the reasons why the other kind of people you know when caesar arrives they'll act like a bunch of pharisees you know he's not respectable or something like or you know they you know they everything's about appearances, everything's about, you know, economics, you know, like national economics, but also kind of the economics of caste dynamics. You know, there really is something to, I mean, I think their observations, they arrive at these things for the wrong reasons, but there's something to it when, when these old Marxists or when these

post-Marxist's like global systems theory types talk about, you know, how bourgeoisie types are you know, kind of John Q and Jane Q public, you know, conservative voter. They really are like culturally impoverished. I mean, I think that's true. So I can't fully explain it, but except, you know, but that they're metaphorical Pharisees, you know, like, you know, Cromwell's the wrong kind of man,

or Mohammed, oh, he's, he's, he's from a family of merchants. He's not, you know, he's not a king. You know, or Adolf Hitler, he's, he's a ruffian. I think it's someone, I think it's that simple in some ways, you know. Or if, like, if Hamas took down Israel, they'd be pissed off about that

because it was the brown people who did it and it wasn't proper white Europeans who did it. Yeah, but they, also they but they themselves like you know don't even understand uh their own lore in that regard like yeah i mean that's part of it too but they also but they're i mean some of that too is just like stupid uh stupid prejudices you know i don't mean racism i mean just i mean it's like unexamined uh unexamined belief structures you know like these people think they and as everybody knows i get a lot of shit for this which i don't give a fuck

about they're like literally nothing I care less about but I get really really irritated by my simpletons and a and um mental midgets who like think they hate Islam when like they couldn't tell you anything about the faith they have no understanding the difference between the sex they have no understanding that you know literally every race on this planet is represented within Islam you know they they don't even understand that you know the the founders the Palestinian resistance or Christian, not Islamic. But, you know, they, so if there's some, if there's, if there's some, like, if there's some, if there's some criminally minded, like, lumping black guy from, like, In Gola who gets dropped in

the UK or Ireland, you know, by some, by some NGO tailored to oversee, like, ethnic cleansing European countries, like, and that guy does something horrible, they decided that's Islam. It's not like some, like, it's not some, like, deviant third world guy who's criminally minded. Like, somehow it's, somehow it's Islam doing that. You know, like, I made the point that it'd be like if, like, when the Venezuelan invasion for that everybody Biden was underway, they'd be like me insisting that this was like Catholics doing something to me. Like, you know, like I, I mean, that's another issue, but it's,

There is a, there is like a serious provincial ignorance. I think it's all of those things, you know, but I, uh, but, uh, you know, at the same time, though, I mean, I'm always making the point that with this kind of subject matter, you know, we're not, we're not, we're not through host witnesses, and we're not Scientology, and we're not, we're not a Billy Graham crusade. you know, we're not, we're not trying to, like, get Normies to think right. It's always about, it's always about waking up the Normies. You got to wake up the normies, man. Yeah, yeah.

That's like, that's literally the last thing I, I have any interest in doing. I mean, maybe if I ran a megachurch or something, or if I was like a salesman, I'd feel differently, but, you know, there's nothing to do with what I'm, what I'm up on. But, you know, the, uh, and, to bring it back, and I'll move us forward from Heidegger, because I realize we can't spend like endless episodes on this subject matter. But, you know, the whole, in terms of practice, where politics intersects with metaphysics and with, you know, returning culture to a situation of higher development, you know, As the potential for, you know, a historical existence and an authentic cultural existence recedes, as the potential for, you know, like an immediate kind of ontological

understanding of being, you know, as the truth of what is truly, or what is genuinely fundamental kind of like recedes out of, uh, you know, the collective grasp of a people in psychological and spiritual terms. This leads to inevitable nihilism. Okay. It creates pointless societies that kind of passively commit suicide slowly. Or, you know, an act of nihilism emerges, which is communism. You know, and you have, you have megacidal class warfare.

And, you know, again, the entire communist project is essentially the eradication of culture and the reduction of people to a state of slavery, you know, because slaves can't live historically. You know, they're precluded from it because they can't access it, an historical experience. they can't access historical memory any longer. You know, and that's basically like imposing a billion deaths on it. I mean, you're wiping out an entire culture of people, like even if physically their descendants are still alive for many generations.

You know, and I mean, so that's, that's both like the immediate crisis that, uh, you know, Heidegger and his coterie and those adjacent realized that they had to remedy. I mean, but this was like the nature of the emergency whereby the praxis of something like, you know, national socialism or, you know, the national fascist party

or an ever was view of the Iron Guard. which again you know he viewed as a the most perfected form of this tendency you know born of the crisis modality you know born of the extant zeit guys um but that's uh you know Aside from whatever other differences in, you know, like ethical or aesthetical or, you know, moral differences in basic terms existed between, you know, the revolutionary right and concertive elements, you know, the former or the only ones, acknowledging this or who probably really understood it i don't i don't make people like the stahlhelm i and uh you know the christian democrats understood these things um i mean he obviously perceived that there was some sort of apical crisis afoot i mean that's obvious

but you know a and even even people who mean well and i don't think conservatives ever really mean well, okay? But even if they did, you know, in absence of a cadre that understands these things and understands what is and is not possible in terms of praxis and is capable of, you know, developing a meaningful conceptual paradigm of, you know, the historical situation as well as you know, the metaphysical basis of, you know, the values being defended and other things. I mean, without that, whatever movement or party in question is, is, is useless. You know, so, I mean, that was a big part of a, that was a big part of Heidegger's, um,

partisanship, too. You know. And when Heidegger stepped away, people have a misunderstanding too. I mean, He disagreed himself from active membership within the party pretty quickly after the revolution.

And that wasn't accidental. And it wasn't because he suddenly decided that you know, national socialism was grossly offensive to his person and that Hitler was a bad man. It was because mission accomplished in part. You know, that the chips are going to fall where they may. You know, fate has, or the historical process

or the cunning of reason has ordained this outcome, you know, the national socialist are they going to deliver Europe to you know a kind of racial and cultural salvation in historical and ontological terms or they're not.

You know, like what? Like a man in a Heidegger's situation. First of all, most people like Heidegger who are basically these guys are introverted big thinkers.

They don't really like engaging with politics. You know, I don't like that kind of thing. I'm not nearly the and Heidegger is obviously, but the last thing I want to do is fuck around with party politics. You know,

and it would have been kind of unbecoming for a guy like a Heidegger. Who I think that, I mean, Heidegger didn't have, I mean, Heidegger had an ego like all like all brilliant men do, but I don't think his was particularly

overly cultivated. But be as it may, he did have an understanding of himself in his role, okay, in the German intellectual tradition and as kind of the last true continental philosopher in that discrete tradition. You know, if he'd been like running around trying to insinuate himself, you know, into party affairs and become some kind of partisan celebrity, like that would have been. very gross, you know. So, I mean, you can tell me that's speculative. I don't think it is. I think it's pretty clear. But, you know, it, uh, this process of nihilism, you know, this higher view it as literally the most, uh, the most catastrophic and disastrous development, probably since the fall of Rome, you know, it was, it wasn't, it wasn't just, it wasn't just something that was the subject matter for, you know, kind of highfalutant, disengaged

intellectuals to debate about in, you know, in men's clubs or something. You know, this, this was a critical existential challenge, you know, that had to be met. You know, and even if it couldn't be overcome, history demanded that a European man, you know, go down while meeting the challenge, you know, in a manly and, you know, in a manly and upright and forthright way. But, you know, moving on to Evela and some of these other thinkers. You know, I think there's a volume published. I can't remember who published it initially.

I wrote a series of essays directly, it was, you know, directly in the subject of national socialism and fascism. And various permutations of, you know, what he viewed as, you know, radical traditionalist thought within revolutionary right-wing praxis. This is also in the same period that he wrote this kind of hegiography to the Iron Guard. And 10 or 15 years ago, it might have been countercurrents. They published these collected essays and this volume. You can find a free PDF online. It was, you know, I think it's called Fascism. considered from the right

critique from the right but uh you know for context um evela wrote a lot of stuff that was a critical what he viewed as the overly proletarian character

of the fascists particularly their direct action element um and uh i i love latin people i'm not saying bad things about them but nobody no nobody does honor feuds like like like Latin people and especially Italians so like some of some of a some of a some of a

Evelace takes on these a squadrisi type guys really really raised their ire um his life was threatened repeatedly but he came very much under the patronage of a man named Roberto Ferranacci. Ferenacci was the fascist party boss of Cremona. And he also ran a newspaper, The regime fascista, a regime probably, the regime a fascista, you know, which obviously was a partisan newspaper.

and he brought Evel on board as the editor of the opinion page. So Evela had, through an official party organ, you know, basically carte blanche to, like, drop, like, op-eds on the state of the party, on the, you know, on the state of the internal situation in Italy, on the state of, again, what he viewed as, you know, an international fascist movement. And I don't want to get ahead of myself, but his correspondence with Eliotti and George Dumazil. We'll get into Dumazil next episode, but Dumazil was, he's still, he's one of the few traditional anthropologists. You know, and in the old days, before, you know, long before the human genome was even, you know, before, for example, when anybody's kind of place and that the human genome, I'm going to be mapped. Anthropology and comparative linguistics and philology,

it kind of ran together as a common discipline. Dumazil is the progenitor of the tri-functional hypothesis of Indo-European societies. you know, those who work, those who fight, those who pray, you know, the priestly caste, the warrior cast, and, you know, the agrarian caste. And through comparative linguistics and through endlessly pouring over these recurring symbols in national mythologies, you know, of Aryan-derived cultures, he developed a conceptual, picture literally of where ancient erians emerged, where their cultural footprint was most strongly felt what cultures were derived from this root founding population based on the tri-functional social organization principle, and again, these kinds of prime symbols and their

pantheon of gods and heroes and recurring motifs and things and fascinatingly as the human genome has been mapped Dumazil was basically correct in how he mapped these things like literally on the physical map and conceptually okay but Dumazil and Elioti had a notion and Evela shared in this that one of the things that made

fascism an international tenancy, a movement of zeitgeist, and something that was demolished the fact that it was something that transcended and superseded ordinary politics.

The martyrdom of Ayamota and best Silly Marine in Spain. You know, they were Iron Guard partisans. He died fighting the communists. Dumazel and Elioti, in their correspondence, they discussed that this was a blood sacrifice. Okay.

And the blood of these murders has awakened this, you know, dormant tendency towards, like here to for dormant tendency towards palingenesis. And, you know, the racial memory and the ancestral memory with an Aryan-derived peoples has been awakened by this. To me, like an existential enemy, who even though at this time is situated in Spain, you know, represents the traditional enemy from the Orient. that, you know, has always menaced Europe, you know, and just as, just as, you know, the great con had to be resisted as news of the golden hoard traveled by word of mouth as millions fled in terror. in its stead and awake, you know, a similar awakening was underway. And, you know, from the traditionalist perspective,

blood sacrifice is always a catalyst for these sorts of awakenings, you know, which is one of the reasons why it's universal to human societies. you know, savage and civilized, you know, Occidental and Oriental, you know, wherever you find man on this planet, you know, from the most primitive sub-Saharan tribe to, you know, the most advanced Western population, you know, this is a feature that exists within their cultural psychology. and their understanding of worship and, you know, religious practice. And even if it's cast under different names and even if it's theological, significance, it's obscured,

you know, it exists, you know, to the modern present, you know, in the form of, you know, the martyrdom of partisans or in, um, executing a condemned man, you know, because the blood of the victims cry out to heaven for justice, and, you know, because wrongs can be redeemed, you know, by the sacrificial bloodletting of the condemned, you know, however you want to characterize these things, you know, that was in the in the mind of dumazel and eliotti and to some degree of evela himself you know the the true catalyzing influence of upon you know the fascist international you know that was for context they said at the outset there's a comparative analogy with the Islamic awakening, that the martyrdom of Ayan Moza and Vestil Marín, that was the siege of the Grand Mosque by Salafis, okay, is a comparable moment. Or probably a more direct example of martyrdom. I would say that the martyrdom of Bobby Sands and, you know, the Catholic moment, as it was called, that

I believe very much expedited the death of the East Block. Okay, that's another example. All right. But, you know, so I think it's important to acknowledge to, I mean, I agree with these, the musings of the men in question wholeheartedly.

But even if you don't, don't it's important understand that agree to which you know this this we're not just talking about like a prestige that kind of discreet and isolated ad hoc um right wing movements that you know sort of arbitrarily collided when it was expedient to do so for military or or political reasons you're talking about uh you're talking about a genuine movement just as much as the communist international was, you know. And among other things, I think it's essential to understand the Second World War. You've got to understand that, you know, because that changes everything, you know.

And the intellectual vanguard of that phenomenon were, you know, People like Dumasel, like Marcia Elioti, like Julius Sebelot, like Heidegger, you know, Carl Schmidt, who was also in correspondence with all of these people. Although, you know, again, his orientation was a bit different. But, you know, he very much accepted these premises, you know. And anybody who accepts those premises. They're acknowledging that what was underway, again, was something that was outside of the conceptual parameters of what is viewed as ordinary politics. But, I mean, that itself is a traditionalist imperative. The bifurcation of authority, of theology, of social obligation.

of metaphysics, you know, that's a modern contrivance that owes to, you know, a corrupted experience of being, you know. The, uh, and that's, uh, and that's where Evela especially, but all the things are so named. I make a lot of the significance of René Guillaum, as the intellectual father of a lot of these concepts. And one of his, one of the points he came back to again and again in his, in his body of work, and that Elah echoed directly was that,

you know, in a traditional state, you know, there's a holistic and spontaneous unity, the human activity, and acts of worship, you know, obviously some of these things are familiarly, or ethically familiar to, you know, anybody on the right, you know, the subordination of the economic, the political. but you know again this uh i don't think people fully grasp that uh in the traditional view a healthy state is like a healthy human there's a unified coherence to all of its aspects you know um there's not this kind of there's not this uh kind of agonistic pluralism of

of institutionalized factions. You know, I mean, that was the critique of parliamentary democracy from the Peace of Westphalia until the 1930s. You know, is that it institutionalizes

social divisions as a matter of course. But, you know, that kind of thing that kind of thing shouldn't be possible within a properly educated populace. You know, it doesn't mean people remain mired in a sort of honorable ignorance. You know, like I think in some ways was George Sorrell's suggestion.

but these things have when there's metaphysical agreement between worldly human affairs you know

these tensions just don't emerge you know and again to Heidelas or to Heidegger's point the German Reich essentially accomplished that you know it's not say it was some sort of telluric utopia

in terms of relationship between the classes, but it's not as if this was just some sort of speculative musing on order of when, you know, Cruciff would say that, you know, there'll be true socialism by

1980, you know, and we will have done away with money and done away with, you know, ownership. You know, like the state it's won't even exist. You know, I,

one of the reasons people find these, uh, these images and these films from a the Third Reich and in the, in the, in the pre-war years, whether they found it's so compelling, it's not just because of spectacle.

I mean, there's, I can show you spectacle all day from, you know, Stalinist countries. I can, uh, I can show you spectacles from places like Turk men of stand today, you're like, you know, the North Korean mass games. There's something evocative and stirring to people about the Third Reich

for the reasons just elucidated. And I think anybody's paying attention realizes that. Yeah, we'll end you here because we're coming up on about an hour and I want to

I'll wrap up this little sub um, subseries, uh, next time. I just thought it was important to take up, you know,

and I know that this, I know that the subs want to do, um, want to do, uh, dive into the subject matter of it, you know? Well,

you were talking about the, um, the reaction to the Reich, prior to the war, you know, much of that was purely on aesthetic terms, but also it has to go beyond aesthetics. I think that's,

well, probably what, scares people have been trained to be scared of that because instinctively they look at that and they're like yeah I wish we had that oh yeah yeah and so it conflicts with

you know the state related of anti-fascism so it causes this it causes this cognitive dissonance that also has like moral implications because you know people people in America don't have a real moral

education, you know, there's just this kind of confused pastiche of kind of conditioned responses and arbitrary assignations of, you know, evil to things or, you know, so they, it leads to really, really confused responses from, you know, people who weren't really thoughtful or something. self-aware. Yeah, definitely. All right. Tell people where they can find you. Well, I rejoined social media recently. I will see how long that last, but

I did that because I'm not trying to stroke myself, but people said they really wanted me to be on social media. So despite my version, I set up a Twitter account. It's

at Thomas Sear 777. So it's Thomas T-H-O-M-A-S-C-Y-R, which is my government name, 7777. The best place to hit me up is on Substack, because that's where my pod is and all kinds of other good stuff. It's Real Thomas 777.7.7.com. And my website's a one-stop kind of location for my content. It's Thomas 777.com. It's number 7-H-M-A-S-777.com. That's all I have for now.

All right. Until the next time. Thank you, Thomas. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanuono show. Thomas is back and we are continuing this series on the radical traditionalist school. How are you, Thomas?

I don't very well. I think today I'll wrap up this sort of like subtropical treatment of, you know, the, the fascist internationals, I think of it, and the intellectual cadre that, you know, constituted the radical traditionalist sort of vanguard and the 20th century. century. You know, and to be clear, I'm going to primarily talk about Mercia Eliotti today, but like a lot of people on social media and other platforms and stuff, they've been asking about like René Guillaume, who's something of a mysterious figure, I mean, for all kinds of reasons. I think he curated that image, but he, and he died, I think, in 1950. But, you know,

Carl Schmidt, as I mentioned, Carl Schmidt had an active correspondence with Bracia Eliotti, with Julius Sevel up, with Ernst Younger. And we don't think of Carl Schmidt as being insinuated into this milieu, but he was. You know, and that goes to show you again, oh, there was a true cadre of intellectuals and a true internationalism to fascism and related movements. but Carl Schmitt said that he considered René Guillaume to be the most like compelling living intellectual you know um and uh

Gionne's conversion to Islam I mean that was a very French thing of him to do he was very much an Orientalist you know like a lot of like a lot of Westerners were and are and particularly a certain a certain type of adventurous soul and you know there's a certain ecumenicalism to the traditionalist school like I indicated but also you've got to understand the context particularly in the first half of the 20th century this was well before the Islamic awakening in 1979 but Islam seemed far more of a living

faith and way of life than you know it was the case on the ground in christendom outside of place like Romania and we'll get into that you know so in that that's the way to kind of understand Gion and I mean he lived among the Arabs and and basically became unculturally you know he went native as it were but beyond that his attraction to that theological system owes to what I just said I you know the degree to which this kind of scientific or scientism secular scientism was the dominant conceptual paradigm that really can't be overstated you know it was just like a foregone conclusion you know that's

why it was so interesting how the the final phase of the Cold War shook out you know and just uh across cultural tears. You know, I, the martyrdom of Bobby Sands was tremendously important. And, and the Catholic revival, you know, that was so instrumental in the resistance behind the wall in Poland, you know, that, that was an aspect of this zeitgeist shift. You know, and a lot of this stuff's coming to like full realization today. You know, there's a, there's a theological subject. text to discourse right now and just the way

you know and symbolic psychological phenomena and all kinds of other things and this is fascinating and you know these these are very exciting times right now that's one of the reasons I disdain it when when people act like they live in a boring century or

something I mean there's always compelling things like in any century you live in if you know you if you're conceptual horizon is an adequately wide temporal sample, you know, but you know what I mean. But interestingly, too, you know, Marcia Eliotti was at University of Chicago. And at the University of Chicago library now, Evela's letters to Eliotti are, you can, you can access them there. They're in the Mercia Eliotti papers, which is great.

universities remain a really good resource like that um next time i'm in portland oregon i found out lately that uh the university of portland that for h keith steimley who was uh he he was instrumental in um the institute for historical review in like very early 80s and he uh and h keith thompson became pretty close and Keith Steinley, he died young. He died of AIDS, interestingly. And apparently people didn't know that he was gay, but apparently he was.

I mean, I'm not speaking on that one way or the other. But when he died, he was aggregating all these papers and taking testimony from, you know, a bunch of people because he intended to write a biography of Francis Yaqui. And Kevin Coogan, I believe H.K.E. Thompson passed on a lot of that material that Steinley had aggregated to Kevin Coogan, who wrote, obviously the seminal biography of Yaqui is the one... Carrie Bolton.

Yeah, yeah, thanks. At a senior moment. It's the Kerry Bolton treatment. but the book by Kevin Coogan is a great book. And like the footnotes and end notes alone are like a treasure trove of data. And it's and then H.D. Thompson, Elsa DeWitt, you know, a lot of other people who were friends of Francis Yaki as well as George Lewis Javiric and other guys in that milieu. I mean, they participated in it because they came to trust Coogan. And so it's not, people shouldn't be put off by the fact that Kugan's, you know, this kind of neo-Marxist type of guy.

But be that as it may, the critical thing to understand in terms of, in terms of praxis, how this fascist international, what I insist was extant as like an ant, animating force and an intellectual tendency, you know, in the inner war years. And that really, as I think I, as I think we discussed the other day, was a really catalyzing influence, especially after the martyrdom of Ayan Moza and Vasil Marine. But, you know, Evela and his, he came, he met Murcia Eliotti. for the first time when he traveled to Romania. And Evela wanted to meet Kudriano. And in his estimation, as well as in the estimation of Carl Schmidt,

I don't think Younger directly commented on the internal situation in Romania. But yeah, Evela viewed it as a, he viewed as a kind of pure expression. of traditionalist capital t traditionalist praxis you know and he viewed it as a new kind of revolution you know and something unique unto itself and he traveled to romania to meet kodrianu and that's when he first came across eliotti you know and at that time eliotti was was serving in the in the iron guard and um kadriano's intellectual mentor and we kind of considered to be is spiritual forebearer was email Ceron, Cioran. I'm probably butchering that pronunciation.

Ceron wrote a book called The Transformation of Romania in 1936. It was basically a manifesto, you know, calling for palingenesis in ethnocultural terms. you know and national renewal something that Evel accommodated on and we wanted to engage with Eliotty

and these then young guys who were kind of filling out the ranks of the Iron Guard there's a characteristic aspect of the Iron Guard movement you know it um they constructed uh their primary organizational modality was what they referred to as nests you know and this wasn't just a way of you know breaking down paramilitary organization

for political warfare and direct action it represented an emphasis on an on a common or communitarian form of life. That was primarily centered around ethical and religious sensibilities and criteria. You know, and that was something, there wasn't really a counterpart to that in the German essay or the fascist black shirts. you know one of the things Cardreano said to

Evela is that prayer is a decisive element of victory you know it was a kind of pure crusader spirit transposed to the modern era like and uh

the kind of the modern interpretation of jihad militant Islam, this is really kind of the Christian counterpart to that,

okay, in a very real sense. And this is important because until fairly recently, there wasn't a lot of serious scholarship other than people like Ernst & Olte who

you know were in our somebody esoteric in their work product you know like noelty was a political philosopher you know he wasn't um an analytic historian but there's not there was not for many decades serious scholarship of of a fascist type movements you know and uh what their characteristics were and even those people in mainstream Magadim, who set out to be reasonably objective, the kind of metrics they were applying in

their methodology were wrong. You know, and the way they interpreted these variables were wrong. And the context wasn't something that they had a meaningful grasp of. You know, so the Iron Guard weren't reactionaries. They didn't want to just kind of turn the clock back to, you know, inculcate people like Romanians and medieval sensibilities or something. Their entire praxis was to bring about something that hadn't been seen before. And to be clear, Siron, he had certain progressive aspects to his worldview.

Like he said that, you know, the relative democratization of political life, something that had to happen because otherwise ontological shock would have just led to revolution and we'd be in the situation the Soviet Union is, which is, of course, correct. Beyond that, one of the things that ties younger to a lot of these movements that were, you know, right word of his own perspective and something that's set younger apart from his revolutionary conservative ideological counterparts in a lot of ways you know the concept of the anarch is like a man who's you know this kind of self-contained agents who's neither a master nor slave you know and who can't be categorized according to traditional sociological schema in terms of how he fits into a class paradigm in modernity.

You know, that's very much the kind of historical personality that the Iron Guard and that Cioran was trying to cultivate. and this is important. Okay. There is a new fascist man. I mean, I'm invoking kind of a colloquial phraseology, but revolutionary rightist movements had as much of a concept of a new man as did their enemies, you know, in the Marxist-Leninists, because that's what history called for.

And also, you know, the entire catalyst for this kind of revolutionary activity was ontological. You know, historical situatedness and the factors that constitute

that historical situatedness, this is what, you know, defines the culture in any given era. You can't just say, like, I'm going to consciously reject that and, you know, ascribe to something else that I find preferable. You know, that's a kind of retreat into fantasy or, you know, the relegation of oneself

to irrelevancy by way of subcultural insularity, you know. So this is important because Romania is kind of overlooked anyway. traditionally in analyses of the war, which in military terms, you know, Romania was the German Reich's most important ally. And, you know, they dedicated the most forces to the crusade against the Soviets. Antonescu and Hitler were actually quite close. But beyond that, you know, Romania, I think it's ill understood as a culture because it's the direct descendant,

like literally of both Rome and Byzantium. I think the Balkans are kind of ill-understood anyway. During the Cold War, Romania kind of staked out its own path, which seemed very ASEAD. and kind of alien. There's this kind of morbid fascination with the Chisetsu regime and its excesses and things

in America and in Europe, Western Europe. But the internal situation there was very dynamic and outsized in its impact. So I think that that kind of

insularity caused people. to kind of ignore it as a historical quantity but also one of the the people remain prisoners of the kind of Cold War conceptual paradigm and something that's neither a merely reactionary protest against liberal modernity or something that's not you know actively revolutionary in terms of its ambition to socially engineer traditional modalities out of existence. If there's a political tendency that's neither of those things,

mainstream scholarship doesn't know how to deal with it. And furthermore to, like, the big imperative of the traditional school, and one of the reasons why the revolutionary sensibilities, the Iron Guard, represent such a piece. pure iteration of traditionalist practice is that there's an integralism and a symbolic psychological aspect of this that sets it apart from what we think of as politics in the late modern sense you know people like quadriano and people like eliotti they were talking about entire kind of modes of life and ethics.

They weren't talking about politics as this kind of discrete mode of activity that's separate from all other cultural activity, you know, or something that's a, or something that's a, that has psychological aspects unto itself that don't touch and concern. other other other other you know

identitarian aspects of the human being in you know in in any meaningful way that's the wrong way to look at it because all these things are viewed as one you know

the only legitimate politics is a politics that derives from Christian ethics and you know orthodox Christian ethics in the case of Romania and orthodoxy is rather congregational you know so the the folk community or like you know the Romanian race and its its heritage it's

it's it's shared memory you know both epigenetic as well as you know the you know the the symbolic psychological aspects that individuals share in common in the culture relating to ritual and right and religious practice and things. You know, all these things are what makes congregational life possible, which in turn allows people to, you know, partake of the grace of the living God through the Christ. And this is the metric of all activity as a Romanian patriot, but also, like, as a man, as an Orthodox Christian and everything else. You know, church isn't something you do on Sunday so that, you know, you have something to do or for the sake of appearances or because you're worried about, you know, your kids not getting an adequate moral education. It's a totally different perspective than, you know, people in kind of like 20th century, late modern Anglophone cultures ahead of things. You know, I'm speaking in terms of like the majoritarian sensibility, obviously there were exceptions within those cultures and countries. But it's also, you know, another aspect of.

the Iron Guard that was kind of overlooked or de-emphasized. And Eliotti wrote about this and the political writing that he did engage in after 1945 is pretty sparse for obvious reasons. But his correspondence with Evel, he emphasizes the need for the need for, an intellectually rigorous vanguard. You know, and Eliotty was like an urbane intellectual. And most of these Iron Guard legionnaires, they were university students and some like working guys. But this was not, this wasn't some like peasant movement or something.

It wasn't, you know, comparable to say like the, you know, Father Tiso's party. I'm not having like punitive. And I'm not saying there's something like wrong. with that kind of agrarian peasant um you know patriotic sensibility but it's a very different thing if you're talking about basically like you know um cadres of christian jihadists who you know dedicate themselves this kind of like monastic this like warrior monastic sort of like intellectually driven existence it's very different you know

And, you know, and key to, I think, understanding why this was an important movement, for all the reasons we've been discussing. You know, when I talk about the martyrdom of Ayan Mota and Vesil Marín, this wasn't some ex post facto sort of mythification. you know in the moments all kinds of men went down in theater who were fighting for the nationalist cause and who had a very romantic sort of back story

about what brought them there it was these pious orthodox iron guard legionaires you know who became the martyrs and you don't I mean the congregants decide who's a martyr and he was not okay

and this funerary train of the two martyrs you know everywhere they went they were saluted you know by Philangis you know by black shirts by national socialists you know by Carlos you know in Belgium and France

and um in Italy in Austria you know there was this ecumenical kind of fascist reverence around the sacrifice and murderdom of these two Romanians, you know, who again

represented in a pure sense, a kind of Christian jihad. I mean, that speaks for itself, you know. And Eliadi throughout his life, you know, the concept of sacred time and how that situates people psychologically and historically and how that functions as you know an essential aspect of worship this was kind of one of the core concepts within his political theology but also like the catalyzing effect of sacrifice and martyrdom you know

and this was a huge hugely revered thing among the Iron Guard and they were talking about this years before any of them deployed to Spain you know they they were in touch with the zeitgeist

in instinctive ways you know that the national socialists save you know people like Hitler himself just weren't apprehending. And in the case of people like Hitler,

you know, like Lenin or Mussolini, you know, he understood the like historical imperatives at play in an absolutely instinctive way. And he was like, you know, in some ways he had like a savonious genius for these things. But we're talking about something very different, you know. know, I think that's clear. And I don't, a movement like the, the Legionary movement or like the Iron Guard, I, that wouldn't have jumped off in, in Germany.

It wouldn't have had a context. I can see something, I can see maybe a pious Catholic movement emerging in Austria. That was like openly fascist and that, and whose praxis was strongly oriented, oriented towards martyrdom. But I, but even that, I think it's somewhat dubious, you know? So this,

any serious scholar of the era and again, of these, you know, of the movement, it should account for this, man. And that's changing, but like I said, even among

sympathetic scholars, I think, I think there's something and then there's something basically lacking in their understanding not just to the concrete particulars but of the kind of conceptual whole um you know and um i go as far as to say too i mean quadriano obviously was in dialogue with the the revolutionary proletarian movement because i mean anybody so engaged in the political struggling in the interwar years i mean that That's literally what all discourse was in dialogue with. So, I mean, like, that itself situates any partisan in a sort of modernist category.

You know, so it's kind of like neither hearing or there. I mean, Cadriano and Eliotty, they weren't like reactionaries anyway, but it's kind of a meaningless criteria to assign. as a characteristic, you know, when we're talking about people who are engaged in, like, direct action against the communists, you know, in the 1930s. It, you know, and the, uh, the, uh, yaki, some of the language that he lifts, uh, or, like, some of the concepts that he fleshes out, particularly in Imperium, like the first, few chapters of the book where he's kind of touching on like you know the new fascist man he's talking about how the new europe is going to require a new consensus specifically one of living

dangerously and sacrificially and that's a hundred percent um you know the kind of philosophical disposition of the Iron Guard. It's not a conventionally political concept, you know, and it's not a kind of superficial extremism. And it's also not a conventionally, even among the more sanguinary and war-oriented modalities of Christianity, it's not really a Christian sensibility either, at least in the sense that is under discussion.

you know and uh that's very much a modernist understanding you know of uh what constitutes you know redemptive factors and worldly conduct um you know it's uh and karl schmidt too you know he even in know most of the earth where which is a I mean that's his magnum opus but it's also probably his most kind of mainstream scholarly work but uh he's dealing with a lot of conceptually theological things okay you know and in the 1950s and 60s obviously nobody on the right you know even people uh who were pretty far right, unless they were openly dissenting elements or like underground national socialists or something. You know, they weren't, they weren't openly trying to drop parallels between themselves and the fascist international. But there's concepts that just axiomatically endured within, you know, right-wing thought in the European sense.

you know and the concept of sacrifice if not martyrdom and the understanding of sacred ground and what makes land appropriation legitimate is the sacramental spilling of blood you know that's that's a schmidian concept that it was very much to this kind of political theology you know so this stuff had it's not like this stuff was totally dormant or these concepts were totally dormant and so

you know a couple of decades after the Cold War and now like you know the kind of subcultural tendencies that we represent like rediscovered this stuff it was like insinuated all throughout everything subsequent to it you know so

So this can't be dismissed as some strange artifact of an ontological shock, you know, and kind of that tragedy of the commons amidst, you know, the European Civil War and all these horrible events that, you know, led to communism and resistance to it and things. you know there's an independent significance here and there's an enduring significance that is uh yeah is um must be accounted for in its own right you know in the younger um and even uh even in all quite in the western front i'm not a fan of eric maria remarky i think he's um I think he was a very, I think he was a very egoistic person who dressed up his personal grievances and his own moral cowardice as some, as some sort of principal stand against, you know, the, the heartless Prussian establishment or whatever. but the concept of the First World War constituting a mass sacrifice and thus moving forward having expiated the sins of the German nation and race you know and thus the punitive sanctions they were availed due deliberately in terms of the political structure of Versailles, that that is a subtext to, you know, all Weimar discourse. You know, even the KPD kind of acknowledge that in their own strange and toleric way.

You know, and also this understanding of the sacrificial victim, status, actual or potential of the entirety of the nation, or as the kind of international sensibility set in and all trappings of nationalism fell by the wayside, after the Great War, you know, speaking not just in terms of the nation, but, you know, the race writ large or, you know, the West or European civilization, this understanding. of every man, woman, and child therein potentially being availed a sacrificial status that also made certain things possible that wouldn't have been before, you know, in terms of, in terms of ethics and what becomes what was previously unthinkable.

because not just something that can be entertained in the abstract, but can be implemented for the sake of civilizational survival. You know, obviously there's like the immediate threat of, you know, being subject to extermination. And that was an old thing's all point. But if people want to know how the inner struggle relating to the ethics of, resisting such things by comparable

and direct countermeasures became resolved. I would say that that's how. And that of itself has a sacrificial implication.

Like Kaudreanu made the point that a Legion may condemn himself to hell for his commitment and for his actions in the service of that commitment. But that's the ultimate offer of sacrifice because, you know, obviously the pious man, the holy warrior, the man on the path of jihad,

he always hopes that God will let him come back and return to grace. But if the service. survival of his people and if his commitment to his comrades and even his commitment to God call for him to do monstrous things that will damn his soul for eternity, there is no sacrifice greater and no conceivable martyrdom more severe, you know, than to literally willfully bear witness to one's own damn name. So that's part of this ontology too and I'm not just speculating here it's

intrinsic to a lot of the it's intrinsic to a lot of the reflections I believe of people like Gearing especially at Nuremberg, although he didn't characterize it that way because um

garing was many things and i think he was a real hero like we talked about but garing was not a pious man uh and i don't think you spent a lot of time contemplating these kinds of things but it was intrinsic to the zeitgeist

um eliotti too and this is something eliotti's probably probably probably the most famous books were shamanism, archaic techniques of ecstasy, which is a great book. And the sacred and the profane.

He wrote another book called The Myth of Eternal Return, Returns, that's problematic because people associate eternal recurrence with the Nietzschean postulate, which incidentally, and we'll get to this later in our series, eternal return in the eugenic sense that's the equivalent of cons categorical imperative it's a fascinating concept it redefines ethics and moral action in terms of aesthetical principles it's just fascinating but eliotti's meaning of that phrase was that ritual and spiritual purpose practice in the form of rights. You know, it's, it's temporally situated outside of ordinary human time.

And it connects the past and the present and the future in a way that no other human activity does. And that's part of its purpose. you know and um obviously there's a symbolic psychological aspects that presumably trigger epigenetic memory and things there's a aspects of the shared cultural mindset that respond uh to uh aspects of um you know uh ritualized worship that are familiar even though, you know, people have never been taught these things as a, you know, in the way that one is a, uh, uh, uh, availed, uh, you know, simple steps in, in a process that they then emulate, you know, but, um, Eliotti's main, one of his main contributions was his methodology and the way that he approached discussion of a, you know,

religious phenomenon, you know, in terms of worship and, uh, and existential aspects of it. You know, he said that you've got to approach something. If you take, if you're looking at what you're talking about like a primitive tribe in Africa or whether you're talking about some highly developed society like Japan and you know like a the shamanism that they practice like with a Shinto priest you know there's not like variables you can code to try and flesh out the significance of this the human psychology or to cultural learning it requires a kind of instinctive ability to perceive the meaning of these things in symbolic psychological capacities. You know, it requires a certain empathy that, you know, allows one to see subjects to the eyes of the other.

And such that these things can be modeled in a more. conventional analytic format the variables we're talking about in something like shamanism or a sacramental practice you've got to identify the aspects in common that allow for a proper categorical description now what are the aspects of shamanism the thing is like astral projection real or perceived I mean, some people believe I'm not going to think. Some people don't. But the inner experience of it, of that sort of ecstatic response, a lot of people attributed to, you know, a sort of spiritual soaring or elevation, you know, things that relate to people's pre-rational emotional responses to a sacramental symbol. across cultures you know like you can't

code these things in a way that reveals the essential meaning of them to the human being you know it's something that can only be experienced and kind of anecdotally relayed so Eliati relied a lot on direct testimony

on subjective interpretation and in common psychological features of a symbolic nature that could be observed. You know, and obviously me and she made a deem claim that, well, this is all conjecture and like reactionary romanticism or, you know, fascist epilogia. But Eliotty was right. Wolfgang Smith, his methodology was a bit different and the subject matter that he emphasized was a bit different. But he similarly eschewed conventional modeling when dealing with this kind of experience, like religious phenomena as experience.

Okay. This is what Wolfgang Smith called traditional data. you know it is data make no mistake but it it can't be analyzed and interpreted or um properly situated within a wider analytical paradigm according to conventional and quantitative research methods you know um and it's it goes beyond it it's not just you know i know it when i see it it goes beyond that there's a real there's a real method here um although not again in the sense we think of it in something like economics or you know other types of social research um you know and the concept of course too of uh the return to sacred time this is one of the things that grounds people

in their own culture because it means that, you know, there are aspects of the human psychology and the human inner life. You know, if you're a religious man or woman, you know, you interpret that as spiritual life that are not historically contingent, you know, and that's one of the functions in terms of revolutionary praxis that prayer and ritual serve is that it literally takes us out of you know historical time and situates us in sacred time you know and that's the key element of what is sacred and what is profane and that dichotomy is it just isn't just an essential aspect and mercia eliades thought it was an essential aspect of email CRN is a paradigm. It was an essential aspect of Kodrianu's understanding of

the existential aspects of, you know, the path of the legionaire, you know, and also while removing us or the subject population or congregation or cadre from historical time, at the same, same time, it does allow us to relate to historical and primordial psychological settings. You know, so in these renewal ceremonies, on the one hand, they're timeless, but in the other hand, you know, they bring a historical phenomenon into not just living, memory but living experience, you know, and a participation of the individual and itself contained capacity as well as a member of the congregation and, you know, the nation and the race, it initiates them into a kind of mythical framework, you know, such that these

things aren't merely trivial abstractions or inaccessible, you know, arcane behavioral observances of the distant past. And that's essential as part of a cultural education as well as communitarian bonding. because one of the things about sacramental practices is very intimate. It's not a kind of thing you share with strangers. You know, the deliberate

diminishing and in some cases purging of these things from cultural and national life. This is one of the reasons, and this is changing, thank God, that people are overly focused on sex.

in these post Nuremberg's socially engineered cultures because that's one of the only avenues of intimacy like people still can that isn't just available where that people can even conceptualize and that's very worked don't be wrong and people who think it through

or who have their modesty and their kind of internal moral core intact don't go that route but a lot of men and women are weak and there's nobody there to properly guide them as to why that that's perverse. I'm not like acquitting them from responsibility,

but a lot of people are easily misled. Okay, that's a fact. But, yeah. I don't want to dive into the next part of the subject matter yet. I was going to kind of try and tie this into the broader topical essence of the series, but we'll do that next time. And at long and last, we'll return to the main topical thrust, which is kind of a philosophy.

I hope people found this worthwhile. I think it was important to kind of articulate that the significance of the traditionalist school of thought to, you know, the revolutionary right and all of that, you know. I wanted to add this just because our mutual friend Carl Dahllin. I were recording on the Iron Guard yesterday. Yeah, that's awesome. Both of you guys told me that. That's great. Yeah, here's Vassili Marines' quote that we ended it on, said,

um, soaked in dynamism, our movement is revolutionary. The Legion promotes the creative spirit and all the fields of public life and sincerely rejects conservatism. The Legion organizes the conquest of the future with the help of of all the productive categories of the nation and does not represent a reaction toward the past. Yep. And I think a lot of people will hear that and they will forget that they're Orthodox Christians and that nothing that is said there negates that. No.

It defines, it defines it. No, and this was, you know, I, no, Carl's a, he's a great guy. like he's he's our he's our friend and comrade but he's also a brilliant dude and the it's not just like intellectual curiosity that that brings thoughtful people to a study of of the iron guard it's it's got a hugely outsized significance in in terms of uh revolutionary praxis you know um and the essence of you know it was

not only was it not reactionary it was like very forward-looking that kind of thing is incredibly I mean one of the things that doomed the lead during the movement was that it was like too early I think you know it's very much suited to the world of like 1989 and beyond

obviously you know it's our present yeah no that's that's great and no I'm glad that you and Carl were covering that subject matter because this will be kind of a common piece to that stuff too. Well, I think this

went a lot more into the philosophy behind it and why. Good deal. No, I'm glad I'm being useful and not just redundant, but yeah. All right, Thomas. Tell everybody where they can find you. Yeah, man. You can find me on my website. it's Thomas 777.com. It's number 7, H-O-M-A-S.

I'm on social media for the time being. We'll see if, I'm sure at some point they're going to, like, ban this account, too, even though I never violate T-O-S. But it's at Thomas Sear. That's my government name, T-H-M-A-S-C-Y-R-7-7-7. and my substack where a lot of the magic happens, you know, like my podcast, like some video content, long-form stuff, like announcements relevant to like our cadre,

you know, and when and where we're meeting up and stuff. That's at real Thomas 777.7.7.7.com. And forget, like, my voice and stuff. Like, I'm feeling a lot better, and I was, like, some weeks back, but I'm still dealing with some, like, respiratory stuff, you know? All right, no problem. Thank you. Talk to you in a couple days. Take care.