The Pete Quiñones Show - *Throwback* Reading Léon Degrelle's 'The Burning Souls' w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

231 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas joins Pete to read and comment on the entirety of Léon DeGrelle's "poetic memoir," The Burning Souls. 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.

Ready for huge savings, we'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye, distinctive by design. They move you, even before you drive.

The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Cooper. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services, Arland Limited, subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply.

Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? Well mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. And thank you. This is my thousandth episode.

If you would have told me when I started this, that I would have had an 1,000th episode, I would have told you that you were probably insane and I'd probably be dead by now or something. But here I am. And I invited my friend Thomas 777 to come on the show and do this with me. How you doing, Thomas? I'm very well. Thank you. I'm honored to be here for the, for the millinerian episode, I guess.

I mean, that's no small thing, a thousand episodes. That's a hell of a lot of content. That's a real milestone. And it's a milestone that it's New Year's Eve. This has been a really incredible year. I mean, everybody says that. I mean, I don't, I don't mean that in a corny way. I mean, it really has.

And I'm profoundly optimistic for 2024. So we're in a good place. I am as well. I'm very optimistic for 2024. I think if our people really concentrate on getting things done, taking care of business this year, 2024 at the end, we're going to be much stronger for it. They will be much stronger for it, too. I think there's a historical moment underway.

Yeah, definitely. And I think I'm both old enough. And I'm plugged in enough to the zeitgeist because, I mean, that's frankly all I do is try and perceive these things. you know um i think i think i can i think i can read the proverbial proverbial tea leaves more adeptly than some men so yeah these are exciting times man um it's good we're here on new year's eve of producing content like the busy bees we are and not not not not not doing gross stuff for new year's eve like like dodging petals of vomit and and and stepping over like weeping phaed shigs.

Those days are gone for me. I like being at home, being at home or being with friends. So, well, what I wanted to ask is, well, what I wanted to say is the reason I chose this to read is because it's something very different than what I normally read. A lot of this is poetry is very poetic. I also think that I'm pretty sure this is probably the last thing that, that, that, Mr. DeGrell wrote. It definitely seems like it's probably the last thing that he wrote that it really meant something to him.

I thought we'd open this up by, to tell us a little bit about what you know about Leon DeGrel. I mean, in the inner war years, DeGrelle was too young to have fought in the Great War. I think he was born in 1906. He was born in 2005 or six, like around there, okay. but he came of age. He was very much marinated in the culture, the inner war years. And one of the things that's lacking in court history accounts, even ones that aren't particularly punitive in terms of casting Germany as being taken,

swept up by a kind of cultural pathology that was both against precedent and not really connected to the, spirit of the age other than other than in a kind of contrarian way but they're you know the the things that were ripping through germany you know very powerful intense energies of of a constructive and destructive nature this kind of confrontation with the future and with the present which had all the trappings of a kind of ominous future like this stuff was the was impacting every every culture in Europe, okay, writ large. And I mean, that's why, like we talked about in the Spanish war episodes, you know, there was a truly, on the nationalist side of the fascist side, which, you know,

is an incomplete characterization, which just for purposes, a shorthand description, I think that's at least adequate. You know, like we talked about, you know, there was, um, the funerals of Vasili Marine and ion mota you know these romanian iron guard guys and you know it was uh you know italians german national socialists you know hungarians um you know uh carless types in in spain who supported the crown you know like all these all these anti-communist right wing elements you know turned out to literally salute like this funeral procession and similarly the guys who staffed the ranks of of these frontline formations in the same

Spanish war. I mean, they, they were guys from all kinds of backgrounds and, you know, all the nations of Europe, quite literally. And, you know, the common bond was, you know, a belief in, like, you know, in race, you know, like capital R, you know, like a, you know, faith in God, you know, a radically highest commitment to those things. You know, and in Belgium, there's a lot of high culture that comes from Belgium, you know, I mean, it's, it's not just, it's not just, um, this kind of like accidental convergence of of German or Dutch culture and and you know kind of like a francophone statelet it really is a unique

place. I've been there like many years ago. You know, de Grell was a de Gras was a a Walloon he was a Belgian

like a francophone Belgian the right wing tendency there that he he was actually instrumental in kind of creating. It was very much, I mean, it was the rexist party. You know, it was very much royalist, you know, in terms of its kind of, in terms of superficial trappings. But it was very national socialist adjacent, okay?

It was really, other than me Catholic and openly Catholic and royalist, like it was, I'd say it was more adjacent to the national socialist. the culture than any other and any other of the of the lesser axis movements say maybe the the situation in Croatia but that's basically the

that that's a culture from from where de Grell emerged and initially there was a Walloon Legion that was incorporated into the Vermacht the term legion was kind of loosely applied like i think uh it could mean anything from a force that was you know slightly larger than than that company you know um in uh in the u s army or the british army of the day you know to something that was um you know the size of like a battalion and a half

you know um so it varied but the walling legion was it was it was comparatively small but it was game enough and it was um it was populated enough by volunteers that you know the uh it enjoyed the honor of being formally incorporated into the veraumox and then later de grello proved himself uh an incredible an incredibly effective like infantry combat commander okay um first at squad and then and platoon and then you know company level and beyond is a very young man and ultimately uh the wildling legion became part of the vaughan ss and that was very much de grell's that was the rome to his behest de grell believed in the vaughan s okay um and that's important like it wasn't

just um the reason why there was such that there was a kind of like delicately and very and powerfully uh evocative uh like it delicately crafted and the kind of like the the the powerful evocative in design heraldry of the vaughan sassus like that wasn't an accident it wasn't just because it wasn't just because german artists attached to the it's actually the the officer schools were bored or something like the vaughn s as an enterprise it was uh it was supposed to be an enduring institution it was supposed to represent the pan-European idea and moving forward after n sigig you know, there was going to be a European army, okay? And to what degree they would have butted heads with the Vermathe.

That's hard to say. But operational integration on the Ostfront was actually very tight. And there was a lot of mutual respect between the here and between the Vaughn and SS that developed. So I don't think it would have been another like night-along-nigh situation at all. But point being, you know, DeGrelle, he wasn't just this kind of dreamy, you know, pan-Europeanist, who also had to be a war hero. Like he, you know, he, the culture of the Vafn-SSS, it was guys like him, it was guys like Yacquim Piper and Kurt Panzer Meyer.

It was Paul Hauser, who was an unsung military genius, in my opinion. And he was kind of the big, Hauser was kind of the big defector from the old sort of army elite, you know, who, I mean, he, he, he, he signed on for the Vof and SS immediately. And it's not like he was some, it's not like he was a guy, you know, who had problems, like some of these early OvenSS officers did, like who were great time at commanders, but, you know, they had a problem with womanizing or brawling or alcoholism or something. Like, Hauser could have done anything you wanted. You catch them in the corner of your eye.

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Lidl, more to value You know but he um He believed in the Vof and Sessess you know like as as a proposition and as an enterprise and to itself that was essential to you know what was to become the new order so de grell kind of embodied all those things you know that's that's why significant and then he he um he survived the war um he quite literally crash landed in franco spain as a wanted man and he he lived to be quite elderly he lived until the 1990s early 90s if memory serves i know he lived beyond 19th I think he was alive until like 93, 94. But, you know, he'd show up at IHR events and, like, mingle with people. And, you know, he very much positioned himself as kind of a defender of the historical record. He never shied from his war record, you know, up until the day he died.

On a formal occasions, you know, he'd wear his like war decorations, you know, and he was proud of the Vafa and incest until the day he died. So he was a real man and a real patriot. And especially, you know, because my, like my generation, our generation, we were kind of like the last generation of young people, you know, who were like around like World War II veterans, you know, in appreciable numbers. And DeGrelle, I've talked to a lot of guys who got to meet DeGrelle and stuff, you know, mostly European guys, but some of the American. dudes who were active, you know, in IHR and with like Liberty Lobby stuff, you know,

ladies, early 90s, and they who had a chance to meet him and they just said he was like an incredible guy, you know, which I'm sure he was. But that's, I mean, that's a significance. And this, that's something, uh, I take a bit peculiar interest in the Bafin as says. And as you know, and as the fellows know, as well as, you know, the, even the casual subscribers. I'm not a military guy, obviously. I'm not like prior service. And like I'm not, I'm not some military science guy. I focus on the Vafn-SS like I do, like not just because it's cool, which it is.

And I don't run from the fact that gravity towards things just because they're cool sometimes. You know, I don't think we ever outgrow that if we're intellectually curious. But it's also like the VAPNSS is a model of European integration. I mean, that's essential, and that was after NSEG, that was the model for how things were going to be organized. Okay, so these guys like Ian Kirshaw and some of these other kind of just midwit court historians, they're like, oh, German chauvinism and German nationalism. It's like, look, nobody, there were a million, like, non-Germans who signed on to the fight in the Vof and SS because they love the German nationalism. Like, that's not how things work.

And that's just not how this assign. Like, in, you know, by the mid-20th century, that kind of thinking was dead anyway. You know, like, you had the whole, the entire raison dead for the Third Reich in geostrategic terms and consequently in cultural terms, because the two things can't be extricated, was to make Europe a superpower.

You know, so a, um, this, uh, this kind of like, this armed, like, protection echelon. and like vauffin shoot stoffel like it quite literally translates to like armed protection echelon or like armed like defensive echelon you know of um kind of like replacing or as like a or representing um you know kind of a a vanguard formation against uh the enemies of europe like racial and otherwise you know kind of like a watch on the rhine like writ large that was where like all all the nations of Europe represented, you know, and with heraldic signification, you know, that's something that dates to, like, Crusader era, you know, like, that's very deep in the European kind of cultural, like military cultural mind. So it's important beyond the fact that it's just cool. You know, and that's why I was, like, very much not like a military type, like spend so much time with

Devap and SS, because it's, it's got an outsized importance. in the Third Reich and like the worldview that shaped it. But that's, that maybe that's probably a little bit outside the scope, but that's, that was important to consider for talking about DeGrelle in history and what he represented. All right. Well, this is,

I guess once we start reading this, people will get, people will get the notion that he's, he's looking back upon his life and he's looking at not only what was, but what could have been. and there's a lot of that in there in here, but there's, I think this is something that a lot of people should hear. So I'm going to share it and start reading. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive by design. They move you. Even before you

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All right, there we go. All right. Part one, empty hearts. One, the flame and the ashes. Stop me anytime, Thomas, to comment on anything. Here I am, nearly at the end of my life. I felt almost nothing. I felt almost everything, knew everything, more than anything, I suffered.

I saw, dazzled, the great golden fires of my youth arise. Their flames illuminated my land. The crowds made the starry waves of their thousands of faces dance around me. Their fervor, their eddies existed. But did they really, in fact, exist? wasn't all this a dream? Did I not dream that 30 years ago, a nation called my name, and that on certain days that the most distant newspapers of the planet repeated it? Tucked away in my exiled sadness, I can no longer believe in my past itself.

Did I live those times or not? Know those passions. Raise those oceans. I walk my terraces. I lean over my roses. I discern the sense. Have I ever been another being other than this lonely, dreamer who vainly clutches at memories frayed like mountain fogs.

Wasn't all this something other than a hallucination? I cannot see far away, far away, in faded lights, their bodies, as if from a Greco painting growing thinner and thinner. Did these men who have faded forever from the horizon know me? Did they follow me? Did I lead them? Did I exist? In my memories, as in my hands, I no longer feel that fleeting wind.

My eyes and what eyes should I have, eyes of desperation? My eyes have searched the impassive sky, tried to see in the depths of the years, in the depths of the centuries. What did it mean? The being that I am, in what way it is still the being that once carried my name, who was known, who was listened to? For whom many have lived and for whom also many have died? This being, what does it have to do with the man who was? walks bitter, endlessly alone, upon a few meters of foreign land, rummaging through his past, losing himself in it, no longer believing in it, wondering if it is really he who was tossed

a hundred times in the tornadoes of an implacable destiny, or if this was no more than a dream. So if I doubt my flesh, my bones, what my public action once forged, if I doubt the reality of my past and the part that I took in a few years of building up the history of men, what can I still believe of the ideals which were born in me, which burned me, which I projected, of the value of my convictions at the time, of my feelings, of what I thought of humanity, what I dreamed of creating for her. Each human being is a succession of human beings as dissimilar from each other as the passers by whose disparate faces we scrutinize in the street. street. At 50, how do we still look like the young man of 20 whom we are trying to remember

and whose survival we want at all costs? Even his flesh is no longer the same flesh. It is gone, has been remade, renewed. No more than a millimeter of skin is the skin of those times. You know, for context, too, like DeGrelle just mentioned that he's 50 here. And 30 years past the war, he's like in his 50s and around that yacquem piper died um when he was about 60 but it the degree to which um i mean it's politics aside um you know it had to be very very strange beyond um i mean it's it's strange if anyone who gets caught up in historical circumstances as a really young man and that kind of settles in a normalcy i mean that's strange but Piper, you know, Piper went on to a prestigious job, like with Portia.

Like, you know, he was like an incredibly successful guy by like any metric. But he, during, like, the last interview he gave to Spiegel, when he kind of became marked man again, during the kind of resurgence and anti-fascist tendencies, you know, he was like, you know, when I was, you know, when I was in, when I was in my 20s, I was, I was leading a tank across the step against the Red Army, you know, and we were prepared to go all the way to Moscow, crush it, and literally shake the world, you know, um, and then, uh, you know, like nothing, like nothing later in life is going to come close to that and everything else is going to seem just kind of like mundane. But it's also, these guys felt like prisoners. I mean, not just because of like the, the kind of, you know, the constant, um,

the constant threat, like a physical and spiritual of the regime that replaced the one that they fought on behalf of. But, you know, everybody was hostage to the Cold War at this time, and particularly, like, in Europe. And Piper made that point, too, like, when the Spiegel guy was trying to kind of like impeach his, you know, not, it kind of impeaches moral credibility. Piper's like, well, you know, now we're the designated battleground of World War III. like we're better off now you know it um like basically saying like the existence we as europeans live now is crushing the mundane punctuated only by like the periodic terror of you know um a crisis that could resolve in in in in a nuclear apocalypse you know it's i'm inside the gravity of those things that's it's a very strange place to be you know um and yeah in de grell's case um you know you know

he personally, he was personally decorated by Hitler. He was a, he was a knight's crossholder. You know, he was a, he was a hero of the Third Reich. You know, he wasn't, he wasn't just a run-on-the-mill kind of war hero looking back on, on his glory days or whatever, you know, and to go from that to in a few years, you know, kind of having to watch for you travel, because, you know, you might be, you might be, you might be, you might be assaulted and detained and find yourself, you know, indicted in some kangaroo court in the Hague or

Tel Aviv or the United States. I mean, that, that, that, they had to be almost kind of surreal. Like, I think about, like, those old TV shows, like, the prisoner or something, you know, like the old BBC show or whatever. It just, I, it's a very strange way to live. anybody is at all thoughtful or psychologically sensitive, as obviously DeGrelle was, that had to really do a number on him. But that's all I want to do insinuate. What then about the soul and our thoughts, the feelings that propelled us to action, and the feelings that pass to us like breaths and fire through the heart? How many distinct men do we carry with us who fight, who contradict each other, or who even

ignore each other? We are good and we are evil. We are both the objection, the objection and the dream. We are both tangled and extricable nets, but it is not here that the horror of fate lies. The atrocious thing is to break these nets themselves, to throw your soul overboard. The horrible thing is to have to say that the essential in our lives was caricatured, disfigured by a thousand defilements, and a thousand denials. Who has not experienced these debacles? Some realize their bankruptcy with pain. Others make the observation with cynicism. or with an arrogant smile of those who no longer listen, who are convinced that the knowledge of man and the superiority of the spirit consist in engaging in all experiences, deliberately exhausting

the most perverse pleasures, without excessive astonishment and without regret, having found in the use and in the desecration of everything, information, the condescension and indifference of an ethics of decomposition, free from any spiritual counterbalance. Without a doubt, the world in which we live has become, to a great extent, the world of these amoral people, so sure of themselves. No doubt those who would persist in imagining a humanity of high virtues may fancy them to be anachronistic beings, non-evolved, glued to old fads, living apart from men, apart from their time, apart from fashion, apart from reality. And that's the Catholic to growl, like the Catholic game comes out a lot. you know like it's obvious like a non-catholic national socialist wouldn't write this way i mean there's nothing i'm not putting shade on on on his tone at all quite the contrary but it's it's

interesting because you know the grel the grel the catholic and de grel the national socialist uh coexist very in a very complimentary and seamless way and like that the the people who are ignorant of the topic it loved a mouth off about it always claiming like that's not possible with some of contradictory. But he's very much speaking as a Catholic through much of this memoir. That's all. It was here that I arrived. I had dreamed of a century of knights, strong and noble, all dominating.

Hard and pure, my banners said. I feel unbalanced with my bundle of old dreams. I know the feelings like the ones I have tried to express can hardly be felt anymore or even seem painful to some. But I have seen so much. I have suffered so much that one more bitter thought will not tire me beyond my ability. So too bad. These dreams?

Well, yes, I had them. These impulses, yes, I carried them. This love of others, yes, it burned me. It consumed me. I wanted to see in man a heart to love, to excite, to raise, a soul witch, even if it was half exsixated by the pestilence of its slavery, aspired to find a pure breath and sometimes only waited for a word or a look to emerge and to be reborn. Let us be straightforward. The right to interject, to use others, the right to moral or spiritual consideration,

these I do not have. I know this only too well. I have had my share of miseries alas, like so many others, and even if I hadn't suffered them myself, I've been loaned so many miseries from others that I can only feel when I analyze myself confusion and unfathomable sadness. Yet the spirit of the ideal that throws its fire into this book has devoured me every day of my existence. I should, of course, have left it to others, less affected, the care and responsibility of returning light and song to mankind, but that fire was burning me down. Today, suffocated by a relentless spell, the great fire of yesteryear leaves nothing but ashes. I come back to it anyway, stubbornly, because these ashes evoked the moment of fervor in my life,

the deepest impulses, the very spiritual basis of my action. Here they are, disarrayed, delivered to the wind, which will quickly disperse them. These thoughts, these dreams are all in disorder. I have not made a plan. It is the height. I did not sit at my table like a distinguished and reasonable writer. I have not written a manual of the idealist, chapter by chapter. calculating everything, measuring everything. Not that. Nothing like that. What to do. The impulses of the soul are not graduated like the flow of a gas appliance. Hope, passion, love, faith, pain, and shame dictated to me the writings that I tossed about at such and such a time, because I felt them then with great force. Sometimes it was at the summit of my public action.

Sometimes it was in the abandonment, the mud, and the cold of my distant life as a suffering soldier in the vastness of the eastern front. But the soul that lived these impulses followed a common thread, invisible to many. It was nevertheless the artery that spiritually nourished my existence. Therefore, these notes are not so much nonsense. They record the ups and downs of a soul among souls, all of which have their ups and downs. Certainly the spirit which has arrived at the stale wisdom of cynicism can dominate by its cold smile, can display the icy marble of its interior tomb and engrave on them its findings with an impassive pen.

But fire, it has many forms. It rises, lowers, is reborn, starts anew. This book is fire, with the exultations of fire, the excess of fire. If only they could have the beneficent heat. If only the souls could find this comfort and vigor as we find them meditating in the evening, near a large, almost silent wood fire. The waves of its powerful life penetrate in their radiation and their contemplation. They offer themselves completely.

They deliver themselves completely. The gift. The real gift is thus, annihilating until the last brand. For me, my fire is dead. My life has plunged into the abyss, has been submerged by the black dawn that has smothered everything. But I still want to believe that these impulses which animated the action of a man already dead in the eyes of most, though he has the misfortune to still live for himself,

will still be able to join spiritually from here to there in the world, anxious hearts. I remember these words that I had deciphered one day on a tomb of black marble, there in Dumb in Flanders, in a church of my lost homeland, at Seymortus were ripped, even dead it burns. May these pages, the last fleeting fire of what I was, burn for a moment, warm for a moment, souls haunted by the passion of giving and believing, believing in spite of everything, in spite of the assurances of the corrupt and the cynics, despite the sad, bitter taste that leaves us with the memory of our falls,

the awareness of our misery and the immense field of moral ruins of a world that is certain to have no more of salvation, which prides itself on it and which nevertheless must be saved, must more than ever be saved. Yeah, and that's the, you know, that's the point I'm always drawing a parallel between Crusader orders and the Vafana and says that's not just ex post facto romantic interpretations. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive by design. They move you even before you drive. The new Cooper plug-in hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon,

and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited, trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars for

from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself.

The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. And it's not just a, you know, way of superficially drawing a parallel owing to the kind of multinational character. This is the

like the degree to which I mean for better or worse and however anybody feels about the Third Reich and adjacent regimes and you know institutions like the Fafana S which were kind of like the tie that bound like these

regimes together in terms of praxis like these guys really did view themselves as as crusaders and the the imperatives that they were abiding were were very much metaphysical and uncompromisingly moral ones. Like, not moral in the sense of, you know, what is morality?

But, you know, their role of view was populated by, you know, by values directed things. You know, it was not, it was not conventional kind of a 20th century politics, okay? I know that some people, the rebuttal would be that, well, this was a sort of like window dressing for, you know, typically crude power political activity. And, yeah, there's always some degree of that. But these institutions don't just spontaneously develop mythologies to substantiate, you know, the needs of like a war executive. Even a messianic type person, like it off Hitler. That just doesn't happen. Okay.

This is obviously something that these men felt very deeply in a, it was very extant in their, in their minds and hearts, as it were. And that they can't be overstated. I mean, yeah, there was, there was a, there was a, there was, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a revolutionary ambitions felt. and a kind of a kind of reckless indifference to what the consequences would be, you know, if their revolutionary ambitions felt short or whatever. But it wasn't the same thing. You know, the place where it emerged in emotional, in the most primitive kind of emotional terms, you know, might have been the same.

But what it, what it, what it, what in its, what it's, what it's, what it's, what it's, what it's intentions were and ultimately what populated that kind of worldview was like very, very different, you know, and you, um, it's not just de Grell, um, who makes these points. You know, like I said, like if you read what Piper wrote, I mean, even guys except Dietrich, who was, uh, you know, very much kind of a, like a, like a, like a, like a, a, like a, like a, like a, a, like a, he talked about, you know, his role as a commanding Leipstant, are in basically like religious terms, you know, and that's, that's some, that's very authentic, like whether you believe that it's right or not. That's not what we're talking about. Like,

we're talking about what animated, you know, the men who actually took up arms in the service of these institutions and the, and the idea that these institutions, you know, created to serve. All right. Onward to the Agony of the Century. Love? Why? Why love? Human beings have barricaded themselves behind their selfishness and pleasure. Virtue has abandoned its natural song. We laugh at our old rights. Souls suffocate. Perhaps they were already liquidated, the evidence hidden behind the decorum of habits and conventions. Happiness has become, for man and for a woman, a heap of fruit, which they devour in a hurry,

or in which they plant their teeth, without more, and reject them pell-mell, damaged by, bodies, damaged souls, quick exhausted by the fleeting frenzy, already looking for other more exciting or more perverse fruits. The air is charged with all moral and spiritual denials. The lungs draw in vain for a breath of fresh air, the freshness of a spray thrown close to the sands. Man's interior gardens have lost their colors and their birdsong. Love itself is no longer given.

And besides, what is love? the most beautiful word in the world reduced to the rank of physical pastime, instinctive and interchangeable. The only happiness lays in the gift, the only happiness that consoles that intoxicates like the full fragrance of the fruits and leaves of autumn. Happiness only exists in the gift, the complete gift. His selflessness gives him the flavor of eternity. He returns to the lips of the soul with an intangible sweetness.

Give to have seen eyes that shine. to have been understood, touched, fulfilled. Give. Feel the grand, happy tablecloths floating like dancing water on a heart suddenly adorned with sun. Give to have reached the secret fibers that weave the mysteries of sensibility. The mysteries of sensibility. Give to have this gesture which unburdens, the hand which relieves its carnal weight, which exhausts the need to be loved. Then the heart becomes as light as pollen. Its pleasure rises like the song of it, the night in game. a burning voice that lights the darkness. We pour forth with joy.

We have emptied this power of happiness, which was not to be partaken self-sufficely, which encumbered us, which we had to pour out in the same way that the earth cannot endlessly contain the life of springs and lets them burst under crocuses and daffodils, or in the fault of the green rocks. But today, in a thousand withered wells,

the springs of life have ceased to flow. The earth no longer pours out this gift which swelled it. She holds back her happiness. She chokes. The agony of our time lies here. The century does not fail for lack of material support. Never before has the universe been so rich, filled with so much comfort, helped by such productive industrialization. Never have there been so many resources or goods offered.

It is the heart of a man, and this alone, which is bankrupt. It is by a lack of love. it is by a failure of believing and of giving oneself that the world has overwhelmed itself with murderous blows. The century wanted to be no more than the century of appetites. This century wanted to be no more than the century of appetites. Its pride was wasted. It believed in miracles, stocks, and ingots over which it would be the master. It believed just as much in the victory of carnal passions projected beyond all limits

in the liberation of the most diverse forms of enjoyment, constantly multiplied, always more degraded and degrading, endowed with a technique which is, after all, generally only an accumulation without great imagination of rather impoverished vices of emptied beings. Even people who are critical of, you know, the fascist regimes and of the Third Reich, you know, people like Julius Evel and to some degree René Guillaun, you know, they, that what was significant about these movements was that there was an ambition for something um transcendental that's was fundamentally lacking in not just opposing ideologies but in adjacent ones too and i mean

everybody everybody who's um i mean everybody who's it all tragically minded realizes there's limitations to politics i mean as there should be. You know, you don't, you don't swap out religious piety for politics. And you don't, you don't decide that, you know, um, you know, you don't, you don't decide that, you know, there's a political path to the cultural renewal or something on its own terms. But, um, there is not an accident that there's not really, you know, you don't, you don't find, you don't find communists and you don't find guys who, uh, you don't find Tories in the UK, um, from the epoch or like, right. writing and talking this way.

You know, the fact is, um, just like Knit Hamson said, um, Hansen, uh, you know, he, he got the Nobel Prize for literature and then he, he essentially, like, eulogized Adolf Hitler and that made a bunch of people really mad. But he, um, you know, um, Celine made the same point, you know, that there was a, that, um, this was, you know,

Europe's historical moment to try and redeem something of a of cultural life by way of political mechanisms. Like however

misguided that may have been in terms of you know an improper instrumentality being employed to that effect. But that's why that's why it's laughable when people are like oh you know the right is

uneducated. It's like what do educated people talk about? You know, like labor and capital paradigms and like what people are doing with their genitals. I mean, that's what educated people are into. Like, it's, I mean, it's laughable. But, you know, DeGrelle, obviously

DeGrele is an outlier in the sense of, you know, he was a, he was a remarkable guy, both, you know, as as an infantry commander, as well as like a man of letters and stuff. but it wasn't, it wasn't remarkable that, you know, these are the kind of like, this was the kind of like passion that animated his commitments, you know, and that's important to consider, that's all.

From his conquest, or more precisely from his mistakes, then from his falls, man acquired pleasures that seemed supremely exciting at first, and which were, in fact, only poison, filth, and falsehood. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Terramar.

Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera, design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited,

trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs. When the doors open, the deals go fast.

Come see for yourself. The Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. For this falsehood, this filth and this poison, however, the man and the woman had abandoned, had desecrated through their dreams and their devastated bodies, inner joy, true joy, the great son of true joy. The puffs of pleasure from possessions, matter of flesh, must being illusory, and compounding in their flaws, sooner or later vanish.

What remains is only the passion of, for taking, seizing, in bouts of anger that set them against all obstacles and against the stale orders of decay clinging to their ransacked and rotten lives. Vane, emptied, their hands dangling, they do not even see the moment approaching when the artificial work of their time will collapse. It will collapse because it is contrary to the very laws of the heart, and, let's say the big word, to the laws of God. He alone, so strong that we laughed at him, gave the world its balance, directed the passions, opened to us the gates of complete giving and authentic love, gave a meaning to our days, whatever our happiness and our

misfortunes. We can gather all the conferences of the world, gather by herds, the heads of state, the economic experts, and the champions of all the techniques. They will weigh, they will decree, but essentially they will fail, because they will ignore the obvious. The disease the century is not in the body. The body is sick because the soul is sick. This is what is essential, whatever it may take to cure. The real, the great revolution to be made is there. Spiritual revolution. Or the ruin of the century. The salvation of the world is in the will of souls who believe. Section 3 here is the right path. Those who hesitate in the face of struggle are those whose souls are numb. A grand ideal always gives you the strength to overcome the body to suffer from fertility.

from hunger from cold. What matters sleepless nights overwhelming toil, stress or poverty? The main thing is to have at the bottom of your heart a great force which warms and which pushes forward, which revives the loose nerves, which makes the tired blood beat with great blows, which puts in the eyes that fire which burns and which conquers. Then suffering is of no consequence. The pain itself becomes joy because it is a means of enhancing one's legacy, of purifying one's sacrifice. Ease sedates the ideal. Nothing writes it better than the whip of hard life.

It makes us understand the depth of the duties to be assumed, the mission of which we must be worthy. The rest does not count. Health does not matter. We are not on earth to eat on time, to sleep on time, to live a hundred years or more. All this is vain and foolish.

Only one thing matters, having a useful life, sharpening your soul, improving it at all times, monitoring your weaknesses and exalting your impulses, serving others, throwing happiness and tenderness around you, giving your arm to your neighbor to rise all by helping each other. Once these duties are accomplished, what does it mean to die at the age of 30 or 100 years to feel the fever throbbing at the hours when the human beast cries out at the end of its power? Let him get up again, despite everything. The ideal appears to give its strength only at the breaking point.

Only the soul counts and must dominate everything else. Short or long, life is only redeemed if we have no cause for shame at the moment we have to give it back. when the sweetness of the days calls to us and the joy of loving and the beauty of a face, a perfect body, a light sky, and the call of distant races when we are close to giving in to the lips, to the colors, to this light, to the numbness of the relaxed hours, let us tighten in our hearts all these dreams on the verge of the golden escape. The true escape is to quit our dear, quit our dear, sensitive prey at the very moment when the sweet scent invites our bodies to fail. At this hour when you must abandon softness and place love above desire, when everything is painful

to the point of cruelty, a sacrifice really begins to be whole, to be pure. Then we have surpassed ourselves. We are finally giving something. Before we looked only to ourselves, and the concern for pride and selfish glory corrupted what flows out from our souls, and it was used. instead of given. One gives for good, without calculation, because all is given, and nothing remains of the giver. Only when one kills the love of the self, this does not come easily, because the human beast is reluctant. We understand so poorly what can be learned from bitterness.

It is sweet to dream of an ideal and to build it in your mind, still, to tell the truth, this is precious little. What is an ideal if it is just a game or a sweet dream? You have to to build it, after all, in reality. Each stone must be torn from our comfort, from our joys, from our rest, from our heart. When despite everything, the building rises over the years, when you do not stop along the way, when faced with heavier and heavier stones to be placed, you continue, only then does the ideal begin to live. It lives only to the extent that we died to ourselves. What a drama, deep down, that righteous life. Yeah, it's heavy stuff. And It's also, just more generally, not simply related to the epoch from which de Grell emerged and things.

That's, the maestro makes those points, too, that there's not, there's not this like, there's not this, you know, intractable tension between, you know, men of action and, and, and, um, people prone to aceticism. You know, like the latter are the ones who bleed quite literally to bring those things into reality. You know, and I mean, it's, I mean, plus two. I mean, that those two functions were literally combined, you know, in the nightly orders that served the Roman church. You know, I mean, I realize that can be overstated, too, because that's not, that was a discreet epoch as well. You know, it's not like the final statement on soldiering or on or on piety or whatever. But, you know, this idea that, um, this idea, this idea that these things are fundamentally at loggerheads and like irreconcilable.

It's this nonsense. You know, and it's not people, people draw upon, um, like the birth of tragedy and the genealogy of morals as well as like beyond good and evil, like Nietzsche, it's like trying to flesh out their conceptual biases. It's not what Nietzsche is talking about. It's far more conceptually nuanced. And his notion is basically that it's a self-defeating enterprise because salvation comes in the form of repudiating that which it sets out to confirm. I mean, that's like I said to scope of what we're discussing now.

But people have this very, very literalist and rigid idea of, you know, oh, like the soldier or the partisan is at odds with, you know, the priest or the or the religious person. Like, that's not the case at all. Like, not only is that not the case, but they're, they're essentially one and the same. And unless you understand that, you're not going to understand, you know, like how politics as we know it developed in the West. And we're talking about if by politics, we mean, you know, not, I'm not talking with a day-to-day

business about, like, the village council figures out, you know, how to keep the water running. I'm talking about, you know, I'm talking about how conceptual horizons develop, you know, and how these things come to, you know, how these things come to embody, like, prime symbols of cultural reference and things, you know, and that's, in that regard, you know, the Third Reich and, um, the Bafn-SS and the various fascist movements and these difficult to, you know, categorized movements like the Iron Guard. Like on the one hand, there was not a lot of precedent for that because the historical conditions that created those tendencies hadn't existed before. But at the same time, like the underlying kind of impulse that gave rise to those movements, like within the minds of the men who created them, Like that's something that that's something that's not, that's something that's well, well known to the Indo-European mind.

And I'd argue it's so ancient as it be primordial, you know, yeah, that's, that's heavy stuff. Excellent, yeah. All right, we're going to start getting into some heavy stuff here because it's going to start getting real personal. Yeah. Part two, Well Springs of Life, The Land of Our Birth, Part Four.

As men, we belong always to a piece, people, a land, a history. We may not know it. We can try to forget it, but events eternally return us to these sources of life. They bring us back first to the men of our blood. Shameful or bright, family binds us together, ever tighter and firmer with time. It can even be suffocating. We never get rid of it. Where our blood is concerned, we are bound to it. Blood comes always before reason. We are one with these ties as if our veins were only one organism and the family had only one heart, a heart that pumps the same blood in each of us and reminds us of our vital hearth. The same is true of our homeland. We cannot escape it. The sight of a yellowed print

of our cathedrals, the memory of the smell of the dunes, or the gray hue of our hillsides, of the curve of our rivers, brings up to our throat a love that stifles us that makes a makes our voices hoarse. The country's past is embedded in the depth of our consciousness and our sensibilities. Everything about us is survival, rebirth, even if unconsciously. The past of a country is reborn in each generation as spring returns, always a new sprout. We may be unburdened, traverse the world, lose our mind, the native soil still sends into our hearts and essence that we do not create and that dominates us. All that it takes is the voice of a radio station picked up in a distant country,

brought by imprecise waves, so that memories, ties, and laws emerge again, real watermarks, indestructibly embedded in the fabric of our tormented days. Part 5, hearth and stone. You must have wandered over the most distant seas, known the red nights of the tropics, the cane fires, the songs, or the Negroes, The deserts with their pink sands, their leafless shrubs, the skeletons of horses bleached by the winds. You must have climbed frozen lakes and hot snow, pick mimosa flowers from the ruins of Carthage, grapefruits in Havana, a blade of grass near the fluted pillars of the Acropolis, to fully love your homeland, that which we first saw with the only lucid eyes in the world, the eyes of a child. It is necessary to have known other journeys with furniture and clothes, books, tables, to simple material goods.

It is necessary to have been this nomad of the anonymous apartments where one sits as one sits in a train to know the passion and the nostalgia of the first of all landscapes, of this place in the heart that is home. We can speak without regret of the great joys of foreign lands. They still gild our eyes. The day rises yellow and silver on the palm trees, which skirt the sea of the Antilles, clouds of fog in the olive trees of the Delphi Valley, fishermen rowing in the clear blue nights of the cyclades. The palm grove streaked with sun near the red walls of the Marrakesh. But the memory of wandering journeys in the prisons of our soulless lodging weighs us down and suffocates us. what remains in our life of these impersonal relays.

The walls where we heartlessly hung and removed the paintings, the apartment next door where you were surveilled, the mingled chatter of telephones, the staircase where we met without knowing each other, the cell car of the elevator with his double bars. We look at this decor of life and death with dull eyes, charged with veritable despair. What do these partitions tell us?

The kitchen open to a horrible courtyard, a few meters long, without an unexpected nook, without a quirk, a barren of natural foliage, without a cozy nest. What say these beds and furniture always awkward and embarrassed, as if they feel out of place, poor, unhappy, vaguely nomadic. Even furniture has a soul. The old sideboard that clutters the corridor, the clock case that no longer resonates so as not to annoy anyone, once lived, once knew a real house, had for a hundred years, 200 years, their place, their touch, their scent.

Poor sideboard and poor clock. Far from the polished parquet from the smell of lavender, the worn and water-stained staircase, the conversation all about it, the salute of the sun entering suddenly through an open door. We alienated moderns, dragged from apartment to apartment in soulless cities, feel a little more torn from our hearts each time we have to cross a new threshold, light up the sterile white corridors, get used to these handles,

these shutters, this door that does not hold, this gas stove that flares up too quickly, these buses that pass by with awful horns that crushed a soul. We are silent, but we forget nothing. It's very much Heidegger. I'm sorry? I said it's very much Heidegger.

Yeah. Yeah. And man like the old sideboard and the big clock, motionless, looks and sees. The land of our birth returns to life and our memories. Here it is. A little foliage lights up the facade. Two blue stone steps. A large, vine encumbered balcony in the gardens.

Everything is in its place. Everything has a meaning, a smell, a form. We go to the cupboard. The cupboard, that beautiful, full, serious word because it holds our nourishing bread. So familiar we can navigate it with our eyes closed. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive by design. They move you.

Even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro, search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Cooper, design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria.

Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals open. go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November.

Lidl, more to value. This corner smells a tobacco, that one the cat, who always purred in the warmest place. That noise is father rising from the office chair. The halting footstep is mother, who, in the dining room, waters her flowers. These rooms are not merely places to stop. This one is the room above the living room. This one is the room above the office. This one is the room. This one is the room of the little ones, even when they have become men with heavy thoughts. Each of these rooms has its history, has known its vigils, its maladies. We left it one morning carrying a darling body in our arms. Ah, the horror of our children being born or dying in anonymous apartments, surrounded by living furnishings since departed, where other nomads have,

in their turn, resume their awkward life without soulful memories, not even daring to remember. So out of place are they. House of yesteryear with your poor draperies, your occasional bad taste, this ball on the railing, these photos of children in a cue lulu, the grand piano, the black fireplace, the tin bathtub where people washed one after the other, these steps that we still scale 20 years later in memories, the breaths that we hear again passing close to us, the face of the mother who appears, first in the distance, then right there before our eyes, almost inscrutable, we feel like children, desiring again her soft caress. Calls of immense tenderness rise with distant sense of flowers and foliage, songs of water

pass at the bottom of the garden, the soft sunshine filling our entire world. Everything we are comes from that time. Unfortunate are children who have never had a house of their own, and who do not collect these memories from which our life flows. It is the home that forms us into who we are. How can we have a soul in a faceless house, one that has changed like a carnival mask? Life is fixed on hearth and stone. The rest flows away like broken wood floating on a winter stream.

Home, our tender fortress. It takes on a unique face little by little built over time through common hardships and the birth of children. The walls hold love in dreams. Its furnishing is beautiful or ugly Are our companions and witnesses A sweetness rises slowly from the souls within It becomes a place of contemplation, rest, and certainty Rather than a brief stop on the journey of our existence

Softness, balance, points of reference, testimony, self-examination Without mother and home, tell me my soul. Where would we be? Is this him always talking about living historically. It's kind of hard to live historically when you live a nomadic life. No, exactly. And it also, you know, epigenetic memory is, you know, what is it crude during people's lifetimes. There's no reason to believe that that's not passed on at the biological level. in addition to, you know, simple cultural learning and things, you know, um, when we talk about a way of life, we're quite, this is quite literally what we're talking about, you know, um, and that kind of like

linear natal experience of, um, of the culture. So, um, not only is it disruptive, um, obviously, you know, if, if there, if there's literally no rootedness to anybody's life and, And, you know, not only every generation who, you know, does the, does the family, like, up in, and moves, you know, to totally strange environments, but even, like, within people's lives, like, in the present epoch, it's, it's supposed to be normal for you to just, you know, radically alter your surroundings and your pattern of life in day-to-day terms, you know, multiple times. And that's, that's crazy. I mean, obviously that doesn't lend itself to psychic or spiritual stability, but it also makes it basically impossible to sustain any kind of cultural learning over time. But I mean, that's the point. You know, and what consciousness is, that's a huge question. But whether it was, you know, whether his Heidegger remains relevant is because he was fundamentally concerned with the question of consciousness. you know we can't talk about culture um as a as an intergenerational experience without discussing consciousness

and the and the degree to which it is actually like literally transmitted okay um and that's a controversial subject but um nobody would deny that basic postulate and to deliberately aim to erratic that process, you're basically murdering cultures, like you're basically destroying people's ability, not just within their own discrete, like, individual life to, like, you know, derive meaning, um, and, uh, to participate historically, like, within their life, you're essentially, like, removing their ability to, to constitute, you know, a component of, um, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, cultural enterprise or phenomenon. And that's, that's, um, that, that's an incredibly evil thing to do.

You know, um, and I think people detect that, even if they don't have the knowledge base or the sort of conceptual signifiers to coherently identify what's underway. Um, I believe that is one of the reasons why so many people, are in comparative terms, revolting against, you know, the global regime because they're realizing what it's trying to do to them. I mean, not just them personally, but like what is trying to do to people and kind of retool the human condition. It is something that, you know, basically doesn't just render individual lives meaningless,

but, you know, like murders cultures, which means that, you know, it's basically erasing people's, entire peoples from history as if they never existed. That's like committing homicide times a million. But that's probably a bit outside the scope. But it's fundamental to understand that what I just described,

to understand where DeGrelle is coming from. I mean, that's the core of what, national socialism was aiming to address as well as, you know, the rexist movement that he found himself at the helm of as, as well as any number of other movements that constituted the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, capitalist Bolshevik paradigm. Part six, the breath of life. Men can debase themselves. They can live in increasingly frenetic agitation as millions of madmen engorge themselves, yet the nobility of motherhood preserves among thousands of natural and vibrant hearts its own pale radiance.

Today, the maternal essence moves just as it did in the days when the first woman felt their bodies stirred by its indescribable thrills. From that hour, women are no longer the same. Yesterday they were hurried, their eyes clear, their souls empty, their lips distract. The life born in them, like a hidden flowering, suddenly gives them gravity, confidence, a great and proud force, the certainty of creating, of giving, and the emotional charm of the living mystery that will one day be born through their pain. They remain mirthful, but their gaze becomes deeper. They carry within them a treasure whose pulses intimately linked to their own. Their vigor, they're melancholy, this great ideal, sometimes undeclared, which lifts or torments them, thoughts and regrets, joys and desires become one with this hidden life, ever present for the one who gives its blood and soul in this perfect communion of flesh and heart. They are brave and weary, tired of the overburdened body of their youth bent like branches laden heavy with fruit, weary of sun and wind.

yet still valiant, knowing what renewal their bodies now tenderly contained in this flesh that their most delicate tremors shape. They know that this flower soul barely open in the night will bloom tomorrow. The innocent heart which they cover like the night sky is filled with sweetness and peace of the stars and the silence. Among the clamorous world, they carry this glimmering night. Their dreamy eyes contemplate these great moonlit landscapes where a world known only to them lies dormant, powerful, and immense. They see blue mountains, black and smooth waters, enchanted skies studded with fires, set in the jet black of evening like ethereal gems. They advance under these nocturnal lights. The heart taught, but unsure.

No one walks beside them. The universe looks elsewhere. They alone watch. They alone have the eyes to see it. They go on, body heavy, soul tense and elevated, as if drawn by the greatness of this secret night. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive.

By design. They move you. Even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Cooper and a scuba. and discover our latest offers.

Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself.

The Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. These months when the flesh blossoms are their private springtime, when only the shadows and the sense, the colors and the lights reach their great love, stretched out with arms open to life,

like an orchard of the heart. They will experience the birth of this new life, sundered from the great dream. They then are faced with constant efforts in the service of these bodies and these souls, which enchant them and which frighten them. Royalty, trembling, and radiant. What will be reborn in these hearts? Will they keep the song and purity of mountain waters? Will these naive eyes ever make you cry?

Will this little curly head, the color of the sun on the stone wall, carry good and clear thoughts, the mother's dream, like fiery sword lilies. It is best not to fear too much, to show the straight course, but to leave it lined with greenery and woodlands, and to let them travel pure and bright, the earth and path of the horizon. The mother will put in the hearts of the little ones once again only what she will have nourished herself. Their soul will contain what hers will have contained. The images of her heart will, will trace great reflections on them, like shadows advancing in the fields under the white clouds of the great summer sky. She can only bear their gaze if her soul is as clear as theirs.

All that is not flesh and pure astonishes children and leaves a mark on their hearts. They will not later have strength and renunciation, wisdom and simplicity, virtue and joy, unless their spiritual nourishment is as pure as mother's milk. The faces of mothers are noble, supremely clear, rejuvening. by the presence of willfully innocent lives, even through a thousand days of hardship. Women are greatly blessed by the body that trembles, turned towards the inner dream, and which dwells the grand secret of the breath of life. Part 7. The task of happiness.

The more we walk among false smiles, greedy or unclean eyes, grasping hands, withered bodies, the more we are disappointed by the mediocrity of existence. We quickly realized that only the joys put in our hearts when we were young remained solid and eternal. It is in youth that we are made happy or unhappy forever. If we had a calm childhood, soft as a big golden sky, if we learned to love and to give of ourselves, if we enjoyed when we were very young, the enchantment that the sky and the light gave us at all times, nature always within our reach and always changing.

If we were made with a simple heart, naive as the morning, human, sensitive, good, linked to real and natural affections, then life will remain for us until the end of our troubled days like the sky arrayed powerful and clear over even the most treacherous roads. There is a task to happiness. We either develop it or suffocate it. If we train children simply in deep but elementary joys, they will advance in life by keeping in their eyes the light of their inner life, balanced persevering.

But if we ruin their childhood, if they have seen too much or heard too much, if they have been caught in a whirlwind, if years of calm tenderless have not strengthened in them the tender happiness of their innocence, then their life will be what their childhood was. Witnessing disorder, they will become disordered. Having never been made steady in their tastes, their feelings, their thoughts.

They will be at the mercy of the winds, possessing only illusory joys that will burn them and emensurate, and emisurate them at the whims of others. It becomes far more difficult to change later. A hardened tree cannot be straightened. One can it most clear the foliage and cut back branches. But when it was young, full of sap,

we could have straightened it with an agile finger, guided it, helped it to flourish. It is at a time when children simply seem to be playing, watching, simply observing a sparrow or a lark, spelling words, and giving kisses, that they photograph in their hearts, in their imagination, exactly that which we give them. Life is just the development of this photography. The acids of existence will imprint on them the images, beautiful and powerful, or troubled and sad, which we have offered to their curious little eyes, to their clear hearts,

like sheets of shiny paper. What we deprive them of by our pride or our agitation or, alas, by our passions will be cruelly repaid to us in seeing them unstable, dissatisfied, the soul weakened, and ravaged by our own fault. You got anything on that? No, I mean, nothing, I think anything I, I add as addendum, would kind of take away from... You catch them in the corner of your eye, distinctive. By design, they move you even before you drive.

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because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. more to value what I suggested a moment ago not because what I said was so profound but because it would um you know detract from the kind of core yeah message yeah I mean that's um we should get more into without going too far outside the scope we should get more into you know the era in which DeGrell was looking back, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s, and the implications therein. And that's also when, you know, I mean, Heidegger's last public statement in the former like an interview was 1965.

And then there was, but I mean, I, this, this, this stuff all, the kind of enduring perspective of, of, of, um, dissident traditionalist, you know, the capital T or unconstructed national socialist and fascist of the era. And the degree to which that became like a truly underground tenancy, which now is somewhat emergent in ways that was not possible before. But I mean, this is all important stuff. It's not just, you know, a conversation starter about, you know, why, oh, why is de Grell interesting to read today? You know, it relates to the origins of the movement that DeGrelle served and why the stakes became so truly desperate when Europe was threatened existentially by the kind of twin hydra of Sovietism and and Americanism. But yeah, I'll be more with it too when we reconvene. I'm getting over another flare-up.

But well, if it's not going to screw up what you want to accomplish, we'll deep dive a little bit into, you know, the Heidegger and kind of the Aristotelian aspects of National Socialism that also dovetail with Catholic... Metaphysics, if that's agreeable to you. Okay. Well, part three, I'm going to finish up Christmas time right here. Then we're going to take a break. And then when we come back for part three, part three is the misery of mankind.

It may, starting off with what you want to talk about would probably be a very, be a good introduction to that. Yeah, that sounds great. Right. Another page and a half. Part eight, Christmas time. We were only little children from the Ardennes. The snow blanket at the horizon piled above the eaves of the roofs and packed itself tight into the bottoms of our shoes.

We were sure we saw St. Joseph turn around the corner of the Rue de Malone. To climb the way to the church was tough going in the midnight darkness. At the last deep slope we resorted to carrying our shoes in our hands. Suddenly the night of frozen darts gave way to this warm smell of the dazzling nays. Our heads were spinning a bit. The smell of the incense intoxicated. Doyenne himself was pale. But from behind the choir screen came a din powerful enough to drive away the wild boars 10 kilometers from our tangled woods. The organ blower peddled as if he feared arriving late. The director brought the choir brought the choir to a wild turbulence. By the time of midnight Christians, the emotion and the noise had been such that we were climbing atop.

the straw, the chairs, expecting to see the angels suddenly appear above the choir. But the angels had continued to stand quietly among the candles, with their large wings at rest. We approached them, hands clasped under our big woolen gloves. We were kneeling on the marble. The brown ox and the gray donkey were close by. We were burning to touch them to see if their hair would part like a fountain of water. But we children loved our children even more than we loved animal. We loved other children even more than we loved animals. Jesus was lying on the straw. It softened our hearts to think he must be cold. Nobody had given him thick stockings like us. No shoes. No scarf to wrap around his nose. No green woolen gloves to cover his hands. We looked a little astonished

as the father, St. Joseph, who humbly stood doing nothing to glorify himself, and the mother clad in blue and white, so still and so beautiful. We knew only beautiful. We knew only beautiful. beautiful mothers with pure eyes in which we saw everything. We had looked into those eyes so often, but those are the mother of little Jesus enchanted us to the extreme, as if heaven allowed children to see more in them than men did. We said nothing when going down to the coast. When children say nothing, it is because they have much to say.

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big table covered with cakes never managed to tear us away on the return from invisible conversations between the children of human mothers and the little child of the mother of heaven. On the top of the piano, a crib had been erected where we could, standing atop a stool, take the ox and the donkey in our hands. Little pink and blue candles were lit every night. Each child had their own, on which they would blow a deep breath at the end of the prayers. behind, kneeling near a chair, in the dark, the mother led our religious impulses guided us. When it was all over, when we turned to her in order to obtain the right to put out our little lights, we saw in her two eyes shining so much emotional fervor.

Paradise comes into the hearts of children through the example of the mother. At that hour, humble and poignant, the mother knew that little souls had been marked forever, that we could blow out the little candles near the manger, but they would never be extinguished in our hearts. Every winter, when Christmas returns, the little flames lit by our mothers once again burned high and bright. Yeah, that's a great Christmas statement, man. Yeah.

Very timely. I realize Christmas has passed us, but on New Year's Eve, I consider kind of part of the same ongoing event, you know, between Christmas and New Year's Eve. New Year's. So yeah, that's very timely and very, very, uh, inspiring stuff. Very edifying as well. Yeah. I'm still saying Merry Christmas to people. I don't care. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's yeah. I was like I said the other day too. Like even where I, I mean,

I obviously like don't give a fuck about abiding regime convention. But it's like what, what other holiday is on December 25th? Like I don't know about it's like a competitor holiday. You know, it's, um, yeah, I, you know, um, yeah. No, that's, uh, really, uh, really beautiful stuff, man. And thanks. Um, again, sorry, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm dragging a little bit. Um, but I, I hope, uh, I hope people got something out of my commentary on this episode. All right.

We're going to continue to part three in the Burning Souls by DeGrelle. But, um, Thomas, want to talk a little bit about the thought and about the basically what would have been guys like him at the time he's writing this. What would have been their thoughts, especially looking back upon the war? There's a context that's not appropriately addressed when we're talking about national socialism and fascism and adjacent movements as a political political philosophy. Ironically, some of the only people I know who've addressed that correctly were Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey. When both were at the University of Chicago, they

published this huge volume just a history of political philosophy. And I highly recommend it. Like, it's not Strauss, it's not Strauss. It's not Strauss's own kind of. I have it on the shelf over there. It's great. Yeah. Yeah, it's not Strauss's own. I mean, I don't generally recommend Strauss to anybody unless they're trying to, I kind of trace the trajectory of, you know, the American right post Nuremberg. But as an intellectual historian, he's very useful. And the book I mentioned, it's, it's very straightforward and it's very much correct. There's not, there's not, there's not polemic in it. And it's not, it's not colored by, you know, a stain of the author's ideological biases. But other than that, there's just not, and Carl Loweith, too, who obviously,

my Peter Strauss was inspired by, but who he parted ways with on fundamental issues, not just of ethics, but, you know, ontological ones about kind of the history of European thought. But, you know, there's this idea that, and it transcends to just like rationalizations for for dismissing any merits of other movements that animated the countries that constantly access powers. It goes beyond just the kind of pragmatic affair of discrediting them. People honestly believe that these things just emerge as some kind of stopgap measure to either prevent revolutionary communism or to, you know, from dominating the political landscape or to rationalize what amounted to do a power grab by a coterie of extremists who

only had a loosely defined city grievances as their kind of political ambitions that's not true at all and in fact there was the the inner warriors the right whether we're talking about you know the fascist the fascist movement around mussulini whether we're talking about the national socialist movement post Drexler, what we're talking about, you know, the Romanian Iron Guard. All these movements attracted a disproportionate amount of intellectuals, you know, like middle-class intellectual types, you know, the kinds of people who spent a lot of time with political philosophy and with things abstracted from the kind of day-to-day business of politics. And that's one of the things that within their own dialogue with themselves.

and with each other, they were aware of that and lamented that this tended to be harmful to praxis. Okay. But if you want to really understand where the rubber meets the road, you've kind of got to read Heidegger and you kind of have to look at these things through an Aristotelian lens through a 20th century continental perspective. Okay. And this can't be overstated.

And like generally, like I wouldn't bring this up in a discussion or a reading of a memoir but leander grell is so very much in that tradition that i don't think it's something can be overlooked and um and also too i think heidegger some will disagree with me including i'm sure some of the guys who who follow bronze age pervert i'm not this is not like a slam on him or anything or or or the people i'm disgusting but they seem to view heidegger as like as as somebody who sort of like broke with nietzsche and like was with some kind of like neosolastic that's very misguided and it's incorrect. And what Heidegger clarified, too,

like what Nietzsche's objection was to Christianity and, like, why it was problematic. And it's not, it's not, it's not because Christianity is purported to look like pacifist or because it's Semitic or, like, anything like that. There's nothing to do with it at all. The Heidegarian view,

and thus what became the national socialist view, and I'm not saying they're synonymous. I'm saying they share this. kind of an ontological view or view of like political and and philosophical and ontology in common is that uh like the beginning of the west um as like a cultural form you know it uh it began with it began with the pre-socratic's um and it began with a question of being you know like what it is to literally be conscious and to exist in the world um there was an understanding of this as being essentially,

as being characterized by a certain dynamism and a tendency towards change and reconstitution and creative destruction. Okay. I'm trying to condense it as much as possible, but this understanding of being was superseded by the emergence of Plato in Platonism, which of course, too, informs in indispensable ways, you know, the Christian

metaphysics, regardless of your sect. Okay. Being as characterized through the lens of Platonism is an eternal presence. It's absolutely unchanging. It's accessible by coming to know if you want to look at this way like a realm of uh of perfect existence that can only be accessed by a difficult dialectical assent now human beings can't experience it directly obviously in the christian view you know in mortal life but the only way they can even come to understand it at all is basically through a combination of grace and piety, like the form of which, depending on your interpretation and confessional heritage and satirology therein,

is exclusively in the hands of God. But the crisis of the modern age to people like Heidegger and those two fascists and national socialists is that what modernity did was it created conditions whereby people could know longer believe in God. Like, not that they'd be punished if they did or something. What I mean is that just by being in the world as it existed in the modern age.

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possible to believe in this perfect immutable the form of being that was God. Okay, like even if when said about to believe in it, you know, they, it'd be, it'd be a, it'd be dead on arrival as a proposition

because like, what would you do? Would you mathematically calculate God? Would you, would you identify, you know, the essential characteristics of God and then attempt to access those things discreetly? And then, you know, through some kind of like discourse whether to learned men, like, come to know God. You know, like, obviously, I'm being obtuse on purpose,

but it's essential understand. We're not talking about some, like, deliberate turn towards atheism, as we think of atheism today. We're talking about a literal impossibility of holding a belief in God is understood, you know, from a very, very ancient, a very, very ancient epoch, and to the present. Okay. The problem with this is that

if you look at the way people exist politically, again, in the view of Heidegger, in the view really of Aristotle, accounting for the kind of modern conditions and the limitations they're in, as well as, you know, possibilities that weren't in the classical world. What being is, it's inextricably related to time and temporal experience. That's how the human mind structures itself in individual persons, as well as within cultures,

in races, any kind of human organization writ large, socially and politically, I mean. to like literally what your ethnos is is like the experience of a people and they're being over time and the way that develops is this kind of immediate consciousness in the mind of any man and woman that they are in the world that someday they will die that others around them are like them in some way and the language they speak you know the the physical artifacts they're attracted to you know, the things they hold to be sacred, the things they hold to be profane, you know, what they consider beautiful, what they consider ugly, you know, what they identify with in intimate capacities, and what repels them similarly in intimate capacities. That's related to quite literally the experience of a people over time that could be said to be their people in the past, in the future, and in the present, until that person or those people die. Okay. This is the only way one can be said to experience beating in the world in some capacity other than an animal.

Okay, because it's the only thing that is facilitated to production of culture. The grave danger of not just the modern age, but specifically the 20th century, is that the twin kind of hydras of communism and Americanism. Heidegger spoke of Americanism when he meant what we'd probably say is capitalism. That's not him like trashing Peckerwoods or saying Americans are the almost all the people ever, so don't get upset. And that's actually accurate. What he is, it's more accurate to say Americanism than capitalism. But he said that the enterprise, the whole raison d'etra of these ideologies is to utterly eradicate the ability of people to exist in time and live historically. It's to totally eradicate culture so that there's no potential of any kind of identitarian existence so that there's no human,

as we've thought of it heretofore, and instead we can replace culture with the things that really matter in terms of eliminating inequities and in managing people in secular life. You know, and that is, you know, mastering technology to bring nature within, you know, a productive domain, you know, so that we can do away with shortages, so we can do away with, you know, inequalities of status and power. or into the fact that, you know, productive technique can avail everything in our environment, you know, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, and avail it to being marshaled as a consumable resource. Okay. So as you're talking about a world literally devouring itself for the sake of keeping humans alive, for the sake of keeping them alive, you know, um, you're literally eradicating the ability of man to exist. this temporally, you know, and that's a monstrous enterprise. And when you add in the understanding of the human being is not just inheriting his culture

in some loose metaphysical way, but in a very direct and biological way, as, you know, is becoming clear as one part of the equation in terms of epigenetic memory, that's one of the fascinating aspects of the Human Genome Project among many. and I'm not saying that biological process takes precedent over anything else at all, but I'm saying that the fact of the discovery of these such things further confirms what we already knew, okay? And that is, I realized that that wasn't short what I just kind of laid out there, but as a condensed, that's the condensed version of why the right became so radical and what its enterprise was and why it's somewhat difficult to define.

Okay, like, you ask, like, what the communist program was, there was a certain complexity inherent because there's a certain complexity inherent to economics, even if your economic schema is not really founded upon falsifiable premises, but is basically just, you know, like an ideological statement, you're still drawing upon tremendous volumes of data, okay, that is, you know, within the terms, of its own processes and assumptions is complicated.

Okay, if you're talking about Americanism, if Americanism is, you know, the capital illiberal tradition, I'm talking about it purely in terms of political philosophy, you know, from Hobbs to Locke, you know, to Payne and then do, you know, Adam Smith and things like that. there there's there's a certain

complexity there despite its reductionism but it's a complexity that can be pretty but they can be described in terms of very concrete variables and phenomenon okay um if you were a fascist or a national socialist

or today if you're a capital T traditionalist or a dissident um wherever you fall in the equation You know, whether you're, you know, whether you're a, you know, whether you're a national socialist in the 21st century sense, you know, like I'd say I am in large part, whether you're a capitalist, you know, whether you're a view of things is kind of like that, guys who, you know, serve in Hezbollah or on the other side of the divide, you know, are, you know, serve with these like Mujahideen groupings on the same. Sunni side. It's difficult, it's not as simple of saying, it's not as simple as stating like, well, I just believe in my race or like, well, I, you know, I just, I believe in Christ or, well, like, I'm a Maslow. I'm, you know, well, I believe in tradition and preserving, you know, tradition as an essential to culture and culture being in an extricable aspect of the human and the human

experience and the human soul. You know, there's like, you're talking about things of tremendous significance that also you know can't can't can't just be broken down into discrete sentences you know so that's I know that people the rebuttal is going to be like we're just trying to myth myth mythologize something that's at base course and as simple as any other political um ontology I don't think that's the case okay um and I don't see how this is arguable and that When you're reading a guy like DeGrelle or Cadreanu or Francis Yaqui, those three men came from very different places, okay, at very different background. That's my whole point.

The tie that binds is a commitment to this perspective that I just described and kind of the condensed version. And these guys aren't just, they don't just love hearing themselves. They just love hearing themselves talk or, you know, it's not like they were getting paid by the word. they decided to be as, you know, voluminous as possible. And it's not like these guys were literary figures who were trying to, try to capture the perfect sentence or something. You know, it's because what they were dealing with, it wasn't reducible to the same concrete kind of schema of, you know, a liberal Americanist or a communist. Or these days, you know, like a secular humanist kind of statement of rights or like of, you know, what constant. constitutes the dignity of the person or what you know what we consider to be what we can consider to be you know due process and in terms of um you know in in terms of the moderate state and uh you know what the individual can expect um in in terms of uh you know his his intrinsic claims to liberty is is it good in itself being honored you know when confronted with the great

power of that modern state. And I'll end now because I don't want to take up O'EEoxygen in the room. But I consider this to be very important, man. Like when we're discussing any of these we're discussing this topic

just in general terms, you know, approaching it philosophically and attempting to unpack like what constitutes its philosophical core, but also specifically when, you know, any discussion of any author in part, you're going to be dealing with like, not just the character that

author. I mean, when I say character, I don't just mean moral behavior and stuff that's part of it, but like what actually, like what characteristics are most paramount in his personality, but also, you know, like why, why he configured his thoughts the way that he did in terms of trying to convey to others, you know, what, what the, what his experience of, of, of, of, of life as a partisan was. So that, that's, that's all I've got on that. But yeah, I wanted to get that out. I think that's important because if you bring up the names like DeGrelle and Yaki and anyone, basically from that quadrant, it's just dismissed this.

They were evil. They were doing this just because they were evil men. And it's a real easy way to dismiss and to promote what the regime propaganda has been since then. Well, it's also just like grossly simple-minded. I'm always making the point if you're a per if you're a guy like then or is now like de grell or like francis yaki

or like kudreanu or like johan von leers who's like different than all those guys but you know i'm suddenly of an orientalist myself so i take an interest in what he did if somebody like really takes an interest in race you know like as uh not just his own and you know an interest in the posterity of his own people but you're truly interested in like race if you're interested in politics you're interested in race and you're interested in race you know you're interested in what its origins are

you're interested in its implications and you're interested in its nuances so like you're going to you're going to spend time around like other peoples just because you want to observe them and I do that all the time and I've realized like every like major national socialist like did that

all the time so like this idea of like oh you know fascists are guys who just like hate in words and like, like, refuse living in, like, segregates, refuse living anything but the most segregated environments. I'm like, actually, they're, like, the opposite. Now, you can say that, like, people like, are looking down on people or, like, we're reducing people to, you know, these kinds, like, non-human integers because we're curious about them. Like, I don't accept that. You can, like, say that.

But this idea of, like, that basically, like, a fascist or, like a contemporary partisan, you know, who holds, you know, similar sympathies adjusted for. epoch is some guy who just quote hates people and wants to like live in some mall of America environment where everybody's exactly like him like that's not that's really really off base that's like not at all you know you're basic that's some kind of caricature that's not kind of a combination of a caricature of like of kind of like a pussy Reagan Republican and like some weird communist like this like it's not like don't get me wrong it's not like me or people like us. We want some like multicultural environment around us because it gives us a chance, you know, to augment our research. But the point is that, you know, first of all, genuine multiculturalism

is, is, is very robust and rich when you're talking about exclusively like white people on deck, because there's many, many cultures that constitute our race. Okay, secondly, um, it not, what, what I think, what I approve of or don't approve of, like politically really has nothing to do with like who I like or dislike like it's it's in some ways it's the opposite you know I mean the tragedy of power politics is that you may have to kill people individually or at scale who not only do you not have any problem with but you might not even dislike you know like this idea that politics is just some sort of highly scaled expression of crude human passions of not particularly intelligent people who like don't like other people

like that's that's oddly illiterate and like this is not the way humans at you know like uh like at all like like like anywhere but yeah so it's like um you know it uh it's it's it's it's really really really fucking bizarre but it's also i mean even people again whoever you catch them in the corner of your eye distinctive by design they move you even before you drive the new cooper plug-in hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP

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erect an endless kind of army of straw man to try and tear down the right as an intellectual tendency. Like they, like they don't, they don't get it either. You know, like the, you can, um, you know, you can say that, uh, you can say that people like Heidegger were crazy, I guess.

Or you can say that, well, you know, Heidegger was just, he was afraid of what, he was afraid of a process that, translates approximately to practical transcendence. You know, like, oh, for all of his talk about the pre-Socratics, you know, kind of like the immediate, the sensuous presence, immediate presence of the human individually and at scale, you know, that's what makes culture. For all, for all his talk of dynamism and change, you know, he really was just kind of attached

to like the state forms of the past. I think that's a gross and deliberate misreading of him, but like, I'll accept that. But just saying that, like, this is all some, like, elaborate, This is also some sort of like elaborate charade so that people can, you know, go around doing mean or evil things or so that, you know, they can rationalize the fact that they have some personal animosity towards like X, Y or Z group of people. Like that's literally retarded, that the suggestion that such things are the motivations or, you know, constitute the commitments in the minds of the people who advocate such things. or who suggest that what I just described, you know, is a matter of imperative significance to anybody who, you know, wishes for human life

to not deteriorate to the level of beasts. But, yeah, I don't want, again, I don't want to take up all of our time. So I will shut my mouth and let you get on with our reason. Well, let us, on that note, let's get to part three here, which is the misery of mankind. I will start reading again. And like I said, stop anytime you wish to comment on it.

Okay. So part nine, the blind men. The money, the honors, the mess of bodies, the eagerness to seize an earthly happiness, which leaks between the fingers and always escapes, has made of the human herd a pitiful horde ruining itself, tearing itself apart to find a liberation which does not exist. Only the false laughter rising from the rabble serves to remind us that it is not a question of herd animals, but of men. This stampede of the dam seized first the individual, then the people as a whole. It is no longer a solitary game in which one is enthralled by personal passions or vices.

Whole communities are sucked in by the vertigo of impossible desires, the desire to be first, that is to say, the desire to trample upon. The desire to be first. The desire to say the desire to trample upon. for purely material power, that is to say the desire to suffocate and destroy the spiritual. All willpower, all effort becomes useless in the face of this human dissolution, and it is here that the spiritual always reappears as rebuke or as a curse. Yeah, I wanted to insinuate just, that's an important point, because as you do, whether you believe in the intrinsic value of Haimanschaft, you know, blood and, like, you know, folk community or whatever, you know, when those things are taken away and all you have basically

is, you know, if, if something like, you know, if something like the Soviet system, like, you know, is realized as it was, you know, in the 1920s, and basically like you do succeed, like you being, you know, the revolutionary vanguard, you do actually succeed in transforming, you know, what was previously, you know, a community based on ethnos and temporal being in the world or generations. If you just like reduce that to a labor camp, like people who do start tearing each other apart because it's like, first of all, I got to look out for myself and my family. Like second of all, I want to be a chief, not an Indian or at least, you know, like a shot caller. You know, so I'm, I'm going to attack whoever's has more, whether it's cloud or whether it's,

you know, what passes for wealth, whether it's proximity to, you know, the party apparatus. Like you're actually, like you're actually encouraging people to, you know, to kind of tear out the route even further and kind of do your work for you. I mean,

which is very much by design, in my opinion. That's not some kind of accident. But yeah, go ahead. This baseness has poured out from the limited circles of the elites into the extended circles of the masses, tossing them about on waves of infinite desire ambition and pseudo-pleasures, which are just caricatures of joy. The clear water of the heart has been clouded to its outer limits.

The river of men now carries a putrid stink. The disorder of the century has upset this river that was once light, reeds, and plunging flights of swallows. Men and peoples regard each other with violent eyes, their hands seared and bitter by their avarice. every day the world is more selfish and more brutal. This is great hatred between men, between classes, between peoples, because everyone is bent on the pursuit of material goods, which ultimately avail nothing. But all abandon the goods proffered to all of the moral universe and the eternity of the soul. We run madly, bloody our foreheads beating our heads against the walls on paths of hatred or of abuse. objection, or of madness, shouting our passions, throwing ourselves wildly at everything,

desiring to gain that which we can never have. Part 10, the lines of sorrow. There are few hearts that have not been soiled with villainy, sordid acts, leprous faults, leaving telltale cracks for those with eyes to see them. Even hearts washed of the stains of the moral swamp will still keep a bitter taste of imperfection and ashes. Cracked porcelain can be fixed, yet whoever saw it broken will forever recognize the lines, however finally repaired, of the break. He knows that the invisible unity of the perfect will never return, but it is gone forever. The longer one lives, the more of the heart is

marked by these lines of sorrow, imperceptible for all those who have not seen or not known what made them, but heartbreakingly by all they contain of broken delicacy, like fine silks which runs silently. Happy again, those are who are purified by invisible suffering. How many others, whatever value vice may have, strive to convince themselves that this abasement was useful, forever marked by this burning apparel which is cooled on their skin and sticks to it corrupts their flesh and becomes one with it. Whose eyes can one meet without trembling? What are they hiding? Who has not been vile on one day? Who does not carry within himself words, gestures, desires, shameful abdications, or the mummified corpse of his inner life? How many men,

how many women do not even hide the bankruptcy of their senses, their oaths and the miserable desecration of their bodies? Sometimes with remorse, most of the time without remorse. Or rather, even with a touch of triumph and insolent provocation. In the final account, those who have liquidated everything, decency, modesty, respect for oneself, for one's body, for one's word, and God with the rest, are only the results of hundreds of smaller prior denials, denied or hidden from the start. The whole is destroyed only when the innumerable fibers of the heart have been sheared, one after the other, by lies and ill intent, followed by multiple, abandonments more and more irredeemable, irremediable, with the conscience assassinated at the end disaster. Decay saps to mind before spreading throughout the whole body. The body does not yield, does not allow itself to be to debased, trapped, and defiled to death until long after the soul,

negligent or intoxicated by the appeal of sin has abandoned the oars, which at the beginning traced straight paths on pure waters. Part 11, The Saints. Check on some here. Okay, good. All right. The Saints. Varying in intelligence but possessing a heart given without limits,

whom the fallen and corrupt hold in such esteem. The saints show us that perfection is open to all. They too were simple men, simple women, charged with passion, weaknesses and often faults. They too sometimes did to tire, give in, and tell themselves that they would never be able to get rid of the smell of muck and sin that accompanies us. But still they did not renounce themselves.

And that's important as vis-a-vis what we were talking about or what I raised in the intro. Like about if you look, if you're looking for like a fascist praxis, it borrows heavily from the understanding of from the Roman church's understanding of murderdom. And for this reason is what DeGrile just said. And that's, you know, the getting, you know, this idea that like, well, you know, we, we, when, one can't come to know the eternal.

One can't come to know providence, you know, through, through dialectic. You know, it's just, it's just completely kind of off and unavailable. So, you know, how, how can we part? take of, you know, what's essentially godly then. You know, it's like, well, you know, through martyrdom. That doesn't mean, like, running out, looking for ways to kill ourselves or, like, running out and becoming, you know, holy warriors, all over some men and some women, too. That is their vocation.

Martyr, as our Roman Catholic friends will tell you, literally needs witness, okay? And it doesn't mean that, I'm obviously not saying that fascist and national socialists somehow cornered the market on martyrdom in the contemporary age, nor even that, you know, Christian or Catholic concepts are intrinsic to national socialism or fascism. I'm not saying that at all. But what I'm saying is that this concern with the abandonment of God and, you know, the literal death of God by way of, you know,

the triumph, the total and complete triumph, of the rationalist and in scientific perspective and the destruction of the ability to live historically

you know which and again living historically is simply the human being individually and at scale you know confronting death and thus like living in time you know

the only way to reconstitute that is through the practice of religion. You know, whether it's, you know, returning to Catholic, a Catholic practice, whether it's, you know, discovering, you know, reawakening the inner witness if you're a Protestant, or like awaiting, you know, the conferring of grace,

you know, through God's will, awakening that inner witness. Or, you know, if you're like an agnostic national socialist, which a lot of our comrades are and that's fine. Nevertheless, you know, it's like the praxis of what we're talking about of reconstituting the sacred entails murderdom. And that's hugely important. They too sometimes did to tire give in and tell themselves that they would never be able to get rid of that smell of muck and sin that accompanies us. But still, they did not renounce themselves.

With each fall they straightened up, determined to be all the more vigilant as their strength failed them. Virtue is not a sudden dazzle, but a slow, hard, and sometimes very painful conquest. They had the superhuman joy of finally feeling victorious over their bodies and their thoughts. Their struggle tells us that happiness, on earth and beyond the earth, is within everyone's reach. Every one of us has a choice to make. Before the body fails, it is the spirit that triumphs or capitulates, and even, even, Even when the body has given way, the spirit can lift it up or let it corrupt itself even more than poison itself forever. We are our own masters.

We can sink into the chasms or stand in them up to the shoulder or climb out of them and overcome them. Everything can be avoided and everything can be done. Part 12, the eternal crucifixion. Faced with the contemptuous ironies of hedonists and skeptics, one hardly dares to recall that For two thousand years, the greatest human drama, that of the passion, has been spiritually repeated each spring. Who will suffer? Who will be there near Calvary in these new days of agony?

In the desert of time stands the cross. The mundane, shady, and perverse life of men flows on like a dull river. Christ will receive the blows and the thorns. He will collapse to the ground. The wood of the cross will crush his flesh. The hammer will strike great blows against the hard beams. They pierced my hands and my feet. I can count all my bones.

What will the world know? His blood will slowly come down on his pale body. His eyes will seek both his father and our souls. What will our souls understand about this tragedy? They have not shuddered or cried, nor even thought about it, nor seen. Christ moves well alone. Alone. The souls sleep or are sterile or ever.

have committed suicide, while it is to pull them out of their torpor, mud, and death that this body hangs between heaven and earth in pain. The distress of this heart mainly launches a cry of despair, which should freeze the earth and stop the breath of men. Yet it is because of man's spiritual suffocation that the world is falling apart. It is hope, charity, justice, humility that the world needs to find fresh air. We have received this spiritual life as a gift. We are the bearers, and our hands are dangling at our sides, and our eyes are dry, and our lips do not tremble in fervor and emotion. Our hearts are like dry sand. Our souls lay lifeless where they died.

Faith is worth anything only as long as it conquers. Love as long as it burns. Charity as long as it saves. Part 13. Nobody. A palm tree trembles. The sand slides between the tan fingers of a child. Lamb's marked with blood collide with.

stubborn little foreheads. Tiny donkeys, eyes wet, come down from the hill. The Easter landscape, clean and shiny. The air is still fresh. Daisies are scattered on the hillside. Why does Christ again suffer the most heartbreaking agony in these days when fans of mimosa flowers decorate the twisting roads? These clear, warm roads bring him back every year, silent in agony, to the nails and thorns, to the blood and sputum. Lord, we are following you and your dusty procession mingled with those rough and cowardly fishermen who loved you, but who loved you like us, with measure as if measure was not an insult to your love. We are like unto them, no worse than others. Our eyes sometimes beaming with joy in serving you.

We dismiss intruders, we wave the palms, we believe we are very close to your heart, we think ourselves better than we are. In your sad eyes, it is our vanity that we project. And in this hour of agony, because our love hung always by a thread, we will turn away from your wounds, your blood and sweat, and that great icy cry that will pierce the earth. Lord, we're coming back to your blued feet. We clasped this wood of the cross between our trembling arms. How dare we look up at your bloody head? We dare do nothing but extend our dismayed hearts to you. It would have been so sweet to give our souls to you in a complete act to be with you from the Garden of Olive. to this mound where you hang inert in the evening wind. We did not even have the fate of the penitent thief, the one who loved you last, who regarded you as he fell into heaven. We suffered the

overwhelming force of our weaknesses, our cowardice, our tepity, our tippity. Lord, you brought us to the essential and the eternal, the blood and the drink, the breath in the sun. You animated our hearts. You gave us strength. We should have jumped. We should have jumped. We should have jumped. Light. with heart and celebration, freed forever from all bond, all regret, all other hope. Yet we remained fearful, hidden in the shadow of a doorway or under the bright olive tree. You went, crushed and overwhelmed with insults. Ah, my God. In these minutes of pain and salvation, we have not grasped the cross.

We have not kissed your wounds and your thorns, put to flight your executioners, broken their whips, refuted their insults. We did not know how to love. At the moment of this complete giving, our hearts were lifeless. My God, there you are abandoned by all, silent and dismal, stiff-limbed. There was nobody. Nobody. We squeezed the dead wood and depart without raising our heads, laying our defeated hearts at your feet. You'll return to the light, Lord.

At this hour, have mercy on the destroyed souls. Have mercy on empty souls. We suffer so much from our mean and vile sentiments, so imbued with ourselves, so preoccupied with our selfishness, our ambitions, our vanities. We let you suffer. We saw your blood flow. We saw you plant your cross. Saw the life fade from your face. Will we ever dare to look upon your open wounds and to meet your weary eyes? Lord, the hour is near. Your light will suddenly burst forth upon the hill. We will still be there, ashamed and sad. Burn our hearts with your dazzling sweetness. Give us the warmth and purity of this divine fire from which you,

you will spring. We are overwhelmed at the threshold of your tomb. Lord, make the spark of the resurrection bloom in our defeated souls. Yeah, see, this is, this book is essentially, it's probably 90% Christian apologetics and, and, um, beatification of the murders by a layman. And this is a, there's a, this is a Vafin SS officer, you know, who wrote this. And again, it, um, I mean, I realized there was very much like a Catholic moment of a sort in Francophone Europe underway, which was DeGrelle's culture.

But it, you know, but this wasn't accidental. And again, you know, DeGrelle wasn't some outlier. You know, the, the understanding of, you know, martyred on being, being

the essential vocation of the racial patriot of the holy warrior. And you know, the understanding of, um, the understanding of the ability to live historically, being an extricably bound up to man's confrontation with death, you know, and, and, um, you know, religious faith, you know, being the only way, not just the man comes to terms of that, but, I mean, comes to understand it. You know, like, that's really the only, like, the, like, the, like, the metaphysical discourse on.

man's relationship to death is his religious confession, okay? You know, and again, I, DeGrelle wasn't, DeGrelle wasn't just this kind of like random guy, you know, who ended up on the Eastern Front or something. I mean, he had, um, he was a war hero. He had serious cloud. He'd met Hitler personally, and, like, he was known to Hitler personally. You know, he, um, had N. Sieg been realized.

He almost undoubtedly would have been, um, you know um one of the most powerful men in what was formerly belgium you know i mean like he was he was a guy with serious clout you know within kind of the the greater the greater rike and um and he's also like in a secondary sense too it shows you how it shows you the degree to which you know what was animating the third rake was very much becoming a european movement i mean the seeds of that were always kind of present just going to geostrategic realities and and kind of the shrinking of um of the world into kind of like one place as it were conceptually but you know this idea that like oh there was this you know chauvinistic kind of like backward looking

nationalist party you know capital end nationalist party in the ns dap but you know just kind of like out of military necessity you know the vaughan s came about and some of these european guys you know, decided they were going to get theirs to and, you know, kind of forced acknowledgement of, of, um, of their own, you know, nations and government. So that's, that's not the case at all. You know, it, um, you got to look at national socialism. Socialism is a European phenomenon. And you got to look at DeGrell specifically as, you know, like an exemplar of, you know, kind of the, the European Vaf and SS, you know, as, um, as well as, uh, you know, francophone fascism, but, you know, everything, everything, everything, everything, every everything, every testament this man ever put the paper was absolutely inundated with his Catholic faith, you know, um, yeah, I just wanted to insinuate that. Perfect. Part nine, uh, or is, yeah, where am I at? Part, where is this third? That says part 14. Yeah, how do I, how do I?

How have I forgotten in my old age to read Roman numerals? They can be confusing, man. Thank you, Thomas. I appreciate it. Just think of the Super Bowl. That's the one of the time. I think of what I'm like, okay, now what is the X simple way? Okay, yeah, yeah.

Is the only time anybody uses Roman numerals anymore is a freaking super bowl? You know, it's like on the street and Shytown, like for $10 where the drugs or a $10 bill, like street talk is still a saw buck because literally like an X looks like a saw horse. So like the last hundred years in the street, like a 10 or $10 or like a little bit of drugs, saw a book. It's like weird that's endured. That's so funny. Yeah, yeah. All right. This is the last part of part three, last section of part three.

Two have loved. In the icy pale gold sky, a lark quivered. What was she thinking up there? She shuddered. She uttered strident cries, swooning every, swooning every second, clinging to, to the sky with a flutter of wings that passed like a lightning bolt. She loved to love until broken, broken with happiness, she felt like a pebble and a furrow. So does the soul soar. She cries of love.

She remains suspended in mystical immensity, only by the wonder of invisible wings that support her. She no longer even knows that she can fall, that the ground is under her. She is there, detached from everything, trembling, pulsating, as if speaking. The large, Swooning upon the warm earth must also feel this great joy of fulfilled love. The soul is panting. Love returns in waves and breaks into effort, giving, and joy. The great tragedy of sin, which causes so much suffering, is that on account of it, we give less of ourselves, or give badly, offering only a portion of what we might have, a portion with hints of indelible defilement. To love is to give, and to give is to give everything.

The punishment for falling is the pain of having trampled on your love, of having reduced the love you might have given. If only we could remove from our bodies, our hands, our eyes, these forces that pulsed in them at the hours of weakness and objection. Too late, much to our chagrin. We may cry all the tears in the world, no matter what, we can never recover that which we so carelessly lost. the day of the fall, despite all our repentance and remission, or remain the black hole into which the good of the world is eternally lost. We may endeavor to love thereafter as ardently as we can, yet we will not create the lost, we will not recreate the lost purity, nor regain the most beautiful part of love which was annihilated. Our love could have been so much greater. What we yet possess to offer at the hour of the highest love will carry whatever we do, this terrible mark.

This is why having profaned his gift of self makes the heart which yearns for the absolute suffer until the end of life. We would like to be God ourselves, to take back this day or these times, to give them the freshness of dawn and to guard them fearfully until the night. From the first misstep, we know that we will no longer love as much as we could have. That is what makes repentance because it cannot repair a broken man, so heartbreaking. When we have known this pain of the irreparable, we seek beyond the possibilities of our heart so that a few moments of sublime love seized upon with great effort can compensate what fell in the

swamps and in the shadows. Part four, the joy of men. Part 15, strong and hard. The sun is gone, and half an hour it will be shade. The birds, who sang madly in the gardens, perceive it. There are roses everywhere, so gorge with light that they will soon perish. The wood is already sleeping around a few tiled roofs. As always, the birds now begin to utter their sharp cries and their pleas, no doubt for the two lovers sitting there, dreamy, with a huge white hat lying across their knees. All of life seems condensed here. Nothing lives apart from these birds, this dog which barks at the end of the world, and that these two hearts which steadily beat in the evening calm, heavy with the vibration of June.

How can one believe in hatred? Has one never seen the last roses go dim in the light evening silence? We will have to tear ourselves away from this great country oasis later. It will be necessary to take again, at the end of the path, the road where the cars tear up the ground through a sputtering, relentless rain. There will be brutal lights, empty faces, soulless eyes. This evening landscape is so clear, it is given with such a complete generosity. These dying roses, these bouquets of trees, these oatfield shimmering and gray, these gray fir trees, are so pure and so simple that a childlike wonder rises in our beings near this eternal youth of grasses, trees, and flowers.

We cannot hear anything anymore. The night slicks down the roses. And then there's Heidegger and Heidegger's ontology like all over that, you know, the immediately present, the sensuous present. of the immediate, you know, human consciousness, you know, constituting what it is to live, you know, historically or live, you know, as a European, is as simple as, you know, what, what DeGrell just described, you know, in that passage. The woods cut their jagged silhouette in the dying gleams. The last singing bird stops as if he, too, from time to time, must simply listen to the silence. The two lovers have disappeared, hands,

trembling, a light wind in their hair. I should move on. I will go slowly without disturbing the branches and the variety of life which slides through those shadows. I will guess the outline of things. I will feel the dew blooming at the end of the grass, which will refresh the sun tomorrow when it climbs the top of the world, top of the wood. Where is the night of hearts from which the tender morning would spring? We will have to renew our sorrows, resume our journeys through the fields and lost woods among cold hearts. Who will understand later in the savage glimmers before our trembling eyes that we have just left the forest and the wheat fields, the shade and the silence? But why falter?

At the end of the path, we watch as cruel life snatches everything up in wolf's teeth. We no longer look at anything. We no longer think. We no longer breathe this air charged with a sense of passing death. Put out the lights. Let the night weigh it upon our hearts. Tomorrow, when daybreak reaches the crest of the trees, we will have before us only the closed horizon of man.

We will have to be strong and hard, joyful through nothing but the radiance of our souls. Dying evening, silent and sure of dawn, give us the peace of awaiting the light that is reborn, renewed from the immense and auspicious night. 16. The Price of Life. We must reiterate the price of life. Life is the admirable instrument put in our hands with which. we forge our wills, raise our consciences, and build a monument of reason and of heart.

Life is not a form of sadness, but joy made flesh. Joy of being useful. Joy of mastering what could demean or weaken us. Joy of acting and giving. Joy of loving all that trembles, spirit and matter. Because everything under the impetus of a righteous life rises, lightens instead of weighing down. You have to love life. Sometimes in times of weariness and disgust, we nearly lose our love of life.

You have to pull yourself together, straighten up. Too many men are debased. But alongside in opposition to those whose baseness is a blasphemy to life, there are all those who see or don't see, who redeem the world and bring honor to all life. 17. Dispolliation. Happiness born of ignorance is not flattering. It is a kind of narrow, vegetative happiness.

intelligence has nothing to do with it, and neither does the body. True happiness, happiness worthy of man, that which raises him up is the happiness assured by the spirit. Happiness born by the stripping of the soul, from the renunciation of the soul, in contemplation of human pleasures, is always made or broken by circumstances. Happy is he who is not a slave to circumstances, he who knows how to enjoy pleasure as well as privation. As long as one suffers from such a deprivation, as long as one suffers from such a deprivation, as long as

one suffers by comparing his material fate to others, we are neither happy nor free. To remain in good spirits, even to live with one's soul apart from the world, when the exterior universe holds nothing but a yawning void, to live intensely in this material absence, to live without regret, master of your desires, having bent them to the complete domination of the spirit, marks the victory of man, the true, the only victory, next to which the greatest conquests and dominions are merely caricatures of power. Any comparison seems laughable next to the liberation brought by the mastery of the spirit over our possessions, our needs, and our chains.

We are freed from the old rusty chains that riveted us to mediocre conformities. We hold destiny in our hands. Destiny clearly discovered in its liberating nudity. Happiness can be born everywhere. It comes not from without, but from within us, holding within it infinite possibility. 18, the power of joy. There are so many things that can bring you joy. Even when, through our strength, we are free of our desires, we are happy. Just the joy of living is itself so powerful.

Joy of having a radiant heart. The joy of having a sturdy heart, arms and legs, hard as trees, lungs that draw life and air. Joy of having eyes that take on colors and shapes in their soft curves. joy of thinking of spending hours drawing out the straight lines of reason or feasting on dreams, joy of believing, joy of loving, of giving oneself, of striding through life, flexible as water. How can one be unhappy? It is so simple, so basic, so natural. Through the worst calamities, happiness always bursts forth like a geyser which we try to obstruct in vain.

Happiness in life for the same thing. to be no longer happy is to doubt one's body, the warmth of one's blood, the consuming fire of one's heart, to doubt these great lights of the spirit which bathe all of existence. Even misfortune still brings us to joys of the soul, which gives its own blood, which weighs out its sacrifice, which feels deeply misfortune's bitter sting. A cruel joy, but a higher joy, a joy reserved for the man whose broken heart understands. And that's, I can't emphasize enough if one's looking for something a little bit less remote to apply to their own circumstances. That's not to say that one should read political philosophy in order to discern, you know, prosaic, in order to discern remedies to compare to the prosaic problems.

But there really, there is no such thing as a bad experience, 100%. Like, it's not, that's, that's not just a cliche or something. that, you know, religious people pull out to, you know, in the face of challenges to, you know, how one is supposed to negotiate horror and pain in everyday life. You know, I don't, I don't regret anything that's happened to me because it brought me to this point. And I mean, my life now was incredible. I never thought that, where I meant now would be possible, and I'm just unbelievably blessed. But, you know, I, my life was horrible, I mean, for years, you know, and I don't regret that. Like, I learned more during that period, and I came, became firmer in my faith during that period,

than would have been possible otherwise. And it also, you know, only the proximity of death, because the lifestyle I was living, it forced me to contemplate it in very immediate terms in a way that I otherwise probably would not have because I was quite a bit younger then. You know, and that just kind of, whether you want to or not,

you develop a tendency towards contemplation of theological principles, you know, unless you're truly like a dullard or something. like when you're within such circumstances. So, I mean, I can't emphasize enough that there's practical value in reading things like DeGrel. You're not just doing a credit to our forebears. If, in fact, you know, you're committed to these ideological principles like I am. You know, you're also, you're also, you know, contributing to the strengthening of your own piety and fiaty and

by studying such things. That's all I wanted to see. All right. 19. To dream, to think. The hours of dreams are hours of profound life where all the poetry that floats in our consciousness gets up and runs in wisps.

Then the sun comes. The snowy fog descends as if called down by the river. We see before us the bright, clear sword of water. And reason, reorders, and assembles the scattered discoveries sprung from the dream, unifies them under a its dominion. Joy to find, to compare, joy of giving meaning and direction, joy of understanding, and of scaling the slopes in the summit to the true, the beautiful, and the useful. The mind orders it into clear, parallel lines, and extracts the laws revealed within.

Man feels then that he is master of all the elements, master of this disproportionate universe where his brain, no bigger than a bird or a fallen fruit, imposes a comprehensive order and harmony. Whoever does not know how to enjoy the possibilities of dreaming and thinking offered to man every second ignores the nobility of life. We can always be enchanted, for dreams are our secret cellos. One can always think, that is to say, having the mind not only occupied but vibrant, tending towards a domination more powerful, more exhilarating than the fire of a thousand desires. To be bored is to give up the dream and the spirit. boredom is the disease of empty souls and brains. Life quickly becomes a horribly dull chore. Love itself is exalted and amazed only to the extent that the superior being nourishes poetry strengthens the impulses of sensitivity. One must still dream and ponder over their love.

20. Patience is the first of victories. Victory over oneself, over one's nerves, over one's weaknesses. As long as we have not acquired it, life is only a cascade of capitulations, capitulations made in struggle, certainly crying out in what we perceive to be manifestations of authority, but which are in fact only an abdication to petty pride. To be patient is to wait for one's hour, finger to the trigger as one watches for prey. It is to build each of the day's actions and consideration of order and balance, laying carefully the foundation stones that will support the building. Patience delivers the joy of not having given in.

Impatience leaves the heart with the reproach of having been exiled and of having been the author of vanity and vain agitation. 21. Obedience. No great work is accomplished in selfishness and pride. Obeying is a joy because it is a form of gift, of clairvoyant gift. Obeying is fruitful, multiplying the results of the results of the, efforts tenfold. Obeying is a duty because the common good depends on the discipline coming

together of many energies. Human society is not formed by a cloud of fierce and fanciful mosquitoes rushing in the wind according to their personal interest in their mood. It is a large sensitive complex, it is a large sensitive complex made sterile or dangerous by anarchy to which order and harmony give unlimited possibilities. A rich people of millions and populations, but selfishly isolated and atomized is a dead people. A poor people where everyone intelligently recognizes their limits and their communal obligations obeys and works as a team is a people with life. Obedience is the highest form of the use of freedom.

It is a constant manifestation of authority, authority over oneself, the most difficult of all. No one is really capable of commanding others who is not first able to command himself, to tame in him the proud wanderer who would have liked to throw himself madly into the winds of adventure. After having obeyed one may command, not as a brute enjoying the right to crush others, but because command is a magnificent prerogative when it aims to discipline unruly forces, to lead them to the fullness of obedience, to the superior source of joy. 22. Kindness. Sometimes a word, a single word, an affectionate justice.

a look full of sincere friendship can save a man on the brink of the abyss. By affection and by example, we can do anything. Shouting and storming about rarely leads to the source of problems. You have to be good-hearted. Discover what is going on among the fog of each heart. Temper the necessary reproach with a friendly joke that gives hope. Always put yourself in the shoes of the other, in the soul of the other. Think of your personal reaction if you had received the observation, the encouragement, the reprimand, instead of addressing it to others. Most of the men are grown-ups, quite vicious but still sensitive. Tends towards affection.

There are not 36 routes to guide them. There is only one, that of the heart. The other roads sometimes seem easier to take, but ultimately, they do not lead anywhere. 23. Happy isolation. The company of others is, most of the time, nothing but restlessness, nor troubles revolving around mutual loneliness. To constantly search for what is called a stimulation is to be afraid of being in the presence of yourself. It is, in reality, to take flight morally.

How can you confuse joy with being constantly mixed up in the tumultuous crowd? Why would one absolutely have to be swallowed up among other beings to believe oneself happy? One is then only in contact with the tree bark of others. One enjoys only their artificial or superficial attitudes. This can obviously give distraction, temporary pleasure, a kind of breath of wind or fresh air. But what a gulf between the shallow pleasure and the deep, essential joy of conversation with yourself, the analysis of one's own intimate thoughts and one's most secret sensitivity. There we see everything. We go to the source of everything. To deny the power, the magnitude of this true joy is to deny the whole inner life.

Loneliness is a wonderful opportunity for the soul to get to know itself and to keep watch, to learn. Only empty heads or fickle hearts are afraid of remaining silent in front of themselves. It is at such times that we see if our feelings are solid or if they were nothing but noise. High feelings can live alone, without physical presence. On the contrary, isolation purifies and grows them. The joy, the joy that spreads like a block of ground. planet under the water of flowing life, the one that never gives up and which never disappoints, lies in the inner struggle, in the inner exultation, to watch over oneself, to dominate oneself,

to purify oneself, to rise, to have the courage to think, because it is so simple to be lazy or cowardly in the face of spiritual work. Have the energy to expand your hidden world, to love intensely, that is to say, to give oneself silently without reluctance. We prefer to forget to forget get or deny that these fundamental joys exist to be satisfied with immediate enjoyments that we believe to be superior to everything and after which we have nothing very often, if not dust in the heart and a wilting of the wings. The mystics have long known that this constant animation of the interior life. Were they less happy? Did they have less joy than we who chatter, mingled with faces where we only discover appearances fed by words that die with the echo?

The joy of the mystics is just one example. The same inner joy exists at other stages of spirituality and sensitivity. The presence of others is not even essential at all. One can perfectly love be possessed by the highest joys of the heart in physical distance and even in death. As long as we have not once freed ourselves from external elements, as long as we have not been able to live alone, that is to say, in the most real company, that nothing can disturb, we have not yet reached a very threshold of joy.

Instead of complaining about loneliness, you have to bless it. You have to take advantage of this unexpected possibility of examining yourself in silence and dominating yourself lucidly, completely, even in your most contradictory thoughts. Doors close to the world, willful termination of the contract with outside, so much the better. Because it means, if you like, doors open to the soul. exact contact with oneself, exhilarating joys of knowledge, spiritual fulfillment, and mystically,

the most delicate and complete gift. And this is the last part. This is part 24, Granger. It is often by doing, this is the last part for this section here. It is often by doing with maximum nobility, a thousand bothersome little things that you are great. It is infinitely more difficult to stretch your soul a thousand times every day without relief and to give a single grand impulse at the moment of a visionary event. Merit to be given there is slight. The magnitude of the fleeting opportunity alone gives us the strength to act and the desire to astonish while allowing us to have the highest opinion of ourselves.

You can do a great thing wonderfully and be far from real greatness. Greatness is the nobility of the soul wearing down, dripping with the desire to to give, each according to our duties, especially when they are stripped of those things that give rise to vanity for both women and men. Greatness for a woman is often to give herself hour by hour to dull even prosaic housework, yet who will admire it? Who will know the thousand battles fought in the bottom of the heart, in laziness, in pride, in singing passions, in the softness which calls the soul and the body towards the warm sands of

easy life. The one who despite all this advances resists, progresses, is great since the gift of herself was total without requiring the vanity of recognition. So many high status people always complain, find everything unpleasant, never know how to rejoice, frankly, of nothing. Everything seems boring to them because they never give themselves up, because they approach each moment, even when it would require only a small exertion with the firm intention of delivering only the bare minimum, and even with that reluctance. Everything is a question of giving freely. Happy people are those who give themselves.

The dissatisfied are those who strangle their existence with perpetual retraction, constantly wondering what they will lose. Virtue, greatness, happiness, everything revolves around that. Give yourself. Give yourself completely, all the time. Do what you have to do. bravely with maximum application, even if the object is merely housework, without apparent grandeur. Wherever you are, above or below, man or woman, the problem is exactly the same.

It is giving that differentiates clear souls from troubled souls. And that's the end of that part. Yeah, it's essential. The monastic tradition, I mean, there's a lot there. I mean, to the monastic tradition, but, um, you know, the understanding that through silence and through introspection, that's the way one comes to know God, that's something that a lot of Protestant congregations have gotten away from, and that's really unfortunate. There's nothing intrinsic to dissenter faith structures that makes it axiomatic. Like, if anything, I think that, you know, the understanding, the inner witness you find in Calvin basically says you should that that's you know that's that's

basically like the core of of uh faith as as as as a practice but I I really enjoy being around like people I love and who love me back and you know enjoying um that kind of community we've developed among our peoples like it's fucking incredible you know like and I'm really really lucky but I I don't just like being by myself a lot of the time. Like, I need to be by myself because that's, you know, the mind is its own place in ways that are both good and bad. And like beyond bad, like, that can be terrifying because it can create an environment that's either not livable or that has been compromised by, by evil things.

And some of those things may be entity. to themselves. I mean, that's a metaphysical question. I don't want to get into on the tail end of our stream. But in any event, a lot of, that's one of the ways that people are kept under control by officialdom, you know, is this inability of people to really be alone and to be alone properly. I mean, people are isolated, but they don't know how to truly be alone. That's why they're always seeking out. That's why, that's why social media is like their standards. and for, you know, actual social life and things. It's like, it was an inability of people to be alone with their own mind.

You know, and I'm always talking about, you know, my mind, I think of it as an ice cathedral. It's other things, too, but, you know, that's, like, the ice cathedral is where I would draw into myself. And within its proverbial walls, you know, I can go anywhere. You know, like I, not, not like actual projection in a literal sense, but, you know, practically speaking, you know, I, I go all kinds of places in my mind. And it's not because, you know, I'm some rarefied case. You know, that's, I suppose that's what some people are up on if they say they're getting into meditation. You know, I mean, it's like, okay, if people want to call it that, that's fine. I think there's some hokey stuff attached to those interpretations. But I'm not going to criticize anybody. for, you know, for welcoming or cultivating an impulse in that direction. That's all I got for that. All right.

Section 5. Stop me anytime, Thomas. I think you may have some comments on this section because this is part 5, a man's duty, notes from the Eastern Front. 25. The Great Retreat. To die 20 years too early or 20 years too late is of no consequence. All that matters is.

to find a good death. Only with this goal in mind can we truly begin to live. As a simple soldier, I would gladly die tomorrow. The humility of my lot in life at the front reconciled me such an outcome. Not having lived as a saint to die as a soldier's soul would be the most suitable thing. Are my weeks numbered? Then it is best to make the most of these chances to purify our souls. I once dreamed of dying after a long illness to better prepare

myself for the inevitable. But such a death necessarily takes place in an atmosphere of pollution. On the front, our preparation takes place in a feeling of power in the unfolding of the will. I realize how lucky I am. Perhaps I return alive, more alive than ever before. Either way, this great retreat, which life or death will close, will have been a blessing. I enjoy it freely, fully, like a nourishing, and beautiful sun. Why should I tremble under its fire? The soldier learns to be great among the most mundane or the most painful things. Heroism is to stand, to struggle, to be always alert, happy, and strong, and nameless, unrecognized misery of the front, in the mud, the excrement, the corpses, the mist of the water and snow, the endless and colorless fields, the total absence of outer joy.

Every day we move further away from the blissful world of yesteryear. Are we not already half dead, we who advance, gritting our teeth through the mists? Always look at those who have less than you and rejoice in what you have, never lusting after ephemeral desires. Life is always beautiful when you look at it with peaceful lives, the light of a soul at peace. We soldiers, we have nothing, and we are happy. The joy of an unencumbered soul can only flourish when one has cast off this jumble. of mental slavery. War is not just combat. Above all, it is a long, sometimes exhausting streak, sometimes stretching into tedium of silent renouncements of daily sacrifices without relief.

Virtue is forged in the same way everywhere. The privations endured with humility, waiting patiently for death's arrival, the giving of oneself. Far from the spotlight, one plays one's part in an unknown field in unknown fields. and groves in this wasteland far from all human joy. Such is the real war, the one waged by millions of men who will never know ostentatious glory, and who, if they do not die, will return home with their faces tight, their lips closed, for others would not comprehend the heartbreaks and renunciations in their obscure heroism. The crowd is only struck by heroism when it is bright and loud.

What impresses the public is to brilliance and not the painful and slow a sense of souls who rise in silence and shadow to greatness. But are we ever understood? Do we hear? Do we see anything other than the superficial? The bottom of hearts is such an abyss of desires, denials, sorrows that we prefer not to approach it. It is simpler, more pleasant to stick to the superficial,

and without thinking too much, to enjoy the words and attitudes that weave the tapestry of human drama. We, we soldiers, stand behind that tapestry. what souls will imagine our journeys, who will have the strength to join us spiritually? Zeal, even intelligence, cannot be enough. To have culture is to have a balance of mind, illumination, wisdom, which can only be the results of a long discipline of the higher faculties, where the only proven method is the application of extensive contact with the most fundamental works of human intelligence.

The disinterested study of ancient civilizations, mothers of ideas, mothers of ideas, and systems, the study of philosophy, the study of mathematics, the secret fabric of all the arts, the comparative study of the lessons of history, this alone can bring about the harmony of the human faculties, without which the most dazzling successes always have a character of miracle and fragility. Intellectual maturity is not irreconcilable with genius. Maturity makes genius exact and human, channeling it towards a desirable end. Its strength is not thereby diminished, only more useful. Richelot would not have given France half of the blessings of his genius if he had been self-taught. The origin of our century's mental debilitation is that it is a century of the

self-taught. Their work has a disorderly, inhuman, unstable character. True genius, or at least beneficent genius, is balanced, which brings happiness, progress, and order. The Distinctive genius is stunning, dazzling, but always at a great cost. When the fireworks fade, the sky only looks darker than before. The banal and the vulgar are neighbors of the grandiose and eternal. Earlier I watched a pig going to slaughter. He was keen on life, poor thing. Almost bloodless, still he gasped and moaned.

Beasts and men in the face of death, we are the same. Yet our honored demands, and we must take great care to ensure that at the hour of our death, we have the courage to face it with dignity. Soldiers, we risk our own skins all the time, and so we take very simple joy in merely existing. Death is always right before our face. Death is everywhere. Therefore, we understand the greatness of life better than others.

If the soul did not rise, straight as the barrel of a gun, straight as the crosses over the graves, we would quickly sink into moral decay. Our whole world consists of woods, fields, marshes, strip trees near which one is on the lookout, day or night, warming his hands with his breath, rubbing his ears, trampling over ground that as today is hard and unforgiving as granite, where just yesterday it was a sea of mud. In the evening from four o'clock, we watch the shadows. We must guard our hearts closely so as not to weep in the face of such an abyss. The soul is

faced with total surrender. And yet she is proud and she sings, because strip bearers in the bygone days of innocence, she is aware of the gravity of the mission offered to those who tread this lonely abyss, those who will redeem the cowardice and filth of a world peopled by empty souls. Here her wings start to beat again, shaking off the dried mud that once had dirtied them. They find joy again in the returns of clean air, open space, distant lines. If we here have made good of our suffering, we will have achieved our true victory. but will we who suffer be able to remain pure to the end? Won't we feel ridiculous in our angelic garb on our return?

Will we have the courage not to be ashamed when we hear the countless jeers of those who have soiled their souls and who insolently believe themselves to be triumphant? Something important, and you find this again and again in Vofan-Sess's memoirs. And there's a peculiar irony, I think at least, you know modern modern infantry elements the degree to which they owe not just you know um not just doctrinal things and um and tactical preferences to the vaughan s but the kind of organizational spirit and um the breaking down of barriers between officers and men you know, that all came from the Vofan SS, and that was specifically Paul Houser, you know,

who's kind of like an unsung figure, I think, not just because of his battlefield aptitude, but, you know, the kind of organizational model he had for the Vav and SS. It wasn't just DeGrel being some romantic and, like, you know, talking about, like, oh, you know, the glory that is, you know, to be the common soldier or the NCO, you know, leading the common man. Like, like, Bob and us officers actually did lead from the front, you know, and like they ate with their men and like they, you know, there wasn't, I mean, it wasn't just mission-oriented tactics. You know, and what we don't think of as the precursor to special operations in some cases, you know, particularly the case of people that Scorsesini's commandos that kind of created sort of like egalitarian spirit. Like that was very much cultivated, you know. And so, It's corny as well as just, you know, a lie, you know, in these old movies or even in this kind of more contemporary stuff where they cast, you know, like the Vermecht or the, I mean, they cast the Vaphafenessess. And even the Vermacht, which still had these kinds of class-based issues, but I don't know the same degree.

But they cast like any German military forces, it's kind of like these like cruel like Prussian Mertonette types, you know, like quite of contempt for the men. And like there's no recourse if you're, if you're an illicit man or an NCO, you know, against an. officer even he's in the wrong i mean it's like a combination of like the worst of like the way the soviet army was with you know kind of a caricature of the 19th century royal navy or something like they they could not be farther from the truth you know um that point there's a reason why there's a reason why modern militaries like literally look like the vaughn s s too from like the rifles they pack to their helmets you know to um to uh you know some of the ways uh they deployed especially in the early Cold War, you know, as the distinction between, you know,

light medium and heavy, light medium and heavy armor was abolished. You know, they can't be overstated. And that really comes out in Begril, because he was obviously like a man of letters who had a certain, there was like a certain ashen lyricism and what he wrote. And finally, then we can move on. You know, this idea that like war is just horrible. The only reason I object to all quite on the Western Front. Not just because it's crybaby stuff, but it's just kind of at odds with, you know, the way humans are.

Like, if you're, if you're, if you're an infantryman at war, I've had guys relayed to me that they're big terror, especially, um, especially guys in Vietnam who are either flyers or on long range reconnaissance or in long range of conductance roles. There's a terror of being captured, which made sense. And there's an ongoing terror in the, in the mind of re-intreement of, of being, of being wounded, of being wounded, wounded particularly and I mean not not to be crass but being wounded below the waist um but you know the worst thing that happens is you die that you don't have anything else to worry about you're free you know um and uh there's not any distinction between principle and action and um you know the idea that there's some kind of like horrible hell to like be uh serving the infantry in a modern war like compared to what? Compared to

working in like a mid-20th century factory? I mean, like, or compared to working in a, you know, compared to like having the life of Willie Lohman as like a 1950 salesman. Like, it's something really at odds with reality about it. I mean, not just kind of like posified and cowardly, although it's that too,

but just like nakedly at odds with reality. And I think that that's important. Like a lot of Yacquem Piper didn't write any formal memoirs, but what he did put the paper about what it was like on the eastern front you know like he didn't romanticize it like there you know he talked about awful some of that kind of duty was i mean not just in what was called for

in moral terms but like you know the physical brutalities that the modern infantry men had to put himself through i mean it certainly was not fun but it but it's profoundly as guided when people act like you know there's some like horrible fate you know to be full you was a man like to be a soldiered That's all I want to do insinuate. Okay. Part 26, the taming of horses. Flee's cling to our uniforms and seried ranks. Mice run all about.

In the middle of the night, I awake to find a rat nestled against my nose. These companions strengthen us against vanity and pride. We who cannot escape even the smallest of beasts, the most ridiculous and the dirtiest. But poetry is everywhere. In front of our guns, thousands of sparrows jump in the hedges, round-bellied birds slowly dancing about, they listen a meter away to the little compliments that we offer them. Then they settle in wild flocks in the rushes. They cry, chirp, and hiss, as if the silver sky had thrown fistfuls of pure joy over the frosty landscape. There are also passing ravens,

like black lightning, few in silent. From time to time they utter their great hoarse cry, no doubt to remind us that death awaits us, harsh like them, ravenous like them, on dark and deadly wings. We strive to always smile at the singing sparrows at the solemn crows that pass, but the heart is the heart, and every man, those smiling with his mouth and eyes, hides underneath the awful secrets of a suffering animal. We feel that death watches on every side. Each step exacts a cost.

Our steps grow heavy and must be made light, despite the heavy guns, the stumbling feet, the fields of overripe grain that scratch the skin, The massive shell holes in which a misplaced step could drop one into the abyss without a word. This is it, the thankless life of a soldier, which knows neither exhilaration nor glory, where, at any time, one can be stabbed, shot, or dragged off as a prisoner by the enemy on the other side. You have to move forward calmly, meter by meter, even when shots may ring out suddenly from ten paces away. Shots ring out in the night, between the outposts, a hoarse cry, and the night rolls on,

impervious, frozen, relentless. At these times, our entire being wishes to rebel. We care for our lives, those of our comrades, the blood coursing powerfully through their veins. We are beings of the flesh. We want the light to be reborn. With vigor and heat, the human beast roars and cries out for his will to unfold, to burn, to resound.

To remain huddled, subdued, to remain in the shadows, ready for the final act or take or the final breath takes a terrible discipline. It inflicts terrible injury on our will. But our taste for life will be even stronger because we have more intensely experienced the value, the flavor, the burning sweetness of every second, falling like a drop of silence in this great tension of ready hearts. We love with unchained power, our carnal existence, the rhythm of our thoughts, the momentum of our senses, which a single bullet in the night could shatter. Our arms, our legs, our eyes, to surround, to cross, to regard with passion and domination. All this screams man's right to life, the right of the animal that wants to run and

seize, the right of the intelligence that wants to enchant and create. Life. How beautiful, how beautiful, indescribably beautiful, exhilarating, softness of body, light of midday, ardor of fire. We clench this life in our willful fists, those of silent, attentive patient shadow watchers. We have learned to tame ourselves, to tame the wild horses which ran across the vast fields of our dreams. But holding them in our hands, with a steel fist, we close our eyes and inhale the powerful smell of life that gathers above. Life. Life. It is so cold that the medicine vials shattered. The alcohol itself froze in the ambulance. Poor feet, poor ears, poor frostbitten noses, mummified in the atrocious,

Howling, whistling night. This morning, the order to leave for another combat sector arrived. We will go where we are ordered, smiling in the snow, which since we awoke has been falling in heavy flakes. Our feet will be cold, our lips will be raw, our bodies huddled over against the cold, will be heavy and awkward, but our inner fire will continue to rise and fill our eyes with glimmers of the sun. Here our souls are strained, these low hills, these rows of furs, these abhors, these abyses, abandoned millstones watch us go, regarding our lines with shining eyes. This black sky that I contemplate now for the last time, I have filled it with the brilliant

streaks of tracer bullets while the enemy's rounds uttered their shill cries, like pouncing cats all about me. Already my bag is ready. I look at the crushed straw, broken into smaller pieces on the spot I habitually rested after returning, tired and frozen, from late-night patrols. The smoky little lantern casts a yellow light over my last daily report. A few more shirts, a few handkerchiefs, freshly washed, already covered with dust. Rough mud walls, the oven that we heated with debris from barracks, little frozen tiles,

painted with designs of white ferns. We picked up our battered bowls, our canteens, our weapons emblazoned with black lightning. No doubt to this place will one day return plants laden with fruit. Christian icons, a woman clad in heavy petticoats, and the thick smell of vegetable fat. But forever gone will be the humble and bustling life of many young foreign boys, lost in the depths of step, who left in the middle of the night with calloused hands and frozen blood. This miserable, poorly lit square has been the center of an intense spiritual life. That life will leave with us, and will be reborn at random from the frozen roads,

improvised lodgings, embankments, and trenches from which we watch for and track down our opponents or avoid his blows. We may return to these spots one day, but the essential character will be gone. And so we leave at dawn without looking back. Life is ahead, even if life is death. The greater the sacrifice, the more we give of ourselves. And it was to give of ourselves that we stood up with radiant hearts. Take a sip. 27. The Apocalyptic Cycle. The wind blows in biting gusts whipping the snow against our skin like darts.

The river is frozen. Frozen. It's little tributaries which ran through the crevices. Frozen. The hills, the thistles of the embankments, the ruined factories. My heart itself has caught cold. Cold from these months of soul tension. A withdrawal into inhuman solitude. Cold as these rigid black trees, which and North Wind Whips. Distress in everything. Everyone feels to chill. We break our cold bread. We scrape the huge chunks of mud from our clothes with a knife. We cut away great clumps of the blackish glue from our shoes and gaiters. No water. You have to go three kilometers to obtain a dirty brown liquid filled with grass clippings. Let us love our misery anyway,

as it uplifts us, prepares us for destinies that call for pure and strong hearts. The cycle of wars is now apocalyptic. The waves widen more and more. Grow in speed and force to spread in a fabulous gyrating movement. Wars have become universal revolutions. The whole world is caught up in its whirlwind. Armies collide. Economic forces clash.

They tear each other apart. The forces of the spirit engage in a merciless duel. The universe will have to bleed, struggle, know the pangs of flight, the agony of separation. thousands of men, millions of men, will have to look with frozen or feverish eyes at death, always the same, that is to say, always cruel, tearing the heart at the same time as the flesh. This drama was inevitable, only the blind and the foolish, that is to say almost everyone, believe that these were conflicts of rival nations, conflicts which could be localized. However, these are implacable pseudo-religious wars, quite similar to all religious wars,

but which will take almost limitless proportions reaching up to the last little island or ice flow, so that all people, be they Tahitians or Laplanders, will have to choose like everyone else. When, how will this prodigious settling of accounts end? Our skies will long be crossed by this lightning. Our children will grow up amid the blinding flashes of falling or triumphing ideas at arms. A century where the scale of the drama chills the blood, but a sorrowful century in which the whole universe is being remade, more by spirit than by iron. Tragedy such as the world will never know, tragedy such as the world has never known so complete in which we are all actors, but where it is hearts that play. Millions of hearts are on the scene, still young and naive, or old and silent, or ruined and confused.

To walk 100 meters between the bloody lines, we come back broken, as if every step took all our strength. Nothing to do. Nothing to read. We only have a miserable kerosene lamp with a small yellowish flame that lights up a square meter of our shelter. It takes more courage to live like this, hold up in the mud, than to advance on the enemy with the machine gun under your arm. You can feel the temptation, the muffled voices, the demoralizing questions. What are you doing here? Can't you see you're wasting your time?

your efforts, your sacrifices? Does anyone even remember that you exist? Shall we leave you alone to rot away into oblivion? But the soul quickly regains its serenity. She knows that nothing is more precious than this renunciation, this silent descent into the depth of consciousness. Can the real victory, the victory over oneself, be better acquired elsewhere than in the midst of these humiliations,

welcomed with the head held high, by straightforwardly opposing this hostile environment, the loneliness of the heart and the cunning of the enemy which assault the spirit. 28, enlightenment. War for us soldiers is to become among poor companions with grim faces, men huddled under the frozen earth, defined by dark suffering, without comfort. It is mud. It is a snow.

It is bottomless despair. It is feet torn by the endless steps. It's the hundred shameful little miseries which surround the life of the soldier at the front, like a clinging and fog of sadness. The stifled life ceaselessly calls for the calling up of energy, the leap of the soul, which must tear itself out that mist in order to shine again. This life bears no resemblance to the brilliant ideas that the public has about the exploits of war, but they ought not to be disabused of this notion.

We would thereby spoil their beautiful and brightly colored image. Yet I lie down in exhaustion at the end of each day with a joy, That is a little bit sad, but powerful, because it is an incomparable lesson in patience, self-mortification, the elevation of the soul. We should never try to cheat the ordeal or stifle its voice. If the lesson were to be useful, if we did not return as men changed by the experience, there would not be this wall between, on one hand, those who were afraid of the ordeal, and on the other hand, those who looked hardship in the eye and learned from it.

Life sinks its fangs into us time after time. I escaped this time, like so many others, with a weary, worried, chewed-up heart. I wish now to return there at peace, having found innocence in confidence. It is Christmas. I watch the snowfall tirelessly, and despite its lightness, I feel that I am suffocating. Soldiers pass, bent and double against the wind, going quickly. Around me, nothing. Around me, nothing.

the wind blowing, a man nervously biting his nails, others collapsing into sleep, exhausted by the nights on the watch. Jesus could have been born in our little shelter. Sincerity of the good animals about the manger who offered themselves entirely. The honest hearts of the shepherds who did not doubt for a second, did not hesitate, and who immediately gave everything at their disposal. They only had sheep, and they gave their sheep. Who remembering them would not, who remembering them would not take heart. What counts is not what you give, sheep, or great treasures. It is the fervor of the heart that weighs upon the scales. Sometimes life seems too exhausting to carry, painful even to think about. Today, it is almost an anguish. To forget

your own existence, your screaming soul. What could let us forget? We have spent the day killing by the dozens the lice that chew at our skin. That is all. And yet the soul must, stand tall, proud, steadfast, and it must stay that way. But great muffled voices, deep in the background, moan. We are not men differently built than the others. We too would like, when we listen only to the calls of that outer life, to do not but pile up money earned without labor. All men desire this, whose bodies run hot, whose eyes are alight with the mixture of desire and pleasure. The human beast, youth, the need to dominate rears up in distress. Are you not wasting your ears of radiant life?

Watched by death every hour. Don't you have any regrets? Feel the desire to break everything and run, to throw yourself towards pleasure, towards luminous faces, towards beautiful women as the other boys of your time? These are times when you have to stifle your passions to feed your soul and your faith at the expense of such human desires that shine to. before our eyes like a mirage. We stand guard on icy parapets with a touch of bitterness in our hearts, but supremely

happy yet at the sacrifice renewed every day without even knowing if we will ever be ever be understood. End of the year, I recap the line of dying days. This year with its secrets and its illuminating lights. The secrets that are hidden behind a smile, but which often bleed, like wounds never clothes, and then the light, light shown upon our character and our deeds. There are the lights that we may show others. They are the least beautiful.

These heroic lights we show to others, they maintain an air of theatricality and falseness, even when displayed in modest fashion. It is only with great difficulty that one can keep a truly naive heart and yet also take care to avoid an excess of pride. These lights, these imperfect lights, will remain superficial, but these glorious lights hurt our eyes. We are blinded when we leave them, and we are so often plunged from these brick lights into the shadows of everyday banality or minor setbacks. I remember those lights. I love them only to the extent that they illuminated that ideal towards which I walk.

I should only like these lights for this reason, but I know very well that I have often let myself be taken in by my own self. satisfaction. Finally, these lights, necessary to rouse us to action, sad in me because they show me that over and over again, I find myself biting down on the hook of vanity or pride. And then there are the other lights, the ones that no one else sees from the outside. They light up our souls like x-rays. Then you know exactly what you are worth. Caught these lights, we are no longer very proud. We see ourselves, we see clearly all of our weaknesses. We see clearly the poverty, the excuses we have made for a hundred mistakes, always the same. But it is precisely because we know our own mediocrity all too well that we experience intoxicating joys when the lights that emerge from the depths of the soul

end up illuminating a heroic work of our own doing. Though it be only a small act, it was born after so much secret cowardice that that first inner smile plunges us into unspeakable raptures. 29. Intransigence. Who kept us on their thoughts? The lost boys of the steps, who had nothing to drink to the new year but melted snow, streaked with bits of yellow grass, or a few sips of artificial coffee that smelled of soap, miserable details, humiliating details, the evocation of which seems out of place.

Who else could imagine how the biting colds? made a Herculean effort of even minor tasks, for example, the miserable, inevitable sickness of dysentery. Of course, we had no sewers. Fifteen, twenty times in just a few hours, you would have to run into the blizzard to relieve yourself, allowing your body to be cut by a wind as sharp as a blade, as sharp as a whip. Vanity of our bodies, in which we often took such pride. The beautiful human beast, strong, burning with life, must submit to the world.

these humiliations, the body rebels, but must give in. The body that was so satisfied with the pleasant rhythms of life, body which has been caressed, kissed, love, and we heap such shame upon you. Yet nothing can reach the mind that is master over itself. If the body is humiliated, it is because the will has led him into these whistling snows to the bottom of these sordid shelters. Yesterday it was lice. Today, the cold claws at our skin. We willed it to be so. We do not care that we are scouraged by this hostile, ferocious situation. One day the cruel winds will die off with the return of the leaves to the trees. Our bodies stretched out in the waters of the rivers, and the sun and in the winds,

will feel life beating more ardently than ever around their bones, strong as metal, under a living flesh like the flesh of flowers, hard and clean like marble, but golden, full, vibrant. Having suffered in triumph, we will open our arms to the sun. and our smooth, powerful, and rough bodies will flow with blood like the sap of the great virgin trees. Our wills will bring back to life the beautiful human beast prancing with life, now tamed. The whole step caught up in the turmoil might well crackle, whistle, rise in gigantic waves. Despite the cold that scorched us, despite the gusts of hailstones that riddled our face,

I faced a maelstrom a hundred times to fill my eyes with this grandeur. I felt carried away by the squalls. I communicated with this epic power where the white plane, the sky, and the wind mingled their strength, their leaps, their icy flames, their long cries, springing from the horizon and howling away at the end of the quivering plain. What are, at such moments, the forces which rise up in us, in communion with the great natural outbursts. I then feel transported. An immense bliss rises from all my body as if fabulous correspondences were established between my blood which runs and the wind which blows, between the life

which boils in my limbs and the savage life which blows past under the great sky. There is not one of us soldiers who does not have to be prepared for the most gruesome endings. But do we give only with reservation. Death and humiliation isn't a way of giving even... Death and humiliation isn't it a way of giving even more? True sacrifice cannot be calculated. Cannot be given with reservation. We listen to cynics more readily than to the message of righteous hearts. Yet pure hearts will have victory. Only idealists will change the world. I am writing near a rusty barrel at the bottom of which floats the last bits of stepped grass suspended in our icy water. This poverty, this isolation, we know them because we desired sincerity.

And more than ever, in the solitude where bodies and hearts feel invaded by mortal cold, I renew my oaths of intransigence. More than ever, I will go straight ahead without giving in, without rest, heart on my soul, heart of my desires, heart of my youth. I'd rather see ten years of cold and abandonment than one day feeling my soul emptied, voided of its living dreams. I write these words without trembling, which nevertheless make me suffer. In the hour of our world's bankruptcy, souls are needed which may

stand hard and tall as rocky cliffs beaten in vain by raging winds. 30. The cross. Which moment will be our end? Death pass is unresponsive and his hands strangle hearts at random. The machine gun fires, it whizzes, it cracks, or it pierces with its deadly fingers a young man's body. What to do, if not to have a pure heart, a quiet regard to the timely sacrifice made freely. If it comes, our eyelashes will not quiver, and we will leave with the faint, sad smile of the tender memories to surround our last seconds. If we come back, even though the warmth of life will have made us forget this icy breath, our hearts will forever have the composure of a life that has not trembled before death.

May fate always find us strong and worthy. You still have to love happiness as you love the song. of the wind, however fleeting it may be, as you love the colors of the evening, even though you know they are going to die. For the great winds are reborn, and sing again, and every day the colors return to the blazing axis of the risen sun. It is up to us to keep the winds from dying, or to prevent the sun from fading, but to draw strength from them while they yet live. Joy is the fire of indomitable hearts, and no reversal can extinguish or stifle its burning colors. When you see the waves retreating from the sands, returning to the dark depths of the sea,

think of a great outpouring that will return a few hours later, white, shimmering in the sun, bold and strong, as if these waves were the vanguard of an assault on the world itself. To be happy is to be unselfish. Happiness is just that, giving all of oneself. There are so many mediocre things on earth, lower ugly, that one day we would be overwhelmed by them if we did not carry them within ourselves, the fire which burns away ugliness, which consumes it and purifies us.

Art is our inner salvation, our secret garden that constantly refreshes and soothes us, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, anything but to escape from the mundane, to rise above the drying dust, to create something grand, instead of submitting to the small, to let out that spark of the extraordinary

that each of us possess, and converted into a grandiose devouring, indistinguishable fire. The dead and dark centuries are those where souls hesitated before this effort. The luminous centuries are those which have seen these great fires of souls mark out dominate the mountains of the spirit. The only true joys are not those that others give us, but those that we carry within us, that our faith creates, that fill us with dynamism. The rest comes like the foam of the sea, shining at the tip of the waves, quivering for a moment on the edge of the sands, then quickly dies or withdraws with the waves.

This is the happiness that others bring us from time to time. The joy that arises from our passion for life and our will is like the great force which rumbles and rolls at the bottom of the sea, which springs up to meet the sun and is renewed every second. As if hanging from a boat, we watch the mighty sea throw its waves like immense leopard skins, spread out, supple and shiny, standing up like a silver flame or like a prodigian. a spray of white flowers. This life constantly returns, rebounds. We know that nothing until the end of the world will stop this momentum.

So must be our hearts, brash, but like this wonderful rhythmic force, ordered, chanted like an eternal song. During the day we are caught up in poor, often trivial concerns. But at night, the imagination weaves itself through our dreams, takes us into its, It takes us in its fantasies, its reconstruction or anticipation. Sometimes I'm amazed by the relentless lucidity of dreams. Of course, the dream is often a wild folly of phantasm, but it is often also for me a meeting with my conscience and with my first intuitions.

I see myself naturally, as I am when my will is not there to lock its brakes upon the movement of my passions. I then know exactly on which points I doubt myself. Each time I must say to myself, look, here you falter. I thus have the almost daily proof that I can resist a thousand temptations, lead my life with honor only to the extent that a renewed effort, masters, and restrains every day, deep within myself, a wild horse which can never be fully tamed, and which only the whip of the will wielded unceasingly can contain.

If the world were relaxed, everything would come undone. I see this in my dreams. Will the will itself fall asleep? I awake, defeated. The dream has cut me adrift. There is no more decisive examination of conscience for me than the unfolding of dreams. Dreams lay bare my soul before me, leaves deep marks upon my thoughts with the knowledge that we must always be on guard over our baser impulses because these baser elements do not naturally run towards, but on the contrary, run from it as soon as they are tempted by beautiful falsehoods. The soul, freed by the gift it has made of itself, flies, sores, and sings. Because we hear within us these great songs of

serenity, we know that the work we embark upon will be beautiful, for the great and the beautiful can only be created in joy and in faith. If we love virtue only insofar as it has taken notice of, we defile it with pride. We are no longer virtuous a moment we desire, the virtue, which we believe we have achieved to be seen and admired. So it is with all virtues. They are beautiful, soft, radiant if we love them for themselves, if we cultivate them for the unique pleasure of having reached them. We come to life without thinking or caring that we might not be understood by others. Uncomplicated hearts cannot imagine the complications of others. Fresh hearts cannot imagine other hearts being hateful or defiled. Suffering is the most

wonderful of companions, pathetic and angelic, washing souls of all desire, raising them to the heights they had dreamed of for so long. Defeats, victories, dreams, or material successes pass away are forgotten. Fires that shine for a moment, a sense swept away by a passing wind. But the essential, the unique, is for us the great spiritual conflagration without which the world is nothing. So long as there remains a little fire in some corner of the world, All miracles of greatness remain possible. Everything in life is a matter of faith and tenacity. Trust cannot be begged for.

It has to be one. And the best way to conquer it, to conquer, is to first give of yourself. We all carry our cross. We must carry it with a proud smile so that we know that we are stronger than suffering, and also so that those who seek to harm us understand that their arrows reach us in vain. What does it matter if you suffer if you have, what does it matter if you have, what does it matter if you suffer, if you have had a few immortal hours in your life. At least we have lived.

It's important, I think, to give particular attention to the fact that, you know, there's a basic dishonesty in the way warfare is discussed, not just in the abstract, but in the concrete experience of it, you know, by, um, by, by realist types as well as you know, neoliberals and what remains at least of, you know, Marxist types and academia who

you know, assigned productive force determinism you know, to their analysis of warfare and its causes and its systemic function and you know, kind of sociological affairs at scale. You know, by the 20th century, wars of pure ideology, which is what the Grell's getting at when he talks about, you know,

warfare itself being a revolutionary process and all warfare by the juncture at which, you know, he and his men took the field of battle, you know, being a theological crusading enterprise, that's that's totally accurate, you know. That's one of the reason that it's bizarre. when you hear American academic types whether there's strategic forecasting types who've got their own kind of

conceptual biases or whether they're just talking about kind of you know court historian types they always come up short in describing warfare as a process or as like an ontological postulate you know they're always like grasping at

some sort of some sort of concrete variables, you know, be it of an economic nature or, or they're falling back on, on, you know, the systemic remedies assigned by the system that they themselves serve, you know, and kind of, you are afraid of warfare in terms of legalisms, you know, and bad actors and purportedly, you know, actors who are abiding what amounts to you know

a juristic moral precedent I mean this is this is incredibly misguided even if you issue the fact that it's at odds with you know kind of the the human reality of it you know nobody

like World War II wasn't waged because you know the German Reich needed to capture markets to you know needed to capture you know destination markets for for evaluated manufacturers you know it wasn't waived because you know like the british one needed to guarantee that they could access their rubber plantations you know that were in japan's backyard like that's not that's not um reality um and uh i mean and this endured throughout the cold war obviously because the

the the the the Cold War literally was a the conflict that determined you know what what world order would would be constituted of you know in terms of not just concrete structures that you know kind of determine the you know human life and labors at scale but also you know like what what values for lack of a better term to invoke um would would rain and what and what kind of what conceptual horizon would would uh be triumphant over all others you know that's why um that's why america had such problems in vietnam because it it couldn't within within its own intellectual and moral paradigms like it couldn't it couldn't rationalize what it was doing because uh the war in vietnam was an ideological war as all as all 20th century war's were and it was incidental that it took place in southeast Asia it was incidental that you know the people who was waged against were were asiatic um and uh the logic of the body count wasn't just a performance metric of success it was and in and in itself because if you're going to eradicate communism you've got to eradicate the standard bearers of it and um the standard bearers of any of any concept um are human beings. You know, so you're talking about the eradication of human beings at scale

in order to exterminate a concept and the ability of that concepts to exist in the world, let alone constitute an enemy force to oppose you. Like, you're talking about the slaughter of human beings. You know, that's why, too, people like, Another Frenchman, Christian de la Manzieri, I'm sure I'm butchering that pronunciation. He wrote the book The Captive Dreamer, and he joined the Vofnsis late in the game. I think he didn't go into action until late 1944. He fought with Charlemagne, who were incidentally among the last defenders of Berlin.

But, you know, in this book he made that point. It was, you know, he, he, um, it, we when it was clear that Europe was going down, you know, he's, like, I, I wasn't, I wasn't going to not participate in, you know, in the crusade do save it from, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's ideological and racial enemies. And that, um, that, that's, that's, um, you know, that's very much a crusader spirit. And, um, that's really the only spirit that they can animate. people at scale towards a modern war and um in trying at least in the stakes that were on the table for the for the germs and for the russians you know um it's a little more complicated when you deal with america insinuating itself into these like wars of choice but that that's kind of a different thing i mean that's that's born it's born of a i mean of a purely ideological imperative as well but there's there's a complexity there that is the subject for a different discussion.

But no, that's all I had, that's all I have to contribute right now. All right. The final part, part six, to give completely. Part 31, the reconquest. The turmoil that agitates public opinion, the wars that shake up nations, are just episodes. Partial reforms will do away with such periodic chaos. To attempt to change people would be a very disappointing work if it were if it were not accompanied by the essential work of changing that which lies deep in the soul

by a transformation of the very foundations of our times. All the scandals, the decline of honesty and honor, shamelessness in the certainty of impunity, the passion for money which sweeps away conventions, dignity, self-respect, immorality, which has become unconscious, indicate the existence of a deep-seated evil which calls for remedies of equal magnitude. It is not suddenly that we lie, that we break all moral laws,

supernatural or natural, and more simply the laws of the public code. It is not overnight that you work yourself up to bold hypocrisy, to speak truth only with reticence, to lie with virtuous words. This deformation of consciousness which amazes, which frightens today, or which puts on an air of sarcastic superiority, is the only conclusion of a law. long decline in human virtues. It is the passion for wealth, the will to be powerful no matter what. It is the frenzy to be honored. It is materialism. It is the unscrupulous gratification of instincts, which have corrupted men and through men institutions. The world is more and more preoccupied with banal, material, or simply animal joys. It maintains itself only by the principle of

maximizing material wealth. Each man lives only for himself and allows a domination of life both within his own home and within the country by a constant egoism which has converted men into hateful, embittered, greedy wolves, or corrupt and soulless half men. We will come out of this downfall only through an immense moral recovery by reteaching men to love, to sacrifice themselves, to live, to struggle, and to die for a higher ideal. In a century when we live only for ourselves, it will take hundreds thousands of men to live no longer for themselves, but for a collective ideal, accepting in advance all the sacrifices, all the humiliations, all necessary heroism.

All that matters is faith, brilliant confidence, the complete absence of selfishness, and individualism, the pulling of the whole being towards service without promise of reward in any place by any means toward a cause that goes beyond man, asking him everything, promising him nothing. The only things that count are the quality of the soul, the pulse, the total gift, the will to hoist an ideal above all else in the most absolute selflessness. The time is coming when saving the world will require this handful of heroes and saints to make the great reconquest. 32. Flotilla of Souls. Nations recovered rapidly from financial setbacks. They may reconstitute without too much difficulty a new political framework. All that is needed

is skilled technicians and a willingness to work together. Great revolutions are not political or economic. They are small revolutions, changes of purely mechanical nature. When the specialists put the pieces together, when the engines have found their rhythm and stern-faced foreman have been set to watch over them, the material revolution is accomplished. The rest will only require repairs from time to time a modification here and there. The machine is fitted or overhauled. The gears turn. Most of the work is done. The real revolution is far more complicated, one which brings together not the machinery of the state, but the secret life of every soul. There it is no longer a matter of automatic review and monitoring. It is about the vices and the

virtues, the impulses towards profundity and weaknesses, the desperate hopes that that are so dear to us. What is there at the bottom of that gaze, behind those eyes that remained on us for a long moment, as if great secrets lie upon our eyelids? A hidden heart, a soul, its secret crises, its outbursts, its despairs, the desire of the body and its indelible decline,

the sorrows that are so difficult to hide or guess at, the uncertain and troubled struggle towards happiness, is the great drama of man. But there too is the real revolution, bringing light to spirits caught in the shadows to aid in the restoration of failing souls, to relearn that we consist of more than just a body, to perfect the imperfect, to rise to heights of virtue, no matter how great are the efforts required of us. The revolution alone can be enchanting, but terrifying. We all walk through a labyrinth. that thin bowed head and that beautiful golden hair, that laughter that burst too suddenly, that arm that descends, ten faces, ten abysses, who cheats us, who is mistaken, who seeks to deceive us? We only see the deceptive shadows of beings.

Everyone tries to deceive themselves, to deceive others, by simplifications, and by more or less skillful artifices. And it is among these subterfuges, however, that we are, we must advance our flames burning white in the darkest night. What is there to take hold of? What can we do about these beings who to our impotent eyes appear only mysteries? Mysteries all the more poignant as we observe their laughter, vivacious eyes, pale foreheads, this soft caress of flowing hair, which with joyful light oppose all our regrets, anguish, weariness, and corruptions? We all make our way a long-distant,

paths. The bottoms of our hearts alone know our true face, the false secrets of our soul, its hopes and faults, our true joys, and our true sorrows. There were so many joys and so many tears that the others thought they knew shared and assuaged. We look in the hours of solitude at our real selves, where no one else, alas, can ever go. This inner self tells us who he loves and to whom he belongs. What overwhelms him and causes him to stumble and tells us what raises up his spirit, perhaps, if by fortune the breath of truth brushes aside the invisible veil. To be this current, this great warm and long wind which rises from the depths of our spiritual horizons, which gives souls this first movement. All of a sudden the sail undergoes an impalpable

swelling, rounding off in the light. The hole slips across still waters. The inflection of the white sails gently pushes the air away. We think of those thousands of motionless sails waiting for what will give them imperceptibly at first, then with quivering force, life and movement, the joy of moving through air and water, advancing through the clear line of the horizon in the distance. The boats are heavy. The water is dark and sluggish. Everything is silent. Be this breath that will come at last to rouse these souls to push them off, clumsy at first, left after so much waiting and stagnation, then happy and firm as to strength that sustains them and the life that revives them is confirmed, show all these beings that

existence can be beautiful and pure and great, even after all the weaknesses and all the disenchantments, to bring up from these dry or numb or perverted hearts, the fountain of renewal, this is the task, the real one, the hard one, the necessary task, terrible task. We would like to take these half-dead people in our arms, look deeply into their eyes, ward off these creeping doubts and hesitations to run our trembling fingers through their silken hair. But what a stir upon meeting those eyes which return the light of others. Those eyes which show us so quickly from their first lie or their first confession, the confusion that inhibits us ourselves. How to look at a face without hearing cruel questions. Are you lying? How shall you fare under fire under privations of the

flesh, and what will remain tomorrow of the hopes and aspirations painfully suspended, buoyed by this gaze. The source of all redemption lies there, however, to give life to drifting souls, to calm the storms which break their mass and tear their sails, to give them sun and breath, to make serene the seas of men, to make their horizon clear, free from the shadows and perils of violent and tormented skies. Breathe. Resume believing in virtues, in beauty, in goodness, in love. Field dancing around you on the waves, a thousand other sails, full of wind, carried with the same momentum towards the same call. When the Golden Sea sees these white sails rush forth, the revolution will be on its way, carried onwards by this flotilla of souls.

33. Summets Your road is hard. You come short of breath. There are times when you would like to throw away this burden that weighs you down. Let yourself go downhill and return to those idyllic farms that welcome you back at the bottom of the hill, blue streams against the green and gray backgrounds of meadows and slate roofs. You feel nostalgic for the quiet waters and the clear rushes, the ore that lapses against the surface, the flat, effortless path along the banks. We would like to think of nothing. Wash away the memories of men from your thoughts and, with your back against the grass, watch the passing sky, lightened by flocks of birds.

No more weariness. You won't let go of your bag and your stick. You won't attend to your bleeding knees. You won't listen to the clamor of hatred. You won't look at the smiling eyes and the wickedness they hide. It is to the summit that you must cast your eyes. Your body should live only for these twisting paths. Your heart should dream only of these heights that you and the others should reach.

What lies at the root of your confusion? You thought you would find immediate joy. in climbing this path along the sea and raising this human host, you have often suffered. Sometimes you feel nauseous, yet you needed it. You had to learn that ambition does not pay off, that sooner or later it tires out the heart it possesses. You know it now. You know that you should not expect any constant joy from outside. You have learned to doubt the comfort of men. Your face is flushed, not from the tenderness they gave you, but from the blows that you were dealt by them. Of course, did not think it would. You imagine that along the road your hands and eyes would find what you so

feverishly desired. You look back and you say, I am going back down. No, it is only then that life becomes noble when it beats you down when you no longer having the enthusiasm to carry on. Do you remember the early days? You wanted a very beautiful climb. It is true. You were leaving this way to free your soul. You knew that that man must always overcome his limitations. Didn't you believe in this obscure pleasure of honor and discipline? Are you crying out? You did not think for it to be like this. You rejected comfort with sincere enough words, but it still hemmed the edges of your actions as to foam borders the edge of the sea. You honestly thought that you only lived for this threat of light, beautiful only from afar on the edge of the sands.

The temptation was there in your heart. You wanted something grand, something real, but you still had the thought of yourself near you. You announced your readiness to do your duty, but you made this silent addition. That to fulfill your duty would bring glory to your name and satisfy your own desires, would make you golden with pride.

It's because you don't see this phantasm before you anymore that your eyes reflect only shadows. you are looking in the dark. Confront it, the fact that you love something false. Those who have disgusted you a hundred times with their wickedness and injustice have carried you more than your own strength. Are you giving up? You give your flesh and your breath, your heart and your mind,

and you think now it is all in vain? In vain? Why? Because you no longer give them in service and your selfish pride? Only now can you start to give of yourself. That wickedness had to overwhelm you. By the time you were almost fainting, at the end of your effort, the jeers would rise and contempt would drive you on. It was necessary that all your gestures of love be covered with hatred, that all your impulses be soiled,

that each throbbing of your heart command the new blow to fall upon your face. You have known so many times those exhausting last few meters where you smiled on the threshold of the gold, despite your sweat and your pallor. The next moment you were falling among the rocks, betrayed by your own, overwhelmed by the others. Everything had to be redone. And always, the charming emptiness of the valley below hailed you. The trembling poplars called you like a line of ships on the sea of easy days.

You suffered from the harshness of the fighting. You said to yourself, whatever the victory, the price is too expensive, and I no longer desire it. You always thought of yourself, Yes, for you, for the human pleasure of having reached the top, you made a fool's bargain. But if life had not slapped you a hundred times, would you ever have understood that there are other pleasures than pride, than smiles, and glory? You have felt the hypocrisy of so many faces around you. You have guessed all the lies, all the gall, all the meanness that is in store for you every time you start climbing again.

You are no longer entitled to anything. You hear the swarm of slithering horrors. You know you will go through with the objection anyway. It is at the hour when you have given everything that you will be said to be greedy. It is at the hour when your heart will suffer the most abandonment that will be given the basest of demands. You turn around with tears that well up in spite of you. Why? Are you still thinking of yourself?

Do you still suffer from injustice? Is it all about you? How hard is it to be free from our humanity? Let them come crashing down in your life like jackals. Let them trample your dreams. Let them open your heart to all the winds. Suffer from being thrown to the beasts of envy, calumny, baseness. Endure above all.

And this is what bruises the most, that at the moment when you cannot take it any longer, when your knees bend, when your eyes cast about for a supportive look, your arms search for an ardent hand, support, while you were hanging on a word, a look, that this word falls down to break you, that look to hurt you, except that it is those who are closest to you who finish you off, those to whom you had left everything, whom you love so naively, without reserve, and without hesitation. Your eyes have a bewilderment worse than tears. Do not cry out. Expect that everything you suffered yesterday, tomorrow will be renewed. Except this in advance. Do not even turn around when you hear that step behind you.

Bless the blows received. Love those who will bring them. They are more useful to you than a thousand hearts that love you. Did you get it? You may find tomorrow, or perhaps you may have found already, that tenderness that comes to you like a breath of fresh air, or like the sense of a cluster of country flowers. You are now without weakness in front of them.

You will only enjoy dignity to the extent that, by dents of suffering, You have learned to do without it. This you would never have obtained had you not paid the price a hundred times, hundreds of times, without ever being sure of receiving anything in return. If one day this appears to you, enjoy it as a sublime landscape glimpsed in passing. But it is not for this that you came. It is the air. It is the light of the summits calling you. You are breathing better already.

You will slowly attain true joy at those great peaks of consciousness, shining, unsullied. Think only of this. See only this. Try to get there. Light, pure, radiant with sunlight. It is your weaknesses and your faults on which you should weigh. On them alone. Your pride, your name, the vain appeals of the departing men.

Throw them beyond the rocks. Did you hear them break as they bounce down the slope? May it all perish. May bitterness and abandonment. instead of rebellion, keep you on the path. These two howling dogs are the guardians of the herd of your thoughts. Without them, you would stop. You would pull away.

Do not waste a moment. It is far. And you must reach to summit. When you reach these pure immensities, behind you will be a great silence. All those who screamed after you, who hated or trampled you despite the smiles on their faces, all those who, just to strike at you, followed you on the road, will suddenly realize that that this game they have, they too, have reached the snows, the new air, and the horizons cut out in the sky. They will forget to hate you.

They will have wonderfully childish eyes. They will discover the essential. Their souls will have been lifted to heights. They would never have agreed to reach if your back that had received their blows had not hidden the length of the road. So you will have it. Your victory. You will be able. having given the final effort suddenly to fall, arms outstretched from the top of the mountain,

into the rocks below. You will be done. You will have one. Reaching the end of your own journey by the last effort will no longer matter if the others are there on the brink of the pure immensities of redemption. You are so happy deep down. You know the only happiness is there. Sing. May your voice thunder in the valleys. Regrets and tears. The most unremarkable man among you has suffered this, and you would reject him. The hardest thing is done. Hold on. Clench your teeth.

Silence your heart. Think only of the top. Go up. And that is the message from Mr. DeGrelle. Yeah, it's quite, it's a, it's, there's a positive tendency. I've discerned. There's a lot more people taking an interest in, not just revisionist topics, but, you know, real testimony of officers and men who fought for the German Reich and affiliated adjacent forces.

It's not unlike the kind of Renaissance of lost cause historians in the 1980s, who in the 1980s, who, that's when Shelby Foote became really kind of popular. It's also when the Killer Angels became this beloved book. And kind of the tail end of that was when, you know, the Killer Angels was made into Gettysburg, which people have mixed feelings about that movie. But, you know, the very early 90s was kind of the end of that sort of tenancy, both in war academia as well as in kind of,

pop culture. But obviously, that's got profound implications that something similar is underway vis-a-vis the German Reich and the experience of World War II. And that's very exciting. And it's very much a corrective because it's not this stuff directly impacts the structure of the world we live in, you know, conceptually. physically, you know, every way you can imagine. So the fact that, the fact that, you know, it's, it's never got the ability to kind of fascinate the public imagination to the point that, you know, not only our revisionist perspective is crowded out, but that it's unthinkable, you know, on. in as regards the prevailing morality for you know any any counter any countervailing narratives going to enter public spaces discursively speaking is or is it's a sea change but it's

very exciting so yeah i think it's important to um make people aware of stuff like the grills memoir because again too the grill was obviously like a man of letters and very much you know like a cultured european type and you know that's um people that even people were sympathetic to the to the access cause in history, they've got a sense of the, they got a sense of the Germans as being possessed of a certain kind of rigidity in their cultural output, which is not entirely fair,

but I understand what they think that. But yeah, that was great, man. Yeah. What it really makes me think is that those people who are waking up to it, who are genuinely seeking the kind of, Enlightenment that someone like Mr. DeGrell had, they really need to put aside their pet

causes, especially if their pet causes are divisive. Yeah, 100%. Well, it's also, too, like these people, they're not, you know, like where the rubber meets the road, people like DeGrelle are their, their ethical commitments, as well as their aesthetic ones were informed pretty much by idealism, but it's through a filter of concrete political realities. And like most of these,

like most of these guys, most these guys who are the most kind of stalwart proponents, these divisive pedidioologies, like, they're creatures who exist only in the internet. Like, there's nothing remotely concrete about their shit. You know, and that's one of the things why they're so inflexible, because it's, it's never,

it's never been challenged by, you know, the nuances of war and peace questions. And when I say war and peace questions, I mean, things that impact anybody of a partisan mindset, even in day-to-day life, you know, like there's a spectrum of war and peace of, you know, on the most extreme ends are, you know, hostas and anymachus. and on the other end is, you know, a splendid piece where within the kind of political space, only friends, capital F, exists. But, you know, there's a, there's infinite gradations between one side of that spectrum and the other. So, you know, you're very much, you're very much at war and metaphysical and unfortunately sometimes, concrete terms. Although I certainly don't advocate anybody to undertake violence other than in defense

themselves, their property or their loved ones. But, you know, people are closer to these processes in a very sanguinary sense than they realize if they're truly engaged and not just, you know, somebody playing a game, you know, from some anonymous and remote location. But yeah, that's very good, man. Well, before I have you do your plugs and everything, we have to thank the, I don't believe this was ever translated into English before Anselaup Hill did it.

So we have- Yeah, they're a great publishing house. I'm on their mailing list, and they release great stuff, man. I can't recommend them enough. All right, do your plugs. And once again, thank you for joining me for a thousand episodes.

Yeah. No, that's great. Yeah, you can always find me at Thomas 777.com. That's the one-stop location for links to all my content. It's number seven, HMAS, 777.com. Substack is going to continue to be my primary home for podcast content as well as longer form content. And I'm debating releasing the third.

book in my science fiction series exclusively on substack now like the subscribers like chapter by chapter I haven't decided yet because I won my war with Stripe in the effort to deplatform me for the time being we're going to remain on substack

I'm probably also going to set up a gum road account too for among other things like repository for video content which I'm actively shooting. But that's new to me, so thanks for bearing with me. I mean, everybody who subscribes. But you can always find me at Substack at Real Thomas-777.7.com.

I'm on Instagram as well. You can link through my website. and I'm on X at Real capital REL underscore number seven HMAS777.com That's where we're at right now. I'll be announcing some of these changes.

I mean, I have been and will continue to announce some of these changes on my substack. Things are kind of normalizing. I've got my workflow locked in now. Thanks to our dear friend Jay Burton, as well as some of the people you plugged me with So yeah, I'm having a report that, you know, I'll finally be up on, you know, fresh content every 14 days again, as was the case for most of the last year. That's all I got.

Excellent. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this with me. Yeah, man. I appreciate it. And, yeah, just little tease, Thomas and I, before we started recording this, started talking about the next series. And I think that would be a, it's going to be of great interest to a lot of people.

a lot of, I think a lot of people have already commented that, yeah, we'd like to see, uh, like to see that, that subject covered, but let's not tell them what it is and just, no, I'm very excited. And yeah, I appreciate the, the guy who suggested it very much. Um, yeah, yeah, I'm really excited, man. All right, thanks, man. Yeah, likewise.