Léon Degrelle: The Revolution of the Souls

Léon Degrelle: The Revolution of the Souls

Europe is going mad. Mad with scandals. Mad with egoism. Mad with revolt against Heaven. Mad with blood. […] Corrupt in its morality, debased in its faith, puffed up with individualism, fanaticism, and pride, having lost touch with charity, with the love of God and man, anaemic, modern Europe is waiting for the final blow, the last convulsions, the last corpses. The hour is approaching when all accounts will be settled. The hour is also coming when to save the world it will need a handful of heros and saints who will carry out the Reconquest. […]

A country soon gets back on its feet after financial set-backs. It is not too hard for it to find a new political structure. It just calls for able technicians and a collective will to join forces. […] The real revolution is much more complicated, the one which puts right not the mechanism of the State, but the secret life of each soul. […]

It is only the quality and vibrancy of the soul which matters, the capacity for giving oneself unstintingly, its will to place an ideal above all other considerations in a spirit of total disinterest. Only faith counts, burning confidence, the complete absence of egoism and individualism, the striving of the whole being towards service, however lowly it is, wherever it may be, however it may be fulfilled, for a cause which transcends man, asks everything of man, and promises him nothing.

In a century where people only live for themselves, hundreds, thousands of men must no longer live for themselves, but for a collective ideal, and be prepared in advance to endure for its sake every sacrifice, every humiliation, every heroic act. […] I can hear in the night’s darkest hour crowds of people rising to their feet to protest their will and their faith. I see these thousands of men and women renewing their vow. How can one doubt that this heroism will bear fruit? It is these souls which will change the world.

[From Révolution des âmes [The Revolution of Souls] (Ĕditions de la France: Paris, 1938) 145-62]

Rolão Preto: ‘Oiro’

Rolão Preto was the leader of the Portuguese National Syndicalists of the 1930s, these quotes are from the movement’s weekly newspaper, União Nacional, the issue of February 25th, 1934:

‘Oiro’ (Gold)

A terrible wave of utilitarianism and baseness is sweeping through the world, and is threatening to subvert and vulgarize everything, plunging it into a quagmire of tragic moral degradation. [ ... ] Where are we going? Day by day more is being chopped away. The clear and holy light of ideas is covered up and lost sight of under a cheap blanket of unfettered commercialism which darkens the soul. Justice, independence, nobility of feeling or thought: empty words. Contemporary man feels increasingly a pawn in a game of material interest, more a slave of gold than ever.

Every so often these acts of extraordinary moral decadence sweep over the world. Man abandons his supreme position in the scale of what is valuable on this earth to surrender to the lure of material objects and the state of supreme wretchedness which goes with them. Only his vanity, his comforts, his material possessions seem to him a worthwhile goal, a path to follow. To achieve this goal, to follow this path, any contradiction of his spirit, any abdication of responsibility, any amount of baseness or shame are justified. Now more than ever all means serve to fulfil this end.

This is the way of the world.

But there are independent spirits, free spirits, those who are prepared to embark on a hard road of sacrifice to preserve their pride and the glory which their independence and freedom give them. They should not despair. Already the signs of reaction are becoming manifest in the noisy protest on every side from those able to resist the temptation to trade their own dignity for material comforts, to swap strength of character for the possibility of making money.

This reaction against the materialist and corrupting utilitarianism of a whole age is the beginning of the great Revolution whose spirit is going to burn and purify the earth. It is a singular aspect of the human condition that the onset of man’s decadence and death always create the conditions of his salvation and deliverance. [ ... ]

The Revolution is under way. It will redeem man, raising him to the height of all the divine greatness that is his. Friends, the glitter of gold, however intense and brilliant, will never obscure the light of the ideal which we carry inside our breast and which is like the pure, redeeming brightness of the dawn in the tragic night of human distress.

Nietzsche in ‘The Gay Science’

Quote:

We who are homeless — Among Europeans today there is no lack of those who are entitled to call themselves homeless in a distinctive and honorable sense ... We children of the future, how could we be at home in this today! We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead one to feel at home even in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for its ‘realities,’ we do not believe that they will last. The ice that still supports people today has become very thin: the wind that brings the thaw is blowing, we ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin ‘realities’ ...

From Among the Ruins

Quote:

Wherever colonisation is a fact, the indigenous culture begins to rot. And among the ruins something begins to be born which is not a culture but a kind of subculture, a subculture which is condemned to exist on the margin allowed by a European culture. This then becomes the province of a few men, the elite, who find themselves placed in the most artificial conditions, deprived of any revivifying contact with the masses of the people.

-- Not one of ours lamenting the marginalisation of voices that speak for us but Aimé Césaire in his address to the Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Paris, 1956. Apt to be nicked though, and the vital and topical thing is, of course, that the age of deprivation and marginalisation (short cycle, at least) appears to be coming to an end.

A Fine and Heroic service to Civilization

Concerning a closely related struggle, but in a different country and era and with different reference points, Georges Sorel gave advice that may be worth storing away for today’s British nationalists:

The danger which threatens the future of the world may be avoided if the proletariat hold on with obstinacy to revolutionary ideas, so as to realize as much as possible Marx’s conception. Everything may be saved if the proletariat, by their use of violence, manage to re-establish the division into classes and so restore to the bourgeoisie something of its energy: that is the great aim towards which the whole thought of men who are not hypnotized by the events of the day but who think of the conditions of tomorrow must be directed. Proletarian violence, carried on as a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of class struggle, appears thus as a very fine and heroic thing; it is at the service of the immemorial interests of civilization; it is not perhaps the most appropriate method of obtaining immediate material advantages, but it may save the world from barbarism.

George Sorel, Reflections on Violence, Ed. Jeremy Jennings: Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2004) p.85.

The political and even the democratic is no less the preferred method than it was before the race-replacers outlawed the BNP’s policy of being unapologetically White, but we must know that other means to our ends might one day become preferred or necessary.

Like Jefferson said, ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’