Introduction: Understanding the West

We who are part of Western culture - and especially we who are concerned about our people, our Western identity and our culture - must take a critical look at ourselves, our history, and our culture in order to better understand and appreciate that history and culture.

There is a general belief, especially among  the proponents of a Western resurgence and nationalism, that Western culture is more civilized and indeed superior to other cultures with this belief more often than not causing us to be uncritical about our history and achievements, or what are regarded as our achievements.

Worse, this belief about the superiority of Western culture - which leads to a belief about the superiority of those of European descent - leads many to accept as part of Western culture many, many things which are not part of our culture and heritage, just as it leads us to glorify certain historical events which, in truth, were far from glorious because contrary to the norms of civilized behaviour.

This glorifying approach is especially evident in the almost uncritical acceptance of Western imperialism, with many nationalists in Western nations lamenting the passing of this imperialism, and uncritically supporting what is regarded as their own national achievements: military, economic, cultural and technological.
 

By "the West" is meant the world-outlook, the culture, the heritage, of those of European racial descent. The recorded history of the West begins with Ancient Greece and Rome, and the roots of the West - culturally, intellectually and historically - are there. Western history continues with the establishment and development of the modern nations of Europe, and, more recently, with the establishment and development of the United States and Canada, which originally were Western outposts in what was then called the New World.

The West, in the present article and in terms of Western culture itself, does not mean the current governments of Europe and the United States, for these modern governments, and their social, economic and political policies, are in many ways a contradiction of the true ethos, the true culture, of the West.
 

What is Western Culture?

The primary and distinguishing features of genuine Western culture are the ideal of honour, the free giving of allegiance, the concept of duty to the folk and to Nature, and the quest for excellence, reason and discovery.

These features are evident, for example, in the ethos of Ancient Greece, especially in works such as Homer's Odyssey:
 

 Odysseus embodied everything that the ancient Greeks, from the time of Homer to the time of Sophocles and beyond, admired
and saught to emulate. Fundamentally, Odysseus was the archetypal or ideal Greek man - proud, strong ( both physically and in character), forthright, independent, war-loving, skilled in combat, cunning, inventive and capable of being, if necessary, ruthless with his enemies. This man had an instinctive and healthy respect for the gods and Fate. He was a warrior who considered it natural and necessary to carry a weapon, and who also considered it was his responsibility, and his alone, to defend himself, his family and his kin. It was such individuals who created, and maintained over many centuries, the Greek civilization - a civilization which, until recently, has remained the inspiration for generation after generation of Europeans.  (Introduction to Homer's Odyssey, translated by D. Myatt.)

True Western culture - like Greek culture itself - was and is a balance between our questing honourable warrior nature and our desire to know and understand things and the world through reason. When we are true to our heritage and ethos, we are, as Sophocles said, thinking warriors.

For the sake of clarity, and especially to distinguish  between genuine Western culture and the materialistic consumer "culture" which now dominates the West, genuine Western culture will henceforth be referred to as Aryan culture, and those indigenous peoples of the West will be referred to as Aryans.
 

The Problems of the West:

The West has several problems to understand and solve:

1) The problem of loss of Aryan identity among Aryan peoples, partly caused by the spread of the consumer-capitalist ethos and ethic which is anathema to true Western culture;
2) The problem of the continued immigration of other, non-Western, peoples;
3) The problem of the exploitation of Nature caused by the continuing economic development of Western nations;
4) The problem of the dishonourable, inhuman, tyranny created by and maintained by the large modern States which dominate the Western world.
 
 

The Problem of Aryan Identity:

This has arisen from a decline in true Western culture and its replacement with the ethos and the ethic of consumer-capitalism with its egotistical materialism.

The so-called culture that now dominates the West is a commercialized, mass culture promoted by vested commercial and political interests with their own commercial and political agendas and abstract ideas, all of which are contrary to the Aryan ethos of honour, of the free giving of allegiance, duty to the folk and to Nature, and the quest for excellence, reason and discovery.

The solution to this problem is for Aryans to discover their own ethos, their own culture, their Aryan identity.
 

The Problem of Immigration:

The West itself is responsible for this for three reasons. First, the affluence and rampant materialism of the West attracts those who live in poverty with little or no prospects in their own lands. Second, the West, during its colonial centuries, rapaciously plundered and exploited other nations and other countries in order to maintain its materialistic way of life.

Third, and perhaps the most important reason, the West has lost the will to enforce border controls and no longer wishes to deal with the problem in an honest and rational way.

The West has brought this problem of mass immigration upon itself, through the greed, the egotism of its own peoples, and through these people accepting and indeed voting for governments which uphold political and social ideas contrary to the Aryan ethos: contrary to the culture, the heritage of the peoples of the West. In brief, the West has become decadent, mostly because of the soft, egotistical, materialistic life-style of most Aryans.

The solution is not simply more and tougher border controls and the deportation of non-Aryans: rather, it is a change in the life-style of Aryans themselves. It is a return to: (1) the way of the warrior, where duty is considered more important than indulgence, and where the Spartan, self-disciplined, warrior ethic dominates society; and (2) the way of rural living, with people preferring to work on the land, or in trades and occupations connected with the land.

Immigration will not only continue but increase while the society we live in, and our way of life, is decadent and materialistic, urban, and is attractive to others. Only when our society is spartan, war-like, outward-looking, with most people living on the land in rural communities will this change.
 
 

Why the West is Barbaric:

All the problems that now face the West are the result of its dishonourable, barbaric, nature.

Despite the rhetoric of modern Western governments and despite the belief among those Aryans who support nationalism, the West is essentially barbaric, having failed to build societies based upon the civilized ideals and principles of honour, reason, duty to Nature, respect for other human beings and other life, and having failed to allow for individuals to change by those individuals using their will.

In essence, the West has committed, and is committing, what the ancient Greeks called hubris. This is arrogant insolence, an overstepping of the mark, a going beyond the due, the honourable, bounds. And, as the Greeks so well understood, hubris is the mother of tyranny. It is easy to understand the problems of the West (as the Ancient Greeks would) as consequence of this hubris: as a retribution from the gods.

Despite hundreds of years of scientific and technological advances, despite over a century of State education, despite the apparent freedoms most Western people enjoy, and despite the outward material prosperity of all Western nations, the West is barbaric in many areas. For instance:

1) In the exploitation of and disrespect for Nature, especially through industry and continued development.

2) In the exploitation of and disrespect for life, evident in the continued demand for animal food and animal products and the use of animals in "scientific" experiments (See, for example,  Practical Consequences of Cosmic Ethics ).

3) In the continued use of an abstract concept of law - and a punitive notion of punishment - which is medieval and tyrannical and which denies the human ideal of honour and the principle of a person being able to change themselves through self-discipline.

4) In the continued use and wholehearted acceptance of the modern dishonourable concept of war - and the demonizing of enemies through propaganda - evident especially during the First World War, where technological devices are used to slaughter and maim the opposing army (and often civilians) from a distance.
 

Consider the notion of law and punishment which exists in the West. As I have explained elsewhere  (in  Liberty and the Right of Rebellion ) this is uncivilized because contrary to the ideal of honour and the principle of genuine liberty which honour entails.
 

All modern Western States are, in greater of lesser degree, tyrannical because the individual is powerless before the might of The State. The authority of The State is supreme and in modern nation like Britain there are no individual rights which the State cannot take away. For instance, consider the recent outbreak, among livestock, of what is called "Foot and Mouth Disease". The government of the day decided that the best policy was the wholesale slaughter of animals they and their advisers considered "at risk". They enforced this policy regardless. Thus government agents and servants went onto farms and slaughtered animals whether or not the farmers who owned those animals wanted them to or not. That is, the farmers had no rights which the government could not take away. The farmers may have believed they owned their land, and their livestock, and that this gave them the right to decide who could be allowed on their land and what could be done to their animals, but the reality was and is that it was and is The State which, through its governments and their agents and servants, owned all rights, and simply chose in this instance to fully exercise its rights

Thus, there were scenes of government slaugherman being accompanied by Police with these Police in some causes searching farms and seizing shotguns. And, of course, anyone who resisted this invasion of their land was "breaking the law" and could be arrested, and charged with some criminal offence.

In truth, the peoples of Britain, like all other Western nations, have less genuine freedom today than the citizens of the folk-communities of Ancient Greece; and less freedom that the free men and women of Viking Scandinavia and Iceland.
 

The reason for this loss of freedom is that the abstract idea of an abstract law has replaced the noble law of personal honour. As I have explained in  Liberty and the Right of Rebellion  and  Aryan Law  true freedom and true justice mean and imply the ideal of personal honour and the free giving of personal allegiance. All modern States are in effect benevolent (or not so benevolent) tyrannical oligarchies whose rule is enforced through an impersonal Police force and an inhuman, dishonourable, system of law Courts which make the individual powerless before the might of The State.
 

In addition, all of the governments of modern Western nations - echoing the sentiments and beliefs of the majority of Western peoples - still adhere to barbaric notions of punishment, with many of these nations (for example America) still upholding capital punishment. For all these Western nations still accept and still enthusiastically support imprisonment in penal institutions, with hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people being imprisoned for years upon end. This is dishonourable, uncivilized, as explained elsewhere (see, for example,  Why Prisons are Barbaric ).
 
 

The History of the West:

The demise of true Western culture - Aryan culture - began with the acceptance, among Western peoples, of Christianity.

It is true to say that Christianity changed our ethos: our noble warrior ideals were replaced by the abstract ideas of this religion, and all medieval and later Western societies were basically societies created by despots, bullies, tyrants (such as Henry VIII of England) who used Christianity either hypocritically or otherwise to maintain their rule over their subjects (the divine right of monarchs). The modern abstract State, with its tyrannical dishonourable concept of abstract law, is the direct result of these medieval societies, all of which destroyed and made illegal our Aryan concept of law.

The history of Western imperialism - contrary to the many myths peddled by modern nationalists swayed by anti-Aryan sentiments - was, for the last two hundred years or so, the history of greed, exploitation and dishonour. Once the Industrial Revolution changed our societies, and once our nations expanded and became a modern-type State ruled by a remote, impersonal Government whose officials did not know, on a personal basis, their own people, then hubris became rampant, with the resources of Western nations - including the people themselves - sacrificed in the name of commercial, personal, government and capitalist greed. For example, consider the original British Empire:
 

which was an even greater achievement than the Roman Empire. It brought reason, justice, order and education to millions upon millions of people world-wide, greatly improving their way of life through building the infrastructure a civilization needs: an uncorrupt administration; roads; bridges; safe trade routes. For instance, the British Navy managed to control the piracy which was rampant in certain areas of the world (in South East Asia for example), as in India the British administrators ended the bribery and corruption of
officials which was endemic. For a long time, and from about the middle of the 1700's, the British Navy was the most enlightened and civilized institution in the world: a fine example of our Aryan ethos. Throughout the whole British Empire, the civilized ideal was followed, and literally hundreds of thousands of British people struggle and died in the lands of the Empire over the centuries in their quest to do what was right, noble and just. Millions upon millions of people could live in relative safety and peace, in an ordered and just way, thanks to this Empire.

Note that I said the original British Empire, for the truth is that from very early on in the Victorian Era the ethos began to change - the true, respectful, civilizing mission of Empire gave way to a brute Imperialism based upon financial gain. To quote Thomas More: "Everywhere do I perceive a certain conspiracy of rich men seeking their own advantage under the name and pretext of commonwealth."  There had always been an element of this present, of course, but the financial cabal gradually became the dominant force behind the expansion of the Empire, often unscrupulously using missionary Christianity to achieve their capitalist purpose.

Aspects of the old, civilized, Roman-type, Imperial attitude remained, and inspired individuals and some Institutions but they were largely without power and influence, often mere show, and more often than not manipulated by the financial cabal and their capitalist lackeys.  By the time of the Boer War, British Foreign Policy had became purely a means of maintaining and extending capitalist markets, of obtaining raw materials with little or no regard for the native people.  This was particularly evident in Iran, where until just after the First Zionist War the British Government supported a despotic, unpopular and repressive ruling minority, while capitalist companies leeched away the natural resources of the country, with little respect shown for either Iranian culture or the way of life of Islam. The decadent life-style of wealthy often immoral Europeans was held up as some sort of "ideal" for the "natives" to follow.

The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, presented us with glimpses of our own Aryan culture: thus, for example, the brief return to the ideals, the examples, the reason, of Ancient Greece and Rome. But our own Aryan values - our own ethics, based upon honour - never became widespread because all our societies during those and later times were still governed by barbaric rulers and barbaric privileged elites who had no love for their own folk, no notion of duty to their own folk, and certainly no genuine desire to improve their own folk and create a genuine folk-community based upon honour and excellence where the worth of an individual was judged by honour, by excellence, alone and not by wealth, or privilege, or occupation.

Only in the latter part of the last century - and the early part of this present century - were opportunities presented to change the status quo, to return to our values, to create a new type of society where our values could be expressed and where duty to the folk was seen as the highest ideal.
We had many, many opportunities, in Europe, in America, to begin anew, to harness our understanding of life, our technology, in the service of our folk. There were some experiments, a few new Aryan societies born out of struggle and idealism, but they did not last, and the promise remained only that: a promise.

We, as a people, as separate nations, struggled for century after century for understanding, for wisdom, for freedom, for honour, until by the beginning of the present century we had all the tools we required to build new, free, honourable and Aryan societies where we could live as free, honourable, Aryans fully knowledgeable about our culture, our heritage, our Destiny, our purpose in life, and so fully able to live in a civilized way and continue with our own human evolution.

But so far, we have failed. There is more tyranny now than before; more dishonour among our people; less understanding about our own culture, our own values. There is now no Destiny, and no notion of duty to Nature, to our folk, to the Cosmos: no desire to naturally and honourably continue with our evolution. Instead of living among our own kind in free, honourable societies dedicated to numinous, evolutionary, Destiny-giving goals such as Space Exploration and the colonization of other worlds, we are condemned to exist in multi-racial societies dedicated to hedonism and materialism where drugs, crime, dishonourable behaviour and selfish-indulgence are rife and where our own Aryan behaviour - based upon honour - is forbidden.

Today, if Odysseus returned and acted honourably as he did to avenge his dishonour, he would be arrested, tried and convicted for "murder" and dishonourably confined in some prison by many cowardly bullies. And, moreover, he would be hauled before some Court and charged and convicted of having committed "war crimes" during the Trojan war.

We have become more barbaric, not less. More dishonourable, just as our liberty and honour have been taken away. Would would a man like Odysseus do today, faced with arrest by some "government officials" (Police) trying to enforce an impersonal, dishonourable, so-called "law"?
Would he fight? Of course he would, and to the death if necessary. And what would most of us - the heirs of Odysseus - do? Meekly go along and accept all and everything our dishonourable, tyrannical governments do.
 

What We Must Understand:

The crucial thing we must understand and act upon is to know our own culture, our own values, our own ideals. For century after century - for well over a millennia - our culture, our values, our ideals have not been fully understand. We have allowed ourselves to be poisoned by, distracted by, anti-evolutionary, irrational ideas such as Christianity, and by our own weakness, our own fondness for pleasure, for comfort, for privilege. No one fundamentally is to blame but us: what is now came to be as it came to be and its ending was foretold, as Aeschylus once said and I often repeat. What is, came to be through the working of life, of Nature.

In essence, we have failed to grow up; failed to learn the lessons which the few wise people among us (Homer, Sophocles and others come to mind) saught to teach us. We have failed to seize the many, many opportunities we have had over the past thousand or more years. We have failed to learn from our own experience, our own suffering, and from the suffering we have inflicted upon others. Instead, we have preferred to have the perspective of children and to continue playing our selfish, often dishonourable, childish games, enwrapped, as children often are, in our own concerns, failing to see, to appreciate, to understand, the wider world beyond, the very Cosmos beyond, of how we are but part of Nature; but a living nexus between the past of our folk and its future.

We must stop dreaming of some non-existent idyllic past; stop romanticizing this past, dishonourable as if often was (and that includes Ancient Greece and our own recent colonialism). We must accept what this past teaches us, what it reveals about our own Aryan nature, about the very purpose of our lives. And then, having learnt and accepted this, we must move forward, upward: striving to create an entirely new type of society founded on what is noble, civilized.

It is time for us to grow up, to learn self-discipline: to act upon the wisdom that our culture, our heritage, teaches us. The essence of this wisdom is the truth concerning honour and the truth concerning our duty to our folk because our folk is a manifestation of Nature, with Nature being but one presencing of life in a vast and as yet unknown and unexplored Cosmos.
 

What the West Must Do to become Civilized:
 

1) Understand, accept, and strive to live by our own  Aryan Ethics, based as these are upon personal honour.

2) Understand, accept and strive to act upon the knowledge that we as individuals are a  living nexus .

3) Understand, accept and strive to add to our own Aryan culture. We can add to our culture by seeking to honourably quest after new adventures, new horizons, new worlds: that is, by seeking to explore and colonize the final frontier of Outer Space. Such an exploration and such a colonization are the honourable means whereby we can live according to our own noble values and consciously continue with our evolution as human beings. In effect, such an exploration and such a colonization is our unique Destiny.

4) Strive to create Aryan societies, based upon Aryan law, with these societies being not much larger than, for example, the present Republic of San Marino, for anything larger is inhuman and breeds the dishonourable tyranny of the abstract, modern-type State.
 
 
 

David Myatt
JD2452070.992