Life Is Beyond Moral Judgement

“The meta-politics of the Conservative Revolution and the New Right rests on a rejection of Christianity and the affirmation of paganism. In their eyes, Christianity is totalitarian, Jewish, and dualistic. Its removal reveals neo-paganism which is whole, organic, andaffirmative of all that is.

The above thrust privileges Schicksal (fate) or Weltganze (cosmos) above individual, putting these in a part-whole relationship. Within the whole may be Spannungen (creative tension) but not, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Spaltungen (divisions owing to dualism). Rather than make radical moral judgements of good and bad, fascists accept any and all happenings as meaningful. It is an aesthetic rather than a moral stance, so that the human being is not basically good (liberalism) nor bad (Christianity) but Unvollkommen (imperfect) and this by virtue of being but a part of a whole. The part-whole relationship does not debase, since the part shares in the dignity of the whole. Yahweh, by virtue of being totally-Other, debases totally the human being. 

According to Mohler, the key to fascism, is captured in Nietzsche’s notion of Amor Fati, meaning love of the world as it is, with its eternal dialectic between birth and destruction (Vernichtung) the world, as it now is without hope of improvement in the beyond nor in the distant future. Mohler, once private secretary to Ernst Jünger, captures perfectly Jünger’s notion of heroic realism. Heroic, Mohler writes, because this world is not to be seen as realistic (in the sense of true to reality) in order to allow us to postulate another and better one, but to affirm the world as it is. 

Neo-pagans accuse Judenchristentum (Jewish-Christianity) of constituting a dictatorship of morality. Premised on unworthiness and the fall, its perspective is moral and time linear. By contrast, for neo-pagans history is like life. It sits on the premise that as human beings are innocent, so is historical development. 

The thought processes of fascist ideologues from Weimar to the present vary in detail but follow the same basic pattern. Rejection of Christianity is the way to the recovery of neo-paganism. Neo-paganism affirms a unitarian world-all. This unitarian world-all manifests itself in a plurality of distinct organic Völker (peoples) and organic individuals. What makes Völker and individuals distinct and different are, for M. Ludendorff, Volksseele which refers simultaneously to the quality of genius (Genialität) and biological traits. Both are one’s Rasseerbgut (race-inheritance), although Genialität is inherited and passed on through undying works of art and knowledge. Hunke’s ideas are an adaptation to present conditions. Rather than dwell on a single Volk (a people, nation), she thinks in terms of Europe, and Genialität becomes a specific European thought structure. Their scheme sits on the same heroic realist epistemology as that of Jünger, except the Amor Fati of Nietzsche and Jünger become the unity of natural science and religion for Ludendorff and Hunke. The unity of natural science and religion is an expression of the fact that as the soul experienced so reason saw.”

-Excerpted from Scientific Neo-Paganism and the Extreme Right Then and Today: From Ludendorff’s Gotterkenntnis to Sigrid Hunke’s Europas Eigene Religion By Karla Poewe and Irving Hexham