Prophet Of Aryan Communism
Below are excerpts from Michael A. Hoffman’s essay “Celine the Impossible: The Anti-Humanist Prophet of Aryan Communism” as it appeared in his newsletter “Independent History and Research” (issue #5 Summer 1996)
Louis-Ferdinand Destouches was born in Paris in 1894 of Celtic parents from the Breton region. His father was a clerk and his mother a lace-maker. He would take his mother’s first name, Celine, as his pen name.
Celine was soon a hero of the Left for both his innovative writing style and the ferocity of his critique of bouregoise society. But in 1936, after a trip to the Soviet Russia, he denounced the Reds as just another gang of swindlers, in his pamphlet “Mea Culpa”. “The program of communism? In spite of all assertions to the contrary: completely materialistic. The claims of the brute for the usage of the brutes…to stuff the belly. Take a look at the mug of the fat Marx, his belly full!”
Celine was not opposed to communism n principle. He believed that the white race was dying due to a lack of community consciousness and the prevalence of an egotism he had spotted behind the jingoism of Soviet propaganda:
Celine’S definition of hell was 20th century modernism, which had blinded man, made him subservient to matter and exhausted him, all for the sake of profit. “We are croaking because we have no legends, no mysteries…Without artistic creation by everyone there can be no lasting society….The only defense, the only resource of the white man against robotism, and undoubtably against war…is to return to his own emotive rhythm.”
Celine was in favor of Communism, but Communism of a very special type, which had thus far only prevailed in the distant past of Europe and which he hoped National Socialism would embody. He outlined this in 1938 in his volcanic work of black comedy and intractable anti-humanism, “The School of the Cadavers” (dedicated to the pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate), wherein he identified himself as a “communist of the soul” and proclaimed: “The Jew is afraid of only one thing, Communism without Jews”.
Celine has no faith in mankind, yet he saluted and propagated the revolt of the German people as it was organized in the early years of National Socialism, calling, in his remarkable and prescient language, “The butter rebellion…The insurrection of the eternally skimmed!” He wrote:
“What’s this! What’s this! Insolence! Horror! The Aryan, that so docile, always bending butter-brain, who always on every occasion has submitted to Jewish will; whom the jewish knife has ground up, splattered, mashed, spread like butter for all eternity; that perfect comestible for commerce par excellence, for all war and peacetime trafficking, whom any bleary kike can slice up, chop up, speculate on, barter, stew, vilify, shit on at leisure, here he is getting together with his own now, en masse, suddenly standing up! The butter rebellion! The insurrection of the eternally skimmed! That’s never been seen before! Heard of! Suspected possible, ever!”
In Celine’s estimation, “The trick of the Jew as ‘hunted’ and ‘martyred’ never fails to work on the stupid cuckold of an Aryan. It is they who are persecuting us…We are the martyrs’ victims”
“…I don’t want to go to war for Hitler, I’ll admit it, but I don’t want to go against him, for the Jews.” Celine predicted that the bamboozled countrymen would wage fratricide anyway: “Frenchmen, you’ll go off to war at the moment chosen by M. le Baron de Rothschild, your lord and absolute master, at the hour fixed, in full accord with his sovereign cousins in London, New York, and Moscow.”
Celine saw France “…as a country essentially owned and operated by Jews in which the native or gentile population could only exist with the indulgence of their Jewish rulers. Celine says that if the bourgeois can ‘smell a little jewish,’ then this is all to their benefit as a kind of life insurance. In this sense, smelling a bit Jewish is akin to assuring one’s survival in a land run by Jews…’The dream of the French bourgeois is to be Jewish, to worship the Golden Calf…”
Though he was raised a Catholic and had positive things to say about the early Church Fathers in (Mea Culpa) in 1936, by 1941 he pronounced, in (A Fine Mess):
“Crime of crimes, throughout our history the Catholic religion has been the great pimp, the great crossbreeder of noble races, the great procuress for the corrupt…for the rabid contaminator. The Catholic religion, founded by twelve Jews, will have proudly fulfilled its role when we have all dissappeared under the great boggy waves of that giant Asiatic whorehouse brewing on the horison.”
In a December, 1941 meeting between Celine and the Prussian officer and novelist Ernst Junger, at the offices of the German Institute of Paris, Junger reports:
“He (Celine) says how surprised and stupefied he is that we soldiers do not shoot, hang, exterminate the Jews–he is stupefied that someone availed of a bayonet should not make unrestricted use of it. ‘If the Bolsheviks were in Paris, they’d show you how to go about it; they’d show you how one purifies a population, neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house.”
Celine’s relationship with the Nazi authorities was rocky. He was, in his writing style, convictions and person, an extreme radical and a suspect Leftist or at least, a Bohemian, in the eyes of the bigwigs of Berlin. Kurt Vonnegut says that Celine, “discovered a higher and more awful order of literary truth by ignoring the crippled vocabularies of ladies and gentlemen and by using instead, the more comprehensive language of shrewd and tormented guttersnipes.”
In any event Celine could have cared less: “I’m not a Yid, or a foreigner or Freemason or a graduate of the Ecole Normale; I don’t know how to make friends and influence people”.
Celine, unlike Ezra Pound, who in his dotage, repudiated his attacks on Jews, never recanted and stayed defiant to the bitter end. In 1960 journalists asked him what his definition of tragedy was. He replied:
“Stalingrad. There’s a catharsis for you. The fall of Stalingrad was the end of Europe. There’s been a cataclysm. It’s epicenter was Stalingrad. After that you can say that white civilization was finished, really washed up.”
Celine’s banned books, (Short Stories of a Massacre), (The School for Cadavers), and (A Fine Mess) remain under interdict in France and have not been published in more than fifty years. They have never been translated into English. The French publisher of the supposed “Collected Works of Celine” recently tried to pretend that these three books never existed.
Celine remains the focus of a constant stream of books and articles in France and interest in his material in English, is strong. Celine the Impossible continues to haunt the dark century of his incarnation. He sought not happiness but truth, which he defined as facing up to the worst, a vocation which he fulfilled to such a virtuoso effect that he obtained, through his convulsive and oracular ‘verbum’, admission to the mysterious dance and eternal dream of racial memory, which he managed to make manifest even in this, the worst of times.