Bowden on Evola.
The aristocratic critique of race.
Anodyne videos on immigration get taken down, Bowden on Evola stays up.
When Bowden was alive, prior to 2012, the political situation on the right was so desperate, so desolate, so idiotic, so ugly, that he seemed by contrast to be a genius. The right of that period was so decayed, like a cemetery, that it was inviting him, almost begging him, to dance all over its grave with Shakespearean theatrics. Nature abhors a vacuum. When confronted with the decrepitude of stodgy conservatives, Bowden declared that the only way to win was to be sexy.
I don’t meant to pile onto Bowden’s recent denouncement,1 coming from some snobbish old fuddy-duddy friend of Ed Dutton. This article was already in the works before that bit of old-man gossip came out. I will be critical of Bowden in this article, but he is miles above such prattlers.
Since the rise of Trump, the right has become more seductive. It is just popular enough, with just enough money, and just enough hot women, and just enough opportunities for grifting, success, and hope, that it attracts an even weaker breed. It is not the bittersweet stage of Hamlet. Instead, it is infotainment, comedians, and grifters, headed by the clown in chief, Trump.
It is wrong to build a wall between the right of Bowden and the right of 2024. Bowden, in his praise of Punch and Judy, predicted, or manifested, the violent clown in the form of Trump. Bowden was familiar with all types of grifters, criminals, and narcissists. Rather than look down on them, he embraced them. Bowden was a narcissist, but an aristocratic narcissist, rather than a bourgeois narcissist.
A bourgeois narcissist wants the acclaim of the people. All of the right wing e-celebs of social media today can be classified as such. The aristocratic narcissist despises the people, and the kind of attention he craves is entirely different. Bowden, like every great speaker in history, loved the sound of his own voice. He was a singer, an actor, a performer, a thespian, and always strove for timelessness. He was attracted to tragedy, because to “win” is to become normal or contextualized and conquered by your surroundings. Every doctrine which “wins” and captures the mass man also becomes infected by mediocrity. The beautiful loser wishes to die alone rather than be consumed with filth.
“It’s lonely at the top.” To die alone like Abhimanyu, the Vaishnava Apollo, surrounded by enemies on all sides, being watched voyeuristically by friends from a distance, unable to help. Such a thing is impossible outside of mythology. To achieve such a death is to verge toward a singularity where reality becomes mythology. Bowden did not die that death, since he did not become a God, like Alexander or Caesar.
The Greeks did not worship Homer as a God, but reserved a special place for Homer among mortals. He pointed toward the Gods with his ability to speak poetically, evocatively, to bring the soul of man up into his throat, to bring tears to his eyes: this is the archetype of the prophet.
Bowden prophesied a hidden potential for the world to change. Many of the latent “pagan” energies which he identified have sprung out and made their presence known. Trump, Israel, Russia, and Ukrainian Naziism: an aggressive and criminal form of Caucasian revanchism is rearing its head.
An Aside on Israel
Israel is a difficult subject, since it doesn’t fit neatly within the cloud of “ambiguous whiteness.” If there were some Armenian nationalist group, or Albanians, Alawites, or Assyrians, one could argue that such groups are of mixed descent, and therefore, they could participate in “white pride,” in a mixed and muted form. The same can be said of the publicity surrounding “Chechen masculinity,” in MMA and within Russia’s armed forces. Putin himself belongs in this category, since he seems to have some kind of Tartar, Talesh, Kipchak, Circassian, Lakic, or Kalmyk ancestry.
Israel does not come off as “ambiguous,” but rather, as a “horseshoe.” Russia and Israel are both engaged in a border war and violent colonization of their neighbors. At the same time, Israel and Russia liken their enemies to Hitler. Israel retains the distinction of being one of the few countries in the world where Christians are spit on. One could say that Israel’s relationship with white supremacy is Caducean. It is simultaneously a racial apartheid state, and the greatest opponent of Naziism.
On Evola
The following remarks, which I quote inexactly, can be found between minute 40 and 55 of his talk, Julius Evola: The World's Most Right Wing Thinker:
The interesting thing about him [Evola] is that everything always looks upward, even in his doctrine of race. You find in many racialist movements a sort of socialism, that if you're of my ethnicity, you're, quote-unquote, "all right." As if possession of a certain melanin skin content or absence of the same was all that the thing was about. When Norman Tebbit says that the British National party is Old Labor plus allied racialism, there is always a streak of truth to such viewpoints. Evola doesn't believe in that. Evola believes that race is spiritual as well as physical. If a man comes to him and says, "Oi! I'm white! You should be looking after me mate!" He would say, "what is your intellect? What is your quality? What is your moral sense? What do you know about your civilization? How far are you prepared to fight for it? What pain can you endure? [..] are you a profound human being, or are you part of the limitless universality, although you were born in a particular group? [..] That is an attitude of revolutionary snobbery.
"Some of the hierarchies, although they wear different names and forms [like Communism], are occurring in an entropic phase, or in a culture of decay.
[David Cameron:] all his values are bourgeois. All of his values are middling and mercantile.
"Most right wing people are pessimistic introverts. They don't like the world they were born into. But Evola seems to be the most [..] extravagant aristocrat, who sees not the best side of things, but the most heroic side of things, even beyond itself.
Isn't all these middle class tax revolt type movements, which are 100%, should we call them, grassroots America? Aren't they really within the allowed channels of opposition? “He's a socialist,” it's all about taxes, it's not about anything else, it's all within budgetary constraints, etc etc.
Revolutionary Snobbery
Bowden was sympathetic to the BNP. Even after he left the party formally, he continued to speak to small gatherings affiliated with it. Bowden, like many British nationalists, had an affiliation for National Socialism, Fascism, and Oswald Mosley. There was always a populist bent to his ideas, and as previously mentioned, his admiration for the low-class Punch and Judy betrays an inner tension and dynamism. He could appreciate the cold gaze of Evola, and also slum it with the proles. He was enlivened by the contrast of opposites.
Bowden’s concept of the cultured thug represents himself, his autobiography and his physiognomy. Bowden was not dolichocephalic. He had no aristocratic posture. He was short and fat. This isn’t to take away from any of his positive attributes, but to be brutally honest about his biological potential.
Bowden was not athletic. The physical body is not some random formulation which mixes and matches with various souls and spirits. The body is the manifestation of the spirit.
This isn’t meant to be a mean-spirited hate fest against Bowden. He would perhaps agree that his body was akin to that of a a gang leader, a cigar-smoking criminal, Santa Claus with a gun. In fact, his body type in many ways shares similarities with Trump, Salvini, and Berlusconi. This isn’t to call these men ugly. I’m not speaking of ugliness. Socrates, who is said to have been ugly (dog faced), like all early Platonists, was an elite military hero and athlete by today’s standards. There is a fine distinction being made here.
Bowden refers to the heroic as appearing even among the ideology of the mass man. Even among communists, princes appear. Perhaps Bowden, being reflective or introspective, understood himself as having a “thuggish” body, but saw some divine spark of culture within himself. This inner contradiction animated all of his thought and life.
Bowden’s contradictory nature wedded him to the British working class. He always saw it as having some purpose or some sort of meaning. He references Evola’s belief in the idea that every creature, no matter how low on the hierarchy, gains its significance by being part of the greater order. This belief is wishful thinking, and does not stand up against the cruel and unforgiving gaze of nature in its highest manifestation.
Nature has no use for chavs. The agricultural economy which defined medieval Europe has come to an end. When the Indo-Europeans first arrived in Britain, 2500 BC, they did not look around at the native farmers and think to themselves, “we must preserve these people. Surely there is a place for them.” No! After centuries of genocide, the natives who “survived” were the wives taken by the conquerors. But even then, their genetic survival rate was 10%. They did not even spare the average women.
Can you imagine what that would look like today? Swiping through tinder, left, left, left, left, right. Those on the left leave the game of life, their line being swiped into oblivion. We are not all going to make it. That is the law of life, then as now.
The Birthrate Collapse
The difference is that the current game being played is not one of piracy, adventure, or conquest. Rather, America and China have conquered every square inch of the globe, and are presiding over the greatest crash in birthrates in the history of our species. Never before has any one of our ancestors decided to simply stop breeding at this rate. We are like Pandas in captivity.
This global imprisonment can be rebelled against, by banging on the iron bars and rattling our chains. We can spit at the guards, give them the middle finger, but they are trapped in here as well! We can form little prison gangs, and attack our fellow prisoners. All of this disruptive behavior makes life a little more eccentric, unpredictable, and for those who like violence and chaos, it can be fun. But it doesn’t truly undermine the foundations of this process.
Surely, there were some who resisted the Aryan invasion of Britain. They gathered some swords and shields, and stood against the raiders. We can imagine these short and weak men, trembling, pee running down their legs. The force they were facing was a nightmare race of werewolves.
Similarly, the entire globe seems to now be faced with the same level of threat. The air, water, and food is toxic. The culture is poisonous and oozes self-hate and narcissism (two interdependent psychologies) into children. Every aspect of life — religion, nationality, gender — have all been thrown into confusion. It shouldn’t surprise us if 90% of the population destroys itself through drugs, video games, infertility, or depression.
African Overpopulation
One of the objections to this picture of the future comes from Africa. Sure, Europe, Asia, and America might all become a depopulated wasteland, with the last of the elderly finally kicking the bucket in 100 years, ushering a new race of “survivors.” But if Africans continue to have 8 children each, then the future will be African. Instead of allowing this to happen, the right wing has an obligation to fight against white genocide — you know the thing.
That propaganda makes some sense, until you look at the numbers. In 2021, the birthrate in South Africa was 2.351 births per woman. In 2022, that dropped to 2.330 births per woman.
If the South African birthrate were to continue to decline at a rate of 0.89% per year, we should expect the birthrate to be 2.289 in 2024. The actual birthrate stands projected between 2.291 and 2.27 children per woman. In other words, the South African birthrate seems to be decreasing linearly at a rate of 0.89%, or even faster.
If this is true, then South Africa will be below replacement rate (2.1) in nine years: 2033. In 100 years, the South African birthrate will be similar to the current South Korean birthrate, reaching 0.93. The rest of Africa is likely to follow.
Yes, Africa is experiencing a population explosion. Niger has the highest rate on the continent, at 6.6. If Niger’s decline mirrored South Africa’s (linear, 0.89% per year), then Niger would slip below replacement rate in 129 years.
The actual decline of Niger’s birthrate is not 0.89% per year, but 1% per year. That small difference reduces Niger’s “lifespan” as a positive-birthrate country to 118 years. However, even that is not an accurate model. Let’s look back at South Korea.
In 1960, South Korea had a birthrate of 5.95, which dropped to 5.81 in 1961. That represented a 2.35% decline in the birthrate. This is when South Korea began its “demographic transition,” from a country with a family size of 6 kids on average, to a country with a family size of less than 2 children on average. This transition was completed in 1984, when South Korea saw birthrates dropping to 1.74. In total, the transition only took 24 years.
Even countries like Niger can make this same transition at the same speed or even faster speeds. Understanding the elements of this transition will be key to its acceleration. Feminism, the education of women, female economic independence, female literacy, condoms, birth control, and other bio-chemical factors all play a prominent role.
Haiti, which is just about as poor as most countries in Africa (somewhere between Burundi and Nigeria), has a birthrate of 2.81. There is nothing stopping a poor country from having a low birthrate, just as Israel has defied odds to keep its birthrate steady since 1992, despite GDP per capita tripling over this period. The key to Israel’s success has been the growth of its ultra-orthodox population. So in addition to feminism, the solution to the African demographic crisis will also include secularism.
One of the men who understands this better than anyone is Bill Gates. He has striven to create the necessary infrastructure in Africa to connect it to the rest of the world. It is only through this infrastructure that Africa can become secular, egalitarian, and educated. Africa may never reach the level of Sweden or Japan, but it doesn’t need to. Haiti and South Africa have already demonstrated that birthrates can fall to sustainable levels even without first world standards.
It is reasonable to be concerned about the African population explosion. Overpopulation is a serious threat to the natural beauty of our planet. Anyone who loves beauty and hates ugliness will become sick at the sight (or smell) of a third world favela. The best way to combat this cancer is not through “white nationalism” or “defending the white working class,” or “counter-semitism,” or any other far right “beautiful loser” martyrdom, but by working with international NGOs, like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to reduce fertility.
“Monoethnic”
Bowden preferred a world which is “monoethnic,” with a "respect for the past glory of our civilization," and an end to the constant apologies for the sins of the past.
In the first case, Bowden betrayed that idea which he identifies in Evola: that of spiritual racism. What difference does it make, if the scum on the street are white or black? From a spiritual point of view, there is no such thing as a “monoracial” society, because even if you have ground everyone down into the same shade of melanin, differences will arise between them. In truth, the desire for a “monoethnic” society, when taken to its spiritual conclusion, is nothing less than a Chinese (or Christian) desire for conformity, that everyone should be the same, that there should be no racial conflict, that walking down the street should be a stroll through the longhouse of all your 6th cousins. No!
It is the destiny of higher men to always, and everywhere, exert themselves over the others. Whether this pertains to the ancient Hebrews, the Egyptians, the Brahmin of India, the Samurai of Japan, the Mongol invaders, the Dorians of Greece, the Jarls of Scandinavia, the Normans of England, the Varangians of Russia, and so on and so forth — this principle can be denied, ignored, doubted, explained away, but it persists. And it will persist, whatever petty objections remain.
That should make the bourgeois man uncomfortable. Who will protect his daughters from racial foreigners? Who will defend him against “the knockout game?” Where can he hide, as in a hobbit hole, to avoid the hustle and bustle, the meanness of daily life, the cruelty of the confusion of languages and cultures? He will only find salvation in his own strength, his own virtue, and his own Will. Perhaps he will climb the corporate ladder, to live in a gated community. Perhaps he will organize politically. I will not stand in his way. But have no illusions that bourgeois man, who is at heart a peasant, or at best a used car salesman, can do any of these things. Criminal classes within society may ally with foreign enemies to agitate this class. Andrew Tate, at the behest of some shadowy pool of investors, can get young men fired up about “ZOG.” This is at best a form of demoralization, which amounts to the manifestation of a collective middle finger in the form of “Trump.” Yet Trump is the same “ZOG” these people claim to oppose.
One cannot maintain a belief in the “people,” that they can forge their own destiny, after traveling to Egypt, or Jordan, or some other antisemitic country. These are countries of millions, with tanks and planes and bombs, and just over the border, they watch women and children die by the thousands. Nothing. Silence. There is no “Arab Spring” — unless it is directed by “ZOG.” These people cannot organize themselves. They are, politically speaking, an inert substance. This is the same substance of the masses everywhere.
“Glory”
Bowden professed a hope that western civilization would, once again, appreciate the glories of its past. No one is prohibited from doing this. You can learn Greek and Latin — they are taught at the most liberal of universities. If you truly hate the university, pick up a book at teach yourself. Read the Aeneid. Read the Iliad. Read the Odyssey.
If humans are truly creatures of biology, and our choices are simply a reflection of our inborn nature, then what do we make of the fact that most people ignore these tomes and instead jerk off? Who is going to read this article? Who has bothered to learn the declensions, to read Caesar’s Gallic War in the original language, to study Sanskrit? Nietzsche was a philologist — that was his nature. What are these “white” people, in comparison to him?
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If reminiscing on the “good old days” of western civilization is such a treasure to the soul, then rejoice! You are free to do so. No one is stopping you. Will you? Probably not. Very few do. Most of the “far right” would rather post a quick meme about Hyperborea than pick up a book. The more educated might wish that they would — but has this sort of wishful thinking ever improved anyone’s inborn qualities? If education is a useless “liberal” idea, then no. This hereditarian obsession is self defeating, from the perspective of mass movements. Mass movements require a belief in egalitarianism. What is the point of educating the masses, if their ignorance is inherent to their being?
This is the reason why BAP advocates for race blindness. Nick Fuentes claims to reject race blindness, but that is only because he prefers affirmative action.
Multiracialism is unavoidable in a globalized world. No, you cannot have technology without its consequences. And Bowden misunderstands the “glory of western civilization” if he believes the ancient Aryans, least of all the Spartans, aspired toward “ethnic homogeneity” instead of invasion, intrusion, and xenophilia, the love of the strange, foreign, and unknown. Ethnically mixed political movements will win a thousand times over in America, and America will determine the tone around the world. Europe can choose to align itself with America or China (through its proxy, Russia), but it cannot stand alone in purity.
“Apology”
Bowden wished for a world without endless groveling apologies. He might as well have wished for a world without Christianity. “Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault, I have sinned.” Christian soteriology necessitates repentance, which begins with an apology. Liberalism did not invent the virtue of repentance. Its spiritual core runs much deeper.
Moving beyond Christianity, if that were even desirable, is not to be accomplished by reviving the corpse of western civilization. If anything, that would only engender feelings of warmth, nostalgia, and reinvigorate Christianity with new respect. The best argument against Christianity is that it has overseen the greatest period of decay known to history. If western civilization is saved, it will limp on, without ever going through the birth pains of a new spirituality.
I question whether repentance can ever be removed from the human spirit, so long as any form of morality persists. A world without repentance is a world without guilt. Such a world would look sociopathic, animalistic, or robotic compared to our current state. At the very least, the problem is much deeper than “liberalism” or the post-war consensus. Instead of asking for a world without apologies, Bowden merely wished for a 1944 level of apology, rather than a 1946 level of apology. This distinction seems petty when one takes a grand view of the entirety of western civilization.
Hypothetically, ignoring all moral considerations, if it were desirable: the best way to make the world sociopathic, violent, robotic, “beyond good and evil,” would be to incarnate Nietzsche’s Overman. This will never be accomplished by a mass movement of Naziism 2.0. It can only be conceived of, not from the bottom up, but from the top down, by means of the development of technology. Genetics marches forward, as does computing. While BLM riots in the streets, the universities remain untouched, undisturbed. The convulsions of the rabble do not impede progress. They are about as relevant as the cries of infants to the hunt of Apollo for Daphne. A distraction, but no more.
Some say there is no political solution. But an alternate view is that there is no political problem. Or, if there is a problem, it is solving itself, and the only question left is how quickly? History, time, marches on without end. The desire to create a better world is an expression of the Will, which is as inevitable as life itself. Each person is born with a Will to Power. This manifests as hunger and thirst, in sexual desire and even perversion, in ideology and religion, in narcissism and athleticism.
Some would say that each person must decide how they will live. But from that biological or even spiritual view, we have no choice. Each of us has a destiny which we walk slowly toward. Spengler saw that destiny in fatalistic, defensive, and even defeatist terms. Nietzsche saw the destiny of the higher man as aggressive, violent, and expansive.
In medieval Europe, arousing the masses through populism was not necessary or even desirable. It was a particular and peculiar dominance of the merchant class during the capitalist period, from 1500 to the present day, which has equivocated politics with mass marketing. From Protestantism to Wokism, everything is a sales pitch. What glory is there in that? I look forward to the arrival of certain geniuses who decode the genes for intelligence, and maybe other forgotten powers as well, and blow this whole thing out of the water. How can we ready the soil for them? By throwing up the middle finger, praising Putin and Xi, crying tears for the forgotten white masses? Whether we do or don’t might be irrelevant. Perhaps we will arrive at the same point under liberalism as we would under fascism. Perhaps history is converging onto a single point, after which, the past will collapse and become irrelevant.
The celebration of the glories of the past can never be the true life. What was it like to fight in the Trojan War? What is it like to be an animal, with no sense of one’s “ancestors,” but merely sensing the immediate presence of life? In this sense, the best way to honor the past is to live in the present. That could manifest in art, in physical feats, or we could say that both of these are the same.
This is clear: art is for the few. Genius is for the few. Who do you think you are? What are you capable of? A better question: are you even capable of knowing? To truly know yourself means to face death. Perhaps we can never know our limitations until we reach them — self knowledge is only possible in the moment of death. And death is easily found, in a car, speeding 100 miles an hour down the highway, veering into oncoming traffic, or off a cliff. But maybe the best way is to “edge.” Not to die all at once, but to die a million times. To die in every moment, and to be reborn. Let every moment be a near death experience. To be on the “edge,” to never be safe, content, comfortable, relaxed. Or to alternate between the extremes, between total relaxation and total catastrophe. Is this possible, or even desirable? Is this what it means to be alive?
Conclusion
“Know who you are,” Bowden said. Did he know himself? Do you?
What would Bowden think about the current state of affairs? Israel is acting with impunity in the Middle East, while the far right allies itself with the third world. The state of the right in 2012 is almost unrecognizable in 2024. Yet despite this seeming “inversion” of the Islamophobia of the early 2000s, there is a logical thread tying the two together.
The right is a protest against the modern world, which is at the same time a product of modernity, intertwined with it, with all the same flaws. Depending on the perspective, it is either a petulant child who denies the authority of his father, or a grumpy uncle who complains about “kids these days.”
The effort to save civilization, which animates the right, seems not only rotten, but pathetic. Death, Bowden said, was a part of life. In this respect, I wish to out-Bowden Bowden. I see the best of him, what was heroic in him, even beyond himself.
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