This is going to be a long post, I think.
Devrim wrote:I always envied your country about that. Japanese people show how they are loyal to their culture, traditions and beliefs. Believe me, you are the only foreign nation whom Turks trust and love without any doubt, along with Azerbaijan.
Although it is different today, our beliefs and culture were nearly common in the past when we lived in Central Asia.
Regarding Japan, I appreciate the compliment.
Since you mentioned Tengriism
specifically though, Mongolia kept
that same religion even to the present day.
I know a Mongolian woman around my age
(25), and she practices it even while outside her country, just the other week she said to me that she went and had her son put through their Tengriist/Shamanist coming-of-age ritual. I don't know much about it, but they seem to be really enthusiastic.
So I think you Central Asian guys should also talk to Mongolians about this, they may be an ally on that and a source of information as well since they've preserved the same thing that you once had there. Just you would have to carry out that change very carefully, of course.
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Plaro wrote:And Christianity does not suppress national sentiments, how do you think all those nationalities survived in Europe? Not only did they survive, but still have their language and lots of pegan and traditional rituals that many of which have been incorporated into Christian rituals.
The thing is, that the rot caused by Christianity is visible
now, since the end-section of a national narrative is determined by its origin. So the construct known as "Christendom-Liberalism" is what it was always going to end up as. It could be argued that Europe succeeded as much as it did, insofar as it figured out how to
wriggle around the Judaic influences and social mores that it had encumbered itself with.
Plaro wrote:Also another point I would like to make, Shintoism is an example how Japanese peoples have been influenced and formed by foreign influence. Primary coming from China, secondary India.
This is a misconception though, Shinto is a name given to the
indigenous religion of the islands of Japan. Japan always maintained ideological and moral control over that. Buddhism and Taoism are of course influences, influences which were subjected and structured to meet Shinto uses by the time the Azuchi-Momoyama period had been reached.
You would be right to say that Taoist and Indic influences are there and there are really good grounds for historic India-Japan co-operation You'd also be right to say that every East Asian nation has their own version of Neoconfucian thought.
On Buddhism, Buddhism became problematic and reactionary, and had to be tamed, so I need to really go right back in history to the Azuchi-Momoyama period and then go forward in Japan's religious and popular-culture history to see the moment at which Buddhism ran out of energy there and was unable to be conjugated into any new and progressive forms, like so:
- With regards to the religion itself, it was around the middle of the Ashikaga shogunate, when Shinto began to come back into the fore again, due to the previous [non-]war against the Mongols showing them that the kami were powerful and worthy of renewed attention, and by the time of the Edo period, Buddhism was becoming so ramshackle as a social force that people like Razan Hayashi and Fujiwara Seika - for their own intellectual reasons - ended up steadily calling for Shinto-Neoconfucianism to be preferred over the combination of Shinto-Buddhism (this is not to say that aspects of Buddhism had not irreversibly rubbed off on Shinto, but you get the point). The differences between the two combinations meant that Shinto-Neoconfucianism in praxis was more conducive to actually producing investigations of why the world works, and I'm sure you can imagine the uses of that since that was just around the time period when economics and early scientific enquiry were going to become very important.
People like Kaibara Ekiken (for example) are held in mind, as he was a retainer in Fukuoka and a descendent of the priesthood at Kibitsu Shrine. He wrote "History of Dazaifu Shrine", "Lessons of the Deities", and also "Treatise on the Non-Divergence of Shinto and Confucianism". His doctrine was basically that Shinto and Confucianism have wahlverwandtschaft with each other because they are both interested in this world and the relationships between people and things that are in it. Buddhism is rejected by Kaibara because he saw it as being not sufficiently interested in that sort of investigation. Therefore there should be unity between Neo-Confucianism and Shinto - and that was the way things went forward from there.
The idea was to analyse reality by looking at the relationship between 'configuration/principle' and 'material energy', and by carrying out investigations on the latter, they can establish knowledge of the former, and the basis of knowledge was seen to be in the former, and then you just keep figuring it out as you go along. Kaibara studied western science at Nagasaki and basically became a botanist. That is not the same thing as the scientific method, obviously, but it was a step in that direction compared to what preceded it.
- With regards to popular culture, we have back to the start of that and explain that as well, there was a dialectic that emerged between the ostentatious behaviour of competing upper class entities around the Muromachi period going forward, and Zen. That occurred because of the anomaly of the Ashikaga shogunate moving its headquarters right up next to the same district that the imperial household was residing at (there is a tactical, political and military reason why they did that, which I will not get into), which then resulted in them playing 'keeping up with the Joneses Kobayashis' with each other. The effect of Zen on their behaviour was in fact to curb that use of resources, because Zen in the material realm of popular culture, was like Apple Macintosh - it made it trendy to be minimalist. This resulted in the upper class turning on a heel-about-face as the new trend emerged, and they began competing to be minimalist instead, reaching a sort of of middle ground. This is in a way slightly disjointed from my first point, since this trend endured separately after the ideological shift, but it is worth mentioning anyway.
And the influx of Abrahamic religions was then also stopped, thanks to Neoconfucian lessons learned:
Historical Momentums at Nagasaki's Suwa Shrine, Lane Earns and Brian Burke-Gaffney, Faculty of Human Environment Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science and Department of History University of Wisconsin Oshkosh wrote:But the Tokugawa rulers were not mere dictators, having developed a certain flair for crafty manipulations that diffused potentially explosive situations. Using what skills in social engineering they had at their disposal (thanks in part to scholars like Hayashi Razan, versed in neo-Confucian principles of "benevolent" rule), the government began a policy which stressed that a revival of traditional Japanese beliefs and institutions was essential in restoring centralized control to the Nagasaki region. Since the Christian values of individual worth were so obviously inflammatory and hostile to the plans of stability which the Tokugawas had charted as essential to national peace, a return to communal values promoted by Buddhist and Shinto temple/shrine complexes could only enhance local and regional compliance with the "beneficence" of the government's authority. It began contributing heavily to the reconstruction of destroyed temples and shrines throughout the area, but nowhere more so than in the centre of Nagasaki. The first temple to be rebuilt was Shokaku-ji in 1604, but due to acts of sabotage during its construction, additional rebuilding plans went slowly. Still, plans were set in motion around 1610 for an institution that would embody the myths of the founding of the Japanese nation and promote vigilance, purity, and unity. Named after one of the deities of valor and duty, Suwa-no-kami, the shrine would be strategically located on the side of a mountain overlooking the lower regions leading out to the harbor. Its official date of conception is listed in the shrine's annals as 1614 (the same year as Ieyasu's edict against Christianity) and a small structure is thought to have been completed soon after, but frequent harassment by Christian urban guerillas and the lack of a powerful personality to guide development kept the idea of a central shrine little more than an idea.
The man who would become the first priest of Suwa Shrine, Aoki Kensei, came to Nagasaki in 1623 from Saga prefecture. His career to that point had been of a wandering monk in the tradition of 'Shugend', famous for its yamabushi ascetic-priests who were given license by the military government to roam freely, dispensing cures, charms against demons, and Buddhist doctrine influenced by Shing'n metaphysics and ritual practices. Although there is no evidence that he was directly employed by the Tokugawa government, the missionary zeal with which he attempted to revive Shinto in Nagasaki, and the logistic as well as financial support these efforts received, indicate a close working relationship. One of his first reports to the government listed the number of shrines and temples that had been destroyed by the Christians starting around 1567. He tried to find people to help him in his rebuilding efforts and solicited help from local carpenters and administrators, but even at the height of the persecutions he made little progress. Deciding to go to Kyoto, he sought advice and legitimation from leaders of Yoshida Shinto, a powerful institution that stressed a revitalized religious nativism.
So we end up with "Shinto-Neoconfucianism" in the end for Japan. But what is the difference between Shinto-Neoconfucianism and Christendom-Liberalism?
Well, easy, the latter aggressively reshaped and conditioned the European people to accept a Judaic outlook on the world, an outlook that was forged in a completely different climatic area and - if it weren't already bad enough - has now truly outlived any momentary usefulness it may have had. Example, Judeo-Christian values provide the psycho-social grounds in which capitalism could smoothly operate
(simulated nomadism), which may have given the illusion that it was "good for Europe", in the ascending phase of capitalism, but now the mismatch is clearer than ever in this era.
There's also this, which I don't like always bringing out since it's very long, but in these cases it is necessary, to explain what I mean by ceding jurisdiction:
Chronicles, 'Monotheism vs Polytheism', Alain de Benoist, April 1996 wrote:As Shmuel Trigano notes, "by projecting itself as the new Israel, the West has given to Judaism a de facto jurisdiction, albeit not the right to be itself." This means that the West can become "Israelite" to the extent that it denies Jews the right to be Israelites. Henceforth, the very notion of "Judeo-Christianity" can be defined as a double incarceration. It imprisons "the Christian West," which by its own deliberate act has subordinated itself to an alien "jurisdiction," and which by doing so denies this very same jurisdiction to its legitimate (Jewish) owners. Furthermore, it imprisons the Jews who, by virtue of a religion different from their own, are now undeservedly caught in the would-be place of their "accomplishment" by means of a religion which is not their own.
Trigano further adds: "If Judeo-Christianity laid the foundations of the West, then the very place of Israel is also the West." Subsequently, the requisites of "Westernization" must also become the requisites of assimilation and "normalization," and the denial of identity. "The crisis of Jewish normality is the crisis of the westernization of Judaism. Therefore, to exit from the West means for the Jews to turn their back to their 'normality,' that is, to open themselves up to their otherness." This seems to be why Jewish communities today criticize the "Western model," only after they first adopt their own specific history of a semi-amnesiac and semi-critical attitude.
In view of this, Christian anti-Semitism can be rightly described as neurosis. As Jean Blot writes, it is because of its "predisposition toward alienation" that the West is incapable of "fulfilling itself or rediscovering itself." And from this source arises anti-Semitic neurosis. "Anti-semitism allows the anti-Semite to project onto the Jew his own neuroses. He calls him a stranger, because he [the European Christian] himself is a stranger, a crook, a powerful man, a parvenu; he calls him a Jew, because he [the European Christian] himself is this Jew in the deepest depth of his soul, always on the move, permanently alienated, a stranger to his own religion and to God who incarnates him."
By replacing his original myth with the myth of biblical monotheism, the West has turned Hebraism into its own superego. As an inevitable consequence, the West had to turn itself against the Jewish people by accusing them of not pursuing the "conversion" in terms of the "logical" evolution proceeding from Sinai to Christianity. In addition, the West also accused the Jewish people of attempting, in an apparent "deicide," to obstruct this evolution.
So someone must de-Christianise Europe, then.
Imperialismo pagano,'Fascism against Christianity: The Great Liberation', Julius Evola, 1928 wrote:Ethical and religious Christianity today is nothing more than a name and a habit, absolutely external to conscience; but nobody, or nearly nobody, has bothered to abolish the name itself and to put its content on trial again, so as to start right back at the beginning, rejecting the "fact" of Christianity, its "tradition" and all the rest.
This is precisely my intent: to hold such a trial, demanding that every account to be scrutinized with inflexible severity, that all cards be placed openly on the table, and that every way out and every compromise be barred in advance. At stake are not more or less anticlerical polemics but rather a serious, objective examination, unbiased by feeling and belief. A cool-headed examination should suffice to blunt the ecstatic thrill and to unmask the true poverty and inferiority of the Christian vision of the world and of man.
Comment Peut-on Etre Païen?, 'The Path Toward the Sacred', Alain de Benoist, 1981 wrote:In ancient Europe, the sacred was not conceived in opposition to the profane, but rather embraced the profane and gave it meaning. There was no need for a Church to mediate between man and God; the whole city itself effected this mediation, and religious institutions constituted only one aspect of it. The conceptual antonym of Latin religio would be the verb negligere. To be religious is to be responsible, not to neglect. To be responsible is to be free -- to possess the concrete means of exercising a practical liberty. To be free is also, at the same time, to be connected to others through a common spirituality.
When Lévy remarks that "monotheism is not a form of sacrality, a form of spirituality, but on the contrary, the hatred of the sacred as such," his comment is only apparently paradoxical. The sacred involves unconditional respect for something; yet monotheism, in a literal sense, outlaws such respect, placing it outside the Law. For Heidegger, the sacred, das Heilige, is quite distinct from traditional metaphysics and from the very idea of God. We say, to use an antimony favored by Emmanuel Lévinas, that the sacred vests itself as a mystery in this world, that it is based on an intimacy between man and the world, in contrast to holiness, which relies on the radical transcendence of the Other. Paganism sacralizes and thereby exalts this world, whereas Judeo-Christian monotheism sanctifies, and thereby deducts from and diminishes it.
The Origins and Diffusion of Patrism in Saharasia, c.4000 BCE: Evidence for a Worldwide, Climate-Linked Geographical Pattern in Human Behavior, James DeMeo PhD, Kyoto Review 23: 19-38, Spring 1990 wrote:Given the new evidence presented here, patrism, to include its child-abusive, female-subordinating, sex-repressive, and destructively aggressive components, is best and most simply explained as a contractive emotional and cultural response to the traumatic famine conditions that first developed when Saharasia dried up after c.4000 BCE, a response which subsequently spread out of the desert through the diffusion of traumatized and affected peoples, and their altered social institutions.
Elements, #139 (April–June, 2011), The 'West' Should Be Forgotten, Alain De Benoist (emphasis added, translated FR to EN by Tomislav Sunic) wrote:The “West”? Raymond Abellio observed that “Europe is fixed in space, that is to say, in geography, as opposed to the West which is “portable.” In fact, the “West” has continued travelling and changing directions. In the beginning that term meant the land where the sun sets (Abendland), as opposed to the land of the rising sun (Morgenland). Starting with the reign of Diocletian in the late third century AD, the opposition between East and West came down to the distinction between the Western Roman Empire (whose capital was Milan and then Ravenna) and the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople. The first one disappeared in 476 AD, with the abdication of Romulus Augustulus. After that the West and Europe merged for good. However, starting with the eighteenth century the adjective “Western” came to light on nautical charts referring to the New World, also called the “American system,” as opposed to the “European system,” or the “Eastern Hemisphere” (which then included Europe, Africa and Asia).
In the interwar period the West, having always been associated with Europe, as for example in Spengler’s works, was contrasted to the Orient, which turned into an object of fascination (René Guenon) and a scarecrow (Henri Massis). During the Cold War, the West included Western Europe and its Anglo-Saxon allies such as England and the United States, both being at that time opposed to the “Eastern bloc,” dominated by the Soviet Russia. This view, which allowed the U.S. to legitimize its hegemony, survived the collapse of the Soviet system (also for example with Huntington).
Today, the West has again acquired new meanings. At times it can have a purely economic one: “Western” are all developed, modernized, industrialized countries, such as Japan, South Korea and Australia, including the countries of the former “Eastern Europe,” North America or Latin America. “Ex Oriente lux, luxus ex Occidente,” (Light comes from the East; luxuriousness comes from the West) quipped jokingly the Polish writer Stanislaw Jerzy Lec. The West is losing its spatial content only to become merged with the notion of modernity. On the global level and as the last incarnation of furor orientalis in the eyes of Westerners, the West is opposed to Islamism. Accordingly, a fundamental divide separates the “Judeo-Christian” West from the “Arab-Muslim East,” and some people do not hesitate to predict that the final struggle of “Rome” and “Ismaël” — the war of Gog and Magog — will culminate in the messianic era.
In reality, there is no more such thing as the unitary “West,” just as there is no homogenous “East.” As for the notion of the “Christian West,” it has lost all meaning ever since Europe sank into indifference and “practical materialism” and in view of the fact that religion has become a private matter. Europe and the West have become completely disjointed from each other — to the point that defending Europe often means fighting against the West. No longer related to any geographical domain, let alone cultural, the word ‘West’ should be forgotten for good.
Let us rather talk about Europe. By thinking objectively, that is to say, by acquiring the gift for distancing itself from its self, and in order to be able to objectively rule on the true, the just and the good, Europe, all of a sudden, wished to access the universal — a desire that is not to be found in other cultures. Jean-François Mattei rightly speaks about the “theoretical view of the universal.” This idea of the universal has later on degenerated into universalism, which originally had a religious nature and then a secular nature (there is just as much distance between the universal and universalism as there is between liberty and liberalism). In its quest for Sameness, universalism boils down to the ideology of the Same, at the expense of Difference, i.e. in affirming the primacy of Oneness over Multiplicity. But it also reflects hidden ethnocentrism to the point that any idea of universal inevitably reflects a specific conception of the universal. Initially, there was a need to grasp the Other from the point of view of the Others and not from one’s own Self — which was both commendable and necessary. Afterwards, one gave up on being his Self — which turned out to be catastrophic.
Europe seems to be now in decline at all levels. The very construction of Europe is melting away before our eyes. Not only is Europe the “sick man on the economic planet” (Marcel Gauchet); it is also facing an unprecedented crisis of intelligence and political will. It wishes to bail out of history, driven by the idea that the present state of things — the boundless capital and techno-science — are expected to continue their course forever and that there is nothing else possible, and especially that there is nothing better. Ceding to an impetus that has become a part and an object of the history of others, Europe has exempted itself from its very self. Between the destitution of its past and the fear of its future, it believes in nothing else other than abstract moralism and disembodied principles that would save her from thriving in its being — even if the price is its metamorphosis. Forgetting that history is tragic, assuming that its can reject any consideration of power, searching for consensus at any cost, floating weightless, as if in a form of lethargy, not only does it consent to its own disappearance, but it interprets its disappearance as a proof of its moral superiority. One can obviously think of the “last man” that Nietzsche talked about.
So the only thing that is not declining is the subject of the decline itself — which is the subject of the permanent “declination.” This issue is not an offshoot of the old tradition of cultural pessimism. We need to know whether history obeys intrinsic laws that go beyond human action. If there is a decline of the West, then this decline comes from far away and must not be reduced to the present state of affairs such as globalization. The fate of a culture is contained in its origin. Its very history is determined by its origin because its origin determines its historical itinerary, its narrative skill, and the content of its narration. Historically, the Western idea first expressed itself in a metaphysical form, after that in an ideological form, and then in a “scientific” form. Evidently, it is running out of steam today. The West has said everything it had to say; it conjugated all its myths in every possible manner. It is coming to an end in a chaotic dissolution, as a depletion of energy and all-out nihilism.
The real issue is whether there is another culture which, having already embraced modernity, could offer the world a new form of mastering the universal, both in theory and practice, or for that matter, whether Western culture, having reached its terminal phase, could give birth to another one. Indeed, when a culture comes to a close, another one can replace it. Europe has already been the site of many cultures and therefore, there is no reason why it can’t be again the homeland of a new culture, of which we need to detect warning signs. This new culture will follow on the preceding one, but it will not be its extension. Rather than lapsing into unnecessary lamentation, what is needed is an eye sharp enough to look at the margins where something can grow that enables hope.
We are back at Spengler’s, but with one correction; what comes to an end heralds a new beginning.
Long story short, for a European agenda to exist, Europe must decouple itself from Christendom and start devising its own indigenous path that it can control. 'The west' as an ideology
(Christendom-Liberalism) in its present form is actually the enemy of the people who live in Europe.
Now, I mentioned also the word 'agenda', but what is also the meaning of '
European agenda'? Well, this is the difficult part, since now I become prescriptive: There can only be a European-
ness when Europe begins to take life into its own hands and demarcate a border for itself, and struggles to create an identity for itself. At the moment it is just submitting to Judeo-Christendom one day, and now submitting to the liberal globalist outgrowth of that with the universal nationless human the next day. That 'one day' and 'next day' are - as Devrim in a way pointed out - directly and disastrously connected to each other.
Europe should never be about the universal human, the human that is either 'saved' or 'unsaved' individually in the Judeo-Christian sense, the human that is alone in the universe, it's a totally abstract concept that can't sustain nationalism, much less regionalism. Europe can't recline and submit itself to exist in a trail of cathedrals that no one attends anyway. It would die.
A European agenda can only exist when Europe strives for political and spiritual independence in the continent with decisive action. It has to be active and build a real European religion and a real European way of life with its own hands,
otherwise, Europe will not be able to come into being, and would become just a shadow.
I'll end this post here:
Let's not let any fears of 'sin' or so-called 'blasphemy' or any such thing get in the way of the work that needs to be done for Europe.
The idea that all existent things are 'alive' and part of the conceptual unity
* of The All, is an idea
** that has existed really since the dawn of humanity. As we approach the end of this epoch and conjuncturals open up with possibilities for shaping the next epoch, these tensions between religious actors are destined to intensify as various nations prepare to take on the task of developing
(and conserving!) the earth and assuming responsibility for planetary evolution.
The old Abrahamic institutions are really illegitimate and they must be eroded out of necessity, or there will be no independent action possible.
We need to be confident that we are correct about this and that the spiritual hierarchy supports us and is on our side in this quiet struggle. It's also said that a firm and popular conviction has the same energy as a material force, which is extremely heartening.
* "that fourth something which hovers behind all manifestation and behind all objects, all qualified expressions of divinity and which is hinted at in the Bhagavad Gita in the words: 'Having pervaded this whole universe with a fragment of Myself, I remain'" - Alice A. Bailey, A Treatise on the Seven Rays, Vol 3: Esoteric Astrology, p. 591
** Acknowledging a kind of interdependence of beings in all states of consciousness, namely: a. 'our nation', b. 'the dead', c. 'the ascended masters', d. 'the spiritual hierarchy'.
NB: Greece is in Europe, by the way! Israel isn't. Just saying.[Very Relevant Soundtrack (CC)]
- By QatzelOk
- By KurtFF8