"I write for a species of men which does not exist yet, for the Lords of the
Earth..."
-F. Nietzsche, The Will To Power.
The sudden disappearance of Jean Thiriart (in 1993 ed.) was for us like a thunder clap in a serene sky. We, the militant Europeans, during successive decades, learned how to appreciate this thinker of action - especially with his return to active politics in the 1990’s, after a considerable number of years in internal "exile" during which he reformulated his previous positions. For immediate reasons, his death had also surprised us. His Italian friends had personally learnt of it at the time of his journey to Moscow in August 1992, where we formed a Western-European delegation to the forces involved in a National Salvation Front. This Front, thanks to work of the untiring Alexandre DUGIN, organizer of the geo-political and ‘mystical’ review Dyenn (the Day), learned how to appreciate and weigh many aspects of Thiriart’s thought and then diffused it throughout the countries of the former USSR and in Eastern Europe.
I intend in the lines which follow, to honour the memory of Jean Thiriart by stressing the importance that his thought always had, and has, in our country, Italy, from the Sixties and Seventies, in the field of geopolitics. In Italy, his reputation rested primarily on his main book, the one which truly gave organic coherence to his thought in the field of international politics: Europe - An Empire Of 400 Million Men. Published by Giovanni Volpe in 1965, over thirty years ago, its power is still with us.
Only three years had then elapsed since the end of the French experiment in Algeria (France withdrew in 1962, ed.) This dramatic event was the last great mobilization of nationalist right-wing policy, not only within France, but in other countries of Europe, including Italy. The major reasons for the Algerian tragedy were not understood by the anti-Gaullist militants who fought for French Algeria. They did not understand the geo-political stakes of the business at hand or how the victorious powers of the Second World War (especially America) intended to redistribute the cards to their own advantage How many of these militants for French Algeria understood exactly which power was the PRINCIPAL ENEMY of France and Europe? How many of these fighters understood that, on the historical level, the loss of Algeria, preceded by the loss of Indo-China, just like the collapse of all the European colonial systems, were direct consequences of the European military defeat of 1945? The Belgian, Jean-Francois Thiriart, was one who saw this.
Indeed, 1945 signalled not only the defeat of Germany and Italy, but also of EUROPE - Great Britain and France included. Not even a single colony of the old colonial system did not become a victim of a new, but a more modern and more subtle form, of neo-colonial imperialism.
By contemplating the events of Suez (1956) and Algeria (1954-63), the new "national-revolutionaries", as they called themselves, ended up formulating an analysis of the consequences of these two tragic episodes. This analysis differentiated them from the "traditional lines" pursued by the Right in the post-war period: a visceral anti-communism and the slogan of the defence of the ‘West’, white and Christian, against the combined attack of Soviet Communism and the national liberation movements of the people of colour of the Third World.
The old vision of international politics was integrated perfectly into the world economic strategy and geopolitics of the American thalassocracy (rulers of the seas) which, with the Cold War, had succeeded in recasting the issues for Europe. Os so maintained many of the fascists and the post-fascists with their geo-strategic project of ‘world domination’. Everything the U.S. system did, brought us eventually to the "New World Order", already partially fallen through (!!) but which seems to be a reverse-image and satanic caricature of the Hitlerian "New Order". The old vision did not serve the European Right gaining true independence of thought and action.
The new French line, to give only one example of the new national-revolutionary politics, began its advance at the time of the events of Algeria. It started a long-running political and ideological revision, which led to the recent journey of Alain de Benoist to Moscow, an obligatory course for all the revolutionary European opponents of the globalist system. This step by de Benoist, in spite of relapses and later disavowals, was supported by some of his trustworthy associates. Yet many European Nationalists did not yet fully understand the real range of the meetings between Europeans of both the West and Russia at the international level and therefore preferred themselves to remain lost in dead farmyard quarrels, to continue to retain small hatreds over (sometimes nationally specific) doctrine. In this field like so many others, Thiriart had already given his example. While understanding the natural differences existing between the men and the schools of European Nationalist thought, he worked in favour of the supreme interest of the fight against American imperialism and Zionism.
To return to Italy, we must remember the situation which reigned in that remote year 1965, when the work of Thiriart appeared. The forces of national-revolution, were still integrated into the Italian Social Movement (MSI). These forces were victims of a PROVINCIALISM of a vétéro-fascist quality, a provincialism cynically used by the leadership of the MSI, which was completely controlled by the strategy of America and NATO. This political line would be followed thereafter with fidelity, even during the short bracket of management supposedly inspired by the national-revolutionary theses of Pino Rauti around 1989-91. Even this leadership of the MSI supported the intervention of Italian troops in Iraq on the side of the US Army!
The heads of this collaborationist line once used the revolutionary groups as a centre, made up primarily of very young people, supposedly to create militant bases for action. In ultimate practise, the MSI collected the votes necessary to send to the Parliament deputies and "entrists", there to be used as support for the reactionary governments of the Centre-Right.
All that, of course, was not in the interest of Italy or Europe, but only in the interest of the occupying power, the United States. And once more, we witness a small chauvinistic nationalism, used for the profit of foreign and cosmopolitan interests! This was also time when the Extreme-Right side was still able to mobilize in Italy thousands of young people who claimed that Trieste is and would remain Italian, and who commemorated annually the events of Hungary-1956!
The Italian right wing overall, did not see Thiriart’s "revolution" in thought when it was announced. The old vererans of ‘nationalist politics’, were indeed provincial and in practice, philo-American, with no real commitment to a sovereign Europe. As a consequence, during all the years of the late 1960’s and 1970’s, (the "years of lead", or crimes of the State carried out against the Left), they collaborated with a false anti-communist politics. The work of Jean Thiriart had for a great number of nationalists the effect of a bomb; a salutary electric shock which faced the true nationalist position towards solving problems which, had been forgotten by the leaders or had fallen into a type of ideological disuse.
Today, we compelled to take account of the political effects inspired by the Thiriart’s Initially, the impact were extremely modest. Starting with the publication of Thiriart's book, the ‘European’ set of themes gradually became the ideal inheritance of a whole sphere of political effort. In the following years, the European Nationalists developed the current anti-globalist arguments. Without exaggeration, we can affirm that it was in the late 1960’s that the strategy of the European-Nationalists developed towards the ‘line’ of a non-Left anti-imperialist fight, a geo-strategic alliance between European Nationalists and the revolutionaries of the Third World. The adoption of this line was all the more astonishing and significant when it is said that the history of ‘Young Europe’ started with a fight against the Algerian FLN!! Thiriart had, on this level, completely changed camp, without substant-ially changing his vision of the world. A few decades before Thiriart had left the Belgian Extreme Left to pursue ‘collaboration’ if it produced a new Europe. Flexibility in action was necessary for Thiriart. The new politico-ideological line was worth the baseless charges made by the patrons of the old nationalist line, that he was a "double agent" under the command of Moscow!
In Italy, the Italian section of Young Europe (Giovane Europa) was quickly set up. In spite of the political origin of the majority of the militants, Giovane Europa did not have any direct affiliation with Giovane Italia, the organization of the MSI (modelled upon the Giovine Italia de Mazzini in the 19th century). On the contrary, Giovane Europa was practically the antithesis of the MSI youth group, the contrary perspective. So that once the militant experiment of "Giovane Europa" concluded around 1969, the majority of its militants were found carrying on the fight in Movimento Politico Ordine Nuovo (MPON). They remained opposed to the MSI political line which preached parliamentary intervention. It wanted the partisans of Pino Rauti outside of the ‘anti-communist’ MSI of Almirante.
If any account of the singular roles played by movement theorists is undertaken, then the thought of Julius Evola was central to the various cultural and ideological strategies pursued in Italy. However, one should not forget either that Jean Thiriart impelled, for his part, a genuine attempt at the restoration of the national forces in those years and after. Even national-revolutionary activist, Giorgio Freda, recognized the debt to Thiriart.
One very particular and significant aspect of Europe - An Empire Of 400 Million Men, is to have anticipated, by several decades, a fundamental set of themes, which recently resurfaced in the Russian debate, (thanks to the initiatives of Alexandre Dugin and of the Dyenn review), and in the Italian debate (thanks to the reviews ORION and AURORA): geo-politics.
The first sentence of Thiriart's book, in the Italian version, is precisely dedicated to this essential science. This science which had undergone, in our post-war period, a very long ostracism, under the pretext of its having been an instrument of the Nazi expansion! At the very least this is an incongruous charge when it is known that at Yalta the winners of the Second World War shared the skins of Europe and the rest of the world on the basis of truly geopolitical and geo-strategic considerations. Thiriart was perfectly conscious of this and wrote of it in his first chapter, significantly entitled "From Brest To Bucharest. Let Us Erase Yalta". He said: "In the context of geopolitics and a common civilization, as it will be further shown, the European unit and community extends from Brest to Bucharest". By writing this sentence, Thiriart imposed geographical and ideal limits to his Europe, but soon, he exceeded these ‘limits’ and arrived at a unit of design concerned with the great geo-political space which is EURASIA. Once more, Thiriart showed that he was a lucid anticipator of political ideas which only mature very slowly in his readers. But there is more!
Jointly with the great ideal of the Europe-Nation and the rediscovery of geopolitics, the reader is obliged to take a fresh glance at the great spaces on this planet. It was another merit of Thiriart to have gone beyond the European trauma of the era of the decolonization and to have sought, for European nationalism, a strategic world alliance with those governments of the Third World not controlled by imperialism. In particular, he looked to the Arab and Islamic zones in North Africa and in the Middle East. It is true that those who discover geopolitics, cannot fail to see world events in a new light.
And it is in such a context, that it is necessary to note the many trips undertaken by Thiriart to Egypt and Romania, etc, and his meetings with Chou En Lai, Ceaucescu and the Palestinian leaders. Everywhere possible, Thiriart sought to weave an international information network and build anti-imperialist alliances even with the most ‘contrary’ of forces. In addition, let us all note that the original style of the Cuban revolution exerted its own influence on Thiriart. With his synthetic almost telegraphic style, Thiriart had traced in its texts the essential lines of a foreign policy relating to a future Europe: "guidelines of Europe as a unit: with Africa: symbiosis with Latin America: alliance with the Arab world: friendship with the United States: reports/ratios based on equality".
We note that Thiriart’s geo-political vision was perfectly clear. He visualised large continental blocs. He was distanced from any vision which skimped on a small Western Europe with the Atlantic alliance. Today, this EEC Europe is nothing more than the Eastern appendix of the Yankee thalassocracy, which has as its centre the Atlantic Ocean, reduced to the function of an "interior lake" of the United States.