The Nature Of Politics
by Francis
Parker Yockey
First, what is politics? That is, politics as a fact. Politics is
activity in relation to power.
Politics is a domain of its own—the domain of power. Thus it is not
morality, it is not esthetics, it is not economics. Politics is a way of
thinking, just as these others are. Each of these forms of thought isolates
part of the totality of the world and claims it for its own. Morality
distinguishes between good and evil, esthetics between beautiful and ugly;
economics between utile and inutile (in its later purely trading phase these
are identical with profitable and unprofitable). The way politics divides the
world is into friend and enemy. These express for it the highest possible
degree of connection, and the highest possible degree of separation.
Political thought is as separate from these other forms of thought as
they are from each other. It can exist without them, they without it. The enemy
can be good, he can be beautiful, he may be economically utile, business with
him may be profitable—but if his power activity converges on mine, he is my
enemy. He is that one with whom existential conflicts are possible. But
esthetics, economics, morality are not concerned with existence, but only with
norms of activity and thinking within an assured existence.
While as a matter of psychological fact, the enemy is easily represented
as ugly, injurious, and evil, nevertheless this is subsidiary to politics, and
does not destroy the independence of political thinking and activity. The
political disjunction, concerned as it is with existence, is the deepest of all
disjunctions and thus, has a tendency to seek every type of persuasion,
compulsion, and justification in order to carry its activity forward. The
extent to which this occurs is in direct ratio to the purity of political
thinking in the leaders. The more their outlooks contain of moral, economic or
other ways of thinking, the more they will use propaganda along such lines to
further their political aims. It may even happen that they are not conscious
that their activity is political. There is every indication that Cromwell
regarded himself as a religionist and not as a politician. A variation was
provided by the French journal which fanned the war spirit of its readers in
1870 with the expectation that the poilus would bring car-loads of blonde women
back from
On the other side, Japanese propaganda for the home populace during the
Second World War, accented almost entirely the existential i.e., purely
political nature of the struggle. Another may be ugly, evil and injurious and
yet not be an enemy; or he may be good, beautiful, and useful, and yet be an
enemy.
Friend and enemy are concrete realities. They are not figurative. They
are unmixed with moral, esthetic or economic elements. They do not describe a
private relationship of antipathy. Antipathy is no necessary part of the
political disjunction of friend and enemy. Hatred is a private phenomenon. If
politicians inoculate their populations with hatred against the enemy, it is
only to give them a personal interest in the public struggle which they would
otherwise not have. Between superpersonal organisms there is no hatred,
although there may be existential struggles. The disjunction love-hatred is not
political and does not intersect at any point the political one of
friend-enemy.
The world-outlook of Liberalism, here as always completely emancipated
from reality, said that the concept enemy described either an economic
competitor, or else an ideational opponent. But in economics there are no
enemies, but only competitors; in a world which was purely moralized (i.e., one
in which only moral contrasts existed) there could be no enemies, but only
ideational opponents. Liberalism, strengthened by the unique long peace,
1871-1914, pronounced politics to be atavistic, the grouping of friend-enemy to
be retrograde. This of course belongs to politics—a branch of philosophy. In
that realm no misstatement is possible; no accumulation of facts can prove a
theory wrong, for over these theories are supreme, History is not the arbiter
in matters of political outlook, Reason decides all, and everyone decides for
himself what is reasonable. This is concerned however only with facts, and the
only objection made here to such an outlook in the last analysis is that it is
not factual.
Enemy, then, does not mean competitor. Nor does it mean opponent in
general. Least of all does it describe a person whom one hates from feelings of
personal antipathy. Latin possessed two words: hostis for the public enemy,
inimicus for a private enemy. Our Western languages unfortunately do not make
this important distinction. Greek however did possess it, and had further a
deep distinction between two types of wars: those against other Greeks, and
those against outsiders of the Culture, barbarians. The former were—and only
the latter were true wars. An agon was originally a contest for a prize at the
public games, and the opponent was the "antagonist." This distinction
has value for us because in comparison with wars in this age, intra-European
wars of the preceding 800 years were agonal. As nationalistic politics assumed
the ascendancy within the Classical Culture, with the Peloponnesian Wars, the
distinction passed out of Greek usage. 17th and 18th century wars in
West-Europe were in the nature of contests for a prize—the prize being a strip
of territory, a throne, a title. The participants were dynasties, not peoples.
The idea of destroying the opposing dynasty was not present, and only in the
exceptional case was there even the possibility of such a thing happening. Enemy
in the political sense means thus public enemy. It is unlimited, and it is thus
distinguished from private enmity. The distinction public-private can only
arise when there is a super-personal unit present. When there is, it determines
who is friend and enemy, and thus no private person can make such a
determination. He may hate those who oppose him or who are distasteful to him,
or who compete with him, but he may not treat them as enemies in the unlimited
sense.
The lack of two words to distinguish public and private enemy also has
contributed to confusion in the interpretation of the well-known Biblical
passage (Matthew
II
Every non-political human grouping of whatever kind, legal, social,
religious, economic or other becomes at last political if it creates an
opposition deep enough to range men against one another as enemies. The State
as a political unit excludes by its nature opposition of such types as these. If
however a disjunction occurs in the population of a State which is so deep and
strong that it divides them into friends and enemies, it shows that the State,
at least temporarily, does not exist in fact. It is no longer a political unit,
since all political decisions are no longer concentrated in it. All States
whatever keep a monopoly of political decision. This is another way of saying
they maintain inner peace. If some group or idea becomes so strong that it can
effect a friend-enemy grouping, it is a political unit; and if forces are
generated which the State cannot manage peace-ably, it has disappeared for the
time at least. If the State has to resort to force, this in itself shows that
there are two political units, in other words, two States instead of the one
originally there.
This raises the question of the significance of internal politics. Within
a State, we speak of social-politics, judicial-politics, religious-politics,
party-politics and the like. Obviously they represent another meaning of the
word, since they do not contain the possibility of a friend-enemy disjunction. They
occur within a pacified unit. They can only be called "secondary." The
essence of the State is that within its realm it excludes the possibility of a
friend-enemy grouping. Thus conflicts occurring within a State are by their
nature limited, whereas the truly political conflict is unlimited. Every one of
these internal limited struggles of course may become the focus of a true
political disjunction, if the idea opposing the State is strong enough, and the
leaders of the State have lost their sureness. If it does—again, the State is
gone. An organism either follows its own law, or it becomes ill. This is
organic logic and governs all organisms, plant, animal, man) High Culture. They
are either themselves, or they sicken and die. Not for them is the rational and
logical view which says that whatever can be cogently written down into a
system can then be foisted on to an organism. Rational thinking is merely one
of the multifarious creations of organic life, and it cannot, being subsidiary,
include the whole within its contemplation. It is limited and can only work in
a certain way, and on material which is adapted to such treatment. The organism
is the whole, however, and does not yield its secrets to a method which it
develops out of its own adaptive ability to cope with non-organic problems it
has to overcome.
Secondary politics often can distort primary politics. For instance the
female politics of petty jealousy and personal hatred that was effective in the
court of Louis XV was instrumental in devoting much of French political energy
to the less important struggle against
III
The concrete nature of politics is shown by certain linguistic facts
which appear in all Western languages. Invariably the concepts, ideas, and
vocabulary of a political group are polemical, propagandistic. This is true
throughout all higher history. The words State, class, King, society—all have
their polemical content and they have an entirely different meaning to partisans
from what they have to opponents. Dictatorship, government of laws,
proletariat, bourgeoisie—these words have no meaning other than their polemical
one, and one does not know what they are intended to convey unless one knows
also who is using them and against whom. During the Second World War, for
instance freedom and democracy were used as terms to describe all members of
the coalition against
Similarly, the word "fascist" was used purely as a term of
abuse, without any descriptive basis whatever, just as the word
"democracy" was a word of praise but not of description. In the
American press, for example, both during the 1914 war and the 1939 war,
During the period when Liberalism ruled in the Western Civilization, and
the State was reduced, theoretically, to the role of
"night-watchman," the very word "politics" changed its
fundamental meaning. From having described the power activities of the State,
it now described the efforts of private individuals and their organizations to
secure positions in the government as a means of livelihood, in other words
politics came to mean party-politics. Readers in 2050 will have difficulty in
understanding these relationships, for the age of parties will be as forgotten
then as the Opium War is now.
All State organisms were distorted, sick, in crisis, and this
introspection was one great symptom of it. Supposedly internal politics was
primary.
If internal politics was actually primary, it must have meant that
friend-enemy groupings could arise on an internal political question. If this
did happen, in the extreme case civil war was result, but unless a civil war
occurred, internal politics was still in fact secondary, limited, private, and
not public. The very contention that inner politics was primary was polemical:
what was meant was that it should be. The Liberals and class-warriors, then as
now, spoke of their wishes and hope as facts, near-facts, or potential facts. The
sole result of focusing energy onto inner problems was to weaken the State, in
its dealings with other States. The law of every organism allows only two
alternatives: either the organism must be true to itself, or it goes down into
sickness or death. The nature, the essence of the State is inner peace and
outer struggle. If the inner peace is disturbed or broken, the outer struggle
is damaged.
The organic and the inorganic ways of thinking do not intersect:
ordinary classroom logic, the logic of philosophy textbooks, tells us that
there is no reason why State, politics and war need even exist. There is no
logical reason why humanity could not be organized as a society, or as a purely
economic enterprise, or as a vast book club. But the higher organisms of
States, and the highest organisms, the High Cultures, do not ask logicians for
permission to exist—the very existence of this type of rationalist, the man
emancipated from reality, is only a symptom of a crisis in the High Culture,
and when the crisis passes, the rationalists pass away with it. The fact that
the rationalists are not in touch with the invisible, organic forces of History
is shown by their predictions of events. Before 1914, they universally asserted
that a general European war was impossible. Two different types of rationalists
gave their two different reasons. The class-warriors of the Internationale,
said that inter-national class-war socialism would make it impossible to
mobilize "the workers" of one country against "the workers"
in another country. The other type—also with its center of gravity in
economics, since rationalism and materialism are indissolubly wedded—said no
general war was possible because mobilization would bring about such a dislocation
of the economic life of the countries that a breakdown would come in a few
weeks.