The Decline and Fall of Civilisations Read online

  The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

  by

  Dr Kerry R Bolton

  The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

  by Dr Kerry R Bolton

  Copyright © 2017 Black House Publishing Ltd

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Black House Publishing Ltd

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  “On the world’s loom Weave the Norns doom Nor may they guide it nor change”

  — Richard Wagner, Siegfried Act III

  “The essence of history does not reside in recorded facts but in the thoughts, emotions, ideas and aspirations of the human beings who have made it… Facts are only the outer shell… History is life itself, and, like everything else that is alive, it has both a cyclical rhythm and a linear tension… The great cycle which has been in evidence throughout history like a giant wheel of destiny revolves around the sequence leading from Culture to Civilisation”.

  — Amaury de Riencourt, The Soul of China, xvii.

  “Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity”.

  — W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

  Table of Contents

  Decline and Fall of Civilisations

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Part I - Tradition

  Traditional Historical Outlook

  The Axis

  The Wheel

  Universality of Cyclic Outlook

  Time and Tradition

  The Golden Age

  Expanses of Time

  Traditional Perspective of Time

  Time As An Organism

  Ebb & Flow of History

  “Progress” & Its Dissidents

  Society as an Organism

  The Value of Tradition

  Part II - Ethnos

  Race and Ethnos

  The “Race-Forming Idea”

  Spengler on Race-Formation

  Carl Jung on Race-Formation

  Place and Land in the Making of Culture

  “Environmentalism” and Communism

  Race as Historical Destiny

  Phenotypic Plasticity

  Epigenetics

  Liberal Reaction

  Behavioural Epigenetics

  Morphic Field Theory

  Formative Causation

  Soil and Race Formation

  Part III - Rise and Fall

  I.Q. and Creativity

  Inspirare

  Assumptions About Miscegenation

  Modernist Versus Traditional Interpretations of History

  Civilisations That Died

  Mesopotamia

  Persia

  Greece

  Sparta

  Rome

  The Collapse of Rome

  No More Romans

  India

  The Real Meaning of Varna

  The Indus Valley

  Maurya

  Gupta India

  Egypt

  Arabia

  Hebrew

  Mesoamerican and Andean

  Inca

  Japan

  Afrikaner

  China

  Chiang Kai-shek attempts a Resurgence

  “Harmonising” Elements

  Liberalism and Communism

  Is China the Future?

  Birth of The West

  Romanesque & Gothic Styles

  Comparative Culture Styles

  Western Science

  Decline of The West

  Decay of the Megapolis

  Demographic Suicide

  Degenerative Culture

  Cultural Pathology as Geopolitical Strategy

  Rise of Russia

  The Soul of Russia

  “Russian Socialism”

  Taras Bulba

  Tension of Polarities

  Russia the Katechon

  Russo-European Symbiosis

  Conclusion

  Bibliography

  Foreword

  We are men and women living at the end of history. We are American vagabonds, relishing the promise of a horizon beyond which to pass. We are autochthonous Europeans, proudly defending what is left of our inheritance. Some of us are socially conservative, while others of us are violently revolutionary. Some pine for stasis and gentility, others burn for action and primitivism. Some of us are waiting to embrace a messiah, others of us to ambush him in a rhododendron thicket. Some have a God, others Tyler Durden – and still others little more than the sensation of a chilly early-Fall breeze as we pause to watch a spider patiently devour a futilely struggling bumblebee.

  But we are all here … together. Well, not really. We are a collection of “places without a place,” too amorphous to be concentrated, but too autonomous to create a counter-power to the neo/post-liberal State and Capital.1 We struggle to detach ourselves from the epistemography and ontology of a form of life to which we relate with nothing but mutual disdain. And yet, for most of us, as things continue to fall apart around us; as the State becomes the dystopia that only our most pessimistic and paranoid writers could have imagined; as even the sick, maimed, mediocre, scared, bored, herd animals that we have become begin to recognize the bounds of our rangelands – for most of us, for the too helplessly modern, perhaps, there will never be enough reasons to decide to fight our enemies to the death.2

  Perhaps, though, having reasons – more precisely, reason – is what is holding us back and keeping us forever acted upon and never acting ourselves; keeping us stuck in the redundancy of being rational modern citizens and never immersed in the duration of becoming something else.3 For life is flow. It is constant change. There is perpetual energy and vitality, and there is stasis and death. As Dr. Kerry Bolton demonstrates herein, energy, vitality, stasis, and death come to define the boundaries of all living things – including, and especially, cultures and civilizations.

  With the light touch of an expert archaeologist, Dr. Bolton uncovers the remains of the various known civilizations that have fallen to the axe of time. One by one, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, Sparta, Rome, India, the Indus Valley, Arabia, Mesoamerica, Japan, Afrikaner South Africa, China, and others rise and fall; becoming unique and powerful expressions of human will, ingenuity, and problem creating and solving, that, for all of their power and the value of their values, disappeared. And as we pause in the light of Bolton’s words, we think about what the end must’ve been like, what life became in the colorless shadow of their demise. But only for a moment, as both Bolton, and the miserable comfort of our lives remind us with glaring and unblemished clarity that we are living at the end of our own unique and powerful civilization, itself falling to the axe of time.

  But time alone is not enough to fell something so powerful, so lasting, and so important. No, we are not so lucky that “the somber and spurious judgment of objective forces” alone acts to defeat what we die to create, for time gets a helping hand from human weakness, perfidy, greed, and righteousness.4 These human traits do not always manifest themsel
ves in Bolton’s narrative in ways that will comfort many of his readers, though; for his analyses conclude that it was not simply immigration or miscegenation that precipitated civilizational collapses, but instead the becoming-mediocrity and decadence of imperial nobles – via the contagion of leisure, luxury, and affluence, which themselves unleashed destructive forces of spiritual and cultural chaos.

  But while boundaries are one thing, potentials – and the fact of actually living the death of civilization – are another. Things fall apart, Bolton tells us, but rarely do they do so of their own accord. And that is where we come in. The axes of this book are formed by civilizational creation and destruction, on one plane, and race and contemporary epistemography and politics, on the other. The nexus is the individual and his or her genetic, historical, situational - in short, epigenetic - potential as inheritors and guarantors of whatever the West was and, unfortunately, has now become.

  As Western Civilization continues to confirm the vision of ancient and (counter)modern thinkers of civilizational birth and death – yes, Spengler, we are indeed doomed! – and, as we become experts at dystopic living, actually perusing magazines devoted to post-civilizational home furnishing strategies while breathing air thick with mediocrity, vulgarity, and the ignominy of our weakness in the face of death by asphyxiation, what, we ask, are we to do?

  Thankfully, the pessimism of Bolton’s cast of characters does not engender defeatism as much as a renewed will to defiance of the captain and crew that continue to hunt bigger and sharper ice burgs into which our already sinking ship may be ever more destructively steered. While dismantling the corrosion of materialism – and more importantly outlining the myriad symptoms of its ideational and conceptual power (from notions of progress to teleologies of development and evolution; from Marxist critiques which merely bolster the necessity of homo economicus to neoliberal globalists intent to impose a singular morality of consumption on each and every living thing on Earth; from zoological racists to anti-race racists) – Bolton gives us the keys to reformulating our relations to and with the tiger we are riding.

  He does so by providing a space in which to ponder the need for new tactics, images, and myths – not to forestall the inevitable but instead to begin to create something of our lives that will be important and useful to future generations. In so doing – whether we do so or not, really – we will be playing our role in the building of whatever grows from the ashes of the West. For races, he tells us, are dynamic, ever changing, and never static, like people, peoples, and all living things. They can be changed, destructively or constructively, over generations, strengthening or debilitating individuals and stocks, being eugenically and dysgenically influenced by behavioral norms and political codifications.

  Dr. Bolton clearly relishes explaining these behavioral norms and political codifications. Just as he swings away at the modern totems of the racial materialists, so too does he attack the epistemological foundations of those who might still harbor a soft spot for the State as an example of Western greatness. In fact, in his explanation of American politogenesis5, which is now the hegemonic model of liberal state development, it is the same materialism that allows quantity to reign as the essence of the modern world that points to our demise in a sea of demos – mere population as a vulgar political entity – specifically designed to obliterate the ethnos (and ethnoi) of our forbearers.

  The individual, even as a metaphysical collective, is not just a cog but also a potential wrench thrown into the wheel of the inevitable. We have possibilities far beyond those given us by our present predicament. If we choose submission, so be it: we will bequeath the freedom “to live and think like pigs” to the future.6 But if we choose to fight, then the fun is just getting started. Who and what do we fight at this point? Do we strengthen our enemies today so as to hasten the fall tomorrow? Do we weaken our enemies in order to forestall the inevitable? Do we push along the collapse, then, helping an already terminal creature to its passing?

  Although we are certain that the answers to these questions depend on our relationships with the techniques of the contemporary elite that are driving along our demise: capitalism – which organizes our bodies and lives for labor and consumption; the State – which provides us the ecology of laboring and consuming; universities – which provide the required specialized skills for participation and advantage within that ecology; and media – which buttresses the university’s work of creating a liberal intelligentsia by promoting such a creature as the optimal face of the West; they also depend on our abilities to identify creative and tactical opportunities in both the State’s ecology and the decaying West that feeds it.

  Perhaps the most important development in recent dissident thought is that thinkers of the Right are identifying the State and capitalism as enemies of our people. Dr. Bolton is, by now, quite comfortable demonstrating that the post/neo-liberal State is dysgenic. It is an agent of our demise. It is actively weakening each and every one of us, ensuring that our progeny inherits little beyond obedience, flaccidity, and a desire to be canalized by the whims of revenuers and profiteers. “You are awaiting the apocalypse? Man, our lives are the apocalypse.”

  Our lives. Your life. Your life that is already always overdetermined and organized – at this point by our enemies. We don’t start with nothing, but with everything; it is the State’s incessant overcoding and canalizing that regulates our potentials. As Dr. Bolton explains, the body is not purely biological but also cultural, historical, and political. It will become what is demanded of it, and through each demand, a power of life is affirmed. So we must ask ourselves as we sit in the twilight of an extinguishing civilization – witnessed in the flickering hum of a television or computer screen – with “empty head in captive hands,”7 is it the West that is exhausted, or is it us? Is it civilization that has become unable to realize alternate possibilities or is it us, who can no longer even possibilize the destruction of the cultural, historical, and political habits that ensure our defeat and the imprisonment of our children.8

  The State will not save the West, but instead will erase it along with you. So, without it, what do we have? Men, women, and will. This isn’t a call for wild-eyed dreaming or mass-suicide-by-cop. This is neither romantic nor pretentious. It is instead a herald to begin creating a new ontology – a new way of living and of thinking life – and to recognize that our bodies – their rhythms, thoughts, functions, and abilities – are the fields upon which the final battles will be fought.

  Dr. Bolton shows that we have been here from the beginning: in all civilizations there have been dissidents who fought on the side of strength, wisdom, and spiritual nobility.

  We must become stronger, wiser, and nobler. We have virile, sublime, heroic work to do – not to save the West, but to save our children and ourselves. This is not a reason. It is not reason. It is instead a myth: a guiding sense, a purity of conviction, not to change the world but to reform our wills, to change us!9 The West might well be doomed, but we all have something to do about it. Things fall apart but rarely of their own accord.

  Mark Dyal, Ph.D.

  Mark Dyal, Ph.D. Anthropology, City University of New York, has taught African-Amercian Studies, Race History and Race Theory, Anthropology of Western and of Southern Europe; Anthropology of Violence, of the State, and of Revolution, and North American and European New Right Thought, at Ohio State University. He blogs at “Cultural Anthropology from a Derelict Space”: https://markdyal.com

  * * *

  1 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011 – Kindle edition), loc. 536.

  2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), #352, pg. 210.

  3 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ed. by Jeremy Jennings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999 – Kindle edition), loc. 658.

  4 Irving L. Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason (London: Routledge, 2009 - Kindle edition), loc. 320.

  5
Peter Gelderloos, Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 17.

  6 Gilles Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies (New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2014).

  7 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) pg. 155.

  8 Deleuze 1997, pg. 152.

  9 Sorel, 1999, loc. 1608.

  Introduction

  That so many cultures in such disparate times and places have a similar outlook on the rise and fall of societies suggests a common source of inspiration. Whether this is of divine origin, as suggested by what is called the perennial tradition1; or the intuition and observation of those who lived close to nature and the organic cycles of birth, life, and death, is secondary for our study. Philosopher-historians such as Dr. Oswald Spengler presented empirical evidence for their historical analysis, Hindu and American Indian mystics intuited from divine inspiration. Both empiricists and mystics, centuries apart, rejected what is today called the “progressive” approach that regards history as an onward marching line from “primitive to modern”.

  The traditional (or “conservative”, if you prefer) historical outlook is cyclic. This is at odds with the “modernist” approach to history. This modern historical outlook was formulated as the “Idea of Progress” during the French Revolution by the Marquis de Condorcet, a leading philosopher of the “Enlightenment”. It was given impetus in the 19th century by Darwin’s theory of evolution. The biological theory was applied to history, politics, economics and sociology, as “social Darwinism”. It gave scientific validity to Free Trade economics. The Darwinian myth justifies revolutionary upheavals in society as “progressive”. Those opposing change are ridiculed as “regressive”, against “progress” or, to use the Leftist term, “reactionary”. Such a dichotomy obscures historical realism: that notions regarded as “modern” and hence “progressive”, are nothing unique to our epoch, nothing resulting from an “enlightenment” special to our age: they are symptoms typical of the Late epoch of a civilisation. The traditionalist rejects such notions of “progress”. For the traditionalist “progress” is a dangerous spectre.