"I write for a species of men which does not exist yet, for the Lords of the Earth..."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Will for power.
The sudden disappearance of Jean Thiriart was for us like a thunder clap in a serene sky, for us, the militant Europeans who, during several successive decades, learned how to appreciate this thinker of action, especially since his return to active politics, after considerable interior years of "exile" which contemplated and reformulated his former positions. For stronger reasons, his death had surprised us. His Italian friends who had personally known it at the time of his voyage to Moscow in August 1992, where we formed a Western-European delegation of personalities involved in a national front. This front, thanks to work of the untiring Alexandre DOUGUINE, mystical and geopolitical organizer of the review Dyenn (the Day), learned how to know and estimate considerable aspects of Thiriart thought and then diffused it in the countries of the ex-USSR and in Eastern Europe.
Personally, 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, as of the Sixties and Seventies and in the field of geopolitics. In Italy, its reputation rests primarily on his book, the only one which truly gave an 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.
Only three years had occurred since the end of the French experiment in Algeria. This dramatic event was the last great mobilization of nationalist right-wing policy, not only outside France, but in other countries of Europe, including in Italy. The major reasons for the Algerian tragedy were not included/understood by the anti-Gaullist militants who fought for French Algeria. They did not include/understand the geopolitical stakes of the business at hand or how the victorious powers of the Second World War intended to redistribute the cards to their own advantage, especially the United States.
How many of these militants in French Algeria understood at that time exactly what was the PRINCIPAL ENEMY of France and Europe? How many of these men understood intuitively that, on the historical level, the loss of Algeria, preceded by the loss of Indo-China, just like the collapse of all the European vétéro-colonial system, were direct consequences of the European military defeat of 1945? It was indeed not only the defeat of Germany and Italy, but also of EUROPE ENTIERE, Great Britain and France included. Not only one colony of the old colonial system which did not become with its prone tower of a new, but a more modern and more subtle form, of neo-colonial imperialism.
By contemplating the events of Suez (1956) and Algeria, the "national-revolutionists", as they called themselves, ended up formulating various considerations and analyses on the consequences of these two tragic episodes, considerations and analyses which always differentiated them from the "traditional lines" of our post-war period, animated by a visceral anti-communism and the slogan of the defense of the Occident, white and Christian, against the combined attack of Soviet Communism and the national movements of release of the people of colour of the Third World. In a certain direction, the cultural and political shock of Algeria was due to the left, in fact the whole of the events of Indo-China and after 1975.
The old vision of the international politics was integrated perfectly into the world, economic strategy and geopolitics of the American thalassocracy which, with the Cold War, had succeeded in recycling the various lines of Europe, according to the fascists and the post-fascists and their geostrategic project of world domination. All to arrive today at the "New World Command", already partially fallen through and which seems to be the reversed and satanic caricature of the "Ordre Nouveau" eurocentré of grinding hitlérism.
The New French Line, to give only one example, began its advance at the time of the events of Algeria to start a long functioning of political and ideological revision, which led to the recent voyage of Alain de Benoist to Moscow, an obligatory stage for all the revolutionary opponents of Europe to the mondialist system. The step was thus made by Benoist, in spite of its relapses and its later disavowals, supported by some of its trustworthy associates, which obviously did not yet fully understand the real range of these meetings between Européens of the West and Russians at the planetary level and therefore prefered to be lost in dead farmyard quarrels, which have only personal motivations and concern small hatreds and small idiosyncratic aggressivenesses. In this field like so many others, Thiriart had already given his example, while opposing too the natural differences existing between the men and the schools of thought relating to the supreme interest of the fight against American imperialism and Zionism.
To return to Italy, we must remember the situation which reigned in this remote year 1965, when the work of Thiriart appeared: the forces national-revolutionists, still integrated into the Italian Social Movement (MSI), were then victims of a PROVINCIALISM vétéro-fascist, a provincialism cynically used by the hiérarquical policies of the MSI, which completely controlled by the strategy of the United States and NATO (a political line which will be followed thereafter with fidelity, even during the short bracket of management "rautist", supposedly inspired by the national-revolutionist theses of Pino Rauti, a management which supported the intervention of Italian troops in Iraq on the sides of US Army.
The heads of this collaborationist line used the revolutionary groups as a centre, made up primarily of very young people, to create intended militant bases, in ultimate authority, to collect the votes necessary to send to the Parliament deputies and "entrists", having to be used as support with the reactionary governments of the centre-right. And all that, of course, not in the interest of Italy or Europe, but only in that of the occupying power, the United States. And once more, we deal with a small centralizing and chauvinistic nationalism, used with the profit of foreign and cosmopolitan interests! It was also time when the extreme-right-hand side was still able to mobilize in Italy the thousands of young people who claimed that Thirty and Trieste are and remain Italian, or to commemorate each year the events of Hungary 1956! May 68 was still far away! The Italian right wing, in its prospections, did not see that this "revolution" was announced. In such a human and political, vétéro-nationalist, provincial context and, in practice, philo-American (who will emerge then in the pseudo-golpiste joke of 1970, which will have as a consequence, during all the decade, sadly famous "years of lead", with their procession of crimes of State), the work of Jean Thiriart had for a great number of nationalists the effect of a bomb; a salutary electric shock which put the nationalist extremism botté vis-a-vis towards problems which, certainly, were not new, but had been forgotten or had fallen into disuse. Today, we cannot thus not take account of the political effects which arose from the thought of Thiriart, even if these effects, initially, were extremely modest. Let us say that starting from the publication of Thiriart's book, the European set of themes became gradually the ideal inheritance of a whole sphere which, in the following years, developed the current anti-mondialiste set of themes.
Without exegeration, we can affirm that it is about time that the topics of the Europe-Nation developed, of an anti-impérialiste fight which is not "left", a geostrategic alliance with the revolutionists of the Third World. The adoption of this topic is all the more astonishing and significant when it is known that the adventure of Young Europe started with a fight against the Algerian FLN. Thiriart had, on this level, completely changed camp, without substantially changing his vision of the world, which, a few decades before, had left the rows of the Belgian extreme-left to adhere to collaboration with the III Germanic Reich, without losing sight of the USSR factor. These politico-ideological acrobatics were worth the charges made that he was an "agent double" under the command of Moscow!
In Italy, the Italian section of Young Europe (Giovane Europa) was quickly setting-up. In spite of the political origin of the majority of the militants, Giovane Europa did not have any direct filiation with Giovane Italia, the organization coed of the MSI (copied with its tower of Giovine Italia de Mazzini in the 19th century); on the contrary, Giovane Europa was practically the antithesis, the contrary alternative. So that once the militant experiment of "Giovane Europa" finished, the majority of its militants were found in Movimento Politico Ordine Nuovo (MPON), opposed to the political line and preaching parliamentary insertion, like it wanted the partisans of Pino Rauti turned over in the rows of the MSI of Almirante.
If an account of the SINGLE role is taken that the thought of Julius Evola exploited the cultural and ideological plans in Italy, one should not forget either that Jean Thiriart impelled, for his part, a single attempt at the restoration of the national forces in those years and the years which followed. Even Giorgio Freda recognized the debt, in the field of these ideas, towards this thinker and Belgian militant.
Other particular and very significant aspects of the book Europe - An Empire of 400 million men, is to have anticipated, by several decades, a fundamental set of themes, which recently resurfaced in the debate particular to Russia, thanks to the initiatives of Alexandre Douguine and of the Dyenn review, and to Italy, thanks to the reviews ORION and AURORA: the GEOPOLITIQUE.
The first sentence of Thiriart's book, in the Italian version, is precisely dedicated to this essential science which has as an aim the people and their governments, a science which had to be undergone, in our post-war period, a very long ostracism, under the pretext of having been an instrument of the Nazi expansion! At the very least this is an incongruous charge when it is known that in Yalta the winners shared the skins of Europe and the rest of the world on the basis of truly geopolitical and geostrategic 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 posed geographical and ideal limits to his Europe, but soon, they exceeded these limits and arrived at a unit of design concerned with the great geopolitical space which is EURASIA.
Once more, Thiriart showed that he was a lucid anticipator of political topics which only mature very slowly in his readers, at least some of them...
But there is not only that!
Jointly with the great ideal of the Europe-Nation and the rediscovery of geopolitics, the reader is obliged to throw a new glance towards the great spaces on this planet. It was another merit of Thiriart to have to exceed the European traumatism of the era of the decolonization and to have sought, for European nationalism, a strategic world alliance with the governments of the Third World not controlled by imperialism, in particular of the Arab and Islamic zones, in North Africa and in the Middle East. It is true that those which discover geopolitics, cannot fail to see the events of the world under a new, prospective light.
And it is in such a context, for example, that it is necessary to include/understand the many voyages of Thiriart to Egypt and Romania, etc, just like his meetings with Chou through to Lay and Ceaucescu or the Palestinian leaders. Everywhere possible, Thiriart sought to weave a network of information and alliances planetary from the anti-impérialiste point of view. In addition, let us all note the same that the Cuban revolution, with its originality, exerted its own influence on Thiriart.
With its synthetic style, almost telegraphic, Thiriart himself 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".
Putting aside the Utopia that this was equal to the United States, one will note that its geopolitical vision was perfectly clear: it wanted large continental blocs and was very distant from any vision skimped from small Western Europe "and the Atlantic" which, like that of today, is nothing more tha the Eastern appendix of the Yankee thalassocracy, having as its centre the Atlantic Ocean, reduced to the function of an "interior lake" of the United States.