Reading Léon Degrelle's 'The Burning Souls' w/ Thomas777

So we're in a good place.

New Year's Eve producing content like the busy bees. We are not not not doing gross stuff for New Year's Eve, like like dodging pedals of vomit and stepping over like weeping fit chicks.

that mister Degreaul wrote. It seemed definitely seems like it's probably the last thing that he wrote that it really meant something to him. I thought we'd open this up by tell us a little bit about what you know about Leon de Grell.

in the culture of the Inner War years. And one of the things that's lacking in court history accounts, even ones that aren't particularly punitive in terms of casting Germany as being taken swept up by a kind of cultural pathology that was both against precedent and not really connected to the spirit of the age other other than in

a kind of contrarian way. But there, you know the things that were ripping through Germany, you know, very powerful, intense energies of a constructive and destructive nature, this kind of confrontation with the future and with the present, which had all the trappings of a kind of ominous future.

Like this stuff was the stuff was impacting every culture in Europe, okay, rit large, and I mean that's why, like we talked about in the Spanish War, Sodes, you know, there there was a truly on the nationalist side of the fascist side, which you know is an incomplete characterization, which is for purpose as a shorthand description. I think

that's at least adequate. You know, like we talked about, you know, there was the funerals at Vasili Marine and ion Mota, you know, these Romanian Iron Guard guys, and you know it was uh you know, Italians, German national socialists, you know, Hungarians, you know, uh Carlos types in Spain who supported the crown. You know, like all these all these all these anti communists, right wing elements, you know, turned out to literally salute like there this funeral procession.

And similarly, the guys who staffed the ranks of of these frontline formations in the Spanish War, I mean they they were guys from all kinds of backgrounds and you know, all all the nations of Europe quite literally, and you know, they common bond was you know, a belief in like you know, in race, you know, like capital r you know, like a you know, faith in God, you know, a

radically highest commitment to those things, you know. And in Belgium, there's a lot of high culture that comes from Belgium, you know, I mean it's it's not just it's not just this kind of like accidental convergence of German or Dutch culture and and you know, kind of like a Francophone state. It it really is a unique place. I got been there like many years ago. You know, the girl was the girl was a Walloon? Is it Belgian?

Like a Francophone Belgian. The right wing tendency there that he was actually instrumental and kind of creating it was very much I mean it was it was the Rexist Party, and it was it was very much royalist, you know in terms of it's kind of in terms of it's kind of supervisual trappings. But it was very national Socialist adjacent. Okay, it was very other than me Catholic and openly Catholic

and royalists like it was. I'd say it was more adjacent to to the national Socialist the culture than any other and any other of the the the the lesser access movements, say maybe the the situation in Croatia, but that's basically the that that's a culture from from where de Grelle emerged. And initially, Uh, there's a wild Loon

legion that was incorporated into the Wehrmacht. The term legion was kind of loosely apply, like I think, UH, it could mean anything from a force that was, you know, slightly larger than than that company you know in AH in the US Army or the British Army of the day, you know, to something that was you know, the size of a like a battalion and a half, you know,

so it veried. But the well in legion was it was it was comparatively small, but it was game enough, and it was it was populated enough by volunteers that you know, the UH it enjoyed the honor of being formally incorporated into the Verrimax and then later the Grille Uh proved himself an incredible an incredibly effective like infantry combat commander. Okay, first at squad and then platoon and

then you know, company level and beyond. Is a very young man and all to the wild and legion became part of the WAFS and that was very much the Grell's That was much it is behest the Grell believed in the waf SS, okay, and that's important, Like, it wasn't just the reason why there was such the look kind of the delicately and very and powerfully uh evocative uh like they delicately crafted, and the and the kind of like the the powerfully evocative in design heraldry of

the SS. Like that wasn't an accident. It wasn't just because it wasn't just because German artists attached to the attached to the officer schools were bored or something like. As an enterprise, it was it was supposed to be an enduring institution. It was supposed to represent the pan European idea. And moving forward after n SIG, you know, there there was gonna be a there was gonna be

a European army, okay. And to what degree they would have butted heads uh with the Wehrmacht, that's hard to say. But operational integration on the ast front was actually very tight, and there was there's a lot of mutual respect between the here and between the SS that develops. I don't I don't think it would have been another like not a long night situation at all. But point being, you know, de Grelle. He wasn't just this kind of dreamy you know, pan europeanist to who else would be a war hero

like he? You know, he the culture of the s S. It was guys like him. It was guys like Jack and Piper and Kurt panzer Meyer. It was Paul Hauser, who's who's a non military genius in my opinion. And he was kind of the big hous was kind of the big defector from the old sort of army elite, you know who I mean. He he he signed on

for the s S immediately. And it's not like he was some It's not like he was a guy, you know who had problems like some of these early and S authors did, like who were great comic commanders, but you know they had a problem with womanizing or brawling or alcoholism or something like Howser could have done anything he wanted, you know, but he he believed in the vafn SS, you know, like as as a proposition and as an enterprise and to itself that was essential to

you know, what was to become the new order. So the girl kind of embodied all those things, you know, That's that's why significant. And then he he he survived the war. He quite literally crashed landed in Franco Spain as a wanted man, and he he lived to be quite elderly. He lived until the nineteen nineties, early nineties memory serves, I know he lived beyond nineteen eighty eight. I think he was alive until like ninety three, ninety four.

But you know, he'd show up at IHR events and like mingle with people, and you know, he he very much positioned himself as kind of a defender of the historical record. He never shied from his war record. You know, up until the day he died, he'd on a formal occasions, you know, he he'd wear his like war decorations, you know, and uh he was he was proud of the vafinances on the day he died. So he was he was

a real man and a real patriot. And especially you know because my like my generation, our generation, we were kind of like the last generation of young people you know who are like around like World War Two veterans. You know, I uh inappreciable numbers and uh de Grell.

I've talked to a lot of guys who got to meet the Grell and stuff, you know, mostly European guys, but some with some of the some of the American dudes who were active, you know, with in IHR and and with like liberty lobby stuff, you know, ladies early nineties, and they who had a chance to meet him, and they just said he was like an incredible guy, you know, which I'm sure he was. But that's I mean that that's a significance and this that's something. Uh, I take

up a peculiar interest in the vaf sss. And as you know and as the fellows know as well as you know, the even the casual subscribers. I'm not I'm not a military guy. Obviously, I'm not like prior service and like I'm not I'm not a military science guy.

I focus on the vaf SS like I do, like not just because it's cool, which it is, and I don't I don't run from the fact that like gravity towards things just because they're cool sometimes, you know, I don't think we ever outgrow that if we're intellectually curious. But it's also like the vaf SS is a model of European integration. I mean, that's essential, and that was after NCIGE, that that was the model for how things

were going to be organized. Okay, so these guys like ian Ian Kershaw and some of these other kind of just midway court historians are like, oh, German chauvinism and German in nationalism. It's like, look, nobody there were There weren't a million like non Germans who signed on to the fight in the ass because they love the German nationalism.

Like that's not how things work, and that's just not how this as nine like in you know, by the mid twentieth century, that kind of thinking was dead anyway, you know, like you had the whole the entire Raizone debt for the Third Reich in geostrategic terms and consequently in cultural terms, the two things can't be extricated. What's

to make Europe a superpower? You know, so a this uh this kind of like this armed like protection echelon and like offten shoots staff like it quite literally translates to like armed protection echelon or like armed like defensive echelon, you know of kind of like replacing or as like a or representing you know, kind of a vanguard formation against uh, the enemies of Europe, racial and otherwise you know, kind of like a watch on the Rhine, like writ

large that was where like all all the nations of Europe are represented, you know, and with with heraldic UH signification. You know that that's something that days so like Crusader era, you know, like that's that's very deep in the European kind of cultural like military cultural mind, so that it's important to you on the fact that it's just cool,

you know. And that's why I was like very much not like a military type, like spend so much time with the vass because it's it's got an outsized importance in UH in the Third Reich and like the worldview that shaped it. But that's that that maybe that's probably a little bit outside of the scope, but that's that's that that was born to consider. We're talking about de Grill in history and what he represented.

Thomas to comment on anything here. I am nearly at the end of my life. I felt almost nothing, I felt almost everything, knew everything. More than anything I suffered. I saw dazzled the great golden fires of my youth arise. Their flames eliminated my illuminated my land. The crowds made the starry waves of their thousands of faces dance around me. Their fervor, their eddies existed. But did they really in

fact exist? Wasn't all this a dream? Did I not dream that thirty years ago a nation called my name? And that on certain days that the most distant newspapers of the planet repeated it? Tucked away in my exiled sadness, I can no longer believe in my past itself? Did I live those times? Or not know those passions? Raise those oceans? I walk my terraces, I lean over my roses, I discern the sense Have I ever been another being other than this lonely dreamer who vainly clutches at memories

frayed like mountain fogs. Wasn't all this something other than a hallucination. I cannot see, far away, far away, in faded lights, their bodies as if from a Greco painting, growing thinner and thinner. Did these men who have faded forever from the horizon know me? Did they follow me? Did I lead them? Did I exist in my memories? As in my hands. I no longer feel that fleeting wind. My eyes and what eyes should I have? Eyes of desperation.

My eyes have searched the impassive sky, tried to see in the depths of the years, in the depths of the centuries. What did it mean the being that I am? In what way it is still the being that once carried my name, who was known, who was listened to, for whom many have lived, and for whom also many have died.

up the history of men, what can I still believe of the ideals which were born in me, which burned me, which I projected, of the value of my convictions at the time, of my feelings, of what I thought of humanity, what I dreamed of creating for her. Each human being is a succession of human beings, as dissimilar from each other, as the passer adds, the passers by whose desperate faces

we scrutinize in the street. At fifty, how do we still look like the young man of twenty, whom we are trying to remember, and whose survival we want at all costs. Even his flesh is no longer the same flesh. It is gone, has been remade, renewed, no more than a millimeter of skin is the skin of those times?

like Piper. You know, Piper went on to a prestigious job, like with Portia, Like you know, he was like an incredibly successful guy by like any metric. But he during like the last interview, gave the Spiegel when he kind of become marked man again during the kind of resurgence,

and and I fish it's tendencies, you know. He was like you know, when I was you know, when I was in when I was in my twenties, I was, uh, I was leading a tank across the step against the Red Army, you know, and we were prepared to go all the way to Moscow, crush it and literally shake the world, you know, and then uh, you know, like nothing like like nothing later in life is gonna come close to that, and everything else is gonna seem this kind of like mundane. But it's also these guys felt

like prisoners. I mean not just because of like the the kind of you know, the constant the constant threat, like a physical and spiritual of the regime that replaced the one that they fought on behalf of. But you know, everybody with hostage the Cold War at this time, and particularly like in Europe. And Piper made that point too, like when the Spiegel guy was trying to kind of like impeaches not you know, not it kind of impeaches

moral credibility. Piper is like, well, you know, now we're that designated battleground of of World War three, Like we're better off now. You know. It's like basically saying like these distance we as Europeans live now is crushing the mundane, punctuated only by like the periodic terror of you know, a crisis that could resolve in in in the nuclear apocalypse. You know. It's I mean, so I think gravity of those things, that's it's a very strange place to be,

you know. And yeah, in Degrell's case, you know, he personally he was personally decorated by Hitler. He was a he was a Knights crossholder, you know, he was a

he was a hero of the Third Reich. You know, he wasn't uh, he wasn't just a run on the mill kind of war hero looking back on on his glory d's or whatever, you know, and to to go from that too in a few years, you know, kind of having to watch for you travel because you know, you might be you might you might be you might be assaulted and detained and find yourself, you know, indicted in some kangaroo courts in the Hague or Tel Aviv

or the United States. I mean that they had to be almost kind of surreal, like I think about like those old TV shows like The Prisoner or something, you know, like the old BBC show or whatever. It's just it's a very strange way to live, and like anybody who's at all thoughtful or psychologically sensitive, as obviously the girl was, they had to really do a number on them. But that's that's all I want to do.

break these nets themselves, to throw your soul overboard. The horrible thing is to have to say that the essential in our lives was caricatured, disfigured by a thousand defilements and a thousand denials. Who has not experienced these debacles. Some realize their bankruptcy with pain. Others make the observation

with cynicism or with an arrogant smile. Of those who no longer listen, who are convinced that the knowledge of man and the superiority of the spirit consist in engaging in all experiences deliberately exhausting the most perverse pleasures, without excessive astonishment, and without regret, having found in the use and in the desecration of everything information, the condescension and indifference of an ethics of decomposition, free from any spiritual counterbalance,

without a doubt, the world in which we live has become, to a great extent, the world of these amoral people, so sure of themselves no doubt those who would persist in imagining a humanity of high virtues may fancy them to be anachronistic beings, non evolved, glued to old fads, living apart from men, apart from their time, apart from fashion, apart from reality.

complimentary and seamless way. And like that. The people who are ignorant of the topic it loved, the mouth off about it are always claiming like that's not possible, that some contradictory. But he's he's very much speaking as a Catholic through much of this memoir. That's all.

These impulses, yes I carried them. This love of others, yes, it burned me, It consumed me. I wanted to see in man a heart, to love, to excite, to raise a soul which, even if it was half exiciated by the pestilence of its slavery, aspired to find a pure breath and sometimes only waited for a word or a look to emerge and to be reborn. Let us be straightforward to interject, to use others the right to moral or spiritual consideration these I do not have. I know

this only too well. I have had my share of miseries alast like so many others. And even if I hadn't suffered them myself, I've been loaned so many miseries from others that I can only feel when I analyze myself, confusion and unfathomable sadness. Yet the spirit of the Ideal that throws its fire into this book has devoured me every day of my existence. I should, of course have left it to others less affected, the care and responsibility

of returning light and song to mankind. But that fire was burning me down today, suffocated by a relentless spell. The great fire of yesteryear leaves nothing but ashes. I come back to it anyway, stubbornly, because these ashes evoke the moment of fervor in my life, the deepest impulses, the very spiritual basis of my action. Here they are disarrayed, delivered to the wind, which will quickly disperse them. These thoughts, these dreams, are all in disorder. I have not made a plan.

Sometimes it was at the summit of my public action. Sometimes it was in the abandonment the mud and the cold of my distant life as a suffering soldier in the vastness of the Eastern Front. But the soul that lived these impulses followed a common thread, invisible to many. It was nevertheless the artery that spiritually nourished my existence. Therefore, these know are not so much nonsense. They record the ups and downs of a soul among souls, all of

which have their ups and downs. Certainly, the spirit which has arrived that the stale wisdom of cynicism can dominate by its cold smile, can display the icy marble of its interior tomb and engrave on them its findings with an impassive pen. But fire, it has many forms. It rises, lowers, is reborn, starts anew. This book is fire, with the exaltations of fire, the excess of fire. If only they could have the beneficent heat, If only the souls could

find this comfort and vigor. As we find them meditating in the evening near a large, almost silent wood fire, the waves of its powerful life penetrate, and their radiation and their contemplation. They offer themselves completely, They deliver themselves completely. The gift, the real gift, is thus annihilating until the last brand from me. My fire is dead, my life has plunged into the abyss, has been submerged by the

black dawn that has smothered everything. But I still want to believe that these impulses, which animated the action of a man already dead in the eyes of most, though he has the misfortune to still live for himself, will still be able to join spiritually from here to there in the world. Anxious hearts, I remember these words that I had deciphered one day on a tomb of black marble therein dumb in Flanders, in a church of my

lost homeland, at Seymour Tuus. Or it even dead, it burns, may these pages the last fleeting fire of what I

was burn for a moment, warm for a moment. Souls haunted by the passion of giving and believing, believing in spite of everything, in spite of the assurances of the corrupt and the cynics, despite the sad, bitter taste that leaves us with the memory of our falls the awareness of our misery and the immense field of moral ruins of a world that is certain to have no more of salvation, which prides itself on it, and which nevertheless must be saved, must more than ever be saved.

This is the like the degree to which I mean, for better or worse, And however anybody feels about the Third Reich and adjacent regimes, and you know, institutions like the vaffin As says, which were kind of like the

tie that bound like these regimes together in terms of praxis. Like, these guys really did view themselves as as crusaders, and they the the imperatives that they were abiding were very much metaphysical and and uncompromisingly moral ones like not moral in the sense of you know, what is morality, but you know, owing to ah, their their world view was populated by you know, by by values directed things. You know. It was not it was it was not conventional kind

of uh, twentieth century politics. Okay. I know that some people their rebuttal would be the well, this is a sort of like window dressing for you know, typically crude power political activity. And yeah, there's always some degree of that, But these institutions don't just spontaneously develop mythologies to substantiate you know, the needs of of like a war executive, even even a messianic type person like get off Hitler. That just doesn't happen. Okay, this is obviously something that

these men felt very deeply in. Uh, it was very extant in their in their minds and hearts as it were, and that they can't be overstated. I mean, yeah, there was there was a there's there's a radicalism obviously that animated the communists to do what they did, and that kind of uh, a kind of reckless indifference to what the consequences would be, you know, if their revolutionary ambitions fell short or whatever. But it wasn't the same thing.

You know, it the place from where it emerged in emotional in the most primitive kind of emotional terms, you know, might have been the same, but what it uh what what what it what it's what what its intentions were and ultimately what populated that kind of worldview was like

very very different, you know. And you it's not just to Grill who makes these points, you know, like I said, like if you read what Piper wrote, I mean even guys except Dietrich, who was a you know very much kind of a like a like a like a rough human Bavarian, you know, like he he talked about, you know, his role as a commanding leaf standard and basically like religious terms, you know. And that's that's some that's very authentic. Like whether you believe that it's right or not, that's

not what we're talking about. Like we're talking about what animated, you know, the men who actually took up our arms in the service of these institutions, and and the and the idea that uh, these institutions you know, created to serve.

and conventions. Happiness has become for man and for a woman a heap of fruit, which they devour in a hurry, or in which they plant their teeth without more and reject them pell mell damage, bodies, damaged souls, quick exhausted by the fleeting frenzy, already looking for other, more exciting or more perverse fruits. The air is charged with all moral and spiritual denials. The lungs drawn in vain for a breath of fresh air, the freshness of a spray

thrown close to the sands. Man's interior gardens have lost their colors and their bird song. Love itself is no longer given. And besides, what is love, the most beautiful word in the world, Reduced to the rank of physical pastime, instinctive and interchangeable. The only happiness lays in the gift, the only happiness that consoles, that intoxicates, like the full fragrance of the fruits and leaves of autumn, happiness only exists in the gift, the complete gift. His selflessness gives

him the flavor of eternity. He returns to the lips of the soul with an intangible sweetness. Give to have seen eyes that shine, to have been understood, touched, fulfilled. Give feel the grand happy tablecloths floating like dancing water on a heart suddenly adorned with sun. Give to have reached the secret fibers that weave the mystery of sensibility, the mysteries of sensibility. Give to have this gesture which unburdens the hand, which relieves its carnal weight, which exhausts

the need to be loved. Then the heart becomes as light as pollen. Its pleasure rises like the song of the nightingale, a burning voice that lights the darkness. We pour forth with joy. We have emptied this power of happiness, which was not to be partaken self fishly, which encumbered us, which we had to pour out in the same way that the earth cannot endlessly contain the life of springs and lets them burst under crocuses and daffodils, or in

the fault of the green rocks. But today, in a thousand withered wells, the springs of life have ceased to flow. The earth no longer pours out this gift which swelled it. She holds back her happiness. She chokes. The agony of our time lies here. The century does not fail for lack of material support. Never before has the universe been so rich, filled with so much comfort, helped by such productive industrialization. Never have there been so many resources or

goods offered. It is the heart of a man, and this alone, which is bankrupt. It is by a lack of love. It is by a failure of believing and of giving oneself that the world has overwhelmed itself with murderous blows. The century wanted to be no more than the century of appetites. This century wanted to be no more than the century of appetites. Its pride was wasted. It believed in miracles, stocks, and ingots over which it

would be the master. It believed just as much in the victory of carnal passions projected beyond all limits, in the liberation of the most diverse forms of enjoyment, constantly multiplied, always more degraded and degrading, endowed with a technique which is after all, generally only an accumulation, without great imagination, of rather impoverished vices, of emptied beings.

something on its own terms. But there is not an accident that there's not really you know, you don't you don't find you don't find communists, and you don't find guys who uh you know, you don't find tories in the UK from the epoch core like writing and talking this way. You know the fact is there's like mid Hampson said, Hampson, Uh, you know, he got the Nobel Price for literature and then he essentially like eulogized Adolf Hitler,

and they made a bunch of people really mad. But he you know, Selene made the same point, you know that there was a that this was, you know, Europe's historical moment to try and redeem something of of cultural life by way of political mechanisms. Like however, however is a guide that may have been in terms of you know what an improper instrument instrumentality being employed to that effect.

But that's why, that's why, that's why it's laughable when people are like, oh, you know, the right is uneducated. It's like what what what what what do educated people talk about? You know, like labor and capital paradigms and like what what people are doing with their genitals? I mean, that's that's what educated people are into. Like it's i mean,

it's laughable. But you know, to grow obviously, to Gull is an outlier in the sense of, you know, he was a he was a remarkable guy, both you know, as a as a as an infantry commander as well as like a man of letters and stuff. But it wasn't it wasn't remarkable that you know, these are the kind of like this is the kind of like passion that animated his commitments, you know, and that's important to consider.

the great son of true Joy. The puffs of pleasure from possessions matter of flesh, must, being illusory and compounding in their flaws, sooner or later vanish. What remains is only the passion for taking, seizing in bouts of anger that set them against all obstacles and against the stale orders of decay, Clinging to their ransacked and rotten lives, vain emptied, their hands dangling, they do not even see the moment approaching when the artificial work of their time

will collapse. It will collapse because it is contrary to the very laws of the heart. And let's say the big word, to the laws of God. He alone, so strong that we laughed at him, gave the world its balance directed the passions open to us. The gates of complete giving and authentic love gave a meaning to our days. Whatever our happiness and our misfortunes. We can gather all the conferences of the world, gathered by herds, the heads of state, the economic experts, and the champions of all

the techniques. They will weigh, they will decree, but essentially they will fail because they will ignore the obvious. The disease of the century is not in the body. The body is sick because the soul is sick. This is what is essential, whatever it may take to cure the real the great revolution to be made. Is there spiritual revolution or the ruin of the century? The salvation of the world is in the will of souls who believe

Section three. Here is the right path. Those who hesitate in the face of struggle are those whose souls are numb. A grand ideal always gives you the strength to overcome the body, to suffer from fatigue, from hunger, from cold.

What matters sleepless nights, overwhelming toil, stress, or poverty. The main thing is to have at the bottom of your heart a great force which warms and which pushes forward, which revives the loose nerves, which makes the tired blood beat with great blows, which puts in the eyes that fire which burns and which conquers. Then suffering is of no consequence. The pain itself becomes joy because it is a means of enhancing one's legacy, of purifying one's sacrifice. Yes,

ease sedates the ideal. Nothing writes it better than the whip of hard life. It makes us understand the depth of the duties to be assumed, the mission of which we must be worthy. The rest does not count, health does not matter. We are not on earth to eat on time, to sleep on time, to live one hundred

years or more. All this is vain and foolish. Only one thing matters, having a useful life, sharpening your soul, improving it at all times, monitoring your weaknesses and exalting your impulses, serving others, throwing happiness and tenderness around you, giving your arm to your neighbor to rise all to rise, all by helping each other. Once these duties are accomplished, what does it mean to die at the age of

thirty or one hundred years? To feel the fever throbbing at the hours when the human beast cries out at the end of its power. Let him get up again. Despite everything, the ideal appears to give its strength only at the breaking point. Only the soul counts and must

dominate everything else. Short or long, life is only redeemed if we have no cause for shame at the moment we have to give it back, when the sweetness of the days calls to us, and the joy of loving, and the beauty of a face, a perfect body, a light sky, and the call of distant races. When we are close to giving in to the lips, to the colors, to this light, to the number, to the numbness of the relaxed hours, let us tighten in our hearts all

these dreams on the verge of the golden escape. The true escape is to quit our dear is to quit our dear, sensitive prey, at the very moment when the sweet scent invites our bodies to fail. At this hour, when you must abandon softness and place love above desire, when everything is painful to the point of cruelty, a sacrifice really begins to be whole, to be pure, then

we have surpassed ourselves. We are finally giving something before we looked only to ourselves, and the concern for pride and selfish glory corrupted what flows out from our souls, and it was used instead of given. One gives for good without calculation, because all is given and nothing remains of the giver only when one kills the love of the self. This does not come easily, because the human beast is reluctant. We understand so poorly what can be

learned from bitterness. It is sweet to dream of an ideal and to build it in your mind. Still, to tell the truth, this is precious little. What is an ideal? If it is just a game or a sweet dream, You have to build it after all. In reality, each stone must be torn from our comfort, from our joys, from our rest, from our heart. When despite everything, the building rises over the years. When you do not stop along the way, when faced with heavier and heavier stones

to be placed, you continue. Only then does the ideal begin to live. It lives only to the extent that we died to ourselves. What a drama deep down that righteous life.

I mean it's I mean plus two. I mean that that those two functions were literally combined, you know, in the nightly orders that serve the Roman Church. You know, I mean, I I realize that can be overstated too, because it's not that was a discreete epoch as well. You know, it's not like the final statement on soldiering or on or on piety or whatever. But you know, this idea, that this idea that these things are fundamentally

at loggerheads and like irreconcilable. It's this nonsense, you know, And that's not people people draw upon them like the birth of tragedy and the genealogy of moral as well as like beyond good and evil like Niche, it's like trying to flesh out their conceptual biases. That's not what Niche is talking about. It's far more conceptually nuanced, and his notion is basically that these it's a self defeating enterprise because salvation comes in the form of repudiating that

which it sets out to confirm. I mean, that's like outside the scope of what we're discussing now, but I people, uh, people have this like very very like literalist and like rigid idea of you know, oh, like the the soldier or the partisan is at odds with you know, the priest or the or the religious person. Like that's not the case at all. Like not only is that not the case, but they're they're essentially one and the same.

And unless you understand that, you're not going to understand, you know, like how how politics as we know it developed in the West that we're talking about if by politics we mean you know, not I'm not talking about the day to day business about like this the village council figures out, you know, how to keep the water running, like I'm talking about you know, I'm talking about these how conceptual horizons develop, you know, and how these things come to you know, how these things come to embody

like prime symbols of of cultural reference and things, you know, And that's and in that regard, you know, the the Third Reich and the s S and the various fascist movements and and these uh, these difficult that you know, categorized movements of the Iron Guard. Like on the one hand, there was not a lot of precedent for that, because the stroke conditions that created those tendencies hadn't existed before.

But at the same time, the like the the underlying kind of impulse that gave Riseley's movements like within the minds of UH or the men who created them, Like, that's something that that that's something that's not that that's something that's well well known to the Indo European mind. And I'd argue it's so ancient as to be primordial. You know. Yeah, that's that's heavy stuff.

Blood comes always before reason. We are one with these ties, as if our veins were only one organism and the family had only one heart, a heart that pumps the same blood in each of us and reminds us of our vital hearth. The same is true of our homeland. We cannot escape it. The sight of a yellowed print of our cathedrals, the memory of the smell of the dunes, or the gray hue of our hillsides, of the curve of our rivers, brings up to our throat a love

that stifles us, that makes our voices hoarse. The country's past is embodied, is embedded in the depth of our consciousness and our sensibilities. Everything about us is survival, rebirth, even if unconsciously. The past of a country is reborn in each generation, as spring returns, always in new sprout. We may be unburdened traverse the world, lose our mind, the native soil still sends into our hearts an essence

that we do not create and that dominates us. All that it takes is the voice of a radio station picked up in a distant country, brought by imprecise waves, so that memories, ties, and laws emerge again, real water marks, indestructibly embedded in the fabric of our tormented days. Part five,

Hearth and Stone. You must have one wandered over the most distant seas, known the red knights of the tropics, the cane fires, the songs are the negroes, the deserts, with their pink sands, their leafless shrubs, the skeletons of horses bleached by the winds. You must have climbed frozen lakes and hot snow, picked mimosa flowers from the ruins of carthage, grapefruits in Havana, a blade of grass near

the fluted pillars of the acropolis. To fully love your homeland, that which we first saw with the only lucid eyes in the world, the eyes of a child, it is necessary to have known other journeys with furniture and clothes, books, tables, the simple material goods. It is necessary to have bend this nomad of the anonymous apartments, where one sits as one sits in a train to know the passion and

the nostalgia. First of the first of all landscapes, of this place, in the heart that is home, we can speak without regret of the great joys of foreign lands. They still gild our eyes the days. The day rises yellow and silver on the palm trees which skirt the Sea of the Antilles, Clouds of fog in the olive trees of the Delphi Valley, fishermen rowing in the clear blue knights of the Cyclades, the palm grove streaked with

red sun near the red walls of the Marrakesh. But the memory of wandering journeys in the prisons of our solace lodging weighs us down and suffocates us. What remains in our life of these impersonal relays. The walls where we heartlessly hung and removed, the paintings, the apartment next door where you were surveilled, the mingled chatter of telephones, the staircase where we met without knowing each other, the

cell car of the elevator with his double bars. We look at this decora of life and death with dull eyes, charged with veritable despair. What do these partitions tell us? The kitchen opened to a horrible courtyard a few meters long, without an unexpected nook, without a quirk, with that barren of natural foliage, without a cozy nest. What's say these beds and furniture, always awkward and embarrassed, as if they feel out of place, poor, unhappy, vaguely nomadic. Even furniture

has a soul. The old sideboard that clutters the corridor, the clockcase that no longer resonates, so as not to annoy anyone once lived, once knew a real house had for one hundred years, two hundred years, their place, their touch, their scent, poor sideboard and poor clock, far from the polished parquet, from the smell of lavender, the worn and water stained staircase, the conversation all about it, the salute

of the sun entering suddenly through an open door. We alienated moderns, dragged from apartment to apartment in soulas cities feel a little more torn from our hearts each time we have to cross a new threshold. Light up, the sterile white corridors. Get used to these handles, these shutters, this door that does not hold, this gas stove that flares up too quickly, these buses that pass by with awful horns that crush the soul. We are silent, but

we forget everything. I'm sorry, that's very much hideger Yeah, yeah, and man like the old sideboard and the big clock, motionless looks and sees the land of our birth returns to life in our memories. Here it is a little foliage lights up the facade, two blue stone steps, a large vine encumbered balcony in the gardens. Everything is in its place, Everything has a meaning, a smell of form.

We go to the cupboard, the cupboard, that beautiful, full serious word, because it holds our, nourishing bread, so familiar we can navigate it with our eyes closed. This corner smells the tobacco. That one the cat who always purred in the warmest place. That noise is Father rising from the office chair. The halting footstep is Mother who in the dining room waters are flowers. These rooms are not merely places to stop. This one is the room above

the living room. This one is the room above the office. This one is the room of the little ones, even when they have become men with heavy thoughts. Each of these rooms has its history, has known its vigils, its maladies. We left it one morning, carrying a darling body in our arms. Ah the horror of our children being born or dying in anonymous apartments, surrounded by living furnishings since departed, where other nomads have, in their turn, resumed their awkward

life without soulful memories, not even daring to remember. So out of place are they. House of yesteryear, with your poor draperies, your occasional bad taste. This ball on the railing, These photos of children in a cue Lulu, the grand piano, the blackfire place, the tin bathtub where people wash one

after the other. These steps that we still scale twenty years later in memories, The breadths that we hear again passing close to us, The face of the mother who appears first in the distance, then right there before our eyes, almost inscrutable. We feel like children desiring again her soft caress. Calls of immense tenderness rise with distant sense of flowers and foliage, Songs of water pass at the bottom of the garden, the soft sunshine filling our entire world. Everything

we are comes from that time. Unfortunate our children, who have never had a house of their own, and who do not collect these memories from which our life flows. It is the home that forms us into who we are. How can we have a soul in a faceless house, one that has changed like a carnival mask. Life is fixed on hearth and stone. The rest flows away like broken wood floating on a winter stream. Home our tender fortress.

It takes on a unique face little by little, built over time, through common hardships and the birth of children. The walls hold love and dreams. It's furnishings, beautiful or ugly, are our companions and witnesses. A sweetness rises slowly from the souls within. It becomes a place of contemplation, rest, and certainty, rather than a brief stop on the journey of our existence. Softness, balance points of reference, testimony, self examination.

Without mother and home, tell me, my soul, where would we be.

like linear natal experience of of the culture. So not only is it disruptive, obviously, you know, if if there if there's literally no rootedness to anybody's life, and you know, not only every generation who you know, does uh does the does does the family like up and and moves you know, to totally strange environs, but even like within people's lives like in the present epoch, it's it's supposed to be normal for you to just you know, radically

alter your surroundings and your pattern of life if in day to day terms, you know, multiple times, And that's that's crazy. I mean obviously that doesn't lend itself to psychic or spiritual stability, but it also it makes it basically impossible to sustain any kind of any kind of cultural learning over time. But I mean, that's that's that's that's the point, you know, And the what consciousness is

that's a huge question. But whether it is, you know, whether he is the Heidegger remains relevant is because he was finding like fundamentally concerned with the question of consciousness. You know, we we can't talk about culture as a as an intergenerational experience without discussing consciousness and the and

the degree to which it is actually like literally transmitted. Okay, and that's a controversial subject, but nobody would deny that basic hostulate and to deliberately aim to eradicate that process, you're basically murdering cultures. Like you're basically destroying people's ability, you know, not just within their own discreete like individual life to like, you know, drive meaning and to participate

historically like within their life. You're essentially like removing their ability to the constitute you know, a component of of of of an enduring cultural enterprise of phenomenon. And that's that's that that that's an incredibly evil thing to do, you know, and I think people detect that, even if they don't have the knowledge base or the sort of

conceptual signifiers to coherently identify what's underway. I believe that it's one of the reasons why so many people are in comparative terms, revolting against you know, the the global regime, because they're realizing what it's trying to do to them. I mean not just them personally, but like what it's trying to do to people and and and kind of

retool the human condition. It is something that you know, basically doesn't doesn't just render individual lives meaningless, but you know, like murders cultures, which means that you know, it's basically basically erasing people's entire peoples from history as if they never existed. That's like, that's like committing homicide times a million. But that's probably been outside the scope. But i it's fundamental to understand that what I just described to understand

where Degreel is coming from. I mean, that's the core of what national socialism was aiming to address, as well as you know, the rectist movement that he found himself at the helm of, as well as any number of other movements that constituted the resistance to the you know, to the capitalist Bolshevik paradigm.

its indescribable thrills. From that hour, women are no longer the same yesterday They were hurried, their eyes clear, their souls empty, their lips distracted. The life born in them, like a hidden flowering, suddenly gives them gravity, confidence, a great and proud force, the certainty of creating, of giving, and the emotional charm of the living mystery that will one day be borne Through their pain. They remain mirthful,

but their gaze becomes deeper. They carry within them a treasure whose pulses intimately link to their own, Their vigor, their melancholy, This great ideal, sometimes undeclared, which lifts or torments them. Thoughts and regrets, joys and desires become one with its hidden life, ever present for the one who

gives it blood gives its blood and soul. In this perfect communion of flesh and heart, they are brave and weary, tired of the overburdened body of their youth, bent like branches laden heavy with fruit, weary of sun and wind, yet still valiant, knowing what their knowing, what renewal their bodies now tenderly contain in this flesh that their most delicate tremors shape. They know that this flower soul, barely

open in the night, will bloom tomorrow. The innocent heart, which they cover like the cover, like the night sky, is filled with sweetness and peace of the stars and the silence among the clamorous world. They carry this glimmering night. Their dreamy eyes contemplate these great moonlit landscapes, where a world known only to them lies dormant, powerful, and immense. They see blue mountains, black and smooth waters, enchanted skies studded with fires, set in the jet black of evening,

like ethereal gems. They advance under these nocturnal lights, the heart taught but unsure. No one walks beside them. The universe looks elsewhere. They alone watch, They alone have the eyes to see it. They go on, body heavy, soul, tents and elevated, as if drawn by the greatness of

this secret night. These months when the flesh blossoms are their private springtime, when only the shadow, the shadows, and the scents, the colors and the lights reach their great love stretched out with arms open to life, like an orchard of the heart. They will experience the birth of this new life sundered from the great dream. Then are faced with constant efforts in the service of these bodies and these souls which enchant them and which frighten them. Royalty,

trembling and radiant. What will be reborn in these hearts? Will they keep the song and purity of mountain waters? Will these naive eyes ever make you cry? Will this little curly head, the color of the sun and the stone wall carry good and clear thoughts the Mother's dream like fiery sword lilies. It is best not to fear too much to show the straight course, but to leave it lined with greenery and woodlands, and to let them travel pure and bright the earth and past the earthen

path of the horizon. The Mother will put in the hearts of the little ones once again, only what she will have nourished herself. Their soul will contain what hers will have contained. The images of her heart will trace great reflections on them, like shadows advancing in the fields under the white clouds of the great summer sky. She can only bear their gaze if her soul is as clear as theirs. All that is not flesh and pure

astonishes children and leaves a mark on their hearts. They will not later have strength and renunciation, wisdom and simplicity, virtue and enjoy unless their spiritual nourishment is as pure as mother's milk. The faces of mothers are noble, supremely clear, rejuvenated by the presence of wilfully innocent lives, even though a thousand even through a thousand days of hardship, women are greatly blessed by the body that trembles, turn towards the inner dream, and which dwells the grand secret of

the breath of life. Part seven, the task of happiness. The more we walk among false smiles, greedy or unclean eyes, grasping hands, withered bodies, the more we are disappointed by the mediocrity of existence. We quickly realize that only the joys put in our hearts when we were young remained solid and eternal. It is in youth that we are made happy or unhappy forever.

the most treacherous roads. There is a task to happiness. We either develop it or suffocate it. If we train children simply in deep but elementary joys, they will advance in life by keeping in their eyes the light of

their inner life, balanced, persevering. But if we ruin their childhood, if they have seen too much or heard too much, if they have caught, if they have been caught in a whirlwind, if years of calm, tenderness have not strengthened in them the tender happiness of their innocence, then their life will be what their childhood was, witnessing disorder. They will become disordered, having never been made steady in their tastes,

their feelings, their thoughts. They will be at the mercy of the winds, possessing only illusory joys that will burn them, and immensurate and emiserate them at the whims of others. It becomes far more difficult to change. Later, a hardened tree cannot straightened. One can at most clear the foliage and cut back branches. But when it was young, full of sap, we could have straightened it with an agile

finger guided it helped it to flourish. It is at a time when children simply seem to be playing, watching, simply observing a sparrow or a lark, spelling words and giving kisses that they photograph in their hearts and their imagination.

Exactly that which we give them life is just the development of this photograph, of this photography, the acids of existence will imprint on them the images beautiful and powerful or troubled and sad, which we have offered to their curious little eyes, to their clear hearts, like sheets of shiny paper. What we deprive them of by our pride or our agitation, or a last, by our passions, will be cruelly repaid to us. And seeing them unstable, dissatisfied,

the soul weakened and ravaged by our own fault. You got anything on that, No, I.

the implications there ran. And that's also when you know, I mean, Heidiger's last public statement in the former like an interview was nineteen sixty five, and then there was But I mean, I this this, this stuff all the kind of enduring perspective of of dissident traditionalists, you know, the capital t or unreconstructed national socialist and fascists of the era, and uh they agree to which that became like a truly underground tendency which now is somewhat emergent

in ways that was not possible before. But I mean, this is all important stuff. It's not just you know, a conversation starter about you know, why, oh why is the girl interesting to read today? You know? It it relates to the origins of the movement that de Grell served and why the stakes became so truly desperate when Europe was threatened existentially by the kind of twin hydra of Sovietism and and and Americanism. But uh yeah, I uh,

I'll be more. I'll be more with it too. And this when we reconvene, I'm getting over another flare up. But I'm but well, uh, if it's not gonna screw up what you want to accomplish, we'll we'll deep dive a little bit into you know, Heideger and and kind of the Aristotilian aspects of national socialism that also dovetail with Catholic metaphysics. If that's agreeable to.

carrying our shoes in our hands. Suddenly, the night of frozen darts gave way to the warm smell of the dazzling naves. Our heads were spinning a bit. The smell of the incense intoxicated. The Douyene himself was pale. But from behind the choir screen came a din powerful enough to drive away the wild boars ten kilometers from our tangled woods. The organ blower pedaled as if he feared arriving late. The director brought to the brought the choir

to a wild turbulence. By the time of midnight Christians. The emotion and the noise had been such that we were climbing atop the straw of the chairs, expecting to see the angels suddenly appear above the choir. But the angels had continued to stand quietly among the candles, with their large wings at rest. We approached them hands clasped under our big woolen gloves. We were kneeling on the marble. The brown ox and the gray donkey were close by. We were burning to touch them, to see if their

hair would part like a fountain of water. But we children loved our children even more than we loved animals. We loved other children even more than we loved animals. Jesus was lying on the straw. It softened our hearts to think he must be cold. Nobody had given him thick stockings like us, no shoes, no scarf to wrap around his nose, no green woolen gloves to cover his hands.

We looked a little astonished as the father Saint Joseph, who humbly stood doing nothing to glorify himself, and the mother, clad in blue and white, so still and so beautiful. We knew only beautiful mothers with pure eyes in which we saw everything. We had looked into those eyes so often, But those of the mother of little Jesus entranced, enchanted us to the extreme, as if Heaven allowed children to see more in them than men did. We said nothing

when going down to the coast. When children say nothing, it is because they have because they much to say. At home, the smoky chocolate and the big table covered with cakes never managed to tear us away. On the return from invisible conversations between the children of human mothers and the little child of the Mother of Heaven, on the top of the piano, a crib had been erected, where we could, standing atop a stool, take the ox and the donkey in our hands. Little pink and blue

candles were lit every night. Each child had their own on which they would blow a deep breath at the end of the prayers. Behind, kneeling near a chair in the dark, the Mother led our religious impulses, guided us when it was all over. When we turned to her in order to obtain the right to put out our little lights, we saw in her two eyes shining so much emotional fervor. Paradise comes into the hearts of children

through the examples, through the example of the mother. At that hour, humble and poignant, the mother knew that little souls had been marked forever. That we could blow out the little candles near the manger, but they would never be extinguished in our hearts. Every winter, when Christmas returns, the little flames lit by our mothers once again burned high and bright.

And thanks again. Sorry, I'm I'm uh, I'm dragging a little bit, but I hope, uh, I hope people got something out of my commentary on this episode.

kind Yeah, yeah, it's not Strauss's own. I mean, I don't generally recommend Strauss to anybody unless they're trying to I kind of trace the trajector of, you know, the American right post Nuremberg. But as as an intellectual historian, he's very useful. And the book I mentioned, it's it's very it's it's very straightforward, and it's very much correct.

That's there's not there's not polemic in it, and it's not it's not colored by you know, a stain of the author's ideological biases, but other than that, there's there's just not And Carl Lowith too, who obviously my peters Strauss was inspired by, but who he parted ways with on unfundamental issues not just of ethics, but uh you know, ontological ones about kind of the history of European thought.

But you know, there's this idea that and it's it's it transcends too, just like rationalizations for for dismissing any merits of of of the movements that animated the countries that constantly excess powers. It goes beyond just the you know,

the the kind of pragmatic affair of discrediting them. People honestly believe that these things just emergent as some kind of stop gap measure to to either prevent revolutionary communism or to you know, from from dominating the political landscape, or to rationalize what amount to do a power grab by a coterie of extremists who who only had a loosely defined city grievances as uh as they're kind of

political ambitions. That's not true at all. And in fact, there was the inner warriors the right, whether we're talking about you know, the fascists, the fascist movement around Mussolini, whether we're talking about the National Socialist movement post Drexler, whether we're talking about you know, the Romanian Iron Guard, all these movements attracted a dispports and amount of intellectuals, you know, like middle class intellectual type, you know, the

kinds of people who spent a lot of time with political philosophy and with things abstracted from the kind of day to day business of politics. And that's one of the things that within their own dialogue with themselves and with each other, they were aware of that and lamented that this tended to be harmful to praxis. Okay, but if you want to really understand where the rubber meets the road, you've kind of got to read Heidegger, and you kind of have to look at these things through

it a wrist Italian lanes, through a twentieth century continental perspective. Okay, And this can't be overstated. And like generally, like I wouldn't bring this up in a discussion or reading of a war memoir, but Lean de Grell is so very much in that tradition that I don't think it's something can be overlooked. And it also too, I think Heidiger some will disagree with me, including up to some of the guys who who followed Bronze Age pervert. I'm not.

It's not like a slam on him or anything or or the people I'm disgusting, but they seem to view heidiger Is like as somebody who sort of like broke with Nietzsche and like was with some kind of like neo scholastic That's very misguided and it's incorrect. And what Heidegger clarified to like what Nietzsche's objection was to Christianity and like why it was problematic, and it's not. It's not. It's not because Christianity is proportaly like pacifist, or because

it's Semitic or like anything like that. There's nothing to do with it at all. The the Heidigerian view and thus what became the national socialist view. And I'm not

saying this synonymous. I'm saying they share this kind of ontological view or a view of like political and philosophical and ontology and common It's that like the beginning of the West as like a cultural form, you know it, uh, it began with it began with the pre Socratics, and it began with a question of being you know, like what it is to literally be conscious and to exist

in the world. There's an understanding of this as being. Essentially, it's being a characterized by a certain dynamism and a tendency towards change and reconstitution and creative destruction. Okay, I'm trying to condense it as much as possible. But this, uh, this understanding of being was was superseded by the emergence of Plato and Platonism, which of course too informs in

indispensable ways, you know, the Christian metaphysics, regardless of your sect. Okay, being as characterized through the lens of Platonism is an eternal presence. It's absolutely unchanging. It's accessible by coming and though if you want to look at this way like a realm of uh, of perfect existence that can only be accessed by a difficult dialectical ascent. Now, human beings can't experience it directly, obviously in the Christian view, you know,

in mortal life. But the only way they can even come to understand it at all is basically through a combination of grace and piety like the four of which, depending on your interpretation and confessional heritage and soteriology, they're in like is exclusively in the hands of God. But the crisis of the modern age to people like Heideger and thus too fascist and national socialists, is that what modernity did was it created conditions whereby people could no

longer believe in God. Like not that they'd be punished if they did or something. What I mean is that just by being in the world as it existed in the modern age, and it's the scientific and technological perspective crowded out all other possible ways of knowing it simply wasn't possible to believe in this in in in this perfect and mutable the form of being that way that

was God. Okay, Like even if what's set about to believe in it, you know, they they it'd be it'd be a it'd be dead on arrivals of proposition, because like what would you do? Would you would you mathematically aculate God? Would you would you identify you know, the essential characteristics of God and then attempt to access those things discreetly and then you know, through some kind of like discourse of the learned man, like come to know God?

You know, like obviously I'm being obtuse on purpose. But the it's it's it's essential understand we're not talking about something like deliberate turn towards atheism as we think of atheism today. We're talking about a literal impossibility of holding a belief in God is understood, you know, from ah from very very ancient, a very very ancient epoch and

to the present. Okay. The problem with this is that if you look at the way people exist politically, again in the view of Heideger and the view really Aristotle as a you know, accounting for the you know, kind of modern conditions and the limitations they're in, as well as you know, possibilities that weren't in the classical world. What being is it's inextricably related to time and temporal experience.

That's how the human mind structures itself in individual persons as well as within cultures, in races, any kind of

human organization writ large socially and politically. I mean to like literally, what your ethnos is is like the experience of a people and they're being over time, and the way that that develops is this kind of immediate consciousness in the mind of any man and woman that they are in the world, that somebody they will die, that others around them are like them in some way, and the language they speak, you know, the physical artifacts they're

attracted to, you know, the things they hold to be sacred, the things they hold to be profane. You know what they consider it beautiful, what they consider ugly. You know what they identify with in intimate capacities and what repels them similarly and intimate capacities. That's related to, quite literally, the experience of a people over time that could be said to be their people in the past, in the future,

and in the present until that person or those people die. Okay, this is the only way one can say it be said to experience beating in the world in some capacity other than an animal. Okay, because this is the only thing that is facility is to production of culture. The grave danger of not just the modern age, but specifically the twentieth century is that the twin kind of hydras of communism and Americanism. Heideger spoke of Americanism when he

meant what we'd probably say is capitalism. That's not him like trashing peckerwoods or saying Americans are the almost all the people. Ever, so don't get upset, And that's actually accurate what he is. It's more accuracy Americanism than capitalism. But he said that the enterprise, the whole raizon detra of these ideologies is to utterly eradicate the ability of

people to exist in time and live historically. It's to totally eradicate culture so that there's no potential of any kind of identitarian existence, so that there's no human existence as we thought of it, heretofore, and instead we can replace culture with the things that really matter in terms of eliminating inequities and in managing people in in secular life, you know, and that is, you know, mastering technology to bring nature within you know, a productive domain, you know,

so that we can do away with shortages, we can do away with, you know, inequalities of status and power. Going to the fact that you know, productive technique can avail everything in our environment, you know, to to to

and avail it to being marshaled as a consumable resource. Okay, So as you're talking about the world literally devouring itself for the sake of keeping humans alive, for the sake of keeping them alive, you know, you're literally eradicating the ability of man to exist temporally you know, and that's

a monstrous enterprise. And when you add in the understanding of the human being as not just inheriting as culture in some loose metaphysical way, but in a very direct and biological way, as you know, is becoming clear is one part of the equation in terms of eptic memory. That's one of the fascinating aspects of the human genome project,

among many. And I'm not saying that biological process takes precedent over anything else at all, but I'm saying that the fact of this discovery of these such things for the confirms that we already knew, okay, And that is I realized that that wasn't short when I've just kind of laid out there. But as a condensed that's the condensed version of why the right became so radical and what its enterprise was, and why it's somewhat difficult to define, okay,

Like you ask, like what the communist program was. There was a certain complexity inherent, because there's a certain complexity adherent to economics. Even if your economic schema is not really founded upon falsifiable premises but is basically just you know, like an ideological statement, you're still drawing upon tremendous valumes of data. Okay, that is, you know, within the terms of its own processes and assumptions. It's complicated. Okay, if

you're talking about Americanism. If Americanism is you know, the capital L liberal tradition I'm talking about in purely, purely in terms of political philosophy. You know, from Hobbes to uh to Locke, you know, to Pain and then to uh you know, Adam Smith and things like that. There. You know, there's there is a certain complexity there despite its reductionism. But it's a complexity that can be pretty, but they can be you know, I described in terms

of very concrete variables and phenomenon. Okay, if you were a fascist or a national socialist, or today if you're you know, a capital T traditionalist or a dissident, wherever you follow in the equation. You know, whether you're you know, whether you're AH, you know, whether you're a national socialist in the twenty first century sense. You know, like i'd say I am in large part, whether you're a CAPITALT traditionalist. You know, whether you're whether whether you're a view of

things is kind of like that. Guys who you know servant hes blah or on the other side of the divide, you know, are you know, serve with these like Musha

Dean groupings on the sunny side. It's difficult. It's not as simple as saying it's not as simple as stating like, well, I just believe in my race, or like, well, I you know, I just I believe in Christ, or well like I'm a Maslam or you know, well, I believe in tradition and preserving you know, tradition as an essential to culture and culture being in inextricable aspect of the human and the human experience and and the human soul.

You know, there's like you're talking about things a tremendous significance that also you know, can't can't can't just be broken down into discreen sentences, you know. So that's I know that people there are buttle is gonna be like, well, you're just trying to my mythologize something that's a base course and as simple as any other political ontology. I don't think that's the case, okay, And I don't see how this is arguable. And that's when you're reading a

guy like de Grell or Kadriannu or Francis Yaqui. Those three men came from very different places, Okay, a very different background as well. Point the tie that binds is a commitment to this perspective that I just described and kind of the condensed version. And uh, these guys aren't just uh, they don't just love hearing them so they just love hearing themselves talk or you know, they it's not like they were getting paid by the words. They

decided to be as you know, voluminous as possible. When it's not like these guys were literary figures who were trying to try to capture the perfect sentence or something.

You know, it's because what they were dealing with it wasn't reducible to the same concrete kind of schema of a you know, a liberal Americanist or or a communist or these days, you know, like a secular humanist kind of statement of rights or like of you know, what constitutes the dignity of the person or what you know, what we consider to be, what we can consider to be you know, due process and in terms of you know, in terms of the modern state, and uh, you know

what the individual can expect in terms of you know, his his his intrinsic claims to liberty is a good in itself, being honored, you know, when confronted with the great power of that modern state. And i'll, i'll, I'll end now because I don't want to take up on the oxygen in the room, but I consider that's to

be very important. And like when we're discussing any of these, we're discussing this topic just in general terms, you know, approaching it philosophically, you know, tending to unpack like what constitutes its philosophical core, but also specifically, when you know, any any discussion of any author, in part you're going to be dealing with, like not just the character that author.

I mean when I say character, I don't just mean moral behavior and stuff that's part of it, but like what actual like what characteristics are most paramount in his personality, but also you know, like why, why why he configured his thoughts the way that he did in terms of trying to convey to others, you know, what what the what his experience of of of of life as a partisan was, So that that's that's all I've got on it. But yeah, I wanted to get that out.

take an interest in what he did. If somebody like really takes an interest in race, you know, like as not just his own and you know, an interest in the posterity of his own people, but you're truly interested in like race, I'm truly interested in politics. You're sure you're interested in race and interested in the race. You know, you're interested in in what its origins are, you're interested

in its implications, and you're interested into nuances. So like you're gonna you'ren you're gonna spend time around like other people's just because you want to observe them. And I do that all the time. And I've realized like every like major national socialist like did that all the time.

So like this idea of like, oh, you know fascists or guys who just like hate in words and like don't refuse livings and like segregations, refuse living anything but the most segregative environments, I'm like, actually, they're like the opposite. They can say that like people like us like are looking down on people or like we're reducing people to you know, these kinds of like non human integers because we're curious about them. Like I don't accept that if

you can like say that. But this idea of like that basically like a fascist or like a or like a contemporary partisan you know who holds you know, similar sympathies adjusted for epoch is some guy who just quote hates people and wants to like live in some mall of America environment where everybody's exactly like him. Like that's

that's really really off base. That's like not at all all, Like you're basically there's some kind of caricature that's some kind of combination of a caricature of like of of kind of like a pussy Reagan Republican and like some weird communists like this. Like it's not like it's not like, don't get me wrong. It's not to say that people like mere people like us. We want some like multicultural environment around us because it gives us a chance, you know,

to augment our research. But the point is that, you know, first of all, genuine multiculturalism is is is very robust and rich when you're talking about exclusively like white people on deck, because there's many many cultures that constitute a race. Okay. Secondly, it not what what I think, what I approve of or don't approve of, like politically relates nothing to do with like who I like or dislike. Like it's it's

in some ways it's the opposite, you know. I mean, the tragedy of power politics is that you may have to kill people individually are at scale who not only do you not have any problem with, but you might not even dislike, you know, like this idea that politics is just some sort of highly scaled expression of crude human passions of not particularly intelligent people who like don't like other people like that's that's oddly illiterate, and like this is not the way humans act, you know, like

uh like at all, like like anywhere. But yeah, so it's like you know it, uh, it's it's it's really really really fucking bizarre. But it's also I mean even people again who have a somewhat more sophisticated take on it, yet nonetheless you know, erect an endless kind of army, a straw man to try and tear down the right

as an intellectual tendency. Like they like like they don't they don't get it either, you know, like the you can you know, you can say that, uh you can say that people like Heideger were crazy, I guess, or you can say that, well, you know, how was just he was afraid of what he was afraid of a process that translates approximately to practical transcendence, you know, and like, oh, for all of us talk about the pre socratics, you know, kind of like the immediate, the sense, the sensuous presence,

immediate presence of the human individually and at scale. You know, that's what makes culture for all, for all his talk of dynamism and change. You know, he really was just kind of attached like the state forms of the past. I think that's a gross and deliberate misreading of him.

But like I'll accept that. But just saying that, like this is all some like elaborate this is all some sort of like elaborate charade so that people can you know, go around doing mean or evil things, or so that you know, they can rationalize the fact that they have some personal animosity towards like X, Y or Z group

of people. Like that's literally retarded. That that the suggestion that such things are are the motivations or you know, constitute the commitments in the minds of the people who advocate such things or who suggest uh that what it is described, you know, is a is a matter of imperative significance to to anybody who you know wishes, which is for human life to not deteriorate to the level

of peace. But yeah, that I don't again, I want to I don't want to take up all of our time, so I will I will shut my mouth and let you get on.

Only the false laughter rising from the rabble serves to remind us that it is not a question of herd animals, but of men. This stampede of the damn seized first the individual, then the people as a whole. It is no longer a solitary game in which one is enthralled by personal passions or vices. Whole communities are sucked in by the vertigo of impossible desires, the desire to be first, that is to say, the desire to trample upon, the desire for purely material power, that is to say, the

desire to suffocate and destroy the spiritual. All will power, all effort becomes useless in the face of this human dissolution. And it is here that the spiritual always reappears as rebuke or as a curse.

like you being you know, the revolutionary vanguard, you do actually succeed in transforming you know, what was previously you know, a community based on ethnos and temporal being in the world or generations, if you just like reduce that to a labor camp like people does are tearing each other apart because it's like, first of all, I gotta look

out for myself and my family. Like second of all, I want I want to be a chief, not an Indian or at least you know, like a shot caller, you know, So I'm I'm going to attack whoever has more, whether it's cloud or whether it's you know, what passes for wealth, whether it's proximity to you know, the party apparatus, Like you're actually like you're you're actually encouraging people to, you know, to kind of tear out the root even further and kind of do your work for you, I mean,

which is very mu's by design in my opinion, that's not some kind of accident, but yeah, go ahead.

once light reads and plunging flights of swallows. Men and peoples regard each other with violent with violent eyes, their hands seared and bitter by their avarice. Every day the world is more selfish and more brutal. This is great hatred between men, between classes, between peoples, between everyone, because everyone is bent on the pursuit of material goods which ultimately avail nothing but all abandon the goods proffered to all of the moral universe and the eternity of the soul.

We run madly, bloody our foreheads, beating our heads against the walls, on paths of hatred, or of objection, abjection, or of madness, shouting our passions, throwing ourselves wildly at everything, desiring to gain that which we can never have. Part ten the lines of sorrow. There are few hearts that have not been soiled with villainy, sordid axe, leprous faults, leaving telltale cracks for those with eyes to see them.

Even hearts washed of the stains of the moral swamp will still keep a bitter taste of imperfection and ashes. Cracked porcelain can be fixed, Yet whoever saw it broken will forever recognize the lines. However, finally repaired of the break, he knows that the invisible unity of the perfect will

never return, but it is gone forever. The longer one lives, the more the heart is marked by these lines of sorrow, imperceptible for all those who have not seen or not known what made them, but heartbreakingly by all they contain of broken delicacy, like fine silks, which runs slightly, which runs silently, happy again, those are who are purified by

invisible suffering. How many others, whatever value vice may have, strive to convince themselves that this abasement was useful, forever marked by this burning apparel, which has cooled on their skin and sticks to it, corrupts their flesh and becomes one with it. Whose eyes can one meet without trembling? What are they hiding? Who has not been vile on one day? Who does not carry within himself worryd's gestures, desires, shameful abdications, or the mummified corpse of his inner life?

How many men, how many women, do not even hide the bankruptcy of their senses, their oaths, and the miserable desecration of their bodies, sometimes with remorse, most of the time without remorse, or rather even with a touch of

triumph and insolent provocation. In the final account, those who have liquidated everything, decency, modesty, respect for one's self, for one's body, for one's word, and God with the rest are only the results of hundreds of smaller prior denials, denied or hidden from the start, the whole is destroyed only when the innumerable fibers of the heart have been sheared one after the other by lies and ill intent, followed by multiple abandonments, more and more irredeemable, irre irremediable,

with the conscience assassinated. At the end, disaster SAPs to mind before spending, before spreading throughout the whole body. The body does not yield, does not allow itself to be to debase, trapped and defiled to death until long after the soul, negligent or intoxicated by the appeal of sin, has abandoned. The oars, which at the beginning trace straight paths on pure waters. Part eleven. The Saints check on's up here?

you know, through through dialectic. You know, it's just it's just completely kind of off and unavailable. So you know, how how can we how can we partake of you know, what's essentially godly? Then you know it's like, well, you know, through martyrdom. That doesn't mean like running out looking for ways to kill ourselves or like running out and becoming you know, holy warriors all over. Some men that and some women too, that is their vocation martyr as uh

are a Roman Catholic. Friends will tell you literally needs witness, okay, and it doesn't mean that obvious I'm not saying that fashion The National Socialists somehow corner of the market on martyrdom in the contemporary age, nor even that you know, Christian or Catholic concepts are intrinsic to the national socialism or fascist I'm not saying that at all. But what I'm saying is that this concern with the UH abandonment of God and you know, the literal death of God

by way of UH. You know, the the the triumph, the total and complete triumph of the UH of the rationalists and and and and scientific perspective, and UH, the destruction of the ability to live historically. You know, which UH and and and again, like living historically is simply the human being individually in at scale, you know, confronting

death and thus, like living in time. You know, the only way to reconstitute that is through through is through the practice of religion, you know, whether it's you know, returning to Catholic UH Catholic practice, whether it's you know, discovering you know, reawakening the inner witness if you're a Protestant, or like awaiting you know that the conferring of grace, you know, through God's will awakening that inner witness, or you know, if you're like an agnostic national socialist, which

a lot of our comrades are, and that's fine. Nevertheless, you know, it's uh. It's like the practice of what we're talking about, of reconstituting the sacred entails murderdom, and that's hugely important.

bodies and their thoughts. Their struggle tells us that happiness on earth and beyond the earth is within everyone's reach. Every one of us has a choice to make. Before the body fails, it is the spirit that triumphs or capitulates. And even when the body has given way, the spirit can lift it up or let it corrupt itself even more than poison itself. Forever we are our own masters. We can sink into the chasms or stand in them up to the shoulder, or climb out of them and

over come them. Everything can be avoided, and everything can be done. Part twelve, The Eternal Crucifixion. Faced with the contemptuous ironies of Hedonis and skeptics, one hardly dares to recall that for two thousand years the greatest human drama, that of the Passion, has been spiritually repeated each spring. Who will suffer? Who will be there near cavalry? In these new days of agony? In the desert of time stands the cross. The mundane, shady, and perverse life of

men flows on like a dull river. Christ will receive the blows in the thorns. He will collapse to the ground. The wood of the cross will crush, crush his flesh. The hammer will strike great blows against the hard beams. They pierced my hands, in my feet, I can count all my bones. What will the world know? His blood will slowly come down on his pale body. His eyes will seek both his father and our souls. What will

our souls understand about this tragedy? They have not shuddered or cried, nor even thought about it, nor seen Christ moves well alone alone, The souls sleep or are sterile or have committed suicide. While it is to pull them out of their torpor, mud and death that this body hangs between heaven and earth in pain. The distress of this heart mainly launches a launches a cry of despair, which should freeze the earth and stop the breath of men.

Yet it is because a man's spiritual suffocation that the world is falling apart. It is hope, charity, justice, humility that the world needs to find fresh air. We have received this spiritual life as a gift. We are the bearers. And our hands are dangling at our sides, and our eyes are dry, and our lips do not tremble in fervor and emotion. Our hearts are like dry sand. Our

souls lay lifeless where they died. Faith is worth anything only as long as it conquers love, as long as it burns charity, as long as it saves Part thirteen nobody. A palm tree trembles, the sand slides between the tan fingers of a child. Lambs marked with blood collide with stubborn little foreheads. Tiny donkeys' eyes wet come down from the hill. The easter lands escape, clean and shiny, The air is still fresh. Daisies are scattered on the hillside.

Why does Christ again suffer the most heartbreaking agony in these days when fans of mimosa flowers decorate the twisting roads, These clear, warm roads bring him back every year, silent in agony, to the nails and thorns, to the blood and sput them. Lord, we are following you and your dusty procession, mingled with those rough and cowardly fishermen who loved you, but who loved you like us with measure, as if measure was not an insult to your love.

We are like unto them, no worse than others. Our eyes sometimes beaming with joy in serving you, we dismiss intruders, We wave the palms. We believe we are very close to your heart. We think ourselves better than we are in your sad eyes. It is our vanity that we project, and in this hour of agony, because our love hung always by a thread, we will turn away from your wounds, your blood and sweat, and that great icy cry that will pierce the earth. Lord, We're coming back to your

blued feet. We clasped this wood of the cross between our trembling arms. How dare we look up at your bloody head. We dare do nothing but extend our dismayed hearts to you. It would have been so sweet to give our souls to you in a complete act, to be with you from the garden of olives to this mound where you hang inert in the evening wind. We did not even have the fate of the penitent thief, the one who loved you last, who regarded you as he fell into heaven. We suffer the overwhelming force of

our weaknesses, our cowardice, our tepidy, our tipidity. Lord, you brought us to the essential and the eternal, the blood and the drink, the breath and the sun. You animated our hearts. You gave us strength. We should have jumped. We should have jumped light with heart and celebration, freed forever from all bond all regret, all other hope. Yet we remained fearful, hidden in the shadow of a doorway or under the bright olive tree. You went crushed and

overwhelmed with insults. Ah, my God, in these minutes of pain and salvation, we have not grasped the cross. We have not kissed your wounds and your thorns, put to flight, your put to flight. Your executioners broken their whips, refuted their insults. We did not know how to love. At the moment of this complete giving, our hearts were lifeless. My God, there you are abandoned by all, silent and dismal,

stiff limbed, there was nobody. Nobody. We squeezed the dead wood and depart without raising our heads, laying our defeated hearts at your feet. You'll return to the light. Lord, at this hour, have mercy on the destroyed souls. Have mercy on empty souls. We suffer so much from our mean and vile sentiments, so imbued with ourselves, so preoccupied with our selfishness, our ambitions, our vanities. We let you suffer. We saw your blood flow, saw you plant your cross,

saw the life fade from your face. Will we ever dare to look upon your open wounds and to meet your weary eyes? Lord, The hour is near. Your light will suddenly burst forth upon the hill. We will still be there, ashamed and sad. Burn our hearts with your dazzling sweetness. Give us the warmth and purity of this divine fire from which you will spring. We are overwhelmed at the threshold of your tomb Lord, make the spark of the resurrection bloom in our defeated souls.

some outlier. You know, the the understanding of uh, you know, martyrdom being uh being the essential vocation of the racial patriot or the holy warrior, and you know, the understanding of the understanding the ability to live historically being an extricately bound up to man's confrontation with death, you know, and and you know, religious faith, you know, being the only way not just the man comes to terms with that, but I mean comes to understand it, you know, like

that's really the only like the like the metaphysical discourse on man's relationship to death is is is his religious confession? Okay? You know, and again, the girl wasn't. The girl wasn't just this kind of like random guy you know who ended up on the Eastern Front or something. I mean, he had he was a war hero, he had serious cloud. He'd met Hitler personally, and like he was known to

Hitler personally. You know, he had NCIG been realized, he almost undoubtedly would have been, you know, one of the most powerful men in what was formerly Belgium, you know what I mean, Like he was. He was a guy with serious cloud, you know, within the kind of the the greater, the Greater Reich. And and he's also like in a secondary sense too, which shows you how it shows you the degree to which, you know, what was animating the Third Reich was very much becoming a European movement.

I mean, the seeds of that were always kind of president just doing to geostrategic realities and and kind of the shrinking of of the world into kind of like

one place, as it were conceptually. But you know, this idea that like, oh there was this sho there was this you know, chauvinistic kind of like backward looking nationalist party, you know, capital and nationalist party in the NSDAP, but you know, just kind of like out of military necessity, you knows, came about and some of these European guys you know, decided they were going to get theirs too, and you know, kind of forced acknowledgment of of of

their own you know, nations and government. So that's that's not the case at all, you know, it's you got to look at national socialist socialism as a European phenomenon, and you got to look at the Grell specifically as you know, like an exemplar of you know, kind of the the European and SS, you know, as as well as uh, you know, Francophone fascism. But you know, everything, everything, every everything, every testament. This man ever put the paper

was absolutely inundated with his Catholic faith. You know. Yeah, I just want to insinuate.

cries of love. She remains, She remains, suspended in mystical immensity, only by the wonder of invisible wings support her. She no longer even knows that she can fall, that the ground is under her. She is there detached from everything, trembling, pulsating, as if speaking. The lark swooning upon the warm earth must also feel, must also feel this great joy of fulfilled love. The soul is panting. Love returns and waves

and breaks into effort, giving and joy. The great tragedy of sin, which causes so much suffering, is that on account of it we give less of ourselves, or give badly, offering only a portion of what we might have, a portion with hints of indelible defilement. To love is to give, and to give is to give everything. The punishment for falling is the pain of having trampled on your love,

of having reduced the love you might have given. If only we could remove from our bodies, our hands, our eyes, these forces that pulse in them at the hours of weakness and objection, too late, much to our shoes, we may cry all the tears in the world. No matter what, we can never recover that which we so carelessly lost the day of the fall, despite all our repentance and remission, or remain the black hole into which the good of the world is eternally lost. We may endeavor to love

thereafter as ardently as we can. Yet we will not create the lost. We will not recreate the lost purity, nor regain the most beautiful part of love which was annihilated. Our love could have been so much greater what we yet possessed to offer at the hour of the highest Love will carry whatever we do this terrible mark. This is why, having profaned his gift of self, makes the heart which yearns for the absolute suffer until the end

of life. We would like to be God ourselves, to take back this day or these times, to give them the freshness of dawn, and to guard them fearfully until the night. From the first misstep, we know that we will no longer love as much as we could have. That is what makes repentance, because it cannot repair a

broken man so heartbreaking. When we have known this pain of the irreparable, we seek beyond the possibilities of our heart, so that a few moments of sublime love, seized upon with great effort, can compensate what fell in the swamps and in the shadows. Part four, The Joy of Men, Part fifteen, Strong and Hard. The sun is gone. In half an hour it will be shade. The birds who sang madly in the gardens perceive it. There are roses everywhere, so gorged with light that they will soon perish. The

wood is already sleeping around a few tiled roofs. As always, the birds now begin to utter their sharp cries and their pleas. No doubt for the two lovers sitting there, dreamy, with a huge white hat lying across their knees, all of life seems condensed here. Nothing lives apart from these birds, this dog which barks at the end of the world, and that these two hearts, which steadily beat in the evening calm, heavy with the vibration of June. How can

one believe in hatred? Has one never seen the last roses go dim in the light evening silence. We will have to tear ourselves away from this great country oasis. Later it will be necessary to take again at the end of the path, the road where the cars tear up the ground through a sputtering, relentless rain. There will

be brutal lights, empty faces, soulless eyes. This evening landscape is so clear, it is given with such a complete generosity, These dying roses, these bouquets of trees, these oat field shimmering and gray, these gray fir trees are so pure and so simple that a childlike wonder arises in our beings. Near this eternal youth of grasses, trees and flowers, we cannot hear anything anymore. The night slicks down the roses, and.

I will guess the outline of things. I will feel the dew blooming at the end of the grass, which will refresh the sun tomorrow when it climbs the top of the world, top of the wood, where is the night of hearts, from which the tender morning would spring. We will have to renew our sorrows, resume our journeys through the fields and lost woods among cold hearts. Who will understand later in the savage glimmers before our trembling eyes, that we have just left the forest and the wheat fields,

the shade and the silence. But why falter at the end of the path we watch as cruel life snatches everything up in wolf's teeth. In wolf's teeth, we no longer look at anything, We no longer think, We no longer breathe this air, charged with a sense of passing death. Put out the lights, Let the night weigh upon our hearts. Tomorrow, when daybreak reaches the crest of the trees, we will have before us only the closed horizon of man. We will have to be strong and hard, joyful through nothing

but the radiance of our souls. Dying evening, silent and sure of dawn. Give us the peace of awaiting the light that is reborn renewed from the immense and auspicious night. The price of life, we must reiterate the price of life. Life is the admirable instrument put in our hands with which we forge our wills, raise consciences, and build a monument of reason and of heart. Life is not a

form of sadness, but joy made flesh. Joy of being useful, Joy of mastering what could demean or weaken us, Joy of acting and giving, Joy of loving all that trembles spirit and matter, because everything under the impetus of a righteous life rises, lightens, instead of weighing down. You have to love life. Sometimes in times of weariness and discuss we nearly lose our love of life. You have to

pull yourself together, straighten up. Too many men are debased, but alongside, in an opposition to those whose baseness is a blasphemy to life, there are all those who see or don't see, who redeem the world and bring honor to all life. Seventeen disfoliation. Happiness born of ignorance is not flattering. It is a kind of narrow, vegetative happiness. Intelligence has nothing to do with it, and neither does the body. True happiness, happiness.

as one suffers. By comparing his material fate to others, we are neither happy nor free to remain in good spirits, even to live with one soul apart from the world, when the exterior universe holds nothing but a yawning void. To live intensely in this material absence, to live without regret, master of your desires, having bent them to the complete domination of the Spirit, marks the victory of man, the true, the only victory, next to which the greatest conquests and

dominions are merely caricatures of power. Any comparison seems laughable next to the liberation brought by the mastery of the Spirit over our possessions, our needs, and our chains. We are freed from the old rusty chains that rivetted us to mediocre conformities. We hold destiny in our hands, destiny clearly discovered in its liberating nudity. Happiness can be borne everywhere. It comes not from without but from within us, holding

within it infinite possibility. Eighteen. The power of joy. There are so many things that can bring you joy. Even when through our strength we are free of our desires, we are happy. Just the joy of living is itself so powerful. Joy of having a radiant heart. The joy of having a sturdy heart, arms and legs as hard as trees, lungs that draw life and air. Joy of having eyes that take on colors and shapes in their soft curves. Joy of thinking, of spending hours drawing out

the straight lines of reason, or feasting on dreams. Joy of believing, joy of loving, of giving oneself, of striding through life flexible as water. How can one be unhappy? It is so simple, so basic, so natural. Through the worst calamities, happiness always bursts forth like a geyser, which we try to obstruct in vain happiness in life for the same thing. To be no longer happy is to doubt one's body, the warmth of one's blood, the consuming fire of one's heart. To doubt these great lights of

the spirit which bathe all of existence. Even misfortune still brings us to joys of the soul, which gives its own blood, which weighs out its sacrifice, which feels deeply miss which feels deeply misfortune's bitter sting, a cruel joy at a higher joy, a joy reserve for the man who's broken heart understands.

bad experience one hundred percent. Like that's not that's that that's not just a cliche or something that you know, religious people pull out to, you know, in the phase of challenges too. You know how one's supposed to negotiate horror and pain in in everyday life. You know, I don't, I don't. I don't regret anything that's happened to me because it brought me to this point. And I mean,

my life now is incredible. I never thought that where I'm at now would be possible, and I'm just unbelievably blessed. But you know, I my life was horrible, I mean for for years, you know, And I don't I don't regret that, Like, I learned more during that period, and I came became firmer in my faith during that period

than would have been possible otherwise. And it also, you know, owing to the proximity of death, because the life style I was living, it forced me to contemplate it in very immediate terms in a way that I otherwise probably would not have because I was quite a bit younger than you know, And that just kind of whether you want to or not, you you develop a tendency towards contemplation of a few ideological principles, you know, and unless you're truly like a dullart or something like, when you're

within such circumstances. So, I mean, I can't emphasize enough that there's practical value in reading things like de Grill. You're not just you're not just doing a credit to our forebears. If in fact, you know you're you're committed to these ideological principles like I am, you know you're also you're you're also you know, contributing to the strengthen of your own piety and faith by by studying such things. That's all I wanted to say.

Joy to find, to compare, Joy of giving meaning and direction, Joy of understanding and of scaling the slopes in the summits of the true, the beautiful, and the useful. The mind orders it into clear parallel lines and extracts the laws revealed within. Man feels then that he is master of all the elements, master of this disproportionate universe, where his brain, no bigger than a bird or a fallen fruit,

imposes a comprehensive order and harmony. Whoever does not know how to enjoy the possibilities of dreaming and thinking offered to man every second, ignores the nobility of life. We can always be enchanted, for dreams are secret cellos. One can always think, that is to say, having the mind not only occupied, but vibrant, tending towards a domination more powerful, more exhilarating than the fire of a thousand desires. To be bored, to give up the dream and the spirit.

Boredom is the disease of empty souls and brains. Life quickly becomes a horribly dull chore. Love itself is exalted and amazed only to the extent that the superior being nourishes. The superior being nourishes Poetry strengthens the impulses of sensitivity. One must still dream and ponder over their love twenty Patience. Patience is the first of victories, victory over one's self,

over one's nerves, over one's weaknesses. As long as we have not acquired it, life is only a cascade of capitulations, capitulations made in struggle, certainly crying out in what we perceive to be manifestations of authority, but which are in fact only an abdication to petty pride. To be patient is to wait for one's hour finger to the trigger

as one watches for prey. It is to build each of the day's actions and consideration of order and balance, laying carefully the foundation stones that will support the building. Patience delivers the joy of not having given in Impatience leaves to heart with the reproach of having been exiled and of having been the author of vanity and vain agitation twenty one Obedience. No great work is accomplished in selfishness and pride. Obeying is a joy because it is

a form of gift, of clairvoyant gift. Obeying is fruitful multiplying the results of efforts tenfold. Obeying is a duty because the common good depends on the discipline coming together of many energies. Human society is not formed by a cloud of fierce and fanciful mosquitoes rushing in the wind according to their personal interest in their mood. It is a large, sensitive complex. It is a large sensitive complex made sterile in made sterile or dangerous by anarchy, to

which order and harmony give unlimited possibilities. A rich people of millions in population but selfishly isolated and atomized is a dead people. A poor people. Where everyone intelligently recognizes their limits and their communal obligations, obeys, and works as a team is a people with life. Obedience is the highest form of the use of freedom. It is a constant manifestation of authority, authority over oneself, the most difficult of all. No one is really capable of commanding others.

Who is not first able to command himself to tame in him the proud wanderer who would have liked to throw himself madly into the winds of adventure. After having obeyed, one may command not as a brute enjoying the right to crush others, but because command is a magnificent prerogative when it aims to discipline unruly forces, to lead them to the fullness of obedience, to this superior source of joy.

of the other, in the soul of the other. Think of your personal reaction if you had received the observation, the encouragement, the reprimand instead of addressing it to others. Most of the men are grown ups, quite vicious, but still sensitive toward tends towards affection. There are not thirty six routes to guide them. There is only one, that of the heart. The other roads sometimes seem easier to take, but ultimately they do not lead anywhere. Twenty three Happy isolation.

The company of others is most of the time nothing but restlessness, noise, troubles, revolving around mutual loneliness. To constantly search for what is called a stimulation is to be afraid of being in the presence of yourself. It is, in reality, to take flight morally. How can you confuse joy with being constantly mixed up in the tumultuous crowd? Why would one absolutely have to be swallowed up among

other beings to believe oneself happy? One is then only in contact with the tree bark of others, one enjoys only their artificial or superficial attitudes. This can obviously give distraction, temporary pleasure, a kind of breath of wind or fresh air. But what a gulf between the shallow pleasure and the deep, essential joy of conversation with yourself, the analysis of one's own intimate thoughts and one's most secret sensitivity. There we

see everything. We go to the source of everything. To deny the power the magnitude of this true joy is to deny whole, the whole inner life. Loneliness is a wonderful opportunity for the soul to get to know itself and to keep watch to learn. Only empty heads or fickle hearts are afraid of remaining silent in front of themselves. It is at such times that we see if our feelings are solid or if they were nothing but noise. High feelings can live alone without physical presence. On the contrary,

isolation purifies and grows them. The joy, the joy that spreads like a block of granite under the water of flowing life, the one that never gives up and which never disappoints, lies in the inner struggle. In the inner exultation, to watch over oneself, to dominate oneself, to purify oneself, to rise, to have the courage to think because it is so simple to be lazy or cowardly in the face of spiritual work. Have the energy to expand inner your hidden world. To love intensely, that is to say,

to give oneself silent without reluctance. We prefer to forget or deny that these fundamental joys exist, to be satisfied with immediate enjoyments that we believe to be superior to everything, and after which we have nothing, very often if not dust in the heart and a wilting of the wings. The mystics have long known that this constant animation of

the interior life. Were they less happy? Did they have less joy than we who chatter mingled with faces, where we only discover appearances fed by words that die with the echo. The joy of the mystics is just one example. The same inner joy exists at other stages of spirituality and sensitivity. The presence of others is not even essential

at all. One can perfectly love be possessed by the highest joys of the heart in physical distance and even in death, as long as we have not once freed ourselves from external elements, as long as we have not been able to live alone, that is to say, in the most real come that nothing can disturb we have not yet reached a very threshold of joy. Instead of

complaining about loneliness, you have to bless it. You have to take advantage of this unexpected possibility of examining yourself in silence and dominating yourself lucidly completely, even in your most contradictory thoughts. Doors closed to the world, wilful termination of the contract with out of wilful termination of contact

with the outside. So much the better, because it means, if you like, doors open to the soul, exact contact with oneself, exhilarating joys of knowledge, spiritual fulfillment, and mystically the most delicate and complete gift. And this is the last part. This is part twenty twenty four Grandeur. It is often by doing this is the last part for this section here. It is often by doing with maximum nobility a thousand bothersome little things that you are great.

It is infinitely more difficult to stretch your soul a thousand times every day without relief than to give a single grand impulse at the moment of a visionary event, merit to be given. There is slight. The magnitude of the fleeting opportunity alone gives us the strength to act and desire to the desire to astonish, while allowing us to have the highest opinion of ourselves. You can do a great thing wonderfully and be far from real greatness.

Greatness is the nobility of the soul, wearing down, dripping with the desire to give each according to our duties, especially when they are stripped of those things that give rise to vanity. For both women and men. Greatness for a woman is often to give herself hour by hour to dull even prosaic housework. Yet who will admire it? Who will know the thousand battles fought in the bottom of the heart, in laziness, in pride, in singing passions, in the softness which cause the soul and the body

towards the warm sands of easy life. Who the one who, despite all this advances, resists, progresses, progresses is great, since the gift of herself was total, without requiring the vanity of recognition. So many high status people always complain find everything unpleasant never know how to rejoice frankly, of nothing.

Everything seems boring to them because they never give themselves up, because they approach each moment even when it would require only a small exertion, with the firm intention of delivering only the bare minimum, and even with that reluctance, everything is a question of giving freely. Happy people are those who give themselves. The dissatisfied are those who strangle their existence with a perpetual retraction, constantly wondering what they will lose. Virtue, greatness, happiness.

Everything revolves around that. Give yourself, give yourself completely all the time. What you have to do bravely, with maximum application, even if the object is merely housework without apparent grandeur. Wherever you are above or below man or woman, the problem is exactly the same. It is giving that differentiates clear souls from troubled souls. And that's the end of that part.

that that makes it axiomatic. Like if anything, I think that you know, the the understanding, the inner witness you find in Calvin basically says you should that that's you know, that's that's basically like the core of of of faith as as as a practice. But I I really enjoy being around like people I love and who love me back, and you know, enjoying that kind of community we've developed among our peoples, Like it's fucking incredible, you know, Like

and I'm really really lucky. But I I I don't just like being by myself a lot of the time, Like I need to be by myself because that's you know, it's a you're The mind is its own place in ways that they're both good and bad and like beyond bead Like that can be terrifying because it can create an environment that's either not livable or that has been compromised by by by by evil things. And some of those things may be entities into themselves. I mean, I

that's a metaphysical question. I don't want to get into on the tail end of our stream. But and in the event, a lot of that. That's one of the ways that people are kept under control by officialdom, you know, Uh, is this inability of people to really be alone and and to be alone properly. I mean, people are isolated, but they don't not truly be alone, you know. That's why they're always seeking out that. That's why, that's why social media is like they're standing for you know, actual

social life and things. It's like it also an inability of people to be alone with their own mind, you know. And uh, I'm always talking about you know, my mind. I think of it as an ice cathedral. It's other things too, but you know that's like the the ice cathedral is where I would draw into myself and uh.

With then it's perverbial walls. You know, I can I can go any where, you know, like I not not like actual projection in a literal sense, but you know, praggately speaking, you know, I I I go all kinds of places in my mind. And it's not because you know, I'm some rarefied case, you know that. I suppose that's what some people are up on, if they say they're getting into meditation you know. I mean, it's like, Okay,

if people want to call it that, that's fine. I think I think there's some hookey stuff attached to those interpretations, But I'm not going to criticize anybody for, you know, for welcoming or cultivating an impulse in that direction. Like guess all I got for that? All right?

Front reconciled me such an outcome. Not having lived as a saint, to die as a soldier's soul would be the most suitable thing. Are my weeks numbered, then it is best to make the most of these chances to purify our souls. I once dreamed of dying after a long illness to better prepare myself for the inevitable. But such a death necessarily takes place in an atmosphere of pollution on the front, our preparation takes place, and a feeling of power in the unfolding of the will I

realize how lucky I am. Perhaps I return alive, more alive than ever before. Either way, this great retreat, which life or death will close will have been a blessing. I enjoy it freely fully, like a nourishing and beautiful son. Why should I tremble under its fire? The soldier learns to be great among the most mundane or the most

painful things. Heroism is to stand, to struggle, to be always alert, happy and strong, and nameless, unrecognized misery of the front, in the mud, the excrement, the corpses, the mist of the water and snow, the endless and colorless fields, the total absence of outer joy. Every day we move further away from the blissful world of yesteryear? Are we

not already half dead? We who advance, gritting our teeth through the mists, always look at those who have less than you, and rejoice in what you have, Never lusting after ephemeral desires. Life is always beautiful when you look at it with peaceful eyes, the light of a soul at peace. We soldiers, we have nothing, and we are happy. The joy of an unencumbered soul can only flourish when one has cast off this jumble of mental slavery. War

is not just combat, above all. It is a long, sometimes exhausting streak, sometimes stretching into tedium, of silent renouncements, of daily sacrifices without relief. Virtuous forged in the same way everywhere, the privations endured with humility, waiting patiently for

death's arrival, the giving of oneself. Far from the spotlight, one plays one's part in an unknown field, in unknown fields and groves, in this wasteland, far from all human joy, such as the real war, the one waged by millions of men who will never know ostentious, ostentatious glory, and who, if they do not die, will return home with their faces tight their lips closed, for others would not comprehend

the heartbreaks and renunciations, and their obscure heroism. The crowd is only struck by heroism when it is bright and loud. What impresses the public is to brilliance, and not the painful and slow ascents of souls who rise in silence and shadow to greatness. But are we ever understood? Do we hear? Do we see anything other than the superficial? The bottom of hearts is such an abyss of desires, denials,

sorrows that we prefer not to approach it. It is simpler more pleasant to stick to the superficial, and, without thinking too much, to enjoy the words and attitudes that we have, the tapestry of human drama. We soldiers stand behind that tapestry. What souls will imagine our journeys? Who will have the strength to join us spiritually zeal Even

intelligence cannot be enough. To have culture is to have a balance of mind, illumination, wisdom, which can only be the result of a long discipline of the higher faculties, where the only proven method is the application of extensive contact with the most fundamental works of human intelligence. The disinterested study of ancient civilizations, mothers of ideas and systems, the study of philosophy, the study of mathematics, the secret fabric of all the arts, the comparative study of the

lessons of history. This alone can bring about the harmony of the human faculties, without which the most dazzling successes always have a character of miracle and fragility. Intellectual maturity is not irreconcilable with genius. Maturity makes genius exact and human, channeling it towards a desirable end. Its strength is not thereby diminished, only more useful. Richelieu would not have given France half of the blessings of his genius if he

had been self taught. The origin of our century's mental debilitation is that it is a century of the self taught. Their work has a disorderly, inhuman, unstable character. True genius, or at least beneficent genius, is balanced, which brings happiness, progress and order. The instinctive genius is stunning, dazzling, but always at a great cost. When the fireworks fade, the sky only looks darker than before. The banal and the vulgar are neighbors of the grandiose and the eternal. Earlier

I watched a pig going to slaughter. He was keen on life, poor thing, almost bloodless. Still he gasped and moaned. Beasts and men in the face of death. We are the same, Yet our honored demands, and we must take great care to ensure that at the hour of our death, we have the courage to face it with dignity. Soldiers, we risk our own skins all the time, and so we take very simple joy and merely existing. Death is always right before our face, death is everywhere. Therefore we

understand the greatness of life better than others. If the soul did not rise straight as the barrel of a gun, straight as the crosses over the graves, we would quickly sink into moral decay. Our whole world consists of woods fields, marshes, striped trees, near which one is on the lookout day or night, warming his hands with his breath, rubbing his ears, trampling over ground that today is hard and unforgiving as granite, where just yesterday it was a sea of mud. In

the evening from four o'clock we watch the shadows. We must guard our hearts closely so as not to weep in the face of such an abyss. The soul is faced with total surrender, and yet she is proud, and she sings because strip bears in the bygone days of innocence. She is aware of the gravity of the mission offered to those who tread this lonely abyss those who will redeem the cowardice and filth of a world peopled by empty souls. Here her wings start to beat again, shaking

off the dried mud that once had dirtied them. They find joy again in the returns of clean air, open space, distant lines. If we here have made good of our suffering, we will have achieved our true victory. But will but will we who suffer be able to remain peer to the end? Won't we feel ridiculous in our angelic garb

on our return? Well, we have the courage not to be ashamed when we hear the countless years of those who have soiled their souls and who insolently believe themselves to be triumphant something important.

You know that that all came from the and that was specifically Paul Hauser, you know, who's kind of like an unsung uh figure, I think not just because of his battlefield aptitude, but you know, the kind of organizational

model ad for the Vaines. This wasn't just the Grel being some romantic and like you know talking about like oh the you know, the the glory that is, you know, to be the common soldier or the NCO, you know, leading the common man, like like Vabina says, officers actually did lead from the front, you know, and like they ate with their men and like they you know, there

wasn't I mean, it wasn't just mission oriented tactics, you know. Uh. And what we almost think of is the precursor to special operations in some cases, you know, particularly the case of people like Scorsanese commandos that kind of created a sort of like egalitarian spirit like that was very much cultivated,

you know. And so it's corny as well as just you know a lie, you know in these old movies or even in this kind of more contemporary stuff where they cast you know, like the Verhmacht or the I mean they cast the bafan assess and even the Hrmacht which still had these kinds of class based issues, but I look at the same degree, but they cast like

any German military forces. It's kind of like these like cruel like Prussian Martinette types, you know, LIKEU have contempt for the men and like there's no recourse if you're a if you're an enlisted man or an NCO, you know, against an officer read if he's in the wrong. I mean somewhat it's like a combination of like the worst of like the way the Soviet Army was with you know, kind of a caricature of the nineteenth century Royal Navy

or something like. They could not be farther from the truth, you know, I point there's a reason why, uh, there's a reason why modern militaries like literally look like the wafan SS too, from like the rifles they packed to their helmets, you know, to to uh you know some of the ways uh they deployed, especially in the early Cold War, you know, as uh, the distinction between you know, light medium and heavy light medium and heavy armor was abolished.

You know that they can't be overstated, and that really comes out in Bigrell because he was obviously like a man of letters, what a certain there's like a certain ash and lyricism what he wrote. And finally then we can move on. You know this this idea that like wars is horrible. Uh, that's only reasons I object to all quite in the Western Front, not just because it's cry baby stuff, but it's just kind of at odds with you know, the way humans are, like if you're

if you're a if you're an infantryman at war. I've had guys relay to me that they're big terror, especially especially guys in Vietnam who are their flyers or on long range reconnaissance or in long range of continence rolls. There's a terror of being captured, which made sense. And there's an ongoing terror hell in the in the mind of reentrument, of imma treatment of being being wounded, particularly and I mean not not to be crass, but being wounded below the waste. But you know, the worst thing

that happens is you die. You don't have anything else to worry about. You're free, you know, And uh, there's not any distinction between principle and action. And you know that the idea that there's some kind of like horrible hell to like be uh serving the infantry in a modern war, like compared to what compared to to working in like a mid twentie century factory. I mean, like are compared to working in uh, you know, compared to like having the life of Willy Lowman as like a

nineteen fifty salesman. Like it's there's something really at odds with reality about it. I mean not just kind of like puss a fed and coward yellow it's that too, but just like nakedly at odds with reality. And uh, I think that that's important. Like a lot of yak and Piper didn't write any formal memoirs, but what he did put the paper about what it was like on the Eastern Front, you know, like he didn't romanticize it like there. You know, he talked about how awful some

of that kind of duty was. I mean, not just in what was called for in moral terms, but like you know, the physical brutalities that the modern infantry man had to put himself through. I mean it certainly was not fun, but it but it's profounding was guided when people act like, you know, there's some like horrible fate you know, to befall you as a man, like to be a soldier in war. That's all I want to do.

slowly dancing about. They listen a meter away to the little compliments that we offer them. Then they settle in wild flocks in the rushes. They cry, chirp, and hiss, as if the silver sky had thrown fistfuls of pure joy over the frosty landscape. There are also passing ravens, like black lightning, few and silent. From time to time they utter their great horse cry no doubt, to remind us that death awaits us, harsh like them, ravenous like them,

on dark and deadly wings. We strive to always smile at the singing sparrows at the solemn crows that pass. But the heart is the heart, and every man, though smiling with his mouth and eyes, hides underneath the awful secrets of a suffering animal. We feel that death watches

on every side. Each step exacts a cost. Our steps grow heavy and must be made light, despite the heavy guns, the stumbling feet, the fields of overripe grain that scratch the skin, the massive shell holes in which a misplaced step could drop one into the abyss without a word. This is it, the thankless life of a soldier, which knows neither exhilaration nor glory, where at any time one can be stabbed, shot, or dragged off as a prisoner

by the enemy. On the other side, you have to move forward, calmly, meter by meter, even when shots may ring out suddenly from ten paces away. Shots ring out in the night between the outposts, a hoarse cry, and the night rolls on, impervious, frozen, relentless. At these times, our entire being wishes to rebel. We care for our lives those of our comrades, the blood coursing powerfully through their veins. We are beings of the flesh. We want

the light to be reborn with vigor and heat. The human beast roars and cries out for his will to unfold, to burn, to resound, to remain huddled, subdued, to remain in the shadows, ready for the final act, or take or the final breath. Takes a terrible discipline. It inflicts

terrible injury on our will. But our taste for life will be even stronger because we have more intensely experienced the value, the flavor, the burning sweetness of every second falling like a drop of silence in this great tension of ready hearts. We love with unchained power, our carnal existence, the rhythm of our thoughts, the momentum of our senses, which a single bullet in the night could shatter, our arms, our legs, our eyes, to surround, to cross, to regard

with passion and domination. All this screams man's right to life, the right of the animal that wants to run and seize, the right of the intelligence that wants to enchant and create life. How beautifully, how beautiful, indescribably beautiful, exhilarating softness of body, light of midday, ardor of fire. We clenched this life in our wilful fists, those of silent, attentive, patient shadow watchers. We have learned to tame ourselves, to tame the wild horses which ran across the vast fields

of our dreams. But holding them in our hands with a steel fist, we close our eyes and inhale the powerful smell of life that gathers above life.

But our inner fire will continue to rise and fill our eyes with glimmers of the sun. Here our souls are strained, these low hills, these rows of firs, these abandoned millstones, watch us go, regarding our lines with shining eyes, This black sky that I contemplate now for the last time, I have filled it with the brilliant streaks of tracer bullets, while the enemy's rounds uttered their chill cries like pouncing

cats all about me. Already my bag is ready. I look at the crushed straw broken into small pieces on the spot I habitually rested after returning, tired and frozen from late night patrols. The smoky little lantern cast a yellow light over my last daily report. A few more shirts, a few handkerchiefs freshly washed, already covered with dust, rough mud walls, the oven that we heated with debris from barracks,

little frozen tiles painted with designs of white ferns. We picked up, our battered bowls, our canteens, our weapons, emblazoned with black lightning. No doubt to this place will one day return plants laden with fruit, Christian icons, a woman clad in heavy petticoats, and the thick smell of vegetable fat. But forever gone will be the humble and bustling life of many young foreign boys lost in the depths of step who left in the middle of the night with

calloused hands and frozen blood. This miserable, poorly lit square has been the center of an intense spiritual life, that life will leave with us and will be reborn at random from the frozen roads, improvised lodgings, embankments, and trenches from which we watch for and track down our opponents, or avoid his blows. We may return to these spots one day, but the essential character will be gone, and so we leave at dawn without looking back. Life is ahead,

even if life is death bah. The greater the sacrifice, the more we give of ourselves, And it was to give of ourselves that we stood up with radiant hearts. Take a sip twenty seven the apocalyptic cycle. The wind blows and biting us, whipping the snow against our skin like darts. The river is frozen, frozen, its little tributaries which ran through the crevices, frozen the hills, the thistles

of the embankments, the ruined factories. My heart itself has caught cold, cold from these months of soul tension, a withdrawal into inhuman solitude. Cold is these rigid black trees which the north wind whips to stress in everything. Everyone feels to chill. We break our cold bread, We scrape the huge chunks of mud from our clothes. With a knife, we cut away great clumps of the blackish glue from

our shoes and gaiters. No water, you have to go three kilometers to obtain a dirty brown liquid filled with grass clippings. Let us love our misery anyway, as it uplifts us, prepares us for destinies that call for pure and strong hearts. The cycle of wars is now apocalyptic. The waves widen more and more, grow in speed and force to spread in a fabulous, gyrating movement. Wars have become universal revolutions. The whole world is caught up in

its whirlwind. Armies collide, economic forces clash, They tear each other apart. The forces of the spirit engage in a merciless duel. The universe will have to bleed, struggle, know the pangs of flight, the agony separation. Thousands of men, millions of men, will have to look with frozen or feverish eyes at death, always the same, that is to say, always cruel, tearing the heart at the same time as

the flesh. This drama was inevitable. Only the blind and the foolish, that is to say, almost everyone believe that these were conflicts of rival nations. Conflicts which could be localized. However, these are implacable pseudo religious wars, quite similar to all religious wars, but which will take almost limitless proportions, reaching up to the little to the last little island or ice flow, so that all people, be Theyia, Tahitians or Laplanders,

will have to choose like everyone else. When how will this prodigious settling of accounts end? Our skies will long be crossed by this lightning. Our children will grow up amid the blinding flashes of falling or triumphaning ideas at arms entry, where the scale of the drama chills the blood. But a sorrowful century in which the whole universe is

being remade more by spirit than by iron. Tragedies such as the world will never know, tragedy such as the World has never known, so complete, in which we are all actors. But where it is hearts that play. Millions of hearts are on the scene, still young and naive, or old and silent, or ruined and confused. To walk one hundred meters between the bloody lines. We come back broken, as if every step took all our strength, nothing to do,

nothing to read. We only have a miserable kerosene lamp with a small yellowish flame that lights up a square meter of our shelter. It takes more courage to live like this, hold up in the mud, than to advance on the enemy with the machine gun under your arm. You can feel the temptation, the muffled voices, the demoralizing questions, what are you doing here? Can't you see you're wasting your time, your efforts, your sacrifices. Does anyone even remember

that you exist? Shall we leave you alone to rod away into oblivion? But the soul quickly regains its serenity. She knows that nothing is more precious than this renunciation, this silent descent into the depth of consciousness. Can the real victory, the victory over oneself, be better acquired elsewhere than in the midst of these humiliations? Welcomed with the head held high by straightforwardly opposing this hostile environment, the loneliness of the heart and the cunning of the enemy

which assault the spirit twenty eight Enlightenment. War for US soldiers is to become among poor companions with grim faces, men huddled under the frozen earth, defined by dark, suffering without comfort. It is mud it is a snow, it is bottomless despair. It is feet torn by the endless steps. It's the hundred shameful little miseries which surround the life of the soldier at the front, like a clinging and

fog of sadness. The stifled life ceaselessly calls for the calling up of energy, the leap of the soul, which must tear itself out that missed in order to shine again. This life bears no resemblance to the brilliant ideas that the public has about the exploits of war. But they ought not to be disabused of this notion, we would

thereby spoil their beautiful and brightly colored image. Yet I lie down in exhaustion at the end of each day with a joy that is a little bit sad, but powerful, because it is an incomparable lesson in patience, self mortification, the elevation of the soul. We should never try to

cheat the ordeal of or stifle its voice. If the lesson were to be useful, if we did not return as men changed by the experience, there would not be this wall between on one hand, those who are afraid of the ordeal, and on the other hand, those who looked hardship in the eye and learned from it. Life sinks its fangs into us time after time. I escape this time, like so many others, with a weary, worried, chewed up heart. I wish now to return there at peace,

having found innocence and confidence. It is Christmas. I watched the snowfall tirelessly, and despite its lightness, I feel that I am suffocating. Soldiers passed bent double against the wind going quickly around me. Nothing around me, nothing, always the wind blowing, a man nervously biting his nails, others collapsing

into sleep, exhausted by the knights in the watch. Jesus could have been born in our little shelter sincerity, the good animals about the manger, who offered themselves entirely, the honest hearts of the shepherds, who did not doubt for a second, did not hesitate, and who immediately gave everything at their disposal. They only had sheep, and they gave their sheep, who remembering them, who remembering them, would not take heart. What counts is not what you give sheep

or great treasures. It is the fervor of the heart that weighs upon the sun scales. Sometimes life seems too exhausting to carry, painful even to think about. Today, it is almost an anguish to forget your own existence, your screaming soul. What could let us forget? We have spent a day killing by the dozens, the liights that chew at our skin, that is all. And yet the soul must stand tall, proud, steadfast, and it must stay that way. But great muffled voices deep in the background moan, we

are not men differently built than the others. We too would like, when we listen only to the calls of that outer life, to do not but pile up money earned without labor. All men desire this, whose bodies run hot, whose eyes are alight with the mixture of desire and pleasure. The human beast youth that need to dominate rears up in distress. Are you not wasting your years of radiant life watched by death every hour? Don't you have any regrets?

Feel the desire to break everything in, to throw yourself towards pleasure, towards luminous faces, towards beautiful women. As the other boys of your time, these are times when you have to stifle your passions, to feed your soul and your faith at the expense of such human desires that

shine before our eyes like a mirage. We stand guard on icy parapets, with a touch of bitterness in our hearts, but supremely happy, yet at the sacrifice renewed every day, without even knowing if we will be ever if we will ever be understood. End of the year, I recap the line of dying days, this year, with its secrets and its illuminating lights. The secrets that are hidden behind a smile, but which often bleed like wounds, never close, and then the light light shone upon our character and

our deeds. There are the lights that we may show others. These they are the least beautiful, these heroic lights we show to others. They maintain an air of theatricality and falseness, even when displayed in modest fashion. It is only with great difficulty that one can keep a truly naive heart and yet also take care to avoid an excess of pride. These lights, these imperfect lights, will remain superficial. But these

glorious lights hurt our eyes. We are blinded when we leave them, and we are so often plunged from these brick lights into the shadows of everyday banality or minor setbacks. I remember those lights. I love them only to the extent that they illuminated that ideal towards which I walk. I should only like these lights for this reason, But I know very well that I have often let myself

be taken in by my own self satisfaction. Finally, these lights necessary to arouse us to action, sadden me because they show me that over and over again, I find myself biting down on the hook of vanity or pride. And then there are the other lights, the ones that no one else sees from the outside. They let up our souls like x rays. Then you know exactly what you are worth. Caught these lights, we are no longer

very proud. We see ourselves. We see clearly all of our weaknesses, We see clearly the poverty, the excuses we have made for one hundred mistakes always the same. But it is precisely because we know our own mediocrity all too well that we experience intoxicating joys when the lights that emerge from the depths of the soul end up illuminating a heroic work of our own doing. Though it be only a small act. It was born after so much secret cowardice, that that first inner smile plunges us

into unspeakable raptures. Twenty nine intransigence who kept us on their thoughts, the lost boys of the steps, who had nothing to drink to the new year, but melts it snow streaked with bits of yellow grass, or a few steps of artificial coffee that smelled of soap. Miserable details, humiliating details, the evocation of which seems out of place. Who else could imagine how the biting cold made a herculean effort of even minor tasks, For example, the miserable,

inevitable sickness of dysentery. Of course, we had no sewers. Fifteen twenty times, in just a few hours you would have to run into the blizzard to relieve yourself, allowing your body to be cut by a wind as sharp as a blade, as sharp as a whip. Vanity of our bodies in which we often took such pride, the beautiful human beasts, strong, burning with life, must submit to

these humiliations. The body rebels, but must give in the body that was so satisfied with the pleasant rhythms of life body which has been caressed, kissed love, and we heaped such shame upon you. Yet nothing can reach the mind that is master over itself. If the body is humiliated, it is because the will has led him into these whistling snows, to the bottom of these sordid shelters. Yesterday it was lce. Today the cold claws at our skin. We willed it to be, so we do not care

that we are scourged by this hostile, ferocious situation. One day the cral winds will die off with the return of the leaves to the trees. Our bodies, stretched out in the waters of the rivers and the sun and in the winds, will feel life beating more ardently than ever around their bones, strong as metal under a living flesh like the flesh of flowers, hard and clean like marble,

but golden, full, vibrant. Having suffered in triumph, we will open our arms to the sun, and our smooth, powerful and rough bodies will flow with blood like the sap of the great virgin trees. Our wills will bring back to life the beautiful human beast, prancing with life, now tamed, the whole step caught up in the turmoil might well

crackle whistle rise in gigantic waves. Despite the cold that scorched us, despite the gusts of hailstones it riddled our face, I faced a mailstrom a hundred times to fill my eyes with this grandeur, I felt carried away by the squalls. I communicated with this epic power, where the white plane, the sky, and the wind mingled their strength, their leaps, their icy flames, their long cries springing from the horizon and howling away at the end of the quivering plane.

What are at such moments the forces which rise up in us in communion with the great natural outbursts. I then feel transported, and immense bliss rises from all my body, as if fabulous correspondences were established between my blood which runs and the wind which blows, between the life which boils in my limbs and the savage life which blows past under the great sky. There is not one of us soldiers who does not have to be prepared for

the most gruesome endings. But do we give only with reservation? Death in humiliation isn't a way of giving? Death in humiliation? Isn't it a way of giving even more? True sacrifice cannot be calculated, cannot be given with reservation. We listen to cynics more readily than to the message of righteous hearts. Yet pure hearts will have victory. Only idealists will change the world. I am writing near a rusty barrel, at the bottom of which floats the last bits of step

grass suspended in our icy water. This poverty, this isolation, we know them because we desired sincerity. And more than ever, in this solitude, where bodies and hearts feel invaded by mortal cold, I renew my odes of intransigence more than ever. I will go straight ahead, without giving in, without rest hard on my soul, heart, on my desires, heart of my youth. I'd rather see ten years of cold and abandonment than one day feeling my soul emptied, voided of

its living dreams. I write these words without trembling, which nevertheless make me suffer in the hour of our world's bankruptcy. Souls are needed, which may stand hard and tall as rocky cliffs, beaten in vain by raging winds. Thirty the cross, which moment will be our end. Death passes unresponsive and his hands strangle hearts at random. The machine gun fires it whizzes, it cracks, or it pierces with its deadly

fingers a young man's body. What to do if not to have a pure heart, a quiet regard to the timely sacrifice made freely. If it comes, our eyelashes will not quiver, and we will leave with the faint, sad smile of the tender memories to surround our last seconds. If we come back, even though the warmth of life will have made us forget this icy breath, our hearts will forever have the composure of a life that has not trembled or death. May fate always find us strong

and worthy. You still have to love happiness as you love the song of the wind, however fleeting it may be, as you love the colors of the evening, even though you know they are going to die. For the great winds are reborn and sing again, and every day the colors return to the blazing axis of the risen sun. It is up to us to keep the winds from dying, or to prevent the sun from fading, but to draw

strength from them while they yet live. Joy is the fire of indomitable heart, of indomitable hearts, and no reversal can extinguish or stifle its burning colors. When you see the waves retreating from the sands, returning to the dark depths of the sea, think of the great outpouring that will return a few hours later, white shimmering in the sun, bold and strong, as if these waves were the vanguard of an assault on the world itself. To be happy

is to be unselfish. Happiness is just that giving all of one's self. There are so many mediocre things on earth, low or ugly, that one day we would be overwhelmed by them if we did not carry them within our ourselves. The fire which burns away ugliness, which consumes it and purifies us. Art is our inner salvation, our secret garden

that constantly refreshes and soothes us. Poetry, painting, sculpture, music, anything but to escape from the mundane, to rise above the drying dust, to create something grand instead of submitting to the small, To let out that sparkle, the extraordinary that each of us possess, and convert it into a grandiose, devouring, indistinguishable fire. The dead and dark sentries are those where

souls hesitated before this effort. The luminous centuries are those which have seen that these great fires souls mark out dominate the mountains of the spirit. The only true joys are not those that others give us, but those that we carry within us, that our faith creates, that fill us with dynamism. The rest comes from the foam of the comes like the foam of the sea, shining at the tip of the waves, quivering for a moment on the edge of the sand, then quickly dies or withdraws

with the waves. This is the happiness that others bring us from time to time. The joy that arises from our passion for life and our will is like the great force which rumbles and rolls at the bottom of the sea, which springs up to meet the sun, and is renewed every second. As if hanging from a boat, we watch the mighty sea throw its waves like immense leopard skins, spread out, supple and shiny, standing up like a silver flame, or like a prodigious spray of white flowers.

This life, this life, constantly returns rebounds. We know that nothing until the end of the world will stop this momentum. So it must be our hearts brash, but like this wonderful rhythmic force, ordered chanted like an eternal song. During their day we are caught up in pour often trivial concerns. But at night, the imagination weaves itself through our dreams, takes us into it, takes us in its fantasies, its reconstruction or anticipation. Sometimes I'm amazed by the relentless lucidity

of dreams. Of course, the dream is often a wild folly, of phanfasm, but it is often also for me a meeting with my conscience and with my first intuitions. I see myself naturally as I am, when my will is not there to lock its brakes upon the movement of my passions. I then know exactly on which points I doubt myself each time I must say to myself, look here,

you falter. I thus have the almost daily proof that I can resist a thousand temptations, lead my life with honor only to the extent that are renewed effort, masters and restraints. Every day. Deep within myself a wild horse which can never be fully tamed, and which only the whip of the will, wielded unceasingly, can contain. If the world were relaxed, everything would come undone. I see this in my dreams will the will itself fall asleep. I

awake to feed the dream has cut me adrift. There is no more decisive examination of conscience for me than the unfolding of dreams. Dreams lay bare my soul before me, leaves deep marks upon my thoughts, with the knowledge that we must always be on guard over our baser impulses. Because these baser elements do not naturally run towards, but on the contrary, run from it as soon as they are tempted by beautiful falsehoods. The soul, freed by the gift it has made of itself, flies, sores and sings.

Because we hear within us these great songs of serenity, we know that the work we embark upon will be beautiful, for the great and the beautiful can only be created in joy and in faith. If we love virtue only insofar as it has taken notice of, we defile it with pride. We are no longer virtuous the moment we desire the virtue which we believe we have achieved to be seen and admired. So it is with all virtues.

They are beautif full, soft, radiant if we love them for themselves, if we cultivate them for the unique pleasure of having reached them. We come to life without thinking or caring that we might not be understood by others. Uncomplicated hearts cannot imagine the complications of others. Fresh hearts cannot imagine other hearts being hateful or defiled. Suffering is the most wonderful of companions, pathetic and angelic, washing souls of all desire, raising them to the heights they had

dreamed of for so long. Defeats, victories, dreams, or material successes pass away are forgotten fires that shine for a moment, since swept away by a passing wind. But the essential, the unique, is for us the great spiritual conflagration, without which the world is nothing. So long as there remains a little fire in some corner of the world, all miracles of greatness remain possible. Everything in life is a

matter of faith and tenacity. Trust cannot be begged for it has to be won, and the best way to conquer it. To conquer is to first give of yourself. We all carry our cross. We must carry it with a proud smile, so that we know that we are stronger than suffering, and also so that those who seek to harm us understand that their arrows reach us in vain. What does it matter if you suffer, if you have

what did? What does it matter if you suffer, if you have had a few immortal hours in your life, at least we have lived.

and it's it's systemic function, and you know, kind of sociological affairs at scale, you know, by the twentieth century wars of pure ideology, which is what the Grell's getting at when he talks about, you know, warfare itself being a revolutionary process, and all warfare by the juncture at which you know, he and his mentoring the field of battle, you know, being a theological crusading enterprise. That's that, that's that's totally accurate. You know. That's one of the reason

that this bizarre. When you hear American academic types, Leather's strategic forecasting types who've got, you know, their own kind of conceptual biases, or they're just talking about kind of you know, court historian types, they always come up short in describing warfare as a process or as like an

ontological postulate. You know, they're always like grasping at some sort of some sort of concrete variables, you know, beaut of an economic nature or or there or or they're falling back on on, you know, the systemic remedies assigned by the system that they themselves serve, you know, in uh, and in kind of you know, referring to warfare in terms of legalisms, you know, and and bad actors and purportedly, you know, actors who are abiding what amounts to you know, uh,

a juristic moral precedent. I mean, this is this is incredibly misguided, even if you issue the fact that it's it's at odds with you know, kind of the the

human reality of it. You know, nobody like World War Two wasn't waged because you know, the German arch needed to capture markets to to to you know, needed to capture you know, destination markets for for evaluated manufacturers, you know, and it was it wasn't waves because you know, the like the British wanted need to guarantee that they could access their rubber plantations you know that were in Japan's backyard.

Like that's not that's not reality, and uh, I mean and this endured throughout the Cold War obviously because the the the Cold War literally was ah the conflict that determined, you know, what what world order would would be constituted of, you know, in terms of not just concrete structures that you know kind of the term and uh the you know, human life and labors at scale, but also you know, like what what what values for lack of a better term to invoke, would would would reign and what and

what kind of what what conceptual horizon would would uh be triumphant over all others.

count wasn't just a performance metric of success. It was and then in itself, because if you're going to eradicate communism,

you've got to eradicate the standard bearers of it. And the standard bearers of any of any concept are human beings, you know, So you're talking about the eradication of human beings at scale in order to exterminate a concept and the ability that concepts to exist in the world, let alone constitute an enemy forced to oppose you like you're talking, you're talking about the You're talking about the slaughter of human beings. You know. That's why too people like another Frenchman, uh,

Christian dale MANZERI I'm from Butchering that pronunciation. You know. He wrote the book The Captive Dreamer, and he joined Uh he joined the s S late in the game. I think he didn't go into action until late nineteen forty four. He fought with Charlemagne, who were incidentally the among the last defenders of of Berlin. But you know, in this book he made that point that it was you know, he heven it was clear that Europe was

going down. You know, He's like, I, I wasn't, I wasn't gonna not participate in, you know, in in the crusade to save it from you know, it's it's it's ideological and racial enemies, and that that that's you know, that's very much a crusader spirit, and that's really the only spirit that they can animate people at scale towards a modern war and in turn, at least in some of the stakes that were on the table for the

for the Germans and for the Russians. You know, it's a little more complicated when you deal with America insinuating off into these wars of choice. But that that's kind of a different thing. I mean, that's that's born it's born of a I mean of a purely ideological imperative as well. But there's there's a complexity there that is the subject for a different discussion. But no, that's all I had, That's all I had to contribute right now.

All the scandals, the decline of honesty and honor, shamelessness in the in the certainty of impunity, the passion for money which sweeps away conventions, dignity, self respect, ammorality which has become uncons unconscious, indicate the existence of a deep seated evil which calls for remedies of equal magnitude. It is not suddenly that we lie, that we break all moral laws, supernatural or natural, and more simply the laws

of the public code. It is not overnight that you work yourself up to bold hypocrisy, to speak truth only with reticence, to lie with virtuous words. This deformation of consciousness, which amazes, which frightens today, or which puts on an air of sarcastic superiority, is the only conclusion of a long decline in human virtues. It is the passion for wealth, the will to be powerful no matter what, it is,

the frenzy to be honored. It is materialism. It is the unscrupulous gratification of instincts which have corrupted men, and through men institutions. The world is more and more preoccupied with banal, material or simply animal joys. It maintains itself only by the principle of maximizing material wealth. Each man lives only for himself and allows a domination of life both within his own home and within the country by a constant egoism which has converted men into hateful, embittered,

greedy wolves, or corrupt and soulaced half men. We will come out of this downfall only through an immense moral recovery, by reteaching men to love, to sacrifice themselves, to live, to struggle, and to die for a higher ideal. In a century when we live only for ourselves, it will take hundreds thousands of men to live no longer for themselves but for a collective ideal, Accepting in advance all

the sacrifices, all the humiliations, all necessary heroism. All that matters is faith, brilliant confidence, the come complete absence of selfishness and individualism, the pulling of the whole being towards service without promise of reward in any place by any means, toward a cause that goes beyond men asking him everything, promising him nothing. The only things that count are the quality of the soul, the pulse, the total gift, the will to hoist an ideal above all else, in the

most absolute selflessness. The time is coming when saving the world will require this handful of heroes and saints to make the great reconquest thirty two flotilla of souls. Nations recover rapidly from financial setbacks, they may reconstitute without too much difficulty a new political framework. All that is needed is skilled technicians and a willingness to work together. Revolutions are not political or economic. They are small revolutions, changes

of purely mechanical needs. When the specialists put the pieces together, when the engines have found their rhythm, and sternfaced foreman have been set to watch over them, the material revolution is accomplished. The rest will only require repairs from time to time, a modification here and there. The machine is fitted or overhauled, the gears turn most of the work is done. The real revolution is far more complicated, one which brings together not the machinery of the state, but

the secret life of every soul. There it is no longer a matter of automatic review and monitoring. It is about the vices and the virtues, the impulses towards profundity and weaknesses, the desperate hopes that are so dear to us.

What is there at the bottom of that gaze, behind those eyes that remained on us for a long moment, as if great secrets lie upon our eyelids, A hidden heart, a soul, its secret crises, its outbursts, its despairs, the desire of the body, and its indelible decline, the sorrows that are so difficult to hide or guess at. The uncertain and troubled struggle towards happiness is the great drama

of men. But there too is the real revolution, bringing light to spirits caught in the shadows, to aid in the restoration of failing souls, to relearn that we consist of more than just a body. To perfect the imperfect, to rise to heights of virtue, no matter how great are the efforts required of us, The revolution alone can

be enchancing but terrifying. We all walk through a labyrinth, that thin bowed head, and that beautiful golden hair, laughter that bursts too suddenly, that arm that descends ten faces, ten abysses. Who cheats us, who is mistaken? Who seeks to deceive us? We only see the deceptive shadows of beings. Everyone tries to deceive themselves, to deceive others by simplifications and by more or less skillful artifices. And it is among these subter futures, however, that we must advance. Our

flames burning white in the darkest night. What is there to take hold of? What can we do about these beings? Who are to who? To our impotent eyes appear only mysteries. Mystery is all the more poignant as we observe their laughter, vivacious eyes, pale foreheads, this soft caress of flowing hair, which, with joyful light, oppose all our regrets, anguish, weariness, and corruptions. We all make our way along distant paths. The bottoms

of our hearts. Alone know our true face, the false secrets of our soul, its hopes and faults, our true joys, and our true sorrows. There were so many joys and so many tears that the others thought they knew, shared and assuaged. We look, in the hours of solitude, at our real selves, where no one else alas never go. This innerself tells us who he loves and to whom he belongs, what overwhelms him and causes him to stumble,

and tells us what raises up his spirit. Perhaps if by fortune, the breath of truth brushes aside the invisible veil, to be this current, this great, warm and long wind, which rises from the depths of our spiritual horizons, which gives souls, this first movement. All of a sudden, the sail undergoes an impalpable swelling, rounding off in the light. The whole slips across still waters. The inflection of the

white sails gently pushes the air away. We think of those thousands of motionless sails, waiting for what will give them, imperceptibly at first, then with quivering forth life and movement, the joy of moving through air and water, advancing through the clear line of the horizon in the distance. The boats are heavy, the water is dark and sluggish, everything

is silent. Be this breath that will come at last, to rouse these souls, to push them off, clumsy at first, left after so much waiting and stagnation, then happy and firm. Is to strength that sustains them, and the life that revives them is confirmed. Show all these beings that existence can be beautiful and pure and great, even after all the weaknesses and all the disenchantments. To bring up from these drier, numb or perverted hearts, the fountain of renewal.

This is the task, the real one, the hard one, the necessary task, terrible task. We would like to take these half dead people in our arms, look deeply into their eyes, ward off these creeping doubts and hesitations, to

run our trembling fingers through their silken hair. But what a stir upon meeting those eyes which return the light of others, those eyes which show us so quickly from their first lie or their first confession, the confusion that inhibits us ourselves, how to look at a face without hearing cruel questions? Are you lying? How shall you fare

under fire? Under privations of the flesh? And what will remain tomorrow of the hopes and aspirations, painfully suspended buoyed by this gaze, the source of all redemption lies there, however, to give life to drifting souls, to calm the storms which break their masts and tear their sails, to give them sun and breath, to make serene the seas of men, to make their horizon clear, free from the shadows and perils of violent and tormented skies. Breathe resume, believing in virtues,

in beauty and goodness, in love. Feel dancing around you on the waves, a thousand other sails full of wind, carried with the same momentum, towards the same call when the Golden Sea. When the Golden Sea sees these white sails rush forth, the revolution will be on its way, carried onwards by this flotilla of souls thirty three summits. Your road is hard, you come short of breath. There are times when you would like to throw away this burden that weighs you down. Let yourself go downhill and

return to those idyllic farms that welcome you back. At the bottom of the hill, blue streams against the green and gray backgrounds of meadows and slate roofs. You feel nostalgic for the quiet waters and the clear rushes, the ore that lapse against the surface, the flat, effortless path along the banks. We would like to think of nothing. Wash away the memories of men from your thoughts, and with your back against the grass, watch the passing sky,

lightened by flocks of birds. No more weariness. You won't let go of your bag and your stick. You won't attend to your bleeding knees. You won't listen to the clamor of hatred. You won't look at the smiling eyes and the wickedness they hide. It is to the summit that you must cast your eyes. Your body should live only for these twisting paths. Your heart should dream only of these heights, that you and the others should reach what lies at the root of your what lies at

the root of your confusion. I thought you would find immediate joys in climbing this pathole on the sea and raising this human host. You have often suffered. Sometimes you feel nauseous. Yet you needed it. You had to learn that ambition does not pay off, that sooner or later it tires out the heart it possesses. You know it now. You know that you should not expect any constant joy from outside. You have learned to doubt the comfort of men.

Your face is flushed, not from the tenderness they gave you, but from the blows that you were dealt by them. Of course, you did not think it, would you imagine that along the road your hands and eyes would find what you so feverishly desired. You look back and you say, I am going back down. No, it is only then that life becomes noble, when it beats you down, when you no longer having the enthusiasm to carry on. Do you remember the early days you wanted a very beautiful climb.

It is true you were leaving this way to free your soul. You knew that men must always overcome his limitations. Didn't you believe in this obscure pleasure of honor and discipline? Are you crying out? You did not think for it to be like this. You rejected comfort with sincere enough words, but it still hemmed the edges of your actions, as to foam borders the edge of the sea. You honestly thought that you only lived for this threat of light, beautiful only from afar, on the edge of the sands.

The temptation was there in your heart. You wanted something grand, something real, But you still had the thought of yourself near you. You announced your readiness to do your duty, but you made this silent addition that to fulfill your duty would bring glory to your name and satisfy your own desires, would make you golden with pride. It's because you don't see this phantasm before you anymore, that your eyes reflect only shadows. You are looking in the dark,

confront it the fact that you loved something false. Those who have disgusted, those who have disgusted you one hundred times, with their wickedness and injustice, have carried you more than your own strength. Are you giving up? You give your flesh and your breath, your heart, and your mind, and you think now it is all in vain, in vain? Why because you no longer give them in service and your selfish pride. Only now can you start to give

of yourself. That wickedness had to overwhelm you. By the time you were almost fainting at the end of your effort, the jeers would rise, and contempt would drive you on. It was necessary that all your gestures of love be covered with hatred, that all your impulses be soiled, that each throbbing of your heart command the new blow to fall upon your face. You have known so many times, those exhausting last few meters where you smiled on the threshold of the gold, despite your sweat and your parlor.

The next moment you were falling among the rocks, betrayed by your own, overwhelmed by the others. Everything had to be redone and always, the charming emptiness of the valley below hailed you. The trembling poplars called you like a line of ships on the sea of easy days. You suffered from the harshness of the fighting. You said to yourself, whatever the victory, the price is too expensive, and I

no longer desire it. You always thought of yourself, Yes, for you, for the human pleasure of having reached the top. You made a fool's bargain. But if life had not slapped you a hundred times, which you ever have understood that there are other pleasures than pride, than smiles, than glory. You have felt the hypocrisy of so many faces around you. You have guessed all the lies, all the gall all

the meanness that is in store for you. Every time you start climbing again, you are no longer entitled to anything. You hear the swarm of slithering horrors. You know you will go through with the objection, and with the objection anyway. It is at the hour when you have given everything that you will be said to be greedy. It is at the hour when your heart will suffer the most abandonment that will be given the basest of demands. You turn around with tears that well up in spite of you.

Why are you still thinking of yourself? Do you still suffer from injustice? Is it all about you? How hard is it to be free from our humanity? Let them come crashing down on your life like jackals, Let them trample your dreams, Let them open your heart to all the winds. Suffer from being thrown to the beasts of envy, calumny, baseness, endure above all. And this is what bruises the most.

That at the moment when you cannot take it any longer, when your knees bend, when your eyes cast about for a supportive look, your arm search for and ard in hand support, while you are hanging on a word, a look that this word falls down to break you, that look to hurt you, Except that it is those who are closest to you who finish you off those to whom you had left everything you love, so naively, without reserve and without hesitation, your eyes have a bewilderment worse

than tears. Do not cry out. Expect that everything you suffered yesterday tomorrow will be renewed. Accept this in advance. Do not even turn around when you hear that step behind you. Bless the blows received, Love those who will bring them. They are more useful to you than a thousand hearts. That love you did you get it you may find tomorrow, or perhaps you may have found already that tenderness that comes see you like a breath of fresh air, or like the scent of a cluster of

country flowers. You are now without weakness in front of them. You will only enjoy dignity. Dignity to the extent that, by dints of suffering you have learned to do. Without it, This you would never have obtained had you not paid the price one hundred times, hundreds of times, without ever being sure of receiving anything in return. If one day this appears to you, enjoy it as a sublime landscape glimpsed in passing. But it is not for this that you came. It is the air. It is the light

of the Summit's calling you. You are breathing better already You will slowly attain true joy at those great peaks of consciousness, shining unsullied. Think only of this, see only this, Try to get there, light, pure, radiant, with sunlight. It is your weaknesses and your faults on which you should weigh on them alone, your pride, your name. The vain appeals of the departing men, throw them beyond the rocks. Did you hear them break as they bounce down the slope?

May it all perish. May bitterness and abandonment instead of rebellion, keep you on the path. These two howling dogs are the guardians of the herd of your thoughts. Without them you would stop, you would pull away. Do not waste a moment. It is far, and you must reach the summit. They reach, these pure immensities behind you will be a

great silence. All those who screamed after you, who hated or trampled you, despite the smiles on their faces, all those who just to strike at you, followed you on the road, will suddenly realize that at this game they have they too, have reached the snows, the new air, and the horizons cut out in the sky. They will forget to hate you. They will have wonderfully childish eyes.

They will discover the essential. Their souls will have been lifted to heights they would never have agreed to reach if your back, that had received their blows had not hidden the length of the road. So you will have it your victory. You will be able, having given the final effort, suddenly to fall, arms outstretched from the top of the mountain into the rocks below. You will be done. You will have one reaching the end of your own

journey by the last effort. Will no longer matter if the others are there on the brink of the of the pure immensities of redemption. You are so happy, deep down you know that only happiness is there. Sing, may your voice thunder in the valleys, regrets in tears. The most unremarkable man among you has suffered this, and you would reject him. The hardest thing is done. Hold on, clench your teeth, silence your heart, think only of the top.

And kind of the tail end of that was when you know, The Killer Angels was made into Gettysburg, which people have mixed feelings about that movie, but you know, the very early nineties was kind of the the end of that sort of tendency, both in in in war academia as well as in kind of pop culture. But

obviously that that's got profound implications. That's something similar to underway visa the the German Reich and the experience of World War Two, and that, I mean, that's very exciting and it's very much corrective because it's not this this stuff directly impacts the structure of the world we live in, you know, conceptually, physically, you know, every every way you

can imagine. So the fact that the fact that you know, it's it's not ever we got the ability to kind of fascinate the public imagination to the point that you know, not only are revisionist perspectives crowded out, but that it's unthinkable, you know, on in as regards the prevailing morality. For you know, any any kinntervailing narrative is going to enter public spaces just perfectly speaking, is or was it the

sea change? But it's very exciting. So yeah, I think it's important to make people aware of stuff like the Grill's memoir because again too, Debrill is obviously like a man out letter isn't very much you know, like a cultured European type. And you know that's people that even people are sympathetic to the to the axis cause in history, they've got a sense of the thet they got a sense of the Germans is being consessed of a certain kind of rigidity in their cultural output, which is not

entirely fair, but I understand why they think that. But yeah, that was great man.

but it's through a filter of concrete political realities. And like most of these like most of these guys, most of these guys who are the most kind of stalwart proponents these divisive pedodiologies, like it's there their creatures who exist only in the Internet, Like there's nothing remotely concrete about their ship, you know. And that's one of the means why they're so inflexible, because it's it's never it's never been challenged by you know, the the nuances of

of of Warren peace questions. And when I say Warren peace questions, I mean things that impact anybody of a partisan mindset, even in day to day life. You know, like there's a spectrum of war and peace of you know, on the the most extreme ends are you know, hostas and Animicus, and on the other end is you know, a splendid piece where within the confldical space only friends capital f exists. But you know there's a there's there's an infinite gradations between one side of the spectrum and

the other. So you know, you're very much you're very much at war and metaphysical and unfortunately sometimes concrete terms. Although I certainly don't advocate anybody to undertake violence other than and defense themselves, their property, to their loved ones. But you know, people are people are closer to these processes in a very same winary sense. Then they realize if they're truly engaged and not just you know, somebody playing a game, you know, from some anonymous and remote location.

But yeah, that's uh, that's very good man.

as well as longer form content. And I'm debating releasing the third book in my science fiction series exclusively on on substack now, like you know, the subscribers like Chapter by Chap, I haven't decided yet, but because I won my war with Stripe in their effort to d platform me, for the time being, we're going to remain on Substack. I'm probably also gonna set up a gum Road account too, for among other things, like repository for video content which

I'm actively shooting. But that's that's new to me. So thanks for bearing with me, I mean not I mean everybody who subscribes. But you can always find me at substack at real Thomas seven seven seven at subsec dot com. I'm on Instagram as well. You can link through my website, and I'm on exit uh real Capital r e A L Underscore number seven hm as seven seven seven dot com.

That's where we're at right now. I'll be announcing some of these changes I mean, I have been and will continue to announce some of these changes on my sub stack. Things are kind of normalizing and I've got my workflow locked in now thanks to our dear friend Jay Burden as well as some of the people you plugged me with. So yeah, I'm having to report that, you know, I'll finally be up on you know, fresh content every fourteen days again, as was as was the case, uh for

most of the last year. That's all I got.