Part One.

"Miserable, uneducated half-men. You are not at all what we fought for..." This quote, which opens your "Operation Valkrie" single, comes from a movie about Rome, yet my first impression was that it was the voice of a Europe which existed before the Great War. The degeneracy of our contemporary society seems to mock those who fought and died, seemingly for nothing. Are you aiming with your music to give a voice to the past?

The quote could apply to the ancient or modern past as well as to the present day. There is a certain irony in that the actual scene in the film involves a Roman general captured by Germanic warriors and threatened with execution if he does not permit the integration of the latter into the Roman army. The Germans had a similar contempt for the Slavs in WWII while today the principle could apply to certain aspects of the post-war world where the complacency of a peaceful, affluent society produces a kind of spiritual amnesia. All of these elements are apparent in 'Operation Valkrie'. The song is genuinely inspired by the fateful event in July 1944 and the heroic martyrdom of Colonel Graff Schenk von Stauffenberg. The lyrics were written on the anniversary of Stauffenberg's execution. I recently visited the site in Berlin, which was a very moving experience. Stauffenberg's actions at the time were not only a noble expression of conscience but stemmed from a patriotic defiance and defence of the spirit of Germany (and Europe) which Hitler had so ruthlessly betrayed. His friendship with the poet Stefan George was also important in the development of his role as an aristocratic military figure, which reflected George's belief in the poet as a guardian of civilisation. These two elements, the pen and the sword, conscience and courage, came together in the person of Stauffenberg who, in his death, failed to stem the tide of destruction but immortalised the spirit of true heroism in the face of defeat.

What would you say to those elements who suggest that the current interest in such figures as Stauffenberg and Gregor Strasser is merely a form of misguided romanticism, like the Old Left's fascination with Trotsky?

I would draw a sharp distinction between Strasser and Stauffenberg. The first was part of the Nazi movement and had to come to terms with Hitler's domination of it. Stauffenberg was an army officer forced to choose between his conscience and his oath of allegiance. Both men had ideals that were thwarted by historical reality. Strasser acted early because his own brother had been murdered in the 1934 purge. Stauffenberg acted much later but his critical attitude to Hitler emerged shortly after 1933. But he too was impressed by the apparent miracle of Hitler's early victories. Ultimately, however, both men chose to resist and rebel against him. For this they are to be admired but my admiration for Stauffenberg far exceeds anything I feel for Strasser who was still a Nazi. But history seems to show that it is usually the most ruthless and unscrupulous individuals who succeed in the struggle for power. Even Trotsky proved this by his actions against the Kronstad mutiny, for example. If Strasser was Fuhrer, he may not have exterminated the Jews but the German alliance with Stalinist Russia would have been more genuinely pursued and who knows what consequences this could have had for Germany. The revolt against power is always imbued with some form of idealism just as the cult of martyrdom is tinged with romanticism, and a nostalgia for what was not. But, in the special case of Stauffenberg, I would say that our admiration is justified, precisely because he was part of the most conservative echelon of society (the army) and chose to break his oath as a mark of fidelity to his country and his conscience. There is nothing romantic about this fact, but I agree with you that the memory itself can lead to a romantic perspective. But romanticism is not necessarily naivete: it can hold the balance between the real and the ideal without which the truth is never complete.

"A White Rose crowned with runic thorns, for the murdered sons of God..." Does this line, also in "Operation Valkrie", refer to Hans and Sophie Scholl?

Yes, and all the other victims of Hitler's scourge symbolised by the apocryphal-biblical 'sons of God'. Grace is bestowed by death in the immortalisation of mortality.

Would it be fair to say that you view those like Stauffenberg and the White Rose group almost in a religious light, as symbols of purity against the modern world? If so, can you find any similar purity in contemporary resistance groups?

Yes, I think there is more to The White Rose than just a resistance group per se, but I don't see it as a counter-ideology like Strasser's Black Front or the communist partisans. I see it as a fatal flowering of the spirit of youth in a grim season of decay, a moral rebellion grounded in the idealism that originally inspired the German Youth Movement. This does not mean that they deliberately courted death or martyrdom - like Stauffenberg they did everything they could to avoid this fate. But they knew the risks they were taking and how severe the penalties would be for treason. (The special courts that were dealing with political crimes were operating since 1933). Their political actions were informed by a purity of intent that required a substantial transformation of consciousness within a national psyche dominated by totalitarian control. As with Stauffenberg, it was the soul of Germany they wanted to save from the dark forces that possessed it. There were elements in the 20th of July circle that can be linked to more conservative political principles. It is quite obvious that the German military were authoritarian and more receptive to the idea of a new Reich than to the precarious foundations of the Weimar Republic. The ideas of Moeller van den Bruck and Edgar Jung, who were seeking an alternative to liberal democracy, form a significant part of the neo-conservative ideology that was grounded in the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire and Prussia. Jung was executed in the 1934 purge and van den Bruck (who died in 1925) already felt betrayed by the Nazi appropriation of his ideas. Stauffenberg was from an aristocratic military family and his associations with Stefan George and his Catholicism would certainly have influenced his perspective on the New Order. You could say that his attempted assassination of Hitler was a combination of the moral rebellion that informed the White Rose and the conservative philosophy of a spiritual Reich that had been hijacked and perverted by Nazism. But the failure of the coup attempt and the defeat of Germany meant the dissolution of this seemingly impossible ideal. Perhaps the only comparable event in recent times would be Yukio Mishima's suicide in 1970, which was both a spiritual and political act. Most other so-called 'resistance' movements are either spurious or terroristic (or both) whether from the left or the right. What is lacking is the inspiration of a noble character, that aristocratic spirit which has all but disappeared from the modern world, except in its most moribund state.

I feel that Mishima's suicide was a logical outcome of his obsession with beauty, an obsession that is said to have virtually defined the Japanese character in previous eras. Mishima wasn't political in any ordinary sense, rather his political outlook was an extension of his spirituality. It was also greatly intensified by the wealth of contradictions that made up his personality, which could only be "resolved" by his final act. Do you think it possible for a Westerner to achieve the same "harmony of pen and sword", given that the Western character is even more fragmented than the Japanese?

There have been some Occidental artists who have enacted this principle, although in Mishima's own definition, the ideal of harmony is only exacted at the moment of death, a moment which the life is constantly striving towards and for which the final act is a consummation. Ernst Junger lived to a ripe old age of 102 yet, as a soldier and author, warrior and philosopher, he encompassed that profound bridging of thought and being which placed him in a position that was similar to Mishima's in regard to the spiritual essence of power. Like Mishima, Junger embraced and embodied the soul of his nation, and this necessarily placed him at odds with elements of modern nationalism and its antithesis. I also see D.H. Lawrence as another (non-martial) example of the harmony of life, thought and art. Lawrence strived for that intensity of being stripped of intellectual pretension and mental repression and his exile from Europe is significant in this respect. I am not sure if the Japanese character is more unified than the Western. I agree that the latter may be more fragmented but contemporary Japanese society harbours a radical dichotomy beneath its apparent synthesis of the traditional and the modern. The Japanese soul is bifurcated where the Western is splintered. Mishima embraced and unified this duality in every aspect of his life but this was not a rift that could be universally resolved. It is the rift itself that inspires the will to an ultimate resolution that only the spiritual elite can attain.

Getting back to the Third Reich for a moment, what constitutes the spirit of Europe that you talk of, and in what ways do you think Hitler betrayed it?

The spirit of Europe is essentially the eternal Logos within the dis-continuity of Time. It is our Classical heritage, our interwoven Pagan heritage, our Faustian Christian heritage, our modern heritage and the legacy of all of this. Every age lives in the shadow of its past, even when the past is being rejected and obscured. The 'eternal present' is not the isolation of an epoch but its immanence in the transcendent matrix of a living thread of history. It is true that the contemporary world is quite dead to this spirit of immanence but it is also true that the chasm between temporality and eternity is also the fateful bridge between them and the thread that binds them together in an ultimate unity and singularity of being. The National Socialist Revolution was an attempt to establish a primordial nexus between the forces of the past and the 'new man' or god-man of the future, a spiritual grail-quest for the mystery of the blood that fostered a theosophical-ariosophical ideal of racial destiny. Hitler always argued that politics was but a means to an end and it was this end that he and others (particularly Himmler) had in mind. This was also primarily a manichean, apocalyptic and eschatalogical (note the Christian analogies) vision that polarised the world into a war of destiny that meant annihilation for the ostensible enemies of this ideal. This is where the root of the evil (and I mean evil in its most spiritual sense) lay, a shadow of darkness that not only eclipsed the solar and heroic aspirations of Ariosophy but also inspired its initial inception. The black hole was always waiting to devour the divine sun, like the Fenris Wolf of the Ragnarok, and therefore there was something fatalistic and inexorable about the Nazi revolution. But it is important to realise that the dissolution which Hitler catalysed did not lead to a spiritual rebirth or renewal but a complete despiritualisation of the world through the invocation of the spirit itself. Hitler saw himself as an instrument of Providence and the first prerequisite for membership of the SS was a belief in God. The historical inspiration for the SS was the Knights Templar, the army of God, or what would more accurately be described as the Anti-Christ, the archetype of the Aryan hero. It is no coincidence that these mystical ideals were consummated in the shadow of evil because Hitler chose to define what was German almost exclusively against what was (in his eyes) non-German and the closest apparition of this negation of the spirit (ie. Ario-Germanic Man) was the Jew and those allegedly under his influence.But the separation of the Jew from the German was also an internal act of miscegenation that did as much to destroy the German-Aryan race spiritually as it did to destroy the Jewish race physically. This is the actual and symbolic dissolution of the light into the shadow, a theme which C.G.Jung explored in his 'Essays on Contemporary Events'. For Jung, the Shadow was Wotan, the wild hunter returning to the world in a storm of neo-mythical revival, a palingenesis that had the power to recreate and destroy the foundations of the soul in the spirit. This does not mean that Hitler himself was the god - on the contrary, he was the demonic 'genius' who utilised the divine (in principle) to fulfil its antithesis, not the non-divine but the anti-divine, the spiritual dissolution of the spirit. To me, this is the legacy and burden of his memory. In conclusion, the immortal spirit always transcends race, even if there is a racial dimension to it. The spirit will survive Hitler's bloody twilight because it is and always will be immortal.

What form do you see it [the spirit of Europe] taking in the future, then? Will there necessarily be a total collapse before the sun rises? I don't just refer to a collapse of the natural environment either, though that seems highly likely, but a complete destruction of our society's values, as it seems impossible to achieve anything while the "last men" rule the world.

If you mean a 'spiritual' collapse, I think that has already happened. But, like the Fall of Man, this is a necessary and even desirable process that will seek and re-discover the gods of dark places. I do not foresee a political collapse because the present economic stability engenders little more than apathy or scepticism. This too is necessary for the determination of the future. Isaiah Berlin defined two concepts of freedom, negative and positive. The first is what we have now, the 'liberal' individualism that is grounded on the principle of self-realisation. The second is Positive freedom, which is when the state or a higher authority determines the nature and destiny of the individual. There is an obvious contradiction between the two and the recent history of Europe has witnessed the manifestation of both. This legacy is important because it reveals the complexity of Europe's political evolution between absolutism and federalism that goes back to the Greeks. The European Union is a noble idea but it will be difficult to implement precisely where the parts do not integrate entirely into the whole. Regionalism and nationalism will remain strong elements that the union will have to accommodate. The political scene is also so dominated by economic interests that any attempt to pursue a transcendent vision of European destiny is precarious and too reminiscent of the last war. Joachim de Flora (13th C) believed that history could be viewed in relation to the Trinity and had passed through the kingdom of the Father (the ancient world) to the kingdom of the Son (the Christian world) and was entering the kingdom of the Holy Spirit in which temporal power would no longer have that absolute presence and the true kingdom would be the inner realm of the soul. This vision was quite prophetic and it is this pursuit of an inner road to wisdom/freedom as opposed to the extraneous resolution of power in political structures that must form the ultimate ground of reality. What Camus called exile in the kingdom could very well be a kingdom of exile, the place where the distant shadows of the old Imperium begin to take shape again in the desert of the soul. From there alone may the world turn green again but this will only confirm and re-enact the process anew.

PART TWO