Folk and Land: The Revitalization of Our Culture
"The soil is the foundation of our European Culture, both in terms of practical sustenance and spiritually. The land has a mystical quality to which the Folk is rooted by ties of Family--of Blood--for generation upon generation. This is the meaning of that misunderstood and slandered concept Blood & Soil.
The Village emerges to fill the social and economic needs of an expanding rural population, to both sell produce and facilitate social communication. This is the beginnings of a culture. As the Culture gives way to Civilization, the symbols are no longer the land and its Family/Blood rootedness, nor the Village; but the Town becoming City, and ultimately (at the last, 'Winter' phase of a Civilization) the Megalopolis, drawing the rural population into its embrace, submerging the citydweller into a nebulous, alienated mass of proletarians and merchants without ties of land or blood and with at most a precarious notion of family. Above it all stand the new lords and masters: the Bankers, with their democratic political demagogues.
The philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler writes of this disintegration in The Decline of The West:
"The megalopolis - skeptical, practical, artificial - alone represents Civilization today. The soil-peasantry before its gates does not count. The 'People' means the city-people, an inorganic mass, something fluctuating."
THE ROOTEDNESS OF THE PEASANTRY
The peasant/farmer is rooted to the soil in a numinous, mystical manner. His land provides him with more than food or an income; it is here that the generations of his family live and die, where their sweat, blood and tears and laughter consecrate the earth in the most personal way. Where is there such connectedness to one's environment in the City, where all is in a state of flux and transience: where impersonality is supreme.
Spengler continues:
"He who digs and ploughs is seeking not to plunder, but to alter Nature. To plant implies not to take something, but to produce something. BUT WITH THIS, MAN HIMSELF BECOMES PLANT--namely, as peasant. He roots in the earth that he tends, the soul of man discovers a soul in the countryside, and a new earthboundness of being, a new feeling pronounces itself. Hostile Nature becomes the friend, earth becomes MOTHER Earth. Between sowing and begetting, harvest and death, and child and the grain, a profound affinity is set up..."
The symbol of this youthful Culture, this 'Springtime' is the farmhouse, "The great symbol of settledness... It is PROPERTY in the most sacred sense of the word."
"The soil is the foundation of our European Culture, both in terms of practical sustenance and spiritually. The land has a mystical quality to which the Folk is rooted by ties of Family--of Blood--for generation upon generation. This is the meaning of that misunderstood and slandered concept Blood & Soil.
The Village emerges to fill the social and economic needs of an expanding rural population, to both sell produce and facilitate social communication. This is the beginnings of a culture. As the Culture gives way to Civilization, the symbols are no longer the land and its Family/Blood rootedness, nor the Village; but the Town becoming City, and ultimately (at the last, 'Winter' phase of a Civilization) the Megalopolis, drawing the rural population into its embrace, submerging the citydweller into a nebulous, alienated mass of proletarians and merchants without ties of land or blood and with at most a precarious notion of family. Above it all stand the new lords and masters: the Bankers, with their democratic political demagogues.
The philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler writes of this disintegration in The Decline of The West:
"The megalopolis - skeptical, practical, artificial - alone represents Civilization today. The soil-peasantry before its gates does not count. The 'People' means the city-people, an inorganic mass, something fluctuating."
THE ROOTEDNESS OF THE PEASANTRY
The peasant/farmer is rooted to the soil in a numinous, mystical manner. His land provides him with more than food or an income; it is here that the generations of his family live and die, where their sweat, blood and tears and laughter consecrate the earth in the most personal way. Where is there such connectedness to one's environment in the City, where all is in a state of flux and transience: where impersonality is supreme.
Spengler continues:
"He who digs and ploughs is seeking not to plunder, but to alter Nature. To plant implies not to take something, but to produce something. BUT WITH THIS, MAN HIMSELF BECOMES PLANT--namely, as peasant. He roots in the earth that he tends, the soul of man discovers a soul in the countryside, and a new earthboundness of being, a new feeling pronounces itself. Hostile Nature becomes the friend, earth becomes MOTHER Earth. Between sowing and begetting, harvest and death, and child and the grain, a profound affinity is set up..."
The symbol of this youthful Culture, this 'Springtime' is the farmhouse, "The great symbol of settledness... It is PROPERTY in the most sacred sense of the word."
It is the Civilization in its Late or "Winter" phase with the City and the citydweller :dominant that has man returning to a spiritually nomadic, rootless condition. He is no longer settled; there are no real, deep - inner - ties to property in the profound sense, not even among those who own their city dwellings. The City epitomized by the Megalopolis in Late Civilization (for ancient Rome and modern New York, London or Paris) draws the races of the world to it; no longer only the rural population of its own Folk. The Megalopolis is bloodless, money-based, desiring capital and labor regardless of the racial and cultural sources. The great melting-pot is upheld as the ideal. America symbolizes perfectly the Western Civilization's Late phase, and whoever seeks to predict the future of his own society needs only to look first at what unfolds in America.
URBAN DRIFT/URBAN SPRAWL
One of the most transparent signs of the crisis of the Western Civilization is both the depopulation of the countryside and urban sprawl.
URBAN DRIFT/URBAN SPRAWL
One of the most transparent signs of the crisis of the Western Civilization is both the depopulation of the countryside and urban sprawl.
REBIRTH
This is the inexorable process of a Civilization in decay. It follows the same phases as other Civilizations such as Rome, as Spengler showed. However, Western Man has the advantage of historical perspective, of an historical sense more finely tuned than any other Civilization. He can look back ore the past, on the Cycles of Civilization, and see the whence of his doing. He has an historical conscious that separates him from those of other Civilizations in a manner similar to the way humans are separated from other animals by their self-conscious. THE QUESTION REMAINS WHETHER THERE ARE SUFFICIENT NUMBERS WITH THE WILL AND THE SPIRITUAL ESSENCE LEFT NOT ONLY TO LEARN FROM THE PAST BUT TO PUT THOSE LESSONS INTO EFFECT BY FIGHTING FOR A REBIRTH OF THE WESTERN SOUL.
This is the inexorable process of a Civilization in decay. It follows the same phases as other Civilizations such as Rome, as Spengler showed. However, Western Man has the advantage of historical perspective, of an historical sense more finely tuned than any other Civilization. He can look back ore the past, on the Cycles of Civilization, and see the whence of his doing. He has an historical conscious that separates him from those of other Civilizations in a manner similar to the way humans are separated from other animals by their self-conscious. THE QUESTION REMAINS WHETHER THERE ARE SUFFICIENT NUMBERS WITH THE WILL AND THE SPIRITUAL ESSENCE LEFT NOT ONLY TO LEARN FROM THE PAST BUT TO PUT THOSE LESSONS INTO EFFECT BY FIGHTING FOR A REBIRTH OF THE WESTERN SOUL.
Any revival of the European spirit MUST proceed from the concept of Blood & Soil. It must also take account of how the traditional and spiritual attributes of the European can be synthesized with our science and technology which are themselves products of the European soul: of that yearning for knowledge and exploration Spengler referred to as "Faustian."
Indeed since science itself is but an unfolding of the laws of Nature, it seems logical that science and technology should work FOR the spirit of Blood & Soil, and not as they are now doing AGAINST. The problem is not with technology itself, or the unique Faustian soul that gives it shape; it is with the manner by which it is utilized to ravage Nature and dehumanize Man for the benefit of industrial capitalism and the small coteries of plutocrats who control it. The elimination of plutocracy is therefore a prerequisite for the rebirth of our Folk and Culture."
Indeed since science itself is but an unfolding of the laws of Nature, it seems logical that science and technology should work FOR the spirit of Blood & Soil, and not as they are now doing AGAINST. The problem is not with technology itself, or the unique Faustian soul that gives it shape; it is with the manner by which it is utilized to ravage Nature and dehumanize Man for the benefit of industrial capitalism and the small coteries of plutocrats who control it. The elimination of plutocracy is therefore a prerequisite for the rebirth of our Folk and Culture."
-W.Grimwald
