from: Marx, Moses, and the pagans in the secular city
by Tomislav Sunic
source: CLIO, 1 January 1995
via: HighBeam™ Research
Copyright © 1995 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

There is ample evidence that pagan sensibility can flourish in the social sciences, literature, and arts, not just as a form of exotic narrative but also as a mental framework and a tool of conceptual analysis. Numerous names come to mind when we discuss the revival of Indo-European polytheism. In the first half of the twentieth century, pagan thinkers usually appeared under the mask of those who styled themselves as "revolutionary conservatives," "aristocratic nihilist," "elitists" - in short all those who did not wish to substitute Marx for Jesus, but who rejected both Marx and Jesus.(9) Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger in philosophy, Carl Gustav Jung in psychology, Georges Dumezil and Mircea Eliade in anthropology, Vilfredo Pareto and Oswald Spengler in political science, let alone dozens of poets such as Ezra Pound or Charles Baudelaire -- these are just some of the names that can be associated with the legacy of pagan conservatism. All these individuals had in common the will to surpass the legacy of Christian Europe, and all of them yearned to include in their spiritual baggage the world of pre-Christian Celts, Slavs, and Germans.

....many modern pagan thinkers, for their criticism of Biblical monotheism, have been attacked and stigmatized either as unrepentant atheists or as spiritual standard-bearers of fascism. Particularly Nietzsche, Heidegger, and more recently Alain de Benoist came under attack for allegedly espousing the philosophy which, for their contemporary detractors, recalled the earlier national socialist attempts to "dechristianize" and "repaganize" Germany. These appear as unwarranted attacks. Jean Markale observes that "Naziism and Stalinism were, in a sense, also religions because of the acts that they triggered. They were also religions insofar as they implied a certain Gospel, in an etymological sense of the word . . . Real paganism, by contrast, is always oriented towards the realm of sublimation. Paganism cannot be in the service of temporal power."

Allegedly? Recalled? Unwarranted? I'll give you a big "no comment" on Nietzsche, the philosophical Tar Baby of all time, but folks, Heidegger was a Nazi with a capital N. This is not subject to waffling or hair-splitting intellectual debate, as we see being demonstrated here.

....Anxious to dispel the myth of pagan "backwardness," and in an effort to redefine European paganism in the spirit of modern times, the contemporary protagonists of paganism have gone to great lengths to present its meaning in a more attractive and scholarly fashion. One of their most outspoken figures, Alain de Benoist, summarizes the modern meaning of paganism in the following words:

...[What] worries us today, at least according to the idea which we have about it, is less the disappearance of paganism but rather its resurgence under primitive and puerile form, affiliated to that "second religion," which Spengler justifiably depicted as characteristic of cultures in decline, and of which Julius Evola writes that they "correspond generally to a phenomenon of evasion, alienation, confused compensation, without any serious repercussion on reality."

Now this is comforting. Alain de Benoist, who is here defended against charges of fascism, approvingly quotes Oswald Spengler, a unzipped maniacal racist, and Julius Evola, the "thinking man's" fascist ideologue.

Not so by-the-way, the author of this article, one Tomislav Sunic, also wrote a book called Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, also published by the far-right (to be generous) Noontide Press. If you follow that last link, be sure to check out their catalog while you're at it. It contains many other works by "alleged" Nazis. Now you can get all your white-supremacist and holocaust-denier needs met at one convenient location!