The Fascist Bestiary of the Alt-Right
If we want to fight the new fascism, we must not only organise against it politically, but also understand its ideology. Far from being a morbid curiosity, this is essential for understanding twenty-first century fascism’s inner dynamics. Beyond racist tweets, memes, and Richard Spencer’s obnoxious media appearances, we need to lay bare the images, concepts, and ideas that form the core of alt- right thought. We must lay bare the altright imagination.
This imagination is an unstable and fractured thing, torn between two opposing ‘animal spirits’. These are Behemoth and Leviathan. Originating in the Bible, these beasts gained philosophical meaning in Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy, and entered fascist thought through the writings of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
Who are these monsters? Behemoth is a lumbering giant; it is usually mammalian, often an elephant or trampling bull, occasionally a Russian bear.
Behemoth jealously defends its territory against incursions by the sea monster, the serpentine whale-fish called Leviathan. As Schmitt put it in
1942’s Land and Sea, ‘Behemoth exerts itself to rip apart the Leviathan with its horns or teeth, while the Leviathan, on the contrary, holds shut the
mouth and nose of the land animal with its fins so that it cannot eat or breathe’. For Schmitt, this describes a naval blockade, and has its analogy in
the conflicts between England and Russia in the nineteenth century, and England and Germany in the twentieth.
These beasts are a pair of opposites: Behemoth is autochthonous, representing the stable order of earth-bound peoples. Leviathan is thalassocratic, embodying the fluid dynamism of seafaring peoples. Behemoth signifies terrestrial empires, while Leviathan suggests commercial trade and exploration. The former stands for traditional, divinely sanctioned state authority, the latter for the spirit of pirate-capitalist enterprise (what Schmitt calls ‘corsair capitalism’).
Today, the ‘Traditionalist’ philosopher Aleksandr Dugin and the ‘neoreactionary’ philosopher Nick Land are the standard bearers of Behemoth and Leviathan, respectively. They are also the conduits by which these animal spirits have entered the twenty- first century alt-right imagination. It is for this reason that the alt- right mind is such a conflicted, contradictory thing. It is not that most reactionaries today engage much with Dugin and Land’s texts, let alone Carl Schmitt’s. But the seemingly opposed worldviews of Land and Dugin are the very ether within which alt-right thought is steeped. It is an ideology torn between technophilic Futurism and neo-Orthodox Traditionalism. Both positions reject Enlightenment modernity, but each of these fascist ‘postmodernisms’ represents its own distinct variety or brand. For Dugin, the break with modernity is accomplished through an ethno-religious apocalypse – a return to orthodoxy, and an activation of a mystical eschaton beyond time. Land imagines the break from liberal modernity will be accomplished through an accelerating techno-capitalism, superseding humanity itself. Despite these differences, both figures reject modernity as ending in the nightmare of cultural Marxism.
If we want to fight the new fascism, we must not only organise against it politically, but also understand its ideology. Far from being a morbid curiosity, this is essential for understanding twenty-first century fascism’s inner dynamics. Beyond racist tweets, memes, and Richard Spencer’s obnoxious media appearances, we need to lay bare the images, concepts, and ideas that form the core of alt- right thought. We must lay bare the altright imagination.
This imagination is an unstable and fractured thing, torn between two opposing ‘animal spirits’. These are Behemoth and Leviathan. Originating in the Bible, these beasts gained philosophical meaning in Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy, and entered fascist thought through the writings of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
Who are these monsters? Behemoth is a lumbering giant; it is usually mammalian, often an elephant or trampling bull, occasionally a Russian bear.
Behemoth jealously defends its territory against incursions by the sea monster, the serpentine whale-fish called Leviathan. As Schmitt put it in
1942’s Land and Sea, ‘Behemoth exerts itself to rip apart the Leviathan with its horns or teeth, while the Leviathan, on the contrary, holds shut the
mouth and nose of the land animal with its fins so that it cannot eat or breathe’. For Schmitt, this describes a naval blockade, and has its analogy in
the conflicts between England and Russia in the nineteenth century, and England and Germany in the twentieth.
These beasts are a pair of opposites: Behemoth is autochthonous, representing the stable order of earth-bound peoples. Leviathan is thalassocratic, embodying the fluid dynamism of seafaring peoples. Behemoth signifies terrestrial empires, while Leviathan suggests commercial trade and exploration. The former stands for traditional, divinely sanctioned state authority, the latter for the spirit of pirate-capitalist enterprise (what Schmitt calls ‘corsair capitalism’).
Today, the ‘Traditionalist’ philosopher Aleksandr Dugin and the ‘neoreactionary’ philosopher Nick Land are the standard bearers of Behemoth and Leviathan, respectively. They are also the conduits by which these animal spirits have entered the twenty- first century alt-right imagination. It is for this reason that the alt- right mind is such a conflicted, contradictory thing. It is not that most reactionaries today engage much with Dugin and Land’s texts, let alone Carl Schmitt’s. But the seemingly opposed worldviews of Land and Dugin are the very ether within which alt-right thought is steeped. It is an ideology torn between technophilic Futurism and neo-Orthodox Traditionalism. Both positions reject Enlightenment modernity, but each of these fascist ‘postmodernisms’ represents its own distinct variety or brand. For Dugin, the break with modernity is accomplished through an ethno-religious apocalypse – a return to orthodoxy, and an activation of a mystical eschaton beyond time. Land imagines the break from liberal modernity will be accomplished through an accelerating techno-capitalism, superseding humanity itself. Despite these differences, both figures reject modernity as ending in the nightmare of cultural Marxism.
by Harrison Fluss (http://salvage.zone/harrison-fluss/)
& Landon Frim (http://salvage.zone/landon-frim/)
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12/29/2017 Behemoth and Leviathan: The Fascist Bestiary of the Alt-Right | Salvage
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