Education
Oct 22, 2019 16:56:47 GMT
Post by Evola As He Is on Oct 22, 2019 16:56:47 GMT
`La Revolution commence par une orgie' is a chapter from G. Breton's best-seller `Histoires d'amour de l'histoire de France', a 3500-page well-documented work in two volumes that deals with a feigned lightness tinged with irony with the impact women, love and sex had behind-the-scenes on French and European politics from Clovis to the Third Republic, and in which a wealth of more or less anecdotic information can be found on the family tree of historical figures that are universally thought to be of European origin (for example, who could have thought that the Bernadotte family is of Jewish origin ?). For the record, G. Breton, with whom L. Bergier co-authored a few other interesting books, of which `Les nuits secretes de Paris ', did not have a hand in `Morning of Magicians'.
This is an excerpt from the first paragraph of `La Revolution commence par une orgie', which, unfortunately, could not be found online until we put it :
"The `patriotic' propaganda of Philip of Orleans and his friends was successful quite rapidly.
In September, daily riots burst in Paris where there was not enough bread. The previous year, an extraordinary hurricane of hail had destroyed part of the harvest from the banks of the Charente River to those of the Scheldt, and flour had become scarce.
In spite of this food shortage, on October 1st, Louis XVI improperly offered a meal to the officers of the regiment of Flanders. Marie-Antoinette made an appearance at it, holding the dauphin in her arms, and the champagne was opened, while the orchestra was playing : "Ô Richard, ô my king, the whole world abandons you to your fate", which was an oddly prophetic song
This feast made a bad impression on the little people, and the friends of the duke of Orleans took advantage of this to call it a scandal and set the people against the court.
They carefully prepared a `spontaneous reaction', distributing money and gathering together all malcontents. It took them four days. On October 5th, a howling mob left Paris, led by sergeant Maillard, and marched on Versailles.
It has been said time and again that it was made up of nice Parisian women whose children were hungry and who were going to ask the king for bread. In reality, we know now that the eight thousand women led by Maillard and flanked by rioters in the pay of the duke of Orleans comprised many transvestites. These were "easily recognisable with their manly voices, with their unshaved grease-painted faces, with their badly-fitting dresses, under which, in the heat of the moment, some of them revealed a hairy chest, whose shape was very much unlike what that part of the body looks like in women".
The friends of the future Philippe-Egalite had brought together these fake housewives with more than three thousand whores who had been recruited in the faubourgs and in the venal crowd of the Palais-Royal [the centre of prostitution, of idleness and of pamphlets in late eighteenth century Paris. Note of the Editor]."
The elder Cato's landmark speech against the repeal of the Lex Oppia (Livy, History of Rome, XXXIV) can hardly be found online in French translation (as the meaning tends to be sacrificed at the cost of formal excellence in nineteenth-century French translations of Latin works, and Danielle de Clerq's new translation of `Ab Urbe condita' tends to take slight liberties with Liber XXXIV, ours was published)
Denis de Rougemont's `Les Mefaits de l'Instruction publique', in which, two years after they were touched upon in `La Crise du Monde moderne', the ills of public education are examined in greater depth and the conclusion is reached that "democracy without public education would be practically impossible", is even less visible online. D. De Rougemont did not change a iota to 'Les Mefaits de l'Instruction publique', when it was published again in 1972 ; on the contrary, the considerations he first developed in 1929 were `Aggraves d'une Suite des mefaits'.
P. Valery, a contributor (together with R. Guenon, G. Benn and various other thinkers) to a page of the Fascist paper Regime Fascista entitled `Diorama filosofico', of which J. Evola was the editor, identified two other deleterious aspects of public education in `Variete III', when he pointed out that "the actual aim of education is the diploma and the diploma is the deadly enemy culture", and that the graduate is "led to believe that he is owed something." While the first quote can be found on hundreds of web sites, the edifying excerpt from which it is taken cannot.
The sense of vanity, of self-satisfaction, that can arise from education is expertly rendered in the following passage, which, in the absence of an English translation which Tom Sharpe would be most qualified to make, we have resolved to translate into this language, from `Les Annales de l'Empire depuis Charlemagne' (1753) :
"781-782. The King of France holds his court in Worms, Ratisbonne, and Cuierci. Alcuin, archbishop of York, meets up with him there. The king, who hardly knew how to sign his name, wanted to make science flourish, because he wanted to be great in everything. Peter of Pisa taught him some grammar. What was surprising was not that the Italians taught the Gauls and the Germans, but that we still needed the English to learn what is not even honoured today with the name of science.
Lectures were delivered to the king, which may be the origin of academies, and especially those of Italy, in which every academician takes on a new name. Charlemagne was named David, Alcuin, Albinus ; and a young man named Ilgebert, who wrote poetry in the Romance tongue, took on boldly Homer's.
783. However Widukind, who did not learn grammar, stirs up the Saxons again. He beats the generals of Charles on the banks of the Weser. Charles comes to make up for this defeat. He defeats the Saxons again ; they lay down arms in front of him. He orders them to deliver Widukind. The Saxons respond that he has fled to Denmark. "His accomplices are still here," answered Charlemagne, and he had four thousand five hundred of them massacred in front of him. Thus, he inclined Saxony towards Christianity. This is closely akin to what Sulla did ; at least the Romans were not coward enough to praise Sulla. The barbarians who wrote Charlemagne's actions had the baseness to praise him and even to make him a fair man : they were used as models by almost all the compilers of the History of France."
`Les Annales de l'Empire depuis Charlemagne' has not more visibility online than A. Vetault's `Charlemagne', a book which touches upon a lesser known aspect of the Christianisation of Northern European peoples, and whose following excerpt we used in our study on Julius Evola and the Jewish problem in ancient times to support the paragraph dedicated to education as a key institution in the brainwashing and indoctrination of the youth : "The abbeys of Fulda and Herzfeld, Carolingian foundations had finally managed to exercise their influence beyond the Saxon marches. Thanks to these seats of propaganda and evangelic influence, the staunch followers of Wotan had been gradually wrapped in a Christian atmosphere through no will of their own. The new faith had even found apostles among the Saxons, especially among the teenagers, whom Charlemagne held hostage and whose education he entrusted to the monastic schools of Germania. When set free, these ardent greenhorns became in turn missionaries among their relatives and their fellow countrymen."
In 1894, G. le Bon pointed out, with an insight that is all the more remarkable as he was himself a scholar, that it is a great error "to believe that intelligence and culture go together. Culture merely implies the possession of a certain amount of memory, but to acquire it no judgment, reflection, initiative or invention are necessary. Persons of very restricted intelligence are often met with among those who have passed examinations, while it is quite as common to find persons of a very slight degree of culture who are highly intelligent", and that "A negro or a Japanese may easily take a university degree or become a lawyer ; the sort of varnish he thus acquires is however quite superficial, and has no influence on his mental constitution. What no education can give him, because they are created by heredity alone, are the forms of thought, the logic, and above all the character of the Western man. Our negro or our Japanese may accumulate all possible certificates without ever attaining to the level of the average European. It is easy to give him in ten years the culture of a well-educated Englishman. To make a real Englishman of him, that is to say a man acting as an Englishman would act in the different circumstances of life, a thousand years would scarcely be sufficient". He could not possibly foresee that, a century later, the Sorbonne would look like the Babel tower, that, as early as the 1960's, the Pandora box of public education would be fully opened by the hidden leaders of plouto-theocracry to promote and bring about their anti-racist and infra-racial levelling and egalitarian agenda by flattering non- and extra-Europeans into thinking that getting a degree made them equal to White peoples who had already been brainwashed into believing that education was the measure of man, and that what oozed out of it would be used to bridge artificially and virtually the "impassable abyss" "between the mental constitution of the different races". In any case, it is unfortunate but understandable that le Bon's considerations on education are hardly ever quoted online.
The close link, the specific interrelation between egalitarianism and "the wishful thinking that a complete uniformity should be imposed everywhere, for example by providing the same education, as if all persons were equally able to understand the same things, and as if, to make them understand these, the same methods could suit all of them", is more strongly emphasised in `The Crisis of the Modern World'. Since such wishful thinking did not and could not possibly exist in ancient hierarchical and warrior societies such as ancient Rome, Sparta and the Hellenic world, whatever `similarities' educators try desperately hard to find between Graeco-Roman education and modern so-called education can only be purely formal and external. Even after formal education, that is, attendance to a public school run by an unpaid teacher, was introduced in Greece and, later, in Rome, where the first fee-paying private school was purportedly opened by a former slave in the late third century B.C.E., not only informal education coexisted with it, but the type of education a pupil was given was essentially based on the social class his parents belonged to. The very purpose of schooling had as little to do with today's as the curriculum which was never a point of contention and, of course, was not seen as "a social engineering area", with its `learning outcomes', `assessment strategies' and the like - had a distant echo of this differentiated and aristocratic vision of education is found in the literature of J.F. Bobbitt, a member of the eugenic movement who was also one of the first curriculum theorists, who asserted in the early twentieth century that "educational standards are to be based on the "native ability" of students, and their curriculum should reflect this "native ability"." (http://books.google.fr/books?id=9gk3rc-KZkMC&pg=PR3&dq=%22Unequal+by+design:+high-stakes+testing+and+the+standardization+of+inequality%22&hl=fr&ei=Y_WnTrqGAamj4gTW_azwDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false)
Not only schooling was never a legal requirement in ancient Greece, but "there was also no State control or inspection of schools throughout the Republic and early Empire. In the later Empire", when few emperors were still of Roman stock, "the most that anxious, interfering Emperors undertook was to exercise some control over teachers and perhaps to encourage municipalities to appoint better or more schoolmasters." (http://books.google.fr/books?id=3OmxeVI5RSQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Life+in+ancient+Rome%22+cowell&hl=fr&ei=j_mnTv3yFMrKsgbLzbD5DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false)
It is very interesting that, originally, the paedagogos, and, later in Rome, the paedagogus was not a trustworthy slave who escorted a child to and from school, but merely, more etymologically, a slave who accompanied, led a child from one place to another, from home to other places. This etymological meaning is echoed in the Latin educere (to lead out, to lead forth, to raise up, to erect), from which educare (to educate) is derived. Before the third century B.C.E., Roman children were taught at home by their parents. The baby and the small child was raised, not by a slave, as was the case in Greece, but by the matrona herself. After the baby was born, the father kept a close eye on the care the child received. When he was seven year-old, in aristocratic families, his father took care personally of his education. Cato made a point of teaching himself his son all he had to learn. The young noble Roman learned about the social and political life in the feasts, in the curia and in the various public activities he went to with his father, with whom he also visited the baths, which included exercise rooms and courtyards where boxing and wrestling were practiced. Family education was finished by the time he was sixteen. During a religious ceremony, the freeborn boy who had come of age took off the toga praetexta and the other badges of childhood to take on the toga virilis. He was then a citizen, but his formation was not finished. He was then left in the care of a friend of the family, with whom he learned more about public life. He finally served in the military for two years under the protection of a powerful political figure chosen by his family.
This family education was essentially a moral formation, which passed down the ideal of the Roman virtus to the child, then to the young man.
This quality first manifests the complete dedication of the individual to the Urbs. This old totalitistic ideal, which was that of Sparta, gave way in the Hellenistic monarchies to a humanist ideal of individual self-fulfilment. In Rome, however, it always remained present.
The second aspect of the virtus is the respect for ancestral and family traditions. The young noble Roman lived in the admiration of his ancestors and strove to imitate them. The virtus has also a religious dimension. The truly `virtuous' man is the one who is able to subordinate his own life to the respect for justice and for the divine laws. For the Romans, true patriotism is based on pietas as "dutiful respect toward Gods, fatherland, and parents and other kinsmen" - and on the attention paid to the signs given by the gods.
Education also sought to develop rural virtues in the child : hard work, austerity, frugality. The young noble Roman is warned against the corrupting effects of luxury and the virtus of Cincinnatus is cited as an example in this connection. At each stage of his education, he is trained how to be more resilient and he is driven away from all the pleasures which may weaken him. `Virtus' did not cease to be the cornerstone of the Roman education after the opening of formal schools in Rome.
This overview of education in ancient Rome, which was borrowed in part from www.memo.fr/en/article.aspx?ID=ANT_ROM_017, was made absolutely necessary by the need to prevent the misconceptions that could arise from the use of the word `education' in the following excerpt :
"And Celse provides with a master's hand the amazing picture of the methods of propaganda of the Christians in the public square or in the gynaeceum, where they strive to undermine the authority of the head of household and of the tutors : `[What harm is it then to be well educated, to love fine learning, to be wise, and to pass for such ? Is that an obstacle to the knowledge of God ? Are they not rather helps to attain to the truth ? What are these fair-runners, these jugglers doing ? Do they address themselves to men of sense, to tell them their good news ? No, but if they see somewhere a group of children, of street porters, or low people, it is there they ply their industry and cause themselves to be admired. It is the same way inside families ;] here are some wool-carders, some shoemakers, some fullers, some people of the lowest ignorance, and quite destitute of education. Before masters, men of experience and judgment, they dare not open their mouths ; but if they surprise the children of the house, or women who have no more reason than themselves, they set themselves to work wonders. Only such can believe ; the father and the preceptors are fools who do not know the true good and are incapable of understanding it. Those preachers alone know how they ought to live ; the children are found following them, and through them good fortune will come to all the family. If while they are speaking some serious person, one of the preceptors, or the father himself, come in unexpectedly, the more timid keep silence ; the bolder are not allowed to excite the children to shake off the yoke, insinuating in a low voice what they would not say before their father or preceptor, so as not to expose themselves to the brutality of those corrupted people who would chastise them. Those who want to know the truth have only to brave the father and preceptors, and go with the women and brats to their part of the house, or to the bootmakers' stall, or the fullers' shop, to understand the absolute ! See how they act to gain converts "
`Celse contre les chretiens' by L. Rougier, to the best of our knowledge, has not been translated into English yet, unlike E. Renan's `L'Histoire des origines du christianisme' (http://www.davidcox.com.mx/library/R/Renan,%20Ernest%20-%20History%20of%20Origins%20of%20Christianity%20Bk7.pdf), in which some of the arguments of Celsus against the Christians (http://books.google.com/books?id=3IAEAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr#v=onepage&q&f=false) can be found. The greater online availability of this excerpt and of a second excerpt from `Celse contre les chretiens', which, so far, could be found on one website only, should not overshadow too much the increasingly enlightening lines that the many leaders of the current French New Right and of its countless excrescences keep doing their readers the favour of dropping on this media.
All main aspects of National-Socialism were examined by J. Evola, except education, an area in which the policy of the Third Reich was however informed by Nordic and Sparto-Roman concepts and values more than in any other. The issue of education is at the very heart of `Mein Kampf', in which the word can be found 91 times ; there are 96 occurrences of the word `training' and 76 of `teaching'. Before looking at A. Hitler's views on education, it is important to stress that, unlike the proponents of the environmental theory, he acknowledges, in line with the higher doctrine of race (see Sintesi di dottrina della razza), that there are innate qualities, which "can never be the result of education or training."
A. Hitler takes as a starting point the observation that the educational system of the Weimar Republic was "wrong", since it "was simply and exclusively limited to the production of pure knowledge and paid little attention to the development of practical ability. Still less attention was given to the development of individual character, in so far as this is ever possible. And hardly any attention at all was paid to the development of a sense of responsibility, to strengthening the will and the powers of decision." More particularly, he accuses public education of having been unable to "inculcate in the youth a lively sense of their German nationality", "a feeling of common citizenship", and of having aggravated the ills of contemporary German society, among which anarchic, atomistic individualism, by fostering intellectualism and putting the emphasis on subjectivity and abstract knowledge : "The education which makes them the devotees of such abstract notions as 'Democracy', 'International Socialism', 'Pacifism', etc., is so hard-and-fast and exclusive and, operating as it does from within outwards, is so purely subjective that in forming their general picture of outside life as a whole they are fundamentally influenced by these A PRIORI notions." "German education in pre-War times had an extraordinary number of weak features. It was simply and exclusively limited to the production of pure knowledge and paid little attention to the development of practical ability. Still less attention was given to the development of individual character, in so far as this is ever possible. And hardly any attention at all was paid to the development of a sense of responsibility, to strengthening the will and the powers of decision. The result of this method was to produce erudite people who had a passion for knowing everything." Intellectualism, both in its, so to speak, pragmatic aspect, that is, as excessive emphasis on abstract or intellectual matters, and in its theoretical aspect, that is, as the doctrine that knowledge is chiefly derived from pure reason, is singled out as a degeneration ; first, as an intellectual degeneration - as A. Hitler does not deny the existence of "a small minority" of "real intellectuals", "whom natural aptitude and education have taught to think for themselves and who in all things try to form their own judgments, while at the same time carefully sifting what they read" ; then, as a cause of moral degeneration : " the intellectual classes are themselves physically degenerate, not through privation but through education. The exclusive intellectualism of the education in vogue among our upper classes makes them unfit for life's struggle at an epoch in which physical force and not mind is the dominating factor. Thus they are neither capable of maintaining themselves nor of making their way in life. In nearly every case physical disability is the forerunner of personal cowardice" ; finally, its corrupting effects can also be felt in the emotional and sexual development of young boys : "The extravagant emphasis laid on purely intellectual education and the consequent neglect of physical training must necessarily lead to sexual thoughts in early youth. Those boys whose constitutions have been trained and hardened by sports and gymnastics are less prone to sexual indulgence than those stay-at-homes who have been fed exclusively with mental pabulum. Sound methods of education cannot, however, afford to disregard this, and we must not forget that the expectations of a healthy young man from a woman will differ from those of a weakling who has been prematurely corrupted." As a result of this unsound upbringing, which, in the last analysis, is entirely based on a lunar, abstract, feminine exercise of the intellect, " our educated leaders had received only an `intellectual' training and thus found themselves defenceless when their adversaries used iron bars instead of intellectual weapons. All this could happen only because our superior scholastic system did not train men to be real men but merely to be civil servants, engineers, technicians, chemists, litterateurs, jurists and, finally, professors ; so that intellectualism should not die out."
The whole German educational system, the whole German education, must thus be changed in a comprehensive way. To achieve this, "Roman history, along general lines, is and will remain the best teacher, not only for our own time but also for the future. And the ideal of Hellenic culture should be preserved for us in all its marvellous beauty." Indeed, along Roman lines, "pumping into young people that knowledge which will help them to make their way in life" is stated to be "the principal object" of the reformed system of education ; rather than a reform, it is a radical change in the system of education, in the name of the re-awakening and reassertion of the Gemeinschaft and of the State. Still along Sparto-Roman lines, physical education is revived and valorised, not as an end in itself, but as a means to build and shape character, as "the State which is grounded on the racial idea must start with the principle that a person whose formal education in the sciences is relatively small but who is physically sound and robust, of a steadfast and honest character, ready and able to make decisions and endowed with strength of will, is a more useful member of the national community than a weakling who is scholarly and refined. A nation composed of learned men who are physical weaklings, hesitant about decisions of the will, and timid pacifists, is not capable of assuring even its own existence on this earth. In the bitter struggle which decides the destiny of man it is very rare that an individual has succumbed because he lacked learning. Those who fail are they who try to ignore these consequences and are too faint-hearted about putting them into effect. There must be a certain balance between mind and body." "The fight against pollution of the mind must be waged simultaneously with the training of the body." As in ancient Greece, sport skills and military prowess are considered as inseparably linked to the development of the mind and of character : "In our present educational system a balance will have to be established, first and foremost, between mental instruction and physical training." "What is known as GYMNASIUM (Grammar School) to-day is a positive insult to the Greek institution. Our system of education entirely loses sight of the fact that in the long run a healthy mind can exist only in a healthy body." Thus, as was the case in Rome, physical education, far from being limited to the care and the development of the body in conjunction with formal training, is aimed at having a permanent formative effect on the mind and on character, through the cultivation of physical qualities analogically related to mental virtues, such as stamina, strength, endurance of pain. "If the educational system fails to teach the child at an early age to endure pain and injury without complaining we cannot be surprised if at a later age, when the boy has grown to be the man and is, for example, in the trenches, the postal service is used for nothing else than to send home letters of weeping and complaint."
The ethical formation of the youth is given precedence over literacy, bookish knowledge and the content of the courses : "In the future much more emphasis will have to be laid on this side of our educational work. Loyalty, self-sacrifice and discretion are virtues which a great nation must possess. And the teaching and development of these in the school is a more important matter than many others things now included in the curriculum." In line with his critique of early hyper-specialisation and compartmentalisation, A. Hitler makes it clear that "This education will always have to be confined to general ideas in a large perspective and these ought to be deeply engraven, by constant repetition if necessary, on the memories and feelings of the people." These "general ideas", these `idees-forces", are the National-Socialist Weltanschauung : "Whoever marches in the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach said in a speech in 1934, `The Year of Training', is not a number among millions but the soldier of an idea. The individual member's value to the whole is determined by the degree to which he is permeated by the idea. The best Hitler Youth, irrespective of rank and office, is he who completely surrenders himself to the National Socialist world view." The "crowing task" of the "whole organization of education and training which the People's State is to build up" is "the work of instilling into the hearts and brains of the youth entrusted to it the racial instinct and understanding of the racial idea. No boy or girl must leave school without having attained a clear insight into the meaning of racial purity and the importance of maintaining the racial blood unadulterated."
Military schooling (Wehrerziehung), in the Deutsches Jungvolk, the Hitlerjugend, the Jungmaedelbund, the Bund deutscher Maedel, and in Special Hitler Youth paramilitary formations for boys, is the culmination of education. Its supreme aim "must always be to achieve that which was attributed to the old army as its highest merit : namely, that through his military schooling the boy must be transformed into a man, that he must not only learn to obey but also acquire the fundamentals that will enable him one day to command."
National-Socialist Education was modelled on the agoge in all respects, both from a conceptual and from an structural standpoint. In particular, it was compulsory and rigorously state-sponsored. The state-sponsorship of education and, by implication, its compulsoriness in the Third Reich was reasserted as decisively, as firmly and as clearly as possible : "With ruthless determination the State must keep control of this instrument of popular education and place it at the service of the State and the Nation." Just as the introduction of compulsory and collective instruction in Sparta should be understood in the twofold context of a tiny city-state whose total population never exceeded 16,000 and of the social and political anarchy that reigned in Lacedaemon at the time Lycurgus was begged to come back to it to restore law and order, so the catastrophic state in which Germany was in the late 1910's and in the 1920's can account for the imperative need expressed in `Mein Kampf' to increase and strengthen the state control of a key area such as education : "As regards purely formal education the State even now interferes with the individual's right of self-determination and insists upon the right of the community by submitting the child to an obligatory system of training, without paying attention to the approval or disapproval of the parents. In a similar way and to a higher degree the new People's State will one day make its authority prevail over the ignorance and incomprehension of individuals in problems appertaining to the safety of the nation. It must organize its educational work in such a way that the bodies of the young will be systematically trained from infancy onwards, so as to be tempered and hardened for the demands to be made on them in later years. Above all, the State must see to it that a generation of stay-at-homes is not developed" In the troubled times of Athenian democracy, similar considerations were made by Plato, for whom the child belongs to the state and his education is the responsibility of the state (Republic, bk. 2, 376), and education must be compulsory for all ; for whom the supreme aim of education is to produce "a keen desire to become a perfect citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled" in turn (Laws, bk. 1, 643) ; for whom girls should receive the same training (athletics, fighting in armour, and horseback riding) as boys however, the Third Reich's educational policies avoided the communist like tendencies of the Republic's ideal : expectations and demands for boys and girls were actually quite different ; if both learned more or less the same subjects, girls learned them in correlation and in view of the tasks they would later perform as housewives and mothers. The NSDAP established elite secondary boarding schools, of which the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten, run by the SS, are the best known. Thus, the National-Socialist emphasis on a "common education" should be put into perspective.
It should be so, especially in a country where efforts at unification were constantly frustrated by the "centrifugal forces produced by the geographical features of the land and the particularistic tendencies of the German people" (Education in the Third Reich : a study of race and history in Nazi textbooks, G. W. Blackburn, p. 57), centrifugal forces and particularistic tendencies which were only increased by the acute economic, social, psychological and political crisis fourteen years of a liberal constitutional democracy allowed to develop and was actually a breeding ground for. Germany had to be brought under control again, and the only way to re-establish its leadership was to `recentralise' it. D. de Rougemont, in his `Journal d'Allemagne', was wrong to describe National-Socialism as a "braun Jacobinism", and so are those who compare the National-Socialist conception of political power with Jacobinism, on the basis of baseless prejudices and stereotypes handed down without any discrimination from generation to generation. France was very much a centralised country when the Jacobins came to power in 1792, and it had been so for centuries. First, since it is not the place to go into a detail analysis of the process of centralisation in the Ancien Regime, which started, both locally (the baillages bailiwick was establishes din the thirtieth century) and centrally (the King's Council, the Parliament and the Chamber of Accounts were also established in the thirtieth century), under the first Capetians, as an integral part of state building and the construction of an organic political entity, nor the place to show how this process of centralisation was corrupted under the Bourbons, the reader is referred to `Why Administrative Centralization Is an Institution of the Ancien Regime and Not, As Some Say, the Work of the Revolution or Empire', the second chapter of `The Ancient Regime and the French Revolution' Book II, insofar and only insofar as it shows that monarchical France was an administratively centralised state by then, not in terms of decision-making and activity, but in terms of authority and of political unity. Then, what Tocqueville did not really see is that the Jacobins, far from pushing forward for the centralisation process, did exactly the opposite : they were actually engaged in a process of decentralisation, which has only accelerated teratologically since then. In the Ancien Regime, power, whether social, economic, administrative or political, was brought under a single, central authority, while the basis for the segmentation and the fragmentation of authority was laid by the Jacobins, not exactly through the doctrine of the separation of powers, but through the notion of the limitation of powers ("In the high theory of Jacobinism, pragmatically speaking, the role of any state institution was of necessity circumscribed" - Goodness beyond virtue : Jacobins during the French Revolution, P.L.R. Higonnet, p. 157), which boils down to the same thing, let alone that it is a very curious way of achieving oneness and indivisibility ; through the establishment of counter-power in the broadest sense (because of the "unlimited freedom of the press sedition, treason, and every kind of calumny, became quite common, and rendered it equally impossible to live peacefully, or to administer justice and regulate public affairs" - The history of Jacobinism : its crimes, cruelties and perfidies, Volume 1, W. Playfair, W. Cobbett ; "The duality of power and counter-power is strikingly evident in the French Revolution. Already in 1789 a word had emerged to denote a complementary form of sovereignty that was seen as essential to achieving the ideal of a government embodying the general will : surveillance. Perpetually vigilant, the people were to oversee the work of the government... Later, during the Terror, the term surveillance lost its luster when it came to be associated with tyranny exercised by revolutionary clubs and committees and was subsequently stricken from the political lexicon. Yet if the word disappeared, the thing remained. In one form or another, civil society continued to inspect, monitor, investigate, and evaluate the actions of government - eprints.cscs.res.in/138/1/_uVUaTjbx.pdf ; `popular societies' were watched over by the Jacobins, who were themselves members of a network of `popular societies' ; hence their supporting the right of association that was granted by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and in the Constitution of 1793). Decentralisation was also at work in the political area : The Montagnard-Jacobin-dominated National Convention on June 24, 1793, adopted a democratic constitution and a political system based on decentralisation and representative local self-government. On May 10, the praises of decentralisation was sung by Robespierre (http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/aulard_alphonse/hist_pol_revol_fr/hist_pol_revol_fr.pdf ; p. 379) in words we cannot be bothered to translate, since they can be heard, almost literally, from most political schemers. This centralisation was acclaimed by the vast majority of French, in a country where, to quote Tocqueville, "People Had Become Most Alike, but where "Men So Similar Were More Separate Than Ever, Divided into Small Groups Alien and Indifferent to One Another."
It is now time to close these much necessary comments on the centrifugal nature of Jacobinism, as opposed to the centripetal nature of National-Socialism policy, in order to consider the "particularist tendencies" of the German people the Third Reich had to gather to a centre to prevent the country from imploding. They were the result of the various `races' that could be found in the German people and of their various psychological, moral, and intellectual characters. On the other hand, the Romans of the Republic and of the early Empire, the Spartans, the Athenians, were far more homogeneous peoples, and, therefore, shared the same view of life and of the world to a great extent ; in practice, a young Roman did not have to be `taught' loyalty and honour, no racial and political education was needed to inculcate a young Spartan dedication to the state, self-sacrifice for the fatherland, and full commitment to his bloodline, as is clear from the work of classical authors and from that of Fustel de Coulanges, a French historian whose well-known `La Cite antique' suffers from a lack of online visibility, which will be made slightly less conspicuous by the publication of its chapter on `La religion domestique' on this media.
B. Rust, as Reichsminister fuer Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung, was entrusted with the task to change the concept and the purpose of German education from `personal development' and `educational achievement' to the physical, mental, and spiritual formation of the youth in the service of the state. His first job was to implement the curriculum A. Hitler had had rewritten to make it fit with the National-Socialist world-view. In the new curriculum, racial education and racial hygiene, as the foundation of the Weltanschauung, became a core subject. Accordingly, course textbooks were assessed for suitability and the elaboration and publication of new ones was decided if necessary. His second job was to make sure the curriculum would be implemented in full by teachers. The Nationalsozialistische Lehrerbund was responsible for the related intensive update training course for teachers. In 1938, two years after religious denominational schools were closed, as they were seen as divisive (The Hitler Youth, Origins and Development 1922-1945, H.W. Koch, p. 172), the National Socialist Teachers League "urged the `immediate cessation' of religious instruction for all students because `we can no longer endure the exaltation of the Jewish criminal folk'." (Education in the Third Reich : a study of race and history in Nazi textbooks, p. 90). As early as April 7, 1933, under the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service), "Civil servants whose previous political activities afford no assurance that they will at all times give their fullest support to the national state" (http://tsnoticias.com/vaad_hashoa_br/biblio/nazi-eng/1933%20law%20for%20the%20restoration%20of%20the%20professional%20civil%20service.pdf) had to retire ; this did not come as a surprise to those who remembered the following passage of `Mein Kampf' : "It is an all-important interest of the State and a national duty to prevent these people from falling into the hands of false, ignorant or even evil-minded teachers. Therefore it is the duty of the State to supervise their education and prevent every form of offence in this respect" ; Jewish teachers were dismissed from state schools and universities, in regard to which, at least as for universities, B. Rust only met the request of a majority of German students : " the continuing demand for the removal of Jews from the German Student Federation (Deutsche Studentenschaft or DSt) suggest that the majority of students supported at least a drastic reduction in the number of
Jewish teachers at institutions of higher learning." (http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205420.pdf) However, it took him a while to meet them fully : " many students remained dissatisfied with the law ; they continued to boycott the lectures of Jewish professors even if they enjoyed exemption under the Aryan paragraph in the Civil Service Law. Their ruthless campaign, which lasted almost two years, finally achieved its goal : almost every Jewish professor who was legally still allowed to teach had resigned from his position by 1935." (ibid.) As for academics, many of them "welcomed the dismissal of their Jewish colleagues after Hitler's victory." (ibid.) By 1938, students blocked the entry of Jewish students to the university buildings. The Erste Verordnung zur Durchfuehrung des Gesetzes gegen die Ueberfuellung deutscher Schulen und Hochschulen (Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities), promulgated on April 25, 1933, was quite successful in cutting drastically the number of Jewish students, as well as the number of female students, to universities, but it was not until November 1938, as a result of technical difficulties, that the ban of Jewish children from all state schools became effective by decree, as "after the murder in Paris no German teacher could be expected to continue instructing Jewish children and no German pupil could be expected to stay in the same room as a Jew". The numerus clausus for Jewish pupils and students established by the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities "applied only to those Jewish whose fathers had no fought in the front line during the war. As, however, the majority of the fathers of the Jewish school children had been front fighters, the effect of this clause was felt only locally in places were the number of Jews was particularly high and in consequence the schools had an unusually high percentage of Jewish children." (Six Years of Hitler : The Jews Under the Nazi Regime, G. Warburg, p. 55). On September 10, 1935, B. Rust had announced his intention to open special Jewish schools, and, later, had "(come) out with his decree whereunder by the Easter Term of 1936 all Jewish children had to leave the ordinary elementary schools and special Jewish schools were to be established everywhere. The position in the secondary schools remained for the time being as it was. Of all the Nazi laws and decrees, Dr. Rust's school decree was probably the only one that was not carried out to the letter. It proved impossible to establish sufficient Jewish schools quickly enough, particularly in those places where there were only a few Jewish children living. As the general law compelling all children to attend school was still in force, a large number of Jewish had to remain in the ordinary elementary schools, even after the Eastern Term of 1936." (ibid. p. 56)
"It cannot be denied , J. Evola said, that these measures are rigorously consistent with the state racial idea " (Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem, p. 39)
National-Socialist concept of education and the willingness of the National-Socialist leadership to implement it in strict accordance with its principles can only be seen in a positive light from a traditional European standpoint, while, given that its full implementation lasted six short years and it takes far more than a generation to rid a people of their bad habits, no proper assessment can be made of its effectiveness. Only time would have told whether National-Socialism would have succeeded in mithridatising the modern education system.
Education did not stop at school anymore than it did in other contemporary Western countries. Political education, extending beyond the bounds of formal instruction, was part of public life through media, as was also the case in other contemporary Western countries. Propaganda was its "most effective branch", but, unlike in the case of France, of the United States or of Great-Britain, it was an open, direct, propaganda. Joseph Goebbels, Reichsminister fuer Volksaufklaerung und Propaganda, was its most efficient propagandist in the Third Reich. None of his speech appears to have been published in full in French to date (on the other hand, most of them are available in English at www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goebmain.htm). This oversight has been corrected. `La femme allemande' can now be read online at elementsdeducationraciale.wordpress.com
The aim of this blog is to make available in French, whether they were written originally in this language or not, more or less known, more or less read, political or historical writings, deemed either to be representative of the traditional Roman and Nordic world-view or to support it in some way, even `accidentally' or a contrario, to a larger audience, made up of people who, as they happen to live in a society on its way to become a third-world termite mound in which the only prospect of millions of opinionated graduates and postgraduates is structural unemployment and charity, may be less impervious to this topic and to related ones than they were as a proletariat undergoing a conversion to bourgeois values and tastes under the sign of free and compulsory education and of full employment. Its governing principle is education. While it is not opened to comments, we are opened to suggestions. The selected texts are and will be as far as possible short, but, in any case, to-the-point and edifying. What is edifying about, for example, `La Revolution commence par une orgie" is that it evidences that it would wrong to see 1789 as a whores' revolution only figuratively. While it goes without saying that the Jacobin-inspired historiography needs to be taken cum grano salis, the distortion of history, and, in the present case, that of French history started as early as the first memoirs and chronicles. Voltaire, whose attempt at unravelling the threads of the past was successful only from the factual and merely psychological standpoint, did not just read those that had been used by his predecessors to write, and were used by most later historians to consolidate, the Golden Legend of Charlemagne, to which we will return, when examining J. Evola's assessment of the emperor's historical significance and role. In his days, Voltaire was known for his plays and his historical work, not for his romances, novels and tales. In his correspondence, his thoughts are generally expressed without the irony into which they are so well wrapped in his novels and tales that, for example, a firm and grave universal belief in the anti-slavery character of `Candide' has passed from generation to generation of scholars and readers ; a few lines of the `Letter to Damilaville', dated April 1, 1766, is worth quoting, in relation to the matter at hand :
"It is true that Confucius said that he had known people incapable of science, but none incapable of virtue. The lowest people should thus be taught virtue ; but they should not waste their time examining who was right of Nestorius or Cyril, Eusebius or Athanasius, Jansenius or Molina, Zwingli or Oecolampadius. If only middle-class persons had never become infatuated with these disputations ! We would never have had religious wars ; we would never have had the Saint-Barthelemy. All disputations of this kind were started by easy-going idle people ; when the populace gets involved in arguments, all is lost." Today, it is delusional to think that television studios and Internet forums are filled with the squabbling of stand-in theologists about the interpretation of the content of this or that Surat, even as thousands and thousands of extra-Europeans enter European countries daily, whether `illegally' or `legally', with the active collusion of political schemers and the more or less passive complicity of their clientele.
"I agree, he continues, with those who want to make foundlings good ploughmen, instead of making them theologians. Besides, a book would be needed to pursue this matter further "
Without dwelling on the weakening that the Roman idea and perception of virtus undergone in Voltaire, "I doubt, he writes on the basis that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, that this type of citizens [the populace] ever has the time or the capacity to be educated ; they would starve before becoming philosophers. I believe it is essential that there are needy ignoramuses. If you owned a farm, and if you had plows, you would agree with me." The purpose of modern education as an "engineering area" in Western countries was obviously not to enable "needy ignoramuses" to become billionaires, but to make them a mass of unconditional followers and supporters of democracy by conditioning the most ambitious of them to believe that they, too, could one day become billionaires (some have), through hard studies and degrees, and others that, in any case, studies were the only pathway for a better future.
Modern education, as is well-known, owes much to Rousseau's psychological theories of education which had considerable influence throughout the nineteenth century on the German system of education A. Hitler had to deal with in 1933 -, to Kant's subjective pedagogy, to Locke's utilitarian curriculum, to Diderot's, who were in turn influenced by previous humanist educationalists, who all belonged to the aforementioned "scribe culture". In Europe, the turning point in education was the shift that the Church brought about from a warrior culture to a scribe culture, which was originally utterly foreign to European peoples, into whose culture "elements which can not only be described as literary but even as bookish" were first introduced in the sixth century B.C.E ; "On the other hand, we can detect much later remarkable survivals of these aristocratic, warlike origins, particularly in the prestige attached to physical culture and sport." (http://books.google.com/books?id=wv6kSdSFTgMC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false) The typical examples of a scribe culture were found in Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia. "We find echoes of this in the Sapiential Books of the Old Testament, especially in Proverbs, that handbook of moral education for the training of the perfect Civil Service clerk " (ibid.) A scribe culture can be considered from two points of view, the technical and the social-moral : "From the technical point of view, they emphasize the written word : the scribe is essentially a person who has mastered the technique of writing Socially the scribe was a civil servant : he put his knowledge of writing at the service of the civil administration. In Egypt this was essentially a kingly affair ; in Mesopotamia it was at first, apparently, sacerdotal, but there too it soon came under the direction of the king. This was the scribe's fundamental importance, both historically as regards his origin and practically as regards his function. Contrary to the theories dear to romantic historians, it seems clear that writing was first invented and used, not to fix theological or metaphysical dogma in a rigid form, but for the practical needs of accountancy and administration. It was only later that it developed away from this utilitarian purpose and began to be put to more elevated use in matters of history and abstract thought ; and even then the oriental scribe was still mainly the man who kept the accounts, looked after the archives, drafted orders, and, because he could be given commands in writing, was naturally entrusted with their execution.
Thus, from the social and political point of view, the scribes appear above the popular classes of peasants and manual workers as an upper class raised over the unorganized mass of serfs, and more or less directly sharing in the exercise of power Any scribe could hope that he might one day rise to the highest office in the State (such was the theory, at least : in fact, his hope was seldom realized)" As ancient Rome became more and more semitised, it was to be expected that this characteristic feature of the system would appear "in the bureaucracy of the late Roman empire." (ibid.)
It is easy to understand "the importance which the old oriental societies attached to education as a gateway to success. For the child, education was the means of entry into a privileged class." Does it sound familiar ?
To the Dorians, it was not, who, upon their conquest of Greece, rejected the Creto-Mycenean and Minoan civilisation and its scribe culture. "It was not until long afterwards, when the Christian Faith decided to organize culture and education around the Book of Books - the Bible, the source of all knowledge and life -" that the scribe culture triumphed over the remnants of the noble warrior culture.
Current 'Right-wing Christians' delude themselves in thinking that public education was brought about in Europe to dechristianise European peoples. Free and mandatory education in Europe was not established by the Jewish Freemason J. Ferry in the late nineteenth century. In Scotland, the School Establishment Act 1616 mandated the establishment of publicly funded, Church-supervised schools in every parish of Scotland. "It is sometimes taken for granted that there was general indifference to elementary instruction in France before the revolution. Roman Catholic publicists will point out that even for two hundred years before the `lois scolaires' of the Third Republic there had been a form of primary instruction obligatory for all children, WITHOUT DISTINCTION OF CLASS OR SEX, up to the age of fourteen, under pain of a fine or imprisonment." The emphasis is added because "the instruction of all children in the catechism, reading and writing, was under the direct control of the Roman Catholic Church, and although it varied from district to district, it never ceased to be anything other than Roman Catholic Church The principle of compulsory education had been proclaimed (in 1698) by Louis XIV ", whose confessor was, as is well-known, a Jesuit ; instruction had been made free by a decree of 1680 (Helvetius : his life and place in the history of educational thought, I. Cumming, p. 9-10) Free education was then provided to children exclusively by two religious orders : the Congregation of the Brothers of Saint Charles and the Institute of Brothers of Christian Schools. Young girls and women were not spared. In the Ancien Regime, "The clergy was almost alone in calling for the dissemination of instruction in the working-classes" (L'Ancien Regime, Les Grandes etudes Historiques, Funck-Brentano, Fayard, Paris 1926, p. 426) The first forays into so-called child-centered education date back to the Jesuit and Jansenists educationalists, to Locke and Commenius (L'enfance au XVIIe siecle, B. Jolibert, p. 128), after the child had been found `innocent', as a `recipient of the reign of God", as a "model for entering the reign of God", rather than `guilty' by the theological speculation of the "Middle-Ages".
This is an excerpt from the first paragraph of `La Revolution commence par une orgie', which, unfortunately, could not be found online until we put it :
"The `patriotic' propaganda of Philip of Orleans and his friends was successful quite rapidly.
In September, daily riots burst in Paris where there was not enough bread. The previous year, an extraordinary hurricane of hail had destroyed part of the harvest from the banks of the Charente River to those of the Scheldt, and flour had become scarce.
In spite of this food shortage, on October 1st, Louis XVI improperly offered a meal to the officers of the regiment of Flanders. Marie-Antoinette made an appearance at it, holding the dauphin in her arms, and the champagne was opened, while the orchestra was playing : "Ô Richard, ô my king, the whole world abandons you to your fate", which was an oddly prophetic song
This feast made a bad impression on the little people, and the friends of the duke of Orleans took advantage of this to call it a scandal and set the people against the court.
They carefully prepared a `spontaneous reaction', distributing money and gathering together all malcontents. It took them four days. On October 5th, a howling mob left Paris, led by sergeant Maillard, and marched on Versailles.
It has been said time and again that it was made up of nice Parisian women whose children were hungry and who were going to ask the king for bread. In reality, we know now that the eight thousand women led by Maillard and flanked by rioters in the pay of the duke of Orleans comprised many transvestites. These were "easily recognisable with their manly voices, with their unshaved grease-painted faces, with their badly-fitting dresses, under which, in the heat of the moment, some of them revealed a hairy chest, whose shape was very much unlike what that part of the body looks like in women".
The friends of the future Philippe-Egalite had brought together these fake housewives with more than three thousand whores who had been recruited in the faubourgs and in the venal crowd of the Palais-Royal [the centre of prostitution, of idleness and of pamphlets in late eighteenth century Paris. Note of the Editor]."
The elder Cato's landmark speech against the repeal of the Lex Oppia (Livy, History of Rome, XXXIV) can hardly be found online in French translation (as the meaning tends to be sacrificed at the cost of formal excellence in nineteenth-century French translations of Latin works, and Danielle de Clerq's new translation of `Ab Urbe condita' tends to take slight liberties with Liber XXXIV, ours was published)
Denis de Rougemont's `Les Mefaits de l'Instruction publique', in which, two years after they were touched upon in `La Crise du Monde moderne', the ills of public education are examined in greater depth and the conclusion is reached that "democracy without public education would be practically impossible", is even less visible online. D. De Rougemont did not change a iota to 'Les Mefaits de l'Instruction publique', when it was published again in 1972 ; on the contrary, the considerations he first developed in 1929 were `Aggraves d'une Suite des mefaits'.
P. Valery, a contributor (together with R. Guenon, G. Benn and various other thinkers) to a page of the Fascist paper Regime Fascista entitled `Diorama filosofico', of which J. Evola was the editor, identified two other deleterious aspects of public education in `Variete III', when he pointed out that "the actual aim of education is the diploma and the diploma is the deadly enemy culture", and that the graduate is "led to believe that he is owed something." While the first quote can be found on hundreds of web sites, the edifying excerpt from which it is taken cannot.
The sense of vanity, of self-satisfaction, that can arise from education is expertly rendered in the following passage, which, in the absence of an English translation which Tom Sharpe would be most qualified to make, we have resolved to translate into this language, from `Les Annales de l'Empire depuis Charlemagne' (1753) :
"781-782. The King of France holds his court in Worms, Ratisbonne, and Cuierci. Alcuin, archbishop of York, meets up with him there. The king, who hardly knew how to sign his name, wanted to make science flourish, because he wanted to be great in everything. Peter of Pisa taught him some grammar. What was surprising was not that the Italians taught the Gauls and the Germans, but that we still needed the English to learn what is not even honoured today with the name of science.
Lectures were delivered to the king, which may be the origin of academies, and especially those of Italy, in which every academician takes on a new name. Charlemagne was named David, Alcuin, Albinus ; and a young man named Ilgebert, who wrote poetry in the Romance tongue, took on boldly Homer's.
783. However Widukind, who did not learn grammar, stirs up the Saxons again. He beats the generals of Charles on the banks of the Weser. Charles comes to make up for this defeat. He defeats the Saxons again ; they lay down arms in front of him. He orders them to deliver Widukind. The Saxons respond that he has fled to Denmark. "His accomplices are still here," answered Charlemagne, and he had four thousand five hundred of them massacred in front of him. Thus, he inclined Saxony towards Christianity. This is closely akin to what Sulla did ; at least the Romans were not coward enough to praise Sulla. The barbarians who wrote Charlemagne's actions had the baseness to praise him and even to make him a fair man : they were used as models by almost all the compilers of the History of France."
`Les Annales de l'Empire depuis Charlemagne' has not more visibility online than A. Vetault's `Charlemagne', a book which touches upon a lesser known aspect of the Christianisation of Northern European peoples, and whose following excerpt we used in our study on Julius Evola and the Jewish problem in ancient times to support the paragraph dedicated to education as a key institution in the brainwashing and indoctrination of the youth : "The abbeys of Fulda and Herzfeld, Carolingian foundations had finally managed to exercise their influence beyond the Saxon marches. Thanks to these seats of propaganda and evangelic influence, the staunch followers of Wotan had been gradually wrapped in a Christian atmosphere through no will of their own. The new faith had even found apostles among the Saxons, especially among the teenagers, whom Charlemagne held hostage and whose education he entrusted to the monastic schools of Germania. When set free, these ardent greenhorns became in turn missionaries among their relatives and their fellow countrymen."
In 1894, G. le Bon pointed out, with an insight that is all the more remarkable as he was himself a scholar, that it is a great error "to believe that intelligence and culture go together. Culture merely implies the possession of a certain amount of memory, but to acquire it no judgment, reflection, initiative or invention are necessary. Persons of very restricted intelligence are often met with among those who have passed examinations, while it is quite as common to find persons of a very slight degree of culture who are highly intelligent", and that "A negro or a Japanese may easily take a university degree or become a lawyer ; the sort of varnish he thus acquires is however quite superficial, and has no influence on his mental constitution. What no education can give him, because they are created by heredity alone, are the forms of thought, the logic, and above all the character of the Western man. Our negro or our Japanese may accumulate all possible certificates without ever attaining to the level of the average European. It is easy to give him in ten years the culture of a well-educated Englishman. To make a real Englishman of him, that is to say a man acting as an Englishman would act in the different circumstances of life, a thousand years would scarcely be sufficient". He could not possibly foresee that, a century later, the Sorbonne would look like the Babel tower, that, as early as the 1960's, the Pandora box of public education would be fully opened by the hidden leaders of plouto-theocracry to promote and bring about their anti-racist and infra-racial levelling and egalitarian agenda by flattering non- and extra-Europeans into thinking that getting a degree made them equal to White peoples who had already been brainwashed into believing that education was the measure of man, and that what oozed out of it would be used to bridge artificially and virtually the "impassable abyss" "between the mental constitution of the different races". In any case, it is unfortunate but understandable that le Bon's considerations on education are hardly ever quoted online.
The close link, the specific interrelation between egalitarianism and "the wishful thinking that a complete uniformity should be imposed everywhere, for example by providing the same education, as if all persons were equally able to understand the same things, and as if, to make them understand these, the same methods could suit all of them", is more strongly emphasised in `The Crisis of the Modern World'. Since such wishful thinking did not and could not possibly exist in ancient hierarchical and warrior societies such as ancient Rome, Sparta and the Hellenic world, whatever `similarities' educators try desperately hard to find between Graeco-Roman education and modern so-called education can only be purely formal and external. Even after formal education, that is, attendance to a public school run by an unpaid teacher, was introduced in Greece and, later, in Rome, where the first fee-paying private school was purportedly opened by a former slave in the late third century B.C.E., not only informal education coexisted with it, but the type of education a pupil was given was essentially based on the social class his parents belonged to. The very purpose of schooling had as little to do with today's as the curriculum which was never a point of contention and, of course, was not seen as "a social engineering area", with its `learning outcomes', `assessment strategies' and the like - had a distant echo of this differentiated and aristocratic vision of education is found in the literature of J.F. Bobbitt, a member of the eugenic movement who was also one of the first curriculum theorists, who asserted in the early twentieth century that "educational standards are to be based on the "native ability" of students, and their curriculum should reflect this "native ability"." (http://books.google.fr/books?id=9gk3rc-KZkMC&pg=PR3&dq=%22Unequal+by+design:+high-stakes+testing+and+the+standardization+of+inequality%22&hl=fr&ei=Y_WnTrqGAamj4gTW_azwDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false)
Not only schooling was never a legal requirement in ancient Greece, but "there was also no State control or inspection of schools throughout the Republic and early Empire. In the later Empire", when few emperors were still of Roman stock, "the most that anxious, interfering Emperors undertook was to exercise some control over teachers and perhaps to encourage municipalities to appoint better or more schoolmasters." (http://books.google.fr/books?id=3OmxeVI5RSQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Life+in+ancient+Rome%22+cowell&hl=fr&ei=j_mnTv3yFMrKsgbLzbD5DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false)
It is very interesting that, originally, the paedagogos, and, later in Rome, the paedagogus was not a trustworthy slave who escorted a child to and from school, but merely, more etymologically, a slave who accompanied, led a child from one place to another, from home to other places. This etymological meaning is echoed in the Latin educere (to lead out, to lead forth, to raise up, to erect), from which educare (to educate) is derived. Before the third century B.C.E., Roman children were taught at home by their parents. The baby and the small child was raised, not by a slave, as was the case in Greece, but by the matrona herself. After the baby was born, the father kept a close eye on the care the child received. When he was seven year-old, in aristocratic families, his father took care personally of his education. Cato made a point of teaching himself his son all he had to learn. The young noble Roman learned about the social and political life in the feasts, in the curia and in the various public activities he went to with his father, with whom he also visited the baths, which included exercise rooms and courtyards where boxing and wrestling were practiced. Family education was finished by the time he was sixteen. During a religious ceremony, the freeborn boy who had come of age took off the toga praetexta and the other badges of childhood to take on the toga virilis. He was then a citizen, but his formation was not finished. He was then left in the care of a friend of the family, with whom he learned more about public life. He finally served in the military for two years under the protection of a powerful political figure chosen by his family.
This family education was essentially a moral formation, which passed down the ideal of the Roman virtus to the child, then to the young man.
This quality first manifests the complete dedication of the individual to the Urbs. This old totalitistic ideal, which was that of Sparta, gave way in the Hellenistic monarchies to a humanist ideal of individual self-fulfilment. In Rome, however, it always remained present.
The second aspect of the virtus is the respect for ancestral and family traditions. The young noble Roman lived in the admiration of his ancestors and strove to imitate them. The virtus has also a religious dimension. The truly `virtuous' man is the one who is able to subordinate his own life to the respect for justice and for the divine laws. For the Romans, true patriotism is based on pietas as "dutiful respect toward Gods, fatherland, and parents and other kinsmen" - and on the attention paid to the signs given by the gods.
Education also sought to develop rural virtues in the child : hard work, austerity, frugality. The young noble Roman is warned against the corrupting effects of luxury and the virtus of Cincinnatus is cited as an example in this connection. At each stage of his education, he is trained how to be more resilient and he is driven away from all the pleasures which may weaken him. `Virtus' did not cease to be the cornerstone of the Roman education after the opening of formal schools in Rome.
This overview of education in ancient Rome, which was borrowed in part from www.memo.fr/en/article.aspx?ID=ANT_ROM_017, was made absolutely necessary by the need to prevent the misconceptions that could arise from the use of the word `education' in the following excerpt :
"And Celse provides with a master's hand the amazing picture of the methods of propaganda of the Christians in the public square or in the gynaeceum, where they strive to undermine the authority of the head of household and of the tutors : `[What harm is it then to be well educated, to love fine learning, to be wise, and to pass for such ? Is that an obstacle to the knowledge of God ? Are they not rather helps to attain to the truth ? What are these fair-runners, these jugglers doing ? Do they address themselves to men of sense, to tell them their good news ? No, but if they see somewhere a group of children, of street porters, or low people, it is there they ply their industry and cause themselves to be admired. It is the same way inside families ;] here are some wool-carders, some shoemakers, some fullers, some people of the lowest ignorance, and quite destitute of education. Before masters, men of experience and judgment, they dare not open their mouths ; but if they surprise the children of the house, or women who have no more reason than themselves, they set themselves to work wonders. Only such can believe ; the father and the preceptors are fools who do not know the true good and are incapable of understanding it. Those preachers alone know how they ought to live ; the children are found following them, and through them good fortune will come to all the family. If while they are speaking some serious person, one of the preceptors, or the father himself, come in unexpectedly, the more timid keep silence ; the bolder are not allowed to excite the children to shake off the yoke, insinuating in a low voice what they would not say before their father or preceptor, so as not to expose themselves to the brutality of those corrupted people who would chastise them. Those who want to know the truth have only to brave the father and preceptors, and go with the women and brats to their part of the house, or to the bootmakers' stall, or the fullers' shop, to understand the absolute ! See how they act to gain converts "
`Celse contre les chretiens' by L. Rougier, to the best of our knowledge, has not been translated into English yet, unlike E. Renan's `L'Histoire des origines du christianisme' (http://www.davidcox.com.mx/library/R/Renan,%20Ernest%20-%20History%20of%20Origins%20of%20Christianity%20Bk7.pdf), in which some of the arguments of Celsus against the Christians (http://books.google.com/books?id=3IAEAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr#v=onepage&q&f=false) can be found. The greater online availability of this excerpt and of a second excerpt from `Celse contre les chretiens', which, so far, could be found on one website only, should not overshadow too much the increasingly enlightening lines that the many leaders of the current French New Right and of its countless excrescences keep doing their readers the favour of dropping on this media.
All main aspects of National-Socialism were examined by J. Evola, except education, an area in which the policy of the Third Reich was however informed by Nordic and Sparto-Roman concepts and values more than in any other. The issue of education is at the very heart of `Mein Kampf', in which the word can be found 91 times ; there are 96 occurrences of the word `training' and 76 of `teaching'. Before looking at A. Hitler's views on education, it is important to stress that, unlike the proponents of the environmental theory, he acknowledges, in line with the higher doctrine of race (see Sintesi di dottrina della razza), that there are innate qualities, which "can never be the result of education or training."
A. Hitler takes as a starting point the observation that the educational system of the Weimar Republic was "wrong", since it "was simply and exclusively limited to the production of pure knowledge and paid little attention to the development of practical ability. Still less attention was given to the development of individual character, in so far as this is ever possible. And hardly any attention at all was paid to the development of a sense of responsibility, to strengthening the will and the powers of decision." More particularly, he accuses public education of having been unable to "inculcate in the youth a lively sense of their German nationality", "a feeling of common citizenship", and of having aggravated the ills of contemporary German society, among which anarchic, atomistic individualism, by fostering intellectualism and putting the emphasis on subjectivity and abstract knowledge : "The education which makes them the devotees of such abstract notions as 'Democracy', 'International Socialism', 'Pacifism', etc., is so hard-and-fast and exclusive and, operating as it does from within outwards, is so purely subjective that in forming their general picture of outside life as a whole they are fundamentally influenced by these A PRIORI notions." "German education in pre-War times had an extraordinary number of weak features. It was simply and exclusively limited to the production of pure knowledge and paid little attention to the development of practical ability. Still less attention was given to the development of individual character, in so far as this is ever possible. And hardly any attention at all was paid to the development of a sense of responsibility, to strengthening the will and the powers of decision. The result of this method was to produce erudite people who had a passion for knowing everything." Intellectualism, both in its, so to speak, pragmatic aspect, that is, as excessive emphasis on abstract or intellectual matters, and in its theoretical aspect, that is, as the doctrine that knowledge is chiefly derived from pure reason, is singled out as a degeneration ; first, as an intellectual degeneration - as A. Hitler does not deny the existence of "a small minority" of "real intellectuals", "whom natural aptitude and education have taught to think for themselves and who in all things try to form their own judgments, while at the same time carefully sifting what they read" ; then, as a cause of moral degeneration : " the intellectual classes are themselves physically degenerate, not through privation but through education. The exclusive intellectualism of the education in vogue among our upper classes makes them unfit for life's struggle at an epoch in which physical force and not mind is the dominating factor. Thus they are neither capable of maintaining themselves nor of making their way in life. In nearly every case physical disability is the forerunner of personal cowardice" ; finally, its corrupting effects can also be felt in the emotional and sexual development of young boys : "The extravagant emphasis laid on purely intellectual education and the consequent neglect of physical training must necessarily lead to sexual thoughts in early youth. Those boys whose constitutions have been trained and hardened by sports and gymnastics are less prone to sexual indulgence than those stay-at-homes who have been fed exclusively with mental pabulum. Sound methods of education cannot, however, afford to disregard this, and we must not forget that the expectations of a healthy young man from a woman will differ from those of a weakling who has been prematurely corrupted." As a result of this unsound upbringing, which, in the last analysis, is entirely based on a lunar, abstract, feminine exercise of the intellect, " our educated leaders had received only an `intellectual' training and thus found themselves defenceless when their adversaries used iron bars instead of intellectual weapons. All this could happen only because our superior scholastic system did not train men to be real men but merely to be civil servants, engineers, technicians, chemists, litterateurs, jurists and, finally, professors ; so that intellectualism should not die out."
The whole German educational system, the whole German education, must thus be changed in a comprehensive way. To achieve this, "Roman history, along general lines, is and will remain the best teacher, not only for our own time but also for the future. And the ideal of Hellenic culture should be preserved for us in all its marvellous beauty." Indeed, along Roman lines, "pumping into young people that knowledge which will help them to make their way in life" is stated to be "the principal object" of the reformed system of education ; rather than a reform, it is a radical change in the system of education, in the name of the re-awakening and reassertion of the Gemeinschaft and of the State. Still along Sparto-Roman lines, physical education is revived and valorised, not as an end in itself, but as a means to build and shape character, as "the State which is grounded on the racial idea must start with the principle that a person whose formal education in the sciences is relatively small but who is physically sound and robust, of a steadfast and honest character, ready and able to make decisions and endowed with strength of will, is a more useful member of the national community than a weakling who is scholarly and refined. A nation composed of learned men who are physical weaklings, hesitant about decisions of the will, and timid pacifists, is not capable of assuring even its own existence on this earth. In the bitter struggle which decides the destiny of man it is very rare that an individual has succumbed because he lacked learning. Those who fail are they who try to ignore these consequences and are too faint-hearted about putting them into effect. There must be a certain balance between mind and body." "The fight against pollution of the mind must be waged simultaneously with the training of the body." As in ancient Greece, sport skills and military prowess are considered as inseparably linked to the development of the mind and of character : "In our present educational system a balance will have to be established, first and foremost, between mental instruction and physical training." "What is known as GYMNASIUM (Grammar School) to-day is a positive insult to the Greek institution. Our system of education entirely loses sight of the fact that in the long run a healthy mind can exist only in a healthy body." Thus, as was the case in Rome, physical education, far from being limited to the care and the development of the body in conjunction with formal training, is aimed at having a permanent formative effect on the mind and on character, through the cultivation of physical qualities analogically related to mental virtues, such as stamina, strength, endurance of pain. "If the educational system fails to teach the child at an early age to endure pain and injury without complaining we cannot be surprised if at a later age, when the boy has grown to be the man and is, for example, in the trenches, the postal service is used for nothing else than to send home letters of weeping and complaint."
The ethical formation of the youth is given precedence over literacy, bookish knowledge and the content of the courses : "In the future much more emphasis will have to be laid on this side of our educational work. Loyalty, self-sacrifice and discretion are virtues which a great nation must possess. And the teaching and development of these in the school is a more important matter than many others things now included in the curriculum." In line with his critique of early hyper-specialisation and compartmentalisation, A. Hitler makes it clear that "This education will always have to be confined to general ideas in a large perspective and these ought to be deeply engraven, by constant repetition if necessary, on the memories and feelings of the people." These "general ideas", these `idees-forces", are the National-Socialist Weltanschauung : "Whoever marches in the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach said in a speech in 1934, `The Year of Training', is not a number among millions but the soldier of an idea. The individual member's value to the whole is determined by the degree to which he is permeated by the idea. The best Hitler Youth, irrespective of rank and office, is he who completely surrenders himself to the National Socialist world view." The "crowing task" of the "whole organization of education and training which the People's State is to build up" is "the work of instilling into the hearts and brains of the youth entrusted to it the racial instinct and understanding of the racial idea. No boy or girl must leave school without having attained a clear insight into the meaning of racial purity and the importance of maintaining the racial blood unadulterated."
Military schooling (Wehrerziehung), in the Deutsches Jungvolk, the Hitlerjugend, the Jungmaedelbund, the Bund deutscher Maedel, and in Special Hitler Youth paramilitary formations for boys, is the culmination of education. Its supreme aim "must always be to achieve that which was attributed to the old army as its highest merit : namely, that through his military schooling the boy must be transformed into a man, that he must not only learn to obey but also acquire the fundamentals that will enable him one day to command."
National-Socialist Education was modelled on the agoge in all respects, both from a conceptual and from an structural standpoint. In particular, it was compulsory and rigorously state-sponsored. The state-sponsorship of education and, by implication, its compulsoriness in the Third Reich was reasserted as decisively, as firmly and as clearly as possible : "With ruthless determination the State must keep control of this instrument of popular education and place it at the service of the State and the Nation." Just as the introduction of compulsory and collective instruction in Sparta should be understood in the twofold context of a tiny city-state whose total population never exceeded 16,000 and of the social and political anarchy that reigned in Lacedaemon at the time Lycurgus was begged to come back to it to restore law and order, so the catastrophic state in which Germany was in the late 1910's and in the 1920's can account for the imperative need expressed in `Mein Kampf' to increase and strengthen the state control of a key area such as education : "As regards purely formal education the State even now interferes with the individual's right of self-determination and insists upon the right of the community by submitting the child to an obligatory system of training, without paying attention to the approval or disapproval of the parents. In a similar way and to a higher degree the new People's State will one day make its authority prevail over the ignorance and incomprehension of individuals in problems appertaining to the safety of the nation. It must organize its educational work in such a way that the bodies of the young will be systematically trained from infancy onwards, so as to be tempered and hardened for the demands to be made on them in later years. Above all, the State must see to it that a generation of stay-at-homes is not developed" In the troubled times of Athenian democracy, similar considerations were made by Plato, for whom the child belongs to the state and his education is the responsibility of the state (Republic, bk. 2, 376), and education must be compulsory for all ; for whom the supreme aim of education is to produce "a keen desire to become a perfect citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled" in turn (Laws, bk. 1, 643) ; for whom girls should receive the same training (athletics, fighting in armour, and horseback riding) as boys however, the Third Reich's educational policies avoided the communist like tendencies of the Republic's ideal : expectations and demands for boys and girls were actually quite different ; if both learned more or less the same subjects, girls learned them in correlation and in view of the tasks they would later perform as housewives and mothers. The NSDAP established elite secondary boarding schools, of which the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten, run by the SS, are the best known. Thus, the National-Socialist emphasis on a "common education" should be put into perspective.
It should be so, especially in a country where efforts at unification were constantly frustrated by the "centrifugal forces produced by the geographical features of the land and the particularistic tendencies of the German people" (Education in the Third Reich : a study of race and history in Nazi textbooks, G. W. Blackburn, p. 57), centrifugal forces and particularistic tendencies which were only increased by the acute economic, social, psychological and political crisis fourteen years of a liberal constitutional democracy allowed to develop and was actually a breeding ground for. Germany had to be brought under control again, and the only way to re-establish its leadership was to `recentralise' it. D. de Rougemont, in his `Journal d'Allemagne', was wrong to describe National-Socialism as a "braun Jacobinism", and so are those who compare the National-Socialist conception of political power with Jacobinism, on the basis of baseless prejudices and stereotypes handed down without any discrimination from generation to generation. France was very much a centralised country when the Jacobins came to power in 1792, and it had been so for centuries. First, since it is not the place to go into a detail analysis of the process of centralisation in the Ancien Regime, which started, both locally (the baillages bailiwick was establishes din the thirtieth century) and centrally (the King's Council, the Parliament and the Chamber of Accounts were also established in the thirtieth century), under the first Capetians, as an integral part of state building and the construction of an organic political entity, nor the place to show how this process of centralisation was corrupted under the Bourbons, the reader is referred to `Why Administrative Centralization Is an Institution of the Ancien Regime and Not, As Some Say, the Work of the Revolution or Empire', the second chapter of `The Ancient Regime and the French Revolution' Book II, insofar and only insofar as it shows that monarchical France was an administratively centralised state by then, not in terms of decision-making and activity, but in terms of authority and of political unity. Then, what Tocqueville did not really see is that the Jacobins, far from pushing forward for the centralisation process, did exactly the opposite : they were actually engaged in a process of decentralisation, which has only accelerated teratologically since then. In the Ancien Regime, power, whether social, economic, administrative or political, was brought under a single, central authority, while the basis for the segmentation and the fragmentation of authority was laid by the Jacobins, not exactly through the doctrine of the separation of powers, but through the notion of the limitation of powers ("In the high theory of Jacobinism, pragmatically speaking, the role of any state institution was of necessity circumscribed" - Goodness beyond virtue : Jacobins during the French Revolution, P.L.R. Higonnet, p. 157), which boils down to the same thing, let alone that it is a very curious way of achieving oneness and indivisibility ; through the establishment of counter-power in the broadest sense (because of the "unlimited freedom of the press sedition, treason, and every kind of calumny, became quite common, and rendered it equally impossible to live peacefully, or to administer justice and regulate public affairs" - The history of Jacobinism : its crimes, cruelties and perfidies, Volume 1, W. Playfair, W. Cobbett ; "The duality of power and counter-power is strikingly evident in the French Revolution. Already in 1789 a word had emerged to denote a complementary form of sovereignty that was seen as essential to achieving the ideal of a government embodying the general will : surveillance. Perpetually vigilant, the people were to oversee the work of the government... Later, during the Terror, the term surveillance lost its luster when it came to be associated with tyranny exercised by revolutionary clubs and committees and was subsequently stricken from the political lexicon. Yet if the word disappeared, the thing remained. In one form or another, civil society continued to inspect, monitor, investigate, and evaluate the actions of government - eprints.cscs.res.in/138/1/_uVUaTjbx.pdf ; `popular societies' were watched over by the Jacobins, who were themselves members of a network of `popular societies' ; hence their supporting the right of association that was granted by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and in the Constitution of 1793). Decentralisation was also at work in the political area : The Montagnard-Jacobin-dominated National Convention on June 24, 1793, adopted a democratic constitution and a political system based on decentralisation and representative local self-government. On May 10, the praises of decentralisation was sung by Robespierre (http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/aulard_alphonse/hist_pol_revol_fr/hist_pol_revol_fr.pdf ; p. 379) in words we cannot be bothered to translate, since they can be heard, almost literally, from most political schemers. This centralisation was acclaimed by the vast majority of French, in a country where, to quote Tocqueville, "People Had Become Most Alike, but where "Men So Similar Were More Separate Than Ever, Divided into Small Groups Alien and Indifferent to One Another."
It is now time to close these much necessary comments on the centrifugal nature of Jacobinism, as opposed to the centripetal nature of National-Socialism policy, in order to consider the "particularist tendencies" of the German people the Third Reich had to gather to a centre to prevent the country from imploding. They were the result of the various `races' that could be found in the German people and of their various psychological, moral, and intellectual characters. On the other hand, the Romans of the Republic and of the early Empire, the Spartans, the Athenians, were far more homogeneous peoples, and, therefore, shared the same view of life and of the world to a great extent ; in practice, a young Roman did not have to be `taught' loyalty and honour, no racial and political education was needed to inculcate a young Spartan dedication to the state, self-sacrifice for the fatherland, and full commitment to his bloodline, as is clear from the work of classical authors and from that of Fustel de Coulanges, a French historian whose well-known `La Cite antique' suffers from a lack of online visibility, which will be made slightly less conspicuous by the publication of its chapter on `La religion domestique' on this media.
B. Rust, as Reichsminister fuer Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung, was entrusted with the task to change the concept and the purpose of German education from `personal development' and `educational achievement' to the physical, mental, and spiritual formation of the youth in the service of the state. His first job was to implement the curriculum A. Hitler had had rewritten to make it fit with the National-Socialist world-view. In the new curriculum, racial education and racial hygiene, as the foundation of the Weltanschauung, became a core subject. Accordingly, course textbooks were assessed for suitability and the elaboration and publication of new ones was decided if necessary. His second job was to make sure the curriculum would be implemented in full by teachers. The Nationalsozialistische Lehrerbund was responsible for the related intensive update training course for teachers. In 1938, two years after religious denominational schools were closed, as they were seen as divisive (The Hitler Youth, Origins and Development 1922-1945, H.W. Koch, p. 172), the National Socialist Teachers League "urged the `immediate cessation' of religious instruction for all students because `we can no longer endure the exaltation of the Jewish criminal folk'." (Education in the Third Reich : a study of race and history in Nazi textbooks, p. 90). As early as April 7, 1933, under the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service), "Civil servants whose previous political activities afford no assurance that they will at all times give their fullest support to the national state" (http://tsnoticias.com/vaad_hashoa_br/biblio/nazi-eng/1933%20law%20for%20the%20restoration%20of%20the%20professional%20civil%20service.pdf) had to retire ; this did not come as a surprise to those who remembered the following passage of `Mein Kampf' : "It is an all-important interest of the State and a national duty to prevent these people from falling into the hands of false, ignorant or even evil-minded teachers. Therefore it is the duty of the State to supervise their education and prevent every form of offence in this respect" ; Jewish teachers were dismissed from state schools and universities, in regard to which, at least as for universities, B. Rust only met the request of a majority of German students : " the continuing demand for the removal of Jews from the German Student Federation (Deutsche Studentenschaft or DSt) suggest that the majority of students supported at least a drastic reduction in the number of
Jewish teachers at institutions of higher learning." (http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205420.pdf) However, it took him a while to meet them fully : " many students remained dissatisfied with the law ; they continued to boycott the lectures of Jewish professors even if they enjoyed exemption under the Aryan paragraph in the Civil Service Law. Their ruthless campaign, which lasted almost two years, finally achieved its goal : almost every Jewish professor who was legally still allowed to teach had resigned from his position by 1935." (ibid.) As for academics, many of them "welcomed the dismissal of their Jewish colleagues after Hitler's victory." (ibid.) By 1938, students blocked the entry of Jewish students to the university buildings. The Erste Verordnung zur Durchfuehrung des Gesetzes gegen die Ueberfuellung deutscher Schulen und Hochschulen (Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities), promulgated on April 25, 1933, was quite successful in cutting drastically the number of Jewish students, as well as the number of female students, to universities, but it was not until November 1938, as a result of technical difficulties, that the ban of Jewish children from all state schools became effective by decree, as "after the murder in Paris no German teacher could be expected to continue instructing Jewish children and no German pupil could be expected to stay in the same room as a Jew". The numerus clausus for Jewish pupils and students established by the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities "applied only to those Jewish whose fathers had no fought in the front line during the war. As, however, the majority of the fathers of the Jewish school children had been front fighters, the effect of this clause was felt only locally in places were the number of Jews was particularly high and in consequence the schools had an unusually high percentage of Jewish children." (Six Years of Hitler : The Jews Under the Nazi Regime, G. Warburg, p. 55). On September 10, 1935, B. Rust had announced his intention to open special Jewish schools, and, later, had "(come) out with his decree whereunder by the Easter Term of 1936 all Jewish children had to leave the ordinary elementary schools and special Jewish schools were to be established everywhere. The position in the secondary schools remained for the time being as it was. Of all the Nazi laws and decrees, Dr. Rust's school decree was probably the only one that was not carried out to the letter. It proved impossible to establish sufficient Jewish schools quickly enough, particularly in those places where there were only a few Jewish children living. As the general law compelling all children to attend school was still in force, a large number of Jewish had to remain in the ordinary elementary schools, even after the Eastern Term of 1936." (ibid. p. 56)
"It cannot be denied , J. Evola said, that these measures are rigorously consistent with the state racial idea " (Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem, p. 39)
National-Socialist concept of education and the willingness of the National-Socialist leadership to implement it in strict accordance with its principles can only be seen in a positive light from a traditional European standpoint, while, given that its full implementation lasted six short years and it takes far more than a generation to rid a people of their bad habits, no proper assessment can be made of its effectiveness. Only time would have told whether National-Socialism would have succeeded in mithridatising the modern education system.
Education did not stop at school anymore than it did in other contemporary Western countries. Political education, extending beyond the bounds of formal instruction, was part of public life through media, as was also the case in other contemporary Western countries. Propaganda was its "most effective branch", but, unlike in the case of France, of the United States or of Great-Britain, it was an open, direct, propaganda. Joseph Goebbels, Reichsminister fuer Volksaufklaerung und Propaganda, was its most efficient propagandist in the Third Reich. None of his speech appears to have been published in full in French to date (on the other hand, most of them are available in English at www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goebmain.htm). This oversight has been corrected. `La femme allemande' can now be read online at elementsdeducationraciale.wordpress.com
The aim of this blog is to make available in French, whether they were written originally in this language or not, more or less known, more or less read, political or historical writings, deemed either to be representative of the traditional Roman and Nordic world-view or to support it in some way, even `accidentally' or a contrario, to a larger audience, made up of people who, as they happen to live in a society on its way to become a third-world termite mound in which the only prospect of millions of opinionated graduates and postgraduates is structural unemployment and charity, may be less impervious to this topic and to related ones than they were as a proletariat undergoing a conversion to bourgeois values and tastes under the sign of free and compulsory education and of full employment. Its governing principle is education. While it is not opened to comments, we are opened to suggestions. The selected texts are and will be as far as possible short, but, in any case, to-the-point and edifying. What is edifying about, for example, `La Revolution commence par une orgie" is that it evidences that it would wrong to see 1789 as a whores' revolution only figuratively. While it goes without saying that the Jacobin-inspired historiography needs to be taken cum grano salis, the distortion of history, and, in the present case, that of French history started as early as the first memoirs and chronicles. Voltaire, whose attempt at unravelling the threads of the past was successful only from the factual and merely psychological standpoint, did not just read those that had been used by his predecessors to write, and were used by most later historians to consolidate, the Golden Legend of Charlemagne, to which we will return, when examining J. Evola's assessment of the emperor's historical significance and role. In his days, Voltaire was known for his plays and his historical work, not for his romances, novels and tales. In his correspondence, his thoughts are generally expressed without the irony into which they are so well wrapped in his novels and tales that, for example, a firm and grave universal belief in the anti-slavery character of `Candide' has passed from generation to generation of scholars and readers ; a few lines of the `Letter to Damilaville', dated April 1, 1766, is worth quoting, in relation to the matter at hand :
"It is true that Confucius said that he had known people incapable of science, but none incapable of virtue. The lowest people should thus be taught virtue ; but they should not waste their time examining who was right of Nestorius or Cyril, Eusebius or Athanasius, Jansenius or Molina, Zwingli or Oecolampadius. If only middle-class persons had never become infatuated with these disputations ! We would never have had religious wars ; we would never have had the Saint-Barthelemy. All disputations of this kind were started by easy-going idle people ; when the populace gets involved in arguments, all is lost." Today, it is delusional to think that television studios and Internet forums are filled with the squabbling of stand-in theologists about the interpretation of the content of this or that Surat, even as thousands and thousands of extra-Europeans enter European countries daily, whether `illegally' or `legally', with the active collusion of political schemers and the more or less passive complicity of their clientele.
"I agree, he continues, with those who want to make foundlings good ploughmen, instead of making them theologians. Besides, a book would be needed to pursue this matter further "
Without dwelling on the weakening that the Roman idea and perception of virtus undergone in Voltaire, "I doubt, he writes on the basis that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, that this type of citizens [the populace] ever has the time or the capacity to be educated ; they would starve before becoming philosophers. I believe it is essential that there are needy ignoramuses. If you owned a farm, and if you had plows, you would agree with me." The purpose of modern education as an "engineering area" in Western countries was obviously not to enable "needy ignoramuses" to become billionaires, but to make them a mass of unconditional followers and supporters of democracy by conditioning the most ambitious of them to believe that they, too, could one day become billionaires (some have), through hard studies and degrees, and others that, in any case, studies were the only pathway for a better future.
Modern education, as is well-known, owes much to Rousseau's psychological theories of education which had considerable influence throughout the nineteenth century on the German system of education A. Hitler had to deal with in 1933 -, to Kant's subjective pedagogy, to Locke's utilitarian curriculum, to Diderot's, who were in turn influenced by previous humanist educationalists, who all belonged to the aforementioned "scribe culture". In Europe, the turning point in education was the shift that the Church brought about from a warrior culture to a scribe culture, which was originally utterly foreign to European peoples, into whose culture "elements which can not only be described as literary but even as bookish" were first introduced in the sixth century B.C.E ; "On the other hand, we can detect much later remarkable survivals of these aristocratic, warlike origins, particularly in the prestige attached to physical culture and sport." (http://books.google.com/books?id=wv6kSdSFTgMC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false) The typical examples of a scribe culture were found in Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia. "We find echoes of this in the Sapiential Books of the Old Testament, especially in Proverbs, that handbook of moral education for the training of the perfect Civil Service clerk " (ibid.) A scribe culture can be considered from two points of view, the technical and the social-moral : "From the technical point of view, they emphasize the written word : the scribe is essentially a person who has mastered the technique of writing Socially the scribe was a civil servant : he put his knowledge of writing at the service of the civil administration. In Egypt this was essentially a kingly affair ; in Mesopotamia it was at first, apparently, sacerdotal, but there too it soon came under the direction of the king. This was the scribe's fundamental importance, both historically as regards his origin and practically as regards his function. Contrary to the theories dear to romantic historians, it seems clear that writing was first invented and used, not to fix theological or metaphysical dogma in a rigid form, but for the practical needs of accountancy and administration. It was only later that it developed away from this utilitarian purpose and began to be put to more elevated use in matters of history and abstract thought ; and even then the oriental scribe was still mainly the man who kept the accounts, looked after the archives, drafted orders, and, because he could be given commands in writing, was naturally entrusted with their execution.
Thus, from the social and political point of view, the scribes appear above the popular classes of peasants and manual workers as an upper class raised over the unorganized mass of serfs, and more or less directly sharing in the exercise of power Any scribe could hope that he might one day rise to the highest office in the State (such was the theory, at least : in fact, his hope was seldom realized)" As ancient Rome became more and more semitised, it was to be expected that this characteristic feature of the system would appear "in the bureaucracy of the late Roman empire." (ibid.)
It is easy to understand "the importance which the old oriental societies attached to education as a gateway to success. For the child, education was the means of entry into a privileged class." Does it sound familiar ?
To the Dorians, it was not, who, upon their conquest of Greece, rejected the Creto-Mycenean and Minoan civilisation and its scribe culture. "It was not until long afterwards, when the Christian Faith decided to organize culture and education around the Book of Books - the Bible, the source of all knowledge and life -" that the scribe culture triumphed over the remnants of the noble warrior culture.
Current 'Right-wing Christians' delude themselves in thinking that public education was brought about in Europe to dechristianise European peoples. Free and mandatory education in Europe was not established by the Jewish Freemason J. Ferry in the late nineteenth century. In Scotland, the School Establishment Act 1616 mandated the establishment of publicly funded, Church-supervised schools in every parish of Scotland. "It is sometimes taken for granted that there was general indifference to elementary instruction in France before the revolution. Roman Catholic publicists will point out that even for two hundred years before the `lois scolaires' of the Third Republic there had been a form of primary instruction obligatory for all children, WITHOUT DISTINCTION OF CLASS OR SEX, up to the age of fourteen, under pain of a fine or imprisonment." The emphasis is added because "the instruction of all children in the catechism, reading and writing, was under the direct control of the Roman Catholic Church, and although it varied from district to district, it never ceased to be anything other than Roman Catholic Church The principle of compulsory education had been proclaimed (in 1698) by Louis XIV ", whose confessor was, as is well-known, a Jesuit ; instruction had been made free by a decree of 1680 (Helvetius : his life and place in the history of educational thought, I. Cumming, p. 9-10) Free education was then provided to children exclusively by two religious orders : the Congregation of the Brothers of Saint Charles and the Institute of Brothers of Christian Schools. Young girls and women were not spared. In the Ancien Regime, "The clergy was almost alone in calling for the dissemination of instruction in the working-classes" (L'Ancien Regime, Les Grandes etudes Historiques, Funck-Brentano, Fayard, Paris 1926, p. 426) The first forays into so-called child-centered education date back to the Jesuit and Jansenists educationalists, to Locke and Commenius (L'enfance au XVIIe siecle, B. Jolibert, p. 128), after the child had been found `innocent', as a `recipient of the reign of God", as a "model for entering the reign of God", rather than `guilty' by the theological speculation of the "Middle-Ages".