The Revolt of the Giving Hand

Franz Pokorny

Donald John Trump is a man who enjoys God’s special favour. I wrote these words before the Woke attempt on his life and see them only confirmed thereby. The tribulations he has undergone have only steeled him for the final battle, if such an urfascist in the truest sense of this patently untrue word can ever content himself with one final battle…

„For Goethe,“ writes the critic Ernst Robert Curtius, „as for the Biblical account of creation, the primal polarity of light and darkness is a fundamental manifestation of nature […] The relation of barbarism and culture corresponds to that of illumination and darkness. There occurs a necessary alternation, a pendulum movement, between the extremes of both contrasting pairs. Thus dark ages must recur periodically.“ At the end of the deluge, light refracts through the prism of History and God’s providence pierces the eye in beams of every colour. The Woke, trying to defile all that is holy by pinning this image to their vile mast, have only announced the coming of the Lord and speeded the pronouncement of His terrible judgement upon them. In overturning the 2020 election, the Black Guelphs may have taken a rook, but in doing so only opened their flank to forfeit a bishop…

Structural history — „the factors and the forces“ — emerged as a masonic parody of natural theology. By stripping back the ebb and flow of events to their bare mechanics, these spinozifying beeldenstormers sought to paint over the working of the transcendent in history. The basic error was to remove the dynamic principle and assume the structures would keep ticking along of their own volition — this is no more reasonable than to expect a human body drained of its vital force to maintain its operations. But structural history can nevertheless deepen our understanding insofar as, borrowing from phenomenology, it preoccupies itself with reconstructing the crystalline lattices of facts that recur again and again in history, like the golden ratio in nature. And so we must briefly sketch the structural analogy between our own moment and Weimar…

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After four years in which all that is liberal melted into air, the promise of a Biden presidency was to stabilise the Woke hegemony through select application of the populist program. Surveying populism’s three R’s of reducing migration, retrenching the welfare state, and reshoring industry, it was resolving that the last one — „addressing the economic factors“ — was enough to set liberalism’s lands in order. This was to be combined with a programme of redistribution towards the libs’ clientele — this took many names, from the Green Deal to the Inflation Reduction Act — intended to systematise and bake in the massive wealth transfers undertaken under the corona regime: a no less schizophrenic undertaking than any other postwar experiment in economic planning, which has always sought to thread the opposing parameters of industrial modernisation and preferential treatment for backwards classes. To paraphrase Lenin: energy transition + Charles Maier’s Recasting Bourgeois Europe = Bidenomics. 

After the Weimar consolidation followed the Crash. You do not need to be Niall Ferguson to see the parallels between the Dawes and Young Plans and the impotent IRA; between the debacle in the Red Sea and the Schmachfrieden of Rapallo — these things differ in their specific characteristics, but they occupy the same position in the overall structure. Foreign powers operate within the country’s borders, ethnic gangs shake down honest businessmen, Wokeness runs riot. Like the no-nonsense SPD, the Democrats have lost control of their base to the insane woke left, and can no longer deal to the moneyed interests by wielding the threat of violence in one hand and a big, comprehensive offer to the bourgeois parties in the other. The markets have lost confidence in Heinrich Brandon’s increasingly flaccid authoritarianism. Мне за державу обидно!

Until the cult of reason is installed in every household, the lords of high finance and tech rule the earth, delegating the more mundane functions of the administration of state to various private and public sector siloviki bands. Raiffeisenbank, Likud, the Carlyle Group, the House of Saud, the Sovereign Order of Malta— every member of this House will have their say and they will be heard. This order resembles in macrocosm its most successful experiment in state-building, the Russian Federation: a smorgasbord of oligarchs fighting it out under the cruel eye of a gnostic demiurge, who collects his dues through occasional arbitrary harassment of the players on the board. It was LaRouche’s singular genius to see in this order the realisation of the old-style balance of powers doctrine; the baroque teaching that opposing forces would move in counterpoint to produce a harmony among the spheres, but whether this is by conscious design or simply „how things worked themselves out“ is a question to be delegated to theology. Not that these men do not have an ethos of social responsibility; a certain noblesse oblige. The global financial elite and the senior echelons of the Euro-Russian siloviki are men of aristocratic or haute bourgeois background with a great sense of propriety: stakeholders in the truest sense of the term, but also men of a fundamentally conservative bent, deluded by their humanistic outlook and ill-adjusted to the realities of the modern world.

Any transition from high modernist industrialism to the seigneurial economy of Anatoly Chubais and Nigel Carlsbad will manifest as „managed decline“ — this is in the nature of the thing. But the point of managed decline is, as the name suggests, to manage it, and this means to maintain a sufficient level of productivity as to keep rents flowing for the stakeholders. A globalist elite cannot maintain itself on a slumlord’s wages — at least not without a very brutal period of downsizing and consolidating a shrinking pie in fewer hands. The dark forces of reaction have no inherent objection to the green transition, human rights, or sanctions: all of these buttress their position by closing the mercantile bourgeoisie’s access to lucrative resource deposits. This is how someone like Dan Gertler was able to gain control over much of the Congo’s mineral resources, how Raiffeisenbank doubled its revenues in Russia last year, and why the Israelis lobby so vehemently for sanctions against Iran. But this is a dangerous game, and any attack on the tiers état has to be balanced against the unwanted sapping of Western industry’s puissance. Destroying the bourgeoisie while leeching off the productivity bourgeois specialists — these are the conflicting parameters between which all socialist economics must find the optimal corridor. And a correction is overdue.