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So my friends:
As discussed here last week in View 37 beginning this series, the realm of ‘Eastern Europe’ and Western Eurasia, its peoples and their polities, have been discussed rather too much in ‘Western’ social sciences and commentary as ‘adjunct Europeans,’ more nearly as defective ones. The Renaissance and bourgeois liberalism never happened East of the Elbe River. The peoples of this expanse including Asia Minor and the Caucasus have ever been viewed as ‘barbarians’ by the peoples conversant with the traditions of Mediterranean trajectories of experience; and still are. This view has its defensive elements, for neither have the peoples or places of this vast heartland, called here the Urheim, ever been conquered by those of parts west either, but for some peripheral strips such as the Eastern Baltic littoral and even then only transiently. This sense of otherness to those of the eastern interior on the part of Westerners has a different kind of validation from the standpoint of the research program of The Jagged Spend, however, for the two bodies of people are in fact on distinct and separate syndyne functions, the mass pattern oscillation structures which phase and time the moments of civilizational scale societies and channel together peoples to which accrue distinct traditions and chains of experience. The bodies of concepts and traditions specific to the population on a particular syndyne, its cheuma in the term here, constitute a concept space from which events and interactions are initiated and interpreted, worldviews or metanousa in the term here distinct to them and not fully shared or entirely comprehensible to those mass populations on syndynes apart.
The manifest reality from the modeling perspective of The Jagged Spend which I have developed is that the peoples more or less to the east of the Elbe River in Eurasia alike on the unique 2-Volksgeiste Syndyne from 1559 CE and now pervasively and those to the west and north in Europe proper on the 2-Latin Syndyne from 962 CE and now pervasively not only live in separate regions but in separate macrocultural ‘realities.’ So too and the same the peoples of 2-Union Syndyne America apart from the other two macrocultures. Their de facto and distinct civilizations differ as well from that of a much older syndyne and its folk once spread over the entirety of Eurasia and beyond; the Kurgan Syndyne, which still has participants in more rural district and enclaves across that continental sweep. Being closer in conception to the newer and emergent Volksgeiste Syndyne has been no anodyne for the Kurgan function and its peoples, in precipitous decline today, for Volksgeiste participants have with no little violence actively suppressed the elder, already waning, conceptual tradition and its resonance function, especially over the last century. This sense of ‘civilizational difference’ between those East and West, of Europe and the Urheim, thus has a reality basis that is more extensive and in fact more fundamental than simply some distinction of ostensible ideologies. Though there have been differences in ideologies there, yes, and to the greatest cost over the 1900s CE. Modern ‘racial’ fascism1 and the communism of Western Eurasia both developed from concepts and inclinations basic to the worldview of the Volksgeiste society of the Urheim. Both tendencies were polar opposite extremes of a similar societal perspective, in my view and that of other analysts. As often the case for extremes, however, both these maximalist if inverse ideologies have to a significant degree burned their own polities and peoples so badly that neither view attracts a mass following at present in the Urheim or elsewhere, though both remain latent in concept space of the Volksgeiste metanousa.
A more basic expression of worldview in which ‘the nation’ is central very much remains definitional for Volksgeiste populations in my reading of their history and society, however. Chauvinistic nationalism has been the main trend in Volksgeiste Society from its inception to the present time and on. To the extent to which there is a countervailing sentiment, it is a Völkisch pan-citizenry universalism which nevertheless itself encodes definitional ethnic particularist concepts only with those writ large. This ideological continuum has evolved not as a (West) European nationalism in the sense of ‘a nation of a people’ but more as ‘a people as a nation,’ to my observation. I claim no definitive understanding of this syndyne societal frame of reference, and will offer none here. This subject demands much more cultural historical study than it has received; and outside of the fascist <> communist framing dichotomy too much employed to date, a newer and extensive study which developments in and alongside the Urheim of today are likely to promote over the next decades of 2-Volksgeite zenith moment salience. What follows through the remainder of this week’s View is a most basic sketch of the context in which Volksgeiste communal chauvinism and concomitant territorial irredentism have proved the main current in the political history of the contemporary West Eurasia and its peoples.
Blood and Soil Blend the Mortar of ‘the Nation’
Prior to c. 1500 CE, political affairs in the Urheim were much of a kind for millennia: large conquest states ruled by narrow and ethnically based aristocracies controlled substantial territories of disparate peoples. Most all the peoples involved regardless of language or specific ethnicity were on the Kurgan Syndyne. Practice of the same lifeways held intra-communally. The occasional replacement of one ruling caste by another or large scale excision of territories and their occupants from one state to another made little difference in perspective or polities. Communal locations were in some cases ancient but often the result of migration and infiltration under the pressure or suasion of various ruling castes over time. Local identities were strong; ethnic identities were weak; ‘national’ identities were often nonexistent. Such states as existed were institutionally and often militarily weak to the point of being inchoate. Over the whole of Eurasia into the 1400s CE, the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Hungary, the dynastic union of a Poland and Lithuania with large territorial claims to the southeast, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Türkish sultanates of Anatolia from which the Ottoman dynasty emerged the strongest, the transient Timurid khanate and subsequent amorphous polities of Central Asia: all had large claims over wide territories and diverse peoples within those—but were time and again militarily worsted, with their central control fluctuating wildly accordingly. Infrequent ‘popular mass movements’ yielded joint and confederal efforts to carve out expansive new states or to restore some or all of older ones in disarray, but these were of intermittent result at best. Few people had any love of even their own co-ethnic aristocracies, who were often no more than bailiffs for some other, larger, ethnically different dynastic state. The peoples of no few areas remained enduringly outside the firm control of any larger state, such as much of the South Baltic Coast; Pokutia, Bukovina, and Transylvania; the Dnipro River watershed in Ukraine, or the jigsaw puzzle of communes near about both sides of the Caucasus Mountains. This particular socio-political configuration and the ever-shifting mosaic of transient ruling imperia was and is still perennial and definitional for Kurgan Syndyne peoples to my study of their history, there and elsewhere.
The Volksgeiste Syndyne coalesced in this context in the early 1500s, with a definite inception date to its subsequent harmonic phase structure of VLK ** 1559 CE, as shown in the figure of last week’s View 37. This evidently transpired in some population in Central Europe, and only gradually propagated eastward and south through the peoples of the Urheim, ultimately into Central Asia and Anatolia. As a working hypothesis, it would appear that this syndyne function originated amongst ethnic German minority communities in either the Danube Valley, the Baltic region, or both, though if so and prominent amongst them the nascent function was by no means exclusive to them. It may be that the failures of gradual German infiltration east again into the Urheim with the defeat of the crusading movements in the Baltic prior to 1500 were some precipitant. Even more, the conquest expansion of a strong Ottoman Muslim State north through the Balkans and into Central Europe, and as well intrusive into littoral country north of the Black Sea, was undoubtedly a profound shock to the populations by then indigenous there whether German, Slav, or older still, particularly after the destruction of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Battle of Mohács in 1527 and the narrow survival of the Austrian Habsburg state in the subsequent Siege of Vienna of 1529. Similar conditions prevailed in those times over the comparably disordered expanse of East Central Europe from Volhynia east through Ruthenia (Ukraine), another core region for early Volksgeiste Syndyne propagation. What seems certain is that the Volksgeiste Syndyne originated and largely propagated initially amongst communities in the Urheim heartland who were ethnic minorities amongst larger, ethnically different, and typically more powerful peoples, as an express reaction to minority fears of their own outright conquest, communal expulsion, or even societal extirpation.
Unlike the communities of Western Europe over the last millennia, whose experience has been a steady economic propagation and outright conquest expansion of the polities of the largest regional ethnic communities there, the ethnic communes of the Urheim in Central and Southeast Europe both small and large alike have by contrast the definite, pervasive, experience of insecurity and even subjugation, real or very much threatened by others of different ethnicity, foreign states, and competing religious confessions. The conceptual space of the emergent Volksgeiste Syndyne has been profoundly shaped in reaction to this material history of pervasive pressure on basic practices and even communal continuation. Inclination toward a ‘strong state’ authoritariansim which can provide a hoped for physical security is widespread if not universal amongst those of a Volksgeiste Syndyne worldview, together with territorial and cultural irredentist conceptions which are often far more mythological than historically real though professed with a near desperate intensity not common west of the Elbe. In Europe where mountains and nations made territories difficult to conquer and so broadly secure, the nation was late to arrive in the face of a pervasive parochialism, and merely satisfies an identity, if even that. In the Urheim with vast space and few real geographical barriers or even borders, ANY nation has been won against odds, and sustains ‘a people,’ or so it is hoped.
There is evidently in counterpoise as well a profoundly romantic conception of ‘a better past’ (which never existed) and of some potential ‘universal tradition resorted’ amongst those of Volksgeiste societies claimed as pan-communal and inclusive though always monoethnic at core when its surface gloss is scratched; a literally völkisch inclination as much to be found in Ruthenia, Armenia, and Mordovia as in Franconia, Mazovia, or Anatolia. If not necessarily ‘racist’ in belief as that concept is understood in European tradition, Volksgeiste Syndyne blood and soil concepts have no clear border in practice between communal chauvinism and de facto caste distinctions, as with many ethnic identitarian or irredentist movements; a predilection carried perniciously into racist conceptions too often already by some in Volksgeiste societies so inclined, to the worst results. Socially liberal Latin concepts with their bourgeois privileges have no good fit with the mainstream of ‘strong state’ authoritarianism pervasive in Volksgeiste societies of this time, with philosophical opposition to Volksgeiste perspective evidently more in the nature of a folk anarchism deriving from Kurgan clan-based precepts more than those of Western European class driven pro- or anti-capitalism. Territorial irredentism is endemic amongst Volksgeiste communities whether those are great or small in numbers and territory, both from ‘secure state’ conservative bases and also in consequence of romantic ‘communal restoration’ communitarian universalist inclinations.
This transition to Volksgeiste conceptual propagation and societal co-resonance occurred almost exclusively amongst formerly Kurgan Syndyne peoples, with two exceptions as I understand the evidence. Indeed, the conceptual array of the Volksgeiste Syndyne is very much that of the Kurgan Syndyne ‘on steroids,’ a natural elaboration of ethnic particularism and an extractive rather than capitalist political economy in that elder worldview, now in Volksgeiste formulation with a bias toward a strong state rather than a weak state as before for Kurgan peoples. With a pronounced preference to secure for themselves a claimed and traditional territorial homeland, few Volksgeiste populations have voluntarily emigrated en masse, though it is not uncommon for Volksgeiste elites to live abroad for a time. The exceptions in communal transition to Volksgeiste Syndyne synchrony have been those of a few neighboring Tagor Syndyne peoples: much of the Jewry turned to Zionism within the Urheim itself or in Southwest Asia (though not others of that confession), and the ‘Pan Arab’ movement of Southwest Asia now proving transient. In both cases, these exceptional communal instances largely involved ethnic enclaves which in the same way found themselves minorities persecuted and worse amongst more numerous non-ethnic societies, incorporating the same Volksgeiste ‘national chauvanist’ frame of reference as 2-VLK Syndyne enclaves of identical experience neighbors to them or resident amongst them too in the Urheim.2 Widely dispersed, pervasively persecuted, and without a traditional territorial homeland of their own in the Urheim, Zionist Jews have been the only Volksgeiste Syndyne community of that expanse to establish a geographically distant enclave. This remove of Zionist Jewry cannot be said to have been wholly voluntary even if one prosecuted in and upon Palestine, odiously, strictly along Volksgeiste national chauvinist and fabulatory irredentist lines, with an original leven too of Volksgeiste universalist communitarianism now all but extinct.3 Sympathy for and potential resynchronization to the Volksgeiste Syndyne amongst communities outside the Urheim, in Western Europe and potentially ‘European’ settled nations elsewhere, would appear to be entirely a phenomenon of endstage Kurgan Syndyne populations of those territories, a most consequential potential which will be revisited in the final View of this series.
Volksgeiste vs. Kurgan Societies: Not Creative Destruction but Destructive Creation
Always institutionally weak and never with more than transitory emotional support from the bulk of their populaces, the dynastic Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman states proved gradually, wholly, frangible to these eruptions from below. The comparative success of the lifeways and emergent resonance function of the Volksgeiste Syndyne propagating in juxtaposition against the states and adherent populations of the ancient but declining Kurgan Syndyne had much to do with the fact that the Volksgeiste cheuma underwent the amplification of a period doubling transformation, dating to a transition point of 2-VLK ** 1784 CE whereas the Kurgan cheuma never has even now. As can be followed from the figure here, Kurgan Syndyne states managed to hold the line during their own focal phase periods in sequence over the 1800s even after that Volksgeiste Syndyne β-moment transformation from base-χ to 2-χ long harmonic phase pattern at the end of the 1700s. During the continuing and augmented dynamism of their own now 30 year macron long harmonic periods juxtaposed to Kurgan Syndyne 15 year era grade periods, however, populations on the now 2-Volksgeiste Syndyne forced massive changes to their inclinations when they continued in greater focal moment while elder Kurgan Syndyne populations oscillated to their misfortune into structurally determined grade moment phases of the 1860s and especially after c. 1917. The intensely lethal disintegration of the prior Kurgan Syndyne imperial states in the early 1900s had everything to do with what were not ‘civil wars’ in the populations of the Urheim, but rather ‘civilizational wars’ of existential magnitude between older traditional populations and emergent communally focussed ones from within them. The inherent conflicts of this literally civilizational rupture were exacerbated by existing ethnic communal rivalries whose populations hereafter have all alike determined to enforce their sole communal control over ethnically intermixed territories long typical of Kurgan cheuma lifeways.
All this sounds simplistic and not a little mystical to state so plainly the processes involved, my friends. Mass population conceptual spaces do accrue to those commonly resonant in a syndyne function, however, and are integral to the maintenance of shared synchrony as I have modeled the behaviors involved in historical trends and events. The worldview of the Urheim, of its Volksgeiste Syndyne peoples, has not been studied as a phenomenon unto itself, and so is only thinly approximated in this cursory summary. Time and space cannot be taken here to develop these assertions, so I urge you to take this overview as a working hypothesis. But this generic description holds true in the historical trajectories of the Urheim, and configures their primary trend of the last 500 years and the programmatic episodes within that: the steady destruction of Kurgan Syndyne authority and society by emergent Volksgeiste Syndyne practices and their adherents.
‘Citizen-Heroes’ vs. Boyars and Hordes
The prime trajectories and their policy actors of recent centuries in the Urheim, Western Eurasia, are not those of fascism or communism then but of particularist ethnic movements; communal chauvinists agitating for generations even before they often had sovereign states of which to be ‘nationalists.’ The Volksgeiste Syndyne and its conceptual gestalt are evident for example in full and prototypal aspect in the Great Ruthenian Rebellion led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky with intense severity from 1648 to 1657 CE in the heart of modern Ukraine. Other early predicates of Volksgeiste concepts and expression can be seen in the serial Hungarian revolts against Habsburg German rule, beginning with the irredentist Magnate Conspiracy of Croatian and Hungarian nobles 1666-1671 CE, through the protracted subsequent kuruc insurgencies of Imre Thököli, and distinctly in the insurrection led by Ferenc II Rákóczi, 1703-1711 CE. Hungarian revolts to like ends recurred in the 1800s. Volksgeiste ‘national chauvinist’ irredentism can be followed as well in parallel, definitional, expression through the similarly multi-generational Greek independence movement against Türkish rule from the mid 1700s to the present. Repeated, bitter, defeats have done nothing at all to eliminate communal chauvinist sentiments amongst populations of the Urheim. If anything, communal defeat and repression only accomplished the reverse for such conditions manifested and justified the Volksgeiste belief of existential, ethnically ‘foreign,’ encroachment and repression. Kurgan kings could not change their stripes nor little change their modes of rule. Nor could these elder but tottering territories readily merge their manifold ethnic spots, so rebellions against ‘corrupt and sellout lords’ and ‘foreign infiltrators’ alike had grounds to be revived time and again to any quarter of the Urheim. Volksgeiste Syndyne participation and the worldviews involved propagated gradually amongst peoples of adjacent regions over this heartland where it did not initially occur; from Danubian Europe and across Ukraine; into Poland, the Baltics, and the Balkan regions; gradually into Russia but Türkiye too; into Armenia and the Caucasus lands by the mid 1800s if not earlier; evidently into Central Asia by now also.
The revolts of 1847-48 in Central and Eastern Europe were definitional expressions of Volksgeiste perspective and objective, concurrent with nationalist insurrections in Western Europe though quite different in orientation. While there was no absolute differentiation between on the one hand the movements of ‘national self-determination’ in Western Europe, such as of Italian and German unification, but also of repeated Catalan revolts against Castilian rule, and on the other hand the ‘communal autonomy’ mass movements pervasive in the Urheim of the last 300 years, a general distinction is that the nationalist movements of the ‘Europe’ tended to be elite-led while those of ‘the Urheim’ were more nearly mass popular movements from below. Those of both 2-Latin and 2-Volksgeiste persuasion definitely participated in revolutionary movements on both sides of the macrocultural frontier which I propose here. The popular German insurrections of the nationalist movements of the mid 1800s and especially the repeated national independence revolts by Poland against Romanov and later Soviet rule undoubtedly had popular involvement and conceptual inputs from both major syndyne functions of the larger European sphere. There has been a further distinction of result, however, in that 2-LAT self-determination movements typically have contained a strong strain of liberal democratic expectation and a degree of multi-communal coordination, if not immediately than usually ultimately. 2-VLK autonomy movements have had and have no such liberal dispositions, trending significantly to authoritarian ethnocracies where successful and often including parallel and wholly NOT incidental pogroms against non-ethnics in the course of rebellions against larger and most always Kurgan Syndyne imperial governments.
Thus, it is not ‘socialist’ or ‘fascist’ ideologies and their ideologues that prototypally define Volksgeiste trajectories in the Urheim but rather more ‘conventional’ and far more numerous ethnic chauvinists of various stripes such as Lajos Kossuth, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Georg, Ritter von Schönerer, and Theodor Herzl. In this regard, it wasn’t Vladimir Lenin who stands best as an exemplar of Volksgeiste Syndyne in the early 1900s but rather in juxtaposed tandem Nestor Makhno, the anarchist insurgent for Ukrainian autonomy, and Semyon Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist . . . and pogrom enabler. Carl Schmitt, the anti-liberal and statist legal and political philsopher, is perhaps the definitional ideologue of modern Volksgeiste sentiment as I understand this.4 Adm. Miklós Horthy of Hungary and Enver Pasha of Türkiye were and are better examples of Volksgeiste trend effectors than were, say, Herman Göring or Josip Broz Tito. The former governed states with wide public acceptance because more in sympathy with the popular trends which they rode to power in their day over states with one very predominant ethnic community whereas the latter in their extremity seized power by force over multiple and inherently competing communes only for their never widely popular and quasi-imperial regimes to ultimately shatter and fail.
And now again and on. The 2-Volksgeiste Syndyne presently enters a zenith 30 year macron of its trend and cultural expression, as said in the first View of this series. The extremities of Hitler and Stalin and their ilk appear not nascent in recurrence as their former movements though yet ephemerally extant currently lack anything like mass followings, perhaps having discredited their conceptual particulars by extreme cost and ultimate failure such that only obscure factions of scant power actually advocate those ideologies. The more basic and long trend concepts of Volksgeiste chauvinist nationalism within which former extreme ideologies erupted are very much pervasive, however, and very much have their proponents and political exemplars even in this hour. Órban, Erdogan, Aliyev, Zelenskyy, and Netanyahu are much more what the near future holds than Hitler or Stalin—or Putin; short pants versions of ‘the real thing’ of the early 1900s come again some would say, but more nearly proponents macrocultural precepts developed over hundreds of years of the Urheim longue durée, expressing the same objectives at similar syndynamic phase moments in direct example of affective recurrence. Next week in View 39, I will discuss some dimensions of Volksgeiste society in how it has propagated amongst the peoples of the Urheim. Until then, my friends,
Live the day
There is not space or reason here to fully discuss the basic differences between the corporate fascism of Italy, Spain, and France in the early 1900s CE and the racialist ‘national socialism’ of Germany, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, and other territories of the Urheim of the similar period. While both involve extreme viewpoints of nationalism, however, in my view and that of many they are inherently distinct. In support of that point, my analysis as stated here is that theses two parallel ideologies were the forms of extreme nationalism expressed by peoples on entirely discrete and separate syndyne functions and metanousa. Because the basic worldviews involved were different in principles and nuances, their respective expressions of extreme nationalism were and remain inherently distinct. There has been of course considerable mutual propagation of ideas and resulting practical convergence, certainly of practical alliance, between the fascisms of Europe and the Urheim. Even now, one can find the crypto-fascist Vox political faction of Spain and the crypto-nazi AfD Party of Germany trying to get into lock step on a trans-‘European’ extremist political alliance; attending the same conferences, taking money from the same veiled patrons, employing similar propaganda tropes. As I read the conceptual spaces, two principal differences between the maximal chauvinisms of 2-Latin and 2-Volksgeiste Syndyne societies have been and remain a) the primary emphasis on pseudo-racial ethnic identitarianism amongst Volksgeiste hemi-demi-really nazis, and b) the pervasive dread of external and ‘racially different’ foes on the part of Volksgeiste folk also. Volksgeiste chauvinist fascism did NOT and does not preach acceptance of traditional hierarchies and in fact has often fiercely opposed those in preference for cohorts of ‘new leaders.’ Different ethnicities even if of ancient mutual residence are by definition not seen as ‘of a common nation’ but in fact as ‘internal foreigners.’ Western (Latin) fascism by contrast emphasizes c) enforced conformity to authoritarian traditional hierarchies if not necessarily aristocracies as the glue of ‘the nation,’ for example to the established Church, and d) an obsession with internal and class-distinct foes of the common nation but dissident to it. Views on economic policy have also been markedly different between the two parallel worldviews, though the endemic difficulties for centrally managed industrial policies have perhaps now eroded the Volksgeiste prior inclination to that practice toward a convergent oligarchism. Neither set of perspectives is exclusive to one syndyne metanousa or the other, but the two function metanousa differ consistently in the balance and configuration of these basic concepts.
It is not a coincidence but rather definitional confirmation that Pan Arabism was principally a movement not of majority Sunni Muslim Arabs but of minority Alawite and Christian Arab communities who after the leveling rule of Türkish empire vanished with the Ottoman fall suddenly found themselves threatened minorities in their own lands of ancient residence. In similar respect, former Pan Slavism found its largest expression amongst the geographically dispersed ethnic communities of the Balkans unable to coalesced secure, ethnically dominated, states of their own and endemically in conflict with similarly minded neighbors and larger foreign powers whereas large Slavic populations such as the Poles ever have showed less enthusiasm for a ‘Russian centered’ Pan Slavic orientation.
I would argue that the progressive migration into, conquest of, and colonial settlement within Central and Eastern Siberia by Cossack expeditionaries under Russian aegis was a Kurgan Syndyne process trajectory recapitulating for the umpteenth iteration the inclinations of that syndyne’s cheuma, and so even though an instance of ‘communal emigration’ did not instantiate Volksgeiste Syndyne practices per se, at least down to the later 1800s CE.
If Western European conservative ideologues claimed Carl Schmitt’s anti-liberalism for a time as their own during the latter 1900s, in my view this was more by default in the absence of a programmatic ideology of their own after the broad repudiation of the hard Right with the collaborationism and failure of its governments in WW II. More overtly oligarchical figures such as Silvio Berlusconi or the ‘national exceptionalist’ clan of Le Pen are returning to the fore now that nationalism is being rehabilitated and no longer a verboten perspective in Europe proper.
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