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National-Aristocratism is a third positionist political philosophy and the official state policy of the Commonwealth of Niflungland as well as the Holy Union of Hochheim founded by Sigurð Óðinnsson and adopted by the Nibelungische Reichspartei before that party merged with the Scottish Social Lordship Party to form the National-Aristocratic Party of Niflungland (Nationalaristokratische Partei Niflunglands, or NARP). The ideology in its original form was embraced, to a greater or lesser degree, by both the NRP and SLP in the course of their history. The central tenets of National-Aristocratism include the rule of a strict caste system dominated by nobles elevated by a single ordained Leader of government, the rule of this single, absolute leader by decree, national economic independence, and the domination of society by a single unified spiritual Weltanschauung.
In general, these tenets apply to both major branches of National-Aristocratism, but there are significant differences. In Niflungland, the original NARP still holds to the rule of a Vísir (lit. "Leader"), ordained to rule. At present, however, there is no Vísir, since the appointed successor to Vísir Sigurð Óðinnsson, Siegfried Hohenstaufen, declined the title, prefering to rule as a Marschall - a Regent for the True Vísir, which the NARP believes will reveal himself to the whole of Niflungland through his natural gifts and blessings by the gods. Óðinnsson himself leads a seperate faction of the National-Aristocratic movement based in Hochheim, a small religious enclave in Central Europe. Here he has gathered the highest-ranking members of the Order of the Knights of Othin's Eye, who collectively abandoned Niflungland following a great revelatory experience during one of their rituals. They have since formed the Ordo Fratrum Nominis Sanctis as the religious body for the Nationalaristokratische Union (National-Aristocratic Union, or NAU). Activists and authors supporting the NAU have attempted to form an opposition group in Niflungland, against the wishes of Óðinnsson, now recognised as Pontifex Maximus of Hochheim and Meister of the NAU.
In general terms, National-Aristocratism opposes all forms of capitalism, communism, socialism, liberalism, democracy, and internationalism/globalism. It is highly traditionalist, supporting a quasi-feudal structure of society and a monarchial system of rule, opposing monarchy only when it is coupled with liberal political structures. It also embraces a strong sense of cultural nationalism, placing an emphasis on tradition and cultural history, favouring strict control of immigration and maintenance of the traditional ethnic make-up of the nation. There is a strong opposition to the practise of abortion, citing the damage it causes to birth rates and personal responsibility. The Niflungan branch, or "Old Movement", is firmly grounded in Folkish Heathenry, and therefore generally antipathetic toward inclusive religions such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, and actively favours religions tied to a specific ethnic group, such as Shinto, Judaism, Hinduism, Ásatrú, and other forms of traditionalist or re-constructive Ethnic Religions. The Hochheimlish branch, or "Futurist Movement", is on the other hand generally opposed to all forms of tribalism, which distances the highest caste from the realisation of wisdom and truth, meaning that a tribalist and polytheistic religion may be appropriate for lower castes, but for the ruling nobility, the transcendence and oneness of Truth insists that antipathy toward such religions as Buddhism and Christianity makes little sense. The religious policies of Hochheim and Niflungland reflect this difference.
Ideology[]
The original principles of National-Aristocratism are laid out in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Niflungland, which was taken with very few edits from the official Charter of the National-Aristocracy Party of Niflungland, formed only days before the end of the Niflungan Civil War. In it, the basic principles of Niflungan Nationalism, a strictly defined Social Hierarchy, Economic Autarky, National and Local Rulership, the "New Nobility", and Folkish Faith are adapted to government applicability. These principles in large part can be traced to Sigurð Óðinnsson's work Die Neue Aristokratie: Voraussehend die Zukunft durch die Vergangenheit ("The New Aristocracy: Anticipating the Future in the Past") and his commentary of the Law Professor Carl Schmitt's 1923 essay "Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parliamentarismus" (lit. "The Spiritual-Historical Situation of Contemporary Parliamentarianism", published in translation as "The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy"), titled "Der Glaube des Liberalismus" ("The Religion of Liberalism"). This latter work was especially well-received in academic circles, and details the alternative government structure of National-Aristocratism specifically as an answer to the problems posed by the liberal state, rather than in the socio-cultural terms of the former New Aristocracy.
The New Aristocracy[]
Die Neue Aristokratie was written originally as an examination of the state of the nobility of Europe in contemporary times, focusing specifically on the decline in respect for social norms that seemed to reflect a similar trend amongst the peasant-descent population. Óðinnsson himself was living in Hamburg at the time he was writing the work between 1910 and 1913. He had by chance encounter a teacher from the Realgymnasium near where he lived in 1909, and the two spoke often over the next year, maintaining correspondence during the war. His diary entries from the time show a developing sense of cyclical thinking in terms of civilisations and cultures—specifically Western culture. It was this sense of cyclical development—the rise and then collapse of social structures and entire civilisations—that formed the core of his theory regarding the decline of the old nobility from a true Aristocracy to mere oligarchy.
Contents[]
Óðinnsson devotes half of the book to a survey of the rise and development of nobility from the ancient structure, corrupted by the Christian influence that allowed for Kings and nobles to rule strictly on the basis of their wealth and therefore paving the way for the rise of Bolshevism. He concludes that “Die Christentum ist eine Großelter der Bolschewismus und Sowietismus.” (“Christianity is a grandparent of Bolshevism and Soviet Socialism.”)[1] It was inevitable, therefore, that Christianity would lead to the decay of an aristocratic principle (foreseen in Plato as oligarchy) and ultimately the Marxist overthrow of ancient monarchical systems. The core to a sustainable aristocracy was not found in any form of universal religion, but a religion that was both ethnic and transcendent, both worldly and other-worldy. Folk religions like Ásatrú offered exactly this.
The second half of the book departed largely from the topic of this new religion and the basis for it. The Folk religions were specifically ethnic and national, tied inherently to the land and therefore on their surface peasant faiths. Within their spirituality, however, Óðinnsson finds a constant questing of the heroic individual for the purification of himself and his world through ritual action of the sacrifice of evil creatures, whose deaths often leave the hero, as with Siegfried and Fafnir, with greater other-worldly knowledge (in Siegfried, or Sigurð's, case the Language of the Birds). The centrality of the sacrifice of Óðinn on the world-tree for the runes, symbolic of knowledge and wisdom, also stood out. It was not the thunder-god or even the law-giver who was the chief gods of the ancient Germanics, but the God of Knowledge and Wisdom. This elevation of scholars and those who sacrifice not for glory, but for knowledge, to the highest positions made the structure of the faith ideal for the rebirth of an Aristocracy.
Philosophy[]
The central goal of National-Aristocratism grew out of this cyclical view of civilisation: to anticipate the collapse of the civilisation and, indeed, aid in its collapse through the development of a new cultural structure. Óðinnsson saw the re-emergence of the ancient heathen religion of the ORW as key to this development, and suggested that such an order, though superficially grounded in Christian Western culture, could serve as the foundation for the inheritor to Western Civilisation. He, of course, wrote to this end when the German Empire still spanned Europe from Ghent to Transylvania, in the hope that such a structure would serve as the soil in which this new culture could arise. Later editions of the book contain his 1918 preface which explicitly states that the ideology, by that time given the name Nationalaristokratie ("National Aristocracy") or Nationalaristokratismus ("National-Aristocratism"), was a pan-European movement, whose goal should be to replace the entirety of decrepit European-American Occidental Civilisation with a new culture.
The principles expressed in The New Aristocracy to produce this new culture largely reflect the subtitle of the work; one particular statement from the second chapter expresses the basic principle of a new Aristocracy: "Nur der Geschichtestudent kann dieses Ziel verstehen und verwirklichen. Dieses Zivilisationschicksal ist ein Tier, daß die Geschichte geboren, lieben, und sterben undendlich hat zuschaut, und der Geschichtestudent hat es durch seinen Studiengang erlebt. Er allein kann dieser Weltlauf verstehen und somit beeinflußen." ("It is only the student of history who can understand and realise this end, for he has seen creatures of the same species be born, live, and perish countless times—he alone can understand the pattern, and therefore shape it.")[2] The principle drive of National-Aristocratism, therefore, is a World-Historical drive, specifically aimed at re-creation rather than new creation. Óðinnsson characterises the new civilisation that shall arise and take the place of Western civilisation as "eternally inward" contrasted with the "eternal outward" grasp of Western, or Faustian civilisation.
The structure of the New Aristocracy is based on an ancient structure proposed both by Plato and in Germanic lore. Óðinnsson suggests that the failure of the Medieval aristocracy was founded in the fact that it had been explicitly divorced from an organic structure, passed from Gods to Rulers to Vassals to Serfs. While there was a hierarchy, the notion of Divine Right, this hierarchy reflected not the organic polytheism or lore of the nation in question, but the super-national monotheism and the divine distance of the Christian West. The King was elected by God to reign over the land, his nobles second to him—a notion while not immediately evident in the early Middle Ages, eventually became clear as the centralisation of power came closer and closer to its culmination in the absolutism of the sixteenth century, which ultimately ended the predominance of nobility. The Germanic hierarchy, however, was superimposed over a Christian mythology, and in being so, there was no clear connexion between the inheritance of noble and Kingly power with Divine power—titles and holdings were inherited, but for the sake of convention, not tradition. The Germanic structure, on the other hand, offered a Divine Tradition of rulership—the three classes of men, Járl, Karl, and Þráll, were all sons of a god, Ríg, a name of Heimdallr, the guardian of the realm of the gods. They were born, by direct ancestry, not by circumstance, into their place. The New Aristocracy could not be distantly divorced from the Gods in the way the Christian Aristocracy were theological united with their serfs in the Body of Christ. Óðinnsson observed that Plato had seen the roots of this from his hindsight living in the Autumnal epoch of Antiquity. He therefore took Πολιτεία as the precursor to Die Neue Aristokratie, in that both were observations of an ancient religious structure and that they proposed a new system to replace the dying structure.
Plato's suggestion in The Republic was a three-tier structure that he called ἀριστοκρατία (aristokratia, “rule of the best”). It was dominated by “Guardians” (scholars and priests), below whom were “Auxiliaries” (warriors), who were above the “Producers” (merchants, workers, slaves). It was the spiritual understanding and “closeness” to the Divine which separated these three castes; Plato captured his understanding of the necessary basis of a caste structure in theology through his fictional “Myth of the Metals”. Óðinnsson insists that it is a gross misinterpretation and mistreatment of the text to suggest that Plato was proposing that the structure of government be based on a contrived lie; he was not proposing that the Myth of the Metals be the basis of a government and society, but rather he was observing indirectly that such a foundational myth was necessary for the structuring of a society. These myths must necessarily arise organically, they cannot be designed in the way that the “Myth of the Metals” is. The notion that it should be known only by the Guardians was really nothing more than a further statement that the lowest castes lacked the capacity to understand the mythological foundations of society beyond the superficial details of the myths and folklore.
The goal of National-Aristocratism is therefore not a classless society, but a re-classed society in the four-class structure of the ancient texts proposed by Plato and the Germanic folklore: the ruler-priests, warrior-thegns, and producer-peasants making the primary structure, and below them those outlaws, outcasts, and criminals, who were either taken out of society by death or enslaved to work in areas below even peasantry. The stability of this system was to be preserved by some higher order or religious system, by which the sanctity of the hierarchy was enforced; Óðinnsson, who it should be remembered was not a Niflungan citizen at the time and lived in the city of Hamburg, saw a possibility for this in the Niflungand ORW. The structure of the Order was already hierarchical in its division of degrees and Knights. It was assumed in Die Neue Aristokratie, however, that not all citizens be members of the Order, and therefore the Knights would still be elevated above the vast majority, the masses and the peasants. The reality of masses of persons joining the ORW merely to be members, and ordinary devotees to the religion of the Order joining as Knights somewhat altered this notion, instead placing Knights at the bottom, ranked Knights above them, and the Masters at in the place of priests and rulers.
The establishment of this new class came with a new philosophy of aristocracy by which the old royalty no longer retained the right of ennoblement; rather, only those deemed closest to the spiritual wisdom of the gods, specifically the Alfather Óðinn and therefore the Runes and what Óðinnsson termed the “Geheimnis Selbstandere”—literally a “Secret Self-otherness”—loosely translated into English as a “mystical conversion of the soul”, related to the Medieval conversatio morum of the monks. Those who have experienced this conversion experience in which they have realised some aspect of the true nature of the gods were questioned for their knowledge of the lore, of the writ of the Order, and the nature of their experience as it relates to each of the gods. Óðinnsson answered accusations of allowing for corruption that in a true Holy Order such corruption, rooted in a mercantile personality of the lowest classes who would not advance to a rank that would allow them to become priests.
Reception[]
Within three weeks of its publishing, the book received such wide acclaim amongst the members of the ORW that Óðinnsson received an invitation to come to their headquarters in Franconia. They offered him an all-expenses-paid lecture tour of Niflungland with full ORW endorsement. The opportunity to propagate his ideas, which by that time had not yet taken the name National-Aristocratism, was one that the young author could not throw away. He accepted the offer and moved from Westphalia to Bayreuth. He toured as a non-Niflungan German for the rest of the year, lecturing throughout the German and Swedish lands on the topic of civilisational decay and the necessity of a New Order found in the wisdom of their ancestors. He had to stay several extra weeks in Sweden, where the native population was so enamoured with him, none of the lecture halls at the University there could hold the crowds to hear him, and the lecture he gave ultimately had to be held in the town auditorium of Kalmar, with four times the capacity of a lecture hall filled to capacity with locals and Swedes from around Kalmar and Öland.
In the first three months, his work had sold 600,000 copies throughout German-speaking Niflungland. The outbreak of the World War did not prevent the book from entering English translation merely a year and a half after the war began, by which time the circulation was above 2 million copies. Even while members of the NRP were being jailed, the King himself was fascinated by the ideas contained in the work, and attempted on several occasions to woo Óðinnsson in coming to Edinburgh to lecture on the proper role and structure of an Aristocracy. Óðinnsson responded, always in German, that he did not feel his knowledge of the English language was sufficient for such a lecture series, although he today admits that even by then his use of English was developed well beyond the minimum point necessary to lecture to an English-speaking audience.
The Religion of Liberalism[]
- See also: Niflungland#Government
Der Glaube des Liberalismus was written both as a commentary on Carl Schmitt's interpretation of democracy published in Bonn, Duchy of Cleves as Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parliamentarismus. In the work, a detailed answer to the Parliamentary Democracy is laid out, constituting the single major work in National-Aristocratic government and social structure. The constituion of Niflungland appears in the book almost word-for-word, detailing the structure of government, the role of the Vísir and the cabinet, and the incorporation of a nameless religious order (realised in the form of the ORW) into government rule.
Factional Split and Die Zukunft[]
After his abdication and self-exile to Hochheim, Óðinnsson wrote another book expanding in the ideas of National Aristocratism but abandoning certain tenets, such as rigid adherence to "Folk" religions which, he argued, inevitably create an overly physical religion that prevents the highest caste, the natural aristocracy, from realising itself. The book, Die Zukunft unsres Vertrauen, details the difficulties faced in the ORW and the split that resulted in the exile of the "New Aristocrats" - the highest ranking members of the ORW - from their own creation. Óðinnsson suggests that it is not enough merely to reject the modernism and egalitarianism brought about by the religion of Liberalism, but one must in fact totally divorce oneself from the idea that all castes can hold the same ideology and the same faith. The book received very poor sales throughout most of Niflungland, where in reaction to the book the Alte Bewegung- Nationalaristokratismus ("Old Movement - National-Aristocratism") was formed. The group, headed by students in Niflungland's major universities, held to the original form of National-Aristocratism, calling the movement "incapable of progress, evolution, or change" and accusing Óðinnsson of erroneous assumptions in regards to his own aristocratic nature.
Presently, the NAPN is split between this "Old Movement" faction and the "Futurist Movement" (Zukunfter Bewegung) faction, which holds to the ideas developed in Die Zukunft and calls for a reconsideration of state religious and government policy. They issued an official declaration at the Party Congress declaring that "wisdom is rediscovered, and, for the highest caste, never complete". Many of the theorists of what has become known as the Zukunfterkreis ("Futurist Circle") throughout German-speaking Niflungland have chosen exile with Óðinnsson in Hochheim. Óðinnsson himself has welcomed some of these thinkers to join him in Eccardopolis, and has endorsed the Zukunfterkreis as "der reine und wirkliche Anschein des Nationalaristokratismus, und die wahre Zukunft unsre Weltbewegung" ("the pure and actual face of National-Aristocratism, and the true future of our global movement")[3]
Zufunftkreis in Erfurt[]
Óðinnsson predicts that the factional split will eventually lead to a break-down of Niflungland as one or another faction gains more backing in any of the given homelands, and has warned that the two factions cannot co-exist within Niflungland, encouraging all of the Zukunftkreis to join him in Hochheim. His statements to this end have received support and endorsement from the whole of the RWA (which replaced the ORW after the OBHN/RWA split). The main gathering of contributing philosophers to the Zukunftkreis has hitherto been in Erfurt, the largest city in Hochheim. German thinkers like Edgar Julius Jung, Ludwig Klages, and Hans Freyer, have been joined by foreign contributors like the esotericist Julius Evola to form a group of around twenty core thinkers (the "Inner Ring") and up to seventy writers and activists (the "Outer Ring"). They adopted as their emblem the double-headed eagle of the NAPN, but altering the colours to gold and red and adopting the "Λ" for "λόγος" as their symbol. The lamda can be seen on all Zukunftkreis lapels wherever they are, identifying them.
As part of a plan to create what failed in Niflungland, Óðinnsson has set about structuring Hochheim as a confederation of monastic cities rather than as an absolutist dictatorship. The class structure that appears in his work Die Neue Aristokratie has been made more rigid under the influence of authors like Evola, who proposes a similar structure in his Rivolta contro il mondo moderno. The new direction the Zukunftkreis is taking in regards to National-Aristocratism has met with significant criticism in Niflungland, calling the Neo-platonism of Óðinnsson's new approach "Christian corruption" and disassociating the NAPN entirely from the NAU.
| Political Ideologies | |
| Libertarian | Amalgamatism | Mastabo-Gelibolism | Sindorism |
| Nationalist | Martenism | Nationalism | National-Aristocratism | National Unionism |
| Centrism | Promcapablicism | Schliefenism |
| Other | Forwardism | Francoism | Gatherism | Neo-Tribalism | Silentism | Tayism |
- ↑ Óðinnsson, Sigurð. Die Neue Aristokratie: Voraussehend die Zukunft durch die Vergangenheit. Hamburg: Meister Eckhardt Verlag, 19--. 190.
- ↑ Óðinnsson, Sigurð. Die Neue Aristokratie: Voraussehend die Zukunft durch die Vergangenheit. Hamburg: Meister Eckhardt Verlag, 19--. 16.
- ↑ Óðinnsson, Sigurð. Ein kurze Wort über "Zukunftismus" in Die Neue Zeitung. Zurich, 19--. 3.