The Holy Mountain
Can you feel its haunting presence?
Mount Ararat, consisting of two volcanic peaks known as Greater and Little Ararat, sit at the eastern age of modern day Turkey. Its history is one of pagan worship, Christian adoption, imperial conquest and—in the 20th century—exile and genocide. It serves as a symbol of the spiritual beliefs of the Armenian people, their history and the historic lands they have lost to a neighbour who attempted to destroy them as a people and pushed them back behind the river Aras, where the border of modern day Armenia remains.
They serve as Holy Mountains, a physical space which ties an ethnic people to their land, these are not unique in the modern world. The Kurdish peoples in Iraq and Iran have for hundreds of years fled into their holy mountains and cliffside shrines in times of disaster and war. We see this highlighted in the coverage of Yazidis and Kurds during the Iraq war. The rise of ISIS brought forth extensive coverage of the Yazidi people fleeing to Mount Sinjar—one of the Kurdish holy places—or being exiled from their religious centres by Muslims who they saw as heretics. The defence of their holy places and ancestral homelands was a facet of the justification for continued military operations: we needed to assist ‘the brave Kurds defending the holy mountains of their forefathers.’
Propaganda meant to stir Blood and Soil sentiments containing explicit ethno-nationalism among foreign peoples has begun to creep more and more into the language of globalised neoliberalism. This propaganda also serves an international audience, such as the ubiquitous ‘Free Palestine’ student movements. It is a sign of what a powerful motivator it can be, and how humans implicitly understand the ties of peoples to their lands. Even if they as western peoples are forbidden from recognising that within themselves.
Nowhere has this been more prevalent or long lasting than in the narrative told to western populations about modern Israel; in stark contrast to the neoliberal norm it is the ‘homeland of the Jewish people’, portrayed as a country administered ‘by Jewish people, for Jewish people.’ This is presented as normal and natural by the current order, it is the largest example of an exception allowed by sovereign power in stark contrast to the scorn of nativist, nationalist and especially ethno-religious impulses of other peoples. The power of the ‘The Holy Land’ and its famous holy mountain—Mount Zion— has an allure still to the usual aggressive atheism of the current ruling elite. The power of this land, and the quest to administer and control it, is part of how the U.S. empire justifies sending billions of dollars of aid to maintain the existence of the state of Israel and is enthusiastically backed by Christian sects within the U.S.A itself.
In an age where belief in nothing is the default, fanning the embers of genuine religious sentiment is exceptionally powerful. This power is widely exploited when recruiting for farcical wars in the middle east, but tempered within the native population at large. Our current elites are faced with a difficult balancing act; motivating men to kill and die for a cause requires keeping the aesthetics of an older system of beliefs, but those systems of belief are incompatible with contemporary ‘liberal democracy.’ How do you create the conditions that can foster the acts of both bravery and brutality that are vital for any group of people to survive in times of war and strife, whilst maintaining a population passive enough to accept globalisation, erosion of the family and the erasure of identity?
In 1947 Brigadier General Samuel L. A. Marshall (who has the distinction of the most Wrestlemania sounding nickname ever, being known as “General S.L.A.M.”) published a controversial book entitled Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command. Marshall’s conclusion was that 75% of normal enlisted men never aimed their rifle directly at enemy combatants, and this 75% of enlisted men are unable to shoot to kill as they are naturally averse to killing. The exact numbers can be quibbled over and Marshall’s exact methodology criticised, but the general findings hold true; that average men naturally try to minimise inflicting injury and death on their fellow human beings—even a supposed enemy.
Another idiosyncrasy of military history is the trend that holders of The Victoria Cross, the U.K.’s highest military honour, are overwhelmingly responsible for the wellbeing of family members in their early life—coincidentally also a figure of around 75% of medal holders. Man in warfare needing a solid idea of what he is fighting for seems obvious, but in the post-war modern West increasingly devoid of family ties, modern militaries must create a culture for their soldiers in which these ties are still artifically kept alive. If you look at the belief structures of those within the U.S. military it is overwhelmingly Republican and Libertarian in nature—often reflecting marginally more traditional values than the population at large. However the highly controlled environment makes it prone to repeated expulsion should ideas that counter the current regime take hold as they did in the German special forces.
This demonstrates the distinction between soldier and civilian that breaks down when a Democracy moves into a total war footing. This need not be a war per se, instead a period of exceptional crisis will see the liberal pretentions of pluralism diluted by what must be done to overcome the crisis. A temporary holy mountain is erected in periods of exception, one which may look cartoonish once the crisis has been declared as solved, or superseded by another. This has held true since World War I & II—when political and economic freedoms were largely suspended in the service of total victory. Within the recent lockdown crisis the medical class were elevated to the levels of priests in the ancien régime. These new norms from the time of crisis are then folded into daily reality once normality is declared.
The uncomfortable implications for those with a genuine belief in moderate liberal principles are clear: movements with an unshakeable class of zealots have a much higher chance of success than those made up of purely self interested or rational actors. See our many works on Vanguardism. This is why liberal democracies repeatedly go out of their way to ferment zealotry for the current issue whilst having a standing objection to radical beliefs in most other areas. Belief is a resource that has to be tightly controlled by a modern state, it must exercise a monopoly within its own borders. When liberal states come into conflict with truly unshakeable belief, they cannot find victory outside of a total war and genocide.
There are a lot of myths about Kurdistan, but beneath them is a truth as to why the Kurds persist as a people: their land is not simply land, it is a holy place with significance beyond the physical. No amount of rationality can shake them from this belief. To them, the Holy Mountain is more than real.
The Kurds are not alone in this belief: look at aforementioned Israel and how they continually use fanatical belief to justify their actions and motivate their forces. The Six-Day War is an example of how a small, fanatical force overcomes numerous conscript armies. Afghanistan too is an example of a Holy Mountain, the Taliban are motivated by the expulsion of a technologically superior invader from Muslim lands, and with both the USSR and the USA they succeeded by any means necessary. Material motivations and resources cannot overcome metaphysical and spiritual beliefs which are heavily entrenched in a portion of the population. Vietnam is a prime example of fanaticism overcoming a liberal democracy waging a war of extermination.
This pattern is borne out repeatedly: the most fanatically organised group will often overcome material odds to victory. They are able to demand more, compromise less and appear threatening during political negotiations, therefore extracting greater concessions within liberal democratic ‘consensus’.
NGOs, governments and academia can only create a simulacrum of religion for activists to orientate themselves around, engaging in a surrogate religious activity. Their cathedral is bereft of the truly spiritual, the rituals of the total state consist of a purely material sacrament, but despite being in such a degraded state any semblance of belief in something larger than yourself is a source of immense power. This religious facsimile can be expanded with terrifying speed when needed to warp the social order and lurch a society towards the goals of those in power. The current order is very adept at creating, capturing, and exploiting activists as agents of political change—often acting in ways seen as unacceptable in traditional politics.
To the activist, political battles are existential struggles between good and evil. They lack the conviction of religion proper, but they hijack the very same impulse. Take for example Climate Change, for which all Western governments have signed up on some level to a narrative of apocalyptic doom. It is a well funded cause with an entire class of professional activists inspired to undertake extreme acts of disruption and vandalism. Within the narrative of the current order the result of not adhering to this belief structure is quite literally the end of the world—so their goal is seen as noble, it is only their actions that are debated. Within the internal logic of climate change, isn’t mass disruption better than mass death? Climate activism is a shrieking doom cult but the reaction from those supposedly in opposition is little more than tutting and finger wagging over tactics—the central orthodoxy is not questioned merely the zeal of devotional rituals. The merit of an idea does not matter if it faces opposition that is fanatical. Bad ideas put forward forcefully will defeat “good” ideas held with a mix of apathy and self-doubt.
The communist, the Islamist and the globalist all have an idea of paradise and are willing to subject humanity as a whole—and especially their political enemies—to immense suffering in their pursuit of it. This is not a weakness, it is a strength when it comes time for conflict to take place and the realities of power are laid bare.
To put it simply, Liberalism as a political theory does not have an explicit Holy Mountain to protect outside of its own perpetuation. Worse still, it sees the very idea as anathema to a Liberal society. To the naïve liberal, any movement that considers adopting a "Holy Mountain" mindset would become dangerously extremist and lower itself to the illiberalism of Islamist or fascist movements.
In modern liberal theory having a Holy Mountain, even the facsimile of one the activist class is allowed, is viewed as weakness and a sign of sliding back into a darker pre-modern age of superstition. Thinkers who acknowledge & embrace the genuinely spiritual or transcendent are therefore seen as anti-progress radicals, these thinkers are then placed in the off limits section of “The Radical Right” despite being from politically diverse and distinct schools of thought.
Those who already hold power, whether they genuinely believe in liberal ideas or not, utilise the ambiguity within modern liberal theory as a way to frame those who hold deep belief that does not align with their own as The Intolerant. This is neatly demonstrated in possibly the most infamous piece of modern political theory, Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies:
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
Popper’s formulation functions as a reverse engineering of Carl Schmitt’s famous quote of “The Sovereign is he who decides the exception.” In a Popperian society “sovereign is he who defines the intolerant.” This allows state-sanctioned beliefs to be encouraged and dissident beliefs stamped out. It is an in-built protection against rival factions with their own, differing Holy Mountains and helps explain some of the arbitrary treatment of equally fanatical factions in the middle east such as the Kurds. The arbitrary nature of how power is wielded is pervasive in all mainstream western political movements, not simply those who outwardly use the label of liberal. What we think of as neoliberalism is a set of ‘acceptable’ ideas held across the political spectrum that deal primarily with power, their ideology is largely post hoc to their intended outcome: that the regime’s activists be more zealous and therefore more effective than your activists.
I have described a problem thus far, but I would not do so without offering a solution: how does one fight against the grim forces of modernity and the bastardised parody of The Holy Mountain they have erected? The simulacrum of religious feeling held up by the activist class and their establishment handlers cannot stand up to authentic, unashamed belief. I’m reminded of a speech fellow Nomos alumni and good friend of ours Panama Hat gave at the inaugural Scyldings event in 2021 entitled “A Guide to Authentic Reaction” To quote:
To put it bluntly, the anti-modern world is more than just the pre-Liberal west. Before another modern book of economic or political theory is trawled through, I urge you to steep yourselves in the unwavering faith of the Perennial world.
You must create in yourself a bastion of belief that can stand up to the rigours of political conflict, a centre that is certain that comes not from the physical but from the transcendent—whatever that may be to you. You must build within yourself an inner Holy Mountain that can survive the increasingly bleak world around us. The modern impulses of irony and inauthentic cynicism are hard things to break out of, but in order to achieve any kind of political victory they must be cast aside. Even the most low level climate or race activist of the modern age has a solid belief that he is on “the right side of history.” If we cannot be strident then we are doomed to the string of “principled defeats” of the last hundred years and beyond. There are those who would pretend to be allies against the current order who—when faced with a choice—would rather surrender to living in the pod and eating the bugs than allow a movement based on the transcendent to take hold. What is needed goes beyond the rational, beyond the physical and beyond the narrow limits of “Acceptable Post-war Politics”. Do not fear accusations of radicalism, as any action outside of those limits will be seen as “radical”—especially any belief not based on regime dogma and not couched in limp political niceties.
Belief is not something you can reason yourself into, and certainly shouldn’t be taken up on a surface level for its pragmatic utility, it must be genuine—it cannot be faked or feigned. What centres you—and what you must draw on for that unshakable core of your being—should be your family, your community and a grounded sense of place and time. If you do not yet have those things, seek them out, but as I’ve stated on numerous occasions, a strong real-life community built from the people already in your circles is a good first step. The modern world has made this capacity for genuine feeling more difficult to many, not least because of propaganda that elicits a reaction of disgust to genuine transcendent belief. Our own ancestors valued the high places of the earth, they built Cairns, standing stones, barrows and later shrines, chapels and cathedrals. Theirs was a rich inner spiritual life that is mostly lost, especially in the McMega Churches of the U.S. and the twee niceties of British Anglicanism. The form this new Holy Mountain takes may be unfamiliar or deeply personal, but I implore you to find something eternal to anchor yourself to.
Only once that centre has taken root within yourself can it start to manifest externally, whoever hopes to replace the current order must have a vison that reaches into a deep pool of perennial belief and allow for a transcendent vision. It must have its eyes fixed on the mountain, a far off goal that can be held sacred by those who wish to reach it.
Movements the current regime wishes to succeed are imbued with these higher goals—as the numerous examples above show— whereas in those it wishes to fail they are seen as signs of dangerous extremism. Purely pragmatic and material ideas are doomed to fail against those with their eyes fixed on the transcendent because of the zealotry those ideas instil. This has been an essential component of any successful movement from the pre-modern age and is only seen as dangerous from a specifically modern perspective. The widespread apathy and nihilism of the modern age are not accidental and have been instilled as an effective pacification of western populations. Those within a dissident movement which hopes for victory must have belief steadfast within themselves, and any movement that forms around them must make those beliefs a driving force of their rhetoric and action in a sincere fashion.
Rebuild the mountain within and the mountain without.
A big thanks to Radical Liberation of The Old Glory Club for copy editing this piece.
Great article! Sharing!