This is really extraordinary. Alternative Right writers have been trying to figure out why they can’t attract more women.
For the movement that is.
Alex Kurtagic thinks we need to remind people how highly-regarded women were in pre-Christian Europe, as evidenced by the prominent role that goddesses played in their myths. Our pagan ancestors were supposedly unique in this regard, although Mr. Kurtagic fails to demonstrate that women were more central to European pantheons than they were in non-Western (Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, etc) mythologies. Anyway, patriarchy is supposedly an Eastern corruption, invented by Saint Paul, who forced the egalitarian Romans to start making their wives submit to them. So the prescription for the Alternative Right?
Women both comprise half of the race and are indispensable for its continuity. Moreover, women are a measure of the health of any movement. Therefore, any movement that seeks to preserve the race cannot credibly ignore them. Even though it is up to women who care about the aims of the movement to organise themselves and contribute with activities suitable to their interests and strengths (no matter what they are), barriers to their participation must be eliminated. This begins by shedding the reactive misogyny engendered by feminism, reclaiming from the latter the high status and freedom accorded to women by traditional Western European culture and society, taking intelligent women’s advise seriously, ridiculing the war of the sexes, marginalising defectives, rejecting conservatism, and making a clear distinction between personal religious choices and racial preservation.
So, we are to reject conservatism, reject patriarchy, and work for the social marginalization of religion. To sum up, we are to attack everything that conservatives have thought worth defending. And what do we get in return for throwing Christianity “under the bus”? According to Kurtagic and some others, the point of the Alternative Right is to defend something called “the white race”. What is the white race? Is it only the genetic inheritance of Europe. It’s hard to see how it could mean anything more than that, given that these AR types claim to be following Spengler’s theories of the rise and fall of cultures. If Western culture is about to fall, it will (if we follow Spengler) be replaced by something totally different, based on an entirely new conceptualization of space. Any continuity with the West will be superficial, as Spengler thought Western contacts with our Hellenistic predecessors to be. On the other hand, Kurtagic et al make a special point in boasting about their pseudo-feminist paganism, with its attack on male headship, and I can’t imagine that they’re not hoping for it to rise again among the lighter-skinned once the long night of Christian patriarchy has passed.
To sum up, Kurtagic would seem to agree with me that Christianity is the great patriarchal religion. Let’s be proud of it.
Filed under: Culture, Defense of Christianity, Gender roles |
Throne and Altar 
To arrive at his position, Alex Kurtagic had to have glossed over a number of inconvenient aspects of reality. It is rather obvious, for example, that the secularist attack on Christianity, the feminist attack on patriarchy, and the anti-racist attack on white racial identity (and more importantly, all national identities within the category “white race”) are all linked together in the present decline of Western civilization. How can anyone miss the fact that the abuse words “racist” and “sexist” entered the English language at about the same time and are obviously produced by the same sick mentality?
In one of the last columns, the late Sam Francis wrote for Chronicles, he called for the emergence of a “Hard Right” that would concentrate on the sort of ethnopolitical issues that the writers at Alternative Right specialize in. Kurtagic and his colleagues presumably believe they are working to form this “Hard Right”. From what I have read of Sam Francis, however (which is a considerable amount) I strongly suspect that he would be disgusted at the suggestion of an alliance between gender egalitarianism and a movement dedicated to white racial consciousness. He would certainly have known that the suggestion could not possibly bear edible fruit.
Hi Mr. Neal,
I don’t see what Kurtagic thinks he’s going to accomplish with his “we pagans are more pro-woman than the Christians” line. In the contest over who can offer women the most goodies, they’ll never be able to beat feminism.
To be fair, I should have emphasized that Kurtagic explicitly endorses a complementarian view of the sexes. He accepts some gender role distinctions, but just balks at Pauline patriarchy.
Yes, Bonald, you’re quite right.
The problem for Kurtagic is that he offers no incentives for women to join his merry band. Feminist women value, above all else, their sexual freedom. That’s the whole point of all of the emphasis on career and independence and so on — so that women can be free sexually and choose their sexuality detached from other factors (like economic need or social pressure) that could otherwise impact its free exercise. His whole movement is about (voluntarily) restricting that sexual freedom and for white women to marry white men and have lots of white babies. That directly contradicts feminism at its core, and I pointed that out to him.
I suspect he is aware of that (he isn’t daft, or at least doesn’t appear to be), and therefore seeks to appease feminist women by creating an alternative traditional narrative that isn’t based on Christianity and its Pauline patriarchal norms (because he knows that the latter are DOA on most feminist women — and, really, most women in general. ( I pointed out to him that most of the women on the internet who are against feminism are coming at it from the Christian perspective, not any other perspective.) So he knows he has a “hard sell” for feminists and feminist-influenced women (most women in the West) — and in light of that he decides to trash Christianity and offer an alternative, pagan, Western tradition that is not based on the reviled (by feminists) Pauline Christian patriarchalism, thereby attempting to distance his nouveau Western Tradition from the actual reality of what the Western Tradition was when it was kicking ass and taking down names (i.e., it was CHRISTIAN Western Tradition, Alex!).
One of the main problems with the alt right crowd is that they are generally hostile to Christianity. Paganism is in with that crowd, at least in theory. It’s a self-destructive aspect of it, because by trashing Christianity, the Western Tradition is itself trashed. By erasing Christianity, or treating it as some kind of “eastern abberation” in an otherwise superior Western pre-Christian tradition, history is effectively destroyed, and one becomes the defender (in the cases of the non-Roman pagan cultures Kurtagic seems to fixate on at least) of primitive pre-Christian pagan societies, and not the Christian West that achieved greatness in large part due to its Christianity. It’s a pathological tack they have going on over there, really. Sad.
I wonder at the level of education of the author of that unfortunate article. Athene was a patriarchal state where women enjoyed few rights. Of course, there was a somewhat feminist Sparta to counterbalance it. Also western patriarchal laws were inherited from Rome which gave us the concept of paterfamilias. They were hardly a Christian invention. As for those feminist Vikings, if I remember correctly while male warriors went to Valhalla women were designated to go to Hel (not the Christian type of Hell, but rather a cold, dark and generally unpleasant place), together with the slaves.
I should have said “Vikings believed that…” in the previous comment. Anyway, an awful lot of AltRight types sound like what MRAs would call “pedestalizers” and I tend to agree with them in this case. With such friends who needs enemies?
Kurtagic is fine example of romancing the old paganism, and twisting the facts in order to make his point. In “Where Lord Of The Rings meet wishful thinking” kind of way. Such thinking does not represent authentic paganism, but 19th. century romanticism and ethno-worshiping projected onto past. Kurtagic obviously forget few things:
1. What was status of women in ancient Greece and in Athenian “democracy”? Status of women was almost equal to slaves.
2. Has he forget about ancient pagan Rome, and “Pater Familias”? Father in old Rome was almost God to other family members, and he could do with them as he please.
3. What about female Druids, Hierophants or Pontifex? Even the pagan priests of female deities were men.
4. What about status of Women in Zoroastrian Persia, in India, China or samurai Japan? Hardly an egalitarian or pro-feminist societies.
Kurtagic like to speak about female deities, but does he forget status of women in Christan faith…
What about female saints as object of veneration? What about cult of virgin Mary? What about medieval Christan chivalry and respect to women?
What about Hildegaard Von Bingen, Therese of Aville and others?
What about Christian queens, like Isabelle of Castile or Elisabeth of England? Byzantine empresses Zoe, Irene or Theodora? Were there any women empresses of pagan Rome? Think about it.
His silence about Rome–surely our most important pagan antecedant–is rather striking, isn’t it?
That’s an important point: Kurtagic is trashing the real Western tradition for either precivilized European culture (he doesn’t seem to have much use for Rome, as you noticed) or something wholy imaginary. I’m still trying to figure out how strong paganism is at Alternative Right, though. Some solid Christians write there too. It is reallly surprising, though, how strong the pagan anti-Christian voices are there, though. There seems to be no point in the political spectrum where Christianity is not regarded as a liability.
Christianity has been woven throughout the width and breadth of Western Cultures over a thousand years. What does a pagan Western Civilization even look like (other than what we already see around us)? The Right needs something more than the Society for Creative Anachronism’s dilettantish attempts to recreate long-dead false religions. Do any of the neo-pagans really believe in Valhalla, Olympus etc.?