Review: Return of the Strong Gods

I enjoyed Rusty Reno’s new book Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism and the Future of the West. Next week, I will be reviewing Rich Lowry’s new book The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free. I expect to be much more critical of Lowry’s book on national conservatism, but I will reserve judgment on it for now.

Overall, I found Return of the Strong Gods to be a useful icebreaker. It is the sort of book that I would recommend to someone who is disillusioned with the status quo and new to nationalism and we needs more books in this vein. I would recommend it alongside Pat Buchanan’s books, Ann Coulter’s books and Jared Taylor’s White Identity. This book is particularly useful for young White Catholic paleocons. Nick Fuentes should review it for his audience.

Return of the Strong Gods is essentially an analysis of our current historical era. It is about the postwar era that we have been living through since World War II and its impending demise. This era is defined by a hidebound consensus that seeks to repress the “strong gods.” By “strong gods,” Rusty Reno doesn’t mean the pagan gods, but the strong loves of life that command the loyalty of men in traditional societies. These are things like truth, identity, patriotism, piety, duty, order, sovereignty, beauty, honor and loyalty. The Trojan War, for example, was fought over Helen of Troy which is madness to liberalism. The postwar consensus is suspicious of and hostile to these shared loves which it blames for being the cause of World War I and World War II.

The problem that we are facing is the dead hand of the 20th century. Decades before the Millennial generation was born, the world empires of liberalism, fascism and communism went to war to decide who would control the fate of the West. The 20th century was defined by this intense period of ideological struggle which only finally ended when we were children when the Soviet Union collapsed. Liberalism emerged as the victor in that conflict. As I have explained before, Nazi Germany became a sort of photo negative of the postwar liberal world order.

World War II never really ended in 1945. The military conflict with the Axis Powers ended with the defeat of Germany, Italy and Japan. In order to truly defeat fascism and prevent World War III, a postwar consensus was developed by triumphant liberal elites that was built around the anti-imperatives of anti-fascism, anti-racism and anti-colonialism to ensure that Never Again could something like Auschwitz happen. It was necessary to eliminate the Authoritarian Personality which was animated by the strong gods and was thought to be a proto-fascist. In order to build a permanent anti-totalitarian society, we had to create totalitarian liberalism.

What is totalitarian liberalism? It is all around you. It is our society. The entire Spirit of the Age of the postwar era has been about weakening, critiquing, exposing, undermining, disenchanting, deconstructing, denigrating and dissolving White, Western Christian civilization. Strong loves and desires are repressed. Weak ones are celebrated and promoted. According to Reno, the primary influencers who created this negative mindset on the Left and the Right were Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek. The former set the Left on course to the creation of the Open Society. The latter defined the Right against the menace of “collectivism” which was The Road To Serfdom. The dynamic that goes on between progressive liberalism and conservative liberalism as the two parties exchange power in mainstream politics has led over time to a sort of repressive libertarianism.

Political correctness and multiculturalism are highly authoritarian. They are therapies which are designed to repress the strong gods. If you are caught doing something that breaks the racial etiquette of woke supremacy, your life and career can be destroyed by a social media mob. This is highly illiberal but it is done to promote the liberal end of weakening and dissolving White, Western Christian civilization. The call for the mass censorship of social media is also highly illiberal. It is also done though so that the processes of weakening and dissolution can continue. All of Corporate America celebrated #PrideMonth in June in a relentless wave of LGBTQ propaganda, but we are denied pride because that is a strong god that could lead to fascism.

The strong gods cannot be repressed forever. The postwar consensus has grown toxic and has created its own set of problems which is the cause of the rise of populism and nationalism in the West. The problems that we are facing today are the opposite of the 1930s and are the inevitable result of the project of weakening of the Open Society – nihilism, deracination, the collapse of the family, the retreat of religion, cultural degeneration, a quarter of young men who have become incels and the resentment that breeds, racial discord stemming from multiculturalism and political correctness, a tidal wave of Third World immigrants who find a cultural void in the West and who are encouraged to retain their own cultures and displace the native population, not to mention the extremes of economic inequality produced by neoliberalism.

Return of the Strong Gods is a useful book, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. After reading this book, you should read Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement In Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements. Reno and MacDonald tell the same story about the negative culture of critique of the postwar West, but the difference is that MacDonald – in service to the “strong god” of truth – breaks the ultimate taboo of the postwar era and identifies who is the driving, animating force behind this culture of weakening.

If the Nazis lost World War II, the biggest victors of that conflict were the Jews who not only carved their own nation-state of Israel out of Palestine, but who have dominated the West as a hostile elite ever since. The overwhelming majority of the people who have injected this poison into Western culture as well as the people who are doing the policing to ensure that the Open Society is never overthrown are Jewish and that is a fact which cannot be elided. After defeating the Nazis, the Jews decided that proto-Nazis must also be defeated, which is to say, unborn generations of people of European ancestry regardless of whether their ancestors fought on the Axis side or the Allied side or were neutral in World War II. The culture of critique that the present generation is subjected to in the United States is the same one that exists in Britain, Germany and Australia. The flip side of this culture of critique is that anti-Semitism is absolutely verboten.

My only real criticism of Return of the Strong Gods is that our hostile Jewish elite will not relent. It learned nothing from Weimar Germany and drew the wrong lessons from the Third Reich. Indeed, it has never learned anything from history. It is simply inconceivable to them that anti-Semitism has anything to do with the actions of Jews. So it will press forward with things like tormenting Gentiles by promoting open borders and child trannies and militant anti-White racism. It will press forward with undermining and destroying Rusty’s Catholic Church just as it welcomed the Muslims who invaded Spain or the Turks as their liberators in the Balkans. This will continue until their power and influence is checked. Such has been their entire history.

The hostile Jewish elite is bent on our total destruction as a people. These are high stakes and their ferocity and culture of critique, which is on display on a daily basis in the mainstream media (see Richard Stengel’s article in today’s edition of The Washington Post), which is dripping with contempt for both White people and our White Christian culture, must be matched by a backlash against them that is even more powerful. They must be hurled from their seats of power. The liberal order which facilitated their rise in social and economic status in the West must be dismantled. The world which we ought to build on its ashes is one where they are subjected to a neverending culture of critique. It will also take Never Again as its motto as in Never Again will Jews ever enjoy the same degree of wealth, power and influence in our lands.

Is that a bit harsh? I will remind you that this isn’t a fight which we started. If you were born in the 1980s or 1990s, you had nothing to do with World War II. The decision was made long before you were born that you were the racial and cultural enemy that had to be weighed down and eliminated from this world by a whole dystopian culture of anti-White norms and replaced by a neverending, beneficent tidal wave of Third World diversity in your own country. You should be angry. You are also fully justified in taking back what is rightfully yours as well.

Note: The movie Equilibrium is a brilliant satire of postwar era liberal totalitarianism disguised as a Matrix-like action flick. I recommend watching it while reading the book.