Vad innebär det att vara reaktionär? Den colombianske författaren och tänkaren Nicolás Gómez Dávila, mer känd som don Colacho, valde själv att beteckna sig som reaktionär och utvecklade sin världsåskådning och livssyn i ett stort antal aforismer. Detta uttryckssätt delade han med Nietzsche, men också med andra traditionalister som ungerske Andras Laszlo. I rätt händer är det mycket effektivt, då man på ett fåtal rader kan summera ett helt livs insikter.
don Colacho har de senaste åren varit föremål för ett växande intresse i högerradikala och antimoderna kretsar. De nordamerikanska neoreaktionärerna refererar inte sällan till honom, de franska socialistiska patrioterna i Rebellion nämner honom, ihop med Gobineau och Adorno, som ett värdefullt inslag i militantens bibliotek. Man kan notera att aforismerna har mycket att säga allt från anarker och klassiska liberaler till nationella antikommunister och alternativ vänster. Även om man inte delar den reaktionära världsbilden till fullo är många aforismer kärnfulla och skarpa nog att vara av värde.
Många av don Colachos aforismer finns idag tillgängliga på internet, översatta till engelska. En bra resurs är då don Colacho’s Aforisms, tillgänglig här: Aforisms
Samhälle och stat
Wise politics is the art of invigorating society and weakening the State.
– don Colacho
Några teman återkommer bland aforismerna, och illustrerar den reaktionära världsåskådning don Colacho utvecklade. Detta gäller inte minst relationen mellan samhälle och stat. Reaktionären betraktar den moderna staten som en parasit. Staten är nödvändig för att försvara samhället, men den moderna staten har istället ersatt samhället. don Colacho påminner här om andra reaktionärer som de Jouvenel och von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Han utvecklar sin syn på detta i flera aforismer:
In medieval society, society is the state; in the bourgeois society, state and society confront each other; in the Communist society, the state is society.
Asking the state to do what only society should do is the error of the left.
No social class has exploited the other social classes more brazenly than that which today calls itself ”the state.”
When society is cast entirely in the mold of the state, the person vaporizes.
The modern state is the transformation of the apparatus which society developed for its defense into an autonomous organism which exploits it.
The state will deserve respect again, when it again restricts itself to being simply the political profile of a constituted society.
Massa och demokrati
The political presence of the masses always culminates in a hellish apocalypse.
– don Colacho
Nära knutet till detta finns en skepsis till den moderna demokratin. Reaktionären don Colacho har dels en kritisk syn på den breda massans förmågor, dels en realistisk syn på de människor som konkurrerar om att ”representera” folket. Detta summeras i flera aforismer:
We enemies of universal suffrage never cease to be surprised by the enthusiasm aroused by the election of a handful of incapable men by a heap of incompetent men.
When those elected in a popular election do not belong to the lowest intellectual, moral, social strata of the nation, we can be sure that clandestine anti-democratic mechanisms have interfered with the normal outcome of the vote.
The people that awakes, first shouts, then gets drunk, pillages, [and] murders, and later goes back to sleep.
The people does not elect someone who will cure it, but someone who will drug it.
Democracy is the political regime in which the citizen entrusts the public interests to those men to whom he would never entrust his private interests.
Whoever tries to educate and not exploit a people, or a child, does not speak to them in baby-talk.
Mot detta ställer han en traditionell syn på aristokratin:
Love of the people is the aristocrat’s vocation. The democrat does not love the people except during election season.
Aristocracies are proud, but insolence is a plutocratic phenomenon. The plutocrat believes that everything can be sold; the aristocrat knows that loyalty cannot be bought.
För don Colacho leder ”demokratin” i själva verket snarare till byråkrati, och bidrar till statens urartning:
The despotic decisions of the modern state are, in the end, made by an anonymous, subordinate, pusillanimous bureaucrat, who is probably also a cuckold.
A bureaucracy ultimately always ends up costing the people more than an upper class.
In the modern state there now exist only two parties: citizens and bureaucracy.
Intressant är att don Colacho också ser en positiv aspekt hos demokratin, då folket kan sakta ner alltför radikala reformer. I Sverige är detta uppenbart i bland annat invandringsfrågan:
The people is sometimes right when it is frightened; but is always wrong when it becomes enthusiastic.
After having been, in the last century, the instrument of political radicalism, universal suffrage is becoming, as Tocqueville foresaw, a conservative mechanism.
Lag och sedvanerätt
Conservatism should not be a party but the normal attitude of every decent man.
– don Colacho
I likhet med Bruno Leoni beskriver don Colacho också hur den moderna staten producerar ett otal lagar.
Human warmth in a society diminishes by the same measure that its legislation is perfected.
Neither a declaration of human rights, nor the proclamation of a constitution, nor an appeal tonatural law, protects against the arbitrary power of the state. The only barrier to despotism is customary law.
Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.
Vänstern och borgarna
Marxists define the bourgeoisie in economic terms in order to hide from us the fact that they belong to it.
– don Colacho
don Colacho analyserar också vänstern i allmänhet, och marxismen i synnerhet, i ett flertal aforismer. Han noterar att marxisten är en borgare, som inte vill kännas vid det. Han konstaterar också att bakom revolutionen finns en antropologi med brister, revolutionärerna är kort sagt ofta dåliga människor. Detta förklarar revolutionens nihilism och blodbad, liksom att den enbart leder till en ny härskande klass. don Colacho fokuserar i flera aforismer på att bakom talet om moral och rättvisa döljer sig ofta avunden och viljan att ersätta de eliter man först utplånat. Inflytandet från Nietzsche är tydligt när don Colacho påminner oss om att egalitarianism också är intimt knutet till ressentiment: To refuse to admire is the mark of the beast.
Revolution is progressivist and seeks the strengthening of the state; rebellion is reactionary and seeks its disappearance. The revolutionary is a potential government official; the rebel is a reactionary in action.
The atrocity of the act of revenge is proportional not to the atrocity of the offense, but to the atrocity of the man taking revenge.(For the methodology of revolutions.)
Envy is not a poor man’s vice, but a rich man’s. Of a less rich man before a richer man.
To be a Marxist appears to consist in exempting Communist societies from the Marxist interpretation.
Absolute monarchies disposed with less fickleness of the fortunes of one individual than popular absolutisms dispose of the destiny of entire social classes.
The new left gathers together those who acknowledge the ineffectiveness of the cure without ceasing to believe in the prescription.
Power does not necessarily corrupt anyone except the revolutionary who assumes it.
The leftist who protests equally against the crimes of the right or the left is called by his comrades, and rightly so, a reactionary.
Socialism is the commercial name of state capitalism on the electoral market.
Socialism arose as nostalgia for the social unity destroyed by bourgeois atomism. But it did not understand that social unity is not the totalitarian condensing of individuals, but the systematic totality of a hierarchy.
Victorious revolutions have been outbursts of greed. Only defeated revolutions tend to be insurrections of the oppressed.
The police force is the only social structure in the classless society.
A ³revolutionary´ today means an individual for whom modern vulgarity is not triumphing quickly enough.
The vice which afflicts the right is cynicism, and that which afflicts the left is deceit.
When people stop fighting for the possession of private property, they will fight for the usufruct in collective property.
Social problems are the delightful refuge of those fleeing their own problems.
The communist hates capitalism with the Oedipus complex. The reactionary views it only with xenophobia.
Modern history, ultimately, comes down to the defeat of the bourgeoisie and the victory of bourgeois ideas.
For the Marxist, rebelliousness in non-Communist societies is a sociological fact and in Communist society a merely psychological fact. In the former the ”exploited” rebel, in the latter ”traitors” reveal themselves.
The leftist is so worried about the problems of the 19th century that he does not worry about the problems of the 20th century.The problems raised by the industrialization of society prevent him from seeing the problemsraised by industrialized society.
The proletariat appears when the people become a class which adopts bourgeois values without possessing bourgeois property.
Marxism will only rest when it transforms peasants and workers into petty-bourgeois officeclerks.
The leftist screams that freedom is dying when his victims refuse to finance their own murders.
Adherence to Communism is the rite which allows the bourgeois intellectual to exorcise his uneasy conscience without abjuring his bourgeois identity.
Political violence leaves behind fewer corpses than rotting souls.
”Liquidating” a social class, or a people, is an undertaking that angers no one in this century but the intended victims.
When they define property as a social function, confiscation is near; when they define work as a social function, slavery is on its way.
Marx may win battles, but Malthus will win the war.
The people has never been fêted except at the expense of another social class.
A vocabulary of ten words is enough for a Marxist to explain history.
The progressive’s intelligence is never more than the accomplice of his career.
Nothing is more grotesque than yesterday’s progressive.
Every individual with ”ideals” is a potential murderer.
Denna koppling mellan marxist, revolutionär, borgare och statskapitalist är intressant, och stämmer överens med många människors instinktiva reaktion på revolutionärer.
Stad och land – natur och demografi
The reactionary’s ideal is not a paradisiacal society. It is a society similar to the society that existed in the peaceful intervals of the old European society, of Alteuropa, before the demographic, industrial, and democratic catastrophe.
– don Colacho
don Colacho utvecklar också en kulturkritik med ekologiska och konservativa inslag. Han riktar en skarp kritik mot den moderna storstaden, samtidigt som han positivt beskriver den traditionella landsbygden och de människor som levde där. I likhet med Evola är han också tveksam till att ”fler är bättre”, och beskriver de negativa aspekterna av en ständigt växande befolkning.
It is not just that human trash accumulates in cities, it is that cities turn what accumulates in them into trash.
The modern metropolis is not a city; it is a disease.
Man’s full depravity does not become clear except in great urban agglomerations.
The immigration of the peasant into the cities was less disastrous than that of the notable from the people. Rural society, on the one hand, lost the structure of prestige that used to discipline it, and the notable, on the other, was transformed into an anonymous particle of the amorphous human mass.
The wealth of the merchant, of the industrialist, of the financier, is aesthetically inferior towealth in land and flocks.
The atomization of society derives from the modern division of labor: where nobody knows specifically for whom he works, nor who specifically works for him.
A prolonged childhood permitted by industrial society’s current prosperity redounds merely in a growing number of infantilized adults.
The soul becomes desiccated when it lives in a world that is almost exclusively manufactured.
An overpopulated country is one where every citizen is practically anonymous.
Population growth disquiets the demographer only when he fears that it will impede economic progress or make it harder to feed the masses. But that man needs solitude, that human proliferation produces cruel societies, that distance is required between men so that the spirit might breathe, does not interest him. The quality of a man does not matter to him.
Science’s greatest triumph appears to lie in the increasing speed with which an idiot can transport his idiocy from one place to another.
The psychologist dwells in the slums of the soul, just as the sociologist dwells on the outskirtsof society.
Professional worshipers of man believe they are authorized to scorn their fellow man. The defense of human dignity allows them to be boors toward their neighbor.
The anonymity of the modern city is as intolerable as the familiarity of modern customs. Life should resemble a salon of people with good manners, where all know each other but where none hug each other.
Reading the newspaper degrades whomever it does not make into a brute.
Modern society is proceeding simultaneously to become inhospitable to the old and to multiply their number by prolonging their life.
The age draws near in which nature, displaced by man, will not survive except in arboretums and museums.
The city is disappearing, while the entire world is becoming urbanized. A city, in the West, was a person. Today, overexpansion and state centralism disintegrate it into a mere inanimate heap of housing.
The gods are peasants who accompany man only up to the gates of great cities.
The homogeneity of a society increases with the number of its members.
The modern world resulted from the confluence of three independent causal series: the demographic expansion, democratic propaganda, the industrial revolution.
Demographic pressure makes people brutish.
Även om man inte delar don Colachos reaktionära världsåskådning fullt ut innehåller den mycket av värde, och hans aforismer är väl värda en närmare bekantskap.
Vidare läsning
Nicolas Gomez Davila
Andras Laszlo – excerpter
Gomez Davila på svenska
Om skribenten: Joakim Andersen
