Showing posts with label richard nikolaus von coudenhove-kalergi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label richard nikolaus von coudenhove-kalergi. Show all posts

6 Mar 2017

On the Practical Idealism and Pan-Europeanism of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi

Count Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi 
(1894-1972)


One of the reasons that I dislike crackpot conspiracy theories in which nothing is as it seems, nothing happens by accident, everything is connected and invariably involves either the Jews or extraterrestrials, is that they serve to distract from and disguise what is really going on in the world.

What's more - and worse - they discredit the very notion of orchestrated acts, planned and carried out in secret, by elite groups, with sinister or subversive aims. One is almost tempted to say that all the popular conspiracy theories are themselves part of a wider conspiracy and that people like David Icke are essentially useful idiots, rewarded with fame and fortune for the work they do.     

So it is that people know all about Icke himself, for example, and his shape-shifting reptilians, but very few have ever heard of Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi and his vision of a future Europe composed of a racially-mixed population ruled over by a politico-spiritual elite.

Coudenhove-Kalergi was one of the key early advocates of European integration and served as the founding president of the Pan-European Union for almost fifty years; a body that served as a prototype and ideological foundation for the EU as we know it today.     

Aristocratic by birth and temperament, Coudenhove-Kalergi nevertheless favoured social democracy over feudalism. His ambition, however, shaped by readings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Spengler and detailed in his own extensive writings from the 1920s onwards, was to oversee the creation an ultra-conservative, post-democratic Europe, in which the nation state was dissolved, but the continent united by a common cultural ideal.

Not surprisingly, his Pan-Europa project was despised by Hitler, who characterized Coudenhove-Kalergi as a rootless, cosmopolitan half-breed, supported by Jewish finance and under the influence of Freemasonry. And, indeed, Coudenhove-Kalergi continues to serve as a hate figure today for those on the far-right opposed to globalism and who understand the European migrant crisis as an attempt to destroy the racial foundations of Europe and eventually replace the native peoples with a new population made up of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Who understand the migrant crisis, in other words, as a crucial stage of the Kalergi Plan, as set out in Praktischer Idealismus (1925) and which predicts:

"Today's races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals."

Obviously, depending on one's politics, this can be viewed as either a utopian dream or a dystopian nightmare. But it's maybe something worth discussing seriously - and not quickly dismissed as just another mad conspiracy theory put forward by racist neo-Nazis et al ...