The Rebel:

An Interview with Dominique Venner

http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/06/the-rebel/

Translated by Michael O’Meara

Czech translation based on this English translation: here
The noted French nationalist and historian speaks to the personal imperatives of white liberation.

Translator’s Note:
It’s a testament to the abysmal state of our culture that hardly one of Dominique Venner’s
more than forty books have been translated into English. Venner is more than a gifted
historian who has made major contributions to the most important chapters of modern,
especially twentieth-century European history. He’s played a key role in both the
development of the European New Right and the “Europeanization” of continental
nationalism.
It is his “rebel heart” that explains his engagement in these great struggles, as well as his
interests in the Russian Revolution, German fascism, French national socialism, the US
Civil War, and the two world wars. The universe found in his works is one reminiscent of
Ernst von Salomon’s Die Geächteten — one of the Homeric epics of our age.
The following interview is about the rebel. Unlike the racial conservatives dominant in
US white nationalist ranks, European nationalism still bears traces of its revolutionary
heritage — opposed as it is not merely to the alien, anti-national forces, but to the entire
liberal modernist subversion, of which the United States has been the foremost exemplar.
Question: What is a rebel? Is one born a rebel, or just happens to become one? Are there
different types of rebels?
Dominique Venner: It’s possible to be intellectually rebellious, an irritant to the herd, without
actually being a rebel. Paul Morand [a diplomat and novelist noted for his anti-Semitism and
collaborationism under Vichy] is a good example of this. In his youth, he was something of a
free spirit blessed by fortune. His novels were favored with success. But there was nothing
rebellious or even defiant in this. It was for having chosen the side of the National Revolution
between 1940 and 1944, for persisting in his opposition to the postwar regime, and for feeling
like an outsider that made him the rebellious figure we have come to know from his “Journals.”
Another, though different example of this type is Ernst Jünger. Despite being the author of an
important rebel treatise on the Cold War, Jünger was never actually a rebel. A nationalist in a
period of nationalism; an outsider, like much of polite society, during the Third Reich; linked to
the July 20 conspirators, though on principle opposed to assassinating Hitler. Basically for
ethical reasons. His itinerary on the margins of fashion made him an “anarch,” this figure he
invented and of which after 1932 he was the perfect representative. The anarch is not a rebel.
He’s a spectator whose perch is high above the mud below.
Just the opposite of Morand and Jünger, the Irish poet Patrick Pearse was an authentic rebel. He
might even be described as a born rebel. When a child, he was drawn to Erin’s long history of
rebellion. Later, he associated with the Gaelic Revival, which laid the basis of the armed
insurrection. A founding member of the first IRA, he was the real leader of the Easter Uprising
in Dublin in 1916. This was why he was shot. He died without knowing that his sacrifice would
spur the triumph of his cause.
A fourth, again very different example is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Until his arrest in 1945, he
had been a loyal Soviet, having rarely questioned the system into which he was born and having
dutifully done his duty during the war as a reserve officer in the Red Army. His arrest and then
his subsequent discovery of the Gulag and the horrors that occurred after 1917, provoked a total
reversal, forcing him to challenge a system which he once blindly accepted. This is when he
became a rebel — not just against Communist, but capitalist society, both of which he saw as
destructive of tradition and opposed to superior life forms.
The reasons that made Pearse a rebel were not the same that made Solzhenitsyn a rebel. It was
the shock of certain events, followed by a heroic internal struggle, that made the latter a rebel.
What they both have in common, what they discovered through different ways, was the utter
incompatibility between their being and the world in which they were thrown. This is the first
trait of the rebel. The second is the rejection of fatalism.
Q: What is the difference between rebellion, revolt, dissent, and resistance?
DV: Revolt is a spontaneous movement provoked by an injustice, an ignominy, or a scandal.
Child of indignation, revolt is rarely sustained. Dissent, like heresy, is a breaking with a
community, whether it be a political, social, religious, or intellectual community. Its motives are
often circumstantial and don’t necessarily imply struggle. As to resistance, other than the mythic
sense it acquired during the war, it signifies one’s opposition, even passive opposition, to a
particular force or system, nothing more. To be a rebel is something else.
Q: What, then, is the essence of a rebel?
DV: A rebel revolts against whatever appears to him illegitimate, fraudulent, or sacrilegious. The
rebel is his own law. This is what distinguishes him. His second distinguishing trait is his
willingness to engage in struggle, even when there is no hope of success. If he fights a power, it
is because he rejects its legitimacy, because he appeals to another legitimacy, to that of soul or
spirit.
Q: What historical or literary models of the rebel would you offer?
DV: Sophocles’ Antigone comes first to mind. With her, we enter a space of sacred legitimacy.
She is a rebel out of loyalty. She defies Creon’s decrees because of her respect for tradition and
the divine law (to bury the dead), which Creon violates. It didn’t mater that Creon had his
reasons; their price was sacrilege. Antigone saw herself as justified in her rebellion.
It’s difficult to choose among the many other examples. . . . During the War of Secession, the
Yankees designated their Confederate adversaries as rebels: “rebs.” This was good propaganda,
but it wasn’t true. The American Constitution implicitly recognized the right of member states to
secede. Constitutional forms had been much respected in the South. Robert E. Lee never saw
himself as a rebel. After his surrender in April 1865, he sought to reconcile North and South. At
this moment, though, the true rebels emerged, those who continued the struggle against the
Northern army of occupation and its collaborators.
Certain of these rebels succumbed to banditry, like Jesse James. Others transmitted to their
children a tradition that has had a great literary posterity. In The Unvanquished, one of William
Faulkner’s most beautiful novels, there is, for example a fascinating portrait of a young
Confederate sympathizer, Drusilla, who never doubted the justice of the South’s cause or the
illegitimacy of the victors.
Q: How can one be a rebel today?
DV: How can one not! To exist is to defy all that threatens you. To be a rebel is not to
accumulate a library of subversive books or to dream of fantastic conspiracies or of taking to the
hills. It is to make yourself your own law. To find in yourself what counts. To make sure that
you’re never “cured” of your youth. To prefer to put everyone up against the wall rather than to
remain supine. To pillage whatever can be converted to your law, without concern for
appearance.
By contrast, I would never dream of questioning the futility of seemingly lost struggles. Think of
Patrick Pearse. I’ve also spoken of Solzhenitsyn, who personifies the magic sword of which
Jünger speaks, “the magic sword that makes tyrants tremble.” In this Solzhenitsyn is unique and
inimitable. But he owed this power to someone who was less great than himself. That should
give us cause to reflect. In The Gulag Archipelago, he tells the story of his “revelation.”
In 1945, he was in a cell at Boutyrki Prison in Moscow, along with a dozen other prisoners,
whose faces were emaciated and whose bodies broken. One of the prisoners, though, was
different. He was an old White Guard colonel, Constantin Iassevitch. He had been imprisoned
for his role in the Civil War. Solzhenitsyn says the colonel never spoke of his past, but in every
facet of his being it was obvious that the struggle had never ended for him. Despite the chaos that
reigned in the spirits of the other prisoners, he retained a clear, decisive view of the world around
him. This disposition gave his body a presence, a flexibility, an energy that defied its years. He
washed himself in freezing cold water each morning, while the other prisoners grew foul in their
filth and lament.
A year later, after being transferred to another Moscow prison, Solzhenitsyn learned that the
colonel had been executed.
“He had seen through the prison walls with eyes that remained perpetually young. . . . This
indomitable loyalty to the cause he had fought had given him a very uncommon power.”
In thinking of this episode, I tell myself that we can never be another Solzhenitsyn, but it’s
within the reach of each of us to emulate the old White colonel.
French Original: “Aujourd’hui, comment ne pas être rebelle?”