Who is Richard Heinberg?

We jump rather abruptly in our story to the present time. For cryptofascisticus is on the march in many and unexpected ways. We've recently tracked this pesky parasite within a well known popularizer of the "Peak Oil" and more general "resource depletion" school of thought. It's a complicated story and you will remain unclear, as I am, as to how much our subject, Mr. Heinberg, really understands the implications of his words. However, given his background, there's no way to know if the words are freely given in the first place. But in my jumping ahead, I've jumped FURTHER ahead. Let's slow down.

Richard Heinberg is perhaps best known among the ecologically minded for his The Party's Over , a look at how Peak Oil and resource depletion will bring our overconsumptive lifestlye to a rather jarring halt. Intuitively, this seems right. The west, particularly the U.S., consumes way more than our "share" of stuff. Surely these gluttonous chickens will come home to roost. Surely we will run out of these things we waste so irresponsibly. And surely our hypercapitalist system of wealth created from thin air or even just the promise of thin air cannot maintain itself for long. And surely it is a race to see if we destroy the earth before this madness ends.

And surely someone who warns us of this danger and wants desperately to prevent the degradation of our natural world must be one of the good guys.

Before we tackle Heinberg directly we'd better have a look at some background. I'll start with a question. Did you know Hitler was a vegetarian? You see, ecological concerns have long been the province not just of the left, but also of the right. In fact, there is an entire mythos in Nazi and other fascist ideologies of the spiritual power of the land and her people. Blood and soil. Blut und boten. And in this mythos, the idea of "cleansing of the land" can take on a LOT of extra baggage.

Here is a link to two articles that are essential reading to understand why Heinberg is a real concern. One is about the role of ecological thought in the ideology and mythos of Nazism. The second traces these influences into the present day (but only deals with Germany. Still, it is instructive.) A quote to get you started:

These latter two fixations matured in the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the völkisch movement, a powerful cultural disposition and social tendency which united ethnocentric populism with nature mysticism. At the heart of the völkisch temptation was a pathological response to modernity. In the face of the very real dislocations brought on by the triumph of industrial capitalism and national unification, völkisch thinkers preached a return to the land, to the simplicity and wholeness of a life attuned to nature's purity. The mystical effusiveness of this perverted utopianism was matched by its political vulgarity. While "the Volkish movement aspired to reconstruct the society that was sanctioned by history, rooted in nature, and in communion with the cosmic life spirit," 8 it pointedly refused to locate the sources of alienation, rootlessness and environmental destruction in social structures, laying the blame instead to rationalism, cosmopolitanism, and urban civilization.

The mythos goes much deeper, however, and has roots way back into good ole Madame Blavatsky herself, if not even earlier. We can't go into all that here. But let us just acknowledge the fact that MUCH of so-called New Age thought is not new at all. In fact, it is completely continuous with this same Nazi mythos we'll be exploring a bit here. Does that mean all New Age practitioners are Nazis? Of course, not. But that whole line of thinking has been both developed by and exploited by far right elements for some time now. It distracts from the necessary agenda of addressing the true causes of injustice while it builds influence and credibility for ideas that have very dark roots indeed. It tells us not to look for the roots of injustice in our rulers or in our economic system or system of government. It tells us to look for the roots of evil in a secret group, an "invading force", a people not part of our "homeland." They don't HAVE to be Jews, of course, but most of the time, that is exactly who this line of thinking will end up telling us they are.

Am I overstating my case here? Could Heinberg possibly be approaching this line of thought. I'm afraid so, gentle readers. And as he is a smart man, I don't think this can be unwitting.

Our first clue was a curious blurb, right there on Mr. Heinberg's site, about his book. It is this:

The Party's Over begins with a commanding review of world history, where past and current developments including war, empire, and population growth are interpreted as functions of cheap or increasingly scarce and expensive energy. The discussion of substitutes for fast-depleting fossil fuels, and the formidable impediments to making the transition that would allow industrial civilization to continue, are important to every investor and citizen.
- Virginia Deane Abernethy, Ph.D., author of Population Politics

http://www.museletter.com/partys-over.html

This caught my attention, you see, because Dr. Abernethy is well known as a white seperatist. She writes for an avowedly racist publication called "Occidental Quarterly".

Here's their description of her. I can't link directly to the page about the advisory board as the URL doesn't change for some reason. So you'll have to go there yourself and click around! Get a sense of the kind of publication this is and wonder how ANYONE could feature a blurb from such a person right on the front page of their book's website!

Virginia Abernethy, Ph.D., emeritus professor of psychiatry Vanderbilt University Medical School, and author of Population Politics: The Choices that Shape Our Future (Insight Books, 1993; Transaction 1999), Population Pressure and Cultural Adjustment (Human Sciences Press, 1979), and (editor) Frontiers in Medical Ethics: Applications in a Medical Setting (Ballinger, 1980). A former editor of Population and Environment, she is the author of numerous articles in professional journals and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a graduate of Wellesley College (B.A., 1955) and Harvard University (M.A. 1969, Ph.D., 1970).

So Mr. Heinberg...maybe we can call him Richard now? Richard thinks Abernethy is a good reference. Two mouseclicks would have revealed otherwise. This can not be a mistake. Here's what he says of her:

An ecological politics, a politics of reality. Now who's talking about this? Very few that I have seen. I think the marxist and most of the anarchists are pretty much avoiding the issue. There are a few people who are mostly scientists, people like Virginia Abernathy who wrote the book "Population Politics" and David Pimentel a professor up in Ithaca, New York, people like that are aware of the issues but these are scientists, they're not political leaders.

http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/220

My my. I'll let the reader unpack that statement as an exercise for we must move on.

You see, this is just the beginning of a strange and disturbing tale.

Richard didn't always write about peak oil. He used to write a lot of New Age spirituality books and articles. And it is these articles we will turn to now.

I found these articles right on Richard's archive pages, so he does not disavow them. They are all linked from here:

http://www.museletter.com/archive.html

If you scroll to the bottom, you'll see that there are numerous links under "Essays and Reviews." Many of these links will take you to an online magazine called "New Dawn." What, exactly, is dawning? Maybe you should go there and have a look yourself, but you may need a bit of background to interpret. I'm going to concentrate on one article on that site by Richard: "Back to Paradise - on the myth of a Golden Age." http://www.newdawnmagazine.com.au/articles/Back%20to%20Paradise.html

THE SITE OF PARADISE

Some paradise myths seem to describe a specific place, a lost homeland. Many legends speak of a sunken island or a great world mountain as the original paradisal home of humankind.

In Memories and Visions of Paradise, I mentioned the Tibetan legend of lost Shambhala — “a mystical kingdom hidden behind snowy peaks somewhere to the north” where “a line of enlightened kings is guarding the innermost teachings of Buddhism for a time when all truth in the outside world is lost in war and greed. Then, according to the prophecy, the King of Shambhala will emerge with a great army to destroy the forces of evil and bring in a new Golden Age.”

Tibetan and Western scholars have looked everywhere for Shambhala — from the Gobi Desert to the North Pole. Three recent books offer relevant new information and insight.

In Dawn Behind the Dawn: A Search for the Earthly Paradise (Holt, 1992), cultural historian Geoffrey Ashe theorises that the idea of a lost paradise began with a goddess-worshipping cult in the region of the Altai-Baikal (a Siberian) region of northern Asia some 25,000 years ago. The book is erudite and impressively researched, touching on subjects ranging from Near Eastern mythology to Indo-European philology to modern feminism. Ashe summarises his reconstruction as follows:

“Tens of thousands of years ago, shamans in Siberia and Mongolia held the seven-star constellation [Ursa Major] in reverence. It was all the more important because the pole, which it ruled, was not marked then by a separate polestar of conspicuous brightness. ...The chief deity was a powerful Earth Mother and Mistress of Animals, with whom female shamans were closely associated. Her cult and symbolism, passing from tribe to tribe, played a part in forming the Paleolithic Goddess substratum across Siberia and Europe. Her chief animal form was a bear....

“The constellation built up a unique numinosity, partly because of its relation to the pole and hence to shamans’ ideas of comic centrality, expressed in the image of a central tree or world-mountain, which they climbed in their trances to meet superior spirits. In the Altai region, actual gold that gave the range a name, and an actual mountain cult, helped to evoke the divine world-mountain as golden....

“Late in the fourth millennium B.C., around the Altai, Indo-European groupings such as the Afanasievo came under shamanic influence and acquired a mythical ‘package’ comprising some of the ancient themes, which in the hands of these new people took on a rekindled life and energy. The package included the golden world-mountain... this eventually evolved into golden Meru, central to the universe, a paradisal abode of gods. It also included the seven stars... and something of the connected [mystique surrounding the number seven]. The mythical package was carried south and southwest in Indo-European expansion.” Ashe cites the Tibetan Shambhala legend as referring to the original Altaic homeland.

Victoria Le Page’s Shambhala: The Fascinating Truth Behind the Myth of Shangri-La (Quest, 1996) is an esotericist’s view of the same materials. Le Page has read Ashe carefully — as well as earlier scholars on the subject, such as René Guénon and Nicholas Roerich. Guénon interprets the paradise mountain — Mount Meru in Buddhist lore — as not a mountain at all, but “a metaphor for a conduit of terrestrial energy constituting the earth’s primary power source whose nature, location, and function is presently unknown to us. [Guénon] suggests that the knowledge of this fact belongs to a most arcane and little-known branch of the tantric science that is concerned with cosmic Shakti and the building of worlds, and which for that reason has been jealously guarded from the public view for many thousands of years.”

Le Page follows occultist Nicholas Roerich in his quest to find the true geographical Shambhala — in the Altai mountains. But she has more than a historical interest in decoding the myth. For her, Shambhala — the realm of jewel lakes, wish-fulfilling trees, and speaking stones — is central to the “new world model,” the ideology of the New Age. “Shambhala has had many locations, many names, many forms; over the ages it has been known as a taboo region of Paleolithic magic, a vast Megalithic sanctuary, a sacred kingdom, and underground Wisdom center, a modern complex of ashrams and training-schools.... Its credibility has probably never been so severely tested as in this age of high technology, dense population and intensive exploration; and yet in another sense we have never been more open to transcendental ideas, to the possibility of dimensions unseen, of higher-order beings and energies and presences celestial, of guidance from above.”
---------------------snip for brevity-------------------

Let me summarize for you. There is a mythical people from the North, of Indo-European descent who were highly advanced and whose time of pre-eminence was a "Golden Age". Are those alarm bells ringing just yet? Maybe some of this will ring some bells:

This is from an introduction to the book, Hitler, Buddha, Krishna by Ueberreuter Verlag discussing the ideology of Nazism and its spiritual roots.

A coterie of fascist cultural scholars sprang up (in pre-war Germany) asserting that Buddhism, the Vedas, the Puranas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, yoga and even Tantrism were intellectual remnants of a vanished, global, indo-Aryan, anti-Semitic religion. There were also borrowings from Tibetan culture and especially from Japanese Zen and Samurai traditions


--------------snip----------------

The inventors of the “Nazi mysteries”, French occultists Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels, and the Englishman Trevor Ravenscroft. All three authors saw National Socialism inextricably linked to the Indo-Tibetan Shambhala myth.

---------------------------snip-------------------

SS-Ahnenerbe researchers were especially interested in the Kalachakra Tantra.

The Shambala vision recorded in the Kalachakra Tantra has become a central pillar in the mythology of religious neo-Nazism.

Many of the themes raised in the Kalachakra Tantra (a cyclical view of the world, global domination, the use of super weapons, magic and ritual in sexual practices etc) are key themes in religious fascism.

Ouch. Shambala. Not only is that a big theme with Heinberg, but with the New Age in general. Better stick to Heinberg for now. Here's a bit more on the Nazi roots of the myth of a glorious Indo-European age. From Hollow Earther, Gerry Forster.

Shambhala, Agartha, and “The Hole at The Pole”.

That there was some further mystery related to the Boreal region, is indicated in the myth of Shambhala, which is supposed to have emanated from the early lamas of Tibet. It is thought to have been an ancient realm once located somewhere in Asia - possibly in the Gobi - when what is now an arid desert was still the Gobi Sea. It was thought to have been an island realm, called the “Sacred Island” which, in many respects, seems to have been strangely similar to Thule or Hyperborea.

The mystery deepens when we learn that its inhabitants were the last survivors of the “White Island” which had perished long ages earlier! According to Madame Blavatsky, the inhabitants were descended from her Lemurians, but, since this information was alleged to be from a Theosophist, spiritual origin, we might be wiser in concluding that they were more likely to have been from Hyperboria-Thule!


Shambhala.

From some of the accounts available, Shambhala appears to have been a centre of spiritual enlightenment, very reminiscent of James Hilton’s “Shangri-La”, but others say that it was a centre of occult power and arcane teaching. Its leader was thought variously to be either an evil, tyrannical Sorcerer-King or a God-like “Lord of The World”. We seem to be left with a choice as to which story we prefer to follow, and evidently which Path one desires to follow, too. The evil Left, or the good Right!

Apparently there were two factions (as in Hyperborea), one of which followed the Golden Sun, and the other the Black Sun. (The “Black Sun”, incidentally, was as prominent an emblem of the Nazi mythos as was the Swastika!) According to Jean-Claude Frére, author of “Nazisme et Sociétiés Secretès”, the people of Hyperborea, after migrating to the Gobi Desert over 6000 years ago, founded a new centre, which they named Agartha. It became a great centre of world learning, and people flocked there from all over the world to enjoy its culture and civilization.

However, a huge catastrophe supervened, and the earth’s surface was devastated, but the realm of Agartha somehow survived, under the earth. The legend continues to relate that, as with the original Hyperboreans, the Aryans now split into two factions: one group heading north-west, hoping to return to their lost Hyperborea, and the second going south, where they founded a new secret centre under the Himalayas.

Jean-Claude Frére concludes: The sons of the Outer Intellegences split into two groups, one following the “Right Hand Path” under the “Wheel of The Golden Sun”, the other the “Left Hand Path” under the “Wheel of the Black Sun”. The first preserved the centre of Agartha, that undefined place of contemplation, of the Good, and of the Vril force. The second supposedly created a new place of initiation at Shambhala, the city of violence in command of the elements and human masses, hastening the arrival of the “charnel-house of time.”

link

(a Google cache...I hope it will continue to function.)

Let's get right down to brass tacks, though. Thule, of course, is also the name of the occult society that was so influential in the formation of Nazism.



From Wikipedia:

Hyperboreans consistently play a large role in Nazi, neo-nazi, and proto-nazi mysticism.

Miguel Serrano was a Chilean diplomat and major proponent of Esoteric Hitlerism. He believed that Hitler fled to Shambhala, an underground centre in Antarctica after World War II (formerly at the North Pole and Tibet), where he was in contact with the Hyperborean gods and from whence he would someday emerge with a fleet of UFOs to lead the forces of light (the Hyperboreans, sometimes associated with Vril) over the forces of darkness (inevitably including, for Serrano, the Jews) in a last battle and inaugurating a Fourth Reich. He also connected the Aryans and their Hyperborean gods to the Sun and the Allies and the Jews to the Moon.

Julius Evola believed Hyperboreans were Nordic supermen, originating in the north pole. He felt they had a crucial hand in the founding of Atlantis.


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperborea

And again, looking specifically at Thule:

A primary focus of Thule-Gesellschaft was a claim concerning the origins of the Aryan race. "Thule" was a land located by Greco-Roman geographers in the furthest north. The society was named after "Ultima Thule" — (Latin: most distant Thule) mentioned by the Roman poet Vergil in his epic poem Aeneid, was the far northern segment of Thule and is generally understood to mean Scandinavia. Said by Nazi mystics to be the capital of ancient Hyperborea, they placed Ultima Thule in the extreme north near Greenland or Iceland.

The Thulists believed in the hollow earth theory. Thule had among its goals the desire to prove that the Aryan race came from a lost continent, perhaps Atlantis.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Society

Are you still with me, patient reader? This has been long, and our journey is not yet over. But let's keep our perspective here. Richard Heinberg of peak oil fame, writes about early myths of a Golden Age that resemble the very same mythology that undergirded the Nazi occult movement. As we'll see, it's even MORE significant, that like these earlier myths, the idea that the Golden Land was to the North in Eurasia is extremely important. Because, you see, intrepid reader, there's another person who writes for and praises the New Dawn magazine. And he, in turn, is mentioned approvingly by Richard and shares the same mythology with him. His name is Alexander Dugin. Here's what he has to say of New Dawn right on their "About Us" page:

"New Dawn magazine is one of the best sources of realistic information on the state of things in our world as it nears its inevitable and predicted end. For some people it could seem to be a little bit strange and weird, phantasmagoric... But the reality in which we live is itself something strange and weird... New Dawn magazine helps us to persist. And gives us hope for the better world that is coming..."
– ALEXANDRE DUGIN, leader of International Eurasian Movement

http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/whatisnewdawn.html

Dugin is, as the quote mentions, the leader of the International Eurasian movement. I'll let Richard give you more info on Dugin:

Meanwhile, in Russia political theorist Alexander Dugin was gaining increasing influence with anti-American geostrategic writings. In 1997, the same year Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard appeared, Dugin published his own manifesto, The Basics of Geopolitics, advocating a reconstituted Russian Empire composed of a continental bloc of states allied to cleanse the Eurasian land-mass of US influence. At the center of this bloc Dugin posited a "Eurasian axis" of Russia, Germany, Iran, and Japan.

While Dugin's ideas were banned during Soviet times for their echoes of Nazi pan-Eurasian fantasies, they gradually gained influence among post-Soviet Russian officials. For example, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently decried the "strengthening tendency towards the formation of a unipolar world under financial and military domination by the United States" and called for a "multipolar world order," while emphasizing Russia's "geopolitical position as the largest Eurasian state." Russia's Communist party has adopted Dugin's ideas in its platform; Gennady Zyuganov, Communist Party chairman, even published his own primer on geopolitics, titled Geography of Victory. Though Dugin remains a marginal figure internationally, his ideas cannot help but resonate in a country and continent increasingly hemmed in and manipulated by a powerful and arrogant hegemonic nation on the other side of the globe.

www.museletter.com/archive/132.html

Yes, says Richard, Dugin's ideas can't help but find resonance in Russia.

Dugin has an interesting history which I would like to look more into in later articles. For now, let me say that he was the leader of the National Bolshevik Party in Russia, which is a sort of "leftwing" fascist movement. There are branches all over the world, including here in the U.S. It combines extreme nationalism with ecology and racialism. Indeed, one of the themes that keeps popping up in this journey is this attempt to merge far right and far left, or at least, to appear to do so. Dugin split with the National Bolsheviks who subsequently got into trouble with the law. His Eurasian movement, however, seems to enjoy Kremlin support.



So, great...what's wrong with a Eurasian movement? Better back off and get some perspective on Dugin. You can get LOTS more of this sort of "metaphysics" from his site: ARCTOGAIA Nearly all the articles are by him.

Here's New Dawn on Dugin's take on Hyperborea:

Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophical Society, claimed the ‘second root race’ originated in Hyperborea, before the later races of Lemuria and Atlantis. The Russian metaphysician Alexandre Dugin says that it was the home of the “solar people”, connected to what is now northern Russia. “Solar people,” Alexandre Dugin explains, are a “cultural-spiritual type” who are creative, energetic and spiritual. They are the opposite of “lunar people”, a psycho-spiritual type who are materialistic, conservative and wary of change.

link

I'll leave as another exercise to the reader to decode "solar people" vs. "lunar people."

Here is Dugin himself on Hyperborea. Remember, this is simply another name for the Indo-European utopia discussed by Heinberg. Both of these men, Dugin and Heinberg, write for New Dawn and Heinberg not only finds Eurasian geopolitics to be critical to his analysis of the future, but finds Dugin necessarily to "resonate" with the Russian masses. (Note the entire article on Eurasia. Heinberg does not say that Dugin will succeed in unifying Eurasia. In fact, it's not quite clear to me what he thinks the endgame will bring. Dugin, in the quote above about New Dawn, simply says that what's coming is the inevitable end of the world but that a New Dawn is coming after.)

The ancient Greeks spoke about Hyperborea, the northern island with capital Thule. This land was considered as the motherland of the bright god Apollon. And in many other traditions it is possible to detect most ancient tracks, often forgotten and become fragmentary, of a nordic symbolism. The basic idea traditionally linked to the North is the idea of Centre, Immobile Pole, point of Eternity around which the cycle turns not only of space, but also of time. North is the land where the sun never goes even at night, a space of eternal light. Any sacred tradition honors the Centre, the Middle, the point where contrasts appease, the symbolical place not subject to the laws of cosmic entropy. This Centre, whose symbol is the Swastika (stressing both immobility and constancy of the Centre, and mobility and changeability of the periphery), received a different name according to each tradition, but it was always directly or indirectly linked to the symbolism of North. Therefore it is possible to say that all sacred traditions are in essence the projection of a Single Northern Primordial Tradition adapted to every different historical condition. North is Cardinal Point chosen by the primeval Logos in order to reveal itself in History, and each of its further manifestations only restored that primeval polar-paradise symbolism.

http://www.geocities.com/integral_tradition/sacgeo.html

In case any of the above is a bit too subtle for my weary readers, let's try this:

The Jews are the carriers of a religious culture which is deeply distinct from all historical displays of Indo-European spirituality - from ancient Aryan heathen cults to Hinduism and Christianity. The voluntary or forced seizure of the Jewish diaspora from the Indo-European peoples cannot be a casual episode of history, and no Orthodox Jew will ever deny the theological underlying basis of Jewish "peculiarity". The Jewish question, no matter by whom and how it was put, should begin with a recognition of this fundamental fact - "the Jews are a community which keeps the secret of its radical differences from other peoples". If we do not admit distinction, then it is simply senseless to speak about the Jewish problem.

-----------------------snip------------------------------

The world of "Judaica" is a world hostile to us. But our feeling of Aryan justice and the gravity of our geopolitical situation require comprehension of its laws, rules and interests.

The Indo-European elite stands today before a titanic task - to understand those who are not only culturally, nationally and politically, but also metaphysically different. And in this case, "to understand" means not "to forgive", but "to defeat". And "to defeat with the Light of Truth".

www.arctogaia.com/public/eng/defeat.html

I hope you have followed this so far. Heinberg has put forward a mythos of a Golden Age that leads directly to this last quote from Dugin. We'll see more about Dugin in a future post. For example, we'll examine the seemingly paradoxical idea that he promotes both Russian Orthodoxy and Crowley inspired occultism. In fact, you'll see at the bottom of his ArctoGaia site a symbol that I can't seem to grab the graphic for. It is a red an black box with a Pentagram and a circle in cross symbol and reads: "Tradition. Revolution."

Dugin is an odd one, indeed. But we must return to Heinberg. Heinberg has an interesting past that may shed some light on his questionable beliefs. Interviewed on "Oildrum":

I became a writer and lived in a number of intentional communities.

SS: Which ones?

RH: One in Toronto, Canada called Society of Integrated Living, SOIL for short; one in Colorado called Sunrise Ranch…

SS: Which is a spiritual community?

RH: That’s right. In the early ‘90s my wife and I moved from an intentional community in Southern California called Glen Ivy up to Santa Rosa and I decided from that point on I would make my living completely as a writer.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/9/24/233315/937

It turns out that Glen Ivy and Sunrise Ranch are both "intentional communities" of the "Emissaries of Divine Light." I can't find much about them, though some ex-members have some harsh things to say about them. The quote below is from some ex-members who go into great detail about the group, which you can read by following the link.

Sexual abuses and cover-up's were made public during the first "open" council (described earlier). Exeter (leader of group) and his wife denied knowing about the abuses, though I personally knew two people who had informed them in writing about particular abuses. Women have told me they were seduced, coerced, threatened, and even stalked by men in leadership positions. They have told me about sexual abuse of children. I have heard that in central and eastern regions of the U.S., teenagers were forced to lose their virginity to their group leaders, with the explanation that this guaranteed a spiritually sound beginning to their sex life. I don't know if this was done in all regions and in Canada.

---------------------snip---------------------------

(From Interview with former member...not Richard...no confusion) I was told it was vital to confide everything about my life, including my finances and sexual life. At first it was spelled out completely, to whom I was to tell what. Later the instructions were revised and one could communicate to anyone "upwards." After that I discovered that reports were written about us locally and sent to regional coordinators, who then reported to Exeter . Class faculties also wrote reports about each student. I don't know if these practices continue.

http://www.factnet.org/cults/Emissaries_Divine_Light/Barbara_Clearbridge.html

So what do we make of all this? That Heinberg knowingly praised a white supremacist scholar is without question. It is simply too easy to learn of her background and, to her credit, Abernethy makes no effort to conceal it.

That Heinberg is steeped in a mythic tradition of an Indo-European Golden Age, the longing for the revival of which he finds central to man's spiritual quest is also clear. And that this mythos so closely resembles, in fact actuall IS the mythology of the far-right must also surely have been known by someone who has so thoroughly researched these legends. Yet to this day, he proudly links to those articles. Not once does he profess to be bothered by the Nazi use of these same myths.

His opinion on Dugin is less clear. While he seems to discuss Dugin's role in Eurasia with approval, he ultimately suggests that "...Russian geopolitical fantasies are as vain as those of the US." http://www.museletter.com/archive/132.html He sees a cataclysm coming. Indeed, a perusal of his other New Dawn articles suggests that cataclysm, to him, has been the primary force behind human history. He sees, like Dugin, and end of the world. And, like Dugin, the possibility that this end will lead to a new beginning. A new "Golden Age."

Finally, we see that Heinberg has a long history with a group that could be called a cult, in the sense of an authoritarian community. Their actual ideology is not completely clear from what I've been able to find thus far, but it is quite likely that they, too, speak of the coming of the "end times."

We hear from ex-members of this group that sexual abuse has been alleged and that members had to reveal all of their dark secrets to higher ups. It is possible that such information could then be used against a member or former member for various purposes. Maybe Richard does not even write completely of his own free will.

But the lessons here are numerous and important. That rightwing ideology is finding its way into, and indeed, has always been one wing of the ecology movement is one lesson. That many so-called New Age beliefs come directly from the theologians of the Reich is another. In fact, it is becoming clear to me that much of the New Age movement has been created to serve a very clear agenda. Firstly, it siphons off energy from more direct political action and directs attention away from the true roots of injustice. Secondly, the rightwing ideology that the New Age is so seeped in bubbles up into all kinds of erstwhile "progressive" ideologies. It lays a groundwork for legitimizing ideas that should be horrifying but are becoming acceptable, such as the idea that the best course of action for the planet would be for most of the people to die off and for the planet to begin again, perhaps toward a new Golden Age.

Stay tuned for more on Dugin and more on the Nazi roots of the New Age.