I am a Culturalist

Yesterday, I shared Gary Potter's essay on 'civilisationists'. As I mentioned, I've been using 'culturalist' in the same sense for years. My use of the word goes back to my early days as a man of the legitimist monarchist Right.

Mr Potter defined 'civilisationist' as 'an individual who embraces the history, customs and traditions of a place and people — his homeland or region and countrymen — in contrast and opposition to the economic and political globalist. He believes in rootedness and identity. He also thinks fences make for good neighbours.'

I would go farther. My definition of a 'culturalist' is an individual who is convinced that the Græco-Roman Catholic Civilisation and Culture of Christendom is the highest point that mankind has ever reached in his development. 

In those early days on the Right, I was publishing a small 'review' of my own and had a few articles published in other Catholic Counter-Revolutionary publications. I was contacted by the founder of the 'World Union of Europeans' who hoped to recruit me.

I did my due diligence research and discovered that the WUE was a neo-Nazi group founded by an ex-Wehrmacht soldier. I told him I wasn't interested in co-operating and he accused me of being afraid of being called a racist.

I responded, saying that I had been called a racist, a fascist, and other choice epithets used by the Left to attack those they disagreed with without it affecting me in the least.

I then added that the basic difference between us is that he would consider an Albanian Muslim who ritually slaughtered his goat in his living room a 'European' and I would not.

On the other hand, I would consider a black man from the old French colony of Equatorial Africa, educated in a French-style lycée, steeped in the classics and French history and literature and who attends the Traditional Latin Mass a European and he would not.

At about the same time, I was contacted by Alain de Benoist, one of the founders of the French Nouvelle Droit and leader of the ethno-nationalist think tank GRECE, another neo-Nazi racist movement with a dollop of paganism thrown in, again soliciting my co-operation. I responded to him in much the same terms.