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Book Review: Storm of Steel
by William Yates
17 December 2004
Book Review: Storm of Steel
[by Ernst Junger (New York: Penguin Books, 2004;
Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta'sch Buckhandlung Nachfolger GmBH,
1920.)]
We see the fuzzy shaded films of the Great War, where the men walk too
fast, and the machines are primitive, the horses are pulling cannon. It
impresses us as far away, and naive. And yet the Great War brought the White
men to his present condition of dire emergency. Like the consequences of the
disintegration of the western Roman Empire, the effects of the Great War are
with us: imbued in our economics and culture, our governments and our
ideals, and we hardly notice them. Both events were epilepsies that broke
down the Aryan structure. The Great War, like the disintegration of Rome,
presented openings to the Aryan's most dangerous enemies, and he is now on
the edge of disappearing from lifestream. An Aryan concerned with the
survival of
his kind should understand the Great War. Ernst Junger's Storm of
Steel might be the best encapsulation of it.
Junger was an infantry officer in the Kaiser's army. He kept a diary which
was
published in 1920. It sold so well it was translated and sold well
throughout Europe
and America. Former enemy soldiers wrote Junger. Storm made of him a
celebrity and inspired him with literary momentum which lasted decades. (He
wrote
his last book in 1985; he died in 1998, aged 102.) That few whites know his
name
attests to the effectiveness of the jew oligopoly in the media and his
determination to
obliterate the deeds of great white men. It might be true that the artistic
personality
makes the most effective revolutionary. This does not weaken the impression
of
objectivity the reader gets from him. Descriptions of cataclysm first-hand
require
imagination. Without it a memoir is merely journalism. Junger's
intelligence and style
draw you into his world. He puts you in a trench with a Mauser 98K in your
hand. The
artillery barrage has just ended. Your ears are ringing; you are covered
with mud and
gore. Wisps of detonated nitrate cling to the scarred earth. You are
scanning the
moonscape for the first enemy coming over the rise...
The translation, done by one Michael Hoffman (not the Catholic Internet
writer) in
2003, is excellent. He wrote the introduction also, which is remarkably
fair and
thorough. We may be sure that Storm has been reissued on the
strength of
Junger's career. He never joined the Nazi Party, and he consented to
several
revisions of Storm which, according to Herr Hoffman, were severe and
patriotic
in their first issue.
Junger saw four continuous years of combat. You pay attention to such men;
one of
the first things you notice is the confidence of those men. I refer not
only to the
Germans but the rest. It was a world of Aryans that is nearly gone. Junger
was a total
soldier because he was a total white man. His identity was complete, his
role and
duty clear. He had roots. He was part of a continuity, that is, a
race-organism. One
gets the impression of a wind that must blow, a wind that cannot stop nor
change
direction and only a mountain can break it. The Great War was that
mountain. I cannot
imagine a modern Aryan soldier taking such a beating in a ZOG war and
keeping his
faith.
Those white men born before the Great War were different from us. In
composition,
yes; a great deal more in intellectual sustenance. Whites today carry the
whole blood
of a Junger, but their atmosphere is poisoned, their roots withered. Aryan
man in
1914 was at his height. That was not so long ago; I have a living aunt born
that year.
Now Aryan man is fast approaching his nadir. The fall has been stupefying.
But was it
really a fall, or a grievous wound from which the Aryan will recover and be
more
strong than he ever was? This will show soon. The problem was an is this;
the Aryan
does not understand the power of the technology he invented. Junger brings
you into
the consequences: the gas attacks, the mines and artillery, the medieval
bravado
disintegrating under direct machine gun fire. Let us forgive their naivete
just as we
hope our grandchildren, who will be fighting for existence, forgive us our
faults. Let's
take Junger's Storm of Steel then for what it is: the details of a
type of man at
war, the depiction of his instincts bending against mechanized death, his
ideas of
Fatherland and honor, the consequences of technology. Storm is
neither
pleasant nor repulsive unless you are a simpleton looking for a thriller,
or you are
unused to graphic descriptions of whtie men slaughtering each other.
Ernst Junger was 19 years old when he enlisted as a private in a Hanoverian
regiment on August 1, 1914. School bored him -- of course. A year earlier
he had left
it to join the Foreign Legion. What became of his contract with the French
Government
is not stated, nor does he mention his Legion service. He spoke and read
French, the
only evidence of his life before the war. Storm is a bare
chronological memoir,
made vital by anecdotes. His entire service was on the front north end and
north-east
of Paris: along the river Somme, in southern Belgium, and the Champagne
region.
This was, as you might recall, the thrust of the longtime German plan for
the invasion
of France, which skirted the difficult country directly east (Saarland,
Alsace, Lorraine).
Storm opens sometime in Fall of 1914 (Junger is not precise on
dates, a style
that makes his memoir literature) on a troop train carrying Junger's
regiment towards
the line in Champagne. He describes the villages -- depopulated,
destroyed, overrun
with rats feeding off human corpses buried in the rubble -- the trenches in
the chalky
soil. We end nearly four years later in his fourth hospitalization. Along
the way he
picks up a commission, command of an infantry company, and 20 wounds. There
is
no sensible progression -- perhaps mirroring the staticness, the waste and
loggerhead unintelligibility of the men with their machines. The text is
free not only of
military jargon but also politics. There barely is anything near patriotism
except the
pregnant and plastic "Vaterland," which he uses discreetly. One concludes
he was a
less a flag-waver and more an adventurer. It is also apparent that he liked
a good
scrap. The only element that breaks what is a static description of
bloodletting is the
enemy's increasing power. This alone saves the reader from feeling himself
in a
nightmare mosaic of sodden trenches, tripping over rotting bodies ("A
sweetish smell
and a bundle hanging in the wire caught my attention. In the rising mist, I
leaped out
of the trench and found a shrunken French corpse. Flesh like mouldering
fish
gleamed greenishly through splits in the shredded uniform..."), killing and
being
killed, going nowhere. Finally, the Allies are going to break the
interminable situation
with force majeure. It isn't relief, it is sanity. He lets you know
what is going on,
revealing cowardice amongst his own troops (he had them shot) and amongst
the
enemy.
This cold-eyed honesty comprises Junger's style. He was not a soldier by
nature. The
war drew out the literateur in him and later Fate gave him fame. It
is obvious he
was a ferocious fighter and natural leader. But the absence of military
"feel" reveals
his character as what I term the "hibernational warrior" type. That is, the
type of man
whom danger draws out in total focus and excellence in service of the folk,
who
fourishes in fighting, often out-performing career professionals -- and who
fades back
into the mass when the fighting is over. Because Junger had no stomach for
lying he
could never have gone on to be a "journalist." This is why so few combat
veterans
make an honest living in that racket. His complexity is obvious. Though he
could have
flourished also as a career military man his personality was missing a leg.
He was not
a normal man of high intelligence but a man of high imagination. A normal
man is
content to throw in with the system; he will work with it, defend it until
it doesn't work
anymore, then he will back up the fellow who looks most promising to
restore order.
That is the nature of most men. The creative man, on the other hand, pulls
away from
the system. Junger might have made an Alexander, a Genghis, or Cortes, but
not a
Bismarck or Nelson. Junger needed action but as much he needed to
create. In
the trenches, between combats, he writes in his diary, reads Tristam
Shandy
and captured English newspapers, and knows his wines.
He is a civilized man -- civilized in a way we do not understand. It is
rooted in the last
vestiges of chivalry, and I do not misuse the term here. Junger tells of
his relations
with French civilians. There was apparently no anti-fraternization orders
such as what
ZOG imposed on its troops occupying Germany in 1945. He rents rooms from
French
families (he lets you know they are "working class"), dines with them. One
almost
expects him to imply this was the sentiment between them: "How unfortunate
we are
at war." But it is not there. One concludes, then, that though
interpersonal relations
can triumph over the politics of the general, such are not really
"triumphs" but minor
pools of calm in the great tides of general effects, such as those between
peoples. As
we know in white resistance, this is instinctual, this yielding to the
general rather than
hewing to the exception, for if we do not, chaos ensues. Patriotism is then
nothing
less than the defense of the familiar to prevent the insecurity of
competing cultural
elements.
All governments today, and all involved in Junger's world, are manipulated
by cartels
which take advantage of the patriotic instinct. We always are struggling to
reconcile
our generalizations with our interpersonal relations. And cartels exploit
this gray area
in us. Yet the greatest leaders pull across lines. One million non-German
men
volunteered to fight for Adolf Hitler, a fact the jew puppet-masters will
never reveal.
The pull of charisma, the defense of identity -- these always have warred
against
each other in all peoples throughout history. Considering this we might
wonder, then,
if any people can summon the logic to preserve itself against cultural and
genetic
dissolution. With enough sophistry behind it the question seems valid, but
it will not
stand against the comfort of the familiar, which always reasserts itself.
This amounts
to a man's home civilization, that which his ancestors built and left to
him. This is a
natural law, above time, and rests only on the continuing life-stream,
which must
maintain itself vigorously. Junger expressed his own like this:
At the sight of the Neckar slopes wreathed with flowering cherry trees, I
had a strong
sense of having come home. What a beautiful country it was, and eminently
worth our
blood and our lives. Never before had I felt its charm so clearly, I had
good and
serious thoughts, and for the first time I sensed that this war was more
than just a
great adventure.
But Junger could chat over breakfast coffee with the French family that
boarded him,
and later that day lead a murderous assault against French troops. Why has
the line
between combatant and non-combatant dissolved? Again, the answer is
technology,
because the hyper-powerful weapons governments possess today could not be
without thousands of civilians in their chain of production, transport,
maintenance and
funding. Therefore, to break a government means to break the civilians it
controls. By
this argument we see, then, the logic of BritZOG and USZOG in firebombing
Dresden
and Hamburg, and nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Governments are responsible
and governments are guilty. The situation has become one of rival gangsters
clawing
each other for control of labor and resources, taxable populations and
pools of skills -
- under cover of "patriotism." Political states have become nothing but
deposits of
assets for corporations. Popular sovereignty is a fiction. The U.S. Civil
War, and
moreso the Great War, were the solidifying acts of the corporate will. The
syndrome
repeats in every state controlled by the jew/capitalist cartels. Societies
are kept in
turmoil by media and laws deliberately. These internal wars prime societies
for
external wars. Hostility, stress and anxiety breed and feed the war
machine.
Junger uses the terms "honor," "manliness," "soldierly" and such
throughout. Here
was the last of the age of the horse, and the advent of the powerful,
carbon-burning
machine. These men born at the closing of the 19th century had the
instincts of
struggle imbued by millennia of harshness, instincts which technology now
seemed
to have made unnecessary. Struggle had been so hard that men reserved a
part of
themselves to grant mercy lest they sink into total beasts. We of the
advanced carbon-
burning and electronic era have fewer inhibitions, although we fancy we are
humane.
Our instincts of restraint have been buried at a good depth by push-button
killing.
These men of the 1880s and '90s did not think of the Great War as a "total
war," as
defined by scholar Samuel Huntington (in 1961) as:
"...a struggle between governments in which at least one aims at the
destruction of the
other and uses all the means at its disposal to achieve that aim. Under
present
conditions total war between major powers would involved the use of
thermonuclear
weapons."
To which we would now add biologicals, which are far more transportable and
cheaper to make, and don't destroy wealth-creating infrastructure and
plant. We
should be watching more for powdery substances and suitcases than rockets.
World War II was a total war. The jew-controlled states under the heel of
central
control and debt-monetizing sought the destruction of the governments of
Japan and
Germany, those industrial powers which had turned away from "democratic"
systems
of internal control and debt-finance capitalism. Capitalist/jew systems
must suppress
the natural elites of populations; they can do it only by burying the
elites under direct
voting by the mob. Democracy means class warfare, a boilerplate jew tactic
for
breaking societies. After the Great War Junger was said to have stated that
he hated
democracy. A state policy based on eugenics and defense of culture, of the
honor of
women and support of agriculture and large families, is inimical to the
jew/capitalist
strategy for world control of resources. Thus, a population weaned off the
democracy/
equality myth must be destroyed or broken along with its government.
In the 1920s popular opinion finally compelled the U.S. Senate to open
investigations
into "war profiteering." The pack of whores did no damage to their
paymasters, of
course, but the point here is that production capital had reached such
efficiency that
war had become very big business. Their products had to be "consumed." Thus
capital, facilities, media, government and military fused into one organism
invested in
destruction, and remain so. Its target of the moment is Muslim peoples,
with the bonus
of cheap or stolen petroleum assets. At the end of the line is the simple
rifleman who,
know it or not, is a "worker" in this industry. His job is to burn off
production. This
attitude seeps into the warrior's mentality. In March 1917 German forces
withdrew
across the Somme. They booby-trapped their former positions and destroyed
everything along their line of retreat. Of this Junger
writes:
As far back as the Siegfried Line, every village was reduced to rubble,
every tree
chopped down, every road undermined, every well poisoned, every basement
blown
or booby-trapped, every rail unscrewed, every telephone wire rolled up,
everything
burnable burned; in a word, we were turning the country that our advancing
opponents would occupy into a wasteland.
As I say, the scenes were reminiscent of a madhouse, and the effect of them
was
similar: half funny, half repellant. They were also, we could see right
away, bad for the
men's morale and honour. Here, for the first time, I witnessed wanton
destruction that I
was later in life to see to excess: this is something that is unhealthily
bound up with
the economic thinking of our age, but it does more harm than good to the
destroyer,
and dishonours the soldier.
Some influential men in the warring states understood what was happening,
and
called for talks to explore an armistice. But governments refused, and we
see that
soldiers are at the mercy of their political masters. The military does not
negotiate the
goals it is fighting to achieve. It is a tool of government. Thus warriors
for capitalist
systems are always betrayed, as we see in the case of Rhodesia and South
Africa,
and as it will turn out for BritZOG and USZOG troops in the Middle East.
It is seen that Germany is being "out-capitalized" by her opponents. Of the
German
final offensive (July 1918) Junger writes:
Their advance showed how much the enemy's strength was increasing,
supplemented by drafts from every corner of the earth. We had fewer men to
set
against them, many were little more than boys, and we were short of
equipment and
training. It was all we could do to plug gaps with our bodies as the tide
flooded in.
There wasn't the wherewithal for great counter-attacks like Cambrai any
more.
and
With every attack, the enemy came forwards with more powerful means; his
blows
were swifter and more devastating. Everyone knew we could no longer win.
But we
would stand firm.
It will not do here to recite the appalling statistics from the Great War.
But if we keep its
main effects in mind we will see our present situation more clearly. If
white resistance
would win territory from itself and destroy ZOG, its leaders must imagine
accurately
how its theories will play out in the field. With this in mind I have
culled a few more
excerpts that might aid our thinking:
It was an odd thing that our apparently confused actions in the depth of
the night had
had such pronounced and public consequences. We had done our part towards
bringing the (enemy) attack, which had begun with such mighty force, to a
halt.
However colossal the quantities of men and materiel, the work at decisive
points had
been done by no more than a few handfuls of men.
The high command offered a reward of 30 pfennigs for each enemy propaganda
leaflet. The costs were levied on the populations of the occupied
territory.
Most of all, I was busy with the training of a small shock troop, since I
had come to
understand in the course of the last few engagements that there was an
increasing
rearrangement of our fighting strength in progress. To make an actual
breach or
advance, there was now only a very limited number of men on whom one might
rely,
who had developed into a particularly resilient body of fighters, whereas
the bulk of
the men were at best fit to lend support. Given these circumstances, it
might be better
to be at the head of a small and determined group than the commander of an
uncertain company.
I had got together some kit appropriate to the sort of work I meant to be
doing: across
my chest, two sandbags, each containing four stick-bombs, impact fuse on
the left,
delay on the right; in my right tunic pocket an 08 revolver on a long cord,
in my right
trouser pocket a little Mauser pistol, in my left tunic pocket five egg
hand grenades, in
the left trouser pocket luminous compass and whistle, in my belt
springhooks for
pulling out the pins, plus bowie knife and wire cutters. In my inside tunic
pocket I
carried full wallet with my home address, in my right back pocket, a flat
flask of cherry
brandy. We had removed shoulder straps and Gibraltar badges, so as to give
our
opponents no clue as to our regiment...
This release of Storm of Steel by Penguin might have political
motives. The
Internet has brought out verboten texts and opinions. The media,
understanding that the cat's forelegs are out of the bag, might be
attempting to divert
the public towards less racialist writings of the arch enemy, Germans.
ZOG's primary
weapon is propaganda, but this is being eroded by the Internet. The war
against
Aryans by jews and capitalists thus is changing course. The day of 9/11
marks it. No
preparations will prove useful without knowledge of history, however. We
should start
with Storm of Steel.
WILLIAM YATES
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