Designation of the ‘Enemy’ and the ‘Friend’, ‘Enemy’ and ‘Adversary’

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The enemy is one who physically poses a danger, who endeavours to eliminate you by making you disappear; the adversary dominates and weakens you.

It’s totally erroneous to designate an abstract entity, a doctrine, or a system (like liberalism or socialism) as an enemy, even if one thinks it ought to be resisted. The enemy is someone. Carl Schmitt has said of the enemy that he is ‘the shape or configuration of our own question’. Also: ‘Woe to him who has no enemy, for I myself shall be his enemy on Judgment Day’. Whoever, in effect, has no enemies and sees no dangers will always be defenceless against a cynical enemy: as is the case today, in the Europeans’ confrontation with their Third World colonisers.

Europe’s principal enemy at present is the alien, the colonising immigrant masses, and Islam. Her principal adversary is America, which allies with Islam to weaken and dominate Europe. In opposition to liberalism, which understands the essence of politics as mere state management, Carl Schmitt defines it in terms of ‘designating the enemy’: a definition that is true but insufficient. The political also entails designating the friend, that is, designating allies, but even more, designating one’s co-religionists, comrades, and ethnic brothers, those who possess the same interests, the same origins, and the same values.

Decadent civilisations designate their friends as enemies and their enemies as friends. Thus it is that Europe’s governing elites demonise and ostracise as ‘fascists’ whoever opposes the alien ethnic colonisers, even though these alleged ‘fascists’ defend their people’s identity and survival. By the same turn, the elites designate as friends and protect the alien masses colonising her.

A striking but clarifying example: Arabs and Muslims could be our geopolitical and cultural allies if they remained in their own lands, but once installed in Europe they are our enemies. America, similarly, is an adversary, though it is not intrinsically and eternally so. The adversary endeavours to weaken and dominate, but not physically colonise and annihilate. This is why those intellectuals who designate America as the ‘principal enemy’ commit the grossest of logical errors.

(see ethnomasochism; xenophilia)

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was an important German jurist who wrote about political science, geopolitics and constitutional law. He was part of the Conservative Revolutionary movement of the Weimar era. He also briefly supported the National Socialists at the beginning of their regime, although they later turned against him. He remains highly influential in the fields of law and philosophy.

From Theory of the Partisan (New York: Telos Press, 2007), p. 85. A footnote to this phrase in the Telos Press edition of this work notes that its meaning is explained in Schmitt’s postwar notebooks: ‘Historia in nuce [history in a nutshell]. Friend and Enemy. The friend is he who affirms and confirms me. The enemy is he who challenges me (Nuremberg 1947). Who can challenge me? Basically, only myself. The enemy is he who defines me. That means in concreto: only my brother can challenge me and only my brother can be my enemy.’ From Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), p. 217.
From Ex Captivitate Salus (Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1950), quoted in Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000), p. 132.