Heroes
Emblematic figures of mythic or real personage representing the superior values of a people or a nation — who are willing to sacrifice themselves for their people’s sake.
European civilisation was founded on the basis of heroic gestures, its ‘holy book’ being the Iliad, then the Odyssey. A society is evidently judged by its heroes and anti-heroes. Today, the dominant ideology tends to reject all notion of heroism. Strong, virile, conquering societies, like Islam, have always had their cult of hero-martyrs. In the French school system, heroes have been banished and are no longer referenced (Joan of Arc, Bayard,[1] du Guesclin,[2] etc., and by all means let’s not speak of Charles Martel, who would probably be accused of ‘racism’); even the republican heroes of the Revolution are no longer evoked! There were, though, some residual heroes for the generation of May ‘68 (Che Guevara, Mao, Castro, Frantz Fanon,[3] etc.), whose dubious stature actually has since diminished.
The post-conciliar[4] Catholic Church, in its rigorous campaign of sabotage, no longer insists on the cult of saints, suspected of latent paganism. Egalitarians reject heroes because they are superior personalities, who rise above the mass, providing it with exemplary models and, at the same time, lending themselves to a dynamic notion of the people — as a historical community of destiny, born from the exemplary standards of its great creative personalities — a notion, of course, now totally diabolised. Heroes are models, who sacrifice for their people’s sake: something completely incomprehensible for today’s ‘clerks’.
Our decadent, ethnomasochistic society cannot, however, avoid forging pseudo-heroes or sub-heroes: football players, soap opera stars, humanitarian doctors, and tutti quanti.[5]
The United States, this society allegedly more decadent than Europe (a view which demands demonstration), is, paradoxically, constantly celebrating in literature and cinema its cult of patriotic heroes. This is especially curious in that the United States has created the pseudo-heroes of media and show business, the buffoons fabricated by the ‘society of the spectacle’.[6] An analysis of the U.S. situation is thus not so simple. Its popular cult of heroes is unthinkable in Europe, where patriotic heroism is ridiculed for its ‘primitivism’ and cultural elites devote themselves to a blasé negativity. The heroes in French cinema over the last twenty years or so have been for the most part deranged, arm-breaking, psychopathic types. For better or worse, it’s been the American cinema that has valorised European heroes. For example, films like The 300 Spartans, Excalibur, Braveheart, etc.
Europe’s regeneration will include rehabilitating her heroes in popular culture. It’s amazing, though, the way the media has stunned the public with their insane cult of millionaire athletes, of talentless but well-paid movie and music stars, and of phony personalities created by opinion polls — all of whose hypocritical ‘heroism’ is a matter of financial privilege and histrionic vanity.
(see born leader; personality, creative)
- ↑ Pierre Terrail LeVieux (1473-1524), otherwise known as the Chevalier de Bayard, was a French Knight who fought in many battles and came to be seen as the embodiment of the chivalric ideal.
- ↑ Bertrand du Guesclin (c. 1320-1380) was a French Knight and military commander who won many battles during the Hundred Years’ War.
- ↑ Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a Martiniquan Marxist intellectual and African nationalist whose writings, particularly The Wretched of the Earth, have been highly influential upon anti-colonialist movements.
- ↑ Meaning after the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65.
- ↑ Latin: ‘everything’.
- ↑ This is a term coined by Guy Debord (1931-1994), a French Marxist philosopher and the founder of the anarchist Situationist International. The spectacle, as described in his principal work, The Society of the Spectacle, is one of the means by which the capitalist establishment maintains its authority in the modern world — namely, by reducing all genuine human experiences to representational images in the mass media, thus allowing the powers-that-be to determine how individuals experience reality.
