A New White Elite

Lessons from the Forest Passage

Ernst Jünger was a German World War 1 hero, known for his book Storm of Steel, a war diary which, unlike Remarque’s All’s Quiet on the Western Front, doesn’t cry like a toddler for his mommy to come and save him. Jünger didn’t shun war. He felt war’s confrontation with death made men live up to their true selves.

The technological age, however, changed warfare, and heroism, for the worse. Machines, not men, were now in charge of destiny. Machines reduced men to mere levers and gears in a gigantic meat-grinding machine. And so, Jünger began writing philosophy.

His best book, arguably, was The Forest Passage (German: Der Waldgang). It reads like a manual for individual guerillas to find their way into the unknown. Even the churches can only help prepare this forest rebel for the unexpected future, but cannot guide him.

In Jünger’s vision, a forest rebel who walks the forest path is anyone who still knows “what true freedom is”. He is a person in whom “something uncorupted” still lives. And one day, he may transfer his wolfish nature onto the sheeple (normies), and turn them into a wolfpack—the elites’ greatest nightmare.

Jünger espouses a deeply aristocratic ideal in which such wolfish forest rebels ultimately find each other to form a new elite, one that devours the old, corrupt establishment. One that frees their people from the constraints of machinated servitude.

Modern education, Jünger explains, only trains people to be docile and servile, namely to serve their corrupt upper classes.

But what I found most mysterious about Jüngers book is his juxtaposition of The Forest vis-à-vis what he calls “The Ship”. In philosophical turns undoubtedly heavily influenced by contemporary thinker Martin Heidegger, Jünger proposes The Ship, out at sea, as the “temporally limited” plane of existence, versus “The Forest” as the temporally unlimited.

Why does he make this distinction between Sea and Forest? And why did Jünger say Germans and Russians share the same Forest experience? He doesn’t say it out loud, but the Sea is the Anglo-American civilization and its merchant ships.

Jünger offers us a deeply cryptic message saying as much as: One day, the Germans and the Russians will find each other’s experience relatable. The Forest Rebels, then, shall emerge from the forests of Germany and Russia, and oppose the ships of the sea-faring Anglo-American powers.

Jünger cites a book by Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory, about a priest fleeing the atheist armies of socialism. That priest flees into the jungle of Southern Mexico as socialist death squads are out hunting to kill all priests. But the man vows to remain a priest until his end.

The forest rebel, then, is anyone who dares to make a stand. The forest rebel must live in the here and now, and stay loyal only to his own beliefs.

As, today, many a outspoken, young TikTok nationalist has found mutuals on the app, we are seeing precisely the sort of elite-formation as predicted by Jünger. Young people fed up with their regime are discovering their equals online.

And they are, invariably, the rural types, young men and women, emerging from the Forest, opposing the Sea.

The Sun is rising.