ANOTHER REMINDER THAT THE ALT-RIGHT GOT KALERGI COMPLETELY WRONG

Note: this passage is from a longer academic essay by a Dutch academic. It supports a view promoted on this site that Coudenhove-Kalergi was actually an extremely "based and red-pilled" pro-European. 

Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and his Jewish wife Ida.

by Robin de Bruin

Coudenhove-Kalergi was a staunch supporter of European global dominance and his call for a European rebirth also shows a strong similarity with the aims of the Alt-Right. In Pan-Europa, he wrote that Europe’s culture was ‘die Kultur der weißen Rasse’ (‘the culture of the white race’), which was a product of Antiquity and Christianity. As a result of migration within Europe, all the people of Europe were ‘Mischvölker’ (‘people of mixed ethnic background’), he argued (Coudenhove-Kalergi [1923] 1982, 34 and 135). In fact, there was one white European race.

However, as the son of a Japanese mother and an Austro-Hungarian father, and being married to a Jewish Austrian wife, Coudenhove-Kalergi was certainly not a traditional white supremacist. Coudenhove-Kalergi thought that ‘Jewish blood’ should form an important ingredient in the to-be-created European ‘mixed race’ (Ziegerhofer-Prettenthaler 2004). In his 1925 book Praktischer Idealismus, he wrote that racial groups, like the Jews, and social classes would gradually disappear in the future. An ‘eurasisch-negroide Zukunftsrasse’ (‘Eurasian-Negroid future race’) would replace the existing races. ‘Die Rassen und Klassen im heutigen Sinne werden verschwinden’, he concluded, but ‘die Persönlichkeiten bleiben’ (‘Race and class in today’s understanding will disappear, but the personalities will remain’) (Coudenhove-Kalergi 1925, 23 and 55). A few years later, he changed his views and argued that the white race should stand united in case of conflict with the black race (Coudenhove-Kalergi 1929, 1; Richard 2010). Internal divisions would weaken the European race ‘in the face of the real racial opposition between Whites and Blacks’ (Coudenhove-Kalergi 1937, 199; transl. Richard 2010).

Today, representatives of the Alt-Right movement mix up these phrases about these various expectations for the future in an attempt to prove that Coudenhove-Kalergi, as a tool in the hands of Jewish puppet masters, had developed a plan for a large-scale blending of people from Europe with people from Africa. Endless references to this alleged ‘Kalergi Plan’ can be found online, from the Greek neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn to the discussion boards of quality newspapers. In 2017 even a former member of the Dutch Lower House for the Conservative Liberal VVD, who now is an adviser to Thierry Baudet’s FvD, said on Twitter that the European political response to the refugee crisis was apparently meant to bring the aims of this ‘Kalergi Plan’ to fruition (Klei 2017). Even those with no sympathy for white supremacists continuously repeat this same meme. The Reddit.com board (or subreddit) for people of mixed ethnic, partly Asian heritage held discussions of Coudenhove-Kalergi in 2017, because 4chan’s ‘/pol/’ board had portrayed the ‘mastermind behind the destruction of the white race’ as a ‘disgruntled WMAF [child of a white male and an Asian female] Eurasian male seeking revenge’.

One of the subreddit contributors noted correctly that Coudenhove-Kalergi was ‘the only non-Jew to be mentioned literally thousands of times on /pol/ [“4chan”] as the dark force behind white genocide’. Another contributor concluded on Reddit that ‘the readers of the [Alt-Right website] Daily Stormer were quite disturbed that a Half Germanic, Half Samurai would do something like this to the white race’. A third person concluded that the ‘jews [sic] will often use good goys [like Coudenhove-Kalergi] to carry out their plan, thus masking their actions and avoiding reciprocity’.

One question that remains puzzling is why the Alt-Right movement is so obsessed with Coudenhove-Kalergi – despite the fact that he could, to some extent, be regarded as a kindred spirit to the sympathisers of the Alt-Right movement (Van Der Horst 2017). Why do they focus on conservative figures like Coudenhove-Kalergi rather than left-wing advocates of European federalism such as the Italian Altiero Spinelli? An answer could be found in a fully internalised, fundamental conviction that the nation state belongs to the natural order of things, and is threatened by the process of European integration. They might feel betrayed by an influential person who was both a conservative and an advocate of European union. His being of ‘mixed race’ might be an aggravating circumstance.