Let Us Now Praise the Supermen

The New Right is not as transgressive as it thinks.

There’s no reason why the name “Alfredo Stroessner” should mean anything to Americans today, which is why I was surprised to find him mentioned in Bronze Age Mindset, the 2018 book written by the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, a writer much admired by the Trumpist New Right, a follower of Friedrich Nietzsche. I was even more surprised that BAP considers Stroessner a great man.

A lifetime ago, Stroessner was the dictator of the Republic of Paraguay, a small country sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil, from 1954 to 1989. This is what BAP has to say about Stroessner:

Above all you must reach for the great aim, physical and military independence. Only the warrior is a free man. The only right government is military government, and every other form is both hypocritical and destructive of true freedom. You must aim high! … Some time ago I spoke with another frog about Generalissimo Alfredo Stroessner. He was dictator of Paraguay for forty years. He went to sleep at one in the morning and got up at 4 AM; aside from this he took a two hour siesta in the afternoon (this is before air conditioning, and siesta is a necessity in tropical places). The entire day he worked relentlessly for his country and to keep down the vicious and Satanic communist sect that would have massacred his people — but he also did this for his own glory!

In BAP’s telling, Stroessner’s glory comes not from the fact that he did anything good — however generous it was of him to protect his people from communist massacre — but from the fact that he was strong. Stroessner transcended the limits imposed by his enemies and by civil or moral law. (It’s funny that BAP finds it necessary to justify the two hour siesta to his readers. BAP has transcended good and evil but not the Protestant work ethic.)

BAP is not wrong: there actually were massacres committed in Latin America, many of them by Marxist guerrillas. In Paraguay and surrounding areas, however, they were largely perpetrated by anti-communist forces, including by Stroessner himself. A stalwart anti-communist who received intermittent support from the United States, in the 1970s, Stroessner joined forces with the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, and the Argentine Military Junta to destroy the region’s left wing guerrillas in an infamous CIA-coordinated project known as Operación Cóndor.

Stroessner was eventually ousted by one of his closest comrades, General Andrés Rodríguez. The coup had a court-intrigue dimension to it: Rodríguez’s third daughter was married to Stroessner’s firstborn son. After Rodríguez triumphed in the swift two day coup in February of 1989, the world assumed he would become a dictator himself. But there the court intrigue would end, and Rodríguez would choose to conform to the winds of international politics. The Berlin Wall would not fall until November of that year, but democracy was already the global trend. Argentina had returned to democratic elections in 1986, and Brazil adopted a new, democratic constitution in 1988. Rodríguez called for elections, won those elections (without significant fraud, according to international observers), and then retired after his term was over. His successor was a civilian, the first non-military president in Paraguay since the 1930s.

One of my earliest memories as a child is of the rubble of the 1989 coup. I grew up under the new political dispensation, when we believed that Rodríguez’s achievements were noble: both the violent coup he successfully led, and the peaceful surrender of power at the end of his presidential term. I found a bumper sticker with Rodríguez’s picture on it, and put it on my toy infantry helmet. Yet the new order that Rodríguez established might not have satisfied the utopian ideals of the left wing rebels that Stroessner vanquished in the 1970s. Consider these words from Prison, Torture and Escape, the 1990 memoirs of Juan G. Ventre Buzarquis, who at barely 20 years of age was part of a guerrilla group, called the 14th of May Movement, which tried, unsuccessfully, to overthrow the dictator in 1959.

The person writing this does want to emphasize that the men of the 14th of May Movement — its guerrillas — despite the fact that on countless occasions we have been branded as “useful idiots,” we had the courage enough to wield the very poor weapons that the organization had and, be that as it may, we put our skin at the service of the noble democratic and anti-dictatorial ideals.

And we did it for a PARAGUAY where equality prevails …

I don’t know how happy Ventre Buzarquis was with the imperfect democracy established by Rodríguez after Stroessner’s overthrow. But at least it allowed him to return from exile and publish his memoirs.

Neither the utopian guerrilla nor the enlightened soldier impress Bronze Age Pervert, however. Neither Ventre Buzarquis nor General Rodriguez live up to his vision of a hero. BAP prefers the Third World strongman who rules with a caring fist, fighting communists while convincing the Americans to fill his coffers. In his heart of hearts, as he himself confesses, BAP would have us emulate the Greek heroes, people like Alcibiades or Alexander the Great. But, he laments, “I’m afraid that, in the end, the examples of ancient men of strong hand, ancient men of power, will be very discouraging to many of you. Because you can’t easily replicate their achievements and power in our time, and also, many of you are actually sissies compared to them, in your blood.” Maybe Stroessner is easier to emulate.

These are Stroessner’s achievements, such as they were: Stroessner imposed order after two decades of political unrest, held on to power for three and a half decades by crushing left wing opposition, intimidating the opposition Liberal Party, and winning bogus elections. He brought wealth to the country in the 1980s, once he struck a deal with the Brazilian government to build the then-largest hydroelectric dam in the world: Itaipu, along the Paraná river. He built a highway system that excluded those cities where the opposition was popular. His mandate, so to speak, was to maintain order. He modernized the country to the extent that it helped him exert his control. “Democracy without patriotism does not interest us,” was a typical statement. But his power depended a lot on his usefulness to the United States. Once Jimmy Carter cut American support, his power declined.

Why might BAP prefer a mythical Stroessner to — had he ever heard of them — a guerrilla fighter or a General Rodriguez? More than wanting to scandalize the libs, the attraction is obvious: the mythical Stroessner bows before no gods. His glory was beyond the law. Even Stroessner’s allusion to “patriotism” was a ruse: what he did he did for glory. The guerrilla Ventre Buzarquis was no doubt a courageous man (read this memoirs: they are full of nighttime border crossings, firefights, torture, terror generally), but ultimately he bows before a principle of mediocrity: equality. The same goes for Rodríguez, who ceded power to a chimera called democracy. Stroessner was ousted from power, but he never abandoned his pride.

I am not sure whether BAP’s work actually embodies the spirit of the New Right, or, instead, what the New Right would like itself to be. The New Right, despite itself, does not actually live beyond all gods. It respects the law, or a law, anyway. It appeals to a principle in order to get away with provocation. To draw from a more recent example, the right wing history podcaster known as Martyr Made released a video whose visual effects glamorize Hitler and the Nazis: it’s obviously going for goosebumps. But Martyr Made justifies the video (it’s a trailer for an upcoming podcast) by saying that it’s in the service of telling Hitler’s side of the story accurately. In other words, it is in the service of historical truth, which must be grasped in all of its complexity and nuance. By his own account, Martyr Made is not beyond the law, not beyond gods: he believes that he is serving the truth as he sees it.

Or consider another Trumpist artifact, the “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight” video posted on the White House X page. The images and sounds are meant, literally, to titillate the viewer. Chains, handcuffs, faceless prisoners marching up a metal staircase into an airplane which will fly them back to where they came from. It is meant to be a show of strength — of glory, of the new Golden Age, as Trump himself says. “He who saves his Country does not violate any law,” Trump posted, to the chagrin of many. But he’s only talking tough. The ASMR video derives its justification precisely from the law. It is illegal immigrants that the Administration is making a show of in that video. Trump respects the law, is what he’s saying — unlike his predecessor, who left the border open. With that video, Trump shows off not his own sovereign will but his respect for the law, as he conceives of it. His political legitimacy, at least in this case, rests upon his respect for the law, as his supporters conceive of it. In this vein, I once met a young military officer from Chile who told me that he had no bad words to say about the late dictator, Pinochet. Why? I asked him. “Hizo cumplir la ley,” he told me. It’s an interesting phrase: not so much, “He followed the law,” but, “He made it so that the law was followed.” Weirdly, Stroessner too was obsessed with legality; torture was legitimized by judicial process. Even the dictators who broke the law pretended to be acting in service to the law.

The “law” I’m talking about here is any rule that one can appeal to in order to justify one’s actions. It can be the law of the state, or it can be the moral law. It is some sort of higher principle that transcends day-to-day politics. So Martyr Made appeals to the principle of historical accuracy, Trump to the principle of sovereignty, and Stroessner to the principle of order. The true follower of Nietzsche does not appeal to any principle. He is beyond good and evil, a creator of value, a follower of no law. The Nietzschean impulse is alive on the Right. But who is actually following through on it? Who actually dares to live beyond good and evil?

A liberal version of this beyond-good-and-evil position exists as well. Consider the Israeli scientist Yuval Harari’s statements here:

“Human rights is just a story,” Harari says. There is nothing ultimately “real” about them; they are merely one story among many. Human rights might be (and Harari believes they are) a story preferable to other stories, for many reasons. But there is nothing in the hard stuff of reality that makes human rights “more real” than, say, crimes against human rights. We all live beyond the law, if the law does not exist. Harari is, in this sense, more provocative than Trump. But he does not mean to provoke; he wants to reassure his audience that the transition into a Nietzschean future is going to be OK.

I am not convinced that anyone I’ve quoted above is truly aware of what it means to reject the reality of any overarching principle, any superior law, and to act in a completely sovereign, beyond-good-and-evil fashion. Their words seem more like violent gestures or smug self-promotion. But there is a more relatable side to all this, and that lies in the desire to find someone to emulate. For some reason, many people today believe that only the man who transcends the law is worthy of being a role model. Anything else is weak. Human rights are unconvincing. Any argument against this belief is close to pointless. You can only point to another model, a better alternative.

Here’s a brief interview with Luis Alfonso Resck, one-time leader of the Paraguayan Christian Democrat Party. The interview was conducted by the Museo Virtual del Stronismo, a now-defunct project to create an online record of oral histories and documentary evidence about the crimes of the Stroessner regime. (The project was funded by an NGO that received funding from USAID, which of course has dried up.) In this interview, Resck is ushered into the room in the police station where he was tortured more than one hundred times. Among the methods of torture: electrodes attached to his genitals electrocuted him as he was dunked into a bathtub. Resck returns, remembers, and leaves. He still stands today, and believes himself justified — not by his own strength, but something else, something that has outlasted his torturers.

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This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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