Nicholas R. Jeelvy writes: “…the yearning for self-destruction exhibited by many Dissident Rightists in a non-sexual sense. For many, being hated and hounded by the system is precisely what attracts them to the Dissident Right. They want to be Nazis precisely because the current morality deems it morally justified to punch, persecute, deplatform, fire, and ultimately kill Nazis. There’s a little bit of the sociopathic urge to be notorious and feared at play, but far stronger is the will to self-destruction. This will to self-destruction exists because it is the ultimate act of independence and self-actualization in the egotistic and thanatophobic modern world where a long life is the ultimate good. But this self-destruction cannot take the form of your bog-standard suicide, because suicide is destigmatized and excused and suicides are pitied. No, the destruction of the self must come at the tail end of a grand epic of self-denial so that the self may be actualized.”
I contend that there is simply nothing genuine to learn from him, and few people who have written in support of Mishima can point to anything tangible beyond the amorphous outlines of the Mishima Myth and a film heavy on style and low on authenticity. There is no single piece of text, no treatise, and no piece of authenticity beyond a final, radically un-European and sadomasochistically-inspired act of self-destruction and death-embracing nihilism. Mishima’s monarchism was servile and parodic, his militarism homoerotic, disingenuous and ludicrous, and his death-as-political-statement was psychosexual and ultimately lacking in logic. Otomo is probably correct in viewing the coup attempt more as a sexually inspired method of “politicising art rather than expressing a belief in ultra-nationalism.”[49]
The question thus arises as to whether associating ourselves with such a figure, surely a clownish homoerotic wignat in today’s vernacular, brings more positives or negatives, both within the Dissident Right and within broader considerations of “optics” or public image. In particular, we should question whether we want to place our politics in a nexus that involves, to borrow the terminology of the Japan scholar Susan Napier, “the interrelationship between homosexuality, politics, and the peculiar form of violence-prone psychosexual nihilism from which Mishima suffered.”[50] I’d argue in the negative.
