4,856 words
Alex Kurtagic
Mister
Foreword by Tomislav Sunic
Guildford, U.K.: Iron Sky Publishing, 2009
Imagine a novel that is a marriage of George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four and Jean Raspail’s depressing account of the genocide of Europeans, The Camp of the Saints.
As the definitive dystopian novel of our age, Nineteen Eighty-Four conjures up a world that has far too many parallels to our own day for comfort. For starters, the technocratic totalitarian State of the novel echoes loudly in forms we see today such as the Department of Homeland Security and Federal programs such as the Clinton-era Carnivore that could sift through all e-mail traffic.
The protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a government functionary named Winston Smith, develops an intense dislike of the cynical regime under which he must live, so he sets out to personally foil the omnipresent and omnipotent system of Big Brother. As is famously known, Smith is naïve in believing he can escape the system’s notice and is arrested, tortured and re-educated to love The Party like all other good citizens.
Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (read the Preface here) is cut from different cloth. Unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four, it focuses on race and racial differences, where European whites are on the verge of extinction . . . “encircled by seven billion people, only seven hundred million of them white, hardly a third of them in our little Europe, and those no longer in bloom but quite old.” Boatloads of starving refugees from India head for the shores of southern France, packed onto the ship’s deck:
[I]t was like trying to count all the trees in the forest, those arms raised high in the air, waving and shaking together, all outstretched toward the nearby shore. Scraggy branches, brown and black, quickened by a breath of hope. All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms. And they rose up out of scraps of cloth, white cloth that must have been tunics once, and togas, and pilgrims’ saris.
In the end, these non-white multitudes overwhelm the native Europeans whose sentimental liberalism has prevented them from making the effort needed to save even themselves. The last holdout — mountainous Switzerland — succumbs as well, destined to suffer the fate of its fellow European nations, overrun by “the howling, swarming horde. Thousands of human ants, streaming down the zigzag path from Fontgembar, in an endless column, bristling with fists, and sticks, and scythes, and guns . . .”
Alex Kurtagic’s Mister features both the Orwellian logic of a highly technologized but dehumanized society and the inundation of Europe by non-white swarms. It is the story of an unnamed Brit who leaves his comfortable home outside London for a business trip to Spain. Known only as “Mister,” the protagonist is highly intelligent, at least in the fields of technology, business, and tax evasion. An apolitical gentleman, as Tomislav Suni? describes him in the book’s foreword, Mister exhibits a shocking shallowness that turns out to be central to both his impending predicament, as well as what has already befallen his less intelligent fellow white Europeans.
Kurtagic’s blog describes Mister and his setting:
A status-conscious IT consultant travels to Madrid for a week of meetings at Scoptic, who have hired him to implement a fiendishly arcane accounting system equipped with artificial intelligence, in an effort to keep the company one step ahead of the government’s rapacious tax authorities. Renowned within the catacombs of the scientific community, and with an impressive publishing record in the most prestigious trade and academic journals, he expects to do serious business with a serious organisation. The only problem is that he lives in a hot, overcrowded world where nothing works: hyperinflation, crumbling infrastructure, rampant crime, political correctness, corruption at all levels, and a new world order globalist government, determined to regulate, monitor, and tax every aspect of a person’s life; opposed to the forces of totalitarian democracy are occult underground movements, most notably the Esoteric Hitlerists. As a result, nothing goes according to plan, and frustrations mount as things go only from bad to worse . . .
Kurtagic is a master at creating a living, breathing impression of this nightmarish world, beginning on the very first pages where Mister prepares to board his British Airways flight:
By the time the announcement had been made in English, it was almost impossible to hear anything beyond the foreground murmur of human conversation. The gate had by then long disappeared behind a forest of boubous, abayas, burqas, and business suits, rising above a chaotic undergrowth of push-chairs, plastic bags, rucksacks, handbags, briefcases, and screaming children. Of course, the pre-boarding announcement had invited only a fraction of those standing, but it was clear to him that they all thought themselves in competition for space inside the overhead compartments inside the aircraft; their strategising had begun the moment they had entered the departure lounge, their eyes darting towards the front of the enclousure, scanning for empty seats and cunningly calculating optimal positions.
This Hobbesian sense of war of all against all never leaves us in the novel, which at 531 pages means the reader feels like he has dragged himself into the 23rd inning and still faces the prospect of more. Or, as Kurtagic noted in an interview with Sunic, it was meant to show “a process of strangulation” that would “overwhelm the reader.” That it does — in spades.
As mentioned, the central character is a shallow man, confusing fundamentally important things with superficial social standing and attire. Obsessed with brand-name clothing, Mister prides himself on his Gieves and Hawkes grey chalkstripe suit and sneers at those who possess less. Further, he appears clueless to the fact that the social norms operant in the recent past have little sway in the multi-racial, multicultural world of 2022.
Thus, when he is at first denied boarding of his flight, he bellows:
You did not follow correct procedure. You have not made the proper announcements, so the flight is not closed. So, please, log back on, swipe my boarding pass, check my passport, and let me through!… I paid for a service and you are refusing to provide it. If you do not let me through, I will make a formal complaint and sue British Airways for breach of contract.
While such threats from a “serious man” are successful this time, they appear comic once Mister has arrived in Madrid, the site of perpetual confirmation that nature is indeed red in tooth and claw. For now, however, he finds his seat back at Heathrow. Sad to say, his discomfort has only begun, for, as Kurtagic portrays, Mister is about to endure the assault on civilized senses that modern air travel has become.
One of 853 passengers, Mister shares his row in œconomy (Kurtagic favors archaic English spellings) with “a colourfully attired Afro-Caribbean woman, holding a crying infant on one of her prodigious mammaries, which rested on her giant thigh,” and an obese Chinese student who vomits into his airsickness bag before the plane has ever left the gate.
Mister’s growing thirst amidst the heat of the airline cabin foreshadows the heat and dryness of Spain. On the plane, “He pressed the cabin call button once more. It had no effect. His throat itched with desiccated asperity.” And this is even before take-off (and a long delay in which passengers must deplane). Once in the air, he is prevented from buying two small cans of juice (at €20 a pop) because airline rules limit passengers to one can only. Musing about the past, Mister recalls, “The ordinary cup of yesteryear had fallen victim to the rising cost of potable water. With Southern England’s reservoirs now in permanent crisis, and water consumption subject to a battery of climate levies, any beverage containing water had become an Oriental luxury.”
Having finally arrived at the airport in Madrid, Mister encounters the use of Spanish — as does the reader. Here Kurtagic begins his gambit of scripting conversations in Spanish: “‘Pare. ¿No lleva equipaje?’ said the first número. ‘No. No llevo,’ he replied.”
These conversations continue sometimes for half a page, with translations in 7-point font at the bottom. While this is a burden for the reader, it does add to the sense of being in a foreign country, as well as in a world that doesn’t quite make sense. In addition, it is a harsh reminder that our own English-speaking world is shrinking (“Press one for English, two for Spanish.”) Further, this first encounter with Spanish is with two brutal members of the Guardia Civil, who constantly scream at Mister because he has brought no luggage with him. Can such a situation be far off for LAX?
Kurtagic spent some of his youth growing up in Latin America, so his command of Spanish is convincing. Further, he claims that many of the Madrid scenes he scripted were based on street life he observed in South America. If so, the rising tide of color bodes ill for those of us in the North.
Once out of the airport, the sense of claustrophobia and chaos only increases. Jammed into a cab, Mister is accosted by Europe’s Blade-Runner future. “A cacophony of horns suddenly erupted around them. The cabbie had decided to abandon the lane, but a driver on the target lane, a Mestizo in his thirties wearing a cowboy hat, had been determined not to allow him access.” A fight ensues:
“¡Te voy a matar, negro maricón!” screamed the Mestizo, with an Ecuadorian accent.
The cabbie used his right hand to slam Cowboy’s head against the dashboard. . . . Cowboy responded by grabbing the cabbie’s face, as if to rip its flesh; however, he was in an awkward position, and the cabbie was able to grab Cowboy by the hair and once again and repeatedly slam his attacker’s head against the dashboard. Angry horns flared around them, followed by angry shouting from the motorists behind them. . . . Cowboy managed again to grab hold of the cabbie’s shirt, and, holding the two-way radio’s microphone by the cable, smashed it against the cabbie’s forehead as hard as he could. The blow was weak, however, because Cowboy’s torso was still in a horizontal position and there was not enough room to properly swing the device. Realising this, Cowboy then decided to pull his torso out of the vehicle and rip the microphone out of the radio. The cabbie was unable to prevent Cowboy’s vandalism, and, before her had time to think of an appropriate act of retaliation, witnessed Cowboy climbing over the cab’s bonnet, and repeatedly kicking the windscreen with his high-heeled boot. The cabbie burst out of his vehicle and jumped onto the bonnet, where he pushed Cowboy with violent force. Cowboy landed on his back, slamming against the bonnet of his car.
At this point, two racially-indeterminate men materialised, running in to join in the brawl.
We quickly realize that this passes for “sport” in the gladiator-filled world of 2022. Cars spew out their drivers and passengers as everyone strives to gain a better view of the fight. A man riding a scooter stops, “obviously hoping to witness sufficient spilling of blood, rupturing of septa, and loss of teeth to titillate his cruelty.” Additional people enroll in the fight, but eventually it winds down, as the cabbie retrieves a crowbar from the trunk of his car, causing the defeated Cowboy to call it quits. Alas, such random violence is rife throughout the novel.
The non-whites in Mister are different from the immigrants in Raspail’s novel, however. In Camp of the Saints the immigrants were frail and numerous: “They were there! A million wretches, armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil, the vanguard of the multitudes pressing hard against every part of the tired and overfed West.” In Mister the non-whites are certainly numerous, too, but they are far from weak. On the contrary, the abundance of food found in Europe, along with the savage conditions of life on the streets, allows them to become powerful predators, always willing to use maximum violence to rob, rape, or just relieve the day’s boredom.
In addition to the violence, there exists a pervasive sense of the shortages of life’s most basic needs. This is paired with oppressive heat and always — always — manners of the jungle, as revealed in a Madrid street scene:
All competed for space with a remarkable absence of civility, none above using elbows and shoulders to force or ram their way through. Above them, the sun beat their heads without mercy, burning their skins, blinding their eyes, scorching their scalps, melting the tarmac [pavement] – so strong was the light that it bleached out the grey urban landscape of cement and baked brick; the trees and bushes that had once adorned the avenue had long been dead, desiccated, and cut down, their past existence only evident through the stumps that had been left in the pots and circles of caked dirt lining the pavement. The street thermometer read 46°C [115°F]. It was 8 o’clock in the morning. . . .
If it was teeming above surface, there was no room for an atom beneath the surface. Commuters were packed into the Metro system at a pressure of 1.1 megaPascals, or approximately 11 atmospheres. The queues were interminable, and moved at geological time-scales. It took millions of slow-moving seconds to purchase a ticket, just as long to get to the ticket gates, and again as long to get past security. This entire interval he spent with his feet burning, in a standing position, with his chest pressed against a warm commuter’s back, and someone’s warm chest pressed against his own back, his nose never more than two inches from someone’s head. . . . The air had the consistency of lentil soup, and the stink of body odor and halitosis.
Mister never really gets to spend much time on business, instead using most of his energy and wits simply to stay alive and keep his money and possessions intact. When he does manage to meet with clients, he’s disappointed to learn that their office is in a violent and derelict section of town. At this point, however, Kurtagic is able to mimic another Orwellian construct. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell introduces Emmanuel Goldstein, the elusive author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism and the major enemy of The Party. As such, he is the subject of the daily Two Minutes Hate, a period during which loyal citizens of the State watch the scripted depiction of Goldstein on State television and indulge in a mindless frenzy of hate toward this object of State scorn.
In Mister this object is “The Monster of Long Beach, “an American evolutionary psychologist and columnist, about to be tried at the Human Rights Tribunal in The Hague for crimes against humanity.” Having harmed no one violently, this defendant was unique: He was “a peaceful, urbane, soft-spoken university professor and author of seven books, who had, until his legal troubles began, lived a quiet life, teaching and writing from his base at California State University, Long Beach.”
In the novel, this “monster” is Dr. Kevin MacDonald.
Kurtagic explains how MacDonald’s three books on Judaism — A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements — had been deemed racist and likely to encourage genocidal policies. His tenure has been revoked and his books banned and burned; possession of the books was now illegal.
To show they were serious, the European government staged sting operations in which they would offer underground copies of MacDonald’s works, but in fact would only be interested in collecting the names of people looking for such banned literature.
This development in the novel allows Kurtagic to present a disquisition on MacDonald’s theories, particularly those found in the third book, Culture of Critique. Thus we learn about Freud’s fraudulent concepts, which were always intended to undermine Western culture, and tracts from the Frankfurt School and Franz Boas, which pursued similar goals. Mister begins to catch on, as his business client explains to him how Freud et al. had always been nothing but “ethnopolitical activists masquerading as scientists.”
For such a soft-spoken university professor, MacDonald sure finds himself at the center of a lot of action. As reported by CNN, MacDonald manages to escape from prison in The Hague, prompting an international search and capture operation. “The so-called Monster of Long Beach was not thought to have left the EU. One of the talking heads commenting on the breakout — a rabbi — vehemently asserted that Dr. MacDonald’s writings were poisonous and extremely dangerous: it was vital that he be captured before he gained the opportunity to access a computer or the internet.”
As with Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Goldstein, MacDonald is an obsession of the State. Newspapers carry unflattering photos of him on the front pages, with headlines screaming “MOBUS: DID HE BANKROLL MACDONALD’S BREAKOUT?”
Later, Mister actually shares a ride with MacDonald, but there is no dialogue. In fact, Mister cannot be sure that his fellow passenger was really the escapee, MacDonald. Mister’s fervent hope that it is not MacDonald becomes important when Mister is suddenly and unceremoniously arrested by the Unidad Especial de Intervención, a special police unit used for only the most dangerous missions. Mister stands no chance and is violently arrested.
Here Mister becomes Winston Smith, locked up for his thought crimes. The all-seeing State has detailed records of everything Mister has done, said, or purchased over decades, and uses these to construct a case that Mister is a dangerous racist. At the police station, he is interrogated by two non-white goons, who mercilessly taunt and mock him, clearly showing one of Kurtagic’s important themes: “The former conquerors now behave like the conquered, and the former conquered are devouring their former conquerors.”
As Mister’s freedom is taken away and his psyche gradually broken down, Mister finally begins to reflect more deeply upon what has happened both to himself and to European man. In his cell in the gulag, with the prospect of a decades-long sentence, he asks himself, “How did he end up in that cell?”
The answer speaks to all modern white men. Mister begins to admit that he had known all along about the corruption of society, the nincompoops who passed for politicians, and the slide into chaos throughout Europe. Despite his exceptional intelligence, though, Mister had taken the selfish route:
He had railed against the mediocrity of the common man, fulminated against their choice of political leaders, ranted against the cowardice of politicians beholden to œconomic interest, and raged against the supine addiction to comfort and safety of the general voting public, because they would rather make small concessions here and there than actively defend their freedoms. . . . He had expressed himself on the subject in no uncertain term — except he had done so privately, strictly among trusted friends and family, where there was no risk and therefore where it did not count, while acting in the outside world just like the common man . . . [emphasis added]
Apparently, this is a turning point in the character’s development, as he abandons the position he had previously prided himself on always taking: “Best to keep quiet, make money, live well, and be safe.” Now he faces years in the gulag among resentful non-whites seething with the desire for revenge against the Oppressor. Laws throughout Europe privilege these non-whites, while white men like Mister are apt to trigger the trip-wire on fiendish hate crime laws that have been enacted.
Clearly, Mister is a man taken from Raspail’s Camp of the Saints, where
many Frenchmen of true lineage are no longer anything but hermit-crabs that live in shells abandoned by representatives of a species, now disappeared, that was known as ‘French’. . . They are content to just endure. . . . Under the flag of an illusory internal solidarity and security, they are no longer in solidarity with anything, or even cognizant of anything that would constitute the essential commonalities of a people.
Mister is willing to accept the blame, however, for “he had withheld his talents, withheld his opinions, withheld his energy; in short, opted out, and focused on being comfortable within the domesticity of his life, watching his civilisation being devoured by anarchy, brutality, corruption, incompetence, misguided ideology, and hyperinflation, in an inexorable descent from the light of the stars to the mud of the jungle.” In short, he had by default given the Zionists and corrupt politicians “carte blanche to destroy the world” — his world and our world.
The ending of the novel is disappointing, for the protagonist, instead of using his chance release from prison as an opportunity to finally act, instead reverts immediately to his former selfish, shallow mode, evidenced most starkly by his plaint while trying to get back to England, “I’d give anything for a jar of pomade!”
This is a shame, for the System has finally broken down and Spain is in chaos, giving the native inhabitants the opportunity to throw off their totalitarian oppressors. This should have been the point where the newly enlightened Mister joins them in enacting scenes of revolution, scenes similar to those in the opening pages of William Pierce’s classic novel of white revolution, The Turner Diaries: “Today it finally began! After all these years of talking — and nothing but talking — we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with the System, and it is no longer a war of words. . . . We have finally acted!”
Given Kurtagic’s obvious intelligence, he could have allowed his protagonist to develop into a role model for his race, one who clearly understands the origins of the problems whites face and what must be done to correct them. Pierce did this with his second Andrew Macdonald novel, Hunter, creating the character of Oscar Yeager, a former combat pilot who experiences the “malaise” so common to Western men of his era. The difference is that Yeager acts. In contrast, Mister beats a retreat back to London, tail between his legs.
Does Kurtagic mean for it to end this way? Or might there be a sequel in which Mister regains his jail-cell convictions and actually does something to improve the miserable situation of whites in the Western world?
Kurtagic offers hints that solutions are at hand, one being political involvement. For instance, Kurtagic has the real-life radio show host James Edwards (The Political Cesspool) appear as Governor James Edwards or Tennessee, whose motto about white activism is “No retreat, no surrender, no apologies.”
When a Congressman commits suicide because he was hounded for purported anti-Semitism, Governor Edwards explodes at reporters:
Look: your network helped conduct a hate campaign that drove this man to suicide. Are you going to apologize to his children? Are you going to pay them compensation for the loss of their father? We all know that if the Congressman had not been White he would not have been faced with a vile hate campaign – I am offended by that. When do you plan to say you are sorry? When do you plan to make your donation to American Renaissance and the Council of Conservative Citizens? When do you plan to campaign for a museum honoring the memory of the tens of millions of victims of Soviet terror? Why aren’t you outraged by the fact that not one has been built? Will you now turn yourself in to the authorities so that you can be charged with racism and serve your prison term?
Another available avenue is secession from central governments. In Mister we see resort to this in America, where David Duke (briefly a cellmate of Mister in Spain) has now become President of the newly seceded Confederate States of America. Meanwhile, Vermont had also seceded, while Aztlan, as in other novels, has reverted back to Mexican control.
Harold Covington, in his “Northwest Quartet” novels The Hill of the Ravens, A Distant Thunder, A Mighty Fortress, and The Brigade, covers the fictional story of white secession most extensively. In his books, whites create “the Northwest American Republic,” 40 million racially-conscious white people from all over the world. As in Mister, Aztlan is a Mexican-controlled nation in the American Southwest and California. A similar situation prevails in The Savaged States of America: A Futuristic Fantasy by Kevin Beary. Here, not only is Aztlan where it is supposed to be, but another nation formed out of the American South has been ceded to blacks. It bears the name “Malcolmland.” A rump state called “The Corridor” is all that is left of white America, but it is run by illogical women and populated with emasculated white men who are forced to take anti-testosterone pills. Needless to say, its days are numbered.
Perhaps I am too hard on Kurtagic, for the disease Western men like Mister face is advanced. In fact, it is very much as Raspail describes in Camp of the Saints:
For the West is empty, even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul left. At every level — nations, races, cultures, as well as individuals — it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles. It is the only the soul that forms the weave of gold and brass from which the shields that save the strong are fashioned. I can hardly discern any soul in us.
By having Mister abandon his promises to stand and fight like a man, does Kurtagic conclude — with Raspail — that there is hardly any soul left in us? If true, the fate of the Roman Empire may be our fate, but only in some ways: “The Roman empire did not die any differently, though, it’s true, more slowly, whereas this time we can expect a more sudden conflagration.”
Finally, a few comments on the structure of the novel are in order. Like any good postmodernist, Kurtagic includes in the text a hearty wink at himself. In a conversation with a woman he meets in his hotel, Mister hears about her husband’s story of a genius IT consultant who goes to Spain on business. The book is called Mister. Mister allows that the story sounds familiar, prompting the woman to blurt “There you go. Reality imitates fiction. Hey, you might even be a character in someone’s novel!”
Second, Mister desperately needs a stern editor. For starters, the book is too long. Pruning shaers should be able to bring it down to a more digestible four hundred pages. Next, the spelling errors, missing words, and duplicated phrases (pp. 482-3, for example) have to go. And then there are the marathon paragraphs. Fine, the author means to “overwhelm the reader” with his descriptions of heat and thirst and masses of human bodies, but that does not justify paragraphs that span three pages (see, for instance, the start of chapter 34).
Mostly, however, the eclectic vocabulary has to go. When even a reader with a Ph.D. in the humanities is mystified by the meaning of over a hundred words, it’s time to jettison the steroid-saturated thesaurus. Canescent, consputing, phenolic, contortuplications, catosopher, ephectic, absquatulation, pullulated, eidetic, hypertelic, delectate, paedomorphic, gluttei (it’s spelled correctly the next time it appears), thelyphantic, etc. & etc. Alright already!
On the whole, however, this is a book worth reading, if only to test a hypothesis Kurtagic advances elsewhere:
Of course, were it purely a matter of logic, we would easily win the debate over White displacement and multiculturalism, because our arguments are amply substantiated by science and history. The problem is, however, that we are not dealing with rational processes: we are dealing with psychological processes that stem from an innate human need for belonging and self-esteem, which have been successfully exploited by the masters of discourse, and which are notoriously impervious to logical argument.
Will his novel, then, trigger the desired responses? Like the works by Covington, Beary, and Pierce mentioned above, I do think they help. But where Kurtagic can really contribute is in transforming his novel into other media, particularly visual media. As people throughout the world born after, say, 1970 are famously averse to reading extended arguments, other message forms are needed. Kurtagic, who has experience the music business, understands this, especially the power of style, as he demonstrates here.
As he writes, “The end product to aim for is a parallel universe, comprised of alternative institutions, media, and markets, that legitimates Whiteness and is poised for a cultural reconquista once the present establishment is sufficiently weakened by its own cultural bankruptcy and corruption.”
I look forward, then, to watching Mister as he makes his debut on the big screen or perhaps in an underground Internet video. Kurtagic has spent immense time and effort to create this story, so let’s hope it grows. After all, the White race deserves it.
Mister is available for purchase here.