Counter-Currents
Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 80
Greg Johnson interviews Leo Yankevich on Art & Politics
Leo Yankevich
Leo Yankevich
56:34 / 205 words
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Greg Johnson interviews leading formalist poet Leo Yankevich, who has been hailed as one of the most important poets of the last 100 years. His books include The Unfinished Crusade, The Last Silesian, The Language of Birds, Grief’s Herbs (after Stanisław Grochowiak), The Gnosis of Gnomes, Epistle from the Dark, The Golem of Gleiwitz, Tikkun Olam (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012) and Journey Late at Night: Poems and Translations (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2013). His website is http://leoyankevich.com/.
Topics include:
- His life in the United States and Poland
- His political awakening
- The poets he most admires
- The life of a politically incorrect poet
- William Pierce
- The importance of reaching the young
- His religious views
- Natural law
- His creative process
- Death and the poet
- Philosophy and poetry
- Georg Trakl and Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Setting poetry to music
- Translating poetry
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Jerzy Kosinski
- Polish nationalism and White Nationalism
- The value of integrity and courage
- His views on the Bible
- His interest in historical research on Jews and Communism in Poland after World War II
- The Jewish decapitation of white societies
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16 comments
Leo Yankevich’s kids do not understand what he is talking about because they have not lived around any other people other than whites. My daughter did not understand my beliefs until she went to school with blacks now she is fully on board. My niece would call me a racist and say I was closed minded until she went to school with a bunch of Mexicans who would tell her she needed to go back to Europe.
The only way kids understand this stuff is to experience it. Parents need to put their naive children around these animals and have them experience what diversity really is or their kids will continue to believe the Jewish propaganda. There is no better advocate for our cause than a bunch feral Blacks and Mestizos.
I agree completely. Going to school as an ethnic minority in what is supposedly my own country, surrounded by invaders, worked wonders for my racial/national consciousness.
When I first heard of the notions that races don’t exist or that all races are equal, I immediately dismissed them out of hand as some of the most bizarre nonsense I had ever heard.
I have to say that for me, I had never lived in a place where I was of the racial minority except in very brief visits to certain locations, yet I did not require such experiences described above to have race-feeling or racial identity. There were always few non-whites I interacted in the places I grew up (those in America, that is), even if it the majority of people were white, and that was enough for me to recognize differences and develop a sense of a separate identity. I remember that by my first teenage years, I had such a strong sense of European identity, I wanted to live in as white an environment as possible, and I was annoyed by every additional non-white student (particularly the blacks) that arrived at my school. All this occurred with very little education of racial differences to begin with, and in spite of the endless multiculturalist propaganda.
I suppose being born in Europe, even though I only lived there briefly, helped somewhat in this regard, but Americans need to learn how to give their children a European ethnic-cultural identity which can form the basis of the awareness of differences and their importance; there is too often a failure to do this properly. It should honestly not take requiring them to live in a non-white majority location or hostile interactions with blacks and mestizos. There is also the problem of the fact that not all blacks or mestizos are hostile to whites (just about all of the Mexicans I had interacted with as a child were friendly, actually); what are you going to do then? There obviously needs to be a basis for race-feeling in an underlying identity which is developed over childhood.
Lucian Tudor if you are around a large amount of Blacks and Mestizo’s they will be hostile, it is that simple. Mestizo’s are usually pretty good people when their numbers are small but when they reach a certain number watch out. Blacks make life intolerable at around 10% of a given population. This is as simple as putting red and black ants together and wondering if they are going to fight….
Bill, in my comment I was not addressing what happens when you have large amounts of blacks living together in a location; it is all too obvious to us here that any society composed of a large amount of blacks is of much lower quality compared to one that is not. This is not my subject of discussion, it is rather the experience of the youth. Firstly, I was asserting that a youth does not need to live where whites are a minority to become racially aware. Secondly, you claim that living in a place with large amounts of blacks or other non-whites live will necessarily make a person into a racial separatist. This is something I dispute, for the reason that social complications and alternative possibilities need to be taken into account.
For example, I have encountered some whites who have lived in majority non-white locations but who did not become racialist because many of the non-whites living there became friends with them (even if there may have been some who were also unfriendly). As for mestizos, they are oftentimes similar to blacks in their effects on society, especially if they come from a very poor background, but I cannot say this is always the case; not because of personal experience, but more because of being educated about varieties of mestizo societies. Either way, racial awareness and separatism cannot be based solely on a focus on those races who produce low-quality societies, because not all non-whites produce such societies (think, for example, about the Asiatic races). So, as I have asserted before, a certain European cultural identity needs to be properly developed during childhood to create a more sound basis for racial awareness.
That’s for sure. My racial awareness was instilled in the fifth grade, when our formerly almost all white district was integrated and became about a third black. All the race equality propaganda in the schools – and this being a suburb of NYC, there was quite a lot of it – was neutralized by experiencing the joys of integration and equality first hand. After five years of that, nothing could make me believe in equality. I’d like to think that I would have come around to this way of thinking, but experiencing reality for myself not only accelerated my intellectual development but made me feel white in a way that simply reading cannot.
Fascinating interview. Tikum Olam is THE book I pull from the shelf when I need a certain type of motivation. Buy it, read it, and you’ll know what I mean. Journey Late at Night is going on the list.
I spent a few years living over the hill from Sharon, in Brookfield. Farrell is a place that people only mentioned as a dangerous wasteland to be completely avoided.
Very concise man. AG your comment, about pulling Tikum Olam out of the shelf when you need motivation, has motivated me to purchase the book.
Bill, I’d agree that living amongst the others does have a profound effect on certain types of our people, even if they come from families and White subgroups that are not ethnically or racially conscious.
I very much appreciate this interview. It was fantastic in content and execution, and what a character this man is! It was especially enjoyable to me, because I had already read the volume Tikkun Olam, and I found the poems there very moving spiritually.
Yankevich’s personality reminded me of Taki in his interview with Dr. Sunic
Greg, around 15:30 or so you said that you enlightened a student of yours about the nature of our media system in just 30 seconds by bringing up some well-chosen examples. Do you remember what those examples were?
I just pointed out the difference between the liberal press coverage of South African and Israeli Apartheid.
Once you understand that Poland (and the rest of the EU) is part of the American Empire it shouldn’t be hard to grasp what follows from that fact. Resistance may come from the tendency of youth to view the current existing system as an extension of the natural order or the product of historical inevitability. During “The Sixties” the Hollywood-Manhattan media told the young “revolutionaries” that the WASP establishment (and its counterparts in France and Germany) needed to be overthrown because it was puritanical, authoritarian and lacking in imagination.
Good book, there is a poem at the back of “A Candidate For The Order” that I read somewhere was part of the oath of the SS; there is also a very good poem about the jews at the beginning of Chesterson’s “The New Unhappy lords’ that you might be interested in. If you like I will post them on this blog.
Yes post them as a comment.
Great interview with a deep and interesting man; unfortunately, poetry is only accessible to few. I don’t read poetry myself, for example, but love history and philosophy. Hopefully, he’ll also do something outside poetry for a broader audience.
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