Toward the Light:
Young Adult Fiction from the Alt Right

2,238 words

Carl F. Robinson
The Moon of Twilight
iUniverse, 2015

In the wake of the Dyann Roof affair, one might profitably ask again a question I have hammered at for a while now: is it enough to just get information out there, or does that newly informed individual need some kind of cultural context to operate from? 

In the case of Roof, we seem to have someone who figured out some truths about the perilous situations of Whites in America, and then leaped immediately to the conclusion that “someone must pay for this – kill ’em all.”

Our enemies know this, of course – the Left has mastered Cultural Subversion – which is why they’re not just concerned with rebel flags but movies, books, TV shows in general.

It is not enough to become One Who Can See.[1] That knowledge has to fit into some kind of cultural context that provides guidance for how that knowledge is most usefully put to work.

We must do more than just ask, with George Bush, “is our children learning?” We must also ask, what are they learning, what are they reading?

Silly as they may sound, the Christian housewives and pastors who worry that reading Harry Potter “communicates occult teachings” or “accustoms our children to demons and witchcraft” are instinctively right, no different than the “smart” educational elite that dictates they read about Heather’s Two Mommies and never sees a Stars and Bars in a book.[2]

With Twilight, Carl Robinson has done something new and important. Moon of Twilight is young adult fiction written from a pro-White, race-realist perspective. While this story takes place in a darkened off-world, its dramatic situation is easily comparable to the twilight conflicts of here and now.

Here’s the publisher’s summary:

Harold lives on Illissos, a far away world where most of the time it is never really day, and never really night. In this place it is twilight, and hard to really see things clearly. In this twilight, a dangerous creature called Bavianer can attack. Sometimes they attack in swarms so big that all must flee to safety behind the city walls. Normally these sieges are small and easily defeated by horsemen in the brief hours of daylight, but this siege is different and Harold is needed to get help.

Harold must travel through the twilight to get help, and the journey is not easy. Along the way Harold comes of age and his mission allows him to explore the nature of conflict, different religious philosophies, and human courage.

I don’t think of myself as an expert on “young adult” fiction, or even I reader thereof – I’ve recently written about my inability to read or even find an interest in Tolkien; heresy on the Right! – so I’ve done a little research on writing for this market, and I think Robinson has succeeded in checking most of the boxes required by this genre.

Harold is impatient to become a man, to receive the ritual shave and Cap of Faith, and take his place in the militia. His father, though, gives him wise counsel that Dylann Roof could have used as well:

“When you’re needed for this, you’ll be called, and you won’t have an option to keep away.”

Consequently, things are a bit slow to start, and the reader may feel Harold’s impatience himself, but once the real danger of the new situation manifests itself at the Garrison House things move at a fine clip.

Each episode, though complete in itself, moves things forward, and at each step Harold is compelled by new dangers to push himself to discover more about himself and his world, and at the end he returns to his community able to take up a mature role in it. Check and double check.

Actually, of course, there are two sets of boxes to check, since it gradually becomes clear that the author has the plan of introducing into the book various ideas associated with the new or alt-Right as I like to call it. This is perhaps the more difficult task than just checking the YA boxes, and I am happy to say that he has succeeded there as well. There’s no preachiness or didacticism, just situations that bring out questions and where suggested answers are put forth.

The alien race among us, the Bavianer, are not so much feral animals as semi-human, and hence nicely designed to take a liminal, or “twilight,” role: it’s clear how one group of humans will consider them “almost like us” and seek to “integrate” or “uplift them” (although the failure to accomplish that may modulate into “it’s our fault” and calls to lower ourselves to their level) while other will see the danger and seek to “segregate” or even exterminate the brutes.

“She’s wrong about the Bavianer,” said Greamand. “I remember these debates within the priesthood. We haven’t really been able to connect with the Bavianer. We don’t feel their minds, we live in different realities. The reason why we have negative views on the creatures is their behavior; it isn’t our views which cause the behavior.”

The parallels to our current racial situation are clear without being harped on (or, as the liberal might say, “exaggerated”) and even those the reader may never have thought of before seem natural, not mocked up by the author to make a point. The tie-in to an alien, “we are one” religion and moral in-grouping is especially subtle and convincing.

A vigilant parent or school-board would have to read pretty closely to catch on, unless they simply banned all “violent” reading material as such, which, in the wake of Roof, they just might plan on doing.

And please don’t think from the title that this has anything to do with some Twilight Saga. “Twilight” as a symbol is an excellent way of tying all this together – maturing into adulthood, the fog of war, and the questioning of absolutes, religious and moral in particular.

Our author arrived at his central meme the hard way:

While in Iraq, most of his memorable action took place in twilight which got him thinking about conflict, a hypothetical extended twilight, the philosophy of managing conflict, and the religious attitudes of conflict.

The violence is sparsely used but there none the less, as is appropriate for a book that will interest youth without scaring them off or traumatizing them.

Regarding the combat scenes, here again I must confess some inexperience, as I did when reviewing Breakfast with the Dirt Cult (here). I can only say, with special regard to the rendering of percussion effects, that the passages seem plausible and effective to a reader without actual combat experience.

One question young adults are likely to be starting to ask after a lifetime of reading Tolkien, viewing Star Wars and such is, why are these adults interested in us kids anyway? Robinson’s way of handling the past indiscretions of Greamand, anathemized priest and rebel guru, is nicely done, bringing the matter up without making a big to-do about it.

“I think that the banishment did me good. Nobody should be bitter at those who push you toward the light.”

Although I must confess I was reminded of a kinder, gentler version of Joe Pesci’s character in JFK: “I had one fucking weakness and they defrocked me!”

Greamand himself is an interesting character, seeming to appear first as a Strider/Aragorn type and then taking on more of a Gandalfian role. The subtlety of that development shows Robinson’s skill at characterization, and it’s an interesting combination from an Evolan point of view: priest and warrior at one.

Although Harold seems suitably naive up through the first great siege at the dance hall, I wonder if he shows too much independence of thought, of take-chargedness, right from the start of his messenger mission. It’s only a slight matter of degree, and otherwise his growing objectivity, shall we say, rather than cynicism, about the flaws in leaders, mentors, society and in religion are skillfully developed.

The “folkies” scene is a real hoot – no pun intended – for those of us who still remember those unctuous, commie “folk music” TV broadcasts.

The show was the strangest stage act ever. It had a bald, thin, grey bearded folk singer playing a banjo. Harold had seen this singer before but he couldn’t remember his name. The singer was wearing blue jeans and a paisley patterned shirt. . . .

The old man was from a sub segment of Illissos called folkies that were into the Ancient Faith but they tended to be looser with some of the religious interpretations. Specifically, they liked to smoke an herbal, mind altering substance. Despite being looser on some areas, they also seemed to Harold to be grindingly preachy.

The folkie and the singers around him were singing on the front part of a stage, but behind them were juvenile Bavianer. Incredibly, they were sort of dancing in time with the music. At first Harold thought that they were tame and docile, like a cow, or perhaps trained like the Aviabron Bavianer now surrounding Hattusa, but then he realized that the creatures had a large, thick collar and a restraint rope that anchored them in place. They were not able to rush upon the singers, who were blithely singing away.

The concert is “the most awkward, patronizing, and unsettling thing Harold had ever watched,” and its descent into chaos and violence is a great way to make a point about racial incompatibility in the face of starry-eyed liberal goodthinking backed up by selective media editing.

The inevitable interrogation scene is well done, and should easily bring to mind a young White reader’s own recent school experiences without hammering the point home. The contrasting of the two priestesses is well done without sinking into misogyny (but then “they” always complain anyway).

Watching her walk, Harold realized that Begedet the High Priestess had gained her office through sheer loud bullying. Harold figured that she was able to bully others from a position of invulnerability; any hostile response to her actions would be automatically deflected by the fact she was a woman, and a heavier, less-than-attractive one at that.

I congratulate Robinson on doing well a job that needs to be done. I would have no problem recommending this to a young reader even – or especially – if he wasn’t already looking for some “white nationalist” or “race realist” literature. And judging by all the adults I see on the trains reading Harry Potter and Twilight, there might be an even bigger audience out there.

Forget about vampires and werewolves; when you put this book down you will see our world in a whole new light.

Notes

1. In They Live (John Carpenter, 1988) our protagonist, “Nada” (note the name) immediately picks up a rifle and starts shooting, but in this case (1) he’s an idiot, and (2) he sensibly targets the alien broadcast tower, not a church full of his fellow humans, (a church and a black preacher figure in his process of enlightenment) and succeeds in freeing mankind from the programming signal. (See my review here). Remember, it’s only a movie, and this stuff is symbolic. The way to target cultural brainwashing is through counter-programming, or metapolitics.

2. This is the reason the Brits forcing the children that would run the Empire to study Greek and Latin; English novels you could read on your own time. The rise of modernism promoted the idea that, in fact, you might need to go to college to learn how to read Ulysses or The Waves, ironically producing future readers that knew less than such classically trained authors themselves. The decline of the Empire can be correlated with the introduction of Modern Greats and suchlike; even the Oxford English course, though, achieved some academic seriousness by starting off with Old English or Norse, taught by Prof. Tolkien. This was the generation wiped out by the two World Wars, and the survivors returning to University brought “the Age of Hooper” with them, as Evelyn Waugh called it. As Charles Riyder’s scout laments, the new crop “didn’t know and didn’t want to learn” (Brideshead Revisited). Smug, de-mobbed gits like Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin despised Tolkien as a teacher and Old English as a subject: “I can just about stand the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Larkin wrote Amis about Old English poetry. “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.” Instead, Amis and Larkin amused themselves by scrawling obscenities in library books of Beowulf, Chaucer and other olde tyme authors. Unsurprisingly, Larkin became famous for such poetic sentiments as “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. . . . But they were fucked up in their turn/By fools in old-style hats and coats. . . . Man hands on misery to man./It deepens like a coastal shelf./Get out as early as you can,/And don’t have any kids yourself.” Quite a contrast with the response to World War One by such Europeans as Jünger or Evola (although the latter did agree on the futility of raising children in the Kali Yuga). It was this appallingly philistine and anti-intellectual pose that made them despise Colin Wilson, and was returned in kind; it also became the template for the British “conservative” as that shabbily dressed old man with the beer-soaked moustache, pounding n the pub table, spewing cheese crumbs from his mouth as he shouts “I’ll have none of this tomfoolery!”