Counter-Currents
Remembering Filippo Marinetti (December 22, 1876–December 2, 1944)
Greg Johnson
Marinetti in the First World War.
176 words
Those on the Right who believe that modern art is always “decadent” need to come to grips with Italian Futurism. In commemoration of the birthday of Filippo Marinetti, the founder of Italian Futurism and one of the prophets of Fascism, I would like to draw your attention to several writings on this website.
By Marinetti:
About or making substantial reference to Marinetti:
- Kerry Bolton, “Filippo Marinetti,” which has also been published in his book Artists of the Right: Resisting Decadence (Portuguese translation here)
- Mark Dyal, “Life is Always Right: Futurism and Man in Revolt” (Portuguese translation here)
- Ted Sallis reviews Mark Antliff’s Avant-Garde Fascism.
- Alex Graham, “Fascism, Futurism, & Aviation”
Marinetti is briefly discussed in this interview with Giordano Bruno Guerri, “’68 was Invented by D’Annunzio.”
There are two excellent English language editions of Marinetti’s principal works:
- Selected Poems and Related Prose, trans. Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R. Studholme (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)
- Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)
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4 comments
I bought my first copy of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto and Other Essays in K-mart. It was in a bin of ‘discount books’ (otherwise I could not have afforded it. That is who were during my lifetime: A people who had books by Italian avant-garde thinkers in a discount big box along with parakeets and motor oil.
Some Futurist essay in that book taught me that you can create ‘rules’ for writing to achieve a particular effect. At the time, that was a novel idea. At least for me.
You make an interesting point with your story about Marinetti at Kmart. Sadly, the intellectual standards of the US can only continue to plummet, as ongoing mass Third World immigration drops average IQs further and as the (((elites))) continue to deliberately debase our culture by selling black cultural garbage as the new thing all the cool kids love, which is what they did first with jazz and later with rap.
Way back in the 1990s I happened to attend a warehouse performance of an industrial band in a major West Coast city, the sort of “underground” event which exists only in the hours between when the lights went down and when the lights went up. The people running the show were handing out a mimeograph sheet quoting a certain Filippo Marinetti about the “roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
The band claimed the Futurists as inspiration, using modern technology to create previously impossible sounds which would break the communicant free of the prevailing liberal mindset and carve out a new (and implied fashy) consciousness.
The industrial scene of that era had crossovers with Boyd Rice, Survival Research Laboratories, Apocalypse Culture, really beyond left and right. The astute sensed that the current system, regardless of the apparent prosperity and recent victory over communism, had run its course. The Decline of the West was in the cards and it was time for men to rise among the ruins.
If the goal was not a spiritual war then it was a technological facsimile thereof…and a future worth a struggle or two.
The confluence of Goth and industrial culture was exciting, then. And almost invisible now. But, still, even now, I can picture the magazines, the album covers, hear the sounds and there is a feeling that something was stirring. The ‘culture’ was, of course, commodified and thereby neutralized to a great extent, but for those of use that were there, it had the potential to be make its mark on our consciousnesses. The phrase I remember most from that time is ‘Everything You Know Is Wrong’. In the pantheon of pithiness, it’s up there with ‘panta rhea.
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