Counter-Currents
1,929 words
When I was in the middle of my teenage years, my cronies and I would tear around our southern English town on our bicycles, rickety machines partly constructed from old parts salvaged from the municipal rubbish tip. The last time I was in my home town, two years ago and aged 58, I walked around it and I found I still knew every alleyway, every park, every incline, every bit of pavement (as we Brits call sidewalks) that you could skip your bike up. There was not an inch of that town that me and my bicycle buddies didn’t know.
Except that there was.
It was a squat stone building by a park which looked too small for anyone except a dwarf to get into, and it had a green wooden door fastened with an ancient padlock. There was no indication as to what its purpose was, or had been. We would cycle past it and wonder, far too respectful (i.e., scared) of authority to kick the door in and investigate. Until someone did it for us. One day as we cruised by on our wonky bicycles, we saw the door had been smashed in. It was obviously essential that our little band of English Huckleberry Finns and Tom Sawyers investigate.
One of us had a bicycle lamp to use as a flashlight and in we went, nervous but excited. It looked like a small building from the outside but it wasn’t a building, except in the most literal sense. It was an entrance to an underground structure. We walked down stone steps, slippery with ancient moss, hearts thumping, and when the torchlight flashed onto the wall, they started thumping harder. There was a stenciled image of a face in a gas-mask in faded red paint. My friend said, “It’s an air–raid shelter.”
My home town took a few of the Luftwaffe’s bombs in the Second World War. There is still a local airport — used for gliding now — which was a target of Göring’s aerial campaign in 1940, as some of the Spitfires which took part in the Battle of Britain took off from there. As kids, we would cycle up and down the banks of what we called “bomb-holes,” the craters left by German materiel. We found an Iron Cross once. I don’t know what happened to that. These air-raid shelters (also known as “Anderson shelters”) were common in suburban London.
I remember the sense of excitement as we descended into this mysterious chamber in much the same way as I remember chancing across Counter-Currents years later, but years ago now. I remember what I felt: a sudden shock of recognition. I had been academically rather smug for many years, my Ph.D. behind me and with a sort of blasé confidence that somehow I had mastered Western thought. How wrong I was, and CC was as much a kick in the arse (or ass, as you prefer) as anything. The late, great Jonathan Bowden was one of many rich discoveries I made on this site, and he described it as an online university. Now, anyone of 18 years of age considering studying a humanities degree at an actual Western university would do far better to save their money and build a library from books promoted on and connected with CC, pausing only to send some of that saved money to the site.
I had never heard of Julius Evola, Savitri Devi, Jonathan Bowden, Tito Perdue, or Ernst von Salomon’s extraordinary novel It Cannot be Stormed. I was introduced to the work of Greg Johnson, Jim Goad, James J. O’Meara, Kerry Bolton, Michael Polignano, and many others. I read the work of Collin Cleary in a kind of daze, never having realized how close paganism is to beliefs of my own.
Sadly, there was nothing in the air-raid shelter all those years ago but rat-droppings. No tin helmets, gas masks, or dead Nazi pilots. Not even a tin of SPAM (a very English joke). Counter-Currents, however, is a very different kind of shelter, and it contains a treasure trove which can quite literally change your life and the direction of your thinking.
You must read new ideas. You have to. If not, you will be led by the nose for the rest of your life. If you do not swim against the stream, the way the West is flowing as I write, that tide will wash you away. Counter-Currents does not accept the dictates of the tides but sails against them.
I hate to come over as what British journalist Julie Burchill once called “amockalyptic” — i.e., ginning up doom and gloom just for kicks and clicks — but I don’t expect the next couple of years to be a walk in the park for the world in general, and the white West in particular, and you will need your wits about you. And wit (which is often described metaphorically as “razor-sharp”) is whetted on the leather strop of wisdom, which happens to be the currency in which Counter Currents trades.
Yes, there are some clashes of heads in the comments section, but if you are a dissident online conservative writer (you are unlikely to be one in the mainstream media) and you don’t have a thick skin, you may want to do something about that. It should be apparent by now that debate — the dialectic of disagreement and resolution — is what we on the Right do. We leave the ideological lockstep to the Left, and I firmly believe that, intellectually, speaking CC brings a gun to a knife-fight. I note with amusement that the Southern Poverty Law Center — a sort of metapolitical Addams Family — describe CC as being “academic” writing. Given that there are many qualified academics writing here, why the sneer quotes? When it comes to the goombahs of the SPLC, the ADL, and so on, I always think of the wonderful line delivered by Robert de Niro in Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear: “I can out-run you, I can out-think you, and I can out-philosophize you.”
Counter-Currents is not confined to the rarified atmosphere of philosophical investigation, however, although you will find plenty of that here. It is a properly cultural site. Movies, comics, music, sport, art — all the elements in culture’s periodic table can be found discussed engagingly. Also — and this is missing from more centrist online sites and magazines that think they are a bit edgy — CC has balls. There is great stylistic writing here, but there is also confrontational, two-fisted prose that makes going back to the print media like listening to your favorite band and then entering an elevator and hearing piped muzak.
So, if you donate or subscribe to CC, it is not merely an act of philanthropic goodwill for a plucky website, but an investment in your own future and our collective chances of getting out of this collapsing coalmine alive. The Left are moving, and quickly. They aim to neuter the political internet (something I have blogged about for over a decade) because it is far too free for the elites’ liking; there is way too much liberty for the peasantry, and that is why CC is more than just a casual read for the intellectually curious. Someone, somewhere is scared of us. I have a friend who works for one of Britain’s — one of the world’s –most famous newspapers. He tells me he has to be very careful not to read CC at work.
The Left are doing everything they can to destroy white culture, like some poor, silly girl slicing her arm with a razor. Soon, crises will erupt for us across the West. They already are. Culturally speaking, for those on the political Right, there will be blitzkrieg. And Counter-Currents will be the closest thing we have to an air-raid shelter.
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Full details about how to give are below.
(1) E-Checks
If you are in the United States, E-checks are the fastest and most convenient way to send money to Counter-Currents. All you need is your checkbook.
(2) Credit Cards
Currently the only way we can take credit card donations is through Entropy, a site that takes donations and comments for livestreams. Visit our Entropy page and select “send paid chat.” Entropy allows you to donate any amount from $3 and up. All comments will be read and discussed in the next episode of Counter-Currents Radio, which airs every weekend.
(3) Bank Transfers
It is also possible to support Counter-Currents with bank transfers. Please contact us at [email protected].
(4) Gift Cards
Gift cards are a useful way to make donations. Gift cards are available with all the major credit cards as well as from major retailers. You can either send gift cards as donations (either electronically or through the mail), or you can use them to make donations. Simply buy a prepaid credit card and click here to use it. If you can find a place that sells gift cards for cash, they are as anonymous as sending cash and much safer.
(5) Cash, Checks, and Money Orders
Sometimes the old ways are best. The least “de-platformable” way to send donations to Counter-Currents is to put a check or money order in the mail. Simply print and complete the Word or PDF donation form and mail it to:
Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd.
P.O. Box 22638
San Francisco, CA 94122
USA
[email protected]
Thank you, Boomers, for keeping your checkbooks, envelopes, and stamps. There are youngsters reading this site who have never written a check or put a letter in the mail.
(6) Bill Payment Services
If you wish to make monthly donations by mail, see if your bank has a bill payment service. Then all you need to do is set up a monthly check to be dispatched by mail to our PO box. This check can be made out to Counter-Currents or to Greg Johnson. After the initial bother of setting it up, you never have to think about it again.
(7) Crypto-Currencies
In addition to old-fashioned paper donations, those new-fangled crypto-currencies are a good way to circumvent censorious credit card corporations.
- Click here to go to our crypto donation page.
- Click here for a basic primer on how to get started using crypto. Do not, however, use COINBASE. COINBASE will not allow you to send money to Counter-Currents. (Yes, it is that bad.)
(8) The Counter-Currents Foundation
Note: Donations to Counter-Currents Publishing are not tax deductible. We do, however, have a 501c3 tax-exempt educational corporation called The Counter-Currents Foundation. If you want to make a tax-deductible gift, please email me at [email protected]. You can send donations by mail to:
The Counter-Currents Foundation
P.O. Box 22638
San Francisco, CA 94122
USA
(9) Remember Us in Your Will
Finally, we would like to broach a very delicate topic: your will. If you are planning your estate, please think about how you can continue helping the cause even after you are gone. The essay “Majority Estate Planning” contains many helpful suggestions.
Remember: those who fight for a better world live in it today.
Thank you again for your loyal readership and generous support.
Greg Johnson
8 comments
If I had to choose anyone to be huddled next to while the bombs are dropping, I’d choose none other than that good Doctor Gullick and the grand assemblage of people we have writing, commenting and donating to Counter-Currents.
Many thanks. I have a spare tin hat. Bring Spam
My home town took a few of the Luftwaffe’s bombs in the Second World War.
My home town, Middlesbrough, was the first major British town and industrial target to be bombed during WWII.
When I was a lad, we discovered a German bomb in our attic! To be clear, it hadn’t come crashing through the roof during the war and no-one since then had noticed the gaping hole. A previous owner must have come across the device in some waste ground and thought it would make a cool memento. It would have been “funny” if it had exploded and I’d been officially recorded as the war’s last fatality.
When I was a lad in the tail-end of the 1960s living in and around Whitecross Street, London EC1, on the border of the City of London, there were still extant derelict old buildings, and joy of joys for us gang of boys air raid shelters. Up near St Paul’s Cathedral and along old Aldersgate Street (now called the Barbican), the area was an ‘adventure playground’. It’s called Urbex now (Urban Exploration), but in those days on the weekend, climbing in and exploring those now long gone places that survived the bombing of the Second World War planted the seed in this (old) boy’s mind; it got me interested in how the war started, and why.
During the 1950’s in America, many bomb shelters were built for civil defense to contain populations in case of nuclear (then Atomic) attack, and some were well-stocked with food and drugs. Addicts started breaking into them to get the drugs, so all the provisions were taken out.
By the 70’s, all of this was abandoned, as the nuclear scare faded away and civil defense became oriented more to storms and floods.
I remember an interesting documentary called the Atomic Cafe about the fear of nuclear war in the fifties. One interesting bit was a priest arguing it was perfectly ethical for a shelter to take in Catholics only in case of an attack.
You English might remember a fictional documentary called The War Game, imagining a nuclear war in Britain.
You British had a nice bit of war in the Blitz. At least the Germans didn’t drop bombs that sucked oxygen out of shelters like we did in Dresden.
Or in 1991, during the bombing in Iraq, where a U.S. “smart bomb” hit an air raid shelter, killing hundreds of civilians, mostly women and children.
America never apologized. After all, remember all those weapons of mass destruction Iraq had? You had a very nice war, indeed. of course, ours was even better. One day of Pearl Harbor.
In Germany, there were thousands of undetonated bombs after the war, and even today they find them and have to close off a city block to remove them, and they go off, killing people or bomb disposal crews. Not quite as fun.
But then, Britain wasn’t saturated with bombs as Germany was. The Luftwaffe was poor stuff compared to the USAAF and the RAF.
And yes, let’s contribute to CC. It’s doing a great job.
A wonderful piece: I feel the same loss and alienation. The London of my childhood with its bomb-sites, open-air markets and proud garrulous locals is gone forever. I remember a city quiet at night and almost deserted at the weekends. Yes, Blacks and ‘Indians’ (as they were then politely called) were around — and seemed better settled in their then far lower numbers. Race and identity were not then the cynosure of education, work and culture. Absent was that aura of sulking grievance and smouldering vindictiveness that now has us all walking on eggshells, cowering ahead of the next scolding from on high. But as the numbers grew so did the demand for absolute parity of achievement and reward. When that failed to materialise there could be only one culprit: the white indigenous English.
Though even using that term could be perilous today. The sons and daughters of Jamaicans and Ghanians, such as the idiot legislator David Lammy MP, imagine themselves related to the (contested) ‘mesolithic negroid’, Cheddar Man, and the English to be merely Germanic pirates who mingled with the already present multicultural Romans. An audacious inversion of history where we are the incomers and troublemakers, laying feudalism, empire and whiteness upon the dusky noble savages of Albion!
It’s all nonsense of course, promoted by the usual types, though London is indeed lost to us. What, short of a Reconquistsa, could recover that city and its green and pleasant hinterland for us is an open question.
I’m very thankful for C-C. Your air-raid-shelter experience is an apt analogy for my own initial exposure to this singular site.
Having been more of a civnat (I guess), and hearing what I’d heard about C-C, I felt truly transgressive being here. But damned if I didn’t soon find intelligent, decent people who simply don’t like being perennially shit on for existing, and who (like myself now) honestly concluded that the races have a healthier future apart than together.
Counter Currents is my daily devotional; I scour the archives so much it sometimes thinks I’m a bot. Like Dr Gullick and others have said, it truly is an online University.
No one catches as much hell undeservedly as Greg Johnson and his writers do. Support Counter Currents according to your ability! I do, and plan to for years to come.
When I read such articles, or when I see documentaries or read books about the WW2, about German military industry under constant bombardmends, or German fights in 1945, or about the build-up of the US Navy after Pearl Harbour, about mass production of the Liberty ships, about Resistance in Europe or about Japanese Kamikadze, I have only one thought. No one of the same nations now is able for such efforts, military or industrially, or socially. Germans could not do it, the English and the French could not do it, Japanese could not do it, Russians could not do it. I doubt that the Poles, maybe the sanest in the whole Europe, could fight now their guerrilla, as Armija Krajowa did it 1939-1945. One more evidence of regress and decay.
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