Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Motion in Space
2,804 words
Things continued briskly for the Counter-Currents fundraiser over the last week, and we got 1% closer to our goal of raising $300,000 this year. Since our fundraiser started on March 10th, we have raised $129,188.50, which is 43% of our goal. We thank all of those who have given so far. Full information on how to donate is below, but first, here are a few words from Mark Gullick on what led him to Counter-Currents, and what makes us special.
And you may ask yourself, well,
How did I get here?
— Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”
Anyone who is familiar with the British comedy series Father Ted will recall one of its best lines. Ted has befriended a fellow priest, who invites him home for what Ted assumes will be tea. The priest leads Ted down to a basement and unlocks the door. Inside is a shrine to Nazism, the center-piece of which is a portrait of Hitler, complete with a burning torch on either side. Ted feels the need for casual conversation to fill the awkward silence, and says: “Isn’t it funny how you get more Right-wing as you get older?”
It is, of course, an old adage, but it helps to look back and plot your political voyage through life in hindsight, particularly when you have passed the rather introspective shadow line of 60 years of age, as I have.
I was entirely uninterested in politics up until, and including, my years at university. Although studying philosophy, I shunned political writing in favor of metaphysics, existentialism, and post-structuralism. The campus around me had a crackle of political activism in the early 1980s, but nothing like today’s bush-fires. Students would protest outside my bank on campus, Barclays, because of the parent company’s investments in South Africa, which was then under apartheid. They would scowl at us as we went in. I remember coaches would be chartered by the Student Union (SU) to take students up to London for various Leftist rallies. The trip was free and the train was not, and so I used to get the coach, get to London, start out on the rally, gradually lose whoever I was with, walk to the nearest underground station, and go out and have a good time with friends.
The university students then were predominantly Left-wing without today’s psychosis, and I recall having a fairly jaundiced view of them. The people I knocked about with were apolitical, and had no genuine interest in politics apart from the occasional poseur who found it useful in attracting the opposite sex. I went to one SU meeting, and I remember a farcical argument about whether £50 should be sent to Britain’s striking coal-miners or Bolivia. I didn’t stay long.
In fact, it was a coal-miner who gave me my first glimpse of what would be coming in the following decades as the Left became less and less tolerant of certain proscribed attitudes. I did a lot of acting at university. There was a superb theater on campus so renowned for the excellence of its acoustics that British saxophonist Courtney Pine, who older jazz fans may remember, would always insist on playing there whenever he toured the United Kingdom.
During Britain’s infamous miners’ strike, I helped with a satirical review to raise funds for the strikers. The organizers had scored a bit of a coup in getting a real, live Kent miner to perform, and he played and sang various protest songs pretty well — Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan and so on. He also told jokes.
I watched one of the review organizers closely as the miner went into his stand-up routine, and observed his face turn ashen as the working-class miner who up until then had been a prize exhibit began telling jokes about mothers-in-law, gays, women, and all the other topics which would have been natural comedic territory for him and his fellow miners. It taught me my first real lesson about the Left: They expect the minorities they claim to champion to behave according to rules they themselves lay down.
My second lesson was also connected with acting. After having played several leads and major roles, I was given the chance to direct a play. I chose one of my favorite works, John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy (and gore-fest) The White Devil. It is one of the things I am proudest of. I had a superb cast — I started at least one professional career by casting a lad who went on to become a minor TV actor — and wrote the incidental music with a synthesizer on a four-track cassette recorder.
I set the production in 1930s Chicago, largely because I had “borrowed” the costumes of that period from the English National Opera in London. I knew a scene-shifter there and he got us the clothes during a rest week for a production of Figaro set in the same period. I felt guilty about that because the opera was directed by Dr. Jonathan Miller, a well-known English intellectual and also connected with my university. He never knew anything about it, and when I met him years later and had a brief chat about Plato’s Symposium by the canal in Camden Town, I felt pangs.
Anyway, the play was a great success, filling the theater for four nights and making what for the dramatic society was a small fortune to be spent on the next production. Only by then it was all gone.
The SU, Sussex chapter, had voted in secret to occupy the faculty buildings over some issue, real or imagined, and they did just that. During the occupation there was vandalism of property, destruction of important documents, and even the nice touch of some brat defecating on the Dean’s desk. When it was over, the university charged the SU for the damage, and this included the dramatic society’s treasure chest we had earned with hard work and talent. The money was not ring-fenced, and it helped to pay for the pathetic behavior of a couple of hundred idiots. Lesson two: The Left will bring destruction and ugliness and expect someone else to pay for it.
The first time I remember taking an active interest in British politics was the General Election of 1997. I was 36 years old. Since I had been of an age to vote, during the Thatcher era, I had voted Labour and been on the losing side every time. But I don’t remember any conviction at the ballot-box; it was just reflexive, like listening to the same records as your mates.
In the run-up to the election I would go to a beautiful old pub by east London’s Victoria Park for my lunchbreak from work as an information officer for the National Health Service (NHS). It has always been a wonderful tradition in a certain type of English pub to have all that day’s newspapers in a rack. I wonder if that still happens. I used to order my Guinness, pick a couple of titles — “inkies,” as the old newspapers were once called on account of how dirty your hands were after reading them –and settle into the corner to read all about it. I began to get a sense of the political realm. Unfortunately, it didn’t help me — or many other people who voted for his party — from being sucker-punched by Tony Blair.
It seemed like a glorious dawn and there was a mood of optimism in people’s faces as I walked across London Bridge the day after Blair’s victory. (Strangely, this is London’s ugliest bridge across the Thames, as well as being the one featured in Eliot’s “The Waste Land”). That weekend, my girlfriend and I went to quite a swanky party held by some triumphant Labour activists on a roof in Kensington (my girl’s friends, not mine, I assure you). There was something about them I found disquieting, as though they were a part of some Borg-like entity producing monadic and identical personalities. My girlfriend and I ended up talking to one another. I had been brought up culturally to believe that conservatives conformed to a rigid personality type, while those on the Left were the individualistic free-thinkers. Next lesson: The reverse is the case.
Shortly after Labour’s historic election victory, and before the horrors of the Iraq War, I met a guy who went on to become a great friend and is now a journalist in what used to be called “Fleet Street.” He was becoming just as disillusioned as me with Labour, Blair, and the new strain of socialism which was in its larval stage then and has recently pupated and hatched into the horrorshow we see today.
I would date my permanent move to the political Right to the long, pub-based conversations Garrett — not his real name, but one which will make him smile should he be reading this — and I would have. By the time we were sharing an apartment that could have given Withnail & I a run for its money, we had seen through Blair (too late, like the rest of the electorate), but we had nowhere else to go, the Conservative Party having been trying to emulate Blair and the myth of the political “third way” he preached so much about. Next lesson: There is no third way in British politics. There are two ways, winning and losing. Politics in a democracy is not really about demos, the people, but solely concerned with kratos, power.
At this time Garrett and I both read Peter Oborne’s The Triumph of the Political Class, a vital book for me as it both crystallized my thinking about politics and was to be, years later, the subject of my first piece here at Counter-Currents. The ideas that politicians formed a class of their own, that there was really only one party with nominally different wings, and that democracy was a sham, a quasi-theatrical production performed by the political class were shocking but also exciting. I could feel myself becoming what the French call engagé.
You can buy Mark Gullick’s Vanikin in the Underworld here.
By the time I had got into production journalism at the end of the 1990s I had, as mainstream media journos write of parties of which they disapprove, “lurched to the Right.” I started blogging, as did Garrett, and I discovered the truth of a simple question by English writer G. K. Chesterton: How can I know what I think until I see what I say? Or, in the case of the blogger, write? I still believe that the ability to host a blog is far more important a component in your democratic arsenal than the ability to vote.
It was while working in journalism, for mega-publisher IPCMedia, that the day arrived on which I exchanged politics as a minor ornamental portico in my life and began to make it a central supporting wall. At the exact moment everything changed, I didn’t know it, because I was in London’s Tate Modern art gallery by the River Thames, spending my lunchtime looking at a favorite sculpture of mine — and one which seems visually appropriate for my accelerated interest in politics from that day onwards: Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Motion in Space.
When I got back to the office, everyone bar one girl in features was crowded around the television. I assumed the editor was doing some lunchtime chat show, and asked Deirdre what was happening. In her dry Huddersfield accent, she said: “Oh, someone’s flown a plane into a building or something.”
All I knew about Islam until 9/11 was that a bunch of bearded wackos had blown up the Banyam Buddhas. I went on to learn a lot more. In the nauseating rear-guard action the media mounted in the days and weeks after the Twin Towers, I heard the same thing reiterated by a dozen appeasing voices: The West doesn’t understand Islam. The West needs to learn more about Islam. I took them at their word. This was the event that led me into the labyrinth of politics. I began reading about Islam, and I focused on the political repercussions of 9/11.
As the first years of the new millennium passed, I moved away from conventional media despite being very much of the newspaper generation, as noted, and began to wander the political pathways online, hopping from one blog to another featured on their blogroll, commenting, bookmarking, absorbing. In particular, I began to understand American politics, which had been a sealed room to me before the Internet. And gradually I discovered that there was a “shadow media,” and opinions which helped me to formulate both my political beliefs while at the same time constantly questioning those beliefs – which, with appropriate Socratic humility, began to take form and shape.
As the years passed, I spent more and more time both on political websites and learning a little about the history of politics from Aristotle to de Tocqueville, and on into the twentieth century. I became particularly interested in America. I visited Antietam — or Sharpsburg, depending on your allegiance — while in Maryland and, whereas once I would have taken some photos and left it at that, I bought a second-hand, 1,000-page book on the Civil War, and read it. I also built up a library of online sites which introduced me to the modern American dissident political voice. I found myself wanting to know about America. Then I bumped into Counter-Currents.
When Counter-Currents entered the room, I stood up as a mark of respect. Who on earth were these people? And why was this so much more than politics? What was metapolitics? And who the devil were Guillaume Faye, Julius Evola, Collin Cleary, Tito Perdue, and Kerry Bolton? And who were the staff of this brave new world?
I sent my first piece to CC and it was published. It was a review of the book mentioned above: Oborne’s Triumph of the Political Class. As my second offering, I sent a piece about a minor comedy classic from British television in the 1970s, It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. Again, it was published. This was unlike any title I had seen online. As a general rule, politics provided the mainframe of the titles I favored. Counter-Currents was like an arcade, an intellectual shopping mall, a library. The BBC long ceased to adhere to its core principle, which was to inform, educate, and entertain, but now I had found a provider who did all those things.
In the last year I have been contributing here, I have written about Jacques Derrida, Thin Lizzy, Islamic philosophy, British online legislation, H. P. Lovecraft, Joy Division, the expulsion of a philosopher from my alma mater, my career in Britain’s NHS, Aleister Crowley, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. If anyone can tell me another Dissident Right website that would indulge that curriculum, I would be happy to hear from you.
And curriculum is the key here.
There are many jewels I have grasped from Counter-Currents, but the greatest is Jonathan Bowden. Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, but his voice spoke to me in a way in which I had not previously been spoken to. I recommend everything he ever wrote or said, but nothing more than his comment about Counter-Currents. That site, he said, is an online university. Nothing is more needed in these times of Denaissance.
I imagine that most of you reading this have degrees from another, better age. But now you will have children, grandchildren, perhaps friends with both. Without intruding onto the sanctity of the family — which Western governments have already made a habit of doing — try to persuade any youngster of university age not to waste their college loan (soon to become government-subsidized) on a worthless university degree. For a small fraction of the time and money that would be thrown away there, you can settle down with a couple of hours of Counter-Currents a day and emerge more intelligent, better read, entertained, more equipped for the rigors of the modern world, and a human being with a genuine advantage over our enemies on the Left. Oh, and unquestionably more employable, as companies will grasp very quickly when the Gender Studies graduates start to fill the interview room.
This site relies on subscriptions, as the Deep State — it really does exist — has decided to make it as difficult as possible for you to know the truth, or even to know which road to set out on to look for it. The English used to use the phrase “subscribing to an opinion,” but that is not what happens here. At Counter-Currents, you subscribe to something which enables you to form an opinion. And therefore you are subscribing to an improved future for you and your descendants.
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Counter-Currents: an online university. Roll up.
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7 comments
I am new here and enjoying the site.
I thought it might be a good idea to sort the archive by topic so it would be easier to browse? Sometimes I’m not inspired and can’t think of keywords to search for. Every university needs a library!
Thanks for sharing your history. I am also from the UK and a fan of Father Ted too.
That was a most enjoyable read, especially as Dr. Gullick and I appear to be nearly the same age (though, along with Pat Buchanan, I have been Right from the Beginning; no Damascene conversions for me). Thank you for sharing.
It’s important for the young to know that, at least in the 70s and 80s (and possibly going back well into the 60s), universities were already very left wing (although W.F. Buckley’s early 50s jeremiad against the liberal professors he sparred with at Yale in the late 40s makes the latter sound like creatures from a more civilized planet compared to the present rotters). Indeed, even in the very early 80s as an undergrad, I knew not to open up about my real political views, esp. wrt race, which were already in embryo what they remain today, though I was never “punished” for being a known rightwinger (except by one aggressive homosexual who refused to write me a rec for grad school despite having begged me to take his senior seminar that year – I’d taken a class of his a few years earlier – and always being effusive in his praise of me; his refusal was because I was “dangerous” due to my “well-known views {I think this was an exaggeration, as I otherwise had no difficulty obtaining my needed recs, also from leftwing professors – there were no non-leftists} that Western civilization was being overrun by Third World immigrants” – at least he was accurate!).
What has changed I think is the vitriol and viciousness, as well as the introduction of a far more hysterical and rigid egalitarianism. No one I can recall in the early 80s denied the reality of men and women. And professors could make jokes deploying sexual (but not racial) stereotypes. It was still maybe a bit of a transitional time between past normality, and present insanity. But the 80s on campus was not an objectively healthy decade.
On a totally unrelated matter: whatever happened to “Travis LeBlanc”? Remember him? And Robert Hampton? Both prolific contributors here who just disappeared one day. I’m starting to think both of those gents were yet additional aliases of the late, and possibly indispensable, Martin Rojas (aka, Chris Roberts, Hubert Collins, and …?). I wonder how much else of this masquerading goes on in prowhite circles. I was surprised to learn that Sam Francis had published essays in AR under pseudonyms, in addition to using his own name. And as a very early subscriber to AR, I always thought that long time book reviewer “Thomas Jackson” was none other than Jared himself (though I have no proof of this; only what I perceived to be similarities in literary style).
I believe LeBlanc left because he found CC too critical of the Groypers, or something to that effect. I remember Greg talking about it. There seemed to be no ill will, at least.
Trav left because I rejected an article defending the Fuentes line on Patriot Front.
And what line is that?
It’s almost impossible for anyone who’s provided a large sample of their writing to write extensively under a pseudonym without linking back to their original identity. This is ofc how Ted Kaczynski was ultimately caught, the single phrase “You can eat your cake and have it too”, which his brother recognized.
Creating an informatically unlinkable pen name could be done but would require careful analysis of every word and sentence structure, especially with an oeuvre beyond about 1,000 words, to avoid information-yielding idiosyncrasies.
The only exception might be creating a persona like Benjy from “The Sound and the Fury” or GBFM that communicates in novel troll- or retardspeak.
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