Month: August 2023

Tafari Campbell

1,540 words / 10:34

Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

Around 20 years ago, when the Somali pirates started popping up in the news, I was intrigued because you don’t expect to hear that black people are into boating.

Not that I’m much of a seafarer myself — when I recently heard that Barack Obama’s former White House chef “tragically drowned during a paddleboarding excursion in Martha’s Vineyard” on Monday evening, July 24, I didn’t even know what “paddleboarding” was. (more…)

The holistic society of the Middle Ages, as embodied in the “Three Orders of Mankind,” began to be broken down by the coming to prominence of the marketplace with the rise of nation-states.

4,142 words

Part 3 of 3 (Introduction Part 1 here, Chapter I Part 2 here)

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

This strictly economic representation of society has considerable consequences. Finishing off the process of secularization and “disenchantment” of the world that is characteristic of modernity, it results in the dissolution of peoples and the systematic erosion of their particularities. At the sociological level, the adoption of economic exchange leads the society to be divided into producers, owners, and sterile classes (such as the former aristocracy) at the end of an altogether revolutionary process. (more…)

2,252 words

In rock ’n’ roll it wasn’t the winners but the losers who made for the most compelling stories. — English rock journalist Nick Kent (more…)

3,096 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Spanish version here

After discussing the distinction between identity and culture, and explaining why culture is not what creates nations (it is nations that create culture), let us now talk about what a nation is. (more…)

The Scottish economist Adam Smith, who understood the ways in which the market would transform human relations already at the dawn of liberalism.

3,287 words

Part 1 of 3 (Introduction Part 1 here, Chapter I Part 1 here, Chapter I Part 3 here)

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Liberalism must, however, recognize the fact of society. But instead of asking why the social realm exists, liberals are mainly preoccupied with understanding how society is able to establish itself, maintain itself, and function. Society, as we have seen, is for them nothing but the sum of its members (the whole is nothing but the sum of its parts). It is nothing but the contingent product of individual wills, a mere assemblage of individuals all seeking to defend and satisfy their particular interests. (more…)

1.257 slov

English original here

K otázkám obvykle probíraným na stránkách The Occidental Quarterly jsem dospěl až dosti pozdě. V mládí jsem se totiž o politiku nezajímal, za což jsem při pohledu zpět vděčný. Stejně jako většina Američanů jsem měl za to, že „politika“ znamená volební klání takřka k nerozeznání podobných stran.

Během dospívání jsem však narazil na Souostroví Gulag a plně si uvědomil, o jak vysoké sázky se v politice hraje. (more…)

A Lammas loaf owl with salt eyes, baked to mark the blessing of the First Fruits of harvest on August 1, or Lammas Day.

3,874 words

The first day of August is one of the four cross-quarter solar holidays. It’s known as either Lammas or Lughnasadh, depending on whether you’re of the Saxon or the Celtic persuasion. (If “Blessed be!” is a common greeting for you, then you get it. If not, I’ll just say welcome to the hottest part of the year — and this year’s been a doozy.) It’s one of the traditional harvest festivals, which of course has a secondary meaning: death.

Things often get pretty wonky for me on August 1; if it’s not the Grim Reaper dropping by for a social call, then it’s some other fine mess. Also, the day falls on a Full Moon this year. (more…)

2,148 words

The following was originally published in Polish in July 2023 in the Do Rzeczy weekly magazine. This translation was published at the English-language Polish conservative site Sovereignty.pl.

In 2002, Vladimir Putin was asked in an interview how the Russia he rules differs from the Soviet Union of Stalin’s time. The questioner’s intention was obviously to show that the times of bloody dictatorship in Russia were past, and that its present and future were times of freedom and democracy. In a conversation with the same reporter in 1991, Putin had warned with a sad face of a possible “return to totalitarianism.” 11 years later, when he had become the country’s President, he again put on a sad face, albeit for a completely different reason. (more…)

The early philosophers of liberalism postulated the “noble savage” as the type of man encumbered by social problems who had existed prior to the advent of civilization, and who still prevailed among the primitive peoples Europeans encountered in the rest of the world. (Detail from Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1771.)

3,856 words

Part 1 of 3 (Introduction Part 1 here, Introduction Part 3 here, Chapter 1 Part 2 here)

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Not being the work of a single man, liberalism has never presented itself as a unified doctrine. The authors who have laid claim to the name liberal have sometimes given divergent and even contradictory interpretations of it. Yet there must have been enough points in common between them to consider them liberal authors. It is precisely these points in common that allow us to define liberalism as a school. (more…)

1.385 slov

English original here

Stephen Mitford Goodson
Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd: South Africa’s Greatest Prime Minister

Jedná se o citacemi důsledně vybavený a přesvědčivý životopis „muže ze žuly“, jehož bych si troufl označit nejen za „největšího premiéra“ Jižní Afriky, ale dokonce za jednoho z největších státníků naší doby. (more…)