Counter-Currents
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Halloween is my favorite holiday. Who doesn’t love chocolate and pumpkin flavored everything? Halloween’s metaphysical tones always appealed to me even before I consciously identified as a blood-and-soil nationalist. It is a time of fiery foliage, fertile pumpkin patches, and intriguing mists, It is perfect for rereading a bit of Lovecraft or Poe.
I find Halloween a soothing, tranquil time of year. There’s no pressure. You can do as much or as little as you want, and what you want. Its difficult to appreciate the spirit of Christmas amidst a flurry of activity. Halloween, and really the entire month of October, feel like an open invitation to enjoy the time without demands.
We already know about the war on Christmas via secularization and commercialization. But there is also a war on Halloween. It is quieter and more sinister, but it is a war nonetheless.
The principal direct attack on Halloween has been through tacky horror movies. Like modern “art,” they elevate ugliness for its own sake. They are also full of stupidity and cowardice which are inimical to the European spirit. Not all horror movies are like this. Some, such as Sleepy Hollow and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, are genuinely artful. But these are exceptions and not the norm.
Tacky horror films are a form of blasphemy, because Halloween is actually a religious holiday. Its proper name is All Hallows’ Eve in the Christian tradition, with its true roots running much deeper to Celtic Samhain. This was when the veil between our world and the Otherworld was thought to be at its thinnest. Halloween’s underlying meaning is veneration of our ancestors, pondering the mysteries of death and magic, and reaping the bounty of autumn’s harvest. In this light, most horror films purposefully mock our heritage, such as Sarah Silverman’s and Seth Rogen’s Santa Inc.
You can buy Collin Cleary’s Summoning the Gods here.
There is also the decline in trick-or-treating. I have a lot of nostalgia for it, and for a long time considered the decline in trick-or-treating to be a symptom of the same sort of parental overprotection that undermines society by producing weak citizens. I have completely reversed my opinion on this, however, as we are no longer in the 1990s.
Due to demographics, drugs, and degeneracy, there are very few neighborhoods in which I would feel comfortable letting kids wander around after dark or accept candy from strangers. The old saying that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” never hit so hard. It is a mark of America’s catastrophic failure that trick-or-treating must be added to the list of nice things we can’t have anymore. Thankfully, “trunk-or-treating” and other innovations are keeping our traditions alive through the gloom.
Alas, even pumpkin spice lattes are not safe anymore. The Washington Post — which itself is as decrepit as a zombie — ran an article complaining about the colonial legacy represented by nutmeg and other spices. Somehow, we whites are simultaneously guilty of not seasoning our food and of colonizing other peoples for their spices. They are now trying to poison even our pumpkin spice lattes with white guilt.
Why is Halloween and the broader season of Faustian Fall the target of so much subversion? It’s because they’re as implicitly white as It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
The decline of Halloween plays into a broader narrative that “white people have no culture.” This assertion is not true. This is so firstly because people of all races swim in white culture to the point that they no longer notice it any more than a fish notices water. Secondly, it is because those subversives who assert we have no culture are often the same ones who either actively destroyed out culture, commercialized it before selling it back to us as a cheap knockoff (this is especially true in the case of Christmas), or who encouraged it to whither away by allowing mass social decay.
We must rediscover how Europeans — and yes, even the Anglo-Saxons — are as ethnic and exotic as the non-whites featured in travel magazines. Halloween is our peculiar folk custom. Trick-or-treating was our outlet for dressing in costumes and decorating our homes, hanging out with our neighbors, and of course eating candy (and maybe playing some tricks on each other). It was our way of venerating our ancestors. It was our happy harvest festival.
I hope Halloween will see a resurgence as white Americans become interested in their heritage again.
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22 comments
Could there be fewer trick or treaters because there’s fewer white children? I live in a virtually all white enclave, but for some strange reason I always have a deluge of black kids looking for hand outs in my neck of the woods. I guess they don’t pass out candy where they live.
Your local phenomenon is a symbolic microcosm of the current American racial dynamic.
Hardly a new phenomenon. Been happening since I left my parents house
Ooga booga where the white chocolate at?
We wuz Dracula
The shine kids often don’t even dress up in costume.
And rarely, if ever, do you see Halloween decorations up in their already grotesque “neighborhoods.”
The HTML is mangled and I don’t know how to fix it, but this is from 2008:
“Halloween in Da Hood“
Hilarious Jim. Back when I lived in the city I left a bowl of candy with a Take 1 sign. I returned to the house a few minutes later when I realized I forgot something. The entire bowl was gone.
That reminds me of my stridently “not racist!” wife’s first obvious collision with race, when we had our first Halloween after moving to our first (and current) house. In addition to the mediocre stuff, she had bought a few really good and expensive treats.
The first few kids were white and said stuff like “Wow, I love these! Is it okay for me to get one for my sister, too?! … Thank you!” Then two black kids came and, without a word and ignoring my wife’s request to “just take one, please”, they both double-fisted the bowl twice and emptied it entirely, as their parent watched. Then they turned and walked away. She almost cried and hasn’t been enthusiastic about Halloween since.
That sucks to hear.
Did she at least change her tune?
I think she’s gradually warming back up to it, just because the kids like it so much, but she hasn’t tried to prepare any special treats since then.
That’s good to hear, but I should have been more clear.
I actually meant to ask if she warmed up to the race question after her bad experience.
Ahh. No, not really. 😛
You might be pleased to hear that Halloween is making strong inroads in Australia, where it was wholly imported from America about thirty years ago. Long Spring days don’t really fit the folkloric aspects and it is an orgy of consumption but it’s nice to see mothers and children out on the street interacting with each other rather than the black mirror. It feels almost like a memorial day for the vocation of home-maker.
Everything white is made to be “inclusive.” This goes for fantasy and gothic aesthetics which are inherently European. They are as white as you can get and you’ve seen this deliberate blackening of it then people proceed to say “fantasy isn’t white only thing”. Yes, because the architecture, clothing, weapons etc aren’t all European in style. They are actually Japanese. Wait no, black, let’s see some black architecture from real life see if it matches. Yea, these mud huts sure match Minas Tirith.
Who doesn’t love…pumpkin flavored everything?
Me. Pumpkin “flavor” is bland and overrated.
The suggestion that neighbourhoods are not safe for trick or treating is ridiculous unless one lives in a literal African ghetto with shootings on the regular. “Trunk or treating” performs the functions of Halloween without any of the magic.
Declining numbers of trick or treaters may just be another phenomenon of helicopter parenting, and with kids having the distraction of video games and computer screens they don’t even feel the need to rebel against it.
I agree that trunk-or-treating is a pretty lame replacement for trick-or-treating. While I wouldn’t feel comfortable letting the kids go out alone in this neighborhood, I’m glad to take them out with me. It’s a bit sad how few kids are around, though. It’s a far cry from the multiple hordes of 20+ kids with pillow cases running around when I was young.
I suspect that the hollowing out of our holiday traditions has a lot to do with the rise of atheism, religious apathy, and shallow belief.
Thomas Pellow endured months of torture in Muslim captivity rather than say the blasphemous words that would set him free, because he took Christianity and the threat of hell seriously. So did his contemporaries. What Christian in America today would last even an hour?
When religion is the central organizing principle of your life and community, it’s only natural that religious ceremonies and holy days will have great significance. And in modern times, when religion is just a Sunday social club for many, perhaps it’s inevitable that the rituals and holy days will fade away…
Also, the convenience of modern life where farming happens far away and most people never see a harvest, let alone a harvest festival, probably plays a part in disconnecting us from these traditions.
I find it even more unpleasant that the Halloween was and still is imported into countries where this tradition has never existed, for example, in post-Soviet republics. This has been happening for about 25 years, and, of course, the Halloween is presented there in a purely commercial form with corresponding sales in the malls, and with stupid horror films. But even without them, this holiday is completely alien there.
I think that a lot of European nations used to have special traditions around this time of year. It seems to be universally, or at least eurocentric-ly accepted that at this time of year, the dead and the living are closest to each other.
I am guessing that the Irish tradition held on for much longer though.
There is also the decline in trick-or-treating. I have a lot of nostalgia for it, and for a long time considered the decline in trick-or-treating to be a symptom of the same sort of parental overprotection that undermines society by producing weak citizens. I have completely reversed my opinion on this, however, as we are no longer in the 1990s.
This is hilarious, doubtless unintentionally. My parents were already worried about me going treating back in the … 1960s. After the Federal Civil Rights Act passage in 1964, followed closely by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (as well as the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of that truly glorious year), there was an explosion of overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) black crime that continuously accelerated until the mid-90s – the Thirty Years’ Crime Wave. Following various conservative crime control and policing reforms (real ones, which made it easier to catch crooks, not the pro-thug garbage proposed under the ‘reform’ label today), crime went down for about two decades (mid-90s-mid-10s), though public safety never remotely returned to what it had been in the 50s and earlier.
Perhaps what has changed and inspired the author’s observation is the condition of too many formerly safe white communities, ones that would have been fine to trick or treat in as recently as the 90s, but which have now changed due to either non-black diversity-importation, making whites feel more alienated from their environments and thus less safe even if the actual crime rate is not appreciably worse, or genuine endogenous white degeneration, either under the influence of drugs, or perhaps the general breakdown of all forms of external social authority and control.
My point is that treating was not remotely safe in any major American urban area in the 90s, except perhaps for certain relatively homogeneous ‘home blocks’ where the kiddies and their parents know their neighbors.
On a final note, I do think inculcating nostalgia for earlier, better, whiter times and practices is an excellent metapolitical way to foster what we might call proper alienation among whites, especially the young, who must be made to realize that life really was better when it was whiter – when more of the population was white; when the cultural ‘tone’ was determined by whites; and when whites, especially non-liberal ones, controlled the nation and its destiny.
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