Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill (1628)
1,994 words
I was carrying out a literary exercise of quite a different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself . . . — George Orwell, “Why I Write”
Litera scripta manet.
(That which is written, remains.)
— John Dewey
One of many benefits of creative writing is that reading what you write or have written helps in understanding both your political worldview and how it was assembled. What you have written is the diary of your political travels, a tourist guide to your own opinions. Despite the word’s overuse, there is an element of narrative about this audit, something of story-telling. “And so I tell myself my life . . .” writes Nietzsche. This is journalism in the sense of the keeping of journals. I have my political journals going back 20 years; old weblog material for the most part, features more recently. In terms of my political and metapolitical beliefs, and why they still shift and settle, like a building, I have the map of the territory I crossed to get here. And where is here?
Fear and power, and their correlation, are the base elements of the modern Western crucible. In order to exercise power over another, you must make him afraid of something, and if you want to make someone afraid of something, you must exercise power over him. That sounds self-cancelling but represents more of a feedback loop in that power relations are everywhere, and already present in any situation or social transaction. “Two men will not be together half an hour,” writes Dr. Johnson, “but one will try to get the better of the other.”
As for the resultant fear, the elites — a term which serves as well as any — require us all to live in Traumaville. I discovered this word due to an error in transliteration, a mistake brought about by writing. It was at the end of last century, last millennium, excellent timing at the dawn of what is turning out to be a pretty dread epoch. I was working for a magazine and sub-editing the text of an interview with Stanley Kubrick, then working on his last movie, Eyes Wide Shut. The film was based, said Kubrick, on a German novel called Traumaville. Except that isn’t what he said.
The German title of the novel Kubrick gave would have been Traumnovelle, this being the 1926 novel by Arthur Schnitzler usually translated into English as Dream Novel. But the interviewer had heard Traumaville, and that is what he wrote down. Traumaville is where we all live now, the town motto familiar to all: “Be not too afraid, but be afraid.” Like Winston Smith, crouched in his corner in 1984 so that he is out of view of the invasive telescreen, using the stub of a pencil to scrawl his dissenting thoughts in a notebook, we must allay all fear, reject the validity of power, and keep before us the importance of the scriptive. Scripture, after all, has always been important. We must write if we can, and some of us must. Some writers are urged, some commanded.
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“From a very early age,” wrote George Orwell in the opening line of his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” “perhaps at the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.” This determination, even pre-determination, in the young Eric Blair (Orwell’s real name) puts me in mind of the opening voiceover line of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” Now that the Left reliably inform us that words are violence, perhaps a shotgun wedding can be arranged ‘twixt writer and mobster.
How dangerous is writing? Are the Left currently completing their long march through the institutions because they have all read up on Marx and Gramsci? Which is really mightier, the pen or the sword? Don’t answer that until you have watched this scene from Martin Scorsese’s Casino. When I consider the modern West, gangsterism is inextricably linked with its dramas. Scorsese seems as relevant a cultural commentator as Sir Roger Scruton. Both men are writers, in their different ways.
Certainly, Western governments and their enforcers, both in their police forces and their outsourcing of censorship to Big Tech, seem very exercised by writing of a certain stripe. They are not coming after the writers of huge political screeds, or even those such as the poet Shelley, throwing his revolutionary pamphlets as he did from a balcony into the street below, but rather searching — researching — for their required samizdat online.
Around ten people a day are being arrested in the United Kingdom for online “hate speech” (meaning the written word), and a recent example of this ideological intifada is a retired policemen who is facing jail for commenting on a meme. The meme featured parrots of differing colors, and children likewise. Parrots, it quaintly suggested, are loved for their different colors. Why can’t we do that with people? The perp commented that “No parrot ever stole a bike from my front garden.” Jail beckons, and the message from Command Central is clear, and could be advice from a kindly old teacher: Always take care with your writing.
Without going full Jacques Derrida, the differences and similarities between speech and writing are more important than simply the transliteration of one medium by another. Before ease of voice recording, the range of effects of speech was limited only to those who heard it directly. The availability and sheer global reach of writing was very different. Now, of course, this difference has been exacerbated. A very short message can have seismic effects now, even if it does not originally appear online.
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Like all the British police, Scottish officers and their bosses find the idea of attending such humdrum crime scenes as burglaries and vandalism as archaic, like seeing an old-fashioned telephone or an actual police station. They snapped into gear last year, however, when posters turned up on lampposts in a Scottish town reading, “It’s okay to be white.” Luther’s 99 theses, hammered onto the church door at Wittenberg, caused less of a stir.
So, writing really is powerful. And five words, at that. Six syllables. Short, sharp, and very much like a magic spell. Which is, of course, what it is. Incantational magical thinking — in its original form, not just its modern, doltish incarnation — is based on the premise that certain words are words of power. Spoken, their power is great. Written down, they often gain in efficacy. The name of a conjured devil, written as a sigil or cypher (because too powerful in itself to be written in full, or spoken), should, the Medieval grimoires inform us, be contained in strong iron caskets during an invocation. You can’t be too careful when it comes to writing. It is advisable to lock it up somewhere safe. To return from our sorcerer’s cell, modern governance has been taught, and taught well, to keep writing somewhere very safe: the mainstream media or legacy media, call it what you will. I liked the original from many years ago: dead-wood media.
The mainstream media is the iron casket in which the globalists keep the name of the demon. As for us scribbling away on the dissident Right, we are not even summoned, snarling as we do from the infernal regions, flapping our leathery wings. But the media is so precisely maintained in favor of the status quo, the only response from a dissident writer is one of shock and awe. The media is very, very good at what it does. In fact, the globalists — if you want to call them the Jews as shorthand, go right ahead; you won’t hear word one from me against it — are extremely accomplished at what it is they are doing, even if it is malevolent and borderline psychotic. What of the elites? Let’s have a brief glimpse at what the British hard Left think about them — or rather, those who point out their existence.
I did a lot of work on the British antifa organization HOPE not Hate (HNH), mostly in connection with their annual “State of Hate” report, in which it is my firm ambition one day to appear.
HNH obviously have their signature theme of racism and its endless practice by a far Right that is always growing in power and violence (even though no such entity exists), but last year there was a little subtext that found its way in among the white supremacy and general oppression. They seem very exercised by the expressed “far Right” belief that a cabal of global elites are running things. This is dismissed with a phrase only a few places down the league table from “racist”: conspiracy theorist.
Of course, I have my own pet conspiracy theories — indulged, played with, and fed, as all pets should be. Observe!
I believe the United States deep state worked very hard to get Joe Biden elected because they knew to a certainty that his inevitable media disasters — some of which may have been pre-scripted — and those of Kamala Harris would distract the media to such an extent that much of the rest of the program to destroy America could slip by unnoticed.
I think that the spurious imposition of black culture and blacks themselves on British culture, and particularly history — the claims that blacks have always been in Britain, for example — are intended to lead to an Australian-style “Voice” vote. If this referendum vote had passed in Australia (it lost quite heavily), Aborigines would have had a sort of co-axial government, a government within a government. But it wouldn’t have been devolved. Its legislation would have impacted on all Australians. Imagine such an arrangement with blacks in the UK or US. Without an overseer, blacks should not be put in charge of anything, particularly not their own destinies.
Finally, I think the World Economic Forum (WEF) is yet more distraction from the real global action. I don’t think it’s real. The WEF are the shadows on Plato’s cave wall.
To call a belief in a ruling cabal a conspiracy theory, however, is a bit rich for my blood. But what are these people doing, and why are they doing it? Malevolence, sheer devilment, like Iago? Or are they just godless game-players with the biggest and best board game a child ever had? Or are they a good, old-fashioned conspiracy? It might be a relief to know. Conspiracies, like any other group project, have successes and failures. Caesar’s senators, Guido Fawkes’ bombers, and Hitler’s generals had different aims and different outcomes.
I had a little internal poll with myself, and noted the first four American conspiracy theories that popped into my head. In order, they were: JFK, fake Moon landings, Area 51/Roswell, 9/11 as an inside job. I wanted to see how my instincts fared, meaning how well transatlantic culture had travelled. Well, all my picks were in the top flight, as you would expect — not because I am astute, but because memetic culture has done its job too well. Memes are not recent arrivals composed of images juxtaposed with comic or ironic captions, but memetics as a linguistic event.
The Left have one central conspiracy, that white men banded together in order to oppress everyone else. In reality, this is itself a transliteration of the fact that white men conspired to take charge of history because they knew that cooperation of the able and willing would be better for the able and willing. The Founding Fathers knew this best of all. They recognized the importance of writing it down. They were not afraid to do so, more afraid of the mere and breakable spoken word of a man. And we must write about our freedom and its enemies, from all angles. If we become frightened of writing, we become frightened of our own shadows, for that is what writing is.