Counter-Currents
Nick Lowles, founder and Chief Executive of the antifa organization Hope Not Hate. (Image source: Gov.uk)
2,616 words
The first point in occult science is by no means the advancing of assertions or opinions which are to be proven, but the communication, in a purely narrative form, of experiences which are to be met with in a world other than the one that is to be seen with physical eyes and touched with physical hands. — Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science
The meaning of a word is its use in the language. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
The British political and media class uses the term “far Right” in the same way the Biden administration and the American mainstream media warn of the supposed threat of “white supremacy.” Both establishments require an enemy at the societal level to distract from any actual threats (which they have pretentiously started to call “existential” threats), and as neither white supremacists nor the far Right exist in any meaningful sense in either country, their respective political/media complexes have had to invent them.
This is not merely a media affair but also, and more importantly, a philosophical one, particularly in the area of language. As we shall see, descriptions of “white supremacists” and “the far Right” are based not on definition, but on association. When Biden or CNN accuse half of America of being white supremacists, the mental image conjured up is the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan League, and Birth of a Nation — a twilit world in which American History X is a documentary, not a work of fiction. When the British political and media class use the term “far Right,” the phrase is associated in the British mind with the skinheads of the National Front in the 1970s. This media-produced image is perfectly captured by the late Jonathan Bowden, writing in an essay on Ezra Pound:
The radical Right is regarded as a trajectory that has no connection with civility, or with art, or with culture. It is a tendency connected to thuggery in the mass mind and in the mass media mind.
You can buy Mark Gullick’s novel Cherub Valley here.
The caricature of the “far Right” in Britain is often described as “knuckle-dragging.” Association is paramount, definition nowhere to be seen. Let’s see this associationism in action.
Earlier this year, Ex-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made a speech warning of the dangers of Islamism after a maverick Left-wing politician won a local election on the Gaza ticket. “Islamist extremists and far-Right groups are spreading a poison,” Sunak said earnestly, further conflating the two by calling them “two sides of the same coin.” London Mayor Sadiq Khan described those protesting his ULEZ (ultra-low emission zone) policy outside the building in which he was speaking as “part of the far Right.” Not only this, Khan added, but some of those keeping far-Right company “are COVID deniers, some are vaccine deniers, and some are Tories.” In 2018, then-Assistant Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police Force (the Met) Mark Rowley was also head of counter-terrorism. In a speech to the think tank Policy Exchange, Mr. Rowley said that “Islamist and Right-wing extremism is reaching into our communities through sophisticated propaganda and subversive strategies creating and exploiting vulnerabilities that can ultimately lead to acts of violence and terrorism.” Rowley is currently Chief Commissioner of the Met.
The Irish government regularly refers to those protesting against migrant centers being placed unceremoniously in their small rural towns as “far Right.” The BBC likewise talks of the “resurgence of the far Right” in Europe when they disapprove of an election result.
Finally, and again earlier this year when his party was still in power, Communities Secretary Michael Gove — a foolish title for a foolish man — decided the best way to combat extremism was to change its definition. He specifically named five groups, three Islamic organizations, and two from the “far Right,” as though this somehow represented a ratio of threat levels:
Across this House, I am sure that we would agree that organizations such as the British National Socialist Organisation and Patriotic Alternative, who promote neo-Nazi ideology, argue for forced repatriation, a white ethnostate and the targeting of minority groups by intimidation, are precisely the type of groups about which we should be concerned and whose activities we will assess against the hew definition.
Don’t like your old definition? Change it to a new one!
Writing about Khan’s comments in The Daily Telegraph, GB News presenter Camilla Tominey summarizes the reasons for this insistence on the use of the term “far Right” (or any variant) to a nicety:
The casualisation of terms like “far-Right” and “alt-Right” is of course designed to move the centre ground further to the Left by making mainstream views, often ones held by the majority of the population, appear extremist.
The problem is one of a lack of definition. As with “hate speech,” “Islamophobia,” “white privilege,” and the ubiquitous “racism,” the term “far Right” has no consensually-agreed meaning, which is what definition is. If a term in common usage is not defined, we are either in the position of Wittgenstein’s player of private language games, or we are in Wonderland with Alice when Humpty Dumpty informs her that “when I use a word . . . it means just what I want it to mean, neither more nor less.” Orwell unpacked the consequence of the lack of fixity in defining a word in “Politics and the English Language” with reference to “fascism,” a term still in vogue today. “The word Fascism,” he wrote in 1946, “has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.” Definition is anathema to many on the Left, and if they ever get around to book-burning, the dictionary will be the first volume consigned to the flames.
The replacement of definition with association serves two purposes. Firstly, it allows toxic tropes to dictate the image of the far Right. Secondly, it does away with the need for definition and the relative conceptual stability it brings with it. The Left’s inability to define the terms they use for those they oppose is not mere woolly thinking. Definition is anathema to them because it regulates the terms of a debate they have no intention of having. To define something places it in the objective world which is and must be communitarian, or communication would not be possible. This is why the Left use language in an elastic, malleable way.
Definition looks straightforward, but internal bifurcations make it anything but. Dictionary definition looks as though it is an ultimate arbiter as it explains the meaning of a word or words by reference to other words. But there is a strange internal slippage at work which does not allow definition to settle in a fixed position. John Locke, the eighteenth-century English philosopher whose political theories influenced the American Declaration of Independence (itself a document reliant on definition), writes the following concerning the problem of dictionary definition in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1689: “For if the Terms of one Definition were still to be defined by another, where at last should we stop?”
Definition has different applications and requires recognition of its differing functions. Both virtue and the triangle can be defined, and when Plato asks in the Euthyphro “What is virtue?”, we can see that a definition is what is sought, but not in the same sense that Plato defines a geometrical figure in the Meno. So already we have at least two types of definition, one which is open to dispute, and one which is not. Virtue may be defined today in a very different way than it was in first-century Rome, but a triangle may not. Virtue may be defined differently depending on whether you are inquiring in Tehran or London, but a triangle is a plane figure bounded by three sides wherever you are.
The difference between these two species of definition looks unimportant, but it is quite the opposite. A common category mistake seeks to boost synthetic definition to the status of a priori. It is a very common mistake to expect truth functions which operate entirely separately of one another to be confounded as though they were one process. One regularly hears intelligent people stating that someone who disagrees with them is “acting illogically” or “not using logic.” That is because the value system in which they are debating or defining is not one where logic properly applies. The charge of illogicality simply means the accused is not in agreement with the accuser.
In philosophical terms, an unwillingness to define terms denotes an emotivist use of language in which words and their application aim not at explaining the nature of a person, object, or event, but reduce to a simple act of approval or disapproval on the part of the speaker. This reductive act of simple, personal preference is also known as the “Boo/Hooray theory.” As we are dealing with speech and language, it is instructive to reread the great British philosopher and speech act theorist, J. L. Austin.
Austin begins by dividing speech acts into two, the constative and the performative. Constative statements are made with the expectation that they are to be considered as true, performative statements as suitable only to be apprised in some other way. Thus, to say that a person is gay can be a valid description of that person as a homosexual or an insult hurled in a playground. In the first instance, the term is used constantively; in the second, performatively. To call someone “far Right,” the term being undefined, has no constative substance, and is a purely performative utterance.
Austin’s second division of speech acts is tripartite. A statement (and a single word is still a statement) is always locutionary, as any utterance understood by any hearer must be simply by virtue of its being made. The subsequent pair are the revival of divisions within classical rhetoric. The illocutionary act is the informational status of the statement: Is it a simple observation, a question, a request? Finally, the perlocutionary function of a statement is its intended outcome, the effect the speaker intends to have on the hearer, be it agreement, an answer, or assistance. Shouting “Get out!” at someone is always a locutionary act whatever its inflection or intention. Whether the command is due to disgust with the person or because the house both parties are in is on fire is an illocutionary consideration. The intention to persuade the other person to leave is perlocutionary. In Austinian terms, the charge made against someone that they are “far Right,” while necessarily locutionary and certainly perlocutionary, simply skips the illocutionary. It has no informational status.
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The elasticity of what constitutes a “far-Right” personality is not, however, directly foisted onto the populace by government. Instead, they outsource the task in the same way they outsource social media censorship to the Big Tech platforms that provide the service. In the United Kingdom, the main regulator is an organization called HOPE Not Hate (HNH).
HNH are the British equivalent of America’s Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). They produce an annual report entitled State of Hate, in which they exhaustively list figures which they associate with the far Right. As we have seen, there is no working definition of the term, and as it functions as a pure Austinian perlocutionary, it is a simple blanket pejorative. HNH are at liberty to include anyone who contravenes rules they themselves have introduced. In common with many commentators on the political Left, their working premises are ex cathedra.
All that said, HNH do at least acknowledge the theoretical necessity of definition. In the editorial preface to the 2024 report by the CEO of HNH, Nick Lowles, we read that:
This year’s State of Hate report focuses heavily on the Radical Right, a political phenomenon we define as right-wing populist in outlook, with strongly anti-immigration and anti-elite rhetoric, but differs from the traditional far Right in that it advocates an illiberal democracy rather than overthrow of the system itself.
This seems a cautionary move, indicating that HNH realize that simply firing off accusations of a person or body being “far Right” is no longer sufficient to taint the full range of dissident commentators and politicians they require to stay in business. In the paragraph following that quoted, two representatives of the “Radical Right” are journalist Douglas Murray and polling expert Matthew Goodwin. HNH can see that branding these two level-headed and relatively moderate men as “far Right” will not work. This caveat is, however, rather mannered in comparison with the tagline for HNH’s appeal for funding, which reads:
We take action on and defeat nazis [sic]. Will you step up with a donation to ensure we can keep fighting the far right?
The conflation of the far Right with Nazis is hardly news, but might be considered extreme in what is effectively a government watchdog. This shift in focus in this year’s report shows that HNH are alive to the intractability of applying the term “far Right” to every shade of conservative opinion. Put simply, people are starting to notice, and HNH’s credibility is paramount to their existence.
We are in the arena of rhetoric, and as Austin shows us, language has more uses than clarification by definition. It is also used to confound and to confuse. Plato gives a description of those against whom it is difficult to argue in the Theaetetus:
If you ask any of them a question, he will produce, as from a quiver, sayings brief and dark, and shoot them at you; and if you inquire the reason of what he has said, you will be hit by some other new-fangled word, and will make no way with any of them, nor they with one another; their great care is, not to allow of any settled principle either in their arguments or in their minds, conceiving, as I imagine, that any such principle would be stationary; for they are at war with the stationary, and do what they can to drive it out everywhere. [Italics added]
What can Plato mean if not that his supposed opponent resists the concept of definition?
There has been very little philosophical analysis on the Right of how and why a small but vociferous minority have managed to impose language usage on the majority. Studying contemporary politics and informing ourselves with dissident literature from the past is necessary for the dissident Right, but a philosophical grounding is, I believe, lacking in the resistance movement. It is very difficult, outside of Counter-Currents and The Occidental Observer, to persuade editors that philosophical articles are as essential to our understanding of the enemy as any amount of social commentary.
And so we will continue to be labelled as “far Right” in Britain and “white supremacists” in America, along with a host of other perlocutionary fortune-cookie mottoes, examples of what I call “placardism.” The question is how much this will fool how many people, and for how long. The American Right has seen four years of what the Left can do to its country, itself a relatively recent experiment in democracy, as de Tocqueville pointed out. The British, founded, as their league of nations is, on centuries of tradition, are about to find out what five years of even more self-hating and destructive socialism can do.
In the meantime, we must dust off our volumes of philosophy. As a child said in a garden long ago, “Take up the book and read.” St. Augustine, hearing the ghostly but persuasive voice, opened his Bible and never looked back at his old life. He redefined himself, as we must, straining our ears across the centuries to catch an echo of the same voice.
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37 comments
Excellent piece. It deep-dives into deceitful, propagandistic usage with which we’re all familiar, and the mendacity of which is bog-obvious to most. There’s no immediate solution, no magic bullet, alas! Just a black pill. But not really black because when you sort these terms out and analyze how they’re used, you start to understand how they might eventually be defused and defeated.
Without proselytising too much, I really do think that is why philosophy is important to ‘get into gear’ for dealing with these intellectually negligible weirdoes. They are winning, but they have absolutely no idea how it is they are doing that. If we come at them with relentlessly thought-out reasons why they are so desperarately wrong in the societies they want to build, horrible mountains of madness, we at least stand a fighting chance. Make philosophy great again!
Your plan assumes they have enough intelligence to comprehend your logic. Most of them don’t. You also assume they don’t want the madness and chaos their horrible actions create, most of them do. Evil requires chaos and hopelessness.
They have the platforms for the rhetoric, ergo dictates the narrative; which justifies the actions they take. Anything slightly to the right of David Cameron’s shadow is extremism.
Thank you for that. I think of it at times as choosing the site for the battle. If their false definitions, or lack of definitions are not first thrown aside, you have given up the high ground.
‘Choosing the site for the battle’. Precisely. We are fighting on their turf and we need to be engaging on ours.
“placardism”
Yes. My own version is that the great majority of people “think” in cartoons and speak in slogans.
And it’s been the Liberal/Progressive elites who have been in charge of providing the cartoons and the slogans for most of the past 75+ years. I know of no vocabulary created by them, from “Native American” to “racist” that has not been implicitly or overtly anti-White.
Yes, cartoonish thinking. When I was a young man I thought The Clash’s lyrics were profound political commentary. Then I grew up – a bit, anyway – and realised they were shouty pop lyrics. The Left won’t touch the deep end of thinking, they splash around in the shallow end and yet they run the show. It’s our language, not theirs, and we need to make the best use of it we can.
I must say, certain cartoons are very powerful catalyst’s. Sometimes an image speaks a thousand words
We may have Rush Limbaugh and George Lakoff to blame for the Left learning the weaponization of language, at least for that one period in time.
Limbaugh often mentioned George Lakoff, who in turn analyzed the effectiveness of Rush’s talk radio empire in defining the Left.
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Progressives-lack-a-Limbaugh-like-voice-3163880.php
Thanks, that’s a useful piece, particularly this.
‘Words, even those heard casually and listened to incidentally, activate frames – structures of ideas that are physically realized in the brain. The more the words are heard, the more the frames are activated in the brain, and stronger their synapses get – until the frames are there permanently’.
I’m working on a piece on NLP, which I believe has a very sinister role to play in British government. Blair was a fan, which tells us all we need to know. I know they run seminars on NLP, and it involves repetition and inculcation. Listen to the trending buzz-phrases that come and go in political/media discourse and it becomes mantra-like.
This reminded me of the time when Al Gore mirrored Reagan’s style and demeanor in a Presidential. He may have used the NLP technique of mirroring in rehearsing for the debate. He was a notoriously stiff guy. The effect was downright spooky.
Climate change rather than global warming. Fascist for disagreement. White supremacist for those who prefer their own kind. They seem to feed on moving goalposts and fluid meanings to stay steps ahead. Nazis, such as any actually exist anymore, have no power. Wanting to take back Britain for the British or America for Americans is simply not an extreme position. Mass deportation or self deportation is a bit of an extreme position, but extreme doesn’t mean wrong. Fighting Britain in the Revolutionary War was quite extreme yet definitely justified. We all know it’s easier to put on fat (freeloading aliens) than it is to get back to our fighting weight (natives only). Let’s take back our countries and language.
‘Extreme doesn’t mean wrong’. Exactly. If you let your enemy lay out the rules of engagement, and it involves you having no weapons and them having lots, the battle will be a tough one. They made language into a weapon, so they need disarming, like those daft scenes in movies where a guy has a gun in the other guy’s face, and the other guy magically whips it off him and turns the tables. We need a bit of gun-whipping-off, if you see what I mean.
…[N]either white [sic] supremacists nor the far Right exist in any meaningful sense…
Bingo! A necessary subject for discussion among serious racial nationalists with the correct conclusion provided.
I remember John Harland’s Word Controlled Humans that was passed around in pro-White circles back in the 1980s. I see on Amazon.com that one rare, used paperback copy is available for $54.39 plus shipping. Keep your money.
An interesting review of it there has this pearl: “There is no left or right, there [are] only word-controlled people.”
Forty years later and for some, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
The words “far right” do not exist in the serious White racial separatist’s lexicon or in his world. How can serious Whites whose goal is to separate from racial aliens be accused of being supreme over those from whom they are determined to separate? Maybe there are still White “supremacists” somewhere who wish to exploit non-Whites in their midst since racial segregation and Apartheid utterly failed, but I don’t know of any myself. White supremacy is a stupid term from past half-measures.
I haven’t heard of the Harland book, although as you say the price is a bit steep. ‘Word controlled people’. Spousal arguments often take place precisely on that level. As I say, while everything else is being stripped away from us, language is still a weapon on the wall. We ought to take it down and use it.
Mark Gullick PhD: July 23, 2024 I haven’t heard of the Harland book, although as you say the price is a bit steep. ‘Word controlled people’.
That’s just me, Dr. Gullick. As an academic, in your specialty, as the only copy available, it may well be worth nearly $60. Supply and demand.
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When Biden or CNN accuse half of America of being white [sic] supremacists, the mental image conjured up is the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan League, and Birth of a Nation…
Being a White American man in the half that a Biden or CNN are smearing so smugly, conjuring up those negative images, I’m not that suggestible. Wouldn’t it be ideal if there are actually half of us who aren’t preconditioned to accept their propaganda unquestioningly?
The image I conjure up is the “Day of the Rope” when white race traitors like politicians and media moguls are dancing on air, hanging from lampposts.
QUESTION: When our side capitalizes the word White when referring to our race, unlike our enemies who use the lower case, white, would you say that is taking control of that word for our purpose?
—
‘Extreme doesn’t mean wrong’.
No, not when in defense of liberty, as the demi-Jew Goldwater famously said. But after the comma he also reminded that “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
When the enemy call us extremists, don’t deny it. Embrace it; fighting for the preservation of our race is certainly virtuous.
To capitalise ‘white’ just looks like tit-for-tat because Associated Press mandated that ‘black’ should always be capitalized. We need to reclaim grammar, rhetoric, inductive and deductive reasoning, all the toolkit language gives us. They are not out-thinking us, so how come they are winning?
Mark Gullick PhD: July 23, 2024 To capitalise ‘white’ just looks like tit-for-tat because Associated Press mandated that ‘black’ should always be capitalized… They are not out-thinking us, so how come they are winning?
The Jew-run Associated Press may be influencing and out-thinking you, Mark, with its goddamned influential anti-White Stylebook. AP is not out-thinking me.
Who’s “titting for tat”?
Thanks for reminding me of AP’s role. I found the article below about when AP made the decision that henceforth everyone should capitalize Black but not white — our race — on “Juneteenth” four years ago. Dr. William Pierce and other serious White separatists — not supremacists — were capitalizing White when referring to our race decades before that phony nigger holiday was foisted on us as a federal holiday. But Pierce wasn’t so narrow-minded as the AP and capitalized Black as well as other races, like Jew.
AP says it will capitalize Black but not white
BY DAVID BAUDER
July 20, 2020
NEW YORK (AP) — After changing its usage rules last month to capitalize the word “Black” when used in the context of race and culture, The Associated Press on Monday said it would not do the same for “white.”
The AP said white people in general have much less shared history and culture, and don’t have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color.
Protests following the death of George Floyd, which led to discussions of policing and Confederate symbols, also prompted many news organizations to examine their own practices and staffing. The Associated Press, whose Stylebook is widely influential in the industry, announced June 19 it would make Black uppercase.
“We agree that white people’s skin color plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore these problems,” John Daniszewski**, the AP’s vice president for standards, said in a memo to staff Monday. “But capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.”
**Mr. Daniszewski, race unspecified, did not make the cut on this handy WikiJew list: List of Jewish American journalists – Wikipedia.
However, by claiming that capitalizing the term white risks subtly conveying legitimacy to white supremacist beliefs — there’s that Jewish slur of legitimate White loyalists again — does not exactly qualify him for WikiJews’ very short List of Aryan American journalists. The burden is on him and AP and WikiJews to prove he does not have Yids in his fuel supply. Prior to becoming an expert in setting language standards, he reported for years for The Times of Israel, after all.
Sorry no, Mr G, with respect, we capital-W now.
“They are not out-thinking us, so how come they are winning?”
They shout what we can and cannot do and we obediently comply. They said making the Okay sign with index finger and thumb touching in a circle with the three other fingers extended is a sign of White supremacy so we stopped doing it. There are other countless examples. One of the latest is calling someone a DEI hire is the equivalent of calling them the n-word.
If we want to start winning we must stand our ground. If someone says not to use the hand ok sign, I make a point of using it and if they say anything I reply they are a moron that hates White people and I have no interest in listening to someone who hates me because of the color of my skin.
Part of the problem is the internet and social media which easily reaches into the depths of many people’s lives. Before the internet, you could easily exclude people you didn’t want to associate with and not hear their bs.
fascism had real negative connotations in the 20th Century. The strictness, anti-labor, anti-free speech, war mongering of fascism was less attractive than Marxist ideology or Liberal capitalist prosperity (at least in the post-war period.)
However, the real people–jews–who control everything only used these unpopular tropes until about the 1990s, when it became a full anti-white definition.
The history of the use of the word ‘fascism’ would make a good piece. From what I have read of Julius Evola, he points out quite simply that it is possible to disassociate ‘Hitlerism’ from the positive aims of German fascism. Yes, Auschwitz, but also, yes, support for small farmers.
Well Auschwitz was a labour camp which was only set up after England, France and effectively the USA had declared war on Germany. Faked buildings, forced confessions and selective testimony from members of a race with a matchless talent for confabulation constitute the “evidence” that anything outside the normal bounds of wartime inhumanity occurred there. These being set against the wartime reports of the Red Cross.
Great article
Every economic and social political issue should be reviewed in an independent manner, given independent attention and analysis.
The ability to promote independent philosophical thinking is very important. In a world were this philosophical thinking is lacking among the general populous and not promoted in their education systems,… words and their perceived definitions become even more important. Narrowing down much complex, variable and diverse concepts, and political issues to just the existing “political party scopes” and then further narrowing them to just two political party’s, increasingly produces very obtuse mind frames.
Fascist, Communist, Socialist, Marxist, Liberal, Federalist, “Conservative or Democrat”,, very few men from historic or modern political arenas can be properly or perfectly categorized under these titles, [perhaps with the exception of the founders]. Categorization regarding levels of intelligence and corruption would be more revealing and accurate.
“Bottom line (or baseline) is that these old political titles or classifications are now just slogans (many intentionally redefined with new significance to symbolize only good or evil), and insofar as that they are each trees of accumulated wisdom, they are also epistemological weapons, so choose carefully how you read those who use them, and remember that before 1850, or there’s about, almost no one had any data but what they had gathered in their own mind and within proximity of their dwellings or classroom. Today with all the mass, missing or misdirecting data available in the internet we are still void of knowledge and truth as the masses were then, only with a greater capacity to be misinformed or misdirected. Also, everyone who uses these words with grave intent seems to want to take your language from you and use it against you, we accept it so we don’t have to do the math (to reason, collect facts and calculate truths), which is quite sad.”
“The social problems of our time exist because of the state of mind that the people find themselves in. It is the accepted norms that we are conditioned to now exist in, (hegemony, also philosophized in Plato’s Republic).” – (Reflection, Guzziferno).
And let us recognize and remember this tactic is used by all groups, requiring constant mediation in our listening and our understanding.
…but a philosophical grounding is, I believe, lacking in the resistance movement.
I am an outsider, yet, I think I can add something to this discussion.
I reckon linguistic proficiencies are as essential as a good philosophical grounding. A native speaker of English should also have some familiarity with Greek, Latin, and German. Only then will he/she be able to develop a capacity to grasp philosophical concepts. Possibly, a polyglot can examine a word or a statement simultaneously in several dimensions. And, hence, it would become difficult to play linguistic games with any such individual.
My native language is Urdu. Roughly speaking, it is a combination of Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian.
Now, here is something interesting: I tried to read Heidegger’s Being and Time in English. It was difficult. Then I read him in Persian [text directly translated from German], and, understood, a little more clearly what the great philosopher was saying. Perhaps, the rich vocabulary of Urdu and Persian helped me in this endeavor.
Interesting. What is the base language family of Urdu? I mean, how would it classify, indo European or Semitic?
@DarkPlato
The Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family.
Not to besmirch the vocabulary of Urdu about which I know next to nothing, but isn’t the reason you preferred reading Heidegger in your native tongue that it is difficult and hinges on precise understanding which requires mastery of the language in which it is presented?
I fully agree with you that an Anglo-Saxon ought to be familiar with German, Latin and some Greek in order to really understand his own language and its sprawling vocabulary. Blair/Orwell’s Newspeak, crafted with the help of the telegraph and now the text message, stands as the antithesis of this idea.
@Antipodean
I didn’t say I read in Urdu. I said I did so in Persian; though given the same terminological precision that Urdu also possesses, the experience would be the same.
Secondly, I understand English as I understand my mother-tongue (Urdu). If Shakespeare’s lines sends shivers down one’s spine, it can, then, be said that he/she has attained significant proficiency in the English language.
What I meant to state was that despite its literary grandeur and beauty, the English language still has some limitations when it comes to studying philosophy. I can say that because I can compare English texts with their translations in Urdu and Persian and vice versa.
Now, I am not that fluent in German, Latin, and Greek, however, I hold that a good knowledge of these languages would bestow upon an English speaker the metaphysical depth necessary for philosophical exploration. In my case, the same task is done by Urdu and Persian (both heavily influenced by Arabic, the language in which we say our obligatory prayers).
Let’s not forget human nature,
“No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth” – Plato
I have never understood how calling me or anyone “right-wing” or “right-winger” or “far-right” is supposed to be any sort of insult or why people cower from it the way they do. In fact, I think these terms need to be turned on themselves and embraced by those opposed to the left, if there is to be any meaningful opposition to the left at all, precisely because mainstream conservatism has been such a failure. Not only is mainstream conservatism a failure, a paid to lose enterprise, in fact, its propensity to lose is an instance of linguistic determinism. I wrote about that in this essay:
https://theravenscall.substack.com/p/conservatism-defined
In any case, let’s embrace the label “right-wing” or “far-right.” Doing that has the same effect as “yes, and?” to accusations of racism, anti-semitism, etc. Take it from me, a real, hard-line right-winger and right-wing populist.
Richard Parker: July 23, 2024 I have never understood how calling me or anyone “right-wing” or “right-winger” or “far-right” is supposed to be any sort of insult or why people cower from it the way they do…
In any case, let’s embrace the label “right-wing” or “far-right.” … Take it from me, a real, hard-line right-winger and right-wing populist.
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Who’s cowering?
No offense, Richard, but isn’t it about time White race-thinkers ditch the left/right nonsense used to define factions in France 235 years ago and get down to what counts today with simple terms that everyone understands: pro-White and anti-White?
Where Do the Political Terms Left and Right Come from?
The modern usage of the political terms left and right comes from the French Revolution of 1789 when supporters of the king stood to the president’s right, and supporters of the revolution to his left.
No. There has been no left right dichotomy, only left-conservative. And conservatism, in the end, protects nothing.
Richard Parker: July 24, 2024 No. There has been no left right dichotomy, only left-conservative. And conservatism, in the end, protects nothing.
We seem to be pretty much in agreement, Richard. See: “Conservatism Is for Losers” at nationalvanguard.org.
…National Vanguard’s heritage, which began more than fifty years ago in 1969 with the National Youth Alliance’s tabloid newspaper Attack!. During those early years, in 1971, William Pierce wrote an article — “Why Conservatives Can’t Win” — that was so far ahead of its time that it remains important, even vital today. For more than ever now, we need to guide our people away from the trap of “conservatism,” which is a totally inadequate response…
Read the text of Dr. Pierce’s classic at nationalvanguard.org or download the trifold flier for distribution to White conservatives, here: “Free National Alliance Fliers / Graphics” at natall.com.
I managed to catch Israeli PM Bibi Neyanyahoo’s speech today to the Joint meeting of Congress. half of the 532 0f the 535 of “our” Senators and Congressmen in attendance were in front of him to his left and the other half to his right. They were all standing and applauding him most of the time like he was their king (except a few non-Whites who pull for the Palestinian Semites Bibi has been genociding). There was your left right Jew-loving dichotomy in full view. Some of those may pretend to be pro-White when asking you for your vote or your money, but that’s a politician’s act. That’s what they do.
Fionn McCool: July 24, 2024 Sorry no, Mr G, with respect, we capital-W now.
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WayDown: July 24, 2024
Mr. G asks: “…[H]ow come they are winning?”
If we want to start winning we must stand our ground. If someone says not to use the hand ok sign, I make a point of using it and if they say anything I reply they are a moron that hates White people…
Part of the problem is the internet and social media which easily reaches into the depths of many people’s lives. Before the internet, you could easily exclude people you didn’t want to associate with and not hear their bs.
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The ‘Net is a wonderful tool. Social media could be, if in the right hands, but they are not for the most part. Like television, a wonderful tool that is almost entirely in the hands of the Jew or his collaborators.
So, we build our own media to bypass (((theirs))) to reach our people and only our people — no interlopers telling us to capitalize Jew and Black, but not White, nor submissive morons that say we mustn’t flash the “hateful” OK sign with our thumb and forefinger.
Capitalizing White is little more than passive resistance. (((They))) haven’t managed to criminalize it yet. Let (((them))) whine when they see us do so. When there are more Whites standing our ground and doing this than there are white sissies who don’t, the battle is half won.
I’ve been placing First Class 0ne-ounce American flag stamps upside-down on mailings for nearly 40 years. [Even Supreme Court Justice Alito’s courageous wife, Martha-Ann, knows that an upside-down American flag is a symbol that the nation is in distress (which it most certainly is).] I do this on every National Alliance BULLETIN mailed to NA members each month. It’s almost as encouraging to see stamps placed like that on envelopes when members mail back their monthly dues as it is to see them capitalizing the word White as our NA Founder did. Doing so is not NA policy, they just do it as harmless passive resistance. It’s catching on. Our White postal workers have noticed the practice.
If your enemy can get you to conform to their value system merely by calling you a mean name, you’re just going to fail to achieve anything you think you want.
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