1,397 slov
English original here
Fakta sice jsou důležitá, mnohem důležitější ale bývají příběhy. Fakta – izolovaná data – lze snadnou zapomenout, ale příběhy se shlukují do infrastruktury našeho světonázoru. Jejich prostřednictvím si utváříme tento světonázor, který následně ovlivňuje, jaké příběhy vyslechneme v jakési nekonečné smyčce zpětné vazby – a právě proto má kontrola nad narativem tak nenahraditelný význam. (more…)
1,019 words
Paul Christensen
Greybeard
Createspace, 2017
Greybeard is the new novel by Paul Christensen, author of The Hungry Wolves of Van Diemen’s Land, The Heretic Emperor and Reveries of the Dreamking (the first two of which are reviewed here at Counter-Currents). (more…)
1,418 words
Charles Manson was a scapegoat for the sixties counter-culture and he became a false Messiah for the seventies, eighties, nineties, and naughties counter-cultures. His real meaning can only be discerned by understanding these two equally imaginary poles of social function that he was compelled to occupy during his decades of imprisonment. The fact that Manson himself was keenly aware of this process of projection and that he actively sought to manipulate it does not attest to evidence of demonic powers but neither does it attest to the machinations of a victimized magus. (more…)
1,619 words
J. A. Nicholl
Venus & Her Thugs: Fifteen Weird Tales
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2017
What is a weird tale? To keep the question manageable, it makes sense to think only about modern, literary tales. In that respect, then, the weird tale is a scion of the ghost story family. The modern, literary ghost story is widely acknowledged to have been created by M. R. James. James’ stories followed a formula of a cerebral, monastic academic discovering some sort of occult object, and subsequently being assaulted by a supernatural emanation connected to that object. (more…)
1,504 words
War for the Planet of the Apes is the third film of the rebooted series and one of the best. With its austere visual palette and dark tonal mood it could so easily have been a flawless masterpiece. Unfortunately, a couple of trivial missteps get in the way of its overall quality and undermine the film’s otherwise brutal solemnity.
War begins 15 years after the simian flu outbreak that wiped out much of the human species. (more…)
1,553 words
One of the exhibits in Manchester Art Gallery’s True Faith exhibition is a notebook in which Joy Division’s manager, Rob Gretton, used to write thoughts and reminders concerning the band’s schedule and ethos. Presented in a glass case, it is open at a page where Gretton muses on certain questions asked of him by the journalist Paul Morley. (more…)
4,440 words
“Only the dead can know what it means to be dead.”—Ananda Coomaraswamy[1]
Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” articulates his fear of death in chilling terms. It describes a man who hates his job and gets drunk every night. Then, before dawn, he wakes, and with the gathering light, he fixates on the certainty of his own death and what it will mean for him. Larkin is clear that it means complete cessation of the self, that there is no possibility of an afterlife, and that this absence of the self is the most terrifying thing in the world. (more…)
1,661 words
Czech version here
Facts are important, but stories are more important. Facts are isolated data that can easily be forgotten, but stories coalesce to form the infrastructure of our worldview. The stories that we learn inform our worldview and our worldview filters the stories that we hear in an ongoing feedback loop. This is why it’s so important to control the narrative.
When Grenfell Tower went up in flames on the morning of 14th June, the narrative practically wrote itself. (more…)
Manchester residents observing a moment of silence on Thursday.
1,180 words
What does it mean to be a Mancunian? Perhaps it’s as simple as being a resident or former resident of Manchester. Or perhaps it’s characterized by a particular type of identity, one that is often embodied in the numerous musicians who have come from there in recent decades. (more…)
1,710 words
John David Ebert
Art After Metaphysics
CreateSpace, 2013
Many readers will be familiar with John David Ebert from his excellent podcast (with Darryl D. Cooper), Decline of the West. In an early episode of the show, Ebert called the US presidential election for Trump even before Trump had won the Republican nomination. (more…)
2,472 words
When Jean Baudrillard published his classic text, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in 1995, it still seemed like a relatively novel idea. Common-sense notions of war such as friend and enemy were still current and reportage was confined to large media corporations. (more…)
2,237 words
It’s obvious to anyone with eyes to see that the contemporary Left is spectacularly alienating its own natural constituency with its increasingly unfocused and incoherent forms of protest. Certainly, they are vocal in denouncing Trump as a fascist, and Brexit as some sort of ur-nationalism, (more…)
1,956 words
Brett Stevens
Nihilism: A Philosophy Based in Nothingness and Eternity
Colac, Australia: Manticore Press, 2016
The title of Brett Stevens’ new book, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based in Nothingness and Eternity, inclined me to think that this work would be in the same vein as other works of pessimist philosophy such as Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, or Eugene Thacker’s Horror of Philosophy trilogy. (more…)
1,381 words
Guillaume Faye
Archeofuturism 2.0
London: Arktos, 2016
Guillaume Faye’s new novel begins in the last few days before the outbreak of the First World War. A fashionable and rather aristocratic group of young people (nowadays we would call them “privileged”) consult a clairvoyant who gives an astonishingly accurate series of descriptions of increasingly distant futures. (more…)
2,434 words
The 2000 novel Under the Skin by Michel Faber tells the story of a female alien called Isserley. We meet her living on a remote Scottish farm from where she takes regular road trips looking for single men. The purpose of these trips transpires to be predatory; she is hunting humans to farm for her fellow alien beings.
Michel Faber has an interesting background. According to Wikipedia: (more…)
3,156 words
Joy Division left us with the most relentlessly depressing body of songs since Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. In some ways, though, this singularity of approach, this lack of light touches to add color to the palate, is responsible for making them enduringly fascinating. (more…)
2,923 words
Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises) begins with the evocation of fear which becomes the motivational impulse for Bruce Wayne’s story. As a child he accidentally falls down a disused well, and, whilst he lies trapped and injured, he is terrified by a flock of bats that appear like a chthonic force of nature from the bowels of the earth. (more…)
1,075 words
Samuel Crowell
William Fortyhands: Disintegration and Reinvention of the Shakespeare Canon
Charleston, W.V.: Nine-Banded Books, 2016
The idea that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare is a well-established motif in literary conspiracy theories. Starting in the mid-19th century, numerous and varied writers have gone into great detail to prove that the Shakespeare corpus was actually written by Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or Edward de Vere, amongst others. (more…)
604 words
English original here
Ohledně vraždy poslankyně Jo Coxové zjevně panuje politický konsenzus. Zasedání obou komor parlamentu byla odvolána, aby všichni zástupci lidu mohli náležitě projevit svou soustrast. Mimoto už všechny ostatní velké politické strany oznámily, že se v doplňovacích volbách nebudou ucházet o její uprázdněné křeslo. (more…)
794 words
Czech translation here
There seems to be a political consensus surrounding the murder of Jo Cox MP. The House of Commons and the House of Lords are to be recalled so that everyone will be able to pay tribute to her. Additionally, the other main political parties have announced that they will not be contesting the resulting by election that will take place as a result of her death. (more…)
2,046 words
Francis Bacon, 1909–1992
Francis Bacon was an extraordinary and extreme artist and one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century. He was also a Right-wing elitist and individualist who approached the problem of creating art in the twentieth century with an honesty and intensity that have not really been matched. Generally speaking, it is probably true to say that most of the Right dismiss Bacon along with other contemporary artists mainly because of his unique treatment of the human form. But in my view his art enunciates a violent assault on the complacency of conventional thinking and perception that should be seen as deeply consonant with the project of the Alt Right. (more…)
John Everett Millais, Self-Portrait
3,789 words
If you think of the Pre-Raphaelites you will probably be put in mind of flame-haired women in medieval dress or perhaps the depiction of a scene from a biblical or mythological story. The aesthetic appeal of such paintings seems to derive from a pre-modernist craving for something formally beautiful in its own right, without any sense of remove or cynicism. And if you consider that the tail end of the Pre-Raphaelite movement preceded the emergence of Dada by only a few years then it really does seem as though the Brotherhood marked a final statement in the history of Western art. (more…)
6,156 words
Oswald Spengler’s radical contribution to the philosophy of history was to observe that different Cultures and Civilizations are discrete life forms and that they all have a certain life-expectancy. The linear progression of history, from the Stone Age to the prevailing Western liberalism, is a myth. There is no single line of history running through all of humanity. Instead, Cultures are born, they grow to maturity, they age, and they die. (more…)
Brussels today: Fighting terrorism with moral signalling, grandiose self-abasement, and wishful thinking
1,097 words
After the attacks on Charlie Hebdo last year I wrote about the puerile immaturity of the response in some quarters. Later in the year, after the even more deadly attacks in Paris, I wrote about the empty sentimentality of the response in some quarters. These two responses are in fact facets of the same mindset; a bipolar condition that simultaneously laughs and cries at our collective suicide whilst refusing to admit that anything is fundamentally wrong. It is an adolescent sensibility that combines impotent cynicism with ostentatious mawkishness.
3,475 words
Why did I agree to become involved? As I look back now I can see no clear decision or conscious choice, just a hapless falling into circumstance. If I had refused to entertain the stupid idea from the beginning would that have absolved me from the knowledge that was to come to me? Or was I already destined to find it no matter what I willed or thought? (more…)
1,488 words
David Bowie
Blackstar
Columbia, 2016
Blackstar will inevitably serve as Bowie’s last will and testament whether he meant it to or not. Certainly the writing of much of the material would have preceded his awareness of his terminal illness and his confrontation with imminent death. (more…)
Jean Sibelius, 1865–1957
1,437 words
English original here
Tapiola est la dernière œuvre majeure composée par Jean Sibelius. Elle fut commandée par le chef d’orchestre de New York, Walter Damrosch, au début de 1926, et fut jouée pour la première fois le lendemain de Noël de la même année. Damrosch avait demandé un poème symphonique, le choix du sujet étant laissé au compositeur. Pour trouver l’inspiration, Sibelius se tourna, comme il le fit si souvent, vers le Kalevala, le recueil de folklore finnois qui transparaît si souvent dans son œuvre. (more…)
2,512 words
Katherine Beem and Andy Paciorek, eds.
Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies
Wyrd Harvest Press, 2015
The term “folk horror” is a relatively recent invention that can be applied to a wide range of artistic creations, not all of them belonging to the horror genre. It was popularized by the 2010 BBC TV documentary A History of Horror where the term was used to describe three horror films: Witchfinder General
