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…)