Author: Kathryn S.

Persian relief of soldiers similar to those lost in the 525 BC march from Thebes.

2,931 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

III. Deserts Take Few Prisoners

 “. . . we saw the break-up of the enemy . . . [they escaped] into what they thought was empty land beyond. However, in the empty land was Auda^[1]; and in that night of his last battle the old man killed and lulled, plundered and captured, till dawn showed him the end. (more…)

3,438 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

II. Deserts Create Monsters and Messiahs

“The Bedouin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great . . . He was the most familiar of their words.” — Thomas Edward [T. E.] Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (more…)

Chile’s Atacama Desert: one of the driest places on Earth.

5,203 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

Deserts are the strangest places on Earth.

I spent my undergraduate years at an isolated college town that sat on the fringes of a vast, interior desert. To the northwest, the great Rocky Mountains began their ascent; directly west lay No Man’s Land, but the Sun’s; to the south, the flats gradually lifted into ancient atolls, red gorges, and rock. As a native woodland creature, this dryland seemed to me like another planet. (more…)

Kay Nielsen, Scheherazade before the Sultan, ca. 1920

4,469 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

VI. Famous Last Words: Oriental Crimes and Punishments

I’ve warned against too much Orientalism, but at this point the Arabian Nights are as much Western as they are Eastern classics. Furthermore, like all tricky tellers-of-tales and spinners of yarns, I reserve the right to contradict myself on occasion. The untangling of knots I’ll leave to the scientists, philosophers, and Alexanders, if they can. (more…)

Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch, Faust and Mephisto Playing Chess, ca. 1825

5,747 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

III. Eating His Words: Renaissance Tricksters

Renaissance dramas were also a rich fount for stories/speech gone awry and ironic. (more…)

Unknown artist and date, The Pilgrimage to Canterbury

4,059 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

There’s an old story within a story told by a pilgrim knight about ancient Thebes and two Theban cousins named Arcite and Palamon.^[1] According to everyone who knew them, no two warriors were more perfect. (more…)

4,031 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

II. To Winter Wonderlands

The road through the Almond and Raisin Gate led Nutcracker and Marie to Rock Candy Mountain and the Christmas Woods, Bon-Bonville, Marzipan Castle, and Jamburg. Upon crossing Lemonade River, six monkeys in red vests began “playing the most beautiful Turkish military music,” while they walked “farther and farther on multicolored tiles, which, however, were nothing but nicely filled lozenges.” (more…)

Left: Antoine-Jean Gros, Premier Consul Bonaparte, ca. 1802; Right: Cover for E. T. A. Hoffmann and Alexandre Dumas’ The Nutcracker & the Mouse King

5,234 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Like many of us this past season, I have had to endure far too many repetitions of the same 11 ”holiday” songs that fail to capture the essence of the season: the contemplative, dirge-y, or haunted side of winter, paired with the tasteful emotional warmth and childlike joy of Christmas. (more…)

William Blake, Mrs. Q, ca. 1815

7,128 words

“The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it.” — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

The last article of mine that our editors at Counter–Currents kindly published was about the masculine topic of military history. To complement a foray into the Napoleonic Wars, I included a clip from the 1970 film Waterloo.^[1] In the comments, a reader shared an observation about one of the few Waterloo scenes that did not take place on a battlefield. Instead, this particular scene immersed audiences in a Brussels high-society fête, where the Duchess of Richmond hosted the Duke of Wellington’s officers at her famous summer Ball of 1815. (more…)

Horace Vernet, Napoleon at Jena: “En Avant!”

1,990 words

1. Homer, Iliad. W. C. Bryant, trans. Perth, Aus.: Imperium Press, 2019, 576 pp.: While everyone knows the story, few people today have actually read it. You can bet that almost every great military commander in Western history read it. Composed during the Greek “Dark Ages” and (probably) based on a real event, Iliad is an echo of the even earlier Bronze Age — of war’s power at its all-encompassing, glorious, and terrible pinnacle. (more…)

Captain Semmes and Lieutenant Kell aboard the Alabama, ca. 1863.

3,770 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Grand Tour of a Cause-Célèbre

Perhaps just as galling to Unionists as Alabama‘s destructive impunity was her sheen of romance that so enthralled the public imagination. (more…)

The Fate of the Rebel Flag, William Bauly, ca. 1861

5,576 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Prologue: The “Alabama Claims”

Sir Alexander E. Cockburn, official of Her Majesty’s Empire, couldn’t wait for the Conference to end. (more…)

Giuseppe Garibaldi (1866)

485 words

The dog days of summer are a slow time for movement activity and fundraising, but over the last week, our fundraiser still crept 1% closer to the goal. This year, Counter-Currents is raising $300,000. Since our fundraiser started on March 10th, we have raised $112,660.50, which is 38% of our goal. I want to thank all of those who have given so far. Full information on how to donate is below, but before you read that, I want to share a few words from Kathryn S. — Greg Johnson (more…)