7,819 words
And I have in mine owne bowels made my grave, That of all nations now I am forlorn, “I was that citie that the garland wore . . . delivered unto me By Romane victors, which it wonne of yore; Though not at all but ruines now I bee, And lie in mine owne ashes, as ye see.”[1]
Scipio’s Tears, Scipio’s Oath
There was that memorable scene, played again and again in every age. That vision of ruin at the moment of triumph. So did Napoleon later look out on the vale leading down to the Olomouc Road and see that the hunt after honor had reared a trophy for “devouring death.” (more…)
1,233 words
When I first began frequenting Counter-Currents, I was working at a university as a “writing consultant,” which — stripping away the fancy-sounding title — meant that I was a tutor, or “paper doctor,” as I called it. And as a “paper doctor,” my professional diagnosis was usually that the assignments themselves were lousy — dead on arrival. (more…)
5,993 words
The year was 939 AD, the setting near the city of Simancas. Count Fernán Gonzalez, a commander of free Spain, rode at the head of an army whose mission was to strike a blow against the Saracen invaders of Al-Andalus. Still, they were outnumbered and desperate. Fortune, it seemed, would favor the Moors on this day. But as the Count’s troops prepared to clash with their foe, a miracle occurred. (more…)
3,353 words
It was a sweltering July afternoon at the Malvern Hill battle site — more than 150 years gone since it had been the scene of General Robert E. Lee’s debut in the 1862 Seven Days campaign. It was the conclusion of his defense of Richmond from the numerically-superior Army of the Potomac, led by George McClellan. (more…)
Richard II, the English monarch whose missteps inaugurated the decline of respect for royal authority in Britain.
2,247 words
Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)
A “Cony Struggling in the Net”:[1] The Plantagenets vs. the Plantagenets
Legendary for its blizzards and blood, the fifteenth-century English conflict known as the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487) was poetic in name and savage in fighting. Medieval warfare was the most physically brutal form of battle Westerners in their long history have ever fought: huge, murderous fistfights of chaos and close combat in which few were afforded a “clean” death. (more…)
“Let the dice fly high,”[2] Julius Cæsar Crosses the Rubicon, Adolphe Yvon
2,659 words
Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)
“A God Who Has Appeared Among Us for the Salvation of Mankind”:[1] Cæsar vs. Rome (more…)
3,337 words
Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)
Dual Charismatic Cycles of the West
“Heed my words all classes of men, you greater and lesser children of Heimdall”: When all “the gods went to their thrones, those holy, holy gods,” they came to a decision. They would make leaders from “Ymir’s blood and his rotting limbs.” (more…)
Contemporary illustration of the Beast of the Gévaudan
6,404 words
“The consternation is universal throughout this district,” began a frenzied letter dashed off from the French town of Marvejols. Sometime “in the night we had a great storm here attended with lightning and thunder such as we have scarcely known in the greatest heats of summer.” The “wild Beast which hath long” haunted the forests “of St. Come, four leagues from hence,” has carried off “a shepherdess 18 years of age, who was celebrated for her beauty.”[1] Non, my friends, ce n’était pas un film de Disney. C’était vrai! Dated November 23, 1764, this note spread word of a true horror that had for months stalked the southern gorges of France. (more…)
Marcel Duchamp, Mona Lisa with Moustache, 1919.
5,752 words
I’m a recent transplant in this city. And as far as cities go, this one isn’t terrible. We live just over the hill from Erie, one of those giant inland seas carved from North America’s heartland, and it’s like having our own, muted stretch of coast for the quiet. (more…)
Like most illustrations of this kind, Death seems to be having a grand ol’ time.
8,057 words
Prologue: The Styx
The half-light of an autumn evening reflected off the Old River and into the face of the boatman. Over and under each subtle ripple and eddy, his eyes darted here to there so quickly that his gaze seemed fixed. As if he took in the whole broad sweep of the Thames with a hungry look-out. Next to him, and charged with steering the dinghy, stooped a young girl, his daughter. She “watched his face as earnestly as he watched the river. But in the intensity of her look, there was a touch of . . . horror.” (more…)
Kay Nielsen draft of a shipwreck, ca. 1940
6,074 words
It was a dark and soon-to-be stormy night on the Gulf Coast some years ago, when my other half and I sat on our porch chairs, gazing toward the sea. He held a cigarette — a bad (thankfully short-lived) habit he’d picked up during his year-long research sabbatical in Valladolid; paired with his fedora, I’m sure he knew that it lent him a (pretentious) air reminiscent of interwar Europe (more…)
Jules Chéret, 1880 Parisian advertisement for a recurring Saturday masque performance
8,839 words
On April 19, Counter-Currents instituted a paywall for articles and podcasts that will be made freely available 30 days later. This article by Kathryn S. was one of the first items to go behind the paywall, and is now one of the first items to be released to everyone else. More information about how to get behind the paywall can be found below. (more…)
“Off with her head!” An original illustration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1864)
7,655 words
The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree.
— D. H. Lawrence
A question, readers: what is the most profound of all human activities? With the previous sentence, I’ve already provided the answer, for it is the question itself — the thing that drives all exploration and philosophy. How can philosophy (or any knowledge) exist without first the riddle, the profound need for the answer? (more…)
Jules Chéret, 1880 Parisian advertisement for a recurring Saturday masque performance
8,691 words
This past winter I lost my last grandparent — the most stubborn one, still to the end a strict English schoolteacher after having long since retired from the profession in the 1970s. She suffered through the desegregation years while working at Marshall High and was never dishonest about the experience. She possessed that combination of Southern decorum and irascible (and accurate) bluntness, which gave her the ability to reduce anyone, including 250-pound, six-foot-three black football players, to tears. (more…)
George Barbier, “Eventails (Fans)”
7,971 words
Twentieth Century Studios is threatening to release a remake of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937). And if Kenneth Branaugh’s previous outing as the Hercule Poirot character in 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express was anything to go by, best to avoid it. (more…)
Edmund Dulac, “The Buried Moon” from The Red Cross Fairy Book, 1916.
4,430 words
He had me at: “It was still the South, he knew it for a certainty when they passed an aged negro in overalls hobbling down along the highway toward no conceivable destination. The land was cursed. God, he loved it.” [1] Tito Perdue, author of the two novels here reviewed, The Smut Book and Cynosura, is a proud Southerner who has enjoyed skewering the sacred cows of these, our cursed times since he became a writer in the early 1980s. (more…)
Illustration of a firebird by Kay Nielsen in Hansel and Gretel & Other Stories (1925)
6,744 words
Yet more and greater ills by land remain.
The coast, so long desir’d . . .
Thy troops shall reach, but, having reach’d, repent.
Wars, horrid wars, I view a field of blood,
And Tiber rolling with a purple flood.
— The Æneid [1]
I hope Counter-Currents readers are enjoying the first flush of spring and continue to find moments of happiness despite all the petty Javerts in our midst. (more…)
Danses de Jadis (Dances in Times Past), George Barbier, 1921
6,629 words
This is an old and very cruel god . . .
We will endure;
We will try not to wince . . .
If indeed it is for your sakes,
If we perish or moan in torture,
Or stagger under sordid burdens
That you may live —
Then we can endure . . .
Without utter bitterness.
But, O thou old and very cruel god,
Take, if thou canst, this bitter cup from us. [1] (more…)
Caspar David Friedrich, Greifswald in Moonlight, 1817.
9,130 words
As men and women of the Right, we are searchers for Truth. We believe that by finding Truth and living by Truth, we might know Beauty, and we might know ourselves. Essence is our mission and with it, survival. And so this essay will try to surface and then sketch three fundamental “lifeways,” (more…)
John Everett Millais’ Joan of Arc, The Maid of Orléans (1865)
3,902 words
I have both the pleasure of informing Counter-Currents readers of an upcoming novel authored by Mr. Spencer Quinn and of reviewing this latest addition to white nationalist-friendly fiction. When critiquing an author (especially for the first time), I like to get a sense of his Weltanschauung by reading and synthesizing some of his other works in conjunction with the monograph in question. Thus, I will also refer throughout to a few of his salient articles. (more…)
8,232 words
As an American, I find European theories about this country and its character intriguing (or amusing) — particularly those formed from intimate experience. Of course, such theories presuppose that there is and has been such a thing as “the American people,” or “ethny” from which to draw an assessment. I submit two, not quite antithetical, but competing European judgments about the United States. (more…)
4,781 words
Sometime in the early 2000s, the retail chain Urban Outfitters began selling a board game based on a Hasbro classic, called Ghettopoly. The box cover, made to look like a hoodlum had graffiti-painted its title across an alley wall, also featured a black “gangsta” holding a bottle of ‘shine in one paw and a gun loaded with an extra magazine (more…)
Detail, John Everett Millais’ foreboding The Princes in the Tower, 1876.
5,894 words
No author would be able to get away with writing such a story in a novel, it was so fantastic. Providence and Destiny are real. In 2012, a group of amateur enthusiasts and archaeologists traveled to Leicestershire (located in the heart of England), site of the 1485 Battle of Bosworth Field. They were on a quixotic mission: to find the remains of Richard III, England’s most controversial king, in the vast area surrounding the old Grey Friars Church — and on a shoestring budget. (more…)
Yeah, right, lady.
2,529 words
For the purposes of learning about human nature and the kind of “diversity” that our globalist thought-leaders have in mind for us all, there’s nothing quite like working a public sector job. After following my passion and earning a less-than-useful degree in history and literature, (more…)
Winslow Homer, The Woodcutter, 1891.
6,121 words
I read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods sometime in college. I found it more Flannery O’Connor than Marvel Studios, but it’s hardly surprising that the latter interpretation seems to have driven the new television series’ production team (but I haven’t watched). (more…)
3,469 words
He came from a world where soft music lilted through dining rooms and ballrooms and salons . . . it was played to make life sweeter and more festive, to make women’s eyes flash and men’s vanity throw sparks . . . [his] music on the other hand didn’t offer forgetfulness; it aroused people to the feelings of passion and guilt and demanded that [they] be truer to themselves . . . such music is upsetting . . . [1] (more…)
Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: a modern take on the motifs of the weird nineteenth century.
5,476 words
It’s ill to loose the bands that God decreed to bind;
Still we be the children of the heather and the wind.
Far away from home, O it’s still for you and me
That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie. [1]
Even below the Missouri-Compromise Line, the mornings now have a delicious coolness, faltering on the edge of a “chill,” and I found myself yearning for an old-fashioned, nineteenth-century ghost story. (more…)
Johann Peter Krafft, The Siege of Szigetvár, 1825.
5,125 words
The bad news is the bad news — the stories we’ve seen and heard in the past few months, years, decades that all keep warning us of more to come. The good news is that these times of transition provide us with opportunities for clarity and fresh perspectives on historical and social phenomena (more…)
Don’t mess with Hindoostan. [1]
5,449 words
It began with whispers. In what should be a familiar script, false narratives and unsubstantiated rumors about white treachery ignited nonwhite hysteria—murders, riots, and fires consumed the countryside. It was the most traumatic episode for the British in the nineteenth century, and it took place thousands of miles and oceans away from Europe. While not exactly obscure, it has become a historical footnote with which many educated people have next to no familiarity (at least on this side of the Atlantic).
(more…)
Promotional image from the UK’s Almeida Theatre production of The Duchess of Malfi (performed from November 30, 2019 through January 25, 2020)
5,736 words
I. Classical Western Thought on Justice and Revenge
One of the most fascinating discussions to emerge from our collective Western inheritance concerns the definition of justice and the double-sided nature of justice or vengeance (personified memorably in pop culture through the literal “two-faced” character of Harvey Dent and his Janus-faced coin). Aristotle (384-322 BC) determined that “justice” had at least two different meanings: (more…)
