Author: Kathryn S.

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…)

Napoleon’s North African-attired Consular Guard: a hard look to pull off

4,571 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

2. Rage Militaire: Franco-American Zouave-mania

“His parents taught him to be a cavalier, but the life of the Zou-zou he much did prefer.” — anonymous Confederate verse

“The city,” one Richmond, Virginia newspaperman enthused, “was yesterday thrown into a paroxysm of excitement by the arrival of the New Orleans Zouaves — a battalion of six hundred and thirty, as unique and picturesque looking Frenchmen as ever delighted the oculars of Napoleon the three.” (more…)

The Eunuch’s Dream, Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ, 1874

3,742 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Called The Eunuch’s Dream and finished during the imperial golden age, the French painting displayed here is one of the most evocative examples of “Orientalism” that I’ve ever seen. (more…)

5,552 words

The editors of Counter-Currents have recently shared their findings that, among other interesting facts, females make up about one-third of the readership here. There are apparently quite a few Dissident-Right women who swim in our waters, and therefore a need exists for some un-feminist, but “woman-positive” readings that mine our traditional canon and seek to shape the future of femininity.

I don’t usually write about “female things,” and that’s not really on purpose. I find history, war, and a mostly male cast of authors interesting, and I always have. (more…)

Mycenaean bust of a Bronze Age warrior wearing a boar’s-tusk helmet

10,118 words

By the late spring of 1185 BC, something had gone terribly wrong in the palace-complex of Syrian Ugarit. The city’s leader, Amurabi, had just received a letter from the grand supervisor of Alashiya (Cyprus), asking Amurabi to send what men he could spare to help his beleaguered ally to the east. Cutthroats and bands of foreign invaders were menacing his Cypriot towns. Unfortunately, Amurabi had his own border problems. In a message whose words have lost none of their exasperation or sarcasm after 32 centuries, the ruler of Ugarit replied: (more…)

Battle of the ironclads, the Merrimack vs. the Monitor

4,699 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

II. Out of Space: Fever

The thickened present manifested also in both a more expansive and a more constricted space during Gothic Science Fiction wars. (more…)

Grahame Baker-Smith’s 2017 Folio illustration for War of the Worlds.

3,882 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Introduction

It was perhaps the most famous description of a (space) alien in English literature. The narrator felt an “utter terror [grip] him” as a thing from a nightmare emerged slowly, slowly from the pit that its smoking spacecraft had cratered in the Earth. As its body “bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.” A pair of huge, fathomless dark eyes regarded him intensely, “steadfastly. (more…)

6,299 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Dante’s Inferno

Dante Alighieri’s conceptual map of Hell also lay at the intersection where biblical and classical ideas about the afterlife crossed. Virgil, fellow Italian poet and ancient Roman author of the Æneid, accompanied him during much of his journey, for Virgil was someone who had imagined his own hero Aeneas successfully navigating the underworld. (more…)

Terror Antiquus, L. Bakst (1908)

6,674 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Prologue: Little Pine Lake

The first time I got lost, it was because of a map. It was Easter in my grandparents’ home of Marshall, Texas, and during that golden-age glow that now suffuses the nineties. (more…)