Author: Mark Gullick

3,779 words

Robert O. Paxton
The Anatomy of Fascism
New York: Random House, 2003

When it is pointed out to someone on the political Left that socialism and communism have never worked anywhere ever, there is a standard reply; it wasn’t the right kind. Let’s give it one more try, they plead. This time it will work out. Why, then, should we not make the same claim about fascism? Hitler and Mussolini? Woefully incompetent poseurs, one a monomaniac, the other a narcissist. We can then echo our Leftist opponent’s riposte and apply it to fascism. Let’s give it one more try. This time it will work out. (more…)

Théodore Chassériau – Le Spectre de Banquo. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

3,137 words

Like Macbeth in Dunsinane, Sir Keir Starmer grows isolated. The British Prime Minister (PM) is loathed by the public, certainly, but that is of no importance to Starmer’s handlers, or “policy advisers” as they are euphemistically called. When these humorless young men and women look at negative polling indicating that the public—meaning the white public—intensely dislike current government policy, they will attempt the closest that sort of person gets to a smile. (more…)

2,998 words

British television in the 1970s punched way above its weight in an arena dominated by America. While the US ruled the mass entertainment market, Britain held the prestige drama niche in the palm of her hand. Britain sold more finished programs than formats, whereas the reverse is now the case, and received industry awards at a disproportionately high rate. Its actors had mostly been trained at venerable thespian institutions such as RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts), and were as comfortable with Shakespeare as they were with a situation comedy. (more…)

Johan Huizinga, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

2,902 words

Johan Huizinga
Homo Ludens
Groningen, Netherlands: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1938

After writing last week about Tarot considered as a game, I kept with the subject of gaming for a while longer. I realized I didn’t really know what Game Theory was, for example, so I swotted up on that. I also came across a book I had never heard of by a writer whose name rang only the vaguest of bells, although readers may be more familiar. Homo Ludens was published in 1938 by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, and has turned out to be a complete delight. (more…)

The Fool from the Sola Busca deck.

3,533 words

“Tarot” is a strange word because everyone and no one knows what it means. Ask anyone over 20 what “Tarot” means, and the likelihood is that they will recognize it in the simplest, most popular way; A deck of cards which can tell the future. Like so many modern myths, that is misleading on both counts. Although there are decks of Tarot cards, and they predated its study, Tarot is also the school of thought behind the meaning of the cards, rather than just the cards themselves and any simple meanings which might become attached to them. (more…)

20/01/2026. Prime Minister Keir Starmer holds his weekly Cabinet meeting. Picture by Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street

2,968 words

Something is Rotten in the Fourth Estate

What can I know? The question was famously posed by the 16th-century French essayist, Michel de Montaigne. But his was a metaphysical question, whereas if we bring the question into our own age, it has become more straightforwardly ontological. In fact, we can even say that it has become informational. In terms of the expanded info-world in which we now live, what we can know is what we are told, and the media is often the curator of that knowledge. (more…)

3,058 words

Charles Shaar Murray
Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix & The Post-War Rock ‘N’ Roll Revolution
London: Faber & Faber, 1989.

“Pop mythology [is] a loose conflation of lies, rumours, old newspaper cuttings and snap judgements”.
Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic.

“’Scuse me while I kiss the sky”.
Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze.

Good writing transcends genre. If that is an acceptable proposition at least for consideration, then rock writing has often been treated as a poor relation of “higher” forms of journalism, despite a steady manumission of music writers to the mainstream media which extends back decades. (more…)

3,111 words

An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom. — Charles Baudelaire, epigraph to 2666

The British Prime Minister was asked during an interview to name his favorite novel, and the answer he gave was revealing. Sir Keir Starmer said he didn’t have a favorite novel. He didn’t have a favorite poem, either. This is a man who was the Director of Public Prosecutions, one of the highest appointments in the United Kingdom. I know that he had a good education because I was at school with him, although he evidently spent more time studying than I did. (more…)

Heidegger on a country path, 1966.

3,538 words

That whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent. — Last line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The rest is silence. — Shakespeare, Hamlet

Berel Lang
Heidegger’s Silence
Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2018

Martin Heidegger’s association with the Nazis is well documented. Having come to Hitler’s attention as Germany’s leading academic, the philosopher was elected to the position of Rector of Freiburg University on April 21, 1933. (more…)

You can buy Steven Tucker’s Nazi UFOs here.

3,380 words

In Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise, the central character is a professor at the Department of Hitler Studies in an American university. DeLillo has a minor obsession with Der Führer. His 1997 novel, Underworld, is one of the great American novels of the twentieth century, and its title is a translation of Unterwelt. This refers to a strange home movie at the center of the novel, one apparently filmed in the Bunker during its last days. Hitler is and will remain a source of fascination for writers and, as we shall see, his ambition to rule the skies apparently took some freakish turns. Or did they? (more…)

3,518 words

Edward Ball
Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

It is 2013 in the deep South of America, and deep in the woods it seems a historical film-set is in production. A dozen or so actors portraying men from America’s famous and notorious Ku Klux Klan are recreating the ceremony of the lighting of the burning cross. “Do you accept the light?” each Klansman is asked as he is handed a lit brand. (more…)

Cellphone footage of the recent Clapham mob.

3,019 words

What is terrorism? There have been many attempts to provide a universally accepted definition. So many, in fact, that in the 1980s a Dutch academic named Alex P. Schmid reviewed over 100 such definitions and collated them into one:

Terrorism is the use (or threat) of violence against civilians, intended to create fear, in order to achieve political or ideological objectives.

Although academically respected, Schmid’s definition has never been universally accepted into legislation, and for an obvious reason. No nation wants to commit to a definition of terrorism which might one day describe their own actions. But Schmid’s definition seems perfectly serviceable, the key points being the use of violence, the ideological nature of the objective, and the fact that the victims are civilians, although that is not always the case. (more…)

2,878 words

“In my songs, I’m trying to duplicate verbally the pain or the joy or the emotion that’s going on inside my head.”
—John Lydon

Your musical opinion of punk rock is unimportant, and so is mine. Its cultural significance is a different matter. Music as music is important to us as individuals, of course. Music plays a part in every life, and many of you won’t just like your music of choice, you will be attached to it as something sacred. But any musical genre is not just notes and scales, voice and instrumentation, it is a part of the culture that produces it, and therefore any music produced over the centuries is important, like it or not. (more…)