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Here we have a continuation of the narrative presented in past installments, describing Brasillach’s auto-tour through wartime Spain in July 1938, accompanied by his brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche and their friend Pierre Cousteau. As before, I have translated it directly from Brasillach’s memoir Notre avant-guerre (1938-41). (more…)
Phil Eiger Newmann, Flannery O’Connor, 2021.
1,842 words
Like her near-contemporary Gore Vidal (both were born in 1925), the fiction writer Mary Flannery O’Connor had her first brush with fame via a Pathé movie newsreel. She had a pet chicken whom she’d taught to walk backward. Gore’s fame came a few years later when he piloted an airplane, age ten. (more…)
1,566 words
Kevin D. Williamson
Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the “Real America”
Washington, DC: Regnery, 2020
I suppose the author and publisher meant the title Big White Ghetto (etc.) to be eye-catching and amusing, (more…)
1,978 words
Seyward Darby
Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism
New York: Little, Brown, 2020
This badly named book began with a cover story in Harper’s back in September 2017. It was about female activists and intellectuals on the Far Right. (more…)
J. D. Vance.
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There are many odd and irksome things about the new Hillbilly Elegy movie on Netflix. For my money, the strangest aspect of the production is that it has only a superficial resemblance to J. D. Vance’s 2016 book. It’s as though you were to make a movie of Moby-Dick, knowing only that it has a ship and a white spermaceti whale and a mad captain who stumps around on a peg-leg. (more…)
1,473 words
Raheem Kassam
Enoch Was Right: ‘Rivers of Blood’ 50 Years On
Independently published, 2018
“Up like a rocket” is how Enoch Powell predicted his Birmingham speech would go on April 20th, 1968. And so it did. This, of course, was his “Rivers of Blood” speech, (more…)
2,954 words
Graham Macklin
Failed Führers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right
London & New York: Routledge, 2020
(Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right)
The comic highpoint of Failed Führers comes about halfway through the book, when Colin Jordan marries the tall, blonde, stunning Françoise Dior — niece of the designer. (more…)
2,339 words
Mary Eberstadt
Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics
West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2019
Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt is a onetime speechwriter for George Schultz, author of several books, sometime fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, and currently senior fellow at something called the Faith & Reason Institute. (more…)
1,703 words 
Paul Corthorn
Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain
London: Oxford University Press, 2019
Before reading this new biography of Enoch Powell (1912-1998), I’d expected it would be a rollicking Roy Jenkins kind of Parliamentary biography, full of witty asides in the smoking room and dark mutterings through the Octagon. Actually, it’s a detailed, often dry, but generally surprising survey of a political career. (more…)
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In his memoir Notre avant-guerre, Robert Brasillach tells how his political enthusiasms developed in the years preceding the outbreak of war in September 1939. One of the high points of the story is Brasillach’s 1938 visit to Spain, in order to report on war conditions for his Rightist newspaper in Paris, Je suis partout. (more…)
1,779 words
Like her near-contemporary Gore Vidal (both were born in 1925), the fiction writer Mary Flannery O’Connor had her first brush with fame via a Pathé movie newsreel. She had a pet chicken whom she’d taught to walk backward. Gore’s fame came a few years later when he piloted an airplane, age ten. (more…)
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Reviewing a story collection in 1925, an American critic compared Gabriele d’Annunzio’s influence on the Italian mindset to that of Rudyard Kipling in England. “[T]o understand him is to understand pre-war and immediately post-war Italy.” [1] That sort of remark is almost inaccessible to us today; when we think of the Great War, if we think of the Great War at all, we surely don’t automatically think of Kipling or d’Annunzio. That is one hurdle in approaching d’Annunzio today. (more…)
940 words
Happy Birthday, George Washington!
(February 22, 1732–December 14, 1799)
Alexis Coe
You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington
New York: Viking, 2020
For a lightweight, mildly scurrilous biography of George Washington, this has received an awful lot of advance publicity in recent weeks. (more…)
Dearden and his clapper.
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For decades now, I’ve been waiting for someone to package an oversized picture book called The Films of Basil Dearden. The 1970s would have been a good time for that, since Dearden died in ’71 (car accident), and this mid-rank British director was in need of appreciation. (more…)
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Extraordinary! There are three—maybe four—Pinocchio films now in development or newly released. They all promise to reveal dark, hitherto unexplored aspects of the famous marionette’s saga. One is a Robert Downey Jr. project that’s been hemming and hawing since about 2012. Initially Downey was planning to play both Geppetto and the title role. Now he’s older, so he’ll just play Geppetto. A new live-action Pinocchio premiered last month in Italy. (more…)
2,340 words
David Ryan
George Orwell on Screen
Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2018
This book took me down a rabbit hole when I discovered it last June. For several days I didn’t want to do anything but watch old television dramatizations and documentaries about George Orwell’s works and life. There have been a surprising number of them, and most of the key ones can be found online or in other digital media. (more…)
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1. John Sutherland
Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography
London: Reaktion Books, 2016
This small but brilliant volume is a joy to read, maybe the best single Orwell critique in recent years. “A Quirky and Snarky Treat” somebody at Amazon called it, and that it certainly is. “The lower classes smell,” Orwell famously offers as an upper-class folk belief, in The Road to Wigan Pier. (more…)
3,276 words
Lawrence Auster
Our Borders, Ourselves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism
Litchfield, Ct.: VDARE, 2019
On dipping into this book, I was hit with a sense of cruel nostalgia, mixing memory and despair. Assembled from writings that Lawrence Auster did in the 1980s and ‘90s, it’s a window into how forthrightly we then approached problems of race politics and non-white immigration.
2,484 words
Andrew Marantz
Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation
New York: Viking, 2019
For the past five years, New Yorker scribe Andrew Marantz has been working a steady beat, writing about Internet trolls and dank memes on the Far Right (which in his mind is still the “Alt Right”). Antisocial is a compilation of some of those writings, strung together with some outtakes and new material.
Anti-woke comedian Sam Hyde
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Our goal this year is to raise $100,000 in order to expand our efforts to build a metapolitical vanguard for White Nationalism. So far, we have received 369 donations totaling $53,970.23. We set our goals high because the task we have before us is formidable, but with your help, we will succeed. (more…)
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Today I wish to talk about Charles de Gaulle and some seldom-examined aspects of the Algerian Crisis that spanned 1954 to 1962. But in order to edge into all that, I first have to talk about one of my favorite and oft-viewed movies, The Day of the Jackal (1973; the original version).
De Gaulle himself is a character in that film, since the whole plot revolves around assassination attempts on him in the early 1960s. (more…)
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Jill Lepore
This America: The Case for the Nation
New York: W. W. Norton, 2019
The theme of This America isn’t what Jill Lepore thinks it is.
Jill Lepore is a Harvard Professor of American History, and an incredibly prolific author – twenty-five books, and many essays in The New Yorker – with a fluid, appealing writing style. (more…)
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If you know the broad outlines of Willis Allison Carto’s life (biography review here), you know that he was, for well over a half-century, the founder and patron of those political movements we now variously call paleoconservatism, race realism, Dissident Right, or White Nationalism.
Pause and consider. When you imbibe the heady sophistication and philosophical analyses here at Counter-Currents— (more…)
1,591 words
Ashley Jardina
White Identity Politics
Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019
The big takeaway from White Identity Politics is that there’s been a huge raising of white American racial consciousness in recent years. This is due to a number of factors, none of them imaginary or rhetorical. (more…)
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Today is the birthday of Revilo Pendleton Oliver, born in Texas in 1908. He was Professor of Classics and Modern Languages at the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana) for many years, an analyst with the War Department in the 1940s, and a contributor to the National Review and other publications from the 1950s onward.
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Professor Revilo Pendleton Oliver died in 1994, full of years and honors, as they say; and also notoriety. Long a Classics professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana, he gained his PhD in 1938 with a translation and commentary on a 1500-year-old Sanskrit drama. At age 80 was capable of holding lengthy telephone conversions with a young fellow linguist, in which (just to show off) they would switch back and forth between German and Attic Greek.
O’Brien (Richard Burton) demonstrates that 2 + 2 doesn’t always equal 4.
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Did the international crises of 1947 and 1948 leave their mark on the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four? I’ve spent a lot of time on this question, and so far as I can tell, the answer is – yes; but only obliquely. And George Orwell may not even have been conscious of the fact.
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June 8th is the 70th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Greg Johnson interviews Margot Metroland on some of Orwell’s sources and influences, the loosely “Trotskyite” political context in which he wrote, and the possibility that he was bumped off by Stalinists. (more…)
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Connolly, Burnham, Orwell, & “Corner Table”
“In the torture scenes, he is merely melodramatic: he introduces those rather grotesque machines which used to appear in terror stories for boys.”
—V. S. Pritchett, The New Statesman, June 18, 1949
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Bret Easton Ellis
White
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019
When you see Bret Easton Ellis emerge as a Generation X elder, you know you’ve moved pretty far along the abattoir ramp. Technically he’s not Gen X at all, as he was born in 1964, but Simon & Schuster brought out his first novel (Less Than Zero) when he was still an undergraduate at Bennington, and Ellis’ precocity was part of the sales pitch. (more…)