Author Archives: Margot Metroland

Margot Metroland

I was born in a house I helped my father build.

Raheem Kassam’s Enoch Was Right

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, Read more …

Published: June 16, 2020 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged articles, book reviews, Britain in the 1960s, Enoch Powell, immigration, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, originals, popular history, Rivers of Blood, the Conservatives, white dispossession | 7 Responses

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Graham Macklin’s Failed Führers

Margot Metroland

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. Read more …

Published: June 11, 2020 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged A. K. Chesterton, Arnold Leese, articles, book reviews, Britain in the 1960s, Colin Jordan, John Tyndall, Margot Metroland, Nick Griffin, North American New Right, originals, Sir Oswald Mosley | 8 Responses

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Sexual Predators & Autistic Monkeys: Mary Eberstadt’s Primal Screams

Margot Metroland

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. Read more …

Published: May 11, 2020 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged #MeToo, articles, atomization, book reviews, Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, identity politics, Margot Metroland, morality, North American New Right, originals, sexual revolution, the family | 12 Responses

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Paul Corthorn’s Enoch Powell: Politics & Ideas in Modern Britain

Margot Metroland

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. Read more …

Published: April 21, 2020 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged articles, book reviews, Britain in the 1960s, Enoch Powell, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, originals, Rivers of Blood, the Conservatives, the United Kingdom | 7 Responses

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Reflections on the Revolution in Spain: Remembering Robert Brasillach (March 31, 1909 – February 6, 1945)

Margot Metroland

2,169 words

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. Read more …

Published: March 31, 2020 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged articles, commemorations, in English, Je Suis Partout, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, Robert Brasillach, Spain, Spanish Civil War, translations | 4 Responses

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Remembering Flannery O’Connor (March 25, 1925 — August 4, 1964)

Margot Metroland

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. Read more …

Published: March 25, 2020 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged articles, Catholicism, commemorations, Flannery O'Connor, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, originals, religion, Southern Agrarianism, Southern literature, the South | 16 Responses

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Approaching D’Annunzio

Margot Metroland

1,284 words

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. Read more …

Published: March 12, 2020 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged articles, Artists of the Right, Benito Mussolini, commemorations, Ernest Hemingway, Fiume, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Italy, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, originals, poetry | Leave a comment

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Alexis Coe’s You Never Forget Your First

Margot Metroland

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. Read more …

Published: February 21, 2020 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged book reviews, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, originals, political correctness | 5 Responses

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Race & Class in the Films of Basil Dearden

Margot Metroland

Dearden and his clapper.

3,951 words

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. Read more …

Published: February 18, 2020 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged articles, films, Margot Metroland, movies, North American New Right, originals, the 1960s | 9 Responses

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Pinocchio: The Face of Fascism

Margot Metroland

4,065 words

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. Read more …

Published: January 22, 2020 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged articles, cartoons, children's literature, Disney, fascism, Guillermo del Toro, Italy, Margot Metroland, movie reviews, North American New Right, originals | 8 Responses

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Orwell on Screen

Margot Metroland

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. Read more …

Published: January 8, 2020 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged book reviews, George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Margot Metroland, movie reviews, Nineteen Eighty-Four, North American New Right, originals | 4 Responses

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My Five Favorite Books of 2019

Margot Metroland

2,921 words

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. Read more …

Published: December 24, 2019 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged 2019 roundups, articles, banking, book reviews, Czechoslovakia, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Orwell, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, originals | 12 Responses

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Lawrence Auster’s Our Borders, Ourselves

Margot Metroland

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.

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Antisocial: A Review

Margot Metroland

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.

Published: October 23, 2019 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged Alt Lite, articles, book reviews, journalists, Margot Metroland, Mike Cernovich, Mike Enoch, North American New Right, originals, the alt right | 8 Responses

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The Counter-Currents 2019 Fundraiser
Laughter: The Best Medicine

Margot Metroland

Anti-woke comedian Sam Hyde

1,620 words

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. Read more …

Published: August 30, 2019 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged 2019 Counter-Currents Fundraiser, articles, comedy, humor, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, originals, political correctness, the left | 11 Responses

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Charles de Gaulle, Algeria, & the JQ

Margot Metroland

2,957 words

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. Read more …

Published: August 13, 2019 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged Algeria, Algerian war, articles, Charles De Gaulle, France, Margot Metroland, movie reviews, North American New Right, originals | 9 Responses

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Chatty Cathy’s Poison Pill

Margot Metroland

3,082 words

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. Read more …

Published: July 31, 2019 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged American history, articles, book reviews, civic nationalism, liberalism, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, originals | 8 Responses

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Remembering Willis Carto:
July 17, 1926–October 26, 2015

Margot Metroland

1,980 words

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— Read more …

Published: July 17, 2019 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged articles, commemorations, David McCalden, Elisabeth Carto, Francis Parker Yockey, Keith Stimely, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, originals, Paleoconservatism, The American Mercury, The Barnes Review, Willis Carto | 3 Responses

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Cargo-Cult Sociology:
Ashley Jardina’s White Identity Politics

Margot Metroland

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. Read more …

Published: July 10, 2019 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged articles, Ashley Jardina, book reviews, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, originals, white identity, white identity politics, whiteness | 3 Responses

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Remembering Revilo Oliver (July 7, 1908–August 20, 1994)
Revilo Oliver in Winter

Margot Metroland

1,992 words

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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Remembering Revilo Oliver (July 7, 1908–August 20, 1994)
The Professor & the Carnival Barker

Margot Metroland

3,431 words

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.

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Orwell, Molotov, & the “Crisis of Capitalism”

Margot Metroland

O’Brien (Richard Burton) demonstrates that 2 + 2 doesn’t always equal 4.

2,306 words

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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Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 234
Happy Birthday Nineteen Eighty-Four!

Margot Metroland

65 words / 52:55

To listen in a player, click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

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. Read more …

Published: June 8, 2019 | Posted in Counter-Currents Radio | Tagged Communism, Counter-Currents Radio, Cyril Connolly, dystopian fiction, George Orwell, interviews, James Burnham, Margot Metroland, Nineteen Eighty-Four, podcasts | 8 Responses

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Your Nineteen Eighty-Four Sources in Full

Margot Metroland

3,232 words

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

Margot Metroland

2,103 words

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. Read more …

Published: May 30, 2019 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged American Psycho, articles, book reviews, Charlie Sheen, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, originals, Robert Taylor, Tom Cruise | 11 Responses

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If Whiteness is Sick, What is the Cure?

Margot Metroland

1,496 words

Jonathan M. Metzl
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland
New York: Basic Books, 2019

The most impressive thing about this strange little book is its merchandising. That includes its provocative, in-your-face title as well as its promotional blurbs and media spin.

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Misreading Animal Farm

Margot Metroland

1,695 words

If you’re seeing a lot of Nineteen Eighty-Four editions showing up in bookstores these days, it’s because 2019 marks the seventieth anniversary of the novel’s publication. Read more …

Published: May 1, 2019 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged 1984, articles, book reviews, Communism, George Orwell, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, originals, propaganda, Soviet Union | 11 Responses

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Robert Brasillach & Notre avant-guerre:
Remembering Robert Brasillach, March 31, 1909–February 6, 1945

Margot Metroland

Robert Brasillach at his trial in 1945.

3,574 words

Today is the birthday of Robert Brasillach, French journalist, novelist, and film historian (The History of Motion Pictures, co-written with Maurice Bardéche).

It is Brasillach’s fate mainly to be remembered for being the only collaborateur sentenced to death (by firing squad) for “intellectual crimes.” Read more …

Published: March 31, 2019 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged Albert Camus, Alcazar Palace, Belgium, Ce Soir, Charles Maurras, Colette, commemorations, France, Francisco Franco, Georges Bernanos, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, Henri Massis, Jacques Maritain, Je Suis Partout, Jean Cocteau, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, La Cabeza, Léon Degrelle, M. de Lequerica, Margot Metroland, Maurice Bardèche, North American New Right, Paul Claudel, Pierre Cousteau, Pierre Daye, Pierre Gaxotte, Popular Front, reprints, Rexist Party, Robert Brasillach, Spain, Vendredi | Leave a comment

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Perused with Pleasure in 2018
My Top 5 Books

Margot Metroland

1,530 words

I was using my Spectator-co-uk digital subscription to search for odds and ends in its wonky archive. What, I wondered, did the Speccy have to say about the Angry Young Men in the late 1950s? Better yet, what did they have on Colin Wilson and his friend, the ever-elusive Bill Hopkins?

Not an awful lot, as it turns out. Read more …

Published: December 27, 2018 | Posted in North American New Right | Tagged 2018 Roundups, articles, Bill Hopkins, book reviews, Charles De Gaulle, Colin Wilson, KGB, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Margot Metroland, North American New Right, originals, T. S. Eliot | 4 Responses

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Bernardo Bertolucci & The Conformist

Margot Metroland

1,340 words

Reputation-wise, Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018) missed a good bet by not dying a quarter-century ago, rather than lingering on for years of illness and diminishing fame. Orson Welles spent his lengthy dotage introducing himself to new generations as a pitchman for Paul Masson wine, and that seemed pretty sad, but at least people knew who he was. When the equally talented Bertolucci died on November 26, he had almost no public profile at all. Read more …