William Powell Frith (1819-1909), A May Day Celebration (private collection)
6,740 words
Throughout Europe and the United States, the chill mornings and blossoming trees of spring are giving way to summer’s warmth and abundance. As the midway point between spring and summer, the month of May has historically been a season of great importance to the peoples of Europe, a joyful time of sowing, revelry, feasting, and courtship. (more…)
2,390 words
I cannot speak for the rest of the world, but for those of us who grew up in the United States, especially in its more rural environs, autumn is a particularly nostalgic season. In part, this is owing to associations formed during childhood: the forest ramblings, the fallen leaves crunching underfoot, the morning fog over the trees, the smell of woodsmoke in the air; the pumpkin patches and hayrides, county fairs and bonfires — all of these thoughts and remembrances come back to us in this season, tinted in shades of red and gold. (more…)
8,088 words
O my brothers, I dedicate and direct you to a new nobility: you shall become procreators and cultivators and sowers of the future — verily, not to a nobility that you might buy like shopkeepers and with shopkeepers’ gold: for whatever has its price has little value. (more…)
8,304 words
The very idea sounds absurd. Militant supporter of National Socialism, foundational figure of Esoteric Hilterism, the iron maiden known to academia — insofar as she is known at all — as “Hitler’s Priestess”: dissociating Savitri Devi from her fanatical loyalty to Hitler’s Germany seems as futile as denazifying The Führer himself. (more…)
6,101 words
Come out, ’tis now September, the hunters’ moon’s begun,
And through the wheaten stubble we hear the frequent gun;
The leaves are turning yellow, and fading into red,
While the ripe and bearded barley is hanging down its head.
— “All Among the Barley,” British folk song (more…)
Caspar David Friedrich, Landscape with Mountain Lake in the Morning, 1823.
3,918 words
Among those on the Right who address man’s relationship to the rest of the natural world, one finds a variety of approaches. There are the anthropocentric conservationists, who promote the “wise use” or prudent management of natural resources for future generations. There are the Social Darwinist varieties, (more…)
Caspar David Friedrich, Wall at Dusk, 1837-40.
3,000 words
My ancestors arrived in the Tidewater region of this continent around 400 years ago, and lived and died almost entirely beneath the Mason-Dixon line. As a Catholic, a Southron, and an Anglo-American, I am filled with sorrow and impotent rage at the sight of my forebears being demonized by those who are so manifestly inferior to them. (more…)
4,436 words
Jef Costello’s recent articles concerning the “Carnivore Diet” inspired me to ponder a subject that I had neglected for some time: the ethics and politics of diet.
1,554 words
I have returned, for a time, to the lakes and forests where I spent my childhood summers.
Returned to the knotted post oaks and the impenetrable blackjack pines, to the dense undergrowth and brambles, to the thick forests echoing with the song (more…)
4,631 words
While mankind suffers through the worst global crisis in recent memory, the rest of the world appears to be benefiting from our discomfiture.
The quarantines, travel bans, and economic stagnation brought about by COVID-19 have had a number of unintended consequences for the natural environment: improvements in air quality resulting from the reduction of major pollutants such as nitrous oxide and greenhouse gases; cleaner waterways (most famously the canals of Venice); and the return of wildlife to humanized landscapes. (more…)
3,789 words
In March 2020, the world declared war on COVID-19.
The use of martial rhetoric with reference to peacetime political conflicts — the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the domestic arena of the War on Terror — has a long and dubious history in American politics. The appeal is obvious. Warlike language depicts every conflict as a life-or-death struggle, encourages mass mobilization, justifies significant intrusion into people’s lives, and provides a pretext for novel (and possibly illegal) political solutions. (more…)
Albertus Pictor, Death Playing Chess, 1480-90.
2,823 words
There is something sinister in the springtime this year. Rather than a serving as a yearly reminder of rebirth and natural beauty, the blooming trees and emergent grasses wear the face of some ancient enemy, awoken from its long slumber. The spreading pestilence makes one long for the dormancy and stasis of winter.
This atmosphere of dread has infected every dimension of our lives. (more…)
3,121 words
Despite their many social ills, one might judge the decades prior to World War I to be the last period of sanity in the West. It was truly the last epoch in American history in which the values of old Europe still held any sway, when criticism of modernity by men of the Right still exerted some influence, and when ancestral traditions of dignity and civic responsibility were still in force among the old families. It was a time when anxieties about the rising power of the underclass and the preservation of America’s political, cultural, and natural heritage were paramount. (more…)
1,287 words
“Few now remember them . . . yet still some go wandering, sons of forgotten kings walking in loneliness, guarding from evil things folks that are heedless.” (Tom Bombadil, “Fog on the Barrow Downs,” The Fellowship of the Ring)
In memory of Christopher Tolkien (more…)
1,815 words
Murray the Hegelian
Part 2 of 2; part 1 here
With the early successes of Earth First! came the envious spite typical of the doctrinaire Left — who, despite their constant denunciations of ugly noxious screeds are themselves often quite guilty on that score. The opening salvo was fired by Murray Bookchin, a bloviating Hegelian from Vermont (by way of New York City). This was a man whose vituperative style and all-around prickliness eventually led even his own disciples to concede that he set back the cause of the American ecology movement for decades. (more…)
3,464 words
Part 1 of 2; part 2 here
While its current champions would have us believe that political ecology is the exclusive domain of the Left, and often fret about the specter of entryism by racists and crypto-fascists into their struggle for world liberation, a cursory glance at the history of ecological thought reveals the opposite to be true. (more…)
Horatio Greenough, George Washington, 1840
3,341 words
Valor, fearlessness, fortitude, resourcefulness, and also, not fleeing in war, charity, and the ability to rule, are the natural duties of a Kshatriya. — Bhagavad Gita 18:23
According to a widely-accepted hypothesis of Georges Dumézil, prehistoric Indo-European society was divided into three basic functions: a sacral, a martial, and an economic class. This tripartite ideology survived the Indo-European migrations throughout Europe and Asia and has persisted, with various modifications, into modernity. (more…)
2,885 words
Whatever its contemporary associations, the natural home of political ecology lies on the Right – not the false Right associated with the Republican Party in America, of course, whose conservatism is little more than a desperate and self-destructive attachment to the liberal principles of the Enlightenment, but what Julius Evola has called the True Right: (more…)
1,209 words
This time of year, when autumn fades into winter, has been particularly evocative to me ever since I was a child. Of course, “the holiday season” has a special meaning for many people, and their reasons are probably for the most part quite similar to mine. There is a shared seasonal nostalgia for the cold autumn air, the brilliant foliage, Jack-o’-lanterns and Christmas trees, eggnog and pumpkin pie and sugar cookies, Halloween costumes and Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas mornings. (more…)