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Knut Hamsun was born Knut Pedersen in Lom, Norway on August 4, 1859. He died in Grimstad, Norway, on February 19, 1952. The author of more than twenty novels, plus poems, short stories, plays, and essays, Hamsun was one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers. His rejection of both Romanticism and naturalism, his emphasis on outsiders and rebels, and his exploration of inner and sometimes extreme states of consciousness, made him a pioneer of literary modernism. (more…)
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Here are the young men.
But where have they been?
— Ian Curtis, “Decades”
Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man.
— Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (more…)
Carl Schmitt, 1888–1985
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Carl Schmitt was born on July 11, 1888 in Plettenberg, Westphalia, Germany — where he died on April 7, 1985, at the age of 96. The son of a Roman Catholic small businessman, Carl Schmitt studied law in Berlin, Munich, and Strasbourg, graduating and taking his state exams in Strasbourg in 1915. In 1916, he earned his habilitation in Strasbourg, qualifying him to be a law professor. He taught at business schools and universities in Munich, Greifswald, Bonn, Berlin, and Cologne.
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Revilo Pendleton Oliver was born in Texas on this day in 1908. He received his undergraduate degree at Pomona College in California and his doctorate in classics at the University of Illinois under William Abbot Oldfather. He was Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois for many years. (more…)
William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939
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William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet, playwright, and politician, was born on this day in 1865. One of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century, Yeats’ life and work straddle the great divide between Romanticism and Modernism. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
In life and in art, Yeats rejected modern rationalism, materialism, and egalitarianism. He saw them as coarsening and brutalizing.
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Oswald Spengler was born on this day in 1880. For his contributions to the philosophy of history and culture, Spengler is one of the most important philosophical influences on the North American New Right, largely by way of his disciple Francis Parker Yockey. Spengler is often wrong, but even when he errs, he does so magnificently.
Spengler’s magnum opus is The Decline of the West, (more…)
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French novelist, essayist, and physician Louis-Ferdinand-Auguste Destouches, who was born on this day in 1894. Céline is one of the giants of 20th-century literature. And, like Ezra Pound and so many other great writers of the last century, he was an open and unapologetic racial nationalist. For more on Céline, see the following works on this website: (more…)
You can buy Kerry Bolton’s More Artists of the Right here.
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Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813 in Leipzig in the Kingdom of Saxony. He died on February 13, 1883 in Venice. As an artist, intellectual, author, and cultural force, Wagner has left an immense metapolitical legacy, which is being evaluated and appropriated in the North American New Right. I wish to draw your attention to the following writings which have been published at Counter-Currents. (more…)
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Baron Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born on May 19, 1898 in Rome. Along with René Guénon, Evola is one of the writers who has most influenced the metapolitical outlook and project of Counter-Currents, which is reflected in the fact that Evola is one of the most-tagged writers on this website. In commemoration of his birthday, I wish to draw your attention to the following resources.
Counter-Currents has published the following writings of Evola’s: (more…)
Philippe Halsman photographs Salvador Dalí, Decline of hair on the face, 1954.
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It’s the most basic thing in the world. You can look at a rock, think it’s a bear, and run away. Or you can glimpse a bear, assume it’s a rock, and get eaten. Over time, evolution will select for seeing bears, when in fact, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s just rocks. Then clever fools will come and say that believing in a bear infestation is primitive superstition, and that they, taught by “science” and “logic,” have surmised that there are no bears among the rocks. In fact, bears do not even exist. (more…)
Sam T. Francis by Phil Eiger Newmann, 2021
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This year, Counter-Currents is adding Sam Francis to our list of thinkers of the Right whose birthdays we commemorate. We are also running a symposium on his work, beginning today.
Samuel Todd Francis was born April 29, 1947, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He died February 15, 2005 in the Maryland suburbs of the imperial capital. Francis took his BA from Johns Hopkins University in 1969 and his PhD in modern history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1979. (more…)
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Today is Earth Day, which has been an occasion to call for conservationism and environmental protection since it was first celebrated in America with bipartisan support in 1970, in response to the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. Although in recent decades, environmentalism has come to be identified with the political Left, taking stewardship of the Earth and seeking harmony in the relationship between man and nature has traditionally been an issue of the Right. (more…)
July 1976 cover of Instauration
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Wilmot Robertson has been a perennial favorite in these pages, and it’s time to provide a list of relevant links and articles published over the years.
The ever-intriguing fact about Robertson is that he thrived for decades as an original, often contrarian, thinker on the racialist Right; yet he remained a man of mystery, known to few. And that was no accident. (more…)
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The French soldier, historian, and European patriot Dominique Venner was born on this day in 1935. He famously ended his life with a bullet on the altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris on May 21, 2013 to protest the demographic replacement of Europeans. Through both his life’s work and his death, Venner wished to draw attention to the demographic decline of European man and to indicate what we must be prepared to give to save our people: everything. But his death will be in vain unless it is remembered. So take this day to remember Dominique Venner: his life, his work, and his sacrifice.
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Jonathan David Anthony Bowden was born on April 12, 1962. He died on March 29, 2012, just short of his 50th birthday. Jonathan was a painter, novelist, essayist, playwright, actor, and orator. He was also a friend. His ideas and personality have had a real and permanent impact on my approach to New Right metapolitics. He will be missed, but he will also be remembered and honored. (more…)
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Emil Cioran was a Romanian philosopher. Cioran was born on April 8, 1911 in Rășinari (Transylvania, then part of Austria-Hungary and today part of Romania) and died stateless in Paris on June 20, 1995. A nationalist writer in his youth, after the Second World War he achieved fame as a French-language author of essays and aphorisms of a markedly dark and apparently nihilistic bent. (more…)
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Hungarian translation here; Czech translation here
Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one above or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
If I could choose to be anyone from the twentieth century, I would not hesitate for a moment to pick Ernst Jünger. (more…)
Joseph Campbell & his wife, Jean Erdman Campbell, c. 1939.
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Joseph Campbell, the famed teacher of comparative mythology, was born on this day in 1904. For many people, including yours truly, he has served as a “gateway drug” into not only a new way of looking at myths, but into a non-materialistic way of viewing the world. And although as a public figure, Campbell mostly remained apolitical, evidence from his private life indicates that he was at least nominally a “man of the Right.” (more…)
Jean Raspail as photographed by Pascal Parrot in 1981.
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On June 13, 2020, the French explorer and novelist Jean Raspail died in Paris at the age of 94. Many were the nationalists, identitarians, and traditional Catholics who paid tribute at his passing. Former European MP and co-founder of the European identity movement Iliade, Jean-Yves Gallou, stated that Raspail was “the man who foretold the destructive impact of blame culture and anti-racism on our civilization back in 1973.” (more…)
Phil Eiger Newmann, Flannery O’Connor, 2021.
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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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Anyone familiar with 19th-century American history will recognize John C. Calhoun as the man who, more than anyone else, represented the antebellum South. He, along with John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia, provided much of the intellectual heft behind the character and institutions of the South and defined its position as a distinct economic and cultural region within the greater Union.
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Today is the birthday of Gabriele D’Annunzio, novelist, poet, playwright, aesthete, dandy, playboy, war hero, and the first fascist dictator, who from 1919 to 1920 ruled over the Adriatic city-state of Fiume, establishing many of the political and aesthetic forms followed by Mussolini a few years later.
To learn more about D’Annunzio’s life and accomplishments, see the following works on this site: (more…)
Richard M. Weaver
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America wasn’t always a liberal country. The founders drew more upon classical republicanism than liberalism. In the nineteenth century, the populist movement was decidedly anti-liberal. But the founders and the populists were never consistently anti-liberal, because consistency is the province of intellectuals, not statesmen.
America never had a genuinely anti-liberal intellectual movement until the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s. (The North American New Right is America’s second anti-liberal intellectual movement.) (more…)
Rush Limbaugh receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2020.
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Rush Limbaugh passed away from lung cancer Wednesday at the age of 70. No one did more to shape modern conservatism than the talk radio giant. Republican politicians bowed before him and sought his favor. Rush had the power to shape the opinions of millions, and one rant from him could scuttle a presidential candidacy or legislation. (more…)
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Today is the birthday of New Zealand poet, essayist, Social Credit advocate, and social reformer Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn, another Artist of the Right. In honor of his birth, I wish to draw your attention to the following works on this site.
By Fairburn: (more…)
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Spanish translation here
Yukio Mishima was one of the giants of 20th-century Japanese literature. He has exercised an enduring influence on the post-World War II European and North American New Right. In commemoration of his birth, I wish to draw your attention to the following works on this website:
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Anthony Mario Ludovici was born on January 8, 1882.
Ludovici was one of the first and most accomplished translators of Nietzsche into English and a leading exponent of Nietzsche’s thought. Ludovici was also an original philosopher in his own right. (more…)
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Alan Watts was born on this day in 1915. A prolific scholar and dazzling stylist, Watts is best known as the chief popularizer of Asian philosophy for the Beat and Hippy movements, but he was also an original thinker in his own right and a quiet man of the Right. In commemoration of his birth, I wish to draw your attention to these works at Counter-Currents: (more…)
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“I am in fact a Hobbit.”—J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a favorite author of New Left “hippies” and New Right nationalists, and for pretty much the same reasons. Tolkien deeply distrusted modernization and industrialization, which replace organic reciprocity between man and nature with technological dominion of man over nature, a relationship that deforms and devalues both poles. (more…)
