Tag: empire

4,304 words

“A splendid little war” was how Secretary of State John Hay described the Spanish-American War of 1898. Since Hay had served in Abraham Lincoln’s administration, he had had a lot of experience with more jaundiced wars like the one in the 1860s. The Spanish-American War was little, and its splendor depended upon where you were when it occurred. In DC’s clubrooms and in Congress, it was quite alluring, and was to most of the country. But if you were on the front line taking rounds from Spanish Mausers or suffering agony from malaria or dysentery — which a good part of the army was — it was not so splendid. (more…)

3,808 words

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Communities, whether old or recent, whether ethno-cultural, linguistic, religious, sexual, or something else, are natural dimensions of belonging. No individual can exist without belonging, even if only to distance himself from it. (more…)

Jozef Brandt, Return from Vienna, 1883.

3,350 words

I’m a pretty cold-hearted realist, but after such a buildup of how the Right has been losing again and again for over a century, I expected something perhaps a bit more stirring. Some call to arms, or flowering prose. Instead, you essentially offer “Who knows? Our luck may change; stranger things have happened.” (more…)

1,789 words

Adam Curtis has been compiling and documenting the nature of power in the world for over two decades now for the BBC. Those of us who reside in the UK and are required by law to pay a yearly sum of £157.50 ($218.35) for a television license, and for many native British people, paying this sum has been increasingly feeling like a spit in the face. Adam Curtis’ documentaries have been the one reprieve from the stream of abuse and guilt-tripping amongst the state-sponsored news media and junk celebrity TV.   (more…)

3,395 words

Mike Duncan
The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic
New York: Public Affairs, 2017

If the United States is anywhere on the Roman timeline, it must be somewhere between the great wars of conquest and the rise of the Caesars. (more…)

1,614 words

While traveling the past few weeks, I kept thinking about the upcoming 2020 US presidential election. More precisely, I kept wondering whether this election would be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back. (more…)

Johann Peter Krafft, The Siege of Szigetvár, 1825.

5,125 words

The bad news is the bad news — the stories we’ve seen and heard in the past few months, years, decades that all keep warning us of more to come. The good news is that these times of transition provide us with opportunities for clarity and fresh perspectives on historical and social phenomena (more…)

2,442 words

Napoleon has generally been viewed harshly by anti-liberal thinkers, with a few notable exceptions such as Nietzsche, Léon Bloy, and Francis Parker Yockey. A great deal of criticism has been leveled at him. He has been accused of being a mere petty dictator without any higher authority legitimizing him, an enemy of the Catholic Church, a liberal egalitarian who brought the violence of the French Revolution to the legitimate monarchies of Europe in his conquests.  (more…)

Words: 3,528 text, 1,044 notes

In our previous essay, “Race, Identity, Community,”[1] we discussed a number of subjects: most importantly, the varying levels and relations of ethnic and cultural groups, the matter of cultural communication, openness, and closure, the relationship between race and culture, the necessity of resisting miscegenation for the sake of ethno-cultural stability, (more…)

3,715 words

American Renaissance: You have said that modernity is the enemy of identity. Could you explain this idea further?

Alain de Benoist: When one considers modernity, one must consider two meanings of the word. The first is known to everyone: It is the changes of life that come with more material wealth. But modernity is also the product of an ideology that appeared in the 17th and 18th century with the Enlightenment. (more…)