Tag: George Orwell

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Recently, an all-too-familiar act of violence perpetrated against white children resulted in several weeks of unrest in the United Kingdom. (more…)

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The following is being published in commemoration of George Orwell’s 121st birthday today.

I’ve been trying to figure out how George Orwell fits into that 1950s literary phenomenon, or cult, called the Angry Young Men. The Angries, as a movement, were partly an invention of the British popular press of 1956-58. Some writers who are included among them, notably Kingsley Amis, rejected the label and got counted in only because they were new young writers with an irksome attitude. Others, such as Colin Wilson, treated the whole concept whimsically or dismissively but used it as a publicity tool. (more…)

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Dwight Macdonald (ed. by John Summers)
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
New York: New York Review Books, 2011

Long before Paul Fussell’s Class, or Jilly Cooper’s Class, or such dubious offerings of social criticism as The Preppy Handbook and The Yuppie Handbook, we had Dwight Macdonald’s Masscult and Midcult, a long essay originally written for the Partisan Review and published as a slight volume in 1961. More recently (2011) it was republished as a New York Review Books (NYRB) Classics title, bound together with an Introduction by Louis Menand and a collection of pointed and frothy Macdonald writings from the same era, originally published as Against the American Grain. (more…)

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England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr. Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. — George Orwell, “England, Your England”

Evening has fallen, the swans are singing.
The last of Sunday’s bells is ringing.
The wind in the trees is sighing,
And old England is dying.
— The Waterboys, “Old England” (more…)

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George du Maurier’s gothic horror novel Trilby is all but forgotten today, and to the extent that it is remembered, it is for introducing the term “svengali” into the popular lexicon. “Svengali” has been used as a term for the power behind the throne of an entertainer. He is more than just a business manager who negotiates contracts, although he may do that as well. A svengali is a puppeteer for whom the performer is his own creative outlet. He cultivates the performer’s image and makes artistic decisions for them. (more…)

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Old England is dying.
— The Waterboys, “Old England”

Looked at from the outside, even the cockney and the Yorkshireman have a strong family resemblance. — George Orwell, “England Your England”

Cultures change, and forms of their rituals and practices shift and mutate in their wake. Perhaps it’s the other way around, and the latter is upstream of the former, to mix aquatic metaphors. Either way the coin falls, the times they are a-changing, and in perpetuity. They always have been. (more…)

Walter Kaufmann

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What, then, is this that we call existentialism? –– Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism

Sartre formulates the basic formula of existentialism in these words: existence precedes essence. — Martin Heidegger, “What Is Humanism?”

Schools of philosophical thought are usually quite clear in their lines of demarcation. (more…)

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s collection The Cultured Thug here.

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Every month in 2024, Greg Johnson will invite some of our authors and friends to read and discuss some of the best material from our catalog and more in what we are calling The Counter-Currents Book Club. The first meeting was held in place of our most recent Counter-Currents Radio broadcast, where Greg was joined by Margot Metroland, James J. O’Meara, and Kathryn S. to discuss our latest publication by Jonathan Bowden, The Cultured Thug. It is now available for download and online listening. (more…)

Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill (1628)

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I was carrying out a literary exercise of quite a different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself . . . — George Orwell, “Why I Write”

 Litera scripta manet.
(That which is written, remains.)
— John Dewey (more…)

You can pre-order Jonathan Bowden’s collection The Cultured Thug here.

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Jonathan Bowden (ed. by Greg Johnson)
The Cultured Thug
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2023

Stylistically there are two kinds of Jonathan Bowden essay. There are the neat, trim, polished ones that clock in at 800 to 1,100 words, like a review in The Spectator. Then there are the luxuriant, digressive ones that are always rambling off onto weird, and often interesting, tangents. The difference between the two is that the latter kind usually come to us as transcripts of speeches from gatherings where Bowden had an hour or more to fill, and thus had good reason to pad out his thesis with amusing asides and intriguing anecdotes. (more…)

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Jordan Peterson was asked by journalist Camilla Tominey about his views on multiculturalism during a recent exclusive interview with GB News, Britain’s nominally Right-leaning news station. In a refreshingly scathing tirade, the Canadian public intellectual branded the idea of mixing incongruous population groups together as “a miracle of stupidity,” correctly making the link between diversity of cultures and the potential within multicultural societies for civil conflict. (more…)

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[M]an has ascribed to all that exists a connection with morality and laid an ethical significance on the world’s back. – Friedrich Nietzsche

Everybody wants to rule the world. — Tears for Fears (more…)

Yaroslav Hunka at the Canadian House of Commons.

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

On September 22 of this year, the speaker of the Canadian House of Commons agreed to bring a special guest to the Parliament of Canada. That special guest was a 98-year-old Second World War veteran named Yaroslav Hunka. (more…)