The rarely-photographed H. Keith Thompson, Jr. in 1954
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My theory on Feds is that they’re like mushrooms: Feed ’em shit and keep ’em in the dark.
–Mark Wahlberg’s character in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed)
The gracious and courtly Harald Keith Thompson — he told me to call him H. K., as we had too many Keiths around — would never put it that crudely. But when it came to disseminating (mis)information, H. K. and Marky-Mark were very much on the same page.
The wonder is that some investigators would gladly repeat his stories as gospel truth even when they knew Thompson liked to tease and deceive. (more…)
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English original here
„Onen hlad feláhů po míru, po ochraně proti každému narušení každodenní rutiny, proti každé formě osudu jako by naznačoval ochranné mimikry před chodem dějin, lidský hmyz, který vystaven nebezpečí hraje mrtvého, ‚happyend‘ prázdné existence, nuda, jež dala vzniknout jazzu a černošským tanečkům v pohřebním průvodu za velkou Kulturu.“… (more…)
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English original here
Margot Metrolandová
Samuel Francis
Leviathan and Its Enemies: Mass Organization and Managerial Power in Twentieth-Century America
Arlington: Washington Summit Publishers (more…)
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Wendy K. Z. Anderson
Rebirthing a Nation: White Women, Identity Politics, and the Internet
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021
This is a book that the author conceived back in 2005 on a cute but shaky premise. A young academic in “Communications Studies,” Wendy K. Z. Anderson proposed that there was a cadre of tech-savvy White Nationalist women out there, and they were using their insidious HTML skills to ensnare and influence other women. (more…)
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Michael Brendan Dougherty
My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home
New York: Sentinel Books, 2019
When this was first published a couple of years ago, reviewers had two distinct takes about the book. One was that it was a wistful, sometimes bittersweet memoir about growing up without a father, because the father was off in Ireland, having never married Dougherty’s American mother; and also, the author had some romantic notions about Ireland, and wasn’t that special. (more…)
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Czech version here
Samuel Francis
Leviathan and Its Enemies: Mass Organization and Managerial Power in Twentieth-Century America
Arlington: Washington Summit Publishers
Leviathan and Its Enemies has the subtitle Mass Organization and Managerial Power in Twentieth-Century America, which seems curious, given that it was first published in 2016. (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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Here we have a continuation of the narrative presented in past installments, describing Brasillach’s auto-tour through wartime Spain in July 1938, accompanied by his brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche and their friend Pierre Cousteau. As before, I have translated it directly from Brasillach’s memoir Notre avant-guerre (1938-41). (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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Kevin D. Williamson
Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the “Real America”
Washington, DC: Regnery, 2020
I suppose the author and publisher meant the title Big White Ghetto (etc.) to be eye-catching and amusing, (more…)
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Seyward Darby
Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism
New York: Little, Brown, 2020
This badly named book began with a cover story in Harper’s back in September 2017. It was about female activists and intellectuals on the Far Right. (more…)
J. D. Vance.
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There are many odd and irksome things about the new Hillbilly Elegy movie on Netflix. For my money, the strangest aspect of the production is that it has only a superficial resemblance to J. D. Vance’s 2016 book. It’s as though you were to make a movie of Moby-Dick, knowing only that it has a ship and a white spermaceti whale and a mad captain who stumps around on a peg-leg. (more…)
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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, (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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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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. (more…)
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. (more…)
Dearden and his clapper.
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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. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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.
(more…)
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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.
(more…)
Anti-woke comedian Sam Hyde
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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. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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— (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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.
(more…)
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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.
(more…)
O’Brien (Richard Burton) demonstrates that 2 + 2 doesn’t always equal 4.
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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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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. (more…)
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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
(more…)
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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. (more…)
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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.
(more…)
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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. (more…)
Robert Brasillach at his trial in 1945.
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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.” (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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. (more…)
Maxwell Knight (right) and friends.
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The spymaster’s fascist background is just one of the many obstacles in telling the Maxwell Knight story.
One of the oddest television projects now in development is a forthcoming series about master spy Maxwell Knight, the real-life “M” of MI5. (more…)
Father Coughlin
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The public career of Rev. Charles E. Coughlin during the 1930s and early ‘40s is massively documented. Newsreels, publications, speeches, and broadcast recordings are all at your fingertips online. Yet the historical significance of this Canadian-American prelate (1891-1979) is maddeningly elusive. You may have read that he was an immensely popular but controversial “radio priest” with a decidedly populist-nationalist bent, or that he published a weekly magazine called Social Justice (1936-1942), (more…)
Cass Sunstein
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Cass R. Sunstein
Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014
Do people actually read Cass R. Sunstein? Millions, maybe, are vaguely aware of him as a talking head on cable TV. Others might recall that Sunstein held an obscure but sinister-sounding sinecure in the Obama administration (Administrator, White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, 2009-2012), or that he is frequently touted as some kind of esteemed legal scholar at Harvard Law School. (more…)
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The writings of Francis Parker Yockey have fascinated the far Right for a half-century and more. I would argue that the person most responsible for this popularity is the late classics professor Revilo P. Oliver. While Prof. Oliver had little practical input in the distribution of Yockey writings (that credit would go more to Willis Carto and George Dietz), it was Oliver’s imprimatur that lent Yockey a gravitas that ensured he would be cherished as something other than the author of some controversial, obscurantist tracts. (more…)
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June 29 is the birthday of T. (for Theodore) Lothrop Stoddard (1883–1950)—scholar, lecturer, journalist, polymath, and author of many, many books.
Stoddard is best known for 1920’s The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World Supremacy, discussed two years ago here. Along with Madison Grant (1865–1937), author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916), and Prescott F. Hall (1868–1921), eugenics crusader and founder of the Immigration Restriction League, Stoddard can rightly be considered a father of the sweeping Immigration Act of 1924 (aka Johnson-Reed Act). (more…)
William Joyce
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William Brooke Joyce, the Berlin propaganda broadcaster known as “Lord Haw-Haw,” and the last man to be executed in England for treason, was an agent for MI5. He went to Berlin in August 1939 at the behest of an old friend and spymaster, and wound up becoming the English voice of Nazi radio. Then, in 1945, he was brought back to London, tried as a traitor, and hanged on January 3, 1946.
This was done to please the Kremlin, and to protect Communists in the British government and intelligence services. (more…)
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The novel-memoirs of Louis-Ferdinand Céline have a peculiarly cinematic texture, like that of rough drafts for projected screenplays. He flashes sense-impressions and side-thoughts at the reader. For the neophyte, this can make for some hard going.
On the other hand, these impressionistic prose-sketches can provide a series of clear visuals for anyone attempting to hammer a Céline tale into a script. This is particularly true of his Exile Trilogy (more…)
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One of the saddest episodes in the life of Dr. Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, alias Louis-Ferdinand Céline, came right after he published his first novel in 1933.
Voyage a la bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) was a succés d’estime from the start and before long a bestseller too. Surely it would be soon made into a major motion picture.
(more…)
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Jonah Goldberg
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy
New York: Crown Forum, 2018
Anyone expecting Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West to be a new meditation on James Burnham’s 1964 classic[1] about the moral degeneracy of liberal democracy is in for a laugh. Having borrowed Burnham’s tasty title, Goldberg goes off in another direction entirely, often inverting Burnham’s argument. (more…)
Adam Parfrey in Hollywood, 1990
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Adam Parfrey, the publisher of humor and esoterica who parlayed a 1980s “‘zine” sensibility into a durable niche publishing house, has died at his home in Port Townsend, Washington. He was 61. [Erratum note: Adam died in Seattle. —MM]
His main publishing imprint, Feral House, specialized in topics pertaining to pop culture, far-Right politics, and conspiracy theorizing. (more…)
Robert Brasillach at his trial in 1945.
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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.” (more…)
It was never really wonderful.
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A few years back—let us say, forty—some TV boffins decided there was a perfect and archetypal Christmas film that must be broadcast every Yuletide season. And that film was the disturbing and surreal It’s a Wonderful Life with James Stewart. A downer-fable about failure and suicide, it flopped resoundingly with critics and public alike when it came out in 1946. Director Frank Capra himself counted it among his least favorite efforts. Personally I’ve never met anyone who really likes the movie. (more…)
Henry Williamson
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December 1st is the 122nd birthday of Henry Williamson (Dec. 1, 1895–Aug. 13, 1977), English naturalist, novelist, and nationalist.
One of Williamson’s unique distinctions is to have been T. E. Lawrence’s literary friend and personal confidant during the last seven years of Lawrence’s life, 1928–1935. It is a matter of record that when Lawrence had his fatal motorcycle accident, he had just been to the post office to send a telegram to Williamson. (more…)
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November 16, 1896 – December 3, 1980
November 16th is the 121st birthday of Sir Oswald (“Tom”) Mosley, English MP, baronet, political innovator, fascist and nationalist.
We’re at a strange new moment in history now, when figures such as Mosley can be honestly appraised without our falling into cant or parroting someone else’s hobby-horses. (more…)
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Greg asked me to pen this week’s fundraiser update to bring a fresh voice and perspective. Since last week’s update, we have received 23 donations (including 12 all-important pledges of monthly support) totaling $2,045.04. This brings the total for our fundraiser to $44,973.56. That puts us just short of 75% of the way to our goal of $60,000. (more…)
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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. (more…)
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Francis Beckett
Fascist in the Family: The Tragedy of John Beckett MP
London & New York: Routledge, 2017 (Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right)
Here is a book of deep political scholarship and heartbreaking family history. It misses being great because the author lost the plot during the many years he worked on it, and he wound up hanging his father’s story on a lurid promotional “hook,” which I’ll get into below. (more…)
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Sometimes you read a newspaper column that starts off so pointlessly and insipidly you can’t tell whether it’s supposed to be a parody of bad writing, or the writer just wants to introduce a humorous idea but can’t find the right hook to hang it on. This happened a few days ago (April 10) in The Washington Post, with a column by one Steven Petrow. (more…)
Whittaker Chambers, underground man.
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(Written in the style, if not quite the spirit, of senior TIMEditor Chambers’ weekly newsmagazine.)
Rumpled, paunchy Whittaker Chambers (April 1, 1901-July 9, 1961) has long merited haughty sneers and raised eyebrows on America’s nationalist Right. Reasons: his shifting ideologies, his inscrutable motives.
Among the most compelling critiques of Chambers we may count those of Classics professor Revilo P. Oliver. (more…)
Robert Brasillach at his trial in 1945.
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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.” (more…)
Mock ad by Michael O’Donoghue & George W. S. Trow, 1971 National Lampoon
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For the past couple of weeks there’s been a lot of media blather about how the novelist Jane Austen is an icon of the Alt Right. The distress this causes Leftist critics has been a thing of high comedy and low hysteria.
If you haven’t been keeping up, I review some articles immediately below. Otherwise, feel free to skip about halfway down, where I get into matters of cultural appropriation and Austen sex roles. (more…)
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Nearly fifty years after his assassination, the image of George Lincoln Rockwell (March 9, 1918-August 25, 1967) is more iconic than ever. You can drop his amiable face into a Twitter avi or Website header, and feel pretty certain that most of your audience will know who it is. At Amazon, publications by and about Rockwell run on for pages: new, used, rare first editions; hardbound, paperback, Kindle; memoirs, speeches, political tracts; cartoon pamphlets and dank satires. (more…)
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Emmett Till was killed more than sixty years ago, but he’s a hotter property than ever. Scarcely a year goes by without yet another book or documentary recounting the tale of the hefty black youth from Chicago who got beaten and shot in Mississippi in 1955, for the mild transgression of “whistling at”—and physically molesting—a young white woman in a country store. (more…)
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Future historians will be endlessly fascinated by the intertwined media phenomena of Taylor Swift and Donald Trump during 2015-2016. The parallels and symbiosis of the two have been noted by many, particularly in the precincts of Twitter and the Alt Right, although no one’s ever studied the thing in depth.
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Henry Williamson
Today is the birthday of Henry Williamson (Dec. 1, 1895 – Aug. 13, 1977)—ruralist author, war historian, journalist, farmer, and visionary of British fascism.
Two rather incongruous points of Williamson’s life stand out. One is that he achieved fame with what is usually regarded as a children’s book, Tarka the Otter (originally published 1927, with a movie version in 1979).
The other is that he was a friend of Lawrence of Arabia; and that it was on his way back from posting a letter to Williamson that T. E. Lawrence was mysteriously killed in a motorcycle accident. (more…)
John Singleton Copley, Portrait of Paul Revere, 1768
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For the past few days the mainstream media have been deluging us with one of their favorite clichés about Euro-American nationalism. They keep telling us that the Alt Right or New Right are just old-fashioned “racism” relabeled as a public-relations move. According to The New Republic, National Review, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, this rightist movement is nothing more than old-style “white supremacy” and Klanster cross-burnings, now dressed up in Jos. A. Bank suits at posh intellectual conferences. (more…)
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At the National Policy Institute’s conference on Saturday (officially titled Become Who We Are / 2016) I met a tweedy, middle-aged journalist I’ll call Charles. Charles was making notes for a political-analysis piece for a certain Newspaper of Record, and struggling to find an insightful angle about the Alt Right.
At the moment his working premise was that this Alt Right thing is essentially a revamping of old-fashioned “white supremacy” from decades past. But he wasn’t really happy with that idea. (more…)
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If you follow NPI events, there was more than a little déjà vu in the National Policy Institute’s press conference in DC on Friday, September 9th. Titled “What Is the Alt Right?,” and framed as a reply to Hillary Clinton’s disordered denunciations of Donald Trump and his nationalist supporters, it was a very sedate, familiar affair. (more…)
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Poor White Trash! Hillbillies! Rural poverty! It cannot have escaped your notice that we’re having a rash of stuff on this topic right now. Books, columns, thumb-sucking op-eds, talking-head concern-trolls nattering away on PBS NewsHour and Sunday morning chat-fests.
So far as I can tell, the genre first reared its head back in March of this year with a long-winded, digressive piece by Kevin Williamson in National Review (more…)
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Today is the 11th anniversary of the death of Wilmot Robertson (April 16, 1915–July 8, 2005), author of The Dispossessed Majority (originally published 1972; several revisions over the next two decades) and publisher/editor of Instauration magazine, a print-only monthly that flourished from 1975 to 2000. For many people now middle-aged or beyond, these were their first, or most eye-opening, introduction to intellectual racialism.
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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.
(more…)
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June 29 is the birthday of T. (for Theodore) Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950)—scholar, lecturer, geopolitical and racial theorist, and author of perhaps eighteen books.
For a century now, anyone with an interest in geopolitical and racial matters was bound, sooner or later, to come across Stoddard’s name and work. Although he held three degrees, including a doctorate from Harvard, in his career he was always foremost a journalist and popular lecturer rather than an academic scholar. (more…)
Archduke Maximilian, c. 1855
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One hundred and forty-nine years ago, on June 19, 1867, Maximilian von Hapsburg—Emperor of Mexico, brother to Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, and descendant of Holy Roman Emperors—was shot by a firing squad of rebels in Querétaro, Mexico. Maximilian stood six-foot-two, had blond hair and blue eyes, and was 34 years of age. He had been Emperor of Mexico for barely two-and-a-half years.
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There has long been a commonplace notion in journalism (now often repeated in blogs and social media), that Oswald Spengler declared us to be at the end of Civilization. After all, he did write The Decline of the West, didn’t he? Furthermore, Spengler’s end-phase of Civilization is Caesarism, (more…)
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Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born 150 years ago today in Bombay, India, to a cultivated English family of artists and academics. After an often unhappy childhood at school in England, he returned to his beloved India where he worked as a journalist, short story writer, and author of light verse (including the original Barrack-Room Ballads). (more…)
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December 25, Christmas Day, is also the birthday of one of the most exotic and courageous thinkers ever to stride across the American political stage: Lawrence Dennis.
Now, there are three basic facts everyone learns about Mr. Dennis at the outset.
One: he was a leading Right-wing economic and political theorist of the 1930s and ’40s—an American fascist if you will. (more…)
Camille Paglia, who says she “thinks like a man and writes obnoxious books.”
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Every time you turn around, someone’s hanging another Hakenkreuz on our Tay Tay. Latest and most famous culprit is Camille Paglia, that shooting star of the 1990s critical firmament. On Thursday this acerbic counter-feminist had a piece in the Hollywood Reporter in which she denounced Taylor Swift as a “Nazi Barbie” for swanning around with equally gorgeous female celebs. Almost immediately the story was picked up by The New Republic and New York magazine, as well as the NY Post, the Daily Mail, US magazine, and lord knows where else.
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Checking the lights in Sydney
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It’s a big weekend for Taylor Swift. She winds up her record-breaking 1989 World Tour on Saturday, December 12, in Melbourne and reaches the ripe old age of 26 on Sunday, December 13. So now is a good time to sit back and think about what it all means.
What exactly is the significance of Taylor in pop music, modern aesthetics, and Western culture in general? (more…)
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Willis Allison Carto died Monday night in Virginia, full of years (89), achievements, and honors. But this memorial tribute is nevertheless way overdue. If you know the broad outlines of Mr. 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, White Nationalism . . . or Alt Right.
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James J. O’Meara
End of an Era: Mad Men and the Ordeal of Civility
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2015
Doing your Christmas shopping early? Here’s a great stocking-stuffer for you: James J. O’Meara’s End of an Era: Mad Men and the Ordeal of Civility. There are other books aimed at Mad Men fans, of course, but it’s a pretty safe bet that your friends and relatives haven’t seen anything that analyzes the Mad Men series at quite this cockeyed angle.
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Where were you when Adlai Stevenson died? It was the summer of ’65, and I was sitting in a dark movie theater in Plattsburgh, New York with some cousins, and we were watching a very long, complicated, black-and-white war movie called In Harm’s Way.
In Harm’s Way was way over my head. It was an Otto Preminger production, thus by 1965 standards it was racier than the average fare, chuggy-jam full of intricate subplots about rape, adultery, class-envy, and other grown-up business that left me cold. (more…)
Enoch Powell
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Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right
Edited by Jonathan Bowden, Eddy Butler, and Adrian Davies.
With a Foreword by Professor Antony Flew
Beckenham, Kent: The Bloomsbury Forum, 1999
Somewhere between the “hug-a-hoodie” Toryism of David Cameron’s Conservatives, and those far-right parties considered beyond the pale, is believed to lie a broad “respectable” middle ground of British nationalist politics. (more…)
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Harper Lee
Go Set a Watchman: A Novel
Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015
As nearly everyone knows by now, Atticus Finch, that steadfast attorney from Maycomb, Alabama, led the local Citizens’ Council in the 1950s. When agitators from the NAACP and Communist Party came south to stir up trouble after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision, he fought the good fight for segregation. (more…)
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Czech version here
“That is what the craving for the peace of fellahdom, for protection against everything that disturbs the daily routine, against destiny in every form, would seem to intimate: a sort of protective mimicry vis-à-vis world history, human insects feigning death in the face of danger, the “happy ending” of an empty existence, the boredom of which has brought in jazz music and negro dancing to perform the Dead March for a great Culture.”
—Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision (more…)
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“The white people invented the atom bomb, and a little later they disappeared.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Rigadon
May 27th is the 121st birthday of French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline (real name: Louis-Ferdinand Destouches)—avant-garde novelist, propagandist, dissident, and physician. In America Céline is mainly known for his first two dark, expressionistic novels, first published in the 1930s, (more…)
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There’s a story about George Orwell’s death that’s been bubbling up from the underground for the past 20 years or so. To the best of my knowledge it’s never been published anywhere. And this is odd indeed, because all the essential pieces have been out on public display for a long time—in biographies, memoirs, and newspaper headlines. Anyone, almost anyone who cares to, can connect the dots.
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RamZPaul
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The 2015 American Renaissance Conference, April 17-19, had a healthy turnout of nearly 200 attendees, making it AmRen’s biggest confab since 2008. As it has for the past few years, AmRen held it at an inn/conference center in a Tennessee state park an hour’s drive west of Nashville.
The conference/banquet room was vast (actually it was three regular meeting rooms combined into one via slide-away partitions), but still looked near capacity. (more…)
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Part 2 of 2
An Unexpected Party
The Fortean Society was founded on January 26, 1931, with a great fanfare of sounding brasses, tinkling cymbals, after-dinner speeches, and press releases. Thereafter the Society did practically nothing for six years.
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T.T. with Pet Python, 1930
Circus Day Was Not Yet Over
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Part 1 of 2
An unlikely linchpin of Postwar America’s Far Right was a slick-haired, grinning ad copywriter and ex-actor with the mad moniker of Tiffany Thayer (1902-1959). Thayer earned a handsome pile as scribe of radio jingles (Pall Mall cigarettes) and “meretricious bestsellers” (Time, May 26, 1956)—quite enough for an apartment on swank Sutton Place and a summer house on not-yet-swank Nantucket—but his most enduring legacy was likely his Fortean Society, (more…)
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Part 2 of 2
Bill Hopkins
3. “The corrupt vigour of fascism.”
In early 1958, Time magazine ran a humorous squib titled “Sloane Square Stomp.”[9] It told how Colin Wilson (and presumably Bill) had attended a premiere of their friend Stuart Holroyd’s new play at the Royal Court Theatre. Bill and Colin’s onetime friend Christopher Logue stood up in the stalls with Kenneth Tynan, denouncing Holroyd and Wilson as fascists. During the interval, this led to a shoving match in a nearby bar. The whole thing was a tempest in a teapot, (more…)
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Hopkins, around the time of Declaration and The Divine and the Decay (1957).
(Told in the discursive spirit, if not quite the style, of Jonathan Bowden.)
“The evidence of exhaustion stares out from the columns of the daily newspapers. The references to ‘Angry Young Men’ for example, record a general astonishment at the vigour of simply being angry. Another instance is the hero-worship of the late James Dean, who posthumously remains as the embodiment of Youth’s violent rebuttal of a society grown pointless. That the rejection is equally pointless does not appear to matter; the sincerity redeems it.”
— Bill Hopkins, “Ways Without a Precedent,” in Declaration, 1957 (more…)
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One of these days Harper Lee is going to kick off and have great big posthumous laugh at our expense. Bwah-hah-hah! Because right there in her Last Notes and Testament, we will find an answer to that puzzlement that has troubled the publishing biz for a half-century or more.
Namely, why didn’t Harper Lee write any more novels after To Kill a Mockingbird?
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