Tag: myth

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.

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The trial and death of Socrates is one of the most compelling places to begin one’s philosophical education. — Greg Johnson, The Trial of Socrates

Everyone strives to obtain the law. — Franz Kafka, The Trial

Philosophy in the West has been withering on the vine for decades. A combination of Jacques Derrida’s “death of the civilization of the book” and the replacement of that civilization with Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle” has rendered philosophy outmoded, antique, and frankly too much like hard work for an intellectually undemanding generation. (more…)

You can pre-order Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

The following is an excerpt from Greg Johnson’s forthcoming book, The Trial of Socrates, which is available for pre-order at a $5 discount from now until its release on June 30. See here for details.

Socrates’s Flight to the Logoi

Socrates literally calls his second-best method his “second sailing,” which is an allusion to a comment made earlier by Simmias: (more…)

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Cryptids are an endless source of fascination, and explanations for the phenomenon abound. My personal theory is that they are for the most part real, albeit in strange extradimensional, metaphysical ways. Regardless, whether they are real or not, and if so and in what manner, is a question of fact. Right now I want to deal with the question of their meaning. (more…)

Unknown artist and date, The Pilgrimage to Canterbury

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Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

There’s an old story within a story told by a pilgrim knight about ancient Thebes and two Theban cousins named Arcite and Palamon.^[1] According to everyone who knew them, no two warriors were more perfect. (more…)

Georges Sorel

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Note: This essay is occasioned by the new Imperium Press edition of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, which is required reading.

Like Jack London, Georges Sorel (1847–1922) was a Left-wing writer whose primary influence today is on the Right. Sorel’s most influential book is Reflections on Violence, written in 1905–1906. (more…)

You can buy Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence from Imperium Press here.

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Host Greg Johnson welcomed Mike from Imperium Press back to the show on the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio to discuss Georges Sorel’s On Violence, which was recently published by Imperium, and it is now available for download and online listening.

Topics discussed include:

01:02 Who was George Sorel?
07:33 Why did Sorel, a Marxist, hate progressives?
11:42 Sorel also criticized the working class (more…)

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During my short stint on this Earth, I’ve come to realize that people really aren’t that complicated. While we all have free will, hardly everything — or even the majority of the things we do — is of this divine spark. (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…)

You can buy Collin Cleary’s Wagner’s Ring & the Germanic Tradition here.

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Collin Cleary
Wagner’s Ring and the Germanic Tradition
Wagnerphile Books, 2021

Richard Wagner is a cornerstone of Western culture. He is one of the few composers that still receive mainstream attention in the 21st century, but usually for negative reasons. Hacks can’t resist the temptation to bash him for his alleged proto-Nazism and anti-Semitism. Even if critics see him as a predecessor to Hitler, many of them still enjoy his music. Few doubt he was a great musician. (more…)

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Christian Petzold’s Undine, set in contemporary Berlin, begins with Undine Wibeau (Paula Beer) having coffee with Johannes, her boyfriend. It’s not going well. She has deep, penetrating eyes and red hair that looks ready to blaze. She says to him: “You said you loved me. Forever. If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you. You know that.”

We’ve all had girlfriends like that, haven’t we? (more…)

Schedel’s Phoenix from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493

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If I had to recommend one book on politics, it would be James Burnham’s The Machiavellians. If I had to recommend one pamphlet, it would be an overlooked gem of American political discourse, Sam Francis’s The Other Side of Modernism: James Burnham and His Legacy. There is no white identitarian, racially aware conservative, American nationalist, or any other member of the Dissident Right who does not owe a massive debt to this towering genius. (more…)

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Robert M. Price, ed.
The Exham Cycle
Selma, North Carolina: Exham Priory, 2020

The de la Poer madness was so singular, opening up new lines of inquiry into the much-debated question of ancestral memory, that no men of the psychological sciences could in good conscience fail to try to resolve it. (more…)

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John Ford’s last great film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) enjoys the status of a classic. I find it a deeply flawed, grating, and often ridiculous film that is nonetheless redeemed both by raising intellectually deep issues and by an emotionally powerful ending that seems to come out of nowhere.  (more…)