Tag: Napoleon Bonaparte

Giovanni Martinelli, Death Comes to the Banquet, ca. 1635

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Part 1

I’m sure many readers are familiar with the French comic, Astérix le Gaulois. Ever since a fun day in high-school French, I have followed the adventures of its eponymous character and its tongue-in-cheek depiction of the Gauls and their Roman antagonists during what was a serious and brutal episode in ancient European history. (more…)

Unknown artist and date

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

I’ve recently become bogged down in several areas — working, writing, etc. — and only my continued inspiration from Napoleon the Great and the Counter-Currents community has kept up my spirits. No self-pity or fishing for sympathy here; these moods happen to us all, and in due course pass into other, better seasons of life. As I was lying awake thinking about things that crowd the brain during the least crowded hours of the night, my mind’s eye summoned an imaginary staircase. (more…)

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Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is a bad movie, but not a terrible one. There are legions of nerds complaining about how Scott got this or that historical detail wrong. Honestly, that’s beside the point. Even if Scott didn’t know Saint Helena from Elba, he could still have made a great movie.

Everyone has heard of Napoleon. But what’s so great about Napoleon? Any film about Napoleon needs to answer that question. But in nearly three hours’ screen time, Scott fails to do so. (more…)

Persian relief of soldiers similar to those lost in the 525 BC march from Thebes.

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Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

III. Deserts Take Few Prisoners

 “. . . we saw the break-up of the enemy . . . [they escaped] into what they thought was empty land beyond. However, in the empty land was Auda^[1]; and in that night of his last battle the old man killed and lulled, plundered and captured, till dawn showed him the end. (more…)

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Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

II. Deserts Create Monsters and Messiahs

“The Bedouin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great . . . He was the most familiar of their words.” — Thomas Edward [T. E.] Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (more…)

Chile’s Atacama Desert: one of the driest places on Earth.

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Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

Deserts are the strangest places on Earth.

I spent my undergraduate years at an isolated college town that sat on the fringes of a vast, interior desert. To the northwest, the great Rocky Mountains began their ascent; directly west lay No Man’s Land, but the Sun’s; to the south, the flats gradually lifted into ancient atolls, red gorges, and rock. As a native woodland creature, this dryland seemed to me like another planet. (more…)

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Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

1. Fichte on the Nature of the State

We began to explore Fichte’s political philosophy in the last installment, as expounded primarily in his 1796 work Foundations of Natural Right. It is a basic principle of Fichte’s philosophy that subjectivity, what he calls the “I,” must bring nature under the control of reason. (more…)

Ed Kemper

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Part 3 of 8 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 4 here)

The following should only be used to supplement the Hare Checklist-Revised, the real way psychologists diagnose psychopaths. It draws heavily on excerpts from interviews with the serial killer Ed Kemper. Kemper is an unusually intelligent psychopath whose IQ was tested at 136 and 145. He seems to be more honest, too, so he makes a good case study. It also cites examples of psychopathic behaviors in the Tate brothers, Jared Fogle, and the rapper 50 Cent. (more…)

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

II. To Winter Wonderlands

The road through the Almond and Raisin Gate led Nutcracker and Marie to Rock Candy Mountain and the Christmas Woods, Bon-Bonville, Marzipan Castle, and Jamburg. Upon crossing Lemonade River, six monkeys in red vests began “playing the most beautiful Turkish military music,” while they walked “farther and farther on multicolored tiles, which, however, were nothing but nicely filled lozenges.” (more…)

Left: Antoine-Jean Gros, Premier Consul Bonaparte, ca. 1802; Right: Cover for E. T. A. Hoffmann and Alexandre Dumas’ The Nutcracker & the Mouse King

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Like many of us this past season, I have had to endure far too many repetitions of the same 11 ”holiday” songs that fail to capture the essence of the season: the contemplative, dirge-y, or haunted side of winter, paired with the tasteful emotional warmth and childlike joy of Christmas. (more…)

William Blake, Mrs. Q, ca. 1815

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“The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it.” — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

The last article of mine that our editors at Counter–Currents kindly published was about the masculine topic of military history. To complement a foray into the Napoleonic Wars, I included a clip from the 1970 film Waterloo.^[1] In the comments, a reader shared an observation about one of the few Waterloo scenes that did not take place on a battlefield. Instead, this particular scene immersed audiences in a Brussels high-society fête, where the Duchess of Richmond hosted the Duke of Wellington’s officers at her famous summer Ball of 1815. (more…)

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The eclectic scholar Kathryn S. returned to join host Nick Jeelvy on the latest broadcast of The Writers’ Bloc for a discussion on Orientalism — what happens when Western man gazes eastwards — and it is now available for download and online listening. (more…)

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The world suffers a lot, not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people. — Napoleon

A negative externality occurs when one person’s business indirectly impacts someone else negatively or threatens a species. (more…)