1,241 words
Although it probably needs no print space, I wanted to begin with the worst book I read because it is so awful that it inspired me to read a couple on my real top five list. In fact, I’m even cheating a little bit because I started it in 2017, but it really made an impression on me.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books 2017). (more…)
5,169 words
Richard B. Spence
Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult
Port Townsend, Wash.: Feral House, 2008
“The great scientists, the artists, the philosophers, the religious leaders — all maniacs. What else but a blind singleness of purpose could have given focus to their purpose? Mania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius. (more…)
Landing site memorial in Scotland
1,919 words
A case can be made that Rudolf Hess, Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler from 1933–1941, can be viewed as a de facto—I stress de facto, or in effect—member of the German opposition by the time of his quixotic (in retrospect) 1941 flight to Scotland on a failed mission to forge peace between Great Britain and Germany. Though he remained loyal to Hitler, Hess’s unauthorized flight and peace proposal were clearly acts of high treason, assuming Hitler did not authorize them. (more…)
Illustration: A propaganda double entendre: Thomas Hart Benton’s “The Year of Peril. Again” (1941)
10,279 words
Translated by R. G. Fowler
Chapter 10 of Souvenirs et réflexions d’une Aryenne (Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Woman)
“The fools scorn Me when I take on human form;
My essence, supreme source of beings, escapes them.” (more…)
Willy Meller, Schicksalsstunde (Hour of Destiny)
9,576 words
Translated by R. G. Fowler
“Time, Space and Number
Fell from the black firmament,
Into the still and sombre sea.
Shroud of silence and shade,
The night erases absolutely
Time, Space and Number.”
—Leconte de Lisle (“Villanelle” [pastoral poem], Poèmes Tragiques)
2,015 words
German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935-German), about the 1934 Nuremberg Party rally, is one of the most famous documentary films ever made. Virtually unknown is her first-ever documentary, a comparable film about the 1933 Party rally, Victory of Faith (Der Sieg des Glaubens) (1933-German). It was lost between 1934, when Hitler ordered all prints destroyed, and the 1990s, when a surviving copy was discovered in Great Britain. (more…)
Rudolf Hess, 1894–1987
291 words
“My coming to England [sic] in this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it. I was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice unless I had continually kept before my eyes the vision of an endless line of children’s coffins with weeping mothers behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers with mourning children.”
—Rudolf Hess to his wife Ilse, June 10, 1941 (more…)
