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Monty Python co-founder John Cleese endured a bit of a career hiccup a few days ago at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas — but this hiccup is indicative of bigger things. (more…)
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Roots, the mother of the television miniseries, recently reached its 45th anniversary. It was based on Alex Haley’s book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The story begins with Kunta Kinte, a young Mandinka tribesman from the Gambia who was captured and put on a slave ship bound for colonial America. It further covers his descendants and their tribulations, ending during the Radical Reconstruction.
All told, the acting is pretty decent for a TV program, featuring several existing and up-and-coming stars. LeVar Burton, who played the younger Kunta Kinte, does the haunted look just about as well as Nicolas Cage. (more…)
1,568 words
I may not have change for a dollar, but I sure know how to break a buck!
Let’s face it, people, it just wouldn’t be “Black Hisseray Monf” without a sober look at Black America’s favorite gay interracial BDSM story.
The Willie Lynch Letter has been promoted for years as a legitimate historical source about the brutality of the eighteenth-century slave trade. (more…)
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The indubitable longtime Counter-Currents writer Kathryn S. was host Nick Jeelvy‘s guest on the last episode of The Writers’ Bloc, where they discussed Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City, a history of the religion of the ancient world and the society it founded, and it is now available for download and online listening. (more…)
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Simon Webb
The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam
Yorkshire/Philadelphia: Pen & Sword Books, 2020
Simon Webb’s excellent new work The Forgotten Slave Trade demonstrates how the story of Islam’s centuries-long trade in white slaves has been almost entirely removed from white people’s folk history. Historians and scholars may still be aware of it, but sadly, not the average educated white person. (more…)
5,641 words
Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
Penguin Classics, 2020
“How do you have the nerve to write some of the things you do?” I asked him. “Oh, it’s easy. I just pretend that I’m already dead.” — Michel Houellebecq[1]
Some years ago, in that white-collar internment camp known as graduate school, a classmate pointed out to me a book with a title that, being nominally philosophy students, amused us: Philosopher or Dog? by one Machado de Assis. (more…)
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Some eminent notables have claimed that the American Civil War had substantial roots in literature. Mark Twain, for example, said of Sir Walter Scott that he was “in great measure responsible for the war.” That proposition is debatable, of course. This argument hinges on how much the widespread influence of his romanticized chivalric prose bolstered the South’s hyper-thumotic stance — in plainer words, piss and vinegar — which contributed to secession, and shortly thereafter a war that went horribly awry. (more…)
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Saturday’s installment of the new and improved Writers’ Bloc, hosted by Nick Jeelvy, is now available for listening and download. His guest is Counter-Currents’ own regular writer, Kathryn S. They focus on the ante-bellum Southern writer George Fitzhugh’s classic defense of slavery, Sociology for the South. Topics discussed include:
00:03:00 George Fitzhugh’s style
00:06:00 Is slavery good? (more…)
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Fascinating drama can always emerge when characters argue the truth against each other. Each has something that is undeniably correct in their position, but since neither wishes to back down, it’s up to the audience to figure out whose position is more correct in the long run. Kevin Beary has written three one-act plays which deal with the African question, and uses dialectic with expert precision. (more…)
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Like a shooting star in a white hood, the news crossed my Twitter feed about how evil white supremacist Republicans in Texas voted last Friday to make it impossible for teachers to say anything bad about the Ku Klux Klan.
Naturally, that’s not what happened, (more…)
Ross Douthat
Ross Douthat
1,484 words
A fierce battle is being waged over American history, pitting liberals against conservatives over how to present our past to children. Conservatives argue American history should inspire a civic nationalism within children, regardless of color, and our history should present the Founding Fathers as colorblind liberals. (more…)
Robert Cuccioli as Ben Rumson in Jon Marans’ Paint Your Wagon
Robert Cuccioli as Ben Rumson in Jon Marans’ Paint Your Wagon
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The Western dominated American pop culture until the early 1970s, when it suddenly winked out like an aging athlete. TV was infested with Westerns. Jonathan Winters once complained that though he loved Westerns, he didn’t like “fifteen of them in a row.” It sure seemed that way. (more…)