Tag: totalitarianism

3,314 words

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Right or Left does not have a chapter on the eighteenth century. Rousseau is mentioned only three times, Diderot and Kant once each. The three references to Rousseau are all predictably negative, linking Rousseau to communist dictatorship and naivety about man in the raw state of nature. An opportunity is missed again, in this case the opportunity to review how right and left view the relation of human societies to biological reality and the natural world and what consequences their views might have in respect of a right or left world view. (more…)

2.677 słowa

English original here, Translations: French, German, Polish, Spanish

Część 3 (Przedmowa, Wprowadzenie, Rozdział 2)

Co jest “nowego” w Północnoamerykańskiej Nowej Prawicy i jak odnosi się ona do “Starej Prawicy”?

Zanim odpowiem na to pytanie, muszę wyjaśnić, co Stara Prawica i Nowa Prawica mają wspólnego oraz co odróżnia je od dzisiejszej fałszywej prawicy, a mianowicie od współczesnych centro-prawicowych partii i wszelkich form klasycznego liberalizmu. (more…)

You can pre-order Jonathan Bowden’s collection The Cultured Thug here.

2,507 words

Jonathan Bowden (ed. by Greg Johnson)
The Cultured Thug
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2023

Stylistically there are two kinds of Jonathan Bowden essay. There are the neat, trim, polished ones that clock in at 800 to 1,100 words, like a review in The Spectator. Then there are the luxuriant, digressive ones that are always rambling off onto weird, and often interesting, tangents. The difference between the two is that the latter kind usually come to us as transcripts of speeches from gatherings where Bowden had an hour or more to fill, and thus had good reason to pad out his thesis with amusing asides and intriguing anecdotes. (more…)

1,236 words

All new Star Wars stories, like the denizens of a vast coral reef, need to inhabit nooks and crannies in the universe and narrative created by George Lucas. But there are better and worse ways to do this.

Disney has produced two kinds of Star Wars products: new and original stories and cynical, safe, nostalgic remakes. Four out of five of Disney’s Star Wars movies fell into the safe and cynical camp. (See my reviews of The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, The Rise of Skywalker, and Solo.) (more…)

David Starkey

2,070 words

In recent years an attempt was made to reshape Britain on the model of a totalitarian dictatorship. We were constantly being urged to report each other to the authorities.

This was done by the government, which wanted us to denounce our neighbors if they left their houses more than once a day, and by the police, who did all they could to attract reports of “hate incidents.” (more…)

The Paris Commune of 1871, one of Europe’s first attempts to seek an alternative to liberalism.

3,103 words

Part 3 of 3 (Introduction Part I here, Introduction Part II here, Chapter 1 Part 1 here)

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Let us sum up. Man is a “social animal” whose existence is consubstantial with that of society. Justice in the first instance is not a matter of rights but of measure; i.e., it is only defined as a relation of equity between persons living in society, so there are no holders of rights outside social life, and within it there are only those to whom rights are attributed. (more…)

2,200 words

The following is being published in commemoration of George Orwell’s 120th birthday on June 25.

George Orwell is one of those authors well worth stealing, as Orwell famously wrote of Charles Dickens. I am not the first person to start an essay like this. While rummaging through my memory files I recalled a cover piece in the January 1983 Harper’s, and 40 years later I am astounded to discover it begins almost exactly the same way. (more…)

You can buy Greg Johnson’s New Right vs. Old Right here

3.306 palabras

English original here

Introducción aquí, Capítulo 2 aquí

¿Qué hay de “novedoso” en la Nueva Derecha norteamericana, y qué relación guarda con la “Vieja Derecha”?

Antes de poder responder a eso, necesito aclarar lo que la Vieja Derecha y la Nueva Derecha tienen en común y lo que las diferencia de la falsa derecha actual: es decir los partidos de centro-derecha actuales y todas las formas de liberalismo clásico. (more…)

2,165 words

By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter — one book. This was the book of the Machine. – E. M. Forster

Welcome, my son.
Welcome to the machine.
— Pink Floyd

Writers of fiction are obviously not bound to set their work in their own times. (more…)

5,740 words

Having already published two extensive articles on The Prisoner (see here and here), I didn’t expect to ever write about the series again. But times have changed, and so has The Prisoner. Works of art are living things, and their meaning changes over time. This ultimately has little to do with the artist’s intentions. That The Prisoner had changed was brought home to me one evening when, on a whim, I chose to revisit an episode I had always disliked. (more…)

Czesław Miłosz

2,059 words

When today’s dissident Right looks back at Communism, they will object to its atheism, anti-nationalism, unsound economics, and the utter falsehoods behind the class romanticism. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offers many examples of this in his vast corpus. In general, Right-leaning critics will conclude that Communism was at best unnatural, and at worst violent and unjust. The aristocratic and even feudal old ways, as flawed as they were, shine in comparison.

But what about critics from the Left? (more…)

3,643 words

Much could be said about Laibach (and has been, here at Counter-Currents). The name is the German form of Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital city. The language choice references their Austro-Hungarian past, and depending on who you ask, maybe some other era, too. Their sound is one of a kind, as unique as that of Laure LePrunenec. Laibach is best described as an industrial band with heavy martial and totalitarian influences. One notable characteristic of their unique presentation is walking a tightrope between fascist aesthetics and socialist realism. (more…)

Alain de Benoist

2,290 slová

English original: Part 1, Part 2

V roku 2005 poskytol Alaine de Benoist rozhovor pre The Occidental Quarterly, ktorý bol publikovaný pod titulom „Syn Európy: Rozhovor s Alainom de Benoist.“ Rozhovor bol veľmi obšírny a nakoniec sa pristúpilo k jeho skráteniu. (more…)