5,026 words
Known mostly as a novelist, memoirist, and historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had actually completed four plays before his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962. He composed his first two, Victory Celebrations and Prisoners, while a zek in the Soviet Gulag (more…)
Mars, ca. 2nd century AD.
2,096 words
You are here because you are convinced of the rightness of your ideas. This is not meant in a specific, epistemological sense; as in, your ideas have been verified by some kind of universal truth or that they are backed by data drawn from rigor, though these things could be applied to many of the ideas we hold on the Right. I mean that you are convinced enough of what you hold to be true that you are taking a risk in upholding it, even in the face of great adversaries. (more…)
1,215 words
Six black people have been found dead, hanging from trees, during the month of June so far. They were all ruled as suicides by local police. Black people refuse to believe that’s true, of course. The circumstances of these deaths too closely resemble the lynchings of yesteryear, right down to the surrounding social turmoil and the highly public spectacle of the corpses. (more…)
4,585 words
An important question for those on the Dissident Right to ask is how humans ought to relate to nature; both their own “human nature” as well as the “outside” world. Depending on one’s religious beliefs, this might be the most important question there is. History seems to indicate two conventional approaches to this question. (more…)
Samuel T. Francis.
1,585 words
Have you ever heard of Drew Pearson? I grew up in the 1970s and 80s and vaguely remember a football player by that name. But a different Drew Pearson (1897-1969) was mentioned briefly in Wilmot Roberson’s classic The Dispossessed Majority (1972). I had never heard of him, but according to Robertson, his columns were once syndicated in 650 newspapers — twice as many as any other columnist at that time. (more…)
1,947 words
There are great thinkers, and then there are great thinkers whose prescience is so acute that they seem to operate on a precognitive, almost prophetic level. Included among the latter category is Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963). Weaver was a professor of English at the University of Chicago when the humanities were taken seriously, and nowhere were they taken more seriously than at UC in the two decades following the end of the Second World War. (more…)
Philippe de Champaigne, “Saint Augustin,” 1645-1650
2,587 words
The key problem of our age is disconnection from truth. This takes several distinct forms. The first, and most obvious, is the prevalence of lies. As everyone knows, modern, western civilization is founded upon lies about human nature, culture, and history. The most significant of these – underlying, in one form of another, most of the rest – is the equality lie; the myth of human equality, which is the chief myth of our age. (“Myth,” as most of my readers know, can have a positive or a negative connotation, as there are salutary myths; here, obviously, I am using the term in its purely negative sense.) (more…)
The face of today’s Left
4,645 words
Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
2. A Will to Nothingness: The Essence of Leftist Metaphysics
We are now in a position to step back from these observations and draw some general conclusions about the metaphysics of Leftist ideology. I trust the reader understands, however, that I am identifying the metaphysics that underlies Leftist ideology. (more…)
3,629 words
Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)
Metaphysics is the science of what is real. It is the most fundamental branch of philosophy; other philosophical ideas are derived from or based upon metaphysical convictions. For example, the Epicurean principle that pleasure is the highest good follows from its materialism and rejection of belief in an afterlife. However, it is also possible to speak of metaphysics outside of the context of philosophical systems. (more…)
985 words
Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (1938) is one of those unfortunate great books (think Spengler’s Decline of the West and any book by Henry Adams) that is often mentioned but seldom read. The book was meant as a guide to the essential philosophy, art, economics, history, and ethics from Confucius to the 20th century as uniquely interpreted by Pound.
This and the ABC of Reading (1934) constituted the core texts of the “Ezra-versity,” the informal seminars that Pound held before World War II for those acolytes who came to visit him in Rapallo, Italy. (more…)
Philippe de Champaigne, Saint Augustin, 1645-1650
2,587 words
The key problem of our age is disconnection from truth. This takes several distinct forms. The first, and most obvious, is the prevalence of lies. As everyone knows, modern, western civilization is founded upon lies about human nature, culture, and history. The most significant of these – underlying, in one form of another, most of the rest – is the equality lie; the myth of human equality, which is the chief myth of our age. (“Myth,” as most of my readers know, can have a positive or a negative connotation, as there are salutary myths; here, obviously, I am using the term in its purely negative sense.) (more…)
Grant Wood, Parson Weems’ Fable (George Washington and the Cherry Tree), 1939
987 words
Truth Telling Regardless of Cost
The rise of the West is due to a single accident: we discovered truth telling. We are the only people who discovered it, and we paid the high cost to establish it as a commons – as normative infrastructure – in manners, ethics, morality, law, philosophy and science. (more…)