We then coincided at a brunch that was held the morning after the event. As I was to take a flight back to the United Kingdom in the afternoon, and as his base is on the way to the airport, he suggested I take an early cab and stop by for a visit later in the day.

I accepted his invitation, and ordered a cab to collect me from the hotel at the appointed time.

The cab driver was a 46-year-old immigrant from Egypt, tall, slender, dark, with a lightbulb head. He had been in the United States for 16 years, during which time he had become a citizen, having previously worked for a five-star hotel in Saudi Arabia. From what he told me, he had been involved in the services industry all or most his working life, first in the hospitality business, and later in his present occupation, transporting live humans.

He told me that he had moved to the United States in order to rake in the cash, that he had sent his wife and children back to Egypt in order to spare them the West’s corrupting influence, that he intended to bring them over to America once they completed their secondary education, that he would put them through university there, and that he intended them to remain in America, where they would become citizens, so that they too could rake in the cash. As to himself, he would eventually return to Egypt and start a business there. He added that although living in the United States had transformed his life for the better, his heart was and would always be in Egypt. He put his palm over his cardiac muscle and looked to the sky as he thought of his homeland.

In due course this amiable conversation turned to more pressing matters, as the cab driver got lost. Without a satnav, and relying on a printout from Google Maps, he drove us in the wrong direction for lightyears, perplexed by Google’s elliptical instructions, before finally turning around and stopping at a petrol station to ask for directions. (While I waited, I noticed prognathous Hispanics, shod in rubber flipflops, idling in the parking bays immediately in front of the shop, joking casually and munching snacks; they only moved when the cab driver shoved them aside with his Lincoln.)

Armed with new instructions, my Egyptian driver headed towards Jared’s green and pleasant woodland suburb. There, however, he got lost again, and he drove us up and down a main road four times, forsaken by Google, until he telephoned my host to get further instructions. The situation became comical, since poor Jared, otherwise an accomplished linguist and polyglot, could barely understand the driver, who butchered every street name in his heavily accented English.

‘Menrod. Am in menrod,’ he said.

The Egyptian had to repeat himself twelve times before his pronunciation could be decyphred.

But, eventually, we made it.

I asked for a discount to my fare, which was granted—I think the driver was about to offer it anyway. I caught a crease on his brown forehead as he turned to leave, shaking his head, annoyed with himself.

‘I thought a lot about you on the way here,’ I told Jared. Indeed, the incident seemed an oddly appropriate staging for White Identity, the Virginian’s most recent book, which I obtained during my visit.

White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century is a sequel of its author’s earlier book, Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America.

The book is everything I expected it to be: elegant, measured, well argued, accessible, and vacuum-packed with information.

The latter is, without a doubt, the tome’s most salient feature, for the author backs up his theses with such a profusion of examples that it becomes impossible not to see it as missionary zeal, despite the sober prose. The examples range from the infuriating to the grotesque, and in some cases the situations or incidents described are so ridiculous that they would be risible, were they not so tragic.

White Identity contains little about White racial identity. This is because these days there is generally no such thing. There is plenty, however, about Black and Hispanic identity in it, which the author argues is normal, natural, and good—except, of course, for Whites in the United States. Because said Whites have unilaterally disarmed themselves while simultaneously arming their competition out of fondness for universalist abstractions.

The main argument of White Identity is that in a world where everyone else thinks in terms of race and pursues their racial interests, Whites will need to rediscover theirs if they are to avoid being eaten alive by racially conscious groups.

In turn, the main assumption behind the book is that it will be read by Whites and that enough of them will be persuaded by its contents to reassess the value of an egalitarian diversity ideology. This assumption belies a secondary one: that anger at and frustration with the negative effects of diversity will eventually cause Whites to develop racial consciousness. The more fundamental assumption, therefore, is that humans think and act rationally.

But of course, this is not the case, as otherwise there would not have been any need to write White Identity.

Consequently, there is a depressing contradiction between the book’s cause and its intended effect. This broken causality chain means that, for all its merits, the book will fail to achieve its objectives: it will be read by those already favourably predisposed to its author or his worldview, by the author’s existing fans, and by ideological enemies seeking to scare people away from identifying with its theses; and readers outside these categories will, if they are ever allowed to catch a glimpse of the book, content themselves with imagining what it says based on what they know or think they know about the author.

The lack of a way forward has already been noted by another reviewer, and results from an ultimate belief in the rationality of man.

That aside, White Identity makes two valuable contributions.

Firstly, and as has already been noted, it collates in a convenient, single volume a wealth of data from innumerable news and scientific sources. It is, in fact, fully comprehensive on diversity as a weakness. This makes it a powerful armamentarium for anyone desiring to impress debating this issue. It is very much its author’s brainchild, as Jared Taylor’s effectiveness in debate results from, besides his polish and intelligence, his ability endlessly to back up his arguments with precise data.

Secondly, it implicitly articulates the notion that Enlightenment ideals are only viable in homogeneous societies composed of White Westerners. This was not the author’s intention, but follows from his historical overview of White racial consciousness in the United States.

For the author, two centuries of coexistence between White racial consciousness and the Enlightenment ideals of the U.S. constitution rules out fundamental contradictions between them, and in quoting statements by the country’s founders he seeks to illustrate that they never intended to create a universal proposition nation, as Marxist revisionists and forgers pretend. Jared Taylor’s point is that they were racially conscious as Whites and that this consciousness was normal and natural up until fifty years ago.

Yet, it is clear from their statements that the founders did not think their Enlightenment project was compatible with a racially heterogeneous society, for they generally advocated either segregation or shipping the Black labourers back to Africa. They were enlightened in that they knew humans are different and are best in free societies that reflect their innate temperament and abilities because they are governed by people who are similar.

And it was not simply that the country’s founders thought genetically distant peoples could not be assimilated into a White European society, but also that their Enlightenment values were dangerous in the presence of Blacks, for, as some noted, Blacks did not internalise these values and only took advantage of the Whites who lived by them.

Thus, while White Identity does not directly address the question of why Whites lost their racial identity, it does glimpse an answer supplementary to those presented by Pat Buchanan in The Death of the West and Kevin MacDonald in the Culture of Critique. The latter author, particularly, stresses how enlightened rhetoric was hijacked by ethnic activists on the radical Left.

The problem lies not so much in ideological enemies or racial competition, for these are facts of life that will never go away. The problem lies with the Enlightenment values themselves, for their inbuilt universalist logic, irrespective of how they were interpreted in the past by Whites who had racial consciousness, in time inescapably leads to borderless, multiracial proposition societies. And this, in a world of instant mass communication, rapid motorised transport, globalised electronic commerce, exploding Third World populations, and ever more intense competition for resources, is a mechanism for self-destruction.

This is perhaps why White Identity cannot, rather than simply does not, show a way forward: it is ultimately predicated on Enlightenment values, while the way forward would necessitate abandoning those values, which in the United States would mean also abrogating the country’s constitution and rethinking it all from zero—inconceivable without secession or a total systemic meltdown.

What to do, then?

Some Americans have proposed secession and founding a White ethnostate. But this is only applicable in the United States and seems unlikely without Whites regaining their racial consciousness, followed by another civil war. And Whites will not regain any racial consciousness so long as it remains socially unacceptable for them.

Others, both in America and Europe, have pursued identity politics. This, however, is unlikely to prosper since politics makes possible only what is already widely accepted within the culture—it does not change the culture on its own.

In all cases, these proposals are flawed because they seek to change outward forms before changing inner substance.

Before White identity can be revived and political solutions can grow, it will be necessary to seed the culture with a different set of concepts, principles, and ideals, and to fertilise it with the right combination of emotional triggers: creative movements, intellectual currents, organising strategies, alternative self-reinforcing networks and status systems, and so on.

It is worth noting that if völkisch politics were successful (if flawed) in the past, it was only after dozens of artists, novelists, musicians, philosophers, sociologists, scientists, and mystics, not to mention a plethora of study groups, societies, clubs, and other organisations, along with publishers and publicists, had spent a century laying the groundwork. It was a slow, organic process that built an alternative society from the bottom up—an alternative society that was technologically advanced, but with long roots in ancient tradition.

Of course, we do not have the luxury of a hundred years, as they did, or as did the Left, who had no demographic sunset to contend with, but we do have the technological means to do the good work within a shorter timeframe. In a technologically advanced society, history is constantly accelerating. It will, nevertheless, take time to develop the synergies.

As the Enlightenment project, deformed as it is, continues to rush towards its logical extreme, the means will have to be found to retard its progress, for only when the cultural ground has been made viable for any kind of White identity will such an identity be viable enough to become a political force.

I have never seen this argument work with anyone outside of the racialist Right. At best, ordinary White folk outside the movement are left cold by appeals to their collective self-preservation; at worst, they react negatively, and dismiss the appeal as hateful nonsense, Nazism, and a rationale for genocide.

This is baffling, and it is certainly frustrating, at least for those of us who care about the future of the White race, but there are good reasons for this.

Firstly, Western civilisation is highly individualistic—individualism being, in fact, one of the principal traits that contribute to the uniqueness of Western civilisation.

This is particularly true among Anglo-Saxon folk, probably the most individualistic Westerners of all, responsible for extremist ideologies like Liberalism, and thanks to whose fanatical attachment to universalist abstractions has caused individualism across the West to be exacerbated to the point of fundamentalism.

Both the cause and the result of this is that White folk, already weakly ethnocentric by nature, have become culturally much less ethnocentric, much less racial, than other peoples of the world.

Western man sees himself as an autonomous, or sovereign individual, as a generic man, who may be from a town, a state or county, or a country; who may support a football team; who may belong to a leisure subculture; who may belong to a church, or a religious denomination; who may work for a given company, or work in a given industry. Very rarely—and only because minorities, politically correct politicians, and the multiculturalist media remind him—he remembers that he happens to be White.

In fact, when he develops friendships with non-Whites, he often forgets that the non-White is not of the same race as he is. The non-racial nature of his identity and self-concept is such that even drawing attention to Whites in private conversation is socially awkward.

This is not to say that he is incapable of a White racial identity, because the various identitarian political parties in Europe and the various forms of White advocacy in the United States are proof that he is. But, it requires a much higher level of existential threat, real or perceived, for Western man to adopt such an identity. Before he does so he is more likely to adopt all manner of other collective identities, a racial one being the very last resort.

It is only those who are contrarian by nature, obdurately independent, or unusually principled, who adopt racial identities today.

Thus, an appeal to racial self-preservation means nothing to someone for whom his race is so unimportant.

And it means even less when the surrounding culture only sanctions a negative White identity as part of a narrative that depicts Whites as privileged enslavers and oppressors.

Secondly, the threat of racial extinction seems so remote to most White folk as to appear but a preposterous delusion. Many Whites remain unaware of the extent to which their homelands have been colonised because the different races have automatically—explicitly or implicitly—self-segregated into ethnic or racial communities, and diversity is something they only encounter in the unreal worlds of television, airports, offices, and the public spaces of metropolitan areas, while commuting to their all- or nearly all-White peripheral enclaves.

What is more, while most White folk are aware and will openly acknowledge that the ethnic composition of their native countries has changed, the change, which in most cases he has witnessed from afar, and which in many cases began before he was born, has taken decades to occur. Racial extinction, therefore, seems to them so far off as to be of no personal import. ‘I won’t be here to see it, so what do I care?’

There is also a certain normalcy bias. So far most Whites, and almost all the Whites with meaningful power in our societies, have successfully avoided most of the unpleasantness of diversity. To them the prospect of extinction seems doubly remote.

Equally remote is the unpleasantness they would experience as a dispossessed minority, following a change in the balance of power away from the Whites. Comparatively few Whites, except some of those now residing in former colonies like South Africa, have any real experience of life as a dispossessed minority. The experience of those in highly diversified Western cities, like London or Los Angeles, is relatively recent and can be conceived in ways other than as an ontological threat as a race: it can be conceived in terms of political correctness being a nuisance; immigration being a requisite for economic growth, propping up state pension funds, and ‘doing the jobs that Whites refuse to do’; and muggings, rapes, and murders being part and parcel of living in a large city, easily avoided through sensible precautions.

This makes it easy for White folk to believe the narrative of the radical Left, which explains the extinction scenario as a concoction of paranoid, fear-mongering haters.

Thirdly, preservation is about the past, and appeals to something of the past in a culture that prizes progress and modernity is a marker of irrelevance.

To frame the battle against the radical Left in terms of preserving the race is to cast oneself as a conservative. And a conservative is always easy pickings, because he negates the new without ideas of his own; he represents stasis, ossification, museology—concepts linked to old age.

Against him the radical Leftist can easily cast himself as a force of innovation, as the voice of the future, because he does have an idea of his own: his is an act of affirmation. What he affirms may now be old, decrepit, orthodox; it may have been exhausted, it may be bankrupt, and, because of its inherently destructive nature, it may offer no way out; but an affirmation is always more appealing than a negation, and the Leftist’s affirmation, though of an old idea, is newer than the idea defended by the conservative, which is even older.

Worse still, conservatives seek to conserve the ideas of superseded radicals, so he is by implication a dealer in antiquated, second-hand goods.

Hence, why scribblers of the radical Left strain to portray their enemy’s events as gatherings of superannuated pensioners, consigned to irrelevance and reduced to waving an arthritic fist at a world that has left them behind.

Hence, why the radical Left loves the racial preservation argument. For the reasons given above, its ideologues and supporters understand better than anyone the degree to which said argument is an own-goal for their enemies. After all, it was the radical Left that campaigned to move the goalposts further apart, and to hire a midget for a goalie.

The racial preservation argument is only good for 1) endangered non-White ethnic groups, and 2) racialist Right-wingers in need of self-justification.

White racial preservationism is dead.

What, then, is the alternative?

As I said earlier, it is always better to affirm rather than to negate; to be for something rather than against the opposite.

Therefore, rather than speaking in terms of preservation, we need to speak in terms of destiny; not in terms of what we are, let alone what we were, but in terms of what we can be, of what we ought to be, of what we must be.

Rather than lament the loss of the West, we must pursue its future glory; we need to imagine it, to daydream, to fantasise about it, and we need to project our visions out there, in the most seductive manner possible, with the most modern media, methods, and techniques.

If we are not masters of the present it is because the radical Left defined it in the past as their glorious future.

We can only be masters of the future if we define it ourselves.

Framing our proposition in terms of destiny is utopian, and implies regeneration and rebirth. In other words, it implies a renaissance.

And after so many decades of misery under the Left; after so many decades of broken promises, failure, and decline; after so many decades of disillusion, scepticism, cynicism, guilt-mongering, and forced apologies, people in the West are crying out for a renaissance, for strength, for pride, for glory.

A renaissance, or rebirth, goes well with a traditional outlook. Tradition is the ongoing affirmation of the archaic, which is endlessly regenerated and renewed, always rooted in the past, but also always futuristic.

Hence, why a radical traditionalist outlook is also called archeofuturist.

Framing our proposition in such terms also avoids the negativity of a preservationist argument, with its implied fear and pessimism. Because it implies fear and pessimism, such an argument is the marker of a losing faction, of people who have lost power and are en route also to lose their future. And with good reason, according to the Left, since those who talk about preserving the White race are an evil anachronism.

As no one wants to be part of that, doing away with the fearful and pessimistic preservation argument further eliminates the risk of denial, for most find living in denial preferable to being sober realists.

One additional advantage: a utopian conception of destiny cannot be deconstructed, cannot be disproven, because it is about belief; whereas arguments about preservation can be subjected to forensic investigation, to case-making, because there is a historical record that can be used and interpreted as evidence to support any imaginable position, including the revisionist slander preferred by the Left. Facts can be neutralised with other facts, logical arguments with other logical arguments, and rationalisations with other rationalisations, ad infinitum; but belief cannot be paralysed in this fashion because it is transcendent, metaphysical, not of this world.

Ultimately, to get us from here to there, we have to know in our hearts, and visualise in our minds, what there could, ought, must look like. It is about ideals—about ideals that give life meaning, that cause individualist man to reach outwards, higher, beyond. It is, in short, about being Westerners.

The story is simple: a twenty-something suburban couple, Micah and Katie, he a day trader, she a university student, both White, middle class, and American, encounter evidence of nocturnal paranormal activity in their house, which Micah sets out to document; the situation grows progressively worse and eventually climaxes at the end of the film.

The latter employs a number of familiar tactics.

Firstly, it has extraordinary events befall perfectly ordinary folk, and seeks, therefore, to augment its affrighting potential by making it easy for the audience to identify with the characters.

Secondly, it has the male protagonist not take the paranormal threat very seriously, while the female protagonist descends into hysterics.

And thirdly, it has the activity escalate in an algorithmic crescendo, slowly at first, rapidly at the end: said activity is not only minor and relatively harmless during most of the film, but it is never witnessed directly by the protagonists until the final chapters; for the most part, the activity takes place while the characters sleep, with its discovery posthumous and mediated by a digital recording.

What interested me about the film, however, was not so much the technique but how it related to the characters, particularly where whiteness and gender roles and representation intersect in modern American cinema.

Evidently, if we are watching a horror film and if the protagonists are meant to be young and nothing special, we would be wrong to expect them to display great wisdom or superior intelligence. Yet, precisely because they are meant to be nothing special, it is shocking to deduce what their characterisation says about the Ronald Reagan generation.

The viewer will notice, for example, that, although the couple lives together, they are neither engaged nor have plans to marry. Having been together for three years, one would imagine that they know each other well enough by now to be able to ascertain whether their relationship is going anywhere; but, instead, it seems they are content with the status quo, neither party willing to commit to anything, leaving their options open, and, by implication, merely staving off loneliness until they get bored or someone better comes along.

This is the normal state of affairs these days, and, I will concede, one not without advantages: after all, the good old days whose passing so many nostalgic Right wingers like to lament had its fair crop of unhappy marriages and life partnership is a serious commitment where mistakes can be enormously costly in more than one sense.

All the same, open-ended arrangements like that of Micah and Katie bear the seeds of dysfunction and are symptomatic of the disintegration of the Western family structure. An ex-girlfriend of mine from my university days found herself in an analogous relationship, only to discover, after nine long years, that the gentleman in question was unwilling to marry her. By this time she was well into her thirties, not an easy age for anybody to find fresh new partners or start a new relationship from scratch. She was eventually successful, however, and recently married, but she is now over 40 and a healthy conception, if at all possible, will be considerably more difficult – women over 40 are more likely to conceive a child with genetic defects, such as Down syndrome.

The speculation one can make from watching the film is that, perhaps, culpability for the absence of a marriage proposal lies with Micah. This gentleman is good at making money from buying and selling shares on his computer, but he persistently exhibits an irritating lack of maturity and an inability to assume responsibility and keep promises.

Early in the film the couple is advised by an expert in the paranormal not to get a Ouija board or attempt communication with, let alone bait or antagonize, the demon. He, in fact, recommends referring the matter to a demonologist. What does Micah do? Too wrapped up amusing himself recording ‘cool’ paranormal events to think of consequences, gets the Ouija board, attempts to communicate, bait, and antagonize the demon, and scorns the suggestion to call the demonologist, despite mounting evidence to its advisability. When confronted about the Ouija board, which his girlfriend had made him promise not to buy, Micah’s smirking response is exactly what we would expect from his type: “I didn’t buy it. I borrowed it!”

Micah’s puerility is compounded by a weak and half-developed sense of masculinity; his reactions are consistently adolescent, he allows himself to be shaped by events, and he even permits Katie to treat him like a child. That he does is nor surprising, given his lack of seriousness, bemused flaccidity, and fainéant laggadliness, which inspire nothing but contempt.

When, by dint of sniping sarcasm and scornful skepticism, he is finally embarrassed into adopting a more assertive approach, his performance is juvenile and pathetic: “Nobody comes into my house . . . fucks with my girlfriend . . . and gets away with it,” “I am taking care of this . . . this is my house, you’re my girlfriend . . . I’m gonna fucking solve the problem. OK?” Yea, right. Whatever.

Whatever Micah’s shortcomings as a White, heterosexual male, the fact is that he deserves his girlfriend. She is bossy and, as is routine in modern American film and television, incapable of having an argument with her partner without gratuitous sarcasm and derogatory shots at his masculinity. She also shouts, bellows, and dresses in a most unfeminine manner, favoring informal, thick, cotton wear that often conceals rather than emphasizes her feminine curves. This latter point might be unfair, as the filming takes place during evenings and mornings and it is common for people, even sartorially relaxed university students, to change into comfortable clothes while at home. All the same, it is easy to imagine Katie either tarted up for a boozy evening at the nightclub or in sneakers, t-shirts, and jeans or jogging suits, with little variety in between; while at university in the late 1980s and early 1990s I came across hundreds of Katies, so her character conforms to a common American type.

As to the house inhabited by this irksome couple, it is well worth noticing, as it tells us as much about them as it does about contemporary American culture. Firstly, the viewer will observe that there is not a single book in the whole house – not one, except for a copy of one of Wiley’s For Dummies manuals and a handful of college textbooks hidden away on a low-lying shelf. As an English Literature major, it is clear that Katie scrapes by with the textbooks alone: no genuine lover of literature here. And when Micah decides to do some research to better understand the haunting, we find him leafing lazily through a copy of Ernst and Johanna Lehner’s Devils, Demons, and Witchcraft, which is little more than a picture book. At the same time, the viewer will also observe that the shelves in the lounge hold hundreds DVDs: this is, then, the sole source of culture for this college-educated couple.

Indeed, their lounge is dominated by – oh, yes – a monstrous television set several parsecs across and massive enough to form a steep gravitational well. One wonders why the sofas are not in orbit around this monstrosity. Television is so important to this couple that they are not above sacrificing natural daylight in order for the television set to constitute the epicenter of stimuli in the area: the black jumbo set blocks the front window almost entirely, and (presumably to avoid tempting burglars) the blinds to this window are kept permanently shut.

Is it any surprise, then, that their dialogue is so exasperatingly brainless? Admittedly, they are not as dumb and inarticulate as the characters in The Blair Witch Project, who could barely string a sentence together, and who lacked words to name even basic objects or concepts; but, even so, Micah and Katie are somniferously superficial and have nothing interesting to say. I imagine one’s frontal lobes would rapidly necrotize and liquefy after a few weeks in their company.

On the second floor we encounter another anomalous feature. The three-bedroom house has… three double bedrooms. One is theirs; the other two are unused guestrooms. Now, for a house inhabited by a lonely couple with no plans to marry and, as far as one can see, no plans to reproduce anytime soon, this creates the impression of their having more space than their impoverished imaginations allow them to fill. Could it be that they have an active social life and frequently entertain visitor friends? There is little indication that this is the case: the film records their activities over a period of several weeks and, during this time, we find Micah never talks to anyone but his girlfriend, while Katie is visited by only one friend, a patronizing tubular female with no conversation.

When we consider that Paranormal Activity was written and directed by one Oren Peli, a 39-year-old Israeli-born film director and screenwriter, his instincts with regards to what constitutes an ordinary White American couple is revealing because they are those of an outsider: the White Americans in this film are uncultured philistines, infantile, spoilt, obdurate, bickering morons incapable of learning from experience, let alone anything profound or useful; they are, put a different way, like oversized children, with too much time, too big an allowance, and really nothing to do. They are parochial, ovine consumers, serving time with no sense of purpose or direction, completely oblivious of the world outside the confines of their feckless existence, and for whom life is simply a succession of unconnected moments, wiled away meaninglessly in search for endless entertainment and fun.

Peli is not alone pumping out similarly negative portrayals of White American youth; I am reminded of the vile Eli Roth and the latter’s Cabin Fever, another horror film featuring cognitively deficient all-White university students.

The sad aspect of these films is that, because viewers consume them passively as entertainment, the sheer persistence of the attitudes and interpersonal dynamics therein presented act eventually to normalize them. I have seen enough of them reproduced in real life to wonder about the degree to what ordinary people take their cues from modern American cinema when faced with unstructured social situations. Even though most realise that the scenarios presented are fictional, fantastical, stupid, or impossible, American cinema’s influence as a model of social interaction ought not to be underestimated.

To better suspend disbelief, fiction imitates life. But in postmodernity, in the age of ubiquitous information and mass communications, life is known to imitate fiction, with the result that fiction imitates life that imitates fiction that imitates life imitating fiction. Distortions – because the imitations are two dimensional – are introduced into every revolution. Round and round they go, the distortion growing ever larger until they acquire a life of their own. The medium is the message, as the saying goes.

Without cinema able effectively and entertainingly to challenge Peli’s and Roth’s and their ilk’s message, without a different voice providing an alternative narrative, theirs becomes the cultural default, the dominant paradigm and archetype. The main premise of Paranormal Activity is entertaining enough, even for a complete skeptic, but it needs to be told by a less contemptuous narrator.

Franz von Stuck, "Der Krieg"

Black Metal and the Return of Völkisch Thought

How did völkisch ideas resurface in popular culture? By the 1960s Christianity had entered a phase of decline in the West, following a long period of growing skepticism as well as hostility from political ideologies from both Right and Left. As has been the pattern in the West since the fourth century,[1] the decline of the dominant religion coincided with a renewed interest in alternative spiritualities, exotic religions, and the occult.

Much of this interest found expression in modern popular culture, especially modern popular music. Perhaps the most striking example of this confluence is the music of Heavy Metal pioneers Led Zeppelin, whose lyrics blended Aleister Crowley, J. R. R. Tolkien, and pagan Norse and Anglo-Saxon folklore. Artists like Black Sabbath, Black Widow, and Coven also incorporated occult themes and went on to influence subsequent waves of more explicitly Satanic Heavy Metal artists, such as King Diamond and Mercyful Fate.

Influenced by Black Sabbath, Motörhead, and punk rock, Bathory emerged within this milieu. We have already seen how the Satanic themes of Bathory’s early albums were replaced by Nordicist and pagan ones. Bathory’s Thomas Forsberg articulated the view that Christianity was a foreign religion, a form of Judaic spiritual conquest that sought to crush and eradicate indigenous European paganism. During the 1990s, this view became widely influential in the Black Metal subculture, especially in Scandinavia.

Anti-Christian views within the Black Metal scene usually fall into two categories: Nietzschean (often mediated through Anton Lavey’s “Satanism”) and neo-pagan. The Nietzscheans denigrate Christianity as an egalitarian religion of weakness, meekness, repentance, confession, and self-denial. The neo-pagans generally agree with the Nietzscheans, but emphasize the foreignness and deracinating influence of Christianity compared to the more authentic European pagan heritage. This outlook is explicitly völkisch, evoking the unity of blood and soil, of race and nation, and of spirituality and the Volk. The Black Metal scene also tends to be anti-Semitic for the same völkisch reasons they are anti-Christian. Some Black Metal musicians were so militantly anti-Christian that during the early-to-mid 1990s, they embarked on a campaign of church arsons.

In the world of Black Metal, genuine spirituality and depth of artistic expression is all about delving fearlessly into the darkness of the human soul. Hence the unremittingly dark songs filled with hate, fear, melancholy, misery, and depression. Black Metal—“true” Black Metal—seeks to put the greatest possible distance between itself and the mainstream of capitalistic mass society, which it perceives as meaningless, banal, materialist, brainless, conformist, uncreative, and hypocritical.

The Black Metal subculture glorifies war and the martial spirit. Scenes of battle are common on Black Metal album covers, and musicians often photograph themselves wielding axes or swords and wearing bandoliers, spiked arm-bands, and, occasionally, coats of mail. Likewise, lyrics celebrate war and battle, often heroic but always bloody. This militarism is often wrapped in mysticism. Typical titles include “Sunwheel on the Helmet of Steel” in Capricornus’ Alone Against All, “Nine Steps to Eternity” in Thor’s Hammer’s Fidelity Shall Triumph, and “Fire and Snow” in Graveland’s Will Stronger than Death.

Black Metal artists also emphasize nature and landscape, but a morbid and mystical sensibility is evident even here. Whether inspired by völkisch thought or mere Satanic occultism, nature is always conceived in spiritual, mystical, and Romantic terms. The Black Metal aesthetic dictactes that night and winter are eternal. Coniferous forests are preferred to tilled fields and manicured gardens. Where the glorification of war merges with nature mysticism, the emphasis remains on the latter. Viking and Folk Metal bands, in contrast, adopt a more obviously völkisch approach to nature, allowing daylight in their landscapes and generally emphasizing the idyllic as opposed to counter-Enlightenment Sturm und Drang.

The Black Metal sensibility does not reject culture in favor of nature, but instead valorizes culture and nature, both conceived organically, over civilization, which is conceived in mechanistic and materialistic terms. In the Black Metal universe, cities were never built, the Industrial Revolution never occurred, and modernity never arrived. For all its belligerence, Black Metal is inherently nostalgic, a comprehensive negation of modernity.

This negation is apparent even in the Black Metal sound, which would of course be impossible without the techno-industrial society Black Metal rejects. Thus the technological source of the Black Metal sound—that which links it to modernity—is concealed to the same degree that it is flaunted in Techno music: “raw” Black Metal bands favor a heavily under-produced, “necro” sound that deliberately avoids high-fidelity or otherwise seeks to emulate low-fidelity recording media—in contrast to other genres that favor a primitive, under-produced sound, the desired effect is not “street cred” (as in with Punk) but a sense of quasi-occult obscurity; more instrumentally sophisticated bands use layers of synthesizers to generate a volatilized mystical atmosphere that obscures the act of performance, while bands with a vehemently pagan orientation (e.g., Nokturnal Mortum) add traditional folk instruments into their mix musically to evoke an earthy sense of Volkstum.

The desired effect is always for the listener to lose himself in the sound, to go into a semi-trance, raised above the tedium of mundanity; Black Metal music aspires to hypnosis and, in the case of specifically pagan Black Metal, it seeks to create the spiritual union—with the landscape, with the collective unconsciousness, with the lost pagan soul, with the lost heroic spirit of the distant past—that was longed for by völkisch authors a century ago.

The rejection of modernity goes hand in hand with the rejection of progressivism. Like völkisch thinkers, Black Metalers, whether pagan, Satanic, or merely suicidal, are cultural pessimists. Their pessimism is often allied with the explicit adoption of the Indo-European Traditional cyclical view of history, in which history begins with a Golden Age then declines through Silver and Bronze ages to the present Iron or Dark Age (Kali Yuga), which is doomed to perish of its own corruptions or through a cataclysmic final battle, whereupon a new Golden Age will dawn.

References to such culture pessimists as Nietzsche and Spengler and to more mystically inclined authors like Julius Evola, Savitri Devi, Miguel Serrano, and H. P. Lovecraft, are common in Black Metal. Hence titles like “Decline of the West (Europe Will Rise)” in Pantheon’s Aryan Rebirth, “Eve of the Kali Yuga” in Arkthos’ Knights of the Eternal Sun, “The Gathering of the Elite to Destroy both the Modern World and Demiurge” in Beyond the North Winds’ Aryan Cult of A-Mor, “Desecration of Our Fatherland” in Darkthule’s Awakening of the Ancient Past, “Melancholy of the Inaccomplished Vengeance” in Sons of North’s Death of the White Race, “Among the Ruins” in SIG:AR:TYR’s Beyond the North Winds, “Son of the Fatherland” in Hordak’s The Last European Wolves, “A Golden Age Turns to Rust” in Drowning the Light’s The Fallen Years, and “Exiles of the Golden Age” in Weltenfeind, a three-way split with Absurd, Grand Belial’s Key, and Sigrblot.

Explicit references to völkisch thought are rare, but they occasionally surface: there is a Finnish band called Armanenschaft; Hate Forest’s Blood and Fire EP contains the song “Aryosophia”; Vril released a demo entitled “Once and Again Thule”; Werewolf’s track “Vrilmacht” appears in their Fidelity of Ideology split EP with Semper Fidelis; there is Apriaxia’s Blood and Soil EP; and Adalruna’s Wer ist der Starke von Oben shows a photograph of Guido von List standing by the Heltentor with members of the Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft in 1911.

References to specifically Nazi mysticism and esotericism are also not infrequent: there is Bilskirnir’s EPs Ahnenerbe and Hyperborea, and the song “Reconquering the Atlantean Supremacy” in the album Wotansvolk, Hakenkreuzzug’s Centurions of Thule EP, the song “Jewel of Atlanteans” in Graveland’s Memory and Destiny, and the song “Hyperborean Ascention” in Contra Ignem Fatuum’s Detritus, among others.

The emergence of explicitly National Socialist Black Metal should not surprise, for the original völkisch current was the incubator of Conservative Revolutionary tendencies, including National Socialism, and by the mid 1990s Black Metal had re-created the same cultural logic that led to National Socialism 80 years earlier. But the readiness with which Black Metal came to embrace an outlook and sensibility so thoroughly stigmatized following the Allied victory in 1945 still needs to be explained.

The answer lies in the nature of Heavy Metal’s genesis following the collapse of the popular music subculture of the 1960s. Deena Weinstein identifies two strands within this genesis, an idealist one and a conservative one, which were fused at the point of Heavy Metal’s inception.[2]

Heavy Metal emerged at a time when its original core demographic—white working-class males—were experiencing a growing social, cultural, economic, political, and demographic displacement, thanks to the rising tide of radical feminism; belligerent black activism; discriminatory legislation in housing, education, and employment favoring minorities; non-white immigration from the Third World; and a serious economic downturn that drove the most marginalized whites to the wall. These developments aided the formation of an implicit white community that was strongly ethnocentric, and which, in a world where whiteness was increasingly de-centered, came to make a badge of honor of its negative marginality: Heavy Metal fans are what Weinstein calls “proud pariahs.”

The Heavy Metal culture was defined by its working class roots, and working class culture is by nature conservative, with well-defined male and female roles, a readiness to express strong emotions, and a distrust of government and corporations. It is a culture that is decidedly out of step with modern mainstream liberalism. Not surprisingly, then, Heavy Metal tended to resist radical changes in its form, celebrated heroic masculinity, and was predicated on an ethos of integrity and authenticity that deplored its own commercialization. Indeed, “[f]or fans, perhaps the worst thing that can be said about a heavy metal band is that it has ‘gone commercial.’”[3] Nevertheless, Heavy Metal gained many fans from the lower middle class, and subsequent offshoots have followed this pattern. The lower middle class is the same demographic that Mosse identified as formulating the völkisch critiques of modernity a century earlier, and indeed the key features of Heavy Metal culture are highly compatible with those critiques.[4]

Even in its rawest forms, Black Metal tends to appeal to a more elitist and culturally sophisticated sensibility than its parent genre, but it has not radically changed the basic anti-modern, anti-liberal, anti-commercial, anti-cosmopolitan outlook it inherited from Heavy Metal. It only made it more serious: deepened it ideologically, elaborated it artistically, and radicalized it metapolitically. From the beginning Black Metalers were proud pariahs in the modern world, and, as such, were receptive to anti-establishment ideologies that were compatible with Black Metal’s own constitution.

In sum, a good portion of Black Metal’s intellectual and aesthetic features are völkisch. Crowley, Satanism, and Tolkien also boil in the Black Metal cauldron, to be sure, but these too have been appropriated to the extent that they are consistent with the völkisch worldview. Therefore, one can plausibly characterize Black Metal as a revival of the Conservative Revolution, profoundly transformed in the context of a modern musical subculture, but recognizable nonetheless.

Lessons

My characterization of Black Metal will inevitably lead radical elements within the white nationalist movement to ask, “How do we use Black Metal to start the revolution?” Those asking this question will likely be thinking of how rock music in the 1960s helped to disseminate and popularize among the young the “progressive,” liberal, and anti-Western ideas that had been festering in the catacombs of the academia since the 1930s and even earlier.

I am not convinced that Black Metal has an application in that political sense. The music of the 1960s enjoyed broad appeal, whereas Black Metal seeks and revels in its own marginality and obscurity. Student engagement in radical politics during the late 1960s is only mirrored by the modern Left, and enjoyed, as it does today to a much greater degree, media and institutional support. Fans of Black Metal, on the other hand, detest politics even more than the Conservative Revolutionaries: theirs is a strategy of negation and of escape from mundanity.

The Anti-Geldof Compilation that I sponsored and released through my record label remains to date the sole extant example of engagement with current affairs and everyday politics in the Black Metal scene—and even in this case it was largely an emotional response on the part of the participating artists against the pious hypocrisy of self-indulgent rock stars. This is significant when one considers that the Encyclopedia Metallum currently lists over 17,000 Black Metal bands.[5] Then, again, most of the participating artists were associated with the NSBM scene, and, as we know, one aspect that distinguished the National Socialists from the Conservative Revolutionaries in Germany was their willingness to engage in mass politics.

At best, we can see Black Metal as proof that it is possible for a cultural space to exist, even today, where anti-egalitarian thought can find honest artistic expression and forge an alternative positive identity among whites through the praxis of style. Our task is to understand the mechanisms that enabled significant parts of the Black Metal scene to exist as an explicit white community in the first place. Our task is also to create other such cultural spaces, to expand the constellation of stylized activities, so that we may eventually build a parallel cultural universe wherefrom they can be afforded institutional support and thus gain momentum and consolidate, once the liberal establishment collapses by the weight of its own corruption and ideological bankruptcy.

This is an important task, because inasmuch as Black Metal artists have developed and inspired an evocative style or aesthetic that (implicitly or explicitly) is uniquely white and European and/or celebrates whiteness in all its diversity of history and heritage, Black Metal is a genuine object of study in the context of a cultural war where the opposing faction seeks to suppress, defame, and eradicate whiteness. Humans are sentimental and emotional animals, more readily persuaded by an appealing style than by a rational argument, so winning the cultural war will require more than hard facts and superior logic. It requires that we successfully appeal to sentiment and emotion by becoming masters of style. Black Metal contains important lessons in this respect.

Discography:

Adalruna. Wer ist der Starke von Oben. 2008.

Apraxia. Blood and Soil. Othal Productions. OLP008. 2001.

Arkthos. Knights of the Eternal Sun. Supernal Music. Ferly048CD. 2006.

Bathory. Blood Fire Death. Black Mark Productions. BMCD666-1. 1989.

Bathory. Hammerheart. Black Mark Productions. BMCD666-1. 1991.

Bathory. Twilight of the Gods. Black Mark Productions. BMCD666-1. 1992.

Beyond the North Winds’ Aryan Cult of A-Mor. 2004.

Bilskirnir. Ahnenerbe. Nykta Productions. NYKTA06. 2004.

Bilskirnir. Hyperborea. Solistitium Records. SOL052. 2005.

Bilskirnir. Wotansvolk. Wotanstahl Kangschmiende. WKG006. 2007

Capricornus. Alone Against All. Supernal Music. Ferly011CD. 2004.

Celtic Frost. Into the Pandemonium. Noise Records. N-0067. 1987.

Contra Ignem Fatuum. Detritus. Supernal Music. Ferly036MCD. 2005.

Darkthule. Awakening of the Ancient Past. Battlefield Records. 2004.

Graveland. Memory and Destiny. No Colours Records. NC057. 2002.

Graveland. Will Stronger than Death. No Colours Records. NC0118. 2007.

Hakenkreuzzug. Centurions of Thule. Battlefield Records. 2004

Hate Forest. Blood and Fire. Sombre Records. 2001.

Hellhammer. Apocalyptic Raids. Noise Records. N-0008. 1984.

Hordak. The Last European Wolves. Griffin Music. GRIFFIN008CD. 2006.

Pantheon. Aryan Rebirth. Strong Survive Records. SSR025. 2005.

Thor’s Hammer. Fidelity Shall Triumph. Darker Than Black Records. DTB001. 1998.

Semper Fidelis/Werewolf. Fidelity of Ideology. Eastside Records/ Hammerbolt. 2008.

Skyforger. Semigall’s Warchant. FR034. 2004.

SIG:AR:TYR. Beyond the North Winds. Morbid Winter Records. MWR012. 2008.

Various Artists. Anti-Geldof Compilation. Supernal Music. Ferly035CD. 2007.

[2] Weinstein, Heavy Metal.

[3] Weinstein, Heavy Metal, 115.

[4] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 7.

[5] http://www.metal-archives.com/.

Part 3 of 3. Read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

Franz von Stuck, "Der Krieg"

Völkisch Thought and the Conservative Revolution

Some of the most fascinating aspects of Black Metal are its parallels with the ideas and sensibilities of the Conservative Revolution and the wider völkisch (populist) movement that swept Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These similarities are so striking that Black Metal may well be considered, if not the continuation, then at least the revival of the Conservative Revolution on the plane of modern popular culture.

Black Metal is, moreover, part of a growing subculture of resistance to the anti-white system. This subculture consists of a constellation of interconnected musical genres and subgenres, religious practices, philosophical and political thinkers and schools, websites, booksellers, publications, and cultural activities, such as battle re-enactment. This subculture sustains itself by providing its members with a positive identity that is not dependent on the system of status awards maintained by the present sociocultural and political dispensation. Moreover, if, as Jacques Attali has proposed, the music of the present is the noise of the future, then, in a coded way, Black Metal could well be more symptomatic of things to come than of things as they are.[1]

The Conservative Revolution was entirely different from modern American conservatism, which is merely a form of classical liberalism allied with socially conservative views. American conservatives believe in progress, democracy, equality before the law, and free markets; their ideology derives from the Enlightenment as formulated by John Locke and Adam Smith. They are closely associated with libertarianism. They regard man as a rational, sovereign individual, and they tend to have a linear, progressivist conception of history. The German Conservative Revolutionaries, like other völkisch movements, were reacting against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and, in American terms, have much in common with the Southern Agrarians. Their common enemies were modernity, urbanism, and industrialism.

Völkisch thought is characterized by a romantic focus on the “organic,” German folklore, local history, blood and soil, and nature mysticism. The term derives from the German word Volk, which corresponds to “people,” or “folk,” but with the added connotations of folklore, race, and nation. Among the German romantics, “Volk” “signified the union of a group of people with a transcendental essence,” the fusion of man with nature (particularly his native landscape, following Wilhelm Riehl), mythos, or the cosmos, wherein man found “the source of his creativity, his depth of feeling, his individuality, and his unity with other members of the Volk.”[2] A related concept is “Volkstum,” a term that combines the notions of folklore and ethnicity.

Völkisch thought arose from the Romantic nationalism of the early nineteenth century, particularly that of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who, along with Ernst Moritz Arndt and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, “began to conceive of the Volk in heroic terms during the wars of liberation against Napoleon.”[3] Völkisch thought emerged at a time when Germany existed as a collection of semi-feudal principalities. As political unity eluded them for more than half a century, völkisch thinkers were forced to emphasize cultural and spiritual rather than political dimensions of unity. Thus they came to idealize, even mystify, the concept of nationhood. This process attained such momentum that when political unification finally came in 1871, the prosaic nature of Bismarck’s Realpolitik led to a tremendous sense of disappointment.

Völkisch thought also coincided with the Industrial Revolution and the attendant destruction of the German landscape, dislocations of the population, obsolescence of traditional crafts and tools, social alienation, political upheavals (e.g., the revolutions of 1848), and economic crises. These led eventually to disenchantment and finally to the wholesale rejection of industrial society and modernity, which came to be seen as materialistic, soulless, rootless, abstract, mechanical, alienating, cosmopolitan, and irreconcilable with national self-identification. Völkisch thought was a quest for rootedness, for the “inward correspondence between the individual, the native soil, the Volk, and the universe.”[4] Hence the calls for a “‘German revolution’ to liquidate the dangerous new developments and to guide the nation back to its original purpose.” Unsurprisingly, völkisch ideologists saw “traditional politics as exemplifying the worst aspect of the world in which they lived,” and “rejected political parties as artificial,” favoring instead an “elitism that derived from their semi-mystical conceptions of nature and man.”[5]

The völkisch rejection of modernity was sometimes combined with racialist occult and esoteric doctrines exemplified by runologist Guido von List, author of The Secret of the Runes. List’s racialist reading of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy proved influential in occult circles. The Guido von List Society (Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft), which he founded, included among its members the sexo-racialist Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, author of Theozoologie, founder of the esoteric order, Ordo Novi Templi (Order of the New Templars), and founder and editor of the magazine Ostara. Lanz glorified the Aryan race as Gottmenschen and advocated the sterilization of the unfit and the inferior races. Lanz’s “theozoology” eventually evolved into “ariosophy”—the study of occult wisdom concerning the Aryans. Other List disciples became involved in the Reichshammerbund and the Germanenorden, organised by Theodor Fritsch, a prominent activist in the German anti-Semitic movement.

When the Germanenorden split into two schismatic factions (the Germanenorden and the Germanenorden Walvater of the Holy Grail), Hermann Pohl, the order’s first leader, was joined by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a Freemason who was also an admirer of List and Liebenfels. Sebottendorff eventually contacted Walter Nauhaus, leader of the Germanenorden and head of the Thule Society, a Germanic study group. Sebottendorff adopted the name of this study group as a cover name for his Munich lodge of the Germanenorden Walvater, which was run jointly by him and Nauhaus. In time the Thule Society came to organize the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), which was renamed the Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) in 1920, months after Adolf Hitler, once a reader of Liebenfels’ Ostara magazine, joined the party.

This occult branch of völkisch thought, which during the post-World War II years produced writers like Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano, adopted elements from Eastern mythology: a cyclical view of history (mirrored in Oswald Spengler’s metahistory) followed the Hindu model of the four successively degenerative ages, or Yugas; while the swastika, ubiquitous in India and the Far East, was adopted by numerous organizations before the NSDAP, from Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society to Lanz’s Ordo Novi Templi (the first to use the swastika in an Aryan context) to Fritsch’s Germanenorden to Sebottendorf’s Thule Society.

Although dismissed by some völkisch thinkers, the Jewish question acquired added importance during this period. As a people of the desert, Jews came to be “viewed as shallow, arid, ‘dry’ . . . devoid of profundity and totally lacking in creativity.” This contrasted with the Germans, “who, living in the dark, mist-shrouded forests [were deemed] deep, mysterious, [and] profound.”[6] Moreover, because the Jews thrived in the liberal, secular, commercial, urban context, they came to be seen as the incarnation of modernity, and hence a corrupting, conspiring outsider, an insidious agent of dissolution.[7] Indeed, Jews had grown closely connected to the liberals on the road to emancipation and, in particular, to the Revolution of 1848.

Because of its links to Judaism, Christianity also came under scrutiny: “in common with most völkisch thinkers, [Paul de] Lagarde blamed St. Paul for having enveloped untainted Christianity in sterile Hebrew law” and advocated a Germanic religion through which a “realignment of the spiritual forces [could] effect a true unity of the Volk.”[8] Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity as a debilitating agent was influenced by the anti-Jewish, but nevertheless still Christian, Lagarde. By the time Savitri Devi wrote Defiance and Gold in the Furnace, shortly after World War II, however, radical hostility to Christianity was tightly bound to radical anti-Jewish sentiments.[9]

Following World War I, the völkisch ideology “acquired a mass political base,”[10] propelled by the anguish of Germany’s military defeat in a context where völkisch ideas had long been disseminated within German institutions. The Conservative Revolution emerged at this time as a predominantly völkisch movement: it thought organically rather than mechanistically, emphasized quality as opposed to quantity, prized folk-community (Volksgemeinschaft) as opposed to class conflict, believed in the Führerprizip as opposed to ochlocracy and parliamentarism, glorified war as opposed to unheroic economism, and rejected progressive liberalism, egalitarianism, and the banal commercial culture of urban industrial civilization.

The Conservative Revolutionaries were revolutionaries because they realized that culture was threatened not merely by liberalism and Communism, but by the entire political order, which had to be replaced—using revolutionary means if necessary—by a new order based on conservative principles.[11] Although the term existed prior to the end of World War I, it entered general use only after it was popularized by Hugo von Hoffmannstahl and Edgar Julius Jung during the Weimar Republic. Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, and Carl Schmitt, along with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (who coined the phrase “Third Reich”) were representative of this movement. Völkisch ideas enjoyed considerable social prominence and institutional legitimacy long before the National Socialists came to power. They were, however, marginalized and suppressed by the Allied Occupation regime and the new post-war dispensation following Germany’s military defeat in 1945.

Part 2 of 3. Read Part 1 here.

[2] George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).

[3] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 14.

[4] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 6.

[5] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 3.

[6] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 5.

[7] Fritz R. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).

[8] Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 33.

[9] Savitri Devi, Gold in the Furnace: Experiences in Post-War Germany, 3rd ed., ed. R. G. Fowler (Atlanta: The Savitri Devi Archive, 2008) and Savitri Devi, Defiance, 2nd ed., ed. R. G. Fowler (Atlanta: The Savitri Devi Archive, 2009).

[10] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 5.

[11] Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair.

I have written before about the need to create a parallel universe outside contemporary mainstream culture, and this involves not only choosing our own topics of scholarship, but anticipating their being defined through appropriation by the establishment’s own conformist scholars.[See Alex Kurtagic, “Mastery of Style Trumps Superiority of Argument,” TOQ Online, May 4, 2009, http://www.toqonline.com/2009/05/mastery-of-style/ and Alex Kurtagic, “I am not racist, but . . . ,” The Occidental Observer, June 7, 2009, http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Kurtagic-NotRacist.html.] I write, therefore, in hopes of introducing Black Metal as a topic of scholarly analysis within the anti-egalitarian tradition.

Black Metal has not been entirely ignored by mainstream scholars. It is discussed, for example, in Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge by Keith Kahn-Harris, founder of the New Centre for Jewish Thought; in The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure: Habermas and Leisure at the End of Modernity, by Karl Spracklen; in Commodified Evil’s Wayward Children: Black Metal and Death Metal as Purveyors of an Alternative Form of Modern Escapism by Jason Foster; and in Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. It has also been discussed by a few popular writers, including Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, whose Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground is available from mainstream booksellers.

While Moynihan and Søderlind rely on Jungian archetypes for what is otherwise a sensationalist and journalistic analysis of Black Metal, the other texts rely on analytical frameworks derived from the Freudo-Marxist scholastic tradition, which includes Marxist theorists like Louis Pierre Althusser, postmodernists like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, critical theorists like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and so on. It is not difficult to see that interpretations of culture from these quarters, while containing many astute insights, are necessarily limited and distorted by the theorists’ unquestioning belief in equality as a good in itself, by their rejection of evolutionist insights as nefarious and ideological, and by their alienated—when not merely alien—attitudes towards traditional Western culture.

The limitations and distortions built into this body of theory are exacerbated by its status in Western academia as the institutional orthodoxy, a closed universe of theory where alternative—e.g., inegalitarian, evolutionist—perspectives are rejected in advance as discredited, outmoded, prejudiced, or lacking in scholarly rigor. When the subject of study is a cultural phenomenon that explicitly rejects the first principles upon which such a body of theory is predicated, there is always the danger of analysis degenerating into moralizing incomprehension.

Black Metal, Folk Metal, and Viking Metal album covers

Dissidence as a Style

What is Black Metal? Black Metal is a radical outgrowth of Heavy Metal. During the 1980s bands playing commercialized forms of Heavy Metal entered the mainstream, attaining lofty positions in the music charts and selling millions of albums. This prompted “fundamentalist” elements within the Heavy Metal scene to reclaim it as an underground praxis by developing extreme variants of the Heavy Metal sound, perceived to be more in tune with the genre’s original anti-commercial and countercultural values.[See Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music And Its Culture (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000).] Black Metal was one such variant. It is deemed “Black” Metal because it originally defined itself in terms of Satanic and occult themes and aesthetics.

Black Metal does not sound like Heavy Metal. Both musical forms rely on the same core sonic components (guitar, bass, drums, and vocals); both are characterized by sonic intensity, extreme vocal performances, and the use of heavily amplified, distorted guitars. Heavy Metal musicians, however, tend to favor predictable song structures (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, verse, chorus), as well as sung/screamed, melodic vocals. In addition, Heavy Metal guitarists, although often incorporating influences from classical music in their style, play in a manner that still evinces Heavy Metal’s roots in Rhythm and Blues. Heavy Metal lyrics tend to deal with relatively superficial matters associated with youth: love, growing up, sex, rebellion, fun, drinking, etc.

Black metal, on the other hand, is much darker and much more extreme, favoring a rawer, noisier, and much harsher guitar sound; unpredictable song structures; classically-influenced melodies that suggest grimness, mysticism, sorrow, and misanthropic hatred; and inhuman, demonic screeches for vocals, unintelligible and heavily reverberated. In addition, Black Metal lyrics tend to be serious and arcane, dealing with the occult, pre-Christian mythology, pagan pride, war, misanthropy, genocide, and hatred of Christianity.

Black Metal logos

Black Metal also significantly differs from Heavy Metal aesthetically. Black Metal favors black above any color. Black Metal logos tend to be tortuous and elaborate, almost always unreadable, and laden with occult and/or pagan symbols, such as runes, swastikas, inverted crosses, pentagrams, and mjölnirs. Tortuous “blacklettering” (gothic letters) are nearly ubiquitous. Musicians use esoteric mythological stage names and obscure their faces with corpse-like black and white face paint. They appear on their albums in nocturnal, wooded, mediaeval, and/or wintry settings, clad in studded black leather and laden with bandoliers. It is not uncommon for the most extreme and misanthropic Black Metal bands to engage in self-mutilation (usually with hunting knives, around the arms and torso) and to have themselves photographed covered in blood after having performed such acts. The object is always to create images likely to inspire fear and horror among observers in the cultural mainstream—although this is merely “preaching to the choir,” of course, an effort to distinguish themselves as radically as possible from the despised “mainstream,” for otherwise Black Metal is nearly invisible outside its subcultural milieu.

Origins of Black Metal

Early Black Metal bands were Bathory, from Sweden, and Venom, from England. Venom are credited with inventing the term “Black Metal,” which first appeared as the title of their 1981 album. Bathory, however, proved far more influential. Although Bathory’s early works were dominated by Satanic themes and aesthetics, these were gradually displaced by the infusion of elements from classical music (particularly the Romantic period) and a growing fascination with pre-Christian Scandinavian mythology and history. Albums like Blood Fire Death (1989), Hammerheart (1991), and Twilight of the Gods (1992) eventually inspired the development of an entire new genre, now known as Viking Metal.

Similarly influential was the Swiss trio, Hellhammer, and its subsequent incarnation, Celtic Frost. Hellhammer was a prototype of such 1980s outgrowths of Heavy Metal as Thrash Metal, Death Metal, and Black Metal, but cannot be categorized as any one of them. Through their highly poetic and esoteric lyrics and increasingly elaborate musical compositions (peaking in 1987’s Into the Pandemonium), Hellhammer/Celtic Frost pioneered the transformation of Metal music into a sophisticated popular art form.

At a time when Heavy Metal seemed preoccupied mostly with base, low-brow, hedonistic excess (beer, girls, partying), Celtic Frost’s albums dealt with gods and ancient civilizations, and Bathory’s with Asatru, Vikings, and World War II. The British Thrash Metal band, Skyclad, was also significant, instigating the development of Folk Metal, a genre which incorporates traditional Folk music into a Black Metal framework, and whose musicians have links to the Black Metal and Viking Metal scenes.

Modern Black Metal has long ceased to be characterized purely by Satanism. Indeed, since the late 1980s, some Black Metal musicians have self-consciously refused to be defined by a foreign (i.e., non-European) monotheistic tradition. There is no Satan, however, without Christianity. By defining itself against Christianity, Satanism merely inverts Christian values instead of rejecting them altogether and embracing an authentically European worldview.

Many Black Metal musicians have, as a result, recognized the superficiality and ultimate futility of continuing “the war against (Judeo-) Christianity” which was central to Black Metal scene during the early and mid 1990s. Moreover, and at least partly in consequence, Black Metal has long since splintered into a variety of vehemently pagan subgenres, such as the abovementioned Viking Metal and Folk Metal, and—the most radical of all—National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM).

Part 1 of 3

As far as I am aware, this is the first published review in English of The Golden Thread: Esoteric Hitlerism, the first volume in Miguel Serrano’s Esoteric Hitlerist trilogy. Having woven a shadowy conspiracy of Esoteric Hitlerists into my dystopian novel Mister, and having recently reviewed Savitri Devi’s Defiance, it seems pertinent to examine the work of the other main proponent of Esoteric Hitlerism.

The esoteric syntheses of Serrano and Savitri Devi were developed independently of one another. Any parallels we encounter in our exoteric plane of existence are due to common sources of inspiration. The two writers corresponded briefly when they encountered each other’s work in the late 1970s; by then, however, their respective worldviews were already well-formed.

Miguel Joaquín Diego del Carmen Serrano Fernández was a Chilean diplomat, explorer, and poet, and, in Spanish letters, a celebrated author of the Generation of 1938. Born in Santiago, Chile, he was first attracted to Marxism, but quickly grew disillusioned with Communism and became associated with the Movimiento Nacional Socialista de Chile (later known as Vanguardia Popular Socialista), headed by Jorge González von Mareés.

In 1941 – the year he discovered the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – he was introduced to an occult order by ‘F. K.’ a German immigrant to Chile; the order, to which he was initiated in 1942, claimed allegiance of a Brahmin elite based on the Himalayas, and blended kundalini and tantric yoga with the Nietzschean will to power, emphasizing the subtle or astral body and regarding Adolf Hitler as an initiate and the saviour of the Aryan race, who had incarnated in the Kali Yuga.

The order’s master, who claimed to maintain astral contact with Hitler during and after the war, claimed that the Führer was alive and had survived the Berlin bunker. In the midst of popular speculation about Hitler’s survival in secret Nazi bases in Antarctica (see below), in 1947 Serrano traveled to the continent as journalist; the experience left a lasting impression.

Serrano subsequently traveled to Europe, where he made friends with Hermann Hesse and Carl Gustav Jung, about whom he eventually wrote El círculo hermético, de Hesse a Jung (in English, C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships (1965)). Jung’s pre-war characterization of Hitler as a semi-divine embodiment of the collective consciousness of the race also made a lasting impression.

From 1953 to 1970 Serrano held a series of ambassadorial posts, heading the Chilean diplomatic mission in India, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Austria. Dismissed from his post in 1970 by the Allende government, Serrano established himself in Switzerland, where he cultivated friendships with National Socialists, such as Léon Degrelle, Otto Skorzeny, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Marc Augier (Saint-Loup), and Hanna Reitsch, as well as writers such as Julius Evola, Hermann Wirth, Wilhelm Landig, and Ezra Pound.

He subsequently returned to Chile, and from 1978 onwards wrote a series of books with occult and National Socialist themes, including El Cordón Dorado: Hitlerismo Esotérico (1978), NOS: El Libro de la Resurrección (1980), Adolf Hitler, el Último Avatãra (1984), Nacionalsocialismo, Unica Solución para los Países de América del Sur (1986), La Resurrección del Héroe: Año 97 de la era Hitleriana (1986), Manú: “Por el hombre que vendra” (1991), No Celebraremos la Muerte de los Dioses Blancos (1992), and Nuestro Honor se Llama Lealtad (1994), plus a book on cyberpolitics, a four-volume autobiography (1996-1999), and his final monograph, Se Acabó Chile (2001).

El Cordón Dorado is a singularly dense and arcane work that will challenge all but the most erudite of scholars. To appreciate it fully requires several careful readings, as well as being steeped in Ancient and Mediaeval history, Western and Eastern mythologies, Ariosophy, Jewish conspiratology, Jungian archetypes, Nietzschean philosophy, and National Socialism, including its existence after the war.

Although the book is not very long (227 pages), although it is divided into five themed parts, and although these are broken into short chapters (totaling 143), each chapter contains a relatively desultory discussion weaving many disparate strands, comprised of numerous obscure facts, incidents, anecdotes, speculations, myths, and occult insights, and taking the narrative through tortuous, labyrinthine paths that seldom end at the destinations suggested by the chapter headings.

Serrano, moreover, only very loosely stays within the ostensible themes governing each of the four parts: he discusses the Cathars, the Druids, the Knights Templar, and the Rosicrucians, but infuses into each part a dizzying constellation of historical and metaphysical references, legends, imaginations, and recollections.

Among these we find his discussion of Hitler’s mythical survival. Obviously, Serrano interpreted this in mystical, metaphysical terms: Hitler, having lost the exoteric war, was supposed to continue the war esoterically from Antarctica, in whose polar regions lay hidden the entrance to the Earth’s interior, which Serrano believed to be inhabited by a highly advanced civilization of extraterrestrial origin.

Serrano also subscribed to the Nazi UFO conspiracy theory: towards the end of the war, the Nazis were said to have been working on highly advanced aircraft, including the famous flying discs (Haunebu I, II, and III); according to the theory, the Nazis continued their development from their underground base (Base 211) in New Berlin, New Swabia, the German Antarctic claim that lies in Queen Maud Land. Some ufologists claim this is what people saw during the UFO sightings of the 1950s. Serrano shared the ufologists’ belief that U.S. Navy’s Operation Highjump (1946-47) was not launched for the purposes of mapping and training, as was officially claimed, but to destroy the Nazi base. (I allude to some of this in my novel.)

The various themes, however, are held together by a common thread – the golden thread – which is a worldview that is hierarchical, elitist, neo-pagan, Gnostic, ariosophical, neo-Romantic, Nietzschean, and, of course, National Socialist.

Serrano’s narrative is like a firmament of stars: slowly, as our knowledge accretes, we begin to glimpse galaxies, galactic clusters, and, finally, the cosmos. His method of argumentation does not follow the Anglo-Saxon linear model, where one thing leads to the next; nor the German model, which goes from general to specific; nor the East Asian, which goes from peripheral to central; but, rather, anti-entropic, whereby through his agency chaos resolves into organization. From this perspective, we can see that in the downward rush of history, in Kali-Yuga, in a cyclical universe governed by the laws of progressive degeneration, Serrano was perhaps also a man against time.

What do we learn in El Cordon Dorado?

It would be wrong to think of Serrano as a political ideologue: he had a well-defined Weltanschauung, and, yes, he had clearly-defined and radically anti-establishment political views; but he was not a writer of political tracts. Rather, his prose inhabits an indefinable literary space, somewhere between poetry, metahistory, metapolitics, religion, and philosophy; it is neither entirely factual nor entirely fictional: Serrano mediates between the outer world of matter and the inner world of spirituality, questioning rather than answering, searching rather than finding, and suggesting rather than asserting, but always affirming a core set of anti-materialistic, inegalitarian, traditionalist doctrines.

A materialist would read this as an extended prose poem, as an elaborate work of fiction that draws from many antiquarian, pagan, and occult traditions to create a sense of the mystic and the fantastic; a non-materialist would read this as a profound work of revelation and a life-affirming profession of faith. I can well imagine this, under the right circumstances, becoming a religious text in a distant, post-apocalyptic future; read, interpreted, and re-interpreted by mystics and monastic scholars.

Of what there can be no doubt, is that Serrano is a highly accomplished literary artist and a man of vast erudition, able to produce sublime prose, rich with lyrical beauty and spiritual and cultural profundity.

One feature of my recent novel, Mister (Iron Sky Publishing, 2009), that has stirred up a ferment of discussion and questions is the shadowy conspiracy of “Esoteric Hitlerists” that runs like a golden thread through the labyrinth of the plot.

As much as I would like to take credit here for a brilliant stroke of imagination, this is a case of truth being stranger than fiction, for there really is something called “Esoteric Hitlerism,” and I am fairly sure that it already exists as a world-wide conspiracy – although, of course, nobody has let me in on the secret.

The two founders of Esoteric Hitlerism are the French-born Savitri Devi (1905–1982) and the Chilean Miguel Serrano (1917–2009).

A hundred and five years after Savitri Devi’s birth, we are gradually seeing her entire literary corpus brought back into print. This 2007 Centennial Edition of Defiance: The Prison Memoirs of Savitri Devi, published by the Savitri Devi Archive is the most recent contribution to this effort.

Defiance is Savitri Devi’s memoir of her arrest, trial, and imprisonment for distributing Nazi propaganda in occupied Germany during the early months of 1949. She was sentenced to three years and served six months before being deported to India. The story is told in a gripping first-person narrative, and it constitutes not only a fascinating historical document of Allied justice and prison life for Nazi women during the immediate post-war years but also provides a hugely engaging insight into Savitri Devi’s incandescent personality.

Born Maximine Portaz in Lyons, France in 1905 of an English mother and a father of mixed Greek and Italian ancestry, Savitri Devi was repelled by egalitarian, democratic, Christian, and humanistic doctrines from an early age, and enjoyed overtly mocking them in school, much to the shock of her tutors. She nevertheless impressed them with her penetrating mind and performed well academically, earning two masters degrees and a doctorate in philosophy, as well as learning eight languages. The realization that she was a National Socialist took place in 1929, while on a pilgrimage to Palestine during Lent.

From 1935 to 1945 Savitri Devi lived in India, where she went in search of the pagan Aryan culture, and where her formal adherence to Hinduism led to the acquisition of her adopted name. Despite her ardent – and religious – belief in National Socialism, Savitri Devi never experienced Germany during the National Socialist era; her first opportunity to visit the country would not be until 1948, three years after Hitler’s empire had perished in the inferno of the Allied bombing. The lost opportunity proved a tremendous source of regret and disappointment, and resulted in a burning desire for expiation, for making up lost time. It is this that compelled Savitri Devi to make a passionate – and indeed “quixotic and futile” – profession of support for National Socialism, even though by then all had been long lost.

Savitri Devi made three visits to Germany between 1948 and 1949, funding the journeys and the printing of thousands of propaganda leaflets and posters with the sale her gold jewelry. We learn in Defiance that she began writing Gold in the Furnace: Experiences in Post-War Germany and her magnum opus, The Lightning and the Sun, during this period, mostly in cafés.

We also learn to what intense, fanatical, even foolhardy degree Savitri Devi identified with National Socialism: once arrested, and once convinced that a conviction was inevitable, she became inflamed with the truculent euphoria of a righteous martyr, from then on almost sadistically relishing every opportunity afforded by the legal process to make a dramatic show of her scorn for the values of the victors as well as of her uncrushable defiance in the face of their power.

As by this time Savitri was a British subject (having previously held Greek and French nationalities), she was the responsibility of the British authorities, and they treated her rather kindly, given the nature of her offence. Indeed, they show a great deal of baffled patience in the face of Savitri’s strident support for every National Socialist policy, even the most cruel.

Savitri is unimpressed and unmoved, however, and on the day of her trial, which she sees as the paroxysmal moment where she is to show the world what she is and what she thinks of the democratic powers, she even makes it a point to wear her gold swastika ear-rings. (And rather appropriately, on the front cover of this volume we find a photograph of Savitri Devi at the height of her powers, aged 46, looking into the distance with the aforementioned ear-rings and the expression of a wrathful demi-goddess.)

Savitri Devi is so over the top, her prose so high-flung with joyous visions of Nazi palingenesis, poetic revanchism, and cruentous glory, that one cannot help but smile when Mrs. Taylor, the British policewoman escorting her to and from the court house in Düsseldorf, finally says “What a baby you are for a woman of forty-three.” The pragmatic Mrs. Taylor, however, did not understand Savitri Devi’s need for redemption.

Savitri’s “glorious day” ends in disappointment. When sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, she is outraged: Is that all? She had been hoping for the death penalty, or at least life imprisonment. The phlogiston of the immediate aftermath of the war, however, had abated somewhat, and by 1949 Nazi propaganda no longer entailed capital punishment.

This only exacerbated Savitri’s contempt for democracy: she tells us that she would not have been so lenient herself, had she been on the other side; she thinks the democracies are soft, craven, ideologically vacuous, and interested only in material comfort and money. She promises that one day – never mind when – they will pay a millionfold for their foolishness and their weakness. She only hoped that she would be there personally to mete out justice, or at least gloat.

Despite Savitri’s electrifying intensity, velocious extremism, and brutal misanthropy, the “democrats,” as she calls them, often could not help but take a liking for her, and even respect her for her ideological integrity, consistency, courage, and strength of character. This sentiment also affects the reader: Savitri Devi is a very likeable monster.

Once transferred to the Werl prison, Savitri wasted no time to seek out “her comrades and superiors,” namely the Nazi war criminals. She soon developed an intense friendship with Hertha Ehlert, a former deputy wardress at the Bergen-Belsen prison camp, then serving a 15-year term. Colonel Vickers, the British Governor, tried to keep Savitri segregated from the political prisoners, which provoked a good deal of tedious self-pity and complaining. Fortunately, the German wardresses – some of whom were crypto-Nazis – took a liking to Savitri and allowed her regular visits from Ehlert and other “war criminals.” Moreover, equipped with copybooks, she was assigned light tasks so that she may have time to write.

Propelled by a fulgor of inspiration, Savitri poured all her love and energy into her writing, completing large sections of Gold in the Furnace and The Lightning in the Sun within the first few months. One day, however, her cell was searched and her manuscripts confiscated, dealing Savitri a devastating blow. The manuscripts seemed doomed to destruction.

For two weeks, she agonized over her manuscripts, alternating between stratospheric defiance and blackest depression. And it is here, in her darkest hour, that Savitri Devi finally had her most profound insight, which leads to Defiance’s core philosophical meditation on the Nazi ethics of detached and selfless duty. She consoles herself in the face of the imminent destruction of her manuscripts—the favorite children of her brain—by reminding herself that a true Aryan does what is right, regardless of personal consequences, leaving those to the gods to sort out.

For Savitri, the right thing to do is nothing less than the perfection of the cosmos by contributing to the emergence of the Superman, which she takes to be the ultimate aim of National Socialism. She cannot control what is done with her manuscripts, but she can take solace in the fact that she has acted in the cosmic interest, an aim which justifies any expediency—even humiliations, lies (which she detested), and tactical alliances with the hated enemy—and renders her personal suffering of no consequence.

Eventually, for unexplained reasons, Savitri’s manuscripts were returned to her. Far from being grateful to her captors, however, she regarded them with incredulous contempt. All thanks were reserved to “the invisible powers” that she felt were watching out for her.

Savitri then resolved to complete her manuscripts right under Colonel Vickers’ nose, only this time she took additional precautions to ensure their survival. We see that while never compromising or attenuating her extremism, Savitri Devi has learnt the value of employing more careful methods in the interest of long-term results.

Defiance is an enormously entertaining book, told in a rousing and poetic style, blending philosophical meditation with personal revelation in a hypnotic, novel-like narrative.

Unavailable for over half a century, the new Centennial Edition of Defiance is elegantly designed, lavishly illustrated with archival photographs, and carefully edited to the highest scholarly standards. It was initially offered as a limited edition of 200 hand-numbered clothbound copies, which proved highly collectible. If you covet one, you may be in for a wait, as I imagine only death will separate current owners from their copies. Fortunately, however, the new edition of Defiance has now been released in a high-quality, smyth-sewn paperback edition.

I highly recommend it to those who enjoyed Mister and want additional reading in the same vein to tide them over until my next novel.

Having reviewed Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition, and having over the Yuletide read Scott’s diaries from the latter, I deemed it opportune to read Roald Amundsen’s account of his pioneering journey to the South Pole. After all, Scott and Amundsen reached the Pole within a month of each other, and this is, so to speak, the other side of the story.

If you are not familiar with the history of Antarctic exploration, for this review to make sense you will need to know that in the year 1910 two teams of explorers, one British, lead by Scott, and the other Norwegian, led by Amundsen, set sail to Antarctica, with the aim of being the first to reach the South Pole. Both men were successful, but Amundsen arrived first and he and his team returned to their base, and then home, without incident; while Scott and his men perished on the Ross Ice Shelf during their return journey. Scott’s tent was found eight months later by a rescue party, who discovered Scott’s frozen body and those of two of his party of five, along with their diaries. Scott’s fate turned him into a tragic national hero, and, being a skilled wordsmith, it was his story that was told across the English-speaking world: his diaries underwent numerous editions and re-prints, from popular to lavishly-illustrated, and became mandatory reading for schoolchildren, until eventually his tale was made into a film in 1948, starring John Mills. Amundsen’s story, on the other hand, had a much more limited readership and is, therefore, less well known.

Scott’s and Amundsen’s accounts, however, are equally interesting, albeit for entirely different reasons. While Scott’s possesses romance and pathos, Amundsen’s is engaging on a technical level: here is where you learn how to mount a successful expedition, and get a sense of the Norwegian temperament as well.

The South Pole is a considerable work, spanning 800 pages in the modern reprint edition (the original edition came in two volumes). It begins with Amundsen’s preparations in Norway in 1909 and concludes with Amundsen’s disembarkation at Hobart, Tasmania, in 1912; what lies in between is more or less as detailed a relation of events as Cherry’s own, written ten years later. Amundsen’s tone and style is very different from that of the Englishmen: the 43-year-old Scott was anxious and prone to depression; the 36-year-old Cherry (writing nearly a decade after the events) was more philosophical and psychological; the 39-year-old Amundsen, by contrast, is colder, calmer, relatively detached, and prone to ironic understatement. In some ways, his tone is very similar to mine in Mister, except my diction and syntax are somewhat more baroque.

Amundsen arrived in Antarctica in January 1911, and established his base, Framheim, on the Ross Ice Shelf (then known as “the Barrier”), at the Bay of Whales, 803 miles away from the South Pole and 350 miles to the East of Scott’s base, in Cape Evans, Ross Island. This placed Amundsen’s base 60 miles nearer to the Pole than Scott’s – a considerable distance considering that it was to be covered without the aid of motorized transport.

The shore party consisted of 97 dogs and eight humans, all Norwegian: Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, Oscar Wisting, Jørgen Stubberud, Hjalmar Johansen, Kristian Prestrud, and Roald Amundsen. Like Scott, they built a hut, but, unlike Scott, when the snow and drift started to cover it, Amundsen’s party allowed it to be buried, and expanded their living quarters by excavating a network caverns in the ice, where they set up their kennel and their workshops. This not only afforded them more space, but also insulated them from the elements.

During the Winter months leading up to the polar journey, Amundsen and his team continuously optimized their equipment, testing it and refining it for the conditions on the ground. Scott’s team were doing exactly the same over at their base, of course, but it seems, from this account, that Amundsen went further, being extra meticulous and paying close attention to every detail. Boots and tents were redesigned; sledges and cases were shaved down to make them lighter; stacking, storage, and lashing techniques were perfected, and so on. In the end, Amundsen ended up with truly excellent equipment and highly efficient arrangements. For example: while Scott’s parties had to pack and unpack their sledges every time they set up camp, Amundsen’s sledges were packed in such a way that everything they needed could be retrieved without unlashing the cases or disassembling the cargo on their sledges. This was a significant advantage in an environment prone to blizzards and where temperatures are often so low that touching metal gives instant frostbite.

Amundsen had spent time observing and learning from the Inuit and possessed a thorough understanding of working with dogs. Scott, on the other hand, although the most experienced Antarctic explorer of the age and indeed a valuable source of information for Amundsen and his men, had become reluctant to use dogs due to their poor performance during the Discovery Expedition he had lead in 1901-1903, during which many of the animals visibly suffered. The problem, however, was not so much dogs in general but the choice of dogs, and Amundsen’s chosen breed of canine was better adapted for Antarctic conditions. So much so, in fact, that Amundsen eventually decided to travel by night, because his dogs preferred the colder temperatures.

The postmortem examination of Scott’s and Amundsen’s expeditions have led experts to conclude that Amundsen’s decision to base his transport on dogs was decisive in the outcome of their respective polar journeys. Scott’s transport configuration, relying on motorized sledges, ponies, dogs, and man-hauling has been described as ‘muddled’. This is certainly the conclusion one draws from reading the accounts of the two expeditions. Amundsen’s dogs afforded him with pulling power that was up to seven times greater than Scott’s. What is more, Amundsen’s men ate the dogs along the way, in the measure that they were no longer needed because of the staged depoting of supplies for the return journey; this provided them with an additional source of fresh meat (the other was seal meat, obtained at the edge of the barrier), which they needed to stave off scurvy. Scott’s party, on the other hand, was blighted by the early failure of the motorized sledges and the poor performance of the ponies. Although he and his men ate the ponies, they relied heavily – and once on the plateau exclusively – on man-hauling. Man-hauling is far more strenuous than skiing, like Amundsen’s men did, and this soon led to a deterioration in Scott’s party’s physical condition.

This takes us to the diet. Scott’s understanding of a polar explorer’s nutritional requirements was the best that could be expected from the Edwardian era, so he cannot be blamed for having had inadequate provisions. Indeed, having learned from his failed bid for the Pole in 1902 and from Shackleton’s own failure in 1909 (in both cases the men starved and developed scurvy), Scott paid close attention to nutrition and worked closely with manufacturers to obtain specially-formulated food supplies. Moreover, Scott also had the Winter party (Cherry, Edward Wilson, and Henry Bowers) experiment with proportions during their journey to Cape Crozier to secure Emperor penguin eggs. Yet, the fact remains that, in terms of its energy content, his diet of pemmican, biscuits, chocolate, butter, sugar, and tea fell well short of what was needed. Ranulph Fiennes and Mike Stroud, the first explorers ever to achieve the unsupported (you-carry-everything) crossing of the Antarctic, found their caloric consumption averaging 8,000 calories a day, and sometimes spiking at over 11,500 calories a day. The Scott team’s intake was around 4,000, and the result was, inevitably, starvation, cold, and frostbites. Worse still, lack of vitamin C, the primary cause of scurvy, caused wounds to heal very slowly, a situation that eventually led to the breakdown and death of 37-year-old Petty Officer Edgar Evans in Scott’s South Polar party. Amundsen’s men had an abundant supply of fresh meat, coming from dog and seals, as well as the typically Scandinavian wholegrain bread, whortleberries, and jam, so they were very well supplied of vitamin C. With a lower caloric consumption (typically at 5,000 calories a day), they were very well fed throughout their journey, and Amundsen was able to progressively increase rations well beyond requirements. As a result, Amundsen’s men remained strong, staved off scurvy, and suffered no frostbites.

Scott blamed the failure of his expedition on poor weather and bad luck. Amundsen, who greatly respected Scott, says in the present volume, written before he learnt of Scott’s fate:

I may say that this is the greatest factor — the way in which the expedition is equipped — the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.

It would be too harsh to say this applied to Scott, because Amundsen did, after all, enjoy relatively good weather (he even eventually dispensed with the very warm fur outfits we see in the photographs), whereas unseasonably low temperatures and harsh conditions hit Scott’s party during the return journey across the Ross Ice Shelf. (Remember this is a huge geographical feature: a platform, hundreds of miles long, comprised entirely of iron-hard ice up to half a mile deep, flat (except near land) in every direction as far as the eye can see – it is so large that it has its own weather system.) Similarly, on their approach to the Pole, Scott’s team had found conditions on the plateau, particularly after 87°S, especially severe, with bitter head-on winds, rock-hard sastrugi, and snow frozen into hard, abrasive crystals – this made pulling sledges especially difficult. Imagine pulling 200 lb sledges on sandpaper, day after day, week after week, with 50-70 degrees of frost, eating less than half what you need. It must be remembered, at the same time, that the Antarctic was for most part terra incognita: Scott’s furthest South in the Discovery Expedition was 82°17′S, a latitude located on the Ross Ice Shelf; Shackleton’s 88°23′S, somewhere on the plateau; no one knew what the South Pole looked like or what they would find there, and Scott only had Shackleton’s verbal account of the conditions on the Beardmore Glacier and Antarctic plateau to go by. Today we know that the continent, approximately the size of Europe and once located on the Earth’s equator, is under a sheet of ice several kilometers deep; that the ice covers 98% of its surface; that the plateau, extending a thousand kilometers, is nearly 10,000 feet above sea level; that there are mountain ranges and nunataks in its more Northernly latitudes; and much more. Also today there is an enormous American-run research station on the South Pole, as well as dozens of stations spread across the continent; we have radio and satellite communications, high resolution imaging, mountains of very detailed data; we also have aeroplanes and motor vehicles able to operate in the Antarctic airspace and terrain. None of this existed in 1911. Much of the nutritional, meteorological, and glaciological knowledge we have today was discovered decades later. The early explorers were doing truly pioneering work on a landscape as mysterious and as alien as another planet.

It is interesting to note that both Amundsen and Scott were quite surprised to find themselves descending as they approached the South Pole. Indeed, once past the glaciers that give access to the Antarctic plateau from the Ross Ice Shelf, the Pole is hundreds of feet below the plateau summit on that side of the continent.

Amundsen’s original ambition had been to conquer the North Pole. For most of his life, he tells us, he had been fascinated by the far North. That he turned South owed to his being beaten to the North Pole by the American explorers Fredrick Cook (in 1908) and Robert Peary (in 1909), who made independent claims. Therefore, upon reaching the South Pole, Amundsen experienced mixed feelings: he says that it did not feel to him like the accomplishment of his life’s ambition. All the same, aware of the controversies surrounding Cook’s and Peary’s polar claims, he determined to make absolutely certain that he had indeed reached the geographical South Pole, and spent several days taking measurements with a variety of instruments within a chosen radius. He named his South Pole station Polheim. There he left a small tent with a letter for Scott to deliver to the King Haakon VII of Norway, as proof and testimony of his accomplishment in the event he failed to return to base safely.

As it happens, subsequent evaluations of the Polar party’s astronomical observations show that Amundsen never stood on the actual geographical Pole. Polheim’s position was determined to be somewhere between 89°57’S and 89°59’S, and probably 89°58’5’’ – no further than six miles and no nearer than one and a half miles from 90°S. However, Bjaaland and Hanssen, during the course of their measurements, walked between 400 and 600 meters away from the Pole, and possibly a few hundred meters or less. Scott, arriving a month later, did not manage to stand on the actual Pole either. This, however, was the best that could be done with the instruments available at the time.

Amundsen’s success resulted not only from his careful planning and good fortune, but also from his having set the single goal of reaching the South Pole. Comparatively little science was done on the field, as a result, although geological samples were brought back, both from Amundsen’s Polar party as well as Kristian Pestrud’s Kind Edward VII Land’s party, and meteorological and oceanographical studies were conducted. Scott’s expedition, by contrast, was primarily a scientific expedition, and was outfitted accordingly. It was certainly not designed for a race. Conquering the Pole was important in as much as the expedition’s success or failure was to be judged by the press and the numerous private sponsors on that basis: a hundred years ago, the whole enterprise of polar exploration was fiercely nationalistic in character, in marked contrast to the internationalist character of Antarctic research since the signing of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959.

Scott found out about Amundsen’s plans while on route to the Antarctic. Needless to say that this caused a great deal of anger, particularly as Amundsen had kept his plans secret until he was well on his way. Scott’s men obviously hoped that Amundsen would be having a rough time on his side of the barrier (indeed, he experienced lower temperatures, but, on the other hand, he enjoyed fewer blizzards). Yet, when the Englishmen aboard the Terra Nova paid a visit to the Norwegians at Framheim, they quite naturally had a number of questions but were otherwise cordial. They all took it like the soldiers a number of them were.

It is inspiring to read the accounts from the heroic era of Antarctic exploration. They highlight the most admirable qualities of European man, and serve as an example to modern generations in times when men of the caliber we encounter in these tales have (apparently) become rare. Enthusiasts have noted the marked difference in tone between the books written by explorers Fiennes and Stroud in the early 1990s, and the books and diaries written by Scott, Amundsen, and Douglas Mawson a hundred years ago: the latter, they say, come across as far more stoic, far harder, and able to write poetically about the hostile Antarctic environment even in the most adverse of situations. This perhaps not surprising when one considers that European civilization was at its zenith in terms of power and confidence in the years immediately preceding the Great War. I think truly hard men still exist, but sensibilities have obviously changed, perhaps because of the outcome of two great European civil wars, perhaps because the equality-obsessed modern culture encourages men to adopt feminine qualities in the same measure that it encourages women to adopt masculine ones. Whatever the reasons, this type of literature is most edifying and a healthy antidote to all the whining, fretting, and apologizing – not to mention in-your-face fruitiness from certain quarters – that has become so prevalent in recent decades.

The South Pole is not as intimidating as it might at first appear: there are numerous photographs and the print is quite large, so a fast reader can whiz through this tome at the speed of light, if he or she so wishes. In addition, it is not all Amundsen’s narrative: the last 300 pages consist of Kristian Pestrud’s account of his journey to King Edward VII’s land; first lieutenant Thorvald Nilsen’s account of the voyage of the Fram; and scientific summaries dealing with the geology, oceanography, meteorology, and the astronomical observations at the Pole. Pestrud’s and Nilsen’s contributions are also written in a tone of ironic detachment, blending formality with humor, which suggests to me, having met and dealt with Norwegians over the years, that this might be characteristic of the Norwegian temperament.

There is certainly more to Antarctic literature than conspiracy theories about Zeta Reticulans and Nazi UFOs.

Last time I saw Jonathan Bowden, I asked him how he was. His answer, delivered with bared teeth and so typical of him, elicited peals of laughter from Bowden himself, “I am always superb and getting stronger!” Bowden, you see, loves an audience, but he is quite able to entertain himself without one, as the second volume of his art eloquently shows.

The present volume differs substantially from the first, which I reviewed last November: where the latter compiled the artist’s adult work, the former compiles his juvenilia, covering his childhood through to his majority.

And what is it that we find between its covers? Anybody who has met Jonathan Bowden and spoken to him for any length of time will easily guess the answer: comic strips, of course! What we have here is a 200-page coffee table book bulging with comic strips, or graphic novels, drawn by a fervid, truculent little boy, obsessed with power and violence, with a brain the size of a planet balanced on a toothpick.

Unfortunately, as in Volume 1, we are deprived of a full-length, scholarly introduction, so, to gain a deeper understanding of his early output, one has to go directly to the artist’s maw. My initial attempts resulted in a couple of profuse emails from Bowden, replete with erudite references and overflowing with theoretical verbiage.

His efforts were highly entertaining, of course, and gave me a flavor of the sort of introduction he would like to have added to a future edition of his art books: obviously, a lengthy, esoteric text of such impenetrable density as to require nanonic circuitry implanted on the brain to permit a modicum of comprehension; a text, needless to say, bursting with quotes from, or mention of, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Thomas Carlyle, D. H. Lawrence, Grünewald, Balthus, Bacon, and Buffet, and comprised of epic, syntactically-complex sentences with enough sesquipedalophilia to titillate even an excessive logovore like Alexander Theroux.

Yet, to me this was insufficient, for such introductions, interesting as they may be on a hyper-intellectual plane, often obscure more than they clarify. A game of cat and mouse thus ensued, with me attempting to corkscrew useful biographical data from Bowden, an insatiable orator who is permanently on stage, even when he has an audience of one. My efforts yielded interesting results.

It is impossible to imagine Bowden as a child. For one, he has looked forty years of age since he was eighteen (visit his website and browse through his gallery, if you doubt me). For another, he appears barely human: whereas Tomislav Sunic is so down to earth that he will happily receive visitors in slippers and pajama, Jonathan Bowden is the exact opposite, to the point where one decides that he probably sleeps with his shoes on, wearing a suit and tie, in a coffin, with his eyes wide open.

But a boy he was, once upon the time, and the following anecdote will give you an idea of the kind of little monster his patient parents had to put up with. In 1972, when Bowden was 10, he witnessed a man slip on a banana peel, strategically placed by life on a high street pavement. The man, morbidly obese, fell with such force that he dove straight into a shop window, which shattered and rained a million pieces all over the man’s face. The demon child burst out laughing, of course, and roared with gleeful hilarity, his short body convulsing in a paroxysm of decachinating sadism as his pointed finger drew attention to the source. Bowden tells that this went on for so long that his mother deemed it necessary to scold him publicly. “Don’t laugh, Jonathan” she apparently said, “Don’t you see that the poor man is suffering?” Like a true Nietzschean, Jonathan replied, “But that’s why it’s funny!”

Such scorn for the Christian values of empathy and compassion is evident in every story contained in this volume. It is clear that Bowden was heavily influenced by Marvel comics, and his graphic novels faithfully reproduce all the expected tropes: ghoulish, power-crazed villains; mad science; ornamental women; a tardy and rather useless police force; and an indefatigable, unconquerable hero.

What is significant, however, is that his chosen alter ego happens to be Iron Man. (One smiles knowingly at the thought: how could it be any different?)

What is more, his stories are crammed, and indeed self-consciously make a virtue of, ruthless violence – and this violence does not result from a moral struggle of good versus evil, but from a struggle for power between subhuman and superhuman. Where the villains possess superhuman powers, they are specializations suggestive of science or nature pushed to its most grotesque limits. In this titanic struggle, ordinary citizens are, needless to say, helpless, and political leaders weak, corrupt, and irrelevant.

Indeed, there is evidence of political as well as linguistic precocity, as we find here references to American political crises from the early 1970s, such as the energy crisis and the Watergate Tapes. It is impossible not to notice that these references are all negative, all linked to weak and/or corrupt political leadership, so we can conclude also that political precocity and contempt towards democratic politics came at an early age. (Then again, is this surprising, when one considers that Bowden grew up in a decade when there were brownouts, three-day weeks, and frequent labor strikes?) This is where we notice the divergence between the Marvel original and Bowden’s reinterpretation.

Another area where Bowden’s personality is felt is in two facets that in his adulthood were channeled into segregated media: coloring technique and torrential verbosity. The latter is just as prominent as the violence, and each page carries a great deal of text, coming from three sources: the character’s mouths, the character’s minds, and Jonathan Bowden, the invisible and irrepressible narrator. The individual stories follow relatively elaborate plots, carrying narrative threads that are – or were intended to be – ongoing and involving numerous, interacting characters.

The coloring technique, on the other hand, attempts to mimic that of the old Marvel strips, but ends up being almost an abstraction: Bowden used color pencils rather lightly before applying a black marker to highlight outlines and shadows. This he did very intricately and belaboredly, to the point where each page ended up looking like Roy Lichtenstein doing an impression of Jackson Pollock. Save for the vignette outlines, we find few straight lines and it is all executed rather nervously and obsessively.

This reveals the dual nature of Bowden’s personality: one side is inclined towards madness, chaos, brute force, excess, raw emotion, and hyper-individualism; the other side is inclined towards meticulousness, fastidiousness, authority, and order (the latter is quite apparent in his electronic communication, where even mobile text messages are impeccably formatted, punctuated, and grammatical). These two tendencies form a tense and turbulent nexus that many probably perceive as dangerously unstable and volatile: I would not be surprised if, while in education, his coevals saw him as a gifted loner and a loose cannon. He certainly seems to have spent a great deal of time drawing these graphic novels.

Is it original? Evidently, like most children, Bowden had no conception of copyright – and like most gifted children, his brain was like a sponge, like that alien blob that gobbles and grows, ready to absorb anything that came in its way. In this case, it was, for reasons as yet unclear, Marvel comics. That he responded to them in the way that he did seems now almost inevitable, given what we know about him now: this is the man, after all, who caricatures everyone, cartoonifies every situation, and extrapolates and exaggerates everything to the limits of the absurd, the monstrous, and the insane; for whom each moment in life is a vignette in a Nietzschean comic strip.

Yet, as can be inferred from my discussion, it is possible to see where Bowden departs from his original inspiration and begins to assert his own vision, however derivative it might have been in his childhood years. This is really the most important aspect of this volume, for, otherwise, it is all quite haphazard, with the unfinished and overlapping plotlines, the randomness, and the omissions that are typical of an age when one tends to bore easily and divert attention each time a novel stimulus comes along.

The preservation of this early work is rather remarkable, given its age (indeed some of it is quite degraded) and the fact that parents tend to dispose of at least a part of a child’s possessions every time they move. Obviously, this proto-portfolio was both jealously guarded by Bowden and ignored by his progenitors. Bowden tells me that his parents were never really interested in his pop art and that, in fact, they rather disapproved of it. They thought that it would “warp” his mind. If Bowden was anything like me, he would have replied: “The fact that I am drawing it suggests my mind is already warped; and since you made me, you only have yourselves to blame!”

The Art of Jonathan Bowden, vol. 2 can be obtained through the artist’s website for a modest sum. The miser, the hostile, and the impecunious, however, can view the totality of the images, entirely free of charge as well.

Before the 1950s, many consumer objects that we take for granted today were relatively more costly; but, at the same time, they were also manufactured to be durable. As a result, if a person purchased a typewriter at the age of 20, it was likely to last until his death, and beyond. It was also a repairable item. After the 1950s, however, the philosophy of major manufacturers changed, as it was realized that once everyone had everything they needed, sales would drop, thus making it impossible to maintain growth in many industries. The result was a shift away from quality and durability and towards inbuilt obsolescence and constant technological upgrades. This not only increased market share, as consumer goods could be manufactured (and therefore sold) more cheaply, but it proved up to eight times more profitable, because of the inbuilt need to constantly replace items every few years.

Thus, the consumer has ended up paying more in the long run for a worse product – worse despite the superior technology, because, after certain point and beyond a narrow set of key areas, most people hardly benefit from added functions. Toilet paper only needs to be soft; the quilting, the colors, the moisturizers, the instant chemical analysis and forwarding of nutritional recommendations to your email address by the electronic paper, are simply excuses to charge more.

What annoys me, however, is not so much the fact that such practices exist, for, in a free market economy, they are bound to appear and add to choice; what annoys me is the fact that the old-fashioned alternative has been made impossible by the predations of big government and its preferred debt-based monetary system.

The link is less tenuous that you would like to think.

Governments grow big in the hands of world-improver politicians who think they know better, and believe that society needs a big, fat, racially indeterminate nanny, offering top-down solutions to every problem (except, of course, those afflicting the hard-working White majority that feeds her) and keeping the multicultural pressure cooker from exploding. The big, fat, racially indeterminate nanny requires vast sums of tax money, and seeks to perpetuate her presence by gorging herself into immobility. She therefore craves for an ever-larger bite of private earnings, and desires to know, monitor, record, analyze, and regulate every aspect of a citizen’s life in order to tax it. Yet, of course, even the most rapacious tax regime would be insufficient to fund the nanny’s voracity (at least not without risking open revolt from the White middle class), so her handler-politicians, for whom avoiding the noose relies on a continuously growing economy, welcome a debt-based monetary system. Such a system enables them to bribe a lazy electorate with handouts without their having to worry about the funding, for the system makes it possible for governments to borrow without limit, safe in the knowledge that debts need not ever be repaid.

Since in this system, debt equals money printing, and money printing equals currency devaluation (a.k.a., ‘inflation’), the consequence for businesses is the progressive destruction of profits through accelerating tax predation, interest on debt, and monetary devaluation. This is compounded, in turn, by the fact that taxes, interest, and devaluations also progressively destroy the purchasing power of the consumer, upon whom businesses depend. In sum: everything becomes more expensive than it needs to be.

This makes a regular supply of technological breakthroughs necessary for survival. But, as these are by no means predictable or guaranteed, and it is difficult indeed to come up with a fabulously profitable business model, the next line of defense is, necessarily, economizing on materials, labor, and service; and drastically limiting a product’s lifespan. After a while, the only businesses able to offer genuine, old-fashioned levels of quality are small in size, narrow in scope, and vocational in nature. They are also difficult to find, as they are obscure and do not survive for long.

With such environmental pressures, it is not surprising to find that profitable businesses increasingly expend their ingenuity in constantly finding new and creative ways of deceiving the consumer. Cereal brands continue to sell their cereals in large boxes, whose graphics are enhanced every year, but whose contents are reduced in the same proportion: cereal boxes are sold half empty these days; it is all about visibility on the supermarket shelf. Kitchen towels are sold in 3 for 2 offers, but, upon closer examination, the three rolls are fluffed up, with the paper towels rolled so loosely that the three rolls contain less paper than two rolls selling at full price, so one effectively pays more for less. Meat is pumped with water, ostensibly “for added succulence,” but in reality to make the cut heavier and its price higher. More egregiously, as a BBC documentary showed in the United Kingdom a few years ago, meat that is past is display-by date, and sometimes even its use-by date, is routinely soaked in brine and repackaged with new use-by dates in the future. Much of the meat being sold in major British supermarkets is rotten and fit only for vultures (come and sue me: I have years’ worth of evidence).

Creativity is diverted from truly improving a product to finding ways to charge more for a worse version of it, concealing a downgrade that costs less under the illusion of an upgrade that sells for more.

The desperate drive for ever-keener efficiency savings degrade customer service in a similar manner. Nowadays it is virtually impossible to telephone a business above a certain size and speak to a human, let alone one of European descent: consumers are forced to endure obnoxious IVRs, installed on premium lines and fiendishly designed to phlebotomize the caller’s bank account with their tiered menus, perversely ordered options, and slow and overly prolix enunciation. And, where a way is found to circumvent the IVRs (pressing star or hash repeatedly tends to work), most of the time we are served by lobotomized, low-cost humans in a cubicle in an Indian call center, with incomprehensible accents reading from, and unable to comprehend anything outside, an infuriating, patronizing, pleonastic script.

The businesses that employ these subterfuges are the fortunate ones. Usually, they are the big ones, the ones able to open sweatshops in Vietnam and El Salvador and lobby election-conscious, donor-receptive politicians for a multi-billion dollar bailout when deserted by their customers. Those who cannot marshal these resources – the traditional family businesses – find themselves progressively crunched into oblivion.

When fiscal predations are aggressively inflicted on all areas of business, when success is systematically penalized and mediocrity regularly rewarded, when private citizen and small and medium enterprise alike feel the mounting fiscal pressure without the government offering anything in return (except more surveillance, more laws, more regulations, more red tape, more immigration, more propaganda, more spurious wars, more rigged elections, and more political correctness), it is not surprising that many feel tempted to go on strike and emigrate or disappear – to say, “You know what? To hell with it!”

While living in The Netherlands during the 1980s, I found that Dutch office workers groaned under a tyrannical fiscal regime. Some dreaded being promoted and awarded a pay-raise, since that would have put them on a higher and more punitively taxed income bracket, resulting in their being left with even less of the money that they had worked for. They were, as a result, not very motivated to be particularly brilliant. The moment the clock hit 5 o’clock, pens fell from fingers and offices experienced explosive decompression, with workers disappearing into the ether within seconds. At he same time, the high streets of all major towns were teeming any day of the week – teeming with young, able-bodied, healthy men and women (many of them colored), who preferred not working and receiving generous welfare payments over working and having their financial reward stolen from them.

During the 1990s, such a species was not uncommon in Nordic countries – their generous welfare provisions made it possible to live a perfectly comfortable, idle lifestyle.

Among Third World immigrants, this is El Dorado: an abundance of free money, security, reliable infrastructure, space-age technology, and a non-threatening population of soft, depressed, dependent, indolent Whites, sitting ducks for them to shoot down (or blow up) at their earliest convenience.

Against such backdrop, it no doubt becomes possible for some of the European aborigines to conceptualize periodic spells on welfare as an effort to claw back money that has been suctioned from their paycheck by the government. Certainly, this would avoid the risk of imprisonment through becoming a tax rebel.

The picture that emerges is a world of impoverished, demotivated workers, enslaved by debt and forced to endure poor customer service and to make do with flimsy, cheap (but overpriced), low-quality goods, manufactured by debt-ridden companies forced into subterfuge and pandering to privileged minorities in their desperation to stay above the rising waters of inflation and taxation; a world of pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes, and Nigerian businessmen proposing to share their millions, because criminality is the only way left to run a profitable enterprise.

Fortunately, there is still a way around this in some areas. Mine is bypassing the shops and going to the antiques and second-hand market. Not only are antiques not subject to VAT or manufactured by raceless politically correct corporations, but one is more likely to find goods made to last a lifetime. Some of these goods, because they are both sturdy and low-tech, offer the additional advantage of immunizing the consumer against eventualities and small disasters. For example, two years ago my laptop broke down during a house move. I was, at the time, in the middle of writing a novel. What did I do? I lifted the cover of my 1955 Remington Noiseless and carried on typing. Another example: two months ago my wife and I experienced a power outage. Modern telephones need mains power to operate and we live in the country, meaning our cellphones have only a weak and intermittent signal. No chance of it holding out long enough to get past the IVR and the endless queue. What did I do? I went to my 1947 Bakelite rotor-dial telephone and called the electricity company, keeping silent until I was allowed past the IVR. Obsolete technology works just fine in many instances and provide a more economical and reliable solution to modern technological failure (an event likely to become more frequent in our dystopian future of crippling debt, shortages, 90% taxes, and hyperinflation). It also makes it more difficult for the government to keep track of the consumer, as newer technology is more capable and efficient in this respect.

Perhaps there is a suggestion here as to a possible way forward. I am sure I am not the only one who thinks this way.

I would like to think that the future is in traditional, high quality, original goods and services, supplied by small and medium enterprise capable of social intelligence and a personal touch. In other words, in going back to the good old ways, except with the benefit of modern science and superior technical knowledge. These were the ways that made Europe the world’s economic master. Of course, whether or not that remains a fanciful dream depends on what we do. But there is no doubt that the hard-working White middle class is tired of being ripped off with cheap, generic, sub-prime manufacture, IVRs, and microcephalous, fake-sounding, foreign call center nincompoops, employed by faceless, raceless, politically correct corporations propped up by bailout money and partly owned by a bloated, incompetent, traitorous, and virtually unaccountable government.

I certainly do not want to give the enemy my money, if I can help it.

It would appear that multiculturalism in Israel could well use a course of anabolic steroids, as the Israelis appear not to be feeling its strength.

Jewish lobby wages war on Christmas trees

Lobby for Jewish values passes out fliers against hotels, restaurants putting up Christmas trees, other Christian symbols ahead of civil New Year, say businesses who do so risk losing kosher certification

Ari Galhar

A new front for religious battles: Hotels and restaurants

The “Lobby for Jewish values” this week began operating against restaurants and hotels that plan to put up Christmas trees and other Christian symbols ahead of Christmas and the civil New Year.

According to the lobby’s Chairman, Ofer Cohen, they have received backing by the rabbis, “and we are even considering publishing the names of the businesses that put up Christian symbols ahead of the Christian holiday and call for a boycott against them.”

Fliers and ads distributed among the public read, “The people of Israel have given their soul over the years in order to maintain the values of the Torah of Israel and the Jewish identity.

“You should also continue to follow this path of the Jewish people’s tradition and not give in to the clownish atmosphere of the end of the civil year. And certainly not help those businesses that sell or put up the foolish symbols of Christianity.”

The Jerusalem Rabbinate also works each year to ensure restaurants and hotels receiving kosher certification from the Jerusalem Religious Council do not put up Christian symbols.

According to a senior official in the kashrut department, this is done each year consensually, but that businesses which do not meet this requirement may find their kashrut certificate revoked.

It should be noted that most of the hotels in Jerusalem and a significant part of the restaurants in the capital receive permanent kosher certification from the city’s religious council.

Considering that there is a significant Christian caucus that is staunchly pro-Israel and whose members even put their money where their mouths are, it would appear that, were these Christians ever to visit that troubled country around this time of the year, they would be disappointed, encountering absolutely no concessions to their faith. Sadly, these Christians, being wet and limp-wristed, meekly take any amount of scorn or abuse without a word of complaint; they are too scared to offend anyone. I do not respect them at all. Being, as they are, enthusiastic champions of multiculturalism, I would respect them somewhat if they demonstrated the courage of their convictions by demanding, vociferously and with righteous anger, tolerance and diversity in the Jewish state – including the right for hotels and restaurants to display Christmas trees, if they so wish, without threats or sanctions.

Come to think of it, however, I think the Jewish lobby has an excellent initiative that the West should emulate. The Christmas tree is important, even if one is not a Christian, as it has its roots in Germanic and Roman paganism. Hotels and restaurants that fail to display Christmas trees should be punished with a withholding of custom, accompanied by naming and shaming, of which they should be made aware. What we are lacking is the equivalent of the Jewish kosher certification. It seems a shame that we have not developed an authochtonous völkisch certification: one that is prestigious and requires exacting criteria, rigorous standards, periodic inspections, and annual fees; and which entails the right to display proudly a badge or seal that indicates to users of the business’ goods and services that these are a) of excellent quality, and b) actively contributing to the continuance and advancement of traditional European culture and values. If such a certification existed (I can dream), the threat of revocation, and the shame and vituperation that would ideally follow, would be an added weapon in the arsenal of opprobrium against businesses that suddenly developed socially and culturally obnoxious practices.

Shackleton’s Forgotten Men: The Untold Tragedy of the Endurance Epic

The heroic age of Antarctic exploration ended with Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition of 1914-1916. And this, no doubt because of the relatively recent film starring Kenneth Branagh, is nowadays probably the best known of the many incredible adventures experienced by the early Antarctic explorers.

Ernest Shackleton took part in Robert Falcon Scott’s Discovery expedition of 1901-1904, during which the two men, plus Dr. Edward Wilson, attempted unsuccessfully to reach the South Pole. Shackleton’s physical collapse caused Scott to send him back, invalided on a supply ship, in 1903. The former, however, was far from giving up exploring and returned to Antarctica as leader of the Nimrod expedition in 1907, establishing his base, like Scott before him, on Ross Island. His own bid for the pole would take Scott’s route across the Ross Ice Shelf and would vastly improve on Scott’s southernmost latitude of 82º 17S; it would also lead to the discovery of the 100-mile-long Beardmore Glacier, via which the explorers would be able to reach the Antarctic plateau, access to which in 1902 the Scott team had found blocked by what is now known as the trans-Antarctic mountains. After crossing the ice shelf, however, ascending the 10,000 feet up to the plateau, and sledging hundreds of miles at high-altitude and in conditions of extreme cold and fearsome blizzards, Shackleton, was forced to turn around at 88º 23S, 97 nautical miles short of the South Pole, having ascertained that there was not enough food left to sustain the party on the return journey, even if on starvation rations.

Next to return to the Antarctic was Robert Falcon Scott, who led the Terra Nova expedition of 1910-1913. As I already related in my review of Scott’s fellow expeditioner Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account, The Worst Journey in the World, Scott succeeded in his bid for the South Pole, only to find that he had been beaten by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen (who had reached it a month earlier) and to eventually die, along with the rest of his party, on the Ross Ice Shelf during return journey.

With the South Pole already conquered, there was no great feat left for Shackleton to do but to attempt a crossing of the Southern continent. To this effect he organized the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917. This new venture was to consist of two parties: one, led by Shackleton himself, was to sail aboard the Endurance and approach the continent via the Weddell Sea; the other, led by Captain Aeneas Mackintosh, was to sail aboard the Aurora, and land on Ross Island. Shackleton was to lead his party up onto the plateau, through to the South Pole, down the Beardmore Glacier, across the Ross Ice Shelf, and right through to Mackintosh’s base on Ross Island. Mackintosh, on the other hand, was to lead a team across the Ross Ice Shelf, laying supply depots to support the latter stages of Shackleton’s march, at regular intervals, all the way to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier.

This was to be accomplished in an era when there were no radio or satellite communications and where there was no possibility of an air rescue or re-supply. Each party was to accomplish its mission in the expectation that the other party would do their part, but without any way of knowing whether they were still alive and without any means of contacting civilization.

Lennard Bickell’s book tells the harrowing and mostly unknown story of the Ross Sea Party.

The Aurora reached Ross Island early in 1915, during the Austral Summer (Northerners should remember that seasons are reversed in the Southern hemisphere). Mackintosh decided to set up in Cave Evans. Cape Evans is some 13 miles North of Hut Point, where Scott’s Discovery hut is situated, and where there the snow slopes provide easiest access to the Ross Ice Shelf (or Barrier, as it was known back then, since it ends in a sheer, sea-facing cliff some 150 feet high). Shackleton, however, had forbidden mooring the boat any further South than the Glacier Point, aware that when the Discovery did so some 14 years earlier the sea froze the ship in, and rendered it immoveable, for two years. Scott’s Terra Nova hut was to be used, and, accordingly, the dogs, some coal, and minimal supplies were brought ashore; but the Aurora was intended to remain the main base of operations.

Mackintosh, unaware that Shackleton was not planning to attempt the crossing until the following year (the cable that was to inform Mackintosh was never sent), and thinking it conceivable that Shackleton might attempt the Antarctic crossing that same season, ordered the laying of depots to begin immediately. At the very least, two depots were to be laid: one at the Minna Bluff (at 79º S) and another at 80º S. Mackintosh was impetuous and lacked experience on the ice, so the depot laying began without allowing the dogs to acclimatize and at a grueling pace; the operation was beset with problems and imperfect organization. As a result, the 80º S depot ended up incomplete and, after two months, the party returned to Hut Point frostbitten, exhausted, and demoralized, having worked to death all the dogs that they had taken with them.

The route back to Cape Evans involved crossing the sea ice, but, due to the seasonal thinness of the latter, the party was forced to remain at Hut Point, living in Spartan conditions and with inadequate supplies, until deep into the Winter (June). When they finally were able to return to Cape Evans, they found that the Aurora had been blown away in a blizzard, and was presumably lost with all hands. Along with it went their scientific equipment, clothing, soap, sledging gear, and food supplies. The remains of the Ross Sea Party thus found themselves marooned in the Antarctic, and facing a minimum of two years on the ice, without food, fuel, or adequate supplies, before any possible rescue.

Knowing that Shackleton’s party depended on them, Mackintosh ordered the depot laying mission to go ahead regardless. To this effect, the men plundered all the huts, looking for whatever supplies had been left behind from the previous three expeditions. This amounted to very little: 15-year-old dog biscuits, a few tins here and there, and a few items of old, used, battered, discarded gear. To survive, it was concluded, they would have to rely of seals for both food and fuel; and they would have to use available materials to improvise extra clothing.

What follows in the book is a horrific account of the 1,200-mile depot-laying journey across the world’s largest ice shelf – and the world’s most inhospitable terrain. For most people a 12-mile walk is considered very long, even in good weather, when well fed, sufficiently hydrated, and adequately attired. Imagine, then, doing that a hundred times over, while pulling 200-pound sledges across rugged and sticky surfaces, sinking up to your waist in snow, at temperatures of 60 or more degrees of frost, beset by freezing winds and blizzards, on starvation rations (consisting of months-old meat and biscuits every day, for every meal), wearing threadbare and ragged clothing, with painfully frostbitten hands and face, sleeping in bags that have frozen solid, unable to bathe, shaking violently with cold every night, having to defecate into a hole in the ice inside a freezing tent, and, eventually, with a severe case of scurvy, without access to medicine, analgesics, or fresh food. Consider that at –4º F (-20º C) , boiling water freezes instantly if thrown up in the air; –4º F was considered a warm day for the old Antarctic explorers. If you think this is bad, this is just the beginning.

Page after page, the situation for the depot-laying party gets worse and worse, ever grimmer and more desperate; wasting away, excruciatingly cold, in agonizing pain, clinically depressed, drained of vitality, sick, and with no option but to carry on pulling for hundreds of miles, one cannot help but shake one’s head in wonder every five or so pages, as the men are hit by new and ever-more-horrible setbacks and are forced to brave the most unimaginable conditions. This is truly grim and brutal reading.

And things do not end there, because, although all minus one of the men eventually manage to crawl back to Hut Point, they, by then little more than wide-eyed wraiths, skin and bones, with beards down to their chests and hair down to their shoulders and gums swollen out of their mouths and blistered skin as black as coal, then are forced to winter in what was little more than a bare cupboard, or drafty shed, battered by blizzards and eking a troglodytic existence by eating seals and heating themselves with a grimy, fuliginous, pungent bubbler stove that was barely able to keep their living space above freezing within a one-foot radius. This, without any idea of whether they would ever be rescued – or whether Shackleton had survived the trans-Antarctic crossing; without any idea, in fact, of what was happening at all, except that there was a war going on in Europe and that rescue operations to remote Antarctica would probably not be a priority.

To find out how it all ends, you will have to read the book.

But one thing that is clear when reading these chronicles of the early Antarctic explorers is that, whatever their faults, it is clear from their behavior and their speech that the citizens of the British Empire had a clearer sense themselves and their place in the world than their modern counterparts do today. Moreover, they seem much harder, on average, than our coevals: despite the numerous reverses, and despite having, at times, fierce disagreements on how to proceed given their circumstances, it is evident from the narrative that civility, mutual respect, and a sense of responsibility were always maintained. The narrative does not suggest at any point that there was ever any panic, hysterics, back-stabbing, or selfish dog-eat-dog behavior, like that which we see so often and so convincingly depicted in modern films. There was a mission here, and, despite the extreme adversity and zero external support, it was accomplished. The depots were laid.

Compare and contrast what you read here against what you see in the 2006 BBC reality series Blizzard: Race to the Pole, with Bruce Parry (of Tribe and Amazon fame), where a team of modern explorers attempt to replicate (in Greenland) Robert Falcon’s Scott march to the South Pole – and fail, despite shortcuts, modern gear, and comparatively benign conditions. In the end, it did not matter that the extreme suffering of Mackintosh’s men (and the deaths of three of them) was in vain (Shackleton never made it): as one of the survivors remarked years afterwards, it showed what white men can accomplish, even with everything going against them.

I must point out that Lennard Bickel’s prose has some shortcomings: I would personally punctuate more than he does, and his rhythm can be, at times, awkward. However, he is sufficiently adept at conjuring the bleak atmosphere and evoking the desperateness of the plight of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expeditions’ Ross Sea party to overcome said shortcomings: the reader is sucked into the white-knuckle tale almost instantly, and the book is difficult to put down. Even if you never thought of reading about early 20th century Antarctic exploration, you may well find yourself craving for more after this tome.

Certainly, there is much we can learn from the great British exploits in the white continent at a time when the Empire was at its zenith. And one can easily see, when reading accounts such as Bickell’s and Cherry’s, why a certain German chancellor whom I will not name held the British Empire and the British in as high regard as he did.

Read Alex Kurtagic’s review of The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, another true story of Antarctic exploration, here.

Medusa Now Ventrix

The Art of Jonathan Bowden, volume 1, 1980 – 2007
Jonathan Bowden
London: The Spinning Top Club, 2007

The first time my wife saw Jonathan Bowden’s art she thought he was insane. I had some days before attended a meeting where he spoke about the German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and his epic, 7-hour production Hitler: A Film from Germany. Due to engineering work on the railway network, I arrived late, in the midst of Lady Michele Renouf’s talk about freedom of speech, the Lisbon Treaty, and the European Constitution. At this time Bowden, who was due to speak next, was leaning on a windowsill, facing the audience. Clad in suit and tie, sporting a wooden pendant carved with a rune, and a pair of small, bottle-bottom spectacles, he stood there with a head of curly hair, arms crossed, and eyes closed, deep in thought. The room was hot, pre-Victorian, crammed to capacity with angry middle-aged men, compressed into tightly packed rows of hard coccyx-crunching chairs–stewing in their fury against the modern world.

As I sat down, a man in the front row, who had already asked a question, asked another. Bowden leapt like an attack dog and forcefully silenced the inquisitor. ‘Questions at the end, please!” he shouted. “Authoritarian men won’t have another’s will imposed upon them,” he said on a different occasion. His manner was harsh, loud, serious, unpleasant, overbearing. This is how I knew he was the chairman.

When his turn came to speak, his vast oral cavity exploded with a hurricane of decibels; the thermonuclear shockwave of intellectual verbiage swept over the heads of the congregated audience, stunning it into paralyzed silence. Bowden turned his head left, then right, then left, then right, his eyes closed, gesticulating, baring his teeth, roaring like a lion. Even if there was anyone present who did not understand his erudite diction, everyone knew where it was coming from: a place of Nietzschean ferocity, Doric hardness, primal purpose, pagan pride, ancient darkness, and unquenchable fury. The discharge of energy was inspiring, and motivated me to visit this man’s website.

Kratos 1

It found he was a prolific writer and an artist with an especially rabid style. His paintings, done in acrylic (for speed), are chaotic mosaics of color, intense, expressionistic, and densely crisscrossed with sadistic lines. It is the work of a schizophrenic patient, who labors at night, hunched over his table, pen in fist, his face red, his eyes wide, perspiring, hyperventilating, furiously attacking the paper surface in an paroxysm of uncontrolled hatred and rage. Otherwise it is the work of an obsessive compulsive, who fills vast surfaces with incomprehensible patchworks and patterns that respect no rhyme or reason, who destroys as he creates, who accretes as he annihilates, cackles as he militates. The art is grotesque, primordial, and rudely contemptuous of bourgeois expectations. It is filled with ghoulish faces, deformity, evil, psychotic stares, lascivious leers, nightmarish sarcasm, and human monstrosity. The portraits offer nothing but a demonic freak show. Where there are women, the images are not flattering: they are obscene, vulgar, violently sexual. This is no derivation from the Classicist figurative tradition: when one looks at Bowden’s art one thinks of Marvel comic strips, blended with Edvard Munch, Otto Dix, and Jackson Pollock. (View a slideshow of Bowden’s paintings here.)

Bowden’s art is modern, or modernist, but he argues that it is no longer so, for what we class as “modern” art has already been around for well over a hundred years. This is obviously true, but all the same it enrages, perplexes, and horrifies some in Bowden’s political constituency: indeed, some years ago, he was vigorously attacked by a number of anonymous posters in Stormfront, in a manner that he later described as “semi-literate and scatological.” But while for some Bowden’s creations are another example of entartete Kunst, others rate it highly; views on its merits are polarized. In a subsequent response to his critics, Bowden wrote:

Jonathan Bowden

Once a classic early photographer like Edward Muybridge produced an interconnected series of images featuring Greco-Roman wrestlers and running horses, the world was forever changed. Fine art now had a choice–it either replicated photography badly or in a stylized way which was loyal to a tradition running from Rembrandt to Orpen or it contrived to do something else. What it did was to go inside the mind and tap all sorts of semi-conscious and unconscious ideas, fantasies, desires and imaginative forays. The point about this art is that it is highly personal and powerful because it comes from inside. This means that people often of a highly rigid and morally defensive character find this work heretical, blasphemous, evil and even degenerate. (Indeed the theory of degenerate art originates from the 1880’s when this change of direction took place).

He explained that “representational, classical, traditional and academic work has been taken over by cinema,” and that he sees the failure of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union to prevent painters and sculptors from producing modernist work as a confirmation of the dynamism of the modernist current. He added:

Turning to my own work, various currents are discernible. These are the demonic, strength and a concern with pure power, ugliness and fury as well as erotica and shape, or purely imaginative formulations. In my own mind the softer material balances the harsher, more violent and aggressive work. Nonetheless, I have also done a large number of relatively traditional pieces which hark back to classic art by Bosch, Rops, and Caravaggio. Some are also based on Hellenistic form. Obviously a subjective element intrudes into art but I believe that modernistic fury is the correct vehicle for elitist and hierarchical values.

Neo-Classic High Jinx

The Art of Jonathan Bowden is the first of two volumes, collecting the 47-year-old artist’s work from 1980 to 2007. In total we have 179 paintings and 25 sketches. The pages are black and the text white, which is what works best with artwork of such vibrant colors. Sadly, it is a softcover edition and a few of the images are slightly out of focus.

Sadly also, there is no introduction or biographical essay: one goes from the table of contents straight to the art. The interaction between the latter and the former, however, provides an unexpected source of entertainment that compensates for these deficiencies, as it proves quite rewarding either to look at the title of a painting in the index and then find the corresponding painting or vice versa.

This is because the titles reflect an obvious, (in Bowden’s own words) “elitist, semi-transcendentalist, hieratic, non-dualist, neo-pagan, ‘politically incorrect’, and inegalitarian” sensibility, and, as Lasha Darkmoon has pointed out in her recent articles for The Occidental Observer, we do not find that very often in the contemporary art world. One cannot read titles like Against Greenpeace, An Apple a Day Keeps Fury at Bay, Depressed Human Reptile, Eugene Sue’s The Eternal Jew, Louisiana Lynching, Flying Vagina Head, Give Me 140 Million Dollars, God Plays with Balls, Happy Hellraiser, I am Disembowelled, Too Many Turkey Twizzlers, and not want to find out what Bowden visualized.

These are, of course, the quirkier titles. Others suggest a number of recurring themes: classical / mythological (Masked Acropolis, Olympia on Blue), demonic (Orange Lucifer, Lycanthropy Now), sexual (Napalm Blonde, Vulvic Head and Ear), fascistic (Adolf & Leni, Mussolini with Bi-Planes), among others.

Artistically unexplored among Bowden’s obsessions are his morbid fear of obesity, for example, and his troglodytic indifference to technology. At a recent event in the United States, I noticed Bowden, who on previous occasions had refused to eat anything at all, dined out of tiny dessert dishes. When questioned on his rather singular temperance, he explained that he comes from the West country, and that people from his part of the world have a tendency to grow sideways.

His worry, however, is wrapped into a certain morbidity of the imagination. At various points he expressed disappointment at the lack of examples of “brontosaurian obesity,” the witnessing of which he had been eagerly anticipating, not without a measure of horrified fascination. Perhaps this is because Bowden, like one Harry Stephen Keeler, appreciates human deformity and freakery of nature: “it adds to the fauna and flora,” he says.

As to his relationship with the electronic marvels of our age, Bowden admits to not owning a CD player, a DVD player, or even a color television; indeed, the communicates with the world via a mobile telephone that must be nearly a decade old–a geological era in technological terms. “I believe in planning your own obsolescence,” he argues.

The Marquis de Sade

I must admit I recognize a bit myself in this rather eccentric character. This is a man who likes extremes, and rushes to them faster than the speed of light the moment an idea is presented to him. Like me, he cartoonifies everything and everybody; he enjoys exaggeration, obscurity, exoticism, rarity, maximal expression–life is a comic strip; he can see humor in even the nadir of the Kali Yuga.

Bowden’s stern appearance (I say he has looked 40 since he was 18) is somewhat deceptive, but his art accurately reflects this personality profile: beneath the hyperchromatic energy there is a gothic sensibility, that is drawn to authors like Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Bram Stoker–not forgetting the Irishman’s more obscure books–blended with an extroverted theatricality. Suddenly his suit and tie and heavy-soled, skull-crushing footwear and the van filled with corpses are not inconsistencies, but parts of an organic–and partly animalistic, partly inhuman–whole. They are consistent with the orator whose meanest and most gleeful insults are “BBC News reader” and “lib-er-alll!”

The Art of Jonathan Bowden will not please everyone and will not confirm the ordinary man in his beliefs (Bowden does not give a damn), but it is without a doubt interesting for those who revel in psychological extremity and would like an insight into the psyche of this Nietzschean beast.

Note: Many of Jonathan Bowden’s books can be purchased or downloaded for free from his website.

The basic premise is simple: neutrinos from an exceptionally large solar flare act like microwaves and rapidly heat the Earth’s core. Scientists discover this, governments are warned, and, faced with a planetary cataclysm, secret plans are implemented to save humanity. Only government officials and the rich benefit from these plans, of course, and the secondary storyline consists of a writer’s accidentally finding out something is up and then narrowly escaping a series of escalating natural disasters as he tries to save his family and get them to safety in the Himalayas, where it is rumored space ships have been built, and where they eventually arrive to discover seven Old Testament-style arks, one of which they manage to board, thus ensuring their survival.

As can be expected in the age of CGI, when hundreds of millions of dollars are spent making a film, the special effects, the sound, and the situations faced by the characters are truly mind-blowing. My wife and I were both on the edge of our seats for the film’s whole two and a half hours’ duration, our jaws not only on the floor, but rolling down the incline of the cinema theater, out of the door, down the street, and into the River Wey, where they sank straight to the bottom, to be devoured by the piranhas and the crocodiles. During this time we witnessed crust-shattering Earthquakes, miles-high mega-tsunamis, exploding volcanic calderas, whole coastal regions and cities falling into the sea, global flooding, and even massive continental displacements.

On this level, if you love seeing the Earth destroyed in graphic detail, this film is terrific escapism. But, as is usually the case with Jewish cinema, doomsday films like these serve as a vehicle for indoctrination into a “humanist,” liberal, anti-White ideology. (I put “humanist” in quotation marks because although the ideology in question is often described as “humanist,” or “universalist,” it is also one that contemptuously rejects the notion that the White race is worth preserving at all, in which case it cannot accurately be described as “humanist.”) 2012 is to date the most aggressively anti-White doomsday film I have seen.

Firstly, both the scientist who discovers the phenomenon (Satnam, played by Jimi Mistry) is Indian; and the one who learns of it and then goes on to advise the president of the United States (Dr. Adrian Helmsley, played by the London-born Nigerian Chiwetel Ejiofor) is Black. Secondly, the President of the United States is not only Black, but deep Black, played by Danny Glover. Satnam, Helmsley, and Glover are portrayed very sympathetically, and the latter two are selfless, thoughtful, strong, determined, humanist heroes.

And the White characters? Ah, yes, I forgot. As an afterthought, and for the purposes of bearing the brunt of the brainless, emotion-laden action, we have Jackson Curtis (played by John Cusack), the writer I mentioned earlier. Curtis is a complete loser: author of a science fiction novel that barely sold; the excised element of a failed marriage; and a disorganized, unremarkable, overall underachiever, who works part-time as a limousine driver for a repulsive Russian billionaire. The remaining White characters are just peons, necessary to keep the plotline going, physically attractive, but otherwise completely vacuous, shallow, small-minded, none-to-bright, and interchangeable.

When not all of the above, it is Charlie Frost (played by Woody Harrelson), a creepy, hermetic conspiracy theorist and general nutcase, whose residence is a derelict trailer, and whose diet consists entirely of gherkins and beer.

None of the latter White characters have anything to do with saving the human species: this is only made possible by Black and Indian scientists, a Black president (who leads the effort), and Chinese engineers (who build the arks, within a time-frame thought impossible by the Whites). The Whites are simply beneficiaries for colored talent, industry, and generosity.

We see where we stand with writer, producer, and director Roland Emmerich.

Who is this Emmerich? He is the same gentleman of ultra-liberal and militantly homosexualist persuasion who brought us films like Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. These were films that emphasized special effects and epic disasters, yet evinced an epicly poor grasp of the science: in Independence Day, for example, the alien ship was Mac-compatible and the positioning of a ship that was a quarter of the mass of the moon in near-Earth orbit caused no seismic activity.

These were also films with an anti-White, anti-European racial agenda: in Independence Day the heroes were a Black man (played by Will Smith) and a Jew (played by Jeff Goldblum); and in The Day After Tomorrow we are treated (as we are several times in 2012) to an interracial couple as well as the arrogant and ignorant derision of Friedrich Nietzsche as a crank who harbored inappropriate affections for his sister.

Emmerich spoke at the 2009 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival; supported the odious Hillary Clinton in her race for presidential candidature; has campaigned and donated funds to further gay and lesbian and third world causes; and does not like Hollywood because, among other reasons, he finds it racist and homophobic. Well, well, well – what a surprise.

We can now see 2012 is quite harmonious with his system of beliefs. Besides anti-White, multiculturalist zealotry, we find the film a quasi-communistic, spitting-mad screed against what the hard Left would term “privilege.” When it transpires that only the super-rich and a pre-selected list had advance warning and access to tickets to ride the arks while the rest of humanity was kept in the dark, Dr. Helmsley is outraged. He is outraged again when he sees the size of his cabin – “You could have fit ten people in here!” And he is outraged yet again when, one of the arks having suffered structural damage, it is the intention of Mr. Anheuser, the commander in chief, to leave its intended occupants all stranded in the face of certain death, rather than open the gates to his ark to let the horde in. The remaining world leaders of the G8, all White, eventually respond to his extemporaneous and impassioned appeal, but are nevertheless slow to react, and in any event, only follow the lead of the female German chancellor; the Black US president, we know for certain, would have ordered the gates to be opened, as the reason for this abnegating and down-to-Earth leader’s absence is that he chose to stay behind to look after his desperate and doomed citizens, having opened the doors to the Whitehouse to offer them comfort and succor.

We also find in the film gleeful vengeance meted out against Catholicism, with the destruction of a number of Catholic icons, such as St Peter’s basilica, whose dome topples over a crowd of praying faithful, killing them all; and the statue of Christ the Redeemer, in Rio de Janeiro, which crumbles to pieces, killing more faithful.

Apparently, Emmerich had planned to show catastrophic scenes of the destruction of Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām in Mecca, the mosque where the Muslim faithful congregate during the Hajj, but decided to excise said scenes for fear of a fatwa. (Apparently he feels he has nothing to fear from Christians.) Both Catholicism and Islam have traditionally been intolerant of homosexuality.

Interestingly, although Emmerich claims to be against organized religion, he does not show scenes of destruction involving Jewish temples. Was this an editing error? An oversight, perhaps?

As to the end of the film, in case we have not had enough Afrocentricity, or have been too obtuse to notice its having been relentlessly piledriven into our brains for the past 160+ minutes, we are shown that Southern Africa – the Cape of Good Hope, the new “roof of the world” – is to be the new home of what remains of humanity, the place where humanity is to begin again in the new flooded and re-jiggled Earth. Hence, out of Africa and back to Africa we go, is Emmerich’s sledgehammer moral. Afrocentrism reigns supreme.

It is a shame that it is people like Emmerich making these types of motion pictures. If only we were allowed to enjoy a rollicking disaster film without having him ram his repugnant  – and, frankly, fatuous and silly – ideology down our throats, or having to endure the thought of this repellent creature growing obscenely rich while contemning the very same White people who fund his lifestyle for the most part – if only we were allowed that, we could speak of relatively innocuous entertainment.

Unfortunately, however, our enjoyment is spoilt, and our resentment stoked, by the obnoxious subtext pervading every frame. And it is this type of subtext that causes me (and no doubt others) to long for the day when the corrupt, idiotic, myopic, and criminal establishment that legitimates Emmerich’s message is swept out of power, dismembered politically, ostracized socially, decimated fiscally, disprivileged academically, and extinguished forever as a force of destruction in the entire Western world.

Is not that what they have been trying to do to us for the past sixty years?

The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism

As the title immediately suggests, this is meant to be a companion volume to Max Weber’s classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In Colin Campbell’s opinion, the latter only told half of the story (that of production), and left unanswered fundamental questions relating to the other half (that of consumption). His aim was, therefore, to complement Weber’s narrative with its logical counterpart and to provide a complete account of the socio-cultural aspects of the modern Western economy with a synthetic super-narrative that explained both its facets of production and consumption. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism is, needless to say, a hugely ambitious multidisciplinary enterprise, produced by a profound and astute thinker.

According to Campbell, most writing about consumption had hitherto focused on taste and fashion, without explaining where taste and fashion came from or why, and attributing the consumer revolution to simple emulation of the aristocracy by an aspiring middle class, when, in fact, the consumer revolution was a middle class phenomenon, and the two classes were divided by crucial psychological and socio-cultural differences. Another problem has been that Protestantism and Romanticism have been cast as in opposition, while Protestantism was widespread among the middle class. How come the relatively ascetic protestants, and not the profligate aristocracy, were the ones who drove the consumer revolution?

Campbell’s investigation spends a great deal of time on an excruciatingly detailed unraveling of the protestant system of belief, and uncovers there, rather surprisingly, the origins of modern consumption. To reproduce Campbell’s analysis here in a rigorous manner would be unnecessarily prolix, but suffice it to say that a disillusionment with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination led to a more individualistic, autonomous, and heuristic approach to life choices; that this served as background for the idea of being a man of sentiment; that the “sentimental man,” originally a term that implied a man with the capacity for deep emotion (especially of a pious and sorrowful nature) and thoughtfulness, evolved to mean a deeply emotional man; and that Sentimentalism, as it evolved into Romanticism, accreted notions of daydreaming, fantasy, and individual genius. Consumption, therefore, is the attempt of the consumer to create his own individual reality through daydreaming.

The notion of daydreaming is important, and harmonious with the characterization of the modern consumer we find in Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior (2009), which I reviewed this last Summer: modern consumers make significant psychological and emotional investments into consumer products, daydreaming about the kind of lifestyle they would like to have, and therefore of the kind of person they would like to be. This, in the context of the psychological processes triggered by the present historical socio-cultural environment, leads to a cycle of longing and acquisition, where acquisition does not result in satisfaction but in disappointment and continued longing. Thus, even mediocre consumer products are imbued with enormous meaning, and are frequently replaced and/or disacquired once obtained by the consumer, who has by then moved on to continued daydreaming and fixation on yet another product. This fits well with an evolutionary account of consumption, whereby consumer objects are used – sub- or semi-consciously – for purposes of status display along a variety of dimensions (e.g. amiability, stability, conscientiousness, etc.), and whereby consumers engage, accordingly, in deception and self-deception in the effort to define themselves to themselves and to others.

The fact that Campbell’s notion of the daydreaming consumer survives comparison with evolutionist explanations of human behavior suggests that said notion is theoretically sound. This is good news, for the system of objects is not the only realm where the daydreaming occurs: it also occurs in the realm of the system of ideas. Thus, by transposing Campbell’s narrative we can gain a better understanding of how ideas become objects of taste and fashion, and how, irrespective of quality, daydreaming consumers acquire and disacquire them as a result of their longing to be a certain type of person as well as of the ideas in question being emotionally imbued with meaning.

William Pierce’s claim, therefore, that people usually have no opinion of their own, and simply acquire an opinion by looking around to see what others are saying and doing and then selecting the one that is in the majority, was not far from the truth. I would only add that when people look around in search for a ready-made opinion to espouse, they are looking to identify the one that best enhances their self-esteem, according to their temperament, socio-economic status, and personal history. Of course, because humans fear ostracism, ego-enhancing opinion often ends up being majority opinion, but this is not always the case: many feel superior in their adoption of contrarian or unconventional views.

Personally, I found Campbell’s monograph deathly boring – particularly during the era-long chapter where he waded into the somniferous quicksand of Calvinist theology. This is not to say that Campbell’s prose is difficult: it is, simply, dull, clumsy, desiccated, and occasionally pleonastic – the opposite what is needed when dealing with as coma-inducing a topic as some obscure nuance of Christian theology. Worse: the book has been printed using a small, dark, narrow font, which makes each line look lightyears long and each page seem like a deep pond of turgid sludge, exhausting to the reader before he even begins, and as unpromising of any joy as the front cover. The unfortunate result is a reluctance on my part to relive it all over again with a blow-by-blow explication of its theoretical and argumentative subtleties. The mere thought of it makes me anxious.

However, there is no question that this is an accomplished effort at a theoretical level, and, to my mind, Campbell cleverly and successfully reconciles the Protestant ethic with its Romantic counterpart, as well as the parallel processes of production and consumption in modern society, in a fashion that also seems to answer the questions that had been ignored, or left unanswered, by previous writers.

Having said this, to me this is not the end of the journey, for Campbell, like Weber before him, only explains the socio-cultural aspects of consumption, ignoring the fact that Man is also a biological entity, and that, therefore, the morphology of society and culture have biological origins. With Spent Geoffrey Miller did a better job at integrating the socio-cultural consequences of biology into his evolutionist account, but it was light on the socio-cultural side and his book lacks the depth of Campbell’s study. (This, however, is not surprising, for Spent was aimed at a popular audience whereas The Romantic Ethic… was aimed at a more academic audience.) To have a complete understanding of consumption, its socio-cultural and its biological sides need to be theoretically synthesized. I am not aware of whether this synthesis has occurred or been consciously attempted.

I would recommend this book only to those who both have an active interest in consumption and are adept at a highly creative synthesis and application of dry-as-dust theoretical knowledge.

This is not a profound insight; it is something every schoolboy learns in the playground. When a challenge is allowed to pass without a forceful response, the challenger is immediately emboldened into starting a program of escalating depredations. The greater the depredations, the greater the retaliation needed to end them. After a while, the level of retaliation needed to regain peace becomes so destructive that victory over the predator ultimately becomes a pyrrhic victory. It is, therefore, always preferable to take the first challenge very seriously, and to respond forcefully, even disproportionately, rather than ignore it or let it pass in an attempt to keep the peace.

Perhaps no film serves as a better metaphor for this than the controversial 1971 psychological thriller, Straw Dogs. Directed by Sam Peckinpah, and starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, this is the story of a young couple – David Sumner, a timid, American mathematician and, Amy, his rather puerile Cornish wife – who move to a farm in a small village in Cornwall, and quickly run into trouble with the locals.

Having hired four workmen to finish his garage roof, David becomes absorbed in his work and Amy, bored and craving attention, begins flirting with the men – one of these is Charlie, who has a previous history with Amy. David had encountered a status challenge early on in the film (see below), but he had chosen to ignore it, thus triggering idle talk and a progressive loss of authority before the workmen.

One evening, David finds their cat dead, hung by the neck in their closet. Amy claims the workmen have done it as a provocation, to prove that they could get into his bedroom. David, however, is a coward, and lacks the nerve to confront the workmen. Instead, he attempts to win their friendship, and invites them in for a beer. Amy is horrified, but David argues that he wants to ‘catch them off-guard’. She is not fooled, however, and, when David fails to mention the cat, as expected, she visibly loses respect for her husband.

The workmen suggest that he come duck hunting with them, and David agrees; but on the appointed day the workmen leave him stranded on a lonely moor, after promising to drive ducks in his direction. Charlie then goes back to the Sumners’ house and rapes Amy, who, after some resistance, soon appears to enjoy the violation. Upon finishing, however, another workman shows up, and forces Charlie at gunpoint to hold Amy down while he takes a turn at raping her.

After several hours of standing around looking like an idiot on the moor, David finally realizes that he has been had and decides to walk back to the farm. By the time he arrives back home it is dark, and he finds his wife in bed, disheveled and withdrawn; she does not tell him about the rape. David tells his wife how the workmen stuck it to him, but is patronizing — as he always is towards her — and makes himself look even more of a fool in the process; Amy rebukes him for his cowardice and failure to confront the workmen about the cat. True to form, however, David blames Amy for ‘pushing’ him.

The following day David fires the workers, but even at this point he does it nervously and with diffidence. Later, David and Amy attend a church social. Amy is haunted by the trauma of the rape, and David, noticing her discomfort (yet still unaware of its source) suggests that they leave early.

They do, but it is a foggy night and, on the drive home, they hit the village idiot, Henry Niles. David takes him back to the farm. Unable to reach anyone as he telephones for help, however, he eventually telephones the village pub, with whose landlord he leaves a message.

This proves a mistake, though, for Niles had earlier in the evening disappeared with Janice Hedden, a village girl, who was later found dead: the girl’s father, Bobbie, an unemployed drunk and Charlie’s uncle, was by the time of David’s telephone call out for blood. Upon learning that Niles is at the Sumners’ farm, he and the workmen, including the two who raped Amy, decide to go there.

All drunk, they pound the door of the Sumners’ house and begin breaking windows. David refuses to give them Niles, despite his wife’s remonstrations, deciding it is a matter of principle. The violence escalates until the local magistrate arrives; the latter, however, is shot dead by Janice’s father. At this point, seeing that there was no turning back, the workmen decide to pull all the stops, and begin a violent siege. David attempts to defend his home, but, eventually, defenses are breached and some of the workmen gain access to the house. One by one, however, David kills them all. The last scene is David driving Niles back to town, smiling.

The film was meant to be an exploration of violence, and Dustin Hoffman is said to have agreed to play David Sumner because he was intrigued by the idea of a pacifist who was unaware of his capacity for violence.

I, however, see the film as an exploration of pacifism, and I believe David Sumner illustrates rather well how stupid we must look to our racial competitors when we remain silent in the face of their depredations and rationalize tolerating endless forced concessions and humiliations. To them, we are David Sumner; to us, they are the drunken villagers.

The villagers are rough, uncouth, virile, hard, clannish, and menacing; they wear Wellington boots and coarse garments; they represent low cunning, brute force, excess, base instinct, and manual labor. David Sumner is polished, polite, feminine, soft, individualistic, and physically insignificant; he wears cloth shoes, cotton, and wool; he represents intelligence, pacifism, moderation, high principle, and mental work.

The sad moral of the film is that low cunning and brute force tends to be an effective strategy for resource acquisition. It is certainly also a universal one, which is favored by the bulk of humanity. And even if David emerges victorious in the end, we are forced to think of what he has lost: his cat has been killed, his wife has been raped, his home has been trashed, his peace has been stolen, and any goodwill he might still have enjoyed among the villagers has been fully expended. It is reasonable to speculate that he will have to move out and be tried for the deaths of the men he has killed — he might even be convicted for some or all of those deaths, and his wife might even leave him in the end.

Despite his intelligence, his high principles, and good will, the evil, lazy, drunken, and dumb workmen are unimpressed and they manage to take everything away from him — everything, including his sense of self, for through his final resort to slaughter, he abdicates the intellectualism, pacifism, and high principles with which he sought to define himself. All right, the workmen lose their lives, but what do they care? Their lives seemed rather useless anyway and they are dead, so they do not suffer their loss.

There are a number of key points in the film worth noting.

As Charlie rapes Amy, she is seen to become enthralled by his obvious masculinity, and she, accordingly, allows herself to be dominated. This scene was controversial at the time and instigated bans and cuts. Yet, it is probably one of the most educational scenes. There is no doubt here that she re-discovers in Charlie what her husband is lacking; even if only momentarily, her brewing contempt for, and anger at, her husband for his spinelessness is what causes her only to mount a weak resistance and to finally melt and embrace Charlie’s usurpation.

And despite the second rape by one of Charlie’s friends, of which Charlie is an accomplice, the two men subsequently show neither remorse nor worry at the prospect of David finding out. It does not seem to even cross their minds for the remainder of the film. Throughout it, both before and after the rape, the workmen remain tight and maintain a united front; the Sumners, by contrast, are divided: they undermine each other; she taunts him he ignores her; she is petty, he is patronizing; she rebukes him, he dismisses her; and, in short, they fail to act as a unit — to synchronize, complement, and synergize — which is one of the keys to a solid marriage.

Although Amy’s anger was triggered by the cat incident, David’s weakness and the fissures in their marriage, not apparent to her until that point, are revealed much earlier, during the initial scenes of the film. The latter begins in Amy’s native village in Cornwall. She has obviously been away with David in America, and has only just returned; David has obtained a research grant and the nearby farm is to serve as a retreat.

Amy encounters Charlie as David is loading the Sumner’s car with groceries, and Amy and Charlie engage in conversation. She attempts to show off her husband, telling Charlie about his research. But she does not explain it accurately, and David makes a patronizing and dismissive remark.

This is mistake number one: a married man ought never to undermine his wife in front of third parties; only a coward would do so to a loving wife, and only a man not interested in keeping his wife would thus invite others to steal her from him.

Then, David, upon learning that Charlie is unemployed, decides to hire him, as the workman he had previously hired to build the roof of his garage was taking too long. David asks for a cost estimate, but Charlie says simply ‘Reasonable,’ an unspecific answer that David accepts.

Mistake number two: if your money is on the line, you always demand precise answers; you always establish who is boss.

David then goes to the pub nearby to purchase a packet of cigarettes. Bobbie Hedden, hunched over at the bar and drunk, notices David walking in and facially registers his scornful disgust at the sight of David’s unmanly shoes; David, oblivious, looks immediately weak in the hard, working man’s pub, standing wide-eyed as he blows his nose. By the time he approaches the bar and orders his cigarettes — apparently the wrong kind, as far as the locals are concerned — he has already marked himself, not only as an outsider, but as prey: he speaks quietly and unassertively and is, accordingly, ignored by the barman.

Mistake number three: in a hard setting, hard presentational tactics apply; the moment the newcomer enters the scene he is under observation, and male observers begin determining his position in the power hierarchy; it is essential to confidently and unambiguously establish an assertive position, and to scare off challengers before they dare surface.

David then walks to the window and witnesses Charlie putting his hand around his wife’s neck, in a possessive gesture of masculine assertion. Charlie is trying it on, attempting to revive an old romantic flame. David watches the scene, says nothing, and does nothing; therefore, it falls upon Amy to rebuff him, which she does. Charlie backs down as David returns. Despite what he has just witnessed, however, his behaviour remains agreeable.

Mistake number four: self-explanatory.

Thus we see that the mock politeness of Charlie and his workers and, subsequently, their escalating transgressions have very subtle and fleeting points of origin. David, a classic introverted, intellectual type, attaches little importance to what I would like to call here ‘primate politics.’ He probably has never even thought about it.

Perhaps this is because David grew up in, and inhabited, a rarefied environment, where other people were very much like him, and where, therefore, he lived a sheltered existence. As a result, with offensive and defensive instincts very weak, power moments and status challenges pass either unnoticed or unacknowledged, with power and status gains invariably defaulting to the challenger.

This is very much analogical to the position of European-descended peoples in relation to the ever-growing presence of, and ever-escalating challenges from, immigrants from the Third World in Europe and across the Anglophone world.

European man is said to be the product of environmental evolutionary pressures that occurred in relative geographical isolation and, therefore, occurred away from intensive ethnic and racial competition. With the environment, rather than competing human collectivities, presenting the main source of challenges, group strategies designed for dealing with competition from the latter appear not to have been as important as those designed for dealing with the former: it could be that for European man intelligent cooperation, rather than cunning competition, proved more adaptive, and that, consequently, any inborn ethnocentrism became weakened or recessive.

Be that as it may, it is clear that modern European man unwittingly marked himself as prey long ago, and that he continues to do so now because, like David in the film, he encounters a psychological — and perhaps even a physiological — barrier when faced with the need to overcome evolved temperamental proclivities that were once adaptive but have become maladaptive in the changed human ecology of traditional White homelands.

Besides what I outlined at the beginning of this review, a key lesson of this film is the importance of being alert, of remaining vigilant, and even of being on the lookout for those subtle power moments that fly by in an instant, well before a visible, tangible challenge occurs. Before present negative trends became established, there were plenty of opportunities to pre-empt even their origin — yet we failed to notice them, and, when we did, we failed to act upon them, each time in the belief that it was only a minor incident, not worth the hassle and the unpleasantness of kicking up a fuss. Even the most minor of transgressions needs to be taken very seriously, and retaliation has to come fast and overwhelmingly.

Straw Dogs is a splendidly shot film, and both the interiors and exteriors are highly evocative, sometimes because of their bucolic charm, sometimes because of their natural beauty, sometimes because of their chilling grimness. It is also a film that perpetuates the tired old stereotype of rural and small-town Whites: the village’s tightly-knit community is portrayed here in a blatantly negative way, to the point where the villagers are quasi-animalistic, nearly deformed, and positively sinister.

This is likely to resonate with a Jewish audience, not only because the village is what one would imagine is every Jew’s worst nightmare, but also because Dustin Hoffman is so obviously Semitic in his physiognomy and — being cerebral, bespectacled, puny, urban, and high minded — a fairly common type of hero in Jewish American cinema. (Sumner’s swipe at Christianity at one point in the film contributes to this perception.)

Yet, for those who know and appreciate European village folk and the charms of living in a close, friendly rural community, the villagers in this film resemble not real life ones in Cornwall, but our new non-European fellow citizens and arrivals — although many of the latter are far uglier, far ruder, far more lustful, far more primitive, far more rapacious, and far quicker to engage in evil violence.

It works in this case, but such negative portrayal of Cornish villagers ought to be admonished all the same. The Duchy of Cornwall should have slammed the filmmakers with an immediate suit for defamation, if only to teach them a lesson.

This is certainly a strong and excellent film, even though made decades ago – and a must for its educational value.

After much controversy, discussion, soul-searching, explanation, and legal posturing, BNP Chairman and Member of European Parliament Nick Griffin was allowed to participate in the BBC’s premier political television program, Question Time. The format of this show consists of a panel of politicians and public figures, sitting at a table, chaired by a moderator (David Dimbleby), and facing an audience inside a television studio. The purpose of the show is to perpetuate the illusion of a democratic society, whereby members of the public are given the opportunity to question politicians and public figures on current affairs issues in front of the nation. The show broadcasts from different cities every week, and average audience figures tend to be under the 3 million mark.

The audience for the 22 October 2009 edition — that is, the edition with Nick Griffin — was nearly 8 million viewers.

Nick Griffin is not new to mainstream television, having appeared on various news programs broadcast by corporate networks, including the BBC, ITN, and Sky. Appearing in Question Time, however, was different, for this is a one-hour forum, intended for mainstream politicians only. And this being the first time that the leader of a pro-White party was allowed to contribute his views to the political debate alongside mainstream politicians, the unrepresentative liberal clique that staff the present British establishment was terrified that Mr. Griffin’s appearance would cast the BNP as a credible party, thus increasing the voting public’s level of comfort with admitting sympathy for the party’s policies on race and immigration. The BBC bosses, however, perhaps because they relished the boost in audience, perhaps because they feared exposing themselves as the organ of liberal fascism that we all know they are, felt that they had better allow Mr. Griffin into their studio, deciding to remember that they are obligated to fulfill a charter of due impartiality.

I knew that the BBC would use every trick in the book to massively bias the program against Mr. Griffin, and ensure that he was properly and thoroughly humiliated. I knew that they would ensure that both the audience and fellow panelists were aggressively hostile. I knew also that they would focus their odion laserbeams onto Mr. Griffin for the duration of the program. I knew that they would make sure to keep the political discussion well away from relevant issues by dredging up the Nazis, the Holocaust, and the Ku Klux Klan. And I knew that Mr. Griffin would be interrupted at every possible moment and not given adequate opportunity to reply to accusations.

And, of course, I was not disappointed.

The BBC hosted the program in heavily multicultural London, thereby ensuring a strong presence by ethnic minorities while avoiding, by only technically fulfilling, their moral obligation to host an audience representative of the British population. And the BBC then invited Jack Straw, the (Jewish-descended) Justice Secretary, representing Labour; Bonnie Greer, a Chicago-born ultra-liberal Black playwright, author, and critic; Muslim Conservative politician Sayeeda Warsi, Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action (yes, we now need a whole ministry to try to keep communities from exploding); and Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat’s home affairs spokesman, a socialist. The set up was almost cartoonish in its tendentiousness, to the point where I could not help but imagine the program makers standing around the kettle in the BBC kitchen, doubled up in hysterical laughter, with tears running down their faces, as they dreamt up ever more outrageous ways to pervert the program.

The resulting spectacle presented by the BBC was shameful. The panelists were childish, their arguments moronic, their ad hominems base, their sophistry unbelievable, their self-delusion even more so. And their fear, in the secret knowledge that their position in these troubled times is weaker and more precarious than the public realizes, glaringly obvious.

As to the audience, it was apparent to anyone with detectable cranial cubicage that the BBC had comically contrived to fill the studio with all manner of hooting apes, pious liberals, rabid anti-racists, self-hating Whites, irascible Blacks, militant homosexuals, and politically agitated Muslims. The audience represented all manner of tricky demographics, including mixed-race British citizens, inter-racial couples, and descendants of Asian and Afro-Caribbean immigrants.

Accordingly, Mr Griffin was barely given opportunity to express himself on behalf of the million who voted for him: He was systematically attacked, he was seldom allowed to respond, he was almost never allowed to finish his sentences, and every minor hesitation or draw for breath was rudely exploited by his pitiless opponents. Mr. Dimbleby, who happens to be the president of the Institute for Citizenship, which issues resource packs aimed at promoting diversity and (get this) educating people about media bias, studiously tolerated this chaos. So much for due impartiality!

And, of course, all the while, an unwashed anti-White rabble of deranged, deformed, egg-pelting terrorists — sponsored by the government with tax-payers’ money — protested outside, having been frustrated in their attempts to prevent Mr. Griffin from entering the building or to have the BBC workers go on strike.

Mr. Griffin’s performance was not excellent. He was nervous, he faltered, he sought to be liked, to refute his media image as a hater, a Nazi, a racist, and a potential mass murderer in a suit, and he even made absurd attempts to ingratiate himself with Bonnie Greer. It seems harsh to rebuke him for being nervous: This is, to a large degree, physiological, and it is easier said than done to perform brilliantly in a psychologically hostile environment, in a situation that poses as a great opportunity, yet has been so carefully engineered to embarrass and discredit.

It also seems harsh to rebuke him for attempting to discredit the media portrayal of him as a nasty, hate-filled, and unpleasant hoodlum — no ordinary human wants to be perceived like that. Yet the nervousness is linked to what, to my mind, is the main weakness in Mr. Griffin’s position, so clearly exposed in the program, and to what motivated his attempts to make friends with those who despise him: As a politician, access to power and the media is a function of his being liked, and his being liked is a function of his perceived legitimacy as a politician, which is, in turn, a function of how much he is willing to conform to the liberal establishment’s ideological orthodoxy.

In other words, Mr. Griffin’s position is dependent on the favors and toleration of a corrupt power structure that abhors him and is fundamentally inimical to the interests of those whom he was elected to represent.

In the post mortem examination, Mr. Griffin will probably hope for sympathy and will re-evaluate his tactics. There is no question that his efforts to re-present the BNP to the public as a sensible party have yielded electoral results, and that, as a result, he has been able to reach a much wider audience.

There is also no question that many voters know that the only way to motivate mainstream politicians to listen to concerns they would rather ignore is to scare them with the threat of a so-called ‘fascist’ party coming to power. It was the BNP ‘threat,’ after all, that motivated the Conservatives to make immigration a campaign issue in the 2005 general election. Moreover, it is true that major movements have had marginal beginnings — one has only to look at the Labour Party itself. It is therefore possible that the BNP could continue to grow.

Yet, the creeps that comprise the present establishment will never cede power voluntarily: they are absolutely ruthless and amoral, they are convinced of their own righteousness, and they will never permit a threat to their existence. If there is a lesson from Mr. Griffin’s appearance in Question Time, it is that, when dealing with the enemy, it is futile to be anything but perfectly frank in one’s hostility, vicious in one’s humor, and relentless in one’s aggression. However elegant the suit or polished the language, one has to be proud to be considered a monster, a beast, a demon, and never apologize for it, never feel one owes an explanation, never accept their terms, never empathize, never sympathize, and never issue an apology. One must encourage their fear, relish their discomfort, and revel in their demonizations.

Some might not agree with unconventional opinions, but they all respect what they fear.

It is painful to think of the opportunities that went unexploited in this program. In theory, it should have been easy to make the establishment politicians in the panel look like fools, for it is not as if their parties have not already supplied — through a lurid chain of failure, corruption, deception, embezzlement, and scandals of every stripe, all going back decades — ample ammunition with which to gun them down into the trench of discredit and professional embarrassment. They are vermin; a horripilating freak show of intellectual dwarves, equivocating slugs, fiscal leeches, snake oil salesmen, lying demagogues, pompous ideologues, toxic pedagogues, legal eels, media lice, economic burglars, political toads, crooks, cowards, traitors, cretins, weirdos, academic fraudsters, and orangutanaceous buffoons. It should have been equally easy to ridicule their delirious utopian visions, for they have failed on every level, and the mess we are in is entirely of their making. No one else has been in power.

Unfortunately, Mr. Griffin’s desire for legitimacy and acceptance, caused him to temper his aggression and offer amiability: Much time was wasted in the effort to appear moderate by explaining, denying, or qualifying alleged remarks and previous statements, and not enough was invested in vigorously attacking the corrupt politicians and mediacrats, their lies, their cravenness, their slipperiness, and their catastrophic policy failures.

Mr. Griffin has performed much more forcefully on other occasions, and to his credit, he did go on the offensive several times, such was when he pointed out that during World War II his father had served in the RAF while Mr. Straw’s had been in prison for refusing to fight for his country. However, on the whole, despite presenting some sound arguments, he came across as defensive, almost obsequious, which hostile observers have smugly interpreted (for the ‘edification’ of fence-sitters) as evasion and as Mr. Griffin’s deceptiveness in the secret knowledge that he is wrong.

But he is not wrong. The aboriginals of the British Isles are White. They have never been, and will never be, anything else. They have a culture, a language, an identity, and a geographical space of their own. They are right to desire a White society. They are right to desire its continuity and prosperity. They are right to desire the ability to define themselves and to choose their own destiny. They are right to loathe and despise those who seek to take away what is rightfully theirs. They are right to wish the destruction of those who seek to destroy them. They are right to be vicious and ruthless in dealing with their enemies, because their enemies are vicious and ruthless too. They are right, and the Left is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, forever wrong.

This issue transcends British politics, because the same applies everywhere else across traditional White homelands. Utopian liberals dream of cohesive communities of multicultural diversity where very different groups live in splendid, impossible harmony, followed by a homogenized brown world were everyone looks the same, earns the same, and thinks the same. For utopian liberals equality is the ultimate goal, the key to happiness and human progress. If the price is the destruction of genius, the suppression of individuality, and the irrecoverable loss of beauty, so be it. It is monstrous, perverse, insane. Yet they are absolutely determined to realize their vision.

If we are to stop them, if we are to survive them, we have to embrace the Nietzschean maxim and dare to be ourselves. To be assertive and devoid of qualms in the pursuit of glory — of glory defined by us, for us, and in our terms. To not care what they think, to scorn their friendship, and be prepared to eat them, lest they eat us first.

Let us hope Mr. Griffin’s appearance has cured the hopeful of any illusions that this is anything but an all out war to the finish.

I was once asked to imagine what the world would look like today had North American settlers snubbed the African slave traders in the 18th and 19th centuries. We can let our imaginations run wild with speculation, but one thing is certain: had the slave markets in Africa been starved of custom, our Pop music charts would look nothing like they do today.

Most of mainstream Pop nowadays is African-American in either origin or derivation, even if the musicians playing it are not. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find even a nanosecond of music in the charts that is quintessentially European in its sensibility. The fact that music derived from African-American creativity has come to enjoy maximum visibility in contemporary mainstream culture, however, says more about the policies of corporate record labels and the mass media of news and entertainment than it does about the quality of music originating in the European soul on either side of the Atlantic. This music is alive and well, I am happy to report, thriving purer and truer than ever, aloof from—and completely ignored by—the brainless and banal MTV sausage factory.

What does this music sound like? . . . Read the whole article

Sometime ago I visited my local surgery. At the reception desk, I was confronted with a poster, bearing Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) logo. The poster was produced by the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), which is a spawn of the British government’s Department of Health. Across the top of the poster, in large white letters set against a black background, it read, “YOUR CHOICE OF TREATMENT.” Below followed eight captioned photographs, depicting eight models in different attires. The four on the left, under the captions “pharmacy,” “optician,” “dentist,” and “doctor,” sported smiling faces and a friendly manner; they were also ethnically diverse, with 50%–75% of the physiognomies bearing partly or wholly non-European features. The four on the right, under the captions “security,” “police,” “court,” and “prison,” sported serious faces and an unfriendly manner; they were ethnically homogeneous, with 100% of the physiognomies bearing Northern European features. Further down, in large white letters against a bright red background, the poster demanded “STOP ABUSE OF NHS STAFF,” and warned, “Verbal or physical abuse of our staff could result in prosecution.”

I am sure I am not the only here who has found the distribution of models rather odd. As it stands, the poster carries with it an obnoxious subtext: friendly help comes from the ethically diverse camp, while unfriendly punishment comes from the indigenous, White Britons. None of the three possible explanations for this subtext are flattering to the NHSBSA.

The first possible explanation is that the IQ distribution among members of the NHSBSA management is restricted to points along the far left end of the Bell Curve. And as the mean IQ is obviously very low, we must assume that some of the points on that curve will be found at such distance from the Caucasoid mean that supplying sufficient paper to print the full graph would necessitate clearing out the Amazon forest twice over. Were this not the case, the management at the NHSBSA would have quickly detected and harshly rebuked the knavish attempt to infuse the agency’s anti-white bigotry into their commission.

Unfortunately, they did not, thus suggesting either that the NHSBSA’s professed zeal for inclusiveness has motivated them to maintain lax cognitive requirements for employment within their organisation; or that their human resources department has been forced to lower their expectations from the available pool of labour in modern Britain, due to the accumulated dysgenic effects of Tory and Labour government policies.

The second possible explanation is that the NHSBSA is imperfectly committed to multiculturalism: They think it is OK to multiculturalize the NHS, but are happy to advocate institutional racism when it comes to extending the process of multiculturalization to private security agencies and the criminal justice system. A perfect commitment to multiculturalism would have demanded that either the Asian pharmacist or the African dentist be swapped with one of the scowling Englishmen on the right hand side for the sake of balance. . . . Read the whole article.