George Cochran Lambdin (1830–1896), "Girl Reading"

730 words

Editor’s Note:

As with our December newsletter, I have been unable to distribute our January newsletter to our mailing list due to computer problems. Rather than delay it any longer, I have decided simply to publish it on our front page.

Dear Friends of Counter-Currents,

1. Our Readership and Web Traffic

January was another month of record-breaking traffic at Counter-Currents/North American New Right.

If you visited our website in January, you were one of 56,633 unique visitors (up from 49,845 in December). These visitors paid us 107,644 visits in January (up from 97,223 visits in December). The pages you viewed were among the 408,373 pages viewed in January (up from 337,881 in December).

Trevor Lynch’s review of the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo remains our top article for the second consecutive month. Irmin Vinson on Hitler, Gregory Hood on Scarface, and Daniel Michaels on Stalin’s plan to conquer Europe remain some of our most popular essays. Jef Costello, Andrew Hamilton, and Greg Johnson each had 3 articles in our top 20. Matt Parrott and Trevor Lynch have two each.

Five of our top 20 articles are about films: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Scarface, Fight Club, Pulp Fiction, and No Country for Old Men. Hollywood and the television industry are the primary media of anti-white propaganda. Racially conscious analyses of movies and TV are thus highly effective at drawing traffic and combating enemy propaganda. (See Trevor Lynch, “Why I Write.”)

4. Announcing Counter-Currents Radio

On January 17, 2012, Mike Polignano and I launched Counter-Currents Radio, a weekly interview podcast. In addition to recordings of the interviews, we also make transcripts available. Our first three interviewees are Yoav Shamir, director of Defamation, Kevin MacDonald, author of The Culture of Critique, and Andy Nowicki, author of The Columbine Pilgrim and Under the Nihil. Podcasts go online every Tuesday evening. You can subscribe to them with iTunes.

5. Where Our Readers Are: The top 20 Countries

Our web statistics program gives us a country-by-country breakdown of our readership. Here are the top 20 countries:

1. United States
2. Great Britain
3. Germany
4. Canada
5. Sweden
6. Australia
7. France
8. Finland
9. Poland
10. Netherlands
11. Norway
12. Japan
13. Russian Federation
14. Mexico
15. Italy
16. Czech Republic
17. Spain
18. Brazil
19. India
20. Slovenia

6. Where Our Readers Are: The Top 20 Cities

1. New York City
2. London
3. San Francisco
4. Sydney
5. Vancouver, B.C.
6. Stockholm
7. Chicago
8. Toronto
9. Melbourne
10. Philadelphia
11. Washington, D.C.
12. Atlanta
13. Mexico City
14. Seattle
15. Berlin
16. Dallas
17. Winnipeg
18. Edinburgh
19. Montreal
20. Los Angeles

Nine of our top cities are in the United States. Four of them are in Canada. Two are in Australia. Four of our top 20 cities are on the West Coast of North America. Five of them are capital cities: Washington, D.C., London, Berlin, Stockholm, and Mexico City. Six if you count Edinburgh.

* * *

I want to thank our writers, donors, and proofreaders; our webmaster/Managing Editor; and above all, you, our readers for being part of a growing intellectual and spiritual community.

Greg Johnson
Editor-in-Chief
Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.
& North American New Right

A hard-drive crash (the second in as many months!) has completely erased my personal and business correspondence going back to December 20, 2011.

To make matters worse, I was weeks behind in answering some emails. So if you have been awaiting a response to an email, please resend it, so I can reply to you.

Also, those who signed up for our mailing list between now and December 20th should resend your emails.

I apologize for the inconvenience, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Greg Johnson
Editor

Léon Frédéric (1856–1940), "The Ages of the Worker," 1895, central part of a triptych, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

2,677 words

I know of a large German American Catholic family consisting of 22 single-birth children born to one married couple. The “children” are now middle-aged. At a recent reunion, over 100 family members were present. 

This family is not fundamentalist in any way, though one sister is a nun. As far as I know they are purely mainstream (which is not necessarily high praise). I never heard what philosophy motivated the parents, who were farmers, to have so many children.

The Most Children Ever Produced by One Mother: 69?

According to my 1978 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, the greatest number of children produced by one mother “in an independently attested case” (no sources were cited) was “the first wife” of Fyodor Vassilet (1816–1872), a peasant in European Russia. The number of offspring was 69. The woman was “so renowned that she was presented at the court of Czar Alexander II.”

Wikipedia helps clarify this entry in the popular record book.

It lists the name of the husband as Feodor Vassilyev, and situates him a century earlier. He is said to have lived c. 1707–1782. Thus, the wife could not have been presented at the court of Czar Alexander II, as Guinness stated; the Czar would have had to have been Alexander I.

The two sources are referring to the same individual, because the number of children and other details match. Wikipedia, however, is correct and Guinness wrong about dates, because Wikipedia links directly to the relevant primary source for the information. The online encyclopedia also provides quotations from persuasive authorities suggesting that the information may not be reliable.

For example, the proper name, birth and death dates, and other information about the mother are not known.

All 69 children allegedly resulted from multiple births, with no single births whatsoever: 16 pairs of twins, 7 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets (= 69).

Casting further doubt on the story, the original 1783 Gentleman’s Magazine source claims that Vassilyev’s second wife gave birth to an addition 18 children, also from multiple births: 6 sets of twins and two sets of triplets (= 18). Naturally, there were no fertility drugs in those days. (For the increased risks associated with multiple births, see below.)

It was also an age when high child mortality was the norm, yet 84 of the children of the two marriages supposedly survived, and only 3 died—a suspiciously low number.

So it would appear that there is no compelling reason to accept the story of 69 children in this case. Therefore, I don’t know what the correct, verifiable record number of children born to a single mother might be. Certainly, one would have to distinguish between historical examples and modern births involving assisted techniques.

The Demographic Transition

Large white families were much more common before the “profound transformation” wrought by the European “demographic transition” [1:08 mins.] than they are today.

Italian demographer Massimo Livi-Bacci maintains that the tremendous decline in European fertility associated with the Industrial Revolution was due primarily to a large increase in the cost of rearing children compared to the preceding millennia-long agricultural era, which resulted in “voluntary fertility control” through family planning.

The rise of mass communications and the dismantlement of social controls formerly imposed by Western laws, traditions, institutions, and religion were also vital in causing a decline in births.

Birth control in Europe and other developed regions, Livi-Bacci writes, was once “virtually unknown except to select groups (nobility, the urban bourgeoisie).” But at the end of the 19th century it spread rapidly. It did not reach some rural and peripheral areas until the middle of the 20th century, however.

Large families are still the norm in the Third World, as well as among non-whites imported into First World countries to replace the native inhabitants.  Therefore, many non-white populations continue to expand at a rapid pace. Their death rate has been slashed by foreign aid and other Western largesse, while fertility rates remain high.

Relying upon the prevailing universalistic creed that all races are identical, globalist planners and demographers hypothesize that non-white populations will likewise undergo a demographic transition (huge decline in fertility) in the future.

Despite the long-term negative population growth rate among whites, some large white families as well as a nascent natalist ideology do exist.

The (Non-White) Gosselins

Jon and Kate Gosselin starred in a popular cable TV reality show called Jon & Kate Plus 8 (Kate Plus 8 after their split) from 2007–2011. I have never seen this program.

The Gosselin Family

During its first year, the show aired on Discovery Health, a now-defunct cable channel owned by Discovery Communications, Inc., whose CEO is David Zaslav and major investor is the Newhouse family. From 2008–2011 it ran on TLC, another Discovery-owned channel.

Kate Gosselin (née Kreider), is one of five children of a pastor. Her (now) ex-husband Jon is reportedly half-Korean and half-white. So the 8 child stars are 75% white and 25% Korean.

They were conceived with the aid of fertility drugs, a set of twins first, followed by sextuplets. My impression is that the couple did not expect to have sextuplets the second time around.

All of the Gosselin births were premature, the twins at 8 months and the sextuplets at 7 months. As a result, the sextuplets were placed on ventilators.

Fertility drugs have a higher likelihood than natural methods of producing multiple births, including increased numbers of twins, triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, sextuplets, and so forth, as well as premature births. While many or most premature babies survive today, I don’t know whether they suffer any negative long-term aftereffects.

The Gosselins appear to be entirely secular. Much tabloid gossip was generated by Jon Gosselin’s affair with the (evidently) Jewish daughter of Kate’s plastic surgeon, the woman’s possible trashing of his apartment, etc.

A major reason for the family’s strong appeal to television executives (and viewers) was no doubt its conspicuous display of racial hybridity.

The family is a model of multiracialism and non-whiteness; socially, Jon and Kate and their offspring should be regarded as foreign. The gene flow exhibited in this case should be directed away from, not into, the white community.

The Duggar Family—19 Children & Counting

Less famous but more interesting and educational from our perspective are the Duggars, another reality TV show family seen on Discovery-owned TLC, 19 Kids and Counting (formerly 17 Kids and Counting and 18 Kids and Counting) (2008–present).

The Duggar family

This is another program I have not seen.

The show tells the day-to-day story of James Robert “Jim Bob” and Michelle (née Ruark) Duggar and their 19 children—nine girls and ten boys who all have names beginning with the letter “J.”

The parents, described as conservative, fundamentalist Baptists, married in 1984 and practiced birth control. Their first child was born three years later. They resumed birth control, but Mrs. Duggar conceived anyway and suffered a miscarriage. This they interpreted as a religious sign, and thereafter decided to let God determine how many children they should have.

From that point on, Mrs. Duggar gave birth at regular intervals of approximately a year and a half.

In addition to the first miscarriage, another child was delivered 3 months prematurely via emergency C-section, weighing 1 lb., 6 oz. at birth. This child survived. In December 2011 Michelle Duggar, then age 46, suffered a second miscarriage while pregnant with her 20th child.

Of 21 children, 19 of whom survived and two miscarried, two were home birthed and 4 (including 3 of the last 5) were delivered via C-section.

The only multiple births were two sets of fraternal twins. Like most natalist Christians, the Duggars do not use fertility drugs.

According to Mark Perloe, M.D., an Atlanta infertility specialist, there is a lifetime fertility window:

A woman reaches her peak fertility at age 18 or 19, with little change until the mid-20s. As she approaches age 30, her hormone levels start to decline and her fertility also begins a slow decline, with a more rapid decline after age 35. Menopause, which occurs in the late 40s to early 50s in most women, marks the end of a woman’s natural ability to bear children. A man’s fertility decline is not as rapid and has no clear-cut end point, but a man of 50 has lower hormone levels and is likely less fertile than he was at age 25 or 30. (“Infertility,” Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2005)

When the couple married in 1984 Mr. Duggar was 19 and Mrs. Duggar 17. Their first child was born when they were 22 and 21 respectively; in 2009, when their 19th surviving child was born, they were 44 and 43.

Mr. and Mrs. Duggar adhere to various conservative family practices, including home schooling, which are summarized in their Wikipedia entry. In common with other large Christian families, every child is responsible for helping to raise the younger children.

The family lives in Arkansas. The husband, “of English descent,” is in real estate and owns several commercial properties. Mr. Duggar served as a Republican in the Arkansas House of Representatives from 1999–2002.

The family is a good example of how ideology (in this case religious belief) can potentially influence fertility decisions even in today’s anti-natalist (at least for whites) environment.

Of course, the very sight of the large Duggar family—white and Christian, the two most hated identities in the contemporary world—drives denizens of the fever swamps crazy.

A Google search for “Duggars racist” generates 600,000 hits.

The Quiverfull Movement

Quiverfull (a term derived from Psalms 127:3–5) is an informal natalist movement among some conservative evangelical Christians, mostly in the US, but also in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It is important to note that other Christian families eschew the name but follow similar principles.

The core Quiverfull beliefs are that Christians should maintain a welcoming attitude toward large families, and birth control should be rejected.

It is a small movement. Even its noisiest Establishment critic, Kathryn Joyce (whose race is not clear from her photograph; she might be white), reluctantly admits, “The number of families who have committed themselves wholly to the Quiverfull path doesn’t represent any pollster’s idea of a key demographic.”

Nevertheless, she worries (or pretends to) that in a generation or two the barbarians might accomplish a “demographic revolution.” However, this appears to be fear and loathing more than reason talking. Joyce of course depicts the movement as racist and antifeminist.

Early Quiverfull pioneers were a woman named Nancy Campbell (Be Fruitful and Multiply, 2003), and especially Mary Pride, a former radical feminist who in 1985 published The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality.

Mary Pride’s oldest daughter wrote on Amazon.com: “I grew up in the halo of this book. I don’t know even how much of an influence it had. All I know is that, whenever I went with my mother to homeschool conferences, dads and moms would bring up their children and say, ‘Look! He wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t read your book!’”

Interestingly, the Quiverfull movement rejects infertility treatments on Biblical grounds but welcomes large-scale adoptions, thereby opening the door wide to interracialism.

Implications

Replacement fertility—where each generation exactly replaces the one before it (i.e., equilibrium, or zero population growth—no expansion)—is currently 2.1 children per couple in the First World and 2.4 in developing countries.

Replacement fertility exceeds 2 because more boys are born than girls (the sex ratio at birth is 1.05/1.06 boys for 1 girl) and also because children who die before reaching reproductive age must be replaced by additional births. The higher mortality, the higher replacement fertility. (Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population, 4th ed., Blackwell Publishing, 2007, p. 242 n. 20)

Because some men and women in each generation do not reproduce, couples who do so must give birth to more than 2.1 children to sustain the overall population level.

Actual First World fertility is currently below replacement level (signifying population implosion)—despite factoring in miscegenation, which is now substantial, and the high birth rates attributable to permanently-settled non-whites, whose numbers under existing policies are continuously augmented by new arrivals, legal and illegal, at a ferocious pace.

The implications are harsh. Population changes

vary between a maximum annual potential growth rate of 4 percent (many developing countries have a growth rate of over 3 percent) and a minimum of -1 percent (which will be realized by many European countries should the current fertility and mortality levels remain unchanged). We are able to recognize the exceptional nature of the current situation if we keep in mind that a population growing at an annual rate of 4 percent will double in about 18 years, while another declining by 1 percent per year will halve in 70. Two populations of equal size [emphasis added] experiencing these different growth rates will find themselves after 28 years (barely a generation) in a numerical ratio of four-to-one! (Livi-Bacci, World Population, p. 20)

Note that Livi-Bacci is saying that these disparate extremes exist now. Whites are clearly on the losing end. Observe too the tremendous velocity built into the numbers. Race is not static.

Christianity and Natalism

I cite the various Christian examples of natalism here not because they are pro-white. The Christian religion as presently constituted, including its fundamentalist or conservative manifestation, is the opposite. (I am ignoring for the moment marginal variations such as Kinism or Christian Identity, for whom whiteness is central and explicit.)

Not only are Christians not explicitly white, they are effectively anti-white. Race either plays no role in their thinking, or members actively reject white identity—but not Jewish, black, or other politically correct expressions of racism. I assume this is the result of cultural conditioning rather than religion. At least that’s what history would suggest.

Unlike Jews, Christians have no racially exclusive membership criteria, or explicit, effective barriers to, or admonitions against, interracial marriage. When pressured, they will doubtless strive, like the Mormons, to dilute their racial makeup in hope of destroying its “too white”-ness.

Thus, Christianity as formulated and practiced in the contemporary non- and anti- white world will never preserve our people. Even if it can sustain itself religiously, which remains to be seen, it will self-destruct racially because Christian whiteness is viewed as a purely incidental, and probably undesirable, attribute.

Racially, the Duggars and others like them are already the Gosselins. It’s simply a matter of time.

However, large natural families like the Duggars or the German American family I mentioned at the outset are concrete examples, or models, of how population expansion, under current conditions or within a white ethnostate, can begin. The higher the total fertility rate, the quicker population recovery can occur.

The individuals and movements discussed here demonstrate concretely how natalism could work for anyone, right now, in practice. Christian natalists are altering their lifestyles and behavior without possessing a state of their own, separating themselves and their families now—ideologically, psychologically, behaviorally, and educationally (via home schooling) in ways that conscious whites have yet to match.

The good news is that there is a substantial amount of cumulative experience, information, and guidance for young whites to draw upon should they choose this path. Like their forebears and contemporary “quiverfull” Christians, young whites would have to develop faith that they could make it.

Perhaps the greatest leap forward has been the huge reduction in infant mortality. In the past as many as one-third to one-half of children born might perish before reaching reproductive maturity.

Today, almost all children conceived will survive, even in the largest families. This is something new under the sun, greatly enhancing the possibility of population recovery. Fertility drugs, despite drawbacks, could also prove advantageous.

In terms of white survival, concerned families would have to develop, sustain, and transmit across successive generations a powerful sense of individual and group identity effectively rooted in whiteness.

The primary problem for whites, as for Christians, is the powerful undertow produced by a deeply hostile, all-intrusive, one-sided culture capable of nullifying all of their hard work. Defection and intergenerational attrition is likely to remain high as long as control of the culture and government remain in alien hands.

The siren call of the sewer, the gutter, and the mass will remain stronger than culturally transmitted family values for a long time to come.

World War II Memorial, Washington, D.C.

275 words

“We lose 1000 WW II veterans every day. Take a moment to share your stories.” — Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, tweet, June 6th, 2011

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell

There’s so much that you could say, isn’t there,
Old friends? And not many of you left who
Remember the truth, all these years later.
Plus, you don’t know who would listen to you,
Do you? Know this: we will. So, will you few
Clear your wrinkled throats, and start to express
How it was? Will you, who are dying next,

Now give us, who are living now, some thing
Real of the truth, your own truths, all the bits
That make up which truths are worth the sorting
Out and telling? Your own black sun still hits
Our shoulders every day. We know what fits
The stories that are whispered, but we don’t know
The truth. We know that. So, before you go,

Before you and your comrades leave, and our
World forever loses you, please listen
To this: we want to listen to you. For
You have something we may never again
Have the chance to know your truths. And when
You die, if you leave silently, we’ll be
The lesser for them: your lost truths that we

Could use to know ourselves. Will you please tell
Us — will you please share every unsaid thought
That will help us find what’s true, and what’s well
And truly fiction, from what is just not?
Do not die without passing forward what
You know about your time, that bright time when
Hope stood gladly with you, Europa’s men.

The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) is the second novel/movie in the dismayingly popular Millennium Trilogy by the late Swedish communist and feminist Stieg Larsson. It is the sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which was recently remade in English directed by David Fincher. Assuming that Hollywood will remake all three Swedish films, we might as well get a sneak preview by taking a look at the Swedish sequels.

The basic cast of The Girl Who Played with Fire is the same as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, although the new movie was directed by Daniel Alfredson instead of Niels Arden Oplev. The look and style of both movies is very much the same.

I will now spoil the movie by summarizing the plot.

The Girl Who Played with Fire is set a year or so after the first movie. Lisbeth Salander, the “girl” of the title (although shouldn’t womyn find “girl” demeaning?), has been living abroad but decides to return to Sweden. She stops by the home of her legal guardian, the lawyer Bjurman, who in the previous movie had a thing for tying her up and raping her. Lisbeth filmed one of these rapes and used it to blackmail Bjurman. To remind him of their arrangement, Lisbeth brandishes Bjurman’s gun at him.

A short while later, Bjurman’s gun is used to kill Bjurman and a young couple, Mia and Dag. Lisbeth’s fingerprints are on the gun, so by an unlikely turn of events, she becomes a murder suspect.

The young couple were investigating human trafficking: the kidnapping of young Russian and East European women for sex slaves. (We see a Swedish journalist drooling as he rapes a young Russian who is tied to a bed.) Mia wrote her doctoral dissertation, From Russia With Love, on the subject. And, by another unlikely turn of events, her boyfriend Dag was writing about it for Millennium magazine, a Left-wing journal that employs Mikael Blomkvist, Salander’s partner in crime-solving in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

With virtually no contact, Salander and Blomkvist work independently to solve the murders and clear Salander. (The two only see each other at the very end of the movie.)

But the improbabilities are just getting started. It turns out that the man running the human trafficking ring is Alexander Zalachenko, a Soviet GRU (military intelligence) defector who is living in Sweden. His trigger man is his son, Ronald Niedermann, a giant blonde thug who is incapable of feeling pain. (We’re getting into Bond territory here.)

Zalachenko turns out to be Lisbeth Salander’s father. (Niedermann is her half-brother.) Zalachenko regularly raped and assaulted Lisbeth’s mother until she suffered permanent brain damage. Lisbeth, aged 12, then doused her father in gasoline and struck a match, leaving him disfigured and crippled.

Zalachenko’s handlers in the Swedish government had Lisbeth confined to a mental institution for two years, where she spent more than half of the time tied to a bed (again with the bondage) by Dr. Peter Teleborian, a creepy psychiatrist with a penchant for underage girls. Lisbeth then was placed under the care of Holger Palmgren, a sympathetic social worker. Since she was deemed incapable of functioning as an adult, Bjurman the rapist was eventually appointed her legal guardian.

For no apparent reason, Zalachenko decides he wants Bjurman’s files on Lisbeth, and Bjurman wants Lisbeth’s blackmail video in exchange. For no apparent reason, Zalachenko dispatches Niedermann to kill Bjurman, even though his files on Lisbeth remain hidden. Then Niedermann kills the young couple who were working to expose his father’s sex trafficking business. Niedermann also goes searching for Lisbeth.

Lisbeth takes up with one of her old lesbian flames, a blue-eyed woman with the unlikely name of Miriam Wu. We are treated to a long sex scene, which they refer to as “fucking,” proving that sex education is not as advanced in Sweden as we were led to believe. To find Lisbeth, Niedermann abducts Wu but extracts no useful information from her, so he decides to burn her alive in a warehouse along with Paolo Roberto, a boxing instructor who comes to her rescue (they escape).

Lisbeth goes to Bjurman’s weekend cottage and finds his secret files on her. Two motorcycle gangsters who work for Niedermann arrive to torch the place. Naturally, they decide to rape her. Lisbeth, using pepper spray, kick-boxing, a taser, and a lot of grrrrrl power, overcomes the two toughs and escapes on one of their bikes.

Lisbeth finally tracks down Zalachenko and goes to confront him. She is captured. Niedermann digs a grave. Lisbeth tries to escape, but she is shot three times, once in the head, and buried. Yet she survives and manages to dig herself out with her cigarette case. She then plants an axe in Zalachenko’s head and leg. With Zalachenko’s gun, she chases off Niedermann. Only then does she collapse. Did I mention that the story is unlikely?

The movie ends with Blomkvist arriving to call the police and paramedics, who whisk both Lisbeth and Zalachenko, both of them still alive, off for treatment.

The Girl Who Played with Fire is a boring film. It clocks in at 2 hours, 9 minutes, but feels as long as The Lord of the Rings. There are many places in the film where a better director could create a great deal of suspense. But the real weakness is the underlying story, which is just a pulpy mishmash of one damn improbability after another, but filmed with the utmost seriousness.

Lisbeth Salander has to be the most unlikeable heroine in all of literature. Frankly, I cannot fathom the mind that would find her admirable. She strikes me as nothing but an embodiment of feminist paranoia and hatred. I can’t even feel sorry for her, since her suffering is so unlikely.

Larsson does not make it clear if all Swedish women are tied up and raped by every third Swedish man, or if Lisbeth is just accident prone. But clearly he thinks that a very high percentage of Swedish men are rapists, hence their need to import victims. In reality, however, it is the rapists, not the victims who come from abroad: Virtually all the rape and sexual exploitation of Swedish women is the handiwork of non-white immigrants, primarily Muslims — imported and championed by feminist, multicultural leftists like Stieg Larsson.

Furthermore, virtually all the trafficking in sex slaves in Russia and Eastern Europe is the handiwork of Jews, not ethnic Russians like Zalachenko. Larsson, moreover, was well aware of this connection, which we can infer from his studied attempt to invert reality. In one of the most interesting scene changes in the movie, we go from the discovery of the murdered couple to . . . a synagogue in Stockholm. A cell phone rings during the service, and a Jew answers. Is Larsson actually going to touch on the Jewish role in the sexual exploitation of Eastern European women? Of course not. This is Jan Bublanski, a policeman, one of the good guys, a real Mensch who is so concerned with helping his fellow man that he leaves his phone on in shul.

In spite of the Millennium Trilogy’s strident feminism, the truth is that for Larsson and the left in general, the safety of white women is trumped every time it conflicts with the overriding agenda of preserving Jewish power and promoting white race replacement.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an evil film, but it still manages to be engrossing. This is also an evil film, filled with lies. But the story is so stupid, the villains so laughably cardboard, the heroes so wetly liberal, and the directing so boring that it is not a particularly apt propaganda vehicle. It will be interesting to see what Hollywood can make of it.

Editor’s Note:

A. R. D. Fairburn was born on February 2, 1904. Fairburn was a poet, painter, critic, essayist, and advocate of Social Credit, New Zealand Nationalism, and organic farming. In commemoration,we are publishing the following expanded version of Kerry Bolton’s essay on Fairburn. To read Fairburn’s magnificent poem “Dominion,” click here.

A. R. D. “Rex” Fairburn, 1904–1957, is not usually identified with the “Right.” As a central figure in the development of a New Zealand national literature, much of the contemporary self-appointed literary establishment would no doubt wish to identify Fairburn with Marxism or liberalism, as were other leading literary friends of Fairburn’s such as the Communist R. A. K. Mason.

However, the primary influences on Fairburn were distinctly non-Left, and include D. H. Lawrence, Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and of course Social Credit’s Major C. H. Douglas.

While Fairburn described himself at times as an “anarchist,”[1] it was of a most unorthodox type, being neither Left-wing nor Libertarian. For Fairburn outspokenly rejected all the baggage dear to the Left, including feminism and internationalism. His “anarchism” was the type of individualism of the Right that called for a return to decentralized communities comprised of self-reliant craftsmen and farmers. His creed was distinctly nationalistic and based on the spiritual and the biological components of history and culture, both concepts being antithetical to any form of Leftism.

We feel more than justified then in identifying Fairburn as an “Artist of the Right.”

Rejection of Rationalism

Fairburn was born in modest though middle class circumstances. He was proud of being a fourth generation New Zealander related to the missionary Colenso.

Although critical of the Church hierarchy and briefly involved with the Rationalist Association, Fairburn was for most of his life a spiritual person, believing that the individual becomes most profoundly who he is by striving towards God. He believed in a basic Christian ethic minus any moralism. Fairburn soon realized that rationalism by itself answers nothing and that it rejects the dream world that is the source of creativity. He was in agreement here with other poets of the Right such as Yeats, and often stated throughout his life his rejection of materialism.

While he concurred with his friend Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, who called poets a “spiritual aristocracy,” Fairburn at first thought socialism was the answer to “free artists of economic, worldly shackles,” and even made sporadic favorable references to Communism.[2] However, in particular he looked to the non-doctrinaire socialism not of a political theorist but of another artistic luminary, Oscar Wilde, whose essay on the subject[3] he enthusiastically recommended to Potocki, Wilde advocating the elimination of the “burden” of private property to free the creative spirit from economic drudgery.[4]

Potocki would have no belief in socialism of any type other than “national socialism,” and Fairburn would find the answer to the economic question he was looking for in Social Credit. Nonetheless, the early socialist interests were part of Fairburn’s quest for a more humane system.

Fairburn throughout his life rejected any form of “materialism” and rationalism, and it seems likely that in his youth he had not realized that these are the predicates of communism and most forms of socialism, having rather a romantic ideal of “socialism” and even of “communism.” The counting-house mentality came to be seen by Fairburn as intrinsic to rationalism and it repelled his sense of the spiritual.

This,
having rejected Jonah and Genesis,
contrived to erect
a towering edifice of belief
on the assumption that God
is an abridgement of the calculus
and lived happily
ever after.
What is adequate suffices.[5]

England

Potocki had left New Zealand in disgust at the cultural climate and persuaded Fairburn to join him in London, since New Zealand prevented them from doing what they were born for, “to make and to mould a New Zealand civilization,” as Potocki stated it.

Fairburn arrived in London in 1930. Like Potocki, he was not impressed with bohemian society and the Bloomsbury intellectuals who were riddled with homosexuality, for which both Potocki and Fairburn had an abiding dislike.[6] He was reading and identifying with Roy Campbell’s biting satire and ridicule of Bloomsbury,[7] and there was much of the “wild colonial boy” in both personalities.

However, away from the bohemianism, intellectualism, and pretentiousness of the city, Fairburn came to appreciate the ancestral attachment with England that was still relevant to New Zealanders through a continuing, persistent “earth-memory.”[8]

In London he felt the decay and decadence of the city. Like Knut Hamsun and Henry Williamson, Fairburn conceived of a future “tilling the soil.” He now stated: “I’m going to be a peasant, if necessary, to keep in touch with life,” and he and his future wife lived for a year at a thatch-roofed cottage in Wiltshire.

Regarding a land and culture in metaphysical terms gave Fairburn a deeper spirituality than he could find in modern religion, while early eschewing rationalism and godlessness, and the land became fundamental to his world-view. His reading of Spengler would have made him acutely aware of the land and the farmer/peasant as the foundations of a healthy culture, and of the symptoms of cultural decay and of the predominance of money-values in the “Winter” cycle of a civilization, when the land becomes denuded of people, debt-ridden, with foreclosures and urban drift.

The barn is bare of hoof and horn,
the yard is empty of its herds;
the thatch is grey with age and torn,
and spattered with the dung of birds.

The well is full of newts, the chain
long broken, and the spindle cracked,
and deep in nettles stands the wain
three-wheeled, with rotten hay half-stacked.

Where are the farmer and his bride
who came from their honeymoon in spring
filled full with gaudy hope and pride,
and made the farm a good paying thing? . . .[9]

Social Credit

In 1931 Fairburn was introduced to A. R. Orage,[10] who had published New Zealander Katherine Mansfield, and who was editing the New English Weekly which was bringing forth a new generation of talents to English literature, including Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Orage was a “guild socialist,” advocating a return to the medieval guilds which had upheld craftsmanship and represented interests according to one’s calling rather than one’s political party. Orage met C. H. Douglas in 1918 and had himself become a seminal influence on Social Credit. Orage probably introduced Fairburn to Douglas around 1931.[11]

Fairburn  had read Spengler’s Decline of the West at least as early as 1930. He saw that New Zealand as a cultural outpost of Europe was just as much subject to Spengler’s cyclical laws of decline as the Occident.[12] It would have been with the fatalist eyes of a Spenglerian that Fairburn observed London and bohemian society and recognized in them the symptoms of decadence of which Spengler wrote, retreating to rural England where cultural health could still be found.

However, Fairburn felt that the vitality of individuals could be the answer to a reinvigorated culture, and break the cycle of decay, rather than the rise of  a Caesar that Spengler stated was a kind of “last hurrah” of a Civilization before its eclipse,[13] despite Fairburn’s earlier belief that Social Credit could only be “ushered in by a dictatorship.”[14] This anti-statist, individualist belief reflects two major influences on Fairburn, that of Nietzsche and of D. H. Lawrence,[15] who espoused “heroic vitalism” as the basis of history.[16]

Spengler however, also had much to say on the role of money and plutocracy in the final or “Winter” epoch of a civilization, and of the last cultural resurgence that saw the overthrow of money by “blood,” or what we might call the instinctual.[17] It is not too speculative to believe that Fairburn saw “Social Credit” as the practical means by which the money-power could be overthrown through economic reform rather than through an authoritarian “Caesar” figure. Fairburn returned to a Spenglerian theme in 1932 when writing to his communist friend, the poet R. A. K. Mason: “A civilization founded on Materialism can’t last any time historically speaking of course. But it may be necessary to go through the logical end of our present trend of development before we can return to the right way of life.”[18]

While Fairburn agreed with Marx that capitalism causes dehumanization, he rejected the Marxist interpretation of history as based on class war and economics. Materialistic interpretations of history were at odds with Fairburn’s belief that it is the Infinite that touches man. Art is a manifestation of the eternal, of pre-existing forms. It is therefore the calling of the artist to see what is always here and bring it forth.[19]

Fairburn met the Soviet press attaché in England but concluded that the USSR had turned to the 19th century Western ideal of the machine. He did not want a Marxist industrial substitute for the capitalist one. Hence Fairburn’s answer amidst a decaying civilization was the vital individual: not the alienated “individual” thrown up by capitalism, but the individual as part of the family and the soil, possessing an organic rootedness above the artificiality of both Marxism and capitalism. Culture was part of this sense of identity as a manifestation of the spiritual.[20]

Not surprisingly, Fairburn was increasingly distanced from his communist friends. He was repelled by communist art based on the masses and on the fetish for science, which he called “false.” He writes: “Communism kills the Self—cuts out religion and art, that is today. But religion and art ARE the only realities.”[21]

Fairburn also repudiated a universal ideal, for man lived in the particular. New Zealand had to discover its own identity rather than copying foreign ideas. Another communist friend, the photographer Clifton Firth, wrote that the “New Zealand penis was yet to be erect.” To this Fairburn replied: “True, but as a born New Zealander, why don’t you try to hoist it up, instead of tossing off Russia? Why steal Slav gods? Why not get some mud out of a creek and make your own?”[22]

The artist and poet William Blake appealed to Fairburn’s spiritual, anti-materialist sentiments, as a means of bringing English culture out of decadence, Blake being for Fairburn “the rock on which English culture will be built in the future, when Christianity dies of an inward rot,”[23] Blake’s metaphysic holding forth against the tide of industrialization and materialism.[24] Fairburn also saw in D. H. Lawrence “a better rallying point than Lenin.”[25] He was similarly impressed with Yeats.[26] In 1931 he wrote to Guy Mountain that “Lawrence is the big man of the century as far as we are concerned.” To Clifton Firth he wrote of a lineage of prophets against the materialist age: William Blake, Nietzsche, and Lawrence.[27]

To Mason, he wrote: “our real life is PURELY spiritual. Man is not a machine.”[28]

While social reform was required, it was the inner being that resisted the onrush of materialism, and Blake “was a great old boy” for what he had offered to those who fought against the material: “Social reform by all means: but the structures of the imagination are the only ones which, fortified by the spirit, can resist all the assaults of a kaleidoscopic world of matter.”[29]

In 1932 Fairburn wrote an article for the New English Weekly attacking materialism. He feared that the prosperity that would be generated by Social Credit monetary reform would cause rampant materialism devoid of a spiritual basis. He saw the aim of monetary reform as being not simply one of increasing the amount of material possessions, but as a means of achieving a higher level of culture.

Fairburn wished for a post-industrial, craft and agricultural society. The policy of Social Credit would achieve greater production and increase leisure hours. This would create the climate in which culture could flourish. Because culture requires sufficient leisure time beyond the daily economic grind, not simply for more production and consumption, as the declining cultural level of our own day shows, despite the increasing quantity of consumer goods available. It was the problem that Fairburn had seen admirably but impractically addressed by Oscar Wilde, but the practical solution of which could now be sought in Social Credit, which moreover did not aim to abolish private property but to ensure its wider distribution as a means of freedom rather than servitude.

In June 1932  Fairburn wrote to Mason that if the Labour Party rejected Social Credit economics,[30] he would on returning to New Zealand start his own movement:

 If I were in NZ I should try to induce Holland[31] and the Labour Party to adopt the Social Credit scheme. Then, if they turned it down, I should start a racket among the young men off my own bat. A Nationalist, anti-Communist movement, with strong curbs on the rich; anti-big-business: with the ultimate object of cutting NZ away from the Empire and making her self-supporting. That party will come in England hence, later in NZ. I should try and anticipate it a little, and prepare the ground. Objects: to cut out international trade as far as possible (hence, cut out war); to get out of the clutches of the League of Nations; to assert NZ’s Nationalism, and make her as far as possible a conscious and self-contained nation on her own account. I should try, for the time being, to give the thing a strong military flavor. No pacifism, “idealism,” passive resistance, or other such useless sentimentalities. Then, when the time came, a Fascist coup might be possible.

But Social Credit and Nationalism would be the main planks and the basis of the whole movement. Very reactionary, you will say. But I am quite realistic now about these things. No League of Nations, Brotherhood of Man stuff. “Man is neither a beast nor an angel”: but try to make him into an angel, and you will turn him into a beast, idealism is done with—over—passé—gone phut.

Behind the labels, of course, all this would be a cunning attempt to get what we are actually all after: decent living conditions, minimum of economic tyranny, goods for all, and the least possible risk of war. Our Masters, the Bankers, would find it harder to oppose such a movement than to oppose communism. And it would be more likely to obtain support.[32]

Murray in commenting on this stated of Social Credit that it drew from both the Left and the Right, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound being Social Credit adherents from the Right, while New Zealand author Robin Hyde, a Leftist, also embraced Social Credit. As for Fairburn, Murray describes him as “probably one of the most notable campaigners for Douglas’s ideas in New Zealand [who had] flirted with at least the theories of fascism early in the decade.”[33]

On his return to New Zealand Fairburn, instead of launching his own movement, wholeheartedly campaigned for Social Credit, mainly through his position as assistant secretary of the Auckland Farmers’ Union, which had a social credit policy, and as editor of its paper Farming First, a post he held until being drafted into the army in 1943. As Trussell says of New Zealand during the early 1930s, “Everywhere now Douglas Credit was in its heyday,” and in 1932 the Social Credit association was formed, followed that year by the adoption of Social Credit policy by the Auckland Farmers’ Union. “Rex Quickly slipped into the routine of a campaigner,” speaking at Social Credit meetings, and engaging in public debates.[34]

As Trussell accurately observes, although the Social Credit association did not field candidates,[35] the victorious Labour Party incorporated some of Social Credit’s “more useful concepts.”[36]

National Culture, Organic Society

Around the closing years of the war, Fairburn began to paint in earnest and made some money as a fabric designer, necessitated by the need to provide for a wife and four children.

He spurned abstract art, and particularly Picasso, as falsifying life. Abstraction, like rationalism, was a form of intellectualism that took life apart. Fairburn believed in the total individual. In art this meant synthesis, building up images, not breaking them down: “If art does anything it synthesizes, not analyses, or it is dead art. Creative imagination is the thing, all faculties of man working together towards a synthesis of personal experience resulting in fresh creation.”[37]

While Fairburn believed in innovation in the arts and had earlier adhered to the Vorticist movement founded in England by Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, et al., he also believed that art should maintain its traditional foundations, which was a feature of Vorticism: its classicism was quite unique among the new forms of art arising at the time Art is a product of an organic community, not simply the egotistical product of the artist.

Fairburn, however, saw many artists as not only separate from the community but also as destructive, calling Picasso for instance, “a bearer of still-born children,” and referred to the “falseness of abstract art” and its “nihilism.”[38] By way of example, Fairburn pointed to the contemporary French and Italian artists, writing of the “French Exhibition” that few of those who either scoff or praise see the art for what it is: “the great monument to industrialist and materialist civilisation.”

It is the finest expression of that civilisation that has emerged yet. But as I happen not to be a materialist, I can’t accept any of the modern French painters as of any permanent importance. I’m all for Turner and the English landscape school, and for the Dutch. The Italians and the French can go and stuff themselves for all I care![39]

Fourteen years later Fairburn elaborated in a  radio talk:

Art is not the private property of artists. It belongs to the living tradition of society as a whole. And it can’t exist without its public. Conversely, I think it can be said that no society can live for long in a state of civilization without a fairly widespread appreciation of the arts, that is to say, without well-organized aesthetic sensibility.[40]

Hence there was a reciprocal interaction between the artist and the public. Both possessed a shared sense of values and origins, in former times, whether peasant or noble, in comparison to the formlessness of the present day cosmopolitanism. “The artist has brought contempt upon himself by letting himself be used for ends that he knows to be destructive. By doing so he has brought art and his own type close to extinction.”[41]

“Form” in art, geometrically, is fundamental. It is the primary responsibility of art schools to teach “traditional techniques” then allow those who have genuine talent to flow from there.[42]

Fairburn lectured in art history at the Elam School, Auckland University, the most influential of New Zealand’s art schools which produced Colin McCahon et al. McCahon, New Zealand’s most esteemed artist whose splatters fetch millions on the market and whose influence upon new generations of artists endures, was vehemently opposed by Fairburn, who considered his works devoid of form, “contrived,” and “pretentious humbug, masquerading as homespun simplicity.” “In design, in colour, in quality of line, in every normal attribute of good painting, they are completely lacking.”[43]

He also considered modern music sensationalist, without content, form, or order, reflecting the chaos of the current cycle of Western civilization.[44]

Fairburn, in accordance with his nationalism, advocated a New Zealand national culture arising from the New Zealand landscape. He believed that one’s connection with one’s place of birth is of a permanent quality, not just a question of which place in the world one find’s most pleasant as a place to live.

Conversely to this rootedness of Being, Fairburn had early come to regard Jews as a rootless people who consequently serve as agents for the disruption of traditional society,[45] juxtaposing old England with that of the new in his 1932 poem “Landscape with Figures,” where:

In mortgaged precincts epicene Sir Giles,
cold remnant of a fiery race, consorts
with pale fox-hunting Jews with glossy smiles,
and plays at Walton Heath, and drives a sports[46]

Writing to Mason in June 1932, Fairburn had stated that the criterion of “fortune-hunting” in choosing where one lives cannot satisfy “anybody who is un-Semitic like myself.”[47]  Fairburn explained to Mason that the art which is manufactured for the market by those who have no attachment to any specific place, is Jewish in nature:

The Jews are a non-territorial race, so their genius is turned to dust and ashes. Their works of art have no integrity—have had none since they left Palestine. Compare Mendelsohn and Humbert Wolfe with the Old Testament writers. When I came to England, I acted the Jew. I have no roots in this soil. In the end every man goes back where he belongs, if he is honest. . . . Men are not free. They are bound to fate by certain things, and lose their souls in escaping—if it is a permanent escape. . . . Cosmopolitanism—Semitism—are false, have no bottom to them. Internationalism is their child—and an abortion.[48]

Fairburn condemned the notion that a culture can be chosen and attached to “like a leech” without regard to one’s origins. He further identifies the impact of Jewish influence on Western culture: a contrived art that does not arise spontaneously from the unconscious mind of the artist in touch with his origins.

 Jewish standards have infected most Western art. It is possible to look on even the “self-conscious art” of Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Pater—Coleridge even—as being “Jewish” in the sense I am meaning. The orgasm is self-induced, rather than spontaneous. It has no inevitability. The effect is calculated. The ratio between the individual artist and his readers is nicely worked out prior to creation. It does not arise as an inevitable result of the artist’s mental processes. William Blake, who was not Jewish, had perfect faith in his own intuitions—so his work could not fail to have universal truth—to have integrity. But the truth was not calculated . . . [49]

This cosmopolitan influence expressed an “international” or “world standard” for the arts which debased culture. He wrote: “Is poetry shortly to be graded like export mutton?”[50]

The “racket of modern art” was related to economic motives:

. . . the infection of the market place . . .  the sooty hand of commerce. The “modern art racket” has the aim of “rapid turnover, a rate of change that induces a sort of vertigo, and the exploitation of novelty as a fetish—the encouragement of the exotic and the unusual.

Fairburn’s biographer Denys Trussell comments: “Rex feared that internationalism in cultural matters would reduce all depiction of human experience to a characterless gruel, relating to no real time or place because it attempted to relate to all times and places.[51] In contrast, great art arises from the traditional masculine values of a culture: “honor, chivalry, and disinterested justice.”

Writing to the NZ Listener, Fairburn decried the development of a “one world” cosmopolitan state, which would also mean a standardized world culture that would be reduced to an international commodity:

The aspiration towards “one world” may have something to be said for it in a political sense (even here, with massive qualifications), but in the wider field of human affairs it is likely to prove ruinous. In every country today we see either a drive (as in Russia and the USA) or a drift (as in the British Commonwealth) towards the establishment of mass culture, and the imposition of herd standards. This applies not only in industry, but also in the literature and the arts generally. In the ant-hill community towards which we are moving, art and literature will be sponsored by the State, and produced by a highly specialized race of neuters. We have already gone some distance along this road. Literature tends more and more to be regarded as an internationally standardized commodity, like soap or benzine—something that has no particular social or geographical context. In the fully established international suburbia of the future it will be delivered by the grocer—or, more splendidly, be handled by a world-wide chain store Literary Trust . . . [52]

The situation today has proved Fairburn correct, with the transnational corporations defining culture in terms of international marketing, breaking down national cultures in favor of a global consumer standard. This mass global consumer culture is most readily definable with the term “American.”[53]

Fairburn opposed State patronage of the arts, however, believing that this cut the artist off from the cycle of life, of family and work, making art contrived and forced instead. He also opposed the prostitution of the nation and culture to tourism, more than ever the great economic panacea for New Zealand,along with world trade. In a letter to the NZ Herald he laments the manner by which the Minister of Tourism wished to promote Maori culture as a tourist sales pitch to foreigners:

May I suggest that there is no surer way in the long run to destroy Maori culture than to take the more colorful aspects of it and turn them into a “tourist attraction.” If the elements of Maori culture are genuine and have any place outside of a museum, they will be kept alive by the Maori people themselves for their own cultural (not commercial) needs. The use of Maori songs and dances to tickle the pockets of passing strangers, and the encouragement of this sort of cheapjackery by the pakeha are degrading to both races. . . . And the official encouragement of Maori songs, dances, and crafts as side-shows to amuse tourists is both vulgar and harmful. [54]

This situation has since become endemic in New Zealand, but where once in Fairburn’s time there was the spectacle of the plastic Maori tiki made in Japan and sold in tourism shops, Maori culture has now been imposed as the “New Zealand culture” per se, as a selling point not just for tourism, but for world trade. Conversely, opening New Zealand up to the word economically has a concomitant opening up to cosmopolitanism, which usually means what is defined as “American,” and the younger generations of Maori, uprooted from the rural life of Fairburn’s time, have succumbed to alien pseudo-culture as conveyed by Hollywood and MTV. It is part of the “one world,” “internationalized commodity standard” Fairburn saw unfolding.

In discussing the question as to whether there is any such thing as “standard English” Fairburn nonetheless alluded to his opposition to cultural standardization, including that between those of the same nationality, in favor of “personalism” and “regionalism,” distinguished from “individualism,” which in our own time we have seen in the form of a pervasive selfishness raised up as social, political and economic doctrines. Fairburn wrote:

There is, first of all, the question whether it is a desirable thing for all English-speaking people to conform to a common standard in their style of speech. My own instinct leads me to resist standardisation of human behaviour in all possible contexts. I believe in ‘personalism’ (which is not quite the same thing as individualism), in regionalism, and in organic growth rather than mechanical order. With Kipling, I ‘thank God for the diversity of His creatures’.[55]

A “mechanical order” pushing cultural standardization across the world is the present phase of capitalism, now called “globalization,” of which Fairburn was warning immediately after World War II.

The Dominion of Usury

In 1935 Fairburn completed Dominion, his epic poem about New Zealand.[56] Much of it is an attack upon greed and usury, and is reminiscent of Ezra Pound’s Canto XLV: “With Usura.”[57]

The assumption to Government of the Labour Party gave Fairburn  little cause for optimism. Trussell writes that Fairburn’s view was that the Labour Government might introduce “a new dimension in social welfare, but apart from that he felt it to be conformist.”[58]

Dominion begins by  identifying the usurer as the lord of all:

The house or the governors, guarded by eunuchs,
and over the arch of the gate
these words enraged:
He who impugns the usurers Imperils
the State.[59]

Those who serve the governors are picked from the enslaved, well paid for their services to “keep the records of decay” with “cold hands . . . computing our ruin on scented cuffs.” For the rest of the people there is the “treadmill . . . of the grindstone god, and people look in desperation to the “shadow of a red mass” of communism”’[60] Like Pound in “With Usura,”[61] Fairburn saw the parasitic factor of usury as the corruptor of creativity and work, where labor becomes a necessary burden rather than a craft with a wider social function than that of profit.

For the enslaved, the treadmill;
the office and adoration
of the grindstone god;
the apotheosis of the means,
the defiling of the end;
the debasement of the host
of the living; the celebration
of the black mass that casts
the shadow of a red mass.[62]

And . . .

In this air the idea dies;
or spreads like plague; emotion runs
undamned, its limits vague,
its flush disastrous as the rolling floods,
the swollen river’s rush; or dries
to a thin trickle, lies
in flat pools where swarms of flies
clouding the stagnant brim
breed from thick water, clustered slime.[63]

The unemployed and those on relief work, as Fairburn had been when he returned to New Zealand, were “witnesses to the constriction of life” which was necessary to maintain the financial system. Nor did the countryside escape the ravages of the system. The farms are “mortgaged in bitterness . . .” to the banks. “A load of debt for the foetus” dramatizes how the debt system of usury compounds generation after generation, with each being placed further into serfdom to the banks, while the banker is lauded as an upstanding businessman, the new aristocrat of the age of decline that Spengler states emerges in the “Winter” cycle of Civilization.  The city is:

a paper city built on the rock of debt,
held fast against all winds by the paperweight of debt.
The living saddled with debt.
A load of debt for the foetus . . .
And all over the hand of the usurer,
Bland angel of darkness,
Mild and triumphant and much looked up to.[64]

Colonization had bought here the ills of the Mother Country, and debt underscored the lot:

They divided the land,
Some for their need,
And some for sinless, customary greed
. . .

Fairburn’s answer is a return to the land.

Fair earth, we have broken our idols:
and after the days of fire we shall come to you for the stones of a new temple.[65]

The destruction of the usurers’ economic system would result in the creation of a new order: the land freed of debt would yield the foundation for “a new temple” other than that of the usurer. Fairburn’s belief in the soil as a key ingredient to cultural renewal and freedom brought him also to the cause of farmers, then allied to Social Credit.

Organic Farming

In 1940 Fairburn extended his advocacy to include organic farming, and he became editor of Compost, the magazine of the New Zealand Humic Compost Club. He considered that the abuse of the land led to the destruction of civilization. The type of civilization that arises depends on its type of farming, he said. Food remains the basis of civilization, but industrial farming is spiritually barren.

The type of community Fairburn sought is based on farming, not industry that gives rise to fractured, contending economic classes. Industry reduces life to a matter of economics.

In a lecture to the Auckland Fabian Society in 1944 Fairburn stated:

It is natural for men to be in close contact with the earth; and it is natural for them to satisfy their creative instincts by using their hands and brains. Husbandry, “the mother of all crafts,” satisfies these two needs, and for that reason should be the basic activity in our social life—the one that gives color and character to all the rest.[66]

In the same lecture he spells out his ideal society:

The decentralization of the towns, the establishment of rural communities with a balanced economic life, the co-operative organization of marketing, of transport and of necessary drudgery, the controlled use of manufacturing processes . . .

In 1946 Fairburn elaborated again on his ideal of decentralization, regarding the corporation as soulless and the State as the biggest of corporations:

The best status for men is that of independence. The small farmer, the small tradesman, the individual craftsman working on his own—these have been the mainstay of every stable civilization in history. The tendency for large numbers of men to forsake, or to have taken from them, their independent status, and to become hangers-on of the state, has invariably been the prelude to decay.[67]

“The broad aspect of soil politics engaged Rex’s imagination: the consciousness that the fate of civilization and the shape of its culture depended ultimately on its style of farming,” writes Trussell.

He hankered after a community that was itself “organic” rather than broken into a meaningless series of economic functions, and as far as he could see, the community that was founded on industrialized farming was spiritually barren even though, in the sort term, it could produce huge surpluses of food.[68]

The influence of Spengler obviously remained, as did William Blake, and the aim was clearly to return through agriculture and the defeat of “Money” via Social Credit, to the “Spring” epoch of Western Civilization; an era prior to industrialization, the “City” as a Spenglerian metaphor for intellectualism and its ruler, Money, and all the other symptoms of decay analyzed by Spengler.

However utopian, Fairburn’s vision was still vaguely possible in the New Zealand of his day. Today, the vision is inconceivable considering not only the rate of debt at every level of society, but due to a steady elimination of the independent farmer in favor of the corporation. If Fairburn were alive today he might well return to his original belief that such a revitalized society could only be implemented after a period of crisis and via a dictatorship, as he had written in The New English Weekly in regard to Social Credit.

New Barbarism—America and the USSR

Fairburn feared that the victors of World War II, America and the USSR, would usher in a new age of barbarism. In 1946 he wrote in an unpublished article to the NZ Herald:

The next decade or two we shall see American economic power and American commercial culture extended over the whole of the non-Russian world. The earth will then be nicely partitioned between two barbarisms. . . . In my more gloomy moments I find it hard to form an opinion as to which is the greater enemy to Western civilization—Russian materialism, the open enemy, or American materialism with its more insidious influence. The trouble is that we are bound to stick by America when it comes to the point, however we may dislike certain aspects of American life. For somewhere under that Mae West exterior there is a heart that is sound and a conscience that is capable of accepting guilt.[69]

Experience has shown that Fairburn’s “more gloomy moments” were the most realistic, for America triumphed and stands as the ultimate barbarian threatening to engulf all cultures with its materialism, hedonism, and commercialism. The Russian military threat was largely bogus, a convenient way of herding sundry nations into the American orbit. The USSR is no more, while Imperium Americana stands supreme throughout the world, from the great cities to the dirt road towns of the Third World, where all are being remolded into the universal citizen in the manner of American tastes, habits, speech, fashions, and even humor.

Fairburn’s attitude towards “Victory in Europe” seems to have been less than enthusiastic, seeing post-war Europe as a destitute, ruined, famished heap, yet one that might arise from the ashes in the spirit of Charlemagne and Jeanne d’Arc.

. . . Ten flattened centuries are heaped with rubble,
ten thousand vultures wheel above the plain;
honour is lost and hope is like a bubble;
life is defeated, thought itself is pain.

But the bones of Charlemagne will rise and dance,
and the spark unquenched will kindle into flame.
And the voices heard by the small maid of France
will speak yet again, and give this void a Name. [70]

Biological Imperatives

Fairburn regarded feminism as another product of cultural regression. In The Woman Problem[71] he calls feminism an “insidious hysterical protest” contrary to biological and social imperatives. He saw the biological urge for children as central to women.

Fairburn also considered biological factors to be more important than the sociological and economic, therefore putting him well outside the orbit of any Left-wing doctrine, which reduces history and culture into a complex of economic motives.

Our public policies are for the most part anti-biological. Social security legislation concerns itself with the care of the aged long before it looks to the health and vitality of young mothers and their children. We spend vast sums of money on hospitals and little or nothing on gymnasia. We discourage our children from marrying at the right age, when desire is urgent, and the pelvic structure of the female has not begun to ossify; we applaud them when they spend the first ten years of their adult lives establishing a profitable cosmetic business or a legal practice devoted to the defense of safe breakers. The feminists must feel a sense of elation when they see an attractive young woman clinging to some pitiful job or other, and drifting toward spinsterhood, an emotion that would no doubt be shared by the geo-political experts of Asia, if they were on the spot.[72]

Indeed, what has feminism shown itself to be, despite its pretensions as being “progressive,” other than a means of fully integrating women into the market and into production, while abortion rates soar?

It is interesting also that Fairburn makes a passing reference to the burgeoning population of Asia in comparison to New Zealand, in relation to geopolitics, the implication being that he foresaw a danger of New Zealand succumbing to Asia, which in the past few decades has indeed been the case, and which proceeds with rapidity.

Fairburn saw Marxism, feminism, and Freudianism as denying the “organic nature” of man. Urbanization means the continuing devitalization of the male physically and ethically as he is pushed further into the demands of industrial and economic life. The “masculine will” requires reassertion in association with the decentralization of the cities and, “the forming of a closer link with agriculture and the more stable life of the countryside.”

The influence of Spengler’s philosophy can be seen in Fairburn’s criticism of urbanization as leading to the disintegration of culture: “Whether this will anticipate and prevent or follow in desperation upon the breakdown of Western society is a matter that is yet to be decided.”

Fairburn, with others, especially the poets, such as Dennis Glover, Mason, Curnow, and Potocki, represented the great blossoming of an embryonic New Zealand culture that was starting to come into its own from out of the cultural hegemony of British colonialism. It was the type of nation-forming process that was being forcefully advocated by Fairburn’s contemporary “across the ditch” in Australia, Percy Stephensen.

World War II cut short what Fairburn and others had hoped to achieve; the creation of a nativist New Zealand culture. Maori culture became, as Fairburn wrote, a tourist curiosity, and the arts became as subject to international “market forces” as any commodity. Fairburn exposed, like none other of the New Zealand cultural milieu from out of that Golden Age, the forces that were bending and shaping the arts, and his polemics were a reflection of what he saw as his calling to help create a “New Zealand civilization.”

Fairburn died of cancer in 1957. He continues to be recognized as a founder of a New Zealand national literature; albeit one that in this writer’s opinion was an abortive process that waits fallow for refertilization.

William Blake, "The Good and Evil Angels," 1795

193 words

Evil is to be conquered by absorption, not by rejection.

Editor’s Note:

Due to technical problems with the recording, we have decided it best to release only the transcript of our interview with Andy Nowicki.

Mike Polignano:  Welcome to Counter-Currents Radio. We’re joined here today by one of our authors, Andy Nowicki. Andy is the author of several books: the novel Considering Suicide, which is published by Nine-Banded Books, The Doctor and the Heretic and Other Stories, published by Black Oak Media, and two novels published by Counter-Currents: The Columbine Pilgrim, and his latest book, Under the Nihil.

Hello Andy, how are you today?

Andy Nowicki:  Hello, Michael and Greg. It’s good to be on your podcast.

Greg Johnson: Welcome to the show.

Andy: Thank you.

Mike: Andy, if you would tell us a little about yourself, where you’re from, what you do, and who are your people.

Andy: Well, my name is Andy Nowicki. I currently live in Savannah, Georgia, and I teach college-level English for a living. But for a calling, I write. Your listeners might know me from various outlets such as The Last Ditch, Alternative Right, and a couple of others including TakiMag and a few others as well.

Lately, the focus of my writing has been in the area of fiction; it’s a place in which the muse has spoken to me, and the last couple years have been a very productive time for me. I’m very happy to be in the stable with Counter-Currents authors. I was happy last year to have my novel The Columbine Pilgrim published, and this year, what I would call a thematic sequel to that novel: my new novel Under the Nihil, “Nihil” spelled N-I-H-I-L, which I guess technically might be NEE-hill, or something like that, in the book it’s a clever tie-in, a comic kind of thing, but I’m just discovering it can make for some marketing difficulties. So I do want to emphasize that the title is Under the Nihil, with “Nihil” spelled N-I-H-I-L, as in the prefix to “nihilism.”

Mike: Yes, I wasn’t quite sure if it was pronounced NEE-hill or “Nile” at first, but “Nile” sounds better.

So, where did you go to college?

Andy: I was, like Mike, an Emory student, although I’m a little bit older, and I didn’t quite cause so much of a stir as Mike did when he was there. I graduated from Emory in ’93, with a good old English major, which was a foolish decision for a major because there are tons of unemployed Ph.D.s in English out there — right now. I’m thankfully not one of them. But I graduated with a degree in English, then I got a masters degree a few years later at the University of Dallas. My doctorate still remains unfinished, and might remain that way. So that’s basically my story. I am certified to teach English, and right now, as I was saying, I teach on a college level. But again, there’s vocations and there’s callings, and I feel that my calling is really the written word.

Greg: So what made you choose to write fiction?

Andy: Well, that’s a good question. It was something that I always aspired to do, but for years and years I was blocked in that regard. I remember way back when, in elementary school, my friends and I would get together at lunchtime and we had this group, which we called “the dream group.” We told stories in the form of dreams, we would say. We would talk about this adventure story and sort of make it up as we go, and it was just this wonderful thing we had a lot of fun with. And then somehow when you get a little older, you become more of a harsh editor of yourself, and it’s harder to just let the creative juices gush forth, as they were.

So I got to a point where I was writing a lot of nonfiction. I was interested in political, social, cultural issues. But I always saw fiction as a higher aspiration, as something that I eventually wanted to do. And recently, I would say in the last five years, I’ve had the good fortune of being inspired to write fiction, and I have managed to find some very supportive publishers. And the rest is history; [laugh] or rather, it is continuing to be history. Hopefully it hasn’t stopped being history just yet.

Greg: So who are some of your literary influences?

Andy: Well, I would say . . . it’s funny, there are people that you read that you enjoy, and then there are people that when you read them, you don’t necessarily enjoy them as much, but somehow they become more influential: they seep into your own writing. I would say, when I think about it, the hugest influence for me has got to be Dostoyevsky, particularly his Notes From Underground, as the ultimate portrayal of the alienated man of a certain reactionary mindset who rejects modernism. That’s a very compelling character for me, the kind of character I keep coming back to over and over again. So Dostoyevsky’s a big influence.

As far as style goes, I love F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite novels. His breathtaking style of writing is something that I think I aspire to, although I would not claim to be anywhere close to it. But I’m trying, and maybe I’m getting better.

So Dostoyevsky, Fitzgerald . . . the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was a somewhat very bleak writer, a difficult writer, but somebody I’ve always really loved to read and a man I really admired, the first — I guess you could call it — Christian existentialist. And that’s really had an influence on my subject matter or it’s touched on a lot of the same things I find are interesting or compelling as far as subject matter goes.

And I could probably think of some more. I love the early poetry of T. S. Eliot. I’m not sure how much of that fits into my work because I don’t really do much poetry. I’m sure I could think of some more. I’m sure once I get off the line with you all I’ll probably think, “Oh man, why didn’t I mention this person, or that person?”

Flannery O’Connor, there’s another one. When I teach the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the shocking twist of the ending that it has. Flannery O’Connor combined her very strong Catholic faith with this very tough and sometimes disturbing — humorous but darkly humorous — very dark and disturbing subject matter. It still, even though it was written quite a while ago, it still really catches you off guard. And I really love that. I love the idea of shocking the reader, because you don’t want to just speak to people’s prejudices and flatter them, you want to shake it around a little bit. And I like that idea.

Greg: One twentieth century author that your books bring to mind is Walker Percy, who is a Southern Catholic, and something of an existentialist as well. Do you know and like Walker Percy’s work?

Andy: Yes I do. I kind of think of him as in the same echelon, or very much following in the footsteps of, Flannery O’Connor. Maybe — this sounds a little bit harsh but — maybe a second-rate Flannery O’Connor.

Greg: Yeah, that’s reasonable. I don’t think he’s quite on the same level as her, but I do think his work deals with a lot of the same themes.

One more little follow up about sources and influences. Are you from the South?

Andy: Yes, I am, and that throws a lot of people off. There’s a lot of things that I could say in response to that. I was born in Atlanta, and people in Georgia would say “oh, that’s not the South.”

Greg: No, not really.

Andy: [Laughs] But yeah, I am actually a Southerner in the sense I was born here and raised here, but my parents are both from Wisconsin, and I hear all the time “well you don’t sound like you’re from the South.” I don’t really know what to say to that. It’s a reasonable point. But I think if you heard me when I was growing up at 12, 13, 14 years of age, I really did have a Southern twang. And somehow I just unconsciously unlearned it. So now I just sort of sound like the North American broadcaster, this accent that I have today.

But yes, I am from the South. I see myself as kind of an outsider from Southern culture, but I admire the defiance of the South: at its best, the disinclination to assimilate with the Zeitgeist, this tough, hardy kind of spiritedness that you find in the South and in other similar cultures. But again, for me I’m kind of on the outside looking in, culturally speaking. So it’s a complicated relationship I would say I have with the South – but yes, technically speaking, I am from the South.

Greg: You’re not unlike two of my favorite Southern authors, though, those being Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, because although they were born and raised in the South they were also outsiders insofar as they were Roman Catholics in an overwhelmingly Protestant culture. And so they had a bit of that outsider perspective which I think added to their ability to capture things about the South that maybe Southern Protestant writers might not have been able to.

Andy: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. I think if I’m not mistaken Percy was a convert. Am I wrong about that? I actually don’t know.

Greg: You know, I actually don’t know either, and I should, because I read his biography maybe 15 years ago.

Andy: Well, I know that O’Connor was born and bred Catholic. But also a born and bred Southerner, Southern to the bone in a lot of ways. But also Catholic which does give her outsider status. And I do think I of myself as a type of Catholic convert. And I do think that the Church had — it’s probably a controversial subject among the listeners of this podcast — but I do think that whatever else you would say about the Catholic Church or Christianity in general, there is a definite aesthetic something that is brought by the years of the Church’s dominance over the Western world. And that’s something a writer could really use, even if he rejects the tenets of it.

I’m thinking of somebody like James Joyce, who’s earlier work I would also say is very influential for me, someone I didn’t think of earlier. But I think he was really shaped, even though technically speaking he was not a faithful believer, I think he was really shaped by Catholicism in a lot of ways that definitely affected his writing, for the better.

My relationship to the Church, to Catholicism, is not always an easy one. I struggle with faith, I will openly admit that. But I do think that, as you were mentioning with Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, there is something about having that perspective that helps you see things in a culture that maybe someone more immersed in that culture — the American, Protestantized culture — wouldn’t necessarily see. So I think that’s a good point.

Mike: Andy, I understand you wrote a nonfiction book called The Psychology of Liberalism. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Andy: The Psychology of Liberalism is something that I wrote back around the turn of the millennium. It was published in 2002. It’s not available right now on Amazon, although people can write me if they are interested, since I do have a few copies of it in my house right now.

It was a book that I wrote out of an interest in scrutinizing all the ideas behind liberalism, about what we know is liberalism today. Why does liberalism exist, what it is composed of, and so forth. I wrote from the point of view of somebody who — what is the famous statement: “A young man who is not a liberal has no heart, an old man who not conservative has no brain”? I was a liberal in my younger days, in my more foolish days, and then turned against it with a vengeance in my college years and soon thereafter, even though I didn’t have nearly the same kind of experience that you had at Emory.

Once I rid myself of all vestiges of political correctness, I obtained a visceral kind of loathing towards it, one that I still have, deep in my heart, deep in my bones. And that really turned me toward seeing liberalism as a real fraud. Not that there aren’t sincere and good-hearted people who call themselves liberals, but for me, at a certain point, when I saw just the smugness of it, the tyrannical nature of so much of it, I turned against it with a cold fury. And so this was a movement that is still the driving movement of the times, of the Zeitgeist, that brought me along in its wake for many years. So I was thinking to myself, what is it exactly? And the book is my effort to grapple with what liberalism is.

And I guess it was kind of influenced by some other writers like Thomas Sowell, his book The Vision of the Anointed. Of course Buckley’s Up from Liberalism. I’m sure I could think of something by Ann Coulter. Some writers that, whatever we think of their ideas, are good writers and have some interesting ideas about this subject. But this is my side of it. I did the best I could with it, and I think it turned out pretty well.

But I had a hard time. That was really before I found a niche for my writing. So I was still very much struggling. I think I ended up self-publishing that book, way back when. But like I said, it’s still available, and I think it’s still worth reading and something that would interest your readers.

Greg: Let’s talk now about your new novel, Under the Nihil. “Nihil,” as you pointed out, is the root of “nihilism,” which means “nothing-ism,” literally. What is your view of the nature of nihilism and its causes?

Andy: Well, that’s a really good question. As far as the nature of it, I don’t know. Maybe what brings it about it just disillusionment. I think that characters like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, and what he represents, or a lot of Nietzsche – I know Nietzsche claimed not to be a nihilist, but there’s still that same kind of “everything’s falling apart, nothing’s holding the world together,” so there’s this very desperate state of mind. And it’s something even though I deplore nihilism morally, I can understand its appeal aesthetically. Like I said, you can also connect it with the movie that was reviewed recently on Counter-Currents, Fight Club, which is also a book, and is also one of my favorite movies.

There is something about getting to this point where you just realize that so much of what you thought was a sham, particularly I would say in our modern world with the phony dogma, the smell of the orthodoxies of Liberalism and Leftism and multiculturalism. All this sanctimonious crap that we just have to believe if we’re to be thought of as a good person. There’s something really liberating about just saying “screw all this,” blaspheming the idols of the age. It’s aesthetically very appealing; that’s where I go to a lot in my writing.

The problem is, of course, you disbelieve in the idols of the age, you disbelieve in the Zeitgeist, but you need to replace that with something else. Otherwise, you just have something fundamentally very destructive.

That’s where a lot of my characters end up going, into these very destructive places. It’s certainly the case with my narrator in the Columbine Pilgrim, Tony Meander. He ended up being lured into this very dark place where he made a decision to do something horrible. And I think that’s also the case with the main character in my new novel, Under the Nihil, who was also very disillusioned, feels put upon and spited, let down, spat on, and there’s this real push back. Eventually he gets his revenge on the world, as it were.

But again, it’s liberating. It’s fun in a way to read about or to live through vicariously, but there needs to be something more. Hopefully people who read Under the Nihil and The Columbine Pilgrim and other things that I write where I deal with these kind of characters will see that I’m not ultimately recommending that we go down that route. That is always a concern.

Mike: Are there any particular authors who especially influenced your thinking about nihilism?

Andy: Well, an author I mentioned earlier — someone I’ve never particularly liked the substance of his ideas, but I like his spirit — is Friedrich Nietzsche. That seemed to be a concern, a preoccupation for him. And also I mentioned Dostoyevsky. It seemed like it’s something that Dostoyevsky was very much aware of. I mean we’re approaching some moment in history when all the certainties that we used to hold dear are going out the window. What is going to be left after that, you know? Just anticipating this great crisis.

I think those two people are the main ones I can think of now. And of course I mentioned Fight Club. Chuck Palahniuk is the author, who I would not say is a great author or anything, but it was a good book and a great movie. And it does also cover a lot of that same territory with regard to nihilism and its appeal as well as its drawbacks.

Greg: I think Fight Club is a great movie and a somewhat less great book. And one of the things that disturbed me about the book that was edited out of the movie — and I thought much to the advantage of the story — was the incredible nihilism of the original novel. There’s a bit of that in there. There’s the pranks and things like that, which are a bit nihilistic. But you can see logic to them, because they’re a way of building camaraderie amongst the members of the fight club. But in the novel they’re contemplating things like blowing up art museums and things like that, which are destructive of things of real value, as opposed to blowing up corporate art and trashing franchise coffee bars, which aren’t things of real value.

But the thing about Fight Club that is interesting to me, the real question that comes out of the movie and out of the piece by Jef Costello that we published is, “is it just nihilistic, or is there something positive about this story?” There’s a lot of tearing down, and a lot of anger and so forth in Fight Club. But is that laying the foundation for something new? And I kind of like the Hegelian take on it, that you see with Jef Costello, which is that Fight Club is a return to the beginning of history. And so you have to have a certain amount of tearing down, and there’s a lot of struggle, but if you look at Hegel, struggle –the fight to the death over honor — is the beginning of history. So there’s a sense in which new culture, new values, new hierarchies, and things like that will emerge organically from that explosion of what seems to be purely nihilistic anger. So I think it’s a tremendously important text, and it is kind of hard to interpret.

One thing I’ve been meaning to write about Fight Club for the website is on this very question of just how nihilistic it is, because Jef Costello doesn’t deal with the big question in my mind: In the end, the building that the protagonist and his girlfriend are standing in, isn’t that rigged to blow up any minute? And if they’re standing in a building that’s about to go “boom,” it sort of bums out the happy ending that seems to be there; it gives it a kind of Inception-like ambiguity at the very last moment.

So let’s talk about Under the Nihil some more. One way to look at it is on the dust jacket, which is that this novel is a fictional exploration of the question, “What if you could take a pill that removed all of your inhibitions, including the fear of death?” And I want to think about that a bit, because do you think that loss of inhibition, and specifically loss of the fear of death, is necessarily a bad thing? Couldn’t one see it as a kind of enlightenment?

Because most people fear nothing more than death. Death is the scariest thing in the world for most people. And if they get over their fear of death, then all of the other fears are taken care of at the root. And that gets rid of the main impediment to living well and doing the right thing, which is fear. So in a way, it strikes me that overcoming the fear of death might be an incredibly liberating and empowering thing. Is that a possibility in your view?

Andy: Yeah, fear of death is something we all have to deal with in our lives. Obviously, being human that’s what sets us apart from animals is we are aware of our mortality. Most of the time we don’t think about it or deal with it, but we have to eventually, because death will come assuredly to all of us. So the idea of being able to deal with that fear, to get over that fear, is definitely a positive thing.

Now the question comes in the notion in the book that this is an experimental drug that’s going to create the synthetically produced loss of the fear of death. Whereas what you find instilled in some parts of the world, not in the secularized West, where we just live for comfort most of the time and don’t really believe in a transcendent truth or reality, but in covering the point that’s made in the book where the characters talk about radical Islam, where you have people willing to strap bombs to themselves and blow themselves up, or hijack planes and fly them into buildings. Which of course I don’t approve of, but the impressive thing about them, is they show these people are . . . unlike us. They have this transcendent faith that leads them to think, “if I die doing this, or when I die doing this, I will not be afraid of death,” because of their beliefs, because of the faith that they have.

Now of course we can mock their faith, and there are things about it that are mockable. But I think that’s a pretty damn impressive thing to have. It’s something we don’t have in the West today, in our degenerate state. We have the best weapons, we have the best technology, we have the largest army, and all that. But what we don’t have, which our enemies in the “War on Terror” do have, is faith.

To tie it to the book, that’s the experimental program that the main character agrees to become a part of, this Dostoyevskyean figure, this Underground Man, who has lost everything, has had this nervous breakdown, lost his calling in life, been chewed up and spat out and left with nothing. He gets approached by this mysterious figure who claims to represent some kind of shadow government who says they’re working on this drug called “Nihil” — pronounced like “Nile” — and they’re trying to refine it. But what they’re going for is a pill to get rid of their fear of death but at the same time not have to believe in any of it. Not have to have any transcendent faith.

I think that’s where I see the issue. It’s not the idea of being able to cease the fear of death, because since we have to die, we have to get over that fear eventually. But just whether we can do it through access to a transcendent faith as opposed to just having this secularist point of view, where we seek pleasure and a concordant avoidance of pain. Where it’s almost like cheating to take the pill to reproduce this state of mind, when you haven’t really deserved it, you haven’t done the work necessary to get it. So I guess that would be my answer.

Greg: I love the line where you describe the purpose of this drug, Nihil, as to deliver “the fruits of faith together with the luxuries of faithlessness.” I thought that was a nicely-turned phrase.

Andy: Yes.

Greg: But isn’t that so much like Americans? We just want to skip the process and go right to the payoff, and if we can do it by sticking a penny in the fusebox or by addling our brains with psychoactive drugs, well, so much the better.

What’s the significance of having the protagonist be a washed-up Catholic priest? Or rather, a washed-up would-be Catholic priest?

Andy: Well, it calls to mind the crisis of faith that I want to make reference to. That’s a referent in a lot of my books. It’s also in The Columbine Pilgrim. There’s a lot of Catholic imagery there. This depraved individual who chooses to do a very — from a Catholic point of view — a very immoral thing — but who still retains his Catholic sensibilities in this weird, twisted way.

And the character in Under the Nihil is similar. He’s somebody who has this strong desire to believe, and he has this attraction to the Church. In this case, he has a sister who is a nun who is very devout. So he sees it as his calling for a little while, and frankly there was a time in my life where I thought of the priesthood. Things didn’t shake out that way, but I know what it feels like to have that kind of hunger for meaning. You want to have a calling that is not just “a job,” not just something you do that pays the bills, and then you come home and forget about it. It’s something that’s real, that’s substantial.

So he gets it in his head that he wants to be a priest, but then he ends up getting thrown out of seminary school because they think he’s psychologically unstable. Of course ironically, that sets up his breakdown, maybe proving them right. But maybe he would have been an okay priest. We don’t really know. In any case, his faith — the idea of faith, or wanting to believe — was something very strong for him, and I think it’s a very important issue in the West. I think we can come together on this whether Catholics or Protestants or pagans or whatever. That it’s important to have some kind of transcendent faith. You don’t really get anywhere that you want to go without it.

Of course, how do you get it? That’s another question.

So I would say that his Catholicism foregrounds a lot of the nihilism which follows. After he loses his faith, he plunges deep into nothingness, and really all that’s left at that point is a whole lot of anger and spite. He becomes this very destructive man on a mission to do something very destructive. So it’s a kind of a tragic fall from grace in some ways, similar to the character in The Columbine Pilgrim, too.

Greg: Andy, maybe I should be a little worried here. I’m concerned: how much of the characters in Under the Nihil and The Columbine Pilgrim is autobiographical?

Andy: [Laughs] Well, I would say quite a bit, so maybe you should be worried. [Laughs] But of course, you know, that’s the thing. That’s what I find interesting to explore; that’s what I find the most interesting thing about writing. You can take on these kinds of characters and have them do things which you would never do, whether it’s because you’re too scared to do it, or because you think it’s wrong to do it, but they’re things that part of you would like to do.

Maybe you’ve found that — I know you’re a writer as well, you both are — maybe you all have found that to be the case too. But to me it’s part of the cathartic experience of writing. You get some stuff done. You take on this role of this character, who’s a lot like you but a bit more extreme or maybe a lot more extreme. And that way you could, again, have this cathartic experience through this fictional character without having to go to prison. [Laughs]

Greg: That’s great. There’s an important change in the main character in Under the Nihil in the third chapter that I want to ask you about. Before I go into that though, I should say to the people out there in radio-land . . . I should issue a spoiler alert. I’m going to talk about the plot of the novel and how it ends. So maybe you’ll want to tune out right now because you’re all hooked on the idea of buying it anyway.

I think it’s an important question, and I want to discuss it. In the third chapter, the fellow who has taken the deal, he’s been offered this deal to be a guinea pig, taking this drug Nihil, which takes away his inhibitions and his fear of death. And he meets this 40-something desperate divorcée, and she takes up with him. And in the first part of the chapter he behaves towards her and towards her daughter in a really absolutely vicious way. He’s a real cad. He’s a real monster. And then in the latter part of the chapter he decides to blow up a famous New York landmark in an act of terrorism.

And I’m curious about that latter decision and how that was sparked by his interaction with the divorcée. I guess my real question is this: did he have a crisis of conscience there? Did he come up against just what a monster he was capable of being, and was he so revolted by that that he decided to strike back at the America that had turned him into this monster, by becoming a terrorist?

Andy: Yeah, I think his state of mind is confused, and I think he is casting about for motivations. He’s got this primal urge to destroy, to take things down. He’s got this very strong anger against the world and against the culture as it stands. Part of his critique is correct, but of course he doesn’t go about it the right way. [Laughs]

But yeah, I guess that is what you call a good thing. I think his account of it is not that he says “oh God, what have I done, in the way I’ve treated these two women?” The divorcée and her daughter aren’t very likable characters themselves. At least the divorcée isn’t. But his behavior is still inexcusable towards them.

So his account of it isn’t “oh my God, what have I become? Let me atone for it by this act of self-destruction.” What he says is “I gotta up the ante here. I’ve been on this level. I’ve had these particular kinds of adventures. I’ve messed with people on this level. But now I want to really do it for good.”

But there is, throughout the book, this despair about the character. There’s this sincere critique of the America that is on display in the book. So I think that you could see it that way as well. He’s a messed-up guy doing messed up things, but he does have a point. There is something that’s righteous about him. There is a way in which his critique of things has some substance.

Which again, I would tie in with the Dostoyevsky character, the Underground Man, in that he’s a kind of insufferable guy also, but he’s got some good points. He makes some profound arguments on the way to being this cad, or monster, whatever you want to call him.

So I guess maybe there’s room for both interpretations, I don’t know. But it’s a good question.

Greg: That’s very clarifying, thank you. That’s very helpful.

Mike: So Andy, what’s the connection between the American love of liberty and nihilism?

Andy: I think it’s not a connection that most people would want to make, particularly conservatives. We’re all men of the Right here, but I’m talking about the typical Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity-type of “conservative” that’s out there who wouldn’t see any equation at all between liberty and nihilism. “Liberty is enshrined in the Constitution,” “this is the greatest country in the world,” all that kind of rhetoric.

But I think that there might be a connection between democracy and nihilism. When you have this idea that the majority rules, and so if there’s a vote, and 55% of the people vote for a law, then it passes. Or if they elect certain people into Congress, and a majority of them enact this law into practice, then it’s like the truth is whatever the majority says it is. And that’s a deeply destructive way of viewing things.

Mike: Certainly lynch mobs are very nihilistic, even though they’re the majority opinion.

Andy: Mob mentality, exactly. We enshrine democracy. We enshrine the idea of the righteousness of the majority. There’s a populism that’s a part of the nature of belief in America and what America is supposed to represent that I think could be easily a shortcut to nihilism.

Greg: So what message would you like people to take away from reading Under the Nihil? And more broadly, from your other writings as well. Is there one big Andy Nowicki issue? Or are there a whole range of issues that you’re dealing with?

Andy: Well, I would like for people to be . . . I think the kind of books that I’m moved to write probably aren’t for everybody, and that’s fine. Frankly my wife doesn’t necessarily . . . [laughs] I mean, she likes the fact I’m a writer, and she thinks that I’m a good writer. But she doesn’t necessarily find some of the extreme circumstances or the subject matter that I write about to her tastes. And that’s probably the case with a lot of people. But my biggest issue is the postmodern crisis of faith, and the confrontation with the Zeitgeist. It’s a really big motivating thing for me just to challenge this artificial, corrupt, and false Zeitgeist that’s out there.

Counter-Currents writes about it, Alternative Right writes about it, we have more in common in what we’re against than in what we’re advocating, but I think we see this real modern crisis brewing that’s going to be our undermining if we’re not careful. And I think this is an issue on a micro level and on a macro level. It’s something that I deal with personally and individually, that’s important for me and what I feel moved to write about, subject matter wise. But also I think it’s a civilizational issue.

I don’t know whether that answers your question or not.

Greg: That’s a really good answer. You mentioned Nietzsche earlier. One of the things I think a lot of the people who read Nietzsche overlook is just how profoundly religious a thinker Nietzsche is. Nietzsche believes that the death of God is a catastrophe for civilization and for mankind, but by the same token he also blames Christianity for being a religion that had the seeds of its own destruction in it. And what he’s looking forward to is the emergence of some kind of new transcendent ideal or set of ideals, because he thinks that without that humans are reduced to what he calls the “Last Man”: people who are incapable of conceiving anything above themselves and their petty concerns and pleasures and anxieties. And that’s really the world that we have to live in. And that is the passive nihilism that we’re in the midst of today.

Andy: Yeah. That’s the landscape we inhabit. I guess the characters that I’ve created, or that I feel drawn to write about — again some part of me is definitely in these characters — are people who confront this whole passive nihilism, everything you’ve just been referring to, this nihilism of the culture . . . and for whom this is absolutely not acceptable. They’re moved to do things that are extreme and that might be terribly wrong. But as T. S. Eliot said, the man who chooses to do evil is in some ways better than the man who does nothing, because at least he’s assessing things and then doing something about it, even if it’s the wrong thing. So there’s something in the desperation of these characters that I really do like. Desperation is a very aesthetically interesting thing for me. So I think it the main concern that I have, that’s what I tie it all down to: desperation.

Mike: Have you ever felt any desire or any inclination to write you’re protagonist as taking heroic action instead of nihilistic, destructive action?

Andy:  That’s a fair question. You know, I want to get to that. I think maybe I’m still working on it. I’m Catholic, of course, which is something that not everybody listening can relate to, but something I really appreciate about Catholicism is the saints, the lectionary of saints out there, that the Church holds up. These people who are enshrined as heroes. I guess anybody with a point of view where there is a certain legion of bigger than life people, people who were just like us but weren’t like us, who rose to the occasion in some great way and achieved spiritual greatness or some other kind of greatness . . . So I’ve thought before about writing about what it would be like, instead of about the devil or about a really messed up kind of person, the way that I am now. What would it be like to write about a saint as opposed to the opposite of a saint, which is more what I’m drawn to?

I would like to progress to that subject matter eventually, but the thing is, you have to go where your muse directs you, and so far this is what I’ve felt inclined to write about, the kind of people I’ve felt more comfortable with. But maybe that’ll change. Hopefully it will.

Mike: I know that recently you went to South Africa. Could you tell us a little bit about your journey and what you learned?

Andy: I visited South Africa in December. I went through Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute. They paid for my plane trip over there and gave me room and board while I was there.

I stayed for a couple of weeks, and I visited Johannesburg and Pretoria, and I also spent some time down in Orania. I wrote a piece about it. It’s going to be featured in Radix, the new print journal that Richard Spencer and Alex Kurtagic are coming out with soon. I think it definitely would be of interest to most of your listeners. There’s an analysis of the Afrikaner nation as they currently stand today. What things are alike today in South Africa almost two decades after the end of the Apartheid era and the ascendency of the ANC, everything that has taken place and what kind of changes have happened. What kind of fears are lingering in people’s hearts, who are wondering what’s going to happen next. It was a very, very, very interesting trip, and I really feel thankful and blessed to have gotten to make it. I’d like to go back sometime, even though it was a trip I felt a little apprehensive about, because as we all know South Africa is a somewhat dangerous place these days, with a very high crime rate. But I made it through safe and sound. It was a very interesting trip.

I wrote it up for Alternative Right, but I gave a forecast of what I was going to be doing while I was there. The piece itself should be available from Radix, which you can find out about at Alternative Right, alternativeright.com; I encourage all of your listeners to do that, I think it would be something of interest.

Greg: So what’s next for you, Andy? What are your upcoming writing projects? Is there anything that you’ve already started? Any new novels/plans for novels?

Andy: Yes, right now I’m working on something else, that’s going under the tentative title, The Carnal Terrorist. It’s a little bit different than what I’ve been doing lately, in that it’s actually going to be novel length. Under the Nihil and The Columbine Pilgrim and other things that I’ve written tend to be shorter, novella-length. This is a work that I’m composing now. I’m also writing regularly for Alternative Right, you can find my work there. That’s an ongoing spot where I write.

I’m also working on some shorter stories that I haven’t yet found a home for. I’d really like to try to break into the [mainstream]. I don’t think my writing is terribly mainstream, but my fiction is not really ideological either. So even though I’m probably seen as radioactive for associating with the likes of people like you, and Alternative Right, and all those guys — with whom I’m happy to be associated — I still have some ambition of maybe being able to get published and be read by people who are not necessarily “on the Right” but who are at least open-minded, and who have the same dislike of political correctness and the same enjoyment of . . . provocation, that I do. So we’ll see where it goes. But I’m happy with the way things have been going the last couple of years. I just hope the Muses keep communicating to me, and I keep it up.

Greg: So what do you think about the current New Right scene in North America?  Intellectually, culturally, politically? I find it very, very exciting that there are novels like yours getting published, and poetry and commentary. I’m just wondering what’s your take on that?

Andy: Yeah, I think it’s very exciting as well. I’m not naturally inclined to be optimistic, but sometimes I wonder if we aren’t on the verge of a “paradigm shift” of one kind or another, where all these ideas and thoughts that have been and still continue to be relegated to the back burner or criticized as being “radioactive,” like a lot of the things that you write about at Counter-Currents, and are discussed at Alternative Right and The Last Ditch and other places . . . I don’t know, maybe we’re on the verge of something big — maybe we’re riding the crest of a wave that’s ultimately going to pay off for us.

Whatever happens, I’m enjoying the ride, and I’m thankful for you all, for Richard, and for everybody else who’s given me a chance: Nick Strakon of The Last Ditch, whom I’ve also written a lot for.

I agree, it is a very exciting movement, if you want to call it that. I don’t necessarily see myself as a mover and shaker in the movement, but I’m excited to be a part of it and thankful to be a part of it.

Greg: Well, thank you very much Andy for your time. I’ve found this to be really, really enjoyable, and I’ve learned a lot about you and your work.

Mike: I enjoyed this too Andy, thank you.

Andy: Well, thank you both for having me. I enjoyed it quite a bit myself, and I hope we can do it again sometime.

In the United States, Black History Month — formerly known as “February” — is, unfortunately, not just about history. It is also an occasion for lies and propaganda to stoke black pride in spurious achievements and white guilt over spurious crimes. To combat this propaganda, we have assembled the following articles.

• Black Invention Myths
• Andrew Hamilton, “The Black (& White) Predicament: Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967)”
• Julian Lee, “In Praise of the White Singing Voice”
• Julian Lee, “The White Singing Voice in Rock and Pop”
• Michael O’Meara, “The Cold War on Whites”
• Jack Pershing, “Hinton Rowan Helper: Harbinger of America’s New Dawn”
• William Pierce, “Destroying the Past”
• William Pierce, “The Fraud of Black History”
• William Pierce, “Lies for Profit: The Myth of Black History“
• William Pierce, “The Roots of Civilization”
• Michael Polignano, “White Pride and White Guilt”
• Kevin Alfred Strom, “The Beast as Saint: The Truth about Martin Luther King”
• Frances Cress Welsing, “The War of the Balls”
• “Who Invented Peanut Butter?”

Please link and repost these pieces far and wide.

Greg Johnson
Editor

Editor’s Note:

Ludovici published the following three-part article on “Hitler and the Third Reich” in The English Review in 1936. Ludovici describes his travels in the Third Reich in his autobiography, Confessions of an Anti-Feminist. Although the autobiography has not been published in full, I have published the relevant excerpts as “Memories of Hitler and the Third Reich.” See also Ludovici’s “Hitler and Nietzsche.“ 

In his Confessions, Ludovici disputes the charge that the was an uncritical admirer of Hitler by reproducing another article he wrote for The English Review — an article which, he claims, was rejected because it was too critical of Hitler. The article is about Hitler’s physiognomy. And it does prove that Ludovici was not an uncritical admirer, since there was something he did not like about the shape of Hitler’s nose! For all of Ludovici’s criticisms of the British over-emphasis on a sense of humor, he obviously had a sense of humor himself — and a rather dry one at that. 

I.

The present temper of the German people, unlike that of their kinsmen before the Great War or under the Republic, is also unlike anything that Europe has witnessed probably since the Middle Ages.

The visitor to their country who fails to grasp this fact, like the stay-at-home Englishman whose Press does not enable him to appreciate it, misses the most fundamental feature in the whole of Nazi Germany.

For something akin to a new religious zeal has spread throughout the land, making the people wistful, but strangely light-hearted and confident in their earnestness. It is as if they had been not only raised from the dust, but also shown a star or ball of fire which will lead them to the fulfilment of their destiny.

It was to be expected that a great proud nation, broken and humiliated, would respond with turbulent gratitude to anyone who helped her to recover her self-esteem and face the world once more without shame. But those who are inclined to see only thankful exultation over rescued vanity in the present mood of the German people would sadly misunderstand and therefore underrate what has happened. For in Germany today there is none of the truculence of a greedily recovered self-confidence, none of the self-complacency of a people basking in a light which their sense of superiority claims. On the contrary, everything is reserved, serene, almost reticent, as if beneath the inexpressible joy that everyone feels there stirred the constantly sobering reflection that the defeat, the humiliation and the shame of yesterday was a judgment, a penance for the mistakes of the older generation.

The Fuehrer never loses an opportunity of reminding them of this. But it is a thought that must form spontaneously in most of their minds, because their behaviour, even towards strangers and foreigners, bears the stamp of it. They appear to have reached a level of self-respect from which they look down with anxious dread upon any impulse, word, or action which might bear an a-social or negative interpretation. Petty deeds of mutual strife, hostility or exploitation, are naturally scorned as infra-dignitatem. Again and again the visitor is impressed by the scrupulous honesty, consideration, patience, and willingness of menials, public servants and the rank and file of government employees. I could mention scores of instances of this. The tone of the country seems to be set by the general consciousness that a great common good is being served, and that those who depart too conspicuously from the example of impersonal effort set by the Fuehrer may wreck his prodigious scheme. Thus a mood prevails which makes certain things — mean, ill-natured thoughts and actions — appear unworthy of a great nation stirred and united by a lofty purpose.

“Not individual gain, but the common good!” This can be read on almost every hoarding. And it is no empty phrase. It genuinely inspires the mass of the people, and makes for a wholesome reluctance to indulge in ill-informed criticism and fault-finding, while the gigantic work of reconstruction is in progress. Indeed, the Fuehrer himself is the very last to claim infallibility in his function, and with a wisdom surely exceptional in history repeatedly takes the people into his confidence to remind them that, if he is to act with courage and a cheerful readiness to shoulder responsibilities, they must allow him occasionally to make mistakes.

The last great movement of anything like the same importance as National Socialism was the Reformation. With his teaching, the fire he put into it, and the music and song he used so skilfully to carry it into the hearts of the people, Luther swept the country. But he divided Germany and left it divided. Even the united Empire created by Bismarck, although it integrated a congeries of petty states whose rulers had often been dominated by mutual jealousies, left Germany in the grip of parties whose rivalries proved even more dangerous and disintegrating.

The Nazi movement, however, has united the country as no country has been united since the Renaissance. It has not merely destroyed the barriers between the states, it has obliterated the demarcations of factions. There are no parties today in Germany. Nor should there be in any so-called “nation”.

If the people naturally look up to their leader more as a saviour than a statesman, more as a Heaven-sent prophet than a politician, if at the loudspeakers fixed to almost every pillar and post in the land, they hang on his words and his voice and are ready to accept and do his bidding, and if to us in strife-ridden England they appear to be standardised, “conditioned” on a scale no free Briton would tolerate, let us in this country remember two important aspects of this state of affairs:

The first is that over here we cannot pretend to be able to fathom the depths of the humiliation they suffered after the Great War and therefore cannot appreciate the extent of their devotion to their rescuer.

The second is that we, too, in this country are standardised and “conditioned” on a vast and alarming scale. But whereas in Germany the standardising and conditioning powers are responsible and ready to answer for the effects they produce, over here these powers are wholly irresponsible and, as things are, could not by any conceivable means be made to answer for what their untrammelled use of publicity enables them to effect in the moulding of so-called “public-opinion”.

Herr von Ribbentrop assured me that if to-morrow the Fuehrer were to ask the German people to do without sheets on the beds, they would cheerfully accede to his request and, to a family, give up this form of comfort.

There seems to me not the slightest doubt that this is true. But before we call such a request tyranny, and the hearty response to it slavery, let us be quite sure that we understand the amount of mutual confidence, affection and respect it implies.

When I was asked by a prominent member of the government, a man who, in his day, had ruled over one of the smaller nominally autonomous States of the old Empire, to sum up in a line how the Germany of the Third Reich impressed me, I replied that I could think of nothing like it in recent history and could compare it only to what I imagined western Europe must have been when our great Gothic cathedrals were being built.

Nor is there anything factitious or perfunctory in the enthusiasm with which the people acclaim and welcome the enigmatical figure who has contrived to strike this deep religious note in their hearts. I witnessed two public appearances of the Fuehrer. I saw him drive into a vast stadium at half-past eight in the morning to address 80,000 children of the Hitler Youth Movement and a few thousand adults; and, an hour or two later, I saw him arrive at the Lustgarten in the centre of Berlin to address a vast assembly of working men and specially invited guests of both sexes.

On both occasions something more than ordinary enthusiasm was displayed and no visitor required to understand the language in order to feel the magic of the moment.

Long before the actual appearance of the smart black touring car bearing the Leader, the ringing cheers of the populace could be heard in the distance drawing gradually nearer and nearer, until, when the car entered the arena, the whole gathering of thousands took up the cry and, standing with right arms raised, shook the May morning with their greetings.

“Sieg!” (Victory) he cried.

“Heil Hitler!” the throng roared in return.

“Sieg!” he cried again.

“Heil Hitler!” came the response once more.

“Sieg!” he cried for the third and last time.

“Heil Hitler!” was thundered back by 100,000 voices.

No sense of humour! — No! But we should be thankful that there are still occasions, even in modern England, when a sense of humour would be thought out of place. We still see no humour in the death of a beloved relative or in a broken heart, or a lost love. And is not possible for the degree of passion behind the love for a relative or a betrothed to be equalled by the love for a figure which stands for the salvation of a people’s native land, their pride and their hopes?

I certainly saw no sign of a sense of humour in the reception given to the Fuehrer on these two occasions. But I witnessed instead something bordering on the magic, something which, although beyond reason, was anything but madness.

I saw bent old men and women who must have known Bismarck, the Kaiser William I, and the glorious early seventies of last century, and I saw crowds of educated and uneducated middle-aged people, young men and women and adolescents, thousands of whom could never have seen the days of the Empire. But one and all displayed the same passionate affection of children in the presence of the Fuehrer, and to watch them was to learn what miracles can still be wrought with the ultra-civilised and often effete populations of modern Europe if only they are given a lofty purpose.

This is surely the secret of the perpetual hold religions have on men, and it explains Adolf Hitler’s magic influence. To exhort men to commercial and industrial prosperity is not enough. To stimulate them to make good in individual enterprise, in profit-making, in self-help, ultimately leaves the best elements of the nation cold — not merely cold, but fractious, restless, mutually negative and given to petty criticism and fault-finding. In fact, it creates the populace which is typical of modern democratic politics, and makes possible every kind of large-scale fraud, from a general election to the vast advertisement hoardings of a city like London.

The religious appeal, however, by giving men a higher, impersonal purpose, sets humanity at one stroke above the market-place, above considerations of merely individual gain, with all that these mean in internecine and suicidal struggle. And to have given his nation such a purpose, to have persuaded them that such a purpose can be worthwhile, is the secret of the Fuehrer’s magic. To my mind, this constitutes his chief importance to the German nation.

It is perhaps a pure coincidence that this man who, according to his own admission, moves and acts in state affairs with the somnambulistic certainty (nachtwandlerische Sicherheit) of a sleep-walker — that is to say, whose most important decisions spring from the mysterious strata of the Unconscious — should have chosen for the badge of his party and his movement the ancient mystic sign known as the Gammadion, Fylfot or Swastika. But when we bear in mind that this very badge was once the symbol of a mysterious cult, and has for countless ages stood as the sign of a particularly instinctive and deep-seated form of worship, the choice of the symbol seems particularly apt. For the fact that Germany is to-day stirred by a purpose super-personal and therefore religious, is beyond question.

Whether the conspicuous diminution in crime all over the country is to be ascribed to this religious mood, I cannot pretend to judge. If, however, I throw my mind back, as I like to do, to the days in western Europe when our great cathedrals were springing up in almost every large town, I imagine that they, too, must have been times of a low incidence of crime. For it is impossible to believe that all that anonymous, impersonal work, which must in millions of cases have offered no hope of being completed before those engaged upon it died, could have been performed in any mood which promoted the negativism of crime.

When, therefore, we learn from Liebermann von Sonnenberg, the head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the German government, that since 1932, crime in Germany has declined 50 per cent., and in some districts actually as much as 60 per cent., and that in all Prussian towns of over 50,000 inhabitants murders have declined 32 per cent., robberies by violence 63 per cent. and burglaries 52 per cent., it ought not to surprise us.

To suppose that, in such a mood and with such impersonal strivings, the German nation can now entertain purely predatory and venal aims would be wholly to misunderstand the feat Adolf Hitler has performed, and the metamorphosis his magic has effected.

He has effected this transformation on a foundation of repentance, on the constant reminder that Germany’s defeat and humiliation were a judgment and a penalty. Those who have been chastened by his appeal, and they represent over 90 per cent. of the German nation, cannot therefore be insincere in their desire for a relationship of peace and friendship with their neighbours and particularly with England.

This is not to say, however, that peace and friendship do not impose certain duties of mutual consideration on the parties concerned. But it struck me that it is only to that feeling of duty, and not to ideals of force and violence, that modern Germans now look with hope for the redress of their wrongs and the relief of their domestic difficulties.

Thus the greatest of the Fuehrer’s reforms and most creative of his innovations, as I hope to show, have aimed at construction and development at home. And if, in this work, Hitler and his advisers have in the last three years performed miracles, about which we in this country hear little, and appear to care less, it is to the rigorous press-censorship now prevailing over here that we must ascribe both our ignorance and indifference.

II.

It is difficult to give an adequate impression of the enormous assistance afforded to the Fuehrer’s various schemes of construction by the spirit he has contrived to stimulate in the German people.

In a country uninspired by his personal leadership, many of his reforms, particularly those deriving from his biological revaluation and his wise attitude towards women, manual labour and agriculture, would undoubtedly have provoked the likeliest opposition. And if so many of his fundamental innovations have passed smoothly into the everyday life of the people to transform their sentiment and outlook, he has to thank the religious mood with which he first infected his nation.

Nowhere, however, has the change of point of view and life-habits been more conspicuously displayed than in the movement which led to the so-called “Labour” camps, of which there are now 1,300 for men alone all over Germany.

Designed, on the cultural side, to reduce class cleavage, to whittle down the marked difference of esteem in which manual and mental work are held throughout Western civilization, and to promote health and manliness in all classes, these Labour Camps are, economically, one of the greatest assets of the new régime. For by providing the means of concentrating unpaid labour at all these points in the land where it is most needed, either in order to develop or reclaim existing wastes, or to help newly settled urbanites to make good as farmers, market-gardeners, fruit-growers, etc., it has given an impetus to agricultural development which, without it, would have been quite unrealisable.

It is not generally appreciated in England that the problems in the sphere of agriculture alone which the Fuehrer had to face, and which had actually been studied by him and his advisers before his Party came into power, were manifold and complicated.

The Treaty of Versailles deprived Germany of 9.5 per cent of her people and over 13 per cent of her area. Thus the ratio of population to territory was in any case less favourable than it had been before the war. Over and above this, however, the land lost on her eastern and western frontiers was of a very high grade, and therefore made the total decrease of her agricultural area more than it seemed — i.e., nearer 30 per cent than 13 per cent in actual value.

In addition, about one million of her nationals returned to the Reich from ceded territories, and, owing to the increasing use and perfection of labour-saving machinery, ever larger numbers of industrial workers were being turned out of work every year. So that, failing a wise and drastic policy calculated to improve the state of agriculture and provide fresh employment for the workless (numbering 6,000,000 before 1933), it seemed as if disaster must soon overtake the country.

Two things were clear — thousands of recently urbanized families must at all costs be restored to the land, and the arable areas of the Reich must be increased.

A “Back-to-the-land” movement was therefore immediately inaugurated on a grand scale, while under the slogan that Germany, if she chose, could conquer a whole new province for herself within her own borders, another movement was started to improve the quality and yield of existing agricultural areas, to reclaim millions of acres of existing marsh, heath and moor-land in various parts of the country, and shoals and flats along the North Sea coast, to regulate the course of small rivers, to plant and grub, and to transform waste woodland into profitable forests.

In connexion with the first movement an administration known as the Reichstelle für die Auswahl deutscher Bauernsiedler, was soon set up for selecting desirable people for settlement in rural districts as farmers, farm labourers and peasants, which, working on the lines of the new biological revaluation, granted permits, land and sometimes credits, only to the best people from the standpoint of descent, health and capacity.

Thus favour is invariably shown to:—

(a) Men who in their family line and blood have long had some close relationship to the soil and been lately separated from it — for instance, farmers who have been recently uprooted or lost their farms through no fault of their own.

(b) Men who have large families. (Only men over 25 and married are considered.)

(c) Men who served in the late war, or who are known to have served in the S.A. (Hitler’s Sturmableitung) or the S.S. (the biological cream of the S.A.).

(d) Men who have served in the Reichswehr (the post-war German army).

(e) Finally, rural labourers whom adverse conditions have driven from the soil.

I have not the statistics for 1935 at hand; but in 1934 the Office for Selecting German Settlers on the Land received 15,948 applications of which 11,094 were accepted and provided for; and since the inauguration of the movement (not reckoning 1935) 67,000 new farmsteads have been established, covering about 1,827,800 acres. Altogether, up to the end of 1934, about 2,964,000 acres had been secured for settlement purposes.

The Government reckons that it takes about five years for these newly settled farmers and peasants to make good, and during their first years of endeavour, every kind of assistance is given them provided they display the right spirit and energy.

Now in the work of reclaiming the soil for the reception of these new agricultural workers, and in the task of helping them to make good, the Reich Labour Service finds its principal functions; and, apart from the cultural advantages the camps secure for the whole male population, as described above, it is in these principal functions that they constitute one of the greatest assets of the new régime.

Briefly stated, the conditions of the service are these:—

Every young German must enter the Labour Service between the end of his seventeenth and the end of his twenty-fifth year; he is enrolled only after a thorough physical examination and has to serve for six months, after which his year’s military service begins.

Life in the camps is divided between manual labour with spade and hoe, in which all must take part, strenuous drilling exercises, and periods of leisure given to reading and the study of contemporary events and problems. The day starts at 5 a.m. in the summer and 6 a.m. in the winter, and ends at 10 p.m. — the time after supper (7 p.m.) and short intervals during the day being devoted to rest and leisurely pursuits.

Each camp consists of 152 men, and there are at present about 1,300 camps for men in Germany. Thus, year in year out, the country can command the work of 200,000 young men whose labour is to all extents and purposes unpaid. Actually, they do receive about 3d. a day in pocket money.

A similar organisation exists for German girls. But, so far, the service has not been made compulsory. Nevertheless, such is the impersonal spirit prevailing in Germany to-day that, on the present voluntary basis, these Reich Labour Service girls have come forward in sufficient numbers from all classes of society to form 500 camps which, like those of the men, provide unpaid labour devoted to assisting the newly settled peasants and farmers all over the land.

As to what these men’s labour camps have done, let it suffice to say that, out of an area of 15,437 square miles (about half the size of Portugal) of swamp land, half has already been reclaimed for agricultural purposes; hundreds of thousands of acres of waste land and waste woodland, of no use to the peasants, have already been transformed into profitable forests; and drainage and irrigation, now being carried out, is expected to double the value of more than 46,312 square miles of existing agricultural land of poor quality.

It is, in fact, reckoned that the net annual proceeds derived from the work done by the Labour Service organisation have already exceeded 10 per cent. of the cost of the organisation. But the full value of what they are now creating in the form of new agricultural areas, new farmsteads and a new peasant population will, of course, not be realized for perhaps a generation or two.

I visited several of these men’s camps in the Havelländische Luch and questioned men whom I saw at work. As I had been led to expect, there were among them representatives of every class of the community, and they all appeared to be enjoying their labours and flourishing under the discipline of the camps. They were young enough to relish the hard work and the rough life as an adventure, and they all looked healthy enough to thrive under Spartan conditions.

Their camp officers who, without exception, attracted attention by their unusually fine physique and manly bearing, are men specially picked from the standpoint of psycho-physical standards. They do not separate from their men at meals or during the hours of leisure, as Army and Navy officers do, but have to live every moment of their waking hours with them, setting them an example of good manners, correct speech, and a cultured outlook.

In the women’s camps the girls are subjected to much the same camp discipline, but their work is of course different. They may, if called upon, help the newly settled farmers and peasants in light work in the fields, but their principal function is to give the rural families help in the home as unpaid domestic servants, dairymaids, nursemaids, etc. In this way, the newly settled farmers who are trying to make good, are substantially assisted at no cost to themselves, and are often able to have the more skilled work of their wives in the fields, while the voluntary Reich-Service workers look after the home and the children and do the cooking, mending and washing.

Valuable by-products of both the girls’ and the men’s Labour Camps are, of course, the excellent discipline that all these young people have to undergo at a period in their lives when discipline is most salutary, the breaking down of class barriers by the mixing of the various social strata in the camps, and the benefit to all concerned derived from the closer acquaintance made by the children of middle and upper-class families with manual labour, its hardships, its advantages and its immense importance in the economy of the nation.

“Work ennobles!” (Arbeit adelt!) — that is the device of this branch of the National Service. And, thanks to the right spirit and the right values, and in spite of a world that has too long worshipped only money and the successful stockbroker and financier, it somehow comes true. It can already be seen in the faces and manners of the people, and it is evidenced in every relationship of high and humble in the life of modern Germany.

Meanwhile, promoting and consolidating the “Back-to-the-land” and “Reich-Labour-Service” movements, laws have been passed which make it difficult, particularly for young rural women, to swell the throng of country folk who annually try to migrate to the large towns; and a very important series of laws — not based on abstract principles or theory, but rooted in peasant custom — which came into force in September, 1933, and are known as the Reichserbhofrecht (the Law relating to the Inheritance of Landed Property) now provide for the hard-working and capable peasant a security in his holding, which no usurious or other kinds of creditors can defeat (Paragraphs 37–39 of above law). The test appears to be not whether the creditor has a lien on the land, but (a) whether the present debtor has defaulted through any fault of his own, and (b) whether the peasant debtor is a capable, knowledgeable and diligent farmer and has shown that he can keep his land in a proper state. The general idea inspiring the whole measure is that land cannot and should not be treated as moveable property, to be bought and sold in the open market.

It is impossible in the space at my disposal to describe in detail what this law has done to secure the peasant landowner in this holding, to regulate the inheritance of land so as to keep it in the hands of worthy families, and generally to enhance the prestige of conscientious and painstaking husbandry; but anyone who wishes to study the law in detail can do so in the excellent handbook on the subject by Otto Baumecker (Handbuch des Gesamten Reichserbhofrechts) the third edition of which was published in Cologne in 1935.

III.

Great as are the reforms discussed in my last article, and wonderful as is the tribute their success pays to the inspiration of the Fuehrer, they are, however, as nothing compared with his innovations in a far more difficult and pitfall-strewn field — the field of human biology.

Three influences — urbanisation, industrialism and the negative Socratic values which began to prevail with the spread of Protestantism, and happened to be favourable to the two former — have now, for almost two centuries, been inclining the people of Europe, and all countries like Europe, to set their faces ever more and more steadfastly against a biological attitude towards man. And this has resulted in the tendency of modern civilisation not only to neglect and despise the body but also to exalt as praiseworthy all those practices which favour the multiplication of biologically inferior human beings.

To deal with urbanisation first, it must be clear, even to those who are unfamiliar with the contempt in which boroughs and their inhabitants were held by the rural populations of the Middle Ages, that the city and town do not and cannot breed the healthiest, sturdiest and most active members of the community and cannot, therefore, cultivate a very fastidious taste in standards of human desirability. The kind of occupation open to the town-dweller — quite apart from the air he breathes and the food he tends to live on — neither selects nor is calculated to maintain the soundest of types. Moreover, by withdrawing the human being from a close touch with the realities of Nature’s work and laws, from the everyday and obvious lessons to be learnt by watching cultivated plants and animals grow, and observing the conditions essential to their prosperity, town life must in time foster a fantastic or unrealistic attitude to life and its problems, which of itself constitutes mental or intellectual unsoundness.

Over and above this, however, in towns and cities, the very roots of human life tend to wither. In the country there is always some way in which the child only just past toddlerdom can help in the general impersonal work of Nature, even if it is only to scare the sparrows from the ripening corn. Thus children are always welcome and quickly become a further asset to the house in which they are born. But in towns the child tends to become more and more a luxury, an undesired by-product of the sexual adaptation of its parents. The result is that an unnatural relationship begins to grow up between married couples, and women as a whole incline to neglect and despise maternal occupations. In fact, society reaches a condition known as Feminism, on the one hand, in which, as even the Feminist Havelock Ellis admits, “Motherhood is without dignity” — indeed, how could it have dignity when children are unwanted? — and, on the other, a condition known as Pornocracy, in which the taste of the harlot, and the outlook of the harlot, necessarily tend to prevail.

Industrialisation, even under the most humane and solicitous factory laws and regulations, confirms and intensifies most of the worst influences of urbanisation. It cannot help so doing, because, in addition to offering the urban crowds unhealthy occupations, it has not reached that stage of enlightenment when it would necessarily regard it as a duty to protect the character and minds of the so-called proletariat from the besotting and degrading influence of mere machine-minding, or of performing, year in year out, unskilled, repetitive and often merely fragmentary tasks. Besides, the factory can be adequately served by types which would not have the stamina or endurance for heavy farm work, and this again exercises with the town a preferential selection in favour of unsoundness.

On its occupational side, therefore, it undermines the garnered qualities of a national constitution and character. It lives on the spiritual and physical capital of the people, without making a single contribution of value to either from one generation to another. Thus, it creates among a mass of physically deteriorated, uprooted and traditionless individuals, already removed from the instructive realities of life by their urban habits, a standardized type of mind and character, which is steadily becoming more and more helpless, passive, colourless and servile. It means that a race is being reared which in character, body and mind is hardly civilised.

Turning now to the third influence — that of Socratic values — which has made the two former influences possible, it is difficult for the modern man of Western Europe to appreciate the extent to which he has become saturated, “conditioned”, and disciplined both in body and mind by the values which tend to underrate and neglect body standards. If we have ceased to look with horror on a man or woman who, although under thirty, has false teeth, if we have ceased to demand an apology from people with foul breath, and if we imagine that human rubbish and human foulness can give us good laws, good poetry, good science and good art, it is wholly and exclusively due to Socrates and his influence.

His exclusive claim to notoriety is that, thanks to his own wretchedly poor physical endowments in the midst of a population of beauty-venerators, he found himself forced in self-defence to discover a dialectical method of excusing every kind of physical disreputability, degeneracy and putrescence.

He argued, after the manner of the fox who had lost his tail, that the beauty of the body is but a slight affair, and that man’s greatest achievement is to set a higher value on the beauty of the soul, and he declared to Glaucon, “If there be any merely bodily defect in another, we will be patient of it and love the same”.

“Merely bodily defect”! — These three words epitomise the whole savour and trend of Socratic teaching.

Thus radiant and flawless health is everywhere rare among human beings, and wherever Western civilisation has spread the minority of the sound are taxed out of existence and sacrificed in order to preserve, succour and pay honour to the unsound.
Now to set one’s face against this deeply implanted bias, to invite modern men, and particularly modern women, in the teeth of their morbid sentimentality, to change their attitude and to honour and look up to the sound, to protect the sound from extermination by the unsound, and to resist their being sacrificed for the latter — in fact, to assume towards humanity the very attitude which, to a farmer contemplating his animals and his crops, is a commonplace of good husbandry, is to-day one of the most difficult and precarious of undertakings, particularly for the head of a State.

In the lives of the people, Socratic values, by inculcating a contempt for bodily considerations, leads to all kinds of perverted tastes and unwise matings — marriage with cripples, with the hereditarily blind, with the hereditarily deaf and dumb, the diseased and malformed. Three popular works, such as Lytton’s Pilgrims of the Rhine, George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss and Charlotte Yonge’s Pillars of the House, in which diseased or crippled persons are solemnly held up as marriageable or as objects to be specially honoured (and there are hundreds of lesser English novels which do the same), could hardly have been written or read unless a culture had lost its sanity in mating.

Now the fact that Adolf Hitler, as soon as he seized the reins of Government at the beginning of 1933, did not hesitate to grapple with Socrates and, at least in Germany, to discredit him, is surely one of his most remarkable achievements.
True, his assault on urbanisation and industrialism would have been imperfect and abortive had he failed to attack the values based on Socratic teaching which enable both to flourish. But, apart from the measures he has framed to restore a healthy agricultural life to Germany and arrest the flight to the cities, his daring attack on the traditional “glory” of fifth-century Athens should alone have sufficed ultimately to sweep unhealthy tastes and prejudices from his country.

For to-day the sound in health and mind are the honoured of the German nation and, as the guarantors of a desirable posterity, are granted many privileges. Although to us over here this cannot help seeming slightly odd, it is, of course, the most elementary wisdom.

Among the principal measures framed to secure a healthier generation, I would refer to the Law of July 14, 1933, to Prevent the Transmission of Hereditary Diseases. By means of this law it became possible through sterilisation to prevent men and women suffering from certain hereditary diseases specified in the law from having progeny. Such diseases are congenital feeble-mindedness, certain mental diseases such as schizophrenia and manic depression, hereditary epilepsy, blindness, deaf-mutism and severe malformations.

All cases are tried before a Eugenics Court, consisting of one judge assisted by two doctors, and their decisions are reached only after a thorough and conscientious inquiry into each case. In the report for the year 1934, published on July 3, 1935, we find that in all 84,525 petitions were filed in the 205 eugenics courts, i.e., about one case per 771 of the population. There were 42,903 males and 41,662 females.* Of this number, 64,449 or about 75 per cent. were heard before the courts, and sterilisation was ordered in 98.8 of the cases, i.e., 56,244 persons. In 3,692 cases (6.2 per cent.) the petitions were rejected, while in 4,563 the petition was either withdrawn or else referred to a superior Eugenics Court, of which twenty-six participated in the ultimate decisions.

Of 8,219 appeals taken against a court order for sterilisation, only 377 were allowed. In 438 cases, appeals were made against the rejection of sterilisation petitions ordered by the Eugenics Court of first instance. And of these, 299 heard before the end of 1934 ended in the granting of the petition in 179 cases, and the reversal of the decision of the first Court.

In regard to pregnant women, it has been decided that if a valid Court has ruled that sterilisation should take place, the pregnancy may be interrupted provided that this is done before the sixth month of pregnancy.

The importance of these measures will be appreciated, as Dr Burgdörfer points out, when it is remembered that according to the last census there were 2,000,000 sufferers from incurable disease, crippledom and insanity in the country. The cost of maintaining them was 1,000,000,000 Reichsmarks, or about £76,000,000 a year — a burden which is not only useless but also actively pernicious, seeing that under it the sound cannot have the number of desirable healthy children they might otherwise give the country. To continue suffering such a burden and allowing it to increase, as it inevitably would if it were not dealt with, amounts to sacrificing the sound for the unsound. And this only a nation that has forgotten the laws of good husbandry through generations of urbanisation could ever tolerate.

A further measure, known as the Law to Protect the Hereditary Health of the German People (October 18, 1935), provides for the refusal of marriage certificates to all applicants who fail to reach certain standards of health. Thus a marriage certificate must be refused (1) to all parties suffering from an infectious disease which may affect the other partner or the children of the marriage; (2) to all parties suffering from a mental disorder which would make it contrary to public policy for them to marry; and (3) to all parties affected with a hereditary disease within the scope of the law of July 14, 1933, described above.

If both of the parties to the proposed marriage are foreigners, or if the prospective husband is a foreigner, the law does not apply. But if a foreign woman wishes to marry a German citizen, she must subject herself to a medical examination and obtain her Ehetauglichkeitszeugnis — her certificate of fitness for marriage.

The law makes it compulsory for these certificates to be obtained from the local bureau of health, and all people contemplating marriage have to undergo a medical examination before they can obtain their certificates.

But these purely negative measures do not satisfy the present rulers of Germany, and, side by side with them, they have instituted positive measures, not merely for encouraging marriage and large families, but also and above all for giving such encouragement only to desirable and sound couples. Thus, the unhealthy and pornocratic tendency of town life is stigmatized, and honour is given where it is due, i.e., to those who are a guarantee of a desirable coming generation and who, as married couples, are fit to lead to lead normal lives as parents.

The first measure dealing with this policy, formed part (para. x) of the Law for the Reduction of Unemployment of June 1, 1933. It provided that all young couples who desired to marry, and who had not the means to do so, could obtain from the government a loan to the extent of 1,000 marks in order to help them set up a home. But other measures have since confirmed and amplified these provisions, as, for instance, those of July 1933, August 1933, and March 1934.

The conditions under which the loan is granted are, however, severe. The parties to the marriage contract are required to be of German blood, hereditarily sound, and free from any disease, infectious or otherwise, which would make their marriage incompatible with the best public interest.

From August 1933 to March 1935, 400,738 such loans were made, of an average of 600 marks apiece, and the statistics show not only a sudden increase in marriages throughout the Reich, but also — and this was one of the objects of the measure — a corresponding decline in unemployment, owing to the number of posts vacated by the girls concerned. The number of marriages encouraged under this law were far more numerous in the urban that in the rural districts, and rose to the level of 12.6 per thousand in towns of more than 100,000 inhabitants.

The loans carry no interest, but are repayable at the rate of 1 per cent. per month. Thus, a loan of 600 marks is repaid by 100 monthly instalments of 6 marks. If, however, children are born of the marriage, a quarter of the loan is remitted for each child, and the repayments are suspended for a year. Of the 400,738 marriages which took place under these conditions, 182,355 children were born by end of March 1935, and a large proportion of the recovery of the German birthrate may justly be ascribed to these measures.

But these are not the only measures adopted by the government to promote soundness and good health in the nation. From the Health Record books of the Hitler Jugend — the corps of young Germans constituting the Youth Movement in Germany — to the biological selection of the S.A. (Sturm-Abteilung) known as the S.S., all of whose members strike the onlooker by the splendour of their health, build and looks, no detail is lost sight of which can transvalue the Socratic values still latent in the people, and make them honour, seek and favour the sound in mind and body.

The S.S. men may be encountered in every walk of life, and before the stranger, familiar with the spectacle of widespread degeneration at home, has learnt to read the signs or symbols proclaiming their order, his attention is usually drawn to them by their exceptionally fine condition and bearing. Our chauffeur on one occasion happened to be a man of this type, whose biological rank was obviously high, and as I was then unaware of the significance of the various badges worn in present-day Germany, I commented to my host on the healthy manly appearance of his servant.

“He belongs to the S.S., the biological cream of the S.A.”, replied my host. And he proceeded to inform me that not only did the young man belong to highest biological class, but that his wife, too, when he took one, would require to be the same. In fact, no marriage certificate would be granted either to him or his fiancée unless she could satisfy the relevant authorities that she came up to his standard.

No sense of humour? — Lucky Germany!

Note

* The total according to these figures should be 84,565 and not 84,525. But the fault lies with the original German report and not with the present extract from it.

Source: The English Review 63, 1936, pp. 35–41, 147–153, 231–239; online at http://www.anthonymludovici.com/IIIreich.htm

The only thing I hate more than watching sports on TV is watching sports movies. And as for baseball, well, I would rather watch the AstroTurf grow. So when I tell you that Moneyball is an excellent film, that really means something. All my prejudices were against it, so the bar was set very high.

In Moneyball, Brad Pitt plays “Billy” Beane — the diminutive is emblematic of the arrested boyishness of sports fandom — a failed professional baseball player who is the general manager of the Oakland A’s, which I learned is a baseball team here in the Bay Area. The film is supposedly based on a true story, but I have zero interest in where it mirrors or distorts history. My interest is in the drama and the psychological and even “philosophical” truths it portrays.

The film begins in 2002. The A’s are facing a crisis. They have far less money than the teams against which they have to compete. (Maybe that has something to do with being located in Oakland.) The richer teams, moreover, are poaching their star players. Beane is told that he simply cannot spend more money rebuilding the team. So Beane needs to think innovatively.

But when he meets with his cabinet of scouts and trainers — a bunch of sentimental old ex-jocks — he finds them fixated on building a team of individual “star” athletes, each of whom is evaluated in terms of astonishingly superficial criteria: their looks, whether they have a “baseball body,” the aesthetics of their play (the crack of the ball off their bat), the hotness of their girlfriends, and the like. Yes, of course, they also factor in athletic ability, the ideal of which is to have “tools” in as many areas as possible: hitting, running, etc.

The trouble with these star packages is that they are very expensive. Moreover, a group of prima donnas polishing their resumes and constantly searching for more lucrative contracts does not necessarily work as a winning team.

I found the “cabinet” scene astonishing. The spectacle of ostensibly straight old men making serious staffing decisions based on the looks and physiques of young men (I call it “jock-sniffing”) is something I have seen again and again in the real world, but never on the movie screen.

Of course such criteria are relevant in modeling. They might be understandable in sports and acting, were these not billion dollar industries with objective standards of performance — and countless good-looking failures testifying to the enduring temptation of this particular folly.

But jock-sniffing is astonishingly common in serious endeavors, such as politics and the military, where the dire consequences of failure would seem to dictate making decisions strictly on the basis of character and objective qualifications, not looks.

I would be very interested to read a good psychological, even evolutionary psychological, investigation of jock-sniffing and “golden boys.” Many elements need to be disentangled: the nostalgia of old men for their youth, romanticized self-images, vicarious gratification, latent homosexuality, etc.

Culture also surely plays a role. A German comrade once spoke disdainfully of the prevalence conscious and unconscious of “Anglo pederasty” throughout American culture, which astonished me, because I did not see it at the time. It is, however, a phenomenon that Jews see clearly and do not hesitate to exploit. Jewish philosopher Jonathan Lear once wrote about how Anglo pederasty served him well in his academic career in England and America.

Nobody involved in serious enterprises can afford to be unaware of the power of these sorts of motives, which can be profoundly destructive if allowed to work unconsciously.

Beane decides that he needs to junk the “star” system and instead focus on building a team of players who are not stars on their own but who are capable of working together as a team to outperform teams of expensive prima donnas. He is aided in this project by Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill Feldstein, who inexplicably omits his last name from his film credit), a young Yale economics graduate. Brand obviously loves baseball. But he is not a jock. He is an obese geek with a love of sports statistics and a knack for number crunching. Together he and Beane assemble a team of undervalued players — has-beens and near misses — who, based on their statistics, can “in the aggregate” (e.g., as a team) outperform more expensive rosters of stars.

At first, the new team seems to be a disaster. But it is just growing pains. After Beane trades a few prima donnas for other undervalued players, and kicks a bit of middle management ass, his team hits its stride and goes on a record-breaking 20 game winning streak. Beane’s new management techniques are adopted by other teams, giving the Boston Red Sox (which even I have heard of) their first World Series victory in nearly 100 years.

Beane’s quantitative approach met a lot of initial resistance from old school management and fans whose approach to baseball is essentially romantic and aesthetic. They maintain that there is something mysterious and ineffable about baseball that cannot be quantified. Baseball, they say, is an art, not a science. It all smacks of 19th century Romanticism and holism. And it is true, of course, that not everything can be meaningfully reduced to numbers.

But it is also true that numerical models can have such predictive power that we can frequently act as if the quantifiable is the only factor that matters. For instance, we know that there is more to human intelligence than IQ, and more to the human soul than intelligence. But in terms of its predictive power for a whole array of real-world effects, it is as if IQ alone matters.

What I find objectionable about Beane is not that he subjects the hallowed traditions of baseball to empirical criticism. The ability to stand up to empirical tests (quantitative or otherwise) is what differentiates between what Edmund Burke called “blind” and “wise” prejudices.

No, the real objection to Beane is that he is using quantitative methods to subject the game of baseball — which is inextricably caught up with romanticism, sentimentality, and the cult of well-rounded and excellent athletic heroes — to the business of baseball, which rates the Oakland A’s better than the New York Yankees, simply because the A’s spend less money per win. To this mentality, a man who airbrushes Jesus on black velvet is superior to Michelangelo if the former produces more pictures for less money.

I admit that I am annoyed by professional sports, sports fandom, and sports movies. I despise their ethos of self-indulgent romanticism and perpetual boyishness. I want to smack grown men for wearing baseball caps (if they are not actually playing baseball, that is). Thus I found Moneyball‘s unsentimental, intellectual approach to baseball appealing. Part of me loved this movie precisely because I don’t love baseball.

But that’s just my prejudices speaking. If Billy Beane went to work for the San Francisco Opera (talk about self-indulgent Romanticism!), rather than the Oakland A’s, I would be screaming for his head too.

In the end, the romantics are right, because baseball is a game, after all. It shouldn’t be serious. It belongs to the realm of play, not work; luxury and freedom, not necessity; the sacred and aristocratic (the worship of heroes), not the profane and leveling (the statistical “aggregate”).

If Moneyball teaches us anything, it is the old lesson that the heroes of the business world are all too often the destroyers of the rest of the world: history, tradition, nature, culture, and everything that people hold sacred. Moneyball is another example of how the 9 to 5 world erodes and destroys the 5 to 9 world.

Beane is portrayed as a character whose emotional detachment is uniquely suited to a quantitative approach. He obviously loves baseball, but it is intimated that his own professional career fizzled because he was somehow not emotionally invested in it. It is also hinted that he feels victimized by the patter of the old school scouts who convinced him to pass up a full scholarship at Stanford to go professional. Beane then went into scouting and management, which is one step removed from actual play. As a manager, he tries to remain detached. He does not attend games, and he cuts players in a cold, business-like manner. But perhaps as a sop to the romantics, the script shows that Beane has to become more of a “people person” and more emotionally invested in his new team to make it work.

I highly recommend Moneyball. It is a serious, intelligent film with a superb script. It is dramatically paced, beautifully photographed, and free of sports movie clichés. There really isn’t a weak link in the cast, but Brad Pitt’s performance is particularly noteworthy. I would like to see him play Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, another story of innovation versus tradition on an even grander scale. (And unlike Billy Beane, Howard Roark’s struggle is not merely a disguised form of subjecting art to commerce — although most modern architecture is precisely that.)

But best of all, Moneyball  is not just thought-provoking and full of lessons for politics and life in general. It is also highly entertaining — which is what sports, at their best, should be.

Rudolf Hess, 1894–1987

291 words

“My coming to England [sic] in this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it. I was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice unless I had continually kept before my eyes the vision of an endless line of children’s coffins with weeping mothers behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers with mourning children.”

—Rudolf Hess to his wife Ilse, June 10, 1941 

He had fought in the trenches, watched the rats
gnawing the feet of dead or dying soldiers,
the flower of Europa slain in youth.
He understood Trakl’s pain, the grandsons who
would never father future generations.
So the mission in his mind was clear:
he climbed into the cockpit of a fighter
and flew to Scotland. Ankle broken now,
parachute on the ground, he babbled to
a farmer, to Lord Churchill. Neither listened.
They declared him mad, and locked him up
inside the tower of London, where the rooks
of war besieged his mind, and where the clouds
brought back memories of his Grecian mother.
At Nuremberg his final words were: “I
have no regrets.” He would repeat them how
many times in his cell at Spandau prison
as years turned into decades and he found
himself the lone remaining prisoner?
Towards the end, he’d whisper to pale flowers,
glance at Erich Honecker’s grey portrait,
the covers of East German TV guides,
senile, limping, propped up by a cane,
a friendless, shunned, and isolated man.
When the guards found him in the summer garden
a power cord was wrapped around his neck.

From Tikkun Olam and Other Poems

Louis-Henri Foreau, "Still Life with Books," 1889

94 words

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Andy Nowicki
Under the Nihil
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2011
108 pages

Like a hellhound on the heels of his last book, The Doctor and the Heretic, comes snarling in Andy Nowicki’s Into the Nihil (pronounced, as the characters do, as “Nile,” as in Land of the Dead).

Here we have another one of Nowicki’s “cockroach” heroes — perhaps he really should get out more — but with a bit more gumption than usual, having early found the Church (or “run to it” as his brutish father sneers) and persevered through schoolmate taunts (“Bead boy! Peed Boy!”). You might think he’s related to the titular heretic of his previous collection until he is undone by the Mother Church itself; its once hippy-dippy post-Vatican II superiors no longer interested in Kumbaya but desperate now to keep out the weirdos like . . . him.

Frederick Rolfe, another “spoiled priest” convinced of his vocation, took a thirty year vow of celibacy, sponged off a series of friends in lieu of secular employment, wrote a sequence of exquisitely unpublishable novels (“Caviar, but from a real fish,” D. H. Lawrence called them) and then, his vow expired, perished in Venice during spell of “furious pederasty” (according to my old Penguin edition). Our unnamed narrator moves into a crack neighborhood rather than a working class rooming house, writes a blog rather than novels (“which shows you just how far away I truly was from salvation”), but the main difference is that he finds what Rolfe always wanted: a benefactor with a big checkbook. This “Mister X,” who represents “a privately-run organization which sometimes consulted for the interests of American security,” provides a weekly stipend in return for participation in the trial of a secret, experimental drug: Nihil.

But at this point I’d like to step back and take a look at the book’s unusual narrative form.

The first thing you notice is that it’s written in the second person. There must be something hard or unsatisfactory about such convention, since the number of second person narratives you can think of, to say nothing of whether you’ve read them, or if they’re any good, can be counted on the fingers of, well, slightly less than one hand.

There’s Faulkner’s 1934 Absalom ! Absalom! which, as you can tell from the title, no one reads. Then there’s Edna O’Brien’s 1970 novel A Pagan Place, but more recently, and more relevantly, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984)– and that’s the one you’ve probably read.

Asked by the Paris Review about her unusual choice, O’Brien said:

The reason was psychological. As a child you are both your secret self and the “you” that your parents think you are. So the use of the second person was a way of combining the two identities. But I tend not to examine these things too closely—they just happen. (Edna O’Brien, interviewed by Shusha Guppy)

McInerney’s use has a different psychological effect. Consider his novel’s opening:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.

The effect here is to implicate the reader — or rather listeners, given the conversational style — in the narrator’s point of view. “You” means “If you were me right now at this here bar.”

Nowicki’s “you” however is not the reader but our “Mister X,” who lassos the protagonist into a deranged “fight terrorism through drugs” scheme that seems all too plausible given the history of the half-assed “bright ideas” produced by the decayed Ivy Leaguers that make up our “intelligence community.” (See Tim Weiner’s excoriating history Legacy of Ashes.)

And like so many of our “best and brightest,” his “Big Man on Campus bearing, incongruously clashing with the foot-shuffling false modesty” reaches the peak of annoyance with a Boston accent.

It’s a small detail, that Nowicki goes on to milk for a few laughs, but it does set up a series of reverberations in this reader’s pop sensibilities, sort of like a round of “Kevin Bacon” (who appeared in JFK, which connects him to . . . you’ll see).

Once the detail emerged, I began to hear Mr. X’s interview, and his subsequent ones, in the tones of Martin Sheen’s character in The Departed. Like the young men Sheen interviews there, Nowick’s hero is playing a double game, going along with Mr. X in order to “punk the punkers.” He thinks he’s smarter than this James Bond wannabe played by Thurston Howell III, and, like most of the CIA’s foreign “assets,” he probably is.

The younger Sheen starred in Apocalypse Now, a fitting title for most of Nowiki’s work, where he is pulled from a drunken, self-destructive delirium in a disheveled Saigon hotel room – comparable to Nowicki’s “dump of an apartment, in the middle of a massive colony of roaches, rats, meth-labs, and gang-bangers [where] I set up shop, and began my downwardly-mobile descent . . .” — to be interviewed by another unctuous CIA type (who delivers the famous “Terminate . . . with extreme prejudice” line) before receiving his own secret assignment that, like this one, will also be subverted by an encounter with moral nothingness and end in a blaze of napalm:

The chaos! “The horror, the horror.” The same conflagration of faith-eroding poison that had washed through society in the latter half of the 20th century, throwing all of our lives into the wretched mire of purposelessness, making us absurd, faceless, soulless mannequins tumbling through a terrifying abyss . . . this same poison now pumped through my veins, eating me away from the inside.” (p. 12)

The “faceless, soulless mannequins” are the interchangeably baby-faced young actors in The Departed, instructed by older men like Sheen and Jack Nicolson that:

Frank Costello [Nicolson]: I was your age they would say we can become cops, or criminals. Today, what I’m saying to you is this: when you’re facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?

Or as Nowicki says: “One can fall both ways—gravity often reverses from generation to generation.” (p. 15)

Billy Costigan [Di Caprio]: Families are always rising or falling in America, am I right?]

Oliver Queenan [Sheen]: Who said that?

Billy Costigan: Hawthorne.

Dignam [Mark Wahlberg]: What’s the matter, smartass, you don’t know any fuckin’ Shakespeare?

Cop, or criminal? Nowicki’s narrator chooses a third, more traditional path:

I decide I’m going to be a priest! The lovely sense of calm that accompanies this thought. I have a CALLING, instead of just a FALLING. . . . Now that I’ve declared my calling, in fact, I feel more lonely, more isolated, more doubtfully dubious than I’d ever felt previously . . . (p. 15)

The interview between Sheen and Di Caprio essentially conflates the two sequences in Under the Nihil, Sheen tells him he’ll “never be a cop” but offers him the chance to “serve and protect” in the role of a rat; Nowicki’s hero is told he’ll never be a priest:

“Not ‘no,’ but ‘not yet,’” he said. Oh, but he was wrong! It was no; the profoundest of nos, to every possible question! (pp. 2–3)

But he can help win the “War on Terrah” by becoming a lab rat.

I COULD’VE been a priest, and been happy. I COULD’VE said the Mass reverently, could have composed and delivered worthwhile sermons, could have lived simply, could have counseled people who were in pain or faced difficult straits.

 Yet they drummed me out. I didn’t make the cut; I was deemed defective. (pp. 24–5)

And we know from Oliver Stone’s JFK what happens when spoiled priests meet up with CIA agents and start living in filthy apartments filled with lab rats:

David Ferry: All I wanted in the world . . . was to be a Catholic priest. Live in a monastery. Pray. Serve God. I had . . . one terrible fucking weakness. And they defrocked me! Then I started to lose everything.

But what if your vocation really is something else? Perhaps he really does need to become a criminal after all. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise:

They wanted me to snort and snivel and jump through their hoops, to prove myself worthy of their post-Vatican II norms, and I failed their examination, so it was off to the scrap heap for me . . . (p. 25)

Frank Costello: Church wants you on your place. Kneel, stand, kneel, stand. If you go for that sort of thing, I don’t know what to do for you. A man makes his own way. No one gives it to you. You have to take it. “Non serviam.”

Maybe, like Sheen in Apocalypse Now, you need not a career but one more mission. And if you’re bad enough, maybe you’ll get it.

Yes, I was “saved,” but not really. I came “back,” but only partly. I hadn’t hit bottom, because in spite of everything I still found myself hoping against hope for hope. Still a poseur: not a hardcore bone in my brittle frame, my spirit still pitifully seeking its Savior, aching to fill its God-shaped hole with something, anything, unable to reconcile my God-hole to the Void that is, in fact, the very essence of God . . .

The fools who treated me, of course, mistook my relapse for a recovery. It’s the typical response of the world to one who almost escapes its clutches, only to be pulled right back into its infernal orbit, as I was. (p. 29)

Under the Nihil is relatively short book, and you can sense that perhaps the middle section, devoted to the narrator’s one Nihil-powered adventure, the seduction and humiliation of an older woman and her younger daughter, is only a sample of what could have been, like a Grail romance, or a picaresque novel, or most closely one of those overlong “great books” of the 50s, an Augie March or Sot-Weed Factor or Recognitions, an indefinitely multiplied, ramshackle series of grotesque, literally nihilistic “anti-adventures” in which the stupid, unhip world is one-upped by the anti-hero. Perhaps Nowicki thought one would be enough to make the point, and decided to spare his reader such a numbing and depressing trudge. (Even when Terry Southern did something similar in The Magic Christian or Candy, he kept it short and did it with humor, albeit of the then-fashionable “black” sort, and it still left a bad taste in the mouth.)

Having acquired a certain notoriety by describing Nowicki, in reviewing his last book, as “the Aldous Huxley of the Alternative Right,” I may dare to go further by suggesting that this is his Brave New World, with our narrator as The Savage, whose confrontation with a world run by pharmaceutical manipulation — Soma rather than Nihil — ends in an equally futile public suicide. His final rant could have come equally well from The Savage’s interview with the World Controller:

Freedom, you say? Freedom from what? Freedom to do . . . what?

Freedom to drop their venerable old traditions, which gave their lives a sense of meaning and their deaths a sense of closure? Freedom to jettison their connection with the ancient, and embrace un-shackled materialism? Freedom to degrade themselves, debase themselves, corrupt themselves, turn themselves into animals, into something worse than animals? Freedom to elevate their loins over their brains; to make sure their sons become pimps and your daughters whores; to condemn their progeny to Hell forever? (p. 100)

While The Savage has to stage his suicide at a mere lighthouse, Nowicki’s narrator has the Statute of Liberty to play with. Still, I find the final scenario –

I hope to light a fire in the big, stony Whore’s head, a blaze that will light up the sky over Manhattan Island. I hope to turn many a head, provoke the posting of many a YouTube video, inspire a headline or two. (p. 101)

– a bit of a letdown, in comparison with passage at the beginning:

I have always been falling, falling, falling, but only lately have I had the opportunity to reject and utterly erase all of the faux-scenery in my sight that ever led me to assume the existence of a ground under my feet. I am now a burning, falling man, hurtling through a heartless void, but falling is no different from flying when there’s nothing substantial beneath you. To be aware that one is sinking forever may be a disconcerting feeling at first, but it soon becomes a pleasant, even a blissful condition. To float into eternal nothingness is to be truly free. (p. 9)

It’s a really remarkable image, recalling, perhaps, one more cinematic analogue: the bravura opening of Scorsese’s Casino (and recently reprised by the opening of Mad Men): Robert De Niro as Ace Rothstein, falling endlessly through a blaze of light composed of the flames of a car bomb, Las Vegas neon and Hellfire.

Nowicki’s “hero” presumably dies, but the world goes on without him (quick, name one of the 9/11 terrorists) while Rothstein improbably survives — his kind always land on their feet — but it is a living death; everything he loves, from his wife to Vegas itself, having died already.

For Nowicki, as for the producers of Mad Men, this is probably the best we can hope for. At this stage of the Kali Yuga there aren’t even any tigers to ride; perhaps we can convince ourselves that our falling is really flying after all.

You can buy Under the Nihil in hardcover, paperback, or Kindle E-book here.

The Fall of Constantinople

925 words

English original here

O que é Europa? O que é um europeu?

Do ponto de vista geopolítico e histórico, a Europa é definida por suas fronteiras. O centro, o núcleo europeu, é formado de nações que, ainda que muitas vezes em conflito, tem experimentado uma história comum desde a Alta Idade Média. Essencialmente, elas são as nações resultantes do Império Carolíngio e seus arredores, aquelas que constituíram com o Tratado de Roma em 1957 a Europa conhecida como “os Seus”: França, Alemanha Ocidental, Itália, Bélgica, Holanda, e Luxemburgo.

Além, vê-se tomando forma um segundo círculo incluindo as nações atlânticas e setentrionais, bem como Europa Oriental e os Balcãs. Finalmente, um terceiro círculo de alianças privilegiadas engloba a Rússia.

Eu absolutamente não estou referindo-me aqui a um projeto político. Eu falo apenas como um historiador apontando uma série de realidades.

Poderíamos mencionar outras. O Império Danúbio dos Habsburgos foi uma realidade. A Europa Báltica igualmente foi, ainda que isso não seja mais verdadeiro do Mediterrâneo, que deixou de ser um eixo de unidade européia desde as conquistas árabe-muçulmanas.

Mas a Europa é algo bem diferente da estrutura geográfica de sua existência.

A consciência de pertencimento à Europa, ou Europeidade, é muito mais antiga que o conceito moderno de Europa. Ela é aparente sob os nomes sucessivos de Helenismo, Celtismo, Romanismo, Império Franco, ou Cristandade. Vista como uma tradição imemorial, a Europa é o produto de uma comunidade multimilenar de cultura derivando sua distinção e unidade de seus povos constitutivos e uma herança espiritual cuja expressão suprema são os poemas homéricos.

Como as outras grandes civilizações – China, Japão, Índia, ou o Oriente Semítico – a nossa possui profundas raízes na pré-histórica. Ela assenta em uma tradição específica que cruza o tempo sob aparências mutantes. Ela foi formada de valores espirituais que estruturam nosso comportamento e nutrem nossas imaginações até mesmo após esquecermos eles.

Se, por exemplo, a simples sexualidade é universal, tanto quanto o ato de alimentar-se, o amor é diferente em cada civilização, como são as representações de femininidade, a arte pictórica, a gastronomia, e a música. Elas são os reflexoes de uma certa morfologia espiritual, misteriosamente transmitida por sangue, linguagem, e pela memória difusa de uma comunidade. Essas especificidades fazem-nos o que somos, e não alguém mais, mesmo quando nossa consciência delas perdeu-se.

Compreendida nesse sentido, a tradição é o que molda e prolonga a individualidade, funda a identidade, dá significado à vida. Ela não é uma transcendência externa a si mesmo. A tradição é um “eu” que atravessa os tempos, uma expressão viva do particular dentro do universal.

O nome de Europa apareceu 2.500 anos atrás em Heródoto e na Descrição da Terra de Hecateus de Mileto. E não é por acaso que esse geógrafo grego classificou os celtas e citas entre os povos da Europa e não entre os bárbaros. Essa foi a era em que a consciência européia primeiro emergiu sob a ameaça das guerras persas. É uma constante da história: a identidade nasce da ameaça da alteridade.

Vinte séculos após Salamis, a queda de Constantinopla, em 29 de Maio, 1453, foi sentida como um revés ainda pior. Todo o lado oriental da Europa ficou aberto para a conquista otomana. A Áustria Habsburga era a última muralha.

Esse momento crítico trouxe o florescimento de uma consciência européia no sentido moderno do termo.

Em 1452, o filósofo George de Trebizonda havia já publicado seu Pro defenda Europa, um manifesto no qual o nome de Europa substituiu aquele da Cristandade.

Após a queda da capital bizantina, o cardeal Piccolomini, posteriormente Papa Pio II, escreveu: “A parte oriental da Europa foi arrancada”. E para comunicar a significação completa e o pathos do evento, ele invocou não os Pais da Igreja, mas, superior na memória européia, os poetas e tragediógrafos da Grécia antiga. Essa catástrofe, ele disse, significa “a segunda morte de Homero, Sófocles, e Eurípides”. Esse lúcido Papa morreu em 1464, desesperado por sua inabilidade de mobilizar um exército e armada para libertar Constantinopla.

Toda a história testemunha que a Europa é uma muito antiga comunidade de civilizações. Sem voltar às pinturas de caverna e à cultura megalítica, não há um único grande fenômeno histórico vivido por um dos países da esfera franca que não tivesse sido compartilhado por todos os outros. Cavalaria medieval, poesia épica, amor cortês, monarquia, liberdades feudais, as Cruzadas, a emergência das cidades, a revolução gótica, o Renascimento, a Reforma e Contrarreforma, a expansão ultramarítima, o nascimento do Estado-Nação, o barroco secular e religioso, a polifonia musical, o Iluminismo, o Romantismo, o universo prometéico da tecnologia, ou o despertar do nacionalismo… Sim, tudo isso é comum à Europa e apenas à Europa. No curso da história, cada grande momento em um país da Europa imediatamente encontrou seu equivalente entre seus países irmãos e em nenhum outro lugar. Quanto aos conflitos que contribuíram por tanto tampo para nosso dinamismo, eles foram ditados pela competição de príncipes e Estados, nunca por oposições de cultura e civilização.

Contrariamente a outros povos menos favorecidos, os europeus raramente tiveram que levantar a questão de sua identidade. Era suficiente para eles existir: numerosos, fortes, e geralmente vitoriosos. Mas isso acabou. O terrível “século de 1914″ pôs um fim ao reino dos europeus, que desde então tem sido amaldiçoados pelos demônios da dúvida, ainda que mitigados relativamente por uma abundância material provisória. Os artesãos da unificação borram as calças de medo diante da questão da identidade. Mas a identidade é tão importante para uma comunidade como a questão vital das fronteiras étnicas e territoriais.

Source: http://legio-victrix.blogspot.com/2011/09/europa-europeidade.html

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia might be a uniquely bleak film. Even for a director who is well known for offering dark and disturbing pictures of humanity, Melancholia expresses a special sort of hopelessness. The film begins with a series of strange, surreal tableaux shot in extreme slow motion. The musical accompaniment is the Tristan und Isolde Prelude. The beauty of the scenes, shot in crisp focus and with rich colors, is immediately apparent and compelling. But the meaning of what we are witnessing is less clear; it seems to somehow prefigure the ensuing drama with a heightened touch of painterly detail.

The story itself concerns the discovery of a new planet, Melancholia, which is found to be passing through our solar system. The discovery coincides with a wedding party given for an unsure bride, Justine (Kirsten Dunst). As the dysfunctional celebration plays out it becomes apparent that Justine has significant personal issues, and we sense that she is being pushed into the role of bride. Due to her aberrant and confused behavior, her husband leaves her on her wedding night. Her sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), then attempts to look after Justine against the wishes of Claire’s husband, John, played with some conviction by Kiefer Sutherland. As the family drama unfolds, Melancholia looms larger on the horizon and, with a horrible sense of inevitability, it seems less and less likely that it will avoid colliding with Earth.

The first section of the film which centers on the wedding party recalls Thomas Vinterberg’s film, Festen. The comparison is apt, as Festen was the first film made under the conditions of Dogme 95. Dogme 95 was an avant-garde movement started in 1995 by Vinterberg and von Trier to encourage a type of film-making that would focus on story and character, rather than special effects and technical innovation. It was thoroughly expressive of certain trends in European film-making, and was radically opposed to the increasingly formulaic fare offered by Hollywood. The Dogme 95 manifesto consisted of the following rules:

1. Filming must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in. If a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found.
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. Music must not be used unless it occurs within the scene being filmed, i.e., diegetic.
3. The camera must be a hand-held camera. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. The film must not take place where the camera is standing; filming must take place where the action takes place.
4. The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable (if there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action (murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden (that is to say that the film takes place here and now).
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
10. The director must not be credited.

The second film made under this ‘vow of chastity’ was von Trier’s The Idiots. In this film a group of young people decide to explore their inner idiot by pretending to be mentally retarded in public. By turns disturbing, sexually explicit, and blackly funny, The Idiots confirmed von Trier’s reputation as the enfant terrible of European film-making. But the most interesting thing about Dogme 95 was that it provided a practical manifesto and program for film-making that was economically, aesthetically. and intellectually opposed to the Hollywood methodology.

Despite the presence of American heavyweights Dunst and Sutherland, Melancholia is financed with European money, and it shows. Although von Trier has now grown out of the austerity of the Dogme 95 school, its influence is still apparent in the use of handheld cameras and the avoidance of slick editing. Even the special effects which show the approach of Melancholia (and which sometimes echo the aesthetics of Kubrick’s 2001) are subjugated to the demands of the narrative, never becoming an intrusive presence. Von Trier’s interest in characterization means that Melancholia is paced to a very different rhythm than any other mainstream film. It is notable that despite being able to attract actors of the stature of Dunst, Nicole Kidman (Dogville), and Björk (Dancer in the Dark), von Trier has persisted with his unique vision and has resisted the temptation to conform to the demands of multiplex inanity. Indeed, the great and the good of American film-making must now conform to his idiosyncratic demands and not the other way round. For this, if nothing else, he should be admired.

If there is a weak point in Melancholia it is perhaps the performance of Dunst. I was not convinced that she was capable of commensurately conveying the extremity of the mental distress her character was suffering from. It is undoubtedly unfair to compare her performance to that of Björk in Dancer in the Dark or to Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves; both of those actresses appeared to be dangerously immersed in the worlds of their characters. It is not especially problematic that Dunst’s performance is not quite so extreme, but the world created in Melancholia requires a great deal of weight to be carried on Dunst’s characterization of Justine. Without a sufficiently convincing performance in this role, the logic of Melancholia is lacking an objective correlative, so to speak.

And this is due to the symbolic power of the planet Melancholia. Melancholia is on a collision course with Earth and is set to destroy all life. It is also an externalized symbol of the mental distress suffered by Justine. For the person suffering from depression there really is no hope, no future. Justine is not able to live a married life, despite a sympathetic husband. Unlike her sister, she has no children and nothing to live for. She cannot function as an autonomous human being. And yet, at the end of the film, she is proved to be right. Her mentally disturbed nihilism is vindicated. Only those who have no hope can cope with the end of the world. This is why Melancholia is a uniquely grim film.

It is normal for a Lars von Trier film to focus on the distress of a mentally disturbed woman. Melancholia may fail to achieve the same degree of intense, disturbing empathy for such a character as some of his other films but it is, nonetheless, a deeply poetic and visually arresting work of art.

Edward Burne-Jones, Angel, stained glass, St. Catherine window at Christchurch Cathedral Oxford

128 words

Two novelists who have published their works at Counter-Currents, Andy Nowicki and Ward Kendall, have recently been interviewed on the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network.

• Andy Nowicki, the author of Under the Nihil and The Columbine Pilgrim, was interviewed by Matt Parrott and Mike Connor on The Friday Show on Friday, January 20, 2012. The interview starts at the beginning of the second hour. To listen, click here.
• Ward Kendall, the author of Hold Back This Day, was interviewed by Tom Sunic on The Sunic Journal, January 24, 2012. To listen, click here.

We want to thank our authors and Tom Sunic, Matt Parrott, and Mike Connor for conducting the interviews.

Greg Johnson
Editor

Edward Burne-Jones, "An Angel Playing Flageolet," 1878

110 words

Ten new original French translations are now available on Counter-Currents/North American New Right:

• Collin Cleary, “Les Commandements de Gôt de Karl Maria Wiligut”
• Greg Johnson, “De l’argent pour rien”
• Greg Johnson, “Le déclin et la chute de Mouammar al-Kadhafi”
• Alex Kurtagić, “Bêtes de Norvège : Breivik & Vikernes”
• Jonson Miller, “Les dieux sont encore là : Une réponse au livre de Collin Cleary : Summoning the Gods”
• Sir Oswald Mosley, “Le Christ, Nietzsche et Cesar”
• National Vanguard, “Rudyard Kipling : Le poete de l’homme blanc”

We wish to thank our French translator for his continued generosity.

Greg Johnson
Editor

Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg Jünger

3,510 words

English version, Part 1 and Part 2

Ao evocar O Trabalhador, ao mesmo tempo que a primeira versão de Coração Aventureiro, o ensaísta Armin Mohler, autor de um manual que converteu-se em um clássico sobre a revolução conservadora alemã (Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918-1932), escreve: “Ainda hoje, não posso aproximar-me a essas obras sem sentir uma certa turbação”. Em outra parte, qualificando a O Trabalhador de “bloco errático” no seio da obra de Ernst Jünger, afirma: “Der Arbeiter é algo mais que uma filosofia: é uma criação poética”. O termo é apropriado, acima de tudo se admite-se que toda poesia fundadoria é ao mesmo tempo reconhecimento do mundo e revelação dos deuses. Livro “metálico” – estamos tentados a empregar a expressão “tempestade de aço” – O Trabalhador possui, em efeito, uma transcendência metafísica, que vai mais além do contexto histórico e político no qual foi escrito. Sua publicação não somente marcou uma data capital na história das idéias, senão constitui na obra jüngeriana um tempo de reflexão que não deixou de fluir, qual veia oculta, ao longo da vida de seu autor.

Nascido em 29 de março de 1895 em Heidelberg, Jünger fez seus primeiros estudos em Hannover, em Schwazenberg, nos Montes Metálicos, Braunschweig, novamente em Hannover, assim como na Scharnhorst-Realschule de Wunstorf. Em 1911, adere à seção de Wunstorf dos Wandervögel. Esse mesmo ano, publica seu primeiro poema (Unser Leben) no jornal local daquela organização juvenil. Wm 1913, à idade de 18 anos, foge do lar paterno. Objetivo de sua fuga: alistar-se em Verdún na Legião Estrangeira. Alguns meses mais tarde, depois de uma curta estância em Argel e uma fase de instrução em Sidi-bel-Abbés, seu pai convence-lhe a voltar para a Alemanha. Retoma seus estudos no Gildemeister Institut de Hannover, onde familiarizar-se-á com a obra de Nietzsche.

A Primeira Guerra Mundial começa em primeiro de agosto de 1914. Jünger converte-se em combatente voluntário. Ingressa no 73º Regimento de fuzileiros e recebe a ordem de marcha em 6 de outubro. Em 27 de dezembro parte para a frente de Champagne. Combate em Dorfes-les-Epargnes, em Douchy, em Monchy. Chefe de seção em agosto de 1915, alferes em novembro, segue a partir de 1916 um curso para oficiais em Croisilles. Dois meses mais tarde participa nos combates de Somme, onde é ferido duas vezes. De novo na frente, em novembro, com patente já de tenente, é outra vez ferido, desta vez próximo de Saint-Pierre-Vaast. Em 16 de dezembro é condecorado com a Cruz de Ferro de 1ª classe. Em fevereiro de 1917 é elevado a Strosstruppführer, chefe de comando de assalto. É o momento em que a guerra atolou-se, ao tempo em que as perdas humanas adquirem uma terrível dimensão. Do lado francês, apresta-se à sangrenta e inútil ofensiva de Chemin des Dames. À cabeça de seus homens, Jünger desliza pelas trincheiras e multiplica golpes de mão. Escaramuças incessantes, novas feridas: em julho, na frente de Flandres, e também em dezembro. Jünger é condecorado com a Cruz de Cavaleiro da Ordem dos Hohenzollern. Durante a ofensiva de março de 1918 continua capitaneando seus soldados em múltiplas escaramuças. É ferido uma vez mais. Em agosto, novas feridas, desta vez próximo de Cambrai. Finaliza a guerra em um hospital militar, depois de ter sido ferido catorze vezes! Isso vale-lhe a Cruz “Pelo Mérito”, a mais importante condecoração do exército alemão. Somente doze oficiais subalternos de terra, entre eles o futuro marechal Rommel, reeberão dita distinção ao longo da Primeira Guerra Mundial.

“Somente vivia-se para a Idéia”

De 1918 a 1923, Jünger, aquartelado na Reichswehr de Hannover, começa a escrever seus primeiros livros impregnados da experiência que aportou-lhe sua presença na frente. Tempestades de aço, publicado em 1919 por conta do autor e reeditado em 1922, conhecerá grande êxito. Seguir-lhe-ão A Guerra Como Experiência Interior (1922), O Bosque 125 (1924), Fogo e Sangue (1925). Não tardará Jünger em ser considerado como um dos escritores mais brilhantes de sua geração, como recordou-nos Henri Plard, inclusive se apelamos a seus artigos sobre a guerra moderna publicados na Militär-Wochen-blatt.

Porém Jünger não sente-se cômodo em um exército na paz. Tampouco é-lhe tentadora a aventura dos Freikorps. Em 31 de agosto de 1923, abandona a Reichswehr e matricula-se na Universidade de Leipzig para estudar biologia, zoologia e filosofia. Terá como professores a Hans Driesch e Felix Krüger. Em 3 de agosto de 1925 casa-se com Gretha von Jeinsen, de dezenove anos, que dar-lhe-á dois filhos: Ernst, nascido em 1926, e Alexander, em 1934. Durante esse período, suas idéias políticas amadurecem na mesma direção da efervescência que agita quaisquer facções da opinião pública alemã: o vergonhoso Tratado de Versalhes, o qual a República de Weimar aceitou sem vacilar todas as cláusulas e a que somente aceitar-se-á como um insuportável Diktat. No transcurso de uns meses converte-se em um dos principais representantes dos meios nacional-revolucionários, importante grupo da Revolução Conservadora situado à “esquerda”, junto aos movimentos nacional-bolcheviques agrupados ao redor de Niekisch. Seus escritos políticos inscrevem-se no período médio republicano (a “era Stresemann”) que finaliza em 1929, tempo de trégua provisória e de aparente calma. Jünger dirá mais tarde: “Somente vive-se para a idéia”.

Suas idéias expressaram-se primeiramente em revistas. Em setembro de 1925, o antigo chefe dos Freikorps, Helmut Franke, que acabava de publicar um ensaio sob o título Staat im Staate, lança a revista  Die Standarte, que trata de aportar uma “contribuição ao aprofundamento espiritual do pensamento do fronte”.

Jünger pertencerá a sua redação, em companhia de outro representante do “nacionalismo dos soldados”, o escritor Franz Schauwecker, nascido em 1890. Die Standarte foi, em princípio, suplemento do semanário Der Stahlhelm, órgão da associação de antigos combatentes do mesmo nome dirigido por Wilhelm Kleinau. Die Standarte tinha uma tiragem nada desprezível: ao redor de 170.000 leitores. Entre setembro de 1925 e março de 1926, Jünger publica dezenove artigos. Helmut Franke assina os seus com o pseudônimo “Gracchus”. A jovem direita nacional-revolucionária expressa-se ali: Werner Beumelburg, Franz Schauwecker, Hans Henning von Grote, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, Goetz Otto Stoffengen, etc.

Nas páginas de Die Standarte, Jünger adotará logo um tom muito radical, distinto ao da maioria dos membros do Stahlhelm. A partir de outubro de 1925, critica a tese da “punhalada nas costas” (Dolchstoss) que teria representado para o exército alemão a revolução de novembre (tese quase unânime nos meios nacionais). Chegou inclusive a sublinhar como alguns revolucionários de extrema esquerda foram valorosos combatentes durante a guerra. Afirmações deste tipo suscitaram vivas polêmicas. A direção do Stahlhelm põe-se em guarda e decide distanciar-se da jovem equipe jornalística. Em março de 1926 a publicação desaparece, para renascer ao mês seguinte com o nome abreviado de Standarte, com Jünger, Schauwecker, Kleinau e Franke como coeditores. Neste momento, os laços com o Stahlhelm não romperam-se ainda; os antigos combatentes continuam financiando indiretamente a Standarte, publicado pela casa editore de Seldte, a Frundsberg Verlag. Jünger e seus amigos reafirmam o melhor de sua vontade revolucionária. Em 3 de junho de 1926 Jünger publica um chamamento à unidade dos antigos combatentes do fronte com o objetio de fundar uma “república nacionalista dos trabalhadores”, convocatória que não terá eco. Em agosto, a pedido de Otto Hörsing – cofundador da Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, a milícia de segurança dos partidos socialdemocrata e republicano – o governo, tomando como pretenxto um artigo sobre Reithenau aparecido em Standarte, fecha a revista durante cinco meses. Moment que Seldte aproveita para relevar a Helmut Franke suas responsabilidades. Em solidariedade com Franke, Jünger aparta-se do jornal e em novembro, junto ao próprio Franke e a Wilhelm Weiss, inicia a edição de uma nova publicação entitulada Arminius. (Standarte aparecerá até 1929, sob a direção de Schauwecker e Kleinau).

Em 1927 Jünger marcha de Leipzig para instalar-se me Berlim, onde estabelecerá estreitos contatos com antigos membros dos Freikorps e com meios da juventude bündisch. Estes últimos, oscilando entre a disciplina militar e um espírito de grupo muito fechado, tratam de conciliar o romantismo aventureiro dos Wandervögel com uma organização de tipo mais comunitário e hierarquizado. Jünger trava uma especial amizade com Werner Lass, nascido em Berlim em 1902, e fundador em 1924, junto ao antigo chefe dos Freikorps Rossbach, da Schilljugend (movimento juvenil com cujo nome perpetua-se a memória do major Schill, caído na luta de liberação contra a ocupação napoleônica). Em 1927 Lass separa-se de Rossbach para fundar a Freischar Schill, grupo bündisch do qual Jünger será mentor (Schirmherr). De outubro de 1927 a março de 1928 Lass e Jünger associam-se para publicar a revista Der Vormarsch, fundada em junho de 1927 por outro famoso chefe dos Freikorps, o capitão Ehrhardt.

“Perder a guerra para ganhar a nação”

Durante este período, Jünger experimentou não poucas influênicas literárias e filosóficas. A guerra, o fronte, permitiram-lhe a mesma tripla experiência de certos escritores franceses de fins do século XIX, como Huysmans e Léon Bloy, que desemboca em um certo expressionismo que deixa-se perceber em A Guerra Como Experiência Interior e, acima de tudo, na primeira versão de Coração Aventureiro, e em uma espécie de “dandysmo” baudeleriano em Sturm, obra novelesca de juventude, tardiamente publicada, que leva claramente esta marca. Armin Mohler, nesta linha, comparou o jovem Jünger com o Barrés do Roman de l’énergie nationale: para o autor de A Guerra Como Experiência Interior, como para o de Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme, o nacionalismo, substituto religioso, modo de expansão e de reforço da alma, resulta acima de tudo uma opção deliberada, sendo o aspecto decisório desta orientação o que deriva do estouro das normas, consequência da Primeira Guerra Mundial.

A influência de Nietzsche e de Spengler é evidente. Em 1929, em uma entreivsta concedida a um jornal britânico, Jünger definir-se-á como “discípulo de Nietzsche”, sublinhando o fato de que este foi o primeiro em recusar a ficção do homem universal e abstrato, “rompendo” dita ficção em dois tipos concretos e diametralmente opostos: o forte e o fraco. Em agosto de 1922 lê com fruição o primeiro tomo de A Decadência do Ocidente e é no momento da publicação do segundo, em dezembro do mesmo ano, quando escreve Sturm. Porém, como ver-se-á, Jünger não resignar-se-á em ser um passivo discípulo. Está longe de seguir a Nietzsche e a Spengler na totalidade de suas afirmações. O declive do Ocidente não será, desde seu ponto de vista, uma fatalidade inelutável; há outras alternativas a uma simples aceitação do reino dos “Césares”. Assim mesmo, retoma por sua conta o questionamento nietzscheano, que deseja perfilar de uma vez por todas.

A guerra, a final de contas, foi a experiência mais impactante. Jünger aporta, em primeiro lugar, a lição do agônico. Ardor, nunca ódio: o solsado que está do outro lado da trincheira não é uma encarnação do mal, senão uma simples figura da adversidade do momento. Jünger, portanto, carece de inimigo absoluto (Feind): ante si somente existe o adversário (Gegner), confirmando-se assim o combate como “coisa sempre de santos”. Outra lição é que a vida nutre-se da mrote e esta daquela: “O saber mais preioso que aprendeu-se na escola da guerra, escreverá Jünger, em sua intimidade mais secreta, é indestrutível”.

Para alguns, a guerra foi entregue. Porém em virtude do princípio de equivalência dos contrários, o desastre concitará uma análise positiva. A derrota ou a vitória não é o que mais importa. Essencialmente ativista, a ideologia nacional-revolucionária professa um certo desprezo pelos objetivos: combate-se, não para conseguir a vitória, senão para guerrear.” A guerra, afirma Jünger, não é tanto uma guerra entre nações, como uma guera entre raças de homens. Em todos os países que inverviram na guerra, há ao mesmo tempo vencedores e vencidos”. (A Guerra Como Experiência Interior). Mais ainda, a derrota pode chegar a converter-se no fermento da vitória. E chega a pulsar a condição mesma desta vitória. No epígrafe de seu livro Aufbruch der Nation, Franz Schauwecker escreveu esta estremecedora frase: “Era preciso que perdêssemos a guerra, para ganhar a nação”. Recordava, talvez, esta outra de Léon Bloy: “Tudo o que chega é adorável”. Jünger, por sua parte, sustenta: “A Alemanha foi vencida, porém esta derrota foi saudável porque contribuiu para o desaparecimento da velha Alemanha (…) Era preciso perder a guerra para ganhar a nação”. Vencida pelos aliados, a Alemanha pôde volver-se para si mesma e transformar-se revolucionáriamente. A derrota devia ser aceita com fins de Transmutação, de maneira quase alquímica; a experiência do fronte devia ser “transmutada” em uma nova experiência vital para a nação. Tal era o fundamento do “nacionalismo dos soldados”. É na guerra, diz Jünger, onde a juventude adquiriu “a segurança de que os antigos caminhos não levam a nenhuma parte, e que é preciso abrir outros novos”. Colheita irreversível (Umbruch), a guerra aboliu os vetustos valores. Toda atitude reacionária, qualquer desejo de marcha para trás é impossível. A energia de ontem era utilizada em lutasp ontuais da pátria e pela pátria, porém no sucessivo servirá à pátria sob outra forma. A guerra, dito de outro modo, fornecerá o modelo de paz.

Em O Trabalhador, pode ler-se: “O fronte da guerra e o fronte do trabalho são idênticos”. A idéia central é que a guerra, por superficial e pouco significativa que possa parecer, tem um sentido profundo. Não pode ser apreendida através de uma compreensão racional, senão que unicamente pode ser pressentida. A interpretação positiva que Jünger dá da guerra não está, contrariamente ao que costuma-se dizer, essencialmente ligada à exaltação dos “valores guerreiros”. Procede da inquietude política de buscar como o sacrifício dos soldados mortos não deve nem pode ser considerado inútil.

A partir de 1926 Jünger faz vários chamamentos para a formação de um fronte unido de grupos e movimentos nacionais. Ao mesmo tempo, trata – sem muito êxito – de assinalar-lhes o cmainho de uma necessária autotransformação. Também o nacionalismo precisa ser “transmutado” alquimicamente. Deve desembaraçar-se de toda vinculação sentimental com a velha direita e converter-se em revolucionário, dando fé do declive do mundo burguês, fato que podemos observar tanto nos romances de Thomans Mann (Die Buddenbrooks) como nos de Alfred Kurbin (Die andere Seite).

Desde esta perspectiva, o essencial é a luta contra o liberalismo. Em Arminius e em Der Vormarsch Jünger ataca a ordem liberal simbolizada pelo literato, o intelectual humanista partidário de uma verdadeira sociedade “anêmica”, o internacionalista cínico ao que Spengler aponta como verdadeiro responsável da revolução de novembro e propagador do tipo consistente em que os milhões de mortos da Grande Guerra pereceram por nada. Paralelamente estigmatiza a “tradição burguesa” que reclamam para si os nacionais e os aderentes ao Stahlhelm, esses “pequeno-burgueses” (Spiessbürger) que, favoráveis à guerra, escapuliram-se atrás da pele do leão”. Ataca sem trégua o espírito guilhermino, o culto ao passado, o gosto dos pangermanistas pela “museologia” (musealer Betrieb). Em março de 1926 define pela primeira vez o termo “neonacionalismo”, que opõe ao “nacionalismo dos antepassados” (Allväternationalismus). Defende a Alemanha, porém a nação é para ele muito mais que um território. É uma idéia: Alemanha é fundamentalmente aquele conceito capaz de inflamar os espíritos. Em abril de 1927, em Arminius, Jünger autodefine-se implícitamente nominalista: declara não crer em verdade geral alguma, em nenhuma moral universal, em nenhuma noção de “homem” como ser coletivo possuidor de uma consciência e direitos comuns. “Cremos, dirá, no valor do singular” (Wir Glauben an den Wert des Besonderen). Em uma época em que a direita tradicional aposta pelo individualismo frente ao coletivismo, ou os grupos völkisch refugiam-se na temática do retorno à terra e à mística da “natureza”, Jünger exalta a técnica e condena o indivíduo. Nascida da racionalidade burguesa, explica em Arminius, a todo-poderosa técnica revolve-se contra quem engendrou-a. O mundo avança para a técnica e o indivíduo desaparece; o neonacionalismo deve ser a primeira tendência em extrair essas lições. É mais, será nas grandes cidades em que “a nação será ganha”; para os nacional-revolucionários, “a cidade é um fronte”.

Ao redor de Jünger constitui-se o chamado “grupo de Berlim”, em cujo seio encontraremos a representantes das diferentes correntes da Revolução Conservadora: Franz Schauwecker e Helmut Franke; o escritor Ernst von Salomon; o nietzscheano-anticristão Friedrich Hielscher, editor de Das Reich; os neoconservadores Augusto Winnig (o qual Jünger conhecerá no outono de 1927 por mediação do filósofo Alfred Baeumler) e Albrecht Erich Günther, coeditor – junto a Wilhelm Stapel – do Deutsches Volkstum; os nacional-bolcheviques Ernst Niekisch e Karl O. Paetel e, sem dúvida, a seu irmão e reconhecido teórico Freidrich Georg Jünger. Friedrich Georg, cujas posições terão uma grande influência na evolução de Ernst, nasceu em Hannover em 1 de setembro de 1898. Sua carreira correu paralela a de seu irmão. Voluntário na Grande Guerra, participa em 1916 nos combates do Somme, alcançando a função de comandante de companhia. Em 1917, gravemente ferido no fronte de Flandres, passa vários meses em distintos hospitais militares. De regresso a Hannover, concluída a guerra, e após um breve parêntese como tenente da Reichswehr, em 1920, inicia seus estudos de Direito, redatando sua tese doutoral em 1924. A partir de 1926 envia seus artigos regularmente às revistas nas quais colabora seu irmão: Die Standarte, Arminius, Der Vormarsch, etc, e publica na coleção “Der Aufmersch” dirigida por Ernst, um breve ensaio entitulado Aufmarsch des Nationalismus. Influenciado por Nietzsche, Sorel, Klages, Stefan George, e Rilke, a quem frequentemente cita em seus trabalhos, consagrar-se-á ao ensaio e à poesia. O primeiro estudo que sobre ele publica-se, enquadra-o no “estilo prussiano”.

Em abril de 1928 Ernst Jünger confia a sucessão da direção da revista Der Vormarsch a seu amigo Friedrich Hielscher. Alguns meses mais tarde, em janeiro de 1930, converte-se junto a Werner Lass no diretor de Die Kommenden, semanário fundado cinco anos antes pelo escritor Wilhelm Kotzde – que exerceu uma grande influência sobre os movimentos juvenis de ideologia bündisch e de maneira muito especial sobre a tendência deste movimento que evoluirá para o nacional-bolchevismo, representado por Hans Ebeling, e acima de tudo, por Karl O. Paetel – colaborando ao mesmo tempo em Die Kommenden, em Die sozialistische Nation e nos Antifaschistische Briefe.

Trabalha também para a revista Widerstand, fundada e dirigida por Niekisch em meados de 1926. Ambos conehcer-se-ão no outono de 1927 estabelecendo-se uma sólida amizade. Jünger escreverá: “Se quer resumir o programa que Niekisch desenvolve em Widerstand em uma frase alternativa, esta poderia ser: contra o burguês e pelo Trabalhador, contra o mundo ocidental e pelo Leste”. O nacional-bolchevismo, no que por outra parte confluem múltiplas e variadas tendências, caracteriza-se de fato por sua idéia da luta de classes a partir de uma definição comunitária, coletivista se quer-se, da idéia de nação. “A coletivização, afirma Niekisch, é a forma social que a vontade orgânica deve possuir se quer afirmar-se frente aos efeitos mortíferos da técnica”. Segundo Niekisch, o movimento nacional e o movimento comunista tem, a final de contas, o mesmo adversário, como os combates contra a ocupação do Ruhr demonstraram e é a razãp ela qual as duas “nações proletárias”, Alemanha e Rússia, devem buscar um entendimento. “O parlamentarismo democrático liberal foge de toda decisão, declara Niekisch. Não quer bater-se, mas sim discutir (…) O comunismo busca decisões (…) Em sua rudeza, há algo de fortaleza campesina; há nele mais dureza prussiana, ainda que não seja consciente disso, que em um burguês prussiano”. Tais posições impregnam uma facção nada desprezível do movimento nacional-revolucionário. Jünger mesmo, como muito bem captou Louis Dupeux, chegou a estar “fascinado pela problemática do bolchevismo”, ainda que não possamos considerá-lo um nacional-bolchevique em sentido estrito.

Werner Lass e Jünger apartam-se em julho de 1931 de Die Kommenden. O primeiro lança, a partir de setembro, a revista Der Umsturz, que fez as vezes de órgão da Freischar Schill e que, até seu desaparecimento, em fevereiro de 1933, declarar-se-á abertamente nacional-bolchevique. Jünger, não obstante, está em outra disposição espiritual. No transcurso de alguns anos, utilizará toda uma série de revistas como muros onde colar seus carteis – serão os ônibus “aos quais sobe-se e abandona-se por capricho” – seguindo uma linha evolutiva eminentemente política. As consignas formuladas por ele não obtiveram o eco esperado, seus chamamentos à unidade não foram atendidos. Jünger acabará por sentir-se um estranho em qualquer corrente política. Não há mais simpatia pelo nacional-socialismo em ascensão que pelas ligas nacionais tradicionais. Todos os movimentos nacionais, explica em um artigo publicado no Süddeutsche Monatshefte, quer sejam tradicionalistas, legitimistas, economicistas, reacionários, ou nacional-socialistas, extraem sua inspiração do passado e, desde esta perspectiva, são tão somente movimentos quais não cabe mais que qualqificar de “liberais” e “burgueses”. Entre neoconservadores e nacional-bolcheviques, entre uns e outros, os grupos nacional-revolucionários não poderão impor-se. De fato, Jünger já não crê na possibilidade de ação coletiva alguma. Assim sublinhar-lhe-á mais tarde Niekisch em sua autobiografia, e Jünger, que pulsou suficientemente a atualidade, acaba por traçar-se uma via mais pessoal e interior. “Jünger, esse perfeito oficial prussiano que é capaz de submeter-se à disciplina mais dura, escreve Marcel Decombis, não poderá já integrar-se em coletivo algum”. Seu irmão que, a partir de 1928, abandonou a carreira jurídica, evoluirá de igual forma que Ernst. Escreve sobre a poesia grega, o romance americano, Kant, Dostoiévski. Os dois irmãos empreendem uma série de viagens: Sicília (1929), as Baleares (1931), Dalmácia (1932), o Mar Egeu.

Ernst e Friedrich Georg Jünger continuam publicando alguns artigos, principalmente em Widerstand. Porém o período jornalístico de ambos acaba. Entre 1929 e 1932 Ernst Jünger concentra todos os seus esforços em novos livros. É o momento da primeira versão de Coração Aventureiro, o ensaio A Mobilização Total, e O Trabalhador, publicado em Hamburgo no ano de 1932, pela Hanseatische Verlangsanstalt de Benno Ziegler e que antes de 1945 chegará a conhecer várias reedições.

Source: http://legio-victrix.blogspot.com/2011/09/ernst-junger-e-o-trabalhador-uma.html