Apologies to both my readers, but I am pretending to be busy. In case you didn't wander over from Counter Currents, here is a review of mine of editor Greg Johnson's new book, The Trial of Socrates.
https://counter-currents.com/2023/07/greg-johnsons-the-trial-of-socrates/
Here, on the other hand, is a piece in VDARE on immigration and all its works.
Stay free.
A piece of mine from Taki's Magazine in December of last year. Paris is a busy city...
The 1942 movie Casablanca
is the cinematic version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which a Victorian
woman reportedly disliked because she found it “full of clichés”. It ought not
to be legal to be unable to recite at least one of Bogart’s lines as suave
restaurateur Rick Blaine, and my personal favorite is when the radiant Ilsa
Lund, played famously by Ingrid Bergman, reminds Rick of the couple’s dalliance
in Paris as the Wehrmacht marched in. He replies;
“I remember every detail.
The Germans wore grey. You wore blue”.
It is not his only comment
on the City of Love in the movie, as he adds, “We’ll always have Paris”. Don’t
be too sure, Mister Rick.
Paris goes by many names,
one being the City of Lights, and if you wanted to see France’s capital all lit
up, you should have been there over Christmas. On December 23, a man allegedly
69 years old, white, French and with a self-confessed dislike for foreigners,
walked into a Kurdish cultural center in the heavily immigrant 10th arrondissement
and shot three Kurds dead, wounding three others.
Now, Paris is not Chicago, it's
not even Kosovo, and this type of shooting is a rarity. But the response was
not the comparatively mawkish displays in the UK or USA, whereby candles and
teddy-bears are placed at the site of the latest tragedy. Instead, Paris’s
Kurdish community rioted so hard they made the BLM chaos in 2020 look like a
dorm pillow-fight.
By Boxing Day, when the cars
were all burned out and the testosterone had worn off, the protests were solemn
and processional, accompanied by haunting, threnodic music. (Oh, and of course
another staggering tax bill for Parisians to clear the debris). Framed
photographs of the dead were held up at the head of the gloomy marchers. It was
strangely moving.
Then the rioting started
again, protesters using metal bars to smash the boulevards in order to
provide missiles to throw at the police. Torched cars, tear gas, police
charges, batons. I wonder if any old soixante huitards, veterans of the
1968 student riots in Paris (and elsewhere) that almost brought down de
Gaulle’s government, looked on at the carnage with misty-eyed nostalgia and
thought, whatever else these Kurds are good at, their rioting is top-notch.
The Kurdish people are the
largest stateless population in the world, and Kurdistan is a theoretical jigsaw-puzzle,
some of which has its autonomy recognized, some of which does not. It seems
that everyone just forgot, in the general hubbub of the 20th century’s
World Wars, to create Kurdistan, which these enforced nomads have been looking
for ever since. But they have a formidable and ruthless enemy in Turkey.
The response of the latter
to the Parisian rioting was informative, as Ankara summoned the French
Ambassador, not to ask whether there was anything they could do to help, what
with their roguish but lovable neighbors having just burnt down the 10th
arrondissement, but to express concern at some of the flags flown, and
social media comments made about the shooting.
The Turkish deep state –
everyone’s got one these days – despise Kurds, and particularly the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK). To be fair, they have a point, PKK flags being bright red
and featuring in one corner a rather clever symbol composed of a yellow hammer
and sickle which may be familiar to you. They were conspicuous in Paris. The
PKK are also proscribed worldwide as a terrorist organization – a point to
which we will return - but at what stage did a Muslim country in the Asiatics
get to tell France who can and cannot march in their streets? Around the same
time China opened police stations to look for dissidents in the Americas, I
guess.
The PKK are not Commie
LARPers. They are a proscribed terrorist organization banned across the EU, the
US, ah, forget about it. It’s easier to say where they aren’t banned. North
Korea or Cuba would probably buy them a beer, but the latest Global
Terrorism Index hardly puts them in the big league. So why
the blanket ban? Well, the Index is produced by The Institute of
Economics and Peace, which is a branch of the European Union, which is de
facto run by Germany, which has always appeased Turkey. So perhaps the Turks
forced the ban but kept the PKK out of the papers to avoid giving them
publicity. Just a thought.
Also, comments were made in
the idiot’s agora of social media implying that Turkey was behind the
Parisian shooting. An awful lot of logistics, that, just to whack out three
Kurds 1,700 miles away from Istanbul, and the authorities are sticking with the
line that the suspect is a crazed Frenchman who had been released from jail
after a saber attack on a migrant camp. Reuters attempted to contact the
suspect’s lawyers but without success. Now, that is odd. Western
governments are so keen for right-wing extremist killers to exist that, when
they actually do, their face and history are on the news 24/7. But it’s all
gone a bit quiet, and the question remains; who killed the Kurds?
The Turks get all their news
from state-run news provider Anadolu Agency, essentially Pravda with a
fez, and their anti-Kurd response is to be expected. But the European media are
being coy about this whole affair. They don’t want to annoy anyone, as in anyone.
One thing that even the media can’t smokescreen, however, is that Paris is no
longer the City of Lights but the City of Riots. And that will hurt more as
rioting becomes the new soccer.
Paris famously empties of
Parisians in August as they head south to the famous resorts of Nice, Cannes, Juan
les Pins. But if riot season now starts at Christmas, by summer some of those
escaping gay Paree won’t be coming back. White flight works to the same
principle throughout the West. Worse for Paris, much as the media and the
tourism lobby will try to minimize footage of daily rioting, tourists foreign
or domestic just will not visit a war zone. “Hey honey, how about Paris in the
spring?” “Sure, cheri. You get a Guide Michelin map, I’ll see to
the Kevlar body-armor”.
Whether the Kurd-killer was
a crank or a Turkish emissary, the Kurdish community blamed the French for
failing to protect their people. Really? Perhaps sir and his wives would like
24/7 personal security? Leave it once again to the French tax-payer, allez!
What becomes clearer with each of these internecine disputes – be the killer a
racist nutjob or a Turkish hitman – is that when countries import sectarian
religions, they also import either the strife that goes with it or a whole new
civil war. Then it’s their problem.
Paris might want to think
about lines not from Casablanca but Dickens’ famous opening to A Tale
of Two Cities, set in London and Paris;
“It was the best of times, it
was the worst of times”.
One or the other. You can’t
have both.
Ack ack ack!
I am
a third or so through the English Medieval poem Beowulf, which I seem to
have avoided at school (along with much else). It’s a rip-roaring read, too,
rendered in half-prose, half-poetry whose metricality drops in and out like a
half-heard rhythm. The opening scenes also feature a lot of tough talk and his
Beowulf and his crew big up themselves before handing out a career-ending
beating to the giant Grendel.
Of
course, you want tough guys to fight psychotic giants, accept nothing less. And
Medieval berserkers didn’t have CVs or resumés, and so would undoubtedly
be eager to tell the tale of the last dragon they dismembered. But while I was
pursuing my Medieval studies, I happened to see a video – along with 18 million
other people – of Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr.
working out in his yard. He certainly is a buff man for 69 years old. He could have been one of Beowulf’s posse.
Does
the state of a candidate’s physique indicate he is worth your vote? It did
Arnold Schwarzenegger no harm, and the Western media who scoffed at Vladimir
Putin’s photoshoot from a few years ago, which showed him shirtless on a sturdy
Russian steed, might compare him to the almost literal doughboy Boris Johnson.
This
is, of course, a time in which the white Western alpha male has all but been
run out of town, but Kennedy’s people – unless he went rogue and came up with
the optics himself – may be on to something by airing the primaries with some
testosterone.
Also,
Kennedy is singing from a different hymn sheet to his Democrat colleagues.
Skepticism of the Covid vaccine is still a grand heresy, and it might be a good
thing if Kennedy smuggles in some genuine political substance rather than Biden’s
illusory belief-system. Go get ‘em, Popeye.
It has been fashionable in some circles in recent
times to talk of the ‘post-truth society’. Epistemologically, that falls at the
first hurdle as the invocation of such a society would require us to take its
existence as a truth, thereby nullifying its validity, but that – to quote the
poet Shelley – is a tale for the long winter nights.
Truth is also, famously, the first casualty of war,
gunned down as it leaps out of the trench to death. It certainly caught the
first volley of the war in Ukraine, where the story of battle swirls around
like a dust storm, with small, momentarily appealing truths flashing by to be
grabbed at and caught.
As I clamber over the trash-mounds of the media, I
read that Putin is finished and that he has only just started. I find that the
Russian economy is teetering on the brink of annihilation and also that it is a
powerhouse, out-performing its NATO enemies due to increased oil revenue. Apparently,
this is both an unwinnable war and one Putin had won from the start. It’s like
the board game Scrabble; you wait to see what letters you pick blind, then you
try and make an intelligible, legitimate word from them.
Now, a rebellion that lasted for far less time than a
cricket test match. Is this psy-ops by Putin, or did one of the – surely unstable
– mercenaries earning the Czar’s shilling really come swashbuckling his way
almost to Moscow? Were the Western media supposed to get the message that the
calculating, chess-playing, judo brown-belt Vladimir Putin is a better bet with
the nuclear codes than a man who commands drunken battalions for money from whomever
will pay him for his time and violence.
Trouble anywhere in the Balkans usually bodes ill for
Europe, and with the added involvement of NATO, we must now be seeing a proxy
war. I must look out the definition. If definition is still operation, that is.
A British school teacher was recently caught on
audiotape telling two female students that their view of sex and gender – that there
were only two of each – was bigoted. ‘Bigotry’ is an unshakeable adherence to
an idea or opinion, and you might be hard-pressed to find a better definition
of nature.
You may throw nature out with a pitchfork, Horace famously wrote in the Epistles, but she will
always come back. Nature is a reference grid, a matrix, a pantheistic
yardstick, a preset calibration against which we can measure and compare such
things as morphology and normative behaviour. Once you apply your pitchfork,
Horace would say that it was just a matter of time before nature
re-equilibriates, but there is a new generation of genuine influencers – not the
worthless, low-IQ internet kind but the ones who teach children – who refuse to
countenance this return.
This is a very strange time to be alive.
State-sanctioned curation of the truth is not new, the Communists made a
science out of it, but the sternest, most brutal despots never told their
people that women could be men on a whim and must be respected as such on pain
of punishment. Taking the fight to the epistemological is a new angle, and is
of course the meaning of the torture scene at the end of 1984, In which
it is not O’Brien’s aim to force Winston to say he sees five fingers
where there are four, he is not after mere token acquiescence. He wants
Winston actually to see five fingers.
What this new epistemological environment means for
intelligent children is all too clear. Punished for expressing biological
truths, they will soon learn that they cannot advance without agreeing to a
whole new load of terms and conditions, ones that apply not to buying a phone
but to life in general.
If you have no final arbiter for what is and is not
true in the world, an epistemological guarantee, then you a in a weightless arena
with nothing to grasp and ground yourself. Once one natural category is disregarded,
the others are equally vulnerable.
There is a piece of mine here
at Counter Currents on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The introduction
discusses the opinion of Donna Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, and her fears that
white men – ‘the worst men on the internet’ – will be attracted to the classics
and try to make them great again. As I say in the piece, there was never a time
when the classics were not great. Ms Zuckerberg has confused the intellectual
worth of something with its market value. I suppose it must run in the family.
Classical literature has been around in its extant
entirety since the Renaissance. It hasn’t just popped up like Harry Potter
or Star Wars. It requires a certain approach, being neither beach
reading nor a genre requiring knowledge of philosophy. It is humanistic, Plato’s
theology notwithstanding, and presumably this explains its popularity during
and shaping of the Renaissance. Classical literature is also white.
It is axiomatic that anything tainted by whiteness
must be chivvied out and either censored or cancelled entirely. Whiteness is
feared by the Left and their ethnic tailcoat-hangers as Kryptonite is feared by
Superman. Whites are success victims, responsible for Western supremacy for so
long and also, by the same process, responsible for those who now wish that
supremacy destroyed and replaced by a different hegemon, one whose likelihood
of recreating or replacing civilization in the same way is slim.
What has led to our current Denaissance, this Age of
Unreason, a Dark Enlightenment? It would be a bit precious to claim that we are
careering down the highway to hell because we don’t read enough Cicero or
Lucretius. That said, the classical civilisations were among the first to
manifest as successful, and they left a (partial) record of that feat.
The internet – our Gutenberg moveable type press –
offers what the BBC once claimed to provide: Information, education, and
entertainment. Western governors would prefer you to use it for the latter,
there being too much liberatory discourse out there in the virtual cosmos for
their liking.
You can read yourself to a tolerable level of freedom
in an increasingly oppressive world. And, if you happen to engage with
classical literature – and indeed the whole treasure trove of white Western
literature – you are in luck on a table where the odds are increasingly being
stacked against you and your chance of liberty. There is nothing of the air of
the (post-) modern about the literature of strong times, no cynicism about its
philosophy (the school of the Cynics notwithstanding) but a sense of an
ethno-intellectual brotherhood, one now forced underground where the shades
are.
The collected works of Plato and Shakespeare are available
as e-books for far less than the price, combined, that you would pay for a half
of lager in an identikit bar in London. Have you any idea of the difficulty and
expense of obtaining these volumes our grandfathers would have experienced?
So, the classics are waiting there for you, should you
be intrigued. Escape from the modern, go back in time, make the classics great
again.
The twin offensives against
Christianity and whiteness continue. Whether one is a Christian or not is
unimportant. Christianity created a viable moral and social framework along
with its baroque metaphysics and its abuse of power. The relentless onslaught
against the (white) nuclear family was the first redoubt, but all Christian
values – and Christians themselves - are currently being jostled and harassed.
The nuclear family was a huge
target to hit and an obvious one. It doesn’t much affect blacks who, with 72%
of black American children born out of wedlock, don’t tend to go in for that
sort of thing. For obvious reasons it doesn’t affect the Alphabetti Spaghetti
people because they bat for the other team and are not breeders. Islam is a bit
worrying but the problem solves itself. Muslims are never going to adapt to any
of these faddish examples of middle-class 1st-World ennui. Any
attempt to break up the Muslim nuclear family – which has the added electron of
genetically ruinous cousin marriages – will be met with force. Look at what is
happening with the transgender movement. The people making the most noise are
Muslims. Regardless of your or my view of Islam, it must be conceded that they
are more capable in terms of aggression and organization. When the caliphate
comes, at least things will be ordered. It just won’t be a very nice order if
you don’t happen to be a Muslim and you don’t quite feel like converting.
As for anti-whiteness, it’s
woven through the fabric of Western society, and this in a remarkably short
space of time. From visual advertising to public sector hiring policy, from BBC
staff to black-only events, movies to TV series, it is absolutely as clear as
crystal that blacks are being boosted, lauded, and affirmatively hired. Not
Sikhs, Hindus or the Chinese, you understand. They are not corrosive enough, they
don’t disrupt the white experience as much as aggressive blacks and hulking
queers in dresses in the classroom showing their arses to children.
Blacks aren’t going to like
that one much either, by the way. It is amusing that the three championed
groups – blacks, Muslim and alphabets – don’t like one another all that much.
What is also funny, because schadenfreude is always funny, is that on
the way to this dystopia queers and feminists were jettisoned as surplus to
requirements. Hi, feminists and queers. Now you’re taking it for the decades of
your shit that we were forced to listen to and acknowledge.
So, Britain and America
continue to transform their world-historical cultures into a Rabelaisian pig-pen,
endlessly highlighting the most desperately worthless elements of what used to
be a society. And we are still fighting even though we lost the war some time
ago, like the Japanese soldiers found in the jungle many years after WW2 ended.
The only option is to wait for the inevitable collapse of society – which has
to be odds-on favourite – and hope that there is something left to piece back
together after the party’s over and the house has been trashed.
Apologies to both my readers, but I am pretending to be busy. In case you didn't wander over from Counter Currents, here is a review o...
