Remembering J. Philippe Rushton (3 December 1943 - 2 October 2012)

Alex Kurtagic

We celebrate the life of J. Philippe Rushton, who was born 73 years ago today. A British-born professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, he went with his research on human nature where most wouldn't have dared.

Rushton is best known for his work on altruism, race and intelligence, and the application of r/K theory to humans.

It is a sad reflection of the times we live in that acceptance or rejection of his theories comes down to someone's politics. Jonathan Bowden defined the essence of the Left as the idea that equality is morally good, and the essence of the Right as its opposite. According to this definition, liberalism is a discourse of the Left, and since liberalism is the dominant discourse in the West, this meant that Rushton's conclusions automatically pushed him out of the mainstream, for they posited the essential inequality of man.

Jonathan Bowden's Right - Long-Thought-Lost Book, Available Now!

Alex Kurtagic

In celebration of Jonathan Bowden's 54th birthday, today we are making available through our online store (in advance of the official publishing date, when it will be available in the usual outlets) his long-thought-lost book on the Right.

The first edition of Right appeared in the aftermath of the Maastricht Treaty, the Euro-federalist document signed by the government of John Major that deeply divided the Conservative Party. Jonathan Bowden appeared in the Right-wing fringes of the political landscape around this time, storming the motley array of groups, discussion circles, and clubs that rejected the politics of the Major era, impressing some—and dismaying others—with his political and philosophical zeal, his torrent of ideas, and his mastery of obscure and difficult concepts. While Bowden, like many of his colleagues, disliked the European Union, he did so as a self-confessed ‘European fundamentalist’, his criticism being that the EU was neither . . .

Forgetting Filippo Buonarroti (11 November 1761- 16 September 1837)

Alex Kurtagic

We celebrate the death of Filippo Buonarroti, who died 178 years ago today. Buonarroti was a supporter of Jacobin terrorism, egalitarian extremist, and a proto-communist conspirator. Filippo Michele Buonarroti was born in Pisa, in the Duchy of Tuscany, on 11 November 1761. Not for the first time when it comes to champions of equality, his family could boast of an elite pedigree: his mother, Giulia Bizzarini, was a Sienese noblewoman, while his father, Leonardo, came from a long line of Florentine jurists and magistrates. He was also descended from the Leonardo Da Vinci's brother, Buonarroto. As will be seen, such ancestry contributed exactly zero to making him a proponent of civilisation.

David Crawford's Lights Out

Alex Kurtagic

David Crawford's Lights Out is one of a constallation of underground post-apocalyptic novels written by American authors in recent years, catering to the prepper / survivalist subculture. These novels would be considered by mainstream readers to be on the political Right, although in reality their authors are libertarians or classical liberals who describe themselves as 'conservative'. While theirs are not the views promoted in mainstream media nowadays, they do not stray from acceptable discourse. Written between 2003 and 2006, Crawford's novel began life much like those by Dickens, only serialised in a blog as opposed to a periodical. It is claimed that once it was made available as a PDF, the file was downloaded millions of times. It was finally published as a print book in 2010. Lights Out falls into the subset of apocalyptic fiction that explores the EMP scenario: an event takes place that knocks out all electronics throughout the United States, causing society quickly to fall apart. Like Fortschen's One Second After, which I reviewed in 2013, this novel focuses on what a man, his family, and his community do in order to survive. In many ways, the two novels are . . .

Remembering Sir Henry Morton Stanley (18 January 1841 - 10 May 1904)

Alex Kurtagic

Sir Henry Morton Stanley (born John Rowlands), was born 174 years ago today. Sir Henry was one of the great explorers of Africa in the Victorian era, along with Richard Burton, John Speke, Samuel Baker, James Grant, and Stanley's inspiration, David Livingstone. In his day, central Africa was a big unknown: the map for this region was a blank. Stanley authored a number of books:

Forgetting Rosa Luxemburg (5 March 1871 - 15 January 1919)

Alex Kurtagic

We celebrate death of Rosa Luxemburg, who died 96 years ago today. She was a Marxist theorist, ideologue, agitator, and convicted traitor, who was involved in various terrorist groups of the far Left. She co-founded the Spartacist League and later the Communist Party of Germany. Red Rosa, as she is known, was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Zamość, in the Kingdom of Poland, which was at the time controlled by Russia. The youngest of five children, her father, Eliasz Luxemburg, was a timber trader; her mother was Line Löwenstein. Her childhood was uneventful, save for a hip ailment that confined her to bed for a year while aged 5 and left her with legs of different lengths, and hence a limp. At the age of 9 she was enrolled in a Gymnasium, an all girls' school in Warsaw. And for the next few years, everything went well. However, it wasn't long before Rosa fell in with bad company. In 1886, at the tender age of 15, Rosa joined the First Proletariat, a gang founded by Ludwik Waryński, who already had a criminal record and would later die in prison. This group was by then allied to Narordnaya Volya, a Russian Far-Left terrorist organisation, which already had the assassination of Tsar Alexander II to its credit . . .

Available Now: Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Aryan Worldview

James Stevenson

Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Aryan Worldfview is now available in a professional edition for the first time in 110 years. In Aryan Worldview Houston Chamberlain discusses the importance of Indology in the effort to gain deeper insight into the essence of Indo-European thought. Relying on Sanskrit being part of the Indo-Aryan, and thereby part of the Indo-European, family of languages, from which he supposes a common ancestry, he deems Europeans can benefit greatly from a study of the Vedic texts, the latter expressing another facet of the Indo-European ancestral soul; this facet he sets in contradistinction, and as complementary, to the Hellenic: while the Hellenes were concerned with form, the Aryans were concerned with substance.

Available Now: Jonathan Bowden's Axe

Alex Kurtagic

Between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, Jonathan Bowden wrote 27 books, about which almost nothing was known until after his death. Combining cultural criticism with memoir, high journalism, and selected correspondence, these texts belong to no particular genre, the prose being allowed to roam where it may, drawing from many strands, finding unexpected links, and collecting shrewd insights along the way. More than anything, they are exercises in exploration and self-clarification, wherein one will find, as work in progress, many of the themes that would later emerge in his orations. The Jonathan Bowden Collection aims at making these obscure texts readily available for the first time, complete with annotations and indeces, so that they may be studied and / or enjoyed by present and future generations interested in the dissidents at the margins of British intellectual life at the turn of our century.

Forgetting Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) (9 December 1895 - 12 November 1989)

Alex Kurtagic

Dolores Ibárruri died 25 years ago today. She was a pro-Soviet communist, Republican leader, and feminist in Spain who agitated to impose communism in her country and who later worked with Stalin's régime in Moscow. Upon her return to Spain, following the death of Franco, democratic politicians loaded her with honours. She is known for the slogan '¡No pasarán!' during the Battle of Madrid in the Spanish Civil War. Isadora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez was born in a Gallarta, in the Basque Country. Her father was a miner. He was also—and this says much about what he had to contend with—a supporter of Carlism, a traditionalist, legitimist, monarchist, counter-revolutionary movement, which arose in the reaction against the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and which was akin to Joseph de Maistre and the French Reactionaries. Her mother was Castillian. And she was also exasperated by young Dolores, whom, aged ten, she finally took to the Church of San Felicísimo to have her exorcised.

Forgetting Wilhelm Reich (24 March 1897 - 3 November 1957)

Alex Kurtagic

Wilhelm Reich died 57 years ago today. He was a Freudo-Marxian psychoanalyst, sexual pervert, conspiracy theorist, ufologist, and quack. To his 1933 book, Mass Psychology of Fascism, we owe the fatuous idea that fascism is a symptom of sexual repression. This idea is still taken seriously today, notably by post-modern intellectuals. He died in prison after being convicted for contempt of court in a fraud case. Reich was born in Dobzau, now in the Ukraine, but then in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, a part of Austro-Hungarian Empire. Soon after birth, the family relocated to Bukovina. His parents, Leon and Cäcilia, well-to-do farmers, were vehemently apostate Jews: they raised him and his brother as non-Jews, taught them only German, punished their use of Yiddish expressions, and forbade them from playing with local Yiddish-speaking children—all in vain, however, for as an adult Reich operated in an overwhelmingly Jewish milieu. His childhood may explain his—shall we say, 'colourful'—career: his younger sister died an agonising death while still an infant, and Reich, according to his second daughter, was abused by a paedophile, which triggered an early and unhealthy obsession with sex. He recorded . . .

Out Now: The Partisan by Fenek Solère

James Stevenson

We have published a new novel on our fiction imprint.

The Fifth Republic

Son of a mudered activist during the Algerian War, the ambitious French Minister of Justice, Said Ben Hassi, dreams of a Pan-Eurabian Caliphate.

But his is not the post-colonial revanchism of a haunted man; it is the logical end product of decades of corrupt politics and misguided utopianism.

The old European establishment, weak and morally bankrupt, is impotent. The ancient French, victims of their own selfishness and nihilism, are fading, demoralised, and increasingly disenfranchised.

Interview with Fenek Solère

Alex Kurtagic

Almost every time I receive a communication from you, it has originated in an exotic location, and it seems you are more often in some far-flung place on the planet than Britain. Are you an adventurer, or do you have a very interesting job?

I am both an adventurer and an entrepreneur. Like an ever-increasing number of people attracted to our movement I have thrived in the modern world, in direct contradiction to the media portrayal of dissidents like ourselves as lonely bitter bachelors, sitting in their basements with no friends and no sexual outlet.

Over the course of my adult life I have lived and worked in London, France, St Petersburg, Kiev, San Francisco, Central Asia, and the Middle-East. I am not someone who can be castigated and mocked for being unsophisticated or parochial. My home is filled with art, books, and the numerous artifacts I have collected from all over the world.

Forgetting Che Guevara (14 June 1928 - 9 October 1967)

Alex Kurtagic

Ernesto 'Che' Guevara finally died 47 years ago today. Guevara was a Marxist revolutionary, mass murderer, and guerrillaman, whose stylised visage has become synonymous with youth rebellion in the West, at once the symbol of the triumph and defeat of Marxist ideology. To date, Western Leftists and even UNESCO continue to venerate this man as a sort of secular saint.

Guevara was born in Argentina, the eldest of five children. His parents, Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna y Llosa were of Basque and Irish descent. Sadly, this upper-middle-class family was also enamoured with the political Left (a bourgois way to purchase virtue), and his father, a firm supporter of the Communists during the Spanish Civil War, even opened the family home to veterans of that conflict, so young Ernestito, who could have become a respectable physician and successful travel writer when grown up, never had a chance.

Forgetting Eric Hobsbawm (9 June 1917 - 1 October 2012)

Alex Kurtagic

Eric Hobsbawm finally died two years ago today. He was a Marxist writer, apologist for Stalin, Communist propagandist, and professional liar, who plied his trade as an academic historian. Profusely eulogised by Britain's Left-leaning intellectuals, media, and political class, and obscenely rewarded for his labours, he was described in the British media as 'our greatest historian'. Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt. His father, Leopold Percy Obstbaum, was an East London merchant of Polish Jewish descent. His mother, Nelly Grün, came from an middle class Austrian Jewish background. Leopold had already altered his surname to Hobsbaum when Eric was born, but a clerical error resulted in a futher alteration to Hobsbawm.

Remembering Francis Parker Yockey (18 September 1917 - 16 June 1960)

Alex Kurtagic

Francis Parker Yockey was born 97 years ago today. Yockey was an American political philosopher and author of Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, a neo-Spenglerian work that sets forth a vision for Occidental resurgence. He has remained influential among critics of Western liberalism. Yockey was born in Chicago, son of a Louis Francis Yockey, an accountant, and Rose Ellen 'Nellie' Foley, daughter of the logging baron, James Foley. The youngest of four siblings, he had two sisters, Alice and Vinette, and an older brother, James. By ancestry he was largely Irish, except for his paternal grandfather, Valentine Yocky, who was originally from Bavaria. At the onset of the Great Depression, the Yockeys moved back to their base in Ludington, Michigan. Francis was enrolled in Ludington High School and proved a bright student, making the honour role. He was musically inclined, taking lessons first from O. W. Colvin and later from Ernst Lund Johnson, and in time giving piano recitals. He also participated in history debates organised by the school.

Forgetting E. P. Thompson (3 February 1924 - 28 August 1993)

Alex Kurtagic

E. P. Thomson died 11 years ago today. He was a theorist for the Communist Party of Great Britain, the founder of the Communist Party's Historians Group, and a Marxist historian, biographer, journalist, essayist, and campaigner. Edward Palmer Thompson was born in Oxford on 3 February 1924 and was the son of Edward John Thompson, a writer and poet. Young Edward's parents were Methodist missionaries. Educated at The Dragon School in Oxford and Kingswood School in Bath, Thompson left school in 1941 to fight in World War II, in which he served in a tank unit in the Italian campaign, taking part in the final battle for Cassino. After the war, he enrolled at Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge.

Forgetting Shulamith Firestone (7 January 1945 - 28 August 2012)

Alex Kurtagic

Shulamith Firestone was found dead two years ago today. A key figure in the break out of radical Second-Wave Feminism during the 1960s and 70s, she was a founding member of the New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and the New York Radical Feminists. Though it transpired afterwards that she suffered from a severe mental illness, her evil work, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), is still taken seriously today. Shulamith Firestone was born Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Feuerstein from Orthodox Jewish parents living in Ottawa, Canada. After moving to the United States, her parents Americanised her surname while she was still a child. Raised in Kansas City and St Louis, she attended the Yavneh Rabbinical College of Telshe, in Wickliffe, Ohio, a leading Haredi institution of Torah study. She then attended . . .

Forgetting Leon Trotsky (7 November 1879 - 21 August 1940)

Alex Kurtagic

Leon Trotsky died 74 years ago today. He was a Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet commissar, first leader of the Red Army, and founder of the Fourth International. Trotskyism, his theory of Marxim, involved support for a vanguard party of the working class, proletarian internationalism, the need for 'permanent revolution', and advocacy of a United Front of revolutionaries and workers throughout the world opposing capitalism and fascism. He was born Leiba Davidovich Bronstein on 7 November 1879. He was one of eight children. His parents, David Leontyevich Bronstein (1847–1922) and Anna Bronstein (1850–1910) were wealthy, middle-class Jewish farmers, based in Yanovka, which is now in southern Ukraine.

Remembering H. P. Lovecraft (20 August 1890 - 15 March 1937)

Alex Kurtagic

H. P. Lovecraft was born 124 years ago today. Though obscure and increasingly impoverished in his lifetime, he has since been recognised as one of the most influential writers of supernatural horror fiction in the 20th century. Lovecraft was born in 1890, into a conservative upper middle class family, in Providence, Rhode Island. His father, Winfield, was a travelling salesman, employed by Gorham & Co., Silversmiths, and his mother, Sarah, could trace her ancestry back to the arrival of George Phillips to Massachusetts in 1630. His parents married in their thirties. The young Lovecraft was talented, intellectually curious, and precocious, able to recite poetry by age two, and to read by age three. Growing up at a time when school was not compulsory, Lovecraft would not be enrolled in one until he was eight years of age and his attendance would be sporadic, possibly due to a nervous complaint and / or psychosomatic condition. But he was well ahead of his coevals in any event, having been exposed, and thereafter enjoyed ready access, to the best of classical and English literature. From Lovecraft’s perspective, this meant 17th and early 18th century prose and poetry, and, indeed, so steeped . . .

Forgetting Theodor Adorno (11 September 1903 - 6 August 1969)

Alex Kurtagic

Theodor Adorno died 45 years ago today. He was a sociologist, cultural critic, musicologist, and a leading member of the Frankfurt School. He is associated with critiques of modern society, fascism, anti-Semitism, and the culture industry, and 64 years on he still taken seriously by Left-wing academics in Western universities. His writings strongly influenced the development of the New Left. Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund—also called Theodor Ludwig Adorno-Wiesengrund, Theodor Ludwig Adorno-Wellington, and Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno—was born on 11 September 1903, son of a singer and a wine merchant. His mother was a Corsican, and professed Catholicism; his father was an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism. Said to have been a child prodigy, he enjoyed playing Beethoven on the piano aged 12. He also excelled in school, gratuading at the top of his class. Unfortunately, he was quickly led astray, for he had not even yet obtained his diploma when György Lucáks and Ernst Bloch poisoned his mind with their Marxist theories.

Remembering Knut Hamsun (4 August 1859 - 19 February 1952)

Alex Kurtagic

Knut Hamsun was born 154 years ago today. A Norwegian author, poet, dramatist, and social critic, he is considered one of the most innovative literary stylists of the twentieth century, pioneering psychological novels that used stream of consciousness and interior monologue. His writing influenced many 20th century authors, including Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Maxim Gorky, Stefan Zweig, Henry Miller, Hermann Hesse, and Ernest Hemingway. Hamsun was born Knut Pedersen Hamsund in Lom on 4 August 1859. He was the fourth son of seven children by Pedter Pedersen, a tailor, and Tora Olsdatter. The family was poor, and moved to Hamsund when Knut was three to farm his uncle's land.