Supernatural Horror in Metal

Henry Akeley

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to “uplift” the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness. –H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

Forgetting Herbert Marcuse (19 July 1898 - 29 July 1979)

Alex Kurtagic

Herbert Marcuse, so-called 'Father of the New Left', died 35 years ago today. Marcuse was a philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist associated with the Frankfurt School of Social Research. He was born in Berlin in 1898 to Jewish parents, Carl Marcuse and Gertrud Kreslawsky. In 1916 he was draughted into the army, but he only worked the stables. Apparently fond of the horse manure, Marcuse's hatred for Germany manifested early: after the Great War, he got involved with communism, and became a member of the Soldier's Council, which participated in the Spartacist Uprising that involved Rosa Luxemburg's Communist Party. He then returned to education, and after completing his PhD at the University of Freiburg in 1922, he spent a spell working in publishing, before carrying on his studies at Freiburg under Edmund Husserl (the founder of phenomenology). He wrote a Habilitation under Martin Heidegger, and at first he sought to synthesise Heidegger's ontology with Marxism, but Heidegger's support for the National Socialists got in the way.

Remembering Roald Amundsen (16 July 1872 - 18 June 1928)

Alex Kurtagic

Roald Amundsen was born 142 years ago today. Amundsen was a Norwegian polar explorer, best known for leading the first expedition to reach the South Pole. Roald Amundsen was born into a family of shipowners and captains in Borge, south-eastern Norway. The fourth son in the family, and inspired by Fridtjof Nansen's crossing of Greenland and Franklin's lost expedition, he craved a life of exploration in the arctic wilderness, but his mother wanted him to avoid the maritime trade and made him promise to become a doctor instead. He kept his promise until she died, when he was 21 years of age. At that point, he promptly left university and set out for life at sea.

Forgetting Jean-Paul Marat (24 May 1743 - 13 July 1793)

Alex Kurtagic

Jean-Paul Marat died 227 years ago today. He is best known for his role as a murderous journalist and inflammatory pamphleteer during the French Revolution. He was linked to the Jacobins, of course, the most extreme and wild-eyed egalitarian groups of this period. Marat was born in the Principality of Neuchâtel, now a French-speaking canton of Western Switzerland. He was the son of Louise Cabrol, a French Huguenot, and Giovanni Mara, an Italian immigrant from Sardinia, who converted to Calvinism while living in Geneva. The 't' was added later, to make the surname seem more French. Before Geneva his father had lived in the village of Boudry, where he worked in manufacturing. It seems that while there Louise and even young Jean-Paul created a great deal of enmity, to the point that Giovanni was forced to move the family. The following letter, addressed to Jean-Paul's mother in 1768, is suggestive: . . .

Remembering Carl Schmitt (11 July 1888 - 7 April 1985)

Alex Kurtagic

Carl Schmitt was born 126 years ago today. He was a German jurist, philosopher, and political theorist, who wrote on the effective exercise of political power. As such, he has proven one of the most important 20th-century figures in legal and political theory. Though he was active in National Socialist Germany, and theorised the legal and political basis for the authoritarian state, his influence has been strong among Left-wing intellectuals, such as Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Žižek. The classical liberal Friedrich Hayek and the conservative Leo Strauss were also influenced by Schmitt.

Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political

Michael O'Meara

The political addresses the state in its highest manifestation as the agent of its inner peace and outer security. Only after liberal society reformed the state — to enable private individuals to maneuver for positions of power and influence, once particular interests superseded the polity’s collective interest — did politics and the political begin to diverge.  (In the Unites States, the first liberal state, politics was a business from the very beginning). The political for Schmitt is thus not about what is conventionally thought of as politics, but rather about those situations, where the state (“the political status of an organized people in an enclosed territorial unit”) is separate from and above society, especially in situations when it is threatened with destruction by a superpersonal movement or entity and must therefore act to defend itself and the community it is dedicated to defending.

Forgetting Max Horkheimer (14 February 1895 - 7 July 1973)

Alex Kurtagic

Max Horkheimer died 41 years ago today. Director of the Institute of Social Research from 1930 till 1953, Horkheimer was a leader of the Frankfurt School, a group that became identified with Critical Theory, a wholly speculative concoction blending Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis. Horkheimer was born into a conservative, wealthy family of orthodox Jews. His father, Moritz, was a prosperous businessman, owning several textile factories. Mortiz expected his son to succeed him, and from 1910 prepared Max for a career in business. Max, however, met Friedrich Pollock at a dance soon after. Pollock had been brought up by a father who had turned away from Judaism. In his history of the Frankfurt School, Rolf Wiggerhaus tells that this gave an impetus towards Max's gradual 'emancipation from his generally conservative background'. With Pollock he read . . .

Remembering Theodore Lothrop Stoddard (29 June 1883 - 1 May 1950)

Alex Kurtagic

American historian, journalist, anthropologist, and eugenicist Theodore Lothrop Stoddard was born 131 years ago today. A popular author and journalist until World War II, he was the author of 18 books, most published by a prestigious New York Publisher, Charles Scribner, including, The French Revolution in San Domingo (1914) and The Revolt Against Civilization (1922), of which we published new, annotated editions in 2011. Stoddard was the archetypical product of ivy-league education in the old United States. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, studied law at Boston University, and obtained a PhD in history from Harvard University, later published as the aforementioned book on San Domingo (Haiti).

The Fourth Estate

Aleksandr Dugin
(Translated by Michael Millerman)

None of the words we use in the course of social and political discussions and analyses is ideologically neutral. Outside of ideology entirely, such words lose their meaning. And it is not possible to determine one’s attitude toward them unambiguously, since the content of any expression is shaped by context and semantic structures, a kind of operational system. When we live in a society with an obvious ideology, openly maintained as the dominant one, things are clear enough. The significance of words flows directly from the ideological matrix, which is instilled through upbringing, education, and instruction and is supported by the active ideological apparatus of the state. The state forms a language, defines the meaning of discourse, and sets—most often through repressive measures, broadly understood—the limits and moral tint of the basic collection of political and sociological concepts and terms.

Remembering Jonathan Bowden (1962 - 2012)

Alex Kurtagic

Jonathan Bowden was born 52 years ago today. He was an author, artist, intellectual, and political figure in the United Kingdom, considered by some to have been the best orator in the English-speaking world of the last one hundred years. He died on 29 March 2012, aged 49 (see my obituary here). A Nietzschean, he was a proponent of elitism, power morality, and aesthetic modernism. At the same time, he possessed a Gothic sensibility and was an insightful cultural analyst of popular forms such as comics, graphic novels, cinema, and heroic and horror fiction. He was highly unusual as a British intellectual: while most thinkers from these isles are pragmatists and suspicious of theory, Jonathan drew from Continental philosophy. He perceived his rôle as that of a revisionist, his mission being to recuperate, reinterpret, and recast Western cultural forms emphatically from an elitist perspective, in order so that, amidst the ruins of this age of egalitarianism and liberal decline, a powerful counter-cultural proposition may arise, rooted in notions of strength, pride, heroic vitalism, Faustian adventurism, and tradition. Crucially, he saw tradition never as conservative but as a endless renewal and reaffirmation.

Available Now: Jonathan Bowden's Demon!

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, with high journalism, with 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 who were on the margins of British intellectual life in our troubled times.

John Christopher's The Death of Grass

Alex Kurtagic

John Christopher (1922 - 2012) was a British science fiction author from Lancashire, credited with about 70 novels, written under either his real name (Christopher Samuel Youd) or his eight pseudonyms. Many of his novels are (post-)apocalyptic, following the world-in-ruins pattern; those after 1966 were aimed largely at adolescents. Popular during the 1950s and 1960s, he later fell out of favour and his books are now mostly out of print. The Death of Grass, first published in 1957, was loosely adapted to film in 1970 and re-published by Penguin Books in 2009. The premise is that an unconquerable, mutant plant virus (Chung-Li) kills off all grass speciesaround the world. This means not just lawn grass, but also all forage grasses and cereal grain crops, on which both animals and humans depend. The disappearance of grasses decimates the global food supply within months, sowing death by starvation on an apocalyptic scale. The virus originates in China and inexorably moves across Asia, towards Europe, and, ultimately, the United Kingdom, where the narrative unfolds.

Remembering Ernest Shackleton
(15 February 1874 - 5 January 1922)

Alex Kurtagic

Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton was born 140 years ago today. In 2014 he seems better remembered than his former expedition leader and rival, Robert Falcon Scott, whose Antarctic expeditions were more successful, and who enjoyed fame as a tragic hero for many years after his death in 1912. Those who are aware of my interest in Antarctica will have noticed that I have so far not paid attention to Shackleton, except where I reviewed Lennard Bickel’s book (Shackleton's Forgotten Men) telling the less-known story of the Aurora party in Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917. This is probably because my awareness of Antarctic explorers began with the 1948 film, Scott of the Antarctic, which is based largely on the book (The Worst Journey in the World) by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the younger members of Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition of 1910-1913.

Remembering John Robison (4 February 1739 - 30 January 1805)

Alex Kurtagic

John Robison was born 275 years ago today. Professor Robison was a Scottish physicist and mathematician, who taught philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and was the first General Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburg. Inventor of the siren, and collaborator with James Watt on an early steam car, Robison is significant to our purposes because in his later life he also wrote Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies (1797), the founding text of the conspiracy theory of history in the English language. His book had an analogue in Augustin Barruel's Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, published in French at the same time, and arriving at the same conclusions (the two worked independently, unaware of each other until their books were published), but only appearing in English translation a year later.

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

Alex Kurtagic

Sir Henry Morton Stanley (born John Rowlands), was born 173 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:

Yukio Mishima

Kerry Bolton

Yukio Mishima was born into an upper middle class family in 1925. Author of a hundred books, playwright, and actor, he has been described as the “Leonardo da Vinci of contemporary Japan,” and is one of the few Japanese writers to have become widely known and translated in the West. Since World War II, the West has forgotten the Shadow soul of Japan, as Jung would have termed it, the collective impulses that have been repressed by ‘Occupation Law’ and the imposition of democracy. The Japanese are seen stereotypically as being overly polite and smiling business executives and camera snapping tourists. The emphasis has been on the soft counterpart of the Japanese psyche, on the “chrysanthemum” (the arts) as Mishima puts it, and the repression of the “sword” (the martial tradition). The American anthropologist Ruth . . .

Yukio Mishima Speaking in English or with English Subtitles

Alex Kurtagic

What follows is collection of YouTube videos featuring Yukio Mishima either speaking in English or with English subtitles. There are four videos: three interviews and one speech with autobiographical content.

• Interview with Yukio Mishima. In Japanese with English subtitles (press cc button).
• Yukio Mishima speaking In The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan/FCCJ.
• Yukio Mishima interviewed in English on a range of subjects including Hara-Kiri.
• Rare 1969 interview with Yukio Mishima in English.

Remembering Anthony Ludocivi (8 January 1882 - 3 April 1971)

Alex Kurtagic

British philosopher, sociologist, and social critic Anthony Mario Ludovici was born 132 years ago today. Though he wrote on many subjects, including art, metaphysics, politics, economics, religion, differences between sexes, race, and eugenics, Ludovici is best known for being a proponent of aristocracy. Perhaps not surprisingly, he was at first an artist (as book illustrator) and a student of Nietzsche. With Nietzsche and Art, published in 1911, he was said to have attempted a history of art in terms of rising aristocratic and decadent democratic epochs.

When Gods Hear the Call: The Conservative-Revolutionary Potential of Black Metal Art

Olena Semenyaka

I. Black Metal: a Subculture or a Counterculture? Methodological Foundations

Black Metal shares the fate of all complex and multifaceted phenomena that transcend their narrow genre identities and, similar to Hegel’s philosopher who is able to “grasp an era through thought,” are always ahead of their time, either by affirming, or by totally rejecting the spiritual foundations of the time period in which they live. Both require an ability to examine it from a distance. As the unquestionable product of Modernity, Black Metal paradoxically issues a death sentence to the Modern world. The latter is the case not only with respect to contemporary Christianity: it is the antithesis to everything that is believed to be of any value for an average representative of today’s Western society: from the conventional notions of the good and the beautiful to the metaphysical Being itself. In other words, Black Metal, at a glance, is the very embodiment of an active-nihilistic phase in a metaphysical process of transvaluation of all values heralded by Friedrich Nietzsche. This is the second reason why Black Metal is mostly defined apophatically, that is to say, from negation. I have already mentioned the first reason for this: despite Black Metal’s prevalent description as a subculture, it is more accurate to define it as a counterculture the goal of which is to terminate the entire Modern era.

The Wild Boar and the Bear

René Guenon

Amogst the Celts, the wild boar and the bear symbolise respectively spiritual authority and temporal power, that is to say, the two castes of the Druids and Knights, the equivalents, at least originally and in their essential attributes, of the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas. This symbolism in origin clearly Hyperborean, is one of the marks of the direct connection between the Celtic tradition and the primordial tradition of the present Mahayuga (cycle of four "yugas" or ages) whatever other elements from previous but already secondary and derivative traditions may have come to be added to this main current and be, as it were, reabsorbed into it. The point to be made here is that the Celtic tradition could well be regarded as constituting one of the "links" between the Atlantean and Hyperborean traditions, after the end of the secondary period when this Atlantean tradition represented the predominant form and became the "substitute" for the original centre which was already inaccessible to the bulk of humanity.[2] As regards this point also, the very symbolism we have just mentioned can provide some not uninteresting evidence.

Troy Southgates' Nazis, Fascists, or Neither?

Gil Caldwell

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

For nationalists living in Britain during the 1980s and early 1990s the above quote of Wordsworth doubtless rings true. It was then that, as the electoral endeavors of nationalists nosedived and the numbers of their assorted party’s members shrank, the movement engaged in some very significant ideological clarifications and self analysis. This led, as often does when folks think seriously about their ideals, into very heavy internecine warfare, producing, in a relatively short time, several tiny groups, where once there had been one, the National Front. The story of that tale of ferment and fragmentation has been ably told in the pages of this journal by Peter Rushton. Minus Rushton’s sympathy, the leftist historian Larry O’Hara has also, in various forums, dissected, with reasonable neutrality, those turbulent times. Now, Troy Southgate, a participant in many of those struggles, first, as a follower and, eventually as a creative writer and thinker, has chosen to scrutinize one aspect of the varied ideologies of that surge of original political theory.

The Year 2014: Plans and Projects

Alex Kurtagic

The 1 January is my favourite date in the calendar. It represents possibility, orderliness, pristine logic—all unsullied by messy, unreliable, wobbly and topsy turvy practical reality. At the same time, it is a time of raw brutal energy, formal renewal, and prospects limited only by the imagination. By the end of 2013 Wermod and Wermod completed its fifth year of existence. It must be said that, due to my being involved in so many different projects, several outside publishing, I would have liked to have published more and for . . .

Why Has Homicide Increased in the United States - Part II: Barbarism and Civilization

Cesare Lombroso

The special conditions under which North American civilization has been developed are such that the results, even with respect to the white race, present an intermingling of the effects and dangers of the maximum of civilization and the maximum of barbarism. The types developed by Aryan civilization are two fold; the first is a type of violence, where the struggle for existence is met by force, political power, and wealth, which unite and maintain themselves by arms to the detriment of the weak; and as competition between ancient communities was supported by armed forces . . .

Jonathan Bowden Interviewed by Tomislav Sunić

Editor's Note: The following is a transcript by V. S. of the interview conducted by Tomislav Sunić with Jonathan Bowden, first aired on the Voice of Reason Radio Network on 25 May 2010, on the host's weekly radio programme, The Sunić Journal. Both the show and the network have since been discontinued. I have made some corrections and restored the British spelling in Jonathan's answers, as he was English and this is the spelling that he used in his writings. You can download the audio here.

Jonathan Bowden

Tom Sunić: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen! Good afternoon, dear friends! 

This is your host, Tom Sunić, from Croatia and I’m very pleased again to have a good friend of mine and also a good guest. This is Jonathan Bowden. Hello, Jonathan! Can you hear me well?

Jonathan Bowden: Yes. Hello! Greetings from Britain!

Sunić: Listen, Jonathan, I’m very, very pleased to have you on my show for a variety of reasons. And what I would like to do today is the following thing. In the first segment, I’d like you first to say . . .

Why Has Homicide Increased in the United States - Part I

Cesare Lombroso

One of the surest and most confident conclusions I have drawn from a study of crime is that, in those countries which are supposed to be the most cultivated and civilized, crimes, if they do not decrease in number, are certainly decreasing in ferocity; whilst, on the other hand, crimes destitute of the element of violence, such as swindling, fraudulent bankruptcy, and kindred offences, are constantly increasing. In other words, the assassin and the murderer become transformed into the thief, and the transformation involves a maximum risk to property and a minimum risk to human life. Belgium may be cited in illustration of this fact. Statistics show that in that country homicides decreased from 1 in 83,000 inhabitants in 1882 to 1 in 93,220 in 1892.

Evola on Christmas and the Winter Solstice

Cologero Salvo

In “Roma e il natale solare nella tradizione nordico-aria” (La Difesa della razza, 1940), Evola writes:

Very few suspect that the holidays [i.e., Catholic holy days] of today, in the century of skyscrapers, radio, great movements of the masses, are celebrated and continue . . . a remote tradition, bringing us back to the times when, almost at the dawn of humanity, the rising motion of the first Aryan civilization began; a tradition, in which, moreover, the great voice of those men is expressed rather than a particular belief.

The Bugbear of Literacy

Ananda Coomaraswamy

It was possible for Aristotle,[1] starting from the premise that a man, being actually cultured, may also become literate, to ask whether there is a necessary or merely an accidental connection of literacy with culture. Such a question can hardly arise for those to whom illiteracy implies, as a matter of course, ignorance, backwardness, unfitness for self-government: for you, unlettered peoples are uncivilized peoples, and vice versa as a recent publisher's blurb expresses it: "The greatest force in civilization is the collective wisdom of a literate people."

Jonathan Bowden on Discovering Colin Wilson

Jonathan Bowden

Editor's Note: What follows in an excerpt from a 'letter to an absent relative', which is included in the book Fury, written by Jonathan Bowden in the latter half of 1991. I have only lightly edited the text for punctuation.

. . . All of which is reminiscent of the holiday home Buda, down on the Kent coast and the nature of the trips we used to have there, trips that you always loathed and attempted to boycott. In fact, most of the time you regarded work as a form of holiday and the holiday, when it came, as a the most appalling form of work that you had to ‘get through’ as quickly as possible. As a result, these holidays in Kent became an exercise in survival as far as you were concerned; a form of survivalism. This was an activity that can only be described as a task; an offering—although not a propitiation. It was something that you had to live and suffer under, as the hands of the clock moved round the face of the dial until they read zero. Buda itself, of course, was an extraordinary house that lay back from the cliff’s edge and that presented two storeys, three if you include the garret at the top, which looked out to sea, while another storey, essentially the first floor—a crude basement of a sort—lay behind the cliff and was only contactable from the rest of the house down an iron stair-well of uncertain provenance. Nevertheless, there was also a secret . . .

A Heroic Vision for Our Time: The Life and Ideas of Colin Wilson

John Morgan

Colin Wilson, the English author of well over a hundred books on subjects as diverse as philosophy, literary criticism, criminology, and the occult, as well as many novels, essays and short stories, passed away last Thursday (December 5, 2013) at 11:45 PM local time, in the presence of his wife, Joy, and his daughter, Sally. He was 82.

It was unfortunate that Colin’s death came within hours of Nelson Mandela’s, as it ended what little chance it had of being reported in the television news media, as would have been fitting for an author who I believe to have been among the most important authors of the latter half of the twentieth century. A number of obituaries have appeared in the British press this week, most of them full of mockery and some venturing shamelessly into insult. This was not unexpected, for reasons that I will discuss further on.

The Life of Thomas Paine, Interspersed with Remarks and Reflections - Part 5

William Cobbett

“To prohibit” (says this learned and elegant writer)

To prohibit the open, public, and explicit denial of the popular religion of a country, is a necessary measure to preserve the tranquillity of a government. Of this no person in a christian country can complain; for, admitting him to be an infidel, he must acknowledge, that no benefit can be derived from the subversion of a religion which enforces the best system of morality, and inculcates the divine doctrine of doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. In this view of the subject, we cannot sufficiently reprobate the baseness of Thomas Paine, in his attack on Christianity, by publishing his Age of Reason. While experiencing in a prison, the fruits of his visionary theories of government, he undertakes to disturb the world by his religious opinions. He has the impudence and effrontery to address to the citizens of the United Stares of America, a paltry performance, which is intended to shake their faith in the religion of their fathers; a religion, which . . .

The Life of Thomas Paine, Interspersed with Remarks and Reflections - Part 4

William Cobbett

Here ends the account of Paine’s life, as I find it in print, and which, as I formerly observed, was published about the beginning of 1793. I shall now attempt a continuation of it down to the present time, dwelling on such parts only of his conduct as will admit of no dispute respecting facts.

Thomas’s having merited death, or, at least, transportation in England, was a strong recommendation to him in France, whose newly enlightened inhabitants seem to have conceived a wonderful partiality for all that’s vile. Several of the departments disputed with each other the honour of having a convict for their representative; a thing not so much to be wondered at, when we recoiled!, that their wise rulers declared, by a decree, that the galley slaves were all most excellent patriots, and that the hangman’s was a post of honour.

The Life of Thomas Paine, Interspersed with Remarks and Reflections - Part 3

William Cobbett

What remarks I have to make here, I shall preface by an extract from Swift’s excellent work, lately published, on the laws of Connecticut, book V. chap. vii. Speaking of Paine’s baseness in his attack on Christianity by publishing his Age of Reason Mr. Swift observes:

This work is said to be written by Thomas Paine, secretary for foreign affairs to Congress in the American war. Now, the truth is, that during some period of the American war, Congress appointed a committee for foreign affairs, to which Paine was secretary, but he had no power, and performed no duty, but that of clerk to the committee; without any portion of the authority afterwards annexed to the office of secretary for foreign affairs. From the post of secretary to the committee for foreign affairs, he was dismissed for a scandalous breach of trust. What must we think of a man who is capable of such a pitiful artifice to gratify his vanity, and render himself important?

These are not the words of an Englishman, but of a native American, a learned and elegant writer, and a tried friend and servant of his country.

The account given by Mr. Swift of Tom’s dismission confirms that which is given of it in his life. Both accounts, however, are silent as to the nature of the intrigues which he divulged. As I have heard this marter often spoken of by my old bookseller and others, I will just repeat what I have heard, without pledging myself for the truth of it.

The Life of Thomas Paine, Interspersed with Remarks and Reflections - Part 2

William Cobbett

Reader, how often have I observed, that disappointment, and refusal of favours asked from government, are the great sources of what is nowadays called patriotism? Here we are arrived at the cause of Tom Paine’s mortal enemy to the British government. Had his humble petition been granted; had he been restored to his office, he might, and undoubtedly would have stigmatized the Americans as rebels and traitors. He would have probably been among the supplest tools of Lord North, instead of being the champion of American Independence.
Who, after reading this, will believe that he was actuated by laudable motives, when he wrote against taxation; when he called the Excise a hell-born monster? He long was, you see, an advocate for this hell-born monster, and even one of its choice ministers, and such would he have been to this day, had not his petition been rejected. What, Thomas! Petition to be one of the under-devils of a hell-born monster!

Nelson Mandela: Another False God

Kerry Bolton

Mandela’s name cannot be spoken of by television and radio journalists other than with tone of utmost reverence. I recall when he was released from jail and women radio hosts were imparting the news while hardly holding back cries of joy. He has long been treated as godlike. As I am writing this, I am listening to television news stating that he is in deteriorating condition, and making the invariable references to having brought “freedom to the rainbow nation.” I see his visage portrayed on the colored glass of a church in South Africa while a black congregation sings his praises. How many times has hell on Earth has been created in the name of “democracy” and “human rights”? “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” brought the “Reign of Terror” to France and the genocide of the Vendée peasantry. The People’s Republic of China brought deaths to some 80,000,000. More millions died in the name of the “people’s democracy” in Bolshevik Russia and Cambodia. Every . . .

The Life of Thomas Paine, Interspersed with Remarks and Reflections - Part 1

William Cobbett

Editor's Note: The following is the first part of William Cobbett's The Life of Thomas Paine, which we will be serialising on this website. The text presented herein was published in 1797 and was intended as a continuation of George Chalmers' 1793 biography of Paine. Obviously, these authors were no friends of Paine, let alone his ideas of equality and human rights, and thus serve as counter-point to the hagiographical treatments that are common today.

Biographical memoirs of persons, famous for the great good or the great mischief they have done, are so sure to meet with a favourable reception in print, that it has long been subject of astonishment, that none of the disciples of Paine should ever have thought of obliging the world with an account of his life. His being of mean birth could form no reasonable objection: when the life of his hero is spotless, the biographer feels a pride as well as a pleasure in tracing him from the penurious shed to the pinnacle of renown. Besides, those from whom we might have expected the history of Old Common Sense, are professed admirers of all that is of low and even base extraction. They are continually boasting of the superior virtues of their “democratic floor,” as they call it; it, therefore, seems wonderful, that they should have neglected giving an instance of this superiority in the life of their virtuous leader.

"Occupation is Occupation", an Interview with Aleksandr Dugin

Aleksandr Dugin
(Interviewed by Manuel Ochsenreiter)

Prof. Dugin, the NSA spying scandal caused a deep impact on German-American relations. We Germans have been told for decades that Washington is our "friend" and "partner". Now many Germans have come to realize that the US has been behaving more or less like an occupation force. Why did it take so long to realize that?

We cannot answer this important question without historical details. First of all, Germany lost World War II. In May 1945 there was the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces. The result of the total loss of the war was the total occupation by the two main powers – USA and Soviet Union. Washington and Moscow were not just the main forces at the end of the war; they also represented the two ideological camps of the post war era. The German eastern provinces, eventually annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union, and Central Germany were occupied by the Soviet army, West Germany by the US-army and its western allies, UK and France. Germany was divided by two occupation forces. No part of Germany was free. Frankly speaking, occupation is occupation. There is no degree of occupation.

Guillaume Faye Interviewed on Dominique Venner

Guillaume Faye
(Transl. by Greg Johnson)

Thomas Ferrier: Tuesday, May 21 at 2:40 p.m. on the very altar of the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, the historian Dominique Venner, author of Cœur Rebelle [Rebel Heart] (autobiography), an Ernst Jünger biography, Histoire et tradition des européennes: 30,000 ans d’identité   [History  and traditions of Europeans: 30,000 years of identity], Le Siècle de 1914 [The Century of 1914], Le choc de l’Histoire [The Clash of History], etc. . . . and also editor of the journal Nouvelle revue d’Histoire [New Review of History], ended his days.

"We are at the End of Something"—Alain de Benoist Interviewed by American Renaissance

Alain de Benoist

American Renaissance: You have said that modernity is the enemy of identity. Could you explain this idea further?

Alain de Benoist: When one considers modernity, one must consider two meanings of the word. The first is known to everyone: It is the changes of life that come with more material wealth. But modernity is also the product of an ideology that appeared in the 17th and 18th century with the Enlightenment. It is an ideology of progress, of which the basic idea is that mankind will always be better. The future will be better than the present and the present is better than the past. For this ideology, the past has nothing to teach us. The past is a graveyard of archaic customs and irrational constraints. Instead, man must use his reason to decide by himself what he wants.

Against Equality Again

J. R. Lucas

Equality in the present age has become an idol, in much the same way as property was in the age of Locke. Many people worship it, and think that it provides the key to the proper understanding of politics, and that on it alone can a genuinely just society be reconstructed. This is a mistake. Although, like property, it is a useful concept, and although, like property, there are occasions when we want to have it in practice, it is not a fundamental concept any more than property is, nor can having it vouchsafe to us the good life. In an earlier paper I argued against equality by showing that the concept of equality was confused and that many of the arguments egalitarians adduced were either invalid or else supported conclusions which were not really egalitarian at all. Many egalitarians, however, have complained that my arguments were not fair, because I had failed to elucidate the concept adequately, or because the position I attacked was not one that any egalitarian really wished to maintain, or because I had overlooked other arguments which were effective in establishing egalitarian conclusions, or because the positive counter-arguments of my own I put forward more as a matter of taste than of serious political commitment. In this paper, therefore, I want to elucidate the concept more fully, concede what I should to my critics, point out that, even so, their conclusions do not follow, and give further reasons not only for supposing that egalitarian arguments are invalid but for discerning positive merits in some forms of inequality.

Leftist Personality Types

Kerry Bolton

In order to understand how such outbreaks of mass psychosis [as the French and Bolshevik Revolutions] manifest with the intent of bringing about the overthrow of civilisation and the resurgence of the atavistic, it is necessary to examine the personality types of some of the revolutionary leaders and theorists. These are the individuals who feel civilisation to be a burden; a social and cultural prison. Their urge to destruction is rationalised by ideology and implemented by the agitation of mobs; their bloodlust is rationalised with slogans about justice and liberty. They enact on a mass scale what Jeffrey Dahmer and Edward Gein enact on limited scales, for similar reasons, but behind a façade of ideology. They are thereby generally called by history ‘revolutionary leaders’ rather than ‘psychotic murderers’. We can still often see the same dregs on the streets in Western societies, rioting and looting, calling themselves ‘anarchists’, cultivating a filthy appearance, sneering, bitter, humourless, with the proverbial ‘chip’-on-the shoulder’, ‘brave’, when in a mob, but cowardly when confronted.

The Physiognomy of the Anarchists

Cesare Lombroso

One of the most curious applications, and perhaps the most practical, of Criminal Anthropology, (of that new science which has associated itself with sociology, psychiatry, and history), is that which flows from the study of the physiognomy of the political criminal. For not only does it appear to succeed in furnishing us with the juridical basis of political crime, which hitherto seemed to escape all our researches, so completely that until now all jurists had ended by saying that there was no political crime; but it seems also to supply us with a method for distinguishing true revolution, always fruitful and useful, from Utopia, from rebellion, which is always sterile. It is for me a thoroughly established fact, and one of which I have given the proofs in my Delitto Politico, that true revolutionists, that is to say, the initiators of great scientific and political revolutions, who excite and bring about a true progress in humanity, are almost always geniuses or saints, and have all a marvellously harmonious physiognomy; and to verify this it is sufficient simply to look at the plates in my Delitto Politico. What . . .

Nobody Likes a Scientist

Amory Stern

Marx, Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School, Spengler, Jünger, Heidegger, and Schmitt all enjoy more cult popularity today—whether on the Left, the Right or both—than Werner Sombart does. I'm not sure why this is, or whether it has anything to do with the fact that Sombart was a more scientific thinker than any of those German giants. There is only one reason I can think of. Because he was an economist, Sombart is unattractive or uninteresting to the tradition of Right-wing thought which regards economics in general as unmanly, anti-traditional, and decadent, or else more Jewish than European. Yet he is incomprehensible or evil to economists because he was, in a way, the most brilliant representative of that very tradition. Whatever . . .

Against Equality

J. R. Lucas

Equality is the great political issue of our time. Liberty is forgotten: Fraternity never did engage our passions: the maintenance of Law and Order is at a discount: Natural Rights and Natural justice are outmoded shibboleths. But Equality---there men have something to die for, kill for, agitate about, be miserable about. The demand for Equality obsesses all our political thought. We are not sure what it is---indeed, as I shall show later, we are necessarily not sure what it is---but we are sure that whatever it is, we want it: and while we are prepared to look on frustration, injustice or violence with tolerance, as part of the natural order of things, we will work ourselves up into paroxysm§ of righteous indignation at the bare mention of inequality. For my own part, I think the current obsession with equality deplorable. There are problems enough in all conscience, to occupy our minds for the rest of this century, without inculcating in each man's breast a feeling of resentment because in some respect or other he compares unfavourably with somebody else. But it is not enough to deplore; and my attack will take the more insidious form of understanding Equality.

Sten Gunnar Flygt's The Notorious Dr. Bahrdt

Lieselotte E. Kurth

The title and an announcement of this book as the "Biography of an 18th century German theologian who gained a great deal of notoriety in his day by insisting on living exactly as he pleased" (Am. Book Publ. Rec., Oct. 1963) seem to promise delightful entertainment for the casual reader. An additional reference to Dr. Bahrdt as "one of the principal exponents of the eighteenth-century intellectual movement" suggests that it also offers information, perhaps penetrating insights for the scholar of intellectual history. Professor Flygt manages to fulfill more or less both of these implied promises.

Demon - Part V

Jonathan Bowden

Yet, what conditions, insofar as there are any, lie behind this crime? Who commits it(?)—and why? Indeed, the disinterested reader or casual browser can sit through multiple cinema releases, sift through piles of True Crime magazine, and browse in the alleged archives of New Scotland Yard’s The Black Museum, accompanied (as may be) by the dulcet tones of Orson Welles, one’s compère for the evening. But ultimately this proves nothing. For what it doesn’t address is the reasons for this phenomena, the incidentals of this necessary offensiveness. In that this time is primarily to do with the desire to dominate, the naked demand to destroy and o’ermaster, when linked to low personal esteem; a crippled fortitude. It is the dark under-current, the negative self-image of a positive attitude, the desire to master fate or existence. In this case, however, it represents the regressive personality within the creative mind: one of the reasons—itself unmistakable—why the attributes of great artists and great criminals seem strangely connected, and not just in the manner of opposites.

Céline on Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
(Tr. by Mitch Abidor)

Translator’s Note: Prior to its publication Céline shopped the manuscript of Journey to the End of the Night around to a couple of publishers. He wrote the following summary of the book to the prestigious Gallimard publishing house, but before they could agree to publish it he had already accepted the offer of Denoël et Steele. 

To NRF, shortly before April 14, 1932

Monsieur:

I submit to you my manuscript “Journey to the End of the . . .

Living in Accordance to Tradition

Domonique Venner
(Tr. by Giuliano Adriano Malvicini)

Every great people own a primordial tradition that is different from all the others. It is the past and the future, the world of the depths, the bedrock that supports, the source from which one may draw as one sees fit. It is the stable axis at the center of the turning wheel of change. As Hannah Arendt put it, it is the “authority that chooses and names, transmits and conserves, indicates where the treasures are to be found and what their value is.”  This dynamic conception of tradition is different from the Guénonian notion of a single, universal and hermetic tradition, which is supposedly common to all peoples and all times, and which originates in a revelation from an unidentified “beyond.” That such an idea is decidedly a-historical has not bothered its theoreticians.

America's Two Ways of Waging War

Francis Parker Yockey
(Edited by Kerry Bolton)

Editor's Note: Late in 1951 Francis Parker Yockey was approached by a member of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s staff and was asked to write the Senator a speech. This association drew the attention of the FBI. The Bureau regarded the speech as the work of Senator McCarthy, but remained uncertain about the association between McCarthy and Yockey.  However, it is apparent that Yockey was the author. This is evident by such phrases as Western Civilization as a “superpersonal force,” reference to the “inner enemy,” and the use of lower case when writing the names of “acheson” and “marshall” rather than capitalization of the first letter—a Yockeyism used in The Proclamation of London when referring to de gaulle and churchill, for example.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain's
The Wagnerian Drama

James Stevenson

In commemoration of Richard Wagner, born 200 years ago this year, we are publishing a new, annotated edition of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's first book, The Wagnerian Drama. Houston Stewart Chamberlain attended his first Wagner opera at the age of 23. Though disappointed, he was undeterred, and soon became completely immersed Wagner’s work, going on to become the intellectual leader of the Bayreuth Circle, centred on the composer’s widow; Wagner’s biographer; and, in 1909, Wagner’s son-in-law. Published in 1892, The Wagnerian Drama builds on Chamberlain's previous essays commenting on individual Wagner operas—‘Notes sur Lohengrin’ (1882), his fi rst published essay; ‘Notes sur Parsifal’ (1886); ‘Notes sur Tristan’ (1887); and ‘Die Sprache in Tristan und Isolde und ihr Verhältnis zur Musik’ (1888)—and is a commentary on the whole of Wagner’s dramatic work, focusing on its heroic Germanic elements, and intended to inspire a deeper appreciation for the great master.

La falsification de Hermann Hesse

Miguel Serrano

J’ai eu la chance d’être un ami du grand écrivain allemand. Après sa mort, alors que j’avais abandonné la carrière diplomatique, j’ai habité pendant dix ans dans l’ancienne maison Camuzzi, à Montagnola, en Suisse italienne – la première maison de Hesse dans ce petit village de montagne, non loin de Lugano. Il est totalement absurde de croire que Hermann Hesse ne serait plus à la mode, comme si c’était un auteur pour la jeunesse d’il y a quarante ans. En fait, Hesse avait été mis artificiellement « à la mode » et utilisé à des fins précises, pour désorienter les nouvelles générations des années cinquante et soixante. Je me souviens fort bien que Suhrkamp Verlag, l’éditeur allemand de Hermann Hesse, avait pour obligation de vendre quarante mille exemplaires par mois de l’œuvre de Hesse, et dans ce but se servait de n’importe quelle publicité ou pression sur les jeunes générations de cette époque. C’est ainsi qu’aux Etats-Unis on a falsifié et transformé Hermann Hesse, le faisant apparaître comme un hippie, favorable à la drogue, etc.