Serene Falcon

Death Of A Civilisation

September 25th, 2008 at 11:30 am (Melancholy, Self, Spengler, The Enemy)

Back to the nearest memories of humankind, 1980, when the fatuous figures of Reagan and Madame Thatcher were stalking the globe as twin pestilences, Hordes of the Things made it’s first appearance on Radio Four ( BBC ). The links should be read after listening, since they naturally are spoilers. Radio, apart from it’s life-preserving, as in rescue, or life-destroying, as in war, — though British military radio from the late Balkan Wars to Iraq in the form of the aging Clansman system was wretched enough for the soldiery to opt for using their mobiles instead if possible — services has little to commend it’s survival now; yet for the prior half of the 20th century it was more important for popular cultural enrichment than TV as a later phenomenon: fortunately, both are being obviated by the internet. Still, radio humour — as variable in quality as any other medium ( viz: mostly crap ) — supplied a need in those less advanced years; and Hordes of the Things was fairly good. However rarely repeated, the combination of actors well-known in their day, and seasoned comedic writers produced from four short episodes phrases that live in the mind. The occasional mock-shakespearian rhapsody and the underlying menace of beauty from Wagner’s finest didn’t hurt a Tolkienesque burlesque with Dragons, Eagles and Spiders. Still, ‘We are trained to be patient in the Brotherhood of Night.’ kind of haunts the mind even of those of us who are severely lacking in patience of any kind.

Quite other than it’s being comedy, there is a satire implicit upon the very worst and most despicable Liberal. The utterly sincere, and really morally pure, harmonising, well-meaning, honest idiot who horridly sees good in all and tries so hard to reconcile, that his weakness destroys himself and all that he is obligated to protect. Who genuinely thinks that competing cultures must be greeted with complacent self-destruction. Combining self-satisfied fellow-travelling, dumb moral relativism and a disgustingly feeble-minded belief in the value of all, and their good intentions, together with total disdain for those who prefer reality, makes them so worthless as to be more dangerous than a frank villain such as Bush or Clinton.

Still, as I was saying, though the contemporary in-jokes have reached the inevitable fate of all such trifles, many of the finely delivered lines resonate so as to be almost unforgettable [ Bearing in mind that everything is ultimately forgot here below... ]. Thanks to a friendly torrent this aged comedy is available here.; but also proffered as a downloadable zip which is recommended for home use.

 
FOOOOOOLLLL ! Now I can seeee yoou !

Name not that name within these walls, Master..

Loathsome Brothers !

Just a, a minute. There’s something strange here.
Majesteh ?
Why are there so many more wenches than hags in the village ?
The men had marched a long way, Majesteh.
Oh. Ah… yes… I see…

Beware, Agar, son of Yulfric; for no power on earth is granted without a price.

You take the counsel of that cannibal and sentence your own son to grisly death ?

Right, what is this ?
Just a mirror.
It looks like the All-Seeing Mirror of Ganst, whose power lies by reflecting deep into the souls of the fallen…
Reproduction.
And all these axes here, magic helms and articles of torture ?
Collector’s Items.
I don’t doubt it Yulfric, but what sort of collector ?

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The First Chronicle

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The Second Chronicle

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The Third Chronicle

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The Fourth Chronicle

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Messengers Of Reason

July 28th, 2008 at 12:00 am (Manners not Morals, Melancholy, Other, The Enemy)

Gorky was devoted to reason, knowledge and science. He wrote bitterly of the impotence of reason in the old church-dominated Russia, of the “dark abyss” and the “elegiac submissiveness to fate”. What initially alienated him from Lenin’s regime was the conviction that it was suppressing the light of reason and perpetuating in a new form the dark abyss. For Rolland, the authentic esprit was above all a rational one. Shaw, like the Webbs and like the Welsh Utopian socialist Robert Owen, whom the Fabians had latterly discovered as an intellectual ancestor, was a fierce rationalist. Like Owen, the Fabians condemned ignorance, waste, dislocation, booms, slumps and unemployment as essentially ir­rational. Was racism, Needham asked, anything but irrational ? Was not the Soviet Union the most determined opponent of racism ? “The subjective and irrational are anti-democratic, they are the instruments of tyranny.” Georges Friedmann described the Soviet Union as “the most magnificent effort towards the rational transformation of institu­tions .. . that humanity has ever attempted”. So here “reason” be­comes simultaneously a system of logic or cerebration immaculately synthesized with a set of moral values. No one voiced the liberating claims of reason more fervently or consistently than Heinrich Mann with his perennial argument that the greatest weapon of the Geist in its struggle with arbitrary power was reason ( Vernunft ): indeed he pub­lished in 1923 a collection of essays collectively titled Diktatur der Vernunft. In 1937 he wrote of the USSR: “At last a state undertakes to make out of men what we have always wanted: a rational existence, the collective working for the benefit of each individual, and out of that individual shall something higher and better develop within a totality that further predicts itself.” But here rationality is interpreted as a common heritage not a class monopoly, as a matter of Geist not of Macht: he spoke of the “deep, fundamental intellectuality of the Revo­lution” and he pleaded that it was “in the last resort no rebellion of some against others. Basically it asks for and receives the agreement of all.” This was indeed the dream of the Enlightenment. Mann’s friend Feuchtwanger continued to regard reason as the preserve of an enlightened minority, a treasure destined to be distributed to the populace at large but so far withheld from them in all countries except the Soviet Union. “I sympathized inevitably with the experiment of basing the construction of a gigantic State on reason alone… .” He stressed the ethical “Vernunftmassigkeit” of the Plans, and later he wrote of his belief in “a slow, slow yet sure growth of human reason between the last ice-age and the next”. Similarly, “reason-through-knowledge” was the formula recommended by the Webbs and finally identified by them as operational in Russia. They were convinced that under socialism the problem of who gives orders to whom would progressively diminish since the combination of what they called “measurement with publicity” and the “searchlight of public knowledge” would burn out unreason, ignorance and apathy among the public, freeing it from its false de­pendence on traditional or arbitrary power. This had also been Saint-Simon’s belief.

It is of course easy to criticize the philosophical naivety of the fellow-travellers. Too blandly did they incorporate subjective, ethical premises into the general concept of reason, and in this respect they were little in advance of Thomas Paine, who described history as a periodically interrupted progress from the government of priests and conquerors to the government of pure reason – this reason being defined simply as the antithesis of ignorance. When Owen declared: “Train any population rationally, and they will be rational”, he virtually spoke for a later generation separated from him by a hundred years. Yet what sounded enlightened in 1830 could only be judged as naive in 1930. When Condorcet and Owen argued that idleness, poverty, crime and punishment were merely, in Owen’s words, “the necessary consequences of ignorance”, they could not reasonably be criticized for lacking a concept of alienation or anomie, whereas the fellow-travellers turned their backs not only on such concepts but blandly ignored a century of psychological inquiry. It was time to recognize that formulas such as Bentham’s “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” had an ethical rather than a rational basis, yet the fellow-travellers continued to elect Unitary Reason to the throne once occupied by God, complete with all the court ritual of the fall, redemption and salvation. One can at least partially sympathize with Marx’s scorn for the endeavours of Saint-Simon and Owen to convert humanity, including the rich and powerful, to socialism by means of rational persuasion; it was this aspect of their thought rather than the building of model settlements like New Harmony which provoked him to brand them as “Utopians”. Admittedly the later fellow-travellers occasionally acknowledged that the knout had become a frequent messenger of reason in Soviet Russia, but they refused to draw conclusions about the motivation of the knout-wielders, preferring to judge them as benevolent schoolmasters occasionally resorting to sterner discipline out of love for their pupils. Though they were anti-capitalist, and though some of them, like Shaw, recognized the necessity of force, the fellow-travellers still inhabited the mental universe of Auguste Comte, with his vision of history as being synonymous with the progress of the human mind towards the final, rational stage of universal positivism. No doubt the immense upheaval which took place in Russia during forced collectivization was in a sense positivistically inspired; but what appears ruthlessly rational is not neces­sarily reasonable, and the fellow-travellers lacked not only Kant’s in­sight into the necessity of an inner, moral revolution within men but also the vital gleam of cautionary wisdom offered by Voltaire when he remarked: “Le monde avec lenteur marche vers la sagesse.”

David Caute : The Fellow-Travellers

 
One of the finest books ever written; and by a leftist, too…

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Make Ready To Slaughter His Sons For The Guilt Of Their Fathers

July 24th, 2008 at 2:05 am (Manners not Morals, Melancholy, Other, Spengler, The Enemy)

This suggests the fascinating possibility that the key for a group intending to turn Europeans against themselves is to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment by convincing them of the moral blameworthiness of their own people. Because Europeans are individualists at heart, they readily rise up in moral anger against their own people once they are seen as free riders and therefore morally blameworthy — a manifestation of their stronger tendency toward altruistic punishment deriving from their evolutionary past as hunter gatherers. In making judgments of altruistic punishment, relative genetic distance is irrelevant. Free-riders are seen as strangers in a market situation; i.e., they have no familial or tribal connection with the altruistic punisher.

As a very interesting and influential European group, the Puritans exemplified this tendency toward altruistic punishment. A defining feature of Puritanism was the tendency to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues — their susceptibility to utopian appeals to a ‘higher law’ and the belief that government’s principal purpose is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectibility of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms’.” There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate — inspired by the devil. Puritan moral intensity can also be seen in their “profound personal piety” — their intensity of commitment to live not only a holy life, but also a sober and industrious life.

Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own genetic cousins. The suggestion is that this is a form of altruistic punishment found more often among cooperative hunter-gatherer groups than among groups based on extended kinship. For example, whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired the rhetoric and rendered the massive carnage of closely related Anglo-Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa justifiable in the minds of Puritans. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy rendered the heaviest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans. Puritan moral fervor and its tendency to justify draconian punishment of evil doers can also be seen in the comments of “the Congregationalist minister at Henry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Church in New York [who] went so far as to call for ‘exterminating the German people . . . the sterilization of 10,000,000 German soldiers and the segregation of the woman,.”

Thus the current altruistic punishment so characteristic of contemporary Western civilization: Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic — violations of communal norms by free riders are punished by altruistic aggression.

Kevin Macdonald : What Makes Western Culture Unique ?

 
Guilt is rather necessary, for we ought to know what we are; but it is also necessary to discard it as mere vainglorious self-obsession once past fault is recognised and subsumed. Natürlich, some of us find it easier than others; but that’s just through rigorous self-training ( or something ) — which is far less complacent than the opposite urge to purge another’s guilt. And certainly beats killing or self-killing to satisfy a ridiculous moral ego…

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Against The Evil Of The Banal

July 15th, 2008 at 12:00 pm (Correctitude, Manners not Morals, Other, Self, The Enemy)

You are quite right –– I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective –– neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this ‘love of the Jews’ would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person. To clarify this, let me tell you of a conversation I had in Israel with a prominent political personality who was defending the – in my opinion disastrous –– non-separation of religion and state in Israel. What [ she ] said –– I am not sure of the exact words any more – ran something like this: ‘You will understand that, as a socialist, I, of course, do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people.’ I found this a shocking statement and, being too shocked, I did not reply at the time. But I could have answered: the greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself ? What good can come out of that ? Well, in this sense I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.

Hannah Arendt

 
Also… from the same publication, an amusing glance at feel-good morality when it contemplates atrocity by persons it disapproves of, Effing the Ineffable.

 
Of course, the proponents of the antithetical beerier type of incontinent love of folk are the most apt to promote sacrifice for the religious object of love; group, gods, or even person — carefully ignoring the fact that no sacrifice except one’s individual own can have the faintest value howsoever that value is defined… Only an Imbecile God — perhaps Azathoth — can prize the stench of some burnt offering.

‘We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war’.

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Iron In The Soul Goes A Trifle Rusty

April 30th, 2008 at 2:30 am (Melancholy, Other, The Building Blocks of Democracy, The Enemy, The King of Terrors)

“There followed a series of uncovered plots, some true, others fantastic, some Cheka provocations. Dzerzhinsky was constantly sharpening the weapon of Soviet dictatorship. To Dzerzhinsky was brought the mass of undigested rumours from all parts of Petrograd. With the aid of picked squads of Chekists, Dzerzhinsky undertook to purge the city. Little time was wasted sifting evidence and classifying people rounded up in these night raids. Woe to him who did not disarm all suspicion at once. The prisoners were generally hustled to the old police station not far from the Winter Palace. Here, with or without perfunctory interrogation, they were stood up against the courtyard wall and shot. The staccato sounds of death were muffled by the roar of truck motors kept going for the purpose.”

“Dzerzhinsky furnished the instrument for tearing a new society out of the womb of the old — the instrument of organised, systematic, mass terror. For Dzerzhinsky the class struggle meant exterminating ‘the enemies of the working class.’ The ‘enemies of the working class‘ were all who opposed the Bolshevik dictatorship.”

“At meetings of the Sovnarcom, Lenin often exchanged notes with his colleagues. On one occasion, he sent a note to Dzerzhinsky. ‘How many vicious counter-revolutionaries are there in our prisons ?‘ Dzerzhinsky’s reply was: ‘About fifteen hundred.’ Lenin read it, snorted something to himself, made a cross beside the figure, and returned the note to Dzerzhinsky.”

“Dzerzhinsky rose and left the room without a word. No-one paid any attention either to Lenin’s note or to Dzerzhinsky’s departure. The meeting continued. But the next day there was excited whispering. Dzerzhinsky had ordered the execution of all the fifteen hundred ‘vicious counter-revolutionaries‘ the previous night. He had taken Lenin’s cross as a collective death sentence.”

“There would have been little comment had Lenin’s gesture been meant as an order for wholesale liquidation. But, as Fotieva, Lenin’s secretary, explained: ‘There was a misunderstanding. Vladimir Ilyich never wanted the executions. Dzerzhinsky did not understand him. Vladimir Ilyich usually puts a cross on memoranda to indicate that he has read them and noted their contents.’”

From computer jottings. Original link 404ed.

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The End Of Faustian Man

April 24th, 2008 at 10:00 pm (High Germany, Melancholy, Music, Self, Spengler, The Enemy, The King of Terrors, Videos, War)

The doom of our culture was already well upon it’s way by the time of the Second World War — or War of the Republics as I would prefer it to be known, since this was conducted entirely betwixt differing republican systems, all equally loathsome. Possibly not Japan, I guess, since it was at least nominally a monarchy, although cursory search indicates it was more of a constitutional monarchy. WWII may be summarized as that the nazis were detestable; the western allies despicable; and the communists disgusting.

The Russians had reverted to becoming savages by 1945: the Americans maintained their customary anthropological status as barbarians. Their especially barbaric political system of representative democracy had grave consequence as victors… The very first moralistic theatre was the judicial murder of General Anton Dostler, of which may be read here, written by the son of his American defense counsel. Essentially, 15 American soldiers were captured disguised as Italian civilians, and the — non-nazi — General referred the case to Kesselring, who ordered them to be executed. Admittedly Smiling Albert had enough to occupy his mind right then without giving this a great deal of thought, but under the laws of war this was a done deal anyway. It is pointless to object or blame soldiers for disguising; it is equally pointless to object to the consequence — which procedure is actually there to protect civilians. Thus although guiltless — neither prosecutor nor defence expected anything except acquittal — General Dostler was then sentenced to death after new instructions were handed down from Washington in response to the revelation that the prosecution would fail, that is that henceforth in these trials hearsay evidence would be admissible. This was to satisfy the voting constituents. Democracy is awesomely repellent not merely in practice, but still more so in idealist theory…

‘Hope to God we never lose a war.’ said the prosecutor.

 
Another version, shorter, but with a few more frames

Incidentally, this trial caused the innocent prosecutor to lose his faith in the Rule of Law forever…

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Jerome II : ‘We Shall Have To Teach You’

March 7th, 2008 at 4:01 pm (Other, The Building Blocks of Democracy, The Enemy, The King of Terrors)

As a child I studied one of the part-works — a form once popular from the 1920s to 1980s, but which has rather naturally fallen out of vogue: magazines issued weekly — on WWI; obviously such publications included photographs which should be seen once, in order to understand consequence, but not dwelt upon unless one is in training to become a serial killer. Actually, mere death cannot appall: there is nothing in the least romantic in death — as opposed to dying well — and it’s displays are solely squalid; however ongoing injury or the truthful immediacy of creatures suffering causes as much instantaneous flinching within as if in their presence. The issue dealing with the murder of Tsar Nicky and his family had on the back page another murder, that of a black man burning with grinning morons surveying this act.

To maintain that these lynchings — within living memory — were all of the innocent seems both unlikely and inapposite; since that matters not: such behaviour is utterly unacceptable were you dealing with devils from Hell. Still, it can be pointed out that this is one form of action that can be justified under any variant of democracy, from pure populism to libertarian individualism. And again, those who condemn such atrocities of the past, just under current fashion rather than for the pure lack of decency in such degrading manifestations, are often glad and usually silent when the victims are those of whom they disapprove — such as say, nazis or Saddam’s people..

 
Once only — at Chattanooga — did I meet with dis­agreement : and then I was asking for it. Two negroes had been lynched a few days before my arrival on the usual charge of having assaulted a white woman: proved afterwards ( as is generally the case ) to have been a trumped-up lie. All through the South, this lynching horror had been following me; and after my reading I asked for permission to speak on a matter about which my conscience was troubling me. I didn’t wait to get it, but went straight on. At home, on political platforms, I have often experienced the sensation of stirring up opposi­tion. But this was something different. I do not suggest it was anything more than fancy, but it seemed to me that I could actually visualize the anger of my audience. It looked like a dull, copper-coloured cloud, hovering just above their heads, and growing in size. I sat down amid silence. It was quite a time before anybody moved. And then they all got up at the same moment, and turned towards the door. On my way out, in the lobby, a few people came up to me and thanked me, in a hurried furtive manner.
My wife was deadly pale. I had not told her of my intention. But nothing happened, and I cannot help thinking that, if the tens of thousands of decent American men and women to whom this thing must be their country’s shame would take their courage in both hands and speak their mind, America might be cleansed from this foul sin.

***

My curiosity has always prompted me to find out all I could about my fellow human beings wherever I have happened to be. I maintain that the American man, taking him class for class and individual for individual, is no worse than any of the rest of us. I will ask his permission to leave it at that.
The last time I visited America was during the first year of the war. America then was all for keeping out of it. I had friends in big business, and was introduced to others. Their opinion was that America could best serve Humanity in the bulk by reserving herself to act as peace-maker. In the end, she would be the only nation capable of considering the future without passion and without fear. The general feeling was, if anything, pro-German, tem­pered in the East by traditional sentiment for France. I failed to unearth any enthusiasm for England, in spite of my having been commissioned to discover it. I have sometimes wondered if England and America really do love one another as much as our journalists and politicians say they do. I had an interesting talk with President Wilson, chiefly about literature and the drama. But I did get him, before I left, to say a little about the war; and then he dropped the schoolmaster and became animated.
“We have in America,” he said, “twenty million people of German descent. Almost as many Irish. In New York State alone there are more Italians than in Rome. We have more Scandinavians than there are in Sweden. Here, side by side, dwell Czechs, Roumanians, Slavs, Poles and Dutchmen. We also have some Jews. We have solved the problem of living together without wanting to cut one another’s throats. You will have to learn to do the same in Europe. We shall have to teach you.”
Undoubtedly at that time Wilson was intending to remain neutral. Whether his later change of mind brought about good or evil is an arguable point. But for America the war would have ended in stalemate. All Europe would have been convinced of the futility of war. “Peace without Victory ” — the only peace containing any possibility of permanence — would have resulted.

To the democrat, America is the Great Disappoint­ment. Material progress I rule out. Beyond a certain point, it tends to enslave mankind. For spiritual progress, America seems to have no use. Mr. Ford has pointed out that every purchaser of a Ford car can have it delivered to him, painted any colour he likes, so long as it’s black. Mr. Ford expresses in a nutshell the mental attitude of modern America. Every man in America is free to do as he darn well pleases so long as, for twenty-four hours a day, he does what everybody else is doing. Every man in America is free to speak his mind so long as he shouts with the crowd. He has not even Mr. Pickwick’s choice of choosing his crowd. In America there is but one crowd. Every man in America has the right to think for himself so long as he thinks what he is told. If not — like the heretics of the Middle Ages — let him see to it that his chamber door is locked, that his tongue does not betray him. The Klu Klux Klan, with its travelling torture chamber, is but the outward and visible sign of the spirit of modern America. Thought in America is standardized. America is not taking new wine, lest the old bottles be broken.

I ask my American friends — and I have many, I know — to forgive me. My plea is that I am growing old. And it comes to me that before long I may be called upon to stand before the Judge of all the earth, and to make answer concerning the things that I have done and — perhaps of even more import­ance — the things that I have left undone. The thought I am about to set down keeps ringing in my brain. It will not go away. I am afraid any longer to keep silence. There are many of power and authority who could have spoken it better. I would it had not been left to me. If it make men angry, I am sorry.
The treatment of the negro in America calls to Heaven for redress. I have sat with men who, amid vile jokes and laughter, told of “Buck Niggers” being slowly roasted alive; told how they screamed and writhed and prayed; how their eyes rolled inward as the flames crept up till nothing could be seen but two white balls. They burn mere boys alive and sometimes women. These things are organized by the town’s “leading citizens” Well-dressed women crowd to the show, children are lifted up upon their fathers’ shoulders. The Law, represented by grin­ning policemen, stands idly by. Preachers from their pulpits glorify these things, and tell their congrega­tions that God approves. The Southern Press roars its encouragement. Hangings, shootings would be terrible enough. These burnings; these slow grillings of living men, chained down to iron bedsteads; these tearings of live, quivering flesh with red-hot pinchers can be done only to glut some hideous lust of cruelty. The excuse generally given is an insult to human intelligence. Even if true, it would be no excuse. In the majority of cases, it is not even pre­tended. The history of the Spanish Inquisition unrolls no greater shame upon the human race. The auto da fe, at least, was not planned for the purpose of amusing a mob. In the face of this gigantic horror, the lesser sufferings of the negro race in America may look insignificant. But there must be tens of thousands of educated, cultured men and women cursed with the touch of the tar-brush to whom life must be one long tragedy. Shunned, hated, despised, they have not the rights of a dog. From no white man dare they even defend the honour of their women. I have seen them waiting at the ticket offices, the gibe and butt of the crowd, not venturing to approach till the last white man was served. I have known a woman in the pains of childbirth made to travel in the cattle wagon. For no injury at the hands of any white man is there any redress. American justice is not colour blind. Will the wrong never end ?

Jerome K. Jerome : My Life and Times

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Old Skool PC

February 16th, 2008 at 4:30 am (Generalia, Other, Self, The Building Blocks of Democracy, The Enemy)

A sort of doubt has always hung around the character of Tolstoy, as round the character of Gandhi. He was not a vulgar hypocrite, as some people declared him to be, and he would probably have imposed even greater sacrifices on himself than he did, if he had not been interfered with at every step by the people surrounding him, especially his wife. But on the other hand it is dangerous to take such men as Tolstoy at their disciples’ valuation. There is always the possibility — the probability, indeed — that they have done no more than exchange one form of egoism for another. Tolstoy renounced wealth, fame and privilege; he abjured violence in all its forms and was ready to suffer for doing so; but it is not easy to believe that he abjured the principle of coercion, or at least the desire to coerce others. There are families in which the father will say to his child, ‘You’ll get a thick ear if you do that again’, while the mother, her eyes brimming over with tears, will take the child in her arms and murmur lovingly, ‘Now, darling, is it kind to Mummy to do that ?’ And who would maintain that the second method is less tyrannous than the first ? The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power. There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison’, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics — a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage — surely that proves that you are in the right ? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.

George Orwell : Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool

 
I cannot esteem the tragic Walter Ralegh particularly highly, if the jury may still be out on whether he was a traitor or not he had an unfailing ability to give bad advice, and his pompous Polonian — wholly unasked for by King James — precepts suggesting that the Dynasty reconcile itself to parliamentary governance would have resulted in Kings becoming mere feeble puppets of whatever faction is temporarily in power, as it has with the present useless grinning eunuchs of Windsor, down, down into the the noisome abyss of true democracy. Still, like many men of action including the brutal dictators of the past century he had a pithy turn of phrase on occasion expressing obvious sense; in one debate on the Puritan Menace he rightly pointed out:

“That law is hard that taketh life, or sendeth into banishment where men’s intentions shall be judged by a jury and they shall be judges of what another man meant.”

To which, more pointedly still, one biographer adds: ‘Instead of proceeding against intentions, Ralegh said, the law should proceed against deed and fact; where they could be established, let the law be as harsh as necessary and justice would still be done.‘ Better words were never said, and the fact that Ralegh himself was convicted on deed rather than opinion is just another pleasant irony.

It can never be too strongly felt that all opinion should be free, and that law should only concern itself with deeds. [ Plus the need for heavy penalty against vile deed, of course --- *meditatively* --- Terrible Swift Sword should never be a mere phrase... ]

Fast-forward to our own day with ludicrous ‘Hate’ legislation to protect the injured feelings of fools. If a definite crime has been committed then it should receive due punishment: it is not aggravated because the actor did it from hate; justice should ignore good or bad intentions and concentrate solely on the action, and it’s due. For expressing opinion, no matter how vile, or just inciting others, there should be no penalty whatsoever. I am not harmed if some wretched iman urges his dumb flock to massacre non-muslims. I am if they act on it, and only if they act on it. If they do so, then they are the guilty, and he was merely the agitator. They should have had more sense than to carry out his suggestions, and therefore need to carry the penalties also. No-one should be blamed for thought or speech, however distasteful, that does not cause palpable injury, since to select what thoughts people should have leads to robotic tyranny and the paradise of 1984.

Some years back, where I was working one man was forbidden to talk to the clients as an interviewer since he belonged to a proscribed political group, not that he would be offensive, merely that he belonged to this group. A number of fellow-workers were of the opinion that he should not be given employment at all. A penalty that has obviously been applied to members of a number of groups ranged from socialists, nazis, communists, jews, Irish etc. etc., and continues as people are sacked for holding views, racialist, communist, insufficiently islamist or pro-islamist ( depending on location ) all around the world. The point being, that if you debar people from all employment for, say, being racially bigoted; the next step is to suggest they should not have government or state resources — their views being so abhorrant — and maybe that they should be run out of town… The Left has a strong tradition of suggesting morally objectionable persons should be killed, or at the least dealt with by fascist-type violence. In effect by denying the rights of citizens to hold views that do not conform to current morality — usually purely subjective and emotionally held — one is denying their rights to exist at all; and logically they are then expendable after a while.

Sir Walter was legally dead from his sentence, and reprieve, until his later execution; but his life in the Tower was not too bad for a prisoner in any age. The legally dead of the future state won’t be so lucky.

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Fill My Life With Song

December 22nd, 2007 at 4:00 am (Generalia, Self, The Enemy)

Feeling blue, I decided to go from pyrates to their successors, and watched the comedy Goodfellas. Obviously the usual satire is that it mirrors the establishment since mobsters are merely a bunch of psychotic little men in suits whose exaggerated concept of respect only emanates from the money nexus; yet it is more lightly done than in 70’s and 80’s films, and if much of the humour comes from an agonising tradition mind-blenchingly done to death in British comic films — bungling gangsters: at least here it derives from their competence being short on detail, rather than pure slapstick stupidity as in the latter. And as with the prominente in the real Mob, from the instituting of the Five Families on to Gotti, it rarely seems to have dawned that mindless killing, and really most of their murdering, was counter-productive to their ends; to kill unnecessarily is as sentimental a fault as not to kill from exaggerated respect for human life — and grosser. The film is true to life, too, in the fact that mafioso launch into pointless and demented self-justification at the drop of a hat: I’ve a copy of Joe Bonanno’s autobiography somewhere. Maybe their catholic heritage; maybe the fierce anti-intellectualism of the lower classes…

The lifestyle displayed in those dear dead, thank God, days beyond recall, such pure awe-inspiring tastelessness it resembles, as in a mirror darkly, islamic visions of Paradise.

 
I have the severest dislike for Cool, but this rendition is extremely powerful.

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Lion Of The North

December 18th, 2007 at 9:30 pm (Correctitude, Generalia, Melancholy, Royalism, Self, The Enemy)

“Now then, me Bullies: would you rather do the Gallows’ Dance — and hang in chains ’till the crows pick your eyes from your rotting skulls — or would you feel the roll of a stout ship beneath yer feet again ?”
Captain Kidd film

The last ship of Captain Kidd has been found and coincidentally I watched the above film with Charles Laughton: the acting, with of course the exceptions of both him and Mr. Carradine, was rather stilted, but the actress was very pretty.

As for Kidd, it scarcely matters whether he swung unjustly or not. He should have been deaded for serving William of Orange anyway; as should anyone who served that usurper and all his successors; and indeed, so should William himself, ‘The Unhung Thief‘, as Cabell dubbed him.

Life as a legitimist monarchist has the added bonus of making a very large percentage of human existence very cheap indeed; so saving one from getting worked up over mass inevitable mortality — no matter how randomly purposed.

 
Sweden, despite still having a remarkably tough military, has never been the same since the affair of the Masked Ball… that hideous snivelling progressiveness so redolent of all the Scandinavian countries has never been so well epitomised as in the castrating of the Royal Lion. Apparently ‘female soldiers‘ from a rapid reaction force made a sudden swift surgical whine regarding the fact that an animal has genitalia and the Army, instead of telling them to take a long walk off a short pier, caved in with an abasing alacrity that would have delighted the soviets had they invaded. The original designer from the Nation Archives is naturally deeply pissed.

‘Female Soldiers‘ are in any case a modern joke of course, and were not present in the Armies of Gustavus Adolphus, Queen Christina or Charles XII when those not wholly admirable monarchs’ armies were the Swedish Terror of — Northern — Europe: so, really, if any military has declined in spirit enough to have such beings, then one must just expect attendant lunacies to come along with them.

 
 
It’s a relief to turn to a purer aspect of Scandinavia. I’ve never owned, nor wanted, a bicycle, but this blog on Copenhagen bicycling is rather fascinating.

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How The Day Goes

December 11th, 2007 at 11:15 pm (Correctitude, Melancholy, Self, Spengler, The Enemy)

It is taken as a rule that whenever, and no matter in which context, a personal pronoun is used, the speaker is — hopefully unconsciously — boasting. Still, I have identified my major flaw and can’t really feel it increases self-esteem. I am incapable of reverence. This might be a coded way of saying rebellious, were it not for the fact that as a reactionary traditionalist I’ve never seen the point in rebellion for it’s own sake save as a narcissistic attitude ( see: Shelley, and indeed, Byron ); rejection of belief seems as pointless as it’s easy acceptance, and considerably more self-dramatizing. Naturalich, I feel honour to my hereditary lord: he is God’s Vice-Gerant; then again, I am scarcely likely to meet him, even less to serve him; and no chance at all to die for him > which last should be man’s natural doom. I think it was Lord Bernard Stuart who died with his back to a tree fighting eight Roundheads; and later, as my namesake lay dying…

The Viscount then asking the said Johnston: “How the day went ?”

“The day went well for the King, but I am sorry for your Lordship.”

Claverhouse : “It is the less matter for me, seeing the day went well for my Master.”

Dying was worthwhile in those days. Now it has the same unimportance as life.

To continue, no singer or band has ever held my heart. No people or group, large or tiny, seem the least bit worthy. I can’t respect breeding, wealth or achievement, no matter what it cost the achiever; work, any work, is as only good as the result; and most present day work produces ugliness adding to the material world. As a legitimist, concurrent politics merely seem the futile gesturings of freed slaves aping the process of governance. Religion is not to be crudely disdained, even — especially —- if one is fundamentally irreligious, so short ceremonies are easy enough to be for mannered respect, but in church I’ve never felt anything except annoyance and a dislike of kneeling — and this lack of interest applies to all manifestations of the religious impulse, whether church-based, atheistic, faith in science, faith in materialism, faith in people ( all, or a selected group ), nationalism, racialism, anti-racialism, and all the creeds that mix any of these to form a cocktail of belief. And too philosophers have very little to do with a functioning spiritual life any more than economists have to do with the random workings of whatever the economy may be: both are merely theologians, only to be read for the funny bits.

Thus both religion and ethical theory fail, if just because both make enormous logical leaps by constructing the desired end — good and evil — first, then creating the theory that accounts for why they think one of these is right or wrong. There are only two pole-stars for correctness: personal honour and loyalty. So in fine, there is nothing in life that can command respect or even much admiration.

I feel horror and disgust at having lived in the decades I did, both from their and my own inadequacy: all platitudinous self-serving of both rulers and ruled nauseates; we are lucky enough to have excellent gear now, but a hideous environment to house it. Technology is excellent, yet can hardly substitute for the lack in modern life. If I go anywhere in Great Britain, I know exactly what I’ll find, no matter if I’ve never seen the area once. All towns. cars, supermarkets, garages, motorway stations, same shops everywhere — maybe a museum or gallery might be interesting for an hour, or it might be as trite as the media society that invests us all. Certainly the countryside in Europe is still pretty good in places: but you have to get further in than you see from the roadside. Culturally, the bittersweet Still Game regarding two pensioners in Glasgow pretty well sums up the dead end-game of life in Britain. I can now go anywhere, but can’t conceive of any place I want to live in.

And North America and Europe — which comprise the continents I should feel comfortable within —- are pretty much the same way. All is dullness. And the people are devoted to weakness and ineptitude. We live, as predicted, in Ressentiment World. Slaves Rule.

 
Cologne on the Rhine

And what is Köln now…

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La Belle Sauvage

December 9th, 2007 at 2:00 am (Generalia, Literature, Other, The Enemy)

A month or so back I attended some bookfair and amongst others, purchased this small item for 50p, which I only just decided to look at: 18th century writing being somewhat precious.

This horrific little tale is slightly patronising to uneuropean cultures in the world-set of the time, nevertheless displays a healthier and more cynical view that the hideous idealism and disgusting relativism inseminated by Rousseau and brought to birth by Boas — both of whom have good claim to be in the top ten of most repellent persons evah — which holds sway for now. In the end, one culture, however massively imperfect, can still be decided to be generally better than another; and the nearer to naked nature a culture, the less satisfactory it remains. Anyway the author was evidently having enormous fun in writing it…

More thoughtfully, it does increase the conclusion that, whatever the difficulties, it is worth being a vegan if only for hygenic reasons.

VII. STORY OF TQUASSOUW AND KNONMQUAIHA, TWO HOTTENTOT LOVERS. CONNOISSEUR, numb. 21.

TQUASSOUW, the fon of Kqvuffomo, was Konquer or Chief Captain over the Sixteen Na­tions of Caffraria. He was defcended from N’oh and Hingn’oh, who dropt from the moon; and his power extended over all the Kraals of the Hottentots.

This prince was remarkable for his prowefs and activity : his fpeed was like the torrent, that rufhes down the precipice ; and he would overtake the wild afs in her flight : his arrows brought down the eagle from the clouds; the lion fell before him, and his launce drank the blood of the rhinoceros. He fathomed the waters of the deep, and buffeted the billows in the tempeft : he drew the rock-fifh from their lurking-holes, and rifled the beds of coral. Trained from his infan­cy in the exercife of war, to wield the Haffagaye with dexterity, and break the wild bulls to battle, he was a ftranger to the foft dalliance of love ; and be­held with indifference the thick-lipped damfels of Gongeman, and the flat-nofed beauties of Hauteniqua.

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The Categorical Imperative Has A Good Time In Siberia

December 3rd, 2007 at 6:30 pm (Other, The Building Blocks of Democracy, The Enemy)

The cold of those white Siberian nights with a pale, sickly gleam by which you could read, pierced us through and through. The prisoners, inadequately nourished by hot water, went below decks to sleep off the hunger which was becoming ever more acute.

A draft of women convicts was separated from us only by a thin wooden wall made of planks. Behind it were a few score of thieves, prostitutes and other assorted criminals: Russian, Ukrainian, Cossack, Tartar and Azerbaijan. Locked up in such close proximity to the men prisoners, they were yet more restless than the latter. Their long sojourn in captivity had affected them quite differently: more than food and sleep, they desired men.

One of the planks dividing us was soon prised free and a woman crawled through the opening, to find herself amid rows of men, lying one beside the other, like brown loaves on a baker’s shelf. We heard no affectionate exchanges, but a few heavy sighs, quickened breathing and a hasty struggle followed by a moment of silence while one lover changed places with the next. This scene caused no undue commotion. The barge was wrapped in darkness, many of the men were sound asleep, totally unaware of the amorous delights available, and the woman, moreover, was dressed no differently from the men. This daring escapade might well have passed unnoticed by the authorities had it not been for the malice of man. Someone whose moral susceptibilities were above average or who, perhaps, was himself incapable of such amorous pursuits, ran off to report. We heard the rapid tread of army boots and in rushed the soldiers who, obviously well directed, made straight for the scene of the crime. They caught hold of a man by the neck and flung him on the floor thus revealing the girl. She betrayed no fear. She was a street-walker. That was what had brought her to prison, to trial and now to Siberia. Nothing worse could befall her.

A soldier grabbed hold of her legs and started to pull her, but she was perfectly willing to go of her own accord, which she did with an impudent smile of triumph. What could they do to her ? But the authorities were well able to deal with the case.

With the soldier as escort the girl set off in the direction of the ladder, parading between the rows of men who surveyed her with regretful longing — sorry to see her leave so soon. She was taken up on deck and there ordered by the soldier to remove her padded jacket, her blouse, a sweater in shreds and her vest. Thus stripped, she was placed in the bow and made to face up-river. She was going to freeze, so that she might cool down a little.

In the grey, misty silence of the Arctic, the half-naked woman with her shameless smile and hair streaming in the wind, the full, white flagons of her breasts thrust proudly forward, seemed to challenge the forest deities lurking in the tundra, slowly gliding towards her.

Behind the girl stood a soldier, silent, sullen and indifferent. He was not a man, not even a male with whom she could go. With bayonet levelled at the girl’s bare back he stood there motionless, as though carved out of wood. The punishment lasted one hour, and the frozen girl had hardly gathered up her clothing to go below when another woman was sent up to take her place on that unusual pillory.

Tadeusz Wittlin : A Reluctant Traveller In Russia

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Not Quite So Handsome

November 4th, 2007 at 1:35 am (High Germany, Other, Self, The Building Blocks of Democracy, The Enemy, The King of Terrors, War)

For sentimental reasons, the Lancastrian usurper PKing Henry V is somehow excused for ordering prisoners killed at Agincourt — even in the following civil wars affecting parts of England during the rest of the century, caused by his verminous House’s illegal seizure, this would only happen to prisoners of high enough status to merit expungement — however, although England has actually had more monarchs who were usurping thieves than legitimate rulers, this little fellow may well be in the top three for unpleasantness: a snivelling pious puritan who majored in self-righteousness and slaughtered as freely as any serial killer for pointless aggrandizement.

Usually however it’s considered a bêtise to slay the surrendered — the Aussie furore on behalf of Breaker Morant and his mates being shot for so doing may be charitably ascribed to pitiful anti-Pom nationalism rather than condoning his shooting of captives.

After the invasion of Russia in 1941 the Germans, partially through luck and partially through skill were rewarded with hundreds of thousands of prisoners: partially through immediate inability and partially through ideological imperative a large proportion of the 5-6 million soviet POWs were starved to death in a crime worse than the labour-camps. This had a precedent ( apart from the fact that 85% of German POWs died in the camps that Stalin kept for his own people, and anyone else he could collect… ):

 
In the evening of the long day, as the imperial column was approaching Gzhatsk, we were surprised to find a number of dead Russians, still warm, on the road in front of us. We noticed that their heads had all been shattered in the same manner, and that their brains were scattered about. We knew that two thousand Russian prisoners had gone before us under the escort of Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish troops. Some of our generals greeted this with indifference, others with indignation, still others with approval.

…

…but the next day those murders had stopped. After that we simply let our un­fortunate prisoners die of hunger in the enclosures where we penned them up for the night, like cattle. This was doubtless an atrocity; but what were we to do ? Exchange them ? The enemy refused to consider it. Set them free ? They would have spread the news of our destitute condition far and wide, and soon would have joined up with others and returned to dog our steps. In this war to the death we should have sacrificed our­selves in letting them live. We were cruel by necessity. The evil lay in the fact that we had got ourselves in a position where we were faced with such a terrible alternative.

Count Philippe-Paul de Ségur : Napoleon’s Russian Campaign

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Upward And Onward

October 5th, 2007 at 1:00 am (Other, Places, Self, The Building Blocks of Democracy, The Enemy)

These important changes in the social role of women ought to be considered alongside the 1978 amendments to the Code of Personal Status introduced by the Ba˘th. The preamble states that the new code is based on “the principles of the Islamic shari˘a [ Islamic law ], but only those that are suited to the spirit of today.” The break with tradition as it affected women occurred in two important areas: first, authority was given to a state-appointed judge to overrule the wishes of the father in the case of early marriages; second, the new legislation nullified forced marriages and severely curtailed the traditional panoply of rights held over women by the men of the larger kinship group ( uncles, cousins, and so on ). The intent of the legislation as a whole was to diminish the power of the patriarchal family, and separate out the nuclear family from the larger kinship group whose hold over the lives of women was considerably weakened.
…
In general, wherever women were clearly being involved in new areas of decision making, these were explicitly formulated as pertaining somehow to their sex ( not their individual personhood ) and simultaneously “politicized” to a remarkably unnecessary extent. The only way in which the “popular committees” could function is as pressuring agencies, forcing couples to conform to whatever outcome the party line deemed suitable. The facts of the case, the letter of the law, and the “rights” of everyone concerned are shunted aside in such arrangements. In addition whenever traditional male rights over women were weakened or abolished, the state adopted this role, acting “on behalf of” the female sex, not upgrading the status of women as individuals who were being discriminated against because of their sex.
…
The Ba˘thi measures must not be exaggerated. No social group, least of all Iraqi women, was exerting pressure on them. But by choosing a particular “style” of legislating on this issue, they reveal how they think when not being boxed into a corner by the “contradictory demands of modernization and development and those of ‘cultural authenticity.’”
…
Ba˘thist ideals, tied up as they are with the Ba˘thist view of the Islamic experience, provide the ultimate source of authority and the final test for what is justified. Even the power of the Leader is derivative from these ideals, and all sources of authority outside them threaten the Ba˘th. It rankles to have fathers, brothers, uncles, and cousins, all lined up to exert varying degrees of real power and control over half of the Iraqi population. Thus, if a new loyalty to the Leader, the party, and the state is to form, women must be “freed” from the loyalties that traditionally bound them to their husbands and male kin. This was the essential purpose of the 1978 legislation on Personal Status, which diminished the power of the patriarchal family. Therefore, women, ( like children, as we have seen ) gain somewhat in status in relation to these particular groups of men, only what they must lose in freedom to the Ba˘th. Politically, the appropriate imagery is once again that provided by Saddam Husain of the child informer.

Samir Al-Khalil : Republic of Fear — Saddam’s Iraq

 
Actually, the Invasion, and imperialist imposition of a new regime over there has rather nullified most of the Ba’athist sexual equality measures, leading to the restoration of the traditional opportunities for muslim women. The joy of the above passages relate to the fact that feminism, like other ploys, was merely a means for the revolutionary state to shatter opposition and tighten control. As has happened here also.

Whether either Saddam’s pro-feminism or the new lot’s older ways were better should be regarded as a deep question, involving the various alleged rights of plenty of differing and utterly disparate groups; the rights of imperialist conquest; the rights of indigenous peoples; questions of religion and questions of culture, that can best be answered by ‘Meh, who cares ?‘

Nonetheless, the sort of people who go around looking wise, and pontificating: ‘Only Time will provide an answer.‘ are in rare luck.

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American Idiot: The Funeral Version

September 30th, 2007 at 4:23 am (Correctitude, Royalism, Self, Spengler, The Enemy)

America is a mistake, a giant mistake. Sigmund Freud

But… there’s no point to America anyway. It has no hereditary King or Emperor to provide a meaning or centre or source of law, merely a flag and whatever significance the individual places upon that object, whether entire people; particular section of the people with whom the individual identifies; continent; laws; congress; temporary chief officer, or any number of interpretations that do not coalesce into anything real. Notably because they are mere abstractions: notions with which each individual invests with his own misty preconceptions and unformed wishes. Therefore, America is not so much a mistake, as a conglomeration of millions of individual mistakes. So it has to be with all republics, including Rome and all the pseudo- [ non absolutist hereditary ] monarchies of today… Homer Simpson’s agonized question in the film from which the above title is purloined, though uniquely American in it’s self-misunderstanding, “Why does everything I whip leave me ?” is why Americans cannot combine moral courage and realism, even if — exceptionally rarely, as in the case of the current president — they possess the former quality. It is not enough to maintain a whip, whether right or wrong to wield it, there has to be a purpose in doing so: comfort, rightly derided by the Prussian exponents of Kultur against the concept of mere civilisation, is — like patriotism — not enough. The dearth of courage is not merely a consequence of the decline of the culture — this is shared in Europe and all westernised nations — nor solely from the idiots’ political system, but also stems from the very bases of the American Idea.

 
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which and outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost it’s civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There remain many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales a to how realistic, reasonable and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weariness and cowardice… Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end ?…”

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 8, 1978

He added:
“The human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, exemplified by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.”

They still don’t like Alexandr…Rigour and unsentimentality repel the satisfied, complacent and weak; yet as Hermann Hesse pronounced: “People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.”, so it will never bother the great witness of our times.

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Unfortunate Incident

September 21st, 2007 at 8:40 pm (Generalia, Self, The Building Blocks of Democracy, The Enemy, The King of Terrors)

Firstly, whilst caution is a virtue in reporting, the very title of this ‘incident’ seems misplaced. I am fully seized of the fact that most jurisdictions no longer rely just on confessions, beside corroboration etc. ( actually it was the sole evidence required in some places, like Soviet Russia, even when simply induced… ), but when a couple are in jail on million-dollar bonds and have offered apologies for the ‘unfortunate incident‘, alleged seems out of place…

Anyway, the story is, that chap A is charged with downloading underage porn, released on bail; a couple of virtuously outraged yokels then set fire to his house, killing his wife in the blaze. So far, so disgusting; yet things like this have happened in every age — though not so much in the last 200 years — and every clime — mainly in countries where rugged individualism is revered as much as in the USA, and with a like criminality, such as contemporary South Africa and neighbour nations; where killing witches is almost the norm right now.

[ From that last link: 'I have also omitted the victims of occult belief who fearlessly throw themselves in harm's way believing they are immune to gunfire.' *chokes* Sometimes, the darwinian imperative is so killingly funny... ]

Neighbors Allegedly Torch Man’s Home

It’s too much to hope for that the two will get a quick trial and then be quietly shot. Still, as ever, there is a morbid pleasure in glancing at the comments — perfunctorily, there being four-fucking-thousand, eight hundred and eighty-two of them — and regarding the fact that since they generally range from the inane to the psychotic, they form a perfect sample of American opinion-makers; as in We, The People.

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Hei–llll !

September 12th, 2007 at 2:13 am (Correctitude, High Germany, Self, The Enemy, The King of Terrors, Videos)

In the same deep-mining veins dug by those linking Nietzsche to nazi praxis, is this old review of a book on Heidegger’s relationship with naziism… *sighs* There are very few philosophers whose private political beliefs I would be in sympathy with: it’s like art, the output doesn’t depend on the moral stature of the artist. This argues the opposite.

Something to read though…

What is surprising is that Heidegger should be either surprised or dismayed to learn that the Nazis were less than fully absorbed, were in fact uninterested in his own approach to Being, in the same way that they were also uninterested in the effort of Rosenberg, the well-known Nazi “philosopher,” to bring about a profound spiritual renewal. Heidegger’s objection reveals, then, an astonishing lack of awareness of the nature of Nazism.

Rather that he knew pretty much what they were — and to be fair average contemporaries in any country then would have had the same response to most philosophers — but had hoped they could become something better.

The problem with the Nazis, according to Heidegger, was not that they terrorized and murdered people, and started World War II, but that they had the wrong attitude towards metaphysics. Whether they would have still been murderers if they had the right metaphysics is a good question. One of the most disturbing things about Heidegger’s thought is that the murders — or even the public thuggery that he could have seen in the earliest days of the Third Reich — don’t really seem to have disturbed him all that much. It was not the murders or the public mayhem that discredited “existing” Naziism but simply the wrong attitude towards philosophy, i.e. Heidegger himself. The most damning accusation, however, is just that Naziism was a form of liberalism !

Which last, uh, is factually correct. Plus one of the true reasons naziism is utterly abhorrant. National Socialism was the outcome of republican German nationalism of 1848 ( As is much of American political praxis ). And indeed a youtube of the esteemed neo-nazi band Stahlgewitter explicitly makes this connection, the black-red-gold republikaner flag makes it’s appearances along with other nazi crap.

Apart from which, ‘public mayhem’ in the sense meant here ran through both the soviet and the American system — even in the Thirties.

Heidegger is not a moralist and does not have anything like a theory or system of moral principles. It is not clear how a prohibition of murder would even be grounded in his system. A “resolute” and “authentic” murderer actually sounds pretty good.

There is nothing wrong with killing someone if one has authentic reasons to so do. ( The nazis didn’t very often, being mostly dim thugs — plus they did it messily whenever possible. )

Heidegger’s conservatism is also reflected in his hostility to modernity, not just in the form of liberal democracy, but in the form of science and technology and commercial culture. This is another area where he appeals to modern leftists, who not only want a socialist mandarinism, run by themselves, rather than liberal democracy, but who are also constitutionally hostile to science, which depends on criteria far harder than their own self-persuasive rhetorical sophistries, and to technology and commerce, which are not only similarly hard edged but have done far more to improve the life of most people than the chatter of Marxist dialectics ever has.

Ah, the magical sweet matrix of science, parliamentary democracy and the free market… What soul-satisfying happiness it has brought; and much more importantly, will always promise to bring. ‘Only a few generations, comrades-citizens-voters, and our children will live as gods !‘

( Much the same mix as nazism and communism would have evolved into, in fact. )

So in the end, quite apart from the frequent hyperbole, the diatribe relies on supposed ethics and appeals to materialism: which being both that which Heidegger rejected, means that it is like similiarly accusing an eagle of not valuing either. The eagle knows that already.

In a Salon article Being Martin Heidegger Ralph Brave gives some answers as to why Heidegger’s semi-sympathy with National Socialism is ultimately irrelevant to his philosophy. [ Note: click the page numbers to avoid getting lost. ]

Of course, I barely understand Heidegger, and sometimes reading both him and other fine thinkers can induce the loss of the will to live, but one should ever recognise greatness in thought, in those we admire, and in those with whom we may disagree for extraneous reasons.

 
At his execution, it was enquired if Alfred Rosenberg had any last words before being topped.

“No.”

Pretty authentic, that.

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Propaganda 101 — A Small Black Pig

September 8th, 2007 at 12:20 pm (Animals, Other, Royalism, The Enemy)

The Terrible Verdict

Roger of Wendover was a monk of St Albans who wrote a great chronicle that began with the creation of the world. Some ten years after John’s death he set down an account of the reign. What is immediately striking about this is that he seems to know more about John’s reign than men who were writing shortly after the events they described. He knows what John said to his nephew Arthur before he made away with him. He can give illustrations of the way the king terrorized the clergy: crushing an archdeacon under a cope of lead, threatening to slit the noses of papal servants and to pluck out their eyes. There is a story of a Jew of Bristol who had a tooth knocked out daily until he revealed where he had hidden his treasure. He gives John’s blasphemous oath ( ‘By God’s teeth’ ), and tells how he made free with the wives and daughters of his barons. He explains that John lost Normandy to the king of France because at the critical stage of the campaign he was uxorious and idle: ‘Let be, let be, whatever he now takes I shall one day recover.’ Historians have often used these stories freely: here at last is the meat after a diet of thin gruel. Now we can know what John was really like, for here are anecdotes that clearly characterise him.

What the historians who use these anecdotes about John seldom make clear, however, is that Wendover’s chronicle is full of anecdotes of a highly dubious nature. There is one about a washerwoman who tried to earn an extra penny by plying her trade on the Sabbath, and was sucked dry by a small black pig as punishment. There is one ( it is eighteen pages long ) about a peasant named Thurkhill from the village of Twinstead in Essex who, in 1206, was led through the realms of Purgatory by St Julian. As Wendover tells it the story has many realistic touches, from the man’s name and the place where he lived to precise details about the torture chambers of the underworld: in one, for example, stand cauldrons of inky water so bitter that if a piece of wood is thrown in the bark instantly peels off it. It is a grim and lively story; but is it true ? Wendover certainly seems to think it as authentic as his stories about John; and it is difficult to see on what grounds historians should reject the former while accepting the latter.

W. L.. Warren : King John

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Wide-Eyed And Full Of Sexual Excitement

September 3rd, 2007 at 2:01 am (Art, Generalia, Self, The Enemy)

Existing without television until just before the end of the last century and which discarded recently completely after little use for years, the only thing to regret in that is that one’s education in early cinema is incomplete. Admittedly cultural zeitgeist of the past informs one though a type of osmosis — I have never seen a Keystone Cops movie, but feel fairly confident it can be imaged enough — but I guess one should at least attempt to become acquainted with known masterpieces/milestones. Suffering is supposed to be good for the soul, although personally I should prefer to stuff it when given a choice.

In this spirit I today watched D. W. Griffith’s great anti-war epic ‘The Birth of a Nation’, Here.
Although only in brief chunks, as it’s kind of long at three hours, and suffers from the pace of a snail got at by horse-dopers. The, uh, low expectations of audience comprehension at that period also adds to the tame pace. Heavy symbolism lingered upon too long — although to be absolutely fair, most people might not find the delineation between the younger characters at the beginning sufficiently drawn, since they appear to be clones; and in any case there’s a whole lot of hand-shaking going on for about ten minutes so one’s attention is bound to wander rather. I frequently glanced at a crib-sheet* to see whom was who.

*( Following the South’s defeat, Stoneman calls for his protege and aide Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), mulatto (half African-American) leader of the blacks. When greeting him, Stoneman orders: “Don’t scrape to me. You are the equal of any man here.” Senator Charles Sumner is summoned, and forced to acknowledge mulatto Lynch’s position. Sumner proposes a less dangerous policy in the extension of power to the freed race. In the next room, Lydia listens to the conversation, wide-eyed and full of sexual excitement. ) I can think of more erotic subjects…

The main lessons this film teaches us are that war is hell — although war is undoubtedly better than a 12-hour ( or two hour for those of us more easily bored ) shift in the cotton fields every day —- mid-victorian clothes were insane; Reconstruction was hell ( although indignation over giving the freed slaves the vote, and disenfranchising whites ignores the fact that giving anyone the vote is lethal ); and that ‘Africans’ are natural brutes. It would be silly to get over-excited at things which were the common currency of mental discourse in another period; besides which blacks in early twentieth century America had far worse things to worry about than filmic propaganda for a racialist view of their recent past.

Generally the men are dorks, but the girls are pretty, although acting at that point often appears to involve imitating lunacy. Worse, the yuckyish sentiment is frequently overwhelming. Perhaps because the war was still in living memory at that time, the battle scenes are surprisingly — for art — realistic, insofar as one can see what’s happening; but then that is a quality of war itself. Still in the end, for the materials of the time, 1915, one can appreciate the skill of the director. The score is more insistent than it would have been when played by a weary piano-player in the cinemas of the time.

Obviously, online one can’t appreciate Griffith’s cinematic values as one ought: this is not a sharp rendering: no worse maybe than for a semi-blind person watching half a mile away at a drive-in on a foggy day.

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Clichéd

August 30th, 2007 at 9:16 pm (Correctitude, Generalia, Self, The Enemy)

All our thinking is bound to be in cliché; it could scarcely be other since our conditioning by education, education in it’s broadest sense, from the moment we are conceived has to come from the external world which does so by laying patterns already determined. One of the major differences ‘twixt the superior and inferior — and here it may be needful to wearily iterate the sublime truth that Inferior is not used in a pejorative sense, even by Nietzsche at his most scornful: this is classification, not judgement — is that the latter uses the latest fashionable cliches to hand, rather than through any process of selection.

Thus, a frequent attack in forums is to accuse people of passive-aggression, based on a misunderstanding of that term anyway: not being able to see that they are merely — entirely rightly — choosing to exercise insolence.

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Timorous & Satisfied

August 30th, 2007 at 12:50 am (Correctitude, Generalia, High Germany, Other, The Enemy)

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.

A mongrel and inferior people, incapable of any spiritual aspiration above that of second-rate English colonials, we seek refuge inevitably in the one sort of superiority that the lower castes of men can authentically boast, to wit, superiority in docility, in credulity, in resignation, in morals. We are the most moral race in the world; there is not another that we do not look down upon in that department; our confessed aim and destiny as a nation is to inoculate them all with our incomparable rectitude. In the last analysis, all ideas are judged among us by moral standards; moral values are our only permanent tests of worth, whether in the arts, in politics, in philosophy or in life itself. Even the instincts of man, so intrinsically immoral, so innocent, are fitted with moral false-faces. That bedevilment by sex ideas which punishes continence, so abhorrent to nature, is converted into a moral frenzy, pathological in the end. The impulse to cavort and kick up one’s legs, so healthy, so universal, is hedged in by incomprehensible taboos; it becomes stealthy, dirty, degrading. The desire to create and linger over beauty, the sign and touchstone of man’s rise above the brute, is held down by doubts and hesitations; when it breaks through it must do so by orgy and explosion, half ludicrous and half pathetic. Our function, we choose to believe, is to teach and inspire the world. We are wrong. Our function is to amuse the world.

Democracy is based upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces.

It is, for example, one of my firmest and most sacred beliefs, reached after an inquiry extending over a score of years and supported by incessant prayer and meditation, that the government of the United States, in both its legislative arm and its executive arm, is ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and disgusting—and from this judgement I except no more than twenty living lawmakers and no more than twenty executioners of their laws. It is a belief no less piously cherished that the administration of justice in the Republic is stupid, dishonest, and against all reason and equity — and from this judgement I except no more than thirty judges, including two upon the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. It is another that the foreign policy of the United States — its habitual manner of dealing with other nations, whether friend or foe — is hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable — and from this judgment I consent to no exceptions whatever, either recent or long past. And it is my fourth ( and, to avoid too depressing a bill, final ) conviction that the American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and that they grow more timorous, more sniveling, more poltroonish, more ignominious every day.

H. L. Mencken

 
 
The trouble with American character is that, en masse, they are fairly on the side of what they are taught is good in the sense of being well-meaning, and they have morals. Also, they are mostly physically brave, but mostly lack courage, and in particular moral courage.

They squirm away from necessary mental ruthlessness, whilst dumbly applauding brutish use of force. Undoubtedly the regime of Democracy has had a large part in ensuring the triumph of spinelessness, yet even under equally vile but different forms of mass democratic society, both the then Russians and then Germans retained the hard integrity in war sacrifice that the U.S. — no matter how exemplary their industry — has never come near to matching. Having two revealed religions, the constitution and some form of degenerate christianity, which are slowly diverging, not only accounts for this lack of rigour, both being fairly soft-headed as creeds, but leads to schizophrenia, which accounts for the fact that since Mencken’s diagnosis of the disease, it has increased and become mortal.

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Everything Is A Construct — Not

August 28th, 2007 at 4:46 am (Self, Spengler, The Enemy)

I’m fairly strong on the Nature side myself. At least 80%, and I rather suspect that even for the undeniable parts of Nurture, such as prior environment and influence, a case can be made that these too are determined by the nature of those who created the environment, no matter how unwilled that creation.

Roissy asks:

Which got me thinking. Is unmanliness a harbinger of the fall of great powers ?

To which the answer is — Spengler yawns —

Yes.

***

Earlier, he has an interesting piece on our robotic future as regards artificial sex.

Much has been written about the sexbot phenomenon, with the skeptics focusing on the technical limitations (men make this argument) and the insistence that sexbots would not satisfy male sexual desire like real women would (women make this argument). It’s possible the technical hurdles to creating a sexually pleasing mechanical woman that could compete with real women might be too high, but assuming those hurdles are jumped, I offer the following future scenario.
etc.

 
Although at least this might lead to less inane chatter from those advocates who make a wishful distinction betwixt ’sex’ and ‘gender’, that might be balanced by an increase in geek chatter about hardware and programming.

Personally, although obviously much stronger on the realist wing than the romantic, I can’t think of anything more dire. Life without passion is tawdry and arid foolishness. No doubt the geeks would insist on the validity of the personality of each machine — where man’s anthromorphological urgings, strong enough in normal life, meet with the insistent deconstructualisation of actual personhood and what it means to be human promulgated by atheist philosophers looking for excuses to be what they would want to be, but lack the courage to implement — yet no matter how realistic these things could be, they would still be slaves and slaves aren’t companions. Which exemplifies that if one creates a perfect world of artifice to merely surround oneself with heaven, one remains a slave oneself.

Authenticity is not just the finest achievement, it is the only prerequisite for a valid life. Which is not to say that it is necessarily nice or good, but that like oxygen to carbon-based beings, it is necessary. Personally I’ll stick with girls.

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Gil-Martin Tripping The Antinomialist Light Fantastic In The Parish Of Colmonel

July 18th, 2007 at 8:11 pm (Correctitude, Generalia, Royalism, Self, Spengler, The Enemy)

‘It is impossible to evaluate the moral compass of George W. Bush without reference to James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’

Not only because of the theology involved, nor yet additionally because it is one of the most influential and greatest of Scots novels, explaining much about Knox’s corrupting legacy that sours that troubled land.

But because i wanted to say that.

The innate manic manichaism of the pressie’s inmost self does at least add an extra edge to the stern boredom of contemporary international politics: the particular wars may be strictly dumb, yet without war we are nothing; so at least he’s fulfilling at least one useful function: entertainment. Much like Arnold Bennet’s famous Denry Machin, ‘The Card‘, “he’s identified with the great cause of cheering us all up.” Future generations — if they retain the habit of reading — will consider the War on Terror much as the same as la Grande Peur, or previous American hysteria over bolshevism…

After the Russian Revolution, Americans based their ideas of Bolshevism on the sensational half-truths of newspaper reports and on the portrayals of Communist activity in films like Dangerous Hours… . In this picture, Russian infiltration of American industry was foiled by Lloyd Hughes. The political complexities were ludicrously simplified. Audiences were shown the most heinous crime of all time: the nationalization of women. This abominable act involved a number of extras on horseback rounding up women, throwing them into dungeons, and beating them.

Kevin Brownlow – The Parade’s Gone By

With all that to be said for Bush though — and I should quote Solzhenitsyn’s gnomic Russian saying that those who speak for the wolf should also speak against him, were it not for that fact that identifying Americans with lupines seems so terribly, terribly wrong, they being much the same as the stalwart, yet not immensurately daring, Slavs, as Mencken noted in the last century: ‘ …nearer to the Russians than any Europeans. Russia was not like Europe, but it was strangely like America. In the same way the Russians were like Americans. They, too, were naturally religious and confiding; they, too, were below the civilized average in intelligence; and they, too, believed in democracy, and were trying to give it a trial.‘ — the lack of character consequent to the Calvinist doctrine of the Elect — it makes men mere puppets in the end — shall finally condemn him as it condemned the deluded Wringham.

The Cloud of Witnesses

Damn good job well done too.

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Idealist Finishing Schools

July 18th, 2007 at 4:33 am (Other, The Building Blocks of Democracy, The Enemy)

The word dokhodyaga… applied in the camps to the men who have been reduced to such a low level mentally and physically that even as workers they are of very limited value. The name dokhodyaga is derived from the verb dokhodit which means to arrive or to reach. At first I could not understand the connection, but it was explained to me: the dokhodyagas were ‘arrivistes‘, those who had arrived at socialism, were the finished type of citizen in the socialist society.

Vladimir Petrov

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