Right wingers love apocalyptic scenarios, so I suppose it is no surprise that, after wading through a turgid and sludge-like philosophical tome of nearly 500 pages, packed with somniferous prose of purely academic interest (and in an awkward translation from the German original), my choice for light reading was John Christopher’s apocalyptic novel, The Death of Grass.
John Christopher is an English science fiction author, from Lancashire, now 88, credited with about 70 novels, written under his real name (Christopher Samuel Youd) and eight different pseudonyms. Many of his novels are (post-)apocalyptic, following the world-in-ruins pattern; those after 1966 are aimed largely at adolescents. Popular during the 1950s and 1960s, he has since fallen out of favour and his books are now mostly out of print. The Death of Grass, first published in 1957, is an adult novel, which was (not very faithfully) adapted to film in 1970 and was re-published by Penguin Books in 2009.
As the title suggests, the premise is that an unconquerable, mutant plant virus (Chung-Li) extinguishes all life in the grasses family around 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, England, where the narrative unfolds.
John Custance, the main character, is an architect, based in London. His brother, David, is a stolid farmer, who lives in an enclosed valley in Westmorland (now Cumbria). When the virus first breaks, there is, as expected, complacency: China is distant and, as horrible as the famine there may seem, there is in the West every confidence that an anti-virus would be found in good time. Said anti-virus proves elusive, of course, and as its ravages grow nearer, Western leaders begin to tremble. Emergency measures are enacted, rationing is imposed, and the United States begins hoarding. Eventually, however, the United Kingdom finds itself bald, without food, without farm animals, and left in the lurch by the United States, whose government finally halts all food aid, having decided, once a last-ditch effort at developing an anti-virus fails, to put the survival of its own citizens before that of other nations.
David Custance, thinking it better to be safe than sorry, and sceptical of government assurances (which eventually prove deliberate lies), is by this time prepared, having re-purposed his fields for the cultivation of beets and potatoes, built up stores, and erected fortifications to defend the narrow pass offering the sole access point to his valley, which is otherwise surrounded on all sides by impenetrable natural defences. His brother John, who was initially reluctant to accept David’s invitation to join him with his family at the Westmorland farm, finally, at the eleventh hour and fifty-nine minutes, decides to make a dash for the valley, hundreds of miles North of his London home: his friend Roger Buckley, a senior civil servant with a pipeline to the upper echelons of government, has warned him with only hours to spare that the game was up and that the government, who had yet to tell its citizens about the exhaustion of food supplies and the impossibility of stopping the Chung-Li virus, had decided to vaporize 60% of the population by nuking all major cities in order to improve the chances of survival for the rest.
The plan is for John and Roger to drive North as quickly as possible, with their families and essential victuals and possessions. Soon, they are met with reverses, which result in the two friends’ returning briefly to London in order to acquire now essential guns and ammunition. There they recruit Pirrie, the cynical, cold-blooded sexagenarian gun shop owner who soon proves an indispensable asset, particularly to John, by now the party’s leader. Not far from London, Marxists—although they are not explicitly so designated—stage a revolution, overthrowing the government and seizing control of the BBC, through which they inform the public about the reality of the food situation as well as about the deposed government’s secret nuclear plot. Foolishly, they expect people to carry on business as usual and ask the air force please not to nuke the cities; inevitably, there is mass panic, and millions of city-dwellers all over Britain begin their own mad rush to evacuate themselves into the countryside (where there is likely to be at least some food). Thus, law and order instantly collapse. And John and company instantly realise that the starving and desperate hordes are now only one or two hours behind them.
The race is on.
Needless to say that their journey is plagued with reverses. And when things get bad, they then get worse, only then to get even worse, relentlessly gloomier, nastier, and more desperate. John Christopher keeps up the suspense and the pages turning as we follow John’s party on its Northward journey through the increasingly dangerous countryside. Although most of the prose consists of action and dialogues, one’s mind is filled with images of dark and deserted lanes, hemmed in by hedges and bare ditches, winding under a general atmosphere of lurking menace and impending—and, later, actual and ever more naked—human rapacity.
The novel traces two simultaneous processes: on the one hand, there is civilized society’s decomposition and descent into barbarism, where rapacity, brutal force, ruthlessness, selfishness, opportunism, mistrust, and a thoroughly cynical realism are the only guarantees for survival; and, on the other hand, there is John’s transformation from educated urbanite into a cold, hard, pitiless leader of men, and, from there, gradually into a feudal lord. The latter part we do not get to see, but it is hinted at, and the suggestion is made that the initial post-democratic chaos and barbarism would eventually lead to the re-emergence of an authoritarian, masculine, feudal society, with a class of farmer-warriors offering military service in exchange for protection. Indeed, a persistent message throughout the novel is that pity, compassion, and democracy are luxuries that are sustainable only where there is a steady income and money and food to spare. Even John’s stubborn illusion of a return to normal life once in the safety of David’s stronghold in Westmorland is shattered in the end. There is, inevitably, an effort to conclude the novel on a high note, in the last paragraph, on the final line, but, in a novel where what is won is won through harsh dictatorial authority and merciless killing and stealing, from guilty and innocent alike, this feels like an afterthought, added for feel-good commercial purposes. We know that, in reality, such a world would have changed irreversibly, and would begin anew on premises entirely different from today’s democratic ones.
In an interview given a few years a back, John Christopher claims that he has no moral programme. Yet we can glimpse in this novel an internally consistent network of auxiliary themes. One is the value of realist foresight: while the Chung-Li virus sweeps across the Earth, with the exception of David Custance nobody prepares; all, including initially his brother John, carry on as normal, putting their faith in technology and in their government’s ability to handle the situation. David secures his own survival by not taking anything for granted—not technology, not progress, not the trustworthiness of the government, not even human decency; instead, he plans well ahead, not caring to be called a doom-obsessed kook who might eventually be proven wrong.
This theme is linked to another: responsibility. John is transformed not just by the evolving situation, but by his assuming responsibility as leader of a party—responsibility to lead its members into safety and keep them alive, making whatever difficult decisions are necessary along the way, even if they are unpopular. Indeed, his status in the eyes of family and friends is elevated when he eventually dispenses with all vestigial democratic methods and asserts his dictatorial rule: his wife, formerly humanitarian, stops complaining; his children, formerly ungovernable, discover respect; his friend Roger, formerly full of bluster and bravado, fades away, becoming a dutiful vassal, two steps removed from dictator John once rifle-wielding Pirrie establishes his usefulness through his marksmanship and knowledge of human nature. Along with responsibility, however, comes a certain loss of freedom: the freedom that John takes away from his charges, and the freedom that he loses by virtue of his duties towards them. And then there is, of course, the loneliness of the leader: as John hardens and grows into this new role, he is progressively alienated from his wife, his children, and his best friend. Intimacy is incompatible with authority.
This theme of responsibility is linked to yet another: the importance of honour and glory. There comes a point in the story where John, now standing before his brother’s stronghold, is faced with three choices: take advantage of familial bonds and smuggle himself and his family to safety behind the fortified valley, double-crossing his vassals and abandoning them to certain death outside; turn around and try to find some other place to survive in; or fight his brother and conquer the valley. The first option is dishonourable and the second inglorious—both would mean betraying his troops, to whom he has promised safety in exchange for service; which leaves the third option. It means murder, this time of people he grew up with, but John deems this easier to live with than dishonour or disgrace. His wife Ann does not understand this, attracted to the first option, but John remains firm. Getting in by the easiest available means is not enough, even in a cutthroat world of pillage and murder.
A further theme is anti-feminism. The women in the novel are strong, but they also have distinct, well-defined, and complementary roles in relation to the male characters, and they are generally submissive, even if at times reluctantly. The fact is that while they represent the civilisational side of man, they depend on their male counterparts—the killer apes—for survival: in the novel, an unprotected female is not deemed likely to survive beyond a day. John Christopher was influenced by a theory, advanced by Robert Ardrey in The Territorial Imperative, that man was ‘descended from a race of killer apes, who wiped out a race of less belligerent but more civilized anthropoids.’ Christopher believes that the two should interbreed, and that women benefited from the presence of (masculine) men, ‘a strong right arm to help defend them both.’ Such thinking, so archaic and reactionary vis-à-vis modern liberal sensibilities, inevitably led to feminist uproar when it was articulated in another novel, Dom and Va, in 1973.
Then, of course, there is the theme already alluded to at various points in this article: the fragility of democratic government, and its inability to cope with extraordinary events. One cannot but think of Carl Schmitt’s state of exception. The democracies in the novel sustain themselves either through criminal deception, which leads to systemic collapse once it is uncovered, or, as is the case with the fictional United States, through nationalist isolationism—the deprecation of all humanistic sentiment and the adoption of a country-wide bunker strategy, complete with vast stores and heavy defences. One does wonder, however, what is likely to happen should stores run out before an anti-virus, or a virus-resistant grass, is developed. America would probably follow Europe in its return to feudalism, following the disappearance of the nation state.
Back in our world, we might not be facing an apocalyptic plant virus, but we know we are currently facing what Guillaume Faye calls a ‘convergence of catastrophes’, the most immediate of which seems presently to be an apocalyptic financial meltdown—one which, if not averted, could well lead to a systemic breakdown in the West, if not ‘only’ a progressive realignment of power towards Asia.
Should this come to pass, we may not see chaos on same scale and with the same finality as in The Death of Grass, but we will experience conditions never previously seen by people from my generation downwards, and this will demand from all a harsh and fundamental readjustment of our thinking. If Somit and Peterson are correct (see their book, Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy), the sort of affluent, free, democratic societies we nowadays take for granted in the West are rare historical occurrences; when they appear, they do so in a localised fashion, for relatively brief periods of time, the human norm otherwise being some form of authoritarianism. Right wingers, many of whom dream of a collapse, thinking that it will somehow magically default in their being back in charge, should beware: a collapse, if severe enough, would sweep away the existing order, but it would not necessarily favour the White man, or even result in anything resembling a European resurgence; just as likely (at least in Europe) is a new order based on Islam. There are millions of Muslims already in our continent who are growing in number every day, many of whom have proven their capacity for collective radical action, as well as their intolerance, their hatred of the West, and their aspiration to Islamicise our traditional homelands. Across the Atlantic, White Americans face different but no less serious competitive challengers.
Regardless of the enemy, however, in such a context, the lesson here is that first we must assume the worst, yesterday, and prepare accordingly today, however comfortable we may feel and however unlikely an apocalypse may appear; and then we must be ready to either lead or be led, once—or rather before—our present democratic phase runs its course. Events will probably play out both similarly and very differently from what is anticipated by apocalypse fantasists, but The Death of Grass, because it deals realistically with human nature, entertaining no liberal illusions about it, offers a useful reference point in any exercise of imagining the coming age of upheavals.
Having said this, the lesson in John Christopher’s novel remains incomplete. It is, after all, fiction for entertainment, so it is too much to expect it to show a way forward. As I have stated repeatedly, indulging one’s imagination in apocalyptic scenarios may be satisfying for many of those with our turn of mind, and preparing for an apocalypse may be well advised for all in any event, but our story does not have to end that way. Disaster can be averted, even if at a price, by forcing cultural change now, and showing the apolitical citizen out there that missing way forward—our way forward. The Left has succeeded, despite having logic and ‘the facts’ against them, because when the earlier dispensation was crumbling the Left showed its way forward. It spent very little time, or none at all, telling the citizenry how things were bad and why they were going to get worse; it told them, rather, why things were bad and how the Left was going to make them better. The Left remains mainstream because it speaks of change and thus instils and sense of hope; our side remains marginal because it speaks of decline and thus instils a sense of despair. Evidence shows that the apolitical citizen would rather side with someone who is for something than with someone who is against everything.
John Christopher has written ‘world-in-ruins’-type novels because he is interested in what happens after the catastrophe. His instincts appear not far from our own. But while his job is to entertain with speculation as to what shape people might be in after a world catastrophe, ours is to instill a sense of purpose in people with our efforts to shape the world beyond the catastrophe. Whether the grasses on our lawns and in our fields will die or grow wild will ultimately be decided by us. Are we ready to assume a role of leadership, seize our destiny, do what it takes, and live in honour and glory, or will we ingloriously cede that destiny to another and remain deferent for what remains of our days?
Facing the Future as a Minority
Was the Immigration Act of 1924 Illiberal?
I read it a long time ago, NO BLADE OF GRASS was its title then.
This is not sci-fic, it is a probable future.
Firearms have become almost impossible to obtain in England, UK today.
This is an NRA site that covers the Obama’s stance on the Second Amendment: GunBanObama.com
It is important to defend the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
REPEAL all the gun laws, they do only harm, not good.
http://gunowners.org/
Mr. Kurtagic,
Thanks for the thoughtful review and commentary.
I too believe that we are very soon to experience a
“convergence of catatrophes” (think perfect storm
on a global scale). We have a financial meltdown
accompanied by moral degeneration. If the British
environmental scientist, Lovelock, is correct, we are
doomed to catatrophic global warming killing off
over 80% of humanity within the next 30 years
(China, India will be uninhabitable desert).
Given scale of these calamities is it reasonable to
want to survive? I view myself as a “sheltered hot house
plant”, accustomed to comfort and leisure. I really
question that I would to live in a post-catastrophic
world.
I am probably too dumb to see the relevance of this “article”. Alex Kurtagic has read a science-fiction novel. Big deal!
@German: Did you read to the end? KM
Only one week left before the Tea Drinkers embark on their next round of Buyer’s Remorse and OO brings us another fantasy: Unprepared urban architect rolling in EZ money, status, and undoubtedly feeling intellectually and culturally superior to his “farmer” brother gets tanned, tough, and ready to become a “pitiless,” fratricidal leader of men in what…a few days, weeks, months? Lulz!
Only one week left before our Tea Drinkers embark on another round of Buyer’s Remorse!
@ KM
Yes, I did, although I might have given only a cursory glance over some passages.
I didn’t want to be overly dismissive. I like some of Mr. Kurtagic’s essays and I understand that a novelist like himself needs to be full of himself and fancy all of his doings important.
But: I found the description of apolcalyptic novel of an man who is neither jew-wise nor race-conscious quite uninteresting and the comments of Mr. Kurtagic quite generic (would have fit to all novels of this genre whether good or bad).
I must admit I am not a doomer myself and find the doomers ofter quiter pretentious and smug (Kievsky of VNN fame comes to mind) so I gave my harsh comment as an admonition to show a bit more self-discipline (although I know that Mister Kurtagic doesn’t need my advice).
Best wishes (I really like your work) and best wishes to Mister Kurtagic as well (I will give his “Mister” a try in the next weeks).
Oh, I should have shown more self-discipline myself: “I finde the doomers ofen quite pretentious and smug” would have been better.
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Poaceous plants such as wheat, corn, and rice are the pillars of civilization. It was only their domestication about 10,000 years ago that enabled man to emerge from the hunter-gatherer stage and build all that we see before us today. Eventually, and probably soon, someone in a position to do something about it is going to notice this weakness and respond accordingly. Developing a pathogen to attack a broad spectrum of these vital cereal grains, all in the grass family, and all of which therefore share a broad degree of genetic similarity and vulnerability, is going to be an obvious method for any group dissatisfied with the existing social and political order to strike out and destabilize it. Once groups such as Al Qaeda realize this, they will no longer be content with relatively harmless stunts like hijacking planes and flying them into skyscrapers. If, for example, Al Qaeda had in its possession a bioweapon such as a strain of wheat virus, smut, rust, or blight, the virulence and pesticide-resistance of which had been enhanced in the laboratory through selective breeding or genetic engineering, it would be in a position to dictate its own terms to the United States. Releasing it would be a devastating blow that would strike directly at the US population, causing famine at home. World prices for these grains would skyrocket, and owing to the large share of the export market controlled by US farmers, mass starvation in the poorer countries of the world would be an expected result.
Further, the list of people who might want to do something like that isn’t limited just to revolutionaries and people with a grudge against the system generally. The fact that prices of cereal grains can be predicted with such certainty to skyrocket all over the world under this scenario means that others, motivated purely by greed, could also be tempted to develop such an organism. We should anticipate that an unscrupulous individual with the requisite means (George Soros, e.g.) might even be working on something like this right now. Certain governments also could stand to benefit enormously from so manipulating the food supply. In theory, the virulence of such a bioweapon could even be attenuated as needed, so that the blow might be merely enough to raise prices without causing a severe degree of starvation. With a little care in choosing a delivery system, it might even be made to seem a natural occurence.
In principle, the development of such a bioweapon is fairly straightforward. One has merely to observe the various fungicides, bactericides, and other pesticides farmers have at hand to combat existing diseases and subject the desired pathogen to sub-lethal doses of them, selectively breeding the survivors until resistance or immunity is produced. Actually, the system of conventional agriculture itself may eventually be expected to generate such resistance and immunities, much as the overuse of insecticides has generated insectide-resistant forms of insects, and the overuse of drugs has generated drug-resistant bacteria. A deliberate attack on the system using such pathogens can be envisioned as simply a speeding-up of this existing process.
The cereal grains could be targeted individually, or the entire Poaceae based on the genetic commonalities of the cereal grains. The latter is quite a bit more difficult, but far from impossible. Most likely a synthetic organism, such as the strain of bacteria recently produced by Craig Venter, could fill the bill. If wheat, rice, and corn were all wiped out at once by a combination attack or by such a synthetic organism, it would cause unimaginable devastation. Deaths from starvation, especially in the poorer countries of the world, would easily number in multiple billions. The existing social and political order would almost certainly topple. Although it would be hard to predict an exact outcome, any group or individual that thought it had nothing to lose, or something substantial to gain, still might be motivated to try it. The technical capability is there, or on the verge of being there. All that remains is for someone to appear with the motive, the means, and the will to carry it out.
Considering the evil ideas and detailed instruction such as you freely provide here to would-be anarchists and Al-Queda operatives who might be reading this blog, perhaps you should have adopted the moniker of “Der Schwartze Engel” instead.
Possibly Kurtagic, should review ” A Canticle for Leibowitz”, the mother of all American nuclear holocaust novels. A sci-fi novel that has been reprinted something like 27 times since 1960.
Written by a Jew named Miller who converted to Roman Catholicism; the novel is about a Jewish engineer who survives a nuclear holocaust and founds an order of Roman Catholic monks who set out to save written knowledge from a post-apocalyptic dark age. Leibowitz goes down in history as Saint Leibowitz. (I’m not making this up).
Shall I go on?
Canticle for Liebowitz is a masterpiece written before the Roman Catholic Church self-destructed. Sad reading today.
Yeah, I can’t wait for the Pope to set up shop in New Rome; formerly known as St.Louis. :)
Non-whites must never be allowed to remain inside White countries. If they are, eventually the area will be racially mixed. Their removal cannot be accomplished democratically and with out bloodshed and we must never negotiate with them for our land. So we must be FOR their removal at any cost. It is in Whites’ long-term racial interests to be FOR a collapse because without it the non-whites will surely prevail. With a collapse they at least have a chance. Whites will probably be able to acquire firearms on the black market from abroad (I’m speaking of the situation in Europe here) and with the law enforcement and military apparatus rendered non-functional, and the fear of arrest greatly reduced or eliminated, the pent up White rage which Dr. MacDonald has observed here in the U.S. will be unleashed on the non-whites and the White leadership which has welcomed them.
In Great Britain, for example, if such a conflict ensued, and if at the end of it there were one thousand White men and one thousand White women left standing on the battlefield with all other human life decimated, Whites will have won.
Let’s not make the mistake of trying to vote our way out of this.
I must agree with *German* above. The narcissistic message of Mr. Kurtagic often seems to be: “Let it be known to the world that Alex Kurtagic is angry and discontent!” If it had been Bill Clinton, it would have been breaking news. But who is Alex Kurtagic? According to himself, he is “not vastly different from” Kevin MacDonald, Tomislav Sunic, Elizabeth Whitcombe and Greg Johnson, but I’m not convinced. Articles of MacDonald, Johnson, Whitcombe (and sometimes Sunic) usually have a message far beyond the author’s (more or less narcissistic) ego.
Sig,
Alex is an elitist. What makes some people uneasy about him is that he is confident, eloquent and intelligent individual . In other words he knows how to ”channel” properly and present what he reads or what he has been (or is) studying.
People sometimes feel ”threatened” by people like Alex as they command knowledge, discipline and have a determination and certain goal in front of themselves.
Besides that there is as well one ”Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer” or a hidden romantic in each of the New /Alternative Right people. Take a closer look and you will find that romantic in Alex’s writings as well, dystopia on side.
Hence only ones who are not confident in themselves in the first place, may point fingers at him.
I am not writing this to point fingers at anyone nor I am fan or admirer of Mr. Kurtagic, I don’t even agree with all of his writings – it is rather just an experience and observation.
This is what I have found most peculiar (at the end of the article) :
”Are we ready to assume a role of leadership, seize our destiny, do what it takes ….?”
I think one point is to point out to those who are “doomers” that doom is not a solution if you’re not prepared for it in advance.
For example, if you’re a doomer you may not see any point in starting a pro-white political party. However if a pro-white political party was the basis of a post-doom cadre then there would be a point. Especially so if an explicit post-doom organisation couldn’t gain recruits as easily as a political party could.
For Angel: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/11/08/obama-food-czar-is-former-monsanto-exec-one-of-the-four-horsemen-of-the-food-apocalypse/
Virus-resistant grass? They’re called heirloom varieties. And they’re still here and available.
Mexican farmers for 9,000 years cared for and developed the original wild grains only to have Monsanto and others profit from them with the creation of silly jokes like Supersweet corn. Maybe the descendants of these farmers should demand compensation for their ancestors’ efforts. They’d be prosperous and wouldn’t have to run over here.
James Howard Kunstler, who is Jewish, has written similar fairy tales of refugee suburbanite Zoglings leaving their Dilbert Cubes and conquering rural neo-nazis in his tales of After The Peak Oil Crash: “World Made By Hand” et al.
All successful writers of commercial fiction aim at creating heroes their paying readers will be flattered imagining themselves as being.
“The Left remains mainstream because it speaks of change and thus instils and sense of hope; our side remains marginal because it speaks of decline and thus instils a sense of despair.”
There are not many ways to “sugar coat” the reality of our (White people’s) situation. I suspect we all know what needs to be done, but none of it is really very “hope” inspiring for the general population.
So with that said, I’d love to see someone formulate a message that would allow “our side” to become less marginal. Somehow I suspect the real issue is not with the delivery of said message (as you may be suggesting) but the general brain-washing of people that makes them *resistant* to the message in the first place.
How else can you explain many white people’s tendancies to extol the virtues of policies that ultimately results in their own decline and misfortune?
I agree, mostly, with Heliand. Alex Kurtagic is deliberate, demanding and out-right with a ‘not easy to swallow’ intellect that often brings the ‘bad-news’ which makes you want to itch, as though he submerges himself with the malignancy of our future on a more than regular basis for the one reason which is to ask us, what are we going to do about it? This can be difficult for the lesser imaginative to delve into. And, what many do not realise is that Alex Kurtagic has helped build an entire sub-culture, which partly resides itself within the musical-expressionism of apocalyptic-affairs, as well as the Volkisch themes and symptoms of modernity. If anyone has a head for apocalyptic picture-painting, with any detail and intricacy, its this man. Why do I respect him? Because he is one of the very few Artists of the musical Sub-Genre of Black Metal, who has linked this fierce expression, with the Philosophical, Political, Racial and Religious Academic discourses of recent years, and, to any success, explained the Psychology behind the pre-dominantly white sub-culture. Again, this no doubt remains a difficulty to swallow, for some, perhaps purely as a matter of taste. But for those of us who weild the pen and the sword, I regard this as a great success. There is something very good about imposing the intellectual upon very angry, destructive, yet intelligent young white people. Something very good indeed. As for taste, each to their own.- C.G Hicks
@ Heliand + Hicks
Whatever!
The same author of the reviewed book wrote the Tripods trilogy. These books are a great read for pre-teen boys, and say much more, of course, then the surface sci-fi tale leads one to believe. An English boy, a German boy, and a French boy join the resistance in battling the “capped” of Europe, and those aliens who’ve done the capping.
Of course, this is for those two of you TOO readers who actually have kids.