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Western Culture

How Did It Come to This?

September 26, 2024/8 Comments/in Featured Articles, Western Culture/by Povl H. Riis-Knudsen
Reposted from:

Danmarks Frihedsraad

The last white people

This article was originally published in Danish on December 30, 2017.


Povl H. Riis-Knudsen

Just 50 short years ago, you would have been considered delusional if you had told anyone what Denmark would look like in the year 2024. In your wildest nightmare, you would not have been able to imagine a multicultural Denmark with representatives of all the world’s exotic peoples walking freely in the streets, a country where Danish schoolchildren are in the minority in their school classes, where an ever-increasing part of the state budget is spent directly or indirectly on foreigners while our infrastructure is in decay, our hospitals have to save on both treatment and patient care, and our elderly are left to lie in their own filth. And no one seems to protest vociferously. The few who do are quickly shamed by the united media mafia, and the particularly stubborn dissidents are hunted down by the system’s storm troopers from Redox, Demos1 and whatever else these criminal organizations are called. But this is really unnecessary, because such difficult individual who persist in demanding free speech are quickly excluded from the labor market and the community of the saved, and their voices are not heard. No wonder, so few dare to speak out, and when some few do, they do so with so much flour in their mouths that they are shrouded in a dust cloud of nonsense and contradictions.

How has it come to this? How has a healthy and thriving society on the rise been turned around in such a short time so that it is now headed towards not only cultural, but biological extinction at the speed of light?

Well, you do it like this:

First you destroy the family, and you do this by destroying the woman, because she is responsible for the family and the next generation2. She is made to believe that she cannot “realize” herself as a mother, even though the maternal role is her natural biological role. In media and movies, the housewife is portrayed as stupid3, naïve, and bland, and the job market courts her so that she can get out and “realize herself” at an assembly line or a cash register for a few pennies. The children, who used to roam freely and play naturally with the neighbors’ children, are now caged in kindergartens where they are looked after by young girls and boys who know nothing about children, and the culture that has been passed on from generation to generation through the mother for millennia is suddenly no longer passed on. The kindergarten staff are just looking after the children, that’s all there is time for. But let us face it: a random assortment of teachers and helpers with no real education wouldn’t be able to do this important job – even if they had time. The children have become the property of the state, just as they are in other totalitarian regimes. The resources that strong and well-educated parents previously passed on to their children are now lost to society. Everyone must be equal (i.e. disadvantaged), and as the labor market in the 1970s succeeded in attracting foreigners whose children also go to kindergarten, there can be no question of transmitting any culture at all, because now there are suddenly several cultures, and emphasizing the country’s own culture is considered discrimination. Gradually, the staff also become multicultural. Danish culture disappears from kindergarten and later from schools and universities.

Parents, schools and institutions are forbidden by law to educate children. Neither teachers nor parents are now allowed to put power behind their words, and both families and schools are transformed into discussion clubs where the 6-year-old’s words carry as much weight as those of parents and schoolteachers. All discipline disappears and with it the basis for concentration and “readiness to learn”. Children, who used to be a blessing, are now, in far too many cases, ill-mannered, impudent egotists who spread fear and terror wherever they appear in a crowd.

Women are then fed birth control pills so that they have fewer children – never mind the side effects – and if they do get pregnant, they are allowed to kill their child before it is born, even encouraged to do so – it is called “an adult decision”. A woman is the sole master of her own body, of course. However, she probably should have considered the possibility that she might get pregnant, before it happened, because now it is no longer her body. It is a small independent being that is now being killed. Abortion is genocide and the doctors who perform it are murderers. The women are helpless victims. And the father is left out of the equation. It seems like such an easy solution, but they often suffer the physical and psychological consequences for the rest of their lives. This ensures a sharp drop in the number of children and thus, in the long term, in the population. Where there used to be numerous flocks of 4 and 6 lovely children, it’s today considered to be a flock if you have 2, and many have none at all.

As women no longer have the time to cook from scratch, we are seeing more and more industrially processed food, while agriculture, which used to employ half the population, is turning into industrial companies owned by corporations. The farmer becomes a food producer. People are gradually losing all connection to the land, and the connection to nature that was once taken for granted disappears. The land, once sacred, is reduced to a means of production. Most farmers leave the profession and become industrial workers. Often they move to the cities. In the pursuit of profit, endless amounts of pesticides are poured over our food. Disease and increased infertility are the results. This is deliberate – it lowers the numerical strength of the people.

The rise of women in the labor market puts family life under pressure. The number of broken families is increasing. The moral stigma of extramarital affairs is being condemned and is disappearing. At the same time, it becomes economically feasible to break up families, which was previously more difficult. Children are now growing up outside the safe confines of a strong coherent family. They are no longer automatically part of a community because the family itself is no longer a small community, only perhaps a shared address. The adults put their selfishness above the children, who are just left to the “care” of the state. The family members live their own lives without having anything really important in common.

Not only the family, but also all other natural human communities are under attack. Singing is an essential factor when it comes to strengthening a community. We know this from the community singing during the German occupation. People gathered in public squares to sing – a kind of protest, for sure, but a positive protest – a protest in the form of a cultural expression of the people’s hopes and wishes, based on the love of their country! Today, there is no community singing, even though the situation today is a lot worse than the situation during the occupation. However, hardly anybody can sing anymore – that is, sing properly. This used to be taught in school – more or less. Proper singing lessons are long gone, as is the communal morning song. It ensured that people got to know the most important songs and hymns, it strengthened the cohesion of society and showed that people had something in common. That’s why it had to go. The church is the last place where you can still cultivate the community of song to some extent, but because no one has learned to sing, many people flee to the theology less and the Africanized universe of free churches with gospel singing and other things that simply do not belong to our culture and our community.

The natural historical geographical communities have also been torn apart by various municipal mergers, with many rural municipalities being incorporated into the big cities, where they quickly lost their identity, the merging of police and judicial districts, the closure of hospitals, medical practices, schools and railways, the centralization of tax services, emergency services, etc. Areas that naturally and historically belonged together were torn apart and areas that had never had anything to do with each other were forced together. As a result of this catastrophic development, many jobs disappeared. Doctors, lawyers, judges, teachers, nurses and many others left the small cities and villages, simply because their jobs disappeared. This spread like ripples in the water. There were fewer customers, businesses closed, people fled, and the remaining craft and industrial companies followed. Suburban Denmark had emerged, rural areas were depopulated, people lost their roots and their connection to nature. Cemeteries, which for centuries had been monuments to family cohesion, were transformed into grassland. There was no longer anyone to look after them and visit the graves of the deceased, and the churches’ inflated prices for the purchase and care of grave sites accelerated this sad development. Instead of the community, the individual, the rootless isolated human being, is cultivated.

The large state institutions that connected the nation as a powerful symbol were privatized and disappeared. Today DSB – the Danish State Railroads – is just one commercial company among many other railway companies. The postal service no longer exists. The state’s daily contact with every Dane in the form of the postman is gone. The impressive headquarters of the postal service and DSB, which in themselves represented the power and splendor of the state and the community, have been sold for hotel and residential purposes. The same goes for the military’s historic buildings. Earlier, there used to be magnificent barracks in almost every major city, which represented the power of the state and connected it to the people. Today there are only a few modernist facilities left – far from the rest of the population, so that the military is not part of people’s daily lives. Conscription has of course been abolished in practice. There is no longer anything to defend. The defense is just a business that seems to have no real purpose.

In school, culture and history are abolished, along with homework and the necessary memorization training. Effective teaching time is drastically reduced and, in reality, it becomes even shorter as a result of the lack of discipline. Higher education is de facto abolished, and the country’s three real universities are transformed into vocational schools. Classical education is abolished. The church is dismantled as an authority. Theologically, it is degraded to being part of the goodness industry, where everything is acceptable as long as it fits into the politically correct picture. People lose their moral compasses. Television and radio degenerate into the most banal form of so-called entertainment, and the language is degraded to the point where you can’t express deeper thoughts. The “heroes” of the new age are football players and pop stars, not Absalon, Niels Ebbesen or Voldemar the Great, who are completely unknown. A hero is someone who puts his life on the line for the sake of others, for the sake of the people – not a bunch of fools who, for sky-high wages, produce bland or insipid entertainment.

History is “deconstructed”, and “the people” is abolished as a concept. Everything that previous generations have revered and been proud of is ridiculed and “revealed” as “myths”. The people becomes a population, a seemingly random collection of individuals with no common religion, identity or history and no deeper sense of belonging. The concept of race is hated, indeed, races are said not to exist, even though every farmer, rabbit breeder or bantam keeper knows better. It is no longer allowed to see the difference between a Negro and a European – indeed, you can no longer even say ‘Negro’. “The only difference is the skin color,” they claim, even though the pharmaceutical industry, hormone and intelligence researchers, biologists, psychologists and physical anthropologists (not to be confused with today’s “anthropologists” who don’t even know what anthropology is) all know (or should know) better. However, it doesn’t pay to know. It pays to jump on the politically correct bandwagon. Universities are turning into spiritual brothels whose whores sell themselves to the highest bidder.

Instead, a wide range of unscientific and nonsensical ideas are put into circulation to keep people occupied and confused. Man-made climate change is a good example of such nonsense – and these and other crazy ideas can only be propagated in a population that is completely ignorant when it comes to history and science, a mass of people who are simply incapable of checking these distorted notions against reality and common sense. What these ideas and ideologies usually have in common is that they make people feel guilty (about the climate, slavery, imperialism, racism, refugees, eating meat, etc., etc., etc.) A population with a guilty conscience is not a proud people with a proud identity that upholds its culture and traditions. It is a people who has lost its bearings, a people who no longer has anything to commemorate, celebrate and be proud of, in short, a people marked for destruction.

Classical literature, painting and music that created a universe of beauty and harmony is abolished and replaced by talentless smears, bogus daubs and discordant noise – all preferably produced by foreigners who are presumed to be able to tell us so much more about the essential things in our life than our compatriots.

Literature revels in primitive depictions of the bottom of society. One need only think of Jakob Ejersbo’s Nordkraft, which is one of the most perverse, filthy and depressing works imaginable, yet its author was praised as “the greatest talent in Danish literature in generations”. That’s saying a lot. Obviously, forgotten are Jacob Paludan, Martin A. Hansen and a large number of other excellent writers who are no longer read. Another good example is the criminal Palestinian Yahya Hassan’s so-called “poems”, a talentless, infantile drivel from the gutter that was praised as brilliant by an almost unanimous group of critics and which sold more than 120,000 copies (where poems usually only sell a couple of hundred copies). The language was characterized as innovative, and indeed it is: a catalogue of oaths, insults, obscenities and other primitivities, the likes of which you have to look hard to find – thank goodness. Its popularity was largely due to the fact that, on the surface, the content seemed critical of immigrant communities. Bourgeois Denmark wanted to read it, even if they had to swim around in Hassan’s excrements along the way. Needless to say, Hassan was showered with important awards that have made him a wealthy man. He was laughing all the way to the bank, apparently having a great time in the environment he pretended to distance himself from. An overdose finally put an end to him.

When it comes to music, it doesn’t look any better. Who doesn’t remember Niels Viggo Benzon’s “piano concerto” that ended with the “artist” sawing the legs off a Steinway grand piano?

The different art forms have the task of uniting people around a common culture, each art form in its own way. Art should be a mirror of the people’s experiences and reflect its experiences reality – and its dreams and values. It can debate problems and important issues, but the result must be, in modern terms, cultural added value. In short, you need to gain a better understanding of the problems being raised. You need to get closer to a solution. Moral issues must be illuminated and clarified. Characters and issues must be relevant and credible. Art should not be glossy, but neither should it offend, it should be edifying in the broadest sense of the word. In this context, art should always be aware of its social and moral responsibilities. “Art” that sees its task as destroying the values that form the basis of national and popular unity dissolves the community and thus the precondition for an orderly and organized society, which is the condition for art to exist at all. It adds no value, but plunges mankind into an unmanageable chaos that only benefits the forces that want to destroy us!

Furthermore, art as a whole must be beautiful. People thrive best in beautiful and harmonious surroundings – this makes for harmonious people. Today, this beauty is deliberately trampled underfoot. Humans are accustomed to ugliness. Even the clothes we buy are ugly – with expensive holes in highly visible places. The body is desecrated with tattoos, piercings and the like. People have been purposefully prepared for ugliness, the ugliness that has entered all levels of society with immigration. An unaesthetic element has entered the streets, an element that does not fit into our world. Everywhere, ugliness is the great common denominator, and ugliness leads to physical and mental imbalance – to the loss of civilization as we understand it.

At the same time, the business community is crying out for foreign labor, even though we have over 100,000 unemployed people in Denmark. What the business community means is cheap labor. Moreover, this is a means of mixing populations, eroding borders and creating a large homogeneous global market. It will increase profits! And if we all just speak English, it will save a lot of money and effort. We must never forget that there is a political driving force behind business organizations and that business has always sided with profit at the expense of people’s unity.

All these things are the basic prerequisites for a healthy society to degenerate and head towards destruction.

However, all this is not just happening; it is being created to destroy Europe and the people who come from there. Behind it is a small, but highly influential, ethnocentric minority that has set itself the goal of eliminating the majority in order to maneuver more easily in a world that exclusively consist of minorities. Among the authors of all the evils listed above, not least the so-called student revolt of 1968,4 which greatly accelerated the development, or rather dismantling of society that we have witnessed, this minority is represented in large numbers, just as it has a decisive influence on the media world that peddles this madness.

Despite this, the right wing loves this minority and does not tolerate criticism of it. People who, like the Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlquist, have seen the connection between this minority and the dismantling of the homogeneous European nation-states are excluded by nationalist circles who suddenly fear being labeled anti-Semitic. But it is necessary to address this problem, to articulate it, as it is called today. How can it be that the overwhelming majority of this minority vigorously promotes immigration to Europe and its successor states, but does not make the same demands of Israel, which must remain a homogeneous Jewish community? As long as European nationalists refuse to open their eyes and analyze the situation as it is, but continues to talk about Muslims, burkas and all the other symptoms of impending doom, it will remain insignificant and unable to make a difference. The salvation of Denmark and the entire Western culture requires the courage of truth, however unpleasant that truth may seem! It is time to stop dealing only with the symptoms. You have to start calling a spade a spade and a shovel a shovel!

It is not the Palestinians who are destroying us!

Povl H. Riis-Knudsen

Translated by means of AI


  1. Redox and Demos are two notorious Anti-Fascist organizations that gather information and plan attacks on right-wingers. ↩︎
  2. This realization is not new. You find it in the Laws of  Manus, a some 2000-year-old Sanskrit collection of fundamentals for human life, which – by the way – has also been claimed to be one of the foundations of the Quran.   ↩︎
  3. See, for example, the extremely popular Dirch Passer movie “Dust on the Brain” from 1961!! ↩︎
  4. Pat Thomas: Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary. Fantagraphics Books; First Edition. August 29, 2017.
    ↩︎
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png 0 0 Povl H. Riis-Knudsen https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png Povl H. Riis-Knudsen2024-09-26 08:10:572024-09-26 08:11:29How Did It Come to This?

Saccharine Sentiment and Slitting Throats: How Feelism Triumphs Over Realism in Leftist Propaganda

August 11, 2024/3 Comments/in Featured Articles, Western Culture/by Tobias Langdon

The central strategy of leftism is very simple and very effective. It runs like this: “Heads we win, tails you lose.” In pursuit and preservation of power, leftists will distort, mutilate and censor reality ad libitum. Or they will simply lie. When the Black criminal George Floyd caused his own death in 2020, the left responded with deadly riots and lying rhetoric about the “murderous racism” of the police. When three little White girls were slaughtered by an imported Black savage in 2024, the leftist politician Humza Yousaf, former First Minister of Scotland, demanded something entirely different:

Our only response to the evil we witnessed in Southport yesterday should be an outpouring of grief for the children and adults killed in such a senseless attack.

If you use such a horrific tragedy to fuel bigotry, then you are the worst of humanity. (Tweet by Humza Yousaf, 30th July 2024)

Yousaf demands that Whites “thinka da paw ickle kiddies” – and do nothing more than that. Leftists like him want grief to be the “only response” because grief is useless. It will not solve the very serious problem of non-White violence against Whites. Leftists don’t simply refuse to care about that problem: they refuse to admit that it exists. It’s real, after all, and leftists don’t believe in realism. Instead, they believe in feelism, in the exploitation of emotion to promote or protect leftist lies. When Number 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the British prime minister, was bathed in pink light “to remember the Southport victims,” the Labour government was using feelism to protect leftist lies. When the Guardian published a cartoon of an entirely imaginary little girl, it was using feelism to promote leftist lies. Here is the cartoon in question:

Saccharine cartoon and soyboy cartoonist: Ben Jennings demands sympathy for an imaginary little brown girl

As Tom Sunić pointed out in a comment at the Occidental Observer: “Excessive sentimentality and hypermoralism are trademarks of the Liberal System.” The cartoonist Ben Jennings was dishonestly exploiting the innocence and helplessness of little girls (note also the slender, unthreatening neck of the caring non-White father). His cartoon says: “Finka da paw ickle kiddies!” But unlike Humza Yousaf, Jennings wants a lot more than that. He’s not just being sentimental, he’s also justifying the harsh repression of the White working-class whom he sneers at the cartoon. It was his leftist response to the White riots of 2024 and to a violent attack on a hotel housing so-called “asylum seekers” in the Yorkshire town of Rotherham. White girls and women have been raped, prostituted, tortured, and murdered by non-White Pakistani Muslims in Rotherham for decades. Jennings has never drawn any cartoons about the rape-jihad in Rotherham or about the murder of three little White girls in Southport. After all, the rapes and murders are real.

Realism vs feelism: the thuggish Trayvon Martin near the time of his death and the much younger Trayvon Martin used in leftist propaganda (images from the Occidental Observer and CNN)

Instead, he has drawn a cartoon about an entirely imaginary little girl. The hotel in Rotherham was housing adult male non-Whites. There were no little girls on the premises. If there had been, they would have been at serious risk of molestation and rape by the non-White men. After all, those men come from the most misogynist and rape-friendly countries on earth. If you want to learn more about the rape-culture and misogyny that flourish in the Third World, the Guardian itself is an excellent source. On the day after the newspaper published that cartoon about an imaginary non-White girl being menaced by White men, it published this story about real non-White women being brutally harmed by non-White men:

She wanted a divorce so her father hacked her legs with an axe: how Pakistan fails women

Sobia Batool Shah is being protected in hospital after a mob of male relatives attacked her in a harrowing case that highlights Pakistan’s epidemic of gender-based violence

The household was fast asleep when the six men broke in. They sought out Sobia Batool Shah, 22, and one of them attacked her with a hatchet, chopping at her limbs in an effort to sever her legs. “He was relentless and must have hit me at least 15 times,” she says. … Shah was attacked by men from her own family – including her father, Syed Mustafa Shah, her uncle and cousins – who broke into the house, in Naushahro Feroze, in Pakistan’s Sindh province, as “punishment” for refusing to withdraw her application to divorce her husband. …

“It’s all about power control,” says Dr Summaiya Syed Tariq, chief police surgeon in Sindh’s capital, Karachi. Syed Tariq, who also heads the Sindh police medico-legal department, has seen hundreds of women physically and mentally abused, raped, burned and murdered over the last 26 years. “We are nurturing abusers who are worse than animals,” she says.

On an average day, the department receives reports of about six cases of sexual violence and 10 to 15 cases of domestic violence across the medico-legal centres at three public hospitals in Karachi. “In the case of sexual violence against minors, my assessment is that for every three cases that come to us, seven more go unreported. And I am not counting the dead bodies that we receive,” Syed Tariq adds.

Gender inequality is a global problem, but Pakistan’s indicators reflect especially alarming rates of disparities and violence faced by women. According to this year’s World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report, Pakistan is ranked second from bottom out of 146 countries, behind only Sudan. It ranked 164 out of 193 countries on the 2023-24 UN gender inequality index. (“She wanted a divorce so her father hacked her legs with an axe: how Pakistan fails women,” The Guardian, 6th August 2024)

To repeat: “Pakistan is ranked second from bottom out of 146 countries, behind only Sudan.” Guess what? The Guardian had reported on Sudan a few days before. The headline ran like this: “Girls as young as nine gang-raped by paramilitaries in Sudan.” The following report said that “Some of the attacks … were so brutal that women and girls died ‘due to the violence associated with the act of rape’.” Both Pakistan and Sudan are non-White and Muslim. But what would happen if you told a Guardian-reader that the Guardian’s own reporting proves that immigration from Pakistan and Sudan will be very bad for White women in Britain? You will of course be denounced as a disgusting racist and Islamophobe.

“I’m so glad you’re safe here” – Chuck the Cuck schmoozes Sudanese Blacks on Holocaust Memorial Day (image from HMD Memorial Trust)

In other words, you’ll be denounced as a realist, a hate-filled bigot who believes in basing his ideas on objective reality rather than ego-feeding emotion. Leftists believe in feelism, not realism. King Charles III, or Chuck the Cuck as I prefer to call him, is one of those leftists who prefer feelism to realism. He places feeding his own narcissism far above the welfare of his White subjects. Indeed, he doesn’t care in the slightest about the welfare of his White subjects. In March 2023, the BBC reported how Chuck the Cuck had met “former refugees from [the] Sudanese community” and told them “It’s been such a pleasure to meet you all — I’m so glad you’re safe here.” Chuck the Cuck can be “glad” about Blacks invading Britain because he doesn’t have to pay the costs of their presence. But a White woman had to pay those costs in 2019. She nearly died after her skull was shattered during a brutal rape by a Sudanese enricher called Zakarya Etarghi.

Raping White women delighted him

Among the many reasons that Blacks should not be residing in White nations is the stark fact that Black men commit sexual crimes at vastly disproportionate rates. Not only that: they specifically target White women, as the American Black Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) boasted way back in 1968:

Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women – and this point, I believe was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge. From the site of the act of rape, consternation spreads outwardly in concentric circles. I wanted to send waves of of consternation throughout the white race. (Quote from Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, 1968)

Black men have a genuine “rape culture” directed at White women. But leftists in 1960s America did not care about the rape and murder of White women by Black men. That would have been realism about Blacks and leftists were concerned only with feelism about Blacks. Here’s a definitive example of that leftist feelism in one of the iconic images of the Civil Rights era:

Norman Rockwell slathers schmalz in The Problem We All Live With (1964)

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) was both an excellent artist and a lying leftist. Like Ben Jennings’ cartoon, his painting dishonestly exploits the innocence and helplessness of little girls. It says: “Finka da paw ickle kiddies!” To be fair, Rockwell’s painting, unlike Jennings’ cartoon, was at least based on a real little girl, the now-sanctified Ruby Bridges (born 1954). But Bridges was not at all representative of Blacks and the threat they posed to Whites. That’s precisely why Rockwell chose her, of course. She’s a helpless little girl who has to be protected by large law-enforcement officers from evil White racists. She just wants to learn, as you can see from the ruler, pencils, and books she’s carrying. But that portrayal of Blacks as simultaneously helpless and studious is a lie. It’s feelism, not realism. In reality, Blacks are disproportionately violent and stupid. The entry of Blacks into White schools was a disaster for Whites and did nothing to improve academic achievement among Blacks.

And although Rockwell’s painting was based on feelism, it does contain one element of realism. The large US marshalls reflect the reality of state force. Whites did not want their schools to be ruined by Blacks. But the state forced desegregation on them even as lying leftists like Norman Rockwell slathered schmalz over the process. Nor did Whites want their neighborhoods to be ruined by Blacks. Again, the state forced desegregation on them. And lying leftists like Norman Rockwell again slathered schmalz. Here’s another of Rockwell’s dishonest pro-Black paintings:

 

Norman Rockwell slathers more schmalz in New Kids in the Neighborhood (1967)

Again Rockwell uses a helpless little girl to propagandize for Blacks. Look at her in her pink dress and pink ribbons, with her adorable little pig-tail. She’s no possible threat. And see the white cat she’s affectionately holding. She loves animals just like the White children facing her with their young black dog. The whiteness of the cat and blackness of dog are symbolic, of course: the Black girl already loves something white even as the White children already love something black. This time there’s a Black boy in the painting too, but he’s slender-necked and goofy-looking. He’s no threat either. He’s carrying a baseball glove, so he loves baseball just like the White boy facing him in a baseball uniform. The Black and White children are the same under the skin, united by their love of pets and baseball. Harmony will surely reign after the moment of mutual uncertainty that Rockwell so charmingly captures.

That’s what the highly dishonest painting says. In reality, harmony didn’t reign after Blacks moved into White neighborhoods. Instead, violent crime reigned. So did noise, vandalism, and street-strewn garbage. In reality, the goofy-looking Black boy in the painting would have been beating up the White boys and, within a year or two, raping the White girl. And the little Black girl would have been torturing the white cat, not treating it with affection. Abuse of animals is characteristic of Blacks, not love of animals. But that’s realism about Blacks and leftists believe in feelism about Blacks. However, there are two sides to leftist feelism. Recall Tom Sunić’s comment about how “Excessive sentimentality and hypermoralism are trademarks of the Liberal System.” He went on to point out that the sentimentality applied only to approved groups, while the moralism justified any level of violence against unapproved groups: the Royal Air Force and United States Air Force “firebombed German cities during WWII – considered lairs of nonhumans.”

You can see those two aspects of leftism in the Guardian journalist Marina Hyde. She no doubt nodded with moist-eyed approval over Ben Jennings’ cartoon about the imaginary little brown girl. But a few years before she had sniggered and joked about the White nationalist Eugene Terreblanche being hacked to death by Blacks in South Africa. Countless other Guardianistas will have nodded with moist-eyed approval over the cartoon. And some of them were in the crowd that cheered, clapped, and laughed when the non-White Labour councillor Ricky Jones recommended a robust response to the “the disgusting Nazi fascists” who don’t like little White girls being slaughtered by Black savages. Jones said: “We need to cut all their froats [throats] and get rid of ’em all.” He then paused to let the cheers and laughter die away before leading the crowd in a chant of “Free, free Palestine!” Here’s a still from a video of the incident:

Leftists cheer and laugh as a non-White Labour councillor recommends throat-cutting for the White working-class

Note the two White woman grinning with approval as they stand next to the aspiring throat-cutter. The woman in glasses is wearing a tabard for Amnesty International, a self-proclaimed humanitarian organization that is resolutely opposed to violence. Out of sight she’s holding another of the SWP placards that say “SMASH FASCISM & RACISM By any means necessary.” The SWP is the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist cult that hates White workers even more than the so-called Labour party does. When a senior male apparatchik in the SWP was accused of rape in 2010, the SWP responded not by reporting the matter to the police but by smearing the female accuser and clearing the male accused in a kangaroo court.

As ever, you can see that leftists are interested in only two things: pursuing power and feeding their narcissism. They are not interested in helping the groups they claim to care about. And they are certainly not interested in helping the White working-class. In this article I’ve discussed a leftist drawing a saccharine cartoon about a non-existent little brown girl menaced by the White working-class. And I’ve discussed another leftist recommending that his comrades “cut the throats” of the White working-class. Those are the two complementary sides of one evil ideology: “Excessive sentimentality and hypermoralism are trademarks of the Liberal System.”

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png 0 0 Tobias Langdon https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png Tobias Langdon2024-08-11 07:08:352024-08-11 07:08:35Saccharine Sentiment and Slitting Throats: How Feelism Triumphs Over Realism in Leftist Propaganda

The Move to Seek Fellowship and Common Values on the Right

July 18, 2024/24 Comments/in Featured Articles, Western Civilization, Western Culture/by Kevin MacDonald

As someone who has moved twice to seek fellowship and a sense of safety in a country hostile to people on the right, I can totally relate to the people described in the article below, except that the people discussed here are serious Christians—true believers. They’re not just “cultural Christians” like me —i.e., someone who admires some aspects and influence of the Church in European history, such as the strong Christian identities of those who fought in the Spanish Reconquista, but who deplores the recent descent of  so much of mainstream Christianity into wokeness and subservience to the dominant, essentially anti-Christian culture. Many of these people doubtless imagine a Western European Reconquista that would return Christianity (and perhaps implicitly at least, Whiteness) to the center of Western culture.

But, despite these differences, we have pretty much everything else in common, including place of residence and a desire to fit into a community with shared values. The main places mentioned here are Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a small-town near Nashville, and suburban Dallas-Fort Worth. These locales are all in red states, at least for now, until the immigration deluge has its intended consequence of turning the country into a White minority nation saturated with people who identify as LGBTUQIA+ and the accompanying propaganda that is attempting to maximize the number of people with these identities. This propaganda is being blared throughout the educational system and all the major media. It’s striking that in the article, a wife exchanges teacups with her husband so that she has the more feminine one. These people uphold traditional notions of sex roles. They seem to understand that biologically based sex differences are real and that its adaptive (or perhaps part of God plan) to adhere to them. And notice the photo of the girl doing embroidery.

But it’s one thing to be in a conducive area, it’s still important to develop social relationships with people you can trust. In my case I am part of a small, all-male group sharing the same values and trying to develop projects that would bring more people like ourselves to our area and to similar areas throughout the country. I realize that people often can’t simply up and move, but many people can. And for long-term happiness, I highly recommend living among like-minded, culturally and ethnically homogeneous people is essential. Robert Putnam, whose research on increasing loneliness in American society and the detrimental effects of multi-culturalism on community (e.g., lack of willingness to contribute to public goods) is well known, realizes the importance of bonding with similar others although, like the mainstream liberal Jewish community he identifies with, he is entirely in favor of the multicultural experiment.

The people described here are successful economically, and they are well educated, including some refugees from the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, More importantly, they are highly fertile, with intact families with 4–8 children (likely with more being planned). They are thus part of the hypothesized demographic revolution described by Edward Dutton and J.O. Rayner-Hilles in which cultural conservatives will become dominant because of their fertility, although our hostile elites will do their best to import the multiethnic, non-White mélange that they favor to ultimately dispossess them.

These people are organizing into small groups. They are not the types to take to the streets with their guns. And I suppose they tune in to mainstream conservative media like FoxNews which will never educate them on the importance of ethnicity in human affairs, much less inform them of the reality of how a very influential Jewish elite is well on their way to shaping the country into something they loathe. An example from the article:

In Mr. Kressin’s new hometown in Idaho, the streets are clean and people leave their doors unlocked. His family lives in a house they can afford to own, with a white picket fence and room for a trampoline in the yard. In the cozy living room, an upright piano stands in the corner, and hymnals and classic novels line shelves on the wall.

“Many in our generation are very, very much longing for rootedness,” he said. “And they were raised in an era where that was really not valued very much.”

On a weekday morning this spring, he took a brisk morning stroll out his front door and up Tubbs Hill, with wildflowers sprinkled along the path and soaring views of the crystalline lake below. At his house afterward, Lauren Kressin, who was pregnant with the couple’s eighth child, served peach tea in tastefully mismatched china, quietly switching cups with him so he would have the “less feminine” one, she said with a smile.

Starting over in Idaho, Mr. Kressin said later, was part of a project so long term that he does not expect to see its conclusion. “The old landed aristocracy in England would plant oak trees that would only really mature in 400 years,” he said. “Who knows what the future holds, but if you don’t even start building a family culture, you’re doomed to fail.”

But of course, this being the New York Times, it’s mandatory to haul in an academic who is hostile to all this:

The circle’s critics say they present a cleaned-up version of some of the darkest elements of the right, including a cultural homogeneity to the point of racism and an openness to using violence to achieve political ends.

“It’s this idea of organizing discontent at the local level and building a network that over the next decade or three decades or even half-century would just keep moving the Republican Party further and further rightward, and mobilizing voters in discontented parts of the country, a lot of them men,” said Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, who has written critically of the crowd. “It’s a highbrow version of the militia movement.”

The Smug, Self-Righteous Damon Linker

Yes, nothing worse than being among people like yourself. People who share your culture and your values, and yes (God forbid!), even your ethnic background (unmentioned here of course) — a sure sign of racism to your garden-variety journalist-academic like Linker.

***

The article is well worth reading: New York Times: “Why a New Conservative Brain Trust Is Resettling Across America.”

The Claremont Institute has been located in Southern California since its founding in the late 1970s. From its perch in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, it has become a leading intellectual center of the pro-Trump right.

Without fanfare, however, some of Claremont’s key figures have been leaving California to find ideologically friendlier climes. Ryan P. Williams, the think tank’s president, moved to a suburb in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in early April.

His friend and Claremont colleague Michael Anton — a California native who played a major role in 2016 to convince conservative intellectuals to vote for Mr. Trump — moved to the Dallas area two years ago. The institute’s vice president for operations and administration has moved there, too. Others are following. Mr. Williams opened a small office in another Dallas-Fort Worth suburb in May, and said he expects to shrink Claremont’s California headquarters.

“A lot of us share a sense that Christendom is unraveling,” said Skyler Kressin, 38, who is friendly with the Claremont leaders and shares many of their concerns. He left Southern California to move to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 2020. “We need to be engaged, we need to be building.”

A bearded man looking to the left, partly in sunlight, partly in shadow, in front of a modernistic fountain.
“There’s an interesting shift going on to Texas. I think there’s a renewed sense of seeking community and shared values and culture amongst right-wing folks.” said Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute. Credit…Shelby Tauber for The New York Times

As Mr. Trump barrels through his third presidential campaign, his supporters buoyed by last week’s debate, many of the young activists and thinkers who have risen under his influence see themselves as part of a project that goes far beyond electoral politics. Rather, it is a movement to reclaim the values of Western civilization as they see it. Their ambitions paint a picture of the country they want should Mr. Trump return to the White House — one driven by their version of Christian values, with larger families and fewer immigrants. They foresee an aesthetic landscape to match, with more classical architecture and a revived conservative art movement and men wearing traditional suits.

Their vision includes stronger local leadership and a withered national “administrative state,” prompting them to celebrate last week when the Supreme Court effectively ended the “Chevron deference,” which could lead to the weakening of thousands of federal rules on the environment, worker protection and beyond.

Fed up by what they see as an increasingly hostile and disordered secular culture, many are moving to what they view as more welcoming states and regions, battling for American society from conservative “fortresses.”

Some see themselves as participants in and advocates for a “great sort,” a societal reordering in which conservatives and liberals naturally divide into more homogenous communities and areas. (And some, including Mr. Kressin, are simultaneously chasing the cheaper costs of living and safer neighborhoods that fuel many ordinary moves.

Former President Donald Trump puts a medal around the neck of Ryan Williams of the Claremont Institute.
Ryan Williams is presented the National Humanities Medal by President Donald Trump on behalf of The Claremont Institute during a ceremony at the White House in November 2019.Credit…Samuel Corum for The New York Times

The year Mr. Kressin moved to Idaho, he and Mr. Williams were part of an informal conversation at Claremont about the need for new institutions in what some hope will be a rejuvenated American society. The idea was a “fraternal community,” as one leader put it, that prioritized in-person meetings. The result was the all-male Society for American Civic Renewal, an invitation-only social organization reserved for Christians. The group has about 10 lodges in various states of development so far, with membership ranging between seven and several dozen people.

The group’s goals, according to leaders, include identifying “local elites” across the country and cultivating “potential appointees and hires for an aligned future regime” — by which they mean a second Trump presidency, but also a future they describe in sweeping and sometimes apocalyptic terms. Some warn of a coming societal breakdown that will require armed, right-minded citizens to restore order.

The group’s ties to Claremont gives it access to influence in a future Trump administration: Mr. Anton served on Mr. Trump’s National Security Council, and a Claremont board member, John Eastman, advised Mr. Trump’s 2020 election campaign. He faces criminal charges in Arizona and Georgia over schemes to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost that race.

Their rhetoric can sound expansive to the point of opacity. “As the great men of the West bequeathed their deeds to us, so must we leave a legacy for our children,” the group’s website proclaims. “The works raised by our hands to this end will last long after we are buried.”

Their output, so far, looks more modest. Mr. Kressin’s home chapter has hosted an expert in menswear, who exhorted members to dress in a “classical American style,” and a screening and discussion of the 2003 naval adventure film “Master and Commander.” The men socialize outside of meetings and pass each other business.

Two adults and six children out for a walk, They are dressed neatly in attire appropriate for school or work.
Skyler Kressin and his family moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, from Southern California in 2020.Credit…Margaret Albaugh for The New York Times

The circle’s critics say they present a cleaned-up version of some of the darkest elements of the right, including a cultural homogeneity to the point of racism and an openness to using violence to achieve political ends.

“It’s this idea of organizing discontent at the local level and building a network that over the next decade or three decades or even half-century would just keep moving the Republican Party further and further rightward, and mobilizing voters in discontented parts of the country, a lot of them men,” said Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, who has written critically of the crowd. “It’s a highbrow version of the militia movement.”

In its first two years, leaders said, SACR received significant funding from Charles Haywood, a former business owner in Indiana. Mr. Haywood seems to delight in being an online provocateur. He has called the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, an “electoral justice protest” and praised the racist 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints.”

Posting on the platform X last month, he wrote that foreign-born citizens should be deported for offenses including “working for Left causes.” Other leaders attribute the apocalyptic tone of the group’s founding documents to Mr. Haywood, who declined to comment.

A young girl, photographed from the neck down, in conservative attire, sewing next to a table full of books.
An interior scene in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Many of the young conservatives who have risen under Mr. Trump’s influence see themselves as part of a movement to reclaim the values of Western civilization as they see it. Credit…Margaret Albaugh for The New York Times

Members of the society are young, mostly white-collar (and mostly white), and often wealthy. Some have left elite institutions to start their own firms and invest in conservative-leaning ventures.

Josh Abbotoy, the executive director of American Reformer, a Dallas-based journal that serves as an informal in-house publication for the movement, is moving to a small town outside Nashville this week with his wife and four children. Through his new professional network, he is raising funds to develop a corridor of conservative havens between Middle Tennessee and Western Kentucky, where he has also purchased hundreds of acres of property. He expects about 50 families to move to the Tennessee town — which he declined to identify — in the next year, including people who work from home for tech companies and other corporations.

Mr. Abbotoy is betting big on the revitalization of the rural South more broadly, as white-collar flexibility meets conservative disillusionment with liberal institutions and cities. He sees the Tennessee project as a “playbook” for future developments in which neighbors share conservative social values and enjoy, he suggested, a kind of ambient Christian culture.

“I personally would happily pay high H.O.A. fees to be in a neighborhood where I have to drive by an architecturally significant church every day, and I can hear church bells,” he said.

The Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationally, was a watershed moment for Mr. Abbotoy and other conservatives’ understanding of how quickly the ground could shift under their feet. It is a decision that signaled to them the onset of an era that the conservative Christian writer Aaron Renn — who has spoken at the fraternal society’s events — calls “negative world,” an influential concept that describes a culture in which “being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of ­society.”

Image

A man in a gray sweater looks out the window from a sparsely furnished office.
Josh Abbotoy, director of the American Reformer, is counting on the revitalization of the rural South as white-collar flexibility meets conservative disillusionment with liberal institutions and cities. Credit…Shelby Tauber for The New York Times

Mr. Abbotoy was raised in an evangelical culture that encouraged conservative Christians to go out into “the world” and influence secular institutions, including corporations and universities. But that approach, which defined the last several generations of mainstream evangelicalism, feels increasingly untenable to people in his circle.

Mr. Abbotoy, who graduated from Harvard Law School, left a job with a major infrastructure company in 2021 and came to work for Nate Fischer, a Dallas venture capitalist and prolific networker whose firm invests in conservative projects and opposes “DEI/ESG and the bureaucratization of American business culture.” Mr. Fischer is the president of SACR’s Dallas chapter.

Andrew Beck, a brand consultant for conservative politicians and entities including SACR and Claremont, moved with his wife and their now six children, along with his parents and five of his siblings and their families, from Staten Island to suburbs north of Dallas in 2020. Almost 30 members of the family now live in the same area, just as they did in New York.

“Something is shifting that’s tectonic,” said Mr. Beck, who wrote a widely shared essay on “re-Christianizing America” for Claremont’s online magazine the American Mind. “It’s not so much about staking out some stronghold where you can live in a cocoon, it’s to be a part of a place you can truly consider to be home.”

Members must be male, belong to a “Trinitarian Christian” church, a broad category that includes Catholics and Protestants, but not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Members must also describe themselves as “unhyphenated Americans,” a reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s speech urging the full assimilation of immigrants.

A stack of copies of the publication, the Claremont Review of Books.
An issue of the Claremont Review of Books from winter 2016-2017.Credit…Brad Torchia for The New York Times

The group’s interdenominational membership reflects the fact that in the Trump era, conservative Christianity is increasingly becoming a cultural and political identity, with theological differences falling to the wayside and Christianity serving as a kind of generic expression of rebellion against modernity. A significant minority of members are Catholic, including Mr. Kressin. The group also includes Presbyterians, Baptists and charismatics.

In Mr. Kressin’s new hometown in Idaho, the streets are clean and people leave their doors unlocked. His family lives in a house they can afford to own, with a white picket fence and room for a trampoline in the yard. In the cozy living room, an upright piano stands in the corner, and hymnals and classic novels line shelves on the wall.

“Many in our generation are very, very much longing for rootedness,” he said. “And they were raised in an era where that was really not valued very much.”

On a weekday morning this spring, he took a brisk morning stroll out his front door and up Tubbs Hill, with wildflowers sprinkled along the path and soaring views of the crystalline lake below. At his house afterward, Lauren Kressin, who was pregnant with the couple’s eighth child, served peach tea in tastefully mismatched china, quietly switching cups with him so he would have the “less feminine” one, she said with a smile.

Starting over in Idaho, Mr. Kressin said later, was part of a project so long term that he does not expect to see its conclusion. “The old landed aristocracy in England would plant oak trees that would only really mature in 400 years,” he said. “Who knows what the future holds, but if you don’t even start building a family culture, you’re doomed to fail.”

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png 0 0 Kevin MacDonald https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png Kevin MacDonald2024-07-18 08:47:132024-07-18 08:59:05The Move to Seek Fellowship and Common Values on the Right

Bright White Light: More on White Men Achieving Most and Being Vilified Worst

June 17, 2024/1 Comment/in Featured Articles, Western Culture/by Tobias Langdon

Why are lighthouses so fascinating? In part, it’s because they’re luminal zoons in liminal zones. And why is Tom Nancollas’ Seashaken Houses: A Lighthouse History from Eddystone to Fastnet (Penguin 2019) such a good read? In part, it’s because it doesn’t use pretentious phrases like “liminal zones” and “luminal zoons.” Instead, it uses clear prose and simple illustrations to describe the huge effort and astonishing ingenuity of the White men who designed and built an essential but often overlooked part of the early modern world: the rock-based lighthouses that saved countless lives and ensured safe voyages for countless ships.

Seashaken Houses: the cover of Tom Nancollas’ unconscious celebration of White male achievement

Or they ensured safer voyages, at least. The sea has never ceased to be a dangerous place and lighthouses didn’t end the wrecks and the drownings. Indeed, the first chapter of Seashaken Houses describes how lighthouses sometimes couldn’t save their own keepers, let alone the ships and sailors they were built for. Tom Nancollas asks his readers to “imagine a time-lapse film” of a dangerous patch of sea “13 miles” off the southern coastal town of Plymouth, England. If the film reached “back three centuries” and were “rewound at speed”:

It would show four towers falling and rising upon the Eddystone reef: one disassembled, one combusting like a firework, one destroyed in a storm, their materials cycling from stone to wood, their forms regressing from engineered simplicity to experimental folly, the types of ships darting around them devolving from diesel to steam to sail, until the time-lapse halts at the first Eddystone lighthouse, a thing of outlandish fantasy. (ch. 1, p. 17)

The “outlandish fantasy” of Henry Winstanley’s Eddystone lighthouse (image from Wikipedia)

It was a fantasy that failed during “a storm of unprecedented ferocity” in November 1703. Henry Winstanley (1644–1703), the “eccentric creator” of that first lighthouse, had expressed “the hope that he might chance to be inside his Eddystone during the fiercest storm nature could muster.” As the Great Storm of 1703 began to grow, he realized his hope and sailed to the reef with workmen, seeking to reinforce his creation against the rising wind and waves. But his efforts were in vain: when the storm subsided, the lighthouse had vanished from the reef with Winstanley and his men. They had defied Mother Nature and been rewarded with death.

The pale male paradox

But in its four years of existence, the lighthouse “had become vital for Plymouth’s prosperity.” (p. 22) That’s why more ingenious and courageous White men defied Mother Nature and built lighthouses on the reef, maintaining Plymouth’s prosperity even as other White men did the same for other ports around the coast of Britain. One of them was Robert Stevenson (1772–1850), the Scottish engineering and architectural genius responsible for the lighthouse on Bell Rock off the coast of Angus. As Tom Nancollas describes, Robert was the grandfather of another White genius, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94). Not that Nancollas ever refers to race in any way in his book or celebrates the creators and keepers of Britain’s lighthouses as “white men.” He’s interested in their achievements, not their genetics or gender, and he celebrates their ingenuity and courage, not the color of their skin.

Turner’s drawing of Robert Stevenson’s Bell Rock Lighthouse (image from Wikipedia)

After all, he’s a White man like them and it’s characteristic of White men that they aren’t obsessed with themselves and their own identity. Unlike Jews or Blacks or women of all races, White men are exotropic, directed outward to the universe, not endotropic, directed inward to themselves and their own advantage. As I described in “The Pale Male Paradox: How White Men Achieve Most And Are Vilified Worst,” this explains both the mighty achievements of White men and their lowly status in the racial hierarchy of leftism. Contra the claims of leftists, White men don’t constantly seek their own advantage and empowerment, which is why they’re been so vulnerable to the culture of critique. It’s also why under-achieving Blacks have been elevated so far above them. In modern Britain, we hear very little about the ingenuity and courage of White men like Henry Winstanley and Robert Stevenson.

Turning history against Whitey

But we hear incessantly about the Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, England’s new patron saint. Lawrence was an aspiring architectural student who was stabbed to death in London in 1993. Hundreds of other young Black men have met similar or worse fates in the same city, stabbed, shot, kicked, beaten or bludgeoned to death. But those others have never become the subject of a martyr cult, because all of them were murdered by their fellow Blacks. Stephen Lawrence was highly unusual, because he was murdered by “a gang of white racists.” That’s why he can be used to promote an enormous lie: that evil and aggressive Whites are an ominous and ever-present threat to the lives and well-being of vulnerable Blacks. The truth is entirely the reverse. Despite still being a relatively small minority, Blacks kill far more Whites every year in Britain than Whites kill Blacks. Blacks also rape, wound, rob, and defraud Whites in vast disproportion to their numbers.

But leftists care about power, not about truth, which is why the martyr-cult of Stephen Lawrence was created and is now lavishly funded by the state. Modern Britain celebrates Blacks and denigrates Whites. For example, Britain’s astonishing history of maritime adventure and exploration is now turned against its native Whites, because what did Whites do with their ingenious ocean-braving ships? They committed horrible and unforgivable crimes against the noble and innocent Blacks of Africa, wrenching them from their homes and carrying them across the Atlantic at huge expense in lives and suffering to toil at voyages’ end in sugar-plantations and cotton-fields for the enrichment of Whites. That’s why Britain is so rich and Africa so poor today, as Black scholars like these are happy to explain to the Whites whose taxes fund their propaganda:

In this essential two-part lecture, Dr Kennetta Hammond Perry and Professor Kehinde Andrews will draw on historical fact to demystify [sic] the notion that the Western economy owed its bounty to scientific advancements, industry and democracy — and was instead built on violence, slavery and colonialism. (“The Guardian at 200: Windrush histories and mythologies of race in Britain,” Online workshop at The Guardian, 19th May 2021)

The anti-White hatemongers Dr Kennetta Hammond Perry and Professor Kehinde Andrews

I would suggest that Dr Kennetta Hammond Perry and Professor Kehinde Andrews are as mediocre in intellect as they are biased in racial politics. After all, they don’t appear to understand the simple difference between “demystify” and “debunk.” I doubt that they have any concern at all for “historical fact.” No, they’re not historians but hatemongers, driven by envy and resentment of White achievements. As I described in “The Pale Male Paradox,” the humble screw undoubtedly contributed (and contributes) more to the “Western economy” than what Kehinde Andrews calls “centuries of African enslavement.” The lighthouses described in Tom Nancollas’ Seashaken Houses also contributed more. But Perry and Andrews aren’t interested in screws and lighthouses, fascinating as those things are in so many ways. Perry and Andrews are Black and endotropic, directed inward to themselves and to their own advantage and self-glorification.

No wheels or sails in Africa

That’s part of why they and other Black pseudo-scholars will never consider another vast crime against the Blacks of Africa: the theft of the rich and abundant natural resources of the island of Madagascar. By all standards of geography and natural justice, Madagascar belongs to the Blacks of the south-eastern coast of Africa. After all, it lies a few hundred miles off that coast and is separated by vast stretches of ocean from all other large land-masses. But Madagascar was peopled and exploited not by Blacks but by Austronesians, a race that began its seafaring on the distant island of Taiwan, thousands of miles from Africa. You see, despite the very long coastline of Africa and its many large lakes, sub-Saharan Blacks never invented the sail or built ocean-going ships. Austronesians, in contrast, were excellent sailors and spread their genes and languages over an astonishing area, from Madagascar in the east to the Pacific islands of the west. When Europeans arrived in the Pacific, they discovered that Polynesians practised both slavery and cannibalism.

Madagascar was stolen from nearby Blacks by far-off Austronesians (image from Wikipedia)

But that isn’t held against them today, as I described in “The Island of Slave-Keeping Cannibal Saints.” Instead, Polynesians are celebrated as the noble and nature-loving indigenes who were cruelly oppressed and exploited by brutal White invaders. Once again, Britain’s astonishing history of maritime adventure and exploration is being turned against its native Whites and their diaspora. Captain James Cook (1728–79), the highly intelligent and courageous navigator who rose from humble origins to remarkable achievements, was once justly celebrated as a hero in White-majority nations like Australia and New Zealand. Now he’s unjustly reviled as a villain. Once again, we’ve got the Pale Male Paradox of White men achieving most and being vilified worst. But I think I’ve explained that paradox. White men have achieved most because they’re not obsessed with themselves and their own advantage. But it’s because they’re not obsessed with themselves that they’re vulnerable to the culture of critique that casts them not as the greatest heroes of history but as its darkest villains.

“Stone, air, water, light”

Tom Nancollas and his book Seashaken Houses are another example of the paradox at work. Nancollas is a White man writing about the vast achievements of White men, but he’s interested in the achievements, not in the Whiteness or the masculinity. He doesn’t refer to race in any way in the book and I doubt that race ever crossed his mind in any way when he was writing it. But that absence of race and self-obsession is part of what makes Seashaken Houses so interesting and so satisfying to read. This is Nancollas explaining what attracted him to his subject:

The [lighthouses] may be sophisticated, but my experience of them felt primal. Out in the starkness of the sea, the basics – stone, air, water, light, dark, life, death – were just as vividly emphasized as engineering prowess. By achieving a home, a presence, in the most hostile of environments, the rock lighthouses provide a poignant insight into what it means to build and endure – and to bring light into places where previously there was none. Entwined with the stories of the houses is the story of their purpose – how lights were established and maintained in these liquid places, then improved, made crisper, more powerful, until certain sectors of the sea were as brightly and safely lit as Grosvenor Square [in the heart of London]. (Introduction, pg. 13)

As you can see, Tom Nancollas would never indulge in pretentious prose like “luminal zoons in liminal zones.” I described lighthouses like that at the beginning of this article. But what did I mean by it? Well, a “luminal zoon” is a light-bearing creature (Greek ζῷον, zōon, “living being”). When lighthouses are operating, casting strong light through salt-laden darkness, they seem alive in an uncanny way. And they exist in liminal zones, that is, places that stand on a threshold between one realm and another. They’re built on solid rocks or reefs but are constantly menaced by the ever-shifting sea.

Black Barack Obama pays tribute to White Neil Armstrong with a photo of Barack Obama (image from Daily Mail)

That uncanny life in precarious places explains part of the appeal and fascination of lighthouses, I think. But you could also say that White men are luminal zoons, light-bearing creatures who have entered the world’s most liminal zones. Who was the first to reach the world’s highest spot? To plumb the world’s greatest depth? To reach the north and south poles? To stand on the surface of the Moon? In every case, it was a White man. But those White men did so as individuals, as exotropic explorers of the outer universe, and not one of them regarded his achievement as casting luster on the male half of the White race. After all, if they’d thought like that, they wouldn’t have achieved what they did. White men are doers of deeds, not celebrators of the self. That’s why, after achieving most, they’ve become vilified worst.

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png 0 0 Tobias Langdon https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png Tobias Langdon2024-06-17 10:25:312024-06-22 01:24:49Bright White Light: More on White Men Achieving Most and Being Vilified Worst

Destination Unknown: Can You Feel the Resistance?

June 16, 2024/1 Comment/in Featured Articles, Western Culture/by Sigurd Kristensen

His wife and family were aboard the lifeboat which held about 150 people. The majestic ocean liner which they originally sailed on was already abandoned, and there were now 30 of these lifeboats scattered on the surface of the rough Atlantic seas. From the moment the cruise was being planned on the SS West, Erik had voiced concerns about this titanic vessel of over 52,000 tons. The ship builder behind the SS West, Orange Star — the first prominent international corporation of its type, had nearly two hundred years together with influential organizations and spy networks that historically caused trouble for the honest engineers. The cruise line carrying the passengers, Clown World Cruises, was a leader in entertainment, especially for kids and young impressionable adults, but also renowned for shady collaborations with the shipbuilder.[1] Erik, a fan of ocean-cruising history and a mechanical engineer himself, had invested thousands of hours studying thick books on these problematic ship designs from the original Yellow Star Engineering of the 1800s through to its competitor Red Star before their 1905 merger.[2] His interest in ships and cruising was piqued by his years serving on the high seas in the U.S. Navy. But neither his practical or intellectual background did any good to earn his family’s respect for his drumbeat of worries and critiques, for the propaganda and promotions that came from serving Clown World were just that good!

The company’s nautical failures — even catastrophic sinkings — have always been overcome by a superior public relations team that brushed aside the blame and concealed the identity of the outside “experts” that replaced the potential for sound engineering with a pattern of corruption. And of course, Erik was well aware of the whistle-blowers, historians, authors and others whose lives would be dramatically altered for confronting the problematic evidence — Bey, Timayenis, Ford, Long, Lindbergh, Reed, Yockey, Oliver, Solzhenitsyn, MacDonald and Unz were some of the big ones Erik’s wife was tired of hearing about.[3]

The foundation of free expression for these men was always in conflict with the experts’ interests. And although Kennedy wasn’t publicly known for venting against the ship builder, historians researching his archives have certainly dug up interesting clues that made him a target too, for his WWII Navy experience certainly helped his understanding of seaworthy construction. Orwell, on the other hand, was left alone and even revered. The characters in his book would be left unchanged by the publisher, his euphemisms and symbolism for disguising his warnings unscathed, as the powers-that-be knew that creative fiction could never succeed in teaching the general masses an eternal lesson, for hardly anyone reads any more! But looking at the list of those who’ve called out this Orange Star and Clown World in one way or another — and there certainly have been scores more than mentioned here — none dared call them “supremacists” for their corruption of the shipping and cruising industry…save one…a courageous professor of history from Duke University who shall remain nameless. Once a not-uncommon figure on political TV shows with a brain functioning like a walking encyclopedia, he would be forever censored and defamed for introducing this label of power and control on the title of one of his books.[4]

Erik wished this was a bad nightmare! Even worse, as he looked over his overloaded boat (including castaways from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Central and South America that were humanely rescued by Clown World), it appeared to him as if this mass of people didn’t even recognize that the SS West was partially submerged behind them. The passengers, all of them, kept their backs to the West and gazed at the beautiful sun slowly setting, ironically, in the west…as if locked in a trance. Erik scanned his eyes towards the other lifeboats and noticed the same eerie and droning behavior everywhere, a sight that mimicked the internet meme of NPCs back in the Trump days.[5] Additionally, the announcements, the ballyhoo, and the chatter of these ill-fated travelers signaled their belief that they were simply going on a short excursion to an exotic island, and that the SS West was still intact. As strange as this certainly was, it appeared that none of these passengers would have even recognized if an elephant had joined them on their boat.[6] And when this responsible father-of-three sought the attention of his own family to explain his dissention over the double-talk, even they were now at the point of tuning him completely out, tired of hearing what they deemed “conspiracy theories.” But Erik repeats himself under stress, and there was no longer any safe harbor to turn to.

Thankfully there were no IGF fighter jets strafing their lifeboats today like Orange Star did back on June 8, 1967. That was likely supposed to be a quick and dirty erasure to set up a false flag, but to the credit of the courageous U.S. Navy servicemen, their plans went awry. What impressed Erik most on this historical tragedy is how many of his friends who’d been gifted books on the event never seemed desirous to open up and discuss the facts. Oh, they’ll talk red, white, and blue all day and claim to be “patriots,” but they tacitly have approved the silent treatment on the most important subjects of our times…loyalty, interests, and foreign entanglements. Erik presumed that these friends would be okay if their son received a Medal of Honor and the ceremony was sidelined to an old Navy hangar so as not to embarrass Orange Star. The details of this betrayal are unfathomable, but we do live, in fact, under the spell of Clown World media masters!

Today it appeared that the method of drowning would be more gradual. Each lifeboat was configured the same. Erik noticed a pattern, as engineers tend to do, and it wasn’t looking good. There were two Orange Star experts at every bow working together, but these individuals were always immediately surrounded by four large and prominent figures that instilled confidence in the safety of the boats while concealing the activities of the two Orange Star advisors. One wore a captain’s hat, another was a famous (has-been) celebrity that had been performing on the cruise liner, the third was a politician of notoriety, and the fourth was a woman of the cloth. This formation at the head of his lifeboat and every other within Erik’s sight brought forth great worry. He had read numerous accounts from the boating industry that the captains and officers of this cruise line were often bribed to toe the party line, and the celebrities would “never work again” if they voiced their objective viewpoints on the shenanigans they’ve witnessed onboard the ships! The politicians, who infamously turned a blind eye to the corruption and enabled the perennial funding for Orange Star’s machinations were often thought to have been blackmail victims, succumbing to threats of exposing their naughty behavior at infamous Caribbean resorts. And the clergy members, being sympathetically drawn in to victimhood narratives, were so easily exploitable by the powers that be. On Erik’s lifeboat, this clergy member was a woman wearing a t-shirt displaying numerous religious symbols slightly altered and all linked together, spelling out the word “PEACE.”

The sweat of the sun beating on Erik’s face didn’t bother him as much as the situation he knew he and his family were facing! As he peered closer to the gaggle at the bow, he noticed water flowing between the celebrity’s and politician’s feet. This flooding of the vessel was undoubtedly stemming from behind the wall of four. Erik rushed to the front to get a better look, and saw one of the experts hacking away at the floor with a sharp object. He hoped the other expert — the one with the small hat  —  was a bona fide sailor with the skills to stop the leak, but on further examination he concluded that this was not a sailor’s cap, and the two were working in unison.

With the front of the lifeboat, appropriately named The Savior, now listing to the left, Erik peeked back at the SS West, about 90 percent under water. With his morale deflating further and his psyche turning towards survival mode, he grabbed his wife and family into a huddle and urgently pleaded with them, “Do you all not see what is happening here? Our boat is being sabotaged!” His wife snapped back with the power of a whip, “What is wrong with you? When I married you, I didn’t sign up for a mariner’s history lesson and all your negativity! You are always a glass half empty, aren’t you?! I hear that the mojitos at our island destination bar are to die for, so lighten up for a change and enjoy the picturesque sunset!”

And as soon as she quit her retort, an echo of serene sound filled the salty air, as if humpback whales were swimming close by. Then there was another echo, but this time he clearly knew it wasn’t marine life, but possibly those unique animal noises performed by King Crimson’s guitarist Adrian Belew. But after the third echo, the sound was confirmed! It was the intro to a song Erik had rocked out to ever since high school, always digging the killer riffs, the massive tone and guitar lead of this radio classic. How seductive this song had always been to him, and the technical advancements of the iPhone 15 belonging to the desperate Somali refugee on The Savior did a nice job playing it so all 150 could hear the crisply distorted chords of the Gibson Les Paul humbuckers and the silky slide lead of the pedal steel guitar. Erik’s head started bopping along to the 98 beats-per-minute pulse of Red Rider’s Lunatic Fringe as he joined the crowd’s wolf-like howl following every verse, “oh oh oh, oh oh oh, oh oh oh.” Erik had never actually delved into the meaning of the lyrics, but this tune was overtly about him — and it wasn’t a good image — but it reinforced the mainstream narrative that there will always be individuals and groups on the fringe of society, holding meetings in hiding while exercising wrong-think!

Since the internet and song-meaning websites weren’t around when this iconic rock piece became popular, Erik, too, was for decades duped into liking and appreciating Lunatic Fringe for its sound. This hit was not just a voice for the songwriter’s frame of mind (and possibly even his girlfriend’s), but also provided substantial reach of his message and honors in an entertainment industry fully approved by Clown World Cruises. Rumor even has it that the pro-IGF mob of counter-protestors contesting UCLA’s peaceful anti-genocide activists were blasting Lunatic Fringe shortly before they sprung their violent 2024 late-night tent attacks. Those unfortunate, humanely minded students never heard their footsteps coming. And for the Orange Star experts, this was open season in Twilight’s Last Gleaming! So a lesson late in life for Erik and all his extracurricular studies and experience was that he never fully comprehended how insidious so much of Clown World’s messaging always was.

The ocean simultaneously subsumed The Savior, the SS West, and the 29 other lifeboats, the final two B-minor chords rang through Erik’s head, a euphoric neurobiological sensation that numbed all his senses from the current trauma and brought back memories of his comfortable yet adventurous life fleeting across his eyes. These last two chords were the same as those found in the beginning of the song. How appropriate! And in the end, songwriter Tom[7] and his supporters didn’t let Erik “kill the laughter,” because they cleverly never let the final resistance begin.

Burbling water now silenced Erik’s ears, leaving his vision as the last sense of his surroundings. With a final glimpse of the bodyguards at the bow, and maybe just a hallucination amidst the chaos, he noticed an additional person assisting the four already protecting the two perpetrators…the useful idiot.

Erik’s last breath consumed his mind for one final minute. At first his thoughts centered on the words of a central figure from a 2013 speech, words stuck in his head, words troubling him as to who spoke them: was it that politician or one of those useful idiots? Nevertheless, they penetrated the depth of his consciousness: “No group has had such an outsized influence per capita…so many notions that are embraced by this nation emanate from your [maritime?] history, tradition and culture…all those movements…I bet you 85 percent of those changes are a consequence of you, Orange Star experts and Clown World Cruises.” But finally, he let go of his deep muse and grasped for his wife, chain-linked by arms and hands to the rest of his family going down in the same ocean their ancestors once commanded as Nordic kings. Erik used the last pocket of air in his mouth to pass his final words directly to her face. And in a dark abyss where ignoble people had to blame someone for their confusion, he might have sarcastically said, “I told you!” Instead, his beautiful and tolerant wife, sleepy-eyed and waking up, lifted her head from the bed pillow and shook her husband’s shoulder to rouse him for the splendid sunny morning, with plentiful bird-chirping nature sounds that greeted them both. And with cheerful sincerity she spoke, “AW, I LOVE YOU TOO!”

Regardless of how his wife and family perceived him through the years, Erik had always, in fact, been the diehard optimist. Undaunted, he nevertheless faced tremendous odds. It was love for his family, love for his homeland, and love for his people and heritage that consumed his mortal space and time, his path in becoming. While it never earned him any respect on Clown World Cruises, it always was his Destiny.

Dedicated to the fathers of dissident politics on Father’s Day, 2024, as well as the oppressed around our world. Yes, while we are all in the same boat, you are not the lunatic fringe, just as two plus two will never equal five.

This article is replete with metaphors and symbolism, and it likely presents some difficulties of interpretation, especially for those unfamiliar with the musical references. The author has provided a commentary that clarifies his intent.


[1] Clown World Cruises had no business relationship with the popular Carnival Cruise Line, but their owners were fourth cousins.

[2] Red Star designed and built the famous Russian cruiser The St. Petersburg, which sailed for over seventy years, but was renown for using a slave labor crew — worked to the death — to operate this ship. Recent unearthed documents show how the American government, even after fighting a war that freed its slaves, provided an abundance of intellectual property, technical supplies, finances, food and personnel support to keep The St. Petersburg running and winning during WWII.  For clarification, it was this company that merged with their American competitor to form the international corporation Orange Star — a global leader in the maritime industry.

[3] Bey’s real name was Millingen.

[4] The word “Supremacist” had been reserved by the experts for use in all media and academia strictly for their mortal enemy alone.

[5] NPC: Non Player Character, a video gaming reference; The song “Waiting Man” by King Crimson provides an interesting backdrop of musical patterns, especially those played by Robert Fripp. Patterns are an important element to Erik’s analyses. The audience in Munich, Germany, from this video clip, appreciated and understood the value of patterns.

[6] Is it possible to recognize and appreciate good music and art these days in a world saturated with noise and commercially suitable compositions controlled by the “experts”? Would the King Crimson musicians be the Wagner of our modern times composing and performing Faustian art if set free from the chains of the music industry?  Oswald Spengler had some philosophizing on this. Also, are we simply inundated with noise in our modern technical world to such an extent that we cannot make heads or tails out of the reality of our lives, much like the people on this author’s lifeboat? Can humans continue to adapt and live in such technically complex societies or will we inevitably return to a simpler life, with naturally acoustic music and nature pleasing our ears? Or will we become technological slaves? Such were the concerns of Dr. David Skrbina and his philosophical predecessors (e.g., Ellul, Kaczynski, et. al), but probably not the cares of Clown World Cruises or Orange Star.

[7] In a Canadian news interview, song writer Tom Cochrane is quoted, “‘Lunatic Fringe’ should be disturbing, but it should also be a cause for hope, because, like I say in the song, there are those of us out here that aren’t gonna let those things happen again. And you gotta speak out when you see injustice.” In this interview and other “song meaning” sources, it is suggested that Cochrane was influenced by the humanitarian efforts of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish architect, businessman, and diplomat during WWII.  This author would be curious whether Cochrane’s girlfriend at the time of writing his hit song ever introduced him to the humanitarian deeds of the noble Swede Count Folke Bernadotte? If Cochrane would have written a song honoring the Count, would it have been accepted in the American record industry? Let us hope so!

 

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png 0 0 Sigurd Kristensen https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png Sigurd Kristensen2024-06-16 07:51:212024-06-16 15:13:51Destination Unknown: Can You Feel the Resistance?

Author’s Commentary on “Destination Unknown: Can You Feel the Resistance?”

May 16, 2024/in Featured Articles, Western Culture/by Sigurd Kristensen

“Destination Unknown: Can You Feel the Resistance?” carries both maritime and musical motifs. This short article explains some of the euphemisms, metaphors, symbolism and messaging of the fictional story’s details. While much if it may seem confusing, twisted or odd, that is the author’s intent in stressing the chaotic world we currently live in. Much of our culture today is entirely nonsensical. And so many with a keen eye for reality these days wonder why so few can see what is happening, what is going down (as the ship is similarly going down).

The Vikings dominated the European continent and high seas prior to Christianity taking firm hold of its people’s religious and spiritual direction. “The West” is the larger ship that represents the greater civilization of the European peoples and their colonial nations around the world since the demise of the Vikings, roughly the last thousand years as described by Oswald Spengler’s four seasons—spring, summer, fall and Winter—of our European culture. Perhaps this story will spur the great seafarers (metaphorically) of our time to begin building new ships and boats so as to regain command of our own Destiny as opposed to having our vessels and people commanded by forces hostile to our interests, those of Orange Star and Clown World who are clearly sinking our fleet. In this regard, the West obviously contained many flaws that were consistently exploitable. Hopefully this euphemistic storyline will inspire any future Heroes (Yockey liked this term) to begin engineering our more seaworthy boats and ships that could result in a stronger and more efficient fleet, much like we have seen new materials and technology vastly improve upon today’s transportation vehicles.

Music has been credited to initiating peaceful revolutions in some countries like the Baltics’ resistance against the Soviet Union/communism and advocating for nationalism. Apparently their choirs sang themselves into freedom! Music culture has also been philosophically critiqued, again by Spengler, as a measure of a culture’s season and artful spirit. The different types of music referenced in the author’s story, the musicians themselves, and the lyrics symbolically tell a story on its own. Reading history of the 1930s shows how fearful many Europeans were of the new “Jazz” from America that was penetrating the old continent. So should there be concern for us today on where music is now going and how little control our own musical talent has in steering it? The music motif, after the reader listens to the samples linked in the storyline, also expresses a critique on the modern technological world, compares it to the serene song at the story’s end, and hopes that the new maritime fleet will include musical composers that will entertain our people with aural sensations akin to the Ride of the Valkyries, or as soothing as Edward Grieg’s Norwegian folk classic, Morning. Can music bring us salvation? Now for some symbolism on the bands and songs:

The band King Crimson of the time frame featured (1982) consisted of Robert Fripp, Bill Bruford, Adrian Belew, and Tony Levin (two Brits and two Americans, with one of the Americans being a highly liked and respected Jewish musician and the non-Jewish American from Kentucky — the South — where the South has always been over-represented in our military: Thank you Southerners!) This band is comprised of immensely talented individuals, but the “progressive rock” (also known as “art rock”) usually only appealed to the fans of esoteric instrumental music. These are the same fans that might appreciate Wagner’s symphonic music today, but are culturally chained to the product of the modern music industry. Just as the fans of King Crimson music are considered to be on the fringes of popular music, it is men like Erik who appreciate historical research and esoteric (or non-mainstream) writings that find themselves on the fringes of society for the educated viewpoints they hold. This doesn’t make them crazy (or lunatics, as the story would later reveal), but places them statistically in the one percent of the far-right bell curve, whether analyzing musical tastes or political opinions.

The allies of the West during WWII mainly consisted of the British and the Americans, with considerable warm-nudging influence by the Jewish community of America (as suggested in a famous 1939 Des Moines speech by Lindbergh, who is mentioned in the story). These three elements are found in the composition of King Crimson. In the story we find a link to a video clip where King Crimson is playing Munich (1982), the city that launched the resistance to Jewish internationalist influence in the West. The first song of this videotaped concert is “Waiting Man,” and two interpretations found on the internet as to its meaning are (1) The song is from the point of view of a person going to a funeral and then coming home. Home is forever changed by the loss, but retains its integrity. What is he waiting for? What we all wait for after losing a loved one; their return. Something irrational and impossible, yet what we wait for all the same as we grieve; OR (2) It seems pretty obvious to what this song’s about. I think it’s about a guy who falls in love with a girl, the girl goes off to a new (possibly better looking, richer, but not nicer) guy, and the waiting man knows that their relationship will end, so he just sits and waits for her to come back to him. Really a deep and touching song. The story’s author leans towards the first interpretation regarding Western Man returning home. But strangely enough, the opening of Waiting Man sounds like drum beats and melodies more attune to an African vibe, symbolizing the musical and even cultural trends of our last seven decades or more in the West. Is he returning to his home in the West from his modern Africanized cultural enrichment? Did King Crimson re-conquer Germany and the West with its Americanized modern music and all it entails?

The second featured song from King Crimson is Elephant Talk, which alphabetically presents the myriad types of talk we receive in our daily lives. While effective communication are important in our lives, we are unnecessarily inundated with “too much talk” (as the song emphasizes), and at this point in our civilization the bicker bicker bicker, the commentary, controversy, criticisms, and double talk are simply unhealthy for us all. Or so this author suggests. We are overwhelmed with it, and King Crimson’s song suggests the absurdity of what we have grown to tolerate! The guitar solos of the band might sound incredible to the one percent of listeners, but to the majority — especially those women who largely look at music for its danceable aspects — the unique electric guitar effects from Adrien Belew represent noise to ears of the masses, noise that might as well be coming from an elephant, and if an elephant were in the room nobody would recognize it today because the masses only absorb what the system emphasizes. And they don’t want you to notice the big elephant, and you are not allowed in polite society to notice or analyze patterns. And patterns are a great part of King Crimson’s songs, especially the tape-looping and complex Frippertronics of guitar player Robert Fripp. The average music listener in the West could never appreciate Fripp’s guitar work, but the protagonist Erik’s mind is wired with more critical and insightful senses, and watching a King Crimson concert from the front row could equal the fascination he might find in discovering the patterns contained in the books of the web page www.Samisdat.in as found linked in the story. Finally regarding King Crimson music, the author finds it extremely technically advanced and modern for its time period of the 1980s, and we are heading towards technical complexities that will inevitably cause us all profound problems, as great as those constructed by Orange Star/Clown World, and maybe together with them, just as King Crimson was probably under the sway of record-company management.

Red Rider’s Lunatic Fringe signals the messaging mastery of the music and entertainment industry, in that Erik never paid much attention to the lyrics of the song, but loved it his entire life for the rock-styled instrumental elements, just as he probably would enjoy King Crimson purely for the instrumental works while caring little at all for the lyrics. Not only does he hear the introductory slide guitar sounds three times, but the wolf-howling is repeated three times for reasons unknown. There is an inner-wolf residing in all of us of the West, but for now Westerners are droning in repetitive manner to the tunes of their media masters, socially engineered by Orange Star and media controlled by Clown World. Even Erik, with his razor-sharp mind and experience, falls prey to the collective drum beat found in the song.

Lunatic Fringe was written as political commentary (and the word “commentary” being found in the song “Elephant Talk”) that chooses a side that most likely supports those who are destroying the lives of university anti-genocide protestors these days (in 2024), because Orange Star can do no wrong and America is the land of the free. The 2021 interview of the songwriter linked in the article clearly indicates his influences, those being his readings of a Swedish historian, and a particular girlfriend. The author of the story ponders if the songwriter might have had different feelings if he knew of another Swede, Count Folke Bernadotte and the terrorists that assassinated him during his negotiating efforts for Middle East peace after having saved thousands of prisoners from WWII prisoner camps? Did the songwriter’s girlfriend even know about the Count —  few Americans or Canadians ever heard of him because our history is consolidated into a neat little package of approved content suitable for a sixth grader.

Lunatic Fringe is a song that incites hatred against the well-learned, history-revisionists or history aficionados, and hatred for the reader with the critical eye and mind that can score a perfect 1600 on an SAT like Ron Unz did as a high school junior. The lyrics are intended to instill fear in anyone considering to think outside the Orange Star/Clown World box, because they’re on to them now and “can hear you coming.” The lyrics “this is open season, but you won’t get too far” seem to at least tacitly condone the vigilante violence and terrorism so prevalent with the anarchists of today and witnessed a few years ago across our nation. While the songwriter uses the phrase “your final solution” as an obvious reference to WWII villainy understood by all the masses in their Western imperial education, the author of the story suggests that if left unchecked, the final genocide will be of the masses in the West themselves, and what we really need is a “final resistance” (or “waking up”) as a defensive and peaceful measure to this slow-going and insidious attack (as many these days compare to boiling frogs very slowly in a pot).

The name of the lifeboat, “The Savior,” and its listing to the left while it is sinking is an overt reference to how Christianity has morphed sharply in favor of leftist politics, while the right-wing flavor of evangelical Christians favors an end-times eschatological narrative to bring back their savior once and for all. Both of these religious paths are, in the author’s view, detrimental to nationalism and the future of “The West,” and probably are contributing to its sinking. But if it all needs to sink in order to start fresh, that nightmare is becoming more plausible for each new generation.

The passengers on the lifeboat are all like NPCs — non-player characters (such as in a video game) — of the famous internet meme and image included with the story, in that it is tremendously difficult to express views outside what is approved by Orange Star and propagandized by Clown World. To do so would incur ostracism or worse, and maybe even hostility from loved ones who find the repetitive pattern recognitions as representing a rather pessimistic attitude towards the comfortable lives we live today (compared to that of our past). And honestly, most people invest too much of their time working to- make-ends-meet to begin a truth-seeking journey that exposes uncomfortable facts. The sum total of our masses reflects the repetitive picture of the NPCs, since the depths of critical investigation fall statistically to the one percenters of society with exceptionally critical and curious minds.

Erik’s noticing the same behavior in the other lifeboats is comparable to the decline of all Western nations simultaneously while “The West,” the ship representing the greater civilization of European ancestry, is almost sunk as a larger collective. The passengers having their backs to “The West” foreshadows the paragraph that exposes the true attack on America’s Navy ship USS Liberty in 1967, where even lifeboats were strafed by Israeli fighter jets, 34 servicemen were killed and 174 wounded — and hardly anybody knows! This is well concealed from the general public, even Navy personnel, by Orange Star and Clown World and off limits for discussion. The ultimate betrayal capping this off is the downplaying of the Medal of Honor ceremony for its skipper, Captain William McGonagle, and by patriotic museums like the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center (Chattanooga, TN) ignoring requests to honor today’s Liberty survivors. The masses represented in the lifeboat also are betraying the West by reinforcing the unwritten ban on having pride in their European heritage and people, the only people and interests one is not permitted to advocate for today — thanks to Orange Star. Just ask former congressman Steve King and look into his inability to speak positively about Western Civilization without becoming snared in a media trap or reprimanded by his congressional peers (and ultimately removed from his job). This furthers the point made in the author’s storyline that these NPC passengers have their back facing to “The West.”

The mojitos reference points to our addiction and abuse of alcohol, and how it tends to motivate our regular activities and behaviors, to the point that we can’t function in society without it. Henry Ford had a great deal to say about control of the liquor trade in America. But that’s unauthorized reading. The fact that the mojito is a Caribbean drink emphasizes our drift into the culture of the islands like Jamaica. Consider the impact of reggae on Western culture. Has the laid back, pot-promoting music scene been all positive on Western man? Don’t we all see a slow drift into a drug culture that has the entire population entranced and dysfunctional?

The story ends with Erik waking up to the Nordic folk song with natural orchestral instrumentation — one that everyone associates with “the Morning” as the song title indicates. The “Morning Song” by Grieg signals that it is a new day, and perhaps it signals a return to his roots after the noise of the post-modern-civilization Decline of The West (as Oswald Spengler might suggest): The great beginnings of a new culture, but with our same people just as it was the same Vikings who became Christians. Can we (once again) become who we are?

As the ending dedication states, we are all in the same boat that is largely under the command of the Orange Star and Clown World international corporations (representing social engineering and entertainment/mass media respectively), and so the maritime euphemism encompasses this point that these entities have global control. And for today’s political circumstances it further asserts that we are all Gazans. Today’s political news misrepresent “the resistance” just as the song Lunatic Fringe does in its lyrics. Few realize how long ago this all began, but this author’s article on 1922 gives some clues. Will the real, authentic “resistance” please stand up!

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png 0 0 Sigurd Kristensen https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png Sigurd Kristensen2024-05-16 07:43:112024-06-16 08:11:18Author’s Commentary on “Destination Unknown: Can You Feel the Resistance?”

Review of “Storm of Steel” by Ernst Jünger

March 10, 2024/18 Comments/in Featured Articles, Western Civilization, Western Culture/by Bernard M. Smith

When once it is no longer possible to understand how a man gives his life for his country—and the time will come—then all is over with that faith also, and the idea of the Fatherland is dead; and then, perhaps, we shall be envied, as we envy the saints their inward and irresistible strength.
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger

The end of the greatness of Western Civilization in one man’s death.

*        *        *

On February 17, 1998, a frail centenarian passed away in Wilflingen, Germany. Born in 1895, Ernst Jünger’s life was far more noteworthy than simply its prodigious length — it was a life that epitomized the gallantry, curiosity, patriotism, intelligence, and culture that made Western Civilization what it became — and from what is has descended. Fused in one man were all the qualities — qualities that are not merely in short supply today but positively lacking. It is not hyperbole to say that an era of sorts and an entire civilization was buried with his remains at Wilflingen Cemetery. We simply do not produce men like him — and have not for a very long time.

To say that Jünger’s life was incredible is selling it short — by a longshot. His life almost perfectly corresponded with the entirety of the twentieth century. The changes he witnessed boggle the mind — from the world he inherited to the world that he left. Born less than twenty-five years after Germany’s unification in 1871, he came into the world during the heady optimism of the German Empire. Successively he would be a participant and witness to: World War I and Germany’s partial dismemberment following its defeat at the hand of the allies; the chaos and political upheavals of the Weimar Republic; the rise of the Third Reich and World War II; the complete destruction and dismemberment of Germany following the war; the eras of West and East Germany; and finally, the reunification of Germany in 1991 following the fall of the Soviet Union. During every phase, from a young man to a very old man, Jünger participated and contributed to Germany. Indeed, he is virtually without parallel in what he means to soul of Germany.

He was a man that lived his entire life wrestling with ideas with a creative mind that seemingly never lost its vigor. An active writer from a young age, his books span multiple generations. He consumed life in an almost inexhaustible way — cogitating over things in a way that was almost superhuman. In that sense, he is close to being the personification of Western Civilization in microcosm. Really, it is that unbelievable.

I could recapitulate his life, but perhaps citing to a then-contemporary obituary to give a flavor for the man is more appropriate. While there were many, I found that The Independent gave as good a voice to the extraordinariness of his life as any other — and I cite it in full because it is worth reading in full:

ERNST JUNGER first beheld Halley’s Comet during its 1910 passage, when he was a boy of 15. In 1987, he made a special journey to Malaysia for a second glimpse. He was one of the very few writers to have seen the comet twice in his lifetime.

All this is described in Zwei Mal Halley (“Halley Twice”, 1988), a book filled with Junger’s characteristic meditations on time and place, on dreams, nature, crystals, stars, mountains, the sea, wild animals and insects, especially butterflies, a passion he shared with Nabokov. Throughout his very considerable body of work, there is an obsession with time, with dates, with temporal coincidences, with the fatidic power of numbers over our birth and death. In a volume of his journals covering the years 1965–70, Siebzig verweht (“Past Seventy”, 1980), he makes this revealing entry at Wilfingen, his home between the Danube and the Black Forest, in sight of the castle of Stauffenberg, on 30 March 1965: “I have now reached the biblical age of three score and ten — a rather strange feeling for a man who, in his youth, had never hoped to see his 30th year. Even after my 23rd birthday in 1918, I would gladly have signed a Faustian pact with the Devil: “Give me just 30 years of life, guaranteed, then let it all be ended.”

A similar expression of his fascinated awe of time and numbers appears in an earlier work, An der Zeitmauer (“At the Wall of Time”, 1959). But one of the most extraordinary examples of this obsession can be found in a journal entry for “‘Monday, 8.8.1988’ — a date with four units. 8 is special (four 8’s, and a fifth one by subtracting the 1 from the 9). Odin rides an 8-legged horse. . . . Dates have often brought me surprises.”

One of his many hobbies was the collection of antique sandglasses, on which he was an authority. He also collected sundial inscriptions. Ernst Junger’s birth at Heidelberg is recorded precisely. It fell on 29 March 1895 on the stroke of noon, under Aries, with Cancer in the ascendant. He was the eldest of seven children, one of whom, his beloved brother Friedrich Georg (who died in 1977), was also a writer, a poet and philosopher.

Junger spent the greater part of his childhood and adolescence in Hanover, where his prosperous parents settled shortly after his birth. They possessed a beautiful villa by a lake, where Ernst made his first entomological investigations. He soon developed a dislike for bourgeois life, and spent a couple of unhappy years in boarding schools, whose reports complain of his dreaminess and lack of interest in the boring curriculum. He was later to write: “I had invented for myself a sort of distancing indifference that allowed me to remain connected to reality only by an invisible thread like a spider’s.”

He spent hours reading unauthorised books, and with his brother lived in an exalted universe of their own. They would go wandering round the countryside, and Ernst struck up happy friendships with tramps and gypsies. He was already the Waldganger (wild man of the woods), the anarchist hero of his 1977 novel Eumeswil. It was the beginning of an unending passion for travel and exotic lands. He took the first big step in 1913 by running away from home to join the Foreign Legion, in which he saw service in Oran and Sidi-Bel-Abbes. After five weeks, his father bought him out. Ernst was to write about this escapade in Kinderspielen (“Children’s Games”, 1936). His father promised that if he passed his Abitur (school-leaving examination) he would be allowed to join an expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro. So Junger swotted away at the Gildermeister Institut, whose grim atmosphere is evoked in Die Steinschleuder (“The Catapult“, 1973), a novel in the great tradition of German school stories.

Junger passed his exam in August 1914 and at once volunteered for the army, in which he fought on the French front with exceptional courage all through the First World War. Wounded four times, he received the highest German military honour, the Order of Merit created by Friedrich II: he outlived all those who also received it. Out of his wartime experiences was born Stahlgewittern (“Storm of Steel”, 1920), which he had to publish at his own expense. This story of the horrors of modern warfare was drawn from his wartime notebooks, often written in the heat of battle on the Western Front. It remains one of the greatest works about the First World War, along with those by Erich Maria Remarque, Henri Barbusse, e.e. cummings, David Jones and Lucien Descaves.

Junger stayed in the army until 1923, when he left and began studying zoology at the University of Leipzig and at Naples. He married Gretha von Jeinsen and his son Ernst was born in 1926. In 1927 they moved to Berlin, where he became a member of the national revolutionary group led by Niekisch (arrested by Hitler in 1937 and kept in a concentration camp until the end of the Second World War). He also got to know Ernst von Salomon, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Toller and Alfred Kubin, as well as the publisher Rowohlt. He began travelling widely, to Sicily, Rhodes, the Dalmatian coast, Norway, Brazil and the Canaries, and made the acquaintance of Andre Gide in Paris. These travels had a great influence on all his writings, most noticeable in his superb novel Heliopolis (1949) – the most elegantly learned, eloquently written and hauntingly convincing science- fiction story ever written.

Goebbels tried in vain to draw him into the ranks of the Nazi hierarchy in 1931, and he refused to be elected to the German Academy of Letters because it was dominated by national socialist timeservers. In 1932 Junger produced a very significant book, Der Arbeiter (“The Worker”), which is nevertheless one of his least-known works. It was long out of print until Martin Heidegger, himself besmirched with Nazi collaboration, persuaded him to risk letting it be reissued in 1963. It presents the mythical figure of standardised modern man as “The Worker” whose pragmatism and nihilism destroy the old traditional categories of peasant, soldier and priest, foretelling an unprecedented reversal of temporal power in our collapsing cultures where an intellectual and artistic elite has no place.

Related to this theme is a later work, Das Aladdinproblem (1983), in which he asks who will rub the magic lamp of destructive science and dehumanising technology: “With the heavens empty, we live in the Age of Uranium: how can we believe our modern Aladdin’s lamp will not produce some unimaginable monster?” Der Arbeiter is also an important theoretical study of the political history of the Thirties in Germany, and has been considered by critics like Georg Lukacs and Walter Benjamin to have been the ideological matrix of national-socialist ideas. But Junger’s links with national socialism were infinitely complex. He was a serving officer, partisan of the revolutionary right, a sort of conservative anarchist, hostile to the Weimar Republic, yet he refused all honours and promotions.

Unable to bear the rising tide of Hitlerism, he left Berlin for the quiet of the countryside at Kirchhorst, where in February 1939 he began the painful drafting of Auf den Marmorklippen. Its anti-Nazi tone is obvious, but the book was published in September, the month war was declared. On the Marble Cliffs was part of my wartime reading, and I well remember the excitement it caused when the translation was published by John Lehmann just after the war.

With the outbreak of war, Junger was given the rank of captain and took part in the invasion of France, during which he did his utmost to spare civilians and protect public monuments. Posted to Paris, he became a well-known figure in the literary salons of the time like the Thursday reunions of artists and writers at Florence Gould’s. He made good friends of authors like the acid-tongued critic Leautaud and above all Marcel Jouhandeau, whose scholarly ease and wit in writing seemed to Junger exceptional at a time of growing artistic barbarity. Even after their condemnation for collaboration with the Nazis, Junger praised the characters and writings of Chardonne, Celine (whom he did not like), Brasillach and Drieu de la Rochelle, while his admiration for Cocteau, Sasha Guitry and actresses like Arletty was as sincere as that for artists like Braque and Picasso, whose studios he frequented.

His journals of this period are studded with all these famous names. However, he was indirectly implicated in Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, and requested to leave the army and return home to Kirchhorst, where he spent the rest of the war, composing a text on Die Friede (“Peace”). His son Ernst, in prison for opposition to Hitler, was despatched to the Italian front and killed on 29 November in the marble quarries at Carrara by Allied snipers.

After German defeat and capitulation, despite his firm denials of having supported Nazism, Junger encountered the shrill hostility of Marxist and so-called liberal critics who accused him of being its predecessor. They even criticised his scholarly, noble, refined style, calling it frigid, elitist and academic. He writes of his experiments with drugs in Annaherungen (“Approaches”, 1970), influenced by Aldous Huxley’s works on the same subject. He finally settled at Wilfingen in the house of the Master Forester attached to the ancestral home of his executed friend Graf Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, where in 1959 he founded the literary review Antaios with Mircea Eliade. By 1977, his father, mother, brother and wife had all died. He remarried, taking as his wife Liselotte Lohrer, a professional archivist and literary scholar.

All through the Seventies and Eighties Junger travelled widely. In 1979, he visited Verdun and was awarded the town’s Peace Medal. In 1982 he received a final literary consecration with the award of the City of Frankfurt’s Goethe Prize, which aroused violent protest among his detractors. In 1984, he again made a pilgrimage to Verdun, with Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Francois Mitterrand to pay homage to the victims of two world wars. In 1992, there was extraordinary confirmation of Junger’s anti-Nazi stance with the discovery of a top-secret document proving that his fate was in the balance just before the Third Reich’s capitulation and during the final days Hitler spent in the Wolfs-Schanze, the very headquarters where he was wounded by the Stauffenberg bomb.

The document is dated December 1944. It is addressed by Dr Freisler, president of the Volksgericht (People’s Court) to Martin Bormann, Hitler’s right-hand man. Freisler informs Bormann that the proceedings to be taken against Captain Junger are to be cancelled. Junger had been indicted on account of his novel On the Marble Cliffs and the “defeatist” opinions he had expressed at his old colleague Commandant Stulpnagel’s HQ in Paris, not long before the latter’s suicide. Freisler reveals that on 20 November 1944 the Fuhrer himself had given the order by telephone from the Wolfs- Schanze that the matter was not to be pursued any further. Freisler ends his letter with “Heil Hitler!”, then adds a postscript: “I am sending you three dossiers on the affair. The Fuhrer wishes to have his orders executed immediately.”

In his Journals, Junger notes that the Gestapo had described him at that period in Paris as “an impenetrable, highly suspect individual”. He comments in a 1992 interview: “It was no surprise to me. After all, it conformed to the pattern of my horoscope. Ever since my schooldays I’ve been accustomed to that kind of unpleasantness.” Ernst Junger’s work is all of a piece — highly literary, beautifully sonorous, excitingly visual, intellectually profound and stimulating. It is the life work of an aristocrat of letters, and one of the best tributes to it has been made by another literary patriarch, Julien Gracq: “The hard, smooth enamelling that seems to armour his prose against the touch of too great a familiarity would seem to us perhaps a little frigid if we did not know, and if we never lost consciousness of the fact while reading, that it has been tempered in an ordeal of fire.”

That is a fitting eulogy for one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

Ernst Junger, writer: born Heidelberg, Germany 29 March 1895; married 1925 Gretha von Jeinsen (died 1960; two sons deceased), 1962 Liselotte Lohrer; died Wilflingen, Germany 17 February 1998.

Noticeably absent from this obituary is any mention of religion, which is unfortunate. I find great solace that this man, who retained his wits sharply until his death, converted to Roman Catholicism at the ripe age of 101 and died in the bosom and sacraments of the Catholic Church. While there are similar conversion stories of remarkable men who converted after a long lifetime of exhaustive study and moral exploration, his conversion is particularly meaningful to me. While I am no Ernst Jünger, by both blood and conviction, I am northwestern European and a Teutonophile: that the very best modern German man saw fit to do exactly what I did — that is, make an adult conversion to Rome — gladdens me exceedingly. A man such as him — a Western man in the best sense of the term who had lived life to its maximal fullness in every way — decided after seeing virtually everything a man can see and thinking about over in a lifetime came to the conclusion that the ancient faith of Rome was true is inspiring beyond measure. Truly this was a man who drunk deeply of virtually every idea and experienced virtually every political and social movement — all in the great vacillations of the greatest privations intermixed with periods of abundance. From a human perspective, he was someone that saw hope and despair, in both a people and in his heart, wax and wane repeatedly. Such a man knew the scope of life as few ever have — and after surveying all of it, he cast his lot with the Nazarene and the Catholic Church. It is true that we live in an appalling age of nihilism and apostasy in our time, but I am gratified that Rome continues to attract the very best of men even if loses millions more of mediocre and self-centered. It is a testament to the powerful and enduring attraction that is Christ as mediated through the Church He founded — a Church that uniquely fits the soul of the most virtuous men of the West.

Now, the argument from authority is the weakest of all arguments; that said, hostile and indifferent non-Catholics who nonetheless care about the survival of Western Civilization and bemoan the depths of depravity into which we have sunk ought to take something from his conversion. Even if it does not result in a similar conversion, it ought to communicate to every non-Catholic Westerner who cares about the West that Catholicism is not merely a part of our history but a living force that continues to attract men of the highest quality. That means it ought to never be tarnished or mocked even by those men who stand aloof from her.

*        *        *

Jünger, as it clear from above, wrote a great deal — this review only addresses one of his earliest published works: Storm of Steel, which is a first-person account of his experience as a soldier and officer during the First World War. It is a beautiful — if tragic — account of that senseless killing field. It represents the genre of a “soldier’s story” as well as any that I have read, and while it details the horror of the mechanized monster that is modern war, it is neither the glorification of war nor its condemnation. Somewhere in between, Storm of Steel is an account of a man of honor doing his duty without apologizing for it — indeed, if anything, it is the pronouncement of his good fortune to be among the generation that was able to do it. To the modern reader — no doubt a collection of beta men (or, in Nietzsche’s pithier words, “last men”) — such a sentiment after reading the horrors and carnage that Jünger saw and experienced is virtually inexplicable. But then again men of today use words like duty, honor, and fatherland as punchlines — something to be mocked by men who get pedicures. Such is the distance between us and him and the whole of his generation that passed.

The First World War is a confounding — and depressing — topic for me. I have studied it from different angles and perspectives. I have thought about it for seemingly hundreds of hours. I have lamented it and in particular its senselessness. In its essence, WWI was a collective civilizational suicide pact — the destruction of Europe’s finest and the impoverishment of Europe’s future. On the eve of August 1914, European civilization (late-stage Western Civilization) was ascendent around the globe. The war ended that ascent definitively and decisively. What is more, it is virtually impossible to understand why the leaders of Europe decided — in unison — to kill all their best young men and destroy and impoverish their countries simultaneously. The lack of reason or cause, I suppose, bothers me most. Western Civilization was mortally wounded by November 1918 and its self-inflicted wound was utterly meaningless.

But this is not a story of the war’s meaninglessness — it is a story of one of those best men who happened, unbelievably, to survive and tell the tale. Throughout, Jünger speaks for the millions who died — he gives voice to those we lost and what we lost even if we did not lose Jünger. This is a book that communicates the patriotic enthusiasm that swept over Germany, and, by extension, the whole of Europe at the outset of the war. He writes:

We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war.

The enthusiasm, which he shared with many of his generation, is seemingly out-of-place considering that carnage and hellfire that they would face. Likewise, the enthusiasm did not reflect a belief in the ideological righteousness of the cause beyond the ardent patriotism in the breasts of the men who fought. Consider his view of the enemy, which is infused with a latent sense of chivalry from a bygone era:

Throughout the war, it was always my endeavour to view my opponent without animus, and to form an opinion of him as a man on the basis of the courage he showed. I would always try and seek him out in combat and kill him, and I expected nothing else from him. But never did I entertain mean thoughts of him. When prisoners fell into my hands, later on, I felt responsible for their safety, and would always do everything in my power for them.

We learn early in this book what kind of man this is — and he displays a remarkable consistency throughout in terms of his character.

Jünger’s account is not about military strategy per se although as an officer and leader of men in various battles, the tactics and strategy are always there for consideration. No, this is an account of the primal nature of war — especially the vicious and unforgiving nature of mechanized trench warfare. While this book is not like Guy Sajer’s Forgotten Soldier in that the literary motif of the fog of war is used in the writing itself, there is a distinct chaos that seems never far from the surface in Storm of Steel. But there is something alive — and dare I say beautiful — in the horror of what he describes. It is the continuous paradox of life — man never feels more alive than when he faces death in a real and meaningful way. And death was everywhere in Jünger’s account.

One could almost say that his literary talents created a battlefield aesthetic in which the war was a visual tableau and spectacle — even in its destruction and mangled reality. He paints an intense picture of the trenches, nighttime patrols, and terrifying infantry and storm trooper attacks. Artillery is everywhere and these men lived under constant bombardment. We get a sense of the drip-drip maddening effect of the barrages coupled with the occasional direct hits, which leave multiple men mangled beyond recognition. But we also get a sense of the indomitable esprit de corps of these men; he writes:

Even if ten out of twelve men had fallen, the two survivors would surely meet over a glass on their first evening off, and drink a silent toast to their comrades, and jestingly talk over their shared experiences. There was in these men a quality that both emphasized the savagery of war and transfigured it at the same time: an objective relish for danger, the chevaleresque urge to prevail in battle.

And there is the constant vagaries and senselessness of who dies and how — death is something always lurking and stealing people away in a completely haphazard way. If there is a hidden metaphor in the book as it relates to the meaningless of the war — at least in a geopolitical sense — it is the caprice of who dies and who does not. That said, Jünger does not strike me as intentionally embedding such devices, but it was nonetheless something that struck me repeatedly.

He does not glorify battle per se but there is an unapologetic quality of the writing that conveys the veiled Germanic warrior of an age lost in the mist of time. The suffering and privations — the cold, damp, and hungry conditions — only add laurels of the might and mane of the men who endured and fought. His mode of writing, which builds on a contemporaneous journal that Jünger kept throughout the war, keeps the action moving in an almost herky-jerky fashion that gives us a sense the vicissitudes of soldiers moving hither and thither without always understanding why. Consider this example of his style:

These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass in an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsmen, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.

For those who might have seen it, the recent film 1917 uses the cinematic technique of equating the runtime of the film with the sequence of action presented by the film — i.e., the film is a two-hour film that depicts two hours in 1917; it has some similarities to Storm of Steel, not so much in the passage of time or the length of the book, but the work is action-oriented with little dedicated space for philosophical musings other than what is relevant to the action.

Like other war stories, it is a coming-of-age story — innocence and enthusiasm giving way to death and gravitas. The book details Jünger’s progression of increasing responsibilities and dangers. He is eventually trained as a storm trooper who leads offensive raids towards the end of the war. The experience he and his fellows gain always comes at a cost; he writes, “[i]n war you learn your lessons, and they stay learned, but the tuition fees are high.” The book reaches its crescendo during these accounts of the offensive storm trooper raids including the one in which his final injuries were sustained that effectively put him out of the war for good. Both the glorification and vivification that come from war — especially that war — are recounted by him in an evocative way; for example, he writes of his time as a storm trooper:

Trench fighting is the bloodiest, wildest, most brutal of all. … Of all the war’s exciting moments none is so powerful as the meeting of two storm troop leaders between narrow trench walls. There’s no mercy there, no going back, the blood speaks from a shrill cry of recognition that tears itself from one’s breast like a nightmare.

During his service, Jünger was wounded a dozen or so times, each leading to a brief return home or time in the military hospital for recovery. He writes in detail: “[l]eaving out trifles such as ricochets and grazes, I was hit at least fourteen times, these being five bullets, two shell splinters, one shrapnel ball, four hand-grenade splinters and two bullet splinters, which, with entry and exit wounds, left me an even twenty scars.” Despite the comforts, he yearns for the frontlines — he literally cannot wait to return to the hell of the war. Even in his last — and most serious injury — he is anxiously preparing for the winter offensive of 1919 that never came.

Notably, unlike other stories from the losing side, Jünger’s experiences do not lend themselves to cynicism. While Jünger provides a firsthand account of the brutality of trench warfare and the psychological effects it had on the soldiers, there is no sense of complaining in the slightest even when he gives voice to the various temptations that he had to shirk on occasion. The book may be a gripping and unflinching portrayal of the horrors of war, but it is not a demonization of it or his country on account of it. He simply sees himself as a man who did his duty for fatherland and he never exhibits anything remotely like cynicism of the enterprise even if he complains, from time to time, of the mistakes made by generals far off from the tactical reality that he confronted. In that sense, it is a very different book from All Quiet on the Western Front, notwithstanding the many similarities, which exudes a manifested cynicism.

Jünger begins the war and his memoir with the love of his country:

At the sight of the Neckar [River] slopes wreathed with flowering cherry trees, I had a strong sense of having come home. What a beautiful country it was, and eminently worth our blood and our lives. Never before had I felt its charm so clearly. I had good and serious thoughts, and for the first time I sensed that this war was more than just a great adventure.

After all the destruction and carnage, he ends the book with the same love of his country not only intact but somehow strengthened — even as it is tinged with foreboding of what was to come:

Now these [battles]too are over, and already we see once more in the dim light of the future the tumult of the fresh ones. We—by this I mean those youth of this land who are capable of enthusiasm for an ideal—will not shrink from them. We stand in the memory of the dead who are holy to us, and we believe ourselves entrusted with the true and spiritual welfare of our people. We stand for what will be and for what has been. Though force without and barbarity within conglomerate in sombre clouds, yet so long as the blade of a sword will strike a spark in the night may it be said: Germany lives and Germany shall never go under!

We live today among men, at least in the West, who treat their countries with disdain and ignore that they even belong to a people. Where are the men today who might say that Germany — or England — or France — or Spain — or dare I say America — lives? Where are the men who love their fatherlands and love their kin?

*        *        *

Jünger recounts many men he killed during the war. What stands out to me, however, is the one he did not kill:

A bloody scene with no witnesses was about to happen. It was a relief to me, finally, to have the foe in front of me and within reach. I set the mouth of the pistol at the man’s temple — he was too frightened to move — while my other fist grabbed hold of his tunic, feeling medals and badges of rank. An officer; he must have held some command post in these trenches. With a plaintive sound, he reached into his pocket, not to pull out a weapon, but a photograph which he held up to me. I saw him on it, surrounded by numerous family, all standing on a terrace. It was a plea from another world. Later, I thought it was blind chance that I let him go and plunged onward. That one man of all often appeared in my dreams. I hope that meant he got to see his homeland again.

This was a haunting scene. What a waste that war was — what a waste of men such as these. Hidden in this moment in an otherwise unforgiving war is the recognition of the Western sensibility of humanity. True enough it was his duty to kill, but the hope he articulated for the survival of his enemy is rich in meaning and pregnant with the fraternity that exists — or at least once existed — among European men.

When I took the whole of this book in, what struck me more than anything is that a man of twenty-five could write it. Consider too that four of his twenty-five years were not in graduate school but in muddy and bombed-out trenches. Throughout the book are references to themes of Western Civilization, theology, mythology, and philosophy. By no means is this a book that plumbs any of them deeply but the facility of a twenty-five-year-old with all of them demonstrated a greatness in the German psyche that is simply unrecognizable in virtually any men today regardless of age. True enough, Jünger proved to be a gifted writer after the war, but his talents notwithstanding, the civilization that reared him and existed before World War I was astounding.

Why oh why did we allow them all to be killed?

 *        *        *

Saint Martin of Tours, Pray for us.

 

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png 0 0 Bernard M. Smith https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png Bernard M. Smith2024-03-10 11:29:132024-03-10 12:07:54Review of “Storm of Steel” by Ernst Jünger
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