Vibrant Verse: British Poetry as Occupied Territory

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The British Isles have given more than their share to science, literature and philosophy. But in other ways they have done less well, as the great Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) noted in one of his short stories. This is a German woman talking to the English spy Ashenden:

“You English, you cannot paint, you cannot model, you cannot write music.”
“Some of us can at times write pleasing verses,” said Ashenden,
[and], he did not know why, two lines occurring to him he said them: “Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding, Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West?”
“Yes,” said Mrs Caypor, with a strange gesture, “you can write
poetry. I wonder why.”
And to Ashenden’s surprise she went on, in her guttural English, to recite the next two lines of the poem he had quoted. (“The Traitor,” 1928)

Mrs Caypor was right. The British Isles have never produced a composer to compare with Beethoven or an artist to compare with Michelangelo. They haven’t even come close. But Milton compares with Dante and other great poets have graced these islands, from Burns and Yeats in Scotland and Ireland to Wordsworth and Thomas in England and Wales, from the home-grown Chaucer to the adopted T.S. Eliot. Britain has a golden poetic tradition. You can say that without hyperbole or irony. Read more

Liam Neeson in the Flying Film “Non-Stop”

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In February I reviewed the film Sully, a tale of White heroics on the Hudson River. Director Clint Eastwood cast Tom Hanks as Captain “Sully” Sullenberger and managed to keep the entire film a White affair.

Today I have a less profound flying film to play with, but still one with a pro-White perspective, which is reason enough to feel good inside. Hollywood does, after all, appeal to White audiences, at least some of the time. In this day and age even Thor can be played by a black actor, so when Hollywood hands us a treat, as they did with Sully, and now Non-Stop, we can sit back and enjoy it.

The plot of the film is totally preposterous, so accept that for what it is. We are, however, treated to a fine performance by Irish actor Liam Neeson, who has somehow been transformed over the years from a serious actor with serious roles to an action hero, albeit a good one. I know I sure didn’t see that coming when I watched him in the Steven Spielberg-directed Schindler’s List (1993).

Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler

By the turn of the millennium, however, one began to see how Neeson had transitioned to an action character, playing Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, the main character of the 1999 film Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. A few years later, in K-19: The Widowmaker, he appeared as the executive officer aboard a Soviet nuclear submarine involved in a disaster, and in Batman Begins (2005) he was arch-villain Ra’s al Ghul.

 

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Sean Spicer’s faux pas: a little historical context, please

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First of all, one can hardly call Sean Spicer the most effective White House Press Secretary: he lacks the one quality a spokesman for the President needs; namely, he is not articulate.  He bumbles and stumbles over his words to an extent I have not witnessed by previous press secretaries, who have been nothing if not slick and slippery in their repartee with journalists.  To give a concrete example, Spicer pronounces “nuclear” as “nucuIar” á la George W. Bush.  I sense that he is fluent in certain matters, such as the economy perhaps; but otherwise, he is an ill-fated choice for the job, a bad omen of sorts in the young Trump administration which is itself a mix of successes and confounding missteps.

That said, we should give Spicer some credit for referring to a relatively overlooked fact of World War II history —  that Hitler declined to use chemical weapons (in the context of warfare, to be very clear!).  Spicer doubtless thought that he had a sure winner with the media and political class: comparing anyone to Hitler is surely the ultimate insult in today’s intellectual and political climate. He probably didn’t think this one through very well, but what he was probably thinking was that World War II did not see poison gas being used in battle between armies as it was in the trench warfare of World War I. This clearly was an argumentum ad Hitlerum  that went terribly wrong.

Spicer made this point in trying to underline the dastardliness of Bashar al-Assad in his supposed use of chemical weapons “against his own people.”   “We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II,” Spicer explained, “You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

He was asked later in the press conference by a reporter to clarify his provocative comment, to which Spicer responded, “When it comes to sarin gas, [Hitler] was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing.”  Naturally, from the perspective of our MSM, this was a horrifyingly obtuse explanation.  One could infer from this that while Hitler used gas on Jews in the concentration camps, perhaps these after all were not “his own people”; and in that sense, we can say that Hitler did not drop chemical weapons on his domestic opponents in the manner that Assad is alleged to have done.   Read more

Adaptive Barbarism: Politics and Kinship in the Iliad, Part 2

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Shield of Achilles

Part 1 of “Adaptive Barbarism”

Patriotism: For Family and Fatherland

An attractive feature of the Trojans, however, is their patriotism. The Achaeans fight for loot, honor, and the glory of their names and families. The Trojans’ allies fight for gold. But the soldiers of the city of Troy itself are fighting to save their families and fatherland from a grim fate. When exhorting his troops to abandon their doubts and drive the Achaeans in the sea and burn their ships, Hector cries: “Fight for your country — that is the best, the only omen!” (12.281). This famous line was often cited by Greeks in later ages as a splendid sentiment, inspiring them to defend their cities even against overwhelming odds.

Hector later urges his comrades to fight and die for family and fatherland:

So fight by the ships, all together. And that comrade who meets his death and destiny, speared or stabbed, let him die! He dies fighting for fatherland — no dishonor there! He’ll leave behind him wife and sons unscathed, his honor and estate unharmed — once these Argives sail for home, the fatherland they love. (15.496)

As the last line suggests, while the Achaeans are fighting for glory and plunder rather than patriotism, they too are moved by a deep love and longing for their country and kinsmen far away.

Elsewhere, the soldier Glaucus shames his Trojan allies for giving ground instead of taking the corpse of Patroclus, Achilles’ dearest friend, with them: “If the Trojans had that courage, that unswerving courage that fires men who fight for their own country, beating their enemies down in war and struggle, then we could drag Patroclus back to Troy at once” (17.155). A Trojan later goads Achilles: “We have fighting men by the hundreds still inside her, forming a wall before our loving parents, wives, and sons to defend Troy — where you rush to meet your doom” (21.585).

Among the Trojans, the fate of family and country are one. There is a famous and touching scene of Hector with his wife and infant son, before battle, knowing full well their fate hangs in the balance. Homer shows us the intertwined fates of King Priam’s city and family by showing us, in graphic detail, the painful deaths of many of his sons in battle.

Familial and patriotic sentiment are not unknown to the Achaeans either, although this is less apparent in this expedition. Wise Nestor, in council, faults those who foment civil conflict as failing both family and nation: “Lost to the clan, lost to the hearth, lost to the old ways, that one who lusts for all the horrors of war with his own people” (9.65). Later, Nestor, “Achaea’s watch and ward,” sought to inspire the troops to fight by appealing to thoughts of their families:

Be men, my friends! Discipline fill your hearts, maintain your pride in the eyes of other men! Remember, each of you, sons, wives, wealth, parents — are mother and father dead or alive? No matter, I beg you for their sakes, loved ones far away — now stand and fight, no turning back, no panic. (15.660)

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Adaptive Barbarism: Politics and Kinship in the Iliad, Part 1

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The following article will appear as a chapter in an upcoming book on ethnopolitical thought in ancient Greece. Constructive criticisms and comments are therefore most welcome.

We know that every organism and every species is engaged in a ceaseless struggle for survival and reproduction. This is equally true of peoples: throughout history, those with the values and genes necessary to reproduce and triumph in war prospered, the rest have already perished. I believe this basic truth is reflected in what is perhaps the most ancient sacred text to come down to us in the Western tradition: Homer’s Iliad.

If Hesiod’s genealogy of the gods portrays the primordial sex and violence at the origin of the creation, the Iliad recounts the violence of love and war at the dawn of civilization. The poet tells of a terrible war involving sexual competition for the heart of beautiful Helen, and its inevitable tragedies. But the maudlin self-pity and effeminacy of our time is unknown to Homer: if tragedy is inevitable in the human experience, the poet’s role is to give meaning and beauty to the ordeal, and to inspire men to struggle for a glorious destiny.

Homer’s portrayal of “the great leveler, war” is by no means sugar-coated. The killings of over two hundred men are individually described, dying by having their brains splattered, bladders pierced, or innards slopping out. . . . By these and so many other ways, “the swirling dark” falls before the eyes of countless men. The Iliad immortalizes the Greek variant of a wider warrior ethos: that of the Indo-Europeans — traditionally known by the more poetic name, Aryans, which I shall use — who burst forth into Europe some four thousand years ago and conquered the indigenous hunter-gatherers and farmers. The Europeans have, ever since, been profoundly influenced by the genes, languages, and martial way of life of these peoples.

The heroic values of Homer are by our standards extremely harsh, even barbaric.[1] These values however, I will show, are supremely adaptive: values of conquest, community, competition, and kinship. These reflect the spirit of the Bronze Age with its countless forgotten wars between peoples. From an evolutionary point of view, these men embraced a high-risk, high-reward strategy, with winners in battle being rewarded with great wealth, honor, and women. Their boldness and prowess indeed remain imprinted on our very genes: scientists have found that half of Europeans descend from a single Bronze Age king.

The Iliad is also worth reading to understand the ancient Greeks and the values which they lived by to survive in the brutal world of the ancient Mediterranean. Indeed, Homer’s influence over Greek culture was enormous, akin to the Bible in medieval Europe. As Bernard Knox notes, the Greeks believed the Trojan War actually occurred and was central to their national identity:

But though we may have our doubts, the Greeks of historic times who knew and loved Homer’s poem had none. For them history began with a splendid Panhellenic expedition against an Eastern foe, led by kings and including contingents from all the more than one hundred and fifty places listed in the catalogue in Book 2. History began with a war.[2]

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Kevin MacDonald – Neocons to Remove Assad, Trump Buys the MSM Lie

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The War to End All Peace

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Today, 6 April 2017, marks the one hundredth anniversary of America’s entry into the First World War, probably the decisive factor in the eventual outcome of that war a year and a half later. Most schoolchildren, if they are taught anything at all about this event, hear it attributed to the German sinking of the Lusitania with American passengers aboard. Many do not know that the Lusitania was a British ship, that its sinking occurred nearly two years before our entry into the war, and that it was carrying a substantial amount of munitions, making it fair game under the laws of war. The existence of the munitions was only publicly acknowledged in 1982 after a salvage operation was announced; the British government finally admitted the truth, citing fear that explosives still inside the wreck might claim a few lives even yet.

Anti-German propaganda made much of the fact that the Lusitania was not a warship, but failed to mention that Britain had commonly disguised its warships to look like merchant ships and even to fly the flags of neutral nations. It was in response to such illegal practices that the German navy adopted a policy of treating any and all ships heading for Britain as potential enemy combatants. In the case of the Lusitania, the German Embassy in Washington even issued public warnings to potential travelers that if they sailed on any ships headed for Britain, they did so at their own risk.

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