What to read? (Part 2)

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Literature: Harold Covington

Let us leave aside the political plausibility or post-historical veracity of Covington’s novels dealing with the war of White independence at the beginning of the 21st century in the Pacific Northwest. What needs to be singled out in Covington’s prose is his language, his ability to construct both real and surreal plots, and above all his skill to administer a good dose of empathy with his diverse characters.

And indeed there is a whole gallery of diverse characters in his novels — from disfranchised poor Whites from the South who were once victims of positive discrimination and who have now landed in the embattled Northwest, to ritzy and sold-out WASP politicians in DC, vying to be more Jewish than the Jews themselves. Each of his numerous characters is carefully situated in his own timeframe, each carrying his own clusters of conflicting memories, often haunting him for the rest of his life. Covington, as much as he dissects the mindset of his warring heroes does not just examine their self-proclaimed racial awareness, but focuses instead on their historical consciousness. The reader won’t find characters blaring “White power!” or sporting swastikas, or endlessly debating about the ominous Jews. The frequent monologues by his characters bear witness that their individual memories are seldom sweet. Even in a pristine environment of the Northwest Republic, residents are immersed in their own Shakespearean dilemmas of being vs. not being. In most cases the racial awareness of Covington’s characters is coupled with their reminiscences of the haunting times of bygone eras. Thus, in his latest novel Freedom’s Sons  depicting the nascent Northwest Republic, we come across a man who serves as one of the chiefs of the Northwest secret police. But this man has also a past; he is not just an empty White slate. His grandparents, back in the mid-20th century had fled communist Czechoslovakia and settled in the city of Chicago – only to discover another form of paleo-communist aka liberal insanity. Their progeny, the future settlers in the Northwest, realized that in the land of the free and the home of the brave, they were not just subjects to the terror of affirmative action, but also victims of serial burglaries and rampant Black crime. Finally, after much procrastination they decided to move to the Northwest, encountering on their way both physical and psychological roadblocks which in many ways reflected the predicaments they had once encountered in communist Europe. Read more

What to read, Part 1

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There is no such thing as rightwing vs. leftwing literature. There is only bad literature vs. good literature, with the definition of goodness vs. badness resulting from one’s own implicit cultural and racial baggage. For more than a half century, teachers and scholars have used public and academic discourse quite in line with the egalitarian White-hating dogmas, and reading lists for their students were constructed on the basis of those dogmas. Important novelists, key social scientists, and authors   suspected of writing prose that goes against the stream of dominant political ideas, have either been swept aside or removed from the reading list. Their books, if ever mentioned, receive a critical, criminalizing, downgrading, or caricatured interpretation. Worse, if some of them trespass over the historiographic lines of self-censored behavior, as is the case with historical revisionists in Europe and the USA, they may lose a job or land in prison.

1. Literature: Homer and the Tragic

One can tell the author’s identity by his style and narrative. At the beginning of his autodidactic voyage, a young student should avoid authors whose style and syntax are boring, or whose main theme is difficult to grasp. A White student in the humanities should start with easy-reading classics first, such as Homer and the equally easy texts of fairy tales. Great writers love clarity of expression and do not hide their towering egos behind dangling sentences and obscure lingo. This is unfortunately not always the case with some prominent racialist and traditionalist scholars, especially in the field of social science. Many good social scientists often do not know how to frame their important ideas into simple language. Hence, it’s necessary for a student to read the classics first. Read more

Is the purge at National Review complete? John O’Sullivan may be next

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It ain’t over at National Review. The guillotine may get another victim besides John Derbyshire and Robert Weissberg.

Yesterday the metrosexual lefty blogger from Salon, Alex Pareene, outed yet another long-time NR figure, John O’Sullivan, in one of his “Clean out the racists!” posts. He denounced O’Sullivan as the editor of NR when it was strongly against mass non-White immigration back in the 90s, and employed Peter Brimelow to write on the subject. O’Sullivan was also the editor when NR defended The Bell Curve and other research showing racial differences in IQ. (O’Sullivan was eventually demoted to “editor at large” by William Buckley when Buckley decided to open NR to more liberal views.) Pareene also condemned O’Sullivan as a former board member at VDARE.com, which published “extremist white nationalists” like Jared Taylor and Sam Francis, and for the other high crimes and misdemeanors you might expect.

It’s hard to expunge white nationalist racism from respectable conservatism when some of the most respectable of conservatives dabble in white nationalist racism. John Derbyshire, accomplished as he was, was just a contributor to the National Review. John O’Sullivan is a former editor of the National Review, a current “editor-at-large,” a fellow at the Hudson Institute, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher, and Commander of the British Empire. He’s also on the board of directors at the foundation that publishes VDARE, the nativist site listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

(Snip)

O’Sullivan was demoted from editorship by National Review ouster-in-chief William F. Buckley during a 1997 purge of Peter Brimelow, a virulent anti-immigration writer (and English immigrant) O’Sullivan championed who went on to found VDARE. VDARE has published a wide variety of extremist white nationalists, like Jared Taylor and Sam Francis.

O’Sullivan is still on the masthead at the National Review, and he was published defending Derbyshire at length at NRO a few days ago.

(Snip)

Yes, “anti-white racism” is obviously a huge and growing threat in our corporate executive suites, as any glance at the Fortune 500 will demonstrate.

Having allowed that Derbyshire’s piece was sloppy and a bit racist, O’Sullivan goes on to defend each point anyway. Sure, Derbyshire believes that black people are innately criminal and stupid, but is that really a fireable offense? He might be right!

After half-purging O’Sullivan more than a decade ago, what possible reason is there to keep him around to embarrassingly defend his more explicitly awful colleagues? Especially while he’s working with the wackos at VDARE. Read more

How to read

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It is far easier to reflect on the art of dating than on the art of reading. For a student in humanities the main concern must not be which author he needs to read and which one he needs to discard, but rather how to read and how to interpret the text. Before he flips open a book he must ask himself a question: Who will interpret this text? Over the last several decades the focus in the humanities has not been so much the substance of the author’s work, but rather the biased interpretation of his work. The egalitarian-multicultural “paradigm” in higher education still determines how an author is studied — and hence how he is being interpreted. Here is an example: Johan W. Goethe, the German classic writer of the late 18th and early 19th century had a glowing reception in literary circles in National–Socialist Germany, a glowing reception in the postwar Allied-occupied West Germany, and a glowing one during the same period of time in the Soviet-occupied East Germany. Each political regime interpreted Goethe’s texts in accordance with the dominant political ideas of the time. The same rule of (re)interpretation applies to all authors, regardless whether they are novelists, social scientists or legal scholars.

The Frankfurt School Program in Applied Brainwashing

For many White activists, or would-be college students in humanities, it is still hard to comprehend that since the fateful 1945 the academic program in the West has been subject to a drastic methodological overhaul, which in turn resulted in gigantic brainwashing of students. The steady removal of hundreds of politically incorrect titles from library shelves on the one hand and a radically new interpretation of the classics on the other, only added insult to injury. The notion of just vs. unjust, of beauty vs. ugliness, of crook vs. hero, of truth vs. lie, has been reversed, or rather, the meaning of those words changed in accordance with the dominant leftist-liberal aka “multicultural” teaching philosophy. Very early on, largely as a result of the Frankfurt School Program in Applied Brainwashing, the System managed to conflate the notion of academic integrity with the notion of “humanism.” Any attempt by critically minded professors to examine authors lying beyond the pale of the standard curriculum, was immediately branded as a criminal, fascist enterprise, worthy of penal sanctions, loss of tenure, and academic ostracism. Read more

Advice from my grandmother

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There is a lot of talk about ‘the talk’ in the media, in all shapes and colors. And it got me thinking. See, I never got any talk from my parents, but after reading several articles on the recent John Derbyshire affair, I suddenly recalled some things my grandmother had taught me when I was very young—so young in fact that I don’t even remember being told this or that for the first time. For example, that I should never talk to a stranger.

My grandmother was born well before the Russian Revolution, and as an adult, she managed to survive the major historical upheavals such as the WWI, the change of the regime, the collectivization, the siege of Leningrad, the Red terror, the Stalinist terror before and after the war, the Cold War period, and the rest of the Soviet reality, until her death at the venerable age of 90. I still remember her as a good old grandma but, being a kid, I could hardly appreciated the considerable survival skills that kept her and her family alive, out of prison as well as could be expected all through the troubled years of modern Russian history. Although she was poisonously contemptuous towards all things Soviet (her favorite nickname for V. I. Lenin was “the Antichrist”), she had realistic attitudes through her entire life. What she tried to instill in me also, ever since I was three years old, was certain norms of behavior that, as I realize now, were the basic rules of survival. How well they served me later in life! Obviously, those rules were survival strategies in an age of anarchy, wars, a totalitarian regime and finally multiculturalism with its abundance of crime, dirt and diseases. So here it is — some advice from my grandmother. And since her wisdom was simple and commonsensical, I didn’t even need Bill Ayers’ help in writing it.

Who would’ve thought her advice would be so painfully applicable in contemporary multicultural, PC-vigilant US of America? Read more

Valentin Rasputin’s Crusade

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Valentin Rasputin

With the passing of the great Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), the no less great, though in a different genre, Valentin Rasputin (b. 1937), assumed the mantle of doyen of the Russian literary scene. Whereas Solzhenitsyn wrote monumental tomes about festering political issues in Russia (Gulag, Revolution, Jews) and gained international fame thereby, Rasputin, a son and guardian of Siberia, gained his initial recognition mostly from his finely executed, almost precious novellas about life in his homeland and the ruin the Communist government was inflicting on it.

While the differences in style and subject matter between Solzhenitsyn and Rasputin are obvious, the bonds of similarity that immediately identify them as Russian writers are less so. Russian literary figures have religiously followed the tradition of earlier Russian literary figures like Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Bunin in seeing the role of the writer not as an entertainer or propagandist but as a kind of culture-bearer, a teacher, a conscience, and always a patriot — not in the sense of a chauvinist but rather as one who loves his country and its people. Such literary giants therefore help forge “a spiritual commonality” with their readers and give them “moral direction.” To fail to do this would be considered a betrayal of a sacred trust.[1]

The principles of Orthodox Christianity are most evident in the lives of both Solzhenitsyn and Rasputin. Rasputin, for example, was baptized by an Orthodox priest in 1980, when the Communist government was still in power. Both the writings of Solzhenitsyn and Rasputin are suffused with not only a sense of civic responsibility but with an overriding moral concern as well. Just as the Orthodox Church keeps alive and treasures everything in its past history, both Solzhenitsyn and Rasputin reach into older Russian writings to retrieve and reuse words and expressions that might have fallen into disuse. Both writers also studied ancient Russian folklore. Both were literary crusaders. Read more

What’s up with Alex Jones?

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How fortuitous.  Just the other day I had resolved to write about radio show host Alex Jones on this blog. He’s the hyper-provocative host of Infowars.com/PrisonPlanet. I’ve only recently begun listening to his broadcasts and am stunned at what he’s getting away with.

Because I respect the background knowledge that so many TOO readers have exhibited, I intended my blog as an appeal for opinions and background on Jones.

Now Kevin MacDonald’s latest posting on Glenn Beck’s implicit anti-Semitism (National Review Fires Derbyshire) provides the perfect framework for my appeal. To wit: Is Alex Jones peddling anti-Semitism?

Let me explain.

I’ve long understood MacDonald’s discussions on implicit Whiteness, as I’m sure most readers have, too. MacDonald ties that to the recent spate of firings of media people who have made implicit appeals to White interests. He then adds:

However, appealing to implicit Whiteness, implicit race realism, and implicit anti-Semitism translates to good ratings, so we will continue to see this sort of programming directed at White audiences—programming that feeds into their very legitimate fears, frustrations, and anxieties, not only about the current state of affairs but also about their future in a society where Whites are no longer the majority.

MacDonald’s article is based on Richard Spencer’s comments  on the Derbyshire affair which include some very clear examples of implicit race realism:

The Blaze and Breitbart (Beck’s and Breitbart’s answers to the Huffington Post) have filled their webpages with salacious stories of various flash-mob attacks and general Black misbehavior. As I write (Sunday, April 8), the top story on The Blaze is about the New Black Panther Party’s call for a “race war.”

On the same night that Breitbart declared John Derbyshire to be a non-person for talking about the dangers of Blacks, its best-read story was one on a unsuspecting White Man who ventured into Black Baltimore and was attacked and stripped of all clothes and possession by a feral gang.

Refining it further, Spencer writes, “The new wave of conservatives, represented by Breitbart and Beck, have peddled implicit racism; they’ve made a great deal of money off implicit racism. But the trick only works if they shun and condemn anything approaching actual White Nationalism.” Read more