Anarcho-Tyranny Strikes Again in Scandinavia

For many decades following World War Two, Sweden was presented to an impressed but gullible world as the very model of a safe, tolerant, liberal, progressive, welfare-state paradise. Now, it seems to many outsiders like myself to have become much more of an unsafe, unfree, intolerant, intolerable, failed-state dystopia instead.

Granny, Get Your Gun

A harmless 80-year-old Swedish woman is currently being prosecuted for illegal weapons possession after a long-forgotten antique hunting rifle she had borrowed from a shooting club and failed to return for some reason was found locked away in a sealed storage unit dating back to the 1960s when it was being cleared out. No license was needed for such things back then, so the woman was committing no offence whatsoever when she shut it away. However, as the item still works, by absent-mindedly failing to apply for a permit in the interim, she has technically now been rendered a massive gun-criminal. Common sense would dictate the Swedish state should just have thrown this whole issue aside without any comment or censure. But common sense no longer applies in the deliberately ruined legal systems of the contemporary West.

The whole debacle has raised the question of whether or not the senior will receive a jail term. If so, as the crime of possessing an unlicensed firearm carries with it a potential punishment of five years, it is a safe bet the Swedish state would essentially be sentencing the pensioner-prisoner to die in despair behind bars.

No such worries for the 13-year-old “Swedish” (or, more probably, “Swedish from a migrant background”) boy apprehended for shooting six people in the town of Gävle with a rather more consciously illegally acquired firearm during the very same week the 80-year-old gangsta granny was reported as being questioned by police. The boy will not be tried as an adult, even though facing charges of attempted murder, so is most unlikely to spend the rest of his (regrettably) rather longer remaining lifespan rotting away inside a Swedish cell. Instead, said early reports, “It is unclear whether he will be kept in custody” at all, despite being an alleged gunman.

Moves are afoot to lower Sweden’s age of criminal responsibility from the current age of 15 to 13, and begin incarcerating minors, but this will surely come too soon to treat the bullet-happy teen from Gävle in this fashion. And many malevolent forces in society don’t want this measure to happen at all. Even in spite of the currently unfolding immigration-fueled national adolescent crimewave, still liberal do-gooders from left-wing organizations like Sweden’s Children’s Rights in Society (BRIS) warn that the proposed move “could backfire, pushing gangs to recruit even younger children.”

Presumably there’s a limit to how young they can go? Once Sweden’s babies begin killing people, we will know the country really has been successfully third worldificated by mass immigration.

Political Vehicle

Being both legally a child and, most probably, an ethnic minority one, the accused from Gävle is much more likely to be treated as a victim than as a criminal. And that is a deliberate ruling-class policy decision. As many readers will know, the phenomenon is called anarcho-tyranny, a term coined by the writer Sam Francis, and it has been a widespread strategy across Sweden—and wider Europe and North America—for many years now. Most present Western governments hate their own people, and love their intended outside replacements, and it should be no surprise today’s criminal justice system reflects this fact accordingly.

Chosen randomly from amongst innumerable others, we have the German girl sent to prison for calling a foreign gang-rapist a “pig” and a “disgusting freak” online, whereas the foreign gang-rapist himself emerged without any jail time whatsoever. Or the father in England who says he was thrown into a cell by police for daring try to rescue his daughter from a Muslim rape-den. Also in Britain, there was the recent case of a former Muslim charged with hate-crimes offenses for burning a Koran, whilst the Muslim who consequently attempted to stab him to death for “blasphemy” was let off with a non-custodial sentence by a judge on the grounds the initial book-burning must have quite naturally caused him to have “lost his temper”, a classic case of two-tier justice in the land of Two-Tier Keir if ever there was one.

Within Sweden itself, an absolutely classic illustration came as far back as 2013, during a prolonged outbreak of rioting and arson in the capital Stockholm over the course of several nights, mainly at the hands of yet more imported non-Swedish youths whom the state strangely chose to hardly bother arresting. As the youths also torched police stations, maybe there was just nowhere available left to hold them?

Stockholm’s then-Chief of Police, Mats Löfving, openly explained his force’s distinctly stand-offish tactics to Swedish newspaper Expressen at the time as follows: “Our ambition is really to do as little as possible.” Mission achieved! And so Stockholm burned, in particular its cars, with Löfving more than happy to stand there and idly warm his hands by their exploding engine-flames:

We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait. If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.

Except by the cars’ angry owners, perhaps. But then, the cars’ owners were likely to be ordinary law-abiding citizens, rather than angry violent immigrant mobs, and thus rather easier to simply ignore: or, indeed, to actively police into oblivion. Out surveying the destruction one morning, a reporter from Swedish news outlet Fria Tider —often identified as a far-right “junk news” outlet, which probably means you can trust it—was astonished to see a traffic warden from local parking company P-Service issuing a fine to a burnt-out vehicle with a smashed windscreen and severe internal fire damage but, crucially, a still-legible license plate.

That the car was now clearly undrivable was “irrelevant”, according to the warden. The vehicle lacked the necessary permit-paper on display proving its parking had been paid for—probably because it had just been burnt to cinders by a petrol-bomb—so the letter of the law said the owner had to be punished by the courts without fail. Petty rules had been broken, and the usually law-abiding citizen must be forced to pay for this fact, whilst non-petty rules being broken, like an immigrant setting the car on fire in the first place, were evidently far less worthy of immediate enforcement.

The photograph of this event taken by the Fria Tider reporter really does say a thousand words. If you had asked AI to generate an image emblematic of precisely how European race-based anarcho-tyranny looks in action, the dangerous online disinformation-spewing picture-bot couldn’t have done any better than this.

Stockholm Syndrome

An even worse manifestation of anarcho-tyranny is when someone law-abiding has a serious crime committed against them by a privileged state-protected “victim” group, and then ends up being arrested and punished themselves, merely for complaining about the fact.

The classic example within a Swedish context occurred in 2016, when a 65-year-old pensioner, Christina Nilsson Öberg, who had foolishly ventured outside without packing her illegal 100-year-old hunting rifle, was beaten, hospitalized and mugged by a gang of youths during a bicycle ride. Unfortunately, the youths happened to be non-white Afghans, not white Swedes, so the police closed the case without prosecting anyone and apprehended Öberg for subsequently complaining about this sad chain of events online.

Calling the robbers “black mold” and “beardless youths”, besides asking for their deportation, Öberg had no idea her Facebook page was being secretly monitored by an online Stasi-style thought-police spying operation called Näthatsgranskaren (Net Hate Examiner), who make it their business to seek out the social media pages of people who have suffered crimes at the hands of Mohammedans and then make sure they dare not tell anyone the truth about the fact.

The Swedish police may not have been able to apprehend the Afghan robbers, but handcuffing a 66-year-old who had typed the highly offensive word “beardless” about a Muslim was an altogether easier case to crack, with Öberg’s phone and iPad being seized as evidence, her home being searched, the old woman being interrogated, and a lengthy 200-page report on her activities being compiled as a “preliminary investigation”. Öberg had the presence of mind to claim it was not her who had typed the offending comments, however, but someone else unknown and unnamed with access to her accounts, so a doubtless highly disappointed judge felt he had to let her off, the “crime” being thereby technically non-attributable.

However, unlike with the actual mugging, dogged hate-crime investigators did not give up the trail and, sometime later, Öberg was summoned to appear before an appeals court, where she says she was sentenced to three months in jail on eight separate counts (i.e., eight separate Facebook comments) of “committing hardship against an ethnic group”. The Swedish government should have been sentenced themselves for committing an exactly similar crime against their own people.

Öberg’s later account of her imprisonment amongst drug-addicts and other actual criminals was harrowing indeed:

We have a sick legal system in Sweden, it is the truth [i.e., the innocent] that should be rewarded and it is evil [i.e., the guilty] that should be punished … [Non-white prisoners] bullied me because [the state said] I was a RACIST. They hit me into a pole, so my teeth broke out … I was denied help with my teeth by the correctional services, they had made up a lie and I was not allowed to appeal. However, could I sue the state??? If I had been from Afghanistan, I would never have been imprisoned, and I would have obviously received my compensation without having to fight for it. I am Swedish, I have no value in my own country. Seeing how Sweden is being crushed day by day because of incompetent people who should be locked up, how much should WE Swedes tolerate?? I can’t stand it anymore, we live in a war-zone where foreign criminals set the rules.

No, Europeans today live in a war-zone where white-hating anarcho-tyrants in government set the rules, the foreign criminals are just the fortunate ones who happen to benefit from the whole fact.

Sweden, a model for the world? More like a model for the end of it.

Steven Tucker
https://counter-currents.com/2025/10/anarcho-tyranny-strikes-again-in-scandinavia/

Respect has its origins in fear

On Respect Between the Sexes

We live in an age when ordinary standards of civility have collapsed yet somehow there is universal agreement that even morons and criminals deserve to be treated with “respect.” We are urged to extend respect even to other species and the planet as a whole. Sometimes self-respect is enjoined upon us. Within my experience, the most common such injunction is addressed to men, who exhorted ad nauseam to respect women. It would be a bold fellow indeed who presumed to disagree. When was the last time you heard anyone suggest that men ought to hold women in contempt?

In fact, it took me several decades of living in this world before I realized that I had never once heard anyone speak of the desirability of having respect flow in the opposite direction as well. But shouldn’t we want to see mutual respect between the sexes? And is it reasonable to expect male respect for women never to falter in the absence of any reciprocity?

Talk of the respect men owe to women is not exactly new, either. In Victorian Britain, land of old-fashioned gallantry, one sometimes heard references to “the respect due to a lady.” But a closer look reveals that respect was not always their due. For example, I recall reading an anecdote from that era concerning a woman who was successfully prosecuted for cruelty to animals. In reporting on the case, a newspaper remarked that the defendant had “forfeited the respect due to her sex.” In other words, she was rightly punished for her actions as any man would have been.

(...)

Strictly speaking, “the respect due to a lady” is an inaccurate figure of speech. The merely biological fact of having been born female clearly does not entitle anyone to respect. What the Victorians really meant was that every woman should enjoy a presumption of respectability—i.e., should be treated with respect “on credit,” as it were—unless and until her behavior proved her unworthy. A sexual indiscretion was one important way in which a woman could lose respectability, of course, but there were others. Savagely flogging a defenseless horse is not ladylike, as that Victorian newspaper reporter correctly perceived.

In other words, respect in the proper sense must be earned by one’s behavior. A presumption of respectability is a mere point of courtesy, and may apply to men as well. Demands for universal respect are in part symptomatic of a decline in conceptual clarity, specifically, a growing inability to distinguish between genuine respect and mere civility.

Perhaps the advocates of “respecting women” assume any fellow deserving the slightest regard from the ladies can be certain of getting it in full. But I am not so sure. Women have participated in the general decline in civility characteristic of our time. They swear and tell dirty jokes as only sailors used to do, and even saying “please” and “thank you” may be too much to expect from some of them. I have on occasion been simply shocked at the rudeness I have observed women practice both toward myself and to other men, and I have heard other men make similar observations. This is less likely to be a response to male unworthiness than a failure to socialize our daughters properly. They might have benefitted from being taught early in life by some authority figure such as their parents that women should treat men with some minimal degree of civility. This ought to be possible, for women have clearly internalized the message that men owe them unlimited respect with marvelous success.

If we want to consider the matter of respect between the sexes thoroughly, we must start our inquiry from the beginning, and that means asking where the phenomenon we call respect comes from. This question comes under the heading of what the philosopher Nietzsche called the “genealogy of morals.” For respect is a moral idea and found in many forms, from the crudest to the most refined. Yet its origins are best grasped not in the highly civilized and ceremonious forms of etiquette which might be found (for example) at a royal court, but precisely at the very lowest and crudest levels of human existence.

If the reader wishes to go where he may hear respect discussed most frequently and with the greatest possible sense of practical urgency, I recommend he visit a maximum-security prison. Inmates obsess over the “respect” they believe themselves owed by others, and are beside themselves with rage when they do not get it. Wardens must run a tight ship to prevent mutual demands for respect from boiling over into deadly riots.

It does not take an intelligent observer very long to realize that what jailbirds mean by respect is simply that other people should be afraid of them. At its most basic and primitive level, respect is fear, specifically the fear of physical violence or death. At the dawn of human history, and even earlier in primate bands, life was harsh and unpredictable. A victim of aggression could not simply call up the police to enforce laws or attorneys and judges to regulate disputes. To avoid being victimized by others, it was useful to respond as aggressively as possible to any threat. Even today, after many centuries of civilization, social environments like this can still be found. Think of playgrounds with insufficient adult supervision, or urban slums—and most especially in the prisons where so many slum-dwelling “badasses” end up. Such men will be happy to regale you with plenty of talk about respect, but they never mean by it anything much going beyond the sheer physical fear they wish to arouse in others so as not to be victimized by them.

(...)

This origin in the fear aroused by others’ power to harm us explains why we still teach children respect, as well as good behavior more generally, through punishment. It is what first teaches the child to respect its parents, then gradually to respect their wishes, and finally (in the most successful cases) to internalize the principles the parents mean to inculcate through the punishment. A whole history of human moral development, whether in the individual or the race, might be written as the narration of such a process of increasingly refined and internalized discipline. But the beginning of moral education lies in fear; and since the world in a sense begins anew every time a child is born, fear can never be dispensed with entirely.

Just as human coexistence and religious worship took a cruder form in primitive societies from what can be observed today, so relations between the sexes were probably not originally marked by any very ennobling conception of male gallantry or female decorum, nor by any very demanding sense of honor in either sex. Many still-observable sex differences are traceable to the sheer fact that men are on average a good deal bigger and stronger than women, so much so that the average man is physically capable of killing the average woman with his bare hands. In a state of savagery, a man can get sex or anything else he happens to want from a woman (e.g., foodstuffs) simply by using force. He can also seriously harm or kill her out of mere anger.

Such male behavior is, of course, sternly punished by law in all civilized societies. But the danger of rape or other violence from uncivilized men must have had at least one positive consequence: primitive women probably respected men in the original sense of the term, viz., by being afraid of them. If they pressed a man too far, they might find themselves in serious danger. This set some limits upon how bad their behavior could get. In a shameless feminist girlboss society of “liberated” females, there really are not many such limits.

And it is not as if women had no means of countering male violence, real or merely threatened. Most of female psychology comes from their evolved ability to get what they want without using force. Women attain their ends using lies, deceit, scheming, manipulation, backbiting, innuendo, and a whole arsenal of ugly tricks whose only common denominator is an avoidance of direct confrontation and force such as would correctly be described as “unmanly” if practiced by a male. The battle of the sexes, in other words, is a battle between force and cunning, and as in other contexts, cunning usually proves more effective.

Even in civilized societies, men continue to oppose force to cunning in dealing with women, but the force is generally that of law rather than their fists. Traditional European marriage law, for example, granted primary custody of children to their father. As Hobbes saw, there was nothing natural or necessary about this:

If there be no contract, the dominion is in the mother. For in the condition of mere nature, where there are no matrimonial laws, it cannot be known who is the father unless it be declared by the mother. And therefore the right of dominion over the child dependeth upon her will, and is consequently hers. (Leviathan I:20)

Paternal investment in offspring is very rare even in the great apes which are our closest evolutionary cousins, probably because apes do not grasp the causal connection between mating and reproduction. Fatherhood in more than the bare biological sense is not a fact of nature but created by the laws of matrimony, established once primitive men discovered their own contribution to reproduction. It was quickly found that men would invest heavily in children if they could be certain the children were theirs. Marriage began as a male invention designed to give them paternity confidence.

We may be sure women objected to the idea of lifelong marriage when it was first introduced, for it meant they could not longer mate as they pleased. In practice, this meant mating exclusively with high-status men: in primitive hunter-gatherer bands, sixty percent of men fail to reproduce. Marriage allows more men to become fathers, but also means that some girls get stuck with low-status “losers.” Men were stronger, however, and carried their point, creating the patriarchal, male-headed family.

Eventually women themselves became the biggest champions of the institution of marriage—they have always been the more impressionable sex—whereas men more frequently sought to expand their reproductive potential with extramarital escapades. But we must not be deceived into thinking this familiar situation is how things began. As Nietzsche understood, the origins of moral institutions often bear little resemblance to the behavior observed in more civilized eras and societies. Marriage was almost certainly invented by men in response to their discovery of fatherhood. Its advantages over instinctive Darwinian mating must have quickly become apparent. Perhaps the best testament to the institution’s success is the ease with which later generations of men were brought to believe their women “naturally monogamous.”

We may hope that the force of law and social shaming were used more frequently than husbands’ fists in inculcating marital fidelity upon those first wives, but as we have already pointed out, force of some kind cannot be dispensed with. It is how respect first arises, and is the original instrument of moral training, whether of the child or of the human race as a whole.

And in primitive societies that do not enforce monogamy, men as a group do not enjoy a great deal of respect from women. I once attended a lecture by the late anthropologist Henry Harpending, who spent much time with the bushmen of the Kalahari. He reported that women in bushman society commonly regard the men as silly creatures. Most of the time they seem to wish the men would just go away and leave them alone.

It struck me upon hearing this that Dr. Harpending need not have travelled all the way to the deserts of Namibia to observe such a society. We Americans have been instructed for several decades now that women can do everything men can do. Their professional careers can be just as successful and lucrative provided only they are not “discriminated against”—and any failure of work to be lucrative and “fulfilling” for them is proof of such discrimination. Lesbianism is a perfectly legitimate alternative to marriage, and it is a moral outrage if such women are not allowed to adopt or conceive through artificial insemination. Women have a right to divorce their husbands for any reason or for no reason at all, and are not to be criticized for separating their children from their father, who is merely an optional add-on and not a necessary part of the family. In short, as we’ve been told, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. And the thanks men get for stoically putting up with all of this—they have not, after all, had much choice—is to be portrayed as “abusers” by feminists with masochistic fantasies!

Declining phases of civilization are marked by a recrudescence of the primitive. The “women’s liberation” movement has in effect made the ways of some of the most backward peoples known to anthropology into an ideal which our own society is condemned for failing to match. But our failure has not been for any lack of trying. Radical changes in marital and employment law over the past several decades have been motivated by a determination to render men superfluous (although this has often been done by increasing women’s dependence upon the state, i.e., upon men as a faceless collective). The result is a society in which women regard men as a kind of optional economic resource and occasional sperm donor. Why depend upon a husband to provide for you when a “family” court can simply extract resources from him by force? It is impossible that women should continue to respect men under such circumstances.

Samuel Johnson wrote: “Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.” This is correct. The tendency of law in traditionally arranged Western societies has been to make up for the natural advantages women enjoy in the battle of the sexes. Reforming the laws to increase women’s natural power rather than mitigating it results in an unworkable imbalance. When we take from men the possibility of using the force of law and institutions against women, yet leave women their full powers of sexual attraction and cunning, we get not equality but female despotism. And there are no grounds for hoping that women will prove an exception to the rule that power corrupts. “Liberated” women simply run roughshod over their own families and society as a whole.

I cannot furnish the objective data I might which for in this matter, but I do catch wind of relevant anecdotes, such as the wife who starts filling out divorce papers any time her husband does not let her have her way. Knowing what would be in store for himself and his children, the unfortunate husband simply gives in every time.

It would be hard to exaggerate how unnatural and unhealthy such a relationship is. It is difficult to imagine likely that even the woman herself is happy with it. Normal women want to respect their husbands, but are unable to do so as long as they are permitted to wield arbitrary power over them. Most men also sincerely enjoy gratifying their wives’ wishes where possible, but this cannot mean submitting to their commands under threat of being hauled into divorce court.

As Johnson seems to have perceived, manhood relies on the force of law in a way that femininity does not (at least assuming men do not want to go back to simply using their fists). Respect between the sexes can be re-established, but not by mindlessly exhorting women to it, as is now done with men. The laws governing work and family must be restored to something like their former state, returning to men their ability to support a wife and children as well as the proper legal authority that goes with this role. In effect, men get respect from women by demanding it. It would, admittedly, be nice if women could learn to respect men out of sheer recognition of the goodness of our hearts, but this is simply not how respect works. Respect has its origins in fear, just as all authority relies ultimately upon force.

Women who accept the traditional conditions of marriage and fulfill their duties as wives and mothers to the best of their abilities will most often find themselves enjoying the respect of their men. If and when that happens, perhaps we will finally cease to be deafened by female demands for “respect.

F. Roger Devlin
https://counter-currents.com/2025/10/on-respect-between-the-sexes/

How Rabid Zionism Split the Libertarian World

 Like archaeologists uncovering layers of forgotten civilizations, the Block-Hoppe schism reveals that beneath every high-minded intellectual movement lies the bedrock of tribal identity, waiting to reassert itself when abstract principles collide with the eternal reality of us versus them.

The quiet corridors of libertarian academia echoed with a familiar tension. Beneath the polished language of universal principles, old loyalties and invisible borders stirred once more. What seemed like an argument over ideas was, at its core, a reckoning of identities no theory could contain.

The recent falling out between economist Walter Block and the Ludwig von Mises Institute was not a routine dispute over doctrine. It revealed something far deeper, a reminder that even among those who preach the supremacy of logic and liberty, human nature resists the purity of abstraction. Intellectual movements, however rational they may appear, remain vulnerable to the same ethnic and cultural divisions that have divided men for centuries.

Walter Edward Block embodied this paradox. He emerged from the intellectual heart of Brooklyn’s Jewish community, a world where fierce debate was a form of devotion. Born in 1941 to Abraham and Ruth Block, he began as a socialist idealist and evolved into one of the most uncompromising defenders of anarcho-capitalism.

Block’s conversion began with an encounter that would shape the trajectory of libertarian thought. Attending an Ayn Rand lecture as an undergraduate, followed by meetings with Nathaniel Branden and Leonard Peikoff, he eventually found his intellectual home under Murray Rothbard’s mentorship. This progression from Objectivism to Austrian economics positioned Block as one of the rising Jewish voices in the Austrian school.

His 1976 masterwork Defending the Undefendable established Block as libertarianism’s most provocative voice, willing to defend society’s most marginal figures—prostitutes, blackmailers, and drug dealers— through the rigorous application of property rights theory. The book’s central thesis separated economic analysis from moral judgment, creating a framework that embodied Block’s Jewish character of challenging gentile norms wherever possible.

With over two dozen books and more than 700 scholarly articles, Block constructed an intellectual empire spanning road privatization, water capitalism, and space economics. His positions at institutions such as Baruch College, Holy Cross, and Loyola University New Orleans provided platforms for developing anarcho-capitalism while maintaining respectability within academic circles. Yet beneath this impressive scholarly output lay dormant ethnic loyalties that would eventually surface with explosive consequences.

The October Revelation: Block’s Zionist Awakening

The October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks triggered an ethnic awakening within Block that betrayed his libertarian commitment to non-aggression and a non-interventionist foreign policy. In his Wall Street Journal op-ed he penned with Argentine economist Alan Futerman “The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas,” Block revealed convictions that had apparently been gestating beneath his libertarian exterior for years.

His call for “total, unrestrictive support” for Israel represented a complete abandonment of libertarian non-interventionism. Block argued that “Hamas needs to be destroyed for the same reason and by the same method that the Nazis were,” explicitly comparing the conflict to World War II’s total war paradigm. This was not merely policy disagreement but a fundamental rejection of the non-aggression principle that forms libertarianism’s cornerstone.

More dramatically, Block’s “Open Letter to the Children of Gaza” revealed depths of ethnic passion that stunned even his closest associates. Addressing Palestinian children directly, he declared that “your parents launched a despicable, unwarranted attack on October 7” while conveniently overlooking the long history of Jewish expropriation of Palestinian lands dating back to the 1880s—a campaign of extermination that the United States government has fully endorsed through its ongoing flow of military aid, economic support, and diplomatic cover. And of course, he didn’t mention Israel’s oppressive control over Gaza—making Gaza into an open-air prison. Who could live like that?

These positions revealed Block not as a consistent libertarian applying universal principles, but as a Jewish intellectual whose ethnic solidarity ultimately trumped philosophical commitments when forced to choose between abstract theory and tribal loyalty.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The Libertarian Contrarian Who Stood Up to Block
Standing in stark opposition to Block’s ethnic particularism was Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a German-born philosopher whose contrarian positions place him at odds with virtually every aspect of 20th-century political consensus. Hoppe’s intellectual journey from German academia to American libertarianism produced the most radical critique of democratic governance within the movement, making him perhaps libertarianism’s most polemical voice.

Block’s Wall Street Journal essay, coupled with his longer-running claim that Jewish homesteading and inheritance justify Israel’s territorial rights, put him sharply at odds with libertarians who ground foreign-policy ethics in the non-aggression principle (NAP).

Hoppe answered with a public severing of ties. In his “Open Letter to Walter E. Block,” he charged that Block had revealed himself as “an unhinged, bloodthirsty monster” and that the stance amounted to “a complete and uninhibited rejection and renunciation of the non-aggression principle.” Hoppe’s critique went beyond rhetoric. He proclaimed that Block’s position endorsed collective guilt and “indiscriminate slaughter of innocents,” abandoning methodological individualism.

Institutionally, the fallout was swift and decisive. By 2024, Block was no longer listed as a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, and access to much of his archival writing on affiliated platforms was curtailed. Although not fired in a formal employment sense, his long association with the Institute had effectively ended. Block, for his part, framed his stance as consistent with libertarian property theory and Jewish tradition.

Rather than a purely ideological statement, Block’s pro-Zionist outburst appears to mark an ethnic awakening akin to the one Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg described, wherein the Six-Day War “united American Jews with deep Jewish commitments as they have never been united before, and … evoked such commitments in many Jews who previously seemed untouched by them.”

Hoppe’s sharp rebuke of Block forms only a single episode in a longer saga of intellectual defiance that has rendered him a lightning rod even within libertarian ranks. His 2001 work Democracy: The God That Failed articulates a systematic challenge to democratic legitimacy that extends far beyond typical libertarian anti-statism. Rather than viewing democracy as the least objectionable form of government, Hoppe argues that democratic institutions actively accelerate civilizational decline. His preference for monarchy over democracy places him in direct opposition to fundamental assumptions underlying both liberal and conservative political thought.

Some of Hoppe’s most controversial contributions to libertarian thought also concern his idea of “covenant communities” structured around the notion of “physical removal.” These entities, as he conceives them, would claim an absolute prerogative to exclude those considered misaligned with their norms, effectively transforming property rights into instruments of communal self-definition.

Writing in Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe argues that maintaining libertarian social order requires active exclusion of ideological opponents. “There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society,” he declares, extending this principle to “advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism.”

Similarly, Hoppe has stirred the pot on the immigration question in contrast to Jewish libertarians like Block who are notorious open borders boosters. Despite describing himself as an anarcho-capitalist who favors abolishing the nation-state, Hoppe supports immigration restrictions, arguing that unlimited immigration constitutes forced integration that violates native peoples’ rights.

The Jewish Intellectual Foundation of Libertarianism

Hoppe’s divergence on immigration highlights how libertarianism’s internal debates often mirror the worldviews of its founding intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish and profoundly shaped the movement’s philosophical trajectory.

It’s no secret that libertarian movement’s development has been profoundly shaped by Jewish intellectual leadership. This pattern extends from the movement’s Austrian School foundations through its contemporary institutional structure.

Ludwig von Mises, whose Austrian School economics provided libertarianism’s theoretical foundation, was born to a Jewish family in what is now Ukraine. His development of praxeology and systematic critique of socialist economics established the intellectual framework that would influence generations of libertarian scholars. Murray Rothbard, perhaps the most influential libertarian theorist of the 20th century, was born to Jewish parents and founded anarcho-capitalism while establishing the Mises Institute. Curiously, Rothbard had more of a populist turn toward the end of his life, where he advocated for a strategy of “right-wing populism” that endorsed the presidential campaigns of David Duke and Pat Buchanan.

Milton Friedman’s Nobel Prize-winning advocacy for free markets brought libertarian ideas to mainstream public attention through works like “Free to Choose,” while his policy proposals for school vouchers and a negative income tax brought libertarian policies into DC think tank circles. Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum to Jewish parents in Russia, developed the philosophy of Objectivism and wrote novels that profoundly shaped libertarian culture despite her rejection of the libertarian label.

In addition to promoting capitalism, Rand and Friedman expressed strong support for Israel, revealing how ethnic identity influences supposedly universal philosophical positions.  Rand’s support for Israel proved particularly significant given her influence on free-market thought in the United States. In her 1974 address to West Point cadets, Rand declared her support for “Israel against the Arabs for the very same reason” that she supported American settlers against Native Americans. She argued that “Israel is being attacked for being civilized, and being specifically a technological society” while describing Arabs as representing “centuries of brute stagnation and superstition.”

Rand’s position that America should “give all the help possible to Israel” including “technology and military weapons” represented a clear departure from libertarian non-interventionism that often rejects both direct military intervention and the provision of military aid to belligerents in foreign conflicts. Her justification that Israel represented “the progress of Man’s mind” against “primitive” Arab culture revealed how ethnic solidarity could override Rand’s purported commitment to individual liberties and anti-collectivist thought.

Unsurprisingly, Friedman was also an admirer of the Jewish state. When Friedman visited Israel in 1977, shortly after Menachem Begin’s election, he was invited to advise the new Likud government as it sought to move away from more dirigiste economic policies. His admiration for Israel’s early economic management predated this visit. And like most American Jews, Friedman would look the other way at the plight of the Palestinians facing constant Jewish aggression. Writing in his 1969 Newsweek column, “Invisible Occupation,” Friedman observed during a trip to the West Bank, “Much to my surprise, there was almost no sign of a military presence. … I had no feeling whatsoever of being in occupied territory.” He commended Israel’s “wise policy that involved almost literal laissez-faire in the economic sphere,” concluding that “to a casual observer, the area appears to be prospering.”

With regards to the viability of the Israeli state, Friedman also maintained that “Israel would hardly have been viable without the massive contributions that it received from world Jewry… primarily from the U.S.,” arguing that democratic capitalism, not socialism, made such aid possible: “If these donor countries had been socialist, such support would not have been possible.” Decades later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would adopt Friedman’s free-market ideas as the intellectual blueprint for his own reforms. Netanyahu frequently invoked Friedman, saying: “I am very appreciative of the fact that someone I have the utmost respect for, Milton Friedman, said that, when I was finance minister, that finally Israel has a finance minister that believes in and promotes free market ideas.” In 2005, Friedman reciprocated the admiration, praising Netanyahu for recognizing that Israel had long been held back by “rigid government intervention… socialist policies… and unnecessary state ownership of critical means of production.”

*   *   *

The libertarian movement’s significant Jewish intellectual leadership, combined with theoretical commitment to universalist principles, creates vulnerabilities to ethnic tensions when specific policy questions force choices between abstract philosophy and ethnic solidarity. Regardless of what one thinks about libertarianism, the case of Walter Block’s removal from the Mises Institute highlights the inherently adversarial nature of Jews and non-Jews in political movements. The Block-Hoppe conflict reveals challenges facing intellectual movements with significant Jewish participation. While such movements have witnessed Jewish intellectual contributions, they also become vulnerable to inevitable tensions that arise when Jewish ethnic interests conflict with movement ideology. Block’s passionate Zionism ultimately proved incompatible with libertarian anti-interventionism, leading him to walk away from the intellectual community he had contributed to for over four decades.

Like archaeologists uncovering layers of forgotten civilizations, the Block-Hoppe schism reveals that beneath every high-minded intellectual movement lies the bedrock of tribal identity, waiting to reassert itself when abstract principles collide with the eternal reality of us versus them.

Jose Nino →

Opening Up Frontiers

(in which we discover that the inhabitants of Formosa get around on hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses)

After having studied the different types of nonjourney and some of the situations which might lead us to talk about them, the time has come to put forward some suggestions on how to acquit ourselves in such situations, which as we’ve seen are more frequent than you might think, and which each of us risks having to face at some moment or other.

Seldom having traveled myself and already having found myself having to talk about imaginary places on many an occasion, I am not badly placed to offer some tips to those who fear being confronted with the necessity of having to reinvent space without being contradicted. And we can see that far from falling victim to the situation, it is possible to profit from it and gain a better knowledge of the places in question and of oneself.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, an inhabitant of Formosa1 called George Psalmanazar appeared in London and was an immediate sensation, rapidly gaining huge popularity.

He said he had been kidnapped from his island by Jesuits who had taken him to France and tried in vain to convert him to Catholicism. He spoke both Latin and English, and the religious persecution he’d suffered immediately won the hearts of the Anglican community in London, who took him under their wing.

Psalmanazar took it upon himself to promote his native island, largely ignored in Europe. He soon became very successful, partly because of his original style of dress—he wore exotic, baroque outfits—and his diet—he ate only raw meat—but above all for the novel information he was able to supply on his home country. His stories were mind-blowing.

His reputation grew even more after the 1704 publication of his work An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan. It had been preceded by an autobiography, which had swiftly been reprinted and was translated into several languages. The success of the book, which was due to the revelations it contained, led the author to give lectures to learned societies and increased his fame even more, not only in England but across Europe.

It is true that Psalmanazar furnished a considerable amount of firsthand information on this country about which little was known at the time. He made it known that Formosa, whose capital was Xternetsa, was a dependency of Japan and not of China, as had been incorrectly believed for a long time, and that the ruling regime was a monarchy.

Psalmanazar also provided some original insights into the country’s customs. It was thanks to him that we learned that the inhabitants wore clothes that accurately reflected their social rank, that they were polygamous, that they ate their wives if they discovered them to be unfaithful and that human sacrifice was practiced regularly.2We also discovered through Psalmanazar that the inhabitants of Formosa mainly ate snakes, that they lived underground in circular houses, and they didn’t only use horses and camels to get around but also rode hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses.3

But Psalmanazar didn’t content himself with providing precious information on life and customs on Formosa. He also allowed us to study its language.4 Not only was he a fluent speaker, but he could also write it without difficulty. He explained that it used twenty characters, different from the characters used in China or Japan; it had six distinct tenses; and variations were made by using auxiliaries and tones.

In order to improve our knowledge, he was able to provide a translation of the Lord’s Prayer which began with the words, “Amy Pornio dan chin Ornio vicy, Gnayjorhe sai Lory, Eyfodere sai Bagalin, jorhe sai domino apo chin Ornio.” Formosa’s language aroused keen interest among intellectuals, including Leibniz, and because of its rigor, continued to be studied by linguists decades after Psalmanazar’s fraud had been brought to light.

Of course Psalmanazar didn’t come from Formosa. Born in France, he had adopted this ersatz identity after first having passed for an Irish pilgrim in order to travel around Europe more freely. He was happy to explain himself in his Memoirs, a book in which he recounted in detail the circumstances that led him to create this fiction.

Despite the success of his deception and the lack of criticism he received, it seems that Psalmanazar ended up feeling guilty about the way he had made fun of the English intelligentsia. While he didn’t denounce himself during his lifetime, he dedicated himself to the study of theology and became a specialist in issues related to the Hebrew religion. It might be assumed that this was what led him to participate in a dictionary of religions for which he provided the entry on Formosa in which he criticized Psalmanazar’s trickery, writing of himself in the third person.

When you think of the number of improbabilities with which he embellished his stories, it is astonishing that Psalmanazar was able to construct this pretense and maintain it for several years. For example, there was the number of children he claimed were sacrificed each year on Formosa—twenty thousand—which led certain skeptical spirits to remark that at that rate, the population would rapidly become extinct.

Moreover, even if few people visited the island at that time, some Europeans did go there and their accounts were radically different from Psalmanazar’s, who, with great composure, replied that they had only visited part of the island, never having ventured beyond the west coast.

The most surprising thing was that Psalmanazar, who had pale skin and blond hair, didn’t correspond in the slightest to the picture one might have had of an inhabitant of Formosa. But the majority of his interlocutors didn’t seem surprised by this—at that time, the concept of race wasn’t decisive in the perception of otherness. And Psalmanazar explained eruditely that members of the intellectual class on the island were pale skinned because they lived underground.

How did Psalmanazar go about fooling so many people? The first reason he managed to convince so many intellectuals and for such a long period of time was the verisimilitude of his description of Formosa and his own personal investment in the simulation.

With Psalmanazar, we rediscover the play of intertwined places that I noted earlier. For the real country of Formosa, which was difficult to visit at the time, Psalmanazar substituted an imaginary country that he knew how to reinvent in every aspect without ever having been there. But this substitution doesn’t become intelligible until we take into account what I proposed calling the “inner landscape” of the author and the eternally lost “original place” that he never stops searching for in vain through all of his confabulations, just like every one of us.

It is notable in fact that Psalmanazar, by engaging in this deception, isn’t only looking for the tangible social benefits he might gain from describing a virtually unknown land; he also attempts to construct a true romance of his origins by inventing for himself a new identity and a new history, going so far as to develop a new language whose rules he had better know, given that he is the only person in the world who can speak it.

To this end, Psalmanazar’s Formosa is a compromise formation in the Freudian sense, like a dream or a delirium. Psalmanazar recreates himself through an imaginary Formosa that allows him to deploy an infantile fantasy of omnipotence—just as Rosie Ruiz and Jean-Claude Romand did in their own ways. He invents his own origins and those of everyone close to him and creates a comprehensive family saga of which he is the hero.

Psalmanazar’s second quality is the possession of a fertile imagination. In this, he fits into the tradition of authors like Marco Polo and Margaret Mead’s female informants—like them he is capable of inventing a plethora of picturesque elements that capture and retain the public’s attention.

It is impossible to hope to speak with any conviction of places you haven’t been to without a vivid imagination. The capacity to dream and to make others dream is essential to anyone wanting to describe an unknown place and hoping to capture the imagination of their readers and listeners.5

This imagination is deployed in several ways that appear contradictory. First of all, Psalmanazar invents a country to suit his taste, gives it a political system, an economy, a language, customs, and even endows it with a unique animal husbandry. What he constructs is a complete world, capable of functioning, like the imaginary realms that populate travelogues and children’s games.

This imagination relies upon a strong sense of faux realism, or what one might call true detail. Like Chateaubriand, with his detailed descriptions of the flowers and insects of parts of America that he took good care not to explore, Psalmanazar nurtures the tiniest elements of his stories to create a credible illusion of an alternative reality.

But, as specific as it is, the place invented by Psalmanazar cannot clearly be situated in any particular locality. Although it has a determined geographical location, it could just as easily be found anywhere at all. The truth is that Psalmanazar combined several travelogues from different continents, and his montage contains elements from the Aztec and Inca civilizations—starting with human sacrifices—as well as from the Japanese and Chinese.6

It is no trivial matter that Psalmanazar transports hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses to Formosa, anticipating Henri Michaux’s gesture when he added camels to his description of Honfleur.7 Transporting animals or objects from one country to another, prevalent in the accounts of armchair travelers, shows that there is a different kind of space here than the one that prevails in the real world, a place that is much more flexible and mobile than the one in which we operate on a daily basis.

This apparently contradictory mixture of precision and ambiguity is essential to the invention of a haven of refuge conducive to the imagination. The details guarantee the existence of the imaginary place and the veracity of the account; the ambiguity allows the reader or listener to project themselves individually according to a particular hook offered by the account and to find a singular space that chimes with their own inner landscape.

But personal investment and imagination would not have been sufficient to explain—any more than in Margaret Mead’s case—that such an absurd fiction could be sustained for so long and accepted by the scientific community like a realist document. A model of individual compromise, Psalmanazar’s Formosa is also, when you take a closer look, a model of collective compromise.

If you think about it, the description of Formosa is just as much a plural work as a singular fiction. As we have already seen, the conversations we can have about places we don’t know do not only concern the places and ourselves, but also involve the people we are addressing ourselves to, often benevolent accomplices.

Michael Keevak showed in the book he wrote on Psalmanazar that the latter’s success can be explained by the fact that Psalmanazar addressed a disquisition to the English that they wanted to hear, particularly in terms of religion, and offered them an image of themselves that they found recognizable:

Psalmanazar, in short, wasn’t just the perfect response to the start of a period of fascination for exotic chinoiseries, but also the solution to a growing desire amongst Europeans to meet exotic specimens who weren’t overly exotic: as Linda Lomeris wrote, foreigners should function as a kind of mirror of the subjective preoccupations of Europeans. Psalmanazar might have been a stranger who ate raw meat and spoke a completely foreign language, but he didn’t present the slightest menace. After all, he was a noble savage, he was Anglican, and (in particular?) he was white.8

Psalmanazar’s Formosa functioned as a collective compromise in the sense that it allowed an entire community—who weren’t necessarily, on the unconscious plane, as fooled as they led us to believe—to think about their relationship to a remote foreign country. As such, this fiction allowed real psychological work to be done, in the same way that Margaret Mead’s imaginary Samoans offered Americans a transitional place onto which they could project their unconscious desires and be a step ahead in thinking about sexual liberation.

Hence the importance of the spatial jamming that Psalmanazar engages in by presenting a place that is just as specific as it is unsuitable. His rewriting of Formosa is all the more liable to please a vast audience because it isn’t too limited geographically, nor too personal in terms of fantasy, but caters to all. In doing this, he places Formosa in the universalized space of a collective mythology in which numerous readers can find themselves.

The bric-a-brac country that Psalmanazar constructs with the support of his benevolent audience shows that, like numerous armchair travelers, he doesn’t play with the real geographical place addressed by science, but with an aberrant space that is the same as the one literature invents to describe the world.

This aberrant space is resolutely atopic—that is to say, it doesn’t experience the limitations that organize the geography of the real world. It possesses great mobility, like dreams do, dominated as it is in the same way by the primary processes of the unconscious. It is possible to move at full speed from one location to another as Rosie Ruiz did, as though no distance was insurmountable.

It establishes communication between geographical places that are not adjacent to each other in the real world but separated by large distances by renewing the frontiers. It is therefore not surprising that in this space, animals are able to move without difficulty from one continent to another and settle in new territories where one would never come across them normally.

And it is equally likely that, profiting from the mobility of the literary space and this opening of frontiers that disrupts circulation in the real world, the characters of certain works of fiction profit from this by passing from one text to another and settling in a world that seems more hospitable to them.

If we don’t take into account the atopic character of literary space, we cannot hope to understand the extent to which it involves a different space from that of the real world, nor grasp the multitude of discrete events that occur, sometimes without even the writer’s knowledge, and which merit our attention.

Paying attention to the atopic character of literary space is essential when describing places you haven’t been to, since this atopia and the new traffic rules it establishes between worlds encourage a generous opening up of the field of descriptions by no longer limiting them to a single evoked area.

In fact, it encourages supplementing described areas with elements borrowed from other real or imaginary worlds as Psalmanazar does, elements that it might be desirable to have in the story in order to make the descriptions of the place one hopes to have others experience more sensitive and relevant.

1.    UP–

2.    Psalmanazar’s book, published in 1704, was reissued in 1705 in a new version that accentuated the cruelty of Formosa’s morals. See the analysis of the two versions in Richard M. Swiderski’s The False Formosan: George Psalmanazar and the Eighteenth-Century Experiment of Identity (San Francisco, CA: Mellen Research University Press, 1991), 66.

3.    See Swiderski on Formosa’s abundant fauna, which included lions, bears and wolves (ibid., 75).

4.    For a detailed analysis of the language of Psalmanazar, see Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 61.

5.    And Psalmanazar does it with enough conviction to win the support of his interlocutors. In his Memoirs, he tells how he had resolved that, once having made an assertion, he would never to go back on it, whatever unlikelihood might be revealed or contradiction made by witnesses (George Psalmanazar, Memoirs of ****. Commonly Known by the Name of George Psalmanazar; a Reputed Native of Formosa. Written by Himself in Order to Be Published after His Death (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Ecco Print Editions, Dublin, 2011), 141.

6.    Formosa’s language is a montage, too. Its articles (oi hic, ey haec, ai hoc) are inspired by Latin (see Swiderski, 75).

7.    “In the past I had too much respect for nature. I placed myself in front of things and landscapes and I let them be.

That’s over, from now on I’m going to intervene.

I was at Honfleur and I was bored. So I resolutely added some camels. It wasn’t really called for. Never mind, it was my idea. Besides, I went about this with the greatest prudence. I introduced them first of all on very busy days, on Saturdays in the marketplace.” Henri Michaux, La nuit remue (Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard, 1967). English translation by Michele Hutchison.

8.    Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian, 53.

Pierre Bayard

How to Talk About Places You've Never Been 

Varapanyo's good friend's

 There is something definitively vile about the man who only admits equals, who does not tirelessly seek out his betters. NGD

[What about the man who admits only disciples?😊]

Half the Holy Life

Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was dwelling among the Sakyans where there was a town of the Sakyans named Nāgaraka. Then the Venerable Ānanda approached the Blessed One. Having approached, he paid homage to the Blessed One, sat down to one side, and said to him:

“Venerable sir, this is half of the holy life, that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship.”

“Not so, Ānanda! Not so, Ānanda! This is the entire holy life, Ānanda, that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship. When a bhikkhu has a good friend, a good companion, a good comrade, it is to be expected that he will develop and cultivate the Noble Eightfold Path.

“And how, Ānanda, does a bhikkhu who has a good friend, a good companion, a good comrade, develop and cultivate the Noble Eightfold Path? Here, Ānanda, a bhikkhu develops right view, which is based upon seclusion, dispassion, and cessation, maturing in release. He develops right intention … right speech ... right action ... right livelihood … right effort … right mindfulness … right concentration, which is based upon seclusion, dispassion, and cessation, maturing in release. It is in this way, Ānanda, that a bhikkhu who has a good friend, a good companion, a good comrade, develops and cultivates the Noble Eightfold Path.

“By the following method too, Ānanda, it may be understood how the entire holy life is good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship: by relying upon me as a good friend, Ānanda, beings subject to birth are freed from birth; beings subject to aging are freed from aging; beings subject to death are freed from death; beings subject to sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair are freed from sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair. By this method, Ānanda, it may be understood how the entire holy life is good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship.” SN 45: 2

“Bhikkhus, as to external factors, I do not see any other factor that is so helpful for the arising of the seven factors of enlightenment as this: good friendship. When a bhikkhu has a good friend, it is to be expected that he will develop and cultivate the seven factors of enlightenment.” (...)
SN 46: 50

“Bhikkhus, I do not see even a single thing that so causes unarisen wholesome qualities to arise and arisen unwholesome qualities to decline as good friendship. For one with good friends, unarisen wholesome qualities arise and arisen unwholesome qualities decline.”
AN 1:7

“Then, Māgandiya, associate with true men. When you associate with true men, you will hear the true Dhamma. When you hear the true Dhamma, you will practise in accordance with the true Dhamma. When you practise in accordance with the true Dhamma, you will know and see for yourself thus: ‘These are diseases, tumours, and darts; but here these diseases, tumours, and darts cease without remainder. With the cessation of my clinging comes cessation of being; with the cessation of being, cessation of birth; with the cessation of birth, ageing and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair cease. Such is the cessation of this whole mass of suffering.’” MN 75

***
My friends.

1) Suttas as the true representation of the Lord Buddha words.

Nanavira Thera:
It was, and is, my attitude towards the Suttas that, if I find anything in them that is against my own view, they are right, and I am wrong. I have no reason to regret having adopted this attitude. Regarding the Commentaries, on the other hand, the boot is on the other leg—if this does not sound too incongruous.)

Monks, a faithful disciple, having scrutinized the Teacher’s advice, proceeds in accordance with this: “The Auspicious One is the teacher, I am the disciple. The Auspicious One knows. I do not know. MN 70

With the cessation of my clinging comes cessation of being (see↑) The most incredible conspiracy theory cannot be compare with the Dhamma, which undermine the puthujjana's very existence, the thing which, according to Descartes cannot be doubt. But:

This ‘sacrifice of the intellect’, which Saint Ignatius Loyola says is ‘so pleasing unto God’, is required also, incidentally, of the quantum physicist: he has to subscribe to the proposition that there are numbers that are not quantities. It is not, however, required of the follower of the Buddha, whose saddhā—trust or confidence—is something like that of the patient in his doctor. The patient accepts on trust that the doctor knows more about his complaint than he himself does, and he submits himself to the doctor’s treatment. So far, indeed, from saying to his disciples ‘You must accept on trust from me that black is white’, the Buddha actually says, in effect, ‘What you must accept on trust from me is that you yourselves are unwittingly assum-ing that black is white, and that this is the reason for your suffering’.

A man with avijjā, practising reflexion, may identify ‘self’ with both reflexive and immediate experience, or with reflexive experience alone, or with immediate experience alone. He does not conclude that neither is ‘self’, and the reason is clear: it is not possible to get outside avijjā by means of reflexion alone; for however much a man may ‘step back’ from himself to observe himself he cannot help taking avijjā with him. There is just as much avijjā in the self-observer as there is in the self-observed. And this is the very reason why avijjā is so stable in spite of its being sankhatā. Simply by reflexion the puthujjana can never observe avijjā and at the same time recognize it as avijjā; for in reflexion avijjā is the Judge as well as the Accused, and the verdict is always ‘Not Guilty’. In order to put an end to avijjā, which is a matter of recognizing avijjā as avijjā, it is necessary to accept on trust from the Buddha a Teaching that contradicts the direct evidence of the puthujjana’s reflexion. This is why the Dhamma is patisotagamī (Majjhima iii,6 <M.i,168>), or ‘going against the stream’. The Dhamma gives the puthujjana the outside view of avijjā, which is inherently unobtainable for him by unaided reflexion (in the ariyasāvaka this view has, as it were, ‘taken’ like a graft, and is perpetually available).

Nanavira Thera

Here is Camus on Heidegger; perhaps it says more about Camus than Heidegger—and also something about me, since I trouble to quote it.

Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that existence is humiliated. The only reality is “anxiety” in the whole chain of being. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man “in whom existence is concentrated.” This profes-sor of philosophy writes without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that “the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial than man himself.” His interest in Kant extends only to recognizing the restricted character of his “pure Reason.” This is to conclude at the end of his analyses that “the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish.” This anxiety seems to him so much more important than all the categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the mind contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and “existence then delivers itself its own summons through the intermediary of consciousness.” It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence “to return from its loss in the anonymous They .” For him, too, one must not sleep, but must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way amid these ruins. (Myth, p. 18)

Clearing the Path is a work book. Its purpose is to help the user to acquire a point of view that is different from his customary frame of reference, and also more satisfactory . Necessarily, an early step in accomplishing this change is the abandonment of specific mistaken notions about the Buddha’s Teaching and about the nature of experience. More fundamentally, however, this initial change in specific views may lead to a change in point-of-view, whereby one comes to understand experience from a perspective different from what one has been accustomed to—a perspective in which intention, responsibility, context, conditionality, hunger, and related terms will describe the fun-damental categories of one’s perception and thinking—and which can lead, eventually, to a fundamental insight about the nature of personal existence.

Such a change of attitude seldom occurs without considerable prior development, and this book is intended to serve as a tool in fostering that development. As such it is meant to be lived with rather than read and set aside. These notions are developed more fully throughout Clearing the Path but it is as well that they be stated concisely at the outset so that there need be no mistaking who this book is for: those who find their present mode of existence unsatisfactory and who sense, however vaguely, the need to make a fundamental change not in the world but in themselves.

Clearing the Path has its genesis in Notes on Dhamma (1960-1963), printed privately by the Honourable Lionel Samaratunga (Dewalepola, Ceylon, 1963—see L. 63). Following production of that volume the author amended and added to the text, leaving at his death an expanded typescript, indicated by the titular expansion of its dates, (1960-1965). Together with the Ven. Nanavira Thera’s type-script was a cover letter:

To the Prospective Publisher:

The author wishes to make it clear that Notes on Dhamma is not a work of scholarship: an Orientalist (in casu a Pali scholar), if he is no more than that, is unlikely to make very much of the book, whose general tone, besides, he may not altogether approve. Though it does not set out to be learned in a scholarly sense, the book is very far from being a popular exposition of Buddhism. It is perhaps best regarded as a philosophical commentary on the essential teachings of the Pali Suttas, and presenting fairly considerable difficulties, particularly to ‘objective’ or positivist thinkers, who will not easily see what the book is driving at. From a publisher’s point of view this is no doubt unfortunate; but the fact is that the teaching contained in the Pali Suttas is (to say the least) a great deal more difficult—even if also a great deal more rewarding—than is commonly supposed; and the author is not of the opinion that Notes on Dhamma makes the subject more difficult than it actually is.

The difficulties referred to in this cover letter gave rise to extensive correspondence between the Ven. Nanavira and various laypeople who sought clarification and expansion of both specific points and general attitudes and methods of inquiry . The author devoted considerable energy to this correspondence: some letters run to five thousand words, and three drafts was not uncommon. From one point of view the Ven. Nanavira's letters may be seen as belonging to the epistolary tradition, a tradition refined in an earlier era when much serious philosophical and literary discussion was conducted on a personal basis within a small circle of thinkers. On another view many of the letters can be regarded as thinly disguised essays in a wholly modern tradition. Indeed, one of these letters (L. 2) was published some years ago (in the ‘Bodhi Leaf’ series of the Buddhist Publication Society), stripped of its salutation and a few personal remarks, as just such an essay. The author himself offers a third view of the letters in remarking that at least those letters which contain direct discussion of Dhamma points ‘are, in a sense, something of a commentary on the Notes’ (L. 53).

In this perspective the letters can be seen as both expansions and clarifications of the more formal discussions in the Notes. Those who find the mode of thought of the Notes initially forbidding might profitably regard the letters as a useful channel of entry.

Nanamoli Thera

I seem to have lived my life in three modes: up till the outbreak of war in 1939 I lived it in a very pleasant and mainly graceful rock-pool. The financial insecurity beginning in 1937 and the outbreak of war in 1939 silted the pool up. 1939–1948 was lived in the midst of History: Anti-aircraft volunteer gunner to G.S.O. III, I.B. in Caserta, and afterwards Assistant head of the B.B.C. Italian section at Bush House. From then on it has been lived as an observer, withdrawn and watching. (Nov. 56)

I shall never be able to compose my biography: but let no one else have the presumption to do so; for this would amount to theft. (Nov. 56)
Don’t worry, no one will think of it. (Nov. 57)

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women actors on it” says Shakespeare. But actually only the men and women in the public gaze are actors on it. I, for instance, whom—and this I hold one of my greatest blessings while it is so—the public does not gaze on, am not an actor, but only a scene-shifter: the stage is curtained when I and those like me move on it.
(Addition:) Or that is how I should like it to be always. (Jan. 58)

People seem to approach religion for one of two main reasons or for both mixed together: They are moved either by a wish to discover truth (leaving that vague word vague here) or by a need to find justification for a predilection. Of the first, an outstanding example is, perhaps Kierkegaard. The second is far the more common. In myself I find elements of both. Perhaps the two merge with the incompatibility of two lines that meet at right-angles, and from the meeting-point some set out in one direction and some in the other. (Jul. 59)

Modern analogy: just as the bombardment by neutral mesons is needed to split the atom’s nucleus which is held together by negative and positive charges, as we are told—so perhaps equanimity is the projectile with which to split the individual held together by the charges, of hate and lust. (Jan. 58)

There are certain aspects of truth that one can only discover in oneself; if one is told of them, one will certainly, and in the very nature of existence itself, reject them absolutely. But perhaps they can be shared by those who have discovered them individually for themselves, and perhaps those who have not discovered them can be aided indirectly to discover them for themselves. (The use of the word “truth” here is in the sense of desirability of discovery). (Mar. 58)

“Don’t build yourself an ivory tower” the moralists say. But I am an ivory tower by the mere fact that I am. On the crude physical level the body is a frame of (ivory) bones on which the muscles are stretched, crowned by an (ivory) bone pill-box turret housing the brain-shielding it from the blows of ‘reality’ so that it can get on with its absurd work undisturbed. On the non-physical level my I-ness is an ivory tower of orderly individual views and vistas shielding ‘me’ from being swallowed up in chaos. Dear moralists: don’t they see that life is a constant flight up and down the endless steps of the dark ivory tower seeking to escape from the horrid chaos of real freedom? (Jun. 59)

Words distort thinking, thoughts distort perceiving, percepts distort acting, acts distort being, [beings distort naught, that I may be the acting of the perceiving of the thinking of the wording of the question ‘who?’.] (Aug. 59)

It is not memory but forgetting which is the positive function in maintaining existence. It is partial forgetting that conceals the contradictions and makes what is not forgotten, to be possible. (Nov. 59)

Existence described as a system of null-functions activated into partial non-nullity by ignorance. (Jan. 60)

From Theravada tradition:

Ajhan Sumedho:

This investigation of time, I think, is a very important reflection because we are a time-bound society; we really believe in the reality of it. We believe our age, the sense of history and the continuity of time. And we believe we have been born; we have this sense of going through the years and yet in some way remaining the same. We just assume that we are the same person throughout this span which we call ‘our lifetime’.

In awareness, however, we realize there is no such thing as time, and that all we do is project onto the experience of now. That is what we call ‘time’. In reality there is only right now, only the here and now. This is where consciousness operates. Breathing is happening right now; feeling through the body and the senses is now; the thinking process is now. We can remember what we were thinking yesterday, but even that is a thought, a memory in the present.

Breaking down the assumptions about oneself and the cultural habits one has in regard to time I found very helpful in learning to trust in awareness and recognizing that liberation is now, freedom is now, nibbana is now ― rather than having this perception of practising now in order to attain liberation in the future. The point is, we create the perception of past, present and future, birth and death, beginning and ending. First we create the words to describe experience, and then we become attached to those words, often not noticing the reality behind them. So we create ourselves as personalities, and we create England, and we create our positions in society. When Christians ask whether we have a Creator-God in Buddhism, we say, ‘Well, not exactly, because “I” am the creator of the world,’ which can sound like a kind of megalomania. If one is claiming to be the ultimate creator, that is a sign of madness, isn’t it? But in terms of the reality of this moment, we are the ones who are creating; we are projecting our habits and feelings onto this moment. So, in terms of reflection in awareness, we call this ‘the creator of the world’.

Ajhan Chah

A devout, elderly village lady from a nearby province came on a pilgrimage to Wat Ba Pong. She told Achaan Chah she could stay only a short time, as she had to return to take care of her great grandchildren, and since she was an old lady, she asked if he could please give her a brief Dharma talk.

He replied with great force, “Hey, listen. There's no one here, just this. No owner, no one to be old, to be young, to be good or bad, weak or strong. Just this, that's all; various elements of nature playing themselves out, all empty. No one born and no one to die. Those who speak of death are speaking the language of ignorant children. In the language of the heart, of Dharma, there's no such thing.

“When we carry a burden, it's heavy. When there's no one to carry it, there's not a problem in the world. Do not look for good or bad or for anything at all. Do not be anything. There's nothing more; just this.”

A visiting Zen student asked Achaan Chah, “How old are you? Do you live here all year round?”
“I live nowhere,” he replied. “There is no place you can find me. I have no age. To have age, you must exist, and to think you exist is already a problem. Don't make problems; then the world has none either. Don't make a self. There's nothing more to say.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj

To be is to suffer. The narrower the circle of my self-identification, the more acute the suffering caused by desire and fear.

I only say that to find the immutable and blissful you must give up your hold on the mutable and painful. You are concerned with your own happiness and I am telling you that there is no such thing. Happiness is never your own, it is where the ‘I’ is not.

Why do you worry about the world before taking care of yourself? You want to save the world, don't you? Can you save the world before saving yourself? And what means being saved? Saved from what? From illusion. Salvation is to see things as they are.

Your mind projects a structure and you identify yourself with it. It is in the nature of desire to prompt the mind to create a world for its fulfilment. Even a small desire can start a long line of action; what about a strong desire? Desire can produce a universe; its powers are miraculous. Just as a small matchstick can set a huge forest on fire, so does a desire light the fires of manifestation. The very purpose of creation is the fulfilment of desire. The desire may be noble, or ignoble, space (akash) is neutral — one can fill it with what one likes: You must be very careful as to what you desire. And as to the people you want to help, they are in their respective worlds for the sake of their desires; there is no way of helping them except through their desires. You can only teach them to have right desires so that they may rise above them and be free from the urge to create and recreate worlds of desires, abodes of pain and pleasure.

Q: Is there no salvation for the world?
M: Which world do you want to save? The world of your own projection? Save it yourself. My world? Show me my world and I shall deal with it. I am not aware of any world separate from myself, which I am free to save or not to save. What business have you with saving the world, when all the world needs is to be saved from you? Get out of the picture and see whether there is anything left to save.

Q: I find all this seeking and brooding most unnatural.
M: Yours is the naturalness of a born cripple. You may be unaware but it does not make you normal. What it means to be natural or normal you do not know, nor do you know that you do not know.

Meister Eckhart

A pure heart is one which is worried by nothing and is tied to nothing, which has not bound its best part to any mode, does not seek its own in anything, that is fully immersed in God's dearest will and gone out of its own.

Do you want to know who is a truly poor man? That man is truly poor in spirit who can do without anything unnecessary. That is why he who sat naked in his tub said to Alexander the Great, to whom the whole world was subject, 'I am a greater ruler than you, for I have rejected more things than you have ever possessed. What you think it a great thing to possess, is too petty for me to scorn.' He is far more blessed who can do without all things and have no need of them, than he who has possession of all things and has wants. That man is the best who can do without what he does not need. Therefore he who can do without and despise the most has abandoned most. It seems a great thing if a man gives up a thousand marks of gold for God's sake and builds many hermitages and monasteries and feeds all the poor: that would be a great deed. But he would be far more blessed who should despise as much for God's sake. That man would possess very heaven who could for God's sake renounce all things, whatever God gave or did not give.

Since it is God's nature not to be like anyone, we have to come to the state of being nothing in order to enter into the same nature that He is. So, when I am able to establish myself in Nothing and Nothing in myself, uprooting and casting out what is in me, then I can pass into the naked being of God, which is the naked being of the spirit.

for God is in this power as in the eternal Now. If a man's spirit were always united with God in this power, he would not age. For the Now in which God made the first man and the Now in which the last man shall cease to be, and the Now I speak in, all are the same in God and there is but one Now.

Observe, this man dwells in one light with God, having no suffering and no sequence of time, but one equal eternity. This man is bereft of wonderment and all things are in him in their essence. Therefore nothing new comes to him from future things nor any accident, for he dwells in the Now, ever new and without intermission. Such is the divine sovereignty dwelling in this power.

Collection of born ariyas (according VB)

Antonio Porchia

Caillois, wanting to find out what sort of man had written and sent this surprising volume, had looked into the matter and "found myself in the presence of a man somewhere in his fifties, respectably—though neither studiously nor elegantly—dressed; a potter or carpenter by trade, I forget which, and self-employed, what is more; at once simple and shy, and altogether such that I assured myself, simply as a formality, first by means of certain subterfuges, and then quite openly, that he had never in his life heard of Lao-Tzu or Kafka." (By whom Caillois had suspected his unknown author to be influenced.) Judging by Caillois' observations, the remarkable content of the Voices is a peculiarly pure sense the product of Porchia's own non-literary experience. Of this, or of its circumstances, little is publically known beyond a few facts so bare that they would fit on any tombstone.

Antonio Porchia was born in Italy in 1886, lived in Argentina from 1911, and died in 1968. Voices represents the whole of his writing—some six hundred entries in all. There have been several editions since the first one.

The most recent (and in Porchia's judgment the most complete, though it does not include some from the first collection) was published in 1966, and it is from this edition that the present selection has been made. Some of the entries, Porchia has stated, evolved over the course of years; some he has deleted in favor of later ones which, in his opinion, convey the same sense better. But the aphorisms themselves are not, in his view, compositions of his own so much as emanations which he has heard and set down.

It is easy to see why Caillios might have imagined that Porchia owed something to certain Eastern texts, and perhaps to some moderns such as Kafka. A few of the aphorisms have close affinities with sentences from Taoist and Buddhist scriptures; others suggest, among the moderns, not only Kafka but Lichtenberg, or—to some-one whose language is English—Blake. Caillois' determining, to his own satisfation, that Porchia was unfamiliar with such possible mentors is interesting, surprising, and in the end remains for the most part a matter of curiosity rather than a contribution to an assessment of the values and originality of Porchia's Voices. For the authority which the entries invoke, both in their matter and in their tone, is not that of tradition or antecedents, but that of particular, individual experience. Whatever system may be glimpsed binding the whole together is not fashioned from any logic except that of one man's cast of existence. It is this which makes the work as a whole, and some of the separate sentences, elusive, but it is this which gives them their unmistakable pure immediacy— their quality of voice.
At the same time, the entries and the work as a whole assume and evoke the existence of an absolute, of the knowledge of it which is truth, and of the immense desirability of such knowledge. With no doctrinal allegiances, nor any attempt at dogmatic system, Porchia's utterances are obviously, in this sense, a spiritual, quite as much as a literary, testament. And the center to which they bear witness, as well as the matrix of their form, is the private ordeal and awe of individual existence, the reality that is glimpsed through time and circumstance, as a consequence of feeling and suffering. It is this ground of personal revelation and its logic, in the sentences, that marks their kinship, not with theology but with poetry.

And yet the reality of the self, except as suffering, is not an unquestionable certainty. "My final belief is suffer-ing. And I begin to believe that I do not suffer." In any event, the self is less real than that which is greater than it, on which it depends. "We see by means of something which illumines us, which we do not see." The fidelity of Porchia's vision, and its personal embodiment in lan-guage, is too sharp, and frequently too desperate, however, to be tempted to homiletics. On the contrary, the distillate of suffering in some of the entries is pure and profound irony—an irony not of defense but of acceptance. "Every toy has to break." "When I throw away what I don't want, it will fall within reach." It is finally the acceptance, with its irony, that underlies the suffering and the vision and relates them to each other in a way that suggests that the relation may be the privilege of man's existence. "Man goes nowhere. Everything comes to man, like tomorrow." —w. S. MERWIN

https://varapanno.blogspot.com/search/label/Porchia?m=0

Fernando Pessoa

I don’t feel my soul, just peace. External things, all of them distinct and now perfectly still, even if they’re moving, are to me as the world must have been to Christ when, looking down at everything, Satan tempted him. They are nothing, and I can understand why Christ wasn’t tempted. They are nothing, and I can’t understand why clever old Satan thought they would be tempting.

Caesar aptly defined what ambition is all about when he said: ‘Better to be first in the village than the second in Rome!’ I’m nothing in the village and nothing in any Rome. The corner grocer is at least respected from the Rua da Assunção to the Rua da Vitória; he’s the Caesar of a square city block. Me superior to him? In what, if nothingness admits neither superiority nor inferiority, nor even comparison?

Creator of indifferences’ is the motto I want for my spirit today. I’d like my life’s activity to consist, above all, in educating others to feel more and more for themselves, and less and less according to the dynamic law of collectiveness. To educate people in that spiritual antisepsis which precludes contamination by commonness and vulgarity is the loftiest destiny I can imagine for the pedagogue of inner discipline that I aspire to be. If all who read me would learn – slowly, of course, as the subject matter requires – to be completely insensitive to other people’s opinions and even their glances, that would be enough of a garland to make up for my life’s scholastic stagnation.

Cioran

Nescience is the basis of everything, it creates everything by an action repeated every moment, it produces this and any world, since it continually takes for real what in fact is not. Nescience is the tremendous mistake that serves as the basis of all our truths, it is older and more powerful than all the gods combined.

Existence = Torment. The equation seems obvious to me, but not to one of my friends. How to convince him? I cannot lend him my sensations; yet only they would have the power to persuade him, to give him that additional dose of ill-being he has so insistently asked for all this time.

In the slaughterhouse that morning, I watched the cattle being led to their death. Almost every animal, at the last moment, refused to move forward. To make them do so, a man hit them on the hind legs.
This scene often comes to mind when, ejected from sleep, I lack the strength to confront the daily torture of Time.

Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what freedom, what space!

Nicolas Gomez Davila - very good friend (ariyan or not - not enough data to be certain)

—An ethics that does not command us to renounce is a crime against the dignity to which we should aspire and against the happiness which we can obtain.

—The man who wants to avoid grotesque collapses should not look for anything to fulfill him in space and time.

—There is something definitively vile about the man who only admits equals, who does not tirelessly seek out his betters.
[What about the man who admits only disciples?😊]

—Phrases are pebbles that the writer tosses into the reader’s soul.

The diameter of the concentric waves they displace depends on the dimensions of the pond. 

—Once I believe I have mastered a truth, the argument which interests me is not the one which confirms it but the one which refutes it.

The Desert Fathers

A brother was leaving the world, and though he gave his goods to the poor he kept some for his own use. He went to Antony, and when Antony knew what he had done, he said, ‘If you want to be a monk, go to the village over there, buy some meat, hang it on your naked body and come back here.’ The brother went, and dogs and birds tore at his body. He came back to Antony, who asked him if he had done what he was told. He showed him his torn body. Then Antony said, ‘Those who renounce the world but want to keep their money are attacked in that way by demons and torn in pieces.’

Macarius once told this story about himself: When I was a young man, and living in my cell in Egypt, they caught me, and made me a cleric in a village. Because I did not want to minister, I fled to another place. A man of the world, but of a devout life, came to help me, and took what I made with my hands and ministered to my needs. It happened that a girl of the village was tempted by the devil and seduced. When she was seen to be pregnant, she was asked who was the father of the child and she said, ‘It was this hermit who slept with me.’ They came out, arrested me, and brought me back to the village; they hung dirty pots and jug handles on my neck, and made me walk round the village, beating me as I went, and saying, ‘This monk has seduced our girl. Away with him, away with him.’ They beat me until I was almost dead but another hermit came and said, ‘How long have you been beating that stranger monk?’ The man who used to minister to my needs followed behind, much ashamed, and they heaped insults on him, saying, ‘You supported this hermit, and look what he has done.’ The parents of the girl said that they would not let me go unless I found someone to guarantee her support. I spoke to the man who used to minister to me and asked him to be my guarantor, and he gave a pledge on my behalf. I went back to my cell, and I gave him all the baskets I had, and said, ‘Sell them, and give my wife some food.’ Then I said to myself, ‘Macarius, since you have found a wife for yourself, you need to work much harder to support her.’ So I worked night and day and passed on to her the money that I  made. When it was time for the unfortunate girl to bear a child, she spent many days in labour, and still did not produce the baby. They said to her, ‘What’s the matter?’ She said, ‘I know why I am in agony so long.’ Her parents asked her why. She said, ‘I accused that hermit falsely, for he had nothing to do with it; the father is a young man named so-and-so.’ The man who ministered to me heard this, and came to me with joy saying, ‘The girl could not bear her child, until she confessed that you had nothing to do with it and that she had told lies about you. Look, all the villagers want to come to your cell and glorify God, and ask your pardon.’ When I heard this, I did not want them to trouble me, so I rose and fled here to Scetis. That was why I began to live here.

Once Theophilus of holy memory, the archbishop of Alexandria, came to Scetis. The brothers gathered together and said to Pambo, ‘Speak to the bishop, that he may be edified.’ Pambo replied, ‘If he is not edified by my silence, my speech certainly will not edify him.’

Antony once heard about how a young monk showed off on a journey. He saw some old men walking wearily along the road, and he ordered some donkeys to appear and carry them home. When the old men told Antony about this he said, ‘I think that monk is like a ship laden with a rich cargo, but it is not yet certain that it will reach port in safety.’ Shortly afterwards, Antony began to weep and pull his hair, and groan. When his disciples saw it, they said, ‘Why are you weeping, abba?’ He replied, ‘A great pillar of the church has just fallen.’ He said this about the young monk, and added, ‘Walk over and see what has happened.’ So his disciples went, and found the monk sitting on his mat and weeping for a sin that he had committed. When he saw Antony’s disciples, he said, ‘Tell the abba to pray God to give me just ten days, and I hope to be able to satisfy Him.’ Within five days he was dead.

The monks praised a brother to Antony. Antony went to him and tested him to see if he could endure being insulted. When he saw that he could not bear it, he said to him, ‘You are like a house with a highly decorated outside, but burglars have stolen all the furniture by the back door.’

A provincial judge once wanted to see Poemen and he would not allow it. So the judge arrested his nephew as if he were a criminal and imprisoned him, saying, ‘I will release him when Poemen comes to ask about him.’ The boy’s mother came to her  brother Poemen and began to weep outside the door of his cell. Bitterly unhappy, she began to reproach him, saying, ‘You may have a heart of cold steel, you may be pitiless, but at least have mercy on your kin and relent.’ But he told her, ‘Poemen is not a father of children.’ So she went away. When the judge heard this he sent a messenger to say, ‘You have only to ask and I will release him.’ Poemen sent back this message, ‘Try his case legally. If he ought to die, let him die. If he is innocent, do as you say.’

Good books on practice

Epictetus - Discourses, Encheiridion
Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
Seneca - Moral letters
Pierre Hadot writings

Higher ethics, higher culture

French Moralists: Joubert, Chamfort, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère
Stanisław Lec,
Guido Ceronetti
Pascal, Montaigne,
Jacob Burckhardt

Thinking against

Akio Nakatani - Exploding the Nuclear Weapons Hoax
Holocaust - www.HolocaustHandbooks.com, www.NukeBook.org

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The Team

Our team consists of several scholars and numerous volunteers from various countries. Unless Western societies stop persecuting and prosecuting scholars and laypersons who peacefully voice their skepticism about aspects of the orthodox Holocaust narrative, we will not disclose the identity of any of these individuals.

Company Philosophy

Freedom of Speech (in any form) needs to be defended where it is threatened. The expression of non-controversial views is basically never threatened, hence needs no pro-active protection. Only views considered controversial or even offensive by those in power, or by an intolerant lynch mob, are threatened. However, as long as the views expressed do not advocate, promote, approve of, justify or condone the violation of anyone’s civil rights, there is no objective justification, and thus no legitimacy, to limit the expression of such views. If anyone strives to suppress them anyway, they turn into oppressive powers meriting every human being’s stiff opposition.

Criticizing an individual (such as a witness to a claimed historical event) or a group of individuals (such as survivors of a historical tragedy) for their behaviors or attitudes, and scrutinizing their expressed views, is NOT a violation of their civil rights. Disagreeing in a civilized manner with the views people expressed, and with their actions, is a fundamental part of Freedom of Speech. Anyone infringing on this right needs to be met with peaceful resistance and civil disobedience, in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi.

This is the very core of our engagement.

So called Antisemitism

Kevin MacDonald 

Andrew Joyce https://varapanno.blogspot.com/search/label/Andrew%20Joyce?m=0

Herve Ryssen https://varapanno.blogspot.com/search/label/Ryssen?m=0
Oliver Revilo

Intelligent Project

William A. Dembski
Michael J. Behe
Jonathan Wells

9/11 Jewish crime

Christopher Bollyn https://varapanno.blogspot.com/search/label/Bollyn?m=0
Nicolas Kollerstorm https://varapanno.blogspot.com/search/label/Kollerstrom?m=0

History

Thucydides, Tacitus
Jaeger Paideia
Annales - French school (history of ideas)

Respected and admired writers

Shalamov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Lichtenberg, W.H. Auden, Bela Hamvas, Bobkowski, Witkacy, Ortega y Gasset, Henryk Elzenberg, Edward Stachura, Leopardi