Samuel Crowell: In Memoriam!

By Richard A. Widmann ∙ May 1, 2017
Last updated on August 19, 2024

I learned of the passing of Samuel Crowell as I have learned of the passing of several friends over the past year—via email. I had been away for the day but decided to check my messages prior to retiring for the evening. There were several stacked up regarding my late friend; the subject of the first was simply “Crowell.” Nearly three weeks had already passed since the heart attack that claimed his life on 1 April – news doesn’t necessarily travel fast on the Internet.

As revisionists, we are naturally skeptical and therefore question reports of contemporary events as well as historical accounts. The attachment of an obituary quickly removed all doubt. It is widely known that “Samuel Crowell” was a pseudonym – one of several which my colleague chose to assign to his articles; I shall for the sake of the privacy of his family use that name throughout this article. Crowell selected his nom de plume due to the threat of persecution that revisionists suffered from the mid-1990s on. It was in fact legislation throughout Europe trampling free speech with regard to the Holocaust story that first caught Crowell’s eye and resulted in his immersion in the subject.

The man who would become Samuel Crowell was born in San Francisco on 5 May 1955. Crowell loved his country and especially the freedoms that so many took for granted during the Eisenhower administration of his birth. He would join the Marine Corps where he served two tours of duty. He graduated from the University of California (Berkeley) where he studied philosophy, foreign languages, and modern European history. His continued love of history and amazing ability to recall facts resulted in his attainment of a Master’s degree in Eastern European History from Columbia University. He would later become a Professor of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

I first became aware of Crowell around 1994. I spotted his comments on the alt-revisionism newsgroup in the days before the appearance of any websites on the Holocaust (or just about any other matter). His user ID at the time was “Ehrlich606” and for the first couple years, I referred to him simply as Ehrlich. I noticed his comments initially because they were utterly free of cant. His questions were sharp. His comments were direct – but never derogatory. Crowell would later describe himself as a “moderate revisionist.” This was more than a label but rather a school of thought that he hoped would find more adherents. Crowell was genuinely interested in debunking the exaggerations and excesses of the Holocaust story but did so without any intention of offending anyone – especially the Jewish people.

Shortly after our first exchanges on the Internet, I introduced Crowell to Bradley R. Smith and the small cadre of volunteers around CODOH. Crowell was immediately drawn to Smith’s style, charm, and cause – namely to argue for intellectual freedom with regard to the Holocaust story. It was not long after this that I had the opportunity to meet Crowell face-to-face. It was the first of many such occasions in which we would gather with other revisionists for food, drink, and discussion of the latest turns in Holocaust studies. During that first meeting, we visited the home of Friedrich Berg, who was well known for his studies surrounding the absurdity of the diesel-gas-chamber story.

The Repal company of Leipzig offers “air defense shelter doors and shutters, in steel” in this advertisement, which appeared in a 1942 issue of the German trade periodical Baulicher Luftschutz. Such doors were gas resistant. Note the protected peep hole.

Berg shared documents from his personal files including several having to do with the construction and sale of German air-raid-shelter components. While going through these wartime materials, we first saw the Repal advertisement for “air defense shelter doors and shutters, in steel.” We immediately recognized that the gas-resistant door with protected peephole was identical to the Majdanek “gas-chamber door” replica that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) had put on display for an American audience at their new museum on the National Mall.

By early 1997, Crowell’s first article appeared on the CODOH Website, “Wartime Germany’s Anti-Gas Air-Raid Shelters: A Refutation of Pressac’s ‘Criminal Traces.’” Crowell’s approach was to address the leading “exterminationist” writers with a positive rather than negative approach. His idea was, rather than saying something could not have been used as a gas chamber, to explain what it may more likely have been used for. Beginning with Jean-Claude Pressac’s noted 39 “Criminal Traces” – what he called “indirect proofs” of the Holocaust, Crowell presented benign explanations. When his article appeared in The Journal of Historical Review, the editor explained:[1]

“His basic argument is that the documents cited by Pressac as ‘traces’ of homicidal ‘gas chambers’ are references to air-raid shelters, or to their fittings or equipment. Specifically, he contends, the Birkenau crematory morgue rooms – the supposed ‘gas chambers’ where, it is alleged, hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed with ‘Zyklon’ pesticide – were modified to also serve as air-raid shelters with features to protect against possible Allied attacks with poison gas.”

By July of 1997, Crowell penned his second article dealing with the “bomb shelter thesis” – this time expanding his argument and leveraging newly found materials.

“Defending Against the Allied Bombing Campaign: Air Raid Shelters and Gas Protection in Germany” quickly found adherents and detractors from both the revisionist and exterminationist camps. While Crowell never claimed to be the first to make the air-raid-shelter argument, he clearly developed it beyond what others had done.[2] For revisionists who had argued for years that the gas chambers were all disinfection or delousing chambers, the “bomb-shelter thesis” seemed to take direct aim at their work. Likewise, a letter to Walter Reich, the Director of the USHMM explaining that the door displayed in the Washington DC museum was the replica of a common mass-produced air-raid-shelter door, went unanswered.[3]

Beyond various short book reviews, editorials, and commentary that Crowell penned at the time under various pseudonyms, he set to work to complete his revisionist magnum opus, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes: An Attempt at a Literary Analysis of the Holocaust Gassing Claim. Crowell’s book-length effort now went beyond the “bomb-shelter thesis” and examined the origin of the gas-chamber stories from the first reports through the disinfection procedures, the confessions of key witnesses and even the euthanasia campaign. Again, using his standard approach, Crowell sought to find logical explanations for the stories, which developed into what he termed “the Canonical Holocaust.” His approach was again a unique one. He applied the methodology of literary analysis and considered the sources and reports in a chronological and comparative method.

The title of Crowell’s definitive work was based on his discovery that the gassing narrative by “witness” Alexander Werth bore a stark similarity to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s description of a poisonous gassing in his Sherlock Holmes tale, “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman” of the 1920s. Crowell observed that there were causes for the gassing claims and did not accept the often-repeated explanations of the more extreme revisionists that the entire tale amounted to a lie, a hoax, or some sort of Jewish conspiracy. Rather Crowell would call the gassing claims “the delusion of the Twentieth Century.”

Bradley Smith published the first copies of Sherlock (as we referred to it) in an inexpensive Xerox-copied, plastic covered, spiral-bound edition. Smith began a public relations campaign called “Operation Sherlock” in which over a hundred copies of the book were sent to an elite of authors, intellectuals, and activists.[4] Needless to say, there were few who would respond publicly, or honestly.

In 2000, Crowell would tackle the bomb-shelter thesis once again. Based on additional research, Crowell wrote his highly provocative “Bomb Shelters in Birkenau: A Reappraisal.” In “Bomb Shelters in Birkenau,” Crowell argued that the crematoria at Birkenau had been equipped with gas-tight fixtures as part of a civil-defense measure and that this is the most plausible argument for their existence.

As Lao Tzu commented, “The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long,” Crowell’s bright revisionist career abruptly ended as the millennium began. If interesting events occurred or new discoveries were made, Crowell would continue to comment among friends, but his public writing had all but ceased. It was a great surprise when in 2011 publisher Chip Smith decided to publish a proper volume of Sherlock now titled, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes and Other Writings on the Holocaust, Revisionism, and Historical Understanding.

The new 400-page edition by Nine-Banded Books included a new preface, and new chapters including “Revisiting the Bomb Shelter Thesis: A Postscript to ‘Bomb Shelters in Birkenau,’” and “The Holocaust in Retrospect: A Historical and Revisionist Assessment.” For a moment it seemed that Crowell was back. A prototype for a website was drawn up, but it was really not to be. The final words that Crowell would write on the subject were these:

“The destruction of the Jews in World War Two will remain an important object for study and commemoration among the Jewish people and the German people. The wars, revolutions, ethnic cleansings, famines, epidemics, and grand experiments in social engineering that dislocated many tens of millions of human beings, and killed a large proportion of them, and of which the Holocaust was a part, will be remembered by everyone who has a stake in the European inheritance. Like any series of events, it will be romanticized. Like any series of events, it will be mythologized. And, like any series of events, it will be properly understood only after the passage of time.”

Crowell was done with the Holocaust story. As such he turned his attention to other subjects. Foremost in his mind was another historical controversy—one that he claimed to wrestle with for 50 years — that of the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare. His final book was William Fortyhands: Disintegration and Reinvention of the Shakespeare Canon (2016). Crowell stated that his disintegration of the Shakespeare canon was the work that he was most proud of. Crowell inscribed the copy that he gave me, “The H. is over, so time for other things.” Indeed, for Crowell, he had said all that he could say on the Holocaust.

In early 2016, following news of the passing of his old friend, Bradley Smith, Crowell wrote what would be his last article – a memorial for Smith – “Bradley Smith: In Memoriam.” Here, once again, Crowell used the phrase “In Memoriam” just as he had dedicated his magnum opus many years prior. As used in Sherlock the Latin phrase seemed like a seal on the tomb of the Holocaust story itself, forever relegating it to memory. The meaning of these words shifted however when applied to Bradley Smith. The words had transformed into a requiem for a dear departed friend. It seems fitting that they be used once again to remember my friend Samuel Crowell. You will be missed.

Notes
[1] Samuel Crowell, “Wartime Germany’s Anti-Gas Air-Raid Shelters: A Refutation of Pressac’s ‘Criminal Traces,’” The Journal of Historical Review Vol. 18, No. 4, July / August 1999, p. 7.
[2] Crowell credited Arthur Butz for example and his 1996 article, “Vergasungskeller.” Online: https://codoh.com/library/document/vergasungskeller/
[3]Samuel Crowell, “Samuel Crowell’s Letter to the Director of the USHMM.” Online: https://codoh.com/library/document/samuel-crowells-letter-to-the-director-of-the/
[4]“CODOH Launches a New Revisionist Masterpiece: ‘The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes’.” Smith’s Report No. 62, Feb./Mar. 1999; https://codoh.com/media/files/sr62.pdf.https://codoh.com/library/document/vergasungskeller/

[3] Samuel Crowell, “Samuel Crowell’s Letter to the Director of the USHMM.” Online: https://codoh.com/library/document/samuel-crowells-letter-to-the-director-of-the/

[4] “CODOH Launches a New Revisionist Masterpiece: ‘The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes’.” Smith’s Report No. 62, Feb./Mar. 1999; https://codoh.com/media/files/sr62.pdf
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Richard A. Widmann

Richard A. Widmann, together with David Thomas, created modern CODOH as we know it, when he talked Bradley Smith into creating what was then called CODOHWeb, CODOH's online presence in 1995/1996. In 1999, Richard Widmann was among the team that launched and ran the revisionist periodical The Revisionist, until it was taken over by Germar Rudolf in 2003. When this project collapsed in 2005 with Rudolf's arrest, deportation and 44-months imprisonment, Richard Widmann, after some hesitation, created a new revisionist periodical in 2009 called Inconvenient History, which he issued until 2017, when this project, too, was once more taken over by Germar Rudolf.
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A New Approach to Shakespeare Authorship
Christopher Pankhurst
1,075 words

Samuel Crowell
William Fortyhands: Disintegration and Reinvention of the Shakespeare Canon
Charleston, W.V.: Nine-Banded Books, 2016

The idea that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare is a well-established motif in literary conspiracy theories. Starting in the mid-19th century, numerous and varied writers have gone into great detail to prove that the Shakespeare corpus was actually written by Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or Edward de Vere, amongst others. These theories are entertaining enough, partly because they convey that gratifying feeling of having discovered hidden knowledge, and partly because they shine light into the puzzling lacunae of Shakespeare’s biography. But they have never been particularly convincing.

This leaves us with a situation where the known facts of Shakespeare’s life seem too paltry to tell us much about the writing of the plays, but the alternative candidates seem no more plausible. Consequently, we find a majority of scholars coalescing around the conventional attribution of the plays to Shakespeare (the Stratfordians) and smaller groups advocating for one or other of the alternative candidates (the anti-Stratfordians). In the absence of any greatly compelling evidence, positions on all sides tend to become rather fixed.

In his new book, William Fortyhands, Samuel Crowell gives an erudite and entertaining history of the background to the Shakespeare controversy, weighs the merits of all sides, and offers his own, surprisingly plausible solution.

Crowell characterises the literary milieu in which the plays were produced as the “Elizabethan Beats.” This description applies to the group of dissolute young men who congregated on the London theatrical world in the late 16th century, men like Christopher Marlowe. Like their 20th-century counterparts, these young writers embodied a “live fast, die young” ethos, and unlike the later beats mostly did die young. There were hundreds of plays being produced in England at this time and the Elizabethan Beats seem to have been an important engine of this industry. It is within this milieu that William Shakespeare left his legacy.

Famously, following Shakespeare’s death a folio of plays bearing his name was published. This has forever been the foundational document of Shakespeare studies but the situation is complicated because many of the plays had also appeared in quarto editions which were usually much shorter than the folio versions. Some of these quartos bore the name of Shakespeare but others were published anonymously. Even more confusingly, some of the individual plays were published in differing versions as quartos. Just to complete the confusion, earlier versions of the “Shakespeare” plays seem to have existed, written by other authors and upon which the Shakespeare versions seem to have been based, such as the Ur-Hamlet.

Crowell marshals all of this material expertly and gives an excellent and lucid account of the rise of Shakespeare studies culminating in David Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee festival in Stratford. Ironically, the increase in Shakespeare’s popularity and growing interest in his life led to the uncovering of certain documents (most notoriously his will) that began to provoke questions about authorship. Crowell documents the history of the authorship question in great detail and is careful to contextualize his study with various theoretical perspectives, too much so in my opinion. But this does at least demonstrate his good faith in seeking to approach an objective view rather than promoting a personal hobby horse.

Ultimately, Crowell concludes that the plays were probably written by a number of those Elizabethan Beats, either singly or collaboratively, and that a final position on who wrote exactly what is probably unknowable. The reason that Shakespeare’s name was so definitively associated with so many of the plays, Crowell argues, is that his role was something like editor and theatrical producer. Essentially, he sourced texts, edited them down for performance (the shorter quartos) and funded the whole enterprise. He would have been “informally presented” (p. 214) as the writer of the plays. Unlike the actual writers, Shakespeare appears to have been very wealthy at a time when playwrights were treated as cheap hacks.

This is an elegant interpretation of the available evidence. Even though it leaves us with a situation vastly more complex than attribution to any one single author, it allows us to go beyond all of the evidential problems that such attributions caused. It is an excellent application of Occam’s Razor because Crowell follows the evidence and accepts what it tells him, even if doing so seems to shatter our idea of what it means to be an author. It would appear that in the 18th century the person who actually wrote the words of the plays was not much of a consideration. The “pull” would have been the name of the producer who would have been associated with a string of hits. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see the sort of contemporary parallels with this. For example, films are generally more closely identified with their directors than their screenwriters. Perhaps an even better example would be the mythical creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. It is quite possible that Satoshi is a pseudonym hiding a number of cryptocurrency experts. Perhaps we should start calling him Satoshi Fortyhands?

Despite Crowell’s compelling assessment of the evidence there are still questions remaining. Crowell points out that if Shakespeare really did write the plays then he must have amassed a great deal of knowledge from somewhere. It is pretty much agreed by everyone that he didn’t have an extensive education so perhaps he picked his knowledge up by socializing with a range of interesting and knowledgeable people?

If Shakespeare really was the sort of person who went to local drinking establishments to get the lowdown on legal terminology, Italian geography, hawking, or what have you, then one would expect more contemporary references to him as a real person. This is not what we find. Almost all the references to him are based strictly on the title page attributions of the plays and poems. (p. 236)

But if this mitigates against Shakespeare as a writer, which is primarily a solitary occupation, then surely it mitigates even more against Shakespeare as impresario, with all the organizational and publicity work that that would imply.

Such questions are unlikely to resolve into definitive answers, and Crowell is surely right to conclude that we will never come to a definitive conclusion about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. The scenario he paints in William Fortyhands is remarkable for being at once a sober handling of the evidence and a radical reassessment of the authorship question.

Christopher Pankhurst
https://counter-currents.com/

The Owls of Afrasiab: The Secret Story of Constantinopole 1453

 Principal Characters: A Presentation

The Emperor

Constantine XI Dragases (after his Serbian mother Helena Dragas) descends from a long line of imperial rulers of the Palaiologos dynasty that recovered Constantinople in the mid 13th century from alien Frankish lords, who had been ruling Constantinople for half a century after taking it during the Fourth Crusade. He’s the eighth child of ten. Although he rules the city in the absence of his emperor brother John between 1440-43, he probably never imagines that he is one day going to be its officially appointed head. The death of John changes all that. Even so, Constantine can only, and in competition with another brother, claim the imperial title through arbitration by his arch enemy, the Turkish sultan Murad II.

Once emperor his political position is difficult to say the least. On the one hand he has to oblige the sultan in order to sustain the truce concluded after the latter’s latest unsuccessful attempt in 1422 to conquer the city. On the other hand he has to take steps to protect it from simply being engulfed within the relentlessly expanding Ottoman empire. To do so, Constantine, in spite of the resistance among his people, must rely on the continued support of the Aragonese Kingdom of Catalonia, the City Republics of Genoa and Venice, as well as the Papal State, all of which have vested commercial and military interests in the eastern Mediterranean. Consequently, he has no choice but to uphold the union of the Orthodox and the Catholic churches agreed in writing at a Church council held in Florence a decade earlier. But this union is not only bitterly resented by the common people. Considered heresy and treason, it has its fierce opponents among the upper clergy, yes, even among Constantine’s own generals and ministers.

With hindsight it’s easy to see that Constantine and the people backing his views were right in considering the union an absolute political necessity. But what could he have done to win the others – still piously holding on to the millenarian Nicene creed – over to his side? His was a time when miracles authored by God were not only prophesied but fervently believed in. To the people everything seemed to indicate that the time of Christ’s promised second coming was imminent.

In the historical documents Constantine comes across as an experienced military leader and a responsible monarch eager to secure a modicum of safety, prosperity and peace for his sadly reduced and war-ravaged people. But there is also something melancholy, even lonely about him. Two wives die young without securing him an heir – he had loved them both. As we enter the scene he has, aged fifty, been forced to relinquish the hope of finding a third wife. Like so many other people of his status in society, his personality at times has a tendency to disappear behind its official and ceremonial embodiment.

As a man of honour – obliged by the noble institution and tradition created by the first of the Constantines more than a thousand years earlier – he knows that in the last instance he will have no choice but to make the city’s destiny his own. I thus envisage his imperial crown to also be a wreath of thorns. Not that he consciously tries to emulate our Lord and Saviour; as the plot thickens, though, he willy-nilly seems to grow into his sandals.

Old, dilapidated, a mere shadow of its former glory, Constantinople remains the city of God parexcellence, the very pillar on which the Holy Trinity rests. Moreover it is precisely the definition of the Trinity that lays at the heart of the endless theological disputes between the two churches, at a time when not only Islamic fundamentalists, but many Christians too, found it worthwhile to sometimes die for their faith. I find one quote attributed to the emperor especially pertinent in this regard: “What would posterity think of us if we didn’t even put up a fight to defend our holy churches?”

Legend has it that Constantine during the decisive great battle was petrified by an angel and laid to rest as a marble statue under the Golden Gate. Ever since he is abiding the time when Christians will again unite. He will then come alive, rise to the occasion and drive the Moslems out of Europe. Lord Byron and other prominent people of his day hoped the moment had come during the Greek war for independence – he gave his own life for the cause while trying to swim across the Bosporus.

To Byron and other romantic characters (to this very day) the last of the Constantines was an indisputable hero, the double-headed eagle incarnate. In truth, he did obey the dramaturgic rules incumbent upon a hero of a Greek tragedy and could subsequently see his maker eye to eye. Posterity too has exonerated him. What he himself felt deep at heart about the whole thing is, perhaps, an altogether different matter, parts of which might be glimpsed through the cracks of this story.

The Commander – Giovanni Giustiniani Longo

(all three names are alternately used in

reference to him throughout the book)

A Genoese noble man, blond, blue-eyed, in his mid-thirties, of Norman descent on his mother’s side. His influential family (its Coat of Arms carries an eagle similar to that of the empire) is represented both in the actual Republic of Genoa, and in the Aegean island of Chios, at this time under Genoese rule.

Charged with two, perhaps three, different missions – one of state, one of family obligation and one of entirely private character – he has above all been entrusted with the Herculean task of protecting the city’s Genoese population and securing the Genoese trading town of Pera across the Golden Horn, a mere stone’s throw from Constantinople itself. Giustiniani is the pivotal point in this account of the siege. Without him there simply wouldn’t be any defence of Constantinople, and he is well aware of this. But although Pera is a point of utmost strategic interest to the Genoese by and large, Giustiniani’s own position is ambiguous. True, he has, at his own expense, brought seven hundred mercenary fighters to reinforce the depleted domestic troops. But if this mission has indeed been sanctioned by the Grand Council back in Genoa, how come Pera itself has received orders (or has decided by its own volition) to remain neutral in the case of a military conflict with the Turks? It seems the Genoese are trying to simultaneously play at least two different hands. Doing so they also appear willing to sacrifice Giustiniani himself if need be.

His agenda is not obvious, and it’s hard to guess in how many plots he is actually involved. One thing is for sure, though. The camaraderie which the ruthless siege forces upon the city’s defenders brings him ever closer to the emperor, who’s moral example in the midst of crisis makes a great impression upon him. An indivisible bond and a sense of mutual obligation between the two men is created. As time goes by Giustiniani finds himself more and more deeply involved in the “to be or not to be” of the celestial city. Tried to the utmost by the enemy and the wrath of God, maybe he too could in the end have been persuaded to become a tragic hero. But then we haven’t taken that fair, foreign woman into account. She has a very different idea in her head, and the corresponding strength of heart to see things through.

State Secretary Francis

Is a childhood friend of Emperor Constantine and a key player behind the scenes. As a man of learning and, above all, diplomacy, he can be petty and scheming if he deems it necessary. But he can also exercise his reason and act accordingly. All his life he has striven to merit the respect and esteem he a priori enjoys with Constantine, and he does have the vanity of a courtier. Nonetheless, his loyalty to his friend and master is genuine. The empire to him, though presently reduced to a very small point in space, is an eternal truth which in the end must prevail. But even though this is his true feeling, his levelheadedness luckily gets the better of him and he clearly realises that wishes, dreams and the belief in miracles won’t save the city from falling into the hands of the enemy.

As the drama opens Francis has been intensely preoccupied trying to rally the Christian powers to their aid. He has also tried to find his master a suitable new wife, but perhaps he has committed a major tactical error by single-handedly withdrawing the marriage proposal Constantine (then only a despot of Mistra in the Peloponnese) made to the only remaining daughter of the Duke of Venice. It doesn’t take much imagination to realise that the old Doge doesn’t exactly find it endearing to learn that the Byzantine Secretary of State suddenly, after Constantine has become crowned emperor, considers him, the head of the mighty Venetian Republic, too low in rank to come into question as a father-in-law.

Constantine has given Francis more or less carte blanche in finding him a suitable bride, but as time goes by, and the Venetians stubbornly refuse to show up at the scene of action, Constantine grows weary. It dawns on him that Doge Foscari – despite the Venetian Council of Ten meanwhile deciding in favour of a military intervention – probably does everything he can to delay the entire operation until it will be too late.

Constantine then begins to distrust his old friend and State Secretary’s political judgment. Francis himself is devastated by what he feels to be his master’s lack of appreciation for his unswerving loyalty to him and his family. This is also one of the reasons why he loathes their own local Grand Duke, Lucas Notaras. In Francis’ eyes the emperor has been duped by this man, whom Francis considers deceitful, disloyal, and only simulating patriotism and noble bravery to the galleries, while in reality not giving a damn about the fate of the city and its population.

Lucas Notaras, Megadux

Is a member of a noble and influential family of long standing within the empire. He prides himself with the title Grand Duke. In this capacity he is also Prime Minister and Chief Admiral of the Fleet – a position of some consequence as Constantinople becomes exposed to a series of fierce naval attacks. Whether or not he is at heart set against the union of the two churches is not clear. Even though Francis regards him as a traitor to the unionist cause, Notaras’ family has entertained privileged relations with the Catholic Republic of Venice for the better part of two centuries; he even has a second, Venetian, citizenship. In spite of this he has made himself rather popular among the sworn anti-unionists in the city, who are fond of attributing to him the saying: “I’d rather see the Sultan’s turban than the Pope’s mitre in Constantinople.”

Neither the emperor, nor Francis, have ever heard him say so in person. It might just have been an emotional outburst, subsequently, and maliciously, quoted out of context, since Notaras is known to be temperamental, at times paying scant attention to the decorum of his position. But this lack of diplomatic caution certainly has not ingratiated him with Francis, who continues to consider him a menace to them all.

Francis’ aversion on the other hand might be interpreted as his bad conscience for frivolously having waved a marriage proposal in the face of the Doge, only to pull it back when the latter readied himself to swallow the bait. It is possible that it is thanks to Lucas Notaras alone that so many Venetian galleys have in fact remained in the harbour, and that the Venetian population, fearing and loathing the Genoese both in the city and at Pera, and not really loving the Greeks either, could at all be persuaded to participate in the city’s defence.

The Turkish Princess

Hadije, once wife to the late Sultan Murad II, is to this story what mercurial salt is to the hermetic process, the yeast to the dough, the fermentation to the grape: she is the secret agent that brings about the transformation of substances. Her provenance is shrouded in mystery. Where does she really come from? Who sent her? What is her purpose?

To Hadije herself, the outcome of certain key events have been obvious long before they actually occur. This is one reason why at first she must sound like a cry in the wilderness. Once brought within the ambit of the city she has to fight the incredulity of all those who see nothing but a devilishly seductive embodiment of the enemy, hence of evil, in her appearance. But even though, from the outset, she has the cards stacked against her (and although her bosom is stacked slightly more in her favour), she manages to drive home an overwhelmingly strong point, namely that the memento mori mustn’t prevent us from realising that it is, above all, the exuberance of life we as human beings are meant to nourish and protect to the best of our capacity, and that dying for a lofty cause, however noble per se, may in the end prove to be an illusion without redemption.

With Hadije – or Felicia as her Christian name will be – the unforeseen factor enters the story, working as a catalyst, thus bringing the process to its last and perhaps inevitable consequence. I do charge her with la forza del destino, and she is the architect of treason, if you will. But in this capacity she is also a representation of the eternally feminine and that tenacious natural life which, no matter what, will always find a way.

The love story between her and the commander in chief is one of those that are simply bound to happen over and over again in the course of human history. In the semi-eternal light of archangels and apocalypses it is perhaps a banal story, meaning one we have heard many times before. But at the same time it is the symbol of an inner battle that bears the fatal hallmark of irresistible attraction combined with the determination of an indomitable soul. Whether or not she is in the end “right” in what she is doing is a moot point. It is not for nothing that the saying is so often repeated: “All is fair in love and war”.

Doge Foscari

Francesco Foscari, descending from an ancient noble family, was elected Doge in Venice in 1423, thereby temporarily defeating a man destined to become his life-long political adversary, Peter Loredan, who ultimately brought him down. As our story begins to unfold, Foscari is already 80 years old and marked by a life of endless political intrigue. During his long tenure Venice has been precipitated into numerous, and in the end very costly armed conflicts with the city state of Milan, first under the rule of Filippo Visconti, then by Francesco Sforza, a condottiere born in Venice who in 1447 became the implacable enemy of his native city by marrying Filippo Visconti’s only remaining natural heir, Bianca Maria.

However, it wasn’t just Foscari’s obsession with terra firma domination on the plains of Po that made him reluctant to engage in overseas activities and send military aid to Constantinople. There was also his sense of hurt pride for having been rejected as an imperial father-in-law (see presentation of Secretary Francis above). In addition, his only son, accused of having conspired against the republic and, to this end, to have committed murder, was exiled from Venice to Crete. Foscari senior tries everything in his power to have his reputation restored and dreams of the day when the prodigal son will be able to return home to eventually – although the title as yet is not heritable – succeed him as Doge of Venice.

The dazzling last act of this real-life political drama inspired two prominent 19th century artists to dramatise the destinies of father and son. Lord Byron wrote a play on the theme of double and mutually exclusive loyalities – in this case the artful preservation of virtue and truth in a republic as opposed to the natural but potentially corrupt promotion of family interests – and Giuseppe Verdi composed a today all but forgotten opera named I due Foscari.

Around this time northern Italy witnessed the appearance of the first Tarot deck in western history, designed by an artist working for the court of Milan (still today this first deck bears the name of Visconti-Sforza, indicating that it was indeed produced in the late 1440s). Foscari – haphazardly coming into possession of these cards – becomes deeply puzzled by their enigmatic symbolism and he consults the humanists around him to elucidate him on the subject. Shortly after he is seen turning into something of a magus, dabbling in occult sciences in the hope of not only being able to foretell the future, but to actually change the course of destiny.

Pope Nicholaus V

Exhibits many of the paradoxes of the highly talented renaissance man. As a learned humanist he allegedly possesses a private library comprising over nine thousand books – one of his close friends even says: “What he does not know is outside the range of human knowledge”. At the same time he can be a prelate of the most appalling bigotry, hurling intolerant decrees in all directions. One of his most infamous bulls, for example, gives the Portuguese the formal right to ruthlessly oppress, convert and then enslave all pagan populations they come across in their attempts to colonise the world. Simultaneously he envisages a morally irreproachable world of united Christians, but refuses to consider adjusting the dogmatic pillars of Catholicism even an inch. He advocates another crusade yet somehow fails to see what tremendous strategic importance the preservation of a Christian Constantinople, in the midst of a hostile Moslem world, would be to Rome itself. Although he eventually orders some ships to sail to the besieged city, it takes forever to get them under way since he refuses to pay his dues to his Venetian creditors.

As a man in constant self-contradiction it is no wonder he falls under the spell of Ramon Lull’s magic wheel, inviting man to reflect on apparently irreconcilable opposites, such as: is it possible to be at the same time a good Catholic and a liar? In this spirit he also entertains a lengthy correspondence with Foscari, whom he suspects of not always being altogether sincere in his professed affirmation of the formal supremacy of the Papal State in matters mundane and religious.

It takes one to know one...

Mehmet the Sultan

To introduce to the reader the legendary Mehmet II, nemesis of Constantinople, I find no words better than the ones uttered by the awestruck State Secretary Francis at a state visit to the kingdom of Trebizond on the Black Sea coast:

“– Your Majesty. With all due respect. We should perhaps do well in reminding ourselves that for every head cut off from the Lernian hydra two new ones emerged. The new Sultan is such a hydra. Although hardly twenty years of age he has developed several heads. One is belligerent, another deviously diplomatic.

A third loves hunting, a fourth one speaks Persian, Hebrew, Greek and Latin fluently. A fifth knows the entire Islamic jurisprudence by heart, a sixth is accurately informed about the fathers of our church. A seventh drinks copious amounts of wine while the yet another studies maps, siege engines and weapons of mass destruction. The scope of his general intelligence and single-minded ambition is matched only by the fierceness of his many passions. He already has children but is said to prefer hardly mature boys to satisfy his lusts. He is, as you can understand, a perfect monster, but one to whom the designation of neither intelligence nor discipline can be denied. Above all, he’s the most formidable, the most ruthless and implacable opponent to our Christian world since Tamerlane. And he will never give up the ambition to conquer every area within his reach still in Christian hands. Therefore, most venerable Majesty of the glorious House of the Comneni, I dare to disagree with the optimism expressed among our many friends around this table. Instead we should all concentrate on how to best unite and counter this formidable new threat to our peace and prosperity.”

Bishop Leonard and Cardinal Isidore

Appear in this story as a couple of theological detectives. Leonard is born to Greek parents of what he himself refers to as “humble origins” on the island of Chios, at the time governed by the Genoese. Chios furthermore is the island on which the family of Giovanni Giustiniani – the right hand of the emperor during the siege – is in power. Leonard is consequently better informed than most others about the various motives that might have played a role in Giustiniani’s decision to come to the rescue of the city.

As a young man Leonard becomes a Catholic and joins the Dominican order. Subsequent studies in Italy and contacts within the papal sphere make him eminently suited to mediate between the two churches, and a part of his mission to Constantinople is to make sure the Greeks are not in theory alone celebrating the Laetentur Coeli (“may the heavens rejoice”), which is the visible and audible liturgical expression of the unity of the two churches, concluded at the church Council in Ferrara and Florence in 1438.

Cardinal Isidorus, also Greek born and the former Metropolitan (Arch Bishop) of Kiev is the official papal legate to Constantinople and the highest ranking Catholic church official to be present during the siege. Both he and Cardinal Isidorus are forced to conclude that this new article of faith remains a paper construction as far as the divine worship by the people of Constantinople is concerned. At a high mass in Hagia Sophia on December 12, 1452, the hymn is recited, but the service is poorly attended. Lucas Notaras, the Megadux, is present but shows open hostility; the emperor himself seems listless.

The learned George Scholarius, also and better known under his monastic name Brother Gennadi, is conspicuously absent.

Brother Gennadi

Is the monk whom both Leonard and Isidorus suspect of conspiring against both the pope and the emperor. In spite of his erudition he is a very popular figure advocating blind faith in God and his capacity to work miracles when need be. For him to alter the millenarian creed in any way simply does not come into question. He is a typical example of the illuminated, inspired fanatic always to be found in communities held together by strong religious and traditional beliefs. It goes without saying that he is also an ascetic, carrying out countless daily prostrations and practising self-mortification by means of a knotted whip. In the eyes of the people he is the haggard prophet incarnate. That is one thing. But Isidore and Leonard from early on suspect his divine madness is not only simulated, but also that there is definite method to it. In the midst of the turmoil they do everything in their power to find out what he is, in reality, up to. When they finally do find out what is in the making, it has become too late to kill either him or the messenger.

Iannis Papanikolaou and his family

With the possible exception of the city itself, I believe Iannis and his family are the centre of gravity in this drama. In a way one could also say that they are the city. They are also the only members of the common people to detach themselves from the staffage in this account, and their role in so doing is crucial.

Iannis, the father, is a fisherman and it could well have stayed at that if he did not also possess a poet’s soul. This soul in turn is linked to being a child at heart, which also could have been just fine had the circumstances been just a bit more favourable for poets and children. As it is he becomes entangled in a power-plot that his reason cannot fathom. Nonetheless he remains confident that he is participating in events that by far surpasses ordinary human understanding. To him this drama, no matter how fantastic, is real, and he is immensely proud to have been singled out to be the first to receive into the city of God our Lord and Saviour.

Iannis’ wife and two children all carry names associated with imperial dynasties since times immemorial. There is the mother, Irene, who clearly sees that her husband’s penchant for story-telling sometimes gets the better of his veracity. She herself struggles to keep family and home together under very trying circumstances while remaining calm and resourceful in critical moments. She has to her aid the clever eleven year old daughter Anna, whom she calls Princess and has promised a regal marriage in the fullness of time.

The eight year old Manuel, the namesake of so many legendary emperors, has inherited his father’s psychic disposition. In addition he is from time to time afflicted with epileptic seizures. He too sees things hidden to the ordinary mortal eye, and his mother and older sister are not only worried about his physical health, but about his mental state too.

It would be fair to surmise that young Manuel, based on the evidence, is the one closest to God of all the men and women involved in this apocalyptic battle. It is through his eyes that I would finally like to view this story, namely as an instant in time and space where fact and fiction have temporarily been suspended in a higher union, not to say – reality.

**

The City

Consecrated by Emperor Constantine I in AD 330 as the new capital of Rome, it subsequently became the capital of the Byzantine empire. It was to remain so through a checkered history of more than 1100 years until finally conquered by the Turkish Ottomans in 1453. The city, which ever since has remained in Turkish hands, was officially renamed Istanbul in 1950.

Through its famous basilica, the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), raised at a time when Rome lay in ruins after having been sacked and violated by one barbarian tribe after the other, Constantinople in the Middle Ages became known as the epitome of Christianity on Earth. Jerusalem would have been another candidate, but it was never on par with Constantinople in terms of architectural and artistic splendour.Secondly, it was never lastingly held by Christians.

Constantinople was able to withstand so many protracted sieges first and foremost because of its strategic and protected location – the Golden Horn is not only an excellent natural harbour; once the famous floating boom across its inlet was in place it could also be easily defended. The city itself, heavily fortified, is located at the southern end of the Bosporus which makes it both easily accessible and an excellent point for control and surveillance of all maritime traffic through the narrow straits that connect the Mediterranean with the Black Sea.

In the 5th century, during the reign of emperor Theodosius, the original city walls were declared obsolete and a magnificent new defence system, designed by master engineer Anthemius, was erected further to the west, along the line where its remnants now cut right through modern Istanbul.

Ironically the weakest link in that chain is still today an open wound in the cityscape. A multi-lane highway runs through the completely leveled walls in both directions. The remaining ramparts on both sides are used as outdoor toilets, aptly garnished with general rubbish, crushed bottles, cans and condoms. A part of the wall system a bit higher up on the eastern side serves as a refuge for male prostitution. A highway bridge runs perpendicularly to the wall. Under it, the gypsies have taken shelter and hang around in improvised lounges consisting of discarded furniture, as an alternative venue to occupying their make-shift shacks nearby. To be honest, it’s not one of the more quaint places of the city, and it is not frequented by tourists.

Nonetheless it was right here that the destiny of Constantinople was decided. It was right here – on a rainy day in September, overwhelmed by the humdrum of the megapolis – that I was granted a secret glimpse of the city as she might have presented herself to a single witness during one foggy evening, full of strange omens, decay and despair, at the end of the month of May, 1453. And it was right here that the idea came to me to write the story of her fall as I see it.

This, strangely, was the image that opened the gate to the hidden chambers of imagination:

“Fields, orchards, churches, monasteries, houses, villas, palaces, squares, streets and alleys – all enveloped in the same thick moisture, slowly depositing itself on every roof, dripping down, drop by drop, as though descending the insides of a gigantic watery time glass: tick, tock, tick, tock, like a clock still moving but showing no time. In once bustling loggias and open court yards made slippery by fungus and lichen, vast mosaic frescoes majestically sunk into a sea of no return. Neptunes, tritons, sirens and dolphins, dispossessed of their pagan innocence and exuberant gaiety, gaping empty-eyed at the forlorn silence over and around as they disappear into the depths of oblivion. Neptune’s horses, the very emblem of the Meltemmia at the height of summer, dragged out of sight by a giant octopus; the sirens dissolving into foam. Strewn all over the floors, flowers massacred in the prime of youth, left to wither and litter the cool marble turned sickly green and sulphurously yellow in a misplaced autumn. Red roses nipped in their bud and thrown to the ground by showers of hail, rain, pumice and sand. All exquisite art, all venerable tradition, covered in debris, disintegrating, rotting, sinking, and, most disheartening of them all, a magnificent statue of Nike, split in two by a falling beam infested with snails.”

Lars Holger Holm

The age of metaphysical homelessness

Now one sees more clearly what the principle of desert means for the ecology of spirit. Whoever goes into the desert seeks out the worldly location that is uniquely suited to the minimization of the world. The desert is the option of acquiescing only to the world’s unavoidable remainder; the least evil place in the evil world is that which is most hostile to life. The desert forms only a translucent film of being holding the souls back from immediate disappearance into the ultimate ground [Grund]; it is the real almost-not-being that demands no interest for itself but stands open like an empty cosmic therapy-room for the staging [Inszenierungen] of the soul. It is the pure projection-space in which the experience of self and God, including what foils and interrupts it, can be brought to emergence. The alliance with the desert as a sort of transitional thirdness that tends toward zero thus represents a pact with a growth-hostile principle. Inasmuch as growth rep-resents the world-characteristic par excellence, the refusal of it also severs the root of the expansivity of worldly interests.8 Thereby they dry out the birth-friendliness of worldly misfortune that the force of continuation of evil sinks together into itself, the influx of forces into the reproduction of old miseries comes to a halt. Where nothing grows, spurious Becoming is also deprived of its foundation. [96] In its place, the desert offers itself as a stage for exclusive adventures into fusion; these lead, if one believes the aretalogies or glorious speeches concerning the stars of the desert, through sufferings and euphorias to an ever-higher grade of purity, to an ever more empty and sublime form of drunken soberness. If it is the virtuosity of the saints to challenge the desert, then it is the virtuosity of the desert to be amply gruesome in order to induce or elicit or call forth a salu-tary desperation; wherever she gives her best, there the desert becomes the bad-enough mother.9 By giving nothing more than barrenness, scantness, she gives the sovereign emptiness. The desert is hostile and strenuous enough to agitate individuals to a permanent commitment to the extension of the struggle for divinization; it is raw and inhumane enough to exterminate all tenderness for fleeting things. As a zone on the margins of the inhabitable world, it can house the paradoxical movements that want no other status than that of disappearance.

In this empty field,10 which seems to await signs and miracles since long ago, the first outbreakers from the antique social cosmos inscribed their hyper-bolic gestures. Like no other space the desert indeed invites one to act out psychotheological imagery. There, men who at some time in their childhood have absorbed the lectures [97] concerning the captivity of the resistant bodies by the will, move about through the driest areas of Palestine for decades with real fifty-pound iron chains around the hips. They lock themselves for many years into huge graves to prepare themselves for ascension through Christ— and if this is postponed, this is only because of the lethargy of the flesh, in which the nights pass in hard battles with sensual simulacra and the midday hours in the struggle against demons of heat. Famously the life of St. Anthony filled the image arsenals of European nightmare culture up to modernity with inexhaustible impulses. The emergence of gruesome images became possible because the deserted space framed the specter of associating and projecting souls like therapeutic brackets; above the delirious holy patients, the neutral attention of God floats as a saving ear. In this regard, the desert experiment had to lead to a spontaneous discovery of what the nineteenth century calls the unconscious; whoever was there knows more about the area out of which temptations [Versuchungen] and symptoms emerge.
If the human decides to go into the desert, he elevates his life into the state of metaphysical alertness—awakeness is everything. The metaphor of keeping oneself alert for the lord translates for these extremists of orthodoxy into an unprecedented battle against sleep, which is for the most part reduced to a few hours and in many cases only sitting, even hanging attached to ropes in vertical position. The saints spark themselves up like living eternal lights who illuminate the desert nights with their awakeness; thus, they correspond to the fixed stars, [98] whose light radiates from yonder into the black space of creation. John of Moschus, the poetic eulogist of anchoritism, saw in the people of solitary prayer out there a blooming “spiritual meadow,” and when that meadow laughed, as accords with the rules of rhetoric, its laugh already bore witness to the glamour of the overworld. In contrast, in the literal desert, over centuries people wept more than ever before or after in the history of humanity. Without the gift of tears, hardly one of these athletes could have been capable of elevation into the higher grades of dyadic unity. Tears were at all times held in the highest regard as means and signs of purification by the world-escapists. Together with persistent prayer, that inner monologue of the dyadic monad, tears were incomparably well suited to liquidate the world-blockage and to flush away the separating layers between “God” and soul. If prayers and tears have become identical, nothing is left of the subject but a supplication to be allowed to abandon itself; the supplication makes to its god the unspeakable confession that it wants to be nothing but a part of him; even the anchorite’s desperation belongs to God; in his final weakness the desperate one encounters non-being before the beloved. Then the anchorite wants to not be his own anymore, and above all to have no will of his own and no world of his own. For the sake of becoming unworldly [Entweltlichung], the monks forbid themselves laughter; many spent their whole lives naked, like animals in ecstasy; others abandoned the use of shoes, some even the use of first-person possessive pronouns. John of Cassian said about the undergarments of the Egyptian monks: “The cutoff sleeves [99] should remind them that they are cut off from all deeds and works of this world. The linen garments say to them that they are dead to all life on earth.”11 How far the concern for the destruction of all worldliness reached among the holy solitaries reveals itself above all in the mythlike episodes of anachoretic literature, which, from the fourth century onward, submerges the whole Near East in a climate of desert fanaticism.

(...)

But then the question of where the monks are going would have to be reformulated so radically that it would no longer be about monks at all. The question would instead be: how does human acosmicity manifest itself under modern conditions? How do the forces oriented toward resettlement organize themselves in post-metaphysical times? How do modern subjects conduct themselves with their element-changing tendencies, if anachoretic, monastic or psychotheological “paths” no longer stand open? What, in general, will become of the escapist, path-forging impulses of the polyvalent animal?

It bears repeating that an adequate response to these questions would amount to a cultural history of modernity. For the moment, it should suffice to indicate that the unexampled development of western music can only be understood on the basis of the necessity of producing a convincing culture-wide substitute for the lost desert and for the barred monastic refuge. European art music between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries touches, with its combination of ascesis and metaphysical tension, on the secrets of dyadic extremism formerly accessible only to hermits and mystics—it too had its athletes and its lonely protagonists, it too was oriented toward an external public, which already consisted more of spectators than of listeners. In the last hundred years, music has established itself as a universal transitional thirdness with which the world-age seeks to address its need for world-flight without recourse to the desert. The artificial sonic attack on the exterior world-noises has in this century reached an intensity unprecedented in the entire history of the species. But unlike the desert, which helped free the interior, the mass-medial musicalization of all spaces [115] floods the last breaches of free interiority: the oblivion of being out of every loudspeaker;
low-level worldlessness in every household at every time of day. Ever since headphones have existed, the principle of world-shutoff in the modern use of music has taken effect purely at the level of apparatuses. Here a drug-theoretical account of all forms of “light” ambience in modernity suggests itself.

There is hardly any phenomenon of contemporary culture in which no traces of quasi-musical world-distancing techniques can be found. The new wave of cocooning, the mass-emigration of modern subjects into the unreachable interior of solitudes, trips and symbioses, would be quite impossible without immersion in the tonal menu of sound-systems. World-distance is the lowest common denominator of a poly-escapist society.

The age of metaphysical homelessness (to recall Lukács’ formula for modernity) generalizes the habitus of flight. With its progressive constitution the world flees from itself in itself; from each point of the fleeing world, further flights are prepared. The accelerated world of money and of absolu-tized communication parodies the metaphysical relation to impermanence; it possesses neither an idea of the pleroma of metaphysics nor a conception of positive emptiness. The acosmic needs of people in a monkless time must seek other outlets—routes that, for all their differentiation, have in common that they run perpendicular to the abundance principle of the secular bourgeoisie. The word bourgeoisie here stands for the type of human that seeks wealth not in the expansion of inner space, but in stuffing oneself with content that ensures seamless self-filling. Flightiness, expanded to an element, makes a compromise between the fluid and the dead. In it move people who recognize themselves neither in the monk nor in the worldling. In a conversation with Boris Groys, the Russian avant-garde artist Ilya Kabakow issued the following statement:

The willingness to feel out of place is highly developed in me. It was always an especially comforting experience for me to not be anywhere. Whenever I go on a journey, even the foretaste of driving away already makes me happy. This obviously is an infantile trauma expressing the lack of the wish to come to the world. The world in which I was born and the form into which I was born leave me deeply unsatisfied. I don’t like my appearance and I don’t identify myself with it. I still remember when I saw my profile for the first time in the mirror; I literally moaned in pain: I couldn’t believe that that’s me. This is the desire to run away from my body, from my things, from my home. . .

I don’t have a home, I always feel that I am in a state of transit. Of such people one often says: they are well nowhere.

Instead of a commentary, I confront this statement with a temporally distant echo that responds to the artist from a nearness, and with a temporally near counterpart that distances itself from it milky-way-wide. In the Manichaean cosmogony that Theodore bar Koni quoted in the seventh century, it is said:

The shining Jesus approached the naïve Adam and awoke him from deathly sleep thereby to redeem him from the many spectres . . . so it was also with Adam, for the friend found him as he was sunken in deep sleep. He woke him, gave him movement, made him lively and drove the false spirit out of him. . . Thereafter Adam examined himself and recognized who he was. And he showed to him the fathers of the heights and how his soul was thrown into everything, devoured by those who devour, swallowed by those who swallow. . .

He erected him and let him eat from the tree of life. Thereafter Adam came to see and wept and cried with a loud voice like a roaring lion. He shook his hair, hit his chest and spoke: “Woe! Woe to him who built my body and to him who bound my soul.”

The distant echo resonates in the closing stanzas of Goethe’s poem “To the Moon”:

Blessed is he who walks apart,
Though no hate he bears,
Holds a friend within his heart;
And with him he shares
All that steals, by men unguessed,
Or by men unknown,
Through the maze of his own breast
In the night alone.

Out of the World
Peter Sloterdijk 

Rusing From The Ruins: The Right in 21th Century - extracts

 Tidehverv and a Possible New Christianization  

Rather than a Christian, I might be a pagan believing in Christ.

— Don Colacho

Jung showed in his time that without religion, Europe is living dangerously. This is probably something many would agree with. The connection between religion and asabiyya is strong, as is the connection between religion and meaning in existence. Atheism and science seem not to suffice as alternatives, no matter how useful they may be in other contexts. North American social thinker and immigration critic Lawrence Auster identified in this spiritual vacuum the root cause of the West’s second problem:

We must look inward and realize that the third worldization of our society is only the external symptom of a disease in our own soul—the rejection of the religious beliefs, moral truths, and the cultural loyalties that once made us a nation rather than just a collection of economic factors.

Nature despises a vacuum, and the void has therefore been filled with post-Christian ersatz-religions, such as liberalism and ethnomasochism. Prior to that, impossible long-term attempts to make race, “art for art’s sake,” or the class into ersatz-religions have also failed. Auster said that a society dies without its soul, and that its body then gets taken over by strangers. Whether we are believers or not, it is obvious that he has a point here. Atheists also do not conceive that many children, and their capacity for self-defense is small. Peter Turchin reminds us in War, Peace and War, about the link between asabiyya, meta-ethnic borders and religion. The groups on the various sides of the meta-ethnic border are often united by a shared religion; it is also shared religion that makes them fearless of death and urges them to gladly sacrifice their lives in the fight against the unfaithful. “I lead those who love death as you love life,” as Khalid ibn-Walid expressed it. History will reveal if strong asabiyya is possible without the religious factor; so far, it does not look too promising. 

At this point, we encounter something that can be called the “Maurranian dilemma.” Charles Maurras was one of the most historically significant French nationalists. He was Catholic but not Christian. In that way, he was a champion of the Church but could not believe himself. Many people today find themselves in a similar situation. Several attempts have been made to fill the spiritual void Jung described. Under other demographic conditions, parts of the radical Right converted to Islam, among them Guénon, Clauss, and Mutti. An interest in Hinduism and Buddhism has not rarely been combined with anti-liberalism. The pre-Christian traditions have experienced several renaissances in the 20th century, especially in the early 1900s and after the 1970s. Julius Evola explored both the Roman and the hermetic tradition, and, like Herman Wirth, sought “the light from the north” rather than “the light from the east.” Since the 1970s, a second pagan renaissance has slowly emerged, including the Icelandic Ásatrúarfelagiđ, founded in 1972, and the Asatru Folk Assembly, founded by Stephen McNallen in 1972 (under the name the Viking Brotherhood). This was one of the best aspects of the motley legacy since 1968. The Pagan Renaissance still forwards its positions, even though it is now mostly quiet.

But even in Christian circles, valuable attempts to meet the modern world are ongoing, in spite of worrying starting points. During the 20th century, Christianity has largely degenerated and been influenced by liberalism, political correctness and 1968-ideas. This has, in particular, been facilitated by what is called churchianism in the United States, a term describing many believers’ strong need to identify with a certain church even when it transforms. Their loyalty is to an organization rather than to God and Christ. But there have been examples of the opposite even in Lutheran circles. The Danish Tidehverv, founded in 1926 by theologians with inspiration from Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, later also from Grundtvig, is a good example. The Danish nation is shaped at least as much by the Church as by the state, largely thanks to the inheritance of Grundtvig, his joyful Christianity and his interest in the Danes’ roots.

Grundtvig and Oehlenschläger are reminiscent of the Swedish Göticisterna in the sense that they were interested in the myths and tales of their own people, and successfully popularized them. But Grundtvig, in particular, is reminiscent of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis insofar as he created a synthesis of the pagan and the Christian, adding a homely and patriotic touch. Obviously, Grundtvig was more successful than his Swedish counterparts. Tidehverv has evolved into a think-tank, delivering a critique of the modern world in a style similar to the New Right and Evola. The intellectual level is often high, with references to Schopenhauer, Weber, and Ellul. The perspective combines the popular, the holy, the philosophical, and the political into a whole. In the vein of New Right, Tidehverv has developed a sharp critique against the ideology of human rights and the demonization of Russia, and like Evola, they have described the history of the modern world as a story of demonic humanism.

The Church and the People  

Cult and culture have always been closely interconnected—a truth we will learn again in Denmark and in the Western world. 

— Christian Langballe

In Christian thought, there has often been a focus on preaching the message to the “people”; and the people, subsequently, form folk-churches. In politically correct “Christianity,” this is diminished or denied, but for Tidehverv it is still important. The definition of people is not linked to race, but at the same time it is not temporary or something you can change randomly. To assimilate into a people takes time—something which should be of importance for immigration policy. At Tidehverv, we find a significant interest in Islam, which is depicted as a potential threat; aside from a small secularized Muslim elite, the majority of Muslims cannot become Danish. Moreover, people, Church, and state are also not synonyms. Tidehverv has criticized the therapeutic State that is trying to force political correctness and other forms of politicization down the throat of the Church. Tidehverv is also strongly family-centered, and in Denmark, the EU resistance is largely a right-wing phenomenon, and includes Tidehverv representatives.

Grundtvig can be compared to Tolkien and Lewis in two ways: interest in our ancestors, and a deeper Christian faith. Here, Tidehverv also reminds us of the British professor and culture critic—as well as another Christian—Bruce Charlton. Charlton is a venerable civilization critic in his own right, and has, among other things, written on how the media makes us “addicted to amusement,” and also on political correctness. He also writes with John Fitzgerald and William Wildblood on the blog Albion Awakening. The starting point is close to Tidehverv’s: it is about rediscovering the British myth. C. S. Lewis described the history of the kingdom as the battle between Logres and Britain: “After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell.” Charlton finds expressions for Deep Britain—Albion—for example, in William Blake—“Albion’s only poet-prophet”—in the Arthur myth, and in the so called Inklings (Tolkien, Lewis, among others). Tolkien and Lewis mediated the myth in the form of, among other things, The Lord of the Rings and Narnia to generations of Brits. Each people has a similar myth, but there is also a struggle between the good sides of heritage, and the less good sides—a struggle between Milton and Cromwell. We are doing well to seek our own deeper Swedish heritage, the life-giving sources from which we can return to our contemporaries with new interpretations of the myths, truths and archetypes, so desperately needed among our people.

The War Against the Multidimensional Man  

Commerce has since the beginning appeared as the enemy of imagination.

— Brooks Adams

Tolkien’s goal was a “mythology for England.” Charlton emphasizes the role imagination played for the Inklings; Tolkien regarded it as something closely connected with divine creation. At the same time, the modern world, including all its distraction and entertainment, appears to be an enemy of imagination. This includes what social scientist Wright Mills described as sociological imagination, which also is lacking in the today’s man: a human without imagination cannot imagine a world other than the late modern that he or she lives in, and therefore has difficulty criticizing it other than at a superficial level. Here Charlton joins a retinue of ancient civilization critique, with several representatives: Klages turned away from the fact that the modern world reduces the importance of dreams, of the oneiric, of fantasy and of magic; Lovecraft wrote his short stories about the Dreamlands; the narrative of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman also touches the destiny of the oneiritic in the modern world; Brooks Adams believed that the modern world is characterized by a loss of imagination.

This is linked to a broader anthropological criticism of the modern world, where we lose touch with important aspects of our humanity. Marcuse talked about the fact that man becomes one-dimensional, and although the process was described better by others, it is an accurate concept. C. S. Lewis partially corroborated the loss of thumos when he set courage as the principal virtue. Courage is not just one virtue among others, but the form every virtue takes when tested in a trying situation. Without courage, we can neither be honest nor helpful when it really matters. “Pilate was merciful until it became risky,” as Lewis summarize it.

This reminds us of the loss of the thumotic dimension in our own society. German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has developed this notion further in the book Zorn und Zeit (Fury and Time). Sloterdijk addresses the focus of psychoanalysis on desire and sexuality, but sees an equally central driving force in thumos. Thumos is what lies behind the pursuit of glory, the will to surround oneself with honorable friends, and the desire to avoid shame. But thumos is also what can make a man furious. At regular intervals, Achilles let loose his fury, to the great demise of cities and heroes. Sloterdijk is aware that there are negative forms of thumos, or “dark thumos” as he calls it. But politics that does not take thumos into account is based on a dangerously erroneous anthropology. Indeed, a person who experiences the violation of his dignity is driven more by thumos than by “desires”; he can not be bought; every attempt to bribe him will only exacerbate his fury. This is one aspect of the relationship between the ghettos and majority communities. But our society has forced thumos out—it even has difficulties in understanding the difference between positive thumos and “dark thumos.” This permeates everything from politics and debate to popular culture and economics. When our society is described as “unmanly,” it is often the lack of thumos that is referred to. Sloterdijk reminds us of how a thumotic policy and a thumotic economy can look like. Politically, it is based on the recognition of groups, similar to the thoughts of de Benoist and Eichberg. Economically, Sloterdijk connects thumos to Bataille and generous billionaires like Carnegie. A man driven by thumos can both pay off debts and donate to long-term projects and needs. But he or she also has felix meritis, pride in his success. In short, Lewis and Sloterdijk remind us that our society has lost a central dimension by demonizing thumos; it tries to reduce its citizens to children.

Overall, Tidehverv and Charlton remind us of the possibility of a deeper Lutheran criticism of the modern world. As such, this criticism cannot avoid the link between cult and culture, between people and Church. It should also pick up the link between the imagination and the divine, as well as the meaning of courage and thumos. In this sense, we are dealing with a genuine Deep Right, which means that the elements of Tidehverv’s and Charlton’s projects and perspectives should be able to inspire even pagans and others.

***

The Great Worsening, and the Internet as a Refuge  

Uneasy and fractional people, having no center

 But in the eyes and mouths that surround them

 Having no function but to serve and support

 Civilization, the enemy of man,

 No wonder they live insanely, and desire

With their tongues progress; with their eyes pleasure; with their hearts death.

— Robinson Jeffers

The late 1900s witnessed the intensification of what we have called the Great Worsening, and the degeneration to accompany it, which among other things meant the emergence of a new human material, shaped almost entirely by ersatz-religions and the pop-culture industries. Each year the universities continue to mass produce new hordes of easily offended, intolerant and ignorant individuals ready to infiltrate and co-opt everything from environmentalist organizations and Wikipedia, to atheism and role-playing games—often to the great chagrin of the original members of these groups, but with the whole choir to back them up in event of any conflict. This human type has been characterized with several different designations, the favorite of many being the SJW, for “Social Justice Warrior.” Most often this is used in an ironic, derogatory manner, as the individuals to which it refers are neither warriors nor do they care about any genuine justice. Quite the opposite, they are rather motivated by a diffuse sense of ressentiment: underneath their veil of “anti-racism”, one usually finds a profound hatred of, for example, “white cis-males” (“cis-males” referring to actual males, in contrast to “trans-males”, who have “transitioned” from their native male form).

Marxist metapolitical thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s and later Louis Althusser emphasized the importance of controlling non-governmental as well as governmental institutions, to shape the conception-of-the-world and “common sense” of a society. In the late 1960s German student activist Rudi Dutschke, inspired by these thinkers, formulated a revolutionary strategy which he called the long march through the institutions. Thousands upon thousands of leftist baby-boomers emerging out of the various counter-cultural movements of 1968 later made their careers within said institutions, fulfilling Dutschke’s plan. Recruiting the SJWs from the younger generation to gradually replace them, the marchers consolidated their power. By the end of the century these conquerors were dug in deep in the mainstream media as well as academia, and they had no intention of tolerating any challengers to this position. Another long march to counter the one completed by the leftists was thus not an option. Simultaneously however, a new institution had without much notice by those in power rapidly grown in importance: the Internet. The Internet was becoming, to speak with Althusser, a crucial ISA, an “Ideological State Apparatus”; and moreover one which the Right had an actual chance to conquer. Right from the start discussion forums and trolling played a major part: Internet-based environments sprung up where people freely discussed every thinkable aspect of reality in a manner elsewhere considered far too politically incorrect.

***

Roosh and Neomasculinity  

When you live below your means, you begin to see that most people are unnecessarily living above theirs. That leads to the conclusion that they were trained to live a life of excess by corporations with the complicit help of a government that wants to keep society in a never-ending state of indebtedness and distraction, so that they ignore everyday injustices while losing any will or desire to fight the establishment.

— Roosh Valizadeh on adopting a minimalist lifestyle 

Another important sphere consisted of men who were fed up with the recommendations of the official ideology to “be themselves” and with the promise that “women like nice guys.” Their conclusion was that none of it worked, that they felt confused, and they needed new, useful advice. Ultimately this was caused by the generational conflict: youths no longer received advice from their parents but were forced to try to explore the world on their own. The advice they got from their teachers and television was too rooted in politically correct feminism and was part of the process of demasculinization.

The sphere created by these men was termed the manosphere. The men within the manosphere discussed the ways in which men and women function. It was initially largely focused on how to bed women, but gradually developed a more obvious interest in politics, culture and ideology, as well as a natural opposition to feminism. Several sub-spheres emerged—some consisting of men who turn their back on women completely, like MGTOW, Men Going Their Own Way, and the zealous virgins at Wizardchan (it is, of course, widely known that a male who is still a virgin at thirty turns into a wizard). Among the more familiar figures of the manosphere are Roosh Valizadeh and the more secretive talent behind the blog Chateau Heartiste; with time, both became increasingly politicized.

Bit by bit at, with Roosh’s project Return of Kings, a conception-of-the-world crystallized, and was given the name Neomasculinity. What had begun with juvenile travel guides like Bang Poland—How to Make Love to Polish Girls in Poland, developed into interests in traditional gender roles, spirituality, anti-socialism, and defending of our civilization against the looming cultural collapse, feminism, and mass immigration. Roosh explains his concept of cultural collapse:

… the decline, decay, or disappearance of a native population’s rituals, habits, interpersonal communication, relationships, art, and language… Cultural collapse is not to be confused with economic or state collapse. A nation that suffers from a cultural collapse can still be economically productive and have a working government.

The phases of cultural collapse Roosh identifies as the loss of religion, the elimination of traditional gender roles, decline in family formation, decreasing nativity, mass immigration, and natives becoming marginalized within their own country. Consequently, it is reminiscent of our civilizational perspective. Roosh has also developed a minimalist philosophy, in which he for instance expresses the view that full-time employment, college education and “entertainment” are hindrances to the discovery of truth, reminding us of earlier critiques of proletarianization and culture-industry; Roosh is not seldom an interesting cultural critic himself. Further, Roosh has adopted the traditionalist concept of inversion to describe modern society: all old values have been turned upside-down. What was once looked upon as beauty is now seen as ugliness, what was once seen as desirable is now considered harmful, and so on. This inversion affects every aspect of human life—from family formation to art.

Roosh and the RoK collective are not necessarily part of the Alt-Right, but multiple aspects of the neomasculinist project overlap with the views of the Alt-Right—possibly with greater emphasis on self-improvement and less on ethno-nationalism. One writer from the manosphere who today is part of the Alt-Right is the man, or men, behind Chateau Heartiste. The blog now combines advice on how to attract women with political commentary. The language used is far from politically correct but rather quite vulgar—globohomos and shitlibs are derided, and mudshark psychology explained. The page has many visitors and, along with much else, has provided an analysis of how Donald Trump won the presidential election. From Chateau Heartiste also stem pithy expressions like “Diversity + Proximity = War” and ”Physiognomy is real,” often in conjunction with scientific studies which confirm their veracity, demonstrating that Lombroso and L. F. Clauss were right all along.

The manosphere is a phenomenon which often conjoins analyses of psychology and society with vulgar commentary on and scantily veiled ressentiment toward the female sex. It is reminiscent of Don Colacho’s observation that while “feminists are ridiculous, the anti-feminists are vulgar.” As Roosh exemplifies, though, there is a tendency among its better participants to mature with time. This tendency may be facilitated by the study of Jung, Illich, Ludwig Klages, and others, all of whom offer a more nuanced picture of the sexes and the differing shapes they take. These can be valuable to explore for those who want to avoid imitating a non-Nordic misogyny. Such misogyny is, to reconnect with Günther, as artfremd as pop culture and its hatred of European masculinity. 

The Trolls  

If hackers were an ethnic group, the UN would be declaring a humanitarian crisis.

— Weev, on the repression of hackers

It is doubtful whether the anti-feminist environment that is the manosphere would have been able to sprout without the Internet. However, HBD geeks and pick-up artists were in no way alone in finding their asylum online. On the web forum 4chan a distinct environment also sprouted, particularly on the sub-forum /pol/, Politically Incorrect. On 4chan free and anonymous debate flourished, and countless images of varying entertainment value were created and posted as an integral part of the discourse. Many users felt sick to death of the SJW types and their grasp on society, and took to ridiculing them and their conception-of-the-world. Some of these users were trolls, and they carried out veritable raids on the surrounding web. A distinct, irreverent attitude emerged, as did a do-it-yourself culture permeated by memes and obscure jargon.

Within this sphere of trolls and hackers we find Andrew Auernheimer, known online as Weev. Auernheimer started out as an inventive hacktivist, but following a fundamentally questionable prison sentence he came out as a pagan and a National Socialist. His interests include “computing’s lack of will to power” and the treatment of hackers by the United States government. The Right Stuff as well as the Daily Stormer trace much of their roots back to Chan culture. Both are highly visited initiatives employing irreverent humor in the service of undermining hegemonic ideas and taboos. The mercurial boundaries between irony and gravity, person and persona pose something of a problem. For instance, The Right Stuff found themselves in a massive quarrel about betrayal when it was revealed that one of the headmen was married to a Jewess. Evidently, many participants equated the Alt-Right with National Socialism rather than utilizing the latter as a tool to ridicule and troll politically correct power-holders.

The troll mindset was also prevalent within the manosphere, in which bloggers caught attention with articles that crossed ethically as well as politically correct boundaries by, for instance, arguing for the legalization of rape and the how and why of slapping women. While patently distasteful, such bait attracted droves of readers and, to much delight, successfully enraged the despised politically correct crowd. These spheres often overlapped with each other as well as neighboring spheres: some within the HBD sphere were attracted by the realistic view of the men-women-relations promised by the manosphere, and some combined their interest in HBD with a more politically inclined race realism. Commonly, seeing through one part of the official ideology, such as feminism or the myth of no significant genetic differences between races, naturally leads to the questioning of other parts. With reference to the Matrix movies, this process of questioning and discovery is often called taking the red pill. The choice of whether to take or not to take a certain red pill is not necessarily an easy one to make, as leaving a world of cozy lies and convenient illusions comes at its cost. To seekers of inner freedom, however, it is difficult to abstain from the taking of red pills.

**

Meme Magic and Private Language  

If you control the memes of a society, you control that society.

— Lawrence Murray

A key success factor is the Alt-Right’s use of memes: shareable pictures and text, referencing various aspects of politics and pop culture. Such memes are a defining characteristic of the late postmodern era in which pop culture has become constantly self-referential. On 4chan, memes have long been an everyday occurrence, and through a collective, organic process the swarm of users has created a multiplicity of new memes, while existing ones are constantly recreated. This process involves an element akin to the natural selection of genes; depending on their properties, some memes proliferate and become ubiquitous, while most quietly sink into oblivion. The apparent connection between this selection process and the collective unconscious is still uncharted territory, not least of all since it involves processes which are massively collective and largely anonymous.

The postmodern era is sometimes described as borderline illiterate; people lose their reading ability while sounds and pictures battle for their attention. Memes are an expression of this development, which in turn is at its core a step in the Great Worsening. At the same time this opens new possibilities to dodge the gatekeepers of the collective unconscious, bypass the official ideology and the taboos of the ersatz-religions. A picture of a band of orcs with a speech bubble containing the phrase “where are the White women” and the caption “immigration is rape culture” can be just as effective as a more elaborated text, which at any rate is almost exclusively read by those already in the loop. Here memes act as a tool for rapidly establishing novel associations. Many memes convey various aspects of the modern world and modern man. This entails tragic figures and situations, like the “Forever Alone” meme, the “Foul Bachelor Frog,” and the superficially expressionless, actually uncannily suggestive face of Wojak. In several characters the lack of self-respect and discipline is obvious, as is the type Evola spoke of as fickle, and void of a sovereign within. The banality of the modern world and its general degeneration are expressed incisively by the Foul Bachelor Frog: “Fell asleep in yesterday’s clothes, woke up in today’s clothes.” Similarly the ever lonely Forever Alone character expresses the collapse of dating and the atomization following in its wake.

The meme lords of the Alt-Right have utilized several memes portraying the modern world and poking fun at anything from political correctness to African-American culture. However, one soon detects a will to something else—a struggle for another, distinct anthropology. Man, though void of a sovereign within, consciously struggles by way of memes to regain control. During Trump’s presidential campaign elaborate Trump memes were created, in which the candidate appeared as a Roman emperor as well as the “God Emperor” from the science-fantasy board game Warhammer 40K. These memes joined a heroic, regal, and masculine aesthetic—something for which our time is unconsciously longing—with optimism and faith in the “Trumpquake.” We have already dealt with the cuck meme earlier in this chapter. A “normie” or “normfag” is any outsider to the Alt-Right or Chan culture. Many within the Alt-Right also adopted the Harambe meme, in memory of the silverback gorilla which was shot dead when a black child fell down into the gorilla’s pen. Initially mocking Afrocentrists who assert that all civilization originated in Africa, the “We Wuz Kangz” meme was created, and has later been used to mock, among others, Whites who believe everything of value in the world originated in Europe. White genocide, woke, and “the current year” are other often encountered memes. The latter is a scornful reference to liberals who unironically might use a phrase like “after all, this is 2017,” as if it were an argument. The Memescape quickly shifts, meaning that by the time you read this new memes and mutations will surely already long have out-replicated the memes mentioned here.

Most memes are entertaining, not rarely using absurd and tongue-in-cheek undertones. Meanwhile, memes are as self-referential as other pop culture, and eagerly combine elements of African-American culture, historical National Socialism, Hollywood productions and Japanese anime. The Alt-Right, their tweeters and trolls in particular, are associated with the politically incorrect. This comprises everything that most bothers the politically correct; their sorest points, what they hold most sacred. This is often done ironically, in an attempt to trigger the politically correct. One idea within metapolitics is that this tactic is necessary to drain politically correct demons and accusations of their meaning. Every troll posting pictures of a Hitler-saluting Pokemon is not necessarily a Nazi—many times this is just irony. Add the generational aspect: those who take the trolls seriously simultaneously betray themselves as being what in 1968 would have been called bourgeois or a square. Today, it is more likely normfag. The irony can have several layers. Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer has spoken of “unironic Nazis disguised as ironic Nazis.”

The Alt-Right also has a close relation to anime—Japanese animated cartoons. These are intently used in meme-making, for instance by letting female anime characters express various politically incorrect statements. There is a logic behind this. Western entertainment has gone through a radical degeneration and politicization, which more often than not makes it part of the problem. Japanese entertainment, anime included, has rarely gone through this process, and can with some exceptions be seen as sound and exciting. Unsurprisingly, Japanese cartoonists like Kentaro Miura and Makoto Yukimura with Berserk and Vinland Saga captured the essence of our Nordic archetypes and legends significantly better than current European cartoonists. The Japanese aesthetics also express striving toward self-discipline and beauty in ways rarely seen in Western pop culture. Lawrence Murray writes on the current state of “Anomie, Anime and the Alt-Right” in a worthwhile article with the same title first published on The Right Stuff. Murray notes, among many other things, how anime is still based on archetypes and characters struggling to reach some kind of goal, while much of the most popular Western entertainment productions seem to have strayed from this tried and true formula, replacing the hero’s journey with “the coastal progressive agenda.” The Alt-Right has nicknamed such politicized entertainment poz, after gay slang meaning “HIV positive.”

Joakim Andersen 

Tucker Carlson's Dishonest Film about the Fatherhood Crisis

Tucker on Fatherhood: Here’s What He Forgot​
TOM GOLDEN

Fatherhood matters.

That’s the message at the heart of Tucker Carlson’s documentary Fathers Wanted—and it’s a message worth hearing.

A man who gives his time, his energy, and his life to his children is doing something deeply meaningful. There’s no controversy there.

But as I watched the film, I kept noticing something else.

Not what it said.
But what it didn’t.

Because by the end, the story felt strangely incomplete—like watching a documentary about lung cancer that never once mentions smoking.

The framing begins immediately.

Within the first moments, we are told that young men are choosing pornography, video games, and drugs over marriage and family. The implication is clear: the problem is not just that fatherhood is declining, but that men are turning away from it—opting for comfort, distraction, and indulgence instead.

That may be true in some cases.

But starting the story this way does something important. It establishes, from the outset, that the primary driver of fatherlessness is male behavior.

Everything that follows is filtered through that lens.

The film goes on to frame fatherlessness largely as a cultural and moral failure.

Men, we’re told, are retreating. Avoiding responsibility. Choosing comfort over commitment. Losing faith. Losing purpose.

By the end, the message is unmistakable:
good men step up, bad men walk away.

And if a father abandons his children, Carlson makes it clear—he deserves contempt.

That’s a powerful claim.

But it rests on a narrow frame.

Because what the film barely examines—if at all—is the system in which modern fatherhood actually exists.

There is no serious discussion of:

family courts

custody outcomes

child support structures

no-fault divorce

or how fathers often lose daily access to their children

These are not minor details.

They are central to understanding what happens to fathers in the real world.

In many cases, fathers do not simply walk away.

They are separated—from their children, from their role, from their identity as fathers—by processes largely outside their control.

A man can go from being an everyday presence in his child’s life to being a visitor—or, in some cases, a paycheck.

And yet, culturally, the outcome is often interpreted the same way:

He left.

But that is not always what happened.

There is another layer here the film only partially acknowledges.

For decades, men have been broadly portrayed as:

oppressive

emotionally deficient

disposable

dangerous

​toxic

These ideas have been reinforced across media, education, and public discourse—under the influence of feminist frameworks that carry a deep skepticism and contempt toward men.

At the same time, we have seen something very different happen on the other side.

Single motherhood has increasingly been framed not as a difficult circumstance to be supported and stabilized, but as something to be celebrated—even idealized. Cultural messaging often elevates the strength and independence of mothers raising children alone, while saying very little about the cost of a father’s absence.

The contrast is striking.

Fathers are questioned.
Their role is diminished.
Their presence is treated as optional.

While single motherhood is often presented as sufficient—sometimes even preferable.

The result is a contradiction we rarely confront:

We tell men they are not needed.
We question their value.
We undermine their role.

And then we ask why they hesitate to step into it.

​When structural forces are ignored, a complex social problem ​can get reduced to a simple moral failure.

And when that happens, the burden of explanation—and blame—falls almost entirely on individuals.

In this case, on men.

Carlson is right about something important:

Fatherhood matters.

But if we want more fathers present in their children’s lives, we need to do more than praise the ideal.

We need to examine the systems that shape the reality.

Because until we do, we will keep asking the same question—

Why aren’t men stepping up?

—without fully understanding what they are stepping into.

MenAreGood Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.


Tom Golden
MenAreGood offers a sharp red-pilled contrast to the default negative cultural views of masculinity.

https://substack.com/redirect/acdfd2c8-e2fb-44b9-a9aa-9d9ef2434d14?j=eyJ1IjoiMXBvcTY0In0.bpX_Ri4UrVVzEcwn2tPJZmntoRqzSx0aLRc9mOX6Iw8

***

StephenBaskerville.com
Tucker Carlson's Dishonest Film about the Fatherhood Crisis
Are we back in the 1990s?

It is truly sad to see Tucker Carlson producing this kind of vapid drivel. Many people admire Carlson, and his influence is enormous. But this is beyond belief.

Carlson just released a new video: “Fathers Wanted”. It may be a tribute to his sense of shame that he refrains from narrating it himself, and he seems to make only two appearances. One (54:00) is to scold fathers for “abandoning” their children.

This is a throwback to the 1990s/2000s. For those too young to remember, we were inundated with propaganda about “responsible” fatherhood and “good fathering”. The underlying message was that most fathers are ir-reponsible and their “fathering” needs improvement. But the insult added to injury was precisely the falsehood that Carlson reserves for himself to utter: Fathers whose children are confiscated by crooked tyrannical family courts have “abandoned” them.

Vice-President Al Gore initiated a White House program, and many state governors and even foreign governments followed suit: conferences, books, articles, films, TV shows — all filled with the same sentimental cliches and empty platitudes as Carlson’s video, scolding and nagging men to practice their officially accepted version of this “fathering”. (Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently displayed similar dishonesty by recycling the deception.) Federally funded scholars like David Blankenhorn and David Popenoe produced books touting the party line. The media credulously joined the witch hunt. We heard no objections from anyone (except feminists, ironically and perfunctorily), though of course fathers themselves were never allowed to be heard — as they are not in Carlson’s film.

None of the “fatherhood advocates” explained how government officials could “promote” fatherhood or “encourage” good fathering — or (another theme) “reconnect fathers with their children”. It turned out that “good fathering” meant feminist-approved fathering and feminist psychotherapy, and “reconnecting” with your children meant paying child support.

Meanwhile governments intensified ongoing efforts to disconnect more children from their fathers in order to fill their coffers with more child support. President Bill Clinton’s “Welfare Reform” tried (in vain) to reduce the welfare roles by “cracking down” on alleged “deadbeat dads”. Here too the media showed credulity rather than scepticism or scrutiny toward the government. Journalist Bernard Goldberg said, “We’ve done a million stories at the networks on deadbeats dads…but almost none on how too many divorced women use custody and visitation as weapons to punish their ex-husbands.” And absolutely zero on how family court judges were ripping millions of children away from fit and legally innocent fathers in order to plunder them for the “child support” that was really judge support, because it funded their own salaries and those of other functionaries.
This, not fathers “abandoning” their children, is the cause of this crisis — entirely.

Now, according to Carlson, fathers are to blame even when they are not fathers, because they refuse to marry unappealing, litigious women and find their children judicially kidnapped by juridical gangsters. The message is the same: Fathers cause problems when they are present, when they are “absent”, and even when they are never fathers in the first place. And still not a word about the corruption of family courts or injustices of the divorce industry.

It is hardly surprising that, 30 years on, the problem is worse than ever, because those programs could never do anything other than make it worse. Even amid Covid, election rigging, multiple forever wars, and impending economic catastrophe, former gang leader John Turnipseed still calls fatherlessness “the biggest problem we have in the nation”, and Jason Whitlock, Candace Owens, and Larry Elder say the same. (DeSantis recently showed, yet again, how to evade and worsen it.)

This should provoke a major outcry from throughout the “Manosphere”. If men can coalesce around rejection of this lie, this film may do some good in getting the abuses that Carlson avoids onto the public agenda.
~~~
This is by far the most dishonest and cowardly thing I have ever seen from Tucker Carlson.

I have criticized him repeated for his dishonesty on this topic and for his obvious fear of the divorce industry. But until now, I have tried to be charitable. He has long given indications that this topic interests him deeply. Little asides in his commentaries, hinting at things he dares not say. On other other hand, I happen to know that he is well aware of the real cause of this ongoing crisis, but like the rest of the mainstream media he chooses mendacity instead of truth.
By this, he signals that he is part of the problem: pretending to address a problem by blaming those who suffer under it because you fear offending those who are perpetrating it.
I have also published numerous articles about this dirty scam in mainstream and scholarly journals, as well as my books, starting with Taken Into Custody: The War on Fathers, Marriage, and the Family:

• “Is There Really a Fatherhood Crisis?” www.independent.org/tir/2004-spring/is-there-really-a-fatherhood-crisis/
• “The Failure of Fatherhood Policy” www.lewrockwell.com/2004/09/stephen-baskerville/the-failure-of-fatherhood-policy/
• “The Federal Bureau of Marriage” www.academia.edu/34065959/The_Federal_Bureau_of_Marriage
Sadly, none of these are out of date, because nothing has changed, except for the worse.

If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics (retired) at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.










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StephenBaskerville.com

Tucker Carlson's Dishonest Film about the Fatherhood Crisis
Are we back in the 1990s?
STEPHEN BASKERVILLE
APR 30

 




READ IN APP
 
It is truly sad to see Tucker Carlson producing this kind of vapid drivel. Many people admire Carlson, and his influence is enormous. But this is beyond belief.


Carlson just released a new video: “Fathers Wanted”. It may be a tribute to his sense of shame that he refrains from narrating it himself, and he seems to make only two appearances. One (54:00) is to scold fathers for “abandoning” their children.

This is a throwback to the 1990s/2000s. For those too young to remember, we were inundated with propaganda about “responsible” fatherhood and “good fathering”. The underlying message was that most fathers are ir-reponsible and their “fathering” needs improvement. But the insult added to injury was precisely the falsehood that Carlson reserves for himself to utter: Fathers whose children are confiscated by crooked tyrannical family courts have “abandoned” them.

Vice-President Al Gore initiated a White House program, and many state governors and even foreign governments followed suit: conferences, books, articles, films, TV shows — all filled with the same sentimental cliches and empty platitudes as Carlson’s video, scolding and nagging men to practice their officially accepted version of this “fathering”. (Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently displayed similar dishonesty by recycling the deception.) Federally funded scholars like David Blankenhorn and David Popenoe produced books touting the party line. The media credulously joined the witch hunt. We heard no objections from anyone (except feminists, ironically and perfunctorily), though of course fathers themselves were never allowed to be heard — as they are not in Carlson’s film.

None of the “fatherhood advocates” explained how government officials could “promote” fatherhood or “encourage” good fathering — or (another theme) “reconnect fathers with their children”. It turned out that “good fathering” meant feminist-approved fathering and feminist psychotherapy, and “reconnecting” with your children meant paying child support.

Meanwhile governments intensified ongoing efforts to disconnect more children from their fathers in order to fill their coffers with more child support. President Bill Clinton’s “Welfare Reform” tried (in vain) to reduce the welfare roles by “cracking down” on alleged “deadbeat dads”. Here too the media showed credulity rather than scepticism or scrutiny toward the government. Journalist Bernard Goldberg said, “We’ve done a million stories at the networks on deadbeats dads…but almost none on how too many divorced women use custody and visitation as weapons to punish their ex-husbands.” And absolutely zero on how family court judges were ripping millions of children away from fit and legally innocent fathers in order to plunder them for the “child support” that was really judge support, because it funded their own salaries and those of other functionaries.

This, not fathers “abandoning” their children, is the cause of this crisis — entirely.

Now, according to Carlson, fathers are to blame even when they are not fathers, because they refuse to marry unappealing, litigious women and find their children judicially kidnapped by juridical gangsters. The message is the same: Fathers cause problems when they are present, when they are “absent”, and even when they are never fathers in the first place. And still not a word about the corruption of family courts or injustices of the divorce industry.

It is hardly surprising that, 30 years on, the problem is worse than ever, because those programs could never do anything other than make it worse. Even amid Covid, election rigging, multiple forever wars, and impending economic catastrophe, former gang leader John Turnipseed still calls fatherlessness “the biggest problem we have in the nation”, and Jason Whitlock, Candace Owens, and Larry Elder say the same. (DeSantis recently showed, yet again, how to evade and worsen it.)

This should provoke a major outcry from throughout the “Manosphere”. If men can coalesce around rejection of this lie, this film may do some good in getting the abuses that Carlson avoids onto the public agenda.

~~~

This is by far the most dishonest and cowardly thing I have ever seen from Tucker Carlson.

I have criticized him repeated for his dishonesty on this topic and for his obvious fear of the divorce industry. But until now, I have tried to be charitable. He has long given indications that this topic interests him deeply. Little asides in his commentaries, hinting at things he dares not say. On other other hand, I happen to know that he is well aware of the real cause of this ongoing crisis, but like the rest of the mainstream media he chooses mendacity instead of truth.

By this, he signals that he is part of the problem: pretending to address a problem by blaming those who suffer under it because you fear offending those who are perpetrating it.

I have also published numerous articles about this dirty scam in mainstream and scholarly journals, as well as my books, starting with Taken Into Custody: The War on Fathers, Marriage, and the Family:

“Is There Really a Fatherhood Crisis?” www.independent.org/tir/2004-spring/is-there-really-a-fatherhood-crisis/

“The Failure of Fatherhood Policy” www.lewrockwell.com/2004/09/stephen-baskerville/the-failure-of-fatherhood-policy/

“The Federal Bureau of Marriage” www.academia.edu/34065959/The_Federal_Bureau_of_Marriage

Sadly, none of these are out of date, because nothing has changed, except for the worse.

If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.


Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics (retired) at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.

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