Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

 

Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (1938) is one of those unfortunate great books (think Spengler’s Decline of the West and any book by Henry Adams) that is often mentioned but seldom read. The book was meant as a guide to the essential philosophy, art, economics, history, and ethics from Confucius to the 20th century as uniquely interpreted by Pound.

This and the ABC of Reading (1934) constituted the core texts of the “Ezra-versity,” the informal seminars that Pound held before World War II for those acolytes who came to visit him in Rapallo, Italy.

The book is dedicated to two of these acolytes and “graduates” of the Ezra-versity: the British poet Basil Bunting (1900–1985), author of Briggflatts; and the American Jewish poet Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978) whose monumental long poem “A” is the only work comparable in scope and complexity to Pound’s own Cantos.

Guide to Kulchur is unique in both its structure and style. Written in Pound’s folksy demotic English that at times seems more akin to Mark Twain or Joel Chandler Harris, the book is arranged in a series of very short chapters that seem to unfold in a haphazard fashion. The book’s form only becomes manifest the longer one reads, and by the end of the book one is amazed at how Pound has managed to weave seamlessly the many strands of Western and ancient Chinese thought.

For Pound, philosophy and ethics begin with Confucius, particularly the Confucian idea that a well-ordered and moral society is based upon the imperative to call things by their correct names. This may seem like a minor point upon which to build a civilizational edifice, but it is, in reality, nothing less than a commitment to truth telling, a commitment that is sorely at odds with our own postmodern age that has abandoned the search for truth as a sine qua non. For Pound, the commitment to truth telling extends not only to philosophy and the arts but also to economics. His unique and highly critical take on the ancient Greek philosophers (especially Aristotle) stems in no little part, as he sees it, from their inability to conceive of money as other than a means of measurement without a basis in morality. Pound viewed the ancient Greeks as “happy men with no moral fervor”[1] who represented a decline from the seriousness of their Homeric era ancestors.

While Pound’s embrace of Social Credit economics and strong denunciation of usury are well known, the Guide to Kulchur reveals how closely Pound linked together economics and aesthetics. In the very remarkable Chapter 50, entitled “Chaucer Was Framed,” Pound states:

Usury is contra naturam. It is not merely opposition to nature’s increase, it is antithetic to discrimination by the senses. Discrimination by the senses is dangerous to avarice. It is dangerous because any perception or any high development of the perceptive faculties may lead to knowledge. The moneychanger only thrives on ignorance.
He thrives on all sorts of insensitivity and non-perception.
An instant sense of proportion imperils financiers.[2]

Pound’s insights are as remarkable as they are prescient. An imperiled aesthetic sense that is incapable of discerning differences of quality and meaning and that cannot sense subtleties of emotion is necessary for a complacent body of fungible consumers who, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Pound, who viewed the Medieval Church as the highest expression of Western Civilization, likewise saw Calvinist Protestantism as its lowest expression, one that permitted, indeed glorified, usury and the inability to make aesthetic and moral distinctions:

You can, by contrast, always get financial backing for
debauchery. Any form of “entertainment” that debases perception, that profanes the mysteries or tends to obscure discrimination, goes hand in hand with drives toward money profit. It might not be too much to say that the whole of protestant morals, intertwined with usury-tolerance, has for centuries tended to obscure perception of degrees, to debase the word moral to a single groove, to degrade all moral perceptions outside the relation of the sexes, and to vulgarize the sex relation itself.[3]

What is remarkable here is that Pound was able to see through the practices and goals of the leftist globalists at precisely the time that the right-wing nationalists were at the zenith of their power. These two paragraphs of Pound’s explain why the globalists use pornography as a means to normalize sexual perversions in order to subvert white family formation. They also explain the bread-and-circus nature of the global financiers to keep consumers satiated with cheap toys and gadgets. And finally, Pound was able to ascertain that Calvinist morality has led to an inability of our enemies to be able to make moral distinctions, wherein any disagreement with a leftist, however minor, becomes an example of “hate speech” in which the speaker literally becomes Adolf Hitler. It is also amazing that Pound saw the origin of leftist ideology in Calvinism, and as such, antedates by more than half a century the same conclusion brought by the Neoreactionaries, especially Curtis Yarvin a/k/a Mencius Moldbug.

Pound is a demanding author. He does not suffer fools gladly and he expects his readers to do their homework, but the rewards are many for those readers who are up to the challenge. Guide to Kulchur should be an essential book in the library of every white nationalist. Although written 80 years ago, the book is even more relevant today than it was when it was written, for in the words of its author:

Liberalism is a running sore, and its surviving proponents
are vile beyond printable descriptions. They have betrayed the “Droits de l’homme”, they are more dastardly than Judas . . . . In our time the liberal has asked for almost no freedom save the freedom to commit acts contrary to the general good.[4]

I rest my case.

Quintilian

Notes

[1] Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970 [1938]), p. 330.

[2] Ibid., p. 281.

[3] Ibid., pp. 281–82.

[4] Ibid., p. 254.

1 comment
ThreestarsJanuary 16, 2019 at 2:22 am
“is also amazing that Pound saw the origin of leftist ideology in Calvinism, and as such, antedates by more than half a century the same conclusion brought by the Neoreactionaries,”

I wouldn’t call Pound “prescient”, or at least especially so, since he seems to draw pretty heavily from Max Weber’s theory on the origins of capitalism in Protestant morals. Although the latter doesn’t articulate it as clearly, he does decry that material worth came to displace higher, more abstract values in his contemporary, turn of the century society.

“especially Curtis Yarvin a/k/a Mencius Moldbug.”

While I do understand that Moldbug is especially fixated on this, he is far from being the first Reactionary writer (I pause to call him “thinker”) to place the roots of modern American liberalism in the Calvinist ethos. Paul Gottfried comes readily to mind, who did so some 20 years in advance.

I admit, I haven’t read all of Yarvin’s work, but what I did seemed to me derivative, with only an appearance of originality due mostly to his habit of not crediting any of his modern influences (assuming he didn’t re-invent the wheel…). This is a huge no-no for any serious humanities grad student and above, as it can deceitfully give the aura of a “thinker” to a mere popularizer. It’s little surprise his influence almost exclusively extends to poorly read computer programmers…

Again, I have only cursory knowledge of Yarvin’s writings, I’d appreciate a defense of the guy from someone more familiar with him.

https://counter-currents.com/

Quintilian, "August Strindberg's Tschandala"

Although best known as a playwright, the Swedish author August Strindberg (1849–1912) was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, poetry, and essays. The official edition of his collected works comes to more than seventy volumes. In 1888 Strindberg attended a series of lectures about the then little-known philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. He quickly became a devotee of Nietzsche and even started up a brief correspondence with the philosopher. After reading Beyond Good and Evil, The Twilight of the Gods, The Case of Wagner, and On the Genealogy of Morals, Strindberg began to write works that were directly influenced by Nietzschean philosophy as well as social Darwinist thought. One of the most explicit examples of this is the novella Tschandala of 1889.

The novella is set in Lund, Sweden in the 1690s, which was in a province that had only been recently captured from the Danes. The protagonist is one Master Andreas Törner, a professor at the University of Lund and an army veteran who had participated in the battle in which the Swedes wrested control of Lund from the Danes. Unlike the situation today, the victorious Swedes realize that multiculturalism does not work, and they use the educational system to enforce the societal norms, language, and ethos of the dominant culture. In scenes reminiscent of a typical Chicago or Detroit public school, Strindberg even describes Törner needing to employ his walking stick as a cudgel against his more recalcitrant students. After a long academic year, Törner is looking forward to taking his wife and children to his home province for the summer. Just as the school year is about to end, Törner receives orders from the Swedish court that he must remain in the area and ingratiate himself with the local population as a means to determine the degree to which the process of integration with Sweden is succeeding.

Törner ends up renting rooms in a dilapidated estate from a demented Danish Baroness. The estate is run by the Baroness’ factor Jensen, who is a gypsy given to wearing outlandish and filthy clothes, lies almost constantly, treats animals in a most cruel fashion, does almost no work on the property, and who is also the Baroness’ lover. In the beginning, Jensen tries to ingratiate himself with Törner, but the gypsy’s monstrous behavior soon puts him at odds with Törner. In a moment of self-clarity, Törner realizes that just proximity to a person as vile as Jensen is debilitating:

When he [Törner] examined himself, he found he had adopted a number of the gipsy’s gestures, borrowed certain tones of voice and, even worse, mixed Danish words and expressions into his speech. He had been jabbering with these infantile people for so long that he was forgetting how to speak properly; he had been lowering himself to their level for so long that his back was becoming hunched; he had been hearing lies for so long that he had come to believe that everyone lied. And he, a strong man who had never been afraid of battle, noticed that his courage was beginning to desert him, that cowardice and fear were creeping up on him in this struggle against invisible powers and enemies who were superior because they did not shrink from using weapons he could not bring himself to employ.

Herein lies Törner’s dilemma: the civilized man has difficulty accepting the fact that the uncivilized play by a different set of rules, that etiquette, good form, fairness, and tolerance are actually weaknesses when confronted by barbarism. As the novella’s narrator states:

What, then, lay at the heart of Törner’s disquiet about crushing this opponent? It was his sense of the value of human life, the doctrine that we should forgive our enemies, defeated or not. Old and foolish teachings which malevolent men have always availed themselves of to overthrow those who have been merciful in victory; stories of the blessings of compassion—omitting, of course, the story of the frozen serpent which turned on the breast that warmed it.

After a visit from a friend who—when hearing of Törner’s conflict with the gypsy—advises Törner to take more drastic measures with Jensen, Törner begins to plot the gypsy’s downfall. Using his superior intellectual abilities and in a manner in which to bring no suspicion upon himself, Törner is able to manipulate Jensen into a very macabre end, which I will not reveal so as not to spoil the delight of readers at witnessing the just desserts of such a reprehensible creature. The narrator states:

The pariah was dead, the Aryan victorious. Victorious thanks to his knowledge and spiritual superiority to the inferior race. But had he not found the strength to commit
 a crime he could easily have been the victim.

Back at the University, Törner comes across a Hindu text that describes the Tschandala, the lowest substratum of the untouchable class, a race of humiliated persons who are denied permanent abodes, must wear only clothes taken from corpses, and may not wash since they are only allowed water to drink. He realizes that Jensen was a Tschandala and that the hatred that Jensen displayed toward him—who had only shown the gypsy good will—was inevitable, a hatred born of genetics, “the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime.”

Not surprisingly, Tschandala is not easily obtainable in English. The translation I have is by Peter Graves and was published in 2007 by Norvik Press in Norwich, UK. Copies can be found, however, on Amazon and a Swedish version is available on Gutenberg.com

Quintilian - Knut Hamsun's Pan

Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) is considered to be Norway’s greatest novelist. Along with Ibsen and Strindberg, Hamsun brought Scandinavia to the forefront of literary modernism. Eschewing realism for penetrating psychological insights, Hamsun’s subjective style proved to be extremely influential for a variety of writers ranging from Thomas Mann to Ernest Hemingway and even to Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Hamsun traveled widely and spent several years in the 1880s in the United States where he taught and gave lectures. He was highly critical of the lack of racial awareness among whites and opined in his 1889 book The Cultural Life of Modern America that “[I]nstead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto studfarm.”

Hamsun’s nationalism and animus towards the Anglo-Saxon world was exacerbated by British atrocities against the Afrikaners in the Boer War. It was only natural, then, that Hamsun greeted with great enthusiasm the rise to power of Hitler and Nazi domination of Europe, including the occupation of Norway. After World War II, the Norwegian government brought treason charges against the author, but except for a fine, they were dropped due to alleged mental incapacitation. Hamsun, however, continued to write lucidly until shortly before his death in 1952.

Pan (subtitled From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn’s Papers) was published in 1894 and utilizes many of the thematic and literary devices that have become associated with Hamsun’s style: a solitary wandering protagonist, an acute sense of nature and its spiritual dimensions, the contrast between the health of the rural environment and the decadence of the city, a profound subjectivism, and an almost cinematic approach to narrative that embraces interior monologues and flashbacks.

The protagonist of the novel is a superannuated army officer who has rented a hut in the north of Norway near a small coastal village. He hunts and fishes for subsistence and lives alone, save for his dog Aesop. The title Pan refers to the figure of the Greek god that is embossed on his gunpowder horn, but it is also indicative of the unfettered sexuality that the god represents. Glahn meets Edvarda, the daughter of a wealthy local merchant, and immediately falls in love with her. While Edvarda seems to requite the Lieutenant’s affection, she is, in reality, just playing with his affections, and is holding out for different prospects of a more pecuniary nature. Glahn also becomes involved with Eva, a passionate working-class woman who, unbeknownst to the Lieutenant, is married to the local blacksmith. Unable to deal with the hypocrisy and artificiality of society, Glahn is forced to leave his forest idyll after a series of tragic events. Travelling to India, where he hunts for big game, Glahn meets his ultimate fate, which I will leave up to the reader to discover on his own.

A number of fine English translations of Pan are available and the W. W. Worster translation is available on Kindle for free from Amazon.

Quintilian on Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) is probably best known today for Brideshead Revisited, his 1945 novel of fin-de-siècle longing and Catholic apologetics that has received both television and cinematic adaptations. He made his fame in the 1930s, however, by penning some of the most biting, satirical novels of the British upper class and its various hangers-on. Waugh was brutally honest about the inferiority of the Negro race and its incompatibility with Western civilization. In the world according to Waugh, wogs began in Calais, and the United States wasn’t far behind. Anglo-Saxon superiority was a given and prejudice (in the sense described by Robert Nisbet) kept the savages and the lower classes at bay. All this was done, though, with great wit and manners. Nowhere is Waugh’s satirical genius seen in better form than in his 1932 novel Black Mischief.

The novel begins with a civil war in the East African nation of Azania, a miserable typically corrupt African hell-hole whose current emperor is one Seth, a deluded ruler whose Anglophilia expresses itself in hare-brained progressivism and an affinity for ornate titles: “We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University,” etc. The native population of Azania on its own is unable to sustain any of the infrastructure or institutions of civil society. Seth’s advisor is an Indian, the head of the army is Irish, Armenians are tradesmen, Arabs are traders, Greeks tend to the engines of the Grand Chemin de Fer Imperial d’Azanie, Jews are money-lenders, and the clergy of the nominally Christian nation are Canadian, English, or American. Through a clever bit of subterfuge by General Connolly, the soldier of fortune commander of the Azanian Army, Seth ends up winning the civil war he had all but lost against his father, who, regrettably, is killed and eaten by the Azanian troops who do not understand the subtleties of the Geneva Convention. General Connolly has gone native and married an Azanian woman whom he affectionately calls Black Bitch.

News of Seth’s victory reaches London where Basil Seal, the ne’er-do-well son of the Conservative Whip and a classmate of Seth’s at Oxford, is recovering from a series of scandalous benders that have forced him to abandon his nascent political career. Desperately in need of money, Seal travels to Azania as a free-lance journalist. Within a short time of his arrival, Basil becomes Seth’s most trusted adviser and is put in charge of the Ministry of Modernization; in effect, Basil has become the real ruler of Azania since Seth spends his time immersed in catalogs and dreaming up more and more ridiculous “progressive” schemes for the betterment of Azanians, such as requiring all citizens to learn Esperanto. The natives who run the other departments are all too happy to refer all business to Basil.

Added to all this are the machinations of the British and French legations, the former of which is staffed by incompetents who have been sent to Azania where it is believed that they can do the least amount of damage. The French, however, are convinced that the British and the Americans are involved in grand espionage in order to shut out all French influence in the region. The situation is further complicated by Basil and Prudence, the daughter of the British envoy, falling in love and the wife of the French envoy engaging in an affair with General Connolly.

A new coup against Seth is plotted when his opponents discover that an aged brother of his grandfather is still alive who has a legitimate claim to the throne of Azania. Just as the coup is about to begin, two British ladies from an ASPCA type organization arrive to investigate allegations of animal cruelty. The natives mistakenly believe the ladies are there to promote animal cruelty, so they brag to them about how horribly they mistreat their farm animals. The coup takes place during a festival for birth control, another “progressive” scheme hatched by Seth who wants to promote sterility among his people. I will leave it up to the readers to discover on their own how the coup turns out, but I can report that the ending is unexpected, and if you’ve ever read Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus you might get a hint of what to expect.

Amazingly for a novel in which the nigger word is so liberally used, Black Mischief is readily available on Amazon.

Quintilian, "Why I Write: Putting the Pieces Back Together"

The great monologist Jean Shepherd used to remark, “In four thousand years, no one will know that you ever existed.” This statement is shocking for modern man, who — while not believing in an immortal soul — is convinced that technological advances will soon grant immortality to his physical being. Mortality might come as a shock to deracinated modern man — who is never more than a few feet away from a hand sanitizer or a “safe zone” to protect him from the challenges of bacteria or differing opinions — yet this was not always the case. Death haunts the poetry of Emily Dickinson, not because she was of a preternaturally morbid disposition, but due to the simple fact that more than half of the students with whom she began grammar school died by the time of their high school graduation.

Like human beings, civilizations, those organic structures of collective human agency, experience growth and decay, often leaving behind only skeletal remains. Although Western civilization is founded upon the civilizations of Greece and Rome, we possess only a small fraction of our cultural inheritance. There is perhaps nothing more depressing than to come across a reference in Aristotle’s Poetics to the title of a play that is no longer extant. Of the some eight hundred plays of Athenian Greece for which we have titles, only around forty — that is, five percent — survive.

In the aftermath of the physical and spiritual devastation of the First World War, the High Modernists, especially Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, saw about them a civilization in ruins and a supercilious new ruling class that prided itself on its disdain for tradition, hierarchy, aesthetic quality, and intellectual integrity. The program of the High Modernists was quite simply to take the remnants of Western civilization and put its pieces back together to make an organic whole. Pound’s mantra, “Make it new,” was not a call for mindless novelty, but was instead a yearning for a restored Western tradition for the twentieth century.

In many ways, the situation we face in the current year is even more dire than that faced by Pound and Eliot in the 1920s. Academe is actively hostile to Western civilization, and dumbed-down, negro-level academic standards have become the norm even in the most prestigious institutions of higher learning. Truer words were never spoken than when Joseph Sobran remarked, “In one hundred years, we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to teaching remedial English in colleges.”

Christian churches, both High and Low, have largely abandoned Christianity, substituting smugly sanctimonious social justice virtue-signaling in place of virtue based on faith and humility. Even corporate capitalists nowadays seem less interested in making money than in seeking the approbation of the glitterati and chattering classes. Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick may have been robber barons, but at least they put their ill-got gains to good use. It’s hard to imagine Mark Zuckerberg putting on a clean T-shirt, let alone endowing a library or art museum.

Once again, Western civilization is in tatters, a thinly-layered shell that surrounds fragments that obscure a core containing, essentially, nothing. This needn’t be the case. Civilizational rebirth is always within our reach. Truth is on our side, and the truth of our positions can cause our opponents to abandon their false claims in utter humiliation, not unlike the Emperor whose fantasies were shattered after he was forced to confront the fact that he was not wearing clothes. All it takes for our side to be successful is will and the desire to be — as my ancient namesake put it — “vir bonus, dicendi peritus” — that is, “a good man speaking well.”

And that is why I write.

Quintilian - Wyndham Lewis' Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting-Pot

This rather obscure 1929 book by the fascist sympathizer and Modernist novelist and painter, Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), is one of the most prescient volumes dealing with the efforts to dislodge the white race from its dominance in Europe and North America. Lewis not only anticipated much of today’s race realist thinking, he also foreshadowed Moldbug and the neo-reactionaries by outlining the origin of white racial suicide and guilt in the decadent remnants of Puritanism. The most fascinating aspect of the book is, however, Lewis’ description of how Jewish publishers (most notably Alfred A. Knopf) deliberately published popular novels in which negro protagonists were uniformly good and their white antagonists were uniformly bad:

My position is that I am ready and most anxious to assist all those who suffer from paleness of complexion and all those under a cloud because their grandfathers exterminated the Redskins, or bought and sold cargoes of Blacks. My sense of what is just suffers when I observe some poor honest little palefaced three-pound-a-week clerk or mechanic being bullied by the literary Borzoi big-guns of Mr. Knopf, and told to go and kiss the toe of the nearest Negress, and ask her humbly (as befits the pallid and unpigmented) to be his bride. I am also convulsed with a little laughter at the solemnity with which so often these discussions are pursued . . .

With titles such as The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, The Fire in the Flint, The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer, The Weary Blues, Fine Clothes for the Jew, Negro Drawings, Fo’melsaday, Lily, Lady Luck, The Wildcat, The American Negro, Quicksand, and The Sailor’s Return, the Knopf catalog provided plenty of propaganda in the war against the white race of the 1920s. But Knopf was not the only purveyor of anti-white porn at the time. Lewis goes into great detail about W. E. B. Dubois’ novel Dark Princess(published by Harcourt Brace), in which the protagonist, a negro medical student, is unable to complete his medical education. He goes to Berlin, where he falls in with a group of African and Asian revolutionaries who are plotting the destruction of the white race. Needless to say, the dashing negro ex-medical student returns to America, where he becomes a Pullman porter, almost gets lynched by the Ku Klux Klan, and ends up in prison, but everything works out in the end.

Lewis points out that the purpose of novels such as Dark Princess is not to promote literature, but to bring about revolution:

Have you read Uncle Tom’s Cabin? It was a book that was reputed to have put the spark to the gunpowder and to have precipitated the American Civil War. If you are disposed to dismiss the sort of Film-farrago I have been quoting, you must at the same time recall that Mrs. Beecher Stowe was as a novelist no better than Du Bois. I do not indeed mean that any single book today could have the same effect that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had in a simpler time, with fewer books. But hundreds of such books as Dark Princess, accompanied by Films and plays, might reasonably be expected to have some such effect — a particular consciousness being evolved by this mass of books and plays, that is the point.

That the Whites, on their side, are being given a certain consciousness — this dual process is what I have been discussing: for the Coloured Peoples are urged to develop a consciousness of superiority, and the same book seeks to force upon the Paleface a corresponding sense of inferiority.

Take the above passages, replace the names Knopf and Dubois with Weinstein and Tarantino, and the result is that they could have been written in the current year rather than 1929. Lewis goes on to demonstrate the anti-white bias of German and French popular novels of the same time period.

Lewis’ critique of H. L. Mencken is unique and may prove unsettling to some on the Right who view the writer’s unabashed Nietzscheanism as proof that he is “one of us.” Lewis argues that Mencken’s disdain for poor Southern whites and small-town Midwesterners was meant to reinforce the anti-white animus of the Jewish elite and contributed to a loss of self-confidence among whites. The overall effect of Mencken’s journalism was, in Lewis’ opinion, an attempt to prove that whites had no unique culture and that white culture was, in fact, merely the negation of a culture, visible only by its absence. For Lewis, Mencken is a Theodor Adorno with a sense of humor and a readable prose style.

At the end of the book, Lewis states that the only “melting-pot” that can be efficacious is pan-European in nature, and that the ethnic line should be relaxed while the color line is observed. Lewis chastises those Europeans of mixed ethnic ancestry who refer to themselves as “mongrels.” Although he does not explicitly state the obvious, Lewis would no doubt agree that white “culture” is Western civilization, a civilization that appears to have been as much under attack in 1929 as it is in the current year.

Paleface: The Philosophy of the “Melting-Pot” is not currently in print, and hardbound copies are expensive when they are available. Fortunately, the book is available for free download at the Internet Archive.

Quintilian - Richard Wagner's "Judaism in Music"

Published pseudonymously in 1850 in the influential journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, “Judaism in Music” is both the most-often cited and least-often read of Richard Wagner’s voluminous prose works. Although commonly described as a vile work of hate speech or as a model for the breathless prose style of Der Stürmer, Wagner’s essay is actually rather mild and extremely clinical in its assessment of the mostly deleterious influence of Jews in German culture. The mildness of the essay is only apparent to those who have actually read the work, very few of whom are numbered among Wagner’s detractors.

First of all, Wagner’s solution to the Jewish question is for Jews to stop being Jews, that is, to convert to Christianity. This is hardly the stuff of genocide. Wagner reveals himself to be the greatest civic nationalist of the 19th century. For Wagner, the Jewish question is confessional, not genetic, in origin.

And what really is Wagner’s problem with the Jews? It is, quite simply, that the Jews have not truly assimilated into German culture. Wagner acknowledges the talented nature of many Jewish intellectuals and musicians, but likewise points out that their talents are imitative, rather than creative, in nature. As such, Jews have been able to insinuate themselves into German society without truly becoming part of German culture. As Kevin MacDonald has so often reminded us, the Jews always remain a people apart.

According to Wagner, the inability of Jews to truly assimilate into German culture is rooted in language, which in turn, has a profound impact on Jewish aesthetics. Wagner rightly remarks upon the discordant sounds of the language of the Jews. Here he is referring to Yiddish, the common tongue of East European Jews, which is a pidgin form of German. German is a beautiful language when spoken correctly and an even more beautiful language when sung well. I doubt that even the most fervent Zionist believes that Yiddish possesses sonic beauty. The tonal ugliness of Yiddish, then, has an impact upon Jewish aesthetic sensibilities. Jews, therefore, have different standards of aesthetic beauty than do Caucasians of European descent. Of course, Wagner sees this as being rooted in cultural conditioning rather than being part of Jewish genetic proclivities.

Unwittingly, Wagner has stumbled onto something that has been substantiated by genetic research. Aesthetic standards are not universal; they vary by race. The old adage that music is a universal language has no more validity than the Lockean tabula rasa. It should not be surprising, then, that Jews are at the forefront of every artistic movement that subverts Western standards of aesthetics.

Wagner also touches upon Jewish economic and political solidarity, and implies that criticism of the Jews is taboo since wealthy Jews control the finances of most European nations. Substitute Zuckerberg and Soros for Rothschild and you have an essay that is as relevant today as it was in 1850.

“Judaism in Music” is available for free downloading on the IMSLP website as part of Volume III of William Ashton Ellis’ outstanding 1895 translation of the 8-volume Richard Wagner’s Prose Works. An affordable paperback edition (which also includes several introductory essays as well as Wagner’s 1869 article “Some Explanations Concerning ‘Judaism in Music’” and Mark Twain’s article “At the Shrine of St. Wagner”) is available as Volume 6 of the Barnes Review Revisionist Handbook Series (Judaism in Music: Wagner for the 21st Century).

Quintilian on Ezra Pound's Guide to Kulchur

Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (1938) is one of those unfortunate great books (think Spengler’s Decline of the West and any book by Henry Adams) that is often mentioned but seldom read. The book was meant as a guide to the essential philosophy, art, economics, history, and ethics from Confucius to the 20th century as uniquely interpreted by Pound.

This and the ABC of Reading (1934) constituted the core texts of the “Ezra-versity,” the informal seminars that Pound held before World War II for those acolytes who came to visit him in Rapallo, Italy.

The book is dedicated to two of these acolytes and “graduates” of the Ezra-versity: the British poet Basil Bunting (1900–1985), author of Briggflatts; and the American Jewish poet Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978) whose monumental long poem “A” is the only work comparable in scope and complexity to Pound’s own Cantos.

Guide to Kulchur is unique in both its structure and style. Written in Pound’s folksy demotic English that at times seems more akin to Mark Twain or Joel Chandler Harris, the book is arranged in a series of very short chapters that seem to unfold in a haphazard fashion. The book’s form only becomes manifest the longer one reads, and by the end of the book one is amazed at how Pound has managed to weave seamlessly the many strands of Western and ancient Chinese thought.

For Pound, philosophy and ethics begin with Confucius, particularly the Confucian idea that a well-ordered and moral society is based upon the imperative to call things by their correct names. This may seem like a minor point upon which to build a civilizational edifice, but it is, in reality, nothing less than a commitment to truth telling, a commitment that is sorely at odds with our own postmodern age that has abandoned the search for truth as a sine qua non. For Pound, the commitment to truth telling extends not only to philosophy and the arts but also to economics. His unique and highly critical take on the ancient Greek philosophers (especially Aristotle) stems in no little part, as he sees it, from their inability to conceive of money as other than a means of measurement without a basis in morality. Pound viewed the ancient Greeks as “happy men with no moral fervor”[1] who represented a decline from the seriousness of their Homeric era ancestors.

While Pound’s embrace of Social Credit economics and strong denunciation of usury are well known, the Guide to Kulchur reveals how closely Pound linked together economics and aesthetics. In the very remarkable Chapter 50, entitled “Chaucer Was Framed,” Pound states:

Usury is contra naturam. It is not merely opposition to nature’s
increase, it is antithetic to discrimination by the senses. Discrimination
by the senses is dangerous to avarice. It is dangerous because any
perception or any high development of the perceptive faculties may
lead to knowledge. The moneychanger only thrives on ignorance.
He thrives on all sorts of insensitivity and non-perception.

An instant sense of proportion imperils financiers.[2]

Pound’s insights are as remarkable as they are prescient. An imperiled aesthetic sense that is incapable of discerning differences of quality and meaning and that cannot sense subtleties of emotion is necessary for a complacent body of fungible consumers who, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Pound, who viewed the Medieval Church as the highest expression of Western Civilization, likewise saw Calvinist Protestantism as its lowest expression, one that permitted, indeed glorified, usury and the inability to make aesthetic and moral distinctions:

You can, by contrast, always get financial backing for
debauchery. Any form of “entertainment” that debases perception,
that profanes the mysteries or tends to obscure discrimination, goes
hand in hand with drives toward money profit.
It might not be too much to say that the whole of protestant
morals, intertwined with usury-tolerance, has for centuries tended
to obscure perception of degrees, to debase the word moral to a
single groove, to degrade all moral perceptions outside the relation
of the sexes, and to vulgarize the sex relation itself.[3]

What is remarkable here is that Pound was able to see through the practices and goals of the leftist globalists at precisely the time that the right-wing nationalists were at the zenith of their power. These two paragraphs of Pound’s explain why the globalists use pornography as a means to normalize sexual perversions in order to subvert white family formation. They also explain the bread-and-circus nature of the global financiers to keep consumers satiated with cheap toys and gadgets. And finally, Pound was able to ascertain that Calvinist morality has led to an inability of our enemies to be able to make moral distinctions, wherein any disagreement with a leftist, however minor, becomes an example of “hate speech” in which the speaker literally becomes Adolf Hitler. It is also amazing that Pound saw the origin of leftist ideology in Calvinism, and as such, antedates by more than half a century the same conclusion brought by the Neoreactionaries, especially Curtis Yarvin a/k/a Mencius Moldbug.

Pound is a demanding author. He does not suffer fools gladly and he expects his readers to do their homework, but the rewards are many for those readers who are up to the challenge. Guide to Kulchur should be an essential book in the library of every white nationalist. Although written 80 years ago, the book is even more relevant today than it was when it was written, for in the words of its author:

Liberalism is a running sore, and its surviving proponents
are vile beyond printable descriptions. They have betrayed the “Droits
de l’homme”, they are more dastardly than Judas . . . .
In our time the liberal has asked for almost no freedom save
the freedom to commit acts contrary to the general good.[4]

I rest my case.

Notes

[1] Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970 [1938]), p. 330.

[2] Ibid., p. 281.

[3] Ibid., pp. 281–82.

[4] Ibid., p. 254.

Quintilian - "Spengler on Fate"

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) is one of the thinkers most admired by the Dissident Right, yet it is obvious that this admiration largely stems from Spengler’s portrayal of Western civilization as being “Faustian” in nature, that Western man (i.e., the white man) is a seeker of the infinite, which can be expressed by analytical mathematics, instrumental polyphony, perspective painting, etc.

Very few people of the dissident right have taken the opportunity to read Spengler’s magnum opus The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abenlandes). This is not a criticism of our political brethren. Spengler’s work is incredibly dense and difficult, and The Decline is one of those books that is far more referenced than read. This holds true for many of those who have gained scholarly recognition as explicators of Spengler’s thinking.

A close reading of Spengler may be difficult to take for some on the dissident right. Although he is still denounced as a “fascist” by the left, Spengler detested Hitler and was declared anathema by the Nazis and was not allowed to publish shortly after the ascension to power by the NSDAP. Furthermore, Spengler’s philosophical system of cultural and civilizational development is rooted in a conscious and vehement rejection of darwinism.

Spengler regards darwinism as a mechanical and chemical process that was inadequate to explain the organic development of cultures and civilizations. The biological determinism that is a hallmark of Spengler’s writing is firmly rooted in the philosophy of organicism that was expounded by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Goethe, of course, is widely regarded as the greatest of all German writers and is best known for his monumental drama Faust (Part I 1808; Part II 1833). Goethe was also a polymath and wrote highly regarded studies in the fields of mineralogy, biology, and a theory of color that was admired by von Helmholtz.

For Goethe, the concept of fate or destiny (Schicksal) is a biological imperative. For example, an oak tree is implicit in an acorn. It cannot be otherwise. This is likewise for humans, and in Spengler’s expansion of the concept, for human societies and civilizations as well. It is Spengler’s belief that what makes the Faustian West unique is its self-awareness of its fate: “No culture is at liberty to choose [emphasis Spengler] the path and conduct of its thought, but here for the first time a Culture can foresee the way that destiny has chosen for it.”1

What is it then that Spengler foresees as the West’s fate? It is nothing less than a transcendence of everything that has been up to this point in time: “a comprehensive Physiognomic of all existence, a morphology of becoming for all [emphasis Spengler] humanity that drives onward to the highest and last ideas, a duty of penetrating the world-feeling not only of our proper soul but of all souls whatsoever that have contained grand possibilities and have expressed them in the field of actuality of grand Cultures.”2 While this may conjure up images of Zarathustra announcing the advent of the Übermensch, Spengler goes on to quote this famous line from the final scene of Goethe’s Faust: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis” (I would translate this as “All that is transitory is merely a reflection.”) Here we have a sentiment expressed that is similar to the Platonic idea of the real being an imperfect reflection of the ideal or the Christian concept of the City of Man being a corrupt and impermanent version of the City of God.

It is in this brilliant evocation of Goethe’s Faust (which in itself is a brilliant amalgamation of Classical and Christian philosophies) that Spengler reveals his philosophy of fate. Doctor Faust—like Western civilization—strives for the infinite while being simultaneously not in control of his fate. The issue that motivates the 12,111 lines of Goethe’s drama is not the result of Faust’s will-to-power but a wager between God and Mephistopheles. The joke is on the Devil. You cannot win a bet with an omniscient and omnipotent being. Faust’s salvation has already been fated for him just as Spengler views the categorical imperative of the Faustian West to pursue its self-transcendence to be something that has already been assigned to it by fate.

For Spengler, then, Western Civilization cannot evade its fate. The West is on its last legs. (Spengler estimated the end of Western Civilization to come around the year 2200.) Liberal democracy, laissez-faire capitalism, and the ludicrous worship of equality have run their course and will soon—in historical terms—be distant memories of a fallen age. Spengler’s pessimism about the end of the West is belied, however, by his—dare I say—beatific vision of the apotheosis of the West:

Solutions and panoramas as yet unimagined await the unveiling. Light will be thrown on the dark questions which underlie dread and longing—those deepest of primitive human feelings—and which the will-to-know has clothed in the “problems” of time, necessity, space, love, death, and first causes. There is a wondrous music of the spheres which wills to be heardand which a few of our deepest spirits will hear. The physiognomic of world-happening will become the last Faustian philosophy [emphasis Spengler].3

Now there’s an “end of times” that one can believe in. May we all live to see it come to fruition.

Notes

1 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West Vol. I, trans. by Charles Francis Atkinson, (New York: Knopf, 1932), p. 159.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., p. 160.

Quintilian - Spengler on Unfruitfulness

Perhaps Oswald Spengler’s greatest contribution to the philosophy of history is his removal of history from the mechanistic realm of cause and effect and placing it instead within the sphere of biology. Human societies are, after all, composed of living human beings, and so it is only logical that cultures and civilizations are themselves subject to biological, rather than mechanical, laws. In probably the single wisest statement ever made about historiography, Spengler reminds us that, “On the surface of history, it is the unforeseen [emphasis Spengler’s] that reigns.”[1] This realization is a bitter pill to take for many on the Dissident Right, who appear to have taken too seriously the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov, one of the conceits of which is the invention of the mathematically-based psychohistory by the character Hari Seldon.

If only there were a calculus of history, how much simpler life would be. History is too complex to be mechanically based. History is not a mathematical function. It is a discipline that is more art than science, and it is not for nothing that of all the so-called “social sciences,” only history was accorded its own muse, Clio, by the ancient Greeks.

Spengler makes the distinction between Kultur and Zivilization. A Kultur is the collective manifestation of a human group’s artistic, scientific, economic, moral, and religious identity when it is in its vital phase. Normally, Kultur manifests itself when the human group is mostly bucolic. When the group becomes increasingly urbanized and less vital, this phase is called Zivilization. And when the Zivilization reaches its apogee, according to Spengler, the death process has already begun.

We on the Dissident Right often talk about declining birth rates as a form of cultural and racial suicide. Spengler saw this more than a century ago, and extended the insight to include the artistic and intellectual creations of the group in question:

Unfruitfulness – understanding the word in all its direct seriousness – marks the brain-man of the megalopolis, as the sign of fulfilled destiny, and it is one of the most impressive facts of historical symbolism that the change manifests itself not only in the extinction of great art, of great courtesy, of great formal thought, of the great style in all things, but also quite carnally in the childlessness and “race-suicide” of the civilized and rootless strata, a phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed and deplored – and of course not remedied – in Imperial Rome and Imperial China.[2]

Unfruitfulness, lack of fecundity, sterility – these are all terms that describe Western birthrates and contemporary Western art and thought. The philosophy of Derrida, a building designed by I. M. Pei, an “artwork” created by Jeff Coons, or anything ever done by anyone calling itself a “performance artist” are as sterile as the womb of a man pretending to be a woman. And here is where causality breaks down. Are the modern artworks that eschew beauty, the modern philosophy that rejects logic, and the modern science that replaces objectivity with emotions the result of cultural suicide, or are they its harbingers? And in the long run, does determining the origin of a chicken-or-the-egg process really matter?

If taken seriously, Spengler’s insight into the unfruitfulness of the West suggests what course the Dissident Right should pursue. Even if the West were one hundred percent Caucasian, the West is essentially dead. It is no longer a fecund civilization; its creativity is spent, and the only project with which it is concerned is the tertiary development of devices for amusement and to make consumerism more facile. All of the great books in my library are from the past; the history of music essentially ended with the death of Stravinsky; and the only works of contemporary visual art that do not bring about vomiting are derivative of past styles. Neoliberalism is slavery, and liberal democracy is merely a velvet glove covering the jackboot.

Perhaps what is needed is for the Dissident Right to use the mourning process of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross so we can get on with the real work of building a new polity and culture. Let’s take a moment and mourn the end of Western civilization, but let’s quickly get to the stage of acceptance so that we can begin the real work of creating a dynamic future, rather than trying to save a dying civilization that does not want to – and probably cannot be – saved.

Notes

[1] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. I, trans. by Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), p. 140.

[2] Ibid., p. 359.

Quintilian - Reality: Ain't It a BITCH-100

The past four months have been a rather hectic round of presentations at scholarly conferences for your favorite ancient Roman rhetorician. This is my main contribution to the movement. I attend scholarly conferences so that the rest of you don’t have to. Also, it’s the best way of doing reconnaissance of the enemy. And even though I’m fairly inured to the nonsense that passes for “humanistic scholarship” these days, sometimes it’s just more than one can stand.

Recently, I found myself in a mostly deserted auditorium listening to some five-hundred-pound purple-haired creature of indeterminate sex drone on about “Queering Melville.” Interestingly enough, her remarks had little to do with homosexuality or Herman Melville but were mostly concerned with President Trump’s border policies. I was unable to discern how ICE regulations could affect Queequeg’s legal status, however, so I quickly lost interest. I pulled printouts of recent Counter-Currents articles from my briefcase and began reading Collin Cleary’s three-article series on the metaphysics of the Left and the Right. There is always a certain pleasure in reading forbidden texts behind enemy lines, but this time the pleasure was compounded by the wisdom of Mr. Cleary’s writing and its appropriateness to the occasion in which I found myself. Although this does not give full due to the intricacy and fullness of his argument, I would summarize Mr. Cleary’s position as being that the metaphysics of the Right is based on reality (truth, facts, objectivity, logic, etc.), while the metaphysics of the Left is based on unreality (denial of facts, subjectivity, inability to discern contradictions, illogic, etc.)

I started to think about how many times in the past four months of conference attendance I had seen nearly perfect examples of the Left’s perverted metaphysics as described by Mr. Cleary. One such case was a paper given by a mestizo affirmative-action professor who said that the greatest challenge faced by his Hispanic students was the stereotype promoted by whites that Hispanics are violent. He said that this stereotype was particularly harmful to his students because most of them are poor and live in an area of the city in which his college is located that has a daily average of eight homicides perpetrated by Mexican gangs. Most of the members of the all-white audience nodded in agreement with the speaker, and more than a few could be heard to say “that’s right” or “um-huh,” just like Negro parishioners at a Reverend Ike crusade. It was amazing to me that these allegedly highly-educated white academics could not fathom that the speaker had effectively contradicted his argument while making it. How is the fact of Hispanics being murdered on a daily basis by their co-ethnics somehow dispositive of the argument that Hispanics are violent? Of course, it goes without saying that any white person is racist who points out that Hispanic violence is evidence of Hispanic violence. In the bizarre metaphysics of the Left, 1 is never equal to 1. The old saw about Leftism being a mental illness is not an exaggeration. It really does seem that Leftists are incapable of recognizing their own cognitive dissonance.

All of this has brought me back to my own first memorable experience with Leftist unreality that occurred while I was in graduate school in antediluvian times. I had a number of particularly demanding classes one semester, and needed to fill out my schedule with one more class in order to fulfill the requirements for my fellowship. Several friends suggested to me that I take a class from a professor who was known as Dr. Hippie and whose classes were automatic A’s, since they were devoid of content and requirements. The early 1970s were actually pretty peaceful on college campuses. After the Kent State shootings, most of the radical behavior died down, especially since the radicals realized that they could be shot for their behavior. Ah, the good old days. Professors were mostly male, wore suits and ties to class, and faculty and students alike even smoked during classes. Other than an occasional snide remark about Spiro Agnew, most Leftist professors just confined themselves to teaching their classes, which were often extremely intellectually stimulating.

Dr. Hippie, on the other hand, wore jeans, had long hair and a beard, and sat cross-legged on his desk while he “rapped.” He didn’t lecture, he rapped, which in the early 1970s was not a pop music subgenre but a term that meant having a “down-to-earth” talk. Dr. Hippie’s rapping was fine by me, since the only requirement for the course was attendance. I got a tremendous amount of work done for my real classes during Dr. Hippie’s rapping. In a way, I kind of felt bad for him. Dr. Hippie was perpetually depressed. There seemed to be a black cloud following him wherever he went, like the character Joe Btfsplk from the comic strip Li’l Abner (look right).

Dr. Hippie was depressed because he was a refugee from a progressive experimental school in the late 1960s that had collapsed in a spectacular fashion. As I understood it, Dr. Hippie was one of the few teachers at the school who was not prosecuted for financial and/or sexual improprieties. A large percentage of the faculty and most of the school’s administrators even wound up doing prison terms, some of them quite lengthy. Even though he just barely professionally and legally survived from the disaster of the experimental school, Dr. Hippie could not stop talking about it. Indeed, that is all he “rapped” about during his classes. It didn’t make any difference what the subject of the course was; he just talked incessantly about how great the experimental school was and how much better off we’d all be if we just adopted its progressive policies without, I suppose, the felony convictions and prison terms.

Dr. Hippie seemed to me to have a weak grasp of reality, but at that time I didn’t think it was indicative of Leftism as a whole, as my other Left-wing professors actually did a very good job of teaching their subjects and had very rigorous academic standards, which they even applied to Negroes. Because of this, the Negro students avoided them like the plague. The Negroes were, however, as fond of Dr. Hippie’s classes as they were of KFC and shiny wheel rims. But even though attendance was the only requirement for Dr. Hippie’s courses, the Negro students still had difficulty passing the classes, as it required them to rouse themselves out of bed for a 3 PM class. One day, in a remarkable change of pace, Dr. Hippie announced that the whole class would be taking a test – but this test was designed specifically to demonstrate that regular testing was unfair to Negroes, and that if they were just given special Negro tests, all of the Negro students would become valedictorians and all of the white students would be confined to special ed. This test was called the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity, or BITCH-100. I’m not kidding you, that is its actual name. It even has its own Wikipedia entry.

We took the test, which seemed to me to be just a quiz on black slang and wasn’t terribly difficult. I didn’t think anything about it. Several days later, as I was walking down the hall to the class’ next session, Dr. Hippie stopped me before I entered the classroom. He was red in the face and visibly shaking. He pointed at me and started yelling, “You did that on purpose; I know your type!” When I asked what it was I was supposed to have done, he started screaming, “You deliberately got the highest score in the class just to embarrass me and make the black students feel bad!” Being confronted with the heretofore unknown experience of being excoriated by a teacher for doing well on a test, I did what was probably the worst thing I could have done in the situation and started to laugh. This caused Dr. Hippie to scream even louder, and me to laugh uncontrollably. Dr. Hippie’s behavior was so unnerving to everyone in the hallway within earshot that the Chairman of his department came running down the hall to see what was the matter. When the Chairman asked me why Dr. Hippie was screaming at me, I replied that it was because I had gotten the highest score in the class on a test. Dr. Hippie again screamed, “He did it on purpose!” The Chairman – a decent sort of fellow who retired a few years later – rolled his eyes. He told me to go into the classroom with the other students, and he took Dr. Hippie down to his office. After a few minutes, the Chairman returned to the classroom and told us that class was cancelled for the day, and that since there was only another week left in the semester, that we would not be meeting next week and should turn in all assignments to the departmental office before the end of finals week.

The repercussions from my encounter with Dr. Hippie were relatively mild. Several weeks later, I received my grades in the mail. In my real classes – which were the most difficult classes I have ever taken – I received all A’s. In Dr. Hippie’s class, I received a B. As this was in ancient times, there was no official process to challenge a grade. In a sop to the radicals in the 1960s, however, there was a clause in the student handbook that allowed one to change a grade from a passing letter grade to simply passing as long as it wasn’t in one’s major. This applied, and my GPA was none the worse for wear. Today, of course, I would have been expelled and hounded for the rest of my life.

Dr. Hippie was less fortunate. About a year later, he impregnated one of his students and quickly married her. His chances for tenure were slim, so he did what so many other disgraced academics have done: He went to seminary and became an Episcopal priest. At my last college reunion, I heard that Dr. Hippie had recently passed away. There were several more marriages and several more sex scandals that ultimately led to Dr. Hippie abandoning priestly orders and becoming a New Age spiritual advisor, which these days is just about the same thing as being an Episcopal priest. In a strange way, I have to admire Dr. Hippie’s consistency. He never allowed reality or a rational thought to intrude upon his metaphysics. And he was a man ahead of his time. Contra Cory Booker, as far as today’s Leftists go, the politically correct mantra is not, “We are all Spartacus.” It is, instead, “We are all Dr. Hippie.”

Morse Peckham on Corporations & Cultural Incoherence

Quintilian

Morse Peckham (1914-1993) was a literary critic and cultural historian who was very well-known during his lifetime but who has been largely forgotten today. He had all the qualities that make him anathema in today’s academia: Besides being white, brilliant, and a writer of enormous clarity and precision, Peckham was also a careful and insightful editor of nineteenth-century literary texts, a Darwinist, and a prescient observer of the decline of the American university.

Nowhere is Peckham’s prescience seen to greater effect than in his 1971 essay “The Corporation’s Role in Today’s Crisis of Cultural Incoherence.”[1]Peckham begins the essay by remarking that the corporation is primarily an institution of social management that is transcending the political and social importance of the nation-state in much the same way that the nation-state earlier transcended the Church. Already in 1971, Peckham perceived the university to be little more than an appendage of the corporation, existing primarily “to provide the corporation with replacement parts for worn-out or otherwise discarded personnel . . .” (266)

For Peckham, the university no longer attracts the best and brightest individuals, who are now more often drawn to the greater rewards and challenges of corporate careers. Interestingly, Peckham views the one institutional strength of the university to be the gathering and processing of information. The corporation’s single-minded focus on profit is, according to him, responsible for its weakness in collecting and collating information; the university, on the other hand, with its multiplicity of disciplinary interests, is a better instrument of proto-information technology. Of course, this statement was made in the era before the ubiquity of computing and the advent of big data.

What was true in Peckham’s day has seen a complete reversal in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Corporations are now seemingly less interested in maximizing profits than in enforcing adherence to a rigid Leftist ideology. Today’s universities are notable not for their catholicity of interests, but in a narrow set of gender and racial dogmas. Universities are now primarily focused on profitability, whereas corporations are more concerned with collecting information, controlling human behavior, and advancing ideologically-based narratives.

Peckham also correctly identifies the role that government and corporate elites play in controlling narratives. For him, the very words “government” and “corporation” are mere rhetorical terms. They are not entities, but collections of verbal and non-verbal signs by which elites control society. In fact, Peckham remarks that corporations pay more attention to rhetoric than governments and are much better at using it. As such, the corporation is a “kind of synthesis of government and church.” (265)

Never were truer words ever written. Today’s corporations seek control of human behavior to a degree unimaginable to the most repressive dictators of the past century. And neither Cotton Mather nor Torquemada ever exhibited the murderous religious zeal of a five hundred-pound, blue-haired, gender-fluid, anti-white SJW employee of Google or Facebook.

For Peckham, the solution to higher education’s dilemma is a return to producing individuals educated in the aristocratic traditions of high culture:

Since the complexity of modern society, the incoherence of the current cultural crisis, and the increasing domination of the corporation require far more people inculcated with these values of high culture than the universities are currently producing or seem able to produce, the question arises as to whether or not it can be done. I believe the answer is that it is indeed possible. (278)

Ever prescient, Peckham hedges his bet and states at the end of the essay:

Perhaps it would be better for the corporation to allow the university to go its declining way and instead to start new academic institutions for the sole purpose of preserving and inculcating those values of high culture so essential to the corporation’s survival. (284)

Unfortunately, the type of academic and corporate reform that was still possible in 1971 no longer obtains in 2019. It is almost quaint to think today of high culture being essential to the survival of the corporation. The university and the corporation are inimical to freedom, destructive to society, and adamantly opposed to the interests of the white race, Western civilization, and every institution that has proved beneficial to a well-established and ordered polity.

Morse Peckham’s insights into the corruption of the corporate world and the cultural incoherence of the university have the makings of a blueprint for the recovery of our race and civilization. Peckham saw that the corporation was at its essence an ephemeral entity, more rhetoric than substance. And any entity that exists by rhetoric can be “deconstructed” rhetorically.

It is a shame that Morse Peckham’s observations were not given greater credence in 1971, but prophecies are seldom heeded in the era in which they are made. It is therefore up to us to utilize his insights as we dismantle the anti-white institutions of the postmodern world one rhetorical brick at a time.

Note

[1] Morse Peckham, “The Corporation’s Role in Today’s Crisis of Cultural Incoherence,” Romanticism and Behavior: Collected Essays II (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), pp. 263-284.

Quintilian on Ernst Jünger's The Glass Bees

Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) was a prominent member of the German nationalist Conservative Revolutionary movement of the 1920s that was opposed to the feckless Weimar Republic. The son of a wealthy chemist, Jünger rejected the staid bourgeois world of his upbringing and instead sought adventure wherever he could find it. Running away from home and joining the French Foreign Legion while a minor, Jünger was sent to Algeria and Morocco. Through the intercession of his father, Jünger got out of the Legion in time to join the German Army at the outbreak of World War I.

It was the Great War that brought fame and glory to Jünger. As a young officer he was renowned for his bravery in the field, winning Iron Crosses 1st and 2nd Class as well as the Blue Max (Pour le Mérite). It was Jünger’s wartime memoir Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern, 1920) that made his reputation as an author. In this book, Jünger describes war as an almost mystical experience, a transcendental transformation in which man becomes fully actualized. As such, Storm of Steel serves as a true antipode to the pacifism of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nicht Neues, 1929).

After leaving the German Army in 1923, Jünger continued his literary efforts and did advanced study in a variety of scientific fields, most notably entomology (a field in which his work was highly regarded). Although his glorification of war struck a chord with Hitler, several times Jünger turned down the Führer’s offer of a parliamentary seat among the Nazi rolls. Jünger never joined the Nazi Party and was highly critical of many Nazi policies. Re-entering the German Army after the outbreak of World War II, Jünger was assigned to an administrative position in occupied Paris. Tangentially associated with the Stauffenberg Plot, Jünger was allowed to resign from the army in 1944 rather than face execution. Untainted by Nazism, Jünger continued his literary career after WWII and became a lionized figure in German cultural affairs, although many leftists considered him suspect due to his promotion of German nationalism and martial virtues. Passing away at the age of 102, Jünger was both the youngest ever recipient of the Blue Max and the last surviving recipient of the award.

Jünger’s little-known novel The Glass Bees (Gläserne Bienen, 1957) is one of the most remarkably prescient literary works concerning the deracinated corporate-run globalist consumer dystopia in which we find ourselves currently imprisoned. The novel is set in an unspecified present in which one corporation headed by a man named Zapparoni controls all entertainment and information flow and produces miniaturized robots that perform most manual labor. When thinking of Zapparoni, think of a combination of Walt Disney, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs. Zapparoni’s corporation not only produces those machines that replace human labor, it also produces the entertainment that keeps the masses occupied while being displaced by those machines.

But there is a weakness in Zapparoni’s business model. While Zapparoni may be an entrepreneurial visionary, he is an organizer, not a creator, and is dependent on the engineers and developers that he employs. In order to maintain his monopoly, Zapparoni must continually cater to the whims of his engineers, who are paid lavishly, have no set working hours, and are indulged in every conceivable manner, not unlike the Silicon Valley corporate campuses of today that resemble entertainment complexes more than workplaces.

Into the story comes one Captain Richard, a superannuated army officer who began his career in the cavalry, switched to the tank corps when those mechanized monsters began to appear at the end of World War I, and who now finds himself out of a career now that war is in the hands of technocrats, or “super-philistines” as he calls them:

Even in peace they had brought about greater evils than any tyrant or warlord had ever imposed; they prepared poisons which no one before had ever imagined or even known by name. Each day their machines took a toll equal to the casualty list of a single battle, and the yearly toll equaled that of a war—and in what a ghastly manner.

Behind all this was a brutal and ruthless use of intellect which basically recognized only one tendency—that which at the same time shortened, mechanically increased production. But could they create an olive tree or a horse? With all their enormous potentialities they could, of course, build cities, but not the smallest dwelling of the kind once built by a simple mason or a carpenter. Certain naïve souls even commissioned them to build churches, though one would not want even a garden pavilion as a gift from them. The churches they got were built in a style suitable only for pillboxes, airplanes, and refrigerators; there they celebrated their religious rites before a congregation that considered penicillin more effective than any sacrifice of the Mass. [emphasis mine]

Captain Richard, however, is down on his luck and desperately needs a job, but the skill set of a retired cavalry officer is of little use in a world that has divorced itself from tradition, honor, and the natural world. An old army friend with connections arranges a job interview with Zapparoni who is in need of someone with the Captain’s tainted background. In what must be the most unusual job interview in literary history, a psychological tug-of-war begins between the Captain and Zapparoni, the results of which I will leave up to the reader to discover on his own.

So much of speculative fiction which tries to imagine the future ends up being risible only a few years after it is produced. The Glass Bees, however, is remarkable for how accurate a portrait of the future internet age could be that was written in 1957 by a 62-year-old man with roots in the Wilhelmine Era. Even more remarkable is that Ernst Jünger lived for forty more years and got to see most of his dystopian vision come to fruition.

Quintilian on Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief

Evely Waugh (1903–1966) is probably best known today for Brideshead Revisited, his 1945 novel of fin-de-siècle longing and Catholic apologetics that has received both television and cinematic adaptations. He made his fame in the 1930s, however, by penning some of the most biting, satirical novels of the British upper class and its various hangers-on. Waugh was brutally honest about the inferiority of the Negro race and its incompatibility with Western civilization. In the world according to Waugh, wogs began in Calais, and the United States wasn’t far behind. Anglo-Saxon superiority was a given and prejudice (in the sense described by Robert Nisbet) kept the savages and the lower classes at bay. All this was done, though, with great wit and manners. Nowhere is Waugh’s satirical genius seen in better form than in his 1932 novel Black Mischief.

The novel begins with a civil war in the East African nation of Azania, a miserable typically corrupt African hell-hole whose current emperor is one Seth, a deluded ruler whose Anglophilia expresses itself in hare-brained progressivism and an affinity for ornate titles: “We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University,” etc. The native population of Azania on its own is unable to sustain any of the infrastructure or institutions of civil society. Seth’s advisor is an Indian, the head of the army is Irish, Armenians are tradesmen, Arabs are traders, Greeks tend to the engines of the Grand Chemin de Fer Imperial d’Azanie, Jews are money-lenders, and the clergy of the nominally Christian nation are Canadian, English, or American. Through a clever bit of subterfuge by General Connolly, the soldier of fortune commander of the Azanian Army, Seth ends up winning the civil war he had all but lost against his father, who, regrettably, is killed and eaten by the Azanian troops who do not understand the subtleties of the Geneva Convention. General Connolly has gone native and married an Azanian woman whom he affectionately calls Black Bitch.




News of Seth’s victory reaches London where Basil Seal, the ne’er-do-well son of the Conservative Whip and a classmate of Seth’s at Oxford, is recovering from a series of scandalous benders that have forced him to abandon his nascent political career. Desperately in need of money, Seal travels to Azania as a free-lance journalist. Within a short time of his arrival, Basil becomes Seth’s most trusted adviser and is put in charge of the Ministry of Modernization; in effect, Basil has become the real ruler of Azania since Seth spends his time immersed in catalogs and dreaming up more and more ridiculous “progressive” schemes for the betterment of Azanians, such as requiring all citizens to learn Esperanto. The natives who run the other departments are all too happy to refer all business to Basil.

Added to all this are the machinations of the British and French legations, the former of which is staffed by incompetents who have been sent to Azania where it is believed that they can do the least amount of damage. The French, however, are convinced that the British and the Americans are involved in grand espionage in order to shut out all French influence in the region. The situation is further complicated by Basil and Prudence, the daughter of the British envoy, falling in love and the wife of the French envoy engaging in an affair with General Connolly.

A new coup against Seth is plotted when his opponents discover that an aged brother of his grandfather is still alive who has a legitimate claim to the throne of Azania. Just as the coup is about to begin, two British ladies from an ASPCA type organization arrive to investigate allegations of animal cruelty. The natives mistakenly believe the ladies are there to promote animal cruelty, so they brag to them about how horribly they mistreat their farm animals. The coup takes place during a festival for birth control, another “progressive” scheme hatched by Seth who wants to promote sterility among his people. I will leave it up to the readers to discover on their own how the coup turns out, but I can report that the ending is unexpected, and if you’ve ever read Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus you might get a hint of what to expect.

Amazingly for a novel in which the nigger word is so liberally used, Black Mischief is readily available on Amazon.

Counter-Currents Publishing