Sunday Book Club By James Reed

     In preparation for the end of the world, or more likely, the end of my world, I am cleaning up my books, and finding a home for them. Some will wind up sent to Uncle Len, who will use them for burning in his shed, in an old 44 gallon  oil drum. For warmth and light in winter, and maybe to keep the mossies at bay in summer.  Some, I imagine, he will tear up, and put on the dirty cement floor, to keep his tootsies toasty in winter. I am pleased that great literature always finds a natural home.

     So, what first to briefly note and throw out? Here is my copy of Alain de Benoist, Beyond Human Rights, (Arktos, London, 2011). De Benoist is a leading French New Right theorist, who likes being photographed with his cat. Me, I hate cats, being highly allergic to their fur which always seems to get everywhere, just like human rights.

     Human rights are taken by the elite today to be natural, timeless rights. However, the intellectual elite also adopt the idea of multiculturalism, that human (with the exception of Nordics/Northern Europeans) are ethno-cultural beings who gain their identity from their culture. This, though, introduces cultural relativity, and a contradiction with the universalism of human rights. Hence, paradoxes such as “slavery as practiced in ancient Rome and Athens has become the very symbol of degeneration, and yet purchasing a child conceived in the womb of a woman who is renting her uterus is held to be a right in some modern Western countries.” (p. 15)

     Islamic views of man, do not sit well with modern liberal conceptions either, and sharia law conflicts with standard Western jurisprudence. As well, the ruling  relativism of the age conflicts with the universalism of human rights: “subjectivity leads necessarily to relativism (everything is valid), reaching in this way the egalitarian conclusion of universalism (all are important). Relativism cannot be surmounted except by the arbitration of one’s self or of our selves): my point of view should prevail for the sole reason that it is mine (or that it is ours). The notions of justice and the common good are destroyed in one blow.” (pp.21-22)

     The human rights of the human rights lobby are arbitrary, and are primarily devised to aid globalisation: “In history ‘rights’ have too often been that which the masters of the dominant ideology had decided to define in this way. Associated with the expansion of markets, the discussion of human rights constitutes the ideological armour of globalisation. It is above all an instrument of domination, and should be regarded as such.’ (p. 24)

     My next book is by Troy Southgate (ed), The Radical Tradition: Philosophy, Metapolitics and the Conservative Revolution, (Primordial Traditions, 2011). Why did I buy this book, and not try and read it before my brain began its rapid decline? Also, there are probably better people to read and review this than me, like Chris Knight. Anyway, struggling on, this book is a kind of Alt Right treatise covering topics and philosophers dear to their hearts, like Spengler, Heidegger, Ortega y Gasset, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and so on. Here is the opening paragraph by Gwendolyn Toynton, for those who think that some of us at this site are pessimistic, and/or over the top:

“Our civilisation is dying. I make no atonement and pull no punches for this dramatic and bold opening assertion. Our day is gone, the empire has fallen – may its death knell awaken the survivors from their slumber. Amongst the ruins of an empire toppled, a world in tatters awaits our rebirth, ready to herald in a new aeon. But we wait in vain. No savior comes forth to answer our desperate calls. We lie dreaming in the gutter and extend our reach towards the stars, which shine eternal and watch our children suffer under the eyes of the gods – all the time waiting for a change, a sign which never comes. The blind and deaf cannot hear the portents of the winds, and we are dying, waiting by the roadside because we refuse to rise. We worship impotence and utter our prayers to failure under the veil of obscurity. Thus do we fade away in silence, our protest and dreams still born in the womb of apathy.” (p. 7)

     What is missing from the text and most contributions is that they are preoccupied with the decline of the West, without seeing that things have got infinitely worse since Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) wrote The Decline of the West. We face now a total threat against civilisation itself, with danger on every front, race, economics, ecology, biology, with no stone of crisis remaining unturned. No amount of smart philosophical footwork escapes this problem. I did not find a real recognition of the depth of the problem, which is revealed each day in new horror articles released at sites such as Natural New.com. Perhaps none of this survives, and all that is left after the great crash is small tribal groups? That would preserve traditionalism then, wouldn’t it? Too much abstract philosophy and not enough concrete economics, ecology and street wisdom, is a recipe for the disaster depicted in the paragraph quoted above by Toynton.

     Next, I read Troy Southgate’s Tradition and Revolution: Collected Writings (Arktos, 2010). By this time of the day I had eye strain, a head ache caused by neck pain, and had probably drunk too much alcohol to do justice to a review, but when have I ever let that stop me?
     This book is complex as well with many history essays dealing with nationalist themes. There is also fiction and poetry, which is good. But my attention went to the last section “activism,’ to see what answers this guy had on the blood and soil issue.

     First, there will need to be personal sacrifice, even giving up one’s life for higher ideals. Then there will need to be programs of decentralisation to break up the globalist power nexus. A return to community and small is beautiful. Real sustainable living. The globalist system will inevitably come toppling down like the towers in The Return of the King: “it will always be the case that chaos inadvertently contains the redeeming elements of sanity and redemption, and this unifying spirit will engender a common identity and enable people to pull together and fight back. (p. 227) I sure hope so.

     This rebooted my mood and energy, and so I looked at Jonathan Bowden, Western Civilization Bites Back, (Counter-currents, 2014). Oh no, more philosophy, Nietzsche. A quick pit stop for a tin of cheap Asian sardines – I could feel the mercury and heavy metals giving me renewed strength – and with a glass of cheap plonk, I am off again.

     The Bowden book is a collection of his essays and speeches on various Alt Right topics, such as cultural Marxism. I simply did not find anything spectacular to report about at this late stage of a long day. Maybe sardines from Asian are not good for one’s thinking? Reading this book I wondered if anybody will publish my collected essays, or will they, like me be forgotten the next day?

     Michael O’Meara, Toward the White Republic, (Counter-Currents, 2010), has a nice cover, with three Roman soldiers reaching out to take swords from some guy who looks like he is from the Roman senate. Symbolic stuff, no doubt. The opening this time got my attention: “these essays speak to the impending demise of European America. …Common to all of these essays is the author’s intent to make whites more conscious of their destiny as a people – and to remind them, thus, of what needs doing to ensure the continuation of their kind, unique gift of Europe’s blood and spirit.”

     The author advocates forming an ethnostate for whites, once the poorly managed enterprise known as the United States collapses in a centrifugal dispersion of its decaying and perverted powers.” (p. 2) It is simply easier to break away from the old decaying countries than to fight for them back in the present culture, given the present levels of degeneracy and lack of manhood. Further, it seems an inevitable bit of history too.

     The presented essays weave in and out of this theme, and I tried to work out how O’Meara believed history would play out. I did not find much beyond the idea that some type of social cataclysm may awake the masses. (p. 98) That is unlikely for most would just die without leadership. As he says: “In this pre-collapse interlude, before the fall, nothing can be done to halt the inevitable of mitigate the immitigable. We are facing, in America’s world decline, not a solvable problem, but an unavoidable predicament that promises to rip apart the illusions that have animated American life for at least the last two generations – especially the illusion that unlimited growth and limitless consumption are possible in a world of finite resources.” (p. 138)

     That, of course, is where things will really get interesting, but all of the nationalist types do not think beyond that point. It is the new form of thought censorship – never contemplate the endgame in the richness of its full horror.