BLM, credit Wikipedia
Edouard Frederic Wilhelm Richter, Scheherazade, credit Wikipedia
In this edition: French song, from Chandos Records; RPO plays English music on BBC Radio 3, reviewed by STUART MILLSON
Virgil Reading from the Aeneid, painting by Ingres, credit Wikipedia
G.B. Conte (ed.), Publius Vergilius Maro: AENEIS, Editio altera, De Gruyter, 2019. Pp. IX-LI; 1-384, reviewed by Darrell Sutton
It is always a happy occasion when a critical text of a classical author is released. Much more opportune is the event when G.B. Conte places in the reader’s hands an original text that is accompanied by an expansive apparatus, one that makes it easier for students to form their own judgments. The first edition was reviewed at length. The changes made in this edition are for the better. This review is concerned rather with whether Aeneus’ adventures are set forth shrewdly in the unclouded horizons of a newly revised and edited text.
Virgil needs no introduction. The Aeneid is one of the great treasures of Western civilization. Herein the adventures of Aeneas are wonderfully told. Departing from Troy, he faces one obstacle after another before arriving in Italy. His enemies are gods and men. The poem’s originality is well known to readers of its Latin text. Conte knows Aeneas and his worlds.
In the Ad Lectorem (MMXIX) section, Conte reminds the reader of C.G. Heyne’s (1729-1812) remarks about the difficulty of Virgil’s texts (difficile est Virgilium…). Therefore a sound-minded guide is needed. We concur. He also says that errors were gradually introduced into the texts; but that not all of what has been transmitted is corrupted. He has respect for certain previous critics. Richard Bentley (1662-1742) and Emil Baehrens (1848-1888) provided emendations and are to be remembered. Continue reading
Landscape in Scotland, by Gustave Doré
The Scottish National Party won a majority of seats at May’s Holyrood elections, but Scots remain divided over the future of their country. There is a chance now to restore the fortunes of the United Kingdom with a new vision for Britain.
On the eve of May’s elections to the Scottish Parliament, the headline-writers for the Scottish edition of The Sun excelled themselves. With the SNP predicting a surge in its support – and with the former First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, leading his own breakaway party (Salmond predicting a “super-majority” for secessionists at Holyrood), hubris was very much in the air, north of the border. The rainy Caledonian skies did nothing to dim the enthusiasm of the SNP’s seemingly unassailable leader, Nicola Sturgeon, who was photographed – with her SNP-branded umbrella – on the streets of Glasgow, greeting supporters. Yet, for the wits at The Sun, it was time for – a reign check: an opportunity for voters to think again about a ruling party in Scotland which, during the Holyrood enquiry into the recent and complicated Alex Salmond enquiry, did not entirely give the impression of complete openness; an opportunity to show the SNP inner circle and party faithful that, perhaps, not everybody in the country shared their single-minded desire to break away from the United Kingdom, in favour of “independence in Europe”. Continue reading
“The proper aim of education [was] to make virtue habitual.”— Leonard Roy Frank, my friend & editor of Random House Webster’s Quotationary
In his 2004 foreword to my book Broad Sides, Peter Brimelow, the man who penned everything there is to say about America’s immigration disaster in 1996, wrote this:
“… somewhat to my surprise, it is actually quite rare for this most emotionally intense of columnists to draw on … personal experiences. What seems to motivate Ilana, ultimately, is ideas.”
In this tradition, on February 6, 2017, I wrote a column titled, “Are Liberals Turned-On By Turning The Other (Gluteus Maximus) Cheek?” In it, I expressed the kind of—dare I say?—outsized idea that has animated my writing for 21 years. To quote:
“The pale, liberal patriarchy is a pioneer in forever scrutinizing itself for signs of racism and deficits in empathy toward The Other, while readily accusing others like it of the same. It’s as though liberal men derive homo-erotic pleasure from bowing-and-scraping to assailants and ceding to racial claims-making.”
Paul Klee, Senecio, credit Wikipedia
This writing is as an attempt — building on the insights of figures as intellectually diverse as Marshall McLuhan, the lesser-known media theorist Harold A. Innis, Canadian philosopher George Parkin Grant, Noam Chomsky, and Camille Paglia — to develop a “unified field theory” of the relations between media and society.
The effect on society of the emergence of electronic mass media (and their immediate precursors such as cinema) has been profoundly underestimated by most thinkers, or interpreted in trivial terms. One initial observation is that there are considerable differences between the mass media before the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium, and afterwards. The real birth of the Internet was in 1995, with the creation of the first websites which could be accessed by everyone who had a computer with an Internet connection. With ever-faster connections and ever-faster microcomputers (personal computers) the Internet spawned all kinds of new media developments that had never really been possible before, or had been prefigured only in some kind of fragmentary form. Thus, to look at the impact of the earlier media (mainly cinema, television, and the VCR) and then to try to examine the multifarious impacts of the post-1995 Internet, are largely separate questions. Continue reading
Statue of John C. Calhoun, credit The Charleston Chronicle
Calhoun; American Heretic, Robert Elder, Basic Books, New York, 2021, hb, 640 pp. Leslie Jones reviews a masterful biography
Senator John C Calhoun, that tireless and intrepid champion of slavery, was born in South Carolina in 1782. His father, a wealthy surveyor and slaveowner, hailed originally from Northern Ireland but emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1733. Concerning Calhoun’s Scots-Irish ancestry, author Robert Elder observes that in Ireland, Scottish Presbyterians like Calhoun’s grandfather had to pay a tithe to the established Anglican church but were barred from holding office by the Test Act of 1704. Their second class status made them receptive to the notion that a people had a right to resist, even to change their government, as maintained by sometime Scottish Presbyterian minister Francis Hutcheson, in his Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1747). By extension, citizens of a colony, such as those of North America, had the right to separate from the mother country if they felt oppressed. Calhoun had evidently imbibed his father’s anti-British and libertarian sentiments. That government was best, according to Patrick Calhoun, “…which allowed the largest amount of individual liberty compatible with social order and tranquillity”.[i]
Mark Rothko, White Centre etc, credit Wikipedia
Institutionalized, systemic anti-whiteness, allied to demonization of whites: this is the creed that is becoming entrenched across state and civil society in the U.S. Chiseled down, these are also the building blocks of Critical Race Theory, a specious, subintelligent concoction, originated by subpar intellectuals. The Critical Race project now pervades private and political life. A further twist of the screw (or the shrew) was delivered recently by Vice President Kamala Harris, who insists on yammering about white America’s historic racism.
In practice, whites are being singled out for a punishing program of reeducation, subjugation and continued intimidation. Dangerous in isolation, the entrenchment of anti-white animus is made worse by the conservative cognoscenti’s inability to acknowledge it. Too many conservatives euphemize our anti-white culture. In particular, they all too often characterize the latter as identity politics. This is obfuscation.
Here’s why: Blacks are not being pitted against Hispanics; Hispanics are not being sicced on Asians, and Ameri-Indians aren’t being urged to attack the aforementioned groups. Rather, they’re all piling on honky. Hence, anti-white politics or animus. The multicultural multitudes are gunning for whites and their putative privilege. The tarring of whites is now close to becoming a curricular requirement in education (primary, secondary, tertiary), and from entertainment to technology, anti-white racial “redress” is an important objective.
When they are not lamenting Democrat-driven, divisive “identity politics”; conservatives will dilate about Marxism and communism. The anti-white theoretical kudzu enervating every aspect of life is, apparently, a manifestation of the radical Left’s Marxism. Or, so you are told. This further downplays the anti-white project of the purveyors of Critical Race policy prescriptions.
Put it this way: if your first response to “Kill the Farmer, Kill the Boer,” chanted by South Africa’s murderous Julius Malema, is, “Marxism, identity politics”—you are going to come up short in the survival department. In South Africa, inciters of black-on-white violence are known to rile the crowds with this anti-white chant. Born into “freedom,” after 1994, these haters can hardly read and write. Is a complex political theory, Marxism, then driving illiterates to slaughter whites in ways that beggar belief? This is made-in-America suicidal nonsense. American “analysts” have coated the sustained attacks against white South Africans with this more respectable intellectual patina. The South African National Congress’s problem, however, is not communism; it’s white-hot hatred of whites.
This is not to say that endemic corruption, statism and state-capture by industry are not economic realities in South Africa. They are. The definition of “state-capture” is “private actors subverting the state to steal public money.” In the U.S., private actors, Deep Tech, acting with state imprimatur, encroach on the rights of innocent civilians to make a living and partake in the national conversation. Potatoes, potahtoes.
In truth, the ANC guards the goose that lays the golden eggs. South Africa’s economy is not socialized, but is, rather, “based on private enterprise, [in which] the state participates” energetically. The economies of the West are at best Third-Way systems, too, neither free nor entirely state-controlled. As an organizing principle, however, South Africa’s political, economic and social institutions are firmly anti-white. They imperil whites as a principle.
To sum up, anti-white ideology is not to be conflated, as conservatives habitually do, with Marxist ideology. Very plainly, communism did not revolve around the exclusive blackening of whites. Stripped of bafflegab, this is Critical Race’s central project. Confusing Americans about this anti-white atavism gripping the country does a disservice to the pigmentally cancelled—those affected. For clear language and clear thinking mediate adaptive actions whereas theoretical escapism inhibits adaptive action.
So, when conservatives insist that Critical-Race based politics in Congress and across corporate America are a manifestation of Marxism or identity politicking—it is more than a hollow exercise in intellectual casuistry: it prevents innocents, (the pigmentally cancelled) from acting adaptively to protect their lives, their futures and those of their progeny.
Crippled as they are by self-serving fear, conservatives have accepted the Left’s terms of debate. Those dictate that, to warn of systemic hatred against browns and blacks is racially virtuous; but to fear the same for whites is incorrigibly racist.
For fear of being dubbed racists, media conservatives simply look the other way, refusing to acknowledge the unadulterated, anti-white hue of American society.
Ditch the intellectual crutches. Concentrate on the crux. You are dealing with anti-whitism. Communism, Marxism and identity politics serve here as respectable intellectual crutches. In using intellectual fig leaves to conceal anti-whitism, conservatives simply alight on similarities in the methods of current thugs and communism’s mass murderers. The anatomy of thuggery is always similar. The foot soldiers of communism, fascism and the American Left are alike because the methods of thugs are alike, not because Critical Race policies and practices amount to communism.
Ultimately, if quibbling about communism and identity politics becomes an obstacle to facing the reality of systemic anti-whiteness—then these theoretical crutches are an affront to reality and, by default, a grave error.
*********
These thoughts were echoed in brief during a segment on Newsmax TV’s Sovereign Nation, graciously hosted by Michelle Malkin.
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s currently on Parler, Gab, YouTube & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook and throttled by Twitter
St Mary le Port, Bristol (1940), John Piper (1903-1992)
In this edition: Phoenix – music for oboe and piano from EM Records; Imogen Holst’s Suite for Solo Viola; Eleanor Alberga takes to The Wild Blue Yonder; Czech Philharmonic – online, reviewed by Stuart Millson
We venture into the fresh air of England’s fields this May, with Four Country Dances, written in 2000 by Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012) – performed with lightness, delicacy and sentimental charm by aspiring young artists, Nicola Hands, oboe, and the pianist, Jonathan Pease. A wide variety of styles was embraced by Richard Rodney Bennett – from the exuberant Anniversaries, performed at the 1982 Proms by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, to cabaret songs, jazz and the magnificent score to Murder on the Orient Express. Here, though, the composer sounds as though he is reinventing the music of George Butterworth – an English idyll from another age, especially in the opening movement, A New Dance. Followed by such evocative titles as Lady Day, The Mulberry Garden and Nobody’s Jig, we must thank Em Marshall-Luck of the English Music Festival’s recording arm, EM Records, for the inclusion of this gorgeous, little-known miniature masterpiece.
But Marshall-Luck’s enterprising programme on disc takes us beyond village revelries, to the more ambitious structures of the 1934 Oboe Sonata by William Alwyn, the English symphonist and film-music composer who lived for many years in the pastoral landscape of Blythburgh, Suffolk. Continue reading
‘Chips’ Channon, credit Wikipedia
One of the weightiest publications to appear this year must be Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38, edited by Simon Heffer. This is to be the first of three volumes and runs to over 900 pages. The Diaries record events in the life of the socialite and sometime MP. An earlier version appeared in 1967 but since many of those referred to, sometimes unflatteringly, were still alive it was heavily redacted. No such restrictions were placed on the latest edition and so Channon’s often waspish pen is given free reign.
In Channon’s world, there were two significant events during the year 1936 and he had a ringside seat at both. The first quite literally since he was a guest at the Berlin Olympics. Given his pro-German sympathies this is hardly surprising. Of course, Channon wasn’t the only person in Britain who saw Nazi Germany as a bulwark against Communism, rather than as the opposite side of the same coin.
Given what we now know about the Third Reich, Channon’s trip to the Olympics has a blackly comedic air. Arriving in Berlin he and his wife are assigned a uniformed Aide de Camp for their stay. Travelling to their hotel, Channon notices with approval the ‘splendidly decorated Unter Den Linden’. No prizes for guessing what it was decorated with. Later he dined with the Bismarck’s. As the reader discovers, the Nazi’s were finding it useful at this stage to ally themselves with members of the old regime, since the German public still held the monarchy and aristocracy in high regard.
Channon seems to have had little interest in the Games themselves and admitted in his diary that he found them ‘boring’. There is no mention in its pages of his witnessing any athletic triumphs. He does note, however, that every German victory was greeted by the crowd with a Nazi salute and enjoys what he terms the ‘gay lilt’ of the Horst Wessel, played as medals were presented. Continue reading
