- Following 'Youth, Beats and Right-Wing Anarchists', a second essay from 'L'Arco e la Clava' has been published at http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/
It is clear that "`The Race of the Fleeing Man' is terribly topical". In the short introduction to it, the reader will come across statements by J. Evola taken from 'The Road of Cinnabar' that are more or less at odds with its American translation, published as 'The Path of Cinnabar : An Intellectual Autobiography' : whatever mistakes were made in this translation were corrected. - I need to correct the idea that the Arktos edition of "The Path of Cinnabar" is an "American" translation. Arktos is based in the UK, not in America. It was translated by Sergio Knipe, who is Italian. None of the Arktos staff are Americans, apart from John Morgan, its Editor-in-Chief. He did edit the book, but that hardly makes it an "American" translation.
From: Evola <evola_as_he_is@...>
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 7:43 PM
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] The Race of the Fleeing Man
Following 'Youth, Beats and Right-Wing Anarchists', a second essay from 'L'Arco e la Clava' has been published at http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/
It is clear that "`The Race of the Fleeing Man' is terribly topical". In the short introduction to it, the reader will come across statements by J. Evola taken from 'The Road of Cinnabar' that are more or less at odds with its American translation, published as 'The Path of Cinnabar : An Intellectual Autobiography' : whatever mistakes were made in this translation were corrected.
- Instead of correcting the "idea that the Arktos edition of "The Path of Cinnabar" is an "American" translation", how about correcting the actual translation ?
We call it "American" out of charity - so to speak.
- I honestly sympathize. "EVOLA AS HE IS" has spearheaded extensive Evolian research in the English world without receiving due credit, or sourcing, by "Jewish-spirits" among us "Aryans"... Why I shall never subscribe to any simplified racism.
- As good as this essay is, it is not up-to-date, as it was written about fifty years ago. The race of the fleeing man has kept evolving and new depths of irresponsibility and immaturity have been reached, especially among the members of the younger generations. One may wonder up to what point all this will end: each generation is worse than the one which gave birth to it.
The dispositions of that race have been reinforced through the use by the subversive forces of various tools, including music. Evola devoted some time analyzing "American" music, such as "jazz" and some forms of "beat" music. He particularly focused on their non-White origins. However, the rise of "modern music", initiated in the 1950's with the "rock and roll revolution", could be considered in a larger picture, as part of the occult war. "Rock and roll", which means "to have sex" in Negro slang, has been at the root of a major cultural revolution promoting various subversive elements: a revolt against authority, general slackness, sexual promiscuity, internationalism, etc. As a phenomenon which has had significant dissolving effects on the minds of people worldwide, it must have been engineered, at least to some extent, as have been most modern revolutions.
French Canadian author J-P Regimbal thoroughly analyzed "rock and roll" as a subversive music causing both physical and psychological damage and leading to a reduced state of consciousness (http://www.histoireebook.com/public/ebook/Regimbald_Jean-Paul_-_Le_Rock_N_Roll_Viol_de_la_conscience_par_les_messages_subliminaux.zip). It appears it is loaded with elements which are more occult. For example, "rock and roll" songs contain numerous subliminal messages and a number of "stars" were ardent spiritualists who composed their "songs" during a state of trance. It seems the recording companies which promoted and sold the music were owned by subversive organizations such as the wicca cult.
- "It seems the recording companies which promoted and sold the music were owned by subversive organizations such as the wicca cult."
While not refuting your preceding notions, this sounds extremely uninformed.
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: tlefranc10@...
Date: Tue, 21 May 2013 17:31:30 +0000
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man
As good as this essay is, it is not up-to-date, as it was written about fifty years ago. The race of the fleeing man has kept evolving and new depths of irresponsibility and immaturity have been reached, especially among the members of the younger generations. One may wonder up to what point all this will end: each generation is worse than the one which gave birth to it.
The dispositions of that race have been reinforced through the use by the subversive forces of various tools, including music. Evola devoted some time analyzing "American" music, such as "jazz" and some forms of "beat" music. He particularly focused on their non-White origins. However, the rise of "modern music", initiated in the 1950's with the "rock and roll revolution", could be considered in a larger picture, as part of the occult war. "Rock and roll", which means "to have sex" in Negro slang, has been at the root of a major cultural revolution promoting various subversive elements: a revolt against authority, general slackness, sexual promiscuity, internationalism, etc. As a phenomenon which has had significant dissolving effects on the minds of people worldwide, it must have been engineered, at least to some extent, as have been most modern revolutions.
French Canadian author J-P Regimbal thoroughly analyzed "rock and roll" as a subversive music causing both physical and psychological damage and leading to a reduced state of consciousness (http://www.histoireebook.com/public/ebook/Regimbald_Jean-Paul_-_Le_Rock_N_Roll_Viol_de_la_conscience_par_les_messages_subliminaux.zip). It appears it is loaded with elements which are more occult. For example, "rock and roll" songs contain numerous subliminal messages and a number of "stars" were ardent spiritualists who composed their "songs" during a state of trance. It seems the recording companies which promoted and sold the music were owned by subversive organizations such as the wicca cult.
- Most generally speaking we might agree with Regimbald, but the book contains some serious errors. And this goes for most texts on the subject.
Far from being perfect, but still useful:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8769443/The-Controllers-of-Art
http://www.scribd.com/doc/75554874/INSIDE-the-LC-Laurel-Canyon-and-the-Birth-of-the-Hippie-Generation
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Whitcombe-Woodstock.html
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: g.vdheide@...
Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 21:25:34 +0200
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man
"It seems the recording companies which promoted and sold the music were owned by subversive organizations such as the wicca cult."
While not refuting your preceding notions, this sounds extremely uninformed.
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: tlefranc10@...
Date: Tue, 21 May 2013 17:31:30 +0000
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man
As good as this essay is, it is not up-to-date, as it was written about fifty years ago. The race of the fleeing man has kept evolving and new depths of irresponsibility and immaturity have been reached, especially among the members of the younger generations. One may wonder up to what point all this will end: each generation is worse than the one which gave birth to it.
The dispositions of that race have been reinforced through the use by the subversive forces of various tools, including music. Evola devoted some time analyzing "American" music, such as "jazz" and some forms of "beat" music. He particularly focused on their non-White origins. However, the rise of "modern music", initiated in the 1950's with the "rock and roll revolution", could be considered in a larger picture, as part of the occult war. "Rock and roll", which means "to have sex" in Negro slang, has been at the root of a major cultural revolution promoting various subversive elements: a revolt against authority, general slackness, sexual promiscuity, internationalism, etc. As a phenomenon which has had significant dissolving effects on the minds of people worldwide, it must have been engineered, at least to some extent, as have been most modern revolutions.
French Canadian author J-P Regimbal thoroughly analyzed "rock and roll" as a subversive music causing both physical and psychological damage and leading to a reduced state of consciousness (http://www.histoireebook.com/public/ebook/Regimbald_Jean-Paul_-_Le_Rock_N_Roll_Viol_de_la_conscience_par_les_messages_subliminaux.zip). It appears it is loaded with elements which are more occult. For example, "rock and roll" songs contain numerous subliminal messages and a number of "stars" were ardent spiritualists who composed their "songs" during a state of trance. It seems the recording companies which promoted and sold the music were owned by subversive organizations such as the wicca cult.
- This claim was made by the author I mentioned. He listed the following recording companies: The Zodiac Productions, The Atlantic Productions,
Capitol Records Inc., Mercury, Inter Global Music and Aristo Records.
I have not checked the particular role of wicca in promotiong "beat" music but why would that claim be so surprising? Today, everything is more or less secretly "owned" or "influenced" by something.
This concerns mostly spelling errors or misnamings and chronological errors. Serious enough to discredit a text that contains otherwise worthwhile considerations.
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: evola_as_he_is@...
Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 05:50:14 +0000
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man
Could you please point at the most serious ones ?
- Certainly. Any other texts that are read-worthy?
In passing I will mention http://fascismefun.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/une-frequence-sonore-pour-chaque-race-lexemple-des-basses/ which points to obvious modern day examples citing Evola's L'Arco et la Clava in the process. Obviously the effects of "rock music" are downplayed in today's nationalist circles.
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: evola_as_he_is@...
Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 16:30:26 +0000
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] Music As Psychological Warfare (was : The Race of the Fleeing Man)
A summary, freed from those errors, of all the major texts on the subject would be worth making.
- http://fascismefun.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/une-frequence-sonore-pour-chaque-race-lexemple-des-basses/ is interesting but the author makes a major mistake when he says that "rock and metal music is of White origin" and opposes it to "jazz" and "funk" music. The author quotes Evola but does not seem to have heard of his three-level race theory: even if Elvis "The Pelvis" Presley had white skin, he had no Aryan soul and spirit. The link which is established between Wagner's music and "beat" music is also dubious. Drums only add intensity, which can be given a higher meaning or an inferior one. However, if one takes the case of Prussian military music from the eighteenth century on, it is true drums were incorporated only later, say the second half of the nineteenth century. Romanticism and Wagner perhaps played a role there.
By the way, does someone know a good history of music among the ancient peoples of Aryan descent? It would be necessary in order to do a comparison with today's music, as music had thoroughly different functions.
I believe the ancient peoples of Aryan descent originally strongly associated music with war. There was a myth in Ancient Greece which said the Dactylian people, who would have flourished around 1000 BC, discovered steel mines in the Mount Ida in Crete and forged weapons with the steel they had extracted. It is from the sounds of the swords on the shields that poetry and music, both instrumental and singing, would have been created. Later, Greek warriors used to sing the pean before and after battles. Plato wrote it was the noblest song he had ever listened to. He also did not like the fact that, during his own time, music had started degenerating and had become a means to give pleasure.
- White fans of rock'n'roll and the like need to ease their conscience.
Aristotle (1. viii. de Republ.) said : "Every kind of music is good for something : that of the theatres is necessary for the amusement of the mob, being well suited to the perversion of their minds and manners ; and let them enjoy it..." In speaking of the vices of London, a XVIIth century Scottish writer had these words, which are singularly reminiscent of Mayer Amschel Rothschild's famous saying on money : "That were a man permitted to make all the ballads of a nation, he needed not care who should make its laws." (in The History of Ancient Greece, Its Colonies, and Conquests, Volume 4, p. 235)
War and music are connected in some peoples. For example, the Scots were known for using bagpipes on the battlefield, to strike terrors into the hearts of their adversaries (the bagpipe is "unquestionably of Arabic origin", The Foreign Quarterly Review, Volume 24, p. 206 ; see also E.J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913-1936, Volume 5, p. 541)
This is not all. The processions of the Galli, the Great Mother's priests, were, as mentioned by Pindar (Dithyr. II), accompanied by loud music, clashing cymbals, and pounding drums ("The Great Mother was always worshipped in Crete with the sound of cymbals, drums, and other loud music ; which custom Apollonius dates from the time of the Argonauts ( )", `The Argonautica' of Apollonius Rhodius, G. Bell, 1889, p. 42), which, on the other hand, were unknown to Homer's age. The Dactyles, to whom Plutarch ascribes the teaching of music instruments to Greeks, were the first priests of Cybele.
Could the use of drums in these matriarchal and orgiastic cults be explained by the fact that the heartbeat of his mother is the first sound a foetus can hear ? If so, it would have regressive effects.
.
- Elvis Presley is Jewish: http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/08/16/elvis-presleys-jewish-roots-highlighted-on-his-35th-yahrtzheit/
http://www.jewpop.com/ils-sont-partout/schmelvis-la-face-juive-delvis-presley/
http://www.elvispresleynews.com/JewishElvis.html
On the one hand, I did not know a book about the music of the ancient peoples of Aryan descent. On the other hand, the CONTENT of the singings of the Templars is sentimental, devotional, Semitic and in last analysis feminine but, in strong contrast, the "CONTAINING" of some is undoubtedly more or less virile/Aryan and so imperious, pure, solemn and full of strength and pride. Many men with different tessitura are singing but it seems that there is only one voice. This applies to the two following, and especially to the first (it is recommended to increase the volume loud enough):
http://grooveshark.com/s/Crucem+Sanctam+Antiphona/3mMaVp?src=5
http://grooveshark.com/s/Media+Vita+In+Morte+Sumus+Responsorium/3mNjZ6?src=5
For their part, Islamic singings are always lascivious, high-pitched, bewitching, like other Semitic singings, for example raï which is sensual and feminine on the shape and the bottom.
- "White fans of rock'n'roll and the like need to ease their conscience." Should they? I'm not sure.
What keeps people interested is either lyrical content or musical idea's, which is excusable, but most of it is imbalanced for reasons of musical technique or instrumentation.
http://www.radioislam.org/thetruth/blmusic.htm is a well-documented on the early beginnings of the record industry. There are controversial notions about the "Beatlemania" which are interesting to overthink, but don't have any ground in facts, as far as is known. It still stands that the "mania" was largely fabricated.
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: evola_as_he_is@...
Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 13:54:21 +0000
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] Re: Music As Psychological Warfare (was : The Race of the Fleeing Man)
White fans of rock'n'roll and the like need to ease their conscience.
Aristotle (1. viii. de Republ.) said : "Every kind of music is good for something : that of the theatres is necessary for the amusement of the mob, being well suited to the perversion of their minds and manners ; and let them enjoy it..." In speaking of the vices of London, a XVIIth century Scottish writer had these words, which are singularly reminiscent of Mayer Amschel Rothschild's famous saying on money : "That were a man permitted to make all the ballads of a nation, he needed not care who should make its laws." (in The History of Ancient Greece, Its Colonies, and Conquests, Volume 4, p. 235)
War and music are connected in some peoples. For example, the Scots were known for using bagpipes on the battlefield, to strike terrors into the hearts of their adversaries (the bagpipe is "unquestionably of Arabic origin", The Foreign Quarterly Review, Volume 24, p. 206 ; see also E.J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913-1936, Volume 5, p. 541)
This is not all. The processions of the Galli, the Great Mother's priests, were, as mentioned by Pindar (Dithyr. II), accompanied by loud music, clashing cymbals, and pounding drums ("The Great Mother was always worshipped in Crete with the sound of cymbals, drums, and other loud music ; which custom Apollonius dates from the time of the Argonauts (…)", `The Argonautica' of Apollonius Rhodius, G. Bell, 1889, p. 42), which, on the other hand, were unknown to Homer's age. The Dactyles, to whom Plutarch ascribes the teaching of music instruments to Greeks, were the first priests of Cybele.
Could the use of drums in these matriarchal and orgiastic cults be explained by the fact that the heartbeat of his mother is the first sound a foetus can hear ? If so, it would have regressive effects.
.
- Given the subject, the "Radio Project" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Project) should not go unmentioned, although it's 'old news', so to speak.
From: g.vdheide@...
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: Music As Psychological Warfare (was : The Race of the Fleeing Man)
Date: Sat, 25 May 2013 19:53:26 +0200"White fans of rock'n'roll and the like need to ease their conscience." Should they? I'm not sure.
What keeps people interested is either lyrical content or musical idea's, which is excusable, but most of it is imbalanced for reasons of musical technique or instrumentation.
http://www.radioislam.org/thetruth/blmusic.htm is a well-documented on the early beginnings of the record industry. There are controversial notions about the "Beatlemania" which are interesting to overthink, but don't have any ground in facts, as far as is known. It still stands that the "mania" was largely fabricated.
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: evola_as_he_is@...
Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 13:54:21 +0000
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] Re: Music As Psychological Warfare (was : The Race of the Fleeing Man)
White fans of rock'n'roll and the like need to ease their conscience.
Aristotle (1. viii. de Republ.) said : "Every kind of music is good for something : that of the theatres is necessary for the amusement of the mob, being well suited to the perversion of their minds and manners ; and let them enjoy it..." In speaking of the vices of London, a XVIIth century Scottish writer had these words, which are singularly reminiscent of Mayer Amschel Rothschild's famous saying on money : "That were a man permitted to make all the ballads of a nation, he needed not care who should make its laws." (in The History of Ancient Greece, Its Colonies, and Conquests, Volume 4, p. 235)
War and music are connected in some peoples. For example, the Scots were known for using bagpipes on the battlefield, to strike terrors into the hearts of their adversaries (the bagpipe is "unquestionably of Arabic origin", The Foreign Quarterly Review, Volume 24, p. 206 ; see also E.J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913-1936, Volume 5, p. 541)
This is not all. The processions of the Galli, the Great Mother's priests, were, as mentioned by Pindar (Dithyr. II), accompanied by loud music, clashing cymbals, and pounding drums ("The Great Mother was always worshipped in Crete with the sound of cymbals, drums, and other loud music ; which custom Apollonius dates from the time of the Argonauts (…)", `The Argonautica' of Apollonius Rhodius, G. Bell, 1889, p. 42), which, on the other hand, were unknown to Homer's age. The Dactyles, to whom Plutarch ascribes the teaching of music instruments to Greeks, were the first priests of Cybele.
Could the use of drums in these matriarchal and orgiastic cults be explained by the fact that the heartbeat of his mother is the first sound a foetus can hear ? If so, it would have regressive effects.
.
- "Could the use of drums in these matriarchal and orgiastic cults be explained by the fact that the heartbeat of his mother is the first sound a foetus can hear ?"
I believe it may be one explanation. Although it does not directly refer to this particular fact, this article, "Drums: Heartbeat of Mother Earth", is of interest: http://www.nativepeoples.com/Native-Peoples/July-August-2009/Drums-Heartbeat-of-Mother-Earth/ It seems "primitive" peoples consider the drum beat as an extension of their own heart beat and that of the Earth.
Further on the symbolical plane, as a drum usually has a rounded shape, it may represent a woman, the Earth and the moon. The hand beating the drum, or the stick used, may represent the virile member and, thus, beating the drum may mean, among "primitive" peoples, the act of sexual generation. On a more practical plane, a regular drum beat has a hypnotic effect. This is probably a reason why drums are used a lot by "psychic mediums" and the like who are increasingly numerous in the West.
However, I maintain that a drum used in a traditional European orchestra does not carry such negative meanings and effects.
Rouesolaire, I did not know there was "templar music", which is rather wearisome to listen to, to be honest. Fortunately, we do not have to go back to such a remote time to find "decent" music. I have a knowledge of French and German "traditional" music. Here are a few tracks worth listening to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWqOVRhBldU (most Landsknechte songs are excellent)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75oM6gTVRYM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74DDwHweRB4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXH3QJrx98U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09gRYDsVsLQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9sVcRxopJU
The first song was the hymn till 2011 of the Front National de la Jeunesse. Now, their hymn is "Le chant du départ", a revolutionary song written in 1794, but which ended up being sung by soldiers during several wars.
Thanks for pointing out that Presley had Jewish origins.
Here is a book which reviews what French "occultists" said on music from 1750 to 1950: http://www.balderexlibris.com/index.php?post/Godwin-Joscelyn-Music-and-the-Occult-French-Musical-Philosophies
"Occultists" have been uttering a lot of nonsense but, from time to time, they are quite right.
- http://www.whale.to/b/mc_music_h.html
Not to dwell upon trivialities, but the above link, while containing only raw data, offers a rather complete overview of occultism present in contemporary music.
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: g.vdheide@...
Date: Sat, 25 May 2013 19:53:26 +0200
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: Music As Psychological Warfare (was : The Race of the Fleeing Man)
"White fans of rock'n'roll and the like need to ease their conscience." Should they? I'm not sure.
What keeps people interested is either lyrical content or musical idea's, which is excusable, but most of it is imbalanced for reasons of musical technique or instrumentation.
http://www.radioislam.org/thetruth/blmusic.htm is a well-documented on the early beginnings of the record industry. There are controversial notions about the "Beatlemania" which are interesting to overthink, but don't have any ground in facts, as far as is known. It still stands that the "mania" was largely fabricated.
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: evola_as_he_is@...
Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 13:54:21 +0000
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] Re: Music As Psychological Warfare (was : The Race of the Fleeing Man)
White fans of rock'n'roll and the like need to ease their conscience.
Aristotle (1. viii. de Republ.) said : "Every kind of music is good for something : that of the theatres is necessary for the amusement of the mob, being well suited to the perversion of their minds and manners ; and let them enjoy it..." In speaking of the vices of London, a XVIIth century Scottish writer had these words, which are singularly reminiscent of Mayer Amschel Rothschild's famous saying on money : "That were a man permitted to make all the ballads of a nation, he needed not care who should make its laws." (in The History of Ancient Greece, Its Colonies, and Conquests, Volume 4, p. 235)
War and music are connected in some peoples. For example, the Scots were known for using bagpipes on the battlefield, to strike terrors into the hearts of their adversaries (the bagpipe is "unquestionably of Arabic origin", The Foreign Quarterly Review, Volume 24, p. 206 ; see also E.J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913-1936, Volume 5, p. 541)
This is not all. The processions of the Galli, the Great Mother's priests, were, as mentioned by Pindar (Dithyr. II), accompanied by loud music, clashing cymbals, and pounding drums ("The Great Mother was always worshipped in Crete with the sound of cymbals, drums, and other loud music ; which custom Apollonius dates from the time of the Argonauts (…)", `The Argonautica' of Apollonius Rhodius, G. Bell, 1889, p. 42), which, on the other hand, were unknown to Homer's age. The Dactyles, to whom Plutarch ascribes the teaching of music instruments to Greeks, were the first priests of Cybele.
Could the use of drums in these matriarchal and orgiastic cults be explained by the fact that the heartbeat of his mother is the first sound a foetus can hear ? If so, it would have regressive effects.
.
- It is interesting that Tortuga island, the `capital' of the pirates in the Caribbean, is precisely the place where "indigenous people... refer to it [the drum] as the heartbeat of Mother Earth".
Since giving birth means also giving death, there is a rationale behind the use of drums on the battlefield. In this respect, however, it should be noted that the use of drums on the battlefield, at least in Europe, does not seem to go back to a period prior to the early `Renaissance', when the birth of modern war took place.
What do you mean by "traditional European orchestra" ? On what basis do you assert that drums used in such context "does not carry such negative meanings and effects" ?
We take this opportunity to mention `Il maestro Dionisio. Scritti sulla musica 1936-1971' (Fondazione J. Evola, 1999), which contains critical writings on Jazz and Wagner as well as, as the title suggests, a few articles on Dionysianism.
- By traditional European orchestra, I meant a musical ensemble, from whatever era, operated by Whites, playing and singing pieces coming from a true White soul. It was still common before the "americanization" of the world. When a drum is used in such an ensemble, it cannot be for the purposes "primitive" peoples use it (i. e. creating a hypnotic state among the audience, reminding the heartbeat of the mother or the Earth, etc.). It is in most cases little used, besides.
Preliminary research seems to indicate the drum was used in war by the Aryans: "The Rig Veda, one of the oldest religious scriptures in the world, contain several references to the use of Dundhubi (war drum). Arya tribes charged into battle to the beating of the war drum and chanting of a hymn that appears in Book VI of the Rig Veda and also the Atharva Veda where it is referred to as the "Hymn to the battle drum". Given the age of the Rig Veda being at least 1500 BC or before, this must rank as the earliest practice of beating of the war drum in the history of mankind." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum
It is difficult to determine the origins of the drum. If it originates from "primitive" peoples, the Aryan peoples may have "absorbed" it and given it a higher meaning. Unless the drum is such a basic instrument it has been shared by all peoples.
- "Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence" (http://www.scribd.com/doc/56587332/Dark-Side-of-the-Tune-Music-Violence) contains various highly interesting observations on the role of music in society and the use of music in psychological warfare, although its analysis is of a very general nature.
The starting point of this study (from the book's description): "Written against the academically dominant but simplistic romanticization of popular music as a positive force, this book focuses on the 'dark side' of the subject. It is a pioneering examination of the ways in which popular music has been deployed in association with violence, ranging from what appears to be an incidental relationship, to one in which music is explicitly applied as an instrument of violence. A preliminary overview of the physiological and cognitive foundations of sounding/hearing which are distinctive within the sensorium, discloses in particular their potential for organic and psychic violence. The study then elaborates working definitions of key terms (including the vexed idea of the 'popular') for the purposes of this investigation, and provides a historical survey of examples of the nexus between music and violence, from (pre)Biblical times to the late nineteenth century. The second half of the book concentrates on the modern era, marked in this case by the emergence of technologies by which music can be electronically augmented, generated, and disseminated, beginning with the advent of sound recording from the 1870s, and proceeding to audio-internet and other contemporary audio-technologies. Johnson and Cloonan argue that these technologies have transformed the potential of music to mediate cultural confrontations from the local to the global, particularly through violence. The authors present a taxonomy of case histories in the connection between popular music and violence, through increasingly intense forms of that relationship, culminating in the topical examples of music and torture, including those in Bosnia, Darfur, and by US forces in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. This, however, is not simply a succession of data, but an argumentative synthesis. Thus, the final section debates the implications of this nexus both for popular music studies itself, and also in cultural policy and regulation, the ethics of citizenship, and arguments about human rights."
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: tlefranc10@...
Date: Wed, 29 May 2013 23:04:19 +0000
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] Re: Music As Psychological Warfare (was : The Race of the Fleeing Man)
By traditional European orchestra, I meant a musical ensemble, from whatever era, operated by Whites, playing and singing pieces coming from a true White soul. It was still common before the "americanization" of the world. When a drum is used in such an ensemble, it cannot be for the purposes "primitive" peoples use it (i. e. creating a hypnotic state among the audience, reminding the heartbeat of the mother or the Earth, etc.). It is in most cases little used, besides.
Preliminary research seems to indicate the drum was used in war by the Aryans: "The Rig Veda, one of the oldest religious scriptures in the world, contain several references to the use of Dundhubi (war drum). Arya tribes charged into battle to the beating of the war drum and chanting of a hymn that appears in Book VI of the Rig Veda and also the Atharva Veda where it is referred to as the "Hymn to the battle drum". Given the age of the Rig Veda being at least 1500 BC or before, this must rank as the earliest practice of beating of the war drum in the history of mankind." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum
It is difficult to determine the origins of the drum. If it originates from "primitive" peoples, the Aryan peoples may have "absorbed" it and given it a higher meaning. Unless the drum is such a basic instrument it has been shared by all peoples.
- A video with the author of "When The Drummers Were Women", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oOnwYrsWE0&feature=player_detailpage#t=466 . For what it's worth: at least it shows some of the archeological findings and ancient art.
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: g.vdheide@...
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 23:13:11 +0200
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: Music As Psychological Warfare (was : The Race of the Fleeing Man)
"Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence" (http://www.scribd.com/doc/56587332/Dark-Side-of-the-Tune-Music-Violence) contains various highly interesting observations on the role of music in society and the use of music in psychological warfare, although its analysis is of a very general nature.
The starting point of this study (from the book's description): "Written against the academically dominant but simplistic romanticization of popular music as a positive force, this book focuses on the 'dark side' of the subject. It is a pioneering examination of the ways in which popular music has been deployed in association with violence, ranging from what appears to be an incidental relationship, to one in which music is explicitly applied as an instrument of violence. A preliminary overview of the physiological and cognitive foundations of sounding/hearing which are distinctive within the sensorium, discloses in particular their potential for organic and psychic violence. The study then elaborates working definitions of key terms (including the vexed idea of the 'popular') for the purposes of this investigation, and provides a historical survey of examples of the nexus between music and violence, from (pre)Biblical times to the late nineteenth century. The second half of the book concentrates on the modern era, marked in this case by the emergence of technologies by which music can be electronically augmented, generated, and disseminated, beginning with the advent of sound recording from the 1870s, and proceeding to audio-internet and other contemporary audio-technologies. Johnson and Cloonan argue that these technologies have transformed the potential of music to mediate cultural confrontations from the local to the global, particularly through violence. The authors present a taxonomy of case histories in the connection between popular music and violence, through increasingly intense forms of that relationship, culminating in the topical examples of music and torture, including those in Bosnia, Darfur, and by US forces in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. This, however, is not simply a succession of data, but an argumentative synthesis. Thus, the final section debates the implications of this nexus both for popular music studies itself, and also in cultural policy and regulation, the ethics of citizenship, and arguments about human rights."
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: tlefranc10@...
Date: Wed, 29 May 2013 23:04:19 +0000
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] Re: Music As Psychological Warfare (was : The Race of the Fleeing Man)
By traditional European orchestra, I meant a musical ensemble, from whatever era, operated by Whites, playing and singing pieces coming from a true White soul. It was still common before the "americanization" of the world. When a drum is used in such an ensemble, it cannot be for the purposes "primitive" peoples use it (i. e. creating a hypnotic state among the audience, reminding the heartbeat of the mother or the Earth, etc.). It is in most cases little used, besides.
Preliminary research seems to indicate the drum was used in war by the Aryans: "The Rig Veda, one of the oldest religious scriptures in the world, contain several references to the use of Dundhubi (war drum). Arya tribes charged into battle to the beating of the war drum and chanting of a hymn that appears in Book VI of the Rig Veda and also the Atharva Veda where it is referred to as the "Hymn to the battle drum". Given the age of the Rig Veda being at least 1500 BC or before, this must rank as the earliest practice of beating of the war drum in the history of mankind." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum
It is difficult to determine the origins of the drum. If it originates from "primitive" peoples, the Aryan peoples may have "absorbed" it and given it a higher meaning. Unless the drum is such a basic instrument it has been shared by all peoples.
- "In this paper new evidence is provided to indicate that vestibular responses may be obtained from loud dance music for intensities above 90 dB(A) SPL (Impulse-weighted). In a sample of ten subjects acoustically evoked EMG were obtained from the sternocleidomastoid muscle in response to a sample of techno music typical of that which may be experienced in a dance club. Previous research has shown that this response is vestibularly mediated since it can be obtained in subjects with loss of cochlear function, but is absent in subjects with loss of vestibular function (Colebatch et al. [J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatr. 57, 190�197 (1994)]. Given that pleasurable sensations of self-motion are widely sought after by more normal means of vestibular stimulation, it is suggested that acoustically evoked sensations of self-motion may account for the compulsion to exposure to loud music. Given further the similarity between the thresholds found, and the intensities and frequency distributions that are typical in rock concerts and dance clubs, it is also suggested that this response may be a physiological basis for the minimum loudness necessary for rock and dance music to work�the �rock and roll threshold� [Dibble, J. Audio Eng. Soc. 43(4), 251�266 (1995)]."
Vestibular responses to loud dance music: A physiological basis of the �rock and roll threshold�� (1999), http://asadl.org/jasa/resource/1/jasman/v107/i1/p496_s1?isAuthorized=no.
"In this article the results are reported of an experiment to provide direct evidence for a perceptual and behavioral significance of human saccular acoustic sensitivity. Ten human subjects were stimulated monaurally with 100-ms trains of 10-ms tone pulses with pulse repetition rate of 40 Hz, and were required to rate the pleasantness of the stimuli on a nine-point scale. The design included three within-subject factors: carrier frequency (two levels, 200 and 4000 Hz), intensity [13 levels from 55 to 115 dB(A) in 5-dB steps] and ear (left and right). For intensities above 90 dB myogenic vestibular evoked potentials (MVEP) were also obtained from the ipsilateral sternocleidomastoid muscle from which it was possible to obtain thresholds by linear regression of MVEP amplitudes against intensity. A further between-subjects factor was added which assessed subjects� attitude to vestibular sensations. The results indicate that across subjects there is a general trend of decreasing pleasantness with increasing intensity, but for the 200-Hz condition there is a significant positive departure from monotonicity in pleasantness (p<0.05) above the mean saccular threshold. However, when split by the between-subjects factor, the positive departure was only evident for those subjects who have a positive attitude to vestibular sensations (p<0.01). Implications of these results for human responses to loud sound and the possible evolutionary significance of saccular acoustic sensitivity are discussed."
Evidence for a behavioral significance of saccular acoustic sensitivity in humans (2001), http://asadl.org/jasa/resource/1/jasman/v110/i1/p380_s1?isAuthorized=no.
From: g.vdheide@...
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 14:52:07 +0200
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: Music As Psychological Warfare (was : The Race of the Fleeing Man)
A video with the author of "When The Drummers Were Women", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oOnwYrsWE0&feature=player_detailpage#t=466 . For what it's worth: at least it shows some of the archeological findings and ancient art.
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: g.vdheide@...
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 23:13:11 +0200
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: Music As Psychological Warfare (was : The Race of the Fleeing Man)
"Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence" (http://www.scribd.com/doc/56587332/Dark-Side-of-the-Tune-Music-Violence) contains various highly interesting observations on the role of music in society and the use of music in psychological warfare, although its analysis is of a very general nature.
The starting point of this study (from the book's description): "Written against the academically dominant but simplistic romanticization of popular music as a positive force, this book focuses on the 'dark side' of the subject. It is a pioneering examination of the ways in which popular music has been deployed in association with violence, ranging from what appears to be an incidental relationship, to one in which music is explicitly applied as an instrument of violence. A preliminary overview of the physiological and cognitive foundations of sounding/hearing which are distinctive within the sensorium, discloses in particular their potential for organic and psychic violence. The study then elaborates working definitions of key terms (including the vexed idea of the 'popular') for the purposes of this investigation, and provides a historical survey of examples of the nexus between music and violence, from (pre)Biblical times to the late nineteenth century. The second half of the book concentrates on the modern era, marked in this case by the emergence of technologies by which music can be electronically augmented, generated, and disseminated, beginning with the advent of sound recording from the 1870s, and proceeding to audio-internet and other contemporary audio-technologies. Johnson and Cloonan argue that these technologies have transformed the potential of music to mediate cultural confrontations from the local to the global, particularly through violence. The authors present a taxonomy of case histories in the connection between popular music and violence, through increasingly intense forms of that relationship, culminating in the topical examples of music and torture, including those in Bosnia, Darfur, and by US forces in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. This, however, is not simply a succession of data, but an argumentative synthesis. Thus, the final section debates the implications of this nexus both for popular music studies itself, and also in cultural policy and regulation, the ethics of citizenship, and arguments about human rights."
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
From: tlefranc10@...
Date: Wed, 29 May 2013 23:04:19 +0000
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] Re: Music As Psychological Warfare (was : The Race of the Fleeing Man)
By traditional European orchestra, I meant a musical ensemble, from whatever era, operated by Whites, playing and singing pieces coming from a true White soul. It was still common before the "americanization" of the world. When a drum is used in such an ensemble, it cannot be for the purposes "primitive" peoples use it (i. e. creating a hypnotic state among the audience, reminding the heartbeat of the mother or the Earth, etc.). It is in most cases little used, besides.
Preliminary research seems to indicate the drum was used in war by the Aryans: "The Rig Veda, one of the oldest religious scriptures in the world, contain several references to the use of Dundhubi (war drum). Arya tribes charged into battle to the beating of the war drum and chanting of a hymn that appears in Book VI of the Rig Veda and also the Atharva Veda where it is referred to as the "Hymn to the battle drum". Given the age of the Rig Veda being at least 1500 BC or before, this must rank as the earliest practice of beating of the war drum in the history of mankind." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum
It is difficult to determine the origins of the drum. If it originates from "primitive" peoples, the Aryan peoples may have "absorbed" it and given it a higher meaning. Unless the drum is such a basic instrument it has been shared by all peoples.
Plutarch describes the role of music in Spartan society under the rule of Lycurgus:
“Nor was their training in music and poetry any less serious a concern than the emulous purity of their speech, nay, their very songs had a stimulus that roused the spirit and awoke enthusiastic and effectual effort; the style of them was simple and unaffected, and their themes were serious and edifying. They were for the most part praises of men who had died for Sparta, calling them blessed and happy; censure of men who had played the coward, picturing their grievous and ill-starred life; and such promises and boasts of valour as befitted the different ages. Of the last, it may not be amiss to cite one, by way of illustration. They had three choirs at their festivals, corresponding to the three ages, and the choir of old men would sing first:—
"We once did deeds of prowess and were strong young men."
Then the choir of young men would respond:—
"We are so now, and if you wish, behold and see."
And then the third choir, that of the boys, would sing:—
"We shall be sometime mightier men by far than both."
In short, if one studies the poetry of Sparta, of which some specimens were still extant in my time, and makes himself familiar with the marching songs which they used, to the accompaniment of the flute, when charging upon their foes, he will conclude that Terpander and Pindar were right in associating valour with music. The former writes thus of the Lacedaemonians:—
"Flourish there both the spear of the brave and the Muse's clear message,
Justice, too, walks the broad streets —."
And Pindar says:—
"There are councils of Elders,
And young men's conquering spears,
And dances, the Muse, and joyousness."
The Spartans are thus shown to be at the same time most musical and most warlike;
"In equal poise to match the sword hangs the sweet art of the harpist,"
as their poet says. For just before their battles, the king sacrificed to the Muses, reminding his warriors, as it would seem, of their training, and of the firm decisions they had made, in order that they might be prompt to face the dread issue, and might perform such martial deeds as would be worthy of some record.”
As a side note, Lycurgus seems to not have been enough studied and regarded as an example. He was a great Reformer whose Law allowed the creation of a truly “superhuman” state which dominated for 500 years.
- Knutsson's serie on Occidental Observer discusses A. Schoenberg and atonal music: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Knutsson-PostmodernismI.html , http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Knutsson-PostmodernismII.html, http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Knutsson-PostmodernismIII.html. Mostly in the third part.
From: tlefranc10@...
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 14:39:45 -0700
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] RE: The Race of the Fleeing Man
Plutarch describes the role of music in Spartan society under the rule of Lycurgus:“Nor was their training in music and poetry any less serious a concern than the emulous purity of their speech, nay, their very songs had a stimulus that roused the spirit and awoke enthusiastic and effectual effort; the style of them was simple and unaffected, and their themes were serious and edifying. They were for the most part praises of men who had died for Sparta, calling them blessed and happy; censure of men who had played the coward, picturing their grievous and ill-starred life; and such promises and boasts of valour as befitted the different ages. Of the last, it may not be amiss to cite one, by way of illustration. They had three choirs at their festivals, corresponding to the three ages, and the choir of old men would sing first:—
"We once did deeds of prowess and were strong young men." Then the choir of young men would respond:—
"We are so now, and if you wish, behold and see." And then the third choir, that of the boys, would sing:—
"We shall be sometime mightier men by far than both." In short, if one studies the poetry of Sparta, of which some specimens were still extant in my time, and makes himself familiar with the marching songs which they used, to the accompaniment of the flute, when charging upon their foes, he will conclude that Terpander and Pindar were right in associating valour with music. The former writes thus of the Lacedaemonians:—
"Flourish there both the spear of the brave and the Muse's clear message,
Justice, too, walks the broad streets —."And Pindar says:—
"There are councils of Elders,
And young men's conquering spears,
And dances, the Muse, and joyousness."The Spartans are thus shown to be at the same time most musical and most warlike;
"In equal poise to match the sword hangs the sweet art of the harpist," as their poet says. For just before their battles, the king sacrificed to the Muses, reminding his warriors, as it would seem, of their training, and of the firm decisions they had made, in order that they might be prompt to face the dread issue, and might perform such martial deeds as would be worthy of some record.”
As a side note, Lycurgus seems to not have been enough studied and regarded as an example. He was a great Reformer whose Law allowed the creation of a truly “superhuman” state which dominated for 500 years.
This is a well-researched study.
In 'Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem', to which we will return soon, it is stated that "the Jewish spirit plays a large part in the development of the ironic style of light opera (from the Jewish Offenbach and Sullivan), then of the atonal (the Jewish Schoenberg) and rhythmic-orgiastic music (the Jewish Stravinsky), and, finally, of Negro-American syncopated music."
- Titles on music (and art history as well) that have come to my attention:
* Alois Melichar : Musik in der Zwangsjacke
* Eugene Gertsman : Mysteries of the History of the Ancient Music (Nota Publishing, Saint-Petersburg, 2004)
* Alexander Jabinski : Another History of ArtThe last two books are clearly related to the "school" of New Chronology or 'recentism':
"Not only the history of technology produce arguments against the orthodox history and its chronology. The Russian book Another History of Art by Alexander Jabinski demonstrates that the full history of art is not longer than 1000 years and all other periods of the history of art (old Greek, old Roman, old Egyptian) are projections of the art of later times to these imaginary virtual times. In his book hundreds of examples are presented which demonstrate how the real art of the last millennium was distributed through the whole old history. They all have been, in reality, produced in the last millennium. In Jabinski's book (p. 157) two pictures are presenting almost the same man. Are that really two portraits of the same person? Or of two close relatives? In the history of art this two works of the same art style are dated with 14 centuries in between: a Roman portrait of AD 60 and a Renaissance portrait from the year 1474. Analyzing hundreds of examples from the named book one can understand that a big part of Renaissance and new historic time art was set in ancient times by wrong dating traditions.
Another Russian book written by a known historian of the music Eugene Gertsman Mysteries of the History of the Ancient Music (Nota Publishing, Saint-Petersburg, 2004) demonstrates that at least 12 centuries of the history of the Ancient music must be cancelled. Important is that the author never before wrote some critical issues on chronology and was itself surprised by his results." (http://cracrocrates.blogspot.be/2007/11/anatoly-fomenko-and-new-chronology.html)
See also (in German) http://unglaublichkeiten.com/unglaublichkeiten/u3/u3_2525Ant.html
A description of the first title, but only in German.
http://unglaublichkeiten.com/unglaublichkeiten/htmlphp/u0361Musik.html Cara al Sol, the anthem of the Falange, is also a great song. Unlike the Horst Wessel Lied, it is devoid of any plebeian element.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cara_al_sol#The_lyrics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TVldBSYo1s
- Esparta y su ley | Ex libris
This a recommendable series of articles on Sparta, translated from the Spanish website "Evropa Soberana" http://europasoberana.blogspot.com.es/search/label/Esparta%20y%20su%20ley
Not exactly an obscure fact, but often forgotten and worth mentioning is that the marches associated in the popular imagination with Prussia and other European kingdoms and nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and so also with the Third Reich) were distantly but significantly influenced by Ottoman Turk Janissary bands, including the distinctive soldiers’ marching cadence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_music_(style)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_crescent
‘Although the fascination with Turkish music proved to be a passing fancy, it nevertheless affected the makeup of the Western orchestra by establishing percussion instruments of Turkish origin (bass drum, cymbals, bells, triangle) as permanent members of the ensemble. It's hard to imagine an orchestra today without them! The Turkish Janissary ensemble also influenced the military band in the West; these same instruments now form the heart of every marching and concert band.’
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/music/enj10/short/content/unit/persp_09.htm
- I think the question at hand is whether the European spirit "transmuted" these instruments of foreign origin into something really European.The Germanic marches of 1700-1800 recorded in the original orchestration with the instruments of the time sound very different when recorded with a 1850-1950 orchestration and instruments. A change has definitely occurred.Also, the military and political music of the Third Reich was very different from what was before. There were few new instrumental marches (except in 1933-34-35 but they did not reach any popularity) and also few of the old ones which were played. Mostly songs were composed and recorded. A very prolific 12-year period, with thousands of military compositions and recordings, which was probably more than in the last two centuries.I know of a few facts which indicate a foreign import in Third Reich music. Luftwaffenmusikinspizient Hans-Felix Husadel introduced the saxophone - at the time linked to jazz - in the Luftwaffe bands to the great displeasure of Himmler (as a rule, it was Luftwaffe music which had the most musical innovations). The most famous Hitlerjugend march (Jugend marschiert) was composed by Ernst Hanfstaengl after the tunes he had composed for American football teams. The tune of the Horst Wessel Lied was actually coming from an old French song. Several political songs of the Kampzeit were copied upon communist songs and vice-versa. Several marches and songs were taken from operettes and similar disreputable shows.
- The papers on "artists" and celebrities at http://mileswmathis.com/updates.html aim at proving that musical and show business hits of the second half of twentieth century were created from the start by subversive groups ("intelligence") whose goal was to alter society.
- Short videos have been published lately on French nationalist websites by patriots who wanted to check whether the decision to close the borders that had been taken by the occupying pseudo-government following a heavy festival in honour of Isis in Paris had been acted upon. One was shot at the French-Belgian border, the other at the French-Spanish border, another at the French-Italian border, and, unsurprisingly, the outcome was the same. For a reason that will become clear shortly, let us focus on the later. The video begins one or two minutes before the car, coming from Ventimiglia, crosses the border. The driver, radio on, explains the purpose of the footage, until he finally gets to the border checkpoint, which he crosses without being checked, without actually seeing any custom officer : there is none. The surprise comes from the type of music that can be heard in the background: rap. It is quixotic to argue that the occupying forces have won the cultural war: for a war to be won, it first needs to be fought ; in the aftermath of WW2, there was simply no organised force left to fight the “cultural distorter”, who, politically in full control, had the field, and could thus promote and spread undisturbed the kind of sound which helped them consolidate and secure their psychic grip on masses.
Mathis' papers are important insofar as they allow those who are aware of the decisive importance of music and the subtle influences it may channel from the lowest depths, as a tool, not just for mass control, but also, precisely, for the manifestation on our plane of existence of lower entities, to have full confirmation of everythng they already knew or suspected about the industry in charge of carrying out methodically the subversive plan devised by a pseudo-elite : 'show-business' ; while others, at least those who are not completely hynotised, may begin to glimpse what exactly is in store for them.
The author does not seem to be exactly the right person to investigate effectively these matters : he is a fan of most of the 'stars' who were at the centre of the psy-operations he exposes. This handicap is hopefully overcome ; besides, aesthetic considerations are not too invasive. The tone is informal, sometimes too informal, something which affects the presentation, since the author seems to assume that his readers are all as familiar as he is with the – utterly predictable - biographies of the 'stars' in question. These are debunked : the background of the star-to-be turns out to be not quite as modest or poor as advertised, wikipediased ; the star-to-be turns out not to have lacked the connections he is said not to have had. The myth of the 'self-made-man' takes a back seat, on which the author, under the delusion that the « real thing » (stars who owe their success to their talent and their hard work) does exist, is found sitting. His papers are affected by most of the biases as conspiracy theorists' are, only to a lesser degree. Some are even enhanced by intuitions which are most unusual in authors who are permeable to democratic suggestions (not that he is consciously fond of democracy as an ideology and as a mental climate ; he is even very critical of the society democracy has produced, in that the art it produces insults his taste). Referring to The Protocols, he states (http://mileswmathis.com/protocols.pdf) : this document « is a fiction that is mostly true » This echoes, albeit distantly, J. Evola's own diagnosis : « the problem of their ‘authenticity’ is secondary to the far more serious and essential problem of their ‘veracity’, as already emphasised by Giovanni Preziosi when he published them for the first time seventeen years ago. The serious and positive conclusion of the whole controversy which has developed since is that, even if we assume that the Protocols are not ‘authentic’ in the narrow sense, it comes to the same thing as if they were, for two capital and decisive reasons :
1) Because the facts show that they describe the real state of affairs truthfully ;
2) Because their correspondence with the governing ideas of both traditional and modern Judaism is indisputable. »
Slightly less distant is his not taking too seriously the passages from the Protocols dealing with the need to destroy « God » as a prerequiste to the advent of the « new order » contemplated by the Elders, while not realising that these are serious about destroying it only insofar as this masculinised avatar of the Mother Godess has had its day, and the time has come to sacrifice once more openly to Her.
He certainly has a sense of humour. It is a shame that his not finding women's right to vote a bad thing is not an expression of it. This does not prevent him from making the following good point about the so-called « Operation Rolling Stone » (still without realising that womens' right to vote and the whole related emancipation package were necessary to the success of the ideology of change he rightly criticises) : « It was the promotion of Change in all forms. To what end? The promotion of trade. The Jews and Gentiles that would run the 20th century were masters of trade. They were money lenders and money changers and money makers.
These families had always been very good at making money, but in the 20th century they discovered a way to accelerate this money making beyond even their own dreams. They discovered that accelerated trade depended directly on accelerated change. The more change of any kind they could introduce into society, the more money they would make. This is simply because change can always be accompanied with new products. New products = new wealth. More products = more wealth. Therefore, the fundamental and underlying Operation of the 20th century has been CHANGE.
This was revolutionary in every way, since humans don't really like change. Like cats and all other
animals, they prefer things to stay as they are. Living creatures tend to equate change with discomfort.
So to promote change was to go against human nature. It wasn't something that would happen on its
own. It had to be manufactured and constantly sold.
It was revolutionary in another way, since it went against all tradition. Tradition had always taught that change was something to be avoided. All the major religions sought balance and harmony, neither of which could be maintained in times of rapid change.
It was revolutionary in a third way, since traditionally trade had been considered dirty. Thoreau was
still teaching in the 1840's that “trade curses everything it touches.” Gentlemen in the early 19
th century looked down on trade, as we see from reading Dickens or Austen, or watching Downton
Abbey. The English aristocracy mocked American wealth, since it came from trade. So you would
think it would be difficult to flip the world 180 degrees, taking us to the present where most believe
that trade sanctifies everything it touches. » (http://mileswmathis.com/dylan.pdf) The religion of progress ends up in the worship of something mobsters do not have in their pockets : change. Movies and music are the most effective propaganda tools today ; to a large extent, National-Socialism used them to manifest that was used to be could be again. By what the author calls the « Intelligence », it is used to that what exists does not exist and what does not exist exists : « Although before this they (the mob and the « billionaire families ») were allied, after this they were merged. This is why we have seen so many mob movies [think The Godfather] since the 1960's: Intelligence is trying to convince you the mob still exists in the old way, but it doesn't. The billionaire families now run everything.
Although before this they were allied, after this they were merged. This is why we have seen so many mob movies [think The Godfather] since the 1960's: Intelligence is trying to convince you the mob still exists in the old way, but it doesn't. The billionaire families now run everything. » (http://mileswmathis.com/bond.pdf). - The Benn text was accidentally double posted (afterwards it was uncertain if it had been correctly sent to the group).Not wanting to focus so much on persons, but rather actual idea's : Wyndham Lewis' The Art Of Being Ruled - although very uneven in contents and hastily put together - is worth looking into. Like most of his other books it has not been reprinted. Most of Lewis' writings are hard to come by.“There are very many male Europeans who never become reconciled to the idea of being ‘men’ (leaving out of count those who are congenitally unadapted for the rigours of manhood).”“Now what really is happening today (and this will continue until the full circle of social revolution has been described) is that the opposite of the initiatory ceremonies of puberty, universal amongst primitive people, are performed. The puberty ceremony of primitive life was directed to separating the adolescent male from the women and children (with whom up to then he had lived) for ever. Simultaneously he became a ‘tribesman,’ and was initiated into the ceremonies over which the male leaders of the tribe presided. Today at the age of puberty, or indeed long before, the child receives, and is destined more and more to receive, an intensive ritualistic teaching opposite in its aim: namely, away from the traditions of the tribe and its traditional rulers. He, he is told, is henceforth the ruler. (This in effect would be the rule not by childhood, of course, but by the mentor or teacher, the dominy, and by the queen-mother, sitting upon an ideologic matriarchal throne.)”Wyndham Lewis, The Art Of Being Ruled, 1926."Other symptoms of the romantic epoch subverting cultural standards include the feminine principle, with the over representation of homosexuals and the effete among the literati and the Bloomsbury coterie; the cult of the primitive; and the “cult of the child,” that is closely related to the adulation of the primitive. Female values, resting on the intuitive and emotional, undermine masculine rationality, the intellect–the feminine flux against the masculine hardness of stability and discipline. To Lewis revolutions are a return to the past. Feminism aims at returning society to an idealized primitive matriarchy. Communism aims at a returning to primitive forms of common ownership. The idolization of the savage and the child are also returns to the atavistic. The millionaire world and “High Bohemia” support these, as it does other vulgarizing revolutions. The supposedly outrageous, to Lewis, is tame." (http://www.toqonline.com/blog/wyndham-lewis/)The lecture given by J. Bowden on Wyndham Lewis (http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/08/elitism-british-modernism-and-wyndham-lewis/) presenting him to the audience as more or less purely fascist, is rather misleading. Facts simply are different, as follows from the larger body of his writings ; changes in his thinking becoming especially apparent from the 1940 years and onwards.See furthermore also https://www.monmouth.edu/the_space_between/articles/CharlesSumner2007.pdf
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2016 07:46:00 -0800
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Short videos have been published lately on French nationalist websites by patriots who wanted to check whether the decision to close the borders that had been taken by the occupying pseudo-government following a heavy festival in honour of Isis in Paris had been acted upon. One was shot at the French-Belgian border, the other at the French-Spanish border, another at the French-Italian border, and, unsurprisingly, the outcome was the same. For a reason that will become clear shortly, let us focus on the later. The video begins one or two minutes before the car, coming from Ventimiglia, crosses the border. The driver, radio on, explains the purpose of the footage, until he finally gets to the border checkpoint, which he crosses without being checked, without actually seeing any custom officer : there is none. The surprise comes from the type of music that can be heard in the background: rap. It is quixotic to argue that the occupying forces have won the cultural war: for a war to be won, it first needs to be fought ; in the aftermath of WW2, there was simply no organised force left to fight the “cultural distorter”, who, politically in full control, had the field, and could thus promote and spread undisturbed the kind of sound which helped them consolidate and secure their psychic grip on masses.
Mathis' papers are important insofar as they allow those who are aware of the decisive importance of music and the subtle influences it may channel from the lowest depths, as a tool, not just for mass control, but also, precisely, for the manifestation on our plane of existence of lower entities, to have full confirmation of everythng they already knew or suspected about the industry in charge of carrying out methodically the subversive plan devised by a pseudo-elite : 'show-business' ; while others, at least those who are not completely hynotised, may begin to glimpse what exactly is in store for them.
The author does not seem to be exactly the right person to investigate effectively these matters : he is a fan of most of the 'stars' who were at the centre of the psy-operations he exposes. This handicap is hopefully overcome ; besides, aesthetic considerations are not too invasive. The tone is informal, sometimes too informal, something which affects the presentation, since the author seems to assume that his readers are all as familiar as he is with the – utterly predictable - biographies of the 'stars' in question. These are debunked : the background of the star-to-be turns out to be not quite as modest or poor as advertised, wikipediased ; the star-to-be turns out not to have lacked the connections he is said not to have had. The myth of the 'self-made-man' takes a back seat, on which the author, under the delusion that the « real thing » (stars who owe their success to their talent and their hard work) does exist, is found sitting. His papers are affected by most of the biases as conspiracy theorists' are, only to a lesser degree. Some are even enhanced by intuitions which are most unusual in authors who are permeable to democratic suggestions (not that he is consciously fond of democracy as an ideology and as a mental climate ; he is even very critical of the society democracy has produced, in that the art it produces insults his taste). Referring to The Protocols, he states (http://mileswmathis.com/protocols.pdf) : this document « is a fiction that is mostly true » This echoes, albeit distantly, J. Evola's own diagnosis : « the problem of their ‘authenticity’ is secondary to the far more serious and essential problem of their ‘veracity’, as already emphasised by Giovanni Preziosi when he published them for the first time seventeen years ago. The serious and positive conclusion of the whole controversy which has developed since is that, even if we assume that the Protocols are not ‘authentic’ in the narrow sense, it comes to the same thing as if they were, for two capital and decisive reasons :
1) Because the facts show that they describe the real state of affairs truthfully ;
2) Because their correspondence with the governing ideas of both traditional and modern Judaism is indisputable. »
Slightly less distant is his not taking too seriously the passages from the Protocols dealing with the need to destroy « God » as a prerequiste to the advent of the « new order » contemplated by the Elders, while not realising that these are serious about destroying it only insofar as this masculinised avatar of the Mother Godess has had its day, and the time has come to sacrifice once more openly to Her.
He certainly has a sense of humour. It is a shame that his not finding women's right to vote a bad thing is not an expression of it. This does not prevent him from making the following good point about the so-called « Operation Rolling Stone » (still without realising that womens' right to vote and the whole related emancipation package were necessary to the success of the ideology of change he rightly criticises) : « It was the promotion of Change in all forms. To what end? The promotion of trade. The Jews and Gentiles that would run the 20th century were masters of trade. They were money lenders and money changers and money makers.
These families had always been very good at making money, but in the 20th century they discovered a way to accelerate this money making beyond even their own dreams. They discovered that accelerated trade depended directly on accelerated change. The more change of any kind they could introduce into society, the more money they would make. This is simply because change can always be accompanied with new products. New products = new wealth. More products = more wealth. Therefore, the fundamental and underlying Operation of the 20th century has been CHANGE.
This was revolutionary in every way, since humans don't really like change. Like cats and all other
animals, they prefer things to stay as they are. Living creatures tend to equate change with discomfort.
So to promote change was to go against human nature. It wasn't something that would happen on its
own. It had to be manufactured and constantly sold.
It was revolutionary in another way, since it went against all tradition. Tradition had always taught that change was something to be avoided. All the major religions sought balance and harmony, neither of which could be maintained in times of rapid change.
It was revolutionary in a third way, since traditionally trade had been considered dirty. Thoreau was
still teaching in the 1840's that “trade curses everything it touches.” Gentlemen in the early 19
th century looked down on trade, as we see from reading Dickens or Austen, or watching Downton
Abbey. The English aristocracy mocked American wealth, since it came from trade. So you would
think it would be difficult to flip the world 180 degrees, taking us to the present where most believe
that trade sanctifies everything it touches. » (http://mileswmathis.com/dylan.pdf) The religion of progress ends up in the worship of something mobsters do not have in their pockets : change. Movies and music are the most effective propaganda tools today ; to a large extent, National-Socialism used them to manifest that was used to be could be again. By what the author calls the « Intelligence », it is used to that what exists does not exist and what does not exist exists : « Although before this they (the mob and the « billionaire families ») were allied, after this they were merged. This is why we have seen so many mob movies [think The Godfather] since the 1960's: Intelligence is trying to convince you the mob still exists in the old way, but it doesn't. The billionaire families now run everything.
Although before this they were allied, after this they were merged. This is why we have seen so many mob movies [think The Godfather] since the 1960's: Intelligence is trying to convince you the mob still exists in the old way, but it doesn't. The billionaire families now run everything. » (http://mileswmathis.com/bond.pdf). Please elaborate on this statement of yours: « changes in his thinking becoming especially apparent from the 1940 years and onwards. » Not that his personal case matters in the least : it is just that, if that change pertained to his most insightful views on the process of matriarcalisation of intrinsically patriarcal « Gemeinschaften », it would be indicative of a feminisation of the thought of the last men aware of the former process.
P.s : Bowden tended to see Fascists almost everywhere.
- This mainly concerns his universalist and internationalist views from then on."Lewis sees the violence, irrationality, and rootlessness of American life as positive qualities; qualities not only to be valued in themselves as exuberant proliferations of the human spirit, but also to be welcomed as the birthpangs of the world society of the future, the society of “cosmic man” (by “cosmic” he means cosmopolitan or internationalist). In effect he turns on its head the negative image which so many European and American intellectuals have of America.""The essence of what Lewis says in America and Cosmic Man is that since most of us realize that permanent peace, some form of economic collectivism, and an international political community are prerequisites for human survival in the atomic age, we must venerate America and learn from it. For the United States is the nation best exemplifying in embryonic form the world order in which these things will be established. The familiar simile of the melting pot fascinates him: he sees America as “the great big promiscuous grave into which tumble, and there disintegrate, all that was formerly race, class, or nationhood.” In a remarkable chapter entitled “The Case Against Roots,” he praises rootlessness as a necessary condition of world citizenship, and points out that no one is really rooted in America, “everyone has left his roots over in Poland or Ireland, in Italy or in Russia, so we are all floating around in a rootless Elysium.” In a similar manner he views the standardization of life with its wiping out of regional peculiarities and prejudices as the forerunner of the standardization of world culture, an irreversible trend under industrialism.""Before the war Lewis had shown sympathy for fascism in his 1926 work The Art of BeingRuled ('I am not a communist; if anything I favour some form of fascism rather than communism')'' and been grouped by T. S. Eliot with a number of writers who 'incline in the direction of some kind of fascism'.He had also written two books about Hitler, which many believed meant that he supported him. In a footnote in his autobiography he was to write as follows about them in response to a comment by George Orwell in the Partisan Review (Summer, 1946): As to my books 'in favour of Hitler', I have written two books about Hitler, one when he first appeared on the scene... (in 1930) before he came to power and revealed what a lunatic he was, and the other (The Hitler Cult and How it Will End) at the time of Munich.The first book was 'in favour': though it was not the Nazi's view of the matter; the second was very much the reverse of 'in favour'. The Hitler Cult is in many ways a rewriting of the earlier Hitler with numerous points refuted which had been made on behalf of Hitler in the first book. The satirical America I Presume impressions of America published in New York in August 1940, reinforces this change of opinion by referring to Hitler as a ' barbarous little mountebank'.In the same book Lewis expressed a view which is one of the main themes of Anglosaxony, namely that whatever happened during the present war - whether or not America would enter it - 'it is of vast importance that the English-speaking peoples of the world should act in harmony'.Anglosaxony is written in three parts. The first, entitled Democracy and Fascism is a defence of the democratic ideal against criticisms from both Right and Left. Lewis stresses that he sees democracy as a 'limited, an Anglo-Saxon family affair' but he does not mean to give democracy a nationalist character. Instead he envisages it as one only among
several ways of life and not as a political system 'desirous of imposing itself upon all and sundry'."(Read further at http://www.bl.uk/eblj/1997articles/pdf/article10.pdf which continues with more relevant explanations ; those very parts however are not easily reproduced here)It must however be noted that The Art Of Being Ruled, thus far from being a balanced work, contains varying positions and statements on the subjects at hand (the breakdown of the family unit being favoured by the author, for example), which in turn are not easily summarized. Academic texts only deal indirectly with these aspects of his writings. Therefore the best sources of reference are the very writings themselves."The first of Lewis' 'Man of the World' books, The Art of Being Ruled attempts to set out the changes that were happening and were, he believed, inevitable the replacement of liberal democracy by some form of socialism (centralised and authoritarian or local and communitarian), the destruction of the nuclear family unit, the growth of corporatism, changes in gender and sexuality, these and other phenomena were not being recognised, but society would need to make choices about them, or it would sleepwalk mechanically into the future. Roughly, The Art of Being Ruled presents the issues about which choices will need to be made, and looks at their implications. In the dust-jacket it is stated that the changes analysed in the book necessitate a new, strenuousand intellectual approach to life. But Lewis began to think that, instead of adopting such a critical approach, culture at all levels ; even avant-garde culture ; was simply replicating the contemporary society's tacit ideology of fatalistic mechanical change.""A large part of The Art of Being Ruled is about the disintegration of the family, the rise of feminism, and the so-called 'sex war', which according to Lewis is a consequence of sexual inversion. Chapter X, "The Matriarchate and Feminine Ascendency", opens as follows:ALL orthodox opinion - that is, to-day, 'revolutionary' opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man. Its terms are those of a war or insurrection still, although theoretically the war is over and the position gained. But subtly and in the nature of things, it is no longer a question of adjusting an inequality, but of advancing (as of a superior nature) the qualities of the 'down-trodden,' of the 'weaker' sex. [...] Such a war as the 'sex war,' as was to be expected, does not end in a stabilization in which the man and the woman exist on equal terms. It necessarily ends in a situation in which feminine values are predominant. (223)As an example of a book in which this tendency is noticeable, Lewis mentions "The Dominant Sex, by Matilda and Mathias Vaerting." (223) [http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b13626103.pdf](...)(...) Part IX, Chapter III ("'Call Yourself a Man!'"). On the opening page of this chapter (Art 279), Lewis discusses the strange use of the term 'man' denoting any individual, male or female:The term MAN implies a variety of indispensable but not necessarily pleasant things, quite independently of the specific sex characters, although it can only be attached to an individual falling within the subdivision of the adult male. The identification by means of sex-character on the part of adult males has always been a source of mortification to women and children : and at the present juncture some more neutral term should be substituded for it [...] (279)(...)The position of the male to-day, and the symbolism of the word MAN, are purely artificial [...] The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards - material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden. (282-3)"Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse. In : "Call Yourself a Man!" (The Art Of Being Ruled)P. S. http://mileswmathis.com contains some interesting speculations about the supposed sponsoring of the earliest modernist art salons by secret services. Thus before the so-called "Cold War" period of the 1950s and the preceeding years. But without factual material these claims remain exactly that : speculations.As for a statement made in that same context : the career of E. Pound is - indeed - notable. The claim of him not really being interned in an American prison wing after the war is simply difficult to sustain considering the many witnesses.
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 05:29:32 -0800
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Please elaborate on this statement of yours: « changes in his thinking becoming especially apparent from the 1940 years and onwards. » Not that his personal case matters in the least : it is just that, if that change pertained to his most insightful views on the process of matriarcalisation of intrinsically patriarcal « Gemeinschaften », it would be indicative of a feminisation of the thought of the last men aware of the former process.
P.s : Bowden tended to see Fascists almost everywhere.
Here are a few points worth noting in no particular order:
-Faking one’s death has been extensively used, so much that at the announcement of the unexpected death of a prominent member of the subversion front one should always asks the question whether it is faked.
-There is probably dissension and disagreement inside the subversion front but it is most likely limited to the means to be employed. It may explain some discrepancies but it is hardly good news.
-The amount of falsified photographs is enormous, especially those related to the major members of the subversion front as their biographies are largely made-up. The lies fed to the public are gigantic.
-One should not trust any “dissident” (e. g. the paper on Chomsky) favoured in one way or another by the “System” as most inevitably he was placed in this role.
-The famous music bands of the 1960’s were created by the subversion front in order to promote subversive values, bring human psyche to a lower level and divert the attention of the public away. They were dismissed once they had served their use.
-We are living in the worst form of oligarchy. It is astonishing how so many proeminent people come from the same families and reached their position through connections and nepotism.
-There is almost always a Jewish connection in the operations and hoaxes described by the author.
-The author seems to have no idea what “fascism” is as he employs rather annoyingly this word as a synonym to globalism.
-There is a chance that the whole “serial killer” story has been faked as a tool to manufacture fear (and demonize the middle-class White man), in a similar way to the current string of “shootings” and “attacks”. Today, there is a whole literature and the TV shows and movies on this theme.
-A few specific numbers are used in a recurrent way by the subversion front as a way to mock the blindness of the public and perhaps to something more.
-The actor has reached in the twentieth century a most destructive role as the members of the subversion front are prone to acting and the “psy-ops” are giant acts.
-The “mob” as such ceased to exist as such decades ago because it was taken over by the organizations of the subversion front. The novels and movies on it are misdirections.
-It seems the Kennedy family is all-powerful, as much if not more as the other often-cited families (Rotschild, Rockefeller, etc.). The author argues it ruled secretly the USA from the 1960’s on after the faked assassination.
-Karl Marx and Marxism was a decoy planted to subvert the legitimate worker organizations. Marx was actually wed to a woman descended from a billionaire family: so much for class struggle.
-The author argues that 90% of twentieth century American “culture” (books, art, movies, etc.) was manufactured by the subversion front. An interesting parallel could be drawn with the question of the fakery of middle-ages litterature by a clique of early subverters, as argued by several “recentist” authors.
-One of the patterns of the twentieth century is the “state” (i. e. the subversive front) acquiring all the markets to increase its revenue. For example, this is what happened with art, “modern art” being a subversive creation to destroy true beauty but also a great place to launder money, among other things.
- Lawrence's essays "Master in his Own House" and "Matriarchy" present some of the arguments about why the family unit was meant to fail in the 20th century (http://m.friendfeed-media.com/ff2a0442e37edf376a59b90dbec19b6796d2729c)
It also explains the parodic character of the promotion of "family values" in the post-war era and the ease with which - whether or not - genuine family-centered political agenda's could be hijacked or distorted ; the destruction of the family unit turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Concerning Lewis' post-war thinking (the whole discussion is again very much related to literature and aesthetics):
"The political character of The Human Age [a trilogy of novels] becomes more obvious in Monstre Gai (1955). The title of this second volume refers to an expression which describes the Bailiff in a hysterical outburst shrieking uninterruptedly on his “puppet-stage” “Die the man – die the man – die the man.” This sequel to Childermass was not published until twenty seven years later, but the thought which underlies it is fundamentally the same, for Lewis’s outlook has changed remarkably little in the meantime. It is true that the “democratization” which followed the Second World War gave him new reasons for attacking communism, but it is rather surprising to find that his attack is still connected with the child-cult, the youth-cult and homosexuality, and that he satirizes with the same contempt Satters and his refusal “to vizualize himself at any time later than his sixteenth year.” Pullman is now less of an innocent and a dupe and may therefore be held responsible for choosing to serve the Bailiff, who here represents “gangster-wealth” at its most irresponsible."
(http://books.openedition.org/pulg/878)
And from the same study, concerning his general ideas and propositions :
"In Time and Western Man Lewis criticizes feminism as “a revolution that aims at reversing the respective positions of the sexes, and so returning to the supposed conditions of the primitive Matriarchate.” (p. 36) Reason is associated with masculinity, whereas emotions are considered as a feminine attribute and of a lower order. “We should make a new world of Reason for ourselves,”13 Lewis writes in his defence of the “classical.” “The ‘classical’ is the rational, aloof and aristocratical; the ‘romantic’ is the popular, sensational and ‘cosmically’ confused. That is the permanent political reference in those terms.”"
(...)
"Time and Western Man (1927) throws light on the relation Wyndham Lewis makes between Romanticism and Bergsonism on the one hand, and social and political democratization on the other. It also shows Lewis’s insight into the revolutionary character of the period, though he looked upon the transformation as a symptom of decadence rather than of revolution. He accuses Bergson and the “time-philosophers” of debasing art, literature, and philosophy because they advocate an approach to them which makes sensations all-important and which should therefore be confined to music. According to Lewis, this approach is essentially romantic and, like all attitudes derived from Romanticism, is responsible for all that is vulgar, immature, or unhealthy whether in art, in ordinary life, or even in politics. He accumulates examples such as advertisement, an unhealthy preoccupation with sex, the doctrine of action, so-called “revolutionary” art movements, the predominance of the mass over the individual, the Russian ballet, the cult of the savage and the child-cult.
For Lewis the romantic approach to life and art is “the opposite of the real.” A romantic person is someone who has not much grasp of present and actual things. The majority of men in modern society are “romantic” because they live in a dream of non-existent things such as “the world of cheap art, education and publicity.” A “romantic” is a “dreamer,” but the kind of dreamer who would want, for instance, to destroy all machinery. Far from alluding to the part played by dream in romantic art, Lewis simply means that the “romantic” is unrealistic. He concludes his reflections on the romantic mind with the following definition:
We say ‘romantic’ when we wish to define something too emotionalized … something opposed to the actual or the real: a self-indulgent habit of mind or a tendency to shut the eyes to what is unpleasant, in favour of things arbitrarily chosen for their flattering pleasantness. Or else we apply it to the effects of an egoism that bathes in the self-feeling to the exclusion of contradictory realities, including the Not-Self; achieving what we see to be a false unity and optimism, regarding all the circumstances."
(...)
"It is perhaps significant that Lewis makes no distinction between Spengler and his defence of “Faustian” culture, and men like Darwin, Einstein, Schopenhauer and Bergson. For him they are all guilty of the same heresy because all have contributed by their work to man’s loss of individuality. Lewis asserts that biology, mathematics and metaphysics as developed by Darwin, Einstein and Bergson have acted upon one another to produce the “time-philosophy,” which does away with the traditional categories in all fields of experience and enquiry, stresses the organic and dynamic aspects of life and reveres life in the raw as opposed to life disciplined and organized by the mind. Thus “Bergson’s ‘creative evolution’ is as Darwinian as was the ‘will to power’ of Nietzsche,” (p. 209) and his “élan vital” is equivalent to Schopenhauer’s “will.” The political implications of these philosophical doctrines are obvious: by emphasizing the unconscious in man, they make him lose his individuality, for man can only be an individual when he is conscious. Having lost his individuality, he lives in a state of “common humanity” and gives precedence to what Plato calls “the mob of the senses.” Life at this level is purely “sensational,” and we know that Lewis associates the life of the senses with the “subhuman” majority. This loss of individuality necessarily leads to political democratization. People are encouraged to give up their personal responsibility and to hand over their life to the community: “Discouragement of all exercise of will, or belief in individual power, that is the prevalent contemporary attitude for better or for worse.” (p. 306) On the other hand, the doctrine of action which derives from the Darwinian doctrine of “‘the struggle for existence” and from Bergson’s vitalism leads to fascism. Bergson’s philosophy is thus held responsible for the development of both communism and fascism. Lewis himself was to become an admirer of fascism, particularly of the German brand, but when he recanted his fascist opinions just before the Second World War, he again associated fascism with democracy on the ground that both were mass movements. Meanwhile, he also attacked at length Behaviorism, which, so he thought, gave the final blow to consciousness and substituted the body for the mind. Professor Watson, he said, describes man as a human body or a machine which possesses only instincts and habits but no mind. Still, the worst mischief-maker remains Bergson, whom Lewis even accuses of dishonesty. Though he often declares that philosophers are the victims of politicians who exploit their ideas for their own purposes, where Bergson is concerned, he asserts that the latter’s philosophy deliberately attempts to deceive men and ultimately aims at destroying individuality."
(...)
"Homosexuality is a branch of the Feminist Revolution since large-scale male perversion is the logical male answer to the New Woman. “Homosexuality is a department of Social Revolution”; (p. 389) it is essentially a romantic and sentimental phenomenon, a “snobbery or cult” encouraged, together with feminism, in order “to lay the foundations of a neuter-class of child-less workers” and to destroy the European Family already doomed by the machine-age."
(...)
"(...) the general argument of The Human Age, might be described as follows: the Bergsonians, who insist on the necessity to develop intuition at the expense of the intellect, encourage man to indulge in the senses and in the confusion of his inner world. By exploring his subconscious, man brings out what is lowest in him, and the importance he gives to instincts naturally leads him to a cult of the child, in whom instinct is predominant, and to a cult of what is primitive in man. The child-cult is associated to the mother-cult; as a result of the growing feminism, man, who is despised for his virility, is tempted to turn homosexual. Lewis considers that feminism, homosexuality and contempt for the male, which are responsible for the destruction of the family, are exploited by politicians who are only too glad to divest people of their differences and reduce them to neuter will-less beings. They incite people to sexual perversion or merely endeavour to transform them into sense- or sex-machines, which will diminish their self-control, impair their intellect and make them more pliable and submissive. They also deprive man of his claim to individuality by insisting that the human personality is part of the surrounding world. Philosophical communism conduces to political communism, and this is how most Western countries to-day are infected with it. No action is intact. Lewis also considers communism or socialism as a means used by Big Business to exploit the great majority of people, the middle class even more than the masses. Indeed, although the masses are being stupefied into a state of quasi-animalism, they enjoy privileges that the middle class don’t have. Lewis has developed this last point with obsessive emphasis in Rotting Hill (1951)."
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:49:34 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
This mainly concerns his universalist and internationalist views from then on."Lewis sees the violence, irrationality, and rootlessness of American life as positive qualities; qualities not only to be valued in themselves as exuberant proliferations of the human spirit, but also to be welcomed as the birthpangs of the world society of the future, the society of “cosmic man” (by “cosmic” he means cosmopolitan or internationalist). In effect he turns on its head the negative image which so many European and American intellectuals have of America.""The essence of what Lewis says in America and Cosmic Man is that since most of us realize that permanent peace, some form of economic collectivism, and an international political community are prerequisites for human survival in the atomic age, we must venerate America and learn from it. For the United States is the nation best exemplifying in embryonic form the world order in which these things will be established. The familiar simile of the melting pot fascinates him: he sees America as “the great big promiscuous grave into which tumble, and there disintegrate, all that was formerly race, class, or nationhood.” In a remarkable chapter entitled “The Case Against Roots,” he praises rootlessness as a necessary condition of world citizenship, and points out that no one is really rooted in America, “everyone has left his roots over in Poland or Ireland, in Italy or in Russia, so we are all floating around in a rootless Elysium.” In a similar manner he views the standardization of life with its wiping out of regional peculiarities and prejudices as the forerunner of the standardization of world culture, an irreversible trend under industrialism.""Before the war Lewis had shown sympathy for fascism in his 1926 work The Art of BeingRuled ('I am not a communist; if anything I favour some form of fascism rather than communism')'' and been grouped by T. S. Eliot with a number of writers who 'incline in the direction of some kind of fascism'.He had also written two books about Hitler, which many believed meant that he supported him. In a footnote in his autobiography he was to write as follows about them in response to a comment by George Orwell in the Partisan Review (Summer, 1946):As to my books 'in favour of Hitler', I have written two books about Hitler, one when he first appeared on the scene... (in 1930) before he came to power and revealed what a lunatic he was, and the other (The Hitler Cult and How it Will End) at the time of Munich.The first book was 'in favour': though it was not the Nazi's view of the matter; the second was very much the reverse of 'in favour'. The Hitler Cult is in many ways a rewriting of the earlier Hitler with numerous points refuted which had been made on behalf of Hitler in the first book. The satirical America I Presume impressions of America published in New York in August 1940, reinforces this change of opinion by referring to Hitler as a ' barbarous little mountebank'.In the same book Lewis expressed a view which is one of the main themes of Anglosaxony, namely that whatever happened during the present war - whether or not America would enter it - 'it is of vast importance that the English-speaking peoples of the world should act in harmony'.Anglosaxony is written in three parts. The first, entitled Democracy and Fascism is a defence of the democratic ideal against criticisms from both Right and Left. Lewis stresses that he sees democracy as a 'limited, an Anglo-Saxon family affair' but he does not mean to give democracy a nationalist character. Instead he envisages it as one only among
several ways of life and not as a political system 'desirous of imposing itself upon all and sundry'."(Read further at http://www.bl.uk/eblj/1997articles/pdf/article10.pdf which continues with more relevant explanations ; those very parts however are not easily reproduced here)It must however be noted that The Art Of Being Ruled, thus far from being a balanced work, contains varying positions and statements on the subjects at hand (the breakdown of the family unit being favoured by the author, for example), which in turn are not easily summarized. Academic texts only deal indirectly with these aspects of his writings. Therefore the best sources of reference are the very writings themselves."The first of Lewis' 'Man of the World' books, The Art of Being Ruled attempts to set out the changes that were happening and were, he believed, inevitable the replacement of liberal democracy by some form of socialism (centralised and authoritarian or local and communitarian), the destruction of the nuclear family unit, the growth of corporatism, changes in gender and sexuality, these and other phenomena were not being recognised, but society would need to make choices about them, or it would sleepwalk mechanically into the future. Roughly, The Art of Being Ruled presents the issues about which choices will need to be made, and looks at their implications. In the dust-jacket it is stated that the changes analysed in the book necessitate a new, strenuousand intellectual approach to life. But Lewis began to think that, instead of adopting such a critical approach, culture at all levels ; even avant-garde culture ; was simply replicating the contemporary society's tacit ideology of fatalistic mechanical change.""A large part of The Art of Being Ruled is about the disintegration of the family, the rise of feminism, and the so-called 'sex war', which according to Lewis is a consequence of sexual inversion. Chapter X, "The Matriarchate and Feminine Ascendency", opens as follows:ALL orthodox opinion - that is, to-day, 'revolutionary' opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man. Its terms are those of a war or insurrection still, although theoretically the war is over and the position gained. But subtly and in the nature of things, it is no longer a question of adjusting an inequality, but of advancing (as of a superior nature) the qualities of the 'down-trodden,' of the 'weaker' sex. [...] Such a war as the 'sex war,' as was to be expected, does not end in a stabilization in which the man and the woman exist on equal terms. It necessarily ends in a situation in which feminine values are predominant. (223)As an example of a book in which this tendency is noticeable, Lewis mentions "The Dominant Sex, by Matilda and Mathias Vaerting." (223) [http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b13626103.pdf](...)(...) Part IX, Chapter III ("'Call Yourself a Man!'"). On the opening page of this chapter (Art 279), Lewis discusses the strange use of the term 'man' denoting any individual, male or female:The term MAN implies a variety of indispensable but not necessarily pleasant things, quite independently of the specific sex characters, although it can only be attached to an individual falling within the subdivision of the adult male. The identification by means of sex-character on the part of adult males has always been a source of mortification to women and children : and at the present juncture some more neutral term should be substituded for it [...] (279)(...)The position of the male to-day, and the symbolism of the word MAN, are purely artificial [...] The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards - material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden. (282-3)"Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse. In : "Call Yourself a Man!" (The Art Of Being Ruled)P. S. http://mileswmathis.com contains some interesting speculations about the supposed sponsoring of the earliest modernist art salons by secret services. Thus before the so-called "Cold War" period of the 1950s and the preceeding years. But without factual material these claims remain exactly that : speculations.As for a statement made in that same context : the career of E. Pound is - indeed - notable. The claim of him not really being interned in an American prison wing after the war is simply difficult to sustain considering the many witnesses.
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 05:29:32 -0800
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Please elaborate on this statement of yours: « changes in his thinking becoming especially apparent from the 1940 years and onwards. » Not that his personal case matters in the least : it is just that, if that change pertained to his most insightful views on the process of matriarcalisation of intrinsically patriarcal « Gemeinschaften », it would be indicative of a feminisation of the thought of the last men aware of the former process.
P.s : Bowden tended to see Fascists almost everywhere.
- An interesting reading, complementary to Mathis' studies, is Ferdinand Lundberg, who wrote critically on the super-rich families in America.See:
- "The Doom of Youth: Wyndham Lewis' Conspiracy Theory" by J. Constable is a recommendable text. It attempts to give a point-by-point summary of "The Doom of Youth"."(...) The Doom of Youth must be understood as a detailed discussion of a world conspiracy.""The Doom of Youth is divided into six sections, an unnumbered introductory preamble consisting of a foreword, an introduction, a list of contents giving a chapter by chapter summary, and five numbered parts. Part I discusses the relationship of youth agitation, economics, and politics at an abstract level, parts II and III use popular sources, newspapers and magazines, to document the activities of the youth cult in the anglo-saxon world, part IV turns to middle and highbrow literature to discuss the concomitant feminisation of the male, and part V reviews the discussion and provides further examples.""Having laid out the progress and methods of the Doom of Youth we are now in a position to summarise, to raise the whisper to the level of normal statement. There is an international conspiracy of capital, largely Jewish, and almost entirely under Jewish direction, and this conspiracy stands behind the reorganisation of the Soviet Union, and also behind the various social phenomena which Lewis terms “wars”, Age-wars, Sex-wars, Race-wars. And indeed it is responsible for the “Great War” itself. These “wars” serve the purpose of destabilising the social structure of the European states, whose character is inconvenient for those who wish to produce maximally efficient industries. Perhaps, also, these conspirators are motivated by ancient political enmities as much as by the desire for profit. It is even possible to see the economics as the manifestation of a deeper political grudge, the anti-Aryan misanthropy of the Jew. Against this the Europeans have little defence. Their intellectuals are too short-sightedly selfish to intervene, and if there is any hope at all it is from a vulgarly populist movement, such as Hitler’s, which is prepared to use the same tools as the conspiracy to mobilise the peoples of Europe in self-defence.""(...) the future rulers of the world will be “male matriarchs – who in fact are physiologically male, though very feminine in outlook – not warlike masters like the Normans, or Manchus, but more like a sleek and subtle theocracy”, the reader will recall that elsewhere in this book Lewis suggests “That the Jew, according to the standards of european masculinity – if put beside a Viking or the typical warlike types of Gaul or of Germany – is feminine – that is clear enough”, and that “In a non-military race, like the jewish [...] the men are less ‘manly’ than the Nordic Blond, and the women are never so chocolate-boxily ‘feminine’ as their anglo-saxon sisters.)”"http://libellus.co.uk/uploads/jc_doom_of_youth_21_04_13.pdf
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:49:34 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
This mainly concerns his universalist and internationalist views from then on."Lewis sees the violence, irrationality, and rootlessness of American life as positive qualities; qualities not only to be valued in themselves as exuberant proliferations of the human spirit, but also to be welcomed as the birthpangs of the world society of the future, the society of “cosmic man” (by “cosmic” he means cosmopolitan or internationalist). In effect he turns on its head the negative image which so many European and American intellectuals have of America.""The essence of what Lewis says in America and Cosmic Man is that since most of us realize that permanent peace, some form of economic collectivism, and an international political community are prerequisites for human survival in the atomic age, we must venerate America and learn from it. For the United States is the nation best exemplifying in embryonic form the world order in which these things will be established. The familiar simile of the melting pot fascinates him: he sees America as “the great big promiscuous grave into which tumble, and there disintegrate, all that was formerly race, class, or nationhood.” In a remarkable chapter entitled “The Case Against Roots,” he praises rootlessness as a necessary condition of world citizenship, and points out that no one is really rooted in America, “everyone has left his roots over in Poland or Ireland, in Italy or in Russia, so we are all floating around in a rootless Elysium.” In a similar manner he views the standardization of life with its wiping out of regional peculiarities and prejudices as the forerunner of the standardization of world culture, an irreversible trend under industrialism.""Before the war Lewis had shown sympathy for fascism in his 1926 work The Art of BeingRuled ('I am not a communist; if anything I favour some form of fascism rather than communism')'' and been grouped by T. S. Eliot with a number of writers who 'incline in the direction of some kind of fascism'.He had also written two books about Hitler, which many believed meant that he supported him. In a footnote in his autobiography he was to write as follows about them in response to a comment by George Orwell in the Partisan Review (Summer, 1946): As to my books 'in favour of Hitler', I have written two books about Hitler, one when he first appeared on the scene... (in 1930) before he came to power and revealed what a lunatic he was, and the other (The Hitler Cult and How it Will End) at the time of Munich.The first book was 'in favour': though it was not the Nazi's view of the matter; the second was very much the reverse of 'in favour'. The Hitler Cult is in many ways a rewriting of the earlier Hitler with numerous points refuted which had been made on behalf of Hitler in the first book. The satirical America I Presume impressions of America published in New York in August 1940, reinforces this change of opinion by referring to Hitler as a ' barbarous little mountebank'.In the same book Lewis expressed a view which is one of the main themes of Anglosaxony, namely that whatever happened during the present war - whether or not America would enter it - 'it is of vast importance that the English-speaking peoples of the world should act in harmony'.Anglosaxony is written in three parts. The first, entitled Democracy and Fascism is a defence of the democratic ideal against criticisms from both Right and Left. Lewis stresses that he sees democracy as a 'limited, an Anglo-Saxon family affair' but he does not mean to give democracy a nationalist character. Instead he envisages it as one only among
several ways of life and not as a political system 'desirous of imposing itself upon all and sundry'."(Read further at http://www.bl.uk/eblj/1997articles/pdf/article10.pdf which continues with more relevant explanations ; those very parts however are not easily reproduced here)It must however be noted that The Art Of Being Ruled, thus far from being a balanced work, contains varying positions and statements on the subjects at hand (the breakdown of the family unit being favoured by the author, for example), which in turn are not easily summarized. Academic texts only deal indirectly with these aspects of his writings. Therefore the best sources of reference are the very writings themselves."The first of Lewis' 'Man of the World' books, The Art of Being Ruled attempts to set out the changes that were happening and were, he believed, inevitable the replacement of liberal democracy by some form of socialism (centralised and authoritarian or local and communitarian), the destruction of the nuclear family unit, the growth of corporatism, changes in gender and sexuality, these and other phenomena were not being recognised, but society would need to make choices about them, or it would sleepwalk mechanically into the future. Roughly, The Art of Being Ruled presents the issues about which choices will need to be made, and looks at their implications. In the dust-jacket it is stated that the changes analysed in the book necessitate a new, strenuousand intellectual approach to life. But Lewis began to think that, instead of adopting such a critical approach, culture at all levels ; even avant-garde culture ; was simply replicating the contemporary society's tacit ideology of fatalistic mechanical change.""A large part of The Art of Being Ruled is about the disintegration of the family, the rise of feminism, and the so-called 'sex war', which according to Lewis is a consequence of sexual inversion. Chapter X, "The Matriarchate and Feminine Ascendency", opens as follows:ALL orthodox opinion - that is, to-day, 'revolutionary' opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man. Its terms are those of a war or insurrection still, although theoretically the war is over and the position gained. But subtly and in the nature of things, it is no longer a question of adjusting an inequality, but of advancing (as of a superior nature) the qualities of the 'down-trodden,' of the 'weaker' sex. [...] Such a war as the 'sex war,' as was to be expected, does not end in a stabilization in which the man and the woman exist on equal terms. It necessarily ends in a situation in which feminine values are predominant. (223)As an example of a book in which this tendency is noticeable, Lewis mentions "The Dominant Sex, by Matilda and Mathias Vaerting." (223) [http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b13626103.pdf](...)(...) Part IX, Chapter III ("'Call Yourself a Man!'"). On the opening page of this chapter (Art 279), Lewis discusses the strange use of the term 'man' denoting any individual, male or female:The term MAN implies a variety of indispensable but not necessarily pleasant things, quite independently of the specific sex characters, although it can only be attached to an individual falling within the subdivision of the adult male. The identification by means of sex-character on the part of adult males has always been a source of mortification to women and children : and at the present juncture some more neutral term should be substituded for it [...] (279)(...)The position of the male to-day, and the symbolism of the word MAN, are purely artificial [...] The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards - material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden. (282-3)"Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse. In : "Call Yourself a Man!" (The Art Of Being Ruled)P. S. http://mileswmathis.com contains some interesting speculations about the supposed sponsoring of the earliest modernist art salons by secret services. Thus before the so-called "Cold War" period of the 1950s and the preceeding years. But without factual material these claims remain exactly that : speculations.As for a statement made in that same context : the career of E. Pound is - indeed - notable. The claim of him not really being interned in an American prison wing after the war is simply difficult to sustain considering the many witnesses.
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 05:29:32 -0800
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Please elaborate on this statement of yours: « changes in his thinking becoming especially apparent from the 1940 years and onwards. » Not that his personal case matters in the least : it is just that, if that change pertained to his most insightful views on the process of matriarcalisation of intrinsically patriarcal « Gemeinschaften », it would be indicative of a feminisation of the thought of the last men aware of the former process.
P.s : Bowden tended to see Fascists almost everywhere.
- Two other texts that may be mentioned :
"Wyndham Lewis's Hitler: Content and Public Reception: The Truth". http://libellus.co.uk/uploads/constable_wyndham_lewis_hitler_03.10.14.pdf
"Two Filibusters in Barbary: Wyndham Lewis and Alfred Rosenberg". http://libellus.co.uk/uploads/jc_two_filibusters_in_barbary.03.10.14.pdf
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:49:34 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
This mainly concerns his universalist and internationalist views from then on."Lewis sees the violence, irrationality, and rootlessness of American life as positive qualities; qualities not only to be valued in themselves as exuberant proliferations of the human spirit, but also to be welcomed as the birthpangs of the world society of the future, the society of “cosmic man” (by “cosmic” he means cosmopolitan or internationalist). In effect he turns on its head the negative image which so many European and American intellectuals have of America.""The essence of what Lewis says in America and Cosmic Man is that since most of us realize that permanent peace, some form of economic collectivism, and an international political community are prerequisites for human survival in the atomic age, we must venerate America and learn from it. For the United States is the nation best exemplifying in embryonic form the world order in which these things will be established. The familiar simile of the melting pot fascinates him: he sees America as “the great big promiscuous grave into which tumble, and there disintegrate, all that was formerly race, class, or nationhood.” In a remarkable chapter entitled “The Case Against Roots,” he praises rootlessness as a necessary condition of world citizenship, and points out that no one is really rooted in America, “everyone has left his roots over in Poland or Ireland, in Italy or in Russia, so we are all floating around in a rootless Elysium.” In a similar manner he views the standardization of life with its wiping out of regional peculiarities and prejudices as the forerunner of the standardization of world culture, an irreversible trend under industrialism.""Before the war Lewis had shown sympathy for fascism in his 1926 work The Art of BeingRuled ('I am not a communist; if anything I favour some form of fascism rather than communism')'' and been grouped by T. S. Eliot with a number of writers who 'incline in the direction of some kind of fascism'.He had also written two books about Hitler, which many believed meant that he supported him. In a footnote in his autobiography he was to write as follows about them in response to a comment by George Orwell in the Partisan Review (Summer, 1946): As to my books 'in favour of Hitler', I have written two books about Hitler, one when he first appeared on the scene... (in 1930) before he came to power and revealed what a lunatic he was, and the other (The Hitler Cult and How it Will End) at the time of Munich.The first book was 'in favour': though it was not the Nazi's view of the matter; the second was very much the reverse of 'in favour'. The Hitler Cult is in many ways a rewriting of the earlier Hitler with numerous points refuted which had been made on behalf of Hitler in the first book. The satirical America I Presume impressions of America published in New York in August 1940, reinforces this change of opinion by referring to Hitler as a ' barbarous little mountebank'.In the same book Lewis expressed a view which is one of the main themes of Anglosaxony, namely that whatever happened during the present war - whether or not America would enter it - 'it is of vast importance that the English-speaking peoples of the world should act in harmony'.Anglosaxony is written in three parts. The first, entitled Democracy and Fascism is a defence of the democratic ideal against criticisms from both Right and Left. Lewis stresses that he sees democracy as a 'limited, an Anglo-Saxon family affair' but he does not mean to give democracy a nationalist character. Instead he envisages it as one only among
several ways of life and not as a political system 'desirous of imposing itself upon all and sundry'."(Read further at http://www.bl.uk/eblj/1997articles/pdf/article10.pdf which continues with more relevant explanations ; those very parts however are not easily reproduced here)It must however be noted that The Art Of Being Ruled, thus far from being a balanced work, contains varying positions and statements on the subjects at hand (the breakdown of the family unit being favoured by the author, for example), which in turn are not easily summarized. Academic texts only deal indirectly with these aspects of his writings. Therefore the best sources of reference are the very writings themselves."The first of Lewis' 'Man of the World' books, The Art of Being Ruled attempts to set out the changes that were happening and were, he believed, inevitable the replacement of liberal democracy by some form of socialism (centralised and authoritarian or local and communitarian), the destruction of the nuclear family unit, the growth of corporatism, changes in gender and sexuality, these and other phenomena were not being recognised, but society would need to make choices about them, or it would sleepwalk mechanically into the future. Roughly, The Art of Being Ruled presents the issues about which choices will need to be made, and looks at their implications. In the dust-jacket it is stated that the changes analysed in the book necessitate a new, strenuousand intellectual approach to life. But Lewis began to think that, instead of adopting such a critical approach, culture at all levels ; even avant-garde culture ; was simply replicating the contemporary society's tacit ideology of fatalistic mechanical change.""A large part of The Art of Being Ruled is about the disintegration of the family, the rise of feminism, and the so-called 'sex war', which according to Lewis is a consequence of sexual inversion. Chapter X, "The Matriarchate and Feminine Ascendency", opens as follows:ALL orthodox opinion - that is, to-day, 'revolutionary' opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man. Its terms are those of a war or insurrection still, although theoretically the war is over and the position gained. But subtly and in the nature of things, it is no longer a question of adjusting an inequality, but of advancing (as of a superior nature) the qualities of the 'down-trodden,' of the 'weaker' sex. [...] Such a war as the 'sex war,' as was to be expected, does not end in a stabilization in which the man and the woman exist on equal terms. It necessarily ends in a situation in which feminine values are predominant. (223)As an example of a book in which this tendency is noticeable, Lewis mentions "The Dominant Sex, by Matilda and Mathias Vaerting." (223) [http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b13626103.pdf](...)(...) Part IX, Chapter III ("'Call Yourself a Man!'"). On the opening page of this chapter (Art 279), Lewis discusses the strange use of the term 'man' denoting any individual, male or female:The term MAN implies a variety of indispensable but not necessarily pleasant things, quite independently of the specific sex characters, although it can only be attached to an individual falling within the subdivision of the adult male. The identification by means of sex-character on the part of adult males has always been a source of mortification to women and children : and at the present juncture some more neutral term should be substituded for it [...] (279)(...)The position of the male to-day, and the symbolism of the word MAN, are purely artificial [...] The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards - material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden. (282-3)"Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse. In : "Call Yourself a Man!" (The Art Of Being Ruled)P. S. http://mileswmathis.com contains some interesting speculations about the supposed sponsoring of the earliest modernist art salons by secret services. Thus before the so-called "Cold War" period of the 1950s and the preceeding years. But without factual material these claims remain exactly that : speculations.As for a statement made in that same context : the career of E. Pound is - indeed - notable. The claim of him not really being interned in an American prison wing after the war is simply difficult to sustain considering the many witnesses.
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 05:29:32 -0800
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Please elaborate on this statement of yours: « changes in his thinking becoming especially apparent from the 1940 years and onwards. » Not that his personal case matters in the least : it is just that, if that change pertained to his most insightful views on the process of matriarcalisation of intrinsically patriarcal « Gemeinschaften », it would be indicative of a feminisation of the thought of the last men aware of the former process.
P.s : Bowden tended to see Fascists almost everywhere.
Thank you for these further quotes from Lewis' work as well as summaries of his thought. Since Romanticism is referred to, it is worth noting that it is at the cost of « redifining Romanticism » (« as a modern critique of modernity », p. 30) that the contemporary author you recently quoted on Benn and Evola is able to label the Italian writer as « romantic » on those grounds, whereby he shows that he only skimmed through 'Revolt against the Modern World', the only book by Evola he seems to be able to spell.
- From the latter :
"In earlier works Lewis seems always to be speaking of the Jews whenhe refers to the enemies of that western culture he values, but we would be justified in thinking that by mid-1931 he had become more literally an Anti-Semite, and though still believing that the most potent enemies of the west were in fact Jews, held that the Semitic world as a whole, Arabs included, was antithetical in its very constitution to the European type. It was an opinion that Lewis held to the end of his life, and forms, I believe, the substantial content of a workoften said, in my view mistakenly, to be his major repentance, The Human Age.
Thus when Lewis quotes Gautier quoting Ibn Kaldoun to say that “If the Arabs want stones to prop up their saucepans, they pull to pieces a house to obtain them ...under their domination ruin invades everything ... the established order is upset and civilisation goes back”, he is not merely referring in code to the Jews. The ploy here is not substitution, but omission. The Jews are not replaced by the Arabs, they are silently included in the Semitic category. The quicker reader would realise that Lewis was implying that other Semites were also tearing down a dwelling in order to enrich themselves, however short-sightedly. And exactly the samepoint may be made about Lewis’ reference to the principal weapon of Arab power being the“debtor’s prison”, and the Arab being a “destructive fiscal despot”. The references to debt send us back to the sections on war debt in Hitler, and the despotic power of high finance is the concealed power behind the conspiracies outlined in The Doom of Youth. But whereas, in thosewritings, Lewis was concentrating on the immediate and local agents of this conflict, the Jews, in his 1931 texts Lewis sees them as being related to a larger conflict between human types. Onthe one hand, the Semite, the wanderer, whom Lewis describes, again via Gautier, as “incapable of creation”: “What he requires is something already made – an organisation created by some-body else. This animal does not manufacture his own shell, he takes up his quarters in the shellof some other animal.” On the other, the less astute, less financial, but more sedentary andcreative northerner, “the good, stupid Indo-Teutonic peoples”, as Chamberlain called them. The relation between them is a deadly one:
A destructive, non-creative, strictly useless creature, living essentially in a lifeless void – that, it is generally agreed, describes the Arab. But although native to, and perfectly suited, to this sort of physical Neantor Nothingness (and of course reflecting that inhis extremely barren, featureless, intellect) the Arab is not above forcing his way into the shell that the other sorts of animals here and there have created, and (as long as the vitality of the entity in question lasts) sucking it drop by drop – ducat by ducat, douro by douro – and living like a gentleman upon its superior sedentariness. If he is vomited forth, he does not care. He goes back to the desert, to theNeant,where afterall is his God, imanating a dull fatality. And from there he will look round for another nut to crack."
"(...) the plotters in the Doom of Youth were described as “people in control of vast capital interest (or people working in their shadow) who [...] in their essential processes, pass over from the particular to the general”, and thus to connect them with the desert dwelling creatures of the néant, whose abstract and religious mind is sterile and incapable of creation, and who therefore exist parasitically on the creativity of others. We might also recall Lewis’ interest, in Doom of Youth, in one journalist’s comment that the German people “does not think in terms of capital and credits, but in terms of land and labour and goods” (...)"
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2016 22:12:43 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Two other texts that may be mentioned :
"Wyndham Lewis's Hitler: Content and Public Reception: The Truth". http://libellus.co.uk/uploads/constable_wyndham_lewis_hitler_03.10.14.pdf
"Two Filibusters in Barbary: Wyndham Lewis and Alfred Rosenberg". http://libellus.co.uk/uploads/jc_two_filibusters_in_barbary.03.10.14.pdf
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:49:34 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
This mainly concerns his universalist and internationalist views from then on."Lewis sees the violence, irrationality, and rootlessness of American life as positive qualities; qualities not only to be valued in themselves as exuberant proliferations of the human spirit, but also to be welcomed as the birthpangs of the world society of the future, the society of “cosmic man” (by “cosmic” he means cosmopolitan or internationalist). In effect he turns on its head the negative image which so many European and American intellectuals have of America.""The essence of what Lewis says in America and Cosmic Man is that since most of us realize that permanent peace, some form of economic collectivism, and an international political community are prerequisites for human survival in the atomic age, we must venerate America and learn from it. For the United States is the nation best exemplifying in embryonic form the world order in which these things will be established. The familiar simile of the melting pot fascinates him: he sees America as “the great big promiscuous grave into which tumble, and there disintegrate, all that was formerly race, class, or nationhood.” In a remarkable chapter entitled “The Case Against Roots,” he praises rootlessness as a necessary condition of world citizenship, and points out that no one is really rooted in America, “everyone has left his roots over in Poland or Ireland, in Italy or in Russia, so we are all floating around in a rootless Elysium.” In a similar manner he views the standardization of life with its wiping out of regional peculiarities and prejudices as the forerunner of the standardization of world culture, an irreversible trend under industrialism.""Before the war Lewis had shown sympathy for fascism in his 1926 work The Art of BeingRuled ('I am not a communist; if anything I favour some form of fascism rather than communism')'' and been grouped by T. S. Eliot with a number of writers who 'incline in the direction of some kind of fascism'.He had also written two books about Hitler, which many believed meant that he supported him. In a footnote in his autobiography he was to write as follows about them in response to a comment by George Orwell in the Partisan Review (Summer, 1946): As to my books 'in favour of Hitler', I have written two books about Hitler, one when he first appeared on the scene... (in 1930) before he came to power and revealed what a lunatic he was, and the other (The Hitler Cult and How it Will End) at the time of Munich.The first book was 'in favour': though it was not the Nazi's view of the matter; the second was very much the reverse of 'in favour'. The Hitler Cult is in many ways a rewriting of the earlier Hitler with numerous points refuted which had been made on behalf of Hitler in the first book. The satirical America I Presume impressions of America published in New York in August 1940, reinforces this change of opinion by referring to Hitler as a ' barbarous little mountebank'.In the same book Lewis expressed a view which is one of the main themes of Anglosaxony, namely that whatever happened during the present war - whether or not America would enter it - 'it is of vast importance that the English-speaking peoples of the world should act in harmony'.Anglosaxony is written in three parts. The first, entitled Democracy and Fascism is a defence of the democratic ideal against criticisms from both Right and Left. Lewis stresses that he sees democracy as a 'limited, an Anglo-Saxon family affair' but he does not mean to give democracy a nationalist character. Instead he envisages it as one only among
several ways of life and not as a political system 'desirous of imposing itself upon all and sundry'."(Read further at http://www.bl.uk/eblj/1997articles/pdf/article10.pdf which continues with more relevant explanations ; those very parts however are not easily reproduced here)It must however be noted that The Art Of Being Ruled, thus far from being a balanced work, contains varying positions and statements on the subjects at hand (the breakdown of the family unit being favoured by the author, for example), which in turn are not easily summarized. Academic texts only deal indirectly with these aspects of his writings. Therefore the best sources of reference are the very writings themselves."The first of Lewis' 'Man of the World' books, The Art of Being Ruled attempts to set out the changes that were happening and were, he believed, inevitable the replacement of liberal democracy by some form of socialism (centralised and authoritarian or local and communitarian), the destruction of the nuclear family unit, the growth of corporatism, changes in gender and sexuality, these and other phenomena were not being recognised, but society would need to make choices about them, or it would sleepwalk mechanically into the future. Roughly, The Art of Being Ruled presents the issues about which choices will need to be made, and looks at their implications. In the dust-jacket it is stated that the changes analysed in the book necessitate a new, strenuousand intellectual approach to life. But Lewis began to think that, instead of adopting such a critical approach, culture at all levels ; even avant-garde culture ; was simply replicating the contemporary society's tacit ideology of fatalistic mechanical change.""A large part of The Art of Being Ruled is about the disintegration of the family, the rise of feminism, and the so-called 'sex war', which according to Lewis is a consequence of sexual inversion. Chapter X, "The Matriarchate and Feminine Ascendency", opens as follows:ALL orthodox opinion - that is, to-day, 'revolutionary' opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man. Its terms are those of a war or insurrection still, although theoretically the war is over and the position gained. But subtly and in the nature of things, it is no longer a question of adjusting an inequality, but of advancing (as of a superior nature) the qualities of the 'down-trodden,' of the 'weaker' sex. [...] Such a war as the 'sex war,' as was to be expected, does not end in a stabilization in which the man and the woman exist on equal terms. It necessarily ends in a situation in which feminine values are predominant. (223)As an example of a book in which this tendency is noticeable, Lewis mentions "The Dominant Sex, by Matilda and Mathias Vaerting." (223) [http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b13626103.pdf](...)(...) Part IX, Chapter III ("'Call Yourself a Man!'"). On the opening page of this chapter (Art 279), Lewis discusses the strange use of the term 'man' denoting any individual, male or female:The term MAN implies a variety of indispensable but not necessarily pleasant things, quite independently of the specific sex characters, although it can only be attached to an individual falling within the subdivision of the adult male. The identification by means of sex-character on the part of adult males has always been a source of mortification to women and children : and at the present juncture some more neutral term should be substituded for it [...] (279)(...)The position of the male to-day, and the symbolism of the word MAN, are purely artificial [...] The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards - material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden. (282-3)"Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse. In : "Call Yourself a Man!" (The Art Of Being Ruled)P. S. http://mileswmathis.com contains some interesting speculations about the supposed sponsoring of the earliest modernist art salons by secret services. Thus before the so-called "Cold War" period of the 1950s and the preceeding years. But without factual material these claims remain exactly that : speculations.As for a statement made in that same context : the career of E. Pound is - indeed - notable. The claim of him not really being interned in an American prison wing after the war is simply difficult to sustain considering the many witnesses.
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 05:29:32 -0800
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Please elaborate on this statement of yours: « changes in his thinking becoming especially apparent from the 1940 years and onwards. » Not that his personal case matters in the least : it is just that, if that change pertained to his most insightful views on the process of matriarcalisation of intrinsically patriarcal « Gemeinschaften », it would be indicative of a feminisation of the thought of the last men aware of the former process.
P.s : Bowden tended to see Fascists almost everywhere.
Against Lawrence's exaltation « of the primitive tribes to inspire a decadent European race to return to its own instinctual being » (http://www.toqonline.com/blog/wyndham-lewis/), and, we may add, to submit to matriarchy, Lewis published 'The Enemy: A Review of Art and Literature (2 vols.)' - republished in 1969 as
'Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting Pot'
(excerpts from both are available at google.books)
The promotion of family values in post-war Europe was parodic because it meant the fostering of bourgeois, women values within the family. In European countries, especially in Germany, as well as in the United States, it had been some time since, with the industrial revolution, « the image of the family as a haven (had become) an integral component of bourgeois class consciousness. The family was the place where men were to be loved, consoled, and refreshed... It was also the place where children were to be nurtured,loved, educated, and cultivated. » (The Making of the Jewish Middle Class, p. 16) Is this to say that « More than ever before, women were defined through the family » ? (ibid.). Not at all. Quite the contrary : the family was defined through women.
- "Marx was actually wed to a woman descended from a billionaire family: so much for class struggle."
And Friedrich Engels nearly never worked in his life as he was the son of a very rich industrialist. He led a schizophrenic existence, dividing between revolutionary action against the "bourgeois" and exploitation of its proletariat. - Also, without wanting to generalise too much, and not ruling out possible occult influences : Satanism more than often appears as a sidetrack in various files or cases.It is clear that Christian themselves profit from these "exposés" and the further promotion thereof.However, if one follows the definition given by Catholic authors such as De Poncins, Satanism can be equated to humanist doctrines in whatever form.More thoroughly, the subject of Satanism in Western societies has been dealt with in the works of the German freemason K. Frick. Although more current works must exist.
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2016 02:21:32 -0800
Subject: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Here are a few points worth noting in no particular order:
-Faking one’s death has been extensively used, so much that at the announcement of the unexpected death of a prominent member of the subversion front one should always asks the question whether it is faked.
-There is probably dissension and disagreement inside the subversion front but it is most likely limited to the means to be employed. It may explain some discrepancies but it is hardly good news.
-The amount of falsified photographs is enormous, especially those related to the major members of the subversion front as their biographies are largely made-up. The lies fed to the public are gigantic.
-One should not trust any “dissident” (e. g. the paper on Chomsky) favoured in one way or another by the “System” as most inevitably he was placed in this role.
-The famous music bands of the 1960’s were created by the subversion front in order to promote subversive values, bring human psyche to a lower level and divert the attention of the public away. They were dismissed once they had served their use.
-We are living in the worst form of oligarchy. It is astonishing how so many proeminent people come from the same families and reached their position through connections and nepotism.
-There is almost always a Jewish connection in the operations and hoaxes described by the author.
-The author seems to have no idea what “fascism” is as he employs rather annoyingly this word as a synonym to globalism.
-There is a chance that the whole “serial killer” story has been faked as a tool to manufacture fear (and demonize the middle-class White man), in a similar way to the current string of “shootings” and “attacks”. Today, there is a whole literature and the TV shows and movies on this theme.
-A few specific numbers are used in a recurrent way by the subversion front as a way to mock the blindness of the public and perhaps to something more.
-The actor has reached in the twentieth century a most destructive role as the members of the subversion front are prone to acting and the “psy-ops” are giant acts.
-The “mob” as such ceased to exist as such decades ago because it was taken over by the organizations of the subversion front. The novels and movies on it are misdirections.
-It seems the Kennedy family is all-powerful, as much if not more as the other often-cited families (Rotschild, Rockefeller, etc.). The author argues it ruled secretly the USA from the 1960’s on after the faked assassination.
-Karl Marx and Marxism was a decoy planted to subvert the legitimate worker organizations. Marx was actually wed to a woman descended from a billionaire family: so much for class struggle.
-The author argues that 90% of twentieth century American “culture” (books, art, movies, etc.) was manufactured by the subversion front. An interesting parallel could be drawn with the question of the fakery of middle-ages litterature by a clique of early subverters, as argued by several “recentist” authors.
-One of the patterns of the twentieth century is the “state” (i. e. the subversive front) acquiring all the markets to increase its revenue. For example, this is what happened with art, “modern art” being a subversive creation to destroy true beauty but also a great place to launder money, among other things.
- "Homosexuality is a branch of the Feminist Revolution since large-scale male perversion is the logical male answer to the New Woman. “Homosexuality is a department of Social Revolution”; (p. 389) it is essentially a romantic and sentimental phenomenon, a “snobbery or cult” encouraged, together with feminism, in order “to lay the foundations of a neuter-class of child-less workers” and to destroy the European Family already doomed by the machine-age."With regards to the "Cult of the Child" (Lewis), W. Stekel argues that homosexuality and various paraphilias are related to psychosexual infantilism.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Stekel#Selected_publicationsIn this context, perhaps the more interesting :
http://critiquehistorique.blogspot.be/2015/07/appreciation-de-lenfant-au-moyen-age.html
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2016 13:22:22 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Lawrence's essays "Master in his Own House" and "Matriarchy" present some of the arguments about why the family unit was meant to fail in the 20th century (http://m.friendfeed-media.com/ff2a0442e37edf376a59b90dbec19b6796d2729c)
It also explains the parodic character of the promotion of "family values" in the post-war era and the ease with which - whether or not - genuine family-centered political agenda's could be hijacked or distorted ; the destruction of the family unit turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Concerning Lewis' post-war thinking (the whole discussion is again very much related to literature and aesthetics):
"The political character of The Human Age [a trilogy of novels] becomes more obvious in Monstre Gai (1955). The title of this second volume refers to an expression which describes the Bailiff in a hysterical outburst shrieking uninterruptedly on his “puppet-stage” “Die the man – die the man – die the man.” This sequel to Childermass was not published until twenty seven years later, but the thought which underlies it is fundamentally the same, for Lewis’s outlook has changed remarkably little in the meantime. It is true that the “democratization” which followed the Second World War gave him new reasons for attacking communism, but it is rather surprising to find that his attack is still connected with the child-cult, the youth-cult and homosexuality, and that he satirizes with the same contempt Satters and his refusal “to vizualize himself at any time later than his sixteenth year.” Pullman is now less of an innocent and a dupe and may therefore be held responsible for choosing to serve the Bailiff, who here represents “gangster-wealth” at its most irresponsible."
(http://books.openedition.org/pulg/878)
And from the same study, concerning his general ideas and propositions :
"In Time and Western Man Lewis criticizes feminism as “a revolution that aims at reversing the respective positions of the sexes, and so returning to the supposed conditions of the primitive Matriarchate.” (p. 36) Reason is associated with masculinity, whereas emotions are considered as a feminine attribute and of a lower order. “We should make a new world of Reason for ourselves,”13 Lewis writes in his defence of the “classical.” “The ‘classical’ is the rational, aloof and aristocratical; the ‘romantic’ is the popular, sensational and ‘cosmically’ confused. That is the permanent political reference in those terms.”"
(...)
"Time and Western Man (1927) throws light on the relation Wyndham Lewis makes between Romanticism and Bergsonism on the one hand, and social and political democratization on the other. It also shows Lewis’s insight into the revolutionary character of the period, though he looked upon the transformation as a symptom of decadence rather than of revolution. He accuses Bergson and the “time-philosophers” of debasing art, literature, and philosophy because they advocate an approach to them which makes sensations all-important and which should therefore be confined to music. According to Lewis, this approach is essentially romantic and, like all attitudes derived from Romanticism, is responsible for all that is vulgar, immature, or unhealthy whether in art, in ordinary life, or even in politics. He accumulates examples such as advertisement, an unhealthy preoccupation with sex, the doctrine of action, so-called “revolutionary” art movements, the predominance of the mass over the individual, the Russian ballet, the cult of the savage and the child-cult.
For Lewis the romantic approach to life and art is “the opposite of the real.” A romantic person is someone who has not much grasp of present and actual things. The majority of men in modern society are “romantic” because they live in a dream of non-existent things such as “the world of cheap art, education and publicity.” A “romantic” is a “dreamer,” but the kind of dreamer who would want, for instance, to destroy all machinery. Far from alluding to the part played by dream in romantic art, Lewis simply means that the “romantic” is unrealistic. He concludes his reflections on the romantic mind with the following definition:
We say ‘romantic’ when we wish to define something too emotionalized … something opposed to the actual or the real: a self-indulgent habit of mind or a tendency to shut the eyes to what is unpleasant, in favour of things arbitrarily chosen for their flattering pleasantness. Or else we apply it to the effects of an egoism that bathes in the self-feeling to the exclusion of contradictory realities, including the Not-Self; achieving what we see to be a false unity and optimism, regarding all the circumstances."
(...)
"It is perhaps significant that Lewis makes no distinction between Spengler and his defence of “Faustian” culture, and men like Darwin, Einstein, Schopenhauer and Bergson. For him they are all guilty of the same heresy because all have contributed by their work to man’s loss of individuality. Lewis asserts that biology, mathematics and metaphysics as developed by Darwin, Einstein and Bergson have acted upon one another to produce the “time-philosophy,” which does away with the traditional categories in all fields of experience and enquiry, stresses the organic and dynamic aspects of life and reveres life in the raw as opposed to life disciplined and organized by the mind. Thus “Bergson’s ‘creative evolution’ is as Darwinian as was the ‘will to power’ of Nietzsche,” (p. 209) and his “élan vital” is equivalent to Schopenhauer’s “will.” The political implications of these philosophical doctrines are obvious: by emphasizing the unconscious in man, they make him lose his individuality, for man can only be an individual when he is conscious. Having lost his individuality, he lives in a state of “common humanity” and gives precedence to what Plato calls “the mob of the senses.” Life at this level is purely “sensational,” and we know that Lewis associates the life of the senses with the “subhuman” majority. This loss of individuality necessarily leads to political democratization. People are encouraged to give up their personal responsibility and to hand over their life to the community: “Discouragement of all exercise of will, or belief in individual power, that is the prevalent contemporary attitude for better or for worse.” (p. 306) On the other hand, the doctrine of action which derives from the Darwinian doctrine of “‘the struggle for existence” and from Bergson’s vitalism leads to fascism. Bergson’s philosophy is thus held responsible for the development of both communism and fascism. Lewis himself was to become an admirer of fascism, particularly of the German brand, but when he recanted his fascist opinions just before the Second World War, he again associated fascism with democracy on the ground that both were mass movements. Meanwhile, he also attacked at length Behaviorism, which, so he thought, gave the final blow to consciousness and substituted the body for the mind. Professor Watson, he said, describes man as a human body or a machine which possesses only instincts and habits but no mind. Still, the worst mischief-maker remains Bergson, whom Lewis even accuses of dishonesty. Though he often declares that philosophers are the victims of politicians who exploit their ideas for their own purposes, where Bergson is concerned, he asserts that the latter’s philosophy deliberately attempts to deceive men and ultimately aims at destroying individuality."
(...)
"Homosexuality is a branch of the Feminist Revolution since large-scale male perversion is the logical male answer to the New Woman. “Homosexuality is a department of Social Revolution”; (p. 389) it is essentially a romantic and sentimental phenomenon, a “snobbery or cult” encouraged, together with feminism, in order “to lay the foundations of a neuter-class of child-less workers” and to destroy the European Family already doomed by the machine-age."
(...)
"(...) the general argument of The Human Age, might be described as follows: the Bergsonians, who insist on the necessity to develop intuition at the expense of the intellect, encourage man to indulge in the senses and in the confusion of his inner world. By exploring his subconscious, man brings out what is lowest in him, and the importance he gives to instincts naturally leads him to a cult of the child, in whom instinct is predominant, and to a cult of what is primitive in man. The child-cult is associated to the mother-cult; as a result of the growing feminism, man, who is despised for his virility, is tempted to turn homosexual. Lewis considers that feminism, homosexuality and contempt for the male, which are responsible for the destruction of the family, are exploited by politicians who are only too glad to divest people of their differences and reduce them to neuter will-less beings. They incite people to sexual perversion or merely endeavour to transform them into sense- or sex-machines, which will diminish their self-control, impair their intellect and make them more pliable and submissive. They also deprive man of his claim to individuality by insisting that the human personality is part of the surrounding world. Philosophical communism conduces to political communism, and this is how most Western countries to-day are infected with it. No action is intact. Lewis also considers communism or socialism as a means used by Big Business to exploit the great majority of people, the middle class even more than the masses. Indeed, although the masses are being stupefied into a state of quasi-animalism, they enjoy privileges that the middle class don’t have. Lewis has developed this last point with obsessive emphasis in Rotting Hill (1951)."
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:49:34 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
This mainly concerns his universalist and internationalist views from then on."Lewis sees the violence, irrationality, and rootlessness of American life as positive qualities; qualities not only to be valued in themselves as exuberant proliferations of the human spirit, but also to be welcomed as the birthpangs of the world society of the future, the society of “cosmic man” (by “cosmic” he means cosmopolitan or internationalist). In effect he turns on its head the negative image which so many European and American intellectuals have of America.""The essence of what Lewis says in America and Cosmic Man is that since most of us realize that permanent peace, some form of economic collectivism, and an international political community are prerequisites for human survival in the atomic age, we must venerate America and learn from it. For the United States is the nation best exemplifying in embryonic form the world order in which these things will be established. The familiar simile of the melting pot fascinates him: he sees America as “the great big promiscuous grave into which tumble, and there disintegrate, all that was formerly race, class, or nationhood.” In a remarkable chapter entitled “The Case Against Roots,” he praises rootlessness as a necessary condition of world citizenship, and points out that no one is really rooted in America, “everyone has left his roots over in Poland or Ireland, in Italy or in Russia, so we are all floating around in a rootless Elysium.” In a similar manner he views the standardization of life with its wiping out of regional peculiarities and prejudices as the forerunner of the standardization of world culture, an irreversible trend under industrialism.""Before the war Lewis had shown sympathy for fascism in his 1926 work The Art of BeingRuled ('I am not a communist; if anything I favour some form of fascism rather than communism')'' and been grouped by T. S. Eliot with a number of writers who 'incline in the direction of some kind of fascism'.He had also written two books about Hitler, which many believed meant that he supported him. In a footnote in his autobiography he was to write as follows about them in response to a comment by George Orwell in the Partisan Review (Summer, 1946):As to my books 'in favour of Hitler', I have written two books about Hitler, one when he first appeared on the scene... (in 1930) before he came to power and revealed what a lunatic he was, and the other (The Hitler Cult and How it Will End) at the time of Munich.The first book was 'in favour': though it was not the Nazi's view of the matter; the second was very much the reverse of 'in favour'. The Hitler Cult is in many ways a rewriting of the earlier Hitler with numerous points refutedwhich had been made on behalf of Hitler in the first book. The satirical America I Presume impressions of America published in New York in August 1940, reinforces this change of opinion by referring to Hitler as a ' barbarous little mountebank'.In the same book Lewis expressed a view which is one of the main themes of Anglosaxony, namely that whatever happened during the present war - whether or not America would enter it - 'it is of vast importance that the English-speaking peoples of the world should act in harmony'.Anglosaxony is written in three parts. The first, entitled Democracy and Fascism is a defence of the democratic ideal against criticisms from both Right and Left. Lewis stresses that he sees democracy as a 'limited, an Anglo-Saxon family affair' but he does not mean to give democracy a nationalist character. Instead he envisages it as one only among
several ways of life and not as a political system 'desirous of imposing itself upon all and sundry'."(Read further at http://www.bl.uk/eblj/1997articles/pdf/article10.pdf which continues with more relevant explanations ; those very parts however are not easily reproduced here)It must however be noted that The Art Of Being Ruled, thus far from being a balanced work, contains varying positions and statements on the subjects at hand (the breakdown of the family unit being favoured by the author, for example), which in turn are not easily summarized. Academic texts only deal indirectly with these aspects of his writings. Therefore the best sources of reference are the very writings themselves."The first of Lewis' 'Man of the World' books, The Art of Being Ruled attempts to set out the changes that were happening and were, he believed, inevitable the replacement of liberal democracy by some form of socialism (centralised and authoritarian or local and communitarian), the destruction of the nuclear family unit, the growth of corporatism, changes in gender and sexuality, these and other phenomena were not being recognised, but society would need to make choices about them, or it would sleepwalk mechanically into the future. Roughly, The Art of Being Ruled presents the issues about which choices will need to be made, and looks at their implications. In the dust-jacket it is stated that the changes analysed in the book necessitate a new, strenuousand intellectual approach to life. But Lewis began to think that, instead of adopting such a critical approach, culture at all levels ; even avant-garde culture ; was simply replicating the contemporary society's tacit ideology of fatalistic mechanical change.""A large part of The Art of Being Ruled is about the disintegration of the family, the rise of feminism, and the so-called 'sex war', which according to Lewis is a consequence of sexual inversion. Chapter X, "The Matriarchate and Feminine Ascendency", opens as follows:ALL orthodox opinion - that is, to-day, 'revolutionary' opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man. Its terms are those of a war or insurrection still, although theoretically the war is over and the position gained. But subtly and in the nature of things, it is no longer a question of adjusting an inequality, but of advancing (as of a superior nature) the qualities of the 'down-trodden,' of the 'weaker' sex. [...] Such a war as the 'sex war,' as was to be expected, does not end in a stabilization in which the man and the woman exist on equal terms. It necessarily ends in a situation in which feminine values are predominant. (223)As an example of a book in which this tendency is noticeable, Lewis mentions "The Dominant Sex, by Matilda and Mathias Vaerting." (223) [http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b13626103.pdf](...)(...) Part IX, Chapter III ("'Call Yourself a Man!'"). On the opening page of this chapter (Art 279), Lewis discusses the strange use of the term 'man' denoting any individual, male or female:The term MAN implies a variety of indispensable but not necessarily pleasant things, quite independently of the specific sex characters, although it can only be attached to an individual falling within the subdivision of the adult male. The identification by means of sex-character on the part of adult males has always been a source of mortification to women and children : and at the present juncture some more neutral term should be substituded for it [...] (279)(...)The position of the male to-day, and the symbolism of the word MAN, are purely artificial [...] The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards - material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden. (282-3)"Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse. In : "Call Yourself a Man!" (The Art Of Being Ruled)P. S. http://mileswmathis.com contains some interesting speculations about the supposed sponsoring of the earliest modernist art salons by secret services. Thus before the so-called "Cold War" period of the 1950s and the preceeding years. But without factual material these claims remain exactly that : speculations.As for a statement made in that same context : the career of E. Pound is - indeed - notable. The claim of him not really being interned in an American prison wing after the war is simply difficult to sustain considering the many witnesses.
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 05:29:32 -0800
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Please elaborate on this statement of yours: « changes in his thinking becoming especially apparent from the 1940 years and onwards. » Not that his personal case matters in the least : it is just that, if that change pertained to his most insightful views on the process of matriarcalisation of intrinsically patriarcal « Gemeinschaften », it would be indicative of a feminisation of the thought of the last men aware of the former process.
P.s : Bowden tended to see Fascists almost everywhere.
- With Lewis, as can be seen, the classical-romantic dichotomy is largely derived from T. E. Hulme. As such it's not wholly without value ; the classical here being the desire for realism or clarity.
The sad misrepresentation (of Evola) borders on the hilarious and virtually surpasses many others of its kind.
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2016 02:07:50 -0800
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Thank you for these further quotes from Lewis' work as well as summaries of his thought. Since Romanticism is referred to, it is worth noting that it is at the cost of « redifining Romanticism » (« as a modern critique of modernity », p. 30) that the contemporary author you recently quoted on Benn and Evola is able to label the Italian writeras « romantic » on those grounds, whereby he shows that he only skimmed through 'Revolt against the Modern World', the only book by Evola he seems to be able to spell.
- Just as a note in passing : surprisingly enough, at least for a work from that era, there's a fairly negative chapter on Nietzsche (and/or his followers) in The Art of Being Ruled (Lewis).
To give a taste (these few sentences were quoted from it online) :“Nietzsche was in fact himself, where philosophy is concerned, a sort of Christ. Under the pretence of a doctrine of aristocracism (with that attractive and snobbish label ARISTOCRACY) he went out into the highways and byways and collected together all the half-educated, anything but aristocratic, student and art-student population of Europe. There was no small attorney’s son or small farmer’s daughter who had been to a school where their parents had to pay, or had studied painting or music, who did not imagine themselves barons and baronesses. At last, on the spot. A few years after his dramatic exit from the stage he became the greatest popular success of any philosopher of modern times.The character of his action as a philosopher, then, was not unlike that of Christ with regard to the religious heritage of the Jews. Both threw wide open the gates- Christ those of salvation, and Nietzsche those of truth-to the ‘publicans and sinners’ the ‘barbarian strangers. And the doctrine of aristocracy arranged by Dr. Nietzsche for Tom Dick and Harry, was a snobbish pill very violent in its action.”Apart from this, I also wanted to highlight this recent and certainly not unimportant article.http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2016/01/review-nietzsches-jewish-problem-part-one-of-two/
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2016/01/review-nietzsches-jewish-problem-part-two-of-two/
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2016 21:21:51 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
"Homosexuality is a branch of the Feminist Revolution since large-scale male perversion is the logical male answer to the New Woman. “Homosexuality is a department of Social Revolution”; (p. 389) it is essentially a romantic and sentimental phenomenon, a “snobbery or cult” encouraged, together with feminism, in order “to lay the foundations of a neuter-class of child-less workers” and to destroy the European Family already doomed by the machine-age."With regards to the "Cult of the Child" (Lewis), W. Stekel argues that homosexuality and various paraphilias are related to psychosexual infantilism.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Stekel#Selected_publicationsIn this context, perhaps the more interesting :
http://critiquehistorique.blogspot.be/2015/07/appreciation-de-lenfant-au-moyen-age.html
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2016 13:22:22 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Lawrence's essays "Master in his Own House" and "Matriarchy" present some of the arguments about why the family unit was meant to fail in the 20th century (http://m.friendfeed-media.com/ff2a0442e37edf376a59b90dbec19b6796d2729c)
It also explains the parodic character of the promotion of "family values" in the post-war era and the ease with which - whether or not - genuine family-centered political agenda's could be hijacked or distorted ; the destruction of the family unit turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Concerning Lewis' post-war thinking (the whole discussion is again very much related to literature and aesthetics):
"The political character of The Human Age [a trilogy of novels] becomes more obvious in Monstre Gai (1955). The title of this second volume refers to an expression which describes the Bailiff in a hysterical outburst shrieking uninterruptedly on his “puppet-stage” “Die the man – die the man – die the man.” This sequel to Childermass was not published until twenty seven years later, but the thought which underlies it is fundamentally the same, for Lewis’s outlook has changed remarkably little in the meantime. It is true that the “democratization” which followed the Second World War gave him new reasons for attacking communism, but it is rather surprising to find that his attack is still connected with the child-cult, the youth-cult and homosexuality, and that he satirizes with the same contempt Satters and his refusal “to vizualize himself at any time later than his sixteenth year.” Pullman is now less of an innocent and a dupe and may therefore be held responsible for choosing to serve the Bailiff, who here represents “gangster-wealth” at its most irresponsible."
(http://books.openedition.org/pulg/878)
And from the same study, concerning his general ideas and propositions :
"In Time and Western Man Lewis criticizes feminism as “a revolution that aims at reversing the respective positions of the sexes, and so returning to the supposed conditions of the primitive Matriarchate.” (p. 36) Reason is associated with masculinity, whereas emotions are considered as a feminine attribute and of a lower order. “We should make a new world of Reason for ourselves,”13 Lewis writes in his defence of the “classical.” “The ‘classical’ is the rational, aloof and aristocratical; the ‘romantic’ is the popular, sensational and ‘cosmically’ confused. That is the permanent political reference in those terms.”"
(...)
"Time and Western Man (1927) throws light on the relation Wyndham Lewis makes between Romanticism and Bergsonism on the one hand, and social and political democratization on the other. It also shows Lewis’s insight into the revolutionary character of the period, though he looked upon the transformation as a symptom of decadence rather than of revolution. He accuses Bergson and the “time-philosophers” of debasing art, literature, and philosophy because they advocate an approach to them which makes sensations all-important and which should therefore be confined to music. According to Lewis, this approach is essentially romantic and, like all attitudes derived from Romanticism, is responsible for all that is vulgar, immature, or unhealthy whether in art, in ordinary life, or even in politics. He accumulates examples such as advertisement, an unhealthy preoccupation with sex, the doctrine of action, so-called “revolutionary” art movements, the predominance of the mass over the individual, the Russian ballet, the cult of the savage and the child-cult.
For Lewis the romantic approach to life and art is “the opposite of the real.” A romantic person is someone who has not much grasp of present and actual things. The majority of men in modern society are “romantic” because they live in a dream of non-existent things such as “the world of cheap art, education and publicity.” A “romantic” is a “dreamer,” but the kind of dreamer who would want, for instance, to destroy all machinery. Far from alluding to the part played by dream in romantic art, Lewis simply means that the “romantic” is unrealistic. He concludes his reflections on the romantic mind with the following definition:
We say ‘romantic’ when we wish to define something too emotionalized … something opposed to the actual or the real: a self-indulgent habit of mind or a tendency to shut the eyes to what is unpleasant, in favour of things arbitrarily chosen for their flattering pleasantness. Or else we apply it to the effects of an egoism that bathes in the self-feeling to the exclusion of contradictory realities, including the Not-Self; achieving what we see to be a false unity and optimism, regarding all the circumstances."
(...)
"It is perhaps significant that Lewis makes no distinction between Spengler and his defence of “Faustian” culture, and men like Darwin, Einstein, Schopenhauer and Bergson. For him they are all guilty of the same heresy because all have contributed by their work to man’s loss of individuality. Lewis asserts that biology, mathematics and metaphysics as developed by Darwin, Einstein and Bergson have acted upon one another to produce the “time-philosophy,” which does away with the traditional categories in all fields of experience and enquiry, stresses the organic and dynamic aspects of life and reveres life in the raw as opposed to life disciplined and organized by the mind. Thus “Bergson’s ‘creative evolution’ is as Darwinian as was the ‘will to power’ of Nietzsche,” (p. 209) and his “élan vital” is equivalent to Schopenhauer’s “will.” The political implications of these philosophical doctrines are obvious: by emphasizing the unconscious in man, they make him lose his individuality, for man can only be an individual when he is conscious. Having lost his individuality, he lives in a state of “common humanity” and gives precedence to what Plato calls “the mob of the senses.” Life at this level is purely “sensational,” and we know that Lewis associates the life of the senses with the “subhuman” majority. This loss of individuality necessarily leads to political democratization. People are encouraged to give up their personal responsibility and to hand over their life to the community: “Discouragement of all exercise of will, or belief in individual power, that is the prevalent contemporary attitude for better or for worse.” (p. 306) On the other hand, the doctrine of action which derives from the Darwinian doctrine of “‘the struggle for existence” and from Bergson’s vitalism leads to fascism. Bergson’s philosophy is thus held responsible for the development of both communism and fascism. Lewis himself was to become an admirer of fascism, particularly of the German brand, but when he recanted his fascist opinions just before the Second World War, he again associated fascism with democracy on the ground that both were mass movements. Meanwhile, he also attacked at length Behaviorism, which, so he thought, gave the final blow to consciousness and substituted the body for the mind. Professor Watson, he said, describes man as a human body or a machine which possesses only instincts and habits but no mind. Still, the worst mischief-maker remains Bergson, whom Lewis even accuses of dishonesty. Though he often declares that philosophers are the victims of politicians who exploit their ideas for their own purposes, where Bergson is concerned, he asserts that the latter’s philosophy deliberately attempts to deceive men and ultimately aims at destroying individuality."
(...)
"Homosexuality is a branch of the Feminist Revolution since large-scale male perversion is the logical male answer to the New Woman. “Homosexuality is a department of Social Revolution”; (p. 389) it is essentially a romantic and sentimental phenomenon, a “snobbery or cult” encouraged, together with feminism, in order “to lay the foundations of a neuter-class of child-less workers” and to destroy the European Family already doomed by the machine-age."
(...)
"(...) the general argument of The Human Age, might be described as follows: the Bergsonians, who insist on the necessity to develop intuition at the expense of the intellect, encourage man to indulge in the senses and in the confusion of his inner world. By exploring his subconscious, man brings out what is lowest in him, and the importance he gives to instincts naturally leads him to a cult of the child, in whom instinct is predominant, and to a cult of what is primitive in man. The child-cult is associated to the mother-cult; as a result of the growing feminism, man, who is despised for his virility, is tempted to turn homosexual. Lewis considers that feminism, homosexuality and contempt for the male, which are responsible for the destruction of the family, are exploited by politicians who are only too glad to divest people of their differences and reduce them to neuter will-less beings. They incite people to sexual perversion or merely endeavour to transform them into sense- or sex-machines, which will diminish their self-control, impair their intellect and make them more pliable and submissive. They also deprive man of his claim to individuality by insisting that the human personality is part of the surrounding world. Philosophical communism conduces to political communism, and this is how most Western countries to-day are infected with it. No action is intact. Lewis also considers communism or socialism as a means used by Big Business to exploit the great majority of people, the middle class even more than the masses. Indeed, although the masses are being stupefied into a state of quasi-animalism, they enjoy privileges that the middle class don’t have. Lewis has developed this last point with obsessive emphasis in Rotting Hill (1951)."
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:49:34 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
This mainly concerns his universalist and internationalist views from then on."Lewis sees the violence, irrationality, and rootlessness of American life as positive qualities; qualities not only to be valued in themselves as exuberant proliferations of the human spirit, but also to be welcomed as the birthpangs of the world society of the future, the society of “cosmic man” (by “cosmic” he means cosmopolitan or internationalist). In effect he turns on its head the negative image which so many European and American intellectuals have of America.""The essence of what Lewis says in America and Cosmic Man is that since most of us realize that permanent peace, some form of economic collectivism, and an international political community are prerequisites for human survival in the atomic age, we must venerate America and learn from it. For the United States is the nation best exemplifying in embryonic form the world order in which these things will be established. The familiar simile of the melting pot fascinates him: he sees America as “the great big promiscuous grave into which tumble, and there disintegrate, all that was formerly race, class, or nationhood.” In a remarkable chapter entitled “The Case Against Roots,” he praises rootlessness as a necessary condition of world citizenship, and points out that no one is really rooted in America, “everyone has left his roots over in Poland or Ireland, in Italy or in Russia, so we are all floating around in a rootless Elysium.” In a similar manner he views the standardization of life with its wiping out of regional peculiarities and prejudices as the forerunner of the standardization of world culture, an irreversible trend under industrialism.""Before the war Lewis had shown sympathy for fascism in his 1926 work The Art of BeingRuled ('I am not a communist; if anything I favour some form of fascism rather than communism')'' and been grouped by T. S. Eliot with a number of writers who 'incline in the direction of some kind of fascism'.He had also written two books about Hitler, which many believed meant that he supported him. In a footnote in his autobiography he was to write as follows about them in response to a comment by George Orwell in the Partisan Review (Summer, 1946):As to my books 'in favour of Hitler', I have written two books about Hitler, one when he first appeared on the scene... (in 1930) before he came to power and revealed what a lunatic he was, and the other (The Hitler Cult and How it Will End) at the time of Munich.The first book was 'in favour': though it was not the Nazi's view of the matter; the second was very much the reverse of 'in favour'. The Hitler Cult is in many ways a rewriting of the earlier Hitler with numerous points refutedwhich had been made on behalf of Hitler in the first book. The satirical America I Presume impressions of America published in New York in August 1940, reinforces this change of opinion by referring to Hitler as a ' barbarous little mountebank'.In the same book Lewis expressed a view which is one of the main themes of Anglosaxony, namely that whatever happened during the present war - whether or not America would enter it - 'it is of vast importance that the English-speaking peoples of the world should act in harmony'.Anglosaxony is written in three parts. The first, entitled Democracy and Fascism is a defence of the democratic ideal against criticisms from both Right and Left. Lewis stresses that he sees democracy as a 'limited, an Anglo-Saxon family affair' but he does not mean to give democracy a nationalist character. Instead he envisages it as one only among
several ways of life and not as a political system 'desirous of imposing itself upon all and sundry'."(Read further at http://www.bl.uk/eblj/1997articles/pdf/article10.pdf which continues with more relevant explanations ; those very parts however are not easily reproduced here)It must however be noted that The Art Of Being Ruled, thus far from being a balanced work, contains varying positions and statements on the subjects at hand (the breakdown of the family unit being favoured by the author, for example), which in turn are not easily summarized. Academic texts only deal indirectly with these aspects of his writings. Therefore the best sources of reference are the very writings themselves."The first of Lewis' 'Man of the World' books, The Art of Being Ruled attempts to set out the changes that were happening and were, he believed, inevitable the replacement of liberal democracy by some form of socialism (centralised and authoritarian or local and communitarian), the destruction of the nuclear family unit, the growth of corporatism, changes in gender and sexuality, these and other phenomena were not being recognised, but society would need to make choices about them, or it would sleepwalk mechanically into the future. Roughly, The Art of Being Ruled presents the issues about which choices will need to be made, and looks at their implications. In the dust-jacket it is stated that the changes analysed in the book necessitate a new, strenuousand intellectual approach to life. But Lewis began to think that, instead of adopting such a critical approach, culture at all levels ; even avant-garde culture ; was simply replicating the contemporary society's tacit ideology of fatalistic mechanical change.""A large part of The Art of Being Ruled is about the disintegration of the family, the rise of feminism, and the so-called 'sex war', which according to Lewis is a consequence of sexual inversion. Chapter X, "The Matriarchate and Feminine Ascendency", opens as follows:ALL orthodox opinion - that is, to-day, 'revolutionary' opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man. Its terms are those of a war or insurrection still, although theoretically the war is over and the position gained. But subtly and in the nature of things, it is no longer a question of adjusting an inequality, but of advancing (as of a superior nature) the qualities of the 'down-trodden,' of the 'weaker' sex. [...] Such a war as the 'sex war,' as was to be expected, does not end in a stabilization in which the man and the woman exist on equal terms. It necessarily ends in a situation in which feminine values are predominant. (223)As an example of a book in which this tendency is noticeable, Lewis mentions "The Dominant Sex, by Matilda and Mathias Vaerting." (223) [http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b13626103.pdf](...)(...) Part IX, Chapter III ("'Call Yourself a Man!'"). On the opening page of this chapter (Art 279), Lewis discusses the strange use of the term 'man' denoting any individual, male or female:The term MAN implies a variety of indispensable but not necessarily pleasant things, quite independently of the specific sex characters, although it can only be attached to an individual falling within the subdivision of the adult male. The identification by means of sex-character on the part of adult males has always been a source of mortification to women and children : and at the present juncture some more neutral term should be substituded for it [...] (279)(...)The position of the male to-day, and the symbolism of the word MAN, are purely artificial [...] The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards - material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden. (282-3)"Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse. In : "Call Yourself a Man!" (The Art Of Being Ruled)P. S. http://mileswmathis.com contains some interesting speculations about the supposed sponsoring of the earliest modernist art salons by secret services. Thus before the so-called "Cold War" period of the 1950s and the preceeding years. But without factual material these claims remain exactly that : speculations.As for a statement made in that same context : the career of E. Pound is - indeed - notable. The claim of him not really being interned in an American prison wing after the war is simply difficult to sustain considering the many witnesses.
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 05:29:32 -0800
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Please elaborate on this statement of yours: « changes in his thinking becoming especially apparent from the 1940 years and onwards. » Not that his personal case matters in the least : it is just that, if that change pertained to his most insightful views on the process of matriarcalisation of intrinsically patriarcal « Gemeinschaften », it would be indicative of a feminisation of the thought of the last men aware of the former process.
P.s : Bowden tended to see Fascists almost everywhere.
- From Time And Western Man (http://www.fivebodied.com/archives/audio/bob/Wyndham_Lewis/TimeandWesternMan-Book1.pdf) :
“When Revolution—that is simply the will to change and to spiritual transformation—ceases to be itself, and passes over more and more completely into its mere propaganda and advertisement department, it is apt, in the nature of things, to settle down in the neighbourhood of sex . . . No Western revolution would be complete without its strident advertisement. In the pagan world the facts of sex had no undue importance. That they have derived entirely . . . from the puritan consciousness.”“If you are desirous of showing your “revolutionary” propensities, and it is a case of finding some law to break to prove your good-will and spirit, what better law than the dear old moral law, always there invitingly ready and eager to be broken. So it is that “sex” for the European is the ideal gateway to Revolution, that no one but a violent sex-snob can enter . . . And so it is that that will-to-change or impulse to spiritual advance, which is the only sensible meaning of Revolution, is confused and defeated.”
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2016 21:09:46 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Just as a note in passing : surprisingly enough, at least for a work from that era, there's a fairly negative chapter on Nietzsche (and/or his followers) in The Art of Being Ruled (Lewis).
To give a taste (these few sentences were quoted from it online) :“Nietzsche was in fact himself, where philosophy is concerned, a sort of Christ. Under the pretence of a doctrine of aristocracism (with that attractive and snobbish label ARISTOCRACY) he went out into the highways and byways and collected together all the half-educated, anything but aristocratic, student and art-student population of Europe. There was no small attorney’s son or small farmer’s daughter who had been to a school where their parents had to pay, or had studied painting or music, who did not imagine themselves barons and baronesses. At last, on the spot. A few years after his dramatic exit from the stage he became the greatest popular success of any philosopher of modern times.The character of his action as a philosopher, then, was not unlike that of Christ with regard to the religious heritage of the Jews. Both threw wide open the gates- Christ those of salvation, and Nietzsche those of truth-to the ‘publicans and sinners’ the ‘barbarian strangers. And the doctrine of aristocracy arranged by Dr. Nietzsche for Tom Dick and Harry, was a snobbish pill very violent in its action.”Apart from this, I also wanted to highlight this recent and certainly not unimportant article.http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2016/01/review-nietzsches-jewish-problem-part-one-of-two/
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2016/01/review-nietzsches-jewish-problem-part-two-of-two/
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2016 21:21:51 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
"Homosexuality is a branch of the Feminist Revolution since large-scale male perversion is the logical male answer to the New Woman. “Homosexuality is a department of Social Revolution”; (p. 389) it is essentially a romantic and sentimental phenomenon, a “snobbery or cult” encouraged, together with feminism, in order “to lay the foundations of a neuter-class of child-less workers” and to destroy the European Family already doomed by the machine-age."With regards to the "Cult of the Child" (Lewis), W. Stekel argues that homosexuality and various paraphilias are related to psychosexual infantilism.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Stekel#Selected_publicationsIn this context, perhaps the more interesting :
http://critiquehistorique.blogspot.be/2015/07/appreciation-de-lenfant-au-moyen-age.html
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2016 13:22:22 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Lawrence's essays "Master in his Own House" and "Matriarchy" present some of the arguments about why the family unit was meant to fail in the 20th century (http://m.friendfeed-media.com/ff2a0442e37edf376a59b90dbec19b6796d2729c)
It also explains the parodic character of the promotion of "family values" in the post-war era and the ease with which - whether or not - genuine family-centered political agenda's could be hijacked or distorted ; the destruction of the family unit turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Concerning Lewis' post-war thinking (the whole discussion is again very much related to literature and aesthetics):
"The political character of The Human Age [a trilogy of novels] becomes more obvious in Monstre Gai (1955). The title of this second volume refers to an expression which describes the Bailiff in a hysterical outburst shrieking uninterruptedly on his “puppet-stage” “Die the man – die the man – die the man.” This sequel to Childermass was not published until twenty seven years later, but the thought which underlies it is fundamentally the same, for Lewis’s outlook has changed remarkably little in the meantime. It is true that the “democratization” which followed the Second World War gave him new reasons for attacking communism, but it is rather surprising to find that his attack is still connected with the child-cult, the youth-cult and homosexuality, and that he satirizes with the same contempt Satters and his refusal “to vizualize himself at any time later than his sixteenth year.” Pullman is now less of an innocent and a dupe and may therefore be held responsible for choosing to serve the Bailiff, who here represents “gangster-wealth” at its most irresponsible."
(http://books.openedition.org/pulg/878)
And from the same study, concerning his general ideas and propositions :
"In Time and Western Man Lewis criticizes feminism as “a revolution that aims at reversing the respective positions of the sexes, and so returning to the supposed conditions of the primitive Matriarchate.” (p. 36) Reason is associated with masculinity, whereas emotions are considered as a feminine attribute and of a lower order. “We should make a new world of Reason for ourselves,”13 Lewis writes in his defence of the “classical.” “The ‘classical’ is the rational, aloof and aristocratical; the ‘romantic’ is the popular, sensational and ‘cosmically’ confused. That is the permanent political reference in those terms.”"
(...)
"Time and Western Man (1927) throws light on the relation Wyndham Lewis makes between Romanticism and Bergsonism on the one hand, and social and political democratization on the other. It also shows Lewis’s insight into the revolutionary character of the period, though he looked upon the transformation as a symptom of decadence rather than of revolution. He accuses Bergson and the “time-philosophers” of debasing art, literature, and philosophy because they advocate an approach to them which makes sensations all-important and which should therefore be confined to music. According to Lewis, this approach is essentially romantic and, like all attitudes derived from Romanticism, is responsible for all that is vulgar, immature, or unhealthy whether in art, in ordinary life, or even in politics. He accumulates examples such as advertisement, an unhealthy preoccupation with sex, the doctrine of action, so-called “revolutionary” art movements, the predominance of the mass over the individual, the Russian ballet, the cult of the savage and the child-cult.
For Lewis the romantic approach to life and art is “the opposite of the real.” A romantic person is someone who has not much grasp of present and actual things. The majority of men in modern society are “romantic” because they live in a dream of non-existent things such as “the world of cheap art, education and publicity.” A “romantic” is a “dreamer,” but the kind of dreamer who would want, for instance, to destroy all machinery. Far from alluding to the part played by dream in romantic art, Lewis simply means that the “romantic” is unrealistic. He concludes his reflections on the romantic mind with the following definition:
We say ‘romantic’ when we wish to define something too emotionalized … something opposed to the actual or the real: a self-indulgent habit of mind or a tendency to shut the eyes to what is unpleasant, in favour of things arbitrarily chosen for their flattering pleasantness. Or else we apply it to the effects of an egoism that bathes in the self-feeling to the exclusion of contradictory realities, including the Not-Self; achieving what we see to be a false unity and optimism, regarding all the circumstances."
(...)
"It is perhaps significant that Lewis makes no distinction between Spengler and his defence of “Faustian” culture, and men like Darwin, Einstein, Schopenhauer and Bergson. For him they are all guilty of the same heresy because all have contributed by their work to man’s loss of individuality. Lewis asserts that biology, mathematics and metaphysics as developed by Darwin, Einstein and Bergson have acted upon one another to produce the “time-philosophy,” which does away with the traditional categories in all fields of experience and enquiry, stresses the organic and dynamic aspects of life and reveres life in the raw as opposed to life disciplined and organized by the mind. Thus “Bergson’s ‘creative evolution’ is as Darwinian as was the ‘will to power’ of Nietzsche,” (p. 209) and his “élan vital” is equivalent to Schopenhauer’s “will.” The political implications of these philosophical doctrines are obvious: by emphasizing the unconscious in man, they make him lose his individuality, for man can only be an individual when he is conscious. Having lost his individuality, he lives in a state of “common humanity” and gives precedence to what Plato calls “the mob of the senses.” Life at this level is purely “sensational,” and we know that Lewis associates the life of the senses with the “subhuman” majority. This loss of individuality necessarily leads to political democratization. People are encouraged to give up their personal responsibility and to hand over their life to the community: “Discouragement of all exercise of will, or belief in individual power, that is the prevalent contemporary attitude for better or for worse.” (p. 306) On the other hand, the doctrine of action which derives from the Darwinian doctrine of “‘the struggle for existence” and from Bergson’s vitalism leads to fascism. Bergson’s philosophy is thus held responsible for the development of both communism and fascism. Lewis himself was to become an admirer of fascism, particularly of the German brand, but when he recanted his fascist opinions just before the Second World War, he again associated fascism with democracy on the ground that both were mass movements. Meanwhile, he also attacked at length Behaviorism, which, so he thought, gave the final blow to consciousness and substituted the body for the mind. Professor Watson, he said, describes man as a human body or a machine which possesses only instincts and habits but no mind. Still, the worst mischief-maker remains Bergson, whom Lewis even accuses of dishonesty. Though he often declares that philosophers are the victims of politicians who exploit their ideas for their own purposes, where Bergson is concerned, he asserts that the latter’s philosophy deliberately attempts to deceive men and ultimately aims at destroying individuality."
(...)
"Homosexuality is a branch of the Feminist Revolution since large-scale male perversion is the logical male answer to the New Woman. “Homosexuality is a department of Social Revolution”; (p. 389) it is essentially a romantic and sentimental phenomenon, a “snobbery or cult” encouraged, together with feminism, in order “to lay the foundations of a neuter-class of child-less workers” and to destroy the European Family already doomed by the machine-age."
(...)
"(...) the general argument of The Human Age, might be described as follows: the Bergsonians, who insist on the necessity to develop intuition at the expense of the intellect, encourage man to indulge in the senses and in the confusion of his inner world. By exploring his subconscious, man brings out what is lowest in him, and the importance he gives to instincts naturally leads him to a cult of the child, in whom instinct is predominant, and to a cult of what is primitive in man. The child-cult is associated to the mother-cult; as a result of the growing feminism, man, who is despised for his virility, is tempted to turn homosexual. Lewis considers that feminism, homosexuality and contempt for the male, which are responsible for the destruction of the family, are exploited by politicians who are only too glad to divest people of their differences and reduce them to neuter will-less beings. They incite people to sexual perversion or merely endeavour to transform them into sense- or sex-machines, which will diminish their self-control, impair their intellect and make them more pliable and submissive. They also deprive man of his claim to individuality by insisting that the human personality is part of the surrounding world. Philosophical communism conduces to political communism, and this is how most Western countries to-day are infected with it. No action is intact. Lewis also considers communism or socialism as a means used by Big Business to exploit the great majority of people, the middle class even more than the masses. Indeed, although the masses are being stupefied into a state of quasi-animalism, they enjoy privileges that the middle class don’t have. Lewis has developed this last point with obsessive emphasis in Rotting Hill (1951)."
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:49:34 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
This mainly concerns his universalist and internationalist views from then on."Lewis sees the violence, irrationality, and rootlessness of American life as positive qualities; qualities not only to be valued in themselves as exuberant proliferations of the human spirit, but also to be welcomed as the birthpangs of the world society of the future, the society of “cosmic man” (by “cosmic” he means cosmopolitan or internationalist). In effect he turns on its head the negative image which so many European and American intellectuals have of America.""The essence of what Lewis says in America and Cosmic Man is that since most of us realize that permanent peace, some form of economic collectivism, and an international political community are prerequisites for human survival in the atomic age, we must venerate America and learn from it. For the United States is the nation best exemplifying in embryonic form the world order in which these things will be established. The familiar simile of the melting pot fascinates him: he sees America as “the great big promiscuous grave into which tumble, and there disintegrate, all that was formerly race, class, or nationhood.” In a remarkable chapter entitled “The Case Against Roots,” he praises rootlessness as a necessary condition of world citizenship, and points out that no one is really rooted in America, “everyone has left his roots over in Poland or Ireland, in Italy or in Russia, so we are all floating around in a rootless Elysium.” In a similar manner he views the standardization of life with its wiping out of regional peculiarities and prejudices as the forerunner of the standardization of world culture, an irreversible trend under industrialism.""Before the war Lewis had shown sympathy for fascism in his 1926 work The Art of BeingRuled ('I am not a communist; if anything I favour some form of fascism rather than communism')'' and been grouped by T. S. Eliot with a number of writers who 'incline in the direction of some kind of fascism'.He had also written two books about Hitler, which many believed meant that he supported him. In a footnote in his autobiography he was to write as follows about them in response to a comment by George Orwell in the Partisan Review (Summer, 1946):As to my books 'in favour of Hitler', I have written two books about Hitler, one when he first appeared on the scene... (in 1930) before he came to power and revealed what a lunatic he was, and the other (The Hitler Cult and How it Will End) at the time of Munich.The first book was 'in favour': though it was not the Nazi's view of the matter; the second was very much the reverse of 'in favour'. The Hitler Cult is in many ways a rewriting of the earlier Hitler with numerous points refutedwhich had been made on behalf of Hitler in the first book. The satirical America I Presume impressions of America published in New York in August 1940, reinforces this change of opinion by referring to Hitler as a ' barbarous little mountebank'.In the same book Lewis expressed a view which is one of the main themes of Anglosaxony, namely that whatever happened during the present war - whether or not America would enter it - 'it is of vast importance that the English-speaking peoples of the world should act in harmony'.Anglosaxony is written in three parts. The first, entitled Democracy and Fascism is a defence of the democratic ideal against criticisms from both Right and Left. Lewis stresses that he sees democracy as a 'limited, an Anglo-Saxon family affair' but he does not mean to give democracy a nationalist character. Instead he envisages it as one only among
several ways of life and not as a political system 'desirous of imposing itself upon all and sundry'."(Read further at http://www.bl.uk/eblj/1997articles/pdf/article10.pdf which continues with more relevant explanations ; those very parts however are not easily reproduced here)It must however be noted that The Art Of Being Ruled, thus far from being a balanced work, contains varying positions and statements on the subjects at hand (the breakdown of the family unit being favoured by the author, for example), which in turn are not easily summarized. Academic texts only deal indirectly with these aspects of his writings. Therefore the best sources of reference are the very writings themselves."The first of Lewis' 'Man of the World' books, The Art of Being Ruled attempts to set out the changes that were happening and were, he believed, inevitable the replacement of liberal democracy by some form of socialism (centralised and authoritarian or local and communitarian), the destruction of the nuclear family unit, the growth of corporatism, changes in gender and sexuality, these and other phenomena were not being recognised, but society would need to make choices about them, or it would sleepwalk mechanically into the future. Roughly, The Art of Being Ruled presents the issues about which choices will need to be made, and looks at their implications. In the dust-jacket it is stated that the changes analysed in the book necessitate a new, strenuousand intellectual approach to life. But Lewis began to think that, instead of adopting such a critical approach, culture at all levels ; even avant-garde culture ; was simply replicating the contemporary society's tacit ideology of fatalistic mechanical change.""A large part of The Art of Being Ruled is about the disintegration of the family, the rise of feminism, and the so-called 'sex war', which according to Lewis is a consequence of sexual inversion. Chapter X, "The Matriarchate and Feminine Ascendency", opens as follows:ALL orthodox opinion - that is, to-day, 'revolutionary' opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man. Its terms are those of a war or insurrection still, although theoretically the war is over and the position gained. But subtly and in the nature of things, it is no longer a question of adjusting an inequality, but of advancing (as of a superior nature) the qualities of the 'down-trodden,' of the 'weaker' sex. [...] Such a war as the 'sex war,' as was to be expected, does not end in a stabilization in which the man and the woman exist on equal terms. It necessarily ends in a situation in which feminine values are predominant. (223)As an example of a book in which this tendency is noticeable, Lewis mentions "The Dominant Sex, by Matilda and Mathias Vaerting." (223) [http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b13626103.pdf](...)(...) Part IX, Chapter III ("'Call Yourself a Man!'"). On the opening page of this chapter (Art 279), Lewis discusses the strange use of the term 'man' denoting any individual, male or female:The term MAN implies a variety of indispensable but not necessarily pleasant things, quite independently of the specific sex characters, although it can only be attached to an individual falling within the subdivision of the adult male. The identification by means of sex-character on the part of adult males has always been a source of mortification to women and children : and at the present juncture some more neutral term should be substituded for it [...] (279)(...)The position of the male to-day, and the symbolism of the word MAN, are purely artificial [...] The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards - material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden. (282-3)"Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse. In : "Call Yourself a Man!" (The Art Of Being Ruled)P. S. http://mileswmathis.com contains some interesting speculations about the supposed sponsoring of the earliest modernist art salons by secret services. Thus before the so-called "Cold War" period of the 1950s and the preceeding years. But without factual material these claims remain exactly that : speculations.As for a statement made in that same context : the career of E. Pound is - indeed - notable. The claim of him not really being interned in an American prison wing after the war is simply difficult to sustain considering the many witnesses.
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 05:29:32 -0800
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Please elaborate on this statement of yours: « changes in his thinking becoming especially apparent from the 1940 years and onwards. » Not that his personal case matters in the least : it is just that, if that change pertained to his most insightful views on the process of matriarcalisation of intrinsically patriarcal « Gemeinschaften », it would be indicative of a feminisation of the thought of the last men aware of the former process.
P.s : Bowden tended to see Fascists almost everywhere.
- (An interesting report that sums up the current state of affairs with regard to the European Union and foreign activities on European soil. The annexed part can be read at the original address http://www.justresponse.net/DougalWatt20Aug02.html. We put in bold the most striking parts. A related file is http://www.justresponse.net/DougalWatt3Sep02.htmlCIA and freemasons among dark forces in Europe: an exclusive JUST Response report from the Dougal Watt Dossier.
'Whistleblower' Robert Dougal Watt speaks outMr Michel HERVÉ
Secretary General
European Court of Auditors
Subject: further to my letters of 17 June and 8 July
For your information, please find in the attached Annex material of relevance to my letter of 17 June. Essentially, this material supports the plausibility of the central hypothesis presented in that letter.Firstly, the material presented demonstrates that concern for one’s personal safety when querying official explanations for any past mafia-related death is symptomatic of common-sense rather than paranoia. This is particularly true given the apparent public distance between the institution and myself. When the circumstances of the “suicide” in London of Roberto Calvi were officially re-examined, several years after the event, the British authorities were careful to minimise the exposure to risk of all those involved in the re-examination.Secondly, evidence is presented of the penetration by freemasonry of the European institutions, and Member State administrations; and accounts of the consequential corruption in France, Belgium and Italy.Thirdly, historical evidence is presented of the key role played by the United States, and its intelligence community in particular, in the post-war formation of the “Europe Community”. As the leading historian (in English) has concluded, “Viewed from Europe, the most striking aspect… is the extent to which officials working for European reconstruction and unification shared the experience of wartime intelligence, special operations and resistance. European unity had taken root in wartime resistance movements. These links with clandestine organisations continued into the post-war period. The emerging European Economic Community and the growing Western intelligence community overlapped to a considerable degree.”Fourthly, evidence is presented of more recent CIA intervention in domestic Italian politics; of the Agency’s role with regard to the P2 masonic lodge; and of the lodge’s associated criminal and terrorist activities.Fifthly, evidence is presented of contemporary CIA spying on the European Institutions.Sixthly, by way of balance, evidence is presented of KGB activities in Europe during the Cold War period. At least some of the fears of US agencies with regard to clandestine Communist activity were well founded, offering corresponding justification for covert US activity in Europe. Essentially, just as the United States endeavoured to encourage Western European unity, so the Soviet Union endeavoured to keep the states of Western Europe divided.Seventhly, evidence is presented demonstrating the establishment under NATO auspices of a Europe-wide network of “Gladio” or “Stay-behind” forces; and the linkages made between the personnel/equipment of such forces and terrorist atrocities in Italy and Belgium during the 1980s. The revelation in the early 1990s of these clandestine forces, and such linkages, gave rise to a strongly-worded condemnatory resolution of the European Parliament.The evidence presented in the attached Annex thus supports the plausibility of the central hypothesis of my letter of 17 June. Again, I should like to emphasise that I have presented – and maintain – a hypothesis, and neither a conviction nor a definitive proof. The hypothesis is derived from the facts known to me; and given the significance of the potential audit findings, I believe further investigation by the Court of the matters raised is merited.Consequently, it gives me great distress to find that the Court seems, from my perspective at least, to prefer to “shoot the messenger” rather than to give consideration to the “message”. It gave, and its gives, me no pleasure to question the integrity of two senior officials with whom I have worked and/or known for many years. However, if two individuals voluntarily swear to protect their “brothers”, and their fraternal secrets, upon pain of death and dismemberment; and an analysis of the audit evidence available casts material doubt on their, and other “official” explanations offered to date; and evidence of masonic corruption in other fields of public life is well known and thoroughly documented; then I fail to understand why it must be unreasonable to assume it possible that such “brotherly” oaths might take precedence over employees’ normal duties of loyalty to their employer.Furthermore, I was astonished to receive from OLAF a fax dated 9 August stating, “Mr Michel Herve, Secretary General of the Court of Auditors, informed the European anti-fraud Office about your letter of 17/6/02”; and inviting me to contact OLAF in order to allow the Office to “complete and assess these allegations”. Given that my letter of 17 June presents allegations of serious impropriety by OLAF, committed at the highest level; and given that the Court, as a sovereign institution under the Treaty, has responsibility for reporting on the sound management of OLAF; - I regret I find your decision to pass my letter to OLAF for further investigation to be incomprehensible.With regard to your letter of 31 August, and its opening remark, “You have not answered to my letter dated 2nd July 2002”: I observe that I did reply, on 8 July, before noon, as you had requested in your letter of 2 July. I hold a fax “transmission record” which confirms the above, and confirms that your fax machine received the transmission “OK”. Furthermore, a copy of my letter to you of 8 July was included in the fax which I sent to the President of the institution’s Staff Committee on 9 July; which I asked be made available to all staff who requested access; and which I understand was submitted for your consideration.My fax of 8 July raised a number of queries with regard to your proposal to conduct a second medical examination on 23 August. I have waited patiently in the expectation of some response to my queries; to date, in vain. In view of the proximity of the proposed examination, I await your urgent response to the queries presented in my fax of 8 July.In addition, I should be grateful if you would forward the following to me: the terms of reference for the employment by the Court/Commission Medical Service of Dr John Callender; an explanation for his selection by the Court/Commission Medical Service (i.e., selection methodology, criteria, etc.); and a copy of all information which has been provided to Dr Callender by the Court/Commission Medical Service.R Dougal WATT
Auditor
20 August 2002
(on sick leave)
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2016 21:28:43 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
"The Doom of Youth: Wyndham Lewis' Conspiracy Theory" by J. Constable is a recommendable text. It attempts to give a point-by-point summary of "The Doom of Youth"."(...) The Doom of Youth must be understood as a detailed discussion of a world conspiracy.""The Doom of Youth is divided into six sections, an unnumbered introductory preamble consisting of a foreword, an introduction, a list of contents giving a chapter by chapter summary, and five numbered parts. Part I discusses the relationship of youth agitation, economics, and politics at an abstract level, parts II and III use popular sources, newspapers and magazines, to document the activities of the youth cult in the anglo-saxon world, part IV turns to middle and highbrow literature to discuss the concomitant feminisation of the male, and part V reviews the discussion and provides further examples.""Having laid out the progress and methods of the Doom of Youth we are now in a position to summarise, to raise the whisper to the level of normal statement. There is an international conspiracy of capital, largely Jewish, and almost entirely under Jewish direction, and this conspiracy stands behind the reorganisation of the Soviet Union, and also behind the various social phenomena which Lewis terms “wars”, Age-wars, Sex-wars, Race-wars. And indeed it is responsible for the “Great War” itself. These “wars” serve the purpose of destabilising the social structure of the European states, whose character is inconvenient for those who wish to produce maximally efficient industries. Perhaps, also, these conspirators are motivated by ancient political enmities as much as by the desire for profit. It is even possible to see the economics as the manifestation of a deeper political grudge, the anti-Aryan misanthropy of the Jew. Against this the Europeans have little defence. Their intellectuals are too short-sightedly selfish to intervene, and if there is any hope at all it is from a vulgarly populist movement, such as Hitler’s, which is prepared to use the same tools as the conspiracy to mobilise the peoples of Europe in self-defence.""(...) the future rulers of the world will be “male matriarchs – who in fact are physiologically male, though very feminine in outlook – not warlike masters like the Normans, or Manchus, but more like a sleek and subtle theocracy”, the reader will recall that elsewhere in this book Lewis suggests “That the Jew, according to the standards of european masculinity – if put beside a Viking or the typical warlike types of Gaul or of Germany – is feminine – that is clear enough”, and that “In a non-military race, like the jewish [...] the men are less ‘manly’ than the Nordic Blond, and the women are never so chocolate-boxily ‘feminine’ as their anglo-saxon sisters.)”"http://libellus.co.uk/uploads/jc_doom_of_youth_21_04_13.pdf
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:49:34 +0100
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
This mainly concerns his universalist and internationalist views from then on."Lewis sees the violence, irrationality, and rootlessness of American life as positive qualities; qualities not only to be valued in themselves as exuberant proliferations of the human spirit, but also to be welcomed as the birthpangs of the world society of the future, the society of “cosmic man” (by “cosmic” he means cosmopolitan or internationalist). In effect he turns on its head the negative image which so many European and American intellectuals have of America.""The essence of what Lewis says in America and Cosmic Man is that since most of us realize that permanent peace, some form of economic collectivism, and an international political community are prerequisites for human survival in the atomic age, we must venerate America and learn from it. For the United States is the nation best exemplifying in embryonic form the world order in which these things will be established. The familiar simile of the melting pot fascinates him: he sees America as “the great big promiscuous grave into which tumble, and there disintegrate, all that was formerly race, class, or nationhood.” In a remarkable chapter entitled “The Case Against Roots,” he praises rootlessness as a necessary condition of world citizenship, and points out that no one is really rooted in America, “everyone has left his roots over in Poland or Ireland, in Italy or in Russia, so we are all floating around in a rootless Elysium.” In a similar manner he views the standardization of life with its wiping out of regional peculiarities and prejudices as the forerunner of the standardization of world culture, an irreversible trend under industrialism.""Before the war Lewis had shown sympathy for fascism in his 1926 work The Art of BeingRuled ('I am not a communist; if anything I favour some form of fascism rather than communism')'' and been grouped by T. S. Eliot with a number of writers who 'incline in the direction of some kind of fascism'.He had also written two books about Hitler, which many believed meant that he supported him. In a footnote in his autobiography he was to write as follows about them in response to a comment by George Orwell in the Partisan Review (Summer, 1946): As to my books 'in favour of Hitler', I have written two books about Hitler, one when he first appeared on the scene... (in 1930) before he came to power and revealed what a lunatic he was, and the other (The Hitler Cult and How it Will End) at the time of Munich.The first book was 'in favour': though it was not the Nazi's view of the matter; the second was very much the reverse of 'in favour'. The Hitler Cult is in many ways a rewriting of the earlier Hitler with numerous points refuted which had been made on behalf of Hitler in the first book. The satirical America I Presume impressions of America published in New York in August 1940, reinforces this change of opinion by referring to Hitler as a ' barbarous little mountebank'.In the same book Lewis expressed a view which is one of the main themes of Anglosaxony, namely that whatever happened during the present war - whether or not America would enter it - 'it is of vast importance that the English-speaking peoples of the world should act in harmony'.Anglosaxony is written in three parts. The first, entitled Democracy and Fascism is a defence of the democratic ideal against criticisms from both Right and Left. Lewis stresses that he sees democracy as a 'limited, an Anglo-Saxon family affair' but he does not mean to give democracy a nationalist character. Instead he envisages it as one only among
several ways of life and not as a political system 'desirous of imposing itself upon all and sundry'."(Read further at http://www.bl.uk/eblj/1997articles/pdf/article10.pdf which continues with more relevant explanations ; those very parts however are not easily reproduced here)It must however be noted that The Art Of Being Ruled, thus far from being a balanced work, contains varying positions and statements on the subjects at hand (the breakdown of the family unit being favoured by the author, for example), which in turn are not easily summarized. Academic texts only deal indirectly with these aspects of his writings. Therefore the best sources of reference are the very writings themselves."The first of Lewis' 'Man of the World' books, The Art of Being Ruled attempts to set out the changes that were happening and were, he believed, inevitable the replacement of liberal democracy by some form of socialism (centralised and authoritarian or local and communitarian), the destruction of the nuclear family unit, the growth of corporatism, changes in gender and sexuality, these and other phenomena were not being recognised, but society would need to make choices about them, or it would sleepwalk mechanically into the future. Roughly, The Art of Being Ruled presents the issues about which choices will need to be made, and looks at their implications. In the dust-jacket it is stated that the changes analysed in the book necessitate a new, strenuousand intellectual approach to life. But Lewis began to think that, instead of adopting such a critical approach, culture at all levels ; even avant-garde culture ; was simply replicating the contemporary society's tacit ideology of fatalistic mechanical change.""A large part of The Art of Being Ruled is about the disintegration of the family, the rise of feminism, and the so-called 'sex war', which according to Lewis is a consequence of sexual inversion. Chapter X, "The Matriarchate and Feminine Ascendency", opens as follows:ALL orthodox opinion - that is, to-day, 'revolutionary' opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man. Its terms are those of a war or insurrection still, although theoretically the war is over and the position gained. But subtly and in the nature of things, it is no longer a question of adjusting an inequality, but of advancing (as of a superior nature) the qualities of the 'down-trodden,' of the 'weaker' sex. [...] Such a war as the 'sex war,' as was to be expected, does not end in a stabilization in which the man and the woman exist on equal terms. It necessarily ends in a situation in which feminine values are predominant. (223)As an example of a book in which this tendency is noticeable, Lewis mentions "The Dominant Sex, by Matilda and Mathias Vaerting." (223) [http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b13626103.pdf](...)(...) Part IX, Chapter III ("'Call Yourself a Man!'"). On the opening page of this chapter (Art 279), Lewis discusses the strange use of the term 'man' denoting any individual, male or female:The term MAN implies a variety of indispensable but not necessarily pleasant things, quite independently of the specific sex characters, although it can only be attached to an individual falling within the subdivision of the adult male. The identification by means of sex-character on the part of adult males has always been a source of mortification to women and children : and at the present juncture some more neutral term should be substituded for it [...] (279)(...)The position of the male to-day, and the symbolism of the word MAN, are purely artificial [...] The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards - material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden. (282-3)"Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse. In : "Call Yourself a Man!" (The Art Of Being Ruled)P. S. http://mileswmathis.com contains some interesting speculations about the supposed sponsoring of the earliest modernist art salons by secret services. Thus before the so-called "Cold War" period of the 1950s and the preceeding years. But without factual material these claims remain exactly that : speculations.As for a statement made in that same context : the career of E. Pound is - indeed - notable. The claim of him not really being interned in an American prison wing after the war is simply difficult to sustain considering the many witnesses.
From: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
To: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 05:29:32 -0800
Subject: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)
Please elaborate on this statement of yours: « changes in his thinking becoming especially apparent from the 1940 years and onwards. » Not that his personal case matters in the least : it is just that, if that change pertained to his most insightful views on the process of matriarcalisation of intrinsically patriarcal « Gemeinschaften », it would be indicative of a feminisation of the thought of the last men aware ofthe former process.
P.s : Bowden tended to see Fascists almost everywhere.
Free-masons have been penetrating the institutions of European countries for the past 300 years. Is there still much to be penetrated ?
The NSA spying on the « European » Union offices is more than a bit like a hedonistic husband spying on her wife, or rather, to extend the sexual metaphor, his lesbian wife spying on the lesbian girlfriend of her gay husband's best friend, in some sort of cosmic vaudeville, as long as, to take the aquatic metaphor one step further, a sponge can have a sexual life.
The trouble with that kind of investigations is that they tend to predict as imminent phenomena which have occurred ages ago, - one of the means employed by the global forces of subversion which was not indicated neither by R Guénon, nor by J. Evola.
Here's a transcription of the original Pan-European Manifesto (1923) by Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi.
https://eufundedproeutroll.wordpress.com/2014/06/08/eu-federalization-the-pan-european-manifesto-paneuropa/eufundedproeutroll.wordpress.comVan: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com> namens evola_as_he_is@... [evola_as_he_is] <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com>
Verzonden: maandag 28 maart 2016 22:32
Aan: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Onderwerp: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)Free-masons have been penetrating the institutions of European countries for the past 300 years. Is there still much to be penetrated ?
The NSA spying on the « European » Union offices is more than a bit like a hedonistic husband spying on her wife, or rather, to extend the sexual metaphor, his lesbian wife spying on the lesbian girlfriend of her gay husband's best friend, in some sort of cosmic vaudeville, as long as, to take the aquatic metaphor one step further, a sponge can have a sexual life.
The trouble with that kind of investigations is that they tend to predict as imminent phenomena which have occurred ages ago, - one of the means employed by the global forces of subversion which was not indicated neither by R Guénon, nor by J. Evola.
'The Principle of Advertisement and its Relation to Romance', as taken from 'Time and Western Man' (1927) by Wyndham Lewis (http://www.fivebodied.com/archives/audio/bob/Wyndham_Lewis/TimeandWesternMan-Book1.pdf).
The Principle of Advertisement and its Relation to Romance
Romance, as currently used, [...] denotes what is unreal or unlikely, or at all the events not present, in contrast to what is scientifically true and accessible to the senses here and now. Or it is, in its purest expression, what partakes of the marvelous, the extreme, the unusual. That is why Advertisement (in a grotesque and inflated form) is a pure expression of the romantic mind. Indeed, there is nothing so ‘romantic’ as Advertisement. Advertisement is the apotheosis of the marvelous and the unusual; likewise of the scientifically untrue. The spirit of advertisement and boost lives and has its feverish being in a world of hyperbolic suggestion; it is also the trance or dream-world of the hypnotist. This world of the impossible does not pretend even to be real or exact. The jamesian psychology—more familiar to most Europeans as couéism—is its theoretic expression. What you can make people believe to be true, is true. (The american pragmatical test of any theorem is ‘What difference will its truth or falsehood make to you?’) Advertisement also implies in a very definite sense a certain attitude to Time. And the attitude proper to it is closely related to the particular timephilosophy we were considering above; namely, that philosophy that is at once ‘timeless’ in theory, and very much concerned with Time in practice. Both that conscious philosophy, and the instinctive attitude of the advertising mind towards Time, could be described as a Time-for-Time’s-sake belief. For both, time is a permanent fact. Time for the bergsonian relativist is fundamentally sensation; that is what Bergson’s durée always conceals beneath its pretentious metaphysic. It is the glorification of the life-of-the-moment, with no reference beyond itself and no absolute or universal value; only so much value as is conveyed in the famous proverb; Time is money. It is the argent comptant of literal life, in an inflexibly fluid Time.And the ultimate significance of the philosophy of Time-for-Time’s-sake (since Time is a meaningless thing in itself) is Existence-for-Existence’s-sake. (This difficulty of the meaninglessness of Time, which becomes especially acute when it is your intention to erect Time into a god, as is the case with Professor Alexander, is dealt with at length by that philosopher.)The world in which Advertisement dwells is a one-day world. It is necessarily a plane universe, without depth. Upon this Time lays down discontinuous entities, side by side; each day, each temporal entity, complete in itself, with no perspectives, no fundamental exterior reference at all. In this way the structure of human life is entirely transformed, where and in so far as this intensive technique gets a psychologic ascendancy. The average man is invited to slice his life into a series of one-day lives, regulated by the clock of fashion. The human being is no longer the unit. He becomes the containing frame for a generation or sequence of ephemerides, roughly organized into what he calls his ‘personality.’ Or the highly organized human mind finds its natural organic unity degraded into a worm-like extension, composed of a segmented, equally-distributed, accentless life. Each segment, each fashionday (as the day of this new creature could be called) must be organically selfsufficing. This account of the fashion-day of Advertisement may seem to contradict between the Present of the classical mind, as opposed to the perspectives of the romantic, the time-mind, too. This misunderstanding will already have been partly averted. The reader’s attention has been drawn to the paradox of the doctrinaire of ‘timelessness’ more obsessed by Time, and the fashion day, than is anybody else. For the further and complete dispersal of this possible difficulty, I must refer the reader to a subsequent section of my book. It can only finally be disposed of by a careful definition of the classical ‘Present,’ as opposed to the romantic ‘Present.’In the world of Advertisement, Coué-fashion, everything that happens to-day (or everything that is being advertised here and now) is better, bigger, brighter, more astonishing than anything that has ever existed before. (Dr. Coué actually was embarked upon his teaching, so he said, by noticing, and responding to, an advertisement.) The psychology that is required of the public to absorb this belief in the marvellous one and only—monist, unique, superlative, exclusive—fact (immediately obliterating all other beliefs and shutting the mind to anything that may happen elsewhere or to-morrow) is a very rudimentary one indeed. The best subject for such a séance would be a polyp, evidently. An individual looking, with his intellect, before and after, seeing far too much at a time for the requirements of the advertiser or hypnotist, is not at all the affair of Advertisement. For the essence of the this living-in-the-moment and for-the-moment—of submission to a giant hyperbolic close-up of a moment—is, as we have indicated, to banish all individual continuity. You must, for a perfect response to this instantaneous suggestion, be the perfect sensationalist—what people picture to themselves, for instance, as the perfect American. Your personality must have been chopped won to an extremely low level of purely reactionary life. Otherwise you are of no use to the advertiser. If there were many like you, he would soon be put out of business.The traditional yankee method of Advertisement suggests a credulity, a love of sensation and an absence of background in the submissive, hypnotized public, that could justly claim to be unexampled, and as beating anything ever heard of before in recorded history. But that method is now in universal use. It promises monts et merveilles every instant of the day. It has battered and deadened every superlative so much that superlatives no longer in themselves convey anything. All idea of a true value—of any scale except the pragmatic scale of hypnotism and hoax—is banished for ever from the life of the great majority of people living in the heart of an advertising zone, such as any great modern city. They are now almost entirely incapable of anything except sensation; for to think is to be able to traverse the scale of values from the nadir to the zenith. The world of superlatives is a monotonous horizontal drumming on the top-note, from which an insistent, intoxicating time can be extracted, but nothing else. So Advertisement fulfils all the requirements of the general definition of ‘romance.’It is not altogether without point to refer to this method to its origins in the competitive frenzy of finance, and of finance first become delirious as it saw its staggering opportunity in its operations in the New World. The marvellous american vitality enhanced this process, and may yet defeat it. For the decision, as to Europe and even the destiny of the White Race, rests with America, perhaps.Just as the individual whose conscience is clear, and whose pockets are full, does not experience the need to overwhelm his neighbour with assurances of his honesty—indeed, if his pockets are sufficiently full, does not care much what his neighbour thinks; so such a system as that of Coué is not invented for people in robust health, but for the debilitated and ailing members of a ruined society. The optimism-to-order of ‘Every day and in every respect I grow better and better’ is of the same kind as the political optimism-to-order- of democratic politics.The wholesale change-over of what was ‘public’ into what, for the European, was private (the conditions obtaining in aryan civilization, what Maine calls the ‘ancient order of the aryan world,’ from the earliest tribal times, as a result of the ‘individualism’ distinguishing our race), and vice versa, has been very much facilitated by the agency of Advertisement. Advertisement has functioned in the social and artistic or learned world rather as the engineer has in the factory. It has taught the public—as the engineer taught the producer—that as Advertisement-value nothing is refuse or waste. Indeed, the garbage is often more valuable than the commodity from which it proceeds. But this value is a money-value essentially, and functions imperfectly in its social application.Van: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com> namens evola_as_he_is@... [evola_as_he_is] <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com>
Verzonden: donderdag 14 januari 2016 11:07
Aan: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Onderwerp: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)Thank you for these further quotes from Lewis' work as well as summaries of his thought. Since Romanticism is referred to, it is worth noting that it is at the cost of « redifining Romanticism » (« as a modern critique of modernity », p. 30) that the contemporary author you recently quoted on Benn and Evola is able to label the Italian writer as « romantic » on those grounds, whereby he shows that he only skimmed through 'Revolt against the Modern World', the only book by Evola he seems to be able to spell.
I have chosen the following excerpts from Wyndham Lewis' writings to present more fully his discussion of the feminisation of European men, even though it shows that he is actually not at all opposed to these developments (very much the contrary).
Lewis, Percy Wyndham (1984). Rude Assignment : An Intellectual Autobiography. Santa Barbara : Black Sparrow Press, p. 187-191.
One of the first questions dealt with in 'The Art of Being Ruled was that of inherited, or artificially generated, martial ferocity. This is of course the central problem of Europe and its wars. Mr. Bertrand Russel's solutionafter world war i was 'kindliness'. Failing that, he considered the solution adopted by the Houyhnhnms towards the Yahoos, 'namely extermination', is the only one. He added that ápparently the Yahoos are bent on applying it to each other'.
But who are the Yahoos ? My grocer and my postman, the teller at my bank, the Smith's bookstall man from whom I buy magazines - they are the kind of men who get 'wiped out'. But are they the Yahoos ? I do not think so : for they are quiet, good-natured people. From the 'ferocious' solution of the Houyhnhnms I for my part turn away. Nature, I suggest, will step in : has already done so.
Nature, I mean, will whisper in the ear of the little overtaxed male : 'Why be so big and tough and take all the knocks ? No one believes in you any more. Stand down, reduce your chest measurement to the C.3 mark. That is the way to survive. The survival of the fittest is out of date. The C.3 man will be there while you are pushing up the daisies !'
The feminisation, or neutralisation, of the White European, some change affected by the glands of internal secretion perhaps, will produce the desired result. All this, in 1925, seemed indicated by everything which the social scene was charged. In many directions, even, could be seen what looked like the emergence of a third, or neuter, sex.
That was a uniquely favourable moment to observe the first violent symptoms of disintegration. A little later and they go under the surface and are more difficult to study. The feminist had been followed by the feminising male - a compensatory movement - and these developments took a spectacular form. New York was far less affected than London ; the American he-man is a redoubtable conservative obstacle. But I remember in 1931 in New York a journalist relating some violent incideents in a nightspot, and his subsequent reflections ran like this. 'You see how things have changed,' he said. 'A few years ago if you were rude to a fairy he would go away into a corner and cry. Now he gives you a sock on the jaw that knocks you cold and telephones for an ambulance.'
The change from the traditional social pattern, dominated by sex, into an asexual pattern, with maleness shorn of all but its merely organic distinctness, will come about in many ways. One of the most obvious, is via class-war. Man constitutes as it were a class. Among the many class-wars by which European society is being ery effectually disintegrated, the sex-war occupied a position of great importance.
Though no longer a 'war', the effects of that civil war of the sexes are everywhere evident: in the form of pressures tending to dissolve the Family (which is the stronghold of the 'masculine'as much as of the 'eternal feminine') is revealed the same great design as was, in the first place, responsible for setting in motion the 'sex-war', and its Press-slogans injurious to the man as husband.
I have spoken of these 'wars' in an earlier sectio, but now I must refer to them again. The 'class-war' is the proto-type - the war of the poor against the rich. Organised upon the same principle are the sex-war (man against woman) ; the age-war (old against young) ; the war of urban-man versus agricultural-man ; of the highbrow against the lowbrow. In all socieites there have been these divisions, and many others. These are the seams where the various patches of which our society is composed are sewn together. Unpick these patches - of which every society is made up, of necessity - and chaos comes again.
As to urban versus agricultural man, all Marxist parties favour the proletariat as against the peasant : agricultural man is traditionally the great conservative, the factory worker (or formaerly the urban populace) the potential revolutionary. By the age-war I refer to the tendency to incite the young against their elders. The same motive is again operative here. The revolutionary of course regards the young as his natural allies : the old (with caution and scepticism that years generally bring) his natural enemies.
In most primitive or patriarchal socieites the Elders are the leaders : and this tradition is always very strong. Also, the old are the repositories of tribal or national tradition : but it is precisely those traditions that it is the purpose of the revolutionary to undermine. All advertisement of the 'young idea', 'youth at the helm' slogans, and so on, is encouraged, if not promoted, by Big Business or the revolutionary mind of contemporary politics.
Regarding these 'wars' I have always been in two minds. First, as much wars of this sort, as armed conflict, are techniques I can not applaud, even if I recognisese that they are means to ends of which I approve. As I stand for fundamental change, I am for the end, at east, in all these instances. Alas that the good so frequently lies at the end of a sewer, or cleverly concealed in a lunatic asylum.
However, the aim throughout is definitely to reduce the 'high' to the level of the 'low' (as if we were all primitive christians) : to dissolve privilege in ay shape or form, wherever encountered. And has not the European world been a 'man's world' ? Its laws the reporter on the sex-war front was wont to refer to as 'man-made laws'. Man, that classical example of privilege, secured his many advantages by force. So he stands condemned - in an age committed (theoretically) to the discouragement of physical force - as enjoying power resting ultimately upon physical violence.
As a symbol of the bully and violator of elementary human rights, men often are ironically situated. A weedy and insignificant specimen of the male sex-class hardly looks the part. There are a group of functions which involve him in this class struggle. 'Apart from man as father, or man as husband or man as leader (in the tribe of the State), there is an even more irreducible way in which man is a symbol of power and dominiation. Man as man, tout court, is an anachronism.' Such is the situation I have just indicated.
The discrediting and dethroning of this feeblest and smallest of sovereigns, the little father of the family, in his squalid domestic 'castle', is on of the main features of the demasculinising process. ['We do not want an Englishmans home to be his "castle", we want a community to get the best out of every human being.' Mr. Silkin, May 17, 1947] Many of the specifically masculine attributes would disappear at the same time as the loss of status.
Such is the political aspect of the transaction. But Big Business, as well as the politician, has for many years had the male principle under observation ; both have their plans for its elimination. To think of the housewife, for instance, puts the modern economic planner in a rage. The entire horsepower of this good woman, all the year round, consumed in attending to one man and perhaps a couple of children - washing, cooking, scrubbing, sewing, shopping ! That must without delay, he insists, be superseded by some kind of barrack-life for working people, the male and female segregated, with communal meals, crèches etc. The housewife must go !
There is something besides this : there is the simple question of man's economic prerogative. Great numbers of men are engaged in unskilled work which a woman or a child is equally capable of carrying out : on account of the sex prerogative, male privilege, some inefficient little man demands a wage superior to what a woman or child would receive, for doing the same thing.
These operations are obscured just now by the great social changes which have marked the first two years of post-war ii. But those changes will finish what the 'suffragette' and the post-war i 'sex-war' etc. began. The abolition of the Family as we have known it up to now is more than ever on the agenda of those who have the power to change what they want to change. It is not an idle or ill-founded prohecy to say that a third sex ultimately emerge. The wayin which the more intelligent promoter of these social reajustments envisaged the matter was that something like the sterile female workers of the beehive should be, not perhaps aimed at, so much as anticipated, in the ordinary course of things.
All this of course is hardly more than a speeding-up and deliberate organisation of tendencies inherent in the Machine Age. Wasp-waists, corsetry and crinolines (aside from the question of their absurdity) could not have survived. The economic injustice imposed on women by barbarous laws must, in a period obsessed by problems of social justice, be ended. It is a something superadded about which I have been speaking.
A few words before leaving the subject of the Family, and of the Third Sex respectively. It would be absurd to suppose that the working man would be the loser as a result of the dismantling and dispersion of the Family. To live cooped up with a snarling woman, or a lazy shatternly one (I am speaking realistically) who adds child after child to the household until there are so many there is scarcely room to move in their little dwelling, is not a thing to look back on with the regret for an uprooted landlord. A family group that he is unable to feed and clothe, half of them adopting the habits of scavenger dogs - to have to relinquish that male privilige should be easy.
This man would be far happier, who can doubt it, in a monastery : happier still in a men's communal dwelling, collective farm, barracks, bunk-house, club : anywhere liberated from the crushing responsibilities of sex, of fatherhood and the upkeep of a dirty little 'castle'. As to the woman, is there any question that she would be far better off as a member of a 'third sex' - with he pin-up boy over her spinster's cot, no children tugging at her like a rag-doll, with some such healthy work as a 'clippie' [Woman omnibus conductress: postwar ii] or (a little grander) a confidential secretary ? This postscript should suffice to dispose of any feeling that I have been betraying an inhuman streak.-
Sex, too, in one of its most obsessive forms, played its part in the early disintegrating process : the 'nineties led the way with a great literary martyr.
World war i produced socially more shock symptoms, as I have already observed, than has world war ii. Whether male inversion must count as one of them depends upon whether post-war ii can show as severe an epidemic as its predecessor or not. In the Universities of post-war i the Proust-reading, Wilde-worshipping, undergraduate turned daintily to Sodom, while the female student repaired to Lesbos. The building up of the species was suddenly out of favour : [The attitude of the ancient Hebrews to this aberrant sexuality was severely practical. They condemned it as unpatriotric. So undoubtedly it is, in so far as it it spells sterility.] the stocks of the species did not stand very high. Young men wanted to be women. THe man's rôle was patently unprofitable : too much had recently been asked of him. In the decade of 'What Price Glory' he reacted violently. If you think this analysis is fanciful, what other cause would you assign to such epidemics ? Although only world war can account for the violence of this fashion, however, it may not occur (in the 'forties as in the 'twenties) as a result of war alone. War is only part of a larger pattern.
How male-inversion correlates with other sex-movements is explained by me in chapter iv of Part viii, 'A. of B. R.' ['Art of Being Ruled'] 'It (male inversion) is as an integral part of feminism proper that it should be considered a phase of the sex-war. The "homo" is the legitimate child of the "suffragette".'
What is quite certain is that socially the conjunction of the women and one of these ubiquitous perverts boded no good for the normal male. There was an affinity between the rouged boy and a violent type of young middle-aged woman, of the kind Lawrence wrote about and describes as 'sitting on a volcano'. Intrigues hatched themselves where Jockey Club mingled with the odour of Ninetyish carnations blooming in buttonholes upon male bosoms. - The male-invert fashion shared many antagonisms with the average woman. An embittered, and no longer young, woman is able to revenge herself upon the he-man, for whom she would no longer be attractive. Often it has been alleged that the 'pansy' shelters behind the woman, but, as I pointed out somewhere, it is equally true to say that women act through these militant anti-he-man perverts.
Symons, Julian (1991). The Essential Wyndham Lewis. An Introduction to his Work. London : Vintage, p. 63-83.
(From The Art Of Being Ruled)
The Matriarchate and Feminine ascendency
All orthodox opionion – that is, to-day, 'revolutionary' opinion either of the pure or the impure variety – is anti-man. Its terms are those of a war or insurrection still, although theoretically the war is over and the position gained. But subtly and in the nature of things, it is no longer a question of adjusting an inequality, but of advancing (as of a superior nature) the qualities of the 'down-trodden,' of the 'weaker' sex. On the scientific, or the pseudo-scientific, front of the world-movement of sex reversal, it issues in the form of a great deal of insistence on the phenomenon of the Matriarchate. The Matriarchate tends to be represented as a more absolute thing than it ever was, and as in a sense the natural, the primitve social organization. Such a war as the 'sex war,' as was to be exected, does not end in stabilization in which the man and the woman exist on equal terms. It necessarily ends in a situation in which feminine values are predominant.
That the 'sex war' is not at the finish (whatever it may have been at the start) an egalitarian movement is certain. It is not an insurrection with an egalitarian watchword any longer, but a'war' for domination, not 'equal rights.' The nietzschean notions that converted in the vague general The nietzschean notions that converted in the vague gneral mind the darwinian formula of a struggle for existence into that of a struggle for power operates here as elsewhere. In innumerable books and articles on the subject this tendency can be traced. A highly characteristic one is The Dominant Sex, by Matilda and Mathias Vaerting. (Whether the order in which their names are printed is a survival of the days of chivalry, or is a token of the surrender of Mathias, we are not told.)
Abusing and over-using the slender evidence of the Matriarchate, these writers' theory is that sometimes men have ruled the world and sometimes women: that the pendulum swings backwards and forwards: but that equal rights, or a rule shared equally by both, is only a transitional state, and is not the characteristic one. That one or other should be the top dog is the natural condition.
“There is, indeed, a tendency towards fixity in the relationship of power between the sexes, whatever that relationship may be. But there is a still stronger countervailing tendency towards change, towards progressive modification. The relationship of power is subject to the laws of motion. The present authors' researches seem to justify the contention that the movement of the relationship of power between the sexes is undulatory or that it resembles the swing of a pendulum. Automatically, masculine dominance is replaced by feminine, and feminine by masculine. In the swing from the prevalence of one form of sexual dominance to the other the pendulum necessarily traverses the stage in which there is a balance of power between the sexes: this the phase of equal rights.
This movement, however, does not seem to be a simple oscillation. We do not find that the power of one of the sexes continuously diminishes, whilethat of the other continuously increases. The subordinate sex experiences from time to time reverses in its march to power, these reverses being followed by fresh advances... The dominant sex, on the other hand, the one whose power is declining, will win occasional victories even during that decline... The highest point of the movement of the pendulum is that at which the reversal of the movement begins. After the dominance of one of the sexes has been pushed to the pitch of absolutism, and when the power has reached a climax, the descent into the valley of equal rights begins.”
These writers excuse themselves presumably for the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence on which they have to rely for this mechanical and well-ordered picture by inventing something like Freud's Censor. They imagine a despotic and marvellously thorough sex soul, carefully erasing all traces of the rule of the sex recently dispossessed.
It will be seen that the Vaertings deal in a type of historic psychology like the fatalism of the decline and fall of all empires ; although for the foundations of their statemts they have to get into the vague, 'vast,' conventient region of proto-history and unlimited pre-history. But as to any movement on the part of these two minds to question the desirability of 'empire' and domination at all, you would look in vain for it.
If this mechanical oscillatory movement were, for the history of which we have any reliable record, correct, then would it not be strange to find these 'rebel minds,' because a certain mechanical movement has always taken place, accepting it for all time? Should not the 'progressive' ticket oblige its holder to something different to that? Is not, in fact, the historic attitude the very negation of 'progress' – if 'progress' is to break the spell (for is it not that?) of mechanical necessity? So the historic conservatism of such mechanistic writers throws them into the sort of strange opposition with their 'revolutionary' label that we have noticed occurring elsewhere. Their evidence is collected on the same princple as that directing the inquisitorial procedure in which the functions of judge, attorney, jury, etc., were vested in one person: their evidence of the order and value of that extracted by torture and hypnotic suggestion.
To wish back the patriarchal family (with the patria potestas of the roman domestic despot at the end of the end of the reactionary road, or the slave-wife) because feminsm seems to be rapidly becoming affected to a vast scheme of politcal exploitation; or because men, not yet free of women, have not the necessary initiative to institute a secondary war, to hasten the dissolution that has begun, and which, as things stand present, falls most heavily on them, – is the natural reactionary gestury. They feel too guilty in their capacity of hereditary 'tyrant' or 'sultan' to say much openly. And 'chivalry' is a great obstacle to declaring war.
The recommendation of Christ to the Rich Man has alread been mentioned in connection with the Man as an emblem of sex-authority. The surrender of the Plain Man to the feminizing woman was a piece of chivalrous nonsense, if it was no coercion. So christianity is responsible for it, since chivalry dictated it; unless force covers the whole transactionl. But if the Rich Man, when he had given up his possessions, should howl like Timon because he was not then of so much importance, he would be a poor christian. It is against christianity that man should turn, the source of all his sexual woes. These two actions – that of surrendering any wealth you may have accumalated or inherited by the caste or sex to which you belong – are highly to be commended, in my opinion. But what is not usually recognized is that they are of exactly the same order: just as a magnanimous christian self-sacrifice in sex is the same as it would be in race. According to any worldly standard they are both excessively stupid.
The 'right' of the child to freedom fram family control is of a piece with the 'right' of the woman to an 'independent' existence. They and the rest of the sex innovations and theories of the family are in the nature of factory regulations, nothing more. The multitudinous mollusc in the body of which these changes occur has to be found a soft or a sentimental reason for everyting that happens in such a tender and respectable place. But the real reason, although matter-of-fact enough, is not from the public point of view threatening or alarming. The truth always has to be hidden, whether it is good or bad. In itself it causes alarm: any truth is impossible to utter.
Sorel writes: 'Marx, as is known, proposed this law, that “every class which, successively, has seized power has sought to safeguard its newly acquired position of mastery by imposing on society conditions calculate to ensure it (the conquering class) its own revenue.” Several times the same principle is employed by him in attempting to predict what would happen to the world as a result of aproletarian revolution. It is in this way that he comes to announce the disappearance of the bourgeois family, becuase the proletarians will not find themselves conditions likely to permit them to practise this type of sexual union.'
Since the great masses of the people are not likely to be in a position to be prolong the famliy arrangement based on an individual 'home' (marriage, and the family acircle to which the European is accustomed), it will be abolished. That is the economic fact at the bottom of 'feminism.' Given industrial conditions, the Plain Man and the Plain Woman will be better off if the unit of the family is abandoned. But that consideration would perhaps not have been sufficient to bring this revolution about. It is an economic adjustment primarily: after that a great deal of relief from responsibility, and rom a too constant conjugal tête-à-tête, is to be laid to its credit.
The Piecemealing of the Personality
Race is the queeen of the 'classes': but in Europe to-day its power is very slight – for one reason, because it lacks all organization or even reality. But there are less fundamental ones, but usually far more present to our consciousness in everyday life, needing the greatest attention, and involving a variety of ritual. The other 'classes,' it is true, have never been recognized as of the same standing as race. As a casus belli they have been inferior of it. None of these other differences, or the membership of any of the other classes, was recognized as a pretext for taking life. Race or nationality, on the other hand, has, in the modern world, been recognized as a sanction for murder by every State. But this sanction usually had only 'nationality' to repose on, which was a very different thing to race. Marx, with his 'class war,' indirectly demonstrated the absurdityy of these privileges of race – especially when it was not race at all. The success of his system has shown how easy it is to substitute, in a disorganized, non-racially founded society, any 'class' for the classical 'racial' unit of the State.
Once 'war' between classes started spreading, from the teaching of Marx, it did not stop at social 'class,' naturally. Schopenhauer, for instance, early in the last century, called women the 'short-legged race.'So women were thenceforth one race and men another race. The idea of race substituted itself for that of sex. But where there are races there are wars. The 'sex war' was soon in full swing. Schopenhauer himself, it is interesting to recall, was one of the first in the field. He early in life flung himself on a strange woman whom he found conversing on the staircase of the house where he lived, and threw her downstairs. For this pioneer engagement, however, he was forced for the res of his life to pay a crushing pension to this crippled member of the enemy 'race.'
Women are notoriously unamenable to strictly racial mysteries. The classical example of this is that of the Sabine women deciding, as it is supposed, to remain the property of the Sabine ravishers rather than return to the defeated men of their own race.
The child is the 'class' that is most nearly associated with the sex-classification: or ather, the age-difference it represents. 'The child is father to the man': and the child is, as primitive soieties saw, actually a different being, in spite of physiological continuity, to the grown man into which he develops. It is the case of the worm and the butterfly – only in inverse order, the butterfly coming firtst. So Master Smith and Mister Smith are as different almost (when they are the same person at different ages of Smith's career) as though they were offspring and parent.
But the differences diminishes when you are dealing with Isaac Newton, or even with Clara Vere de Vere, in place of poor 'Smith.' The more highly developed an individual is, or the more civilized a race, this discontinuity tends to disappear. The 'personality' is born. Continuity, in the individual as in the race, is the diagnostic of a civilized condition . If you can break this personal continuity in an individual, you can break him.For he is that continuity. It is against these joints and sutures of the personality than an able attack will always be directed. You can divide personality than an able attack will always be directed. You can divide a person against himself, unless he is very well organized: as the two halves of a severed earwig become estranged and fight with each other when they meet.
A good demonstration of the rationale of this piecemealing of the personality for attack was given the other day by a caricaturist. He divided his celebrated victims into their Young and Old Selves: in this way he had them in half, like hydras, and made the angry tail discourse with the fiery head. But you can effect far more than this. You can with luck cut men up so thorougly that they become almost 'six-months men,' as they might be called, rather than men of one continuous personal life – than 'life men.' It is only necessary to mention the central subject of the very effective and fashionable plays of Pirandello, to show how, systematically presented in a dramatic form, this segregation of the 'selves' of which the personality is composed can affect the public mind.
But there is no way in which people differ, however minutely, that does not supply material for a 'war.' And the general contention throughout this essay is that they cannot have too much of 'class': that people's passion for 'class' and for reposing their personality in a network of conventional 'classicfication,' is not often realized. Where war is concerned you must, of course, disregard entirely the humanitarian standpoint. Passively men may even enjoy war, as the bird enjoys being drawn irresistibly to the fang of the snake. The blowing off of heads and arms is a very secondary matter with the majority of people. But that does not justify you as a responsible ruler in abusing this insensitiveness.
When really well mixed into a good, strong group, men are so many automata: they hardly notice any disturbance, like a war. But that the conscious self (in so far as it remains) of the average human being is terribly bloodthirsty and combative, much as I should like to, I find it difficult to credit. By themselves people are, every one admits, averse to fighting: it demands too much energy. Perhaps a really perfect group, or class, to prevent itself from dying of inanition, would favour war, as a stimulant. But I think the more the question is examined, the more certain it is that people for themselves (not for others – they enjoy seeing other people fighting, and dying, naturally), and in the mass, prefer eating, sleeping, fornicating, and playing games of skill to killing each other. And even if the happiness of the greatest number is not so individual a matter as Bentham supposed – even if the happiness of dying, let alone living, with a huge crowd of people must have a serious claim on our attention – nevertheless the individual, betrayed, betrayed momentarily bo some collapse or etiolation of the communistic medium, does object very strongly to dying. As an individual he is all for not dying or being crippled – that is the law of nature. And the ruler who bases his action on the stability of this Artificial Man of communism constantly risks sinning against God.
The Physiological Norm and the 'Vicious'
Of all the tokens of the flight of the contemporary european personality form the old aduous and responsible position in whose rigours it delighted, now made too hot for it, there is none so significant as the sex-transformation that is such a feature of post-war life. A few years ago this topic would have been exceedingly difficult to deal with in a book destined for public sale. Even to-day it is not an easy one, but for rather different reasons.
On what tone are we to address ourselves to the consideration of this inverted fashion, abstracting ourselves, of necessity, from any prejudices we may feel for the purpose? Dr Matignon (Archives d'anthropologoie criminelle), the great authority on China, said that he had never hearda Chinese express any disapproval of sexual inversion except that is was universally agreed to be bad for the eyes. Until auite recently european society took a very severe view of it; which dislike was apparently a sort of tradition in any case among the germanic peoples. Genuine, fully developed physical inversion in men is probably quite rare: in a time unfavourable to its practice it makes a sort of martyr of the individual born with it – a martyr to his glands, like 'the painter called Sandys' in the limerick, or in the sense that we say 'a martyr to the gout.' People regard it askance as a kind of possession; and in many rough communities every misfortune would befall these delinquents of natural processes, whose auite simple and harmless topsy-turvydom was associated with witchcraft and treated on that basis. Even so late as the famous 'nineties the english courts made a martyr of that description of Oscar Wilde. He became almost a political martyr, other countries using well-advertised agony to point to the philistinism of England. A very amiable and charming person, he awakened the chivalrous instincts everywhere, like a very attractive maiden in distress. And as he possessed to the full the proselytizing zeal that usally goes with sex inversion (as with any other intesification of sex), he prepared the ground with his marydom, ecstatic recantations, eloquent and tearful confessons, and the great prestige of his wit, for the complete reversal of the erotic machinery that has ensued or ensuing.
An admission of complete moral blindness and indifference, although it might be damaging under certain circumstances, will not be misplaced in handling this subject. But there is is another aspect of the matter that also claim attention. There are many people, perhaps, who would be lacking, as I am, in moral sensitiveness, and who would yet be in some way physically offended by practices 'against nature.' This would be extremely unreasonable, as I have already suggested; for to an impartial taste, divinely exempt from participation in either normal or 'abnormal' joys, as we call them, their 'normality'would be just as offensive. They might very well offend the most fastidiuous god more than the object of their disgust; for their 'norm' would be merely the dislike or revolt of the senses against somehting different, not part of their personal norm or system. It would, in short, be the animal self-complacency and self-love that thinks itself 'natural' and engaging, and everything else 'unnatural' and disengaging.
The physical is the only aspect that interest the majority of people, however: which makes the non-physical impracticable as a basis of discussion, or at least very difficult. That there is any other side to a fundamental thing of comon experience – about themselves, in short – they require much persuading. Nevertheless, the attempt has to be made, since the subject is important.
There is still, of course, one thing, but that a physical and exterior one, that plays an important part with many people in any such question as this. A drunkard soon develops a red nose and a generally inflamed, bloated, and dissipated appearance. Red noses are for some reason universally disliked by both men and women. So in the case of the drunkard, although no one would be likely to raise any objection to or experience any disgust as the physical act of pouring into the mouth a probably attractively coloured liquid, the result of this action in the long run is the red nose by which people are generally repelled for some reason. The 'Nancyism'of the joy-boy or joy-man – the over-manneerdpersonality, the queer insistence on 'delicate nurture,' that air of assuring those met that he is a 'real lady,' like the traditional music-hall 'tart' who is always a 'clergyman's daughter,' the grating or falsetto lisp, or the rather cross hauteur of the democratic teashop waitress – are to some human norm almost as central as that which resents the red nose, or the big paunch, offensive.
But the drunkard is at peace with his red nose, probably, and left to himself can live on terms of mutual respect with his paunch, no doubt. Some human norm – the same one, perhaps, that is outraged by the red nose – hates the rat and the beetle. But its idea of the rat is not at all that which the rat has of itself; it loves its swift, clammy sausage of a body as much as the human being does his hairless, erect machine. That erect, conceited human norm may yet have to bend to the will of the rat or the serpent, and go about on its belly near the ground. And then it will be just as pleased with itself as at present: and indeed be happier relieved of the white man's burden cum the human burden cum its amazing moral rectitude.
I suggest that it is only the over-instinctive person, the slave of the human-all-too-human norm, who would be such a stickler for the 'natural' as the reactions sketched above imply. It is this unfortunate conservative human-all-too-human norm that we are incessantly combating. It is even that Old Adam in the 'Nancy' that makes him so satisfied with his humble eccentricity, and insignificant loudly-advertised change of gear – like the exultant cackling of a hen who had laid an egg of an, for it, unwonted calibre.
It is not, alas! by victories of such modest proportions over our too rigid physiologic norm that we can hope to break it down, if that is our intention. We merely flatter and preserve it by such indirect attentions.
But in order to advance a little farther into the physical problems involved in such a scrutiny, let us take the objections of the conventional bridgegroom on his marriage night to evidences of unchastity in his bride. Marrying, the man of the approved masculine type is distressed and disillusioned if he finds that some one has forestalled him in the tasting of this fruit. The gilt is off the gingerbread. This painful situation we usually take at its face value. We think we know what we mean by the gingerbread, and where it is situated. It is on the physical plane, in short, that we believe this deception to have occured. In this, I think, we are wrong.
Suppose
(Message over 64 KB, truncated)- 'The 1927 Time and Western Man, originally to be entitled The Politics of the Personality, is generally considered to be the most important expression of Lewis’ philosophical beliefs. The whole work is an attack on what Lewis calls ‘time-philosophy’, which he claims to be a consensus established among philosophers and literati that serves an ultimate political end: the reduction of men to mechanical, manipulable producers in an industrial dystopia, as described in The Art of Being Ruled. The book is divided into two parts. The first part treats the dissemination of the time-philosophy in a vulgarised form in literature. The second part examines the beliefs of several contemporary philosophers. Lewis greatly generalises the nature of the time-philosophy in such a way that he is able to find traces of it in the work of almost all his contemporaries. The general argument of Time and Western Man is easily expressed. Lewis associates philosophies that celebrate time, and therefore change, with instability of self and society. Philosophies that emphasise space — particularly his own — he identifies with stability and common sense. The time-philosophers emphasise the self within history as part of a process, and therefore, according to Lewis, tend to a mechanistic view of history and of the self which eliminates entirely the free agency of the independent subject. These time-philosophers, then, whether operating at the level of literature or philosophy, are contributing to the dawning of an age of the machine in which all are enslaved and manipulated on Pavlovian principles, dreaming a collective dream of the progress of history towards the millenium. Conversely, those who insist that space rather than time is the essential human medium — and Lewis’ principal ally in this is Bishop Berkeley — refuse to fetishise time and change, and cultivate the intelligence as a reflection upon the world and not a mechanical function of matter. This in turn creates a stable and temporally continuous self. One passage from Time and Western Man is worth quoting at length to indicate how fundamental a conflict Lewis held this to be:So from, say, the birth of Bergson to the present day, one vast orthodoxy has been in the process of maturing in the world of science and philosophy. The material had already collected into a considerable patrimony by the time Bergson was ready to give it a philosophic form. The Darwinian Theory and all the background of nineteenth century materialist thought was already behind it. Under the characteristic headings Duration and Relativity the nineteenth century mechanistic belief has now assumed a final form. It is there for anyone to study at his leisure, and to take or leave. It will assume, from time to time, many new shapes, but it will certainly not change its essential nature again till its doomsday; for I believe that in it we have reached one of the poles of the human intelligence, the negative, as it were. So it is deeply rooted, very ancient, and quite defined. (TWM, 103)' (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-349-22075-5_5)The full table of contents is as follows :Book I THE REVOLUTIONARY SIMPLETONPREFACECHAPTER I: Some of the meanings of romanceCHAPTER II: The Principle of advetisement and its relation to romanceCHAPTER III: Romance and the moralist mindCHPATER IV: The romance of actionCHAPTER V: Art movements and the mass ideaCHAPTER VI: The revolutionary simpletonCHAPTER VII: The russian ballet the most perfect expression of the High BohemiaCHAPTER VIII: The principal 'revolutionary' tendency to-day that of a return to earlier forms of lifeCHAPTER IX: Ezra Pound, etc.CHAPTER X: Tests for counterfeit in the artsCHAPTER XI: A brief account of the child-cultCHAPTER XII: 'Time' -children. Miss Gertrude Stein and Miss Anita LoosCHAPTER XIII: The prose-song of Gertrude SteinCHAPTER XIV: The secret of the success of Charlie ChaplinCHAPTER XV: A man in love with the pastCHAPTER XVI: An analysis of the mind of James JoyceCONCLUSIONAPPENDIXBOOK II AN ANALYSIS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF TIMEPREFACEPART ICHAPTER I: Professor Alexander and the age of time or motionCHAPTER II: The philosophy of the instruments of researchCHAPTER III: Spatialization and concretenessCHAPTER IV: Pure poetry and pure magicCHAPTER V: Romantic Art called in to assist in the destruction of 'Materialism'CHAPTER VI: The popular counters, 'action' and 'life'CHAPTER VII: 'Time' upon the social plane and in philosophyCHAPTER VIII: The fusion of idealism and realismPART IICHAPTER I: History as the specific art of the time schoolCHAPTER II: The 'chronological' philosophy of SpenglerCONCLUSION OF ANALYSIS OF SPENGLERCHAPTER III: The subject conceived as king of the psychological worldPART IIICHAPTER I: Science and scepticismCHAPTER II: Belief and realityCHAPTER III: God as realityCHAPTER IV: The object conceived as king of the physical worldCHAPTER V: Space and TimeCONCLUSIONVan: G. H. <g.vdheide@...>
Verzonden: vrijdag 3 maart 2017 16:38
Aan: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Onderwerp: Re: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)'The Principle of Advertisement and its Relation to Romance', as taken from 'Time and Western Man' (1927) by Wyndham Lewis (http://www.fivebodied.com/archives/audio/bob/Wyndham_Lewis/TimeandWesternMan-Book1.pdf).
The Principle of Advertisement and its Relation to Romance
Romance, as currently used, [...] denotes what is unreal or unlikely, or at all the events not present, in contrast to what is scientifically true and accessible to the senses here and now. Or it is, in its purest expression, what partakes of the marvelous, the extreme, the unusual. That is why Advertisement (in a grotesque and inflated form) is a pure expression of the romantic mind. Indeed, there is nothing so ‘romantic’ as Advertisement. Advertisement is the apotheosis of the marvelous and the unusual; likewise of the scientifically untrue. The spirit of advertisement and boost lives and has its feverish being in a world of hyperbolic suggestion; it is also the trance or dream-world of the hypnotist. This world of the impossible does not pretend even to be real orexact. The jamesian psychology—more familiar to most Europeans as couéism—is its theoretic expression. What you can make people believe to be true, is true. (The american pragmatical test of any theorem is ‘What difference will its truth or falsehood make to you?’) Advertisement also implies in a very definite sense a certain attitude to Time. And the attitude proper to it is closely related to the particular timephilosophy we were considering above; namely, that philosophy that is at once ‘timeless’ in theory, and very much concerned with Time in practice. Both that conscious philosophy, and the instinctive attitude of the advertising mind towards Time, could be described as a Time-for-Time’s-sake belief. For both, time is a permanent fact. Time for the bergsonian relativist is fundamentally sensation; that is what Bergson’s durée always conceals beneath its pretentious metaphysic. It is the glorification of the life-of-the-moment, with no reference beyond itself and no absolute or universal value; only so much value as is conveyed in the famous proverb; Time is money. It is the argent comptant of literal life, in an inflexibly fluid Time.And the ultimate significance of the philosophy of Time-for-Time’s-sake (since Time is a meaningless thing in itself) is Existence-for-Existence’s-sake. (This difficulty of the meaninglessness of Time, which becomes especially acute when it is your intention to erect Time into a god, as is the case with Professor Alexander, is dealt with at length by that philosopher.)The world in which Advertisement dwells is a one-day world. It is necessarily a plane universe, without depth. Upon this Time lays down discontinuous entities, side by side; each day, each temporal entity, complete in itself, with no perspectives, no fundamental exterior reference at all. In this way the structure of human life is entirely transformed, where and in so far as this intensive technique gets a psychologic ascendancy. The average man is invited to slice his life into a series of one-day lives, regulated by the clock of fashion. The human being is no longer the unit. He becomes the containing frame for a generation or sequence of ephemerides, roughly organized into what he calls his ‘personality.’ Or the highly organized human mind finds its natural organic unity degraded into a worm-like extension, composed of a segmented, equally-distributed, accentless life. Each segment, each fashionday (as the day of this new creature could be called) must be organically selfsufficing. This account of the fashion-day of Advertisement may seem to contradict between the Present of the classical mind, as opposed to the perspectives of the romantic, the time-mind, too. This misunderstanding will already have been partly averted. The reader’s attention has been drawn to the paradox of the doctrinaire of ‘timelessness’ more obsessed by Time, and the fashion day, than is anybody else. For the further and complete dispersal of this possible difficulty, I must refer the reader to a subsequent section of my book. It can only finally be disposed of by a careful definition of the classical ‘Present,’ as opposed to the romantic ‘Present.’In the world of Advertisement, Coué-fashion, everything that happens to-day (or everything that is being advertised here and now) is better, bigger, brighter, more astonishing than anything that has ever existed before. (Dr. Coué actually was embarked upon his teaching, so he said, by noticing, and responding to, an advertisement.) The psychology that is required of the public to absorb this belief in the marvellous one and only—monist, unique, superlative, exclusive—fact (immediately obliterating all other beliefs and shutting the mind to anything that may happen elsewhere or to-morrow) is a very rudimentary one indeed. The best subject for such a séance would be a polyp, evidently. An individual looking, with his intellect, before and after, seeing far too much at a time for the requirements of the advertiser or hypnotist, is not at all the affair of Advertisement. For the essence of the this living-in-the-moment and for-the-moment—of submission to a giant hyperbolic close-up of a moment—is, as we have indicated, to banish all individual continuity. You must, for a perfect response to this instantaneous suggestion, be the perfect sensationalist—what people picture to themselves, for instance, as the perfect American. Your personality must have been chopped won to an extremely low level of purely reactionary life. Otherwise you are of no use to the advertiser. If there were many like you, he would soon be put out of business.The traditional yankee method of Advertisement suggests a credulity, a love of sensation and an absence of background in the submissive, hypnotized public, that could justly claim to be unexampled, and as beating anything ever heard of before in recorded history. But that method is now in universal use. It promises monts et merveilles every instant of the day. It has battered and deadened every superlative so much that superlatives no longer in themselves convey anything. All idea of a true value—of any scale except the pragmatic scale of hypnotism and hoax—is banished for ever from the life of the great majority of people living in the heart of an advertising zone, such as any great modern city. They are now almost entirely incapable of anything except sensation; for to think is to be able to traverse the scale of values from the nadir to the zenith. The world of superlatives is a monotonous horizontal drumming on the top-note, from which an insistent, intoxicating time can be extracted, but nothing else. So Advertisement fulfils all the requirements of the general definition of ‘romance.’It is not altogether without point to refer to this method to its origins in the competitive frenzy of finance, and of finance first become delirious as it saw its staggering opportunity in its operations in the New World. The marvellous american vitality enhanced this process, and may yet defeat it. For the decision, as to Europe and even the destiny of the White Race, rests with America, perhaps.Just as the individual whose conscience is clear, and whose pockets are full, does not experience the need to overwhelm his neighbour with assurances of his honesty—indeed, if his pockets are sufficiently full, does not care much what his neighbour thinks; so such a system as that of Coué is not invented for people in robust health, but for the debilitated and ailing members of a ruined society. The optimism-to-order of ‘Every day and in every respect I grow better and better’ is of the same kind as the political optimism-to-order- of democratic politics.The wholesale change-over of what was ‘public’ into what, for the European, was private (the conditions obtaining in aryan civilization, what Maine calls the ‘ancient order of the aryan world,’ from the earliest tribal times, as a result of the ‘individualism’ distinguishing our race), and vice versa, has been very much facilitated by the agency of Advertisement. Advertisement has functioned in the social and artistic or learned world rather as the engineer has in the factory. It has taught the public—as the engineer taught the producer—that as Advertisement-value nothing is refuse or waste. Indeed, the garbage is often more valuable than the commodity from which it proceeds. But this value is a money-value essentially, and functions imperfectly in its social application.Van: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com> namens evola_as_he_is@... [evola_as_he_is] <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com>
Verzonden: donderdag 14 januari 2016 11:07
Aan: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Onderwerp: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)Thank you for these further quotes from Lewis' work as well as summaries of his thought. Since Romanticism is referred to, it is worth noting that it is at the cost of « redifining Romanticism » (« as a modern critique of modernity »,p. 30) that the contemporary author you recently quoted on Benn and Evola is able to label the Italian writer as « romantic » on those grounds, whereby he shows that he only skimmed through 'Revolt against the Modern World', the only book by Evola he seems to be able to spell.
That which this article ('The Fifties Illusion: The Cultural Dry Rot that Doomed the Postwar Era', http://familyinamerica.org/journals/summer-2012/fifties-illusion-cultural-dry-rot-doomed-postwar-era/#.WOTr8Ijyi00) refers to as the 'Fifties illusion' in relation to the American postwar period, also partly applies to the European situation.
The same author discusses the demographic backgrounds in greater depth in the following lecture ('Why Things Went Wrong: The Decline of the Natural Family', https://archive.fo/CrcY).
This new article also briefly discusses a number of assumptions about this period ('The '50s: True Benchmark Of Family Values?', http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1992-08-23/news/9208210266_1_non-family-households-1950-and-1960-median-age).Van: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com> namens evola_as_he_is@... [evola_as_he_is] <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com>
Verzonden: donderdag 14 januari 2016 14:58
Aan: evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
Onderwerp: RE: [evola_as_he_is] Re: The Race of the Fleeing Man (http://mileswmathis.com/)Against Lawrence's exaltation « of the primitive tribes to inspire a decadent European race to return to its own instinctual being » (http://www.toqonline.com/blog/wyndham-lewis/), and, we may add, to submit to matriarchy, Lewis published 'The Enemy: A Review of Art and Literature (2 vols.)' - republished in 1969 as
'Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting Pot'
(excerpts from both are available at google.books)
The promotion of family values in post-war Europe was parodic because it meant the fostering of bourgeois, women values within the family. In European countries, especially in Germany, as well as in the United States, it had been some time since, with the industrial revolution, « the image of the family as a haven (had become) an integral component of bourgeois class consciousness. The family was the place where men were to be loved, consoled, and refreshed... It was also the place where children were to be nurtured,loved, educated, and cultivated. » (The Making of the Jewish Middle Class, p. 16) Is this to say that « More than ever before, women were defined through the family » ? (ibid.). Not at all. Quite the contrary : the family was defined through women.
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