Month: August 2020

Haverbeck in her youth.

1,073 words

Lubert steeled himself. The war had been over for more than a year, but his daughter had still not surrendered. He needed to suppress this little putsch now. . . At Frieda’s bedroom door, he knocked and called her name. He waited for an answer that he knew wouldn’t come then entered. She was lying on her bed, her legs raised a few inches off the mattress. (more…)

Juliusz Kossak, Kmita’s Companions on a Ride, 1885.

1,763 words

When I first moved to Eastern Europe, I did not have any friends in the region. Thus, I spent the winter of 2017 in solitude. To avoid any feelings of loneliness, I set a goal to finally read Henryk Sienkiewicz’s trilogy of historical novels. I also set a goal to go for a walk each evening. Whether I was in Lviv, Rzeszów, or Minsk, (more…)

1,582 words

More shots have been fired in the trial run of the second American Civil War.

On August 25th, Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen-year-old citizen-militia member, was attacked at least twice by a Black Lives Matter and Antifa mob during a riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was armed with a rifle, and with it killed two of his attackers and injured a third. (more…)

1,174 words

Two days ago, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was charged with murder in the deaths of two people shot during the Tuesday night riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Mainstream media outlets jumped on the story and denounced Rittenhouse, an upstanding young white man who clearly acted in self-defense, as a homicidal “white supremacist” (more…)

1,170 words

Christopher Nolan is one of my favorite living filmmakers. Tenet is Nolan’s new sci-fi espionage thriller. Tenet is highly imaginative and visually striking, filmed on locations in Denmark, Estonia, India, Italy, Norway, and the UK. Its cast includes Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh.

But Tenet is not Nolan’s best work, for two main reasons. (more…)

1,132 words

Believe it or not, there was once a time in the now-enviable 2000s in which Midwestern indie bands were considered the epitome of cool. If you wore plaid shirts (sometimes, with a t-shirt over said shirt), could play passable guitar, and had a just-so-slightly off-kilter voice with which you could sing about outsiderdom and ennui, (more…)

Norman Rockwell, Study for “Freedom of Speech”

4,098 words

French version here, Czech version here

The Specter of Populism^*

The populist uprisings of 2016—Brexit and the election of Donald Trump—aren’t epochal events like the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. Not yet anyway. But you wouldn’t know that judging from the panic that swept through Western political elites. (more…)

Promotional image from the UK’s Almeida Theatre production of The Duchess of Malfi (performed from November 30, 2019 through January 25, 2020)

5,736 words

I. Classical Western Thought on Justice and Revenge

One of the most fascinating discussions to emerge from our collective Western inheritance concerns the definition of justice and the double-sided nature of justice or vengeance (personified memorably in pop culture through the literal “two-faced” character of Harvey Dent and his Janus-faced coin). Aristotle (384-322 BC) determined that “justice” had at least two different meanings: (more…)

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Netflix thinks pimping preteens is a great way to market its new movie Cuties. The French film follows a dance troupe of 11-year-old girls who discover their “femininity.” Netflix advertised the film with images of the girls in suggestive outfits, which inevitably drew a public backlash. The streaming giant apologized for the advertisements (more…)

2,131 words

The 2011 documentary Empire of Dust provides a one-of-a-kind portrayal of the difficulties facing a construction crew attempting to redo a badly dilapidated Congolese highway. Early on we meet Eddy, playing a key role as a translator. Clearly, he is exceptional: he knows Swahili, Chinese, French, and English, and this takes some doing. The other major figure is Lao Yang, the project manager for the CREC-7 construction company. Surely he’s one of the most flustered Oriental expatriates in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). (more…)

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In the latest episode of Guide to Kulchur, historian Mark Weber joins Fróði Midjord to discuss Pat Buchanan’s book Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. The conversation sets the record straight about misunderstood aspects of the Second World War and reveals how the war ultimately resulted in the fall of the West. (more…)

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Andrew Roberts is a renowned conservative, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, and Visiting Professor at King’s College London, who believes that everyone in the world can be educated to love the democratic values of Western civilization. If only blacks and immigrants were taught to appreciate the immense value of Greek (more…)

8,516 words

Thomas R. Pegram
One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011

The Ku Klux Klan suffers from a positively radioactive reputation, even among fellow Rightists. During the infamous family dinner scene in American History X, at which Edward Norton’s Derek Vinyard assaults his sister and displays his swastika tattoo to the Jewish teacher dating his widowed mother, (more…)