Experience white culture with Radish: it’s positively subversive! An aesthetic interlude.

Table of Contents

Spring is sprung, and the Thomas Carlyle Club for Young Reactionaries (Students Against a Democratic Society) finds inspiration in the glorious cultural heritage of the native European peoples: the white race.

Yes, I know, we’re not supposed to call it that. We’re not really supposed to talk about it at all, but if we insist on mentioning those people (very suspicious, Comrade), we must always use another name:

Western civilization. (West of what?)

European culture. (No Australians allowed?)

The American people. (Washington and Jefferson, Shitavious and José.)

Euro-centric history. (We should have put the pivot in the Congo instead?)

And so on and so forth. The less accurate, the less precise, the better. Anything to distract and confuse, to make it as difficult as possible to think and communicate clearly, because the absolute last thing we need, in this our wonderfully post-racial, post-national, post-partisan, globalized society of ‘diversity’ and ‘equality,’ is for some loyal Party member to start noticing that culture is rooted in biology.

That would be just awful.

This issue of Radish, unlike the ones on lynching and colonialism, will not include examples from around the ’net of what progressives think the topic means, because in this case it would basically amount to a loathsome horde of bastard ingrates determined at all costs to stamp out glorious achievement and replace it with the sick and sordid spectacle of collective racial guilt.

And who would want to read that?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Johann Sebastian Bach

Why not start with music, I thought; a little accompaniment to further reading. No surprises here: this is strictly, er, ‘Western’ canon. (Sorry, nothing from Guatemala — a little too far west for my liking.) I’ve included YouTube links for your convenience. Mute the advertisements, ignore the comments section at all costs, and enjoy.

First: — who else? — Johann Sebastian Bach (German, 1685–1750).

Second: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Austrian, 1756–1791).

Third: Ludwig van Beethoven (German, 1770–1827).

What more should I say? Date of birth? Favorite color? Never mind that! Just listen, and read on…

Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’ (1486)

Now that we’ve got our soundtrack, we turn to what Simonides called the “silent poetry.” Shall we begin our exploration of, um, ‘Euro-centric’ painting with that inspired Italian Michelangelo (1475–1564)? “Without having seen the Sistine Chapel,” said Goethe, “one can form no appreciable idea of what one man is capable of achieving.” Accordingly:

Part of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (click to expand)

More of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

‘The Last Judgment,’ from the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel

We follow with that troubled Dutchman Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890):

‘Starry Night’

“I am still far from being what I want to be,” Vincent said, “but with God’s help I shall succeed.”

‘Starry Night Over the Rhone’

“If only we try to live sincerely, it will go well with us, even though we are certain to experience real sorrow, and great disappointments, and also will probably commit great faults and do wrong things, but it certainly is true, that it is better to be high-spirited, even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, is well done.”

‘Sunflowers’

“Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.”

More ‘Sunflowers’

“What is true is that I have at times earned my own crust of bread, and at other times a friend has given it to me out of the goodness of his heart. I have lived whatever way I could, for better or for worse, taking things just as they came. It is true that I have forfeited the trust of various people, it is true that my financial affairs are in a sorry state, it is true that the future looks rather bleak, it is true that I might have done better, it is true that I have wasted time when it comes to earning a living, it is true that my studies are in a fairly lamentable and appalling state, and that my needs are greater, infinitely greater than my resources. But does that mean going downhill and doing nothing?”

‘Café Terrace at Night’

“One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.”

‘Road with Cypress and Star’

Mustn’t forget that refreshing Frenchman Claude Monet (1840–1926):

‘Still Life with Apples and Grapes’

‘Le Pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil’

‘Garden at Giverny’

‘The Pond at Montgeron’

Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, Kipling, and Yeats

Here are some poets whose work I’ve enjoyed. More precisely, here are five poets I read in my, shall we say, formative years, and therefore greatly influenced my way of thinking — for the better, I like to think. Please forgive the English language bias.

First: the justly famous, variously punctuated ‘Tyger’ (1794), by William Blake (English, 1757–1827).

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, and what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? And what dread feet? What the hammer? What the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? What dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears,

And water’d heaven with their tears:

Did He smile His work to see?

Did He who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Second: ‘Ozymandias’ (1818), by Percy Bysshe Shelley (also English, 1792–1822).

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. … Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Third: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), part one, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (exceedingly English, 1772–1834).

It is an ancient Mariner,

And he stoppeth one of three.

‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

Now wherefore stopp’st thou me? The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,

And I am next of kin;

The guests are met, the feast is set:

May’st hear the merry din.’ He holds him with his skinny hand,

‘There was a ship,’ quoth he.

‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’

Eftsoons his hand dropt he. He holds him with his glittering eye —

The Wedding-Guest stood still,

And listens like a three years’ child:

The Mariner hath his will. The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:

He cannot choose but hear;

And thus spake on that ancient man,

The bright-eyed Mariner. ‘The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,

Merrily did we drop

Below the kirk, below the hill,

Below the lighthouse top. The Sun came up upon the left,

Out of the sea came he!

And he shone bright, and on the right

Went down into the sea. Higher and higher every day,

Till over the mast at noon —’

The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,

For he heard the loud bassoon. The bride hath paced into the hall,

Red as a rose is she;

Nodding their heads before her goes

The merry minstrelsy. The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,

Yet he cannot choose but hear;

And thus spake on that ancient man,

The bright-eyed Mariner. ‘And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he

Was tyrannous and strong:

He struck with his o’ertaking wings,

And chased us south along. With sloping masts and dipping prow,

As who pursued with yell and blow

Still treads the shadow of his foe,

And forward bends his head,

The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,

And southward aye we fled. And now there came both mist and snow,

And it grew wondrous cold:

And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

As green as emerald. And through the drifts the snowy clifts

Did send a dismal sheen:

Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken —

The ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice was there,

The ice was all around:

It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,

Like noises in a swound! At length did cross an Albatross,

Thorough the fog it came;

As if it had been a Christian soul,

We hailed it in God’s name. It ate the food it ne’er had eat,

And round and round it flew.

The ice did split with a thunder-fit;

The helmsman steered us through! And a good south wind sprung up behind;

The Albatross did follow,

And every day, for food or play,

Came to the mariner’s hollo! In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,

It perched for vespers nine;

Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,

Glimmered the white Moon-shine.’ ‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!

From the fiends, that plague thee thus! —

Why look’st thou so?’ — ‘With my cross-bow

I shot the ALBATROSS.’

Surely you can find the time to peruse the rest.

Fourth: — oh, why not — that famous conjunction, ‘If —’ (1910), by Rudyard Kipling (extraordinarily English, 1865–1936).

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;

If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools; If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings — nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run —

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!

Fifth: that ominous, obscure, occult (crypto–fascist?) offering, ‘The Second Coming’ (1919), by that ominous, obscure, etc. Irishman William Butler Yeats (not English, 1865–1939).

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

For obvious reasons, this is Radish Editor-in-Chief Karl F. Boetel’s favorite poem.

William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, and Thomas Carlyle

Great works by great men — great white men, that is. Oh, I’m sorry, we aren’t supposed to say that last bit. Once again, please forgive the English language bias.

The Immortal Bard

Naturally, we begin with William Shakespeare (English, of course; 1564–1616). Here are two of my favorite Shakespeare monologues. (What’s that? You say you have better things to do than read Shakespeare? No, in fact you have not. You can check your email next week.)

First: the opening lines of Richard III (Act I, Scene 1), delivered by the titular character, then only an ambitious Duke (of Gloucester).

Second: Macbeth’s infamous ambition finally, irrevocably overpowers his revulsion in this haunting soliloquy from the Scottish play (Act II, Scene 1).

We pass from the early seventeenth century to the latter half of the eighteenth: the Age of Johnson. Samuel Johnson, that is (English, 1709–1784), whose dictionary is criminally underrated, and who said “the first Whig was the Devil,” with which the Carlyle Club cannot in good faith disagree.

A sampling from the eminently quotable Dr. Johnson? I fear we will succeed only, as Johnson put, “like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house for sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.” Still, I cannot resist:

“Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.”

“Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.”

“In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.”

“If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.”

“If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone. A man should keep his friendships in constant repair.”

“Life affords no higher pleasure than that of summoning difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.”

“Adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.”

“Don’t think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.”

“A cucumber should be well-sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out.”

“He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

In deference to the author, I shall stop here.

Which brings us to Thomas Carlyle (Scottish, 1795–1881), for whom the Carlyle Club, unsurprisingly, has enormous respect and admiration. Walt Whitman described him as follows in his 1881 obituary:

As a representative author, a literary figure, no man else will bequeath to the future more significant hints of our stormy era, its fierce paradoxes, its din, and its struggling parturition periods, than Carlyle. … Rugged, mountainous, volcanic, he was himself more a French revolution than any of his volumes. In some respects, so far in the Nineteenth century, the best equipt, keenest mind, even from the college point of view, of all Britain… The way to test how much he has left his country were to consider, or try to consider, for a moment, the array of British thought, the resultant ensemble of the last fifty years, as existing to-day, but with Carlyle left out. It would be like an army with no artillery. The show were still a gay and rich one — Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and many more — horsemen and rapid infantry, and banners flying — but the last heavy roar so dear to the ear of the train’d soldier, and that settles fate and victory, would be lacking.

Whitman added:

under no circumstances, and no matter how completely time and events disprove his lurid vaticinations, should the English-speaking world forget this man, nor fail to hold in honor his unsurpass’d conscience, his unique method, and his honest fame. Never were convictions more earnest and genuine. Never was there less of a flunkey or temporizer. Never had political progressivism a foe it could more heartily respect.

And James Anthony Froude wrote in his biography:

He was a teacher and a prophet in the Jewish sense of the word. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah have become a part of the permanent spiritual inheritance of mankind, because events proved that they had interpreted correctly the signs of their own times, and their prophecies were fulfilled. Carlyle, like them, believed that he had a special message to deliver to the present age. Whether he was correct in that belief, and whether his message was a true message, remains to be seen. He has told us that our most cherished ideas of political liberty, with their kindred corollaries, are mere illusions, and that the progress which has seemed to go along with them is a progress towards anarchy and social dissolution. If he was wrong, he has misused his powers. The principles of his teachings are false. He has offered himself as a guide upon a road of which he had no knowledge; and his own desire for himself would be the speediest oblivion both of his person and his works. If, on the other hand, he has been right; if, like his great predecessors, he has read truly the tendencies of this modern age of ours, and his teaching is authenticated by facts, then Carlyle, too, will take his place among the inspired seers, and he will shine on, another fixed star in the intellectual sky. Time only can show how this will be.

But enough of this: I can’t stand reading about an author when I can read the author himself. Which, in this case, we surely can. From ‘The Present Time,’ first of Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850):

The Present Time, youngest-born of Eternity, child and heir of all the Past Times with their good and evil, and parent of all the Future, is ever a ‘New Era’ to the thinking man; and comes with new questions and significance, however commonplace it look: to know it, and what it bids us do, is ever the sum of knowledge for all of us. This new Day, sent us out of Heaven, this also has its heavenly omens; — amid the bustling trivialities and loud empty noises, its silent monitions, which if we cannot read and obey, it will not be well with us! No; — nor is there any sin more fearfully avenged on men and Nations than that same, which indeed includes and presupposes all manner of sins: the sin which our old pious fathers called ‘judicial blindness’; — which we, with our light habits, may still call misinterpretation of the Time that now is; disloyalty to its real meanings and monitions, stupid disregard of these, stupid adherence active or passive to the counterfeits and mere current semblances of these. This is true of all times and days. But in the days that are now passing over us, even fools are arrested to ask the meaning of them; few of the generations of men have seen more impressive days. Days of endless calamity, disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded: if they are not days of endless hope too, then they are days of utter despair. For it is not a small hope that will suffice, the ruin being clearly, either in action or in prospect, universal. There must be a new world, if there is to be any world at all! That human things in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance there; this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of universal death must be days of universal newbirth, if the ruin is not to be total and final ! It is a Time to make the dullest man consider ; and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound? — A veritable ‘New Era,’ to the foolish as well as to the wise. Not long ago, the world saw, with thoughtless joy which might have been very thoughtful joy, a real miracle not heretofore considered possible or conceivable in the world: a Reforming Pope. A simple pious creature, a good country priest, invested unexpectedly with the tiara, takes up the New Testament, declares that this henceforth shall be his rule of governing. No more finesse, chicanery, hypocrisy, or false or foul dealing of any kind: God’s truth shall be spoken, God’s justice shall be done, on the throne called of St. Peter: an honest Pope, Papa, or Father o Christendom, shall preside there. And such a throne of St. Peter; and such a Christendom, for an honest Papa to preside in! The European populations everywhere hailed the omen; with shouting and rejoicing, leading-articles and tar-barrels; thinking people listened with astonishment, — not with sorrow if they were faithful or wise; with awe rather as at the heralding of death, and with a joy as of victory beyond death! Something pious, grand and as if awful in that joy, revealing once more the Presence of a Divine Justice in this world. For, to such men it was very clear how this poor devoted Pope would prosper, with his New Testament in his hand. An alarming business, that of governing in the throne of St. Peter by the rule of veracity! By the rule of veracity, the so-called throne of St. Peter was openly declared, above three hundred years ago, to be a falsity, a huge mistake, a pestilent dead carcass, which this Sun was weary of. More than three hundred years ago, the throne of St. Peter received peremptory judicial notice to quit; authentic order, registered in Heaven’s chancery and since legible in the hearts of all brave men, to take itself away, — to begone, and let us have no more to do with it and its delusions and impious deliriums; — and it has been sitting every day since, it may depend upon it, at its own peril withal, and will have to pay exact damages yet for every day it has so sat. Law of veracity? What this Popedom had to do by the law of veracity, was to give up its own foul galvanic life, an offence to gods and men; honestly to die, and get itself buried! Far from this was the thing the poor Pope undertook in regard to it; — and yet on the whole it was essentially this too. … The poor Pope, amid felicitations and tar-barrels of various kinds, went on joyfully for a season: but he had awakened, he as no other man could do, the sleeping elements; mothers of the whirlwinds, conflagrations, earthquakes. Questions not very soluble at present, were even sages and heroes set to solve them, began everywhere with new emphasis to be asked. Questions which all official men wished, and almost hoped, to postpone till Doomsday. Doomsday itself had come; that was the terrible truth! — For, sure enough, if once the law of veracity be acknowledged as the rule for human beings, there will not anywhere be want of work for the reformer; in very few places do human things adhere quite closely to that law! … … We know what France suddenly became in the end of February next; and by a clear enough genealogy, we can trace a considerable share in that even to the good simple Pope with the New Testament in his hand. … Close following which, as if by sympathetic subterranean eccentricities, all Europe exploded, boundless, uncontrollable; and we had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing, and on the whole humiliating years the European world ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane: — Enter, all the world, see what kind of Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing in their ear, “Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off with you, off!” — and, what was peculiar and notable in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, “We are poor histrios, we sure enough; — did you want heroes? Don’t kill us; we couldn’t help it!” Not one of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon; by no manner of means. That, I say, is the alarming peculiarity at present. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings conscious that they are but Playactors. The miserable mortals, enacting their High Life Below Stairs, with faith only that this Universe may perhaps be all a phantasm and hypocrisis, — the truculent Constable of the Destinies suddenly enters : “Scandalous Phantasms, what do you here? Are ‘solemnly constituted Impostors’ the proper Kings of men? Did you think the Life of Man was a grimacing dance of apes? To be led always by the squeak of your paltry fiddle? Ye miserable, this Universe is not an upholstery Puppet-play, but a terrible God’s Fact; and you, I think, — had not you better be gone!” They fled precipitately, some of them with what we may call an exquisite ignominy, — in terror of the treadmill or worse. And everywhere the people, or the populace, take their own government upon themselves; and open ‘kinglessness,’ what we call anarchy, — how happy if it be anarchy plus a street-constable! — is everywhere the order of the day. Such was the history, from Baltic to Mediterranean, in Italy, France, Prussia, Austria, from end to end of Europe, in those March days of 1848. Since the destruction of the old Roman Empire by inroad of the Northern Barbarians, I have known nothing similar. And so, then, there remained no King in Europe; no King except the Public Haranguer, haranguing on barrel-head, in leading-article; or getting himself aggregated into a National Parliament to harangue. And for about four months all France, and to a great degree all Europe, rough-ridden by every species of delirium, except happily the murderous for most part, was a weltering mob, presided over by M. de Lamartine at the Hôtel-de-Ville; a most eloquent fair-spoken literary gentleman, whom thoughtless persons took for a prophet, priest and heaven-sent evangelist, and whom a wise Yankee friend of mine discerned to be properly ‘the first stump-orator in the world, standing too on the highest stump, — for the time.’ A sorrowful spectacle to men of reflection, during the time he lasted, that poor M. de Lamartine; with nothing in him but melodious wind and soft sowder, which he and others took for something divine and not diabolic! Sad enough: the eloquent latest impersonation of Chaos-come-again; able to talk for itself, and declare persuasively that it is Cosmos! However, you have but to wait a little, in such cases; all balloons do and must give up their gas in the pressure of things, and are collapsed in a sufficiently wretched manner before long. And so in City after City, street-barricades are piled, and truculent, more or less murderous insurrection begins; populace after populace rises, King after King capitulates or absconds: and from end to end of Europe Democracy has blazed up explosive, much higher, more irresistible and less resisted than ever before; testifying too sadly on what a bottomless volcano, or universal powder-mine of most inflammable mutinous chaotic elements, separated from us by a thin earth-rind, Society with all its arrangements and acquirements everywhere, in the present epoch, rests! The kind of persons who excite or give signal to such revolutions, — students, young men of letters, advocates, editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly bankrupt desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the millions and blowing it into flame, — might give rise to reflections as to the character of our epoch. Never till now did young men, and almost children, take such a command in human affairs. A changed time since the word Senior (Seigneur, or Elder) was first devised to signify ‘lord,’ or superior; — as in all languages of men we find it to have been! Not an honourable document this either, as to the spiritual condition of our epoch. In times when men love wisdom, the old man will ever be venerable, and be venerated, and reckoned noble: in times that love something else than wisdom, and indeed have little or no wisdom, and see little or none to love, the old man will cease to be venerated; — and looking more closely, also, you will find that in fact he has ceased to be venerable, and has begun to be contemptible; a foolish boy still, a boy without the graces, generosities and opulent strength of young boys. In these days, what of lordship or leadership is still to be done, the youth must do it, not the mature or aged man; the mature man, hardened into sceptical egoism, knows no monition but that of his own frigid cautions, avarices, mean timidities; and can lead nowhither towards an object that even seems noble. But to return. This mad state of matters will of course before long allay itself, as it has everywhere begun to do; the ordinary necessities of men’s daily existence cannot comport with it, and these, whatever else is cast aside, will have their way. Some remounting, — very temporary remounting, — of the old machine, under new colours and altered forms, will probably ensue soon in most countries: the old histrionic Kings will be admitted back under conditions, under ‘Constitutions,’ with national Parliaments, or the like fashionable adjuncts; and everywhere the old daily life will try to begin again. But there is now no hope that such arrangements can be permanent; that they can be other than poor temporary makeshifts, which, if they try to fancy and make themselves permanent, will be displaced by new explosions recurring more speedily than last time. In such baleful oscillation, afloat as amid raging bottomless eddies and conflicting sea-currents, not steadfast as on fixed foundations, must European Society continue swaying; now disastrously tumbling, then painfully readjusting itself, at ever shorter intervals, — till once the new rock-basis does come to light, and the weltering deluges of mutiny, and of need to mutiny, abate again! For universal Democracy, whatever we may think of it, has declared itself as an inevitable fact of the days in which we live; and he who has any chance to instruct, or lead, in his days, must begin by admitting that: new street-barricades, and new anarchies, still more scandalous if still less sanguinary, must return and again return, till governing persons everywhere know and admit that. Democracy, it may be said everywhere, is here: — for sixty years now, ever since the grand or First French Revolution, that fact has been terribly announced to all the world; in message after message, some of them very terrible indeed; and now at last all the world ought really to believe it. That the world does believe it; that even Kings now as good as believe it, and know, or with just terror surmise, that they are but temporary phantasm Playactors, and that Democracy is the grand, alarming, imminent and indisputable Reality: this, among the scandalous phases we witnessed in the last two years, is a phasis full of hope: a sign that we are advancing closer and closer to the very Problem itself, which it will behove us to solve or die; — that all fighting and campaigning and coalitioning in regard to the existence of the Problem, is hopeless and superfluous henceforth. The gods have appointed it so; no Pitt, nor body of Pitts or mortal creatures can appoint it otherwise. Democracy, sure enough, is here: one knows not how long it will keep hidden underground even in Russia; — and here in England, though we object to it resolutely in the form of street-barricades and insurrectionary pikes, and decidedly will not open doors to it on those terms, the tramp of its million feet is on all streets and thoroughfares, the sound of its bewildered thousandfold voice is in all writings and speakings, in all thinkings and modes and activities of men: the soul that does not now, with hope or terror, discern it, is not the one we address on this occasion. What is Democracy; this huge inevitable Product of the Destinies, which is everywhere the portion of our Europe in these latter days? There lies the question for us. What is Democracy; this huge inevitable Product of the Destinies, which is everywhere the portion of our Europe in these latter days? There lies the question for us. Whence comes it, this universal big black Democracy; whither tends it; what is the meaning of it? A meaning it must have, or it would not be here. If we can find the right meaning of it, we may, wisely submitting or wisely resisting and controlling, still hope to live in the midst of it; if we cannot find the right meaning, if we find only the wrong or no meaning in it, to live will not be possible! The whole social wisdom of the Present Time is summoned, in the name of the Giver of Wisdom, to make clear to itself, and lay deeply to heart with an eye to strenuous valiant practice and effort, what the meaning of this universal revolt of the European populations, which calls itself Democracy, and decides to continue permanent, may be. Certainly it is a drama full of action, event fast following event; in which curiosity finds endless scope, and there are interests at stake, enough to rivet the attention of all men, simple and wise. Whereat the idle multitude lift up their voices, gratulating, celebrating sky-high; in rhyme and prose announcement, more than plentiful, that now the New Era, and long-expected Year One of Perfect Human Felicity has come. Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic barricades; triumph of civil and religious liberty — O Heaven! one of the inevitablest private miseries, to an earnest man in such circumstances, is this multitudinous efflux of oratory and psalmody, from the universal foolish human throat; drowning for the moment all reflection whatsoever, except the sorrowful one that you are fallen in an evil, heavy-laden, long-eared age, and must resignedly bear your part in the same. The front wall of your wretched old crazy dwelling, long denounced by you to no purpose, having at last fairly folded itself over, and fallen prostrate into the street, the floors, as may happen, will still hang on by the mere beam-ends, and coherency of old carpentry, though in a sloping direction, and depend there till certain poor rusty nails and worm-eaten dovetailings give way: — but is it cheering, in such circumstances, that the whole household burst forth into celebrating the new joys of light and ventilation, liberty and picturesqueness of position, and thank God that now they have got a house to their mind? My dear household, cease singing and psalmodying; lay aside your fiddles, take out your work-implements, if you have any; for I can say with confidence the laws of gravitation are still active, and rusty nails, worm-eaten dovetailings, and secret coherency of old carpentry, are not the best basis for a household! — In the lanes of Irish cities, I have heard say, the wretched people are sometimes found living, and perilously boiling their potatoes, on such swing-floors and inclined planes hanging on by the joist-ends; but I did not hear that they sang very much in celebration of such lodging. No, they slid gently about, sat near the back wall, and perilously boiled their potatoes, in silence for most part! — High shouts of exultation, in every dialect, by every vehicle of speech and writing, rise from far and near over this last avatar of Democracy in 1848: and yet, to wise minds, the first aspect it presents seems rather to be one of boundless misery and sorrow. What can be more miserable than this universal hunting out of the high dignitaries, solemn functionaries, and potent, grave and reverend signiors of the world; this stormful rising-up of the inarticulate dumb masses everywhere, against those who pretended to be speaking for them and guiding them? These guides, then, were mere blind men only pretending to see? These rulers were not ruling at all; they had merely got on the attributes and clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing the wages, while the work remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings, play-acting as at Drury Lane; — and what were the people withal that took them for real? It is probably the hugest disclosure of falsity in human things that was ever at one time made. These reverend Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors, then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a false thing. The story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels they preached to them were not an account of man’s real position in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices, — a falsity of falsities, which at last ceases to stick together. Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were dupes, — a kind of inverse cheats, too, or they would not have believed in them so long. A universal Bankruptcy of Imposture; that may be the brief definition of it. Imposture everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody will change its word into an act any farther: — fallen insolvent; unable to keep its head up by these false pretences, or make its pot boil any more for the present! A more scandalous phenomenon, wide as Europe, never afflicted the face of the sun. Bankruptcy everywhere; foul ignominy, and the abomination of desolation, in all high places: odious to look upon, as the carnage of a battle-field on the morrow morning; — a massacre not of the innocents; we cannot call it a massacre of the innocents; but a universal tumbling of Impostors and of Impostures into the street! Such a spectacle, can we call it joyful? There is a joy in it, to the wise man too; yes, but a joy full of awe, and as it were sadder than any sorrow, — like the vision of immortality, unattainable except through death and the grave! And yet who would not, in his heart of hearts, feel piously thankful that Imposture has fallen bankrupt? By all means let it fall bankrupt; in the name of God let it do so, with whatever misery to itself and to all of us. Imposture, be it known then, — known it must and shall be, — is hateful, unendurable to God and man. Let it understand this everywhere; and swiftly make ready for departure, wherever it yet lingers; and let it learn never to return, if possible! The eternal voices, very audibly again, are speaking to proclaim this message, from side to side of the world. Not a very cheering message, but a very indispensable one. Alas, it is sad enough that Anarchy is here; that we are not permitted to regret its being here, — for who that had, for this divine Universe, an eye which was human at all, could wish that Shams of any kind, especially that Sham-Kings should continue? No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may cease. Good Heavens, to what depths have we got, when this to many a man seems strange! Yet strange to many a man it does seem; and to many a solid Englishman, wholesomely digesting his pudding among what are called the cultivated classes, it seems strange exceedingly; a mad ignorant notion, quite heterodox, and big with mere ruin. He has been used to decent forms long since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial, — what you in your iconoclast humor call shams, — all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting on without them. Did not cotton spin itself, beef grow, and groceries and spiceries come in from the East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of shams? Kings reigned, what they were pleased to call reigning; lawyers pleaded, bishops preached, and honorable members perorated; and to crown the whole, as if it were all real and no sham there, did not scrip continue salable, and the banker pay in bullion, or paper with a metallic basis? “The greatest sham, I have always thought, is he that would destroy shams.” Even so. To such depth have I, the poor knowing person of this epoch, got; almost below the level of lowest humanity, and down towards the state of apehood and oxhood! For never till in quite recent generations was such a scandalous blasphemy quietly set forth among the sons of Adam; never before did the creature called man believe generally in his heart that lies were the rule in this Earth; that in deliberate long-established lying could there be help or salvation for him, could there be at length other than hindrance and destruction for him. O Heavyside, my solid friend, this is the sorrow of sorrows: what on earth can become of us till this accursed enchantment, the general summary and consecration of delusions, be cast forth from the heart and life of one and all! Cast forth it will be; it must, or we are tending, at all moments, whitherward I do not like to name. Alas, and the casting of it out, to what heights and what depths will it lead us, in the sad universe mostly of lies and shams and hollow phantasms (grown very ghastly now), in which, as in a safe home, we have lived this century or two! To heights and depths of social and individual divorce from delusions, — of ‘reform’ in right sacred earnest, of indispensable amendment, and stern sorrowful abrogation and order to depart, — such as cannot well be spoken at present; as dare scarcely be thought at present; which nevertheless are very inevitable, and perhaps rather imminent several of them! Truly we have a heavy task of work before us; and there is a pressing call that we should seriously begin upon it, before it tumble into an inextricable mass, in which there will be no working, but only suffering and hopelessly perishing! — Or perhaps Democracy, which we announce as now come, will itself manage it? Democracy, once modelled into suffrages, furnished with ballot-boxes and such like, will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by? To the great mass of men, I am aware, the matter presents itself quite on this hopeful side. Democracy they consider to be a kind of ‘Government.’ The old model, formed long since, and brought to perfection in England now two hundred years ago, has proclaimed itself to all Nations as the new healing for every woe: “Set up a Parliament,” the Nations everywhere say, when the old King is detected to be a Sham-King, and hunted out or not; “set up a Parliament; let us have suffrages, universal suffrages; and all either at once or by due degrees will be right, and a real Millennium come!” Such is their way of construing the matter. Such, alas, is by no means my way of construing the matter; if it were, I should have had the happiness of remaining silent, and been without call to speak here. It is because the contrary of all this is deeply manifest to me, and appears to be forgotten by multitudes of my contemporaries, that I have had to undertake addressing a word to them. The contrary of all this; — and the farther I look into the roots of all this, the more hateful, ruinous and dismal does the state of mind all this could have originated in appear to me. To examine this recipe of a Parliament, how fit it is for governing Nations, nay how fit it may now be, in these new times, for governing England itself where we are used to it so long: this, too, is an alarming inquiry, to which all thinking men, and good citizens of their country, who have an ear for the small still voices and eternal intimations, across the temporary clamours and loud blaring proclamations, are now solemnly invited. Invited by the rigorous fact itself; which will one day, and that perhaps soon, demand practical decision or redecision of it from us, — with enormous penalty if we decide it wrong! I think we shall all have to consider this question, one day; better perhaps now than later, when the leisure may be less. If a Parliament, with suffrages and universal or any conceivable kind of suffrages, is the method, then certainly let us set about discovering the kind of suffrages, and rest no moment till we have got them. But it is possible a Parliament may not be the method! Possible the inveterate notions of the English People may have settled it as the method, and the Everlasting Laws of Nature may have settled it as not the method! Not the whole method; nor the method at all, if taken as the whole? If a Parliament with never such suffrages is not the method settled by this latter authority, then it will urgently behoove us to become aware of that fact, and to quit such method; — we may depend upon it, however unanimous we be, every step taken in that direction will, by the Eternal Law of things, be a step from improvement, not towards it. Not towards it, I say, if so! Unanimity of voting, — that will do nothing for us if so. Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting. The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigor by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you vote. If you can, by voting or without voting, ascertain these conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape: if you cannot, the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again; the inexorable Icebergs, dumb privy-councillors from Chaos, will nudge you with the most chaotic ‘admonition’; you will be flung half frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or admonished into shivers by your iceberg councillors, and sent sheer down to Davy Jones, and will never get round Cape Horn at all! Unanimity on board ship; — yes indeed, the ship’s crew may be very unanimous, which doubtless, for the time being, will be very comfortable to the ship’s crew, and to their Phantasm Captain if they have one: but if the tack they unanimously steer upon is guiding them into the belly of the Abyss, it will not profit them much! — Ships accordingly do not use the ballot-box at all; and they reject the Phantasm species of Captains: one wishes much some other Entities, — since all entities lie under the same rigorous set of laws, — could be brought to show as much wisdom, and sense at least of self-preservation, the first command of Nature. Phantasm Captains with unanimous votings: this is considered to be all the law and all the prophets, at present. If a man could shake out of his mind the universal noise of political doctors in this generation and in the last generation or two, and consider the matter face to face, with his own sincere intelligence looking at it, I venture to say he would find this a very extraordinary method of navigating, whether in the Straits of Magellan or the undiscovered Sea of Time. To prosper in this world, to gain felicity, victory and improvement, either for a man or a nation, there is but one thing requisite, That the man or nation can discern what the true regulations of the Universe are in regard to him and his pursuit, and can faithfully and steadfastly follow these. These will lead him to victory; whoever it may be that sets him the way of these, — were it Russian Autocrat, Chartist Parliament, Grand Lama, Force of Public Opinion, Archbishop of Canterbury, M’Croudy the Seraphic Doctor with his Last-evangel of Political Economy, — sets him in the sure way to please the Author of this Universe, and is his friend of friends. And again, whoever does the contrary is, for a like reason, his enemy of enemies. This may be taken as fixed. And now by what method ascertain the monition of the gods in regard to our affairs? How decipher, with best fidelity, the eternal regulation of the Universe; and read, from amid such confused embroilments of human clamor and folly, what the real Divine Message to us is? A divine message, or eternal regulation of the Universe, there verily is, in regard to every conceivable procedure and affair of man: faithfully following this, said procedure or affair will prosper, and have the whole Universe to second it, and carry it, across the fluctuating contradictions, towards a victorious goal; not following this, mistaking this, disregarding this, destruction and wreck are certain for every affair. How find it? All the world answers me, “Count heads; ask Universal Suffrage, by the ballot-boxes, and that will tell.” Universal Suffrage, ballot-boxes, count of heads? Well, — I perceive we have got into strange spiritual latitudes indeed. Within the last half-century or so, either the Universe or else the heads of men must have altered very much. Half a century ago, and down from Father Adam’s time till then, the Universe, wherever I could hear tell of it, was wont to be of somewhat abstruse nature; by no means carrying its secret written on its face, legible to every passer-by; on the contrary, obstinately hiding its secret from all foolish, slavish, wicked, insincere persons, and partially disclosing it to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose number was not the majority in my time!

Did you get all that? A roar of artillery indeed!

We close with the words of Alex Kurtagić in ‘Masters of the Universe,’ his speech at the National Policy Institute conference of 2011:

Two years ago I asked the question, “What will it take?” How bad will it need to get, before the inconvenience of changing things becomes preferable to more of the same? I asked this because for many years we’d been hearing about a collapse that would cause a great uprising and magically solve all our problems. … Western culture is individualistic, therefore Western man is not very ethnocentric. He is less tribal, less racial, than other peoples of the world. Likewise, Western culture is unique for its moral universalism, and Western man tends to become enamored of abstract universal principles — liberty, equality, brotherhood, democracy, and so on. Love for abstract principles is linked to a highly developed moral sense, which comes with a highly developed guilt complex. Like all humans, Western man is tribal and has racial instincts, but they tend to put them aside in favor of principles, or individual utility — whatever they are at a given point in time and space. For Western man, a much higher level of existential threat is needed to bring racial instincts to the surface. … Humans, generally, are not motivated by rational self-interest. Humans are motivated by the need to belong, and the need for status and self-esteem. We want to fit into a community with whose members we identify and where we feel good about ourselves. We are also motivated by inborn emotional tendencies. And we humans also like to dream and fantasize, and are motivated by our own dreams and fantasies. They may take the form of a religion, the form of a mythology, or art, or literature, or cosmology. We dream and fantasize about what could be, about what ought to be, about how we would like to be. It’s how we create meaning in our lives. In the West, these daydreams often revolve around abstract principles. At the same time there is too much information. Too many sides to an issue, too many versions of the same story. Most people don’t have the time or the energy to research it, to try and discover the truth, to distinguish fact from fiction, knowledge from propaganda. … So, how then, do we motivate our fellow citizens to proclaim an unconventional allegiance, with all the risks this entails? Earlier I said that humans tend to be impressed by the masterful. They come to an idea because the messenger is somehow seductive. They want to be like him. Or with people like him. I also said that they want to belong and to feel good about themselves. If we are not being more successful selling our message, it’s because we are offering none of the above. Instead, many on our side offer an endless litany of complaints about how the world has gone wrong, about how we are in decline, about how we have less and less power in our society. Anyone looking into our camp often sees wall-to-wall negativity, pessimism, fear, paranoia, despair, and lamentation. It all amounts to one big, long wail of self-pity. The despair is such that the mantra we often hear on the fringes of the Right is “worse is better.” Not because the people saying this have real solutions, but because they’re hoping the collapse will fix everything. That is not the attitude of the masterful, of the powerful, of people who shape events. That is the attitude of people shaped by events. The attitude of a loser. Defeatism is a prelude to defeat. To succeed, we have to project an image of success. That means getting rid of the negativity. Speaking not in terms of what we’ve lost; but in terms of what we’re going to gain; in terms of what kind of society we want to build, in terms of what happens next, not what happened before. A winner learns from the past, but he’s always looking to the future. He’s always facing the sun. And we are solar people. We have brought light into this world. We must not forget who we are. We must not become slaves of the darkness. A winner’s image is an indispensable part of a winning formula. And a winning formula means acting as if. Acting as if we are already there. Which implies operating like an alternative society, offering access to a parallel universe, physical and metaphysical. Access to a different cosmology, a different system of symbols, a different way of understanding life. The new nationalism looks like an establishment in waiting. Not like fearful cynics who are waiting for a collapse, but like people who are building something new and important, that makes the collapse desirable because it opens the way for what comes afterwards, because it opens the way for a golden age. Rather than looking like conservatives fighting the tide of progress, we have to be the tide — the tide that sweeps away the old and decrepit left, that sweeps them out of power, sweeps them into the landfill of history, never to rise again. … Now, when some of us speak of transforming the culture, of reconfiguring it in order to make our politics possible, many are intimidated by the scale of the task. It seems to them a godlike undertaking, more fantasy than reality. But this is not so. We don’t have to be too old to remember how our culture was reconfigured by the radical Left. It has been done before. Within living memory. How does one transform a culture? The process begins very simply. It begins with pen and paper, with brush and canvas, with a man and his musical instrument. It’s in the hands of a creative minority, who create because it’s in their nature, because it’s a compulsion, and because they are impatient with the world around them and dream of something else, they fantasize about something new. The artist, the painter, the philosopher do what their nature compels them to do.

As they have always done, from Beethoven to Shakespeare, from Coleridge to van Gogh. I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God’s help I shall succeed.

Thank you for reading.

Want to learn more about the topics covered in this issue of Radish? We highly recommend the following resources. (We do not, however, necessarily endorse all opinions expressed in them: some are not nearly extreme enough.)

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