The emergence of capitalism has often been equated with the Protestant work ethic, and is here dismissed by Evola for the simple reason that labor has been transformed from a means of subsistence to an end in itself. It is not only the Right who are obsessed with work, of course, it is the Left too. One thinks of endless marches organized by the likes of Militant Labour and the Socialist Workers Party, during which the only objective is to enslave the proletariat to the employment system: “The most peculiar thing is that this superstitious and insolent cult of work is proclaimed in an era in which the irreversible and relentless mechanization eliminates from the main varieties of work whatever in them still had a character of quality, art, and the spontaneous unfoldment of a vocation, turning it into something inanimate and devoid of even an immanent meaning.” Evola sees this process as the very proletarianization of life itself.133
But what is all this to Kurtagić? Who cares for waxing airy-fairy about medieval crafts and vocations? Protestantism and Capitalism (the original “PC”?) produced these deracinated pencil-making Hard Men. Chesterton, Eliot, Guénon, Evola; not a beard among them! Nothing to tickle his fancy here!
IV.
THE WILDE WILDE WEST
Many Rightists are surprised to learn that Evola admired the works of Oscar Wilde, at least in his youth, but it’s not hard to see why. Evola despised Whitcombe’s bourgeoisie, and Wilde was their great tormentor. And Wilde’s social thought, as epitomized in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” was part of the same “work should ennoble or not be done at all” tradition that would later be mined by such Traditionalists as Ananda Coomaraswamy and Guénon as well as Evola himself.
As someone once said about Ayn Rand’s idealized portraits of industrialists, “she writes about industrialists as if she had never met one,” so with Kurtagić and his Hard Men, whom he only knows from photographs; one can only imagine what he would think of Wilde’s idea that work must be abolished because it is ugly and makes men ugly.
Interestingly, Wilde, unlike Kurtagić, actually met with miners, along with cowboys and other Hard Men of the West during his famous American tour. A fascinating article by Jan Wellington134 gives an account of the remarkable encounters, where “Wilde both advertised and embodied the aesthetic movement with its scorn for middle-class Victorian life and the uglier effects of the Industrial Revolution,” a perfect summary of what Evola hated, while also summarizing what Whitcombe and Kurtagić want to preserve in the name of the Right.
Since Kurtagić extends his admiration to “the frontiersmen of American Old West,” let’s see what happened when The Aesthete met The Hard Men.
From the time Wilde disembarked in New York, Americans were surprised to observe that, despite his elegant hands and languid gestures, the Aesthete was a strapping young man who, offstage, ate and drank with gusto and spoke with genial frankness. They learned that even his oft-ridiculed stage dress of black velvet jacket, lace cravat, silk knee breeches, and patent leather pumps could be understood in terms of pragmatics. As Wilde explained, “When a man is going to walk or row, or perform feats which require a display of strength and muscle, the trousers are done away with and knee breeches are worn.”
The Hard Men or Wild Boys of the West were not bowed down under the twin curses of work and muscular Christianity that Kurtagić wants to press down on our brows. Indeed:
[T]hat quintessential westerner, the cowboy, enjoyed freedoms unique in Victorian America: intimacy with women outside of marriage, intimate (though not necessarily sexual) relationships with men, and even the playful donning of women’s garb. To this alternative masculine subculture, their eccentric trans-Atlantic visitor would have seemed uncannily familiar, and thus it is no surprise that at least some Westerners found space in their tradition of individualism for one whose masculinity was complicated by a “feminine” aesthetic and appearance.
This, of course, is the West that served William Burroughs as the basis for his Dead Roads trilogy. These Wild Westerners sound like they could just as well be called the Mötley Crüe or the Guns N’ Roses Gang.
Indeed, one aspect of that free Hard Man culture that Kurtagić, and his Victorians, might have found hard to swallow: the men took Leif Garrett (a relation to Pat Garrett?) as their model, not Thomas Arnold:
In truth, Wilde’s long tresses and outsized hats were not all that eccentric, for Americans had come to associate long hair on men with boldness and adventure. In the West, long hair distinguished masculine men like Wild Bill Hickok, George Armstrong Custer, and Buffalo Bill Cody. . . . The Denver Republican declared approvingly “that if placed in a mining camp dance hall, [the Aesthete] would pass for a real bold, bad man.”
Wellington notes that the Hard Men placed value on three things, and they were not high in the value system Kurtagić promotes: fighting, drinking, and cards. This allows us to get an idea of how Wilde would score on the Hard Man meter (I suggest we designate the units as Kurtagićs, or Ks).
Fighting? Wilde? Sure, he was huge man in real life, although later some described him as resembling a “fat, white slug.” The lecture tour did not give any opportunities for fisticuffs, although he did make “a promising impression”: a reporter noted that he “stumbled onto the stage with a stride more becoming a giant backwoodsman than an aesthete.”
Drinking? “In San Francisco, he foiled an attempt by the Bohemian Club to ply him with liquor and prove him a ‘Nancy boy’; after out-drinking (and out-talking) them all, he was given a proud place in a group photograph of the club.”
Cards? “In the same city, he thwarted another attempt on his manhood by professing his ignorance of poker, bluffing bafflement, and then beating all challengers at the game.”
In short, “when I lit a long cigar,” he reports, “they cheered till the silver fell in dust from the roof . . . and when I quaffed a cocktail without flinching, they unanimously pronounced me in their grand simple way a bully boy with no glass eye—artless and spontaneous praise which touched me more than the pompous panegyrics of literary critics ever did or could.”
As for the miners’ own opinions, the Leadville miners “cheered as Wilde drove a silver spike into the lode that would bear his name. Years after his visit, they recalled their guest with affection, one reportedly declaring, ‘[t]hat Oscar Wilde is some art guy, but he can drink any of us under the table and afterwards carry us home two at a time.’”
Driving a spike? That’s some real work there, Alex; I doubt your beloved pencil factory workers would find that an easy task. Twenty years making the same tiny motions with your hands is likely to leave you with a mean, suspicious visage, but isn’t really good for developing the biceps. No wonder they wore long pants; breeches would have revealed their pitiful shins!
What was the basis of this evident kinship of Oscar Wilde, the dandy and aesthete, with these Wild Boys of the Wild West? Simple: no matter how hard they may have worked, they did not allow their souls to be subjected to bourgeois economic necessity. Instead, their lives were dedicated to ideals and actions that transcended economic necessity: aesthetic appreciation and display, games and contests, chivalrous behavior, the unfettered imagination—in short, the wellsprings of real culture. The West is where the freest spirits in America escaped from the creeping blight of factories and tenements—until they hit the West coast, and modernity finally caught up with and consumed them in the end.
V.
BUNNY ROGER
Speaking of hard men and revealing outfits, consider one final example of the Homo as Hard Man: Bunny Roger. Reading Nicky Haslam’s memoir, Redeeming Features,135 I was delighted to find out about this actual gun-toting Wild Boy, Bunny Roger, described by Clive Fisher as “Erstwhile couturier, wit, dandy, landowner, and social ornament, Bunny Roger was what obituary in its obliquer days styled a lifelong bachelor and what gossip columnists knew as a flamboyant homosexual.”136
But what interests us right now is Bunny’s military career, and the Traditionalist character behind it.
As Haslam says, “His legendary parties, his houses, his dandified approach and outré taste were but a soufflé. They masked an encyclopedic mind, a sense of history, nerves of steel, passionate loyalty, deep patriotism, and the most patrician of values.”
Not only was Bunny a standing rebuke to post-Stonewall, Leftist, “gay,” “queer,” “adversary,” “transgressive” nonsense, his service in WWII should put paid to any nonsense about “gays in the military”; not because of some Leftist whining about “we wanna be equal” (and so hypocritical, given the Left’s pacifism and anti-Americanism), but precisely because, as the pagan world has known since Plato, homosexuals (or rather, as Ean Frick suggests, masculinists) are better soldiers, naturally:
Bunny himself was made of burnished metal. Physically very fit—I saw him run up mountains in Scotland, at the summit adjusting his makeup from a compact kept in his sporran—he was also fearless. As a captain in the Italian campaign, even if his tent was lined in mauve with gilt chairs, and his army overcoats altered to look like Garbo’s redingotes, he was revered by his men for the number of Germans he shot—“some right up the arse”—and after the war even refused ever to set foot in Germany.
Bunny, apparently, could give the Bear Jew a run for his money. Here’s more of Bunny’s War:
After Anzio, while surveying a bombed-out village, he ran into a friend who greeted him: “Bun! What’re you doing here?” Bunny looked at the destruction around them, “Shopping,” he replied. Although appalled and incensed by what he had witnessed during the war, he had the good taste to make light of it. “Now that I’ve shot so many Nazis,” he observed, “Daddy will have to buy me a sable coat.”137
The greatest generation indeed. Of course, now the American army is fully Judaized, doing “God’s work” in the Near East with no homos. How’s that working out for you, boys?
Kurtagić’s beloved beaten-down proles, or Bunny Rogers, leading a battalion of Wandervogel: Which is the face of our White Future?
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
September 20, 2012
FASHION TIPS FOR THE
FAR-FROM-FABULOUS RIGHT
Patsy: [nervous on TV] You can never have enough hats, gloves, and shoes.
Edina: Darling, even Amanda de Cadenet would remember the word “accessories.”138
I.
THE NOT-SO FABULOUS RIGHT
The Right can make even Patsy Stone seem like Karl Lagerfeld.139
Alex Kurtagić, despite his miserablist glorification of pencil-workers, at least sees the problem. In several essays at various “New Right” websites, he’s observed, all too truly, that the Right is losing, has lost, the “cultural war” not because the Left has better arguments, but because no one wants to be seen with us.140
What has happened over the last 50 years or so has been the systematic removable of status—basically, chicks and money—from White cultural expressions, ranging from rebellious rockers in spandex pants to authors speaking correct English, which are one and all systematically denigrated as “white” and—therefore— “gay.”
As Antonio Gramsci told us long ago, in the contemporary words of Pierre Krebs, “To be precise, it is impossible to overthrow a political apparatus without previously having gained control of cultural power.”141
Or, as the protagonist of Bright Lights, Big City says, as he wistfully gazes at a Talmud-reading Hasid on a New York subway:
This man has a God and a History, a Community. He has a perfect economy of belief in which pain and loss are explained in terms of a transcendental balance sheet, in which everything works out in the end and death is not really death. Wearing black wool all summer must seem like a small price to pay. He believes he is one of God’s chosen, whereas you feel like an integer in a random series of numbers. Still, what a fucking haircut!142
“Why?,” whine the Rightists, “why? We are so brilliant, so cutting edge. Why are we so ugly?”
The answer is simple: as Kanye says, “No Homo.”
First, the homos themselves get excluded, taking with them style, ideas, etc. They, by a natural process of cognitive drift, anyone and anything that seems homo-like comes under suspicion, and is then thrown out or self-censored.
First, manicures are scorned as “metrosexual”; then washing altogether, until the ideal “rightist” resembles Khrushchev’s father, who boasted of having taken two baths in his life, once when he was baptized, the other on the day of his wedding.
Gradually, a sort of Gresham’s Law of Fabulosity comes into play, and thus the “movement” moves from epicene, hand-waving fancy-talkers like William F. Buckley to Real American Guys like paunchy, cigar-puffing Rush Limbaugh: “The ‘face’ of White Rage has become the big, flabbily White behind of the thousands of porcine nitwits marching to Sean Hannity’s drums.”143
See, the problem with the “man of the Right” is that he thinks he’s Euro-American, and maybe even anti-Joo, but he’s also a Christer, which of course means he’s really just a self-hating semi-Semite. And along with the Christing, of course, comes a big heaping helping of homo-hate.
Failing to see the root connection of masculinism or homoeroticism (not necessarily “homosexuality” as defined by 19th-century Judaic “scientists”) with Aryan culture, they merely try to turn the clock back a couple of minutes; nor can they even accomplish that, since they fail to meet the opponent at his strongest point.
He’s has been thoroughly fooled by the Judaic Two-Step, the one-two punch of always being on top by covering both sides of every bet. He’s bought into both the Right-Wing satanic sex maniac stereotype, along with the Left-Wing fabulous sex maniac stereotype.
Thus, he’s completely oblivious to the fact that White Civilization was created and sustained by androphiles, not Judaic “family values.”144 That’s why, to paraphrase that icon of the Old Right, Albert Jay Nock, White Americans think the summit of Western Civilization is Kansas City, not Athens or Florence. No Homo!
In fact, where would the American post-war Right of Mr. Buckley have been without Whittaker Chambers, Roy Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover, or Cardinal Spellman?145
Mr. Kurtagić, in short, has merely inverted the basic thesis originally formulated some years ago by the late Alisdair Clarke. Rather than asking “where will the White Right find the style it needs to compete,” he had better ask, “what were we thinking when we kicked out the homos?”
Homosexuals are by nature—elitism, style, exclusivity, etc.—of the Right. Their identification (in several senses) with the Left is a function of Christian-inspired stupidity on the Right, and clever propagandizing on the Left.
It should come as no surprise that the Right has lost the Semiotic War. As long as the White Right bows to the alien contagion of Christianity, the Left (itself a product of Christianity) will continue to win.
I hope it doesn’t upset the Right’s crypto-Judaic sensibilities too much, but the homoerotic Wandervogel were the last successful, decades-long White Consciousness movement, and it sure looked more like a Gay Pride parade crossed with a hippie sit-in or Occupy Somewhere, than either a Skinhead convention, a Teabagger rally, or a buncha “real men” sitting around the sports bar moaning about “them welfare queens bleeding us dry.”
II.
THINK RIGHT, DRESS WHITE
Men always seem to need advice on how to dress, but it’s usually funny, though sometimes creepy, when “conservatives” start bloviating about how to dress like “real men.”
Feet, for some reason, always seem to come up (as it were). Yeah, I get it, the dirty hippies got all the hot chicks in the ’60s, right, Mr. Boomer Conservative? Jealous, much? I remember years ago reading, in something like American Spectator or some “conservative” columnist, someone, a P. J. O’Rourke wannabe or himself, going on and on about a man wearing sandals at some town meeting. He kept referring to such people as “foot fetishists,” but it occurred to me then, and still does, that the fetishist is the one so upset that he writes a column ab
out it filled with references to feet, not the man wearing the sandals without a second thought; just as men are the fetishists, not the women wearing leather or stilettos.
And so, at the appropriately named TakiMag:
9. COVER YOUR MAN TOES The first thing I always say about mandals is, “What if someone slaps your girl and you have to chase them?” Nobody’s saying you have to be Randy “Macho Man” Savage and pile-drive everyone who doesn’t open the door for your lady, but flip-flops render you incapable of physical combat. Shit, I don’t even think mandals should be allowed on the beach. Wear your sneakers to the beach. When you get to your towel, you can leave them there before swimming or, if the sand is hot, wear them to the tide’s edge and leave them there. Men are wearing flip-flops to work, parent-teacher interviews, apartment closings, and the dentist. Wearing mandals reveals a level of shameless self-love that reminds me of a baby playing with his penis while he gets his diaper changed. I barely want to look at a woman’s hideous black toenail polish on the filthy city streets. Seeing your mangled foot-claws flip and flop through dog crap is like forcing us to watch you masturbate.
There’s actually nothing particularly wrong with the peroration:
Here is the fundamental point behind all these rules: A grown man is meant to be prepared for conflict and provide for his wife and family. Indulging oneself like a gay teen on vacation is not only abandoning your post, it’s leaving women to pick up the slack. And nobody wants a world like that—especially women.146
The Homo and the Negro Page 8