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Americanism Autobiography London

Synchronicity?

After midnight I watched some videos about North Korea. I was very impressed that it is a society that has implemented some measures that, I am absolutely convinced, must be implemented in a subjugated Europe to throw off the shackles of Americanism. I am talking about banning Western films or TV programmes in North Korea (remember that not long ago I made a list of the very few that could be seen), degenerate music, the internet, jeans, hair dyeing and something magnificent: banning Bibles too!

Currently, North Korea allows Westerners to visit under controlled tour guides, unless the tourist is an American citizen, who is not permitted to enter the country.

It is laughable that some American vloggers talk about the propaganda with which North Korea’s totalitarian system indoctrinates its citizens because they only see the speck in the other’s eye. Western propaganda is equally totalitarian. But it is not the hard kind of totalitarianism: it is the kind of soft totalitarianism that Aldous Huxley explained to George Orwell not long before the latter died.

No one is more a slave than he who thinks he is free, and the propaganda that every Westerner has suffered for decades about Hitler, the Third Reich and National Socialism is akin to the Two Minutes Hate of 1984. At least in North Korea boys are boys and girls are girls. There is no mutilation of these creatures’ genitals on the altar of ‘diversity’. In fact, I think Andrew Anglin is right to say that this kind of American opprobrium is even worse than that suffered by nations under harsh totalitarianism: just what Huxley tried to tell Orwell, insofar as American totalitarianism is a more subtle, insidious and effective form of mind control.

Alongside these videos about North Korea, there are other YouTube videos about homeless and street junkies in Pennsylvania, or the streets of downtown San Francisco where all the businesses have closed because the mayor has taken neochristian ethics to its ultimate consequences: allowing business robberies as long as they don’t exceed nine hundred dollars.

It reminds me of the first night I spent outside the country of my birth. That was in March 1981, when I only endured a single day in a youth hostel in San Francisco. I was so repulsed by the Sin City that I fled to a privileged area in Los Angeles (Westwood near UCLA).

One of the things I mention in my autobiography is what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences. As a sceptic of the paranormal, I shouldn’t believe in that Jungian theory, but sometimes things have happened to me that seem to be very meaningful.

One of them happened on that one-day trip to San Francisco. When I got off the Greyhound the first thing I did was to slip, along with two educated Spanish speakers I met on the bus, into a Ripley’s Believe It or Not street exhibit close to the bus station.

The small exhibition was about very weird things. In particular, the huge image of an Aryan male, a sort of monk in the sense of extreme asceticism, stuck in my memory. He was so astronomically burdened with Christian guilt that he had wrapped himself in heavy chains, and even a huge mallet hung from the chains to mortify his sinful body.

‘That is America’, so terminally loaded with false guilt, wanted to tell me the collective unconscious by way of a meaningful coincidence the first day I spent outside my native country! Although in 1981 masochistic self-mortification wasn’t as ubiquitous in the West, the seeds of self-hatred were already sown and had germinated in the American psyche. Perceptive Americans who were still alive in that year, such as Revilo Oliver and William Pierce, saw it that way.

I haven’t been able to find via Google the image I saw more than forty years ago, but I recently included this other image of flagellants in Oliver’s anti-Christian essay. So synchronistic was the 1981 image of Ripley’s Believe It or Not in my first trip to the US that, today, if a Hindu tourist were to try to communicate to an Aryan American that, according to his religion, it is a sin for this Aryan to mix with coloureds, the San Fran American might view the Indian who wants to save him with hatred, insofar as his moral mandate is self-flagellation until his race disappears.

Huxley was right: soft totalitarianism is far worse than hard totalitarianism. See Kerry Bolton’s ‘A contemporary assessment of Francis Parker Yockey’ (pages 47-70 of this PDF) for further discussion.

One might ask me what it was that so horrified me in San Francisco that I barely spent a night and hastily fled to another American city. The answer is that something similar would happen to me in London the following year, the first time I visited Europe’s largest city.

In 1982 I saw London as such an incredibly nefarious place, even at a time when the vast majority in that city were white, that I immediately fled to Paris. Sensitive people like Dostoyevsky and Gustave Doré suffered identical impressions when visiting London: even in the 19th century it was already hell (see e.g., Doré’s 250 pen and ink drawings, often with dramatic chiaroscuro, about London). I believe that only artists understand these realities intuitively, which completely escape the man without an artistic spirit.

Categories
Currency crash Kali Yuga London Miscegenation Pandemics Racial right Real men Sword

Andúril: the broken sword

At midnight I was talking about the feeling of unreality that I felt when I saw a video of Jared Taylor. Finding ourselves on the brink of a civil war or rather an anti-white, exterminationist war that gets closer and closer to Ward Kendall’s novel, Taylor gives counsel like getting married, having a good job, and trying to do politics without overtly revealing our true colours…

Another notable racialist webzine, Kevin MacDonald’s, recently published a terrifying article of things I had already seen in London the last time I visited the city. The island has truly become the ultimate example of what I call ‘sin against the holy spirit of life’, an unforgivable sin: doing mass propaganda for English roses to have kids with blacks. But the most serious issue about the MacDonald webzine article is that there is not an iota of hatred among the commenters, or even in the writer. And without hatred there can be no war of recovery of the English roses.

What can save the white race at this point? Only that a million white men on each side of the Atlantic develop the infinite hatred that I feel. But how likely are they to become like me?

Probabilities seem null, don’t they? However, there is a possibility of salvation: a Deus ex Machina in the real world, the convergence of catastrophes.

What would happen if in the coming winter, as happened with the Spanish influenza of a century ago, the contagion curve rises dramatically? And what would happen if that catastrophe converges with the fall of the dollar? (Both gold and silver have already started to rise—the real indicator that something big is coming, as we have been predicting on this site since 2011.) And what if in the US Biden wins and the old senile president dies so that his negress vice president transitions from soft totalitarianism to hard totalitarianism?

Several times I have said on this site that the first president of Paraguay forced whites to marry Indians, blacks or mulattas: an even ‘harder’ step to exterminate the white race than the ‘soft’ steps taken in the UK.

What happened these days on the Taylor and MacDonald webzines confirms what I have been saying: white nationalism only represents a couple of baby steps for the normie to start going to the other side of the Rubicon. It should be more than obvious that on the other side we already can see warriors ready to fight for the recovery not only of their land but… of their beautiful women! Will catastrophes converge in time to make the white male react?

Most white advocates don’t even know that the dollar is going to collapse. Still others are in a state of abject denial about the Chinese virus saying it’s like the flu. And still other racialists are reluctant to see the extreme gravity of the situation: a soft totalitarianism that aims to exterminate the white race. They cannot even imagine that historical inertia is directly aimed at a hard totalitarianism that implements the anti-white policy of the first president of Paraguay throughout the West, as in Kendall’s novel.

Lack of warrior hatred in the movement; the lack of the most elementary knowledge of history (most racialists don’t even want to read Pierce’s non-fiction book) and of the economy, make the white nationalist movement of today a sort of child throwing a tantrum in the middle of the Rubicon, unwilling to walk past his first baby steps.

But history leans toward what we say in The West’s Darkest Hour, not what they say. It is true that we cannot predict, for sure, what will happen to the Chinese virus. But if the herd’s immunity or vaccines are not created (I doubt it—cf. Chris Martenson) and that converges with the catastrophe of the dollar crashing, a window of opportunity will open for white males to start waking up in enough quantity to make a difference.

An opportunity is only an opportunity. In no way is it assured that, even if catastrophes converge with a negress president who starts to implement policies such as those implemented in Paraguay, whites will want to wake up.

‘Men will fight to the death for only the most basic of motives’, said George Lincoln Rockwell. If I understand human psychology well, in the convergence that will unfold in the following years and decades, at least thirty to forty percent of whites will have to die horribly before the survivors finally begin to wake up and wield the sword. Including this article, there are sixteen entries on this site under the heading ‘The Sword’. But when catastrophes converge, who among today’s racialists will want to wield it?

Categories
Blacks Catholic Church London Miscegenation

SSPX ethnosuicide

It is incredible the quantity of Christians in white nationalism. All of them are clueless that their religion is more evil than Judaism: as it implies ethnic treason.
These days the Christians on The Occidental Observer have been discussing traditional Catholicism in the form of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). Although I left the below comment at the comments section, I am pretty sure they won’t pay due attention to the inherent problems in the religion of our parents—even if I manage to translate the ten volumes of Christianity’s Criminal History in the coming years!
 

______ 卐 ______

 
One Sunday during my August 2014 visit to London I visited the Drake House, where SSPX masses were held. I had to get to the last subway station in London, Wimbledon, to get closer to that house.
When I arrived at the parish I realized that it was not a common temple but a small and modest house adapted for religious services. Bishop Richard Williamson was not in London apparently. A gentleman from the London Forum whom I met on the trip had told them that someone coming from Mexico was going to visit them. The kindly people of that place that aspired to church had placed an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in front of the community! I suspected they had put it for me, so I did not dare to tell them that I was an apostate.
When the service ended, I spoke with the head manager on days when Williamson was absent. He began to speak of the painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a miraculous image: just what I had heard a million times in Mexico! The traditionalist Catholics with whom I spoke at the Drake House knew who was Father Joaquín Sáenz y Arriaga. I told them that Father Sáenz had baptized me, but not that I had lost my faith. Sáenz, the priest of my family when I was a child, was also excommunicated for reasons fairly similar to Williamson’s excommunication.
I took a brochure from Drake House, ‘Our program of events’ among the propaganda booklets of the house. The brochure showed the picture of a fifty-year-old black woman on the cover. That was not all. The list of events at the Drake House included dancing from Brazilian Samba to African Dummers referring to events scheduled for mid-September. This in a city that has no longer white majority and where everywhere I saw mixed couples!
At a London Forum meeting I had heard wonders about Williamson’s anti-Semitic stance. When I met his faithful, I realized that the ultra-traditional group was ethnically as self-destructive as the ultra-liberal Argentinean pope.
So my friends [addressing TOO commenters], I must ask again: Has a Christian in this thread started to read my ongoing translations of Christianity’s Criminal History? I am doing it from the POV of white preservation of course.

Categories
Aryan beauty Evil Kali Yuga London Miscegenation

Negroes & English roses


 

I wrote the following article
three years ago:

 

“I’ve never seen a real nigger, only in pictures.”
“Lucky you! That was kind of the idea behind the Revolution, sweetie, so you wouldn’t have to see one.” said Jenny.

Freedom’s Sons, page 579

 
As I said in a comment of my “parting word,” only if I have to say something important I would do it in this addenda to The West’s Darkest Hour.
Presently I am in the United Kingdom and am extremely dismayed at the quantity of both mixed couples and general miscegenation and fraternization among whites with non-whites in a country that still produces some of the most beautiful Aryan women, previously known as “English roses.”
I first visited London in 1982. I was not racialist but my mind did not register non-whites then. Now, in 2014 I see that the native English have become a minority in their own capital. If it were not for a surprisingly large amount of beautiful blond children and adolescents I’ve seen in London, some of them tourists I guess, I’d have no objection in nuking the Sin City.
Even at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, where I had to pay £40 for a seat to watch Antony and Cleopatra, several Shakespearean actors are now Mulattoes and Negroes; and among the audience I had to watch a pubescent white girl being fondled by a dark Indian while watching the comedy. If we keep in mind that the Englishmen of other times treasured their Roses you can imagine the astronomic shift that has taken place in the island since I was born more than half a century ago.
To boot, during my visit to the Guildhall Art Gallery I discovered that it was closed for reparations until September, which means that I won’t see the collection of nymphs depicted in the pre-Raphaelite masterpieces.
In contrast to the paintings that I expected to see in real life but couldn’t, in this visit to the UK I have been bombarded with street and subway photos showing blacks everywhere as if they were the legit inhabitants of this country! A London Forum member told me that the media is even portraying blond women with black husbands and coffee-and-milk kids as something cool and fashionable. Even the front cover of a promotional brochure of the Museum of the Bank of England, that I visited, has a black girl beside a pile of gold bars.
Fortunately, the English are as crazy Keynesians as the Americans, which means that the coming crash of the dollar will drag the sterling pound too bringing this multiracial utopia into utter chaos.
PS of 28 August:
I’ve left the United Kingdom by now. Kevin MacDonald has published an article on an epidemic of non-whites raping pubescent white girls in the UK that perfectly diagnoses the runaway insanity in the UK. This is one of MacDonald’s phrases in the article: “This is a pathology so extreme that it should really be considered a collective psychosis.”
PPS of 7 September:
See also Andrew Hamilton’s article: here.

Categories
Axiology Deranged altruism London

Poisoned arrow

by Jack Frost

Amor vincit omnia
Caritas vincit omnia
Agape vincit omnia.
[1]

 
Perversely, the suicide of the West (Christendom) is an expression of its civilizational confidence—confidence in its own moral purity, in its vision of universal brotherhood, in the power of charity and love, and in its ability to assimilate the victimized Other, who recalls to them the victimized Jesus.

That this is all horribly misconceived according to the rational principles of Darwin is ignored. Calls to faith and universal brotherhood are stronger.

Thus, the poisoned arrow of Christian charity strikes home before the shield of reason can be raised to knock it away.

 

___________________________

[1] Note of the Ed.: The term Agape or Love Feast was used for certain religious meals among early Christians. Originally it was used as a verb but the noun form first occurs in the Septuagint. Other ancient authors have used forms of the word to denote love in contrast to philia (an affection that could denote friendship) and eros, an affection of a sexual nature. Christianity developed Agape as the love of the Providence for humankind. In the New Testament it refers to the covenant love of God for humans and the term extends to the love of one’s fellow man.

Categories
London

See you at the Leaky Cauldron?

Harry-Potter_Leaky_Cauldron_signSoon I will pay a visit to London and other towns in the U.K.

Anyone interested in joining me with a beer in a pub?

Cheers!

Categories
Child abuse Degenerate art Hojas Susurrantes (book) London Music Sexual "liberation"

Dante’s outer circle

In the third season of Downton Abbey, when Matthew experiences a visual shock while entering a jazz club in London trying to rescue Rose dating a married man, Matthew proclaims aloud that the club is “Dante’s outer circle.”

Downton-Abbey-Christmas-2013

(In the above photo inside Highclere Castle this spoiled girl, Rose, appears with a pink dress.) Downton Abbey is the only recent TV series that I might recommend. Even the kissing of Rose with a Negro in the next season is depicted as a silly revenge of Rose against her abusive mother. But there’s no obvious cultural or racial treason in the episodes I’ve watched as to date. (I’ve only missed the last one, the 2013 Christmas special of the fourth season).

These sort of post-war London clubs that shocked Matthew were in operation a hundred years ago. Music is infinitely worse now. Since the self-destructive defense mechanisms of abused adolescents are my specialty I’d claim that the rock classics you may listen today—for example “Tie Your Mother Down” by the group Queen that I used to like when I was the victim of an engulfing mother—are precisely silly defense mechanisms.

Now that I wrote a book confessing how I was abused as a teen I realize that a mature man may develop non-degenerate defense mechanisms to cope with past memories.

Alas, this is not the case of the overwhelming majority of white nationalists. All of them seem to fail to comprehend that it is impossible to revert back to the healthy sexual mores depicted in Downton Abbey if at the same time they don’t reject the music of Queen and the myriads of other rock groups.

In his blog’s entry of the first day of the new year, Iranian for Aryans reposted what musician Roger had said recently:

I’ve just finished reading this interview with the late Cardinal Domenico Bartolucci, former musical director of the Sistine Chapel, and I thought you might be interested by some of his comments. He is speaking primarily about liturgical music, but he also discusses about the general condition of music in this rotten century:

“[My father] was a workman at a brick factory in Borgo San Lorenzo, in the province of Florence. He loved to sing in church. And he loved the romance of Verdi and Donizetti. But at that time, everybody sang: the farmers while they were dressing the vines, the shoemakers while they were working a sole. There were bands in the piazza, during the holidays music directors came from Florence, and the area theatre had two opera seasons each year. It’s all gone now.”

Simple Italian factory workers used to love the music of Verdi and Donizetti? I wonder how this fits with the black metal apologists’ belief that classical music was historically something for a tiny bourgeois clique, and that most normal people were only familiar with folk songs.

I can remember them trying to make these arguments in the comment threads of Counter-Currents, Alternative Right and the Occidental Observer. There is no excuse these people will not use if it will enable them to continue listening to their beloved modern music. Were they serious, they would spend a moment considering why old reactionaries, who grew up before rock music became ubiquitous, are so repulsed by distorted guitars and screeching. (Modern man knows better, of course.)

When asked if the old musical traditions are disappearing, the cardinal said, “it stands to reason: if there is not the continuity that keeps them alive, they are destined to oblivion.”

I think that sums it up in a nutshell. One of my goals in 2014 is to acquire a tenor viol and start learning music by the English consort composers (as well as continental composers from the same time period). Whether it will be possible to find other violists to form a consort is another problem, but keeping the music alive with one’s own hands is a good starting point. It is undoubtedly the case that music cannot survive as a collection of digital audio files. That will turn it into a mere museum piece. If that happens, it will be sad but just. A civilised nation cannot choose to embrace African voodoo devilry at the expense of its own culture and expect to continue living with dignity.

Yup… Precisely because my mother is a piano teacher I rebelled against my family’s traditions and, like Downton Abbey’s Rose, never learnt how to play it. But now that I fully processed my pain thru a thick book I realize that my adolescent infatuation with Queen was just silly. I no longer listen rock. In fact, I just started learning piano at my relative old age!

By the way, in a most recent personal communication, Iranian commented on Roger’s above sentence: “There is no excuse these people [white nationalists] will not use if it will enable them to continue listening to their beloved modern music”:

How correct Roger is! What we have here is a degenerated breed of WNs / “traditionalists” who, basically, have no musical taste, are divorced from their superior heritage, and desire a world where bad music and pornography reign sans Jew.

Recently at Facebook, a Counter-Currents sodomite responded to Iranian that a Persian ought not dare teach him what his western cultural roots are.

Can’t he? I am not an American either but, to my present ears, years after I processed my adolescent pain, the “music” promoted by Counter-Currents and other nationalist sites is becoming like Dante’s outer circle certainly…

Postscript of January 11: Alternative Right is gone now, but Richard Spencer has opened a new site promoting exactly the same “black metal” degeneracy.

Categories
Free speech / association London

A rant from London

In the thread “Stubbs on anti-Nordicism” a woman, Maggie, tried to post a comment that, instead of discussing it there, I better use it as a separate entry:

This blog is a disgrace and should not be on the internet. Who are you (and any of these ridiculous writers that you are so fond of quoting) to decide which race is more superior to another, and to decide that only Aryans should be preserved? People like you are the Tom Buchanans of the 21st century, spouting utter drivel about race and the minute distinctions between races.

Can I just say – who actually cares? Race is a foolish notion introduced by people like yourself to discriminate against others because of the colour of their skin. It is true that in the years to come there will be wars about food and land – because there are too many people on this planet. I accept that. However, removing people from “Nordic” (what a ridiculous term) countries to the countries of their ethnic origin will most probably cause even more fighting, unrest and disruption in this already flawed world.
And by the way, your views on women are completely outdated and shameful. Women have done so much to help this world when the pigheadedness of men has almost ruined everything.

Looking back over what I have written, I admit it is flawed, slightly incoherent and does not address the arguments you made in the article. But I am just simply disgusted and angered that a website like this, promoting bigoted, clearly racist views, is allowed to exist in the 21st century.


BookWiseMy response. Maggie: Before a mere knee-jerk reaction based upon decades of anti-white propaganda, I would recommend a little of owl wisdom. Please read the most elemental articles linked on the sidebar:
 

BASIC (A, B, C):

The fourteen words

Blood and soil

A very brief manifesto

 

BEWARE OF THE NEWSPEAK:

The “mantra”

The word “hate”

The word “racism”

Categories
Emigration / immigration Feminism London Mainstream media Schutzstaffel (SS)

The Champions

The_Champions


William Gaunt, Stuart Damon, and Alexandra Bastedo





When I was a kid my favorite TV series was The Champions (watch the 43 seconds of the opening titles: here). Recently, before an user’s YouTube channel was axed due to copyright infringement, I re-watched the first dozen episodes of the series.

After a little research, however, I was shocked to learn that Stuart Damon, good-looking 1967 is in fact Jewish. In his more recent pics in the internet his age unmasks better his ethnic origins.

The other two characters are whites. Alas, the gorgeous Alexandra Bastedo, a believer in animal rights, did not leave any children but instead purchased a bucolic farm in England and lives among her many pets. (Compare her behavior with what Nietzsche says about how Aryan men must force their women to behave.) Unexpectedly, William Gaunt, whom I most admired as a kid—believing that physically I resembled him but that my parents considered pompous and inflated—, is the only one whose conduct I could not censure with my standards of today: at least he did breed.

As to the episodes, I don’t remember most of Episode 1, for instance, the conversation between Gaunt and the wise man of an ancient civilization in the Tibetan mountains. More to the point, in Episode 7 the anti-German scriptwriting starts to become apparent. A former German soldier, who survived for decades, very angrily asks a former SS officer why on earth could he have chosen the SS? (Incidentally, after re-watching it I realized I remembered fragments of this episode and many others after more than four decades of not seeing them.)

Episode 8 starts with music in a London club where the name of Churchill can be seen. It is no coincidence that precisely in the decade that mass immigration started in the UK, English music—yes: The Beatles et al—conveyed the feeling that the English society’s mores had been extremely relaxed.

It is unnecessary to recount the episodes that recently I re-watched. Suffice it to say that, as a 10-year old kid I was obviously incapable to interpret correctly the subtle propaganda.

Categories
Architecture Art Civilisation (TV series) Demography Industrial Revolution Kali Yuga Kenneth Clark London New York

Civilisation’s “Heroic Materialism”

Originally I posted this article on April 25, 2012. But now that I have been postulating that the One Ring of greed and power—that we might start calling “the Aryan Problem”—could be the main factor in the West’s darkest hour, I am moving it at the top of this blog.

Below, some excerpts of “Heroic Materialism,” the last chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark. (For an introduction to these series, see here.) Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages. Also, the headings don’t appear in the original text:

The westerners’ new god: Mammon

Imagine an immensely speeded up movie of Manhattan Island during the last hundred years. It would look less like a work of man than like some tremendous natural upheaval. It’s godless, it’s brutal, it’s violent—but one can’t laugh it off, because in the energy, strength of will and mental grasp that have gone to make New York, materialism has transcended itself. It took almost the same time to reach its present conditions as it did to complete the Gothic cathedrals. At which point a very obvious reflection crosses one’s mind: that the cathedrals were built to the glory of God, New York was built to the glory of mammon—money, gain, the new god of the nineteenth century. So many of the same human ingredients have gone into its construction that at a distance it does look rather like a celestial city. At a distance. Come closer and it’s not so good. Lots of squalor, and, in the luxury, something parasitical.


Blake’s Satan

One sees why heroic materialism is still linked with an uneasy conscience. The first large iron foundries like the Carron Works or Coalbrookdale, date from about 1780. The only people who saw through industrialism in those early days were the poets. Blake, as everybody knows, thought that mills were the work of Satan. ‘Oh Satan, my youngest born… thy work is Eternal death with Mills and Ovens and Cauldrons.’

The [slave] trade was prohibited in 1807, and as Wilberforce lay dying in 1835, slavery itself was abolished. One must regard this as a step forward for the human race, and be proud, I think, that it happened in England. But not too proud. The Victorians were very smug about it, and chose to avert their eyes from something almost equally horrible that was happening to their own countrymen.

In its early stages the Industrial Revolution was also a part of the Romantic movement. And here I may digress to say that painters had for long used iron foundries to heighten the imaginative impact of their work with what we call a romantic effect; and that they had introduced them into pictures as symbolising the mouth of hell. However, the influence of the Industrial Revolution on Romantic painters is a side issue, almost an impertinence, when compared to its influence on human life. I needn’t remind you of how cruelly it degraded and exploited a mass of people for sixty or seventy years.

What was destructive was size. After about 1790 to 1800 there appeared the large foundries and mills which dehumanised life. Long before Carlyle and Karl Marx, Wordsworth had described the arrival of a night shift ‘that turns the multitude of dizzy wheels, Men, maidens, youths, Mothers and little children, boys and girls, Perpetual sacrifice.’

The terrible truth is that the rise in population did nearly ruin us. It struck a blow at civilisation such as it hadn’t received since the barbarian invasions. First it produced the horrors of urban poverty. It must have seemed—may still seem—insoluble; yet this doesn’t excuse the callousness with which prosperous people ignored the conditions of life among the poor on which to a large extent their prosperity depended, and this in spite of the many detailed and eloquent descriptions that were available to them. I need mention only two—Engels’s Conditions of the Working Classes in England, written in 1844, and the novels written by Dickens between 1840 and 1855. Everybody read Dickens. But his terrible descriptions of poverty had very little practical effect: partly because the problem was too big; partly because politicians were held in the intellectual prison of classical economics.

The images that fit Dickens are by the French illustrator Gustave Doré. He was originally a humorist; but the sight of London sobered him. His drawings were done in the 1870s, after Dickens’s death. But one can see that things hadn’t changed much. Perhaps it took an outsider to see London as it really was.


Degenerate architecture

At the beginning of this series I said that I thought one could tell more about a civilisation from its architecture that from anything else it leaves behind. Painting and literature depend largely on unpredictable individuals. But architecture is to some extent a communal art. However, I must admit that the public buildings on the nineteenth century are often lacking in style and conviction; and I believe that this is because the strongest creative impulse of the time didn’t go into the town halls or country houses, but into what was then thought of as engineering. In fact, all modern New York started with the Brooklyn Bridge.

In this series I have followed the ups and downs of civilisation historically, trying to discover results as well as causes; well, obviously I can’t do that any longer. We have no idea where we are going, and sweeping, confident articles of the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of utterance. The scientists who are best qualified to talk have kept their moths shut.

The incomprehensibility of our new cosmos seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for the chaos of modern art. I know next to nothing about science, but I’ve spent my life trying to learn about art, and I am completely baffled by what is taking place today. I sometimes like what I see, but when I read modern critics I realise that my preferences are merely accidental.

Western civilisation has been a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence in ourselves. I said at the beginning that it is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. Fifty years ago W.B. Yeats, who was more like a man of genius than anyone I have ever known, wrote a famous poem.

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.