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On Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation”

Kenneth Clark may have been clueless about the fact that race matters. Yet, that our rot goes much deeper than what white nationalists realize is all too obvious once we leave, for a while, the ghetto of nationalism and take a look at the classics, just as Clark showed us through his 1969 TV series Civilisation.

Compared to the other famous series, Clark’s was unsurpassed in the sense that, as I have implied elsewhere, only genuine art—not science—has a chance to fulfill David Lane’s fourteen words.

By “art” I mean an evolved sense of beauty which is almost completely absent in today’s nationalists. Most of them are quite a product of Jewish modernity whether with their music, lifestyles or Hollywood tastes, to a much greater degree than what they think. For nationalism to succeed an evolved sense of female beauty has to be the starting point to see the divine nature of the white race. In Clark’s own words, “For all these reasons I think it is permissible to associate the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy that one finds in the madonnas of the thirteenth century. Were there ever more delicate creatures than the ladies on Gothic ivories? How gross, compared to them, are the great beauties of other woman-worshiping epochs.”

Below, links to excerpts of most of the chapters of the 1969 series, where Clark followed the ups and downs of our civilisation historically:

“The Skin of our Teeth”

“The Great Thaw”

“Romance and Reality”

“Man—the Measure of all Things”

“The Hero as Artist”

“Protest and Communication”

“Grandeur and Obedience”

“The Light of Experience”

“Heroic Materialism”

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Art Beauty Charlemagne Civilisation (TV series) Islamization of Europe Kali Yuga Kenneth Clark Literature Mainstream media Philosophy of history

Civilisation’s “The Skin of our Teeth”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “The Skin of our Teeth,” the first chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:


I am standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris.

What is civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms—yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it; and I am looking at it now.

If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings. But this doesn’t mean that the history of civilisation is the history of art—far from it. Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies.

Whatever its merits as a work of art, I don’t think that there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilisation than the mask. They both represent spirits, messengers from another world—that is to say, from a world of our own imagining. To the Negro imagination it is a world of fear and darkness, ready to inflict horrible punishment for the smallest infringement of taboo. To the Hellenistic imagination it is a world of light and confidence, in which the gods are like ourselves, only more beautiful.

It is not my intention to insult white nationalists. But what they ignore is that, presently, with their rock music and media tastes they themselves, like the overwhelming majority of the white population are, spiritually, far closer to the Negro mask than to the Apollo of Belvedere. For Lord Clark it would have been unthinkable to consider civilised the popular forms of cultural expression such as heavy metal and the movies that today are watched even by white nationalists throughout the West.

As we saw in some of my latest entries, other self-destructing forms of cultural expression already occurred in the times of the fall of the Roman Empire. Clark said:

The same architectural language, the same imagery, the same theatres, the same temples—at any time for five hundred years you could have found them all round the Mediterranean, in Greece, Italy, France.

What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan’t embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear—fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence.

Unlike Gibbon and Nietzsche, before his TV audience Clark didn’t dare to point the finger at Christianity. But later in the program, Clark spoke about Islam:

In a miraculously short time—about fifty years—the classical world was overrun [by the Muslim conquests]. Only its bleached bones stood out against the Mediterranean sky. The old source of civilisation was sealed off, and if a new civilisation was to be born it would have to face the Atlantic.

But something very odd happened to Man’s self-image in the early medieval world facing the Atlantic in what today is Ireland. According to Clark:

The subject of Mediterranean man was man. Two hundred years have passed—perhaps a little more—and man has almost vanished.

Crude as this imago hominis may be when compared to the Apollo, presently some white nationalists advertise their blogs with soft-porn pics of semi-nude women: something far more degrading for the divine human figure than the image of 8th century insular art in the Echternach Gospels.

To my mind—and, like Clark, I must say that this is only my personal view­—, the imago hominis only means a psychogenic regression in Man’s understanding of himself compared to the Greeks and the Romans. However, the white nationalists’ soft porn spits on the avatar of God, even if I don’t believe in the existence of a personal god.

After the above image chosen by Clark for the first episode of his program, in the following pages of the book version Clark mentions how St. Gregory destroyed entire libraries of the classical world (I quoted part of it in my recent antichristian series, here), and on the next page he states that even in those obscure days the Europeans fought strenuously against their enemies:

All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war. The Romans were the best organised and most ruthless fighters in Latium. So it was with the Franks. Clovis and his successors not only conquered their enemies, but maintained themselves by cruelties and tortures remarkable even by the standards of the last thirty years.

Without Charles Martel’s victory over the Moors at Poitiers in 732, western civilisation might never have existed, and without Charlemagne’s tireless campaigns we should never have had the notion of a united Europe.

Charlemagne was the first great man of action to emerge from the darkness since the collapse of the Roman world. The old idea that he saved civilisation isn’t far wrong. On the whole, our whole knowledge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne.

If we compared ourselves with the franks, what could it be said about present-day nationalists? Many of them don’t even let our most serious fighter discuss in their forums (by “serious fighter” I mean someone who’s actively planning a revolution). Didn’t the Führer say that those who want to live, let them fight, and that those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live? Do whites and white nationalists deserve to live? If so, where are the Charles Martels in today’s islamized Europe, in America’s mexicanized states?

I am not proposing to do something stupid in a world which media is a hundred percent dominated by the Enemy. But at least be prepared for the tough, revolutionary times that are coming after the dollar crashes.

Categories
Eschatology Mainstream media Michael O'Meara Neanderthalism Toward the White Republic (book)

The national equivalent to what happened in New Orleans

An edited version of the following article, “Katrina’s Intimation of the End: Afterthoughts on the Impending Catastrophe,” published originally at National Vanguard, is the eleventh essay in Michael O’Meara’s book Toward the White Republic, available from Counter-Currents Publishing here.



For a moment, as Katrina’s hurricane winds and high flood waters swept away the smoke and mirrors, the lemmings glimpsed an America that was not quite the bowl of cherries our programmers would have us believe. With a major U.S. city turned over to a mob of tar-face primitives straight out of Black Hawk Down or Pontecorvo’s Burn—reports of cannibalism and savage mayhem—the state-of-the-art Superdome filled with the sub-Saharan stench of feces, sewage, and dead children—corpses floating in fetid waters: America’s Third World future suddenly affronted us in its all irrefutable barbarism. The banner of Austria’s Der Standard said it all: “Third World USA.” For here, televised for the rest of the world to see, was the coming anarchy, the horror Kurtz found in the darkened heart that was Africa—and is becoming America.

Even the Judeo-corporate powers who operate “the rolling tent show we call America” were forced to take note of the unprecedented disaster afflicting New Orleans. The New York Times, flagship of the country’s controlled media, published not one but a series of editorials that hammered home a single unambivalent point: The system is not working. In the Times’ view, the preparations leading up to the storm were criminally negligent, those in its wake pathetically inadequate, and subsequent emergencies likely to follow a similar pattern.

The momentary outburst of discontent on the editorial page of this and other Establishment organs was not, of course, the sort White nationalists feel. The elite opinion molders are exasperated by the current leadership (or lack of it) because its incompetence, irresponsibility, and corruption has allowed “the lie of multiculturalism to explode before their eyes,” exposing the scabious underside of their anti-White plutocracy. Better than most, they see that Katrina was not just a natural, but a political disaster that imperils the entire system. As one European observer (Philippe Grasset) characterizes it, Katrina is the system’s Cindy Sheehan. For against the technocratic conditioning which Baudrillard calls the simulacra deluding and manipulating the facetiously named “public,” a single elemental force—be it a mother’s insistence or nature’s fury—tore away the veil cloaking the system’s corruption of all that once distinguished White America.

The third-rate human being presiding over the United States and the rabid Zionist cabal advising him ought to take the greatest heat for the apocalyptic events that befell New Orleans. But theirs, alas, is not the sole responsibility. More seriously, fault lies at every level of government and society: For an American city was lost not because of individual negligence or incompetence, but because of the system that made such a disaster possible possible

As the accusations and recriminations mount, we, the remnants of White America, must do our utmost to prevent the media moguls, crooked politicians, alien interests, and leading lights from evading the condemnation they deserve. More critically, we need to highlight the systemic sources of their misdeeds, for the system they represent operates not simply in opposition to the interests and welfare of White America, it seeks (and, for two generations, has sought) to destroy the racial-cultural basis of the civilization our forebears founded on this continent. But even more, we need to use this occasion to make every White man aware that the present ethnocidal system targets their survival, that its cataclysmic end is approaching, and that steps need to be taken now to ensure that the next cycle of American civilization is White, European, and anti-liberal.

Since 1999, the great European nationalist, Guillaume Faye, has been predicting a series of converging catastrophes that will provoke the collapse of the liberal-democratic regimes of money that have governed the West since 1945. [See “The Widening Gyre,” National Vanguard, 29 May 2005] Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans (following on the heels of 9-11 and the Iraqi fiasco) heralds what seems to be the first, albeit local, gasp of the system’s death throes.

Contrary to what the scoundrels in charge would have us believe, America was no gift of Yahweh. Like every organic or mechanical order, its social-political system contains elements that sustain its growth and development and, at the same time, ones that impair (or have the potential to impair) it. If ever the latter should dominate, the system cannot but become dysfunctional—and perhaps collapse. In Faye’s view, the present system controlling the former White nations of the West—subordinated to market principles, opened to all the world’s peoples, contemptuous of White tradition, culture, and ethnos, and indifferent to the destructive impact the system has on both human and mother nature—has reached a stage in its development where the dysfunctional elements are increasingly dominant, just as they were in the ex-Soviet Union in the early 1980s.

From this perspective, what happened in New Orleans is symptomatic of the system-threatening catastrophes gathering on the horizon. Be it racial-demographic trends, environmental deterioration, climatic shifts, casino-like economies, decadent social forms, corrupt, sclerotic institutions disloyal to their original intent—each represents a looming catastrophe whose eventual convergence will make all the others unmanageable.

Already the system is beset by failures that have begun to wear it down, erode its legitimacy, and undermine its capacity to rule. The biggest of these is related to the imperial “overreach” that began with the neocon aggression on Iraq. This was preceded by 9-11 and the dangerous geopolitical realignment it provoked and is today accompanied by a series of slower burning, but potentially greater, catastrophes related to the declining U.S. economy, the crisis of Third World colonization and the state of emergency on the border, and to all those cultural, educational, and social problems that come with the globalization of American life.

At each level of these crises—and I have named only the most obvious—the system is failing to resolve the problems besetting it. Though it continues to muddle through, a possible convergence of these mounting catastrophes—provoked, for example, by the confluence of a major economic breakdown, another ecological disaster, and a politically-discrediting scandal—will likely compound the existing crises, straining the system to the point of collapse. The result will be the national equivalent to what happened in New Orleans.

At virtually every level of its operations, the system has become more incompetent, shortsighted, and negligent. And this is not just a temporary or contingent development, for the same sort of failures have occurred day in and day out in the administration’s conduct of the Iraq war, in its international relations, and in its mismanagement of the nation’s economy. These failings, moreover, are system-wide.

Despite the media-amplified rhetoric of leftists and Negro race-hustlers, incompetence and irresponsibility during the emergency were not confined to the top. The corrupt municipal government of New Orleans’ foul-mouthed major, Ray Nagin, was no less guilty of criminal incompetence, neglecting to implement the most obvious precautions: It failed to issue a mandatory evacuation order until pressured by Washington, failed to implement it, and failed to make use of hundreds of city buses to transport those without cars. At the Morial Convention Center and at the Superdome, where it went through the motions of taking action, nothing of consequence was actually done, as local officials waited for “Whitey” to intervene and take charge. The horror tales now told of these sites are rivaled by few in literature. The utter absurdity of the New Orleans’ municipal effort assumed an especially unreal quality when Nagin gave his entire police force (which had shamed itself in the course of events) a five-day paid vacation in Las Vegas, once FEMA and the National Guard arrived to take control.

Thus it was that an indifferent, Israeli-oriented authority at the top and an utterly incompetent, African-led one at the bottom converged in New Orleans to create one of the great disasters in American history. The system’s routine production of such leaders (is it possible to imagine any other system in which a mentally unbalanced non-entity could become the nation’s número uno or a jive-talking African clown the mayor of a major American city?) not only condemns it to self-destructive actions: It closes itself off from any possibility of self-correction, as the illusory values and beliefs its liberal and neocon ideologues arrogantly propagate are confused with reality itself. Not surprisingly, the virtualist mindset of such a leadership is already preparing the basis for future disasters.

But more telling than even the system’s growing incompetence and illusory grasp of reality is its determination to replace its core European population. Evident in the terms that have come to designate New Orleans—Mogadishu-on-the-Mississippi, Haiti North, Post-America America—this once splendid enclave of Franco-American civilization has, since desegregation, been turned into a Third World slum. With a pre-Katrina population more than two-thirds Black, New Orleans had, in effect, ceased to be an American city in any ethno-cultural sense of the term. And it was the non-White racial character of the city’s population that was instrumental in turning a natural disaster into a social-racial nightmare. For once order collapsed in the wake of the flooding, and the veneer of civilization controlling the city’s Congoloid residents gave way, the ruined city almost immediately descended into barbarism. (As David Duke pointed out, the only thing separating American order from African anarchy is that “thin blue line of police armed with high-powered weapons.”)

How, though, is this racial turmoil reflective of the system’s growing dysfunctionality? Besides the fact that the system has eroded the country’s earlier White civilizational forms and violated the most elementary requirements of every social organization (i.e. the biological defense of its people’s genetic interests), it has encouraged the growth of the non-White population through a consciously-implemented policy of open borders and mass immigration, through welfare programs that subsidize non-White births and discourage White ones, through a brain-washing, totalitarian ideology of multiculturalism that undermines the historic conventions of America’s European culture and allows whole cities to be turned over to alien hordes. All these policies, to one degree or another, reflect the system’s effort to undermine the country’s White population and replace it with a non-White one attuned to the demographic requirements of the new global economy.

That the barely humanoid character of many of these “new Americans” lack the civilizational potential of Whites, that they are inordinately prone to violence and aggression, that they harbor murderous feelings towards the former majority, that they sustain a counter-culture of drugs, prostitution, and crime, that they soak up public funds and deprive other programs, like levee maintenance, of needed monies, that they made New Orleans one of America’s murder capitals, all, again, stem from the system’s Judeo-liberal disposition to privilege market exchanges, international labor markets, population transfers, multicultural deculturation, and the destruction of the nation’s historic European core. These anti-White policies are, indeed, so extreme that even criminals and miscreants were allowed to serve in New Orleans police force (as long as they had the proper hue). Was it surprising, then, that Whites caught in this multicultural hell were targeted for aggression, that nursing homes and children hospitals were attacked, or that White areas of Louisiana and Mississippi devastated by the storm have since been ignored or marginalized by government relief efforts?

For those who care to see, the horrors of New Orleans herald America’s possible future. Given the nature of the dominant forces, and the system nurturing and directing them, things are almost certain to get much worse, and do so at a quickening rate. Thus, as the various catastrophes afflicting American life begin to converge in a greater systemic disaster, the system itself is likely to collapse. Such a collapse will be either good or bad, depending: For collapse will either threaten our people with new, more horrendous ethnocidal forces, or it will create an opportunity to begin again. To ensure that the latter is the case, the defenders of America’s European core will need to start heeding the writing on the wall. As Guillaume Faye says, we need to start thinking in post-catastrophic terms.

Categories
Mainstream media

Why I don’t watch TV or read newspapers

Yesterday I picked up a couple of comments from Mangan’s. Here there are two more from another thread:

 

 

Wandrin said…

“The typical bribe paid to a television-channel owner was about a hundred times larger than that paid to a politician”

Yup. Democracy + television = mediacracy.

Most people only know about their little slice of reality which on a national scale is maybe 10%. The media fills in the other 90%. If the media lies about or censors the true reality then the whole political process will revolve around that false reality.

I grew up in and also later worked in certain kinds of neighborhood. There was a lot of inter-ethnic violence and the ratio was about 40:1 black on white. Because the media didn’t report any of the black on white attacks as black on white attacks—they were either not reported or no ethnicities were mentioned—but made a huge splash about any white on black attack that literally went on for months, the people outside those areas believed the majority of the problem was white on black.

People literally four miles away believed the media version even though it couldn’t possibly have been further from the truth. This is just an example of how much they can get away with.

It’s staggering really. You could have death camps in Washington DC and as long as the MSM didn’t report it, it wouldn’t matter.

Mediacracy.

The politicians are the least important part of the process. The MSM are like the air force in the first gulf war. By the time they are finished bombing (manipulating public opinion) all the army (left-liberal politicians) need to do is roll over the start line and start taking prisoners.

Obviously the magic of this form of controlled democracy depends on people trusting the MSM. Without the trust element television loses its power—like it did in the Sov Bloc—and if so the power of the ruling class has to be exercised in a more direct and brutal way.

Daybreaker said…

People think they know a lie when they see one. They forget that you can’t see through what was never reported. That is why the media blackout on undesired information is so effective, and why it’s worth the high price.