Esoteric Brezhnevism

Meghnad Desai with Bill Clinton There is a growing consciousness among nationalists and even conservatives that the “Left” – those parties or cultural elements that previously defended the interests of the working class – have largely abandoned the proletariat in favor of “woke”, identity-oriented platforms that not only do not serve workers’ interests, but actually further capital’s ends. Neoliberal economist and propagandist Meghnad Desai, formerly of the London School of Economics, provides a useful summary of a major contributing factor to this decades-long trend in his largely boring but occasionally interesting 2002 book Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism . The key to the dismantling of the workers’ state, as he explains, was the abolition of the gold-based monetary system established by the Bretton Woods Agreement: This was a historic moment. Just as the British government was rejecting Keynesian reflationary polic...

Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940) It is a truism at Chateau Heartiste that “ Diversity + Proximity = War ”. I was reminded of this useful formula recently while reading Vladimir Jabotinsky’s book The Story of the Jewish Legion , relating the creation and wartime service of an (almost) all-Jewish fighting force that helped the British defeat the Turks toward the close of the First World War. The Legion was made up of Jewish volunteers from the United States, Britain, Canada, Palestine, and other countries; and in one of his chapters, “Why There Was Quiet in Palestine”, Jabotinsky contrasts the character traits of the major Jewish nationalities and their attitudes toward the Palestinian Arabs: The real potential source of trouble […] was […] the Palestine Volunteers, those who had themselves grown up in an Oriental environment. They did not dislike the Arab; on the contrary, they knew him, were friendly with him, and spoke his language as well as he did. And it was just this t...

The earliest stages of cultural trends often go unrecognized until after the fact, having already receded into history; and such is how Vladimir Jabotinsky, future leader of Revisionist Zionism, recalls a developing sensibility he witnessed taking shape during the period he spent in Italy as a student around the turn of the century. In his 1936 memoir, Story of My Life , he writes:  If my memory has retained signs that already then foretold some psychological change [in the Italian people], they did not yet announce Mussolini, but [F.T.] Marinetti: that literary and philosophical tendency that only several years later went by the name of “futurism” – a tendency whose historical mission consisted perhaps in paving the road for Mussolini’s movement. Among my fellow students I knew already a few who protested with bitter wrath against foreign tourists who insisted that Italy was a museum that contained mere relics of past beauty, a memorial to past glory, and treated ...

Sergei Zubatov (1864-1917) Last week I reviewed Brandon Adamson’s new book The Rats of Nationalism , which discusses the online phenomenon of artificially seeded and deliberately ineffectual splinter tendencies within the dissident sphere, positing the existence of “ another kind of fed” whose objective is the fostering of an innocuously controlled opposition. “Rather than attempt to entice someone into committing an illegal act or disrupt a movement’s image by using extreme, off-putting rhetoric, this type of fed inserts himself into the equation at earlier stages in the radicalization process for the purpose of pacification.” 1 Adamson does not suggest terminology for such agents; but one possibility presents itself in the precedent of the synthetic Russian trade unionism of tsarist police administrator Sergei Zubatov. As a young man, Zubatov had been a radical. Recruited as a police informant, he eventually joined the Okhrana and rose within it to become an important...

"Lived any good books lately?" As a high school outcast with a budding interest in art and literature, I remember feeling a sense of envy in reading about the participants in interwar creative-destructive movements like Dada and Surrealism – or, for that matter, Fascism – for the reason that all of these painters and writers had like-minded contemporaries with whom to collaborate or squabble, whereas nobody else in my school seemed to share my self-ostracizing affinity for vintage nationalisms or was openly willing to acknowledge the faintest racialist sentiment. Retiring into a corner of the school library with a book of European propaganda posters in those days before the explosion of internet politics, I could believe that I was the last of my kind. Then, a few years ago, it occurred to me that, without my realizing it, my historical arts movement moment had found me in the dissident sphere of online nationalism. The creative ferment, the comrades, controversial pe...

“I don’t think anybody’s going to be going to the movies for a while,” a Young Republican acquaintance earnestly assured me shortly after September 11, 2001. He was, of course, wrong. While, according to Box Office Mojo , movie attendance did drop 30.5% in the week of the attacks, and fell another 11.6% the following week, ticket sales were already rebounding by the end of the month as people headed out to see Zoolander and the Michael Douglas thriller Don’t Say a Word . My nihilism was near-complete at the time, my initial impression of 9/11 being that it had made an uninteresting world even more boring than before. I was accustomed to watching reruns of Seinfeld on a little television I had in my dorm room, and I can remember feeling peevish and despondent that, days after the event, my program was still being preempted for live coverage of smoldering rubble. I was reminded of that period recently when Retail Dive published Ben Unglesbee’s epic article, “ Who...

[Originally published April 22, 2018] What is a true aristocrat? This is one of the questions pondered by Robert Stark in his startling novel The Journey to Vapor Island . Stark, for those unacquainted with him, is the idiosyncratic host of the Alt-Leftish Stark Truth podcast. His program has been an acquired taste for me – Stark’s distinctive low-energy, low-charisma style of presentation can be unimpressive on an initial listen, and the defiantly eclectic array of show topics can be somewhat jarring for those accustomed to strictly political podcasts – but The Stark Truth has subsequently become one of my favorite programs, and I make a point of listening now whenever a new episode is posted. What one begins to understand and appreciate is that there exists a nebulous constellation of seemingly unrelated people, places, things, and ideas that together comprise the phenomenon of the Starkian . Vaporwave, neon, Japan, Sarah Michelle Gellar, the Bay Area, environmentalism, an...