Esoteric Brezhnevism

[Two years ago Francis Nally, a.k.a. the notorious Pilleater, contacted me to suggest I contribute a piece to a book project he conceived as a new generation's Apocalypse Culture or an "Angry Young Men 2019" anthology. The project never ended up coming together - and I now hear that it never will - so here, for readers' entertainment, is the short autobiographical essay I had written for it.] I was always bad. When I was a junior in high school, I got booted out of a painting class after a series of escalating altercations with the instructor that had begun with me facetiously accusing the woman of “communist sympathies” and ended with me being regarded as potentially the next Columbine kid in the clueless eyes of the school’s administration. To fill the slot in my schedule, I was given a study hall in the school library, and that was where, to pass the time, I picked up Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , the first book I ever read with no academic obligation. I kn...

Earlier this year, I happened to be revisiting some of the classic material by Merle Haggard and Lou Reed when I was struck by the seeming interrelatedness of a pair of the artists’ respective songs: “Billy Overcame His Size”, featured on Haggard’s classic live album Okie from Muskogee (1969), and “Billy”, the closing track from Reed’s catchy, misanthropic masterpiece Sally Can’t Dance (1974). Each song concerns the death, in one sense or another, of a character named Billy who meets his fate in Vietnam. Haggard’s inspiring Billy is an unusually small young man who “never made the football team”, and whose “sergeant laughed at his skinny frame”, but who “overcame his size” and “put pride in his daddy’s eyes / when he died to save those other men” in his unit.  Reed’s “Billy”, meanwhile, could hardly be more different in tone. “In high school he played football / And me, I didn’t do anything at all. / He made touchdowns while I played pool / And no one could fig...

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...