“We shall also be so diverse in our racial idiosyncrasies that each partner will be thoroughly remolded and revitalized by intercourse with the other” and achieve “a true symbiotic organism.”
“What we offer you is permanent spiritual guidance and fortification, so that, as individuals and as a race, you may at last overcome your inveterate short-sightedness and meanness. With our help, but not without it, you will wake to a new level of awareness; and in the light of that experience you will be able to organize our common world for the happiness of our two kinds, and for the glory of the spirit.”
“You, on your side of the partnership, will use all your astounding intellectual and practical powers (which we so envy and admire) to transform the whole planet.”
“Your gift is for practical thought and action. . . . Together, with your practical cunning, married to our ancient wisdom and spiritual insight, we should indeed become a creative world organism”
“There will be neither wars nor class-wars, but only generous rivalry in the common venture of our two races, in equal partnership.”
“The whole human race will become a race of aristocrats . . . no longer guilt-ridden by living on the labour of enslaved classes . . . those aristocrats will not be idle…”
“. . . with us you can become . . . true vessels of the spirit.”
“What a glorious world-community we shall together form!”
Or, cutting right to the chase:
“What we intend is that you shall use some of your new power and your practical ingenuity to provide us with a permanent and reasonably large area of very high temperature, say in Central Africa or South America.”
How about Madagascar?
Again, faced with this inspiring vision of hard-working, practical “aristocrats” laboring away without dissent to improve the world, under the wise guidance of the flames, I can’t help but feel like giving out an exultant shout: “Tikkun olam!”
Cass, however, feels a vague disquiet. Sensing, perhaps, “where have I heard this before?” he asks: “They will regard co-operation with you as sheer slavery. . . . If they are forced to reconcile your superiority in some ways they will regard you as brilliant perverts, in fact, as satanic.”
But the flames have already thought of that, smart little buggers that they are: “In order to make your free acceptance of our plan easier for you, we may have to use our special psychic powers to incline your minds toward it.”
In fact, they’ve already started work on Cass, who is “A human being of quite exceptional detachment from the prejudices of your kind [and able] to look at this whole matter without human prejudice and simply out of love for the spirit.”
The method of mind control seems similar to a well-known pseudo-science: “If I had no respect for your individuality I could break in forcibly and lay bare your most secret feelings in spite of all your resistance.”
And like many victims of this pseudo-science, the first casualty was Cass’s marriage. But then, free from human prejudice as he is, “I think you yourself will agree that our need for you was more important even than your marriage.”
With humanity at large, the technique is slightly different: “We might, for instance, undertake the very easy task of stirring up war-scares and forcing your research workers to produce even more destructive atomic weapons.”
Alas, the flame seems to have talked too much, perhaps due to its long hibernation. 168 Cass bethinks himself thus:
How could I be sure that my affection for the flame and my admiration for his race were spontaneous acts of my own personality? Might they not have been cunningly implanted in me by the flame himself? The more I thought about it the more likely this seemed. And did not the flame race intend to exercise this hypnotic power over the whole race of men, so as to compel them, yes, compel them, to subject themselves for ever to the will of the flames? Men would believe they were acting freely, but, in fact, they would be mere robots acting under an inner compulsion. Mankind, hitherto master of its own destiny, would henceforth be a subject race exploited by a subtler kind, a new Herrenvolk. Of course I agreed that the only final consideration must be “the glory of the spirit,” not the triumph of any one race, human or non-human; but how did I know that these cunning flames would really work for the spirit and not for racial power and aggrandisement? How did I know that they were not at heart, diabolic? Yes, diabolic! Under a cloak of friendliness and generosity the creature in the fire was scheming to capture my very soul for an inhuman end. Was he not subtly tempting me to commit treason against my own kind? But even, as I thought thus, I was torn by conflict. The behaviour of the flame had throughout been so civilized, so considerate and friendly. How could I reject these amiable advances? Yet, as my feelings warmed toward him, I reminded myself that my very feelings were perhaps not my own, but the outcome of his prompting. Anger and fear seized me again. No! A thousand times better that man should retain his sovereign independence, and go down with colours flying, than that he should surrender his human dignity, his human self-sufficiency, his human freedom.
So, an alien race, possessed of group consciousness, abstractly brilliant but incapable of practical physical work, dispersed against its will throughout the universe, lives in secret, and influences mankind to abandon all racial, national or even species loyalty, so as to unite with the alien race, or rather, submit to its wise leadership, so as to perfect a peaceful, class-less, world society devoted to The Spirit. Oh, and some real estate near Miami Beach.
Stapledon has done something truly remarkable. He has taken the very symbol of the Judaic post-War propaganda—the so-called Holocaust, the Shoah, the fires, the furnaces, blah blah blah—and turned it around, into a powerful new symbol of Judaic conspiracy.
It is they who are the flames—an alien race, dedicated to an abstract, inhuman religion, living among us, in our factories, our very homes, seeking increasing control over our minds, to further their literally alien agenda.
Presently a surge of remorse and shame and compassion flooded in on me. But I told myself that this was not my feeling; it was being forced on me by the outraged race of flames in all the hearthfires and furnaces of the world.
Needless to say, none of this was anywhere near Stapledon’s intentions, parlour pink and conventional academic Bolshie that he was. I think, that for whatever reason—the War, age, disease—Stapledon here lays aside his “progressive” ideology and relaxes into the imagination, like his narrator, lost in contemplation of a paltry post-War British fireplace. As a result, he has composed a true, as the subtitle has it, fantasy. And fantasy, the imagination, is controlled by a different kind of “inhumanism.”
As Jonathan Bowden said about Sarban’s fascist-fascinated fantasy novella The Sound of his Horn:
Yet what this novella really exemplifies is a fascination with the dark side, with everything “politically incorrect” long before this terminology entered common usage. Without the thrill of transgression or “inhumanism,” much of liberal fiction and art would be completely flaccid and without any depth of characterization. It is the presence of the right/wrong side which makes it all worthwhile in the long-term. For, as Wall/Sarban gets more and more excited, amid a world of female birds and predatory cats, rampaging boar-hounds, and human prey, under the flood-lights and next to the barbed wire—as the forces of the Reichs forester gets closer . . . one realizes a salient truth. And this is the fact that in a liberal order, the Right appears to be everywhere powerless—except in one’s dreams. For the societies created out of Enlightenment nostrums have surrendered their entire unconscious to the other side.169
And that of course is the rationale for the mind-control technique known as PC. You can’t let people just relax and let their thoughts meander. Who knows where they might stray? They might even start to see the flames.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right,
November 12, 2013
MY WAGNER PROBLEM—& OURS
“Your themes—the
y almost always consist of even values, of half, quarter, eighth notes; they are syncopated and tied, to be sure, but nonetheless persevere in what is often a machinelike, stamping, hammering inflexibility and inelegance. C’est ‘boche’ dans un degre fascinant. But don’t think I am finding fault!
“As for von Riedesel, he had fallen prey to utter confusion. ‘Beg pardon’ he said, ‘if you please . . . Bach, Palestrina . . .’ For him those names possessed the nimbus of conservative authority, and now they had been assigned to the realm of modernistic disintegration. . . . According to [Breisacher], decline, stultification, and the loss of all feeling for what was old and genuine had begun early on and in a place so respectable that no one would ever have dreamt it.”
—Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus170
“Yes, it is. It is very strange, but with our race and in our latitude, rhythmic control is the most difficult thing for a musician to achieve. There is hardly a musician among us who can play the same note five times without minor variations. Part of the fault is that rhythm is never taught correctly to young musicians. For the Negro or African, it comes naturally—this sense of rhythm. As for myself, I can tolerate wrong notes, but I cannot stand unstable rhythm. Perhaps I was born in Africa in another existence. Once in Vienna after we had finished a recording session, I surprised everyone by telling them I was going to hear a Louis Armstrong concert. When they asked why? I told them that to go to a concert and know that for two hours the music would not get faster or slower was a great joy to me.”
—Herbert von Karajan171
What is it about with the fascination on the Right—even the alt-Right—with the music of Wagner? Surely no one—even on the Right—is crazy enough to think that Wagner is sufficient to overthrow the Liberal Hegemony and re-establish Dharma—sweeping in like the Air Cav in Apocalypse Now, blasting out the “Ride of the Valkyries” because “it scares the hell out of the slopes.”172 Nor is Wagner necessary for such a task.
Nietzsche, of course, can be cited either way regarding what he called The Case of Wagner. But there is stronger and more orthodox Traditionalist support for the anti-Wagner Case; or rather, for the case against the whole of “Western” music, of which Wagner is the epitome.
Take Baron Evola. So-called “classical” music, from Palestrina on, was for him no more than another part of the rotting framework of bourgeois culture, an impediment to be discarded, not mummified and worshipped.173 It had, by the early 20th Century, split off into its component parts; the chromatic and harmonic “developments” of which Wagner was an exemplar gave rise to increasingly outré experiments, culminating in the arid academicism of Berg, Webern, Schoenberg and other Judaics who were only too glad to lose the goyishe public. The latter, demanding a healthy, danceable, popular music—as Nietzsche did as well—gravitated to jazz. So, the upshot of Western music was a musical culture dominated by Judaics and Negroes.
Alain Daniélou, who had an even better claim to be an authoritative Traditionalist,174 also had the musical training to make essentially the same case.175 For Daniélou, the mess starts with the Greeks, who, in their typically intellectualizing and number-obsessed way, misunderstood the system of intervals, creating a 12 tone system that combined the incompatible 5 tone (Chinese) and 7 tone (Hindu) systems. Since Western intervals were from then on inherently inaccurate, the possibilities of expression are defective, no longer matching the states of the world and the moods of the human soul. Bigger and bigger orchestras, then new instruments, like Wagner’s special tubas and Adolphe Sax’s various horns, a favorite of the Negro long before the vuvuzela invaded Europe’s soccer fields. Good Wagnerians like Strauss were finally reduced to hauling actual machinery such as aeoliphones onstage to supplement their increasingly threadbare reserves. Meanwhile, as Daniélou tends us, mediaeval Indian musicians could not just “imitate” nature but summon up actual rain storms!
The history of Western music is the history of various such ad hoc attempts to mend things without any understanding of what the problem was; a history which Westerners, in typical fashion, have labeled as “progress” and demanded the whole world adopt, like their “free markets” and “democracy.”
Unlike Evola, Daniélou sees the popularity of Negro music to lie not so much in its vaunted rhythm as in its “blue” or “bent” notes that seek to coax expression from the Massa’s oddly rigid scales. Though praising African music faute de mieux, the well-propagandized won’t like his sensible suggestion that slavery and Jim Crow kept African music vibrant, through forced separation, preventing homogenization via the “melting pot.” No tears for Bessie Smith denied access to a White hospital here.
So far from idolizing Wagner, the Traditionalist should hold him in deep suspicion. Of course, this does not mean one should join or cheer the post-modern wreckers, with their “relevant” productions set in dockside whorehouses, or the academic Grundies tut-tutting about sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and whatever other minority gripe is fashionable. Wagner is a monument of Western Culture, like the cathedrals, probably the closest predecessor to his achievement of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which one appreciates and defends however one may generally and ideologically regret the encroachment of the Semitic superstition on Europe. You play the hand you are dealt, you chose your enemies wisely. To live, Burroughs says, is to collaborate.176 And, as he (or rather, Inspector Lee) goes on to emphasize, there are degrees of collaboration.
And I am not entirely immune to the charms of Wagner myself. Nothing is easier than to just sit back and let Wagner wash over one.177 But it is, or should be, a guilty pleasure. As John Simon said, when he was upbraided by a reader for giving a bad review to a play at which he had been spotted laughing or crying as the case may be, of course I responded to the manipulation, that’s what angers me.178 But unlike Simon, and like Beckett’s Malone, I prefer to remain calm; “I am content, necessarily, but not to the point of clapping my hands.”179
So Wagner and Western music is a fait accompli, part of the thrownness of our Dasein. Two cheers! What matters is the future. If not Wagner, what?
The future of Aryan music should be, well, Aryan and Futuristic. I’ve suggested elsewhere180 that rather than classical or metal, to say nothing of “classically influenced metal” or whatever, we should set our sights on what’s called New Age music. It’s technical sophistication and relative lack of interest in rhythm perfectly suits the Aryan Soul. Interestingly, it shares, with metal, the same contempt on the part of the both the soi disant “hip” and the middlebrow mainstream media alike.
Whereas, of course, our enemies are only too glad to see us hang ourselves on the cross of Wagner—at best, interpreted for us by the “finest” artists—Judaics, or course;181 or at worst, another excuse to tar us with the “Nazi” brush. Meanwhile, our youth’s search for expression in music has exhausted even the domestic Negro’s wares and now seeks “world” music—anywhere but Europe.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
May 17, 2013
OUR WAGNER, ONLY BETTER:
HARRY PARTCH, WILD BOY
OF AMERICAN MUSIC
“In a healthy culture differing musical philosophies would be coexistent, not mutually exclusive; and they would build from Archean granite, and not, as our one musical system of today builds, from the frame of an inherited keyboard, and from the inherited forms and instruments of Europe’s eighteenth century. And yet anyone who even toys with the idea of looking beyond these legacies for materials and insight is generally considered foolhardy if not actually a publicity-seeking mountebank.”
—Harry Partch, Genesis of a Music
“The 19th century must have been an enormously comfortable place; no one seems to want to leave it.”
—Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
“Do not be afraid to be out of tune with the piano. It is the piano that is out of tune. The piano with its tempered scale is a compromise in intonation.”
—Pablo Casals
PART ONE:
I undertook my previous look at Wagner, appropriately enough, in the Nietzschean spirit I have always tried to maintain,182 reserving my critical work only for those cultural idols of sufficient importance that their take-down would serve a greater cultural good—rather than, for example, the typical internet “flame-war.”
The results were all I could have hoped for! Cascades of evidence that Wagner was, indeed, an unquestioned, unquestionable idol for the Right, the alt-Right, White Nationalists, whatever.183 A veritable religious cult, with all the Judaic characteristics Kevin MacDonald has discerned in such thought-negating outfits.184
All the memes were there. “How dare you counsel our Youth to desert our European Heritage!” As if “youth” had not been fleeing from classical music for well over a century, the process, in fact, more or less complete, to judge by the collapse of the classical record industry.185 As if it was I responsible for this killing of the younglings. Again, how appropriate; my arguments were derived from Evola, after all, so why not put me on trial for corrupting the young as well?186
And all the other tactics beloved by Cardinals and Witchfinders down through the ages, such as ignoratio elenchi: after detailing the flaws in the Western system of intonation, the response: “He hasn’t given us any reason to think so.” And the argumentum ad auctoritatem: “All culture is inherently elitist, who cares what people want to listen to?” (Note the contradiction to the younglings argument, but hey, any tool to hit a heretic.) Or again, after noting that by reducing the modes to only two, major and minor, considerable amount of expressiveness are lost, which is why jazz resorts to “bent” or “blue’ notes to recover the modes, an argument, basically, that two is less than twenty, the flat assertion “No one familiar with Western music would think so.”
The Eldritch Evola & Others Page 9
