Stenographers to the Apocalypse

Earlier today there was a discussion on Skype between Vlad and HeHa, one of the translators, about a video Vlad had found on Twitter (which will be posted here shortly with English subtitles). He asked HeHa what it was about, and the following brief conversation ensued:

HeHa:   A Moroccan is so joyous to see how Bruxelles has become a Moroccan city. A Muslim city.
Vlad:   Can we do that one, please?
HeHa:   Sure.
Vlad:   Although, to be honest, more and more it feels like we are all stenographers to the apocalypse. Still, someone has to do it.
Baron:   That’s exactly how I feel: someone has to do it. It’s a dirty job, but necessary.
 

It’s been clear for at least ten years that the current dystopian trajectory of Western culture can’t be corrected by the electoral process — or by any other peaceful means, for that matter.

Every day I curate and edit text and video reports about various aspects of the horror that has engulfed our society. “Apocalyptic” somehow doesn’t seem to do it justice. If I weren’t able to talk to Vlad about it regularly — he and I share the same general take on the likely trajectory of and prognosis for our societal illness — I don’t know how I’d cope with the sheer toxicity of all the information that passes through my hands.

Vlad and I discussed it some more later on, and he added:

There are times where instead of feeling like we are doing something to wake the public up to vast existential problems so that we may fight back in whatever way, instead, we are merely chronicling our demise. Creating a running colour commentary on our destruction, which will itself be destroyed.

I agree with him on that last point: all these digital archives are unlikely to survive the Collapse that lies ahead. Unless someone has printed out hard copies on non-acidic paper, these chronicles will disappear.

Nevertheless, the chronicling must go on.

21 thoughts on “Stenographers to the Apocalypse

  1. This brings up a subject I’ve long been curious about. Have the more prolific contributors to GoV assembled anthologies of their essays in book form? The reason I think most of your essayists should self-publish their work in collections is exactly what you referred to in this post: for the sake of posterity. As grim as it sounds, I think we all need to carefully maintain our libraries (maybe even burying a few here and there) so that when humans start all over again–again!–some explanations of why things took the turn they did will be around. And these essays are the best explanations around!

    This will be like throwing spaghetti against a wall, hoping some of it sticks, but it’s worth it, no?

    • Fjordman has published a couple of books. I’m not sure how many of his essays are in them. He’s so prolific; it’s not possible that all of them are included.

      I don’t recall anyone else who published anthologies of their essays.

      • I am reminded of the story “Apollo will return” by Guillaume Faye.

        If we want to preserve our heritage we should hide it, where the orcs will never come, a place where you need a working technological society.

        And it should be marked. We cannot put a cross or a buildung on top of it, because it will be surely destroyed by the orcs or time.

        We nned something like how we know where the Romans lived. Hills and depressions that make no sense if you look at them when standing among them, but if you look at it from very high it is obvious.

        And yes, sometimes I feel the same. We are on the track to annihilation and only we have the foresight to see it, because we can see the past, the present and extrapolate into the future. And the normies just live from day to day and forget the past and so cannot see the danger.

    • @ Plum

      Re: “The reason I think most of your essayists should self-publish their work in collections is exactly what you referred to in this post: for the sake of posterity.”

      That’s a very good idea. Conventional wisdom in certain historical circles used to hold that the “barbarians” overran and sacked Rome, and ended the western Roman Empire and with it the age of Greco-Roman antiquity
      (We now know that Islam had a great deal to do with the demise of that vast empire as well, but I digress…).

      The so-called “Dark Ages” ensued – a period in which the progress and successes of ancient civilizations stagnated or even receded. During this nearly millennium-long interregnum, the great works of the antiquity were preserved in part by the monasteries of the various Christian orders.

      Thus, when Christendom emerged from this long dark, chaotic and violent period, there was a basis upon which to build, and the next great flowering of the West began, what we know as the Middle Ages, and after that, the Renaissance, and so on and so forth.

      It will be up to historians probably not yet even born to describe and name our age, but the task of those scholars will be made easier if they have some sort of record of events during this time. And not just what people did, but what they thought and believed in their inner lives.

    • I have been considering self publishing, but the Morlocks are expert at book burning and as we are driven further underground, then we need to consider a strategy.

      The Bible is a good example of s document that as survived many purges, but the most successful seem to have been the ones that include subtle textual changes which pervert the direction of mainstream Christianity (and Judaism)

      There is a current trend, for example, to edit authors such as Roald Dahl to make them more woke-like, such is the arrogance of current political theatre that a children’s novel written decades ago cannot be allowed to question woke values, somehow the Hardy Boys must transition to snowflake persons or else young minds may be damaged by the ghosts of Dixon’s proverbial skeleton rock, Nancy is vulnerable too, she needs to abandon her feminine wiles and drop the 6’6 300lb henchmen with a single well placed feminista blow, or else her ‘equity’ will spoil the illusion.

      Successful archiving must therefor have a cryptographic validation key, the public version being part of the archive, but the private key must be secure (or destroyed)

      I don’t know the answer, Yahovah set the ten commandments in stone, but most of us think the ten commandments got ‘nailed to the cross’ Col 2 v 14 and therefore keep a Sunday Sabbath because the commandments are now ‘flexible.’.

      I have multiple backups of all my stuff, some local, some in the cloud, to self-publish is to gamble with what little income I have.

      • The Hardy Boys suffered their first rewrite in the early 1960s, when the books from the ’30s and ’40s were updated to reflect the zeitgeist. I was an avid reader of them, and I possessed some of the original versions of those early books. I acquired some of the updated versions and compared them. One thing I remember is that the language of the negro characters was revised, so that they spoke less like Amos ‘n’ Andy in the new versions.

    • Of all the dystopian future books and movies that have come true, the one that floats to the top of my mind the most recently is Fahrenheit 451. People may want to find the movie if not read the book and get familiar with its ending again. It speaks exactly to your point.

      And the level of commitment required may be as in the movie. Burying the books may not be enough.

  2. “Unless someone has printed out hard copies on non-acidic paper, these chronicles will disappear.”

    — It occured to me about a year ago that some of the content of this blog (GoV) and also Vlad’s should be printed out and sold in paper book forms ASAP. Seriously.

    Both authors have a unique world view that could give the backbone of the narration between the chapters / stories — which would turn the content of the blogs into a different and interesting product that would sell.

    The availability of the transript of the videos is a blessing. Some more written descriptions of what’s happening in the videos should be added — as weird as it sounds today. Some of the videos could be sold / spread in a digital form and delivered by mail, or made available for download in a compressed form.

    The Samizdat of the future.

    What an endeavor it would be to preserve some of the history for the future — at least for some decades longer than the digital library! And it might also end up being somewhat profitable.

    On a personal note: official history never really added up for me before I began engaging in contemporary politology, so to speak. Now I know why: history is a pile of lies and most of the honest chronicles and even raw records have been erased.

  3. Not long ago I read an article that had to do with how contemporary websites and blogs will likely be of very little use to future historians in trying to make sense of contemporary events. I don’t recall where I read it but I found the argument compelling.

    When one thinks about a relatively recent historical event such as the First World War, there has been a huge volume of work written about it but no longer are there living primary sources, and with each passing year contemporary accounts such as letters, diaries, historical documents from units involved etc, become lost or destroyed. And without context it becomes very difficult to make sense of just what happened at a particular event or why.

    One would think in the information age that we live in now that this would not be the case; after all whatever gets put online is forever, we are told. I recall reading somewhere about a phenomenon with dead people’s accounts on Farcebook accumulating year after year with the projection that after a certain date there would be more dead on the site than living. There’s already more brain-dead on the site than any other group but that’s another story.

    A few years ago someone I knew since middle school killed herself. I hadn’t paid any attention to the details of her life after completing high school so out of curiosity I looked up her social media. Her family had closed it out, so whatever she had done in the intervening years and posted online was no longer available. The implications were disturbing; that the sum total of one’s life achievements or the banality of them can just be deleted as if one had never existed. Who would have thought that the ability to post the minutiae of ones existence online for all to see also meant that it is that much easier to de-person someone from existence.

    When the power goes out for good after the West has been overrun by orcs and there are no longer any white people to maintain a modern society and keep the lights on then sites like this will cease to exist if they haven’t been banned already. Probably there will be copies in the massive NSA server farm out in Utah for the purposes of spying on us all and testifying against us at our trials someday. It would be worth the cost of the site’s permanent destruction were some patriots to vaporize the facility with a nuke, or orcs to smash it to bits out of aimless vandalism. And thus all that was recorded during this epoch will be lost to history even more certainly than events from the First World War are to our time.

  4. The West may get overrun by orcs, but we are at the beginning of a multi-polar world where there are new nations and peoples on the rise. Technology is no longer limited to the developed world. In brutal reality, the oligarchic elite of the USA intentionally sent 50,000 factories to China from 2001 to about 2016, thus helping to deindustrialize itself. If the Western elite has such contempt for its people then maybe it is time for this elite to dissolve. Unfortunately they intend to bring down their own countries and may try to extend that to other parts.

  5. @ Baron

    Re: “It’s been clear for at least ten years that the current dystopian trajectory of Western culture can’t be corrected by the electoral process — or by any other peaceful means, for that matter.”

    Apropos of that sentiment, who was it who said “There is a lot of ruin in a nation”? Adam Smith, if memory serves, and he was right.

    Oswald Spengler wrote “The Decline of the West” about a century ago; the first volume of two was published in 1918, and the second in 1922. Spengler died in 1936; what would he say if he was alive to see what has become of Europe today?

    “Every day I curate and edit text and video reports about various aspects of the horror that has engulfed our society. ‘Apocalyptic’ somehow doesn’t seem to do it justice. If I weren’t able to talk to Vlad about it regularly — he and I share the same general take on the likely trajectory of and prognosis for our societal illness — I don’t know how I’d cope with the sheer toxicity of all the information that passes through my hands.”

    Just as individual humans live a defined lifespan, so do nations and empires. They are born; grow to maturity and if they are fortunate, attain a degree of prosperity and stability; age into decline and finally perish. There are many ideas and theories about this cycle, but one commonly-referenced life span for such nations and empires is 250 years.

    Astute readers will note that there are plenty of examples of empires which lived and survived far-longer than this figure. This is correct. The interval of two-and-a-half centuries is still apt, however, since even long-lived empires wax-and-wane somewhat.

    Whether this model is correct or not in all instances is certainly open to debate, but it seems accurate-enough in the case of the United States and many parts of Europe and the West.

    Given the fact that all nations and empires pass away, it is vital that someone record the events of the time and what transpired in those places. Some day, someone – perhaps a young person even – will be struggling to understand the time in which he lives, and will be able to read about the past in order to gain a measure of understanding and perhaps even comfort from the travails and hardships of his time.

    That’s no small achievement to leave that sort of thing behind. I was once one of those young people, and I am eternally-grateful that some of those who came before me recorded their “life and times” for posterity. From dust we came, and to the dust we will return, but that does not mean we can’t leave behind a record of the times in which we have lived.

  6. At the ‘battle of the Frontiers’ 22nd Aug 1914 the French Army took casualties that made the first day of the Battle of the Somme’ look like a teddybear’s cakewalk.

    French casualties exceeded 300,000 as division after division was routed.

    Much has been written about June 1st 1916 when the British volunteer army was mown down – men sent against machine guns, but this was a French war and Britain was a junior partner; Haig who traditionally takes the blame, did as he was told.

    The belief in UK was that Haig was a butcher and a bungler, but the Somme was pivotal and lead eventually yo the 100 days in 1918 where the BEF finally emerged victorious.

    Corrigan’s Mud, Blood and Poppycock

    https://www.amazon.com/Mud-Blood-Poppycock-Britain-Military-ebook/dp/B00A7ZJRYI/ref=sr_1_1?crid=36E5K34JQ6WXT&keywords=mud+blood+and+poppycock&qid=1684218942&s=digital-text&sprefix=mud+%2Cdigital-text%2C208&sr=1-1

    provides a more modern interpretation, it took 100 years for the mythology of WW1 to be put to bed, and I wonder if we will ever get the real history of WW2.

    There are many troubling issues arrising from WW2 not least is the reappearance of Nazism with all the names changed. We were suposed to have bidden goodbye to all that, but the monster survived and took us from behind.

    I suppose that Antifa members can’t read simple history, to see the irony inherent in their brown/red/black shirts or maybe they are just too well paid….

  7. What a cutie! I just feel like I’m in one of the many post-apocalyptic or dystopian novels I’ve read. I just shed tears of emotion. Joke. In fact, I’m extremely depressed. One hope is that next time I will reincarnate in a less hopeless world. And it would be nice if there were no Muslims there.

    By the way, did you read this:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_Found_in_a_Bathtub

  8. Yes, now everything is on “the cloud” it can all disappear in an instant. A young person asked me about the dark ages and how knowledge was lost and we talked about how invading barbarians destroy all knowledge by killing people who know and burning books.
    Now it is so much easier for them to turn us back to the dark ages, just turn off the power.
    Everyone has got rid of their books to tidy up and “it’s all online anyway” so there is no record. Just like those apocalypse movies when someone finds an old book.
    I think the Russians and Chinese will be the only record holders so their version of events will prevail in the end.

    • My dear! There will be no Russians soon, thanks to the efforts of Putin and his globalist masters. Tajiks and Kirghiz will live here and be called Russians. I hope the Chinese will re-educate them in their camps.

  9. Hands up all those who want to bring a child up in this dystopia. No more UK just a diverse dumping ground with whites at the back of the queue. Stabbed in the back politically and literally.
    These days everyone has a burglar alarm and a badly trained dog to keep them company, pubs shut, houses unaffordable and everyone looking over their shoulder in case they are accused of ‘hate speech’.
    And they are not finished yet – just sayin’.

  10. Rod Dreher – who is Catholic, it is germane to note – has written about what he calls “The Remnant,” his term for the remaining survivors of what we once knew as the West, and also all of the knowledge and achievements of that civilization.

    During the Dark Ages – between the fall of the (western) Roman Empire and the beginning of what historians now call the Middle Ages – the civilization of Greco-Roman antiquity was in part preserved by the monasteries of the different Christian religious orders. So that when western civilization emerged from its long slumber, there was a foundation upon which to build.

    Of course, it is an oversimplification to state that Christian civilization everywhere went into eclipse. But it was under siege from the barbarian hordes of the north, and the Muslim invaders from the south. Thanks to Charles “The Hammer of the Franks” Martel and his armies, the Moors conquered the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal), but they were stopped in 732 near Tours, France. But the general point remains; those monks and religious orders did much to preserve/defend what we today know of as western civilization.

    “Gates of Vienna” does much the same thing in our time. It may be that the decline and eventual ruin of our civilization is inevitable and unstoppable; like people, great nations and civilizations have finite life spans – but it is never the less an essential service GoV provides, in the chronicle of these times. This reader is grateful GoV has been here as a source both of comfort and knowledge.

  11. A time when men were men and women were women and children’s innocence was protected. A time when the West knew who their God was and who they were and how they should live. I dare say we have been dislocated from our faith – strategically by the enemy of our souls: Marxism and Islam:

    “Terror cannot be struck into the hearts of the enemy by merely cutting its lines of withdrawal. It is basically related to the strength or weakness of the human soul. It can be instilled only if the opponent’s Faith is destroyed. Psychological dislocation is temporary; spiritual dislocation is permanent. Psychological dislocation can be produced by a physical act but this does not hold good of the spiritual dislocation. To instil terror into the hearts of the enemy, it is essential, in the ultimate analysis, to dislocate his Faith. An invincible Faith is immune to terror. A weak Faith offers inroads to terror.” The Quranic Concept of War by [Pakistani] Brigadier S K Malik, page 60.

    Our salvation lies in repentance and turning away from our sinful ways. Only then will God come and heal our land. II Chronicles 7:14

    • I don’t like the Abrahamic religions, and I definitely gravitate toward Hellenism and the philosophies of that era. And the god of information Hermes (or the Logos himself) definitely loves me for sending me this website and your amazing link to the Pakistani general’s remarks. I’m excited about these new horizons!

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