Category Archives: Books

I Take This Woman…

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Tabitha Korol’s latest guest-essay takes a look at the plight of women under Islam.

I take this woman…

by Tabitha Korol

The internet provides everything you’d want to know about courtships, weddings, married life, but few of them include the instructions on wife-beating. There is a brief but enlightening film, produced by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and posted on Jihad Watch, of a Muslim sociologist who demonstrates the “proper” wife-beating technique. Of course, the sociologist assures his audience that Islam is merciful, and that the man, the head of the household, should not have to beat his wife every day, and to do so lightly, never to hit her face or head, bruise, break bones or cause blood to flow (m10:12, Reliance of the Traveller, A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law — ROTT). But the cautionary statement rings hollow when the wife’s bruises will never be seen because she must be covered from head to toe. And, should she become inured to the discipline’s sameness, there are other means of control and punishment available to him, all sanctioned by The Religion of Peace.

When is it necessary to beat one’s wife? The sociologist did posit that there are women who prefer domineering, authoritative, and even violent husbands. For the most part, however, beatings are needed when the wife has disobeyed him and the strict Islamic rules of marriage. She may have refused to wear a hijab (m:2:7-8, ROTT) or the finery he chose for her; or fancied attending school with the hope of one day having a career and earning a wage. She may have wanted to leave the house unaccompanied or without her husband’s permission; she is literally under house arrest.

The Shari’a marriage contract contains her virginity status, the dowry amount, and grants sexual intercourse rights to the male, giving him total control over his wife or wives. Should she refuse his advances, be too ill or too young to have sex, or if she engages in sex with another man or was raped, he could stop her daily (financial) maintenance. The woman is considered a she-devil, equal to a domestic animal, harmful and with crooked character. Therefore, he may disallow her to sleep in his bed; or lock her in a room, naked, and without food. Should he choose to enact a simple divorce by repeating “I divorce you” three times — she may receive no more than three months’ maintenance and could lose her children older than age seven.

The Muslim husband has the right to accuse her of adultery, in which case he might gather his friends and neighbors together to bury her almost up to her shoulders and stone her to death. The film The Stoning of Soraya M portrays the true story of Soraya, in Iran, whose husband Ali convinced their two sons and the townsfolk that she was committing adultery so that he could marry a 14-year-old girl. The Internet has an actual film of a Syrian woman being stoned to death by ISIS. About four women per day are murdered in “stove bursts” in Pakistan, by husbands or in-laws who claim the wives’ scarves caught fire while they were cooking.

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On Being Snookered by Penny-ante Political Obfuscations

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Hey, Jordan Peterson! Your descriptions of what young men need if they are ever to mature in our Western world are spot on. But as a political philosopher, you lack the foundation to address the ugly divisions the Left has driven into the heart of civil discourse.

Which is unfortunate for us all. You are good at stating what you don’t know, but sometimes you enter into the realms of what you don’t know that you don’t know, i.e., what you have glossed over or failed to comprehend. Yes, you want your reach to transcend politics but it can’t since the Left has inextricably bound the political into every facet of life, a merging the right rejects categorically. You say the right can be seen by its identity politics but you don’t say the left does exactly the same thing. Try saying “All Lives Matter” in public and see where it gets you.

People are anxious to pigeonhole your ideas and you want to allay their fears that you might be -gasp! – right wing. You attempt to declare your political agnosticism while refusing to bow to an overweening leftist identitarianism. When you refuse the strictures of compelled speech from the rulers of Canada, you are speaking from the right. Compelled speech is a leftist/socialist trope; it is the Right which defends freedom of speech.

By the way, how many rightwingextremists have shown up to disrupt your talks, trash your ideas, or make you feel unsafe in public? And if you think Charlottesville was reality-based, you’ve been snookered, sir. We live near there; we watched it go down. From the beginning, the whole mess was a false flag set-up.

Read Tomas Sowell, sir. Across more than fifty years, his body of work, his opera of conservative political philosophy, has been consistently correct. In his eighties now, he’s still sharp. Here’s his Amazon Page It’s a wealth of information that never stale dates.

Meanwhile, listen to Dr. Turley explain why Nazism -National Socialism- is leftist. It did not come from the Right.

Now tell us why wanting to be a nation-state with one’s own peculiar culture, language and traditions is not a good thing. Ask Les Québécois why they won’t give up and join you Anglos. Do you think they should? If not, why not? Compare and contrast.

Loopies and Kooks

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During the past week Dymphna and JLH have discussed Diana West’s new book, The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, which extends the theme of her previous book American Betrayal. I’ll take this opportunity to recycle a graphic I made several years ago. It didn’t draw much attention at the time, because by then the intense controversy over American Betrayal had faded into background muttering. But it was one of my better productions, so here it is again:

This delicious and nutritious breakfast cereal requires some explanatory context.

In the early months (summer and fall of 2013) of the “barroom brawl” prompted by Diana’s book, various indefensibly nasty things* were written by a number of neoconservatives, most of them stars in the David Horowitz constellation.

In one of several vituperative pieces, Conrad Black called her “a right-wing loopy” who had not yet been “house-trained”, and described her book as a “farrago of lies”. In reference to Diana and those who agreed with her, Mr. Black decried the “unutterable myth-making and jejune dementedness, as they hurl the vitriol of the silly and the deranged” (August 16, 2013).

As soon as that little literary delicacy was published, Ronald Radosh sent Diana a triumphant email with the subject line “Conrad Black tears you apart”. To make sure she understood, he enclosed the text of Mr. Black’s essay, with the introduction: “Sorry to upset you once again, Diana, but I’m afraid you’ve lost, big time.”

David Horowitz himself said that she had “organized a kook army”.

Since then Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Radosh have supposedly had a falling-out. I’m not sure about Conrad Black; I haven’t heard much about him recently. However, if I recall correctly, he’s an adamant #NeverTrump guy.

This is just a little taste of the background for the discussion we’ve been having for the last few days.

*   For additional source links to these and other ad-hominem insults, see “An Addled Barroom Brawler”. But it’s been six years; some of them may be stale by now.
 

A Moment of Clarity

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You’re driving down a winding country road late at night. Up ahead, just barely within range of your headlights, you catch a glimpse of a moving shape. Uh-oh — could it be another one of those #@%&?!# deer? After a split second your guess is confirmed: you see the twin red pinpoints of its eyes. And then another pair, and another — the little red winking lights of four or five deer, looking like a row of error codes on a modem. The creatures leap into the road, eager to throw themselves in front of your car and send it to the body shop, and possibly you to the hospital. You brake hard and swerve… Phew! Your luck holds — you miss them by a couple of yards.

Yes, we denizens of the Virginia Outback are all too familiar with the awful moment when the view ahead becomes well-lit and clear enough to see that another close encounter with a deer is on the way. It’s a moment of ghastly clarity.

That’s what the last four years at Gates of Vienna have been like for me. Beginning with the Great Migration Crisis in the summer of 2015, some of the previously obscure underpinnings of currently unfolding events have sprung clearly into view, as if a row of light switches by the door to reality were being flipped on, one by one.

I could list any number of processes that make up this ongoing moment of clarity, but for simplicity of exposition, I’ll condense them into three major categories:

1.   The coordinated, planned invasion of Europe by masses of third-world migrants.
2.   The election of Donald Trump, and the consequent events that followed it.
3.   The global de-platforming of Tommy Robinson.
 

What these events have in common is that they reveal the otherwise occluded machinations of the international elite who strive to manage global affairs to suit their plans. The interference and manipulation have become so obvious that even non-paranoid people can’t help but notice them.

In the following analysis I’ll draw on vast quantities of data that I’ve absorbed over the past few years, without including any links. However, anything that is speculation will be clearly marked as such.

1. The Great Migration Crisis

When the columns of (mostly young male) migrants marched into Europe through the Balkans in the summer and fall of 2015, it quickly became clear that the whole operation had been planned in advance. Yes, Angela Merkel took advantage of the Dead Baby Moment when the corpse of little Ayan was carefully arranged and then “found” on a beach in Anatolia. No good socialist lets a crisis go to waste. Yet the logistical process that followed was far too large, complex, and expensive not to have been arranged ahead of time. Endless caravans of buses were lined up at various national borders to carry the migrants from one photo-op to the next, when they took those brief walks across the frontier that created such good visuals for the media.

And the culture-enrichers were carrying €500 notes to spend at their first stops in the European Union. Where did they get that kind of cash? Almost nobody uses that denomination of banknote in the EU.

A couple of years later it became clear that the EU itself was the cash cow for the migrants, when a credit card company acknowledged that it had partnered with the EU — which had guaranteed repayment of the debt — to hand out prepaid cards to migrants when they arrived in Europe.

Early in the game it became clear that George Soros was heavily involved in the process of migration. His NGOs ferried the “refugees” across the Med, handed out maps and instruction booklets, and chartered the buses that carried them onward towards Germany. But Mr. Soros wasn’t playing the philanthropist — he made that explicit when he told an interviewer that he expected to turn a profit on all his dealings.

Governments across Europe fell into line with the plan. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stood alone against the migration, and has become the sworn enemy of Brussels as a result. Until Matteo Salvini became Italian interior minister last year, Mr. Orbán was the sole governmental leader on the continent to actively resist what was happening.

Mass migration into Europe is not intrinsically profitable for anyone except the culture-enrichers themselves. Yet lots of people — people-smugglers, businesses, NGOs, and local governments — have been making money off the process. So who is paying for the population transfer?

Somebody wanted those migrants to get to Europe, and was willing to pay billions of dollars to make it happen.

Three years later, an exactly analogue of the process could be observed in the migrant “caravans” traveling from Central America through Mexico to the southern border of the USA. That was also a complex logistical process costing a lot of money. The trek overland through several countries had to be organized and supplied. Local officials had to be paid off to allow it through.

Who bankrolled all of that?

I don’t have any definitive answers to these questions, just speculations. I’ll get into those later.

2. The election of Donald Trump

Twenty-five years or so before the 2016 election I noticed how unpopular mass immigration was with American voters. Polls routinely showed that somewhere between 60% and 80% of the population said they opposed immigration, and some considered it an important issue. It seemed that an aspiring presidential candidate could do well if he included a prominent anti-immigration plank in his platform. Yet no one ever did, and that seemed peculiar. How could a pragmatic politician resist such an electoral advantage? Yes, it was considered a “populist” position, and everyone knew that populism was bad. Still… the issue could have helped a candidate win an election because it was, well, popular.

Fast-forward to 2016. As the campaign progressed, and Donald Trump deftly picked off all his opponents during the primaries, it became clear that the reason no one ever took up opposition to mass immigration was because they were not allowed to. The intense vitriol aimed at Mr. Trump from both parties — what we now refer to as the Uniparty — made it clear that primaries were designed to weed out any opponents of immigration. And that was OK with the Republican establishment — they didn’t really want to win elections that much anyway, as their rush to join #NeverTrump proved.

The events since January 20, 2017 have provided more evidence that the political establishment (a.k.a. the Swamp) in Washington D.C. is prepared to use all its wealth and power and influence to push Donald Trump out of the Oval Office. And the major issue that makes Mr. Trump so popular is his staunch opposition to mass immigration.

Why do all those wealthy, powerful members of the entrenched elite want so badly to bring millions of illiterate immigrants into the United States?

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St Patrick’s Day – When the Irish Invaded Canada

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Who knew?

This fine fellow researched the whole tilting-at-windmills brouhaha — including all the internecine fighting that kept that Hunger Generation from succeeding.

It’s here:

When the Irish Invaded Canada: The Incredible True Story of the Civil War Veterans Who Fought for Ireland’s Freedom

The thing is, those fighting Irish didn’t actually want Canada; they simply thought they could use it as a hostage to gain freedom for Ireland and they worked hard to make it happen.

The new Irish immigrants flooded to America in order to work for something to eat. Thus, they fought on both sides of the U.S. Civil War and then kinda, sorta joined forces afterward to secure Canada. The rationale was that if they held Canada hostage then the English would have to let much-poorer Ireland go in exchange.

Several things came out of the attempt. First, the British moved the capital further in from its border with America in order to make it more secure. Secondly, the overdue idea of founding a confederation of Canada’s territories became a reality much sooner than might have been the case otherwise.

‘Tis a fascinating book if you’ve the necessary DNA component which allows one to read gobs of stories about in-fighting and betrayal. Though he mentions it, what the writer doesn’t cover sufficiently, me thinks, is the reality of America’s desire for grabbing Canada its ownself. We had taken Texas from Mexico by then and bought Alaska from Russia. Bringing in Canada had great appeal for many Americans. For Canadians, not so much. They are too peaceable; being part of the rowdy U.S. would cause a profound unease. They weren’t called Loyalists for nothing.

Back during the Irish shenanigans, some of America’s politicians bloviated about the desirability of owning the whole hog, but those who did have an eye on the North wanted someone else to do the dirty work. There was little dirty work the Irish weren’t willing to do to get the English out of the Emerald Isle.

A recent video of the author’s talk in Lawrence Massachusetts about this bit of history is below the fold.

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Living Through a Dark Fatherless Time

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Tucker Carlson is a prominent conservative talking head in America. For the better part of a year, he’s been accumulating occasional pieces on the fate of men in our gynetrophied culture. As usual, this phenomenon is tied implicitly to the unintended effects of globalism.

In this episode, Carlson features Heather MacDonald and her recent book:

Men leaving the scene (#MGTOW) was predicted a generation ago by Lionel Tiger, a cultural anthropologist from Rutgers. Somewhere, in one of his books I read back in the 1980s, he made the observation that when women begin to crowd any given field the men quietly drift away. I recall one of the occupations he cited historically was the way women gradually took over the niche male secretaries once held. But which book that was I’ve since forgotten (though you don’t forget a person named Lionel Tiger, do you?).

Here’s a book of his from the turn of this century:

The Decline of Males: The First Look at an Unexpected New World for Men and Women

A blurb from that page:

“Lionel Tiger, a pioneer of biological anthropology and developer of the concept of male bonding, here delivers a very well-researched and well-written brief for masculinism, which if successful, may gain parity with feminism and eventually transform women’s studies within academia into what they should have always been, namely, gender studies.” (Edward O. Wilson, author of Consilience and Pellegrino University Research Professor, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University)

Here is his Wikipedia page with a partial listing of his books. There is a larger listing at Amazon, here.

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Lest I forget… don’t overlook Heather Mac Donald’s fine new work on our “metastasizing diversity bureaucracy”

Let’s Even the Odds

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In this episode, Dr. Turley covers the American petition to get White House press credentials for Alex Jones so he can sit next to CNN’s infamously rude microphone hog, Jim Acosta. Frankly, I don’t understand why Alex Jones has to have special permission to gain press access nor why a sitting president isn’t allowed to rein in the perfervid jornolistos appearing at the White House on his time.

Here’s a link to the book Turley mentions and the (edited) introductory blurb from Amazon:

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right

Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battleground is the internet. On one side the alt-right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian, Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signaling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.

For Americans, here’s the petition you can sign. They need a hundred thousand signatures by mid-December to have any impact.

German “Right-Wing” Publisher and his Wife Attacked after Frankfurt Book Fair

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Our German readers are probably familiar with the attack on Götz Kubitschek and his wife last Saturday in Frankfurt, but people who don’t follow the German-language news have most likely heard very little about it. Rembrandt Clancy sends this digest of the available information on the incident.


Götz Kubitschek in Chemnitz

German “Right-Wing” Publisher and his Wife Attacked after Frankfurt Book Fair

by Rembrandt Clancy

Götz Kubitschek is a well-known German book publisher and journalist who resolutely places himself to the right of the political spectrum: “Where there is a Left, there must be a Right and if there are intellectuals of the Left there are intellectuals of the Right.” For Kubitschek “Right” is virtually a brand name, even though it is weighted with a negative, “denunciative” or “pejorative” valuation, whilst the Left draws normative descriptors. For the executive editor of Sezession, the only journal for right-of-centre intellectuals in the German-speaking world, being intellectually to the Right is a “metapolitical theme” also for Antaios-Verlag (Antaios Publishing House), which he founded and still manages from the old Schnellroda manor in Saxony-Anhalt. But it is not a question of promoting the word “Right” or “right-wing intellectual” as an end itself; rather, it is a task of Antaios to turn the word “Right” into a positive concept. To be intellectually to the Right in today’s world is clearly more interesting, firstly because its ideas are new; and secondly, because it tackles matters in a different way, hence yielding a more accurate description of reality. (Interview with Kubitschek by RT Deutsch, Der Fehlende Part, 2017).

Writers such as the Austrian Identitarian leader Martin Sellner find a home at Antaios-Verlag. Kubitschek recently published Finis Germania, or “Germania, You are Dying” by the late Rolf Peter Sieferle and thereby called up an hysterical storm among the established press in Germany. Gates of Vienna published a translation of the book’s third chapter entitled “Mythos VB [Vergangenheitsbewältigung]” or “ The Mythos of Overcoming the [National Socialist] Past”.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung was the first to report the attack by three hooded men on Götz Kubitschek and his wife after the Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse) in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen on Saturday 13 October. They were dining at about 2200 hours in the outdoor area of the Pizzeria dal Bianco on Darmstädter Landstraße, a situation which placed Kubitschek immediately adjacent to the sidewalk.

Junge Freiheit reports:

Kubitschek sits with his back to the street and cannot see the attackers. “I never do that otherwise. They came out of nowhere… then I felt someone kick me in the back of the head; I fell with my head against the top of the table and was dazed”.

Kubitschek continues to describe how his wife and an acquaintance were injured, saying “The entire affair lasted five to eight seconds at the most.”

Caroline Sommerfeld is an Antaios author and intellectual of the New Right. She was present during the incident and reports that when Kubitschek’s wife, Ellen Kositza, realised that the perpetrators were trying to steal a notebook computer and a satchel which were on the table, she held on tightly to the items. The attackers dragged her from her bench onto the ground causing an injury to her left knee and wounds to her head. A third acquaintance suffered a black eye and a cut to his temple from a flying bottle (unzensuriert.at, 15 October).

The mainstream Frankfurter Allgemeine provided additional detail suggesting the perpetrators knew their victims:

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Social Justice: An Analysis (Part 4)

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Below is the final part of a four-part guest essay by Richard Cocks about Social Justice. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Social Justice: An Analysis

Part 4
by Richard Cocks

Who gets to be a student?

In the 1980s in New Zealand, university students tended to be the children of parents who had also been university students. This was at a time when only five percent of the population was admitted to college. Universities were funded by the government at great expense and reserved for the academically capable. Standards were high, with no grade inflation. Every student was literate and/or numerate and tended to be interested in his studies. Nearly every student pursued his own reading agenda and most would take an interest in classical literature and foreign (i.e., difficult) movies.

This fact about the parentage of university students was presented as a problem.

However, far from being unfair, it only stands to reason. The children of academically successful people are likely to have inherited a higher genetically derived intelligence. They are more likely to be exposed to a larger vocabulary from their parents, along with relatively sophisticated concepts. Their parents are likely to read to them and to treat education as valuable and important. There will likely be easy access to books with frequent trips to the library. The parents are more likely to be exemplary role models in their own reading habits. Academic subjects might be treated as interesting and discussed around the dinner table.

Many of these New Zealand students grew up wanting to be educated and knowledgeable. Some of it was just vanity and fear — not wanting to be the only person at the party who did not know about, say, Freud.

In my own case, long before attending university, “The Academic Calendar,” a bound book in which all university courses were listed along with their reading requirements, would be eagerly examined. Practically salivating at the books that would be read and discussed, fantasies of alternative course loads ensued. Imitating a friend of the family meant wanting from the age of seven to be a philosophy professor, before even knowing what philosophy really was.

The advantages of having university-educated parents were ones of class, family and genetic inheritance. Are those advantages fair? They are neither fair nor unfair. They are certainly an undeserved good fortune a.k.a. luck.

Crucially, what is the alternative to such a state of affairs?

Social justice would require “fixing” these advantages. One problem with this is that a student who is less able, less literate, less motivated, less interested, with a smaller vocabulary, having read fewer books would take the other’s place. This is a poor use of resources and creates its own unfairness. The other problem is that social justice attempts a kind of unknowable counterfactual — one of putting someone where they would have been had not social, familial and genetic factors counted against him. Sowell points out that social justice requires non-existent God-like abilities to determine what might have been.

Unintended consequences of social justice

One thing that was attempted in many countries to try to counteract disadvantages acquired “through no fault of their own” was to take children away from parents who were poor, unemployed, perhaps drug- or alcohol-addicted, unsuccessful, with bad attitudes towards education and industriousness and to put those children in more middle-class and successful households. This happened to Australian Aboriginal children and to Native American children among others. This attempt at cosmic justice is now regarded as an abomination, though it was well-meaning. Ripping such children from their birth home changes their likely educational and employment attainments positively, but destroys families and the parent/child bond. It is now completely out of fashion and widely condemned.

However, the desire for cosmic justice continues in other forms and similar sorts of things result from it.

In the 1960s liberal judges argued that amateur criminals often implicated themselves in ways that professional offenders would not. Bizarrely, the judges wanted to even the playing field for the amateurs and instituted the Miranda Rights rule. This means more violent criminals wandering the streets, getting off on technicalities, and more difficulty in prosecuting them. A certain number of extra victims will have died as a result of judges’ wanting amateur criminals to avoid conviction as often as the professionals. Those living in high-crime areas such as inner cities will have particularly suffered, and a very high proportion will have been black. Similarly, justices wanted hard-luck stories concerning murderer’s childhoods to be considered, even though there is no way to tell how much this contributed to their offending. These kinds of considerations mean murder trials commonly extend for three years at great expense, while violent criminals are out on bail.

“Social justice” for criminals means more victims, rapes and deaths, especially among the poor.

Traditional justice means one rule for all. Social justice for vicious murderers means the punishment will vary depending on how bad the killer’s childhood was. This means a different punishment for two criminals who commit the same crime. A criminal who could prove he had a particularly harsh childhood could expect a reduced punishment. Reducing the punishment means there is less of a disincentive to offend. If anything that contributes to his greater chance of offending should mean a lighter sentence, then the rule that criminals with bad childhoods should get lighter sentences will justify giving criminals even lighter sentences, thereby reducing the disincentive to offend, ad infinitum.

Affirmative action programs in California, for instance, were shown to actually reduce the graduation rates of blacks and Hispanics. By putting such students in colleges for which they did not qualify based on their grades, the students found themselves outgunned and at the bottom of their classes. This discouraging state of affairs tends to undermine self-confidence and reduce graduation rates. When the University of California system was forbidden by legal decisions to engage in affirmative action admission policies, the graduation rates of blacks and Hispanics rose by 55%.The number of doctorates among that group in the sciences went up 25% after affirmative action policies were banned. [1]

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You Say You Want a Revolution…

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A few days ago I was looking through a box of old papers, vintage ca. 1970, and I found a copy of the 1966 Pelican edition of Volume 2 of The Bolshevik Revolution by E.H. Carr. Since the book hasn’t seen the light of day in forty-odd years, it’s in pretty good shape. I bought it in 1968 — for 9s6d, or about 48p, as a matter of interest — when I was studying for A-levels. My history teacher recommended that anyone who was planning to sit special papers (which I was) should read it in preparation for the exam.

E.H. Carr, if not an outright communist, was definitely a communist sympathizer and an apologist for Stalin. But that doesn’t detract from his work as a historian — like many of the comsymp historians, he was from the old school: researching history meant studying the facts and writing them up, with thorough annotation of sources. A historian might color his narrative with his own opinions, but he didn’t scamp the facts.

The same was true of Isaac Deutscher, an actual communist, whose biography of Stalin was also on my reading list back then. I read those books and others, discounted the bias of the writers, and accumulated a vast store of information about the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet Russia, some of which is still stuck in my head today. Reading history written by commies never improved my opinion of communism — in fact, some of the ghastly truths about Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin contained in those books hardened my attitude even further. A few months ago, when I was arguing with Felix Quigley (who was our resident Marxist commenter for a while), he wanted to know where I got my bogus information about Lenin. My source was in fact the book shown above — I couldn’t remember the author’s name at that point, but I told him it was written by a communist or communist sympathizer.

Facts is facts. And they’re in there.

This book was the second of three volumes on the Bolshevik Revolution, which themselves were part of a series on the history of Soviet Russia. The blurb on the Pelican book says there were eight volumes, but I thought there were about fourteen — maybe Carr wrote more of them after 1966.

Anyway… The font size in the book is microscopic, so I know I’ll never read it again. Oh, for the days when I could read those tiny little black letters!

So here’s my proposal: I’ll put this in a book mailer and send it to anyone in the USA who would be interested in reading it. It’s in good condition; the spine is intact. There’s only a bit of yellowing and that coffee stain from 1968 at the top. I’m restricting it to recipients the USA because book rate is cheap, so I won’t mind paying the postage.

If you’d like it, email me with your address at gatesofvienna (at) chromatism (dot) net. A week from today I’ll compile a list of interested parties (if any), have Dymphna choose one of them at random, and mail it off to the lucky winner.

This book is dense with information. I noticed that there’s a big section on the NEP in the second half of it. That’s one of the more interesting developments in the early history of the Soviet Union.

Understanding Trump Voters: A Good Start

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This long book review, only slightly shortened, is the most recent essay on the Witherspoon Institute’s website.

Pundits will be slicing and dicing the Trump Phenomenon ages hence. In the meantime, the authors of the book in question (and the reviewer, too) have captured well the American zeitgeist.

Sadly, in the almost-two-years since Trump took office, it is still impossible to know whether the wishes of the electorate will be honored by their representatives in Washington D.C.; so far there appear to be few, very few, men of good will there. Or women, either, for that matter. It resembles nothing so much as it does a Fellini film.

The bright spots on the political landscape are the Trump rallies that continue as the hallmark of his direct approach to average American people, people whom American MSM would barricade behind their wall of innuendo and fabrications. Trump’s clever work-around will be taken by future presidents to get past these jornolists.

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The Great Revolt: Understanding Real Trump Voters

by Carson Holloway

The country’s ruling elites misunderstood or ignored the concerns of a significant segment of the electorate. The Great Revolt suggests that those elites should move beyond lamenting the misfortune (to them) of Trump’s elevation to the presidency and ponder the mistakes on their part that made it possible.

Almost two years after the event, many Americans — even the most sophisticated political observers — are still astonished and perplexed by the results of the 2016 presidential election. “What happened?” many people wonder —including Hillary Clinton herself, who chose those words for the title of her election memoir. How did Donald Trump, the most unlikely presidential candidate in American history, ace Clinton and her party out of the presidency?

Was it a mere fluke? This, of course, is the explanation favored by many Democrats and even some Trump-averse Republicans. Trump, after all, lost the national popular vote, and his electoral triumph depended on eking out narrow popular vote victories in certain key states. No one can dismiss the possibility that, had one or two details played out differently — say, for example, had former FBI Director James Comey remained silent about his brief re-opening of the Clinton e-mail investigation — Clinton would have prevailed.

Or perhaps Trump’s victory was not a fluke, but rather a sign of a significant electoral realignment. This interpretation is favored by Trump’s most ardent supporters, and, no doubt, by the president himself. Trump may have lost the popular vote, but he won the electoral college vote handily — more handily than any Republican since 1988. Moreover, Trump “flipped” a number of states that had been reliably Democratic for decades. While he only won them narrowly, he far outperformed previous GOP nominees in those states.

It is only fair to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton was not alone in having her presidential aspirations thwarted by external factors; Trump faced a national press corps that seemed determined to destroy his candidacy from its inception. One can only wonder how much stronger his campaign might have been had the media chosen to act as a nonpartisan conduit of information instead of as an unpaid arm of the Clinton campaign.

Confronted with these competing plausible interpretations, how are we to understand the significance of the 2016 presidential election? Salena Zito and Brad Todd try to answer this important question in their excellent and fascinating study of Trump voters, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics. As the subtitle suggests, the authors are inclined to believe that the 2016 election was no fluke but portends a reconfiguration of the forces that have traditionally shaped American politics. Nevertheless, they are properly cautious about whether Trump’s coalition can be held together and, if so, whether it can remain a governing majority for long.

Who Voted for Trump?

Zito, a journalist, and Todd, a Republican political consultant, make their task more manageable by choosing not to examine Trump supporters nationwide but instead to focus on a relatively narrow subset of them. They surveyed and did extensive interviews with Trump voters from ten counties in five states of America’s Great Lakes region: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Iowa.

This approach serves the authors well. These states — and these voters — are where the difference was made and where there is something new to be learned. Most of Trump’s voters, after all, are a relatively well-known and well-understood breed: loyal, long-term Republicans in traditionally Republican states. In these Great Lakes states, however, we also find long-time non-voters and even Democrats (including, remarkably, Democratic Party and labor union activists) who were moved by Trump’s populist appeal either to vote for the first time or to walk away from the party around which they had organized their whole political lives.

The Great Revolt identifies and profiles seven kinds of voters essential to Trump’s winning coalition in these decisive states:

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Life after Google

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Here’s the George Gilder book, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, discussed in Dr Turley’s video.

Here is George Gilder’s Amazon page.

I am a fan of Gilder, especially his ideas about how wrong and damaging current feminism is – particularly for women. We talk frequently about what will happen when some beleaguered Europeans begin to come to life. Fems ought to worry about their fate when Western men awaken.

Men without women are “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” and those ignorant Fems are clueless. They have no idea.

The Handyman’s Tale

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For readers who are unfamiliar with the novel The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood — to which the following allegorical pastiche by JLH pays non-hommage — here’s the Wikipedia entry for the book.

The Handyman’s Tale

or

Margaret Atwood meets Quentin Tarantino

by JLH

Birth of a Nation

It happened in a place once called California. There was a surprising change of leadership in the national government, which had, until then, pursued a reasonable policy of social benefits for the poor to offset the incredible wealth amassed by the governing class and its consiglieri, and a sensible foreign policy of financial rewards for countries most likely to dislike and attack us. With the unexpected shift in leadership came a fanciful desire to improve an economy that successive bipartisan leaders had shown could not be improved; and a wrong-headed insistence that this country — like any other — should stand up for itself.

The final straws were perverted, “fundamentalist” interpretations of the 1st and 2nd Amendments. A brush-fire revolutionary movement formed, led by a retired power politician named Barbara Wrestler (known to friend and foe alike as “Barbie Bananas”). 10-term Governor Lunagleem was persuaded to declare the Feminist Nation of Westland, with the Golden Teddy Bear as its symbol. Its ready-made rallying cry was the title of the runaway bestseller, Cherchez la femme puissante. A widespread and visceral distaste for “flyover fundamentalism” among the elite of Westland was the impetus for a decree that the official philosophy of the new nation would be based upon principles outlined in the sociological milestone 50 Shades of Pink. The defining motto on the Teddy Bear seal of the new nation would be “allectio privus puellae” — To each her own.

Governor Lunagleem — in recognition of his long and faithful service in government, and his unflagging advocacy of women’s rights — was retired with great honors and offered, by way of exception, a passport that would not expire, should he ever decide to leave Westland and seek the presidency of that other country.

Offal

Our tale of life in the Feminist Democratic Republic of Westland is largely contained in the life of Offal. We first encounter him in the exclusively female- staffed public pre-school (there was no private schooling, except for the few daughters of highly placed officials), where he learned that a dispute between boys was decided on the basis of which boy was perceived to be the aggressor, who was then punished by being sent to an isolation corner for a while. A dispute between girls was resolved by a serious talk with an advisor, who would mediate an agreement between them. A dispute between a girl and a boy was regarded as Right versus Wrong or Good versus Evil. The girl was Right and the boy was Wrong. He was required to stand alone, as all the girls circled him and slapped his face — some angrily, some more kindly and softly. If he resisted — which became increasingly rare — he graduated to being Evil. He was made to lean his elbows on the teacher’s desk; and each girl was given a willow switch to strike his buttocks as she passed by. Offal and his classmates learned two lessons from this: 1)Never argue with a girl within view of any authority; 2) Never wear shorts to school — some girls will choose to whip the bare legs.

Bathroom facilities in schools, as in all public institutions, were of two kinds: Female and General. Offal’s introduction to this system was witnessing an outraged 7-year-old classmate complaining to their teacher that there was a girl standing at the urinals, observing and commenting. “Of course, dear,” the teacher told him kindly, “How else will she learn? She aspires to be a urologist.”

After the conditioning of pre-school, Life Entry School offered more substantive knowledge in arithmetic, reading, writing and the History of the Golden Teddy Bear Republic. All classes were issued waterproof helmets for their required, weekly depilatory shower. Boys were observed, to decide when they should be issued facial depilatory. The goal was no visible hair below the eyes. Everyone alike. There would be no returning to the era of “hairy-chested men.”

A companion program in the summer found every boy at “Summer Camp” — a more social than pedagogical training. Instead of a recorded version of Reveille, the day began with a loud call of “Soo-ee, Soo-ee, Pig! Pig! Pig!” Breakfast was sugarless oatmeal served in lengthy wooden trenchers referred to as “troughs” and a thick slice of bread. After eating, each boy carried his trencher past an open spigot, rinsing it off as he passed and stacking it upside down on the large drainboard. Lunch was beans with some salt pork in the same trencher, and bread. Supper was meatballs in tomato sauce, and bread, with a suety chocolate pudding for dessert. Each meal was presided over by watchful female counselors, who roamed between the long tables, noting when a boy seemed not to be eating, and rapping him across the back with a bamboo stick, saying, “Eat, Piggy, Eat!”

Activities during the day were various kinds of manual labor: moving boulders, leveling paths and roadways, gathering firewood from the surrounding woods. The great advantage for both “campers” and “counselors” was that this regimen facilitated an exhausted sleep. Nonetheless, the older boys were pulled — one by one — out of their bunks during the night and taken to one of the counselors’ cabins for what the counselors laughingly called, “Sex 101,” where they learned all the ways in which a woman could be pleased.

Offal never did know what the girls’ Summer Camp was like, but he noticed that with each end-of-summer return to school, the girls seemed to become more distant and contemptuous of the boys.

The final levels of public education — before girls went to one of the plethora of Westland universities, and the boys went to either blue- or white-collar trade schools — were also the closing phases in the treatment of male toxicity. Boys were separated into algorithmically selected groups and pulled from class twice a week to attend “de-masculinizing” clinics, where they were electronically connected to monitoring devices. Conducted by therapists working in pairs, the clinics featured 50-minute videos of young people at various activities. Blood pressure, pulse and skin temperature often spiked with one of three things: dangerous activities like cliff diving or dirt bike racing; warlike confrontations between males; the sight of an unexpected expanse of female skin. Every boy who registered a spike received an instantaneous electric jolt high inside his thighs. By the end of the second year, the attraction of danger, physical conflict and sex had dwindled to such an extent that images that had once caused a spike now barely registered. Many of the boys just closed their eyes or looked away.

Boys’ credits for graduation — aside from the masculine detoxification sessions — included the ability to read a newspaper, math through plane geometry (algebra and beyond were considered too intricate), a comfortable acquaintance with a computer and keyboard, and at least six credits in gardening/farming, tool-handling and crafts.

Thus well-trained in the necessary rules and attitudes of the Feminist Republic of Westland, Offal matured into a shy, comely young fellow. He was appointed to be a Domestic Worker, and was given a multi-year assignment as a handyman for three of the leading Wives in his designated community, doing yard work, animal husbandry and carpentry.

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The Swelling Tide of International Support for Tommy Robinson

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Dr. Turley comments on the growing anger and the far-reaching consequences of Tommy’s arrest. With some good news for a change.

Here’s his book:

President Trump and Our Post-Secular Future: How the 2016 Election Signals the Dawning of a Conservative Nationalist Age

Here’s his bio:

Steve Turley (PhD, Durham University) is an internationally recognized scholar, speaker, and classical guitarist. He is the author of Awakening Wonder: A Classical Guide to Truth, Goodness, and Beauty (Classical Academic Press) and The Ritualized Revelation of the Messianic Age: Washings and Meals in Galatians and 1 Corinthians (T&T Clark). Steve blogs on the church, society and culture, education, and the arts at TurleyTalks.com. He is a faculty member at Tall Oaks Classical School in Bear, Delaware, where he teaches Theology, Greek, and Rhetoric, and Professor of Fine Arts at Eastern University. Steve lectures at universities, conferences, and churches throughout the U.S. and abroad. His research and writings have appeared in such journals as Christianity and Literature, Calvin Theological Journal, First Things, Touchstone, and The Chesterton Review. He and his wife, Akiko, have four children and live in Newark, Delaware.

Please pray this is over soon or the B may starve to death… when I have no appetite, I can’t cook.