Bootcut and Low Rise: Race, Nationalism, Holocaust Revisionism, and Men's Fashion in the 2000s

I.

 

I read Angelo Plume's journey through the history of the past 14 years with great interest, not only because his impressions of the 2020s and the 2010s mirror my own, but because his journey ends at the same destination that many people in the movement have found themselves at: at the end of the line. In keeping with most ideological polemics written by those in the movement today, Plume's essay takes a negative and pessimistic view of the present and the future, and while that view is not one that I disagree with entirely, it is one that ought to raise the question, 'How on earth do you expect it to attract a following?'.

 

If we are to look to the history of politics since the beginning of recorded time, we see that no political movement has won power with the message that life is bad today, that life will be worse tomorrow, and that there are no answers. Experience shows that politics relies on simplicity and that it seeks simple solutions to difficult problems. Take Marxism, for example: life in Europe in the 19th century in the works of Marx is portrayed as hell on Earth; but fortunately, the way Marx tells it, the answer lies close to hand, and the misery of the working class will be resolved in the fashion of a 19th century comic opera or melodramatic novel; that is, there will be a happy ending. Today, the communist movement lacks that certainty, but so does the 'Alt Right' or dissident Right or white nationalist movement.

 

Some in the white nationalist movement project apocalyptic, millenarian, chiliastic futures, but others are smart enough to know that Western man has lived through the 'end times' many times - just look at European man at the time of medieval Europe - and they know that eschatology has every time come to naught. In any case, I do not think that apocalypticism, the breakdown of civilisation, and a reversion to Darwin’s 'survival of the fittest' accord with human nature; if we ever did see the breakdown of civilisation, and the end of electricity, gas, running water, sanitation, shopping malls, and supermarkets, then women would make sure that men had all these up and running again in no time. It is women's nagging men that drove men to devise these luxuries in the first place.

 

To return to Plume: Plume's problem relates to what we moderns call the 'standard of living', the 'quality of life', and what Aristotle called the 'Good Life'; and the doctrine of vitalism, associated with Nietzsche and Shaw, comes into it as well.

 

To explain how it is that these doctrines relate to the present, I will point to today's media. Every day, I check the news. And unlike my boomer parents, I do not read newspapers; instead, I look at websites. On my morning reading list can be found over two dozen conservative sites and under ten dissident Right sites. They serve up a diet of endless bad news, so much so that I have taken to calling my morning news the 'bad news bulletin'. Are the journalists writing this news portraying real life? No, says Nietzsche: no individual can sum up the value of Life with a capital 'L'. These journalists are portraying life as they see it, however, and that puts me in a difficult position. When reading the bad news bulletin, I do not disagree with the facts as presented, but I do ask myself, do the facts entail that life in the Anglosphere as these journalists see it is worth living? Judging by the articles, the answer often is no. The writers will make the rejoinder: 'No, what I have written for this week's column does not sum up my attitudes towards Life; when you read me, you caught me on a bad day'. Besides which (and this is the conservative writer speaking), 'All of America's problems will be resolved once we re-elect Trump'. My response is: perhaps, perhaps not, but it seems singularly unwise to stake the future of your country and the future of yourself on the election of one man.

 

Having said that, the coming to power of a distinguished leader can mark a turn towards the Good Life. Hitler was once quoted as saying - and I cannot find the origin of the quotation - 'We National Socialists have proved that Germans can live, and live well, without the Jews, and this is the hardest blow we have struck against them'. That quotation, if genuine, shows that Hitler valued 'living well', Aristotle's Good Life; and in part it explains the continuing appeal of German National Socialism eight decades later.

 

We can think of other societies and nations in other historical epochs that valued the Good Life, and among these is the Roman. For centuries, the Romans lived lives of refinement, as we have seen from their architecture, their houses, their clothes. Not every Roman approached the standards of the Roman upper class, of course, but any falling short hardly mattered; it was only the overall standard that mattered.

 

So, when considering overall standards, the question we in the West in 2024 ought to ask is this: is there any time in the recent history that we have overall, like the Romans, followed a certain standard that entailed the Good Life? And if we are no longer abiding by that standard, why? And surely any obstacles that stand in the way of our reaching the Good Life can be overcome - any difficulties smoothed over, ameliorated, if not resolved altogether, by politics?

 

The inspiration for this essay came to me in the lockdown years, when to pass the time, I watched past episodes of a long running daytime American NBC TV drama. In one episode from 2006, two of the heroes were sitting in a bar drinking a beer while ‘deep house’ music blared in the background. Both characters were played by men who were in their fifties but who looked young for their age and who had not let themselves go to seed. They were reasonably well-groomed and were dressed in the casual clothes (including the bootcut jeans) that were fashionable at the time. And I saw in later episodes that the two men's wives were equally as well-dressed and groomed; that the two couples lived in middle-class homes; and that the homes were well-furnished, clean, and full of light and air. Now, all this sounds unremarkable, and so it is; but you must consider that at the time I was viewing the show, simple pleasures such as drinking with friends in a bar were denied to me. And because of the closure of barbers, hairdressers, beauty salons, gyms, and retail clothing outlets at the time, it was quite easy for one to enter a state of dishevelment and hence self-degradation, the outcome sought after by our Covidian masters, who would arrest you if you had the temerity to walk outdoors without wearing a surgical mask. So, I envied these characters on my TV screen, and I wondered at the fact that once - in the America of 2006 - living the Good Life was the norm. For people in the years 2020 to 2022 had become quite deranged, and even though I liked to think in those years that I was holding myself aloof from the madness, gradually the madness came to infect even me, and like them, I began to lose touch with reality; but ironically, my contact with it was restored by my watching an old American TV show.

 

After the experience, I set myself the task of coming up with answers to two questions: what is normal? and what is the Good Life?

 

II.

 

The politics of the 1990s has been written about many times, and most of the writings revolve around the themes of the 'End of History' and the 'End of Politics', as we see in this Travis LeBlanc piece here. In America in the nineties, Far Right politics travelled along the same road as mainstream politics; both preached the doctrine of the 'End of Ideology' and 'End of Politics'. The white nationalist movement, the militia movement, the survivalist movement, all eschewed politics and participation in civic life, and the members of these movements isolated themselves in compounds and camps, the most famous being William Pierce's compound in rural Virginia, there to await the end of the world, which would occur in the year 2000 perhaps. 

 

On the Continent, the decade saw the slow rise of Far-Right populism. Interesting possibilities presented themselves after the reunification of Germany, and liberal observers feared a resurgence of German nationalism, but they need not have bothered, because whatever 'Neo-Nazi' movement there was in reunified Germany was overtaken by the skinhead movement, which was as apolitical as could be.

 

Far more interesting a subject than nineties politics or the lack thereof is how people lived. Were white people better off in the nineties? We could give the rote answer that our dissident Right ideology compels us to give, which is yes, the residents of the Anglosphere were far better off because while the Great Replacement was occurring in that decade, it had not yet picked up steam; in the case of Australia, the annual intake of immigrants would not reach the hundreds of thousands until the following decade.

 

On the other hand, one answer to our question, and one stock standard white nationalist answer, would be no. The Dukes, Metzgers, Pierces, would point to Jewish power, which to them seemed especially pronounced in the nineties. Even worse was the fact that little awareness of the Jewish question and the question of Jewish power and influence existed. For one thing, the Internet was barely in its infancy, and hardly any respectable person had heard of Holocaust Revisionism, much less accessed forbidden works online; in those days, if you wanted to read a book by a nationalist or a Revisionist, you had to write overseas to some publisher of forbidden books. The result was that in the nineties the proponents of Holocaust Exterminationism and anti-Nazism had free rein. The Jewish party line on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, the National Socialists, the events of WWII, the founding of the State of Israel were spread all over the culture. The Holocaust and WWII stories had gotten their start in the seventies and eighties and became reached their peak in the nineties; most likely the turning point was the release of Schindler's List (1993), which at the time was acclaimed by all and sundry as a moving and truthful account of Hitler's persecution and extermination of the Jews.

 

But let us put these dissident Right views to one side for the moment. If we are to evaluate how good white people had it in the nineties, we must consider how they lived. And when I look at that period objectively, I must admit that were I transported to it in a time machine and made to relive it, I would most likely be bored and frustrated. For one, I would be forced to live without modern conveniences such as the smartphone and high-speed broadband Internet, both of which we today take for granted. These luxuries, especially the Internet, have become necessities, and they are no longer luxuries; we can no longer imagine a life without them any more than we can imagine it without electricity and hot and cold running water.

 

How do we transport ourselves mentally to such archaic times? To gauge a bygone epoch, your best course is to watch its TV. If you look up '1990s men's fashions' or '2000s men's fashions' in a search engine, the results will bring up photo after photo of garishly attired rap and boy band performers; you simply will not be able to find pictures of what ordinary men wore. It is only TV that can return you to your past. During lockdown, my positive experience of revisiting the past through watching old TV shows prompted me to obtain compilations of late-nineties episodes of a popular daytime American ABC TV drama; and in these were included all the advertisements that accompanied each broadcast. This complete package, to me, proved to be revelatory; watching the TV shows and the ads from a bygone age is the closest thing we have to time travel; when you see an actor wearing a particular article of clothing, all of a sudden a vivid memory can thrust itself up into the forefront of your consciousness; you are reminded of owning that shirt or that raincoat with that exact colour and that exact pattern. In addition, the advertising brings back memories when it promotes the popular TV shows and movies of the time: when watching the ads for these, you remember with a jolt that you had seen that TV show in your living room and that movie in the cinema at the nearby mall. (Back in those days, you had to visit a cinema if you wanted to see a new movie, and you frequently did want to see that movie; for movies were more popular and significant then than they are now).

 

A sociologist would find the advertisements to be of interest because they give an insight into American life. The ads hawk the usual products - snack food, medicines, household cleaning liquids, toothpaste, etc. - and, to my surprise, medicines, remedies, hygienic items, and enhancers for everything that takes place below the belt. The brutally frank treatment of intimate subjects blows out of the water the notion that Americans are prudish about their bodily functions.

 

In the current year, we are a little wiser, and we can say that most of the worst of the afflictions suffered by everyday Americans in the nineties - afflictions such as heartburn and constipation - came about because of the American diet, which is atrocious. And the subject of diet brings us to another staple of American life in the nineties: the fat man. In the eighties, most male actors, even the middle-aged ones, looked thin, and alarmingly so. The overweight actor, e.g., John Candy, was a rarity and usually a comic figure. But by the nineties, all that had changed. We saw more and more of the chubby character, in TV shows, movies, and advertisements; first we saw him as a background character, then as a lead. Towards the end of the decade, the balding, overweight, middle-aged, usually wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of baggy shorts, came to epitomise the American male. He is a pathetic and comic figure, and he is a slave to his appetites, a plump buffoon who dances ecstatically at the thought of eating a box of Pop Tarts or a Rice Krispie bar.

 

The countervailing force is the stock-standard nineties action hero - the muscle man who usually wears a trench coat and a mullet. The latter signified the hero's strength, power, and virility. Nowadays, it seems gauche. And so did most of nineties men's fashion, which wanted to revive some of the worst items of fifties men's fashion, e.g. the big, loose, and baggy suit. Perhaps the nineties man liked the baggy suit because it hung on his frame comfortably, and perhaps he disliked the eighties suit because it clung tight; eighties suits were made for skinny and runty men.

 

The nineties mimicked the fashion of the fifties but forgoed the staidness of the fifties. A word that springs to mind when contemplating the popular culture of the nineties is: disorder. An underlying zaniness and freneticism, a furious energy, exists, and when you are on the receiving end of it for hours and hours, it becomes intolerable. In the nineties, if I wanted to get away from it all, I would go bushwalking with my friends, because in the tranquillity of the bush, I would be completely isolated from nineties pop culture, politics, and civilisation.

 

A conservative and harmonious side to American pop culture at the time does exist. In certain of the TV ads, we see American life being depicted as a life of comfort, ease, and serenity. See this commercial for Folger's coffee, starring country singer Randy Travis. He wakes up in the morning on his tour bus, looking improbably well-groomed and good-tempered; not for him the early morning dishevelment and hangover. Naturally enough, the beaming Travers, wearing a mullet and resplendent in a pristine white t-shirt and a pair of tight jeans, bursts into song, and he sings the praises of the Folgers brand; and you the viewer cannot help but find the music pleasing and reassuring. I am tempted to call this commercial and the hundreds of others like it implicitly white, perhaps even explicitly white, because the advertising men, knowing their market, wanted the audience to associate the product with whiteness and Americanism. And on that level, the ad men succeeded.

 

III.

 

I, like millions of other non-Americans in the Anglosphere, once found American popular culture to be seductive and enticing; now I do not. And today many popular culture afficionados who are devotees of American movies, TV shows, and comic books agree with me.

 

Some blame the politicisation of pop culture that occurred in the 2010s. The narrative goes that Hollywood and other mass producers of American popular culture had in the 2010s been infected with the new creed of Social Justice; that Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) infiltrated the American entertainment establishment and turned it 'woke'; that, using the same methods of communist infiltrators, the SJWs snuck into the great institutions and subverted them.

 

I am in broad agreement with the critics of SJWism, and one would be foolish to deny their thesis. After all, it is confirmed every day by the latest announcement in the entertainment news that a white character from a beloved franchise is being turned black, that he is being replaced by a female, that he is being turned into a homosexual, and so forth. The SJWs now parody themselves, and worse, they behaved in such a flagrantly provocative fashion that they have drawn attention to themselves - the attention of the entire world. As such, they have made American pop culture a laughingstock.

 

But what strikes me as being most important is that popular culture no longer entertains as it once did; it no longer approaches the old standard. The American entertainment industry in the old days worked like a factory, pumping out a product of a certain quality that the world came to respect. Take for example Hollywood in the years of the Silver Age, when it worked under the now maligned studio system; it churned out movies every year that were often A-grade, sometimes B-grade, but never C-grade. Audiences came to expect their entertainment to be somewhat dull but always robust; they could count on the studios to serve a meal that was satisfying and nutritious. My father, a boomer, once confessed to me that he never refused to see a Clint Eastwood movie because, in his words, 'You know what you're going to get'. But now, the rug has pulled out from under that faithful audience, and the media / entertainment complex turns out a shoddy product.

 

Thanks to the Internet, today the longtime fans of a franchise can assemble on a message board and immediately comment on a new instalment. They tend to dissect it, and they strive to work out where it went wrong and how it could have been made right. One YouTube commentator came to my attention when he suggested a brilliant fix for the movie, The Force Awakens (2015), a flawed movie that was the first instance of 'Disney Star Wars', 'SJW Star Wars'. This way the fans write better stories than the screenwriters themselves; the screenwriters, who are generally incompetent, almost have their job done for them. Fans of a franchise will take it more seriously than the writers, directors, and producers who work on it. This close attention to past and present of a franchise is needed, because the studios today seem largely indifferent. A strange apathy pervades the media and entertainment complex, and this is conjoined with a lack of professional standards and pride in one's work. My reaction whenever I encounter a shoddy instalment is to ask myself: how difficult it could be to devise a piece of escapism that is up to the standards that we all held to only two decades ago? In those days, the men who wrote the movies, comic books, and TV shows, produced decent work with little effort. But today any delivering of a good piece of work strains the capacity of we moderns, thus proving the dictum that a good artist will make the act of creation seem easy, a bad one will make it seem hard.

 

IV.

 

When remembering the decade that followed the nineties, most of us would prefer not to remember it at all; it is a decade most of us would prefer to forget. Bush, 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the War on Terror: many good things may have happened in the 1960s, for instance, but no good thing happened in the 2000s - that is the consensus.

 

What of the politics; what was it in the 2000s that benefited the dissident Right? Unquestionably, the growth of the Internet proved to be a boon; it facilitated the spread of racialism, Holocaust Revisionism, WWII revisionism, Far Right nationalism, across the West - a spread that Jewry, liberals, the Left, the Antifa were powerless to stop. Activists of the dissident Right could now communicate with ease, through message boards, mailing lists, email, and social media. Old-time hands such as William Pierce, who had been part of the movement since the 1960s, took to the new media like ducks to water, and his incendiary American Dissident Voices talks were broadcast on Internet radio every Saturday every week of the year. And those who were new to dissident Right ideas could now devour the classics online; you could read Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium (1948), Pierce's The Turner Diaries (1978), George Lincoln Rockwell's This Time the World (1961), and the key works of Holocaust Revisionism, in addition to a great many other forbidden books.

 

The idea of a decentralised network that facilitated the untrammelled free flow of information outraged Jewish organisations such as the ADL and AIPAC, and if we are to look closely at the 2000s, we can discern in it the beginnings of the end of the conventional narrative of WWII, the Holocaust, and National Socialism - the narrative touted by organised Jewish groups, American conservatives, American leftists, and all the other political groupings. Hard as it is to believe today, YouTube hosted clips that explained to viewers 'How to spot a Jew'; in a crash-course in Jew-spotting, the viewer's attention would be directed to aspects of Jewish physiognomy, including the famous Jewish nose.

 

After the advent of the modern Internet, the attention span of youth shortened, for modern youth is not given to reading; it prefers sound bites, short film clips, and memes. But even though these fragments possessed little by way of written information, they sufficed enough to shatter the belief in the Holocaust. Belief in Hitler's gas chambers slowly and almost imperceptibly became 'uncool', and over the course of years only the fuddy-duddies, the boomers who read their morning newspapers religiously and beheld Holocaust epics such as Sophies Choice (1982) and Schindler's List (1993) in rapt wonder, held fast to the Holocaust tale. Jewish organisations such as the ADL and AIPAC looked at these trends with an unease and disquiet, an anxiety that grew into a panic when they realised that punitive measures against Revisionists such as Ernst Zündel were not working; how to stamp out the unbelief?

 

Because the Holocaust is nothing but the Jewish religion. As we know from the Bible, the idea of a Holocaust, a burnt sacrifice to Yahweh, a burnt sacrifice that is in the words of the Bible of a 'sweet savour to the Lord', forms the cornerstone of Judaism. Cain murders Abel for this reason: Abel offered up dead animals to Yahweh, and Abel's offering met with Yahweh's acceptance, Cain's offering did not; for Cain offered crops to Yahweh, who, not being a vegan, wanted animals instead; and so, Cain grew jealous of Abel and killed him. The account of the offering to Yahweh, and the stipulation of the right sort of offering, lays the foundation for all the Jewish history that came thereafter. A denial of the supreme efficacy of burnt sacrifice, whether that sacrifice be of animals or human beings, flies in the face of Jewish belief, and it is tantamount to heresy. 

 

To clarify: 'Holocaust' means 'burnt offering to God'; the word 'Holocaust' appears 13 times in the apocryphal books of the Bible, and 'burnt offering’ 243 times in the Old Testament. After the Bible comes the Talmud, which is a lengthy commentary on the Old Testament; and in it can be found the prophecy that six million Jews will be put to death in giant ovens by the non-Jews, all as a sacrifice to Yahweh who will, as part of his end of the bargain, restore to Jewry the lost State of Israel. By a miracle, the six million, according to the prophecy, will be resurrected, and the survivors of the Holocaust will go on to reclaim the land promised by Yahweh to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Thus, the covenant between Jewry and Yahweh will be fulfilled.

 

Judaism = Zionism = Holocaustism. Once we understand this, we can understand the fury of Jewry, the extreme anger of Jews, directed towards Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, and Robert Faurisson. These men were persecuted mercilessly because of religion: viewed from a higher plane, the struggle between the political minions of organised Jewry and the Revisionists reproduces a religious conflict; a secular Zionism does not exist.

 

But that struggle, a metaphysical one, takes place at a level far above that of the consciousness of the 'normie'; the 'normie' could not give a tinker's cuss about either Holocaust Revisionism or Holocaust Exterminationism. So far as the 2000s is concerned, I am more interested in the 'normie' consciousness than the Jewish: so, I ask the question, how did people live?

 

V.

 

This article, which features many photos, covers some of the deliberately awful fashion choices made by the characters in the quintessential nineties TV show Seinfeld (1989-1998). Deliberately vacuous, blithe, complacent, and postmodern, Seinfeld, which proudly billed itself as the 'Show about nothing', embodies the nineties spirit. The article highlights some of the more grotesque of the men's apparel of that period, and perhaps by emphasising the abnormal, it neglects the normal; that is, if we are to pay too much attention to some of the weird and attention-grabbing pieces of men's clothing, we will overlook the day-to-day outfits worn by Jerry, George, Kramer, Newman, and the other male characters. And these day-to-day outfits were representative of the time: I argue that Seinfeld is typical nineties fashion and nineties aesthetic. I also argue that, going by Seinfeld, nineties menswear - and nineties men's style in general - is to be summed up as: functional but ugly.

 

Something that stands out is the typical nineties men's shirt worn by Jerry Seinfeld; it is a billowing and flowing affair, the sleeves slowly inflating like hot-air balloons before terminating in tight cuffs. It resembles the classic pirate's shirt (worn by Prince and other eighties stars) but without the frills at the front, and it recalls the shirt worn by the men of the Californian hippie and counter-culture folk in the late sixties, e.g., the men of Californian bands such as the Mamas and Papas.

 

Seinfeld, a comedy, prefers light to neutral colours, but most TV shows and movies of the nineties were dramas and inclined to the gothic and the Romantic. As such, fashionable women used makeup that made their faces look pale. In the time of the nineties, the makers of film and TV dramas wanted the dark as much as possible, and they filmed in shadow, the result being that the dramas looked as though they had been filmed in a cave or gothic mansion. In accordance with the dark and dingy atmosphere, actresses often were clothed to look frumpy and dowdy.

 

Why did artists make these choices? If we are to take up the method of the economist or the sociologist, we can trace the gloom or the optimism of a certain epoch back to that epoch's degree of economic expansion or contraction. Art that uses bright colours and tones matches a period of growth; art that uses dark colours and tones matches a period of recession. In other words, economics determines art, culture, life. But that model, which is a simple and reductionist one, does not fit the nineties. To ascertain this, let us make use of one measure that I have touched upon in previous articles: the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) divided by the price of the gold. Without going into detail, the DJIA is the most important stock market index of the 20th century, and to determine the Dow’s worth at a single point of time, we should use gold, which is the only true measure of an object's worth. If we assess how much the DJIA was worth in terms of gold throughout nineties, we will discover the following. In January 1990, the DJIA was worth 6.31 ounces of gold; in December 1999, the DJIA was worth an astounding 40.62 ounces. Never had the DJIA attained such a height and never since.

 

Some observers contend that the nineties ended not in December 1999 but in September 2001, the month of the 9/11 attack, because often the spirit of a decade will carry over a few months or even a few years into a following decade. For example, the argument could be made that the fifties ended, and the sixties began, at one crossroads: the month of JFK’s assassination.  

 

So, if we are to identify the end point of the nineties as being September 2001, what was the DJIA's worth in gold in that month? The answer is: 31.22 ounces.  Compared to today's, the value of the Dow then is extraordinary. I leave it to the reader to look up today's gold Dow for himself.

 

We should note that these valuations of the DJIA being worth ten, twenty, thirty, or forty ounces of gold reflect an estimate by investors of the future worth of America's capital stock. In their assessments, the markets are always looking ahead; they are not interested in the past; they are not even interested in the present; they are discounting to the present, that is, calculating the future worth of an asset and comparing it to the present worth. Accordingly, to judge by the absurdly high valuations made in the nineties, the future looked bright indeed.

 

So why then was the popular culture of America, and the Western world, so gloomy, weird, and gothic? Hazarding a guess, I surmise that the cultural arbiters of the nineties were reacting to the norms of the eighties; if we are to look back to the eighties, we remember that its colours were bright and pastel and that its spirit was relentlessly, even maniacally, optimistic. If you want an example of the eighties Zeitgeist, listen to one-hit wonder John Parr's St Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion). But the producers of culture in the nineties decided that as great as the decade of the eighties was, it had to be rejected and cast out.

 

This is the only explanation I can offer for the dark turn that the culture took. I remember reading a nineties music magazine and coming across an interview with the Jewish rock band Kiss; the lead singer Gene Simmons complained that the grunge bands took a too gloomy view of life. He agreed that yes, a band's first album could be expected to reflect gloomy tendencies, but after a band had gotten that first album out of the way, if a band experienced success, it should drop the affectations of doom and gloom. Simmons said, 'I don't understand these grunge bands: the economy is doing great, and they have all the p*ssy they want, so what is there to complain about?'.

 

VI.

 

I am not deprecating the pop culture of the nineties, because for the most part it sought to entertain, and that is laudable. When I am looking on YouTube at some of the best TV shows and popular songs from the decade, I feel, as many others do, exaltation, the cultural productions of the decade at their finest stand for pleasure, beauty, and life. The entertainment industry felt obliged to deliver something that was gratifying and pleasing, but that contradicts the ethic of the present age. Today's artists want to deliver something that is politically edifying, and the politics are always of the Left. And even when they are not being political, they want to deliver something that is not attractive but repulsive. Perhaps today's entertainers are motivated by the same desire as the practitioners of the Expressionist school of art a hundred years ago: both groups want to smear the world, tarnish it, make it hideous, and sap the will to live.

 

Having said that, with the passage of time come different views. In the 2000s, I thought that the reality show Jackass (2000-2007) was the most degenerate show on television. The show chronicled mad and self-destructive 'stunts', and the worst of these, in my view, was a dive by one of the Jackass 'performers' into a pool of sewage. When watching that episode, I thought to myself that America had reached the same level of depravity as Germany in the Weimar age. Twenty years on, I no longer feel the same response. The makers of Jackass wanted to shock, but today I can think of something worse than puerile shock effects, and that is the production of a piece of entertainment - whether it be a TV drama, a movie, a popular song, or whatever - that leaves us feeling flat and dull, demoralised, depressed.

 

When we are weighing up Jackass and other cultural confections of the 2000s, we must acknowledge the truth that in every epoch are to be found aspects of the good and the bad. For white men, especially Europeans, the worst decade of the 20th century was undoubtedly the 1940s. And even Americans, the winners of the war, spent time in misery after the war was over. The post-war gloominess gave birth to the film noir genre of American movies, a genre became famous all around the world, and copied, and finally, parodied. Looking back on the 1940s, I can say that I am glad that I did not live in it, and many of my contemporaries would agree. But can something good be said for the 1940s, especially the 1940s of the film-noir period? Yes, and that is this: the men and women dressed extremely well. Even at their lowest ebb, whites retained a sense of style. In the Anglosphere at least, that perhaps would have compensated for the post-war unemployment, inflation, rationing (which in the UK lasted for years after the war), recession, and so forth.

 

In summing up a particular epoch, we must acknowledge complexities, and again, that entails the acknowledgement of the existence of both the good and the evil. For now, when it comes to the 2000s, let us focus on the good.

 

As a starting point, look at men's fashion. A brief survey of a TV series such as Seinfeld reveals that there are two basic male body types, both of which were dressed in clothes that were in keeping with the spirit of the age. The tall, skinny, gangly Jerry Seinfeld body type opted for billowing shirts, tight pants, and belts with a large buckle; this fashion, as noted before, resembled the fashion of the 1960s; Jerry Seinfeld, when wearing his typical garb, looks like one of the frontmen of the Mamas and Papas. As a sort of contrast to Jerry, we are presented with the short to medium height male who is often overweight and who has a pugnacious temperament; think of the actor who plays Seinfeld's father. The type prefers mock 1950s clothing of a sort that is usually best suited for warm weather (Seinfeld's father lives in Florida).

 

All that disappeared on the 1st of January 2000. As soon as the 1990s finished, the style changed, and it is remarkable how quickly, judging by the TV shows and commercials that were broadcast in January 2000, the change took place.

 

It was as though a new edict came down as if from high, and that was this: you must, whether you be male or female, look good. When watching my favourite 2000s American TV dramas during lockdown, I was struck by how almost everything on the screen was chosen for its pleasantness and aesthetic appeal; every piece of decor, every couch, lampshade, bedspread, cushion, pot plant, was used in the same way that an Impressionist painter used colours on a canvas. The artistic choices blended in a harmonious whole, and the whole was pretty. And speaking of tones, the foremost of these were gold, bronze, and copper. The skilful use of these produced a pleasing and soothing effect that was to cross over from TV and into real life. In the cafés and bars that I frequented, one would see stained wooden floorboards and wall panels, purple or red painted walls, dimmed lights, and framed posters that were copies of posters from the Europe - usually France - of the 1920s. All of it conveyed stylishness, good taste, and evoked a distant and fondly remembered past. The same aesthetic impressed itself upon the interiors of upper-class houses, apartments, cafés, restaurants, bars that we saw on American TV. The stylistic choices sent a message understood by all, even if only subconsciously, and the message was this: it is permissible to relax, to let go, to enjoy yourself in pleasant surroundings.

 

Wearing nice clothes formed part of the new sensibility. What is notable is that men's fashion came to the forefront; we can speak of a new awareness of the value of men’s dressing well. The man's vintage tee made a comeback; manufacturers in the 2000s produced t-shirts that were in their design inspired by the t-shirts of the 1970s; these were conscious recreations the t-shirts that would have been worn at a Rolling Stones concert in 1973. The designs were of a cut that emphasised the good side of the male physique and made the wearer seem slim and healthy. Generally, the designs were flattering and could even transform a man; a good outfit would make a fat man appear thin and an old man appear young. For the hundred years prior, men's clothes had been dour and restrained, and perhaps that came about because of American influence - American men's fashion was influenced by America's Puritan and Yankee heritage - but now the stringency and restraint of the past was dispensed with; now the bright colours and pleasing designs of men's shirts allowed a man to preen himself like a peacock.

 

The new sensibility could be detected in the popularity of the reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003-2007). The premise of the show was that five homosexual hairdressers, fashion experts, interior decorators, et al., would call upon an unwitting man of normal (that is heterosexual) proclivities; they would then rebuild his life from scratch; they would give him a makeover and the interiors of his house a makeover as well. Usually after the makeover, the man's marriage would improve, or if he was single, his romantic prospects would improve, and this was because – and so the argument went - the makeover had given the man a new lease on life. One could dismiss it all at as homosexual propaganda, and so it was, but the intentions were benign; the show's producer averred that the heterosexual man following the advice of the Queer Eye gang would make him so attractive to women that he would need to 'beat them off with a stick'.

 

The show's underlying message, one that was never openly expressed, was a racialist one. It was this: white man, enjoy yourself, enjoy your wealth, enjoy your life, make use of your white privilege. I would watch the show every week with my housemate, and both of us would be impressed by the transformation of the straight guy by the end of the episode; but my housemate reflected that the good life depicted in the show lay outside the bounds of possibility for the both of us; after all, the recipients of the Queer Eye makeovers were comparatively wealthy and established; they were, and I quote my housemate, 'cashed up 30 year olds'.

 

Nowadays we can laugh at the quaintness of it all. But at the time, I took Queer Eye seriously. It served as a wakeup call for me and hundreds of thousands of other male viewers. For years, I had neglected my diet, my clothes, my hair, my skin, my home. The last of these, when I compared it to the post-makeover homes in Queer Eye, was dirty, messy, and ugly. I had let it go in much the same way that I had let my hair, clothes, and every other element of my physical existence go. Acknowledging my shortcomings, I resolved henceforth to turn over a new leaf. My friends, who at the time seemed far more sophisticated than me, perceived my desire for self-improvement, and they gave me advice. They could not recommend good choices on interior decorating, but they could steer me on the way towards good choices in clothes and diet. In retrospect, I was retracing the path of the men of previous epochs – of men at the time of the Renaissance, for instance, or at the time of the Roman Empire - who had made the conscious decision to live life and live it well.

 

But if we want an example of that good living, we need not go back as far as the Renaissance. As we can see from one of the best TV shows of the 2000s, Mad Men (2007-2015), American males in the 1960s paid an extraordinary amount of attention to their appearance; they went to the barber, had pedicures, and wore suits and casual clothes that were elegant and slim fitting. It was not until the 1970s that men began dressing like bums; then they let standards slip, and chaos reigned.

 

Contrasting against one another in the photo below are two sets of protesters; one group is protesting the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, and the other is protesting the Israeli-Palestinian War of 2024. When you look closely, the men in the former group wear smart casual clothes, and the trousers, jeans, jackets, blazers, shirts, give evidence of good taste. Particularly striking is the fact that in this group men all chose good footwear. As for the fashion choices of the other group of protestors, the less said, the better.

 

As for women's fashion in the 2000s, there is not much to say. Women, unlike men, have always bestowed a high value upon looking good; they have always paid scrupulous attention to clothes, hair and skin care, and what other women are wearing. Having said that, an examination of the magazines, TV shows, movies, of the 2000s will reveal that women did seem a little more well turned out in the 2000s than in the 1990s, and for one women's casual wear had much improved. But one ubiquitous article of women's clothing elicits controversy, and that is the halter top, which was to the 2000s what the mini skirt was to the 1960s. I call the halter top the Lindsay Lohan maternity dress, for it does look like a sort of maternity dress and it should be associated with 2000s fashion icons such as Lohan. On a well-proportioned and healthy woman, the halter top looked good; on an obese woman, it looked bad. And another significant fashion challenge to woman was presented by the popularity of low rise jeans. A slender woman with wide hips and a flat stomach would look good in them, but the wearing of them took work, because staying slim in the 21st century took work. Fortunately for men, men's clothes had an almost magical slimming effect: a vintage tee and a pair of close-fitting bootcut jeans would make a man look as skinny as a member of Led Zeppelin.

 

As to what put an end to 2000s stylishness, the answer is obvious: the financial crisis of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama. Spengler writes that in the history of the Western or Faustian Culture, the transition from one epoch to another always takes place with great drama. The 21st century, so far, demonstrates this. The nineties came to an end on September 11, 2001; the 2000s came to an end with the financial meltdown of late 2008 and early 2009; the 2010s came to an end with the onset of the Covidian monstrosity in March 2020.

 

But let us dig deeper. It is true that fashions, tastes, appetites, ways of doing things, pass, and pass with the shifting sands of time. Who, after all, remembers the Emo subculture of the 2000s?

Emoism flourished for a time and then disappeared, going the way of disco in the 1970s. By the 2010s, Emoism was usurped by Hipsterism. History, Spengler writes, is irrational, and none of its shifts come about as a product of design: its mutations are as random as the bubbles that form and burst in boiling water. But I think that the ceasing of the 2000s-era style and beauty occurred because of a conscious decision - by women. Simply put, looking like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Avril Lavigne, and Jennifer Love Hewitt every single day was asking too much. Women in the 2010s found it far easier to take on a new persona: the frumpy, overweight, tattooed, blue haired Social Justice Warrior female with the horn-rimmed glasses. And men, too, in the new decade took the less demanding route, and ceased shaving and waxing themselves; following the way of the Hipster, which is the way of a quasi-Beatnik, they grew more hirsute. Statistics show that sales of men's razor blades plunged in the 2010s.

 

VII.

 

I wrote before that the economist or sociologist believes that economics determines art, culture, life. We live in a time that pays too much attention to the economic and the monetary, and it is natural when we look back at the 2000s and see how well people lived - or appeared to live - that we will assume that all these sleek, gleaming, happy people must have lived in a time of great prosperity; we surmise that the presence of money entails the good life, and that the absence of money entails the bad.

 

This hypothesis was disproved by the 2000s. In the first half of the decade, US markets did well, much better than they do today; but in the second half, which was Bush 45's second term, markets fell and fell hard. In February 2005, the month after Bush's second inauguration, the Gold DJIA stood at a respectable 25.43 ounces; but by February 2009, it had fallen to 7.42 ounces, and it had further to fall - by August 2011, it had fallen to 6.36 ounces. It goes without saying that all the other markets around the world, including the Australian, followed the same trajectory. Worldwide, the gains that had accumulated since 1990 had been wiped out in a replay of the crash of 1929 and the crash of 1973. What made the 2000s crash unique was that markets descended to the bottom slowly. If we are to trace the descent of the gold DJIA, we see that it moves like a tobogganist riding slowly and gently downhill. And so, at the time, one could ignore the weakening until it became impossible to ignore.

 

While the commodities, finance, and real estate sectors boomed - as these sectors often do in a time of inflation and depreciating currencies - none of the other sectors did; the expansion benefited the few, not the many. And yet, with only a small outlay, a woman could dress like Lindsay Lohan or Hilary Duff, mimic their hairstyles, use their brands of wax and moisturiser. Likewise, a male could buy a decent wardrobe quite easily, lose weight, use skin cream, get a decent haircut... Nothing prevented him from vacuuming his apartment and investing in new couch cushions, lampshades, and bedspreads. The good life, the easy life, was within reach. After all, did men in the 2000s experience the same penury and hardships, the same scrimping, saving, and rationing, as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers in the 1930s and 1940s? No, they did not. Materially, they lived in better circumstances, and potentially, they could afford to try different ways of living. A man makes choices every day when he decides to shave himself and shine his shoes, and in the 2000s, he could decide to put some grease in his hair and pull on a pair of Robert Plant jeans and don a smart blazer. He need not do these things, but in the 2000s, he operated under a set of rules, a paradigm, that in effect forced him to do these things. The same pattern compelled TV producers; if they were to set out to write and shoot a drama, they should do their utmost to make the clothes, actors, sets, look beautiful and not plain and ugly.

 

In contrast, today's media and entertainment fails to do its job, and it no longer makes a product that is aesthetically pleasing; that so much we have established. What is surprising and alarming is that the media and entertainment complex no longer wants to do its job. In the old days, people became involved in entertainment and the arts because they wanted to make a living doing something that they loved, and they wanted to become part of an artistic tradition that they honoured and revered. As a youth, I wanted to work in movies or theatre or literature or comic books, but I lacked the talent, opportunity, and drive, and now I thank my lucky stars that I did. What intelligent person would want to work in today's Hollywood? Imagine the self-loathing of the 'creatives' who are forced to labour on Disney's Star Wars.

 

The SJWs who have infiltrated the media and entertainment complex have been accused of hating whites, hating the Western Culture, and so forth. But not everyone who works in the field is a seasoned political activist who is striving to achieve 'representation' for 'LGBTQ+ folks' and 'People of Colour' (POC), although it may seem that way. I think apathy more than anything else explains Western Man's turn away from beauty and style. And in a way, this is more concerning; for feelings of numbness and indifference are worse than feelings of hatred and Nietzschean ressentiment.

 

VIII.

 

At the risk of stretching a metaphor, we can outline a difference between the worldviews, Weltanschauungen, that are inclined like capitalist economies to either expansion or contraction. We see the division when we look at the 2000s and the 2010s and how people deported themselves. It goes without saying that not every young woman in the 2000s dressed like Lindsay Lohan and not every young woman in the 2010s dressed like a pink-haired, overweight, bespectacled SJW; but as it was in the days of the Roman Empire at its height, what matters when gauging the style, mores, ethos of a period is the overall standard. And so, when looking at representative samples, we can say that the fashion and aesthetics of the 2010s mark a step down. When comparing the 2000s to the 2010s, we conclude that in the one decade morale expanded, in the other, it contracted; in one it grew, the in the other it declined. It is no coincidence that the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon appeared when it did; America gave birth to it at the time of the weak economic recovery in the Obama years; and because of their limited economic prospects and their myopic world view, young Americans felt an instant attraction towards it.

 

One irony presented by the young's newfound affiliation with the Left is that Americans were more better off in 2011 than they were in 1981; but perhaps this is not an irony when we consider that in the early 1980s, America was situated on the upward curve of the slope of economic expansion, and in the early 2010s, on the downward. But individual choice does matter, and economics is not everything. Western Man chose to ditch metrosexualism for hipsterism; he chose to grow a beard, wear rimmed glasses, don a flannel lumberjack shirt, and allow his belly to bloat - perhaps all that craft beer was to blame - and become hairy.

 

The political controversies of the 2010s are still with us, the main difference being that they have changed their aspect; we see different emphases and weightings. I do not want to discuss these here at length, because that would detract from my purpose, but suffice to say that the two most controversial ideologies, Zionism and Russkiye Mir, both of which turn up in our news feeds now more than ever, do fit into the expansion versus contraction model.

 

What is interesting is that American conservatives tout both ideologies every day, and that both these ideologies run counter to the natural American conservative tendency towards growth, expansion, enterprise, the spirit of can-do, the American Way. Americans on the Right like these things, which is why they like leaders such as Reagan and Trump, leaders who are indefatigable optimists. So, it is strange that, when considering the ultimately self-destructive tendencies of Russkiye Mir, conservatives regarded Speaker Johnson's forcing through of the passage of funding for the Ukrainian war effort as the ultimate betrayal; and that they took a dim view of further funding. A Breitbart headline reads: 'Show me the money!!! - Never enough $$$ for 4-eva war - Zelensky reveals US and Ukraine 'working' on scheme for 10 years of military aid'. Of course, Putin's efforts to keep Russia’s war going '4-eva' are never disparaged.

 

 

And then we come to dear little Israel. American conservatives treated the pro-Palestinian protestor encampments at American universities as a national emergency; the colleges must be cleansed of this 'anti-Semitic' vermin; Jewish students must feel safe; the Western Journal thunders, 'Let Jews Carry Guns'; to paraphrase Samuel Roth, 'Jews must live'.

 

We must ask, how do the ideologies of Zionism and Russkiye Mir advance and improve life? Russia reduces Ukrainian towns to rubble and makes the land as desolate as the plains of Mordor. Ukrainians are not elevated thereby. As for Israel and Zionism, Americans - especially American boomers - like to pat themselves on the back for being on the 'right side of history': the 'Nazis' were 'evil' for 'gassing the Jews', ergo, the Americans who fought against them were 'good'. But it is possible that the WWII Holocaust story is false, and in any case, it does not help; it does not, to borrow from the jargon of economists, add value.

 

The American boomer conservative Ward Clark writes that the pro-Palestinian demonstrators are 'useful idiots who are protesting in favor of violent, misogynistic, racist Bronze-Age barbarians'. I chortled when I read this, and I asked to myself if Mr Clark had ever read the Bible, which is full of 'violent, misogynistic, racist Bronze-Age barbarians', the problem for the likes of Mr Clark being that the 'barbarians' in question are Jewish. Animal sacrifices, burnt offerings, sacrifices of human beings to Yahweh - which is what the Holocaust story is all about - are barbaric and atavistic. A butcher's manual, the Book of Leviticus instructs, in scrupulous and exacting detail, how to kill, prepare, and burn animals for sacrifice to Yahweh. One must ask, how does obeisance to strange, backward, and dark rituals advance the welfare of the American people? In the Jewish tradition, sacrifices of animals - and children - are made in exchange for tangible benefits. Jewry won the State of Israel in 1948 in exchange for the sacrifice to Yahweh of the six million; and what did Americans get? Did the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 boost American economic growth, did it assure Americans a higher standard of living...

 

But if we speak too long about Jewry, Israel, and Zionism, we run the risk of digressing. To close our discussion of the topic, let us look at some of the books of the Prophets - Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hosea - and mull over the threats that they contain; Yahweh, speaking through his mouthpieces the prophets, promises violence, desolation, famine, despair to both the Jewish people who have betrayed him; he even threatens to rape the Jewish women. In the last of books of the Old Testament, Yahweh wills the destruction of the twin kingdoms of Judah and Israel because he wants to punish the Jewish people; and the last books chronicle only Jewish defeat and failure.

 

Inspecting the final book of the Old Testament, the Book of Malachi, Steve Wells records the final utterance by Yahweh: 'The Old Testament ends fittingly with these words: "Lest I come and smite the earth with a curse"'. One cannot say that Judaism is an ideology of expansion; rather, it is an ideology of contraction. And prolonged exposure to it lowers a man's vital energies; the man who takes it up is turning away from the Life Force.

 

IX.

 

Throughout I have been using the language of Nietzsche and Shaw. Nietzschean and Shavian rhetoric broods and mediates upon the themes of life denial and world rejection; but perhaps this mode of thinking, which was most famous over a hundred years ago, fails to match the ethos of the modern age. A postmodernist would ask, what is life, what is the world? Perhaps these do not exist; instead, we only have 'codes', 'signs'.

 

Postmodernism here counts because one of the foremost of the postmodernists, Baudrillard, writes on the same subjects that I am discussing: movies, advertising, fashion, beauty, clothes, diet, fitness. He accords the same importance to these as I do; and these, according to Baudrillard, in the modern age have taken on a religious dimension.

 

In the consumer package, there is one object finer, more precious and more dazzling than any other--and even more laden with connotations than the automobile, in spite of the fact that that encapsulates them all. That object is the BODY. Its `rediscovery', in a spirit of physical and sexual liberation, after a millennial age of puritanism; its omnipresence (specifically the omnipresence of the female body, a fact we shall have to try to explain) in advertising, fashion and mass culture; the hygienic, dietetic, therapeutic cult which surrounds it, the obsession with youth, elegance, virility/femininity, treatments and regimes, and the sacrificial practices attaching to it all bear witness to the fact that the body has today become an object of salvation. It has literally taken over that moral and ideological function from the soul.

 

Unremitting propaganda reminds us that, in the words of the old hymn, we have only one body and it has to be saved. [Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970]

 

The above was written over fifty years ago but could have been written today. Baudrillard made a reputation for himself as being one of the worldliest and up to date of the French thinkers; after all, he was the only one to admit to watching television. His contemporaries, men such as Foucault and Derrida, gave the appearance of wanting to shut television and cars, aspects of the modern world, out. Baudrillard does not celebrate the phenomena of the modern world, and as we can infer from the tone of the above passage, he takes a dim view of them. But that view is belied by the passivity and acceptance that we detect between the lines; and these traits of Baudrillard’s make themselves felt more and more in the books written after Consumer Society. And indeed, what the devil is wrong with beautiful models and fast cars? In 1970, and even more so in 2024, are these not 'Life', 'The World', and is it not the case that the turning against these is the turning against 'Life', 'The World'...

 

The phenomena considered by Baudrillard are still with us, and we can still squeeze some enjoyment out of them, and so on that point I disagree with the pessimistic, life-denying American conservatives and white nationalists. But to extract the maximum value out of the modern world and all its despairs and joys, we must increasingly look towards the past, even towards a past that is quite recent, e.g., the past of twenty years ago, the past of the 2000s. That past shows us the way towards the Good Life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Farewell to Normiedom? On the 1990s, the End of History, American White Nationalism and German Neo-Nazism

 I. 

Before Christmas, I commiserated with some of my friends in the movement and swapped stories about life under the lockdowns and mandates. I raised eyebrows when I declared that the past two years were perhaps the worst in Australian history. My argument was that one could point to, say, the Great Depression as being on the face of it a worse time, but even the Great Depression did not deprive one of freedom - the freedom to enjoy small pleasures and be a normal human being. Back then, if one could afford it, one could smoke and drink in a bar without a capacity limit, for instance - a bar in which one did not have to 'check in' with a QR code, present a 'digital passport' to the publican, or wear a surgical mask... When I put it this way, my friends agreed.

Given that we on the Far Right are living in a time of great crisis, we should be expected to scent an opportunity in it; surely we should be excited over our prospects? One cause for optimism is that many of those attending the Freedom marches are 'normies' who had been 'red-pilled' by recent events. But the evidence suggests to me that the answer to the above question is no: for at present the Far Right seems demoralised and despondent. 

And as to why, I think the answer lies in the fact that politics often disappoints - Far Right politics especially - but up until now the Far Right activist could always escape any discouragement and disappointment and seek passage from the 'red-pilled' world to the 'blue-pilled', from the world of radical Right politics to the world of 'normiedom'. But after 2020 that avenue has been closed off; the gateway to 'normiedom' has been shut, perhaps permanently. And perhaps, once the Covidians are through with them, the 'normies' will have been done way with altogether. 

II.

Usually around this time of year, I re-read Yockey's Imperium (1948), and I re-read this work, a profoundly spiritual one, so as to renew my faith. But this year I feel a reluctance to read it: I feel that it belongs to a past age - the age of dramatic politics - and that the difference between the past age and the present has become too large to ignore.

Imperium was written in 1947, and the 1940s, perhaps Europe's most tragic decade in a millenia, saw a great deal of drama. Some politicians (such as Stalin) seem to thrive in such a dramatic environment: they have an endless appetite for crises, confrontations, wars; for their politics is the politics of what Carl Schmitt calls the exception. 

After Stalin's death, the leadership of the Soviet Union and the communist world was handed to Khrushchev, a much duller man than Stalin - certainly a less confrontational one - and by the middle of the 1950s the countries of the Eastern and Western bloc had settled down to the task of peaceful economic development. They sought to rebuild their countries, many of which had been laid waste to by deprivation and war. But Mao rejected any politics of compromise and conciliation and he stood as an odd man out: privately the other communist heads of state were appalled by his extremism and immoderation. For in that period, non-dramatic politics held sway and Western leaders followed the same path as Khrushchev. The result of it was that, when one looks back on history the East and West in the 1950s, one spies at once on its surface a patina of dullness - even if one takes all the Cold War hysteria, nuclear-saber rattling, wars in the former Western colonies, etc., into account. Daniel Bell drew a similar conclusion in his The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960): the sharp opposition between Left and Right had been muted; the politics of confrontation had been replaced by the politics of technocracy. 

It took time, but even Yockey came to acknowledge the truth of Bell's thesis. He had spent most of the decade building a post-war fascist international with links to the non-aligned regimes of the Third World - an international like that depicted in Frederick Forsyth's  far-fetched novel The Odessa File (1972). WWII veterans filled the ranks of these European organisations which perhaps in truth were nothing more than old soldiers' clubs. The members belonged to another time and one can intuit a recognition of this fact - at least at the subconscious level - in Yockey's writings as the decade drew to a close. His last essay, 'The World in Flames: An Estimate of the World Situation' (1960), does not exhibit as nearly as much a sense of self-assurance and grandeur as Imperium; Yockey here hovers at the edge of great world events; he is an onlooker, not a participant. In its undertone of ironic detachment I find an anticipation of postmodernism. And indeed, a connection exists between the sleepy 1950s and the postmodern 1990s - both of them decidedly dull decades from a political standpoint - and this explains in part why it was that the postmodernists alternatively paid homage and made fun of the 1950s.  

Yockey felt out of place in the 1950s and hated it. Nowadays we in the movement view the 1950s in a different light. Many white nationalists, race realists, immigration skeptics, et al., do not understand Yockey's objection to the America of the 1950s, for example: they see the America of that time as a white man's paradise and that decade as a golden age. To the white nationalist, statistics bear both these contentions out. William Pierce often remarked in his radio talks that America in 1950 was 90% white - something to be proud of. The Americans in this time kept both immigrants and negroes under wraps, and while it is true that desegregation began in earnest in the 1950s, many of the great cities in the north of America were majority white and remained so for the next two decades. 

Another reason for the divergence between the views of Yockey and the white nationalists is that the white nationalists show a pronounced tendency to laud the past at the expense of the present. In a review of the film House of Gucci (2021), Trevor Lynch writes that the film is a 'Meticulous, nostalgia-infused reconstruction of another era, this time the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, a time that seems impossibly glamorous, wholesome, and white compared with the present'. It is at this point that Pierce would take exception to Lynch; Pierce depicts America in the era of the 'Late 1970s to the mid-1990s' as a dystopian hellscape (he published the Turner Diaries, the ultimate dystopian novel, in 1978) but was forever waxing lyrical over the greatness and whiteness of America in the 1950s: a decade can be one white nationalist's hell and another's heaven. 

I agree with Lynch and disagree with Pierce. In part, this is because at the time of writing I would prefer to live in any decade except for the 2020s - I would even be prepared to travel back in time and live in the 1940s: one, I imagine, could live a good life then, provided one was able to dodge all the bombs and bullets. But the main source of my disagreement with Pierce is because I have for the past few months been watching episodes of a famous American daytime TV soap from the time of the late 1990s, and this delving into the recent past - even if it is a mythical and fantastical past - has prompted me to ask myself what possibly could have been wrong with the 1990s. An objective view of the decade would reveal in that decade we had it all. 

III. 

Unlike the 2020s, the 1990s were characterised by an absence of politics. Electoral politics was relegated to the background: the three presidential elections in that time (1993, 1996, 2000 (the 1990s as a decade came to an end, in my judgment, on September 11, 2001)) were dull affairs, and more or less, you could take or leave mainstream politics - it did not interfere with your life in any appreciable manner. 

This state of affairs came about because of the collapse of the Left in the years 1989 to 1991. For hundreds of years, the Right had functioned as a response, a reaction, to the Left; but with the disappearance of the Left came the disappearance of the Right. And that in turn led to the cessation of the political. 

After the end of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, the Left was decimated. The old school communist parties (including the Australian) were wound up for the most part. As for the other sectors of the Left - the anarchists and antifa - they lived at the fringes of society: there was no mainstream acceptance or even awareness of them. And as for Black Lives Matter, social justice warriors (SJWs), 'woke' capital - they did not exist. So: thirty years ago we lived in a world which was blessedly free (mostly) of leftism. 

But a serpent did dwell in this garden of Eden: academic neo-Marxism (known by many as 'cultural Marxism'). Critical Race Theory (CRT), Postcolonial Theory, Black Studies, Queer Studies, Gender Studies began to rear their  heads. Generally, though, this new tendency - labeled 'political correctness' by hostile conservative commentators - was confined to academia. And on occasion it was mocked and not feted (as it is now) by the media. 

By and large, the Left had been forgotten and what really stung the Left was the speed with which it had been forgotten. Only a few months after the dissolution of the USSR, race war was to take precedence over class war.  Ethnic wars broke out in the former Soviet republics and Yugoslavia - wars which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives - and intellectuals such as Bell pronounced these to be portents of the wars to come: wars henceforth were to be motivated not by ideology but ethnicity. This seemed to be an accurate assessment given that the move away from Marxism was permanent and irrevocable. Botched privatisations, IMF 'shock treatment', etc., may have plunged the economies of Eastern Europe and the former USSR into chaos, but there was never any question of a return to communism. 

It is this rather peculiar set of circumstances which explains much of the apoliticism of the period. On a personal note, at the time I took politics - mainstream politics - seriously. I read a number of books written by authors of the mainstream Left and Right (so as to be 'even-handed' and 'objective') and following the lead of my baby boomer parents, I read the newspapers, listened to the radio news and watched the TV news every day so as to keep up with current events. But at the same time, I had no fixed political convictions. I clung to a rather confused and incoherent collection of Left and Right ideas. Had I been pressed, I would have admitted that I was more interested in hobbies and popular culture than politics. In this, I was a typical 'normie'. I have since discovered how typical I was from reading Carl Boggs' classic work The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (2000): 

Why do so many Americans feel that politics has become irrelevant to their daily lives? Why is there so little public discussion of important social issues, despite unprecedented access to mass media and new communication technologies? This book delves beneath the sound bites and news headlines to explore the ongoing process of depoliticization in the United States. Attuned to the many contemporary trends eroding the public sphere, Carl Boggs illuminates the American retreat to an eerily privatized landscape of shopping malls, gated communities, new-age fads, rural militias, isolated computer terminals, and postmodern intellectual discourse. Yet Boggs maintains hope that current trends can be reversed, issuing an eloquent call for revitalizing politics, culture, and civic society. The paperback concludes with a new postscript on the movement against corporate globalization and the tumultuous presidential election of 2000.

IV.

In the nineties, the Far Right prospered and the Far Left did not, and in response to the burgeoning popularity of the Far Right, Boggs wrote a chapter on the proliferating Far Right movements of the decade. He regarded these as 'apolitical' - apolitical in the sense of being detached from civic society (and by that definition he was correct). 

What was my view of these 'apolitical' Far Right movements? For most of the nineties I was blissfully unaware of William Pierce's National Alliance, Richard Butler's Aryan Nations, Jared Taylor's American Renaissance, Tom Metzger's WAR. I was not exposed to their ideas; I was perfectly 'blue-pilled'. Perhaps for that reason I could enjoy with a clean conscience American TV shows such as Seinfeld, The X-Files, The Simpsons, Melrose Place (and lesser-known action TV shows such as Renegade, Pointman, M.A.N.T.I.S. and Fortune Hunter) like the rest of the sheep. 

I can imagine a white nationalist objecting to my consumption of this fare. The white nationalists would ask me in an accusatory tone: was I not aware that these TV shows were decadent garbage - and Jewish? Did I not know that David Duchovny, the star of the X-Files, was a Jew, that Mark Frankel, the star of Fortune Hunter, was a Jew? That the cast of Seinfeld were all Jews? (This is the standard white nationalist debating tactic; to pronounce something to be Jewish is to refute it, whether it is Jewish or no). 

Had I encountered these scolding white nationalists in the time of my innocence, I would have recognised them at once for what they were: killjoys. Pierce made America in the 1990s out to be unlivable when it was not. Pierce could always be counted on to bring the dark side of American life to your attention; he would always be regaling you with gruesome accounts of black on white atrocities such as the Wichita Massacre and the Knoxville Horror. But no rational American could be expected to live their lives in constant fear of being robbed, raped or murdered. But that was the outcome that Pierce and Taylor (author of The Color of Crime (1999)) apparently wanted. 

This is not to say that Pierce and Taylor did not provide value: of course they did. The question concerns what economists call opportunity costs: what would have benefited the average 'normie' c. 1995 - 'blue-pilling' or 'red-pilling'? The benefit of one cancels out of the other: this is the opportunity cost. 

The price paid for 'red-pilling' is that the 1990s-era state of mind - which was one of contentment and complacency - would have been spoiled for good. Pierce, a proponent of dramatic politics to be sure, opposed this 1990s mood, and surprisingly enough, he would have half-agreed with Fukuyama, who argued in an essay (and then a book) that while it is true that the the summit of human achievement had been reached by the 1990s, the peak had been attained only at the expense of foregoing of all heroism, risk and adventure. 'The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands'. [Francis Fukuyama, 'The End of History?', The National Interest, Summer 1989]. To this, Fukuyama expressed reservations and Pierce, full-blown opposition. For what mattered to Pierce more than anything else was the 'Fame of a dead man's deeds' - the remembrance through the ages of a life heroically lived. 

V.

Fukuyama built his argument on Hegel - and Marx, a fact which outraged the Left. History, Fukuyama says, results from Man's 'thinking things through': Man only explores the full implications of an idea - such as Bolshevism - by living through an idea. After 75 years of living the Bolshevist idea, Man had come to the conclusion that the idea did not work: hence the end of socialism in Eastern Europe, China and the Soviet Union. In this Hegelian discourse, the operative word is 'end': Fukuyama takes up the Hegelian thesis that history is a story with a beginning, middle and end, and as such it cannot be properly understood until the end is reached. Hegel writes, 'The owl of Minerva [the goddess of wisdom] spreads its wings only with the coming of dusk'. 

One should not overestimate the influence of intellectuals: they do not determine all that goes on in the culture of a particular period of time (e.g., the 1990s). All the same, credit must go to where credit is due to Fukuyama and the French postmodernist thinkers. In the decade of the 1990s they alone succeeded in capturing the essence of the age. It should be not forgotten that thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard - all outcasts from the French Left - opposed Marxism for most of their careers and so naturally enough their ideas suited the post-Marxist era. 

Thirty years later, one intriguing possibility is that the ideas of Hegel and Fukuyama could serve as a means of illuminating one way out of our predicament. Covidianism has been forced upon humanity, much like Bolshevism, and is the product of a plan years in the making, much like Bolshevism; so Covidianism could be overturned, once Man has 'thought it through', that is, lived through the implications right to the end, much like Bolshevism. 

VI. 

The coming year will see a battle - perhaps the final battle - between what I call Covidian Man and what Fukuyama calls (after Nietzsche) the Last Man. I believe that the Last Man would win any such battle as he is in accord with nature whereas Covidian Man is not - Covidian Man is decidedly unnatural. 

Like any Far Right political activist, I have often come to lose my patience with the Last Man, the 'normie': his slothfulness and contentedness at times have made me despair of him so much so that I at have often considered dropping out of politics altogether. In one such dark period I was rescued from the slough of despond by re-reading Spengler and Yockey. I came to the realisation that the 'normie' had existed in every Culture prior to the Western. The 'normie' was with us in the days of ancient Babylon, Egypt, China, India; he is with us today; and he will be with us in the future. After our Western Culture perishes - like all the Cultures that preceded it - he will preponderate. The ruin of Western Culture will be inhabited by Nietzsche's Last Man, Spengler's Fellahin.

(It is this prediction of Spengler's that warranted, in the eyes of many, charges of pessimism). 

At the beginning of this essay, I intimated that that the Far Right activist occupies two worlds - the world of the 'red-pilled' and the world of the 'normie'. The cause of the activist's recent despondency is that our activist much likes the world of the 'normie' and he is sorry to see it go - he mourns its demise at the hands of Covidianism. On a personal note, my friends and I have many fond recollections of many happy hours spent in the bars and restaurants in the bohemian and 'normie' quarter of the city I live in; we spent those hours discussing politics and ideas while enjoying food and wine in a carefree and convivial atmosphere - like normal humans. All of these pleasures have been taken away by the Covidians. Are they gone for good? The Covidians say yes. According to them, the masks, hand dispensers, capacity limits, digital passports, QR codes, social distancing, working remotely, coerced injections, contact tracing, nasal swab tests, lockdowns, prison camps, etc., will stay in place forever and ever; certainly we cannot foresee any abeyance in the new year. No wonder then that so many in the movement have been driven to despair; the ground - the 'normie' ground - has disappeared beneath us. 

VII.

Something that is missing from today which was present yesterday is trust - trust in politicians, journalists, health officials, intellectuals, our peer group in other words. Only a few years ago we believed that the globalist elites - the Davos men - did not want to kill us or make us sick; we believed there was a lack of animus on their part towards us or at the least a lack of interest; and we believed that they were content to leave us alone. 

That trust can only exist if you believe that the universe is benevolent and means well by you. We find that optimism in evidence in many of the movies representative of the 1990s - one in particular being the  negro comedy Friday (1995). The movie is set in the suburb of South Central Los Angeles, but surprisingly enough, the suburb is not portrayed as a hellhole rife with gang shootings, etc.: the producers originally wanted a violent film but were persuaded by one of the stars, Ice Cube, to downplay any violence - a violent (and exciting) film, Ice Cube argued, would not have been true to life. In the completed movie, South Central LA comes across as a sunny, prosperous, happy place,and perhaps a little dull - certainly a place in which the Last Man lives. 

Spengler writes of the Cosmopolis - the World City - the city which appears with the onset of the old age of a Culture and which devours and incorporates all the suburbs, towns and countryside around it, making it all urban. The World City spawns copies of itself everywhere. This is why the suburb of South Central LA - in the 1990s, at least - resembles the outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne; and in much the same way, the fictional Mid-Western town portrayed in the daytime TV soap I mentioned earlier resembles any town in rural and regional Australia. The World City is omnipresent. 

One can criticise the Cosmopolis for its ubiquity, its homogeneity and its universality, but one must concede that in it, one could lead a life of freedom, one could enjoy the fruits of a consumer society and one could enjoy these - following the collapse of Marxism - without guilt. How life has changed today! By 2022, the World City had been turned into a giant prison. 

Perhaps - and this is a pessimistic line of thought - the free life of the World City contained the seeds of its own destruction. The cults and secret societies run by egalitarians, republicans, technocrats, intellectuals, free-thinkers, et al., only appear towards the end of a Culture's life and not its beginning. Furthermore, they only appear in the cities. Perhaps, then, it is the World City which bears the burden of guilt for giving us Klaus Schwab, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, George Soros... 

VIII.

Even so, who is it that shoulders the ultimate responsibility for the granting of the Schwabs and Faucis power - absolute power - over us? The answer is the 'normie'. 

Covidianism has met with a great deal of resistance - it has not had things all its own way - and a common theme in the polemics against it is the stupidity of the sheep who allowed, step to step, the Covidians to take over their lives. All activists against Covidianism have run up against the obstacles of 'normie' stupidity, gullibility and the rest; the 'normie' seems impervious to facts. When the 'normie' is told that the mask he wears everywhere looks stupid, and worse, is useless in protecting him against Covid, he shrugs - all that matters is that his peer group endorses it and makes it compulsory; likewise, when he is presented with proof that the injections will kill or incapacitate a fifth or third or half of their recipients, this means nothing to him, he will not be deterred at all from lining up for his seventh or eighth booster shot. But of course he will be the first to complain that he was not sufficiently warned should it finally be acknowledged, by the political and health establishments, that the injections are almost guaranteed to cause a compromised immune system, strokes, heart attacks and even death. 

In short, his conditioning has proven to be extremely strong and effective. Supposing that the Covidians were overthrown tomorrow, at least 50% of the population would continue to wear their masks. This really should not surprise us, seeing that that the former members of a cult have a difficult time shrugging off the cult's beliefs and practices. Exiting a cult physically is one thing, exiting it mentally is another; the latter can take years. 

The above does seem to go against my earlier contention that the 'normie', seeing that Covidianism is unnatural and destructive, rise up against it. But the contradiction can be resolved if we accept that yes, the 'normie' will revolt, but only after a period of time. And how long would that period be? It took Eastern and Central Europe forty years to do away with communism (another unnatural doctrine); earlier revolts, such as those in Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, were brutally crushed. But we should not speculate: we can scarcely tell if the anti-Covidian revolution will take four years or forty.  

Two lessons emerge from the two revolts in Hungary in the last century, that is, the revolt of 1956 and the revolt of 1989. The first lesson is that the Left does not change; the second lesson, that the Right does. As an example of the former, consider the fact that the revolts against communism in 1956 and Covidianism in 2021 were regarded by the Left to be at both times the work of a neofascist conspiracy. This shows that the Left has hardly changed its tune in the past 65 years. In contrast, the Right has changed its tune. A prime example is Viktor Orbán: this is a man who in his youth fought for freedom as an anti-communist activist; this a man who became one of the heroes of the 1989 revolution; but this is also a man who has now joined the ranks of the Covidians; this is a man who no longer fights against totalitarianism but throws in his lot with it. The Orban case shows that Covidianism corrupts and corrupts absolutely. One could hypothesise that other anti-communists activists from the eighties, activists who at the time were the darlings of the conservative Right, men such as Václav Havel and Lech Walesa - would have been corrupted by Covidianism as well. 

In his anti-communist days, Orban would have believed, along with Fukuyama and Fukuyama's mentor Kojève, in Hegel's 'cunning of reason'. This is the idea that Man possesses enough logical capability to arrive at the correct conclusion after 'thinking things through'. Following Hegel, anti-communist liberals such as Orbán and Havel in the 1980s took an optimistic view of human nature: they believed that Man was smart enough to see through Marxism and so would be smart enough to reject it. 

But to paraphrase Keynes, in the long run we are all dead, and the Covidians could, up until the time that they meet the same fate as the Eastern European communists in 1989, cause tremendous damage - and they have done so already. 

Besides which, some of us in the movement do not believe in the 'cunning of reason'. The dark thought has crossed our minds that perhaps the 'normie' cannot be relied upon to make decisions in his own best interest. As proof, we only need look at the history of the past two years. 

IX.

I have written here on the travails of the Far Left in the 1990s, and now I will touch upon those of the Far Right. 

Ironically, by the 1990s, German nationalism had become a victim of its own success. As a thought experiment, let us suppose that we were to take an old-school German National Socialist - one who had lived through the war - from 1955 and transport him in time to 1995. We would see at once that the man was an anachronism; the events of 1989 to 1991 had put him out of business. Deeply disturbed, he would be asking himself a number of discomforting questions. With the reunification of Germany and the destruction of communism, what use was there for National Socialism? Why should he continue to be a National Socialist? Why would his fellow Germans want to become National Socialist again? 

Perhaps our time-traveller would knuckle under and resign himself to life as a German 'normie'. He would learn to amuse himself by watching American trash television, dancing at the Berlin Love Parade and shopping at the Bonn malls. The last activity should occupy an important place in his new political world-view, for in Fukuyama's interpretation of Hegel's concept of freedom, freedom means freedom to shop. Acceding to this thesis, in the months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the communist government of East Germany relented: it allowed Berliners from the Eastern half of the city to cross into the Western in order to shop. 

Our hypothetical National Socialist would, under the compulsion of events, be forced to navigate his way back to 'normiedom'. But I can imagine that many of the old fascists of his generation, men who knew and respected Hitler and lived through National Socialism - men such as Otto Remer, Otto Skorzeny, Léon Degrelle, Hans-Ulrich Rudel - would have objected. I would have found it interesting to debate post-communist politics with these men while they were in full possession of their faculties. To that end, a time machine would be necessary to pluck them out of the past and from a past in which they were young and vigorous - and hungry for political power.  

Debate matters here. In this modern age, we no longer believe in the divine right of kings and we expect politicians - even the most firmly entrenched ones - to argue the case for their legitimacy. Why should such and such a politician rule over us? The politician has to give reasons why and he must win over any sceptics and doubters. Even a politician who seizes through power through force of arms must devote  an inordinate amount of time and energy to persuasion and speech-making. See Castro, for instance, who like every successful communist revolutionary, won power not through the ballot box but a successful military campaign. Castro, a former lawyer, had to argue his case in the court of public opinion constantly. All politicians labour under similar constraints, even Neo-Nazi ones. So if we were to transport into the early nineties the young and vigorous Otto Remer of the early fifties, what arguments would he make for his being elected to office? Why should Germans vote for his Socialist Reich Party? My guess is that Remer's arguments would have fallen short; the sudden and abrupt changes in Germany and Eastern Europe would have revealed him to be a relic. 

This touches upon the question of the relation of the 'new' National Socialism to the 'old'. In a conversation fifteen years ago with a German nationalist who had met Remer, I argued that Remer's positions in the 1950s represented a departure from 'classic' National Socialism.  My friend dismissed the notion and referred to Remer condescendingly as an 'Old Nazi', and reflecting later and looking at photos of Socialist Reich Party rallies (which looked a lot like 'old' Nazi rallies) I came to the conclusion that my friend was right. 

Up to the 1970s, the German nationalist movement was filled with old Nazis who had new obsessions; these were Holocaust and WWII Revisionism. It is a knowledge and agreement with these that constitutes 'red-pilling': unless one is accordance with Remer's views on these, one is not 'red-pilled'. 

The great obstacle that the German nationalist - and we in the movement outside Germany - encounters when attempting to 'red-pill' the 'normie' is not hostility but indifference. He is not interested in the correct view of WWII or the Holocaust because he feels - rightly or wrongly - that the events of eighty years ago do not affect his life. And that is especially true today after two years of lockdowns. Why should he want to know the truth about the Holocaust when he has been unable to get a haircut for three months? 

The 'normie' often cannot see the wood for the trees. We can set ourselves the task of educating him, and in this educating him on the connections between the Covidians of today and the Masons of old; but it is more important that we exploit the openings that the Covidians have given us. They have made a rift in the social, economic and political structure. 

Like a good many observers, I find the behaviour of the globalist elites perplexing. Up until 2020, everything was going their way - the Great Replacement was proceeding along nicely, for example - and whatever they did met with the assent of the population. But in 2020, they undertook two actions that would endanger their position. The first of these was the ouster of an American president in a left-wing coup, the first in America's history; the second, the imposition of Covidianism across the entire world. In both instances, the elites broke with normality - and perhaps with the 'normie' as well. To judge by their actions of the last two years, it is as if the globalist elites, the neo-Masons, et al., have a political death wish: they want the 'normie' to turn against them - and terminate them with extreme prejudice. To that end they are doing everything possible... 

In 1969, Lord Russell of Liverpool published Return of the Swastika? The Rising Threat of Resurgent Nazism in Germany; Russell was one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes 'trials', and twenty five years after the war, he finds that the Germans are not behaving to his satisfaction. Russell is filled with suspicion and rage; he excoriates the Germans - for their obduracy and also for their attitudes. He does not give one inch on the Holocaust story (and why should he, given the instrumental role he played in building it) and he rakes the Germans over the coals. What is interesting here is that both Russell and Covidians perceive their enemies in exactly the same way, their rhetoric takes the same tone. Reading Russell, we half-expect him to denounce the Germans for fomenting (to use a favourite pejorative term of the globalists) 'conspiracy theories'. In the parlance of 4Chan, too large a sector of the German population was 'based' and 'red-pilled' - that, in Russell's eyes, was their crime. 

The war crimes 'trials', the Morgenthau Plan, etc., and even Russell's propaganda were inflicted upon the Germans with the intention of continuing the war after the war. We in 2022 are approaching a state of war; abiding by Carl Schmitt's Friend / Enemy distinction, the globalists now see a large sector of the population as the Enemy. If Remer or any of the other 'old Nazis' were to return to the present, they would see that as a positive development; at last their Enemy has given them something to work with.