Reports of the grave escalation of violence in Kiev’s iconic Independence Square, the Maidan, have contained references to “hard-line” and “neo-nazi” nationalists manning the barricades against assault by the riot police, and acting as the military wing of the protest.  These guys are operating under an umbrella group named Pravy Sektor (Right Sector).  Nationalists in the West have become accustomed to viewing Putin’s Russia both as a bulwark against the expansionism of the European Union and a proponent of traditional Russian values against the bromides of Western liberty and decadence.  But Ukraine has its folk memories of the decades of Soviet rule ... of the Holodomir ... of the young men conscripted into the Red Army to be cannon fodder for the Wehrmacht ... of the arrests and deportations and disappearances into the gulag system ... of Chernobyl.  The nationalist movement wants neither a Ukrainian future in the arms of Russia nor the European Union, and it is supplying men to fight for that right now in the Maidan at the cost of their liberty and, for some, their lives.

In no particular order here are a few passages from press articles that have appeared over the last few weeks about these “hard-liners” and “neo-nazis”.  Their thinking seems clear and their instincts pretty good to me.

From The Guardian:

Pravy Sektor, a murky grouping of nationalist and far-right groups, has said it is co-ordinating the violence, and the coalition represents very different ideals from the initial protest goal of closer links with the European Union.

Andriy Tarasenko, one of Pravy Sektor’s co-ordinators, agreed to meet the Guardian in a cafe in central Kiev. Wearing a rollneck jumper and with a quiet voice, he seemed a far cry from the warriors on the street, but his message was clear.

“For us, Europe is not an issue, in fact joining with Europe would be the death of Ukraine. Europe means the death of the nation state and the death of Christianity. We want a Ukraine for Ukrainians, run by Ukrainians, and not serving the interests of others.”

Tarasenko said the goal of the group was a “national revolution” that would result in a “national democracy” with none of the trappings of the “totalitarian liberalism” that the EU represents for him.

...  it is clear that the popularity of Pravy Sektor is growing and that many of those lobbing molotov cocktails and preparing for all-out battle are influenced by their ideas.

Tarasenko said it was hard to say how many active members of Pravy Sektor there were, but noted that its page on the social network Vkontakte had more than 50,000 members. On the barricades, “hundreds are quickly turning into thousands”, he claimed.

... Pravy Sektor says that if Yanukovych does not resign, he should be forced out.

“We would give him and his family 24 hours to leave the country, or there would be a revolutionary tribunal,” said Tarasenko. Asked what he thought the most likely medium-term outcome of the clashes would be, he said: “Prolonged guerrilla warfare.”

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by Neil Vodavzny

New technologies will spawn new jobs in new industries that will be far more rewarding than those they displace

… says Gerald Warner (prev), and the question is what does he know, what secrets is he privy to? The answer is he’s saying what his ideology is telling him, namely that through investment in technique human life is made cosier. Thus does social capitalism trample everything underfoot in its pursuit of comfort. Unfortunately, the natural order is not built on comfort but on antagonism – predator-prey relationships, harvests, seasons. This is the world of action.

It’s worth pursuing this dichotomy. In comments to the recent piece on the new hostility evident in the Daily Telegraph editorial line, DanielS asks where are the true Right? (when you need them). Civilized living indeed is cosy, no more so than at royal courts. Prince Charles sometimes gets criticism for his eco-centric values for speaking from a life of privilege.  In that link to the Telegraph, they have in ‘parenthesis’ that William and Harry had returned from a wild boar hunt in Spain, implying some degree of contradiction.

Why? Because it’s not a comfortable or cosy thing to hunt down wild beasts (not quite Atten-bore). Prince Philip in a recent interview with Fiona Bruce, when asked why he was a conservationist but not a Green, referred to “fluffy bunny huggers”. He was clearly thinking game-keepers and grouse-shoots on Scottish heather. King Juan Carlos is in perpetual sin-mode for his hunting safaris – how sickening to slaughter such proud beasts (not the royals, the buffalo etc), que no?

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by Neil Vodavzny

We are told by no less an authority than Jeremy Warner, the Telegraph’s business editor, that:

New technologies will spawn new jobs in new industries that will be far more rewarding than those they displace

They’ve been telling us that since the Luddites were displaced from their spinning-jennies. By relating this mantra to the Mad Max franchise – and specifically Beyond Thunderdome (1985) – I will endeavour to show that the machine-age generates conspiracies by virtue of the fact that it displaces peoples into a no-man’s land. The habit of the mind is to plant seeds of doubt to occupy the negative space.

This has already partially been approached in “Mythical Action” (and sequels). That is to say, myths are predicated on action which is antagonistic, involving predator-prey relationships, harvests, seasons. A world without action (in that sense) has no myths and therefore in the mythical sense doesn’t exist.

However, myths belong in a fantasy-world, which is why I’ve argued that superheroes are more real than reality in that sense. They have the moral authority notoriously absent in conflicts of unfathomable motivations where the action we see are not morally comprehensible in the sense of good versus evil, fidel versus infidel. A lot of this is down to social capitalist ideology crawling like an omnivorous slug round the planet, leaving a trail of destruction wherever it roams. Meaning, the global money-machine that tramples traditions, and I suppose doesn’t generally benefit living systems, as opposed to monetary systems. How can the moneys invested in such a desolate cause be put to any moral use?

This paradox is indirectly the subject of the third instalment of Mad Max – second only to Planet of the Apes (1968) in the sci-fi allegory stakes - set in a de-fosilised steam-punk dystopia where machines have run silent since the last saurian carbon-reserve was consumed. Exactly what powers the renegades’ gambling-den of Barter-Town is succinctly put by Tina Turner’s Auntie Entity:
“You know how to shovel pigshit, don’t you?”

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There is a common perception among participants in the thread wars at the Daily Telegraph that an era of some fairly rich pickings is at an end.  The editorial line is moving inexorably leftward.  The moderation is becoming obsessive and has nothing whatsoever to do with house rules any more.  Genuinely right of centre bloggers are leaving.  Absurdly leftist academics and outright anti-racists are being provided with platforms.

To add insult to injury, the blogs editor himself has vented his scorn at his own readers not once, but twice in the space of 24 hours.

A number of things could be going on.  For one, there is a new American boss who is expected to deliver some exciting and hitherto undreamt of digital future to the Telegraph Media Group.  And that is notwithstanding the fact that the Telegraph, probably alone among nationals in Britain, delivers a healthy £60 million profit, mainly from its print titles.  Apparently, Jason Seiken is very keen on bottom-up revolutions – meaning it’s the troops who have to come up with creative suggestions for their own areas of activity.  Whether the collective stampede to the left is a nervy reaction to that one cannot say.  I guess it is more likely than a top-down directive to take the paper to the left, given Seiken’s dislike for that kind of management.

On that basis, Damian Thompson’s truly pathetic mimicry of the lower end of UKIPer commentary does not bode well for his understanding of what the word “creative” might mean.  It was Thompson who invited the Hope Not Hate sympathiser Matthew Goodwin and his pal from Manchester, Robert Ford, to begin a blog titled UkipWatch.  Two more petty academics have now joined Ford in a polling blog, evidently for the run-in to the May elections.

These creatures aside, the rest of the writing slate is looking markedly unTelegraph-like.  Liberal leftists and outright socialists now jostle with goody two-shoes Tory boys.  Readers are expected to regard Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan as anti-Establishment figures.  It’s all a long way from the promise exhibited by Ed West a couple of years ago, and by Delingpole til the present, of course

Added to this, the switch to the full DISQUS format has entailed more intrusive word-blocking.  The moderation has become very tetchy (with some hyper-sensitive protection of the Chosen by, I think, one moderator – a single frank sentence will earn you a ban).  I have the feeling that a fair number of nationalists working the DT threads have given up already, and repaired to less problematic sites.  There is quite a bit of talk among anti-AGW types today on the final Delingpole thread of giving up on the DT and leaving it to its two AGW fanatics, Geoffrey Lean and Jenny Jones.

It may be that we are victims of our own success, and the shift leftward represents an angry turn against discourse the liberal mind simply cannot deal with.  I guess we must have seriously pissed off a lot of people who thought they had control of the ideology, and would never be challenged.  How much we have changed reader perceptions I cannot begin to say.  Probably very little.  There is an argument that newspaper threads are not as useful as propaganda tools as we might like to think.  At the same time, we don’t have anything else.

So what to do?  Well, carry on for the present.  But keep a watching brief on the unfolding hostility of the DT editors and mods.  The story might change after the elections, if UKIP don’t do well as expected.  If they do, of course, we can expect the panic at Central Office to reach down into the house magazine, and life to remain difficult for the foreseeable future.

by Neil Vodavzny

The costume I wear is so mythic it belongs to every culture of a warrior society ... It’s like, is this an animal or a man?
Raul Trujillo, Zero Wolf

I’m replying to comments indirectly as there’s a lot of ground to cover, some of it left-field (my favourite). It is remarkable the number of similarities between Apocalypto (Gibson) – set in a re-imagined Mayan kingdom at the time of the Conquistadors – and the original Conan film of 1980 (Milius), based on Robert E Howard’s prehistoric Hyborian age of bejewelled kingdoms and barbarians.

Apart from the visual resemblances which I’ll get to, they are worlds of spirits and living gods. Over the course of Apocalypto, Jaguar Paw becomes imbued with the spirits of the jungle, enduring swamps and racing through greenery, his naked skin changing colour accordingly, using mud, hornets’ nests, poison toads, blow-darts as weapons to defeat Zero Wolf and his henchmen. He calls on the forest to give him strength, which it does.

Conan may be of a less superstitious bent, but when the ‘living god of Set’, Thoth Amon, tells him, “I am your father, you are nothing without me”, his resolve is almost fatally compromised. Milius’s theme is that his belief in the power of his sword-arm is stronger than the superstitions of Set-worshippers, but without his belief he is still nothing.

Both heroes are primeval, in living close to nature and relying on their wits. In other words, they are savagery personified, highly intelligent and resourceful, almost the Superman of Nietzsche’s poem, physically and mentally coordinated with surroundings, mind attuned to a pitch of keenness unknown to modern Man.

You really have to have read Howard to get a sense of the zest. These men are the best that nature has to offer, irrespective of race or creed. They are warriors born, and you get the same feeling from Braveheart and Spartan epic 300.

All of these societies, of whatever era, are tiered. So you have peasants living with the land, aristocracy or Squires (landowners), kings or rulers. This is very apparent in the look of both films, obviously with hamlets and hovels dotting the landscape. The journey through ford and forest to the great Mayan city is a ferocious contrast, a pell-mell fandango of fantastical body-ornament, dancers, drummers and pitiless crowds, through which the hapless sacrifices are led up the steps of a giant pyramid to where the demi-god sits, where their living hearts are dutifully torn out by the high-priest of Kukulcan.

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Along with White Leftism, The White Class and other useful theoretical tools that Jews abuse and obfuscate as they direct White identity into the foibles of the Right.

This discussion will have a fringe benefit of provoking and flushing-out those who are not truly concerned with our people.

Social Constructionism is a European, anti-Cartesian discipline: When conducted properly, Not Jewish

This essay is to be something of a summing-up and clarification:

“You alone are uncontingent my friend. I would counsel epistemic humility” 
- DanielA

Say what?

Thus, in background to this essay:

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Continuing our emphasis on myth, here is Tom Sunic speaking at the last London New Right forum last Saturday.  Religions and hoaxes, liberalism, holocaustism, Georges Sorel, gods and Titans ... it’s all there.  He is introduced by Jez Turner.