Category Archives: War

‘The Magus’ By John Fowles: A Sublime Work of Art

Aesthetics, Art, English, History, Literature, The West, War

It is remarkable how many individuals who cannot write, much less conjugate the verb to “spit” (past tense “spat,” in proper English), have attempted to review John Fowles’s The Magus.

Nick Dybek—Dybbuk, the possessed, is a better name for him—for example. No idea who he is but his grubby English alone disqualifies him from even glancing at this work.

I tried to grapple with The Magus (published in 1965, rev. ed. 1977) when barely into my twenties. I had just left Israel having returned to South Africa, so my command of English was not up to the task. I struggled.

The prosaic mind will not possess the necessary imagination and love of beauty for a book that brilliantly plays with your mind, but takes you through exhilarating labyrinths of art, history, the follies of mysticism and psychiatry, other mid-century fads of Europe and England; a lost natural world where the Greek Islands were pristine not yet swamped with smelly tourists; to metaphysics, political philosophy and the phoniness of dying for the state, for a peddled patriotism, not to mention the best description EVER of the killing fields and suicidal battle technique and posture practiced in World War One:

“…the whole butcher’s shop of war”. And, “I saw only Thanatos.” “A desert of the dead.”

Stunning writing (which only writers who craft sentences could appreciate).

I feel good for I have used “Thanatos” in my book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot, as the most apt concept to describe the drive of the white man who gives up his birthright. But I can understand the trouble an idiot reviewer would have, for most would be unfamiliar with the term and its provenance.

The Magus achieves the purpose of great literature:

If you can’t put down a work of over 600 pages—a novel has achieved its purpose. Of course, the English is exquisite and the author ever-so old Oxbridge educated. Not pretentious; just truly educated as once provided by a traditional, classical liberal arts education in the English Ivy League.

I think people who are pedantic and reductive in their oppositional inability to assimilate art and beauty will see all kinds of “isms” in this book: ” “leftism,” “postmodernism”. I disagree with such a miserable and immiserating approach to art.

Literature is either good or bad. It either takes you on a scintillating trip or mires you in dour tedium. The postmodernism tag, moreover, seems to be used as a cudgel by those who inhabit the American English department, or are of its mindset, where postmodernism was perfected—the kind of reader who has never read gorgeous English prose, and wishes to appear sophisticated by raping the literature with artificial constructs.

National Review pegged this old work correctly, as thoroughly traditional in its sweeping style.

For heaven’s sake: John Fowles was an English gentleman born in 1926. He described the mid-twentieth-century as “androgynous”! If our author toyed with the idea that the sexes had merged then; imagine his thinking had he lived today. Nuance, folks, not labels.

I’m only on page 247 and may well regret my enthusiasm. But, for now, I second the august dust-jacket reviewers on my copy, from National Review to the Charlotte Observer, to that of New York Review of Books, whose verdict was:

* “One of the most ambitious novels of the decade….”
* “Brilliant and colossal….Impossible to stop reading.”
* “A marvel. John Fowles is a master of literary magic…”
* “The book is genius throughout and often beautifully written….”
* Mr. Fowles has accomplished an imaginative tour de force, comparable to the more exciting work of Nabokov, brilliant, elegant, inventive, profound without solemnity… It is an extraordinary novel…”
* “…Fowles writes his way beautifully through the demands of text which calls for every kind of descriptive passage.”

These are observations that could not be made today. The last is particularly smart, for the storyline and the breadth of the thing–The Magus–are formidable. The text—this grand superstructure—demands the bone and blood of the author, which it gets.

NEW COLUMN: FBI SUDDENLY Vested In The Intentional Lab Leak Theory Of COVID’s Origins

China, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Russia, The West, War

PODCAST: Oh, What Wonderful Wars: The West’s Lying Warlords

Affirmative Action, China, Communism, Conservatism, COVID-19, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Republicans, Russia, South-Africa, Technology, The State, The West, War

Boyd Cathey: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: In Ukraine

Boyd Cathey, Christianity, Foreign Policy, Hebrew Testament, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Neoconservatism, Russia, UN, War

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America’s habitual manner of dealing with ‘foreign nations, whether friend or foe—is hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable’ ~ H.L. Mencken

BY BOYD CATHEY

Four critical forces stand behind and vigorously motivate American and NATO policies in Ukraine. These forces support without apparent limitation the globalist-controlled and corrupt Zelensky government in Kiev in its never-ending war against Russia. And like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of the last book of the New Testament, these Armies of the Night propel us, ineluctably and seemingly without concern for what lies ahead, towards nuclear Armageddon.

How has this been possible? How is it that the American citizenry, indeed, the citizenry in most European countries have, for the most part, supinely accepted this state of affairs?

Rationally and geopolitically, the conflict in Ukraine really should be of minor concern to us. It is not our role to be the world’s policeman and to intervene in every conflict, in every distant corner of the world. We have, I would suggest, no actual strategic interest there, except maybe to encourage a peaceful settlement. The Russians were not threatening us or NATO in any discernible or major way. Ukraine is in their backyard, not ours. And yet, we find ourselves mired in an ever-expanding, ever-widening conflict in a country that most Americans cannot even find on a map that may well result in World War III.

Most of the responsibility for what has happened we must bear. President George H. W. Bush and Secretary James Baker promised Gorbachev that NATO would never expand to the borders of Russia (in return for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR). Yet, that is exactly what occurred. Then followed the “color revolutions”/coups d’etats in Tbilisi, Kiev, etc., with the instrumentality and complicity of American international finance and agents on the ground (read Victoria Nuland, etc.) which only intensified legitimate Russian mistrust and hostility.

The watershed moment for Russia was the ouster of a legitimately-elected Russia-friendly Ukrainian president by an American-fomented coup d’etat in Kiev in February 2014 and his replacement by a hand-picked American minion, followed by the intensification of widespread Ukrainian government persecution of the Russian majority in the Donbas eastern regions…followed by a dramatic uptick in that anti-Russian persecution in the Donbas in late 2021 and early 2022.

Author Ben Abelow has succinctly outlined what followed in his excellent primer, How the West Brought War to Ukraine. That brief volume is strongly endorsed by such authorities as Profs. John Mearsheimer and Paul Robinson, Ambassador Jack Matlock, and others, and remains a superb text on the conflict.

Certainly, a case can be made that the Russian incursion into Ukraine was a strategic mistake, ironically, because it was exactly what our foreign policy elites desired…an opportunity to take on the Russians directly by military means, using Ukraine as a helpless proxy, and perhaps effecting regime change in Moscow, or at least eliminating Russia as an obstacle to American global suzerainty. Still, President Putin believed, arguably, he had no other option. Nevertheless, it played into the hands of the War Party.

Over the past two decades our nation has shown an almost complete unwillingness to pursue any kind of negotiations with Russia about peace in Ukraine (e.g., the repeated torpedoing by the US of Minsk I and II). War serves OUR foreign policy purposes, and we managed to maneuver the Russians into making the first major offensive action.

Who, then, are these four forces that have pushed us dangerously into a conflict we should have never engaged in? What are the real reasons behind their hysterical and limitless advocacy, such that dozens of media outlets and most of our political leaders appear to have lost any scintilla of rational judgment?

First, perhaps the least visible but most effective force is what President Dwight Eisenhower termed more than sixty years ago “the military/industrial complex,” that is, the immensely powerful and influential military contractors and their complex web of control and influence, both in and out of the halls of power in DC, in our armed services, and in our politics. Each year billions of dollars in profits are generated for Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, Goldman Sachs, and other supra-nationals. War in Ukraine has been an incredible financial boon for them—missiles, tanks, armaments and equipment of all kinds. They must be built and purchased (usually at inflated and exorbitant prices). And the pockets of our politicians are always ready for a fat share, not to mention the opened pockets of the corrupt thuggery who currently run Ukraine (and dozens of other American client states).

Then there is the zealous opposition of the fanatical Left to what they perceive is the rise of a Neo-Tsarist Christian populism and neo-fascism (anti-LGBTQ, etc.) in Moscow. Russia under Putin has become for them the locus of opposition to their universalist program of a New World Order, opposition to a global world reset, involving NATO, the USA, the EU, and the World Economic Forum. In a moment of candor Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) summarized (October 25, 2022) the official (if unspoken) American and globalist stance on the conflict and the real issues involved:

“Moscow right now is a hub of corrupt tyranny, censorship, authoritarian repression, police violence, propaganda, government lies and disinformation, and planning for war crimes. It is a world center of antifeminist, antigay, anti-trans hatred, as well as the homeland of replacement theory for export. In supporting Ukraine, we are opposing these fascist views, and supporting the urgent principles of democratic pluralism.”

Raskin is a far Leftist and Jewish, and his message is often just as frenzied and fanatical as that of any member of the Squad in Congress. With one major difference: he’s highly placed and well connected, a part of the Democrat leadership establishment. So when he speaks, he speaks with some authority for the party and its leadership. But not only for the Democratic Party, but for those forces internationally who understand fully that Russia and its president stand athwart their path to a form of post-Marxist global hegemony, far worse than anything Joseph Stalin ever dreamed up.

Next, there are the Neoconservatives and their frenzied hatred for Russia (many of the Neocons have a Trotskyite and Labor Zionist genealogy which recalls the anti-semitism of Imperial Russia in the Pale of Settlement). It is the Neocons who have advocated never-ending war whether in Ukraine, or Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Bosnia, etc., in their zealous quest to impose what they conceive of as “liberal democracy” worldwide (what my mentor Russell Kirk once called disdainfully a “pax Americana”). It is not uncommon to see a Brian Kilmeade on Fox or read a Rich Lowry in the pages of the once-admirable National Review, espouse this viewpoint expressed with unrestrained vigor.

Joined to these forces are what we could call the “ground troops”—the vast majority of those who support American policies in Ukraine: those not-too-well-read, or simply dependent on the establishment media, which is completely one-sided on the conflict, for their information. Their views may well be based on a receptivity to continuing “anti-Russian” sentiment left over from the Cold War (similar to the anti-German sentiment which survived WW II) which many Americans partake of.

These forces have fueled an extremely dangerous cocktail. If someone opposes it, he is immediately shouted down as a “Putin apologist” or a supporter of “the new Hitler”: all of which is rubbish. But, sad to say, it seems to be working. I asked in my columns more than once, “Are there no grown-ups in the room? Or, are we fated to drift onward to a conflagration of terrible proportions?”

In St. John of Patmos’s Book of the Apocalypse he recounts that in a dream the Lamb of God summons and reveals to him four creatures that ride out on white, red, black, and pale horses. Over the centuries these Four Horsemen have been variously identified in Christian eschatology as harbingers of the Last Judgment and End Times. The first horseman in St. John’s revelation, riding a white horse and carrying a bow, has been seen to symbolize and invoke conquest, pestilence or perhaps even the coming of the Antichrist. The second horseman, riding upon a blood red horse, carries a sword and is seen to be creator of war, conflict, and anarchy. The rider on the third horse is viewed as a merchant and rides a black horse symbolizing famine. Lastly, the final rider upon the pale horse represents Death and the powers of Hell. And as the Evangelist tells us: “They were given authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill with sword, famine and plague, and by means of the beasts of the earth.”

The Military/Industrial complex, with its extensive and foul tentacles, may be seen symbolically to ride the black horse of greed, financial domination, and famine. The Neocons and their epigones can be represented by a rider seated on a red horse, zealously advancing conflict, anarchy, and fratricidal war.

The pale horse, whose rider symbolizes death and enthrallment by the powers of Hell, could well represent the mass of humanity, beguiled and woefully misled by the first three horsemen, and whose headlong movement like lemmings will result in the destruction and the collapse of the world—and of civilization—as we have known it. It is not hard to visualize such figures as Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell prominent in this group.

Finally, the unleashed and fanatical Left rides the white horse of conquest, pestilence, and heralding of the Antichrist, proclaiming the end of Christian civilization and the triumph of what Irish poet William Butler Yeats calls the “Rough Beast” (in his eschatological poem from 1919, “The Second Coming”): the return of a triumphant Satan, once held in check for twenty centuries by a “Rocking Cradle” but now loosed upon the world.

It is not too esoteric to suggest that the USA and the world now find themselves in a situation where, to follow Yeats again,

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity….”

Are there voices yet who would sound the clarion call and their warnings be heeded? Indeed, are there any grand figures like the prophets of the Old Testament who could plead successfully for us to turn away from war, criminality, and evil? Or, has our civilization become so infected and decayed that it has run its course?

That question, for the moment, remains unanswered.

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~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music. Dive into Dr. Cathey’s Barely A Blog archive and latest Hard Truth interview. Boyd blogs at My Corner.