NOT THE SPARTANS

Shock n' paw

by Colin Liddell

Over at Taki’s, Pat Buchanan is lamenting the Pentagon’s latest kowtowing to the gender equality extremists by agreeing to integrate women into front-line and special combat units, like the Rangers and SEALs.

THE ETERNAL CULTURE WAR

Guns, Crime, and Freedom
by Wayne LaPierre
Regnery Publishing, Inc., 263 pages
Available for purchase from Amazon here

   Reviewed by William Cavanaugh

"Arguments, whether political or philosophical, are like ammunition – you should stock up on them before the trouble starts." That is what I told a friend of mine when he expressed surprise at my idea of writing a review for a book now almost two decades old. The friend in question is rarely impressed with my little aphorisms, so I spelled it out in more concrete terms.

Wayne LaPierre wrote Guns, Crime, and Freedom in 1994 when the country was quite divided on countless issues: immigration, gun control, gays, a new era of foreign policy, and a Democratic president who had come out of nowhere. Sound familiar? I always find it strange when people talk about the "Culture War that was" – when did it end? Maybe for a chunk of time after 9/11, but since at least the 2004 election all the old debates have been raging and are far from stopping. If they were not, Richard Spencer would not still be talking about Peter Brimelow's 1995 book Alien Nation, and Obama would not be interested in keeping the Clintons so close to his administration.

VENNER'S BARE BODKIN

by Andy Nowicki

As a gesture, French ex-paratrooper, veteran right-wing activist, and all around macho badass Dominique Venner’s gunshot-through-the-head self-snuff in the cathedral of Notre Dame sends a powerful message, though I’m not entirely sure what that message is.

One reads Venner’s final words summarizing the rationale for his act, and he truly sounds like a man of sound mind, with a clear-headed notion of aesthetic intent regarding the ramifications of his messy, bloody, brain-splattering final exit at the altar of the historic Paris church. Still, it isn’t easy to discern just how news of an elderly comrade’s suicide is meant to rally the European New Right to fight mass immigration and demographic displacement with any greater determination or ferocity than before. News of a mentor’s auto-annihilation, after all, does not typically have the effect of firing up his pupils or inspiring them to risk their own lives for the cause. Suicide is not martyrdom; whatever we may think of self-slaughter, it cannot be conflated with self-sacrifice. One doesn’t give one’s life for a greater cause, at least not in any obvious way, by directly and deliberately ending it.