There is a spectre haunting the interwebs, it is the spectre of a laid back, occasionally Nazi-cosplaying green frog and his dead gorilla sidekick… And the establishment doesn’t quite know what to do about it.
But even the Alt-Right is not quite sure what Pepe is or even if he’ll stick around. Memes by their very nature are transient and ever changing and Pepe casts a nervous glance over his shoulder at the Mighty Harambe, who in turn casts a nervous glance over his shoulder at…who know what?
OK, stop right there!
Now you see what’s happening don’t you?
A grown man – me! – in an attempt to explain something, has ended up writing what is essentially complete drivel and balderdash within the accepted means of discourse. It is not the first time that Pepe has turned this trick, and it certainly won’t be the last.
This is because Pepe – and the associated 4chan culture from which he is spawned – is essentially something alien to our entire culture. Only by understanding him in this sense – as something truly alien or as a significant category mistake – do we stand a chance of relating him and the 4chan Alt-Right to the wider world, culture, and political process.
In short, while some see Pepe as a saviour of the White race and Western Civilisation, he is in effect just another harbinger of that race and civilisation’s decline and downfall. In truth, as the invokers of Kek have intuited, Pepe has much more in common with the pre-Christian pagan and Oriental mentalities than with anything truly White and Western. This is why "tryhard" efforts to pin Pepe down by "respectable" news sources are doomed to laughable failure.
All generations of White and European man since the early Middle Ages have existed within a culture that is based on a Greek Classical and "Judeo-Christian" basis. That is until now.
The Millennials may in effect be the first post-White or post-Western generation of Whites, in that their essential culture has lost many of the salient points of White European culture as it has been known for so long.
I first started to suspect this one or two decades ago, when I noticed how supine, evasive, wishy-washy, feckless, and "make-do" so many young people in the West were becoming. They were starting to define themselves by a low-grade pragmatism, flexible values, coyness, tweeness, and what can best be described as a general “off-centredness.” An earlier generation might have described it as spinelessness or a lack of backbone.
Consider the more obvious evidence, the Millennials are the generation of irony, memes, cosplay, gaming, RPGs, gay marriage, transgenderism, socking up, trolling, shitposting, doing things for LULZ, insincere racism (Milo is right to a large degree), and going with the flow (while also pissing in the flow), etc. The defining characteristics are listlessness, playfulness, effeteness, constant shapeshifting, neoteny, and a sense of passive fatalism.
With my extensive experience of Asia, I soon started to realise the affinities that young White men (and women) were showing with the fundamental Asian type, which shares many of these characteristics.
Vis-à-vis the traditional European type, the Asian is regarded as self-effacing, less rigidly moral, less logical, more superstitious, dogmatically syncretic, etc.
This dichotomy also operates rather well between the younger generation in the West and its predecessors. Post-Christian generations like the Boomers and Generation-X felt almost as much need for moral validation as their Christian predecessors, which is what gave us terms like "Racism" and "Sexism," "Save the Whale," and those harpies of shrill morality called SJWs.
Earlier Western generations, right up to Gen-X, operated within a corrupted form of what was essentially still Western culture – defined by a high degree of moral rigidity and a Manichean sense of good and evil, stemming both from aspects of Christianity, Judaism, and the Platonic wing of Classical culture.
This is exactly what people like David Duke and Hillary Clinton share in common, although how they process that rigid Black-and-White dichotomy differs markedly. Trump by contrast is a more "Asian" type – although why is a a question for another day.
But how did this great generational shift come about? There are, as usual, several factors. The previous generation was subjected to some of the same forces, but resisted them, so the switch, when it came, happened quite dramatically.
The two most important factors pushing it were (a) the destruction of the “moral bubble” of the West and (b) the isolating and reconnecting of individuals in a self-selecting manner, freed from a social consensus.
The morality of Western Civilisation was always a moral construct bolted onto a previous pagan substrate and in many ways a distortion of more organic and natural patterns of social, spiritual, and moral organisation. This is what gave our civilisation its greatness and its architectonic structure. In the same way that North Korea enforces its own rigid ideology by isolating the state from the World, Western Civilisation was enforced by excluding all that could not be controlled (the period of defence 900AD to 1492AD) or by controlling all that could not be excluded (1492AD to 1990AD).
This was comparatively easy to do – especially in religious, moral, cultural, and media terms – until the turn of the millennium, when the gatekeeper media started to give way to mass-market, globalized internet connectivity.
This opened up each individual to whole worlds, where basic Western morality simply did not exist or operate, or did so very feebly. The essentially Asiatic 4chan mentality of the Millennial generation was empowered by a combination of porn, perversion, gaming, and access not only to alien cultures but the id-directed undersides of those cultures.
This was the significance of manga and anime culture: presenting millions of young kids with a world where Western values – epitomised by the shrill moral signaller that has been with us at least since St. Augustine – was not only ignored, but not even known to exist.
This – combined with the isolation caused by atomisation and the self-selecting reconnection of people through the internet via social media (the echo chambers) – created a world of variable, organic moral textures, rather than the universalist sheen of standardised morality.
This is why tryhard efforts to pin Pepe down by conventional analysis fail. He operates at the level of ever-mutating animism or as a left-handed Zen kōan catalyst. Aim at him directly and you’ll miss, as Eugen Herrigel might have inferred if he were alive today.
This led to the world we have today, with such phenomena as genderfluidity or kids typing “Feels Good Man” to memes of gas chambers for lulz and keks; a world stalked by Heliogalabian types like Milo, leading "moral" insurrections, and where a presidential candidate with serious health problems ends up shouting at a cartoon frog – and the cartoon frog even shouts back.
We have, without realising it, slipped into Asianisation – or our own long-repressed pagan past. The West is dead and Generation X may well be the last true generation of White men.
Also published at Radix
Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here. He is also featured in Arktos's collection A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders.
But even the Alt-Right is not quite sure what Pepe is or even if he’ll stick around. Memes by their very nature are transient and ever changing and Pepe casts a nervous glance over his shoulder at the Mighty Harambe, who in turn casts a nervous glance over his shoulder at…who know what?
OK, stop right there!
Now you see what’s happening don’t you?
A grown man – me! – in an attempt to explain something, has ended up writing what is essentially complete drivel and balderdash within the accepted means of discourse. It is not the first time that Pepe has turned this trick, and it certainly won’t be the last.
This is because Pepe – and the associated 4chan culture from which he is spawned – is essentially something alien to our entire culture. Only by understanding him in this sense – as something truly alien or as a significant category mistake – do we stand a chance of relating him and the 4chan Alt-Right to the wider world, culture, and political process.
In short, while some see Pepe as a saviour of the White race and Western Civilisation, he is in effect just another harbinger of that race and civilisation’s decline and downfall. In truth, as the invokers of Kek have intuited, Pepe has much more in common with the pre-Christian pagan and Oriental mentalities than with anything truly White and Western. This is why "tryhard" efforts to pin Pepe down by "respectable" news sources are doomed to laughable failure.All generations of White and European man since the early Middle Ages have existed within a culture that is based on a Greek Classical and "Judeo-Christian" basis. That is until now.
The Millennials may in effect be the first post-White or post-Western generation of Whites, in that their essential culture has lost many of the salient points of White European culture as it has been known for so long.
I first started to suspect this one or two decades ago, when I noticed how supine, evasive, wishy-washy, feckless, and "make-do" so many young people in the West were becoming. They were starting to define themselves by a low-grade pragmatism, flexible values, coyness, tweeness, and what can best be described as a general “off-centredness.” An earlier generation might have described it as spinelessness or a lack of backbone.
Consider the more obvious evidence, the Millennials are the generation of irony, memes, cosplay, gaming, RPGs, gay marriage, transgenderism, socking up, trolling, shitposting, doing things for LULZ, insincere racism (Milo is right to a large degree), and going with the flow (while also pissing in the flow), etc. The defining characteristics are listlessness, playfulness, effeteness, constant shapeshifting, neoteny, and a sense of passive fatalism.
With my extensive experience of Asia, I soon started to realise the affinities that young White men (and women) were showing with the fundamental Asian type, which shares many of these characteristics.
Vis-à-vis the traditional European type, the Asian is regarded as self-effacing, less rigidly moral, less logical, more superstitious, dogmatically syncretic, etc.
This dichotomy also operates rather well between the younger generation in the West and its predecessors. Post-Christian generations like the Boomers and Generation-X felt almost as much need for moral validation as their Christian predecessors, which is what gave us terms like "Racism" and "Sexism," "Save the Whale," and those harpies of shrill morality called SJWs.
Earlier Western generations, right up to Gen-X, operated within a corrupted form of what was essentially still Western culture – defined by a high degree of moral rigidity and a Manichean sense of good and evil, stemming both from aspects of Christianity, Judaism, and the Platonic wing of Classical culture.
This is exactly what people like David Duke and Hillary Clinton share in common, although how they process that rigid Black-and-White dichotomy differs markedly. Trump by contrast is a more "Asian" type – although why is a a question for another day.
But how did this great generational shift come about? There are, as usual, several factors. The previous generation was subjected to some of the same forces, but resisted them, so the switch, when it came, happened quite dramatically.
The two most important factors pushing it were (a) the destruction of the “moral bubble” of the West and (b) the isolating and reconnecting of individuals in a self-selecting manner, freed from a social consensus.
The morality of Western Civilisation was always a moral construct bolted onto a previous pagan substrate and in many ways a distortion of more organic and natural patterns of social, spiritual, and moral organisation. This is what gave our civilisation its greatness and its architectonic structure. In the same way that North Korea enforces its own rigid ideology by isolating the state from the World, Western Civilisation was enforced by excluding all that could not be controlled (the period of defence 900AD to 1492AD) or by controlling all that could not be excluded (1492AD to 1990AD).
This was comparatively easy to do – especially in religious, moral, cultural, and media terms – until the turn of the millennium, when the gatekeeper media started to give way to mass-market, globalized internet connectivity.
This opened up each individual to whole worlds, where basic Western morality simply did not exist or operate, or did so very feebly. The essentially Asiatic 4chan mentality of the Millennial generation was empowered by a combination of porn, perversion, gaming, and access not only to alien cultures but the id-directed undersides of those cultures.
This was the significance of manga and anime culture: presenting millions of young kids with a world where Western values – epitomised by the shrill moral signaller that has been with us at least since St. Augustine – was not only ignored, but not even known to exist.
This – combined with the isolation caused by atomisation and the self-selecting reconnection of people through the internet via social media (the echo chambers) – created a world of variable, organic moral textures, rather than the universalist sheen of standardised morality.
This led to the world we have today, with such phenomena as genderfluidity or kids typing “Feels Good Man” to memes of gas chambers for lulz and keks; a world stalked by Heliogalabian types like Milo, leading "moral" insurrections, and where a presidential candidate with serious health problems ends up shouting at a cartoon frog – and the cartoon frog even shouts back.
We have, without realising it, slipped into Asianisation – or our own long-repressed pagan past. The West is dead and Generation X may well be the last true generation of White men.
Also published at Radix
_________________________________________________________
Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here. He is also featured in Arktos's collection A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders.
