THE WHOLE OF THE LAW

The Political Dimensions of Crowley’s Thought

by Keith Preston

The fame of Aleister Crowley is principally derived from his reputation as a notorious occultist. It is this reputation that has made his name legendary in numerous counter-cultural and youth culture circles, ranging from contemporary enthusiasts for witchcraft of varying sorts to purveyors of certain shades of heavy metal music.

Yet for all his status as a legendary figure, Crowley is not typically regarded as a political thinker. To the degree that his ideas are considered relevant to political thought at all, Crowley is frequently caricatured as a shallow nihilist or merely as a debauched libertine. Extremist political subcultures of varying stripes have attempted to claim him as one of their own. Whether they are neo-fascists, egocentric individualists, or nihilist pseudo-anarchists, many with an extremist political outlook have attempted to shock the broader bourgeois society by invoking the name of Aleister Crowley. This state of affairs regarding Crowley’s political outlook is unfortunate, because an examination of the man’s political ideas reveals him to be a far more profound and insightful thinker on such questions than what is typically recognized.

"ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS" BY ERNST JUNGER

This is a chapter from Ernst Jünger — A Portrait, a biography of the great German writer, written for the non-academic type, and a personal portrait by an avid Jünger reader. Available at Amazon.com.

by Lennart Svensson

On the Marble Cliffs is a complex work, existing on many levels. To be precise I don’t hold it above the rest of Jünger’s books. But of course it’s among the top five, if I should express it like that. First of all the title is very apt, combining as it does beauty with danger. Jünger himself had that ambition with the title and I must say he succeeded. As for novel titles in general On the Marble Cliffs is especially rich in connotations, the marble part symbolizing tradition and beauty, the cliff part symbolizing danger and then some.

SOUL HACKERS

by Daniel Spaulding

With the closing of another year marked by media hysteria, the narrative that the crazed hermit North Korean regime orchestrated the hacking of the Japanese-owned Hollywood company Sony, thereby assaulting our precious freedom to crank out cultural subversion, has quickly begun to fall apart. From the beginning the story never held neither consistency nor any forensic evidence. Yet the notion that ruthless Korean dictator Kim Jong Un wants to keep them from the movies, the modern substitute for the West’s emptying churches, has sent cable news consumers into a panic.

ANDROID EXISTENCE

"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet."

by Daniel Spaulding

In his classic, prophetic novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick depicted a future dystopia where the only way to determine the difference between humans and rogue, bio-engineered androids was empathy: the latter were incapable of experiencing and thus demonstrating it.

THE SUBVERSION-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

by Daniel Spaulding

Playing in good faith by the rules of the world controllers earns certain undesirable peoples precisely zero credit. As a case in point, recent elections held in the war-ravaged east of Ukraine have unsurprisingly been summarily dismissed by Washington and Brussels. Any political expression running contrary to the aims and ends of the globalist superclass is denounced as illegal and illegitimate, with selective application of international law the one observable norm.

NICOLÁS GÓMEZ DÁVILA

101 years ago today the great Colombian reactionary Nicolás Gómez Dávila was born. ¡Feliz cumpleaños!

by Gwendolyn Taunton 

"The reactionary does not extol what the next dawn must bring, nor is he terrified by the last shadows of the night. His dwelling rises up in that luminous space where the essential accosts him with its immortal presence. The reactionary escapes the slavery of history because he pursues in the human wilderness the trace of divine footsteps. Man and his deeds are, for the reactionary, a servile and mortal flesh that breathes gusts from beyond the mountains. To be reactionary is to champion causes that do not turn up on the notice board of history, causes where losing does not matter. To be reactionary is to know that we only discover what we think we invent; it is to admit that our imagination does not create, but only lays bares smooth bodies. To be reactionary is not to espouse settled cases, nor to plead for determined conclusions, but rather to submit our will to the necessity that does not constrain, to surrender our freedom to the exigency that does not compel; it is to find sleeping certainties that guide us to the edge of ancient pools. The reactionary is not a nostalgic dreamer of a cancelled past, but rather a hunter of sacred shades upon the eternal hills." The Authentic Reactionary, Nicolás Gómez Dávila

CODREANU AND THE WARRIOR ETHOS

by Keith Preston

European civilization of the early to middle twentieth century was characterized in part by the growth of political movements with a martial character. These included both the many variants of fascism from the far Right and revolutionary socialist currents from the far Left. The proliferation of such movements accelerated sharply in the interwar period. Particularly noteworthy were Mussolini’s Fascisti and the National Socialists of Germany, given the later success of these at actual achievement of state power, as well as the various factions involved in the Spanish Civil War. Romania’s Iron Guard, under the leadership of Corneliu Codreanu, was unique among these movements in that it was one of the few such tendencies with a strong religious orientation, and a highly eccentric religiosity at that. (Payne, 1995)