A reader sees where the paleocons’ biological reductionism and tribalism lead

(Note: it turns out that the contributing editor/writer at Alternative Right who wrote the article advocating suicide is a homosexual Satanist go-go dancer who’s written a book called “Androphilia.” See discussion below. It’s time to repeat Chestertons’s remark that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they’ll believe in anything.)

A reader writes:

I can’t believe this, but Alternative Right has published an article endorsing suicide.

I’m beginning to see that you are right about the need for any kind of traditionalist movement to have a sense of a moral order. For a while I’ve grown contemptuous of the negative influence certain Christian movements have had upon my race, and felt the raw tribalism promoted on Alt-Right, among other places, to be refreshing. And yet I now see what happens when you view everything through strictly biological lenses and discard the Christian morality that has done much good for the white race in the last 2000 years. The world is really ugly when everything is nothing but Darwinian genetic conflict. Nick Griffin was right to recognize the need for a spiritual dimension, he has found it in Christianity. I’m still uncomfortable with the idea of Christianizing any nationalist movement, partly to avoid the mistakes of the Religious Right, but also to make nationalism more comfortable for those who have not been regenerated by the Holy Spirit. But perhaps there’s a balance. I’ll need to think on it more.

LA replies:

Look at the masthead of Alternative Right, with those dark, looming, ominous trees. That has always struck me as a symbol of the pre-Christian darkness, the forests of pagan Germany, to which Richard Spencer wants to return Western man.

- end of initial entry -

James P. writes:

You would think Alternative Right would oppose suicide. Isn’t the hegemonic Leftist culture suicidal enough already? Between mass immigration and low fertility rates, the West hardly needs any help dying.

Robert C. writes:

I stopped reading Jack Donovan, the author of Alt-Right’s article on suicide, once I found this out:

Jack Donovan (formerly known by the pen name Jack Malebranche) is an American artist and author. Mark Simpson, British journalist and editor of the 1995 book Anti-Gay, called Donovan “a straight-talking Drill Instructor for today’s gay generation, weaning them off pop divas and bear beauty pageants and licking them into a more manly, more self-reliant shape, ready to re-join the masculine fray.”

Donovan is currently a contributing editor for AlternativeRight.com, and a frequent contributor to anti-feminist, men’s rights blog The Spearhead.

Donovan was also a member of the Church of Satan and used to be a go-go dancer.

This is the guy that Richard Spencer goes to in order teach men how to be masculine. It is also telling that Richard Hoste stopped condemning “homosexualists” once he found out about Jack Donovan.

LA writes:

Donovan makes a point with which, though I realize it is not in accord with Christianity, I confess I feel some sympathy, speaking of the “honorable” suicide for those who “loathe the idea of growing decrepit and dependent on the charity of others.” (This is not a worked-out position I have, and I am not advocating it, so please don’t anybody start a debate with me on it, I’m just saying it’s a view with which I can feel some sympathy.) But he goes way, way beyond that, advocating that people kill themselves in their prime so that they never have to be older than their prime, advocating that they kill themselves when they’re depressed, and so on. There is nothing honorable about his view of life; it is bleakly nihilistic and sounds like something coming out of Sweden. He seems to have zero notion of any spiritual truth that can lift us beyond our physical and emotional troubles. His view comes down to a worship of materiality and will: the moment your life becomes unsatisfactory, or even before it becomes unsatisfactory, off yourself.

Then read his description of himself at the end of the article:

Jack Donovan is a poor, blue-collar man made out of muscle and blood who moonlights as an advocate for the resurgence of patriarchal, paleo-masculine values among the Men of the West. He is a contributor to The Spearhead, as well as the author of Androphilia and co-author of Blood Brotherhood and Other Rites of Male Alliance. Mr. Donovan lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

“Blue collar man made out of muscle and blood”? That’s as creepy as his article. And this guy is a contributing editor at Alternative Right.

Gintas writes:

The incongruity of Jack Dononvan is typical of what is going on at Alt Right. While we reactionary traditionalists are misfits in the Liberal Regime, I don’t think the men at AltRight would fit even in the better days of the West. I don’t know that they really are, at heart, men of the West. I suspect we could get them to admit grudgingly they’d prefer the unhappiness they’d find in the West’s glory days, but they’re not missing the glory days of the West.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

I agree with your interpretation of Alt Right’s Black Forest iconography. I don’t know what Spencer’s response to the suggestion might be, but whatever the case, it seems to me that you can’t revive pre-Christian Europe without reviving paganism—if you can in fact “revive” a way of life that’s been non-existent for over a thousand years, which I doubt. And whatever biological reductionism is, it is not paganism. Paganism, especially of the kind that existed in pre-Christian Europe, is utterly incompatible with a materialist view of nature practically by definition. So if that is in truth what Alt Right’s site design is meant to suggest (again, I don’t know one way or another), then it’s a weird and incoherent picture.

And by the way, if Jim Kalb, supposedly a Catholic traditionalist, continues his association with that increasingly bizarre outfit, which is now publishing an avowedly Satanic homosexualist suicide-pusher, it will forever diminish my opinion of a man whose writings on political philosophy have had a profound affect on my understanding of liberalism and political modernity. No genuine defender of Christendom ought to be willing to share a space with such a man simply in order to be published, nor play along with the monstrous notion that Donovan is a “Man of the West.”

James P. writes:

A suicide-loving Satanist homosexual is a contributing editor to the magazine of “radical traditionalism”! (I see the radical part—the traditionalism, not so much. Or at least, it’s no tradition that I care to associate with.) Will Mangan concede that you were correct to describe Alt-Right as a cesspool and moral swamp? Or will he demand that you leave the country, as your loyalties are clearly incompatible with the all-American traditions of suicide, Satanism, and sodomy?

LA replies:

Your three-item list of American traditions, as seen at Alt-Right, is as good as Churchill’s list of the supposed traditions of the British Navy: “rum, sodomy, and the lash.”

Robert C. writes:

I must say it does seem strange that Richard Spencer chose this man to embody and teach on masculinity. Even if his written work is interesting, it is really hard to overcome the fact that he is a rather flamboyant homosexual with a background in the Church of Satan or a male go-go dancer. It just seems really revolting on a gut, visceral level.

Do you think these things occur among self-styled traditionalists because as rebels against liberal society that this kind of weird phenomena occurs? e.g. a sketchy, flamboyant homosexual man purporting to teach other men how to be masculine?

LA replies:

I don’t know, but Richard Spencer’s use of the term “traditionalism,” even “radical traditionalism,” to describe Alternative Right is so way off it’s ridiculous. It’s dishonest. It’s a way of attracting conservatives under false pretences.

Patrick H. writes:

Imagine Mangan’s (and Spencer’s) chagrin! They’ve been publishing (or defending the publisher of) a gay Satanist go-go dancer! Who’s written a book called “Androphilia”! And another book “Blood Brotherhood and other Rites of Male Alliance”! Androphilia? Well, no kidding! “Male Alliance? I’ll say!

Oh this is rich. This is funny … deeply, darkly funny. Justly funny. Here these right bastards are, slandering you, impugning your patriotism, openly sneering that your defense of Israel somehow means you can’t love America. And all this time, they’ve been publishing a “man of muscle and blood.” Well yes, they sure have!

It’s funny how when you pull the rock off a nest of extreme right-wing anti-Semites, how many homosexuals you find there. (To be fair to Donovan, he may not be an anti-Semite himself.) I mean, who’s next for Spencer to publish? And for Mangan to defend with heat and ardor?

Ernst Rohm, Storming the Troopers: Love and Life on the Extreme right.

Philip Johnson, Great Big Pointy Things: the Architecture of Closeted Fascism.

Heh. This is just neat. There is a God. And he doesn’t like anti-Semites.

Respectfully,

Patrick H

P.S. You do not have to publish this scurrilous comment, perhaps too gleefully vengeful for your blog. But oh this is an occasion for glee. And vengeance can be fun … especially when the humiliation of your foes has been brought on by no one but themselves.

Alan Levine writes:

I second Sage McLaughlin on the incompatibility of biological reductionism and paganism. Not only was the latter pre-scientific (or should I say pre-pseudo scientific?), it was compatible with “open” tribes that readily assimilated conquered peoples and vice versa. The Germanic tribes that invaded the Roman empire and became the “stamme” of the modern German nation were recently formed confederations of smaller groups that rarely dated before the second or third centuries A.D. and were usually assimilated by the conquered (incidentally giving up their paganism) very rapidly.

Someday, perhaps, we will enjoy hearing from the neo-paganists, or for that matter leftist anti-Christians, just how it is that the growth and greatness of the medieval and modern West occurred after the supremacy of the faith they detest was established.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 22, 2010 11:14 AM | Send