We are in the greatest era of book burning ever. Libraries systematically destroy their older books, without allowing staff to go through the books and sort out the valuable ones, the ones that would bring enormous prices on Amazon.com.
This destruction allows a new past to be written, a demonized and hate filled past.
Now one might suppose that this destruction is unintentional, a mere result of perverse incentives, though what is the incentive that compels people to destroy books that would bring high prices on Amazon? But that Google gives limited access to our past, and that books are becoming lefter and lefter makes this destruction suspicious. For example the disturbingly politically incorrect Hakayit Abdullah by Munshi Abdullah is available on google only in snippet view. Why only snippet view? The translation was published in 1874, which makes it well and truly out of copyright everywhere in the world. Google only gives full access to a tiny handful of past texts. One can get around this by looking up texts on google book search, then downloading them from the internet archive. Accessing our past is not criminalized, nor even particularly difficult, but it is systematically discouraged.
This restriction is not obviously politically selective. It is more of a wholesale restriction on the past. Both “Froudacity”, the left wing, politically correct view on decolonization by a black man affirmative actioned to prominence, and “The Bow of Ulysses”, a eulogy and funeral speech for colonialism that looked back to the good old days when colonialists were free to be pirates and brigands, are available only in preview, though of course, one can get them from the Internet Archive.
The author of “Froudacity” is also the originator of what we now call Ebonics – the idea that black speech is not inferior, not less capable of communicating ideas and instructions, but merely different – a proposal that merely has to be stated for its absurdity to be apparent, and merely has to be contradicted to create the most astonishing outrage, for to contradict it implies that blacks are, on average, not merely less literate but less verbal, less capable of human speech, and therefore, on average, significantly less human, speech being the defining human characteristic.
“The Bow of Ulysses”, on the other hand, endorses the old colonialism, nostalgically recalling the days when Britain was not an empire, but rather British colonialists were pirates and brigands, who robbed, conquered and eventually ruled, gradually making the transition from mobile banditry to stationary banditry without the British government paying much attention. In “The Bow of Ulysses” Froude condemns nineteenth century imperialism as unworkably left wing, and inevitably leading the destruction of the British empire, and thus the ruin of the subjects of the British empire, all of which ensued as he envisaged, while the author of “Froudacity” endorsed imperialism.
(Since I posted this, people have reported to me that they can access “The Bow of Ulysses” through Google, but I cannot, even when using Tor, or using a Singaporean proxy)
If we read “Froudacity” and “the Bow of Ulysses”, we discover the remarkable and surprising fact that the imperialists, the ones that upgraded Queen Victoria from Queen to empress, were the same bunch as those then and now preaching ebonics. The imperialists, those advocating British Empire, were the left, and the colonialists were the right. And the colonialists correctly predicted that if this were to go on, we would get the left that we now have – one of the many strange facts one encounters if one reads old books. Reading the works of and about Garnet Wolsely we find that when the British subjugated the Boers, this was the left conquering the right, with a view to eventually producing today’s black ruled South Africa, which the right predicted would be the way that it is in fact turning out to be.
The Google suppression of the past is not in itself directly politically biased, old left texts are not obviously privileged above old right texts, but it is politically biased in that the texts of the past are all non left by modern standards, and tend to discredit the politically correct version of history, so if you suppress old books on the basis of age without regard to their political content, you are suppressing the non left, since old books are mostly non left, and new books are mostly left.
Kim Standley Robinson, moves from far left in 1992 to frothing at the mouth insane left in 1997:
In his 1992 fiction book “Red Mars”, regrettably over-idealistic environmentalists harm people who are trying to develop and settle Mars, harm people who are trying to make it habitable to humans.
In his 1997 fiction book, “Antarctica”, evil developers seeking to develop and settle Antarctica harm idealistic environmentalists
In “Lucifer’s Hammer”, written in 1978 by Niven and Pournelle, civilization collapses, there is famine, and people start eating people The cannibals are not especially black, even though realistically, it is likely that the cannibals would be disproportionately black. The only guy who suggest that there might be a correlation between cannibalism and blackness is the horribly prejudiced ignorant hick.
In Lucifer’s hammer the authors are careful to make the proportion of blacks among the cannibal army exactly and precisely the same proportion as blacks are a percentage of the US population, nonetheless today the book is deemed utterly outrageous and horribly reactionary for having any black cannibals whatsoever. Observe that in today’s collapse of civilization books, all cannibals are white.
“Clone High” 2002-2003 is a cartoon series. It ridicules political correctness. In episode 11, “Snowflake Day; A very special holiday” Christmas has been banned, replaced by a silly made up festival “Snowflake day”. Snowflake Day is celebrated in large part by telling everyone how hate filled and exclusionary Christmas was – which of course reveals that Snowflake day, not Christmas, is hate filled and exclusionary, reveals the intolerance of “tolerance”. Again, I don’t see any recent mainstream works making such criticism.
All the clones in Clone High have foster parents instead of real parents. Clone JFK has two daddies, which family, consisting of a teenage heterosexual boy, and two male homosexuals, is presented as vile, disgusting, ugly, perverse, unnatural, and disturbing, ridiculing the political correctness of “Heather has two mommies”. His two daddies display stereotypical gay behavior, which stereotypes these days would be deemed hateful and hurtful.
Kage Baker’s company series, for example “The Life of the World To Come”, supposes that over the next three hundred years, political correctness will become ever more severe and oppressive – the background is “If this goes on”. In 2004 it was possible for novelists to condemn political correctness as oppressive and still get published by mainstream publishers. No longer.
The science fiction writer John Ringo is pretty far right, as is obvious in his earlier books. In “The Last Centurion” published in 2008 by a mainstream publisher, a military coup saves the US from the excesses of democracy. Like Sulla, though with considerably less bloodshed, the military officers then restore the old republic and resign. The book optimistically promises that this restoration, unlike Sulla’s, will last. Could he publish that today? Let us look at what he is publishing today:
In “Live Free or Die”, published 2010, he tries very hard to contain his right wing slant, and play straight down the middle with obligatory bows to political correctness, piously endorsing the official line with amusingly transparent insincerity. Unfortunately, he committed the unpardonable sin of a few lines about stereotypical blondes.
So, alas, the sequel (“Citadel”, published 2011) has to have as its main character a counter stereotypical blonde female. In the sequel, the rhetoric about freedom mysteriously mutates into anticolonialist, or decolonist, rhetoric, perhaps because merely having a counter stereotypical blonde as main character is insufficient penance for making a joke about blondes.
Writers are steadily moving left – each writer as time passes by produces works that are far the left of his previous works, reflecting what is politically acceptable at that time. The early Keith Laumer ridiculed democracy. The later Keith Laumer did not. In “The Governor of Glave”, published 1963, he seems to take it for granted that everyone knows that democracy is a corrupt system run by people who are foolish, ignorant and evil. The planet Glave is what we would now call a terraformed planet. Earthlike conditions are maintained by some big high technology superscience machinery. The elite rules over their inferiors, but are getting tired of providing their inferiors with bread, circuses, and earthlike conditions. Most of the elite has left for a frontier world less infested with inferior welfare parasites. There is a democratic coup against the remaining elite. Finding democracy even less attractive, most of the remaining elite attempt to leave and/or go on Galt strike. The evil democrats refuse to let them leave, and force them to work under armed guard.
The heroic Retief arranges for their escape. As they escape, we see terraforming collapsing and the planet starting to revert to its natural inhospitable condition.
Similarly, in Keith Laumer’s “The prince and pirate” 1964, the Prime minister and his party are vile treacherous cowardly scum. The prince is kingly and the pirate is bold and martial. Retief makes a deal between the prince and the pirate, which results in the prime minister being killed, something unpleasant happening to his party, and the prince becoming an absolute monarch.
The nearest thing to an anti democratic novel in recent times is “The Last Centurion”, where the military restrain the excesses of democracy – but they then, like Sulla, leave politics so that democracy can continue, whereas the prince in “The prince and pirate” permanently ends democratic politics by killing quite a lot of politicians. We just don’t see novels that unashamedly support technocracy, monarchy, or aristocracy any more.
“The Last Centurion” is far to the left of “The prince and the Pirate”, “Live Free or Die” far to the left of “The Last Centurion”, and “Citadel” far to the left of “Live Free or Die”. I am pretty sure that anything written by John Ringo is as right wing as anything a major author dare publish, and what he publishes indicates that the rightmost thing that a major author can publish gets further left every year.
Gene Wolfe gets away with some amount of true right wingery, but that may be because his work is so dense and weird that it flies under the radar. He also has the inapt but lingering New Wave reputation from his early writing, which likely smooths the way. Two recent novels, An Evil Guest and Homefires have subtle reactionary treatments of politics.
But I guess that’s the point: you can’t get bold reactionary treatments published.
Somewhat similarly, leftists loved the ultra reactionary “District 9″ – because its reactionary message went right over their heads: They saw the progressive message, in that members of the techie caste, who to humans looked exactly like members of the worker caste, were smarter and more civilized than human, but totally failed to notice the uber reactionary message: that it is the duty of the superior kind to rule the inferior kind, or else everything goes to hell.
Progressives saw that “District 9″ was indeed a metaphor of South Africa, but the metaphor that progressives saw was that whites thinking blacks inferior made them inferior, whereas the actual metaphor that everyone else saw was that whites abandoning their duty to rule over blacks was a disaster just as the leadership caste of the prawns abandoning their charges was a disaster – the message was coded, so that only the sane could hear it.
Have not read “an evil guest” Reading the reviews, all of them, naturally, by left wingers, they seem to sense reaction, but cannot quite put their finger on it, and attribute it to incompetence, rather than malice
“Casey is not a strong woman. She is a conservative’s notion of a strong woman: … Wolfe would of course not be the first significant novelist to have been rubbish at portraying women”
I see progressives who liked the book arguing it is actually progressive, being a meditation on imperialism and sexism and such like.
Wolfe actually portrays a strong woman in There Are Doors, the book that almost none of his die-hard fans like, but that he has stated is his favorite. The woman is a goddess from another universe, pretending to be mortal, apparently so she can shack up with some man who won’t treat her like a goddess. It’s creepy. To make it even more offputting, Wolfe’s intentionally makes his hero unintelligent, but devoted to the goddess. I still haven’t figured out exactly what everything means, but that’s the premier attraction of a Gene Wolfe novel.
Well, you just gave me a holy-shit moment. I doubt I’ll be able to convey it, but…
When I see a statement, I habitually try to verify it, whether I agree or not, as part of defeating confirmation bias.
that it is the duty of the superior kind to rule the inferior kind, or else everything goes to hell.
I’m really big on freedom. I think everyone should always have the ‘screw you’ option whenever anyone else tells them to do something. (Should end any relevant contracts, of course.) I think the best kind of management is no management. Et cetera.
But when you said that, my verification was: “If those of inferior abilities follow the plans of their superiors, they cannot help but create more wealth than if they follow their own plans.” By definition: taking superior actions is what makes the superior abilities superior.
Also relevant: there’s a right way to do status hierarchies. Status lets you control resources and therefore the highest status should be those who do the best things with those resources. Anything else makes the group weaker, reducing the resources the high-status get to play with.
Ergo, there’s a right way to do obedience. The incompetent obey the competent.
Genuinely free market capitalism produces a system where the incompetent obey the competent. But what, however will produce free market capitalism? Not democracy, and especially not democracy when the voting roll is stuffed with hordes of the lowest IQ immigrants that politicians can purchase.
Aristocracy is apt to result in incompetent aristocrats due to regression towards the mean, but observed aristocratic systems often have a hereditary caste of reasonably high IQ, compared to the general population – far from always, but often.
The best solution is what Gustav de Molinari called “Free Government” and “Free Self Defense” – market provision of defensive force, anarcho capitalism, but it is tricky to have anarcho capitalism without anarcho piratism. People in societies that approximated anarcho capitalism were apt to behave piratically to outsiders, to people they were out of law with, which is what provides the incentives to sign up with institutions for settling disputes fairly and making those settlements stick. At equilibrium in anarcho capitalism, there will necessarily be a small amount of anarcho piratism, a small number people who are out of law with each other, and therefore apt to behave piratically and sometimes a lot of anarcho piratism, just as in a system of states, there will necessarily be a certain amount of war and civil war – and every now and then a large amount of war and civil war.
When people in a system that approximates anarcho capitalism behave piratically, they are apt to make the transition from mobile bandit to stationary bandit. Bands of pirates become governments.
Genuinely free market capitalism produces a system where the incompetent obey the competent.
It does? The incompetent are rarely fully aware of their incompetence. Thus, they are rarely willing to give up autonomy voluntarily, especially if they are taught that autonomy is the most importantest thing ever. Only at work, for money, do they do so. Most of their decisions in free markets would be made by themselves, thus those decisions would be fucked up. *Somebody* buys Chryslers, after all.
Aristocracy is apt to result in incompetent aristocrats due to regression towards the mean
Aristocracy does not have to mean and has often not meant static, strictly hereditary aristocracy. There were paths in, usually involving military (or, later, other kinds of) success, and paths out, often involving comical mismanagement of money or picking the wrong side in a fight. All are, partially, IQ tests.
Genuinely free market capitalism produces a system where the incompetent obey the competent.
It does?
He means they get jobs. Their bosses are competent people.
Just finished “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” the other day. Bloody brilliant.
[...] tell us how books are being burned all over the Anglosphere. He links to an article on Cracked about some guy who tells how libraries [...]
[...] but recently Jim’s Blog posted an insightful commentary on the degeneration of Western culture and how Laumer’s own writings changed over time: http://blog.jim.com/culture/burning-the-past.html [...]
?????
I thought individuals moved right and organizations moved left.
John Ringo is more right wing than ever, but all publishers, even Baen books, are now further left, and so must tighten his leash.
I think he should just publish on the web.
There are full view versions of The Bow of Ulysses (that’s a scan of a copy donated by Grenville Lindall Winthrop). When you get a result, scroll down to “Other editions”. Also, sometimes it says pages are restricted in search results, but they aren’t.
Did not work for me. Perhaps Google gives different access to different people. I got one edition in which some pages were available, but but the vast majority of pages were not, which is mighty strange.
Rather than fighting Google’s evil for access, easier to go to the internet archive.
I’m not sure whether you live outside the US, Jim, (or use Tor) but I understand Google offer free access to many books only to those inside the US for contractual/copyright reasons. I’ve had this problem before with some of Mencius’ reading lists. Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive are your friends.
I am presently outside the US. Using Tor does not help, indeed Google seems to be paranoid about people using proxies to bypass its national restrictions.
The US has the longest copyright in the world (see Wikipedia), therefore there can be no genuine copyright reason for preventing access by non US citizens.
Ah, no, I meant you can’t access it if you’re outside the US, or you’re using Tor. You’ll have to use a US proxy.
If you still can’t find it, I’ve got both epub and mobi versions I can send you.
Got it from the always excellent Internet Archive
See here: “In addition, copyright law in Europe is different in each of the 27 E.U. member states, unlike the uniform system that exists in the U.S. To avoid disputes Google has so far agreed only to digitize books from European libraries that were published earlier than 1869.”
Fair enough if they don’t digitize books for Europe, but why should people all over the world outside the US be denied access to nineteenth century books because there is some obscure European state in which some nineteenth century books are still under copyright?
Fortunately the publishing industry is becoming disintermediated. Even as few as ten years ago it was ridiculously difficult to get your hands on high proof 19th century reactionary thought. You’d have to go to a library, and also know what you were looking for.
In the past ten years the growth of blogging has given the entire earth access to modern reactionary thought (of, albeit, varying quality). Not just the alt-right-o-sphere, but any blogger who Actually Knows Their Shit, like Brecher, or amanzi, has unwittingly contributed to the modern reactionary corpus. It may not be easy today to get your hands on copies of Carlyle and Froude, but it’s certainly *a lot* easier than it used to be. Just this weekend I packed my kindle with a few tens of megabytes of high Victoriana. Some Carlyle, Froude and Maine is available for free in the Kindle shop, and more is available for the Kobo e-reader (again, for free).
So two major thoughts:
1. I’m not a half-bad writer, and I’ve for a long time been interested in writing a sci-fi serial that is unabashedly reactionary and Carlylean. Any ideas/suggestions of a premise?
2. Most reactionary texts are available on Gutenberg, but in an untidy, raw-text form. The best solution to ensuring easy access to classic reactionary thought, is for someone to build a “reactionary mind-bomb” torrent, with nice clean ebooks in a variety of formats, and maybe some editors/compilers notes explaining the significance of each of the works to historical reactionary thought. Any suggestions?
I am an infinite well of ideas.
You probably won’t like most of them, so here’s a bunch, to get statistics on my side.
Invention or revolution in space travel sparks a reactionary Galt Gulch. Democracy attempts to conquer ideological threat, fails because they lack discipline and enjoy waste. Adjust conflict to taste.
Yet another unrealistic alien contact story. (As per Jared Diamond, alien contact would simply destroy us, regardless.) Aliens are nondemocratic, but completely hands off – if you want to deal with them, you have to move off Earth and become their subject.
Hanson’s razor revolution: invention allows one to see through signalling bullshit. At first, as per the razor, nobody wants to use the device. Someone figures out how to use it anyway/covertly/etc.
Tale of two colonies. A colony ship, after arriving in orbit, fractures after a seemingly inane conflict, resulting in two colonists groups going their separate ways. One group’s leadership is seized by a Carlylean hero. Years later, they meet. (I prefer for trade, but in war is fine too.)
Splinter group forced into an underground complex to escape [disaster], their political theory runs head-on into their survival.
That should be enough for a comment.
Western civilization shows distinct symptoms of imminent collapse. Expect the unexpected.
The Bow of Ulysses is free on Kindle.
As is Past and Present by Carlyle, as well as The French Revolution. If you’ve got the Kobo e-reader, there’s even more available.
The Bow of Ulysses is at Gutenberg Project as “English in the West Indies.” And your interpretation of it is tendentious. I read it recently–it’s tedious and repetitive–but I don’t think Froude ever praised piracy and brigandage. He definitely believes only he and his kind are fit to to rule, but who doesn’t?
The entire book condemns the imperial government for its left wing policies, and for giving the good old colonials a hard time. Froude gives us numerous favorable accounts of incidents in the good old days of piracy, brigandage, and slave raiding, and in the midst of reporting these cheerful, brave, and decent colonials, gives us this poem:
Oh ! England is a pleasant place for them that’s rich and high,
But England is a cruel place for such poor folks as I ;
And such a port for mariners I’ll never see again
As the pleasant Isle of Aves beside the Spanish main.
There were forty craft in Aves that were both swift and stout,
All furnished well with small arms and cannon all about ;
And a thousand men in Aves made laws so fair and free
To choose their valiant captains and obey them loyally.
Then we sailed against the Spaniard with his hoards of plate and gold,
Which he wrung with cruel tortures from Indian folks of old ;
Likewise the merchant captains, with hearts as hard as stone,
Who flog men and keelhaul them and starve them to the bone.
Oh ! palms grew high in Aves, and fruits that shone like gold,
And the colibris and parrots they were gorgeous to behold,
And the negro maids to Aves from bondage fast did flee
To welcome gallant sailors a sweeping in from sea.
Oh ! sweet it was in Aves to hear the landward breeze
A swing with good tobacco in a net between the trees,
With a negro lass to fan you while you listened to the roar
Of the breakers on the reef outside which never touched the shore.
But Scripture saith an ending to all fine things must be,
So the king’s ships sailed on Aves and quite put down were we.
All day we fought like bull dogs, but they burnt the booms at night,
And I fled in a piragua sore wounded from the fight.
Nine days I floated starving, and a negro lass beside,
Till for all I tried to cheer her the poor young thing she died.
But as I lay a gasping a Bristol sail came by,
And brought me home to England here to beg until I die.
And now I’m old and going : I’m sure I can’t tell where.
One comfort is, this world’s so hard I can’t be worse off there.
If I might but be a sea dove, I’d fly across the main
To the pleasant Isle of Aves to look at it once again.
Although Barbados is doing well, the rest of the West Indies suggests he was right.
“In his 1992 fiction book “Red Mars”, regrettably over idealistic environmentalists harm people who are trying to develop and settle Marx, harm people who are trying to make it habitable to humans.”
should be “over-idealistic” and “settle Mars” (though the latter is funny malapropism).
Thanks, fixed.