Recommend Books on This Thread

10 posts

Smile
Japanese Art After 1945 by Alexandra Munroe
This is is the most comprehensive survey of the post-war avant-garde art scene in Japan in English. Reading up on the hijinks of the Hi-Red Collective is always amusing and a welcome corrective to those who only know of Kusama and Murakami.
Niccolo and Donkey
Nemets Good review, but what do you mean by 'foreigners'?

By this time Blacks were certainly not foreign. The last black slaves had arrived in 1804. Blacks had been stripped of their families, their names, and their tribal cultures and identities. In short they had been Americanized, albeit separate from whites.
Nemets

I fixed it - thank you. They definitely had their own ethnogenesis here, and it predates the current American identity which coalesced by the 1940s. They aren't fully in the American identity though; and have different dialects, blood, and culture. In particular, their history has been almost entirely in opposition to the American people. They fought for the British in the Revolution and in 1812, for the Spanish in the Florida border conflicts, for the radicals in Reconstruction, and sympathized with the Japanese and Soviets in the last century. This century will see if globalists are able to subsume them into the American identity fully. Currently their miscegenation rate is about 20%, so seems likely, but who knows.

Irkutyanin

Recently, a few anons managed to get a hold of Henry Kissinger's undergraduate thesis, and scan it into libgen. Since I had the time to flip through its 320 pages, I can talk a little bit about the observations I've gotten into 26 year old Kissinger and his world view.

The first and most interesting part of the thesis is an immediate springboard into Spengler, who Kissinger paraphrases at length as he describes what most of us have by now read in Decline of the West. What becomes apparent is that Kissinger has a deep admiration for Spenglerian thought, and is less troubled by its implications than one might suspect. Several times throughout the section, Kissinger stresses the inseparable quality of history as metaphysics and justification for action, and with Spengler he conceptualizes duty as a personal responsibility greater than the individual which he tries to confirm with Kant.

Despite this, Kissinger unsurprisingly does not seem at all confident in a grandiose future for the West irregardless of the individuals who embrace duty. Twice in his Harvard thesis he drops the n-word, referring to nigger dances and music as unmistakable signs of decline, and considering this is 1950, one doesn't have to stretch very far to see what a specialist on Spengler and the Congress of Vienna would think about the state of America and Western Europe in 1968, much less in 2018. Disarming his thesis-board appeasing style, one sees the 26 year old Kissinger in a starkly modern context, but while his ethnic and post-war ties might have guaranteed him a post under Nixon in 68, I'm not sure his works could have been successfully ignored by his employers in a repeat today, even if he subtracted his tasteful usage of the n-word.

I think that another highlight of the thesis is the Toynbee section, where Kissinger can barely contain his disgust at the metaphysics of Christian Scientistic history. Kissinger may not have been familiar with this term, but what he finds most distasteful is actually what would be termed today as Whig History, and the entire last third of the chapter could be reworded into one of the better UR posts. Indeed, Kissinger dips into Moldbugery and Nrx territory by immediately suggesting that Toynbee's historical metaphysic is a remnant of modified Anglo Dissenter views of history, which is supported by Toynbee's usage of empiricism as a way of simultaneously asserting both moral and "scientific" predestination. Kissinger attacks this throughout the entire chapter with genuine annoyance, because the assertions that post-Calvinist history make dictate that there can be nothing transcendent or rational about history and that there is no room for the spirit of manhood in a clinical and moralistic retelling which obliterates all mystery and genuine feeling. This part is something I think everyone here should read, regardless of your personal views on Kissinger or his writing style, because it really does confirm the subtitle of Niall Ferguson's recent biography: The Idealist.

If we need any further proof, Kissinger uses the next chapter to further rebut Toynbee and what would become the dominate way of telling academic history with reflections on Kant and Dostoyevsky, and spares no expense in his appeal to rather ground Spengler to observable reality through Kant, rather than build the ideal world out of Toynbee's "empiricism".

Kissinger concludes however with a distinctly unspenglerian appeal to art, and poetry in particular as the apex method of historical synthesis presenting the true condition of man. The final pages are dedicated to Homer and Dante in particular, though Kissinger well knows that these are men of Springtime, he does not retreat from calling to their model of organic synthesis of the ideal and observable as presenting life. Because of this, you get a feeling that Kissinger, at least 26 year old Kissinger, is a completely sincere idealist at this stage of his life, and casts a gloomy but honest eye towards the future, despite his personal ambitions.

It is a bit tedious to plow through Kissinger's mildly autistic use of language at times (you'll see what I mean almost immediately) but I would say the opening chapter on Spengler and the last third of the Toynbee chapter are must reads, and if you have a sincere interest in exploring Kissinger as he appears in Ferguson's biography, read the whole thing. It's a fascinating and sincere insight into the mind of the man before his career, and makes me wish that in his old age or death we could have another glimpse at the internal Kissinger and what the hater of nigger dances makes of his garbage planet now.

http://libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=DC3A2C7C508BDA4B2037EC74F1852E7A

swoodsy
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An excellent book for conservationists and nature enthusiasts. A set of essays that blend natural history, conservation theory and philosophy.
Irkutyanin
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Cultural historical scholarship in the Anglosphere is now world renowned for having one of two bends weaved into the historical overview of its “non-western” subject, the older, whiggish forms of cultural confidence, which despite mostly dying as a genre, still finds outlets occasionally for histories of Russian politics or geopolitical foe de jure, or more recent forms of native apologia that also serves its geopolitical and domestic propagandistic purposes. Luckily, T. R. Fehrenbach was a Texas German historian born into a Spanish speaking Texas border city named after Porfirio Diaz, and although he wrote book reviews for San Antonio, with Fire & Blood, he mostly breaks through the stale forms. For although he remains a Lutheran, he is disassociated enough to give a mostly nuanced and partially Spenglerian look at first at the Amerindian and then the Hispanic civilization.

The uniqueness of art and the explosion of form found under the Mayas is set against their own unromantic ecological implosion, the continued Amerindian civilization at Teotihuacan is shown to be the culmination of capital and technics of civic engineering in the pre Columbian Mexico, but ultimately, like related Tula, great and expensive, but fragile, and that the last epoch of Amerindian civilization, the shifting mexica triple alliance that became an imperial form, was actually in comparison to its predecessors, stagnant, it’s art and architecture, as well as its social structure, calcified and immovable. The biggest sacred cow for modern Mexicans historical myths and wounded pride that Fehrenbach slaughters is the unwarranted cultural escapism criollo and mestizo alike engage in trying to express emotional continuity of Indio Civilization, all the while destroying the last pathetic hold outs of authentic Indio lifestyles and peoples. The fascination and centrality of “la raza” is based on an extreme deep cultural inferiority complexes, and reminds me in no small part of modern Odinists, Hapas, and Hoteps if they were given full control over university humanities departments and native media, with state funding. Cultural schytzophrenia of modern Mexico, throughout the book, is shown to be the unsuccessful attempts of a racially and ethnically heterogeneous population to grasp at a dead civilization they never knew just because it wasn’t Hispanic, all the while leadership used the cultural dissatisfaction felt by the humiliated mestizo to sink themselves further into national slavery than they ever were under the Spaniards.

The central calamity of the book, is the disastrous long 19th century, which for Mexico, begins with the involuntary implosion of their civilization, the farce of the war for independence ending in a senseless slaughter, and the laughably tragic First Mexican Empire and Republic being born from the most cynical power maneuvering by some of its least capable men, who had no idea of the damage they were doing. New Spain, for all of its faults, actually did more to preserve Indios and previous cultural forms, and offered the most stable and inclusive, not to mention the most socially safe per it’s time period civilization that Mexico ever experienced. The mixture of Spanish gothic and baroque with indegene sculptures and architecture is extensively remarked upon, its effects still visible even in distant San Antonio, hidden away in the single story suburbs awkwardly away from the freeway.



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The other major irony Fehrenbach highlights is that despite the plagues that thined out the numbers of Indios under Phillip II, the church and in particular Franciscans, runing ecclesiastical properties in many was preserved countless rural enclaves of Indios, who continued to live almost exactly as they had done under mexica domination, and considerably better, since they finally had modern farming labor/tools and monasteries that, albeit imperfect, gave the Indio and poor usually bastard Mestizo alike a social safety net that was literally unfathomable to Amerindian civilization. Monastery lands, and even old Haciendas, were run in feudal ways, which made them, under the period of New Spanish rule, a social structure that was strong and robust enough to survive centuries, so long as the Crown itself survived. Bourbon New Spain, under Charles III experienced a mostly currently unboadcasted cultural renaissance as the Indio and poor mestizo population reached its highest quality of life for the next 100 years, Spain also became ascendent very briefly, as it defeated the Anglos in the war of independence and was at the time financially more sound than France.

The destruction of the Hildago-Morelos insurrection followed the obliteration of the monarchy began a cycle of looting the country from the now morally “liberated” criollos and the utter destruction and cruelty from mestizo anti-clerical insurrectionists, who, while killing those no good Spanish bishops, destroyed the monasteries in fires both in 1810-21 and the Juarista revolution in the mid century. This took away not only the few remaining people who gave a shit if they all died of starvation, but also the libraries containing much of their now much vaunted heritage with them. Fehrenbach, while no big exalter of the Catholic Church in general, doesn’t fail to document these episodes of self-destruction and their implications for la raza and Mexican culture as a whole. For what I can tell, he uses a number of church histories, but his secular period historians, as he notes, are actually even less forgiving or charitable to what they see as the accidental farce of Mexican independence. In the Maximillian camp, Lucas Alaman is extensively quoted by Fehrenbach, as he sees the utter contempt the destruction of the Spanish monarchy and church in Mexico has wrought for the morality of the ruling class in one hand, and the inescapable fact that the country’s independence has actually made them more dependent on Anglo-American Capital and political machination on the other. Framed this way, Fehrenbach documents a small but not insignificant intellectual movement, that, disgusted at Mexican capitulation in the Texas and American wars, genuinely saw Maximillian as a way to restore actual sovereignty through a monarch on equal footing with European powers. The Hapsburg Emperor’s execution by Juarez, is shown to be the pathetic and ironic dead ringer for an unyielding American fealty that it was. Mexico was never independent or self sustaining again, it was never an integral part of anything.

Fehrenbach describes the Porfiriato and the intellectual life in these terms, Diaz hated Yankees but gave them ownership of the country anyway, he had a life to live, a class of people to look after, and a country to keep from anarchy. “White Mexico” was ran by a mestizo-Indio “revolutionary” in a trend that was only to be normalized well into the 21st century, while Sierra Méndez could only remark that “it came with the country” nothing else could happen, and as agriculture began to industrialize across the world, the income that could be expected for farm work in rural Indio and Mestizo Mexico fell below what it had been in the 16th century. The perpetual slums and destitution of the Mexican agricultural community, like similar developments in the Delta and the dirt floor shacks that were to become trailers in America, date from this era of rural upheaval in 1880-1940 before settling into sustainment subsidized living

Fehrenbach expresses that the revolution, despite its manpower being sourced exclusively from the rural destitute and bandits turned revolutionaries by this point, Woodrow Wilson was convinced of the Mexican’s innate democratic Anglo-Saxon qualities that are, of course, naturally found in all men. Wilsonian idealism was the diplomatic force driving the destruction of Huerta as he desperately tries to stabilize the country alone, but William Randolph Hearst and Rockefeller’s interests are fundamental in understanding the US State Department’s turn against Anti-Huerta Villa and Zappata to Obregón’s neo-caudilloism. It’s the now tried and true America cliché, support a terrorist group and intervene while supporting a terrorist group to get rid of the terrorist group you supported. Is it any surprise America became owned by spooks?

The rest of the volume is dedicated to exploring the new Porfiriato, now with more conglomerate ownership and more stable means of ensuring interest continuity that becomes more and more like a modern US election as we approach the 21st century, Mexico overtly develops a patronage structure and system that survives elections and can effectively ignore both democratically imposed “change” and increasingly widespread regional violence without bothering sensibilities of Mexicans who live in a hybrid between failed state and dictatorship. If anarcho-tyranny can be lackadaisically applied to ghettos in North America, Modern Mexico is shown to be the product of diplomatically engineered puppet anarcho-tyranny, that doesn’t even need that much effort to keep running nor overt and offensive intervention to prop up. It’ll outlive any nascent anti-American or anti-capitalist sentiments because those effectively don’t matter in the slightest. Mexico had a 1968, that unlike America or France could have derailed global interest entrenchment in the country, but faced with this growing Fidelista problem, they just shot all of the students, and no one gave a shit. La Raza and ethnic inferiority is not just a contributer to Mexican dysfunction, self-destruction and foreign ownership it is a fundamental mechanism of cultural and historical alienation and atomization. Mexico isn’t Indio, the few Indios that are left are suffering a complete cultural death, as we continue to lose their dying languages. Mexico’s history and Mexican identity can’t just be mestizoism as a rejection of “Europe” or embracing of some lost concept of Aztec pride either. Mexico is Hispanic, which came with the labor, class, and cast distinctions and official church role of integral relation to the state. The Cristero War killed the remaining protest against the country Mexico now is. Fehrenbach doesn’t quite get this, but obstenance of the clergy to kiss the “Revolutionary Party’s” feet was the final and last protest for actual cultural and geopolitical independence for Mexico. A Mexico which is slowly, as the result of 5 decades of private assistance from fat Methodist soccer mom missionaries, becoming as Protestant as Catholic culturally and atheistic in reality. Mexico should be a warning, to everyone who says it is impossible for the current absurdity and persecution to last much longer into our lifetimes. Not only can the absurdity last, but it can get physically so much worse for much longer. I’d recommend Fehrenbach wholeheartedly, and if you can read Spanish I’d go to Lucas Alaman directly.
Razumov
Champagne Socialist
The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
Guy Standing, 2010

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I've just finished reading this extremely important book, rightly called so by omnipresent Noam Chomsky and I'd call it one of the most important criticial pieces on modern state of economic thought from the prospective of changing social dynamics.

Guy closely follows and describes the neoliberal practices which have put in motion the disenfrachisement of the middle class from Reagan to Thatcher to the whole western capitalist system in 1970 and onwards. To solve the global crisis of 1970s various thinktanks and bigwigs found a terrific solution - it was all about sticky wages and overcompensated workers. And the solution was to utilize the 2 billion people who recently joined capitalist ranks in China and India, while converting their own proletarians, who were enjoying the highest QoL ever, into the new poors, precariat, that once again has nothing - no security, no stable job, no stable income, no economic rights.

The solution is quite simple really - gig economy vs. employment, no social security vs. pensions, "freedom of contract" vs. collective bargaining. All in all, we are returning to pre-XIXth century all over again. Laborism is dead because according to current law most of these people are employed illegally even if they aren't migrants (migrants make up a huge fraction though).

Highly recommended.
Champagne Socialist
Would be good if you could present a short summary before going indepth, since one gets immediately lost in details.
Jargon
Read it. The first half is good, 3rd quarter is ok and I skipped 4th quarter because it was just policy prescriptions. It was good but it still suffers from the blindspots of leftist doctrine, which is to admit on one hand that mass immigration lowers wages, raises rents, and strains social services, but to say on the other hand that working-class people wishing to curb immigration are misguided or ignorant. Somehow, this is because they're 'blaming' the migrants rather than 'blaming' the technocrats. Either way it doesn't matter, the only thing that's material is the policy. Anyways it's a great overview of what the economy looks like from the worker-side in the age of global capital. I don't predict that labor organizations will spring up in order to represent precariat interests, there's no soil for worker solidarity within precarianism. IMO the author should've gone into further detail regarding this point: intentional or coincidental, precarianism is a genius way of extinguishing the possibility of labor organization. When people are too alienated to talk to their own friends, let alone strangers, labor never organizing is a foregone conclusion.