Born for the Saber / Zrodzeni do Szabli from Stow. Polska Sztuka Krzyżowa on Vimeo.

Former Polish Nobility Association [ZSP] Chairman Marcin Wiszowaty forwarded this video trailer today. Great stuff.

IMDB:

Set in Poland during the first half of XVII century, the epic documentary-drama “Born for the saber” tells the story of young knight Blazej Wronowski. Jan Jerlicz, a veteran of the Muscovite wars who returns to his fatherland upon Maciej Wronowski’s – his brother’s in arms request to begin training his son, Blazej. “Born for the saber” is a feature story about honor, courage and war, seen through the eyes of a young noble and knight growing up in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Documentary part of the movie is a cinematic journey through history and art of the mystique of high-end crafting of the polish saber, which to date is considered to be one of the best melee weapons on the globe. Word class experts demonstrate the art of saber fighting and forging this extraordinary weapon.

I doubt that an English-subtitled version is available yet. Yet.

Titus Techera‘s must-read review explains why the television series, now in its third season, makes some serious statements about class warfare and the changing character of the American elite.

Like Hemingway’s marlin, which achieves its greatest leap in its death throes and expires at the top of the arc, [John] Dutton is most impressive in agony. He seems superhuman compared to the new American elites. His handling of urgent problems makes him resemble the president—he is an executive. Meanwhile, egalitarianism has not created equality in America, but only a new elite, impatient, ignorant of the future, blind to necessity—thus, astonishingly able to manipulate the new systems of power, since these elites feel no concern for consequences. The real world, where people are tied to a place, to other people, to their past, and the good they pursue, is replaced by access to the institutions and finances that make the world work, which manipulate people’s lives indirectly, in unaccountable and unpredictable ways. Everyone’s tied into legal demands and their lives are increasingly regulated, but only people who know how to use the law to get what they want get ahead in this new situation. The first post-American elite is coming for the last cowboys. …

The opposite of a man in America is a bourgeois bohemian, to recall David Brooks’s signal contribution to our sociology in Bobos in Paradise (2000). Brooks is a sophist for this class, so he will not tell the ugly truth—but Tom Wolfe did in A Man in Full (1998), and even scooped Brooks. It’s not an accident that he saw clearly: Wolfe was the poet of American Stoicism and understood the threats to manliness.

The people who define elite taste in America are themselves opposed to violence, but not because they are Christian or even moral. It’s because their own rule doesn’t require that they ever take any personal risks—poorer people do that, who live in other parts of town or are completely removed from sight by gentrification. Nowadays, the rich take no responsibility for the poorer or those suffering violence, or even ever shake their hands, which is why our cities are such madhouses. There is no noblesse oblige.

Sheridan wants to show the violence in America to rebuke this bloodless view of things. … we see, through the real estate developer drama, how the new American elite is moving in to remove the last ranchers. This establishes the difference between real men and those who want to rule merely through institutions and finance, as though history had ended and we’re just dividing up luxuries.

RTWT

Saw an essay last night, by a Critical Theorist at the Sorbonne, arguing Wokeness is the result of the CIA learning postmodernism and pushing it into academia so the left would look stupid and be discredited so that the right wing could do more capitalist imperialism.

— James Lindsay, toxic scholar (@ConceptualJames) June 30, 2020

Illustrator Amber Share turned bad Yelp reviews of national parks into posters.

————————-
Read the rest of this entry »

This football, supplied by Captain Wilfred Percy “Billie” Nevill, was kicked over the top by Private A A Fursey, 6th Platoon, B company, 8th (Service) Battalion, The East Surrey Regiment from Carnoy trenches, Montauban, The Somme 1st July 1916.

In this week’s Spectator, Jeremy Clarke visits the WWI Somme Battlefield.

Phone calls aside, the only human contact I had on my ten-day Somme battlefield tour was with the lady who ran the bed and breakfast establishment. My bed was on the upper storey of a disused light railway station in a clearing in a beech wood. Madame lived with her husband in a modern bungalow 100 yards down the line, but came along each morning to cook my bacon and eggs. The greater part of her clientele consists of British Great War buffs. But Covid-19 had kept them away and I had the breakfast table, the old station and indeed the Somme battlefield entirely to myself.

The dining room was once the waiting room. In here the walls were decorated with trench maps and other Great War memorabilia, including a tribute to Captain Billie Nevill of the 8th Battalion East Surrey Regiment, who famously led his men over the top on 1 July 1916 by drop-kicking a football into no man’s land. He’d written on the football: ‘The great European Cup-Tie final, East Surreys v Bavarians.’ Displayed on a stand was a punctured leather replica of this celebrated football.

[Actually, Captain Nevill Captain WP Nevill, “commanding “B” Company had purchased four footballs for his platoons to kick across No Man’s Land ‘subject to the proviso that proper formation and distance was not lost thereby’. Captain Nevill promised a reward to the first platoon to score a ‘goal’ in enemy trenches.]

After a careful study of the trench maps, one day I went and found the spot from which Captain Nevill had punted his football. Then I followed his path between the British and German front line trenches. The distance was about the same as three football pitches laid end to end. History records that the East Surreys gamely chased the football up the long uphill slope but were scythed down by a German machine gun on the left wing. Captain Nevill reached the German wire and was about to chuck a hand grenade when a late tackle in the form of a bullet to the head ended the match for him. Every morning he looked levelly out from his framed portrait and watched me eat my bacon and eggs off a plate decorated with a design of red poppies. The tablecloth was a pattern of red poppies. Madame invariably served breakfast wearing a diaphanous shawl hand-embroidered with poppies.

RTWT

Captain Wilfrid “Billie” Percy Nevill Wilfred (14 July 1894 – 1 July 1916).

John Gray notes that, after the collapse of Communism, the Western Liberal Establishment decided it was obligated to follow suit.

The values imposed under communism were internalised by few among those who were compelled to conform to them. Ordinary citizens and many communist functionaries were a bit like Marranos, the Iberian Jews forced to convert to Christianity in mediaeval and early modern times, who secretly practised their true religion for generations or centuries afterwards. Such fortitude requires rich inner resources and an idea of truth as something independent of subjective emotion and social convention. There are not many Marranos in the post-liberal west.

Some have attempted to revive classical liberalism, an anachronistic project that harks back to a time when western values could command a global hegemony. Others have opted for a hyperbolic version of liberalism in which western civilisation is denounced as being a vehicle for global repression.

In this alt-liberal ideology, the central values of classical liberalism — personal autonomy and the rejection of tradition in favour of critical reason — are radicalised and turned against the liberal way of life. A heretical cult, alt-liberalism is what liberalism becomes when it tears up its roots in Jewish and Christian religion. Today it is the ruling ideology in much of the academy and media.

In these conditions one might suspect self-censorship, since anyone expressing seriously heterodox views risks a rupture in their professional life. Yet it would be a mistake to think alt-liberals are mostly cynical conformists. Since practising cynics realise that the views they are publicly promoting are actually false, cynicism presupposes the capacity to recognise truth. In contrast, alt-liberals appear wholly sincere when they denounce the society that privileges and rewards them. Unlike the Marranos, whose public professions concealed another view of the world, alt-liberals conceal nothing. There is nothing in them to conceal. They are expressing the prevailing western orthodoxy, which identifies western civilization as being uniquely malignant.

Of course, civilisational self-hatred is a singularly western conceit. Non-western countries — China, India and Russia, for example— are increasingly asserting themselves as civilisation-states. It is only western countries that denounce the civilisation they once represented. But not everything is as it seems. Even as they condemn it, alt-liberals are affirming the superiority of the West over other civilisations. Not only is the West uniquely destructive. It is only the West — or its most advanced section, the alt-liberal elite — that has the critical capacity to transcend itself. But to become what, exactly? Lying behind these intellectual contortions is an insoluble problem.

RTWT

Just the other day, I received a note from a commenter complaining that Never Yet Melted was not coming up on Google searches.

Well, apparently, this problem was rather more extensive.

Thomas Lifson, at America Thinker, reports:

Yesterday, what Google calls a “technical error” exposed a blacklist of multiple conservative sites, including American Thinker. After the blacklisting became obvious and generated commentary among conservative publications (and crickets among the dominant MSM propaganda organs), it appears to have been reversed.

The blacklist became blatantly obvious when a Google search for “American Thinker” revealed no items from our site, but rather articles elsewhere that mentioned us. …

This morning, the ban on material beginning www.americanthinker.com was no longer visible.

————————-

Rod Dreher sounded the alarm yesterday.

Today I have discovered that Google’s search engine has somehow suppressed not only this blog, but a number of conservative blogs and websites. I don’t know why. Is it deliberate? Was it a hack? I’ll let you know when I find out. Whatever the answer, this reveals the incredible power Google has over access to information. Get on the wrong side of that particular Big Brother, and you can be more or less cancelled.

The editors of the Washington Free Beacon recognize the hypocrisy and special pleading going on here.

The American dream is that any citizen, regardless of sex, race, creed, or color, can rise on his determination and merit. History is littered with examples of the reformers who worked to realize that dream, pushing the most influential institutions in the country to prize talent and hard work over wealth and connections.

The introduction of standardized testing, accessible to all American teens, was part of that push. Harvard University began administering a standardized test to all applicants in 1905. Its effect was profound and immediate: historically a landing spot for the Protestant upper crust, the school began admitting far more public school kids, Catholics, and Jews. …

In the name of racial equality, the woke now seek to dismantle meritocratic norms and return to the quota systems that practices like standardized testing were designed to relegate to the trash heap of history. …

The New York Times’s classical music critic, Anthony Tommasini, is calling for the end of the blind symphony audition, which drove a tripling of women’s representation in the field, so that conductors can make race-based selections. The University of Connecticut School of Medicine, where merit is literally a matter of life or death, recently suspended admissions to its honor society because the GPA-based admissions criterion did not produce an honor society that, as Bill Clinton said, “looked like America.”

The SAT—which measures intellect better and more fairly than do intangible heuristics—is under fire. University of California president and former Obama official Janet Napolitano has joined the chorus of administrators at elite universities who complain that race-blind admissions aren’t producing the desired results.

Those calling for “progress” usually want to forfeit someone else’s job. Tommasini is a white man, as are all his listed colleagues at the Times‘s “music” section. So is the L.A. Times’s Mark Swed, and Washington Post music critic Michael Brodeur, who recently penned a news report about classical music’s “long overdue reckoning with racism.”

All are curiously quiet on the “racism” of their clique. None seem ready to give up their own position for indigenous or trans critics, who surely exist! Surely they are waiting somewhere for the call from the New York Times that their turn has come, merit be damned!

RTWT

I do hate it when a great image appears on Tumblr without any identification whatsoever. Especially when I like the rooms so much that I’m wondering if the place is possibly for sale…

Peter Savodnick recognizes alarming literary parallels.

The metaphysical gap between mid-19th-century Russia and early-21st-century America is narrowing. The parallels between them then and us now, political and social but mostly characterological, are becoming sharper, more unavoidable.

We can reassure ourselves by repeating obvious truths: The United States is not czarist Russia. The present is not the past. History does not repeat itself. But those facts are not immutable laws so much as observations, and even though they are built on solid foundations, those foundations are not impervious to shifting sands. We can go backward. We can descend into a primal state we thought we had escaped forever. That is the lesson of the 20th century.

The similarities between past and present are legion: The coarsening of the culture, our economic woes, our political logjams, the opportunism and fecklessness of our so-called elites, the corruption of our institutions, the ease with which we talk about “revolution” (as in Bernie Sanders’ romanticization of “political revolution”), the anger, the polarization, the anti-Semitism.

But the most important thing is the new characters, who are not that dissimilar to the old ones.

Consider Yevgeny Bazarov. To Bazarov, one of the sons in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the whole of Russia is rotten, and anyone who can’t see that is an idiot or a knave, and the only solution is to raze everything. There is a logic to his thinking. Russia was ruled by a backward-looking monarchy. The nobility was complicit in perpetuating grotesque inequality. The Orthodox Church was allied with the ruling classes. And the ruling classes moved glacially to liberalize. (In Western Europe, the feudal system started to collapse nearly four centuries before it did in Russia.)

One can imagine arriving at the conclusion that Russia would never reform itself, that the only way to liberate it from its medievalism was to start over. Bazarov, a doctor whose empirical nature, we are led to understand, informs his nihilism, is convinced that Russia must start over, and everything about him—his sarcasm, his lack of empathy—is meant to convey disdain, destruction, a sweeping away of the old. He is openly disrespectful of the fathers in the novel—Nikolai Petrovich and Vasily Ivanovich—because they’re old. They’re fathers. They come before, so they are necessarily less developed. To Bazarov, those who do not see the world exactly as he does—most people—are simply roadblocks or enemies. They are not really people. They are not wholly human.

One wonders if Bazarov is that different from today’s protesters and statue-topplers, the 20-somethings sowing discord in our newsrooms, the cancellers, the uber-woke, the sociopaths who police our social media feeds, those who would massage or rewrite history in the service of a glorious future. Like Bazarov, they are incapable of empathizing with those who do not view the world the way they do. Like Bazarov, they assume that the place they come from (America) is cancerous to the core—regressive, hateful, an affront to right-thinking people everywhere. Like Bazarov, there is about them a crude sarcasm (or snark). Like Bazarov, there is a logic to their outrage: Today, we are witnessing Americans revolting against the vestiges of a barbaric, racial hierarchy that was constructed four centuries ago. That hierarchy continues to be felt. It is not unreasonable to wonder, When will we finally transcend the past?

The only important obvious difference between the fictional, Russian nihilist and his nonfictional, American counterpart is the lens through which they view history. Bazarov’s radicalism, descending directly from Marx, amounts to a typical economic determinism—a conviction that the entire human story can be boiled down to those with the means of production exploiting those without it. Today, the radicals have mostly abandoned economic determinism in favor of a race-gender, or identitarian, determinism that also claims to explain the whole of us—our etiology, our political and economic development, our moral worth. This appears to be the animating force, for example, behind The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which squeezes the entire American story into the Procrustean bed of race relations.

RTWT