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republicstandard · 7 years ago

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9 Things Alt-Right Men Need to Know

1. Aesthetics matter more than optics

It Doesn't matter what you do, it matters what you look like while you do it. They hate you, no matter what. You can save an entire school bus of children from drowning in a river in a flash flood, but the second your politics are revealed they will hate you and try to discredit and destroy you. Are we clear? Yes? Good. It doesn't actually matter what you say, hardly anyone will remember it unless it's exceptionally profound and you are a person of note. It matters what you look like, a well kept man is immediately notable versus a disheveled bum. How you are dressed -clean, well-fitted, matched- and what your hair looks like -effort vs no effort- your footwear -appropriate shoe for the occasion- and, if in person, how you smell. These are the things that impact people and it happens in 1/10th of a second. If you can make someone like or trust you in 1/10th of a second they will second guess everything that comes after that, you can only do that visually. First impressions are forever. If in doubt, start with the footwear and move upwards.

2. Not everyone is an erudite gentleman. Nor should they be.

To the untrained eye this may seem in opposition to my previous point. It is not. Authenticity is as much a part of aesthetics as anything else. Cosmopolitan dwelling fellas, you ain't getting a country boy in a suit and tie if he isn't getting married or burying a relative, and that is okay. Some of the issues you have with “optics" is expecting a regionally distinct nation to follow the rules of only one region; which is exactly what the liberal coastal elites have been doing for decades! Speaking of regional conflicts...

3. The South is for Southerners

There is no rational reason to concede ground to an enemy preceding a war, unless you have an advanced strategy to counter the push. You don't volunteer your losses ahead of the game, and you certainly don't reveal your hand of what you find most valuable. Alienating swaths of people by volunteering their homes as tribute to the very people who swarm their neighborhoods making them unsafe and barely habitable may seem like a funny meme or a rational concession; but it isn't and by the by, I don't hear an alternative where you give up your homes and flee to the South. The idea of an ethnic homeland for our people is a good one, but we need to think smarter than Balkanizing the United States of America.

4. Shitposting isn't going to save the world

These ideas have to make it into the real world where people live. Even the people you have contempt for have life experiences they can relate to our ideology. Why? Because the things that you've noticed aren't unique to you just because you noticed them already for what they are. Online we live in a polarized meta-reality of extremes. Fascist or Marxist. Right or left. Genocide or victory. Those extremes simply don't exist on the typical person's radar. There is a season for all things and now is the season to forge real life connections with real life people. The way forward is not tiki-torches and marching, it is a quiet, responsible conversation about real affairs that matter to the man or woman in the street.

5. Stop trying to purge people!

What kind of whacked out brain-fry drug den did you just crawl out of to think that any white person to the right of center is disposable? Identify them for what they are, and then utilize whatever it is they do or can do to benefit our immediate concerns. We have other concerns than just Zionism. We have to get legislation passed or stopped. We have to spread the word of first and second amendment breaches and violations. We have to talk about immigration. We have to talk about MS-13 and other gang activity. We have to have discussions existing on the internet that we don't have a million hours in the day to have. I personally am very critical of basic CivNat conservatives. They are weak and ineffective at conservatism, but i never advocate for purging their huge, beautiful, rarely banned platforms. Stop being ridiculous. Immediately.

6. There's no such thing as "Punching Right"

Nobody is above criticism. Nobody is above harsh criticism. Nobody. This doesn't mean that person needs to be “purged” from the movement. We refine ourselves through defending our positions, we refine our arguments by having them more than once, and losing more often than we win. We refine our ideology through discussion; and you aren't the gatekeeper of how that discussion is meant to be hosted. Anyone who has put their name or pseudonym forward accepts the inevitability that they will be challenged intellectually, morally and spiritually. There is surely no reason to schism between fans of this guy or that guy. That guy is not the be-all end-all, and this guy is only the guy until we find a better guy. Avoid cults of personality.

7. Get a thesaurus

Stop using words you know will get you banned on leftist social media platforms. The English language is the best language on the planet; and there are about 40 legitimate words that aren't bannable for every bannable word you type. For example whore is bannable, strumpet is not. Retarded is bannable, simple is not. Understand that in one moment we talk about white excellence and in the other we show that we can't learn, collectively, how to stop saying bad words and getting shut down. Adapt.

8. Quit pretending you don't want women talking about politics

Yes you do. You need women to talk about politics. You may not want them in politics or to hold office, after all,who does; women are inherently terrible at it. Please though, stop with the ridiculous assertion that you want women to stop talking about current affairs or identity issues. It's an aphrodisiac when a woman agrees with you about topics that you care deeply about. For her to understand what concerns you and why, is a comfort to you. To be able to vent your frustrations to someone who can hear you and can fathom your concern is a boon. Do you really want to come home to dinner, start moaning about Mueller, communists or the latest political compromise in direct opposition to your immediate needs and be met by a blank stare? No. We are a partnership, always. If you happen to be the very small amount of men who actually hate women, shut up and get out of the way of the men who would like to make lots of babies with the women that you despise.

9. Jews aren't that powerful.

I am not suggesting you should give them a single moment of respite from pointing out each and every instance they exercise what influence they've been permitted to have.

I said permitted.

They are not innovative or cutthroat or fun. They merely exhibit an enviable in-group bias. This is the fundamental crux of the relationship between the West and those Jews who take advantage of systems we create for their group benefit. It is not every Jew you meet in day to day life; and therefore our attention to relations between our peoples as a whole should be fair, polite, but firm. The cry of antisemitism arises when the grand arch of Zionist influence is threatened- because it can be taken away from them in an instant, as has been done in many other civilizations throughout history. They cannot outperform us, purely based on the relative sizes of our populations; it is a logical strategy to shape a society to better suit your own interests, given this understanding. It is our role to politely refuse such machinations.

Ultimately, though the Jewish lobby has poisoned our society in many respects they will ultimately only destroy themselves with success; just as a parasite cannot live without a host, they cannot live without the protection of Western Civilization, either in our lands or in Jerusalem. We can recognize this reality in the declining Jewish population in the West, through intermarriage and emigration to Israel. This force is in a process of decline in the West- for as much as we can say demography is destiny, this is true for all peoples. It is thus far more important in this context that you rediscover your power and learn to start saying, "No, thank you. This is not in our interest. Good day."

Absent of criticism we cannot take the steps necessary to accomplish our collective goals. It is what happens within our small but growing community that sets the stage for the future battles we will face; be they culturally, politically, or in some cases physically. We need to learn to turn into ourselves and each other, first to strengthen from within and only after that push forward into the mire that awaits us. If we do, then bleak prospects will become victorious battles rather than nihilistic concessions and defeat.

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

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topmixtrends · 7 years ago

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CATHERINE “KIT” KITTREDGE, the narrator of Paris Metro, is a risk-defying, border-crossing Anglo-American war correspondent who has grown tired of “reaming sentences into paragraphs of clichés and conventions.” She longs “to stretch reportage into something more artistic,” to unbind herself from the headline-hunting Now and leap into something both more raw and more timeless. Kit has “followed the War on Terror bandwagon from Afghanistan to Baghdad, lived in Beirut, detours to Syria, reporting trips to Cairo, Gaza, Dubai.” She is a self-described “grim reaper of the details. […] mistress of the aftermath.” An earnest searcher after fact, she becomes seduced by fiction.

The same could be said of Kit’s creator, the Paris-based Anglo-American journalist Wendell Steavenson, here making her first foray into fiction after writing books based on her reporting in Iraq (The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny) and Egypt (Circling the Square: Stories from the Egyptian Revolution).

As Steavenson’s novel opens, Kit is reporting from Baghdad, reaping the details of the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. “God Curse Saddam and the Americans” has become a popular graffito. The longer she is there, the less she understands the descent into lawlessness, dysfunction, and unyielding sectarian warfare. At the same time, and with equal flair, she chronicles her inner war of attrition against the sense of being ground down “into contempt, black humor, cynicism.”

She is guided first by her godfathers — Alexandre, an effete diplomat, and Jean, a correspondent for Le Figaro — and then by a clever, urbane Iraqi working as a translator for the Americans. Ahmed, son of an Iraqi executed by Saddam Hussein, is fluent in four languages. He is conversant in the novels of the French-Jewish writer Romain Gary and, like Gary, he is a “chameleon charmer,” a silver-tongued man of dissimulation. Even as she falls in love with Ahmed, Kit notices his “faux honesty, a popcorn puff with just enough kernel of truth to be plausible.” She learns too late that Ahmed compartmentalizes his life, that he keeps her “in a separate folder, cross-referenced with other personnel files only occasionally and with caution.”

Where the godfathers’ guidance is paternal, Ahmed’s takes a more merciless cast. He scolds her,

You think you know this country, Kit, because you are fucking an Iraqi. […] You believe in your universal humanity — but humanity is a luxury; you need prosperity to have humanity.

After two years together in Baghdad, Kit and Ahmed move to Beirut in search of prosperity. Not long after they marry, Ahmed coldly informs her that he was married to an Iraqi woman when he married Kit, that he has a four-year-old son, also named Ahmed, and that this first wife has just been killed in the violence. The boy comes to live with them, and Kit, who’s infertile, legally adopts little Ahmed. As he weaves his way into Kit’s heart, the boy personifies an incursion into her habits of dispassionate observation. In creating a home for him, she can no longer afford to hold herself aloof from the story she has reported on with such studied objectivity.

In the shambles of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Kit and Ahmed are no longer intoxicated by Mideast turmoil and decide to move with little Ahmed far from the fray — this time to Paris. Big Ahmed finds work of a vague kind for the United Nations and frequently revisits Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan, “drawn back, inexorably, inescapably, into the region’s disaster, as if he could somehow solve it.” Ahmed has “so many SIM cards,” Kit laments, “that the numbers were all crossed out and cross-hatched in my diary.”

After years of reporting on bloodshed in the Middle East, Kit expects Paris to be a respite, but it’s abruptly cut short January 7, 2015, when brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, born in Paris to Algerian immigrant parents, massacre 12 people in the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Kit is chilled to the marrow by word that her friend, a painter and photographer, was among the murdered.

If in the past Kit had visited violence, had willingly sought its aftermath, now violence has visited her. The experience leaves her enraged and brittle and given to pontification about the low-heat melting pot of France:

The French Republic, under its banner of laïcité, says no, there aren’t Muslims and Catholics and Calvinists, there are only Frenchmen. The French state denies the difference, and it’s a difference that fundamentalist Muslims themselves can’t bear to be denied.

Then, a bit later, after a visit to Greece to witness the refugee crisis firsthand, Kit declares:

Nobody dares mention the fact that Muslims who were born and grew up in Europe are now violently rejecting its values, while at the same time their fellow Muslims are appealing to those values to let them in.

Ultimately, Kit acknowledges the larger tragedy of the attack:

I was in the middle, trying to communicate one to the other, going back and forth from Paris to the Middle East all these years — reporting, listening, writing. But after Charlie, no. They made me choose a side.

Little Ahmed, now a teenager entangled in the demands of assimilation, has become an immigrant fully tethered neither to Iraq nor to France. He scoffs at Kit’s doctrinaire side-choosing and labels her a “ranting right-wing nutcase.”

When Islamist terror strikes Paris again several months later, as Kit knew it would, she spends the night hidden in a flower bed opposite the Bataclan theater. Half buried in the dirt, she’s fixated by the aftermath of the jihadists’ massacre of 89 concertgoers. As suspicions arise that one or both of her Ahmeds may be involved, Kit’s illusion of distance from the tumult and carnage finally collapses into a reality of unbearable proximity.

More than once in Steavenson’s novel, Kit’s eyes are drawn to a stenciled graffito of a rifle with a croissant for a trigger that fires madeleines rather than bullets. The image captures an essential ambition of Paris Metro: the subtle transfer of well-honed techniques of observation — a gift for the descriptive detail — into the realm of imagination. Only imagination, the narrator hints, can call forth what is best in us, even as men, with their full complement of weapons and resentments, do their worst.

In her years of sending dispatches to The New Yorker, the Guardian, and Granta, Steavenson became well versed in the duties and doctrines of detachment. But the voice of elegant gravity that carries this book’s accounts of external events and interior lives is that of an impassioned storyteller more than that of a dispassionate journalist. In this accomplished and deftly plotted debut novel, Steavenson makes clear that her training in journalism has served, too, as an apprenticeship in fiction and its embellishments. Here, clinging to facts that are arresting enough in themselves, she distills the all-too-real convulsions of politicized religion that have brought terror to Paris and elsewhere. Yet to get at more lasting truths, she gives herself license to lie, to admit subjectivity, and the consequent freedoms of fiction seem as revelatory to Steavenson as they will to her readers.

Benjamin Balint, a writer and translator living in Jerusalem, has taught humanities in the Bard College program at Al-Quds University. He is the author of Running Commentary (PublicAffairs, 2010) and Kafka’s Last Trial (W. W. Norton), which is forthcoming in the fall.

The post The Long, Inescapable Tail of Terrorism appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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