Hello James,
Thank you so much for the in-depth response to my questions in your post “Confrontational Predation: Richard Barrett and James Discuss the Arуan Warrior Tradition.”
You and WC are more than welcome to use this article and any future threads on this topic as a reference in the endnotes of any of your upcoming works. It is wonderful to find like-minded people interested in this topic in an intelligent way!
In fact, I have an updated version of the Checklist I have further honed since I last wrote to you. It can be found here on my website at this link:
I’d like to start backwards from your responses and answer the question of why I am writing this book. One thing became clear to me once I went from being a homeschooler to a college student in pursuance of a bachelor’s degree: the Postmodern social experiment our society is running is going to lead our nation to disaster along Third World lines, the Third World in the Middle East specifically being my original area of research.
I came to the conclusion that the many lessons our men at the tip of the spear overseas have learned would benefit our citizens facing a gradual descent into Third World conditions.
[Yes, and I have three observations:
-Those lessons learned overseas will be used by MCs, Spec Ops and Law Enforcement against U.S. Citizens, particularly in regards to forceable relocation of U.S. Citizens in order to facilitate mass immigration of U.S. persons.
-U.S. citizens who wish to resist will need to study these lessons.
-U.S. citizens who wish to survive rather than resist will need to study these lessons.]
Because of my many military friends and my original desire to work for a Counterinsurgency-oriented think tank, my own intellectual tradition falls upon contemporary military lines. This is an intellectual heritage that sadly, I believe has been outrightly ignored by many otherwise original dissident thinkers. I would consider your work a most notable exception to this case.
[The sissy idea of proxy service by soldier slaves—our hipsters cannot imagine their Mamelukes turning on them as the Sultans of Egypt and later the Grand Porte could not when his Janissaries turned on him. This was the case in 1740s America when the unarmed Quakers who paid the Delaware to serve as mercenaries to keep their Irish slaves in line found themselves helpless before their traitor MCs.]
However, I believe that this kind of thinking is perfect for the contemporary and future situations the West faces, as we are fracturing upon ethnic and religious lines, and such intellectual military tools were created by men at the front dealing with such a fracture overseas, the kind of which they had never prepared for.
[The concept of the West has run into the wall of the Orient. Civilization is an all-corrupting matrix and hence it’s most dynamic form, the Arуan, has continually moved west according to a nomad instinct to save itself from ultimate decay. But the West has collided with the Orient on the Pacific Rim and has no fresh pastures to grow, having circled the globe. And with the abandonment of the idea of space travel, Western Civilization in its Arуan form must die.]
It is because of this that I believe such intellectual tools are perfect for the lone man trying to survive in a hostile and decaying Western world. In fact, from reading your writings, I believe you fall squarely in this tradition, as many of your favorite sources are some of my own!
Now to the real meat and potatoes...your analysis of Beowulf. Boy, did that really light me in fire! In your description of the epic, you summarized everything I am trying to do! You put all the pieces together...that have been laying right in front of me the whole time!
[I have the luxury of writing for a living and applying all my mental energy to such work and am shocked when I read some ancient literature for the third time and realize—wow, I pretty much missed the clutch stuff…and then I realize that I was so busy working for a living and trying to keep from getting fired by jealous bosses that my best years were wasted and that I am now thinking deeper with an actual damaged brain than I did when it was healthy. I am also quite insane, so take my more extreme pronouncements with a grain of humor and if they come true… Will you did once hear it from the hermit in his cave.]
It’s all there...the Heroic Western Warrior who's up against the savage predatory monster who has no regard for human life. And the predator, he’s (or she! Very PC!) is a skulking coward who doesn’t come out and fight.
[I have another dozen portions of Beowulf waiting to post and should finish my reading by year’s end.]
So the Western Warrior...he’s got to go out and hunt the Predator down. He can be just as sneaky as the Predator to find the spider hole in which they hide, maybe even more so.
[The problem I see, is that the Western Warrior is going to be coming home from overseas like legions to Rome and hunting media predators—people like me who are not PC—out of our spider holes. The system the Western warrior now serves is in position to define good and evil and even redefine God on earth and gender among mankind. People who stand for traditional western values, will, in the very near future, be labeled Grendel, and when the only monster in creation needs slain the heroes will step forth and slay. And if he does not he will be labeled monster and hunted in his turn. This makes your point all the more important, that some of these military men and their ways might be used to better skulk in the shadows of the terrible edifice of the thing the west has become in America.]
But when it comes time to rock and roll, it’s an upfront battle to the death, mano a mano. And because the Western Warrior fights in the cleanest, most honorable, and (what ties it all together), toughest up-front Confrontational way, he triumphs against the force of Evil!
[This is true and why technology has doomed the Western warrior to serve evil and cull his own kind, and like the many Apaches who hunted the few with Geronimo, he will, if he wants to remain a warrior. Thus, all of his honorable traits and confrontational qualities have turned him into a slave to evil. I may not see it, but you, young man will see the return of the legions to this crumbling Rome and they will not be coming back to uphold the first or second amendment and may well be overturning the 14th.]
I mean, as you explained it, and as I began reading the summary of the tale in detail, I could see John Wayne, Marshall Dillon, or Cheyenne Brody riding into town at the behest of the townsfolk to take care of bandit or Indian problem when Beowulf is invited to Hrothgar to his Great Hall to take of his monster problem...
I could see old Sean Connery as 007 (the only real 007) crawling through the storm drain to kill Dr. No as Beowulf swam deep into the swamp fending off the monsters to reach Grendel’s mother’s lair…
And I could see the Duke himself taking Chief Scar’s scalp in The Searchers when Beowulf killed Grendel’s mom and brought the slain Grendel’s arm back as a prize!
[Great parallels. I would read Eric Von Lustbader’s Sunset Warrior trilogy and Under an Opel Moon. He’s taken over the Bourne series from the creator, an heir of sorts.]
The whole thing...this right here is the Western Warrior Ethos in a nutshell!
On page 6 of Wilhelm Gronbech’s illustrious work, The Culture of the Teutons, the author writes: “And he [the Teuton Warrior] fixes himself in the present by reproducing himself in an ideal type, such a type for instance as that of the chieftain, generous, brave, fearless, quick-witted, stern towards his enemies, faithful to his friends, and frank with all. The type is built up out of life and poetry together; first lived, and then transfused into poetry.”
[Beautiful.]
James, I agree with Gronbech’s analysis 100%. Whereas much of your research has been focused on the Ancient times, my own has been focused on the Anglo-American Colonial experiences of the 19th and 20th centuries (18th too, to a degree).
One of my biggest loves in tandem with the history of these time periods is the Pulp Fiction literary genre. I live for this stuff. I am a firm believer that Pulp Fiction was the continuation of the Western Warrior Epic tradition begun by Homer (and I see now from your analysis, Beowulf).
[Robert E. Howard is the best exemplar of this truth.]
I believe that in surveying Art History and Literary Criticism, it becomes clear that Philosophical Modernism, spawned by certain sects within 19th Century German Romanticism, relegated the Warrior Epic to a second-class citizen in the field of Literature.
[For this reason I value the Death of Arthur and will hopefully reread it this year.]
As such, the Pulp Fiction magazines became a kind of literary ghetto for the Warrior Epic...a thriving and brilliant and vibrant ghetto whose works are some of the genre’s most highest expressions.
[One cannot imagine an ancient warrior standing for the sentimentality of Hollywood or even failing to beat the poet with a beef bone who recited modernist fiction, but he would sing along with a recitation of Howard or London and would probably draw the line at Burroughs unless there was a slave girl to serve as a princess avatar placed on his lap.]
I mean, come on...I know from surveying your writings that you know the history of the Pulps. The authors of these works are quickly derided as “hacks” today. But upon closer biographical examination, one finds that they were WWI veterans, cowboys, Indian Wars cavalrymen, British Empire operators, sailors, boxers, and mercenaries from the many Warlord conflicts of the inter-war and pre-WWI years, such as China, Spain, and Mexico.
[Louis l’Amour started in the pulps and he was a tank destroyer commander in WWII.]
These aren’t hacks writing to con people out of their hard-earned Depression era paychecks. These are heroic Western Warriors telling their stories and passing on their values and lessons in mythological settings with fantastical often fantastical devices...just like the Homeric and Beowulfian Epics of old.
I would also include in this category of ghetto-banished Literary Renaissance the 1930s-1960s Western, War, Spy, Adventure, Historical Epic, and Sci-Fi film and television genres. It is well known that many of the Pulp writers went over to Hollywood to write, as the screen came to displace the written word as the dominant medium of communication, not to mention all of the guys coming back from WWII who starred or produced these films.
[Heinlein, Pournelle, Saberhagan, Poul Anderson, Ernst Junger and Niven fit well into military-minded and historically astute science-fiction writers. The very best was Gene Wolfe who fought in Korea with distinction. The third volume of his Book of the New Sun is essentially a soldier’s yarn. I particularly recommend Junger’s The Glass Bees and Eumeswil.]
You are the only other person I have ever seen—academic, literary critic, lay person, fiction author, historian, casual fan of the genre, or otherwise—who seems to believe the same thing about the Literary Genre of Pulp Fiction. This is from what I can gather from reading the free samples of your books A Thousand Years in His Soul: The Poets—Part One: Five Arуan Mystics At The Dawn Of The Atomic Age and
A Thousand Years in His Soul; The Seers—Part One: Four Arуan Mystics At The Dawn Of The Atomic Age...two books high on my to buy list now that I am once more deemed an “Essential Worker” and am finally again receiving a paycheck!
[Remind me in an email to send Of Fear and night, if I forget, a year or two out from publication.]
Your point on a survey of elite military units is an excellent one, and is worth much deeper study. My knowledge of the French Foreign Legion is limited, but as I said before, the Anglo-American Imperial experience is my specialty, specifically the British Empire operations during the Victorian days.
[Look into Rogers rangers, the best source being the book White Devil.]
Those guys were the epitome of the elite, Confrontational Western warrior unit venturing deep into the Predatory hellholes of the Third World. Unfortunately, the popular imagination equates the British troops of this time period merely lining up in formation and blasting away at the natives with a volley of lead a la The Last Samurai, however, a closer examination finds this to be only the tip of the iceberg.
The British Army of the time period was an elite institution that could not rely heavily on a technological advantage, because its funding was seconded to the Royal Navy. Jeremy Black, on page 96 of his book, A Military History of Britain: From 1775 to the Present, explained that “Indeed, the Maxim (machine) gun, introduced in 1883, was important, although across much of Africa, the breech-loading rifle was more valuable, because it was more suited for the dispersed fighting that was characteristic of much conflict.”
[And they killed most of these guys in three days at the Somme. What a waste.]
As such, advances in marksmanship, small unit tactics, PT, and bayonet fighting became its bread-and-butter, and was tested against some of the greatest, primal, and Predatory warrior societies on the face of the planet—always far from home, nine times out of ten far way from any kind of firm base or supply line (no re-stock of ammo!), and always numerically disadvantaged.
[Jeremy Back, in his Warfare in the 17th Century, mentions how because the musket ball, not deflected as easily in woodlands like the Amerindian arrow, even though the accuracy, rate of fire and even power was greater with many bows, revolutionized infantry tactics among the Indians, tactics which were then taught to the English and would help in the Peninsular War and would be resurrected by Junger in WWI as “fighting in Indian file,” making that frontier experience a perfect example of predatory and confrontational interplay.]
In these situations (many of which occurred before the invention of the breech-loading rifle), the PT and bayonet fighting became the deciding factor in tens of thousands of small tactical engagements mostly forgotten today by the world.
[Check out Egerton’s Like Lions They Fought on the Zulu War. The Washing of the Spears is a better operational history but Egerton focuses on the British Military Culture.]
Continued in Part 2
