Reading from pages 316-359 of Myth of the 20th Century, the 1982 Black Kite Edition

We are taught that our dainty, distaff slaves were not given any concern until 1967 and that they are still in hairy chains. Rosenberg correctly notes that the split-tail fix was in before his time and makes some keen observations on how culture and identity can be effectively attacked most easily through the feminine. This was a long standing tradition among the Jesuits, an order of what he calls the “Hither Asiatic” corruption of Europe through Rome, which he so abhors.

“However, within these world spanning contrasts of races and souls of life there is another polarisation of peoples: the male and the female.”

I now realize what bothers me about Rosenberg, on this second reading: he was a liberal. He actually posits that women are more than or vessels of renewal. Well, it has been a good effort in the main.

“In times of external catastrophes and inner disintegration, however, feminist man joins with the emancipated woman to become the symbol of cultural decline and decay of the state.”

This is vastly true, and since Rosenberg was a liberal, he could not parse out the fact that the state always elevates the woman either as goddess or wife of the state, that the state is feminizing. He also misses the more obvious element in the feminization of men caused by external catastrophe and lionizes the cause in a previous chapter about how Germany was so strong because of the millions of men it sacrificed in the mud pit to the industrial God. Again, his liberalism and pie-in-the-sky worship of the state as a savior mechanism avoids the painfully obvious:

1. That the prime activity of the nation-state, as defined by the Peace of Westphalia, is both professional and conscript warfare on an industrial scale.

2. Industrial nation-state wars, guarantee that all or most of the most masculine men are turned into half-remembered sausage, resulting in a reduction of masculinity within the state during peacetime.

Every combat soldier will tell you that his best fellows died. Ancient warfare preserves the best and culls the weak. Modern warfare, by contrast, is entirely dysgenic.

“Woman is woman by virtue of a certain lack of capability.”

Lack of capability in certain fields of action is a fine domestic virtue, and is a balancing facet of polarized two-gender life, until feminization of the man sets in.

“Two of the greatest male acts of all time are called state and Marriage.”

This is true, but he fails to see that the barely 300 year old nation-state had already destroyed the conditions for marriage between man and woman and turned the concept of the state from the wedding of conquered tribes and princes to its conqueror to the wedding of the state as husband to every woman and increasingly transsexual and sterile male brides. The divorce of tribe and state, or clan and state, or race and state, and the nation-state’s rise as an abstract engine of war, its very design so directed in 1648, doomed the industrial construct to moral extinction. Only the most clownish macro-identity could be attached to the scaled up state. For all of their faults, ancient kingdoms and empires preserved identity, especially in the military sphere: Norman knights, Anglo-Saxon yeomen and Welsh knife men in the 100 Years War, for instance, brought a stronger identity to the battlefield than the French Knights and their rabble of peasant levies and mercenary crossbowmen. Thus industry fatally corrupts the nations-state by turning its focus continually away from culture and towards economy while preserving class duality and corrupting sex duality.

Rosenberg then misreads Sparta of ancient Hellas as “being devoid of any feminine influence,” so at this point can essentially be discounted as capable of assessing the Greeks.

Abstractly, he does well with the concepts of the Norns of the Teutons and the Moirai of the Hellenes, being forces of the submissive and vegetative feminine, compared to the more aggressive and animalistic masculine. The Moirai, being the spinners of fate on the loom of destiny could passively assign even the gods their doom.

In the vein of feminization, Rosenberg points out that the Arуan Kshatriya warriors who conquered Indian were eventually displaced as the top cast by the Brahmans or priests. Illuminating ancient China he describes how “the league of warriors was transformed into a society of learned men.” This is the common fate of Civilization, that the elders, who in a tribal setting merely advise those in their prime, are able to hold onto the levers of scaled power and make of men sissies by elevating those who talk above those who do. The psychopathic tenor of modern war is largely due to this feminization, with female heads of state 30% more likely to condone war and old men sitting at home more likely to send young men to war than would middle-aged men who must lead those young men in war. Although Achilles might appear the monster, he cared more for his men than Agamemnon. Rosenberg is here describing the passing of leadership to management with sorrow, and will, towards the end of his book, anoint a distant manager as national savior, a man who in thirteen years’ time would demand of a million young men that they stand and die against the advice of the leaders in the field.

It is a short leap from the idea that power devolving from men of action to men of position would prefigure the power of the masculine giving way to the feminine.

In any endeavor, the actions of men to render the human field of experience easier to negotiate, will encourage the holders of static power to eliminate those most vigorous actors and begin a moral culling of the social stage and eventually a dysgenic plunge into feminism.

His best line is:

“…the preaching of the insane idea of human equality.”

This insane idea is, in this reader’s eyes, laid most squarely at the feet of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who begin with the bald-faced lie that “All men are created equal.”

How can any viewer of sports or listener of music entertain the idea that we are all created equal?

It is my opinion that this truth is deflected and contained and caged by a focus on cults of celebrity worship in sports and entertainment, averting the naturally critical eye of the mob from obvious actuality into the pit of ritual fantasy.

Rosenberg’s criticism of American manhood was spot on:

“The American man still ruthlessly forces his will upon society. The ceaseless hunt for the dollar almost exclusively governs his existence. His culture is represented by sport and technology.”

So there Rosenberg tolls his hope’s own death knell. The coming war initiated by his savior would be won with technology. The resulting technological world of the Cultural Post-Apocalypse, would then contain and castrate the American war dog with his addiction to diversion, epitomized by sport spectatorship and realized through the very technology [including monetary currency] which he worships.

Rosenberg then gets mired in eight pages of metaphysic musings as he loses his bearings in the utopian fantasy that the super-scaled social tool of the nation-state that erased or corrupted hundreds of cultures and races, might be retooled as the perfect engine to support and nurture that which it was designed to destroy.

Any Tennessee hillbilly knows that you don’t place your chickens under the care of a fox. Yet the greatest thinkers, as illustrated by Rosenberg’s text, and his plight, plummet most completely into the delusional night.