Previously published as ‘Respect for The Enemy,’ with additional commentary

In this analysis of what pre modern ethics have been lost to modern man through the globalist filter that was installed in literature and academia after WWII, Jonathan Bowden gives a lecture on Robert E. Howard, discusses his major works, and then goes on to do an in depth review of Rogues in the House, which I have reviewed on this site ‘Eyes Burning In The Gloom’ earlier this year.

Bowden spends a lot of time on the oral nature of male bonds and on Howard's literary work as a preservation of traditional male culture that flourished until globalism and its attendant isms quenched the masculine spirit in the West. I love his quotes and his suppressed humor, such as his mention of Oliver Cromwell’s statement that, “I disembowel you for Christ’s love.”

Bowden makes a great point by citing the fact that the ethics that built America and were preserved in Howard’s fiction are now reviled by Americans, and that those ethics have proven universal among men where they remain to be practiced in prisons and militaries. He chooses his story quotes well from Rogues in the House, using Conan as an example of the functional ‘innate’ ethics of men ‘when the weapons are out,’ pointing out most pointedly that when Conan kills the ape man Thak he refuses to regard him as anything less than a man, in contrast to the modern liberal habit [reflected in the attitude of his coconspirators] of dehumanizing the enemy. For the reader interested in a metaphor for the American presidency Rogues in the House is perfect.

This is really more of a podcast than a video, with the camera fixed on a portrait of Howard the entire time, and serves as an excellent introduction to Robert E. Howard and his work.

At 18 minutes in, Bowden discusses the English dialect of Howard’s America and its origin in the 1611 King James Bible, which is why most black slaves were referred to as servants and not slaves, and why the reference to white servants in early America was in fact a term denoting slavery. For American English flowed from this single book, in which ancient terms for slave were translated as servant.

20 minutes in a discussion of Solomon Kane gets into Puritanism as a form of martial culture which is fascinating and informative. Bowden’s tangents should be given a close listen as he puts the writer into a political and social perspective, and especially in Howard’s case, as he discusses what Howard predicted, the great tides or war and the decadence of civilization, even as he paints a picture of a modern world barren of the heroic element of life Howard espoused.

Early on Bowden discusses Howard’s cyclic view of life as being similar to those espoused by Spengler, another figure of the early 20th Century, who is discussed by Bowden in the second link below. Spengler had a cosmological view of civilization as preceding in seasons, which is very similar to Howard’s barbarism versus civilization theory that underpinned so much of his fiction.