MAKE CLASSICS GREAT AGAIN

 

 

There is a piece of mine here at Counter Currents on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The introduction discusses the opinion of Donna Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, and her fears that white men – ‘the worst men on the internet’ – will be attracted to the classics and try to make them great again. As I say in the piece, there was never a time when the classics were not great. Ms Zuckerberg has confused the intellectual worth of something with its market value. I suppose it must run in the family.

Classical literature has been around in its extant entirety since the Renaissance. It hasn’t just popped up like Harry Potter or Star Wars. It requires a certain approach, being neither beach reading nor a genre requiring knowledge of philosophy. It is humanistic, Plato’s theology notwithstanding, and presumably this explains its popularity during and shaping of the Renaissance. Classical literature is also white.

It is axiomatic that anything tainted by whiteness must be chivvied out and either censored or cancelled entirely. Whiteness is feared by the Left and their ethnic tailcoat-hangers as Kryptonite is feared by Superman. Whites are success victims, responsible for Western supremacy for so long and also, by the same process, responsible for those who now wish that supremacy destroyed and replaced by a different hegemon, one whose likelihood of recreating or replacing civilization in the same way is slim.

What has led to our current Denaissance, this Age of Unreason, a Dark Enlightenment? It would be a bit precious to claim that we are careering down the highway to hell because we don’t read enough Cicero or Lucretius. That said, the classical civilisations were among the first to manifest as successful, and they left a (partial) record of that feat.

The internet – our Gutenberg moveable type press – offers what the BBC once claimed to provide: Information, education, and entertainment. Western governors would prefer you to use it for the latter, there being too much liberatory discourse out there in the virtual cosmos for their liking.

You can read yourself to a tolerable level of freedom in an increasingly oppressive world. And, if you happen to engage with classical literature – and indeed the whole treasure trove of white Western literature – you are in luck on a table where the odds are increasingly being stacked against you and your chance of liberty. There is nothing of the air of the (post-) modern about the literature of strong times, no cynicism about its philosophy (the school of the Cynics notwithstanding) but a sense of an ethno-intellectual brotherhood, one now forced underground where the shades are.

The collected works of Plato and Shakespeare are available as e-books for far less than the price, combined, that you would pay for a half of lager in an identikit bar in London. Have you any idea of the difficulty and expense of obtaining these volumes our grandfathers would have experienced?

So, the classics are waiting there for you, should you be intrigued. Escape from the modern, go back in time, make the classics great again.