It has been almost 12 years since the release of one of the highest grossing films of all time – that being 2009’s Avatar, James Cameron’s sci-fi epic.
There has been a running meme for the last couple years that despite the first Avatar film’s wild success in the box office, it isn’t a memorable film. The characters aren’t memorable, the storyline is a copy and paste of 1990’s Dances With Wolves, and that its success hinged on the technological breakthroughs in CGI and 3D film that were a staple feature of the film.
In retrospect, the running joke isn’t far from the truth. Avatar is a film that hasn’t held up for casual viewers on its own merits, but rather through nostalgia of a time that has long passed – a time before the insanity of the last 10 years in the social and political scene, where most people were more concerned about the film’s core messages; that being a deeply environmentalist film, a critique on colonialism, and the insatiable appetite of human discovery wreaking havoc on innocent and more noble creatures.
While there are aspects of the original film I enjoy, such as the detailed world-building that Cameron is known for, and the cutting edge visual effects, it still failed to resonate with me the way it has with many other viewers.
The preaching was exhausting when I watched it the first time in 2009, and it is still exhausting today. I get it. Humans are bad, save the trees, the military industrial complex is so evil, etc, etc.While the second installment Avatar: The Way of Water certainly delves a little deeper into the lore and ups the stakes for the protagonists, it still carries the same bare-bones environmentalist sermon that has become all too exhausting in this day and age, especially when we have Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil cronies ruining fine art and causing general inconvenience to all those around them in our current reality.
This is an excerpt from “Provenance”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
-
John Frémont and a Banner for a Forgotten America
The scene in The Patriot where Mel Gibson rides across the early dawn horizon bearing the Betsy Ross flag has always stirred a latent fervour in me. I never felt the same patriotic twitch looking at the modern, 50 star flag. That flag flies in front of government buildings of a state that no longer stands for me.
In the Covid-era, we experienced a de facto coup of long brewing forces of tyranny. As we enter its aftermath, a true and full-hearted Americanism is the supreme counter culture. It is easy and tempting in times of such horrendous decay to see America as a corrupt empire, but behind its aggressive export of proto-Luciferian global progressivism is a nation of forgotten men with a great lust for life.
The true America is a nation of explorers. Exploration is the zenith of vibrant and vital youth. Curiosity and drive for mastery of self and surroundings bred a stock of men seeking God, wisdom and adventure. As the 50 star banner and the government it represents becomes more hostile to these values and the men who inspired them, I submit that our countercultural Americanism should rally behind the banner of a man who embodied our spirit with great zeal – John C. Frémont.
The Frémont flag looks much like the traditional American flag. In the place of stars, the blue field seats an eagle holding an olive branch in one claw and a fistful of arrows in the other. Frémont carried it on his expeditions so as not to provoke war in Indian territory while identifying himself as an American. The symbolism was clear; you can have peace or war with America, but regardless of your choice, it will be on our terms.
To be entirely honest, that message is one for another time, in which our Republic was very different. The intended meaning of the flag is less interesting than its namesake. John Frémont was one of the greatest Americans to ever live, and an exemplar of the spirit we must thrust upon this modern age. Frankly, it doesn’t hurt that it looks cool as hell.
An explorer, commander and politician, Frémont was born with nothing and never accepted a fatalistic life of destitution. He gained marginal status as a military officer and brilliant mathematician. After courting the daughter of politician Thomas Hart Benton, he was pushed away by the senator for his low status. Indignant, the young Frémont ran away with his beloved and eloped.
The senator’s outrage subsided in time and he sponsored the young couple’s expeditions into the untamed west. Frémont would lead five major expeditions, plant the American flag on the peaks of the Rockies, create maps and literature illuminating the romantic wonder of our frontier and inspire thousands to brave the Oregon Trail and settle new territory.
Frémont’s adventures as an explorer were put on pause by the Mexican-American War. The adventurer commanded the conquest of California and was appointed the military governor. He was such a beloved leader that when he was displaced as governor, he staged a mutiny with the fervent support of his regiment. He was court-martialed for the rebellion and stripped of rank. In recognition for his indispensable service in the conquest of the west, he was granted a presidential pardon.
The adventurer’s spirit was never broken. After the Mexican-American War he would find himself commanding new armies, governing new territories and taking on several other new ventures. While he died destitute, he fought at every point to thrust his vision upon the world. He was unwavering with power that was granted to him and he never ceased to chase adventure. The circumstances of his birth were never allowed to be a limiting factor in his drive for an unbridled and wildly whole life. He never pitied himself nor despaired of his misgivings, he was ever relentlessly free.
Frémont was a child born in sin. His mother, seed of the southern gentry, was arranged at the age of sixteen to be married to a wealthy landowner in his late sixties. She began an affair with her tutor, an educated man of French extraction. They conceived John and ran away together, living in poverty. Frémont was born of passion. A forbidden passion, the very nature of his conception was filled with that fiery force of life that possesses us in moments of ecstasy. His birth was by the work of Eros and it baptised him with a great fire and zeal for life that he carried through him into his final days.
This fire of passionate, ecstatic life is inseparable from the American spirit. We are of the great stock of the mighty Englishmen who created an empire upon which the sun never set – though we are a branch of that family filtered by possessing the daring to board wooden ships and cross the most treacherous of oceans, to a land of hostile natives and untamed lands. We arrived upon a continent with nothing but what we could carry and we made it our own. Nothing we have achieved would have been possible without this fiery spirit of passion for life! Frémont is among the greatest of Americans and a symbol of the American spirit manifest in its most uncompromising, violent and arrogant excellence. Under his banner, I see an America made new, cleansed by its own zealous, willful, vicious, wholly alive spirit.
Let us rally behind Frémont’s banner. It is now our time to embrace a heroic spirit of adventure, to be unwavering in our use of power. In times of national crisis, we cannot bind ourselves to convention. The great men of our era must be unforgiving and wield the power that they can acquire with absolute strength. The system is against you. You will face setbacks, perhaps situating you at square one. Embrace the spirit of adventure, and wander on.
-
Britain’s Brown Scare
A spectre is haunting Britain – the spectre of fascism. At least, that’s what we’re told.
In Technology, Communism, and The Brown Scare, Curtis Yarvin defines The Brown Scare as: “America’s ginormous, never-ending, profoundly insane witch-hunt for fascists under the bed.”
However, it is blatantly apparent that this witch-hunt is not inherently American in character. Indeed, such paranoia greatly afflicts the wider Western world, and certainly the United Kingdom.
This month, Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London said: “Those that have legitimate objections [to ULEZ expansion] are joining hands with a far-right group.”
“Let’s call a spade a spade, some of those outside are part of the far-right, some are Covid-deniers, some are vaccine deniers, some are Tories.”
Currently, ULEZ (Ultra-Low Emission Zone) covers all areas within the North and South Circular Roads, but is set to expand across all London boroughs from 29th August 2023.
Vehicles that are not ULEZ-compliant will receive a daily charge of £12.50. This means that cars, motorcycles, vans, and specialist vehicles up to and including 3.5 tonnes, and minibuses up to and including 5 tonnes, will be charged.
Exemptions will be given to lorries, vans, or specialist heavy vehicles over 3.5 tonnes, and buses, minibuses, and coaches over 5 tonnes, which will continue to pay the Low Emissions Charge (LEZ) charge.
Unsurprisingly, there have been a range of objections to ULEZ expansion.
Many commuters cannot afford the charge and fear it will be detrimental to small businesses. Others are angered that no such proposal was included in Khan’s manifesto, and that the results of the ensuing consultation on ULEZ expansion have been ignored.
Some object to the planned expansion of surveillance that is required to make the policy workable, whilst others argue ULEZ is unworkable altogether and will not help lower carbon emissions.
On the whole, none of these positions are conspiratorial. If anything, they’re all pretty straightforward expressions of democratic and economic concern.
Nevertheless, all these objections are irrelevant because, at least according to Khan, opposition to an arbitrary proposal that will destroy livelihoods, expand mass-surveillance, and do little to help the environment is, allegedly, tainted by vague “FAR RIGHT” (!!!) tendencies.
As many have surmised, this is nothing more than a political tactic. Khan hopes that by condemning objections as “FAR RIGHT” (!!!), the Anti-ULEZ campaign will divert time, energy, and resources away from protesting his insane and popular policy, and towards expunging their association with the unnamed, unsubstantiated, likely fictitious and/or irrelevant “far-right group”.
Whilst this is true, it misses a more straightforward point, albeit one that is harder to bring up: just because something is “FAR RIGHT” (!!!) doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Why would it matter if ULEZ is opposed by the “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!)? As a policy, ULEZ is either good or bad depending on its intent, feasibility, and results and should be deliberated and implemented accordingly.
Unfortunately, the Sensible People, despite their obsession with Forensics, care very little for detail. Totally PR-brained, the ‘connotations’ of one’s words carry infinitely more weight than what one actually says.
As such, they are not only inclined to pedantic language-policing, they assess politics by every metric other than policy.
Take the Wakefield controversy as another example. A group of four children, and their families, received death threats after word got out that one had smudged a copy of the Quran, the Islamic holy text, as well as a suspension from their school, despite the headmaster’s declaration that there was: “no malicious intent by those involved.”
Consequently, the boy’s mother was dragged into the local mosque – by the police, no less – in what can only be described as Modern Britain’s equivalent of a Struggle Session.
Teary, veiled, and evidently shaken, she profusely apologised for the behaviour of her son, who is autistic, stating: “[he] doesn’t always realise what is appropriate and what is not appropriate.”
As we all know by now, in Modern Britain, the role of the police isn’t to prevent the type of crime that led to its founding. Recent data, published in The Times, shows that serious crimes, including but not limited to: harassment, assault, stalking, and criminal damage are virtually legal, and that charge rates have plummeted to an all-time low since 2015.
Rather, the purpose of the British police is to calm the ungrounded fears of society’s most unhinged members, those who believe that Britain’s traditional identity, and the preservation of it, inherently predisposes people to THE FAR-RIGHT (!!!), and that there is an omnipresent conspiracy to turn Britain into the least ethnically homogenous ethnostate in history.
As such, the permanent policy of the contemporary British state is not protection, but social engineering; it is one of never-ending, domestic, ‘de-Nazification’.
In fact, this establishment-sanctioned whataboutism, perpetually pointing the finger at the FAR-RIGHT (!!!), is so pervasive that not even national travesties can escape its grasp.
Charlie Peters’ recent documentary, aired by GBNews in February, outlined the scandalous racially charged abduction, trafficking, and rape of thousands of young white girls by south Asian men; a practice which took place across the UK over multiple decades.
Despite the eye-watering amount of completely preventable suffering caused by the scandal, it was clear that such evil was continuously swept under-the-rug by British police; specifically, for the sake of “political correctness” and “community cohesion.”
Like the police, whose complicity in suppressing public knowledge of the scandal has not resulted in a single firing, left-leaning and liberal-leaning individuals, led by a pseudo-academic, are calling for the censorship of Peters’ documentary, believing it emboldens the far-right, stokes racial stereotypes, and promotes “hate” and “division”.
Needless to say, but worth saying nonetheless, when 1 in 73 Muslim males in Rotherham are involved with paedophilic rape gangs, there is no community cohesion to fuss over – it simply doesn’t exist.
This is perhaps the defining feature of Britain’s Brown Scare: it prevents people from understanding what is right in front of them, whether it’s the condition of one’s community or one’s own material interests.
The Manchester Arena bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack and the first suicide bombing in the UK since the 7/7 bombings, conducted by a foreign-trained Islamist that came to Britain as a refugee, has been retroactively rewired to make the bombing about the threat of FAR-RIGHT (!!!), as opposed to Islamist, radicalisation.
No doubt about it, if a civilisation-ending meteor were to crash into Earth, Britain’s pseudo-intelligentsia, the Waterstones Intellectuals that they are, would use their last moments to make pseudo-profound remarks about how such a travesty would ‘embolden’ THE FAR-RIGHT (!!!).
All this said, it’s clear that this delusional preoccupation with an impending fascist threat isn’t a recently-concocted political tactic. Rather, it is at the centre of the West’s post-war secular theocracy. As such, we can expect The Brown Scare to afflict wider culture, more so than mainstream politics, and indeed it does.
Whether it’s Coronation Street’s goofy storyline about a white working-class kid joining the “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!) after he’s replaced by a refugee at his old school, or the upcoming 60th anniversary special of Doctor Who, which is set to feature an antagonistic “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!) party, aestheticized as a mishmash of every “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!) development as of recent: GBNews, Patriotic Alternative, MAGA, Brexit Party, Vote Leave, The Conservative Party, you name it.
Drag Queen Story Time, which involves an adult-entertainer talking to infants about sexual exploration, gender identity, and… other things – Y’know, good family-friendly stuff – was hosted at Tate Britain, inciting sizeable protests and counter-protests. How did the media portray this debacle? As a far-right attack on human rights, but ultimately a triumph for liberal society.
Erstwhile, Prevent, the government’s own anti-terror programme, has flagged various films and TV series as FAR-RIGHT (!!!) material, including but certainly not limited to: Zulu, The Dam Busters, Yes Minister, Civilisation, The Thick of It, and (perhaps most ridiculously of all) Great British Railway Journeys.
In addition, the list features authors ranging from Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to Thomas Carlyle and Edmund Burke. Tolkien, Lewis, Conrad, Huxley, even Orwell, make a debut on an official red-flag list used and taken seriously by the British state.
Even the works of our national poet, Shakespeare, were listed as potentially dangerous material. Considering this, it’s no wonder they are being adapted to conform to our post-war neurosis, with a recent showing of The Merchant of Venice being about fighting Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts.
At this point, one cannot pretend that the scare is just a fringe, confined conspiracy – it’s a widespread, mainstream conspiracy theory that masses of people, “low-status” or “high-status”, have bought into wholesale.
Things have gotten so bad that the BBC, not exactly in good books of “THE FAR RIGHT” (!!!), or the right in general for that matter, had to release a press statement telling people stating that, despite rumours of a “sixth episode” being pulled to avoid “right-wing backlash”, no such episode of Sir David Attenborough’s new series, Wild Isles, exists or has ever existed.
Given this daily bombardment of delusion, there is a tendency to push back; to demonstrate a more measured approach to the topic of fascism, usually echoing, or making direct reference to, Orwell’s words in What is Fascism?:
“The word is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
This tendency is completely understandable. When Reform UK and left-wing individuals with mildly gender-critical views are listed alongside fringe and powerless Neo-Nazi weirdos as threats to society, one gets the impression that those seeking to affirm the veracity of UK-wide fascist collusion are, to say the least, scraping the barrel.
However, this misses the overarching point: according to those afflicted by Britain’s Brown Scare, nothing is in possession of any inherent quality.
From raiding wallets to raping, bombing, and harassing children, from blacklisting timeless literature to human trafficking, things most people would consider egregious, only become worthy of condemnation depending on their imagined relative proximity to Adolf Hitler, or their hypothesised potential to ‘embolden’ the “FAR RIGHT” (!!!).
Most recently, of course, Gary Lineker has been suspended from the BBC after he compared the government’s recent attempts to crack down on illegal channel crossings to 1930s Germany.
Whether one thinks Lineker deserves to be suspended or not is beside the point: Britain’s Brown Scare is believed by those in positions of considerable influence, not just nutty FBPE parochialists.
With a general election set to take place next year, and a Labour victory all but officialised, we can expect Britain’s Brown Scare to get worse, especially when Modern Britain’s founder, Tony Blair, is effectively shadow-leading the party.
Besides, how are Labour meant to remain in power if they don’t satiate the delusions of those that support them to save the NHS and immigrants from Tory Brexit Fascist UKIP Stalinism?
However, none of this means Labour is popular. The British people would like nothing more than a new party, with one-quarter of Brits saying they would support a party led by Farage, which is prepared to lower immigration, bring economic stability and growth, and tackle crimes that people actually care about.
It goes without saying that such a party, unlike the current Conservative Party, should be willing to protect right-minded citizens from the detached and paranoid fury which afflicts much of the populus, and threatens what remains of our livelihoods and liberties.
Many things can happen in politics, but one thing is certain: as long as the Brown Scare continues to spread, speaking the truth will remain a revolutionary act, and those with an outlook barely distinct from David Icke will be considered Sensible Centrists by everyone in a position of power.
-
The Internet as Mob Rule
The ancient Greeks believed political constitutions repeated in a pattern called kyklos (“cycle). The idea first occurs in Plato’s Republic, gets elaborated by Aristotle in his Politics, then reaches its apogee in Polybius’ Histories.
Unlike modern theorists of cyclical rise and fall of civilisations, such as Oswald Spengler, the kyklos doesn’t have a zenith or golden age. It’s rather a waxing and waning of stable society types, followed by unstable society types. What characterises a stable society is that the ruling class and citizens both strive towards the common good, conceived as the objective purpose of human beings, which results in their happiness and flourishing. Society becomes unstable when its members stop having the common good in mind, and instead strive after their selfish private interests to the detriment of other citizens.
Kyklos then presupposes several things. First, it isn’t culture specific. Its objectivist outlook means it applies equally to all political human groups, always and everywhere. Second, the engine that drives history is human virtue and vice, and not economics, class struggle, or war. These are secondary factors resulting from the characters of human beings. Healthy economies, contented class structures, well-won peace and just wars all result from virtuous people. Third, the stable government types are various. Kyklos defends neither monarchy, nor aristocracy nor a republic exclusively. It isn’t a Whiggish or utopian theory of history, that says if and only if a certain group are in power all will be well. Rather it claims that whatever group are in power, they must be virtuous to rule well. Vice immediately leads to disorder.
Simplifying in the extreme, the kyklos model runs as follows. Rule can be by one person, several, or many. When these rule for the common good, they are just, and are called monarchy, aristocracy and republican respectively. When they rule for their private interest to the detriment of society, they are tyranny, oligarchy and democratic respectively.
It’s important to note that by “democracy” I don’t mean here a system of popular representation or voting. The virtuous form of this is called a polity or republic in classical thinking. In the latter, bonds of authority and specialised expertise remain. In the former, absolutely everything is sacrificed for the sake of equality of the masses (see below).
A good monarch rules with benevolence. His successors are unjust and become tyrants. The nobility removes them, creating an aristocratic state. These in turn degenerate into oligarchs as they grow decadent and self-interested and begin to oppress the poor. The people rise up and remove them, creating a republic where all citizens have a say. But the mass of citizens loses the bonds of political friendship, grows selfish, and the republic becomes a democracy. Democracy eventually deteriorates to a point where all bonds between people are gone, and we have a mob rule. The mob annihilates itself through infighting. One virtuous man seizes power, and we return to monarchy. The cycle begins anew.
With these preliminaries out of the way, I come to my point. I believe the present age we are forced to live through is highly ochlocratic. Of course, it’s not a pure mob rule since we have non-mob elites and a rule of law. I also think our age is oligarchic (dominated by elites swollen with pleasure). But it’s more ochlocratic, I contend, than it was a few centuries ago, and enough that mob behaviour characterises it.
The defining trait of unstable regimes, as I’ve just said, is vice. However, vice doesn’t just happen spontaneously as though people awake one morning deciding to be selfish, spoilt, and cruel. Evil people, as Aristotle notes, often believe they are good. Their fault is that they’ve mistaken something which is bad for what is good. For example, the man who hates the poor falsely believes money is the same as goodness. The man who mocks monks and sages for their abstinence believes all and only pleasure is good. Even when we know what is good for us, ingrained habit or upbringing might make the illusion of goodness overpowering. A lifetime of cake-gorging can condition one to the point it overrides the knowledge that sugar is bad for health.
I think the Spanish thinker Jose Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1930) unwittingly echoes Plato when he points to the faults of the democratic “mass-man” of the twentieth century. All human societies need specialised minorities to function. The more demanding and specialised a field, the more those who do it will be a minority of the population. Further, all societies, to function, need sources of authority which aren’t decided by a majority vote. Modern democracy has created the illusion that the unspecialised mass is sovereign and has no reliance on anybody. It has achieved this mirage through artificial liberation: creating unnatural freedoms through constant government intervention and technocratic engineering.
This in turn has supported vices out of unthinking habit. The mass-man accepts his lack of qualifications and is proud of this absence. He isn’t one deluded about his knowledge. Quite the opposite. The mass-man is someone who openly declares he knows nothing but demands to be listened to anyway because he’s a member of the sacred demos. In short, according to Ortega y Gasset, the ideology of the mass-man is: “I’m ordinary and ignorant, and so I have more of a say than those who are specialised and learned.”
The internet is a democratic medium par excellence. This isn’t to say that its members are all egalitarian and individualist, rather, its very construction assumes egalitarian and individualist ideas, and these force themselves onto its users whether they be willing or not.
Here we can extend the criticisms that Neil Postman makes at television in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) to the web. On the internet, all information is available to everyone. Anyone can create it, and anyone can opine on it. The medium doesn’t distinguish for quality, so the greatest products of human civilisation sit alongside the basest, on the same shelf. There are no filters online for expertise or experience, indeed, any attempts to create such filters are decried as “gatekeeping”. As a result, the internet has no difficulty settings (to use a metaphor). Getting through the easier levels isn’t mandatory to reach the harder ones. You can skip ahead, so to speak, and mingle with the pros as their peer.
Someone might object here that I’m exaggerating, since online communities monitor themselves all the time. I can indeed post my amateur opinions onto an internet space for astrophysicists, but these will mock and exclude me once I become a nuisance. However, this isn’t an answer. The internet is built on the assumption of mass wisdom, and the only way to enforce hierarchies of value on it is by banding a mob together. The space around remains anarchic. Yes, there are communities of wise people online, but these exist in an ocean of communities of fools. The medium presents them all as equally valuable. Which communities grow powerful still depends on the wishes of the mass.
When the internet produces a rare fruit of quality, this is because by sheer accident, the wishes of the mass have corresponded to reality. It isn’t an in-built feature.
The result is that the internet functions like a classic mob regimen or ochlocracy. The medium has no sensitivity to quality, but rather responds to will, provided enough people are behind it. Those who wield influence online do so because the mob will has selected them. They are our modern versions of Plato’s Athenian demagogues, or rabble-rousers of the French Revolution. A mass of ignorant and desperate people swirls around equally ignorant and desperate demagogues who promise them whatever they want. Demagogues rise and fall as the mob is first enamoured then bored of them. As the internet has grown to encompass our whole lives, this ochlocracy has spilt out into the real world.
In this space, truth entirely drops out. It’s a common fault of the ignorant to confuse desire with truth since desires are often hotly felt and what is very vivid seems real. Our egalitarian internet machine therefore is wont to magnify desires rather than realities. And because it magnifies desires, these ever more get confused with reality, until mob wishes would replace the common good of society. I believe a good example of this is how the online demagogue-mob relationship works. When internet personalities, especially political and social influencers, fall from grace, it’s usually because their followers realise they can no longer get what they want out of them (seldom do demagogue and mob cordially separate because each has become wiser). The power lies with the followers and not with their purported leader.
Which brings me back to kyklos. A classic Greek political cycle resets when a virtuous individual takes the reigns from the mob and establishes a monarchy. He recreates justice through his personal goodness. This was more likely, I think, in ancient societies where religion, community and family were stronger, and so the pool of virtuous people never entirely depleted. If our ochlocratic internet is indeed a stage in a kyklos (or a component of an ochlocratic stage), and it ends, I think it will end with one demagogic idiocy imposing itself on the others by force.
A population conditioned by the internet to think mass-appeal as equivalent to truth will readily accept a technocratic whip provided it claims to issue from the general will. Which idiocy gains supremacy is a matter of which can capture the greater part of the mass in the least time, to form a generation in its own image. This is why I don’t think the current trend of the internet becoming more regulated and censored is good. The regulators and censors come from the same debased crop as those they regulate and censor.
Enjoying The Mallard? Consider subscribing to our monthly magazine.
