The trouble with the technocrats’ social vision is that there is no creating going on; it is just a highly complex and predatory system for redistributing resources. Indeed it is anti innovation, just as it is anti freedom. But, in the wake of Putin’s break from the globalists, it might also be anti reality.

The Departure of a Faux Emperor

Happy Walpurgisnacht!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw7BP4SVYjE

"One’s life is a bullet that goes through screens. You hit your final screen, and you’re dead. What happens after, none of us know."

Jonathan Bowden (1962-2012)

Heute ist der 100. Todestag des rätselhaften Poeten und Terroristen Boris Sawinkow:

https://youtu.be/7mxjieqcxAE?si=9oHnPTAuGeVkJVof

"The bow (βιός) is called life (βίος), but its work is death."

Heraclitus

Wiedervorlage zum 80. Jahrestag des Kriegsendes:

https://sezession.de/62832/das-jahr-1945-im-film-1

Stefan George - Leo XIII. (aus: "Der siebente Ring", 1907)

118 Jahre nach George: Zu Feier des Tages sandte mir ein Freund ein Gedicht zu, das ihm die Muse am Bahnsteig einflüsterte.

Und weil es so schön ist, noch ein drittes Papstgedicht von Alexander Nitzberg.

Gedanken zum 8. Mai:

https://sezession.de/70223/hat-hoecke-recht-gedanken-zum-8-mai

A new essay (in English), discussing how Germany's 1945 defeat was portrayed in cinema at the time and in the decades since, and how this has affected different generations of Germans:

https://lichtmesz.substack.com/p/liberation-or-defeat-1945-in-film

The victors of 1945 in both East and West framed themselves as “liberators”, and this idea was implanted into the minds of the German people through American and Soviet “reeducation” programmes. Gradually, in a process that lasted generations, the Germans learned to see themselves through the eyes of the victors.

Liberation or Defeat? 1945 in Film (1)

The GDR, a communist country, annually celebrated the Great Victorious Soviet Union that freed the German people and the German workers from the tyranny of “Hitlerfascism”. At least, they did not claim that such a thing as “collective guilt” existed. In their portrayal, the German people were alright, only the “fascists” were bad.

Liberation or Defeat? 1945 in Film (1)

Lynch was the rare case of a true-blue avant-garde underground artist and filmmaker who managed to enter the mainstream without ever “selling out”. In fact, he changed our very notion of what is artistically possible within the mainstream.

David Lynch & the Metaphysical Miasma

This is a riveting read.

https://millennialwoes.substack.com/p/kathleen-and-colin

Many people are more interested in politics or theory than in autobiography. But Millennial Woes has produced something beyond that.

First, I should say that I read this over the course of almost two weeks, bit by bit. I just don’t have time to read much these days but I felt I had to finish it. Compellingly written.

It’s a tribute to his mother, but it’s more than that. It’s an articulate paean to a time and place now gone, as metonymized through someone he loved, now also gone. The familiar, the cosy, the native, that attachment to and feeling for a particular place that Tolkien so wonderfully captured—this permeates the whole essay.

That familiarity, that love of home, that “oikophilia” to use a term dear to myself, is the essence of nationalism.

You can learn more about what it is to be a nationalist by reading Woes’ tribute to his mother, than you can from a thousand political manifestoes.

There it was, the ominous word “liberation”. Now that it had been uttered, it could not be taken back again. Unlike in the DDR (GDR), where the German people had been liberated only from “Hitler fascists”, people in the BRD (FRG) started to believe that they had been liberated also from themselves, or at least from a very problematic and sinister part of their own nature.

Liberation or Defeat? 1945 in Film (1)

Caroline Sommerfeld, Co-Autorin von "Mit Linken leben", und ihr Ehemann Helmut Lethen dienten einer "Performance" auf den Wiener Festwochen als "Vorbild", an deren Ende die Neue Rechte die Alte Linke buchstäblich ausweidet und zu Wurst verarbeitet. Wer hier wirklich wenn verwurstet hat, untersuche ich in diesem Beitrag:

https://sezession.de/70226/verwurstung-sommerfeld-lethen

All of this will find an end through biology some day. The generations who actually lived through World War II have almost entirely disappeared, and the guilt-ridden post-war Boomers are now in their seventies and eighties. German schools are still trying to guilt-trip and brainwash children, but I don’t think making the Zoomers feel bad for the deeds of their great-grandparents whom they never knew will seriously work out.

Liberation or Defeat? 1945 in Film (1)

In which I discuss what makes a GDR state funded, ideologically tightly controlled communist film about the end of WWII in Germany a fascinating watch, including some thoughts about the unbelievably tragic fate of a man called Paul Sakowski.

https://lichtmesz.substack.com/p/liberation-or-defeat-2-konrad-wolfs