Ethno-Nationalism Vs Civic Nationalism (7-9-18)

I moderate this debate:

MP3.

From MSU:

Ethnic nationalism

1. Nationhood is defined by language, religion, customs & traditions

2. According to ethnic nationalists,

–it is not the state that creates the nation but

the nation that creates the state

–The glue that holds people together is

–Not shared political rights

–but pre-existing ethnic characteristics

3. European ethnic nationalism

is exemplified by Germany’s reaction to Napoleon’s invasion in 1806

–And Germany’s “Romantic” reaction against

the French ideal of the nation-state

4. The German ideal of ethnic nationalism appealed to the peoples

of 19th century Europe who were under imperial domination

–Poles & Baltic peoples under the Russian Empire

–Serbs under Turkish rule (Ottoman Empire)

–Croats under the Habsburgs (Austro-Hungarian Empire)

Posted in Nationalism | Comments Off on Ethno-Nationalism Vs Civic Nationalism (7-9-18)

Trump’s Supreme Court Pick

MP3.

* Carl Cameron’s suppressed four-part series on Israel & 9/11.

* Wikipedia: “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (commonly known as the “Clean Break” report) is a policy document that was prepared in 1996 by a study group led by Richard Perle for Benjamin Netanyahu, the then Prime Minister of Israel.[1] The report explained a new approach to solving Israel’s security problems in the Middle East with an emphasis on “Western values.” It has since been criticized for advocating an aggressive new policy including the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and the containment of Syria by engaging in proxy warfare and highlighting its possession of “weapons of mass destruction”. Certain parts of the policies set forth in the paper were rejected by Netanyahu.”

* Edward J. Epstein: Fictoid #9: Plastic Knives and Box Cutters

* Infowars: MASS EXODUS FROM THE CHURCH: THE PERCENTAGE OF YOUNG ADULTS WITH NO RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION HAS NEARLY QUADRUPLED SINCE 1986

With each passing year, the percentage of Americans that claim no religious affiliation is growing, and this trend is especially pronounced among our young people.

* Tomi Lahren tweets: End of the day I don’t think government legislates morality well. If you do, great. I’m not dumb or uneducated because I don’t see the world like you do. So go ahead and reduce me to a “pretty girl who just says things.” That cheap dig says more about your character than mine.

* Jared Taylor wrote in late 2001:

On September 11, President George W. Bush explained to us on national television that “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.” Two days later, he spoke of terrorists who “hate our values” and “hate what America stands for.” The next day, at the National Cathedral, he said, “They have attacked America, because we are freedom’s home and defender.” If that were indeed what motivated the men who flew airplanes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, there would be reason for the huge military operation President Bush now tells us we need in order to “whip terrorism.”

But what the president said about the attacks is not just nonsense; it is dangerous nonsense. If our country believes him, and we go to war against Islamic fundamentalism, we will succeed only in adding millions more to the millions who already hate us, and some of them will launch yet more attacks on us, perhaps even worse than the ones we have just suffered.

Does President Bush really imagine Osama bin Laden saying to his men: “Those Americans are just too damn free; they’ve got too much opportunity. Let’s kill as many as we can”? The idea is absurd. Islamic militants have a grudge against us because of our attacks on Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, and the Sudan. But the main reason they hate us and want to kill us is that we support Israel. Can anyone deny that if we were not Israel’s enthusiastic backer those thousands of Americans would still be alive? It is no coincidence that the two nations against which suicide attacks are now launched are the two nations out of 160 that walked out together from the Durban racism conference in defense of Israel. To Muslim fundamentalists we and Israel are one and the same, and we have given them ample reason to think so.

Fundamentalists dislike us for what we are, but they hate us and kill us for what we do. They despise our loose sexual standards, and many of them have not forgotten the Crusades, but this does not make them mad enough to kill us. They kill us because we support and finance a country they see as having been illegitimately carved out of the very flesh of their Islamic kinsmen. With so much at stake, it is vital that we not be confused about what motivates the terror we plan to combat.

If there really were something about the essential nature of the United States that made people try to kill us, the president’s plans would be justified. Congress would be right to appropriate an emergency $20 billion for a war against Islamic terrorism. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz would be right to promise, as he did on September 13, a “sustained and broad” campaign on the scale of the Gulf War. The Senate would be right to authorize the president, as it did on September 14, to use “necessary and appropriate force” to retaliate.

But that analysis is wrong, and acting on it will bring calamity. The real question is: Why have we so obviously chosen sides in a bitter, decades-long fight in the Middle East? Is Israel so clearly in the right that we should risk the hatred of half the world in order to support it? With the risks so great, we should understand what we are doing with perfect clarity. If we go to war, it will not be because we are the land of freedom and opportunity, but because we are the best friend and benefactor of Israel. Should we go to war for Israel? Should we spend $20 billion to kill Muslims, and thereby expose our cities to inevitable reprisal for the sake of Israel? There had better be convincing answers to those questions, but no one is even asking them.

Americans are prepared to kill and die for America; they will think twice about killing and dying for Israel. Surely, it is because he dares not say thousands of Americans have just died because of Israel that President Bush invents preposterous motives for the men who killed them.

But even if Americans were prepared to fight for Israel, a war to “whip terrorism” will only whip up terrorism. Israel has responded with great force to terror attacks, and the fury that provokes among Palestinians leads only to more terror. What we are planning will have the same effect, except that the terror will be directed at us.

Of course, there is a way Israel could end all Palestinian terror attacks. It need only act on the principle President Bush announced on September 11: to make “no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” By that terrible logic, Israel should exterminate every Palestinian — it has the means to do that. By that logic we should exterminate every Iraqi, Afghani, Yemeni, and Iranian — we have the means to do that, too. Of course, we would then have to exterminate all Muslims, since by then all would be potential terrorists.

If we fight Israel’s enemies, the United States will become like Israel: a garrison state and battleground. Our leaders are already warning us that our safety will henceforth require more inspections, restrictions, and intrusions. There will be worse. The latest series of revenge killings in the Middle East has finally driven some of Israel’s own Arab citizens to violence. Is it out of the question to suspect that if we launch our own jihad against terrorism, we may eventually drive some of our 7 million Muslim citizens to violence against us?

By all means, let us find and even kill the people who helped carry out these terrible acts of terror against us. But it is madness to invent false motives for them, to pretend we have done nothing to provoke them, and to launch a war for Israel that will only give yet more millions reasons to hate us. If that is our response to terror we will only ensure for ourselves yet more terror, yet more smoldering ruins and shattered lives.

Posted in Alt Right, Israel, Jews | Comments Off on Trump’s Supreme Court Pick

Z-Man Interview: The Haunting Of Western Civilization (7-8-18)

I first encountered Z-Man in the comments section of Steve Sailer’s blog. Z-Man has been blogging for five years. He has a right-wing commonsense approach a few steps beyond conservatism. He appeared on the Daily Shoah May 18.

MP3.

Z-Man blogs July 8:

A couple of years ago, John Derbyshire, in one of his podcasts, talked about the sexual aspect of what ails the West. He referenced this comment to Steve Sailer, in one of Sailer’s blog posts. No doubt others have noted that women in the West seem to be the driving force behind things like immigration. The angle is always that the women are ascendant, because the men have grown soft. As Derb talked about in that podcast, the girls are inviting in the swarthy foreigners, because they are dissatisfied with their men.

That is appealing to men, especially older men, as older men are always sure that the younger generation is soft. When I was a boy, my grandfather would say, “In my day it was iron men and wooden ships. Now, it is iron ships and wooden men.” I’m an old man, but not so old that my grandfather lived in the age of sail. It was just his way of saying that his generation was tough, while the younger generation was soft. The thing is though, this assumes that only men have changed, while women are just responding to this change.

Maybe a better way of thinking about the sexual aspect of our cultural crisis is that both men and women are haunted by different specters. For instance, our women are growing increasingly deranged, not because men are wimps, but because the traditional sex roles no longer exist. This leaves them as free radicals, with the wacky fads out of feminism and gender studies, orbiting them like unpaired electrons. Put a different way, women are like bees without a hive. Without the normal social stimulants, they become erratic.

Here’s a good example. This women is not satisfied being an angry lesbian. She has been a public nuisance for a long time, ranting and raving about homosexual causes. Self-identified lesbians are 1.3% of the population, according to the CDC. That’s a small club, but not select enough, so she is now claiming her son is transgender, which is not even a real thing. Like so many of our women, this woman is in a race to the most bizarre and deranged position imaginable. It’s the need for attention, applied to inappropriate things.

The male side of this coin features a nostalgia for a lost future. It is a form of romanticism, where men imagine a past that led to a different present. All of those decisions by prior generations, have led to a present where there is no point to being man, because there is no role for being a man. The only place where men are needed is the military, but even there, the multicultural nags are working to ruin things. It’s not a longing for the past, but a longing for a different past that resulted in a more fulfilling and meaningful present.

If you look at the various sub-groups within the Dissident Right, they are almost exclusively male. The alt-right certainly has a strong romantic streak. Their embrace of the fascist aesthetic was always based on an imaginary version of history. The PUA guys go the other way, embracing a cynical and callous view of women as nothing more than a game to be won. It is an absurd version of the alpha male. Even guys into alt-lite stuff like Patriot Prayer or the Proud Boys are trying to create a space for men to be men.

The result of all this is men and women are rocketing off in different directions, seeking something that fills the void left by traditional sex roles. The trouble is, the current culture views traditional sex roles as toxic. That not only directs the search for biological fulfillment toward the wrong answers, it makes the right answer the polar opposite of what is acceptable. The result of this is blue-haired feminists screaming into the teeth of reality and the cartoonish primal scream of the Bronze Age Mindset.

Z-Man writes May 19, 2018:

On Friday. I went into the lair of the most vile, racist hate filled monsters to ever crawl this earth. That would be The Daily Shoah. When you get around these people, what’s most disconcerting is that they are genuinely nice and honest. Our rulers put so much energy into demonizing dissenters, it is easy to forget that even the most fringe partisans are just decent people with different ideas about the world. Usually, the ideas that come to shape the future start out on the fringe, so it worth engaging with them.

As far as the show itself, it was fun. Mike and Sven are very nice people and extremely generous with guests they have on their show. Unlike the mass media, they don’t see their guests as furniture they can abuse for the amusement of the braying mules in the audience. My only regret is not having used my podcasting setup to do the show. I used my laptop because I could not get Skype working on the other machine. Skype is crappy software and on my laptop the sound quality is terrible, but it came out good enough.

I got a bunch of responses via e-mail. All of them fall into a number of categories. One group wondered why I would go on a show run by anti-Semites, given that I am not an anti-Semite. My view is antisemitism is just an opinion, with the same moral currency as tastes in ice cream. Here’s how I like to explain it. Imagine you move to a new town and learn that one new neighbor is an anti-Semite. Then you learn that another neighbor is a Methamphetamine cooker. Only a liar or a lunatic cares more about the anti-Semite.

More important, the open exchange of ideas and opinions is a base line requirement for a civilized white society. Like any marketplace, the marketplace of ideas does not always produce optimum results. That’s an argument against democracy, not a reason to suppress heretical opinion. In time, bad ideas fail while good ideas eventually succeed, which is the foundation of popular government. That means engaging all comers, as long as they are honest and willing to debate in good faith. It can also be a lot of fun.

Another category of response was to ask why I don’t do more of these things. One main reason is time. My day job, life, the blog and the podcast fill up the dance card. I’m also not a fan of the “blood sports” model that is most popular. Some are OK, but most degenerate quickly into the typical internet purse fight. They should call these things “bum fights” because it’s usually two poorly trained and equipped debaters desperately trying to land a hay-maker. The Daily Shoah format is more to my liking as it fits the medium.

Of course, there were people wondering if Mike Enoch had red-pilled me on the JQ. I’ve come to hate that expression, to be perfectly honest. It implies a soteriological awareness that is only achieved through devotional study. I know the arguments around the JQ as well as anyone can know them. I’ve read the source material and listened to the proselytizers. I’ve done the math. The facts are what they are and there’s no denying Jews wield an enormous amount of influence, in absolute and relative terms.

Z-Man writes March 18, 2018:

I’ve been asked a number of times about my thoughts on the paper produced by someone calling himself Nathan Cofans, examining Kevin McDonald’s theories on Jewish exceptionalism. I had skimmed it prior to last week’s epistle to the anti-Semites and gave a good read the other day, with the idea of treating it as a serious set of arguments. Going back and re-reading it, I kept thinking that it was not produced with the goal of expanding the stock of human knowledge or with the goal of shedding light on McDonald’s claims.

Instead, I kept getting the image of the abbot, marshaling his monks to craft the latest defense of the faith and the realm. I was never a big Moldbug fan, but he picked a good word when describing the prevailing orthodoxy as a “cathedral.” It’s not so much that it is an accurate label, but that it conjures the right sort of image. The people in charge of us, have a set of beliefs that serve as a secular religion, justifying their actions and their position. They respond to challenges the same way the Church responded to heretics.

The two people behind this orchestrated campaign to denounce the heretic McDonald and his followers, are a member of the clerisy and a novice. Jonathan Anomaly is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. His novice, Nathan Cofnas, is a graduate student at Oxford. They have collaborated on this article at Quillette, which is mostly a way to promote this long critique of Kevin McDonald’s book, The Culture of Critique, which has become the textbook of modern anti-Semites.

The reason for describing Anomaly and Cofnas this way is for accuracy. If you work in the academy, you must defend the orthodoxy. In the West, particularly America, universities are theological centers, more like madrassas than places for open debate. If an academic starts talking frankly about observable reality, especially when it comes to the human sciences, they are either committing career suicide, headed for retirement or having a breakdown. Honesty gets even the best scholars hurled into the void.

Cofnas is working his fingers bloody promoting his paper on social media, even getting into slap fights with defenders of McDonald. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is clearly an elaborate effort to counter-signal the alt-right. He has written for legacy-right outfits like The Weekly Standard and National Review, so it is safe to assume he is hostile to modern right-wing movements. Again, there is nothing wrong with it, but it means we should not treat his paper as anything other than polemic on behalf of his team.

Now, I’ve already said I am a skeptic of Kevin McDonald’s theory of group evolutionary strategy. It could be brilliant, but it could be nonsense too. In the human sciences, it is a good idea to be cautious of bespoke theories that define one very narrow set of observations. A million years ago, John Derbyshire hit the nail on the head when he wrote that “There is a whiff of teleology about this whole business.” It’s intelligent design, except the Jews themselves were the designers. That strikes me as implausible.

Z-Man writes Aug. 29, 2017:

Someone contacted me the other day saying they were starting a site called Alt-Jew and he wanted to know if I knew any right-wing Jews that would be interested. You never know about these things. It could have been a terrorist organization trying to get some names of people they could terrorize. Anyone can register a website. Well, not anyone, thanks to terrorist groups like the SPLC and ADL. Still, you never can be sure about these things. The Reagan Battalion was an elaborate Soros fraud.

Regardless, it provides a reason to write about a subject that gets zero attention. That is the schism among American Jews, one that is looking a little bit like the divide within the white world. There are a growing number of right-wing Jews, who are wondering if liberal Jews are bad for Jews. It’s not just politically, but culturally and racially. They look around at the demographics in America and see greater out-marriage, lower birth rates and the telltale signs of assimilation and secularization.

Anyone who has engaged with Orthodox Jews knows they regard Liberal Jews with a high degree of hostility. They are not as bad as the Hasidim, but they view Reformed Jews as fakers, getting the benefits of being Jewish without the commitment. Their relatively small numbers have made them easy to ignore, but demographics are changing quickly. Orthodox are 10% of American Jews and a full decade younger than the median age of Reformed Jews. They also have many more children per female.

Now, the Orthodox are famously ethnocentric. They also vote for conservative white candidates in elections. When it comes to identity politics, the Orthodox favor it over consensus. They may not be talking about ethno-states and separatism, but their revealed preferences run strongly in that direction. Like the Amish though, their numbers will only grow the old fashioned way. They don’t recruit so they don’t attract a lot of converts. Talk to anyone who has converted and they will tell you it is a long and challenging process.

There’s another division, somewhat related to the Orthodox movement, and that is the Chabad movement. Here’s a Globe story from two years ago and a Forward story from last year for some background. One of the unique things about Chabad is they recruit and do so aggressively. They even recruit gentiles. I’ve had them put the arm on me more than once, even though they know I’m not a Jew. President Trump’s son-in-law and daughter are Chabad. Joel Pollak, the Breitbart big shot, is Chabad. This is not an accident.

As that Globe story makes clear, the Chabad movement is a curious thing. On the one hand, they are Orthodox, which puts them culturally to the right of most people and way to the Right of most Jews. On the other hand, they seem to be following the model of the early Christian church by letting converts ease into the life. Jared Kushner is not growing a beard and wearing all black anytime soon. It’s hard not to think that they are first concerned with growing the movement. They’ll worry about discipline later.

There’s another piece to the puzzle. There are Conservative Jews who make up about 20% of American Jewry. These are the folks you will not only see filtering into the Chabad movement, but also on the fringes of the alt-right. They may or may not consider themselves white, but either way, they are fine with white identity politics. They think multiculturalism is madness. It’s not just madness for Jews, but for everyone. Diversity is a cancer to be avoided. These are folks who would be called Alt-Jew.

The number of Conservative Jews sympathetic to the alt-right is debatable, depending upon how you define the terms. There are quite a few Jews supporting Jared Taylor’s work at American Renaissance. I correspond with maybe half a dozen Conservative Jews who share my politics. They think their numbers are growing as Jews in America come to terms with the failings of liberalism and reformed Judaism. To use a phrase I picked up at AmRen, these are Jews who are religious, if not spiritual.

Posted in Alt Right, Jews | Comments Off on Z-Man Interview: The Haunting Of Western Civilization (7-8-18)

An Afternoon With Robert Stark

Matt P. writes:

We talk also of Youtuber Luke Ford, and the careful consideration of his own narcissism that has accompanied his alt-right blogging every step of the way. Robert recalls one particular anecdote about Luke walking the streets of Beverly Hills after becoming a blogger thinking pompously to himself “there’s a new Sheriff in town!”. Robert says this is something he can relate to; that when he walks around after recording a particularly good podcast, he feels as if he is more worthy of respect. I say that I too can relate to this mindset, and that it reminds me of the basic ambivalence I have about all of this blogging, political edge-o-sphere stuff.

Are we highly intelligent critics of society whose ideas can ultimately ameliorate it, and promote civilizational flourishing? Or are we just a bunch of men and boy’s who cannot find the status we crave in real life and so take to the internet to seek it out? addicts going again and again to a well of insubstantial narcissistic supply, entering virtual spaces in which we, and our ideas, are afforded more power, and dreaming up real worlds in which we could be afforded same. The conclusion I have reached, I say to Robert, is that we are not intrinsically one thing or the other– that for now we could be described in either way, and that what we ultimately will be has not yet been revealed.

History is written by the victors, I continue. If we win, we will have always been intrepid ideological and cultural travelers to a new promised land. If we lose, then its all just been a maladaptive daydream–a power fantasy– and we really were just sad boys jerking off to hentai in our basements the whole time. It’s a harsh uncertainty that I bet even Richard Spencer grapples with from time to time.

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The True Story Of Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander

1:17:08 Class structure in 18th Century Britain and 21st Century America
1:22:27 East Coast vs West Coast distinctions in America
1:26:52 Kevin says West Coast friendships are meaningless
1:29:12 Luke names the most dramatic personality difference causing happiness and misery
1:29:54 Growing up in a cult. People in LA have sex to prove that when they say hello, they really mean it
1:31:51 Ben Stein comes to LA
1:37:12 Kevin says fiction teaches him more about life
1:39:33 Kevin’s thoughts on Lolita and Nabokov
1:42:13 Young men love Nabokov
1:47:13 My cruel friends and GFs
1:49:50 Kevin on Philip Roth
1:51:24 Kevin on John Updike, The Coup was not as good as VS Naipaul’s Bend in the River
1:52:54 Kevin likes the Christian Ingmar Bergman better than the atheist Bergman, praises SCTV Bergman spoofs
1:55:31 Kevin on Federico Fellini, prefers Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz
1:57:01 Kevin hated Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ
2:02:36 Kevin’s politics? Patriot.

From the New York Times book review:

The popular versions of the story are usually over-motivated — either a tyrannical Bligh, à la Laughton, or a maddeningly effete Christian, à la Brando — because the actual mutiny seems, if anything, under-motivated. Had Christian appeared at the courts-martial held in Portsmouth harbor in 1792, he might have explained what hell it was that drove him to his actions. It would be worth knowing. The testimony of the mutineers who were court-martialed makes them, and Christian, seem terribly thin-skinned for late-18th-century sailors. Bligh may have been guilty of little more than being inconsiderate of their feelings…

How Heywood evaded punishment (some less well-connected mutineers were executed), and how Bligh became the undeserving villain of a tale that should have made him a hero, is a story of enormous complexity, one with ramifications that seem to spin off in every direction, into the bowels and high offices of the Royal Navy, into the faded lineage of the English and Manx gentry, into the associations of the Christian family with some of the major Romantic writers…

The ending the family feared most would, in fact, have been for Christian to tell his story before a court-martial, where the insubstantiality of his motives would have been weighed against the grievous substance of his crime. As for Bligh, he retired as a highly respected rear admiral, but not before failing as governor of New South Wales.

…”What caused the mutiny on the Bounty?” Alexander asks. ”The seductions of Tahiti, Bligh’s harsh tongue — perhaps. But more compellingly, a night of drinking and a proud man’s pride, a low moment on one gray dawn, a momentary and fatal slip in a gentleman’s code of discipline — and then the rush of consequences to be lived out for a lifetime.”

Telegraph: “It is a terribly sad tale, and one that is utterly without heroes – Bligh, though remarkable, is not a hero, nor is Fletcher Christian, nor the oily and now provably mendacious Peter Heywood. This book should find an enduring place as the definitive rendering, and its appearance should elevate Caroline Alexander to the ranks of the finest historians of the most romantic, and most romanticised, period in British Imperial history.”

The Observer:

A new book reveals fresh evidence recasting the villain of the Bounty as the famous saga’s true hero. A poor boy made good, he was smeared by the mutineers’ aristocratic familes.

Christian, far from the downtrodden innocent, was a bankrupt aristocrat who appears to have acted out of spite and wounded pride. As a ‘gentleman’ he was affronted by Bligh’s candid language, and may never have recovered from the indignity of having had to borrow money from his nemesis.

Bligh’s fate as villain of the piece was sealed by spin: a concerted smear campaign by the well-connected families of Christian and his associates, ensuring that over centuries of storytelling, culminating in Hollywood, the tale would be embellished to leave Bligh on the wrong end of one of history’s great miscarriages of justice.

…’I hope this establishes Bligh as the hero and not the villain,’ Alexander said. ‘The origin of it all is a nasty class snobbery. Bligh is accused of not being a “gentleman” – and only a gentleman can understand why Fletcher Christian had to do what he did. That was the basic argument.’

The mutiny erupted after Bligh clashed with Christian over the seemingly mundane issue of missing coconuts. Alexander said: ‘Bligh clearly accused Christian of being a thief or a scoundrel. Later supporters of Christian tried to make out that was sufficient for the mutiny. How could a man of honour be expected to live having heard such incredible words?

‘It was only later, when times changed, this no longer washed in the same way. It was then that stories started creeping in about Bligh threatening Christian with corporal chastisement, and then flogging Christian, and then you jump into the Hollywood period.’

Alexander said the propaganda offensive to blacken Bligh’s name was launched in his own lifetime. ‘Christian’s brother Edward, a lawyer, was mounting the campaign, interviewing everybody he could get his hands on who’d been on the Bounty, and using the press to great effect. He was like a spin doctor.’

* The Tahiti women were, writes Alexander, “not only very beautiful, but sexually uninhibited and experienced in ways that amazed and delighted their English visitors.”

From Wikipedia:

* As Bligh was being set adrift he appealed to this friendship, saying “you have dandled my children upon your knee”. According to Bligh, Christian “appeared disturbed” and replied, “That,—Captain Bligh,—that is the thing;——I am in hell—I am in hell.”

* The modern historian John Beaglehole has described the major flaw in this otherwise enlightened naval officer: “[Bligh made] dogmatic judgements which he felt himself entitled to make; he saw fools about him too easily … thin-skinned vanity was his curse through life … [Bligh] never learnt that you do not make friends of men by insulting them.”

From Boston.com:

Despite his temper and sharp tongue, there’s no record of cruelty, and none was alleged by the court-martialed mutineers…

The injustice of it gets Alexander’s blood up; you can hear it in her voice.

“Once you penetrate 18th-century thinking and realize how much name, reputation, honor, and duty counted,” she says, “you become aware of what was done to Bligh, how savage that mauling was. For his service in all those battles, he should have been knighted. Many lesser men were.”

She knows, however, that it was not only “spinning” that turned Bligh into a monster and the mutineers into innocents. The Romantic era, which dawned after the French Revolution, fell in love with the image of Christian as the solitary tragic hero. He appears directly or indirectly in the poetry of Byron and Wordsworth and possibly even partly inspired Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” When John Adams, the sole surviving mutineer, was found on Pitcairn’s Island in 1808, not only was he not arrested, he was lionized in England as the benign patriarch of a tiny British colony.

Though Alexander’s book is on The New York Times’ bestseller list, the name of Bligh will probably always stand for cruelty. We like it that way. The more accurate 1984 movie was a box-office failure. One reviewer groused that it was “historically sound but dramatically unsatisfying. Without a true villain, the film becomes a series of anecdotes rather than a tightly knit story.”

“I saw a quote by President Kennedy,” Alexander says, “that the enemy of truth is not the lie but the myth. Once you have a myth, you can’t deconstruct it. It’s got a gorgeous life. The Charles Laughton version we’ll always have with us. To the end of time, there will be Fletcher Christian, the romantic mutineer.”

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Even more remarkable, however, are the specifics of Bligh’s fall from grace. Another tale in itself, it proceeded from the political and social pressures exerted by the families of Christian and Heywood before disappearing into the murky, labyrinthine workings of the Royal Navy.

Here, Alexander’s fine eye for the telling detail proves useful as she leads the reader through one complicated maze of bureaucratic facts after another. Suffice to say, when the dust finally settled, Heywood got off lightly and Christian – murdered on Pitcairn Island – was enshrined as a Romantic hero by such family friends as Wordsworth and Coleridge.

“It was Lieutenant Bligh’s ill luck to have his own great adventure coincide exactly at the dawn of this new era, which saw devotion to a code of duty and establishment authority as less honourable than the celebration of individual passions and liberty,” writes Alexander.

This was not the only setback in Bligh’s long and turbulent career. Among many other incidents, there was also the matter of his rudely aborted governorship of NSW. But, above all, Bligh was a survivor and, evincing the same sublime poise with which he navigated that overcrowded boat through storm-ravaged seas for seven weeks, he eventually retired as a distinguished rear-admiral.

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