the alt-right

That is a great piece. Reminding me first of all to read SupChina more often, I’ve fallen out of the Sino sphere somewhat.

That map! I’m surprised the Chinese government let him get away with this nonsense for so long.

Also had never heard about those 80s coup movements, where can I go to find out more (in English)? Calling yourself the heavenly kingdom, even without going the whole hog and appending 太平, seems like some next level crazy branding for a rebellion.

Turns out the exact rule is 'Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world' (I assume the 'clean your room' line is featured in this most august of sections). Anyway, that's obviously quite rich coming from him.

― pomenitul

when i worked shelving books at a library, i was very bad at my job, because i took time out and browsed through all the books in the self-help section, 158.1. and i found that every self help book is bad for one of two reasons: either the advice it gives is obvious to the extent that it is banal and pointless, or the advice it gives is flatly wrong. the only book in that entire section that did not fall into one of those two categories (or both at once) was a book called "crip zen", which was a self help book which advised the reader to move to mexico and smoke copious amounts of marijuana. i have yet to do this but you can bet your ass that i bought a copy of that book.

John Galton otm

thanks ed. those 80s coup groups, the stories are unbelievable, have lengthy baidu articles about them, and those two i named are two of six or seven plots that came out in the 80s with local cults and regional gangsters trying to split away, but the only english language source i could find for those was a book called china wakes: struggle for the soul of a rising power which is out of print, nicholas kristof going on to fame for writing about things other than china.

most of these reactionary chinese guys now, like liu zhongjing, were mostly posting about how much they hated leftists and feminists, which is fair game, and waited to get overseas before getting on the separatism stuff.

a self help book which advised the reader to move to mexico and smoke copious amounts of marijuana

That does indeed sound like better advice than the usual fare, although I've never been able to thoroughly enjoy getting high, alas. The only self-help book I've read (and tbf I haven't read many) that I didn't flat-out hate was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, maybe because it does a slightly better job of speaking to the anxiety-ridden, nihilistic shambles in me than its sugarcoating competitors. I'd rather just reread Cioran, though.

I wonder if some alt righters might find cioran a bit of a revelation

They'd skip his mature output altogether and cut straight to the fash juvenilia.

That said, his later works are hardly free from reactionary elements, as regards women in particular.

i feel like "intellectual dark web" and particularly "black pill" types would love cioran. i also don't think they would necessarily understand how _funny_ cioran is.

not that /lit/ is uniformly alt-right men but they have definitely discovered cioran
hope this image auto resizes

http://imgur.com/eGyzjT2.jpg

That's a rather… broad definition of 'right-wing literature'.

for my legionaries, a hayek book, evola, pat buchanan, the unabomber, spengler... an intellectual buffet

As a side note, I do find it amusing how Cioran's self-styled 'E. M.', which he fabricated to imitate writers such as E. M. Forster or T. S. Eliot, still graces the covers of his English translations to this day. Emil had no middle name.

I love that they include Kurt Vonnegut but have a little asterisk "just read the one that flatters your anti-egalitarian stance, don't accidentally read anything about how war is stupid and evil and western civilization is kind of a joke"

a more general /lit/ nonfic recommendations list
https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/Non-fiction
cioran gets in there too but a different and obscure? book

A "Nietzschean" tag and no actual Nietzsche

That list isn't half bad tbh. Lyn Hejinian is on it!

xp

A&A is a collection of essays and stories, which could serve ok as a general introduction to Cioran I suppose xxp

A "Nietzschean" tag and no actual Nietzsche

They're referring to Elisabeth Nietzsche iirc.

also isnt "harrison bergeron" supposed to be a satire of rand?

they included emet ve-emunah (principles of conservative judaism) but if they wanted reactionary religious jewish works i could've hooked them up with stuff that made a lot more sense!

there are a lot of great / interesting books on that list tho if this is what they're reading (i'm sure they're mostly not) it seems pretty formidable

they included emet ve-emunah (principles of conservative judaism) but if they wanted reactionary religious jewish works i could've hooked them up with stuff that made a lot more sense!

― Mordy

why would a reactionary want to read something that "made sense"

none of these people have fucking read the magic mountain

i'm fucking livid it's included

i meant made more sense for a bunch of reactionaries looking for religious traditionalist works. not something that necessarily made internal logical sense.

i'm guessing they don't know what "conservative" in "conservative Judaism" means

that seems like a safe bet

none of these people have fucking read the magic mountain

i'm fucking livid it's included

― jolene club remix (BradNelson)

no, but they pretended to read it, and ultimately isn't that what's really important?

maybe they just think all germans are on their side automatically

xp fascinating work, dylannn. Thanks for sharing here.

I don’t know very much about the internal dynamics of china.

And many americans i assume are in a similar boat

I wanna get you on a dunno boat re: china

Our class read "the Chosen" when I was in fifth grade

took this pic in the library the other day

http://i63.tinypic.com/22ixk6.jpg

hope this list doesn't get him cancelled :(

this is /lit/ not exactly representative of the alt-right as a whole or even 4chan, also has a large faction of non-alt-right people too
but good place to get turned on to obscure-to-me books (i'd never heard of julian jaynes the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind until browsing /lit/ today)

also thanks treezo!

none of these people have fucking read the magic mountain

i'm fucking livid it's included

Magic Mountain is super centrist-liberal if it's anything. Settembrini is an airy-fairy idealist with vague notions of Brotherhood Amongst Peoples, Naphta a harsh doctrinaire extremist. Iirc Mann originally planned to have these two serve as equally valid/flawed points of view but as historical events mounted up he sided with Settembrini. I guess from a conservative pov you can suggest the book is Owning The Marxists but their counterpoint is basically a EU stan avant la lettre, which doesn't really reconcile with modern conservatism (well, within the EU it sometimes does).

the magic mountain is not a reactionary text in any form or fashion. i think mann thought there was a problem with liberalism in that it didn't integrate the darker impulses of human nature -- something like the death drive -- in its account of reality. but naphta, who gives himself over to human irrationality, is clearly depicted as more than a villain. if the novel has a "message" it's that the enlightenment needs to be more dialectical if it is going to avoid getting bulldozed by evil.

mann thought there was a problem with liberalism

Sounds like he deserves to get posthumously cancelled.

I mean, he wasn’t someone I’d want to be friends with, given the things he wrote in his diary about his young son klaus. But the magic mountain is an incredibly complex book that doesn’t flatter any particular ideology.

Mann expressed his belief in the collection of letters written in exile, Listen, Germany! (Deutsche Hörer!), that equating Russian communism with Nazi-fascism on the basis that both are totalitarian systems was either superficial or insincere in showing a preference for fascism.[32] He clarified this view during a German press interview in July 1949, declaring that he was not a communist, but that communism at least had some relation to ideals of humanity and of a better future. He said that the transition of the communist revolution into an autocratic regime was a tragedy while Nazism was only "devilish nihilism".[33][34]

I was being facetious btw. That reading list deserves praise for including complex, ambiguous writers, assuming whoever put it together grasps those nuances in the first place and doesn't use polysemy as an excuse to further spread their own dumb ideology ('let me tell you what Mann really meant…').

I knew you were. I just wanted to further emphasize how much that book doesn’t fit into a “right wing” list.

ime these dark cathedral / intellectual alt-right guys can be extraordinarily fascinating to talk with partially bc many of them read lots of weird shit. moldbug always had a corpus of alt-canon he was plugging (a lot of which is on that list)

anybody who takes their display name from mencius is obviously going to be fairly well-read

which mostly serves as an object lesson on the limitations of being well-read, sadly

All too true, sadly. Renaud Camus, who coined the phrase 'the great replacement' is an excellent prose stylist and a 'learned' man. He's also partly, albeit indirectly responsible for the Christchurch mosque shooting.

on first read-through this seems like a good analysis of the manifesto, touching on some of the "absurd" points made above

https://medium.com/@emilypothast/what-the-christchurch-killers-manifesto-tells-us-about-the-radicalization-of-white-men-c55857149b33

sorry by "above" I mean in the "fucking spree shooting" thread but I think this is better here

sleeve do you know emily who wrote that piece? she's a friend of mine and writes very singularly about this subject