They held a running of the bulls in Cave Creek, Arizona last month. Hokey costume-clad thrill-seekers from all over the region poured in to have a shot at a close encounter with a stampede of rodeo bulls. I happen to be an experienced runner in Pamplona. I had mixed feelings about the Cave Creek event. One part of me felt excitement at the potential of a home-grown run. The other felt apprehension at the possibility that this US run would mock the 800-year-old tradition of the encierro.

The Bull and Horse culture of the Western United States has many similarities to the one in Spain. In both the bull is king; its massive power, agility, and aggression set it above all other animals in its domain. Basically, it can kill all of them. The bull has long been a symbol of fighting ability, male fertility, valor, and magnanimity. In ancient Greek Mythology Zeus embodied Taurus (A white bull) in order to seduce and abduct the princess Europa. In other words Bulls have always embodied kicking ass and landing ladies. This American run is a thirteen years old, a pubescent tradition we’ll call it. There is an obvious ring of ridiculousness in the idea of costumed, toothless hicks and A.U. frat-boys running with these mythical beasts. At the same time there is something undeniably archetypal about encountering your cultures most revered animal on foot, in close quarters.

El Encierro (gruffly translated as the running of the bulls) is a pre-historic hunting technique known as corralling—where animals are herded to their eventual slaughter. Though there is far more to the encierro than a hunt. The bull-fight is an ancient, ritual-sacrifice. In Pamplona the sacrifice is in honor of San Fermin, the patron saint of the Fiesta. Why do they kill bulls in honor of a dead guy? I don’t know! But hey vegans, do Spaniards come into your kitchen and ask why you scarf down broccoli and beans and fill rooms with the dank aroma of flatulence? No. The Spanish just look the other way as thousands of live, innocent lima-beans are murdered for your pleasure.

The run is the first leg of this bovine sacrifice. The encierro is a Jungian rite and an opportunity to dip your fingers in the stream of a culture eight hundred years deep. The encierro at Cuellar a town just north of Madrid has documented roots that date back to 1215 A.D., though people had been climbing through the barricades to run with the bulls in Pamplona and Cuellar long before the towns decided to recognize them as actual events. The encierro in Cuellar is also more closely linked to the origins of the run. Originally, bulls were killed by men on horseback as part of wedding festivities. It was only later that the culture evolved into the modern Corrida with matador and sword in the arena. In Cuellar the encierro begins with hundreds of men on horseback corralling the bulls in the fields surrounding the town at the break of dawn.  Later these men corral the herd and gallop them down a long sloping hillside and into the streets of the ancient town, where the runners take over and drive them into the arena. It’s nothing short of epic—take a look. 

The Cave Creek run is the fourth event of its kind to take place in the United States. It’s primarily a business venture with the hopes to draw tourism to such glorious metropolises as Mesquite Nevada, Scottsdale Arizona, and now Cave Creek. There is also a financial element to the tradition in Pamplona. The city spends four million dollars on the free event each year and it receives an estimated 60 million in revenue from the Fiesta. Yes, douche-bags from all over the world come to Pamplona each year to get shitfaced, stumble around on the cobblestones, and go home with their been-there done-that nimrod t-shirts. This is ironically one of the major factors protecting El Encierro from cultural terrorist organizations like PETA in the failing European economy.

There is yet another layer to the encierro. In this deeply religious culture the bulls are sacred and in a sense Jesus-like creatures. There is a pass in the bullfight called a Veronica in which the matador kneels and holds the cape with their palms. As the bull passes the matador wipes the cape across the animals face. In this the Matador mimics Saint Veronica’s wiping of Christ’s face on his path to Golgatha. Essentially in the run we are leading these sacrificial creatures to their own Golgatha. When a mozo (runner) runs on the horns (runs just before a bull's snout) they lead the animal and ease their suffering in their final procession. That is the duty of serious mozos, to help the herd to its destination—the corrals inside the arena.

In Jungian terms the encierro is an act of self-realization. Young men since the epoch of humanity sought to test their courage in order to see what they are capable of, to step outside their bounds and find themselves. I can tell you from experience the run is an incredibly frightening thing to partake in. I mean, every morning before a run I’m literally shaking in my boots. Two runners have been killed in Pamplona in the past decade. Let’s be conservative and say there was one goring per run over that time-span. An average run lasts about three and a half minutes. That multiplied by eight runs per year in Pamplona equals 28 minutes per year. Let’s round it up to 30 minutes to make it simpler. (30 minutes) X (ten years) = 300 minutes. In five hours of bulls in the street in Pamplona, two men were killed and 80 were gored (speared by a horn). Several of those gored (without life-saving Red-cross medics and Pamplona-surgeons) would have died. These are nothing short of war-zone casualty numbers.

In the Evolian Metaphysics of War solders find spiritual self-realization through combat. This definitely plays out each encierro. At first the individual is petrified, pure animalistic instincts compel them to panic. Then the individual has a moment of transcendence through the way they conduct themselves in order to survive, using a mixture of split-second reasoning and instinct.

I recently interviewed Julen Madina (arguably the greatest runner of all time) for Outside Magazine Online. Madina spoke of the mythic quality of the Spanish Fighting Bull and the potent transcendent euphoria he experienced when he was able to somehow dominate the animals in leading them to the arena. Julen is also no stranger to death in the run. He's witnessed several and in 2004, he himself was gored five times and nearly killed. 

It’s no stretch to say the encierro was quite war like for him. I can also say that in my experience I’ve felt many moments of pure animalistic fear and panic in the run and a few moments of that self-realization and transcendence. It’s those self-realized transcendent moments and the euphoria associated with them which draw serious runners back each year. That is also what draws new generations of Spaniards. It’s even what lures (whether they know it or not) all of those globalized douche-bags.

This all may have an even broader commentary on the state of modern Western Society. The new norm is to have a quiet life in a quiet neighborhood; for men to be less confrontational, to suppress their anger. All these things are superficially positive strides for a more peaceful society. Yet, as these notions take hold on a wider scale there is a strong backlash against this new metrosexual, emasculated male. The popularity of Mixed Martial Arts has grown exponentially in recent years. Extreme sports have flourished in this era; thrill seekers have more ways than ever to find that rush and explore their more primal urges.

At the same time there has been an ugly upward trend in mass murders conducted by young men on the verge of entering adult-society, e.g. Columbine and Virginia Tech. Jung says that if a young-person does not proceed toward self-knowledge neurotic symptoms may arise. They include phobias, psychosis and depression. All these symptoms are linked to the perpetrators of those school massacres. I’m not saying they’d all have been cured by a nice little prance with the bulls. I do feel that in this society there is a stronger need than ever for these types of traditional, ritualistic, rites of passage for our young people.

In Pamplona there are six sharp-horned Spanish fighting bulls accompanied by several bell-oxen. In Cave Creek there were 21 scared-shitless rodeo bulls (specifically selected for their docility) followed by two cowboys on horseback. It is illegal for Spanish fighting bulls to see a human on foot their entire lives until they reach fiesta. Rodeo Bulls see and are fed daily by walking, skipping and dosey-doe-ing people. Thus Rodeo bulls see us as food-providers. Spanish fighting bulls instinctively perceive us (with our close-set eyes) as predators; which we are—like it or not you PETA-pansies. I should note here that all the slain fighting bulls are eaten during and after fiesta in one of my favorite dishes, a spicy and hearty concoction—Bull Stew. Delicious.

I wasn’t able to discern much in the footage of the Cave Creek run. What I did notice was a bunch of frightened, small-to-medium-sized animals with sawed-off horns, trotting through a laughing mob of half-drunk nincompoops. The bulls probably thought to themselves, man, why are these food-providers acting so weird? That said there were two very serious mozos in attendance. David Ubeda of Madrid—one of today’s finest Spanish runners and Dennis Clancey of Phoenix. Clancey is a top foreign mozo in Pamplona and currently working on an in-depth documentary of El Encierro.

“The bulls were really slow and afraid of us,” Clancey said. “We ran on the horns the whole way the first time. I was trying to coax the lead bull to follow me but he was just scared. The second run we decided to get inside the herd but when we got there, they dispersed away from us! One got so frightened it darted to the side and got trampled by the other animals.” Clancey sighed. “It was like being an NFL player, playing in a junior varsity game.”

In the end these zany South Westerners weren’t mocking anyone but themselves. And from the look of those joyful, shit-eating grins, they seem to be having a lot of fun in doing so. I don’t know what to really make of last weekend’s stampede but I do remain hopeful for a more dynamic bull run on American soil. Hopefully with some bulls that still have their testicles intact. In fact why don’t we let our courageous American Bull Riders choose the bulls to be run and have it coincide with the PBR tour? At least then PETA won’t have to cross the pond to pick and pry at people in search of self-knowledge through a close encounter with their culture's most noble beast.

Surely, only a Western academic leftist could come up with something as stupid as this. This is reminiscent of when the late televangelist yahoo Rev. Jerry Falwell suggested the Teletubbies were really just a bunch of closeted homos working subversively to turn good Christian children into fudge-packers. Totalitarian humanism is the fundamentalist theocracy of our era. Burn the universities!

Are the Smurfs crypto-fascists?

Editor's Note: The following article comes from Worldcrunch, an innovative, new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. This article was originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur.

By Tristan Berteloot, Worldcrunch

The stars of an upcoming summer blockbuster, the world-famous Smurfs are once again the talk of the town – though not necessarily for all the right reasons.

Known as Schtroumph in the original French, Puffi in Italian, Pitufos in Spanish, Stroumfakia in Greek, Kumafu in Japanese and Schlümpfe across the Rhine (since “schtroumpf” means “sock” in German), the little blue imps have been going strong for more than half a century, entertaining children the world over in comic books, animated cartoons and feature films.

More recently, however, the Smurfs have also caught the attention of a controversial French academic who says there may be more than meets the eye when it comes to the pint-sized characters. Hidden behind their charming veneer are some pretty dark undertones, argues Antoine Buéno, whose work “Le Petit Livre Bleu” (The Little Blue Book) accuses the Smurfs of being maybe just a bit fascist.

Buéno, who is both a senior lecturer at SciencePo University in Paris and a novelist, never set out to destroy the magical energy that emanates from these blue-colored characters. Nevertheless, he analyzes their society and ideology – Smurfology – through an unforgiving political lens.

“Le Petit Livre Bleu” focuses specifically on the man behind the cryptic cartoons, original Smurf author Pierre Culliford, aka Peyo. Whether he meant it or not, Culliford endowed his magical little creatures with some Stalinist, racist and anti-Semitic leanings, argues Buéno.

Read: Here comes the McBaguette.

Buéno first questioned the Smurfs' biological nature and sexuality: by the way, why is there only one Smurfette? Then, he tried to show that Smurf society is the archetype of a totalitarian utopia marked by Stalinism and Nazism.

Peyo came up with the word “Smurf” while dining in 1958 with his friend André Franquin. Peyo reportedly asked Franquin: “could you pass me the Smurf?” He meant to say “could you pass me the salt?” The rest is cartoon history.

The spirit of an era

Born in 1928 in Brussels, Peyo lived in German-occupied Belgium. As an adult, he did not look back fondly on that time in history. Nonetheless, Buéno thinks that “a piece of work can convey an imagery that the author himself does not support. Thus, the Smurfs seem to reflect more the spirit of an era than Peyo's political leanings.”

The Smurfs are self-sufficient. Smurf society is collectivist and interventionist. Its only leader, Papa Smurf, is all-powerful. And, like Stalin, his favorite color is red.

They all eat at the canteen and are all ridiculously puritan. In “The Black Smurfs” album, racism is obvious: blood purity becomes something vital and the dark brown Smurf is referred to as "the ugly one." In another album called “Smurfette,” Buéno notes how the Aryan blond is idealized.

The Smurfs are also united against a sworn enemy called Gargamel, a large-nosed, black-haired possibly anti-Semitic caricature, and his cat Azrael.

Smurf lovers have been quick to challenge Buéno’s “Little Blue Book,” saying his arguments are neither serious nor credible. “Generally speaking I’ve gotten two types of knee-jerk reactions: people saying that I’m either an idiot, or a crook,” says Buéno’s.

“But my analysis isn’t just coming out of nowhere,” he goes on to say. “People from other institutions have been looking at [the Smurfs] before me. People in the United States at one point suspected Peyo’s Smurf albums of being socialist propaganda, going so far as to say the word Smurf was actually an acronym for ‘Small Men Under Red Forces.’”

After Peyo died in 1992, his son, Thierry Culliford, continued to draw the Smurfs. Culliford's albums offered a much more educational approach. According to Buéno, that explains why “the Smurfs' village becomes more explicitly a metaphor for reality.”

The Smurfs make their next big appearance this summer in a 3D live-action movie directed by Raja Gosnell. The blue-colored creatures will besiege New York City for the occasion.

But before the movie is released, the Lombard Editions will publish a 29th album called “The Smurfs and the Golden Tree,” and in November, “the Smurf Encyclopedia”.

The United States of America is no longer the nation that is depicted in the film Captain America: The First Avenger. One of the most beloved characters in all of comics, and arguably just as iconic as Superman himself, Captain America has always been considered a “Man of out Time,” as in all the contemporary telling of the story (this latest movie included), he is presumed “killed-in-action” during World War II, only to be found in a state of suspended animation, frozen in a block of ice during our time.

Most people know the origin of Captain America: the story of the 4-F Steve Rogers volunteering for a super-soldier serum (yikes, eugenics!), which eventually turns him into the Sentinel of Liberty so he can go and fight Nazis and make the world safe for democracy.

The film, starring Chris Evans, will be no different. With a much bigger budget then Marvel’s failed 1990 attempt to bring the character to the big screen, this Captain America story is a period piece that sets the stage for the 2012 Avengers film, which will combine the Iron Man, Thor, Incredible Hulk, and Captain America movies.

The question we must ask ourselves is how does a blond haired, blue-eyed, genetically engineered super solider like Steve Rogers call himself “Captain America” in 2011, a nation where the majority of the births—for the first time ever—are to non-whites mothers? How does a character who exudes so much whiteness—at a time when major academic conferences are held to combat the identity and “when treason to whiteness is known as loyalty to humanity?”—dare claim to represent U.S.?

Coming from a time and place when Whites were 90 percent of the American population; the United States military was segregated; and the Civil Rights Revolution had yet to achieve total, if any, victory—one wonders what Steve Rogers hopes to accomplish as Captain America.

Since Captain America went into his Rip Van Winkle sleep in 1944, the United States has witnessed the collapse of formerly great cities like Detroit, Los Angeles, Birmingham; watched as its industrial might, once the envy of the world, was dismantled and shipped overseas, replaced by $8-per-hour service industry; welcomed millions of immigrants—largely illegal from Mexico; and witnessed such events as Martin Luther King’s I have a Dream speech, which ushered in an era of Black empowerment of which the Haitians of 1802 would be envious.

Captain America: The First Avenger won’t address the situation faced by Steve Rogers when he encounters the world 2011, but two recent comics have tried to do just that, Mark Millar’s Ultimate Avengers and Mark Waid’s Man Out of Time.

In Millar’s Ultimate Avengers story—on which the Marvel movies have been loosely based—Captain America is basically portrayed as neocon. In his book Captain America and the Struggle of the Superhero, Jackson Sutliff describes Millar’s Rogers as “The Ultimate American”:

Ultimate Captain America is less of an inspiration than an action hero; instead of John Adams, he’s Sylvester Stallone. He’s here to wear the American flag and kick ass, all in the heavily marketed name of Nick Fury’s supergroup. Teammate Henry Pym comments that it’s like playing with his old G.I. Joe’s again. Whereas the Cap of the traditional Marvel Universe is known for his stirring orations, this version of Steve Rogers isn’t one for speeches. Snappy one-liners are more this style.

The best example of the divide one can look to is also one of the most famous. There’s a well known page from the blockbuster miniseries: Captain America, enraged at the suggestion of surrender, goes ballistic and bellows, “You think this letter on my head stands for France?” (Millar The Ultimates 12 Vol. 1 22)…

This version of Steve Rogers is something terrifying, charming and deserving of pity all rolled into one. If Captain America represents the American dream, then his Ultimate counterpart is its obituary.

It’s worth noting that Millar’s Ultimate Avengers stories have been the influence behind the Iron Man movies, so one is left wondering what type of hero Captain America will be portrayed in the 2012 Avengers film. Millar wrote this story in the early 2000s, at a time when deriding France during the buildup to the United States “War on Terror” was highly fashionable among those in self-styled conservative circles.

If the Captain America we find in the Avengers is like the one in Man Out of Time, we could find ourselves watching the first Southern Poverty Law Center approved superhero on screen.

In Waid’s Man Out of Time story (henceforth MOT), Steve Rogers is unfrozen in a world similar to 2011 America and brought back to his native New York City by the Avengers. There, he successfully breaks up a mugging of a blond-haired, blue-eyed White girl—by three Black guys –only to be shot by the White girl in the process. The muggings are, of course, consistent with urban racial crime patterns, but the shooting of Captain America by the thankless White girl makes little sense, save in the world of comics.

Waking up in a hospital to be treated by a Black female doctor—in a hilarious panel, Rogers mistakenly calls her a “nurse”—Captain America walks into the waiting room to the shocking sight of absolutely no European-Americans. The drawing of Captain America, upon viewing this scene, is priceless, as the artist does a close-up of his blue eyes staring out into a room of Africans, Muslims, Asians, Mexicans, and Blacks, all speaking different languages and looking absolutely miserable.

Leaving the hospital, Captain America glances back with a melancholy look on his face as an Asian family—speaking in Chinese—take their grandmother into the makeshift United Nations that doubles as a waiting room.

Quite the departure from the Irish, WASPS, Italians, Germans, and any other wWhite ethnics that comprised the New York City of Rogers's youth.

Later in the story, Captain America relocates with the Avengers, who run tests on him to confirm his true identity, the long-lost Steve Rogers from World War II. The billionaire Tony Stark—Iron Man for those comically challenged—updates Rogers on all that has changed since he went into his state of suspended animation:

Stark: Short version: there is no more U.S.S.R

Rogers: You’re joking.

Stark: Nope. Russia’s a shadow of the superpower you know. Today, China and India play on the big board, and it’s all about tech. God, you missed so much. Polio? Gone. G-O-N-E. Cancer? Treatable. Organ transplants. Pacemakers for ailing hearts. Disease immunization—all things we take for granted.

Stark doesn’t tell Rogers anything about the massive racial transformation of America, nor how all of the diseases cured and advances in medical technology came from that racial group which is being dispossessed. The one scene from the hospital waiting room is the only time the truth of America’s racial transformation is discussed in MOT.

Following this quick update on America’s scientific marvels, Stark takes Roger’s to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (which is basically a monument to White people’s advances in aviation) and discusses the moon landing, space shuttle missions, and the building of the space station (and other things the U.S. government is no longer capable of pursuing). Captain America sees a picture of the Challenger crew and notices a Black face among the astronauts, leading to this exchange of dialogue:

Rogers: See. What impresses isn’t the technology, Tony. Your phones and your computers and so forth… they’re definitely mad-scientist gizmos, but they’re not the real achievement.

It’s society itself. The freedom of the people. All people regardless of their race or their gender. That’s what I can’t get enough of. Introduce me to the man who brought that about.

Stark: Glad to.

The next scene of MOT shows Stark and Rogers watching a clip of Martin Luther King's 1963 “I have a Dream” speech, with Rogers completely spellbound in his oration:

King (on a television screen): 1963 is not an end. But a beginning. [He was right about that!] Now is the time lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

Rogers: Were…were you there? For this moment?

Stark: No. But a quarter-million other Americans were. They filled that mall outside to hear the greatest speech of all time. Seventeen minutes changed the world. Wait until you hear about Woodstock. [...]

I hope I’m making my point: I think… I know… that, together we Americans raised one hell of a century from the ashes of a world war. Everything you ever wanted for this country Steve… It’s either come true or it’s around the corner. I truly believe that.

Is the “around the corner” line from Stark a reference to the momentous day when Anglo-Saxons will be just another minority in the land that Captain America still remembers like it was yesterday (and for him, it was yesterday)?

Incidentally, MOT fails to mention how that ideal of racial brotherhood never came true, that the primary achievement from Black people in the 20th century was the fostering of White guilt among Americans for past transgressions and the lowering of every conceivable standard imaginable so that Blacks wouldn’t be left behind.

Though Tony Stark paints a powerful picture of an idealized version of what America has become, it’s when Steve Rogers visits the only person alive that he knew from the 1940s—a now 90-year-old General Jacob Simon—that MOT becomes incredibly confusing.

After the initial shock of seeing an un-aged Rogers, Simon (who lives in a nursing home) proceeds to tell Captain America about all the unsavory changes in America:

Simon (gesturing towards a baseball game on television)--They’re all on drugs these days. That garbage is everywhere now. It’s in the schools. It’s in the streets. Can you believe that?

On another visit, Simon is being checked by a nurse, but has time to state:

Simon: Oklahoma City. One hundred sixty-eight lives lost to a terrorist attack on American soil. This country’s lousy with militias and hate groups. It’s disgusting.

One wonders if the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote the script for this comic, as if Marvel and Teaching Tolerance combined to create the ultimate Captain America story. No mention of the fact that the majority of those selling drugs and arrested for drug possession and drug-related violence are non-Whites from General Simon, who seems more intent on placing the blame for America’s degeneration on “hate groups.”

It’s here that the conversation between Simon and Rogers takes a strange turn that serves as a painful reminder that, though we presumably achieved racial brotherhood, America is royally screwed:

Simon: (coughing and nearing death) …used to make things in this country. You’d have the service. Get education with the G.I. Bill, then settle down to a good union job. No more steelwork. Pittsburgh’s collapsed and Detroit’ll be a ghost town soon enough.

No mention of how the unions helped ruin the manufacturing capacity in these cities, or how Black riots in 1967—and subsequent white flight—helped turn Detroit into the laughing stock of the entire world. This idealized version of America that General Simon waxes whimsically about is clearly that which preceded the 1965 Immigration Act and America's various forays into globalism and “free-trade.”

General Simon's best quotes are saved for last:

(As Simon and Rogers play chess)

Simon: You say Stark showed you the “I have a Dream” speech?

Rogers: It was incredible.

Simon: It truly was. It moved a nation.

Simon: Did he tell you what happened to the man who gave it?

Rogers: (Dejected) ...No...

Rogers: Bucky [Captain America’s World War II partner]… Bucky once asked me what I wanted to do after the war. I didn’t have an answer for him. Sixty years later, I still don’t.

In the next panel, Simon and Rogers watch television and a commercial for a sex hotline is playing.

Rogers: All I know is that this isn’t what I thought we were building.

Simon: This is what Captain America stands for now. Phone sex and an 18th-place educational system.

Rogers: It seemed worth fighting for.

Simon: It’s easy to fight when you’re winning.

So wait…wasn’t the world of equality that Captain America was so impressed with when he was speaking to Tony Stark so wonderful? These scenes with General Simon seem to invalidate that glorious world he thought existed. American history seems to stop with “I Have a Dream,” as few people dare point out what a nightmare the country is turning into.

And what of the so-called 18th-place educational system? Steve Sailer has shown that when you remove the Hispanic and Black test scores from the mix, America’s educational system is doing quite well, thank you (based on the international PISA test results):

• White Americans students outperformed the national average in every one of the 37 historically white countries tested, except Finland (which is, perhaps not coincidentally, an immigration restrictionist nation where whites make up about 99 percent of the population).

• Hispanic Americans beat all eight Latin American countries. African Americans would likely have outscored any sub-Saharan country, if any had bothered to compete. The closest thing to a black country out of PISA’s 65 participants is the fairly prosperous oil-refining Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago, which is roughly evenly divided between blacks and South Asians. African Americans outscored Trinidadians by 25 points.

It is because of that massive immigration (and Black test scores) that America has such a lowly rated, “18th-place education system.” General Simon. Why don’t you tell this to Steve Rogers?

The most revealing section of the MOT comes after General Simon has passed away and his caretaker, a Hispanic, tells Steve Rogers she’ll have to go home soon:

Hispanic nurse: It’s immigration law. I do some cleaning work, but that’s unofficial.

Rogers: Is it really so bad where you’re from?

Hispanic nurse: There is family. We hadn’t much money. But the countryside is beautiful and I am loved there. I do miss it.

Rogers: And yet you’re willing to scrub toilets to stay here?

Hispanic nurse: It is America.

MOT doesn’t tell us that a disproportionate percentage of immigrants are on welfare and EBT/food stamps in America, all paid for by the United States taxpayer. Yes they scrub our toilets, but they have arrived in such massive numbers to turn America into what Victor Davis Hanson called Two California’s.

What in the world does a gringo Captain America mean to Mexicans who cheered on their national soccer team in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum over the U.S. squad? All that Captain America means—when espousing virtues such as tolerance, freedom, and justice—is that nothing will be done to curb the rising tide of color that threatens to make Steve Rogers a minority in his own land.

What is obvious from MOT is that Captain America is incredibly malleable and can be made to fit the Zeitgeist.

If we are in an age where Communism and the Red Menace is the enemy, turn Captain America into a hero espousing McCarthyism (but be sure to change the story when McCarthy falls out of favor with the America, as Marvel did in Captain America 153-156, back in 1972). In our time period, have Steve Rogers espousing egalitarianism and discuss abstractions like freedom, justice and tolerance, and you have the perfect embodiment of 2011 America, certified fresh by the SPLC.

Salon.com ran a historical piece in 2010 (updated on July 20, 2011) that deserves to be quoted at length:

After the July 22 release of the summer blockbuster "Captain America: the First Avenger," we'll probably see even more Captain Americas waving placards at protests for all parts of the political spectrum. The Red, White and Blue Avenger is and always has been a potent political image, but whose side would Captain America be on? Would he be a New Deal Democrat slinging his mighty shield for new public works programs or would he be rallying with the Tea Party to lower taxes on billionaires and gut Medicare? Whose Captain America is he anyway?

"He's not just a guy in a flag suit," former "Captain America" writer Steve Englehart says as he takes a break from signing copies of his latest fantasy-action novel, at the Big Wow ComicFest in San Jose, Calif.

"The problem comes from, I think, when people do say, 'Well, he's a guy in a flag suit,'" Englehart adds. "But he sort of transcends. He stands for America as an ideal, not America as it's practiced."

Englehart, a conscientious objector who was honorably discharged from the Army, took over the writing of "Captain American and the Falcon" in 1972 in the midst of the Vietnam War. To make the comic's star-spangled superhero appeal to an antiwar youth audience, Englehart took on the duality and contradictions not only of the comic book superhero, but of America itself. During his first four issues (Nos. 153-156), the original Captain America, who was frozen in a block of ice at the end of the Roosevelt years and then thawed during the Johnson administration, battles a raging McCarthyite Cap from the paranoid 1950s. The ideological struggle between these alternate versions of the hero isn't all that different from what might happen if the Rally to Restore Sanity and the Tea Party Caps came to actual blows with their plastic shields.

With the Watergate hearings underway, Englehart had Steve Rogers hang up his Captain America persona altogether in "Captain America and the Falcon" No. 176, a comic book dated August 1974—the same month that Nixon resigned from the White House.

"He had thought that the ideal and the reality were the same thing, and finding out that it wasn't threw him off and that was the basis for the whole story," Englehart says, explaining the story line where Rogers took off the red, white and blue and became a darkly clad hero called Nomad for several issues, ending with No. 183 in 1975.

"He stood for something," Englehart continues. "When what he stood for seemed not to exist or seemed to have been damaged, he couldn't go out and stand for that anymore. Again, in my story, he eventually decided that having a Captain America was better than not having a Captain America, whatever was going on with America per se."

Looking at the very first issue of "Captain America," it's easy to dismiss it as a piece of jingoistic wartime propaganda. After all, the cover has our hero leaping into a war room and punching out Hitler while Nazi goons fire their Lugers and machine guns at him. However, "Captain America" No. 1 hit stands in December 1940, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II. While Captain America fit perfectly into the mood of the war effort once it got underway, co-creators Jack Kirby and Joe Simon originally forged the character as a protest vehicle to stir a stubbornly isolationist America to action.

"To me, the times were screaming war," Jack Kirby recalled during a 1989 or 1990 radio interview on "Hour 25" that can now be found at Kirbymuseum.org. "To me the enemy was Hitler. The enemy was growing and growing, and I didn't know where it was going to end, but every day something new would happen, and it was really scary. This was the kind of event that I felt was ruling our times and I felt it inside of me and it had to come out in some way."

When Eisner Award-winning writer Ed Brubaker depicted a Tea Party protest in a slightly negative light in "Captain America" No. 602 in 2010, the right-wing blogosphere and Fox News cranked up their outrage machine, griping that Marvel was "making patriotic Americans" into "its newest super villains." With a $140 million "Captain America" movie only a year away, Marvel had more to lose than back when it was just selling magazines. The company promised to remove the material that wounded the Tea Party's sensibilities from future reprints of the series.

Joe Simon may have put it best when he said, "Things are far more complex than they were in the days when Captain America could punch Hitler in the jaw," but the broad appeal of Captain America appears undiminished by recent controversies. In between Captain America's appearances at the rallies to restore sanity and shut down the government, Mexican American pro-wrestler Rey Mysterio wore a Captain America costume during his match at WrestleMania XXVII in Atlanta. Mysterio's outfit had a Mayan motif in place of the star on Cap's chest, making the character more Meso-American than merely Norte Americano. It seems that Captain America may be the only thing that can bring this fractured country together, if we could only agree on who he is.

Rey Mysterio modified the Captain America costume to ensure a distinctly Mexican flavor to the ensemble, a harbinger of things to come in the United States when Steve Rogers alter-ego only stands for the defense of the country as a proposition nation.

It’s wise to recall the words from the late Samuel Francis, who understood the dilemma at the heart of America, a ciountry defined by a people and culture, but which began to represent everyone, and thus no one:

The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people. If the people or race who created and sustained the civilization of the West should die, then the civilization also will die. A merely cultural consciousness, then, that emphasizes only social and cultural factors as the roots of our civilization is not enough, because a merely cultural consciousness will not by itself conserve the race and people that were necessary for the creation of the culture and who remain necessary for its survival. We need not only to understand the role of race in creating our civilization but also to incorporate that understanding in our defense of our civilization. Until we do so, we can expect only to keep on losing the war we are in…

As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity, at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession and their eventual possible physical destruction. Before we can seriously discuss any concrete proposals for preserving our culture and its biological and demographic foundations, we have to address and correct the problem we inflict on ourselves, our own lack of a racial consciousness and the absence of a common will to act in accordance with it.

A trip to Los Angeles, Atlanta, or Detroit would reveal, once the people who look like Captain America leave, those left behind in positions of power quickly erect a civilization that is completely different from the one that was bequeathed to them.

The Captain America that will debut in theaters today will be living in a world where the ignorant, unwashed masses had yet to be baptized in the racial holy water of Martin Luther King’s oratory and reborn into a world universal brotherhood. The Captain America that will debut in theaters today will be living in a world where military segregation existed. The Captain America that will debut in theaters today will be living in a nation that was essentially 90 percent White. Steve Rogers, that 4-F reject, still volunteered to become a Captain America in that world, defending that America.

In the 21st century, “The First Avenger,” is truly a man out of time.

On Palm Sunday of this year Charles Martel, victor of Tours, could smile upon his descendants. A small band of Franks wielding hammers again rose in defense of the West. The action was local-scale and humble; there was no smashing of the Saracen horde. Four young men entered art mogul Yvon Lambert’s gallery in Avignon and destroyed the Piss Christ, a world-famous image of a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine (It had previously been attacked in Australia; the coup de grace fell to the French). Their raid does nothing to shift the odds against traditionalists- it is rather an emblem of resistance, akin to stealing a general’s banner from the enemy camp. In such symbols the struggle endures.

The story of 20^th-century art is one of subversion, the use of creative media for purely destructive ends. Painting, music, literature and sculpture were used as refined weapons in the avant-garde’s rebellion against Christendom. The enterprise was wildly successful- a witch’s brew of Freud and Marx prepared by the Frankfurt School would only accelerate the dominant liberal trajectory toward cultural dissolution. By 1987 an “artist” like Andres Serrano, with the patronage of collector-oligarch Charles Saatchi, could display his Piss Christ in America to the widespread approval of the elites. Its veneration in public as an object of beauty only highlights the Revolution’s progress.

Before the onset of post-modernity, art diverted from its original purpose, transcendence, still had the capacity to seduce. Escaping the boredom of late 19^th-century bourgeois Europe, stockbroker Paul Gauguin could cast idyllic scenes of Tahiti’s primitive splendor and indulge himself with its native women. And the bored bourgeoisie back home were captivated, at least for a time. Under Gauguin’s influence Pablo Picasso would then paint the lascivious and animalistic Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, portending the rise of a cruel and inhuman spirit that would characterize the coming decades. Fedor Dostoevsky had already spoken of beauty’s elemental danger in The Brothers Karamazov:

Beauty! I can’t endure the thought that a man of lofty heart and mind begins with the ideal of Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom…Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind, beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? What’s awful is that beauty is a thing mysterious and terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

The battles won and lost in these dark recesses produce visible consequences. In our time Sodom would triumph; rejecting the Madonna, civilization proudly set its faith in reason while pursuing desire. Gauguin would die of syphilis, and within the generation Europe experienced a new phase of revolutionary politics and the savagery of mechanized war so well depicted in Picasso’s Guernica. Traditional culture and polity in the West, what Fr. Seraphim Rose termed the Old Order, recognized beauty as an expression of divine hierarchy. Yet the forces of the new era worked to annihilate any such notion. Sic transit gloria mundi- the glory of the modern was truly fleeting, and the false beauty of Sodom would be unmasked in spiritual alienation and death.

With today’s regime committed near-religiously to transgression, there is no further need for seduction in art. Refined weapons have become blunt instruments of demoralization. The repulsive and perverse are simply proclaimed beautiful, and all are expected to accede to the lie. Nobility is mocked, higher love altogether denied, and Eros grotesquely parodied in pornography. Art and its applications in mass entertainment are best identified as profit-driven psychological warfare. In concert with the machinery of political economy, contemporary culture robs the peoples of the West of their identity and denigrates their ancestral faith. In return it offers filth and fun. The alleged consummation of human development, the Open Society has descended to a condition of sub-humanity.

The Piss Christ was exhibited in the United States and Europe for years and served as a testament to the values of the new era. Calculated blasphemy became a holy relic of “our treasured freedoms” for leftists, and American conservatives did nothing besides run through well-rehearsed motions of hapless opposition to gain votes and raise campaign funds from gullible donors. Republicans would never violate the dogmata of secular pluralism in order to defend Christianity and the Western heritage. Their ultimate loyalty has always been to Mammon, the god of liberal democracy. One need only witness calls by U.S. senators to outlaw Koran-burning, as Washington’s trillion-dollar mission to transform Afghanistan into a Muslim Mayberry could be jeopardized by one such stunt! Meanwhile our finest art galleries maintain warehouses of sacrilege and obscenity, with similar content beamed daily to the proles via television.

It is not farcical elections and their attendant theatre that will save the West; it is the strength of will of a blessed few. The now-mangled Piss Christ confirms this. How heartening it is that the men of Avignon evinced not the least concern with sacrosanct rights of expression, the marketplace of ideas, or any other regime methods of division and control. They showed the courage to shatter a minor idol of the age and dent, however slightly, the liberal order’s myth of invincibility.

A genuine Counterrevolution in the Occident will be creative, and moved by the force of love- not just for beauty, Truth and the Good, but for their reflections in our brothers and friends, our kith and kin. In all its glamour and power, the regnant anti-culture will have wrought only its own negation; so it was attested on a Palm Sunday with the defiant swing of a hammer.

Robert N. Taylor has played an active and influential role on the outsider Right for decades. In the 1960s, he was closely involved with “The Minutemen,” a grassroots anti-communist group headed by Robert Bolivar DePugh. Due to a variety of factors, including pressure from the FBI and other organizations, the paramilitary group widely known for its “Traitors Beware!” stickers eventually disbanded; but a template for many future militia groups had been formed. After leaving The Minutemen, Taylor turned to other interests and founded the first incarnation of his folk band Changes with cousin Nicholas Tesluk.  In the ‘70s, Taylor helped pioneer the growing Odinist/ Ásatrú movement and remains involved with various organizations. In the late ‘90s, Michael Moynihan—an editor of the radical traditionalist journal TYR –rediscovered Changes and worked to release old and new material by the duo. Taylor continues to record and tour.
 

Some years ago I remember being introduced to you briefly and then hanging around during a group discussion on the street outside of Optic Nerve Arts in Portland. The topic turned to ritual and coming of age and manhood. You spoke about raising your own son and shared a moving story about how you helped him make the transition from boyhood to manhood through a heathen rite. If I recall correctly, it involved a shield. That was probably one of my first exposures to anyone who actually practiced Ásatrú in a meaningful way, and I was wondering if you could recount the story of that ritual for readers of Alternative Right.

Robert Taylor: It was the opening night of Optic Nerve's Heathen Art Show, and the following night Changes did a performance at a local Irish pub there. The incident I was describing to you occurred at an Althing of the Ásatrú Alliance (of which I was one of the founders and was for a long time a member and supporter). It was a rite of passage into manhood for my older son, Thor. He had turned 16 years old about a month previous to the event. The physical nature of the event is that we formed a large circle. About 82 Ásatrúars were present who composed the circle. On one side of the Circle stood my former wife Karen with my son Thor before her. I stood directly across from them in the circle. Karen was carrying a round Viking style shield made of steel and suede leather. She handed the shield to Thor with an admonition similar to the following:

Here, take this shield and carry it bravely. Never return from battle without it in your hand, or lying on it.

(In other words, come back victorious or dead; don't toss your shield aside so that you can run away faster from the battle.)

Then, with force of her front arms, she pushed Thor into the circle, telling him to go stand with his father and be a man. Thor was visibly surprised by her move and walked across the center of the circle and came by my side. I gifted him a spear telling him to bare it with honor in defense of family and folk. Simple as the rite was, I could see tears brimming on the eyes of many of those in attendance. It resonated with all there, including (most importantly) Thor. From that day onward he never asked for anything from my wife or me. He worked summers to save to purchase his pickup truck and paid his own gas and insurance. And so he was to be right up until the present. He spent four and a half years in the U.S. Military, with a tour of duty in Iraq and is now attending a university, has his own home and is expecting his first child later this year. He recently turned 30 years old. As a father I had no real problems with him. Since he is grown I can praise his attributes. He is industrious, truthful and brave by nature. He has excellent carpentry and building skills, is a good auto and motorcycle mechanic, and lives a clean life and stays in tip-top physical condition. Perhaps he would have been no different minus the rite we did that day. Perhaps all of his virtues are innate, but I myself feel the rite drew a demarcation line between childhood and adulthood in no uncertain terms. The rite we conducted was fashioned from similar rites of passage employed among the Spartans but is perfect for any warrior religion, for that matter.

The dreadful concept of the vampire is common to many cultures, but the version that is most familiar is Dracula – the Anglo-Irish author Bram Stoker’s groundbreaking conflation of central European folk beliefs, exaggerated stories about the mediaeval Wallachian princeling Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes, and 19th century obses­sions with sex, syphilis, Gothicism and occultism. The idea of a nocturnal, blood-drinking creature that is nei­ther alive nor dead still crawls in the shadows of Europe’s imagination.

Yet vampire-themed films tend to be underwhelming. It may be because we are so saturated with the concept that we cannot usually take it seriously. Bela Lugosi was risible as the Count – although he was at least more innocently employed in Hollywood than he had been in his former incarnation as minister of culture in Hungary’s bloodthirsty Bela Kun regime). Hammer was just hammy, and even Francis Ford Coppola could not make us afraid of Gary Oldman’s Count. Some vampiric variations on the theme were more successful (like Dreyer’s 1932 Vampyr) but most film fans would probably agree that the genre leader in this admittedly small field is Prana Films’ 1922 Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (“Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror”).

Nosferatu is preeminent not just because it has the spontaneity of having been the first vampire film, but because of the carefully-constructed cinematography and the lyrical script, which we relish all the more because we are not distracted by approximations of Romanian accents. Darkly Expressionist direction by F. W. Murnau ensures that every frame pulsates with feeling, like the human prey whose life-force Max Schreck’s cadaverous “Count Orlok” seeks so urgently. The distinct eccentricity of the film's chief progenitors must also have contributed subtly to the film’s outré quality. Murnau was an occultist, a fanatic and an overt homosexual. Schreck was so reclusive that many thought he was not a real person; one of the few who knew him reported that he was always in “a remote and strange world” and enjoyed long, solitary walks in forests – a suitably Mitteleuropaisch fixation. (Coincidentally, the German verb schreck means to frighten.) In Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a film about the making of Nosferatu, John Malkovich camps it up creditably as the unbalanced Murnau, so desperate to ensure authenticity that he employs a real vampire (Willem Dafoe) to take Shreck’s role.

The following talk was delivered at the 2010 H. L. Mencken Club.

The title of my talk is PC: The Cultural Antichrist.

It's an odd title, but political correctness is an odd tendency. It's a bit uncanny. It doesn't fit in with how we normally think about things. That's why we don't know what to make of it. People try to laugh it off, but it doesn't laugh off.

It seems too stupid to be real but it trumps everything all the same. If a thieving employee shoots and murders his co-workers the big question is whether any of them were racists. When an affirmative action army officer does the same, because he wants to do jihad, what top brass worry about is whether it will make diversity look bad.

A New Religion

Something that trumps normal considerations so completely must have transcendent importance. It's clear that PC relates to something big.

Fjordman’s comments about multiculturalism, which were originally published on the website Gates of Vienna, are so full of dubious assumptions that it is hard to know where to start one’s critique. But having produced copious scholarship on the subject of his literary exercise, I feel driven to question Fjordman’s conclusions.

Western societies, he explains, can be divided into PC-pushing elites and a far more traditionalist populace, which is now preparing to go after the seats of illegitimate power. Fjordman quotes the Hoover Institute-resident scholar Angelo M. Codevilla, writing in American Spectator, Lee Harris’s The Next American Civil War, and Christopher Lasch’s posthumously published Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy to prove his contention. He then brings up Thilo Sarrazin, the president of the German Bundesbank, who just resigned his post under pressure, after having publishing what became a politically incorrect bestseller Deutschland schafft sich ab. These authors all putatively prove the same thing, Harris, Codevilla, and Lasch by what they say and Sarrazin by the excitement that his controversial attack on Muslim immigration has aroused in Germany.

Fjordman thinks that a great revolt of the populace is erupting, as they turn ever more indignantly against the “multicultural oligarchs,” who are “actively hostile to the long-term interests of the white population.” Fjordman incorporates into his ominous or cheery prediction (depending on how one reads things) published statements about cultural divisions in the US. He then segues into Germany, where despite the almost universal condemnation of Sarrazin’s candor by political elites, from Bundespräsident Christian Wulff and Chancellor Angela Merkel to the fuming multiculturalists in the Green Party and Party of the Left, the “people” themselves are behind the courageous former Bundesbank director.

I maintain a sort of spiritual kinship with the heathen invaders who picked through the ruins of the Roman Empire. These were men who stood in wonder at what had been accomplished by the people who came before them. I generally feel as if I am a sort of barbarian wandering through the ruins of a lost civilization my own self. I look at the beautiful art deco buildings in Berkeley and I know nobody will ever build anything like that in Berkeley again.  I look at the stupendous accomplishment of the American space program which put men on the moon. Does anyone believe we'll do that again in our lifetimes? I certainly don't: I think space exploration is finished. Has there been any great work of art or literature in the last 50 years? Please clue me in if there has been, because nobody has told me about it.

Consider Kenneth Clark's documentary on Western Civilization, made in response to the events of 1968. Could we make such a thing today? I don't think we can. It was partially designed to sell color televisions to the upper middle class people who could afford them in those days. Do you think a documentary telling the story of Western Civilization could sell anything to modern upper middle class people now? I don't think you could sell a stick of chewing gum with such an idea today; not unless there were some groveling shoveled into it -perhaps spiced by some sado-masochistic sneering at the very idea that Western people ever had a civilization worth preserving.

In an age of checklists, decision trees, and zero tolerance, it's a puzzling notion.

People think it means giving up on reason. Or doing what's been done no matter what. Or accepting an external authority that has nothing to do with the situation we're actually dealing with.

What else could it mean, when each of us has his own thoughts and goals, reason is a matter of studies and statistics, and social authority is either following rules we've agreed to for our own purposes, or getting someone else's demands shoved down our throat?