On March 3, the BBC reported that the millions raised by Bob Geldof's BandAid campaign and LiveAid concerts to relieve victims of famine in Ethiopia in 1984-1985 went straight to paramilitary rebels, who then used the money to buy weapons and overthrow the government of the time. The corporation informed us that '[f]ormer rebel leaders told the BBC that they posed as merchants in meetings with charity workers to get aid money.'

Here is how it worked:

Max Peberdy, an aid worker from Christian Aid, carried nearly $500,000 in Ethiopian currency across the border in 1984.

He used it to buy grain from merchants and believes that none of the aid was diverted. ...He insists that to the best of his knowledge, the food went to feed the starving.

The only problem was that

... the merchant Mr Peberdy dealt with in that transaction claims he was, in fact, a senior member of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF).

"I was given clothes to make me look like a Muslim merchant. This was a trick for the NGOs," says Gebremedhin Araya.

Underneath the sacks of grain he sold, he says, were sacks filled with sand. He says he handed over the money he received to TPLF leaders, including Meles Zenawi --the man who went on to become Ethiopia's prime minister in 1991.

Mr Meles, who is still in office, has declined to comment on the allegations. But Mr Gebremedhin's version of events is supported by the TPLF's former commander, Aregawi Berhe.

Now living in exile in the Netherlands, he says the rebels put on what he describes as a "drama" to get the money.

"The aid workers were fooled," he says.

In a satirical blog  about pop culture, I recently presented two sets of photographs: one of ageing mainstream musicians, whom I described as the past, and another of young underground musicians, whom I described as the future. Using a standard tabloid technique, I mischievously chose unflattering images for the first set of musicians, and proceeded to dismiss the latter as a freak show as well as a negative cultural influence. Unfortunately, some interpreted this (rather superficially) as simply a derogation of Elton John, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Bono, and Bob Geldof's looks and musical talent, ignoring the fact that the title of the blog referred explicitly to culture, and the blog itself made no mention of music.

My original aim had been to do a series, where I juxtaposed representatives of the egalitarian against representatives of the inegalitarian camp, taken from the fields of philosophy, politics, journalism, art, literature, psychology, anthropology, and more, always accompanied by a few satirical comments at the enemy's expense. There is no doubt that there was an element of playground malice in this exercise. Yet, the latter had a serious purpose: the enemy routinely engages in self-serving, derogatory, and cartoonish misrepresentations of the intellectuals, artists, and scientists whom they do not like, whom they would like to keep beyond the pale, and whom they would like the apolitical and the miseducated to avoid and dismiss in advance. The message I wanted to convey was that we know how to do it too, and are quite prepared to give them a taste of their own medicine (in fact, in December last year I wrote an article  for The Occidental Observer where I did some post-imperial deconstructing, in response to the White-bashing discourse that permeates the field of postcolonial studies). I think this is important because one of the reasons European descended peoples have come to find themselves in retreat, on the losing side of every significant battle in the cultural war for the better part of a century now, is that the Left has not been met with an effective response - in fact, even so-called "conservatives", who were supposed to have been on the side of European man, have proven - at best - craven, weak, flaccid, myopic, selfishly motivated, and far too willing to compromise, pull back, surrender, and apologise in order to avoid trouble.

Much as has been said of me, I know Larry Auster, he's very intelligent, and I respect him. I read his blog just about every day and find him an engaging presence in person. And I hope he takes the following criticism in the constructive spirit in which it is written.

I often get the sense that Larry has turned himself into a kind of Ayn Rand of the paleo Right. So often, do I see him expelling others from the circle of "conservatism" -- to the point that the only conservatives left are himself and a handful of intimates -- inflating a single issue or difference of opinion into an existential Either/Or, and proclaiming the absolute consistency of his philosophy (while in actuality it's full of the elisions and willed forgetting characteristic of an ideology.)¹

His recent comments on AltRight follow this trend...

The respectable right is respectable because it accepts the principles of liberalism and can't offer serious resistance to liberal conclusions.

That's why a less respectable "alternative right" is needed. But what is the alternative that would do better? People have been looking for a good way to resist liberalism for a long time, and judging by results they haven't gotten very far.

Liberalism has a lot of staying power, so there must be something in it that goes rather deep. If that's so, it's not going to go away because fashions change, and dealing with it effectively is going to require thought and correct diagnosis.

 

A picture speaks a thousand words. Is it a surprise that the creeps running things today are so profoundly dysfunctional, when they grew up listening to this freakshow?

One doesn't know whether to laugh or run in the face of such a weird and repellent collection of vainglorious, pontificating, self-righteous, self-indulgent, cosmetically-enhanced, fossil-like perverts and nincompoops. An eloquent illustration, if any was needed, of why they must be pushed into the deepest depths of the Tartarus, as soon as possible.

They represent the past, and we the future.

It is always interesting to note how the Left describe themselves as champions of freedom when, in fact, every day they prove freedom’s worst enemy. That this is the case is perhaps less indicative of dishonesty as it is of their ideology’s incompatibility with freedom: after all, any world-improver who regards man and nature as a machine will inevitably come to regard himself as an engineer, and engineering is all about finding ways to manipulate components in order force a pre-determined outcome. For the Left, of course, those components are you and I. When people who are not of the Left attempt to do the same, the Left calls this authoritarianism, oppression, and totalitarianism.

An increasingly topical area of Leftist oppression has been their efforts to implement environmentalist policies. When scientists began speculating about climate change Leftist politicians quickly realized that the apocalyptic scenarios arising from these speculations afforded them the most politically viable arguments they had had in years for confiscating an even larger proportion of people’s earnings. Desperate for money to fund their loopy and costly programs, they wasted no time in sponsoring information campaigns and identifying whole new areas of taxation. An obvious one has been our rubbish.

 

Julius Evola (1898-1974) was an important Italian intellectual, though he despised this term intensely. As poet and painter, he was the major Italian representative of Dadaism (1916-1922). Later he became the leading Italian exponent of Integral Traditionalism or Perennialism, the intellectually challenging esotericism of René Guénon (1886-1951). Evola enjoyed an international reputation for books on eastern religious traditions that won the respect of scholars such as Mircea Eliade and Giuseppe Tucci. His 1943 book on early Buddhism, The Doctrine of Awakening, was translated in 1951. It was more than a generation before a second translation appeared, in 1983, when Ienner Traditions published 1958’s The Metaphysics of Sex, reprinted as Eros and the Mysteries of Love in 1992, the same year it published his 1949 book on Tantra, The Yoga of Power. The marketing appeal of books about sex is obvious, but these works are serious studies, not sex manuals. In 1995 Inner Traditions reprinted The Doctrine of Awakening and began publishing translations of his other books, including Revolt against the Modern World, his fullest account of the World of Tradition, which he opposed to the degenerate modern world.

In Europe, Evola is also known as a brilliant and incisive right-wing thinker. His books, New Age and political, were translated into French under the aegis of Alain de Benoist, leader of the French Nouvelle Droite. His books and articles have appeared in German since the 1930s. Translations into English continue to appear. Italian New Age publisher Edizioni Mediterranee keeps his books in print and has republished some with good texts and new introductions. Evola never belonged to a political party or held a political or academic post, but 25 years after his death his books are available in Italian, French, German, and English.