Mark Dyal

An abomination

Reviewed: 09-05-24

I knew I was in enemy territory when he began by saying to ignore Homer and Hesiod for the sake of Plato and theology; but I stuck with it until he spoke of “fearless speech” as a virtue that allows Hera to help you overcome micro-aggressive eye-rolls. I can’t imagine why anyone would listen to a master of modern weakness, resentment, and victimization and then believe themselves closer to the divine. My gods enable me to transcend, not overcome, modern life. But we all get the gods we deserve.

His narration was great though.

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White liberals haven’t changed much

Reviewed: 09-01-23

Thomas Fleming’s A Disease in the Public Mind sets out to re-examine the origins of the Civil War, focusing on the culture of New England and its hatred of the South; and showing how radical abolitionism pushed the country into armed conflict.

The book centers on the years between Jefferson’s 1807 Embargo and the Civil War, during which time New England mocked the embargo, sulked and defied the Federal Government in the War of 1812 and Mexican War, and conferred in Hartford on its own terms of disunion.

The picture Fleming paints is an ugly one, making it clear that abolitionism was more about hatred of Southern whites than love of blacks. Recent scholarship like The Jackson County War has given us a more useful post-Marxist understanding of why working class and poor whites fought for the Confederacy. Fleming deepens that understanding by showing the effects of abolitionist attacks on Southern character and honor. Whites who didn’t own slaves were deemed just as guilty, damned, and depraved as those who did; and so, when a Northern army filled with men who believed John Brown to be as divine as Jesus Christ invaded the South, they were proud and duty-bound to defend their, and their homeland’s, honor (Fleming’s description of the Battle of First Manassas is particularly lovely …).

His character studies of abolitionists reveal a set of wretched losers, filled with self-hatred, and fueled by resentment and moral zealotry. From John Brown to William Lloyd Garrison – with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Angelina Grimke, and Theodore Dwight Weld, in between - we hear the vitriol of their venomous words and feel the faith-based emptiness of their tautological assumptions of human equality.

By the end of the book two things are abundantly clear: no creature on earth is more self-loathing and filled with resentment than the white liberal; and America’s fate was sealed the day the first Africans arrived.

Oddly enough, Lincoln is one of the more sympathetic characters of the story. Fleming insists upon a conciliatory, pragmatically racialist Lincoln who stuttered his way to emancipation and was prepared to forgive the South and reunite the Union; but who’s goodwill was undermined by Black Republicans who insisted that there can be no reconciliation without retribution. Radical Reconstruction and Federal occupation of the South were their abolitionist goals from well before the war, and the war was a perfect excuse for recreating the South in New England’s image.

To those who sing the praises of our own Southern heroes, and who continue to resist the imposition of New England’s disease of the public mind, Fleming has given a gift. Read it along with books like The Jackson County War and The Bloody Shirt, and come to terms with the fact that slavery was indeed the cause of the war, just not necessarily for our side.

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How to Resist Federal Tyranny

Reviewed: 08-11-23

Daniel Weinfeld’s The Jackson County War is a fine example of recent scholarship seeking to nuance our understanding of class and violence in the Reconstruction South. As the book’s description says, Weinfeld focuses upon Marianna and Jackson County, Florida, which, while being violently resistant to Freedmen’s Bureau and Republican Party rule, was also, not coincidentally, home to the type of working class whites who’s defiance erupted forth in Concorde, San Jacinto, and Charleston.

Although the book is entirely too academic to give the subject the partisan fire it deserves, Weinfeld still thrills us with a pretty deep dive into the young men who fought for the CSA but had little material skin in the game, who then came home and showed what skin they actually had in that game: an uncompromising commitment to white rule and ruthless racism.

These defiant men went back to war, not only against their racial and occupying foes, but also against Jackson County’s collaborationist landed elites, who quickly and quietly acquiesced to the freedmen because they needed them to stay and labor. As the author says, these elites, “resigned themselves to the postwar reality,” and so, “lived in fear of their sons.”

For all that Weinfeld adds to our local knowledge of Reconstruction, it still paints the picture we’ve long known – especially since 2020 (or is it 1820?) – of a cynical victorious party using a morality of inclusion to empower black revenge as one aspect of a political reordering designed to guarantee the hegemony of the party.

To this apocalyptic situation the protagonists said, “No! Instead we’ll cleanse the earth with blood and fire and see who still wants to profit from our debasement.”

Weinfeld’s narrative thus joins the growing chorus celebrating Southern defiance which makes Reconstruction all the more beautiful. War is one thing. War at home is another.

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Sugarcoating is weakness

Reviewed: 08-02-23

By the time I finished Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion I had a number of thoughts and questions. My first thought, considering the book’s climax in the new afterword, is how the morality of equality has eroded previous generational commitments to academic objectivity. Of course we know that objectivity was always a lie and that every word spoken or written by any of us is but a symptom; my thought, then, was how normal it is for Mr. Dew to believe, without a shred of doubt, in racial equality, when, unlike the secession commissioners’ mountain of evidence to the contrary, he has nothing on which to base this late-modern religious tenant besides morality.

My second thought was that his book is still a fantastic listen, helped in its cause by Mitchell Dorian’s impassioned narration (Man, why is it that we suffer so many listless narrations, except for those of books seeking to delegitimize the white South? Get a white liberal talking about whites guilty of disobedience to their religion and man oh man the passion flows forth!) Dew has done us all a service by surveying the secession ambassadors’ speeches, for they offer nowhere to hide and no way for one to apologize for their content.

Which leads me to my questions. Yes the commissioners were racist, and deeply so. In fact, it is the depth of their racism that made the civil war a civilizational conflict and a question of the survival of a form of life and it’s attendant norms of thought and comportment. The depth of their racial feeling is also what allows the causes of the war to include states’ rights. Are we allowed to live locally by our own set of values, even if those values are offensive to those living elsewhere and have the nerve to harm the Federal government’s sacred cows?

Yes secession was driven by fears and assumptions of the wretched future that awaited the post-slavery South. Although the speeches that form the basis of this book were delivered to representational bodies and not to the general public, their racial and cultural, more than political or economic, content shows that they were addressed to the public at large. The planters had much to lose, but the speakers seem to be aware that the culture and well-being of Southern men and women was more at stake than the multinational profits of the slave labor system.

But in 2023 we can certainly ask, “Were they wrong?” because Reconstruction certainly manifested most of their fears and assumptions. But what would’ve become of the South without the war? Taking a cue from Dew’s afterword, and in light of the Left’s love of reconstructions, it’s safe to say the war was just an excuse to remake the South in the North’s image.

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Secession as you’ve never heard it before

Reviewed: 08-01-23

Paul Starobin’s Madness Rules the Hour is an open love letter to Charleston, the most defiant city in America, and perhaps all the world, at the moment of its greatest triumph. Starobin weaves together primary sources, character studies, and a swift narrative to create a sense of the passions and politics driving Charleston to secede from a dysfunctional, weaponized, Union.

Among the passions, first and foremost was pure defiance - the life’s blood of the American South - which drove many with no skin in the slavery game besides being told that it, and southern society, was evil, to push harder for secession than most planters.

These working class whites, perhaps surprisingly, were also the driving force of the politics of secession, often using their roles in local militias to promote the lofty ideals of Charleston’s independence.

In positioning the working class whites at the center of secession, Starobin upends the long held assumption that political disunion was driven by a planter aristocracy to the detriment of the classes beneath it. Starobin allows us to see that class is one thing, but type is altogether another; and class interests only trump others for mercenary, non-noble types. For defiant Southern whites, what mattered was not having to answer to New England abolitionist elites, John Brown’s ghost, or similarly vengeful politicians.

Perfectly narrated by Kevin Stillwell, Madness Rules the Hour earns a spot on any shelf or list of books on Southern and militia history. This is no paean to a lost cause but to one very much alive in today’s South. How Charleston managed to lead the Deep South out of a Union hell bent on it’s destruction might not be relevant as a contemporary political primer, but the Palmetto City will always be a beacon for the defiant, sunny South.

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Globalism 101

Reviewed: 07-18-23

There are men out there who have fought on foreign soil, who have come to terms with the disparity and disconnect between them and their leaders - and the sheepish, spoiled, holier than thou population on who’s behalf they are said to have fought - who now work with their hands, straining their muscles to build on all they have learned in combat, and who sit around campfires, laughing about the good times and wondering if they were worth it in the end.

Sometimes these men affirm all they’ve done and seen. After all, glory and honor are very hard to come by these days. Other times, though, they are forced to wonder if their plaudits came at too great a cost - not the deaths of their brothers per se, but the benefit of those deaths to men unworthy of the price paid.

Mark Galeotti’s The Weaponization of Everything will confirm each and every one of these men’s worst fears and basest assumptions. For it is a globalist’s wet dream of a world rapidly coming to fruition in which the weak, cowardly, morally superior consumerist has the world remade in her/their image by lawyers, bureaucrats, and social media influencers - all of whom get to flatter themselves by being warriors in a permanent, bloodless war fought with proxies, drones, and mercenaries - if there is anyone on Earth archaic enough to resist the globalists’ urban, technological utopia - but more likely, if all goes according to plan, by lawyers wielding lawsuits and insurance policy cancellations, bureaucrats imposing sanctions, and the aforementioned cultural scions in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and wherever social media posts can be made browbeating each and all into moralistic submission.

In the end the book is super informative and astoundingly arrogant; and quite frankly, the best justification I’ve seen for the prevailing attitude amongst recent veterans, that to serve this regime and this agenda is tantamount to treason.

Galeotti’s one failure, hell, I hate to even mention it aloud, is a total blindness to intra-state resistance to the globalist world - in his mind we are all either interconnected, morally-impeccable, liberal world citizens; right-wing Russian puppets duped into thinking regional or bodily autonomy has value; or Islamic terrorists.

Unlike Peter Zeihan, Galeotti is a globalist true believer, and his book has a properly hopeful tone. For his sake, but mostly for ours, one prays that the Starbucks laptop brigade to which he panders will indeed inherit the mantle of the new surrogate warfare. After all, it took weakness to create the first State, and boy howdy is the person-of-state bloodless warfighter the apotheosis of weakness. The analogy of State to bloodless, surrogate, permanent warring - calibrated coercion he calls it! - is so perfectly outlined herein, that not only has Galeotti given us an air tight justification to end all working class military service, but also the best explanation I have seen of Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that the State is an anti-war machine that can only go to war by capturing a war machine (young virile masculine bodies) and deploying it - always!! - at a distance far enough away that it can walk away from any battle that becomes too costly to continue (I doubt even Galeotti saw the ignoble Afghanistan surrender coming).

The new and improved bloodless war is, thus, perfectly suited to the pathetic, too well-educated to fight on its own behalf statist. After listening to The Weaponization of Everything, one can envision the next step in the expression of weakness’s will-to-power, and the thriving of the most useless creature our universe has yet seen; but, more importantly, inshallah, one also envisions a day soon to come on which no honorable man would consider fighting on behalf of the globalist State and it’s model consumer-cum-bloodless warfighter.

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2 people found this helpful

Southern Defiance Writ Large

Reviewed: 05-18-23

Budiansky’s The Bloody Shirt reads like a great abolitionist novel. Every black is a noble, intelligent, and courageous victim. Every white liberal is a chivalrous, erudite, and justified savior. Together these two tropes weave a systemic revenge - as heavy as the hammer of the gods - upon the unrepentant, defiant, and violent South. It’s a tale of, “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” as we unblinkingly see Federal power wed to the radical politics of abolition - a politics very much the norm in contemporary America, filled as it is with moral ferver, resentment, vengeance, and hatred - in order to use blacks as a weapon against the deserving South.

And we don’t just see it, we FEEL it, in the judgement of every impassioned and embittered word penned by Budiansky and brilliantly read by Gigante. This is how History should be written: with a side taken and myths in the making.

In the end, audacity abounds, although victories are fleeting and ultimately chimeric. Alas, the war wages on in the spirit of the book’s late chapters: as a spiritual crusade using a heavy-handed morality of tolerance and inclusion to defeat - I mean, win - the hearts and minds of a younger generation, anxious to rid itself of the last vestiges of the Old South for the sake of white guilt, capitalist consumption, and cultural degeneration.

In the end The Bloody Shirt offers all of us a great challenge to become worthy of our forebears and insure that the current reconstruction goes very different from the last.

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Railroaded by Homer

Reviewed: 09-26-22

Although this is the least inspiring of the smattering of Homeric commentary books on audible, it was still interesting and well written/performed. The time spent was probably worth it just to imagine Parry’s life being railroaded by Homer after rediscovering him as an adult. This seems to be common amongst a certain type of man, who revels in comparing various translations, studying Bronze Age warriors, and who seeks to live a Homeric Life. Parry’s story makes apparent the tragic consequences of Homer being the property of flailing, flaccid, and fatuous postmodern academics and intellectuals instead of working and fighting men.

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Good, not Great

Reviewed: 06-09-22

Whether they like it or not, the new generation of scholars researching civil war guerrillas has given us a timely and extremely useful window into localized resistance to federal tyranny.

McKnight isn’t outright hostile to his subject, as so many in the early-20th C would have been, but neither is he romantic; lacking the intimacy of the truly outstanding works by Joseph Beilein. Of course this could be because of the vicious nature of Champ Ferguson, who’s civil war was more personal and murder-ish than his chivalrous Missouri counterparts.

But whereas Beilein seems genuinely interested in why the guerrillas acted and believed as they did, McKnight just seems academically so. We never seem to get to know Champ, nor do we get to know much about Appalachia.

As for Alex Vincent, his voice is great but his reading is at once breathless but also full of awkward pauses. If he can work on his craft he has the potential to be a top-notch narrator.

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2 people found this helpful

A raisin in the sun

Reviewed: 05-20-22

What might have been … Adjustment Day starts with a bang, drawing the reader in with a plausible and exciting, character driven, story. But somewhere along the way, perhaps purposely, it loses its bearings, leaving the reader with a choice: continue on for whatever reason (pride? shame? respect to the author of the eternally unfailing Fight Club?) or move on to more fruitful pursuits (insert almost anything imaginable here). I chose the former, and am only left to wonder why Palahniuk couldn’t let it be. Corey Allen was great, Ro-mee-o, notwithstanding.

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