Reviewed and Briefly Noted (Issue No. 1)

The publisher wishes to introduce old and new books that would be of interest to the critical thinker: classics that have been forgotten or neglected; new works that have found it difficult to break through into the mainstream; other work which would be useful to those who wish to understand how we have arrived at the status quo and the direction we are moving as a people, culture and civilisation.

The below are only extracted quotes from the reviews in this issue. The full text of the reviews is only available in print and can be obtained via the publisher's online store.

[...] The fierce independence that marks the American character can be said to have arisen from their historical genesis in the Revolutionary War. This definition of nationhood is, however, somewhat limiting. Kirk illustrates that the foundations of US culture and institutions were British in their core content. He likewise illustrates that this content survived despite an increasingly ‘diverse’ citizenry. What the British brought to the New World was fundamental to the development of the society built by the colonists and their descendants, even if diluted by subsequent waves of immigration from other cultural groups [....]

This short book by Nick Land is the ninth volume of the “series in reaction” by Perth based Imperium Press. Land was a professor of Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick, a prominent member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and later taught at the New Centre for Research and Practice. In recent years he has developed a following among the neoreactionary movement and been described as the father of contemporary “accelerationism” [...]

[...] Devlin’s perspective is grounded in the social sciences, its biological roots and resulting evolutionary psychology of men and women. By highlighting the differences between the sexes on a basic chromosomal level, he extrapolates from this the different (and often contradictory) strategies employed in sexual reproduction, the consequent tensions between the sexes, and the cultural taboos that arise to mediate them in highly complex organisms and the societies they form. He outlines how this has shaped culture, in particular female and male expectations of each other, how the sexual “liberation” has destabilised this system by rewarding toxic behaviour among women and pathologizing attempted male accommodation to the new paradigm. [...]

[...] The book grew out of Fernandes’ writings for the left-wing journal Arena and one can see throughout the book some influence of the two other main strands of leftist strategic thinking: liberal-internationalism,  which sees inter-state rivalry as a barbarous holdover from a previous age and would like to see the nation-state effectively sidelined in favour of international multilateral bodies, by extension eliminating the need for conflict through a process of consensus-building; and, in small doses, the modern far left disintegrationism (“wokeness” to use its latest appellation), the general entropic pull faced by all civilisations and which, in our context, includes everything which is anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-white and anti-tradition [...]

[...] Published at the end of the Cold War, the book is written in a language that the contemporary reader may find anachronistic. Despite this, it offers an important background perspective to current affairs. While communism itself is no longer a going concern it has metastasised into a number of related causes that draw from a common source in extreme-left theory – for this reason the relevance of the author’s commentary is preserved. McDonald acknowledges that the reason many ex-communists like him find it difficult to convey the magnitude of the threat under analysis is because the audiences may “find even a quarter of the truth virtually unbelievable”, due simply to its audacity. Nevertheless, he reminds the reader: “I can speak with some authority concerning the position of the Aborigines in Queensland, having had the unique experience of having worked as an industrial officer for the Royal Australian Nursing Federation” [...]