In this extraordinary collection of interviews, Jamie Glazov demonstrates that consistent, searching questions can both enrich and impart coherence to disparate answers: for what emerges from 29 interviews conducted over eight years is an illuminating and important commentary on the largest issues facing America and the West.
We here at Covenant Zone in Vancouver, Canada know both the publisher and the author, prompting this promotion in particular. However, it is on the strength of the work itself that I suggest looking at this book closely. Glazov is a good thinker and writer, and the subject is important to us generally. As readers and writers I think this is worth our consideration. Link to Glazov's work at Mantua Books directly here.
6 comments:
Give yourselves a treat and go check out the story at BNI about the Austrian MP who rips the Turkish ambassador a new one over the latter's whining about multiculturalism and "tolerance", and to the cheers of the Austrian parliament.
This is what we need to see and hear EVERYWHERE.
Hey Dag, I'm glad to see you posting. It's been a long time. Hope you are well.
I'm beginning a long process of typing out my long-hand manuscript of A Genealogy of Left Dhimmi Fascism, now looking like it will be not volume but actually five. I didn't intend to do any such thing when I began this effort back in April 2009. Then it was meant to be a large survey of ideas that led us to our current assumptions about individualism versus collectivism. The writing from April to December 2009 took up most of my evenings, and then with a six month hiatus to do further research, I began again from July to the end of Oct 2010, at which point I finished with close to 2,000 pages of manuscript in tiny print without margins on my papers. Lots of words, and not much of it actually interesting-- or decipherable-- to the general reader in this condition.
As I am a terrible typist I am hopeful of finding some way of making the time it will take to keyboard my way to fame and fortune in some less than severely unpleasant environment: I'm preparing to pack in my exile years in Canada for a couple of years at Vientiane, Laos. There I will sit and type by the edge of the Mekong River till I produce a series of manuscripts that will be as good as I can make them.
Thus, my production of other things is limited, but not off my mind. I hope to do more here as time allows.
You live an exciting life.
Is it beautiful by the Mekong River in Laos? Are the women beautiful there?
Most of our most likely sacred places are to be found at sources of water, the Ganges River, for example, and Wells Cathedral, and so on, not simply because it pays to be close to water rather than having to fetch it from a distance but because we are watery creatures in the soul. We might go big on praise for cities or forests, and often do, as well as mountains, but mostly it's rivers, like Huck Finn on the Mississippi or Charon on the Styx. Yes, there is the work of Melville or Conrad, but the ocean is "oceanic" as Roland Romaine puts it, and we are more closely attuned to the specificity of a river, our first form of transportation, far first over horses and carts, and because rivers have a personality that oceans and lakes cannot have, the river being the same but not so, not being able to step into the same one twice. Elemental like fire and air, it is also eternal and close and intimate, hypnotic and spiritual, life giving and terrifying too.
Because of the heat and the rain we find the Mekong area to be lush beyond the norm, life at hyper-speed, competitive and rangy, vegetation abundant and wild, yet tamed for agriculture in part, an ever-ongoing struggle to keep Nature on our side, a batter we cannot let lapse for a day without losing. Man is dwarfed by this power, and enthralled, physically and spiritually, bound, religion-like, by the force. And there is the beauty, not the least of it.
The landscape is beautiful, according to definitions of beauty going back at least as far as Plato. But the women do not have the same advantages the natural landscape has, i.e. nutrition. Laos is a primitive economy and a less than fertile land, given over to a failed economic model of militaristic Communist dictatorship which retards most progress, as we know it in the West. The food might be "organic" and healthy, but there is not enough of it and it's not of much variety, leaving the population at the mercy of Life to provide the minimum for survival and reproduction, the frills, such as beautiful features not having a toehold.
One might see the problem in a place such as Sweden, a nation renowned for its beautiful women. This is undoubtedly so, truly beautiful women abounding; but not all, and not even many Swedish women are beautiful, only those, for the most part, I say, who live in affluence in the cities. Most rural women are coarse-looking due to diet and inbreeding.
Endogamy makes good sense for most primitive economies in that one is trusted to co-operate and ensure the over all survival of the ethnic, i.e. family group. One mates to ensure the traits one knows in the family, producing a "race" or ethnicity. In a free and market economy, people are expected to act interdependently in various ways, not closely related to familism, and hence, racism and ethnic preference are disruptive of a free and market exchange. But in Laos, for example, there is little of that. Exchange is between families and clan groups, reinforcing "traits" and "look." It's essential and good that this occurs in small and poor community groups, otherwise there would be few people at all. One selects for mutuality and security in such an economy.
In reality and on the ground practice, in spite of what I hear and read, the Lao people of the low lands seem to be Thai or Siamese. The hill people or mountain people are a different sort. So, the high and dominant culture is, so far to my mind, Thai. Laos is a province of Thailand with political independence. I could be wrong and will find out when I live there and get to know it better. I'll try to live on the riverside, finding a place in Vientiane by the water, directly across for Thailand. Lowlanders are often passive compared to highlanders, as is too obvious from knowing Scots, for example. Hunters and farmers. It makes for different kinds of minds. I hope to stay among the low landers so I can sit and write in relative peace. As a foreigner and as a total outsider in all meaningful ways I will probably have little interaction with the local life. It should mean freedom for me, the way any alien is excused and ignored for being incomprehensible, a stranger in a strange land.
I think Ill find myself in the middle between two highly dynamic cultures, the Thais and the Vietnamese. I hope and expect to find myself in something of a quiet backwater of Buddhists and subsistence agriculturalists. If I don't find what I need there, I might move on to Burma.
I guess this might seem exciting, but I'd have been much happier to have lived a life like AOW and family, committed to a family life for the duration. Far too late for that now. Now it's typing tyme, bookwritin' time.
I have five volumes here to finish. I have some hope that this effort will stand in the world as worthy. One must have faith.
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