I’ve sometimes wondered why the Mexican drug cartels are so incredibly brutal. You’d expect gangs to enforce their control through violence, including murder, and perhaps even the occasional demonstrative killing in which the victim is particularly brutally slaughtered. The cartels are a whole order of magnitude above that. If you’re dumb enough to go on some of the specialist gore sites, which I don’t recommend, here are some of the things you can see:

• A sicario from a rival gang is captured. The video begins in a squalid kitchen with shiny white tiled floor and a half dozen sicarios present. They’ve already chopped both hands off at the wrist, the victim using the bloody stumps to try to push his attackers away as they attempt to decapitate him with a blunt garden tool. They’d already peeled his face off with a box cutter.
• One of the women present at the above murder, called “the crazy blonde” by her ghoulish fans for her enthusiastic participation, is captured in a reprisal kidnapping and paraded in a field with a few other chubby middle-aged female narcos. After their masked captors talk tough for a while, the women are dismembered and decapitated.
• A young sicario is held down with a foot on his forehead. His arms are tied behind his back. Two other sicarios flay his entire chest while he moans and begs.
• A big fat black man is lying in a field, his arms tied behind his back. A gang of sicarios roll him onto his stomach and then cut off both of his arms with a large knife. They roll him onto his back and then disembowel him. The black man’s eyes are open and he blinks several times, though strangely makes no noise or struggle.

Really tame compared to reality

I never made it to the end of these videos and decided my little psychological experiment in “hardening my amygdala to shocking stimuli” was actually a bad idea. I can’t unsee these things now but I certainly learned my lesson to never go back onto such websites. But anyway, the obvious question is why the brutality?

The torture-murders weren’t about extracting information, and nor was that level of sadism necessary to remove rivals. Most gangs simply shoot you. Now that I’ve been reading Voyages Of Discovery, my best guess is this: Mexicans are descended from the Aztecs. It’s in their blood. Here’s a section from chapter five:

“In 1323, King Achitometl agreed to the marriage of his daughter to the Aztec chief… Hoping to ingratiate themselves with their god of springtime, Xipe Totec, they welcomed the Colhuacan princess and then ritually sacrificed her and flayed her. King Achitometl, arriving to witness her wedding, was aghast to find an Aztec priest wearing her skin as a dance costume.”

Yeah, build the wall.

Don’t think this was an isolated incident. You can go back into European history and find some pretty grim executions. What marks the Aztecs as different is both the sheer scale of their sadistic depravity, and how it was interwoven into their very religion. Here’s another description:

“Human sacrifice was central to Aztec civilisation. Each year between 10,000 and 20,000 victims met their deaths in religious rituals… Taking one limb each, they stretched their prey over a 50-centimetre-high stone block. A fifth priest, wielding a razor-sharp stone knife, made a swift sideways stroke across the chest, cutting through the breastbone and ribs. The still-beating heart was wrenched out and held aloft to the sun.”

When the Spanish conquistadors finally showed up and put an end to this butchery, you can make a solid claim they were liberating the Central Americans from the Aztec yoke, brutal though the wops were. There were lots of other interesting facts in this book that really struck me as significant and yet not generally known. For example, I’m sure you’ve heard plenty about Europe being evil for bringing new illnesses to the Americas that wiped out the native populations.

Oh god, how awful!!! etc….

There’s a wonderful PC game about this era

Well, chapter two talks about the Italian Renaissance that centred around Florence in the 1400s, triggered by the rediscovery of Roman and Greek classics that were preserved in Arabic and then translated into Latin. The instability of warring Italian city states proved a fertile breeding ground for artists and scholars as the rich controlling families such as the Medicis used patronising the arts as a conspicuous display of power and wealth.

What else triggered it?

The massive depopulation of the region through the Black Death in 1347. By the year 1353 it had killed an estimated one third of the European population. Florence had 100,000 people on the eve of the Black Death and didn’t climb back to the 50,000 mark until two hundred years later. Milan lost half it’s people and Pisa three quarters.

Where did the Black Death come from? Rats brought by invading Mongols to the near East, which then boarded the Turk and Arabic merchant ships. Yeah, Orcs from Mordor brought diseases that wiped out a third of Europe. You don’t hear the Left talking about that, do you [1].

Assassins Creed 2 is a romp through Renaissance Florence.

I found the Renaissance fascinating and didn’t realise it was ideologically motivated by humanism, of turning the arts away from standardised glorification of God and to an accurate and mathematical observation of nature. Also fascinating was the chapter on Bohemia’s holy wars, the main takeaway being the utter corruption and evil of the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire [3]. I don’t know if 1400s Vatican was as bad as it is now, as at least then they weren’t promoting the invasion of Europe by Africans, female priests, gangs of homosexuals dominating the clergy, or running international child trafficking networks through Mexico. But they were pretty bad.

The most interesting factoid of all was in chapter one, about the rivalry between the Portuguese and Spanish maritime explorers who discovered the Americas and the southern tip of Africa. Have you ever wondered why Brazil speaks Portuguese whereas all the other wops speak Spanish? “Because it was a Portuguese colony” is not the right answer. Obviously you must wonder why it was Portuguese.

Well, the bickering between Spain and Portugal was ended by the Treaty Of Tordesillas in 1494 brokered by the Vatican. At that time the pope, Alexander XI, was a Spaniard who had been elected only the previous year with the backing of Queen Isabella of Spain. The pope attempted a fit-up job to screw the Portuguese by creating a north-south demarcation line out in the empty Atlantic. Everything to the West was Spain’s, to the East was Portugal’s.

At that time, explorers had charted the West Coast of Africa and found it mostly shit. They had been unable to reach India around the Cape Of Good Hope (where all the expensive spices were that stimulated the exploration because currently Muslims controlled all the land caravan routes). To the West of the line was Cuba and Hispanola, discovered by Columbus two years earlier, and they thought it was only a short hop from there to India.

Nobody had discovered Brazil yet, almost all of which turned out to be east of the line.

Dumb bastards, yesterday

Stupid fucking Spanish.

[1] Just as the African slave trade run by Arabs and Ottomans, far bigger than that run by Europeans and Americans [2], seems to get a pass whereas white people are supposed to feel very guilty about buying African slaves from other Africans.
[2] Actually, Jews. Something like 90% of all “American” slave traders where actually as American as Ben Shapiro and Bill Kristol.
[3] Which was neither Holy, Roman, or even really an Empire.

I thought you might be interested to know that Lulu has two good coupon codes running now which can be used together:

SHIPIT2018 gives free shipping

FWD15 gives a 15% discount.

This means something like the Daygame Nitro hardback is $48, Primal Seduction hardback is $77 and so on. All the other books including my memoir volumes 1, 2 and 4 are also covered by the sale. Just enter the codes in the basket.

Go here for Lulu’s page of my books

This book is an English translation of a memoir serialised as Panzerdammerung (‘Panzer Twighlight’) shortly after it was written in July 1948. The author describes in the introduction that some press critics have deemed it “needlessly controversial”, “too provocative” or even “too violent” whereas those who were there on the Eastern Front, in the panzers, acknowledge it as accurate.

So, finally, after many fictionalised pseudo-memoirs such as the work of Sven Hassel, Leo Kessler, and Heinz Konsalik we finally have an accurate memoir of a tankman on the Eastern Front.

Or do we?

“Oh really?”

A book about panzers written by a man named Faust. Panzer, Faust. Ooooooookay.

There have been a rash of old WWII memoirs ‘discovered’ by family in dusty attics or cellars across Germany, and then rushed to publication to make money or influence politics. Mostly they are frauds. Probably the best example is Anne Frank’s diary, written after the war by her dad in a biro pen that hadn’t even been invented while she was still alive [1]. Now that I’ve read Tiger Tracks I can very safely state this is a work of fiction.

I googled and was amused to see Google’s summary sidebar for Wolfgang Faust said he was born in 1944 and died in 1993, making him minus-one years old when the events of the book occurred [2]. There are no pages I could find talking about this book before 2015, and nothing in German. I also found a few other blogposts asking “is this memoir true?” before inevitably concluding it isn’t. And I’m not surprised.

Covers have gone downhill since Sven Hassel’s days

Tiger Tracks begins with the German army in retreat from the Reds in October 1943. Faust is the driver of a new Tiger tank, “sixty tonnes of the Reich’s finest metal” and his twenty-tank battle group has orders to take a ridge full of Soviet defensive emplacements. Thus begins a solid action sequence described with precision and flair. At no point is any of it confusing: who is fighting, why, when, and how. It’s clear action writing. The panzers take the heights and cover the left flank of an unsuccessful attack by the Army centre. That’s the last forward move of the book before full retreat.

Like most WWII memoirs, the side the writer is on seem to be awfully skilled, frequently overcoming daunting numerical and material disadvantages through pluck and luck. Funny that.

As the Soviet position was rolled up, the tank crew comes into possession of a young female radio operator as a prisoner who they throw into the back of a half-track. This sets up a sub-plot by which the Reds launch a number of counter-attacks to either kill or rescue her. It’s never clear why. The Germans think she must have important intel on Soviet signals and encryption, whereas the woman claims to be a nobody and then latter the mistress of a high-ranking General. The first such attack happens during a retreat through thick forest when the treeline becomes alive with partisans.

The rest of this short book as a chronicle of the single retreat, the objective being to reform at a river and then defend the only bridge on the Eastern side until reinforcements arrive and they can cross to the Western bank, blowing the bridge behind them. Unlike Heinz Konsalik, there are no multiple weaving character arcs, and unlike Sven Hassel there is no dreamlike blurring of different battles or time spent in R&R. This book is a simple, detailed narrative of a single action exclusively from the author’s first-person view.

And what a first person view it is!

It’s how I feel when trying to play a game on a mobile phone

This guy is a Tiger driver and thus his entire battle view is from a narrow viewing slot. Have a look. Pretty restrictive no? Anyone looking out the hatch in this story gets their heads blown off – literally – so Faust is pretty clear that he keeps his head indoors. Yet he’s able to witness scenes such as this:

  “I didn’t even feel their bodies being crushed and chewed by the tracks – there wasn’t even a jolt as we ran them down in clusters. Human flesh was too soft to withstand these forces, too frail to even register on my dials. I saw three of the Ivans try to run, in front of my vision slit, until the square hull front covered them up and only a dismembered leg in its felt boot tumbled up onto our glacis. I span and crushed the enemies down, with Kurt beside me blasting now on his MG34 at any who jumped clear – and together, we defended that corner of Russia on behalf of the Reich.”

Now I think that’s pretty good genre writing but it’s rather embellished with details I doubt he could’ve seen. A few pages later he describes the Ivan infantry managing to get a molotov cocktail into the engine grill of a fellow Tiger, lighting up the interior:

  “The Tiger’s other hatches opened as the crew began to evacuate before their fuel exploded. Of the five men who exited, four were immediately cut down by Red small arms fire. The fifth fell onto the burning grilles, and lay there thrashing in the flames as the gasoline took hold below him.
I looked to see where those murderous bullets came from. I saw, on the T34 that was knocked out on the very edge of the anti-tank ditch, one of the Russian tank crew, still in his ribbed helmet, crouching behind the turret with its slumped gun barrel, aiming a machine pistol over the turret roof.”

Just try visually reconstructing that scene, and the likely distances involved. Now imagine how you’d see that through the vision slit above. I don’t buy it.

Have there been any other DS-to-PC ports?

Anyway, don’t misunderstand me. As a work of fiction I quite enjoyed this tale. It moves along at a brisk pace, there’s no pointless padding or sub-plots, and the action is clearly written. What it also did was made me start wondering if I should get into playing Panzer Tactics again. I did once try it on the Nintendo DS, expecting it to be as accessible as Advance Wars but gave up when the tutorial confused me. Now I’m wondering.

I’d quite like to be a Panzer General. It sounds ace.

If you’d like to read a memoir about a European heading East to take down a long line of Russians you might just want to start at Balls Deep and keep reading.

[1] Sigh, can’t go anywhere without encountering Jew lies
[2] Assuming they did occur. One way false memoirs disguise themselves is to not give specific names or dates of battles, thus military historians can’t check up with the massive amount of battle orders and communiques which would allow them to corroborate the details.

I’ve been a lifelong atheist. Initially this was from growing up in an atheist family [1] and being educated in public schools, and then finally through flirtation with Alt-Left politics. That said, I was singularly unimpressed with the New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. From the beginning, I considered them blowhards. Dawkins may have written a very interesting book in The Selfish Gene but he spent most of his public speaking time talking way outside his field of expertise.

I’d like to believe in God, as I agree with Vox Day that Western Civilisation rests upon the three pillars of Christianity, Greco-Roman philosophical heritage, and White DNA [2]. So lately I’ve been ruminating on existential issues, specifically: how to get around my non-belief in God?

You can’t simply make yourself believe in God any more than you can decide to believe the Earth is flat or to believe Street Hustle is a good book. Even if it were possible, submitting yourself to an elaborate manipulation campaign to believe something you don’t is delusion bordering on madness. So, what to do?

There’s no question that Evil exists

One thing I do believe in is Evil. I see it. It’s everywhere. Can one reason from the existence of Evil to the logical conclusion of the existence of God? I’m not so sure because there’s at least one more plausible explanation

r/K selection.

You see, if you map all the traditional Christian virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope and charity then you are basically describing the K-selected wolf value system. The reverse – Evil – is the r-selected rabbit value system. Thus you can easily make a convincing materialist case that Good and Evil are merely mystical shorthands for our ancestors’ instinctive identification of the differences between wolves and rabbits.

Evil exists because of r-selection. It therefore doesn’t logically compel one to reason one’s way to a belief in God.

If you find this kind of theorising interesting you might like Saint Thomas Aquinas because he wrote literally millions of words on this sort of thing. The most famous of which – Summa Theoligica – is a two million word analysis of the Bible [3]. Obviously I’m not going to read that so I went to a short introduction, this volume in the A Very Short Introduction series. Now, as always happens when engaging with a secondary source, I’m at the mercy of the writer to represent his subject fairly. Fergus Kerr says right from the beginning that Aquinas’ work is so voluminous that he can only scratch the surface.

This fucking dude

So, having scratched it, what are my thoughts?

Imagine I opened my table drawer and pulled out a jumbled mess of iPHone earbuds, string, shoelaces, and USB cables. They are all knotted up like usually happens. Then I say to you, “reinterpret that in the light of Aristotle”. That’s Summa Theologica.

Go on, straighten that shit out

Aquinas was a professional theologian writing in a time of great schisms during the Golden Age of Christianity c.1250. At that time scholarship was reinvigorated by Latin translations of Aristotle from Arabic. Since the collapse of the Greek and Roman empires, the Greco-Roman legacy had been lost to the West and preserved mostly by Muslim scholars. During Aquinas’ time it was rediscovered and he was very impressed. Thus he set himself a project to prove that most of what Aristotle had figured out (and Augustine) was compatible with the Bible.

Throughout this A Very Short Introduction book, Kerr draws examples in how Aquinas is reinterpreting Aristotlean concepts, particularly from his Nicomachean Ethics, to support the equivalent conceptions in the Bible. This was a big deal at the time because it injected a form of humanism into Christianity. Much orthodox thought was that the Bible is a series of strictures on how to live (like a checklist) whereas an Aristotlean Christianity is about internal change and being a virtuous person through internalising virtue. Aquinas was proposing a processual approach to virtue, what modern-day sociologists (if they weren’t all Godless communists) would call ‘interactionist’.

I’m nowhere near familiar enough with either Aristotle or Aquinas to opine on whether the latter did a good job of this. The reason I bring up the tangled cables analogy is because of his laborious methodology and how obtusely it’s presented in Kerr’s book. Here’s a sample paragraph:

“Substance and accidents is of course Aristotelian terminology; yet Thomas explicitly bases his theory on the first theorem of the Neoplatonist Liber de Causis; the first cause can suspend a second cause, and thus keep accidents in existence in the absence of substance of which they were the accidents (ST 3.75.5). In short, for Thomas, this unique phenomenon can be located with a degree of intelligibility only in terms of Neoplatonic ontology of creation. Like the doctrine of creation itself, this understanding of eucharistic consecration completely surpasses anything Aristotle could have understood”

This paragraph is in the middle of a discussion of how Aquinas attempted to explain the possible metaphysical arguments for what happens when Catholics are given bread and wine at service. He wished to examine these three versions:

“the substances of the bread and wine coexist with the substances of Christ’s body and blood; they are annihilated; and they are converted into the substances of Christ’s body and blood”

I’l bet this issue had been puzzling you too.

I really don’t understand why theology exists. The Bible is there, Christians believe it is the Truth, and therefore surely the correct course of action is to simply read the bloody thing [4]. Spending two million words trying to untangle knots that were only ever tangled in the first place because scholars decided to opine and put their own oar in seems like a futile task to me.

Summa Berbalogica

Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine Johnny Berba was taken seriously as a spiritual leader. A host of Berba Scholars discover his YouTube channel and his hundreds of hours of rambling are translated into Hebrew, then from Hebrew to Arabic, then from Arabic to Latin. A new generation later discovers the Latin translations and, without access to the original videos, tries to reinterpret Berba’s wisdom in the light of Aristotle.

Now imagine reading a Berba: A Very Short Introduction volume. That’s how this one felt. I’m utterly unimpressed. I don’t know if my conclusion says more about Kerr than Aquinas but this book was a waste of time for me. I still hold an open mind on Aquinas, as many very intelligent men say he’s a pivotal thinker, but Kerr’s book doesn’t support their case at all.

If you were thinking “fuck all that, let’s talk about shagging” perhaps you’d like to try my Summa Daygamologic also known as Daygame Infinite

[1] Though now I think “philistine” is more accurate as my parents are snobs who are completely lacking in aesthetic taste.
[2] I believe he calls it “the European nations” but they are all white. Further, I’d say almost every Greco-Roman philosophical tract ever written should be read with the imaginary preface of “this only applies to societies that are almost entirely white.”
[3] Think of it like how Daygame Infinite analyses text chats and date transcripts
[4] Something I’ve never done, as it happens.

Regular readers will be aware that I’ve made a return to daygame coaching. So, has it been a triumphant return like Napoleon escaping exile in Elba and marching on to Paris, or was it more like The Ultimate Warrior‘s return to the WWE?

I’ve been hitting the gym and following a calorie-restricted diet lately

So far in 2018 I’ve coached four residentials, of five days a piece. I’ve got two more lined up. Each of the clients gave me a personal debrief at the end and I can confidently say all four felt like they’d really gotten a good week out of it. But that’s just me blabbing on my own blog, where I control what gets written. Of course I’m going to say that, right? [1] So where are the testimonials, Nick???

There won’t be any because I HATE testimonials. They are a scam marketing dodge that PUA fraudsters have been using for years. A common trick is to pump a student’s state on the last day of coaching/boot camp/seminar and then just before he leaves, ask if he’ll do a testimonial for the camera [2]. What a surprise he’s excitable and positive. Even if it’s given for free and in sincerity, the coaching buzz hasn’t worn off yet so he likely really believes it was awesome.

No, fuck that. I have a low opinion of testimonials so I won’t stoop to them myself. However, one of my clients does in fact run his own daygame blog. He was keen to write up his experiences on our Moscow residential and I encouraged him to do so. “Write whatever you want, good or bad” I said, or words to that effect.

If you’d like to read his VERY LONG and VERY DETAILED thoughts on the week of coaching start here. If you’d prefer the summary, start here and then go here.

Here are some cherry-picked quotes that pleased me immensely:

“I was positively surprised of how motivated he still was, for Daygame and for teaching alike.”

“in general was not only professional during our prep messaging but also surprisingly nice. Which continued when we met. I was not sure how well we would get along ..… But I guess one gets a wrong impression to judge him just on his blog persona where he is very exposed to all kind of weirdos.”

“Our days in Moscow really changed my deeper feeling towards Daygame: from It’s work, the grind is hard but necessary to improve your ratios to Sarging can be fun and easy, even if you still screw it up in set; just accept how much the girls like it to be opened and be on dates, enjoy all these moments. There are many other things but I can already say now that he was worth the [hell of a lot of] money he asked for.”

Thanks a lot for taking so much time and care with recording your experience and reflections on it. And thanks Snakeskin for the recommendation!

If you’d like to book residential coaching with me in 2018 then I’m afraid you can’t as I’m fully-booked. Maybe next year. Feel free to contact me though, just in case. Click on the Coaching tab at the top of the page (or here) to get an idea what’s in store.

1. Well, no. Anyone whose asked around in the community knows I don’t lie.
2. Often with a promise of a partial refund or free extra coaching as a bribe.

I’ve read a few accounts of the immediately post-Russian Revolution era now. The US-Jew anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote a bitter repudiation of the commies with his The Bolshevik Myth, following his tour of Russia. You could make a case that Atlas Shrugged is a fictionalisation of the same years, transposed into the USA thirty years later. Ayn Rand stated that it was the economic collapse of 1921 in Russia that inspired the book and it certainly reads that way. Added to this short list is Paul Duke’s Red Dusk And The Morrow: Adventures And Investigations In Soviet Russia.

I’m done with this era for a while

Towards the end of this book, after having savaged the Bolshevik system with a comprehensive strategic analysis, Paul Dukes relates a conversation he had with a returning Lithuanian diplomat [1]. The diplomat had asked a prominent Bolshevik leader in Petrograd how they keep control. He’d replied:

“Our power is based on three things: first, on Jewish brains; secondly, on Lettish and Chinese bayonets; and thirdly, on the crass stupidity of the Russian people”.

Red Dusk was written in 1922 by a former MI6 spy sent by Whitehall to get abreast of the developing Russian situation immediately following the 1917 revolution. The first half is a memoir of his infiltration, poking around, and escape. The second half is an overview of how the Bolshevik regime is run.

Dukes explains the Jewish brains of the above quote is a half-truth. He observed that almost all the intellectual work of the Party was given to Jews, but he points out there were at least as many Jews who were opposed to the regime. Only, they were all in prison and couldn’t offer a public opinion. Whereas Churchill or Solzhenitsyn consider the Bolshevik regime to be a Jewish attack upon Russia, Dukes seems to think it was mostly a put-up job by foreign radicals who’d grabbed the megaphone and the Army.

He describes many cases where soldiers in Petrograd and Moscow could not be relied upon to shoot at their fellow man, so the Bolsheviks imported their enforcers from Eastern Russia and Latvia. Foreigners have no such compunctions.

Dukes when writing versus his disguises in Russia

Where Dukes disagrees with the unnamed Bolshevik leader’s comment is in the Russian people. Throughout the book Dukes speaks highly of the peasants in particular, saying they were mostly outside the Bolshevik propaganda system due to distance and a poor rail network. 1920s Russia lacked radio and television, and pamphlets were used as roll-up paper for marchorka cigarettes. So, unlike the populations of cities who were constantly bombarded with speeches, councils, and parades, the peasants just got on with their lives [2].

Dukes believes that for the whole of his time in Russia, the populace believed Bolshevik rule was a passing phase. They were so utterly incompetent and venal that few believed the regime could last. Remember the civil war was still going on, with the (Allies-supported) White army fighting the Reds in the West and the South. Dukes argues that the Whites were themselves venal and brutal but had the additional handicap of representing the former Tsarist landlords and often shot themselves in the foot by declaring they’d return the seized land occupied by peasants back to it’s aristocratic former owners.

Needless to say, this didn’t go over well with the peasants.

Faced between a brutal, incompetent and likely transitory regime with the Reds, or the same thing with the Whites but likely to return to a centuries-old status quo, the peasants and city dwellers weren’t particularly inclined to get involved. Naturally, they never foresaw Stalin’s rise to power and his utter destruction of the country.

“Every Communist organisation throughout Russia has to present periodical reports to headquarters on the progress of its [recruiting] labours… Thus it is in the interest of the Communist officials to coax, cajole, or even compel soldiers to enter the ranks of the Party. The statistics supplied are compiled at headquarters and summaries are published. It is according to these statistics that the membership of the Communist Party is little more than half a million, out of the 120 or 130 million inhabitants of Soviet Russia.”

Remember this when looking at the Left now. The true believers are a tiny proportion of the population. The Right is much bigger than the Left and always has been. As all the money is stripped from the Left, preventing it funding all the astro-turfing like Black Lives Matter, the European Union, NGOs, and public sector unions, we see it’s true size.

Everyone hated the commies and, as Dukes describes, when they carried out a 1921 purge of party membership to remove people who’d joined simply as grifters looking for better rations and housing, their membership took a harder than anticipated hit:

“The result was that, besides those who were expelled for misdemeanours, many Communists, disquieted by the introduction of so stringent a disciplinary measure, profited by the re-registration to retire, and the membership was reduced by more than 50 per cent. A total of less than 4,000 was left out of a population [of Petrograd] of 800,000”

He paints a picture of unbelievable delusion and duplicity. First he explains how Bolshevism and the Soviets are completely different things, and completely at odds. By Bolshevism he means the Party, its members, its ideology and its actual practices. By Soviets he means the bottom-up collectivisation of factories, farms, and housing in which small councils are elected which then send representatives up a tier and so on right up to national government.

Reality was more like a Hillary campaign rally attendance

As anyone who has ever been in a meeting with Lefties knows, especially of the modern SJW variety, these people have absolutely zero respect for democracy.

Dukes gives numerous examples, noting first that only Communists were allowed to be elected to soviets, and thus despite being only a tiny fraction of the population they controlled all of the institutions. Elections were nominally free and non-Party candidates could stand but this rarely happened because (i) Despite having secret ballots as a Party principle before seizing power, they immediately reneged on it once in power [3] and (ii) anyone standing as or voting for a non-Party candidate would be harassed, arrested, and possibly shot.

This led to the bizarre situation where the Bolsheviks would operate sham Soviets, constantly exhort their centrality to the revolution being “of the worker” but no-one believed a word of it.

Dukes also points out that although the Bolsheviks claimed to rule for the workers, no workers were actually allowed to join the Party! Membership was almost entirely the intelligentsia and former Tsarist experts brought back to rescue the Bolshevik administration form its own chaos. It wasn’t until the commies were desperately trying to grow membership following the disastrous 1921 purge that they opened up places to some workers.

Not a lot happens in the memoir portion of the book because Dukes explains he had to leave out any stories that could be traced to people still living in Russia and, given this was written only a year after he escaped, that’s a lot of people and likely all his best stories. So instead he gives a glimpse into life in Petrograd and the border regions with Finland. It’s dismal, and chimes exactly with how Berkman and Rand describe it.

Most striking to me is the constant flirtation with famine, the utter pointlessness of Party decrees [4], the atmosphere of permanent suspicion and betrayal, and lastly how pretty much everyone ends up getting shot by the Bolsheviks eventually. Their solution to everything was either issue a decree or murder whoever was causing them irritation.

Most people in the UK and USA don’t realise how close we came to tyranny in 2016. Even as Donald Trump is fixing the world, half the population is trying to reinstate the Communist traitors who almost turned the USA into another USSR. As I read this book I was constantly looking for parallels with current times and they abound. The Left of 1922 is the same Left of 2018. The only difference is the amount of power they hold.

If you’d like to get your hands on some great memoirs, just hold your horses two weeks until I announce what I’ve been working on lately.

1. This is in 1922 and thus before Russia invaded Lithuania and forced it into the USSR
2. Stalin would change that rather dramatically
3. “One person, one vote, once” is the real Communist attitude to democracy.
4. As if you can ban famine by simply decreeing it illegal

I should know better by now

When I was a teenager, I was a far-leftist. This isn’t surprising generally, because children are brought up in a bubble where everything is provided for them, they don’t need to work, and they must obey the authority of a controlling force (parents and school teachers). Upon approaching adulthood the child realises they’ll have to fend for themselves and, usually, that’s a frightening thought. Few teenagers know what they really want to do in life, and fewer still feel confident in achieving it.

So, much easier to vote Leftist and ask the government to keep giving you free shit.

“If a person is not a liberal when he is twenty, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is forty, he has no brain” is a quote attributed to many wise men and it’s true. Nothing cures Leftism faster than looking at the tax deductions in your first paycheck.

Given that I was brought up in the People’s Republic Of Northern Britain by Lefty parents, I had no hope of thinking straight. So I got into radical politics, starting with anarchism and then the various fringe issues of the day. One of them was the anti-McDonald’s campaign. We were told that McDonald’s were an evil multinational corporation who treated workers like shit, murdered millions of animals, cut down the Amazonian rain-forest, funded death squads in Brazil to clear tribes, and made unhealthy food that was killing the West.

Suppose for a minute all that is true, as I did. I once asked the middle-aged Lefty organiser [1], “Why are we only protesting McDonald’s? What about Burger King?”

Is he the ONLY cunt in this game?

He didn’t have an answer for that. Every charge levelled against McDonald’s could be levelled against Burger King and Wendy’s yet it was only Ronald McDonald who drew the fire. Why is that? It struck me as rather unfair.

I bring this up because is there any group in history that has been more unfairly maligned than the Nazis? You might well think they were bad eggs but the only bad guys in history? Come on! Stacked alongside Stalin, Mao or Hirohito, Hitler was almost benign. Look further into history at the Ottomans, the Mongols, the Mohammedans, or the Aztecs and you realise the Nazis were far from unique in their savagery or territorial ambition.

And yet the Nazis are the only group in the whole of history about which ANY lie is allowed. Satanists? sure. Sexual Deviants? sure. Genociders? sure. ID Software made an entire franchise, Wolfenstein, from presenting the Nazis as occultist sexual sadists opening the portals of hell to command an army of demons.

Although I suppose it makes them look cooler than the commies

Really? Why wasn’t it Stalin doing that? Or Idi Amin?

Few people [2] realise that the traditional Left/Right split in politics is nonsense as traditionally conceived. Yes, there are basically only two types of human and they instinctively align along the same fault lines: r-selection vs K-selection. But that’s not Left vs Right. L/R is a completely fabricated split to disguise the fact that Nazis and Socialists are almost the same thing. You can even prove it historically, looking at where these things came from. I’ll recap for you [3]

“Enter Benito Mussolini. Notice his given name is not Italian. It would have been Benedetto. He was named after Benito Juarez of Mexico by the admiring Mussolini Sr. a Marxist of the 1st International and acquaintance of Marx. He groomed Benito as a full blown Marxist. Young Mussolini was an active member of the Politburo of the Socialist Party of Italy and, for +-16 years, editor of its publications.”

Mussolini’s big ‘aha!’ moment was in realising that the socialisation of the means of production recommended by Marx and carried out in the USSR was not necessary. You could achieve the same ends by simply regulating production. It didn’t matter whose name was on the shareholder’s certificate – government or a private individual – so long as the whole enterprise was tightly controlled. So, how would that control be effected?

Mussolini set up “Unions” of workers, industrialists and workers who, under the direction of a National Labor Board, would achieve “Social Peace” through “Social Justice”. This reverses the antagonistic proletariat vs bourgeosie relationship under capitalism with one of collusion between workers and owners.

“Every worker would get health benefits, vacation time and a retirement pension. And a minimum salary, established through collective bargaining sessions between the “unions” that represented the universe of a particular sector of the economy (auto makers, restaurants, doctors, lawyers…) under the watchful eye of the National Labor Board.”

Put that way, you can see why in 2008 I was telling my colleagues at work that Obama was a Mussolini style Fascist. The unions were called “Fascio” and it stuck. It was passed into law in 1927 as even Wikipedia notes. Go here for the principles: that’s what fascism is [4]

“Lenin lamented the departure of young Benito as an irreparable loss to the cause of International Socialism. “With him we could have had Italy.” Mussolini’s brand of Socialism caught on and, of course, the first thing he did was clear other socialists off the field, much like the Bolsheviks did with the Mencheviks in Russia. This some idiots point to claiming he was against socialism. He wasn’t. He was against anybody but him claiming the mantle of socialism. The same happened with Hitler, who created a third form of Socialism, mixing it with Bohemian nationalism, hence National Socialism.
Mussolini, who was actually quite intelligent, despised Hitler. After their first meeting describes him as an imbecile who sounds like “a broken gramophone. Jews here, Jews there, can’t he talk about anything else!””

So far so good. Anyone who paid attention in Politics class at a decent university [5] knows that fascism and socialism are basically the same thing. But how did the terms get so corrupted now that most normies think fascism is “far right” as opposed to the reality of it being “far left”? The same way all the other terms got corrupted – by a sustained communist subversion campaign waged by the KGB and their traitorous agents in the West [6]. To finish this train of thought, we’d better call Saul:

“After the war, Soviet propaganda went overdrive to distance the “good” Socialism — Stalin’s if you can believe that! — from “bad” socialism, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s. Painting them as “extreme right wing”, that is, of all things, capitalist pigs. Roosevelt, himself a full blown Fascist and Truman, who could not distance himself from Roosevelt, let it be.
So Nazism and Fascism stopped being Socialism to become… right wing Capitalism courtesy of Soviet propaganda and the apathy of our own American fascists. Hayek warned us about this in the 50s. But nobody gave a crap.
And under Roosevelt’s protection, hundreds of Marxist scholars who lost the tug of war with Hitler and Mussolini came to our Universities and trained two generations of intellectual morons committed to the destruction of our free society. We are now well into the third.
Are they left? Are they right? Paraphrasing the Bard, A turd, by any other name would smell as foul. It is a struggle between Liberty and slavery. A Free Society or Metropolis.”

McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s are all doing the same thing. They are fundamentally the same businesses so there’s no reason to single out one for a pile-on. The only important differences between the types of socialism are in their territorial ambition. Stalin changed USSR doctrine to be “Communism in one country” whereas Hitler wanted his socialism throughout Europe and Mussolini wanted to rebuild the Roman empire for his. Those who believed in global communism became globalists and infiltrated the USA as Neo-Cons (because that was the most powerful nation and thus prime lever for their evil plan) and then later in Europe as the EU.

Saul Alinsky wrote in his Rules For Radicals [7], ““If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive” and the Left managed this by switching ownership for Hitler and the (supposed) holocaust. A quote attributed to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels is “accuse the enemy of what only you are doing, when you are doing it, to spread confusion” [8] and it would seem the commies live by it. Nazis are now of the Right, according to modern culture.

You knew there was a sneaky Jew behind all this, didn’t you?

We own all of their atrocities, not the Left. So not only has the Left managed to keep attention off the incredible barbarity of Stalin and Mao, it’s managed to switch all the blame for socialist Hitler onto the right. Sneaky communists.

So, what’s this long-winded preamble got to do with the second book in The Destroyer series? Only that this book is all-in on the weird fascination with Nazis for invented fetishes. The premise is this: a security guard at an isolated think tank is found dead from a heroin overdose and medical examination shows he was likely murdered with a hot dose. A close search of his clothes finds film negatives stitched into his collar of extreme blackmail photos of the think tank staff. Given that this think tank is a high-end government research facility theorising advanced strategy for world domination, the President needs to be sure it’s not compromised and their plans given to the enemy. So Remo is called in to take the security guard’s vacancy and infiltrate, to have a sniff around.

It turns out there is an escaped Nazi, a former prison doctor who tortured inmates, and his young daughter on the small think tank’s staff. Remo has to smoke them out but their identity isn’t clear to Remo or the reader until the final act plot twist.

The covers rock, though

This would be a normal pot-boiler for any other series but in the strange hands of Warren Murphy, it gets very weird very quickly. Firstly is the unusual focus on sexual deviance. The director of the institute is a deranged narcissist obsessed with control, one of the senior staff is a big fat puff who plays pocket billiards in public, and all the other staff are seriously weird in one way or another. All are being blackmailed due to being caught on camera doing sick sex acts. Murphy clearly has no respect for academia or intellectuals [9] so the think tank is presented as a pointless talking shop of fruitcakes living on the taxpayers dime.

There are a couple of murders and Remo does his usual thing of beating the shit out of everyone with ninja death moves. One scene has him cripple a biker gang who ride onto campus at the fat puff’s call, and that same fat puff is masturbating while it happens. There are faculty events such as a chess tournament and an open-mic.

One thing the book does fairly well is introduce the theme that Remo has been overworked by his boss, who has kept him on high alert for three months straight. This causes him to come off the boil and make mistakes. Still, this whole book smells of weirdness.

For example, the final showdown has Remo sit down for a game of chess with the old Nazi poisoner. His chair has hidden needles that spring out to inject the unsuspecting victim but Remo sees them and subtly moves his wrist to avoid them penetrating the skin. He then shams being poisoned so the Nazi gloatingly reveals his plans [10]. He “hypnotises” Remo into fucking his daughter while he watches. Not only is that odd, but the way it is written is downright freaky.

“Remo moved on. Harder. Faster. His mind sensed the heavily calloused skin on the tips of his fingers.
Her groans grew in intensity, raised in pitch. She was in pain now. Suffering. She would soon shout and stop and Remo, under drugs, would have to obey.
He leaned forwards heavily onto her body and smashed his heavily muscled shoulder down into her mouth, chipping her front teeth. Hard. Stopping her from calling out the command to stop.
Her voice was muffled under his shoulder.
Stohrs had stopped taking pictures. He was now just a spectator. The Nazis had killed by gang rape. Stohrs was watching that fate overtake his daughter, a death administered by a one-man gang.
Then Stohrs called out, “Stop.”
Remo stopped. And the bitch lay semi-conscious, bleeding from the mouth and groin.”

I don’t know about you, but I find that unpleasant. It’s like the author is getting off on it rather than presenting it as the sickness in the characters themselves. Yet there’s something oddly compelling about these Destroyer books compared to the Mack Bolan books. The latter have a clean-cut heroic jib where Bolan is absolutely beyond reproach and takes no sick pleasure in exterminating baddies. In contrast, both Remo and his writer Murphy seem like rather sick puppies who get off on it all. I’m reading these books with the same morbid fascination I’d watch a Johnny Berba or Deepak Wayne video: what will these fruity retards conjure up next?

I consider myself above such sensationalism

Speaking of getting off on personal dysfunction, perhaps you’d enjoy reading one of my memoirs. Start with Balls Deep for just ten english pounds in PDF or twenty in paperback.

[1] Who with the benefit of hindsight, I’m sure was a pedophile.
[2] Though it seems to be rapidly changing
[3] This specific rundown owes a lot to Saul Montes-Bradley on Twitter. His was the most pointed listing of relevant facts I could find. Thanks pal!
[4] It may surprise you that fascism doesn’t mean “anything a Leftist disagrees with”
[5] Such as myself
[6] Academics, journalists, politicians
[7] The book Hillary Clinton did her thesis on, which she dedicated to Alinsky.
[8] Ironically, it seems he didn’t actually say it and it’s just another lie about the Nazis.
[9] Nor do I. Good on him
[10] This was written before Despicable Me was released and thus baddies didn’t have the injunction against monologuing.

I’ve heard lots of uncomplimentary things about the former best-selling Dennis Wheatley who is now one of my all-time favourite authors [1]. Obviously I brush aside the modern soyboy comments that he’s racist, sexist, homophobic and whatnot. I mean the criticisms of him from a literary point of view.

First among these is his turgidness. He has a tendency to overly describe things in precise detail including all the various reflections a character makes before his action. Wheatley could spend two pages outlining the thought process behind Duke De Richlieau brewing a pot of tea. I don’t mind this at all. I’m one of those rare readers who didn’t feel Atlas Shrugged got bogged down and I’m finding the same pleasant pacing to War And Peace now. Slow patient exposition doesn’t bother me when it’s done well.

A second criticism of Wheatley is his ‘make it up as you go along’ plotting. It’s entirely valid but I like it. Most experienced writers will have a general idea where a book’s plot is headed and they’ll go back into early chapters to add foreshadowing and background for later plot twists, once decided on them. Wheatley writes as though he doesn’t even re-read a chapter after writing it. His books exist entirely in their present.

Let me give an example from this book. It begins, in 1938, with a cruise ship halfway from Cape Town to Rio De Janeiro. The first chapter sets us in a wild storm with driving winds and huge waves, the ship on the verge of sinking. Wheatley introduces us to his vast (and very interesting) cast of characters huddled up in the lounge bar and the Finnish crewmen battening down the hatches. All kinds of intrigues are set up here. There’s the twice-divorced thirty-year old beauty who seems to have boarded under a false name to flee South African police, and the sleazy greasy Venezuelan mine owner who knows her dirty secret and will blackmail her for sex. There’s the dissolute disgraced British trustfunder drinking himself to death, and the waif-like society debutante he fancies. Lots of interesting backstories and characterisation.

Wouldn’t scare me

The order is given to abandon ship and everyone piles into two lifeboats. One of the boats is immediately caught on a wave, smashed into the ship’s hull, killing everyone aboard. Like that, in one paragraph, half the cast is killed off. It’s extremely rare to read genre fiction nowadays where a writer would have such redundancy in his writing. I love it, because you really can’t predict how things turn out. Only the main hero is ever guaranteed survival.

This type of plotting continued throughout. So the first few chapters are a disaster movie, like The Poseidon Adventure, the ship’s crew battling a storm and the passengers keeping their spirits up. Then it becomes Castaway, as a lifeboat drifts aimlessly in searing heat as the survivors run out of water and are soon at each other’s throats. Then they find the ship again but their triumphalism is abruptly cut short as they become trapped in supernaturally thick sea-algae and are attacked by kraken. They drift towards two uncharted islands and the book shifts tone again. One island is inhabited by aggressive negros who use balloons of hot air and stilts to traverse the sea atop the moss…. in order to attack the other island which is a peaceable white community [2]. The next plot twist is they are all attacked by giant crabs.

Yes. Giant crabs.

They made of movie of it too

I get the feeling old Dennis would just get a bit bored with his current plot trajectory and think of silly ideas to spice it up.

The thing about Dennis Wheatley is that he has the unmistakable genius for compelling writing. He could write about going to his corner shop for a pint of milk and make it exciting [3]. Despite every single element of this book being utterly preposterous, his writing makes it thoroughly believable. I couldn’t put this book down.

I really ought to do a more in-depth review but I read this in St Petersburg a month ago and left the paperback in my hotel room when I checked out. I instead direct you to a much better review of the same book here. Sadly, that reviewer is a bit of a faggot and seems to support Wheatley’s modern editor SJW-ifying the master’s prose to make him palatable to a new generation of traitors, cucks and soyboys. Still, a good review.

[1] Alongside Sven Hassel, Robert E Howard, Agatha Christie and Alexandre Dumas
[2] You see where the ‘racist’ accusations come from.
[3] He’d likely encounter a sinister communist plot to create aggressive gerbils to assassinate the Tory prime minister or something.

There’s an old ex-pat joke: What’s the difference between a tourist and a racist in Africa? Two weeks.

He looks a bit scared, I think

Africa is a disgusting shithole. This is exactly what you’d expect when many countries have an average IQ of 68. In contrast, Koko the Gorilla tested at 85-90 [1] and was considered typical of the species. It’s the average IQ that mostly determines the quality of life in a country, as the smart tend to isolate themselves in enclaves [2]. None of this is surprising because Africa doesn’t have cold winters and thus the environment, unlike Europe, never culled DNA of people either unwilling or unable to plan ahead for lean times. Also unlike Europe, Africa never had a severe criminal justice code that literally executed and deported all the savages from it’s own population [3].

Africa was never supposed to have a big population. Unfortunately for Africans, do-gooders in the 1970s invented modern agribusiness and exported it to Africa via transnational corporations, United Nations aid, and NGOs [4]. World grain produce was quadrupled in less than a decade and for the first time in human history, there was a global food surplus. In the West, that meant everyone got fat. In Africa, it wiped out the subsistence farmers who used traditional methods and put a rapidly expanding population into food dependency. We are reaping that harvest now, as the continent is swollen with hundreds of millions of low IQ individuals unable to feed themselves.

It’s not surprising many seek to escape, and invade Europe. Thus the Soros-created “migration crisis”.

While I’m sympathetic to how Africa has been completely fucked over by do-gooders and socialists [5] there’s also the fact that the continent is a cesspit of tribal warfare, slavery, and unbelievable fuckwittery. They have 68 IQs, after all. Not just that, but Africa is an extremely dangerous environment for humans. Nature is deadly there: mosquitoes, desert, hippos, lions…. and fucking hell, no wonder black people don’t swim. The water can kill you, so any African DNA that liked a frolic in the water was soon weeded out by the crocodiles [6]

So, I’m sympathetic but I swear there’s one thing I simply love to do when video gaming: gunning down Africans.

Pretty much every video game lets you gun down any other nation. Call Of Duty has you fighting Russians, Homefront has you against the Koreans, and Max Payne 3 pits you against Latinos. But if you want to gun down Africans it’s really really hard. Resident Evil 5 was set during a viral zombie outbreak in Africa and immediately drew “racist!” cries from the SJWs. To my knowledge only Far Cry 2 is the only AAA game to bite the bullet and throw you into the midst of an African civil war where you kill mostly Africans. And even then, white mercenaries form an unusually high proportion of your enemies.

Still, I loved it. Setting fire to villages with my flamethrower and then gunning down everyone who ran out.

Enrichment goes both ways, pal

But I digress.

Africa is constantly in a state of war. In the immediate post-Colonial sixties you had genocide in Burundi, or the Mau Maus kicking off in Kenya, and the USSR meddling with the MPLA in Angola [7]. In the 90s was the “Third World War” in Congo as everyone fought for control of the former Zaire’s vast mineral wealth. I think nine different countries had a dog in that fight.

This is an extremely fertile setting for action stories. You have an exotic location, rival factions, blood diamonds, and hordes of bad guys who you don’t feel the slightest guilt in wiping out by the hundreds. This Mack Bolan book takes full advantage.

The set-up is that there’s a border war between Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast. A Cuban agent, Marie Saragossa, has infiltrated a small town on that border and seized blueprints of a secret military installation making deadly chemical weapons. The Chinese are after it, as is her employer. While holed up in a broken-down hotel, the border war swept over her town and she’s trapped there. Bolan is sent by the US to get the blueprints so that the military can locate and destroy the facility. He is in a race against time with agents on the other sides, including a South African mercenary bringing his own team of yahoos – this is the main antagonist.

This isn’t Far Cry 2

Bolan gets into the town just ahead of the mercs but Saragossa is fatally wounded. Bolan grabs the plans and fights his way out, injuries and fatigue almost killing him as he’s left hiking through the brush to an unlikely ex-filtration point and a ride home.

I really enjoyed this book. The set-up works, giving good reason for everyone’s actions, clear motivations, and lots of action bubbles. That action is described crisply and evocatively, the whole time within a tropical rainstorm I could almost smell. Yeah it’s a silly action story, but the level of competence by the writer is very high for the genre. It was a page-turner.

The scenario reminded me a lot of two memoirs I’d read by mercenaries fighting with rebel armies of Africans. One, My Friend The Mercenary, described a rebel army fighting by way of Equitorial Guinea attempting to oust the Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. It’s comical. The writer is a journalist who accompanies a South African mercenary hired to train, equip and lead the rebels. Upon arriving in the base camp in the north of the country, it takes two weeks to leave because the entire army is just sitting on their ass smoking weed [8]. The convoy of jeeps and trucks sets off and at the last minute the journalist is asked to change jeeps. Just as well he did, because a minute later a child soldier in his first jeep is playing with a grenade and drops it, pin out, in the foot-well where it blows up killing him and the driver.

A week of driving on jungle tracks gets them to the first battle line. The journalist describes running to the battle past a teenage soldier who is fiddling with an RPG. He drops it and it goes off, firing into the sky. The back blast kicks up dirt and gravel which blows the soldiers legs off.

That’s an AK-74 but only an IQ-68

The mercenary sets up his side’s forces in defensive positions facing Taylor’s army and is confident they can hold out for two weeks while waiting for reinforcements and heavier munitions that are en route from a base in Equatorial Guinea. However, his troops fire off all two weeks’ of ammunition in one afternoon and are left helpless. Luckily for them, Taylor’s army are also retarded and have done the same thing. So the two sides settle down to stare at each other for a while.

A week later there’s a huge boom and flash visible over the horizon. It turns out that was the supply train. They find out later that a soldier was smoking weed while driving an ammunition truck. He flicked the joint out the window but it was caught by the wind and blown into the ammunition, setting it off. Lol.

It is such incidents that decide African wars.

Anyway, if you like trashy action stories then I absolutely recommend this one. It isn’t quite The Dogs Of War but it’s one of the better Bolan books I’ve read.

Not this dog of war

And fuck all that shite. Buy my books. They are great. Start off with the brand new full-colour second edition of Daygame Mastery

[1] And likely Harambe scored higher, imo.
[2] Or in the African case, flee to a white country and get a job there.
[3] Don’t underestimate the effect of this. Right up until a hundred years ago, Europeans removed anti-social savages from the gene pool. That left pro-social DNA in it. Sweden is discovering the unexpected consequence: these pro-social people are suckers for when anti-social migrants are reintroduced.
[4] That’s a trifecta of the three most evil organisations in the whole world.
[5] And don’t get me started on that grubby terrorist Nelson Mandela and the white genocide by the ANC. Both whites AND blacks were much much better off under apartheid.
[6] In contrast, Europe has almost entirely benign nature, weather changes can’t kill you, no earthquakes or hurricianes, and all the rivers are easily navigable by boat with no great waterfalls, rapids or swamps.
[7] Forgive me if I mangled the history. It’s been a while since I read about it and I’m going on memory.
[8] Not unlike the whole of South London

The cover is the best thing about it

It’s funny how a series of books can change in tone as the author struggles to develop them. They’ll perhaps begin quite similar to whatever inspired them, then as the author finds his narrative voice (or responds to reader input) the series can shift. The first Destroyer book was hardcore revenge, as a specially-trained government assassin takes on a shadowy New York cartel. The second book [1] went into oddball sexual fetishes and Nazi occultism. I felt unclean just reading it.

This third book veers even more sharply away from the original. It is now mixing in comedy, with assassin Remo playing the straight man against his ageing Korean ninja death master mentor Chuin’s funny man. There’s also a sidekick Chinese girl ranting Mao-isms so that hilarity can ensue from her being slapped down.

Hilarity does not ensue. This book is an abortion.

The story, set in 1972 when the book was published, is that the president of Communist China is due to visit the USA for an historic peace summit. His advance team is poisoned on a domestic US flight and then when his second-in-command General Liu flies out he is promptly kidnapped from his motorcade and mysteriously disappears. The POTUS sends Remo and Chiun to investigate, with a one-week deadline to find and rescue the General.

Remo enters the fray in chapter two as he and the eighty-ish Chiun are practising running up and down the outside of tall buildings. I quote:

“Fleetingly, he wondered if he really was ready. Were his hands strong enough, his timing keen enough, to overcome gravity, by the disjointed rocking technique perfected in Japan by the Ninja – the warrior wizards – more than ten centuries ago?”

If you think that’s ridiculous, well, it’s just getting started. Remo is getting chauffeured from an airport with the commie chink girlfriend of Liu, who is sent by the ChiComs to aid the investigation. The driver leads them into an ambush, so Remo kills him and gets out the car to face his eight assailants. The action proceeds as follows:

  “You’re all under arrest,” he said. The eight stopped.
“What’s the charge?” one of them answered, in precise English. In the light of the headlamps, Remo could see he was a tall heavy man with a bony face, wearing a snap brim hat. His answer marked him as the group’s leader. That was what Remo wanted to know. He had use for him.
The man repeated, “What’s the charge?”
“Reckless dying,” Remo said. He leaned his weight back onto his hands, then with a push of his arms and a leap his body flashed through the air. The polished tip of his right shoe crashed into the Adam’s apple of the first man on his right. His feet hit the ground, his hands still on the trunk of the cab, and without stopping, he spun about on the trunk of the car and repeated the action, flashing out with his left foot at the man closest to him on the left. This shoe too was christened in the Adam’s apple. The action occurred so quickly that both men fell simultaneously, their throats crushed, death on its way.”

That’s the first two guys. Be sure the other six died in equally theatrical and unlikely fashion as Remo whizzed between them in a blur of ninja motion. That attack failing, Remo’s enemy hires a Puerto Rican super sniper to shoot him from a building across from his hotel. The ninja power of Chiun is so strong that just by sitting in lotus position on his bed, two hundred metres away, he’s able to unnerve the assassin and render him unable to fire his rifle. The sniper gives up and waits in his hotel until Remo comes up and murders him.

This book is filled to the brim with super-Ninja bullshit. It’s unbelievable. What kept me reading is the astonishing lack of political correctness as the Korean Chiun bickers with the Chinese girl Mei Soong, while American blacks and whites do likewise. There’s a constant undercurrent of racial tension in everything – not surprising considering this was the era when major US cities were all like Ferguson in it’s month of riots.

But I stress, the humour is awful.

  “My government has sent me here to officially identify my husband [General Liu],” Mei Soong said in English. “They did not send me here to suffer abuse from this reactionary, meddlesome old man.”
“I’ll show you how old I am in bed, little girl. Heh, heh”
“You are gross, even for a Korean. Do you still remember your last erection?”
Chiun emitted a warlike shriek and then poured forth verbal Oriental abuse.
Remo pulled to the side of the road, “All right, Chiun. Up front with me.”
Stilled instantly, Chiun moved into the front seat and adjusted himself angrily. “You are a white man,” he said. “Like moldy dead grain. White.”

The tonal shift from Destroyer #1 is massive. Back then, Chiun was a learned, wise and impertubable martial arts master who could inflict death at a touch. In this scene he’s merely a cantankerous old letch who’s easily phased by a girl’s taunts about his todger.

A bit later, Mei Soong kicks off again and Remo figures the only way to calm her down is to rape her until she likes it. So he holds her down and molests her while she calls him a filthy capitalist swine, but just as he’s about to stick it in she says “Damn you, I want it.”

  “Ah,” yelled Mei Soong, her eyes shut in ecstasy, “Fuck Mao, Fuck Mao,” and Remo suddenly withdrew fully and stood up. Under different circumstances, he would have stayed, but now he needed her to follow him, to be unsure that he would ever want her again. So he left her exhausted on the couch, and zipped up this trousers, having performed fully clothed.
And then he say Chiun standing in the doorway, shaking his head.
“Mechanical,” he said.

The trio have trouble in a department store when Mei Soong is seduced by capitalism’s amazing clothes and handbags, but shit-talks the unionised shop assistant wrapping her purchases. There’s a fight in a Chinatown restaurant and then finally a showdown in a karate dojo that even made me blush for it’s outrageous racism. Remo is lured there by Mei Soong, who is actually working with General Liu to undermine the Chinese peace attempt (Liu had escaped the motorcade deliberately, and was not kidnapped). So, Remo is surrounded by seven big muscular black men, all karate black belts (and Black Panthers, to hear them talk).

“You jumped right out a comic book”

After the leader attacks and is killed by Remo, this happens:

  Then there were six, six stunned black faces, eyes widening. Then someone had the correct idea to attack en masse. It looked like a race riot in martial arts robes. “Get the honkey bastard. Kill whitey. Get whitey.”

Remo chins most of them then picks up two curved gray tiles from a pile as weapons.

  He spun around one blow and brought the two bricks, one in each hand, together, with an Afro between them. Directly in the middle of the Afro was a head. The two bricks made valiant effort to meet. But they cracked. So did the head in the Afro between them.
The Afro with the open-mouthed head went to the mat. The remnants of the tiles went into the air. The last black standing threw an elbow that missed and then said, eloquently:
“Sheeit.”

I think liberals would be unable to finish this book. Remo kills everyone then soon tracks down General Liu who murders Mei Soong before she can betray his secret plan by blowing her head off with a .45. Remo and Chiun are invited to China where the Korean jumps around the presidential palace with a seven-foot sword dismembering Liu’s bodyguards before ramming the sword into his mouth and skewering him vertically to the floor.

It’s so very very odd.

So long as the art is like this, I keep buying

I don’t recommend this book at all, excepts as a car-crash of what happens when martial arts mystical baloney is wrapped up in ludicrous jingoist racism and sadistic violence for the edification of teenage boys who want thrills. I might try one more Destroyer book but if they keep going in this direction I’m going back to the relative sanity of Mack Bolan

If you’d like to read about a forcible seduction of a lippy Chinese girl who eventually surrendered and wanted more, consider volume two of my memoir A Deplorable Cad.

[1] Which I’ll review soon.