Click to Subscribe
‘On This Rock’
The Hour of Decision: Germany and World Historical Evolution by Oswald Spengler
© 2015 James LaFond
MAR/22/15
1933, 2002, University Press of the Pacific, Honolulu, Hawaii, pages ix-xvi
My gonzo patron Mescaline Franklin mailed this small tome to me last week with a suggestion that I review it:
“Spengler is, I think, what you’ve been calling a distant mirror, but for the disaffected person. On almost every page he brings up themes that are core to your work—the horror and the nonfiction. These leftist academics claim on the back of the book that Spengler’s views had a strong effect on Hitler’s racial politics. These people piss me off—that our universities are so devoted to the lie…”
I responded, “Look, anybody that has studied Hitler knows that his racial hatred and rage at the Jews was not even original, but merely taken whole from pre-World War One political pamphlets. Hitler sells, and even though this is a university press, there is always an attempt to sell. The publishing arm of the college wants to stay relevant just like the football coach. Like most supposed conspiracies I think we can chalk up this misrepresentation as another symptom of a greed-based society.”
Little did I know, upon making that statement that Spengler was not writing about racism, racial superiority, or even German hegemony, but about the altered state of mankind’s collective mind in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. I found Spengler immediately to be an anti-materialistic thinker that found himself—like some few postmodern writers—reconsidering a material-based world during an economic depression.
’Danger is Life Itself’
The Hour of Decision is written in four parts, and will be reviewed in four sections according to the author’s scheme, as an appendix to Of Lions and Men, as I would now clearly be negligent in pursuing the completion of that book without drawing on Spengler.
Oswald Spengler is a figure that for me, dropped unexpectedly from a supposedly empty sky. He comes off as a cross between Evola ‘A Higher Dimension Of Life’ and Stoddard Overflowing The Cup Of Wrath, ‘The Curse Of Heaven’ and Alain Locke And Lothrop Stoddard, and his work, thankfully preserved by some academia press whose parent institution would most likely horrify him, has much to offer those who would consider the plight of postmodern man in a less cluttered light than is usual.
To set Spengler, the man, in context consider that for the thinking person* educated before the First World War, to find himself alive and lucid during the 1930s was a challenge to his very sanity. Such people typically adopted a willful ignorance, falling into line with some ideology, withdrew into poetry ‘Challengers Of Oblivion’ or fiction ‘Keep Your Bounty For Your City-Bred Dogs’, or spit into the intellectual wind, as did Oswald Spengler.
To be Spengler in 1933 was to be a man of 2015 who came of age in a nuclear family just before society plunged into a frenzy of divorce, in a house wired with a phone, now looking out on a world where such small intact families are a fading exception and where every aimlessly engaged person is wired with a mass communication device. Spengler, for this author, offers through a distant mirror, the view to the birth of a world that I suspect is now in its death-throws.
If your interest lies in fascism, as does the interest of a select portion of our readership here at HopelessCrackpot.slum, or if you are of the opposite persuasion and are averse to reading anything that might seem to promote Nazi ideology, let me offer a quote from Oswald Spengler, from page 7 of The Hour of Decision:
“And the National Socialists believe that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it, and build their castles-in-the-air without creating a possibly silent, but very palpable reaction from abroad.”
Spengler wrote at a time when men around the world wondered if the very means to raise a family would ever again be a possibility. Men 40 and older recalled a much richer, much simpler time, just as middle-aged people of today recall a time dominated by the nuclear family which now hurdles rapidly toward extinction; a time before instant worldwide mass communication; a time when people thought, wrongly or not; a time before the world became a clusterfuck of hypercommunicative consumer organisms vacuuming the bilge of their betters and believing it food.
*I define a thinking person as one that uses their mind to examine the foundations of the society they find themselves in; who are willing to question their own framework for social existence. These people constitute a tiny slice of any population but represent a significant portion of writers.
‘Against the Grain’
book reviews
‘A Woman with No Honor or Protection’
eBook
the year the world took the z-pill
eBook
triumph
eBook
predation
eBook
on the overton railroad
eBook
z-pill forever
eBook
beasts of aryas
eBook
logic of force
eBook
the combat space
eBook
sons of aryas
eBook
wife—
eBook
your trojan whorse
eBook
book of nightmares
eBook
into leviathan’s maw
eBook
fanatic
eBook
ranger?
eBook
logic of steel
eBook
honor among men
eBook
hate
eBook
winter of a fighting life
eBook
solo boxing
eBook
the lesser angels of our nature
eBook
night city
eBook
taboo you
eBook
when you're food
eBook
sorcerer!
eBook
the fighting edge
eBook
on combat
eBook
america the brutal
eBook
fate
eBook
advent america
eBook
masculine axis
eBook
fiction anthology one
eBook
son of a lesser god
eBook
song of the secret gardener
eBook
let the world fend for itself
eBook
the gods of boxing
eBook
thriving in bad places
eBook
barbarism versus civilization
eBook
the first boxers
eBook
within leviathan’s craw
eBook
the sunset saga complete
eBook
broken dance
eBook
songs of aryas
eBook
under the god of things
eBook
cracker-boy
eBook
dark, distant futures
eBook
uncle satan
eBook
time & cosmos
eBook
the greatest lie ever sold
eBook
menthol rampage
eBook
the greatest boxer
eBook
all-power-fighting
eBook
by the wine dark sea
eBook
blue eyed daughter of zeus
eBook
orphan nation
  Add a new comment below:
Name
Email
Message