HAMLET THE ANTI-MAN, INTRODUCTION: ANTIHEROIC HAMLET

In this first segment of Andy Nowicki's "Hamlet" podcast series, Andy grapples with the paradox at the core of Hamlet's appeal: the fact that he is an immaculate rendering of a deeply disillusioned soul, an "antihero" of whom we stand in awe, yet at the same time find confoundingly, endearingly relateable.

https://soundcloud.com/jnow1101/hamlet-the-anti-man-introduction-antiheroic-hamlet

STRAIGHT TALK ON BULLIES

by Andy Nowicki

I have written before about the outrageously hypocritical antics of the anti-bully brigade, whose self-appointed members constantly puff out their chests and pound their proverbial podiums ad infinitum these days, constantly getting in our faces, and all but stealing our lunch money and throwing us into trash cans and slamming us into lockers as they hector and bluster and demand all the while that we need to STOP BULLYING!!!!

Of course, to a large extent, those who denounce “bullying” the loudest don’t really care about bullying qua bullying. For them, the War on Bullies is but a proxy battle, through which they intend to vilify anyone opposed to gay marriage and any type of concerted gay-normalization effort. When such folk speak spitefully of “bullies,” what they mean are “(white) Christian conservatives,” who in their prejudiced perception just can’t be anything but bullies, since they’re so closed-minded and bigoted… (and so very gauchely white, too...)

SPEAKING ART TO POWER

by Andy Nowicki

A while ago, I wrote an article entitled “Alt Right Art,” a sort of mini-manifesto for dissident aesthetic voices who find their scope impaired by the machinations and ministrations of a dully ultra-conformist and punitively small-minded age, an age wherein the once-revolutionary Left has seized hold of nearly all established citadels of thought, its entrenched cultural commissars ruthlessly enforcing their ever more pernicious institutional “innovations” with monotonous fervor and plodding regularity, and in so doing, rendering adherence to embattled traditional mores the only possible means of rebellion, excitement, redemption, and relief.

SOPHIE'S CHOICE

SOPHIE'S CHOICE

Sophie and Hans Scholl, commemorated on a 1961 East German postage stamp.

by Andy Nowicki

On February 22, 1943 – seventy-two years ago – three leaders of the dissident student movement The White Rose were executed by guillotine at the Stadelheim Prison in Munich, Germany.

Twenty-four year old Christoph Probst, 24-year old Hans Scholl, and his sister, 21-year old Sophie Scholl – all students at the University of Munich – were sent to their deaths mere hours after being tried and convicted for treason in what amounted to a show trial, presided over by the ogre-like "hanging judge" and infamous Nazi stooge Roland Freisler. Their "crime" consisted primarily in the fact that they printed up and surreptitiously distributed pamphlets which condemned the war and urged passive resistance to the Hitler regime. At no time did the White Rose movement ever practice or even espouse violence, but they were nevertheless shown no mercy by the totalitarian government they so vigorously opposed in print. Many more arrests and summary executions of other young people belonging to the group were to follow in the weeks and months to come.

ALT-RIGHT ART

Once it's seen, it can't be unseen.

by Andy Nowicki

Left-liberal attitudes and habits of mind may at one time have been radical, provocative, and gutsy, but today they are staid, stale, conventional, and boring. Any honest contemporary cultural Marxist will have to admit that, politically speaking, his side now holds all significant power. Those who openly decline to subscribe to the ideological establishment's point of view on such matters as race, gender, and sexuality have in effect committed social suicide; having put themselves utterly at the mercy of the powers-that-be, such unfortunates have left themselves open to attack by legions of official Zeitgeist-enforcers and their numerous toadying minions.

DRESDEN WAS *NOT* DA BOMB

Those always classy antifa femen, here nakedly endorsing genocide.

by Andy Nowicki

I couldn’t possibly add anything to Colin’s excellent summation of the Allied atrocity of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany at the tail end of World War II. This premeditatedly murderous attack on innocent and helpless men, women, and children—overwhelmingly civilians who had nothing to do with the German armament effort—was certainly one of the most grievous war crimes ever committed in human history. We hear little about it today, because history is recorded by the victors, and it was the Allies, the eventual winners of the world’s most recent global conflagration—in the specific form of Great Britain’s Royal Air Force—who were responsible for raining down an unrelenting barrage of incendiaries upon a populous city center in eastern Germany on February 13 and 14, 1945, incinerating tens of thousands and maiming thousands more in a planned terror campaign of untrammeled brutality.

"TOMORROW'S GETTING HARDER": BON JOVI AND EXISTENTIAL DOOM

by Andy Nowicki

To properly engage with his subject requires both confidence and willing vulnerability on an artist's part. Thus, an artist’s best work is often accomplished when the ravages of age cause him to fear that he may have exceeded his arbitrarily-assigned—but no less real and ever-looming—expiration date. Cockiness born of the arrogance of youth is replaced by the easier, more graceful self-mastery which can only derive from, and consequently be tempered by, a sobering awareness of one’s undeniable limitations, itself a scarcely-avoidable by-product of aging.