Benjamin Teitelbaum is an ethnomusicologist who got interested in the rise of the nationalist far right. This connection probably makes more sense if you’re European: Oi, turbofolk, National Socialist Black Metal etc. As he gained direct expertise in the scene, he started to see something from his deep reading show up in the world:
By Traditionalism—with a capital T—we were referring to an underground philosophical and spiritual school with an eclectic if minuscule following throughout the past hundred years.
Amid startling political gains for nationalist, anti-immigrant forces in the twenty-first century, Traditionalists on the right appeared to be carrying on with a fantasy role-playing game—like Dungeons & Dragons for racists, as a student once put it.
And Traditionalism connects Steve Bannon, the Russian philosopher/Putin-influencer Aleksandr Dugin, and the Brasilian ideologue Olavo de Carvalho. Which strongly suggests this weird and obscure “philosophy” has underpinned a lot of the strange shit of the last ten years.
I have 55 highlighted text pieces off this book. It’s an absolutely thrilling ride into crazytown. Dugin once had what was essentially a small private army who wore chaospheres as their insignia! Mike Moorcock invented that!
The book is wonderfully readable, a real-life conspiracy-theory rabbithole dive, connections made and explored and explained like the best weird thrillers, digging up stuff I’d never heard of or only encountered at its edges and brought out into bright light.
It’s interesting, too, how Teitelbaum can clearly question and abhor the ideologies present here and also empathise with, and sometimes quite enjoy, the humans. I think he quite likes Bannon, and I think Olavo charmed him a little. None of that gets in the way of Teitelbaum’s sight of the threats presented by these people. But also, there’s a sense of how small these people are. How they’re not as smart as they think they are. How fundamentally damaged some of them are. How they fail.
First book I read front-to-back this year and it was brilliant.