jhg1995's review
0.5
Just a ripoff of The Turner Diaries, an already stupid load of regressivist garbage.
Also, DON'T try and say this or The Turner Diaries is "realistic" or "predicted x events." Realism =/= cynicism and anyone who says otherwise knows less than Jon Snow.
Also, DON'T try and say this or The Turner Diaries is "realistic" or "predicted x events." Realism =/= cynicism and anyone who says otherwise knows less than Jon Snow.
b00kl0v3r's review
1.0
This book is depressing, bleak and rather squalid. Its critiques of political correctness can be quite amusing in parts, and its deliberation in how the USA could collapse in the context of a more unstable near-future are fascinating to think about. However, the way William S. Lind author goes about it is distasteful.
This book is a bleakly depressing book on how the USA falls apart a few years from now along different irreconcilable identity lines. Much violence ensues, with the odd spot of ethnic cleansing, genetically engineering superbugs, positive allusions to Prussian social and military culture, all wrapped around the concept of Fourth-Generation Warfare.
Lind can write. However, so could many eugenicists and racists from last century, who he sometimes seems to be channeling.
His style draws you in to begin with, but then his political views start to come through in a much more obvious way as the story progresses. He apparently supports ethnic cleansing, self-segregation along racial line, thinks it would have been better if the South had won the Civil War and that Reconstruction was a huge mistake, that women should be back in the kitchen and nothing else, and that we should all live in the world of Retroculture, or basically go back in time to before the 1960's.
Added to these already pretty unsavoury views (to put it mildly) Lind obviously has a real bugbear with the modern world of academia and the professors who inhabit the positions of teaching and the dispensing of knowledge through the lens of "cultural-Marxism". There is a particularly gruesome scene, gratuitous in its violence and disturbing in its support for religiously motivated massacres, when the teaching staff of the reestablished Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale are massacred for spreading the rot of cultural-Marxism (aided by UNESCO just because) once again through the minds of the young, even with all the experience of the collapse of the USA. The men who kill them are dressed as Crusaders, are followed by monks singing the Dies Irae, and all watched over by a priest and newly appointed governor of Maine who has the aforementioned love affair wth Prussia.
While I have my own issues with the way modern academia is more about credentials than education and seems to be confining itself to narrower and narrower fields of study hemmed in by dogmatic identity politics, this solution seems rather extreme, no?
Having done some further research on Lind, it seems that he is an arch-conservative of the Paleocon stripe, and has had some dealings with Holocaust deniers and other unsavoury types. One gets the impression that the voice of the protagonist who narrates the story has echoes of Lind's own beliefs on everything from government, religion, education and race relations.
In sum, I suppose my real issue with this book is not so much the subject matter of the collapse of the USA and what happens as a result, but the way in which Lind approaches the subject, and how he seems to revel in his depictions of the various events, and in the way he describes different racial groups. I can't repeat some of the ways he described black Americans for example, because if I did, Goodreads would ban me.
Again, the subject matter could be interesting if handled in a different way. This does not mean it should be any less grim, because it's a grim subject. However, there are certain aspects already alluded to that could have been handled in a different way so as to avoid condoning or supporting them.
By all means read it and see for yourself, but don't expect to come out of it feeling very hopeful or having a great sense of cheerfulness.
This book is a bleakly depressing book on how the USA falls apart a few years from now along different irreconcilable identity lines. Much violence ensues, with the odd spot of ethnic cleansing, genetically engineering superbugs, positive allusions to Prussian social and military culture, all wrapped around the concept of Fourth-Generation Warfare.
Lind can write. However, so could many eugenicists and racists from last century, who he sometimes seems to be channeling.
His style draws you in to begin with, but then his political views start to come through in a much more obvious way as the story progresses. He apparently supports ethnic cleansing, self-segregation along racial line, thinks it would have been better if the South had won the Civil War and that Reconstruction was a huge mistake, that women should be back in the kitchen and nothing else, and that we should all live in the world of Retroculture, or basically go back in time to before the 1960's.
Added to these already pretty unsavoury views (to put it mildly) Lind obviously has a real bugbear with the modern world of academia and the professors who inhabit the positions of teaching and the dispensing of knowledge through the lens of "cultural-Marxism". There is a particularly gruesome scene, gratuitous in its violence and disturbing in its support for religiously motivated massacres, when the teaching staff of the reestablished Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale are massacred for spreading the rot of cultural-Marxism (aided by UNESCO just because) once again through the minds of the young, even with all the experience of the collapse of the USA. The men who kill them are dressed as Crusaders, are followed by monks singing the Dies Irae, and all watched over by a priest and newly appointed governor of Maine who has the aforementioned love affair wth Prussia.
While I have my own issues with the way modern academia is more about credentials than education and seems to be confining itself to narrower and narrower fields of study hemmed in by dogmatic identity politics, this solution seems rather extreme, no?
Having done some further research on Lind, it seems that he is an arch-conservative of the Paleocon stripe, and has had some dealings with Holocaust deniers and other unsavoury types. One gets the impression that the voice of the protagonist who narrates the story has echoes of Lind's own beliefs on everything from government, religion, education and race relations.
In sum, I suppose my real issue with this book is not so much the subject matter of the collapse of the USA and what happens as a result, but the way in which Lind approaches the subject, and how he seems to revel in his depictions of the various events, and in the way he describes different racial groups. I can't repeat some of the ways he described black Americans for example, because if I did, Goodreads would ban me.
Again, the subject matter could be interesting if handled in a different way. This does not mean it should be any less grim, because it's a grim subject. However, there are certain aspects already alluded to that could have been handled in a different way so as to avoid condoning or supporting them.
By all means read it and see for yourself, but don't expect to come out of it feeling very hopeful or having a great sense of cheerfulness.
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