Bump
Here’s some more info on Garet Garret:
Was there ever a prose stylist on the Right as elegantly idiosyncratic as Garet Garrett? “We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire,” he warned in a 1952 polemic, his voice husky with tragedy. The moment went unheralded, however, and even unnoticed: “There was no painted sign to say: ‘You now are entering Imperium.’ Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying: ‘Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible.’ And now, not far ahead, is a sign that reads: ‘No U-turns.’”
Garrett wrote novels in his youth, short stories and serials for the old Saturday Evening Post – he later became the magazine’s chief editorial writer – and his flair for the dramatic, the unexpected turn of a phrase, embellishes his later essays and nonfiction books. His classic trilogy of booklets, The Revolution Was, Ex America, and Rise of Empire, is a bittersweet elegy for our old Republic that, read today, has about it the air of prophecy. After twenty years, he was turned out of the Saturday Evening Post in a general purge of America Firsters, and like most of his Old Right brethren – Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov – sent into a kind of internal exile, estranged from liberals and conservatives alike.
Yet he did not fade into silence. In a last burst of eloquence he turned out three books in the final few years of his life, including The American Story – a history book such as could not be written (or published) today. To begin with, it starts out in a most politically incorrect fashion, with a dialogue between the “Supreme Voice” and “Mankind’s Advocate,” a philosophical argument of sorts that takes place against a backdrop of stars and endless night: “Mankind’s Advocate had been speaking continuously since last the Great Dipper was in a spilling position.” After a long silence, the Supreme Voice speaks: “They have done badly with the world they possess.” The advocate admits it, but blames the knowledge of good and evil, which “made them both better and worse.”
“And now you ask for a new world,” says the Supreme Voice after a while. “What reason is there to suppose they would do better with a new world – the same people?”
Mankind’s Advocate replies in a voice that sounds like Garrett, the American nationalist: “They will not be the same people. As the mountains select mountain people and the valleys select valley people and the deserts still others, so a new world will select its own people – those in flight from evil, from oppression, from the glory of war. They will begin all over again and they will have no history.”
“They find no benefit in history?” interjects the Supreme Voice.
“History,” replies the Advocate, “is their fatal luggage. They were better when they had no history. Now they fight endless wars about what they remember.”