THE SONGS OF SUPERIOR MEN

Cranston Allard

The modern men of the West are lost. Drug addiction, screen addiction, porn addiction. All of these dependencies are interconnected, and many come from the same source. The modern male often lacks a grand vision, or even a reason to wake up in the morning. There is no adventure. And while Benjamin Roberts’ “Nomos of the Nightclub” article in IM1776 proffers the idea that, “Aesthetics, fighting, and the nightclub…is enough to shake the sleeping spirit of man into new vital action,” this is still not enough. Nightclubs, especially in the age of COVID idiocy, are not dens of flesh and challenge. They are monuments for marionettes mostly, with men and women playing kabuki to scenes that they have internalized from mass media. Also, Roberts’ diagnosis misses the fact that a large swath of Western men are either incels or luckless bastards to begin with, and not all of them can be cast aside as unfitting of the new elite. Most cannot help it; the geriatric matriarchy in the West has done an awful job in raising their young men, and many retreat time and time again to virtual reality rather than face the horrors of contemporary dating. In a similar vein, a man successful in the nightclub can become a specialist and seek no new adventures thereafter.

What is needed now are heroes, not just playboys. It may sound cliché, but it is true. Men of the West need heroes. They need masculine examples of courage and iron will. They need to see and read about their ancestors who stood against great odds and often bore the slander of the “lying press” of their days. They need, above all else, counterexamples to deprogram themselves away from the mass media’s representations of men as ignorant oofs, lustful marauders, or, at worst, unnecessary accessories in progressive society.

Fortunately, independent publishers on the Real Right are right now dispensing the much-needed correctives in the form of books. The most well-known of the lot, Mystery Grove, have earned acclaim from right-wing pundits as diverse as Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, and Darryl Cooper (@martyrmade). Other publishing companies include Agartha Publishing and Catacomb Archives. All three have so far specialized in autobiographies written by men of action and adventure. These men, Peter Kemp, Siegfried Müller, and Gustav Krist, have all been rescued from the ash heap of history by these dissident publishing houses. To honor their legacies, as well as the work of Mystery Grove, Catacombs, and Agartha, let us now sing the songs of superior men.

Peter Kemp – His Were of Trouble

Peter Kemp lived like a Victorian adventurer in the 20th century. Born into a bureaucratic family in British India, Kemp came of age in London and at Trinity College, Cambridge. Unlike many of his peers, Kemp kept conservative and monarchist politics. As such, when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, Kempt leapt into action to support the Nationalist cause. On what he described as a “cold, wet day in November 1936,” Kempt left London for Spain despite knowing no Spanish and having never been to Spain. The Nationalists made no effort to recruit him or any other Englishmen. Indeed, of the Englishmen who went abroad to fight in the Spanish Civil War, most joined the International Brigades, which were armed and supported by the Comintern and Bolsheviks the world over. Kemp proved to be a novelty in other ways, as his Anglican faith often caused either gentle ribbing from his Catholic compatriots, or more serious enquiries about whether or not he belonged to the Freemasons. 

Kemp’s first taste of combat came with the Requetés, or the Carlist militia of mainly Navarrese monarchists who provided the initial shock troops for the Nationalists. While wearing the militia’s distinctive red beret, Kemp saw action at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937 and the Battle of Santander in July of that same year. Kemp rose through the ranks to become a junior officer, but the disciplined Englishman felt that he needed something more than the brave, but often ill-trained and undisciplined Requetés. Accordingly, Kemp joined the feared Spanish Foreign Legion. Modeled after their French counterparts, the Spanish Legion first cut its teeth during the bloody Rif War of the 1920s. There, the Legion fought running gun battles and engaged in counter-insurgency warfare against the Rif Berber tribes, who sought to create an independent republic in northern Morocco. The Legion’s most famous son, Francisco Franco, would become the leader of the Nationalists in the Civil War, and the Legion provided Franco with his best troops.

The Protestant Kemp seemed to be an ill-fit for the majority Catholic and primarily Spanish fighting force. Through pure pluck and daring, Kemp became the leader of the 14th bandera and its machine gun platoon. In this capacity Kemp fought at Guadalajara and was wounded several times. Despite his wounds, Kemp always found a way to return to the frontline. This changed in May 1938 when Kemp took a mortar shell to his hand and jaw. The wounds would have killed a lesser man, but Kemp managed to make a full recovery. He even met El Caudillo while recuperating. Franco thanked the brave Englishman for his contribution to the Nationalist victory. Kemp went home in 1939 to prepare for the war that he saw coming. He would not see the golden fields of Spain again for years.

Kemp did not record his memories of the Spanish Civil War until 1957 when he published Mine Were of Trouble (republished by Mystery Grove in 2020). Mine Were of Trouble is first and foremost a rip-roaring recount of the hideous conflict. Kemp saw the thick of things, and his writing has all the pacing and poignancy of a trained journalist. (Kemp went to Spain undercover as a journalist. In truth, he was merely a law student.) Mine Were of Trouble is also a much-needed corrective to the historical record. As Mystery Grove (@MysteryGrove) are want to point out on Twitter, common knowledge about the Spanish Civil War is often colored by Republican propaganda. Today’s media atmosphere is not much different from the 1930s, and Mine Were of Trouble often speaks about the left-wing bias of the international press. For instance, the bombing of Guernica was reported as a “terror bombing” of a purely civilian city. Pablo Picasso cemented this idea with his famous painting. However, Kemp reports that the city was likely burned by the retreating Republicans, and the subsequent bombing by Nationalist and German planes were wholly legitimate. As for terror bombing, the Republicans had used it plenty of times in the past, especially at Toledo, a Nationalist stronghold.

There are other scenes of great pathos in Mine Were of Trouble. Arguably the most memorable is the scene wherein Kemp is ordered to shoot an Irish deserter from the International Brigades. Despite their opposing political views, Kemp initially recoils from the cold-blooded execution. In the end, two of his subordinates carry out the deed. Elsewhere, Kemp comes across scenes of unimaginable horror, from tales of crucified priests to entire villages burned and exterminated. Most of these atrocities came courtesy of the “humanitarian” and enlightened Republicans, who emptied the jails and armed criminals to terrorize Nationalist sympathizers.

Mine Were of Trouble is the perfect introduction to Kemp and his life. The subtle humor and charm of the brave Englishman carries over into his other two autobiographies, No Colours or Crest (1958) and Alms for Oblivion (1962), both of which have been reprinted by Mystery Grove. It seems that Kemp could not rest after his Spanish adventures, and when the Second World War began, he successfully joined the British Commandos after several failed attempts. No Colours or Crest tells the story of Kemp’s induction into the Commandos, as well as the group’s many foolhardy raids along the French coast in search of U-boats and weak points in the German defenses. The core of the book takes place in the Balkans, specifically Albania and Kosovo, where London had assigned Kemp the task of supporting anti-Axis resistance movements among the hardy mountaineers. Kemp found this lot either lazy or vicious, with many of the village chieftains using the shifting alliances that characterized the Balkans Theater to settle blood feuds. Just as in Spain, Kemp found communist infiltration strong in both Albania and among some of Allied operators. The communists waved the flag of Albanian nationalism and anti-fascism, all the while greedily hoarding Allied aid to prepare for their own hostile takeover. Enver Hoxha, the future leader of communist Albania, makes an appearance too. No Colours or Crest makes many of the same sociological assertions about communism as Mine Were of Trouble, namely that the ideology is a thin gloss over what is mostly the permanent underclass’s desire for revenge.

No Colours or Crest has all the requisite battle scenes and near-death escapes. Kemp also pontificates about the seriousness of ethnic hatreds in the Balkans. Hasan Beg, one of the leaders of the Kosovar Albanians that London sent Kemp to woo, admitted to the Englishman that “the majority of Kossovars [sic] preferred a German occupation to a Serb.” Such attitudes made finding reliable allies difficult if not impossible.

Alms for Oblivion sees Kemp at the end of his ten years at war. This time Kemp is in Southeast Asia after the surrender of the Imperial Japanese Army. Rather than either face-to-face fighting or conducting ambushes deep behind enemy lines, Kemp’s posting in Asia is about keeping the peace in the face of rising anti-colonial sentiment. In Bali and in French Indochina, Kemp finds Asian men-at-arms willing to murder their European officers. He also finds incredible amounts of beautiful women, and Alms for Oblivion presents the most human side of Kemp yet. Kemp seems happy as a lark among the lush jungles of Bali, where life moves at a leisurely pace. But there is action aplenty in Alms for Oblivion, as Kemp becomes a successful gun runner for the French Union forces trying to maintain Paris’s legitimacy in Indochina. A bounty is placed on his head, but Kemp gets away again. The specter of communism appears again, this time in the form of prisoners in Bali, who compare their temporary imprisonment to the tribulations faced by the first-generation Bolsheviks. And like Kemp’s other two memoirs, Alms for Oblivion dispenses some “red pills,” this time in displaying the mixture of naivete and malice that drove postwar U.S. foreign policy in Asia. The agents of the American state in Indochina, most notably the OSS men that Kemp meets, are eager to push the Europeans out of their rightful colonies to usher in a new geopolitical epoch. Many carried out their orders with glee, and Kemp rightly diagnoses this joy as par for the course for crypto-communists. Sean McMeekin’s Stalin’s War provides a more general view of communist infiltration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, while Alms for Oblivion gives a more jungle-level view of said infiltration and how it doomed later American attempts to fight the Cold War, which so often meant fighting their old clients.  

When Peter Kemp finally went home after a decade at war, he tried his hand at insurance. Unsurprisingly, Kemp did not take to this humdrum life. He picked up the pen and became a foreign correspondent. As a journalist he would see more war in Zaire, Hungary, the Congo, and Latin America. He lived until 1993, when old age did to him what communist bullets could not. Now, after so many decades of obscurity, with his immensely readable autobiographies either out-of-print or languishing away as hard-to-find relics, Mystery Grove has resurrected the exploits of the great Peter Kemp for generations to come. Much like General Pyotr Wrangel, whose memoir of the Russian Civil War, Always with Honor, Mystery Grove republished in 2020, Kemp’s account is clear-eyed about how far-left movements operate. General Wrangel witnessed first-hand as the Bolsheviks emptied jails and armed criminals, while simultaneously arrested ordinary citizens for trumped up crimes. The American conservative writer Samuel Francis labeled such acts as “anarcho-tyranny,” but Wrangel and Kemp called them simple communism. Kemp devoted his life to ideals and adventure, and in turn he became a knight in the holy crusade against communism. His story is emblematic of a life lived dangerously. Rather than the respectable comforts of a barrister’s life, Kemp chose one of trouble.

Siegfried Müller — Iron Cross in the Congo

By his own account, Siegfried Müller had an upbringing similar to Peter Kemp. Peter Kemp came from the respectable middle class of the British Empire, while Müller grew up in East Prussia as the son of a decorated soldier and veteran of the Great War. Despite his surname, which indicated a craftsman forebearer, Müller claims in The New Mercenaries that his bloodline came to East Prussia “in the time of Frederick the Great” and hailed from the Netherlands, Poland, and among the Huguenots. These forebearers were likely mercenaries.

The Müller family established themselves among the estates of East Prussia, although one could not call Herr Müller a junker. Rather, little Siegfried enjoyed the perks of being bourgeoisie, albeit during the chaotic mess of the Weimar Republic. Following in the footsteps of his father, who headed the Prussian branch of the Stahlhelm paramilitary organization of the monarchist German National People’s Party (DNVP), Müller aligned politically with national conservatism. The New Mercenaries sees him not entirely averse to National Socialism, and like millions of other Germans, Müller got swept up in the enthusiasms of 1933. Rather than join the NSDAP, Müller joined the Wehrmacht. He served in the Polish and French campaigns, the latter of which he fondly recalled decades later.

When Operation Barbarossa commenced, Müller and his unit went east. The NCO and later officer-candidate would spend years fighting the Soviets, earning awards like the Iron Cross for his heroics. Müller’s war entered a rest period in 1945 but did not end. The Prussian soldier spent time as a prisoner of the U.S. Army before joining a multi-ethnic labor battalion organized by NATO. It was here that Müller first became a mercenary. He soon moved from physical labor to military training, where the experienced veteran taught future soldiers as a leader among NATO’s military police. Müller wanted more. The then contemporary Korean War inspired him to learn about the technical side of killing, and he studied at the American Military School as a result. For five years, Müller trained to be a technician and specialist in war, and yet the West German Bundeswehr ultimately denied his request to join their ranks. The new and democratic force wanted nothing to do with old Nazis. Müller declined to embrace the bitterness that surely existed in his guts, and instead set off for Libya, where he spent time de-mining former battlefields.

Libya inspired Müller to remake himself in Africa. The Prussian immigrated to South Africa. The reality of Apartheid surprised him, but not the in the way one would expect:

On arriving in Johannesburg, an image struck me…a white fiddler singing a German lament, begging for money…an old white couple were snatching their food from the trash cans of a palace, under the insensitive eyes of a black lady emerging from her black chauffeured Cadillac in livery, followed by a young maid carrying the shopping nets. They entered the shop through a door marked “Non-White,” were served by a white saleswoman who also served the customers entering the door reserved for whites with the same politeness and at the same prices!

When the scene ended, all parties involved either left on racially segregated buses, or went about their business as if nothing unusual had happened. To Müller’s eyes, the Republic of South Africa had solved the vexing problem of multi-racial societies by giving each a chance to flourish under their conditions. Müller writes about South Africa as a man impressed by the civilization. He is also unashamed of complimenting African females. Müller is not a fire-eating extremist in The New Mercenaries, but he admits that “South Africa is a white territory” that “was a virgin land when the Afrikaners arrived there.” It is for this idea, along with the idea of preserving the white right to live on the African continent that Müller became a mercenary again.

Reprinted again after fifty-five years as a new English translation, The New Mercenaries is the first publication by the new imprint, Catacomb Archives (@CatacombArchives). This slim volume recounts the hectic and dangerous days of the Simba Rebellion in the newly independent Congo.

The Simba Rebels emerged out of the jungles around 1964, and their communist-inspired revolution saw a red tide of violence sweep across the already fractured African nation. For instance, when the rebels took Stanleyville, they captured the city’s mayor and removed his heart while he still breathed. Other acts of cannibalism and mutilation occurred throughout the rebellion, with victims ranging from Congolese soldiers to Italian airmen. The rebels practiced witchcraft and black magic and believed that eating their victims and wearing their skins provided them with immense power, including the power to turn enemy bullets into drops of water. To end this horror show, and to protect the lives of the white population that was scheduled for genocide, Moïse Tshombe, the former leader of the breakaway State of Katanga and the fifth prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, agreed to hire a band of mercenaries under the command of “Mad” Mike Hoare. Another son of British India and a World War II veteran with special operations experience, Hoare was the foremost mercenary leader in Africa in 1964. He promised his men good pay and gave them British discipline. Most of Hoare’s volunteers came from Rhodesia and South Africa, but some came from further afield like Belgium and Italy. One of them came from Germany—Siegfried Müller.

Owing to his to his depth of military experience, Müller earned a command position in 52 Commando, a sub-unit of Hoare’s 5 Commando. Müller tasted blood for the first time since Russia when his small unit of European mercenaries traded gunshots with rebel youths outside of Albertville. For his troubles, which included casualties and days and nights of exhaustion, thirst, and hunger, Müller became a major, thereby making him one of the highest-ranking white mercenaries in all of Africa. After Albertville, Müller took part in the rescue of Stanleyville as well as other countless firefights between 1964 and 1965. Thanks to Müller and the rest of Hoare’s Commandos, the rebellion ended in failure. The mercenaries managed to save the Congo from itself, at least for a moment.

The Prussian’s activities became known back home, where the German press dubbed him Kongo Müller. The press took a dim view of Müller and his mercenary brethren. This view is on full display in The Laughing Man—Confessions of a Murderer (1966). The documentary, which can be watched in its entirety on YouTube, features a drunken Müller speaking about his time in the Congo as well as his opinions on America’s fight against communism in Southeast Asia. The documentarians got the mercenary officer liquored up as part of their broader subterfuge. The “journalists” were in reality East German propagandists, and their film was made with the purpose of turning Müller into the sociopathic face of Western imperialism.

The New Mercenaries presents a much different picture. Müller is not a bloodthirsty manhunter; he is an oftentimes funny and oftentimes poetic fighting man with a genuine love of Africa and her people. He is also an astute observer of politics. Müller writes stinging denouncements of Nasserism and pan-Arabism as providing a political cover for the continuation of the Arab tradition of economic vampirism south of the Sahara. He pulls no punches in flatly stating that the post-colonial and socialist states of Ghana and Algeria sought and achieved widespread chaos in the Congo because only in such chaos can left-wing revolutions hope to achieve any kind of power. Again, like Kemp before him, Müller instinctively knew about the machinations of communists.

Contemporary readers may be surprised at Müller’s numerous references to the Chinese in The New Mercenaries. Some online commentators and talking heads are quick to minimize Chinese involvement in African affairs, or otherwise downplay them as neither colonialist nor expansive. The New Mercenaries shows the lie behind this propaganda, as the Simba rebellion took direct inspiration from Maoist China. Chinese agents and military advisors were on the ground too. Müller labeled Chinese involvement in revolutionary Africa as part of a broader civilizational danger posed by Beijing: “The danger lies in the East…They are advancing, slowly but surely, towards the United States. They (the Chinese) are settled in Indonesia, Burma, Hong Kong, and many other places.” Like the Third Reich that he served, Müller sees in the Maoist Chinese a united racial identity and mission. Such prophetic words written so long ago are still too often ignored now.

The New Mercenaries provides quite a bit in just over 130 pages. Müller’s diary and remembrances provide the largest chunk, but other parts include a general history of the Congo, discourses on the UN’s botching of the Congo Crisis, and much more. But the undeniable appeal of the book is Müller himself. The brave and hardy Prussian survived the war and ended his days as a South African citizen. Stomach cancer claimed him in 1983. Now, thanks to Catacomb Archives, Müller’s courage and aplomb can be enjoyed again after so many decades unremembered.

Gustav Krist — Prisoner of the Mountains

A duck caused Gurk, aka Private Gustav Krist, to run afoul of the Tsar’s army. “Not for the first time in history,” Krist writes in the newly republished Prisoner in the Forbidden Land by Agartha Publishing (@AgarthaBOOks), “a domestic fowl played a treacherous role in military affairs.” Thus begins the bizarre and exhilarating story of Krist—soldier, POW, explorer, and wanted man.  

Like millions of the Kaiser’s subjects, Krist, a simple man from Vienna, found himself a conscript on the frontlines of Galicia in 1914. The Austrian soldier, who calls himself Gurk in his first autobiography, fights hard and well, but the Slavic winter hits him hard. He and his comrades are light on food, so when they see a wandering duck, they go all-in. Unfortunately for them, their wild duck hunt is noticed by a Cossack patrol. Krist and a fellow soldier are captured and made prisoners of the Russian Empire.

Prisoner in the Forbidden Land (1936, 2021) recounts Krist’s harrowing years as a POW throughout the Great War. His story is part war memoir and part ethnography. The first portion of the book is about Krist’s dealings with the Russian authorities, from brutal police officers in the provinces to a congenial cook who provides the young Austrian with work and extra food. Krist even has the pleasure of meeting Russian royalty, as his hospital is visited by no less a luminary than Gran Duchess Xenia Egorovna. The duchess takes a liking to Krist, and extols the virtues of Vienna to him, a native son. Krist’s fellow wounded POW, Abeldamm, gets a much different treatment owing to being German instead of Austrian. “‘Get out! Get out at once, you German devil,’” the duchess cries at the wounded man.

Before long, Krist and his mates are transported deeper and deeper into Russian territory. Siberia beckons them, and then before long they are in the fabled lands of Central Asia. Krist sees his first Kyrgyz nomads. He marvels at the medieval architecture of Samarkand. Like Kemp in Bali and Müller in Africa, Krist finds more than just exotic pleasure in Central Asia; he finds a purpose. Prisoner in the Forbidden Land chronicles Krist’s many escapes from captivity, along with his explorations through lands previously forbidden to Europeans like him—Afghanistan, Persia, and the wild mountains of the Hindu Kush. Two years after capture, Krist manages to flee towards British-controlled Kurdistan. His hopes of reaching Vienna again are dashed, so he finds his way to Tabriz. Here, Krist immerses himself in the Persian’s city’s small German community. He also develops a passion for Tabriz’s chief export—carpets. Krist will later become a professional carpet merchant and author on the subject. That will have to wait, as Krist is once again captured by the Russians in 1916 and brought back to Turkestan.

The Austrian POW witnesses the Russian Revolution in the East, where things proved to be even more chaotic. Besides the war between the Whites and Reds, Turkestan and all of Russian Central Asia erupted with what became known as the Basmachi Revolt. Although the origins of the rebellion began with the Tsar’s conscription drives among his Turkic Muslim subjects, the revolution of 1917 provided the necessary accelerant to turn disobedience into revolt. Muslim chieftains, nationalists, pan-Turanists (including the Young Turk Enver Pasha), and common bandits resisted the Red Army for years. The Soviets, in the face of their own proclamations of worldwide anti-imperialism, used force, including indiscriminate bombings of civilian centers, to subdue the Basmachi and return Turkestan to Moscow’s authority. Krist and many Austrian POWs were offered their freedom in return for taking up arms against the Muslims. Krist did so, along with other unpleasant tasks such as burying Ottoman POWs who shared a similar fate. However, the Reds showed their true colors by ultimately denying the Austrians a train ride back to Europe. Krist would not make it home again until 1921, and he had to transverse a war-torn Russia and the Baltic states to do so.

Unlike Kemp and Müller, Krist came from a humble background. He did not serve as an officer, and indeed, between 1914 and 1921, he was officially just a POW. Still, Krist snatched life by the throat and became a wanderer, a merchant of the old Silk Road, and, according to the Soviet authorities, a counter-revolutionary agent scheduled for execution. And most surprising of all, he was not yet done. In 1922, Krist returned to Tabriz. There he sold carpets and explored Persia. Two years later, using forged papers and cover as a geologist, Krist returned to Soviet Central Asia. The Basmachi revolt was still ongoing, but the Soviets had by then effectively sealed Central Asia off from the rest of the world. Krist entered this world merely out of curiosity. This curiosity would propel him to Ferghana, the Karakum Desert, and the Amu Darya. Krist wintered with Kyrgyz nomads prior to their forced collectivization by the Soviet authorities. He met a GPU agent who claimed to have been present at the death of Enver Pasha. He worked and saw many fabulous things, from the frontier of Tajikistan all the way back to the deserts of Mesopotamia. By 1926, Krist had seen enough. He moved back to Vienna permanently. He died there in 1937, succumbing to old war wounds that never fully healed.

Prisoner in the Forbidden Land, which tells of Krist’s first round of adventures, and Alone Through the Forbidden Land, which tells of his final explorations between 1922 and 1926, are now available in English after eighty-five and eighty-four years of virtual oblivion. Agartha Publishing’s two volumes are lovingly crafted. More importantly, Agartha, Mystery Grove, and Catacomb have done the Lord’s work in bringing back to life these incredible and incredibly brave men from the past.

Old Heroes for a New Future

Peter Kemp, Siegfried Müller, and Gustav Krist. For decades these names were little-known and even less appreciated. Today, that is changing thanks to right-wing, anonymous, and independent publishing companies. Mystery Grove, Catacomb Archives, and Agartha Publishing are not the only ones. Antelope Hill, Tsar Press, and Imperium Press have also resurrected previously out-of-print or hard-to-find books from early twentieth century Europe. Praeda Publishing (@PraedaBooks) is scheduled to be the next to join this illustrious movement. There are many more, including those waiting to be born. Other heroes will join Kemp, Müller, and Krist as old heroes providing a blueprint for the new future. That is the point.

These memoirs are meant to inspire. They show truly masculine men doing daring things against often overwhelming odds. The stories these men tell are worth remembering and emulating. Kemp, Müller, and Krist also serve as reminders about the ever-present threat of communism, and it is not surprising in the least that these publishers have all published these books between 2020 and 2021, when the United States descended into the type of anarcho-tyranny that so often characterizes the first stages of a Red revolution. Much of the propaganda online and IRL would lead any young Western man to believe that a counter-revolution is hopeless. To fight back is to be called nasty names, to be cancelled, to be labeled a non-person worthy of complete ostracization. It has been this way for longer than most can remember. Kemp, Müller, and Krist all suffered scorn for their ideals, their ethnicity, and their politics. They also faced death multiple times over. Their books are full of close calls with the reaper, but never once do these men seem to falter or wallow in their own misfortunes. Each had an incredible zest for life, real life, which so often includes more heartbreak and struggle than anything else.

The stories of Peter Kemp, Siegfried Müller, and Gustav Krist need to be read, studied, and taken to heart by our young men. They also deserve the attention of supposedly “serious” scholars and pundits, especially those instinctively worried about the current projection of the American state. It is never too late to fight back, and it is never too late to head off into the sun for an adventure. These are often the same, whether the fight is in Albania, the Congo, Samarkand, or somewhere as yet undiscovered.