12 Axioms

A break from the usual to share some observations from a real life exchange about the beast system and how to navigate the fake narratives that make up its House of Lies. 

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction to the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and other topics have menu pages above. 

Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check regularly and it will be up there.

Ted Nasmith, The Ships of the Faithful

The Band is generally disinterested in analysis of current events. The ubiquity of lies and deception + no historical perspective from being in the middle of things + not being privy to the minds of decision-makers limits insights into the present. Time spent on news narrative is generally time wasted. And there are other observers and interpreters more suited to what value there is to be found there.  

The same people who were surprised that we exclude the histrionic degeneracy of the imbicile-fest called tv from our lives...

...were later surprised by our exclusion of all mainstream social media too. We don't even have Twitter or Facebook accounts. 

In other news, we are neither self-loathing nor inclined to lick the fingers of those that despise us either.

But the House of Lies is where modern life plays out. The Functionally Two Species model does comment on that life [click for the post]. And while the beast system of with it’s foundational lies of secular transcendence and Progress! was centuries in the making, the level of disconnect has recently hit terminal levels. From mass delusions around fake elections to fake plagues and toxic “vaccines” to the mind-numbing mix of gross ignorance and retardation around Ukraine – it’s an apotheosis of FTS-2 brainlessness and fruit-fly tier memory. To a point where it’s impossible to ignore. Even for those disinterested in current events.

There’s no point in dismantling the fake narratives.

The House of Lies has become so disconnected from reality that the entire world view of its idiot inhabitants is a grand unified liars’ club. There’s no there there – no anchor in fact to even start to try and build a truthful account on. 

Readers know enough to ignore beast blather from a collapsing empire anyhow. 

What we can do is share a few axioms drawn from observations of this rancid clown show and some attempts to explain it offline.

These don’t deal with specific lies as much as structures of the House of Lies. Because while specifics are murky and deceptive, there are identifiable patterns in how the beast system lies that let you know that a narrative isn’t even trying to get at the truth. That it’s creating a fake reality or false consciousness to serve some other end that they need to make sure you aren’t aware of. Consider that for a moment. In fact, that could be the first axiom…

1) No need for lies if the truth is beneficial 

This is the general moral bellweather and should be obvious. The truth is easy in itself. No need to concoct complex tales, stage events, devise false corroborations, get everyone on the same page, etc. Just say what happened as you understand it. Gaps in knowledge will be apparent and the story will be consistent and coherent. 

If something is going through the effort to build a fake reality and withhold the truth, it’s because it doesn’t want you to know what is really happening. In a personal case, this can be to make the liar look better. But on the institutional level, the preeminent reason is because you would object. The House of Lies purveys false realities so you comply with things that are not in your interests.

This is a particularly good illustration because it's meta-accurate. There's the deception of the anglerfish. Then there's Disney's use of colorful cartoon characters to lure children into the lies, degeneracy, and pedophilic grooming of the real beast system.

 

The vast majority of the idiot masses are so incapable of thought, devoid of memory, and dependent on external command that they can no longer even articulate their own self-interest. Where they would rather imbibe feel-good lies on the way to the abattoir than have to consider contradictions and draw conclusions. Rather rage at and cancel  revealers of the lies then the filth constructing false realities to destroy their way of life and ultimately them. There is no solution to this barring some divine intervention – FTS-2 is functionally a different species for a reason. Replacing mass fruit-fly tier memories with usable capacity is as materially unlikely as teaching the actual rabbit population physics. 

Before being compelled to a Christian reverence for life, the Band shared globalists’ conclusions about the necessity of culling the herd. Watching them virtue-signal mindless self-destructiveness, we can still understand the beast’s contempt. We just can’t condone it anymore.

The first axiom sets the moral compass on the self-interest level. We know lies serve evil on an abstract level because they deviate from alignment with reality and Logos. This simply makes it personal – the liar isn’t only violating God’s will by bearing false witness and placing their will over reality in a satanic inversion, they’re doing it to harm you directly. On every level, the House of Lies is objectively, morally evil and should be rejected by anyone who isn’t the same. And with that said, we can move to more specific tactics and techniques to watch out for.

2) If something changes, it’s no longer the same.

Beast narrative draws on assumptions based on a socio-cultural context that no longer exists. Referencing relations and conclusions from then and pretending they are applicable now. If you approach new scenarios with old thought patterns you are unaware of new threats and dangers.

It's the same place... Pay no mind to a few small changes...

Boomers are particularly susceptible to this because their world view is so simplistic and heavily imprinted, but it’s not limited to them. It applies to the entire West. Nothing about the current legal, political, economic, educational, demographic, moral, or cultural nature is the same as it was 40 years ago. We explained how keeping the word – the reference – while changing the reality fools those trapped in fake narratives in an earlier post.

Cut to the chase. If society is legally, politically, economically, educationally, demographically, morally, and culturally degraded from even a few decades ago, old observations don’t apply. At least not directly. Take “Russia”. Trying to see things through a lens of 1980s socio-cultural assumptions is not just retarded, it provides cover to the entities that are actively destroying our countries and culture. The Cold War West image of the West and the world fits contemporary globalism about as well as the 100 Years War. Less well, because it’s actually a full inversion of the Cold War narrative. There’s still a godless, amorphous, soulless tyranny attempting to crush national and personal self-determination. Except now it’s the globalist beast based in the US and  Europe but aspiring to world hegemony.

When something is proposing outdated paradigms as relevant, they’re lying. And playing along provides cover for the actual destruction they’re planning for you.

Therefore…

3) If you don’t see the larger structure, you’re in the larger structure.

Note the widespread venom now spewed towards Russian culture and people. Not the government or policy, but culture and people. We could write poetic meditations on the beauty of the Russian soul with paintings by Shishkin, Levitan, Aivazovsky and others, but who cares? The larger question is why is acceptable within the beast system to make collective character judgments for one group and not all groups? 

Roman Bozhkov, Landscape, oil on canvas, 21st century

Don't have to look at historical masters either. Contemporary Russian artists are still creating works of haunting beauty using fresh takes on old master techniques. Bozhkov's subtle lighting, atmosphere, and reflections have a poetic aura that would be at home in any era.

Now, let's generalize. Start by comparing this to the contemporary Art! that the beast offers...

Evgeny Lushpin, The Walk Home, oil on canvas, 2015

How about this guy? [Puts on Clott "never saw that one coming" Adams hat...] Could it be that the animus towards Russians is directed in part because they they favor beauty and logos over the poo-flinging trash excreted by the modern globalist "West"? 

We think we're on to something! Look at the next one...

Alexander Averin, Summertime, oil on canvas, around 2000

Turns out they can paint figures too...

The Band is not claiming that collective traits don’t exist. What we are pointing out is how beast myths of equalism and tolerance vanish when it’s politically expedient for the beast agenda. Of course the idiot masses drool along in slack-jawed outrage for as long as the glowing screens command them to. But for those who aren’t functionally retarded, blatant inconsistencies from the same source indicate they’re in the world of rhetoric, not logic. And we’ve known since ancient Greece that rhetoric is not based in truth value. 

So...

4) Why this now?

Because we don’t have fruit-fly tier memories, the Band recalls past events and compares them to the present. Looking for similarities and differences. At the same time!!! We see the same frame structure of [designated thing to be outraged by du jour] play out over and over. 

One manufactured world moral crisis after another. The Sandinistas and contras in Central America to Apartheid to Saddam to Islamic terror, etc. One mass hysteria laser pointer after another that disappears from public consciousness -if not in reality  - as soon as it exhausts its usefulness. 

Ukraine would be more of the same, only now social media amplifies and reifies mass narrative formation in way it never could before. 

What hasn’t changed is the question that really matters. If the outrage narrative – not the event but the collective mass reaction to it - is manufactured, what are the reasons for this narrative now? Consider the recent subjects of mass retardation from the disengaged and objective observer perspective.

Trump is a venal civic nationalist that would have been a moderate liberal a few decades ago [See #2].

Covid is a mild virus with a mortality profile similar to a bad flu at worst and then susceptible to robust natural immunity.

Ukraine is a sorry puppet state that harbors a variety of unsavory entities and has had the applicable Russian security issues clearly laid out for years. 

Nothing about these things is rational grounds for an all-hands-on-deck mass freak out by every institutional platform and organization. And it’s the same platforms and organizations in each case. 

This means the answer to why now is somewhere other than the nonsensical subjects of the top-down manufactured responses. All three serve the larger beast agenda - the ongoing and intentional destruction of Western economies by the neo-liberal world order under such labels as the Green New Deal, Build Back Better, or the Great Reset. Trump’s tepid civic nationalism was an obstacle and the others have used idiot fear and outrage to undermine personal and national self-determination, attack food and energy security, and curtail freedom of movement. Leading to...

5) If the reason isn’t a reason, look for the real one.

If the House of Lies – or anyone really – is offering an “explanation” for something that doesn’t actually explain it, they’re lying. There is no actual causal reason to demonize a head of state for controlling a country’s borders and strengthening the domestic economy. There is no actual causal reason to coerce and compel mass experimental genetic toxins, lockdowns, and masks for an historically insignificant viral infection. There is no actual causal reason Russia’s incursion into the Ukraine should equal $10 gas. But these self-evident lies are offered up straight-faced to justify nakedly evil globalist predation. And the idiot masses nod along.

Some "explanations" are so self-evidently untrue that no "proof" is needed. At which point, accepting and acting on them leads to our having to hypothesize that humanity is functionally two separate species.

Think a little further. There's no reason for that matter that there isn’t a North American food and energy self-sufficiency policy already implemented. Since the given reasons for these outcomes aren’t actually causes of them, the real reason is elsewhere. See #3.

6) The slippery slope is holistic. And steep.

If the socio-cultural context is changing, any meaningful reaction has to reflect that. There are two main patterns in detaching “analysis” from reality. The common one is the magical thinking that defines the whole stack of inverted secularist dogmas of the post-Enlightenment West.  Pretending what is wished for can replace what is. The other is more subtle and focused – a form of binary thinking that a lot of dumb people that think they’re clever fall into. That’s forecasting something by trying to extrapolate the consequences of one changing variable while assuming everything else stays exactly the same. 

Reality is complex and multi-faceted. Societal change occurs across an incalculable array of interlocking butterfly effects. Each status quo is a simply a momentary snapshot of this vast flow. Like a grain of sand in an landslide. Any credible projection needs to look at the entire trajectory of the last X years and then extrapolate. Not pretend that this special moment on the socio-cultural collapse train will remain frozen except for that one thing they’re fixating on.

It's sort of like planning how to keep the table from sliding on a sloping floor and thinking you're prepared...

The slippery slope is not only real, it’s holistic. And each individual line of degradation contributes to the overall mudslide. 

7) If you can’t define it, it’s an emotional projection

This applies to using words as if they were referring to what they always did while changing what they currently refer to. Consider the outdated left-right paradigm. You hear it all the time. Now define what they mean as a set of concise coherent ideologies.

We'll wait...

Conservatism isn't a coherent political philosophy because it's inherently reactive. But "conserve" does have a coherent definition. This semantic grift is the opposite of conserving a traditional social order. It literally inverts the meaning of the attitude it claims to profess.

Once you become aware of this meaning switch, you'll see it everywhere.

What does the modern “right” stand for? How about the modern “left”? How do these align with the historical associations of the terms? The answer to the last question is simple. They don’t. So there is no point in using them apart from deceptively creating a false impression. Trying to make people think something is other than what it is. Think about it. Why would anyone speaking in good faith use terms that don’t mean what they’re being used for?

Well... the entities connected to the "left" today - the globalist oligarchs and cultural atavists in the Democrat party etc. don't give a rat's ass about "labor". So we'd suppose you can learn how to call yourself something that means the opposite of what you are, but the cuckservative "right" already has that covered.

Good golly, the "American Conservative" is a disgusting smear of feces...

If something has no consistent meaning beyond a vague positive/negative resonance, what it actually means is [thing I like/don’t like], depending on which nonsense term the user identifies with emotionally. Which is as meaningful a key to understanding reality as your dinner preferences. The two primary drivers of the late-stage American empire are globalists and neoconservatives. Their opponents would be those who value free will and personal moral accountability. Actual nationalists, coherent individualists, real Christians, etc. Left and right have become meaningless nonsense terms that can't be coherently defined. That is, shorthand for unreflective emotional reaction in lieu of hard choices about reality.

The neoconservatives are intellectual descendants of Trotsky that oozed into American “conservatism” under the guise of opposing the Soviet Union. That is, extreme genocidal atavist “left” in the early-20th century usage. And the idiot cucks that welcomed them took their hated of Stalin and desire for revenge as "loving freedom" or something equally stupid. 

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1568, oil on wood, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

The globalists are related in their hatred of human dignity and spiritual potential, but don’t fit any traditionally political structure. Well, beyond the literally satanic craving of centralizing power by exerting will over reality. The impulse of Babel. 

In short, it’s metaphysical. See #13

8) Conceptual abstracts require real implementers

Metaphysics  - or ideology for that matter – frame and inform scenarios but don't materially exist as things in themselves. They're abstracts. They operate materially through material individuals and structures. This is pure ontological hierarchy - idealized abstractions lack material forms.

Theophany of Divine Love, early 13th-century illumination in the Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, MS 1942 edition of Hildegard of Bingen's Liber Divinorum Operum, written 1163 to 1173

Metaphysics are literally not materially extant – it’s in the name.

Ideology is either a) some things someone(s) wrote in a particular context and/or b) an abstracted description of collective belief and/or action. 

None of which is capable of doing anything on it's own.

The oft-bleated “that wasn’t real Marxism” is such a retarded position because there is no real Marxism. It’s an abstraction, not a material entity. More specifically, it's a collection of poorly-written 19th-century blather that intellectually limited sociopaths apply in diverse circumstances. It has no empirically objective existence, only in the claimed motivations of actual people. That is, definitionally not true Marxism or Marxism qua Marxism. The only possible critique would be "my applicational interpretation of it is better than his is". When none of them actually are because the source texts are as idiotic as the idiots drawn to them.

Globalism is the same – a descriptor for a variety of actors who share similar power-seeking dyscivic goals. It’s an abstract construct that has to be administered and enacted by real people. And those people are sociopathic freaks who prevent organic socialization and natural social selection from doing what it always did. We are now in the later stages of dysgenic devolution akin to the old Mouse Utopia experiment. Meanwhile the freak-rulers exploit the degraded capacity and rampant appetite of the idiot masses to accrue more power. 

Ultimately the only metrics to measure "true globalism" would be socio-cultural destruction and personal or institutional power accrued. Cloaking this techno-satanism as an economic ideology simply obscures how it's the same ancient anti-human, anti-beauty, anti-God evil adapted to current technological levels.

We’ve recently lost assumed rights to open speech, bodily autonomy, association, medical privacy, due process, financial security, community, etc. The Band can remember a world where people could ride in the back of a pick-up truck. Now you can be fired for a tweet. Basic self-determination doesn't just come back without some massive reckoning. Because the increasing totalitarianism is an orchestrated macro-scale movement from individual and national sovereignty to globalist control. See #6. We’ve posted on centralization – it’s the mechanism of globalist control. But it’s administered and run by actual people. The “elites” are people. And Russia is demonstrating that they’re as susceptible to a Kinzhal missile as we are.

9) There is no collective “we”, just larger stables for the masters.

Globalism is meant to sound like reassuring group harmony, but consider the mechanisms by which uncontestable rules are imposed. Does anyone poll the group before stripping "rights" and transforming organic preferred culture? Words are meaningless without actions - we can only judge morality by actions and outcomes. By the fruits. And by the fruits, globalism in all its metastases is just a new manifestation of an old will to power. Another collectivism imposed by force by centralized sociopaths adapted to current technology and social organization. Like communism, only with digital currency flows and information control rather than industry. Plus way more overt satanism. And like any totalitarianism hiding behind the fig leaf of some collective good, it’s really a just another tyranny. Albeit it way more overtly satanic.

It's why older images of demonic tyrants are always generally applicable. The faces come and go and the labels change - communism, corporatism, etc. - but the structure doesn't. A monstrous elite tier floating parasitically on a subjugated populace. It's why ignoring what is materially happening to argue over ideological made-up words is such a sign of self-erasing retardation. 

It doesn't matter what they call themselves or what their stated motives are.

When demonic freaks blather about owning nothing and eating bugs, it explicitly doesn’t refer to them or their private enclaves.

Economically, the dissolution of national distinctions & barriers to capital flows - the two are intrinsically linked – is presented as an unexamined moral good. But in reality, actual people preside over this degradation of the human condition while reaping massive material rewards. Pretending human action is really some sort of demented offspring of Hegel’s inexorable spirit of history makes it easy to claim inevitability or draw up facile fake moralities. But there is no mass identity, only individual predators and prey in varying degrees of concert or opposition. Those who wish to actualize their God-given free will and those who wish to grind them under their heels. Anyone accruing personal power and privilege while blathering about the “greater good” or the “current year” is objectively a liar and probably a psychopath. Judge the deeds, not the words. 

10) "Ockham’s Razor" has become a tonic for Dumb People

There is at best no correlation between the simplest explanation and the truth. At best because the correlation is likely a negative one, given the complexity of the butterfly effect interactions that make up reality. 

Hiroki Sayama, Visual, organizational map of complex systems broken into seven sub-groups. 2010

Multi-component interactions across domains make up complex systems. And material reality is made up of countless interacting ones in a dizzying interplay of complexities. Dominant patterns can be detected, but monocausual linear and binary thinking are almost doomed to uselessness. Despite their "simplicity".

Take Ukraine. The liars and their lobotomized dupes have this “fighting for freedom” narrative that is definitely simplistic. It’s also so stupid that it’s actually annoying to even have to think about. Understanding the main thrust of the Ukraine situation doesn't take the number of parameters in the above chart, but it needs a heck of a lot more than slack-jawed idiocy about "freedom". Which is itself a nonsense word with a complex history of mass distortion and ontological impossibility.

Ukraine is a puppet creation of the same unaccountable unelected globalists that run the puppet juntas “Western democracies”. "Led" by a degenerate midget installed by globalist elites. Pedestalizing this turd as a hero is a perfect confluence of beast moral inversion and the functional mass retardation of FTS-2.

 

Processing complex situations with different historical roots requires a rudimentary understanding how geopolitics actually work. Some glimmer of the globalist beast system that's jacked Western society, and the role of Ukraine in their ongoing malfeasance. How narrative is engineered in the House of Lies through mass manipulation of technology, media and massive fraud. In other words, things further beyond the reach of the moral and mentally crippled masses than Tantalus' grapes.

Then there's the instant over-the-top reaction that is self-evidently orchestrated top-down. It's the mass-moron fear spell from a recent post on the functionally two species nature of modern humanity translated to faux-outrage over a country few were aware of a few months ago. Certainly not during the years of shelling civilians that ultimately helped precipitate Russian intervention.

Like the rationally inexplicably decision to illuminate degenerate cesspool San Francesco city hall. Maybe the lights look sharp glimmering off the discarded syringes and vials...

Here's a list on ongoing conflicts right now. To say nothing of the last few decades. On the surface, Ukraine should be as globally trivial as any other conflict to the fruit-fly minds of the average clod. But the absolutely hysterical reaction by every wing of the corrupt globalist narrative machine suggests otherwise. See #4, #11.

So why the orchestrated reaction? Multiple things overlapping. An existential struggle beginning between the globalist elite and the nationalist powers. Expect China to move at some point. The hysteria towards both of them – and Iran - is driven top-down by their threat to the neo-liberal world order. Russia represents the first time globalist ambition has been confronted by old-fashioned military might. Which is sufficient to explain the severity of the reaction. Governments, tech, media, etc. simply follow orders and their master is frightened. There are other things like the US bioweapon labs and so forth that add more nuance to the existential lines being drawn. To the actual globalists – see #7 & #8 - this is potentially apocalyptic. Hence the strident absurdity of the coordinated response.

Blathering about the simplest explanation guarantees getting it wrong.

1l) Public "Opinion” is Dictated

Response is coordinated. "Public reaction” is not organic. It’s orchestrated. This is far from a new observation, but recent events have made it obvious in a way it wasn't before.

Graphic from a recent post shows the process by which the fake narratives making up the House of Lies are produced by a network of narrative engineers & uptaken by a network of narrative huffers. That is, FTS-2 or the idiot masses, who then support or "stand with" their lying overseer abusers.

We were focusing on the trauma aspect of this as a hypothesis for why the masses are as emotionally and cognitively crippled as they are. But it also catches the more general process of being given "opinions" that serve the destructive ends of those giving them.

Twittter, Facebook, big media, etc. don’t reflect public opinion, they create it. And they deliver narrative content written by the same architects of the neo-liberal world order. This is where 70 years of diminishing IQ, educational degradation, and the cumulative damage of a toxic culture come in. The vast majority are so incapable of thought that they can no longer even articulate their own self-interest. There is no solution to that, and without a Christian reverence for life, there’s a dark logic to the globalist desire to cull the herd. 

It's a common misconception that the idiot masses are driven by desire for the luxe life. They may daydream of extreme wealth and privilege, but raw acquisitive greed only actively motivates a relatively small percentage of the populace. What most will sell personal, familial, and cultural health for is being able to do nothing. Passive, low-grade consumerist sloth. To sit motionless before a screen and absorb processed carbs and grease. And often intoxicants of various kinds.

Pro-tip. Ignore the fake binary they want you to get caught on and consider the aggragate.

This is partly human nature but enhanced by the meaningless nihilism of modern life. People whinge about "jobs" while enjoying material ease and comfort unimagined in past eras. The problem isn't actually that it's hard - most soft modern protoplasm have never experienced work that's hard. It's that it's meaningless. There's no tangible accomplishment. No one actually gives a rat's ass about your "report". It's socio-historic contribution is actually less than nil because the time and effort wasted on it could have been used for something worthwhile. Anything. 

But subordinating most of your waking hours to existentially irrelevant inanity in generally pathological social environments is inherently stressful. And once conditioned to meaningless stress as the norm, meaningless passivity becomes the tonic.

Imagine a meaningful existence of family and faith. Of truth, beauty, and goodness...

We do.

Body, mind, and soul are linked. The passive consumption of the lowest-frequency toxic junk isn't limited to the physical. The bag of suet that "lives" for hours of screen time is no better a steward of their mental or spiritual lives.

At least the turtles are moving and creating in a beautiful natural setting, though that alone in insufficient to break out of the House of Lies.

It's not just the obese and/or deconditioned majority. There's a segment that believes they "look after themselves" while still accepting the larger structures of the House of Lies. 

Ever-changing "health" dicta, a conga line of "self-help" and fake spiritualists... same end result as the suet bags, just with better BMI and fewer mobility issues.

Like this cheap luciferian occultism sweetened with the false promise of low-effort self-divinization. Do what thou wilt for the sloth-addicted huffers.

Disconnecting from the screens, developing anti-fragility, and back to the land self-sufficienty won't cure a terminally ill society. But it’s still better than the narrative-huffing alternative.

12) The enemy of the enemy is better than the enemy

Putin or Xi are not on the “side” of Western nationalists. Thinking in terms of two sides is part of the problem. See #9.  They are on their sides, as they should be. But they’re enemies of our enemy, and that’s significant. They’re not forcing toxic genetic “therapies” on us, or inverting human nature, or digital money and pod life in teeming failing cities ruled by psychopathic totalitarians that want us impoverished or dead. Because while material reality is a complex and multifaceted web of butterfly effects and endless agendas, abstract reality does orient around absolutes. And the one binary that matters is the moral one. Anyone opposing the beast aligns with a primal divide.

Abstract absolutes can't materially exist - see #8. They manifest more or less imperfectly through material agents. Who are themselves complex and multifaceted in ideology and motivations. Insofar as those oppose the beast, they align with our opposition to the same.

Checking the imperial designs of globalism is a net benefit, full stop. Now obviously there are many possible pathways from there in a lot of different directions. But whatever comes next will not follow the same trajectory of what was before. Because it’s also obvious that the post-War era – and perhaps the entire post-Renaissance era – of the West is ending. Best-case scenario is a lot less ease and abundance but new organic communities form. Others are less good. Who prevails in this clash of powers matters to all of us. There’s a serious difference between reality-facing groups with rival interests and satanic totalitarian atavists perched atop the food chain.

In the last of our Thomas Covenant posts, we noted how Lord Mhoram's epic clash with the forces of darkness is applicable to multi-level truths in reality. His attack is preceded by an assault on Satansfist's army by the Waynhim - an unaligned eldritch race that had no involvement in the clash up to this point. But Foul's evil is repulsive to them as well, and despite their differences from the Lords, took their shot for their own moral reasons. Mhoram seized on the unexpected distraction to sally forth and... well... look at the picture and read the post...

The point is that in the face of true evil, the non-evil, even if at cross-purposes - have common cause.

And that means...

Bonus) It’s metaphysical

Post-Enlightenment materialism is a monument to human vanity. Auto-idolatry based on the self-evident falsehood that the infinite exists within the finite and limited human minds can fully grasp the fullness of abstract absolutes. What we call secular transcendence for short. We've traced this over several years of posts showing the empirical and logical necessity of levels of reality beyond the material. We express them in the ontological hierarchy, but that’s just a graphical metaphor. The point is that the false claims of the modern world are ontologically and epistemologically false. They can’t work, which is why the system founded on them is collapsing under its own fakeness. 

This also means that people who refuse to recognize the full ontological significance of the current situation are powerless to even understand it, let alone fix it.

Samson Gabriel, The Blind leading the Blind, 21st century, oil on canvas

The fiery abyss is right. But they should be wearing masks and standing with Ukraine.

The servants of the beast certainly believe it’s a metaphysical conflict. Recurring occult rituals and symbols make that painfully obvious. The secularism and “atheism” of the de-moralized, posturing, self-fluffing lackwits is a form of spiritual unilateral disarmament. 

With sufficient perception and intelligence the larger patterns in the House of Lies can be somewhat puzzled out. But once the metaphysical angle is understood they snap into focus, no exceptional perception or intelligence required. And that’s the globalists’ uniquely sharp animus towards Christianity explained in sentence.

Where are You Coming From? Where are You Going? On Art and Reading Paintings

Gavriil Pavlovich Kondratenko, Moonlit Winter Evening with Solitary Figure, 1903

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and reflections on reality and knowledge have menu pages above.
Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check a couple times a day and it will be up there.






This is a short post that isn't part of any of the ongoing series, but responds to something interesting that came up elsewhere. In a way, it's part of all the series, because it has to do with making sense - "reading" - images.

And it may become the start of a new one.







The Band is built off the idea that images are information vectors as well as aesthetic experiences - both, not either/or. In this post, we are going to look at a pair of images that complement each other and explain how they communicate their complementary messages.

But before getting into that it is necessary to address some basic points around art. These have come up in regular posts, but those are long and the scattered points aren't always easy to pull together or link to. And it's worth taking stock of why art matters and why the enemies of the West have tried to take it from us.

Franz Marc, Small Composition II, 1914, color on canvas, Sprengel Museum 

The Band is at odds with modernism, which falsely proclaimed "art" had to be self contained. Like this piece of crap. And if it did communicate, it had to avoid anything "traditional" like beauty, truth, or history and fixate only on "modernity" as defined by a sliver of dyscivilizational European perverts. 

Lawrence Weiner, Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole, 1991, by laser-cut aluminum typography on brick. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

It also puts us at odds with Postmodernism and its aftermaths, which falsely claimed that aesthetics aren't part of "art" since they don't exist and are racist or something. 

This pretentious garbage is typical output from the sort of artworld creature that lives off the teats of govenrments, debased unaccountable institutions, and globalist "foundations". Apparently it's "meta" because it's a stenciled message you can put anywhere that describes the creative process...

These bodies gatekeep Art! with no checks other than their own perverse hatred of truth and beauty. They don't even talk like normal people, preferring a stilted, meaningless "discourse" that marks a place in their human centipede. Click for an example referring to the crap on the left.





Look past the atavists and the reality is that the visual arts are a subset of imagery. All visual arts are images, but not all images are art. The Modernists and Postmodernists are right to point out that this distinction is arbitrary. But they're morons and or liars because they believe that that observation somehow matters. All language is arbitrary in that it assigns unrelated phonemes or graphemes to concepts and objects.

Even the word "arbitrary" is an arbitrary assignment. Why on earth should we care if the term "art" is as well? It's dishonest to even pretend this is noteworthy.

But why single art out for a dishonest criticism. It's a puzzler. Might it have something to do with a desire to destroy standards and replace it them with anti-human cultural poison? 







All human activity is arbitrary in that we choose forms and set hierarchies of meaning. We pick names, colors, sizes, and lay-outs - designation and distinction are essential building blocks for the civilizations that allowed us to live better than animals. We can think of the civilizing process of as a ongoing clarifying and refinement that began when the first person named the first thing.

The reverse of drawing distinctions is entropy. Chaotic goo where communication and understanding dissolve into a meaningless pink slime. When you look past the specifics to the underlying pattern, this is what the atavistic inhuman globalist left - call them SJWs - want. They oppose enculturation and the refinement of meaning that comes with it. They desire entropic chaos where protoplasm twitch to subjective stimuli. The fact that without the distinctions and refinements of civilization the protoplasm die horribly escapes them because they're stupid. And their position is fundamentally evil.

Maerten de Vos, God Creating the Birds and the Fishes, 1600-1602, oil on copper.

From a Biblical perspective, Creation is a series of distinctions and designations. Drawing boundaries and defining things. And why do the designated things look the way they do? Why, it's arbitrary!









Innovation and artistic creation express the divine impulse in us and put us in the footsteps of God. Materially of course. When we build on the creations that came before, we advance refinement, diminish chaos and reduce indeterminacy. And we do so in ways that are constrained by the laws of nature, but are otherwise arbitrary. The morality of our creations is a separate thing.

A generically altered bioweapon designed for stealth transmission and maximal impact on health care and economic systems is a creation. It's innovative, but not moral.









For artistic creation, specific media may come and go and choices differ culturally and contextually. This is the part that is "arbitrary" in the sense that preferring tapestry to mosaic or stained glass to wall painting are issues of taste. But what matters for civilization isn't what arts are chosen but that there are specific arts. That there are skilled processes for creative distinction, refinement, and sophistication. And this is not arbitrary, unless you consider elevating our quality of life above the savage state to be so as well. It is the necessary expression of cultural refinement, of pushing away chaos, entropy, and indeterminate slime with divine creation. On that level, it is a moral imperative.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Collection of Pictures at the Time of Augustus, 1867, oil on canvas

Alma-Tadema was an academic artist best known for melodramatic scenes of ancient Greece and Rome. But he was an excellent technician. This painting captures the important place of art in ancient Roman culture. 

Every healthy civilization and many unhealthy ones express themselves and their values through the visual arts. Out current situation, where our "art" aggressively opposes our culture, our standards, and our identities is utterly bizarre. It is hard to think of another example. 

Kalachakra Shambhala, 19th century, Buddhist thangka painting from Sera Monastery, Tibet, private collection

Even cultures with abstract art traditions use them to express their values and identities. This picture diagrams the Kalachakra Shambhala - the final stage on an inner search for a new awareness of the world in Tibetan Buddhism. 

It isn't a realistic depiction of something in the world, but it doesn't spit on the culture where it came from either.








One Postmodern trick is to ask what art is, then pretend the impossibility of providing a concise and definitive answer disproves the concept. All liars have are tricks in the end, but they can be effective if you're unaware of them. The reality is that art takes on many forms and roles - even in the West, let alone the world - and there is no concise answer that will sum up everything you see in a major museum. But that's the trick - the correct definition of "art" is conceptual, not a list of art forms. And the answer is easy - art is structured making according to cultural norms. If you want something more specific, you have to refine the question.

Bertel Thorvaldsen, Gravestone of Poniński's Children, 1842, marble,  Gallery of Art in Lviv, Ukraine 

Like what is a sculpture, or relief sculpture, or Neoclassical relief, or funerary art, etc. 

Art is a higher order term with a lot of constituent subsets. Precise definitions are subset-dependent. 








Since the Band writes from a Western perspective, we are considering a Western notion of art. We've found that a definition based off a set of Greek terms best fits the art of the West on the broad level. This isn't perfect - definitions never are - but it captures the main assumptions from antiquity to the dawn of Modernism in the "art world" and still fits what the non-retarded and morally healthy tend to think art should be today.If you're interested in the reasoning behind these, click for a link to the post this was worked out. But this recap of the basics are enough for this purpose.

Art isn't either the making or the ideals being expressed - it is the coming together of the two in a visible material form. The Greeks used the term techne for skilled craft and episteme for the higher truths that art communicated. Art itself is phronesis - the marriage of the two. It looks like this:

Techne is skilled craft. It’s material-level on the ontological hierarchy, and follows culturally-specific customs rather than universal rules. The key is that it is skilled. Art isn't easy - it's talent refined to mastery. Otherwise you get the modernism where a perverse "art world" anoints talentless dyscivic garbage. 

Episteme refers to higher abstract principles - the metaphysical ideals that a culture holds most important and that are immaterial. Truth, Beauty and the Good. These don't change.  

Phronesis is the coming together of the two - techne guided by, serving, and expressing episteme in artistic form. This is the art of the West. Technical skill to express abstract values. 

What makes this definition so good is that it can distinguish art from "craft" or "skilled labor". Since the purpose of art is to communicate episteme in material terms, which is different from the purposes of craft objects. Both require refined skill or techne and be aesthetically pleasing but craft has a primary functional purpose other than purely communicating episteme in some way.

The formula:

This is so effective because it combines several key ingredients in a concise formation. Modern simpletons dislike this because it means entertaining more than one thought at a time. But art is a refined cultural activity and as such, consists of more than "orange man bad" level linear idiocy. First, there has to be the idea of a higher principle or truth. The image can be negative, but it needs to be truthful on some level.

Vasily Vereshchagin, The Apotheosis of War, 1871, oil on canvas, 127 × 197 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

It's not an attractive picture, but it is truthful. It's skillfully made - techne - and conveys truth - episteme - so it is art.  








Then there is the idea of skilled making - the most obvious casualty of the satanic inversions and applied idiocy of the modern era. Again, art types are cultural preference, but regardless of what types are preferred, they have to be skillfully made. Skilled making in the service of truth is a requirement of worldly beauty.

The Band refers to visual attraction without the higher principles of episteme as allure. Allure can be amoral - neutral subjective pleasure - but it won't be moral because if it were, it would channel epistome and become beauty. More often than not it's immoral - visual seduction that plays on emotional response to draw one onto a dark path.

Alexandre Cabanel, Albaydé, 1848, oil on canvas, Fabre Museum

Cabanel's picture is rich in techne - the fall of the garments, the exotic setting, the creamy skin, and seductive insouciance of the expression are signs of a master painter. But there is no episteme to speak of, other than perhaps the appeal of the female form. But even that is presented in a tawdry way - the figure is a herem girl or courtesan. The only purpose other than the display of techne is to stimulate emotional desires - base feelings that may be "true" in a hormonal sense, but not in a higher one. It lacks logos.

Perhaps that is sufficient - there are shades of gray in qualitative judgments. But the painting is more alluring than beautiful. It has its value perhaps, but as ornament, a moment of seductive pleasure rather than "art" in the purest sense. 






This is why techne alone is not sufficient to define art. Allure and seduction also require high level craft skills.  It's the presence of episteme that separates the art of the West from pretty pictures.

To clarify, this is a broad generation. The material-level truths of human existence cover a lot of ground - everything from Biblical revelations to natural processes, to human relations. But the litmus test is simple:

The history of the arts of the West include many forms, but traditionally, painting is probably the preeminent one. The versitility and nuance of painting gave it a wider range of effects, subject matter, and contexts than any other art form. Because of this, the West developed more sophisticated attitudes and refined understanding of painting than any other art form. The history of painting almost is the history of post-Medieval art in the West, with a wing for sculpture and another for the rest of the arts. But even there, painting set the stage.

Media like collage or embroidery were thought of in painted terms.

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Landscape with a Greek Temple, around 1900, stained glass window, Cleveland Museum of Art
Mehitable Starkey, Embroidered Chair Back, 1755-65, linen embroidered with wool and silk threads, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York


This is because art in the West represents things, and painting is the most versatile and sophisticated representational tool. Art doesn't have to be realistic, but it does have to be representative on some level if it is going to convey episteme through techne. A Gothic cathedral isn't a depiction, but it conveys the material logos of it's construction and abstract logos about beauty and the glory of God through its arrangement and impact on the viewer. But depiction is the easiest and most direct way to communicate visually, and painting is best at that. Which is why most painted art depicts something recognizable.

John Atkinson Grimshaw, November, 1879, oil on canvas, private collection

The range and nuance of the power of painting to depict things comes through in a technical virtuoso master of expression like Grimshaw. His incredible moonlit skies, varied light sources, and textured foregrounds are testimonials to the ability of oil paint to represent. 
















One of the most diabolical aspects of modernism was the notion of autonomy [click for a post]. This is the false premise that art has no purpose other than to be art. That it exists in complete isolation from any function or expectation other than itself - paint on a surface, form in space, in a disconnected cultural space called art. Even after Postmodernism restored the idea that art represents things, it kept it locked in the stunted, self-referential discourse of "art" and focused on perverse "critiques" of the culture and history of the West.

On the surface, autonomy seems simply retarded, but we've come to realize a more diabolical purpose. Consider: the art of the West is purposeful, but the purpose is to express episteme - abstract truths that aren't obvious in the world around us.

Sanford Robinson Gifford, A Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove), 1862, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art 

This can be explicitly spiritual. But it can also be as basic as the truth of natural beauty shining from creation and the healthiness of man's place in it. Logos in a material sense.

Gifford, like Grimshaw above, made art that made us aware of the wonders of the world around us with ideal visions of what that could be. The beauty comes from the ordered perfection that is implicit in the natural world, but rarely seen directly. 

Carl Bloch, The Daughter of Jairius, 1863, oil on canvas, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

A picture like this one wears its truths - faith, salvation, and the actual Logos - openly. Bloch depicts the moment before the miracle to capture the sorrow and loss. Jesus' arrival in the background is electrifying.

"Autonomy" eliminates all of this - even the logos-free allure of the Cabanal. It cuts art off from it's most essential cultural function - manifesting the True, the Beautiful. and the Good in visible, meaningful forms. Autonomy bars us from what has always been an essential vector for encoding wisdom, values, aesthetics, and discernment, and replaced it with hideous idiocy. Viewing art shifts from perceiving logos through phronesis to an act of humiliation - the self-abasement of capering around rooms filled with detritus while degenerate blurbs and audio guides tell you what to like. In other words, licking the globalist hand as it slaps away your fundamental identity.

Atrium of Daniel Libeskind's Museum of Contemporary Art in Milan.

Postmodern architectural darling designs a house of trash. 

Because Italy lacks decent art to look at...


















Simply calling artistic autonomy retarded sells this way short. It is evil. Pure satanic inversion of the bedrock identity of the art of the West. Representation, communication - enculturation - are not aspects of art, they're fundamentals. The reason for its existence. Without this purpose, there is no art.

Julius Klever, Winter Evening in the Forest, 1897, private collection, oil on canvas

Like the connection between people and the land by a Russian artist. Globalist filth deny the reality culture in order to transform people into fungible units of debt and consumption. A painting that communicates the logos of a unique identity based on shared experience opposes that. 

That's why globalists are evil - they're satanic liars who invert what it true for personal gain.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1808, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum

Or the civilizing message of the triumph of reason over animal savagery that's the subject of this mythic scene by an academic painter. The Sphinx is a murderous beast with a perverse nature signified by her hybrid form. Contrasted with the well-formed Oedipus, she embodies the violation of distinctions and boarders that reduces life-preserving civilization to primordial chaos.

Globalists wish to invert the logos of civilization and reduce us to manipulable pink slime - it's clear in their endless attacks on clear definitions and differentiation. A painting that reiterates reasoned clarity and distinction over bestial emotion and whim opposes this.  

The art of the West is the opposite of autonomous - if it were autonomous, it would cease to be the art of the West. Which is what has happened in the sham "art world" of today. The irony is that modernists decry the so-called arbitrary standards of the past while dishonestly promoting the most arbitrary perspective of all - a meaningless bubble filled with talentless hacks, self-promoting sociopathic liars, and money-launderers trying to outdo each other in praise of garbage. It's hard to imagine something more purposelessly arbitrary than that.

Its no surprise that the wicked invert reality, then project that inversion on the targets of their wickedness...

William Blake, Eve Tempted by the Serpent, 1799-1800,  tempera and gold on copper, Victoria and Albert Museum

...they learned from their master. 

In reality, artistic forms are culturally arbitrary, but the purpose is not. Art communicates truth visually by showing us things that we can't see in everyday life. But because of the modernist assault on our heritage and identity, many don't know how to see the communications. They don't know how to read or hear what art has to say. And worse than that, they're so turned off of art in general by the modernist-globalist-luciferian garbage surrounding it that they'll never look closely enough to figure it out.

The pretension, moral ugliness, and dishonesty of the modern art "scene" and the self-abasement needed to subscribe to its nonsense make it a non-starter for most. Healthy people tend to avoid weird creeps and liars. Then the historical art that actually is appealing gets buried under the discursive blather from the same. And things like this go unnoticed:

Johan Christian Dahl, View of Dresden by Moonlight, 1839, oil on canvas, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Imagine if the art appreciation types really put the full scope of the beauty of the West against the Modernist hacks?


This site was the first hit on a duckduckgo "art appreciation" search. Notice how talentless modern garbage predominates on their landing page. They're typical for the way the conventional modern institutional definition of art is simply taken at face value and presented as fact. Great works and trash are put side by side as if they share anything beyond designation by anti-human globalist freaks. There's no mention of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. There's no consideration of the relationship between art, culture, and values. Just the mindless parroting of the atavists, poseurs, and frauds that choke our institutions like the plaque in a diseased artery. We aren't singling them out for criticism - they're simply an example of what passes for "art appreciation" in the cultural cesspool that is Art! 

Here's a question:

The answer is obviously that you can't. Which is why you'll get nonsense descriptions of movements and the importance of technical terminology and nothing about communication. How artworks encode logos in appealing visual forms that can make the soul soar. Nothing about how those techniques arrange that wisdom for emphasis and reliability. Nothing about the interplay of the old Aristotelian terms of dialectic and rhetoric, or pathos, logos, and ethos in lines and colors. In short, nothing to let you connect with the real artistic heritage of the West and let it show you what we are, where we came from, and where we need to go.

The Band came together to fight back against the lies. Since then, it's become apparent that reconnecting people with their artistic and cultural heritage is a major component. This is a big project - what is peddled as "art" needs to be completely reconsidered in light of logos. Modern history needs to be scrapped altogether and a reality-facing alternative set up in its place. How to look at, understand, and yes, appreciate art needs to be built from the ground up.

Jonas Lie, The Old Ships Draw to Home Again, around 1920, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum

A history where 20th century art actually relates to the life, people, and culture of the time rather than theoretical nonsense and talentless hackery.

Aleksandr Averin, Walk #3, around 2017, oil on canvas

And contemporary art is distinguished by mastery of techne and the logos of beauty - of both nature and human nature. 










This isn't going to happen overnight, or through the work of one small site. But we can start.

With that in mind, this post will look closely at two pictures as a demonstration of what art says and how it says it. It won't be the systematic, ground-up, "how to read a picture" that needs to happen - that's a project that will unfold over time, and will involve other platforms as well. But it is a start. And once you start thinking about what art says, you become empowered to read other pictures, make your own judgments, reject the cultural emasculation of the liars and globalists, and begin to wake up to the incredible heritage that you're part of.

A new dawn. Sort of like this:

Frederic Edwin Church, Coast Scene, Mount Desert (Sunrise off the Maine Coast), 1863, oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT


The two pictures that we're going to look at are an uncommon pair. One came from the daily paintings that the Band posts elsewhere and the other was contributed by an ally and associate. Both were popular, but come from different periods and address very different subjects. They share Slavic origins but it is unlikely that they have any direct connection beyond that. But this is the difference between reading paintings and building histories of style or defining movements - the direct connections matter much less than the logos that shines through them. Once you can see that, the entirety of Western art opens up to you.

What they do do is communicate opposite messages in similar ways.

 

Gavriil Pavlovich Kondratenko, Moonlit Winter Evening with Solitary Figure, 1903

Pre-Communist Russian painting is fascinating. It shows some influence of European movements like Romanticism and Impressionism, but had a unique quality that we can call fantastical realism. That is, realistic art with a fantastical quality. 

It is especially good at capturing the feel of the land and the relationship of the people with it. See the Klever painting up above for another example. Not surprising, considering the size of the rugged Russian landscape, but other places were quicker to toss their heritages for modernist lies. 

This painting is impressionistic in its grainy blurry quality but doesn't share the Impressionist interest in making images out of color dots. What it does is capture the feel and beauty of a bright moonlit snowy night where the noises are muffled and edges blurry. The light in the church is the point of warmth that draws the traveler forward. 







Our second picture is an untitled piece often called the Valley of Death or of the Dead by a Polish master of surrealistic hellscapes. The dimensions of the painting are such that we can't fit a large version with text beside it given Blogger's format constraints, so we'll introduce it, then blow it up into a larger view after.

Zdzislaw Beksinski, Unntitled, 1972

The Band generally dislikes Beksinski's work. He's a skilled technician, but wallows in horror and depravity in the nihilistic "moral vacuity of modern life" cliche that isn't so much wrong as a dead end. Endlessly pointing out how vile the contemporary world is quickly crosses over into debasement porn without starting to show a way forward. At the same time, he did live through the Communist system and was knifed to death by a teenage "friend" looking for money, so it is possible that his hellish visions were true to his inner life. But this isn't that. 

Untitled is an excellent depiction of hope and resolve in a dark world. The monstrous figures loom but don't threaten, leaving a clear path without a clear beginning or end. Crows circle, but the figure moved forward, guided by the brightest light in the scene. 






Here is the large-scale view for comparison with the Kondratenko. Note the lighting - it also only illuminates vague forms, but it is more monochrome and has no obvious source. Just a grim haze that recalls distant fires reflecting off an ashen sky. It's the light of pyres or hell - the opposite of the pure light of  the moon on fresh snow.

We should note that Beksinski denies giving meaning to his works: "Meaning is meaningless to me. I do not care for symbolism and I paint what I paint without medating on a story." But art expresses the world that it is drawn from. If the artist wishes to include explicit meanings, that's great. But it isn't necessary for insight to be communicated to us.

So why look at these together? What makes them jump out? First, look at the overall compositions. Both feature solitary walkers, single points of light, and diagonal pathways through uncertain terrain. Composition or arrangement is how the paintings are put together. Not the materials used, but how the elements in the picture are arranged or composed. It's like music or writing that way. There are many ways to organize a scene, and how the artist does so determines not only what it looks like aesthetically, but how you will understand it conceptually.

Rembrandt, Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, 1653, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Here, Rembrandt obscures the background to push your attention onto the figure and the bust. The diagonal light connects them and especially illuminate's Aristotle's face to enhance the impression that the great mind is deep in thought. Dressing the philosopher in 17th-century clothing made him more accessible to Rembrandt's contemporary audience. 

Composition is a huge part of a meaning - a reflection on the legacy of the classical tradition that the West was built on.

Consider two versions of the same scene from eminent academic painters. They depict the moment when the great Roman poet Virgil was reading his masterpiece to the Emperor Augustus and his family and referenced the death of the emperor's nephew Marcellus. Augustus' sister Octavia, Marcellus' mother who was devastated by the death of her son, faints at his mention. The emperor's second wife Livia was married to him for over 50 years but they had no children. She was accused of having Marcellus killed so her children from her first marriage would become heirs to the throne, though the rumors were never proven.

Angelica Kauffman, Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia, 1788, oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum 

Kauffman was a rare female history painter and a founding member of the British Royal Academy whose art is defined by Neolassical clarity. 

She depicts a moment of dramatic action, rushing to the aid of fainting Octavia, while Livia looks reproachfully at the somewhat worried poet. 

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Virgil Reading from the Aeneid, 1864, oil on canvas, private collection

Ingres was president of the French Academy and combined Classical and Romantic themes on the way to becoming the preeminent artist of his day. 

He downplays the physical action to focus on the psychological intensity of the scene. Augustus locks eyes on Virgil and commands him to stop while to advisors communicate nervously behind him. The focus in on the poet and emperor while between them Livia sits unconcerned beneath the statue of Marcellus, emphasizing the crux of the drama. The lighting ratchets up the emotional tension, while Kauffman uses more natural illumination to create a more realistic scene. 

This is how composition determines the nature of the story you're seeing. The position and interaction of the figures, the expressions and gestures, the light and color, even their locations in space all shape the viewer's experience. Both pictures depict the same moment and are carefully structured with figures locking together into integrated groups. This allows both to show this as a Classical ideal rather than a random snapshot - you can see the conscious thought that went into the planning. But one opts for action, the other for psychological nuance, with the result that your impression of the scene is completely different.

When reading a painting, it is important to focus on the subject. But it's just as important to focus on the composition and be attentive to how the subject is put together.  The similarities - the solitary walkers, single points of light, and diagonal pathways through uncertain terrain - indicates that the paintings might be presenting information in comparable ways. So we look closer.

Start with the figures, because it is human nature to focus on the figures in paintings that include them. We don't necessarily see ourselves in them, but they do give us something we can relate to as an access point.

Two things jump out:

1. The are going in opposite directions. Kondratenko's is moving inwards - away from us - and Beksinski's is heading out.

2. The relationship to the warm light source is different. Beksinski's carries his like a torch while Kondratenko's is moves towards his. One lights his own way and the other is drawn to the light.




These differences are significant, especially when taken together. One follows the light inward, towards something known. The other has to light his own path and is moving out towards the unknown. Which poses the next questions - where are they coming from and where are they going?

Kondratenko's destination is a church. Where he is coming from is unclear, but this is unimportant, given where he is going.

He follows a light that he doesn't have yet, but will soon reach. His journey is from the exterior world to the Logos, to the Christian community and salvation that is the only antidote to the chaos and evil of a fallen world. We can see his destination because it is a destination - the endpoint of wandering in the wilderness. Just as it was for Dante in his dark wood.

Beksinski's comes from the mysterious depths of the scene and his destination is unknown. The lurid light darkens ahead of him, suggesting that he is finding his way out of the hellscape he knew, but the future is uncertain. There is no light to guide him other than his own - his wisdom, discernment, resolve.

If there is a refuge of faith and Logos, he can't see it yet. It's a secular, material world, where fallen man is on his own.













Bringing us to the next question - where are they?

Kondratenko's world is cold and obscured, but natural. There is a bright moon and harsh beauty.

The perspective funnels our - and the wanderer's - attention to the warm light from the church, and the alignment with the moon tells us that this light is natural in its own way - the natural culmination of a journey through the metaphorical wilderness of the spirit.

The wander will soon be home.

There is nothing natural about Beksinski's. This is an artificial hell, a man-made one. The path isn't through nature, but between monstrous, anthropomorphic forms. The lighting is not a natural source like the moon, but a dirty glow. The way forward vanishes into darkness, rather than culminating in a house of Logos. And the only direction is the figure's own tiny light.
















Taken together, the opposites are complementary inverses. The inversion point being the presence of Logos in the represented world. Beksinski's is the monstrous secular hell of materialist tyranny. Where there is no clear path of righteousness, just lurid depths where you're on your own. Survival demands some kind of escape but the light of your own powers promises nothing. Kondratenko reminds us that Logos restores the natural human condition, and that with it, we are never alone. We don't have to bear the overwhelmingly daunting task of navigating the valley of death that is the fallen world because the pathway through is assured.

Look at them together.

One is the promise of globalism - the tyrannical collective lie that crushes the spirit and stacks the bodies. There is no logos here - just a road into darkness that goes as far as your own spirit can take you and where you can't even see the sky. The other is the natural order of man in creation. A world where beauty prefigures spiritual wholeness. It's possible to imagine them as the same path - a journey out of the evils of vanity and inversion and into the light.

When we read these paintings, we see why the art of the West is purposeful. Although some 70 years apart, they describe mirror-image conditions that in the modern world must consider. And they don't just explain them like our narration - the show you them in a real visceral way. You can feel the oppressive gloom and the menace of one and the warm hope and promise of the other. You can see the difference between trying to light your own path through darkness and death and seeking your place in the Light. Between standing alone against the hopelessness of a fallen world and taking your rightful place as part of something bigger, no matter how what the world around you is like.

Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape with Church, 1811, oil on canvas, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund


This is the cultural heritage that the satanic globalists would steal from you.

We think otherwise.