Takimag: What’s Going On?

December 27, 2009 Hunter Wallace Paleocons 120

I’ve been reading Takimag ever since January 2008. Whenever I come online, I never fail to make my rounds and check for updates. It is one of the top five sites that I visit on the internet. The short list includes TOQ Online, Occidental Observer, SBPDL, Majority Rights, VDARE, Guy White, View From The Right, and Age of Treason. Two years ago, Takimag was thriving and seemed to have a lot of momentum. It was hands down the best site around.

Lately, I have noticed that Takimag has been very quiet. I suspect others have noticed the same thing. The Sniper’s Tower hasn’t been updated in almost a week. A few Buchanan columns have been uploaded, but they are starting to run into each other. Christina Oxenberg and Mandolyna Theodoracopulos seem to have taken over the site. Everyone else seems to have left the building.

Something is up. I’ve heard rumors flying around. I have a vague idea of what is going on. Has anyone else heard anything? Speak up.

About Hunter Wallace 12380 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

50 Comments

  3. It was all downhill after they kicked me off! hahaha

    Basically, I endorsed a foreign policy of realism and punitive action on our enemies. I would not brook the idiotic pacifism (and race denial) of Justin Raimondo. They wouldn’t have it. Not sure what’s going on there, though.

  4. You’re a Derbyshire cloan, Roach. Better on the JQ but since you don’t seem to me advocate actually doing anything about race that would encroach on the JQ it makes me wonder why you bother.

  5. I quit reading Takimag when they banned “Max Nordau.” There was a lively and intelligent holocaust debate going on last year (2008) and the moderator(s) curtailed it. “Max Nordau” brought up the role of The Frankfurt School in the denazification of Germany. This story has yet to be written. The Frankfurter’s work for the OSS has been glossed over by writers, including Kevin MacDonald, because the primary source material remains buried in disparate personal and bureaucratic archives.

    http://www.takimag.com/site/article/willing_executioners_the_holocaust_germans_and_collective_guilt/

    Mr. de Zayas argument would be self-evident if we did not operate in the West under the assumption that collectively the Germans were guilty, and that therefore all crimes committed against the Germans, were a mere retribution, a form of raw cosmic justice embodied in the persons of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. On these lines Daniel Goldhagen’s indictment of the Germans as ‘willing executioners’ attempted to give a new lease of life to the spurious anthropology put forward by the Frankfurt School in the effort to denazify and reeducate the defeated Germans. This spurious anthropology postulated as the eternal German national character an ‘authoritarian personality’ marred by sado-masochism and compulsive anti-semitism, and whose only solution lies on state-driven ‘Mass Pedagogy’ (Volkspädagogik), and ‘Mass Re-Education’ (Volkserziehung). The Freudian savvy of the Frankfurtians came in handy for the task since the whole process of re-education was –and still is- carried out through carefully crafted conditioning techniques such as mass-media aversion therapy. Denazification developed into a totalitarian practice of its own, and came to the US – with its implicit double standards- already in the 1970s in the form of Political Correctness, the present dominant ideology.
    In the war memories of de Gaulle, Churchil and Eisenhower, you will not find a mention of the word Holocaust. And in the online proceedings of the Nuremberg trials (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/imt.htm ), you will find 3 mentions of the word Holocaust: one referring to generic German crimes (not exclusive towards Jews), and to referring to the devastation of Dresden and Germany itself.
    If you do a search in the electronic full-text version of the massive, 32 volume World History (Propyläen-Weltgeschichte) published between 1960 and 1965, you will not find a single mention of the term ‘Holocaust’. The series was edited by Golo Mann, Alfred Heuß and August Nitschke all respected Historians in denazified Germany.
    The timing of its arrival in the US is important because it coincides with the emergence of the term ‘Holocaust’ as shorthand for the persecution of the European Jews during WWII. Norman Finkelstein argues that the rise of the Holocaust industry coincided with the Israeli success in the 1967 preemptive attack against Syria, Egypt and Jordan. At that moment, the image of a defenseless little David fighting against the Arab Goliath had become untenable and required a redoubling of the Hasbara efforts in the West. It is important to keep the historical perspective of how the term Holocaust evolved, and to what political ends it is used, so that we can understand why all children born today in the West, three generations after the crimes committed during WWII, are still being denazified. A brave new world indeed, this one is ours.

  8. Takimag was at one time one of my daily stops too. One thing that started to drive me away from it was Taki himself. His columns while they can be funny are exactly what our movement doesn’t need. He personifies every stereotype Marxists once held about people on the Right: rich, hedonistic, materialistic, and elitist. His colmns about his affairs, the people he hobnobbed with at parties, and memories about the “golden age” of private resorts in Switzerland and the Riviera (which I’ve spent time in) are utterly useless to us. The white working and middle classes that are suffering because of the actions of the elites Taki is apart of have no use or need for spoiled rich brat bullshit.

    If it’s true Richard is leaving I’m glad and not surprised. I attended this past October’s Mencken Club meeting and listening to Richard’s presentations, talking to him in private, and seeing him nod in agreement to some of my questions about race and Jewish hypocricy reveal he is more to the Right than Taki will ever let him be. His talents will be better used and more effective elsewhere.

  10. The name of the site contained a prophecy of its own demise. It was always “Taki’s Magazine.” I don’t think anyone ever browsed the site to read Taki’s own column though.

    From the beginning, Taki posted articles about his various escapades with his rich friends. I never had the slightest interest in that material. He also began publishing Mandolyna and Christina Oxenberg.

    A few months ago, Oxenberg posted a blog in the Sniper’s Tower about how horrified she was that a date had presented her with a purple teddy bear. I wrote an article called “The Decline of Takimag” in response, but never published it. Richard Hoste of HBD Books had similar reaction and wrote about it on his own site.

    From what I gather, Mandolyna and Oxenberg have taken over Takimag and have been given free reign to write about all the inanities of their social circle. That was the kiss of death to what had once been the best site on the net.

  11. I remember reading somewhere that Taki was once arrested at Heathrow airport for drug smuggling.Rumors like that are easy to dismiss but something tells me that it just might be true.

  13. Hunter,I read about it a while back.I don’t recall where,I’m afraid.I don’t like spreading rumours;all I can say is that I read about this somewhere,not whether it is true or not.

  14. Yes, it is true. Taki wrote a book about his drug offence and experiences in prison. It’s a good book. I happen to like Taki and his columns in The Spectator. His star shone most brightly, IMO, in The Spectator in the late 1970s-1980s-early 1990s.

  17. Roach, you were awesome, so was John Zmirak, Russel Seitz, Andrew Cusack, Helen Rittlemeyer, Marcus Epstein and others. Even if you did not agree with the writer’s opinions, the opinions were not trash or dogma. I wish Takimagazine would return to its old format, and become a place of intellectual discovery and debate again. It was the closes thing the alternative right had to a National Review or the Nation with the exception of the American Conservative. I hope Richard Spencer creates a new website that surpass the intellectual prowess of the old Takimagazine.

  18. Richard Spencer could be the William F Buckley of the alternative right in my opinion.

  19. Takimag (if it’s going down) wasn’t a bad publication but they hindered themselves unnecessarily by including anti-racists like Raimondo (his articles on the Jewish war lobby are worthwhile however) and Zmirak around. Their site became then characterized by ideological struggle and often devolved into arguments between the antis and racialists in every article. They could have taken a proactive stance and banned the worst offenders permanently or taken a firm stance on the race issue instead of waffling. But as usual the paleocons took no decisive action besides cutting off comments completely which was, imo, the worst move they could have made since many of the commenters added value to the site. Here’s hoping that if they start another online mag they don’t make the same mistakes.

  20. Agree with both AG’s illegetimate son’s last two comments. As worrisome as Takimag has gotten just recently, I was even more sorry to see all those writers disappear along time ago. Also Larison, Raimondo… I wonder what happened. They can’t all have been fired, right?

    Vaguely on the subject, Sailer got fired from TAC, right?

  21. Takimag’s jump the shark moment came when Zmirak started posting articles about his online dating adventures. The real decline began when the comments section was eliminated. The comments by people such as CaptainChaos and a few others, were instrumental in pushing waffling paleocons further in a WN direction.

  22. I didn’t take a front-row seat at the time so wasn’t an eye-witness to the goings-on, but my impression is — and please correct me — that Captainchaos was more than anyone THE man responsible for pushing Taki into shutting down comments. Whether it was a good thing or not I don’t know, and I myself would not have done what CC did over there, but my understanding it he, CC, is the man everyone has to thank (or curse) for that development.

  23. I completely stopped reading Takimag when Zmirak wrote that piece trashing Kevin MacDonald and others on race. I walked away, shook the dust off of my shoes, and never looked back. Talk about bottom-feeders, John Zmirak is about as close to the absolute bottom as they come.

  24. It was here, http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_vdare_monologues/ , but the really vicious trashing he did, trashing specifically of Jared Taylor, Kevin MacDonald, and Brenda Walker, took place in the comments thread which is no longer there. It was absolutely outrageous, what he went on to say about them repeatedly in the comments thread in arguing with their defenders who had come forth. Showed himself to be an insect.

  27. Taki shows the weakness of the “aristocratic financier” model – was it ever anything more than a vanity press for the old Greek playboy?

    Now we’re treated to his granddaughter’s musings about her fetish for expensive watches. Rubbish.

  28. I knew something was wrong when Taki defended the rapist, Roman Polanski. The right must be a movement of the workers and the middle class. The very rich and the very poor are both dangerous for a self-governing Republican people and need to be kept from having excessive political power.

  29. “The right must be a movement of the workers and the middle class.” ( — Roach)

    I don’t think we should be calling ourselves “the right.” We’ve as much reason to call ourselves the left as anything else. I certainly do, at any rate. Yes I understand your use of the term and I of course use left and right the standard ways too, when I have to in order to communicate, but I’m saying at some point we should stop acquiescing in that categorization of ourselves. What in the goddamn hell if “the right” and what has it done for us that we should “belong to it”? We’re us, sui generis.

  30. “The very rich and the very poor are both dangerous for a self-governing Republican people and need to be kept from having excessive political power. …”
    __

    Most especially so, Roach, since both are essentially PARASITICAL in their nature and essence.

  31. I certainly did enjoy sticking the knife in and twisting it at Takimag. I’d like to think I played more than a small role in its demise.

  33. Oops –

    Eh, just checked this link and it is obvious that it is ‘Caleb’ (and a few choice others) that are the ‘PERMANENT CHILDREN’!!!

    Whoever the heck this ‘Christina Oxenberg’ is, she is not only a child, but a spoiled, snot-nosed one at that!

    http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/christinaoxenberg

    Why ‘Taki-ness’ would hire to write for him such an empty-headed AIRHEAD as her is truly baffling. We are in the throes of our dispossession and this loser has the audacity to speak of a ‘watch fetish’, and her hypergamous-fueled ‘sex-life’ (or lack thereof).

    ANd the bitch

    Taki-Mag certainly jumped the shark with such turds as this! Now it should be officially renamed TAKI-RAG.

  34. “And the bitch GET’S PAID to pen such meaningless drivel.”

    While other good men have been chased away!

    Ah, ‘Taki-ness’…

    Doin’ his absolute best to live up to every Med stereotype!

  35. Captainchaos is gloating over contributing to the demise of TakiMag. How, exactly, does the demise of TakiMag help our cause? TakiMag was one of the places where paleoconservatives were exposed to white nationalism. Is that a bad thing?

  36. You have to admire the zeal of Linder and his cult of followers. They tirelessly work around the clock attacking credible WN leaders and institutions. They even work on Christmas.

  40. Hardcore/thick-skull: “Captainchaos is gloating over contributing to the demise of TakiMag.”

    Yes.

    “How, exactly, does the demise of TakiMag help our cause?”

    Faileoconservatism is a false opposition that drains off real struggle for our race into impotence, and creates a false consciousness of what our true interests are.

    “TakiMag was one of the places where paleoconservatives were exposed to white nationalism.”

    Bullshit.

    “Is that a bad thing?”

    Lying to our people now near the hour of their doom when perhaps only the truth can save them is despicable.

  42. “Laughing” (at “Laughing”) is regurgitating Buchanan’s drivel, ‘race is important but is not everything’. Wrong, ultimately, race is everything.

  43. Unfortunately for Captainchaos, Linder is wrong and Buchanan is right. Race is important but hardly everything. Nothing is ever “everything.”

  44. #5 WhoDaresWins: great post, well written, thank you.

    #8 Pip Pockets: I like Taki and enjoy his rich, materialistic and elitist name dropping and droll asides about his uber eurotrashen adventures and anecdotes. It is a form of satire. A time honoured one.
    God save us from the proletarian revolution. European culture is not about mediocrity or the proletariat, you should know that. Nor is it about pitting the lower classes against the upper classes. Your statements regarding the working classes and middles classes and ‘spoiled rich brat bullshit’ reflect badly on you. There is no need for psuedo-postmodernists or quasi-proletarian revolutionaries mentalities of resentment in this world. Nor do we need israeli ideology imported into this movement. Make your choice whether you are a zion inspired ‘leveler’ and rejoin Cromwell, or you are a European and learn to live in a rich culture of ideas and personalities.

    #10 Hunter Wallace: I have read Taki before his appearance in the Spectator. Taki is relevant because he stands for speaking ones mind, plainly and without fear. Whether discussing old friends, the gilding of a heirloom spatula, the proper way to grill sausages, the holocaust, the elections, women, political debauchery, plain -old debauchery whatever. Taki is old now, which is too bad since we need him more than ever to guard against the Cromwellian levellers who would reduce our culture to the level of a iowa socialist summer camp.
    If Taki had never existed it would have been vital to create him.

    11# Euro: he was arrest for possessing a small quantity of opium

    #28 Roach : It is impossible to keep the rich from political power. You put a poor man in a sensitive position, he immediately becomes a richman. You show a remarkable naivety about the people you claim to represent. Communism and separating people by class and bank accounts has no place in our movement…please package your leninist/trotskyist ideology and send them back to whatever community college walmart you brought them from.

    #3- Kulaks Never Learn
    —————————————–
    “The very rich and the very poor are both dangerous for a self-governing Republican people and need to be kept from having excessive political power. …”?__
    Most especially so, Roach, since both are essentially PARASITICAL in their nature and essence.\——-
    ——————————————————–

    I go to sleep one night and wakeup the next day and you all turned into fucking Communists Jew Manchurian Candidates. The comments in this thread make me sick to my stomach,
    You goddamn Cromwellians who want to destroy everything that makes life worth living…I will kill you with my own hands when I come across you, one by one. And you won’t be the first. I’ve never met a Puritan who wasn’t both a coward and a barking dog.
    Let me tell you now Puritans, with your love for destroying things you cannot appreciate or create. It is you that is the first symptom of jew madness. It is you who are the cancer in this society. You are sick individuals. You should quietly take your attention off other peoples cultural valuables and go take some cyanide pills and go to bed.
    We know you do not enjoy culture or mental freedoms, now take this pill and go to sleep while I put this pillow on your face.
    Nighty night. Say hello to Karl Marx and ask if his hemoroids are not still bothering him in Hell.

  45. Our culture at its best is an expression of our (genetic) being, and tends to propagate that being. If our culture begins working against, to the detriment of, our being then that culture is engaging in the destruction of the necessary conditions for it to obtain at all. It has then become a serpent devouring its own tail. To misunderstand/be unaware of that is a misunderstanding/lack of awareness so profound as to render one unqualified and therefore unjustified in commenting on ‘the bigger picture’ at all.

    As I said, and I will say it again, race is ultimately everything.

  46. It might be unwise for WNs to alienate Taki, given his own personal wealth and links to potential donors worldwide. Speaking of which, the articles covering the Hal Turner incident mention that he visited Brazil to meet with wealthy nationalists there who were interested in providing funds. Any idea who and where these people are, and might it be a good idea to approach like-minded individuals for fund-raising requests (of a legal nature of course)?

  48. Grimioire, America had strong traditions of middle class identity, limits on corruption (both cultural and legal), limits on the power of accumulated capital, such as antitrust laws and restrictions on the right of “foreign” corporations to do business out of state, property and religious oath requirements on voting, a WASP culture of limits on ostentation (quite unlike the Jewish oligarch’s in today’s Russia, which buys yachts but builds no museums), noblesse oblige, and all the rest. The idea that people should be devoted to the country and identify with its people and their life experiences is hardly Marxist; it’s nationalist: as in there are things more important than making money, and virtue and love of one’s people is a greater claim to fame than mere wealth. It’s an impoverished imagination that screams Marxist at people like me or Pat Buchanan.

  49. Grimoire

    zion inspired ‘leveler’ and rejoin Cromwell, or you are a European and learn to live in a rich culture of ideas and personalities.

    I’m not willing to be a slave to Jews nor Euro-aristocrats. Levellers were not Zionist inspired in any way, shape, nor form, and were in fact anti-Jew and anti-usurer.

    I’m slightly amused at the wanna-be White aristocrats in the pro-White movement. They are as impotent as anyone, kings without a kingdom, leaders without followers, and legends in their own mind. How do they claim to be an “elite” anyway? What good have they done for Whites exactly?

    “You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you.”

  50. Grimioire
    Let me tell you now Puritans, with your love for destroying things you cannot appreciate or create. It is you that is the first symptom of jew madness. It is you who are the cancer in this society.

    And that is what I mean when I said (in the Paleocon thread) that the “administrative concept of the world is jewish.” Cromwell and his ilk bringing Talmudic totalitarianism to wreck Europe. I don’t want any administrators, jew or white.

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