Intense Hammer rage

(With thanks to the Sound is a Factor YT channel who reminded me the other day about the band of that name…)

You know what I hate? When I don’t do enough research… So I spent a good chunk of tonight watching a fantastic video by a chap calling himself the Academic Agent on Hammer Films and its history (one thing I don’t think I ever knew before: Will Hinds, who founded the company in 1935, didn’t actually even like films that much), going into the key people at the company and even the business transactions and stuff like that, all of which is great and fascinating… and then in the last bit where he cites his sources, he mentioned another Youtuber and observed the latter individual had a tendency to go off against THE WOOOOOOOOOOKE. Which he approved of.

Hang on… had I just spent two hours greatly enjoying a fascinating video about something I love by a right-wing goon?

And yeah, it appears I had in face done precisely this. My fault for not checking, too, cos if I had just looked at our host’s list of videos, I would’ve seen this:

Um. A quick squiz at his community posts further revealed he has a Substack which had been made into an audiobook by yet another Youtuber with the… promising name of Daughter of Albion, who hasn’t posted much in ages but the tagline on her YT channel is “it’s OK to be English”. Didn’t realise anyone was saying it’s not, but sure…

Who, then, is Neema Parvini, the Academic Agent, proprietor of the Academic Agency and non fan of THE WOOOOOOOOOOKE? Well, he’s a trained Shakespearean with several books to his credit and an enthusiast for classical economics and political theory, to which end he’s written books on those subjects too. (Folio Society collector, judging by his website photo.) And, per Hope Not Hate, an “extremist” who associates with far-right mobs like the Traditional British Group and Scyldings and Imperium Press (an Australian white nationalist publisher who have two of his books in their catalogue) and people like Carl Benjamin (though funnily enough, I did spot a video by the latter whining about Parvini refusing to debate him on something). And that Substack offers this interesting piece on whether or not he’s “white”, given that he’s mixed Welsh and Iranian:

I can no more claim the victories of Cyrus the Great for myself as I can the victories of Henry Tudor. I find it absurd to think in this way. This is a kind of cartoon nationalism. In my experience only Tory Boys imagine this is what nationalism is. None of my truly nationalist friends ever speak in this way. Our ancestors live in us but it’s not a low-rent game of glorified spectator sports whereby the Liverpool fan lords it over the Manchester United fan because some man wearing the right shirt scored a goal. To feel the call of a hundred generations in your bones is not some two-bit game of oneupmanship, it should be a profound and humbling realisation that you are part of something far bigger than yourself and far more significant than the trifles of the past few decades.

Charming. Fortunately (?) Neema is far too much of a rugged individualist to fully embrace either identity, though he definitely seems to lean one way:

To be spiritually ‘white’ in 2022 is to be deracinated and atomised and dislocated from any sense of belonging. This is why we fight: because we have been denied even the possibility of being rooted in a world that is fake and gay. I see my fight as the same fight as Fróði Midjord’s ultimately: the return of the real. Even if Fróði’s ancestors were Vikings and mine were nomads the from the Zagros mountains or Welsh druids, I feel like our struggle is the same.

This Midjord character is apparently a Faroese white supremacist, so… that’s the struggle he identifies with, apparently.

I’m really kind of ticked by this, cos I could’ve just looked at Parvini’s channel and seen the anti-woke kids’ books video (no, I didn’t actually watch it) instead of, you know, giving him the view. And yeah, I deleted it from my viewing history so I don’t think the view counts, but still, I gave him the time. About two hours of worth. I was enjoying it so much I was going to link it here and make a post about how good it was… which is the most galling thing, it was a great video. But Neema is a right-wing goon with kind of clear white nationalist sympathies (even if, to be sure, they didn’t affect this particular video apart from that one bit), and I regret having given him my time and attention like that… To be honest I’m a bit surprised by my own reaction to this whole thing, am I overreacting or what, and once again probably only I care, but I think this is just what happens to me when I encounter someone godawful like this who loves something like this which I also love (cf. Davis “Fucking N****rs” Aurini‘s fondness of Motorhead)… Whatever. It is what it is, as always… and if all else fails I suppose I can take some bitter amusement at the idea of this half-Welsh half-Iranian dude being in bed with white nationalists; Hitler might’ve excluded Persians from the race laws for their “Aryan” ancestry, but I don’t think his more recent followers would find Neema sufficiently Aryan despite his own…