Tony Gosling answers questions about wargaming Langley Park schoolfriend (1976-8) 'Nazi Nick' Land

Tony answers questions on Nick Land who he was friends with at Langley Park School for Boys,
https://politicsthisweek.gn.apc.org/2025/10/not-the-bcfm-politics-show-presented-by-tony-gosling-260/

Nietzschean philosopher Nick Land: God, The Cairngorms and the Dark Enlightenment. I got to know an incredibly knowledgeable, 14 year old, 'Nazi Nick' Land at Langley Park grammar school in 1976 and we struck up a friendship playing SPI war games etc at 'Diplomacy Club' every Saturday at Nicks home in Warren Road on the edge of Hayes Common. The large interlinked woodland wilderness was the perfect place for Nick's occasional 'paramilitary exercises' with other school friends. Nick and I sat next to each other at Langley Park School for Boys (LPSB) racing through Maths and Physics exercises, both joining the school's Air Training Corps 578 squadron under Brian Hockings and later developing a shared interest in the curious phenomenon of hallucinogenic drugs. Nick had an obsession with the US carnage and had developed a 'dark sense of humour' around Vietnam. In contrast he borrowed one of my hardback copies of Catholic writer and modern Bible translator JRR Tolkien's Lord of The Rings.

'Accelerationism is a range of revolutionary and reactionary ideas in left-wing and right-wing ideologies that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, infrastructure sabotage [citation needed] and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, otherwise referred to as "acceleration". It has been regarded as an ideological spectrum divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and right-wing variants, both of which support the indefinite intensification of capitalism and its structures as well as the conditions for a technological singularity, a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible.'

Nick Land on Satanism. Who Is Nick Land? Originally an anarchic academic at the University of Warwick, and later the leader of an avant-garde-theory cult organized around cyberpunk, cybernetics, mumbo jumbo and drugs, Land today is a living meme and an oracle, generating a singular mixture of caustic political commentary and oblique numerological ravings on his seminal X account from Shanghai. Known as the “father of accelerationism” after his doctrine of hyperintelligent capitalism superseding humanity (a fate which he welcomes), in recent years Land has been linked with white nationalist terrorism by U.S. activist journalists, saluted by investor Marc Andreessen in his widely circulated Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and had his writing cross-examined for 'crimethink' by a corrupt British barrister at the High Court in London.

NICK LAND: You know, it's really not just about whose side are you on, you know. I mean, if you say whose side are you on? Well, okay. You know, if it's Manakian, I'll be on God's side rather than the devil's side. You know, if I'm going to be punk, I'll be on the devil's side rather than God's side.

David Livingstone does well in trying to explain it all - Nick Land was a lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick from 1987 until his resignation in 1998. At Warwick, he and Sadie Plant co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit CCRU. After the CCRU split from Warwick in 1998, according to Andy Beckett, a journalist who chronicled the CCRU’s in The Guardian, Land and his remaining followers moved into a home in Leamington, where they were drawn to numerology, HP Lovecraft, and Aleister Crowley, part of an obsession with the occult that had flourished in the accelerationist ranks. “The CCRU became quasi-cultish, quasi-religious,” explained former member Robin Mackay. “I left before it descended into sheer madness.”[246] Land has also “highly-recommended” the works of David Myatt’s fascist Satanist Order of Nine Angles (O9A), whose international distributor is adept Kerry Bolton, founder of the Black Order and associate of Alexander Dugin.[247] On his blog and on Twitter, Land describes Dugin as his “best enemy,” and also accepts Dugin’s appellation of “Atlanticist,” par of Dugin’s Land and Sea dichotomy that pits the West and NATO against his own ambition for his own anti-liberal Eurasian empire. “We agree exactly about what the war is,” expands Land, “We’re just on opposite sides of it.”