Painting of the day:
John William Waterhouse
In the Peristyle ~1874
Categories
Author: C .T.
Luke said…
“Our problem is us, not the Jew. The Jew is weak in and of himself, for he is totally dependent on his White slaves performing outside their character. He has only the strength we give him.” —Franklin Ryckaert
This sounds suspiciously like a Jared Taylor style proclamation. May I suggest that the TOO [The Occidental Observer] readers, and Brother Ryckaert visit this link and peruse what the blogger Tanstaafl has coined “The Suicide Meme” and what Tanstaafl’s views are of those who push it?
http://age-of-treason.blogspot.com/2010/05/suicide-meme.html
Incidentally, I would be last White to try to deny that there exists an incredible amount of White racial cowardice throughout the vast majority of the non-White Nationalist, still asleep, White community. I have seen this disgusting cowardice up-close, and it is truly sickening to behold.
However, I do not support the idea of letting the jews off the hook for the mess we find ourselves in today. For those so inclined, would they also make excuses for a doctor whose patient just kept getting sicker and sicker, the longer the doctor handled the patient’s health care?
These “sick” and racially gutless Whites that most of us on TOO encounter in our lives—are the way they are, because of jewish media brainwashing, which is reinforced via academia, via our treasonous anti-White alien hijacked government and via just about every major area of our jewish corrupted society. Their only real fault was not being immune to jewish spider venom, the way most on TOO readers seem to be.
I encourage all TOO readers to review Tanstaafl’s “Suicide Meme” and absorb its implications and message. I found it to be excellent.
Franklin Ryckaert said…
Luke, this discussion about the question of “guilt” is going on Carolyn Yaeger’s new website The White Network in the comment section of the program “Are White Males Hooked on Weakness” with comments by me, Chechar and Tanstaafl himself. Tanstaafl blames everything on the Jews and even has asked Chechar whether he is himself a Jew or partly Jewish simply for suggesting that Whites might be partly responsible for their own predicament. On this latest developments, see Chechar’s website The West’s Darkest Hour article: “Are monocausalists Paranoid?”
My position is that Whites have some unique characteristics such as individualism, abstract idealism and universal moralism [emphasis added] that can be exploited by alien ethnocentric groups, especially in times of degeneration. This has to be understood by Whites themselves. Many however refuse to consider a change to White ethnocentrism. Of these Whites one could say that they are indeed suicidal. Even without Jews such Whites would fall victim to other ethnocentric groups. To fight the Jews we must be strong ourselves and that entails an honest taking stock of our own weaknesses.
Chechar said…
Re: “Our problem is us, not the Jew.” —Farnham O’Reilly
More important that the post you mention are my series of articles criticizing “monocausalism”. In one of them I advanced a definition of the JP: “The Jewish Problem is an epiphenomenon of the deranged altruism resulting from the secular fulfillment of universal Christian values.”
Franklin Ryckaert said…
Chechar, Tanstaafl has reacted to your articles on his own blog Age of Treason on June 22, 2012. He seems not to understand.
The problem with Tanstaafl, who is definitely gifted in other respects, is that he is incapable to see the difference between guilt tripping (by Jews) and honest self-criticism (by Whites). He thinks that self-criticism by Whites is nothing but interiorized guilt tripping. Then he proceeds to proclaim the total innocence of Whites (as if that is possible): Jews are the only ones who are guilty of white decline, anyone who suggests that Whites have a responsibility of their own is telling a lie. He calls that the “suicide meme”.
Fact is that Jews cannot practise their destructive dominance without cooperation of Whites. Fact is also that Jews couldn’t exploit certain weaknesses of Whites if they didn’t have them in the first place. As for guilt tripping, Whites have committed crimes during their history. That cannot be denied. Only, their crimes are not unique to them.
Tanstaafl cannot think in terms of a combined causality, for him there can be only one cause: the Jews.
Chechar said…
I am afraid that you are right.
“There is NOTHING wrong with us”.
This is monocausalism in a nutshell: an actual quotation of a commenter in Tan’s site not long ago.
When you study the Whites’ ethno-suicidal tendencies in historical contexts sans Jews (e.g., how the Catholic Spaniards mongrelized their race in the Americas since the 16th century or how after Constantine the Romans destroyed the libraries of their Classic World—a “self-lobotomy” as Carl Sagan put it), we simply cannot claim that all of our issues are to be laid on the feet of Jews. I find it amazing that some people don’t want to see something so obvious.
Franklin Ryckaert said…
Yes, and people with such a self-righteous mindset tend to become paranoid. That is why he suspected you of being a Marrano. To his mind that could be the only explanation.
Carolyn Yeager said…
Franklin, you are misrepresenting Tanstaafl’s views. He is not a “monocausalist”. That is not his word or his position. That seems to be Chechar’s word for something he disagrees with. [Chechar’s note: In fact, Tanstaafl seems to subscribe to what commenter Helvena said in Tan’s blog: “There is NOTHING wrong with us”: a perfect definition of monocausalism by a “single Jewish causer” himself]
It would be correct to state that Tanstaafl’s main focus is on the Jews, not on white guilt or white faults. Tan has opened a lot of people’s eyes to the Jewish strategy and to Jewish interlopers. I can’t see that that has anything to do with paranoia.
Chechar, you quote Farnham O’Reilly as saying “Our problem is us, not the Jews.” That is supposed to solve everything? Because O’Reilly says it, it must be true? That is too simple. People are imperfect, including White people. Are Whites supposed to be perfect paragons of virtue, as you present yourself, in a way? Jews have taken advantage of White characteristics and right now hold ALL the power. White confidence needs to be built up, not torn down.
Franklin Ryckaert said…
Carolyn Yeager,
Tanstaafl may of course chose himself the subject he wants to concentrate upon. For him that is the JQ and he is doing a good job at that. I found especially his exposure of the insincere motives of so-called “pro-White” Jews like Lawrence Auster very clarifying.
But there are always two sides in a conflict. I never saw a conflict in which one side is totally “guilty” and the other side totally “innocent”. Whites do have their faults and weaknesses. They had better face it and try to mend their ways instead of always complaining being “victims”. That is not undermining self-confidence, it is strengthening of character.
Of course this is something different from the (mostly Jewish) “guilt tripping”, which is a psychological tactic to disarm Whites in order to make them accept their own dispossession. Guilt tripping, based on real, exaggerated or invented guilt is meant to destroy not to build.
Self-criticism is meant to restore. To point that out doesn’t mean that you are in the enemy’s camp.
Junghans said…
Very well stated Franklin, my sentiments as well. With all due respect to both Carolyn and Tanstaafl, (who I highly regard), the poisoning of the Anglo/White mindset is both internal and external, and that is what we need to recognize. This issue has been discussed before at this site, in an article by Kmac [Kevin MacDonald] about whether our genetic demise is ‘racial suicide’, or ‘assisted racial suicide’. The general consensus was that it was both. [emphasis added] The racial interlopers have discovered our foibles, and are ruthlessly compounding and exploiting them. The mega-question here is: finding the psychological key to unlocking these enigmatic, innate White racial character faults, and to come to grips with them.
Carolyn Yeager said…
“The racial interlopers have discovered our foibles, and are ruthlessly compounding and exploiting them.” —Junghans
That is exactly what I said.
“The mega-question here is: finding the psychological key to unlocking these enigmatic, innate White racial character faults, and to come to grips with them.”
This has already been done. But our White character is not something we need to, or can, change because Jews exploit it. We are good people and our character is important to who we are, and all that we have accomplished. What we should come to grips with is those who are exploiting this.
This “debate” over “monocausalism” as it’s being called, has only confirmed for me that we need to educate our people about the Jews much more than we need to blame ourselves and try to make ourselves better. I’m seeing that Tan is right when he says that this is just one more Jewish tactic to take attention off themselves.
You, for example, want to spend time and energy looking for a “psychological key” to unlock our faulty nature in order to fix ourselves. A fool’s errand. However, if you’re talking about ridding ourselves of homosexuality, pornography, alcoholism, drug addiction, sex addictions, and other such vices, I’m for that. But who injects these vices into our societies? Let’s start with getting rid of them.
Junghans said…
Carolyn Yeager: A Fool’s errand? Hardly. Please re-read what Franklin wisely wrote, and calm down a bit.
Studying our own people’s nature is essential in understanding who we are, how we think and how to enlighten and motivate our alienated folk. In my experience, considering the apathetic White people that I encounter daily, and the greater historical experience, I’d say that we face a titanic struggle in trying to save these credulous, intellectually toxified people from themselves. Why, indeed, have they foolishly let themselves become domesticated as a de facto Jewish colony? A Golem for Israel? And, worse yet, remain clueless about it! Where is their sense of critical analysis? Why have they let their weak racial radar become deactivated by the Jewish usurped media? Why, indeed, why? I believe that even Kmac recognizes this dilemma, is currently researching this White psychological enigma, and is likely to write another paper on it. [emphasis added]
Regarding Jewish culture distortion, revisionism and the JQ, I quite agree with you. By all means, keep the major focus on these critical problems. I never implied otherwise. By the way, Carolyn, I still like you and your outspoken grit, and do listen to your broadcasts. I wish that there were more ladies like you out there.
Chechar said…
This “debate” over “monocausalism” as it’s being called, has only confirmed for me that we need to educate our people about the Jews much more than we need to blame ourselves and try to make ourselves better. I’m seeing that Tan is right when he says that this is just one more Jewish tactic to take attention off themselves. —Carolyn
I don’t know what this means, since as a relatively newcomer to WN (by the end of 2009) I learnt everything about dismissing the single-cause hypothesis from well-known WN writers, who for obvious reasons cannot be accused of “one more Jewish tactic to take attention off themselves [the Jews]”.
Here’s a quotation from my June 21 blog entry that caused all of this debate (links omitted so that this comment doesn’t get stuck in the filter):
Niflson is not alone speaking out about the character flaws of present-day whites. If I wrote for this blog the articles criticizing monocausalism it’s because notable people moved my train of thought toward that direction after Michael O’Meara became disenchanted with the webzine Counter-Currents:
1) Tom Sunic for one has been openly dismissive of monocausalism in his radio podcasts.
2) Michael O’Meara’s best 2011 article at Counter-Currents dismissed monocausalism as something silly and quite stupid.
3) Many of Harold Covington’s radio rants convinced me that, although the subversive Jew must be named, something horribly wrong—“yellow dogs” is one term used by Covington—is going on within the character of today’s Whites.
4) Hunter Wallace has been contradicting monocausalism for at least two years at Occidental Dissent. Although I disagree with his claim that America is run by blacks (I believe that Jews are far more influential) I have quoted some of his recent pronouncements on monocausalism, which Wallace calls “single-cause hypothesis.”
5) The harshest diatribes against these degenerate whites I’ve read comes from the pen of William Pierce: one of the best minds that the movement produced in the continent.
6) Even Kevin MacDonald himself doesn’t seem to support strict monocausalism!
The heavyweights convinced me that strict monocausalism is silly, and that besides naming the Jew we must also note our flaws that empowered the tribe since the French Revolution.
Carolyn Yeager said…
Junghans, Why is it that so many men want to tell a woman to “calm down” when she is calm? What was not calm about what I said? A fool’s errand? Well, that is what you’re on, whether you and Franklin agree with me or not… I do not care.
Along with that, you advise me to listen to Franklin’s “wise counsel.” I’m surprised you didn’t add, “child.”
I have concurred we have to know ourselves, and there is plenty of information on who and how we are. Because every white person is not a paragon of virtue bothers you?
“We face a titanic struggle in trying to save these credulous, intellectually toxified people from themselves.”
Give me a break. Get rid of the Jews and you’ll see a transformation (after the worst of our lot go into work / rehabilitation camps). Mr. O’Reilly was referring in his article to WN leaders, not the average White man. Do you think you can take that on? Well, wait for KMac to write another paper on it; then you’ll know what to say.
I am a little fed up with what’s found on comment boards. I made clear points and you just take on a superior air.
fender said…
Chechar, It’s not about one cause or many, it’s about which cause is most destructive, and that’s the Jewish one.
Chechar said…
Which is, of course, a matter of opinion. The above debate with Carolyn comes from three other websites besides TOO (Carolyn’s, Tanstaafl’s and mine). If you follow the above linked pages you will hit an audio-reply by Severus Niflson to the position of Tanstaafl. Here’s my transcript of part of Niflson’s audio:
If I had to choose on these two sides, I’d go for Ben Klassen and say: it’s our fault… He was very clear that in reality it’s our fault… We are not victims… This type of thing that we are victimized by Jews, I think it’s erroneous, it has a very dark aspect… because it makes us into pathetic type of losers. They [the Jews] have a lot of power, but a lot of it is because we allowed them to, right? Therefore, if we turn the focus on ourselves I think we will do a lot better.
In that audio reply Niflson also mentions that the ancient Greeks brought non-whites into their lands and that it caused the first race replacement in Europe that, with centuries of miscegenation, destroyed that civilization. These ideas are found in scholarly form in Madison Grant’s great book, and I have also complained a lot about how the Spaniards and the Portuguese basically destroyed their ethnicity throughout the whole American subcontinent without the help of the Jews since the 16th century.
See my definition above of the JP. If that definition is right, then a substantial sector of the movement is, basically, blaming the white shark (the Jews) and sparing the megalodon (secular Christianity).
I agree with Niflson that if we turn the focus on ourselves—the megalodon—we will do a lot better.
♣
Excerpted from a discussion at The Occidental Observer.
Categories
Diogenes
Painting of the day:
John William Waterhouse
Diogenes ~1882
In the “Saturday Afternoon with Carolyn Yeager: Kairos on The German Character,” a man called to rebut the German blogger Kairos arguing that Christianity is good because of the Fourth Commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother.”
What the caller ignored is that the Fourth Commandment is intrinsically intertwined with the Monsters from the Id that are destroying our civilization.
I don’t want to explain the subject at length. Suffice it to say that the late Alice Miller discussed how religion can contribute to the guilt that prevents us from being conscious adults. In The Body Never Lies Miller urges us to realize that the Fourth Commandment offers immunity to abusive parents, and argues it is healthier not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical childrearing methods have resulted in ruined adult lives.
Below, a page about the poet Arthur Rimbaud from The Body Never Lies that I stole from Miller’s webpage:
Self-Hatred and Unfulfilled Love
Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 and died of cancer in 1891, a few months after his right leg had been amputated. In other words, he only lived to be 37 years old. Yves Bonnefoy tells us that his mother was harsh and brutal, a fact on which all the available sources are unanimous.
Bonnefoy describes her as ambitious, proud, stubbornly self-opinionated, arid, and full of covert hatred. He calls her the classic case of someone fired by the pure energy derived from bigoted religiosity. The astonishing letters she wrote around 1900 reveal that she was enamored of death and destruction. She was fascinated by graveyards, and at the age of 75 she had gravediggers lower her into the grave she was later to share with her dead children Vitali and Arthur, so that she could have a foretaste of the eternal night that was to come.
What must it have been like for an intelligent and sensitive child to grow up in the care of a woman like this? We find the answer in Rimbaud’s poetry. Bonnefoy tells us that his mother did everything in her power to curb and thwart his development as a poet, albeit to no avail. Failing that, she nipped in the bud every desire for independence on his part, every premonition of liberty. The boy took to regarding himself as an orphan, and his relationship to his mother split up into hatred, on the one hand, and obsequious dependency on the other. From the fact that he received no token of affection Rimbaud concluded that he must be in some way guilty: “With all the strength of his innocence, he rebelled fiercely against the judgment passed on him by his mother.”
Rimbaud’s mother maintained total control over her children and called this control motherly love. Her acutely perceptive son saw through this lie. He realized that her constant concern for outward appearances had nothing to do with love. But he was unable to admit to this observation without reserve, because as a child he needed love, or at least the illusion of it. He could not hate his mother, particularly as she was so obviously concerned for him. So he hated himself instead, unconsciously convinced that in some obscure way he must have deserved such mendacity and coldness. Plagued by an ill-defined sense of disgust, he projected it onto the provincial town where he lived, onto the hypocrisy of the system of morality he grew up in (much like Nietzsche in this respect), and onto himself. All his life he strove to escape these feelings, resorting in the process to alcohol, hashish, absinth, opium, and extensive travels to faraway places. In his youth he made two attempts to run away from home but was caught and restored to his mother’s “care” on both occasions.
His poetry reflects not only his self-hatred but also his quest for the love so completely denied him in the early stages of his life. Later, at school, he was fortunate enough to encounter a kindly teacher who gave him the companionship and support he so desperately needed in the decisive years of puberty. His teacher’s affection and confidence enabled him to write and to develop his philosophical ideas. But his childhood retained its stifling grip on him. He attempted to combat his despair at the absence of love in his life by transforming it into philosophical observations on the nature of true love. But these ideas were no more than abstractions because despite his intellectual rejection of conventional morality, his emotional allegiance to the code of conduct it prescribed was unswerving. Self-disgust was legitimate, but detestation for his mother was unthinkable. He could not pay heed to the painful messages of his childhood memories without destroying the hopes that had helped him to survive as a child. Time and again, Rimbaud tells us that he had no one to rely on except himself. This was surely the fruit of his experience with a mother who had nothing to offer him but her own derangement and hypocrisy, rather than true love. His entire life was a magnificent but vain attempt to save himself from destruction at the hands of his mother, with all the means at his disposal.
Young people who have gone through much the same kind of childhood as Rimbaud are probably fascinated by his poetry because they can vaguely sense the presence of a kindred spirit in it. Rimbaud’s friendship with Paul Verlaine is a well-known fact of literary history. His longing for love and genuine communication initially appeared to find gratification in this friendship. But the mistrust rooted in his childhood gradually poisoned their intimacy, and this, coupled with Verlaine’s own difficult past, prevented the love between them from achieving any permanence. Ultimately, their recourse to drugs made it impossible for them to live the life of total honesty that they were in search of. Their relationship was crippled by the psychological injuries they inflicted on one another. In the last resort, Verlaine acted in just as destructive a way as Rimbaud’s mother, and the final crisis came when Rimbaud was shot twice by the drunken Verlaine, who was sentenced to two years in prison for his crime.
To salvage the genuine love he was deprived of in childhood, Rimbaud turned to the idea of love embodied in Christian charity, in understanding and compassion for others. He set out to give others what he himself had never received. He tried to understand his friend and to help him understand himself, but the repressed emotions from his childhood repeatedly interfered with this attempt. He sought redemption in Christian charity, but his implacably perspicacious intelligence would allow him no self-deception. Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very early age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. He experienced himself as a monster, his homosexuality as a vice, his despair as a sin. But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinately shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child that was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her.
Verlaine (far left) and Rimbaud (second to left)
depicted in an 1872 painting
by Henri Fantin-LatourRimbaud’s biography is a telling instance of how the body cannot but seek desperately for the early nourishment it has been denied. Rimbaud was driven to assuage a deficiency, a hunger that could never be stilled. His drug addiction, his compulsive travels, his friendship with Verlaine can be interpreted not merely as an attempt to flee from his mother, but also as a quest for the nourishment she had withheld from him. As his internal reality inevitably remained unconscious, Rimbaud’s life was marked by compulsive repetition. After every abortive escape attempt, he returned to his mother, both after the separation from Verlaine and at the end of his life, when he had finally sacrificed his creative gifts by giving up his writing to become a business man, thus indirectly fulfilling his mother’s expectations of him. Though Rimbaud spent the last days of his life in a hospital in Marseille, he had gone back to Roche immediately before, to be looked after by his mother and sister. The quest for his mother’s love ended in the prison of childhood.
♣
For those interested in the subject, I’ve written about why forgiving our parents may invoke those Monsters from the Unconscious that are destroying our civilization. In Fallen Leaves I mention the mental issues of a poor Michael Jackson that forgave his father:
“Solitude among millions of fans”
More to the point, a few years ago I analyzed a woman who hates the West as a result of transferring her repressed, parental rage onto substitutive objects:
Categories
Temple of Aesculapius
Painting of the day:
John William Waterhouse
Temple of Aesculapius ~1877
Below, a section of Andrew Fraser’s “Natural Born Citizen? Obama and the Fourth American Revolution” published today at The Occidental Observer.
Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity
The constitutive principle of the First (Federal) Republic was liberty. But the festering contradiction between the progressive ideal of liberty and the reactionary realities of Negro slavery unleashed another wave of revolutionary dynamism, found in its most extreme form in the rise of the abolitionist movement.
Eventually, the First (Federal) Republic was overthrown. When the War for Southern Independence was lost, the federal principle which licensed the secession of the slave states was subordinated to the colour-blind ideal of personal liberty. It was clear that sovereign authority had passed from the citizens of the several states into a consolidated Union-dominated government under the direction of Northern commercial and industrial interests.
But formal legal recognition of the Second (Bourgeois) Republic required another constitutional coup d’état. The revolutionary Fourteenth Amendment was adopted by Radical Republicans to subordinate the states to the federal government and to create a uniform national citizenship.
According to Article V of the federal Constitution, however, amendments require the formal consent of three quarters of the states. The South was still under military occupation by Union troops. Fraud and coercion were employed freely to compel Southern legislatures to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. In effect, white Southerners were made an offer they could not refuse: ratify the Fourteenth Amendment or be denied re-admission to the Union.
The Second Republic was founded on the principle of equality. But it eventually foundered upon the multiplying contradictions between the formal legal ideal of equality and the substantive social realities of race, class, and gender.
Seventy years after the Civil War, the New Deal ushered in the Third (Managerial/Therapeutic) Republic which radically expanded the powers of the federal government. No effort was made to obtain the formal consent of the states to this constitutional revolution.
Indeed, in 1937, the Supreme Court, too, was compelled to abandon its early resistance to repeated and sweeping federal usurpations of state jurisdiction by making the famous “switch in time that saved nine.” Faced with Roosevelt’s threat to pack the court, the judiciary simply turned a blind eye to the Article V amendment procedure, choosing instead to place its imprimatur on the Third American Revolution.
The Third Republic based itself upon the revolutionary ideal of fraternity among American citizens of every class, race, and gender. While allowing Congress a free hand to regulate the economy, the Supreme Court brought every so-called “discrete and insular minority” under its own wing. In the Forties and Fifties, the Court waged its own revolutionary war against discrimination in landmark cases such as Shelley v Kraemer and, most famously, Brown v Board of Education.
By the Sixties, it was obvious that the principle of fraternity stood in stark contradiction not just to individuals’ freedom of association but also to the exclusionary character of allegedly “racist” immigration laws. Accordingly, the progressive leaders of the Republic launched a demographic revolution which extended the blessings of American citizenship to millions of non-Whites drawn from every corner of the Third World.
As a consequence, the principle of fraternity quickly morphed into the celebration of diversity as an end in itself. But demographic diversity stands in clear contradiction to the ancient republican ideal of a body politic in which citizens unite in pursuit of the public interest and the common good.
Homo americanus long ago renounced his historic allegiance to throne and altar. Soon afterward, the blood faith that his colonial ancestors had shared with their kith and kin across the Atlantic was replaced by the civil religion of the Republic. Americans had also become hopelessly addicted to endless economic growth and territorial expansion. Within that future-oriented, novus ordo seclorum, it was impossible to define the constitutional abstraction known as the sovereign people-at-large in backward-looking, traditional terms of shared blood, language, and religion.
♣
A commenter said…
You state:
“Inspired by the secular humanist ideology of the European Enlightenment, America’s constitutional faith strove to incarnate the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, one after another, in a series of revolutionary republican moments.”
Wait, no mention of the influence of the Bible and the Ten Commandments? Yet, these leaders were overwhelmingly inspired by the Bible as evidenced by an army of relevant sources. Here’s a cursory list:
• “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for a government of any other.” —John Adams, 1798 in letters to the Massachusetts Militia.
• “It is equally undeniable… that the Ten Commandments have had a significant impact on the development of secular legal codes of the Western World.” —U.S. Supreme Court, Stone v. Graham, (1980) (Justice Rehnquist, dissenting)
• “The fundamental basis of this nation’s laws was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don’t think we emphasize that enough these days.” —Harry S. Truman, Feb. 15, 1950, Attorney General’s Conference.
Suggested Reading: The Ten Commandments & their Influence on American Law
Categories
Hylas and the Nymphs
Painting of the day:
John William Waterhouse
Hylas and the Nymphs ~1896
Painting of the day:
John Collier’s Lady Godiva ~1898
Herbert Art Gallery & Museum
For those who liked a featured article I reproduced here under the title “Wagner’s wisdom,” Michael Colhaze has now written another piece on Wagner, but this time about “Barbarians who seem to lack any access to Beauty’s divine joy, and therefore hate it, and thus try to destroy what they can’t have.”
However relevant to understand how these “gay” barbarians of San Francisco want to destroy Aryan beauty, below I omitted most of the images chosen by Colhaze in his recent article at The Occidental Observer:
Let’s assume, just for the fun of it, that they blindfold you, help you up the wide stairs of the San Francisco Opera and lower you carefully into a velvet fauteuil. You hear the murmur of many voices, a squeaking and scraping of instruments being tuned, and a few harsh coughs as mucous residues are brought under control. Then, on a more mechanical note, a different squeaking and scraping as the curtain opens. Silence! Suddenly the tentative moan of wind-instruments, perhaps oboes and bass clarinets. Horns, or possibly tubas, trumpets, bassoons, bass trumpets, trombones, contrabass trombones and contrabass tubas join the gradually accelerating symphony until a ringing crash shatters the ominous tonal procession. As an old Wagner aficionado you have already twigged the conundrum: this is Mime wielding his hammer while forging anew the sword Nothung that was broken. A sword intended for his mighty foster-son Siegfried who must kill Fafner the Dragon and divest him of his most precious treasure, the one Ring of Power. Which, as the nasty dwarf hopes, will thus end up in his own claws and so make him Master of the World! With a deep sigh you lean back, and while the powerful music overwhelms your heart and mind, its visual setting unfolds before your inner eye.
When Mime laments the Forced Drudgery! with a voluminous tenor while doggedly banging his hammer, you can’t take it anymore. You jump to your feet and rip the blindfold from your eyes. And, from your Grand Tier Premium seat, what do you see?
The above! A hideously illuminated scrap-yard with a smashed-up trailer and a stunted street-bum banging his Made in China Wal-Mart mallet onto a piece of rusty iron.
Stunned, you sit down again. And while you do so, the terrible truth dawns on you. Namely that you have been tricked into attending the modern production of a great classical opera.
Now let’s assume you weren’t in such a great mood anyway, because some run in with your Japanese SUV or Siamese tomcat or crooked solicitor had darkened the day already, and all it needed to blow your top was a piece of theatrical hogwash like this. Thus you jump to your feet again and, with all the power your lungs can muster, begin to curse the heathen hogs to kingdom come.
Which, for a while at least, has the desired effects. The orchestra stops playing. Harp, trombone and first violin allow for a sip from the pocket flask while the conductor opts for a line. Mime drops his hammer and pops another upper. The audience is in turmoil. Some people stand and stare. Others use the opportunity and rip off programs when nobody looks. Old Rebecca Greenberg-Traurig, granny to some of the House’s foremost sponsors, goes down with the vapours. David Dunn Bauer, a celebrated art critic and rabbi, recognizes you as sincerely heterosexual and therefore, amongst other deviations, terroristically inclined. The House’s General Director, David Gockley, widely derided in certain circles as one of the major innovators in American opera, appears on stage while frantically hissing into his diamond-studded I-pod. Francesca Zambello, the production’s legendary artistic director, rolls into the main isle and yells insults at you that would make a harbour trollop blush. From your elevated position you glare down at her heavily powdered pizza-face and hurl your French fauteuil at it. But the damn thing misses by half a yard and only flattens her recently wed wife, Faith Gay (sic).
Finally the door is kicked down and all the world’s cops jump on you, and you are blissfully saved from watching the rest of the outrage.
Well, too bad really! Because by refusing so callously to consider the SFO’s magnificent production of Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelung, you’ve missed one the season’s cultural highlights. Just read what the assorted press had to say of the old semitophobe’s most acclaimed oeuvre:
Wagner’s Siegfried a Stunning Smasher, informs Opera Warhorses, which is most likely the most consummate praise ever.
Zambello’s “decaying American landscape” and “world ravaged by greed and neglect”—on Michael Yeargan’s sets with piles of garbage, polluted water and smoke-belching chimneys”—is OK, we are categorically assured by Janos Gereben in The Examiner.
Francesca Zambello, the first American woman to direct Wagner’s macho four-opera epic, was loudly cheered (if also booed by a handful), writes Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times.
A Siegfried of unparalleled physicality and imagination. Director Francesca Zambello and her forces have created a five-hour opera that plays like a two-hour action flick, enthuses Michael J. Vaughan in The Opera Critic.
And more of the same. But to get a real in-depth impression of the grandiose event, let us look at what one of the more subtle and thoughtful art critics has to say in his international journal for the arts where we are treated prominently to his curriculum vitae:
David Dunn Bauer is a rabbi, stage director, critic, and educator. He is an alumnus of Yale University, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and Pacific School of Religion, in addition to having studied with Nadia Boulanger in 1976 and at the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 2010 and 2011. Based in San Francisco, he coordinates the Jewish Queer Sexual Ethics Project at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry and is the Bay Area Director of Programming for Nehirim, the leading national provider of community programming for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) Jews, partners, and allies. He writes regularly on issues of Torah, sexuality, Queer culture and community, and the arts.
Truly impressive credentials, you will agree, and particularly appropriate to give the stunning, smashing SFO production its proper due. In addition, Mr. Bauer’s journal styles itself The Berkshire Review, a somewhat misleading label since it clearly tries to give the impression that its editor is in some way akin to bygone critical genii like George Bernard Shaw who commanded the ethical and aesthetic clout to understand what the whole incredible Ring was really all about.
Here follows a brief compression of Rabbi Dunn Bauer’s critical acclaim:
Francesca Zambello forged something new and wondrous from Wagner’s tremendous and often toxic masterwork. I want to proclaim the true innovative triumph of the whole endeavour, the way in which Zambello told a worthy and contemporary feminist story through Wagner’s Romantic score, his heroes and heroines. While the sung (German) text remained unaltered, SFO’s (American) supertitles never referred to “the Rhine” (do you remember the Rhine?), only a nameless “river” and, as has become more and more the custom, often provided a slang and ironic commentary that bent the meaning of the original words.
For this Jewish Wagnerian who feels profound discomfort with Wagnerian anti-Semitism, I was deeply relieved at how thoroughly Zambello’s production eschewed the racist stereotypes implicit in the text and score. The prime Nibelungs, Alberich and Mime, were not by nature ugly or evil, more troubled and embittered. The Valhallan Gods were not lofty in manner or motivation. Neither the Volsung Twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, nor their love-child Siegfried shone with gilded character against the dark horde of their moral inferiors. The ethical playing field was rendered strikingly even for a game played among deities and dwarves, goddesses of wisdom, demigod heroes, and scheming murderers.
As if to mete out a further measure of Borscht-Belt retribution for repugnant Aryan sins past, Zambello introduced an unprecedented amount of shtick into this portentous musical mythology. There were enough precisely timed elements of low comedy and enough laugh-provoking prop gags (beer bottles, butt kicks to God, telephones, televisions, remote controls, croquet mallets, and lap dances) to fill a revival of Gianni Schicci. In a rough tally, we find that Zambello transported the Ring out of the Rhine to the American River; brought the gods down (and the gnomes up) to a very humane plane; spiked Teutonic mead with vaudeville borscht; enriched the quality of women’s experience and agency beyond the stale limits of conventional heroine-ism; and erased the ethnic caricatures of the most offensively anti-Semitic work of dramatic art to hold an enduring place on the world stage.
And here a few visual highlights of the incredible extravaganza. The comments are lifted from Mr. Dunn Bauer’s unabridged critical piece. [images omitted]
Which seems to be a persiflage of Conrad’s “The horror! The horror!” and is therefore a perfect epitome of the entire hideous and miserable travesty.
Mr. Dunn Bauer, himself in danger to be labelled an ethnic caricature, and a damn queer one at that, has correctly identified Alberich as one of his own tribe. Though imperatives of loyalty forbid him to enlarge on the matter, he surely understands that the nasty dwarf is alive and well and wields the one Ring of Power to his heart’s content. What better therefore to divert attention to Siegfried’s heirs and crush a baby Nibelung for sport, an elegant simile clearly inspired by Elie Wiesel’s masterwork Night wherein the famed Nobelist and crackpot saw with his very own eyes how lorry-loads of small babies were hurled into a gigantic furnace?
Seen in this context, it is of course small wonder that a vengeful schmuck like Mr. Dunn Bauer rejoices about the mountains of shtick that disfigure Wagner’s incomparable magnum opus like plague spots a beautiful Rhinemaiden. Yet what seems odd is that he never mentions the generous sponsors who made this Twenty Five Million Dollar Enterprise possible. Because they are easy to make out. Just look at SFO’s official website and you will find, among small fry like La Boulange who occasionally doles out a free espresso, the usual suspects, namely a few international investment corporations who obviously laid out most of the aforementioned millions.
Just as in other great houses where there are frantic and vain attempts to destroy Wagner’s glorious legacy by presenting it as a theatrical garbage heap. Which gives us once again a clear idea about this particular type of barbarian who seem to lack any access to Beauty’s divine joy, and therefore hate it, and thus try to destroy what they can’t have.
As for those who are firmly grounded in Christian-humanist ethics and aesthetics, the smutty antics of the San Francisco Opera can’t be anything but the convulsions of an utterly diseased counter-culture that will slide back into the gutter once its sponsors have been divested of the one Ring of Power. Which, according to the developments in Greece and elsewhere, will happen rather sooner than later.
Chapter IV of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History is titled “Race and History.” Although one of my favorite books is Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy (1926), the Durants were already in the train on its way to political correctness when, after the ten first volumes of their monumental The Story of Civilization (1935-1967), they published The Lessons of History in 1968.
It is symptomatic that in the blogosphere people like to quote chapter passages where the Durants subscribed to political correctness in racial maters (search for “Chapter IV” here): blaming the environment, not blacks, for the poor cultures at Sub-Saharan Africa and concluding the chapter with the sentence that “racial antipathies” cannot be cured except by “a broadened education.”
Apparently the Durants were completely ignorant about IQ studies and HBD in general (see this splendid interview of Henry Harpending by Craig Bodeker). Also, when in the chapter on race in The Lessons of History they write about Mayan and Aztec cultures they completely ignore that both cultures were based on organized serial killing. (See for example my own book chapter on pre-Columbian cultures, a subject that I am far more knowledgeable than the Durants.)
If any “lesson of history” has been learnt it is that you can write ten or eleven thick volumes about civilizations and, still, be totally immersed in the Matrix of your own age and culture.
Below, the complete Chapter IV, where the Durants try to rebutt the theory of Madison Grant:
There are some two billion colored people on the earth, and some nine hundred million whites. However, many palefaces were delighted when Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, in an Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853-55), announced that the species man is composed of distinct races inherently different (like individuals) in physical structure, mental capacity, and qualities of character; and that one race, the “Aryan,” was by nature superior to all the rest:
Everything great, noble, or fruitful in the works of man on this planet, in science, art, and civilization, derives from a single starting point, is the development of a single germ; … it belongs to one family alone, the different branches of which have reigned in all the civilized countries of the universe… History shows that all civilization derives from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it.
Environmental advantages (argued Gobineau) cannot explain the rise of civilization, for the same kind of environment (e.g., soil-fertilizing rivers) that watered the civilizations of Egypt and the Near East produced no civilization among the Indians of North America, though they lived on fertile soil along magnificent streams. Nor do institutions make a civilization, for this has risen under a diversity, even a contrariety, of institutions, as in monarchical Egypt and “democratic” Athens. The rise, success, decline, and fall of a civilization depend upon the inherent quality of the race. The degeneration of a civilization is what the word itself indicates—a falling away from the genus, stock, or race. “Peoples degenerate only in consequence of the various mixtures of blood which they undergo.” Usually this comes through intermarriage of the vigorous race with those whom it has conquered. Hence the superiority of the whites in the United States and Canada (who did not intermarry with the Indians) to the whites in Latin America (who did). Only those who are themselves the product of such enfeebling mixtures talk of the equality of races, or think that “all men are brothers.” All strong characters and peoples are race conscious, and are instinctively averse to marriage outside their own racial group.
In 1899 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman who had made Germany his home, published Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), which narrowed the creative race from Aryans to Teutons: “True history begins from the moment when the German with mighty hand seizes the inheritance of antiquity.” Dante’s face struck Chamberlain as characteristically German; he thought he heard unmistakably German accents in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians; and though he was not quite sure that Christ was a German, he was confident that “whoever maintains that Christ was a Jew is either ignorant or dishonest.” German writers were too polite to contradict their guest: Treitschke and Bernhardi admitted that the Germans were the greatest of modern peoples; Wagner put the theory to music; Alfred Rosenberg made German blood and soil the inspiring “myth of the twentieth century”; and Adolf Hitler, on this basis, roused the Germans to slaughter a people and to undertake the conquest of Europe.
An American, Madison Grant, in The Passing of the Great Race (1916), confined the achievements of civilization to that branch of the Aryans which he called “Nordics”—Scandinavians, Scythians, Baltic Germans, Englishmen, and Anglo-Saxon Americans. Cooled to hardness by northern winters, one or another tribe of these fairhaired, blue-eyed “blond beasts” swept down through Russia and the Balkans into the lazy and lethargic South in a series of conquests marking the dawn of recorded history. According to Grant the “Sacae” (Scythians?) invaded India, developed Sanskrit as an “IndoEuropean” language, and established the caste system to prevent their deterioration through intermarriage with dark native stocks. The Cimmerians poured over the Caucasus into Persia, the Phrygians into Asia Minor, the Achaeans and Dorians into Greece and Crete, the Umbrians and Oscans into Italy. Everywhere the Nordics were adventurers, warriors, disciplinarians; they made subjects or slaves of the temperamental, unstable, and indolent “Mediterranean” peoples of the South, and they intermarried with the intermediate quiet and acquiescent “Alpine” stocks to produce the Athenians of the Periclean apogee and the Romans of the Republic. The Dorians intermarried least, and became the Spartans, a martial Nordic caste ruling “Mediterranean” helots. Intermarriage weakened and softened the Nordic stock in Attica, and led to the defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, and the subjugation of Greece by the purer Nordics of Macedonia and Republican Rome.
In another inundation of Nordics—from Scandinavia and northern Germany—Goths and Vandals conquered Imperial Rome; Angles and Saxons conquered England and gave it a new name; Franks conquered Gaul and gave it their name. Still later, the Nordic Normans conquered France, England, and Sicily. The Nordic Lombards followed their long beards into Italy, intermarried, and vitalized Milan and Florence into a Renaissance. Nordic Varangians conquered Russia, and ruled it till 1917. Nordic Englishmen colonized America and Australia, conquered India, and set their sentinels in every major Asiatic port.
In our time (Grant mourned) this Nordic race is abandoning its mastery. It lost its footing in France in 1789; as Camille Desmoulins told his cafe audience, the Revolution was a revolt of the indigenous Gauls (“Alpines”) against the Teutonic Franks who had subjugated them under Clovis and Charlemagne. The Crusades, the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War depleted the Nordic stock and left it too thin to resist the higher birth rate of Alpine and Mediterranean peoples in Europe and America. By the year 2000, Grant predicted, the Nordics will have fallen from power, and with their fall Western civilization will disappear in a new barbarism welling up everywhere from within and from without. He wisely conceded that the Mediterranean “race,” while inferior in bodily stamina to both the Nordics and the Alpines, has proved superior in intellectual and artistic attainments; to it must go the credit for the classic flowering of Greece and Rome; however, it may have owed much to intermarriage with Nordic blood.
Some weaknesses in the race theory are obvious. A Chinese scholar would remind us that his people created the most enduring civilization in history—statesmen, inventors, artists, poets, scientists, philosophers, saints from 2000 b.c. to our own time. A Mexican scholar could point to the lordly structures of Mayan, Aztec, and Incan cultures in pre-Columbian America. A Hindu scholar, while acknowledging “Aryan” infiltration into north India some sixteen hundred years before Christ, would recall that the black Dravidic peoples of south India produced great builders and poets of their own; the temples of Madras, Madura, and Trichinopoly are among the most impressive structures on earth. Even more startling is the towering shrine of the Khmers at Angkor Wat. History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization (in any favorable environment) under almost any skin.
Difficulties remain even if the race theory is confined to the white man. The Semites would recall the civilizations of Babylonia, Assyria, Syria, Palestine, Phoenicia, Carthage, and Islam. The Jews gave the Bible and Christianity to Europe, and much of the Koran to Mohammed. The Mohammedans could list the rulers, artists, poets, scientists, and philosophers who conquered and adorned a substantial portion of the white man’s world from Baghdad to Cordova while Western Europe groped through the Dark Ages (c. 565-c. 1095).
The ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome were evidently the product of geographical opportunity and economic and political development rather than of racial constitution, and much of their civilization had an Oriental source. Greece took its arts and letters from Asia Minor, Crete, Phoenicia, and Egypt. In the second millennium b.c. Greek culture was “Mycenaean,” partly derived from Crete, which had probably learned from Asia Minor. When the “Nordic” Dorians came down through the Balkans, toward 1100 b.c, they destroyed much of this proto-Greek culture; and only after an interval of several centuries did the historic Greek civilization emerge in the Sparta of “Lycurgus,” the Miletus of Thales, the Ephesus of Heracleitus, the Lesbos of Sappho, the Athens of Solon. From the sixth century b.c. onward the Greeks spread their culture along the Mediterranean at Durazzo, Taranto, Crotona, Reggio Calabria, Syracuse, Naples, Nice, Monaco, Marseilles, Malaga. From the Greek cities of south Italy, and from the probably Asiatic culture of Etruria, came the civilization of ancient Rome; from Rome came the civilization of Western Europe; from Western Europe came the civilization of North and South America. In the third and following centuries of our era various Celtic, Teutonic, or Asiatic tribes laid Italy waste and destroyed the classic cultures. The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
Attempts to relate civilization to race by measuring the relation of brain to face or weight have shed little light on the problem. If the Negroes of Africa have produced no great civilization it is probably because climatic and geographical conditions frustrated them; would any of the white “races” have done better in those environments? It is remarkable how many American Negroes have risen to high places in the professions, arts, and letters in the last one hundred years despite a thousand social obstacles.
The role of race in history is rather preliminary than creative. Varied stocks, entering some locality from diverse directions at divers times, mingle their blood, traditions, and ways with one another or with the existing population, like two diverse pools of genes coming together in sexual reproduction. Such an ethnic mixture may in the course of centuries produce a new type, even a new people; so Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans fused to produce Englishmen. When the new type takes form its cultural expressions are unique, and constitute a new civilization—a new physiognomy, character, language, literature, religion, morality, and art. It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people; circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type. The Englishman does not so much make English civilization as it makes him; if he carries it wherever he goes, and dresses for dinner in Timbuktu, it is not that he is creating his civilization there anew, but that he acknowledges even there its mastery over his soul. In the long run such differences of tradition or type yield to the influence of the environment. Northern peoples take on the characteristics of southern peoples after living for generations in the tropics, and the grandchildren of peoples coming up from the leisurely South fall into the quicker tempo of movement and mind which they find in the North.
Viewed from this point, American civilization is still in the stage of racial mixture. Between 1700 and 1848 white Americans north of Florida were mainly Anglo-Saxon, and their literature was a flowering of old England on New England’s soil. After 1848 the doors of America were opened to all white stocks; a fresh racial fusion began, which will hardly be complete for centuries to come. When, out of this mixture, a new homogeneous type is formed, America may have its own language (as different from English as Spanish is from Italian), its indigenous literature, its characteristic arts; already these are visibly or raucously on their way.
“Racial” antipathies have some roots in ethnic origin, but they are also generated, perhaps predominantly, by differences of acquired culture—of language, dress, habits, morals, or religion. There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education. A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a co-operative product, that nearly all peoples have contributed to it; it is our common heritage and debt; and the civilized soul will reveal itself in treating every man or woman, however lowly, as a representative of one of these creative and contributory groups.