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Category: Art

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Ancient Greece Art Friedrich Nietzsche

Crusade

against the Cross, 8

The publication of Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music) caused so much trouble in the stagnant German-speaking academy that even when Rhode wanted to defend his friend Nietzsche against the attack of their colleagues, he was unable to obtain a professorship in Freiburg.

We are used to the culture of cancellation in the darkest hour of the West. This month, on the Führer’s birthday for example, Kevin MacDonald expressed his mixed feelings that his ideological enemy at Cambridge University, Nathan Cofnas, had been expelled for daring to talk about race and IQ. But already in 19th-century Europe things were far from an open marketplace of ideas. The aforementioned textual critic of the New Testament, David Friedrich Strauss, whom Nietzsche had read, was also unable to obtain a professorship after the publication of his book (even today academic exegetes don’t even bother to read Richard Carrier’s book about the dubious historicity of Jesus).

Once one understands that the academy is not the proverbial forum for an open marketplace of ideas, but for the ironclad and orthodox transmission of the paradigm of the day, one will understand that only the freelance philosopher will be able to write something worth reading. Always keep in mind that guys like Kant and Hegel didn’t openly contradict the interests of the State or the Church, so their obscurantist philosophies weren’t only tolerated, but promoted.

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche not only expounds the content of his study of the Greeks, but begins to shape his philosophy. The book is a hybrid of philosophy and philology, which is why Nietzsche himself called it a ‘centaur’. It deals with the birth of Attic tragedy, the motives that inspired it, and the causes of its demise. He aimed to interpret tragedy in ancient Greece, which differed from the concept that the learned had of it. The work develops the thesis that two great opposing forces govern art: the Dionysian force and the Apollonian force. These two forces, once united in Greek tragedy, were separated by the triumph of rationality with Socrates. Nietzsche hoped to rediscover this ancient union in the music of Richard Wagner, to whom he dedicated the book.

The Greece of the white sculptures came to us, but originally they were painted. (Something of this can be seen for at least a few seconds in Oliver Stone’s film in a scene of Alexander the Great’s father, though that film is generally Hollywood Greece rather than historical Greece.) And the same can be said of its architectural ruins: they were originally painted in bright colours, as can be seen in some contemporary reconstructions. To understand Nietzsche one would have to colour not only the sculptures and temple reconstructions, but the original pathos of Greek tragedy, insofar as the Germanic psyche of his time was burdened with what we might call an ogre of superego: something like baptising the pagans through the late saintly Socrates, a figure who doesn’t represent the violent origins of Greece and the ensuing tragedy.

For the man of our century, one way to grasp the controversy that Nietzsche’s first book sparked would be to watch a film like the tragedy of Iphigenia and compare it with thousands of Hollywood turkeys where we see no tragedy at all: the drama is simply resolved with a rational and even happy ending. Apollo is present but Dionysus is absent: prolefeed for the proles! If we take into account what we said yesterday about how the degenerate Aryan, emasculated by comfort to the point of losing the tragic sense of life—and Hollywood has played a central role in making us forget about tragedy and believe that life is merely a drama—we will have, perhaps, a distant analogy to what happened after the publication of Nietzsche’s first book.

Without going into the details, which can be read in scholarly biographies, Nietzsche had violated the rules of the philologists’ guild by saying that a German Renaissance could be catapulted by Wagner’s music. In The Birth of Tragedy a holy man, Socrates, was dethroned. I would add that, being physically ugly, Socrates was never a true Greek because in the real Hellas physical ugliness was almost a refutation (being the son of a midwife, the baby Socrates avoided premature infanticide by the eugenicists of the time). According to Nietzsche, the original tragedy was lyrical-musical, like Wagner’s musical tragedies. With Socrates and his calculating reason a dangerous optimism had penetrated the Greek psyche, and the original, deeply pessimistic tragedy died (I really suggest that any fan of Judaizing Hollywood watch the Greek film Iphigenia, linked above, to get a taste of what we are talking about).

Wagner went to great lengths to calm Cosima down from the shock of such iconoclasm, and she herself wrote to Nietzsche: ‘The master must have told you what excitement I have been in, and also that all night long he had to talk to me about it, with all the details’.

Wagner certainly applauded Nietzsche’s daring, but he feared greatly for his academic future. For in turning against the white Greece to which 19th-century Europeans were accustomed, introducing the violent colour of the original culture, as well as advocating a revival of Germanism thanks to Wagner’s musical dramas, the book was no longer a dull text: it was a political essay. By presenting himself not as an obscure Basilian professor whose texts are suitable only for colleagues but as a Dionysian dancer, Nietzsche, besides being too strong for the palate of his classicist contemporaries, was marked in relation to the notorious composer.

These were times when Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung—the most pagan and ambitious of his operas—was much talked about in Germany. He was still working on the last of the four operas in that series (see our summary from Wagner’s libretto here). Tannhäuser had been left behind in public conversation and the neo-Christian Parsifal hadn’t yet been composed. Nietzsche couldn’t have imagined that he alone would lead the way in transvaluation while the Wagnerians would take a step backwards. Only the next century Himmler and his kind would take steps forward on the psychological Rubicon instead of the fear that the Rubicon causes by stepping back (say, like the regressive step William Pierce took after the exterminationist The Turner Diaries with his next novel, Hunter, where Pierce introduces a Christian character as the good guy in his drama).

Before Parsifal the medicine that Nietzsche prescribed for the general malaise of the Germanic peoples was still sold in the Wagnerian pharmacy. Richard, in fact, invited Nietzsche, now his herald, and in Cosima’s diary we see that her husband even wept with happiness after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. Unfortunately, Nietzsche didn’t attend because that winter he suffered from the typical Christmas depression that invaded him on the darkest days of the year.

The King of Bavaria himself, a great friend of Wagner, let it be known via third parties that he had received Nietzsche’s book but didn’t comment on its contents. Ritschl, the representative of academic philology who had been so supportive of the young man, wrote in his notes not intended for publication that the book was ‘a witty drunkenness’. For what was already apparent in this essay was a desire to reorganise German culture and to declare conventional philology, so devoid of bright colours and the tragic meaning of life, dead. For the depressed Nietzsche all that suited him: to fight. He wanted to pick a fight to get out of his depressions!

And the fight actually came. One of the normies of the time, the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, who like Nietzsche had studied at the boys’ cloister, asked the professor to leave the chair and wrote a pamphlet denouncing The Birth of Tragedy, where he writes: ‘What a shame you inflict, Mr Nietzsche, on Mother Pforta’ and later added that Nietzsche had degraded all that he had been taught as untouchable and sacred. Biographer Ross comments: ‘The serene Hellenism… was like a piece of religion for bourgeois and intellectuals that would not be extirpated’. For Wilamowitz had grasped Nietzsche’s intention to create a new philology based on the original spirit of Ancient Hellas, on that deep blue of the Mediterranean and so distant from the grey skies of northern Europe.

Rhode replied to Wilamowitz and even Wagner himself intervened in the exchange with a published text of his own (ignored by the philologists of course). Wilamowitz in turn replied to Rohde and other professionals intervened. Never before had such a furious controversy raged in philology, and Nietzsche took refuge in a further elaboration of his pregnant philosophy.

Categories
Art Film Pedagogy

Eleven films

Note from June 27, 2024: I think I overdid it with the Sleeping Beauty thing (due to the sins of Disney Studios). It’s certainly great for kids to watch it, even in an ethnostate. Thus, my 11th recommendation would be Sleeping Beauty (1959).

I have added bold to the three films I recommend most: all based on Jane Austen’s novels. Three months ago I wrote:

 

I left the previous posts for a few days without adding new ones because it is of some importance that at least some visitors to The West’s Darkest Hour find out that in the racialist forums a troll is impersonating me supported by… the moderators! But I made magnificent use of the time to finish the last few pages of the third book of my trilogy. So—

Thanks, Brad!

Thanks Jewish troll!

 

______ 卐 ______

 

“L’art pour l’art values must be transvalued to Art practiced in conformity with the cultural task” —Francis Parker Yockey (rephrased).

In 2013 I posted a list of what were, at the time, my ten favourite films and last year I confessed that, having taken my vows as a priest of the sacred words, I could no longer watch many of the 50 films I once loved. So I would like to compile a new list of ten films that, if I were to adopt an Aryan son,[1] I would allow him to watch. Sorted by the year they were released, this new list would be:

 
1. Beauty and the Beast (1946)

2. Hamlet (1948)

3. Lust for Life (1956)

4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

5. Death in Venice (1971)

6. Sense & Sensibility (1995)

7. Indictment: The McMartin Trial (1995)

8. Pride & Prejudice (1995 TV series)

9. Pride & Prejudice (2005 movie)

10. Spotlight (2015)
 

In the case of the first on the list, it is only because of our interpretation of it that I recommend it. Why I put the second one on my new list, which also appears on my 2013 list, is explained by clicking the link above on Hamlet.

But the third one doesn’t appear on my old list. As I own several Vincent van Gogh books, including a huge illustrated one with his complete works, I recommend Lust for Life because, like Hitler, it seems to me essential that the Aryan who wants to save his race from extinction should make deep contact with the art of painting; and the film, based on an entertaining novel that I read, transports us to the places where brother Vincent lived.

Of articles by intellectuals, John Gardner was the first white nationalist I ever read, in 2009, when I returned to this continent from Spain. In one of his TOQ Online articles Gardner said that 2001: A Space Odyssey managed to put the white man’s aesthetics in its place, which I agree with.

Why I include Death in Venice is guessed at in ‘Transvaluation Explained’ and ‘Puritanical Gomorrah’ in my book Daybreak, but most of my list (#6, #8 and #9) concerns films about Jane Austen’s novels. As for the remaining ones, Indictment and Spotlight, just click on the links in the above list to see why I include them.

Note that, unlike my 2013 list, my criteria is no longer to include films based on their artistic quality but on what Yockey says above. The film about the medieval monk Andrei Rublev for example is highly artistic to the true connoisseur of cinematic art. But I wouldn’t show it to my son, at least not until he had developed a sufficiently anti-Christian criterion to realise that the pagan Russians should never have embraced a religion of Semitic origin.

I can say something similar about Sleeping Beauty, which appears on my previous top ten list, although this is a fairly tale. It makes me a little nervous that at the climax Maleficent invokes all the powers of Lucifer, and that Prince Philip’s coat of arms bears a Christian cross. A child, of course, wouldn’t notice that. But what Walt Disney had done, collaborating with the American government in times of anti-Nazi propaganda through another of his cartoons caricaturing the Third Reich, I cannot forgive.

Likewise, in my new list I didn’t include 1968’s Planet of the Apes which was on the old list because a child shouldn’t see a black astronaut next to a good-looking Aryan actor like Charlton Heston. The same I must say about another of my favourites that I removed from the old list: Artificial Intelligence, where in the first scene the Jew Spielberg puts a compassionate Negress in front of a huge team of scientists who want to design a robot child with real feelings.

The 1977 film Iphigenia was also taken off my list. Although Iphigenia is a masterful adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy many of the actors, unlike the hyper-Nordic Homeric Greeks, are already mudbloods (of course: the film’s actors were contemporary Greeks!). A boy brought up in National Socialism ought not to be fooled by such images.

If someone asks me now, after taking my vows, which of the above list of ten are now my favourite films, they will be surprised to learn that they are all three based on Austen’s novels. That’s exactly the right message of sexual courtship that Aryans, young and old, should see on the big and small screens if we have the fourteen words in mind.

_________

[1] Although the lad I was doesn’t look too bad in the Metapedia picture, as a priest I can’t sire because my bloodline is as compromised as the Greek actors mentioned above.

Categories
Art Aryan beauty Classical sculpture

Aryan beauty

Photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann. Adolf Hitler introducing Myron’s Discobolus (Discus Thrower) during the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition of 1938 in Munich:

May none of you who visit this house fail to go to the Glyptothek, and may you then realise how wonderful man once was in his physical beauty and how we can only talk about progress when we not only achieve this beauty but, if possible, surpass it. But let the artists also judge how wonderful the eye and skill of that Greek Myron reveal themselves to us today, the Greek who created the work almost two and a half millennia ago, in front of whose Roman image we stand in deep admiration today. And may they all find from this a benchmark for the tasks and achievements of our own time. May they all strive for the beautiful and the sublime so that their people and art can also withstand the critical assessment of the millennia.(*)

Speech by Hitler on July 10, 1938 at the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich, House of German Art, published in Völkischer Observer on 11 July 1938.

Few things bother me more in today’s racial right than the lack of these panegyrics to the physique of Aryans (‘…and how we can only talk about progress when we not only achieve this beauty but, if possible, surpass it’ —my emphasis, remember my crush on Mayfield Parrish’s painting!).

The Greco-Romans knew the metaphysics of the Aryan body perfectly well. Most Christians and neo-Christians today have forgotten it. Let us never forget that the first thing the Judeo-Christians did when conquering the Roman Empire was to destroy the statuary. How many better sculptures than the discus thrower were lost for eternity because of Christian takeover of the Empire?

To ignore these facts is to be a historical fool.

____________

(*) Mögen Sie alle, die Sie dieses Haus besuchen, nicht versäumen, in die Glyptothek zu gehen, und mögen Sie dann erkennen, wie herrlich schon einst der Mensch in seiner körperlichen Schönheit war und wie wir von Fortschritten nur dann reden dürfen, wenn wir diese Schönheit nicht nur erreichen, sondern wenn möglich noch übertreffen. Mögen aber auch die Künstler daran ermessen, wie wunderbar sich das Auge und das Können jenes Griechen Myron uns heute offenbaren, jenes Griechen, der vor fast 2 1/2 Jahrtausenden das Werk schuf, vor dessen römischen Abbild wir heute in tiefer Bewunderung stehen.

Categories
Art

On John Milton

This entry should be understood based on what, in Daybreak, I said about Johann Sebastian Bach: that, while I am capable of appreciating the art of the father of classical music in recent centuries, a priest of the sacred words repudiates religious works such as his St Matthew Passion.

Octavio Paz used to say that Dante was the poet of the West par excellence. That’s true only if we refer to Western Christian Civilisation, but not to European Civilisation in general. The matrix created by Christianity so permeated the soul of the common Westerner that even a non-Christian like Paz was able to say what he said about Dante.

I repudiate Dante for the same reason I repudiate Bach: his art is Christian propaganda. And the same can be said of cathedrals, despite their beauty. And the same can be said of the Dante for the English, John Milton. Once one breaks with the paradigm of the day everything seems retarded, and even iniquitous to the mental health of the Aryan man.

Milton’s parents intended him for the church and the young poet grew up in a very puritanical environment. Milton was twenty-one when he created his first masterpiece, an ode to the nativity of Christ. He later rebelled against ideas of free will and predestination, which is why some consider Milton, the contemporary of Hobbes and Kepler, a Renaissance man. I find that claim grotesque (see what I say about Erasmus and the real Renaissance in Daybreak).

Milton travelled to Italy and visited Galileo when the latter was an old man and a prisoner of the Inquisition. Looking through the telescope, young Milton saw for the first time the new conception of space (in the medieval worldview the Moon was believed to be immaculate, incapable of scarring). That did him no good, since years later, in his masterpiece, although he paid homage to his experience with Galileo, Milton was always a slave to his parental introjects by making Satan perform a terrible and daring flight through the cosmos, from the lavas of hell to the new world created by the God of the Jews for Man. In other words, it is the structure of the inner self—how it had been programmed from childhood—that counts, not the facts of the empirical world, pace Galileo. Milton never left the matrix of his time.

In 1649 Charles I of England was beheaded and Milton became the point man for the new regime of Cromwell, who brought the Jews back to the island. But Milton found himself in trouble after the fall of Cromwell, when his body was exhumed and hanged for public shame. To make matters worse, in 1665 he fled London because of the plague, and the great fire of 1666 destroyed the house where his parents had instilled Christian Puritanism in him: his only important property. But Milton had already amalgamated the religious parental introject with his mind.

Twice widowed, after half a century of existence in this world Milton was lucky enough to marry a woman of twenty-four. Returning to London, he published his great poem in 1667 (Paradise Lost is a complete cosmological system!). Two years later, that first edition of thirteen hundred copies was out of print.

Milton, now blind, forced his daughters, Mary and Deborah, to read books to him and dictated his verses to them. The two girls were condemned to a test of patience as they read to their father in foreign languages they didn’t understand. In recent posts, I linked to videos that explain the narcissistic personality. Milton was one of them, and he considered his daughters, to whom he had given biblical names, tools of the trade.

Milton’s masterpiece, his epic poem, Paradise Lost written in blank verse, influenced the generation of English Romantics. William Blake, poet and painter, is considered the most inspired and congenial of Milton’s illustrators. He has a famous drawing in which God the Father embraces God the Son, who has offered himself for Redemption.

If any of my readers did a close reading of my Day of Wrath, he would recall that in the Mesoamerican pantheon, the parent Gods reward the Children Gods who sacrificed themselves by throwing themselves on the stake to become the Sun and the Moon. In that book, my analysis was that the opposite was Zeus, who, instead of submitting to the will of primitive gods (like the Christian god and the Mesoamerican gods), rebelled against the tyrant father, Cronus. If there is one thing that the intellectual sympathisers of American racialism still don’t understand, it is that psychohistorically the Jewish deity represented a regression from the level to which the Aryan had already reached in the Greco-Roman world.

Some notable apostates from Christianity realised this to some extent. In his Candide for example, Voltaire alludes to Milton as a ‘barbarian’, and Ezra Pound branded Paradise Lost as ‘asinine’ sanctimony and beastly Hebraism. I would go further.

In The Fair Race we can read that, if the Aryan is saved from extinction, in the new ecclesias where values are transvalued, young Aryans will be taught Indo-European culture. This obviously excludes the classics of Western Christian Civilisation. The poems of Dante and Milton ultimately reinforce the churches: the opposite of the Indo-European ecclesia that Julian the Apostate, and Hitler, wanted to restore. In the future Aryan state Christian propaganda should be suspended regardless of its aesthetic value.

Categories
Art Film

The remaining 42

I have just modified the hatnote of the 50 films I recommended not to be bored at home when the COVID-19 epidemic started because I will no longer review those films individually.

While it is true that those films made a big impression on me as a child and young man, once I woke up to the real world, in the sense of stepping out of the System’s matrix that controls us, most of those films lost their original meaning. I prefer to continue reviewing Brendan Simms’ book about Uncle Adolf insofar as, now free from the matrix that controls the white man, I feel a moral responsibility to convey who he was under a completely different narrative from that of the ubiquitous System (a narrative that includes Simms’ POV). Nevertheless, I would like, in a single entry, to say what I think roughly about the remaining 42 films that I won’t review individually, as I did with the first eight on the list.

First of all, I have already said something about Shane, #9 on the list. (Incidentally, when the month before my dad died, I showed him the DVDs of the films we had at home to see which one my ailing father wanted to see, he chose Shane.)

About other films on my list from the 1950s, ten years ago I already said something about Ben-Hur and I don’t have much to add. The two movies that the Swede Ingmar Bergman filmed in his country the year before I was born are watchable, especially The Seventh Seal. Although Wild Strawberries is the only one, along with A.I., that made me cry, I would have to explain why I projected myself into it, and that would be getting deep into my biography, which I won’t do in this entry. (By the way, when I saw Wild Strawberries on the big screen I met, on the way out, my first cousin Octavio Augusto whom I said a few years ago he had just killed his daughter and then hanged himself.)

I already said something about Forbidden Planet in 2012 in the context of some paragraphs by the Canadian Sebastian Ronin that are worth re-reading. Of Journey to the Center of the Earth, I had already said something in 2011 (incidentally, it’s worth watching the clip of the film that I uploaded on YouTube, embedded in that post).

The other film from the 1950s, Lust for Life, I haven’t written anything about: the life of Vincent Van Gogh. Given that I have several books—huge books, by the way: those deluxe ones that seem to take up an entire table—on Vincent’s paintings, and that as a small child I tried, modestly, to copy his paintings with my watercolours, his life has a special significance.

This film was shot when the Aryans weren’t yet betraying themselves as nefariously as they do today. For those who still appreciate 19th-century Europe, it is worth seeing this novel-based interpretation of Vincent’s life. And the same can be said of Sleeping Beauty and The Time Machine: once upon a time there was an optimistic ethos about the Aryan race, with very blonde and extremely beautiful women indeed: films that one could even play to children being educated in NS.

So much for the films of the 1950s. As far as the films on my list from the 1960s are concerned, I have to say that 2001: A Space Odyssey is my favourite film, and I can conceivably write a review in the future about the film that has influenced my life the most. As for the others from that decade, I’ve already commented here and there but unlike the previous ones, I won’t link to my posts. And I can say the same about the films on my list from the seventies, except Death in Venice of which I’ll say something.

As for the only film on my list from the 1980s, Fanny & Alexander, I already said what I had to say in my entry on the 50 films; and as for my recommendations of films from the 1990s, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride & Prejudice—an English TV series, although here we could also include the 2005 film—, I already said what I had to say in Daybreak (page 42) and On Beth’s Cute Tits (pages 134-135). It’s precisely in this context that Death in Venice could be understood, albeit in the sense of purely platonic admiration that is in line with what I wrote in Daybreak (pages 163-164).

As far as the films of our century from my list of 50, why A.I. caught my attention so much can be guessed from what I say in Day of Wrath (pages 32ff) in the context of the bonding or imprint we all have with our abusive parents; and about LOTR I already said something here.

If a visitor is curious about the details of how any film on my list affected me (or another film that doesn’t appear on my list, as long as I have seen it) I’m willing to answer any questions.

Categories
Art Film

Frankenstein

As far as the Seventh Art is concerned, my life is divided into two great crises.

The first occurred in the early 1970s. As I recounted in ‘Beneath Ridley Scott’s Planet’, as a child I realised that the film industry didn’t always coincide with art, but could betray it badly.

The second crisis occurred more recently when I realised that even artistic films that are not solely driven by economic interests, but where the creator may be a genuine artist, often contain bad messages for the 14 words (as I showed this Monday with my brief review of The Godfather).

So today’s mature César not only demands of cinema that it be genuine Seventh Art. Even more important is that the film industry doesn’t betray the sacred words (and nowadays almost all of the industry betrays it).

This day I will start my series of fifty movie reviews with Frankenstein (1931 film): the second one to appear in my entry ‘50 films during the quarantine’.

It is important to bear in mind when reading my movie reviews that my confessed crisis in ‘Beneath Ridley Scott’s Planet’ represented an early awakening to the colossal crap that Hollywood makes just for profit, without the slightest concern for true art. From this point of view, when I saw on YouTube the black-and-white film of the 1931 horror movie produced by Universal Pictures and directed by James Whale—the adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, starring Boris Karloff and Colin Clive—I was very impressed by its artistic value.

The first thing that came to my mind was that it was unbelievable that, in the consumer society where I live, I had to watch this classic on YouTube because I had never seen it advertised for theatres, not even in art cinemas! I was also struck by the fact that the colour films about Frankenstein that can now be seen on TV lack artistic value when compared to this old black-and-white film.

Of course, both Shelley’s novel and the 1931 adaptation don’t promote our sacred words, so I won’t include it in a new list of my National Socialist must-see films. But at least, from an artistic point of view, it passes the test of my tastes: something that cannot be said of the sequels, remakes or parodies that have been made since that year to date.

Categories
Art Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Art

‘Above all, he [Hitler] lived for all the satisfactions that art in all its forms could give him; art that he placed so high that he didn’t admit that a man who was insensitive to it should ever take over the leadership of a National Socialist state.’ —Savitri Devi

Categories
2001: A Space Odyssey (movie) Art Film

60K words article!

‘Jews control Hollywood and make movies for themselves that the dumb white gentiles believe to be about them.’

You may read this article, nay a mini-book, on The Unz Review here.

In the comments section we learn that the mini-book is full of typos, and there’s another comment I agree about ‘the late great Stanley Kubrick.’ He wrote: ‘2001 a Space Odyssey ASO is the greatest work of art ever made by a human being.’ But what does ‘ASO’ stand for? (remember, I am not a native English speaker).

Categories
Art Axiology Civilisation (TV series) French Revolution Kenneth Clark Liberalism Napoleon

The fallacies of hope

The best way to realise that it is we rather than the Jews who are responsible for white decline is simply to listen, very carefully, to the great communicators of Western culture.

In my post on Tuesday, in which I reproduced an angel painted by da Vinci, I alluded to Kenneth Clark: who from the time we had a black-and-white television captivated us with his Civilisation series. These days I re-watched ‘The Fallacies of Hope’ while reading the corresponding chapter in the text version of Civilisation. In the TV version, we heard that Clark chose a few bars of the Funeral March from Beethoven’s Eroica to illustrate his disenchantment with Napoleon.

It’s a pity that what Clark told us in the TV version about Napoleon’s secret police doesn’t appear in the book. Why did he leave it out? The audio-visual version is supposed to condense what is written, not vice versa; and the dungeons of Napoleon, who crowned the French Revolution, are not even pictured in the text.

‘The Fallacies of Hope’ is a phrase from the painter Turner, and in the episode referred to we see allusions to various years: France 1830, Spain 1848, Germany 1848, France 1848, Hungary 1848, Italy 1861, France 1871—all these were the naive daughters of the monster that came later—Russia 1917, Spain 1936 (remember what I recently said about Franco), Hungary 1956, France 1968 and Czechoslovakia 1968.

Clark then complains about prisons for political prisoners in Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain (who was a dictator when the BBC filmed Civilisation) and Hungary, but says not a word about the millions of Russians imprisoned by Lenin and Stalin. Why did Clark omit the most conspicuous?

Civilisation, about which in 2012 I had written several reviews on this site, can serve wonderfully to show how the distorted view of today’s West was generated: liberalism as a product of Christianity (Clark considered the Church of England too secular for his taste). A close reading of Civilisation, as well as careful viewing of the television version, is an excellent passport to penetrate the Christian-liberal zeitgeist.

Here is what Clark, who had a very deep insight into Western art, didn’t know. Since he speaks of the Church as the cornerstone of our civilisation (his series begins with Greek art and continues through the Middle Ages), it is clear that he knew nothing of what we have been translating from Karlheinz Deschner’s book (Clark died three years before the first volume, in German, of Deschner’s history of Christianity came out). Also, in 1969 Civilisation was released in the UK and the US, a few years before The Gulag Archipelago was published. As we have been saying on this site, to be ignorant of the history of Christianity, or communism, is tantamount to being a historical fool. Since I was brought up as a child in the arts that Clark mastered so well, it is easy for me to understand him. But art alone is insufficient to understand what happened: we need to know the dissenting voices.

Still, as I said, Civilisation, in its two versions, is a magnificent gateway to understanding how liberalism is shaped by a Christian scholar. Despite the title of the penultimate episode of Civilisation, ‘The Fallacies of Hope’, Lord Clark never lost hope in the liberal point of view. That same episode, in its television version, shows us images of liberated students in post-’68 Paris, and Clark puts his faith in their struggles never suspecting that, once grown up, those same Sorbonne students would open the gates to mass migration.

But what Clark got absolutely right is that, to understand a culture, you have to understand its art. More recently Tom Sunic has said things in line with this premise, and I have refracted it here by mentioning the novelistic art of some nineteenth-century white authors, such as the European author of Ivanhoe (a pro-Jewish novel), the female author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (a pro-black, anti-racist novel) and Ben-Hur (authored by a pro-Jewish American colonel): great bestsellers of their time.

Rather than the misguided approach of so-called social sciences, to penetrate the deep secrets of art is to understand our soul.

Categories
Art Miscellany

Dear Cesar,

Listening to the Waves by Vig

Let me be clear, I don’t need any advertising or publishing in WDH of the image I sent you. I am a Dutch sculptor and painter and recently sold a number of my works to private people in Germany whom I consider to be part of the true Germans, the German resistance so to say.

But, if you like it you are free to use the image. When you think it useful and appropriate you may use the image with the only condition that you put my name under it.

The reason I sent it to you is that reading your before last post on WDH I understood that you were struggling to give a verbal title to your trilogy.

Having read your posts for a few years now and then, I perceive you as an exceptional clear and honest mind. Also you are very sensitive to Aryan art, all together making your WHD to an exceptional platform. Your consistent analysis of the whole issue of Christianity and Judaism in our history is so spot on that I have only praise for it.

But most essentially I recognize the depth of your perception by way of the openness that you have displayed about the story of your childhood. Just reading your last post with translations of your trilogy concerning your understanding of your parents behavior and their psychological wounds the phrases like “killing your inner father and mother” come as a liberating truth because that is exactly what I went through. Sorry I don’t read Spanish but your English is clear enough.

That is why I said that your path has led you to a recognition of true spiritual significance. I had to get rid of my parents’ minds by going to India and practice Tibetan tantric techniques to cleanse my whole being of the influence of their emotional wounds, which basically is a being stuck in adolescence (12 to 13 years of age when sexuality sets in). That is why your insights have vast extents of meaning. “The West is sexually diseased”. Humanity is a nice idea, it is time to really put it into practice.

At present there is not much of a recognition publicly, but to my perception there is at least in Europe gathering an undercurrent of resistance which should not be underestimated.

The reason I responded to you with an image is that I think we have to support each other when recognition happens. I my case I can do that better with images because I am a visual thinker. Another thing is that although I am academically trained I see verbal expressions as necessary but only superficially penetrating peoples’ minds. The reality is that half of the mind is rational and verbal and the other half is visual and intuitive. That means an unbalance in using those capacities is reducing the effectiveness of communication.

I often wonder why you have so much energy responding to comments while it is often the question what is really the effect of it. For example, it is clear that the “Christian cucks” are souls that are emotionally false, very false, to the core even. The smell of it is intolerable. They will bend every word into a meaning suitable for them. So changing to Gestalt is more effective. Art could do the job.

So the whole thing of humanity is altogether of a different dimension. This whole modern indignation about the crimes of Nazi Germany is so thoroughly false and hollow seeing the present day practices of military powers like USA and UK and Israel, that one wonders how far we have sunk spiritually.

Your mention of a whole fresh start for humanity is a recognition of our spiritual nature. As far as the details of that is concerned the wisest of us will admit that it will not be a path of roses.

Hail to you,

Vig.