This piece has been moved
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Tag: Materialism / capitalism
This piece has been moved
to a single entry: here.
Categories
Mammon
by Frances Fowle
George Frederic Watts, in common with such social commentators as William Morris, Ruskin and Carlyle, began to question the benefits and purpose of modern industry and commerce and their dehumanizing effects. In 1880 he wrote, “Material prosperity has become our real god, but we are surprised to find that the worship of this visible deity does not make us happy.” (G.F. Watts, “The Present Conditions of Art”). Four years later he decided to personify this so-called deity—the evil “Mammon”—in paint.
The picture is nearly life-size and the seated figure against a curtained backdrop calls to mind the portraits of Titian. However, instead of an established figure or celebrated beauty, Watts depicts an object of revulsion, seated on a throne decorated with skulls. Just behind the curtained background we are offered a glimpse, not of a peaceful landscape, but of fire and destruction. The picture is painted in a rich, almost hellish palette of red, gold and black. Watts visualizes Mammon as a brutish despot: an ugly, lumpen figure seated on his throne, nursing his moneybags on his lap. The ogre brushes aside a beautiful girl with one hand, and crushes a young man under foot. Both are symbols of youth, innocence and beauty; yet, naked and vulnerable, they are also lifeless and inert. Mammon sits in glory with his “gorgeous but ill-fitting golden draperies, which fall awkwardly about his coarse limbs” (M.H. Spielmann, “The Works of Mr. George F. Watts, R.A., with a Complete Catalogue of his Pictures,” Pall Mall Gazette, 1886, p. 21). In the oil study (Watts Gallery, Compton), Watts also gives Mammon a bandaged, gouty foot, a symptom of his indulgent and excessive lifestyle.
Mammon’s crown, with its upended gold coins and ass’s ears, symbolizes Mammon’s ignorance and stupidity, but also links him with Ovid’s King Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold and to whom Apollo gave ass’s ears because he did not respond to the music of the lyre. The best-known literary reference to Mammon occurs in Spencer’s Faerie Queene, book II, canto 7. Spencer describes Mammon as tanned by soot from the blacksmith’s forge, a detail that perhaps accounts for the smoke on the right hand side of the painting.
The subtitle of the picture—Dedicated to his Worshippers—is like an inscription on a monument. Watts apparently had plans to commission a sculpture of Mammon which would be set up in Hyde Park and “where he hoped his worshippers would be at least honest enough to bow the knee publicly to him.”
Categories
“Property”
From Faith and Action (1938) by Helmut Stellrecht for the Hitler Youth:
In the National Socialist state, there is no longer property with which the individual can do whatever he wishes. There is no unlimited right of property, only a right that has been earned to administer it for the good of the whole.
§ Property is a loan. One may certainly use it, but only to advance the interests of the whole.
§ A farmer has a field. It belongs to him. And it should belong to him, for his ancestor tilled it, his fathers toiled on it. It belongs to him as long as he tills it so that food for other citizens grows on it. But the field must be taken from him if he leaves it fallow because he is too lazy or unambitious to till it.
§ A house! Why shouldn’t a German have a house, a home for his children? The apartment in the city has taken a piece of the fatherland from the German. His own house and garden give him again a piece of Germany, and he has a right to that.
§ But it is not an unearned gift. Property must be earned by the work of the hand or the mind. The ambitious and hard-working settler in newly-won land will plow more land for himself and his children than others. Is that a failing on his part? He grows grain not only for himself, but also for others. What he grows is his property.
§ But he who through treachery and deceit gains possession of that which the mind and hands of others have created is a thief and a deceiver. He is like the swindler and the Jew who, without creating anything themselves, live greedily from that which they steal from others using corrupted justice. To eliminate them in Germany is our highest law. Once Germany’s forests were freed of wolves. In the same way, Germany must be freed of those who are worse and craftier than wolves.
Originally I posted this article on April 25, 2012. But now that I have been postulating that the One Ring of greed and power—that we might start calling “the Aryan Problem”—could be the main factor in the West’s darkest hour, I am moving it at the top of this blog.
Below, some excerpts of “Heroic Materialism,” the last chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark. (For an introduction to these series, see here.) Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages. Also, the headings don’t appear in the original text:
The westerners’ new god: Mammon
Imagine an immensely speeded up movie of Manhattan Island during the last hundred years. It would look less like a work of man than like some tremendous natural upheaval. It’s godless, it’s brutal, it’s violent—but one can’t laugh it off, because in the energy, strength of will and mental grasp that have gone to make New York, materialism has transcended itself. It took almost the same time to reach its present conditions as it did to complete the Gothic cathedrals. At which point a very obvious reflection crosses one’s mind: that the cathedrals were built to the glory of God, New York was built to the glory of mammon—money, gain, the new god of the nineteenth century. So many of the same human ingredients have gone into its construction that at a distance it does look rather like a celestial city. At a distance. Come closer and it’s not so good. Lots of squalor, and, in the luxury, something parasitical.
Blake’s Satan
One sees why heroic materialism is still linked with an uneasy conscience. The first large iron foundries like the Carron Works or Coalbrookdale, date from about 1780. The only people who saw through industrialism in those early days were the poets. Blake, as everybody knows, thought that mills were the work of Satan. ‘Oh Satan, my youngest born… thy work is Eternal death with Mills and Ovens and Cauldrons.’
The [slave] trade was prohibited in 1807, and as Wilberforce lay dying in 1835, slavery itself was abolished. One must regard this as a step forward for the human race, and be proud, I think, that it happened in England. But not too proud. The Victorians were very smug about it, and chose to avert their eyes from something almost equally horrible that was happening to their own countrymen.
In its early stages the Industrial Revolution was also a part of the Romantic movement. And here I may digress to say that painters had for long used iron foundries to heighten the imaginative impact of their work with what we call a romantic effect; and that they had introduced them into pictures as symbolising the mouth of hell. However, the influence of the Industrial Revolution on Romantic painters is a side issue, almost an impertinence, when compared to its influence on human life. I needn’t remind you of how cruelly it degraded and exploited a mass of people for sixty or seventy years.
What was destructive was size. After about 1790 to 1800 there appeared the large foundries and mills which dehumanised life. Long before Carlyle and Karl Marx, Wordsworth had described the arrival of a night shift ‘that turns the multitude of dizzy wheels, Men, maidens, youths, Mothers and little children, boys and girls, Perpetual sacrifice.’
The terrible truth is that the rise in population did nearly ruin us. It struck a blow at civilisation such as it hadn’t received since the barbarian invasions. First it produced the horrors of urban poverty. It must have seemed—may still seem—insoluble; yet this doesn’t excuse the callousness with which prosperous people ignored the conditions of life among the poor on which to a large extent their prosperity depended, and this in spite of the many detailed and eloquent descriptions that were available to them. I need mention only two—Engels’s Conditions of the Working Classes in England, written in 1844, and the novels written by Dickens between 1840 and 1855. Everybody read Dickens. But his terrible descriptions of poverty had very little practical effect: partly because the problem was too big; partly because politicians were held in the intellectual prison of classical economics.
The images that fit Dickens are by the French illustrator Gustave Doré. He was originally a humorist; but the sight of London sobered him. His drawings were done in the 1870s, after Dickens’s death. But one can see that things hadn’t changed much. Perhaps it took an outsider to see London as it really was.
Degenerate architecture
At the beginning of this series I said that I thought one could tell more about a civilisation from its architecture that from anything else it leaves behind. Painting and literature depend largely on unpredictable individuals. But architecture is to some extent a communal art. However, I must admit that the public buildings on the nineteenth century are often lacking in style and conviction; and I believe that this is because the strongest creative impulse of the time didn’t go into the town halls or country houses, but into what was then thought of as engineering. In fact, all modern New York started with the Brooklyn Bridge.
In this series I have followed the ups and downs of civilisation historically, trying to discover results as well as causes; well, obviously I can’t do that any longer. We have no idea where we are going, and sweeping, confident articles of the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of utterance. The scientists who are best qualified to talk have kept their moths shut.
The incomprehensibility of our new cosmos seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for the chaos of modern art. I know next to nothing about science, but I’ve spent my life trying to learn about art, and I am completely baffled by what is taking place today. I sometimes like what I see, but when I read modern critics I realise that my preferences are merely accidental.
Western civilisation has been a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence in ourselves. I said at the beginning that it is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. Fifty years ago W.B. Yeats, who was more like a man of genius than anyone I have ever known, wrote a famous poem.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
“In ancient Rome, as in modern America, the economic system and its imperatives are treated as absolute and fixed, whereas the people are treated as liquid and fungible.”
—Greg Johnson
“After all, the chief business of the American people is business.”
—President Calvin Coolidge
Yesterday I listened Tom Sunic’s interviews of Andrew Fraser, author of The WASP Question. Fraser is a Protestant and Sunic, of Catholic background, like me has given up Christianity. Although their very friendly discussion on the role that Calvinism and Puritanism may have played in today’s suicidal zeitgeist was fascinating, what piqued my interest was the view that both Sunic and Fraser share: how White Anglo-Saxon Protestants fell into the spell of the One Ring (economics-over-race policies).
Since the Jewish Question was almost absent in this two-part interview, it reminds me very strongly Michael O’Meara’s view that the JQ is secondary to America’s Low Church worship of Mammon. In the heated debate at Counter-Currents between O’Meara and the monocausalists (those who believe that whites are blameless), that I copied and pasted, O’Meara said:
Kevin MacDonald, unlike his epigones, knows how to make an argument and support it with substantiating evidence. Nevertheless, his argument proves nothing (except his own intelligence), for with the same methods but in reference to different facts, I could make an equally convincing argument to “prove” that corporate capitalism (or the Cold War state, Catholicism, Protestantism, or a half-dozen other factors) were far more influential in legalizing the formal de-Europeanization of the American people.
I think that Sunic, Fraser and O’Meara are right. In fact, the moral of the historical books by William Pierce and Arthur Kemp is that non-whites have always overwhelmed the white minority after some centuries. Pierce and Kemp have proven, to my satisfaction, that ever since the civilizations of the Ancient World to date, whites have been losing because they don’t follow the golden rule: total separation from non-whites. Instead, they have fallen, and still fall, in the temptation of trying to use non-whites as “capital”: whether slaves, servants, second-class citizens, or wet-backs in the US and elsewhere.
From this meta-perspective that reviews several millennia of history the culprits of the West’s darkest hour may be listed, in order of importance, thus:
1) The One Ring
2) The Christian Problem
3) The Jewish Problem
This blog has been focusing on the second etiological factor because other white nationalist blogs are reluctant to fully discuss it. Nonetheless, both the Christian and the Jewish problems are far from being the most influential factors, and it is a pity that nobody is sponsoring O’Meara because, in addition to his published articles, I believe that his thesis must be expanded as thoroughly as MacDonald has presented his views on Judaism. (But why does this movement have no wealthy sponsors…?)
Michael O’Meara, the first white nationalist author I ever read, has said that the United States, as the architect of the prevailing world system, is the source of all evil. But a humble book by Tomislav Sunić is even more focused on the subject. In fact, to me it is the key to understand the West’s darkest hour.
Here there are a few quotes:
♣
“America is the least homogeneous country in the Western hemisphere… But there is one common feature which is characteristic for all Americans, regardless of their social and racial background or status; namely their rejection of their previous roots.”
Homo Americanus, pages 1-2
“The American species, Homo americanus, exists all over Europe now…
Following the Second World War, hundreds of European and American authors were removed from library shelves on the basis of their allegedly extremist, racist and unscientific character.”
Homo Americanus, pages 5, 7
Lawrence R. Brown, in his magnum opus The Might of the West… acknowledges that the Declaration was a form of political theology, compatible with the spirit of the time of Enlightenment, and therefore replete with platitudes and “self-evident” truths. The Preamble of the Declaration could very well fit into the Middle Ages.
Homo Americanus, page 17
“Not a single politician will ever admit that America is a theocratic system with a peculiar political theology.”
Homo Americanus, page 3
“Ethnic or racial discrimination, let alone charges of anti-Semitism, are viewed in postmodern Americanism as the ultimate intellectual sin… Certain dogmatic views, particularly those regarding the sacred Jewish question and inherent goodness of non-European races, are imposed by force and must be accepted by all…”
Homo Americanus, page 14
“However, there seems to be a contradiction in their [white racialists] analyses regarding the waning of the Euro-American world. While they bewail the passing of the white race, they fail to critically examine the economic foundations of Americanism, i.e. an ideology that is fully propitious for low wage non-European immigrant workers… Why should one worry about the passage of the great white race if that race has only been involved in endless economic transactions? This seems to be a feature of many white American racialists who stubbornly refuse to criticize capitalism…”
Homo Americanus, page 23
“It must be recalled that the passionate American desire to make the world safer for democracy also led, after World War II, to the creation of the Nuremberg Tribunal whose legal structures make up the judicial framework of the postmodern European Union, including the European Criminal Code… They opened up, long ago, a Pandora Box.”
Homo Americanus, page 60
Both the American and the Soviet experiments were founded on the same principles of egalitarianism… At the beginning of the third millennium, the immense egalitarian meta-narrative, encapsulated in Americanism, is very much alive… Both Homo sovieticus and Homo americanus herald the slogan that all men are created equal… All academic discussions about genetic or racial differences are quickly neutralized by the all-encompassing words such as “racism” or “hate speech.”
Homo Americanus, pages 55-56