Racial Self-Image: The Ideal of Beauty  

Theologies and ideologies come and go but the merciless laws of racial biology are here to stay. One can flee his country’s oppressive rulers, but one cannot escape his heredity. It was not some wicked proverbial “Nazi,” but the Jewish British Prime minister and author Benjamin Disraeli, who said: “The difference of race is one of the reasons why I fear war may always exist; because race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance.”   

Not tons, but megatons of book titles were  seized, burned down or simply  shoved down the Orwellian  memory hole by the victorious Allies in defeated Germany. And among those were works by prominent European geneticists, anthropologists, artists and biologists, whose work long predated the National Socialist seizure of power.  The entire Allied inquisition against European scholarship and science was euphemistically called the “The List of the literature to be singled out (Die Liste der auszusondernden Literatur); see here and here.  The Lamarckian-Marxian idea of racial equality and human interchangeability has become so powerful that the most modest academic skepticism regarding contemporary “self-evident truths” is severely punished.    

Figurative and plastic forms of art are the best vectors for studying racial types and subtypes, but also an ideal mirror of physical beauty among Western men and women. Ideas of race and beauty were perhaps best described by Paul Schulze Naumburg, the much acclaimed art critic and artist himself in the Third Reich, and Hans Günther,  a racial anthropologist. Both were among the thousands of authors banned by the post-WWII Inquisition.  

One does not need to be an expert in anthropometry or eugenics to distinguish between racial ugliness and racial beauty. Glancing at classical art exhibits in European museums tells us all. 

As a rule, artistic creation reflects not just the personality and the race of a depicted human, but also of the subject, i.e., the artist himself. Portraits and pictures of naked women tell us much about the idea of race and beauty of a given nation, at a given historical time period.  Schulze Naumburg writes that every artist crafts his characters in his own image. Sandro Botticelli’s face, his blue eyes,  lank stature, and  his racial Nordic-Mediterranean (“westisch”) makeup found their way on his canvasses, particularly in his famous, elegant and long-limbed Nordic looking, beauty with high cheekbones,  the Primavera — albeit embellished in a timely fashion.

Botticelli: Primavera

Botticelli: Self-portrait

So does Rembrandt’s own facial combination of a Nordic-Dinaric-Mediterranean man, including his stocky limbs, find its way on his canvass. The portraits of Titian’s naked females tell us two things: a) the idea of female beauty in Europe of his time; b) the personality and Nordic racial makeup of Titian himself. A Black artist or an Asian artist can never ever have such racial empathy.    

One could probably explain the relationship between the artist and his work simply as a preference of every human being for his own race and his own type. It appears quite obvious that each artist presents that which in his perceptions lives and what is preferably his subject of preoccupation.  Decisive is the choice of the role model based on preference for his own race or (corporal) type. (p. 31–32) 

When two races mix, there is a likelihood that the rhythm will be upset or that it will disappear. Surely, there are cases in which harmony occurs — which is more likely the closer the races that are to be mixed are. Thus the relation between the Nordic and the Dinaric man will be easier achieved than the relation between a member of the Nordic race and an Oriental man (“einem Mongoloiden”) (p. 34) (my translation) Schulze-Naumburg,  Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race)  ( 1928, 1942) 

Japanese or African art differs from European art because it reflects a different gene pool. The African woodcutting has nothing in common with the German woodcuts of Nordico-Dinaric artist Albrecht Dürer. What strikes the eyes of the White observer is that the women bathing, shown on some of the 17th-century Japanese woodcuts, have expressionless faces, flat hips and breasts, and instead of the eyes one can see two slits above their tiny nose. The brush of vivid and different colors is nonexistent.  

Dürer: The Knight, Death, and the Devil 

African Woodcut

For obvious reasons, despite their high verbal IQ and their proverbial ears for music, Jews have never excelled in plastic and figurative art. Their religion strictly forbids them worshipping of idols and their pictorial representation. The poor sense for imagery and the lack of the metaphor seems to be primal racial traits of Jews. A good connoisseur of the Jewish spirit, the French linguist and philosopher, Ernest Renan wrote that “the desert is monotheistic” ("Le désert est monothéiste") — hence by definition devoid of mystery and pictorial imagination. It is debatable to what extent the much vaunted Jewish Russian painter, Marc Chagall fits into the European artistic and racial consciousness. His paintings depicting flying goats or Jewish newlyweds floating in the sky above a shtetl in Russia make one wonder whether Chagall was high on vodka at the moment of his artistic exuberance.  

The Frankfurt school attempt at pathologizing European art and particularly the concept of European physical beauty was in full swing shortly after WWII. But one could use exactly the same procedure, albeit in a reverse manner, to describe racial psychology of many Jewish writers, as for instance Franz Kafka.  In his convulsive prose, the main Kafka’s hero identifies himself constantly with images of ugliness (The Castel, The Metamorphosis). For that matter even books by the famed Jewish “father of psychoanalysis, ” Sigmund  Freud testify of a troubled man with compulsive neurosis, whose work today, after having done so much damage in creating guilt feelings among Whites, is no longer considered very serious —  even by his former disciples.  

Scores of Jewish  intellectuals, like Bruno Bettelheim went to great lengths in order to criminalize the beauty of European fairy tales (and by detour provoke guilt feelings among non-Jewish parents), ascribing them a barbaric character — while prudently avoiding to delve into morbid tales  from the Old Testament —  whose violence is proverbial .  

In his classic Rasse und Stil (Race and Style, 1926), Hans Günther writes that different White racial subtypes are not only physically and facially different, they also express artistic feelings differently. A Western man with predominately Nordic features (Scandinavia, Northwestern Germany, Holland, central Britain) shows unwavering perseverance, “will to power,” and disinterestedness — what Nietzsche called the “pathos of distance.” This is despite the fact that Nietzsche and scores of “Faustian-Promethean” Western thinkers had a clear streak of Dinaric genes, as seen on Nietzsche’s own face. From the architectural point of view the Nordic spirit is best embodied in Gothic cathedrals.

Günther points out that vividness, verbosity, occasional theatrical posturing, yet amazing courage in military close combats, are racial features that one encounters in the European Dinaric racial subtype (Bavaria, Lombardy, Austria, western Balkans). This is best seen in popular folk costumes, love for music and dance, unwavering friendship, and love for ornaments — so typical for the spirit of the Central European Baroque.   

The Alpine round-headed man ('ostisch') appears all over the White race in the USA and Europe, although historically the bulk of Alpine Europeans are located in Eastern Europe and Russia. The Alpine man is sentimental and home-bound, but also tends to be moody and cranky. Older comics and caricatures in Europe and the USA, when depicting a petty bourgeois, or an un-intellectual person, use the round-headed Alpine as a symbol of social derision.  Günther writes that “the work of an artist with an Alpine (‘ostisch’) trait is mostly calm, conciliatory, in contrast to the Nordic artist whose work appears shocking and demanding. … ‘German accuracy’ is a Nordic-Alpine feature.  Nordic man is punctual; he loves order and discipline — as long as he can combine this proclivity with generosity.…  The Alpine streak transpires in precision, combined with pettiness and grumbling” (pp. 70, 79). 

A Dinaric-Mediterranean Macho Touch? 

It is no accident that the ideal type of White male beauty in the West never appears in a single racial type but rather as a combination of all three. Historically, the ideal type of an attractive White male has Nordic stature and skull with dark Dinaric or Mediterranean hair.  No wonder that White women in the West are attracted to this combination, as embodied by films stars Antonio Banderas, Sean Connery, etc. Seldom is a pure Nordic male specimen viewed among White women as the epitome of male attractiveness. There are jokes in continental and southern Europe about blond-haired White males being “albinos” or “faggots.” Manliness, with a grain of machismo, has traditionally been associated with the Dinaric and Mediterranean subtypes.   

The ideal type of woman for a White male is also supposed to have other admixtures — next to her Nordic substance. Surprisingly, for many White males attractive White woman must have high cheekbones and a slight Oriental touch — to be fully “sexy.” (White males in the US are courting and breeding en masse with Asian women — perhaps partly due to Asian women poaching into the White gene pool. This is a socio-psychological topic that will be addressed separately in a later column).  

A touch of Oriental lasciviousness, if not outright vulgarity, is what makes many White males seduced by the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer.

Michelle Pfeiffer

Is it an accident that the Nordic Botticelli’s Primavera has very un-Nordic high and sexy cheekbones with a seducing glance lurking in her eyes? This feature we never find among classical Nordic nudes whose perfect bodies, yet with serene and tragic looks on their faces, rarely ever trigger erotic fantasies among White males.

Tom Sunic (http://www.tomsunic.info;  http://doctorsunic.netfirms.com) is author, translator, former US professor in political science and a former Croatian diplomat. He is the author of Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (2007). His new book of essays, Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity, prefaced by Kevin MacDonald, will soon be released.  Email him.

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