Category Archives: The arts and culture
Notes from Distant Battlegrounds
The historical mission of our time is to arrange a new culture of humanity, one that will replace the previous ruling system. This reorganization consists of two essentials: the destruction of the old order and the building of the new. To begin with, all physical border posts, ethical barriers and social definitions of the [...]
Michael Colhaze’s Collected Essays
Introduction by Prof. Kevin MacDonald As the editor of The Occidental Observer, it has been my great pleasure to post many of the essays by Michael Colhaze. To begin with, I must confess that I attempted to get Michael to write in the typical journalistic/social science style that fits my background and is characteristic for [...]
Implicitly White themes in “The Hobbit”
The Hobbit is a bit long, and some of the scenes could have been edited down. But I am not really complaining. It held my interest. The only thing is that it has a sort of “one thing after another for no good reason” feel—the result of a lot of padding needed to make [...]
All that is good and beautiful
A new Order is arising! We will drive the Machine of War with the sword and the spear and the iron fist of the Orc! Saruman [...]
Thanksgiving: “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained”
The problem with holidays like Thanksgiving is that they give White people the impression that nothing has really changed. Just like when we were young, there is a huge Thanksgiving dinner, football on TV, and family get-togethers. The only difference is that now it’s all followed by an orgy of shopping on Black Friday, which [...]
The One Hundred Fifty Million Dollar Sock (Part 2)
Solemn DoSS Inauguration in New York’s fabled MoMA I have learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense. Philip Roth The shyster’s name was Bernie Goldshtick, and he resided in an opulent office overlooking Central Park. Big in REPHAM (Reparations for mentally disturbed Third Degree Cousins of H. Victims [...]
The One Hundred Fifty Million Dollar Sock (Part 1)
Portnoy in Middle Age (Lucien Freud) Editor’s Note: And though it’s nonsense, it has method. Michael is, as far as I know, one of the few contemporary essayists with a penchant for traditional Satire. Or, as he calls it, pulling our foes with their noses through the mud. What follows is an example. [...]
Lee Siegel: Exuding Jewish Triumphalism
A bit of Jewish triumpalism by Lee Siegel in the Wall Street Journal (“Rise of the Tiger Nation“). The basic plot line is that Jews overcame WASP dominance to attain the high ground in American culture. Now there is a rising Asian minority which, according to a Pew Research Center Study is “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing [...]
The Crimson Goddess
Not Hell! Purgatory! That’s the price men like me have to pay for keeping the world a sane place! General Nicola Mas y Redondo THE CRIMSON GODDESS Permit me to mention a book. Nothing grand, though. Just a spot of decent reading for a long and lazy summer evening, preferably supported by a pint [...]
Prowling the Moral High Ground
If I wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t be alive. If I couldn’t ever be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive. [...]
“Flight”: Denzel Washington’s New Movie, Part II
Now comes a truly sardonic confirmation that I am right. A good part of my teaching involves showing the changing images of a high-level American vocation that has not changed much racially over the last century: that of the pilot. Few careers have for so long captivated the imaginations of American boys and men. [...]
“Flight”: Denzel Washington’s New Movie, Part I
I find myself in a conflicted position. While I enjoy being right as much as the next guy, it hurts to be right about something with negative consequences. Imagine, for example, that you are convinced you have a serious malady, yet your stubborn doctor pooh-pooh’s your concerns. As a result, you conduct a grueling online [...]
Alberich’s Revenge
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. MC The Fifth Column 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 [...]
How They Lie to Us: the film Margin Call
Paul Craig Roberts made an intriguing reference the other day. He wrote that “a noted philosopher wrote an article in which he suggested that Americans live in an artificial or virtual reality. Another noted philosopher said that he thought there was a 25% chance that the philosopher was right. I am convinced that he [...]
The Southern Point: Rhetorically Speaking, Part 2
The rhetorician who practices “amplification” is not thereby misleading his audience, because we are all men of limited capacity and sensitivity and imagination. We all need to have things pointed out to us, things stressed in our interest. The very task of the rhetorician is to determine what feature of a question is most exigent [...]
Review of Thomas Martin’s “The Victory of Humanism”
The Victory of Humanism: The Psychology of Humanist Art, Modernism, and “Race” Thomas Martin Palm Coast, FL: Backintyme, 2011; 177 pages There can be little doubt that in historical perspective, perhaps the most important upheaval in Western culture has been the decline of aristocratic culture. This is apparent, for example, in two recent books that [...]
Keep the Beltane Fires Burning!
It appears sometimes that the Finns view a calendar year exclusively in terms of the important holidays. A man lives merely to celebrate one big holiday that doesn’t happen often. Once the celebration is over he simply waits for another one to come. For example, there is such a big event as Christmas. When it [...]
What to read, Part 1
There is no such thing as rightwing vs. leftwing literature. There is only bad literature vs. good literature, with the definition of goodness vs. badness resulting from one’s own implicit cultural and racial baggage. For more than a half century, teachers and scholars have used public and academic discourse quite in line with the [...]
Tristan Tzara and the Jewish roots of Dada, Part 4
The destructive legacy of Dada Dada’s destructive intellectual and cultural influence has proved to be seminal and long-lasting in at least three ways. First, as Dempsey points out, Dada’s notion that “The presentation of art as idea, its assertion that art could be made from anything and its questioning of societal and artistic mores, irrevocably [...]
Tristan Tzara and the Jewish Roots of Dada, Part 3
Dada in New York According to Marcel Duchamp’s own account, in late 1916 or early 1917 he and Francis Picabia received a book sent by an unknown author, one Tristan Tzara. The book was called The First Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine and had just been published in Zurich. In this work Tzara declared Dada to [...]
Tristan Tzara and the Jewish Roots of Dada, Part 2
Other Jews involved with Zurich Dada Among the other Jewish artists and intellectuals who joined Tzara in neutral Switzerland to escape involvement in the war was the painter and sculptor Marcel Janco (1895–1984), his brothers Jules and George, the painter and experimental film-maker Hans Richter (1888–1976), the essayist Walter Serner (1889–1942), and the painter and [...]
Revival of Nordic Consciousness in Metal Music
Heavy metal music has been strongly associated with devil-worship and a fetish for all things ‘evil’, but since the 1990s a new current has risen from the North. Scandinavia, particularly Norway, is the cradle of the most extreme form of metal called Black Metal. Black Metal in turn has given birth to the phenomenon of [...]
And What About the Pygmies, Bienvenu?
Those who read Mister will remember than in my future dystopia Herge’s Tintin in Congo circulated in the underground as a banned text. This was not entirely without reason, as in real life one Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, a Congolese citizen based in Belgium, has since at least 2007 been on a crusade to get the [...]
The West as a Tomb
In earlier articles I discussed the negative culture within the racialist Right, focusing on two common examples: the ‘worse-is-better’ mantra, and ‘naysayerism’. A third example is the insistence that the racialist Right, White Nationalism, White advocacy, whatever you may want to call it, is about ‘defending Western culture’. It may seem strange to conceive the [...]
The Southern Point: Bardic Dynamic, Pt. 2
“The study of literature is hero-worship. It is a refinement, or, if you will, a perversion of that primitive religion.” Ezra Pound, from The Spirit of Romance The Bardic Dynamic focuses on the magnetic relationship between a speaker and an audience and the communication of a fundamental series of ideas. Traditional examples of this can [...]
Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art, Part 3
Abstract Expressionism and the Culture of Critique Abstract Expressionism was disproportionately a Jewish cultural phenomenon. It was a movement populated by legions of Jewish artists, intellectuals and critics. Prominent non-Jewish artists within the movement like Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell married Jewish women (Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler). Willem de Kooning defied the trend, although [...]
Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art, Part 1
The life and career of Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko is a prototypical Jewish story that encapsulates a range of themes discussed at The Occidental Observer. Central to Rothko’s story is the political radicalism of eastern European Jewish migrants arriving in the United States between 1880 and 1920; the reflexive hostility of these migrants and their [...]
Review of “Hold Back This Day”
For years I was after this book. Each time I checked, however, Amazon had the paperback edition listed for ridiculous prices, well into the triple-digit range. At last Greg Johnson came along, contacted the author, and organised a new edition of this long-out-of-print dystopian novel through his imprint, Counter-Currents. It is now in print, and orders are [...]
Superman Shrugged
The recent release of a film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged has brought Ayn Rand’s fantasy of the world’s supermen abdicating from the role of stewards and leaders to a much wider audience. Within her frame, these men are noble and their decision to retreat into “Galt’s gulch” is an honorable response to the indignity and [...]
“A Serious Man” Revisited
I don’t have much use for light comedies, but I love dark ones. Thus I have been a fan of the Coen brothers ever since their first movie Blood Simple, which I regard as a masterpiece. But not all of their movies succeed. The Coens are at their best when they are working with tight [...]
In Defence of the Defenders (Part 2)
PECUNIA NERVUS BELLORUM Roman Proverb As the years went by and turned into decades, my perception sharpened and my illusions diminished accordingly. I became a silent but keen observer of present and past historical events, the difference between their official interpretation and, if one looked long enough, their objective and provable truth. Which were more [...]
Derrida’s (Crypto-) Jewish Identity
In Culture of Critique I had a brief section on philosopher Jacques Derrida’s strong Jewish identity and how that informed his writing. (See here, p. 198ff.) It emphasizes the point that Derrida thought of himself as a crypto-Jew. Despite his pose as “a leftist Parisian intellectual, a secularist and an atheist,” Derrida descended from a long [...]
Charles Dodgson replies to comments
I want to thank commentators for pointing out errors in my review of Band of Brothers. Watching the sequence again I can see that it was Webster who shouted out at the surrendering German troops. And sure enough there are the different types of uniforms on the camp inmates, as John Orloff notes. Also I [...]
Steven Spielberg: Body Snatcher–A Review of the Miniseries “Band of Brothers”
Band of Brothers, the 2001 TV miniseries, was produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Episode 9 was directed by David Frankel and written by John Orloff. Based on the 1992 book by Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers. E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle Nest, Simon and Schuster (reviewed [...]
More on Barton Fink: Aggression and Intellectual Superiority
I saw Barton Fink a long time ago, before I had any sense of things Jewish, so Andy Nowicki’s fascinating TOO article was a real eye-opener. I was intrigued enough to take another look. What sticks in my mind are the characters of Jack Lipnick and Ben Geisler as prototypical Hollywood figures of the period. [...]
Jewish Racialism and Jewish Capitalism: An Analysis of the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink
The recent high-profile firings of Rick Sanchez, Helen Thomas, and Octavia Nasr leave the eager-to-please among us with an uneasy feeling in their collective gut. What is the “proper,” socially-sanctioned way to react to such shocking displays of high-handed, sanctimonious, censorious overreach on the part of one’s party bosses, as it were? Crystal clear as [...]
Facing the Future as a Minority
Was the Immigration Act of 1924 Illiberal?
