Homer’s Odyssey: The Return of the Father; Part 2 of 2

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Odysseus in Ithaca: The Father’s Revenge

Odysseus engages the suitors in combat. 1814 painting by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg

Finally, Odysseus makes his way home and “he rejoiced to be in his own country” (13.165-243); “King Odysseus was filled with happiness, filled with joy that this land was his. He kissed the grain-giving soil of it, then prayed to the nymphs with uplifted hands” (13.332-422). Athena transforms Odysseus’ appearance to that of an old man, to better gather allies, observe the suitors’ misdeeds, and prepare his revenge.

Odysseus enters the palace as an elderly beggar and is mistreated by the suitors, who have been scheming to murder Telemachus. The task will not be easy, but Odysseus asserts that he would rather die than live with such indignities: “I would rather perish, rather meet death in my own palace, than look on perpetually at things as detestable as these” (16.41-133). Finally meeting Telemachus, the two emotionally embrace, but Odysseus quickly turns to business: “at Athena’s bidding, I have come to this place to consult with you on the slaughtering of our enemies” (16.222-311).

When Odysseus reveals himself to the suitors, he will not be turned away from vengeance against those who “devoured my substance, forced my serving-women to sleep with you, and in cowardly fashion wooed my wife while I still was living” (22.1-122). One of the suitors offers tribute, but Odysseus will have none of it, dishonor cannot be redeemed with gold:

Not if you all gave me all your patrimony, whatever you have and whatever more you might come to have, not even then would I hold back my hands from slaughter till every suitor had paid for the whole transgression. (22.39-122)

Through subterfuge and prowess, Odysseus and his few allies are able to overcome and kill the suitors. They are not the only ones who must pay. While the few in Odysseus’ household who helped the suitors unwillingly are spared, the willing collaborators must pay, notably the servant-women, who are hanged. As Telemachus says: “Never let it be said that sluts like these had a clean death from me. They have heaped up outrage on me and on my mother; they have been the suitors’ concubines” (22.375-466). The punishments are monstrous, but the guilty perpetrated evil deeds, and the gods willed retribution.

The suitors overthrown and his authority restored, Odysseus can then finally unite with Penelope, who recognizes him in their own bed. Penelope has remained faithful to Odysseus and, with her handmaidens, maintained “the hearth’s unflagging fire” (20.122-93). Thus, the family has been saved. There is something touching in the couple’s complicity. As Odysseus had previously said: “There is nothing nobler, nothing lovelier than when man and wife keep house together with like heart and with like will. Their foes repine, their friends rejoice, but the truth of it all is with her and him” (6.121-200). The family members’ faithfulness to one another has allowed their collective survival.[1]

This is only a brief respite, for in a social world defined by kin, Odysseus knows that the suitors’ families will not be long in retaliating for what has happened. But the three generations, Laertes, Odysseus, and Telemachus, find confidence and joy in the honor and prosperity of their line:

King Odysseus . . . said forthwith to his son Telemachus: “My son, when you enter the battlefield where warriors prove their mettle, you need not be told not to shame the lineage of your fathers. In courage and manliness we have long been foremost, the whole world over.”

Thoughtful Telemachus replied: “Father, if you are minded so, you shall watch me in my present spirit by no means shaming the lineage that you speak of.”

So he spoke, and Laertes, in his joy cried out: “Dear gods, what a day is this for me! What happiness, when my son and my grandson are vying for the prize of valor!” (24.442-525).

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Homer’s Odyssey: The Return of the Father; Part 1 of 2

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Head of Roman-era statue of Odysseus, found in the grounds of the former villa of the emperor Tiberius.

“Who are you, and from where? Where are your city and your parents?” Thus does a stranger ask Odysseus to identify himself in Homer’s poem dedicated to that hero, the Odyssey (10.325). Taking place after the travails of the Trojan War, the tale is fundamentally about Odysseus’ struggle to find and reestablish his place in a chaotic world. During his twenty-year absence, the hero’s native land of Ithaca has fallen victim to usurpers, and he must overcome innumerable obstacles to find his way home and restore his political authority as king through subterfuge and violence. Odysseus never gives up on his quest, nor does he settle down in one of the many places he visits, because he never forgets his dear family and fatherland, those two defining aspects of his social identity.

The Odyssey has inspired Europeans of every generation since the ancient Greeks and Romans up to the present day. Besides the picaresque quality of Odysseus’ fantastic adventures, one finds an enduring story that can only resonate with all those who long for home. Odysseus, rather unlike Achilles, is close to an ideal hero: enduring, cunning, resourceful, diplomatic, and ruthless when necessary. If the Iliad is the memory in poetry of the archaic Greeks’ countless forgotten wars of conquest and plunder, the Odyssey is that of their exploration and colonization of the ancient Mediterranean and Black Sea, endeavors which were often no less violent. If the Iliad is about the tensions between individual and community in the savagery of wartime, the Odyssey suggests a more constructive personal and political project: the journey home and the restoration of a good country.

Odysseus’ visiting various, often dystopian, societies and his quest to restore his Ithacan kingdom indeed suggest an implicit Homeric politics. The world of Odysseus is an often brutal and lawless one in which travelers are at the mercy of the goodwill of their hosts. Without reciprocity or strength, one is liable to fall victim to depredation. In this trustless world, Homer identifies two things which can serve to create more civil societies: piety and kinship. While the ideal of the polis, of individual sacrifice for the common good, is indeed hinted at in the Odyssey, Odyssean politics are firmly monarchic, with reciprocal duties between king and people.

Among the aristocratic ruling class Homer is dealing with, kinship is the basic foundation for identity and solidarity, and therefore of both personal and political action. Strangers are synonymous with uncertainty and potential violence. Kinship in contrast entails inherited resemblance and shared pride in and duties towards one’s lineage. Among kin, there is the possibility of security. That security, however, only exists by the strength of the family father, his domestic authority and his willingness to use violence against hostile aliens. The Odyssey is then also a tale of what befalls a family and country when the patriarch, by his absence, no longer meets his responsibilities.

For Homer, identity and purpose is found in one’s lineage. One acts for the sake of one’s ancestors and one’s descendants. Odysseus and his son Telemachus resemble one another by virtue of their shared blood and must work together to save their family’s status and power. The restoration of paternal and kingly authority in Ithaca is impossible without brutal revenge against the usurpers. And it is only within the circle of such violence that one’s kin can enjoy a secure and gentle life. According to Homer, a happy man has prosperous descendants and the people thrive under a righteous king, for he rules them like a good father. Read more

Jewishness and the Culture of Crypsis

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Summary: The so-called neoconservatives are crypto-Israelis, comparable to crypto-Jews passing as “New Christians” in the 14th to 17th century. Crypsis is a fundamental aspect of Jewish culture. It is in fact the very essence of Judean monotheism, crafted in the context of the Babylonian exile by having the god of Israel masquerading as the “God of Heaven” worshipped by Persians.

Laurent Guyénot is the author of JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014, and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018.  (or $30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556).

What’s a neocon?

“What’s a neocon?” clueless George W. Bush once asked his father in 2003. “Do you want names, or a description?” answered Bush 41. “Description.” “Well,” said 41, “I’ll give it to you in one word: Israel.” True or not, that short exchange quoted by Andrew Cockburn sums it up.[1] The neoconservatives are crypto-Zionists, in the sense that their only loyalty goes to Israel — Israel as defined by their mentor Leo Strauss, that is, including an indispensable powerful Diaspora. In his 1962 lecture “Why We Remain Jews,” Strauss quoted as “the most profound and radical statement on assimilation that I have read” Nietzsche’s Dawn of Day aphorism 205 on the Jews (here in Strauss’s translation): “it only remains for them either to become the lords of Europe or to lose Europe […] at some time Europe may fall like a perfectly ripe fruit into their hand, which only casually reaches out. In the meantime it is necessary for them to distinguish themselves in all the areas of European distinction and to stand among the first, until they will be far enough along to determine themselves that which distinguishes.”[2] Update that statement with “Western nations” instead of “Europe” and you have indeed the best possible summary of what the strategy of assimilation really means for the Diaspora elite of the Straussian sort.

The proof of the Straussian neocons’ crypto-Israelism is their U.S. foreign policy, which has always coincided with the best interest of Israel. Before 1967, Israel’s interest rested heavily on Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. From 1967, when Moscow protested Israel’s annexation of Arab territories by closing Jewish emigration, Israel’s interest depended solely on U.S. military support and included the U.S. winning the Cold War. That is when the editorial board of Commentary (the monthly magazine of the American Jewish Committee) experienced their conversion to “neoconservatism,” and Commentary became, in the words of Benjamin Balint, “the contentious magazine that transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right.”[3] Irving Kristol explained to the American Jewish Congress in 1973 why anti-war activism was no longer good for Israel: “it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States. […] American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”[4] This enlightens us on what reality Kristol was referring to, when he famously defined a neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality” (Neoconservatism: the Autobiography of an Idea, 1995).

With the end of the Cold War, the national interest of Israel changed once again. The primary objective became the destruction of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East by dragging the U.S. into a third world war. The neoconservatives underwent their second fake conversion, from anti-communist Cold Warriors to Islamophobic “Clashers of Civilizations” and crusaders in the “War on Terror.” The “Clash of Civilizations” meme was invented in 1990 by neocon ideologue Bernard Lewis, in an article entitled “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” The concept was then handed down to the goy Samuel Huntington (The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order). Never before had a book of geopolitics been the subject of such international media hype. Between 1992 and 1994 a parody of intellectual debate was acted in the press, opposing, on one side, Francis Fukuyama (a PNAC member) and his ridiculous prophecy of the “end of history,” and, on the other side, Samuel Huntington and the “clash of civilizations.” The purpose of this fake alternative was to build up Huntington, until the attacks of September 11, 2001 validated his thesis in the most dramatic way. Huntington’s book, meanwhile, has been translated into fifty languages and commented on by the entire world’s press. Long before that, the “clash of civilizations” became an essential part of hollywoodism, (watch Jack Shaheen’s documentary Real Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, based on his book).

In September 2001, the neoconservatives got the “New Pearl Harbor” that they had been wishing for in a PNAC report written a year earlier. Two dozens neoconservatives had by then been introduced by Dick Cheney into key positions, including: Scooter Libby as Cheney’s deputy; Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon, David Wurmser at the State Department, and Philip Zelikow and Elliott Abrams at the National Security Council. Abrams had written three years earlier: “Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart — except in Israel — from the rest of the population.”[5] As for Perle, Feith and Wurmser, they figured among the signatories of a 1996 secret Israeli report entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, urging the new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to break with the Oslo Accords of 1993 and reaffirm Israel’s right of preemption on Arab territories.  According to Patrick Buchanan, the 2003 Iraq war proves that the plan “has now been imposed by Perle, Feith, Wurmser & Co. on the United States.” Read more

The Sexual is Political (And Profitable)

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“Freud envisages any social order larger than that between sexual partners as founded on a common, enforced, unrecognised renunciation of sexual life. Marcuse wishes to envisage a possible social order in which human relationships are widely informed by that libidinal release and gratification which, according to Freud, would spell the destruction of any social order.”
Alasdair MacIntyre, Marcuse, 1970.

The most comprehensive prostitution decriminalization effort ever initiated in the United States has commenced in New York, led by Richard N. Gottfried, the Jewish head of the State Assembly’s Health Committee. Gottfried is an ardent crusader for sexual ‘liberation’, having previously introduced the first same-sex marriage bill in the Assembly in 2003, acted as key sponsor for GENDA, the Gender Non-Discrimination Act which would “make discrimination based on gender identity illegal,” pioneered legislation compelling the trustees or sole trustee of every school district to establish policies and procedures regarding the treatment of ‘transgender or gender non-conforming students’, and introduced legislation requiring ‘sexuality education’ in schools. In fact, the only conservative position Gottfried has ever taken in his role as head of the Health Committee was when anti-vaccine Ultra-Orthodox Jews came under fire during a measles outbreak in New York back in May. As the New York Times noted, “Richard N. Gottfried, the Assembly’s longest serving member is usually a reliably liberal voice on all things related to health. (Mr. Gottfried, a Democrat from Manhattan, is the sponsor, for example, of the New York Health Act, which would establish a universal single-payer health plan in the state.) But on the issue of eliminating religious exemptions, Mr. Gottfried has withheld his support.” Since Jews benefited more than any other group from exemptions in this instance, Gottfried’s coercive measures relating to health and sexuality are apparently for the goyim only. Coming during ‘Pride Month,’ his advocacy for prostitution reinforced my belief that, in postmodernity, the sexual is political, indeed hyper-political, and I wanted to share some general thoughts on the subject.

Recent social media ranting about a proposed “straight pride march” are strongly indicative of the ways in which the sexual has become hyper-political. To summarize, a heavily ironic group of activists named Super Happy Fun America planned a Straight Pride parade in Boston in reaction to the city’s rejection of the group’s application to raise its “straight pride flag” at Boston’s City Hall earlier this spring. In a statement, the group announced: “We have decided to launch a campaign to educate the public, politicians, and civil servants about the straight community and the unique problems we face. We have determined that a parade would be the best way to promote our community and its diverse history, culture, and identity. We anticipate that the city will eventually choose to embrace tolerance and inclusivity.” This is clearly an ironic and humorous, and ultimately harmless, play with leftist tropes and catchphrases. But if the intention of Super Happy Fun America was to force the totalitarian nature of postmodern sexual politics to the surface, then they succeeded. The reaction to this boyish prank was quite remarkable. The city’s Jewish newspaper warned of ‘The Covert anti-Semitism of Straight Pride,’ while an astonishing number of major news sources (for example, see here, here, and here) warned that the Straight Pride organisers had links to the Alt-Lite and anti-Marxist groups, and were ‘racists’ and ‘anti-Semites.’ Read more

Is The “Hate Group” Concept A Legitimate Intellectual Concept Or Nothing More Than A Weapon Of Cultural Marxist Hegemony?

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I attempted to criticize the “hate group” concept on Wikipedia, by adding a section doing just that to its “hate group” article. The top editors over there would have none of it. Wikipedia’s editors are so left-wing, they think the SPLC is a neutral, apolitical organization, if you can believe it. Wikipedia, a supposedly unbiased and independent online encyclopedia and information source, has unfortunately become a mouthpiece for the Cultural Marxist US power class.

Here is what I wrote, and what they subsequently scrubbed from the internet:

==Criticism of the hate group concept==

            The “hate group” concept has come under fire in recent years from academics and intellectuals on both sides of the political spectrum, but especially the political right. Like “hate speech”, “hate group” is a concept not traditionally recognized by American courts and the American legal system.[i] Nevertheless, outside of the American legal context, the concept is widely accepted and employed.

Many critics of the term argue that the demographic divisions (racial groups, whole religions) the term attempts to insulate from group criticism are arbitrarily or ideologically selected. For example, why aren’t lesser political groups (atheist organizations, for example) or smaller religious denominations (scientologists, for example) equally protected by the label and the stigma surrounding it? Thus, instead of protecting the powerless, the term seems to insulate from criticism those populations with sufficient numbers, power and prominence to command protection. After all, any number of randomly selected demographic categories could be deemed above group criticism or political opposition, yet few are. Why do certain groups seem to be so much more worthy of the term’s protections? In sum, the term appears to place arbitrary or ideology-laden restrictions on speech and activism, in defiance of the liberal democratic tradition, which asserts that all ideologies, movements, groups, and religions are fair game for philosophical critique and peaceful opposition.[ii] [iii] [iv]

Other critics of the term argue that the label is not only arbitrary, but selectively applied.[v] Some well-known champions of the term are even on record admitting as such. Mark Potok, former senior fellow at the SPLC, the organization that basically invented the term “hate group”, conceded this years ago. In a 2009 interview, he stated that the “hate group” label is not uniformly applied, because the SPLC is by no means apolitical, but is instead a fundamentally leftist organization that does battle with radical groups on the political right in an effort to “destroy them” (his words), and that it is sometimes very much guilty of focusing on the political right, while roundly ignoring bad actors on the political left which engage in the self-same tactics and employ the self-same incendiary language as supposed “hate groups”.[vi] Some believe this political bias is driven partly by perverse economic incentives, that the SPLC chooses to focus its ire and its activism on right-wing groups and activities because that is how it appeals to its donor base and funds its massive war chest, which totaled upwards of half a billion dollars in 2018.[vii] Nevertheless, many believe that an anti-right bias is not something unique to the SPLC’s hate monitoring and classification system, but instead something that inheres in the term itself, which is to say the very concept of “hate group” is rooted in, steeped in, and defined by the ideals of the political left, and is thus partisan by nature and design.

Some have argued that virtually any political organization could potentially meet the standard definition of the term, given its breadth.[viii] For example, a cadre of left-leaning academics that regularly publishes papers criticizing “White privilege” or “White fragility”, could easily be understood to be expressing hatred toward, exhibiting animus toward, or even dehumanizing Whites, as a race. Likewise, a feminist activist organization that regularly criticizes the putative prevailing culture of the patriarchy or the toxicity of masculinity, might also be said to be a “hate group”, according to the accepted definition of the term, given its willingness to insult an entire sex. Occupy Wall Street might also have been labeled a “hate group” on account of its open disdain for financial executives and oligarchs, who its members so endearingly labeled “banksters”. Unsurprisingly, however, Occupy Wall Street was never labeled a “hate group” by the pundit class or society at large, and none of the hypothetical groups would be labeled as such, because groups like these—that is those with the “right” values, residing on the “correct” side of the political spectrum—are rarely, if ever, described this way by the press or the powers that be. Read more

Why I Write

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“I have written it as an attempt at justice.”
    Hilaire Belloc, Introduction to The Jews (1922)

Several weeks ago I participated in a discussion of my work with Kevin MacDonald for TOQLive, and in the days prior to that I had a look at my past articles in the TOO author’s archive. It came as something of a surprise to see that there are now almost two hundred essays, blog posts, and translations (in five languages) under my name, submitted over a seven year period. I really hadn’t realised I’d written that many essays, though I suppose it goes some way towards explaining Rabbi Bruce Warshal’s description of me as a “prolific anti-Semitic academic.” In some ways these years seem to have flown by. A lot has happened. The roster of writers at The Occidental Observer, with the exception of a couple of returning stalwarts like Brenton Sanderson and Edmund Connolly, has changed somewhat. This is due in part to the fact this website stands at the frontline of the culture war and bears several scars. To say nothing of the early years of The Occidental Observer, during my time writing for the site two TOO writers were doxxed by the SPLC and have not returned, the site underwent a period of DDOS attacks in 2015 (with some of the offending IPs originating in Israel), and we were then deplatformed from PayPal as part of a concerted post-Charlottesville censorship strategy by our opponents. Outside TOO, between 2012 and 2019 I made a brief foray into politics, delivered speeches in three countries, edited a few books, became a father two more times, started work on a volume of my own work, was arrested twice on spurious allegations relating to my political opinions, was (temporarily) prohibited from entering the United States, and managed to get banned from Twitter more times than I can now remember. I have no regrets, and in fact found much of it enjoyable. During this busy and important period in my life, and that of the movement, I believe my reasons for writing developed, matured, and evolved, and I thought I’d share my thoughts on this.

My path to The Occidental Observer probably began in 2004/5, a few years before the website was created. It was during that year that I began reading large amounts of academic material on the historical relationship between Jews and Europeans, a process that began with Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) and steadily developed to encompass most of the field’s mainstream authors including Robert Wistrich, Jacob Katz, Gavin Langmuir, Schmuel Almog, Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Kenneth Stow, Yehuda Bauer, David Sorkin, Marvin Perry, and Frederick Schweitzer. Although most of the books produced by these authors were well-written, had a polished academic veneer, and were published by some of the most-respected publishing houses in academia, I felt they all suffered, to borrow Albert Lindemann’s description of Robert Wistrich’s work, from repeating the same “colourful and indignant narrative, accompanied by weak, sometimes tendentious analysis.”1 It occurred to me very early on that it wasn’t altogether healthy for Jews to dominate the academic discussion of the historical relationship between their people and other peoples, and that resulting histories were bound to come with their own subtle or not-so-subtle biases. By the time I made it to Anthony Julius’s Trials of the Diaspora (Oxford, 2010), I had grown quite suspicious of Jewish-authored histories of anti-Semitism, and Julius’s extremely arrogant and manipulative work was in some sense a final straw. In the opening of Part 1 of Trials of the Diaspora, Julius opined that anti-Semites were mere charlatans in search of something to appear “expert” in,2 but I came away from his book wondering if it wasn’t Jews who were claiming the monopoly on expertise in anti-Semitism, entirely ignoring the other half of a very long and painful story. Read more