Berger’s Blade on Botticelli: The War on the White West and a Culture of Cutting Critique

By Tobias Langdon

If you want to understand the riots in France in 2026, then one good place to start is Britain in 1972. That was when the BBC broadcast what I think is one of the most shocking scenes ever seen on British television. The scene starts with a man in striped shirt and gray trousers standing silently in front of Botticelli’s Venus and Mars (c. 1485), one of the most famous paintings in the National Gallery in London. The man then takes a craft-knife from his trousers, lifts it to the painting, and begins cutting out a rectangle containing the face of Venus. For a second or two the only sound is the skritch-skritch of the sharp blade cutting through the tough canvas. Then a voice-over starts, a man speaking in a patrician English accent with a faint rhotacism (pronouncing r as w). As the voice-over proceeds, the man finishes cutting, pulls the rectangle of canvas free, and turns away from the painting, symbolically separating a beautiful White woman from both her White partner and her White painter.

Culture of Cutting Critique: the Jewish communist John Berger takes a blade to Botticelli’s Venus and Mar

The man speaking on the voice-over is the man cutting at the canvas. He tells his audience that “This is the first of four programmes in which I want to question some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting. That tradition which was born about 1400, died about 1900.” In other words, he’s talking about European classical art. And who was he? He was a Jewish art-critic, painter, novelist and communist called John Berger (1926-2017). You can see one of his own paintings above on the top right in the image above (more details here). The quality of the painting perhaps helps to explain some of his hostility to Botticelli. Now, the name Berger is German for “Hill-Dweller,” but it also means “shepherd” in French. And that’s what John Berger wanted to be in those four programmes that began with the scene described above. But he didn’t want to herd sheep: he wanted to herd goyim. He succeeded spectacularly, because Ways of Seeing (1972) is one of the most influential series ever made.

Ways of Sneering
Yes, inter alia the series and accompanying book introduced the concept of the “male gaze,” the oppressive White male surveillance of female faces and bodies that expresses male power, feeds male pleasure, and forces women and girls to conform to male standards of beauty and behavior. Book and series also argued that the female nude in classical European art is essentially pornographic, serving as an erotic feast for that oppressive White male gaze, as an exploitation and oppression of White women, not as a celebration of their youth and beauty. The “assumptions” about classical art that Berger wanted to “question” were those resting on concepts like “Beauty,” “Truth,” “Genius,” and “Civilisation” (Ways of Seeing, Penguin 1972, ch. 1, p. 8). “Civilisation” is an implicit sneer at an earlier BBC series called Civilization (1969), a survey and celebration of European classical art by the gentile art-critic Kenneth Clark. Where Clark surveyed and celebrated, Berger wanted to cut and condemn.
In other words, Ways of Seeing falls squarely into what Kevin MacDonald calls the Culture of Critique, the hostile Jewish commentary on and subversion of White European culture and history. That’s why Berger began the series with that deliberately shocking scene, the literally cutting critique of Botticelli that separated a beautiful White woman from both her partner and her painter.

The series drew directly on the ideas of the Jewish Marxist Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), one of the founders of the Frankfurt School. As Brenton Sanderson has described at TOO, “For Frankfurt School intellectual Walter Benjamin the purpose of modern art was to spread the kind of cultural pessimism that would bring on the revolution, insisting that ‘To organise pessimism means nothing other than to expel the moral metaphor from politics.’”

Benjamin was one of the Marxist mentors behind that blade wielded against Botticelli on the BBC. Thankfully, Berger was cutting a reproduction of Venus and Mars, not the real thing, but his hostility and hatred were perfectly clear nonetheless.

Trannies as torturers
That’s why that British programme in 1972 helps explain the French riots in 2026. The same hostility and hatred, mutatis mutandis, have been on display in Paris and other great French cities, where the non-White shock-troops of the war on the White West have rioted, looted, burned and destroyed with the enthusiastic support of White leftists. Except that some of those leftists won’t in fact be White. Instead, they’ll be Jewish like John Berger, the communist who created Ways of Seeing and donated half of the money he won for a prestigious literary prize to the British Black Panthers. He kept the other half to fund his work for a book on “migrant workers in Europe.”

That support for non-White migrants is another way in which Berger’s anti-White activism casts light on the riots in France. As a close student of the Frankfurt School, Berger believed that non-Whites and radical students would replace the White working-class as the battering-ram of revolution in the West. The White working-class had failed to fulfil the role assigned to it in classical Marxist theory, which incorrectly forecast an uprising of “the proletariat” against capitalism and the bourgeoisie.

And so, betrayed by the White workers, the heavily Jewish revolutionary left turned to non-Whites, students and other groups alienated from, and hostile to, the culture, history and traditions of the White West. That explains the mud-flood, the mass migration of non-Whites from the Third World into the West. But it also explains the rise of the biologically nonsensical and sexually perverted ideology known as transgenderism. As Nick Griffin has noted: “While the rank-and-file of the coming leftist uprisings against populist parties which make it into office will be ethnic minorities and middle-class students, the actual shock troops – the ones doing the assassinations and, post-victory, running the prison camps, pulling out fingernails and sexually assaulting inmates with truncheons – will be transexuals.”

Three goy actors, one Jewish script
All three groups – non-Whites, students, and troons (transgender goons) – are tools of the hostile Jewish elite. In particular, the mud-flood has been organized by Jews and their shabbos goyim against the clear opposition of the White majority in every White nation that has experienced it. France is no exception, and her chief shabbos goy for the past nine years has been president Emmanuel Macron. As I’ve described before at the Occidental Observer, Macron is remarkably similar to Tony Blair and Barack Obama. It’s as though three gentile actors have been recruited to follow the same Jewish script in three once-great Western nations.

Like Blair and Obama, Macron is a posturing narcissist with a peculiar wife and is long rumored to be secretly homosexual. It’s certain that, like Blair and Obama again, Macron is in a life-long love-affair with the sound of his own voice. The parallels continue: Macron worked for Jews before entering politics, in his case as an “investment banker” at Rothschild & Co. He was lavishly funded by Jews as he rose with unnatural speed to power, making big promises of unity and renewal as he rode a wave of friendly media coverage to an overwhelming election victory. But he never fulfilled his big promises, particularly on border-control, and having entered the Elysée Palace on a tide of popular acclaim he is leaving it on a tide of popular contempt and disillusionment.

Perplexing the hexagon

Macron and his peculiar mannish wife Brigitte attended a Celine Dion concert on one of the days that the mud-flood was pouring into the heart of Paris from les banlieues, the crime-ridden, White-deserted suburbs of the city where non-White rape-gangs have flourished just as they have in Britain, Sweden and Australia. Macron’s taste in music is execrable, and his choice of words was risible in the televised speech he made in response to the looting, rioting, and destruction of the mud-flood. With a perfectly straight face, he began his speech like this:

My dear fellow citizens, I am speaking to you tonight at a moment of extreme gravity, following the events that unfolded yesterday in many cities across France—both in mainland France and in our overseas territories. Yesterday, Saturday, October 17 [2026], agitators from far-left fringe groups, joined by numerous criminals, unleashed unbridled violence in our cities. Businesses were looted; public buildings, shops, and town halls were attacked — some even destroyed. Hundreds of police officers and gendarmes were injured.

As we look at these images, we all ask ourselves: what is going through their minds? How can French people do this to France? Why burn down the town hall in Limoges, the tourist office in Lyon, storm the town hall in Marseille, or attack the prefect’s residence in Bordeaux? How could they reach such a point? Nothing justifies it, nothing explains it, and nothing excuses it. (AI translation of Macron’s “Address to the French People,” 18th October 2026)

Mes chers compatriotes, je m’adresse à vous ce soir dans un moment d’une extrême gravité, après ce que nous avons vécu hier dans de nombreuses villes de France, en hexagone comme dans nos Outre-mer. Hier, samedi 17 octobre, des factieux, issus de groupuscules d’ultra-gauche, rejoints par de nombreux délinquants, se sont livrés à une violence débridée dans nos villes. Des commerces ont été pillés, des bâtiments publics, des magasins, des mairies ont été attaqués et pour certains détruits. Plusieurs centaines de policiers et de gendarmes ont été blessés.

En regardant ces images, nous nous sommes tous demandé, qu’ont-ils dans la tête ? Comment des Français peuvent faire cela à la France ? Pourquoi brûler la mairie de Limoges, l’office de tourisme à Lyon, envahir la mairie à Marseille ou attaquer la résidence du préfet à Bordeaux ? Comment peuvent-ils en arriver là ? Rien ne le justifie, rien ne l’explique, rien ne l’excuse. (Macron’s “Adresse aux Français,” Publié le 18 octobre 2026)

So Macron thinks that the riots must have perplexed the “hexagon,” that is, the mainland of France, which is roughly hexagonal on a map. He asked: “How can French people do this to France?” The glaringly obvious answer for the mud-flood side of the riots is that Blacks and Arabs aren’t French and hate France. The glaringly obvious answer for the White-leftist side of the riots is that leftists believe in power, not patriotism, and that like their Black-and-brown allies they exult in destroying what they are incapable of creating. Macron went on to claim of the disorder that “Nothing justifies it, nothing explains it and nothing excuses it.” In fact, the disorder is perfectly explicable, because it’s perfectly justifiable in the eyes of those who committed it. They hate the White nation of France, its art, architecture, culture, history and symbols. Above all they hate the White native French whose ancestors made France great and who are custodians of that greatness.

Most of the mud-flood are too stupid to see beyond the transient joys of looting and destruction, but leftists in France have the same shining vision as their comrades in Britain, America and the rest of the West. They want to destroy White civilization and rule the ruins. That’s why Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the 75-year-old leader of La France Insoumise, the “France Unbowed” party, speaks of La Nouvelle France, “New France,” the youthful, racially rainbowed France of Algerians and Angolans, Moroccans and Malians, Tunisians and Togolese, destined to replace the old France, which he’s called tout blanc, tout moche – “all white, all ugly.” I strongly suspect that Mélenchon has Jewish ancestry, perhaps through converso Jews expelled from Spain in the Middle Ages to his natal city of Tangier in Morocco. Whether or not he’s partly or wholly Jewish, he is certainly following a Jewish manual in his war on the White West. With one important exception, it’s the same manual that was followed in a famous French film by the radical Jewish director Matthieu Kassovitz. On the 20th anniversary of the film’s release, its vision of a multi-racial coalition of the oppressed against White racism and xenophobia was celebrated in the Guardian in 2015:

The film was called La Haine (Hate) and was the story of three young men in one of the wretched housing projects outside Paris, commonly referred to as la banlieue. The three lads were a north African, a black guy and an eastern European Jew […] They were cheeky, funny and likable – a gang of what the French call “branleurs”, which is literally translated as “wankers” but really means young guys who mess about. The core of the story was, however, that they were also full of rage – against the police, but ultimately against a society that has pushed them to the margins. Much of the film’s comedy as well as its social comment comes from the gang’s misadventures in central Paris, a world as distant and alien to them as America.

The plot is relatively simple, centring on the fact that Vinz, the angry young Jew, has got hold of a gun stolen from the police. He threatens to use it against them if his mate Abdel dies from his injuries after being held in police custody. When Abdel does die, Vinz’s moment for revenge comes when he has the chance to kill a neo-Nazi skinhead. He backs away, however, and finally hands the gun over to Hubert, the black boxer who is the most philosophical of the gang and totally against violence. The film ends with Vinz being accidentally shot dead by a policeman, who is taunting him with a gun. The shocking and powerful final scene is a standoff between Hubert and cop pointing guns at each other; the scene is framed by the traumatised face of Saïd, the north African member of the trio, and a voiceover saying that this is the “story of a society falling apart”. (“La Haine 20 years on: what has changed?,” The Guardian, 3rd May 2015)

As I said in my article “Dreams of Eurocide: Non-Whige Immigration as a Weapon of Race-War” at the Occidental Observer in 2016, La Haine proved very popular with leftists right around the world. After all, it showed them what they wanted to see: that “cheeky, funny and likeable” minority youths in France are being cruelly oppressed by racist Whites. The film didn’t, of course, explore the epidemic of gang-rape in the banlieues, because that would have shown the minority scamps in the wrong light. As the George Floyd, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown hysterias in America also prove, leftists don’t like to complicate their morality tales with anything so sordid as reality.

Pacifist Black and merciful Jew
Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his fellow leftists still believe in that morality tale of non-Whites being cruelly oppressed by racist Whites in France. But their morality tale isn’t quite the same as that of Matthieu Kassovitz, the director of La Haine. As I pointed out in 2016, it was risible that his idea of a coalition of the oppressed was “a sensitive Arab, a pacifist Black and a merciful Jew.” First of all, those adjectives invert rather than reflect the psychology of the races in question. Second, it was entirely obvious in 2016 that la haine – “the hate” – of Arabs and Blacks in France was directed firmly against Jews, whom they rightly saw as the most powerful group in the French elite. Contra the Guardian, Jews are not numbered amongst those whom French “society” “has pushed … to the margins.” However, Jews have still been able to exploit non-Whites and their misbehavior for their own advantage. Anti-White activists like Moshe Kantor, head of the European Jewish Congress, have used Muslim terrorism to demand ever more surveillance and ever less free speech, not remigration. The part-Jewish philosemite Mark Steyn has written constantly about Muslim attacks on Jews in Europe and portrays Jews as innocent, powerless victims gagged by Europe’s pro-Muslim ideology and harsh laws against “hate-speech.” But he’s never discussed the central role of Jews both in creating those laws and in opening Europe’s borders to the Muslim World.

What was obvious about relations between non-Whites and Jews in 2015 is even more obvious in 2026. Alas, a glittering Jewish dream has faded to black in more ways than one. Jews dreamed of smashing the White West and creating a rainbow Europe firmly under Jewish control. But the colors of the rainbow have revolted: those non-Whites and leftists in France rioted, looted and destroyed whilst flaunting the flag of Palestine, which has become an even more potent symbol of anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish rebellion since Israel’s mass-murderous war on Gaza. If Mélenchon speaks of La Nouvelle France, you could say that Jews dreamed of La Jouvelle France. It would be a Nouvelle France where non-Whites and les jeunes, “the young,” could jouir, “rejoice,” in the overthrow of their old White oppressors. But look and listen a little closer and it’s apparent that Jouvelle France also contains joug, “yoke,” and ju, “Jewish.”

“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!”
That was the Jewish dream: la Jouvelle France would be a rainbow France as firmly under the Jewish yoke as the early Soviet Union. But the Jewish dream is as dead as the Jewish art-critic John Berger, the cutting culture-of-critiquer who had moved to France in 1962 because he disliked England so much. Berger died in the affluent and hideously White Parisian suburb of Antony, Hauts-de-Seine, in 2017. He had published a book in support of “Migrant Workers in Europe” way back in 1975, so he certainly supported the mud-flood during his decades in France and opposed the hate-filled fascists of the Front National (FN), the National Front, under its leaders Jean-Marie Le Pen and then Le Pen’s daughter Marine. After all, Berger believed in the old Jewish idea that non-White immigration was good for Jews precisely because it was bad for Whites. Like the also deceased Dr Richard Stone in Britain — the Jewish brains behind the Black-worshiping martyr-cult of St Stephen Lawrence, Berger thought of Muslims and other non-Whites as “natural allies” of Jews in the Jewish war on the White West.

But how did those “natural allies” respond to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel? Oy gevalt!, they flooded the streets of Paris and other great Western cities in support of gore-splattered Hamas, not of grieving Israel. Those hate-marches and the accompanying pro-Palestinian activism have convinced many powerful and influential Jews to abandon their support for the mud-flood and their opposition to populist parties like the FN. It’s now known as the Rassemblement National (RN), the National Rally, because Marine Le Pen has broken with the past, dediabolized her party and rendered it respectable. In other words, she’s made it Jew-friendly, and she’s been duly rewarded with a clear path to the Elysée Palace in the presidential election of 2027. The riots of October 2026 have made her path even clearer, because the chaos and destruction have shown even more French Whites that the mud-flood will inevitably submerge French civilization if things remain as they are.

But the way the riots have helped Le Pen upward in the polls makes it entirely plausible that the riots themselves were helped along by Jews in the French Deep State or Israeli intelligence. Many Jews now believe that What’s good for Le Pen will be good for Jews, because like Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Le Pen will be a shabbos shiksa, a female servant of the Jews, once she enters office. Le Pen won’t favor Muslims and other non-Whites, like previous presidents, but she won’t favor Whites either. Instead, she’ll continue to do what French presidents, American presidents, German chancellors and British prime ministers have done for so many decades: to favor and fawn over the Jews. In short, although Jews may have abandoned their dream of la Jouvelle France, they still dream that l’Hexagone will remain la France sous le joug juif, France under the Jewish yoke.

But we can hope that their dream will not be fulfilled. As the disastrous Israel-directed war on Iran has clearly shown, the best-laid plans of mice and mensches often go astray.