Anti-Jewish Writing

Wagner Reclaimed: A Review of “The Ring of Truth” by Roger Scruton, Part 1

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Roger Scruton is Britain’s (many would say the world’s) leading conservative philosopher and intellectual. His prolific output includes books on philosophy, politics, art, architecture, music and aesthetics. Scruton, who was knighted in 2016, writes with unusual clarity and fluency and is a model for how to combine analytical rigor with lucidity and accessibility. His critiques of leftist thought are, however, ultimately hamstrung by his unwillingness to stray outside the bounds of acceptable thought. Scruton has assiduously avoided straying into the forbidden fields of race realism or an honest discussion of the Jewish Question.

Despite his timid and ultimately ineffectual brand of intellectual conservatism, Scruton has much to offer readers on the Alt-Right. He has a profound knowledge of European high culture and particularly the Western musical tradition. His analyses of the German composer Richard Wagner are always insightful, and his 2016 book The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung is no exception. It offers readers a rich account of Wagner’s masterpiece though an examination of its drama, music, symbolism and philosophy. Scruton’s goal is to interpret one of the supreme works of the European imagination to “show its relevance to the world in which we live.”

Wagner’s Ring cycle is enormous in every way. Performed over four evenings, and made up of Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, it lasts some fifteen hours. Its composition began in 1848, a year when Europe was torn by nationalist and democratic revolutions, but not finished until 26 years later. The final product is widely considered the finest piece of musical theatre ever written, and even critics of Wagner grudgingly acknowledge the magnitude and importance  of his achievement, agreeing with Tchaikovsky’s assessment that: “Whatever one might think of Wagner’s titanic work, no one can deny the monumental nature of the task he set himself, and which he has fulfilled; nor the heroic inner strength needed to complete the task. It was truly one of the greatest artistic endeavors which the human mind has ever conceived.”[1] The German critic Wilhelm Mohr, who had originally dismissed Bayreuth as “cloud-cuckoo land,” left the 1876 premiere of The Ring comparing Wagner to the “two masters of all masters, Shakespeare and Beethoven.”[2]

The Ring began life as a single drama, devoted to the story of Siegfried’s death as Wagner had extracted and embellished it from his reading of the old German Nibelungenlied and the Icelandic Völsunga saga. The original is a far cry from the masterpiece that Wagner eventually composed from its useable fragments. He looked for a subject that would provide a suitably large-scale vehicle for his vision of contemporary German society and destiny. The result, notes Scruton, while “far from authentic as an account of Viking theology,” is nevertheless “a remarkable attempt to give coherence and meaning to the pagan narratives.”[3] The final product, which Wagner intended to “involve all life” encompasses an emotional spectrum wider than any other opera, from superhuman rage and self-annihilating heroism to the meanest of base emotions. Read more

English Translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “200 Years Together”

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There is a project to publish (long-overdue) translations of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together. So far, they have posted Chapters 2, 3, 6, and 7, with more on the way. The website is: https://twohundredyearstogether.wordpress.com/ The translation reads very smoothly and seems quite professional.

 

Review: Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem [Part Two of Two]

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Friedrich-Nietzsche-und-Richard-Wagner

Nietzsche and Wagner

Go to Part One

Was Nietzsche bold or stupid? As stated above, I don’t think he quite fully grasped the scale of the ethnic conflict subtly playing out in Germany at that time, or the sheer power already enjoyed by Jews. For someone of his (then lowly) position, his 1872 lecture appears to me as a step too soon. Wagner had of course taken even further steps against Jewish influence — but the older man possessed significantly more stature and legitimacy. Nietzsche sent his lecture notes to Wagner on February 4, and the composer replied cautiously. Wagner, who was fully aware of the damage that could be wrought by Jews on lone targets like himself, responded: “I say to you: that’s the way it is. … But I am concerned about you, and wish with my entire heart that you don’t ruin yourself.” Cosima, Wagner’s wife, also wrote to Nietzsche expressing concern. Starting by citing Goethe (‘Everything significant is uncomfortable’), she said that his ‘boldness’ and ‘bluntness’ surprised her. In a later letter she makes her concerns more explicit, stating that she wanted him to take some “maternal” advice so that he should “avoid stirring up a hornet’s nest” :

Do you really understand me? Don’t mention the Jews, and especially not en passant; later, when you want to take up this gruesome fight, in the name of God, but not at the very outset, so that on your path you won’t have all this confusion and upheaval. I hope you don’t misunderstand me: you know that in the depths of my soul I agree with your utterance. But not now and not in this way.

According to Cosima’s diaries, Nietzsche was summoned to a meeting with her and Wagner on February 12 to discuss the lecture. We can only speculate at what precisely was said, but Nietzsche dropped the Jewish reference from the published version of his lecture and nothing similar to it would ever again appear in his speeches or published writings. He would continue to attack the evils of the press, newspapers, financial affairs, the stock exchange, modernity, urban life, and cosmopolitanism — but he would never again mention them in conjunction with Jews or Judaism. Holub argues that the episode taught Nietzsche that he should not mention the Jews by name and certainly not attack them in print. He would thereafter adopt the same ‘cultural code’ that many anti-Jewish intellectuals were forced to utilize as a means of fighting the culture war without being labelled ‘anti-Semitic.’ Read more

Review: Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem [Part One of Two]

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 nietzsches-jewish-problem

‘Wagner himself asserts about Nietzsche that a flower could have come from this bulb. Now only the bulb remains, really a loathsome thing.’
Cosima Wagner, 1878.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s puzzling stance on Jews and Judaism has perplexed me for the better part of a decade, so I was intrigued and optimistic about Princeton University Press’s 2015 publication of Robert Holub’s Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism. Broadly speaking, I’m sympathetic to certain elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy, particularly its rejection of equality and the concept of the ‘will to power.’ However, I can’t say I ever came close to describing myself as a ‘Nietzschean’ in the same way that the late Jonathan Bowden was fond of doing. One of the reasons for my hesitation in claiming affinity with Nietzsche’s worldview was that I couldn’t escape the impression that its nihilism was often destructive ‘for the sake of it,’ a quality that has endeared it to the Left, past and present. Then there was Nietzsche’s, to my mind unforgivable, habit of lauding the Hebrew over the German. More importantly though, I couldn’t perceive any true coherence or solidity in Nietzsche’s writing beyond his celebrated aphorisms. Taken as a whole, the philosophy of Nietzsche was apt to strike me as too intentionally fluid; too deliberately open to interpretation. Nowhere was this non-committal stance more apparent than in Nietzsche’s sparse, vague, contradictory and often quite opportunistic references to Jews and Judaism.

As one might expect of a philosopher as enigmatic as Nietzsche, his work has been approached awkwardly and suspiciously by scholars and ideologues alike. His attitudes towards Jews, in particular, have been debated, discussed and fought over from the very beginning of his public career. Nowhere, and at no time, was a consensus ever reached. During the Third Reich he was both ‘recruited for the cause’ by some, and rejected outright by others. His foundational place in the National Socialist philosophical canon was thus never assured, primarily because of his nihilism, his hostility towards Nationalism, and his ambivalence regarding Jews. Confusion still reigns. Modern scholarship has been divided between those who condemn Nietzsche outright as a ‘racist’ reactionary and a proto-Fascist, and those who highlight his vocal opposition to political anti-Semitism as thus seek his social exoneration and academic rehabilitation. As noted above, elements of Nietzsche remain strongly attractive to the Left. Therefore, where total exoneration of anti-Semitism has been found difficult, blame for ‘corrupting’ Nietzsche and shaping him as an ‘anti-Semite’ has been attributed variously to his one-time guru, Richard Wagner, or his sister Elisabeth, who married Bernhard Förster, perhaps the leading figure in nineteenth-century political anti-Semitism. The result of these battles has not been a clarification of the historical record, but an ever-thickening web of biased interpretations, white-washing, and pseudo-history. Read more

 “The Lobby-That-Doesn’t-Exist”: Politicians and Pundits on Jewish Influence in France

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French President François Mitterrand spoke of “a powerful and harmful Jewish lobby”

French President François Mitterrand spoke of “a powerful and harmful Jewish lobby”

There are few things as difficult to talk about as Jewish elites and Jewish ethnocentrism (which, translated into left-wing parlance, could be termed “Jewish privilege” and “Jewish racism”). For the French case, Paul-Éric Blanrue (see my previous article on his work) usefully documents the numerous cases in which various prominent figures and journalists have spoken of Jewish ethnocentrism or “the Jewish lobby.”

Jewish influence is typically remarked upon by bragging activist Jews, by senior politicians near death, by uncritical commentators, or by critical commentators who, being swiftly punished, usually learn to keep quiet. The penalty for criticism – universal ostracism – is such that Blanrue speaks of “the-lobby-that-doesn’t-exist”: the lobby that everyone knows about and everyone knows must never be spoken about (lest they find themselves in the dock with Alain Soral and Dieudonné M’bala M’bala).

But prominent figures, even at the highest levels of the state, have spoken of Jewish power in France despite this threat. In 1995, President François Mitterrand, near the end of his life and on his last day in office, referred in private to “the powerful and harmful influence of the Jewish lobby in France.”[1] Mitterrand was specifically referring to the constant politico-media pressure that has made the Shoah “the official religion of the French Republic” (in the words of Jewish pundit Éric Zemmour[2]). Read more

St. John Chrysostom on the Jews: Creating an Anti-Jewish Group Strategy

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Body of St. John Chrysostom (Chapel of the Choir – Basilica of St. Peter – Vatican City)

Body of St. John Chrysostom (Chapel of the Choir – Basilica of St. Peter – Vatican City)

A correspondent just notified me of a blog post from 2010 on St. John Chrysostom by Roger Pearse, a scholar of Christianity in the ancient world (“Some remarks about John Chrysostom’s homilies against the Jews“). Pearse quotes from a 1935 summary of Chrysostom’s writings whose author, A. L. Williams, notes that Chrysostom was motivated by the fact that many Christians were

frequenting Jewish synagogues,  were attracted to the synagogal Fasts and Feasts, sometimes by the claims to superior sanctity made by the followers of the earlier religion, so that an oath taken in a synagogue was more binding than in a church,  and sometimes by the offer of charms and amulets in which Jews of the lower class dealt freely.

Williams concluded:

We gather from these Homilies that the Jews were a great social, and even a great religious, power in Antioch.

Exactly. As discussed in Chapter 3 of Separation and Its Discontents, the phenomenon of Judaizing Christians in the ancient world is a marker of Jewish power at the time. For example, the rather limited anti-Jewish actions of the government during the 150 years following the Edict of Toleration of 313, which included many attempts to ban the common practice of Jews enslaving non-Jews, are interpreted by historian Bernard S. Bachrach “as attempts to protect Christians from a vigorous, powerful, and often aggressive Jewish gens.”  Jews as a powerful group were looked up to and emulated by many non-Jews, just as today we see the same phenomenon, not only Bush-yarmulkaamong many Evangelical Christians, but also Hollywood celebrities who dabble in kabbalah and pretty much the entire non-Jewish political class which we see making pilgrimages to Israel and proudly wearing yarmulkes and displaying menorahs during photo-ops. Read more

The Bizarre World of Dr Theodore Isaac Rubin

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We all have our guilty pleasures. One of mine is that I occasionally love reading the often crazy and convoluted theories of Jews who wrestle with the question: why have Jewish populations attracted so much animosity through the centuries? Whether the authors call it anti-Semitism, Judeophobia, Jew-hatred or any other label which is fashionable these days, the theories, abstractions, emotions, obfuscations and intellectual blindness in their works rarely fails to shock or amuse me. The productions of the psychoanalysts are among the most dependable for raising a chuckle. Clearing out a bookshelf recently, I found an old favorite tucked away and decided to give it one last read before consigning it to its rightful home — the trashcan. And before it began its fateful final journey, I took some notes in the hope of putting together an article through which I might share with you some of its choice pieces of dubious wisdom.

Although written in 2009, Ted Rubin’s Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind,[1] is in several respects a relic of a by-gone era in that it is a classic work of old-school Freudianism and psychoanalysis. Kevin MacDonald has noted in The Culture of Critique that:

One way in which psychoanalysis has served specific Jewish interests is the development of theories of anti-Semitism that bear the mantle of science by deemphasizing the importance of conflicts of interest between Jews and gentiles. Although these theories very greatly in detail — and, as typical of psychoanalytic theories generally, there is no way to empirically decide among them — within this body of theory anti-Semitism is viewed as a form of gentile psychopathology resulting from projections, repressions, and reaction formations stemming ultimately from a pathology-inducing society.[2]

Read more