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Critical Race Theory is Not The Problem. It Is the Symptom of a Bigger Problem

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Parents have recently discovered that the education establishment—the odious class of persons consisting of professional school administrators, teachers certified by our social-justice-warrior education schools, and, often, disconnected boards of education “representing” gigantic swaths of voters, often representing districts the size of a small State—have inserted a program of so-called “critical race theory” into the K-12 curriculum.

The program typically has content similar to the mandatory diversity sessions at major corporations, in which Whites trudge into a large conference room and hear why they are all racist.

Parents are rightly outraged that their children are being subjected to anti-White propaganda instead of an actual education.  However, parents are making a big mistake.  They are reacting as if this is something new, as if only a few years ago all was well with modern public education.

Not so.  Critical Race Theory, or “CRT”, is simply the latest propaganda program snaking its way through the school system.  In fact, it seems reasonable to say that elites have been progressively attempting to use the public school system for more than 100 years as a method to anaesthetize successive generations, to acclimate them to automatic obedience to authority, and to reduce over time the actual educational content in the schools themselves.  Then, with the Federal Aid to Education Act of 1965, came an acceleration:  the centralized push of anti-White, pro-pre-marital sex, pro-globo-homo programs, one by one, through the system.  At first the propaganda was “justified” as a way to force southern Whites to “buy into” racial integration.  A form of revived reconstruction for the much-loathed Southern States.  Very quickly, however, the true intentions of the masters and commanders in Washington and compliant state capitals became evident:  a full scale “reconstruction” a la 1871 being forced on the entire country.  No one, it seemed, was sufficiently pro-Negro, pro-gay, pro-abortion, or pro-condoms and pro-pre-marital sex.  And the schools had damn well better take care of that.

We start from the beginning.

As John Taylor Gatto, a New York City school teacher for 30 years, set forth in his multiplicity of books on this topic (see, e.g. John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, 2008) in the mid-nineteenth century the purpose of “public education” turned from the traditional colonial idea of producing an independent-thinking citizenry capable of participating in and supporting a free democratic republic into a system whose ultimate purpose was to regiment the vast majority of the population into a Prussian sense of passivity.  This program accelerated when, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the foundations founded by large manufacturers and mineral extractors like Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil realized that the old-style education would produce people unwilling to work long hours at boring jobs for a single employer, such as the factories run by the giant capitalists of the day.  In fact the old-style school system would undoubtedly produce nothing more than a bunch of hell-raising troublemakers (think “give me Liberty or give me death”) that would continually disrupt production lines.

The program developed by the foundations picked up a number of wack-job pseudo intellectuals to put an acceptable cover on their intentions, the most well-known of whom was the infamous John Dewey.  Dewey’s basic premise, set out in his 1897 book, My Pedagogic Creed (available on Archive.org), effectively was that schools should stop teaching anything—i.e.,  facts, history, geography, grammar, arithmetic, Latin; rather, schools would teach children to cooperate with each other and, most importantly, with the teacher.  The intent clearly was to produce generations of students so ignorant of their own history and unable to function independently that they would generally be amenable to the absorption of any propaganda pushed their way by government or private industry so that they could become mere cogs in someone’s big wheel.

The big blocks to the implementation of such a program were that virtually every school was controlled by a separate school board, and public schools were financed by local taxes, not by the state or federal governments.  In 1880, for example, the U.S., with a population of approximately 50 million, had 140,000 school boards.  Thus, local parents and taxpayers—essentially the same thing in that era of big families (often farm families)—hired and fired the principals and the teachers, approved the textbooks, and controlled the curriculum.  The likelihood that they would knowingly subvert their children’s education at the behest of the Rockefellers was slim indeed.  This posed a big problem.

How was one to force a centralized program through such a fractured system?  The methods were many, and, over time, stunningly effective.

  • First, school district “consolidation” always sold on the basis of “efficiency” and expanded opportunity. Hence the mega high schools of today and the mega school districts.  Today, the number of school districts has been reduced to 14,000, many comprising such mega districts as Loudon County (60,000 in 1960, now 400,000); or New York City (8 million).  The larger a district becomes, the less accountable to local parents and taxpayers.  Effectively, many school districts have become what in the U.K. are called “quangos”—self-perpetuating entities like the FDA or the SEC virtually unaccountable to elected authority.
  • Second, a nationwide system of “teacher certification” that would require—or at least strongly encourage—public schools to hire only teachers that had been certified as professional teachers, mainly through attendance at soon-to-be formed teachers colleges.
  • Third, the funding of a whole series of teachers colleges, each of which would, over time, push the desired centralized dogma onto the teachers. Some turned out to be worse than others, but, they gradually became what could be called propaganda centers, with less and less educational content and more whipped cream stirred up by centralized bureaucrats.
  • Fourth, the flip-side of steps two and three—the consequent elimination of normal college graduates from the certified teacher rolls. Out goes the Yale history or mathematics graduate, in comes the SJW educated in very little from a mediocre teacher’s college.  The low IQ, uneducated mass of teachers was picture perfect for a system intentionally designed to eliminate educational content and maximize the teaching of docility and, later, outright propaganda.  Attempts to change certification to provide that all college graduates should be automatically certified have been fought tooth and nail.  Befuddled conservatives can’t figure out why, since the proposal is so logical, but of course this could not be done!  Doing so would undermine the whole program!

Things were moving along, but then the whole program got a jet-fueled boost by the Federal Education Act of 1965.

Contrary to what one might think, the Federal Aid to Education Act of 1965 did not provide ONE DOLLAR to schools or classrooms.  The sole permissible use of the money was to fund and keep in place vast state-level education bureaucracies.  Such centralized bureaucracies, whose employees would undoubtedly be staffed by “professional” school administrators educated at the crappy teacher’s colleges, were custom-designed to assist the federal government in substantially centralizing state education through the imposition of detailed state-wide rules on curricula and hiring, as well as to assist in pushing through the system the propaganda favored by the elites in Washington D.C.

From 1965 on, the entire educational bureaucracy has been grindingly waging a war against Whites, and a war in favor of “sex education”—read, the promotion of pre-marital sex, homosexuality, and now transgenderism.  Old books in school libraries not furthering the narrative were quietly stripped out of school libraries and curricula, propagandistic “new” books pushing a pro-Negro, pro-homosexual, and pro-free sex program were inserted into school libraries and curricula.

Only in the latest twist has CRT been introduced.  However, CRT is no more than a modest extension of the anti-White, anti-family curricula that has been pushed through the system since 1965—another indication that the countercultural revolution of the 1960s has been a watershed even in American history.  In that sense, “educators” who state that “CRT is nothing new” have a valid point.  But the real issue is: will parents unite to strip away the whole disastrous system and its already-imbedded programs to start anew?

Here are some modest suggestions that might be implementable:

  • Subdivide school districts so that each school has its own school board (may require state legislation). If it cannot be done officially, do it unofficially.
  • Along with (i), over time, work to reduce substantially the size of any one school. The mega-school of three to four thousand children needs to be replaced gradually with much smaller schools.
  • If permitted under state law, NEVER hire another “certified” teacher; if state law does not permit this, work to change state law.
  • Never hire a “certified” “professional” school administrator. They hate you, your race, and your family.  Instead, hire administrators—principals and district superintendents only from the local community, and make sure they are people who can be trusted.  Again, if state law does not permit this, work to change state law.
  • Demand that a detailed syllabus and reading list for every course be posted on a school’s website. Have a parent’s committee—assisted by independent scholars selected solely by the parents—select the books and design the midterm and final exams and make the teachers teach to your test, not someone else’s.  In that way, teachers—even if “credentialed” social justice warriors—will be forced to teach your curriculum, not someone else’s.
  • Work to change law to end statewide mandates such as (a) mandatory bus transport, (b) mandatory nurses and psychiatrists on staff, and (c) mandatory school lunch. These programs can almost double the cost of local education and provide no educational benefit.
  • Avoid where possible the use of textbooks, particularly in history or English courses. The textbook industry is as corrupt and woke as the federal Department of Education. Use original works wherever possible.  If not possible, except perhaps with math textbooks, use only textbooks 50 years old or more.  Using old textbooks, especially those out of copyright, can substantially reduce the cost of books at a local school.

Depending on the state, not all, but much of this can be done by a local school board.  If these steps are taken, a lot of the John Dewey/1965 Act system will literally be swept away at the local level.

If, instead, school boards restrict themselves to rules prohibiting CRT, the result will be failure.  The already corrupted system will just fall back on the pre-CRT anti White curricula—not to mention the globo-homo-trans curricula—it was already promulgating.

The real question, thus, is not the students but the parents.  Have they been so anesthetized by THEIR public education that they cannot act?

If so, perhaps CRT—and what will inevitably follow—is a well-deserved punishment.

As the Peruvian author Nicholas Gomez Davilla noted in his Schola to an Implicit Text:  “the modern age will not be punished; it is the punishment.”

Jewish Loot and Neglected Fruit: How the Mainstream Right Serves Jews and Betrays Whites

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“Low-hanging fruit!” cry deluded right-wingers all over the West. “Why doesn’t my favored party on the mainstream right pluck that fruit and defeat the left?” Well, they’ve been crying that for decades and will still be crying it when the left pack them off to a slave-labor camp or an organic gas-chamber. Some of those right-wingers are too stupid to see the truth; some are too frightened to admit it. Their favored party on the mainstream right doesn’t pluck the low-hanging fruit because it doesn’t want to defeat the left. And it doesn’t want to defeat the left because it is the left. That is, it’s financed and controlled by Jews who support the left and its anti-White, anti-Christian, anti-Western agenda.

The lies and delusions of perverts

Take the question of transgenderism. In 2021 Boris Johnson, British prime minister and leader of the so-called Conservative party, was presented with some low-hanging fruit — ripe, delicious, and trembling on its stalk. Johnson was asked to affirm that “only women have a cervix” after his supposed opponent, the Labour leader Keir Starmer, had said that this simple statement of biological fact was “transphobic.” According to Starmer, “it is not right” and “should not be said.”

The Goy Grovel: Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and Boris Johnson betraying Whites and serving Jews

If Johnson had wanted to stand up for “conservative values,” defeat the left, and rally millions of ordinary Whites to his party, he would have said that, yes, of course only women have a cervix and that the Labour party are pandering to the lies and delusions of perverted and mentally ill men. But Johnson didn’t say that. He’s a cuckservative and he cucked. If he’d spoken the truth about transgenderism, he would have pleased ordinary Whites. But he would have angered Jews. As Kenneth Vinther pointed out in his review of Scott Howard’s The Transgender-Industrial Complex (2020) at Counter Currents, transgenderism is a thoroughly kosher campaign: “at the top of the [transgender] pyramid rests a series of charming Jewish billionaires like George Soros, Paul Singer, Dan Loeb, Seth Klarman, Jennifer Pritzker, David Gelbaum, Andrew Shechtel, Sheldon Adelson, Loren Schecter, Martine Rothblatt, David T. Rubin, and Mark Hyman, to name a few.”

Take the fight to Labour!

Now take the question of racism. A typically deluded right-winger called Patrick O’Flynn has recently complained in the cuckservative Spectator about “renewed lurches into race-baiting by Labour.” He condemns Labour for demanding “a posthumous royal pardon of those who took part in an anti-slavery uprising in Guyana in 1823” and for blaming “health inequalities” and the poverty of Black-headed households on racism.

O’Flynn rightly says that all this inflated anti-racist rhetoric “will be hated” by the working-class White voters who have switched allegiance from Labour to the Conservatives. Labour’s claims “ought to be meat and drink to a competent Conservative party.” After all, he says, a “cabinet in which the Home Secretary, Chancellor, Health Secretary, Education Secretary, Business Secretary and several others are from non-white backgrounds should be taking the fight to Labour about its unfair characterisation of modern Britain.”

“Anti-racist” means “anti-white”

O’Flynn points out the obvious: “Now would be the perfect time for some of these ministers to step forward and make the case that Britain is one of the least racist countries in the world and a place that should be aspiring to a post-racial politics rather than buying into Labour’s relentless grievance-mongering.” But alas, none of those non-White ministers has stepped forward to defend Britain, so O’Flynn concludes his article on a puzzled and despondent note. Despite the low-hanging fruit waiting to plucked by the multi-hued hands of that admirably vibrant cabinet, Labour’s racial rhetoric has “gone pretty much unanswered.” O’Flynn can’t bring himself to admit the truth, you see. The Tories don’t want to defeat the left’s rhetoric on racism, let alone attack the anti-White ideology central to the concept of racism.

That’s because the Tories accept the anti-White ideology themselves and proudly proclaim themselves to be an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic party. As the Jewish Conservative Tom Tugendhat has said: “Anti-Semitism sits alongside racism, anti-Islam, homophobia, and sexism as a cretinous and divisive belief that has no place in our public life and particularly not in government.” O’Flynn doesn’t mention at the Spectator that the Pakistani Muslim Sajid Javid, one of those non-White ministers in the Tory government, did indeed recently “step forward” in response to leftist hysteria about racism. In fact, he stepped forward not once but twice. And what did Sajid Javid do after he stepped forward? He heartily agreed with the left, first about the need to stamp out racism by White sportsmen and second about the need to punish a White comedian called Jimmy Carr for a good joke about Gypsies: “When people talk about the Holocaust they talk about the tragedy of six million lives being lost to the Nazi war machine, but they never mention the thousands of Gypsies killed by the Nazis, because no one wants to talk about the positives.”

Diligently kissing Jewish backsides

In between those two anti-White interventions, Sajid Javid found time in his busy schedule to extend “early Chanukah greetings” to Britain’s tiny but very powerful Jewish community. Javid knows which side his bagel is buttered. He wants to be prime minister and that’s why he has been diligently kissing Jewish backsides ever since he entered politics.  Being anti-White is part of being pro-Jewish. The same is true of Priti Patel, the high-testosterone Indian Hindu fem-pol who was fired as a minister by Theresa May for having secret meetings with Israeli officials under the supervision of the little-known but very powerful Jew Stuart Polak, a former chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI). Theresa May didn’t object to Patel being a shabbos-shiksa, agent of Israel and cringing step’n’fetchit for Britain’s Jews. After all, May was all those things herself. No, she objected to Patel being a clumsy shabbos-shiksa and bringing Jewish control of British politics to public attention. But Patel didn’t spend long out of high office. When the part-Jewish Boris Johnson became prime minister, he appointed Patel Home Secretary and she’s now overseeing a harshening of Britain’s already draconian laws against “hate speech.”

She’s also been revealed as an obnoxious bully of her White staff. That’s poetic justice, because White officials at the Home Office are heavily leftist and have been imposing ethnic enrichment on ordinary Whites for many years. Now they’ve experienced for themselves a little — very little — of the misery inflicted by non-Whites. All the same, if rules on ministerial conduct had been followed, Patel would have been fired for the second time. But obnoxious behavior towards Whites doesn’t count. Patel performs the goy-grovel before Jews and that does count. She’s still in her post, still obeying Jewish orders, and still declining to “step forward” and defend Britain from the left’s anti-racist (and anti-White) hysteria. Rishi Sunak, the Indian Hindu Chancellor in the Tory cabinet, has also declined to step forward and bat for Britain. He’s much more intelligent than Patel, which isn’t difficult to be, and he’s a former employee of Goldman Sachs, which is exactly what you would expect him to be (Richard Sharp, his Jewish overseer at Goldman Sachs, became “the BBC’s third Jewish chairman” in 2021).

The logic of looting

At least, Sunak’s earlier work for Goldman Sachs is exactly what we haters at the Occidental Observer would expect. Sunak has been placed at the top of British politics to serve Jewish interests, not the interests of Whites. But his work for the great “vampire squid” went unremarked in another of Patrick O’Flynn’s deluded articles at the Spectator. O’Flynn was complaining that Sunak hasn’t plucked yet more low-hanging fruit. The policies Sunak is pursuing don’t help the former Labour-supporting Whites who switched to the Conservatives. Their hard work isn’t being rewarded and Sunak is deliberately pushing them down the social scale. As O’Flynn says:

Think about how this must feel to workers on roughly median earnings. Two decades ago they earned two-and-a-half times as much as minimum wage workers. Now they earn less than twice as much. By 2024, Sunak has decreed that minimum wage workers in entry level roles will be earning two-thirds of the amount that median earners do. This will represent a massive compression of wages within a single generation.

For those working people who put in a lot of effort in their schooldays compared to their more idle classmates, or who perhaps underwent apprenticeships on very low earnings at the start of their careers, this is highly unlikely to feel like progress. … Sunak has no parallel policy of ensuring that median earnings catch up as a proportion of the top 10 or 1 per cent of earners. In other words, his approach defies logic. Those in the modest middle of the pay scale have every reason to feel victimised. (Does Rishi Sunak really understand red wall voters?, [“red-wall voters” = traditionally Labour-supporting Whites who switched to the Tories], The Spectator, 13th November 2021)

O’Flynn is wrong. Sunak’s approach doesn’t defy logic. It’s perfectly logical for an alumnus of Goldman Sachs to continue serving plutocratic Jews, not ordinary Whites. Sunak is there to help mega-rich Jews get richer, not to defend Britain against their looting. Of course, you can’t expect O’Flynn to mention Jews in a cuckservative magazine like the Spectator. But he could at least have mentioned Sunak’s connections to Goldman Sachs and drawn the obvious conclusion. I suspect he was scared to bring an obviously Jewish bank into the argument. After all, look at what happened to the great conservative philosopher Roger Scruton when the left whipped up a hysteria about a speech he had once made in Hungary. He had criticized George Soros and said, with perfect truth, that “Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros empire.” Scruton was denounced as an “anti-Semite” by Luciana Berger, the very Jewish Member of Parliament for a very non-Jewish constituency in Liverpool.

Blind to the truth

As I described in “A Philosopher Falls,” Scruton’s response was typically cuckservative. He should have denounced Berger for her dishonesty and turned the blowtorch of his mighty intellect on the flimsy and regularly misused concept of “anti-Semitism.” He didn’t. Instead, he indignantly denied that he was an anti-Semite, thereby accepting the validity of the charge and merely rejecting its application in his particular case.

That is not how a great philosopher should behave. But then I don’t think Scruton was a great philosopher or an effective defender of Western civilization. To defend something, you have to recognize who its enemies are. Then you expose and oppose them. Jews are the central enemies of Western civilization, but far too many self-proclaimed defenders of the West are still blind to the enemy within the gates. Thanks to their blindness, they are betrayed by the Jew-controlled right again and again. When they stop being blind, they’ll stop being betrayed, because they’ll stop supporting the Jew-controlled right.

The Great Russian Restoration VI: The Retreat of the Oligarchs 

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The police operation in the Ukraine is at a standstill at the moment except in a few areas along the various fronts. The Russian army slowly, gingerly advances into the cities, cutting off sections controlled by the enemy like a kolbasa, piece by piece. Civilians fleeing the city of Mariuple have to run the Azov gauntlet with many refugees sharing accounts of being shot at and terrorized. The “nats-bat” fighters aren’t keen on letting their hostages escape. Azov, by the way, is largely composed of Russian-speaking easterners from the Dniepopetrovsk and Donbas regions. An unusually high percentage of them appear to be former prisoners or career criminals and their use of satanic and Nazi imagery begins to make more sense when you factor this in. This all, of course, makes perfect sense if you read the previous article on the Ukrainian swamp, but jars with any set narrative promoted by one side or the other. Make of this factoid what you will.

But civilians aren’t the only ones trying to escape the conflict. We’ve already talked about the celebrity caste and the journalist caste so it makes sense to spend some time now on the oligarch caste, that is on the people that finance and support Liberal Democracy in Russia (or any Democratic country, really).

The background of this story should be well-understood by now so I hope that I can avoid going into it again in any detail here. But, just to make sure that everyone is on the same page and up to speed, the story goes something like this: a pro-Western faction of Soviet party elites imploded the USSR. Nationalized assets became private i.e., up for grabs overnight. Communist Jews called up their capitalist cousins in New York who sent briefcases full of dollars to buy up state assets for pennies; a new caste of Jewish oligarchs rose up to rule the country thanks to the inept drunken rule of Boris Yeltsin; Vladimir Putin emerges as a compromise leader — a puppet of both the KGB and the oligarchs —someone who would be pliant and obedient; the new president surprises everyone and turns on part of the oligarch faction and starts arresting them while simultaneously crushing a CIA-funded Chechen uprising. Putin begins systematically consolidating his own power base and not relying on the United Russia party. An uneasy détente develops between the rest of the oligarchs and the office of the Presidency. Putin gives a speech denouncing a treacherous 5th column within the country that needs to be “spat out” like a “midge/fly” stuck in the country’s teeth. This is where we stand now — all caught up and eagerly anticipating what comes next.

Of course, Putin isn’t the only one talking about coups and subversion — one simply has to turn Fox News or MSNBC on to hear American senators and political pundits openly expressing their hopes that the oligarchs will overthrow Putin. We mentioned this in a previous article — this was the preferred strategy for dealing with Russia adopted by the Deep State and there is little indication that their plans have changed. The sanctions on Russian oligarchs appear to be an attempt to light a fire under their behinds and get them agitating for his overthrow and replacement with a Navalny-like puppet. Frankly, I don’t know how anyone doesn’t see or understand the nature of the plot at this point. Lindsay Graham as much as spilled the beans when he literally compared President Putin to Caesar and called for a Brutus to rise up and murder him. What’s more, the story of the Roman Senate vs. Caesar is the archetypical example of the eternal conflict between authoritarianism and oligarchy. I would go so far as to say that these are the only two forms of government and all other models simply lie on the spectrum in-between the two diametrically opposed ends.

In an Autocracy of any kind, be it a dictatorship, a military takeover, or a monarchy, there is one man who assumes immense power. He may have gotten there democratically or through military action or by birth. Once in power, there is little reason for him to leave, so Autocrats rarely do. Given the option, the masses would prefer and even use their right to a plebiscite (if they have one) to elect a strong, charismatic leader with unlimited power who can assume the mantle of their champion. Even Liberals have no problem admitting this preference of the people to be the case, and they simply resort to chastising the masses for their bad behavior and believing in the false siren cry of Populism. To the proponents of Oligarchy, the masses frustratingly do not share their concerns about checks and balances or so-called Liberal Democratic values and principles. The people want real solutions to their problems and they view (rightly) the tangled and corrupt system of jockeying interests and factions that any Oligarchy sets up (checks and balances) as an obstacle and an enemy. Naturally, they will attempt to appoint an Alexander the Great of sorts, a people’s champion, to cut through the Gordian Knot of graft if they can. If he proves to be good at his job, the masses would prefer that he stay there because they may not get another chance to push up one of their own to power.

But let’s put the political theorizing aside for now and see what the Russian optimates have said about the situation themselves. A recent Bloomberg article came out which had Jewish oligarch Mikhail Fridman lamenting the fact that the sanctions were imposed on him and his friends and amounted to him pleading for Washington to relent, arguing that neither he nor his friends had any real pull or power over Putin. Without information indicating anything to the contrary, we may as well take his words at face value — Putin’s position is strong and consolidated. So far, there hasn’t even been so much as a whisper of sedition from any serious potential contender for the position of a modern-day Brutus. This is probably because Putin has decided to make public examples of people who took to social media or the streets to show their support for Ukraine with immediate arrests, fines and incarceration applied liberally (heh!) by the police and the FSB.

Meanwhile, the private jets continue their mass exodus to Israel, Cyprus, and the Gulf States. When asked to comment on the travails of the oligarchs, Dmitry Medvedev blithely replied that perhaps these individuals shouldn’t have invested and stashed their money in the West and added that he himself didn’t have any condos in Miami or villas in Italy. He then no doubt shrugged before whispering “You get what you f*cking deserve!” while pointing a finger-gun at the camera and mouthing “pow” with his lips…

Alright, I embellished a tad on the last part. But the attitude from the Kremlin has certainly been one of showing absolutely no mercy. You either get with the program and support the military intervention and showdown with Russia or you out yourself as a fifth column traitor. In fact, many of Russia’s optimates have openly and publicly sided with Putin. These are the so-called “Putin-aligned” forces in the country and we will have more to say about them in a subsequent article.

The key takeaway here is that the almost two decade-long détente within Russia between the pro-West and pro-Russia factions has now been totally shattered. President Putin has made a play to consolidate more power and move the country in the direction of autarchy and autocracy by appealing to the support of the people. His recent speech at a stadium in Moscow was something you don’t see often from him — the last time we saw something comparable was when he appeared on stage after his electoral victory in 2018 and gave an emotional thank you to the Russian people for re-electing him again. But for the most part, Putin has not often utilized mass rallies as a political instrument, preferring to stream conferences with ministers and deliver pre-prepared video speeches. In that sense, he is quite unlike Trump, who built his entire movement on his high-energy political rallies where he would rail on and diss his personal and political opponents for hours at a time in front of a rapturous crowd. His populist appeal to the Russian people was answered in force: the stadium was overflowing and there were massive crowds outside it as well.

With this move, Putin has proven that he has the Russian people behind him.

None of this is particularly surprising or unexpected by the way. There is a natural course to human politics. Just as there are constant processes of disintegration and entropy at work, so too are there order-building processes as well. Countries can devolve into the most depraved forms of Liberal Democracy imaginable, but the road back to normality always remains open. The process by which this occurs is as follows: Mass Democracy ====> Populism ====> Autocracy ====> Monarchy.

Given a chance to vote in a national election, the people will support and elect a strong right-wing leader with a populist agenda. This is not speculation, this is simply the result of watching the last several centuries of political trends in the world. After the populist champion takes office, people, at the first opportunity, intend to transfer to him all the earthly power he needs to solve the problems that plague the country. If he succeeds in this, the people will bless him, wish him long years in office, and hope that he comes up with a reliable succession strategy. Few will work themselves up into a lather at the idea that the sacred democratic principle of separation of powers, term limits, and so on are being violated. If you doubt me, you simply weren’t paying attention to the whole “God-Emperor Trump” phenomenon and didn’t notice that die-hard Trumpers were waiting for their champion to declare himself dictator and go to war against the Deep State.

Trump did indeed have his Rubicon moment and, as we all saw, he foundered in the current eventually selling out his own supporters and giving up any real chance to leave a lasting legacy. Putin, in sharp contrast, has already taken Rome. It’s worth mentioning that mercy is a trait especially prevalent in extraordinary men, which, consequently, has been the undoing of many a great man. We can only hope that Putin refuses any stranded optimates begging to be readmitted and pardoned for their disloyalty. Mercy should be reserved for the people, not the treacherous international oligarchic elites who more than anyone else deserve to reap the harvest of our discontent.

Is Christianity Compatible with White Racialism?

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It is a common misconception among many to assume that Christianity is against all forms of racialism, especially that of White identity or White racial advocacy. The Christian Faith, it is argued, stands opposed to “racism” and ethnic tribalism. Believers in Jesus throughout Europe and America are urged to be “non-racist.” They are to stand against any stripe of nationalism that favors one ethnic group or nationality above another. Along with everyone else in a deracinated society as ours, White Christians too believe that “race doesn’t matter.”

Yet, are such notions supported by the New Testament itself (hereafter, NT)? Has today’s “anti-racism” been the prevailing viewpoint throughout the history of the Christian Church?

I intend to demonstrate in this article that the NT does not deny racial differences among human groups, nor does it foster a multiracial and multicultural framework for the nations. I also want to show that popular prooftexts from the Old Testament (hereafter, OT) and NT cited in defense of open borders and receiving all foreign immigrants as “the Christian thing to do” is horribly misguided and serves to work against the testimony of Christians in their respective countries.

I write as a Christian in the Reformed Baptist tradition.

Are Racial and Cultural Differences Denied in the New Testament?       

Reading through the Gospels and Epistles, one discovers that they are not particularly concerned with the subject of race in the way Westerners are today. The NT doesn’t address contemporary racial questions in ways we might prefer. There is nothing about how a society should implement “equitable racial policies” for its citizens. There is not a word about national immigration policies. Absolutely nothing that would provide a framework or some direction on how racial matters should be solved.

Yes, there is the rule that we should “do unto others as we would have done unto ourselves,” but other than some general notions, there is nothing specific, concrete, and detailed in how Christians should deal with immigration, race-mixing, and other related matters.

The NT assumes the reality of race (in contrast to the idea that “race is just a social construct”), including that of racial and ethnic differences. But it doesn’t dwell on it. Race is not the paramount focus of the Bible’s message. It’s not even a minor concern of it. This is because Christianity is fundamentally a religious category, not a racial one.

Jesus, for example, was aware of the ethnic and geographical differences between Jews and other groups living in Palestine at the time. This is evident when he addressed the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark 7:26–30. But He had no specific mission to solve “systemic racism.” He did address how people were to treat others when He spoke of “loving one’s neighbor” and “turning the other cheek.” Yet these exhortations were in the context of normal, everyday relations and not intended to serve as public social policies.

The apostle Paul was aware of the same sort of cultural and ethnic differences between Jews and Greeks. Yet at no point did Jesus and Paul attempt to erase or delegitimize genuine racial, cultural and ethnic differences among the groups they encountered.

Paul did not urge Jewish believers to abandon their Jewish culture or certain ethnic traditions that were unique to them as a people. In fact, Paul himself was quite proud of his ethnic pedigree as seen in Philippians 3:4-6 even though he thought that paled in comparison with “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (v.8).

When Paul was maligned by false teachers who accused him of teaching other Jews who are among the Gentiles to “forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children nor to walk according to the customs” in Acts 21:17, he was urged by James and the elders to ritually “purify” himself and the others with him so that “all will know that there is nothing to the things which they have been told about you, but that you yourself also walk orderly, keeping the Law” (v.24).

It is important to recognize that there is a historical transition occurring during this period from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant, and so naturally there is going to be some overlap between the two covenants. The Christian elders in Acts 21 did not want Paul’s message to be misunderstood, and they did not want people to reject it based on lies. As a form of concession, Paul subjects himself to a Jewish ritual cleansing to show he has not abandoned his people and culture.

This demonstrates that Paul was not against maintaining certain ethnic customs and traditions unique to Jews. He clearly maintained his Jewish identity. Likewise, he did not require that Gentile believers lose their unique ethnic and cultural identity either, except in those realms that conflicted with the Gospel message. Gentile believers were forbidden from idolatry, fornication, including eating meats that have been ceremoniously offered to idols (Acts 15:19–20).

These types of prohibitions are religious in nature, and not intended as a prohibition of all things ethnic or cultural. The natural deduction from it was that everything distinctive to them as a people was permissible. Greeks did not have to stop being Greeks, and Jews did not have to stop being Jewish. Paul had no interest in erasing ‘Whiteness,’ or ‘Jewishness,’ or ‘Greekness.’

In the same way, Whites do not have to cease being White and everything that goes along with their unique cultures and nationalities. Well-meaning but misguided Christians who urge Whites to jettison their Whiteness or “White privilege” are advocating things contrary to the NT. Interestingly, these same Christians never urge Blacks or Hispanics to do the same. Since Whites are a unique and distinct race from other groups, we can also advocate on behalf of our racial and cultural interests in the same way Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and Asians advocate on behalf of themselves.

When Paul gave his speech to the Athenians in Acts 17:26 (“He made from one, every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times, and the boundaries of their habitation”), he clearly assumes that while we have all descended from Adam, there are legitimate boundaries of habitation (national borders) that separates us from each other. At no point does Paul argue that such boundaries should be torn down, nor that each nation should pursue a racial “melting pot” model for its citizens.

One could argue that it wasn’t Paul’s purpose in his speech to address immigration issues and racial diversity as it pertains to nations. True, but it’s interesting to observe that in the many public addresses Paul gives, including the various people he encountered during his missionary travels, there is not even one recorded occasion where he spoke of the need for miscegenation, racial and cultural diversity, or the blending of all people into some grand Utopian society. I think if it were so important for the nations of the world and vital to the Christian message, he would have said so. The fact that he never once did this sort of thing tells me that it’s not an essential of Christian belief.

The great fourth-century theologian, St. Augustine, did not have a particularly high view of Africans and he rightly recognized that they were very much different in terms of race. In his Exposition on Psalm 72, he states: “[T]he Catholic Church has been foretold, not as to be in any particular quarter of the world, as certain schisms are, but in the whole universe by bearing fruit and growing so as to attain even unto the very Ethiopians, to wit, the remotest and foulest of mankind.” So it would seem that Augustine wanted to convert everyone to Christianity while retaining the belief that some groups are decidedly inferior.

R.L. Dabney, an esteemed Southern Presbyterian theologian in the 1860s, wrote the following of Africans and of his concerns over miscegenation:

[T]his miserable career must result in one of two things, either a war of races, in which the whites or the blacks would be, one or the other, exterminated; or amalgamation. But while we believe that ‘God made of one blood all nations of men to dwell under the whole heavens,’ we know that the African has become, according to a well-known law of natural history, by the manifold influences of the ages, a different, fixed species of the race, separated; from the white man by traits bodily, mental and moral, almost as rigid and permanent as those of genus. Hence the offspring of an amalgamation must be a hybrid race, stamped with all the feebleness of the hybrid, and incapable of the career of civilization and glory as an independent race. And this apparently is the destiny which our conquerors have in view. (Discussions, Vol. III Philosophical, p.871)

The observations of St. Augustine, Dabney, and so many other Christians over the centuries were not “racist” and “hateful” tirades. Rather, their conclusions about Blacks were the result of serious contemplation and protracted observations of these people that has been similarly acknowledged by a host of intellectuals and philosophers throughout history.

Christians in prior centuries never thought their religion required them to abandon their race or that which was distinctive of them culturally and ethnically. They didn’t even think in such terms, and the very notion of race not being important would have sounded strange to their ears—its importance was taken for granted. The obsession of far too many Christians in our day with diversity being good and Whiteness being bad is a contemporary phenomenon. It’s just one more example proving that Christians have capitulated to the spirit of the age. It’s not proof of Christians thinking carefully and biblically about issues of race, but of being influenced by those who wish to culturally subvert the West—namely, Jews and their Gentile enablers.

Both Jesus (Matthew 23:37) and Paul (Romans 9:1-5) expressed a deep love for their own people. There is nothing to suggest that it was morally wrong either. Jesus even gave historical priority to His fellow tribesmen (Matthew 10:5-6; 15:24). Nothing about it was “racist” or “hateful,” at least not in the way most Americans seem to think. Yet, we must ask, if it was not wrong for Jesus and Paul, why would it be wrong for Whites to do the same?

When White racialists oppose Christianity on the grounds of what they see on the contemporary Christian scene, I can’t really disagree with them. It’s embarrassing to say the least. Yet, at the same time, I recognize that what they are rejecting is not authentic, NT Christianity, but in large measure a counterfeit version.

Today’s Charismatic movement with its “miracles, signs and wonders,” along with the Christian Zionism popular among evangelicals, are all false belief systems grounded on pretexts and misunderstandings of the Bible. Few churchgoers are even aware of how relatively new these movements are, and how the majority of Christians throughout the centuries did not believe any of these strange doctrines. That alone should make it automatically suspect by anyone sensitive to the Bible’s message.

White racialists who are anti-Christian wrongly assume that all Christians believe such things. They seem to have little awareness that most Protestant Reformed and Reformed Baptist churches have rejected such doctrines. The Russian Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church have rejected them as well. The sort of nonsense that passes for Christianity today is laughable if it were not so tragic.

Many pastors have rightly lambasted Christian Zionism, and there are a plethora of books written by Christian scholars refuting it as well. This lack of awareness among White racialists is due to their ignorance of Christian theology in general. They don’t understand the Bible’s redemptive history, and they possess even less knowledge of how to properly interpret such ancient texts (i.e., basic rules of biblical interpretation known as ‘hermeneutics’). Like so many of the Christians they condemn, they too are ill informed of the Christian Faith, its history, and its doctrines. Thus, they are largely rejecting a gross caricature of Christianity and not the real thing.

Biblical Texts Allegedly Supporting Mass Immigration to the West   

The “Great Commission” of Jesus in Matthew 28:19-20 to go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel is sometimes cited as support for allowing migrants and Third-World peoples into Europe and America. There is no doubt that Jesus’s words have an international scope and urgency to them. Christians are commanded reach out to all the nations of the world with Christ’s message of salvation. Salvation is not limited to White people alone, and in this sense the Gospel is universal or international in nature (Revelation 5:9-10; Acts 8:27-39).

Yet there is no imperative or hint that we should bring back any Third-World converts to our White nations! The apostolic custom was not to spread Christianity to far away countries and then assist them in immigrating to Jerusalem “for a better life,” but for missionaries to plant churches among the indigenous people in distant lands, appoint elders, and then move on to other regions where the same process is repeated. The indigenous Christians remained in their respective countries where they could minister to their own people in their own language. This was the role of Timothy in the NT who was not a “pastor” per se, but an apostolic assistant who planted churches under Paul’s mentorship.

One must also wonder how Christians can think they are “loving their neighbor” by encouraging hordes of low-intelligence, low-skilled, and non-assimilating Africans and Third-World peoples into their White communities. Blacks, especially, have strong natural proclivities toward violent crime. They are impulsive and they are not known to consider the consequences of their actions before doing them. Is it any wonder why America’s prisons are filled to the brim with young Black males?

How can any of this be good for Christians and their unbelieving neighbors? How can it be good for a nation to take in so many Africans and Muslims as does the U.S. and Europe? What kind of testimony are Christians providing to others when they encourage a host of social problems and skyrocketing levels of crime by their insistence that the West must allow migrants from all over the planet to immigrate? When Christians harbor illegal aliens from Mexico, as does the Catholic Church (Lutheran churches too), how does any of it comport with Paul’s words in Romans 13:1-7 for Christians to submit to the governing authorities? Why would American Christians encourage illegal aliens from Mexico and El Salvador to violate the sovereignty of our nation’s immigration laws? How “Christian” is it to justify such law-breaking?

In their “love” for their fellow man, these same Christians have tossed out their brains.

Some Christians argue that since “God is not partial nor a respecter of persons” based loosely on Paul’s words in Romans 2:11, therefore one’s race is inconsequential. Race doesn’t matter and shouldn’t matter to a Christian, so it is argued. We are all of the human race! But this completely misunderstands Paul’s argument in Romans Chapter 2. His point is that God’s judgment will not pass over those who condemn others for their behavior all the while doing the same (vv.1-3). God will not judge people based on arbitrariness or human partiality. He is fair in all He does.

Thus, Jews will be judged by the very Law they possess and claim to obey, while Gentiles who may not necessarily possess the Law in any codified form, will be judged “by the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness” (vv.14–15). In the end, God will judge “the secrets of men” because it’s “not the hearers of the Law who are just before God, but the doers of the Law” (v.13). These texts nullify the boasting of Jews who think that because they have the Mosaic Law, they are superior to the Gentiles.

Paul’s words in their context have nothing to do with race or racial diversity. It has nothing to do with national immigration policies.

Christians who promote multiracialism in America don’t seem to understand the concept of a nation. Contrary to what Democrats and even what many conservatives argue, America is not a “proposition nation,” at least not in the sense that merely having a set of propositional beliefs written on some document that we all give assent to makes us a nation.

Rather, a nation consists of blood and soil, a shared race or ethnicity, a common culture, a set of cherished traditions, often a shared religion, a common ancestry or lineage, a common history, and shared values. This was certainly how the American statesman and Founder, John Jay, viewed the newly formed republic: “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manner and customs” (Federalist No.2, 1787).

Likewise, Thomas Jefferson in 1801 looked forward to the day “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.”

These citations hardly support the racial “melting pot” model that America would later morph into with its multiple languages, cultures, and ethnic groups all competing for dominance. Indeed, Christians who promote the diversity cult are contributing to the endless racial conflicts that plague America.

Yes, propositional beliefs are part of the mix, but it’s not the only factor nor even the most important one. One’s race always takes priority. If Christians don’t think so, they ought to inquire among the Israeli people on just how important a shared ethnicity and culture is. They might learn a thing or two.

One of the strongest proof-texts among Christians in support of mass immigration is found in the OT and how Jews were commanded to treat “strangers” (Leviticus 19:33-36). These people were basically foreigners, sojourners, or people traveling through or staying temporarily in the land of Israel. While they are permitted to live among the Israelites, they must also obey the laws of the land (Leviticus 18:26; 20:2). Are the millions of foreigners who have invaded the U.S. similarly required to obey the laws of our land?

Thus, God wanted the Israelites to be considerate and hospitable to foreigners who entered their land because “you were once aliens in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34).

Moreover, the way in which the subject of “strangers” is treated in the Mosaic Law strongly infers that it is a periodic and sporadic thing, something that happens every so often but is not normative. In America and most of Europe, unfortunately, mass non-White immigration is normative. They are flooding our once great nations, and they are producing more children than the indigenous Whites by far. It is projected that by the year 2030, Whites in the U.S. will be a demographic minority in the very country their ancestors founded.

OT passages that speak of “the stranger among you” cannot be twisted to support mass immigration no matter how hard one may try. Jews in ancient Israel knew back then as well as Jews in modern Israel know today that allowing any foreign group into one’s country in large enough numbers is a recipe for national suicide. The arrival of foreigners, then, ought to be restricted to a manageable number. These kinds of common-sense immigration policies are no longer followed in the U.S.

Any discussion of race and Christianity would not be sufficient without at least some reference to the Tower of Babel recorded in Genesis 11:1–9. This incident shows clearly God’s design for the nations, and there is no indication that it has been nullified under the New Covenant.

When American Christians promote non-White immigration to their country, they are not thinking about the social consequences of it in terms of crime and what kinds of repercussions it will have on the nation’s economy. They are not only uninformed about genuine racial differences, but they don’t bother to think how this might impact future generations of their own countrymen nor even the perpetuity of the Christian Faith in North America.

In the U.S. a growing number of the immigrants turn out to be Muslim which has a long historical record of hostility toward Christianity. This is especially the case in Europe where almost all of the migrants adhere to the Islamic religion. These sorts of practical considerations never seem to enter the thinking of Christians who advocate for more non-White immigration.

Paul’s words in Galatians 3:28 (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus”) is another passage grossly misunderstood by Christian zealots eager to erase all racial differences. Their use of it reminds me of the old adage that states: “a text without a context is a pre-text.”

The words of the apostle in Galatians 3 denote the essential oneness of believers regardless of their class or economic status, including their ethnic makeup: “for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (v.28). Gentile believers should not fear that they possess a lower status in God’s eyes because they are not Jewish for “if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (v.29).

Besides, had Paul really believed that all racial and gender differences were mere “social constructs” and done away with in Christ, it seems strange that he would command the women to be “silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but let them subject themselves just as the Law also says. And if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church” (1 Corinthians 14:34-35). In his letter to Timothy, Paul also declares “Let a woman quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet” (1 Timothy 2:11-12). Evidently, not all ethnic and gender distinctions were erased in the way race-denying Christians imagine.

The Founders of the U.S. saw no contradiction between Christianity and the recognition of differences between the races. They did not view it as either “hateful” or “bigoted” to speak openly of such differences because it was common knowledge and readily apparent when one encountered those of other racial groups.

More than that, our Founders and some of the most respected Americans knew that Blacks and Whites were much too different in terms of intelligence and temperament. Any notion that the two races could exist peacefully together as equals in the same society was viewed as overly charitable and idealistic.

On the wall of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C., there is a quotation from him that reads: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate that these people [Blacks] are to be free.” That’s where the quotation stops. But in the full quotation we are further told: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” Truth is, Thomas Jefferson wanted Blacks deported and separated from Whites so they would be “beyond the reach of mixture.”

Many Christians would see Jefferson’s views as reprehensible and antiquated, but I think he foresaw many of the problems that would arise as a result of miscegenation and the kind of society it would produce.

Jefferson was not alone. Abraham Lincoln had very similar views: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality . . . I will add to this that I have never seen, to my knowledge, a man, woman, or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men.”

Before Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, he was still seeking to colonize freed Blacks in America to Liberia (Haiti today) though the funds needed for his colonization project had run out by that time.

American Christians who refuse to acknowledge real and abiding differences between the races reveal that they are woefully uninformed of both their own Bibles, and that of their own history.

Racially naive Christians make the same mistake that Utopian liberals make. They want to create a nation that bypasses the realities of life and the natural order of things. Christians, like liberals, want a perfect world now—and doggone it, they’re going make it happen come hell or high water! They then create a mindset for themselves and implement social policies that intentionally place blinders over their eyes. Everything they see and hear is filtered through a false worldview that instantly jettisons any inconvenient truths about race.

In the case of Christians, it’s their failure to recognize the “already-not yet” teaching of the NT. Without going into complex detail, the NT teaches that while the kingdom has arrived, it has not yet reached its full expression. That will come in the future when the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord. Thus, while we see the kingdom now, we do not yet see it in its full glory. This is also known as the “inaugurated eschatology” of Geerhardus Vos who was Professor of Biblical Theology at Princeton Seminary from 1893–1932.

The point is that there is a day coming when all racial differences and conflicts will be set aside. Society’s greatest and most complex problems will one day be solved. They will no longer exist when we reach the eternal state. But that day has not yet arrived. Every attempt to go ahead of Christ and His timetable will prove to be futile.

In the meantime, Christians must face the harsh realities of racial differences, including the lies we’ve been fed about racial equality. This does not mean that we should enslave Blacks or anyone for that matter, nor parade around wearing white sheets with pointed hoods. Instead, it means we stop lying to ourselves. We recognize that there exists an on-going soft genocide waged against Whites throughout the West. Whites are obligated to resist it both for themselves and for their posterity. And if Christians really do love the Truth, they are obligated to resist such lies too.

Review: Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

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Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
Gregor von Rezzori
1981 (English translation)

A central concern of The Occidental Observer from its inception has been the way in which understandings of anti-Semitism in Western culture have been shaped by Jews, often through pseudoscience but also through culture. The early work of Kevin MacDonald on the Jews focused on the activities and motivations of Freud, and the Freudian-influenced Frankfurt School and its products like The Authoritarian Personality and Studies in Prejudice. MacDonald noted that the approach of Jewish-dominated intellectual movements like psychoanalysis and the critique-based sociology and psychology of the Frankfurt School offered a “philosophical-speculative approach to anti-Semitism” rather than empirical analysis.[1] The unscientific work of Freud and the Frankfurt School was, however, critical in moving discourse about anti-Semitism away from considerations of economic, social, and political competition and towards more nebulous philosophical speculation on the role of “suppressed nature,” “projection,” “hatred of the father,” and “pathological” social conformity. Underpinning this re-engineering of discourse was a more dramatic shift — the shift from criticism of the Jews to criticism of Western civilization and its peoples. In my own attempt to add to, and expand upon, MacDonald’s work, I have attempted to demonstrate the ways in which such pseudoscience spread from academia into the wider culture. It’s now clear that there were firm links between the Frankfurt School and the early pioneers of what has been termed “mass communications.” That these movements eventually absorbed and influenced enthusiastic Europeans is beyond question—demonstrated best perhaps in the “philosophical-speculative” approach to anti-Semitism reaching its zenith in Jean-Paul Sartre’s pretentious and incoherent Antisemite and Jew.

Until recently, I have struggled to find substantial expression of these ideas in literature, especially literature produced by Europeans. The most well-known example is probably Laura Zametkin’s 1947 Gentleman’s Agreement, which was almost immediately made into a film starring Gregory Peck and released alongside the similarly-themed Crossfire. There has of course been an abundance of Holocaust literature produced since the 1940s, but these are most often pieces of propaganda built on fantasies of violence. They are designed to introduce and reinforce visions of Jewish victimhood, and only to a secondary degree make any attempt to pathologize anti-Semitism as such. Carrying out such a direct pathologization in literary form really requires a first-person narrative from which to “expose” the anti-Semite as the deeply insecure psychopath the Frankfurt School alleged him or her to be, and such first-person literary narratives on this theme are rare.

The most raved about fictional first-person exploration of anti-Semitism, produced in the last twenty years, is probably Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones). Littell, a Jewish homosexual, published the book (styled as the remembered wartime odyssey of an SS solider) in 2006 to huge acclaim, winning the Prix Goncourt and having Le Nouvel Observateur declare it “a new War and Peace.” It’s now more than ten years since I read the 983-page book, but apart from an interesting section on the racial classification of the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus, I remember Littell’s text as little more than a nasty and sadistic exercise in the writing of perverse Freudian fantasies — fantasies that offer more insight into Littell’s own mind than into historical anti-Semitism. Littell’s protagonist, Maximilien Aue, is far from an “ordinary German” in that he is an incestuous homosexual with barely concealed transsexual tendencies who at one point in the novel tries to have sexual intercourse with a tree. All of which goes to show that any piece of long-winded, Jewish, ultra-violent, homo-pornographic trash can be declared a “new War and Peace” so long as it sets about defaming ‘the Nazis’ in the most novel and grotesque manner imaginable. In one of the more sober reviews of the book, David Gates at the New York Times pointed out that The Kindly Ones fails to offer even slight insight into anti-Semitism because “Aue is simply too much of a freak, and his supposed childhood trauma too specialized and contrived, for us to take him seriously.”

More subtle and interesting, but no less nasty and strange, is Gregor von Rezzori’s 1979 Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, which more than any other work of fiction I’ve read in the last decade truly embodies the Frankfurt School’s “philosophical-speculative” approach in literary form. I had no idea the book existed until a few weeks ago when, during a routine browse in a local used book store, the title on the spine grabbed my attention. The name of the author suggested a European view, which further piqued my interest. These early hopes were dashed when a later Google search for reviews (I have developed a terrible habit of reading reviews after purchasing a book, but before reading it) brought up the gushing praise of a Martin Levin who celebrated the novel’s exploration of the narrator’s “attraction-repulsion obsession with Jews.” I realized that I’d found precisely what I’d been looking for — the dissemination of Freudian/Frankfurt School ideas in culture, encased in the form of European-authored literature.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

Gregor von Rezzori (1914–1998), was an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat whose family background straddled Italy, Austria, and Romania. His diverse family origins induced a lifelong cosmopolitanism, reflected not only in his successive citizenships of Austria-Hungary, Romania, and the Soviet Union (and even at one point in his position as a stateless person), and his second marriage to a Jewish woman, but also in his fluency in German, Romanian, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, French, and English. From both his biography and fiction it’s clear that national feeling was something fundamentally alien to von Rezzori, whose writing combines an aristocratic aloofness with a hopelessly bankrupt understanding of almost everything he discusses.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite strikes me as possibly semi-autobiographical or as some kind of perverse self-flagellating fantasy. The novel’s protagonist, for example, is also named Gregor, and during the book’s five chapters he drifts, like the author, between Romania, Austria, Germany, and Italy. The pseudo-memoir follows the protagonist from childhood, through to the post-World War II period, in what amount to five snapshot-style, chronologically-arranged episodes that have Jews, or attitudes toward Jews, as the central theme.

In the novel’s opening chapter, “Skushno” (Russian for boredom), we are introduced to the young Gregor in his early teens. He is presented as fundamentally lacking and inherently bad. He is expelled from school as an “unworthy” student, and is sent to a strict boarding school to resolve “imbalances” in his character. Even here, the schoolmasters reject young Gregor, informing his parents that

the mix of neurotic sensitivity and a tendency to violence, alert perception and inability to learn, tender need for support and lack of adjustability, would only develop into something criminal.

Christopher Hitchens once wrote that the novel dealt with anti-Semitism in “the mild language of understatement.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, reviewing for the New York Times, wrote of Memoirs that “all the complex causes of European anti-Semitism are anatomized in these pages.” It’s difficult to understand quite what novel these men were reading, given that within the first two pages of Memoirs  we are basically slammed, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, with the idea that anti-Semitism is purely a problem of malevolent personal psychology. Gregor, we learn on the third page, is an abuser of animals, roaming the countryside with his dog seeking cats, “my special prey.” He attempts to study for exams that will prevent him from becoming a complete academic failure, but realizes that “sheer wickedness rather than genuine slow-wittedness made me unwilling to fulfil my duties.” Gregor is sent from Austria to a German-speaking enclave in Romania to live with elderly, childless relatives, Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie, in the hope that the change of scenery and household will bring him to his senses and change his character for the better.

Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie live in a small aristocratic estate on the outskirts of a small village with a substantial Jewish minority. The most notable building in the village is not, in fact, the home of Gregor’s relatives but that of the village’s Jewish doctor:

Startling, crazy — turreted, merlons, and orioles — it had a sheet metal roof with edges serrated like doily and dragon-head gargoyles at each eave, and it was richly decked out with pennons, halberds, and little weather vanes. This was the “villa” of the physician Dr. Goldmann.

The village itself is almost lifeless apart from “straggling gangs of lice-ridden Jewish children.” Uncle Herbert is introduced as a German nationalist, “an anti-Semite and a Wagnerian.” Gregor is at first in awe of his uncle, poring over Hubert’s old student and dueling-fraternity digests and developing a fascination for the uniforms they depicted. After mocking up one of the uniforms from pieces of clothing found around the estate, he draws the laughter of one of the housemaids. He explains to himself

What I was trying to experience for myself, feel for myself — in this presumably highly comical imitation of a costume that was nothing so much as the fashionable expression of a sentiment — what I was after was the Germanhood of the corpsmen.

This, of course, is a petty caricature of nationalism, and one quite common to Frankfurt School analyses of White ethnocentrism. In renderings like these, national feeling is presented as irrational, or reduced, as in von Rezzori’s fiction, as a simple and semi-comical matter of wanting to wear a uniform.

Gregor’s insecurities are contrasted with the personality of the other major character of the first chapter — Wolf Goldmann, son of the above-mentioned physician. Gregor takes a walk in the village one day wearing his homemade uniform, and is quickly surrounded by mocking Jewish youths. At the head of the gang stands Goldmann who, in contrast to the furtiveness of Gregor, possesses a “look of downright smug self-assurance.” Goldmann mocks Gregor, asking if it’s Purim. When Gregor lashes out, he is set upon by the Jewish gang, with the attack called off at the behest of Goldmann. When Gregor bitterly blames his dog for not defending him, Goldmann retorts “Because he didn’t wanna face odds of ten to one? He’d have to be as dumb as a goy—as you, maybe.” Taking pity on Gregor, Goldmann invites him to his father’s villa.

This marks the beginning of the chapter’s main plot, which is more or less a tale of Jewish superiority and German insecurity. Gregor worries that his Wagnerian Uncle Hubert will not approve of his taking Wolf Goldmann as a friend, and he hesitates to invite him to the estate. Goldmann, meanwhile, tells Gregor that his father is well aware of the exclusionary tendencies of the Germans and explains to Gregor that German dueling fraternities excluded Jews because the Jews were “master swordsmen. … Dr. Goldmann himself had been featured as the best swordsman in his [Jewish fraternity].” Gregor tries to impress Wolf Goldmann with his slingshot and climbing trees, but Goldmann showed no interest in these activities and Gregor “began to feel childish in front of him. … His sophistication was so far ahead of my own. … He was already a budding intellectual.” The only time I laughed during my reading of the book was at the point where young Goldmann takes Gregor on a tour of the villa, at one point revealing “his father had a priceless collection of documents on Jewish persecutions from the early Middle Ages to the most recent times.” The addition of this detail seemed so gratuitous and somehow outlandish that laughter seemed the only appropriate response.

The plot accelerates somewhat when Gregor persuades Goldmann to play slingshot with him. A wayward pellet smashes a window in Uncle Hubert’s prized Daimler. While Gregor is too scared to concede blame, young Goldmann confidently strides up to the house to tell Hubert what happened and to inform him that Dr. Goldmann will gladly pay for repair. Once inside, young Goldmann starts playing Aunt Sophie’s piano, revealing an astonishing musical talent. Aunt Sophie immediately begins fawning over the young Jew, while Gregor quickly succumbs to “jealousy born of envy” and finds a new bond with his uncle: “We could read in the other’s gaze physical disgust at the Jewish brat.” As well as innately bad psychology then, we must now add insecurity, inadequacy, inferiority, and now plain jealousy to the novel’s “exploration” of anti-Semitism. Subtle indeed.

Gregor begins spending more time with his uncle, hunting in the surrounding forests. This draws a typically sarcastic and superior response from Wolf Goldmann, who tells Gregor, “You goyim know more about animals than people” and alleges his uncle is in fact a rumored homosexual who probably has ulterior motives in taking the young man into the woods so often. Whether the rumor is true or not, the young Jew instantly achieves total psychological victory over Gregor, splitting him away from his only meaningful familial relationship. Gregor is isolated and bitter: “I cannot describe the profound repugnance I felt during the next few weeks, not only toward Wolf Goldmann but toward just about everyone.”

The chapter reaches its finale when Gregor returns to pitting his dog against the neighborhood cats, in this case a feral colony encamped on the property of Dr Goldmann. While attempting to hold a cat for his dog to attack, Gregor’s arm is badly wounded by the cat’s biting and scratching. He is then taken to the Jewish physician, but Goldmann, who presumably had been told of the circumstances of Gregor’s injury, refuses to treat him. Gregor is eventually treated in Czernowitz, but the refusal of Goldmann to treat the boy prompts calls for Uncle Hubert to fight him in a duel. Hubert refuses, provoking accusations of cowardice and expulsion from his fraternity at Tübingen. Hubert, a proud nationalist and very social person, dies abandoned by his friends. Goldmann, meanwhile, had his medical license revoked for his refusal to treat Gregor, and he abandons the village, the ostentatious “villa” falling into ruin. Gregor, presented to us as a vicious, jealous young anti-Semite, having essentially ruined both men, returns to Austria, never visiting the village again.

The second chapter, “Youth,” finds Gregor in his late teens, leading a bohemian existence in Bucharest as he seeks to fulfil his ambition of becoming “a world-famous painter”—like young Hitler in Vienna? Insecure around women, he attempts to meet with a gypsy prostitute at a sleazy hotel. He walks into the hotel and hands his money to the hotel owner:

Above his head, from a nail in the keyboard, hung a small, light-blue tin box stamped with a Star of David  — the box was a kupat kerem kayemet, for contributions to build the Promised Land of Israel. It was typical for such a seamy hotel of ill repute to be in Jewish hands.

Gregor goes to one of the rooms with the gypsy girl, but is interrupted every ten seconds by the hotel owner who insists that Gregor has given him false currency. Gregor keeps exchanging the offending notes for new ones from his wallet until the gypsy girl laughs at him and points out that is in fact the Jew who is passing his fake coins onto Gregor. Gregor lashes out with a verbal insult, at which point the Jew begins punching him. Gregor is beaten to the ground, before running down the stairs and out onto the street. As he runs, he has a fantasy that a pogrom will break out:

Perhaps his Jewish brethren would form a mob and lynch me, and the Rumanians around the Calea Griviţei would finally be fed up with the riffraff that sucked their blood, would rise up against them and murder them all, a pogrom would erupt throughout the land. … I felt good picturing it.

The question of inter-ethnic violence, and anti-Semitism more generally, is therefore once again reduced to caricature by von Rezzori, who roots something like a pogrom in the fantasies of the easily duped and sexually frustrated. The reality of Romanian anti-Semitism in the interwar period was in fact inextricably bound up with socio-economic competition. Between 1910 and 1927, the Jewish population of Romania expanded from 250,000 to 900,000, largely via territorial acquisitions,[2] with Jews thriving in a nation perceived by many to lack a middle class. During the interwar period, the country was home to almost ceaseless legislative attempts to curb Jewish influence, most often in the form of quotas, especially at universities. The real history of Romanian anti-Semitism was therefore linked to the undeniable Jewish rise to positions of demographic, social, cultural, and economic dominance, and not, as von Rezzori suggests, in the petty jealousies of the sexually insecure. This rather nasty little short story in Memoirs, like so much else in the novel, smugly signals at the gesture of insight without offering anything of the sort.

Gregor continues his self-pitying state, eventually becoming a soap and shampoo salesman. He struggles to sell anything, and quickly finds that “mostly Jewish shopkeepers cut sharply into my richly prejudiced self-esteem.” He eventually wins a contract with a Jewish widow in her 30s, and while bringing his wares in for display one afternoon he falls through the cellar trapdoor. The widow helps young Gregor to his feet and brings him some water before the pair fall into a romantic embrace. Yes, von Rezzori, who has already dazzled us with subtlety, now moves onto the next character trait of his “anti-Semitic” protagonist — his apparently ceaseless attraction to Jewish women. The writing in this regard is abysmal:

I had finally understood that it was quite possible for me to love a Jewess, not in spite of the eternal Jewish tragedy, the age-old Jewish sadness showing in her face, but because of it: to see that face suddenly transformed by happiness — in fact, actually inundated with happiness — affected me deeply.

The chapter, quite possibly the worst of a bad bunch, concludes after many pages of inanity, with Gregor abruptly coming to a boil at witnessing his Jewish “Black Widow” putting on social affectations in a restaurant, slapping her across the face, ending the relationship and finding himself alone once more. The plotting and pacing of the episode are atrocious, with von Rezzori attempting to distract the reader by means of seemingly endless narrative deflections.

The novel’s third chapter, “Lowinger’s Rooming House,” follows Gregor as he moves into the lodgings of the chapter title. The Lowinger family are Hungarian Jews. The family is presented as patient and generous to their guests, particularly in their provision of meals. The patriarch is presented as highly intelligent and “peace-loving.” The boarders at the Bucharest rooming house are overwhelmingly male and rather rowdy, including a Russian sculptor, some political radicals, and a pair of Greco-Roman wrestlers. None of the residents are particularly well disposed to Jews, including their hosts, and during petty arguments there is frequent recourse to such outbursts as “those Jewish harpies,” and “that little Yid.” When one of the residents, Pepi Olschansky, a German journalist, challenges Mr. Lowinger to a game of chess and is beaten quite easily, he flees into petty superstition, telling Gregor “You know, I really believe they’re capable of certain kinds of witchcraft. … They’ve got their God in their blood. They can’t get rid of him.” The episode presumably serves von Rezzori’s purpose of adding another alleged quality to the anti-Semitic character — irrationality.

The dynamic of the chapter changes when a young Sephardic Jewish woman, Bianca Alvaro, comes to stay at the boarding house. An intellectual, she intrigues some of the male guests, and for a while also Gregor, but Gregor is eventually driven to disgust by what he perceives to be her social pretentiousness (the same fault he found with the widow). Gregor comes to regard her as nothing more than the same “snotty-nosed Jewish guttersnipe we were always in danger of running over when driving through the dusty village streets.” For all his inner protests, however, Gregor cannot seem to divest himself of an attraction to Jewish women, and when Alvaro asks Gregor to help her deal with the contents of a deceased relatives’ apartment, he agrees. He eventually makes a dramatic discovery about her relatives during his sorting of their effects, and believes that this will further develop his bond with Alvaro. He realizes that Alvaro “engendered a mixture of respect and fondness I’d never before experienced with anyone my own age.” The slowly budding relationship is then catastrophically ended through the interference of the vulgar Olschansky. The journalist, who had been plaguing Gregor for some time with questions about the nature of his relationship with Alvaro, finally succeeds in getting Gregor to (falsely) state that it is in fact sexual. The following morning Gregor finds an uncommunicative Alvaro hastily packing her things for departure from the rooming house. Suspecting Olschansky has said something, he goes to confront the journalist, only for Olschansky to freely admit to mentioning Gregor’s negative comments on Alvaro and also, it is strongly implied, that he sexually assaulted her. The chapter ends with Gregor’s departure from Romania several weeks later, and his arrival in Vienna in March 1938.

The penultimate chapter, “Troth,” which was once published as an independent short story (later expanded into the novel we have today), follows Gregor as he moves into his (anti-Semitic) grandmother’s apartment in Vienna against the backdrop of the Anschluss. He first recalls an earlier period spent living with his grandmother, when he first met and befriended Minka Raubitschek, the Jewish girl upstairs, whose parents have recently died of Spanish flu, leaving her plenty of money. In keeping with most presentations of Jews in the novel, Minka is utterly charming, with Gregor developing a romantic crush on her. The chapter is for the most part concerned with the first days of the Anschluss in 1938. Gregor is somewhat sympathetic to the new National Socialist authorities, including most of their views on Jews, even though he continues to spend his time with the Jewish Minka. Troth, although riddled with clichés, is by some distance the best chapter in the book, and its speculations on anti-Semitism are better than anything else found in the novel by several degrees. The anti-Semitism of Gregor’s grandmother is not the caricature we are by now used to, and her concerns about Jews range from crypsis (especially the changing of names), social criticism, negative influence in the arts, social pushiness, and economic dominance. Aside from brief glimpses of genuine interaction with anti-Jewish critique, however, the chapter is full of banalities and predictable, stock narratives. The “anti-Semitic” granny clashes with young SA men as they make Jewish intellectuals wash anti-National Socialist slogans from walls and sidewalks, telling them they’ve “gone too far.” Gregor uneasily tries to balance his friendships with Minka and her Jewish circle with an old friendship with a young man who is now an SS man. Minka makes it to America with her friends, and dies without further explanation. The entire chapter has a boilerplate feel.

The novel’s final chapter, “Pravda,” is a rambling third-person narrative, concerning no fixed time period, the purpose of which seems to be to offer some kind of reflection on the meaning of European guilt in relation to the Jews. The most prominent section of the chapter, which really acts as a shorthand for the intention of the entire novel, is essentially the argument that Gregor is a kind of proxy for Europeans of the early twentieth century. His putative sins are theirs, and theirs, his:

It was no personal guilt but a sort of collective guilt, a guilt shared by everyone belonging to so-called Western Civilization, a guilt that was imminent in the epoch, in this civilization’s present, particular state and shape. To be conscious of it, as if it were a personal guilt, was his dark privilege.

The primary message of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, then, is for us to accept the “dark privilege” of collective guilt.

Conclusion

Elie Wiesel once remarked of Memoirs that Gregor von Rezzori “addresses the major problems of our time . . . with the disturbing and wonderful magic of a true storyteller.” As with every statement uttered by Wiesel, you can be sure that the truth resides in the opposite direction. Not as graphic, strange, or perverse as The Kindly Ones, the novel is nevertheless just as nasty and facile. This is a novel that trades exclusively in caricature and cliché; weak in style and even weaker in content. The Jews one finds within its pages are invariably absurdly innocent, or at least, in the case of the sleazy hotel owner, straightforward in their dishonesty. The Europeans in Memoirs are, by contrast, a concoction of Freudian neuroses: attracted to Jews, jealous of Jews, fearful of Jews, and all for the pettiest of reasons. They are the literary representation of the sociological construct proffered by the Frankfurt School in bogus studies like The Authoritarian Personality.

Anti-Semitism, as a serious matter of ethnic competition and conflict, does not meaningly feature anywhere in von Rezzori’s novel, and the “anti-Semite” is understood only as a born deviant. As both art and a contribution to discourse, Memoirs is an abject failure. Readers keen for a genuine and illuminating memoir that tackles one of the most crucial questions of the last few centuries would do much better to consult Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together.

[1] K. MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (paperback edition), 157.

[2] A. Gerrits The Myth of Jewish Communism: A Historical Interpretation (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009), 48.

The Great Russian Restoration V: The Suicide of the Entertainment Industry  

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The media situation in Russia we have already painted over in broad strokes. As bad as the situation was with the news media outside of the government-controlled state channels, the situation with the entertainment media was only marginally better. Unlike the news media, the entertainment media has not been shut down and purged over the last couple of weeks. And yet, many of the big names of Russia’s entertainment industry have fled the country. Were they right to do so? Did they suspect a purge was in the works? Who knows — without insider information we can only watch the developments continue to unfold and see if their suspicions were well founded.

We can start with the example of Ivan Urgant, a late-night show entertainer much in the same vein as American entertainers Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon. In fact, the three of them are so similar in appearance and in their act/show format that if you lined the three of them up next to one another and held a gun to my temple, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell them apart to save my life. Like many Russian entertainers, Urgant is Jewish and he recently decided to take a surprise trip to Israel as an impromptu holiday. He was followed there by entertainment media matron Alla Pugacheva and her game show host husband Maksim Galkin (Jewish), who also decided to take a sabbatical to Israel together during these trying times. Many celebrities followed suit, although, to be fair, not all of them chose Israel as their destination.

Here, again, we have to do a deep dive into another aspect of Russian culture that no one outside of Russia knows about and that the so-called Russia experts haven’t ever bothered to explain. To be fair, I’m by far one of the least qualified people in the world to talk about the entertainment industry in Russia. A far better source of insight would be any old granny sitting on the bench by her commieblock who would be all too willing to share some of the arcane lore of the careers of her favorite actors and actresses in exchange for a pack of sunflower seeds. But, alas, Russian grannies are in short supply in the West and so the task falls on my unworthy shoulders. Feel free to compensate me for the veritable fortune I spent on sunflower seed bribes here!

The Russian entertainment industry is a continuation of the Soviet entertainment industry, from which it emerged. It was run by a cabal that, over time, began to be referred to as “the Family” because of the close ties of members in the tight clique and their tendency to marry (and divorce) within the same narrow circle of entertainers, producers and artists. The last 30–40 years saw the undisputed reign of Iosef Kobzon (Jewish) who was the veritable don of this circus family. His favor made or broke careers. He got the final say on all matters of import in the industry. He was revered and feared until he died in 2018.

But if there was a king, there was also the indisputable queen — Alla Pugacheva. She may or may not be a good singer, I wouldn’t know because I haven’t listened to a single song of hers (even for research purposes), and even Kobzon would occasionally go up on stage and give a well-received performance — but that isn’t really the point. The point is that a small clique of ideologues controlled the state media in the USSR and then an even smaller clique of entertainers controlled it in the period that followed. To be allowed on TV meant to go through them. As for who “they” were, well it was a mix of many Soviet peoples (plenty of Armenians and Georgians) with Jews disproportionately represented and running the show, of course. The internet changed many things in Russia, but the monopoly on the minds of the older, TV-watching generation remains firmly cemented. During the USSR, entertainers toed the ideological line. During the post-USSR period, they toed the “family” line. If I had to choose, I would prefer sucking up to commissars with pistols over groveling before pop stars, but hey, that’s just me.

So what did they promote throughout their careers? Was the cultural product in the USSR as bad as the woke anti-White and anti-Christian garbage that Hollywood has been promoting for God knows how long? Well, it was far worse in terms of production quality and artistic merit, probably. But the content of the late Soviet period was tame — it was just your standard generic “pop” love-song tripe for the most part. Many Russians, especially of the older generation, know these songs by heart and play them during holidays or request them while at the restaurant. I’ve been known to sing along too if I’ve had a few drinks — ironically, of course.

But with the 90s came a wave of “chansons” based on prison culture, Jewish resentment towards the late USSR, and basically what amounted to street hustlin’. This merged with the rapidly emerging Russian rock scene that rivaled the Western rock scene in terms of the proliferation of bands and the enthusiasm with which the public greeted it. Another one of the cultural figures of this period was Aleksander Rosenbaum (Jewish), a member of the Family, who eventually became an influential capo within the Family promoting and defending the proliferation of this anti-social form of quasi-gangster culture in Russia. Maybe I am exaggerating a bit here, but regardless of how you want to classify this genre of music, you would have a hard time labelling it as pro-patriotic, pro-family or pro-Russia.

Anyway, the point that I am driving at here is that very little good cultural content has been produced by the Family.

The average Russian tunes in to watch a fairly informative and well-produced news summary on the state channels, only to be exposed to a mountain of trash before and after the evening news featuring celebrity gossip, vulgar concerts and mind-numbingly dumb soap operas replete with drama, debt, and divorce—all of which were all filmed in Ukraine until recently to save a few rubles. None of the content in Russia is woke though, unless it’s a Western product dubbed over or subtitled, and characters are all played by White actors (or Jews and Armenians playing White characters). But that doesn’t automatically make it good or wholesome or even watchable. Just think: there are 180 some countries in the world with about 6 million channels between them (probably) and there is still nothing good on TV. How does one explain that? How do these people get to keep their jobs? Absolute madness!

If one wanted to familiarize oneself with the nomenklatura of the entertainment media, one could do no better than to watch the New Year’s Eve special which they play on all the major Russian channels. The celebrities all gather together (in June) to tape themselves celebrating the New Year and congratulating the Russian people, wishing them warm feelings, etc. Again, there is nothing particularly repugnant about these specials. You will never see a George Clooney type clambering up to the podium to lecture the Russian masses on the need to buy electric cars and not burn as much coal or something as grotesque and elitist as that. For the most part, the Family hasn’t openly thrown its cultural and media weight at Putin, even though it’s rather obvious that they’d prefer to see him gone and a more progressive man in his place. And yet, as we mentioned at the beginning of the article, big entertainment names are jumping ship and fleeing the country. It begs the question: why? Do they suspect that they’re in trouble? We can only speculate for now, but fleeing to a foreign country as your country goes to war isn’t a good look now is it?

Another little cultural tidbit that’s worth mentioning: the French have seized a Russian art treasure trove — the Morozov collection — worth tens of millions of dollars and seem to have no intention of returning it. Art is quite a lucrative field if you can get your foot in the door, especially in Russia. See, Russia has priceless collections of art that the country’s museums loan out to the top museums of the world. In exchange, Russia tends to get absolutely nothing in return. Now, usually, when museums lend art collections to one another, they trade art to put on display in their respective countries and this is usually a mutually profitable venture for both parties as well as for the general public. However, Russia seems to simply export her best collections and receive nothing of the same value in return. Why? Well, Russian art enthusiasts allege that the people who run these programs make a tidy profit from allowing themselves to be convinced to lend out these priceless art works to Western institutions and so have an incentive to keep them in circulation abroad and not on display at home. It is probably worth mentioning that Marina Loshak, the director of the Museum Art Committee and the woman who so generously lent out the priceless Morozov collection, was born in Odessa to a Jewish family. Judging by the outrage of the art enthusiasts, it seems that she may be on her way out soon. Who knows — maybe she too will suddenly decide to take a sabbatical to Israel to get some sun and a salt bath. We can only pray that she doesn’t come back.

The only significant unified cultural group that has come out openly swinging against Putin is the rapper community, which is not a part of the Family network and is mostly comprised of the new up and coming millennial crowd that doesn’t rely on TV to get their media out. This gang of drooling brats with tattoos on their faces have vocally voiced their opposition to the operation in Ukraine. The Russian government, to their credit, has started shutting these people down. Rappers in Russia, as a rule, come from rich oligarch families and seem to be disproportionately Jewish as well. There are a few big rapper groups like Black Star who are also connected to the Family and are, for all intents and purposes, one of their cultural products. But to be fair to Black Star, they have never been vocally anti-Putin or anti-Russia which is more than can be said of Jewish rappers like Oxxxymiron, who has been baying at Putin for years now in the same way that Eminen harassed Donald Trump. Unlike Eminen, Oxxxymiron has yet to challenge the president to a rap battle. Let’s hope he doesn’t get any bright ideas.

Oxxxymiron

All in all, Russia loses absolutely nothing if her so-called creative cultural class decides to cancel itself and repatriate back to Israel. In fact, this may be the shake-up that Russia so desperately needs to get the old talentless, worthless hacks out of their positions of power and influence so that new, younger, Russian talent can rise up to take their place. This seems to be happening regardless of whether it was planned or not. Putin did declare that Ukraine would be “decommunized” before giving the order to move in, but it seems that, as an added bonus, Russia is decommunizing at a rapid pace as well.

Why “Nazis” in Ukraine?

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In the current conflict between Ukraine and its Western allies versus Putin’s Russia, both sides have blamed the other as being “Nazis”. The Jewish comedian and actor become Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said “Russia attacked Ukraine in a cowardly and suicidal way like Nazi Germany did during World War II.”[1] For his part, Putin declared in his address of February 24, referring apparently to the role of the Azov battalion in the fighting in eastern Ukraine: “The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and de-nazify Ukraine.”[2]

Both statements may appear to have some validity, though the irony and clownish accusations of each side calling the other “Nazis” is inevitably humorous. Putin’s comment seems to have more validity, since circumstances between Ukraine and Russia today are far different than between Ukraine and Germany in 1941. Conversely, news of “Neo-Nazis” in Ukraine have permeated Western media for years, with reporting on such groups as Azov Battalion and umbrella group Right Sector, among others.

Much can be said about this phenomenon of National Socialist and affiliated groups and interests persisting in Ukraine to this day, but here we will focus on the historical roots of why “Neo-Nazis” are said to exist with such prominence in Ukraine today.

Before dawn on June 22 1941, the National Socialist armies, formally joined by the soldiers of Hungary, Rumania and Italy, as well as soldiers from many other nations in the Waffen SS, launched Operation Barbarossa.[3] Stalin had impoverished the USSR assembling and equipping the world’s largest horde of armies, which were poised on the mutual border with Germany via the then double-occupied Poland.  Arranged in two Strategic Eschelons, all Soviet defensive structures and forces had been removed, and Stalin’s immense Red Army was preparing to launch a devastating offensive attack into Germany and onward to seize all of Europe.[4]

Hitler and the National Socialist Germans and their allies struck first in a bold pre-emptive strike on a scope and scale the world had never seen. Three immense columns of troops, tanks, armaments of every kind, and supplies, accompanied by the Luftewaffe forces in the air, surprised the Soviets and immediately captured huge war supply depots and hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers.

The southernmost of the three columns commanded by General von Rundstedt (of Dunkirk fame) had as its objective Kiev in the Ukraine and the Caucuses mountains beyond. It was this column which the Hungarians and Rumanians joined, equipped with arms taken from the French the previous year. Von Rundstedt had great initial successes against disorganized, surprised Soviet forces, pushing forward rapidly with Panzer encirclement tactics and seizing immense supplies and arms, capturing entire armies from the Soviets.[5]

As this column penetrated Ukraine, the men were dismayed to see the “scorched earth” policy the Soviets had inflicted on the countryside and Ukrainian people still living there, even beyond the general poverty and misery they had seen earlier.[6] Farms and homesteads were burned to ashes, animals slaughtered and rotting, some of the cities and towns destroyed.  Trains had been dismantled and shipped East, along with entire factories. Many people, Ukrainian and Soviet, had been evacuated and deported back into the USSR. Even historic monuments and magnificent architecture had been destroyed with explosives.[7] Some of the Ukrainian people were found slaughtered too.[8] However, Operation Barbarossa was such a surprise to the Soviets that they had not had enough time to carry their strategy of infrastructure and resource destruction to completion.

When the Ukrainian people saw the German/Hungarian/Rumanian armies approaching, some welcomed them as liberators.

“Hitler Liberator” poster

As poor as Jewish-influenced Wikipedia is on accurate history for all things “Nazi,” it does have this to say:

When Nazi Germany with its allies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, many Ukrainians and Polish people, particularly in the west where they had experienced two years of harsh Soviet rule, initially regarded the Wehrmacht soldiers as liberators.[9]

Further:

Some Ukrainian activists of the national movement hoped for momentum to establish an independent state of Ukraine. German policies initially gave some encouragement to such hopes through the vague promises of a sovereign ‘Greater Ukraine’ as the Germans were trying to take advantage of anti-Soviet, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Polish, and anti-Jewish sentiments. A local Ukrainian auxiliary police was formed as well as Ukrainian SS division, 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Galicia (1st Ukrainian).

Wikipedia, despite its insistent anti-German atrocity propaganda, presents good information about this Waffen SS Ukrainian division formed in the region of Galicia. This region was given to Poland after World War I, but most of its citizens were Ukrainians. The Soviets invaded in 1939 and annexed the region, which was then liberated by the Germans in 1941. Galician Ukrainians were divided among those willing to remain subjects of other nations, and Nationalists who wanted an independent Ukraine. Of these, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists A (OUN-A) were led by Andriy Melnyk, who advocated cooperation with the National Socialists and its Abwehr intelligence office, and the OUN-B led by Stepan Bandera, who would eventually fight against both Germans and Soviets for Ukrainian independence—tragically, as it turned out.

Otto von Wachter, the German governor of the region, promoted formation of the division in April 1943 with the stipulation that it be deployed exclusively against the Soviets and “Bolsheviks” as they were known to these Ukrainians. It saw multiple deployments at the front and was engaged in direct combat against Soviet and Polish forces.[10]

The Ukrainians had suffered brutally under the Stalin regime and its Communist totalitarian rule for many years.  The planned starvation genocide of 1933–4, when Stalin sent the Jew politburo member Gendrick Yagoda to impose “collectivized farming” and starve millions of Ukrainians to death in a slow miserable genocide known as the Holodomor,[11] was in the memories of Ukrainians as were more recent Soviet horrors. Some Ukrainians, always a proud people with a unique ethnic identity among Slavs, were thrilled that the Germans and their allies had pushed back the Red Army and Soviet occupiers. Some of them welcomed their liberators with joy.

An historical account submitted by Konrad Kreft and Clara Weiss (most likely Jewish), writing for the World Socialist Web Site of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI),[12] places Ukrainian nationalist military cooperation with National Socialist Germany even before the launch of Barbarossa. These are obviously Communist authors, with too few citations to support their obviously war propagandistic statements—as well as too many accounts of Jewish persecution and “pogroms” attributed to “fascists” and lavish whitewashing of early Jewish Communists such as Trotsky (Bronstein) to be credible. They do state some honest history however:

Stalin’s murderous policies of repression played into the hands of Ukrainian nationalists and fascists, who agitated in the western parts of the divided Ukraine and collaborated with Hitler when he invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. … In 1940, the OUN split into the Bandera (B) and Melnyk (M) factions, which bitterly fought each other. Bandera’s more extreme group was able to attract more followers than Melnyk’s. It began by establishing Ukrainian militia (the Roland and Nightingale Legions) on German-occupied territory in Poland which, in league with the Wehrmacht (German army), invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

By this account, Ukrainians participated in Barbarossa from the beginning. After the obligatory stories of these Ukrainian Nationalists being used by Germans to massacre defenseless Jews and especially children, we see more credible history:

While Alfred Rosenberg … urged greater involvement of local fascist forces, Hitler opposed the nationalists’ so-called independence projects. On Hitler’s orders, the OUN-B leaders were eventually arrested and the Ukrainian legions disarmed and relocated.

From 1942, the Ukrainian militia served the Third Reich in the “anti-partisan campaign” in Belarus, in the “security service,” and as armed personnel in concentration camps. Bandera and Stetsko remained in custody in Sachsenhausen concentration camp until September 1944.

Some Ukrainian men wanted to join the German armies and fight for their enduring freedom. Some were already aligned with National Socialist ideology and politics, as many were throughout Europe and beyond in many nations, but in Soviet Ukraine such adherence was strictly forbidden. Now they were free, and wanted to fight to vanquish Communist tyranny and ensure their freedom. They called for arms and officers to join Operation Barbarossa.

This posed a dilemma for the German command. Some distrust existed among them that they should give arms to those among who might remain Soviet agents or might turn around and fight the Germans themselves in a misguided attempt at unaffiliated Ukrainian Nationalism, as eventually happened with Bandera. This was most likely Hitler’s reluctance, as opposed to Rosenberg who was Russian himself and longed to see his former homeland liberated from Judeo-Communist control. Vetting was difficult, and certainly von Rundstedt needed to continue his lightning pace and could not stop to equip, organize and integrate such forces. Much Soviet military equipment had been captured, but it was uncertain the Ukrainians could use them, with little time for training.

Von Rundstedt achieved the capture of Kiev by the end of September, and continued in the Ukraine region with the most successful of the three Barbarossa columns, eventually capturing or vanquishing one third of the entire Soviet forces.[13]

Some Ukrainian veterans and men were able to integrate into the Waffen SS and join the later battles against the Soviets in 1943 and beyond, as we saw with the Waffen SS Galicia division. Others organized behind the lines as the Germans moved on, joining the anti-partisan warfare efforts alongside the German Einsatzgruppen against Soviet loyalists trying to sabotage Barbarossa supply lines and communications, and even making swift guerrilla raids against German armed forces. Ukrainians joined the partisan forces fighting against these saboteurs, a fierce aspect of Barbarossa apart from the main battles.

I could find no sources, but one wonders how the Ukrainians greeted the Romanians and Hungarians among the Barbarossa soldiers, since these nations shared a common border with Ukraine and had the same concerns of Soviet domination—and possibly the same hopes of German liberation. Romania was supplying Germany’s crucial need for oil for its war effort and was threatened by a Soviet take-over, having lost two regions to the Soviets the year before. Hungary was a formal ally of Germany, having signed the Tripartite Pact the year before also.[14]

Hitler had issued an offer to Ukrainians, showing how a version of National Socialism, with all its finance policies, economic benefits, social upliftment and religious freedom could be adapted for Ukraine, and many were enthusiastic to adopt it. Of course this was forbidden under Stalin’s cruel domination, but now they were free to pursue it. The combined effect of the arrival of the National Socialist Germans and their allies as liberators, with the promise of a hopeful future as a National Socialist sovereign state and a German as an ally, left a lasting inspiration among the Ukrainians. Of course, eventually Barbarossa was turned back and Ukraine was re-occupied by the Soviets and brutally punished for its betrayal to the enemy.

Let’s examine one example of how this strong influence from the emotional days of Ukrainian liberation and cooperation with National Socialists has endured into the current era. On “Victory Day” May 9th 2014, the Governor of Ukraine’s southern region Kherson, Yuri Odarchenko, gave a public address to a large crowd. Here are his key statements:

Those [Soviet] aggressors justified their capture not only by their desire to seize others’ territory and enslave the people, but they also put forward slogans about liberating nations and people that inhabit the lands which Hitler hoped to capture. … If you read history books, we have a number of documentaries on this, then we see that he [Hitler] first of all put forward a slogan of liberating people from the communist yoke, and liberating people from the tyrant Stalin.[15]

Many in the crowd had been indoctrinated to a certain perception of history, maintained by Putin today, that the Germans were the aggressors and oppressors, and the Soviets the liberators. Even veterans in the crowd booed and expressed outrage at Odarchenko’s suggestion that the “Nazis” were the liberators.

We are not told what history books or “documentaries” he refers to, but we have presented some here. Odarchenko lost an election for the Ukrainian parliament later that year, but won another in 2016,[16] showing that his outrageous and politically incorrect statement in 2014 did not disqualify him. Some Ukrainian voters most likely approved of it. No candidate could get away with such political heresy in most nations, but in Ukraine it may actually win a candidate votes. Odarchenko represented the All-Ukrainian Union “Fatherland” party.

It is not difficult to understand that a positive memory of National Socialism and negative attitudes toward Russia would survive among many Ukrainians to this day. Revisionist historian Mike Walsh states: “Stories went from generation to generation, anecdotal evidence of the German presence in Ukraine are still commonplace.”[17] This is not the place to trace the history of such persistent groups as the Azov Battalion and other such groups, but this history does help us understand why a strong National Socialist presence would exist in Ukraine today.

[1]    AFP, “Ukraine’s Zelensky says Russia acting like ‘Nazi Germany’”, The Times of Israel, March 2 2022
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/ukraines-zelensky-says-russia-acting-like-nazi-germany/

[2]    Anisotopia, Putin’s Speech Declaring the 2022 Invasion of Ukraine, February 24 2022
https://anisotopia.files.wordpress.com/2022/02/ebook___putin_s_speech.pdf

[3]    Alan Clark, Barbarossa, the Russian-German Conflict, William Morrow & Co, New York, 1965
Such a source from a Jewish-influenced published must not be fully acknowledge as valid, and Clark is clearly anti-German, presenting some of what must be considered war propaganda atrocity stories. His military history is more accurate.

[4]    Viktor Suvorov, Icebreaker, Hamish Hamilton, London England, 1990

[5]    Clark, ppg 129-144

[6]    Letters, Russia Insider

[7]    Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine: Stalin’s Scorched Earth Policy, Infoukes
http://www.infoukes.com/history/ww2/page-06.html

[8]    Mike Walsh, The Liberation of Ukraine, March 31 2016, Renegade Tribune
http://www.renegadetribune.com/the-liberation-of-ukraine/

[9]    Wikipedia, “Modern History of Ukraine”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_history_of_Ukraine#World_War_II

[10]  Wikipedia, “14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician)”   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_(1st_Galician)

[11]  Sever Plocker (Jew), “Stalin’s Jews”, Ynet News, December 21 2006
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html

[12]  Konrad Kreft, Clara Weiss, “Nationalism and fascism in Ukraine: A historical overview”, World Socialist Web Site, June 9 2014   https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/06/09/fasc-j09.html

[13]  Clark, p 145

[14]  Global Security, “1939-1945 – Hungary in World War II”  https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/hu-history-25.htm

[15]  This link used to go to an RT web page, but during the wirting and research of this essay, it now says “Forbidden”.
A partial mirroring can be found at Revisionist researcher Carolyn Yeager’s site.  https://carolynyeager.net/

[16]  Wikipedia, “Yuri Odarchenko”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuriy_Odarchenko

[17]  Walsh, “The Liberation of Ukraine.”