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Dr. Ricardo Duchesne’s Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age  

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Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age
Ricardo Duchesne
Arktos, 2017, 239 pages    

Since at least the 1960s, American progressive public educators have made revising or eliminating accurate accounts of the scientific and cultural advancements that enabled the West to dominate the planet and replaced them with moral indictments. While some ideas may be subject to careful modification as a result of critical thought, wholesale changes in the interpretations of historical events and the rejection of longstanding scholarly norms of research are simply efforts by progressive educators to promote personal political or cultural biases to fit within a history that simply did not exist.

The Western Civilization course requirements are among several focused disciplines in American universities that ended abruptly in the 1960s. By the time of the campus protests, professors gave up on the importance of courses on Western Civilization because they felt that the courses had been fashioned to support the eras of two world wars—a time when Americans saw themselves as leaders of a great Atlantic civilization, were proud of their relative affluence and the history of Western expansion, and were comfortable with what came to be labeled “white supremacy.” The cultural Marxists also claimed that Western Civilization studies were obsolete because of new commitments to the critical importance of China, Africa, Vietnam, and other parts of the world; in other words they became globalists. Others considered the subject old-fashioned at a time when politicized students called for a liberal arts education without required courses. For professional historians eager to produce “original” ideas in their increasingly fragmented fields, the concept of an all-inclusive course with a common purpose seemed dated.

The question, however, is how did the World History programs of study that superseded the required Western Civilization courses of the 1980s and 1990s ultimately come to be embedded within a multicultural ideology that emphatically weakened the critical role of Western culture itself?

The answer is postmodernism.

In his Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age, Ricardo Duchesne convincingly reminds us that postmodern thought has become the dominant philosophy in modern public classrooms. In order to make postmodernism work, historical truths have to either be altered beyond recognition or eliminated. Fact: 79 percent of the world’s most important inventions, including political institutions, modern technological innovations in medicine, agriculture and industrial technologies, and a moral order based on reason, moral universalism, and the rule of law came from Britain, France, Germany, Italy and/or the United States. These facts are irrefutable, and any attempt to reject them as false is an attempt to rewrite what had been the settled historical record. However, most leftist students view these realities as nothing more than White, self-congratulatory back-patting.

Duchesne’s recent book, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age, is a continuation of his seminal 2011 book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (reviewed here). In that research and subsequent book Duchesne argued that Western Civilization is responsible for the world’s greatest innovations, technologies, and ideas as a result of not only the West’s ability to create something of intrinsic value from nothing, due, in large part, to the tenets of certain native Western philosophies, but, more importantly, the West’s burn-the-candle-at-both-ends work ethic, never-say-die character, their commitment to rational thinking, their inquisitiveness and willingness to explore. The West’s success is deeply rooted in its history; it was not a result of luck, or fortunate access to colonial resources, as the academic left wants us to believe.

In the break between Uniqueness and Faustian Man, Duchesne, it seems, had moments of additional clarity and insight. In Faustian Man, Duchesne relies on ideas that he has pondered since childhood—ideas that developed over time and that he visited and re-visited as he became acquainted with various intellectual perspectives—important ideas that, once unbound from suppression, influenced his thinking and the subsequent research which obviously influenced his remarkable academic journey.

The rise and fall of superpowers is cyclical; and, as it turns out, race matters. The opening chapter of Faustian Man is replete with the idea that White, Western men made the greatest leaps in human history—the leaps also Duchesne discussed in Uniqueness.  Duchesne looks at Polybius, Vico, and Oswald Spengler, three historians who tracked the decline of the West through their own cycles of change: the ancient’s cycle of birth, growth, zenith and decay; Vico’s cycle of anarchy and savagery, order and civilization, and decay and a new anarchic barbarism; and Spengler’s cycle that relied on geographically based identity and a culture that thrives and dies similar to the life cycle of a human being—childhood, youth, maturation, old age, and death. However, none of these theories concluded that civilizations completely die-out, nor did any of the theorists include race as an important factor in the rise, fall, and renewal of a civilization. In Faustian Man, Duchesne incorporates this cyclical view within his theory of the West as a continually advancing civilization, while arguing that if current immigration replacement trends continue, and the White race is utterly marginalized, Western civilization will die out completely.

Duchesne revealed the pseudo-scholarship that postmodern academics have promoted as their sworn duty to rewrite history according to the idea that the greatness of the West was not possible without the “indispensable” influences of the African slave trade, or the Islamic preservation of classical knowledge, or “geographical good luck.” In other words, they portray the West as a civilization lacking a dynamic of its own, always enmeshed within a global network of nonwestern influences, culture-mixing and lucky acquisition of colonies. For example, ancient Greece, according to the late postmodern political scientist, Martin Bernal, was not founded, developed, and advanced by Aryan settlers; it was developed by Egyptians and other Semitics. Greece, it turned out, was settled and developed by “Afroasiatics.” What none of these historians ponder about is why the West was the site of most achievements if all cultures are interconnected?

In fact, the entire history of European accomplishment from ancient times to the twentieth century, should be suspected, according to the academic left, as inherently “Eurocentric” and “racist.” How could anyone seriously credit, in our increasingly multiracial societies, Europeans living in a comparatively small landmass with thousands of years of achievements at levels higher than the rest of the world combined? “The racist privileging of Europe should not be allowed,” mused John M. Hobson. The “downgrading of Europe (on Mercator-derived maps) should be encouraged among the students,” he wrote. Consequently, not only should the ideas of Western greatness be banished, the landmass should get the same treatment.

A contrast between Faustian Man and Uniqueness is the stronger emphasis Duchesne assigns to race in the identity of the West and in its preservations. Duchesne cites Samuel P. Huntington’s mega-popular, often vilified but sometimes lauded work on Western Civilization, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. “By 2013,” Duchesne writes, “I found myself agreeing with Huntington’s thesis that the very success of modernization in non-Western countries was encouraging indigenization and ethnic confidence, rather than Westernization” (11). However, Duchesne submits that Huntington was too careful—that he skirted a nation’s ethnic backdrop as a key issue in state identity. Huntington rightfully proclaimed that “Western values were particular to the West and alien to other cultures” (12). However, Huntington could not come to terms with the idea that the West, like other civilizations, had an ethnic identity.  In other words, while Huntington argued that Western ideas of liberalism, citizenship, and democratization were universal regardless of the West’s ethnic ties to White Europe, Huntington had no problem identifying other civilizations in terms of their ethnic identities, rather than focusing only, as he did for the West, on their “cultural attributes” (12). While the ideas we associate with liberalism are framed in a universalist language, Duchesne argues that we should not ignore the fact that they developed in a civilization with a particular ethnic identity.

Faustian Man’s promotion of the relationship between White ethnic Europe and Western thought prompted waves of backlash from leftist students, fellow academics, local newspapers, and other media that read Duchesne’s research. The President of the university that employed him received many complaints: One must never question mass immigration in the name of ethnic interests of Europeans was the thrust of their arguments. Still Duchesne persevered in his quest to answer the questions that intrigued him since Uniqueness: where was the historical West, and was it possible to identify it in a definite racial way—a way that seemed to be declining due to mass immigration and demographic colonization?

Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age was previously reviewed by F. Roger Devlin for TOO.

Aleksandr Dugin on the Alien, Substantially Jewish Elite in the U.S. and Its War Against Traditional American Individualism

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A translated version of an article by Aleksandr Dugin has appeared on KATEHON, an anti-globalist, pro-Russian website. (When I tried to post a link to the article on Twitter, they said that “the link has been identified by Twitter and its partners as harmful” and they blocked it.) Dugin’s article indicates that he has a solid grasp of politics in the U.S., and for the first time that I am aware of, he points to Jewish influence. Since Dugin is reputedly close to Vladimir Putin (“Putin’s brain” and of course, a “fascist,” as the neoliberal Washington Post phrased it) and because he has supported the Ukrainian war, it indicates that the Russian political establishment understands the upheaval going on in the United States.

Excerpts from Alexander Dugin: “The United States Court Against the Ideology of Progress.”

The fact is that there is not just one American state, but two countries and two nations with this name and this is becoming more and more evident. It is not even a question of Republicans and Democrats, whose conflict is becoming increasingly bitter. It is the fact that there is a deeper division in American society.

Half of the US population is an advocate of pragmatism. This means that for them there is only one yardstick: it works or it doesn’t work, it works/it doesn’t work. That is all. And no dogma either about the subject or the object. Everyone can see himself as whatever he wants, including Elvis Presley or Father Christmas, and if it works, no one dares to object. It is the same with the outside world: there are no inviolable laws, do what you want with the outside world, but if it responds harshly, that is your problem. There are no entities, only interactions. This is the basis of Native American identity, it is the way Americans themselves have traditionally understood liberalism: as freedom to think what you want, to believe what you want, and to behave as you want. Of course, if it comes to conflict, the freedom of one is limited by the freedom of the other, but without trying you cannot know where the fine line is. Try it, maybe it will work.

That is how American society has been up to a certain point. Here, banning abortion, allowing abortion, sex change, punishing sex change, gay parades or neo-Nazi parades were all possible, nothing was turned away at the door, the decision could be anything, and the courts, relying on a multitude of unpredictable criteria, precedents and considerations, were the last resort to decide, in problematic cases, what worked/didn’t work. This is the mysterious side of the Americans, completely misunderstood by Europeans, and also the key to their success: they have no boundaries, which means they go where they want until someone stops them, and that is exactly what works.

Dugin is describing traditional American political values based on individualism and personal freedom. But traditional American political values have been in conflict with the values of a new, substantially Jewish elite with strong authoritarian tendencies.

But in the American elite, which is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds, at some point a critically large number of non-Americans have accumulated. They are predominantly Europeans, often from Russia. Many are ethnically Jewish but imbued with European or Russian-Soviet principles and cultural codes. They brought a different culture and philosophy to the United States. They did not understand or accept American pragmatism at all, seeing it only as a backdrop for their own advancement. That is, they took advantage of American opportunities, but did not intend to adopt a libertarian logic unrelated to any hint of totalitarianism. In reality, it was these alien elites who hijacked the old American democracy. It was they who took the helm of globalist structures and gradually seized power in the United States.

This is exactly what we have emphasized at TOO. There are people with a variety of backgrounds that make up our new elite, but there is a substantial Jewish core with “alien” values, and in general, this elite speaks with one voice and dissent on important issues is not tolerated. This new elite largely emigrated to the United States in late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the Marxist commitments of many of them were an important aspect of the enactment of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. In subsequent decades Jews became the backbone (p. 68ff) of the American Old Left and New Left. Indeed,  as noted in my review of Amy Weingarten’s Jewish Organizations’ Response to Communism and Senator McCarthy, “a major problem that the organized Jewish community was forced to confront—a problem stemming from the long involvement of the mainstream Jewish community in communism and the far left, at least until the end of World War II, and among a substantial number of Jews even after this period. … Weingarten points to a “hard core of Jews” (p. 6) who continued to support the Communist Party into the 1950s and continued to have a “decisive role” in shaping the policies of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) (p. 9). These leftist Jews were welcomed into the Jewish organizations during the early post-war, particularly the American Jewish Congress, the largest American Jewish organization, but they were gradually made unwelcome due to the anti-communist fervor of the period.

Notice that Dugin emphasizes that the new alien elite has exploited American individualism to advance these alien values—they “took advantage of American opportunities, but did not intend to adopt a libertarian logic unrelated to any hint of totalitarianism.” When they achieved power, they rejected the libertarian ethos in favor of top-down, centralized, authoritarian control that is antithetical to traditional American political culture.

This is precisely the thesis of my 2019 book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future where I document the rise of the substantially Jewish elite (Ch. 6; see also here) and describe how this new elite is shaping attitudes via domination of the media, the educational system, and political culture. Rejecting the libertarian framework, the new elite favors censoring ideas that conflict with these messages (Ch. 8), and it has established a two-tier justice system in which dissidents from the established orthodoxy are treated far more harshly than those favored by the new elite. In Chapter 9 I argue that traditional Western individualism is under dire threat from this assault. I would add that our new elite is not only alien to traditional Western values, it is also a hostile elite—hostile to the traditional people and culture of America, and that their desired multicultural future in which Whites would be a much-hated minority is very dangerous for Whites.

And I agree entirely that Jews “took advantage of American opportunities.” Because of their intelligence, their ethnic networking, and their long experience as merchants and in  financial matters, Jews  have certainly shown that they are quite successful in an individualist economic system (capitalism) and they have taken advantage of the relatively low ethnocentrism that is an integral aspect of individualism. As I noted in Chapter 8 of Individualism,

as emphasized throughout this book, White people tend to be more individualistic than other peoples, implying that they are less likely than other peoples to make invidious distinctions between ingroups and outgroups and they are more likely to be open to strangers and people who don’t look like them. Because Whites are low in ethnocentrism and high in conscientiousness, controlling ethnocentrism is easier for them. Their subcortical mechanisms responsible for ethnocentrism are weaker to start with and hence easier to control [via messages from the media and educational system enabled by top-down inhibitory control over the modular processing typical of the lower brain].

As a result,  this new elite encountered only minimal resistance from the old American elite which was under intense pressure during the 1950s and capitulated entirely in the 1960s and 70s—the era that resulted in Roe v. Wade (1973), civil rights legislation, affirmative action, replacement-level non-White immigration, etc.

Critically relevant is that Dugin notes parallels of the new elite with Bolshevik attitudes of authoritarian control, including “destruction” of those seen as having the wrong attitudes: “If you are not a progressive, you are a Nazi and “must be destroyed.”

These elites, often left-liberal, sometimes openly Trotskyist, have brought with them a position that is deeply alien to the American spirit: the belief in linear progress [as in Marxism]. …

However, the emigrants from the Old World brought with them very different attitudes. For them, progress was a dogma. All history was seen as continuous improvement, as a continuous process of emancipation, improvement, development and accumulation of knowledge [presumably a reference to Marxism]. Progress was a philosophy and a religion. In the name of progress, which included a continuous increase in individual freedoms, technical development and the abolition of traditions and taboos, everything was possible and necessary, and it no longer mattered whether it worked or not. What mattered was progress.

This, however, represented a completely new interpretation of liberalism for the American tradition. The old liberalism argued: no one can ever impose anything on me. The new liberalism responded: a culture of abolition, shaming, total elimination of old habits, sex change, freedom to dispose of the human foetus (pro-choice), equal rights for women and races is not just a possibility, it is a necessity. The old liberalism said: be what you want, as long as it works. The new one replied: you have no right not to be a liberal. If you are not a progressive, you are a Nazi and must be destroyed. Everything must be sacrificed in the name of freedom, LGBT+, transgender and artificial intelligence.

We often hear the phrase “on the right side of history” from progressives, the idea being that history is going in only one direction and change in that direction is inevitable. At this time, being on the right side of history means believing that you believe in a future in which White “racism” is abolished and all peoples will live together in peace and harmony, ethnic conflicts will be abolished, and all groups—freed from the scourge of White racism—will have the same average level of income and achievement. Such a utopian view flies in the face of the long history of ethnic/racial conflict and the reality of biologically based race differences. But believing it is progressive dogma and, as Dugin would say, “If you are not a progressive, you are a Nazi and must be destroyed.”

Dugin is quite aware of the opposition of our hostile elite to Donald Trump:

The conflict between the two societies — the old libertarian, pragmatic one and the new neoliberal, progressive one — has steadily escalated over the past decades and culminated in the Trump presidency. Trump has embodied one America and his globalist democratic opponents the other. The civil war of philosophies has reached a critical point.

As I have written before, Trump made many mistakes and often fumbled the ball on  his appointments (although the pool of mainstream Republicans from which he chose was completely corrupt, and he saddled himself with Jared and Ivanka as central players). However, his campaign pronouncements were clearly anti-globalist—opposing immigration (not just illegal), building the wall, wanting better relations with Russia, removing U.S. troops from the Middle East, complaining about the effects of immigration (“Paris isn’t Paris any more”), etc. These pronouncements engendered an unprecedented uproar from our hostile elite (now being reenacted as a result of the recent SCOTUS rulings—blamed on Trump because of his choices in SCOTUS nominations) and the Washington bureaucracy—the deep state (including the FBI). Media articles during the 2016 campaign were replete with messages that Trump was the reincarnation of Hitler, etc. This hostility continued throughout Trump’s presidency resulting in the prolonged Mueller investigation (based on the Russia collusion hoax) and two impeachments by the Democrat-controlled House (with the help of some Republicans). For the entire four years, there was an atmosphere of crisis surrounding Trump’s presidency, and this has continued now with the January 6 Committee hearings (which are mainly aimed at preventing Trump from running again).

Dugin repeats his emphasis on the totalitarian and violent tendencies of the new elite:

New America … insists that freedom requires violence against those who do not understand it well enough. Which means that freedom must have a normative interpretation and it is up to the neo-liberals themselves to determine how and to whom they use it and how they interpret it. The old liberalism is libertarian. The new is blatantly totalitarian. The Supreme Court is now overturning the totalitarian dictatorial strategy of the neo-liberal globalist elites, who act — a bit like the Bolsheviks in Russia — in the name of the future.

Yes, but I’d say it’s more than “a bit like the Bolsheviks.” Moreover, it’s tempting to think that Dugin is here linking Bolshevik-type authoritarian attitudes to the Jewish overrepresentation in the new American elite, given that he noted the obvious role of Jews in the new globalist elite dominating America, and his likely awareness of the well known outsized Jewish role in the murderous, intensely authoritarian early decades of the USSR with its utopian promises of creating the New Soviet Man. This very large role of Jews in the early decades of the USSR has also been noted by Putin and is presumably common knowledge among Russian intellectuals.

And the almost desperate old Americans, pragmatists and libertarians rejoice [at overturning Roe v. Wade]: the freedom to do what you want, not what the progressives and technocrats say, to go in any direction, not just where the globalists are forcibly sending us, has triumphed again, and Missouri’s brave attorney general has already shown what can be done. Bravo! It is a pragmatic revolution, an American-style conservative revolution.
Of course, all the globalist progressive crap is about to go down the drain. The old America has in a way counter-attacked the new America. “If the kingdom of law is divided in itself, it will surely become desolate”. Matthew 12:25 Better sooner than later…

“Better sooner than later.” I couldn’t agree more. While the White population still has political and demographic clout.

Dugin’s comments on the alien American elite and his strong support for the Ukrainian war make clear the dominant Russian perspective on this conflict. They see it correctly as a conflict between Russian sovereignty and neoliberal globalist elites based in the West that are aiming for a unipolar world with themselves dominating a subservient, relatively powerless Russia. It is the world dreamed of in the 1990s during the Yeltsin administration and abruptly snuffed out by the rise of Putin. Neoconservatives have targeted Russia ever since.

Make no mistake. It is critical for Russia to win this war. But it’s quite clear that the neoconservatives (Blinken, Nuland, Sherman) dominating the Biden administration’s foreign policy also see this as a critically important struggle, and they have continued to increase the U.S. commitment—willing to fight to the last Ukrainian. And, I suspect that ultimately they will be willing to use U.S. troops in the conflict to prevent a Russian victory.

Martin Christopher Rojas, RIP

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Martin Christopher Rojas has died unexpectedly at age 29. Jared Taylor has written a beautiful, deeply felt tribute to him. Martin wrote a very interesting account of life in rural West Virginia for TOO under one of his many pseudonyms, Christopher Martin. I met him a couple times. Great guy, and reading Jared’s obituary, one realizes what great talent he had. As Taylor notes:

Rojas never lost sympathy for the working-class people he knew growing up. He took unpaid leave from AmRen to spend a week in one of the poorest towns in West Virginia, where he got to know whites who were barely scraping by. They had been studied so many times, they were suspicious of yet another outsider from whom they expected yet another sneering exposé. He won their confidence and wrote a portrait of the town that is one of his best pieces.

I am very proud to have posted “Grace and Grit in Southern West Virginia.” His conclusion is a good illustration of his sympathy for the working class:, his erudition, and his graceful writing style:

At the end of the week, I drive home and there’s everything to think about alone in my car for hours and hours. It’s as if I can’t even remember what I was expecting to find now that I’ve seen so much. Southern West Virginia is poor, and the stories of its heartbreak could fill the Library of Congress a hundred times over. But I knew all that before I got there— you probably did, too. However, it’s not some kind of “big White ghetto” in the midst of a Hobbesian war of all against all. I’ve really never met kinder people. I’ve also never met a people more determined to withstand it all and persevere. The place enlightened me— but only after it humbled me. All of us really do have a lot to learn from these people. Marcus Aurelius wrote that, “Nothing can happen to any man that nature has not fitted him to endure. Your neighbor’s experiences are no different from your own; yet he, being either less aware of what has happened or more eager to show his mettle, stands steady and undaunted. For shame, that ignorance and vanity should prove stronger than wisdom!” My Christian friends assure me that Christ agrees. I couldn’t tell you if God is real, but after a week in Welch, I do know for certain that God smiles upon southern West Virginia— and on the rest of us as well.

A Fascist Fun-Day: Enrichment for Whites, Ethnocentrism for Jews

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“Hideously white.” That was what a righteous White leftist called Greg Dyke called the BBC in 2001. Dyke was actually the Chief Commissar of the BBC at the time. And did he then resign in protest at his own “hideous whiteness”? Or did he vow that, henceforth, he would donate at least half of his huge salary to pro-Black causes and anti-racist charities?

Wiping out Whiteness

No, of course he didn’t do that. Leftists believe in posturing, not in payment. They pose and posture; ordinary Whites then pay the price. And Dyke followed another leftist rule in his attack on his own organization: he didn’t speak the truth. The BBC wasn’t “hideously white,” because Whites weren’t over-represented there. He said, for example, that “the management of the BBC” was “almost entirely white.” In fact, the management of the BBC has been disproportionately Jewish for many decades and Jews do not regard themselves as White. Dyke himself doesn’t appear to be Jewish, but he knows from the inside how successful Jews have been at the BBC: Alan Yentob, Danny Cohen, Jenny Abramsky, Mark Damazer, and more have all held positions of great power and influence.

Genuine British Whites were actually under-represented at the BBC in 2001, particularly in management, and they’ve only become more so since then. The BBC reflects Britain as a whole: hideous whiteness has fallen, ethnic enrichment has soared. Britain’s tiny but very powerful and influential Jewish community has played a central role in wiping out Whiteness. Barbara Roche, the Jewish immigration minister under traitorous Tony Blair, told the Guardian in 2001 that she “entered politics — she still emphasises this today — to combat anti-semitism and xenophobia in general.” In 2003, while urging her party “to promote the benefits of legal migration,” she told the Independent that “My being Jewish informs me totally, informs my politics.”

Britain is a Judeocracy, not a democracy

That’s why Roche opened Britain’s borders to the Third World with great enthusiasm but little fanfare. After all, the Labour party didn’t want to alert its traditional supporters in the White working-class. But those supporters noticed what was happening and didn’t like it. They wanted much less migration and much more control of the borders. That’s why they turned away from Labour and gave their votes to the Conservatives. Their switch has had no effect. The Tories entered government loudly promising to control migration and have completely failed to fulfil their promises. This failure has been explained by the part-Jewish George Osborne, former Chancellor in the Conservative government: in 2017 he “revealed that, despite having pledged to reduce immigration in both its 2010 and 2015 general election manifestos, the Tory leadership secretly abandoned this ambition long ago.”

Well, it was “secret” to the ordinary Whites who voted Tory, but not to the Jews who finance the Tory party and are heavily over-represented in its senior ranks. If Jews didn’t want open borders, Britain wouldn’t have them. But Jews do want open borders and that’s why Britain has them. The same applies in the US, where righteous Jews in the Democratic government keep the borders open and crack down on White supremacism. Ethnic enrichment is good for Jews, as Barbara Roche herself pointed out in 2011:

Friday rush hour. Euston station [in London]. Who’s here? Who isn’t. A kaleidoscope of skin colours. The world in one terminus. Barbara Roche can see it over the rim of her cup of Americano coffee. “I love the diversity of London,” she tells me. “I just feel comfortable.” (Hideously Diverse Britain: The immigration ‘conspiracy’, The Guardian, 2nd March 2011)

Roche felt “comfortable” because, amid that “kaleidoscope of skin colours,” she didn’t stand out as a Jew. But she would have felt exceedingly uncomfortable if she’d been at Aldenham Country Park in Hertfordshire on 12th June this year. There was no “kaleidoscope of color” at the park, just a sea of staleness and paleness. What was happening? Well, a group of white supremacists were celebrating what they dishonestly called a “Family Fun-Day.” In fact, it was a Fascist Fun-Day. Why else were communities of color so conspicuously and horrifically absent from the festivities? Photographs of the Fun-Day reveal that it was “hideously white.”

But that Fascist Fun-Day was even worse than it appeared, because a large group of Jews were there at the same time: the charity Jewish Care had booked Aldenham Country Park for a genuine “Family Fun-Day” on the exact same day. I can only conclude that the Jewish families turned up, saw the hideous whiteness of the fascists at the park, and fled for their lives. Jews “love diversity,” remember. They “just feel comfortable” amid a “kaleidoscope of skin colours.” So while the fascist fun-day was a sea of hideous whiteness, the Family Fun-Day organized by Jewish Care would have been a kaleidoscope of color. It’s no coincidence that a Jew called Enver Solomon heads the Refugee Council, which works night and day to enrich Britain with Blacks, Muslims and other vibrant folk from the Third World.

Enver Solomon, anti-White head of the Refugee Council


When the so-called Conservative government pretended it was going to get “tough” on illegal migrants by sending them to Rwanda (see Andrew Joyce’s “Thoughts on Britain’s Rwanda Plan” at TOO), Solomon wrote a stern article for the Guardian entitled: “UK asylum seekers sent to Rwanda? That takes punishment of fellow humans to a new level.” He’s following that age-old Jewish injunction to “Welcome the Stranger,” as set forth in the Jewish Bible. And so Jewish Care would surely have invited their “natural allies” in the Muslim and Black communities to join the Family Fun-Day at Aldenham Country Park.

A hideously white advert for Jewish Care’s Family Fun-Day 2022

Well, sarcasm over. Jewish Care didn’t invite Muslims and Blacks to join the festivities, of course. The photographs aren’t of a Fascist Fun-Day but of a genuine Jewish Family Fun-Day. That’s why the photos are “hideously white.” Ashkenazi Jews flocked to Hertfordshire to enjoy what they assiduously deny to White British goyim: the exclusive company of their own kind. Jewish Care’s Family Fun-Day wasn’t enriched with Blacks or Muslims, which is why it wasn’t enriched with crime or obnoxious behavior either. While working tirelessly to turn Britain and other Western countries into Third-World swamps, Jews are careful to maintain ethnocentric islands amid the chaos and crime. If those islands are ever threatened with submersion by vibrancy, Jews have a secure place to flee: the ethnocentric enclave of Israel, where that age-old Jewish injunction to “Welcome the Stranger” is completely ignored. Israel doesn’t welcome black and brown strangers: it keeps them out with high-tech fences.

The creation of Fortress Israel — the Hebrew text, running right-left, reads “Likud: Israel-Egypt Fence”


But what’s good for Jews — ethnocentrism and exclusion — isn’t good for goyim. Or rather, it is good for goyim, but that’s precisely why Jews want to deny it to goyim. Jews don’t want what’s best for Whites: they want what’s worst for Whites. That’s why both America and Britain have open borders and endless ethnic enrichment. Jews are in control of politics on both sides of the Atlantic, so governments pursue what’s worst for Whites, not what’s best. But I think Jews should remember a warning from their own Bible: “Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him.” (Proverbs 26:27)

Comrade Krieger and the Kiev Campaign, Part 2: A Small Victory

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We pick up where we left off with Comrade Krieger and his unit making their way south during the Kiev campaign. If you want to follow the hero of our story, you can follow him on his freshly-minted Gab account.

The next day, after the counter-attack that never came, we left the field because it was too exposed. In daylight, the enemy could, in theory, see us, but we wouldn’t be able to see the enemy. We moved into another abandoned village nearby and took up residence in an abandoned home. Most villages are generally in a state of dismal disrepair and half-abandoned even in the best of times. It looked like the damage here was done before the war had even reached the village. We fixed up the chimney and then we repaired the old boiler so that we wouldn’t be cold at night. Next, we broke a hole through to the roof and put a ladder through it to set up a sniper nest and observation post. The immediate necessities out of the way, we began to focus on more pressing matters.

The next order of business was to set up an improvised banya. We stuck some long sticks into the ground and wrapped them in a thick black canvas cloth. Then, we made a make-shift oven with bricks in the center of our teepee banya and lit it up. Soon, we were sweating and relaxing and having a good time. After being exposed to the cold out in the open, our little banya felt a godsend.

By the time I got out, the only available sleeping place was in the commander’s quarters. I set up a hammock as if I was relaxing on a Caribbean island between two palms and began to relax. Because of all the time in the cold, I had developed a cough, and I did my best to stifle it as I began to drift off to sleep. Our сommander was very tired and I felt bad that I would be keeping him up if I kept coughing. Neither he nor I got to relax for long though.

I drifted off, but came to as new orders were issued to me to rouse the unit. The enemy had been spotted nearby. I stumbled off to rouse the sleeping soldiers in the make-shift barracks. This was proving to be an impossible task and I was struggling to get them up from their slumber. But then a whistle sounded and the explosion from a mortar rocked the village, causing the windows shaking.

That got them up quick. Even the two that I had tried to wake up with my feet suddenly jumped up, no longer as keen on sleeping. More explosions sounded and I ran up to the roof to get my sniper rifle, which I had left there. Once again, I took off my helmet to peer through the scope. I scanned the fields and woods, but couldn’t find anything. It was darker than dark in the fields and woods that surrounded the village. I could barely see my own hand out in front of me.

I ducked down after I heard a return salvo from our mortars right next to my position.

Dawn was close, but the glow that began to rise up was from nearby fires and not the sun. My commanding officer came up to check on me in my nest, and he had something quite interesting to tell me.

“There’s a 1000-strong company that is moving in to attack our positions!” He said.

I found that I was excited. “Sounds like fun,” I called back to him.

Soon after, mortar shells began to fall around us, and our return fire continued.

Despite the darkness, I saw and felt shrapnel hissing through the air above me like bats, kicked up by the explosion. Then some more news came down the line to me. I was well and truly expecting a colossal pitched battle to start any moment now.

But it turns out that we had misunderstood the intelligence passed onto us. There wasn’t a 1000-strong unit attacking our position. It was a unit with a name that sounded like one thousand…

[NOTE: The word for 1000 is “tisiach” and the name of the unit that they were engaged with was the “tisatski”. It was a miscommunication.]

I realized that I was relieved and I shared a laugh with the others when we heard the news. Morning came eventually, and by 8 am we heard no more shooting in our direction. We finally got some much-needed sleep. The way we figured it, we had held our positions and just won our first small victory.

The patrol we sent out into the nearby town gave us the all-clear soon after.

I should mention that we had a german shepherd with us this whole time. Why did we have this dog, you ask? To this day, I can’t tell you. Apparently, we’re just supposed to have a dog with us according to unit regulations. Anyways, I was assigned to dog-walking duty the next day. So, leash in hand, we went out for a stroll around the town as part of a patrol. This dog, for some reason, simply didn’t listen to me. I immediately regretted letting it off the leash and tried in vain to chase after it and call it to come back.

All of a sudden a huge boom, louder than any I had heard so far, sounded out. In panic, I called out to the dog and this time it listened and came running straight back to me for once. The boom came from nearby, and we rushed back to camp to learn that an airplane had dropped a bomb not too far from our positions. I am unsure whose plane it was.

Other than that, it was quiet for a bit and our soldiers got restless eventually and would go out on patrols around the town from time to time just because they were bored. I never took my helmet when it was my turn for a stroll because it hurt my head. Whenever we passed by a shop, we found that it was always already thoroughly looted. First, by the locals, then by the Ukrainian Army, and then by the Chechens as we understood it.

After one patrol, we were headed back to our camp when a UAZ Patriot civilian car pulled up in front of us. In the driver’s seat was an extremely irate driver. We gripped our weapons and began to spread out, unsure of what to do. But then an officer from the forward headquarters of our sector stepped out of the passenger side. He was apparently driving around and speaking to all the individual commanders in the area. He came up to us demanding to know what unit we belonged to. When we took him to our commander, the superior officer chewed out our commander for allowing us to go out patrolling without our helmets. We stood there in silence for a bit, and we were well and truly ashamed of ourselves. When our commander came out to speak to us again, he told us that we had gotten him in trouble and, truth be told, we all didn’t know what to say so we just mumbled our apologies. He was a good commander, and we didn’t want him getting into trouble for our sake.

“If you’re going to walk around without your helmets, don’t get caught,” he told us.

Soon after, it was time to move south into a larger town on the outskirts of Kiev about 37km from the city proper.

I was shocked by the state of destruction that I saw as we rolled in. The Khrushevki and smaller residential houses and the larger 10-story buildings were in ruins.

We camped out in the local shopping mall near the center. We made a sweep of the facility and found that several of the shops were burnt out. All of them were trashed. Looters, probably.

Our rations were long-gone at this point so we went out on a patrol to look for a grocery store. Next to the shopping center, we found one. The scene that I saw in front of it stuck with me for some reason. There was a truck with an open door and supplies in it with three soldiers from my unit standing guard around it. Next to them was a Ukrainian soldier’s corpse and a cat that had begun to nibble at his face. We found some tasty treats in the truck along with some crates of Promidol — a synthetic pain-killer similar to Tramadol. Luckily, I never had to use any of that awful stuff.

Nearby, we found the storage shed for the grocery store that the truck was bound for. Inside, we found some Turkish Delights, which we immediately began to feast on, along with some other tasty treats. There were also entire crates full of alcohol in the shed, but our commanding officer quickly found out about it and forbade us from touching it.

We were then given orders to set up a sniper nest on top of the abandoned shopping center that we had made our temporary home.

Some PMCs (Private Military Companies) that were in the area joined us and we went up the stairs of the shopping center looking for the roof exit. We found a locked gate and one of the PMC guys asked to use my sniper rifle to blow the lock off the door leading to the roof. The ricochet was potentially lethal, so we took cover while he did his work.

We quickly realized that we weren’t the first ones to have been on the roof. There were fortifications and other signs of a hastily-organized defense. The defenders had even locked the roof as they retreated. We set about blowing the signal cables that were on the roof and the wiring that connected them to the other buildings. We didn’t want our signals to be monitored by the enemy.

Back during the Georgia campaign of 2008, electronic surveillance equipment was used by the Georgians, who were given American equipment that allowed them to perform pin-point strikes against our soldiers. Only after our soldiers got rid of their phones did the missiles stop falling on their positions. In Donbass, without secure communications, many militia men had to rely on regular phones to stay in touch with other units. The same thing happened to them as well until they ditched their phones.

We began fortifying our position on the roof, and I felt that I was finally being put to use as a proper sniper. Once the PMCs helped us set up and pointed out where trouble could be expected to come from, they left and we didn’t see them again. I never found out what unit they were from.

At that point, it was becoming quite clear that the weather was turning for the worse. Already thoroughly chilled, I decided to go down to see if I could find some more warm clothes. I was sure the night would only be worse. I ended up passing by the shed of the grocery store and I decided that I had to get two bottles of vodka, just in case. It was a good thing that I did. We began to freeze on the roof as we continued with our two hour on-and-off shifts. Of course, it takes 10 minutes to actually wake someone up and then another 10 before they’re ready to take up their positions, but that’s just how these things go.

It was becoming harder and harder to maintain the watch from the roof. My arms were shaking from the cold and fatigue at that point. To make matters worse, as the night dragged on, it began to snow. Visibility dropped, but even if it hadn’t, I’m not sure that I could have noticed much in the state that I was in. By about 4 am, even with the vodka and the warmer clothes, we simply had to abandon our watch positions for a few hours. To make matters worse, we were all quite thirsty, but our water had frozen solid. We couldn’t light any fires at night, so we simply had to wait it out.

Morning finally came and we took our knives out to pry the ice out of the bottles that it had frozen in. Our little gas fires popped to life and began to melt it down. Soon, we successfully brewed some tea and gulped it down gratefully while gazing over the ruins of the town, happy for the liquid warmth.

It was a small victory.

Degas and the Jews

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Edgar Degas: Self Portrait 1865-66

It is customary in our political circles to link cultural modernism (and its negative social consequences) to Jewish influence. While there are strong grounds for this stance, things are sometimes more complicated than this narrative would suggest. Take, for instance, the group of painters who made up the French Impressionist movement of the late nineteenth century. Considered to be the first avant-garde movement of the Modernist period, Impressionism served as a springboard for many artistic movements of the twentieth century, including Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism. Yet among the leaders of the Impressionist movement were artists, like Cezanne, Renoir and Degas, who were notable for their antipathy to Jews.

Of this trio of leading Impressionists, the one who evinced the keenest aversion to Jews was Edgar Degas (1834—1917) who was described by Jewish artist Camille Pissarro as “that ferocious anti-Semite.” Though Degas is regarded as one of the cornerstone founders of Impressionism, he disliked the name and, indeed, many of the artists who made up the movement. He thought of himself as a realist and “pragmatist” painter first and foremost. But this did not stop him from leading the collective and co-organizing their ground-breaking exhibitions from 1874—86.

The label “impressionist’ was coined by a critic who said their paintings looked unfinished, as if they were “impressions” of a scene rather than finished paintings. While many of Degas’ paintings do look spontaneous, they involved intensive planning. He would study his subjects obsessively, making numerous sketches before starting a painting. He once observed: “I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.” He seldom considered a painting complete, always striving to improve it. Degas combined the classical methods he mastered as a youth with Impressionistic sensibilities: he liked to experiment with light, angles, and focus. Sometimes subjects would have their backs to the viewer or be cut off by the edge of the canvas. He would paint them doing mundane things like ironing clothes.

Unlike other leading impressionist artists, Degas shunned landscape painting — the result of personal preference and the visual ailments that plagued him from middle age. Retinal problems led to his having trouble recognizing colors and made it hard for him to see in brilliant light. He therefore appreciated the low light of the theater and developed a strong preference for working there. From the 1870s, Degas explored the subject of dance which accounts for a large portion of his work. He is most famous for his paintings of ballerinas at work, in rehearsal, or at rest. He depicted them from various angles in hundreds of different positions. His failing vision doubtless affected his work, prompting more extensive strokes, bolder colors, and experimentation in a wide assortment of media, including pastels, photography, and printmaking. In his last years, Degas had to wear dark glasses outdoors and quit working altogether in 1912. He died in 1917 at the age of 83.

Despite Degas’s reputation as a reactionary bourgeois, for most of his long life he was a democrat and a republican. Degas mostly kept his politics — and his opinions about Jews — out of his art. Despite this, some critics insist that anti-Semitism “pollutes his pictures, seeping in to them in some ineffable way and changing their meaning, their every existence as signifying systems.” Jewish subjects appear recurrently in Degas’ canvases. Particularly noteworthy is his 1871 oil portrait of Rabbi Astruc, a leading figure in the Jewish world who helped establish the Alliance Israelite Universelle before his appointment as chief rabbi of Belgium in 1866. Regarding Degas’ portrait of Astruc, the Rabbi’s son never forgave the artist for “making a wreck of his splendid subject, replacing his tiny mouth with thin, sensual lips and changing his tender, loving regard into a look of greed.” For him, the portrait was “not a work of art — it is a pogrom.”[i] Degas painted Astruc rapidly, accentuating in his subject what “he though were the traits of his race.” Degas was intrigued by physiognomy: the act of judging individuals from their appearance. Some critics contend that this interest is manifest in Degas’ allegedly unflattering depiction of his Jewish subjects.

Portrait or pogrom? Portrait of Rabbi Astruc (left) by Edgar Degas (1871)

Degas also depicted Jews in a series of paintings of Parisian brothels and their customers. These brothel scenes include clients whose facial features are recognisably Jewish. Callen argues that, in doing so, and by implicitly constituting Jews as a “racially impure ‘other,’” Degas was attempting to absolve himself and his audience of any potential charge of voyeurism.[ii]

L’Absinthe (The Absinthe Drinker) (1876) by Edgar Degas

Degas’ most famous painting, L’Absinthe (The Absinthe Drinker) from 1876, is considered a masterful representation of social isolation in Paris during a period of rapid industrial growth. This painting was censured as ugly and disgusting and shut away from viewers for a long time until it was introduced again in 1892. Numerous French nationalists (on the left and right) ascribed the immorality and degeneration of French social life encapsulated in this painting to Jewish influence. Jews were seen as “agents of social change; they were symbols of confusion and alteration. Against them, to be safe from the threat they posed, anti-Semites affirmed and invoked a stable social order, stable moral values, immutable and absolute categories.”[iii]

Widely cited by those eager to prove Degas’ anti-Semitic bona fides is his 1879 painting At the Bourse. It depicts the Jewish banker, speculator, and patron of the arts, Ernest May, on the steps of the stock exchange in the company of a certain Monsieur Bolatre.

At the Bourse by Edgar Degas (1879)

Regarding this painting, Brown insists “there is a nasty, if subtle, suggestion of anti-Semitism in the depiction of May’s physiognomic traits,”[iv] while for Armstrong, Degas’ “dark slovenly depiction of moneylenders might certainly be inflected with anti-Semitic racism.”[v] Jewish art critic Linda Nochlin claims this painting depicts Jewishness in an “unflattering, if relatively subtle way,” and “draws from the same polluted source of available visual stereotypes.”

It is not so much May’s Semitic features, but rather the gesture that I find disturbing — what might be called the “confidential touching” — that and the rather strange, close-up angle of vision from which the artist chose to record it, as though to suggest that the spectator is spying on rather than merely looking at the transaction taking place. … What is “revealed” here, perhaps unconsciously, through May’s gesture, as well as the unseemly, inelegant closeness of the two central figures and the demeanor of the vaguely adumbrated cast of characters, like the odd couple, one with a “Semitic nose,” pressed as tightly as lovers into the narrow space at the left-hand margin of the picture, is a whole mythology of Jewish financial conspiracy.

That gesture — the half-hidden head tilted to afford greater intimacy, the plump white hand on the slightly raised shoulder, the stiff turn of May’s head, the somewhat emphasized ear picking up the tip — all this, in the context of the half-precise, half-merely adumbrated background, suggests “insider” information to which “they,” are privy, from which “we,” the spectators (understood to be gentile) are excluded. This is, in effect, the representation of a conspiracy. It is not too farfetched to think of the traditional gesture of Judas betraying Christ in this connection, except that here, both figures function to signify Judas; Christ, of course, is the French public, betrayed by Jewish financial machinations.[vi]

This kind of speculative analysis of Degas’ work to establish his anti-Semitism is ultimately superfluous given the artist’s catalogue of statements critical of Jews. Toward the end of his life, Degas, for instance, declared without equivocation: “I detest them, those Jews! An abominable race that ought to be shut up in ghettos. Or even totally eradicated!” Ostensibly unable to conceive of the existence of rational and valid criticisms of Jews, Nochlin insists that “although Degas was indeed an extraordinary artist, a brilliant innovator, and one of the most important figures in the artistic vanguard of the 19th century, he was a perfectly ordinary anti-Semite. As such, he must have been capable of amazing feats of both irrationality and rationalization, able to keep different parts of his inner and outer life in separate compartments.”[vii]

Nochlin draws on the (now venerable) Jewish apologetic trope of characterizing anti-Jewish sentiment as akin to a virus. The fact that Degas, “stubbornly nationalistic, and blinded by fanaticism,” produced ‘At the Bourse’ while still friends with the Jewish author and playwright Ludovic Halévy, suggests, she claims, that this “virus was in a state of extreme latency, visible only in the nuances of a few works of art and intermittently at that. Or perhaps one might say that before the period of the Dreyfus affair, Degas … was anti-Jewish only in terms of a certain representation of the Jew or of particular ‘Jewish traits,’ but his attitude did not yet manifest itself in overt hostility toward actual Jewish people, nor did it yet take the form of a coherent ideology of anti-Semitism.”[viii]

It was the Dreyfus Affair and the writings of Eduard Drumont that supposedly crystalized Degas’ nascent anti-Semitism into a fully delineated ideology. Through such influences, the “virus” of anti-Semitism “mutated” in the 1880s and 1890s from “stereotyped prejudices diffused all over Europe” into an organized movement and ideology (accompanied by the emergence of anti-Semitic literature, leagues and groups). By 1895 the artist was, “in addition to being a violent nationalist and uncritical supporter of the army, an outspoken anti-Semite.”[ix] According to some accounts, he had his maid read aloud from Drumont’s La Libre Parole and Rochefort’s L’Intransigeant. It was these publications that, according to Kleeblatt, “constructed the anti-Semitic identity of men like Degas.”[x]

Despite the conclusion to the Dreyfus affair, there are no signs, according to a biographer, “that he ever thought he had taken the wrong side in the great clash of the two Frances.”[xi] Chrisci-Richardson ascribes his anti-Semitism to his economic vulnerability — as an “inexcusable symptom of his life-long struggle for money and his uncertain social position.”[xii] Born into a well-off family, Degas suddenly experienced financial difficulties in 1874 with the death of his father and the closure of his brother’s business. He was forced to sell his home and started living with the subjects he was painting, offering his paintings as payment. According to Nochlin:

There was a specific aspect of Degas’ situation in the world that might have made him particularly susceptible to the anti-Semitic ideology of his time: what might be called his “status anxiety.” According to Stephen Wilson: “The French anti-Semites’ attacks on social mobility, and their ideal of a fixed social hierarchy, suggest that such an interpretation applies to them, particularly when these ideological features are set beside the marginal situation of many of the movement’s supporters.” Degas was precisely such a “marginal” figure in the social world of the late 19th century and had ample reason, by the decade of the ’90s, to be worried about his status.[xiii]

Degas was adversely affected by the crash of the Union Générale Bank in 1882. This event was widely interpreted as “the result of deliberate action against the Catholic finance house by its Jewish rivals, led by Rothschild.” The crash of the Bank was only one of the financial and business scandals attributed to Jews in France. Others included to Panama scandal (1892), and the failures of Comptoir des Metaux and the Comptoir d’Escomptes. In the aftermath of these scandals, Jewish financiers like the Halevys, the Hasses, the Schlumbergers, the Camondos, the Ephrussis and the Rothschilds, were “viewed with suspicion and thought to be working for the ruin of France.”[xiv]

For Chrisci-Richardson, as well as being a response to “Jewish capitalists monopolizing the wealth of France” and “Jewish workers taking the jobs from French workers,” Degas’ anti-Jewish outlook was also a response to his vision of Jewish immigrants as “carriers of revolution.”[xv] By the 1880s various Jewish revolutionaries had established themselves in Paris, forming revolutionary circles, whether anarchist, anarcho-communist, or, later Bolshevik. Thousands of politically-radical Jews migrated to France, particularly to Paris, between 1880 and 1925. At the time of the Dreyfus trial, 40,000 of the 75,000 Jews in France were concentrated in Paris.

Fellow impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir also denounced Jews as vectors of political radicalism. According to Nochlin, Renoir was “openly anti-Semitic, a position obviously linked to his deep political conservatism and fear of anarchism.”[xvi] Capps laments that Renoir was an artist “who appeared to embrace the methods of early modernism but none of its revolutionary goals.”[xvii] Renoir maintained there was a good reason for Jews having been repeatedly expelled from countries throughout history, and warned “they shouldn’t be allowed to become so important in France.” He observed that “the peculiarity of the Jews is to cause disintegration.”[xviii]

In her diaries, Renoir’s daughter Julie regularly records her father expressing a variety of anti-Jewish views. In January 1898, during a discussion of the Dreyfus Affair, she quotes Renoir as saying. “[The Jews] come to France to earn money, but if there is any fighting to be done they hide behind a tree. … There are a lot of them in the army, because the Jew likes to walk about wearing a uniform.” Renoir also “let fly on the subject of Pissarro, ‘a Jew,’ whose sons are natives of no country and who do their military service nowhere.” Renoir goes on, “It’s tenacious[,] the Jewish race. Pissarro’s wife isn’t one, yet all the children are, even more so than their father.”[xix]

Renoir’s famous 1880–81 painting Luncheon of the Boating Party, features more than a dozen figures and a dog. One of these figures, a man wearing a hat with his back turned to the viewer, is Charles Ephrussi, a Jewish art critic and collector. From a wealthy Jewish banking family, Ephrussi, the stereotype of the wealthy Jewish banker exemplified by the Rothschilds, played a key role in Renoir’s career. Ephrussi rubbed elbows with the Parisian elite and was an unrelenting networker and social climber. The writer Edmond de Goncourt once observed that “Ephrussi the Jew went to six or seven parties a night, so that he could climb to a position in the Ministry of Fine Arts.”[xx]

Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Ephrussi helped Renoir find buyers in the French Jewish community — where he gained popularity as a portraitist. Degas was particularly disappointed with what he saw as Renoir’s transformation into a Jewish-society portraitist. In 1880, he wrote: “Monsieur Renoir, you have no integrity. It is unacceptable that you paint to order. I gather you now work for financiers, that you do the rounds with Charles Ephrussi.” Shortly after Degas’ missive, Renoir ended his activity as a society portraitist. Aside from Degas’ chastisement, Renoir became exasperated with his Jewish patrons — especially the Cahen d’Anvers family. Writing to a fellow artist, he protested: “As for the 1,500 francs from Cahens, I must tell you that I find it hard to swallow. The family is so stingy; I am washing my hands of the Jews.” Over the following year, Renoir penned a succession of letters expressing his disdain for Jewish patrons, and severed all ties with the Ephrussi patronage circle. Melanson notes that:

As he renounced his Jewish patrons, and his anti-Semitic remarks became more frequent, Renoir’s wrath was directed at the artist most commonly associated with Jewish high society. [Léon] Bonnat painted almost every member of the salons juifs, including Albert and Louilia Cahen d’Anvers, Charles Ephrussi, Marie and Edouard Kann, Louise Cahen d’Anvers, Mme Leopold Stern, Mme Bischoffsheim, Countess Potocka, Joseph Reinach, Abraham de Camondo, and Henri Cernuschi. Like many society portraitists, Bonnat and his wife became members of high society, particularly the world of the salons juifs.

In the twentieth century, Jacques-Emile Blanche recalled the affinity of “wealthy Jewish financiers” for Bonnat. Blanche was correct in asserting that it was Bonnat, and not Renoir, who was truly the portraitist of Jewish high society. Blanche explained that Renoir’s Jewish patrons were “not at all convinced of [Renoir’s] talent” but were promised by Ephrussi “enormous returns on the sale of Impressionist pictures.” Accusing Jewish art patrons of speculation was a common trope of anti-Semitic discourse, and Blanche’s tone was demeaning when he described Ephrussi’s circle as “rather proud of their audacity” in commissioning portraits from Renoir that ultimately “ended up in the laundry room or were given away to former governesses.”[xxi]

Despite their anti-Jewish views, Jewish patrons and art dealers avidly bought up the work of Degas and Renoir. While Jewish artists of the first rank were few and far between (Pissarro perhaps excepted), Jews still dominated the art scene in Paris in the late nineteenth century as publishers, collector-patrons and dealers. They were, moreover, absolutely committed to the modernist movement, even to the point of making excuses for artists who, like Degas, Renoir and Cezanne, were anti-Dreyfusards and even openly anti-Semitic. Laufer notes that:

At the end of the long nineteenth century, the [non-Jewish owned] Parisian press often described French Jews as greedy, cosmopolitan, materialistic traitors — and avid collectors of modern art. While several of these characterisations are mere anti-Semitic stereotypes, French Jews did make up a disproportionately large number of the supporters of modern artists (particularly of the Impressionists and the Symbolists).[xxii]

In his exposition of the political significance of the widespread Jewish involvement in cultural modernism, the Jewish historian Norman Cantor noted that: “Something more profound and structural was involved in the Jewish role in the modernist revolution than this sociological phenomenon of the supersession of marginality. There was an ideological drive at work.”[xxiii] This ideological drive was the urge to subject Western civilization (deemed a “soft authoritarianism” hostile to Jews) to intensive criticism. The late Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj concurred with this assessment, equating anti-Semitism with anti-modernism. “Jewish brilliance”, he said, “made the modern world.” Jews were agents of change, architects of human unease.[xxiv]

Degas’ status as a Modernist master therefore sits incongruously, for today’s establishment critics, alongside his political conservatism and anti-Semitism. For Brody, the problem of Degas’ legacy “isn’t a matter of anti-Semitism or bigotry per se, but of a bilious repudiation of the world as it runs, or, in a word, modernity.” Echoing Jewish responses to Richard Wagner, critics have, in recent decades, confronted the “problem” of Degas’ legacy by character assassination — recent articles about the artist abound with epithets like “cruel,” “misanthropic,” “misogynist,” and “embittered man as well as a bigot.” Criticism inevitably centers on his adherence to a “virulent belief system” which, it is argued, is unredeemed by the sublimity of his art.

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here and here.

[i] Gabriel Astruc, La pavillon des fantomes: souvenirs (Paris, D. Grasset, 1929), 98.

[ii] Anthea Callen quoted in: Washton-Long, Baigel & Heyd (Eds.) Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture: Anti-Semitism, Assimilation, Affirmation, (Waltham MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 166.

[iii] Roberta Crisci-Richardson, Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 31.

[iv] Marilyn R. Brown, Degas and the Business of Art (University Park: Penn State Press, 1994), 130.

[v] Carol M. Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Getty Research Institute, 2003), 282.

[vi] Linda Nochlin in: Maurice Berger (Ed.) Modern Art And Society: An Anthology Of Social And Multicultural Readings (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 30.

[vii] Linda Nochlin, “Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: A portrait of the artist as anti-Semite,” Tablet, January 4, 2019. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/degas-and-the-dreyfus-affair

[viii] Nochlin, Modern Art and Society, 35.

[ix] Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society (Taylor & Francis, 2018),

[x] Norman Kleeblatt, “The Dreyfus Affair: Art Truth and Justice,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 5: New Research, New Views (United Kingdom: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008) 425.

[xi] Roy McMullen, Degas: his life, times, and work (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), 444.

[xii] Roberta Chrisci-Richardson, Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) (United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 12.

[xiii] Nochlin, Modern Art and Society, 39.

[xiv] Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Anti-Semitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (United Kingdom: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1982), 170.

[xv] Chrisci-Richardson, Mapping Degas, 297.

[xvi] Nochlin, Modern Art and Society, 25.

[xvii] Kristin Capps, “Why Absolutely Everyone Hates Renoir,” The Atlantic, October 15, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/why-everyone-hates-renoir/410335/

[xviii] Manet, Julie, Growing up with the Impressionists: the diary of Julie Manet (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1987), 129.

[xix] Ibid., 124.

[xx] Menachem Wecker, “Was Renoir Anti-Semitic?,” National Review, November 18, 2017, https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/11/renoir-and-friends-exhibit-phillips-collection-was-renoir-anti-semitic/

[xxi] Elizabeth Melanson, “The Influence of Jewish Patrons on Renoir’s Stylistic Transformation in the Mid-1880s,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Vol. 12(2), 2013.

https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn13/melanson-on-renoir-and-the-influence-of-jewish-patrons

[xxii] Mia Laufer, Jewish Taste: Modern Art Collecting, Identity, and Antisemitism in Paris, 1870-1914 (St Louis: Washington University Open Scholarship Institutional Repository, 2019), Abstract. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/1814/

[xxiii] Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews (New York, HarperCollins, 1994), 303.

15 Norman Lebrecht, Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 155-6.

The Great Russian Restoration X: A Purge in the Russian Orthodox Church

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The Russian Orthodox Church has been affected by recent events as much as the rest of Russian society has. Now, more than ever, the Church is being asked to support the government and this has had ripple effects on church politics. The biggest story is the unceremonious demotion of Metropolitan Hilarion. Once the Russian Orthodox Church’s ambassador to the West and Ecumenist-in-Chief, Metropolitan Hilarion has now been stripped of his official positions. This is almost certainly because he refused to support the special operation in Ukraine. While we don’t have conclusive proof of this yet, we can piece together the story by looking at recent events in context and then puzzle out the implications that this will have for the Russian Orthodox Church going forward.

The Hilarion Controversy 

Metropolitan Hilarion is an outspoken and liberal-minded priest who formerly occupied very high positions in the Church hierarchy.

When he was a much younger man, he was a vocal anti-Soviet activist clergy member. There is an interesting 2020 interview of Hilarion where he shared highlights from his career in the faith. An interesting episode that he brought up was the time he spent serving in Vilnius. He, apparently, personally went on TV to call on the Soviet soldiers to disobey their order to put down the independence protesters in Lithuania. The protestors had decided to seize the TV stations as part of their coup and the Soviet troops stationed at these communication hubs had been given orders to defend them, with deadly force if necessary. Hilarion publicly called on them to stand aside and let the protestors seize the towers and thereby prevent blood being spilt. When asked about this rather interesting display of loyalties in his youth, Hilarion justified his actions by stating that the protestors were anti-Soviet and not anti-Russian and that he was always loyal to Russia, just not the Soviet Union.

In more recent times, Hilarion has vocally come out against Russians’ right to own firearms by claiming that no Christian can use deadly force to defend their lives. I do not know whether or not this is theologically correct, but I find that theology often has very little to do with official Church positions on various social issues. But, the most questionable public position that Metropolitan Hilarion took was when he came out vocally against anti-vaxxers. You may have heard of this:

Now, one individual priest is entitled to his opinions, but Metropolitan Hilarion was serving as the Church’s official PR spokesman at the time. So, when speaking to the press, the question was always whether or not the position being expressed was the Church’s or just Hilarion’s personal opinion. The PR guy is a very important position in the Church and one that was formerly occupied by the current patriarch Kirill. Hilarion and Kirill were always considered to be close and there were persistent rumors that Hilarion would eventually become the new face of the Church. With all that context out of the way, it should become clearer why people kept such a close eye on Hilarion and his various activities. Hilarion was far more important within the Church than, say, the hapless and irrelevant Press Secretary Dimitri Peskov is in the Kremlin hierarchy.

Anyway, Hilarion declared that people who refused to get vaxxed were sinners, or rather, his specific words were, that if someone refused to get vaxxed, and then got someone sick because of that decision, that it would be a sin on the part of the anti-vaxxer. Hilarion also encouraged his congregation to get vaxxed and to not entertain any conspiracy theories about COVID. Knowing what we know about the WEF agenda and the ever-shifting narrative around COVID, it’s hard not to look at Hilarion with suspicion after he so blatantly laid his cards out on the table in favor of Corona-mania.

Finally, Metropolitan Hilarion was constantly being accused of working to promote ecumenism i.e., the merger between the various Christian churches and the project to create a one-world religion. He would often go abroad, most often the Vatican, and talk about the common values of Orthodoxy and other Christian denominations and even other religions. While the Orthodox Church officially cannot even entertain a passing interest in Ecumenism, as it would be an unthinkable, un-canonical and deeply unpopular position to take, the Catholic Church does not seem to be bound by such constraints. Many Catholic websites, including the official Vatican one have an “Ecumenism” page, tab or category where they share stories about meetings with other religious leaders and their progress in promoting interfaith dialogue. During these meetings, they outline points of congruence that Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and the most powerful religion of our time, Liberalism, have in common. If the goal is to create a one world religion to go along with the one world government, as many believe it is, then the final product would resemble the Noahide Laws. After all, if we are to approach the question logically, and ask what both Christianity, Islam and Judaism have in common, the answer would have to be the Old Testament. But that’s a topic for another time.

Now, the relationship of the Russian Orthodox Church to the ecumenist, one-world religion project is complicated. The Russian Orthodox Church was allowed to join the World Council of Churches, the premiere ecumenism-promoting organization, by the Soviet authorities. The WCC was reliably left-wing and there was an interest on the part of the Soviets in using it to promote their interests. This story is difficult to summarize and explain, as it has to do with various spook agendas and scheming on the part of everyone involved in the project. But, recently, the WCC threatened to expel the Russian Orthodox Church from its organization because of the operation in Ukraine. This is welcome news. It is unclear why the Russian Orthodox Church is still involved with the organization; for one thing, it leads to conspiracy-minded people asking uncomfortable questions.

In summary: Metropolitan Hilarion’s pro-protester, anti-gun, pro-vax and pro-ecumenist views put him squarely in the Liberal wing of the Russian Orthodox Church. But he has now been stripped of his positions and sent to Hungary, where he won’t be able to cause any trouble in Russia, which is welcome news indeed.

The Ukrainian Church Crisis in Orthodoxy 

The Orthodox world is in turmoil over Ukraine. But, to understand what is going on, some more background on Church tradition is necessary.

The Church is divided along canonical territories in most of the territories of the Soviet Union, or, if you prefer, the Russian Empire before it. These demarcations are not built around national boundaries, but they approximate them. There has always been a canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church that historically fell under the auspices of the Russian Orthodox Church. They were granted semi-autonomy following the collapse of the USSR, but still remained part of the overarching Russian structure. In other words, the two Churches remained in communion and that meant that one could take part in the services of both interchangeably at no mortal risk to one’s soul.

As a result of the war, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church hierarchy has decided to break with the Russian Orthodox Church and has declared autonomy. Autonomy is a complicated topic. For example, there is a Russian Orthodox canonical territory in North America, but the Russian Church granted them autonomy a long time ago. In Ukraine, the situation is more complicated because there were already several major splits within the Church leading up to this moment. According to the rules of Russian Orthodoxy, autonomy can be granted, as was the case with North America, but it cannot be declared on the part of the secessionists. The Russian Orthodox Church has not called this an official split as of yet, because it’s considered a grave sin for the Ukrainians to act as they have, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has, essentially, condemned the souls of the people under it. Also, on account of the current crisis in Ukraine, allowance is being made to Metropolitan Onufriy considering that there might be SBU agents breaking priests’ thumbs and forcing the split.

Metropolitan Onufriy, however, is an interesting personality. There are people in his congregation in Ukraine who consider him a living saint. This is a problem because Russian Orthodoxy generally frowns on the concept of living saints. This is in stark contrast to Catholicism, or at least this used to be one of the main points of contention between the East and the West centuries ago. The case of St. Francis of Assisi is a good example. The Orthodox Church considers him to be a fake saint because he acted like a rock star during his day and basically overdid his whole act. Naturally, the Catholics beg to disagree. But even extremely popular and influential Orthodox monks and priests like Father Seraphim (the American) who basically introduced America to Russian Orthodoxy with his popular books have to spend decades in clerical purgatory before the Church decides whether or not to grant them saint status.

Following the news from Ukraine, there was a gathering of higher-ups in the Church who demanded that Metropolitan Onufriy and his Church be declared schismatics and therefore no longer saved by the light of the canonical Church. Although, even here, there is some nuance. Officially, in the end, God decides who goes to Heaven or not, not the Church. So, basically, there is some wiggle room, but not much and being considered a schismatic is a big deal in the Orthodox world.

After the aforementioned council in which the Ukrainian Orthodox Church decided to go its own way, and at the meeting gathered by the Russian Orthodox Church to discuss the situation, Metropolitan Hilarion decided to defend Metropolitan Onufriy. In other words, he claimed that Onufriy and his people weren’t schismatics and he counter-signaled the position of other bishops who stated that Onufriy and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church were as good as damned. This may have been the final strike against Hilarion.

Church Politicking in the Orthodox World

Here, we should say a few words about the other schismatics in Ukraine. Before the very recent split of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, there was already a splinter organization that calls themselves the Orthodox Ukrainian Church (the order of the words is reversed) and they are led by Filaret Denisenko.

Back in the 90s, Denisenko wanted to become the Patriarch in Moscow, but he lost his bid for power to the now reigning Patriarch. After that, he decided to go his own way and created his own autonomous Church. He was supported in this endeavor by the Ukrainian government, and the West, naturally. He and his church were always considered schismatics by the Russian Orthodox Church.

But the situation is even more complicated by the existence of yet another key player in the world of Orthodoxy.

Enter Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, an ambitious man, and a priest who clearly wants to become the Pope of Orthodoxy:

The Constantinople Church claims that it is the first among equals among the Churches because of historical reasons. Bartholomew supported Denisenko and his schismatics back in the day. But, more recently, in 2018, he officially granted autonomy (autocephaly) to the Orthodox Ukrainian Church and this led to a final, formal split between Moscow and Constantinople. In other words, the faithful are no longer allowed to take communion in each other’s Churches — it is considered a grave sin. Bartholomew believes that the Constantinople Church has the right to grant autonomy to other Churches and this was his justification for acting as he did. However, he also refuses to recognize the separateness of the Greek Orthodox Church.

In other words, he pursues his own politics and acts as he sees fit in his own interests and the interest of his Church. Another example: in Macedonia, there used to be a Serbian Orthodox Church that was the official canonical church in the region. But then, a split occurred in the aftermath of Yugoslavia — a move that was supported by the Macedonian government, of course. After negotiations, the Macedonians agreed to rejoin the Serbian Orthodox Church with the understanding that they would then be granted autonomy, making the split canonical. Bartholomew, claiming the exclusive right to grant autonomy, encouraged them to declare themselves autonomous without the blessing of the Serbian Church. In this instance, he failed to cause an even deeper split between the two Churches.

More than any other Patriarch, Bartholomew is very enthusiastic about the ecumenical effort and always rushes to support The Current Thing™. Nowadays, he supports mass migration into Europe, the Kiev government and the Green Agenda, which earns him fawning praise from the world press.

The Agenda of the Russian Orthodox Church 

In the 90s, the Church was concerned with returning its stolen property from the government. It was only under Putin that the Church started receiving support from the government. Most recently, the famous St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg was returned to the Church. It used to be a museum and large revenue generator for the city, and so the decision was protested. But the problem of property restitution has largely been solved in Russia at this point and the situation for the Church has stabilized.

Within Russia, there are schismatic Orthodox movements, but they do not have an organized structure. Mostly, it’s individual priests who have pulled away from the canonical Church for one reason or another and taken their congregations with them. Russia’s Old Believers, who refused to go along with the Nikonian reforms back in the 17th century, were partially brought back into the fold in the 90s. They struck a deal whereby they could keep their traditional pre-Nikonian rites in exchange for recognizing the official Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy. These Old Believers are called Единаверы (United Faith). Solzhenitsyn praised them and supported their recognition and reintegration into the Church, critiquing the original genocide and persecution that was unleashed on them by Church authorities centuries ago. Also Dugin, who used to be more interested in right-wing esotericism, now attends an Old Believer Church in Moscow.

Also, the position of the Church is, officially, against blood-letting in general. But, this year, an official decision was made to re-institute the official chaplain role in the military. In other words, military units will now have a priest assigned to them. This is an old Russian tradition from pre-Soviet times that has been restored and it is a very promising sign that Russia is moving past its Soviet legacy, at least in the military, where Orthodoxy is taken seriously by many soldiers and officers. Patriarch Kirill recently stated that “the Russian military in Ukraine is driven by an inner moral sense based on the Orthodox faith.”

Other than the effort to strengthen Orthodoxy’s place in Russian society, the Church is also deeply involved with the politics of the Orthodox world, which we briefly touched upon above. Much time is spent debating and discussing the development in Ukraine and the larger Orthodox world. For obvious reasons, the Russian Orthodox Church believes that it should take a leading role in the Orthodox world. This puts them at loggerheads with the various schismatic movements and competing centers of influence.

The war has only exacerbated the political struggle between the various Church’s, which is not good news for the Russian Orthodox Church’s ambitions.

But, for conservative-minded people who were concerned about the course that the Church would take in the coming years, the recent developments are cause to rejoice. The Russian Orthodox Church will be forced to harden-up, turn away from cooperating with the West and clamp down on liberal-minded clergy like Metropolitan Hilarion. As I have stressed before in previous essays, the sanctions and the aggression of the West against Russia have led to improvements across the board in various institutions and an embrace of patriotic ideas by society at large.