Featured Articles

How COVID-19 Will Test the West

“If trouble comes when you least expect it, then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”
      Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Writing anything about COVID-19 at this moment is a daunting task since the situation is evolving so rapidly, and in so many different locations. Information contained in this piece could be thoroughly outpaced by transformative events by the time it reaches publication, or even by the time I finish up and click “save.” There is also a glut of information online right now, some of it reliable and fascinating, and some of it misleading and counterproductive. Everywhere there is a mixture of growing apprehension, clashing opinion, and outright confusion. If the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center’s interactive map is accurate, there are currently 284,566 cases of COVID-19 worldwide, a figure that is growing. The “true” number of infections, that includes asymptomatic carriers, will be much higher. Beginning on February 24th, an accelerating number of new transmissions emerged outside China, primarily in Italy which currently has over 47,021 cases. At time of writing, France and Germany are also experiencing rapid increases in affected persons, together totaling over 33,000 cases, and Spain is on the brink of a national lockdown with over 25,374. Almost every European country has now been affected, and COVID-19 is now spreading in the United States, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. How will it test the West?

Relations with China

Early speculation on COVID-19, especially in dissident circles, orbited conspiracy theories that the virus was engineered, and that it was either deployed by the United States or was an accidental leak from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology. In recent days, the former theory has been eagerly taken up by the Chinese themselves, with the added detail that COVID-19 may have been unleashed by visiting American soldiers during the Military World Games, which were staged in Wuhan in October 19-27, 2019. According to epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, in the course of a very interesting interview with Joe Rogan, it’s possible to date the origins of human COVID-19 through a process much like carbon dating, and scientists now have data suggesting COVID-19 became active in humans for the first time in mid-November 2019. Ron Unz has asked:

How would Americans react if 300 PRC officers had visited Chicago, and immediately afterwards, a deadly new plague broke out in that city, with a major risk of spreading throughout the country? Isn’t it also rather suspicious that Iran has been hit so hard? So the two countries in the world most subject to current American hostility just tend to be especially “unlucky.” It hit China just before Lunar New Year, the absolutely worst possible time, and the epicenter was Wuhan, a key transport hub. It really seems an *astonishing* coincidence that 300 American military servicemen had been visiting Wuhan just prior to the outbreak, at a peak of international tension.

Other than timing of course, there seems to be little or no evidence that this was a bioweapon attack. Most obviously, one would assume that any attempted bioweapon attack by the United States on China would be much more covert than what has been suggested (a deliberate release by a very public group of soldiers). Also, while we know that SARS-like viruses based on bat coronavirus can be developed in the lab, the genome of COVID-19 has also been examined countless times with the result that there are now over 300 papers on MedRXiv concerning the structure, nature, and origins of the virus. None of these papers have highlighted anything suggesting an artificial origin of any aspect of COVID-19.

Conspiracy theories on the origins of COVID-19 are of course a very convenient and useful tool for the Chinese government, because they deflect attention from the fact the outbreak can easily be attributed to bad government, and to Communism itself. I find the idea that the virus originated in a Wuhan “wild food” market to be utterly compelling (see this documentary by 60 Minutes Australia, and this short piece by Vox), and this has direct consequences for perceptions of Chinese Communism. The consumption of “exotic” foods is itself a legacy of the Great Chinese Famine 1959–1961, after which the government permitted private farming but failed to prevent the monopoly by big companies of the rearing of conventional livestock. The peasantry, priced out of the market, resorted in large numbers to the farming of wild animals, especially, in the initial stages, the farming of turtles. Since this curbed starvation to some extent, the government backed these initiatives, and then in 1988 made the encouragement of domestication and breeding of wildlife an explicit aspect of law. Wildlife farming became an industry overnight. Bears, snakes, rodents, lizards, and bats began to be mass-produced for human consumption, and sold in mass markets in many of the country’s largest cities. In these markets, multiple species, alive and dead, are stacked in cages on top of one another, with the animals soaked in cocktails of urine and excrement—each cage a petri dish for the development new diseases, especially respiratory diseases, with the potential to jump to humans from myriad mammals. Together with its failure to take decisive preventative action in January 2020, and absent conspiracy theory speculation, the origin tale of COVID-19 is ultimately an indictment of Chinese politics and culture.

How that indictment will impact relations between the West and China remains to be seen. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have speculated that while mutual suspicion between the Chinese and the United States will remain high, the coronavirus outbreak will have no meaningful impact on trade between the two countries, and may in fact help de-escalate some prior economic tensions and involve the suspension of tariffs. In the longer term, however, COVID-19 has accelerated discussion about the need to become more independent from China in the production of goods. Several multinational corporations with supply chains based in China, having already considered diversifying their supply chains because of the U.S.-China trade war, are now likely to further their plans. Apple, for example, intends to move some manufacturing of its products (including AirPods and Apple Watches) to Taiwan due to the coronavirus. In Washington, members of Congress have used the outbreak to call for scaling back U.S. reliance on China, especially for prescription drugs, medical supplies, and other critical resources. Since Europe (Germany in particular) is the world’s largest manufacturer of drugs and medicines, we are likely to see a gradual decoupling of the United States from Chinese production, and a greater integration of European-American trade. Brexit Britain, until recently seen by the Chinese as having great potential for a lucrative trade and investment deal, may now present more of a cold house than previously thought. The EU, already resistant to increased Chinese economic influence, is also likely to dig its heels even deeper in the face of Chinese approaches. Some of the lasting challenges of COVID-19 will be how the West can distance itself from economic dependence on Chinese manufacturing, what impact this will have in both the shorter and longer term, and how the Chinese will respond.

Migrant Pressures

The first European outbreaks of COVID-19 fatefully coincided with an aggressive two-week operation by Turkey on its border with Greece, involving the movement of thousands of Syrian and African migrants. Beginning in late February, the Turkish government announced it would no longer stop migrants trying to reach Europe, and then drove thousands to the Greek border, live-streaming the process to encourage more to follow. The move was widely understood as an attempt to force European support for Turkey’s military campaign in northern Syria, and also as an attempt to extort more money from the EU. Although the effort now appears to have concluded with Turkey backtracking in the face of Greek resilience, Europe continues to have this metaphorical human “pistol” pressed to the side of its head.

COVID-19 is going to aggravate the broader migrant problem. Already the clamor is growing that migrant camps on Europe’s borders should be evacuated on health grounds, with the migrants permitted to enter Europe. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) have argued that unhygienic and cramped living conditions mean COVID-19 can spread very fast, and that social distancing and hand washing are more difficult. While Europe bans mass gatherings, it’s been said that people in these camps have nowhere to go. Even within European countries, the outbreak has been associated with calls for amnesties and the opening of migrant detention centers. In the UK, lawyers and campaigners have called for hundreds immigration centers detainees to be released “because of fears they will contract coronavirus while locked up.”

The problem with such calls is that they all appear to present COVID-19 as a deadly plague slaughtering all in its path, rather than as something that afflicts the most seriously ill among the old and infirm. As is well known, the average age of Europe’s would-be migrants, particularly those from Syria, is somewhere around the late 20s. Given the known progression of COVID-19 in people in this age category, calls to permit mass influxes of masses of migrants purely because of the outbreak is tantamount to calling for open borders because potential immigrants might otherwise catch the common cold. Such calls are likely to ride the crest of a media-induced wave of panic, however, and the resolve of the West to resist further migrant flows will indeed be tested by twisted forms of moral blackmail in the weeks and months to come.

Life and Death under Liberalism

As stated in my review of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), we live in a decaying society  that is in terror of death, and pathologically so. This pathology is rooted in mistaken beliefs that our civilization is dying from, or could imminently die from, disease epidemics, climate catastrophes etc., in the midst of willful and ignorant abdication of a future (via self-hate and industrialized abortion) in favor of mass immigration, consumerism, and instant gratification. Just as one has to confront death in order to truly live (or to become “authentic” in Heidegger’s philosophy), our society is in constant flight from death and thus inevitably collapses into inauthentic decay. COVID-19, while not as lethal as media coverage would suggest, is a reminder of our mortality and human fragility and will necessarily have a jarring effect on a Western liberalism that has become increasingly distant from the confrontation with death.

Life under liberal finance capitalism is largely one of illusion, in which the prospect of real death is pushed far into the distance, both psychologically and culturally. Postmodern Western liberal culture is largely one of perpetual adolescence, in which the primary virtues are acting according to one’s individual will, identifying oneself in a hyper-individualistic manner, and expressing these identities via conspicuous consumption and behavior. We do not “live towards” Death, with a sense of purpose and a feeling that we are part of a much grander civilizational trajectory. We do not understand that Death has shaped our historical path, and that it hangs over us in ways that should direct our actions in the present.

COVID-19, regardless of current confusion over its true mortality rate, is a corrective to illusions that “progressive” Man has overcome Nature and can shape the world according to the human image, and without consequences. Certainly throughout my own lifetime, I’ve grown accustomed to assertions that life expectancy will continue to increase, and that there will be an endless supply of innovations and social projects that will make the mechanics of life easier and more productive. One increasingly expects that one will live a long life, mostly in very good health. Such a sense of security can breed all kinds of arrogance and fantasies, including the recent perverse luxury of the delusion that one can simply decide to be this or that gender. This new virus, however, presents the possibility, both in itself and its inevitable heirs, that Death is much closer than we ever thought, and that for all our technological advancement and self-congratulation, Nature need only tweak one molecule, so small our naked eyes could never perceive it, and the grave opens before us. The Age of Fantasy is confronted with the ultimate reality.

How the West responds to this realization will be a further cultural challenge. We have grown equally accustomed to the idea that we have “advanced” morally as a society, and that we have overcome some of the more “brutish” aspects of human existence that we perceive in the past. But in a world of apparently increasing plenty, such notions can be hard to test. It’s always easy for a man with a full stomach to condemn the actions of the starving. The conceit of the full-bellied West that it has overcome and surpassed itself and its past will now be tested. I, of course, arise from a political and philosophical tradition that insists there is no shame in the past. I see little or no place for morality in the struggle for survival. And I also see the cracks already forming in the Western conceit. This society that is against “hate” and prides itself on “coming together” is already struggling to stop people rioting over toilet paper and bottled water. If civil order breaks down, will the proud feminists be seeking their own resources, or hoping for a strong man to protect them? If the death toll does rise dramatically, and if curfews and lockdowns are imposed and intensified, I ask: How well will your beloved multicultural societies respond? If resources become scarce and tensions rise, who will you trust? These tests are coming.

Economic and Political Fallout

Just days ago, JPMorgan projected that a recession will hit the US and European economies by July, with US GDP to shrink by 2% in the first quarter and 3% in the second, and Eurozone GDP to contract by 1.8% and 3.3% over the same periods. Sudden cessation of economic activity through quarantines, event cancellations, social distancing, and the almost complete shutdown of the tourist industry will have both immediate and longer term consequences for national economies and broader trade patterns. The mass closing of schools will expose pre-existing weaknesses in a modern system that sees women funneled en masse into the work place while their children are left in day cares or schools. According to numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 70 percent of American mothers with children under 18 work. Through the closing of schools alone, the impact of COVID-19 will almost certainly have the greatest impact on the role of women in the workplace since World War Two, with many forced to leave work and return to the home for an as yet undetermined amount of time. How this will impact the businesses or public entities employing these women remains to be seen, but it will undoubtedly cause significant difficulties and necessitate some level of infrastructural change.

The outbreak of COVID-19 is also projected to test Western healthcare provision to the limit. It’s been particularly interesting that the outbreak in Italy effectively broke the health system in Lombardy, widely regarded as one of the best in the world. Before the outbreak, it was remarked that:

The Lombardy healthcare system, characterised by quality and efficiency, is a model of reference both in Italy and worldwide. With the benefit of private partnerships in fact, it ensures its citizens and those who live in other regions or abroad have access to prime level health care with all the advantages of a public system. Lombardy has 56 University Departments of Medicine, 19 IRCCS (IRCCS means an institution devoted to excellence in clinical care and research) which represent 42% of the national total, 47 Institutes and 32 Research Centres. As a result, Lombardy and in particular Milan have always attracted the most renowned physicians in every field of expertise.

It took COVID-19 just four weeks to exhaust every hospital bed in Lombardy, force doctors out of retirement and medical students to graduate early, and provoke the creation of 500 triage tents outside hospitals nationwide. The different, and ever-politicized, healthcare systems of the United States and Great Britain are about to experience the most intensive test in their respective histories. One of the most outspoken figures from the medical profession on social media in recent days is Eugene Gu, who has made a point of attacking the profit-seeking nature of much of the American medical establishment. Gu has argued that American medicine is essentially a pyramid scheme that profits those at the top by artificially restricting the number of doctors produced by the system:

The medical school and residency system in the United States is completely broken compared to other countries. Now that we are in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, we need to reflect upon an abusive system that hurts patients and seeks to make a few specialists filthy rich. Even before the coronavirus, we created a huge physician shortage by limiting spots in medical schools to inflate doctors’ salaries the same way De Beers fixes the diamond market. And we gutted primary care so that specialists like plastic surgeons and dermatologists can get rich. I took an oath to “first, do no harm.” I cannot just stand by and watch as the corrupt cesspool we call our American medical system fails our patients while a few doctors, insurance executives, and Big Pharma get filthy rich. Medicine should not be a for-profit industry.

Whether or not one agrees with Dr Gu’s perspective, the coming weeks and months will test both American for-profit medicine and Britain’s nationalized health system, and perhaps leave long term political legacies for both.

Political consequences will also inevitably result from the approaches of individual leaders to the crisis. Boris Johnson is risking his political future on a “herd immunity” strategy that is radically different from the course of action pursued by other leaders. It’s been criticized as involving the sacrifice of the older generation for a slightly prolonged period of economic normalcy and an entirely assumed future immunity among the young. Donald Trump, meanwhile, is quickly trying to move on from a highly dismissive initial response to the outbreak. In both cases, and throughout the West, moderately “conservative” populism based on the celebration of finance capitalism and token gestures on borders will be tested to the limit by increasing strains on all aspects of social, political, and economic life. Trump, in particular, has managed to squeeze a lot of political mileage out of the performance of the stock market. With stocks tumbling, and the American healthcare system pushed to the limit, it remains to be seen whether Trump’s drive to make gay sex legal in Africa will be enough to keep his voters happy.

In another return of the Real, of course, COVID-19 is doing more to close borders than any expression of political populism ever has. It was all well and good that “the world is a village” when this involved cheap and cheerful vacations, but all it took was a few houses in the throes of sickness for the rest of the villagers to wish there was somewhere they could escape to. The global village is in shutdown. All humans might be equally susceptible to this virus, but national borders, so often scorned until recently, now reveal they might have some uses after all – just one of them being the invaluable opportunity to seal and control a limited territory. How people grow accustomed to this renewed emphasis on border control may leave a lasting political legacy for the West also. In any case, we can only hope it will.

Conclusion

With events moving so quickly, I conclude with the oppressive sensation that I’ve written both too much and too little. The figures presented at the outset of this essay will be superfluous by the time this piece is published, but I do think some of the suggestions in the body will remain relevant for some time to come. I wish all our readers the best of luck and the best of health in the weeks and months to come. May globalism’s difficulty be the dissident’s opportunity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism, and the Decline of Western Art, Part 3 of 3

Convergence by Jackson Pollock (1952)

Abstract Expressionism and the Culture of Critique

Abstract Expressionism was disproportionately a Jewish cultural phenomenon. It was a movement populated by legions of Jewish artists, intellectuals, critics, and patrons. Prominent gentile artists within the movement like Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell married Jewish women (Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler). Willem de Kooning defied the trend — though had to ingratiate himself with the Jewish intellectual and cultural elite focused around the journal Partisan Review which was “dominated by editors and contributors with a Jewish ethnic identity and a deep alienation from American cultural and political institutions.”[i]

For Jewish writer Alain Rogier, it seems “hardly a coincidence that Jews made up a large percentage of the leading Abstract Expressionists.” It was an art movement where the culture of critique of Jewish artists, frustrated that the post-war American prosperity prevented the coming of international socialism, turned inward and instead “proposed individualistic modes of liberation.” This mirrored the ideological shift that occurred among the New York Intellectuals generally who had “gradually evolved away from advocacy of socialist revolution toward a shared commitment to anti-nationalism and cosmopolitanism (i.e. the multicultural project), ‘a broad and inclusive culture’ in which cultural differences were esteemed.”[ii] Doss notes how this ideological shift manifested itself among the artists who became the Abstract Expressionists:

As full employment returned, New Deal programs were terminated — including federal support for the arts — the reformist spirit that had flourished in the 1930s dissipated. Corporate liberalism triumphed: together, big government and big business forged a planned economy and engineered a new social contract based on free market expansion. … With New Deal dreams of reform in ruins, and the better “tomorrow” prophesied at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair having seemingly led only to the carnage of World War II, it is not surprising that post-war artists largely abandoned the art styles and political cultures associated with the Great Depression.[iii]

The avant-garde artists of the New York School instead embraced an “inherently ambiguous and unresolved, an open-ended modern art… which encouraged liberation through personal, autonomous acts of expression.” The works of the Abstract Expressionists were “revolutionary attempts” to liberate the larger American culture “from the alienating conformity and pathological fears [especially of communism] that permeated the post-war era.”[iv] Rothko claimed that “after the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb you couldn’t paint figures without mutilating them.” His friend and fellow artist Adolph Gottlieb, declared that: “Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind… abstraction is not abstraction at all… it is the realism of our time.”[v]

At the heart of Abstract Expressionism lay a vision of the artist as alienated from mainstream society, a figure morally compelled to create a new type of art which might confront an irrational, absurd world—a mentality completely in accord with that of the alienated Jewish artists and intellectuals at the heart of the movement who viewed the White Christian society around them with hostility. MacDonald notes that the New York Intellectuals “conceived themselves as alienated, marginalised figures — a modern version of traditional Jewish separateness and alienation from gentile culture. … Indeed [Norman] Podhoretz was asked by a New Yorker editor in the 1950s “whether there was a special typewriter at Partisan Review with the word ‘alienation’ on a single key.”[vi]

During the 1950s Jewish artists and intellectuals chafed against the social controls enforced by political conservatives and religious and cultural traditionalists who limited Jewish influence on the culture, “much to the chagrin of the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals who prided themselves in their alienation from that very culture.” This all ended, together with Abstract Expressionism as an art movement embodying the alienation of the New York Intellectuals, with the triumph of the culture of critique in the 1960s, when radical Jews and their gentile allies usurped the old WASP establishment, and thus “had far less reason to engage in the types of cultural criticism so apparent in the writings of the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals. Hollywood and the rest of the American media were unleashed.”[vii]

Jews and Modernism

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.”[viii] This ideological drive was the urge to subject Western civilization (deemed a “soft authoritarianism” fundamentally hostile to Jews) to intensive and unrelenting criticism — in the process of which they spawned a massive literature of cultural subversion throughout the post-war period.

Kevin MacDonald notes how there was a great deal of influence and cross-fertilisation between the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School. Both promoted modernism in art at least partly because of its apparent compatibility with expressive individualism, but also because it was seen as being capable of alienating people from Western capitalistic societies. For Frankfurt School intellectual Walter Benjamin the purpose of modern art was to spread the kind of cultural pessimism that would bring on the revolution, insisting that “To organise pessimism means nothing other than to expel the moral metaphor from politics.” His colleague, Willi Munzenberg, saw the central role of the Frankfurt School as being “to organise the intellectuals and use them to make Western Civilisation stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Clement Greenberg and the New “American” Art

Clement Greenberg was the most influential theorizer and promoter of modernism in America during the middle years of the twentieth century. His advocacy helped to bring about the institutionalisation of Abstract Expressionism and to secure the dominance of American modernist art in the immediate post-war period. MacDonald notes that Greenberg “made his reputation entirely within what one might term a Jewish intellectual milieu” including as “a writer for PR, managing editor of Contemporary Jewish Record (the forerunner of Commentary), long-time editor of Commentary under Elliot Cohen, as well as art critic for The Nation.”[ix] Greenberg’s Jewish identity was strong, and he once avowed that “that the quality of Jewishness is present in every word I write, as it is in almost every word of every other contemporary Jewish writer.”[x] He also claimed that it likely “that by world historical standards the European Jew represents a higher type than any yet achieved in history.”[xi]

Clement Greenberg

Greenberg’s later rejection of Pop and Conceptual Art led to a period when his writings and preferences were dismissed by those who aligned themselves with the views of rival Jewish art guru Harold Rosenberg. This arose from Greenberg’s dogmatic advocacy of abstraction, and his distaste for commercial popular culture — what he called “kitsch” in his most famous essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) — his response to the destruction and repression of modernist art in National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” one of the most influential essays of the twentieth century, made Greenberg’s name as a critic and led to his participation in the world of cultural journalism as an editor of Partisan Review.

It is not hard to detect an underlying concern with anti-Semitism in Greenberg’s famous essay. There was a general understanding among both the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals that mass culture — whether in the Soviet Union (both groups were anti-Stalinist), National Socialist Germany, or bourgeois United States — promoted conformism and escape from harsh political realities. It “offered false pleasure, reaffirmed the status quo, and promoted a pervasive conformity that stripped the masses of their individuality and subjectivity.”[xii] By contrast, avant-garde art had the potential to foster the kind of subjective individualism that could disconnect the masses from their traditional familial, religious and ethnic bonds — thereby reducing the salience of Jews as an outgroup and weakening the anti-Semitic status quo within these societies.

In his essay, Greenberg downplays the culturally critical potential of avant-garde art, and instead seeks to account for the ubiquity of “kitsch” in totalitarian societies by stressing its usefulness in ingratiating a regime with the masses — a practice that, he informs us, will only cease when these regimes “surrender to international socialism.” He writes:

Where today a political regime establishes an official cultural policy, it is for the sake of demagogy. If kitsch is the official tendency of culture in Germany, Italy and Russia, it is not because their respective governments are controlled by philistines, but because kitsch is the culture of the masses in these countries, as it is everywhere else. The encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects. Since these regimes cannot raise the cultural level of the masses — even if they wanted to — by anything short of a surrender to international socialism, they will flatter the masses by bringing all culture down to their level. It is for this reason that the avant-garde is outlawed. … Kitsch keeps a dictator in closer contact with the “soul” of the people. Should the official culture be one superior to the general mass-level, there would be a danger of isolation.[xiii]

Greenberg’s thesis is not without validity. Indeed one of the striking features of modern Western life under Jewish cultural hegemony has been an all-pervasive popular culture of Hollywood that is supersaturated with the rankest multi-cultural and multi-racial kitsch. Despite the real-world failure of the utopian vision being relentlessly endorsed, this form of easily assimilated kitsch (seasoned with liberal doses of sex, violence and schmaltz) works very well to brainwash the great bulk of White people and avert even the mildest forms of rebellion.

Greenberg’s famous essay in Partisan Review

“Kitsch” works for the Jews of Hollywood for the same reason it worked for Hitler and Stalin. This is because kitsch is defined by efficiency of communication, while the avant-garde alienates some viewers “simply because this was an inescapable by-product of their formal experiments and of their rejection of kitsch.”[xiv]  Barlow notes that, for Greenberg:

Kitsch worked to maximize effect, while the avant-garde sought to address cause. Both commerce and totalitarian regimes sought maximum penetration of controllable information. They required the culture of kitsch. Mass culture will almost inevitably be kitsch, as passive consumers will comprehend accessible effects more readily than the self-conscious explorations of cause. Only in a truly socialist society will mass culture transcend the psychology of passive consumption. Despite important differences between the two men, Greenberg’s attitude to popular culture is close to that of Theodor W. Adorno.[xv]

Like Greenberg, Adorno initially directed his attack not against the high culture of Western civilization, but against the “mass culture” which warred with it — a “secondary emanation of authority” which was an inescapable product of capitalism. For Adorno, nothing was more abhorrent in the mass culture of America than its music. For him, popular music, riddled with cliché and kitsch, was not art but ideology that promotes a false consciousness that numbs the revolutionary senses of the working class. It is the owners of the means of communication (the capitalist class) that is sovereign in this debased musical culture. Under socialism, Adorno implied, this false consciousness would be swept away and the emancipated proletariat would be whistling the ideology-free music of Schoenberg and Webern in the streets.[xvi] However, as Roger Scruton noted, this aspect of Frankfurt School’s critical theory was later to change fundamentally:

Since the Frankfurters came as exiles to America, there to pour scorn on their hosts, the culture of repudiation has taken another and more home grown form. Instead of focusing on the “mass culture” of the people, it now targets the elite culture of the universities. It is indifferent, or even vaguely laudatory, towards popular art and music, seeing them as legitimate expression of frustration and a challenge to the old forms of highbrow knowledge. Its target is the culture in the sense that I have been defending it: all those artefacts that have stood the test of time, and which are treasured by those who love them for the emotional and moral knowledge that they contain.[xvii] 

Unlike his rival Harold Rosenberg, Greenberg never embraced this new critical paradigm. In his essay “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940) he articulated his famous claim that resistance to kitsch requires that art “emphasize the medium and its difficulties,” adding that the history of the avant-garde is one of “progressive surrender to the resistance of the medium.”[xviii] Greenberg argued that the vision of the Abstract Expressionists was characterized by a “fresher, opener, more immediate surface,” offensive to standard taste. He related this quality to a “more intimate and habitual acquaintance with isolation,” which was, in his ethnically, morally and culturally particularistic view, “the condition under which the true quality of the age is experienced.”[xix]

Greenberg’s dismissal of Harold Rosenberg’s account of Abstract Expressionism as “action painting” was based on his view that Rosenberg’s claim implied that the active process of painting mattered more than the result — that one chaotic combination of drips and splodges was as good as another. For Greenberg, Rosenberg’s theory gave the green light to charlatans whose work was no more than “stunts.” Such stunts certainly came into prominence with the rise of Pop and Conceptual art during the 1960s as many artists embraced Rosenberg’s claim that the moment of “performance” could itself be art. This aspect of the art scene in the 1960s earned Greenberg’s contempt, but as Barlow points out, “could all too easily be interpreted as the conservative critic whose time had passed — the modern equivalent of Ruskin’s attack on Whistler.”[xx]

Harold Rosenberg

It is somewhat ironic that Greenberg, an ethnocentric Jewish Trotskyite, in his staunch defence of Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction, and rejection of the “pre-emptive kitsch” of Pop Art, Neo-Dada and Conceptual Art, was pushed into the role of cultural reactionary. The Abstract Expressionists Greenberg championed had been eager to break with the figurative art of the Regionalist painters, but their work (owing to its highly abstract nature) lacked the more overtly ideological form of much of the conceptual art that replaced it. This shouldn’t, however, obscure from us the fact that the rise of Abstract Expressionism coincided with the Jewish takeover of American high culture, and the deposing of the old WASP art establishment. Nor should it obscure the profound influence Greenberg’s ideas continue to have on Western culture.

Since “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” artistic and cultural production in the West has been underpinned by an aggressive “kitschophobia.” Since Greenberg’s essay was published, figurative painting, tonal music, and classical architecture have been regarded with suspicion (if not outright hostility) by cultural elites. It was fear of kitsch that gave rise to the pre-emptive kitsch of postmodern art:

Artists began not to not to shun kitsch but to actively embrace it, in the manner of Andy Warhol, Alan Jones, and Jeff Koons. The worst thing is to be unwittingly guilty of producing kitsch; far better to produce kitsch deliberately, for then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody. … Pre-emptive kitsch sets quotation marks around actual kitsch, and hopes thereby to save its artistic credentials. … Public galleries and big collections fill with the pre-digested clutter of modern life, brash items of salesmanship which pass their sell-by date the moment they go on permanent display. Art as we knew it required knowledge, competence, discipline and study, all of which were effective reminders of the adult world. Pre-emptive kitsch, by contrast, delights in the tacky, the ready-made, and the cut-out, using forms, colours and images which both legitimize ignorance and also laugh at it, effectively silencing the adult voice. Such art eschews subtlety, allusion and implication, and in the place of imagined ideals in gilded frames it offers real junk in quotation marks.[xxi]

This “kitschophobic” art belligerently shuns the traditional Western preoccupation with beauty—substituting for it a cult of sarcasm, nihilism and ugliness (yet always within a politically correct framework). To be an “authentic” creation, postmodern art must “challenge,” and preferably be offensive, to standard taste. If this requires producing a dead shark in formaldehyde or a crucifix in urine, then so be it. These deliberately ugly and offensive productions, wittingly or unwittingly, provoke among their audiences a disconnection from the traditional reinforcers of ethnocentrism and group cohesion, and engender what Frankfurt School intellectual Georg Lukacs called “a culture of pessimism” reflecting a world “abandoned by God.”

Israel Shamir aptly summarized the process of degeneration that has occurred within Western art over the last 70 years when he noted that: “In the beginning, these were works of some dubious value like the ‘abstract paintings’ of Jackson Pollock. Eventually we came to rotten swine, corrugated iron, and Armani suitsArt was destroyed.” An art that emerged in response to the alienation of Jewish artists and intellectuals in mid-twentieth century America ushered in an art of cultural alienation for everyone. This debasement of the West’s glorious cultural inheritance has sapped the cultural confidence of White people, and contributed to making Western societies, in the eyes of their increasingly atomized populations, increasingly “unlovable” and not worth defending.


[i] MacDonald, Culture of Critique, 211.

[ii] Ibid., 212.

[iii] Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 124.

[iv] Ibid., 130-1.

[v] Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art, 128.

[vi] MacDonald, Culture of Critique, 212.

[vii] Kevin MacDonald, ‘Review of Thomas Wheatland’s ‘The Frankfurt School in Exile’ Part II’, Occidental Observer, 2009: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-WheatlandII.html

[viii] Cantor, The Sacred Chain, 303.

[ix] Ibid., 211.

[x] Ibid., 213.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] MacDonald, Review of Thomas Wheatland’s “The Frankfurt School in Exile.”

[xiii] Clement Greenberg,

[xiv] Paul Barlow, In: Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century, Ed. By Chris Murray (London: Routledge, 2003), 152.

[xv] Ibid., 150.

[xvi] Roger Scruton, Culture Counts — Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (New York: Encounter Books, 2007), 70.

[xvii] Ibid., 73.

[xviii] Barlow, Key Writers on Art, 150-1.

[xix] A. Everitt, “Abstract Expressionism” In: Modern Art — Impressionism to Post-Modernism, Ed. By David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 256.

[xx] Barlow, Key Writers on Art, 151.

[xxi][xxi] Roger Scruton, Modern Culture (London: Continuum, 2000), 93.

Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism, and the Decline of Western Art, Part 2 of 3

Go to Part 1.

Wisconsin landscape by John Steuart Curry (1938-39)

Creating a New “American” Art

Before the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, the American art scene was defined by two main currents. The first were the Regionalists (e.g. Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry) who used their own signature styles to portray the virtues of the hard-working rural American population. The second group were the artists of Social Realism (e.g. Ben Shahn and Diego Rivera), whose work reflected urban life during the Great Depression and their devotion to international socialism. Neither was interested in abstract art, and despite their political radicalism the Social Realists held rather conservative attitudes to figurative representation. While these two styles dominated, the artists of the nascent New York School “met frequently at the legendary Cedar Bar, where they discussed their radical theses. They argued endlessly about the problems of art, about how to effect a total break with the art of the past, about the mission of creating an abstract art that no longer had anything to do with conventional techniques and motifs.”[i]

The Museum of Modern Art did not yet exist; the Metropolitan Museum tended to “look down its WASP patrician nose at modernism;” and the Whitney favoured exactly the kind of American painting young Rothko most despised: scenic, provincial, anecdotal, and conservative.[ii] For a Jewish outsider like Rothko, who in 1970 declared that he would never feel entirely at home in a land to which he had been transplanted against his will, urban America was his America.

But what was on the mid-town gallery walls was, for the most part, another America altogether: big Skies, fruited plain, purple mountain majesty, the light of providence shining on the prairie. About that America Rothko knew little and cared less. Early on, he had the sense that America ought to offer an art that was as new and vital as its history; but he also wanted that art to play for high stakes, to be hooked up somehow to the universal ideas he was chain-smoking his way through. Just what such an art might look like, however, he had as yet not the slightest idea.[iii]

The New York Intellectuals (who were overwhelmingly Jewish) associated rural America with “nativism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and fascism as well as with anti-intellectualism and provincialism.” By contrast, urban America was associated “with ethnic and cultural tolerance, with internationalism, and with advanced ideas.” Their basic assumption was that rural America “with which they associated much of American tradition and most of the territory beyond New York” had “little to contribute to a cosmopolitan culture” and could therefore be dismissed.

Artistic Expression as “Unrelated to Manual Ability or Painterly Technique”

Rothko’s skill in rendering the human form was poor, which is evident in early works like Bathers or Beach Scene (Untitled) (1933/4). Schama admits as much, noting that: “When he [Rothko] stood in the Brooklyn [Jewish Center] classroom [where he taught art classes from 1929–46] it all seemed so easy. He would tell the children not to mind the rules — painting, he said, was as natural as singing. It should be like music but when he tried it came out as a croak. It’s the work of a painfully knotted imagination. No not very good.”[iv] According to the general consensus, Rothko “never stood out as a great draughtsman and could even at times appear clumsy in the execution of his oil paintings.”[v]

Bathers or Beach Scene by Mark Rothko (1933–34)

Rothko, in a speech in the mid-thirties, offered a quasi-philosophical rationale for the unimportance of technical skill, stressing “the difference between sheer skill, and skill that is linked to spirit, expressiveness and personality.” He insisted that artistic expression was “unrelated to manual ability or painterly technique, that it is drawn from an inborn feeling for form; the ideal lies in the spontaneity, simplicity and directness of children.”[vi] Such grandiloquent pronouncements from Rothko were not unusual, with Collings noting that “Rothko was outrageously over-fruity and grandiose in his statements about art and religion and the solemn importance of his own art.”[vii]

This tendency on his part prompted one writer to declare: “What I find amazing … is how a painting which is two rectangles of different colors can somehow prompt thousands upon thousands of words on the human condition, Marxist dialectics, and social construction.” He suggests a good rule of thumb is “the more obtuse terms an artist and his supporters use to describe a work, the less worth the painting has.  By this definition Rothko may be the most worthless artist in the history of humanity.” Another critic humorously observed that:

Rothko needed to be fluent in rationalizing his existence and validating himself as a relevant artist to the average idiot who spent tens of thousands of dollars on paintings which could be easily reproduced by anyone with a pulse and a paint brush. Rothko … learned to garner attention to his paintings by getting into a frenzied drama-queen state and hysterically claiming that his works were deep, profound statements and not just indiscriminate blobs of color. They were expressions that rejected society’s expectation of technical expertise, actual talent and an artist’s evolution over time.

As well as self-interestedly seeking to redefine the nature of great art, Rothko often spoke out for the importance of “artistic freedom,” which in practice meant artistic freedom for those on the left. He became involved in the famed 1934 incident between John D. Rockefeller and the Social Realist painter, Diego Rivera. This began when Rivera was commissioned to paint a huge mural in the lobby of the main building of Rockefeller Center, the newly completed showcase of the oil baron’s ideals. Shortly before Rivera completed his work, Rockefeller dropped in and saw that the mural had a defiantly socialist message based on a heroic depiction of Lenin. He ordered the removal of the mural, resulting in its destruction. After this incident, a group of 200 New York artists gathered to protest against Rockefeller, and Rothko marched with them.[viii]

Part of Diego Rivera’s mural for Rockefeller Center

Jewish Ethnic Networking and “The Ten”

In 1934 Rothko was one of the original 200 founding members of the Art Union and Gallery Secession which was devoted to the newest artistic tendencies. A year later he became a member of the group who called themselves “The Ten” (the minimum number of Jews that can pray together). This unashamed exercise in Jewish ethnic networking was an opportunity for Rothko and his colleagues to engage in mutual admiration and promotion, and agitate in favor of “experimentation” and against “conservatism” in museums, schools and galleries.[ix] Among “The Ten” were Ben Zion, Adolph Gottlieb, Louis Harris, Yankel Kufeld, Louis Schanker, Joseph Solman, Nahum Chazbazov, Ilya Bolotovsky and Rothko. Gottlieb, in describing the group, later recalled: “We were outcasts, roughly expressionist painters. We were not acceptable to most dealers and collectors. We banded together for the purpose of mutual support.” “The Ten” acted as an alliance against the promotion of Regionalist art by the Whitney Museum of American Art, which to them was too “provincial” for words.[x]

Rejecting the local artists’ Regionalist perspectives, they were unable to define themselves as mere U.S. citizens. Instead, they presented themselves as cosmopolitan internationalists, freer and more open to incorporate the intercultural lessons of the European Modernist avant-gardes. When the fascist regimes began to decapitate these new art movements (with the closing of the Bauhaus in 1933 and the mounting of the exhibition Entartete Kunst [Degenerate Art] in Munich in 1937), great masters like Josef Albers and Piet Mondrian made their way to the United States, and American Jewish artists welcomed them with open arms.[xi]

The pronounced ingroup-outgroup mentality of “The Ten” mirrored that within the Jewish intellectual movements reviewed by Kevin MacDonald in Culture of Critique, where he notes how Norman Podhoretz described the group of Jewish intellectuals centered around Partisan Review as a “family” – a sentiment derived from their “feeling of “beleaguered isolation shared with masters of the modernist movement themselves, elitism – the conviction that others are not worth taking into consideration except to attack, and need not be addressed in one’s writing; out of the feeling as well as a sense of hopelessness as to the fate of American culture at large and the correlative conviction that integrity and standards were only possible among ‘us.’”[xii]

Within these alienated and marginalized Jewish groups was an atmosphere of social support that fostered an intense “Jewish ingroup solidarity arrayed against [what they saw as] a morally and intellectually inferior outside world.”[xiii] Despite the ethnic superglue, there were tensions within the Jewish milieu of “The Ten,” with Schama pointing out that, ”Amidst the usual Talmudic bickering of leftist factions, the denunciations and walk-outs, Rothkowitz and his comrades were all burning to make an art that would say something about the alienation, as they saw it, of modern American life.”[xiv] For Rothko, “the whole problem of art was to establish human values in this specific civilization.”[xv]

Isolationism as “Hitlerism”

Jewish gallery owners like Sam Kootz decried the “nationalist” art of the Regionalists and promoted the internationalist art of a rising generation of (often Jewish) expressionist, surrealist and abstract artists. “America’s more important artists are consistently shying away from Regionalism and exploring the virtues of internationalism,” he commented at the time. “This is the painting equivalent of our newly found political and social internationalism.”[xvi] For Rothko, like for most American Jews, the Second World War was a moment of universal moral crisis. He had only become an American citizen in 1938 and like many American Jews, “he was worried about the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the possibility of a revival of anti-Semitism in America, and U.S. Citizenship came to signify security.” Following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, Rothko along with others left the American Artists’ Congress to protest its continuing support for the Soviet Union.

When on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the Metropolitan Museum organized an exhibition entitled Artists for Victory, consisting of 1,418 works by contemporary artists—John Steuart Curry took first prize—the Federation of Modern painters vehemently criticized the works, denouncing them as “realist and isolationist.”[xvii] Jewish abstract artist Barnett Newman took a clear stand against local American artists, declaring: “Isolationist painting, which they named the American Renaissance, is founded on politics and on an even worse aesthetic. Using the traditional chauvinism, isolationist brand of patriotism, and playing on the natural desire of American artists to have their own art, they succeeded in pushing across a false aesthetic that is inhibiting the production of any true art in this country…. Isolationism, we have learned by now, is Hitlerism.”[xviii]

Jewish artist Barnett Newman with his “true”art untainted by “Hitlerism”

Rothko enthusiastically celebrated American entry into the war, insisting that it represented “an escape from narrow-minded isolation,” and “a reconnection with the destinies of modern history.” Schama observes that:

Now Rothko and his painter friends — so many of them originally European Jews — wanted American art to go the same way. With European civilization annihilated by fascism, it was up to the United States to take the torch and save human culture from a new Dark Ages. It was not just a matter of offering safe haven to the likes of Piet Mondrian or Guernica, but rather the authentic American way — doing something bold and fresh, taking the fight to the enemy which had classified modernism as “degenerate” and had done its best to destroy its partisans. … The Nazis had art (as well as everything else) entirely the wrong way round. The modernism they demonized as “degenerate” was in fact the seed of new growth, and what they glorified as “regenerate” was the stale leavings of neo-classicism. Their mistake was America’s — and particularly New York’s — good fortune.

This was a time when many American Jews were changing or modifying their names to sound less Jewish. In January 1940 Marcus Rothkowitz officially became Mark Rothko. During the war years Rothko’s art changed too: he produced a series of surrealistic pictures inspired by Freud’s interpretations of dreams, C.G. Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious, and ancient Greek mythology. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy was an important influence at this time.[xix] One source claims that “Amid an era of rising anti-Semitism, such themes enabled Rothko to address the unfolding catastrophe in Europe without publically proclaiming his status as a Jew.”

The Jewish Ethnic Networking Finally Pays Off

In the 1940s, Rothko’s intensive Jewish ethnic networking started to bear tangible fruit. He befriended Peggy Guggenheim, “the most voracious patroness of American avant-garde art,” who had migrated to New York in 1941. Guggenheim’s artistic consultant, Howard Putzel, “convinced her to show Rothko in her Art of This Century gallery, where she had opened in 1942, during the low point of the war.”[xx] In 1945, Guggenheim decided to put on Rothko’s first one-man exhibition at her gallery.[xxi] In 1948, Rothko invited a coterie of mainly Jewish friends and acquaintances to view his new “multiforms.” The prominent Jewish art critic Harold Rosenberg found these works “fantastic,” and called the experience “the most impressive visit to an artist” in his life.”[xxii] Rothko returned the favor, lauding Rosenberg as “one of the best brains that you are likely to encounter, full of wit, humaneness and a genius for getting things impeccably expressed.”[xxiii]

One of Rothko’s “fantastic” multiforms

When, in late 1949, Sam Kootz inaugurated his new gallery, he asked Rosenberg to select the artists for the opening show, and Rothko was inevitably among them. That year Rothko produced his first “color field” paintings, describing his new method as “unknown adventures in unknown space,” free from “direct association with any particular, and the passion of organism.” 1949 was also the year Jewish art critic Clement Greenberg expressed the hope that “national pride will overcome ingrained philistinism and induce our journalists to boast of what they neither understand nor enjoy.” Greenberg’s article appeared in the Nation on June 11, and two months later, journalist Dorothy Seiberling took up Greenberg’s challenge in an article in Life Magazine entitled: “Jackson Pollock: is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” This article, published in a magazine with a circulation of five million, made Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists famous.[xxiv] Subsequent articles by Sieberling sought to “make Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline accessible to a somewhat perplexed public.”

When, in 1950, the Metropolitan Museum announced an exhibition entitled American Painting Today, Rothko’s Jewish colleagues Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, in a letter published in the New York Times, lashed out at the curator for being hostile to “advanced art,” accusing the director of “contempt for modern painting,” and lamenting that “a just proportion of advanced art” had not been included in the upcoming exhibition.[xxv] Rothko was moved at the time to flatly reject the “whole tradition of European painting beginning with the Renaissance.” “We have wiped the slate clean,” he declared. “We start new. A new land. We’ve got to forget what the Old Masters did.”[xxvi]

In the 1950s, Rothko had arrived at his mature style, and with Katherine Kuh and Sidney Janis as his professional agents, “enjoyed both fame and material success at last.”[xxvii] Rothko’s professional ascent was fostered by these two eminent personalities of the art world: Kuh was the curator of the Art Institute in Chicago; and Janis an art dealer with the power to make or break reputations. In her biography of Rothko, Annie Cohen-Solal emphasizes the role of Jewish ethnic networking in Rothko’s rise from obscurity to celebrity in the American art scene. “Of all the ‘dynamic players’ instrumental to anchoring Rothko’s position as artist in American society,” she notes, “how not to mention that these two, in particular, were ‘assimilated’ Jews?”[xxviii]

Influential Jewish art dealer Sidney Janis

As soon as she became curator of the Art Institute’s painting department in 1954, Kuh proposed a solo show of Mark Rothko, and following the exhibition, the Institute “proudly announced that the museum had purchased No. 10, 1952, for its permanent collection. ‘It is needless to tell you how greatly this transaction contributes to the peace of mind with which my present work is being done,’ Rothko admitted to Kuh.”[xxix] Meanwhile, taking on Sidney Janis as his dealer in 1954 “marked a shift into higher gear” that resulted in a “spectacular windfall for Rothko.”[xxx] Janis signing up and actively promoting Rothko settled his status “as a protagonist of international importance in the post-war art scene.” After this, Rothko’s art was declared a good investment by Fortune magazine, which led to his relationship with colleagues Clifford Still and Barnet Newman deteriorating to the point where “They accused Rothko of harbouring an unhealthy yearning for a bourgeois existence, and finally stamped him as a traitor.”[xxxi] Sales of Rothko’s work would only improve when, a few years later, Congress passed a new tax law particularly advantageous to art collectors.

The Seagram Murals

In 1958, Rothko received a contract to paint murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram’s Building in New York. The man who approved the commission was Seagram’s American subsidiary head Edgar Bronfman Sr.—later to become President of the World Jewish Congress. The fee offered was $35,000 (a huge sum at the time). Rothko was, however, uncomfortable with the commission and the damage it might do to his bohemian reputation, and subsequently refunded the money and asked for the completed murals to be returned. The idea that his “Seagram murals,” conceived as deep metaphysical statements, would become mere background decorations, was intolerable. Nine of them were permanently installed in a room at the Tate Gallery in London in 1970.

According to an unsigned source, Rothko’s color field paintings of the 1950s and beyond “can be seen as profound mediations on the Holocaust,” with their rectangular forms inviting “associations with the haunting images of mass graves seen in American newspapers and magazines during and after the war.” The dark tones of Rothko’s Seagram murals are described as “doorways to Hell” and “likened to the rims of flames: responses with obvious Holocaust resonance.” These paintings are widely held to be Rothko’s greatest achievement. Rothko certainly thought so, immodestly equating them with Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.[xxxii]

Rothko’s Seagram Murals at the Tate Modern

1961 marked the climax of Rothko’s public recognition as an artist with a comprehensive exhibition of his work at MoMA. The man responsible, MoMA’s Jewish curator, Peter Selz, raved about “these silent paintings with their enormous, beautiful, opaque surfaces [that] are mirrors, reflecting what the viewer brings with him. In this sense, they can be said to deal directly with human emotions, desires, relationships, for they are mirrors of our fantasies and serve as echoes of our experience.”[xxxiii] Selz, alongside fellow Jew Alan Henry Geldzahler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was one of “New York’s reigning curators,” was, like Rothko, “born into a European-Jewish family, but he came from Munich and had immigrated to the United States in 1936, driven out of Germany by the rise of Nazism.”[xxxiv] For Rothko, “who had already encountered various secular Jews in his professional trajectory—from Peggy Guggenheim to Sidney Janis, Katherine Kuh, and Phyllis Lambert”—Peter Selz would be the one to stage Rothko’s most prestigious exhibition in the United States.”[xxxv]

Despite the cheerleading of New York’s Jewish-dominated art establishment, a few critics resisted the enthusiasm for Rothko, most notably the gentile Howard Devree who, regarding Rothko’s paintings, noted that “the impact is merely optical rather than aesthetic, the validity as a work of art negligible. Seemingly it has become necessary for the color group to increase the size of their paintings, with corresponding emptiness; to make impact and size equivalent; and, as a corollary, they escape making any valid statement.” Devree compared Rothko’s paintings with “a set of swatches prepared by a house painter for a housewife who cannot make up her mind.”[xxxvi]

Works of ineffable genius or “a set of swatches prepared by a house painter
for a housewife who cannot make up her mind?”

Critic Emily Genauer described Rothko’s paintings as “primarily decorations,” which for Rothko was the ultimate insult. Rothko’s works were, she opined, “less paintings, as a painting is generally conceived, than theatrical curtains or handsome wall decorations.” Leading art critic and historian, John Canaday, observed “Mr Rothko’s progressive rejection of all the elements that are the conventional ones in painting, such as line, color, movement and defined spatial relationships,” before dismissing his work as “high-flown nonsense.”[xxxvii] Doubtless with Devree, Genauer and Canaday in mind, Rothko, who was intensely protective of his memory and paintings, once declared: “I hate and distrust all art historians, experts and critics.”[xxxviii]

The Rothko Chapel

In 1965 Rothko was commissioned by the oil tycoon John de Menil and his wife Dominique to paint a series of panels for a chapel in Houston, the city where they lived. Rothko adorned this chapel — a small, windowless, geometric, postmodern structure — with a collection of dark (almost black) murals essentially devoid of any content. The Jewish head of MoMA, Peter Selz, inevitably declared these paintings masterpieces, insisting that “like much of Rothko’s work, these murals seem to ask for a special place apart, a kind of sanctuary, where they may perform what is essentially a sacramental function…”[xxxix]  Dominique de Menil claimed to be similarly impressed, asserting that Rothko’s colors “became darker, as if he were bringing us to the threshold of transcendence, the mystery of the cosmos, the tragic mystery of our perishable condition.”[xl]

Rothko Chapel Murals: bringing us to the “threshold of transcendence?”

Rothko’s place at the summit of the New York art world was threatened three years after his MoMA exhibition when the Golden Lion was awarded to Robert Rauschenberg at the Venice Biennale of 1964. This gave prominence to the emerging artists of the Neo-Dada and Pop Art movements, and made Abstract Expressionists like Rothko seem passé.

In 1968, Rothko was diagnosed with a mild aortic aneurysm. Ignoring his doctor’s orders, he continued to drink and smoke heavily, avoid exercise, and ignore dietary prescriptions—which also exacerbated his depression and seclusion. He died in his studio on February 25, 1970 after overdosing on anti-depressants and cutting his right arm with a razor blade. He was 66 years old and left no suicide note. After Rothko’s death, 798 of his works were “procured” by his then dealer, Frank Lloyd, the Jewish director of the Marlborough Gallery, in dubious circumstances. The lengthy legal proceedings this initiated became emblematic of mounting financial corruption in the art world, and led to a growing distrust of art dealers among Americans.[xli]

Conclusion

Opinions vary widely about Rothko’s work and legacy. Many within the Jewish-dominated art establishment hail him as a genius, a creator of transcendental, spiritual works for secular times. Others cannot believe that any sane person would pay hundreds of millions of dollars for what amounts to nothing more than a large, empty canvas occupied by two colors divided into separate rectangles by a third color. What is clear, however, is that Rothko’s career and burgeoning posthumous reputation have been overwhelmingly the result of shameless barracking and hyping on the part of the Jewish intellectual and cultural establishment. Rothko’s son had the chutzpah to draw a parallel between his father’s work and that of Mozart, insisting that his father’s paintings are “the visual embodiment of a Mozart composition.”

Jews have long used their cultural dominance to construct “Jewish geniuses” to foster ethnic pride and group cohesion. It has been (and remains) a standard feature of Jewish intellectual life in the West to wildly exaggerate the significance of Jewish scientists, writers, composers, artists and intellectuals (often while downplaying the achievement of their non-Jewish peers). The absurdly exalted status accorded to Mark Rothko and his oeuvre is emblematic of this practice. Rothko is surely an artist for whom the expression “the emperor has no clothes” is particularly apposite.

Go to Part 3.


[i] Baal-Teshuva, Rothko, 10.

[ii] Schama, Simon Schama’s Power of Art, 403.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Schama, Simon Schama’s Power of Art TV Series.

[v] Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, 64.

[vi] Baal-Teshuva, Rothko, 24.

[vii] Matthew Collings, This is Modern Art (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1999), 169.

[viii] Baal-Teshuva, Rothko, 26.

[ix] Schama, Simon Schama’s Power of Art, 405.

[x] Baal-Teshuva, Rothko, 26.

[xi] Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, 7

[xii] In MacDonald, Culture of Critique, 217.

[xiii] Ibid., 218.

[xiv] Schama, Simon Schama’s Power of Art, 406.

[xv] Schama, Simon Schama’s Power of Art TV Series.

[xvi] Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, 90.

[xvii] Ibid., 79.

[xviii] Ibid., 88.

[xix] Baal-Teshuva, Rothko, 33.

[xx] Ibid., 38.

[xxi] Ibid., 39.

[xxii] Ibid., 45.

[xxiii] Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, 97.

[xxiv] Ibid., 116.

[xxv] Ibid., 121.

[xxvi] Ibid., 126.

[xxvii] Ibid., 153.

[xxviii] Ibid., 138.

[xxix] Ibid., 144.

[xxx] Ibid., 117.

[xxxi] Baal-Teshuva, Rothko, 50.

[xxxii] Norbert Lynton, The Story of Modern Art (Oxford: Phaidon, 1989), 242.

[xxxiii] Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, 174.

[xxxiv] Ibid., 175.

[xxxv] Ibid.

[xxxvi] Ibid., 147.

[xxxvii] Ibid., 176.

[xxxviii] Ibid., 161.

[xxxix] Ibid., 185.

[xl] Ibid.

[xli] 206

Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism, and the Decline of Western Art, Part 1

Mark Rothko

The life and career of Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko is a prototypical Jewish story that encapsulates a range of themes discussed at The Occidental Observer. Central to Rothko’s story is the political radicalism of Eastern European Jewish migrants arriving in the United States between 1880 and 1920; the reflexive hostility of these migrants to the traditional people and culture of their new homeland, and how this hostility was reflected in the artistic and intellectual currents that came to dominate Western societies in the twentieth century. Rothko’s story also exemplifies other familiar themes including: the power of Jewish ethnic networking and nepotism in promoting Jewish interests (both individual and collective), and the tendency for Jewish “genius” to be constructed by Jewish intellectuals as self-appointed gatekeepers of Western culture.

With Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko has been accorded a leading place in the ranks of the Abstract Expressionists. If there is such a thing as a cult artist among the liberal Jewish intelligentsia, then Rothko is probably it. Important people stand in grave silence before his empty expanses with looks on their faces that bespeak lofty thoughts. As a critic for The Times noted:

Rothko evokes all that could be criticized as most pretentious, most clannish, most pseudish about his spectators. They stand there gravely perusing something that to the outsider probably looks more like a patch of half-stripped wallpaper than a picture and then declare themselves profoundly moved. And many outsiders will start to wonder if they are being duped, if this Modernist emperor actually has no clothes on and his fans are just the blind followers of some aesthetic faith.[1]  

For critics like Ottmann, Rothko’s genius is indisputable and he possessed an “extraordinary talent” that enabled him to transfer his metaphysical “impulses to the canvas with a power and magnetism that stuns viewers of his work. … In fact Rothko’s skill in achieving this result — whether intentional or not — perhaps explains why he was once called ‘the melancholic rabbi.’”[2] For prominent Jewish art historian Simon Schama, Rothko’s “big vertical canvasses of contrasting bars of colour, panels of colour stacked up on top of each other” qualify him as “a maker of paintings as powerful and complicated as anything by his two gods — Rembrandt and Turner.” For the ethnocentric Schama, “these [Rothko’s] paintings are equivalent of these old masters. … Can art ever be more complete, more powerful? I don’t think so.”[3]

After experimenting with Expressionism and Surrealism, Rothko finally arrived in 1949 at the style that would typify his work until his death by suicide in 1970 at the age of 66. This consisted of two or three floating rectangles of color painted against a monochrome background. A pioneer of what the Jewish art critic Clement Greenberg christened “color field” painting, Rothko claimed that only abstract painting could express the “full gravity of religious yearnings and the angst of the human condition.” He intended their effect to be transcendental with his stated goal being “only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” Rothko claimed that “a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures” which showed they were “having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” His final works became so minimalistic (large black canvasses) as to be almost void of any substance.

Mark Rothko’s No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red) which sold for $186 million in 2014

In the twenty-first century, the sale prices of Rothko’s paintings at auction have risen consistently, surpassing those of his Abstract Expressionist colleagues, to reach staggering sums in the vicinity of $200 million. In 2011, Mark Rothko became the main character in Red, a successful Broadway play that treated him as a unique genius and won six Tony Awards.[4] Rothko would have approved of the portrayal: Elaine de Kooning once noted how he was “hypnotized by his own role, and there was just one. The role was that of the Messiah.”[5]

The making of Mark Rothko

Born in 1903, Marcus Rothkowitz was the youngest child of pharmacist, Jacob Rothkowitz, and his wife, Anna Goldin Rothkowitz, in the Russian city of Dvinsk (today Daugavpils, Latvia). Dvinsk, at the time in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, was a hotbed of Jewish radicalism. The Pale was then inhabited by five million Jews confined there by the Tsar at a time when thousands of Polish Jews were crossing the border into Russia seeking work. Rothko’s father was the stereotype of the leftwing Jewish intellectual, who presided over a family with an “intense commitment to politics and education.”[6] He initially preferred secular education for his children, and political over religious involvement. According to Rothko, his father’s relation to formal religion was openly oppositional: “My father was a militant social democrat of the Jewish party, the Bund, which was the social democracy of that time. He was profoundly Marxist and violently anti-religious.”[7]

That this was chiefly an anti-Christian, rather than anti-religious, impulse is revealed by the fact he returned to the Orthodox Jewish fold after Marcus’s birth in response to anti-Jewish violence which followed the failed Revolution of 1905. While no “pogroms” were ever visited on the Jews of Dvinsk, the town witnessed occasional incidents where Jews were targeted as sympathizers of the Social Democratic and other revolutionary parties. In 1905, according to Baal-Teshuva, the young Rothko’s “hometown was under the blanket surveillance of the Tsarist secret police. Jews were the usual victims of reprisals whenever the Cossacks, the loyal followers of the Tsarist state, came into the town to break up revolutionary uprisings.” Jews living in the environs of Dvinsk “lived in constant terror of pogroms and massacres. The air was filled with slogans like ‘Kill the Jews to Save Russia.’ This was the atmosphere in which Rothko grew up.”[8]

Despite the fact no pogroms occurred in Dvinsk, Rothko claimed to “remember the local Cossacks indulging in their favorite activity — beating up Jews.” He repeatedly told “likely embellished stories that he would wear a backpack to avoid getting hit by the stones the children of Dvinsk threw at him in the streets,” and that a Cossack who had come to repress demonstrations in the city had “struck him in the face with a whip.”[9]

Rothko later even claimed to recall “dug-up pits in the forests around Dvinsk, where the Cossacks buried Jewish victims they had kidnapped and murdered. These images always plagued him mentally, and he says they exercised a certain influence on his painting.”[10] Baal-Teshuva forgives Rothko these obvious untruths, contending it’s likely “that the child heard adults talking about the pogroms and massacres elsewhere, and in his memory ended up mixing up these stories with his own memories of the nearby woods.”[11] Acknowledging that some critics have happily run with these falsehoods, he observes how they have “gone so far as to say this explains his preference for rectangular forms in his late works, as a formal echo of the grave.”[12]

Rothkowitz family portrait in Dvinsk 1912 (Marcus second from the right)

In response to the economic and political insecurities of life in the Pale, Marcus’s father migrated to the United States in 1910. Only in 1913, when Marcus was ten years old, did the rest of the family move to America. Despite the supposed hazards of life in the Pale, Rothko “referred often to the ‘terrible experience’ of having been torn away from his homeland against his will.”[13] It was certainly not the gentile culture of America that attracted the waves of Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe, but only the relatively advantageous conditions created by American economic growth. “They came to America’s shores,” notes Muller, “motivated not by religion but in spite of it, their more orthodox leaders being inclined to warn them against the dangers of godless and goyish America.”[14] A massive influx of 2.3 million Jews arrived at Ellis Island between 1881 and 1920.

The Rothkowitz family spoke Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish and therefore fit well into their new surroundings. South Portland in Oregon where they settled (which was dubbed “Little Odessa”), provided an environment “very much as we think of a shtetl” where one could go for years “speaking Yiddish, Russian, or Polish without having to learn a word of English.”[15] Beginning in Dvinsk and then in Portland, his father decided Marcus would have a strict religious education. He was sent to a cheder, the religious school run by a synagogue, starting at the age of five, and was subject to a strict and tiring routine: praying, reading and translation of Hebrew texts, and rote memorization of Talmudic law.[16]

Rothko’s parents saw no contradiction in bringing up their son as an Orthodox Jew, a Zionist, and a Communist. This is quite in keeping with Kevin MacDonald’s observation that “within Russian Jewish communities, the acceptance of radical political ideology often coexisted with messianic forms of Zionism as well as intense commitment to Jewish nationalism and religious and cultural separatism, and many individuals held various and often rapidly changing combinations of these ideas.”[17]

After the family had achieved a degree of economic security in Portland, they joined local chapters of radical movements. Marcus avidly participated in discussions on current affairs and argued “skilfully for the right of workers to strike, or for general access to contraception. His entire family was in favour of the Russian Revolution, as Rothko later said.”[18] This was, of course, very typical, with Jewish historian Norman Cantor noting how “In the first half of the twentieth century, Marxist-Leninist communism ran like an electromagnetic lightning flash through Jewish societies from Moscow to Western Europe, the United States and Canada, gaining the lifelong adherence of brilliant, passionately dedicated Jewish men and women.”[19]

Another “Jewish Genius” Gets Stung by the WASPS

Rothko was, according to Schama, very much one of these brilliant Jewish men who, despite his Orthodox Jewish education, was “no Jewish Trappist, but a much more recognizable type (at least to me): loquacious, exuberant, hot-tempered, deeply immersed in literature and history.” While the Orthodox Judaism in which Rothko was schooled was not directly expressed in his later art, Schama insists that “once you’ve done cheder — Hebrew school — it never really goes away, however much you try to banish it; nor did it for Marcus. He was what everyone would call, with smiles, both admiring and pitying, a chocom — a know-it-all. And what do chochoms do if they weren’t going to be rabbis?”[20] He was, Schama insists, “just your super-educated, ungainly, sentimental Jew. In the grip of mighty ideas, he was desperate to tell you all about them, fidgeting on the sofa and waving his arms all around. A big heart and a big mouth to match — you know the type.”[21]

After his Orthodox Jewish education, Rothko, at the age of fourteen, attended Lincoln High School in Portland where “he finally experienced his first true encounter with the non-Jewish world, as only 10 percent of the nine hundred students were Jewish.” There he excelled academically and was a passionate debater for the radical cause. Cohen-Solal admires the way “the diligent student from Lincoln High grew into a passionate young intellectual” who “bluntly decided to confront tradition.”[22] Around this time he went to hear “‘Red’ Emma Goldman lay into capitalism and sing the praises of the Russian Revolution.”[23] Despite his avowed support for the Bolshevik Revolution, Rothko resented the fact that anyone at Lincoln High School who “had a name ending in ‘off’ or ‘ski’ is taboo and branded a Bolshevik.” He and his Jewish friends also begrudged the “control over student organizations exercised by the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant youngsters.”[24]

Rothko was passionately drawn to the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) and Emma Goldman at a time of rising ethnocentrism and growing hostility to Jewish immigration among White Americans. In 1915, the Ku Klux Klan, inactive since the Reconstruction era, revived in the South, and in 1916, Madison Grant defended his racial history theory in The Passing of the Great Race. Rothko saw disturbing parallels between the respective goyim of his old and new countries, especially at the time of Leo Frank’s lynching in 1915, when he observed in a poem that:

Those primitive barbarous people,
They live again in my blood,
And I feel myself bound to the past
By invisible chains.[25]

American entry into World War One in 1917 inspired nationalist demonstrations among Americans who believed their country had no interest in the conflict. The majority of them also, as mentioned, opposed mass immigration, and Congress passed three successive, highly restrictive, immigration laws: the Immigration Act of 1917, which introduced a literacy test; the Emergency Quota Act of 1921; and the National Origins Act of 1924. Such laws were deeply distressing to Jews like Rothko who wanted the country kept open to mass Jewish immigration.

Schama tells us that Rothko was “scholarship material, and won a place at Yale [in 1921] before the Ivy League decided they were about to be inundated by clever Jews and imposed admission quotas.” Despite his admission to Yale, “Rothko felt the sting of the WASPS all the same. If they couldn’t actually evict the talky-smart kikes, ‘those people,’ they could at least make it hard for them to stick around.”[26] Baal-Teshuva claims Rothko and his fellow Jewish students soon discovered the difficulties of gaining social acceptance in a setting where “the majority of generally affluent White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were contemptuous of the Jewish minority.”[27] Exactly how these WASP students were supposed (or even remotely likely) to embrace a group who feted Emma Goldman, were deeply hostile to their people and culture, and longed for the day when a violent revolution would consign them and their kind to the dustbin of history, is unclear. The more desperately the Jews wanted to “climb the social ladder, the more panic-stricken the others became at the idea of being invaded.”[28]

Rothko while at Yale

At the end of a year spent studying the history of philosophy and psychology, Rothko had achieved only mediocre results, and his scholarship was rescinded and replaced with a student loan. Rothko biographer Annie Cohen-Solal indignantly asks:

How could a young man of eighteen years—the image of a 1920s intellectual, with a high forehead, an intense gaze behind round glasses, and a combed-back mass of wavy black hair—who entered with such enthusiasm into Yale, this temple of knowledge, so severely flounder there? Why would this voracious student, craving intellectual debates, so confident in his abilities after a string of successes in Portland, completely fail to find his place at this elite university?[29]

Her predictable answer: the ubiquitous anti-Semitism Rothko supposedly confronted at a Yale dominated by an “inaccessible club of young WASPs.”[30] Cohen-Solal claims that Rothko quickly became a pariah after his arrival in New Haven, and was “stigmatized precisely because he was bright.” He quickly learned that “the Yale social system was based more on breeding than on merit,” while also discovering “the cynicism and hypocrisy of the caste-based micro-society that sought to protect and reproduce itself, in particular by excluding new, upwardly mobile immigrants who, in those years of rampant nationalism, were deemed threatening to the system.”[31] By thwarting his entry into its exclusive society, Cohen-Solal accuses Yale of having unforgivably “hampered the development of the identity of the young prodigy from Dvinsk.”[32]

Rothko lived off-campus with relatives in New Haven, and launched a radical underground newspaper called The Yale Saturday Evening Post “which took aim at the college’s teaching methods and fetish for prestige.”[33] He discovered his artistic calling by chance. One day, in 1923, he visited a friend studying drawing at the Art Students League and decided “It is the life for me.” He dropped out of Yale after his second year, and moved to New York where he took some art courses. According to Cohen-Solal, it was little wonder he elected to become a painter: “Socially, he was a rebel who, after enduring a series of setbacks, had developed a precocious political awareness as well as a desire for revenge. To pursue a career in art meant, for him, joining a professional group of outcasts with which he could identify.”[34] Rothko would return to Yale 46 years later—when the WASPs had been overthrown and his own ethnic group was firmly in charge—to receive an honorary degree.

Rothko relocated to New York in 1925 and remained there for the rest of his life, becoming involved with Jewish institutions and close to various Jewish artists. He enrolled in the New School of Design where Arshile Gorky (not Jewish) became one of his instructors and cubist artist Max Weber, a fellow Russian Jew, became one of his mentors. In 1928, he was invited to participate in a group show at New York’s Opportunity Gallery, with Lou Harris and Milton Avery — a self-taught painter connected to Brooklyn’s Jewish community through his wife — who mentored various Jewish artists including Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Joseph Solman, and Louis Schanker.[35] Rothko also gained experience by drawing maps and illustrations for the Graphic Bible by Lewis Browne, a retired rabbi from Portland who was a best-selling author. When he saw he wasn’t credited for these works, he sued Browne for $20,000 in damages. In the end, he lost the trial.[36]

Early Rothko painting: Woman and Cat (1933)

Despite all this activity, when the Wall Street crash came in 1929, followed by the Great Depression, Rothko had little to show for his decade in New York. He was exhibited but rarely sold, and when it did, it was not a living. Between 1928 and 1939, one exhibition followed the next, but his works—oils, watercolors, and paintings on paper—sold poorly. In the meantime he had married Edith Sachar, “bright and Jewish, whom he had met at a progressive summer camp at Lake George in the Adirondacks: downing dialectical materialism, Freud and Cubism along with the weak coffee.”[37]

Go to Part 2.


[1] Klaus Ottmann, The Essential Mark Rothko (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 8. 

[2] Klaus Ottmann, The Essential Mark Rothko (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 8.

[3] Simon Schama, Simon Schama’s Power of Art, BBC TV Series, Great Britain, 2006.

[4] Annie Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, Toward the Light in the Chapel (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 207.

[5] 78

[6] J.E.B, Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 14.

[7] Ibid., 15.

[8] Ibid., 19-20.

[9] Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, 15.

[10] Schama, Simon Schama’s Power of Art TV Series.

[11] Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Rothko (Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2009), 19-20.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ottmann, Essential Mark Rothko, 17.

[14] Jerry Z. Muller, J.Z. (2010) Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 96.

[15] Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, 26.

[16] Baal-Teshuva, Rothko, 20.

[17] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual and Political Movements, (Westport, CT: Praeger, Revised Paperback edition, 2001), 82.

[18] Baal-Teshuva, Rothko, 23.

[19] Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain – The History of the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 281.

[20] Simon Schama, Simon Schama’s Power of Art, BBC Books, London: BBC Books, 2006), 401-2.

[21] Schama, Simon Schama’s Power of Art TV Series.

[22] Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, 35; 30.

[23] Schama, Simon Schama’s Power of Art, 402.

[24] Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, 30

[25] Ibid., 38.

[26] Schama, Simon Schama’s Power of Art, 402.

[27] Baal-Teshuva, Rothko, 23.

[28] Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, 45.

[29] Ibid., 39.

[30] Ibid., 45.

[31] Ibid., 42-3.

[32] Ibid., 43.

[33] Baal-Teshuva, Rothko, 23.

[34] Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, 56

[35] Ibid., 57.

[36] Baal-Teshuva, Rothko, 24.

[37] Schama, Simon Schama’s Power of Art, 405.

Bernie Bros, Hillary Hoes & Biden Joenestowners

The last time I was in the United States was during the George HW Bush administration. At that time, there was one Yugoslavia, two Germanys and three million dollars on Salman Rushdie’s head. The year was 1990 and the government of South Africa and Michael Jackson were almost finished swapping races. Unbeknown to me at the time of my visit, a freshly amnestied Nelson Mandela was already Black power fisting to sold out arenas from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Black America was, apparently, the model for his own people to emulate, because unlike South African Blacks, American Blacks were no longer “in the grip of White supremacy.” Suffice it to say, political messaging has changed in left-wing circles over the last three decades, though one thing that’s stayed the same is that Joe Biden is still trying to become president.

America has always been a very political country. The breadth of its history as much as its territory seems to act like a convex lens for concentrating unique movements and headways. Political campaigns are so drawn out, perhaps by design, but the level of public participation in these sagas has always astonished me. I find the idea of door-knocking for the sake of political haggling frankly laughable and overly invasive, though in America such volunteerism is considered honorable work.

A vague theory is mine is that politics in the United States is of bloated significance due to a number of historical developments, among which is the lack of a monarchy. Presidential elections are for Americans almost what royal weddings are for the British. The House of Kennedy is America’s most recognizable dynasty, but then there are also the Roosevelts, Bushes and Clintons. A similar phenomenon exists in Europe: the most political country, France, is also the continent’s most famous republic. Monarchism is actually still the norm in Western Europe, whereas Eastern Europe lacks a single one – unless you count fanatically-Catholic Poland’s parliamentary vote to declare Jesus Christ “King of Poland” in 2016.

True royal families, however, barely dent the budgets of Western economies, and in case of the Windsors generate more for the national coffers than they cost – not that such institutions should have their continued existence be dependent on profitability. I suspect that America’s presidential elections are likewise profitable in spite of the apparent internal overkill, since they are also a product for international consumption and help raise the country’s profile.

The way various interest groups, voting factions and moral communities in America manage to politically merchandise themselves has always been something of a marvel. The tokenism can be rather quaint at times, and at other times disturbing. The most perverse instance in recent memory would have to be the syndicate of sex-workers from America’s most famous brothel, who decided to stump for Hillary in 2016. Though it isn’t always clear how such endorsements are procured, politics doesn’t always make strange bedfellows and emeritus president Bill Clinton was known to do some canvassing on the ground that year.

The nuclear hype of the 2016 election was never going to have a worthy sequel, especially not after the anticlimactic Trump presidency. Election cycles involving incumbents invariably have less gusto to them anyway, though the Democratic primaries have brought some new gumption to meet the current year’s political turbulence. Few could have predicted Andrew Yang, and even Bloomberg’s splash was unexpected. But in a way, the most audacious development was the promotion of back to the future Biden, a gamble that could still backfire in the primary stage if cognitive faculties (or immune system) capitulate.

The debut of Tulsi Gabbard was a welcome addition to the race, but to most left-wing voters she was more like an L Ron Hubbard with her crazy ideas of supporting free speech and hated by the Israel Lobby for criticizing endless wars. She has attempted to sue both Hillary Clinton and Google, which has earned her support from the likes of celebrities Susan Sarandon and Oliver Stone to Ron Paul and David Duke. Tulsi, who was given a Hindu name by her hippie parents (father half-Samoan) has ironically become something of an untouchable to the Democratic establishment, and would have been on the debate stage last night were it not for the DNC’s recent changes to the qualification criteria.

The meteoric rise of Andrew Yang was not without its merits also, but reminded me a lot of the flash-in-the-pan hype surrounding Asian-American basketballer Jeremy Lin. A celebrated breaker of barriers one year, a Peking Duck the next. Unfortunately for the Yang Gang, their goose was cooked by Yang himself, who decided rather swiftly after dropping out of the race that he was a free agent and able to sign with CNN as an analyst, even altering his endorsement from Sanders to Biden.

The only person realistically standing in the way of the Biden nomination remains the senator from Vermont Bernie Sander. Bernie Bros once again brought plenty of energy to the campaign trail, but also a whiff of being reheated leftovers from 2016 – a painful defeat capped off with a Sanders sell-out. But primary rigging doesn’t appear to be necessary this time, for the simple reason that Biden is not nearly as loathed as Hillary Clinton.

The center of the American political spectrum, for now, still rests a fair distance from ‘social democracy,’ and is approximately in the hands of low-information voters. There is something to be said about the remarkable ability of Black voters to consolidate around a candidate once there are no Black candidates left in a race. All candidates pander to Blacks, but Biden has been the huge winner in the primaries so far, and it just may have had something to do with him being half of the Ebony and Ivory ticket that swept to power in 2008. Biden was already of pension age back when he was selected to flank Obama, presumably to represent some sort of changing of the guard in American politics. At the time, I couldn’t help but see him as Obama’s ankle bracelet while in the White House.

Joe Biden has not changed in any discernibly positive way over the course of his long and lucrative career in politics. A vote for Biden is unequivocally a vote for machine politics and a return to stability after Trump fatigue, whether unfairly contrived or not. I have a theory that Black Americans are now some of the biggest conservatives in America, and I’m not talking about their opposition to gay marriage but rather their contentment with the new politically correct Americana that is forever endearing their victimhood and appeasing them with perks. White guilt might well be reaching its high water mark, so now might be the time to secure reparations. Demographics are changing rapidly, and that is another reason Sanders had little appeal to Black voters. Sanders’ movement has implicitly become the Brown faction; think Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Omar and the burgeoning rank and file. Even White support for Sanders is hemorrhaging because of this, but the friction between Blacks and Latinoes cuts much deeper.

A year ago, Virginia Heffernan of the LA Times was decrying Biden to be the “White savior” that the electorate had outgrown in favor of “women and people of color.” But Black people don’t seem to have ever bought into that. Blacks can be incredibly trusting of a White authority figure, especially one that preaches the racial utopia gospel. This is what happened with religious leader, civil rights figure and communist Jim Jones, who led 909 people from his Californian temples to Jonestown, Guyana where they suicided voluntarily or by force. Nobody quite knows why Blacks were so drawn to his cult, but they made up roughly 70% of victims. Jones pushed the idea of ‘rainbow families’ at a time when it referred to race rather than sexuality. The tragedy might have been averted, were it not for the intercession of the first homosexual political figure and inextricably Jewish Harvey Milk, who wrote a letter to President Carter affirming Jones to be “a man of the highest character,” with no mention of his maddening streak.

Like Jones, Biden is a man in cognitive decline still being showered with praise and character references from hacks near and far. One certainly can’t deny that the man has charisma and an unfiltered style of communication — unfiltered, disinhibited speech is a mark of senility. Though there is something darkly comedic about this plucked ostrich of a man challenging young people to push-ups. Or his trash talking a woman as a “lying, dog-faced pony soldier,” when he is a coffin-jockey himself at this stage.

Can politicians use Teslas?

Biden may be the youngest man left in the race, but his early stage dementia and failing vocabulary are getting progressively harder to camouflage. Keep in mind that his ‘working vocabulary’ comprises terms like malarkey, record player, shylock and poppycock. Rumor has it he once requested a teleprompter with a rotary-dial. One wonders what further gaffes will be unearthed in the coming weeks, given at any live and unscripted event where Biden must ad-lib, the second half of his sentences frequently don’t remember what the first half said. For now the smelling salts and vitamins are working wonders at the debates, where the canned preparation pulls the rest of his weight in the controlled environment.

As much as the Democrats have done to lose the 2020 election, an electoral college victory this November remains within their grasp. The baseless Russiagate hoax and impeachment effort are now largely forgotten, even if partisan America was never really at risk of changing its mind. Though there is certainly something cynical, schadenfreudistic and even nihilistic in propping up a semi-senile man for the highest office, on the other hand it is a vote of confidence for the old establishment, the deep state and the faceless men from halls of power who can replace Biden at any moment after the inauguration. Whether Biden will become the Grim Reaper of America, or just the Jim Jones of the Democrats remains to be seen.

Thomas Žaja is a research fellow at the Ulster Institute. 

Demonizing Daniel: We Shouldn’t Trust Jews Who Oppose the Muslim Invasion of Europe

How’s that for gratitude? In 2006 the Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski was one of the grovelling goys who staffed an All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism and who listened with entirely straight faces as Britain’s richest and most powerful racial minority pretended to be powerless and persecuted victims. When the Inquiry was complete, those goys urged that even more censorship and surveillance be imposed on Britain to defend Jewish power.

Consorting with racists

And who was the chairman of the Inquiry? Why, it was the Labour MP Denis MacShane, who was working hard for Jewish interests in London even as he ignored the White working-class girls being raped, tortured and prostituted by Pakistani Muslims in his Yorkshire constituency of Rotherham. In other words, the Inquiry into Anti-Semitism supported by Daniel Kawczynski was both deeply fatuous and tragically ironic. But Kawczynski’s goy-grovel and dutiful service for Jewish interests in 2006 counted for nothing in 2020, when Marie van der Zyl, President of the Jewish Board of Deputies, loudly condemned his “decision … to speak at a conference [in Rome] featuring far-right European politicians” and demanded that he be disciplined by his own party for appearing with the “anti-semitic” Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and other racist opponents of Muslim immigration.

Jewish leader Marie van der Zyl pledges to be “a committed ally” of Muslims at an Interfaith Iftar

The Jewish Chronicle backed the Board with a pungent editorial, which said that “by consorting with racists, Daniel Kawczynski sends a clear message that he believes their ideas are legitimate and respectable.” Kawczynski was duly forced into a humiliating “apology” by an “official warning” from the Conservatives, but his critics were not satisfied. As one headline put it: “Jewish and Muslim groups condemn Tory ‘slap on wrist’ for MP who attended ‘festival with fascists’.”

What’s best for Jews?

You can see there how Jews and Muslims act as “natural allies” (the exact words of Jewish anti-racists like Dr Richard Stone) against the interests of Whites and Christians. The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle still plainly believe in that Jewish-Muslim alliance, but a minority of other Jews now think that Muslim immigration into the West is not in the best interests of Jews. And in fact Kawczynski’s “festival with fascists” was addressed by a famous Israeli academic, the yarmulke-wearing Yoram Hazony (called a “gatekeeper” by VDare), and was partly sponsored by an Israeli think-tank called the Herzl Institute, whose Star-of-David-bearing logo was on prominent display throughout.

Yarmulke-wearing Yoram Hazony

In other words, it wasn’t a “festival with fascists” at all. Of course, the Board of Deputies and Jewish Chronicle didn’t mention any of that Jewish involvement in their condemnation of Kawczynski. They were being dishonest, but Yoram Hazony returned the favour when he defended Kawczynski in an article at Quillette entitled “The British Conservative Party Should Stop Cancelling Conservatives.” Hazony and his co-author didn’t mention the prominent Jewish criticism of Kawczynski, because they didn’t want to draw attention to the central Jewish role in censorship and “cancel culture.” But another Jewish academic, the sociologist Frank Furedi, wasn’t dishonest like Hazony. He openly named and condemned the Board of Deputies in an article entitled “The witch hunting of Daniel Kawczynski”:

Almost overnight, Kawczynski, a respected MP, was transformed by his media and political detractors into the incarnation of xenophobic evil. Very few mainstream commentators and politicians were prepared to stand up to the powerful campaign of vilification directed against him. Very few even asked the question, ‘What did he actually do?’. Instead, the very fact that some media outlets branded him ‘far right’ was enough to condemn him.

Kawczynski’s alleged crime was that he attended a meeting of fascistic European politicians who apparently are in the business of promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In the words of former Tory Party chairman Lord Pickles, who serves as the government’s ‘special envoy on post-Holocaust issues’, Kawczynski brought ‘comfort’ to ‘racists and extremism’. Pickles claimed Kawczynski had ‘let fellow Conservatives down’.

It is worth noting that Kawczynski himself is not accused of saying anything remotely racist, xenophobic or anti-Semitic. In the eyes of his persecutors, his crime was that he attended a conference with questionable people. In other words, he is guilty by association.

But who is he guilty of associating with, precisely? Some of his persecutors have alleged that he mixed with well-known anti-Semites and therefore he helped to legitimise anti-Semitism and racism. Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, carelessly waded into the discussion, asserting that the Tories ran the ‘serious risk of the public assuming that they share [Kawczynski’s] views’, unless, that is, they made an example of him. The Guardian and the Independent echoed this sentiment, implying that Kawczynski’s guilt was beyond debate. …

It is a shame that Marie van der Zyl and her colleagues at the Board of Deputies have such a shallow grasp of what anti-Semitism actually means. Even worse, at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise in many parts of Western Europe, crying wolf about it trivialises the seriousness of the threat faced by Jewish people today. If anyone should apologise as part of this sordid, concocted controversy, it should be Eric Pickles and Marie van der Zyl. (The witch hunting of Daniel Kawczynski, Spiked Online, 10th February 2020)

Dedicated shabbos-goy and pie-eater Eric Pickles

Myself, I would trust Frank Furedi as far as I could throw the famously rotund Eric Pickles, but I have to give him credit for naming and attempting to shame the Board of Deputies and for noting that Pickles is “the government’s ‘special envoy on post-Holocaust issues’.” Furedi didn’t explicitly conclude that Jewish organizations play a central role in censorship and “cancel culture,” but he certainly supplied evidence for others to reach that conclusion.

It’s also interesting that Furedi himself seems to have attended the anti-immigration conference in Rome, because it would surely have horrified him during his days as leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a Trotskyist groupuscule that argued for the “rejection of all controls on immigration.” Furedi’s former underlings in the RCP have continued to argue for open borders at venues like Spiked Online, but it appears as though Furedi may no longer believe that open borders are a good way to combat the anti-Semitism that so obviously and deeply concerns him (see his words above).

Viva Italia! Viva Israel!

Anti-Semitism also deeply concerns the Italian politician Matteo Salvini, who had been scheduled to appear at the conference with Viktor Orbán and Yoram Hazony. Salvini didn’t appear in the end, but his views were fully represented there. After all, Salvini strongly opposes Muslim immigration and just as strongly supports Israel. Here’s a translation of part of a speech he made at the Italian Senate proclaiming his love of Israel and blaming anti-Semitism in Italy on Muslim immigrants:

The anti-Semitism of the right, neo-Nazi, neo-Fascist, or of the American/European white supremacist, is our enemy. Similarly our enemy is the anti-Semitism of the left, like the Islamists, like this definition of the modern anti-Semitism, like the red-green alliance. … we are also more concerned with the anti-Semitism that is accepted in some institutions … [like] a European Union that denies its Judeo-Christian roots. A European Union that labels Israeli products produced in disputed territories. A UN which in 2018 dedicated 27 condemnations of Israel in security resolutions, and one against Iran, and not even one on human rights in China and Turkey …

The enemies of Israel are the enemies of civilization and peace. The friends of Israel are the friends of liberty, rights, progress, and peaceful co-existence among peoples, and I remember as one of my greatest satisfactions when, after the meeting I had with Bibi Netanyahu, in a press conference, the Israeli prime minister said, “I have met a friend of Israel.” I am honored, I am honored to be that. And I will fight with all my strength, in all forums inside and outside of the institutions, so that our children and your children never re-live the errors and horrors of the past. Whatever [unintelligible] source or political justification they might have. Long live Italy. Long live Israel. (Matteo Salvini’s Complete Speech on Israel and Jew-Hatred, Gates of Vienna, 22nd January 2020)

I dislike Salvini’s use of the historically baseless term “Judeo-Christian” (giudeo-cristiano in Italian), which was devised in the United States in the 1940s to serve Jewish interests (in another sense, “Judeo-Christian” is a legitimate term in the study of early Christianity). But I don’t think Salvini is a shabbos-goy like Daniel Kawczynski. After all, Salvini said “Long live Italy” before he said “Long live Israel.” I think that a true shabbos-goy would have put Israel before Italy.

Pretending that Jews had no role in Muslim immigration

Nevertheless, Salvini’s praise of Benjamin Netanyahu is a useful warning, just like Daniel Kawczynski’s attendance at the supposed “far right” conference in Rome. We should keep a careful eye on Jewish and Israeli involvement in pro-White, pro-Christian political movements, because those movements might turn out to be not so pro-White and pro-Christian as they appear. Jews like Yoram Hazony and Marie van der Zyl are not really on opposing sides, because Yoram and Marie are merely supplying different answers to a single all-important question: What’s best for Jews?

Prophetic Satire in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) 

“They were all Hitler majors, members of the only class I still taught, Advanced Nazism.”
Don DeLillo, White Noise

Along with Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo is commonly regarded as one of the finest living writers in American fiction. As well as winning the National Book Award for White Noise in 1985, DeLillo has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1992 and 1998), and he was also awarded the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction in 2013. DeLillo’s work is, in the author’s own description, concerned with “power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments.” As such, his work is relevant to most sections of the political spectrum, including our own, and no work is more bitterly appropriate, prophetic, and caustic than White Noise, his 1985 postmodernist satirical masterpiece. Pathological consumerism, insanity in academia, pandemic panics, social decay and fragmented families, the nihilism and anonymity of urban living, obesity, alienated youth, Western modernity’s terror of death, and the manifold abuses of Big Pharma are all foretold and satirized. Added ingredients include a sneaky and oversexed Jewish character, and a protagonist who is founder and director of the discipline of Hitler Studies. What results from this combination is a novel at once terrifying and hilarious, prescient and unforgettable.

The book begins with the start of a new semester at College-on-the-Hill, the work place of the novel’s protagonist, Jack Gladney. Gladney and his wife Babette both suffer from a pathological phobia of death, something that’s exacerbated when a chemical spill from a rail car releases a black toxic cloud over the town. Following a mass evacuation, Gladney discovers that Babette has been secretly taking a new experimental drug named Dylar, which is supposedly capable of treating intense fear of death. He also finds out that Babette has been obtaining her supply of Dylar from a man she’s been having an affair with. Consumed with his own fears, Gladney sets out to obtain his own illicit supply but the drug not only fails to achieve its stated purpose, at least in Babette’s case, but leads to addiction and a number of psychosis-like side-effects. Gladney spirals deeper into his fear of, and obsession with, death. He eventually decides to murder Willie Mink, the man with whom Babette has been having an affair. Gladney then shoots Mink, but the immediacy of another man’s death brings his own obsession with mortality into realignment. He decides to save Mink’s life, and takes him to a nearby hospital where Mink survives.

The baseline plot of White Noise is quite offbeat and simple, but the novel is intensively interwoven with a thorough social critique almost unheard of in contemporary fiction. I have to admit to some negative first reactions to the text, simply because I’m not particularly fond of novels that are “weird” or rely on certain cartoonish exaggerations to make their point. My first reaction to White Noise, based on the plot alone, was therefore much like my first reaction to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), another work of postmodernist satire with which it has much in common in a stylistic and thematic sense. White Noise is, however, worth pursuing through its various literary devices, because at its heart is one of the most profound and cutting indictments of modern culture. It’s a text with much to say to the Dissident Right, despite the moderate leftism of its author, and the social critique within the book is best discussed thematically rather than from the perspective of the chronological plot.

Academia

In White Noise, DeLillo satirizes the decline of academic standards, and the degradation of universities into a plurality of microscopic pseudo-disciplines taught by hubristic charlatans. DeLillo’s literary device in this regard involves a protagonist, Jack Gladney, who acts as founder and director of “Hitler studies.” This is an interesting choice to say the least. Of all areas of ideology, only two are totally unable to be commodified, absorbed, and assimilated by the current system — National Socialism and radical Islam. As such, the idea of universities operating courses of study involving the objective analysis of the life and career of Adolf Hitler is obviously inconceivable. One gets the impression, however, that DeLillo knows this, and that he chose “Hitler studies” precisely because of its extreme nature, as well as its darkly comic potential. DeLillo is also concerned with the impact of “celebrity culture” on modern society and intellectual standards, and while Hitler is anathema in the contemporary West, he at least remains ever-present — a kind of notorious anti-celebrity. In DeLillo’s words, “Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.” As such, for DeLillo, Hitler is the perfect candidate for a micro-discipline within his satire of academia, and Hitler studies takes its place among such real-life disciplines as women’s studies, chicano studies, comic book studies, and celebrity studies.

Most of the novel’s early laughs come from the jarring effect on the reader of the celebration of Hitler studies. Jack Gladney, for example, introduces himself with gusto:

I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. I invented Hitler studies in North America in March of 1968. It was a cold bright day with intermittent winds out of the east. When I suggested to the chancellor that we might build a whole department around Hitler’s life and work, he was quick to see the possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success.

Gladney is never far from his dog-eared and heavily annotated copy of Mein Kampf, and he informs us that it’s his custom on Fridays, “after an evening in front of the TV set, to read deeply in Hitler well into the night.” Gladney is told by a colleague that he’s done “a wonderful thing here with Hitler,” and when asked later “How’s Hitler?,” he responds enthusiastically: “Fine, solid, dependable.” When Babette informs Jack that “[Hitler] was on [TV] again last night,” Jack replies, “He’s always on. We couldn’t have television without him.” DeLillo presents Gladney as an intellectual opportunist who merely capitalized on, and in a sense commodified, Hitler. This image is complicated only twice in the novel. In the first instance, we learn that Gladney named his son Heinrich, an act that he later explains is because “I thought it had an authority that might cling to him. I thought it was forceful and impressive and I still do.” The second point where Gladney’s ideological foundations might be regarded as deeper than surface level come when Babette asks him why Hitler is on TV so much. Gladney responds ambiguously that “It’s not a question of good and evil. I don’t know what it is.”

Overall, however, Gladney is depicted as a quintessential example of academic hubris and fraud. He is obsessed with the pretentious aspects of academic posturing, wearing black academic robes and rejoicing in “clearing my arm from the folds of the garment to look at my watch. The simple act of checking the time is transformed by this flourish.” He invents a middle initial so that he can style himself “J.A.K. Gladney.” Although secure in his position as the celebrated founder of Hitler studies, Gladney’s department is “composed almost solely of New York émigrés, smart, thuggish, movie-mad” and the overall academic atmosphere is “one of pervasive bitterness, suspicion and intrigue.” Ultimately, Gladney is self-conscious as an academic fraud, remarking that he had

long tried to conceal the fact that I did not know German. I could not speak or read it, could not understand the spoken word or begin to put the simplest sentence on paper. The least of my Hitler colleagues knew some German; others were either fluent in the language or reasonably conversant. No one could major in Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill without a minimum of one year of German. I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.

DeLillo thus satirizes the creation of academic disciplines by figures who are themselves intellectually average or lacking in suitable insights or skills, something reinforced when Gladney admits early in the book that in regards to the illustrious posturing of J.A.K. Gladney, he is merely “the false character that follows the name around.” Gladney’s success with Hitler studies, despite the fact he’s something of an imposter, is obvious to other academics. One tells Gladney he wants “to do the same thing with Elvis,” and later explains he’s been asked to “teach a course in the cinema of car crashes.” DeLillo probably never appreciated just how much his speculative jesting would become reality.

Just Your Average Academics: Faculty from the Center for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, University of Leeds

Jews

White Noise is an unusual example of modern fiction in that it presents, as one of its main characters, a rather negative portrayal of a Jew. One of Gladney’s colleagues at College-on-the-Hill is Murray Jay Siskind, an ex-sportswriter. Siskind, who is described as “a stoop-shouldered man with little round glasses and an Amish beard,” is a sex-obsessed urbanite who is totally out of place in small town America. He is also acutely aware of his Jewishness. Siskind informs Gladney that he’s staying in a rooming house, and proceeds to describe the other inhabitants in abstract ways like “A woman who harbors a terrible secret. A man with a haunted look. A man who never comes out of his room.” When Gladney asks him, “Which one are you?”, Siskind responds, “I’m the Jew. What else would I be?” Siskind obsesses with awe over the mundane behaviors of regular townspeople, taking notes about them almost as if he is observing a different species. He is also irrationally suspicious of rural people and manual laborers—reflecting the normative fear and loathing of Jewish intellectuals toward populism and the White working class. When discussing a dripping faucet in his bathroom, Siskind tells Gladney his landlord will fix it before adding “Too bad he’s such a bigot.” The exchange continues:

“How do you know he’s such a bigot?”
“People who can fix things are usually bigots.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think of all the people who’ve ever come to your house to fix things. They were all bigots weren’t they?
“I don’t know.”
“They drove panel trucks, didn’t they, with an extension ladder on the roof and some kind of plastic charm dangling from the rearview mirror?”
“I don’t know, Murray.”
“It’s obvious,” he said.

The humor of the exchange resides in the fact it isn’t at all obvious that manual workers are inevitably bigots. The link between the two exists only in Murray Siskind’s mind, which in fact evidences its own form of bigotry. Even aside from this incident, DeLillo leaves us in no doubt that his Jewish character is altogether unpleasant. Siskind is a lecherous pervert, described several times as having a “sneaky” smile, who reads a magazine called American Transvestite, solicits unusual acts from prostitutes, and leers constantly at Babette, his colleague’s wife, smelling her hair as well as things she’s touched. In fact, elsewhere in the novel he is described in quite animalistic terms, sniffing utensils in the canteen before eating with them. Most ominously, he is also the Mephistophelian influence who persuades Jack Gladney that committing a murder will relieve Gladney’s fear of death.

DeLillo grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s, a time when Jews were accelerating their move into the professions and other areas of economic, social, and political influence. It’s worth pondering whether Siskind was based on real characters encountered by the author, or whether Siskind emerges instead from the unstated, and in many cases unconscious, cultural knowledge that most White people still possess about Jews, despite all politically correct conditioning. Siskind, the quick-talking, psychologically-intense, leering, and predatory bigot, who in turn accuses others of bigotry, is all-too-reminiscent of so many Jewish cultural figures who go on to enter the popular consciousness. Harvey Weinstein, donor to the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL’s campaigns against “bigotry,” is a prime example. And there is little the ADL can do to stop such figures causing speculation, to use their terminology, on “Jewish sexual degeneracy and perversion.” For this reason alone, I found DeLillo’s portrayal of Siskind, the urban Jew in small-town America, to be less grounded in satire than in a rather uncomfortable social reality.

Fear of Death

At time of this writing, much media attention remains focused on the outbreak of novel coronavirus in Wuhan, as well as new outbreaks in Iran and Italy. This panic follows on from previous feverish (pardon the pun) media coverage of Ebola, swine flu (H1N1), and SARS, as well as increasingly vocal and violent protests about putative ecological and environmental disasters such as climate change and the mass extinction of species. In short, we live in a civilization that is in terror of death, and pathologically so. I say pathologically, because our civilization is in fact dying, but not from the causes currently distracting and fixating the masses. Our civilization is not dying from a disease epidemic, global tsunamis, or an asteroid strike, but from its willful and ignorant abdication (via self-hate and industrialized abortion) of a future in favor of mass immigration, consumerism, and instant gratification. We panic about old people dying from flu, but barely blink when millions of Muslims migrate to our countries, utterly transforming the nation and its future. Indeed, we might say that just as one has to confront death in order to truly live (or to become “authentic” in Heidegger’s philosophy), our society is in constant flight from death and thus inevitably collapses into inauthentic decay.

This is the paradox of our age. Fear of death everywhere coexists with a cult of death. Social media and celebrity culture, especially among women, is fixated on fighting ageing and extending youth perpetually. Trying to look younger for longer has long been a human preoccupation in eras of decadence, but our current age would appear to have taken matters to new lows. We live in the period of FOMO, Fear of Missing Out, where individuals collapse into pathological social anxiety if they can’t keep up with events in other people’s lives. Death, once seen as an inevitable part of life itself, and perhaps, for the religious, even of something greater than life, is now reduced for many to a terrifying obstacle to what “might have been.” Death becomes an awful, and extremely personal thing. In their classic essay, “Modernity, Self-Identity, and the Sequestration of Death,” Philip Mellor and Chris Shilling contrast the role of death in modern and pre-modern societies:

[In the past] when death occurred, its significance denoted a disruption to the social body more than it did the passing of an individual body. When identity is rooted more in the group than it is in the individual, death does not threaten the individual as it does in the modern world. Death meant that society had lost part of itself, not that an individual had lost society.

The collapse of group identity in the West has led to a radical change in approaches to death. Death in modernity is lonely, is utterly individualized and lacks deep meaning beyond personal loss. As such, many lives lack meaning also. The elusive search for meaning has translated into an $800 million dollar industry in “self-help” literature, and a series of diet and fitness crazes apparently designed in desperation to ensure one’s body conforms to youthful and sexual standards. The elderly, uncomfortable reminders of an unavoidable future fate, are increasingly segregated from the young. The result is a society, to use the words of Mellor and Shilling, consumed by “intense confusion, anxiety, and even terror,” in the face of mortality. Paradoxically, it does this while condoning abortion on an industrial scale, and the celebration of non-reproductive sexual behaviors that are known to produce their own forms of contagious and fatal illness. In short, the West’s fear of death is as selfish as it is pathological.

To my mind, there are no rivals to DeLillo’s White Noise in terms of the way it tackles fear of death in modernity. Death is a constant topic of discussion for Jack and Babette Gladney. They obsess over who will die first. Jack wakes “in the grip of a death sweat,” while Babette “thinks nothing can happen to us while there are dependent children in the house. The kids are a guarantee of our relative longevity. We’re safe as long as they’re around.” As well as fixations on personal mortality, and much like the postmodern West as a whole, the Gladneys and their children have a nihilistic fascination with natural catastrophes, which provide a kind of entertainment—a mediated version of death too large-scale and “cinematic” to be a genuine disturbance to the real death phobia. Jack describes a night with his family:

That night, a Friday, we gathered in front of the set, as was the custom and the rule, with take-out Chinese. There were floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We’d never before been more attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly. Heinrich was not sullen, I was not bored. Steffie … appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death. Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially mixed kids who build their own communications satellite. She was startled by the force of our objection. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in the mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

Consumerism

In White Noise, death and consumerism are intimately bound up together. Faced with death and disaster, everyone in the book responds by shopping. In fact, every negative feeling is assuaged by consumption. In Gladney’s narration, this is reinforced by periodic unexplained insertions into the text (and therefore of Gladney’s consciousness) of marketing data, or phrases from TV ads. While discussing his fear of death, for example, Gladney suddenly spouts “Visa, Mastercard, American Express,” before returning to the topic at hand. His wife mutters the various models of Toyota cars in her sleep. After an altercation with a colleague, Jack Gladney explains that it “put me in the mood to shop.” Ventriloquizing via Gladney, DeLillo’s meandering reflection on irrational postmodern therapeutic consumption is masterful:

I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it. I sent clerks into their fabric books and pattern books to search for elusive designs. I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me. We crossed from furniture to men’s wear, walking through cosmetics. Our images appeared on mirrored columns, in glassware and chrome, on TV monitors in security rooms. I traded money for goods. The more I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit.

A similar process is enacted in Gladney’s experience of withdrawing cash from an ATM:

I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval … What a pleasing interaction. I sense that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed.

When news reports suggest a coming snowstorm, Gladney observes swarms of old people engaged in media induced panic-buying:

The old people shopped in a panic. When TV didn’t fill them with rage, it scared them half to death. They whispered to each other in the checkout lines. Traveler’s advisory, zero visibility. When does it hit? How many inches? How many days? They became secretive, appeared to withhold the latest and worst news from others, appeared to blend a cunning with their haste, tried to hurry out before someone questioned the extent of their purchases. Hoarders in a war. Greedy, guilty.

DeLillo also links the broader social malaise to that other form of postmodern mass consumption — eating:

When times are bad, people feel compelled to overeat. Blacksmith is full of obese adults and children, baggy-pantsed, short-legged, waddling. They struggle to emerge from compact cars; they don sweatsuits and run in families across the landscape; they walk down the street with food in their faces; they eat in stores, cars, parkinglots, on bus lines and movie lines, under the stately trees.

For DeLillo, postmodernity is typified by an economy built on induced, quasi-therapeutic panic-buying and eating where the majority consumers are reduced to the status of greedy and guilty hoarders. Fear is thus a commodity of sorts, since it is a stimulant to sales, and, to use DeLillo’s words, “Terrifying data is now an industry in itself. Different firms compete to see how badly they can scare us.” This reality can be observed not only in the media, which exaggerates and commodifies bad news in order to sell otherwise superfluous products to concerned buyers, but also in all aspects of marketing. Here a guiding principle is that people should be convinced of an ever-increasing number of artificial “needs” so they can be sold a proffered, and profit-making, “solution.”

Society

DeLillo’s scathing treatment of consumerism is part of a broader critique of society. Most obviously, DeLillo satirizes the decline of stable, married families. While our contemporary education and cultural systems increasingly laud the various types of “new families” (single-parent, homosexual, etc.), DeLillo bases his novel around the fact the Gladneys are a “blended family” that results from two divorces, two sets of children from prior marriages, and all of the emotional baggage and childhood dysfunction resulting from that. Heinrich, in particular, is a 14-year-old metaphor for the confused, alienated, and emotionally-abandoned children that result from such environments, and it really is remarkable that DeLillo appeared to predict both the pattern and notoriety of mass school shooters like those involved in the Columbine massacre. The boy has morbid obsessions, plays chess via mail with an incarcerated mass killer, often wears camouflage, and Babette worries “he will end up in a barricaded room, spraying hundreds of rounds of automatic fire across an empty mall before the SWAT teams come for him with their heavy-barreled weapons, their bull-horns, and body armor.”

Another of DeLillo’s substantial social predictions is his anticipation of vacuous Instagram culture. In the novel, this takes the form of heavy satire on things that are “famous for being famous” and focuses on a trip undertaken by Siskind and Gladney to “the most photographed barn in America.” The barn is entirely nondescript, and its fame is artificial—the result of signs that merely proclaim it to be famous. Siskind and Gladney arrive to find more than forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot beside the barn, and become aware that people are more interested in taking photos of the accumulation of people, cameras, and tripods than they are in the barn itself. They come to the realization that, in postmodernity, fame itself has become famous; that celebrity itself has become the focus of celebrity. Or, in DeLillo’s words:

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said.

“What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the
aura. We’re here. We’re now.”

Like the throngs taking photographs of DeLillo’s barn, the cultural life of the West has descended into a celebrity cult where the objects of adoration are largely non-entities whose individual qualities are of lesser importance to the simple fact that they are famous. In this sense, the Kardashians and other focuses of mass media attention are little more than our “barns,” inanimate and unimportant objects that attract attention because we’ve been convinced that they attract attention. We photograph them being photographed, and in doing so “become part of the aura.”

Conclusion

Don DeLillo’s White Noise is one of the best and most intelligent socio-political satires of the last 50 years, and deserves a careful “reading from the Right.” There are certainly themes in the book that will resonate with dissidents, and this review is intended only to cover some of them within a thematic structure. The plot and style of the novel won’t be to everyone’s taste. White Noise is itself, after all, an example of postmodernist literature. It is quirky, sometimes unbearably so, and is occasionally needlessly abstruse. DeLillo is also much better at descriptive writing than he is at writing dialogue. However, I believe the novel is worth the effort of a slow reading and re-reading, and White Noise is perhaps both the kind of art that the present age needs and deserves.  It’s an awful mirror in which our contemporary society is morbidly, strangely, and yet accurately reflected. If you’ve felt like we’ve been living out some kind of dystopian novel, maybe it’s because we have.