Featured Articles
Other Jews involved with Zurich Dada
Among the other Jewish artists and intellectuals who joined Tzara in neutral Switzerland to escape involvement in the war was the painter and sculptor Marcel Janco (1895–1984), his brothers Jules and George, the painter and experimental film-maker Hans Richter (1888–1976), the essayist Walter Serner (1889–1942), and the painter and writer Arthur Segal (1875–1944). Read more
Tristan Tzara
The twentieth century saw a proliferation of art inspired by the culture of critique. The exposure and promotion of this art grew alongside the ever-expanding Jewish control of the media, and Jewish penetration and eventual capture of the Western art establishment. Jewish writers, painters and composers sought to rewrite the rules of artistic expression — to allow accommodation for their own technical limitations, and to facilitate the creation (and elite acceptance) of works intended as a rebuke to the supposed evils of Western civilizational norms.
The Jewish intellectual substructure of many of these twentieth century art movements was manifest in their unfailing hostility toward the political, cultural and religious traditions of Europe and European-derived societies. I previously examined how the rise of Abstract Expressionism exemplified this tendency in the United States, and coincided with the usurping of the American art establishment by a group of radical Jewish intellectuals. In Europe, Jewish influence on Western art reached a peak during the interwar years. This era, when the work of many artists was suffused with radical politics, was the heyday of the Jewish avant-garde.
A prominent example of a cultural movement from this time with important Jewish involvement was Dada. The Dadaists challenged the very foundations of Western civilization which they regarded, in the context of the destruction of World War I, and continuing anti-Semitism throughout Europe, as pathological. The artists and intellectuals of Dada responded to this socio-political diagnosis with assorted acts of cultural subversion. Dada was a movement that was destructive and nihilistic, irrational and absurdist, and which preached the overturning of every cultural tradition of the European past, including of rationality itself. The Dadaists “aimed to wipe the philosophical slate clean” and lead “the way to a new world order.”[i] While there were many non-Jews involved in Dada, the Jewish contribution was fundamental in shaping its intellectual tenor as a movement, for Dada was as much an attitude and way of thinking as a mode of artistic output. Read more
A Nation of Nations
The harsh reality that America is a “nation of nations” may at long last be sinking in. But, one cannot be confident; Tea Partiers remain steadfastly in denial as they demand “their” country back. As if the Constitutional Republic was ever “theirs” to have and to hold in fee simple! At best, they are now tenants at will on the demesne of the federal Leviathan. But Harold Cruse, the most incisive Black nationalist writer of the Sixties, remarked ruefully that “America is a nation that lies to itself about who and what it is.” WASPs were and are the worst offenders. For Cruse, America was “a nation of minorities…ruled by a minority of one” which “thinks and acts as if [the USA is simply] a nation of Anglo-Saxon Protestants.”
In the Sixties WASPs were still the dominant group among White Americans. It was the civic duty of the WASP intelligentsia, therefore, to produce its own “representative radical-intellectual trend.” Cruse warned that every racial, religious, and ethnic group needed “organic” intellectuals able to articulate its particular interests and shape its distinctive ethno-culture. That representative function must be performed to the best of its ability by the intelligentsia in each of America’s constituent ethno-nations; otherwise “social progress in America” would “be ethnically retarded, if not checkmated.”
Unfortunately American civil religion fosters the delusion that WASPs are not an ethnic group comme les autres. That is partly because previous generations of WASP intellectuals shirked “their creative and intellectual responsibilities to the internal American commonweal,” effectively dissuading, crippling, and smothering “the cultivation of a democratic cultural pluralism in America.” Read more
Introduction
The sweeping gains by the Republican Party in the 2010 mid-term Congressional elections were due in large part to the growing strength of America’s grass-roots Tea Party movement. Tea Party activists are overwhelmingly White; their stated goal is to roll back the federal Leviathan now headed by America’s first non-White President. Predictably, therefore, liberals interpret the Tea Party phenomenon as a manifestation of White “racism.” Equally predictable are Tea Party attempts to deflect such accusations by backing the Black Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain. For a while, even some White nationalists hoped that the Tea Parties would evolve into an explicitly ethnonationalist political movement. It is now obvious that that will never happen.
At heart, the Tea Party movement is not about politics as such, i.e. who gets what, when, and where. Still less does it promote a surreptitious style of identity politics tailor-made for White folks. Instead, the excitement generated by the Tea Partiers resembles a corporate media-savvy revival of the old-time religious fervour for which America is famous.
The Tea Party movement is another episode in the long history of evangelical enthusiasm which has driven the permanent (or at least very long-running) American Revolution since it broke out in the eighteenth century. The radicalism of that revolutionary upheaval is still fuelled by a potent mixture of politics and religion. Well before the American Declaration of Independence, the first Great Awakening laid the foundation for the constitutional faith that transformed colonial Englishmen into homo Americanus. In the early nineteenth century, a second-stage evangelical revival fertilized the spiritual seedbed of secession and Civil War. Read more
The Fall issue of The Occidental Quarterly is now available. Yearly subscriptions (4 issues) can be obtained at the here—hardcopy: $60.00, including postage to U.S. addresses; digital: $30.00. See page for all purchase options.
TOO readers will be very interested in this material. In addition to the intellectual stimulation provided by these articles (and a handsome addition to your coffee table if you purchase the hardcopy subscription), subscribing to TOQ is an excellent way to support media that presents intellectually honest perspectives on Western peoples and culture that simply cannot be published in the mainstream intellectual media in today’s climate of political correctness. We complain endlessly about the stranglehold on the media enjoyed by our enemies. Subscribing to TOQ helps change all that.
The Spring issue of TOQ will be on the topic of “Collapse: Perspectives on the Impending Crisis of the West.” Thinkers on the political right have been prophesying the collapse of our current political and economic system for some time, but recent developments seem to make this a realistic possibility. The problems leading to the this crisis are daunting and quite possibly insoluble without a political cataclysm: Exploding and unsustainable debt at all levels of government; unsustainable levels of immigration requiring unrealistic levels of economic growth to prevent chronic high unemployment; endless costly foreign wars fought to appease the Israel Lobby; a corrupt financial elite that has plunged the Western world into its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; rapidly expanding populations of low-IQ non-Whites requiring unsustainably high levels of social support; large numbers of Whites inchoately angry about their impending displacement and the fact that they are being forced to adjust to a multicultural world they do not desire. This multicultural world promises increased racial conflict (a characteristic of all multicultural societies) and diminished political and cultural influence for Whites. Read more
A NYTimes article (“Fraud seen as a red flag for psychology research“) discusses the case of scientific fraud involving a Dutch social psychologist, Diederik Stapel. This is an amazingly egregious example of fraud by a psychologist well-known for his leftist views. Stapel got his Ph.D. in 1997 but managed to crank out 150 research papers and 24 book chapters in that short period. A recent paper of his, published in the very prestigious Science, “Coping with Chaos: How Disordered Contexts Promote Stereotyping and Discrimination” included two lab studies and three field studies. This study had a wonderfully liberal conclusion—that racial discrimination would be increased in chaotic environments because people have a tendency to simplify their cognitive processing in such environments.
The NYTimes article notes,
In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny. Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged.
“The big problem is that the culture is such that researchers spin their work in a way that tells a prettier story than what they really found,” said Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s almost like everyone is on steroids, and to compete you have to take steroids as well.” Read more
Douglas Reed
Douglas Reed (1895–1976), British author and journalist, was a penetrating and clear-eyed witness to the course of events in Europe and the West following the First World War. He served in the trenches in that war, and afterwards became a correspondent in the then-arising telephone news services. “I began to pick up the tricks of the journalist’s trade,” he writes in Insanity Fair, the book that made him famous. Insanity Fair was published April 1, 1938 and was a great success. Six months later Reed reported in a Postscript: “Now… on October 1st, I am sitting in Belgrade and read in my newspapers that the book is in its 28th edition and that it has been banned in Germany, and all around me is the tragedy that I have foretold you, the tragedy of faith betrayed… moving with gathering speed.”
There were few tricks either in his moral sense or his prose style. He possessed a rare capacity, seemingly extinct in journalists today, which was a refusal to be deceived. This is a character of the will rather than of the intellect. But he was intellectual astute and had a graceful and highly literary prose style. The titles of many of his works speak to this literary flair: Insanity Fair (1938), Disgrace Abounding (1939), A Prophet At Home (1941), Lest We Regret (1943), From Smoke to Smother (1948).
