Featured Articles

Occupy Wall Street: Undertones of Anti-Semitism

/95 Comments/in , , /by

In my recent blog “Jews and the Occupy Wall St. Protests” I mentioned that popular Los Angeles-area radio talk host Bill Handel said he wasn’t upset with Wall St. because “my tribe controls Wall St.” Handel is happily continuing his lucrative career without any problems at all. But Patricia McAlister, a Black substitute teacher in the LA school system has been fired for saying that the  “Zionist Jews who run these big banks and the Federal Reserve … need to be run out of this country.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmXUtwTLcQ

Granted, McAlister went quite a bit beyond Handel in advocating that Jews be expelled, but I rather doubt that that is the issue. Simply pointing to Jews in the context of the financial meltdown would have been quite enough. Indeed, there has been quite a bit of comment about lone protesters like David Smith, a regular at the New York protest, who has gotten quite a bit of attention for his signs, including “Google: Zionist Jews control Wall St.”

JTA Caption: An Occupy Wall Street protester who says his name is David Smith holding aloft a sign in Zuccotti Park in New York that offers an overtly anti-Jewish message, Oct. 11, 2011. Protest organizers say his type is a fringe element of the movement. (neolibertariannet via YouTube)

The situation is similar to what happened during the first stages of the meltdown in 2008 when the ADL expressed concern about the “dramatic upsurge” in anti-Jewish messages on internet discussion boards devoted to finance and the economy in reaction to the huge bailout of Wall Street. The ADL press release was predictable in its attempt to characterize such outbursts as irrational hatred against Jews: Abe Foxman complains darkly that in times of economic downturns, “The age-old canards [the ADL’s favorite word is ‘canard’] about Jews and money are always just beneath the surface.” Read more

Celebrating America’s European Heritage: Leif Erikson

/26 Comments/in , /by

Leif Erikson statue at the Hallgrimskirkja, the largest church in Iceland

Joseph F. Healey has pointed out that White ethnic identities are evolving into new shapes and forms, merging the various “hyphenated” ethnic identities into a single, generalized “European American” identity based on race and a common history of immigration and assimilation.  In light of the fact that virtually every minority group has generated a protest movement — Black Power, Red Power, Chicanismo — proclaiming a recommitment to its own heritage and to the authenticity of its own culture, European Americans should seize the opportunity to reclaim their ethnic and historical heritage on festive October occasions such as Columbus Day (Oct. 12) and Leif Erikson Day (Oct. 9).

Regarding Columbus, it should be remembered that the great Admiral of the Seas may well have had knowledge of earlier Norse explorations.  In 1477 he sailed to Ireland and Iceland with the merchant marine, as attested by his son, Fernando, who quotes a note of his father stating:

I sailed in the year 1477, in the month of February, a hundred leagues beyond the island of Tile [Thule, i.e. Iceland], whose northern part is in latitude 73 degrees north and not 63 degrees as some would have it … the season when I was there the sea was not frozen.

In all societies with a history of migrations, the question “who came first?” becomes important.  Centuries before Columbus and the Waldseemüller world map known as “America’s baptismal certificate,” the Icelandic sagas answered this question by immortalizing the names and deeds of the pioneers for posterity. Read more

The Importance of Columbus Day

/66 Comments/in , , /by

King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella bid farewell to Columbus for his First Voyage, departure for the New World, August 3, 1492.

Columbus Day has suffered an unprecedented diminution in importance in recent years, at least in the eyes of the arbitors of modern American culture.

Why? Columbus Day celebrates Christopher Columbus, the first European (White person) to come to the Western Hemisphere and make the presence permanent. Columbus Day, in other words, celebrates the advent of the White race in the so-called New World of the Americas. This, of course, is the last thing that the multicultural Left wants celebrated.

Their guiding principal, invented by both Trotsky and the Cultural Marxists at approximately the same time, is best summed up by the late, unlamented Susan Sontag’s famous quote, “The White race is the cancer of human history.” Who wants to celebrate cancer? Consequently, Columbus Day has been transformed from a holiday into an occasion for weeping, wailing, rending of garments and gnashing of teeth by the Left.

We at The Political Cesspool Radio Program, however, beg to differ, and think it’s high time to challenge this modern orthodoxy regarding Columbus and Columbus Day.

Consider, if you will, the Western Hemisphere when Columbus discovered it in 1492. The entire continent is estimated to have sustained only 200,000 people. It was a huge undeveloped wildlife preserve; its population stuck for the most part in the New Stone Age. And despite what the Left would have you believe, it was not populated by peace-loving early environmentalists. Read more

Art in the Third Reich: 1933-1945 (Part 2)

/33 Comments/in , , /by

Ernst von Dombrowski (1896-1985), “Little Angels” (woodcut)

The Archaic Postmodernity

National Socialist dignitaries devoted much energy to the promotion of German sculptors and helped them considerably in the execution of massive bas-reliefs and in the erection of monumental stone and bronze sculptures. The political goal was obvious: to bring German art as close as possible to the German people, so that any German citizen, regardless social standing, could identify himself or herself with a specific artistic achievement.

It should, therefore, come as no surprise that the German art of that time witnessed a return to classicism. Models from Antiquity and the Renaissance were to some extent adapted to the needs of National Socialist Germany. Numerous German sculptors benefited from the logistic and financial support of the political elite. Their sculptures resembled, either by form, or by composition, the works of Praxiteles or Phidias of ancient Greece, or the sculptures of Michelangelo during the Renaissance. Read more

Art in the Third Reich: 1933–1945 (Part 1)

/12 Comments/in , , /by

Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885), The Butterfly Hunter

This is a slightly edited version of an article was first published in Ecrits de Paris (Nr. 645, July-August 2002, L’Art dans l’IIIème Reich. Translated by the author.)

When writing about or discussing the plastic and figurative arts in Germany during the period from 1933 to 1945, one must inevitably mention the art that highlighted the epoch of National Socialism. During that short and troubled period of time, art was also a reflection of modern European history, and, therefore, it must be examined, or, for that matter, conceptualized, within the larger geopolitical framework of Europe as a whole.

National Socialist culture has always been a sensitive subject, whose controversial nature is more apparent today than ever before in the ongoing media warfare between so-called anticommunists and antifascists. If one accepts the conventional wisdom, widely accepted in all corners of he world, that National Socialism was a form of totalitarianism, one must then also raise the question as to whether there were any authentic cultural successes achieved during the Third Reich at all. Certain parallels can and should be drawn between artistic efforts in the U.S.S.R. and National Socialist Germany, in view of the fact that culture in both systems was dominated by a specific ideology. Does this therefore mean that there were no valuable works of art created in the U.S.S.R. or in National Socalist Germany? What both National Socialism and Communism had in common was the rejection of “art for art’s sake” (l’art pour l’art) and the repudiation of middle-class aestheticism. Instead, both political systems favored a committed and normative approach to art, which was supposed to be a tool for the creation of the “new man.” On the other hand, from the thematic, aesthetic and stylistic point of view, the differences between art in Communism and art in National Socialism were immense. Read more

Jewish Partisan Warfare During WWII

/46 Comments/in /by

The recurring theme of Jewish suffering during World War II in 1990s movies (Schindler’s List) has gradually shifted to the image of the outsmarting Jew (The Counterfeiters, 2008) and even the resisting Jew (Defiance, 2008). This shift of focus has not been to the benefit of the image of the Jewish victim, because it exposes Jewish crimes as well. The main character in The Counterfeiters is a petty criminal who is willing to work for the German war effort, but the movie “Defiance” has opened up the historical Pandora’s box of Jewish partisan violence and collaboration with the Soviets.

The Bielsky Brothers

The Bielski Brothers

The true story of the Bielski brothers, on which the movie Defiance is based, is actually more interesting than the movie. In the 1930s the Bielski family were grocers and millers (N. Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, Oxford University Press 1993) in what was then a border town between Poland and the Soviet-Union and now is situated in Belarus. When the Soviet-Union invaded Poland in 1939 on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Bielski family collaborated with the communist occupiers as the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza (Jan. 6, 2009) points out. This resulted in a breach with the predominantly Roman-Catholic Polish population, which saw the Soviets as the oppressors of the Polish language, culture and religion. Ten of thousands Polish officers and intelligentsia were executed and hundreds of thousands ordinary Poles were deported to forced labour camps in Siberia as a direct result of Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941. Read more

A Dissident Meditation on Jewish Identity: A Review of Gilad Atzmon’s “The Wandering Who?”

/210 Comments/in , , , , , /by

Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (Winchester, UK and Washington, DC: Zer0 Books, 2011, 202 pp.)

Gilad Atzmon is one of those rarest of all birds—the sort of person who would be called a “self-hating Jew” by Jewish activists. Except that he doesn’t really hate himself and really doesn’t have much of a Jewish identity at all. He is an honest leftist who happens to be of Jewish origin; or perhaps one should label him a liberal devoted to the values of the Enlightenment,  without the typical Jewish blinders. Although he has a few blinders of his own, he sees quite clearly the incompatibility of Zionism with post-Enlightenment Western civilization.

For Atzmon, Zionism is all about Judaism as racial identity politics, ethnic cleansing, and manipulating Western governments via the Israel Lobby. As a child growing up in Israel, “supremacy was brewed into our souls, we gazed at the world through racist, chauvinistic binoculars. And we felt no shame about it either” (p. 2). He began his journey of embracing the West as a result of immersion in jazz. Eventually, “I somehow already yearned to become a Goy or at least to be surrounded by Goyim” (p. 7).

For Atzmon, the racialism so fundamental to Zionism is an aberration from Judaism the religion. He has no problem with people who “regard themselves as human beings that happen to be of Jewish origin.” The problem arises with “those who put their Jewish-ness over and above all other traits” (p. 16). This sort of Jewish essentialism was central to Zionism from the beginning, often with strong racialist overtones. Quoting Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of the Israeli right:

A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German customs, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish because his blood, his body, his physical racial type are Jewish. Read more