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The Archaeology of Postmodernity, Part III: Transvestism in Music

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The Austrian statesman Clemens von Metternich once declared that the Orient started southeast of the city walls of Vienna. Western Europe’s centuries-long confrontation with Oriental empires helped define Central Europe as a cultural and historical frontier region.  The experience of imperial subjugation and multi-ethnicity — an Eastern European patchwork of ethnic groups with different languages, cultures, and traditions living closely together — became essential parts of the Central European historical experience.

Schloss Schönbrunn, Vienna

As Anthony Alofsin points out, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was “a collage of so many nationalities that it could never be transformed into a unified nation-state.” Within this collage, Jews achieved cultural preeminence. As Robert S. Wistrich points out,

In 1900, Gustav Mahler was the leading conductor and composer in the city, Karl Kraus its high priest of satire, Arthur Schnitzler its outstanding playwright, Adolf von Sonnenthal its greatest actor.  The founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, Victor Adler, was a ‘Protestant’ Jew and many of his leading associates were middle-class Jewish intellectuals. Sigmund Freud had just published his epoch-making Interpretation of Dreams and psychoanalysis was about to be born. Waiting in the wings were such central figures of twentieth-century culture as Arnold Schoenberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Buber and Franz Kafka, not to mention writers like Joseph Roth, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Felix Salten, Stefan Zweig and Peter Altenberg – all of them of Jewish origin.

Alexander Ringer points out, perhaps defensively, that “as long as familiarity with New England transcendentalism or American individualism is considered indispensable for a meaningful appraisal of Charles Ives and his particular mission, Arnold Schoenberg, his exact contemporary and eventual fellow American, deserves equally serious attention in equivalent Jewish terms.”

In this context, the significance of Schoenberg’s “antirational” view of art and his personal experiences with anti-Semitism in the early 1920s has been emphasized:

His acknowledgement that he could not escape his Jewish heritage initiated a protracted period of reflection upon Jewish issues from both theological and political points of view culminating in the early 1930s with yet another attempt to give a comprehensive statement of his position by means of words and music — this time in his opera Moses and Aron, which presents his personal vision of Judaism.

The moment of truth is usually believed to have come in 1921, when he was asked for his certificate of baptism (to prove that he was not a Jew) while on holiday in Mattsee, near Salzburg (Austria).  Schoenberg explicitly articulated his identification with a classically Jewish perspective and declared himself “no longer a European” but a Jew, in a letter to the painter Wassily Kandinsky written in 1923:

For I have at last learnt the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year, and I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely even a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but I am a Jew. I am content that it should be so! Today I no longer wish to be an exception; I have no objection at all to being lumped together with all the rest. … We are two kinds of people. Definitively!

Schoenberg’s statements of an explicitly Zionist position begin in 1924, when he, according to Nicholas Cook, “argued that only military victory could secure a Jewish state in Palestine against its enemies.” In The Biblical Way (1926) he presented his belief in the necessity of an exodus of European Jewry in the form of a psychodrama.

In a letter of 13 June 1933, after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, Schoenberg declared: “It is necessary to give up all Western acquisitions; we are Asians and nothing essential binds us to the West. … We must return to our origins.” A few weeks later, Schoenberg stated that he planned “a long tour of America, which could perhaps turn into a world tour, to persuade people to help the Jews in Germany.” He explains that he considers this more important than his art, and that he is determined “to do nothing in the future but work for the Jewish national cause.” On another occasion during the same year he states it explicitly: “I offer the sacrifice of my art for the sake of Jewry.”

Arnold Schoenberg: His sometimes banal use of language is expressed in Die Sanftergebenen: “O wie schön lebt sich’s doch im Dreck” (Oh, how beautiful it is to live in the muck).

Although Schoenberg — whose ancestry included both rabbis and cantors — for a period of time discarded the Jewish faith for Lutheran Protestantism, the proximity of his ideas to Jewish theological thought remained obvious. Adorno had a point when he asserted that Schoenberg translated the Old Testament ban on images into music: Dissonance can be seen as an expression of the need to change forms of expression in art, absolutely necessary in order to fulfill the old Jewish prohibition on images.

As William E. Benjamin points out, “Schoenberg realized that Judaism provided a historical model for what he was attempting as an artist.” Robert Wistrich emphasizes the “connection between Schoenberg’s musical agenda, his Jewish identity and the commitment to a Jewish national renewal (by returning to the essence of ancient Judaism)”: “The Mosaic aversion to idolatry, to visible symbols and mystery, as well as the Judaic call for the triumph of rational consciousness, are harnessed by Schoenberg to the cause of twentieth-century modernist expressionism.”

In Judaism, as in Islam, “it was sacrilegious to make a figurative representation of God. With very few exceptions, there were no Jewish painters before the Russian artist Marc Chagall, who had to come to Paris to paint.”

Gleichgewichtsstörung: The Schoenberg-Kandinsky–Tango

Schoenberg’s friendship and cooperation with the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky — a philosemite who was erroneously listed as a Jew in the Grosse Jüdische National-Biographie (1929) — underscores the impact of the blurring of boundaries between art forms, as well as the underlying, religiously motivated, “aniconic” (i.e., without icons) or “iconoclastic” thematic structure. Music meant a great deal to Kandinsky; he referred to his own paintings as “compositions,” and became deeply interested in Schoenberg’s attempts to establish correspondences between musical tones and colors, and in his rejection of the traditional tonal order.

A new kind of transvestism among the arts was thus born:

We see, for example, a painter who wrote an opera libretto (Kokoschka), a poet who composed music (Pound), and a composer who painted pictures (Schoenberg). It is as if artistic talent were a kind of libido, an electricity that could discharge itself with equal success in a poem, a sonata, or a sculpture. Throughout the modernist movement, the major writers and composers both enforced and transgressed the boundaries among the various arts with unusual energy – almost savage at times.

As Christian Meyer, director of the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna, points out:

The first decade of the twentieth century saw an almost simultaneous musical and visual revolution. Because of Schoenberg’s innovations, musicians were freed from the system of tempered tonality.  At the same time, painters, especially Kandinsky, broke away from the system of central perspective and figural representation. These traditions had been legitimated for centuries by an overwhelming number of masterpieces and were so universally sanctioned that they had come to be regarded as the unquestioned essence of both arts. This explains the anarchist energy that had to be unleashed to liberate music and painting from the bonds of tradition, and at the same time it illuminates the “atonal character” of pre-World War I painting in Europe, which reflects this revolution.  While Schoenberg’s music was an inspiration to Kandinsky as he explored abstraction, today Kandinsky’s paintings function as ambassadors for Schoenberg’s musical works.  The strong colorful essence of Kandinsky’s prewar works has the same richness of sound colors in Schoenberg’s compositions.

Schoenberg approved of Kandinsky’s Der gelbe Klang with its “ungraspable” dimension, comparing it to his own Die glückliche Hand – a work that, according to Christopher Butler, explicitly challenged “the ‘laws’ of art as imposed by the Academy, along with the order of society as a whole.” According to James Leggio, Kandinsky’s “floating sensations” and celestial aspirations were reflections of Schoenberg’s release from “the gravitational grip of tonality”, a feeling of “weightlessness.”

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Kandinsky explained to Schoenberg that Der gelbe Klang was based on the anti-geometrical type of construction attained “by the ‘principle’ of dissonance.” Referring to the Ten Commandments in a letter to Schoenberg, he emphasized the power of negation and the difference between the law as a sign (word) and its signified (the meaning of the law). Kandinsky broke the link between the sign and a transcendental linguistic signified and hence equated art with reality.  As with Schoenberg, the artistic form is conceived as pure perception — independent of external references. This flight from meaning (in the traditional sense) eventually reached its final destination with the Dadaists: “The Dada Manifesto of 1918 proclaimed proudly and in capital letters: DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING.”  As their contemporary Ferdinand de Saussure stated: “The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.”

Kandinsky and Schoenberg viewed their urge to change forms of expression as motivated by the desire to comply with the ancient Jewish prohibition against images. The old Jewish prohibition on images is characterized by its ability to uphold a separation between the pictorial and its referent, that is, the difference between the sign and what it signifies.

Vassily Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert), painted immediately after attending a concert featuring Schoenberg’s music in Munich on 2 January 1911

Steven Beller cites Schoenberg’s maxim “music should not decorate, it should be true,” and suggests that his explicit invocation of musical logic (most obviously in his serialism) represents an “invasion of the world of aesthetics by the ethical impulse of truth.” Beller comments that “it does not seem improbable that this stemmed from attitudes whose origins lay in his Jewish background.” Nicholas Cook agrees: “The whole debate about ornamentation … might be seen as resulting from the application to art of traditional Jewish thinking.” Both Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker have been described as “Grenzjuden” (frontier Jews) — both cultural insiders and alienated outsiders.  Schenker held that Jews are “the compulsory instructors of humanity.”

The Jewish position, inclined to abstraction as in the work of Schoenberg, “stood in tension with the aesthetic hedonism of the official Catholic culture of Austrian society.” No wonder, then, that shouting and scuffling accompanied the 1908 premiere of Schoenberg’s Second Quartet in Vienna — a work that certainly did not result in aesthetic pleasure in the audience. A near-riot erupted on March 31, 1913, at an orchestral concert in Vienna in which works by Mahler, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky, and Schoenberg were played.

As Carl Schorske points out,

The system Schoenberg thus devised was no return to the hierarchical, privileged order of the diatonic system.  Yet its democracy of twelve tones would cohere again in a systematic way: in a hidden order, created by the composer — one in which above and below, forward and back, were related visibly to the analytic mind, even though not generally accessible to the listening ear. … Schoenberg as psychological Expressionist confronted his listener with an art whose surface was broken, charged with the full life of feeling of man adrift and vulnerable in the ungovernable universe; yet beneath it he posited out of his own powers a subliminal, inaudible world of rational order that would integrate the chaos. Here liberated dissonance became a new harmony; psychological chaos, a meta-sensuous order. … Thus Schoenberg the artist, even as he turned back to the faith of his fathers and submission to God, became man the creator, what Goethe would have called ‘der kleine Gott der Welt.’

At a personal level, Schoenberg was hardly a moral icon. Richard Taruskin points out that Schoenberg’s personality “was as absolutist and despotic as any dictator’s,” and that “his personal relationships could be repellently exploitative.” Schoenberg’s only name for skeptics, adversaries, or opponents was “enemies.”

The big step that others called the leap into “atonality,” a term that he deplored for its negativity, Schoenberg called pantonality or the “emancipation of dissonance.” Schoenberg characterized the Tristan chords as “spies reconnoitering weaknesses” to be exploited “in order to create confusion”.  But, as Taruskin points out, it was not dissonance itself that had been emancipated: It was the composer who was liberated “from the constraints of ‘voice leading rules’ whereby dissonance was subordinated to consonance in traditional harmony and counterpoint.”

The assertion that Schoenberg’s atonality represents a consequence of the chromaticism of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde has been commonplace for quite some time.  Heinrich Schenker held that Wagner was directly to blame for the excesses of Schoenberg and his school.  But, as Richard Taruskin points out, the Wagnerian “crisis of tonality” was not Wagnerian at all: “It was read back into Wagner by Schoenberg’s apologists”:

Wagner used the chromaticism of Tristan und Isolde to delay to the point of torture the harmonic resolution that would symbolize the slaking of sexual desire. That harmonic tension … was the mainspring that controlled the syntax of what we now call “tonal” music.  Did the delays caused by Wagner’s chromaticism attenuate that harmonic tension? Don’t be silly.  They only magnified it, vastly so.  Wagner’s chromaticism gave tonality a new source of strength and expressivity. The consequences Schoenberg drew from Wagner’s musical style were entirely idiosyncratic and ahistorical, inevitable only in eyes blinded by “dialectic.”  To say the very least, they had nothing to do with Wagner’s creative aims, least of all in Tristan.

Schoenberg’s style recognized “no distinction between consonance and dissonance, so that harmonically speaking, literally anything goes.” Schoenberg once cracked to a pupil, “Now that I’ve emancipated dissonance, anybody can be a composer.” Removing the qualitative distinction between consonance and dissonance “eliminates the concept of the one being beautiful and the other ugly.”

While Wagner in his heyday took center stage, Schoenberg remained marginal or sectarian, as noted by Leon Botstein:

In contrast to Wagner, Schoenberg’s music and the rhetorical strategy employed in its defense (designed largely by Schoenberg himself) never achieved wide acceptance. … [F]rom the beginning, in the face of controversy, [Schoenberg’s] assertion of artistic integrity assumed a nearly puritanical façade of ethical superiority. Schoenberg’s envy of Stravinsky, Ravel, Respighi, and Bartók took the form of high-minded moralizing about aesthetic concessions and superficialities.

Nevertheless, it is a matter of fact that without Schoenberg, “our era would have made a different sound.” As Jacques Le Rider points out, the utopias of mysticism, genius and narcissism – as responses to “feelings of solitude, ego-fragility, and instability” – had in common the striving to transcend limitations imposed by tradition: “they negate the male/female dichotomy and tend towards an androgynous ideal; they aim at the auto-destruction of a self that suffers because it cannot accept its contingent qualities (sex, race, etc.) and at the creation of a more perfect self.”

As Taruskin notes,

Surmounting the majory/minor dichotomy, voiding all distinctions between particular keys, was for him an achievement comparable to embodying androgyny or double gender. … To his pupil Anton Webern he confided that pantonality, like androgyny, “has given rise to a higher race!”

As Jacques Le Rider points out, “Viennese modernism recognised that [the] old certainties had crumbled. The androgynism of the modern psyche and the inextricable commingling of Jew and non-Jew had given rise to the most bewildering confusion.”

Egon Friedell presented his essay on Peter Altenberg (“the Zarathustra of the Café Central”) as a “natural history” of the human race in process of mutation. Indeed, the phenomenon of Schoenberg “stemmed from an intellectual Gesamtkunstwerk, closely related to new ideas then overflowing from science, literature, and painting that quickly intermingled with those emanating from music per se.”

It has been suggested that the formation and evaluative assessment of systems in relativistic or quantum physics and atonalistic or dodecaphonic music are inspired by the same operative principles and insights, and that there is “a historical-cultural link between these two system mutations as such and the new world-view they produced” (e.g. probability taking over from determinism, the pivotal role of the observer, theoretical pluralism, etc.). In many respects the determinism inherent in tonality theory reflected the determinism in classical physics. In a similar fashion, quantum physics and atonality share an indeterministic rationale, affirmed in the principle of probability and in the disappearance of external determinism (tonality).  As Mark Delaere points out: “In quantum physics external determinism and causality were toppled. The description of reality in terms of probability represented the triumph of ontological determinism over the mechanical determinism of classical physics.”

The ‘twelve-tone idea’ can be defined as a systematic circulation of all the twelve pitch classes based on “transposition, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-inversion”; a shift from harmony as its principal structural determinant and toward counterpoint, reversing the stylistic change that occurred from Bach to Mozart by returning again to polyphonic thinking,” as noted by John Covach (pp. 604–610).

Delighting in parody and outrage, the avant-garde, according to Richard Drain, “fought a guerilla war against bourgeois culture”, the first onslaught of which came with futurism (launched in 1909), followed by Dadaism in 1916. Dada preferred non-Western cultures to ‘modern’ culture, opposed all –isms, including modernism, favoured spontaneity and a cabaret environment, cubist paintings and cacophonous music. Relativity – a key modernist notion, invoked also by the Dadaists and the futurists – was used “to deflate the status of ‘objective’ truth, license multiple viewpoints, and release them from the judgement of a final authority.”

Indeed, transmutations parallel to the convergence between Kandinsky’s painting and Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music – a turning point sometimes described as a ‘Metaphysik des Schwebens’, i.e. a ‘floating’ condition between the subject and the world – can also be seen in a general shift away from apparently absolute certainties in the direction of relativity: Boasian anthropology, denying the concept of race; Saussurean linguistics, insisting that there are no positive quantities but only differences; Gödel’s incompleteness theorem; the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle and the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’, marking the advent of a “postmodern” science characterized by “paradox, uncertainty, and the limits of precise measurement”; Einstein’s theory of relativity; Nietzsche’s scorn for the unfounded pretences of religion, logic, or history; Freudian “decentring” of homo sapiens, not to mention expressionism, surrealism, absurdism, Cubism (Picasso’s “extravagant deformations”), Dadaism, and atonalism in the arts.  Charles Lemert has pointed out that the rise of the relativistic paradigm – or relativistic deconstructionism – was based on the conviction that reality itself is not self-evident and orderly. Relativism is critical of traditional rationality, uncritical realisms, strict tonalisms, objectivisms, and systematic explanations.

This development set off a chain reaction that paved the way for the critical dismantling of Western tradition and traditional modes of thought, the cultural logic of deconstructionism or The Culture of Critique, according to which “the Western ideal of hierarchic harmony and assimilation” was gradually destabilized and perceived as “an irrational, romantic, and mystical ideal.”  The outcome was a gigantic meltdown of a whole civilization’s “cultural DNA structure,” a transition to “liquid” (post-)modernity through a memetic “epidemiology of ideas,” inventing a kind of “assembly line nihilism.”  The age of the gardeners has been succeeded by the age of the hunters and the order of chaos and wilderness.

Jacques Attali was right: music is prophecy. Music makes mutations audible.

Part I: Viennese Mutations

Part II: The Emancipation of Dissonance

E. R. E. Knutsson (email him) is a freelance write

Gabriel Schoenfeld exists in an alternate universe

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Gabriel Schoenfeld’s The Weekly Standard  article “Back to the Future: British Anti-Semitism Returns with a Vengeance” is the sort of thing that makes you want to bang your head against a wall. The idea is that those virulent anti-Semites John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt managed to “peddle” their vicious article on the Israel lobby to the London Review of Books when it was sensibly rejected by American publishers. It then metastasized into a book that was much admired in the US by the likes of David Duke and pretty much no one else. The “respectable middle” were on page with Leslie Gelb’s authoritative review in the august New York Times which accused them of “shoddy scholarship” that promoted anti-Semitism. As I noted in an earlier blog, “Some of Gelb’s charges might even seem reasonable—if you haven’t read the book.”

The fact that Mearsheimer and Walt managed to first publish their monstrosity in England is no accident. After all, the Brits are a bad lot and always have been. “Anti-Semitism has deep roots in England. In the 12th century, many of the country’s Jews were put to the sword in a wave of massacres. The 13th century began with the introduction of the yellow badge, the mandatory marking that Jews were compelled to wear, and ended with the mass expulsion of the Jews.”

There you have it. Nothing much has changed in England since the 12th century when it comes to the Jews. Anti-Semitism remained rampant in England throughout the 20thcentury, going underground when the Brits were fighting the Nazis (who were even more anti-Jewish), but re-emerging now into the open. In its latest incarnation, it manifests itself as hatred toward Israel.

According to Schoenfeld, this irrational anti-Jewish hate is more obvious than ever.  You can tell that because Britain is now “a congenial home” where radical Muslims “preach their genocidal doctrines.” (Never mind the role of Jewish organizations in facilitating immigration into England and opposing nationalist parties like the BNP that want to keep England English. See Ch. 7 of Culture of Critique.)

In fact, right now Parliament is considering a law to force Jews to report to concentration camps.

No wait. Actually, it’s an inquest into how Tony Blair made the decision to join in the Iraq invasion. Not only that, but a newspaper columnist had the temerity to complain that two of the panelists were Jews. Another chimed in that this complaint was “helpful” because the war was “initiated .  .  . by a group of influential American neocons .  .  . nearly all of whom were ardent Zionists.” And the London Times didn’t even label all of this “anti-Semitic.”

And then there was Peter Oborne’s program (see Martin Webster’s TOO article) on the influence  of the Israel Lobby: “With shades of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and shades of Mearsheimer-Walt, the program conveyed a picture of a nefarious conspiracy to plunge Britain into war in Iraq.”

The last straw is the court decision that an Orthodox school is guilty of discrimination for insisting on matrilineal descent as a criterion of admission. Schoenfeld puts ‘discrimination’ in quotes because, you see, it’s not discrimination if Jews do it. Surely it’s obvious that Jews (and no one else) ought to be able to discriminate on the basis of biological descent.

Obviously, Jews like Schoenfeld (and they’re the ones we keep hearing from in the media) are out of touch with reality. This is Abe Foxman on steroids. In Scheonfeld’s eyes, the inquest into the Blair government’s actions and the Oborne program are nothing more than updated examples of centuries-old anti-Jewish hatred. No need to look at what actually happened.

Indeed, the very thought that Jews might be biased against finding that Jews whose main allegiance is to Israel were the major force behind the decision of the British government to join the Iraq invasion is so obviously wrongheaded that even asking the question betrays vicious hatred of Jews. By their very nature Jews are impartial and completely uninfluenced by their ethnic identification. Schoenfeld doubtless sees himself as an exemplar of evenhandedness — completely above the fray and able to judge Israel’s actions and all things Jewish with brutal, impartial honesty.

Schoenfeld and the rest of these Jewish spokespeople are living in an alternate universe — a universe where mundane things like facts and truth are irrelevant. It’s an absolute article of faith that Jewish behavior is always — always —completely irrelevant to anti-Semitism. No matter how much money Jewish activists and organizations shower on politicians and no matter now much media they own and influence, Jews never actually influence anything. And if they do happen to have a slight influence, they only want the best for everyone. There could not possibly be legitimate conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews.

There is simply no way to communicate with people like Schoenfeld. And that’s a big part of the problem.

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She Died for Palestine

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In memory of Rachel Corrie

Like all things pure and precious

Like holy bread and wine

I love the radiant Rachel

Who died for Palestine.

Beautiful in life … Beautiful in death

… cut down like a flower of the field

Once through a green field drifting

In the doldrums of the day

Watching ravens peck out lambs’ eyes

In their cruel, gloating way:

“You take the gun. You shoot. You do what you want.”— Israeli soldier

“The Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs.” —  Menahim Begin

I remembered, I remembered,

How those raptors vulturine

Seized the land and plagued the people

Of historic Palestine.

 

Deir Yassin, April, 1948

… and elsewhere

The Massacre of the Innocents.

“We shall have no pity on them until we shall have destroyed their so-called Arab culture, on the ruins of which we shall build our own civilization.” — Menachem Begin

How the snipers on the rooftops,

Armed with Uzis, standing tall,

Splash the blood of little children

On the weeping classroom walls.

 

How the settlers spit on Christians

In the land where Jesus died—

And how those who do the spitting

Have the world upon their side.

“I know Christians who lock themselves indoors during the entire Purim holiday,” —  Daniel Rossing.

How they bulldoze people’s houses

Till the roofs crash on their heads

And the women lie all broken

With their babies in their beds.

How the wolfish killers wander

Through a vale of endless tears

Shooting children in their faces

While the world stands by and cheers.

 

How the bright-eyed Rachel Corries

Lie in cemeteries dead

While the birds of prey grow fatter—

And the world just turns its head.

Christ, come back and save these children—

Put an end to all their pain!

Put an end to evil Zion!

Palestine, come back again!

 

“The difference between a Jewish soul and the soul of non-Jews

is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul

and the soul of cattle.”

— Rabbi Kook

Dr. Lasha Darkmoon (email her) is an academic, age 31, with higher degrees in classics.  A published poet and translator, she is also a political  activist with a special interest in Middle Eastern affairs. ‘Lasha Darkmoon’ is a pen name.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Peddler of Hate

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Now that we’ve reached December, it’s the time of year to observe (and suffer from) that familiar Jewish attitude toward Christmas: hate.

VDARE is now running its excellent War Against Christmas exposé of assaults on Christmas by “multicultural” haters of a holiday hundreds of millions of Americans love and cherish. For my money, it’s the best source of information on this particularly hurtful aspect of the war on Western cultures and people.

Tom Piatak leads off this year’s account, giving us a link to an Israeli paper’s description of what some Jews do on Christmas Eve. Reading it, I clearly saw the source for so much of Hollywood’s distaste for what Christmas means and what Christians do to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

Scurry over to this Israeli site for the skinny — For them, it’s wholly unholy:

Christmas Eve is one of the few occasions when Hasidim refrain from Torah study, do not conduct weddings or go to the mikveh. But they do play chess and work on their bills.

On Christmas Eve, known in Jewish circles as Nitel Night, the klipot (shells) are in total control. The klipot are parasitical evil forces that attach themselves to the forces of good. According to kabbala (Jewish mysticism), on the night on which “that man” — a Jewish euphemism for Jesus — was born, not even a trace of holiness is present and the klipot exploit every act of holiness for their own purposes.

For this reason, Nitel Night, from nightfall to midnight, is one of the few occasions when Hasidim refrain from Torah study. On this horrific night, they neither conduct weddings nor do they go to the mikveh (ritual bath). An entire folkloric literature has developed around the unusual recreational activities of Nitel Night.

Oh, there’s the usual disclaimer that not all Jews follow this custom, but in two decades of research on Jews, I’ve found that it’s simply a truism that Jews have an exceedingly negative view of Jesus, Mary, Christians and Christmas. No wonder so many spit when passing a church . . . or even spit on Christians themselves.

But in the Haaretz story, this passage about Kabbalistic toilet paper really stood out:

The Knesset correspondent of the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Hamodia, Zvi Rosen, relates that celebrated Hasidic admorim (sect leaders) would cut a year’s supply of toilet paper for Sabbath use (to avoid tearing toilet paper on Sabbath) on this night. Actually, this disrespectful act has profound kabbalistic significance, because kabbalistic literature extensively discusses Christianity as waste material excreted from the body of the Jewish people.

Honestly, I couldn’t make this stuff up. And get this: One of their commandments recommends that they attempt procreation on Friday night, which is a holy time. “Yet on Nitel Night, which has no holiness, it is customary to refrain from observing the commandment, because of the fear that a Jewish child conceived on Jesus’ birthday could become an apostate.”

Now how might this anti-Christian sentiment play out in, say, The Big Apple, home to so many hip and chic magazines? According to one account, “it is tough to beat an illustration by the prominent comic-book creator Art Spiegelman. This was intended to go on the cover of the New Yorker magazine in December, 1994, and it revealed Santa urinating in public. Even Tina Brown, the publicity-loving editor of the New Yorker at the time, thought Spiegelman had gone too far, and the piece was never used. In the long history of fallen Santas, that was a rare moment of restraint.” (But Brown did run Spiegelman’s Easter cover picture of the Easter Bunny being crucified.)

As we’ll see below in another case, here Jews spin their own hatred of others as a response to — drum roll — “anti-Semitism.” As one rabbi explained about Nitel Night, “Anti-Semites would ambush Jews and savagely beat them, sometimes even killing them, in the streets on Christmas Eve. Thus, the rabbis decreed that Jews should remain at home that night and not wander in the streets.”

Now go back and read my two-part series last year about Hollywood movies that kill the spirit of Christmas, and sometimes kill Santa, too. (See Merry Christmas . . . NOT! and Merry Christmas NOT! Part 2. We now have a better idea of the font for such a spirit of hatred.

Our editor Kevin MacDonald recently captured this spirit in his post on TOO’s new blog. When talking about a trio of rich Jews, he notes a passage from one of their books:

The Wikipedia entry includes a comment on [John Sperling’s] book The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America: “One America, to judge from the book’s illustrations, … lives in ‘vibrant’ cities with ballet troupes, super-creative Frank Gehry buildings and quiet, tasteful religious ritual; the other relies on contemptible extraction industries (oil, gas and coal) and inhabits a world of white supremacy and monster truck shows and religious ceremonies in which beefy men in cheap clothes scream incomprehensibly at one another.”

Now that I’ve got you in a spirit of, well, hate, let me introduce today’s subject: Professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.

Younger readers may not remember the name Daniel Jonah Goldhagen because he first came to our attention back in 1996 when his blistering first book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, appeared. That heavily hyped book wanted to take the blame for the Holocaust off Hitler and his lieutenants and put it where Goldhagen felt it belonged: on ALL Germans. They loved killing Jews in the Holocaust, Goldhagen argued. Being Christian and all, they had internalized  virulent “eliminationist anti-Semitism.”

Naturally, the New York Times adored the book (it spent twenty-five weeks on their Best Seller list), and it was translated into at least fifteen languages.

Across the Big Pond, it sparked the “Goldhagen Debate” in Germany. Defeated in war in 1945, and more thoroughly defeated in spirit ever since, the German nation lauded Goldhagen’s assault on them. A prestigious prize was given: “Because of the penetrating quality and the moral power of his presentation, Daniel Goldhagen has greatly stirred the consciousness of the German public.”

Not all informed readers were as thrilled. Professor Albert Lindemann, for one, wrote in Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge U. Press 1997) that treatments of the Holocaust by those such as Goldhagen “lack penetration in striking ways. A large number might best be described as cries of pain or expressions of indignation rather than efforts to understand.” Further, he called the book “questionable and simplistic; [Goldhagen] typically ignores, or is ignorant of, evidence that contradicts his by no means original reading of German history.” In sum, Goldhagen’s thesis about pan-German responsibility for the Holocaust “might be termed a twentieth-century psogos, a tirade that is motivated by goals other than the impartial search for truth.”

Well, that’s putting it more nicely than I would, but then Lindemann was writing a year after Goldhagen’s first book, while I have the advantage of a dozen more years to draw on. By 2002, Goldhagen had cast his net more widely in his next work, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. One reviewer for National Review, called A Moral Reckoning “a 352-page exercise in intellectual bad manners” and “a spree of intellectual wilding.” This was part of the genre of anti-Catholic books that were all the rage during that period, prompting Philip Jenkins to pen The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice.

Now comes Professor Goldhagen’s latest book, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity. And what a doozy it is. I read the review of it in The New York Times Book Review. Reviewer James Traub thought it was swell.

To my surprise, another review of it turned up in The National Interest. The title of the review, “The Willing Misinterpreter,” captures the tone of the review. Though reviewer David Rieff is a fellow Jew (his mother was Susan Sontag, of blessed memory), he tears apart Goldhagen’s heated prose, beginning by labeling him an “amateur historian.”

As I noted, Goldhagen has widened his net in hunting bad guys, as Rieff picks up on: “Worse Than War is, depending on your point of view, either the logical conclusion of the path Goldhagen has been taking for the past fifteen years or its reductio ad absurdum.” Acknowledging Goldhagen’s families’ history, Rieff still states that Goldhagen’s views “are either willfully naïve or idiotic.” Tracing the bombastic style Goldhagen employs to Goldhagen’s high regard for . . . Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Rieff concludes that “The man really does give self-love a bad name.”

In addition to the differences in assessments of the worth of Worse Than War, I noticed one other important difference between The Times piece and that in The National Interest: The former ignores Jewish identity and Israel, while Rieff twice notes Goldhagen’s powerful pro-Israel orientation. This prompts me to unpack the review in The Times.

To do this, however, allow me a short digression. Earlier this year, I was musing over the question of whether Jews ever feel guilt or remorse when they blatantly insult, injure or kill goyim. I had to conclude, based on my research and observations, that the answer was no. Invariably, they possess mental traits that allow them to project their guilty behavior onto the actual victim, and in turn conceive of themselves as the victims. (Have a look at Chapter 8 of Kevin MacDonald’s Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, which deals with the phenomenon of Jewish self-deception.)

No sooner had I reached this conclusion than E. Michael Jones in his magazine Culture Wars called my views into question. In the April issue, he published his essay “Jewish Monsters from the Jewish Id.” The essay was partially based on his 2000 book Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film. The book discussed how the sexual liberation crowd “tried to drive religious and moral nature out with a pitchfork, but found that nature only returned through the back door, in the form of a monster.” In other words, as one review summarized with respect to sexual license and its attendant abortion problem, “Horror, says Jones, comes from a guilty conscience that won’t admit that it’s done anything wrong — and horror stories reveal the true nature of that guilt again and again.”

Jones combined this with his remarkable 2008 book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History to argue that the 2009 film The Unborn “is about Jewish guilt over abortion manifesting itself as fetal monsters.”

Jones’ review is too long to describe here, but let me say I found his argument compelling. Let me just offer this one passage because it informs what follows on Goldhagen. The crucial Jewish role in getting abortion legalized in America, Jones argues, plus the high rates at which Jews abort their own children,

explains the need to bring up Auschwitz, because the function of the holocaust is to absolve all Jews from any guilt they may have incurred by violating the moral law. Auschwitz is the totem which calms the troubled Jewish conscience by assuring the Jew that he is the eternal victim, and, as such, incapable of incurring guilt as the perpetrator of some immoral act like, say, killing a fellow Jew in the womb of his mother.

More pertinently yet, Jones sees that last December’s Israeli massacre of innocent Palestinian women and children also inevitably creates subconscious Jewish guilt. Which brings me back to Goldhagen and the review of his book in The New York Times.

The Times review never mentions Israel or its behavior. Goldhagen is writing about all manner of genocides and man’s inhumanity to man, but the review is silent on one of the most prominent ongoing examples in the world: that of the Israelis against the Palestinians (see “For Whom the Gaza Bell Tolls,” Part 1 and Part 2.) Early chapters in Worse Than War have titles such as “Our Age’s Slaughters” and “Varieties of Eliminationist  Assault,” so I have to wonder if he admits to what Israel is doing and has done.

More broadly, I find it highly unlikely that Goldhagen will highlight the prominent Jewish role in the Communist takeover of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, resulting in tens of millions of deaths of non-Jews. Perhaps readers familiar with this new book can help me.

Based on the two reviews I’ve discussed, however, as well as Goldhagen’s past works, I’d wager that he ignores, downplays, or denies Jewish guilt in any number of mass slaughters over the ages. If so, I can proffer this hypothesis: A Jewish writer like Goldhagen is projecting Jewish guilt for Jewish behavior onto the groups he writes about. More to the point, Goldhagen himself is dealing with the guilt engendered by concrete Jewish behavior, but is repressing it. As we all know, what is repressed must come out somewhere.

The result in Goldhagen’s case is a series of increasingly obsessive books, where the target group grows larger and larger. Meanwhile, because Goldhagen has mis-identified the source of his rage, his rage only grows.

Daniel Goldhagen

So what else might be going on in the mind of Goldhagen, one of the most privileged Americans of his generation? As far as I can tell, no one has ever touched or threatened a hair on his head. He was born in Massachusetts and raised as the son of a Harvard professor (who survived the Holocaust). In turn, Daniel attended Harvard from B.A. through Ph.D. and then taught there for some years. What might account for his elevated level of what can only be termed hate?

Getting back to my introductory discussion on this “Jewish virtue” of hate — yes, it was so identified in an infamous essay in First Things, “The virtue of hate” where the Jewish rabbi and then Yale Divinity School student admitted that a nun who realized that “hatred is in the Jewish religion” was right. As most of us already know, “Hebrew prophets and judges believed ardently in the ‘virtue of hate.’” With a passion. I like that. And the rabbi has no problem acknowledging that “many Jews, in my own experience, have continued to despise religions Christians.” Bottom line: “When hate is appropriate, then it is not only virtuous, but essential for Jewish well-being.”

It is a common Jewish personality trait that we cannot ignore because so many Jews direct so much hatred toward so many of us non-Jews. Worse, they have the power to turn that hatred into real harm (and to subsequently protect themselves from their actions).

As just another taste of this process, peruse Hervé Ryssen’s characterization of Jewish intellectuals’ contempt for non-Jews in this piece:

It is not enough for these intellectuals to talk nonsense, to lull us with “human rights,” to bind us with repressive laws, and to inject us with alien cultural poisons. They also have to pour into our ears their contempt for our old cultures. But this contempt does not seem to fully satisfy their thirst for revenge. They must also insult us and spit in our faces: “ignoramuses, xenophobes, paranoiacs, morons, lunatics, etc.” . . .

And I will not recount the innumerable films in which the cosmopolitan scriptwriters take their revenge against Christian civilization and the white man in general. It seems obvious to me, regarding all this logorrhea, that these people hate us. It could not be any more obvious if they wore flashing neon signs on their heads.

Let me close with this point: Goldhagen writes that “hundreds of millions of people are at risk of becoming the victims of genocide and related violence.” God help us if Goldhagen is projecting repressed Jewish desires and intentions, for given the current Jewish stranglehold over America, they could indeed induce mass slaughter. We have seen the process at work in Russia, so we know many of the details, accentuated by the tremendous death toll of non-Jews. Recall that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.”

Tomislav Sunic expounded on this parallel between Soviet Russia and today’s America in Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age. In that book, he saw dark clouds on the horizon for any group in America that might be targeted: “Thus, in order for the proper functioning of future Americanized society, the removal of millions of surplus citizens must become a social and possibly also an ecological necessity.” Kevin MacDonald, in the book’s Foreword, identified what sectors might be targeted “and therefore worthy of mass murder by the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union—the ones who journeyed to Ellis Island instead of Moscow.” They are the European-derived Whites populating vast areas of the American nation, particularly in the so-called “red states.”

Remember, ideas have consequences. And the good Professor Goldhagen seems to have a fixation on genocide. That worries me, given that he is plugged into the ruling circles of the United States.

But in some distant future, there might be hope. As evidenced by his own books, Goldhagen opts to collectively blame Germans, to collectively blame Catholics, to collectively blame many other groups for their trespasses. What if Jews were ever to collectively repent for their considerable trespasses against others these last three-four millennia? To repent for their financial, political, and most of all lethal crimes against humanity? Maybe then the projection and repression might stop and the world would become a far better place.

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.

The Archaeology of Postmodernity, Part II: The Emancipation of Dissonance

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From an “archaeological” point of view, there are several striking parallels between early 20th-century Austria (as exemplified by the case of Vienna) and early 21st-century America. The easiest ones to unearth are these: increasingly intense minority activism (encouraged by laissez faire policies), a gradual breakdown of the hegemony of the national language and traditional culture, accompanied by a demographic shift away from the country’s Traditionskern — its Germanic ethno-cultural core.

At the turn of the 20th century, Vienna — as the center of the multi-ethnic state of the Habsburg Empire — sheltered a hodgepodge of nationalities, language groups, religious confessions, avant-garde artists, renowned scientists, and rebellious intellectuals who “comingled to give rise to a unique cultural ambiance.”

The ethnic minorities most abundantly represented were the Czechs and the Jews, followed by the Poles and Hungarians. Jacques Le Rider points out that “the xenophobia aroused by the growth of the Czech colony, and the spread of anti-Semitism made Vienna an ethnic battlefield rather than a melting pot.”  The unresolved nationality conflicts “were sapping the foundations of the Monarchy”, according to Robert S. Wistrich.

Kaiser Franz Joseph of Austria

As Stefan Newerkla points out, the basically tolerant laws “provided for the right to have education in one’s native language and stated that no citizen should be forced to learn the language of any other ethnic group.”  Language became a prominent site for inter-ethnic conflicts.  Thomas Wallnig emphasizes the fatal consequences of “the massive struggle between the nationalities that marked the final decades of the Habsburg monarchy”; the state was “unable to establish ‘equal rights of all branches of the people’, since every change to the status quo was interpreted as a political advance by one group at the expense of another with state support.”

These tensions were also felt in the world of music – an art form that occupied a special place in the history and cultural identity of Vienna, as a major repository for some of the greatest composers in the history of Western music (Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, among others).

By the early 20th century, the Jewish impact on music and modernity had become so obvious that critics demanded to “stem Jewish music and Jewishness in music before they spread too far,” as Philip Bohlman points out.

Richard Wagner’s polemical writings — tracing Jewishness in melody and speech, body and race (“inner spaces”) — “unleashed a flood of responses to the presence of Jewishness in music, pro and contra.” The rhetoric shared by Wagner and his detractors stressed the ontological interority of music: das Judentum in der Musik (Judaism or Jewishness in music). As Philip Bohlman notes,

Rather than rejecting Wagner’s anti-Semitism as baseless prejudice, most Jewish responses mounted counterarguments affirming the possibility of Jewishness in music, using the same terms, if not case studies, as Wagner and often embracing the racialization of music.

Thus, Heinrich Berl in his essay Das Judentum in der abendländischen Musik (“Jewishness in Western Music,” later published as a monograph with Wagner’s exact title, Das Judentum in der Musik) not only accepted the charge that Jewishness in music inevitably embodied oriental traditions, but even rejoiced in “the richness of Eastern influences.”

Richard Wagner held that the capacity of Jewish composers only to reproduce enabled them to enter European music history at a moment of historical collapse, in the aftermath of Beethoven’s death in 1827. Bohlman points out that “Wagner’s claim that Jewishness allowed only for the reproduction of music [indirectly] opened the historical door, emancipating Jewish music from ritual and recalibrating it as Western.”  Since Wagner held that Jewish musicians were essentially bricoleurs –  i.e. ‘handy-men’ adopting relational rather than rational approaches to assemble and enchain their performances from bits and pieces – no Jewish innovations were to be expected.

On the other hand, as Thomas S. Grey points out, the Central European lingua franca of Yiddish was seen as “emblematic of a tendency to appropriate and distort all genuine cultural forms, from speech to writing to philosophical or political thought to singing, acting, and musical composition.”

The movement away from classical tonality was thus radicalized with Gustav Mahler’s “tonal irony”, and culminated with Schoenberg’s atonal revolution — the dissolution and abandonment of tonal structures as an organizing system in favor of the radical constructivism that emerged with twelve-tone serial music: “With the progressive fragmentation of musical material — its decomposition into its smallest elements — the hierarchically ordered tonal structures, together with the restrictions they placed upon possible relations and combinations among tones, were dissolved.”

The ‘emancipation of dissonance’, according to Carl Schorske, not only destroyed harmonic order and cadential certainty: “By establishing a democracy of tones … [the] tonal relations, clusters, and rhythms expand and contract ‘like a gas’, as Schoenberg said.”  Schoenberg, as Leon Botstein points out, “sought to transmute a German national heritage — the pre-Wagnerian German tradition, seen as the universal in music — adequately into the twentieth century. In this way Schoenberg sought to dominate the musical world the way Wagner had, but in a manner in which all Jews … could partake as equals. … Like the inter-war protagonists of Esperanto, Schoenberg sought to fashion a new, valid universal modernist art in which both reason and emotion could be communicated and to which no social class, religion or ethnic group had claims of priority or higher status.”

Arnold Schoenberg

Since the Renaissance, Western music  has been conceived on the basis of a hierarchical tonal order, the diatonic scale, whose central element was the tonic triad, the defined key. Musical events, thus, are not of equal importance: Some are structurally important, while others are primarily ornamental.  Music, like linguistic discourse,  has traditionally been a time-oriented structure that progresses from a beginning to an end.  As Carl Schorske emphasizes,

The task of the composer was to manipulate dissonance in the interests of consonance, just as a political leader in an institutional system manipulates movement, canalizing it to serve the purposes of established authority.  In fact, tonality in music belonged to the same socio-cultural system as the science of perspective in art, with its centralized focus; the Baroque status system in society, and legal absolutism in politics. It was part of the same culture that favored the geometric garden — the garden as the extension of rational architecture over nature. … The tonal system was a musical frame in which tones had unequal power to express, to validate, and to make bearable the life of man under a rationally organized, hierarchical culture. To make all movement fall in the end into order (the musical term is ‘cadence’) was, appropriately, the aim of classical harmony in theory and in practice.

Ethan Haimo points out that with Schoenberg’s atonal revolution, it simply becomes difficult or impossible to determine which of the tones in the chord is the unstable tone, and which are the stable ones:

When the dissonance cannot be identified, its resolution cannot be directed. And when that happens, the emancipation of the dissonance is at hand — not as the result of theoretical speculation about the more remote overtones of the harmonic series but as a consequence of the extension of the methods of chordal formation to include multiple altered and elaborative tones. … Schoenberg was not searching for stable intervals when he reached toward the more remote overtones of the harmonic system; instead, his principles of chord formation made it impossible to identify which tones needed resolution. The consequences of this are profound. If dissonance cannot be identified, it cannot be resolved. And if it cannot be resolved, then the very notion of consonance and dissonance becomes moot.

Consequently, some of the essential pillars of tonality were pulled down by Schoenberg: “The lack of directed harmonic progressions throws the existence of a tonic into doubt; the lack of hierarchy abolishes the diatonic scale as a referential collection; the inability to identify the dissonance erases the distinction between consonance and dissonance.”

Nicholas Cook points out the “thread of violent political imagery [that] runs through Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre,” as when he (Schoenberg) writes:

The tonality must be placed in danger of losing its sovereignty; the appetites for independence and the tendencies towards mutiny must be given opportunity to activate themselves; one must grant them their victories, not begrudging an occasional expansion of territory. For a ruler can only take pleasure in ruling live subjects; and live subjects will attack and plunder.

Schoenberg talks of vagrant chords bringing about the destruction of the tonal system.

Cook also points out that ”the overlapping of insider and outsider identities that coloured Viennese modernism is often seen as a specifically Jewish phenomenon,” and that there was “a longstanding Viennese, or Habsburg, tradition … of associating music and social structure.”  He draws attention to “the network of terms connected with harmonic rootedness, terms which have a technical musical meaning yet at the same time carry the imprint of the political and racial discourses of fin-de-siècle Vienna”:

These political and racial connotations tend to be spelt out more explicitly in Schoenberg’s theoretical writings than Schenker’s, and the term Schoenberg uses in his Harmonielehre to describe chords that lack rootedness immediately reveals what is at issue: they are ‘vagrant’ chords. … Circumstances can turn any chord into a vagrant, he says … perhaps he was thinking of the displaced Ostjuden (later he might have thought of himself). … [A]t all events he [Schoenberg] assigns a range of equally dubious attributes to his vagrants: they are ‘the issue of inbreeding’, their character ‘indefinite, hermaphroditic, immature’. It is possible for them to be assimilated (Schoenberg’s phrase is ‘fit into the environment’), but when they appear in large numbers they will ‘join forces’, and ‘through accumulation of such phenomena the solid structure of tonality could be demolished’; elsewhere Schoenberg says that vagrant chords have ‘led inexorably to the dissolution of tonality’.

In the 1920s, the conservative musicologist and critic Alfred Heuss attacked the “specifically Jewish spirit” of Schoenberg’s music, which he saw as resulting from a “ruthless tendency to draw the very last consequences from a narrow premise.” Annegret Fauser points out that Schoenberg’s expansion of Wagnerian chromaticism pushed “quasi-polyphonic voice-leading to extremes.”

According to Arnold Whittall, Wagner’s use of “half-diminished” seventh chords to promote tonal ambiguity at moments of great dramatic tension and instability remained of absorbing interest in the writings of Arnold Schoenberg:

[T]he very “indefiniteness” of the Tristan chord has made it possible for theorists to regard it as a post-tonal or even atonal entity, thereby promoting that very breakdown of tonality of which Wagner’s own practice stopped short. … [T]he tonally disruptive potential of the chord, and of Wagner’s use of it, was well understood by those early twentieth-century theorists who were experiencing the consequences for composition of the breakdown of tonal order and, as they saw it, of the formal coherence that went with that order.

As Cook observes, Schoenberg ends up undermining the conservative discourses from which he borrows: The way Schoenberg turns a conservative argument against the archetypal ‘Other’ into an affirmation of the role of the ‘Other’ in the future of German culture, might be seen as “a deconstruction of the conservative discourse of hybridity”:

It works by taking a political stance, translating that into musical terms, developing the musical argument, and then translating (or leaving the reader to translate) the conclusion back into political terms.  In other words, it uses music to create an assertion about something other than music — in rather the same way … that television commercials use musical logic to make a point about hair dye or financial products (Cook, p. 310).

The birth of atonality was, according to Ethan Haimo, “the result of a single composer’s intellectual and artistic makeup.” Bryan Simms points out that Schoenberg “jealously defended his historical role as the first to break with tonality and as the discoverer of the twelve-tone system.”

Arnold Schoenberg’s abandonment of tonality in 1908 and the development of the Second Viennese School were both symptom and cause of an ever-widening gulf between composers using music to make discursive political and aesthetic statements (a product of analytical reason) and a public that still yearned for the psychological satisfaction that comes from formal coherence.

From this perspective, Schoenberg — at least in effect — can be regarded as Wagner’s opposite, as a Jewish “Anti-Wagner”. Wagner successfully claimed for art, according to Tim Blanning, “the function previously exercised by religion and arrogated in modern times by politics or economics.” Schoenberg dethroned that position, by composing “irrational”, atonalistic, “liquid,” “decentered” music, twelve tones “in free circulation, without any firm hierarchy or even distinction between the seven diatonic tones and the remaining chromatic tones.”

As he declared in a letter (1909) to his colleague Ferruccio Busoni: “I strive for complete liberation from all forms … from all symbols of cohesion and of logic.”

Part III: Transvestism in Music

Part I: Viennese Mutations

E. R. E. Knutsson (email him) is a freelance writer.



Jewish Intermarriage

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There has been a lot of talk about the “high” intermarriage rate (~ 50%) of American Jews and how this “proves” a willingness to assimilate.  However, in Separation and Its Discontents, Dr. Kevin MacDonald analyzed the data and concluded that the 50% rate was likely an over-estimate, at least for first marriages (i.e.,  those most likely to lead to family formation), and because of undercounting conservative and orthodox Jews.  In addition, even if we accept a 50% rate, I previously commented on other forums that such a rate is actually indicative of a resistance to assimilation, not a tendency toward it.  That is because not only do virtually all white gentile ethnic groups have an intermarriage rate greater than 50% (as the work of Alba has shown), but proportion of the population needs to be figured in.  The larger a group, the greater the probability, and possibility, of finding a mate of the same ethnic (or religious) background; the smaller the group, the greater the chance of mating with someone different – that is, if the people in question have no innate resistance to assimilatory intermarriage.  Given that Jews make up a very small percent of the American population, the Jewish intermarriage rate in the absence of anti-assimilation pressures should be much higher than 50%, in fact at least 80%.

An excerpt from a relevant article, emphasis added:

Individuals that make up ethnic groups may influence the group’s rate of assimilation. While not necessarily providing the ultimate explanation for variations in assimilation between ancestry groups, ethnic capital plays a vital mediating role in the transmission of ethnicity. Not only is ethnic capital an outcome, as is implicit in the assimilation literature, but it plays a role in ethnic choice, as individuals with greater ethnic capital will be more likely to retain ethnic identification and invest in their children’s ethnic capital, a subject that has received little attention in the literature. The lack of an explicit concept of ethnic capital has contributed to the focus on group-level, structural analyses of assimilation rather than at the level of the individual….

While the concept of ethnic capital has been shown to incorporate existing theories, its utility depends on its ability to expand theoretical and empirical knowledge about ethnicity. To demonstrate the usefulness of an ethnic capital approach to assimilation, we examine the causes of intermarriage, a key product of and contributor to assimilation among American Jews. The Jewish intermarriage rate of about 50 percent is extremely low, given environmental odds of intermarriage of 98 percent. This compares with ethnic intermarriage rates of 80 percent for U.S.-born whites (Alba 2000:218-220) and religious intermarriage rates of 38 percent for Catholics and 65 percent for moderate Protestants (Sherkat 2004), each of which would be expected to have far lower intermarriage rates than Jews given the greater size of the groups. American Jewry may represent the outer limits of resisting assimilation for white ethnic groups in the United States.

Even though the intermarriage rates for Catholics and Protestants, when adjusted for population, demonstrate a far greater willingness to “mate with the other” than the Jewish rate, those religious comparisons are not reasonable; the correct comparison should be to the ethnic intermarriage rates.  After all, what does Catholic or Protestant intra-religious marriage really mean?  A Catholic marrying a Catholic could be an Irish ancestry person marrying another Irish, or an Italian or a Pole.  Or, it could very well mean the Irish person marrying a mestizo Mexican, mulatto Puerto Rican/Dominican or an Asiatic Filipino.  Likewise, a Swedish ancestry Protestant can “marry within the faith” with a Korean or a Negro.  On the other hand, the vast majority of American Jews are Ashkenazi and a sizable fraction of the small non-Ashkenazi minority is still Caucasian Sephardic or “Oriental” (e.g., Iraqi, Iranian, etc.) Jews.

Therefore, comparing Christian vs. Jewish intermarriage is like comparing apples and oranges, and makes the Jewish resistance to intermarriage less extreme than it really is.  Given the strong ethnic/racial component to Jewish identity, the real comparison is the white gentile intermarriage rate of 80 percent.  Even with a Jewish rate of 50% — likely an overestimation — that’s almost two-fold lower than what is should be.

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Is there a revolt against the Israel Lobby brewing in Britain? A review of Peter Oborne’s TV report “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby”

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It is not often that one can, with pleasure, place on record that one was wrong in expressing a particular opinion. But I can do this in the case of a TV documentary film, Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby, by the journalist and political commentator Peter Oborne, broadcast on Monday 16th November by Britain’s Channel 4, an independent network, as part of its Dispatches series.

On the basis of the pro-Zionism of his regular employers The Spectator and the Daily Mail (extreme in the case of the former, moderate in the case of the latter), and what I perceived to be his involvement with the Zionist-inspired media puffing the British National Party (BNP) towards its present situation — a pro-Israel populist party whose opposition to multi-racialism has been replaced by an anti-Islam placebo — I had predicted that Oborne’s investigation of the Israel lobby would be a damp squib at best, or disinformation at worst.

But I was wrong about his film. It went to the heart of the exercise of Jewish power in Britain. It established that this power is now so substantial and pervasive that Jewry is able to manipulate key institutions of our nation, in particular the governing Labour Party, the official opposition Conservative Party, and the supposedly “independent and impartial by law” BBC for the benefit of a foreign power: Israel.

Nobody who saw the film could doubt that Zionist Jewry has been able to suborn many people holding key positions with sundry organs of the British nation who have a duty imposed by patriotism, honor and, in some cases, by law to uphold British national sovereignty, political independence and democratic freedoms.

In my view these creatures have become ‘Shabbas Goyim’ who, in return for career enhancement and/or cash, serve the interests of World Jewry in all its locations and apparitions and not just, as Oborne shows, the state of Israel.

I will leave to another article the information I have about a cohort of non-Jewish pro-Zionist journalists, mainly employed by Tory-supporting papers, which made me expect the worst from Dispatches film before I saw it. This information, considered in tandem with the film, provides us with a glimmer of hope that Oborne’s desertion from the cohort and his exposure of the Israel Lobby may be part of a wider revolt by journalists against the relentless effort by Zionist Jews to control their output in a way that puts Jewry and Israel above criticism.

The purpose of this article is to provide a taste of Oborne’s research and to comment on it. My review is based on seeing his film when broadcast, supported by the full text of Oborne’s Dispatches commentary. This was posted in the“Our Kingdom — power and liberty in Britain” section of the Open Democracy web site, where it appears to be a pamphlet by Oborne and one James Jones. No title, publisher, publication date or ISBN number is given so it may be awaiting publication in hard copy form. With Oborne’s text the site has also posted a Foreword by the Jewish anti-Zionist campaigner Antony Lerman explaining why he assisted Oborne with the Dispatches report. Any ambiguities may be resolved by those who have 50 minutes to spare by resort to the YouTube posting of the film. Unfortunately that posting has an embedded block against downloading.

I will, of course, intrude my own digressions into my review of Oborne’s work, but will take pains to separate my information and opinions from his. I may have knowledge of matters either unknown to him or which, due to constraints of time or a wish to avoid accusations “anti-Semitism,” he was unable to mention.

The Lobby and the Conservative Party

Despite two very recent public opinion polls which indicate that that the general election next Spring is likely to produce a “hung parliament”, the psephologicalwisdom prevailing for the past two years has it that the Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, is likely to subject the current Labour Party government, led by Gordon Brown, to a landslide defeat.

It was in this context, coupled with David Cameron’s cringing performance at this year’s annual luncheon staged by the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) —which Oborne believes to be the best-funded lobbying group at Westminster —that his commentary began by dealing with Zionist manipulation of the Tory Party:

Every year, in a central London hotel, a very grand lunch is thrown by the Conservative Friends of Israel. It is often addressed by the Conservative leader of the day. Many members of the shadow cabinet make it their business to be there along with a very large number of Tory peers and prospective candidates, while the Conservative MPs present amount to something close to a majority of the parliamentary party. It is a formidable turnout.

Oborne remarked that the dominant event of the previous twelve months had been the Israeli invasion of Gaza at the start of the year. He examined he text of Cameron’s speech to see how that event was handled.

I was shocked to see that Cameron made no reference at all to the invasion of Gaza, the massive destruction it caused, or the 1,370 deaths that had resulted. Indeed, Cameron went out of his way to praise Israel because it ‘strives to protect innocent life’. I found it impossible to reconcile the remarks made by the young Conservative leader with the numerous reports of human rights abuses in Gaza. Afterwards I said as much to some Tory MPs. They looked at me as if I was distressingly näive, drawing my attention to the very large number of Tory donors in the audience…..

It is impossible to imagine any British political leader showing such equanimity and tolerance if British troops had committed even a fraction of the human rights abuses and war crimes of which Israel has been accused.

The Saturday after that CFI luncheon Oborne criticized Cameron’s speech in hisDaily Mail column, drawing particular attention to his failure to mention Gaza and his speaking of “Israeli respect for the sanctity of human life” and the presence of Jewish big business donors to Conservative funds.

Immediately he received a letter from CFI director Stuart Polak which lamented that his “concentrating on the businessmen and David’s alleged comments was really unhelpful”. Hot on the heels of Polak’s letter was a missive from CFI political director Robert Halfon who described Oborne’s opinions as “astonishing” and berated him for suggesting a “moral equivalence” between Israel and Iran.

Such letters from leading Zionist Lobby heavyweights usually have the effect of causing hacks and their editors to issue profuse apologies and retractions. But something in the deep background which we don’t know about — something more that just Israeli genocide in Gaza (which, disgusting though it was, can hardly be described as unprecedented Israeli behavior) — provided Oborne with additional backbone.

His reaction to Polak’s and Halfon’s attempt to pressure him was this:

I resolved then to ask the question: what led David Cameron to behave in the way he did at the CFI lunch at the Dorchester Hotel last June? What are the rules of British political behaviour which cause the Tory Party leader and his mass of MPs and parliamentary candidates to flock to the Friends of Israel lunch in the year of the Gaza invasion? And what are the rules of media discourse that ensure that such an event passes without notice?…..

Now I want to ask a question that has never been seriously addressed in the mainstream press: is there a Pro-Israel lobby in Britain, what does it do and what influence does it wield? [my emphasis]

That is not the kind of question that the organized Jewish community thought would ever again be posed in the mainstream media (albeit a channel whose mandate is to cater to minority groups) and it is the reason why Oborne’s film was subjected to the Silent Treatment by much of the print and broadcasting media even though Jewish web sites and discussion forums were crackling with traffic— but more of the media reaction anon.

Oborne’s pursuit of answers to his questions inevitably led him to examine not only how the Israel Lobby ensures that the Conservative Party pursues an Israel-friendly line by deployment of financial and media patronage (with the specter of character assassination, career destruction and financial ruin hovering in the background), but also how it secures similar compliance from the Labour Party and from national institutions such as the BBC, by application of precisely the same model of bribery and intimidation.

As to the Lobby’s influence over the Tory Party, Oborne mentions that he consulted the Lexis Nexis site to examine the way in which the CFI’s activities are largely ignored by the British media. His search revealed that since 1985 there have been only 154 mentions of the CFI. In contrast, over the same period, Michael Ashcroft, the (non-Jewish) billionaire donor to Tory Party funds attracted 2,239; the Tobacco Manufacturers Association had 1,083; the Scotch Whisky Association 2,895.

How the Lobby circumvents “transparency” law

Under revisions to the law implemented during the last decade with a view to providing the electorate with “transparency” concerning political parties’ sources of funds, parties are required to “record” in their internal accounts the sources of all donations of more than £200 but less than £5,000 and are required to“report” in their accounts lodged with the Electorate Commission (EC) the sources of all donations of £5,000 or more. These annual accounts are posted on the EC’s web site for public examination.

Oborne described how the Conservative Party is “bought-and-paid-for” by the CFI. This bribery is effected not just by big cash donations to Tory Central Office and to the party leader’s “private office,” but to the constituency organizations of individual MPs — or prospective parliamentary candidates.

The CFI — and also the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) — gets around these EC regulations by making in its own name comparatively puny donations. It then tips off its corporate and wealthy individual members to make donations either to Conservative Central Office and/or to the constituency organizations of favored MPs or candidates — without any on-the-record mention of the CFI, Israel, Jewry or whatever.

Oborne gave two anecdotes of the way the system works, provided by informants who were too afraid to go on record.

In one case a man who is now a Tory MP described how before the 2005 election he was lobbied by the CFI’s Stuart Polak at a social occasion. At the end of the meal, Polak asked the candidate if his campaign needed any money. A couple of weeks later two checks arrived at the constituency office. Both came from businessmen closely connected to the CFI whom the MP had never met and who had never, so far as he knew, ever stepped inside his constituency.

In the other case, a Tory parliamentary candidate contesting a marginal seat  had gone to see Stuart Polak, where he was tested on his views on Israel. Within a fortnight a check from a businessman he had never met arrived in his constituency office.

Study of donations to Conservative constituency offices before the 2005 election reveals a clear pattern according to Oborne. A group of donors linked to the Zionist cause, almost all of whom are on the board of the CFI and/or are prominently associated with the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) made donations of between £2,000 and £5,000 either personally or through their companies to the constituency offices of certain Conservative candidates.

Despite CFI and BICOM not formally merging, the two groups are closely coordinated. Many of BICOM’s key figures also play roles in the CFI: Trevor Pears, Michael Lewis and Poju Zabludowicz — all hugely wealthy — are driving forces behind both lobbies.

Oborne devoted special attention to Zabludowicz, a Finnish Jew whose father made multi-millions as an international arms dealer. That fortune has now been transferred to real estate investments, a portfolio that encompasses 40 per cent of downtown Las Vegas and a shopping mall built in an illegal settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of Palestine.

Tory leader David Cameron owes Trevor Pears and Poju Zabludowicz a special debt of gratitude. When Cameron was campaigning to secure the party leadership he received a £20,000 donation from Pears and donations amounting to £15,000 from Tamares Real Estate Investments, a Zabludowicz subsidiary based in Britain.

According to Oborne, since 2005 (the year of the last Parliamentary general election) the total of the CFI’s donations to the Tory Party made in its own name, added to those made by CFI members, personal and corporate, in their own names but at the CFI’s recommendation, has been in excess of £10 million.

On 17th November, the day after Dispatches was broadcast, the Jewish Chronicle web site carried a  report entitled “Dispatches criticised by leading Jews” which included an interview with CFI director Stuart Polack. His remarks were coy, to say the least:

The programme’s claim that CFI donated £10m to the Conservatives over the last eight years was “deeply flawed.“

“Deeply flawed”?

Why not “untrue” or “wrong” or “a lie”? “Deeply flawed” is clearly one of those “non-denial denials” beloved by spin doctors who can also devise “non-apology apologies”. Do these flim-flam artists believe that all the goyim are completely brain-dead?

Polak then went on to say:

CFI as an organisation has donated only £30,000 since 2005. Each of these donations has been made transparently and publicly registered. In addition to this £30,000, it is undoubtedly the case that some of our supporters have also chosen, separately, to donate to the party as individuals.

Note the “as an organisation.” He ducks the crucial issue of donations made by individuals and companies at the CFI’s and BICOM’s instigation.

In order to yet further obscure the Zionist purchase of the Conservative and Labour parties, the CFI, the LFI and BICOM are constituted as “unincorporated associations” — not companies, registered charities, political parties or other formal entities which the law requires to maintain accounts for annual submission to the Inland Revenue or other relevant statutory authorities.

These are not the kind of arrangements we would expect from public spirited citizens willing to expend their largesse in an open and above-board way to promote what they see as good causes through political action.

These are arrangements employed by conspirators intent on corrupting public servants and anxious to hide the source of the bribes. One is put in mind of the criminal mastermind Meyer Lansky who created the financial structure of America’s modern Cosa Nostra. When faced with prosecution he fled not to Sicily but to Israel where he claimed admission under the “Law of The Return”which grants Israeli citizenship to all “authentic Jews.”

“Lord Cashpoint” and the Jewish Leadership Council

Turning to the Zionist influence over the Labour Party (and hence, the current Labour government), Oborne covered territory which is well known and notorious: the relationship between Tony Blair — Gordon Brown’s predecessor as Prime Minister — and Lord Michael Levy.

Levy was the principal fund-raiser for Blair’s “private office” through a so-called “blind fund.” £2 million was raised. Please note: Though they played tennis together at Levy’s mansion every week for several years, they never ever discussed the names of the contributors or how much they were giving.

Levy was also the principal fund raiser for the Labour Party itself (in excess of £15 million). His success was such that he became known as “Lord Cashpoint.” Blair wanted Levy to replace the trade unions as Labour’s principal source of income, and told Levy as much.

The saga of Levy’s fall from grace as a result of his central involvement in the “Cash for Honours” scandal — for which he was arrested but, after a long wait, not prosecuted — is well known and was concisely summarized by Oborne, so I need not repeat it here. The full story is but a Google search away.

What is not so well known — at least until Oborne’s film — is that Levy was rewarded for his services to the Zionist cause by being co-opted to the premier secular entity of British Jewry: the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC). Who set up this secretive oligarchy, which is never mentioned in the mass media, and how it was vested with supremacy, is not clear. Its existence excites “conspiracy theorists” to make comparisons with the fabulous “Learned Elders of Zion”.

The JLC’s current membership is understood (at least by me) to include: Poju Zabludowicz, Chairman of BICOM; Henry Grunwald, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews (JBD); Gerald Ronson, Chairman of the Community Security Trust (CST); and Lord Greville Janner, President of the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) and of the LFI. All these Great Panjandrums of Jewry are, of course, multi-millionaires or billionaires.

I add to Oborne’s information by mentioning that Levy is not the only member of the JLC who has had his collar felt by the police.

In the late 1980s Gerald Ronson was jailed for his part in a massive Guinness brewery share-trading fraud. On his release he, along with other of his partners in crime, were “guests of honour” [sic] at a Welcome Home banquet presided over by the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Jonathan Sacks, who has since been ennobled and is now Lord Sacks.

Sad to say, because of his criminal record, the Queen is unlikely to raise Ronson to the peerage so that he can sit with Sacks in the House of Lords, but he has been given a consolation prize by the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, who appointed him as a member of the “Order of Civil Merit.” This entitles him to be addressed as: “Illustrísimo Señor Don Gerald Ronson”. (You couldn’t make it up, could you?)

Top cops drawn in to the spider’s web

Ronson’s appointment as Chairman of the CST, Jewry’s private security and “spook” organization, was another Jewish one-finger salute to Britain’s law enforcement authorities. Here’s why:

When the CST was established in 1995/6 the London Metropolitan Police and the Greater Manchester Police were prevailed upon by the then Conservative government to provide the CST’s personnel with training and intelligence sharing. It is likely that the arrangement was devised by Neville Nagler, for years the senior Home Office civil servant in charge of race relations matters who, immediately upon retirement, was appointed Executive Director of the JBD.

This was a quite unprecedented and, I believe, extra-legal arrangement between the British police and a private political security formation with close and admitted connections with a foreign power. The arrangement has continued under a Labour government despite the appointment of Ronson, a convicted criminal, as the CST chairman.

So senior police officers continue to be obliged — some may be more than willing — to attend annual CST banquets at swanky West End hotels presided over by a convicted fraudster and jail-bird, and exchange polite conversation with Zionist fanatics, some of whom are doubtless Mossad Sayanim….. and all “in the interests of good community relations.”

At the last CST dinner held early this year at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Mayfair, Lord Levy made a beeline for Assistant-Commissioner John Yates, deputy head of the Met at Scotland Yard. Yates headed the investigation into the “Cash for Honours” scam and it fell to him to arrest Levy in connection with that matter.

Before the gaze of all present, Levy enjoyed administering ostentatious and patronizing “no hard feelings” back-slaps on the hapless Yates. This officer’s feelings, and the corrosive effect news of it has had on wider police morale, political independence and integrity, may be imagined.

I conclude this digression on a lighter note. The central figure in the Guinness/Distillers shares-fraud was prominent Jewish businessman Ernest Saunders. He had part of his jail term remitted on the grounds that he had Alzheimers disease. This incurable and fatal degenerative brain condition went into an unprecedented remission upon his release. Indeed, he was able to start a new career on the business studies lecture circuit, to the continuing amazement of the medical profession — and the admiration of us all.

“Shabbas goyim” grovel in House of Commons Fiascos

Returning to Oborne’s Dispatches thread: The sickly farce enacted between leading officials of the CFI and the LFI on the floor of the House of Commons (as they engage in what the general public is told is “the Labour v. Conservative ding-dong battle”) was well covered.

He cited a recent Commons question from senior Tory MP David Amess “to enquire what the British government was doing to improve British relations with Israel.”

The government’s answer came from Ivan Lewis MP, the Foreign Office Minister with special responsibility for the Middle East. He replied: “Israel is a close ally of the United Kingdom and we have regular warm and productive exchanges at all levels….. We shall continue to foster a close relationship with Israel.”

Many honorable members on both sides of the House, their constituency bank balances gagging for more Zionist donations, just as were given before the last general election — and the election before that, and before that, ad nauseam — nodded sagely and called “Hear hear!”

The House of Commons order paper, the subsequent report in Hansard and media coverage of these proceedings failed to mentioned that David Amess is the secretary of the CFI while Ivan Lewis is a former vice-chairman of the LFI. So much for “transparency” at Westminster.

The Jewish Lobby is not only able to stage-manage question sessions involving relatively junior members of the government, it is able to set the agenda for the well-known weekly Prime Minister’s Questions.

In these time-limited sessions, it is very hard for ordinary members to “catch the Speaker’s eye” — i.e., be given the opportunity to put a question and thereby gain massive publicity for a topic. (The recently-appointed Speaker is John Bercow, a Jew co-opted to the ancient and prestigious post from the Tory benches. His wife is a non-Jewish Labour Party prospective parliamentary candidate. What’s the betting he’s a member of the CFI and she’s a members of the LFI?)

During Prime Minister’s Questions at the end of November — too late for Oborne to include in his Dispatches report — Tory leader Cameron asked Prime Minister Brown about £130,000 of public funds said to have been made available to two Muslim schools run by the Shakhsiyah Foundation in Slough and Haringey which Cameron alleged had “links” to the “Islamic extremist” group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Brown replied that he would investigate Cameron’s concerns “very, very carefully.”

The obvious purpose of the question was to suggest that the current Labour administration was soft on “Islamic extremists” (sub-text: “terrorists”!). But another unstated item on the  Jewish agenda was at work as well, namely:

Why was the government making grants to militant Islamic schools while the Jewish Free School (JFS) is shortly to appear at the Supreme Court to appeal against a High Court ruling that the school’s admissions policy is “discriminatory on the grounds of race or ethnic origin” and, hence, illegal under the Race Relations Act?

Jewry contests Race Relations Act litigation — The BNP does not

Background: The JFS refused to admit a boy whose father is Jewish according to the Orthodox interpretation of the Halacha, but whose mother was born into a non-Jewish family but converted to Judaism via the Liberal-Reform route. Liberal-Reform conversions are not recognized as valid by the majority United Synagogue congregation, from among whose rabbinate the Chief Rabbi of the UK is always appointed. (Liberal-Reform conversions are likewise not recognised by the Orthodox rabbinical authorities in Israel who adjudicate on claims for citizenship under the Law of The Return).

I understand that the litigation against the JFS, though launched by the boy’s parents is — or eventually became — “legally-aided,” that is, supported by grants of public funds via the Legal Aid Fund.

I surmise that the almost coincidentally similar litigation launched against the BNP by the government’s equality quango, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), to persuade the party to change its constitution so as to open its membership to all applicants regardless of their ethnic origin (a demand that BNP chairman Nick Griffin says he is willing to accept without testing its legality before the courts!) was only instigated to provide “proof” that the government and its agencies are even-handed in the enforcement of anti-discriminatory legislation.

Having explored the background to Cameron’s question to the Prime Minister, we must ask: Who provided the information on which the question was based? Step forward Michael Gove, shadow Conservative education secretary. We know this because it emerged that two weeks before Cameron put his question to Brown in public to a blaze of publicity the same facts were rehearsed by Gove in a private letter he sent to the government’s education secretary Ed Balls.

But we must dig deeper. Who provided Gove with the information about the obscure alleged “links” between Islamic schools’  owners, the Shakhsiyah Foundation, and the alleged “Islamic extremists” of Hizb-ut-Tahrir? We have two good clues.

Firstly, last year Gove was appointed as an honorary patron of the Zionist Federation (ZF). The very discreet announcement in the 28th March 2008 Jewish Chronicle which recorded this appointment also mentioned that the previous month he had been awarded the ZF’s Jerusalem Prize “in honour of his support for Israel’s security and well-being.” (No mention was made of the amount of money which comes with this prize. Perhaps no hard cash as granted by the Nobel Foundation, but the the certainty of a golden career path.)

Michael Gove, Jonathan Turner and the Zionist Federation

Among Gove’s senior associates in the ZF is the lawyer Jonathan Turner. He was the person who fronted the Jewish Lobby’s voluminous complaint against the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, which was part of the Zionist campaign to bring the BBC to heel. Turner’s vendetta against Bowen and the BBC was discussed at some length by Oborne. I cover the topic at a later stage. It is enough to remark here that Turner and his researchers obviously see themselves as avenging career-destroyers in the Zionist war against any critical reporting of Israel.

Secondly, the Daily Telegraph of 3rd July 2007, reporting Gove’s promotion as shadow Education Secretary, ended by recording that Gove’s wife is one Sarah Vine, who I understand is Jewish and who was at the time of the report — and may still be — a leader writer with The Times. Gove was assistant editor and chief leader writer of The Times before his election to the House of Commons in 2005.

In 1998 Gove was the first senior journalist of a prestigious mass-circulation newspaper to give substantial and helpful coverage to Nick Griffin when he was seeking to displace John Tyndall as the leader of the BNP. That article set a trend throughout the British media, but especially among papers who support the Tory party and maintain a pro-Israel line.

(I give more information about The Times and its disproportionate number of Jewish senior staff later in this article.)

Turning from the corruption of Conservative and Labour MPs, and, hence, of successive Labour and Conservative governments, so that the war-mongering and genocidal state of Israel might be protected and assisted, Oborne’s other main theme was the relentless campaign by the Israel Lobby to regulate the output of the British media on the subject of Israel and Zionist influence at home and abroad. Its principal target of this campaign for years has been the BBC.

Here I must again intrude a personal digression which I feel provides essential background:

It is true that “the Beeb” (as the BBC is popularly known) is full of Lefties of various stripes who promote all manner of “politically correct” agendas, including, of course “anti-racism.” While I was prominently associated for more than a decade with the now long-dead National Front, I was continuously a target for their attacks. (NB: the organization currently masquerading under that name is not a continuance of the original party)

So while I have no personal motive for coming to the defense of these people, I have to allow that for some of them their “anti-racist” beliefs are sincere and applied without exception.

It is a pity that this principled approach does not allow them to realize that “racism” and “racialism” are different. The latter does not represent a desire to persecute, let alone exterminate, other races but a wish to protect one’s own folk and ancient culture from the creeping genocide which is the inevitable and intended outcome of enforced race-mixing.

Zionists fret as some leftists wake up

Be all this as it may, some of the principled anti-racist Lefties of the BBC (including a few Jews) hold that Jewish “racism” is just as objectionable as any other kind. They have seen with their own eyes as reporters on the ground that Israel, supported by Zionist-Jewry throughout the Diaspora, is engaged in a genocidal ethnic-cleansing onslaught against the Palestinians perpetrated by application of terrorism, massacres, besiegement, wanton destruction of property, imprisonment, theft, torture and other varieties of wickedness.

Despite the Zionists’ massive exploitation of the “Holocaust” narrative —designed to impair the eyesight  and deaden the consciences of the peoples of “the West” —  an increasing element of the Left, including some of those in the BBC, has been forced to confront the reality of the genocide being perpetrated right now by the Jews against the Palestinians.

The attitude, traditional among Lefties until about 25 years ago, that philo-Semitism (and, hence, pro-Zionism) was part-and-parcel of what it means to be Left Wing and “progressive” has withered in the face of what Israel has been doing.

Principled anti-racist journalists in the BBC (and elsewhere, such as The Guardian and The Independent) have increasingly felt compelled to expose Israel as a “racist'” state pursuing policies closely resembling those of Apartheid South Africa and even —  gasp! —  the German National Socialists.

It is because the Zionists, especially the “far Right” element —  who constitute the political mainstream in Israel and increasingly among Jews elsewhere —  have been waking up to their loss of a growing portion of gentile Left Wing opinion that they have been taking an interest in the emergent “far Right” in Europe, providing it can be induced to abandon its traditional “anti-semitism”, support Israel and campaign against the “Islamification of Europe” rather than against Afro-Asian immigration and multi-racialism per se.

“Opinions are like arse-holes — Everybody’s got one.”

I return now to Oborne’s film and his description of the way in which the Israel Lobby has sought to place a leash on the BBC and The Guardian. (The Independent is obviously considered to be such small fry that it seems to have escaped Zionism’s big guns, despite the wonderfully courageous reports from its Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk.)

Oborne begins by recounting the eruption of Zionist fury when in 2006 Guardianjournalist Chris McGreal produced an article which compared Israel’s policies to South African Apartheid. An emergency meeting was called at the Israeli ambassador’s residence with BICOM chairman Poju Zabludowicz, JBD president Henry Grunwald, CST chairman Gerald Ronson and LFI & HET president ‘Lord’ Janner  — all, so far as I know, members of the JLC.

Ronson and Grunwald were deputed to visit Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger at his office. Without even taking off his coat, Ronson launched into a foul-mouthed attack (“…opinions are like arse holes — everybody’s got one!…”) which concluded with the allegation that McGreal’s article had prompted violent physical assaults on Jews in London.

That is a very serious allegation which, had there been the slightest evidence to support it, could have prompted an “Incitement to Racial Hatred” prosecution which, if successful, might have landed Rusbridger in jail. Even without a prosecution such an allegation constitutes a potentially damaging smear.

Oborne reported that Rusbridger kept his nerve and replied coolly:

I’d be interested in the evidence, I’m not sure how you make that causal connection between someone reading an article that is critical of the foreign policy of Israel and then thinking why don’t I go out and mug Jews on the streets of London. I just can’t believe that happens.

We are left with the impression that the discussion fizzled out quite soon after that response. Later the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a pro-Israel media “watchdog,” was put up to stray far from its territory to lodge a complaint with the UK’s Press Complaints Commission. This asserted that McGreal’s article was “based on materially false accusations.” The complaint was not upheld.

Rusbridger went on to tell Oborne that The Guardian was not the only paper to come under such pressure, which often works. “There are a lot of newspaper and broadcasting editors who have told me that they just don’t think it’s worth the hassle to challenge the Israeli line. They’ve had enough.”

The Lobby’s onslaught on the BBC

But nothing experienced by The Guardian can match the viciousness of the campaign waged by the Israel Lobby against the BBC. Here it involved not merely lobbying the senior management of the corporation but waging personal campaigns against individual journalists designed to ruin their reputations and terminate their careers.

Oborne substantiated his claims about these Zionist vendettas against individual BBC journalists by recounting the experiences of Middle East correspondent Orla Guerin, Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen and multi-program presenter Jonathan Dimbleby (currently chairman of Any Questions, Britain’s best-known and longest-running radio political forum.

He prefaced his coverage of campaigns of persecution against particular BBC journalists with these general observations about the British media:

Making criticisms of Israel can give rise to accusations of anti-semitism — a charge which any decent or reasonable person would assiduously seek to avoid. Furthermore most British newspaper groups — for example News International…..[owned by Rupert Murdoch, owner of Sky TV, The Sun [a tabloid], and The Times, whose editor James Harding, assistant editor Danny Finkelstein and chief political columnist David Aaronovitch are all Zionist Jews], Telegraph newspapers…..[owned by the reclusive Barclay brothers, gentile Scotsmen, who seem to favor the strongly pro-Tory, pro-Israel line of the senior editorial staff of their papers, a mixture of Roman Catholic philo-Semites and Jews], and the Express Group….. [owned by Richard Desmond, a Jew, who made himself a billionaire publishing pornographic magazines, but who then went upmarket and bought out the Daily andSunday Express which are now vehicles for pro-Israel and anti-Muslim/Islam sentiment, and which increasingly carry articles helpful to the BNP as that party has aligned itself with far-right Zionism] — have tended to take a pro-Israel line and have not always been an hospitable environment for those taking a critical look at Israeli foreign policy and influence. Finally, media critics of Israeli foreign policy — as we will vividly demonstrate in this pamphlet — can open themselves up to coordinated campaigns and denunciation.

This is what Oborne reported about BBC correspondent Orla Guerin:

Some journalists we spoke to had been accused of anti-semitism, and felt inevitably it had done some damage to their careers. Others, like the BBC’s Orla Guerin, against whom this very serious and damaging charge has repeatedly been made by the Israeli government, wouldn’t even talk to us off the record. It is easy enough to see why. Guerin is a brave, honest and compassionate reporter. Yet the Israeli government has repeatedly complained to the BBC that Guerin is “antisemitic” and showed “total identification with the goals and methods of Palestinian terror groups.”

On one occasion, in an appalling charge, they linked her reporting from the Middle East to the rise of antisemitic incidents in Britain. When Guerin was based in the Middle East in 2004, she filed a report about a sixteen year-old Palestinian would-be suicide bomber. Guerin said in the report that “this is a picture that Israel wants the world to see,” implying the Israelis were exploiting the boy for propaganda purposes.

Natan Sharansky, a cabinet minister at the time, wrote a formal letter to the BBC accusing her of “such a gross double standards to the Jewish state, it is difficult to see Ms Guerin’s report as anything but antisemitic.”

The following year, when Guerin was awarded with an MBE for her reporting, Sharansky said: “It is very sad that something as important as anti-semitism is not taken into consideration when issuing this award, especially in Britain where the incidents of anti-semitism are on the rise.” Officially sanctioned smears like this show why so many people shy away from confronting the influence of the Israel lobby.

This is what Oborne reported about Jeremy Bowen:

In April this year, in an important success for the pro-Israel lobby, the BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, was criticized by the BBC Trust for breaching their rules of accuracy and impartiality in an online piece, and their rules of accuracy in a radio piece. Bowen’s critics have seized on his humiliation, demanding that he be sacked and insisting that the episode proved the BBC’s “chronically biased reporting.” The real story behind the BBC Trust’s criticism of Bowen reports is rather different: it demonstrates the pusillanimity of the BBC Trust and the energy and opportunism of the pro-Israel lobby.

The story begins with an essay written by Bowen to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War for the BBC website. Though many people viewed Bowen’s essay as a fair and balanced account, erring if anything on the side of conventional wisdom, this was not the reaction of two passionate members of the Pro-Israel lobby, Jonathan Turner of the Zionist Federation and Gilead Ini, who lobbies for CAMERA, an American pro-Israel media watchdog organization.

Turner and Ini subjected Bowen’s article to line by line scrutiny, alleging some 24 instances of bias in his online article and a further four in a later report by Bowen from a controversial Israeli settlement called Har Homa.

Turner and Ini’s complaints were rejected by the BBC’s editorial complaints unit, so they duly appealed to the BBC Trust. The meeting was chaired by David Liddiment who, to quote Jonathan Dimbleby, “is admired as a TV entertainment wizard and former director of programmes at ITV but whose experience of the dilemmas posed by news and current affairs, especially in relation to the bitterly contested complexities of the Middle East is, perforce, limited.”

The BBC Trust found that Bowen had breached three accuracy and one impartiality guideline in his online report, and one accuracy guideline in his radio piece. This was a massive boost for the organizations to which Turner and Ini were attached. The Zionist Federation at once called for Bowen to be sacked, calling his position “untenable,” while adding that what they called his “biased coverage of Israel” had been a “significant contributor to the recent rise in antisemitic incidents in the UK to record levels.” Meanwhile, CAMERA claimed that the BBC Trust had exposed Bowen’s “unethical” approach to his work and insisted the BBC must now take “concrete steps” to combat its “chronically biased reporting” of the Middle East.

These powerful attacks might have been justified if the BBC Trust had found Bowen guilty of egregious bias. In fact he was condemned for what were at best matters of opinion. In a majority of the cases, the complaints were found to have no merit, and where changes were made they changed the meaning very little. … The Trust’s ruling was met with dismay in BBC newsrooms. A former BBC News editor, Charlie Beckett, told us “the BBC investigated Jeremy Bowen because they were under such extraordinary pressure. … It struck a chill through the actual BBC newsroom because it signaled to them that they were under assault.”

This is what Oborne reported about Jonathan Dimbleby:

Jonathan Dimbleby had boldly expressed criticism in a powerfully argued article for Index on Censorship of the pressure from pro-Israel groups on the BBC, which led to the BBC Trust’s report on Jeremy Bowen, and had initially been keen to be involved. Suddenly his interest evaporated. There simply wasn’t the time, he said. At first we felt baffled and let down. But in due course we discovered that his comments had brought a complaint from the very same lawyer, Jonathan Turner of the Zionist Federation, that had complained about Jeremy Bowen.

Dimbleby is now going through the exact same complaints process that he criticized. Turner is arguing that Dimbleby’s comments make him unfit to host the BBC’s Any Questions. The Dimbleby experience serves as a cautionary tale for anyone approaching this subject. Others, such as Sir John Tusa, who had opposed the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Committee Gaza appeal, were overcome with modesty, feeling that they simply didn’t have the expertise to tackle the subject.

This now brings us to one of the most disgraceful decisions ever taken by the BBC’s senior management, a decision which indicates the extent to which they are now receptive to Zionist pressure. This receptivity may in part be due to intimidation of the kind revealed by Oborne, but there is another factor which he has not mentioned, which he must have known about, but which did not feature in his otherwise excellent report. That factor will emerge shortly, but let us deal first with the disgraceful decision.

The BBC prides itself on its tradition of mounting at short notice major appeals for funds from the viewing and listening public to bring aid to innocent civilian people anywhere in the world afflicted by disasters and catastrophes.

BBC refused to join fund-raiser for Gaza victims

The Israeli attack on the Gaza strip in December 2008/January 2009, “Operation Cast Lead,” involving massive slaughter and wanton destruction at a level which the report  (250 pages in Pdf format) of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, headed by the South African Jewish Judge Richard Goldstone was obliged to characterize as “actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity” was just the kind of event which would prompt the BBC, along with all other broadcasting networks, to support such an appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee.

But that did not happen. In Oborne’s words:

In January 2009, Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, took the unprecedented decision of breaking away from other broadcasters and refusing to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Appeal for Gaza, claiming it would compromise the BBC’s impartiality. ITV and Channel 4 screened the Gaza appeal, but Sky [a satellite TV network owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International] joined the BBC in refusing.

The BBC’s decision had an undeniable impact. Brendan Gormley, Chief Executive of the DEC, told us that the appeal raised about half of the expected total: £7.5 million. In the first 48 hours of the appeal phone calls were down by 17,000 on the average.

Thompson also cast doubt on the charities’ ability to deliver aid on the ground despite assurances from the DEC and his own charitable appeals advisers that this was not the case.

We asked Charlie Beckett why the BBC had refused. He replied: “If there was no pro-Israeli lobby in this country then I don’t think[screening the appeal] would have been seen as politically problematic. I don’t think it would be a serious political issue and concern for them if they didn’t have that pressure from an extraordinarily active, sophisticated, and persuasive lobby sticking up for the Israeli viewpoint.”

It would be easy to conclude, as Oborne seems to have done, that this wicked decision to deny aid to a wretched civilian population whose environment resembled Hiroshima after the atomic bomb blast, was the product  — solely the product — of the intimidation campaign against the BBC by the Israel Lobby.

Thompson’s trip to Jerusalem and his Jewish wife

But there is another explanation. It was given in a small item that appeared  inGuy Adams’  Pandora gossip column, published in The Independent on November 29, 2005. Under the heading “BBC chief holds peace talks in Jerusalem with Ariel Sharon”, Adams wrote [with emphases added by me]:

The BBC is often accused of an anti-Israeli bias in its coverage of the Middle East, and recently censured reporter Barbara Plett for saying she “started to cry” when Yasser Arafat left Palestine shortly before his death.

Fascinating, then, to learn that its director general, Mark Thompson, has recently returned from Jerusalem, where he held a face-to-face meeting with the hard line Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Although the diplomatic visit was not publicised on these shores, it has been seized upon in Israel as evidence that Thompson, who took office in 2004, intends to build bridges with the country’s political class.

Sources at the Beeb also suspect that it heralds a “softening” to the corporation’s unofficial editorial line on the Middle East.

This was the first visit of its kind by any serving director general, so it’s clearly a significant development, I’m told.

Not many people know this, but Mark is actually a deeply religious man. He’s a Catholic, but his wife is Jewish, and he has a far greater regard for the Israeli cause than some of his predecessors.

Understandably, an official BBC spokesman was anxious to downplay talk of an exclusively pro-Israeli charm offensive.

Apopros this month’s previously undocumented trip, he stressed that Thompson had also held talks with the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas.

Ariel Sharon, of course, achieved Major War Criminal status when he was still serving with the Israeli “Defense” Force. Sharon added to his reputation when he became Israeli Prime Minister when he wallowed exultantly in Palestinian and Lebanese blood. What is the head of our Beeb doing even being in the same room, let lone holding meetings hidden from the British public, with such a man?

Has there been any other occasion when the premier of a foreign state has been able to summon into his presence, on his territory, the Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation for a harangue about the editorial policy of the corporation via-à-vis that foreign state? No, there has not.

According to the statute which established the corporation, not even a British prime minister has the power to do any such thing. Any attempt to do so, were it to be established, would provoke an uproar which would likely lead to the resignation of the prime minister, if not the fall of the government.

Quite obviously it would be naive to assert that successive British governments have never exerted — or attempted to exert — behind-the-scenes pressures on the BBC with regard to its domestic output (I exclude the BBC World Service, which broadcasts to foreigners and which is subsidized by the Foreign Office), but that cannot be viewed as a license for the Israeli prime minister to do the same thing and, what is more, flaunt the fact.

I am surprised that Oborne did not use in his film the information published in The Independent in 2005 and which is still available via a Google search. As I say, he must have known about it.

Perhaps the fact about Thompson’s wife being Jewish might have been viewed as too “personal” and open to allegations of “anti-Semitism”. But if the slightest bit of research were to be done on philo-Semitic Gentiles active on Israel’s behalf in the media and in major political parties and the number of these who have Jewish wives, then eyebrows would be raised beyond the level of coincidence.

Certainly the information about Thompson going to Jerusalem to discuss BBC editorial policy towards Israel with the Israeli prime minister was a political fact apposite to the central theme of the Oborne’s program: The influence of Zionist Jews over leading officials of British state and national institutions to direct their policies for the benefit of Israel, even if it harms British national interests.

Such influence cannot be described as mere “lobbying.” It constitutes treasonous subversion, and it must be rooted out.

Postscript on the media aftermath

The information which Oborne produced in his Dispatches report deserved massive coverage by the entire print and broadcasting media, but especially the BBC, which was so strongly featured.

But the BBC did not carry, so far as I can find, a single mention on any of its multiple TV, radio and web platforms, not even in any of it programs or sites which specialize in reporting what other media are reporting.

The Guardian and The Independent allowed some small-scale print coverage and debate in their web site discussion forums but these are relatively small-circulation publications.

The Times, which proclaims itself as “The Paper of Record”, and all other entities in Rupert Murdoch’s News International group (including The Sun and Sky TV; Independent Television, ITV1 and Channel 5; The Daily Telegraph and all other entities in the Telegraph Group; the Daily Mail; the Daily Mirror) all were completely silent about the film.

The Jewish Chronicle carried smallish, dismissive, low-key print reports and comment, but these did not reflect the quantity and angst of contributions on its website and on a variety of other Jewish community sites.

The almost universal and clearly coordinated application of the “Silent Treatment” of this film is both an illustration of the oppressive power of the Zionist Lobby over the ‘news’ media (and therefore over the public’s “right to know”) — which was one of the main points of the film — but also an indication that no comprehensive rebuttal of Oborne’s litany of damning facts could be found.

Martin Webster (email him) has been a racial-nationalist activist in Britain since he was an 18 year old in 1961. From 1969 until 1983 he was National Activities Organiser of the National Front and a member of its National Directorate. In 1973 he was the first nationalist in Britain (pre- or post-WW2) to “save a deposit” (then set at 12.5%) in a parliamentary election when he won 16.02% of the poll at West Bromwich in 1973. Since 1983 he has not associated with any political organization. He issues occasional e-bulletins to a world-wide circle of friends (and some enemies) who subscribe to his Electronic Loose Cannon newsletter, which comments on nationalist issues and parties, and his Electronic Watch on Zion whose title explains its purpose.