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The Southern Point: Bardic Dynamic, Pt. 2

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Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way – Emanuel Leutze

“The study of literature is hero-worship. It is a refinement, or, if you will, a perversion of that primitive religion.”

Ezra Pound, from The Spirit of Romance

The Bardic Dynamic focuses on the magnetic relationship between a speaker and an audience and the communication of a fundamental series of ideas. Traditional examples of this can be found in the great epic poems of Western Civilization. Ezra Pound believed that before about 1750 or so, the quintessence of Western man could only be found in poetry (Pound, 31). The context of these older texts is often an address made by one who remembers to those who may have forgotten. The bard or poet was the “keeper of memories.” This is a very different conception than that which has developed in contemporary times with the hip-hop rapper and his thousand miles a minute ebonicspeak, backed with heavy bass beats or the coffee-house Ginsberg wanna-be railing against, well, against G.I. Joe Whitey, of course. Who else? Read more

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

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Abstract Expressionism and the Culture of Critique

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

It was an art movement where the culture of critique of Jewish artists and intellectuals, frustrated that the post-war American prosperity based on Keynesian foundations had prevented the coming of socialism, turned inward and instead “proposed individualistic modes of liberation.” This mirrored the ideological shift that occurred among the New York Intellectuals generally who had “gradually evolved away from advocacy of socialist revolution toward a shared commitment to anti-nationalism and cosmopolitanism, ‘a broad and inclusive culture’ in which cultural differences were esteemed.”[ii] Doss notes how this ideological shift manifested itself among the post-war artists who became the Abstract Expressionists:

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

The avant-garde artists of the New York School instead embraced an “inherently ambiguous and unresolved, an open-ended modern art … which encouraged liberation through personal, autonomous ‘acts’ of expression.” The works of the Abstract Expressionists were “revolutionary attempts” to liberate the larger American culture “from the alienating conformity and pathological fears [especially of communism] that permeated the post-war era.”[iv] Rothko claimed that “after the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb you couldn’t paint figures without mutilating them.” His friend Barnett Newman remarked that if people only read his paintings properly “it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism.”[v] Read more

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

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Creating a new “American” Art

Before the rise of Abstract Expressionism, the American art scene after World War I was defined by two main currents. The first were what one might call the Regionalists (e.g. Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry) who used their own signature styles to portray the virtues of the hard-working rural American population. In the second group were the artists of Social Realism (e.g. Ben Shahn and Diego Rivera), whose work reflected urban life during the Great Depression, and reflected a preoccupation with international socialism.

Neither of these two schools was interested in abstract art. Despite the leftwing view of the social realists, both groups held rather conservative attitudes on figurative representation. Yet, even as these two styles dominated, the artists of the nascent New York School “met frequently at the legendary Cedar Bar, where they discussed their radical theses. They argued endlessly about the problems of art, about how to effect a total break with the art of the past, about the mission of creating an abstract art that no longer had anything to do with conventional techniques and motifs.”[i]

Spring in the Country by Grant Wood (1941)

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

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

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

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

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

Stalin’s 1937 Counter-Revolution Against Trotskyism

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Glorious 1937! In that year Stalin finally came to understand that it was Zionism, not Communism, that was being built in the USSR and he destroyed it. After 1937, Suvorov and Kutuzov, Nakhimov and Ushakov, Bogdan Khmelnitsky and the “Knight in Tiger Skin” became the national symbols. And the Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians – all those whom the Zionists had destroyed and left to rot in prisons, labeled “nationalists” or “anti-Semites – returned. General Viktor Filatov[1]

In his book Myths and the Truth about 1937: Stalin’s Counter-Revolution (YAZA-PRESS, Moscow, 2010, 288 pp.), Andrei Burovsky assumes the role of devil’s advocate or apologist for the crimes committed by Josef Stalin during the time of  “The Great Purge.”

This is a highly revisionist point of view, so a bit of biographical information is in order. Burovsky was born in Taganrog in SW Russia in July 1955. He majored in history at the Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical Institute, defended his Candidate’s Dissertation (The Historical and Cultural Stages of the Development of the Paleolithic Yenisei River) at the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Archaeology in 1987, and defended his Doctoral Dissertation (Problematics in Anthropo-Ecology in 1996. He was made a professor in 1998 and since that time has had a position at Krasnoyarsk University.

Burovsky is a prolific author (see, e.g., here). Aside from Burovsky’s 12 books on Jewish topics (I previously reviewed his Empire of the Intellect for TOO), he has written on a variety of subjects, including  Noogenesis and the Formation of the Noosphere School, 1996; Anthropo-Ecosophia, 2009; Petersburg as a Geographic Phenomenon, 2003; Arian Ancestors, 2005;The Great Civil [sic] War, 1939-45, 2010; Russian Atlantis, 2007; The Novgorod Alternative: The True Capital of Rus; Peter the First: The Accursed Emperor, etc.

Burovsky’s view is that the events of 1937 did not represent the usual case in which the devil under indictment is accused of crimes against innocent victims, but rather a case in which the devil is alleged to have committed crimes against another devil of even greater evil; it was the war between Stalin and Trotsky. True, Stalin had succeeded in exiling his nemesis in 1929, but the spirit of Trotskyism, according to Burovsky, had permeated the entire communist establishment and the Red dictator was determined to eradicate it.
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What’s Up with Mel Gibson?

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Mel Gibson has announced that he will be involved in a movie about the revolt led by Judah Maccabee against the Greeks in 160 BC—the basis for the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Patrick Goldstein in the LATimes (“Mel’s miracle: doing right by Maccabee” 9/10/11; apparently not available online) says that “Gibson is back in good standing in Hollywood, at least at Warner Bros., arguably the industry’s leading studio.” (On the other hand, Jim Caviezel says that his career has been damaged because he played Jesus in Gibson’s Passion which was widely detested by Jewish activists.)

Jewish activist organizations have expressed their displeasure with Gibson’s current venture. Abe Foxman called it a “travesty,” and the Simon Wiesenthal’s Marvin Hier said, among other things, that it would be like having “a White supremacist  trying to play Martin Luther King Jr. [!] It’s simply an insult to the Jews.” No surprise there.

Goldstein thinks it’s just fine for Gibson to be involved, noting the parallels of the Maccabee story with Gibson’s signature movie role in Braveheart: An embattled warrior fighting for his people. He expects that Gibson will produce a properly heroic depiction because he “must surely realize that a film from him that in any way undercuts the heroism of Maccabee would be a career killer of the highest order. But it would be almost as bad if he were doing the film as an act of penance for his sins, since dutiful acts of penance rarely lend themselves to great artistry.”

If Gibson is doing this as penance, it would represent groveling taken to a new low. Read more

The Southern Point: Bardic Dynamic

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The Forty-Niners - G. Harvey

After many and long attempts to analyze complex problems by the aid of the method of analogies, you feel the uselessness of all your efforts; you feel that you are walking alongside a wall. And then you begin to experience simply a hatred and aversion for analogies, and you find it necessary to search in the direct way which leads you where you need to go.

–P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, pp.68

White Americans generally do not utilize the innate legendary potential of their historical experience to its fullest. They should. The epic material is available in spades. We love heroes and have many great examples of our own which might inspire us to dare the extraordinary, despite any odds.  In fact, all that is left for this generation and the next is the conscious assumption of the mantle and the active realization of the native mythos…or not. Failure to do so is optional and will eventually result in our racial dissolution and displacement. No more bad men behind blue eyes. But why go there when we don’t have to? The Irresistible Forces cannot continue their onslaught if they encounter an Immoveable Body. The buck stops here.

MLK: Hero of the Eastern Establishment

Before we can amplify, however, there must be some cleavage. There are two essential versions of the American story which, while on the surface may seem similar, in fact do not quite line up with the vanilla platforms of the primary political parties and the color-coded delineation of Red State/Blue State America, though these divisions are useful for general purposes and at a certain distance. Of course, these are broad strokes which are underscored by perennial injections of a youthful revolutionary zeal that tends to defy all attempts at categorization as well as a recognized trait in the White American character towards radical maverick individualism which challenges any comfortable establishment or bullying mentality and always loves an underdog. Read more