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Resurrecting Woodstock?

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Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. A time-proven recipe for poor choices. Forty years ago this summer a group of young promoters organized what is regarded as a milestone in popular music history. The result was a celebration of free love and tuning out.

The Woodstock Music Festival’s original producer Michael Lang had planned a revival for its 40th anniversary. The festival was canceled at the last minute due to lack of interest from sponsors.

If the festival was simply a money-making scheme, it was spectacularly ill-advised. The last minute rollback was unprofessional and unexpected considering Lang’s seasoned career. Could it be that the revival was aiming at something more?

The hippie generation was the death knell of what remained of traditional America. Woodstock was an advertisement glorifying that betrayal. So why do we need to relive it? Because the Obama-rose is fading.

What was Lang Selling?

The counterculture of the 1960s celebrated self-destructive behavior. Young people were told not to trust their parents, but to trust their university professors and pop culture figures instead. It was the flowering of Saul Alinsky and his anti-Western propaganda campaign. But behind the mask of flowers there was a warped and twisted face.

The 1960s drug culture has its roots in the US government’s truth-drug experiments for the MK-ULTRA program. The CIA contracted professors to test out various drugs, often on student volunteers. These programs were carried out at almost every elite US university.[1]

John Marks, a former officer of the United States Department of State, argues that the 1960s LSD craze was at least in part started by drugs leaked from University laboratories. The coordinators of these student-guinea-pig projects were Sidney Gottleib and Harold Abramson.

It is ironic that the generation which claimed to be rejecting ‘the man’ was actually “the man’s” most abject stooge.

The Piper Gets Paid

In Anger in White America — Again, Prof. Kevin MacDonald points out a political trend that isn’t going away soon: disenfranchised Whites getting mad and hitting the streets. The situation has come to the point where the powers that be can no longer ignore it — see Lexington’s recent Economist editorial, Still Crazy After All These Years. Yes Micklethwait, we do want our country back.

Trick question: if your tax base is angry enough to make The Economist nervous, what do you do? More of the same, of course. Enter Mr. Lang and his magical mystery bus.

Mr. Lang promotes events — he is a professional crowd-manipulator. He made his name advertising the same lifestyle choices as Theodor Adorno and Ahmet Ertegun.  Atlantic Records was keen to help the Woodstock project: The firm issued the original “live” festival album. Ertegun had money coming out of his ears — and so did Lang!

In fact, the creators of Woodstock had the money before they had the vision. On March 22, 1967, two of the festival’s four founders, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, put the following advertisement in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal: “Young Men with Unlimited Capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions.”

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Lo and behold, an investment opportunity found them — by way of Ray Charles’ lawyer Miles Lourie. (Charles was Atlantic Records’ star performer.) Lourie sent Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang to meet the pair. In February 1969 the quartet embarked on the project that would become The Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Incidentally, Artie Kornfeld was a friend of Alan Livingston, president of Capitol Records.

Despite limited festival experience, the boys signed up a roster of A-list performers. 300,000 people turned up to get baked and express their collective individuality. It was an orgy of expressive individualism.

Woodstock Attendees Expressing Themselves

In the candid words of Woodstock MC Wavy Gravy, “The whole world was watching us, and we had a chance to show the world how it could be if we ran things.”

Let’s take a closer look at what Messieurs Lang, Kornfeld, Roberts and Rosenman were promoting: Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, Arlo Guthrie, The Who — a little something for everyone. But whatever the flavor, the message is the same: sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out

I am not being facetious when I say that sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll create the perfect cocktail for poor decisions. Political philosophers have recognized this for millennia. In Homer’s Odyssey, the Sirens and the Lotus Eaters were not mere literary fancy. They were an open warning to Greeks about the dangers of opting out of life in a competitive world. Ulysses lost his reason to the Sirens’ seductive songs; the Lotus Eaters lost all thoughts of their home. “Having lost all thoughts of their home, tradition and identity” is an apt description of the Hippie generation and their progeny.

Most people don’t want to think. Jean Cocteau, a French philosopher and the originator of many of Theodor Adorno’s ideas on music and culture, had this to say about what the masses want from music:

The crowd likes works which impose their melody, which hypnotise, which hypertrophy its sensibility to the point of putting the critical sense to sleep. The crowd is feminine; it likes to obey or bite.(Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure, Cocteau, 1930.)

We live in the age of crowds; and the crowd must be told what to believe. Their instruction is not an exercise in reason or logic. Alex Kurtagic hit the nail on the head in “What Will It Take?”:

In previous articles I have argued . . . that superiority of argument is a necessary but insufficient condition for inspiring a change in the status quo, and that mastery of style trumps superiority of argument every time.

Every day Messieurs Lang, Kornfield, Roberts and Rosenman thank G*d for the above fact. It has made them rich men.

Mr. Lang is hyper-aware that crowds must be engaged on an emotional level. The naive students from the Summer of Love were putty in his hands. If he didn’t sell them Herbert Marcuse’s “return of the repressed” through their libidos, he would do it through frying their limbic system or through the persuasive power of music.

It is almost comic how the popular music industry took on the slogan “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.” It might as well be “We’ll make sure they don’t think!”

But why is this cocktail so effective?

Sex is a revolutionary tool in the democratic age. De Sade wrote repeatedly about how the perfect revolutionary agents are sex-sated: They will be too distracted, and yes, too tired to identify and pursue their political interests. If you can convince a young person that free love is the way to go, you could very well set them on an emotionally unstable track for the rest of their lives. Not a bad plan when you’ve a democracy to manage.

Sex is only one prong of a three-pronged attack.

Anthony Damasio has done fantastic work looking at how the “emotional brain,” more properly the limbic system, helps us reason efficiently. Our limbic system is delineated by a higher concentration of dopamine, serotonin, and other chemical receptors which are very susceptible to the influence of illegal drugs like LSD. Taking these drugs alters the chemical balance in the part of your brain that is responsible for effective decision-making. As everyone knows, upsetting this balance will impair one’s judgment, sometimes permanently. If we can’t sate the voters, let’s fry ’em.

The final ingredient is persuasive sound.

I have written a lot about the emotional power of music and its usefulness in propaganda. Suffice it to say that beautiful music is an unusually powerful advertising tool. The music presented at Woodstock was beautiful — and often easy to listen to. It did a great job at making the ideas of Lang and his friends look good.

Jean Cocteau had remarkable insight about manipulating people. In his 1918 essay Cock and Harlequin, he makes the following suggestion to men who wish to lead the crowd through music:

CONCERNING A CERTAIN FRIVOLOUS ATTITUDE. If you feel you have a missionary’s vocation, don’t hide your head like an ostrich; go amongst the negroes and fill your pockets with worthless bric-a-brac.

NEGROES. It is only by distributing lots of bric-a-brac and by much imitation of the phonograph that you will succeed in taming the negroes and making yourself understood.

Then substitute gradually your own voice for the phonograph and raw metal for the trinkets.(Cock and Harlequin, Cocteau, 1918; emphasis in text)

The reader should not assume that by “NEGROES” Cocteau means just the Blacks. Rather, his advice on how to control people through music applies to anyone without musical education. Free men take responsibility for their choices and actions. Cocteau was not in the business of flattering slaves.

Woodstock was a smorgasbord of the popular music that Adorno credited to the “culture industry.” Adorno knew all about It — see The Mysterious German Professor.

Mr. Lang’s glaring error was assuming that the ‘flower power’ would still work today.

In 1960s America, kids could play on the streets and college grads could get jobs. Things are different now — it is much harder to be naive. No matter how many movies are made, no matter how many Rolling Stones articles are printed, and no matter how many Twitter plugs are sent, ‘hippie’ is now synonymous with ”loser’. Turning on and dropping out is not likely to appeal to today’s young people in a society where the elites are busy importing a new people. Hence the lack of interest in Woodstock II.

Some few of the hippies did go on to achieve something, but their record is not pretty. Bill Clinton and his fratricidal war in Yugoslavia (not to mention his sex addiction). Mrs. Clinton and her myriad of scandals. Or the out-of-touch Tom Hayden , still “hating the man” while Los Angeles sinks into the abyss. The list is long and uninspiring.

Bill and Hillary Being Hip in the 60s

But before Mr. Lang embarks on his next venture, he may want to consider  what Cocteau had to say to the music-manipulators:

Take care to conceal your capacity to work miracles, for “if they knew you were a missionary they would tear out your tongue and nails.”(Cock and Harlequin, Cocteau, 1918.)

And Lang’s fans should consider what Cocteau had to say about the slavish crowd:

What are the thoughts of the canvas on which a masterpiece is being painted? “I am being soiled, brutally treated and concealed from view.” Thus men grumble at their destiny, however fair.(Cock and Harlequin,Cocteau, 1918.)

So what do I predict? The New York Times will rave over Woodstock-inspired flotsam, festival or no. Burnt-out sixty-somethings will try to recapture their youth. And there will be many, many more sleepless nights at The Economist.

Elizabeth Whitcombe (email her) is a graduate of MIT in Economics with a concentration in International Economics. She is a financial analyst and free-lance writer living in New York City. Visit her website.

National Security Archives, John Marks Collection. Accessed October,2008. [Return to article.]

The CIA is often portrayed as a WASPish, right-wing organization. A careful reading of John Mark’s book shows that the truth is quite different.Sidney Gottlieb and Harold Abramson were both Jews; Gottlieb had unmatched and consistent control over the LSD  projects as head of the Technical Services Staff. He and Abramson had no scruples about using the flower of 1950s American youth for drug testing.

Mark’s book lists many left-wing notables who collaborated with the research (although sometimes claiming ignorance of where the money came from), including the notorious Boasian fellow traveler Margaret Mead, Jay Schulman (Rutgers, sociology), Adolf A Berle (high government official in the FDR Administration and New York Liberal Party Chairman). The same goes for Francis Stonor Saunders in her book The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. She mentions Jean Cocteau, Nicolas Nabokov, Arthur Koestler, Arthur Schlesinger, and Bertrand Russell In fact, WASPish right-wingers in influential positions at the CIA look quite thin on the ground. [Return to article.]

The Morality of Majority Rights and Interests

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Assertions that Whites have interests are met with a firestorm of moral condemnation and ostracism. These moral panics warrant any and all actions against the miscreant, including removal from one’s livelihood, or even physical assault.

So what is the morality of ethnic self interest? There are at least two ways to think about. One is that many of the people who are most eager to create moral panics about such ideas also have strong ethnic identities and interests of their own. This is one of the first things that struck me about Jewish political and intellectual rhetoric — that they managed to create a culture of critique in which only Whites had a moral obligation to disappear as a racial/ethnic entity while minority cultures such as their own were encouraged to hold on to their traditions and group cohesiveness.

This way of thinking goes back to Horace Kallen, an important Jewish intellectual who was the first to develop a vision of multicultural America, combining this vision with a deep attachment to Zionism. Obviously, Kallen’s prescription for America is quite the opposite of his vision of the Jewish state as a state for the Jews. The only thing these beliefs have in common  is that they serve Jewish interests. This is an example of Jewish moral particularism — the age old “Is it good for the Jews?.” Kallen appeals to the tradition of Western moral universalism to attain the interests of his ethnic group.

Kallen had a major influence on Randolph Bourne whowrote a classic statement of a multicultural ideal for America in his famous “Trans-National America“ that appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1916. All other ethnic groups would be allowed to retain their identity and cohesion. It is only the Anglo-Saxon that is implored to be cosmopolitan.

Randolph Bourne: High-minded Anglo-Saxon

This is a prescription for racial/ethnic suicide. However, at the time he wrote it, Anglo-Saxons like Bourne may have been confident enough to believe that they could safely allow others to have an ethnic identity and retain their cultures while shedding their own. Bourne’s implicit view of the world is that the ethnic identities of non-WASPs would make his world more colorful and interesting but not really threaten his basic interests. Like his mentor Kallen, he envisions of world of peaceful harmony amidst ethnic diversity:

America is already the world-federation in miniature, the continent where for the first time in history has been achieved that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun. Nowhere else has such contiguity been anything but the breeder of misery. Here, notwithstanding our tragic failures of adjustment, the outlines are already too clear not to give us a new vision and a new orientation of the American mind in the world.

I rather doubt that Bourne would have written what he did if he was aware that carrying out his recommendations would ultimately mean that Anglo-Saxons would lose control of their culture and their political destiny — and that even basic institutions like democracy and constitutional government would be in jeopardy.

What is the moral status of such a principled abdication of normal human strivings? Whites give up any claim to political and cultural control and hope that we will all enter a never-never land where we’ll all live happily ever after — White people expressing their individualism and everyone else advancing their ethnic interests.

The problem is that there is no way to rule out racial oppression and violence where Whites will be in a relatively powerless situation — at the mercy of people with festering historical grudges. Jewish historical memory about the 1924 immigration law and anti-Jewish attitudes, especially prior to World War II, is particularly bitter. The historical memory of Blacks in America is also especially bitter (Rev. Jeremiah Wright comes to mind), and Mexicans and Asians (see also here) have their own axes to grind.

The fact that Jews are an elite in the US and throughout the West and the fact that Jews have been a hostile elite in other times and places, most notably in the Soviet Union until at least the end of World War II, does not give much confidence in a rosy multicultural future when Whites cease to have the power to assert their interests. The great tragedy of the Russians and Ukrainians in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution is that they came to be ruled by ethnic outsiders with historic grudges against them.

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Add to that the fact that Jewish political activism on behalf of a non-White America has often been accompanied by overt expressions of hostility toward White elites and toward Western civilization — even among Jewish “conservatives.” There is no reason to think that such hostility will be eliminated when Whites have less power.

In the multicultural America of the near future, gulags and anti-White totalitarian controls are at least as likely as the multicultural utopia envisioned by Bourne. And if they can’t be ruled out, there is a compelling moral case to be made that Whites should not enter willingly into such a world. If there is one thing we should have learned by thinking about the history of the 20th century, it’s that we should not believe in utopias.

I am reminded of the minister quoted in Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America who stated “Political optimism is one of the vices of the American people…. We deem ourselves a chosen people, and incline to the belief that the Almighty stands pledged to our prosperity. Until within a few years probably not one in a hundred of our population has ever questioned the security of our future. Such optimism is as senseless as pessimism is faithless” (pp. 68–69).

The good minister wrote this in 1885 — definitely ahead of the curve. And he was quite right that the Anglo-Saxons should not have been too confident. That’s why the title of Kaufmann’s book refers to the fall of Anglo-America. Well-meaning White Americans who are not concerned that the future could turn out horribly for people like them are simply not paying attention to all the signs around them.

The good news is that there does seem to be a growing anger and insecurity in White America. Spurred by the Obama presidency, large numbers of Whites seem to be questioning their future. But it’s far too early to guess whether this will lead to effective political action — much less a resurgence of White identity and explicit and confident assertions of White interests. The fact that this White anger will probably benefit Republicans scarcely gives one confidence that it will have a positive long term result.

Another set of moral issues derives from biological differences among humans. If there is one common denominator to leftist activism throughout the last century, it is that biology doesn’t matter: Ethnicity is nothing more than culture. Unwelcome racial and ethnic differences in traits like IQ, academic achievement, and criminality are due to White evil. We are all familiar with this litany.

But this ideology leads to very real moral issues. The healthcare debate is a good example where the left is impervious to very real concerns among Whites that the proposed healthcare system will involve a massive transfer of resources, mainly from Whites to massive numbers of non-Whites, including tens of millions of legal and illegal immigrants imported by hostile elites against their wishes. From an evolutionary perspective, such concerns reflect evolved preferences and willingness to help people who look like them and have similar cultural proclivities.

Affirmative action raises a host of moral issues for the majority. Whites are doubtless concerned about the effects of affirmative action for Blacks and Latinos and competition from Asians, especially in states with high Asian populations, such as California which is ground zero for the multicultural future. By using “holistic” rating systems that deemphasize test scores, Blacks entering UCLA had SAT scores that were on average 300 points below White and Asian students. At the other end of the achievement curve, 46% of the undergraduates at the University of California’s flagship university, UC-Berkeley, are Asians despite the fact that Asians are only 12% of the state population.

Ironically, Whites may be unintended beneficiaries of recent policies put in place to aid Blacks and Latinos in a state where it is illegal to consider race in the admissions process. Even so, they will be underrepresented in elite public universities in a state that they built. Asians, who would be less overrepresented among UC students under the new rules (going from 35% to between 29–32%), are predictably outraged.

Welcome to a very small taste of ethnic politics in California where university admissions are still a zero sum game and political processes complexly interact with individual merit to determine how the pie is cut up.

Cleary Randolph Bourne did not think about what the long term effects of multiculturalism would be. There is simply no moral justification for  unleashing all this ethnic competition on the White citizens of California and the rest of the US without their consent. Indeed, the citizens of California voted for Proposition 187 that would have banned services for illegal aliens, but it was struck down by the courts. These same voters — mainly White and Republican — are now refusing to increase taxes that would keep the state of California afloat without drastic cuts in spending on education and health care for everyone.

Of course, the mainstream media sees this as a massive moral failing on the part of California voters. As an evolutionist, I see it as common sense. Why support a system that is fundamentally geared to support people unlike oneself?

This is the problem of donating to public goods like public education and public health care in a multicultural society. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam has shown that increasing ethnic diversity lowers the willingness to contribute to charity or to public goods (including, apropos the current national debate, public healthcare). It also increases social isolation and it lowers trust both within and between races; it also lowers political participation and lessens confidence in political leaders.

Putnam himself is sanguine about the long term effects of immigration. (Such utopian hopes seem to be an occupational hazard of university professors.) These effects are massively unfair to the White people of the US who never voted for this onslaught and will never see any tangible benefits from it —  unless one counts ethnic cuisine as a really important benefit. Couldn’t we just import ethnic cookbooks?

The social isolation, distrust of the political process, and lack of willingness to contribute to public goods means that as this process continues, Western societies will be increasingly unlivable for everyone. Civic mindedness and a strong concern about the society as a whole have been a hallmark of healthy Western societies.

On the other hand, one of the most striking aspects of the behavior of Orthodox Jews in Postville, Iowa was that they didn’t have any interest in developing social ties with their new neighbors or conform to community norms — even seemingly trivial ones such as taking care of their lawns, shoveling their sidewalks, or raking their leaves. They had no concern about the community as a whole; they treated their neighbors like strangers.

Civic mindedness and trust have been noted as unique features of Western culture. As I noted elsewhere,

Trust is really a way of emphasizing the importance of moral universalism as a trait of individualist societies. In collectivist, family-oriented societies, trust ends at the border of the family and kinship group. Social organization, whether in political culture or in economic enterprise, tends to be a family affair. Morality is defined as what is good for the group—typically the kinship group (e.g., the notorious line, “Is it good for the Jews?”).

This lack of ability to develop a civil society is the fundamental problem of societies in the Middle East and Africa, where divisions into opposing religious and ultimately kinship groups define the political landscape. The movement of the West toward multiculturalism really means the end of individualist Western culture.

In individualist cultures, on the other hand, organizations include nonfamily members in positions of trust. Morality is defined in terms of universal moral principles that are independent of kinship connections or group membership. Trust therefore is of critical importance to individualist society.

Yet, as Putnam has shown, trust and civic mindedness are the first casualties of ethnic diversity.

To inflict the White populations of the West with multiculturalism — especially when support for multiculturalism and support for their own demographic and political eclipse have never been majority views among Whites — is profoundly immoral. Imagine what happens when White Americans begin to behave toward their communities in the same way the Hassidic Jews behaved toward Postville.

What is needed is to pay more attention to the morality of infringing on the legitimate rights and interests of the White majority. Everyone has rights and everyone has interests. The interests and rights of Whites as a majority are no less morally legitimate than anyone else’s rights. Whites must jettison the ideal of moral universalism and ask what is good for the future of Whites.

We have to seek a world in which Whites attempting to atone for their personal transgressions would seek moral legitimacy by working even harder on behalf of their own people.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. Email him.

Speaking Truth to the Emperor

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Most children have read (one hopes!) Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (and if you have not read it in a while, read it again; it will pay dividends).  Our modern-day emperor (think of all those in positions of authority or influence within the media, politics, entertainment, academia, etc.) has no clothes either, but he continues to strut around like a peacock while all of his servants, that is, us, do him obeisance.

Because we do not wish to be thought of as stupid, we continue to bow the knee.  Furthermore, we do not want to be regarded as morally evil.  And since our modern-day swindlers have added moral depravity to the list of negative traits for those who cannot see the swindlers’ “priceless” clothing, we continue to scrape and grovel.

Indeed, we often purr our approval, as did the emperor’s old minister, when he saw no actual clothing: “Oh, it is very pretty, exceedingly beautiful.  What a beautiful pattern, what brilliant colors! I shall tell the emperor that I like the cloth very much.”

One place that you can find the king parading around in all his naked glory is in academia.  And one example of an invisible piece of cloth, designed, it can be argued, to cover the emperor’s backside, is the pretty slogan, “Diversity is our Strength!”

When I went to graduate school I saw this shibboleth plastered everywhere.  It was stuck on the bumpers of cars.  It was stuck on professors’ doors.  It was used in conversation in half the classes that I took.  Its content had been thoroughly absorbed by all, from the president of the university down to the lowly janitor. “Diversity is our Strength!  Diversity is our Strength!  Diversity is our Strength!”

And what if you happened to question this slogan?  You would be instantly classified as evil, stupid, and unfit for any position that you occupied.  You then would be persecuted (you might lose your job, for instance).  I mean, diversity is our strength, right?

Let us use just one example to prove our point: The Jews.  We know, don’t we, that the ancient Hebrews and Egyptians had a very cozy relationship?  Was diversity the Egyptians’ strength?  Or, consider the relationship between the Jews and the Canaanites.  They got along swimmingly, right?  By the way, when is the last time that you met a Canaanite? Indeed, the God of the Israelites does not seem to have had much appreciation for diversity:

When the Lord your God brings you to the land that you are going to occupy and forces out many nations before you — Hittites,Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and powerful than you — and hedelivers them over to you and you attack them, you must utterly annihilate them. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy! You must not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons away from me to worship other gods. Then the anger of the Lord will erupt against you and he will quickly destroy you. Instead, this is what you must do to them: You must tear down their altars, shatter their sacred pillars, cut down their sacred Asherah poles, and burn up their idols. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. He has chosen you to be his people, prized above all others on the face of the earth.(Deuteronomy 7:1–4)

Additionally, we are cognizant that the Southern Kingdom, Judah had a very smooth relationship with their kin in the Northern Kingdom, Israel, the land of the ten tribes.  And surely, the Assyrians and the Babylonians were on friendly terms with the Hebrews.  Likewise, the great love between the Samaritans and the Jews has become proverbial (I think Jesus might have said a few things about it) (Luke 10:25–37).  Clearly, the Jews considered the Samaritan contribution to diversity a valuable one (Ezra 4:1–24).

Further, are we not familiar with the ancient relationship between the Jews and the Christians?  It established a reservoir of goodwill that lasts to this day. Similarly with the Romans, except for that destruction of Jerusalem thing.  We also can recall that diversity was a strength in Alexandria, Egypt, where the Jews settled in large numbers alongside the Greeks, and in Cyprus, and in Cyrene, where the Jews exterminated the Roman and Greek population (i.e., the Kitos War). Yes, there was no friction at all, at least after the massacre.

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Even today, it is easy to grasp that diversity is a strength in Israel, where the Jews have a wonderfully diverse relationship with their fellow human beings, the Palestinians.

But, assuredly, we do not have to restrict our historical inquiry to the Jews alone to demonstrate the truth of that malevolent banality, “Diversity is our Strength!” We can chose other examples as well.  For example, is not everyone acquainted with the long history of concord and cooperation between Muslims and Christians?  Or, for that matter, between Muslims and Muslims (e.g., Sunni and Shiite)?  In fact, is it not true that wherever Muslims seem to go, they bring only sweetness and light?  Remember that Iran used to be Zoroastrian, Israel Christian, and Byzantium Christian, prior to being conquered by the “enlightened” Muslims.

And we can all appreciate the fact that Blacks and Whites get along quite splendidly, but that Hispanics and Blacks get along even better!  Undoubtedly, we all realize that the Irish love the English, that Catholics love the Protestants (e.g.,Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre), that Mormons adore the Christians, (e.g., Mountain Meadows Massacre), and that both Protestants and Catholicsdoted on the Mennonites.

If we are historically literate, cannot we recall the love between the Goth and the Roman, the Armenian and the Turk, the Hutu and the Tutsi, the Russian and the Pole, the Atheist and the Theist, the smart and the stupid, the rich and the poor, the Chinese and the Muslim, the French Canadian and the English Canadian, etc., etc., etc.

Hmm, come to think about it, what historical examples do we have that support the conclusion that racial and/or religious diversity is a strength to the nation in which these diversities reside?  Indeed, do we have any examples of two or more truly diverse peoples living side by side not only peacefully, but where both groups actually strengthen each other (and without a unifying external threat)? Has such a state, if there ever was one, existed for any length of time?

Of course, it is all a lie.  “Diversity is our Strength!” is a thunderously stupid and pernicious statement.  The evidence for its truth is non-existent.  Additionally, does not simple common sense indicate that it cannot be true?  For example, would Saudi Arabians find strength with a million Mormons streaming into their country every year?  No?  How about a million Mexicans, even if they were Muslim?  Would the Jews find strength with thousands more Samaritans, Arabs, or Christians in Israel?  Does an increasingly diverse racial, cultural, and religious America strengthen, or weaken, a White, Christian America?

The reality of it is, of course, that diversity is not “our” strength if by “our” we mean any dominant racial or religious group, and if by “strength” we mean something that gives durability and unity to that dominant group.

Diversity is a strength, however, if by “our” we mean any competing, minority group and if by “strength” we mean something that allows the minority to gain the upper hand over the majority.  The lie, then, comes from convincing those who are dominant that by weakening themselves they will be strong.

Consequently, diversity is a strength to the minority group that uses it, if only temporarily, as a sword to dissect the dominant group (in this case, White, Christian America).  This allegiance to “diversity” is nothing but a mask  for ethnic competition against the White majority.

In addition, this doctrine of diversity is inherently hypocritical.  For, in order to stay diverse, each minority group must claim for itself a right that it does not grant to the majority.  That is, the majority group is forced to allow itself to be repeatedly penetrated by the foreigner, without being able to either prevent the foreign intrusion or to colonize the lands of the foreigner in return.  Nobody seems to think that there is a moral imperative for Korea or Zimbabwe to allow mass immigration that would swamp the native peoples.

In conclusion, it is instructive to note that at each stage in Andersen’s tale it became harder and harder for any adult to point out that the king had no clothes. If the king, for instance, was not so vain and greedy to begin with, the swindlers’ offer would not have appealed to him.  Or, if his “old” and “honest” minister had more confidence in himself, he would have scoffed at the swindlers’ ridiculous imposture, and convinced the king that there were no clothes.

If the minister had done his duty, the king would have doubtless punished the swindlers, but, more importantly, he would not have lost a fortune, nor his honor.

What does it require to fight the swindlers?  Courage and intelligence.  We must not rely on the innocence and honesty of a young boy to speak the truth.  As mature men and women, we must have the courage to do it ourselves.

Jack Spence (email him) is a family man, Westerner (with Southern sympathies!), and Protestant.

Decapitation

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In a truly chilling essay on the Israeli-American plan to decapitate potential leaders of Iraqi nationalism, retired sociologist James Petras describes both the plan and its effect.

Entitled The US War against Iraq: The Destruction of a Civilization, the tract documents how “Top Zionist policymakers who promoted the war did not initially directly pursue the policy of systematically destroying what, in effect, was the entire Iraqi civilization. But their support and design of an occupation policy included the total dismemberment of the Iraqi state apparatus and recruitment of Israeli advisers to provide their ‘expertise.’” In other words, “The dismantling of the secular civilian bureaucracy and military was designed by the Zionists in the Bush Administration to enhance Israel’s power in the region.”

I would hope readers have read at least one of his four indispensable books exposing the massive power of Zionists in America and the world at large (see books 1, 2, 3, & 4)

The current essay delineates an age-old strategy of neutralizing an enemy nation by knocking them back into a more primitive form. As Petras writes,

The ‘divide and rule’  tactics and reliance on retrograde social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice in pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified, advanced nationalist state. Breaking up the national state, destroying nationalist consciousness and encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal and regional loyalties required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist consciousness, historical memory and secular, scientific thought. Provoking ethno-religious hatreds destroyed intermarriages, mixed communities and institutions with their long-standing personal friendships and professional ties among diverse backgrounds. The physical elimination of academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation.

To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious client rulers, the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi puppets. This included destroying the libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools, cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class of professionals. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal and external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and educational institutions were cut off. Death squads engaged in the systematic murder of thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the least nationalist sentiment; anyone with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked.

What really draws one’s attention is Petras’s insistence that we are witnessing a premeditated “systematic elimination of intellectuals in Iraq.” Alert readers will immediately recognize this brutal tactic, as it has been employed by the same tribe in both smaller and larger cases.

For instance, during and after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the heavily Jewish leadership eliminated millions of competing non-Jewish leaders and members of the middle- and upper-middle class, as Yuri Slezkine so brilliantly exposed in The Jewish Century. In fact, Slezkine even called such Jews “Stalin’s willing executioners,” a point Kevin MacDonald picked up on. No wonder, since, as Slezkine tells us, quoting Leonard Schapiro, “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.” Estimates are that up to twenty million non-Jews died during that awful period.

Another example of the elimination of the elite of a conquered people is the Katyn Forest Massacre, which even the sometimes squeamish Wikipedia admits “was a mass murder of thousands of Polish military officers, policemen, intellectuals, and civilian prisoners of war by Soviet NKVD. … The number of victims is estimated at about 22,000.”

Tomislav Sunic, author of Homo Americanus, was born and raised in Eastern Europe under communism and knows the effect this genocidal campaign had on non-Jews in those lands. As he noted in an interview with a guest on his radio show, the Jewish-led onslaught of communism took a drastic genetic toll on the peoples of that region, something which points to an intent as clear as that currently on view in Iraq. As Sunic notes, the result was “aristocide”:

Although the true body count of Bleiburg is subject to emotional disputes, one thing remains certain: Bleiburg meant the violent disappearance of the Croat middle class in 1945.

The word “aristocide” first entered into the English vocabulary thanks to Nathaniel Weyl, a former American Communist of Jewish origin, who became a celebrity in the fifties after converting to a radical anticommunist and a denouncer of his former communist comrades. In his essay “Envy and Aristocide,” Weyl describes how envy prompts less intelligent people to criminal behavior and malice.

Weyl’s concept of aristocide makes it easier to comprehend the real reasons for the sanguinary behavior of Yugoslav Communists, who, in the aftermath of WWII, carried out gigantic killings against civilians of the Croatian, Serbian and the ethnic German middle class. In their incessant purges the Yugoslav secret police, the OZNA and the UDBA, were not only motivated by ideological reasons, i.e., the famed ‘class struggle,’ but rather by primordial emotions of envy and knowledge that many anticommunist and nationalist Croat intellectuals, were more handsome, more intelligent, or had more moral integrity than themselves.

One of the more fascinating accounts of the deliberate culling of high-IQ people comes in Biblical scholar Richard Faussette’s essay “Race and Religion: A Catholic View,” which appeared in Race and the American Prospect, edited by the late Sam Francis. Though Faussette situates his arguments in the Old Testament, his analysis is a sociological one in the mold of evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald’s theory on group evolutionary strategies. (See also Faussette’s companion piece here.)

Faussette describes how Cyrus the Persian let the Hebrew people go to rebuild their temple in 538 B.C. The “father of history,” Herodotus, was born in 485 B.C. and completed his signature work, The Histories, around 425 B.C., roughly a century after Cyrus ended the Babylonian exile. In The Histories Herodotus illustrates the savagery of biblical antiquity:

[Periander] sent an agent to Thrasybulus to ask what was the safest kind of government to establish, which would allow him to manage the state best. Thrasybulus took the man sent by Periander out of the city and into a field where the crops were growing. As he walked through the grain, he kept questioning the messenger and getting him to repeat over and over again what he had come from Corinth to ask. Meanwhile, every time he saw an ear of grain standing higher than the rest, he broke it off and threw it away, and he went on doing this until he had destroyed the choicest, tallest stems in the crop. After this walk across the field, Thrasybulus sent Periander’s man back home, without having offered him any advice. When the man got back to Corinth, Periander was eager to hear Thrasybulus’s recommendations, but the agent said that he had not made any at all. In fact, he said he was surprised that Periander had sent him to a man of that kind – a lunatic who destroyed his own property – and he described what he had seen Thrasybulus doing. Periander however understood Thrasybulus’s actions. He realized that he had been advising him to kill outstanding citizens, and from then on he treated his people with unremitting brutality.

Faussette goes on to describe how warfare among tribes in the 6th century B.C. sometimes entailed “murdering the finest of your own people who stood up to you and the same or a refined genocidal strategy for any people you conquered [emphasis added].” He then asks us to consider the Persian treatment of the Ionians:

Whenever the Persians took one of the islands, they ‘trawled’ for the inhabitants. Trawling involves forming a chain of men with linked arms across the island from the northern coast to the southern coast, who then traverse the whole length of the island hunting people down…

When they [the Persians] had conquered the settlements, they picked the best looking boys and castrated them, cutting off their testicles and turning them into eunuchs; they also took the most attractive girls and sent them to the king as slaves.

The victors then gave the Ionian land to others. “For all practical purposes; the Ionians had been ‘spewed out’ of the land. . . . Groups posing a potential threat were subdued and domesticated.”

Okay, the 6th century B.C. was a long time ago. But what if a similar strategy is again being pursued — and we Whites are the target? Personally, I think there is abundant evidence to support such fears. Last year, for example, I posted an article in TOO titled, The Washington Post’s Willing Executioner? (which the ADL somehow found less than amusing.)

In that column I observed how a writer for the Post averred that “whiteness is a huge problem.” Now, that kind of printed claim worries me, especially since I appreciate how the radical turn in Russia nearly a century ago resulted in rivers of non-Jewish blood. Now Jews have risen in America. Ominously, as Kevin MacDonald has noted, “If there is any lesson to be learned, it is that Jews not only became an elite in all these areas, they became a hostile elite—hostile to the traditional people and cultures of all three areas they came to dominate.”

Elsewhere, MacDonald expanded on this theme, noting that the current American regime is “maintained less by brute force than by an unrelenting, enormously sophisticated, and massively effective campaign to constrain political and cultural activity within very narrow boundaries.” A violent communist death is not yet necessary because dissenters “are not yet trundled off to jail or beaten with truncheons, but are quietly ignored and marginalized. Or they are held up to public disgrace, and, wherever possible, removed from their livelihood.”

In Homo Americanus, Sunic, however, envisions a worse scenario 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.” MacDonald identifies 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.”

Can’t happen in the Good Ol’ U.S. of A., you say? Well, why do we read stories such as “Army combat unit to deploy within U.S.”? Further, why does the Army have something called Field Manual No. FM 3-19.40? Have a look — you can learn all about “MILITARY POLICE INTERNMENT/RESETTLEMENT OPERATIONS.”

Getting back to James Petras on Iraq, he wrote: “The US had decided to adopt and expand the Israeli Mossad’s covert operation of assassinating selected key Iraqi scientists on an industrial scale.” Why do I find the pairing of “assassination” and “industrial scale” so terrifying?

In any case, even if my fevered imagination needs a rest, there is still abundant evidence that we Whites are being “spewed out” of our lands. For instance, one California resident who has been following population trends points to the “The Inland Empire,” a two-county area east of Los Angeles. Last Sunday the New York Times triumphantly profiled what is happening to this population of four million.

As coastal areas around Los Angeles become exorbitantly expensive, many Whites opted for the more affordable areas of the Inland Empire, causing the population to triple.

As has happened elsewhere in Southern California, Latinos and others have followed Whites, as the Times documented with respect to Moreno Valley. According to my informant, heavily White areas like Temecula and Murrieta Valley are also undergoing “Mexicanization.”

Steve Sailer added his own perspective to this unhappy story. The mortgage default rate is so high, Sailer notes, that the region is “ground zero for the mortgage meltdown.” My informant tells me that as well-paying jobs disappear, “foreclosure rates are skyrocketing.”

Huge homes are being abandoned, then purchased to be used as rentals, which attracts Mexican families. “These high school classes will be majority Mexican and non-white in a few years. It’s a pattern that has repeated itself across California. The demographic profile of the Murrieta Valley Unified School District tells the sad story of white displacement.”

For instance, from a high of 63.2% in 2001/2002, White enrollment has fallen to only 50% two years ago. Thus, he concludes, “We’re past the tipping point here in Southern California.”

Are we “past the tipping point”  for America in general?

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

Adorno as Critic: Celebrating the Socially Destructive Force of Music

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The Frankfurt School was a group of predominantly Jewish intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research. It originated during the Weimar period in Germany, and became a bastion of the cultural left. With the rise of National Socialism, the Frankfurt School was closed by the German government, and many of its members emigrated to America.

Theodor Adorno was the Frankfurt School’s music critic (as well as the first author of The Authoritarian Personality, probably the best known of the Frankfurt School works). He looked at music like a recording engineer looks at music. But the most important thing is that Adorno used music psychology as a revolutionary tool.

Adorno understood what qualities make music intellectually challenging and what qualities make music “popular” or non-intellectual. He asserted that intellectual music was best suited for bringing about revolution. Why? Because he thought that the revolution would begin in the elite strata of society and work its way down to the masses — that it would be a top-down event. As a result, he thought it was important that the elite world of classical music turn its back on the traditional high culture of the West. (He was wrong: As discussed below, time would show that popular music actually had greater revolutionary potential.)

Theodor Adorno

Adorno’s views were shaped by his times. In the 1920s and 1930s the intellectual elite embraced their ability to re-engineer society. Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud) wrote his famous defense of public manipulation, Propaganda, in 1928. Two years before, Charles Diserens applied the same philosophy to music:

Our purpose then is to study the influence of music on the organism. We approach music from the practical rather than the aesthetic standpoint, regarding it as a necessity, a possible means of re-education and human reconstruction for all, rather than a mere subject of unproductive pleasure, or an object for criticism from the learned few. (The Influence of Music on Behavior, Diserens 1926.)

Adorno certainly shared the insights of Diserens and Bernays. He felt that society needed to be remade and music was an excellent way to do that.

Adorno’s standard for judging music was its revolutionary potential. During the 1920s, the Frankfurt School aspired to be the intellectual vanguard for Marxism in Germany. According to their theory, the First World War should have precipitated a European socialist revolution, but this didn’t happen. The German middle class collectively rejected international socialism after WWI. This was an intellectual slap in the face for Adorno and his colleagues.

The Frankfurters blamed Western Culture for brainwashing people against their brand of socialism. Western culture would need to go. Critical Theory was the Frankfurters’ contribution in the war against the Western middle class, and Adorno was its drummer boy.

Adorno’s strategy took a page out of Plato’s Republic: Innovations in music presage innovations in culture. He wanted to find a type of music that would disrupt the bourgeois way of life and reshape the West in his own image. (See his “Why is the New Art so Difficult to Understand?“)

Which composers did Adorno find revolutionary enough? The later Beethoven, Mahler and Schoenberg. On the other hand, Wagner was both loved and hated.

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Adorno liked Beethoven because his later work broke musical norms — it avoided “harmonious synthesis” and had a destructive violence that previous works lacked (“Late Style in Beethoven,” 1937). However, works like Missa Solemnis — a choral piece celebrating Christ — were “neutralized” by social acceptability (“Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis,” 1959). This negative stance toward a Christian religious work is doubtless a reflection of the hostility of the Frankfurt School intellectuals toward Christianity which they saw as a as a conservative unifying force in society.

According to Adorno, Beethoven’s later works, which were composed after he was deaf, offered tantalizing glimpses of revolutionary changes to come. To get a better idea of what was different about this music, let’s turn to another critic.

In What is Art?, Leo Tolstoy gives a damning account of Beethoven’s later work. According to Tolstoy, Beethoven’s later innovations are alienating and no longer speak to the common man. They are “totally contrived, unfinished and therefore often meaningless, musically incomprehensible works.”

Tolstoy claims that Beethoven’s later music typifies the disconnect between the upper classes and the people who worked the land. (Bear in mind that Tolstoy was a Russian.) In Tolstoy’s view, Beethoven’s later work is immoral art, because the people who ultimately paid for it (the laboring classes) couldn’t enjoy it. By cultivating a taste for the later Beethoven, the aristocracy was disconnecting itself from the little people. Such art tears at the fabric of society. Good art, to Tolstoy, upholds Christian values and can also speak to the people that sacrificed for it. It brings society together in an ennobling way.

For the Frankfurt School, the view of society as an organic, harmonious whole with cooperation among the social classes would smack of National Socialism and consequently be the epitome of evil. It is not surprising therefore, that Adorno admired the late Beethoven. 

Gustav Mahler was the next link in Adorno’s revolutionary chain. A coreligionist of Adorno, he was famous for using the sounds of whips and hammers in his work. Adorno says that in Mahler’s compositions “The underworld of music is mobilized against the disappearing world of the starry heavens in order for the latter to be moved and to be a corporeal presence among humankind” (“Mahler Today,” 1930). The “starry heavens” represents the ossified Viennese music establishment, which Adorno believed should to be brought back to earth in the service of revolutionary activism.

“Mahler’s ecclesia militans is a salvation army, better than the real thing — not moderated in a petit-bourgeois way, not retrospectively proselytizing, but ready and willing to summon the oppressed into proper battle for the things of which they have been robbed and which they, alone, are still capable of achieving.” (“Mahler Today,” 1930) To Adorno, the “hero is the deserter” in Mahler’s symphonies (“Marginalia on Mahler,” 1936).

Adorno claimed that the bourgeois musical world was repressing Mahler’s work because Mahler shunned “moderate peacefulness.” In Adorno’s words: “The genuine significance of Mahler that can be discovered for today lies in the very violence with which he broke out of the same musical space that today wants to forget him” (:Mahler Today,” 1930).

Adorno pairs the work of Mahler and Schoenberg —  both rejected by the conservative forces of the status quo: “Whole groups of formulae are common to the fight against Schoenberg and against Mahler — the Jewish intellectual whose deracinated intellect ruins oh-so-beneficent Nature; the despoiler of venerablytraditional musical goods.” Ultimately, Adorno interprets Mahler as striving toward “the end of the order that bore the sonata” — the end of traditional European high culture.

This, of course, is an anti-Jewish stereotype that was common in Europe beginning in the 19th century: Whether or not they converted to Christianity, Jewish intellectuals were seen as subverting European culture, shattering the social cohesiveness of the society, and mocking and defying social conventions (See Chapter 2 of Kevin MacDonald’s Separation and Its Discontents, p. 51ff). Adorno, himself a Jewish intellectual (although far from deracinated), naturally sympathizes with this stance. Indeed, the Frankfurt School generally is considered part of this anti-Western tradition — precisely the reason that the Frankfurt School was exiled from National Socialist Germany.

Adorno’s views on Richard Wagner are strongly colored by the fact that Wagner was idealized in Germany during the National Socialist period. To Adorno, Wagner is the would-be revolutionary composer who tries and fails. In attempting to break out of the thematic melody form, he simply ends up repeating fragments.

Richard Wagner

But what really bothered Adorno about Wagner is the connection to National Socialism. Although Wagner was dead before Hitler was conceived, Adorno thought that one couldn’t have Wagner without National Socialism. In every crowd applauding a Wagnerian work there lurks “the old virulent evil” which Adorno calls “demagogy” (“Wagner’s Relevance for Today,” 1963).

Adorno believed that Wagner’s work is “proselytizing” and “collective-narcissistic” — clearly pejorative terms.  Adorno’s complaint about the “collective-narcissistic” quality of Wagner’s music is really a complaint that Wagner’s music appeals to deep emotions of group cohesion. Like the Germanic myths that his music was often based on, Wagner’s music evokes the deepest passions of ethnic collectivism and ethnic pride. In Adorno’s view, such emotions are nothing more than collective narcissism, at least partly because a strong sense of German ethnic pride tends to view Jews as outsiders — as “the other.”

It is not surprising that Wagner was by far the most popular composer during the National Socialist period. It is also not surprising that Adorno, as a self-consciously Jewish intellectual, would find such music abhorrent. One wonders if he would have similarly considered the Israeli national anthem as an expression of collective narcissism.

Adorno could never quite shake off Wagner’s greatness. He found Wagner’s music to be erotically free, so he figured there must be something “right-wing, petit bourgeois” about opposing the composer. In the age of psychoanalysis, no Jewish intellectual would want to appear to be anti-erotic. Adorno’s solution was to claim that Wagner’s greatest works are the ones that the public doesn’t like (“Wagner’s Relevance for Today,” 1963). This was clearly an attempt to have his cake and eat it too: If the public was deeply moved by Wagner, it was a sign that Wagner was appealing to emotions of ethnic cohesion. The only safe works of Wagner are those that don’t result in such emotions.

In the end, Adorno falls on the side of disliking Wagner because his music reinforces the status quo. And of course, where Wagner’s music promotes ethno-nationalism, the powers that be must intervene.

Arnold Schoenberg, whose “intellectualism is legend,” was Adorno’s ideal revolutionary composer (“Toward and Understanding of Schoenberg“1955/1967). Adorno ranks Schoenberg with Shakespeare and Michelangelo: He is a god in the art world. Schoenberg had a strong Jewish identity and was a Zionist (Klara Moricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism and Utopianism in Twentieth Century Music).

Schoenberg wrote atonal music, meaning that it was designed to defy traditional musical forms and heuristic expectations. It takes a musically trained person to appreciate just how well designed the discord is; but even for musicians listening to Schoenberg is hard work. Schoenberg’s music is a curiosity to composers; much like how an unusually diseased organ in formaldehyde is a curiosity to medical professors. As a result, Schoenberg’s music was never popular and Adorno was bitter about this.

Music that meets our ears’ expectations tends to be pleasurable. Adorno recognized that beautiful music has a pacifying effect and pacification was at odds with his political goals — at least the goals he held in pre-WWII Germany. This is why Adorno had such good things to say about Schoenberg.

The common characteristic these four composers shared was that they wrote music which challenged the listener’s expectations to varying degrees. Varying degrees is the important distinction here.

Some of the most beautiful music is that which teases our expectations. Prof. David Huron of Ohio State University wrote a phenomenal book in 2006 calledSweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Huron offers an explanation of why discord falling into harmony is beautiful and gives us a pleasurable feeling.

But when unpredictability is taken too far, music becomes discordant and ugly. It leaves the listener feeling dissatisfied and dislocated. Adorno believed that these feelings were necessary to jolt people into thinking and (naturally!) joining his revolutionary cause.

Adorno applied his revolutionary dislike of predictability to technology also. He disliked radio and some recording technology because he thought it made music sound flatter — more like pop and jazz (“The Radio Symphony,”  1941). Adorno hated big-band jazz because he felt it was not destructive enough to Western culture: It satisfied erotic urges in a socially tolerated way. Truly revolutionary music shouldn’t waste energy like jazz did.

Schoenberg — with his awkward and unappealing music —  was supposed to light our way to the future. He didn’t. Adorno had conflated intellectualism with Frankfurt School politics — the two do not go hand in hand. To really reach the masses, what the Frankfurt movement needed wasn’t intellectualism, but advertising power. Adorno’s initial misidentification of effective revolutionary music would be a useful lesson to other propagandists.

Apart from a few aesthetes (such as small coteries of Schoenberg devotees), effective revolutionary music works with our expectations of beauty, not against them. Effective revolutionary melodies should be easy to follow and have strong beats — like most popular music. In his essay “On Popular Music,” Adornorelates the open secret of what makes “hit” music: standardization. What he describes are tunes that play to our most basic musical expectations and heuristics, while erring on the side of simplicity.

The music is super-predictable and encourages mindless listening: “The forms of hit songs are so strictly standardized, down to the number of measures and exact duration, that no specific form appears in any particular piece” (“On the Fetish-Character in Music,” 1938). Adorno used this phrase to describe big-band jazz, but he might as well be describing pop music today: The Beatles, The Spice Girls, The Jackson Five — the list goes on.

Adorno understood how to make effective advertising music or “popular music.” He understood that better than anyone else in his day, probably. But Adorno’s tastes were elitist. He would be embarrassed and ashamed to create music that he felt was as mindless as big-band jazz. Adorno wanted to hobnob in the rarified air of über-educated musical creators.

Adorno didn’t like the commonness of pop music; he wanted to believe that his revolution was somehow more intellectual than that. The notion that Frankfurt ideas would be pushed by pop songs — the musical equivalent of a girl in a bikini advertizing beer or a sports car — would be repugnant to him.

Repugnant or not, advertizing works. Composers like Beethoven and Wagner understood how to play with our listening expectations and create something meaningful at the same time. They were true master composers. The shock value of Mahler or the contrived intellectualism of Schoenberg do not rate in comparison — and this is reflected in their relative popularity today.

Adorno never got over his dislike of popular music. He always wanted to believe that somehow revolutionary people would overcome their evolutionarily-determined listening preferences. But Nature always wins in the end.

And if Adorno wanted a successful Frankfurt-style revolution, he would have to work with the tools Nature provided. Enter Atlantic Records

To be continued.

Elizabeth Whitcombe (email her) is a graduate of MIT in Economics with a concentration in International Economics. She is a financial analyst and free-lance writer living in New York City.

The Beauty and the Beast: Race and Racism in Europe, Part IV

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The term ‘racism’ has a generic meaning today, denoting social ostracism of outgroups, or in the worst case scenario, depicting an act of savagery meted out by some race or some warring party to another race or ethnic group. In the standard usage today the word ‘racism’ is not necessarily a referent for a different skin color, or a depiction of someone’s high or low cognitive ability. As a result of constant semantic shifts the word ‘racism’ is used to describe a form of barbarism, generally viewed as despicable and contrary to the most basic norms of human conduct.

German Endtimes

If one accepts this very general and generic definition of racism, then the German people, shortly after WWII, became a prime victim of the most massive form of racism and racial discrimination — unseen and unheard of at any time in the history of mankind. The scope of terror inflicted to the German people during the Allied firebombing of German cities, the degree of suffering experienced by millions of German civilians in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the war, goes beyond human imagination. By its scope and its sophistication this peculiar type of cruelty against Germans is hardly comparable to any earlier tragedy of any other race or ethnicity in Africa or Asia during colonial times. It had clear racial, linguistic and judicial overtones still awaiting an objective scholarly examination.

Images of Dresden after the fire bombing of February 13, 1945

Numerous books have been published by prominent authors, including the well- known American legal scholar Alfred de Zayas, the German historian Franz W. Seidler, and the Canadian historian James Bacque on the expulsion of Germans, the policy of starving of hundreds of thousands of surrendered German soldiers along the Rhine river that was carried out by the Allied commander Dwight Eisenhower, the grand theft of German property, mass rapes of over 2 million German women by Soviet soldiers, slave labor of captured young German children, etc. Yet most of these books, although based on solid forensic research and physical evidence, are barely accessible, and they are never mentioned in higher education in the USA and in Europe.

Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia

Germany’s European allies, such as Hungary, or the wartime France, dearly paid their collaboration with Germany too. Few French students, let alone American students, know that over 70,000 French civilians perished under American bombs from 1942 to 1944.  They cannot be blamed, as there are no sites of commemoration for the bombs’ victims in France. Tiny Croatia, which remained the loyal ally of Germany to the last day of WWII, paid a heavy price too, losing the best part of its gene pool, after its middle class had been wiped out by Yugoslav Communists. Although considered today the most beautiful country in Europe and a prime tourist destination, Croatia is essentially a huge graveyard. In 1945 it became the largest communist killing field of ethnic Germans and Croats in Europe (see here and here).

It is still common in the Karst area in the mountains of southern Croatia to stumble upon small ravines and pits with rusted German helmets, rosary beads and scattered bones.  Beyond the carnage of WWII and its immediate aftermath, the root causes of the recent interethnic war in the Balkans are the direct outcome of forcible Allied creation at Yalta and Potsdam of the artificial multicultural entity known as Yugoslavia.

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The question that comes to mind is: Why is this unique form of racism against Germans not debated in public as is for instance the plight of Jews during WWII? While acknowledging that others suffered greatly during WWII and that Germany also committed large-scale atrocities against others, one still wonders: Why are the enormous crimes against the Germans simply not discussed?

The answer may not be hard to find. We are still living in the period where history has been written by the victors. The topic of the war and postwar German losses cannot be debated in academe or in public life because the gigantic scale of German suffering would automatically and immediately eclipse all other competing victimologies combined.

What is striking is that there is still no official tally as to the number of German civilians and soldiers who perished in the period from 1938 to 1950. Why has the German government never released the exact casualty figure? One can only read in some marginal revisionist journals or hear occasional rumours that 6 to 12 million Germans perished during that that time span — but there is no official document endorsing this allegation. And this silence is very, very telling, indeed.

Crying Wolf

Racism against Germans had been well thought out and was brought to its academic perfection before the war’s end. An influential American Jewish businessman, Theodore Kaufman, published in 1940 a small pamphlet titledGermany Must Perish! In 1942 pamphlet Kill, his counterpart, the high Soviet-Jewish official Ilya Ehrenburg, unabashedly urged Soviets solders to spare no mercy against the Germans:  “The Germans are not human beings. Henceforth the word German means to us the most terrible curse. From now on the word ‘German’ will trigger your rifle.”

The Morgenthau Plan, devised by two ethnic Jews — Secretary of the TreasuryHenry Morgenthau, Jr. and Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White— would have killed 10 million Germans by starvation and disease in the first two years after the war. (White has been named as a Soviet spy on the basis of the Venona documents.) This would have been in addition to the 1 million that had been killed in saturation bombing and 3 million in forced expulsions. As Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote in his diary, “I found around me, particularly Morgenthau, a very bitter atmosphere of personal resentment against the entire German people without regard to individual guilt, of the Nazis.”

As recounted by Joseph Bendersky, American military officers commonly believed that there were many anti‑German Jews in the U.S. military government after World War II who were bent on de‑nazification and revenge.  “Feeling inhibited from speaking publicly by alleged Jewish power, a number of officers, as well as some government officials, complained incessantly in private that Jewish ‘refugees in American uniforms,’ together with Jews in the U.S. government, unduly affected American policy toward Germany in a variety of detrimental ways” (p. 364). Refugee officers (i.e., German Jews returning as members of the U.S.  military government) treated Germans brutally, including sadistic beatings and starvation (p. 365).  In general, these Jews advocated harsh treatment, the concept of collective guilt, and trials for general staff officers.The reputation of these refugee officers was so bad that the Army ended up firing personnel who had entered the U.S. after 1933.

Although modern mainstream historiography and the media downplay Kaufmann’s little booklet and Ehrenburg’s hectoring of Soviet soldiers, their words had a significant psychological impact on the behavior of Allied soldiers.

Anti-German hatred did not stop when the war was over.  It is still well alive and thriving, albeit by resorting to far more sophisticated methods. Over the last 70 years anti-German racism, under the guise of the fluid word ‘antifascism’ has been the pivot of the “negative legitimacy” of Western civilization in the eyes of intellectual elites. Anti-German hatred still represents the unavoidable pillar of the world order, including international law. Any dent in it would seriously harm the modern system and would possibly bring it down.

There is also a psychological dimension to a racist act. Usually the bigger the magnitude of a racist crime the more intellectual effort is needed by its perpetrator to hide it, or explain it away, either by propagandistic or by pedagogical tools. Perpetrators of huge racist crimes, such as those committed by the Allies against the German people, were subsequently obliged to project their own crimes on their German victims. By reversing the semantics of the word ‘racism,’ they were able to carry out their own racist policies, while at the same time naming the German victim as an exemplary role model of racism. Consequently, the victors of WWII had no other option but to trivialize or hush up their crimes, while simultaneously doctoring up the image of their own victimhoods while ascribing their own evildoing as a racially inborn trait of the defeated German side.  The postmodern liberal “antifascist” and  “antiracist” discourse of “crying wolf” —  blaming the Other for one’s own dark and criminal secrets, can be traced to good old fable teller Aesop and his allegories about human duplicity.

Freda Utley, a former communist intellectual, who very early learned the meta-language of the Allied propaganda and who later turned into an anticommunist writer, observed the psychology of the victors and their usage of semantic pyrotechnics. As early as 1948 she knew what would become of Germany:

A thoughtful American professor, whom I met in Heidelberg, expressed the opinion that the United States military authorities on entering Germany and seeing the ghastly destruction wrought by our obliteration bombing were fearful that knowledge of it would cause a revulsion of opinion in America and might prevent the carrying out of Washington’s policy for Germany by awakening sympathy for the defeated and realization of our war crimes. This, he believes, is the reason why a whole fleet of aircraft was used by General Eisenhower to bring journalists, Congressmen, and churchmen to see the concentration camps; the idea being that the sight of Hitler’s starved victims would obliterate consciousness of our own guilt.  Certainly it worked out that way.” (Freda Utley,The High Cost of Vengeance (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co. 1949)  

Judicial Review or Racial Review?

There is also a judicial aspect of modern anti-German racism, well observed by the German legal scholar Carl Schmitt, who witnessed himself this unparalleled German drama. Wars declared “good” and specifically wars fought in the name of “democracy and human rights,” are the most barbaric ones. A democratic warrior is obliged to place his enemy below democratic standards, or simply set him outside the category of human beings. This was likely the image of Germans crossing the mind of American commanders when given orders to firebomb German cities. There were no longer “bad Krauts” residing in the crosshairs of the bombers, but monstrous beasts — a unique type of bacteria, a special form of disease that needed to be chemically removed in order to make the word safe for democracy.

Psychologically speaking American aircraft pilots or naïve GIs had perfect consciousness, being firmly convinced that some ugly telluric creatures from the Bible, some stray Gogs or Magogs, lived down under in the medieval cities of Cologne, Dresden, Bremen, and Munich. It is no accident that the largest Allied firebombing — of Hamburg in July 1943 — had a code name from the Old Testament: ‘Gomorrah.’

This pattern of demonization of the adversary was first used by the North against the South in legitimizing the Union aggression in 1863 and later on in brainwashing the Southerners. More recently it was used by George W. Bush and his neocon advisors in legitimizing military intervention in Iraq, notably by parroting the expression “Axis of Evil,” put together by his Canadian-American Jewish advisor David Frum in subliminal reference to Axis countries of WWII. In both historical instances, Deuteronomy, Chapter VII, with its prescriptions for genocide, was used as a handbook against unchosen ones. As Schmitt writes:

Hostility becomes so absolute that even the most ancient sacral differentiation between the enemy and the criminal disappears in the paroxysm of self-righteousness. To doubt one’s own justice appears as treason; to show interest in the opponent’s arguments is viewed as treacherousness, and the attempt to start discussion is considered as agreement with the enemy. (Ex Captivitate Salus, Erfahrungen der Zeit 1945/47 (Köln: Greven Verlag, 1950, p. 58).

After 1945, with the hindsight of the Allied terror bombing and fresh memories of immense suffering, the mimicry of political rectitude amidst the new German ruling class was comprehensible.  Hundreds of thousands of German intellectuals had to be purged from schools and universities and newspapers and also obliged to fill out the demeaning Questionnaires (“Fragebogen”), while renouncing over and over again their “authoritarian personality.” The high priests of the Frankfurt School, specialists in “laundering the German character,”accomplished their work meticulously. (See Caspar Schrenck von Notzing;also my Homo Americanus.) In the decades to come German politicians had to prove that they could perform their liberal democratic tasks better than their American tutors. Given that all signs of nationalism, let alone racialism, had to be erased, the only form of patriotism allowed to Germans was “constitutional patriotism”:  “The German people had to adapt itself to the constitution, instead of adapting the constitution to the German people,” writes the German legal scholar, Günther Maschke (Das bewaffnete Wort (“Die Verschwörung der Flakhelfer”) (Wien und Lepzig:  Karolinger Verlag, 1997) p. 74; my emphasis).

The word ‘German’ has become synonymous with evil. German studies in the US academe have been thoroughly neglected; any mentioning of “German culture” is still reminiscent of the time span stretching from 1933 to 1945. Today, the Germans are a thoroughly neurotic people, a case of the victor’s successful cultural (and genetic?) engineering — probably the most unique case in the history of mankind.

The peculiar hatred of German tormentors must be put into wider psychological perspective and possibly also described by an evolutionary psychologist. It was largely the subconscious knowledge of their low character in comparison to the Germans that tormentors of the German people acted in such a barbaric fashion.

The German people, as the synthesis of all European races and residing in the place where North and West meet South and East in Europe, are in many ways the most accomplished of all Indo-European peoples. Rising from the ashes of WWII, they have built the strongest, most productive economy in Europe.Germans have a special sense of space and order (Ordnung and Ortung), which other European peoples do not have to the same degree. There is a joke that even a German drug addict knows how to neatly dispose of his used needles.

In addition, the German language is the richest Indo-European language. It enables hundreds of thousands of neologisms and compound nouns; it is timeless and endless and ideal for philosophical speculation. Unlike the English language and even more so the highly contextual French language (which is full of antonyms and homonyms), the German language is a straight-forward and a very “earthbound” language, having in addition a solid normative grammar. Alas, unlike French, its major fault is that it does not give a speaker latitude for diplomatic weaselling.

The paradox of our postmodernity is that despite being the most demonized people on earth, Germans are the most welcome people anywhere. Unlike the French, the English, and let alone the Americans, who are resented, if not despised in foreign countries, German businessmen, tourists and even their politically correct elites, are welcome everywhere. From the Arabic casbahs to India’s bazaars, barefooted street kids yell in great respect when they spot Germans: “Alemani! Alemani!”  Officially, even Germany’s former archenemies in Russia and Israel reserve to German diplomats a far more lavish treatment than they do to other foreign diplomats.

Subconsciously everybody knows that something terrible and unspeakable happened to Germans. But it’s not deserving loud and open discourse — at least not for now.

Go to Part 5.

Tom Sunic (www.tomsunic.info; http://doctorsunic.netfirms.com/) is an author, former political science professor in the USA, translator and former Croat diplomat. He is the author of Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age ( 2007). Email him.

Anger in White America — Again

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The health care debate continues to rivet the country. By most accounts, the sheer emotional intensity of the protests has forced Democrats to scale back their plans for nationalized health care. And who are these angry protesters? The vast majority of these angry citizens are White people — a topic I wrote about recently, but before the health care debate assumed center stage.

The health care debate seems to have ratcheted things up a notch. As an NPR commentary of August 13 noted,

If you’ve been anywhere near a TV in the past week, you have seen images of irate voters berating their elected representatives. And if so, you cannot have missed the strong representation of vociferous Caucasian males of a certain age. Theirs are not the only voices raised, but they are surely the loudest and most numerous.

Actually, it’s White women too:

Angry

A Democrat strategist commented,

the vocally disaffected represent a very real phenomenon that has been rising around the country since before Obama’s election. It is growing in the face of a damaged economy, a series of bank and Wall Street bailouts, and big-dollar government programs to stimulate jobs and stave off foreclosures.

I’ve never seen as angry an electorate as this one. …. They’re as scared as I’ve ever seen them, and that manifests into anger.

There is a general fear that the American dream is not going to be there for them or their children. … There is concern about trust broken between government and the people.

Angry White people. And we are not talking about elite Whites who wouldn’t have to worry about health care no matter what the government does. This is racially-based populism: The protest is coming from middle- and lower-middle-class Whites, not Blacks and Latinos in the same social classes.

And it’s about more than health care. A month ago it was the angry White people who support Sarah Palin. And before that, it was angry Whites participating in “tea parties” protesting the  stimulus bill.

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It’s not any specific issue, but a generalized fear that the country is slipping away from them — that the Obama presidency is moving America very rapidly into a country that they would not recognize and where they do not have political power. Our friend, Mark Potok, of the $PLC, comments, “Clearly, this president has set off a real rage. … Certain people look around and see this is not the country their white Christian forefathers built, and they are angry.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. These angry White people are quite right to fear such a transformation. The anti-White revolution is working beautifully. Legal and illegal immigration is gradually but noticeably transforming the country so that the White populist base will have decreasing political power. By my calculation, by 2012, the Republicans would have to attract around 63% of Whites to get a majority (assuming Whites continue to represent 90% of the Republican vote). In the ideal world of the left, however, this transformation would be carried out without anger and mass protest, apart from the occasional skinhead, swastika-painting fringe that replenish the coffers of organizations like the $PLC and the ADL. White people would sink peacefully into the sunset of American politics, happily joining multicultural coalitions in both parties.

The problem for the left is the anger. With huge majorities in both Houses of Congress and an Obama presidency that seemed committed to nationalized health care, the “progressives” are saying the Democrats should just push through a plan. Elections matter. We’ve got the power, so let’s do it.

But trampling on the sensibilities of what remains a large constituency is very risky. These voters are energized in a way they were not during the 2008 election where the media’s slobbering love affair with Obama (including Chris Matthews’ “thrill going up my leg” when Obama speaks), the failed Bush presidency, the horrible  economy, and John McCain (need I say more) kept populist passions low.

The White House seems to realize that simply having a large majority in Congress isn’t enough if a large angry minority is so enraged that they start storming the barricades with torches and pitchforks. Imagine the commentariat trying to explain away a 65–70% White vote for the Republicans in 2010 or 2012. The stark racial abyss of American politics would be staring everyone in the face. Best not to wake the sleeping giant until it’s really too powerless to matter much at all.

There are doubtless a great many anxieties behind this anger. Certainly many lower-and middle-class Whites have been devastated by the changes in the labor market brought about by massive immigration (including the H1-B program that imports skilled  workers), and many companies cutting health benefits because of the need to compete in a globalized economy in which American elites feel no obligation to protect American workers. And as immigration begins to transform cities in the heartland of America, more and more Americans are coming face to face with the future. Indeed, I suspect the next major outbreak of White anger  will be any attempt by the Obama administration to legalize the millions of illegals. Already, the administration seems to be scaling back its ambitions on the immigration front.

But I suspect that a large part of the fear is about what health care would be like if the progressive wing of the Democratic Party got its way. These middle class Whites envision themselves standing in line with Blacks, Latinos, legal and illegal immigrants, and everyone else. And they realize that in general the taxes of people like themselves are being used to support services for people quite a bit unlike themselves — people who pay proportionately far less of the tax burden and are part of the coalition of minorities that is the backbone of the Democratic Party, while 90% of the Republican vote comes from Whites.

From an evolutionary perspective, this is a classic case of a public goods issue in a multicultural society. As noted by Frank Salter http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=vdare&l=ur2&o=1, because of closer ties of kinship and culture, ethnically homogeneous societies are more likely to be open to redistributive policies such as social welfare and nationalized health care. European nationalized health care systems were initiated decades ago when those countries were ethnically homogeneous. In the US, the Medicare system was enacted in 1965 —  well before the multicultural onslaught.

Some enraged Whites may also have read about the aspects of the bill that make it “affirmative action on steroids,” including what amounts to a quota system for “underrepresented minorities” in medical schools. It’s one thing to have affirmative action professors teaching obscure subjects to college students. But do people really want affirmative action doctors performing heart surgery?

The problem for advocates of universal health care in the US is that this round of reform is being proposed at the precise point when general anxieties about America’s multicultural future are on the minds of a whole lot of White people. It’s not at all unreasonable for them to believe that universal health care will indeed be the embodiment of the multicultural nightmare of the  future. And it’s not at all unreasonable for them to be very angry about that.

Finally, in my recent fundraising appeal letter, I suggested that the next revolution — like the one that resulted in our current multicultural nightmare — will be a top-down revolution that begins by converting the elite opinion makers.  This anger among non-elite Whites suggests there is a possibility of a successful movement energized by non-elite Whites. In the health care debate, there certainly seems to be a prominent role of elite conservative media figures, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, in mobilizing hostility toward the Obama plan and validating the energy of the protests. The question remains: Will these elite conservative voices openly advocate what needs to be done for their constituency to really take back the country?

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. Email him.