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Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah—PART 2

November 7, 2021/15 Comments/in Featured Articles, The Arts and Culture, Western Culture/by Brenton Sanderson

Jewish activists protesting the 2010 production of The Ring by the LA Opera

Wagner’s Racial Thinking

In addition to his concern about the baleful Jewish influence on German culture, Wagner, under the influence of Darwinism and the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, became increasingly concerned about the fate of the White race generally. Wagner met Gobineau in Rome in 1876 and again in Venice in 1880 when he read the French author’s bestselling An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Wagner thought that Gobineau had demonstrated in this famous essay that “we should have no History of Man at all, had there been no movements, creations, and achievements of the White man,” and was taken with his pessimistic notion that Western society was doomed because miscegenation would inevitably lead to the degeneration of the White race. He nevertheless disagreed with Gobineau’s claim that this degeneration was unstoppable. In his essay “Hero-dom and Christianity,” Wagner writes that: “We cannot withhold our acknowledgment that the human family consists of irremediably disparate races, whereof the noblest well might rule the more ignoble, yet never raise them to their level by commixture, but simply sink to theirs.” The Jews, however, offered a unique exception to this general rule:

The Jew, on the contrary, is the most astounding instance of racial congruence ever offered by world history. Without a fatherland, a mother tongue midst every people’s land and tongue he finds himself again, in virtue of the unfailing instinct of his absolute and indelible idiosyncrasy: even commixture of blood does not hurt him; let Jew or Jewess intermarry with the most distinct of races, a Jew will always come to birth.[1]

While accepting many of Gobineau’s basic premises, Wagner, in his 1881 essay about the German people entitled “Know Thyself,” rejects the idea of Aryan superiority and writes about the “enormous disadvantage at which the German race… appears to stand against the Jewish.” Furthermore, when Gobineau stayed with the Wagners for five weeks in 1881, their conversations were punctuated with frequent arguments. Cosima Wagner’s diary recounts one exchange in which Wagner “positively exploded in favor of Christianity as compared to racial theory.” Wagner proposed that a “true Christianity” could provide for the moral harmonization of all races, which could, in turn, help prevent the physical unification of the races, and thereby the degeneration of the White race through miscegenation:

Incomparably fewer in individual numbers than the lower races, the ruin of the white races may be referred to their having been obliged to mix with them; whereby, as remarked already, they suffered more from the loss of their purity than the others could gain by the ennobling of their blood. … To us Equality is only thinkable as based upon a universal moral concord, such as we can but deem true Christianity elect to bring about.[2]

Wagner had first developed the idea of a revolutionary new Christianity in the opera text Jesus of Nazareth (1849), which depicted Jesus as redeeming man from the materialism of the “Roman world … and still more, of that [Jewish] world subject to the Romans. … I saw the modern world of the present day as a prey to the worthlessness akin to that which surrounded Jesus.”[3] Wagner here drew heavily on Kant’s critique of Judaism. Enslaved to the Law, the Jews had rejected Jesus’ message of love; Jewish egoism and lovelessness had led Judas to betray Him. The Jews had preferred “power, domination… [and] the loveless forces of property and law, symbolized by Judaism.”[4] Wagner’s hope for the emergence of a “new Christianity” to act as a bulwark against miscegenation and the degeneration of the White race has not transpired, although some Jewish commentators see it as having being realized in the ideology and practices of National Socialism.

For the Jewish music critic Larry Solomon, in Richard Wagner “all the racist historical models from Luther to Fichte, Feuerbach, Gobineau, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Chamberlain, come to full maturity.”[5] Yet, despite the irate epithets routinely directed at Wagner, most of his assertions are objectively true—not least his many warnings about the dangers of the Jewish economic and cultural domination of Western nations. The evidence shows that the races are unequal intellectually and physically, and race mixing does lead (on average) to the cognitive decline of the more intelligent racial party to the admixture. It should also be noted that Wagner’s racial views were mainstream opinions at the time he expressed them—including among the leading Jewish intellectuals I cited in my review of Jews & Race—Writings on Identity and Difference 1880-1940.

Wagner’s views on the Jewish Question strongly paralleled those of the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl. Both Wagner and Herzl saw the Jews as a distinct and foreign group in Europe. Herzl saw anti-Semitism as “an understandable reaction to Jewish defects” brought about by the Jewish persecution of gentiles. Jews had, he claimed, been educated by Judaism to be “leeches” and possessed “frightful financial power.”[6] For Herzl, the Jews were a money worshipping people incapable of understanding any other motives than money. Kevin MacDonald notes in Separation and its Discontents that Herzl argued that “a prime source of modern anti-Semitism was that emancipation had brought Jews into direct economic competition with the gentile middle classes. Anti-Semitism based on resource competition was rational.” Herzl “insisted that one could not expect a majority to ‘let itself be subjugated’ by formally scorned outsiders that they had just released from the ghetto.”[7] Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim notes that “Wagner’s conclusion about the Jewish problem was not only verbally similar to Herzl’s” but that “both Wagner and Herzl favored the emigration of the German Jews.”[8] Despite their convergence of opinion on the Jewish Question, Herzl avoided the opprobrium posthumously heaped on Wagner; intellectual consistency being the first casualty of Jewish ethnic warfare through the construction of culture.

Jewish Responses to Wagner’s Ideas

Basically ignoring whether Wagner’s views on Jewish influence on German art and culture had any validity, a long line of Jewish music writers and intellectuals have furiously attacked the composer for just having expressed them. In his essay “Know Thyself,” Wagner writes of the fierce backlash that followed his drawing “notice to the Jews’ inaptitude for taking a productive share in our Art,” which was “met by the utmost indignation of Jews alike and Germans; it became quite dangerous to breathe the word ‘Jew’ with a doubtful accent.”[9] Wagner was surprised by the hornet’s nest he had stirred up, and in a letter to the composer Franz Liszt noted that “I seem to have struck home with terrible force, which suits my purpose admirably, since that is precisely the sort of shock that I wanted to give them. For they will always remain our masters—that much is as certain as the fact that it is not our princes who are now our masters, but bankers and philistines.”[10]

Wagner’s critique of Jewish influence on German art and culture could not be dismissed as the ravings of an unintelligent and ignorant fool. Richard Wagner was, by common consent, one of the most brilliant human beings to have ever lived, and his views on the Jewish Question were cogent and rational. Accordingly, Jewish critics soon settled on the response of ascribing psychiatric disorders to the composer, and this has been the stock approach ever since. As early as 1872, the German-Jewish psychiatrist Theodor Puschmann offered a psychological assessment of Wagner that was widely reported in the German press. He claimed Wagner was suffering from “chronic megalomania, paranoia … and moral derangement.”[11] Cesare Lombroso, the famous nineteenth-century Italian-Jewish criminologist, branded Wagner “a sexual psychopath.”[12]

Later, drawing on this approach, and with the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis and Expressionism in art and music, the habit arose of treating Wagner’s operas as journeys into the inner life of their creator. Scruton observes that:

From the first days of psychoanalysis, Wagner’s works were singled out as both confirming and demanding a psychoanalytic reading. Their super-saturated longing, their cry for redemption through sexual love, their exultation of Women as the vehicle of purity and sacrifice—all these features have naturally suggested, to the psychoanalytic mind, incestuous childhood fantasies, involving a fixation on the mother as wife. Such is the interpretation maintained by [the Jewish psychoanalysts] Max Graf and Otto Rank, both writing in 1911. Thereafter the habit of reading the works in terms of the life became firmly established in the literature.¹¹⁸³

Such interpretations have strongly influenced the discussion of Wagner’s works—“revenge on Wagner” has for some time been “an almost obligatory part of the intellectual’s apprenticeship.” Books like Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s Wagner Androgyne and Joachim Kohler’s Richard Wagner: Last of the Titans continue a now venerable tradition in regarding “anti-Semitism as the meaning and Oedipal confusion as the cause of just about everything the master composed.” Even the respected British musicologist Barry Millington frequently writes “as though anti-Semitism is somewhere near the top of Wagner’s musical and intellectual agenda.”

The denigration of Wagner in the post-World War II era, spearheaded by Jewish musicologists and intellectuals like T.W. Adorno, established the pattern of treating his works as expressions of a deeply pathological personality, where the musicological task at hand was to “analyse them as exhibits in a medical case study, and to create the impression that we can best understand them not for what they say but for what they reveal about their creator.” Adorno condemned Wagner as a symbol of all that was hateful in the culture of nineteenth-century Germany. Scruton notes how Adorno’s criticisms of Wagner were deeply influenced by “the Holocaust and all that it meant concerning the roots of German nationalism.” Wagner’s autobiography is regularly trawled for evidence of psychopathology and “for the proof—however fleeting and arcane—that in this or that respect he was just as ordinary as the rest of us, even though the mind revealed in the book is one of the most extraordinary and comprehensive that has ever existed.”

T.W. Adorno

In 1968, the Jewish writer Robert Gutman published a biography of Wagner (Richard Wagner: the Man, his Mind and his Music) in which he portrayed his subject as a racist, psychopathic, proto-Nazi monster. Gutman’s scholarship was questioned at the time, but this did not prevent his book from becoming a best-seller, and as one source notes: “An entire generation of students has been encouraged to accept Gutman’s caricature of Richard Wagner. Even intelligent people, who have either never read Wagner’s writings or tried to penetrate them and failed … have read Gutman’s book and accepted his opinions as facts.”[13] The long-time music critic for The New York Times, the Jewish Harold Schonberg, was one of them, describing Wagner in his Lives of the Great Composers as “Amoral, hedonistic, selfish, virulently racist, arrogant, filled with gospels of the superman … and the superiority of the German race, he stands for all that is unpleasant in human character.”[14] Likewise, for Jewish music critic David Hurwitz, Wagner was “an obnoxious, jackboot-stomping Nazi pygmy.” He regards Verdi, that other great opera composer of the nineteenth century, as “so overwhelmingly more important and deeper and more emotionally significant and a more finished and talented composer than Wagner could ever aspire to being.”[15] According to the composer Thomas Adès, Wagner is more than bad; he is pathologically bad, and his “music grows parasitically … It has a laboratory atmosphere—a sort of fungus.”

Another prominent refrain from Jewish commentators like Jacob Katz, the author of The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner’s Anti-Semitism, is that Wagner’s concern about the Jewish influence on German culture stemmed from his morbid jealousy of all the brilliant Jews around him like Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Heine. Taking up this theme, the music writer David Goldman insists that “Wagner ripped off the scenario for his opera ‘The Flying Dutchman’ from Heine and knocked off Mendelssohn’s ‘Fingal’s Cave’ overture in the ‘Dutchman’s’ evocation of the sea. Wagner tried to cover his guilty tracks by denouncing Jewish composers he emulated, including Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wagner was not just a Jew-hater, then, but a backstabbing self-promoter who defamed the Jewish artists he emulated and who (in Meyerbeer’s case) had advanced his career.”[16] Boroson, writing in the Jewish Standard, likewise claims Wagner’s envy of Meyerbeer’s success “played a pivotal role in Wagner’s suddenly becoming a Jew-hater.”[17]

Numerous sources trace Wagner’s anti-Semitism to his perception that a clique of powerful Jews (led by Meyerbeer and Halevy) had thwarted the staging of his Rienzi in Paris, and “at his dependence on money lenders, mostly presumably Jewish, at this time.”[18] Carr notes that from early in his career Wagner’s profligacy “put him in hock with moneylenders who were usually Jews.” Already in Magdeburg where he courted his first wife Minna, “he railed at having to deal with the ‘Jewish scum’ because ‘our people’ offered no credit. In Paris he pawned his goods to Jews and did work he felt was menial for, amongst others, Maurice Schlesinger, a Jewish music publisher. Schlesinger’s cash helped ward off starvation but that made the struggling composer feel no better.”[19] Magee notes that the two and half years Wagner spent in Paris trying and failing to establish himself was “the worst period of deprivation and humiliation he ever had to suffer.”[20]

Invoking Freud, the Jewish music writer Marc A. Weiner in his Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, claims that: “Wagner’s vehement hatred of Jews was based on a model of projection involving a deep-seated fear of precisely those features within the Self (diminutive stature, nervous demeanor and avarice, as well as lascivious nature) that are projected upon and then recognized and stigmatized in the hated Other.”[21] Weiner’s view echoes that of the Jewish psychiatrist Theodore Rubin who views anti-Semitism as a “symbol sickness” that involves envy, low self-esteem and projection of one’s inner conflicts onto a stereotyped other.[22]

All these various theories, where Wagner’s criticism of Jewish influence is made a scapegoat for his own psychological frustrations, vastly overemphasize the irrational sources of prejudice, and effectively serve to clothe Jews in defensive innocence. According to these theories, anti-Jewish statements are never rational but invariably the product of a warped mind, while Jewish critiques of Europeans always have a thoroughly rational basis.

A Self-hating Jew?

Another well-worn theory has it that Wagner may have been part-Jewish, and that his anti-Semitism was his way of dealing this unedifying prospect (a variation of the “self-hating Jew” hypothesis). It is claimed that Wagner’s biological father was not his presumed father, the police registrar Friedrich Wagner who died of typhus shortly after Wagner’s birth, but his stepfather, the successful actor and painter Ludwig Geyer. However, there is no evidence that Geyer had any Jewish roots. In his biography of Wagner, John Chancellor states plainly that he had none, and “He [Geyer] claimed the same sturdy descent as the Wagners. His pedigree also went back to the middle of the seventeenth century and his forefathers were also, for the most part, organists in small Thuringian towns and villages.”[23] Magee is even more categorical, stating, “Geyer was not Jewish, and it had never occurred to anyone who knew him to think that he might be. He came from a long line of church musicians; for generations his forebears had been Lutheran cantors and organists in the town of Eisleben. There was nothing Jewish about his appearance that might have misled people who were ignorant of his background.”[24]

Ludwig Geyer

Chancellor blames Friedrich Nietzsche for first raising the question of Geyer’s possible Jewishness to add extra sting to his charge of illegitimacy, after the philosopher famously fell out with Wagner after years of close friendship. In his 1888 book Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner), Nietzsche claimed that Wagner’s father was Geyer, and made the pun that “Ein Geyer ist beinahe schon ein Adler” (A vulture is almost an eagle)—Geyer also being the German word for a vulture and Adler being a common (but not exclusively) Jewish surname. Magee, while agreeing that Nietzsche undoubtedly intended to rile Wagner with the suggestion of his possible Jewish ancestry, believes Nietzsche’s words also represented a jibe of a quite different kind.

Wagner, a provincial with a regional accent, a lower-middle class family background, and a long personal history of penury, had risen late in life to walk with kings and emperors; and somewhere along the way (strikingly reminiscent of Shakespeare, this, as so often) he allotted himself a coat of arms. This was revealingly (it shows what he thought his descent was), the “Geyer” coat of arms, prominently featuring a vulture against the shield while the kings and emperors would have been displaying their royal or imperial eagles. I think it is more than likely that Nietzsche was being sarcastic about Wagner’s self-promotion to the arms-bearing ranks of society with his “a vulture is almost an eagle.”[25]

If, as has been often claimed, Wagner was concerned with denying the possibility that Geyer may have been his father (because of Geyer’s possible Jewish ancestry), why would he have adopted the Geyer coat of arms and insist it be prominently displayed on the cover of his autobiography? This obvious fact did not deter Gutman who contended that Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima tried to outdo each other in their anti-Semitism because they both had Jewish roots to conceal. While offering no proof Geyer was Jewish, Gutman insists that Wagner in his later years discovered letters from Geyer to his mother which led him to suspect that Geyer was his biological father, and that Geyer might have been Jewish. Wagner’s anti-Semitism was, according to Gutman, his way of dealing with the fear that people would think he was Jewish. Derek Strahan recycles this discredited theme, noting that:

Geyer’s affair with Wagner’s mother pre-dated the death of Wagner’s presumed father, Friedrich Wagner, a Police Registrar who was ill at the time young Richard was conceived, and who died six months after his birth. Soon after this, Wagner’s mother Johanna married Ludwig Geyer. Richard Wagner himself was known as Richard Geyer until, at the age of 14, he had his name legally changed to Wagner. Apparently he had taken some abuse at school because of his Jewish-sounding name. Could his later anti-Semitism have been motivated, at least in part, by sensitivity to this abuse, and by a kind of pre-emptive denial to prevent difficulties and suffering arising from prejudice?[26]

According to the only evidence we have on this point (Cosima’s diaries, 26 December 1868) Wagner “did not believe” that Ludwig Geyer was his real father. Cosima did, however, once note a resemblance between Wagner’s son Siegfried and a picture of Geyer.[27] Pursuing the theme that anyone who expresses antipathy toward Jews must be psychologically unhealthy, Solomon draws a parallel between Wagner and Adolf Hitler in that “both feared they had Jewish paternity, which led to fierce denial and destructive hatred.”[28] For Magee, these theories, which are now widely entrenched in the Wagner literature, are the “crassest falsehood.” Moreover, “the idea that Geyer might have been Jewish, or even that Wagner thought that he might have been, is pure fabrication, distilled nonsense.”[29]

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here and here.

Go to Part 3.

[1] Richard Wagner, “Religion and Art,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Vol. 6 (London: 1897; repr. 1966), 211-52. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wlpr0126.htm

[2] Richard Wagner, “Hero-dom and Christianity,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 6 (London: 1897; repr. 1966), 275-84. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/waghero.htm

[3] Richard Wagner, “Know Thyself,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 6 (London: 1897; repr. 1966), 264-74. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagknow.htm

[4] Quoted in Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 361.

[5] Larry Solomon, Wagner and Hitler, (Online article: 2002) http://solomonsmusic.net/WagHit.htm

[6] MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 57.

[7] Ibid., 54.

[8] Daniel Barenboim, “Wagner, Israel and the Palestinians,” Blog post, Undated. http://www.danielbarenboim.com/index.php?id=72

[9] Richard Wagner, “Know Thyself,” op. cit.

[10] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 352.

[11] Quoted in Martin Kitchen, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany, op. cit.

[12] Christopher Nicholson, Richard and Adolf: Did Richard Wagner Incite Adolf Hitler to Commit the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2007) 131.

[13]

[14] Harold Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 268.

[15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ax4N2B4GNs&t=662s

[16] David P. Goldman, “Muted: Performances of Wagner’s music are effectively banned in Israel. Should they be?” Tablet, August 17, 2011. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/75247/muted

[17] Warren Boroson, “Richard Wagner—The Devil Who Had Good Tunes,” Jewish Standard, August 7, 2009, 16.

[18] Michael Steen, The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (London: Icon Books, 2005), 464.

[19] Carr, The Wagner Clan, 83.

[20] Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 26.

[21] Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 6.

[22] Theodore Isaac Rubin, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind (New York: Barricade, 2011), 12.

[23] John Chancellor, Wagner (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 6.

[24] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 358.

[25] Ibid., 360.

[26] Derek Strahan, “Was Wagner Jewish: an old question newly revisited,” Online article, Undated. http://www.revolve.com.au/polemic/wagner.html

[27] Quoted in John Deathridge, Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 1.

[28] Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit.

[29] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 358.

Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah—PART 1

November 6, 2021/43 Comments/in Featured Articles, The Arts and Culture, Western Culture/by Brenton Sanderson

Note: This is a greatly expanded and updated version of an essay that first appeared on TOO in 2012.

A long line of books and documentaries have explored Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitism and his putative role as the spiritual and intellectual godfather to Adolf Hitler. In the Jewish-dominated cultural milieu of the contemporary West, this meme has taken on such a life that Wagner’s name is seldom mentioned today without the obligatory disclaimer that, while admittedly (and unfortunately) a musical genius, his reputation is forever sullied by his standing as a morally-loathsome anti-Semite. A consequence of this is that, for many people, Wagner “has become symbolic of everything evil in the world.”[1]

Richard Wagner was a one-man artistic and intellectual movement whose shadow fell across all of his contemporaries and most of his successors. Other composers had influence; Wagner had a way of thinking named after him. A significant biographical feature of the composers that followed Wagner was how they grappled with his legacy. Some, like Bruckner and Strauss, imitated him; some, like Debussy and Bartok, rejected him; and some, like Hugo Wolf were almost paralyzed by the immensity of his achievement. Wagner’s influence extended to writers and intellectuals like Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Mann, Baudelaire, Eliot, Nietzsche and Shaw. Given his huge impact on Western culture, Bryan Magee has strong grounds for his contention that “Wagner has had a greater influence than any other single artist on the culture of our age.”[2]

Wagner was a deeply polarizing figure in his lifetime, and no other composer has provoked such extreme antipathy or adulation. It has been said that his music has been loved and hated more immoderately than that of any other composer. Wagner was notoriously unscrupulous in his personal life—but his sexual and financial misdemeanors pale into insignificance beside the vastness and originality of his compositions. Even the anti-Wagnerites have had to acknowledge the enormity of his achievement, and his most fanatical detractors (a great many of them Jewish) have reluctantly agreed with the Russian composer Tchaikovsky, who wrote of the Ring: “Whatever one might think of Wagner’s titanic work, no one can deny the monumental nature of the task he set himself, and which he has fulfilled; nor the heroic inner strength needed to complete the task. It was truly one of the greatest artistic endeavors which the human mind has ever conceived.”[3]

The essence of Wagnerian opera lies in the music which deepens and subtilizes the overt meaning of the storyline. Profound, far-reaching psychic changes are accomplished through the music with little or no help from the words, and Wagner’s oeuvre includes some of the most powerful scenes in all opera. Wagner’s music dramas are notable for their use of leitmotifs, musical phrases associated with an idea or character. Not simply accompanying the libretto, they reveal the subconscious feelings of the characters or anticipate what will happen later in the story. There is no one-for-one correspondence between a leitmotif and the concept, idea or emotion that is first attached to it. The leitmotif has a potential to develop—but to develop musically. Scruton observed how “by implanting the principal of musical development in the heart of the drama Wagner is able to lift the action out of the events portrayed on the stage, and to endow it with a universal, cosmic and religious significance.”

One hundred and forty years after his death, Wagner retains a cultural prominence that surpasses any of his contemporaries. The excellence of his music has ensured its popularity has never waned, and Wagner is still well represented on recordings, on radio, and in the theater. Wealthy Wagner devotees travel the world in pursuit of live performances of his fifteen-hour, four-night opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Every year thousands still make a pilgrimage to the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth where in 1876 he inaugurated a festival devoted to his own music. The appeal of Wagner’s music, libretti and stagecraft have ensured his music dramas remain useful to opera companies around the world as a reliable income source, even in straitened economic times.

It is, however, Wagner’s standing as “a notorious anti-Semite,” and the intellectual establishment’s obsession with him on this basis, that has increasingly shaped his image in the popular consciousness. Wagner’s reputation is now so thoroughly tainted that one almost never encounters a serious examination of his ideas. For some, Wagner’s anti-Semitism diminishes or even invalidates his accomplishment as a composer. As the commentator Adrian Mourby noted: “The notion that artists don’t have to be as beautiful as the works they create is a commonplace now—except in the case of Wagner. ‘Judaism in Music’ is what has made him the unforgivable exception.”[4]

Judaism in Music

Kevin MacDonald observes in Separation and its Discontents that Richard Wagner is perhaps the best known intellectual who focused on the Jewish domination of culture.[5] Wagner first expounded on what he saw as the pernicious Jewish influence on German art and culture in his 1850 tract Das Judenthum in der Musik (usually translated as Judaism in Music or Jewishness in Music), which was published under pseudonym in 1850.[6] Wagner’s essay took up the theme of a previous article by Theodor Uhlig in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik that was critical of the “Hebraic art taste” that Uhlig thought manifest in Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer’s grand opera Le Prophète.

Wagner attempted in his essay to account for the “popular dislike of the Jewish nature,” and “the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews.” He concludes that Germans instinctively disliked Jews due to their alien appearance, speech and behavior, noting that “with all our speaking and writing in favor of the Jews’ emancipation [i.e., the result of German high-mindedness and dedication to abstract principles of human rights], we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them.”[7] Wagner here simply stated an obvious fact: that Germans, like all other racial and ethnic groups, were ethnocentric, and this colored their interactions with a fiercely-competitive, immensely ethnocentric resident outgroup like the Jews. According to Wagner, “We are deliberately distorting our own nature if we feel ashamed to proclaim the natural revulsion aroused in us by Jewishness. … Despite our pretended liberalism we still feel this aversion.”[8]

A 1910 English language edition of Judaism in Music

Wagner argued in Judaism in Music that Jewish musicians were only capable of producing music that was shallow and artificial because they had no connection to the genuine spirit of the German people. He observed that: “So long as the separate art of music had a real organic life-need in it down to the epochs of Mozart and Beethoven, there was nowhere to be found a Jewish composer. … Only when a body’s inner death is manifest, do outside elements win the power of lodgment in it—yet merely to destroy it.”[9] Jews had not fully assimilated into German culture, so did not identify with and merge themselves into the deepest layers of that culture, including its religious and ethnic influences—the Volksgeist. According to Wagner, “our whole European art and civilization … remained to the Jew a foreign tongue.” The Jews “through an intercourse of two millennia with European nations” had never fully abandoned the posture of “a cold, nay more, a hostile looker-on.” The entry of the Jews into nineteenth-century European society was, for Wagner, the infiltration of an alien and antagonistic group whose success symbolized the spiritual and creative crisis of German and European culture.

The same thesis was advanced by Zionist intellectuals like Ahad Ha’Am (the pseudonym of Asher Ginsburg). Kevin MacDonald notes that both Wagner and Ginsburg “developed the idea that Jews could not have their own artistic spirit because they failed to identify completely with the surrounding culture.”[10] In Wagner’s view, higher culture springs ultimately from folk culture. In the absence of Jewish influence, German music would once again reflect the deeper layers of German folk culture. For Wagner, “Judaic works of music often produce on us the impression as though a poem of Goethe’s, for instance, were being rendered in the Jewish jargon. … Just as words and constructions are hurled together in this jargon with wondrous inexpressiveness, so does the Jewish musician hurl together the diverse forms and styles of every age and every master. Packed side by side, we find the formal idiosyncrasies of all the schools, in motleyest chaos.”[11]

For Wagner, Jewish art was characterized by imitativeness, and therefore, by shallowness and superficiality. This was exemplified by the compositions that dominated the music scene of his time. From the depth and intensity of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, the music of the concert hall had descended to the comparative superficiality of Mendelssohn—who had diverted the “tempests of revolution” into soothing salon music. Similarly, opera had fallen from the musical-dramatic peaks of Gluck and Mozart to the barren flatlands of Meyerbeer and Halevy. For Wagner, all that was meretricious in Grand Opera could be ascribed to the Jewishness of its composers—whose work amounted to a series of glib surface effects. He writes: “Of necessity what comes out of attempts by Jews to make art must have the property of coldness, of non-involvement, to the point of being trivial and absurd. We are forced to categorize the Jewish period in modern music as the period of consummate uncreativeness—stagnation run to seed.”

Writing in 1988, philosopher and cultural historian Bryan Magee observes that “to write works of this kind was to make use of art as a mere means—a means of entertainment, a means of giving pleasure and getting to be liked, a means of achieving status, money, fame. For Jews it was a means of making their way in an alien society.”[12] It certainly worked for Meyerbeer, with the first hundred performances of Le Prophète in Berlin alone netting him 750,000 marks—almost 200,000 marks more than the entire sum Wagner received over nearly two decades from his patron King Ludwig II of Bavaria.[13]

Wagner’s thesis has been roundly condemned by Jewish commentators, and yet the Jewish academic David Rodwin, while labelling Wagner’s essay “a vile anti-Semitic screed,” admits there is substantial truth in the “aesthetic eclecticism” that Wagner identified as a unifying feature of Jewish composers.[14] Regarding Wagner’s attribution of “imitativeness” as a particularly Jewish trait, Jacob Katz likewise acknowledges that: “Jewish qualities may quite naturally appear—for better or for worse—in artistic creations of Jews, even of those who have joined non-Jewish culture. It would therefore be preposterous to dismiss categorically all observations from the mouths of anti-Semites as prejudicial misconceptions.”[15] Magee calls Wagner’s thesis “unbelievably original” and notes:

One does not need to share Wagner’s view of Mendelssohn, who came from a Christianized and highly assimilated family, to see that his argument is substantially correct. … A really great creative artist is one who, in freely expressing his own needs, aspirations, and conflicts, articulates those of an entire society. This is made possible by the fact that, through his earliest relationships, mother tongue, upbringing, and all his first experience of life, the cultural heritage on which he has entered at birth is woven into the whole fabric of his personality. He has a thousand roots in it of which he is unaware, nourishing him below the level of consciousness, so that when he speaks for himself he quite unconsciously speaks for others. Now in Wagner’s time it was impossible for a Jewish artist to be in this position. The ghettos of Western Europe had only begun to be opened in the wake of the French Revolution, and their abolition was going on throughout the nineteenth century. The Jewish composers of Wagner’s day were among the very first emancipated Jews, pastless in the society in which they were living and working. They spoke its language with, literally, a foreign accent.[16]

According to Magee, Wagner failed to notice that he was describing a transitional phenomenon—that the creations of Jewish composers would inevitably become “deeper” and more culturally authentic as the descendants of emancipated Jews assimilated into their host societies. Magee cites the emergence of Mahler and Schoenberg in the late nineteenth century to illustrate his point.

Richard Wagner

Drawing on the thesis of Heinrich Laube’s book Struensee, Wagner argued in Judaism in Music that Jews had also degraded German art by introducing their commercializing spirit into it. In February of 1848, at the funeral of Wagner’s mother, Laube had commiserated with his friend Wagner, equating the sadness of the hour with their mutual despair at the state of German art and culture, noting that “On the way to the station, we discussed the unbearable burden that seemed to us to lie like a dead weight on every noble effort made to resist the tendency of the time to sink into utter worthlessness.” As the preface to Struensee makes clear, this “worthlessness” consisted in the flowering of Jewish commercial values. Wagner’s only remedy was to “plunge dully and coldly into the only thing that could cheer me and warm me, the working out of my Lohengrin and my studies of German antiquity.”[17] Regarding the Jewish tendency to convert art into a branch of commerce, Wagner writes:

[All] is turned to money by the Jew. Who thinks of noticing that the guileless looking scrap of paper is slimy with the blood of countless generations? What the heroes of the arts … have invented … from two millennia of misery, today the Jew converts into an art-bazaar. … We have no need first to substantiate the Jewification [Verjudung] of modern art. It springs to the eye and thrusts upon the senses. … But if emancipation from the yoke of Judaism appears to us the greatest of necessities, we must hold it crucial above all to assemble our forces for this war of liberation. But we shall never gain these forces by merely defining the phenomenon [of Judaism] in an abstract way. This will be done only by accurately knowing the nature of that involuntary feeling of ours which utters itself as an instinctive repugnance against the Jew’s prime essence. … Then we can rout the demon from the field … where he has sheltered under a twilit darkness … which we good-natured humanists ourselves have conferred on him.[18]

For Wagner, Judaism was the embodiment of the bourgeois money-egoist spirit, and he observes that: “When our social evolution reached that turning-point at which the power of money to bestow rank began to be openly admitted, it was no longer possible to keep the Jews at bay. They had enough money to be admitted to society.” Wagner believed that Jews “will continue to rule as long as money remains the power to which all our activities are subjugated.” He later confessed to his fellow composer friend (and future father-in-law) Franz Liszt, “I felt a long-repressed hatred for this Jewish money-world, and this hatred is as necessary to my nature as gall is to blood. An opportunity arose when their damnable scribbling annoyed me most, and so I broke forth at last.”[19] In Judaism in Music Wagner finds the plea for Jewish emancipation to be “more than commonly naive, since we see ourselves rather in the position of fighting for emancipation from the Jews. The Jew is in fact, in the current state of the world, already more than emancipated. He rules.”

While stressing the harmful effects of the Jewish financial domination of German society, Wagner believed that the Jewish manipulation of language and art was infinitely more pernicious than their control over money. In his essay “What is German?” (1878, but based on a draft written in the 1860s) he states that culture, not economy, lies at the heart of German identity, and that Jews had bought the German soul and turned German Kultur into a sham, a mere image; and in doing this had destroyed “one of the finest natural dispositions in all the human race.”[20]

Wagner believed that the German people had been endowed with a uniquely rich inner life which had been forged during the crucible of the Thirty Years War. The body of the nation had almost been annihilated, “but the German spirit had passed through,” and amidst the physical ruins the Germans once again realized they were a nation of the spirit. This spirit had been preserved in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the German spiritual mission in the world was to proclaim “that the Beautiful and the Noble came not into the world for sake of profit, nay, not for the sake of even fame and recognition.”[21] Wagner thus viewed the new festival theater he built in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth in 1876 as the Grail Castle of a reborn, spiritual Germany. Far from the cosmopolitan theaters owned and operated by city-dwelling Jews, Bayreuth would allow the German nation to regain a sense of its true self by experiencing the mythic force of its own ancient epic—the Nibelungen. Through Bayreuth, Wagner wanted to reclaim German art and culture from that “race of mediators and negotiators whose influence was … to spread its truly ‘international’ power more and more widely over Germany.”[22]

Wagner repeatedly observed (and lamented) the fact Jews had stormed the fortress of German high culture and had successfully “brought the public art-taste of our time between the busy fingers of the Jew.”[23] A host of Jewish middlemen had gained a hold over the critical press, publishing, theaters, operas, orchestras, art galleries and agencies. This Jewish cultural ascendancy in Germany was, of course, to reach its zenith in the Weimar Republic. Despite his stated views, Wagner twice refused to sign the “Anti-Semites Petition” of 1880 (presented to Bismarck) which complained about the very economic domination that so troubled him. The Petition, which quickly won 225,000 signatures, stated:

Wherever Christian and Jew enter into social relations, we see the Jew as master, the indigenous Christian population in a subservient position. The Jew takes part only to a negligible extent in the heavy labor of the great mass of the nation. But the fruits of his [the German’s] labor are reaped mainly by the Jew. By far the largest part of the capital which national labor produces is in Jewish hands. … Not only do the proudest palaces of our large cities belong to Jewish masters whose fathers and grandfathers, huckstering and peddling, crossed the frontiers into our fatherland, but rural holdings too, that most significant preservative basis of our political structure fall more and more into the hands of the Jews. … What we strive for is solely the emancipation of the German Volk from a form of alien domination which it cannot endure for any length of time.[24]

Cosima Wagner gave several explanations for her husband’s refusal to sign the petition, among them that he had already done as much as he could for the cause, that a petition he had signed against vivisection had failed, and that the new appeal was addressed in servile language to Bismarck, who by this time Wagner loathed.[25] Wagner deplored the “Jewishness” of the new German empire, which he thought, thanks to Bismarck, had turned out to be a real-politischer state, rather than a truly German one. In 1878, Wagner wrote that “Bismarck is creating German unity, but he has no conception of its nature. … His conduct is a disgrace for Germany … his decisions have brought forth from the Jews a petition of thanks.” When Bismarck spoke out against the Anti-Semites Petition it only confirmed Wagner in his conviction that Bismarck had “a pact with the Jews.”[26]

For Roger Scruton, central to Wagner’s genius was his determination to use his art to escape from the increasingly commercialized world of art he detested—a world “where value is price and price is value,” and where entertainment is considered more important than art. Wagner escaped “to a garret, high above the market place” in conscious reaction against the sentimentality and disingenuousness of the art and music at his time.

The operas of Wagner attempt to dignify the human being in something like the way he might be dignified by an uncorrupted common culture. Acutely conscious of the death of God, Wagner proposed man as his own redeemer and art as a transfiguring rite of passage to a higher world. The suggestion is visionary, and its impact on modern culture so great that the shockwaves are still overtaking us. … In the mature operas of Wagner our civilization gave voice for the last time to its idea of the heroic, through music that strives to endorse that idea to the full extent of its power. And because Wagner was a composer of supreme genius, perhaps the only one to have taken forward the intense inner language forged by Beethoven and to have used it to conquer the psychic spaces that Beethoven shunned, everything he wrote in his mature idiom has the ring of truth, and every note is both absolutely right and profoundly surprising.[27]

Wagner fled from the commercialized world of art into the inner realm of the imagination. He believed the idealism and heroism of a bygone age could be rekindled again. He strove to create a new music public that would not just identify with the Germanic heroic ideal, but embrace it as part of an idealistic nationalism that eschewed the bourgeois values of the mid-nineteenth century. In this endeavor, he strived to connect at an emotional rather than a rational level with his audience. As Wagner once wrote of his Ring cycle: “I shall within these four evenings succeed in artistically conveying my purpose to the emotional—not the critical—understanding of the spectators.”[28] This was in keeping with his dictum that art should be “the presentation of religion in a lively form.”

It was precisely this quality in Wagner’s works that most repelled the Frankfurt School music theorist and leading Wagner critic T.W. Adorno, who likened Wagner’s famous system of leitmotifs to advertising jingles in the way they imprinted themselves on the memory. For Adorno, Wagner’s musical innovations led to feelings of disorientation and intoxication that seduced audiences and rendered them docile and dangerously susceptible to political persuasion. In every crowd applauding a Wagnerian work, Adorno insisted, lurked “the old virulent evil” of “demagogy.” Elizabeth Whitcombe notes that

Adorno believed that Wagner’s work is “proselytizing” and “collective-narcissistic.” 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 also not surprising that Adorno, as a self-consciously Jewish intellectual, would find such music abhorrent.[29]

Adorno’s jaundiced assessment of Wagner was encapsulated in Woody Allen’s quip that: “When I hear Wagner I have the irresistible urge to invade Poland.” Scruton points out that Wagner’s attempt to engage his audiences at the emotional level of religion (which so perturbed Adorno) was already doomed when Wagner first conceived it. The main problem being that:

[Wagner’s] sacerdotal presumptions have never ceased to alienate those who feel threatened by his message. Hence modern producers, embarrassed by dramas that make a mockery of their way of life, decide in their turn to make a mockery of the dramas [in so-called Regietheater/Eurotrash productions]. Of course, even today, musicians and singers, responding as they must to the urgency and sincerity of the music, do their best to produce the sounds that Wagner intended. But the action is invariably caricatured, wrapped in inverted commas, and reduced to the dimensions of the television sitcom. Sarcasm and satire run riot on the stage, not because they have anything to prove or say in the shadow of this unsurpassably noble music, but because nobility has become intolerable. The producer strives to distract the audience from Wagner’s message, and to mock every heroic gesture, lest the point of the drama should finally come home.

As Michael Tanner has argued, in his succinct and penetrating defense of the composer, modern productions attempt to “domesticate” Wagner, to bring his dramas down from the exalted sphere in which the music places them, to the world of human trivia, usually in order to make a “political statement” which, being both blatant and banal, succeeds only in cancelling the rich ambiguities of the drama. In contemporary Wagner productions we see exactly what the transition from modernism to the “post-modern” world involves, namely, the final rejection of high culture as a redemptive force and the ruination of the sacred in its last imagined form.[30]

In the conclusion to Judaism and Music, Wagner asserts of the Jews that “only one thing can redeem you from the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasverus—going under!”[31] Although this has been taken by some commentators to denote actual physical annihilation, in the context of the essay it refers to the eradication of Jewish separateness and traditions. Wagner advises Jews to follow the example of the German-Jewish political writer and satirist Ludwig Börne by abandoning Judaism. In this way Jews will take part in “this regenerative work of deliverance through self-annulment; then we are one and un-dissevered!”

Wagner was calling for the assimilation of Jews into mainstream German culture and society. He thus offered to take Hermann Levi, the first conductor of his last opera Parsifal, to be baptized. Under the influence of Darwinian thinking (promoted in Germany by Ernst Häckel), Wagner later came to favor expulsion over conversion, and thus paralleled the trajectory of German anti-Semitism over the course of the nineteenth century, which “shifted from demands for Jewish assimilation by intellectuals such as Kant and the young Hegelians in the early part of the century, to an increasing emphasis on the ethnic divide separating Germans and Jews.”[32]

Wagner republished Judaism in Music under his own name in 1869 with an extended introduction, leading to several protests by Jews at the first performances of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In the introduction he writes: “Whether the downfall of our culture can be arrested by a violent ejection of the destructive foreign element I am unable to decide, since that would require forces with whose existence I am unacquainted.”[33] In that year Wagner wrote a letter to the French philosopher Edouard Schoure in which he lamented that the assimilation of Jews into French society was preventing the French people from discerning the “corrosive influence of the Jewish spirit on modern culture.”

The second edition of Judaism in Music was published in the same year as Wilhelm Marr’s influential Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (The Victory of Jewishness over Germanism). Historian Richard Evans claims that by the end of the 1870s Wagner had read Wilhelm Marr’s essay and had “broadly agreed with it.”[34] In 1878, Wagner confessed that “It is distressing to me always to come back to the theme of the Jews. But one cannot escape it if one looks to the future.” In his late essay “Religion and Art” (1881), he described the Jews as “the plastic demon of the decline of mankind,” and declared: “I regard the Jewish race as the born enemies of humanity and everything that is noble in it; it is certain we Germans will go under before them, and perhaps I am the last German who knows how to stand up as an art-loving man against the Judaism that is already getting control of everything.”[35]

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here and here.

Go to Part 2.

[1] William Berger, Wagner Without Fear: Learning to Love—and Even Enjoy—Opera’s Most Demanding Genius (New York, Viking, 1998), 373.

[2] Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 56.

[3] Quoted in Martin Kitchen, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 195.

[4] Adrian Mourby, “Can we forgive him?,” The Guardian, July 21, 2000. http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0,3605,345459,00.html

[5] Kevin MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1st Books Library, 2004), 60.

[6] Richard Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 3 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 79-100. http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/JudaismInMusic.pdf

[7] Ibid.

[8] Bryan Magee, Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2001), 349.

[9] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.

[10] MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 184.

[11] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.

[12] Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 27.

[13] Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan (London: Faber and Faber, 2007) 83-4.

[14] David Rodwin, “Wagner Was Right: Eclecticism and the Jewish Aesthetic,” (Los Angeles: 2011). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkfGEqo3YjQ

[15] Quoted in MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 98.

[16] Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 24.

[17] Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Anti-Semitism from Kant to

Wagner (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992) 360.

[18] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.

[19] Richard Wagner, letter of April 1851 trans. by W. Ashton Ellis, In: Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt 1841-1853, (London: 1897; repr. 1973), 145.

[20]Richard Wagner, “What is German?” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 4 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 151-69. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagwiger.htm

[21] Ibid. (Italics in the original)

[22] Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 376.

[23] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.

[24] Quoted in MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 52.

[25] Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan, 75.

[26] Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 372.

[27] Roger Scruton, Modern Culture (London: Continuum, 2000), 69.

[28] Richard Wagner, “A Communication to my Friends,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 1 (London: 1895; repr. 1966), 269-392. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagcomm.htm

[29] Elisabeth Whitcombe, “Adorno as Critic: Celebrating the Socially Destructive Force of Music,” The Occidental Observer, August 28, 2009. http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2009/08/adorno-as-critic/

[30] Scruton, Modern Culture, 69.

[31] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Ibid.

[32] MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 165.

[33] Richard Wagner, “Some Explanations Concerning ‘Judaism in Music,’” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 3 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 77-122. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagjuda2.htm

[34] Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2005), 33.

[35] Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 377-8.

Matthew Bracken’s Three “Enemies” Novels

April 12, 2021/36 Comments/in Featured Articles, The Arts and Culture/by Edmund Connelly, Ph. D.

This is a dead serious warning to our overwhelmingly White audience. All readers have seen the absurd claims about “domestic terrorists” — meaning White men — surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol “insurrection.” Since then, all manner of outlandish claims have been made about the imminent threat tens of millions of White Americans represent to our beautiful, vibrant, multicultural “democracy.”

In short, this review serves as a warning to “majority Americans” (Whites) that all institutions in today’s United States, up to and including the Federal Government, are arrayed against not just the interests of Whites, but against the continued existence of Whites. Such a thought is hard to accept for many Americans, but the unraveling of American history since 1965 inexorably shows this to be true.

I appreciate that “ordinary” Americans — that is, White Christians as viewed prior to 1965 — could be skeptical of my claims that “their” institutions (which allegedly bestow upon them endless “White privilege”) have been turned and now serve The Dark Side, but it’s quite true. Of course, thanks to the broadcast career of the late Rush Limbaugh and four years of Trump rule, many Whites have woken up to the fact that the American media is overwhelmingly opposed to majority Americans, but it goes much further, I’m afraid.

Education, from elementary through university graduate school, is rabidly anti-White. The judiciary is strongly anti-White as well, as action against Charlottesville protesters and many other cases demonstrates. And the churches? Forget it. What about the police and especially the military? Well, we’ve seen for the last year how the police have been gutted, though whether they are even implicitly pro-White is open to much debate. And finally, the military. Though the process has been in motion for years, Joe Biden’s regime has rapidly ramped up the dispossession of the traditional American military, with this graphic announcement of who the new preferred defenders of the realm are:

28th United States Secretary of Defense

Yes, all of these institutions have turned on White Americans and it will only get worse, as daily news stories show:

The Associated Press WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Tuesday [March 29, 2021] nominated a racially diverse and overwhelmingly female group to federal and other judgeships, including three Black women for the U.S. courts of appeals, one pathway to the Supreme Court.

Matthew Bracken

What I intend to do today, then, is to share with readers a review of novels that fictionally take us through an experience where the anti-White government does not just want to dispossess Whites; it literally hunts and kills formerly valued members of the American population. These are stories of rogue government agents with a license to kill Whites, of affirmative action hires lording it over disempowered White men, and technology such as armed drones — overwhelmingly the product of White male minds and hands — now turned lethally on the White man himself. By reading these novels, you can then more easily imagine these events literally taking place. I want this to be the first step in realizing and accepting that you—all of you, but especially White males, who are descended from eons of Europeans, are now the intended target.

The author of these three novels is former Navy SEAL Matthew Bracken, born in 1957, who modestly describes himself as an “old frogman, boat builder, sailor, novelist.” Revisiting his novels, which were written from 2003–2009, I am amazed at the prescience of this former sailor, as his imagined scenarios could be ripped from the very headlines of today’s news. Thus, it is no surprise that since writing his “Enemies” trilogy, Bracken has been a frequent popular guest and a host of The Alex Jones Show; he also made numerous videos on YouTube, including this recent one. Bracken’s voice matters.

You can visit Bracken’s well-stocked website here for tens of hours of written excerpts and more. For now, let’s focus on the first and third
novels in Bracken’s Enemies series.

Novel 1

Appearing in 2003, two years after the 9/11 Terror attacks, Bracken’s first novel Enemies Foreign and Domestic introduces a vile government false-flag crime, a genre of conspiracy theory that has thrived since 9/11 (or the Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995 … or the Kennedy assassinations, etc. — take your pick). From the prologue onward, the prose is gripping, and Bracken has easily earned himself a place alongside action thriller writers such as Tom Clancy, Dale Brown or Stephen Coonts.

The Prologue

Of the many benefits of Bracken’s site, one of my favorites is his generosity with huge excerpts. (You can find the whole books online for free if you work at it; for others, you can go to Amazon or your local library.) These excerpts make it easy to copy and paste and are an excellent introduction to his writing. This is a good example illustrating his style, from the opening page of Enemies Foreign and Domestic:

The home team was set to receive the kickoff of their season opener. The 80,000 football fans packing the stadium were on their feet looking down at the two teams lined up on the verdant green field. … The crowd noise reached a sustained roar as they watched the kicker trot toward the teed-up football, they saw the two teams rush at each other, and they followed the flight of the ball high into the air.

In the midst of this jubilant bedlam, in the center of the western end zone upper deck, a forty-year-old architect from Annapolis was struck by something on the left temple. He immediately collapsed forward, spurting blood over his friends and several other fans as he fell across the seats below. His shocking injury occurred while the football was still arcing through the air and down the field, so at first the louder screaming of the fans surrounding his crumpled bleeding body went unnoticed by the rest of the crowd around them.

Every two seconds a similar scene was repeated with horrifying variations across the western upper deck stands, as one fan after another was dealt a sudden bloody wound to the face, head, neck, shoulder, arm or chest. A few victims were killed outright, and some were only slightly grazed, but many received searingly painful wounds which caused them to shriek and jerk and fling blood in all directions. Every two seconds another tableau of unexpected violent trauma was created, sending out radiating bands of fear as the shouted word spread from mouth to ear among the trapped thousands: sniper! The waves of horror emanating from each new victim spread and merged and multiplied until the entire western end zone upper deck section became engulfed in seething animal panic.

Noticing the commotion, the stadium video director focused on the activity and showed it on the fifty-foot-tall screens at the stadium, offering all 80,000 fans a view of a woman vainly trying to stanch the flow of blood from her dying husband’s face.

Police marksmen in Black scanned the stands for signs of the shooter, further alerting fans to an unfolding tragedy. The result was that mob psychology took over and hordes of screaming people rushed in unison toward the exit tunnels. Hundreds of bodies pushed against those unlucky enough to be seated by the safety railings.

The rails bent outward as the human avalanche gathered momentum, and then they buckled and victims began to tumble over. The falling victims were still holding tightly onto those above, pulling them over as well, and the solid cascade began. Dozens and then hundreds of linked victims fell past the VIP sky boxes, thudding down on the unfortunate fans packed into the lower stands ninety feet below.

In a surprisingly short time, a police helicopter had located the sniper in a building under construction a thousand yards from the stadium. Finding the shooter, a SWAT sniper aboard the helicopter put a single bullet though the murderer’s brain, killing him instantly. He was quickly identified as a White male military veteran, often homeless, and in possession of “white supremacist hate literature.” As it turned out, the White man was a patsy set up to take the blame for the massacre, while two government employees embedded in a federal agency had perpetrated the attack in order to give the government an excuse to limit the right of Americans to bear arms. This set off a powerful reaction among American patriots who wanted to rein in a wayward government. A revolution almost resulted.

Again, this appeared in book form eighteen years ago. Now factor in all the events since then, especially the last year. No wonder a character in the book says, “I just don’t know what’s happening in this country any more. I feel like a war’s coming.”

Enemies 1 features Brad, who is clearly Bracken’s alter ego, and his romantic interest, Ranya Bardiwell, a Christian Lebanese American raised in the home of a gun-shop owner who is early on slaughtered in cold blood by the same forces who killed so many at the football stadium. Ranya then becomes a sworn enemy of this murderous state.

Having grown up around guns her whole life, Ranya is both proficient in their use and knowledgeable about all facets of shooting. She puts this knowledge to use the night she returns home to the burned gun store and house, and discovers that her father’s murderers were federal agents, as proved by the spent cartridges she finds on the ground. “Ten millimeter with these marks on the brass and the dent on the top means the ‘FBI Special Edition’ MP-5. A night scope on top, and a sound suppressor. I’m guessing subsonic loads, for no sonic crack. It was the feds all the way.”

This discovery not only gives Ranya a motive for bloody revenge, it also elicits discussions about what government forces are willing to do to American citizens, which is the key message I am imparting in this essay.

Bracken spends the next few hundred pages spinning more drama, but the essential political issues have been covered. In the end, Brad, Ranya, and others kidnap one of the crooked agents, but another agent, Bob Bullard, escapes detection and is able to silence his hostage colleague. Unfortunately, Brad is also shot during the operation, and Ranya flees the region.

The action has played itself out in Bracken’s Enemies Foreign and Domestic, but it leaves one with the feeling that loose ends remain. Bullard, for example, is alive and well, a development that is of great importance in the next two Bracken novels. Further, as terrible as the events of Enemies are, the subsequent novels are far more horrific, more loaded with dystopian images of an America that Bracken fears is coming to pass.

Novel 2

I’ll be brief in my treatment of Bracken’s second Enemies novel, Enemies Domestic: The Reconquista. The action takes place in an American Southwest now ceded to those of Mexican ethnicity. In this novel, Bracken is not subtle about his views on the political correctness of modern America, inserting, stark examples portraying lesbians, for instance, as abhorrent. We learn that the new main male character Alex, an FBI agent, had his life destroyed when his wife Karin left him for a highly masculine female lover, Gretchen Bosch.

Karin works for the IRS, as does her new lover Gretchen, and when all three were attending the Federal Law Enforcement Officers annual picnic, the hulking Gretchen had attacked Alex with an aluminum baseball bat, causing Alex to protect himself by restraining her. For this, he has been charged with assault, a fact Karin and a feminist judge use against him in the child custody proceedings over son Brian. The female judge thunders at the defense lawyer,

Silence! I’ve heard enough. More than enough! The irrational homophobic attitude of your client is very well known to this court. He’s lucky he wasn’t charged with hate crimes after that picnic incident! If Special Agent Garabanda can’t deal with the fact that his ex-wife is dating a woman, that does not speak well to his stability nor to his socialization, not to mention his fitness to share in the raising of their son.

Bracken continues to mock the views of the “socially progressives” when, for instance, Alex objects to his wife dressing their five-year-old son in pink, and the wife responds that it is “orchid.” Continuing, she scolds, “We just think you’ve already done enough damage to Brian’s psyche, that’s all. You’ve tried your best to turn him into a little macho man, always playing with toy guns and wearing camouflage. Well, we’re breaking your chain of patriarchy. We’re not going to inflict another heterosexist creep like you on the world!”

As in all three novels, the action here is engrossing and is generally impossible to separate from actual news in the headlines of the last two decades. And now that Bracken has discussed his fictional Southwest, he will turn to the American South for his third novel, the subtitle of which is “Civil War 2,” which turns out to be appropriate for both the novel and today’s America.

Novel 3

Enemies and Traitors: The Greater Depression and Civil War Civil War 2 reintroduces Vietnam-era Green Beret Phil Carson, a character from the original novel. He is sailing through the Gulf of Mexico alone in his boat but a horrible hurricane has devasted the Gulf coast. Politically, the United States is a shambles, with the Southwest ceded to Mexicans, the Northeast and Great Lakes “a socialist nightmare,” and the South broken into parts under the control of a mulatto generalissimo and states absolutely devastated by massive earthquakes. Only the Northwest region remains free. And the White House is occupied by one Jamal Tambor, a thinly disguised stand-in for former President Barack Obama.

Carson aims for the free Northwest, but it’s a long slog. Soon enough, he ends up in a refugee camp in Mississippi, where a surviving surgeon recounts the last year:

We lost more than half of the medical staff, most of my colleagues, including a lot of old friends, and including my only son and most of his family. I can take you to see the mass graves! . . . Cameroon fever, bird flu, cholera, dysentery, beriberi . . . you name it, we fought it. We even lost thousands to pellagra. Pellagra!. . . It brings the four Ds: diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia and death — just from a lack of niacin, because of a shitty starvation diet with no protein. We were right back to square one, we went back a century in medicine . . .

North of them, what remains of the federal government is intent on bringing the states of Kentucky and Tennessee back under federal control, but White troops will not brutalize fellow Whites enough to accomplish this. Instead, the “true enforcers” are “contract battalions” recruited from “Nigeria, Pakistan, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Albania and a dozen other nations.” Carson learns all too well what this entails when he begins his trek into Tennessee.

Traveling alone on foot, Carson is no match for the power of even this reduced federal force plus foreign mercenaries. Set up this way, the plot allows Bracken to present a reverse picture of what Americans are more accustomed to seeing: Advanced American technology used to subdue Brown adversaries in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Now that same technology is turned on White American men, women and children.

Most prominent among these weapons are drones, which are employed against American civilians with terrifying results. Naturally, one of the missions on which drones (“unmanned aerial vehicles,” or UAVs for short) are used is surveillance. “In the areas slated for complete evacuation, the holdouts could be located by the UAVs and targeted for special action as needed, county by county.”

Bob Bullard is in charge of these tools and he has no qualms about employing them liberally. In one early scene, Bullard asks to see a video of a successful termination of an armed curfew violator. “In the first video clip, the infrared image of a man was clearly seen flitting in and out of the brush along a tree line. The man, hotter than his surroundings, was seen as a White figure walking against a dark background of trees and bushes.” He was quickly painted by invisible laser energy, then blown to bits by a one-pound charge attached to a rocket launched unseen and unheard from above. After the white-hot explosion, “the man was gone, replaced by scattered white hotspots on the ground.”

Bracken personalizes this targeted assassination by showing the dead man as a White father who has now left his only remaining child an orphan. Son Zack is experiencing the trials of Job himself. His father had been a survivalist who had seen the economic troubles coming and prepared for them. Unfortunately, tragedy was to be the family’s close friend. Deeply religious, they had expected God to protect them, but the floods and quakes and attendant flu had first taken twins Becky and Annie. “Becky had died first and Annie a day later, both drowning in their own lung fluids.

Zack and his family had prayed continuously, to no effect.” Then his younger brother Sammy slashed himself while chopping wood, but even the family’s most potent antibiotics had not saved him. His mother had a stock of pills for her depression, but when they ran out, the woes of the world overwhelmed her and, either deliberately or by accident, she and baby Sarah had fallen from a railroad bridge and drowned in the swift waters below.

One evening his father had slipped out of the house late, after which Zack heard a single bang — then waited in vain for his father to return. He didn’t find his father — what was left of him — until the middle of the next day. . . . His father had been blown to pieces, his powerful body shattered. Even his shotgun had been blasted into a bent piece of junk. Zack hid in the woods near the human fragments of his father, shaking, crying, and wondering what to do next. He also found pieces of rocket casing and what was probably part of a rocket tailfin knifed into a tree near the body. His father had been the one killed by the drone attack described above.

Tennessee is where the federal government, aided by non-White foreign mercenaries, is fighting the local White population. Carson eventually joins a band of White former soldiers and together they attempt to restore their liberty and freedom. Doug is a young fellow rebel, and Carson asks him, “So how did you wind up fighting a guerrilla war in Tennessee?”

Doug smiled wistfully. “It’s a long story. To start with, I was drafted. I was going to the University of Maryland, majoring in communications, but I had to drop out after my junior year because I couldn’t afford the tuition. Unfortunately I’m just a Category 7 — a healthy heterosexual Christian White male. That’s the bottom, the baseline. My tuition was tripled with no warning, so that was that. They pulled my student loan and I couldn’t get any kind of extension, so I was back at home living with my mom.”

Bracken is right about such a White male’s place in current American society.

Bracken is also astute regarding the way Blacks are manipulated by hidden powers to do the bidding of the Washington regime, predicting unexpectedly the antics of Black Lives Matter half a decade later. Doug describes his recollection of how his version happened:

It was shock therapy. Especially when the Poor People’s Party marched through Baltimore. There were already about a million of them camping out in Washington on the National Mall before the convention. When they took off walking to Philly, it was like a dam bursting. That was on Labor Day. Mile after mile of people with flags, signs, drums, musical bands on trucks — everything you can imagine. Police cars were escorting them, leading them up I-95. They closed the northbound lanes of 95 for something like twenty miles, for the whole time it took them to walk to Philly. …

Naturally, our own locals got into the spirit and joined the march. They took whatever they wanted from any stores along the way, and the police just watched. There was nothing they could do anyway, or it would have caused the biggest riot in history. It was legalized looting, that’s all it was. Legalized looting, all over Baltimore. “Redistributing the wealth,” they called it. We stayed locked in our house and watched it all on television. It would have been suicide to go out and see it in person.

Yes, Bracken champions the view that Black city dwellers are either one step away from being barbarians or actually at that stage, and in Civil War 2 we find mostly negative descriptions of Blacks and their behavior. The bulk of the discussions revolving around Blacks concerns their actions after massive earthquakes have turned Memphis into a living hell, narrated by Doug, the White rebel heard from above:

There was rioting and looting in St. Louis and Nashville, but the video coming out of Memphis was the worst. Video shot from helicopters. It was like the end of the world down there. It seemed like half of that city was unreinforced masonry — brick — and most of it went down. Even regular wood-frame houses were shaken to pieces. All kinds of natural gas lines go through there; it’s like a big energy corridor from the Gulf to the Northeast. Well, at least it was. The gas pipelines broke in a million places, and a lot of Memphis burned to the ground. Then it was the chemical plants. They had all kinds of chemical plants and fuel farms along the Mississippi, and the ones that didn’t burn spilled. It was a mess! And smack in the middle of all of that, a million people. No electricity, no drinking water, no gas stations or supermarkets open, roads blocked, bridges down. … You couldn’t imagine such a place.

It got worse. Another massive quake hit and destroyed even more of the city, and Doug just barely survived. Unfortunately, he was captured by a gang of roving Blacks:

You can’t even imagine how freaking scary it was. Thousands of birds were going insane, screaming and flying in every direction, just flying straight into things and breaking their necks. Lightning was striking all around us. The sky was kind of a sickly yellow from the chemical fires that were still burning over on the Mississippi River, and there was a new sulfur smell just to remind you that hell was opening up. You could smell it: the sulfur was so strong it burned your nose. It was apocalyptic, super-natural, anything you can think of like that — times ten. …

At this point, Bracken envisions savage behavior on the part of many Black citizens of Memphis. Starving, they have turned to cannibalism, and Doug is on the menu. “There were legs and arms hacked down to the bones,” Doug observes, “and a fire pit, with the big iron grill over it. There were even decapitated heads, set in a row. I was lying on my side, and I looked over and saw a severed head that almost seemed like it was looking back at me.” Doug continues, noting that “The cooking grill was a wrought-iron gate, propped up on angle iron legs that were driven into the dirt. There was a square hole in the cement, where they had built their fire. Now I could understand what they had been talking about. That’s why they had been pinching and squeezing me.” Such food even has a name in the novel: “long pig.”

The cannibals are Black, smoke a lot of marijuana, and get drunk. Further, the leader of the cannibals is fiendish looking, as described by Doug: “We were nose to nose. He looked like the devil himself, his eyes glowing yellow in the firelight.” When the leader addresses his intended meal, he says, “White boy, I’m gonna untie you, and then you gonna get all naked and give me them Army clothes,” so we know Bracken is quite aware of racial differences.

In all three of these novels, Bracken imagines that Whites have the gumption to stand up to the trials they face, but is he right about that? It seems like the bulk of Whites — even in this current year — refuse to face reality. I mean, do Whites read what Paul Kersey writes about crimes against Whites? If they do, does it mean anything to them?

Take, for instance, Kersey’s recent discussion about United Airlines intending to replace new White male pilots with women and non-Whites. Without a doubt, Kersey is right to conclude, “Nothing else to say. Every segment of American society is anti-White, to the detriment of the society White people uniquely created…. America, as presently constituted in its extreme anti-Whiteness, is irredeemable.”

Paul Craig Roberts, who probably qualifies (with great justification) as a grumpy old White man, has also forcefully pointed out the same thing. “It is the White liberals in the Democrat Party and their presstitute propaganda machine— New York Times, CNN, NPR, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the rest of the presstitute whores — that comprise the new Nazi movement. The only difference is that this time the target is White gentiles.”

Roberts continues: “The demonization of American White people is a hard undeniable fact. They have been discriminated against for decades because of racial quotas in university admissions, hiring, and promotion. But now discrimination against Whites has become persecution, and it is more scary….”

Can today’s Whites survive?, Roberts asks. “They cannot. And they sit there, insouciant, sucking their thumbs, sheep ready for slaughter.” Reread this sentence three times, then reflect on it seriously.

Another time, Roberts concluded, “White Gentile Americans Are Today’s Untermensch.” Is he wrong? Over a decade ago, Bracken was making these arguments in his three Enemies novels. But Bracken had faith that enough Whites still had the spirit and strength to stand up for themselves and the country their White ancestors had created. I wish I could be as certain. Perhaps by reading one or more of Bracken’s novels, more Whites will finally realize the mortal situation we all face. Then the time will come to either whimper and die — or finally stand up and fight.

And with those words, I have prepared the way for my next review of novels: those of the late Harold A. Covington, whose five Northwest Novels were for a time the center of great discussion about The War on Whites and how Whites might fight back.

“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”: Tarantino on Masculinity

August 20, 2019/18 Comments/in Featured Articles, The Arts and Culture/by Daniel N. Davidson

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is not an homage to the Hollywood of the ‘60s but rather a paean to masculinity using Hollywood as a foil. This fairy tale was created not to praise Hollywood but to censure it.

What drives the movie and constitutes its backbone is the contrast and interplay between two conceptions of what it is to be manly, the one embodied by the mostly Western genre actor Rick (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the other by his stunt man Cliff (Brad Pitt). Rick has been playacting killers and tough guys most of his career. As such he is gritty and fearless and highly skilled in the manly art of self-defense. But, of course, because he is an actor, it is all just an act. The real Rick, the Rick not in front of the cameras, is insecure, and given to weeping, self-loathing and childishness. On the studio grounds he is at one point lectured on the responsibilities of the actor by an eight-year-old girl actor. Later, after doing a scene together, it is the little girl who feels the need to encourage this man much her senior by whispering in his ear, “That was the best acting I’ve ever seen.”

Cliff, by contrast, is fundamentally NOT an actor. He is in movies as a stuntman but his role isn’t to act. It is to fall off roofs and horses and generally help Rick “carry the load,” as Cliff modestly sums up his job the first time we see him. Indeed, Cliff’s modesty, which is fundamentally a self-assurance and far removed from humility, is one of the prominent characteristics that go into defining what it is for Cliff to be manly. The others we will shortly see illustrated: he is confident and exceedingly capable, as exemplified in his genuine ability to defend himself against real threats; he has a pronounced sense of responsibility for his fellow man, even those only distantly related to him, as when he persists at the risk of his own life to enquire about the well being of George Spann; and he is an adult, which is to say mature, not one to give in to the sexual enticements of a girl child. These are some of the jewels in Cliff’s manly crown.

Brad Pitt and Leonardo DeCaprio portray two contrasting types of masculinity in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

On Hemingway, Jews, and Masculinity

May 3, 2019/21 Comments/in Featured Articles, The Arts and Culture/by Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.

“Why not make the Jew a bounder in literature as well as in life? Do Jews always have to be so splendid in writing?”
Ernest Hemingway to Max Perkins, Dec. 21, 1926.

Having previously written about the early twentieth-century writers T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Robinson Jeffers, I felt it was high time that I addressed the work and thought of an altogether more controversial and ambiguous literary figure of the same period — the inimitable Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway may seem an odd choice to profile for a White advocacy site and, moreover, in his last and only appearance at The Occidental Observer, now some three years ago, he proved very controversial and divisive indeed. He was a supporter of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, the novel based on his experiences in Spain, one senses that Hemingway is ventriloquizing when one of his characters responds to the question “Are you a Communist?” with the reply “No, I am an anti-fascist.” Most sensationally however, at least one 2017 text written by a former CIA officer has made the claim that Hemingway was recruited as a Soviet agent in 1940 by two of the top NKVD agents then operational in the United States — the Jew Jacob Golos and the Soviet Jewish spy king Abram Osipovich Einhorn. Both men had in turn provided leadership and support to the notorious spying cell run by Julius Rosenberg. Returning to the title of the last TOO article on the man, we have to once more ask who is the “real” Ernest Hemingway? Was he, as one critic responded to the last piece, “not a great White man”? Or is he, as Robert S. Griffin insists, “an exemplary white historical figure”?

The ambiguity, and even hostility, surrounding Hemingway is not without reason. Even setting aside the “enemy agent” accusations, Hemingway was, in several respects, intellectually of what might be termed ‘the Old Left,’ in the sense that he tended towards support for economic socialism, pursued ideological comradeship with blue collar workers and veterans, and had many friends with similar political tastes. His alcoholism, confrontational character, philandering, and final descent into mental illness and suicide could lead some to perceive the author as little more than a debauched degenerate. This behavior was in all likelihood rooted in genetic causes — and almost certainly reverberated flamboyantly in his son Gregory, an alcoholic transvestite who occasionally called himself Gloria, had surgery to create one “breast,” and finally died in the Miami-Dade Women’s Detention Center a day after being arrested for indecent exposure.

In other respects, however, before his final decline, Hemingway was perhaps the quintessential, unreformed White rogue, a kind of throwback to the ancient, uncivilised Indo-European who defies strictly moralistic explanations. He was a rank individualist, antagonistic to all forms of authority and authoritarian government, Stalin’s included. Of course, his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, was Jewish, and yet he publicly explained his decision not to have children with her as being due to his aversion to having children with Jewish genes.¹ He embraced the lifestyle of the masculine bon vivant, had a strong distaste for what he called “queers” “fairies” and “faggots,” enjoyed his experience observing colonialism in Africa, and loved nature and outdoor pursuits. On a more personal level, he wrote one of my favourite short novels, The Old Man and the Sea, a literary masterpiece on the themes of masculine endurance and stoicism, and influenced two of my favourite twentieth-century modernist writers, William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. Hemingway remains, if nothing else, as enigmatic as ever. As we are now just couple of years away from the 60th anniversary of his death, is there anything in Hemingway’s life and work that retains value for the White man of today? Read more

Dragged Across Concrete (2019) and the Art of Cinematic Trolling

April 8, 2019/12 Comments/in Featured Articles, The Arts and Culture/by Max West

The author writes at Logical Meme and @Logicalmeme.
9125 words

Since the 1960s, there have been sporadic reactions in film against emergent liberal hegemonies in culture. In the early 1970s, when the social changes borne of the countercultural 1960s were, in very short order, becoming the mainstream culture and translating into the disastrous social policies of that era, there were occasional sympathetic depictions from Hollywood which channeled White discontent and a growing White male anxiety — for example, Dirty Harry (1971), The French Connection (1971), Death Wish (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976) — but by the 1990s, articulation of this anxiety (which, as a sociological phenomenon became hardened, not softened, through decades of collective experience) was largely expressed, ironically, through unsympathetically depicted characters — for example, Falling Down (1993) and American History X (1998)[1].

Since this time, the Hollywood filmmaking pipeline has become thematically constricted by a radical surge of political correctness and leftwing, agenda-driven depictions of race and racial conflict. Unspoken rules ensure that any film dealing with race ultimately settles on the side of predictable, leftwing, social justice platitudes. (Various Oscar-winning films of recent years attest to this.) As such, when it comes to subjects such as racial conflict, the effects of mass immigration, or the plight of Whites in America, there is simply no diversity of opinion coming out of Tinseltown. Creatively, this has led to a metastasizing sameness, a bland and boring creative funk, to mainstream films that touch upon such subjects.

In terms of the sociology of filmmaking, the significance of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) was to demonstrate — in stark, jaw-dropping, financial terms — the profound imbalance between the demand for ‘conservative’ films and the sparse supply of such films coming out of a leftwing, Jewish-dominated Hollywood system. Passion was independently produced and distributed by Gibson’s Icon Productions, going on to earn over $600 million worldwide, and currently stands as the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history. (The film also confronted strong rebuke and charges of anti-Semitism from prominent Jewish individuals and organizations.) Gibson’s next film Apocalypto (2006), also produced by Icon Productions, depicted violent, genocidal, tribal conflict in sixteenth century Mexico, and alluded to the eclipse and decline of Mayan civilization, emphasized in the film’s penultimate scene of Spanish Christian conquistadors arriving by ship to the jungle’s coast, with the indigenous locals looking on in awe. (Not surprisingly, Apocalypto was castigated in some quarters for harboring racist and colonialist apologetics.) Read more

M. R. James and Saki: Two Literary Greats and their Anti-Semitism

January 10, 2019/27 Comments/in Featured Articles, The Arts and Culture/by Tobias Langdon

Megalomaniacs dream of ruling the world. Philosophers dream of understanding it — ideally from an armchair. Armchair-understanding is what I’m going to attempt in this article. After all, armchairs are good places for reading. I want to take two short stories by famous English writers and use them to address an important question: Do Jews seek to control gentile societies for their own ends?

Serpents and Waspes

This is also a dangerous question. Any Westerner who answers it in the affirmative will certainly lose his reputation and might lose his income and liberty too. These negative consequences prove the wickedness of the proposition, of course, and not its truth. Or do they? The writers M.R. James (1862–1936) and Saki, born Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), might have said otherwise. Each of them was responsible for poisoning the well of English literature with doses of anti-Semitism, which is sometimes called the Longest Hatred.

Painting by Burne-Jones for “The Prioress’s Tale”

It’s called that with good reason: the well had already been poisoned for centuries when those two writers were born. Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1342–1400) is known as the “Father of English Literature” and was the author of The Canterbury Tales, which dates from about 1380. He wrote in “The Prioress’s Tale” of a pious Christian child ritually murdered by Jews at the instigation of “the serpent Sathanas,/That hath in Jewes herte his waspes nest … .” (see modern version) In the tale, a miracle reveals the crime to the grieving mother and the Jews responsible are hanged. Chaucer concludes his hate-narrative with a prayer to “yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also/With cursed Jewes.” Read more