The Arts and Culture

The Beginnings

The Beginnings by Rudyard Kipling (published 1917)

It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late
With long arrears to make good,
When the English began to hate.

They were not easily moved,
They were icy-willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the English began to hate.

Their voices were even and low,
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show,
When the English began to hate.

It was not preached to the crowd,
It was not taught by the State.
No man spoke it aloud,
When the English began to hate.

It was not suddenly bred,
It will not swiftly abate,
Through the chill years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the English began to hate.

Friedrich Georg Jünger: The Titans and the Coming of the Titanic Age

 Translated from the German and with an Introduction by Tom Sunic

Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898-1977)

Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898-1977)

Introduction: Titans, Gods and Pagans by Tom Sunic

Below is my translation of several passages from the last two chapters from Friedrich Georg Jünger’s little known book, Die Titanen, 1943, 1944 (The Titans). Only the subtitles are mine. F.G. Jünger was the younger brother of Ernst Jünger who wrote extensively about ancient Greek gods and goddesses. His studies on the meaning of Prometheism and Titanism are unavoidable for obtaining a better understanding of the devastating effects of the modern belief in progress and the role of “high-tech” in our postmodern societies. Outside the German-speaking countries, F.G. Jünger’s literary work remains largely unknown, although he had a decisive influence on his renowned brother, the essayist Ernst Jünger. Some parts of F.G Jünger’s other book, Griechische Götter (1943) (Greek Gods), with a similar, if not same topic, and containing also some passages from Die Titanen, were recently translated into French (Les Titans et les dieux, 2013).

In the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche and along with hundreds of German philosophers, novelists, poets and scientists, such as M. Heidegger, O. Spengler, C. Schmitt, L. Clauss, Gottfried Benn, etc., whose work became the object of criminalization by cultural Bolsheviks and by the Frankfurt School in the aftermath of WWII, F. G. Jünger can also be tentatively put in the category of “cultural conservative revolutionaries” who characterized the political, spiritual and cultural climate in Europe between the two world wars.

Ancient European myths, legends and folk tales are often derided by some scholars, including some Christian theologians who claim to see in them gross reenactments of European barbarism, superstition and sexual promiscuity. However, if a reader or a researcher immerses himself in the symbolism of the European myths, let alone if he tries to decipher the allegorical meaning of diverse creatures in the myths, such as for instance the scenes from the Orphic rituals, the hellhole of Tartarus, or the carnage in the Nibelungen saga, or the final divine battle in Ragnarök, then those mythical scenes take on an entirely different meaning. After all, in our modern so-called enlightened and freedom-loving liberal societies, citizens are also entangled in a profusion of bizarre infra-political myths, in a myriad of weird hagiographic tales, especially those dealing with World War II vicitmhoods, as well as countless trans-political, multicultural hoaxes enforced under penalty of law. Therefore, understanding the ancient European myths means, first and foremost, reading between the lines and strengthening one’s sense of the metaphor. Read more

The Holocaust Industry in the UK

Her_Majesty_the_Queen_Lays_a_Wreath_at_the_Cenotaph_London_During_Remembrance_Sunday_Service_MOD_45152054 (1)

At mid-morning on the second Sunday in November buglers will play the Last Post at the Cenotaph war memorial in London and for two minutes Britain will fall silent. The simple dignity of Remembrance Sunday, the Queen laying a wreath, the silence as a canopy of red poppies fall on the veterans and  armed services standing to attention, make it a moment of almost unbearable sadness.

While the event commemorates all British and Commonwealth war dead, it has its roots in the trenches of the First World War and battles like the Somme where the British suffered 58,000 casualties, one third killed, on the first day. The silence marks the eleventh hour of the eleventh day when the guns fell silent in 1918. The symbol of the occasion is a blood red poppy distributed by the Royal British Legion and worn by millions.

poppyThere is no more heartfelt symbol of traditional feeling in Britain than the poppy. and this is why two recent government funding decisions revealed such an astonishing shift in cultural priorities. The first was a refusal to fund a poppy project in a field of remembrance for Britain’s war dead. The second was the Prime Minister’s pledge to pour more taxpayers money into promoting the booming Holocaust industry.

The decisions confirm what many have suspected  — that Holocaust promotion is gradually replacing the commemoration of the sacrifice of servicemen as the subject of community remembrance in Britain.

It is a change for which the British political elite seems to have a driving enthusiasm. The annual government grant to the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) is already a very generous £2.1 million. The extra £300,000 a year will not only pay for more school Holocaust propaganda, but will also pay to set up a new national Holocaust Commission to erect yet another permanent memorial.

It was always predictable that the left-leaning Heritage Lottery Fund, the UK’s largest dispenser of public largesse, would decline an application from an unfashionable veterans group such as the Royal British Legion. Not only was the application rejected owing to “lack of funds” but the Fund then approached a pacifist group and invited them to submit an application to raise awareness of conscientious objectors.

Even by the standards of the Heritage Lottery Fund this was a calculated  insult. The Fund’s Trustees are dominated by the kind of women that seem to proliferate in the public sector. Privately-educated left-wing graduates from the BBC and elsewhere in the world of arts, who have never soiled their hands in the private sector. Read more

Introducing Mjolnir

MJOLNIR

Mjolnir website: http://www.mjolnir-magazine.com

It must be self-evident to all those who consider themselves in some way politically right-wing that the left has achieved cultural hegemony throughout the Occidental world. Virtually every film, every television series, every soap opera, every song, every theatre or radio play, every novel, short story, poem, comic, graphic novel and cartoon is used to carry and push Marxist and neo-Marxist ideology to ever further extremes. How many songs have you heard that urge our youth to reject their parents? How many films have you seen where miscegenation is normalised and those against it demonised? How many soap operas promote ‘alternative sexualities’ and promiscuity?

Think of all the films and TV series that urge us to dissolve national borders and build to a one-world government. In the series Star Trek and its series of films and spin-offs, we have not only a world government, but an intergalactic federation too. Gene Roddenberry himself said that he was creating ‘morality plays’. Think of the recent trend in disaster films such as 2012, The Day After Tomorrow and Armageddon, where disaster is on a global scale. Global disasters call for global solutions and such trifling things as national borders are seen as ridiculous in view of such cataclysmic events.

MJOLNIR2Indeed, cultural Marxism is now all-pervasive. Most people believe cultural Marxism is synonymous with political correctness. But it is more than that. Cultural Marxism, after the ‘work’ of Antonio Gramsci, is about getting Marxist and neo-Marxist ideas ingrained in the public consciousness and even subconsciousness via subversion of the national culture. One way is to imprint Marxist ideology on cultural texts for public reception. Thus, the more texts are received and absorbed by the public, the more sympathetic to Marxist ideas they become.

Certainly, this is the core assumption behind the Reader Response and Reception Theories of the Konstanzer Schule, where a neo-Marxist system of value is placed upon a text, a text being deemed more culturally valuable the further it normalises a pseudo-morality that posits itself against traditionalist reader expectations.

Mjolnir is a major step in the cultural fightback against this tidal wave of propaganda. Our enemies have vast financial resources at their disposal and can therefore invest in all the arts – especially that latterly invented form of Gesamtkunstwerk so conducive to indoctrinating the masses: film. We have no such means at our disposal, yet classical art forms are not beyond our means: graphic art, plastic art and literature. Mjolnir is a print magazine set up to collate and showcase the illiberal Eurocentric arts. Read more

Desdemona’s “Just Understanding” of Othello’s Virtue

Othello_MSC2004Editor’s note: A theme of TOO is that the entire culture of the West has been corrupted. This includes essentially all the arts and academic fields in the social sciences and humanities. It is therefore not surprising that Shakespeare criticism has been influenced by the reigning culture of the academic left. This essay is an abbreviated version of the second chapter of George F. Held’s ebook, Othello’s Disenchanted Eye, available at Lulu. Held shows that Othello, a play about an interracial marriage, has been seen through the eyes of current racial sensibilities.

I have stated elsewhere[1] that Othello is an “ethically lucid play.” I stand by that statement, but will now provide evidence which will to some extent undermine it. The play, though generally lucid, is not simple, and has been subject to gross misinterpretation. In his introduction to the play Frank Kermode writes:

His marriage to Desdemona, founded upon her just understanding of his virtue, is a triumph over appearances; it is grounded in reality and independent of such accidents as color or the easy lusts of the flesh; it is more like the love of Adam and Eve before than after the Fall. The archaic grandeur of Othello’s diction (as in the long speeches to the Senate in I.iii) and the extreme innocence of Desdemona (as the courtly Cassio expresses it in II.i) are ways of emphasizing these simple themes; one may see them ideally reflected in the music which Verdi wrote for Otello’s heroic entry, and the soaring purity of his Desdemona. . . .

There is room for another and more worldly view of the honesty of Desdemona’s proceedings; Iago and Brabantio express it. Her penetrating to the truth of Othello under an appearance conventionally thought repulsive can seem less a result of her purity of response than of some pagan witchcraft of his. It is precisely because such a union must appear to the disenchanted worldly eye perverse or absurd that Iago can destroy it. He represents a sort of metropolitan knowingness, a pride in being without illusion and a power to impose upon others an illusory valuation of himself. He converts to his own uses all the praise of honesty which properly belongs to Othello and Desdemona.[2]

Kermode sees the play in terms of a dichotomy involving two opposing groups: the first group consists of Othello and Desdemona, the second of Iago, Brabantio, and all those disenchanted with Othello’s and Desdemona’s union. The views of the members of each group[3] are similar to each other but differ substantially from those of the members of the other group. Specifically, the members of the first group adopt an unworldly, just, accurate view of race, color, Othello’s “virtue,” and “the honesty of Desdemona’s proceedings,” whereas the members of the second group adopt an unjust and inaccurate “worldly view” of all these same things. The views of the members of the first group are the result of their desire and ability to see reality as it is and to look beyond mere appearances; the views of the members of the second group are the result of convention and prejudice.[4] I will show that this analysis is not merely oversimple but entirely bogus and is itself a product of modern politically correct prejudice. Read more

Is Tom Wolfe a Race Realist? Part 2 of 3

Go to Part 1.

bauhausFrom Bauhaus to Our House, a critique of modern architecture, can be considered a companion volume to Painted Word. Wolfe charges modern architecture with causing “sensory deprivation” due to “the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all.”[1] Beyond aesthetic criticism, Bauhaus again makes explicit the link between modernism in the arts and left-wing politics. And once again a turning point in the U.S. was the Second World War. After the war the American elites were “willing to accept that glass of ice water in the face, that bracing slap across the mouth, that reprimand for the fat on one’s bourgeois soul, known as modern architecture.”[2]

The Bauhaus in the title refers to the Bauhaus School founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany by Walter Gropius. This school, according to Wolfe, was the genesis of modern architecture. Ludwig Mies (van der Rohe, “less is more”) taught at Bauhaus. With the ascension of National Socialism, both Gropius and Mies left Germany for the U.S.

Is there a racial angle to Bauhaus? Author and racial theorist Wilmot Robertson used to say, “There’s a racial angle to every story in twentieth-century America.”

The heirs of the Bauhaus were very concerned with post-war worker housing in America. There was a housing shortage after the war so it was a legitimate issue, but the Left completely misread their clientele. Wolfe points out that public housing became known as “the projects,” and workers avoided them as if they “had a smell. The workers — if by workers we mean people who have jobs — headed out instead to the suburbs.”[3]A dramatic example of this phenomenon was seen in St. Louis where post-war working and middle-class Whites left the city as “a vast worker housing project called Pruitt-Igoe” was being built. There is no explicit mention of race (perhaps none was needed), but Wolfe notes that Pruitt-Igoe “filled up mainly with recent migrants from the rural South … where the population density was fifteen to twenty folks per square mile; [and] one rarely got more than ten feet off the ground except by climbing a tree.”[4] It took just seventeen years for the tenants to destroy P-I. The city demolished the dilapidated buildings in July, 1972. Wolfe calls Pruitt-Igoe and other similar projects “American monuments to 1920s Middle European worker housing.”[5] It turns out that people are not interchangeable cogs after all. Read more

Elysium: An all too real dystopian vision of the future

Reviewing Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium,  Steve Sailer emphasizes the dystopian future resulting from non-White immigration. That’s  certainly there. The  bleak, run-down buildings (filmed, appropriately, in Mexico City), the garbage-strewn streets teeming with poor non-Whites.  There’s the everyday violence and the brutal robot police.

elysium-the-squalors-of-earth

Los Angeles in 2154 as depicted in Elysium

Along with the hordes of Brown people there are a few conspicuous Whites, including Max, the hero, played by Matt Damon. (In an interview, Blomkamp says there would have been more Blacks but they were hard to find in Mexico City. The camera work clearly emphasizes the few Blacks, and at the end of the movie when everyone receives citizenship in Elysium, Blomkamp throws in a scene filmed in Africa where Blacks are seen storming the spaceships that will take them to the promised land. One might say that Blacks were in Blomkamp’s future LA, at least in spirit.)

Matt Damon as Max, being prepared for his journey to Elysium by a Black technician

Matt Damon as Max, being prepared for his journey to Elysium by a Black technician

Unfortunately, the emotional core of the movie is that the teeming non-White masses have moral claims on the overwhelmingly White folks living in Elysium, the space station that slowly orbits above the future Los Angeles. Elysium is everything that the future LA is not: uncrowded, populated by well-dressed, well-mannered, civilized (overwhelmingly White) people with refined tastes, excellent health care, and large mansions with robots waiting on women reclining next to gorgeous swimming pools. And no tattoos in Elysium, unlike pretty much everyone back in LA.

Read more