The Arts and Culture

Art in the Third Reich: 1933-1945 (Part 2)

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Ernst von Dombrowski (1896-1985), “Little Angels” (woodcut)

The Archaic Postmodernity

National Socialist dignitaries devoted much energy to the promotion of German sculptors and helped them considerably in the execution of massive bas-reliefs and in the erection of monumental stone and bronze sculptures. The political goal was obvious: to bring German art as close as possible to the German people, so that any German citizen, regardless social standing, could identify himself or herself with a specific artistic achievement.

It should, therefore, come as no surprise that the German art of that time witnessed a return to classicism. Models from Antiquity and the Renaissance were to some extent adapted to the needs of National Socialist Germany. Numerous German sculptors benefited from the logistic and financial support of the political elite. Their sculptures resembled, either by form, or by composition, the works of Praxiteles or Phidias of ancient Greece, or the sculptures of Michelangelo during the Renaissance. Read more

Art in the Third Reich: 1933–1945 (Part 1)

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Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885), The Butterfly Hunter

This is a slightly edited version of an article was first published in Ecrits de Paris (Nr. 645, July-August 2002, L’Art dans l’IIIème Reich. Translated by the author.)

When writing about or discussing the plastic and figurative arts in Germany during the period from 1933 to 1945, one must inevitably mention the art that highlighted the epoch of National Socialism. During that short and troubled period of time, art was also a reflection of modern European history, and, therefore, it must be examined, or, for that matter, conceptualized, within the larger geopolitical framework of Europe as a whole.

National Socialist culture has always been a sensitive subject, whose controversial nature is more apparent today than ever before in the ongoing media warfare between so-called anticommunists and antifascists. If one accepts the conventional wisdom, widely accepted in all corners of he world, that National Socialism was a form of totalitarianism, one must then also raise the question as to whether there were any authentic cultural successes achieved during the Third Reich at all. Certain parallels can and should be drawn between artistic efforts in the U.S.S.R. and National Socialist Germany, in view of the fact that culture in both systems was dominated by a specific ideology. Does this therefore mean that there were no valuable works of art created in the U.S.S.R. or in National Socalist Germany? What both National Socialism and Communism had in common was the rejection of “art for art’s sake” (l’art pour l’art) and the repudiation of middle-class aestheticism. Instead, both political systems favored a committed and normative approach to art, which was supposed to be a tool for the creation of the “new man.” On the other hand, from the thematic, aesthetic and stylistic point of view, the differences between art in Communism and art in National Socialism were immense. Read more

Carolina Hartley's article on Ezra Pound's ideas on money

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I am soliciting comment here on Carolina Hartley’s current TOO article on Ezra Pound’s ideas on money. Ezra Pound is a tragic figure–jailed for his pro-fascist sympathies and, as Hartley suggests, because of his unwelcome ideas on money. Pound’s fate reminds us that until the end of World War II there were quite a few major intellectual and artistic figures who had views that are vilified today. It’s important to understand what they had to say.

Kevin MacDonald, Editor

Libertarianism under intellectual scrutiny — and a call for papers

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Rand Paul’s Senate candidacy has been a godsend to the liberals. Jonah Goldberg puts it this way:

Indeed, it’s worth noting that the only people who are really jazzed to reopen the argument about the Civil Rights Act are liberals. And they have good reason: They won that argument, politically and morally. This is a fact liberals never stop reminding us, and themselves, about. Like a paunchy middle-aged man who scored the winning touchdown in the high school championship, nostalgic liberals don’t need an excuse to bring up their glory days (which were not the Democratic Party’s glory days, by the way). Give them a living, breathing politician who suggests, no matter how imprecisely or grudgingly, that the Civil Rights Act wasn’t perfect, and they’ll talk your ear off like a drunk uncle at a wedding.

I’d have to agree with Goldberg that the liberals won the argument politically — hence the liberals’ glee at finding a really fat target. But it’s not at all clear that the liberals won the argument intellectually, or even morally. Goldberg himself is quite confused about what Rand Paul is saying — conveniently, as it turns out, because he comes up with a clever argument that he seems to think absolutely destroys Paul’s position:

For the record, Paul and [Barry] Goldwater were both wrong. The libertarian position is not to defend Jim Crow but to condemn it, and not just because of its unjust bigotry but because of its economic folly that served to entrench that bigotry.

Paul weeps for the lost right of white businessmen to refuse black customers (even though he rejects the practice himself). But he fails to appreciate the perverse irony that one of Jim Crow’s greatest evils was its intrusion on the property rights of whites. Jim Crow wasn’t merely some “Southern tradition” undone by heroic good government. Jim Crow laws were imposed by government. And they banned white businessmen from serving blacks.

Based on his interview with Rachel Maddow, Rand is well aware of the distinction between private discrimination and government laws that would force people to discriminate. Paul stated quite clearly that he supports the aspects of the Civil Rights bill that struck down government laws that enforced segregation, but he opposed the parts of the law that made it illegal for private individuals or companies to discriminate on the basis of race.

So Goldberg is managing to go along with the liberals in bashing Paul, without really confronting the intellectual issue of whether the rights of individuals should include the right to personal discrimination. (Incidentally, one wonders whether Israel apologist Goldberg would condemn Israeli apartheid. I assume he would rationalize or ignore all the official and unofficial ways that Israel discriminates against Palestinians in Israel and especially in  the occupied territories, doubtless citing the “Israel is our democratic ally” mantra.)

So the intellectual and moral issues remain.  I have recently become editor of the Occidental Quarterly. (Formal announcement and plea for subscriptions TOQ later, but you can subscribe now, if you want.) Greg Johnson, the previous editor, initiated a contest for the best essay on “Libertarianism and Racial Nationalism.” (The deadline is June 1, but it will be extended to July 1. $1000 to the winner!) Great topic.

Libertarianism is a strong tradition in American history — the tradition of unfettered individualism. Eric Kaufmann’s treatment emphasizes the idea that 19th-century libertarians saw their freedom-loving ideology as an aspect of their Anglo-Saxon ethnic heritage, and as an evolutionary psychologist I agree that there is an ethnic basis to libertarian tendencies.

But Kaufmann also notes that this libertarian tendency became part of the culture of Western suicide in the 20th century. One of the things I noticed in writing the chapter on the Frankfurt School for The Culture of Critique was that these very Jewish (and therefore profoundly anti-libertarian in their own commitments) former Marxists had nothing but good things to say about individualism.  “In the end, the ideology of the Frankfurt School may be described as a form of radical individualism that nevertheless despised capitalism—an individualism in which all forms of gentile collectivism are condemned as an indication of social or individual pathology.”

So it’s not surprising that Goldberg as  a Jewish neocon presents himself as true to libertarianism — while ignoring the more difficult issue of personal discrimination.  But for us White advocates, the problem is even deeper. On the one hand, there is good reason to think that we Whites have a natural tendency to want to live free from intrusive governments and not have to march in lock step with others. That’s not to say that we can’t organize as a collective, it’s just that it’s harder for us to do.

Indeed, White advocacy is essentially a plea that Whites have collective interests and a right and an interest in organizing in order to achieve their interests in what has now become a cauldron of competing ethnic interests. Ethnic competition is always the death knell of individualism, as people organize themselves into competing groups. (That’s the real point  of the Arizona ethnic studies law: The last gasp of American individualism.) Any putative White homeland would necessarily discriminate on the basis of race, if only to secure its borders against the sort of invasion that we are now undergoing. Are Whites really so principled that that they would fail to see a moral imperative in preserving themselves, their culture, and their institutions, even if it meant that they had to discriminate on the basis of race.

It seems clear to me that libertarian individualism is indeed a culture of White suicide given the current political landscape. As Whites become a smaller and smaller percentage of the population, libertarianism will become an “okay” ideology for Whites — an officially approved harmless palliative to make them think they are intellectually honest while they sink into the sunset.

But I am open to all sorts of ideas on this topic and am definitely looking forward to reading the contributions to the special contest issue of TOQ.

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The Arizona Ethnic Studies Law: The Last Gasp of American Individualism

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Things keep getting more and more interesting in Arizona. Now they have penalized school districts that have ethnic studies courses: As reported by the NYTimes, “any school district that offers classes designed primarily for students of particular ethnic groups, advocate ethnic solidarity or promote resentment of a race or a class of people would risk losing 10 percent of its state financing.”

The people involved in teaching these courses deny that there is any advocacy of ethnic solidarity or racial resentment against Whites. And if you believe that, I’ve got some land I’d like to sell you.

Tom Horne, the state superintendent of public instruction, is the main man behind the law. He points to an incident in which all the Mexican students walked outon a speech by his deputy, a Republican Latina who was trying to counter another speaker who said that Republicans hate Latinos: “In the middle of her speech, a group of students that are in the Raza [!] studies program got up, put their fists in the air, turned their back to her. The principal asked them to sit down and listen, and they walked out on their own principal.” Sounds like a hostile act of ethnic solidarity.

The NYTimes article mentions that Horne objects to Pedagogy of the Oppressedby Paulo Freire, and the LATimes mentions Horne’s objection to Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, by Rodolfo Acuña, a professor and founder of the Chicano studies program at Cal State Northridge. Who would ever think that titles like that could lead to resentment against a certain (very evil) race?

Actually reading these books is well beyond my tolerance level. Friere’s book sounds like straight cultural Marxism right out of the Bill Ayers playbook. A reviewerquotes Friere: “Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indocrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.”

Occupied America emphasizes the evil that Whites have inflicted on Mexicans and Native Americans in the past. An Amazon review titled “Abajo con los Gringos!” (“Down with the Gringos”) states that Acuña’s book “contributes additional heft to the indictment of White settlement and expansion in this hemisphere as the cause of immense suffering by an essentially stone-age culture at the hands of a militarily superior civilization.” Another states that Acuña

pulls up countless accounts of slaughter, rape, torture, mutilation, and abuse of Mexican men, women, children, mostly incited as a sort of blood sport by American cavalry, enlisted men, volunteers, and associates, as well as the leveling of Mexican cities and towns just for target practice. To add to the war crimes, most of the Americans involved, even the command of Zachary Taylor, were never brought up on any charges, nor even in the most slightest way, reprimanded for their actions.

One has to agree with Horne and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer that this sort of thing is likely to produce hatred toward Whites. A spokesman for Brewer stated, “Governor Brewer signed the bill because she believes, and the legislation states, that public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.” Horne says much the same.

So the ideology underlying the bill is to let bygones be bygones and get on with the project of getting along with each other. The intellectual basis is classic libertarian individualism. Horne puts it this way:

I believe that what’s important about us is what we know, what we can do, what’s our character as individuals, not what race we happen to have been born into. And the function of the public schools is to bring in kids from different backgrounds and teach them to treat each other as individuals. And the Tucson district is doing the opposite. They’re teaching them to emphasize ethnic solidarity, what I call ethnic chauvinism. And I think that’s exactly is the wrong thing to do in the public schools, and that’s why I introduced this legislation to give myself the authority to put a stop to it.

This libertarian ideology is indeed the last hope of those intent on avoiding a race war as the inevitable consequence of present trends. The idea is that the faces will look different as the US absorbs all these immigrants, but we’ll still have a consensus commitment to individualism — nothing but vestigial group loyalties. No group conflict. No retribution for what happened in the past.

But now that America has gone so far down the road of minority ethnic consciousness and has signed on to massive non-White immigration motivated by fear and loathing of the traditional White population, is it really possible to turn back and pretend we are all nothing more than individuals? One reason to think that this is very unlikely to happen is that individualism is a unique creation of Western culture. No other culture has developed individualist institutions, and there is no reason to suppose that the millions of non-Whites who are crowding our shores will do so. Certainly these programs of ethnic consciousness raising will do nothing but strengthen group loyalties and hatred and resentment and hatred of the White majority.

At TOO we have repeatedly emphasized that White Americans are crazy to voluntarily become a minority in a society where the non-White majority has historical grudges against them and continues to have a strong group consciousness. Hostility to the traditional people and culture of America is a powerful current among Jews, spanning the entire Jewish political spectrum, from leftist intellectuals like Susan Sontag (“The white race is the cancer of human history”) and Howard Zinn (whose A People’s History of the United States has been a staple of college history courses for three decades) to neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz (see also here). It goes without saying that these attitudes are common among Blacks, and the fact that Acuña’s work is mainstream among Latino intellectuals is yet another indication, if any were needed, that it is common among Latinos too.

All the indications are that non-Whites are coalescing into a powerful political coalition centered in the Democratic Party. This coalition is formidable in large part because of the prominenc of Jews who are such an important component of American elites in the areas of personal wealth, media and political influence, and in the legal and academic worlds.

This plea for individualism is really the last gasp of hope for avoiding a racial bloodbath in the future. It is simply inconceivable that a non-White majority led by racial and ethnic activists filled with anti-White hatred of the sort that we see every day now will somehow be magically transformed into an idyllic Neverland of individualists of all races, ethnicities and religions. Unless Whites manage to develop a separatist state or manage to massively reverse the changes of the last 45 years, they will be in a physical fight for survival.

This is not to deny that Whites have been brutal towards other peoples in the past. But it is naïve to suppose that non-Whites would behave any differently if they could have. Speaking as an evolutionist, the idea that Western culture is uniquely evil is ridiculous.

But the idea that Western culture and White people are uniquely evil have been common among the intellectual activists of the left that now dominate in the academic world, beginning with the Boasian anthropologists who dominated anthropology for most of the 20th century. The Boasians created an imaginary past expunged of ethnic violence and warfare (see here, p. 29 ff.) Non-Whites were portrayed as gift-givers and myth-makers, not at all prone to ethnic warfare.

Non-White intellectual activists are now celebrating their ethnocentrism and hostility toward Whites. Legions of them are tenured professors in departments of ethnic studies. Acuña’s department of Chicano studies at CSU-Northridge has 28 professors, and it’s the same pretty much everywhere. The Arizona legislation shows that this sort of intellectual ethnic activism also pervades the K-12 curriculum.

So Whites really have three choices:

  • Reverse the trends of minority empowerment by getting rid of ethnic studies programs and deporting illegal immigrants, as Arizona is doing. However, that won’t be enough, unless they succeed in getting the very large numbers of legal non-White immigrants to leave.
  • Stake out a White separatist area in North America.
  • Get ready for the coming race war.


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Tony Paulsen: Thoughts on the British General Election

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Tony Paulsen: Here are some thoughts on the British general election — not, you will note, an ex cathedra pronouncement! [Editor’s Note: In his current TOO article, Alex Kurtagic thinks it was all a waste of time.]

I’ll begin with the system parties, and move on to the patriotic right.

It’s strange to see a three horse race in which all three horses lose, but Lib/Lab/Con have managed this remarkable feat. Labour have lost 91 seats in our 650 seat Parliament, while the system’s much hyped faux alternative, the Liberals, lost five seats, rather than make the large gains predicted before the poll. They now hold 57 seats.

The Conservative party, standing on a manifesto of change (think about that for a Conservative party!) gained 97 seats, and now hold 306, but are twenty short of an overall majority.

One seat remains vacant, as a candidate died during the campaign. A bye-election will be held in a few weeks, when the Conservatives should take the seat, pushing them up to 307.

Outside Ulster, which has its own political dynamic, the only minor party to gain a seat was the Greens (more on them anon), while the sole Independent in Parliament lost his, despite being much praised as an honourable and competent member.

The Democratic Unionist Party holds eight Ulster seats, after losing East Belfast, one of the most staunchly Protestant and Unionist seats in Northern Ireland, to the very liberal Alliance party on a three way split in the Unionist vote, exacerbated by the scandals surrounding land deals involving DUP leader Peter Robinson and his wife. The three way split in Unionism also cost the Unionist parties South Belfast. Lady Hermon sits as an Independent Unionist for North Down, making nine Unionists in the House of Commons.

Even supposing the Tories (Conservatives) could persuade all nine Unionists to support them reliably, they would still be eleven seats short of an overall majority, so they are negotiating with the Liberals.

Personally, if I were in Tory leader David Cameron’s shoes, I would thank my lucky stars that I did not have to take office and impose an austerity budget of unprecedented severity on a populace not exactly enured to hardship. I would seek to manoeuvre the Liberals into a coalition with Labour, so that they can reap the odium that will follow.

Such however appears to be Cameron’s vanity and his unbridled desire for office at any price that he may rush in where others might fear to tread, unless, of course, his present courtship of the Liberals is a Machiavellian manoeuvre designed to drive them into the arms of Labour when he eventually fails to propose marriage!

Moving on to the performance of the patriotic right, there are basically three contenders in the field. Two are essentially civic nationalists, the United Kingdom Independence Party and the English Democrats.

The EDs, whose ostensible concern is to obtain a devolved Parliament for England, but whose real objective is the end of the Union, and independence for England, performed terribly. I need waste no more time on them.

UKIP, whose original purpose was to oppose British membership of the European union, but which has tried to rebrand itself as a more broadly based party of the populist right, opposing further immigration into England, is a much more formidable force than the hopeless EDs. It polled 917,832 votes across the country.

Nevertheless, these votes were thinly spread, and nowhere did it approach winning a seat under out “first past the post” system.

Last year, UKIP came second in England and Wales in the elections to the European parliament, after the Conservatives, but ahead of the ruling Labour party, an extraordinary performance. This year, most of those voters plainly went back to the Conservative party, whence they came.

It is tolerably clear that UKIP can only win really big votes in elections to a parliament of whose existence it theoretically disapproves, an unusual state of affairs to say the least.

The BNP made a huge electoral effort, contesting 339 of the 650 seats in Parliament and polling 563,743 votes.

One mystery is what possessed Nick Griffin to contest 339 seats. There was no obvious purpose in contesting more than the number needed to secure a broadcast on television and radio (in England, political parties may not buy air time. The television and radio stations, whether state or privately owned, must provide a certain amount of free air time to each party contesting more than a minimum number of seats, I believe c. 110, so it would have made sense to fight c. 120 seats to allow for errors in filling in the nomination papers: similar arrangements obtain in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on local television and radio. Obviously the number of seats involved in those countries is far smaller).

The contrast with the Green party, which enjoys roughly similar electoral support to the BNP, could not be starker. The Greens concentrated their limited resources in one or two constituencies in which they are particularly strong, and took a seat, their first ever win at this level.

The BNP leadership on the other hand was overcome by hubris in the run up to this election, and nemesis duly followed.

Nick Griffin had thought that he might win the Barking (East London) seat from the Labour incumbent, Margaret Hodge, née Oppenheimer, scion of a wealthy Jewish family that fled Germany in the 1930s.

In the event, his share of the vote fell from the 16% that the BNP polled in the 2005 election to 14%, and he trailed in third after the Conservative candidate. Hodge was triumphantly re-elected.

Griffin’s deputy, the enigmatic Simon Darby (widely known in movement circles as 5IMon because of his alleged role as an agent of our equivalent of the FBI, MI5) failed to take Stoke on Trent Central, another seat that the BNP had high hopes of actually winning. Instead, he came fourth.

In a dénouement worthy of the book of Esther, “Haman’s sons”, the twelve BNP councillors on Barking council, all lost their seats in the local elections held on the same day.

Up and down the land, BNP councillors lost their seats in the worst electoral reverse that the movement has ever suffered (in fairness, mainly because until recently it never got more than one or two stray councillors elected, so didn’t have seats to lose).

It is plain that the party’s abandonment of the once successful strategy of concentrating on sinking deep local roots in carefully selected communities that are more receptive to its message than the mass of the people at this stage in its development in favour of a massive effort at national level has failed completely.

So what are the positives? (Yes, there are some!). Well, to poll 563,743 votes in 339 of the 650 seats suggests that there are about 1,000,000 people willing to vote BNP in the United Kingdom, even under an electoral system that makes a vote for a minor party a wasted vote in most constituencies, so that most electors choose whichever of the major parties they dislike less.

Were we one day to move to a more proportional system (not unlikely, as the Liberals will demand it as the price of their participation in a coalition) it is plausible that a phalanx of nationalists would eventually enter the establishment’s sanctum sanctorum. Of course the system parties will try to rig the electoral system to exclude nationalists, but it is difficult to do that, especially in times of serious economic hardship that make radical alternatives to the existing system more appealing to the people.

On the down side, morale in BNP circles will now slump in the short term and not easily be revived. At the end of this year, the party will almost inevitably lose members (it has a “churn” rate of c. 25%, that is to say, one in four does not renew at each year end: this year it is hardly plausible that new members will join to replace those who leave).

It will be interesting to see how the party membership now views its leadership, and whether any credible challenger to Nick Griffin emerges.

The party’s strained finances are under investigation by the authorities after it failed its audit last year, while the 2009 accounts are shortly due. Quite why vast sums of money have been sent “over the water” to its strange Northern Ireland based fund-raiser, “the Rev.” Jim Dowson, a bogus evangelist straight out of Elmer Gantry, is one of the many questions that will have to be addressed in those accounts.

Whether the party can put its financial affairs in order remains to be seen, and will be a crucial factor in determining whether the BNP continues under its present leadership, or drops its pilot (who won’t go willingly).

Tony Paulsen is a pen name.

Tom Sunic: Announcing Postmorten Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity

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Author: Tomislav Sunic
Foreword: Kevin MacDonald
Title: Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity (Collected Essays)
ISBN: 978-0-9561835-2-1
Pages: 224
Imprint: The Palingenesis Project
Publication: 11 February 2010
List Price: £14.99
Edition: Paperback
Publisher’s Webpage
Amazon Webpage
 
Tomislav Sunic is one of the leading scholars and exponents of the European New Right. A prolific writer and accomplished linguist in Croatian, English, French, and German, his thought synthesizes the ideas of Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Vilfredo Pareto, and Alain de Benoist, among others, exhibiting an elitist, neo-pagan, traditionalist sensibility. A number of themes have emerged in his cultural criticism: religion, cultural pessimism, race and the Third Reich, liberalism and democracy, and multiculturalism and communism. This book collects Dr. Sunic’s best essays of the past decade, treating topics that relate to these themes. From the vantage point of a European observer who has experienced the pathology of liberalism and communism on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Dr. Sunic offers incisive insights into Western and post-communist societies and culture. Always erudite and at times humorous, this highly readable postmortem report on the death of the West offers a refreshing, alternative perspective to what is usually found in the cavaderous Freudo-Marxian scholasticism that rots in the dank catacombs of postmodern academia.

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