“She was a genius,” says the Guardian. She was a “uniquely gifted artist who should be considered among the all-time greatest painters,” says the BBC. I say, no, she was not. The Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c.1656) was not a genius, was not uniquely gifted and should definitely not be considered a great painter. But don’t take my word for it — see for yourself. Here is one of her most famous and extravagantly praised paintings:

Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (c. 1640), Artemisia Gentileschi

Given the title of Gentileschi’s self-portrait, you can’t fault her ambition and egocentricity. But you can fault her perspective, her composition, her colouring, her grasp of her own anatomy, and her ability to represent fabric, flesh, and hair. Here for comparison is a self-portrait by a genuinely gifted female artist, the French Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun (1755–1842):

Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782), Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun

Vigée-Le Brun represents herself as attractive and enjoying both life and being a woman. Feminists don’t want women to be attractive and happy like that. They want women to be unhappy, angry and militant. That’s one big reason they prefer the untalented Gentileschi to the highly talented Vigée-Le Brun. I don’t think Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting even rises to the level of bad art. The words that come most naturally to my lips are “bloody awful.” The first time I saw the painting in a book of art history, I wondered whether its inclusion was a joke or mistake. How could any art-historian or critic take that mess seriously?

The siren-song of solipsism

Very easily, it became apparent. And very prudently too. Anyone at the Guardian, BBC or other leftist institution who spoke the truth about Artemisia Gentileschi’s sometimes execrable art would be in serious trouble. If Gentileschi had been a man and painted to the same low standard, she would quite rightly have been forgotten long ago. But she was a woman and a “rape-survivor,” so feminists in the 1970s decided to create a cult around her. By worshipping her, they were really worshipping themselves, because I think some or perhaps most feminists don’t see other women as individuals or even as human beings in their own right. Instead, those feminists see other women as reflections of themselves or as counters in the feminist struggle for power and self-assertion.

But this inability to see others as real applies more generally to leftists and their supposed objects of concern. I was struck by this passage in The Liar (1991), an autobiographical novel by the near-ubiquitous British leftist Stephen Fry: “For Adrian other people did not exist except as bit-players in the film of his life. No-one but he had noted the splendour and agony of existence, no one else was truly or fully alive.” Fry is homosexual and half-Jewish, which may also be significant, but his solipsism is, I’d argue, an important feature of leftism. For leftists, collectivism is really the simplest and surest way to exalt the self. And you can see these aspects of leftism in the cult of Artemisia Gentileschi — and also in Gentileschi herself. Her bad art is now being worshipped in a major exhibition at the National Gallery in London. Here’s how Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett of the Guardian reacted when she overheard some truth-telling at the exhibition:

Artemisia’s features, in the guise of myriad saints and figures from myth and religion, are everywhere. As Laura Cumming wrote, she “seems to live inside every role she depicts”. I delighted in this, but other visitors did not. “Self-obsessed”, said one older man, and I laughed to myself because, really, his remark was just too perfect, too predictable, too tediously sexist for words. The history of women and art has been, in the main part, a history of bodies. Bodies stripped of clothing and imagined and objectified by men. Yet running alongside this parade of breasts and bottoms as conceived by the male gaze is a subversive counterhistory: that of women artists seeing themselves. (The history of art is full of female masters. It’s time they were taken seriously, The Guardian, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett)

Yes, Gentileschi did see herself. She then put herself down on canvas, over and over again, in awkward, ugly, ill-coloured ways. That is subversive, I suppose. It’s definitely self-obsessed. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett says the remark by the “older man” is “tediously sexist” because she can’t say that it’s untrue. Gentileschi also sometimes looks self-pitying, as in her Self-Portrait as Martyr, the painting on the left below:

Some of Artemisia’s subversive self-obsession: self-portraits as martyr, lute-player and St Catherine

Cosslett both explains and echoes the self-pity: “Artemisia was a survivor of male violence, just as I am. Tears sprang to my eyes when I looked at the transcript of her torture during her rapist’s trial, and read that she had repeated ‘è vero, è vero, è vero’ (‘it is true, it is true, it is true’).” I’d suggest that Cosslett wept for herself, not for Gentileschi. That is, Cosslett sees Gentileschi as a reflection of herself, not as an individual. That’s why objective standards of good and bad art don’t apply in the cult of Artemisia Gentileschi. She and her art serve to reflect feminists back at themselves.

And her art is probably even more appealing to feminists because, unlike Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun’s, it is bad art. Leftists hate beauty, truth and goodness, and delight in the destruction of those things. The cult of Artemisia exalts ugliness and insists on untruths: Artemisia was a “genius,” a “uniquely gifted artist … among the all-time greatest painters.”

Chopping off White men’s heads

The cult also celebrates the overthrow of White men, because this is Gentileschi’s most famous painting in its two versions:

Judith Beheading Holofernes

Many painters have represented the ethnocentric Old Testament story of a Jewish heroine killing a gentile to defend her people, but few have done it as badly as Gentileschi did. And here is another of her bad paintings on a similar theme:

Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist (c. 1615)

Gentileschi places herself on canvas, dealing death to White men, and feminists can again see themselves reflected in her bad art. If you want to see how a real genius represents Judith’s death-dealing, here is Caravaggio:

Caravaggio’s Judith beheading Holofernes (1599)

Compositionally, that isn’t one of Caravaggio’s best paintings: it isn’t a realistic portrayal of what such a beheading would have looked like (according to the apocryphal Book of Judith, Holofernes was drunk and helpless when Judith cut off his head as her maidservant kept watch at the door of his tent, but painters have understandably chosen more drama and less drunkenness). Gentileschi understood Judith’s task better, which is why she shows the beheading as a collaboration. After all, men are on average far more physically powerful than women, as Gentileschi presumably learned when she was raped by her father’s assistant, Agostino Tassi.

Victimhood valorizes

So yes, she was the victim of a bad crime and yes, the crime was compounded by the torture she endured to prove her accusation against Tassi. But her victimhood does not “valorize” her art (to use an ugly neologism found in this feminist art-criticism on Gentileschi). Her art is still bad and Caravaggio’s is still sublime. I’m not disturbed by Gentileschi’s decapitations. They might be more realistic, but they don’t look real. Caravaggio’s decapitation does look real.

And while Gentileschi painted herself as a martyr and saint, as you can see above, Caravaggio painted himself as a sinner, as you can see below:

Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ (c. 1602)

The figure on the far right, holding up a lantern to assist the taking of Christ for trial and crucifixion, is probably Caravaggio himself. That is a very simple and effective way to represent a difficult but essential Christian doctrine: that we all bear responsibility for the crucifixion of God’s only-begotten son.

Anatomy out of whack

It’s also significant, I think, that Caravaggio has given a determinedly gentile face to the kiss-bestowing Judas, an archetypal Jewish villain in so much Christian iconography. There’s no evasion of responsibility here: Caravaggio is saying “I did it; you did it; we all did it.” But if Artemisia Gentileschi had attempted the same scene, I think her first impulse would have been to give Christ her own features and thereby play the victim again. She certainly couldn’t have painted to Caravaggio’s sublime standards. He could represent reality; she couldn’t. Even the Guardian and BBC acknowledge Gentileschi’s artistic failings:

Her anatomy is sometimes out of whack, her details occasionally glossed over (or perhaps painted by assistants). … the single light source in [Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (1623-5)] — a candle near Judith’s upper arm — is in the wrong place. It is too far behind Judith, who has her left hand held out catching the light that is clearly behind it, which is not possible. The mistake is compounded by a poorly painted shadow covering much of Judith’s face, which is also not possible. It’s a splodge and a botch. (Artemisia review — overwhelmingly present, The Guardian, 4th October 2020; Artemisia Gentileschi: Will Gompertz reviews her show at the National Gallery, BBC, 3rd October 2020)

Will Gompertz of the BBC then says: “And yet. Who cares?” I care and so should everyone who wants to defend artistic standards. Gentileschi’s failings aren’t minor and incidental, but major and characteristic. It matters that her “anatomy is sometimes out of whack” and that Caravaggio’s isn’t. She aimed for realism like him and didn’t achieve it. And without the example and inspiration of male painters like Caravaggio, she wouldn’t have reached even the low standards that she did. Whether feminists and other leftists like it or not, artistic genius and creativity are largely male things — more specifically, White male gentile things.

Some risibly bad art by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Feminists and other leftists don’t like it, of course, which is why they have created cults not just for Artemisia Gentileschi, but also for the risibly bad Black artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and the parodically minimalist Jewish artist Mark Rothko (see Brenton Sanderson’s three-part study of Rothko). Unlike them, Gentileschi valued realism, even if she didn’t achieve it. Basquiat and Rothko are part of what Tom Wolfe calls The Painted Word, that is, art that depends for its success not on its own merits, but on the spinning of verbal webs by disproportionately Jewish critics, academics and dealers. But Caravaggio’s realism — his ability to capture reality in paint — was not an isolated act of genius. It is no coincidence that his great art belongs to the same period as the birth of modern science and anatomy. Other White men were looking at the world and trying to understand and represent it in objective ways. Caravaggio was obsessed with light; Gentileschi was obsessed with herself.

The might of the “male gaze”

So are many of the feminists who now celebrate her and her subversive gynocentric reclamation of “breasts and bottoms as conceived by the male gaze,” as the Guardian journalist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett put it. But if Cosslett wants true subversion, she should consider the fact that female breasts and bottoms were actually created by the male gaze. You could almost say that the human female is a work of art created by the human male, because countless acts of sexual selection down the course of evolution have favoured some types of women and disfavoured others. The sexual selection has worked in the other direction too, shaping male bodies according to female preferences.

But humans are not like Birds of Paradise, with drab, selective females and spectacular, attention-seeking males. The shaping of women by the “male gaze” may have been particularly strong in Europe when women were competing for the attention of skilled hunters in the colder and harsher European environment. The anthropologist Peter Frost argues that this female competition explains the variety of eye- and hair-colours found in Europe, where genes for blue eyes and blond hair appeared under pressure of the male gaze. In prehistoric times, White women were evolving special beauty even as White men were evolving special creativity.

Opposing beauty, pursuing power

In modern times, that White female beauty was celebrated by the art of White male creators. Later still, both the art and the beauty were attacked by leftist ideologies invented or decisively influenced by an alien group called Jews. I agree with a fascinating article at National Vanguard arguing that “Jews themselves are an unattractive and, on average, ugly people” and that “Jews, as a group, oppose beauty.” Indeed, the Talmud advises Jews not to regard physical beauty as important in marriage: “For ‘false is grace and beauty is vain.’ Pay regard to good breeding, for the object of marriage is to have children” (Taanith 26b and 31a).

The cult of Artemisia Gentileschi is a product of those leftist ideologies, celebrating a painter who was mediocre at her rarely achieved best. And just as Gentileschi’s art was not beautiful, nor was Gentileschi herself. She looks masculine and muscular, with high testosterone that may have given her the ambition and drive to promote herself in a way that her art could not do on its own merits. And she had novelty value as a female painter, of course. Cosslett says that a “large part of why Gentileschi captivates is because she triumphed against patriarchy.” But feminists like Cosslett don’t genuinely care about patriarchy or about rape. It wasn’t the Guardian or BBC that exposed the Muslim rape-gangs of Rotherham and numerous other British towns and cities. But it is the Guardian and BBC that support the continued growth in Western nations of Islam, which competes with Orthodox Judaism for the title of the world’s most patriarchal and misogynistic religion.

Instead, feminists like Cosslett care about themselves and about warring on truth, beauty and goodness. The cult of Artemisia Gentileschi is a small but characteristic battle-front in that war. Gentileschi was a bad artist who created ugly art. There are thousands of male artists far worthier of exhibitions at the National Gallery and of praise in the mainstream media. But those male artists don’t receive the attention they deserve. Not while leftism rules the media and inverts reality in its perpetual quest not for truth and beauty, but for power and revenge.

Clare Ellis
The Blackening of Europe: Volume I. Ideologies & International Developments
Arktos, 2020.

“When this majority-minority shift occurs, there will be an unprecedented transfer of political power from European peoples to non-Europeans, essentially signalling the final endpoint of Europeans’ sovereignty over their ancestral homelands.”

One of the great tragedies of modern times has been the warped and perverse bureaucratic and institutional form taken by the noble idea of European brotherhood. Once promoted by figures like Sir Oswald Mosley as a means to European resurgence, the unity of Europe in recent decades has instead become a byword for mass migration, repressive speech laws, “human rights” insanity, and ethnocultural suicide. How did it happen? The common understanding in our circles is often very simplistic, relying heavily on caricatures of what has become known as the Kalergi Plan. The Kalergi Plan narrative, as we will discuss below, of course has its merits, and its simplicity is one of them. But for some time I’ve been hoping for the arrival of a text that could be considered the definitive, nuanced, and comprehensive account of how the notion of European unity became a vehicle for European destruction. While Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe was a useful step in the right direction, I believe that it is only with the publication of the first volume of Clare Ellis’s The Blackening of Europe that we finally have the account we deserve. And while I have yet to read the second and third volumes, I eagerly await them in the belief that, taken together, this trilogy will represent one of the seminal ‘Third Positionist’ works of the last two decades.

I have to be honest that prior to the publication of The Blackening of Europe I hadn’t heard of Clare Ellis. This is due more to my own ignorance than any lack of activity on her part, and Clare’s credentials really do speak for themselves. A close associate and former PhD student of Ricardo Duchesne, Clare has written for both the Council of European Canadians and The Occidental Quarterly. I think The Blackening of Europe will, and should, raise her profile considerably. Clare’s research at the University of New Brunswick concerned the demographic and political decline of native Europeans in their own homelands. How much of her PhD material made it into the book isn’t immediately clear, but there certainly seems to be a strong crossover in thematic content.

In brief, the first volume of The Blackening of Europe ambitiously attempts to map the various strands of ideological, political, economic, and social thought and action that combined to warp, define, and pervert the idea of European unity, from its inception to its most modern incarnation. The text features a wide range of information I was familiar with, and very much that I wasn’t, including early eighteenth-century concepts of European unity, the ideas of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, the Fabian Society, the Frankfurt School, the European-Israel relationship, Arab oil embargoes, theories on cosmopolitanism from Kant and Marx to Habermas and Nussbaum, a critical micro-history of Liberalism, Jewish hypocrisy, and an examination of Conservatism and neoconservatism. Fortunately, given the dizzying array of information being offered for consideration, Ellis is a capable guide, structuring the book is a sensible, well-organised manner, and writing in a clear, insistent, and authoritative style.

Ellis begins the book with a familiar, but no less stark and disturbing, fact: “Indigenous Europeans are becoming demographic and political minorities in European nation-states.” There’s a brief discussion of the collapse in European birth rates, but Ellis is clear on the real disaster unfolding before our eyes: “It is not the low fertility rate of Europeans that renders them ethnic minorities within their own nations, but elite-sanctioned large-scale non-European immigration, which began about sixty years ago and which is now integral to the cosmopolitan EU project.” In the context of this project,

indigenous Europeans and their political and cultural institutions and identities are undergoing processes of erasure — stigmatisation, marginalisation, deprivation, and replacement — by mandated immigrationism, multiculturalism, and other methods of forced diversification, while resistance to their political and cultural marginalisation and demographic dispossession is criminalised.

Implicit in Ellis’s account is the accusation both that the decline of Europeans is deliberately engineered and that it violates “various rights of native Europeans as well as international laws that prohibit genocide in any form.”

The book is divided into two parts. The first is “Central Influences on the Formation of the European Union,” which is a mixture of history, politics, and economics. Part II of the book is titled “Deep Ideological Currents,” and is predominantly philosophical and political. The first part of the book is further divided into three sections: “Early European Integration,” “The Fabian Society and the Frankfurt School,” and “International Geopolitical Developments.” In “Early European Integration” we are introduced to the growth of pan-European thought in the middle of the Enlightenment, with references to a European union found in the writings of George Washington, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. These figures promoted unity and cosmopolitanism as a means to bringing peace to a continent long-steeped in almost perpetual war, and Kant’s ideas were particularly influential in the rise of “Peace Leagues” at the start of the nineteenth century. What we see even at these very early stages, however, was a mingling of intentions and differing interpretations of cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitanism of Kant retained a national character, and was predominantly geared towards the achievement of peace. Europeans within the peace leagues, such as the Union for Democratic Control (UDC, 1914) more or less echoed the same sentiments, but they unwittingly provided cover for those possessing ulterior motives and radically different ideas about cosmopolitanism. Although not mentioned by Ellis, the British Jewish intellectual Israel Zangwill was a co-founder and key figure on the executive of the Union for Democratic Control, and from October 1914 it was Zangwill who provided the UDC with its headquarters.^[1] From this base, Zangwill pumped out European “unity” propaganda that attacked what Ellis calls “the nationalist canon,” not with the sole focus of achieving European peace but of promoting feminism and his own idea of “the melting pot” or widespread mixing of peoples and the end of national identity. As is common with such Jewish activists, however, Zangwill was reluctant to live out his own philosophy, marrying within his ethnic group (Jewish feminist Edith Ayrton) and spending most of his life promoting Jewish causes.

Zangwill was probably a key influence on Count Richard Nikolaus Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894–1972), the cosmopolitan geopolitician and philosopher whose name has become synonymous with the worst of the European Union project. Kalergi was himself the product of miscegenation, having an Austro-Hungarian father and a Japanese mother, and he spent much of his life producing a blend of pacifist and European integrationist literature. Ellis carefully contextualises Kalergi, once described by Hitler as a “cosmopolitan bastard,” over the course of some 25 pages, and examines his thought in detail. There were some novel revelations for me, including his self-conscious participation in Freemasonry, his quite extensive reliance upon Jewish finance, and his extremely strange and dangerous fantasy that Jews were the ideal leaders of the future European state. That being said, Ellis provides enough information on Kalergi’s thought to cast doubt on the existence of a clearly-defined “Kalergi Plan.” Much of Kalergi’s work promoted European unity under three banners—peace, civilization (including renewed European colonization of Africa), and trade. Kalergi believed that Europeans shared a common cultural destiny and that Europe should be a world power on the same level as the United States and the Soviet Union. And while he eulogized the notion that the European man of the future would be of mixed race, he does not appear anywhere to have actively promoted immigration to Europe and in fact wrote: “Europe must at all costs prevent that great number of black workers and soldiers from immigrating to Europe.” Ellis comments that although Kalergi was wrong to reduce European identity to a matter of “morals and of style,” he “did not intend for large-scale immigration into Europe from non-European peoples, especially from Africa and the Muslim Middle-East.”

As in the Union of Democratic Control, which housed different goals, interests and ideological trajectories, Kalergi emerges from Ellis’s account as an ideologically and racially confused individual, in possession of eccentric, irrational, and often contradictory theories, and acting often at the hands of much more powerful forces with ulterior motives. By far the strangest of Kalergi’s theories was the idea that the new united Europe should be governed by a “spiritual aristocratic leadership” that “can only be found in the Jewish people.” These traits, according to Kalergi, “predestine Jews to be leaders of urban humanity, the protagonists of capitalism as well as the revolution.” As Ellis puts it:

It would not be the European aristocrats that would lead the new Europe to unification and finally world federation; rather it would be the interplay of the leaders of both Jewish capitalism and Jewish socialism alone who would take over and dominate the forces of European power and determine its destiny.

That Kalergi was probably directly influenced by the work of Zangwill in this regard is almost beyond doubt, and Jewish influence here is compounded by the fact Kalergi was funded by his friend Louis Nathaniel de Rothschild, and the Jewish bankers Max Warburg, Felix Warburg, Paul Warburg, and Bernard Baruch. As well as receiving financial backing, Kalergi was in “constant intellectual dialogue” with Max Warburg, who may have shaped some of Kalergi’s ideas on putative Jewish supremacy. Ellis points out that after World War II, when the first steps towards a unified European bureaucratic structure were being taken, some scholars have argued that “the Pan European Movement and Union were appropriated by people who wished to use it for their own ends.”

These “people,” essentially technocrats, politicians and lawyers, are situated by Ellis within the Fabian Society and the Frankfurt School. The Fabian Society, which aimed for a slow and steady socialist revolution in society, is explained as more or less a club of well-intention British utopian socialist eccentrics until it merged in the 1920s with Rothschild finance and received the generous backing of British Jewish banker Sir Ernest Cassel; it also enjoyed the backing of the Rockefeller Foundation and J.P. Morgan. All were involved in the founding of the London School of Economics (LSE) which was intended to train up activists, bureaucrats, politicians for the revolution. Ellis comments:

So here we have a socialist-capitalist alliance whereby Big Business elites utilise socialist institutions to nurture their own aims. This obviously begs a particular question: Why do major capitalists and international finance organizations want to train the bureaucracy for the creation of a future socialist state? Isn’t socialism, in its very essence, antithetical to capitalism? H.G. Wells explained this apparent paradox in 1920: “Big Business is in no means antipathetic to Communism. The larger big business grows the more it approximates Collectivism. It is the upper road of the few instead of the lower road of the masses to Collectivism.”

Ellis adds that it became the strategy of Fabian socialism to “prefer wealthy elites (intellectual, political, economic) rather than the proletariat (working class) as the source of revolutionary potential.” By 1945, the Fabian Society had taken over the British House of Commons, since more than half of the ruling Labour party’s MPs were paid-up Fabians. The same trends are prominent today, most notably in the example of the Fabian Tony Blair, whose Labour Party during his decade of power (1997–2007) ushered in the biggest ever acceleration of immigration to Britain, and who maintains strong links to Jewish international finance in the form of his close friend and ally Moshe Kantor.

Ellis has a very interesting section demonstrating organic links between the Fabian Society and the Frankfurt School, especially in their early stages, and cross-pollination of ideas between British and German socialists. There are clear parallels in the way both groupings set about their destructive tasks with the tactic of gradual infiltration. Permeation, or “honeycombing,” of existing institutions with committed activists and intellectuals was the preferred methodology of bringing about large-scale societal change, and both groupings eschewed the notion of the working class as a viable source for revolutionary socialism. Ellis lists the “products” of Fabian and Frankfurt School activism as:

feminism; affirmative action; deconstruction; the transformation of the traditional family, church, education, and morals; Third-World opposition movements; anti-nationalism; cultural contempt; anti-discrimination; liberal immigration reforms; ‘White Privilege;’ White Guilt; “Diversity is Strength”; ‘tolerance’; Political Correctness; and multiculturalism.

The dramatic changes witnessed in Western society over the last 70 years have been, argues Ellis, wrought by the activity of a “New Class” composed of university-educated, liberal, cosmopolitans who have gained support from financial elites, thus increasing their social capital and expanding their capacity for political action. Both Fabianism and the Frankfurt School are

elite forms of socialism, whether in intellectual political, cultural, or economic terms, as they no longer focus on the working classes. They are bourgeois revolutionary theories that instigate revolutions from above, not below; they are not grassroots or democratic; they are plutocratic, oligarchic, and dictatorial. These socialist intellectuals ‘march through the institutions’ to effect a ‘gradual’ revolution from above and are sponsored by the capitalist forces they supposedly oppose.

The third section of part I, “International and Geopolitical Developments,” is one of the more factually dense elements of the book, but is worth persevering with. The chapter highlights the ways in which early diplomatic support for Israel (led by the United States and Britain) brought Europe into conflict with oil producers in the Middle East, necessitating not only closer economic ties within Europe but also sowing the seeds for the future Islamization of the continent. Ellis dissects the ways in which American imperialism, international finance, and monopoly capitalism influenced post-war European diplomacy and economic recovery strategies (mainly the importation of supposedly “temporary” foreign labor), and links it to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the creation of global institutions like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and NATO — all of which “influenced the opening of Europe and Western nations to non-European immigration from the Third World.”

By a small margin, I found Part II to be more interesting than the first. It’s comprised of a very ambitious survey of the origins and trajectory of all the contemporary ideological currents underpinning the European Union we see today. There are no less than eleven small chapters critically exploring the evolution of cosmopolitanism (including Kantian, proletarian, critical, universal, liberal and pluralistic variants). The text then moves to a three-chapter exploration liberalism, before ending with a three-chapter exploration of conservatism, including a critique of neoconservatism.

I found Ellis’s treatment of the origins of cosmopolitanism to be very interesting, though I felt that something important had been missed in the absence of any mention that Kant had obviously been influenced in his attitudes to tolerance and cosmopolitanism by Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the Jewish intellectual activist most responsible for initiating pluralism, multiculturalism, and even “open borders” as political ideologies in Europe. As one scholar has remarked, “there is every indication that Kant read everything Mendelssohn wrote,” and the pair often exchanged letters and books.^[2] In other words, Mendelssohn was, in a form of intellectual parasitism or symbiosis, the “Zangwill” to Kant’s “UDC”. Ellis may have been helped to improve this already excellent section with at least some reference to Mendelssohn and the ideologies of his co-ethnics among the maskilim, or even with some information from Cathy Gelbin and Sander Gilman’s 2017 Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews. The latter is, given its authors, far from perfect, but is a good introduction to the ways in which Jews have gone about promoting cosmopolitanism and its offshoots in European society for the last three centuries. In making such a suggestion I am, perhaps, playing to my own strengths, but I nevertheless feel that the Jewish influence in the origins of the most pernicious elements of this strain of thought merits at least some attention in a book like The Blackening of Europe. Jewish influence in modern cosmopolitan theories is, of course, treated in Ellis’s analysis of the thought of Martha Nussbaum, who “advocates world citizenship and internationalism” and “criticised patriotic pride.”

The result of centuries of cosmopolitan thought is devastating:

Identity for Europeans is [today] about legal proceedings, universal abstractions, and individual interests rather than substantial and meaningful bonds that are in the interests of a community of people united by ancestral, cultural, and other ties. … The majority population lose their particular ethnocultural identity in their accommodation of all other ethnocultural identities in a pluralistic and ethnically diverse constitutional liberal democracy. European majorities do not even become a minority amongst other minorities with the right to self-determination, for what determines their identity is solely in terms of rational universal rights and legal procedures; they have a post-national identity only. … It is clear that many cosmopolitanists perceive all European-based countries of the world and, by extension, all European peoples, to be guilty of something or other: Nazism, colonialism, slavery, Eurocentrism or Westerncentrism, global capitalism, being White etc. It is through this narrative that the radical transformation of European societies and European peoples to align with the dictates of some form of cosmopolitanism is justified.

Ellis’s treatment of cosmopolitanism ends with an extremely interesting profile of the modern-day cosmopolitan class, including reflections on their mental health. They are composed of

wealthy and influential elites who are either neoliberals motivated by global capitalism, or else some form of socialist (Leftist, cultural Marxists) motivated by universal values and societal transformation, or they are both neoliberal and socialist: a socialist-capitalist alliance. In either case, their primary identity is global or cosmopolitan, which is completely independent from geography, nation, ethnicity, or religion, and they seek to change the world according to their elite visions and ideals of humanity, the future, and the global economy.

I concur with all the above, my only caveat being that there’s an obvious exception to this rule and that’s “the Jewish cosmopolitan,” who can be socialist-capitalist while maintaining an intense attachment to geography and nation (Israel), ethnicity (Jewishness), and religion (Judaism). One need only look at figures like Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer, Moshe Kantor, along with the vast majority of the Jewish Big Tech CEOs, hedge fund bosses, bankers, media barons, consumer culture despots, and loan merchants, etc., to see that this is plainly and inarguably the case. What we therefore see in the ongoing story of European cosmopolitanism is the confluence of two separate strains of activism — the generally well-meaning European variant peopled by Kant, the UDC, and some of the non-Jewish utopians; and the Jewish one featuring Mendelssohn, the Frankfurt School, and Jewish Capital. It is the latter that has attached itself to the former, perverting and distorting its vision for their own ends. The present-day European Union is the disfigured and defective offspring of this sinister congress.

Ellis’s analysis of the mental health of the average member of the cosmopolitan elite is excellent. Her assertion that they “have a combined sense of intellectual superiority, moral arrogance, and existential insecurity, often involving fear of ‘natural groups,’” couldn’t be more aptly applied to Jewish activists. One is also reminded of the infamous 2010 confrontation between the Fabian British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy, one of his own voters. Duffy had mentioned a lack of jobs in the context of ongoing mass immigration, prompting Brown to quickly abandon the exchange and get into a departing car. Unaware that his microphone was still on, a horrified Brown was recorded by the media talking to his aides: “That was a disaster—they should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? Ridiculous!” Asked what she had said, he replied: “Everything, she was just a bigoted woman.” The cosmopolitan elite in a nutshell — fleeing from reality and full of moral and dehumanizing condemnations of those members of the “natural group” who dissent.

The book’s treatment of Liberalism and Conservatism is equally masterful, and includes a powerful critique of neoconservatism that includes references to, and quotes from, such figures as Sam Francis. It sets the stage nicely for Volume II of the trilogy, which will deal exclusively with the aftermath of Zionist neocon wars in the Middle East, in the form of mass migration and the acceleration of the Islamization of Europe. The volume concludes with an Afterword offering a summary of findings, and a helpful guide to what can be expected in Volumes II (Immigration, Islam and the Migrant Crisis) and III (Critical Views) of the trilogy.

Clare Ellis is to be commended for producing what is sure to be the definitive work on the co-option of the European unity project from its beginning by hostile forces, and for setting down for all time one of the clearest records yet written of the ideological, financial, political, and ethnic interests behind them.

^[1] S. Kadish, Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution (Frank Cass, 1992), 62.

^[2] J. Schmidt, Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 75.