Western Culture

Tristan Tzara and the Jewish Roots of Dada, Part 1

Tristan Tzara


The twentieth century saw a proliferation of art inspired by the culture of critique. The exposure and promotion of this art grew alongside the ever-expanding Jewish control of the media, and Jewish penetration and eventual capture of the Western art establishment. Jewish writers, painters and composers sought to rewrite the rules of artistic expression — to allow accommodation for their own technical limitations, and to facilitate the creation (and elite acceptance) of works intended as a rebuke to the supposed evils of Western civilizational norms.

The Jewish intellectual substructure of many of these twentieth century art movements was manifest in their unfailing hostility toward the political, cultural and religious traditions of Europe and European-derived societies. I previously examined how the rise of Abstract Expressionism exemplified this tendency in the United States, and coincided with the usurping of the American art establishment by a group of radical Jewish intellectuals. In Europe, Jewish influence on Western art reached a peak during the interwar years. This era, when the work of many artists was suffused with radical politics, was the heyday of the Jewish avant-garde.

A prominent example of a cultural movement from this time with important Jewish involvement was Dada. The Dadaists challenged the very foundations of Western civilization which they regarded, in the context of the destruction of World War I, and continuing anti-Semitism throughout Europe, as pathological. The artists and intellectuals of Dada responded to this socio-political diagnosis with assorted acts of cultural subversion. Dada was a movement that was destructive and nihilistic, irrational and absurdist, and which preached the overturning of every cultural tradition of the European past, including of rationality itself. The Dadaists “aimed to wipe the philosophical slate clean” and lead “the way to a new world order.”[i] While there were many non-Jews involved in Dada, the Jewish contribution was fundamental in shaping its intellectual tenor as a movement, for Dada was as much an attitude and way of thinking as a mode of artistic output. Read more

The Lost Soul of WASP America, Part 1

Introduction

The sweeping gains by the Republican Party in the 2010 mid-term Congressional elections were due in large part to the growing strength of America’s grass-roots Tea Party movement.  Tea Party activists are overwhelmingly White; their stated goal is to roll back the federal Leviathan now headed by America’s first non-White President.  Predictably, therefore, liberals interpret the Tea Party phenomenon as a manifestation of White “racism.”  Equally predictable are Tea Party attempts to deflect such accusations by backing the Black Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain.  For a while, even some White nationalists hoped that the Tea Parties would evolve into an explicitly ethnonationalist political movement.  It is now obvious that that will never happen.

At heart, the Tea Party movement is not about politics as such, i.e. who gets what, when, and where.  Still less does it promote a surreptitious style of identity politics tailor-made for White folks.  Instead, the excitement generated by the Tea Partiers resembles a corporate media-savvy revival of the old-time religious fervour for which America is famous.

The Tea Party movement is another episode in the long history of evangelical enthusiasm which has driven the permanent (or at least very long-running) American Revolution since it broke out in the eighteenth century.  The radicalism of that revolutionary upheaval is still fuelled by a potent mixture of politics and religion.  Well before the American Declaration of Independence, the first Great Awakening laid the foundation for the constitutional faith that transformed colonial Englishmen into homo Americanus.  In the early nineteenth century, a second-stage evangelical revival fertilized the spiritual seedbed of secession and Civil War. Read more

Fall Issue of The Occidental Quarterly, and a Call for Papers

The Fall issue of The Occidental Quarterly is now available. Yearly subscriptions (4 issues) can be obtained at the here—hardcopy: $60.00, including postage to U.S. addresses; digital: $30.00. See page for all purchase options.

TOO readers will be very interested in this material. In addition to the intellectual stimulation provided by these articles (and a handsome addition to your coffee table if you purchase the hardcopy subscription), subscribing to TOQ is an excellent way to support media that presents intellectually honest perspectives on Western peoples and culture that simply cannot be published in the mainstream intellectual media in today’s climate of political correctness. We complain endlessly about the stranglehold on the media enjoyed by our enemies. Subscribing to TOQ helps change all that.

The Spring issue of TOQ will be on the topic of “Collapse: Perspectives on the Impending Crisis of the West.” Thinkers on the political right have been prophesying the collapse of our current political and economic system for some time, but recent developments seem to make this a realistic possibility. The problems leading to the this crisis are daunting and quite possibly insoluble without a political cataclysm: Exploding and unsustainable debt at all levels of government;  unsustainable levels of immigration requiring unrealistic levels of economic growth to prevent chronic high unemployment; endless costly foreign wars fought to appease the Israel Lobby; a corrupt financial elite that has plunged the Western world into its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; rapidly expanding populations of low-IQ non-Whites requiring unsustainably high levels of social support; large numbers of Whites inchoately angry about their impending displacement and the fact that they are being forced to adjust to a multicultural world they do not desire. This multicultural world promises increased racial conflict (a characteristic of all multicultural societies) and diminished political and cultural influence for Whites. Read more

Celebrating America’s European Heritage: Leif Erikson

Leif Erikson statue at the Hallgrimskirkja, the largest church in Iceland

Joseph F. Healey has pointed out that White ethnic identities are evolving into new shapes and forms, merging the various “hyphenated” ethnic identities into a single, generalized “European American” identity based on race and a common history of immigration and assimilation.  In light of the fact that virtually every minority group has generated a protest movement — Black Power, Red Power, Chicanismo — proclaiming a recommitment to its own heritage and to the authenticity of its own culture, European Americans should seize the opportunity to reclaim their ethnic and historical heritage on festive October occasions such as Columbus Day (Oct. 12) and Leif Erikson Day (Oct. 9).

Regarding Columbus, it should be remembered that the great Admiral of the Seas may well have had knowledge of earlier Norse explorations.  In 1477 he sailed to Ireland and Iceland with the merchant marine, as attested by his son, Fernando, who quotes a note of his father stating:

I sailed in the year 1477, in the month of February, a hundred leagues beyond the island of Tile [Thule, i.e. Iceland], whose northern part is in latitude 73 degrees north and not 63 degrees as some would have it … the season when I was there the sea was not frozen.

In all societies with a history of migrations, the question “who came first?” becomes important.  Centuries before Columbus and the Waldseemüller world map known as “America’s baptismal certificate,” the Icelandic sagas answered this question by immortalizing the names and deeds of the pioneers for posterity. Read more

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

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)

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

National Suicide: Review of Pat Buchanan’s “Suicide of a Superpower”

Pat Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2011, 496pp.).

Pat Buchanan takes the gloves off in his new book.

During a question and answer session after his Bradley Lecture on “the State of White America,” author Charles Murray called on Sam Kazman, general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He prefaced his question with this dictum, “there will always be an America, it just may not be in the United States.”

The sentiment captures the sweeping transformation of American society since the mid-1960s — a society that was largely European (in values, population, culture, and folkways) now is on a demographic trajectory to become a majority-minority cesspool by 2050 with the White population declining to minority status.

An apt description of American society isn’t merely the metaphorical “salad bowl” replacing the “melting pot” — the lettuce is a vanishing ingredient!

The quintessential dilemma that seems to be on the minds of more and more Middle Americans is the question Pat Buchanan poses in the preface of his latest book: “What happened to the country we grew up in?” It is a question weighing heavily on the minds of Midwesterners and other citizens as they see their communities rapidly becoming Third World sinkholes.

The question is one that preoccupies Buchanan in Suicide of a Superpower. It is indisputably his boldest and most passionate assessment of our nation’s fate — an America vanishing before our eyes.

As Buchanan notes, the nation of our forefathers will be unrecognizable to future generations of Americans. It is, as he puts it, a country that lost a nation. Read more