Parents have recently discovered that the education establishment—the odious class of persons consisting of professional school administrators, teachers certified by our social-justice-warrior education schools, and, often, disconnected boards of education “representing” gigantic swaths of voters, often representing districts the size of a small State—have inserted a program of so-called “critical race theory” into the K-12 curriculum.

The program typically has content similar to the mandatory diversity sessions at major corporations, in which Whites trudge into a large conference room and hear why they are all racist.

Parents are rightly outraged that their children are being subjected to anti-White propaganda instead of an actual education.  However, parents are making a big mistake.  They are reacting as if this is something new, as if only a few years ago all was well with modern public education.

Not so.  Critical Race Theory, or “CRT”, is simply the latest propaganda program snaking its way through the school system.  In fact, it seems reasonable to say that elites have been progressively attempting to use the public school system for more than 100 years as a method to anaesthetize successive generations, to acclimate them to automatic obedience to authority, and to reduce over time the actual educational content in the schools themselves.  Then, with the Federal Aid to Education Act of 1965, came an acceleration:  the centralized push of anti-White, pro-pre-marital sex, pro-globo-homo programs, one by one, through the system.  At first the propaganda was “justified” as a way to force southern Whites to “buy into” racial integration.  A form of revived reconstruction for the much-loathed Southern States.  Very quickly, however, the true intentions of the masters and commanders in Washington and compliant state capitals became evident:  a full scale “reconstruction” a la 1871 being forced on the entire country.  No one, it seemed, was sufficiently pro-Negro, pro-gay, pro-abortion, or pro-condoms and pro-pre-marital sex.  And the schools had damn well better take care of that.

We start from the beginning.

As John Taylor Gatto, a New York City school teacher for 30 years, set forth in his multiplicity of books on this topic (see, e.g. John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, 2008) in the mid-nineteenth century the purpose of “public education” turned from the traditional colonial idea of producing an independent-thinking citizenry capable of participating in and supporting a free democratic republic into a system whose ultimate purpose was to regiment the vast majority of the population into a Prussian sense of passivity.  This program accelerated when, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the foundations founded by large manufacturers and mineral extractors like Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil realized that the old-style education would produce people unwilling to work long hours at boring jobs for a single employer, such as the factories run by the giant capitalists of the day.  In fact the old-style school system would undoubtedly produce nothing more than a bunch of hell-raising troublemakers (think “give me Liberty or give me death”) that would continually disrupt production lines.

The program developed by the foundations picked up a number of wack-job pseudo intellectuals to put an acceptable cover on their intentions, the most well-known of whom was the infamous John Dewey.  Dewey’s basic premise, set out in his 1897 book, My Pedagogic Creed (available on Archive.org), effectively was that schools should stop teaching anything—i.e.,  facts, history, geography, grammar, arithmetic, Latin; rather, schools would teach children to cooperate with each other and, most importantly, with the teacher.  The intent clearly was to produce generations of students so ignorant of their own history and unable to function independently that they would generally be amenable to the absorption of any propaganda pushed their way by government or private industry so that they could become mere cogs in someone’s big wheel.

The big blocks to the implementation of such a program were that virtually every school was controlled by a separate school board, and public schools were financed by local taxes, not by the state or federal governments.  In 1880, for example, the U.S., with a population of approximately 50 million, had 140,000 school boards.  Thus, local parents and taxpayers—essentially the same thing in that era of big families (often farm families)—hired and fired the principals and the teachers, approved the textbooks, and controlled the curriculum.  The likelihood that they would knowingly subvert their children’s education at the behest of the Rockefellers was slim indeed.  This posed a big problem.

How was one to force a centralized program through such a fractured system?  The methods were many, and, over time, stunningly effective.

• First, school district “consolidation” always sold on the basis of “efficiency” and expanded opportunity. Hence the mega high schools of today and the mega school districts.  Today, the number of school districts has been reduced to 14,000, many comprising such mega districts as Loudon County (60,000 in 1960, now 400,000); or New York City (8 million).  The larger a district becomes, the less accountable to local parents and taxpayers.  Effectively, many school districts have become what in the U.K. are called “quangos”—self-perpetuating entities like the FDA or the SEC virtually unaccountable to elected authority.
• Second, a nationwide system of “teacher certification” that would require—or at least strongly encourage—public schools to hire only teachers that had been certified as professional teachers, mainly through attendance at soon-to-be formed teachers colleges.
• Third, the funding of a whole series of teachers colleges, each of which would, over time, push the desired centralized dogma onto the teachers. Some turned out to be worse than others, but, they gradually became what could be called propaganda centers, with less and less educational content and more whipped cream stirred up by centralized bureaucrats.
• Fourth, the flip-side of steps two and three—the consequent elimination of normal college graduates from the certified teacher rolls. Out goes the Yale history or mathematics graduate, in comes the SJW educated in very little from a mediocre teacher’s college.  The low IQ, uneducated mass of teachers was picture perfect for a system intentionally designed to eliminate educational content and maximize the teaching of docility and, later, outright propaganda.  Attempts to change certification to provide that all college graduates should be automatically certified have been fought tooth and nail.  Befuddled conservatives can’t figure out why, since the proposal is so logical, but of course this could not be done!  Doing so would undermine the whole program!

Things were moving along, but then the whole program got a jet-fueled boost by the Federal Education Act of 1965.

Contrary to what one might think, the Federal Aid to Education Act of 1965 did not provide ONE DOLLAR to schools or classrooms.  The sole permissible use of the money was to fund and keep in place vast state-level education bureaucracies.  Such centralized bureaucracies, whose employees would undoubtedly be staffed by “professional” school administrators educated at the crappy teacher’s colleges, were custom-designed to assist the federal government in substantially centralizing state education through the imposition of detailed state-wide rules on curricula and hiring, as well as to assist in pushing through the system the propaganda favored by the elites in Washington D.C.

From 1965 on, the entire educational bureaucracy has been grindingly waging a war against Whites, and a war in favor of “sex education”—read, the promotion of pre-marital sex, homosexuality, and now transgenderism.  Old books in school libraries not furthering the narrative were quietly stripped out of school libraries and curricula, propagandistic “new” books pushing a pro-Negro, pro-homosexual, and pro-free sex program were inserted into school libraries and curricula.

Only in the latest twist has CRT been introduced.  However, CRT is no more than a modest extension of the anti-White, anti-family curricula that has been pushed through the system since 1965—another indication that the countercultural revolution of the 1960s has been a watershed even in American history.  In that sense, “educators” who state that “CRT is nothing new” have a valid point.  But the real issue is: will parents unite to strip away the whole disastrous system and its already-imbedded programs to start anew?

Here are some modest suggestions that might be implementable:

• Subdivide school districts so that each school has its own school board (may require state legislation). If it cannot be done officially, do it unofficially.
• Along with (i), over time, work to reduce substantially the size of any one school. The mega-school of three to four thousand children needs to be replaced gradually with much smaller schools.
• If permitted under state law, NEVER hire another “certified” teacher; if state law does not permit this, work to change state law.
• Never hire a “certified” “professional” school administrator. They hate you, your race, and your family.  Instead, hire administrators—principals and district superintendents only from the local community, and make sure they are people who can be trusted.  Again, if state law does not permit this, work to change state law.
• Demand that a detailed syllabus and reading list for every course be posted on a school’s website. Have a parent’s committee—assisted by independent scholars selected solely by the parents—select the books and design the midterm and final exams and make the teachers teach to your test, not someone else’s.  In that way, teachers—even if “credentialed” social justice warriors—will be forced to teach your curriculum, not someone else’s.
• Work to change law to end statewide mandates such as (a) mandatory bus transport, (b) mandatory nurses and psychiatrists on staff, and (c) mandatory school lunch. These programs can almost double the cost of local education and provide no educational benefit.
• Avoid where possible the use of textbooks, particularly in history or English courses. The textbook industry is as corrupt and woke as the federal Department of Education. Use original works wherever possible.  If not possible, except perhaps with math textbooks, use only textbooks 50 years old or more.  Using old textbooks, especially those out of copyright, can substantially reduce the cost of books at a local school.

Depending on the state, not all, but much of this can be done by a local school board.  If these steps are taken, a lot of the John Dewey/1965 Act system will literally be swept away at the local level.

If, instead, school boards restrict themselves to rules prohibiting CRT, the result will be failure.  The already corrupted system will just fall back on the pre-CRT anti White curricula—not to mention the globo-homo-trans curricula—it was already promulgating.

The real question, thus, is not the students but the parents.  Have they been so anesthetized by THEIR public education that they cannot act?

If so, perhaps CRT—and what will inevitably follow—is a well-deserved punishment.

As the Peruvian author Nicholas Gomez Davilla noted in his Schola to an Implicit Text:  “the modern age will not be punished; it is the punishment.”

The police operation in the Ukraine is at a standstill at the moment except in a few areas along the various fronts. The Russian army slowly, gingerly advances into the cities, cutting off sections controlled by the enemy like a kolbasa, piece by piece. Civilians fleeing the city of Mariuple have to run the Azov gauntlet with many refugees sharing accounts of being shot at and terrorized. The “nats-bat” fighters aren’t keen on letting their hostages escape. Azov, by the way, is largely composed of Russian-speaking easterners from the Dniepopetrovsk and Donbas regions. An unusually high percentage of them appear to be former prisoners or career criminals and their use of satanic and Nazi imagery begins to make more sense when you factor this in. This all, of course, makes perfect sense if you read the previous article on the Ukrainian swamp, but jars with any set narrative promoted by one side or the other. Make of this factoid what you will.

But civilians aren’t the only ones trying to escape the conflict. We’ve already talked about the celebrity caste and the journalist caste so it makes sense to spend some time now on the oligarch caste, that is on the people that finance and support Liberal Democracy in Russia (or any Democratic country, really).

The background of this story should be well-understood by now so I hope that I can avoid going into it again in any detail here. But, just to make sure that everyone is on the same page and up to speed, the story goes something like this: a pro-Western faction of Soviet party elites imploded the USSR. Nationalized assets became private i.e., up for grabs overnight. Communist Jews called up their capitalist cousins in New York who sent briefcases full of dollars to buy up state assets for pennies; a new caste of Jewish oligarchs rose up to rule the country thanks to the inept drunken rule of Boris Yeltsin; Vladimir Putin emerges as a compromise leader — a puppet of both the KGB and the oligarchs —someone who would be pliant and obedient; the new president surprises everyone and turns on part of the oligarch faction and starts arresting them while simultaneously crushing a CIA-funded Chechen uprising. Putin begins systematically consolidating his own power base and not relying on the United Russia party. An uneasy détente develops between the rest of the oligarchs and the office of the Presidency. Putin gives a speech denouncing a treacherous 5th column within the country that needs to be “spat out” like a “midge/fly” stuck in the country’s teeth. This is where we stand now — all caught up and eagerly anticipating what comes next.

Of course, Putin isn’t the only one talking about coups and subversion — one simply has to turn Fox News or MSNBC on to hear American senators and political pundits openly expressing their hopes that the oligarchs will overthrow Putin. We mentioned this in a previous article — this was the preferred strategy for dealing with Russia adopted by the Deep State and there is little indication that their plans have changed. The sanctions on Russian oligarchs appear to be an attempt to light a fire under their behinds and get them agitating for his overthrow and replacement with a Navalny-like puppet. Frankly, I don’t know how anyone doesn’t see or understand the nature of the plot at this point. Lindsay Graham as much as spilled the beans when he literally compared President Putin to Caesar and called for a Brutus to rise up and murder him. What’s more, the story of the Roman Senate vs. Caesar is the archetypical example of the eternal conflict between authoritarianism and oligarchy. I would go so far as to say that these are the only two forms of government and all other models simply lie on the spectrum in-between the two diametrically opposed ends.

In an Autocracy of any kind, be it a dictatorship, a military takeover, or a monarchy, there is one man who assumes immense power. He may have gotten there democratically or through military action or by birth. Once in power, there is little reason for him to leave, so Autocrats rarely do. Given the option, the masses would prefer and even use their right to a plebiscite (if they have one) to elect a strong, charismatic leader with unlimited power who can assume the mantle of their champion. Even Liberals have no problem admitting this preference of the people to be the case, and they simply resort to chastising the masses for their bad behavior and believing in the false siren cry of Populism. To the proponents of Oligarchy, the masses frustratingly do not share their concerns about checks and balances or so-called Liberal Democratic values and principles. The people want real solutions to their problems and they view (rightly) the tangled and corrupt system of jockeying interests and factions that any Oligarchy sets up (checks and balances) as an obstacle and an enemy. Naturally, they will attempt to appoint an Alexander the Great of sorts, a people’s champion, to cut through the Gordian Knot of graft if they can. If he proves to be good at his job, the masses would prefer that he stay there because they may not get another chance to push up one of their own to power.

But let’s put the political theorizing aside for now and see what the Russian optimates have said about the situation themselves. A recent Bloomberg article came out which had Jewish oligarch Mikhail Fridman lamenting the fact that the sanctions were imposed on him and his friends and amounted to him pleading for Washington to relent, arguing that neither he nor his friends had any real pull or power over Putin. Without information indicating anything to the contrary, we may as well take his words at face value — Putin’s position is strong and consolidated. So far, there hasn’t even been so much as a whisper of sedition from any serious potential contender for the position of a modern-day Brutus. This is probably because Putin has decided to make public examples of people who took to social media or the streets to show their support for Ukraine with immediate arrests, fines and incarceration applied liberally (heh!) by the police and the FSB.

Meanwhile, the private jets continue their mass exodus to Israel, Cyprus, and the Gulf States. When asked to comment on the travails of the oligarchs, Dmitry Medvedev blithely replied that perhaps these individuals shouldn’t have invested and stashed their money in the West and added that he himself didn’t have any condos in Miami or villas in Italy. He then no doubt shrugged before whispering “You get what you f*cking deserve!” while pointing a finger-gun at the camera and mouthing “pow” with his lips…

Alright, I embellished a tad on the last part. But the attitude from the Kremlin has certainly been one of showing absolutely no mercy. You either get with the program and support the military intervention and showdown with Russia or you out yourself as a fifth column traitor. In fact, many of Russia’s optimates have openly and publicly sided with Putin. These are the so-called “Putin-aligned” forces in the country and we will have more to say about them in a subsequent article.

The key takeaway here is that the almost two decade-long détente within Russia between the pro-West and pro-Russia factions has now been totally shattered. President Putin has made a play to consolidate more power and move the country in the direction of autarchy and autocracy by appealing to the support of the people. His recent speech at a stadium in Moscow was something you don’t see often from him — the last time we saw something comparable was when he appeared on stage after his electoral victory in 2018 and gave an emotional thank you to the Russian people for re-electing him again. But for the most part, Putin has not often utilized mass rallies as a political instrument, preferring to stream conferences with ministers and deliver pre-prepared video speeches. In that sense, he is quite unlike Trump, who built his entire movement on his high-energy political rallies where he would rail on and diss his personal and political opponents for hours at a time in front of a rapturous crowd. His populist appeal to the Russian people was answered in force: the stadium was overflowing and there were massive crowds outside it as well.

With this move, Putin has proven that he has the Russian people behind him.

None of this is particularly surprising or unexpected by the way. There is a natural course to human politics. Just as there are constant processes of disintegration and entropy at work, so too are there order-building processes as well. Countries can devolve into the most depraved forms of Liberal Democracy imaginable, but the road back to normality always remains open. The process by which this occurs is as follows: Mass Democracy ====> Populism ====> Autocracy ====> Monarchy.

Given a chance to vote in a national election, the people will support and elect a strong right-wing leader with a populist agenda. This is not speculation, this is simply the result of watching the last several centuries of political trends in the world. After the populist champion takes office, people, at the first opportunity, intend to transfer to him all the earthly power he needs to solve the problems that plague the country. If he succeeds in this, the people will bless him, wish him long years in office, and hope that he comes up with a reliable succession strategy. Few will work themselves up into a lather at the idea that the sacred democratic principle of separation of powers, term limits, and so on are being violated. If you doubt me, you simply weren’t paying attention to the whole “God-Emperor Trump” phenomenon and didn’t notice that die-hard Trumpers were waiting for their champion to declare himself dictator and go to war against the Deep State.

Trump did indeed have his Rubicon moment and, as we all saw, he foundered in the current eventually selling out his own supporters and giving up any real chance to leave a lasting legacy. Putin, in sharp contrast, has already taken Rome. It’s worth mentioning that mercy is a trait especially prevalent in extraordinary men, which, consequently, has been the undoing of many a great man. We can only hope that Putin refuses any stranded optimates begging to be readmitted and pardoned for their disloyalty. Mercy should be reserved for the people, not the treacherous international oligarchic elites who more than anyone else deserve to reap the harvest of our discontent.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
Gregor von Rezzori
1981 (English translation)

A central concern of The Occidental Observer from its inception has been the way in which understandings of anti-Semitism in Western culture have been shaped by Jews, often through pseudoscience but also through culture. The early work of Kevin MacDonald on the Jews focused on the activities and motivations of Freud, and the Freudian-influenced Frankfurt School and its products like The Authoritarian Personality and Studies in Prejudice. MacDonald noted that the approach of Jewish-dominated intellectual movements like psychoanalysis and the critique-based sociology and psychology of the Frankfurt School offered a “philosophical-speculative approach to anti-Semitism” rather than empirical analysis.^[1] The unscientific work of Freud and the Frankfurt School was, however, critical in moving discourse about anti-Semitism away from considerations of economic, social, and political competition and towards more nebulous philosophical speculation on the role of “suppressed nature,” “projection,” “hatred of the father,” and “pathological” social conformity. Underpinning this re-engineering of discourse was a more dramatic shift — the shift from criticism of the Jews to criticism of Western civilization and its peoples. In my own attempt to add to, and expand upon, MacDonald’s work, I have attempted to demonstrate the ways in which such pseudoscience spread from academia into the wider culture. It’s now clear that there were firm links between the Frankfurt School and the early pioneers of what has been termed “mass communications.” That these movements eventually absorbed and influenced enthusiastic Europeans is beyond question—demonstrated best perhaps in the “philosophical-speculative” approach to anti-Semitism reaching its zenith in Jean-Paul Sartre’s pretentious and incoherent Antisemite and Jew.

Until recently, I have struggled to find substantial expression of these ideas in literature, especially literature produced by Europeans. The most well-known example is probably Laura Zametkin’s 1947 Gentleman’s Agreement, which was almost immediately made into a film starring Gregory Peck and released alongside the similarly-themed Crossfire. There has of course been an abundance of Holocaust literature produced since the 1940s, but these are most often pieces of propaganda built on fantasies of violence. They are designed to introduce and reinforce visions of Jewish victimhood, and only to a secondary degree make any attempt to pathologize anti-Semitism as such. Carrying out such a direct pathologization in literary form really requires a first-person narrative from which to “expose” the anti-Semite as the deeply insecure psychopath the Frankfurt School alleged him or her to be, and such first-person literary narratives on this theme are rare.

The most raved about fictional first-person exploration of anti-Semitism, produced in the last twenty years, is probably Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones). Littell, a Jewish homosexual, published the book (styled as the remembered wartime odyssey of an SS solider) in 2006 to huge acclaim, winning the Prix Goncourt and having Le Nouvel Observateur declare it “a new War and Peace.” It’s now more than ten years since I read the 983-page book, but apart from an interesting section on the racial classification of the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus, I remember Littell’s text as little more than a nasty and sadistic exercise in the writing of perverse Freudian fantasies — fantasies that offer more insight into Littell’s own mind than into historical anti-Semitism. Littell’s protagonist, Maximilien Aue, is far from an “ordinary German” in that he is an incestuous homosexual with barely concealed transsexual tendencies who at one point in the novel tries to have sexual intercourse with a tree. All of which goes to show that any piece of long-winded, Jewish, ultra-violent, homo-pornographic trash can be declared a “new War and Peace” so long as it sets about defaming ‘the Nazis’ in the most novel and grotesque manner imaginable. In one of the more sober reviews of the book, David Gates at the New York Times pointed out that The Kindly Ones fails to offer even slight insight into anti-Semitism because “Aue is simply too much of a freak, and his supposed childhood trauma too specialized and contrived, for us to take him seriously.”

More subtle and interesting, but no less nasty and strange, is Gregor von Rezzori’s 1979 Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, which more than any other work of fiction I’ve read in the last decade truly embodies the Frankfurt School’s “philosophical-speculative” approach in literary form. I had no idea the book existed until a few weeks ago when, during a routine browse in a local used book store, the title on the spine grabbed my attention. The name of the author suggested a European view, which further piqued my interest. These early hopes were dashed when a later Google search for reviews (I have developed a terrible habit of reading reviews after purchasing a book, but before reading it) brought up the gushing praise of a Martin Levin who celebrated the novel’s exploration of the narrator’s “attraction-repulsion obsession with Jews.” I realized that I’d found precisely what I’d been looking for — the dissemination of Freudian/Frankfurt School ideas in culture, encased in the form of European-authored literature.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

Gregor von Rezzori (1914–1998), was an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat whose family background straddled Italy, Austria, and Romania. His diverse family origins induced a lifelong cosmopolitanism, reflected not only in his successive citizenships of Austria-Hungary, Romania, and the Soviet Union (and even at one point in his position as a stateless person), and his second marriage to a Jewish woman, but also in his fluency in German, Romanian, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, French, and English. From both his biography and fiction it’s clear that national feeling was something fundamentally alien to von Rezzori, whose writing combines an aristocratic aloofness with a hopelessly bankrupt understanding of almost everything he discusses.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite strikes me as possibly semi-autobiographical or as some kind of perverse self-flagellating fantasy. The novel’s protagonist, for example, is also named Gregor, and during the book’s five chapters he drifts, like the author, between Romania, Austria, Germany, and Italy. The pseudo-memoir follows the protagonist from childhood, through to the post-World War II period, in what amount to five snapshot-style, chronologically-arranged episodes that have Jews, or attitudes toward Jews, as the central theme.

In the novel’s opening chapter, “Skushno” (Russian for boredom), we are introduced to the young Gregor in his early teens. He is presented as fundamentally lacking and inherently bad. He is expelled from school as an “unworthy” student, and is sent to a strict boarding school to resolve “imbalances” in his character. Even here, the schoolmasters reject young Gregor, informing his parents that

the mix of neurotic sensitivity and a tendency to violence, alert perception and inability to learn, tender need for support and lack of adjustability, would only develop into something criminal.

Christopher Hitchens once wrote that the novel dealt with anti-Semitism in “the mild language of understatement.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, reviewing for the New York Times, wrote of Memoirs that “all the complex causes of European anti-Semitism are anatomized in these pages.” It’s difficult to understand quite what novel these men were reading, given that within the first two pages of Memoirs  we are basically slammed, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, with the idea that anti-Semitism is purely a problem of malevolent personal psychology. Gregor, we learn on the third page, is an abuser of animals, roaming the countryside with his dog seeking cats, “my special prey.” He attempts to study for exams that will prevent him from becoming a complete academic failure, but realizes that “sheer wickedness rather than genuine slow-wittedness made me unwilling to fulfil my duties.” Gregor is sent from Austria to a German-speaking enclave in Romania to live with elderly, childless relatives, Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie, in the hope that the change of scenery and household will bring him to his senses and change his character for the better.

Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie live in a small aristocratic estate on the outskirts of a small village with a substantial Jewish minority. The most notable building in the village is not, in fact, the home of Gregor’s relatives but that of the village’s Jewish doctor:

Startling, crazy — turreted, merlons, and orioles — it had a sheet metal roof with edges serrated like doily and dragon-head gargoyles at each eave, and it was richly decked out with pennons, halberds, and little weather vanes. This was the “villa” of the physician Dr. Goldmann.

The village itself is almost lifeless apart from “straggling gangs of lice-ridden Jewish children.” Uncle Herbert is introduced as a German nationalist, “an anti-Semite and a Wagnerian.” Gregor is at first in awe of his uncle, poring over Hubert’s old student and dueling-fraternity digests and developing a fascination for the uniforms they depicted. After mocking up one of the uniforms from pieces of clothing found around the estate, he draws the laughter of one of the housemaids. He explains to himself

What I was trying to experience for myself, feel for myself — in this presumably highly comical imitation of a costume that was nothing so much as the fashionable expression of a sentiment — what I was after was the Germanhood of the corpsmen.

This, of course, is a petty caricature of nationalism, and one quite common to Frankfurt School analyses of White ethnocentrism. In renderings like these, national feeling is presented as irrational, or reduced, as in von Rezzori’s fiction, as a simple and semi-comical matter of wanting to wear a uniform.

Gregor’s insecurities are contrasted with the personality of the other major character of the first chapter — Wolf Goldmann, son of the above-mentioned physician. Gregor takes a walk in the village one day wearing his homemade uniform, and is quickly surrounded by mocking Jewish youths. At the head of the gang stands Goldmann who, in contrast to the furtiveness of Gregor, possesses a “look of downright smug self-assurance.” Goldmann mocks Gregor, asking if it’s Purim. When Gregor lashes out, he is set upon by the Jewish gang, with the attack called off at the behest of Goldmann. When Gregor bitterly blames his dog for not defending him, Goldmann retorts “Because he didn’t wanna face odds of ten to one? He’d have to be as dumb as a goy—as you, maybe.” Taking pity on Gregor, Goldmann invites him to his father’s villa.

This marks the beginning of the chapter’s main plot, which is more or less a tale of Jewish superiority and German insecurity. Gregor worries that his Wagnerian Uncle Hubert will not approve of his taking Wolf Goldmann as a friend, and he hesitates to invite him to the estate. Goldmann, meanwhile, tells Gregor that his father is well aware of the exclusionary tendencies of the Germans and explains to Gregor that German dueling fraternities excluded Jews because the Jews were “master swordsmen. … Dr. Goldmann himself had been featured as the best swordsman in his [Jewish fraternity].” Gregor tries to impress Wolf Goldmann with his slingshot and climbing trees, but Goldmann showed no interest in these activities and Gregor “began to feel childish in front of him. … His sophistication was so far ahead of my own. … He was already a budding intellectual.” The only time I laughed during my reading of the book was at the point where young Goldmann takes Gregor on a tour of the villa, at one point revealing “his father had a priceless collection of documents on Jewish persecutions from the early Middle Ages to the most recent times.” The addition of this detail seemed so gratuitous and somehow outlandish that laughter seemed the only appropriate response.

The plot accelerates somewhat when Gregor persuades Goldmann to play slingshot with him. A wayward pellet smashes a window in Uncle Hubert’s prized Daimler. While Gregor is too scared to concede blame, young Goldmann confidently strides up to the house to tell Hubert what happened and to inform him that Dr. Goldmann will gladly pay for repair. Once inside, young Goldmann starts playing Aunt Sophie’s piano, revealing an astonishing musical talent. Aunt Sophie immediately begins fawning over the young Jew, while Gregor quickly succumbs to “jealousy born of envy” and finds a new bond with his uncle: “We could read in the other’s gaze physical disgust at the Jewish brat.” As well as innately bad psychology then, we must now add insecurity, inadequacy, inferiority, and now plain jealousy to the novel’s “exploration” of anti-Semitism. Subtle indeed.

Gregor begins spending more time with his uncle, hunting in the surrounding forests. This draws a typically sarcastic and superior response from Wolf Goldmann, who tells Gregor, “You goyim know more about animals than people” and alleges his uncle is in fact a rumored homosexual who probably has ulterior motives in taking the young man into the woods so often. Whether the rumor is true or not, the young Jew instantly achieves total psychological victory over Gregor, splitting him away from his only meaningful familial relationship. Gregor is isolated and bitter: “I cannot describe the profound repugnance I felt during the next few weeks, not only toward Wolf Goldmann but toward just about everyone.”

The chapter reaches its finale when Gregor returns to pitting his dog against the neighborhood cats, in this case a feral colony encamped on the property of Dr Goldmann. While attempting to hold a cat for his dog to attack, Gregor’s arm is badly wounded by the cat’s biting and scratching. He is then taken to the Jewish physician, but Goldmann, who presumably had been told of the circumstances of Gregor’s injury, refuses to treat him. Gregor is eventually treated in Czernowitz, but the refusal of Goldmann to treat the boy prompts calls for Uncle Hubert to fight him in a duel. Hubert refuses, provoking accusations of cowardice and expulsion from his fraternity at Tübingen. Hubert, a proud nationalist and very social person, dies abandoned by his friends. Goldmann, meanwhile, had his medical license revoked for his refusal to treat Gregor, and he abandons the village, the ostentatious “villa” falling into ruin. Gregor, presented to us as a vicious, jealous young anti-Semite, having essentially ruined both men, returns to Austria, never visiting the village again.

The second chapter, “Youth,” finds Gregor in his late teens, leading a bohemian existence in Bucharest as he seeks to fulfil his ambition of becoming “a world-famous painter”—like young Hitler in Vienna? Insecure around women, he attempts to meet with a gypsy prostitute at a sleazy hotel. He walks into the hotel and hands his money to the hotel owner:

Above his head, from a nail in the keyboard, hung a small, light-blue tin box stamped with a Star of David  — the box was a kupat kerem kayemet, for contributions to build the Promised Land of Israel. It was typical for such a seamy hotel of ill repute to be in Jewish hands.

Gregor goes to one of the rooms with the gypsy girl, but is interrupted every ten seconds by the hotel owner who insists that Gregor has given him false currency. Gregor keeps exchanging the offending notes for new ones from his wallet until the gypsy girl laughs at him and points out that is in fact the Jew who is passing his fake coins onto Gregor. Gregor lashes out with a verbal insult, at which point the Jew begins punching him. Gregor is beaten to the ground, before running down the stairs and out onto the street. As he runs, he has a fantasy that a pogrom will break out:

Perhaps his Jewish brethren would form a mob and lynch me, and the Rumanians around the Calea Griviţei would finally be fed up with the riffraff that sucked their blood, would rise up against them and murder them all, a pogrom would erupt throughout the land. … I felt good picturing it.

The question of inter-ethnic violence, and anti-Semitism more generally, is therefore once again reduced to caricature by von Rezzori, who roots something like a pogrom in the fantasies of the easily duped and sexually frustrated. The reality of Romanian anti-Semitism in the interwar period was in fact inextricably bound up with socio-economic competition. Between 1910 and 1927, the Jewish population of Romania expanded from 250,000 to 900,000, largely via territorial acquisitions,^[2] with Jews thriving in a nation perceived by many to lack a middle class. During the interwar period, the country was home to almost ceaseless legislative attempts to curb Jewish influence, most often in the form of quotas, especially at universities. The real history of Romanian anti-Semitism was therefore linked to the undeniable Jewish rise to positions of demographic, social, cultural, and economic dominance, and not, as von Rezzori suggests, in the petty jealousies of the sexually insecure. This rather nasty little short story in Memoirs, like so much else in the novel, smugly signals at the gesture of insight without offering anything of the sort.

Gregor continues his self-pitying state, eventually becoming a soap and shampoo salesman. He struggles to sell anything, and quickly finds that “mostly Jewish shopkeepers cut sharply into my richly prejudiced self-esteem.” He eventually wins a contract with a Jewish widow in her 30s, and while bringing his wares in for display one afternoon he falls through the cellar trapdoor. The widow helps young Gregor to his feet and brings him some water before the pair fall into a romantic embrace. Yes, von Rezzori, who has already dazzled us with subtlety, now moves onto the next character trait of his “anti-Semitic” protagonist — his apparently ceaseless attraction to Jewish women. The writing in this regard is abysmal:

I had finally understood that it was quite possible for me to love a Jewess, not in spite of the eternal Jewish tragedy, the age-old Jewish sadness showing in her face, but because of it: to see that face suddenly transformed by happiness — in fact, actually inundated with happiness — affected me deeply.

The chapter, quite possibly the worst of a bad bunch, concludes after many pages of inanity, with Gregor abruptly coming to a boil at witnessing his Jewish “Black Widow” putting on social affectations in a restaurant, slapping her across the face, ending the relationship and finding himself alone once more. The plotting and pacing of the episode are atrocious, with von Rezzori attempting to distract the reader by means of seemingly endless narrative deflections.

The novel’s third chapter, “Lowinger’s Rooming House,” follows Gregor as he moves into the lodgings of the chapter title. The Lowinger family are Hungarian Jews. The family is presented as patient and generous to their guests, particularly in their provision of meals. The patriarch is presented as highly intelligent and “peace-loving.” The boarders at the Bucharest rooming house are overwhelmingly male and rather rowdy, including a Russian sculptor, some political radicals, and a pair of Greco-Roman wrestlers. None of the residents are particularly well disposed to Jews, including their hosts, and during petty arguments there is frequent recourse to such outbursts as “those Jewish harpies,” and “that little Yid.” When one of the residents, Pepi Olschansky, a German journalist, challenges Mr. Lowinger to a game of chess and is beaten quite easily, he flees into petty superstition, telling Gregor “You know, I really believe they’re capable of certain kinds of witchcraft. … They’ve got their God in their blood. They can’t get rid of him.” The episode presumably serves von Rezzori’s purpose of adding another alleged quality to the anti-Semitic character — irrationality.

The dynamic of the chapter changes when a young Sephardic Jewish woman, Bianca Alvaro, comes to stay at the boarding house. An intellectual, she intrigues some of the male guests, and for a while also Gregor, but Gregor is eventually driven to disgust by what he perceives to be her social pretentiousness (the same fault he found with the widow). Gregor comes to regard her as nothing more than the same “snotty-nosed Jewish guttersnipe we were always in danger of running over when driving through the dusty village streets.” For all his inner protests, however, Gregor cannot seem to divest himself of an attraction to Jewish women, and when Alvaro asks Gregor to help her deal with the contents of a deceased relatives’ apartment, he agrees. He eventually makes a dramatic discovery about her relatives during his sorting of their effects, and believes that this will further develop his bond with Alvaro. He realizes that Alvaro “engendered a mixture of respect and fondness I’d never before experienced with anyone my own age.” The slowly budding relationship is then catastrophically ended through the interference of the vulgar Olschansky. The journalist, who had been plaguing Gregor for some time with questions about the nature of his relationship with Alvaro, finally succeeds in getting Gregor to (falsely) state that it is in fact sexual. The following morning Gregor finds an uncommunicative Alvaro hastily packing her things for departure from the rooming house. Suspecting Olschansky has said something, he goes to confront the journalist, only for Olschansky to freely admit to mentioning Gregor’s negative comments on Alvaro and also, it is strongly implied, that he sexually assaulted her. The chapter ends with Gregor’s departure from Romania several weeks later, and his arrival in Vienna in March 1938.

The penultimate chapter, “Troth,” which was once published as an independent short story (later expanded into the novel we have today), follows Gregor as he moves into his (anti-Semitic) grandmother’s apartment in Vienna against the backdrop of the Anschluss. He first recalls an earlier period spent living with his grandmother, when he first met and befriended Minka Raubitschek, the Jewish girl upstairs, whose parents have recently died of Spanish flu, leaving her plenty of money. In keeping with most presentations of Jews in the novel, Minka is utterly charming, with Gregor developing a romantic crush on her. The chapter is for the most part concerned with the first days of the Anschluss in 1938. Gregor is somewhat sympathetic to the new National Socialist authorities, including most of their views on Jews, even though he continues to spend his time with the Jewish Minka. Troth, although riddled with clichés, is by some distance the best chapter in the book, and its speculations on anti-Semitism are better than anything else found in the novel by several degrees. The anti-Semitism of Gregor’s grandmother is not the caricature we are by now used to, and her concerns about Jews range from crypsis (especially the changing of names), social criticism, negative influence in the arts, social pushiness, and economic dominance. Aside from brief glimpses of genuine interaction with anti-Jewish critique, however, the chapter is full of banalities and predictable, stock narratives. The “anti-Semitic” granny clashes with young SA men as they make Jewish intellectuals wash anti-National Socialist slogans from walls and sidewalks, telling them they’ve “gone too far.” Gregor uneasily tries to balance his friendships with Minka and her Jewish circle with an old friendship with a young man who is now an SS man. Minka makes it to America with her friends, and dies without further explanation. The entire chapter has a boilerplate feel.

The novel’s final chapter, “Pravda,” is a rambling third-person narrative, concerning no fixed time period, the purpose of which seems to be to offer some kind of reflection on the meaning of European guilt in relation to the Jews. The most prominent section of the chapter, which really acts as a shorthand for the intention of the entire novel, is essentially the argument that Gregor is a kind of proxy for Europeans of the early twentieth century. His putative sins are theirs, and theirs, his:

It was no personal guilt but a sort of collective guilt, a guilt shared by everyone belonging to so-called Western Civilization, a guilt that was imminent in the epoch, in this civilization’s present, particular state and shape. To be conscious of it, as if it were a personal guilt, was his dark privilege.

The primary message of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, then, is for us to accept the “dark privilege” of collective guilt.

Conclusion

Elie Wiesel once remarked of Memoirs that Gregor von Rezzori “addresses the major problems of our time . . . with the disturbing and wonderful magic of a true storyteller.” As with every statement uttered by Wiesel, you can be sure that the truth resides in the opposite direction. Not as graphic, strange, or perverse as The Kindly Ones, the novel is nevertheless just as nasty and facile. This is a novel that trades exclusively in caricature and cliché; weak in style and even weaker in content. The Jews one finds within its pages are invariably absurdly innocent, or at least, in the case of the sleazy hotel owner, straightforward in their dishonesty. The Europeans in Memoirs are, by contrast, a concoction of Freudian neuroses: attracted to Jews, jealous of Jews, fearful of Jews, and all for the pettiest of reasons. They are the literary representation of the sociological construct proffered by the Frankfurt School in bogus studies like The Authoritarian Personality.

Anti-Semitism, as a serious matter of ethnic competition and conflict, does not meaningly feature anywhere in von Rezzori’s novel, and the “anti-Semite” is understood only as a born deviant. As both art and a contribution to discourse, Memoirs is an abject failure. Readers keen for a genuine and illuminating memoir that tackles one of the most crucial questions of the last few centuries would do much better to consult Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together.

^[1] K. MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (paperback edition), 157.

^[2] A. Gerrits The Myth of Jewish Communism: A Historical Interpretation (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009), 48.