The University of Austin Is Not a Solution to Wokeness: It May Create a New Echo Chamber

/12 Comments/in /by
Overwhelmed by the procrustean atmosphere of the contemporary university, self-styled contrarians led by Bari Weiss have decided to launch a new university in Texas called the University of Austin. The decision is widely heralded as an antidote to the virulent conformity engendered by major universities. As the mobbing of Kathleen Stock, Dorian Abbott, and Charles Negy demonstrates, universities are becoming inhospitable to free thought.

Due to the fragility of students and administrations, academics can be sacked for mundane declarations. British philosopher Kathleen Stock voluntarily ejected herself from the University of Sussex in response to militant protests orchestrated by students who condemned her for arguing that one’s biological sex is immutable. Currently, Professor Stock is being lionized for uttering an obvious observation by supposedly dissident thinkers and this is exactly why the University of Austin will be unable to combat political correctness.

Bari Weiss is best known as an advertiser of the Intellectual Dark Web and for resigning from the New York Times, at least partly because some at the Times were critical of her emphasis on writing about “the Jews.” For those unfamiliar with the IDW designation, it entails academics unwilling to comply with the tenets of identity politics. However, criticizing wokeness does not make one a renegade intellectual. Sensible people agree that students ought to be judged on merit, so by no account can we consider Dorian Abbott as a radical for rejecting diversity as a measure to evaluate students. Likewise, Charles Negy submitting that the plight of Black Americans is not a consequence of systemic racism should not make him controversial.

The banality of the Intellectual Dark Web is only deemed to be heretical because we are living in an age of hypersensitivity. If students are infuriated by the anodyne assertions of mainstream scholars, then establishing a school to counter this insipid outlook cannot be construed as revolutionary. Bari Weiss and Company are basically the heirs of classical liberalism: they express beliefs that are still palatable in mainstream conservative circles—the sort you’d see on Fox News—but have been eradicated from other universities.

Not even the revered Jordan Peterson should be depicted as a radical. Jordan Peterson was catapulted into the limelight after renouncing a controversial Canadian law promoting gender confusion. Peterson’s narrative abrades the prevailing orthodoxy, but at a time when mainstream culture is intellectually bankrupt and overwhelmingly on the left, his views are more common-sense than insight. Influential outlets flood the internet with criticisms of the Intellectual Dark Web since doing so enables gatekeepers to establish Jordan Peterson and his ilk as deplorable characters thereby diverting attention from truly contentious thinkers like Paul Gottfried, Ricardo Duchesne, Edward Dutton, Jared Taylor, and Kevin Macdonald.

Obviously, I don’t subscribe to all the ideas espoused by these figures, but they are willing to interrogate divisive issues. Gottfried has analyzed the infamous Carl Schmitt at length and a slew of other thinkers seen as unsavory by polite society. Ricardo Duchesne has emerged as the most eloquent and passionate defender of Western civilization, since the demise of Samuel Huntington and David Landes. Moreover, unlike his predecessors, Duchesne has expanded the debate by defending the Whiteness of Western civilization. Similarly, Edward Dutton is a prolific author whose research probes a wide spectrum of issues. Dutton tackles everything from racial differences in ethnocentrism to why Finland is not more innovative, despite its high national IQ.

The infamous Jared Taylor requires no introduction. Taylor is the founder of American Renaissance, an organization dedicated to advancing the interests of White people. Taylor has written on racial differences in the distribution of personality traits and opines that the founding fathers imbued a strong sense of white consciousness. Perhaps the most despised of the group is Kevin Macdonald, a distinguished evolutionary psychologist regarded for his work on monogamy and denigrated for conceptualizing Judaism as an evolutionary strategy aimed at disrupting Western civilization.

Whether one endorses the arguments spouted by these personalities is irrelevant. The point is that an institution truly committed to intellectual diversity would employ them as professors or guest lecturers. Unfortunately, the ideas articulated by this crew are too subversive for polite quarters, and it is unlikely that such thinkers will be courted by the University of Austin. Although the philosophy of Cornel West is distinct from this circle, a serious university would also engage him as a radical man of the left. Employing polar opposites like Edward Dutton and Cornel West would position the University of Austin as a stellar example of intellectual diversity.

Contrary to media stories, the IDW still reflects the spirit of polite society. A case in point is that The Root and Next Shark advocate the interests of Blacks and Asians respectively, but they are never perceived as contemptible publications like Amren and CounterCurrents. Though tribalism is a biological reality, all groups are allowed to express racial pride with the exception of Whites. Like the left, acolytes of the IDW oppose White consciousness. Jordan Peterson, for instance publicly ridiculed Ricardo Duchesne for suggesting that Westerners ought to cherish the uniqueness of Western culture. According to Peterson’s reasoning, the accolades achieved by our intellectual predecessors occurred without our input, so there is no reason for Westerners to extol pride.

Yet, Blacks are encouraged to claim the achievements of African empires like Mali and Songhay as part of a broader cultural legacy. Intriguingly, books like Stolen Legacy (1954) and They Came Before Columbus (1976) inculcate false pride in blacks by cultivating the propaganda that blacks were the true progenitors of Greek philosophy and the Olmec civilization. The double standard is remarkably jarring. Whites are precluded from celebrating concrete achievements, but Afrocentrists can pollute the internet with dubious theories and even acquire positions at prestigious institutions when their qualifications are questionable—people like the late Yosef Ben Jochannan.

The denizens of the University of Austin are braver than some of their peers in academia. But in relation to exploring issues that are actually controversial, they are quite tepid. Without a doubt, the University of Austin will be a safe space for right-leaning, mainstream conservative thinkers and not an oasis for revolutionary thought.

America Must Die—So That the People Can Live

/59 Comments/in , /by

When you live in a 200-year-old house, you would do well to give it a thorough inspection every few years.  Rap on the walls, pull down some old wallpaper, climb into the attic, and get down into the crawl space.  Check the roofing, check the exterior walls, check the foundation.  You are looking for signs of rot:  decay, mold, insects, rodents, or just plain aging.  With luck, you find one or two small problems, you patch them up, and all is well.  Unfortunately, sometimes all is not well.  Sometimes, you find signs of major and irreparable decay.  In those cases, and as painful as it may be, you must be prepared to tear the house down and start anew.  Anything less would be a lost cause, an act of utter futility.

America today is a 245-year-old house—a grand mansion with many rooms, situated on a wonderfully vast and glorious estate.  From the outside, from a distance, it still looks nice: glitzy, glamorous, wealthy, powerful, exciting.  It still carries much from its well-intentioned (if flawed) beginnings.  But our inspection proves otherwise.  When we rap on the walls, or get up in the ceiling, or crawl down to the foundations, we are shocked to find signs of widespread and irreparable decay.  The main timbers supporting the building are rife with termites; the roof is leaking; the foundation is cracked, the sands beneath are eroding, and all manner of vermin are running wild, both above and below.  In short, it is a horrible mess.  We try to plaster over holes here and there, and slap on some new paint once in a while, but the rot inevitably shows through.  By any reasonable accounting, the building is on the verge of collapse.  It may come down on its own, or we can be proactive and take it down, but down it will come.

Any viable nation is not only an edifice; it is a living entity.  It lives and breathes with the people in it.  Our house is a living house; but sadly, it is terminally ill.  A combination of old age, disease, neglect, and poor hygiene have put it in a terrible state, one that is evidently beyond any hope of recovery or repair.  The house must come down; America must die—in order for a new house, a new nation, to arise.  Such is life.

It is worthwhile, then, to review my brief ‘inspection report’ of the American nation, and to diagnose the ailments that we are currently enduring.  If I am able to get down to root causes, this will naturally lead to some prescribed courses of action that we can take, both near-term and for the longer haul.  No one wants to live in a rotting house.  No one wants to live in a decaying nation.  No one wants their children and grandchildren to grow up in such conditions.  We have better options.

At the highest level, my inspection report finds two major, and related, areas of concern: (1) a false notion of human equality, and (2) misplaced faith in the doctrine of democracy.  Further analysis shows that these two aspects have been ruthlessly and malevolently exploited by a potent Jewish lobby to maximize benefit to themselves.  In what follows, I will attempt to outline the nature of this far-reaching and deep-rooted crisis, and to suggest some ways forward.

The False and Destructive Concept of Equality

In 1927, and four years before he penned Brave New World, famed writer, thinker, and “casual anti-Semite” Aldous Huxley published a compelling little book called Proper Studies.  It opens with an essay titled “The Idea of Equality.”  The very first line reads as follows:

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.  (p. 1)

Doctors, editors, bureaucrats—any person, in any walk of life, displays evident and obvious inequalities, says Huxley.  People are different in every way imaginable: skills, abilities, interests, intelligence, appearance, character.  Everyone acknowledges this, and yet at the same time they also want to insist on the essential and intrinsic equality of humans.  Hence does Huxley write of the human mind’s “almost infinite capacity for being inconsistent.”  He then describes the basic axiom at work:

Politicians and political philosophers have often talked about the equality of man as though it were a necessary and unavoidable idea, an idea which human beings must believe in, just as they must, from the very nature of their physical and mental constitution, believe in such notions as weight, heat, and light.  Man is “by nature free, equal, and independent,” says Locke,[1] with the calm assurance of one who knows he cannot be contradicted.  It would be possible to quote literally thousands of similar pronouncements.  (p. 2)

He identifies the original source of this fallacy in Aristotle, whose metaphysical assumption of a human essence (as “the rational animal”; Nicomachean Ethics I.8, 13) implies a sort of equality among the human species.  Against Huxley, we can argue that this does not quite follow; the existence of a common and distinctive quality of all humans need not imply their social, political, or existential equality, any more than the fact that all material objects have mass imply that they all have the same weight.[2]  Huxley also fixes some blame on Descartes, but again, this is perhaps an exaggerated claim.  In Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes writes:

Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world. …  It indicates that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’—is naturally equal in all men. …  [A]s regards reason or sense, since it is the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts, I am inclined to believe that it exists whole and complete in each of us.[3]

Even if we allow that reason is equal in all—a highly dubious assertion, to say the least—it still does not imply political, social, or moral equality.

More to the point, Huxley cites Christian doctrine and the position of the Church.  Even granting a “brotherhood of men” under Christ, “the brotherhood of men does not imply their equality.”  He continues: “Neither does men’s equality before God imply their equality as among themselves.”  Even if God, from his divine and lofty standpoint, views us all as equals, any putative inter-human equality “is entirely irrelevant”.[4]  It is rather like us viewing all ants or mice as identical when in fact they all recognize and acknowledge vast differences among themselves.

All this bodes ill for the “religion of democracy,” says Huxley (and as I will elaborate).  Its “primary assumption” is that “all men are substantially equal.”  If the equality falls, so too falls democracy.  He summarizes concisely:

The historical and psychological researches of the past century have rendered the theory which lies behind the practice of modern democracy entirely untenable.  Reason is not the same in all men; human beings belong to a variety of psychological types separated from one another by irreducible differences.  (p. 12)

Science, anthropology, philosophy, and common sense all come to the same conclusion: human equality is a fallacy, and any political ideology based on that notion is doomed to failure.

Huxley, of course, was hardly alone in his condemnation of a claimed human equality.  Nietzsche viewed the idea with greater contempt and wrote in more scathing terms.  We find, especially in Beyond Good and Evil, a stunning repudiation of the concept.  His elaborations on the “order of rank” among men, the “instinct for rank,” the “noble soul,” and the necessity for human greatness, pervade the work.  A few examples will have to suffice:

Men, not noble enough to see the abysmally different order of rank, the chasm of rank, between man and man—such men have so far held sway over the fate of Europe, with their “equal before God,” until finally a smaller, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something eager to please, sickly, and mediocre has been bred, the European of today.  (sec. 62)

The highest and strongest drives, when they break out passionately and drive the individual far above the average and the flats of the herd conscience, wreck the self-confidence of the community, its faith in itself, and it is as if its spine snapped.  Hence just these drives are branded and slandered most.  High and independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, even a powerful reason are experienced as dangers; everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil; and the fair, modest, submissive, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains moral designations and honors.  (sec. 201)

Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man.  (sec. 257)

The concept of equality is ultimately destructive because it declares, not only that no one is worse than anyone else, but more importantly that no one is better than anyone else—yes, that no one can be better.  True self-betterment and self-enhancement become impossible if we are all equal.  No matter what you do, you will still be only, and always, equal to the very least among men.  This doctrine is not merely false; it is utterly contemptible and destructive of higher aims and goals.  It means the death of humanity.  Where we do not ascend, we decline; this is Nietzsche’s basic outlook.  Sadly, it conforms to the actual world in which we live today.

In the final passage above, Nietzsche points to a central fact and thus to a possible solution.  If every improvement to humanity and to society has occurred in aristocratic societies—that is, rule by the best—then we ought logically to use those as our model.  Societies that are capable of sorting men into lesser and greater types, and to do so effectively, are the drivers of human evolution.  They strive for greatness, and they create greatness.  Even the smallest steps in that direction—such as were taken by Hitler in his National Socialist Germany—would be such an improvement over the present day that any nation even attempting it would likely flourish spectacularly; and in fact, this is precisely what happened in Germany, beginning in 1933.  The rest of the equality-obsessed, Jewish-inspired world was so aghast that they were compelled to drive the remaining industrial nations against Hitler and to destroy him, so fearsome was the prospect of his success.

Still, entrenched myths die hard.  We in the US have our treasured Declaration of Independence, which declares as “self-evident”—with the calm assurance of those who know they cannot be contradicted—that “all men are created equal.”  As we know, this was disingenuous at best.  For one, they indeed meant ‘men,’ given that women could neither vote nor hold office.  And they meant ‘White men,’ given that all the Founders were White Anglo-Saxons, and many were slaveholders or otherwise endorsed slavery.  Hence that famous phrase really meant “all White males are created equal”—though even that is demonstrably untrue, as I have argued.

Original Democracy

Huxley had it exactly right:  support for modern democracy is in fact more of a belief system, or even a faith, than something grounded in history, reason, and philosophy.  Like many other religions, democracy derives from a core of historical truth—here, in ancient Greece—that was then altered beyond recognition by an accretion of layers of myth, lie, and corruption.  Today we have the belief, the faith, by all sides, “left” and “right” alike,[5] that democracy is an unquestioned virtue, that it must be defended at all costs, and that it must be spread to the world, even at the point of a gun.  This is a fundamental political error, founded on an erroneous and detrimental conception of human equality; it must be overcome if we are to survive in the long run.

Democracy wasn’t always a religion.  At one time, at the beginning, it was a rational and effective (though not unproblematic) means of self-government.  Let’s take a minute to examine the original democracy of ancient Greece to see what worked and what did not.

Athenian democracy was a remarkable institution, and remarkably different than what passes for democracy today.  To begin with, the population of the state (or polis) was small—it constituted only some 300,000 people at its peak, which included many slaves and foreigners.  By modern standards, this seems tiny but, for the time, it was extremely large.  Of this number, the only formal citizens were the adult native-born males, numbering perhaps 30,000, or just 10 percent of the population.  These citizens—the demos, the people—were the formal basis of political power, rather than some ruling wealthy elite (also known as oligarchs or plutocrats), or some tyrannical dictator, as could be found in other Greek states.

The democratic system, inaugurated by Cleisthenes around 500 BC, functioned in a very different way than we might expect.  For one, there were no elections; all leadership positions (apart from the military) were chosen by lot, at random, from among the citizens who had put forth their names.  This included even the leader of the Assembly—the collected body of citizens—who was effectively the president of the nation, though without much formal power.  The Greeks had invented a device called a kleroterion into which names were randomly inserted on small tokens; colored dice were then deployed to select names randomly and fairly from among the various tribes or families.  The system had several virtues:  immediate results, no costly or corrupted election campaigns, fairness, transparency, and an equal involvement of all concerned.  The Greeks clearly had to be nice to all their fellow (Athenian male) citizens, any one of whom could someday have a position of prominence.

Secondly, there were no representatives.  Athens was a famously direct democracy.  All interested citizens gathered on a large open hilltop, called the Pnyx, roughly once per month, to listen to the issues of the day.  When the time came for decisions, a very public show of hands determined the outcome.  Even the gravest of matters, such as going to war, were decided this way.  This is all the more striking when we consider that the army was composed of the very men who had themselves just voted for war.  In other words, when you voted for war, you personally went to war.  And many never returned.  We can only imagine a similar situation in America today:  that the Congressmen and women who support the next illegal and unjust foreign war[6] would be compelled to be on the first combat plane into the warzone.  I suspect that we would have very few wars indeed.

In sum, Athenian democracy was small, direct, accountable, and transparent.  The wealthy elite had very little power to steer events in their favor.  The citizenry comprised only native men; foreigners had literally no voice in the state, even though they outnumbered the actual citizens by a factor of two or three.  Greek democracy was thus a racial (White European), ethnic (Athenian), and gendered (men only) system of rule.  And it worked incredibly well; it produced and sustained the brilliant Athenian culture that we know today.

Two Famous Critics

For all that, the system had some harsh and prominent critics—notably, Plato and Aristotle.  Plato had two main complaints against democracy:  First, he asked, why should all the citizens get to vote on key decisions?  Why are they all treated as equals, one vote per man?  This is illogical and counterproductive.  Even in Athens, they had their share of dunces, dimwits, and degenerates.  Why let these men vote?  Why not let only the best, the wisest, vote?  For that matter, why have votes at all?  Why not just determine who are your wisest few, and let them rule?  This was Plato’s vision of an aristocracy, the optimal form of government.  It is, at least in theory, far superior to anything like a democracy.

Plato’s second concern was, ironically, with freedom itself.  In a democracy, since “the people” rule, anything goes.  Whatever the people want, the people get.  And the people—the masses—rarely want the kinds of things that they should want, namely, virtue and discipline.  Rather, they want to have fun: they want to do one thing one day, and something else the next, as it suits their fancy.  They are ‘free,’ after all.  They want to play games, engage in various petty amusements, fill their bellies, get drunk, and so on.  As it was then, so it is now; human nature has scarcely changed in two millennia.

Plato is scalding in his attack.  The “democratic man” is inundated by all manner of trivial and detrimental desires.  True and deep thoughts are driven from his soul, and “false and boastful conceits and phrases mount upwards and take their place” (Republic Bk 8; 560c):

And so the young man returns to the country of the [pleasure-seeking] lotus-eaters, and takes up his dwelling there in the face of all men. … There is a battle and [the false and boastful words] gain the day, and then modesty, which they call ‘silliness’, is ignominiously thrust into exile by them, and temperance, which they nickname ‘unmanliness’, is trampled in the mire and cast forth.  They persuade men that moderation and frugal spending are vulgarity and meanness, and so, by the help of a rabble of evil appetites, they drive them out.

And when they have emptied and swept clean the soul of him who is now in their power and who is being initiated by them in great mysteries, the next thing is to bring back to their house insolence and anarchy and waste and impudence in bright array, having garlands on their heads, and a great company with them, hymning their praises and calling them by sweet names.  Arrogance they term ‘good-breeding’, and anarchy ‘freedom’, and waste ‘magnificence’, and impudence ‘courage’.  And so the young man passes out of his original nature, which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures.  (560d-e)

And if wiser thoughts come calling, and if they struggle for predominance in his soul, he becomes confused; “he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and that one is as good as another.”  He has lost the ability to judge and to discriminate, which degrades his entire life:

His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms ‘joy’ and ‘bliss’ and ‘freedom’; and so he goes on…  [H]e is all ‘freedom’ and ‘equality.’

Hence the democratic man.  His precious freedom, given unrestrained license and lack of discipline, devolves into mindless and confused pleasure-seeking.  He believes he has freedom, and he believes in equality—but this is a sham; it is a false equality and the freedom of a shallow and vapid libertine.  Plato sums up the situation on democracy with one of the most striking sentences in the Republic:

These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.  (558c)

“Charming” and “disordered” democracy, so “fair and spangled,” is all show and no substance.  It encourages undisciplined, unvirtuous lives of hedonistic pleasure.  And most importantly, it “dispenses a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.”  Such a democracy, he says, can only lead in turn to the lowest form of government, tyranny.

I haven’t the space to elaborate, but in short, Aristotle basically agreed with this analysis.  He identified three primary forms of government, each of which had good and bad versions.  In descending order, the three good systems are monarchy (rule by one), aristocracy (rule by a small and wise few), and a ‘constitution’ (conditional rule by many).  The distorted or bad forms of each of these are tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.[7]  In this sense, for Aristotle, democracy is literally ‘the worst of the worst.’  It is rule by the poor and needy masses, not the best or noblest few.

Industrial Democracy

What, then, of democracy in the world today?  We have variations on the democratic theme that are so remote from the Athenian original that they hardly deserve the same name.  They have lost all the virtues of the original but retained all the vices.  Democracy today has devolved into a crude perversion that I like to call industrial democracy.  Its primary characteristics are these:

1)  Representative (parliamentarian) system—no direct participation.
2)  Universal suffrage—all adults can vote.
3)  Multiracial—all races can vote.
4)  Unlimited population size.
5)  Financially corrupt—moneyed interests (especially Jewish) hold great sway.

On every point, this is opposed to the Athenian model.  We vote, but typically only for a handful of pre-determined candidates or on a very limited number of referenda.  Our representation is scaled down by a factor of thousands or millions; a state as large as California, with almost 40 million people, gets all of two senators.[8]  And every half-witted, uneducated ignoramus gets his or her vote—people who vastly outnumber the educated and the wise.  (And we wonder why the intellectual level of political campaigns is so low.)  People of every race can vote, and they often do so in their own racial interest, thus guaranteeing a divided and conflicted government.  Perhaps most critically, the original small size of the Athenian citizen body, some 30,000 individuals, now numbers almost 250 million—the number of eligible American adults.

The vast size and scale of representation ensures that billions of corrupting dollars flow through the system, distorting even the most virtuous lawmaker, and guaranteeing a flood of media confusion, propaganda, and “fake news.”  Industrial democracy is rule by money: those with the most money, and the will to spend it, rule.  In America, we know who leads this race: the Jewish lobby, which contributes at least 50% of Democratic campaign funds and at least 25% of Republican funds.  Wealthy American Jews spend literally hundreds of millions on campaigns, ads, donations, and various other activities, all to influence the outcome in their favored direction.[9]  The situation is comparable in the UK, Canada, France, and Australia, all of which have relatively large and wealthy Jewish populations.[10]  The ancient Greeks—most of them, at least—would be appalled to see what their cherished democracy has come to.

As it is, we now have that which Plato predicted: democracy on the brink of degenerating into tyranny of various forms.  We have tyrannies of the rich, tyrannies of the Judeocracy, and tyrannies of Big Tech, all vying for power, and all cooperating as needed to ensure that nothing like transparent and accountable government ever comes to pass.  The main objective of the rich is to stay rich, and to maintain or grow the wealth gap between themselves and the masses; the larger the disparity, the more relative power they hold.  The main objective of the Judeocracy, of the Jewish power-elite, is to weaken and damage the national psyche sufficiently, and to diversify and deplete the nation genetically, so that they can maintain maximum control without completely destroying the wealth-producing capacity of the economy.  Under industrial democracy, the future is grim indeed.

America, sadly, has been completely subsumed by this pernicious and insidious form of government.  The country is ruled by the lowest, most depraved, most incompetent individuals imaginable.  At the same time, it is being flooded by the virtual scum of humanity—in July 2021 alone, over 212,000 arrests (“encounters”, in the government’s euphemistic propaganda) occurred at the southern border.[11]  How many more evaded “encounter” and entered the country illegally, we do not know.  And to these numbers we must add the “legal” immigration of large numbers of non-European, non-White individuals who inevitably change the character of the nation for the worse.  The combined effect is dramatic.  A recent study stated that the US now has an astonishing 44 million people who were foreign-born, of which about 75% are legal and 25% are illegal.[12]  Nearly half of these millions were born in just five countries: Mexico, China, India, Philippines, and El Salvador.  Surely not more than a percent or two of these 44 million are White.  The grand edifice that is America is collapsing as we speak.

Therefore, it is time to accept reality and give up America for lost.  Put away your flags, your pins, and all your red-white-and-blue paraphernalia.  Toss out your MAGA hats; America will never be “great again.”  Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or a fool.  The country is rotting from above and below.  Vermin are calling the shots from on high, and human detritus washes in over the borders.  This was precisely how Ancient Rome fell.  Such is the terminal stage of many an empire.

Looking Ahead

If this report on the fatal condition of America is close to the mark, it also suggests corrective actions that must be taken to regain a sane and stable civic life, at least for the White Euro-Americans who established and ran the country for most of its existence.  The necessary actions are hardly a secret.  The basic ideas are already floating around the Internet.  Andrew Anglin, for one, was right on the mark in his recent essay on immigration.  His conclusion:

The only way we are going to fix this [immigration] problem is through a two-fold solution:  1) Redrawing the borders of the country, and 2) Physically removing tens of millions of people.  There is no situation where both of those things are not going to be necessary in the future.

He is absolutely right.[13]  Those are two necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for the restoration of rational government among the White population today.

More specifically, my above analysis suggests the following steps: (a) Break up the existing United States into smaller, more cohesive, more homogenous, and more manageable units.  (b) In these new units, encourage all non-Whites, and especially all Jews, to emigrate as soon as possible.  (c) Discard the pernicious concept of human equality and replace it by a celebration of the higher, the nobler, and the best.  (d) Replace industrial democracy with something like an aristocracy.  Let me close by offering a few words of elaboration on each.

More and more people these days seem to be recognizing the desirability and the inevitability of secession of portions of the US, and the establishment of new, independent nation-states.  In fact, as the nation continues to disintegrate, at some point people will have no choice; thus, it is better to plan now than to wait for some chaotic future breakdown.

Some of the current talk on secession has the right intent but is woefully weak and misguided.  One can find articles like “Is America still our country?” and “The separation,” but these are pathetically half-hearted.  Breaking up existing states but staying within America is a wholly insufficient form of secession.  The “6 Californias” idea is very weak; “Greater Idaho” is well-intentioned but falls way short of the mark.  None of these explicitly advocates breaking away from the US and forming new nations.  Only full-blown secession can hope to get to the root of the problem.  The reigning Judeocracy knows this, which is why they do everything in their power to discredit the idea.

Point (b) is mandatory for restoring effective and rational governance.  Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and Jews all have countries of origin; they need to return there with all due haste.  After a short period of voluntary compliance, increasing pressure will need to be applied until they comply.  Yes, Whites could theoretically return to Europe, except that Whites created and built up the present civilization (such as it is) of the USA, and thus have earned a right to stay and to evict the interlopers.[14]  Native Americans were of course here before the White Europeans, and that precedence needs to be respected, such as via truly autonomous homelands.  And since Blacks were forcibly brought here from Africa (with heavy Jewish involvement[15]), I would have no issue with assisting their return to Africa with subsidized travel arrangements, a small one-time cash payment, or with the use of political leverage in Africa to aid their repatriation.  We can ease the transition, but out they must go.

The hardest to deal with will of course be the Jews.  With their political clout, wealth, and bull-headed tenacity, they will be very hard to root out.  The task is made all the more difficult because of the inability of our supposedly “conservative Right” to address the Jewish Question in a meaningful way.  Most all prominent rightwing individuals and organizations flee from the Question like the devil from holy water.  As I have noted elsewhere, Fox News and crew—Carlson, Hannity, et al—never explicitly mention Jews, never out them, and never criticize them in any way; Hannity in fact bends over backward to curry favor.  Alex Jones never criticizes or outs Jews.  Same with Jared Taylor.  American Renaissance won’t deal with the Jewish Question in a serious way.  Breitbart at least discusses them, but always in a neutral or positive light.  The real critics are, sadly, few and far between; to reiterate what I wrote recently, we need to be extremely grateful for The Occidental Observer, Unz.com, National Vanguard, and people like Anglin, all of whom are willing to speak the hard truth on the Jewish Question.

Point (c) obviously follows from the above discussion.  We must drop all talk of human equality and replace it with a promotion and celebration of human uniqueness and human greatness.  This needs to be made explicit in common discourse, media, and school curricula.  We need to celebrate and praise human genius while emphasizing the fact that most people are not geniuses and will never achieve greatness, but who can nonetheless have meaningful and valuable lives.  When it is understood that humans never were, and never will be, equal, then all become free to achieve their full potential and, for those who succeed in bettering themselves, to reap the rewards of exceptional development.  In a just society, exceptional individuals will earn additional rights, but they will also bear additional duties, compared to the lesser.  “Equal” performance for the various subgroups of people—as distinguished by gender, age, socio-economic status, ethnicity, etc.—will never be expected or mandated.  “Racial equality” will be a nonissue.

On the final point, it is clear that the hopelessly corrupt industrial democracy must go.  We can also be confident that something like an aristocracy would be a vast (if imperfect) improvement, even as there is much leeway in the specific details.  If we allow that “rule by the wiser” is superior to “rule by the masses,” then we have many ways to realize such a system.  At the simplest level, we could retain elections for officeholders but permit only the wiser—smarter, more educated, more accomplished—individuals to vote.  It could be very basic:  require that voters earn a college degree, for example; or score above average on an IQ test; or distinguish themselves in some other relevant way (an exceptional athlete, by contrast, earns no right to a voice on political issues).  The disenfranchised would not be made to feel inferior; rather, they would come to accept such a system as in the best interests of all.

At a more sophisticated level, we might move to adopt something like a Platonic education system, as laid out in the Republic.  There he sketches a 50-year training program involving age-appropriate schooling, skills training, physical fitness, and practical experience that both educates the masses and serves as a filtering process to determine who the truly wisest and most capable leaders are.  A series of pass-fail criteria progressively reduce the pool of eligible candidates, leaving, at the end, a mere handful of individuals who have repeatedly proven themselves under pressure.  In a future aristocracy, a small pool of “the best” could be added annually to a kind of ruling congress who would then be unconditionally empowered to make and enforce all laws and policies.  After a fixed term of governance, each individual would be compelled to retire in turn.  Again, this is just one way of realizing such a system.  Variations might include finding ways to identify and empower the truly exceptional individuals—or perhaps a single individual—and give them correspondingly exceptional powers to rule.

In any case, the system would need to be recognized by the vast majority of people as an effective and desirable solution.  In this sense, it would retain a small flavor of traditional democracy.  “Consent of the governed” can work, as long as the population is not too large and as long as we do not have to contend with competing racial minorities or Jewish financial corruption.  But such consent is a far cry from universal suffrage or rule by the masses, which can never work, and which always degenerates.

Such is my basic outline of a path forward.  Obviously, much more needs to be said.  But it is a start, one that addresses the root causes of our present crisis.[16]

I close with this thought:  To the extent that America ever was great, this is because, at the start, it was roughly modeled on the Athenian original.  The early American government was gendered, racial, and ethnic—White males of a predominantly north European stock.  And it stayed that way for nearly 100 years.[17]  The celebrated American “diversity” at the beginning was a diversity among Whites: English, Scots, Irish, Dutch, Germans, and Scandinavians all would have been represented in those early years.  Yes, America had significant numbers of Blacks and Jews from the 1600s, but they had limited or no political influence.  Religion was of secondary importance.  Yes, it was nominally a “Christian nation” at the start, but few among the Founders were deeply religious—Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, and John Jay being the exceptions—and most were skeptical believers or deists, if not functional atheists.

Hence, early America prospered and flourished in spite of, not because of, Christianity; in spite of, not because of, Blacks and Jews; and in spite of, not because of, the principle of equality.  Blacks, Jews, “equality,” and Christianity were millstones around the young nation’s neck.  It is a testament to our initially gendered and racial governance that we accomplished so much in those early years, with such huge burdens to bear.  Two centuries later, those millstones proved to be our ruination.

America is dying a slow and painful death.  Let us euthanize the long-suffering nation, redraw the boundaries, rethink the guiding principles, and begin again.

===================================

Thomas Dalton, PhD, has authored or edited several books and articles on politics, history, and religion, with a special focus on National Socialism in Germany.  His works include a new translation series of Mein Kampf, and the books Eternal Strangers (2020), The Jewish Hand in the World Wars (2019), and Debating the Holocaust (4th ed, 2020).  Most recently he has edited a new edition of Rosenberg’s classic work Myth of the 20th Century and a new book of political cartoons, Pan-Judah!.  All these works are available at www.clemensandblair.com.  For all his writings, see his personal website www.thomasdaltonphd.com.

[1] Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), chapter 8, section 95.

[2] And in fact, Aristotle’s later discussion of the “great-souled man” (Nicomachean Ethics IV.3) demonstrates conclusively that he believed in vast difference among men.

[3] The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume one, Cambridge University Press (1985), pp. 111-112.

[4] Indeed, explicit human equality exists nowhere in the Bible.  Paul claims in Galatians (3:28) that “there is neither Jew nor Greek” under Jesus and that “we are all one in Christ Jesus.”  But this only says that all are welcome into his nascent universalist church; it does not support the idea that all are equal.  And more importantly, there are very good reasons for believing that Paul held to the most obnoxious form of Jewish supremacism, and thus did not believe in human equality in the least; see my essays “Christianity: The great Jewish hoax” and “Nietzsche and the origins of Christianity.”

[5] Though, as I have recently argued in “The problem with leftism,” both the Left and the Right are “fakes,” which explains why they both adhere to similar nonsense, and why they both supplicate to the Jewish Lobby.

[6] Actually, in America we don’t have wars anymore; we have “authorized uses of military force” or AUMFs.  This is Congress’ cowardly way to kill others on behalf of their lobbyists and patrons without having to vote for an actual war.

[7] Politics III.7.

[8] It does get 53 federal representatives, but even here, each represents the interests of an average of 750,000 very diverse individuals.

[9] See my elaborations in “The problem with leftism” and “Confronting the Judeocracy.”

[10] I emphasize “relative.”  Jewish percentages of these four nations range from 0.4 to 1.0%.  Normally this should be inconsequential, but with wealthy and pernicious Jews, it poses substantial problems.  The lesson here is that any nation seeking to free itself from the Jewish Lobby had best restrict Jewish numbers to something well below 0.1%.

[11] Of course, not all illegal immigrants are scum.  But from everything we know, a very high proportion of them are from the lowest, least intelligent, and most criminal segments of humanity.  And since virtually all of them are non-White, even the best will alter the nature of our traditionally White society.

[12] Though the actual number of illegals could be much higher than the presumed 11 million.  One recent study argued that the true figure could be as high as 29 million.

[13] Now, if we could only get Anglin to drop his allegiance to the Judeo-Christian God and to that long-dead Jewish rabbi, he would be much better off.

[14] Yes, Black African slaves and Chinese coolies “built” portions of the early US.  But they provided only the low-end brute labor, not the organizational or intellectual basis for the nation.  To give them credit for building America would be akin to giving credit to the oxen and draft horses of the early pioneers.

[15] See Louis Farrakhan’s book The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (3 volumes).

[16] Elsewhere I have argued that Hitler’s National Socialism can also be a model going forward.  His nationalism created an ethnic-based sense of unity and purpose that far exceeded mindless patriotism, and his socialism served as an antidote to unrestrained finance capitalism.  There are many good lessons to be learned there.  Interested readers should start with my recent edition of Mein Kampf, and with my newly-reworked edition of Alfred Rosenberg’s classic, The Myth of the 20th Century.

[17] Black males were granted the right to vote in 1866, and women (of all races) in 1920.

Murder of a Mensch: Cuckservatives, Crypto-Jews and Catch-22s

/42 Comments/in , , , /by

The central aims of leftism are very simple: to win power, to punish its enemies, and to destroy the West. The central principle of leftism is also very simple: “Heads we win; tails you lose.” Whatever works for leftism is ruthlessly exploited; whatever works against leftism is ignored or reversed. For example, minor infractions or perfectly legal acts by the right are labelled serious crimes and harshly punished; serious crimes by the left and its favorites are censored or brazenly lied about.

Self-defense is no offense

Americans have seen this leftist principle hard at work since the self-inflicted death of the Black thug George Floyd in May 2020. During the Summer of George, Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its antifa allies rioted, looted, burned, and murdered for months on end with both the complicity and the approval of leftist media and officialdom. Their very serious crimes went unchallenged and unpunished. Thanks to the self-righteous anti-police campaigning of BLM, murders have risen sharply among young Black men, the very group the left claim to be seeking to protect from “police brutality.” And all this is censored or brazenly lied about by the left.

He looks sinister because he is sinister: US Attorney-General and Jewish supremacist Merrick Garland

But when a misguided right-wing mob trespassed briefly in the US Capitol in January 2021, the left reacted as though the Apocalypse were upon us. The trespass was “domestic terrorism,” a “deadly assault” on democracy itself, and, according to the Jewish leftist Rebecca Solnit, nothing less than a “coup attempt.” And even as Black and antifa thugs walk the streets unmolested, Solnit’s co-ethnic Merrick Garland, the sinister Jewish Attorney-General in Biden’s Bolshevik cabinet, has poured huge resources into fighting “white supremacy.” The Capitol trespassers have been tracked down and imprisoned, often in solitary confinement and in filthy conditions, before they go on trial on inflated and unjust charges. Also in jail is Kyle Rittenhouse, the young right-winger who coolly and expertly defended his life against a murderous assault by three people, including two Jews, one of whom was a convicted pedophile. If Rittenhouse were non-White or antifa, he would have been released long ago and his deadly shooting would have been accepted as a perfectly legal act of self-defence against bloodthirsty thugs. “Heads we win; tails you lose.”

Somali enrichment strikes again

Across the Atlantic in Britain, the same power-hungry leftists apply the same principle. But even I was taken aback by the leftist reaction to the murder of the supposedly right-wing Conservative politician Sir David Amess on October 15, 2021. The alleged murderer is Ali Harbi Ali, a Muslim “of Somali heritage” (in smarmy leftist parlance) and the murder took place soon after Angela Rayner, Labour’s fiery (and possibly psychopathic) deputy leader, had described Conservatives as “scum … homophobic, racist, misogynistic … scum.” You might think this was embarrassing for the left: a right-wing White man is murdered by a Black Muslim shortly after a left-wing White woman “dehumanizes” right-wing White men. Not a bit of it: the leftist media ignored Rayner’s remark and used the murder to campaign loudly for more censorship of right-wing “hate.”

When a Somali Muslim murders a “much loved” politician, this might appear to be yet more evidence that critics of Third-World immigration are correct. But not to the left, for whom David Amess’s murder is yet more evidence that we must try harder to silence critics of Third-World immigration. After the murder, leftists constantly invoked the saintly Labour MP Jo Cox and her murder by a “right-wing extremist” in 2016. The leftist Andrew Marr “spent his Sunday morning show on the BBC questioning the Home Secretary [Priti Patel] about online anonymity.” There is so far no evidence that “online anonymity” played any role in the murder, but Marr takes his ideas on political discourse straight from the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.”

A cuckservative cucks

And if you had judged by one BBC Radio news-broadcast, the true victim of Amess’s murder was the still-very-much-alive left-wing Black MP Diane Abbott, who was interviewed caringly about the abuse she suffers online. But I’ll freely admit it: I feel much more sympathy for Diane Abbott than for David Amess. Abbott isn’t a traitor; Amess was a traitor. She’s Black and she works for Black interests; he was White and he worked against White interests. I’m happy to see Abbott satirized and mocked, but I don’t think she should receive foul-mouthed abuse and threats of violence. I don’t think David Amess should have been stabbed to death either, but I cannot feel any sorrow at what happened to him. He was a cuckservative whose official website proves that he was complicit not only in his own murder but also in the murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing of countless ordinary Whites, past, present, and to come:

A cuckservative cucks: David Amess supports “refugees” and an anti-White leftist charity

Sir David Joins British Red Cross To Celebrate Refugee Week

On Monday 17th June [2019], Sir David Amess MP met with the British Red Cross to mark Refugee Week 2019 and hear about the challenges facing those as they rebuild their lives in the UK.

The Southend West MP took the opportunity to speak with the charity’s refugee ambassadors, who shared their own stories fleeing conflict and persecution. Sir David learnt about the challenges faced by those arriving in the UK, and what more the Government can do to help refugees resettle, work and study here.

The event marked the start of Refugee Week (17th-23rd June), and the launch of the British Red Cross’ “Every Refugee Matters” campaign. Aiming to highlight the issues that many refugees face, the charity have produced a new film along with those with first-hand experience of the challenges in UK asylum system.

Speaking after the event, Sir David said: “I am proud to be supporting the work of the British Red Cross this Refugee Week, and the brilliant work they do helping those most in need rebuild their lives here in the UK. Speaking to the refugee ambassadors was an invaluable experience to hear directly from who have had first-hand experience of some of the barriers blocking them from working, accessing education and healthcare. It is vital that we are able to help and provide protection to the world’s most vulnerable.” (Sir David Joins British Red Cross To Celebrate Refugee Week, 18th June, 2019)

[David Amess comments on] Black Lives Matter

I have received many emails about the events in America which we have seen unfolding on our TV screens. I have been shocked, horrified and repulsed at the murder of a US citizen by a policeman, with three officers standing by and doing nothing to help. Absolutely unforgivable in every respect. I was deeply moved by the appearance of the brother of George Floyd, who visited the scene of the murder and appealed for peace and calm. I do hope he is listened to. I absolutely despair at American politics at the moment and have made representations to government Ministers. I have also added my name to the cross-party letter to Liz Truss asking the government to freeze exports of riot control equipment to the United States. (Black Lives Matter, 4th June 2020)

Amess was supposedly a right-winger, but there was nothing right-wing about his support for “refugees” and Black Lives Matter. Those posts at his website prove that he was a cuckservative allied with leftism, which is why the Guardian, without the slightest trace of irony, called him a “much loved” politician and “devout Catholic.”

Fake Catholic, fake Pope

I strongly disagree with the Guardian’s second claim: Amess was a fake Catholic whose pro-refugee and pro-BLM views chimed perfectly with those of the Anti-Pope currently occupying the throne of St Peter. If Amess had been genuinely right-wing and genuinely Catholic, the Guardian and the rest of the leftist media would have hated him and found it difficult to conceal their satisfaction at his death. True Christians are not loved or respected by enemies of Christianity, as Christ himself prophesied: “And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved.” (Matthew 10:22)

Anti-Pope Francis kisses the feet of Muslim invaders

And if Amess had been a genuine Catholic, he would never have been called a “real mensch” by one of his many Jewish fans:

Jewish groups express shock over ‘horrific’ killing of MP Sir David Amess

Jewish groups have expressed their “profound sorrow” at the killing of Conservative MP Sir David Amess. In a statement, the Board of Deputies said they were devastated to hear that Sir David had died following a stabbing at his constituency surgery.

“We will never forget Sir David’s long and deep friendship to our community. Our hearts go out in profound sorrow to his wife Julia and children Katie, Sarah and David Jr,” they said. Steve Wilson, CEO of United Synagogue, said the parliamentarian’s murder was “horrific and chilling”. … The Jewish Leadership Council expressed their shock. “He always had a very strong and warm relationship with his local Jewish community. Our thoughts are with his family and friends at this time,” they said. Karen Pollock, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Education Trust, said: “We are shocked and saddened at the tragic loss of Sir David Amess MP. A long time supporter and campaigner for the Holocaust Educational Trust, joining us at every gathering, and encouraging us in everything we did. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family at this difficult time.”

Southend rabbis also paid respect to the MP. Rabbi Geoffrey Hyman of Southend shul described Sir David as “a real mensch”. He said: “We are absolutely devastated by the murder of Sir David Amess, our local MP. He had a very close relationship with our Jewish community here in Westcliff. Always supportive and sympathetic to our members and causes. He attended numerous events at our synagogue. We are deeply saddened and send our condolences to his dear family…. May he rest in peace.”

Sir David previously served as the honorary secretary of Conservative Friends of Israel. From the 1980s, he campaigned for the erection of a statue honouring Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation while the country was under Nazi occupation. Eventually he succeeded, and in 1997 Queen Elizabeth unveiled the statue, located outside Western Marble Arch Synagogue. Earlier this year, speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Day debate, Sir David said although he was a Catholic, “there is Jewish blood in each and every one of us,” and he “would certainly have been proud to have been born a Jew.” (Jewish groups express shock over ‘horrific’ killing of MP Sir David Amess, The Jewish Chronicle, 15th October 2021)

So Amess’s death was the murder of a mensch. He was a dedicated shabbos goy and worked hard for Jews—who have always been the greatest and most implacable enemies of Christianity and the Catholic church. Amess was a traitor to both his race and his religion.

Harvey’s little helper

Or perhaps he wasn’t. Like the saintly leftist Jo Cox, Amess was little-known in Britain before his murder. But he did hit the headlines in 2017 when he appeared to support the Jewish sex-criminal Harvey Weinstein. His parliamentary office issued this unequivocal statement in Amess’s name: “The recent revelations that countless starlets have apparently been assaulted by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein are dubious to say the least. Whilst it has no doubt always been the case that some individuals have achieved their big break via the casting couch, this sudden flurry of alleged inappropriate advances beggars belief. Just as with the claims against Jimmy Savile here in the UK, why did no one say anything until now?”

When the statement was criticized, Amess blamed a mix-up by his staff and claimed that he hadn’t authorized or said anything of the kind. I find that hard to believe. But why would a “devout” “right-wing Catholic” like Amess support a sleazy leftist Jew from anti-Catholic Hollywood? Perhaps the Jewish Chronicle answered that question when, following its tribute to the murdered mensch, it reported that “Sir David Amess MP is believed to have had Sephardi [Jewish] ancestry. … According to information from the The Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain, the MP was a descendant of Sephardic families through his mother, Maud, who died in 2016, aged 104. While Sir David was a staunch and practising catholic [note lower case], who often referenced his faith in his work in parliament, he had ties to Sephardic Jews going back hundreds of years.”

Bound by blood

So perhaps Amess was a crypto-Jew rather than a cuckservative. The Jewish Chronicle certainly wants to believe he was, because Jews like to reassure themselves that their control of Western politics doesn’t rely only on the buying and blackmail of goyish politicians. Some of their agents are bound to them by blood, not simply by Benjamins. Prime minister Boris Johnson and his predecessor David Cameron are known to be part-Jewish. I suspect that the former prime minister Theresa May has Jewish ancestry too. The former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has himself claimed to have “some Jewish ancestry” and others have suggested that Denis MacShane, the former Labour MP for Rotherham, had a Jewish father. Before being jailed for fraud in 2013, the staunch feminist MacShane ignored the rape and prostitution of White working-class girls by Muslims in his Yorkshire constituency while working assiduously for rich Jews in far-off London.

Then there’s the former Conservative minister George Osborne, who discovered late in his career that he was halachically Jewish through his maternal grandmother. This prompted the Jewish politician and journalist Danny Finkelstein to wax lyrical on “That mysterious sense of Jewish connection,” because he had felt close to Osborne before learning that they were both Jewish. So Osborne was a crypto-Jew, not simply a cuckservative. Osborne’s attitude to mass immigration is certainly Jewish: in 2017 he “revealed that, despite having pledged to reduce immigration in both its 2010 and 2015 general election manifestos, the Tory leadership secretly abandoned this ambition long ago.” Well, it was secret to the goyim who were voting for the Conservatives, but not to Jewish organizations like the Board of Deputies, which regularly meet with senior politicians to discuss “matters of concern to the Community.” After these meetings, Jews like to put out trophy-photos that implicitly gloat about their control of British politics. Here’s one of those trophy-photos featuring the obnoxious Hindu Home Secretary Priti Patel:

Priti Patel with the Board of Deputies and other Jewish supremacists

Patel has no loyalty to Britain or to British Whites, only to herself and to the Jews whose support she needs to realize her political ambitions. She’s an intellectually undistinguished authoritarian with a very harsh and unpleasant personality — indeed, her own husband calls her “my personal piranha.” But you can be sure that she performs the goy-grovel most eagerly and becomingly at all her meetings with Jews.

The authoritarian spiral

Under the guidance of her Jewish masters, Patel is currently overseeing the creation of an Online Harms bill, which seeks to fight “horrific terrorist and extremist content.” In other words, she wants more and harsher censorship of those who claim, for example, that Jews have undue influence in British politics. But Patel herself has shown again and again that she clearly recognizes Jewish control of British politics. In 2017 she had to resign from Theresa May’s cabinet when it was revealed that she had undertaken a long series of secret and unminuted meetings with Israeli politicians and officials, supervised by the Jewish peer Lord Polack, former director of Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI). But she bounced back to a bigger and better position when Boris Johnson became prime minister. Patel simultaneously knows about Jewish power and wants to criminalize any discussion of that power.

The murder of the mensch David Amess will help her plans for more pro-Jewish censorship. One of David Amess’s cuckservative colleagues has asked for his memory to be honored by “David’s law,” to “crack down on social media abuse of public figures and end online anonymity.” This is the authoritarian spiral so beloved of Jews and the left. Third-World immigration inevitably spawns Third-World pathologies like terrorism and crime, which are then used to justify ever more censorship and surveillance of those who criticize Third-World immigration. Some right-wing and libertarian journalists have tried to strike back by pointing out that Amess’s murder has not been shown to have had any connection with “social media abuse” and “online anonymity.”

Migration strengthens censorship

But Amess’s murder does seem to have an intimate connection with the Religion of Peace and its ever-growing presence on British soil. Harbi Ali Kullane, the father of the alleged killer, was a member of the political elite in his Muslim homeland, like the Chechen father of the Boston bombers in America, and lives in an exclusive area of London. The Guardian reports that he is regarded by fellow Somalis as “a committed anti-extremist [and] a liberal, open-minded man, who was not very religious.” Kullane has obviously done very well out of his migration to Britain, but can we say the same of Britain itself? The Guardian and other leftists will not try to answer that question, much to the disquiet of the Trotskyist libertarian Brendan O’Neill, who believes passionately in both free speech and open borders. In a hard-hitting column written within hours of Amess’s death, O’Neill asked: “Can we now have an honest discussion about Islamist terrorism?”

Can we? Well, no, we can’t. O’Neill and libertarians like him don’t understand (or pretend not to understand) the Catch-22 that applies to non-White enrichment. The more non-Whites you have in your country, the more they will reproduce the pathologies of their homelands and the less you will be able to discuss those pathologies, let alone try to end them. This isn’t difficult to understand. True nations like Hungary, Poland and Slovakia don’t have big problems with suicide-bombers, rape-gangs, and stabby Somalis. Indeed, they don’t have any such problems at all. Why not? Because they haven’t been enriched by millions of non-Whites and haven’t been initiated into a leftist-Jewish cult of minority-worship. That cult is difficult to establish in the absence of non-Whites, which is why leftists in all those nations are eager to welcome “refugees,” establish the cult, and open the borders. So far, they haven’t succeeded.

Serving leftism from beyond the grave

The crypto-Jew and crypto-leftist Sir David Amess also welcomed “refugees,” who are mostly healthy young men of low social value and high criminal potential. Amess is gone now, seemingly cut short in his cuckservative prime by a stabby Somali and certainly mourned on all sides of British politics. But even in death he’s providing a valuable service to his former Jewish masters and leftist allies. His “shocking murder” will be used to justify more censorship, more surveillance, and more minority-worship. “Heads we win; tails you lose.”

This leftist principle isn’t intellectually sophisticated, but it’s been very effective across the West. When the left is in power, leftism advances. When the so-called right is in power, leftism advances just the same. If you want to see how that works, look no further than that “real mensch” Sir David Amess, the “devout Catholic” who was “much loved” by those who hate Christ and the Catholic church.

Sines v. Kessler Plaintiffs Coordinated with Refuse Fascism, an Anti-White Terrorist Organization

/19 Comments/in , , /by

“Antifa WILL claim they are bystanders so they can file lawsuits.”
@Aeyannic_Order, Unite the Right Discord Server, August 11, 2017

Two plaintiffs in the upcoming Sines v Kessler lawsuit have ties to, and coordinated activities with, the anti-White terrorist organization Refuse Fascism in the months prior to and during the rally. The organization, a “mass line” front group for the Revolutionary Communist Party, rioted across numerous states in the months before Unite the Right in order to “shut down” the events of their political opponents, including the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump. The two plaintiffs connected to the terrorist organization, Natalie Romero and Seth Wispelwey, have both alleged that Unite the Right speakers and organizers conspired to violate their rights at the 2017 Charlottesville rally. A new report by Occidental Observer reveals the extent of these ties, and how a founding leader of the organization was brought in to violate the rights of the defendants.

Refuse Fascism’s 2017 Terrorist Rampage

Following the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016, Refuse Fascism was founded by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party and other anti-White extremists such as Bill Ayers, a member of the infamous anti-White, Judeo-Bolshevik terrorist cell that not only bombed the U.S. Capital in 1971, but discussed the “merits” of murdering all newborn White babies. Numerous protests the group have attended, organized or participated in have descended into violent riots as participants attacked those they were “protesting.”

All the more terrifying is the organization’s connections with several extraordinarily wealthy and powerful anti-White Jewish billionaires. In June of 2020, a Project Veritas undercover operation revealed that the head of the organization’s Atlanta chapter, Tee Stern, claimed to have received funding from George Soros for a side project and was in talks with Jewish billionaire Tom Steyer’s assistant. Steyer was the top Jewish donor to the Democratic party during the 2020 election cycle, contributing 54 millions dollars to Democrats and 35 Million to Republicans.

On January 14, 2017, the homosexual, Jewish libertarian Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak to students at UC Davis. Refuse Fascism was among the terrorist groups who showed up and shut the event down. As with the Unite the Right rally, mob participants brandished genocidal anti-White “antifa” terrorist symbols, as well as the bold black and white Refuse Fascism signs that have various demands such as “NO! STOP TRUMP/PENCE FASCIST REGIME BEFORE IT STARTS” with the organization’s website at the bottom.

In a now deleted video, a Breitbart photographer is shoved and spit on by Refuse Fascism protesters. Ringleader calls for his comrades to steal the photographer’s camera.

During the fracas, numerous attendees were assaulted. Milo’s guest speaker had dog feces thrown at him. Nathan Damigo, a current defendant in the Sines v Kessler lawsuit who conducted an interview with CNN that evening was assaulted while livestreaming the riotous mob. Breitbart cameraman Mike Perdie was assaulted after a member of Refuse Fascism demanded he stop filming. He then called for his comrades to remove Perdie from the area. After pushing and shoving Perdie around, a man shouted directly in front of him with a bullhorn screaming “Fuck off” and then spit in his face. It was then that the man who appeared to be the leader of the Refuse Fascism group yelled for his comrades to steal Perdie’s equipment, “Get that camera! Someone grab that expensive camera!”

Mob participants then began inciting violence, chanting “No justice, no peace!” and “If we don’t get it, shut it down.” Animated by the rhetoric, the agitated mob tore down the barricades and blocked the door of the venue. Administrators and campus police called the event off with little attempt to apprehend the perpetrators of the violence and chaos.

#DisruptJ20

A week later Refuse Fascism would carry out a conspiracy to disrupt the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Days before the event, undercover footage of Refuse Fascism organizer Sunsara Taylor was released by Project Veritas revealing their plan to disrupt the inauguration with various anti-White terrorist groups. The conspirators included numerous organizations who later that summer would descend upon the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, such as Antifa Seven Hills, Ashville Anti-Racism, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council (MACC), Redneck Revolt, and The Revolutionary Communist Party (RevCom), to name just a few.

The night prior to the inauguration, members of Refuse Fascism clashed with police outside Trump International Hotel. They then met up with other anti-White “antifa” terrorists outside the Deploraball, an event put on by Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters. Mob participants threw objects such as eggs and batteries at those entering the venue and attacked multiple attendees. Among those attacked was James Allsup, a young college student from Washington state who would go on to attend Unite the Right. While debating a member of the mob, he was surrounded by the anti-White “antifa” terrorists who stole his hat. When he attempted to retrieve it, the terrorists beat him. They then proceeded to stalk him and attacked him again, hitting him in the back of the head leaving him bleeding so profusely that he had to be taken to the hospital.

A young James Allsup was taken to the hospital following an attack by anti-White “Antifa” terrorists outside the DeploraBall, January 19, 2017.

On the day of the inauguration, Refuse Fascism stormed a highway, shutting down all traffic. Code Pink also blocked streets in an attempt to stop the inauguration from taking place. During the human blockade Tighe Barry, a member of Code Pink who’s in a relationship with the organization’s cofounder, Medea Benjamin, was wearing a large Refuse Fascism sticker on his chest and claimed that “we blocked this street because…we feel like we have the right to tell them not to go into our city.” The stunt created chaos, but unlike Unite the Right, police stepped in and made arrests. Code Pink has a history protesting with Refuse Fascism, and its leaders Tighe Barry and cofounder Medea Benjamin were among those who attended the Unite the Right Rally.

In other parts of the city, Refuse Fascism members participated in a goon march with black bloc terrorists where they proceeded to riot through the streets, smashing windows and setting a limousine on fire. Several hundred were arrested, although only around 20 of the 234 people arrested were ever convicted, and those were primarily due to plea deals. Unlike the majority of the January 6 capital protesters who were refused bail, the majority of those arrested in 2017 received bail and had their charges dropped by prosecutors.

It was during the chaos that defendant Richard Spencer was famously punched in the head by an anti-White black bloc terrorist, igniting a media firestorm about the “ethics of punching Nazis.” One writer for Politico resigned in disgrace after implying that Spencer should be beaten with a baseball bat. A Huffington Post writer instructed his readers to assault White advocates, referring to them with the pejorative, anti-White racial slur of “nazi.” The racial incitement of the public to violence by the mainstream corporate media would contribute to the chaos in Charlottesville that summer, as well as help to cover up attacks on Unite the Right participants.

Crashing Berkeley

With the success of their heckler’s veto at UC Davis and close attempt at a successful coup at the inauguration, Refuse Fascism members launched another aggressive attack several week later against Yiannopoulos’ UC-Berkeley speaking engagement. Following a similar pattern, Refuse Fascism showed up early along with other anti-White terrorist organizations. These groups included the TORCH Antifa Network’s local chapter Northern California Anti-Racist Action (NoCARA) whom law enforcement claimed had attacked a pro-White rally in Sacramento in 2016 hosted by Sines v. Kessler defendants Matt Parrot and Matthew Heimbach’s Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP). Other organizations included By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), whose founding members worked with and were members of the openly pedophile organization North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMLBA), as well as Refuse Fascism’s parent group, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RevCom). A Buzzfeed livestream filmed the entire event, and showed Refuse Fascism members instigating the riot, pulling down the barricades and leading the mob up to the building where the event was set to occur.

After pulling down police barricades, Refuse Fascism member with shield and sign (second from the right) leads the mob into the prohibited area, kicking off the riot.

As the mob attacked the building using the metal barricades as battering rams against the glass windows, they fired explosives at law enforcement. Several women who came to see Yiannopolus speak were then attacked. One of the young female students was giving an interview with local media when she was pepper sprayed. Another woman was attacked with a club disguised as a flagpole. After fending off her attacker, another masked terrorist sprayed her in the face with pepper spray. She was then beaten mercilessly by multiple terrorists with wooden clubs.

A mobile light tower illuminating the plaza was knocked over and caught fire. Numerous trash cans were knocked over and lit on fire, and even a bank  had a  flare thrown in it as the mob proceeded to celebrate the success of their heckler’s veto by parading down the street adjacent to the school and vandalizing local businesses. The San Francisco Chronicle estimated $100,000 in damage to the school and the surrounding area.

Yvette Felarca, a leading member of BAMN openly bragged on Fox News to Tucker Carlson about how her terrorist group had helped shut down the event. Refuse Fascism claimed on their website that “what happened at UC Berkeley is part of the kind of broad, powerful and meaningful protest which needs to continue on an unprecedented scale to OUST this regime from power” and that their actions were “righteous” with “much more like this…[is] needed.”

Plaintiff Natalie Romero, Movimiento Cosecha, and Refuse Fascism

Sines v Kessler plaintiff Natalie Romero, who admitted her parents were in the country illegally, travelled from Houston to Charlottesville on August 12, 2017 to call for the ethnic cleansing of European cultural symbols from the city’s parks. She is among those who filed a lawsuit that same year alleging speakers and organizers of the event “conspired” with James Fields to hit her with his vehicle. Despite a law enforcement investigator involved with the Fields case admitting under oath that there was no evidence of communication between Fields and other Unite the Right defendants of the Sines v Kessler lawsuit, Romero and her fellow plaintiffs have continued to make the unsubstantiated allegation. Why, despite lack of evidence, Romero has continued to make such allegations which have destroyed the lives of the plaintiffs is unknown. However, new evidence reveals that Romero had a history of blocking traffic and was a member of an organization with deep ties to the anti-White terrorist organization Refuse Fascism.

Movimiento Cosecha & Refuse Fascism

At the time of the Unite the Right event in 2017, Romero was a member of the anti-White, racial replacement organization Movimiento Cosecha. The group calls for open borders and the amnesty of all illegal aliens residing in the United States; it had conducted numerous acts of civil disobedience across the country in the months prior to, and in the years following, Unite the Right. In Michigan, three of their members were arrested in April of 2017 for blocking a highway. Two months later, in an event Romero would help lead, 15 members (of whom four were illegally in the country) were arrested in Austin, Texas for sitting in the street and blocking traffic in front of the State’s Capitol. In 2019, 22 members were arrested in Detroit for blocking the Windsor Tunnel.

Movimiento Cosecha’s president Dylan Lazerow, is unsurprisingly Jewish. A recent in-depth report by the National Justice Party revealed that Israel’s strategy outside its borders is the exact opposite of what it advocates for its own people, and that the majority of organizations assisting migrants in ethnically replacing Europeans in all White countries are run by Jews. Even in cases where Christian churches are involved, they are receiving Jewish funding to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. While Lazerow has opposed Israeli settlement policy of Palestine, he promotes the settlement of tens of millions of unwanted non-Whites into European nations.

Movimiento Cosecha President Dylan Lazerow with Refuse Fascism Co-Founder Cornel West.

In March of 2017, Lazerow posted a photo on his Facebook page of himself posing with Cornel West, a cofounder and lead spokesman of Refuse Fascism who has fielded various interviews for the terrorist organization. West was recently denied tenure and compelled to resign from his position at Harvard by the institute’s Jewish leadership for criticism of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Like Lazaro, however, West has no problem promoting the ethnic replacement of European peoples, but he does have a problem with ethnically cleansing Palestinians.

While it is common for popular people to have their photo taken with random individuals they don’t know, this was not the case with Lazerow and West. Lazerow once posted a Movimiento Cosecha advertisement with Cornel West quoting him as saying “In this moment in history, the people dedicated to loving their neighbors must resist. Stand with me as I join Movimiento Cosecha and our immigrant brothers and sisters on May 1st for the #DayWithoutImmigrants — and beyond — as we work to win permanent protection, dignity, and respect.” Furthermore, Movimiento Cosecha also has a history of demonstrating with Refuse Fascism. These facts reveal close ties between the two organizations.

Refuse Fascism members participate in Movimiento Cosecha’s Austin, Texas action.  

Less than a month prior to the now infamous Unite the Right rally Natalie Romero and other members of her organization, along with members of Refuse Fascism, blocked traffic in Austin, Texas to demand citizenship for millions illegally living within the country. Video of the incident revealed Romero to be playing a major role, practicing and then leading the group in chants with a megaphone as they approached the state capitol. Romero initiated chants such as “The power, is in our hands. This is our state!” and “Undocumented and unafraid.” She even went so far as to parrot a slogan taken straight out of the Communist Manifesto “One struggle, one fight. Workers of the world unite!”

As the group approached the intersection of Congress Avenue and 15th Street, a number of agitators marched into the center of the road. Romero can be seen in the background, wearing an orange reflective safety vest blocking traffic on Congress. Fifteen Movimiento Cosecha members were arrested during the action. As those arrested were moved into transport vehicles, Romero led those still remaining in further chants celebrating their actions calling for policy that would further the ongoing racial replacement Americans.

Following the Unite the Right rally, Movimiento Cosecha published a photo of Romero wearing a t-shirt with their logo emblazoned on it and holding a megaphone, claiming her as a member. Another photo published on the organization’s Facebook page on July 25, prior to their July action, shows Romero lying on a pile of Movimiento Cosecha t-shirts with another activist with the caption “We are in Austin! Text “RESISTE” to 41411 to stay updated as we launch the first DACAmented sit-in of the Trump era TOMORROW at 11am. Stay tuned!” This evidence reveals that Romero was no average member, but a very active participant with the organization.

“We are in Austin! Text “RESISTE” to 41411 to stay updated as we launch the first DACAmented sit-in of the Trump era TOMORROW at 11am. Stay tuned!” Natalie Romero (bottom left) poses on a pile of t-shirts for Movimiento Cosecha days prior to blocking traffic in Austin, Texas and a month prior to Unite the Right.

As Unite the Right attendees headed to their vehicles on August 12, 2017 the anti-White mob who managed to shut down the rally followed them to the parking lot on South Street where they blocked attendees in and then attacked and chased their vehicles as they attempted to leave. Moments before Romero and several of her co-plaintiffs were struck by Fields’ vehicle, the mob she was marching with were celebrating how they successfully shut the rally down, chanting “who shut shit down, we shut shit down!” Those Romero was illegally blocking the street with during the state of emergency consisted of various anti-White terrorist cells, such as the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement, several chapters of the TORCH Antifa Network, along with members of Refuse Fascism.

Seth Wispelwey Invites Refuse Fascism’s lead spokesman Cornel West to Help Him Shut Down Unite the Right

In preparation for Unite the Right, plaintiff Seth Wispelwey’s organizations, Congregate Charlottesville and the United Church of Christ, hosted direct action training in preparation for violating the rights of those he is now frivolously suing. During a press conference on July 31, 2017, Wispelwey claimed that Refuse Fascism’s spokesman Cornel West and others “had already responded to the call and are committing to join Congregate’s efforts in Charlottesville to confront the rise of White Nationalist’s political power and refuse to let Charlottesville be used as a platform towards those ends.”  It is no surprise then that several days prior to Unite the Right, West’s anti-White terrorist organization Refuse Fascism called on their members to go to Charlottesville to “protest” the event, a word which the organization had previously used to describe mass rioting and violence they instigated at UC Berkeley.

On the night before Unite the Right, West gave a sermon at St. Paul’s Memorial Church in Charlottesville where he proclaimed to thunderous applause “We have to take a stand! That’s why some of us came to fight and get arrested if necessary!”  During the church service Wispelwey took the microphone and announced that “This [service] is the result of Congregate [C’Ville] being in existence for one month. Think about what we could do in Charlottesville over one year,” and “We are working as the fiscal sponsors for this work.” Prior to the rally the following morning, West gave another sermon at First Baptist Church where he further called on the congregation to get arrested with them to stop the rally, telling the congregants “When we march this morning. We hold hands and lock in this morning. When we’re seen this morning. When we get arrested this morning. When we go to jail this morning, let’s try to remember those, the best of those who came before who sacrificed so much for us. Who paid a greater cost than we gonna pay today.” West then marched to the park with Wispelwey and blocked the entrance.

Cornel West joined Seth Wispelway and other clergy block the entrance to the park and discuss tactics with anti-White terrorists.

Wispelwey blocked UTR participants from entering the park just yards away from where Refuse Fascism members attacked numerous event attendees. Newly released drone footage shows some of the attacks which are all clearly unprovoked. Other video and photographic evidence shows Refuse Fascism members knocking individuals to the ground, kicking and stomping on their heads. The Charlottesville police department never prosecuted the assailants, despite the large black and white signs they were holding during the assaults clearly displaying what organization they were with.

Following the rally, in an attempt to separate himself from the violence of Refuse Fascism and other anti-White terrorist organizations while simultaneously showing his approval of their actions, Wispelwey claimed in an interview with Slate magazine that “They [“antifa”] have their tools to achieve their purposes, and they are not the ones I will personally use, but let me stress that our purposes were the same: block this violent tide and do not let it take a pedestal.” Britany “Smash” Cain-Coneley, who co-founded Congregate Charlottesville with Wispelwey claimed in a now deleted interview with United Church of Christ that “We were all there with the same goal,” in reference to the violent anti-White “antifa” terrorists.

Far from exculpating Wispelwey, these statements, in concert with what is now known about his connection to the Refuse Fascism leadership, indicate his intentions at Unite the Right. During a Q&A session following Unite the Right, Wispelwey was asked about his cooperation with anti-White terrorists; he responded “I encourage a perspective shift. Because when you start to see that that violent ideology, systemically and directly, bodily and physically, harms everyone who doesn’t look like me. Then to stand and confront White Supremacy in its many forms is not an act, is not obstructing someone’s constitutional rights. It is an act of love. Maybe they have a right to the rally, we have a right to block them.”

Wispelwey went on to bemoan his co-religionists who rebuked his actions, admitting that he had “been accused of inciting violence by liberal White Christians so many times for showing up and trying to block their [UTR participants] entrance.” This statement reveals that it was very clear to many in his community that what he was doing would lead to violence. Numerous statements made by Wispelwey on social media since Unite the Right clearly demonstrate that this charlatan was in fact inciting violence and vandalism against his political opponents. Wispelwey encouraged his followers to damage the property of relatives who watch Fox News, assault people with milkshakes; he also follows various anti-White “Antifa” terrorist accounts on social media such as Bat City Antifa, New York City Antifa, and It’s Going Down.

Wispelwey went on to make numerous unsubstantiated, hyperbolic claims that “antifa” had saved his life. After reviewing hundreds of hours of video footage and volumes of photographic evidence of Unite the Right, my colleagues and I  were unable to discover any instance where Wispelwey’s life was anywhere close to being in danger. This cannot be said of Unite the Right attendees whose heads were kicked and stomped on by Refuse Fascism members after being knocked to the ground in unprovoked attacks. Furthermore, evidence conclusively demonstrates that the riots that occurred on the night of the torchlight ceremony at the University of Virginia on the rotunda the night of August 11 and the brawl on 2nd and E. Market street the following day would not have occurred had it not been for the instigation of well-known anti-White “antifa” terrorist groups.

Video evidence has revealed that the night of the torchlight ceremony, several participants were assaulted by known anti-White terrorists, particularly Thomas Keenan and Thomas Massey. While demonstrators were coming down onto the rotunda, Massey, who was arrested for rioting at Donald Trump’s inauguration and was quoted in The Washington Post as being disappointed he and his comrades weren’t able to commit more violence and hoped that he would at future events,  splashed an unknown liquid from a water bottle on torchlight participants. He then turned to journalist Dave Reilly and smacked his camera out of his hand. One “antifa” went so far as to spit on an attendee who did not retaliate. Another man who confronted the two had his arm hit by Keenan in an attempt to knock his torch out of his hand. It was only after these repeated assaults against torchlight participants and refusal of local law enforcement to intervene, that the rioting kicked off. The following year, Keenan and Massey would be arrested for the beating of two U.S. Marines in Philadelphia, in which they were charged with racial intimidation, among other things.

Thomas Massey (Left) and Thomas Keenan (Right) at the August 11, 2017 Charlottesville Torchlight ceremony (Top), 2018 mugshots for the beating of two U.S. Marines in Philadelphia (bottom).

The day of the rally, minutes after Richard Spencer was attacked with bear mace as he entered the park, Keenan, Massey, and various other anti-White terrorists rushed to barricade the street to block the National Front’s entrance to the park. A flag bearer at the head of the parade attempted to push his way through them and was immediately punched by various individuals so as to not let him through. As other National Front members came to his aid, the anti-White gang members pulled out weapons, including a hammer, to attack them with. The situation was the complete opposite of defendant Wispelwey’s claim.

The facts regarding just how these altercations were initiated reveal that there was no threat to the people of Charlottesville and minorities from Unite the Right participants. The violence that broke out was a direct result of known anti-White terrorist networks coming to Charlottesville to utilize violence and intimidation to stop White Americans from expressing themselves and participating in the democratic process in what has been the greatest modern civil rights violation in modern American history. These organizations and their anti-White terrorist members openly claimed they were heading to the rally to disrupt it. The Governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, claimed they had intelligence that extremist groups planned to attack rally participants and law enforcement. Afterwards they bragged on their websites about how they attacked the rally while relying on the anti-White, Jewish-owned mass media to cover up the terrorist’s actions.

Adding insult to injury, the real victims of racial violence and intimidation are now on trial in a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) lawsuit launched by the very individuals who conspired with the anti-White terrorists in the months prior to and during the rally to violate their rights. We will soon see if the Charlottesville jury will buy the outrageous conspiracy theory concocted by Roberta Kaplan and her slimy plaintiffs, though the psychological effects of widespread anti-White terrorism over the last few years means that even if the jury doesn’t buy it, they are likely to be too terrified to clear the defendants of all allegations for fear of their lives and careers.

Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah – PART 4

/5 Comments/in , , /by

Go to Part 1.
Go to Part 2.
Go to Part 3.

Wagner and National Socialist Germany

Richard Wagner has long been reviled by Jews as the intellectual and spiritual precursor to Adolf Hitler who, according to William Shirer, once declared: “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.”[1] This line is spoken by the Hitler character in the 2008 Hollywood film Valkyrie (the Wagnerian title of the film being taken from the codename for the failed Wehrmacht plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944). For music critic Larry Solomon, no other composer in history had a greater impact on world events than Richard Wagner; and “his devastating political legacy is second only to Adolf Hitler.”[2] In his book Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind: A Psychiatrist Explores the Psychodynamics of a Symbol Sickness, Theodore Rubin states that a psychologically sick Adolf Hitler “borrowed from the almost equally sick anti-Semitic Wagner.”[3] Jewish activist and prolific writer on anti-Semitism, the late Robert Wistrich, likewise proposed that: “Wagner’s essentially racist vision of Jewry would have a profound influence on German and Austrian anti-Semites, including the English born Houston S. Chamberlain, Lanz von Liebenfels, and above all on Adolf Hitler himself.”[4]

This widely accepted notion of a direct intellectual line of descent from Wagner to Hitler has, however, been challenged by historians like Richard Evans who points out that “the composer’s influence on Hitler has often been exaggerated,” and that while Hitler “admired the composer’s gritty courage in adversity,” he “did not acknowledge any indebtedness to his ideas.”[5] Magee likewise maintains that “if one studies the intellectual development of the young Hitler one finds no evidence that he got any of his anti-Semitism from Wagner.”[6] While Evans and Magee slightly overstate their case, they are right to attempt to put the issue of Wagner’s influence on Hitler into a more rational perspective.

Wagner’s intellectual influence on Hitler was mainly secondhand through his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who developed some of Wagner’s ideas in his bestselling 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which did influence Hitler’s ideas on race and the Jewish Question. The man who founded the library at the National Socialist Institute in Munich, Friedrich Krohn, compiled an inventory of the titles borrowed by Hitler between 1919 and 1921. The four page list contains over a hundred entries. Listed alongside Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century is the German translation of Henry Ford’s The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, and condensations of titles such as Luther and the Jews, Goethe and the Jews, Schopenhauer and the Jews, and Wagner and the Jew. Clearly Hitler had some exposure to Wagner’s anti-Jewish writing.[7] It is also clear that Hitler read and greatly admired Wagner’s autobiography, and the title of his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was conceivably modeled on Wagner’s Mein Leben (My Life).[8] According to German historian Guido Knopp, “It was not just the title, but also one of the key sentences, that Hitler copied from Richard Wagner. Just as the composer has written in Mein Leben: ‘I decided to become a composer,’ so did the prisoner [Hitler] now write: ‘I decided to become a politician.’”[9]

In his book Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, Timothy Ryback notes that among the books that found their way into Hitler’s vast private collection was a biography of Wagner by Chamberlain entitled Richard Wagner: The German as Artist, Thinker, Politician.[10] This book contains only a few minor references to Jews. In 1933, Hitler received a volume entitled Wagner’s Resounding Universe which was inscribed by its author, Walter Engelsmann, to “the steward and shaper of the descendants of Siegfried upon the earth.”[11] Among the books found in the bunker complex after the fall of Berlin in 1945 was a 1913 treatise on Wagner’s Parsifal.[12] Wagner’s ideas clearly exerted some influence on Hitler’s intellectual development. However, just three known volumes on Wagner (with none by Wagner himself) out of an estimated 16,000 books in Hitler’s collection at the time of his death, hardly suggests Wagner’s intellectual influence was “profound.”

There is certainly no evidence to support the extravagant claim of Joachim Fest in his biography of Hitler that: “Wagner’s political writing was Hitler’s favorite reading, and the sprawling pomposity of his style was an unmistakable influence on Hitler’s own grammar and syntax.” Fest even ventured to claim that Wagner’s “political writings together with the operas form the entire framework of Hitler’s ideology,” and that in these he “found the granite foundation for his view of the world.”[13] This assessment of Wagner’s influence on Hitler is utterly rejected by Jonathan Carr in his 2007 book The Wagner Clan. Carr makes the point that:

If Wagner’s works really were “the exact spiritual forerunner” of Nazism, surely the Fuhrer of all people would have drummed that point home ad infinitum. But one looks to him in vain not only for fascist interpretations of the music dramas but, stranger still, for direct references to the theoretical writings. There is, indeed, surprisingly little evidence that Hitler read Wagner’s prose works, though he evidently did borrow some from a library before he rose to power and the wording of some of his speeches indicates that he imbibed at least Das Judentum in der Musik. Why then did he not use the Master more clearly as an ally, especially in his anti-Semitic cause? In Mein Kampf, for instance, he notes that his early hostility to Jews owed much to the example set by Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna. He also praises Goethe for acting according to the spirit of “blood and reason” in treating “the Jew” as a foreign element. He pays no similar tribute to the Master, indeed he only mentions Wagner by name once in the whole book (although he refers elsewhere to the “Master” of Bayreuth).[14]

In one of three brief references to Wagner in Mein Kampf, Hitler reflects on his early experiences attending Wagner’s operas: “I was captivated. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth master knew no limits. Again and again I was drawn to hear his operas, and today it still seems to me a great piece of luck that these modest productions in a little provincial city prepared the way and made it possible for me to appreciate the better productions later on.”[15] Among the “great men” in history that Hitler singled out in Mein Kampf were Luther, Frederick the Great, and Wagner. He praised Wagner as a “combination of theoretician, organizer, and leader in one person” which he regarded as “the rarest phenomenon of this earth. And it is that union which produces the great man.”[16]

Despite the paucity of evidence for Wagner having exercised the high level of intellectual influence on Hitler that is widely alleged, for the Jewish music writer David Goldman, Wagner’s name is eminently worthy of execration on the basis that he “mixed the compost heap in which the flowers of the twentieth century’s greatest evil took root.” According to Goldman:

The Nazis embraced Wagner not by accident or opportunism but because they recognized in him the cultural trailblazer of the world they set out to rule. … Wagner may not have been the only anti-Semite among the composers of the 19th century, nor even the worst, but he did more than anyone else to mold the culture in which Nazism flourished. The Jewish people have had no enemy more dedicated and more dangerous, precisely because of his enormous talent. In a Jewish state, the public has a right to ask Jewish musicians to be Jews first and musicians second. With reluctance, and in cognizance of all the ambiguities, I think the Israelis are right to silence him. [Goldman here refers to the unofficial ban on performances of Wagner’s music in Israel][17]

For Goldman, Hitler’s intellectual debt to Wagner and the “proto-Nazi” nature of Wagner’s musical dramas are unambiguous. Magee questions the idea that Wagner’s works inherently support National Socialist notions of heroism, and notes that Wagner’s last opera Parsifal (frequently cited as Wagner’s most “racist” opera) was denounced by the regime in 1933 for being “ideologically unacceptable” and was not performed at Bayreuth during the war.[18] Moreover, while Wagner’s music and operas were frequently performed during the Third Reich, his popularity in Germany actually declined in favor of Italian composers like Verdi and Puccini. In the theatrical year in which Hitler came to power, 1932–33, there were 1,837 separate performances of operas by Wagner in Germany. The number of performances then went steadily down until, by 1939–40, they were less than two-thirds of that figure, 1,154.[19] Evans notes that by the 1938–39 opera season, Wagner had only one opera in the top fifteen most popular operas of the season, with the list being headed by Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.[20]

It is well known that the Berlin Philharmonic’s last performance prior to their evacuation from Berlin in April 1945 was of a scene from the conclusion to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung to an audience that included Speer, Dönitz and Goebbels. Likewise, when the Reich Radio announced Hitler’s death, the funeral march from Götterdämmerung was played. With these events in mind, Wagner’s music has been used in countless Third Reich documentaries—in the process consolidating the misleading impression that Wagner’s music was uniquely bound up with the cultural politics of the National Socialist state.

It is clear that the supposed National Socialist fascination with Wagner, to the extent it genuinely existed, was mostly Hitler’s inspiration. Hitler’s boyhood friend, August Kubizek, noted in his book The Young Hitler I Knew that what made the young Hitler so receptive to Wagner’s operas was not the composer’s political outlook, but rather Hitler’s own “constant, intensive preoccupation with the heroes of German mythology,” and Wagner’s ability to translate “his boyish dreams into poetry and music” which satisfied “his longing for the sublime world of the German past.”[21] Kubizek writes that, “listening to Wagner meant to him not a simple visit to the theater, but the opportunity of being transported into that extraordinary state which Wagner’s music produced in him, that trance, that escape into a mystical dream-world which he needed in order to sustain the enormous tension of his turbulent nature.”[22]

Kubizek describes the time they first went to a Wagner opera—Rienzi, an early work by Wagner that established him as a composer. “We were shattered by the death of Rienzi,” he writes of that fateful evening in 1906, “and although Hitler would usually begin to talk immediately after being moved by an artistic experience, and to voice sharp criticism of the performance, on this occasion Adolf remained silent for a long time.” Rienzi was a Roman who rose to be tribune of the people but was then betrayed and died within the ruins of the Capitol. Kubizek described how his friend suddenly announced with “grand and thrilling images,” how he would lead the German people “out of servitude to the heights of freedom.”[23] According to Kubizek, Hitler’s decision to become a politician “was seized in that hour on the heights above the city of Linz,” when “in a state of complete ecstasy and rapture,” he transferred the character of Rienzi “to the plane of his own ambitions.”[24] Describing that fateful night to Winifred Wagner in 1939, Kubizek claims that Hitler solemnly declared “In that hour it began!”[25]

Hitler heard Tristan and Isolde at least thirty or forty times during the Vienna phase of his life. At one stage, he even wrote a brief sketch for a Wagner-style opera entitled Wieland the Smith. Gretl Mitlstrasser, the woman who managed the daily running of the Berghof “recounted numerous stories of Hitler’s private ‘communing’ on the property… when he held late-night vigils on the Berghof balcony, watching the Untersberg bathed in moonlight; when he let the ethereal strains of Wagner’s Lohengrin fill his study as he watched the jagged cliffs peek through the enfolding mists.”[26] Hitler had a bust of Wagner by Arno Breker in his private quarters, and in his table talk once claimed that “when I listen to Wagner I hear the rhythms of a bygone world.”[27]

In the 1920s, Hitler became a friend of Wagner’s children and grandchildren, and particularly of his English-born daughter-in-law Winifred, who joined the NSDAP in 1926, and who proposed marriage to him. She later wrote that “the bond between us was purely human and personal, an intimate bond founded on our reverence and love for Richard Wagner.”[28] In the summer of 1933 she found that hundreds of foreign ticket reservations for that year’s Bayreuth Festival had been cancelled, threatening its financial viability. Lieselotte Schmidt, a close friend of Winifred, noted at the time that “we have been frozen into isolation. The hate campaign against Bayreuth, which is at root of purely Jewish origin, stops at nothing in its lies and unpleasantness.” When the matter came to Hitler’s attention, he summoned Winifred to Berlin, and Schmidt noted that: “She flew there, and within a quarter of an hour we had the necessary help—and how!” The festival was made exempt from all taxes during the Third Reich, and Hitler donated 50,000 Reichsmarks of his own money for each new production.[29]

Wagner’s grandson and daughter-in-law with Hitler

Evans points out that Hitler’s personal patronage meant that “neither Goebbels nor Rosenberg nor any of the other cultural politicians of the Third Reich could bring Bayreuth under their aegis.”[30] Winifred Wagner and the managers of the Festival were “granted an unusual degree of cultural autonomy” by Hitler, and Knopp states that “It is a fact that even the Bayreuth productions during the Nazi era hardly display any evidence of distortion for propaganda reasons.”[31] Hitler was a regular guest at the Bayreuth festivals between 1933 and 1939, and on his fiftieth birthday Winifred arranged for him to be presented with the manuscript draft to Wagner’s Rienzi and original scores of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, as well as a sketch for Götterdämmerung.[32]

When considering Wagner’s posthumous relationship with the National Socialists, we need to draw a clear distinction between Hitler as an individual and the Third Reich as a regime. Magee is careful to do so:

It was not the case that the Nazi regime in general was devoted to Wagner, or did anything to promote his works. Many people nowadays write and talk as if Wagner provided a sort of sound-track to the Third Reich, and that on organized party occasions there was always, or usually, Wagner. This conception has become a cliché on film and television, where it is usual for any depiction of the Nazis to be literally accompanied by Wagner’s music, for preference at its most brassy and bombastic, as in the Ride of the Valkyries or the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin, and played very loud. The whole picture that this conjures up, and is meant to conjure up, is false.

Supporting this thesis, Evans maintains that there was a “lack of interest” in Wagner “on the part of almost everyone in the Party leadership except Hitler himself.”[33] In 1933, Hitler ordered that each Nuremberg Rally would open with a performance of Die Meistersinger, although these performances were very unpopular with other Party functionaries who had be ordered to attend. Evans notes that when Hitler “entered his box he found the theater almost empty; the party men had all chosen to go off to drink the evening away at the town’s numerous beer halls and cafes rather than spend five hours listening to classical music. Furious, Hitler sent out patrols to order them out of their drinking-dens, but even this could not fill the theater. The next year was no better. … After this Hitler gave up and the seats were sold to the public instead.”[34]

While Joseph Goebbels seems to have shared some of Hitler’s affinity with Wagner, and often visited Bayreuth, his diaries reveal no special insights into Wagner’s works or ideas, and nor do his public speeches. He praised Die Meistersinger as “the incarnation of all that is German.” It contained everything “that defines and fulfills the cultural soul of Germany.”[35] The 1933 Bayreuth Festival was opened by Goebbels with the words: “There is probably no work so close in spirit to our age and its intellectual and psychological tensions as Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. How often in recent years has its rousing chorus, ‘Wacht auf, es nahet gen dem Tag’ (Awake for morn approaches), echoed the faith and longing of Germans, as a tangible symbol of the reawakening of the German people from the deep political and spiritual slumber coma of 1918.”[36]

Joseph Goebbels attending the Bayreuth Festival in 1937

Albert Speer, Hitler’s personal architect, and later also his armaments minister, was another Bayreuth regular, ostensibly motivated more by duty than genuine interest. He notes in his memoirs that Hitler often discussed Wagner with Winifred and seemed to know what he was talking about. Evidently Speer did not know enough to be sure.[37] For the leading ideologist of the party, Alfred Rosenberg, the real National Socialist musical model was Beethoven who “took fate by the throat and acknowledged force as the highest morality of man. … Whoever understands the essence of our movement knows that there is a drive in us all like that which Beethoven embodied to the highest degree.” While he also believed Wagner embodied the strength of the “Nordic soul,” Rosenberg criticized the composer’s Gesamtkunstwerk approach, noting that “the inner harmony between word content and physical content is often hindered by the music. … An attempt to wed these forces destroys spiritual rhythm and prevents emotive expression.”[38]

Rosenberg was certainly not alone in his view. The general manager at Bayreuth during the Third Reich, Hans Tietjen, made the point after the war that “In reality, the leading party officials throughout the Reich were hostile to Wagner. … The party tolerated Hitler’s Wagner enthusiasm, but fought, openly or covertly, those who, like me, were devoted to his works—the people around Rosenberg openly, those around Goebbels covertly.”[39] Aside from the hostility to Wagner grounded in aesthetics and ideology, Carr makes a more general point:

The truth is that many Nazis, in high and low places, were bored to tears by Wagner. There is nothing very odd about that. Lots of people past and present who may well have a certain interest in other music will run a mile to escape a seemingly interminable evening with the Master. Too few tunes, too many scenes in which people stand about for ages apparently doing nothing much. The point is only worth stressing here because the Nazis are reputed to have had a special affinity to Wagner’s music. The evidence suggests this was simply not so.[40]

It has been sometimes alleged that Wagner’s music provided a “soundtrack to the Holocaust” and was played at concentration camps during wartime. The German historian Guido Fackler claims that Wagner’s music was sometimes used at the Dachau concentration camp in 1933 and 1934 to “reeducate” political prisoners through the beneficial exposure to nationalistic music.[41] There is, however, no documentary evidence supporting claims that Wagner’s music was used in this way during the war. Larry David mocked this urban legend (and the unhealthy Jewish obsession with Wagner) in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where he is rebuked by a Jewish stranger for whistling a Wagner tune in the street.[42]

Conclusion

The ethno-political motivation that underpins the construction of Richard Wagner as moral pariah is exemplified by the contrasting way that Jewish commentators have reflected on the life and legacy of the Jewish composer Hanns Eisler who once declared Wagner to be “a great composer, unfortunately.” A committed Marxist, Eisler began in 1930 a long-standing collaboration with the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. With Hitler’s ascent to power, Eisler left Germany and eventually settled in Hollywood, where he was nominated for Oscars for writing the music for the films Hangmen Also Die (1942) and None but the Lonely Heart (1944). In 1947, Eisler appeared before the Un-American Activities Committee, and despite the intercession of Albert Einstein, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, was deported to East Germany in 1948 where he remained for the rest of his life, writing music for the totalitarian state (including its national anthem, and the Comintern anthem). Eisler collaborated with T.W. Adorno in 1947 to produce the book Composing for the Films. Instead of reproaching Eisler for his ardent commitment to a regime and ideology that destroyed millions of lives, Jewish commentators invariably portray him as the innocent victim of the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich, and then of the HUAC hearings and the Hollywood blacklist.

Jewish communist composer Hanns Eisler

The Jewish-dominated intellectual and media elite eagerly invoke Wagner’s life and legacy as a salutary lesson in the evils of anti-Semitism and White nationalism. Constructing Wagner as moral pariah allows the composer and his works to be constantly used as a springboard for intensive reflections on “the Holocaust,” the evils of white racial feeling, and the moral necessity of state-sponsored multiculturalism and mass non-White immigration to the West. Only these policies, after all, will ensure that Wagner’s “morally loathsome” intellectual legacy (which amounts to a proposal for a European group strategy in opposition to Judaism) can never again find a receptive White audience—by progressively doing away with White people altogether.

In the meantime, the construction of Wagner as an anti-Semitic exemplar and moral pariah ensures the composer, whose achievement far surpasses that of any Jewish composer, can never become a locus of White racial pride and group cohesion. Richard Wagner has been a particular target for Jewish denigration because of his strong and unashamed ethnic and racial identification, and for his willingness to publicly oppose Jewish influence. This, together with his status as one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that the world has ever seen, endows him with rich potential to re-emerge as a rallying point for White Nationalists. The rebirth of a strong sense of racial feeling among White people will be greatly aided by reclaiming cultural heroes like Richard Wagner from the manufactured taint of moral censure that distorts their popular remembrance.

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here and here.

[1] William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Random House, 2002), 101.

[2] Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit.

[3] Rubin, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind, 127.

[4] Robert S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred (London: Thames Mandarin, 1992), 56.

[5] Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York, Penguin, 2005), 199.

[6] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 362.

[7] Timothy Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life (New York: Vintage, 2010), 50.

[8] Guido Knopp, Hitler’s Women, trans. by Angus McGeoch (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 2003) 158.

[9] Ibid., 169.

[10] Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library, 134.

[11] Ibid., 146.

[12] Ibid., 239.

[13] Joachim Fest, Hitler (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 56.

[14] Carr, The Wagner Clan, 187.

[15] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. by James Murphy (Bottom of the Hill, 2010), 23.

[16] Ibid., 488.

[17] David Goldman, “Muted: Performances of Wagner’s music are effectively banned in Israel. Should they be?” op. cit.

[18] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 366.

[19] Ibid., 365.

[20] Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 201.

[21] August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. by Geoffrey Brooks (London: Greenhill Books, 2006), 84.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., 118.

[24] Ibid., 116-8.

[25] Ibid., 118-9.

[26] Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library, 176.

[27] Nicholson, Richard and Adolf, 21.

[28] Knopp, Hitler’s Women, 152.

[29] Ibid., 181.

[30] Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 200.

[31] Knopp, Hitler’s Women, 189.

[32] Ibid., 193.

[33] Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 201.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Knopp, Hitler’s Women, 184.

[36] Ibid., 182.

[37] Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan, 184.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Quoted in Magee, Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2000), 366.

[40] Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan, 184.

[41] Guido Fackler, “Music in Concentration Camps 1933-1945,” trans. by Peter Logan, Music & Politics, Undated. http://www.music.ucsb.edu/projects/musicandpolitics/archive/2007-1/fackler.html

[42] To view this scene see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nS66Ivbvc

Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah—PART 3

/20 Comments/in , , /by

Scene from Barrie Kosky’s 2017 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg with an outsize image of Beckmesser, the putative Jew

Go to Part 1.
Go to Part 2.

Wagner’s Music Dramas as Coded Anti-Semitism

T.W. Adorno and Wagner biographer Robert Gutman began a modern Jewish intellectual tradition when they proposed that Wagner’s antipathy to Jews was not limited to articles like Judaism in Music, but included hidden anti-Semitic and racist messages embedded in his operas. Numerous Jewish writers have taken up this theme and encouraged audiences to retrospectively read into Wagner’s operas latent signs of anti-Semitism. The gold-loving Nibelung lord Alberich in Siegfried is, for instance, supposedly a symbol of Jewish materialism. Solomon writes that Alberich is clearly “the greedy merchant Jew, who becomes the power-crazed goblin-demon lusting after Aryan maidens, attempting to contaminate their blood, and who sacrifices his lust in order to acquire the gold…”[1]

Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (originally written in 1845), is frequently touted as his most anti-Semitic opera. The character Beckmesser, who is incapable of original work and resorts to stealing the work of others, is said to symbolize the lack of Jewish originality that Wagner highlighted in Judaism in Music. According to Gutman, Beckmesser was modeled after Eduard Hanslick, the powerful half-Jewish music critic who constantly disparaged Wagner. Beckmesser purportedly draws directly on a common fund of nineteenth-century anti-Semitic stereotypes: he shuffles and blinks, is scheming and argumentative, and is not to be trusted. He slinks up the alley behind the night watchman in Act II, and limps and stumbles about the stage in Act III, blinking with embarrassment when Eva turns away from his ingratiating bow at the song contest. Furthermore, when he sings, he wrongly accents certain syllables and sings with disjointed rhythms, parodying the Jewish cantorial style. For British musicologist Barry Millington, the fact that Wagner invested Beckmesser with such traits “is a startling fact that almost of itself provides proof of Wagner’s anti-Semitic intent in Die Meistersinger.”

At the 2017 Bayreuth Festival, Barrie Kosky—the first Jewish director to stage a work at the festival—played up such notions, portraying Beckmesser with stereotypical Jewish features (see the lead photograph). In the production, Kosky embedded the opera’s setting of Nuremberg in the twentieth century as the birthplace of the race laws enacted by the National Socialists, the setting of the NSDAP’s giant torch-lit rallies, and the scene for the postwar show trials of Hitler’s henchmen. Kosky’s “edgy” production won rapturous applause from an audience that included Chancellor Angela Merkel. Spiegel Online called the production “chillingly relevant” in using Wagner’s anti-Semitism to take on “hatred of Jews” in today’s Europe. Die Welt said Wagner’s “toxic ideology” had always been an “elephant in the room” which Kosky had ingeniously opted to make “the actual subject of his staging.”

Jewish Opera director Barrie Kosky

Like Beckmesser, the characters of Mime in the Ring and Klingsor in Parsifal are also widely identified as Jewish stereotypes, although none of these were actually identified as Jews by Wagner in the libretto. Mime is, for Solomon, depicted by Wagner “as a stinking ghetto Jew” while “Siegfried represents the conscience-free, fearless Teuton, he feels no remorse. … He is glorified as the warrior hero of the Ring, the archetypal proto-Nazi.”[2] Unconcerned at the lack of any real evidence for his thesis, Solomon maintains that virulent racism “permeates all aspects of his music dramas through metaphorical suggestion. Wagner is always just a step away from actually calling his evil characters ‘Jews,’ even though it was obvious to his contemporaries.” He claims that Wagner was too clever to identify Jews in his music dramas, especially after the critical reactions he received to his essay Judaism in Music. “His intent was far more artful and covert, but nevertheless still political: to reach his audience on an emotional, subliminal level, bypassing their critical faculties.” In the final analysis, Wagner’s operas are, for Solomon, “tools of racist, proto-Nazi hate propaganda, written for the purpose of redeeming the German race from Jewish contamination, and for expelling the Jews from Germany.” Moreover, the malign influence of Wagner continues insofar as “the subtext of racist metaphors has not diminished in Wagner’s operas, so they will continue to exert a subliminal influence.”[3]

In his book Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (1997), Marc A. Weiner likewise argued that Wagner deliberately used the characters in his operas to promote his sociological theories of a pure Germany purged of Jewish influence. According to Weiner:

Wagner’s anti-Semitism is integral to an understanding of his mature music dramas. … I have analyzed the corporeal images in his dramatic works against the background of 19th-century racist imagery. By examining such bodily images as the elevated, nasal voice, the “foetor judaicus” (Jewish stench), the hobbling gait, the ashen skin color, and deviant sexuality associated with Jews in the 19th century, it’s become clear to me that the images of Alberich, Mime, and Hagen [in the Ring cycle], Beckmesser [in Die Meistersinger], and Klingsor [in Parsifal], were drawn from stock anti-Semitic clichés of Wagner’s time.[4]

For Weiner, Wagner’s anti-Semitic caricatures can be readily identified from their manner of speech, their singing, their roles, and their body language. “All of the stereotypical cardboard, cookie-cutter features of a Jew … show up all over the place in his musical dramas.” Under Weiner’s deconstruction of Wagner’s characters it emerges that his Teutonic heroes are “invariably clear-eyed, deep-voiced, straight-featured and sure-footed. The Jewish anti-heroes have dripping eyes, high voices, bent, crooked bodies and a hobbling, awkward step, with these embodied metaphors all serving to reinforce the ideology of racism.”[5] In response to Weiner’s critique, one is reminded of the aptness of Goldwin Smith’s remark that the “critics of Judaism are accused of bigotry of race, as well as bigotry of religion. This accusation comes strangely from those who style themselves the Chosen People, make race a religion, and treat all races except their own as Gentile and unclean.”[6]

Viktor Chernomortsev, left, as Alberich and Vasliy Gorshkov as Mime in the Kirov Opera production of Wagner’s “Siegfried” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in 2006.

Numerous Jewish commentators cite Wagner’s Parsifal, the last of his music dramas, as his most racist opera. Gutman, for example, labels it “a brooding nightmare of Aryan anxiety.” According to Jewish academic Paul Lawrence Rose in his book Wagner, Race and Revolution, Wagner intended Parsifal to be

a profound religious parable about how the whole essence of European humanity had been poisoned by alien, inhuman, Jewish values. It is an allegory of the Judaization of Christianity and of Germany—and of purifying redemption. In place of theological purity, the secularized religion of Parsifal preached the new doctrine of racial purity, which was reflected in the moral, and indeed religious, purity of Parsifal himself. In Wagner’s mind, this redeeming purity was infringed by Jews, just as devils and witches infringed the purity of traditional Christianity. In this scheme, it is axiomatic that compassion and redemption have no application to the inexorably damned Judaized Klingsor and hence the Jews.[7]

This theory sits rather incongruously alongside the fact that when the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Parsifal was condemned as “ideologically unacceptable” and unofficially banned throughout Germany after 1939.[8] In his diaries Goebbels dismissed the opera as “too pious.”[9] If Parsifal truly is the racist opera that Rose alleges, one might have expected it to have been given a place of prominence in the Third Reich.

In Wagner, Race and Revolution, Rose claims the philosophical revolution brought about by Kant in the late eighteenth century was a response to the Jewish Question, with Kant’s transcendental idealism intended as liberation from the shackles of Jewish ways of looking at the world. The corollary of this, for Rose, is that Schopenhauer’s philosophy (with its heavy debt to Kant) is thoroughly infused with anti-Semitism, and, consequently, Wagner’s Schopenhauerian opera Tristan and Isolde is deeply anti-Semitic. Rose proposes that: “Such is the most fundamental anti-Jewish message that underlies the apparently ‘non-social’ and ‘non-realistic’ opera composed in Wagner’s Schopenhauerian phase, Tristan.”[10] Magee trenchantly observes that:

We are no longer surprised when he goes on to tell us that “Hatred of Jewishness is the hidden agenda of virtually all the operas.” It is no good Wagner trying to slip this past Professor Rose by making no mention of it: Rose is not to be so easily fooled. … Rose often sees the omission of any mention of Jews or Jewishness as being due to anti-Semitism, and this enables him throughout his book to expose anti-Semitism in undreamt-of places, in fact in all forms of art and ideas that are not either Jewish or about Jews. … Writers like Professor Rose can be endlessly resourceful in arguing that the apparent absence of something is proof of its presence. … Such a procedure is intellectually fraudulent from beginning to end.[11]

Jewish music critics and intellectuals, like those cited above, have enthusiastically seized upon Wagner’s great-grandson Gottfried for having backed their various theories about the inherently anti-Semitic nature of Wagner’s operas, and Wagner’s firm standing as a moral pariah. Gottfried Wagner has made a virtual career out of attacking his ancestors—constantly denouncing his great-grandfather and other family members as evil anti-Semites. In his book The Wagner Legacy, he declares: “Richard Wagner, through his inflammatory and anti-Semitic writings, was co-responsible for the transition from Bayreuth to Auschwitz.”[12] In writing his Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family’s Legacy, Gottfried Wagner had, according to Solomon, “in an act of self-imposed moral obligation and great personal sacrifice, restored to his roots the conscience that Wagner and Hitler took away.”[13] Gottfried Wagner appeared at a symposium at the American Jewish University in 2010 where he continued “to set the record straight today. Always on the side of the Jews, he stopped off on Shabbos to mingle with congregants at a local temple.”[14]

Despite all the claims made about the allegedly anti-Semitic nature of Wagner’s operas, Strahan points out that it is equally possible to point to cultural references in Wagner’s work that are sympathetic to the Jewish place in European culture. For Strahan, “the hero of the early opera The Flying Dutchman is synonymous with the ‘Wandering Jew,’ the Dutchman’s endless journeying analogous to that symbol of the Jewish Diaspora.”[15] Wagner himself referred to his eminently non-Jewish personification of redemption through love, the Flying Dutchman, as an “Ahasverus of the Ocean.” Despite this, Rose argues that Wagner’s making the Wandering Jew a Dutchman was itself an anti-Semitic act, claiming that: “Wagner’s use of this universalized figure of a wanderer has a profoundly anti-Semitic implication; for Wagner’s heroes—and especially the Dutchman—are able to achieve redemption precisely because they are not Jewish.”[16]

Wagner explicitly states in Judaism in Music that what makes Jews such unsatisfactory characters in real life also makes them unsuitable for representation in art, including dramatic art. He writes:

In ordinary life the Jew, who as we know possesses a God of his own, strikes us first by his outward appearance which, whatever European nationality we belong to, has something unpleasantly foreign to that nationality. We instinctively feel we have nothing in common with a man who looks like that. … Ignoring the moral aspect of this unpleasant freak of nature, and considering only the aesthetic, we will merely point out that to us this exterior could never be acceptable as a subject for a painting; if a portrait painter has to portray a Jew, he usually takes his model from his imagination, and wisely transforms or else completely omits everything that in real life characterizes the Jew’s appearance. One never sees a Jew on the stage: the exceptions are so rare that they serve to confirm this rule. We can conceive of no character, historical or modern, hero or lover, being played by a Jew, without instinctively feeling the absurdity of such an idea. This is very important: a race whose general appearance we cannot consider suitable for aesthetic purposes is by the same token incapable of any artistic presentation of its nature.[17]

In this passage (first published in 1850 and then again unchanged in 1869), Wagner totally rejects the idea of Jews playing characters and characters playing Jews on stage, stating categorically that the Jewish race is “incapable of any artistic presentation of his nature,” and leading into the statement with the words: “This is very important.” Magee notes that here Wagner “positively and actively repudiates the idea of trying to present Jews on the stage; and if we seek an explanation of why he never did so, here we have it.” Wagner would not, contrary to the wishes of many of his friends, have gone out of his way to publish this again in 1869 if, as alleged, he had just done the opposite and made Beckmesser a Jewish character in Die Meistersinger which had premiered the previous year.[18]

Wagner produced thousands of pages of written material analyzing every aspect of himself, his operas, and his views on Jews (as well as many other topics); and yet the purportedly “Jewish” characterizations identified by Adorno, Gutman and countless others are never mentioned—nor are there any references to them in Cosima Wagner’s copious diaries. It can hardly be argued that Wagner was hiding his true feelings for he took great pride in speaking out fearlessly and vociferously on the subject of Jews, and did not worry about offending anyone. None of Wagner’s supposedly obvious characterizations were ever used in the propaganda of the Third Reich. To identify such characters as Beckmesser, Alberich, Mime, Klingsor and Kundry as Jews is, therefore, entirely speculative.

The Jewish pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim makes the point that: “Whoever wants to see a repulsive attack on Jews in Wagner’s operas can of course do so. But is it really justified? Beckmesser, for example, who might be suspected of being a Jewish parody, was a state scribe in the year 1500, a position that was unavailable to Jews.”[19] Barenboim is also quick to point out that Wagner’s anti-Semitism did not prevent his music from being performed by Jews even after Hitler came to power. In Tel Aviv in 1936, for example, the Palestine Symphony Orchestra—precursor to today’s Israel Philharmonic—performed the prelude to Act 1 and Act 3 of Lohengrin under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. “Nobody had a word to say about it,” Barenboim observes. “Nobody criticised [Toscanini]; the orchestra was very happy to play it.”

Arturo Toscanini with the Palestine Symphony Orchestra

Even Nietzsche, who attacked Wagner on numerous occasions for his personal anti-Semitism, never alleged there was anti-Semitism in the operas. Moreover, the audiences that flocked to Wagner’s works all over the world did not seem to perceive their supposedly obvious anti-Semitic subtexts for, as Magee points out, “in the huge literature we have on the subject, unpublished as well as published, the question arises rarely until the middle of the twentieth century.”[20] For Magee, a great many writers (especially Jewish writers) are simply “swept forward by the momentum of their own anger” into alleging the omnipresence of anti-Semitism in Wagner’s operas. “To a number of them it comes easily anyway, for they are adept at finding anti-Semitism in places where no one had detected it before. … At the root of it all is an unforgiving rage at the mega-outrage of anti-Semitism—and at the root of that in the modern world is the Holocaust.”[21]

“Sarcasm and Satire Run Riot on the Stage”

Even when not overtly propagandistic like Kosky’s 2017 production of Die Meistersinger or the 2013 Düsseldorf production of Tannhäuser which depicted people dying in gas chambers, productions of Wagner’s operas in the modern era almost invariably seek to satirize the drama in order to subvert the message Wagner attempts to convey. Scruton observes that, notwithstanding the increasingly tiresome preoccupation with dissecting The Ring for anti-Jewish and proto-fascistic themes and images (and counteracting them), Wagner’s celebrated tetralogy is also, on a more basic level, problematic for opera producers because its “world of sacred passions and heroic actions offends against the skeptical and cynical temper of our times. The fault, however, lies not in Wagner’s tetralogy, but in the closed imagination of those who are so often invited to produce it.”1203

The template for modern productions was set with the Bayreuth production of 1976, when Pierre Boulez sanitized the music, and Patrice Chereau satirized the text. Scruton notes that:

Since that ground-breaking venture, The Ring has been regarded as an opportunity to deconstruct not only Wagner but the whole conception of the human condition that glows so warmly in his music. The Ring is deliberately stripped of its legendary atmosphere and primordial setting, and everything is brought down to the quotidian level, jettisoning the mythical aspect of the story, so as to give us only half of what it means. The symbols of cosmic agency—spear, sword, ring—when wielded by scruffy humans on abandoned city lots, appear like toys in the hands of lunatics. The opera-goer will therefore very seldom be granted the full experience of Wagner’s masterpiece.

This certainly describes the Ring I attended in Melbourne in 2016. While the soloists and the orchestra were excellent, the postmodernist, Eurotrash-inspired production detracted from the power of the music and drama. Following established precedent, much of the action was set in a space akin to an industrial wasteland. Siegfried’s heroic forging scene was lampooned by being set it in a tawdry apartment replete with fluorescent lighting, microwave, bar fridge and bunk beds. Fafner (meant to have transformed himself into a dragon) was depicted as a transvestite-like figure smearing make-up on his face and appearing naked on the stage.

Productions like these deliberately sabotage Wagner’s attempt to engage his audiences at the emotional level of religion. They let “sarcasm and satire run riot on the stage, not because they have anything to prove or say in the shadow of this unsurpassably noble music, but because nobility has become intolerable. The producer strives to distract the audience from Wagner’s message, and to mock every heroic gesture, lest the point of the drama should finally come home.”

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here and here.

Go to Part 4.

[1] Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Mourby, “Can we forgive him?,” op. cit.

[5] Quoted in Lisa Norris, “Jewish Dwarfs and Teutonic Gods,” H-Net Reviews, September 1997. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1318

[6] Quoted in MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 56.

[7] Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner, Race and Revolution (Yale University Press, 1998), 166.

[8] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 366.

[9] Quoted in Carr, The Wagner Clan, 182.

[10] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 373.

[11] Ibid., 373; 377 & 380.

[12] Gottfried Wagner, The Wagner Legacy: An Autobiography (Sanctuary, 2000), 240.

[13] Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit.

[14] Carol Jean Delmar, “Let the Truth be Heard!,” Ring Festival LA Protest Campaign, June 14, 2010. http://ringfestlaprotest.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/gottfried-wagner-at-the-american-jewish-university-june-6-2010/

[15] Strahan, “Was Wagner Jewish: an old question newly revisited,” op. cit.

[16] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 373.

[17] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. by Bryan Magee, In: Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2000), 375.

[18] Ibid., 375-6.

[19] Daniel Barenboim, “Wagner, Israel and the Palestinians,” op. cit.

[20] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 374.

[21] Ibid., 373; 380.

Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah—PART 2

/15 Comments/in , , /by

Jewish activists protesting the 2010 production of The Ring by the LA Opera

Go to Part 1.

Wagner’s Racial Thinking

In addition to his concern about the baleful Jewish influence on German culture, Wagner, under the influence of Darwinism and the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, became increasingly concerned about the fate of the White race generally. Wagner met Gobineau in Rome in 1876 and again in Venice in 1880 when he read the French author’s bestselling An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Wagner thought that Gobineau had demonstrated in this famous essay that “we should have no History of Man at all, had there been no movements, creations, and achievements of the White man,” and was taken with his pessimistic notion that Western society was doomed because miscegenation would inevitably lead to the degeneration of the White race. He nevertheless disagreed with Gobineau’s claim that this degeneration was unstoppable. In his essay “Hero-dom and Christianity,” Wagner writes that: “We cannot withhold our acknowledgment that the human family consists of irremediably disparate races, whereof the noblest well might rule the more ignoble, yet never raise them to their level by commixture, but simply sink to theirs.” The Jews, however, offered a unique exception to this general rule:

The Jew, on the contrary, is the most astounding instance of racial congruence ever offered by world history. Without a fatherland, a mother tongue midst every people’s land and tongue he finds himself again, in virtue of the unfailing instinct of his absolute and indelible idiosyncrasy: even commixture of blood does not hurt him; let Jew or Jewess intermarry with the most distinct of races, a Jew will always come to birth.[1]

While accepting many of Gobineau’s basic premises, Wagner, in his 1881 essay about the German people entitled “Know Thyself,” rejects the idea of Aryan superiority and writes about the “enormous disadvantage at which the German race… appears to stand against the Jewish.” Furthermore, when Gobineau stayed with the Wagners for five weeks in 1881, their conversations were punctuated with frequent arguments. Cosima Wagner’s diary recounts one exchange in which Wagner “positively exploded in favor of Christianity as compared to racial theory.” Wagner proposed that a “true Christianity” could provide for the moral harmonization of all races, which could, in turn, help prevent the physical unification of the races, and thereby the degeneration of the White race through miscegenation:

Incomparably fewer in individual numbers than the lower races, the ruin of the white races may be referred to their having been obliged to mix with them; whereby, as remarked already, they suffered more from the loss of their purity than the others could gain by the ennobling of their blood. … To us Equality is only thinkable as based upon a universal moral concord, such as we can but deem true Christianity elect to bring about.[2]

Wagner had first developed the idea of a revolutionary new Christianity in the opera text Jesus of Nazareth (1849), which depicted Jesus as redeeming man from the materialism of the “Roman world … and still more, of that [Jewish] world subject to the Romans. … I saw the modern world of the present day as a prey to the worthlessness akin to that which surrounded Jesus.”[3] Wagner here drew heavily on Kant’s critique of Judaism. Enslaved to the Law, the Jews had rejected Jesus’ message of love; Jewish egoism and lovelessness had led Judas to betray Him. The Jews had preferred “power, domination… [and] the loveless forces of property and law, symbolized by Judaism.”[4] Wagner’s hope for the emergence of a “new Christianity” to act as a bulwark against miscegenation and the degeneration of the White race has not transpired, although some Jewish commentators see it as having being realized in the ideology and practices of National Socialism.

For the Jewish music critic Larry Solomon, in Richard Wagner “all the racist historical models from Luther to Fichte, Feuerbach, Gobineau, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Chamberlain, come to full maturity.”[5] Yet, despite the irate epithets routinely directed at Wagner, most of his assertions are objectively true—not least his many warnings about the dangers of the Jewish economic and cultural domination of Western nations. The evidence shows that the races are unequal intellectually and physically, and race mixing does lead (on average) to the cognitive decline of the more intelligent racial party to the admixture. It should also be noted that Wagner’s racial views were mainstream opinions at the time he expressed them—including among the leading Jewish intellectuals I cited in my review of Jews & Race—Writings on Identity and Difference 1880-1940.

Wagner’s views on the Jewish Question strongly paralleled those of the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl. Both Wagner and Herzl saw the Jews as a distinct and foreign group in Europe. Herzl saw anti-Semitism as “an understandable reaction to Jewish defects” brought about by the Jewish persecution of gentiles. Jews had, he claimed, been educated by Judaism to be “leeches” and possessed “frightful financial power.”[6] For Herzl, the Jews were a money worshipping people incapable of understanding any other motives than money. Kevin MacDonald notes in Separation and its Discontents that Herzl argued that “a prime source of modern anti-Semitism was that emancipation had brought Jews into direct economic competition with the gentile middle classes. Anti-Semitism based on resource competition was rational.” Herzl “insisted that one could not expect a majority to ‘let itself be subjugated’ by formally scorned outsiders that they had just released from the ghetto.”[7] Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim notes that “Wagner’s conclusion about the Jewish problem was not only verbally similar to Herzl’s” but that “both Wagner and Herzl favored the emigration of the German Jews.”[8] Despite their convergence of opinion on the Jewish Question, Herzl avoided the opprobrium posthumously heaped on Wagner; intellectual consistency being the first casualty of Jewish ethnic warfare through the construction of culture.

Jewish Responses to Wagner’s Ideas

Basically ignoring whether Wagner’s views on Jewish influence on German art and culture had any validity, a long line of Jewish music writers and intellectuals have furiously attacked the composer for just having expressed them. In his essay “Know Thyself,” Wagner writes of the fierce backlash that followed his drawing “notice to the Jews’ inaptitude for taking a productive share in our Art,” which was “met by the utmost indignation of Jews alike and Germans; it became quite dangerous to breathe the word ‘Jew’ with a doubtful accent.”[9] Wagner was surprised by the hornet’s nest he had stirred up, and in a letter to the composer Franz Liszt noted that “I seem to have struck home with terrible force, which suits my purpose admirably, since that is precisely the sort of shock that I wanted to give them. For they will always remain our masters—that much is as certain as the fact that it is not our princes who are now our masters, but bankers and philistines.”[10]

Wagner’s critique of Jewish influence on German art and culture could not be dismissed as the ravings of an unintelligent and ignorant fool. Richard Wagner was, by common consent, one of the most brilliant human beings to have ever lived, and his views on the Jewish Question were cogent and rational. Accordingly, Jewish critics soon settled on the response of ascribing psychiatric disorders to the composer, and this has been the stock approach ever since. As early as 1872, the German-Jewish psychiatrist Theodor Puschmann offered a psychological assessment of Wagner that was widely reported in the German press. He claimed Wagner was suffering from “chronic megalomania, paranoia … and moral derangement.”[11] Cesare Lombroso, the famous nineteenth-century Italian-Jewish criminologist, branded Wagner “a sexual psychopath.”[12]

Later, drawing on this approach, and with the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis and Expressionism in art and music, the habit arose of treating Wagner’s operas as journeys into the inner life of their creator. Scruton observes that:

From the first days of psychoanalysis, Wagner’s works were singled out as both confirming and demanding a psychoanalytic reading. Their super-saturated longing, their cry for redemption through sexual love, their exultation of Women as the vehicle of purity and sacrifice—all these features have naturally suggested, to the psychoanalytic mind, incestuous childhood fantasies, involving a fixation on the mother as wife. Such is the interpretation maintained by [the Jewish psychoanalysts] Max Graf and Otto Rank, both writing in 1911. Thereafter the habit of reading the works in terms of the life became firmly established in the literature.1183

Such interpretations have strongly influenced the discussion of Wagner’s works—“revenge on Wagner” has for some time been “an almost obligatory part of the intellectual’s apprenticeship.” Books like Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s Wagner Androgyne and Joachim Kohler’s Richard Wagner: Last of the Titans continue a now venerable tradition in regarding “anti-Semitism as the meaning and Oedipal confusion as the cause of just about everything the master composed.” Even the respected British musicologist Barry Millington frequently writes “as though anti-Semitism is somewhere near the top of Wagner’s musical and intellectual agenda.”

The denigration of Wagner in the post-World War II era, spearheaded by Jewish musicologists and intellectuals like T.W. Adorno, established the pattern of treating his works as expressions of a deeply pathological personality, where the musicological task at hand was to “analyse them as exhibits in a medical case study, and to create the impression that we can best understand them not for what they say but for what they reveal about their creator.” Adorno condemned Wagner as a symbol of all that was hateful in the culture of nineteenth-century Germany. Scruton notes how Adorno’s criticisms of Wagner were deeply influenced by “the Holocaust and all that it meant concerning the roots of German nationalism.” Wagner’s autobiography is regularly trawled for evidence of psychopathology and “for the proof—however fleeting and arcane—that in this or that respect he was just as ordinary as the rest of us, even though the mind revealed in the book is one of the most extraordinary and comprehensive that has ever existed.”

T.W. Adorno

In 1968, the Jewish writer Robert Gutman published a biography of Wagner (Richard Wagner: the Man, his Mind and his Music) in which he portrayed his subject as a racist, psychopathic, proto-Nazi monster. Gutman’s scholarship was questioned at the time, but this did not prevent his book from becoming a best-seller, and as one source notes: “An entire generation of students has been encouraged to accept Gutman’s caricature of Richard Wagner. Even intelligent people, who have either never read Wagner’s writings or tried to penetrate them and failed … have read Gutman’s book and accepted his opinions as facts.”[13] The long-time music critic for The New York Times, the Jewish Harold Schonberg, was one of them, describing Wagner in his Lives of the Great Composers as “Amoral, hedonistic, selfish, virulently racist, arrogant, filled with gospels of the superman … and the superiority of the German race, he stands for all that is unpleasant in human character.”[14] Likewise, for Jewish music critic David Hurwitz, Wagner was “an obnoxious, jackboot-stomping Nazi pygmy.” He regards Verdi, that other great opera composer of the nineteenth century, as “so overwhelmingly more important and deeper and more emotionally significant and a more finished and talented composer than Wagner could ever aspire to being.”[15] According to the composer Thomas Adès, Wagner is more than bad; he is pathologically bad, and his “music grows parasitically … It has a laboratory atmosphere—a sort of fungus.”

Another prominent refrain from Jewish commentators like Jacob Katz, the author of The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner’s Anti-Semitism, is that Wagner’s concern about the Jewish influence on German culture stemmed from his morbid jealousy of all the brilliant Jews around him like Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Heine. Taking up this theme, the music writer David Goldman insists that “Wagner ripped off the scenario for his opera ‘The Flying Dutchman’ from Heine and knocked off Mendelssohn’s ‘Fingal’s Cave’ overture in the ‘Dutchman’s’ evocation of the sea. Wagner tried to cover his guilty tracks by denouncing Jewish composers he emulated, including Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wagner was not just a Jew-hater, then, but a backstabbing self-promoter who defamed the Jewish artists he emulated and who (in Meyerbeer’s case) had advanced his career.”[16] Boroson, writing in the Jewish Standard, likewise claims Wagner’s envy of Meyerbeer’s success “played a pivotal role in Wagner’s suddenly becoming a Jew-hater.”[17]

Numerous sources trace Wagner’s anti-Semitism to his perception that a clique of powerful Jews (led by Meyerbeer and Halevy) had thwarted the staging of his Rienzi in Paris, and “at his dependence on money lenders, mostly presumably Jewish, at this time.”[18] Carr notes that from early in his career Wagner’s profligacy “put him in hock with moneylenders who were usually Jews.” Already in Magdeburg where he courted his first wife Minna, “he railed at having to deal with the ‘Jewish scum’ because ‘our people’ offered no credit. In Paris he pawned his goods to Jews and did work he felt was menial for, amongst others, Maurice Schlesinger, a Jewish music publisher. Schlesinger’s cash helped ward off starvation but that made the struggling composer feel no better.”[19] Magee notes that the two and half years Wagner spent in Paris trying and failing to establish himself was “the worst period of deprivation and humiliation he ever had to suffer.”[20]

Invoking Freud, the Jewish music writer Marc A. Weiner in his Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, claims that: “Wagner’s vehement hatred of Jews was based on a model of projection involving a deep-seated fear of precisely those features within the Self (diminutive stature, nervous demeanor and avarice, as well as lascivious nature) that are projected upon and then recognized and stigmatized in the hated Other.”[21] Weiner’s view echoes that of the Jewish psychiatrist Theodore Rubin who views anti-Semitism as a “symbol sickness” that involves envy, low self-esteem and projection of one’s inner conflicts onto a stereotyped other.[22]

All these various theories, where Wagner’s criticism of Jewish influence is made a scapegoat for his own psychological frustrations, vastly overemphasize the irrational sources of prejudice, and effectively serve to clothe Jews in defensive innocence. According to these theories, anti-Jewish statements are never rational but invariably the product of a warped mind, while Jewish critiques of Europeans always have a thoroughly rational basis.

A Self-hating Jew?

Another well-worn theory has it that Wagner may have been part-Jewish, and that his anti-Semitism was his way of dealing this unedifying prospect (a variation of the “self-hating Jew” hypothesis). It is claimed that Wagner’s biological father was not his presumed father, the police registrar Friedrich Wagner who died of typhus shortly after Wagner’s birth, but his stepfather, the successful actor and painter Ludwig Geyer. However, there is no evidence that Geyer had any Jewish roots. In his biography of Wagner, John Chancellor states plainly that he had none, and “He [Geyer] claimed the same sturdy descent as the Wagners. His pedigree also went back to the middle of the seventeenth century and his forefathers were also, for the most part, organists in small Thuringian towns and villages.”[23] Magee is even more categorical, stating, “Geyer was not Jewish, and it had never occurred to anyone who knew him to think that he might be. He came from a long line of church musicians; for generations his forebears had been Lutheran cantors and organists in the town of Eisleben. There was nothing Jewish about his appearance that might have misled people who were ignorant of his background.”[24]

Ludwig Geyer

Chancellor blames Friedrich Nietzsche for first raising the question of Geyer’s possible Jewishness to add extra sting to his charge of illegitimacy, after the philosopher famously fell out with Wagner after years of close friendship. In his 1888 book Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner), Nietzsche claimed that Wagner’s father was Geyer, and made the pun that “Ein Geyer ist beinahe schon ein Adler” (A vulture is almost an eagle)—Geyer also being the German word for a vulture and Adler being a common (but not exclusively) Jewish surname. Magee, while agreeing that Nietzsche undoubtedly intended to rile Wagner with the suggestion of his possible Jewish ancestry, believes Nietzsche’s words also represented a jibe of a quite different kind.

Wagner, a provincial with a regional accent, a lower-middle class family background, and a long personal history of penury, had risen late in life to walk with kings and emperors; and somewhere along the way (strikingly reminiscent of Shakespeare, this, as so often) he allotted himself a coat of arms. This was revealingly (it shows what he thought his descent was), the “Geyer” coat of arms, prominently featuring a vulture against the shield while the kings and emperors would have been displaying their royal or imperial eagles. I think it is more than likely that Nietzsche was being sarcastic about Wagner’s self-promotion to the arms-bearing ranks of society with his “a vulture is almost an eagle.”[25]

If, as has been often claimed, Wagner was concerned with denying the possibility that Geyer may have been his father (because of Geyer’s possible Jewish ancestry), why would he have adopted the Geyer coat of arms and insist it be prominently displayed on the cover of his autobiography? This obvious fact did not deter Gutman who contended that Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima tried to outdo each other in their anti-Semitism because they both had Jewish roots to conceal. While offering no proof Geyer was Jewish, Gutman insists that Wagner in his later years discovered letters from Geyer to his mother which led him to suspect that Geyer was his biological father, and that Geyer might have been Jewish. Wagner’s anti-Semitism was, according to Gutman, his way of dealing with the fear that people would think he was Jewish. Derek Strahan recycles this discredited theme, noting that:

Geyer’s affair with Wagner’s mother pre-dated the death of Wagner’s presumed father, Friedrich Wagner, a Police Registrar who was ill at the time young Richard was conceived, and who died six months after his birth. Soon after this, Wagner’s mother Johanna married Ludwig Geyer. Richard Wagner himself was known as Richard Geyer until, at the age of 14, he had his name legally changed to Wagner. Apparently he had taken some abuse at school because of his Jewish-sounding name. Could his later anti-Semitism have been motivated, at least in part, by sensitivity to this abuse, and by a kind of pre-emptive denial to prevent difficulties and suffering arising from prejudice?[26]

According to the only evidence we have on this point (Cosima’s diaries, 26 December 1868) Wagner “did not believe” that Ludwig Geyer was his real father. Cosima did, however, once note a resemblance between Wagner’s son Siegfried and a picture of Geyer.[27] Pursuing the theme that anyone who expresses antipathy toward Jews must be psychologically unhealthy, Solomon draws a parallel between Wagner and Adolf Hitler in that “both feared they had Jewish paternity, which led to fierce denial and destructive hatred.”[28] For Magee, these theories, which are now widely entrenched in the Wagner literature, are the “crassest falsehood.” Moreover, “the idea that Geyer might have been Jewish, or even that Wagner thought that he might have been, is pure fabrication, distilled nonsense.”[29]

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here and here.

Go to Part 3.

[1] Richard Wagner, “Religion and Art,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Vol. 6 (London: 1897; repr. 1966), 211-52. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wlpr0126.htm

[2] Richard Wagner, “Hero-dom and Christianity,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 6 (London: 1897; repr. 1966), 275-84. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/waghero.htm

[3] Richard Wagner, “Know Thyself,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 6 (London: 1897; repr. 1966), 264-74. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagknow.htm

[4] Quoted in Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 361.

[5] Larry Solomon, Wagner and Hitler, (Online article: 2002) http://solomonsmusic.net/WagHit.htm

[6] MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 57.

[7] Ibid., 54.

[8] Daniel Barenboim, “Wagner, Israel and the Palestinians,” Blog post, Undated. http://www.danielbarenboim.com/index.php?id=72

[9] Richard Wagner, “Know Thyself,” op. cit.

[10] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 352.

[11] Quoted in Martin Kitchen, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany, op. cit.

[12] Christopher Nicholson, Richard and Adolf: Did Richard Wagner Incite Adolf Hitler to Commit the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2007) 131.

[13]

[14] Harold Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 268.

[15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ax4N2B4GNs&t=662s

[16] David P. Goldman, “Muted: Performances of Wagner’s music are effectively banned in Israel. Should they be?” Tablet, August 17, 2011. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/75247/muted

[17] Warren Boroson, “Richard Wagner—The Devil Who Had Good Tunes,” Jewish Standard, August 7, 2009, 16.

[18] Michael Steen, The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (London: Icon Books, 2005), 464.

[19] Carr, The Wagner Clan, 83.

[20] Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 26.

[21] Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 6.

[22] Theodore Isaac Rubin, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind (New York: Barricade, 2011), 12.

[23] John Chancellor, Wagner (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 6.

[24] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 358.

[25] Ibid., 360.

[26] Derek Strahan, “Was Wagner Jewish: an old question newly revisited,” Online article, Undated. http://www.revolve.com.au/polemic/wagner.html

[27] Quoted in John Deathridge, Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 1.

[28] Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit.

[29] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 358.