CALLED THE MOST CITED LEGAL SCHOLAR OF ALL TIME, former federal appellate judge Richard A. Posner calls himself a “pragmatist” in the dimensions of legal interpretation and in the judgment of many contentious social issues, including forms of personal identity and race.

His bona fides are impressive, and the references made by other judges, scholars and writers to his many judicial opinions, books, law review articles and legal journal essays, do indeed verify his ranking in citations.

The concept of pragmatism, or more specifically, American pragmatism, which is generally identified by early twentieth-century thinkers including William James, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce, goes by many variations, but perhaps most simply it is a school of philosophy that seeks to direct its attention to facts (often inconvenient), and to the consideration of effects stemming from policy and politics; that is, on the reasonably probable impact of decisions on groups, institutions and even larger society. These effects can be unintended, which in more abstract versions of philosophical inquiry, are frequently overlooked.  In academia especially, the use of “narrative” or story-telling (which can also go by the term of rhetoric, or the use of language in order to persuade, often regardless of factual inconsistency), has replaced investigation and solid social science methods of research, verification, and testing of hypotheses.

Mr. Posner is generally known among his former law school colleagues at the University of Chicago, as an iconoclast; as even a critical troublemaker in his willingness to call out bias and illogical positions taken by numerous legal scholars.  This bias and emotionalism can become especially pitched when the topic turns to personal identity; but more, when it can be formulated as a more generalized phenomenon.  One subject that lends itself especially well to such rhetorical manipulation is race.

In one of Posner’s books is an assemblage of several of his essays, titled Overcoming Law (where by “overcoming” he generally refers to those aspects of our Western legal system that rest on false assumptions, weak factual awareness, denial of facts, or even the logic of the law as an independent or “autonomous” construction). Posner asserts that law should be “more empirical and less conceptual” and that “the judicial game” should be “a little closer to the science game.”

This is good advice in my view, and he unpacks several examples of law school peer literature that exhibit difficulties in clear thinking, and are cases of non-pragmatic arguments that are advanced by feeling, emotional hyperbole, exaggerated claims, and perhaps especially, a hostility to criticism.  But more than mere hostility, many of his law school colleagues who write on political issues are almost hysterical (in a clinical sense) and even violent in how they will attack their ideological opponents (or their imaginary enemies).

This problem may be most pronounced in theories of race, both in the way race “hustlers” or race promoters see themselves as victims, and in how they describe their asserted tormentors and adversaries as “colonizers,” or even “terrorists.”  It is a dangerous practice that survives—despite its basis in hate speech—through the ideological accommodation of modern law school culture.

Posner does a good job of putting his finger on the excesses of many law professors who have taken up a cause of extremism or vengeance for perceived historical wrongs.  He cites their “loose grip on facts” and their consistent failure to see (or even consider) how their speech and policies can have many unintended consequences in creating the very racial division they putatively seek to cure.

But Posner has a major blind spot of his own: he finds racial and other forms of modern identitarian causes to be largely misguided (while defending otherwise the liberty to be free of formal prejudice), and while he will describe critical race theories, for example, to be distorted in the ways they seek to carve out their own special forms of suffering and justifications for compensation. However, he sees no such distortions to American society by the entrenched interests that have codified the concept of “anti-Semitism.”

What Posner calls “empathetic jurisprudence” is further classified as “narratology” and imaginative literary writing, drawing into the discussion Aristotle’s distinction between history and literature (or fact-seeking versus storytelling). All of this Posner filters through his pragmatic preferences for rational thought, while nevertheless drawing a hard line around anyone who would dare criticize the holocaust narrative (not merely so-called holocaust denial but the stable mass media version of its features).  He even praises Canada’s punitive criminal law on “holocaust denial.”  This law assumes that “denial” or even questioning official narratives creates harm, and that this harm incurs a social cost that requires government intervention.

This kind of special-interest blindness, even by a scholar who prides himself on rational empiricism, and practical or “pragmatic” criticism of such protected special categories, is likely not surprising to most readers here.  But the particular implication I would like to raise is that in the context of today’s increasing hysteria, violence and “re-education” initiatives organized around classes on White racism, the law itself is moving in a steady manner toward criminalization of the White race itself—and, ipso facto, in its supposed historical culpability of Whites, especially toward two particular racial or ethnic categories: Blacks and Jews.

In the former, Posner asks if Blacks can ever locate and accept a group identity that is not affiliated or linked to Black slavery.  But he fails to interrogate what may be an even more dangerous and entrenched narrative that continues to destabilize American society through its highly organized political interests: Can modern Jews locate and accept an identity that is not linked to the Holocaust?

Posner ends one of his essays with a seeming fair-minded consideration: “If Whites must acquire a stereoscopic biracial perspective in order to cope effectively with our society’s racial problems, blacks must too.”  This may indeed signify a path toward a more enlightened perspective on American racial division (a “tit for tat” or good for the goose and gander simplification of course), but what he leaves out is that his personal identity is anchored in modern Zionism and is therefore excepted from any such consideration.  But worse, the anti-Semitic construct continues to be growing more legs and arms in how it is defined, protected as a program (a profitable one), and as codified in international criminal law. The current “disinformation” agenda of the political Left lends itself to the interests enmeshed with the official narrative on anti-Semitism, and it achieves its success not by pragmatic refutation or rational dialogue, but, like Black racial extremism, through an organized effort to diminish White status (and White demographic representation), and to simply erase its culture and history. The parallels to Bolshevik hostility and violence toward White Russians are telling; e.g., writer Douglas A. Smith characterizes the White Russians as “former people.”  This is precisely the political nature of a growing Black racial extremism that is combined with a highly organized Jewish institutional agenda that together seek a partnership in a systematic program (pogrom?) to make the American White race not only diminished but effectively extinguished culturally, economically, and electorally.  This may ultimately fail, but not without a pragmatic preemptive response by Whites. As John Stuart Mill advised in Considerations on Representative Government, change is accomplished by the activation of the twin pillars of a functional democracy: political participation and competence.

V.S. Solovyev is a graduate of the University of Chicago

If you want to feel your head swim, consider this awe-inspiring fact. When Christ was born two thousand years ago, the Great Pyramid at Giza was already more than two thousand years old. In fact, the Great Pyramid is about 4500 years old. But reproducing it would challenge — and perhaps defeat — the technology and organization of modern America or Britain. It’s the worthy structure that begins a fascinating and enjoyable book called Great Buildings (2012), whose subtitle promises The World’s Architectural Masterpieces Explored and Explained.

Great Buildings, a fascinating book that says much more than it intends to

The book was written by an English architectural historian called Philip Wilkinson and belongs to the often excellent Dorling Kindersley series of large-format surveys of history, technology and science. But the book does much more than its author and publisher intended, because it implicitly supports some heterodox and even heretical ideas about politics, culture and human biological difference. When he’s presenting dates of construction, Wilkinson uses “BCE” and “CE,” the supposedly inclusive but actually anti-Christian and anti-Western abbreviations that stand for “Before Common Era” and “Common Era.” Those abbreviations were invented by Jewish academics to replace “BC” and “AD,” meaning “Before Christ” and “Anno Domini” (in the year of Our Lord). In other words, these Jews wanted to push Christ and Christianity out of history. They have succeeded getting their terminology adopted by mainstream publishers, and it has been eagerly adopted by the left generally. It’s one apparently small but in fact very significant expression of leftists’ hatred of Western civilization and their longing to dominate it, destroy it, and rule the ruins.

Man-made mountain — the Great Pyramid at Giza, c. 2500 BC (image from Infogalactic)

By adopting that anti-Western chronology, Wilkinson and his publisher reveal their own leftism. But the book they created is an implicit repudiation of leftist dogma on the oneness of humanity. Large buildings have always been the clearest and most obvious examples of what German might call Kulturgeist, that is, culture-spirit or the expression of the unique traits and abilities of a particular culture. But a culture-spirit is ultimately a race-spirit, an expression of the genetically influenced abilities and preferences of a particular racial group. And once it is complete, a pyramid or a cathedral or a temple becomes a central part of culture-gene interaction: it creates an environment in which members of a particular race can feel happy, energized, positive about themselves and their future, prepared to invest in and work for posterity. Great Buildings is, in effect, a tour of different race-spirits and the different ways in which genetically distinct groups of human being have constructed buildings to suit themselves, strengthen their culture, and attempt to secure the survival of their civilization.

Angkor Wat and Chartres Cathedral (images from Infogalactic)

And what has suited human beings in their architecture throughout almost all of history has been the combining of beauty and grandeur. In their racially distinct ways, the temple-complex (c. 1150 AD) at Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Chartres Cathedral (1194–1223 AD) in France both pursue that goal. But you could say that Angkor Wat is chthonic and Chartres is astral. Angkor Wat seems to grow out of the earth and seems to remain deeply rooted there. Chartres aspires to escape the earth, to draw the mind and spirit heavenward to dwell among the stars.

But there are also distinctive architectural traditions within the West. The Palatine Chapel in Aachen, Germany, and the Borgund Stave Church at Lærdal, Norway, are brother-buildings, but are different in more than simply their choices of building-material. The Palatine Chapel, built in stone, is part of Roman tradition; the Borgund Stave Church, built in wood, is Scandinavian. Both are Christian, both are beautiful, both are rooted in paganism. But they’re distinct and affect the eye and mind in different ways.

The Palatine Chapel and the Borgund Stave Church (images from Infogalactic)

That is, after all, the central role of architecture: to celebrate and affirm the spirit of a particular culture, its gods and its history. Or at least, that was the central role of architecture. Great Buildings does something else that its author and publisher did not intend: by presenting so many centuries of great architecture so well, it underlies the radical — and repulsive — nature of a grand discontinuity that struck the Western world in the twentieth century. You could say that the book begins with a man-made mountain and ends with merde maximale — maximal shit from the present day. The Great Pyramid at Giza is a man-made mountain and the merde maximale is the work of modernist architects like Frank Gehry (born 1929) and Zaha Hadid (1950-2016). Gehry is Jewish and designed the appallingly ugly, obtrusive and eye-assaulting Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which displays ugly modernist art under the auspices of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, as set up by the Jewish plutocrat Solomon R. Guggenheim (1861-1949).

Gehry’s grotesque Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (image from Infogalactic)

I think the Jewishness and the ugliness of the building and its contents are related. Until it reaches the section entitled “1900 to Present,” Great Buildings displays and discusses glorious architecture inspired by major world religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. One religion is conspicuous by its absence: there was no glorious architecture inspired by Judaism. But you could say that modern architecture is inspired by Judaism — Jewish values, Jewish ideas, Jewish money. And that’s why architecture has descended from the sublime to the repulsive.

The invention of Jewish genius

You can see the same descent and same discontinuity in books about the history of art. Before the twentieth century, art was sublime; during the twentieth century it turned repulsive. Modernist art-movements like Dadaism assailed traditional standards of beauty and meaning, and abandoned traditional requirements for artistic competence and realism. Brenton Sanderson has exposed the Jewishness of Dada in his article “Tristan Tzara and the Jewish Roots of Dada.” He’s also discussed — and demolished — the work of the Jewish “genius” Mark Rothko (1903-70), one of the supreme exemplars of the abandonment of artistic competence. When goy philistines say “My six-year-old could have painted that” of a Rothko painting, they’re usually quite right. But one of the great advantages of abandoning artistic competence and realism, from the Jewish point of view, was that it enabled power to pass from gentile artists to Jewish art-critics and art-dealers, who were then able to promote (and profit from) Jewish “geniuses” like Rothko and Marc Chagall.

“Mensch” Richard Rogers and his architectural evisceration, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (images from Wikipedia)

Alas, unlike art, architecture isn’t suited for the stripping away of all competence and technical ability. Even Jewish architects have to be able to design buildings that stand up, resist the elements, and refuse to collapse in all but the most extreme circumstances. But modern architects don’t have to be able to design buildings that delight the eye and elevate the spirit. Indeed, they’re now trained to design buildings that do the opposite: dismay the eye and depress the spirit. According to Great Buildings, the “prestigious Pritzker Prize” is “architecture’s highest honour.” It was established by the Jewish plutocrat Jay Pritzker (1922-99) in 1979 and has been awarded to atrocity-mongers and uglifiers like the Jewish Richard Rogers (1933-2021). Rogers was saluted as “a mensch of an architect, full of whimsy, genius and morality” by the Jewish Forward magazine on his death in 2021. Well, I would describe his acclaimed Pompidou Centre not simply as an architectural abortion but as an architectural evisceration. The viscera of the building — its pipes and ducts and elevators — have been strewn over its exterior. It’s a supremely ugly and uninspiring spectacle. Naturally enough, it’s hailed as a masterpiece of modernism.

Merde MAXXImale: Zaha Hadid and her MAXXI Museum in Rome (images from Wikipedia)

The “prestigious Pritzker Prize” was also awarded to Zaha Hadid (1950-2016), a lavishly praised female architect who embodied the ugliness of modernism and the catastrophic decline of architecture in more ways than one. She was personally ugly and Great Buildings describes her as “Iraqi-British.” That is, she was an Iraqi Muslim who first took a mathematics degree in Beirut before studying architecture in London. She then went on create horrors like the MAXXI, a museum of modern art in Italy. Perhaps Hadid learnt French during her studies in Beirut and would have understood me when I call the museum merde MAXXImale — “MAXXImal shit.” If so, she would also have understood the ominous words of the French modernist Le Corbusier (1887-1965): “Une maison est une machine à habiter.” Great Buildings translates those words into English: “A house is a machine for living in.” Le Corbusier was a gentile but was one of the greatest proponents of uglification in architecture. Hadid certainly made his principle central to her work. Like those of so many modernists, her architectural abortions look like kitchen utensils or household appliances reproduced on a gigantic scale in concrete and steel.

Miracle in marble: the Taj Mahal in India

In giving so many archi-abortions to the world, the Muslim-born Hadid broke with a glorious Islamic tradition of beautiful architecture. For me, the greatest building of Great Buildings is the Taj Mahal, the “vision of shimmering white marble” erected by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1592?-1666) near the river Yamuna in northern India. Like Christianity but unlike Judaism, Islam has given great beauty to the world in its art and buildings. Chartres Cathedral, a Christian masterpiece included in Great Buildings, rivals the Taj Mahal for beauty but does not match it, in my opinion. One reason for that is that the Taj Mahal incorporates an element of beauty that was far less developed in the Christian world: calligraphy. Indeed, as Great Buildings points out, only one identity is certain among the myriad craftsmen who worked on the Taj Mahal, that of the Iranian calligrapher Amanat Khan, who embellished the Taj Mahal with quotations from the Qur’an in an alternately sinuous and sword-like script.

A giant open-air urinal

Khan’s calligraphy is, perhaps, the final touch that brings the Taj Mahal as close to perfection as any building has reached. Islam does not belong in the West, but has given the world some truly beautiful architecture. Judaism is many centuries older than Islam and has given the world no beautiful architecture. Indeed, Jews have responded to the ethical atrocity of the Holocaust by inflicting aesthetic atrocities of their own on the world, like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the so-called Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

Aesthetic atrocities: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles (images from Wikipedia)

Fortunately enough, neither of these horrors appears in Great Buildings. The author and publisher may have been anxious to placate Jews by including the dreck of Rogers and Gehry, but they didn’t want to take sycophancy too far. The Memorial in Berlin looks like a giant open-air urinal and the Museum of Tolerance like a post-modern public lavatory in fetching fecal shades. Perhaps the appearance of the Memorial and the Museum is a private Jewish joke about “taking the piss” and “peddling shit.” What’s certain is that Jews don’t mind commemorating the Holocaust with very ugly architecture that is completely lacking beauty and grandeur.

Replication of the Parthenon in Nashville Greece (top) and the Temple of the Inscriptions in Mexico

And what is that something? It’s intelligence. Building big demands brain-power. Great Buildings doesn’t discuss this stark biocultural fact, but it’s the one thing that unites the very distinct traditions of East and West, of the Old and New Worlds, of Greece and China and Mexico. Tall structures that stand for hundreds or thousands of years aren’t only expressions of race-spirit but also assertions of IQ. You have to be bright to build big. Architecture is also an example of the non-linear powers that high intelligence gives the groups that possess it. For example, European Whites or East Asian Chinese are not hundreds of times more intelligent than sub-Saharan Blacks or New Guinea tribesmen. Yet the structures created by the former races have been hundreds or thousands of times larger and taller and longer-lasting than the structures created by the latter. In a related way, the subversive and anti-Western Jewish billionaire George Soros is not thousands of times more intelligent than Kevin MacDonald or Steve Sailer or Vox Day. But he is, alas, thousands of times richer and more influential.

Unfettering intelligence from aesthetics

The subversive and anti-Western Jewish plutocrat Jay Pritzker was also thousands of times richer and more influential. And his influence, like that of George Soros, has been pernicious. As I pointed out above, Great Buildings describes the “prestigious Pritzker Prize” as “architecture’s highest honour.” But it’s an honor that goes to those who have smashed the millennial-long tradition of beauty and grandeur in architecture. When you reach the final section of Great Buildings, you enter an era of repulsive ugliness and absorb the central lesson of modernism. The lesson is this: When intelligence is unfettered from aesthetics, you get atrocity. Modernism unfettered intelligence from aesthetics in architecture, whereupon the Western world was assailed with the architectural abortions of the twentieth century. You can see that radical and repulsive discontinuity in the single nation of France. Unlike beautiful Chartres Cathedral from the Middle Ages, which has elevated the spirit and enriched the life of France, the ugly Pompidou Centre has assaulted the spirit and undermined the life of France. Once again, it’s not a coincidence that Chartres was created by goyim and the Pompidou Centre by a Jew.

The Choir of Chartres Cathedral

Chartres is also a reminder that Mencius Moldbug, aka Curtis Yarvin, was both utterly wrong and highly dishonest to give the name “The Cathedral” to the vast, interlocking system of anti-White and anti-Western activism, subversion, and propaganda that currently controls politics and the media. The beauty and grandeur of cathedrals like Chartres are integral to the West. But Yarvin’s so-called “Cathedral” hates cathedrals and the Christianity that inspired them. He should have of course have called that system “the Synagogue,” because Jews are central to its subversion and its hatred of the West. Why didn’t he give the hate an honest and accurate name? You won’t be surprised to learn that Yarvin himself is Jewish.

The Sydney Opera house (image from Infogalactic)

There are no synagogues in Great Buildings. And I don’t think Philip Wilkinson, the author of the book, is Jewish. He doesn’t have a Jewish name and most of his book is a celebration of genuinely great buildings that embody the beauty and grandeur of true architecture. Furthermore, two of the modern buildings he describes — the Chrysler Building in New York and the Sydney Opera House — aren’t architectural abortions. They don’t match the best of the past, but they too are great buildings. Perhaps they’re also glimpses of what the twentieth century’s architecture could have been like without the dominance of Jews.

I suppose, after me, all the shits came in? — Phillip Roth

Australia was one of the last holdouts in the West in policing and restricting the publication, importation, and distribution of pornography and other forms of obscenity. Where censorship regimes in the USA and UK had already collapsed by the mid-1960s, as late as the year 1971 vice squads in police forces around Australia still ran raids of bookstores believed to be selling obscene literature. Political leaders of the era such as the formidable Vice-Premier of the state of Victoria, Sir Arthur Rylah, and his counterpart in the state of New South Wales, Sir Eric Willis, still possessed the vocabulary and conviction to resist the mass sexualisation of society and provide a defence to the Christian morals of the Australian people. The prohibition of obscene publications is now a politically dead issue, but opposition to it, the anti-censorship cause as it was known, once occupied an incredibly important front in the wider cultural and sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s that set countries like Australia onto a path of cultural and demographic ruination. Every country in the West has an infamous piece of literature or film that either put a foot in the door for the entrance of pornography or otherwise resulted in the breakdown of obscenity laws and controls in their respective countries, often as a result of a much-publicised legal trial. In the United Kingdom, this was works such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover (first unexpurgated version in the UK in 1960) and Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964). In the United States, the film The Pawnbroker (1964) saw the end of the power of the Motion Picture Production Code, a set of industry guidelines on content that was imposed on the film studios of Hollywood. But in Australia, this ignominious title is given to Philip Roth’s most famous work, a now iconic Jewish book by the name of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969).

As this essay will uncover, the story of the end of obscenity law and censorship controls in Australia—events that subsequently caused the flowering of the sexual revolution—is one of a cultural and political push teeming with Jews. Although not intended to do so, the recently released book The Trials of Portnoy[1] by Australian journalist Patrick Mullins exposes the key Jewish role in this undertaking, showing the deeply involved nature of Jewish ideas, activism, and money, and how crucial Jewish literature was in breaking down the laws that served as a bulwark against the advance of the sexual revolution and the permissive society. Throughout the book, Mullins identifies the major pre-Portnoy victories for anti-censorship that led up to the decisive final battle over Portnoy’s Complaint. Each subsequent victory served to embolden the anti-censorship cause and its supporters, who were convinced the march of progress was on their side, and conversely weaken, embarrass, and enrage the defenders of sexual mores and the moral virtues of Australian society. At the conclusion of this came Portnoy’s Complaint, which was prosecuted for obscenity in courtrooms around the country in the most widely publicized and debated censorship trials since World War II. After Portnoy, it was no longer possible for an obscene publication to be banned in Australia.

Legal Framework

These events will be explored in turn, but a brief digression is necessary to understand the structural basis of the obscenity laws and other legal restrictions that operated throughout the country. In the pre-internet era, the Australian legal framework for the restriction and prohibition of publications deemed to be obscene was contained in federal law jointly under the Customs Act and the Post & Telegraph Act, which took their inspiration from the UK Obscene Publications Act of 1857. Together these Acts gave broad powers to the Federal Customs Minister and customs officials to proscribe “blasphemous, indecent or obscene works” onto a banned publications list and restrict the importation and local distribution of such banned works. This included the power to search through the luggage of arriving travellers from overseas. Further state laws existed, with some variations on a state-by-state basis, to police obscenity on a local level. These were the laws utilised to, for example, fine a bookstore caught selling obscene literature or people caught in possession of a federally prohibited import.

The legal definition of obscenity used in Australia was established under common law precedent by English case law in Regina v. Hicklin 1868, which entrenched what came to be known as the Hicklin Test of obscenity. Central to the Hicklin Test was the question of whether the publication under consideration had “the tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” As such, the focus of the Hicklin Test of obscenity rested not upon the impact of the publication on mature and law-abiding adults, who were considered morally upstanding enough to recognise the obscene work and handle it appropriately, but on those such as children, a group seen as particularly susceptible to the corruption of obscene literature due to their still-developing minds and therefore far more in need of strong laws to restrict its dispersal throughout society. The Hicklin Test did not require obscenity to be established in the context of the publication as a whole. Instead, a publication could be prohibited even if only a few passages in the entire text were found to be obscene. In the era before the sexual revolution, it was exceptionally rare for the law to confront the types of obvious pornography that are commonplace now. Instead, works deemed obscene were those of a sexually explicit or indecent nature, those exhibiting particularly graphic violence, or works that contained egregious attacks on religious beliefs.[2]

The Hicklin Test also implicitly acknowledged a fact that is ignored by pornographers and other liberal opponents of obscenity laws, namely that once an adult can legally and freely access something, it is then not difficult for it to fall into the hands of a child. Even if an age-restricted product can only be purchased in a store by an adult, from that point onwards, any control over its future readership or viewership is entirely down to the prerogative of the purchaser, or simply a matter of chance. No amount of age-restrictive laws on purchase or distribution could, nor can, stop a pornographic magazine/videotape or a violent video game from being discovered hidden under a bed by a child, or from being given by a careless 18-year-old to a younger sibling. Put simply, one cannot effectively protect children from pornography without also restricting it for adults.

The Hicklin Test was also introduced as the definition for obscenity in America in Rosen v. United States (1896), where a New York Jew by the name of Lew Rosen was found guilty of using the postal service to send an obscene publication. Hicklin was later overturned in the US in favour of a ‘community standards’ test (also known as the Roth test) in the landmark Supreme Court case Roth v. United States 1956, where yet another Jew, publisher Samuel Roth, was convicted for selling erotic literature.

OZ Magazine

Early rumblings of change came in 1963 with the founding of the magazine OZ, the premier satirical publication of the 1960s counterculture in Sydney. Established by three students at the University of Sydney, all of whom later went on to prominent positions in Australian cultural life, OZ grew out of the libertarian subculture of the “Sydney Push” and took its cue from Jewish satirists Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, the British magazine Private Eye, and the satirical BBC television program That Was the Week That Was. OZ sought to expand published counterculture in Sydney beyond the limited confines of the student press, prominently Honi Soit at the University of Sydney and Tharunka at the University of New South Wales, and established itself as a literary focal point for the growing forces of the New Left. Alongside its opposition to censorship, OZ was a trailblazer in Australia for a number of other political causes that would soon become major left-wing policies, from the anti-Vietnam War effort, to the dismantling of the White Australia Policy. The founders of OZ magazine, as well as the other leading members of this subculture (Wendy Bacon, the former editor of Tharunka, was another prominent anti-censorship activist) were deeply influenced and indebted to Jewish psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich. Reich’s works in particular formed the basis of much of their anti-censorship critique attributing sexual “repression”—including the proscription of sexually obscene literature—as a root cause of social, economic and political ills in society, as well as providing a seemingly scholarly basis for their belief in the abnormality of Christian morality.

Publication of the first issue of OZ in April 1963 met with immediate outcry. The magazine featured a series of interviews with an abortionist and young women who had procured abortions, as well as a tongue-in-cheek article about the history of chastity belts—intended as a metaphor for Australian sexual norms being “locked in the past.” The founders pled guilty to charges of obscenity levelled against them by the NSW government and were fined 20 Australian Pounds. Unrepentant, the founders of OZ were again charged and found guilty of obscenity for Edition 6 of the magazine in February 1964, and even harsher penalties were imposed, including a prison sentence. Wanting to take a stand against censorship, outraged by the severity of the charges and realizing that the magazine would not survive its infancy much further with repeated convictions, they lodged an appeal against the decision. The case was heard by the Jewish Appeals Court Justice Aaron Levine, a known progressive justice, who bucked public outrage by overturing the obscenity charges, ruling that OZ was satire and that the prosecution had failed to identify any real examples of people that would be corrupted or depraved by the publication, and had to point to more than “a theoretical group of unidentified persons”[3]—a stark redefinition of the Hicklin Test.

Levine’s progressive credentials would solidify in 1971 when he adjudicated in R. v. Wald[4], a case which effectively legalised abortion in the state of New South Wales. Justice Levine provided a defence to abortion on economic and mental health grounds so broad, that legislation to de-criminalize abortion was not taken up in NSW until nearly 50 years later in 2019. The founders of OZ later relocated to the UK, starting London OZ in 1967, and the cover pages of the magazine became progressively more pornographic and LSD-influenced, owing to use of that drug by the editors. The May 1970 edition, Schoolkids OZ, written by and aimed at high school teenagers, was the subject of one of the last major obscenity trials in the UK.

The Trial of Lady Chatterley

Infamous in the history of UK literary obscenity, the unexpurgated publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been banned in Australia since 1929 due to its erotic passages. The issue had lain dormant in the country until 1964, following the UK publication of The Trial of Lady Chatterley, an account of the famous court case four years earlier (R v. Penguin Books Pty Ltd) that broke UK obscenity laws. For including the offending passages, The Trial of Lady Chatterley was also subsequently banned in Australia. A rescue mission for The Trial would come in the form of a trio of liberators, who formulated a daring approach to flout Australia’s obscenity controls. This trio was led by Jewish entrepreneur and property developer Leon Fink, conspiring with Alex Sheppard, the Secretary of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties (CCL), and a local bookshop owner and tenant of one of Fink’s properties, to secretly publish a local edition of the book. With Fink bankrolling the illegal enterprise, a copyright was obtained from UK publisher Allen Lane, and Fink had torn up sections of the book sent to Australia through the post by friends overseas. Using the smuggled pages, 10,000 copies of the book were printed in secret, and distributed to select bookstores around the country in April of 1965.[5] Once the books were in place, Fink and Co. notified the Australian government of their act in an attempt to pressure them to rescind the ban. Prosecution of bookstores selling the book was attempted by Arthur Rylah in Victoria, but the stunt was an embarrassment to the federal government, who promptly gave in and removed Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the Trial of Lady Chatterley and a number of other works from the prohibited list.

The incident exposed the need for a uniform approach to obscenity across all states, as the anti-censorship activists were now getting bolder with their approach. Amendments were made to the Customs Act to tighten up procedure, to close the loophole for local editions of banned works, and a new Board of Review was established to act as a higher review authority than customs officials, which was given the ability to exempt from restriction works that were of “literary, artistic or scientific merit.”[6] This flimsy strengthening of obscenity law was utterly undone however with the landmark High Court of Australia case Crowe v. Graham (1968), an appeal against a conviction of obscenity in relation to two self-published magazines. Despite upholding the obscenity convictions, Justice Windeyer overturned the Hicklin Test in Australia, specifically citing Roth v United States in his decision, and formulated a new Australian test for obscenity based on the Roth Test: whether the publication would “offend the modesty of the average man or woman in sexual matters.”[7] The shift was subtle at the time, but it had far-reaching implications for the Portnoy’s Complaint battle that was soon to come. Thereafter, a publication declared obscene only had to answer for an offence against broad “community standards” (a community acknowledged to have a “new frankness regarding matters of sex”[8]) not against the category of “those whose minds are open to such immoral influences”—that is, primarily young people whose minds were still being formed. The two magazines in question, Censor and Obscenity, were amateurish publications, designed to do little more than thumb disapproval at obscenity laws, and contained a hodgepodge of pornographic images and selections from banned literature. Existing sources are unclear on the identity of the culprits, but they are likely to be more members of the same Reich-influenced university milieu as OZ and the university press; OZ advertised for both magazines within its own pages.

American Hurrah

A performance of the play American Hurrah at a Sydney theater became the scene of another victory for the anti-censorship cause, where a complaint from a local grandmother, who mistakenly attended the performance with her grandchild, led to threats of legal action from deputy leader of the State Government, Eric Willis. Her complaint was directed at a series of obscenities scrawled on the walls of the set during the third act of the play, a set piece intended by the playwright to shock the audience. Written by Jewish playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie, American Hurrah premiered in New York in 1966, directed by Jews Jacques Levy and Joseph Chaikin and critically explored the themes of consumerism and American involvement in the war in Vietnam. The play had gone largely unnoticed until the complaint, but the theater company agreed to remove the offending portions of the set from all performances henceforth. In response, a group of outraged intellectuals conspired to stage a free performance of the play with the offending set pieces included. Willis placed police into the audience, in order to shut down the free performance should they discover that the offending parts were included. The organizers, the “Friends of America Hurrah” which included Jews Cyril Pearl and Harry Seidler, watched on as the free performance degenerated into a pornographic spectacle:

Two actors dressed as dolls simulated sex, wrecked the set, and drew on the walls the words fuck shit, and, a big cock up my juicy cunt. As police all over their theatre leapt to their feet, the actors jumped into the audience and made for the side doors.[9]

Later performances of the play were restricted but the perceived heavy-handedness of Eric Willis’s approach was taking its toll. The anti-censorship cause won more converts, who felt that the mere presentation of “four-letter words” was no longer sufficient grounds for legal action.

Dennis Altman’s Suitcase

Justice Aaron Levine made another appearance in a legal case bought by Dennis Altman and the CCL in 1969, appealing the act of a customs official who seized two copies of banned literature from Altman’s luggage on a return trip from the USA—Sanford Friedman’s Totempole and Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge. Altman saw the opportunity to try the strength of the revised Customs Act in the aftermath of the backdown on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and another prominent censorship case made its way before Justice Levine. Like the Jewish homosexual protagonist in the novel Totempole, Altman was also a Jewish homosexual, and would later become Australia’s foremost gay rights activist, soon to publish his iconic but now forgotten work Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation in 1971. Levine ruled that Totempole was not obscene and should be returned to Altman and upheld the ban on Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge, but as Levine was delivering his judgement, greater efforts to bring down Australian censorship laws were fermenting in Australia and abroad.

Portnoy’s Complaint

What I’m saying, Doctor, is that I don’t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds—as though through fucking I will discover America. Conquer America—maybe that’s more like it. — Alexander Portnoy

Portnoy’s Complaint was first published in New York in February 1969 and was an immediate sensation. Before it even hit the bookshelves, the film rights had already been sold to Warner Bros. for $250,000 USD.[10] The novel, by Jewish author Phillip Roth, is written in the form of a monologue delivered by the titular character Alexander Portnoy, who exorcizes the lurid details of his sexual life and guilty conscience to a Jewish psychoanalyst and ruminates on the frustrations of being a modern Jewish man. Much of the themes of the book likely went over the heads of non-Jewish readers who have not studied the peculiarities of this group of people—the overbearing Jewish mother and timid Jewish father, the lusting after non-Jewish women (“shiksas”), the pangs of Jewish assimilation, and the unique complications of being a Jewish minority in a Christian society. But the significance of the book as an honest presentation of the Jewish psyche (many consider Portnoy to be an author insert for Roth himself) was not lost on the more conservative Jewish leaders. Roth’s earlier works had caused a stir with the American Jewish community, who labelled him a self-hating Jew for failing to follow the dictum that Jews must never be portrayed negatively, only positively. Negative reviews of Portnoy’s Complaint appeared in Commentary magazine, the mouthpiece of the America Jewish Committee, and the religious leaders in the Australian Jewish community were similarly perturbed. Local Rabbis worried that the book was “very dangerous from a Jewish point of view” and “not good for the Jews.”[11]

Of Portnoy’s Complaint, Israeli philosopher and kabbalist Gershom Scholem declared that the book was more disastrous to Jews than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and was “the book for which all anti-semites have been praying.”[12] With this critique, Scholem likely had in mind the numerous passages where Portnoy ridicules the “stupid goyim” or Portnoy’s cognizance that his lust for sleeping with gentile women (schtupping the shiksas) was almost a political act; by defiling their daughters, Portnoy was getting revenge on the WASP anti-semites who mistreated his father at work. Portnoy is, as E. Michael Jones writes, “a Jew right out of Mein Kampf,”[13] another Messiah who has come to liberate the gentiles, in particular the shiksas, from the binds of their Christian morality:

To save the stupid shiksa; to rid her of her race’s ignorance; to make the daughter of the heartless oppressor a student of suffering and oppression; to teach her to be compassionate, to bleed a little for the world’s sorrows.

Portnoy’s shiksas, each given a disparaging nickname (The Monkey, The Pilgrim and The Pumpkin), become the vehicle for his revenge-saturated sexual fantasies, but all three are eventually discarded when they fail to meet his expectations as sex objects. The archetype of the Jewish man indulging his fantasies—often revenge motivated—by having sex with the Christian girl, would become a common theme in the so called “golden age” of pornography, the pairing of Harry Reems and Linda Lovelace in the film Deepthroat being a famous example. It also played out in real life throughout the history of Hollywood, the #MeToo scandal being the latest iteration, where Harvey Weinstein and a cast of other famous Jews were caught out taking liberties with the shiksa on the casting couch. Aside from the screeds against gentiles, the most offending passages, and the ones read aloud the most in the obscenity trials, were undoubtedly the frequent descriptions of masturbation and the objects that accompanied Portnoy’s lewd ritual, from chopped liver to a sister’s item of underwear. Whereas Lady Chatterley’s Lover is embarrassingly written Pagan eroticism that is now quaint to read, Portnoy’s Complaint is fully fledged Jewish obscenity that has not lost its shock value. Even to a modern reader such as this writer, having been fully exposed to the depravities of sexual modernity, the masturbation passages are still viscerally repulsive and generally unpleasant to dwell upon.

In March 1969, an advance copy of Portnoy’s Complaint was sent to the Australian customs office by Tom Maschler, the Jewish literary editor of Jonathon Cape (Roth’s UK publisher), for approval to export the book to Australia. The book was identified for the prohibited list but conscious of the stir it caused in America, it was sent to the National Literature Board of Review for a final decision. Despite conceding literary merit, the board agreed that the presentation of obscene sexual themes outweighed any such merit and Portnoy’s Complaint was duly prohibited. Declaring the book to be “one of the most important literary works we have published in the last 10 years,”[14] Tom Maschler was outraged and vowed to fight the ban, turning to his colleague Graham C. Greene, the managing director of Jonathon Cape who had connections in Australia, to deal a death blow to Australian obscenity laws.       Anti-censorship and sexual liberation ran in the blood of the Greene Family. Graham Greene was the son of none other than Hugh Carleton Greene, Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation from 1960 to 1969. With Hugh Greene’s support, his tenure at the BBC oversaw the arrival of the sexual and cultural revolution onto British television screens, decisions which led to his arch nemesis Mary Whitehouse’s campaign against the BBC. Greene was the BBC’s Berlin correspondent throughout the 1930s and it was here in 1936 that Graham was born, to the first of Hugh Greene’s four wives. Hugh Greene’s time under the National Socialist regime left him with a dislike of any form of censorship, equating Mary Whitehouse’s crusade against sex and obscenity on British television with the events of National Socialist Germany—comments for which Whitehouse won a successful defamation suit against Greene.

In Graham Greene and Tom Maschler, the Australian anti-censorship cause now had two heavyweights of the English publishing industry on their side and Greene began corralling the forces of the anti-censorship vanguard, seeking their advice on the specifics of the Australian situation. Greene voiced his criticism of Australia’s obscenity laws during his visit to Australia in October 1969, publicly threatening that Jonathon Cape would publish an illegal edition to flout the law. Various local publishers offered to run expurgated editions of Portnoy’s Complaint, but Maschler and Greene held to their aims (Maschler explicitly refused to allow an expurgated “Australian edition”), and saw an opening in a censorship system that was on increasingly shaky grounds. They found a willing publisher in Penguin Books Australia, who agreed to illegally publish the unexpurgated edition and struck a deal with Jonathon Cape for the publishing rights, agreeing to pay progressive royalties, depending on how many copies were sold. Following the model set by Fink and Co., 75,000 copies were printed in secret, reproduced via photo offset of smuggled copies, and by late August 1971, copies had been surreptitiously distributed to willing bookstores around the country. Word got out on August 30 and crowds of customers lined up to purchase a copy. Amongst them were the detectives of police vice squads.

In the ensuing chaos, the Australian government held firm in its support of the ban and legal action was taken against bookstores around the country, but defenders of Australian morals watched in dismay as the supposedly iron-tight response broke down around them in a mess of contradictory and disparate outcomes. Almost immediately the anti-censorship forces found a victory in the state of South Australia, where Don Dunstan, the then still closeted homosexual Premier (at the time still with his Jewish wife), announced that there would be no prosecution of the book in his state and that Portnoy’s Complaint would be free and legal to purchase for all adults. In Tasmania, the ban was upheld but no court cases ensued; in the state of Victoria, the book was declared obscene by a judge and the ban upheld; and in Western Australia, a trial centred around a bookstore in Perth owned by the Communist Party of Australia. The book was declared legal for sale on literary merit due to more liberal legislation in the state.

In Queensland, a court case saw a token fine imposed on another Communist bookstore, but the key battle came in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, and the location of the most important Portnoy trials. An impressive prosecution against bookstore chain Angus and Roberston was led by Jack Kenny QC, who outlined the impact a not- guilty verdict on the book would have not only on obscenity law but on wider moral virtues in the country, and attacked the concept of literary merit. Nevertheless, the defenders of Australian sexual mores found no respite, as two back-to-back court cases in NSW ended in a mistrial. Both juries were unable to come to a verdict.

Portnoy’s Aftermath

Following the second mistrial in NSW, Australia’s censorship system was in tatters. A third trial against Portnoy’s Complaint was out of the question. The country-wide mechanisms to police obscenity had been thoroughly broken. A different legal situation existed for Portnoy’s Complaint in every Australian state; in some it was still banned, and in others it was completely legal for purchase and possession. Or it was subjected to otherwise ambiguous legal outcomes that resulted in the book’s effective legalisation. As Mullins notes:

Where the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint figures most in the history of the end of book censorship is in its scale and scope. It was an unprecedented undertaking. In all the opposition to censorship in Australia, no other act of defiance was as bold. It was the first occasion where one book was used to test every channel of the Australian Censorship system.[15]

The Australian government, weary of the continual losses on this front, finally gave in on June 15, 1972, and Customs Minister Don Chipp rescinded the importation ban on Portnoy’s Complaint and a number of other previously proscribed books. Two final scuffles over obscenity ensued during the latter half of 1972, one over The Little Red Schoolbook and another over Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, banned since 1966, where a local publisher threatened to redo the tactics of The Trial and Portnoy’s Complaint with an illegal local edition. However, by this stage it was not only the censorship system that was in tatters, but also the governing Liberal Party of Australia. The election held in December 1972 swept the Liberal government out of office for the first time in 23 years, replaced by the Labor Party and Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister. A kindred soul to the anti-censorship cause and the political embodiment of the coming to power of the New Left in Australia, Whitlam promptly dismantled the censorship infrastructure under the Customs Act, removing all books from the importation ban list and removing powers from the Department of Customs to search for banned publications. The legal apparatus for dealing with obscene works shifted to the function of “classification” of publications based on age limits, and in 1974 the Whitlam government oversaw the introduction of a new federal classification scheme, which for the first time allowed pornography for sale and outright prohibited only publications which advocated for, or incited, crime, violence or the use of illegal drugs.[16] At the conclusion of the short-lived Whitlam Era in 1975, the concept of obscenity and the words “tendency to deprave and corrupt” had all but disappeared from the Australian legal system.

All told, Tom Maschler correctly identified the book as the ideal battering ram to bring down Australia’s obscenity laws. Just as Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker was the perfect mix of nudity and a “culturally important” holocaust tale that broke down the Catholic-based Production Code in Hollywood, Portnoy’s Complaint was the perfect mix of obscenity and celebrated Jewish literature that gave it all the leeway to exploit the fractures in the Australian legal system. 

A Question of Literary Merit

Moving back to the Portnoy trials, the concept of literary merit was the common point of contention throughout all the criminal cases brought to trial in the Australian states. It all came down to whether or not Portnoy’s Complaint had literary merit, and if this merit overruled—where it had been successfully established—the obscene nature of the book.    As Jack Kenny QC, counsel for the Crown during the NSW Portnoy trials outlined to the jury, the term literary merit has no accepted definition, being inherently vague resulting in it being utterly up to the interpretation of the numerous individuals professing to be literary experts who were called as witnesses for the defense.[17] In practice, literary merit is established as soon a book is published by a reputable publishing firm and given positive reviews by book critics in papers of record. In other words, Portnoy’s Complaint is literature for the same reason “Piss Christ” and Duchamp’s “The Fountain” are considered art—because it is in a museum, or in this case, because it was published. Once a piece of writing has passed these gatekeepers in the publishing firms and newspapers, any number of witnesses can be dredged up (as they were in all the Portnoy trials, and similar obscenity trials in the UK and USA) to declare a work as having literary merit. There were as many different interpretations of the term offered during the trials as there were people declaring to be literary experts. When it comes to Portnoy’s Complaint then, who were these gatekeepers?

By now the answer should come as no surprise to readers. It was published by Random House, Jewish Chairman and co-founder Bennet Cerf personally presenting Roth with a contract and an advance payment,[18] and the book received early positive reviews from Jewish critics Josh Greenberg at the New York Times, Albert Goldman at Life magazine and Alfred Kazin of the New York Review of Books. Portnoy’s Complaint struck a deep chord with second- and third-generation Jewish immigrants in America, who at the time were becoming entrenched in the publishing houses and in the wider literary culture of America. It was a time when the older concerns about how Jews were to assimilate into America were subsiding to the realization that American culture itself was becoming Jewish. As underscored by Edmund Connelly:

Roth began writing in the midst of what we can think of as the “Jewish American literary onslaught,” as Jews practically took over publishing fiction in America, and Jewish authors shouldered aside non-Jewish writers. Any English student at an American university from 1970–2000 or so would be familiar with the names: Abraham Cahan, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Brodsky, Henry Roth, Bernard Malamud, Chaim Potok, Saul Bellow, E.L. Doctorow, J.D. Salinger (half), Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, … Erika Jong, Cynthia Ozick and so many others.[19]

The idea of literary merit, if it ever had a concrete definition, comes from a time before Jews took over the reins of the major publishing houses and the direction of American (and therefore Western) culture; a time when it could be expected that the people at the helm of publishing houses would hold the fort against obscenity and not allow blatantly obscene works to be published.

Go to Part II.

[1] P. Mullins 2019, The Trials of Portnoy, Scribe Publications, Australia.

[2] For a while seditious works were also prohibited in Australia.

[3] Mullins, op. cit., p.30.

[4] The defendant Wald was Jewish abortionist Louis Wald, a practitioner at the Heatherbrae Clinic in the suburb of Bondi, at the time the largest illegal abortion clinic in Australia.

[5] Mullins, op. cit., p.40.

[6] Mullins, op. cit., p.45.

[7] High Court of Australia, Crowe v Graham Judgement, retrieved from: https://staging.hcourt.gov.au/assets/publications/judgments/1968/078–CROWE_v._GRAHAM–(1968)_121_CLR_375.html

[8] Mullins, op. cit., p.147.

[9] Mullins, op. cit., p.32.

[10] Mullins, op. cit., p.62.

[11] Australian Jewish News, Portnoy—A Series of Complaints, 30 September 1970, p.11.

[12] Mullins, op. cit., p.64.

[13] E. Michael Jones, 2008, Chapter 30 The Messiah Arrives Again. In: The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, Fidelity Press, USA, p.974.

[14] Mullins, op. cit., p.69

[15] Mullins, op. cit., p.261.

[16] Commonwealth of Australia, 2011 Review of the National Classification Scheme: achieving the right balance, Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee, p.30.

[17] Mullins, op. cit., p.197.

[18] Ibid., p.62.

[19] E. Connelly, 2018 ‘Harvey Weinstein: On Jews and the Shiksa’, The Occidental Observer, retrieved from: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2017/10/18/harvey-weinstein-on-jews-and-the-shiksa/