Leonard Bernstein and the Jewish Cultural Ascendency — PART 1

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Introduction

2018 marks the centenary of the birth of Jewish-American conductor, pianist, composer and teacher Leonard Bernstein. This milestone has seen a global bonanza of 2,500 concerts, programs, exhibitions and theatrical productions. Bernstein features prominently in the pantheon of “Jewish geniuses” as designated by the West’s Jewish-dominated cultural and intellectual establishment. Bernstein’s centenary year inevitably yielded hagiography: for his Jewish biographer Allen Shawn, he was not just a “genius” but “a powerful cultural and political voice and symbol, transcending all categories.”[1] Mark Horowitz, curator of an exhibition at Philadelphia’s Jewish museum celebrating Bernstein’s “pride of tribe,” fully endorses this view, while for the Jewish music writer for the New Yorker, Alex Ross, Bernstein remains “American music’s dominant figure.”

Bernstein lived during the heyday of the recording industry, at the dawn of the television era and of video recording. He left behind what is possibly the most extensive documentation in recordings, films, and on paper of any musician in history. His archive at the Library of Congress already lists some 400,000 items.[2] During the 1950s and 1960s Bernstein was not only the best known of all American classical musicians; his fame rivalled that of Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe. Attitudes to Bernstein varied dramatically during his lifetime, and many responded negatively to the fact he was so visible, so outspoken, so dramatic, and so politically active on the left.

Famous for his flamboyantly extroverted temperament, Bernstein was a “personality on such a big scale that he would naturally manage to offend many people along the way. … His self-regard and need for attention were also, to be sure, extreme.”[3] Bernstein’s brash self-confidence and monstrous ego incurred the enmity of many of those he encountered. He “loved to be the center of attention, even if it meant being obnoxious” observed a fellow student at the Curtis School of Music who noted that his “extroversion was extreme.”[4] John Rockwell, writing for the New York Times in 1986, observed that “It is quite a remarkable personality, for better and for worse, the defines every aspect of his near-manic existence. There are those who still find him inherently annoying — when he shoots off what he likes to call his ‘big Jewish mouth,’ when he prances and gyrates on the podium, when he seems to squander his compositional gifts in flashy trivia or overwrought excess.”[5] Bernstein’s own children pointed out his unsurpassed ability to become emotional on his own behalf, to “move himself.”[6]

Bernstein’s unusual, extremely emotional, visual presentation was his trademark as a conductor. He conducted with his entire body in a style that led to much criticism and derision over the years. German composer Gunther Schuller, for example, observed that Bernstein was “one of the world’s most histrionic and exhibitionistic conductors.” Schuller saw Bernstein as a musician with “very little discipline and no shame,” whose interpretation of Brahms’ First Symphony contained “too much of an ‘oy-vey’ Weltschmerz to be bearable.”[7] Read more

Whites as Witches: “We Must Be Eternally Vigilant against Racism”

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As Mark Twain probably never said: “History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.” Old patterns return in new forms, ancient errors and superstitions slide back into unsuspecting modern minds. It’s very unwise for liberals in 2018 to think themselves superior to the past, because in some ways they’re far inferior. If you believe in the supernatural and accept the existence of an immaterial, spiritual realm, there’s nothing irrational about also believing in miracles and witchcraft.

The irrationality of liberalism

Modern liberals reject the supernatural and embrace materialism. At the same time, they believe in miracles and witchcraft. This is highly irrational. As I described in “Dawkins’ Demon,” liberals scornfully reject the idea that a single human being, Jesus Christ, was miraculously born to a virgin about 2,000 years ago in a tiny region called Palestine. Instead, they fervently embrace the idea that billions of human beings have been miraculously born for many millennia over vast stretches of the earth’s surface.

This is because liberals believe that the human brain, unlike all other parts of the material body, was miraculously shielded from evolution when human beings migrated from Africa and entered new and often very different environments in Europe, Asia and the Americas. And liberals believe in a further miracle: that when  some groups of Homo sapiens interbred with distinct human species like the Neanderthals and Denisovans, the new genes they acquired had no effects on their cognition and psychology. Liberals know this because “There is Only One Race — the Human Race.” For many thousands of years all human beings, no matter how different their environments, have kept the same average range of cognitive abilities and psychological traits.

New ways of saying “witchcraft”

In short, liberals think that we’re all the same under the skin. And if some groups do less well than others in an advanced Western democracy, there can be only one explanation. Witchcraft! Liberals don’t call it that, of course. Instead, they use terms like racism, sexism and Islamophobia. But the underlying concepts and psychology are the same as those that worked in ancient and medieval Europe. And that still work in many parts of the modern world. In Black Africa and the Black African diaspora, belief in witchcraft and magic is still widespread and powerful. Albinos and others are butchered for their magically potent body-parts in Tanzania and South Africa, sometimes while still alive. Adults and children are sacrificed to the spirits in return for material success and riches in Nigeria and Uganda.

Children are also sacrificed for those things in Western nations. In 2001, the headless torso of a young Black boy was retrieved from the river Thames in London. Named Adam by the British police, he had been poisoned and dismembered as part of a magical ritual. And the British police have spent a great deal of time and money trying to find his killers. The same police would also be eager to arrest anyone who said that migration by Black Africans into the West is a very bad idea. People who accept barbarisms like child sacrifice and child exorcism are not likely to be valuable citizens of a Western nation. And they’re not: Blacks in Britain hit the headlines for their criminality, not their contributions to science and high technology.

Whites are to blame

But they’re not to blame for this. When Blacks and other non-Whites in London fail at school, throw acid, and commit murder with guns and knives, this says nothing about non-White genetics and everything about White racism. After all, genes are material things, susceptible to scientific investigation and analysis. How could a mere chemical like DNA affect human cognition and psychology, which long ago slipped the surly bonds of matter and soared into the psychic empyrean? No, for secularist liberals it’s obvious that non-White failure and criminality must be blamed on the supernatural force of White racism.

When Blacks murder Blacks, Whites are to blame

That is certainly the only explanation on offer in an anti-racist investigation launched by the Guardian in December 2018. It carries the portentous title “Bias in Britain” and bewails such things as the way White men pass driving-tests at a higher rate than Black women. What more proof do you need that witchcraft at work? According to liberal ideology, human beings of all colours are the same under the skin, with the same cognitive abilities. Therefore non-Whites or women should succeed at exactly the same rates as Whites or men. If this doesn’t happen, then the more successful group must be guilty of racism or sexism. In the case of Black women and driving-tests, it’s both. Black women are the innocent victims of sexist racism and racist sexism. Read more

Tis The Season for Love

‘Tis the Season: A Pro-White, Pro-Natal TV Movie

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Last year just before Christmas a movie caught my attention because it’s one of the rare pro-White modern Christmas movies, and, for added surprise, it is also pro-natal. Try to name any Hollywood film or any kind of TV fare that fits that bill.

The movie is called  ‘Tis the Season for Love (2015) and it comes from the Hallmark Channel.

In this day and age with the war on Christmas in full swing and at a time when births to White parents are way, way down historically, what a treat it is to have one movie straight out of the maw of our entertainment industry that shows for one woman, life in a small town with a traditional man beats out the “You Go, Girl” life of a single woman in New York City. And there is not an ounce of irony in the entire movie.

Here is Hallmark’s summary of the show:

Beth Baker is an out-of-work actress stuck in New York City without her friends at Christmas time. She decides to return home to the quaint small town she escaped 10 years before and finds a place far different than the hamlet she left. She suddenly finds performing possibilities and even romance that kind of blow her away. Will the holidays prove to be as magical for Beth as they appear, or is Christmas magic doomed to disappear as quickly as it arrived for a lady who is ready to take chances she could never have imagined a decade before? Then again, this is the kind of thing that seems to happen during the Christmas season all the time.

Further, this movie got some serious numbers—2.3 million viewers at its debut three years ago. As far as I can tell, there has been no backlash against the movie, its actors, or its creators, and this year Hallmark again ran it. My own motive for highlighting this movie is to give TOO readers a small Christmas present as we head into the thick of the Christmas season. To be honest, so much of my own cultural criticism has been negative and pessimistic — if only because circumstances and honesty dictate it. So I’d like to offer something positive at this wonderful time of year. Read more

Biocentric Political Thought in the Third Reich: A Review of Johann Chapoutot’s The Law of Blood

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The Law of Blood
Johann Chapoutot
La loi du sang: Penser et agir en nazi
Paris: Gallimard, 2014
(English translation by Miranda Richmond Mouillot
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018, in press)

“I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” — Walter Sobchak

In today’s culture, any nationalist activist, or really anyone who is politically incorrect, is liable to be labeled a “Nazi” and compared to Adolf Hitler. This is so even when the comparison is patently absurd and the person in question is obviously not a “Nazi”: whether the conservative French patriot Jean-Marie Le Pen, the anti-Zionist mixed-race Franco-Cameroonian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, or indeed the populist civic nationalist Donald Trump. Comparisons to fascism are also de rigueur whenever the Western politico-media Establishment wishes to demonize a foreign leader who refuses to kneel, such as Slobodan Milošević or Vladimir Putin.

The reason such individuals are called “Nazis” and compared to Hitler is typically not because of any formal ideological similarities — none of those above have ever championed a totalitarian dictatorship or any kind of systematic racial or anti-Semitic politics — but for more emotional, civil-religious reasons.[1] In the current culture, “Nazi” or “Hitler” is simply the meanest name one can call someone (hence the phenomenon of Godwin’s law) — the designated term for anyone violating the orthodoxies of political correctness. Political correctness, in turn, has steadily shifted leftwards and radicalized over the years. This means that, today, if people adopt the opinions of prominent anti-Nazis like Charles de Gaulle or Winston Churchill (who were both racialist proud of their White identity and moderately Judeo-critical), they will, however absurdly, be sure to be called “Nazis.”

However, eventually a reaction sets in. Nationalists and free-thinkers will tend to become curious: what did Hitler and the National Socialists actually think? Am I, the so-called Nazi heretic, really like them? Were they — the designated worst evil of human history —  really that bad? These questions — as writers such as Irmin Vinson and Greg Johnson have noted —  are irrelevant to the legitimacy of ethnic Europeans’ right to live and prosper in their own homelands.[2] Furthermore, and quite obviously for anyone who examines the topic, the fact is that there are innumerable differences between historical German National Socialism and contemporary European nationalisms and White advocacy.

Nonetheless, National Socialism remains a historically and politically important subject, the genesis and downfall of which remains crucial to understanding the development of Western civilization in the twenty-first century. We can then salute the French historian Johann Chapoutot who in his La loi du sang: Penser et agir en nazi has provided a formidable intellectual history of official thought in the Third Reich.[3] Chapoutot, who had previously written a somewhat less fair-minded but still useful book on National Socialist Germany’s infatuation with Greco-Roman civilization,[4] can be credited for showing why and how so many Germans found National Socialism to be both intellectually and emotionally compelling. Read more

Roche Trap: A Tribalist Lets Slip the Truth

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A Spectre is haunting the Unz Review — the spectre of a highly ethnocentric Jewish commenter called Tyrion 2. He possesses all of Kevin MacDonald’s “background traits for Jewish activism,” from ethnocentrism and intelligence to aggressiveness and psychological intensity. With shameless disregard for facts and logic, he assails any criticism of Jews at the Unz Review, arguing aggressively and incessantly that no Jew anywhere has ever done or said anything harmful to non-Jewish interests.

Trap for a Tribalist

As you might expect, Tyrion 2 has been busy on re-prints of my own articles at the Unz Review. For example, he denies that the Jewish immigration minister Barbara Roche had any true responsibility for the massive increase in Third-World immigration under Tony Blair’s New Labour government. Here is his defence of Roche: “She was a junior minister in a government (naturally) dominated by Gentiles and only holding the relevant brief for 2 years. As to her motivations in upholding the party line of Gentiles Blair, Brown and Prescott, I don’t know (upholding the party line as a junior minister? keeping her job?).”

Anyone who reads my article “Roche Motel Revisited: The Comfort of an Atomized Society” will learn how far Tyrion 2’s assertions are from the truth. However, I thought that he wouldn’t bother attacking the re-print of my article “Liberals vs. Mother Nature” at the Unz Review. After all, the article is about India, Freddie Mercury and AIDS, not about the Jewish corruption of Western politics. I was wrong. Tyrion 2 seized on one small reference to Jews in the article – and entered a Roche trap:

Yes, both Jews and Parsis have been overachievers and yes, as you point out, Parsis were not as singled out for dislike as Jews [were] but Parsis lived in super diverse India and Jews lived in much more homogenous [sic] Europe. (Comment of 8th December 2018 on the re-print of “Liberals vs. Mother Nature” at the Unz Review)

Diversity is Good for Jews

Tyrion 2 is making the classic Jewish argument that racially and religiously mixed societies are safer for Jews than homogeneous ones. According to him, in “super diverse India” (in fact, not-so diverse Gujarat), Parsis didn’t stand out and so didn’t suffer persecution and expulsions as Jews did in “much more homogenous Europe.” And guess what? Tyrion 2 is thinking exactly like Barbara Roche:

Friday rush hour. Euston station [in London]. Who’s here? Who isn’t. A kaleidoscope of skin colours. The world in one terminus. Barbara Roche can see it over the rim of her cup of Americano coffee. “I love the diversity of London,” she tells me. “I just feel comfortable.” (Hideously Diverse Britain: The immigration ‘conspiracy’, The Guardian, 2nd March 2011)

Roche wasn’t acting on her own when she became immigration minister and opened Britain’s borders to Somalis and other low-IQ, high-criminality Third-Worlders. She was collaborating with other Jews to make Britain a more “comfortable” place for Jews. And since she left office, she has continued to campaign for open borders and for more anti-White bureaucracy:

Tony Blair should promote the benefits of legal immigration to Britain, and “not back off” from plans to create a super equalities commission, Barbara Roche, the former equalities minister, has urged. … The child of a Polish-Russian Ashkenazi father and a Sephardic Spanish-Portuguese mother, Ms Roche has reason for her feelings on immigration. “My being Jewish informs me totally, informs my politics. I understand the otherness of ethnic groups. The Americans are ahead of us on things like multiple identity. I’m Jewish but I’m also a Londoner; I’m English but also British.” (Roche urges Labour to promote the benefits of legal migration, The Independent, 24th June 2003)

Migration maniac Barbara Roche

In fact, Barbara Roche is neither English nor British. How could she be, when “being Jewish informs [her] totally”? For her and for other powerful Jews in the West, a term like “British” or “French” or “American” is merely geographic. That’s why she was so eager to flood Britain with low-IQ Third-Worlders, re-shaping its demographics in a way that, while inflicting huge harm and expense on native British Whites, allowed her to “feel comfortable” while sipping “her cup of Americano coffee” at Euston station. Read more

“The Mightier Our Blows, the Greater Our Emperor’s Love”: The Crusader Ideology of Germanized Christianity in the Song of Roland

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There is a mysterious quality to the first literature of any ancient nation. The earliest recorded poems are those produced right at the edge between the forceful spontaneity of barbarism and the dead letter of civilization. They almost invariably reflect a primordial and manly mindset very different from that of our own time. They express the psychology and values of conquering peoples, heeding closely to the law of life, by which nations prosper or die. So it is with the Iliad of ancient Greece,the Beowulf of the Anglo-Saxons, and the Song of Roland of the French.

The Song of Roland is the French national epic and the first great piece of French literature, emerging in the eleventh century, on the back of the First Crusade to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims. The poem’s author is even more mysterious than Homer, for we do not even know his name. The Song is a vivid and powerful expression of the values of medieval European chivalry and indeed of the centuries-long clash of civilizations between Christianity and Islam, dating back to the Muslim conquests of Roman Christian Levant and North Africa.

In contrast with later criticisms of Christianity as embodying a universalist “slave-morality,” in the Song we find Christian values perfectly fused, and perhaps subordinated to, the essentially Germanic warrior ethos of the French knightly aristocracy in the form of a novel crusader ideology. The Song presents a perfect case-study of what James C. Russell called the “Germanization of early medieval Christianity” or what William Pierce called “Aryanized” Christianity.[1] The heroes of the poem are obsessed with honor, family, nation, religion, and service to the emperor. I shall present the historical Charlemagne and the values of the Song of Roland. These can help us understand both the emergence and defense of European identity in past centuries. Read more

Quo Vadis Vatican? Jewish involvement in the radical changes of the Second Vatican Council

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Here’s to our murder-less mystery story, where its religious-ecclesiastical background calls for careful threading, though no issues of faith or belief are involved. I am referring to the Second Vatican Council, (1961–1964), some of its deliberations, the shadowy maneuvers that brought them about, and the implications and consequences for the brethren and the world at large. The Council implemented profound changes, of which many faithful are probably not fully aware, and from which the Catholic Church has perhaps not yet recovered.

But first some background. The late 1950s were a time of critical ideological tension. In Italy, Communist governments, provincial and local, ran and administered large swaths of the country. There was a chance that in the next political elections the Communists could win the majority.

Understandably, America was concerned and had disturbing contingency plans should the enemy win. In this, I think, they misunderstood Italy’s collective psychology. For one, many had already perceived the utopian nature of Marxist egalitarianism and sensed that a Communist state would resemble a convent or a prison. But they also knew that, if the Italian Communists won, they would quickly convert the convent into a brothel and the prison into a discotheque. That is, a change in name but not in substance.

Still, Pope Pius XII, who died in 1958, came from a noble family with a long history of service to the Church. Now policy and the political winds called for a Pope with a different background, a “populist” we would say today — one whose humble origins would implicitly raise favor among the discontent, hope in the disenfranchised and sympathy in the downtrodden.

Pope John XXIII filled the bill, for he was the fourth among thirteen children in a family of sharecroppers. And soon he acquired the byname of “good.” From then on, the masses knew him as “the Good Pope.”

Logic is never a friend of mass psychology, for ‘good’ is a relative term. Good compared to whom? In fact, according to a meaningful section of past and current Catholic thinkers, John XXIII was a disaster. Read more