Bitter Harvest: A Brilliant Film on the Ukrainian Holodomor

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“This particular film was extremely important to me, and it felt almost like a mission. I wanted to bring knowledge about the famine genocide, the Holodomor, to the Western world, and that’s why I did it.”
        Ian Ihnatowycz, Bitter Harvest Producer

Bitter Harvest (2017) is a film inspired by the love and rediscovery of the writer Richard Bachynsky Hoover’s ethnic heritage. On a trip to the homeland of his Slavic ancestors he began to ruminate on how to capture the story of the Holodomor on film. With small acting parts in a variety of television series Bachynsky Hoover was learning the ropes of the film and entertainment industry. He went again to Kiev, investigating his family history. It was 2004 and the Orange Revolution was in full swing — he saw firsthand a Ukraine in the midst of upheaval. He learned that Western audiences had never seen the Holodomor dramatized on film — a dramatically different situation compared to that other genocide that has become a touchstone of Western Civilization and both a sword and a shield for Jewish and Israeli interests through endless promotion in the media.  In 2008 he would return with a script, seeking financing for an English language period piece set during the Holodomor. He met with officials from the Ukrainian Government as well as various oligarchs. All of them turned him down. It was not until 2011 that the dream to make his movie finally caught a glimmer of hope when fellow Ukrainian Canadian investor Ian Ihnatowycz committed $21 million to the film.

British actors Max Irons and Samantha Barks star as Yuri and Natalka, two childhood sweethearts from the same village. They marry young and soon their lives are thrown into the whirlwind of revolution and resistance that comes with annexation of the Ukraine by the Soviet Union and eventual famine by way of grain confiscation. Barry Pepper and Terence Stamp are crucial to the supporting cast as Yuri’s family. Pepper sports the classic Cossack khokol (also called oseledets in the Ukraine) haircut — a long lock of hair on the top or front of an otherwise completely shaven head. Tamer Hassan, an English actor of Turkish Cypriot descent, takes the role of the real life villain Sergei, a Soviet officer who enforced Stalin’s will with relentless brutality. Hassan is the only non-White cast member, and may in fact be the only non-White member of the film crew. With the exception of a few stunts the entirety of the film was shot in Ukraine with Ukrainian extras and crew — some of whom took part in the Euromaidan protests during their off hours while shooting from late 2013 to early 2014. In several interviews and promotional appearances for the film much of the cast — but most significantly Max Irons — expressed a slight sense of shame over their prior ignorance of the Holodomor and the need to raise awareness of this historical tragedy. Read more

Lessons from Trump’s Condolence Call: It’s All About Race Now

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The acrimony surrounding Trump’s call to the Black widow of soldier Sgt. La David T. Johnson killed in Niger demonstrates many truisms about race relations in a society dedicated to multiculturalism and leftist identity politics.  Trump, along with regular Americans, would be well advised to take note.

I’ll take it for granted that readers will share my assumption that Trump did not call the widow Myeshia Johnson in order to somehow provoke her.  What he didn’t realize is just how easily such unintended provocations may occur in multicultural contexts, in particular when the White-Black dynamic is at play.

President Trump was quoted in the press, as reported by (Black activist) Rep. Frederica Wilson who was listening in on the call, as telling the widow heartlessly, “You know, he must’ve known what he signed up for.”  This has been taken out of context as to be a kind of taunt to the widow rather than simply reflecting on the natural role of a soldier.  Left out was the second clause of the sentence: “but it still hurts”

What can we learn from this whole affair? Read more

Harvey Weinstein: Revenge and Domination as Jewish Motives

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Edmund Connelly’s article on Harvey Weinstein and the shiksa phenomenon discusses revenge as a motive. From this perspective, what Jews like Weinstein are doing is the result of hatred toward the goyim because of their perceptions of the long history of anti-Semitism. Of course much of this narrative is false and exaggerated, but the point is that this “lachrymose” version of Jewish history is entirely mainstream among Jews and a cornerstone of Jewish education and Jewish self-conception.

Revenge is important — even critical — in understanding the main currents of Jewish behavior. However, several of the passages from Portnoy‘s Complaint seem to be much more about dominance and sexual competition than revenge. This suggests that another way to look at shiksa lust is from the perspective of evolutionary psychology which suggests that a central motive is domination over the women of the outgroup. In the competition for dominance among males, females are the ultimate prize. Recall that a constant theme of human history is that women are the spoils of war. Conquering males seize the women of their defeated foes — the Mongol harems throughout Asia come to mind, as well as the behavior of our Indo-European forebears. Read more

Harvey Weinstein: On Jews and the Shiksa

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Harvey Weinstein with Hollywood prostitutes

Let me cut right to the chase: The title for this essay should really be “The Specifically Jewy Perviness of Harvey Weinstein,” which, as luck would have it, is in fact the title of a short entry by Jewish writer Max Oppenheimer in the very Jewish magazine Tablet. This Jewish writer opines that “Harvey, sadly, is a deeply Jewish kind of pervert.”

Okay, I’m good with that. It fits the facts.

What is this “perversion”?  Well, Herr Oppenheimer kindly explains how it is common for Jewish men to lust after women with a “non-Jewish origin,” or, to be more specific, White non-Jewish women. As Oppenheimer writes about the targets of Weinstein’s lust, “It goes without saying that nearly every one of these women — Rose McGowan, Ambra Batillana, Laura Madden, Ashley Judd, etc. — was a Gentile, all the better to feed Weinstein’s revenge-tinged fantasy . . .”

Now what’s all this talk about revenge?  And what does that have to do with non-Jewish women? To unpack all of this, I’m going to have to go back in literary history to a Jewish American writer few of my readers under age forty (or fifty?) will even know: Philip Roth.

Needless to say, Oppenheimer knows this history, which is why he employs the following subtitle to his piece:  “The disgraced film producer is a character straight out of Philip Roth, playing out his revenge fantasies on the Goyim.” Before visiting what Roth has written, however, I must offer a brief description of the word “shiksa” and its manifestation in American film. Read more

Homage To The Post-First World: My Wanderings in Europe, Part 2

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Budapest — Pest side, Hungary

I was walking with the nice Bulgarian girl I had met the day before.

We stepped over puddles and little rivers of piss. You try not to, but you can’t help but notice that the Pest side of the city smells like a giant urinal after 6 pm.  And it was gypsy Christmas the day before. Hungarians tossed all their unwanted junk into the streets and hordes of gypsies rummaged through the scrap, claiming what they wanted. Some of the gypsy men had bats to guard their junk. I learned that Gypsy law states that anything on the street automatically belongs to them, and they enforce that law.

All the junk still hadn’t been cleared yet, although we try not to pay attention to it and we laugh it off as best we can. We have already gotten used to the beggars and bums nestled in the doorways, under the scaffolding and on the corners of the streets. We block them out of our vision as well.

And then we reach the square in front of the famous Saint Stephen’s cathedral. There is a wine degustation going on that night, and there was one pretty much every night that week. It is picturesque and romantic.

Christmas lights suspended above, benches with White, soft and jolly Europeans in the middle.

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He Doth Opine: A Review of Making Sense of The Alt-Right by George Hawley

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Making Sense of The Alt-Right
George Hawley
New York: Columbia University Press, 2017, 218 pp.

With any book, it helps to take into account who wrote it and who published it.   George Hawley is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama.   Assistant professor is the lowest professor rank.   Hawley’s a young faculty member, in his early thirties by the looks of his picture with his young child on his website — just starting his academic career, or so he hopes. Assistant professor is probationary status.  At the end of six years typically, you are checked out by senior faculty and administrators and if you pass muster, you get promoted to associate professor and granted permanent status, or tenure, at the university.  If you don’t get tenured, it’s the help wanted ads over breakfast, so the stakes are extremely high for young Hawley.  (With tenure, there’s just one more promotion, and it can be anytime, or never, to full professor.)   A must for getting tenure is a good publication record — publish or perish is real — which means Hawley had to give the editors at Columbia University Press what they wanted or he was dead in the water.

All to say, don’t expect an assistant professor to take intellectual or professional risks—such as running up against the PC doctrine of today’s universities and academic presses; or to go much, if at all, beyond the boundaries of his (or, of course, her) academic discipline, political science in this case — integrating, say, history, philosophy, psychology, and/or literature into his considerations; or to produce mature scholarship so early in his career.  Do expect diligence, however—nobody works harder than an assistant professor.

In sum, I got what I expected from this book.  That means a 4, perhaps 5, on a 10 scale—not bad, but it could have been a lot better.   That acknowledged, this book was worth my time—in fact, I read it in a single setting.  Professor Hawley thinks clearly enough (for this stage of his working life), he writes reasonably well, and he obviously devoted much time and effort to this project.  I profited from his descriptions of what’s going on with the internet (the Alt-Right, he reports, is largely an internet phenomenon, much of it anonymous), about which I am clueless.   I also found helpful the distinction he draws between the Alt-Right and the “Alt-Lite.” Alt-Lites he mentions include Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, Joseph Paul Watson, and the only two women in the book, Ann Coulter and Laura Southern.    No Alt-Right women, such as Lana Lokteff of Red Ice Radio, in this presentation.   The quotes in the book from Hawley’s interviews, including those with Richard Spencer,  were very good, though you couldn’t prove it by me that he took in and worked with what these people actually said. Read more

Andrew Marantz: Retract your libelous statement

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Journalist Andrew Marantz published an article on Mike Enoch (“Birth of a White Supremacist“) in the New Yorker in which he wrote the following:

In January, 2015, Enoch read “The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements,” by Kevin MacDonald, a former psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach. The book—published in 1998, heavily footnoted, and roundly debunked by mainstream social scientists—is a touchstone of contemporary intellectualized anti-Semitism. On “The Daily Shoah,” Enoch called it “important and devastating, something I urge everybody to read,” and then offered even higher praise: “It triggered me so hard.” From then on, he began to express his anti-Semitism more frankly. He sometimes spun his Northeastern upbringing as an advantage: having grown up around Jews, he understood the enemy. “You’ll talk to white Americans today, and they don’t actually know if someone’s Jewish or not,” he said. “I have very honed Jewdar. I can tell.”

The problem is the statement that CofC was “roundly debunked by mainstream social scientists.” This is false, and in saying it, Mr. Marantz has shown reckless disregard for the truth. His statement is libelous and I demanded on Twitter that he either support it or retract it.


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