Susan Sontag’s Jewish World

/18 Comments/in , /by

A theme of The Culture of Critique is that Jewish intellectual movements created a fundamentally Jewish intellectual and social world whose members promoted each other and socialized with each other. People outside that world didn’t matter. They could be subject to mobbing-type attacks or simply ignored.

The New York Intellectuals spent their careers entirely within a Jewish social and intellectual milieu. When Rubenfeld (1997, 97) lists people [Clement] Greenberg invited to social occasions at his apartment in New York, the only gentile mentioned is artist William de Kooning. Revealingly, Michael Wrezin (1994, 33) refers to Dwight Macdonald, another Trotskyist contributor to [Partisan Review, the flagship journal of the New York Intellectuals], as “a distinguished goy among the Partisanskies.” Another non-Jew was writer James T. Farrell, but his diary records a virtually all-Jewish social milieu in which a large part of his life was spent in virtual non-stop social interaction with other New York Intellectuals (Cooney 1986, 248). Indeed, [Norman] Podhoretz (1967, 246–248) refers to the New York Intellectuals as a “family” who, when they attended a party, arrived at the same time and socialized among their ingroup. (CoC, Chapter 6, pp. 220-221)

A discussion in the Forward of a recent biography of Susan Sontag is a nice illustration of this phenomenon (Susan Sontag’s Not-So-Secret and Not-Always-So-Jewish History: Biographer Demonstrates Author’s Persistent Charms). 

Very soon, Sontag would draw inspiration from a series of Jewish mentors and friends, or as Schreiber puts it, the “dominant, exotic European-Jewish father figure to whom Sontag was attracted throughout her career.” These include the political philosopher and classicist Leo Strauss and the sociologist Philip Rieff with whom she studied at the University of Chicago— she married Rieff at age 17. At Harvard, Sontag was taught by another sociologist, Jacob Taubes; his wife Susan’s fascination with the French Jewish philosopher Simone Weil inspired one of Sontag’s ardent campaigns to get the American reading public to heed hitherto overlooked writers and thinkers. Her publicization of “the achievements of such authors as Walter Benjamin [of the Frankfurt School], Elias Canetti, Paul Goodman, and Leonid Tsypkin, who wrote the novel “Summer in Baden Baden,” are among Sontag’s most sympathetic labors.

While respectful of literary elders, Sontag had an ironic attitude toward a few “dominant, exotic European-Jewish father figures” such as French Jewish philosopher Jean Wahl, whom she met in Paris in 1958. The septuagenarian Wahl, who had escaped from Drancy internment camp during the Nazi occupation, was mocked by Sontag for having “three holes in his pants through which his underpants were visible.” By the time she moved to New York in 1959, her Jewish influences were her contemporaries, often gay writers including the novelist Alfred Chester, poet Richard Howard and film critic Elliott Stein. The last-mentioned apparently inspired Sontag to write her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” which, if necessarily of its time, still has value as a cultural artefact today.

Read more

Jews, ‘Israelis’ and the Israel Lobby

/12 Comments/in , , /by

News from England conveys that Andrew Bridgen, a Member of Parliament for the so-called Conservative Party, has troubled those of the Hebrew persuasion by daring to mention that there is a link between the Jewish people and the State of Israel. During an exchange in the House of Commons on proposals to recognize a State of Palestine, Bridgen is alleged to have said:

Does my hon. Friend agree that, given that the political system of the world’s superpower and our great ally the United States is very susceptible to well-funded powerful lobbying groups and the power of the Jewish lobby in America, it falls to this country and to this House to be the good but critical friend that Israel needs, and this motion tonight just might lift that logjam on this very troubled area?

A report at Breitbart.com is illustrative of irrational and pathological responses to any acknowledgement that Jewish lobbying groups (of which the Israel Lobby is only one) are well-funded and highly influential. Despite the measured tone of Bridgen’s comments, Breitbart’s journalist described the statement as a “scathing, anti-Semitic attack on pro-Israel groups in the United States. … Mr Bridgen’s comments give fuel to the anti-Israel lobby in the UK, and echo statements made by a number of anti-Semites. According to the European Monitoring Centre’s definition on Anti-Semitism, equating the actions of the State of Israel with Jewish people as a race is classed as anti-Semitism.”

Bridgen’s sin, we can deduce, is deemed to be two-fold. The first element was that he dared to state that a Jewish lobby existed and that the government of the United States is “very susceptible” to its influence. Although this is a clear and demonstrable fact, it is off-limits for public discussion. His second sin was to dare to suggest that Britain should be a “critical” friend, and that Israel “needs” friends who will carefully point out when it has committed wrongs or errors — another perfectly reasonable statement, that is, unless you are Jewish in which case anyone who criticizes you or blames you for anything is an “anti-Semite.”

Israel’s actions are clearly blameworthy, and have cost it support. The Guardian reported that in the same debate, Sir Richard Ottaway, the Conservative chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, said the Netanyahu government’s recent appropriation of land in the Etzion Bloc area of the West Bank had cost Israel his support. He said he had long been a supporter of Israel but “I realize now Israel has slowly been drifting away from world public opinion. The annexation of the 950 acres of the West Bank just a few months ago has outraged me more than anything else in my political life. It has made me look a fool and that is something I deeply resent.” A significant problem is that there are many more fools, with a variety of motives, who will persist in their support for Israel. Read more

Diseased Defectors: UKIP, Islam and the Hand of the Board of Deputies

/31 Comments/in , /by

UKIP has won a landslide victory in the south of England. It also came within just over 600 votes of winning a formerly safe Labour seat in the north. Both the Tories and Labour are running scared. They’re paying the price for ignoring public anger about immigration. The old accusation of “Racism!” isn’t working any more. And both parties may see MPs defecting to UKIP, frightened that they’ll lose their seats if they stay where they are.

After all, UKIP’s election victor, Douglas Carswell, is a defector from the Tories. But that’s what worries me. Carswell is a plague-bearer from a diseased party. He’s said this: “I have no difficulty with Britain as Britain is today.” Rape-gangs, riots, FGM, electoral fraud — Carswell is fine with all that.

He’s also declined to endorse what the UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, said about banning people with HIV from entry to Britain. This is an eminently sensible proposal with majority support, which is why it has been greeted with outrage by the liberal elite. Don’t White tax-payers realize how privileged they are to fund vibrant enrichers with hugely expensive diseases?

Apparently not. But Carswell won’t side with the White majority against the liberal elite.

Nor is he opposed to further immigration:

On the subject of immigration, let me make it absolutely clear; I’m not against immigration  … We should welcome those that want to come here to contribute. We need those with skills and drive. There’s hardly a hospital, GP surgery or supermarket in the country that could run without that skill and drive.

Apparently the native British are incompetent to run a modern society. The UK simply must have ever more immigrants or the whole society will fall apart. Read more

Tom Sunic’s letter to the US Ambassador to Hungary

/14 Comments/in /by

October 11, 2014

Mr. André Goodfriend
Chargé d’Affaires
Embassy of the United States of America
Szabadság tér 12
H-1054 Budapest

Dear Mr. Goodfriend,

As an American citizen I would hereby like to express my concern over the recent decision by the Hungarian government to ban the National Policy Institute (NPI) conference which had been scheduled to take place in Budapest from October 3 to October 5, 2014. I would also like to express my dismay at the arrest and expulsion of my good colleague, the NPI Chairman, Mr. Richard Spencer, whose colleagues and I decided to proceed with the conference despite the previous ban by the Hungarian government. The interdiction of the conference by the Hungarian government caused severe financial losses to the organizers, to the speakers, as well as to all registered and would-be attendees of the conference.

While I am aware that the truncated NPI conference, held in private in Budapest on October 4, was in legal defiance of the earlier decision made by the Hungarian government, let me also state the following: The NPI has hosted over the years prominent scholars in the field of sociobiology and political science, both from the USA and Europe. Contrary to frequent media headlines and often bizarre speculations, as well as the earlier statements issued by the Hungarian government about the alleged NPI racist gathering, the speakers, including myself, at that smaller version of the event did not preach xenophobia or promote racial hatred. Instead, the main focus of our short lectures was how to prevent nationalist and racial violence in the EU and the USA, which, as an historical rule, always occurs in forcibly and artificially created multicultural and multiracial social structures. Read more

Avoiding Nationalist-on-Nationalist violence: Electoral Politics vs. Cultural Metapolitics

/23 Comments/in , /by

White Nationalist websites appear to be abuzz with conflict these days. Occidental Dissent has a list, amusing or depressing depending on your mindset, of “beefs” between White Nationalists. The movement seems so fractious and sectarian at times it rather recalls the far-leftists inimitably parodied by Monty Python.

I am now involved in this as Ted Sallis has written a critical article that, while not explicitly mentioning me, I am quite sure is referring to my comments on the French National Front (FN). Personally, I welcome frank debate and criticism, and in any case I’m relatively new to the nationalist scene so I don’t claim to lecture anyone.

But these apparently obscure debates and petty conflicts on websites with, let’s face it, limited reach raise an important issue: What should be the relationship between White Nationalists, which for now are largely limited to at best metapolitical groupuscules, and necessarily more moderate nationalist parties with mass voter appeal or which are even in power?

The issue is of the distinction between the political and the metapolitical in a particular régime. That régime today is characterized by two things: absolute liberal/antinational cultural hegemony and mass electoral politics. That means every nationalist party has a choice: either to contest the culture (in which case it will be boycotted/demonized by media) in the hopes of changing that culture or to respect the culture’s taboos (by engaging in self-censorship and crypsis) in the hopes of gaining political power. Read more

Frank Salter on Race and Nation in Australia

/16 Comments/in , , /by

salter war

Frank Salter has published a collection of essays titled The War on Human Nature in Australia’s Political Culture, reviewed favorably by John Derbyshire at Vdare.com. It consists of six essays, five of which previously appeared in Quadrant, an Australian political magazine. Below is an essay I wrote on two of the three essays that deal with the national question when they originally appeared. (Derbyshire labels these three essays “the real meat of the book.”)  Derbyshire notes the following about the Salter’s essay on libertarian immigration enthusiasts which hadn’t appeared when I wrote my commentary:

Salter tosses and gores Australia’s little—but influential and dismayingly respectable—clique of open-borders libertarians, using arguments that will be familiar to VDARE.com readers. He rounds off the essay with some blunt facts.

The only population difference between the immigration levels adopted by succeeding governments over recent decades and open borders is the date at which the country becomes overcrowded. In addition ethnic stratification is growing. Most Aboriginal Australians remain an economic underclass and some immigrant communities show high levels of long-term unemployment. Anglo Australians, still about 70 percent of the population, are presently being displaced disproportionately in the professions and in senior managerial positions by Asian immigrants and their children.

The solution, he believes, is to break the stranglehold of ideology on university departments of humanities and social sciences.

Lots of luck with that.

My essay, originally posted on January 24, 2013:

Readers of TOO are familiar with Dr. Frank Salter’s work on ethnic genetic interests and his critique of multiculturalism. Now he has a series of articles in Quadrant exploring the decline of biological perspectives in the social sciences and concluding with two articles dealing with race and nation.  These articles are brilliant analyses of the plight of White majorities in all Western countries as they attempt to cope with displacement-level immigration and with sweeping changes in national identity and culture. Salter’s analysis focuses mainly on Australia, but it’s clear that his analysis applies to all Western countries. His attempt is not to chart the causes of this sea change, but to describe the changes by presenting a realistic analysis in terms of ethnic interests of all groups, including Whites, and emphasizing the costs to the White majority. Although Salter does not mention Jewish issues, his analysis is entirely compatible with the decisive role of the Jewish left in Australia specifically and in the wider culture of the West. For an in-depth analysis of the Jewish role in promoting non-White immigration and multiculturalism in Australia, see Brenton Sanderson‘s important essay, “The War on White Australia: A Case Study in the Culture of Critique.”

In “The War on Human Nature, III: Race and Nation in the Media” Salter notes that in the course of the twentieth century, the left shifted from attempting to improve the lives of people within particular societies to an internationalist focus. “From before the Bolshevik coup of 1917, cosmopolitans have fought against beliefs that would bolster Western identity and confidence.” He emphasizes the role of Franz Boas in altering the landscape of the social sciences in opposition to Darwinism and biology. (Boas is discussed in The Culture of Critique as motivated by his Jewish identity and antipathy to the people and culture of the  West.) The long-term result has been the dominance of “intolerant utopianism of multiculturalism, revolutionary levels of immigration, and censorship of free speech on the subject.”

As an evolutionist, Salter is aware that the policy of non-White immigration has huge genetic costs to the host population. What is remarkable is that this assault  “is occurring at the invitation of Western elites, often contrary to public opinion. The process is epochal whether viewed through zoological, national or democratic eyes.” He is well aware that ethnic consciousness should be seen as normal for all peoples, not just the peoples who are now inundating Western societies. “Not only racism but pro-social values of ethnic and national community have an innate basis. And if minority ethnic consciousness is normal, so is the majority equivalent.” Read more