“Birth of a Nation” at 100 Years Old

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dwgriffith

Liberals and multiculturalists hate it when confronted with works of obvious genius which don’t fall into the pattern of their worldview. Along with angst-fuelled hand-wringing over certain works by Shakespeare and Wagner, a more modern manifestation of the problem is the cinematic landmark, The Birth of a Nation (available in part here), which will quietly celebrate its centenary this week. Compelling, innovative, trend-setting, and epic in scale, D.W. Griffith’s astonishing and unflinching vision of the Civil War and Reconstruction-era South remains powerful viewing even on its hundredth birthday.

I was an impressionable eighteen-year-old college student when I first viewed it. Despite the admonitions and careful commentaries of my film and media professor, I remember seeing past the fact that it was silent and interspersed with grainy captions and being impressed by its ‘modern’ style and appearance, and the smoothness of the editorial process. But it was some years later before I came to truly appreciate the scale and meaning of what Griffith had committed to film. On this occasion I watched it in North Carolina, at the home of my wife’s very elderly grandfather. This remarkable old man was every inch a Southerner, and a true gentleman at that. There one humid May evening, with the AC broken down and the windows wide open, the old man pulled out some Civil War relics that he had collected over the years. Presenting a series of antique rifles, medals, and pictures of Lee and Jackson, his eyes regained a youthful spark as he spoke of his own family memories and connections (real or imagined) to a host of Confederate heroes. Later in the evening, after we set down the relics of war in favor of cigars and Scotch, he pulled out a dusty VHS from an old bookcase. It was Birth of a Nation. It’s a long movie, clocking in at over three hours, and the old man drifted off to sleep within the first half hour. But I kept watching. And it was that night, with the firebugs glowing and buzzing by the open windows, and with the fragrant Southern air drifting slowly inside, that I felt what Griffith had aimed to portray — pride of land, pride of culture, and pride of blood. Read more

2015 KMEA National Anthem

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The Sharks of Marx: Science vs Censorship

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Some people want to understand the world and some want to control it. But some want to understand the world in order to control it. Science is offering better tools to tyrants, but this means that tyrants may be better able to deny science. If certain facts about the world are ideologically unacceptable, modern technology will make it easier for a tyrant to suppress them.

For example, the Western world is presently governed by the dogma of human equality, namely, that all groups are psychologically and intellectually equal and that any apparent differences are caused by environment and culture, not by genetics. It is highly inconvenient that, scientifically speaking, this dogma is either a naïve fantasy or a self-serving lie. Many dogmatists would therefore like to end the inconvenience by ending the science:

I’m torn over how to respond to research on race and intelligence. Part of me wants to scientifically rebut the IQ-related claims of Herrnstein, Murray, Watson and Richwine. For example, to my mind the single most important finding related to the debate over IQ and heredity is the dramatic rise in IQ scores over the past century. This so-called Flynn effect, which was discovered by psychologist James Flynn, undercuts claims that intelligence stems primarily from nature and not nurture.

But another part of me wonders whether research on race and intelligence — given the persistence of racism in the U.S. and elsewhere — should simply be banned. I don’t say this lightly. For the most part, I am a hard-core defender of freedom of speech and science. But research on race and intelligence — no matter what its conclusions are — seems to me to have no redeeming value. (John Horgan, Should Research on Race and IQ Be Banned?, Scientific American, 16th May 2013)

Horgan’s proposal is neo-Stalinist, but that isn’t surprising. The modern dogma of egalitarianism is based on Marxism and the doyen of the dogmatists, the Jewish-American biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002), was the Lysenko of our day. And who was Lysenko? He was a Ukrainian biologist who revived Lamarckism under Stalin and enforced belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Insisting that there was no true distinction between genotype and phenotype, he enjoyed power and prestige for decades. But now he is listed in the “Pseudoscientific biologists” category at Wikipedia. I hope that Gould joins him there one day.

Lysenko’s enemies were sent to slave-labour camps and paid with their lives for being genuine scientists. In the modern West, the consequences of disagreeing with the dogma of absolute racial equality have, so far, extended no further than loss of job and reputation. There is still a tradition of free enquiry and free speech to destroy before the communist ideal can be realized in America and Western Europe. The Polish philosopher and historian Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) was very familiar with that ideal, because communism ruled his homeland and drove him into exile. He wrote about Stalin’s tyranny in Main Currents of Marxism (1978), which discusses Marxism in three volumes from its foundations through its golden age to its breakdown. In the third volume he described the fate of the “eminent genetician” Nikolay Vavilov, who disagreed with Lysenko’s scientific nonsense. Vavilov was “arrested in 1940 and perished in the Kolyma concentration camp” (op. cit., pg. 103). Read more

Charlie Hebdo — The Gift That Keeps Giving

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The Charlie Hebdo affair is the gift that keeps on giving if you want to understand the contours of power in the West today. There are many past incidents which, although trifling at the time, now take on a whole new importance  when seen through the lens of Charlie Hebdo — this solid gold BBC radio debate is one of them.

On Holocaust Memorial Day 2013 the Sunday Times ran a Gerald Scarfe cartoon which showed a bloodthirsty Binyamin Netanyaju cementing up a wall with the bodies of dead Palestinians. It was a gory, tasteless work which was par for the course for the artist and which would seem to fall well within the lampoonists terms of engagement as claimed by the post-modern supporters of #JeSuisCharlie  — i.e. nothing is sacred and no-one is beyond satire.

Except, as Gerald Scarfe was to discover, it turned out that some things are very much untouchable and unsayable. For the organised Jewish community reacted with predictable well-orchestrated incandescent rage and, equally predictably, the fearless News International caved in, withdrew the cartoon and responded with a fulsome apology from Rupert Murdoch himself. Read more

The Power of the Holocaust Lobby in Britain

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When it comes to a crude illustration of who has power in Britain you could hardly do better than take a look at the plans for the massive new Holocaust Memorial complex to be built in the centre of London (“Britain’s Promise to Remember: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report”). This gleaming new temple of worship for the state religion of the Holocaust will be located, most likely, beside Tower Bridge making it an indelible part of the London skyline and as much a city landmark as Big Ben.

It will be the largest of its kind in Europe and will rival similar memorials such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, DC, and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. The British taxpayer is contributing £50 million to this project on the understanding that at least the equivalent is met from private sources. Doubtless this will multiply before it is all over.

In announcing it on Holocaust Memorial Day Prime Minister David Cameron  was keeping the solemn promise he made to the Jewish people, that “Ensuring that the memory and lessons of the Holocaust are never forgotten lies at the heart of Britain’s values as a nation.”  The British Government has agreed that it has to do much more to step up its indoctrination of British schoolchildren.

With only weeks to go before the next general election this Memorial announcement has given Cameron a golden opportunity to bend the knee and demonstrate his obeisance.  Whether it is in front of the Knesset, on a visit to Auschwitz or celebrating Jewish holy days, he never misses a chance to declare his devotion and unswerving loyalty to Jewish power. Read more

St. John Chrysostom on the Jews: Creating an Anti-Jewish Group Strategy

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Body of St. John Chrysostom (Chapel of the Choir – Basilica of St. Peter – Vatican City)

Body of St. John Chrysostom (Chapel of the Choir – Basilica of St. Peter – Vatican City)

A correspondent just notified me of a blog post from 2010 on St. John Chrysostom by Roger Pearse, a scholar of Christianity in the ancient world (“Some remarks about John Chrysostom’s homilies against the Jews“). Pearse quotes from a 1935 summary of Chrysostom’s writings whose author, A. L. Williams, notes that Chrysostom was motivated by the fact that many Christians were

frequenting Jewish synagogues,  were attracted to the synagogal Fasts and Feasts, sometimes by the claims to superior sanctity made by the followers of the earlier religion, so that an oath taken in a synagogue was more binding than in a church,  and sometimes by the offer of charms and amulets in which Jews of the lower class dealt freely.

Williams concluded:

We gather from these Homilies that the Jews were a great social, and even a great religious, power in Antioch.

Exactly. As discussed in Chapter 3 of Separation and Its Discontents, the phenomenon of Judaizing Christians in the ancient world is a marker of Jewish power at the time. For example, the rather limited anti-Jewish actions of the government during the 150 years following the Edict of Toleration of 313, which included many attempts to ban the common practice of Jews enslaving non-Jews, are interpreted by historian Bernard S. Bachrach “as attempts to protect Christians from a vigorous, powerful, and often aggressive Jewish gens.”  Jews as a powerful group were looked up to and emulated by many non-Jews, just as today we see the same phenomenon, not only Bush-yarmulkaamong many Evangelical Christians, but also Hollywood celebrities who dabble in kabbalah and pretty much the entire non-Jewish political class which we see making pilgrimages to Israel and proudly wearing yarmulkes and displaying menorahs during photo-ops. Read more

Rabbi Schneerson’s Contempt for Non-Jews Advertised on Buses in Israel

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From the Israeli apartheid page on Facebook, via Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss:

A bus in Jerusalem has this caption in large lettering:

Israel’s bus company Egged has accepted this ad in Jerusalem:
“Statement of the kingdom. From the teachings=instructions of the [Lubavitcher] rabbi

The Gentile does not want anything. He waits to be told what the Jew wants!”

Mondoweiss comments:

The Lubavitcher rabbi was Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994). Schneerson died in NY and is buried there. If this ad were on a bus in NY, people would say it was anti-Semitic. But then, it couldn’t be on a bus in NY, could it?

P.S. Egged subsidiary EBS, had just lost a 320M euro 10-year contract in Haarlem district, Netherlands (Pop 155,000), after some demonstrations against its complicity in apartheid.

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