Desdemona’s “Just Understanding” of Othello’s Virtue

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Othello_MSC2004Editor’s note: A theme of TOO is that the entire culture of the West has been corrupted. This includes essentially all the arts and academic fields in the social sciences and humanities. It is therefore not surprising that Shakespeare criticism has been influenced by the reigning culture of the academic left. This essay is an abbreviated version of the second chapter of George F. Held’s ebook, Othello’s Disenchanted Eye, available at Lulu. Held shows that Othello, a play about an interracial marriage, has been seen through the eyes of current racial sensibilities.

I have stated elsewhere[1] that Othello is an “ethically lucid play.” I stand by that statement, but will now provide evidence which will to some extent undermine it. The play, though generally lucid, is not simple, and has been subject to gross misinterpretation. In his introduction to the play Frank Kermode writes:

His marriage to Desdemona, founded upon her just understanding of his virtue, is a triumph over appearances; it is grounded in reality and independent of such accidents as color or the easy lusts of the flesh; it is more like the love of Adam and Eve before than after the Fall. The archaic grandeur of Othello’s diction (as in the long speeches to the Senate in I.iii) and the extreme innocence of Desdemona (as the courtly Cassio expresses it in II.i) are ways of emphasizing these simple themes; one may see them ideally reflected in the music which Verdi wrote for Otello’s heroic entry, and the soaring purity of his Desdemona. . . .

There is room for another and more worldly view of the honesty of Desdemona’s proceedings; Iago and Brabantio express it. Her penetrating to the truth of Othello under an appearance conventionally thought repulsive can seem less a result of her purity of response than of some pagan witchcraft of his. It is precisely because such a union must appear to the disenchanted worldly eye perverse or absurd that Iago can destroy it. He represents a sort of metropolitan knowingness, a pride in being without illusion and a power to impose upon others an illusory valuation of himself. He converts to his own uses all the praise of honesty which properly belongs to Othello and Desdemona.[2]

Kermode sees the play in terms of a dichotomy involving two opposing groups: the first group consists of Othello and Desdemona, the second of Iago, Brabantio, and all those disenchanted with Othello’s and Desdemona’s union. The views of the members of each group[3] are similar to each other but differ substantially from those of the members of the other group. Specifically, the members of the first group adopt an unworldly, just, accurate view of race, color, Othello’s “virtue,” and “the honesty of Desdemona’s proceedings,” whereas the members of the second group adopt an unjust and inaccurate “worldly view” of all these same things. The views of the members of the first group are the result of their desire and ability to see reality as it is and to look beyond mere appearances; the views of the members of the second group are the result of convention and prejudice.[4] I will show that this analysis is not merely oversimple but entirely bogus and is itself a product of modern politically correct prejudice. Read more

On the Somali “Minnesotans”

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In the incredibly unlikely case that you have not yet heard, Jihadist terrorists based out of Somalia  struck a mall in Nairobi, Kenya — with death tolls running quite high. Then came the uncomfortable news that three of the terrorists were from… Minnesota. After that, the media chips fell where you would guess — the Somali-American community officially condemned the attack, then there was fear of reprisal, then Ms. Pamela Geller threw a polemical fit.  What would you expect?

Moving beyond pundit reactions, it is worth noting some of the background to this. Like the rest of America, Minnesota started receiving an influx of Somali immigrants in the 1990s, and quickly became host to more of them than anywhere else in the New World. Since, “those of Somali descent are not asked about their ancestry during the census,” the exact number of them is hard to determine, some say 30 or 35 thousand, others say at least one hundred thousand — regardless, most of whom live in Minneapolis. Despite the media’s best attempts to portray these recent events in a “how could this happen?!” way, this is not the first time Somalis from the Twin Cities have gone to Africa for the glory of Allah. The list keeps getting longer too, and with each new addition, the ones preceding it must be forgotten. For example, the recruitment video specifically targeting Somali Minnesotans that came out last month  is now being described as having “caused little stir.” The video’s obvious ineffectiveness is of course being noted now that there is something to indicate the opposite; much like how the conviction of four Somali Minnesotans earlier this summer for aiding al-Shabab has been completely forgotten. Read more

Ulrichsberg: A Memorial Place or a Road Sign to New Catastrophes?

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ulrichsberg

 

What follows is my translation into English of my featured speech, delivered in the German language on September 15, 2013, at Ulrichsberg, a village near the town of Klagenfurt, Carinthia, Austria, during the annual Memorial Day for the victims of communism and the victims of the Allied persecution in the aftermath of WWII.  The event was organized by the Austrian veterans’ organization Ulrichsberggemeinschaft. (Carinthia  was the last line of the  Axis defense by mid-1945,  before the surrender to British troops and mass deportation of civilians and soldiers to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The famous term, the “Iron Curtain” became then the hall mark of Carinthia).

Approximately 300–400 hundred people, mostly elderly, attended this open air event, mostly post-WWII German expellees from Eastern Europe, dozens of former Waffen SS and Wehrmacht veterans, including the descendants of other European Waffen SS units and other foreign auxiliary Axis troops from France, Italy, Hungary, Byelorussia, Croatia, Romania, Flanders, Wallonia, and Alsace. There were also a dozen representatives from Great Britain, Australia and the USA. The Ulrichsberg memorial day has a strictly commemorative purpose; any unconstitutional insignia any glorification of Nazism or Fascism is considered a serious breach of law and severely punished under the Austrian legislation. The annual event is partly sponsored by the local government of Carinthia.  In 2000, the featured speaker at the Ulrichsberg event was the late leader of the Austria’s FPÖ, Jörg Haider. Read more

ADL: “Conspiracy Theorists Blame Jews for Events in Syria”

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The “respected civil rights organization” is at it again. The ADL labels me a “conspiracy theorist” for documenting the wall-to-wall support of the organized Jewish community for a U.S. military strike on Syria (“ADL: Conspiracy Theorists Blame Jews for Events in Syria.”) There is also the claim that I am an “extremist”—which seems odd coming from an organization that favors the immigration to the U.S. of tens of millions of people from all over the world.

Kevin McDonald, an anti-Semitic professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach wrote a September 2 article in The Occidental Observer stating that, “The delay [in military action in Syria] provides an opportunity for the Israel Lobby to get into high gear in order to bump up the poll numbers and exert its power over Congress.”

You’d think that after all this time with me being on their Most Wanted list, they could at least spell my name right. The article doesn’t have a link to the offending article by me, which would leave the reader stuck with only a misspelled name and the link to the article about me on the ADL’s website (where they do manage to spell my name right). Indeed, there are no links for any of the articles and videos by the “fringe extremists and anti-Semites” listed in the ADL press release — presumably because the ADL doesn’t want its readers to see what they actually wrote.

The ADL’s ire is directed at an article posted on September 1, “The Israel Lobby and the Organized Jewish Community Want Regime Change in Syria,” where I looked at all the Jewish and (what is more or less the same) neocon websites I could think of to see what they were saying about a war with Syria. This included the ADL, and I noted that the respected civil rights organization had engaged in double talk on Assad’s responsibility and had once again used the Holocaust to establish their moral authority in a morally dubious situation. The only conclusion possible was that the ADL wanted regime change. Since the ADL didn’t complain about that, I guess they agree with my assessment. Read more

Bill Kristol: Israel must save the West

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It’s amazing to me that anyone with any brains takes neocons seriously. The Weekly Standard crowd shilled for a war with Syria by claiming that  the president must act “to ensure that Assad’s chemical weapons no longer threaten America” — as if Assad has a battery of ICBM’s ready to rain down terror on America.

Now Bill Kristol is  deeply concerned that peace might break out in the Middle East before the U.S. has destroyed every last enemy of Israel (“From Bad to Worse“). The piece is replete with comparisons to Hitler and  Mussolini, e.g.:

There will be no Rhineland this time. Iran isn’t 1930s Germany, and the United States is more formidable than Britain. For now, Iran will have to achieve its goals by stealth and diplomacy, while Hitler achieved his by bravado and force. But the accommodation of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons lies ahead as surely as the accommodation of Nazi Germany’s expansionist dreams.

They’re going to be stealthy about it, but the next thing you know, the Iranians will be in Cleveland.

Western Civilization is under attack, and as we all know, the neocons are nothing if not devoted to preserving Western Civilization; after all Kristol is a disciple of neocon godfather Leo Strauss.

The only country that can save the West just happens to be Kristol’s favorite country: Israel.

As Iran moves closer to nuclear weapons, undeterred by the West’s leading power, a 21st-century tragedy threatens to unfold. Unless. Unless a dramatis persona who didn’t exist in 1936 intervenes: Israel. Ariel Sharon once famously said that Israel would not play the role of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Nor will it play the role of Poland. Despite imprecations from the Obama administration, Israel will act. One prays it will not be too late.

It is a strange course of events, heavy with historical irony, that has made the prime minister of Israel for now the leader of the West. But irony is better than tragedy.

Israel is a Western society? Nothing more than a proposition culture dedicated to democracy and human rights, as the neocons would have it? I think not. Kristol, like Strauss, is a hypocrite: a strong Jewish identity that informs everything he does, while being a leader in pushing the Republican Party to the anti-White left. As we all know, Israel is the Jewish ethnostate, dedicated to an ethnically-based immigration policy, and ethnic cleansing and apartheid for the Palestinians. Would that he advocated that for Western societies.

But like Strauss who reinterprets the past to convince conservatives that Western Civilization has no racial content, Kristol frames Israel as a Western society to convince conservatives that they have a duty to defend it, no matter how Israel behaves. After all, they’re just like us.

The only sense in which Israel is a Western society is that Israel Firsters like Kristol dominate the foreign policy of Western societies. They are the moving force behind the violence unleashed by the West on the  enemies of Israel — the wars that have become the face of the West to the rest of the world. And despite all the high-flown rhetoric about freedom and human rights, it is an ugly face indeed.

Paul Gottfried and Claes Ryn on Leo Strauss

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The academic life is probably like many careers in that ultimately you have to find an audience. Professors spend months or years on a major project, then try to get it published in the best possible venue. Then they hope for positive reviews and, ultimately, acclaim and influence. I suspect that if one did a study based on exit interviews of academics as they retired from the profession, not a few of them would express the feeling that the game was somehow stacked against them—that their work did not get the attention it deserved, that it should have been discussed in all the elite intellectual venues—the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and ultimately, perhaps, become assigned reading in college courses everywhere. They should have been somebody.

Lots of academics probably feel this way, but no one has so explicitly expressed it quite like Paul Gottfried has. In his recent VDARE.com piece, “Claes Ryn, Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss, and Me,” Gottfried is clearly frustrated. He managed to get his book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, published by an elite academic publisher, Cambridge University Press—no mean feat. But intellectual fame and fortune haven’t happened, and Gottfried is not pleased:

I shall lay my cards on the table. I am outraged at how the usual suspects kept my book from being discussed. Despite my well-known views on certain delicate subjects, I tried to produce a fair study of a difficult topic and bent backward in showing sympathy for the movement’s founder and at least some of his disciples. The successful attempt to white out my work has annoyed me no end.

In order to explain this lack of attention, Gottfried refers to Claes Ryn’s  “Allan Bloom and Straussian Alienation“:

The arguments marshaled by [Claes] Ryn indicate, as does my book, why Straussians reign in the NYT’s Sunday Book Review Section as well as in Conservatism, Inc. Although Ryn does not make this last point explicitly, perhaps for fear of reprisal, a fuller explanation is at least implicit in what he does tell us. His comments may also explain why my book, initially marketed by Cambridge with high hopes and considerable promo, received absolutely no attention in the national Main Stream Media.

For fear of the Straussians.

So how have the Straussians been able to dominate all the high ground of American culture? And in particular, how they have managed to completely co-opt what passes for conservatism? These questions are not really answered by either Gottfried and Ryn, but there are hints. Both emphasize that Straussian ideology has functioned to pave the way for a new elite with no ethnic or cultural ties to the old elite by conceptualizing America as a proposition nation without specific ethnic or religious roots. Given the very large role of Jewish intellectuals among the new elite, the motivation is obvious: If one doesn’t share the ethnic, religious, and historical roots of a society but wants to be accepted as the new intellectual elite, then define the society as having no ethnic, religious, or historical roots. Ryn notes that

the desire to have America be something different from its historical past and to make it perhaps also more palatable to an aspiring new elite is probably most evident and explicit in Bloom’s fellow Straussian Harry Jaffa. Jaffa has made a career of asserting that America must not, repeat, not, be understood as owing anything of importance to an old historical heritage. It must be seen as born out of a radical break with the past and as based on abstract principles of an essentially Lockean cast—Lockeanism understood concomitantly as a departure from earlier thought.

The subterfuge of the Straussians was to attempt to locate this proposition culture in the deep wellsprings of Western culture in order to make it more palatable to conservatives, a position that required them to completely disregard normal standards of scholarship. Thus Plato is presented as an ardent democrat. Ryn:

Allan Bloom contends that Plato, whose iconic status and authority he would like to invoke on behalf of his own beliefs, is markedly different from how a long tradition of classicist scholarship has understood him. Contrary to all appearances, Plato is not scornful of democracy and democratic man. He is a democrat in disguise.

Indeed, in the hands of the Straussians, all of Western philosophy comes down to alienation from society and from tradition—an odd proposal to say the least, and here Ryn also mentions the Frankfurt School as completely on board with the Straussians. The tension arises from the fact that rejection of society and tradition are usually considered to be of the left. As Ryn notes,  “in their disparagement of tradition [they] resemble the open, unqualified left.” In place of tradition and ethnic or cultural particularity, these philosophers opt for universalist abstractions in which the White race or Christianity are excluded as significant categories. Read more

O Lobby Israelense e a comunidade judaica organizada querem mudança de regime na Síria

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Tradução e i
O presidente Obama agora está dizendo que sua administração decidiu atacar a Síria mas vai buscar a aprovação do Congresso para fazê-lo. Isto cria uma situação realmente interessante se o Congresso não concordar, como parece bem possível.
A ideia de Obama ordenar um ato de guerra contra a Síria sem apoio internacional significativo e sem um mandado do Congresso sempre foi uma coisa espantosa. Eis aqui nosso presidente de extrema-esquerda advogando mais outra guerra no Oriente Médio depois de se opor à guerra no Iraque quando era senador. O mesmo presidente que tem uma relação gélida com Benjamin Netanyahu e repetidas vezes ficou aquém das exigências do lobby israelense.