Valentin Rasputin’s Crusade

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Valentin Rasputin

With the passing of the great Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), the no less great, though in a different genre, Valentin Rasputin (b. 1937), assumed the mantle of doyen of the Russian literary scene. Whereas Solzhenitsyn wrote monumental tomes about festering political issues in Russia (Gulag, Revolution, Jews) and gained international fame thereby, Rasputin, a son and guardian of Siberia, gained his initial recognition mostly from his finely executed, almost precious novellas about life in his homeland and the ruin the Communist government was inflicting on it.

While the differences in style and subject matter between Solzhenitsyn and Rasputin are obvious, the bonds of similarity that immediately identify them as Russian writers are less so. Russian literary figures have religiously followed the tradition of earlier Russian literary figures like Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Bunin in seeing the role of the writer not as an entertainer or propagandist but as a kind of culture-bearer, a teacher, a conscience, and always a patriot — not in the sense of a chauvinist but rather as one who loves his country and its people. Such literary giants therefore help forge “a spiritual commonality” with their readers and give them “moral direction.” To fail to do this would be considered a betrayal of a sacred trust.[1]

The principles of Orthodox Christianity are most evident in the lives of both Solzhenitsyn and Rasputin. Rasputin, for example, was baptized by an Orthodox priest in 1980, when the Communist government was still in power. Both the writings of Solzhenitsyn and Rasputin are suffused with not only a sense of civic responsibility but with an overriding moral concern as well. Just as the Orthodox Church keeps alive and treasures everything in its past history, both Solzhenitsyn and Rasputin reach into older Russian writings to retrieve and reuse words and expressions that might have fallen into disuse. Both writers also studied ancient Russian folklore. Both were literary crusaders. Read more

What’s up with Alex Jones?

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How fortuitous.  Just the other day I had resolved to write about radio show host Alex Jones on this blog. He’s the hyper-provocative host of Infowars.com/PrisonPlanet. I’ve only recently begun listening to his broadcasts and am stunned at what he’s getting away with.

Because I respect the background knowledge that so many TOO readers have exhibited, I intended my blog as an appeal for opinions and background on Jones.

Now Kevin MacDonald’s latest posting on Glenn Beck’s implicit anti-Semitism (National Review Fires Derbyshire) provides the perfect framework for my appeal. To wit: Is Alex Jones peddling anti-Semitism?

Let me explain.

I’ve long understood MacDonald’s discussions on implicit Whiteness, as I’m sure most readers have, too. MacDonald ties that to the recent spate of firings of media people who have made implicit appeals to White interests. He then adds:

However, appealing to implicit Whiteness, implicit race realism, and implicit anti-Semitism translates to good ratings, so we will continue to see this sort of programming directed at White audiences—programming that feeds into their very legitimate fears, frustrations, and anxieties, not only about the current state of affairs but also about their future in a society where Whites are no longer the majority.

MacDonald’s article is based on Richard Spencer’s comments  on the Derbyshire affair which include some very clear examples of implicit race realism:

The Blaze and Breitbart (Beck’s and Breitbart’s answers to the Huffington Post) have filled their webpages with salacious stories of various flash-mob attacks and general Black misbehavior. As I write (Sunday, April 8), the top story on The Blaze is about the New Black Panther Party’s call for a “race war.”

On the same night that Breitbart declared John Derbyshire to be a non-person for talking about the dangers of Blacks, its best-read story was one on a unsuspecting White Man who ventured into Black Baltimore and was attacked and stripped of all clothes and possession by a feral gang.

Refining it further, Spencer writes, “The new wave of conservatives, represented by Breitbart and Beck, have peddled implicit racism; they’ve made a great deal of money off implicit racism. But the trick only works if they shun and condemn anything approaching actual White Nationalism.” Read more

Things sure have changed at National Review

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Does anyone remember James J. Kilpatrick? At one time, in the late 1970s to the mid 1980s he was apparently one of the most widely read columnists in the country. Do you know how he became famous? In the early 1950s he was an unknown editor/editorial writer for a newspaper in Richmond, Virginia. Then he began denouncing Brown vs. Board of Education, and championing states’ rights and segregation. He died in 2010. The following was printed in his obituary.

James J. Kilpatrick, a nationally syndicated columnist whose strongly conservative viewpoints on politics, law and language appeared in hundreds of newspapers over the last five decades and made him a popular, even parodied, television pundit, died Sunday at a Washington, D.C., hospital. He was 89.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Kevin.

Kilpatrick, who once described himself as “10 miles to the right of Ivan the Terrible,” was the editor of a Richmond, Va., newspaper in the 1950s. His anti-desegregation crusades gave him national prominence, eventually leading to a thrice-weekly syndicated political column called “A Conservative View. Read more

Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah, Part 2

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Part 2: Jewish Responses to Wagner’s Ideas

Basically ignoring whether Wagner’s views on Jewish influence on German art and culture had any validity, a long line of Jewish music writers and intellectuals have furiously attacked the composer for having expressed them. In his essay “Know Thyself” Wagner writes of the fierce backlash that followed his drawing “notice to the Jews’ inaptitude for taking a productive share in our Art,” which was “met by the utmost indignation of Jews and Germans alike; it became quite dangerous to breathe the word ‘Jew’ with a doubtful accent.” Wagner’s critique of Jewish influence on German art and culture could not be dismissed as the ravings of an unintelligent and ignorant fool. Richard Wagner was, by common consent, one of the most brilliant human beings to have ever lived, and his views on the Jewish Question were cogent and rational. Accordingly, Jewish critics soon settled on the response of ascribing psychiatric disorders to Wagner, and this has been a stock approach ever since. As early as 1872 the German Jewish psychiatrist Theodor Puschmann, offered a psychological assessment of Wagner which was widely reported in the German press. He claimed that Wagner was suffering from “chronic megalomania, paranoia… and moral derangement.”

The long-time music critic for the New York Times, Harold Schonberg (who was a Jew), described Wagner in his Lives of the Great Composers (1997) as “amoral, hedonistic, selfish, virulently racist, arrogant, filled with gospels of the superman … and the superiority of the German race, he stands for all that is unpleasant in human character.” In 1968 the Jewish writer Robert Gutman published a biography of Wagner (Richard Wagner: the Man, his Mind and his Music) in which he portrayed his subject as a racist, psychopathic, proto-Nazi monster. Gutman’s scholarship was questioned at the time, but this did not prevent his book from becoming a best-seller, and as one source notes: “An entire generation of students has been encouraged to accept Gutman’s caricature of Richard Wagner. Even intelligent people, who have either never read Wagner’s writings or tried to penetrate them and failed … have read Gutman’s book and accepted his opinions as facts.” Read more

Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah, Part 1

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PART 1

In the 2010 feature-length documentary Wagner and Me the British celebrity Stephen Fry explored his love affair with the music of Richard Wagner. Fry, who is Jewish, homosexual, and bipolar, enjoys a multi-pronged “victim” status that has made his identity politics credentials the aesthetic equivalent of a nuclear warhead. The inevitable consequence of this (and his Leftist politics) is his constant presence in the British media. Indeed, Stephen Fry is possibly the most overrated and overexposed individual in the history of British entertainment, and has benefited enormously from the intellectual elite’s construction of Jewish genius to the point where he is routinely hailed in sections of this fawning media as a “genius” and a “national treasure.”

As well as providing another celebrity vehicle for the overrated Stephen Fry, Wagner and Me offered another platform for exploring the life, work and thinking of one of the world’s most famous “anti-Semites.” While acknowledging Wagner’s undoubted genius, Fry reminds us in portentous tones that “a shadow falls across the sublime music. It’s not only the fact that it was later appropriated by Hitler which makes some people think of Wagner’s art as tainted. It’s also because Wagner himself was outspokenly anti-Semitic.” Read more

Policing the Media: National Review Fires John Derbyshire

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Peter Brimelow has a wonderful article at VDARE.com, mentioning John Derbyshire’s firing from National Review and noting that

in the last few years, an astonishingly long list of MSM journalists have been eliminated because they challenge, or are thought to be about to challenge, the MSM’s Leftwing consensus—for example, Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan. Even Rush Limbaugh has come under attack.   (“Help VDARE.com Save Immigration Patriots From Living In “A State Of Constant Fear”!”)

Brimelow might have added  Rick Sanchez, Helen Thomas, and now M. J. Rosenberg. Yes, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the organized Jewish community (including the ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and “major Jewish leaders”) are rejoicing that Media Matters “separated itself” from Rosenberg, who was fond of calling the Israel Lobby “Israel Firsters.”

One can only imagine the pressure put on Media Matters, their contacts in the White House, and on Jewish donors like Penny Pritzker who are the backbone of funding for both the Democrats and Media Matters. For Media Matters, what goes around comes around: They have been influential in getting rid of people like Glenn Beck removed from Fox News by pressuring advertizers, but they cannot withstand the financial fallout of a campaign by Dershowitz to get rid of one of their own staffers for political reasons.

But the big recent story is Derbyshire, an articulate race realist. His critics on the left and among mainstream conservatives are horrified at what Derbyshire wrote, but routinely fail to rebut his ideas. Would even the most benighted liberals want their kids to violate Derbyshire’s rules on “statistical common sense”? I thought of Derbyshire when I read “Report shows widening gap between Ethiopian pupils and other Israelis.” We can expect to find similar stories in the U.S., on the children of Ethiopian immigrants, along with stories on how the schools are failing them.

I’d love to post Derbyshire’s race-realist stuff at TOO, but he’s not likely to want to publish here because we deal with Jewish issues. Race realism doesn’t imply realism when it comes to Jewish issues. I guess being a philosemite does not necessarily protect one from the forces of evil. Indeed, even being Jewish is no protection. As Alex Kurtagic notes, Robert Weissberg was quickly removed as a National Review contributor when it was found out that he had recently given a talk at the AmRen convention. Read more

The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Affair: Previewed by Hollywood

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Well, I’m waiting. I’m waiting for something to wake up White people all over the world, especially in America. I’ve thought before there was enough out there to do the job, but people’s survival instincts have yet to kick in. And now we have the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman affair.

I really thought this anti-White media propaganda campaign was a no-brainer, but my brother surprised me by piping up about how terrible it was that a White guy had shot this innocent black boy in cold blood. In other words, my brother had swallowed the media line hook, line and sinker.

What is so discouraging about this is that I’ve kept him informed over the years about racial realism and the real state of crime in America. Further, I’ve situated it in the context of a “culture of critique” explanation showing how ethnic warfare on Whites is being carried out in education, the government, courts, and most explicitly in the mass media. Read more