Art in the Third Reich: 1933–1945 (Part 1)

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Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885), The Butterfly Hunter

This is a slightly edited version of an article was first published in Ecrits de Paris (Nr. 645, July-August 2002, L’Art dans l’IIIème Reich. Translated by the author.)

When writing about or discussing the plastic and figurative arts in Germany during the period from 1933 to 1945, one must inevitably mention the art that highlighted the epoch of National Socialism. During that short and troubled period of time, art was also a reflection of modern European history, and, therefore, it must be examined, or, for that matter, conceptualized, within the larger geopolitical framework of Europe as a whole.

National Socialist culture has always been a sensitive subject, whose controversial nature is more apparent today than ever before in the ongoing media warfare between so-called anticommunists and antifascists. If one accepts the conventional wisdom, widely accepted in all corners of he world, that National Socialism was a form of totalitarianism, one must then also raise the question as to whether there were any authentic cultural successes achieved during the Third Reich at all. Certain parallels can and should be drawn between artistic efforts in the U.S.S.R. and National Socialist Germany, in view of the fact that culture in both systems was dominated by a specific ideology. Does this therefore mean that there were no valuable works of art created in the U.S.S.R. or in National Socalist Germany? What both National Socialism and Communism had in common was the rejection of “art for art’s sake” (l’art pour l’art) and the repudiation of middle-class aestheticism. Instead, both political systems favored a committed and normative approach to art, which was supposed to be a tool for the creation of the “new man.” On the other hand, from the thematic, aesthetic and stylistic point of view, the differences between art in Communism and art in National Socialism were immense. Read more

Gilad Atzmon Replies

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Gilad Atzmon has responded to my review of his The Wandering Who? His comments say a lot about who he is and how he comes to his conclusions. First, he titles his comment “Supremacists on ‘The Wandering Who’“, the word ‘supremacist’  being the term of art used by by anti-White organizations like the SPLC and the ADL to vilify any White person with a sense of racial identity and interests. While the SPLC and the ADL are quite fond of other groups with strong identities (e.g., Blacks, Latinos, Jews, and Muslims), Atzmon is being consistent here: His real complaint is that a strong Jewish identity leads to the horrors of the brutal Zionist occupation, so it is not surprising that he opposes any sense of White racial identity as well.

In a way, I can sympathize with Atzmon’s sentiment. If America had remained 90% White and was not threatened by the massive invasion of strongly identified groups hostile to the traditional people and culture of America, there would be no reason for Whites to develop a strong racial identity. Individualism works well in homogeneous, implicitly White societies, but will break down under the current multi-cultural onslaught.  When people perceive themselves to be under threat from cohesive outgroups, psychological mechanisms of social identity kick in and they assume a group identity themselves—even people who are prone to individualism. Read more

Jewish Partisan Warfare During WWII

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The recurring theme of Jewish suffering during World War II in 1990s movies (Schindler’s List) has gradually shifted to the image of the outsmarting Jew (The Counterfeiters, 2008) and even the resisting Jew (Defiance, 2008). This shift of focus has not been to the benefit of the image of the Jewish victim, because it exposes Jewish crimes as well. The main character in The Counterfeiters is a petty criminal who is willing to work for the German war effort, but the movie “Defiance” has opened up the historical Pandora’s box of Jewish partisan violence and collaboration with the Soviets.

The Bielsky Brothers

The Bielski Brothers

The true story of the Bielski brothers, on which the movie Defiance is based, is actually more interesting than the movie. In the 1930s the Bielski family were grocers and millers (N. Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, Oxford University Press 1993) in what was then a border town between Poland and the Soviet-Union and now is situated in Belarus. When the Soviet-Union invaded Poland in 1939 on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Bielski family collaborated with the communist occupiers as the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza (Jan. 6, 2009) points out. This resulted in a breach with the predominantly Roman-Catholic Polish population, which saw the Soviets as the oppressors of the Polish language, culture and religion. Ten of thousands Polish officers and intelligentsia were executed and hundreds of thousands ordinary Poles were deported to forced labour camps in Siberia as a direct result of Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941. Read more

A Dissident Meditation on Jewish Identity: A Review of Gilad Atzmon’s “The Wandering Who?”

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Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (Winchester, UK and Washington, DC: Zer0 Books, 2011, 202 pp.)

Gilad Atzmon is one of those rarest of all birds—the sort of person who would be called a “self-hating Jew” by Jewish activists. Except that he doesn’t really hate himself and really doesn’t have much of a Jewish identity at all. He is an honest leftist who happens to be of Jewish origin; or perhaps one should label him a liberal devoted to the values of the Enlightenment,  without the typical Jewish blinders. Although he has a few blinders of his own, he sees quite clearly the incompatibility of Zionism with post-Enlightenment Western civilization.

For Atzmon, Zionism is all about Judaism as racial identity politics, ethnic cleansing, and manipulating Western governments via the Israel Lobby. As a child growing up in Israel, “supremacy was brewed into our souls, we gazed at the world through racist, chauvinistic binoculars. And we felt no shame about it either” (p. 2). He began his journey of embracing the West as a result of immersion in jazz. Eventually, “I somehow already yearned to become a Goy or at least to be surrounded by Goyim” (p. 7).

For Atzmon, the racialism so fundamental to Zionism is an aberration from Judaism the religion. He has no problem with people who “regard themselves as human beings that happen to be of Jewish origin.” The problem arises with “those who put their Jewish-ness over and above all other traits” (p. 16). This sort of Jewish essentialism was central to Zionism from the beginning, often with strong racialist overtones. Quoting Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of the Israeli right:

A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German customs, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish because his blood, his body, his physical racial type are Jewish. Read more

National Suicide: Review of Pat Buchanan’s “Suicide of a Superpower”

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Pat Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2011, 496pp.).

Pat Buchanan takes the gloves off in his new book.

During a question and answer session after his Bradley Lecture on “the State of White America,” author Charles Murray called on Sam Kazman, general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He prefaced his question with this dictum, “there will always be an America, it just may not be in the United States.”

The sentiment captures the sweeping transformation of American society since the mid-1960s — a society that was largely European (in values, population, culture, and folkways) now is on a demographic trajectory to become a majority-minority cesspool by 2050 with the White population declining to minority status.

An apt description of American society isn’t merely the metaphorical “salad bowl” replacing the “melting pot” — the lettuce is a vanishing ingredient!

The quintessential dilemma that seems to be on the minds of more and more Middle Americans is the question Pat Buchanan poses in the preface of his latest book: “What happened to the country we grew up in?” It is a question weighing heavily on the minds of Midwesterners and other citizens as they see their communities rapidly becoming Third World sinkholes.

The question is one that preoccupies Buchanan in Suicide of a Superpower. It is indisputably his boldest and most passionate assessment of our nation’s fate — an America vanishing before our eyes.

As Buchanan notes, the nation of our forefathers will be unrecognizable to future generations of Americans. It is, as he puts it, a country that lost a nation. Read more

Kyle Kusz on Andre Agassi

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In a previous blog I commented on Kyle Kusz’s cultural Marxist analysis of White males in extreme sports. I can’t resist also commenting on Kusz’s outrageous discussion of another one of those oppressive White athletes, Andre Agassi. After Agassi’s redemption as an athlete (where he turned his career around after a long stretch of not taking tennis seriously), Kusz claims that Agassi’s later image of “white masculinity is implicitly invested in notions of personal responsibility, sovereignty, self-determination and the disavowal of structural privileges of any kind. … His response to his episode of suffering [during the period when he was a tennis underachiever] enabled the fantasy of extraordinary will and limitless energy of white men ” (p. 56).

In other words, Agassi’s personal determination to get his tennis career back on track counts for nothing. His career magically got back on track because he was able to take advantage of structural privileges only accorded to White men. Just being White allows one to overcome all obstacles. Hey Kusz: Know any White guys, even rich White guys, who have failed despite all their structural privileges? Read more

Racial Preferences in the California University System

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LA Times Caption: A student sells baked goods with prices based on a buyer's race, ethnicity and gender. In reality, the Republican club accepted whatever people wanted to pay. Seated at right is former UC Regent Ward Connerly. (Ben Margot / Associated Press / September 27, 2011)

The college Republicans at UC-Berkeley have gotten a lot of attention with their bake sale in which prices are determined by people’s race and gender, with White males paying top dollar. It’s a great gimmick, definitely putting the usual suspects on the defensive.

The event, met with anger by many students, was timed to counteract a phone bank in support of a bill on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk that would allow the UC and Cal State University systems to consider such factors, as long as no preference was given, in admissions.

Proposition 209, passed by voters in 1996, banned affirmative action in public university admissions. The current bill would not violate that ban. Instead it would permit schools to consider things such as ethnicity, much as they do extracurricular activities, when weighing candidates. “Frosted by Berkeley ‘diversity’ bake sale“; LA Times, Sept. 28, 2011)

But of course that means that being Black will be counted like being captain of the debate team: Very positive. And being White will being like having a few run-ins with your guidance counselor on your high school record—definitely a negative. Read more