Why Has Mahler Become a Cultural Icon?

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R. J. Stove has a delightful article on Mahler posted at the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation:

The Mahler symphonies … get me out of here. I keep surreptitiously cheering Kingsley Amis’s verdict “Mahler lacks talent even more spectacularly than he lacks genius.” …

The leap in Mahler’s stature from near-oblivion in 1960 (when, as Britain’s Spectatornoted on January 13, “[H]is impact on the general public was roughly the equivalent of, say, [Poland’s Karol] Szymanowski today”) to deification after that date, has little or nothing to do with musical merits and almost everything to do with external considerations.

And what might these external circumstances be?

Once it became widely known that Mahler had lamented being “a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian in Germany, and a Jew in the world,” his identity-politics credentials became the aesthetic equivalent of a nuclear warhead, lacking only homosexuality to complete his posthumous triumph.

With the exception of a few musicians enthralled with the challenge of playing his music, the people who love Mahler love him because of who he is, not because they enjoy listening to his music.

Mahler has been the subject of TOO articles by E. R. E. Knutsson and Elizabeth Whitcombe. Knutsson described the Jewishness of Mahler’s music in the context of the fin de siècle cultural scene of Vienna: “It has been arguedthat Mahler’s music has links back to the Hasidic music of Eastern European ghettos of the eighteenth century in which dance music is deployed as a remedy to misery.” An anti-Jewish critic at the complained, “What I find so utterly repellent about Mahler’s music is the pronounced Jewishness of its underlying character. … It is abhorrent to me because it speaks Yiddish. In other words it speaks the language of German music but with an accent, with the intonation and above all with the gestures of the Easterner, the all-too-Eastern Jew.”

Whitcombe links Mahler to T. W. Adorno: “Adorno claimed that the bourgeois musical world was repressing Mahler’s work because Mahler shunned ‘moderate peacefulness.’ In Adorno’s words: ‘The genuine significance of Mahler that can be discovered for today lies in the very violence with which he broke out of the same musical space that today wants to forget him’ (Mahler Today,” 1930).”

Stove’s comment does not get into the details of how Mahler became so important. I suspect that an argument can be made that Mahler’s incredible success since the 1960s has to do with ethnic networking and with peculiarly Jewish attitudes toward culture. The topic deserves a full treatment.

Mahler’s visibility these days is truly phenomenal. Leon Botstein labels Mahler “the most visible figure from the high-art classical music tradition since Mozart.” Whereas in the 1930s Adorno complained that Mahler was on the verge of being forgotten, by the 1960s the intellectual landscape had changed dramatically, bringing to the fore the intellectual movements discussed in The Culture of Critique, including Adorno’s Frankfurt School.  By several accounts, the two most important advocates of Mahler during the 1960s were Adorno and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Adorno’s campaign on behalf of Mahler did not bear fruit until his influential 1960 book Mahler: A Musical Physiognamy. An historian notes, “The effect [of Adorno’s book] on the cultivated, on many musicologists, on composers, has been immense.” The Culture of Critique shows that Adorno had a strong Jewish identity and a hostility toward traditional Western culture (viewed as inevitably leading to fascism and anti-Semitism) that colored all of his writing.  In his view, Mahler was attractive because he was the antithesis of the traditional muscial culture of the West. (The same can be said of Adorno’s attempt to promote Arnold Schoenberg; see TOO’s Knutsson and Whitcombe.)  Re Bernstein, Botstein notes that “Bernstein was Mahler’s most prodigious advocate in the seminal 1960s…. Bernstein implicitly set Mahler’s ambivalence to his fate as a Jew alongside his own proud assertion of Jewish identity and faith.”

The result was that Mahler has become a sainted icon of the new culture — another example of Jewish genius. Even if no one really enjoys listening to his music.

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Edmund Connelly’s "Farewell, My Dear WASP"

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Edmund Connelly’s current TOO article “Farewell, My Dear WASP” again raises the conundrum of why the WASPs collectively abdicated their position of power in the US. He mentions the Stockholm Syndrome and other possibilities — all of which should provide for an interesting discussion here. What strikes me most is the quote from Scott McConnell’s review:

While trying to impress an older girl, his summer tutor in Greek, he blurted out something mildly anti-Semitic. The young woman dryly replied that she was in fact “a New York Jew.” Gilder was mortified. He relates that he has never quite gotten over the episode. It is the kind of thing a sensitive person might long remember. Variations on this pattern are not uncommon in affluent WASP circles to this day: guilt or embarrassment at some stupid but essentially trivial episode of social anti-Semitism serve as a spur for fervent embrace of Likud-style Zionism. Atonement.

This severe proneness to guilt has always struck me as the defining feature of the Puritan strand of American culture. And with excessive guilt comes moralistic aggression aimed at ingroups and outgroups alike. As I noted elsewhere, the Puritans have a unique ethnic background among Anglo-Saxons generally. They have a strong tendency toward moral idealism, whether expressed as opposition to slavery in the 19th century, or as anti-anti-Semitism in the 21st. Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own cousins — perhaps a form of altruistic punishment as the term is used in the scientific literature.

Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic—violations of communal norms . . . are punished by altruistic aggression.

And since Gilder has never quite forgiven himself for a minor ethnic slur, he has become a soldier on behalf of righteousness. Like a Puritan magistrate of old, he is ready to do battle against the sinners among his own people. Of course, in the current environment, people like Gilder also benefit in terms of fame and fortune. But their feelings of moral righteousness make them feel good about what they are doing. Happiness for a Puritan is when self-interest coincides with a feeling of moral righteousness.

Once Jewish intellectuals achieved the moral high ground in the US and elsewhere, people like Gilder lost their resolve to defend their own ethnic interests; the game was over. Fundamentally, we have to stamp out Puritanism among Whites, or at least find a form of therapy for people like Gilder:

Given this state of affairs, what sorts of therapy might one suggest? To an evolutionary psychologist, this moralistic aggression seems obviously adaptive for maintaining the boundaries and policing the behavior of a close-knit group.  … Groups of Angles, Jutes, and their Puritan descendants doubtlessly benefited greatly from moralistic aggression  because of its effectiveness in enforcing group norms and punishing cheaters and defectors. There is nothing inherently wrong with moralistic aggression. The key is to convince whites to alter their moralistic aggression in a more adaptive direction in light of Darwinism. 

The ultimate irony is that without altruistic whites willing to be morally outraged by violations of multicultural ideals, the multicultural New Jerusalem is likely to revert to a Darwinian struggle for survival among the remnants. But the high-minded descendants of the Puritans [like George Gilder] won’t be around to witness it.

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Farewell, My Dear WASP

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George Gilder

“Here’s a WASP joke. Question: Why do WASPs not engage in more orgies? Answer: Too many thank-you notes to write.”

Thus began a NYTime’s book review last fall about the new book Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor by Tad Friend.

I read the review and highlighted a phenomenon I thought was worth commenting on later. The passage was:

In his teenage years, Tad Friend chose to attend the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pa., where he first grew aware of the designation “N.O.C.D.” — “not our class, dear,” an exclusion usually directed at Jews and Catholics. Friend offers a fitting tirade against WASP anti-Semitism, reminding us that well into the 20th century, signs on the lawn of the Lake Placid Club read “No Dogs. No Tuberculars. No Hebrews,” and noting that his paternal grandfather “was hardly alone, among the WASPs on Squirrel Hill, in fretting” that it was harboring an increasing number of Jews. In atonement, the author observes that “almost everyone” he’d hung out with at Harvard was Jewish, as was his first significant other, Melanie Grayboden. When relating his painful eventual shedding of Melanie, he digresses divertingly on different forms of ethnic guilt. “If Catholic guilt is ‘I’ve been bad’ and Jewish guilt is ‘You’ve been bad,’ then WASP guilt is ‘You probably think I’ve been bad.’ ”

This review that I clipped out of the Sunday Book Review then gathered dust on the big pile of magazines and papers that invariably grows on my side table. Atop it later came a curiously related story, this one about a WASP named George Gilder who seems to love Jews more than many of them love themselves, if that’s possible. By pure chance, I’ve just happened across the third review of Gilder’s latest book, which I take as a sign to now write about it.

My first notice of The Israel Test, Gilder‘s new book, came while reading Scott McConnell’s review of it in the Dec. 2009 American Conservative. Titled Chosen People, the review sadly noted the usual mainstream fare: “For Gilder, the superior men are not Teutonic explorers or generals but Jewish scientists and financiers.” (Save the guffaws—we’re not supposed to notice that Madoff, Summers, Rubin, Blankfein et al. are all Tribe.)

We also see that Gilder’s prose includes, “Is one able to admire and embrace Jewish superiority and creativity, or does one, out of envy, oppose it?” Getting to the central argument of the book, we find that Gilder’s thesis is that “all opposition to Israel is rooted in anti-Semitism.” Or this: “We need Israel today as much as Israel needs us, as much as we needed Jewish physicists and chemists [for the Manhattan Project].”” Ho boy, the same old tired arguments trotted out by so many Jews. Fine, Gilder must be a Jew doing the usual group-shielding, meme-selling job. Or so I thought.

Much to my surprise, McConnell revealed that Gilder is a WASP raised in an upper-class world. And McConnell thinks he has found a reason for Gilder’s strange Judeophilia, an explanation that oddly parallels that of Tad Friend above. It seems that

an incident that occurred when [Gilder] was about 17. While trying to impress an older girl, his summer tutor in Greek, he blurted out something mildly anti-Semitic. The young woman dryly replied that she was in fact “a New York Jew.” Gilder was mortified. He relates that he has never quite gotten over the episode. It is the kind of thing a sensitive person might long remember. Variations on this pattern are not uncommon in affluent WASP circles to this day: guilt or embarrassment at some stupid but essentially trivial episode of social anti-Semitism serve as a spur for fervent embrace of Likud-style Zionism. Atonement.

This is simply bizarre. I cannot relate to a group that would be so easily traumatized by, as McConnell states, something so trivial. What is going on?

It gets worse.

The next time I ran into a review of The Israel Test was in the Nov. 2009 issue of Commentary, penned by Michael Medved. Gilder is quoted as declaring: “Israel is hated above all for its virtues.”

This of course is lunacy. Could Gilder be that clueless about Israel’s actual behavior? He shouldn’t be. After all, McConnell described him as a “veteran luminary of the American Right, author of a successful polemic against feminism and a Reagan-admired ode to the free market, and publisher of a newsletter touting technology stocks.”

I believe I understand why many Jews offer explanations for anti-Semitism in which Jews are blameless. Readers will likely recall what Kevin MacDonald wrote in chapter 7 of Separation and Its Discontents about Jewish failure to be realistic about their own often bad or brutal behavior: “Historians of Judaism have often falsely portrayed the beliefs of gentiles as irrational fantasies while portraying the behavior of Jews as irrelevant to anti-Semitism” (p. 220).

But of course Jewish behavior is overwhelming responsible for occurrences of anti-Semitism: people react angrily when their culture is relentless attacked, when they are swindled, and particularly when they are subjected to genocide. This is rational human behavior. Why does Gilder miss this?

Midway through his review, even the normally level-headed Medved gets taken in and becomes party to Gilder’s fantasy about Israel. The Palestinians, Medved and Gilder agree, are fortunate to have had the Israelis take over Gaza and the West Bank because this has “decisively raised the living standards of local Arab populations” [emphasis in original]. Between 1967 and the first intifada in 1987 “per capita income tripled in the West Bank while it rose in Gaza more than twentyfold—from $80 to $1,706.”

I suppose to worshippers of mammon, this represents progress, but what about all those thousands and thousands of Palestinians— including countless women and children—blown to bits by Israeli offensive weapons? Does a dying youth utter with his last breath, “All to the best. At least I would have earned more money . . . had I not died so young”? (See my essay “For Whom the Gaza Bell Tolls” here and here .)

The best review so far of The Israel Test is a negative one by Robert Sungenis that appeared in the January issue of E. Michael Jones’s Culture Wars. (Subscribe here.) Readers should know that Culture Wars and its editor are pariahs among respectable company, mostly because The Jewish Problem is addressed forthrightly. I think that’s the whole draw of the magazine. Indeed, Jones and his writers are “Jew-wise,” as TOQ editor Greg Johnson likes to say.

The Israel Test is reviewed in Culture Wars by frequent contributor Robert Sungenis, Ph.D. He begins by noting the same Gilder quotes about Jewish and Israeli superiority covered above. He then addresses some of the negatives. To be sure, Sungenis’s critique is that of an arch-conservative Catholic, but his claims are nonetheless intriguing. For example, he writes that despite Jewish prominence in capitalism, technology, etc., “there has resulted more atheism, more murder, and more sexual deviance than at any time in history. If anything, these technological advances have stunted man’s development, since the tendency is now to rely on one’s own Tower of Babel to measure human worth to the virtual exclusion of the development of the inner man.”

He goes on to charge these smart Jews with “the promoting of homosexuality, divorce, adultery, gambling, insider trading, cultural revolution, and many other societal ills.” Mischievously he adds that “Among Israel’s Muslim neighbors these ills are practically non-existent.” 

With respect to Jews and capitalism, he asks, “How much more economic upheaval, corruption, greed and scandal do the capitalists need to realize that their system is on a self-destruct course? How many Savings & Loan debacles, Enrons, WorldCom’s, Ivan Boeskys, Bernie Madoffs, deceptive collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps are needed to see that the capitalist system is a racket of smoke and mirrors?”

Sungenis goes on to skewer other categories of Jewish “geniuses.” Psychologists? Well, take Sigmund Freud. Sungenis’s estimation of the good Doctor Freud is in line with what Kevin MacDonald wrote in The Culture of Critique, MacDonald’s culminating volume in his trilogy on Jews: Freud was a charlatan cult leader who was not good for gentile society.

Jewish feminists? Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem and their ilk “have destroyed the traditional role of wife and mother.” Jewish artists and architects? Fuggedaboutit. (See here, here and here.) Ditto for the eighty percent of American comics who are Jewish—“the raunchy Sarah Silverman or the sex-crazed Woody Allen and Howard Stern.” Such humor presents “the abnormal as normal, the neurotic as necessary, the outsider as the true insider.” Even a prominent rabbi admitted that “Some of the most notoriously foul-mouthed and obscene-minded entertainers are Jewish and earn no reproof for their public aggrandizement of filth.”

In summary, according to Sungenis, “The humanist Jew has poisoned every area of our culture. Gilder can’t see any of it because he lacks a properly tuned moral compass. The moral ineptitude of the humanist Jew at large is ignored and only his ‘technological achievements,’ ‘his raw genius,’ his ‘capitalistic entrepreneurial spirit’ is enshrined as the model which the world is not only to follow but to bow down to.”

This leaves me trying to get my head around why such an obviously brilliant WASP like Gilder would write what he does about Jews and Israel. From what I can tell, he sincerely believes what he writes, too.

Consider that this man is the product of the best America has to offer—wealth, Exeter, Harvard, exposure to top leaders (he was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon), etc. His long list of books attests to his intelligence and work ethic. Among them are:

Wealth and Poverty

Sexual Suicide (updated as Men and Marriage)

TELECOSM: How Infinite Bandwidth will Revolutionize Our World

Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution In Economics And Technology

The Spirit of Enterprise (updated as Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise)

The Silicon Eye: Microchip Swashbucklers and the Future of High-Tech Innovation

Life After Television

Visible Man: A True Story of Post-Racist America

In addition he writes the Gilder Technology Report.

Clearly, we have to take such a man seriously. But, again, what could make him believe such things about superior Jews and an enlightened and moral Israel when the facts are so starkly otherwise?

Kevin MacDonald attempted to unravel the effects Jews and WASPs have had on each other. This came in his discussion of Eric P. Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. In essence, Kaufmann argued that WASPs voluntarily relinquished hegemony in America—cultural “suicide,” in other words.

Writing on VDARE.com, MacDonald explained why he viewed it as murder rather than suicide. In short, as he argued at length in his book The Culture of Critique, “the rise of Jews to elite status in the United States and the influence of particular Jewish intellectual and political movements, especially the push for mass and indiscriminate immigration, were key contributions—necessary conditions—to the demise of WASP America.”

Crucially, MacDonald complained that Kaufmann

never mentions coercion and the penalties that are imposed on people who dissent from the elite cosmopolitan consensus. The fact is, Whites who violate these strictures are severely censured — a phenomenon with which I have considerable personal experience.

Kaufmann presents the views of elite Whites who are cooperating in the demise of their own people as nothing more than the enlightened opinions of an intellectual and moral elite. But it is far more than that. Since the 1960s, Whites who depart from the consensus of cosmopolitanism have been penalized in a wide variety of ways — from lack of access to the mainstream media, to firing from their jobs, to social opprobrium. Conversely, those who collaborate are rewarded. This revolution is neither peaceful nor bloodless.

I’m not sure if this helps understand Gilder. In fact, doesn’t it deepen the mystery, because, as MacDonald concluded about the Jewish-WASP ethnic war in America, “For the Anglo-Saxons, it is a defeat of cataclysmic proportions.”

How could Gilder not recognize this? He’s old enough (b. 1939) to have grown up with older relatives who represented the apogee of WASP power in America, but his whole life has witnessed the unbroken decline of his caste — and a concomitant rise of the Jews. Are we witnessing a form of the Stockholm Syndrome, in this case, one where a formerly free man worships the power of his (cultural) captors? I confess I don’t know.

I almost wish I could find evidence that Gilder was blackmailed into writing The Israel Test, or that he did it as a quid pro quo for something else, or that he’s in love with a Jewish woman. Lacking any evidence of that, however, I’m forced to grapple with the question of how an otherwise highly intelligent man could be so misguided about Jews.

Whites in America have suffered in recent decades because of the migration of power from WASPs to Jews. To be sure, middle and working class Whites who are not elite WASPs have done their best to protect their interests. Ford was from a rural background, Lindbergh was never part of the Eastern elite, and McCarthy, Coughlin, and Buchanan were or are Catholic.

Where are the WASPs today? Some have led lives unworthy of their ancestors (think Paris Hilton), while others have died young after fleeting and dissolute lives. The Short Unhappy Life of Casey Johnson may be fitting:

Lesbian heiress, socialite, and Hollywood celeb Casey Johnson, 30, was found dead in the bedroom of her West Hollywood home on January 4, 2010. Jewish gossip website TMZ reported that Johnson, last heard from on December 29, 2009, had been dead for several days before her body was discovered by a maid. A coroner’s toxicology report has yet to be issued, but foul play is not suspected. Johnson suffered from diabetes and had a history of drug abuse.

Casey Johnson’s death provides a convenient window into the seamy underbelly of the contemporary WASP “elite.”

Mostly, it seems, American WASPs have simply disappeared. Updike died, while President Bush (41), undeniably a WASP, gave way to his son Dubya (43), who certainly did not look, speak or behave like a WASP. Where can we now find in positions of power those tall, lean men who, whatever their vulnerabilities, once so confidently bestrode the world stage?

Averell Harriman

George H. W. Bush

Where once we had men like Averell Harriman and George Herbert Walker Bush, we now have Alan Dershowitz, Larry David, Woody Allen, and Michael Chertoff.

America, including its White gentile majority, is about to find out what it’s like to be ruled by a hostile elite. The upper crust WASPs seem to have gone quietly for the most part, but what of the remaining White masses? As MacDonald said with respect to the WASPs, “For the Anglo-Saxons, it is a defeat of cataclysmic proportions.”

The same now goes for all Whites.

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.

The Howard Zinn Cancer Spreads to Australia

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I blogged recently on radical historian Howard Zinn and his lack of concern for historical truth. An article in Quadrant, an Australian journal, discusses Howard Zinn’s disastrous influence. It also discusses Zinn’s main disciple in Australia, Robert Manne — also Jewish. First, about Zinn’s most influential book:

Zinn’s radical (and radically unsound) tome, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, has gone through five editions and multiple printings since it was first published in 1980, selling almost two million copies, and is assigned in thousands of university and college courses in America, making it the best-selling work of history ever written by an American leftist. It also has a high profile in popular culture, being the basis of several documentaries, inspiring pop songs, serving as the basis for a highly successful graphic novel, being referenced in the Academy Award-winning film Good Will Hunting (1997), and even in an episode of The Simpsons, where Marge is shown reading the book at college. Its penetration into American popular consciousness is both unparalleled and insidious.

The Zinn cancer metastasized from America to Australia, spreading the culture of the left that has come to dominate the academic world in recent decades:

Zinn’s book had an immediate impact on the neo-Marxist, Foucaultian, and feminist academic clique that came to dominate the study, teaching, publishing, and grant-allocating activities of Australian history in the 1980s, giving rise to the four volume collectivist effort, A People’s History of Australia Since 1788. This was published in 1988 in order to promote the negative mythology of Australian history in time for the Bicentennial and to ensure that the nation had no illusions about the depths of its historical depravity.

Manne is a worthy acolyte to Zinn:

Manne [and] the many other Australian historians who follow his lead …  make no attempt to champion the Australian people or recognize their efforts to build a nation. Instead, Australians emerge from their historical writings as unrepentant and non-reflective racists who support ignorant, oppressive, and racist policies, and deserve nothing but the unrelenting contempt of morally superior intellectuals like Manne and his colleagues — a contempt they are happy to provide.

Manne is a worthy disciple of Zinn for another reason. He has no scruples about falsifying history in order to advance the Jewish ethnic agenda of undermining a confident, homogeneous White Australia. It is well known that the Jewish community in Australia has been a strong supporter of non-White immigration and multiculturalism (summarized in CofC, where, e.g., I quote Miriam Faine, an editorial committee member of the Australian Jewish Democrat: “The strengthening of multicultural or diverse Australia is also our most effective insurance policy against anti-semitism. The day Australia has a Chinese Australian Governor General I would feel more confident of my freedom to live as a Jewish Australian.” [Sound familiar?] See also here.) Manne is also totally on board with multiculturalism. Here he is discussing his Jewish roots at a website dedicated to making Australia multicultural.

Keith Windshuttle has charged Manne with professional malfeasance in claiming that the Australian government during the 1930s supported a policy of “breeding out the colour” by encouraging White men to marry “half-caste” women in order to eventually make their descendants White. Because of Manne’s position as an elite academic, his word carried a great deal of weight with the government, resulting in an abject apology to appease the contemporary gods of multiculturalism. As Windshuttle notes,

In failing to mention these three critical responses, while pretending the government gave “full endorsement” to the very opposite approach, Manne falsified Australian political history on an issue that he, more than almost any other academic commentator in the country, had the opportunity, the interest and the ability to investigate thoroughly and report honestly. If Manne can get away with behaviour of this kind, it would mean Australian universities no longer demand any standard of truthfulness from their academic staff.

I rather doubt that anything will happen to Manne. Falsifying historical and scientific data is par for the course in all of the Jewish intellectual movements covered in The Culture of Critique. Boas, who shaped American anthropology, and the Frankfurt School are great examples. (This blog discusses Boas’s falsifying data in his notorious head shape study that was used by immigration advocates for decades to argue that the environment would shape everyone into good Americans.) Luminaries like Freud didn’t really falsify data, but he produced untestable theories that successfully masqueraded as science while being very useful in the assault on the traditional people and culture of the West.

The common denominator of all this intellectual work has been to undermine the confidence of Western societies and their willingness to remain racially and culturally homogeneous. The hypocrisy in all this is stunning. For example, Australian Jewish leader Rabbi Isi Leibler, a staunch defender of multiculturalism as a model of Australia, was recently reported as saying that multiculturalism has no place in Israel. “[Israel] is a country which was set up and created as a Jewish country for the Jews.” In another context he stated “”There is a need to sit together and establish a way in which Australians can recapture that spirit of multiculturalism which I think we are all proud being part and parcel of, and which is really under threat.”

As usual, one needn’t bother to look for high principle to explain Jewish activism. The only common denominator is what is good for the Jews.

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Dr. Lasha Darkmoon: Multiculturalism — An Open Letter to Israel Shamir

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Dr. Lasha Darkmoon:  A few weeks Israel Shamir wrote a controversial essay called The Poverty of Racialist Thought in which he took issue with Kevin MacDonald on the subject of multiculturalism. Yesterday I received from him (in an email) an advance copy of his recent follow-up essay: Part 2 of The Poverty of Racialist Thought. He was kind enough to seek my opinion on his new essay, along with the opinions of eight other people far more qualified than myself. 

As I understood this to be an open invitation to discussion, it occurred to me to send my reply to Mr Shamir for publication to the Occidental Observer. I thought the feedback from commentators here could only be beneficial to all concerned: to myself, to Kevin MacDonald and, above all, to Mr Shamir. 

Please note that Part 2 of Shamir’s article has not yet been published. This critique of mine addresses issues raised mostly in Part 1 — see the link above — but which are alluded to and further developed in Part 2.

Dear Mr. Shamir: I read your recent essay, The Poverty of Racialist Thought, with great interest. It is crackling with original ideas, many of them highly subversive, as one would expect from a controversial writer such as yourself!  The main bone of contention between you and Kevin MacDonald is obviously multiculturalism. This is a subject I’ve alluded to only briefly and tangentially in my articles, while dealing mostly with other topics. 

I have enormous respect for KMD, a man who is not only moved to pity by the plight of the Palestinians but who is also deeply concerned at the way his fellow Americans are having their traditional culture subverted and alien values thrust upon them—values which, I think you will agree, are positively satanic: namely, contempt for Christianity, sexual perversion, mind pollution and mendacity in the media, the uglification of daily life, and the systematic demoralization of the masses.    

I feel strongly, as I know you do, about the double standards involved in the fact that organized Jewry promotes multiculturalism in America while insisting that Israel should remain  monocultural and Judeocentric. It’s also of great concern that racial tensions between various ethnic groups in America should be deliberately ignited in order to distract and debilitate the different groups at the expense of the Master group — organized Jewry. It is considerations like these which undoubtedly exercise KMD’s mind and the minds of all Americans who feel they are “losing their country.”  

To portray these beleaguered White Americans  as “White Supremacists” or “racists” is, in my humble opinion,  a low and dirty trick. As disgraceful as calling critics of racist, apartheid Israel with its black record of war crimes — men like Judge Goldstone — “anti-Semites”.  

I do believe with total sincerity, however, that the use of the word “White” is a tragic mistake — from a public relations viewpoint, if no other — and that this word should be avoided if possible.  “This word ‘WHITE’ is the bugbear,” I wrote to KMD a few months ago. “If only a less abrasive and more emollient equivalent could be found.”  You echoed my own sentiments when you said to me in a previous email: “Whites are indeed a misnomer and KMD should give thought how to change it. Christians? Logos believers? Let us give it a thought and share it with KMD.” 

I have racked my brains for a suitable alternative to “Whites”, but have been unable to find one. I don’t think “Christians” would satisfy KMD  with all that that term connotes now. It has to be clearly understood that KMD does not view this matter of multiculturalism, as you and E. Michael Jones do, through the prism of religion. His training as an evolutionary psychologist gives him an entirely different perspective. It’s all about different races competing for resources in a cut-throat Darwinian environment. It’s also about the chronic conflicts that multicultural/multiracial societies have been prone to throughout history and about the psychological reality that people tend to become isolated, politcally disengaged, and mistrustful in multicultural/multiracial societies. He points out that no one has come up with a way to get rid of race as a touchstone of conflict within human societies, and he just doesn’t see that happening in the future.

Between the biological approach of KMD (genetic interests meshing with cultural constraints) and the metaphysical approach of E Michael Jones (Logos), there would appear to be an unbridgeable chasm.  

A final word on KMD’s position — a position I regard as entirely reasonable, because scientifically defensible. He believes that there are many meaningful commonalities between Europeans [“Whites”] at the genetic level. This is because they have similar genetic interests and a natural, instinctive solidarity in spite of their religious differences. That is to say, a European atheist and a European Christian have more in common ultimately than a European Christian and an African Christian. It follows from this that a marriage between a European atheist and a European Christian, which helps to produce children of pure European stock, is to be preferred to a marriage between a European Christian and an African Christian — a marriage that could only result in miscegenated children or “half breeds” — children who would not only be genetically removed from their parents but totally alien to their grandparents. 

In an ideal world, Mr Shamir, all such children would turn out to resemble Dumas père or Pushkin. Proud to be what they are and uniquely valuable in God’s variegated world. In the real world, however, they face many serious problems. If they were happy with their pigmentation, why the incessant and growing demand for skin-whiteners? Even in India there is color prejudice. Indeed, it is India that produces the best skin-whiteners and exports them all over the world. That tells you something.   

There is also the delicate question of IQ. If the IQs of Whites and Blacks were equal, and if this could be adequately proved, there would be no problem. But if Whites are much smarter than Blacks, as is often alleged, then intermarriage can only result in a general diminution of IQ. When diversity entails a general deterioration of intelligence and culture, this surely has to be deplored. This “diversity” is celebrated in America by the Jew-controlled media but, curiously enough, is abominated in Israel. Losing one’s racial identity is apparently good for Whites but bad for Jews. I have to say it: these double standards suck.   

To give KMD his credit, he honestly believes that if we identify on the basis of religion that does not take account of ethnicity at least implicitly, as E. Michael Jones does vis-à-vis his Catholicism, the White race will eventually be destroyed. I think KMD is right to be concerned that the race that gave us Dante and Shakespeare, Leonardo and Botticelli, Mozart and Beethoven, may soon become extinct as a result of malevolent immigration policies designed to serve the interests of one group and one group only: organized Jewry — the group you yourself castigate and criticize in veiled terms as “predators” and “the Masters of Discourse.” 

I’ll conclude this critique by saying that this is an infinitely complex subject. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I  see through a glass darkly, only too conscious of my intellectual limitations. You will therefore pardon me, I hope, if I’ve said anything foolish or inappropriate. I have no wish to offend anyone. 

Kind regards and blessings, 

Lasha Darkmoon.

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Dr. Lasha Darkmoon (email her) is an academic, age 31, with higher degrees in classics.  A published poet and translator, she is also a political  activist with a special interest in Middle Eastern affairs. ‘Lasha Darkmoon’ is a pen name

The New Republic’s “High Shul phase”

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Andrew Sullivan is busy attempting to exonerate himself from charges of anti-Semitism — always a difficult chore, and likely to consume quite a bit of his time given Leon Wieseltier’s rather long accusatory piece. Sullivan’s offense is that he circulated a comment of poet W. H. Auden that it would be to explain the Christian doctrine of the Trinity to the secular leftist TNR writers of the 1940s. How anyone could think of that as “anti-Semitic” is beyond me.

Sullivan’s first line of defense is to link to his “passionate defense of the Jewish people from Catholic bigotry.” I’m sure Sullivan is thinking, “Hey, I earned my stripes as a goy in the media by defending Jews. How dare you question my motives!”

But then it gets interesting. We find that Jews think of TNR as a Jewish publication. Wieseltier himself is quoted as saying that TNR is a kind of “Jewish version of Commentary.” (Update: HelenChicago, a commenter on this blog writes, “”A Jewish version of Commentary“?!? Isn’t that a bit like “a kosher version of matzoh”? Wish I had thought of that. As we all know, Commentary is published by the American Jewish Committee.)

Sullivan notes that “my old friend, Frank Foer” (translation: “some of my best friends are Jews”) commented that Auden made his statement “before we entered our High Shul phase.” And he goes on to describe the “joke ubiquitous at TNR when I worked there . … We teased each other for years about my being one of the few goyim at the place, that I was a function of affirmative action, etc. Leon was particularly and often mordantly hilarious on this kind of theme.”

This reminds me of Michael Wreszin’s comment that Dwight Macdonald, a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to Partisan Review, was “a distinguished goy among the Partisanskies.” He stood out because he was a goy in a Jewish-dominated movement. Always good to have a few goyim for window dressing.

Pretty clearly, the Jews who run TNR think of it as a Jewish publication. But one dare not say that Jews influence the media or that Jews attempt to use their position in the media to advance their version of Jewish interests (or that the New York York Intellectuals were a Jewish intellectual movement). Auden’s quote happened before TNR became a High Shul — a presumably the consequence of Martin Peretz buying TNR and turning it into a fanatically pro-Israel publication. This is a passage in The Culture of Critique:

Jews have also been greatly overrepresented as editors, publishers and contributors to a variety of radical and liberal periodicals, including The Nation, The New Republic, and The Progressive (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 105). In 1974 The New Republic (TNR) was purchased by Martin Peretz, son of a “devoted Labor Zionist and right-wing Jabotinskyist” (Alterman 1992, 185) and himself a leftist student activist before moving in the direction of neoconservatism. The only consistent theme in Peretz’s career is a devotion to Jewish causes, particularly Israel. He reflects a major theme of Chapter 3 in that he abandoned the New Left when some in the movement condemned Israel as racist and imperialist. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, he told Henry Kissinger that his “dovishness stopped at the delicatessen door” (p. 185), and many among his staff feared that all issues would be decided on the basis of what was “good for the Jews” (p. 186). Indeed, one editor was instructed to obtain material from the Israeli embassy for use in TNR editorials. “It is not enough to say that TNR’s owner is merely obsessed with Israel; he says so himself. But more importantly, Peretz is obsessed with Israel’s critics, Israel’s would-be critics, and people who never heard of Israel, but might one day know someone who might someday become a critic” (p. 195).

Sullivan better watch it — he’s just getting himself in deeper. All those quotes from Jews who joke among themselves about Jewish control of particular media outlets like TNR are for internal consumption only. For someone like him — or me — to mention it will certainly draw the ire of people like Wieseltier and the ADL. Tune in for more on this as it unfolds.

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Christopher Donovan: Super Bowl Quick Take

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Christopher Donovan:  *Jewish comedian Jerry Seinfeld once observed that because of constantly rotating rosters, cheering for a sports team is essentially cheering “for a uniform.” That point was underscored at yesterday’s Super Bowl, where New Orleans native Peyton Manning played against his hometown of New Orleans.  If the racial discordance of college and pro sports isn’t enough, you barely ever have anyone who’s even from the area they’re playing for. Put another way, fans root for the local branch of a globalized business enterprise more than they root for the “blood and soil” military-in-miniature warriors of a real hometown team.

*  The game was good enough, with a successful on-side kick and a 70-yard interception that made for some excitement.  An alien in Miami (the kind from outer space, that is) might observe that football is a game where white men throw the ball to black men.  The folks at Caste Football lament this.

* In pre-game interviews, I was struck by the marked Whiteness of Manning and his opponent, Drew Brees.  They both exuded the can-do earnestness of your Eagle Scout, Rotary-club next-door neighbor —  qualities much mocked by Jews and other culture-setters.  Of course, to me, these are heartening qualities, and I suppose our masters only look the other way when lots of money is being made off them.

* If there was a big loser at the Super Bowl, it was the ads.  Lots of people hitting other people, which was supposed to be funny but wasn’t, and lots of crass sexuality.  “People without clothes on” was the theme of more than one ad.  Even Budweiser came up short, with the “people bridge” ad being the only amusing one (you can probably find it on the Internet somewhere, but I’m not linking.)

* One interesting ad theme:  the emasculated male of today’s society.  In one ad, men drone on about all that’s de-masculinizing about being an adult male, then insist that the muscle car will be their refuge.  Hey, white man — yes, you’re emasculated.  You’re deracinated, too.  But instead of chomping Doritos and slathering yourself with Dove, try checking into your racial displacement.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

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