The Blue Octopus

 

 

I.

 

The people shall hear, and be afraid: sorrow shall take hold on the inhabitants of Palestina. [Exodus 15:14]

 

In October 2023, Israel invaded Gaza for the third time since the turn of century - the previous two invasions having taken place in 2008 and 2014 - and a year later, we see that the invasion is dragging on, its progress presenting a singular contrast to that of the invasions of 1956 and 1967. In the wars of 1956 and 1967, the Israeli army ejected the Egyptian from Gaza in a matter of days, but in the war that started in 2023, it is unable to eject Hamas, despite Israel's possessing one of the largest and most-well equipped armies in the Middle East and one of the most technologically advanced air forces in the world. I have heard rumours that most of the Israeli army casualties are caused by friendly fire and that Israeli infantry tactics have deteriorated to the level of the Russian. If the rumours are true, then the present war marks a sad descent, for traditionally the Israeli army, unlike the Russian, values the life of the individual soldier. But Israeli military performance in the present Gaza war is in keeping with Israeli military performance all throughout the 21st century, and in hindsight, Israel enjoyed its last victory more than forty years ago, in the opening stages of the Lebanon War of 1982. Granted, the 21st century Arab and Israeli wars caused the deaths of a great many Arab civilians, which was perhaps the Israeli aim - perhaps we should classify Gaza and Lebanon as punitive expeditions - but in all these operations, Israel failed to secure its objectives; the south of Lebanon remained in the hands of Hezbollah, Gaza in the hands of Hamas.

 

The Far Left has rejoiced because of this; Israeli setbacks and defeats represent a blow to 'imperialism'. In keeping with this 'anti-imperialist' struggle, the Far Left makes its outrage over the Gaza 'genocide' known at all times and in all places and it continually expresses its uncompromising solidarity with the Palestinian cause. This bond was on display when I recently passed by a trade union building in one of Australia's largest country towns and saw on the rooftop a Palestinian flag flying alongside the Aboriginal and the Eureka. Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian Islamism appeals 'intersectionally', that is, it appeals to all the disparate groupings, tendencies, lifestyles, factions, associated with the Far Left; it appeals to negroes, homosexuals, and environmentalists. This is illustrated by a recent episode in which a prominent representative of the last group, Greta Thunberg, the 'Swedish doom goblin', underwent travails because of her affiliation with Palestinianism. That story began when Thunberg posted on social media a photograph of herself holding up a 'Stand with Gaza' placard. Examining the photo carefully, observers spotted a stuffed toy - a blue octopus - sitting atop an armchair, and concluded, by a leap of logic that is unfathomable, that Thunberg was using the octopus to send a coded anti-Semitic message.

 

We must view all this against the background of history. Ever since the Far Left turned against Israel - which was probably sometime in the early 1970s, when the Palestinian cause became Left-chic - Israel and Jewish organisations have levelled a charge of anti-Semitism against the Far Left. The Far Left is said to have taken up a new anti-Semitism; conservatives in their polemics are making the anti-Israel Far Left equivalent to the 'Nazis'. If left-wingers study the history of the Arab and Israeli conflict, they may be surprised to learn that the statement of equivalence that Far Left anti-Zionists = Nazis is nothing new; in fact, it is at least fifty years old.

 

All the same, the virulence and vehemence of the Far Left in 2024 against Israel, Zionism, and the Israel lobby has given some on the dissident Right pause, and some white nationalists have been forced by events to give voice to opinions on the new anti-Semitism; Kevin Alfred Strom of has written a good three-part analysis starting here. Those on the Far Right are debating whether those on the Far Left have come over to their side on the Jewish question. The matter is permeated by fog and confusion, because the idea of anti-Semitism itself is vague and undefined, and this has been the case since Moritz Steinschneider ('Maurice Stonecutter', 'Maurice Jeweller'), the 19th century Jewish political activist, invented the term, putting it forward with a view to muddying the waters. And as we can see from the Thunberg scandal, a great paranoia exists, and when we examine the dispute, we feel uncertainty: does the pro-Israel activist really believe that Thunberg is an anti-Semite, or does he not believe? Perhaps he is tricking us; perhaps he seeks to fool the more gullible among us into thinking that Thunberg is an anti-Semite, that, although it seems doubtful, Thunberg and her circle have been swotting up on anti-Semitism, reading Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf and Ford's commentary on the Protocols.

 

Naturally, those on the dissident Right contemplate the possibility of a left-wing anti-Semitism with excitement and satisfaction: their surrounded and encircled army has been waiting a long time for relief; now their hope is that the Far Left has gotten wise to the Jewish question and that it is assembling a rescue force that shall come to their aid. The hypothesis is a most pleasing one; but all the same, those on the Right must investigate the ideology of the anti-Israel Far Left dispassionately and rationally, even if they run the risk of putting some illusions, some hopes and daydreams, to rest. Articles such as Strom's attempt such an analysis. I here will be doing something similar, and the conclusions I arrive at will not be all that profound and original - the likes of Strom have said it all before - but what I will be doing that is new is looking at the same material from a different angle.

 

II.

 

The political circumstances of 2024 oblige us to formulate clear, precise definitions; I will here attempt to define what anti-Semitism is - that is, the real anti-Semitism and not the fake. Clear formulations matter; their lack pollutes contemporary political discourse, as shown by the careless bandying about of Steinschneider's conception.

 

Whenever accusations of anti-Semitism are made, these should be disarmed by the asking of a few questions that, although obvious, are rarely asked. The first of these is: who are the Semites? We know that the Akkadians, Phoenicians, and Arabs belong to the Semitic category as well as the Jews. And that leads us to the next question: what, precisely, is 'Semitism'? We can define Marxism, Freudianism, and Darwinism easily enough, but 'Semitism' is the great indefinable, and that entails that one cannot be 'anti' it: we must know what the 'ism' is before we can be 'anti' the 'ism'. We know what anti-communism is because we know communism is. We know what a communist is, but we do not know what a Semitist is. And so, we must ask: what is anti-'Semitism'? Furthermore, we must ask why it is that anti-Semitism, whatever it is, is the most wicked and obscene doctrine in the history of the world. I am willing to accept the conclusion, but I have must have arguments, and so far, there seem to be none. Summing up, after a cursory examination, Steinschneider's conception comes loose from its moorings; it is filled with holes, as even Steinschneider's Wiki entry admits.

 

But a person who would make these sound objections would be logical and rational, and at the same time naive; that is, he would be someone who has had little to no experience of the Jewish people - at least none of the experience that the Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, and Greeks of the Bible had. The experience of these ancient peoples gave birth to a doctrine that I call the real anti-Semitism, real because it is empirical.

 

The real anti-Semitism consists of a number of propositions that are easy to understand, hard to accept - hard for most people, that is. In the list, the first of the propositions is: Jews possess political power. Second, they wield it over non-Jews; and third, they can use it for evil and not good; and fourth, they use it as Jews and not as 'Illuminati', 'Masons', 'capitalists', 'corporations', 'globalists', 'the Far Left', 'the Davos elite', not even as 'Zionists'.

 

To the American conservative, these are outrageous slanders, but we can draw these anti-Semitic 'canards' from the one book that the American conservative should regard as the most authoritative, and that is the Bible. One only need start with the story of Joseph in Genesis, which if you have read it - and chances are that you have not - tells of the exploitation and starvation of millions of Egyptians by Joseph and the enrichment of Joseph and his family. If anti-Semitism is whatever casts the Jews in a bad light, then the Old Testament is the most anti-Semitic book ever written. And for our purposes, it is important to recognise that the Bible tells the story of all Jews and not some Jews: it does not distinguish between 'Zionist' and 'anti-Zionist' Jews, 'Marxist' and 'capitalist' Jews, 'good' Jews and 'bad' Jews.

 

Joseph is a hero in the Bible, and the Bible allows us to see how Jews see themselves. We would assume, then, that the Bible paints a flattering portrait of the Jews. Or does it? The truth is that any reader would be shocked and appalled by what Simeon, Levi, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Saul, David, and other Old Testament heroes did to the non-Jews. And this brings us to another proposition of anti-Semitism. The Jewish festival of Passover celebrates evils wrought upon the Egyptians, Purim upon the Persians, and Hannukah upon the Greeks. Any non-Jewish scholar contemplating these would find them offensive, to put it mildly; but they rarely come up for criticism from our Jewish intellectuals, and this is the case no matter how 'left-wing' the Jewish intellectual may be. This is a central proposition of anti-Semitism. The Jews of the Old Testament understood that a hostility existed but could not explain that hostility. A blissful ignorance exists, and with it a presumption of an irrationality dwelling in the minds of the non-Jews who take exception to Jewish conduct. This carries over into the present, and we see a trace of it in one article lauding the anti-Israel protests at American universities. The Jewish communist Daniel Lazare records with pride that at one American encampment, the anti-Zionist Jewish activists 'On Monday evening, the first night of Passover... even held a Seder complete with matzo and prayer books'. Lazare had not read the Bible, otherwise he would have recognised that Passover is not worthy of celebration, for it commemorates the mass slaughter of thousands? tens of thousands? of the Egyptian 'firstborn'. Exodus 10:29: 'And there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead'. Explaining Passover, Dan Barker writes:

 

Every year during Passover, the Jews hold a festive feast where they celebrate the Tenth Plague. They eat unleavened bread, drink wine, sing, and commemorate the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent children. The word “Passover” is a translation of the Hebrew pesach, which most likely means “he passed over.” During the final plague of Egypt, while children were being murdered by the God of the Old Testament through no fault of their own, the children of the Israelites who smeared lamb’s blood on their doors were spared. They were passed over. Apparently, searching for that blood mark was the only way God’s Angel of Death could tell the difference between the bad innocent children and the good innocent children. Jews all over the world annually rejoice over that non-difference, happy that they are the good chosen people. [Dan Barker, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction (2016)]

 

All Jewish organisations, religious bodies, journals, agree that the Jews of Exodus and subsequent books are typically Jewish. And they put forward the notion that any criticism of this Jewishness is unfounded, irrational, and moreover, dangerous and immoral. And this leads to another important thesis, one that AIPAC, the Israel lobby, and American conservatives extend to anyone who criticises Israel: any aspersions cast on the Jewish people give evidence of a desire to hurt and even destroy the Jews wholesale. If you deplore the conduct of the Jews of Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, you are a Jew-hater who wants to exterminate all Jews; and the same affect manifests itself when you deplore the conduct of the Jews of Israel and the Israel lobby. Fancying themselves to be psychoanalysts, AIPAC, the ADL, and other Jewish organisations claim to understand you better than you understand yourself; they know the evil that lurks in your heart.

 

And now we come to another proposition of anti-Semitism, which is this: Jewish organisations and intellectuals can display an extraordinary belligerence, aggression, and paranoia that non-Jews can, whenever they deign to notice it, find obnoxious and offensive. Whatever did Australians of all people do to merit this tweet:

Amusingly, the mentality behind it reminds of this tweet, from the account of a renowned vatnik:

 

'You're locked in here with me', in the words of Rorschach, one of the anti-heroes of The Watchmen (2009). A pop psychologist would not characterise this as healthy.

 

Now it is a peculiarity of human nature that one group, if it is decent and thinks of itself as being decent, dislike being accused of wanting to oppress, enslave, murder another. Suppose a man is indifferent to the fate of Israel or even mildly critical of the Zionist project: does that make him bad? According to the Johnathan Greenblatts, it does; and furthermore, it makes him hateful, evil, murderous. Any intellectual, journalist, politician, entertainer, public figure who takes up a position even mildly critical of Israel is shocked and overwhelmed by the ferocity of the attacks of the Greenblatts. And his hackles rise; he takes umbrage at being called a bigot, an anti-Semite, a Jew-hater, and inevitably, a Nazi. After the assault, which 'discomfits' him - to use one of the favourite words of the Bible - he is often reduced to spluttering that he likes the Jewish people, that he has many Jewish friends, that he recognises the many accomplishments of the Jews in the arts and humanities; and in a last desperate defence, he takes refuge in the thesis (one that has by now become hackneyed) that not all Jews are Zionists. Such is human nature, though, over time he becomes accustomed to the unrelenting hostility and lack of fair play, and these exert influence upon his character. Again and again, our liberal and moderate anti-Zionist is told that he hates the Jews and everything Jewish and that he wants to murder Jews; and the turning point comes when, exhausted, he asks himself whether there is something to the accusations. This is human psychology. If I am indifferent to x or mildly critical of x, and x, perceiving this, tells me that I hate him and I secretly want to destroy him - the first time I may dismiss his accusations as the ravings a madman, the hundredth time, I may think there is something to them. Oddly, the Greenblatts and other witchfinders-general charged with rooting out anti-Semitism make use of the indoctrination by repetition technique of a cult. If you are told something over and over, you begin to believe it, no matter how absurd it is.

 

In Greenblatt's conduct we perceive a self-destructiveness. Representatives of the ADL and other organisations devoted to defending the honour of the Jewish people often bring up without prompting anti-Semitic 'tropes' that are known only to the anti-Semitic cognoscenti, and they shout these 'canards' and 'slanders' out loud and rub them in the faces of the public - a public that is by and large ignorant of real anti-Semitism. The classic example is the ADL's constant bringing up the 'blood libel', which is a Jewish term for something that anti-Semites call Jewish ritual murder. Here, I will not touch upon it, for it should be set aside for an advanced masterclass in anti-Semitism; here, I am writing only a beginner's guide. The question is, why are the Greenblatts, who are in the business of doing public relations for the Jewish people, bringing up such an unsavoury subject; and why are they presenting it to the 'normies', who know nothing of it and want to know nothing of it? It is as though I feel a compulsion to blurt out to complete strangers that I have been accused of terrible crimes and perversions; and at the same time, I noisily insist that there is nothing to these slurs, that they exist solely in the imaginations of accusers who are bad, wicked people who for no reason want to slander my good name and destroy me. The irony is, if an irony it be, that none of the strangers would never have heard the vile accusations had I not importunately injected them into the general discourse. And my repeating these slanders to an audience that is at first indifferent and after a time resistant produces an effect. At the start, my audience concludes, rightly enough, that I am somewhat unhinged; and by the end, it begins to ask itself if there is anything founded in these 'unfounded' accusations after all.

 

III.

 

Because of his unusual appearance, Greenblatt is compared in memes to Max Schreck in Nosferatu (1922).

 

 

Interestingly, modern commentators spy in Nosferatu 'anti-Semitic undertones'.

 

A Nosferatu, a Dracula, any variant thereof, is a Persona - a word that the ancient Greeks used for a mask worn by an actor. In the Greek theatre, the mask brings forth a character from out of the actor's unconscious; and to use one of the terms of Jungian psychology, it presents us with an archetype. Many Personae from the Old Testament are being called forth and presented to this day, and as we shall see, that phenomenon constitutes one of the premises in a chief argument for anti-Semitism.

 

One of the first Jewish Personae that appears in the Bible is the Jewish pimp. Abraham pimps Sarah, Isaac pimps Rebekah, and Mordecai pimps Esther. Significantly, the three Jewish men engage in pandering with a view to political advantage: they wish to win the favour of non-Jewish rulers. This feeds into the anti-Semitic 'trope' that the present-day Abrahams, Isaacs, and Mordecais are encouraging venality and indulging our appetite for vice, whether that vice be pornography, gambling, drugs, alcohol (in the Prohibition days), the services of prostitutes... It is most important to note that they do this in order to assert dominance: like the panderers of Biblical times, the Jeffrey Epstein-style panderers of today exploit Gentile weakness so as to get one over the Gentiles.

 

A second Jewish Persona, and one that is most pertinent in 2024, is the Jewish war criminal, who first appears in Genesis, in the story of Shechem and Dinah. A two-man army, Simeon and Levi kill all the males in the city of the Hivites, lay waste to that city, steal all the livestock, and enslave all the women and children. Fearing the consequences, Jacob reproves his two sons: 'And Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, Ye have troubled me to make me to stink among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites: and I being few in number, they shall gather themselves together against me, and slay me; and I shall be destroyed, I and my house' [Genesis 34:30]. The racial massacres - for which the Jewish intellectual and anti-Nazi activist Rafael Lemkin coined the term 'genocide' - commence in earnest in Numbers. The Midianites are nearly all wiped out after Moses orders the death of all the Midianite men and all the non-virgin women. Of the survivors, the Israelites take captive 16,000 virgin females, and interestingly, 32 of these females are set aside for a sacrifice to Yahweh - one of few instances of human sacrifice that are approved of in the Bible.

 

The third significant Jewish Persona is the cruel overlord and oppressor: see Joseph. The Joseph story leads us to what I call the Jewish political model. The Jewish hero of the Old Testament seeks power not by ascending to a throne - that would be too public - but by becoming a middleman. He insinuates himself into a court and bit by bit makes himself indispensable to a ruler who is usually vain, empty-headed, and easily swayed. Joseph and the Pharoah, Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar, and Mordecai and Ahasuerus give examples. The first two Jewish heroes, Joseph and Daniel, win the Gentile rulers over by becoming interpreters of dreams and portents - that is, psychoanalysts - and all three heroes use their influence to amass wealth and power for themselves and for the Jewish people; and such are the persuasive powers of their Jewish advisors, Ahasuerus and Darius the Median obligingly order the execution of the enemies of Mordecai and Daniel. 

 

Among the other archetypes we find the Jewish heroine who is a Jewish patriot: we see the prostitutes Sarah, Rebekah, and Esther; two female assassins, Jael and Judith, who murder men who are enemies of the Jews; and the prophetess Deborah, a sort of Jewish queen, who being a 'stronk womyn' (strong woman) doubtless wins the admiration of feminist scholars.

 

Quite a few archetypes can be found in the Bible that have fallen into disuse, that is to say, we do not see Jews in the modern age taking up these Personae. For examples of discarded Personae, see Elijah and his disciple Elisha, who are evil wizards; these men are the Jedi of the Bible, but unlike the Jedi, they owe allegiance to the dark side of the Force - perhaps they are not Jedi, but Sith. And any discussion of magical powers in the Bible brings us to the one archetype that appears more than any other, and that is the religious maniac who makes a habit of animal and sometimes human sacrifice. These are the men who give burnt offerings to Yahweh, that is, holocausts, holocaust being a word that stems from the Greek word kauston, to burn. 'Burnt offering' appears nearly 250 times in the Old Testament and 'holocaust' over a dozen times in the deuterocanonical texts. (When someone accuses you of denying the Holocaust, the smart rejoinder is: 'Which one?'). Neither term appears in the New Testament, suggesting that Christianity is a religion that has parted ways from Judaism. The doctrine of the latter rests upon the ritual slaughter, butchery, and sacrifice of animals; Yahweh takes pleasure in it; the fiery sacrifice of these beasts is a 'sweet savor to the Lord'; Leviticus is one long cookbook and butcher's manual. But after the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews stopped their sacrificing; and sometime before then, the Ark of the Covenant, a box that Yahweh lives in, was stolen by parties unknown. After these two cataclysms, Jews enter the modern era, one that is devoid of magic, Yahweh having left the Earth. Steve Wells observes that the destruction of the Second Temple 'caused a complete change in Judaism: from a temple-based religion, with lots of animal sacrifices, to a new form called Rabbinical Judaism, with no sacrifices'.

 

The lower-case 'h' holocaust relates to the upper-case 'H' Holocaust that we all we know; the two are connected. Those on the Left who are opposed to Zionism, Israel, the 'genocide in Gaza', are unable to avoid this relation, because any defender of Israel and Zionism will bring it up sooner or later. And it is here that any rationality, logic, argument, comes to a halt. We traverse from secularism to religiosity. And against faith, there is no argument. Simply put, the Jewish religious tradition is filled with nonsense, but such is the hold of that tradition on the contemporary Jewish mind, not even the most avowedly secular Jewish intellectual is willing to challenge any part, no matter how nonsensical.

 

Strom illustrates for us one instance of Jewish religious absurdity:

 

According to the Talmud, in the year 132 AD the Romans slaughtered the Jews in the town of Bethar. Bethar was a small town about ten miles southwest of Jerusalem, and it had an area of approximately five city blocks — one source gives its area as about 600 meters by 200 meters. Not only did the Romans kill every Jew in Bethar, but according to the named and “authoritative” rabbis writing in the Talmud, the number of Jews killed there was 800,000,000. Just in case such a number might seem a tad exaggerated, the Talmud makes it all clear by informing us that the blood of the holocausted Jews ran to the sea in a huge tidal wave that swept boulders in its path and was so deep that it reached the nostrils of the Romans’ horses. The crimson tide of Jewish blood, we are told, roared over 35 miles to the sea, where it stained the waters red four miles from the shore.

 

Not only did 800,000,000 Jews live in Bethar, but they lived in luxurious ease, and within those 600 by 200 meters were 64,000,000 Jewish schoolchildren who attended schools operated by the 400 synagogues. We are additionally informed that the evil Romans wrapped each of the schoolchildren in his scroll and burned all of them, and that the bodies of the Jews were then used to build a wall enclosing Hadrian’s vineyard, which was 18 miles square, and the Jewish blood that was salvaged from the tidal wave was used as fertilizer for seven years.

 

And that brings us to the Talmudic tall tale that wields the most power. This is the Holocaust, the 'h' being capitalised. According to the Talmud, the Gentiles will throw the Jews into giant ovens; six million Jews will be immolated; and Yahweh, recognising the sacrifice, will bring the murdered Jews back to life. After this, the Jews will reclaim the lost State of Israel.

 

As we know, this reclamation is what happened in 1948, when the prophecy was fulfilled. Or perhaps it was not; perhaps the prophecy was nonsense, religious nonsense, all along.

 

IV.

 

When considering all this, the theme that emerges is continuity. A bridge across time joins the Jews of Biblical times to the Jews of today, and it is faith and blood that links the two generations. Unusually for a religion, Judaism takes race and faith to be commensurate; the men of the Jewish faith who choose to marry women who are of a non-Jewish faith are betraying the Jewish race. In Numbers, the Fourth Book of Moses, Jewish men 'commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab' [Numbers 25:1]. Outraged by this, Yahweh sends a plague that kills tens of thousands of Jews. Fortunately, the plague comes to an end after a Bible hero, Phinehas, spies a Jewish man, Zimri, copulating with a 'Midianitish' woman, Cozbi, in a tent; he steals into the tent and with a spear skewers the pair; he 'thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her belly' [Numbers 25:8]. Greatly pleased by the double murder, Yahweh puts an end to the plague - but not before it has killed 24,000 Jews.

 

Racial purity matters to the Jews of the Bible because of continuity. In one form or another, the doctrines of afterlife and the immortality of the soul turn up in the teachings of all the world's religions, but Judaism is unique insofar as the only immortality and afterlife that it acknowledges lie in the continuance of the Jewish racial line. This is why, after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the daughters of Lot ply him with alcohol and rape him - 'that we may preserve seed of our father' [Genesis 19:32]. As Guyenot writes in From Yahweh to Zion: Three Thousand Years of Exile (2018):

 

This fundamentally materialistic nature of ancient Hebraism has often been pointed out by historians of religion: the rewards promised by Yahweh to those who “fear” him are entirely material—to be “full of days,” to have numerous offspring and a great fortune. Man’s only survival is through generation, or blood descent, according to the Torah... In the story of Cain and Abel... It is not Abel’s soul that suffers, but rather his blood “crying out to God from the ground” (Genesis 4:10).

 

We must pause here. In the event that readers feel some revulsion to the above, I must warn them: they are feeling the onset of anti-Semitism. Does the atmosphere of the tawdry saga that is the Old Testament seem cloying, closed-off, stuffy, suffocating, incestuous? Does the morality of the Bible seem debased? Yes, and such a reaction is healthy and normal; but it is anti-Semitic.

 

V.

 

Guyent's ruminations on blood, progeny, lineage, and continuity prompt us to delve into the topic of the Jewish philosophy of life. Because the events of the Old Testament are often sordid and the actions of Yahweh are often merciless, cruel, and murderous, one would assume that Jews have a fierce mien and a grim view of life, but that assumption does not square with our knowledge of the Jews that we are acquainted with in everyday life and the world of popular culture.

 

Between ourselves, this is where many anti-Semitic polemics fall down. A recent article by Douglas Mercer posted at the National Alliance site, an article that primarily concerns the Jewish comedian Jerry Seinfeld, goes too far; it lacks nuance; simply put, it is so badly written and badly thought out, so much so that I will not be linking it here, for it gives anti-Semites a bad name. If you spoke like Mercer does to anyone old enough to remember Seinfeld, they would regard you as a freak - and rightfully so. A comic masterpiece, Seinfeld features good actors who possess superb comedic timing, and it made viewers laugh. To those of us who experienced it, it gave fleeting moments of pleasure; we have fond memories of it; and perhaps the more nostalgic of us revisit it; but Mercer, a puritan, tells us: stop enjoying it! But even the founder of the National Alliance, William Pierce, concedes that some Jewish TV and movie productions amuse him. In a 2001 broadcast, Countering the Poison, Pierce says:

 

All in the Family’s Archie Bunker was used to make White Americans with traditional ideas about race and sexuality seem ridiculous, to seem ignorant and small-minded. M*A*S*H, starring the leftist actor Alan Alda, was used to make Whites with traditional attitudes seem like vicious bigots, despised by all decent people. Tens of millions of White Americans watched these programs on black-and-white television screens week after week. I was one of those White Americans. The programs were genuinely funny, genuinely entertaining.

 

But alas, he sighs: 'And they were genuinely poisonous to the easily manipulated lemmings who made up the vast majority of the viewers'. He goes on to say that the creator of All in the Family, Norman Lear, was Jewish; as was the producer of the M*A*S*H TV show, Larry Gelbart; as was the director of the M*A*S*H movie, Robert Altman.

 

In all due deference to Pierce, when I first heard him in that broadcast - nearly a quarter of a century ago - identify Altman, one of the great New Hollywood directors, as a Jew, I experienced doubt: after all, Altman was known to be a Catholic director. And indeed, the Wiki entry (which is by no means authoritative) says that Altman was not Jewish. If Wiki is right and Pierce is wrong, it is of no great consequence, but I think that it is a symptom. Simply put, white nationalists always want to offload anything bad about white culture, the white Western world, what Spengler called the Faustian or Occidental Culture, onto the Jews; furthermore, they are unwilling to admit that many of the Jews working in the fields of popular culture and entertainment have given us works that are diverting and amusing. To the white nationalist, such a concession represents a betrayal of the worst kind. For he believes that one cannot relax - not even for a second. The ethic of the white nationalist is: take everything, even an old and trivial piece of entertainment such as Seinfeld, seriously - extremely seriously. The American white nationalist is as dour as a member of the Plymouth Brethren, and one can spy the spirit of Protestantism lurking behind him; for all his professed anti-Christianity, he is at bottom an Evangelical.

 

If you want the opposite of seriousness, look to the Jewish philosophy of life as expounded in Ecclesiastes. There we find plenty of the materialism that Guyenot speaks of, and a pronounced opposition to the heroic spirit that we see in the myths of the Greeks and the Babylonians.

 

To understand the anti-heroism of Ecclesiastes, take note of how the Old Testament parodies certain of the Greek and Roman heroic myths. The story of Samson parodies the story of Hercules, and it does this because it is intending to degrade; it wants to make fun of the demigod myths and drag them into the mud. At the same time, it wants to recast them; it wants to build a Jewish version. The result is that in the person of Samson, the Bible creates a Jewish Hercules. Samson is the son of a mortal woman and an angel (or perhaps Yahweh himself) in the same way that Hercules is the son of Alcmena, who is a mortal woman, and Zeus. From the telling of the Samson story, we can deduce that the Jewish tradition despised the Classical but at the same time acknowledged its power.

 

When examining Ecclesiastes, let us look first to the hedonistic and happy-go-lucky philosophy. This book of the Bible delivers welcome relief from all the gloom, violence, and seriousness, that goes before:

 

"There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour." 2:24

 

"There is no good ... but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life." 3:12

 

"Every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour." 3:13

 

"There is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works." 3:22

 

"A man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry." 8:15

 

"Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart." 9:7

 

"Walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes." 11:9

 

"Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." 12:12

 

Then there is the anti-heroism:

 

"For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast." 3:19

 

"For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion." 9:4

 

"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten." 9:5

 Finally, there is the nihilism and pessimism:

 

"All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again." 3:20

 

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest." 9:10

 

"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." 9:11

 

Seinfeld won for itself the reputation as being the 'show about nothing'. A good many critics attributed Seinfeld's nihilism, hedonism, and anti-heroism to the influence of the spirit of the nineties, a decade which was, according to these critics, postmodern. And indeed, Jerry Seinfeld's world view slots into the postmodernist's quite nicely. But we can see how it is that the philosophy of Seinfeld and Ecclesiastes converge.

 

V.

 

I think I have presented a fairly comprehensive summing up of the principles of anti-Semitism, and over other accounts it possesses the advantage of being rooted in the Jewish past; it does not waste time on recent Jewish history - the history of the Rothschilds, the Balfour Declaration, Theodor Herzl, Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank, Bibi Netanyahu, and the rest. In order to understand the principles of real anti-Semitism, one needs to forgo the contemporary and stick to tradition.

 

Something that struck me when exploring that tradition is the importance of the insight that there are three characters on the stage: the Jews, the non-Jews, and Yahweh. The last of these is the worst killer and oppressor of the Jews, and throughout the books of the major and minor prophets, Yahweh does nothing but threaten to rape, starve, enslave, and kill the Jewish people. Now and then he throws the Jews a bone and promises them dominion over the non-Jews; but most of his utterances, including the very last words of the Old Testament, consist of threats towards the Jews. And if we are to believe the tales of the earlier books, the body count of Jews killed by Yahweh - and often for small infractions - reaches into the hundreds of thousands. Ridiculously, the Catholic Church regards the books of the minor prophets as holy, and it devotes sacred days to their study. That being by the by, the important question is: why is it that Jews worship a god that is so destructive and abusive? What do they get out of it?

 

An economist would say that the Jews of the ancient world performed a cost-benefit analysis when throwing their lot in with Yahweh, which is true enough, and we know that to these Jews, the benefits of a fealty to a murderous, capricious, and grim god outweighed the costs. But to repeat, such a statement is anti-Semitic.

 

And so now that we have some understanding of what I call the real anti-Semitism is, we must ask the question, does the ideology of the radical, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel Left betray its impress? Has the radical Left become anti-Semitic? Has it become - to use a word that is now over-used, worn-out, and nearly devoid of meaning - 'Nazi'?

 

VI.

 

In order to answer that, we must scrutinise contemporary leftist discourse and keep a look-out for the special words and phrases that may indicate anti-Semitism. Such is the task of the Greenblatts, who perform it every day: it is their purpose in life.

 

Certain words were acceptable yesterday and unacceptable today. Some sixty to seventy years ago, Blacks in America were called 'coloreds', 'negroes', and 'blacks'; over time, those terms became verboten and were replaced by 'Black' (with a capital b) and 'African American', the last being a misnomer because most American negroes have never set foot in Africa.

 

Some words become reserved for use by one group and not another, and the word 'Black' may wind up in that category. When Trump referred to 'Black jobs' in the 2024 debate with Biden, sectors of the Left professed outrage: because Trump is a white man, it was implied, he had no right to use the word. But African Americans can use it all they want. The same holds true for the ultimate reserved word, which is of course the 'n' word. Negro musical performers, especially rap artists, can use it all they want, but if a non-negro uses it, well, he condemns himself to cancellation.

 

We see the same twisting and turning when it comes to the words 'Jew' and 'Jews'. If you are not Jewish and you refer to Jews with the definite article - 'The Jews' - you run the risk of sounding anti-Semitic. Likewise, the indefinite article arouses suspicion and hostility from the Greenblatts, especially when you apply it to an individual: 'The economist Milton Friedman is a Jew'. The verb 'jew' betokens anti-Semitism as well: see its use in the 1995 Michael Jackson single They Don't Care About Us: it means to deceive, exploit, swindle, rob.

 

But in the main, Jews themselves are allowed to freely use words that are forbidden to non-Jews. A Jewish writer may exclaim, 'I am a proud Jew'; he may declare that 'rising anti-Semitism on American college campuses is making the Jews nervous'; he is permitted to throw 'Jew' and 'Jews' about liberally. But you are not allowed, and you shall treat 'Jew' and 'Jews' in the same manner that you would treat words that refer to African Americans: these are the words that are to be handled most carefully, and better yet, not at all. It is far safer to use the adjective 'Jewish' ('These are the Jewish people', 'This is the Jewish-American community') instead of the nouns 'Jew' and 'Jews'. But you must take care to deploy 'Jewish' positively, never negatively; otherwise, you will stray into anti-Semitic territory. Years ago, when discussing the world of contemporary finance with a friend of mine - who was a prominent leader on the Far Right - I explained to him the practice of short-selling, and he shook his head disapprovingly and opined that short-selling sounded 'very Jewish'.

 

I predict that the words 'Zionism' and 'Zionist' will go the way of 'colored' and 'negro'. In the Bible, Zion denotes three things: a hill near Jerusalem, Jerusalem itself, and a mystical land. Zionism, the political and national movement that we all know, draws upon these Biblical connotations. A hundred years ago, the word attracted little in the way of controversy and comment, but in recent years, it has become a curse-word, especially to those on the Far Left, so much so that the ears of the Greenblatts prick up when they hear it; to the Greenblatts, the man who uses the word 'Zionist' as a pejorative term - and perhaps he contracts it sneeringly to 'Zio' - is announcing to the world that he is an anti-Semite.

 

We know that in 2024, the Far Left likes using the words 'Zionist' and 'Zio', which to the Greenblatts implies that the Far Left is on the way to real anti-Semitism. How, then, does Greenblatt fight it? The only means of refuting anti-Semitism is denial. You deny the proposition that Jews possess great wealth and power, that they can use their resources to bring about evil and not good, that they can be - as we see in the example of Greenblatt - paranoid, belligerent, aggressive, and a little unhinged. Denying is what American conservatives and Jewish organisations do around the clock. But a limit is reached, and after a point even the Far Left, which traditionally pays scant attention to Jewish matters, starts to show signs of scepticism; it cannot buy into the notion that the Jews are a poor, victimised, oppressed people who are bullied at every turn by the Gentiles in a most savage and cruel manner. They cannot accept Greenblatt's contention that the Jews possess no political power. And so, cracks begin to appear.

 

It is true that the Far Left fails to perceive the link between the Jews of yesterday and the Jews of today: if prominent thinkers of a left-wing persuasion deigned to read the Bible, they would see that Netanyahu's starvation of the Gazans mirrors Joseph's starvation of the Egyptians. But then, few on the Left or the Right bother to read the Bible and study Jewish history; and even the most devout Christians are unaware of what dwells in the Bible's pages.

 

VII.

 

Leftism consists of a number of beliefs, propositions. We can conceive of these as being part of a solar system, the center of which is socialism, Marxism, communism, Bolshevism. The typical leftist mind is filled to the brim with Marxism; it is crammed, and it has no room for any of the 'isms' - and that includes anti-Semitism - that compete with Marxism. All the same, the left-winger must deal with allies who subscribe to non-Marxist beliefs. Among the non-Marxists are those who dedicate their energies to the advancement of Islam and their race. And that brings us to Ilhan Omar, an East African immigrant and a Muslim who was elected to the US House of Representatives in 2019. In that same year, Omar caused a controversy with this tweet, which was deemed anti-Semitic:

 

 

Oddly, Omar is considered to be left-wing, that is, someone to be grouped in the same category as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom are self-professed socialists. And it is here that the notorious phenomenon of left-wing anti-Semitism comes into play. In contemporary America, a sort of no-man's land exists between the sphere of the classical socialist, the Marxist, the Bolshevik, and the sphere of the Muslim, the African American, the immigrant; and in that fertile soil the real anti-Semitism, an anti-Semitism of the sort that can be detected in Omar's tweet, sprouts. Omar showed signs of becoming aware of the propositions that are easy to understand, difficult to accept: that Jews possess power, that Jews possess money, that Jews use both to get their own way, that they do this as Jews and not as members of the 'Davos elite' and 'the capitalist class' and 'the fascist Left' - these are the propositions that the anti-Semite finds unremarkable and the American conservative abominable.

 

The political implications are profound, and we need to digest them; one could write a lengthy analysis of what they entail for the Right, the Center, and the Left. But a meditation on the spiritual aspects as opposed to the political would profit us more.

 

In the section on Ecclesiastes, I touched upon the Jewish attitude towards the Roman and Hellenic heroes, and how Judaism sought to appropriate Classical myth and turn it into something Jewish. Judaism wanted a Hercules or Gilgamesh, and it gave us Samson. But how was the Classical and Babylonian hero to be converted into a Jewish? The answer is: by means of a holocaust.

 

After the mysterious angel reveals that he has impregnated the previously barren wife of Manoah, Manoah begs him to stay for dinner, for he has killed a goat for the occasion. The angel agrees, but demands that Manoah sacrifice the goat to Yahweh so as to mark the unborn Samson and consecrate his person to Yahweh. Manoah complies: 'So Manoah took a kid with a meat offering, and offered it upon a rock unto the LORD' [Judges 13:19]. Now, think of that image - the sacrifice of a goat on an altar - and what it reminds you of; does it not evoke a Satanic horror movie? After this quasi-Satanic sacrifice, the Bible continues with infernal imagery. The angel departs, shooting off to the skies, leaving an exhaust column of flame in his wake; he is like a rocket ship - or a cartoon devil. 'For it came to pass, when the flame went up toward heaven from off the altar, that the angel of the LORD ascended in the flame of the altar' [Judges 13:20]. The symbol of the flame, fire, heat, is to Judaism what the symbol of the moon is to Islam. Because of centuries of Christian indoctrination, we in the West associate the Old Testament fire imagery with hell, devils, Satan; but we must keep in mind that the Old Testament differs from the New in its conception of Satan, hell, devils, demons. Old Testament stories such as the story of Samson challenge our Christian assumptions. For centuries, we in the West have believed that hell is 'down there', under the earth, under our feet; but the fiery angel - who refuses to divulge his name - after taking his leave flies off up there and not down there. Perhaps Hell or what the ancient Norse called Muspelheim is up there, in 'heaven', and not down there, deep in the bowels of the earth.

 

In the B-grade British horror movie Long Time Dead (2002), a marauding Arabic fire demon (a 'djinn') kills a series of British students and nightclubbers, setting them alight with his touch; Yahweh murders Uzzah and then Moses' nephews Nadab and Abihu using the same method. The last two men died because they performed a holocaust ritual in the incorrect way, much like a neophyte practitioner of black magic who, when attempting to summon demons, commits the mistake of stepping outside the pentagram. After the deaths of Nadab and Abihu, Yahweh warns their father Aaron that Jews should take extra care when entering Yahweh's tent. Curiously enough, apologists for Judaism will tell us that the deaths by immolation of Uzzah, Nadab, and Abihu were good. If we are to make sense of this notion of ‘the good’, we must perform what Nietzsche calls a transvaluation of values and understand that the Jewish tradition sees such spectral fire-beings as not evil and demonic but splendid and divine.

 

But those of us who stand outside the Jewish tradition take a different view, and we want to keep Yahweh as far away from us as possible, for he belongs in a horror movie of the seventies Satanic genre - movies such as The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976).

 

Both movies are Christian, and perhaps the makers of them were looking at their subject the wrong way. Our perspective is limited by centuries of Christian indoctrination and training; like us, the ancient Egyptians found themselves constrained by their own religious presuppositions when it came to the Jewish question. For the life of them, they could not understand the Jewish religion, and they sought to comprehend Jewish religious doctrine by seeing in it parallels with their own - they believed that Yahweh was Set, the Egyptian god of darkness and evil, in disguise. And Set in Egyptian theology is the closest deity to the devil in Christian theology. Mulling over cross-religious comparisons, I see parallels between Yahweh and the fire-giant Surtr of Norse myth; Surtr is a blacksmith, and a recent academic treatise argues convincingly that Yahweh is the Canaanite god of smelting.

 

Were the Egyptians right about Judaism? Certainly, we can see that today's Christians have gotten Judaism wrong, and it is the opposing elements, the contradictions, within it that make Christian Zionism a jumble. The authors of the Talmud loathed Christianity, and that should make Christians treat Israel and Zionism with caution; but Christian Zionists treat the State of Israel as a means to an end. Steve Wells speaks of the American Evangelist attempts at building the Third Temple:

 

The Jews returned to Israel in 1948 and took control of the territory that contains the site of the temple in 1967. So a third temple could be rebuilt and animal sacrifices could resume. What's the hold up?

 

The hold up is the red cow.[2] A red cow that meets the requirements of Numbers 19 must be found and sacrificed to make the holy water that can purify priests from all the dead bodies that they have come into contact with during their lives.

 

Once a red cow is found, killed, and burned, its ashes can be used to purify priests, the temple can be rebuilt, and God will smell the sweet savor of burning animal flesh once again.

 

And according to Maimonides, when the third temple is rebuilt the Messiah will come.

 

Of course, Christians believe the Messiah came and went a long time ago. But many also believe that when a red heifer is found and the temple is rebuilt, he'll come again. And then all hell will break loose and the end of the world will come.

 

Recently five red heifers have been sent from Texas to Jerusalem, hoping that one of them will meet the rabbi's standards.

 

To the person who has seen one too many seventies horror movies, these Evangelicals are playing with fire. What would happen if the Dome of the Rock was levelled and the Third Temple was built in its place? Conceivably, Yahweh could come back; although perhaps we need to recover Yahweh's box, the Ark of the Covenant, for that to happen, the mere suggestion alone should frighten. The rebuilding of the Temple could make up the premise of a seventies-style horror movie: by their actions, Orthodox Jewish zealots and foolish Evangelicals unleash Yahweh once again upon the world; in the movie’s trailer, a voiceover announces in a sepulchral tone: 'An ancient evil returns'.

 

But in order to bring back Yahweh, perhaps we do not need to restore the Temple, or find the Ark of Covenant, or build a portal that will allow him into cross from his dimension into ours, because to judge by the chaos, misery, and death in Gaza and Lebanon, Yahweh is already here.

 

Bootcut and Low Rise: Race, Nationalism, Holocaust Revisionism, and Men's Fashion in the 2000s

I.

 

I read Angelo Plume's journey through the history of the past 14 years with great interest, not only because his impressions of the 2020s and the 2010s mirror my own, but because his journey ends at the same destination that many people in the movement have found themselves at: at the end of the line. In keeping with most ideological polemics written by those in the movement today, Plume's essay takes a negative and pessimistic view of the present and the future, and while that view is not one that I disagree with entirely, it is one that ought to raise the question, 'How on earth do you expect it to attract a following?'.

 

If we are to look to the history of politics since the beginning of recorded time, we see that no political movement has won power with the message that life is bad today, that life will be worse tomorrow, and that there are no answers. Experience shows that politics relies on simplicity and that it seeks simple solutions to difficult problems. Take Marxism, for example: life in Europe in the 19th century in the works of Marx is portrayed as hell on Earth; but fortunately, the way Marx tells it, the answer lies close to hand, and the misery of the working class will be resolved in the fashion of a 19th century comic opera or melodramatic novel; that is, there will be a happy ending. Today, the communist movement lacks that certainty, but so does the 'Alt Right' or dissident Right or white nationalist movement.

 

Some in the white nationalist movement project apocalyptic, millenarian, chiliastic futures, but others are smart enough to know that Western man has lived through the 'end times' many times - just look at European man at the time of medieval Europe - and they know that eschatology has every time come to naught. In any case, I do not think that apocalypticism, the breakdown of civilisation, and a reversion to Darwin’s 'survival of the fittest' accord with human nature; if we ever did see the breakdown of civilisation, and the end of electricity, gas, running water, sanitation, shopping malls, and supermarkets, then women would make sure that men had all these up and running again in no time. It is women's nagging men that drove men to devise these luxuries in the first place.

 

To return to Plume: Plume's problem relates to what we moderns call the 'standard of living', the 'quality of life', and what Aristotle called the 'Good Life'; and the doctrine of vitalism, associated with Nietzsche and Shaw, comes into it as well.

 

To explain how it is that these doctrines relate to the present, I will point to today's media. Every day, I check the news. And unlike my boomer parents, I do not read newspapers; instead, I look at websites. On my morning reading list can be found over two dozen conservative sites and under ten dissident Right sites. They serve up a diet of endless bad news, so much so that I have taken to calling my morning news the 'bad news bulletin'. Are the journalists writing this news portraying real life? No, says Nietzsche: no individual can sum up the value of Life with a capital 'L'. These journalists are portraying life as they see it, however, and that puts me in a difficult position. When reading the bad news bulletin, I do not disagree with the facts as presented, but I do ask myself, do the facts entail that life in the Anglosphere as these journalists see it is worth living? Judging by the articles, the answer often is no. The writers will make the rejoinder: 'No, what I have written for this week's column does not sum up my attitudes towards Life; when you read me, you caught me on a bad day'. Besides which (and this is the conservative writer speaking), 'All of America's problems will be resolved once we re-elect Trump'. My response is: perhaps, perhaps not, but it seems singularly unwise to stake the future of your country and the future of yourself on the election of one man.

 

Having said that, the coming to power of a distinguished leader can mark a turn towards the Good Life. Hitler was once quoted as saying - and I cannot find the origin of the quotation - 'We National Socialists have proved that Germans can live, and live well, without the Jews, and this is the hardest blow we have struck against them'. That quotation, if genuine, shows that Hitler valued 'living well', Aristotle's Good Life; and in part it explains the continuing appeal of German National Socialism eight decades later.

 

We can think of other societies and nations in other historical epochs that valued the Good Life, and among these is the Roman. For centuries, the Romans lived lives of refinement, as we have seen from their architecture, their houses, their clothes. Not every Roman approached the standards of the Roman upper class, of course, but any falling short hardly mattered; it was only the overall standard that mattered.

 

So, when considering overall standards, the question we in the West in 2024 ought to ask is this: is there any time in the recent history that we have overall, like the Romans, followed a certain standard that entailed the Good Life? And if we are no longer abiding by that standard, why? And surely any obstacles that stand in the way of our reaching the Good Life can be overcome - any difficulties smoothed over, ameliorated, if not resolved altogether, by politics?

 

The inspiration for this essay came to me in the lockdown years, when to pass the time, I watched past episodes of a long running daytime American NBC TV drama. In one episode from 2006, two of the heroes were sitting in a bar drinking a beer while ‘deep house’ music blared in the background. Both characters were played by men who were in their fifties but who looked young for their age and who had not let themselves go to seed. They were reasonably well-groomed and were dressed in the casual clothes (including the bootcut jeans) that were fashionable at the time. And I saw in later episodes that the two men's wives were equally as well-dressed and groomed; that the two couples lived in middle-class homes; and that the homes were well-furnished, clean, and full of light and air. Now, all this sounds unremarkable, and so it is; but you must consider that at the time I was viewing the show, simple pleasures such as drinking with friends in a bar were denied to me. And because of the closure of barbers, hairdressers, beauty salons, gyms, and retail clothing outlets at the time, it was quite easy for one to enter a state of dishevelment and hence self-degradation, the outcome sought after by our Covidian masters, who would arrest you if you had the temerity to walk outdoors without wearing a surgical mask. So, I envied these characters on my TV screen, and I wondered at the fact that once - in the America of 2006 - living the Good Life was the norm. For people in the years 2020 to 2022 had become quite deranged, and even though I liked to think in those years that I was holding myself aloof from the madness, gradually the madness came to infect even me, and like them, I began to lose touch with reality; but ironically, my contact with it was restored by my watching an old American TV show.

 

After the experience, I set myself the task of coming up with answers to two questions: what is normal? and what is the Good Life?

 

II.

 

The politics of the 1990s has been written about many times, and most of the writings revolve around the themes of the 'End of History' and the 'End of Politics', as we see in this Travis LeBlanc piece here. In America in the nineties, Far Right politics travelled along the same road as mainstream politics; both preached the doctrine of the 'End of Ideology' and 'End of Politics'. The white nationalist movement, the militia movement, the survivalist movement, all eschewed politics and participation in civic life, and the members of these movements isolated themselves in compounds and camps, the most famous being William Pierce's compound in rural Virginia, there to await the end of the world, which would occur in the year 2000 perhaps. 

 

On the Continent, the decade saw the slow rise of Far-Right populism. Interesting possibilities presented themselves after the reunification of Germany, and liberal observers feared a resurgence of German nationalism, but they need not have bothered, because whatever 'Neo-Nazi' movement there was in reunified Germany was overtaken by the skinhead movement, which was as apolitical as could be.

 

Far more interesting a subject than nineties politics or the lack thereof is how people lived. Were white people better off in the nineties? We could give the rote answer that our dissident Right ideology compels us to give, which is yes, the residents of the Anglosphere were far better off because while the Great Replacement was occurring in that decade, it had not yet picked up steam; in the case of Australia, the annual intake of immigrants would not reach the hundreds of thousands until the following decade.

 

On the other hand, one answer to our question, and one stock standard white nationalist answer, would be no. The Dukes, Metzgers, Pierces, would point to Jewish power, which to them seemed especially pronounced in the nineties. Even worse was the fact that little awareness of the Jewish question and the question of Jewish power and influence existed. For one thing, the Internet was barely in its infancy, and hardly any respectable person had heard of Holocaust Revisionism, much less accessed forbidden works online; in those days, if you wanted to read a book by a nationalist or a Revisionist, you had to write overseas to some publisher of forbidden books. The result was that in the nineties the proponents of Holocaust Exterminationism and anti-Nazism had free rein. The Jewish party line on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, the National Socialists, the events of WWII, the founding of the State of Israel were spread all over the culture. The Holocaust and WWII stories had gotten their start in the seventies and eighties and became reached their peak in the nineties; most likely the turning point was the release of Schindler's List (1993), which at the time was acclaimed by all and sundry as a moving and truthful account of Hitler's persecution and extermination of the Jews.

 

But let us put these dissident Right views to one side for the moment. If we are to evaluate how good white people had it in the nineties, we must consider how they lived. And when I look at that period objectively, I must admit that were I transported to it in a time machine and made to relive it, I would most likely be bored and frustrated. For one, I would be forced to live without modern conveniences such as the smartphone and high-speed broadband Internet, both of which we today take for granted. These luxuries, especially the Internet, have become necessities, and they are no longer luxuries; we can no longer imagine a life without them any more than we can imagine it without electricity and hot and cold running water.

 

How do we transport ourselves mentally to such archaic times? To gauge a bygone epoch, your best course is to watch its TV. If you look up '1990s men's fashions' or '2000s men's fashions' in a search engine, the results will bring up photo after photo of garishly attired rap and boy band performers; you simply will not be able to find pictures of what ordinary men wore. It is only TV that can return you to your past. During lockdown, my positive experience of revisiting the past through watching old TV shows prompted me to obtain compilations of late-nineties episodes of a popular daytime American ABC TV drama; and in these were included all the advertisements that accompanied each broadcast. This complete package, to me, proved to be revelatory; watching the TV shows and the ads from a bygone age is the closest thing we have to time travel; when you see an actor wearing a particular article of clothing, all of a sudden a vivid memory can thrust itself up into the forefront of your consciousness; you are reminded of owning that shirt or that raincoat with that exact colour and that exact pattern. In addition, the advertising brings back memories when it promotes the popular TV shows and movies of the time: when watching the ads for these, you remember with a jolt that you had seen that TV show in your living room and that movie in the cinema at the nearby mall. (Back in those days, you had to visit a cinema if you wanted to see a new movie, and you frequently did want to see that movie; for movies were more popular and significant then than they are now).

 

A sociologist would find the advertisements to be of interest because they give an insight into American life. The ads hawk the usual products - snack food, medicines, household cleaning liquids, toothpaste, etc. - and, to my surprise, medicines, remedies, hygienic items, and enhancers for everything that takes place below the belt. The brutally frank treatment of intimate subjects blows out of the water the notion that Americans are prudish about their bodily functions.

 

In the current year, we are a little wiser, and we can say that most of the worst of the afflictions suffered by everyday Americans in the nineties - afflictions such as heartburn and constipation - came about because of the American diet, which is atrocious. And the subject of diet brings us to another staple of American life in the nineties: the fat man. In the eighties, most male actors, even the middle-aged ones, looked thin, and alarmingly so. The overweight actor, e.g., John Candy, was a rarity and usually a comic figure. But by the nineties, all that had changed. We saw more and more of the chubby character, in TV shows, movies, and advertisements; first we saw him as a background character, then as a lead. Towards the end of the decade, the balding, overweight, middle-aged, usually wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of baggy shorts, came to epitomise the American male. He is a pathetic and comic figure, and he is a slave to his appetites, a plump buffoon who dances ecstatically at the thought of eating a box of Pop Tarts or a Rice Krispie bar.

 

The countervailing force is the stock-standard nineties action hero - the muscle man who usually wears a trench coat and a mullet. The latter signified the hero's strength, power, and virility. Nowadays, it seems gauche. And so did most of nineties men's fashion, which wanted to revive some of the worst items of fifties men's fashion, e.g. the big, loose, and baggy suit. Perhaps the nineties man liked the baggy suit because it hung on his frame comfortably, and perhaps he disliked the eighties suit because it clung tight; eighties suits were made for skinny and runty men.

 

The nineties mimicked the fashion of the fifties but forgoed the staidness of the fifties. A word that springs to mind when contemplating the popular culture of the nineties is: disorder. An underlying zaniness and freneticism, a furious energy, exists, and when you are on the receiving end of it for hours and hours, it becomes intolerable. In the nineties, if I wanted to get away from it all, I would go bushwalking with my friends, because in the tranquillity of the bush, I would be completely isolated from nineties pop culture, politics, and civilisation.

 

A conservative and harmonious side to American pop culture at the time does exist. In certain of the TV ads, we see American life being depicted as a life of comfort, ease, and serenity. See this commercial for Folger's coffee, starring country singer Randy Travis. He wakes up in the morning on his tour bus, looking improbably well-groomed and good-tempered; not for him the early morning dishevelment and hangover. Naturally enough, the beaming Travers, wearing a mullet and resplendent in a pristine white t-shirt and a pair of tight jeans, bursts into song, and he sings the praises of the Folgers brand; and you the viewer cannot help but find the music pleasing and reassuring. I am tempted to call this commercial and the hundreds of others like it implicitly white, perhaps even explicitly white, because the advertising men, knowing their market, wanted the audience to associate the product with whiteness and Americanism. And on that level, the ad men succeeded.

 

III.

 

I, like millions of other non-Americans in the Anglosphere, once found American popular culture to be seductive and enticing; now I do not. And today many popular culture afficionados who are devotees of American movies, TV shows, and comic books agree with me.

 

Some blame the politicisation of pop culture that occurred in the 2010s. The narrative goes that Hollywood and other mass producers of American popular culture had in the 2010s been infected with the new creed of Social Justice; that Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) infiltrated the American entertainment establishment and turned it 'woke'; that, using the same methods of communist infiltrators, the SJWs snuck into the great institutions and subverted them.

 

I am in broad agreement with the critics of SJWism, and one would be foolish to deny their thesis. After all, it is confirmed every day by the latest announcement in the entertainment news that a white character from a beloved franchise is being turned black, that he is being replaced by a female, that he is being turned into a homosexual, and so forth. The SJWs now parody themselves, and worse, they behaved in such a flagrantly provocative fashion that they have drawn attention to themselves - the attention of the entire world. As such, they have made American pop culture a laughingstock.

 

But what strikes me as being most important is that popular culture no longer entertains as it once did; it no longer approaches the old standard. The American entertainment industry in the old days worked like a factory, pumping out a product of a certain quality that the world came to respect. Take for example Hollywood in the years of the Silver Age, when it worked under the now maligned studio system; it churned out movies every year that were often A-grade, sometimes B-grade, but never C-grade. Audiences came to expect their entertainment to be somewhat dull but always robust; they could count on the studios to serve a meal that was satisfying and nutritious. My father, a boomer, once confessed to me that he never refused to see a Clint Eastwood movie because, in his words, 'You know what you're going to get'. But now, the rug has pulled out from under that faithful audience, and the media / entertainment complex turns out a shoddy product.

 

Thanks to the Internet, today the longtime fans of a franchise can assemble on a message board and immediately comment on a new instalment. They tend to dissect it, and they strive to work out where it went wrong and how it could have been made right. One YouTube commentator came to my attention when he suggested a brilliant fix for the movie, The Force Awakens (2015), a flawed movie that was the first instance of 'Disney Star Wars', 'SJW Star Wars'. This way the fans write better stories than the screenwriters themselves; the screenwriters, who are generally incompetent, almost have their job done for them. Fans of a franchise will take it more seriously than the writers, directors, and producers who work on it. This close attention to past and present of a franchise is needed, because the studios today seem largely indifferent. A strange apathy pervades the media and entertainment complex, and this is conjoined with a lack of professional standards and pride in one's work. My reaction whenever I encounter a shoddy instalment is to ask myself: how difficult it could be to devise a piece of escapism that is up to the standards that we all held to only two decades ago? In those days, the men who wrote the movies, comic books, and TV shows, produced decent work with little effort. But today any delivering of a good piece of work strains the capacity of we moderns, thus proving the dictum that a good artist will make the act of creation seem easy, a bad one will make it seem hard.

 

IV.

 

When remembering the decade that followed the nineties, most of us would prefer not to remember it at all; it is a decade most of us would prefer to forget. Bush, 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the War on Terror: many good things may have happened in the 1960s, for instance, but no good thing happened in the 2000s - that is the consensus.

 

What of the politics; what was it in the 2000s that benefited the dissident Right? Unquestionably, the growth of the Internet proved to be a boon; it facilitated the spread of racialism, Holocaust Revisionism, WWII revisionism, Far Right nationalism, across the West - a spread that Jewry, liberals, the Left, the Antifa were powerless to stop. Activists of the dissident Right could now communicate with ease, through message boards, mailing lists, email, and social media. Old-time hands such as William Pierce, who had been part of the movement since the 1960s, took to the new media like ducks to water, and his incendiary American Dissident Voices talks were broadcast on Internet radio every Saturday every week of the year. And those who were new to dissident Right ideas could now devour the classics online; you could read Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium (1948), Pierce's The Turner Diaries (1978), George Lincoln Rockwell's This Time the World (1961), and the key works of Holocaust Revisionism, in addition to a great many other forbidden books.

 

The idea of a decentralised network that facilitated the untrammelled free flow of information outraged Jewish organisations such as the ADL and AIPAC, and if we are to look closely at the 2000s, we can discern in it the beginnings of the end of the conventional narrative of WWII, the Holocaust, and National Socialism - the narrative touted by organised Jewish groups, American conservatives, American leftists, and all the other political groupings. Hard as it is to believe today, YouTube hosted clips that explained to viewers 'How to spot a Jew'; in a crash-course in Jew-spotting, the viewer's attention would be directed to aspects of Jewish physiognomy, including the famous Jewish nose.

 

After the advent of the modern Internet, the attention span of youth shortened, for modern youth is not given to reading; it prefers sound bites, short film clips, and memes. But even though these fragments possessed little by way of written information, they sufficed enough to shatter the belief in the Holocaust. Belief in Hitler's gas chambers slowly and almost imperceptibly became 'uncool', and over the course of years only the fuddy-duddies, the boomers who read their morning newspapers religiously and beheld Holocaust epics such as Sophies Choice (1982) and Schindler's List (1993) in rapt wonder, held fast to the Holocaust tale. Jewish organisations such as the ADL and AIPAC looked at these trends with an unease and disquiet, an anxiety that grew into a panic when they realised that punitive measures against Revisionists such as Ernst Zündel were not working; how to stamp out the unbelief?

 

Because the Holocaust is nothing but the Jewish religion. As we know from the Bible, the idea of a Holocaust, a burnt sacrifice to Yahweh, a burnt sacrifice that is in the words of the Bible of a 'sweet savour to the Lord', forms the cornerstone of Judaism. Cain murders Abel for this reason: Abel offered up dead animals to Yahweh, and Abel's offering met with Yahweh's acceptance, Cain's offering did not; for Cain offered crops to Yahweh, who, not being a vegan, wanted animals instead; and so, Cain grew jealous of Abel and killed him. The account of the offering to Yahweh, and the stipulation of the right sort of offering, lays the foundation for all the Jewish history that came thereafter. A denial of the supreme efficacy of burnt sacrifice, whether that sacrifice be of animals or human beings, flies in the face of Jewish belief, and it is tantamount to heresy. 

 

To clarify: 'Holocaust' means 'burnt offering to God'; the word 'Holocaust' appears 13 times in the apocryphal books of the Bible, and 'burnt offering’ 243 times in the Old Testament. After the Bible comes the Talmud, which is a lengthy commentary on the Old Testament; and in it can be found the prophecy that six million Jews will be put to death in giant ovens by the non-Jews, all as a sacrifice to Yahweh who will, as part of his end of the bargain, restore to Jewry the lost State of Israel. By a miracle, the six million, according to the prophecy, will be resurrected, and the survivors of the Holocaust will go on to reclaim the land promised by Yahweh to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Thus, the covenant between Jewry and Yahweh will be fulfilled.

 

Judaism = Zionism = Holocaustism. Once we understand this, we can understand the fury of Jewry, the extreme anger of Jews, directed towards Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, and Robert Faurisson. These men were persecuted mercilessly because of religion: viewed from a higher plane, the struggle between the political minions of organised Jewry and the Revisionists reproduces a religious conflict; a secular Zionism does not exist.

 

But that struggle, a metaphysical one, takes place at a level far above that of the consciousness of the 'normie'; the 'normie' could not give a tinker's cuss about either Holocaust Revisionism or Holocaust Exterminationism. So far as the 2000s is concerned, I am more interested in the 'normie' consciousness than the Jewish: so, I ask the question, how did people live?

 

V.

 

This article, which features many photos, covers some of the deliberately awful fashion choices made by the characters in the quintessential nineties TV show Seinfeld (1989-1998). Deliberately vacuous, blithe, complacent, and postmodern, Seinfeld, which proudly billed itself as the 'Show about nothing', embodies the nineties spirit. The article highlights some of the more grotesque of the men's apparel of that period, and perhaps by emphasising the abnormal, it neglects the normal; that is, if we are to pay too much attention to some of the weird and attention-grabbing pieces of men's clothing, we will overlook the day-to-day outfits worn by Jerry, George, Kramer, Newman, and the other male characters. And these day-to-day outfits were representative of the time: I argue that Seinfeld is typical nineties fashion and nineties aesthetic. I also argue that, going by Seinfeld, nineties menswear - and nineties men's style in general - is to be summed up as: functional but ugly.

 

Something that stands out is the typical nineties men's shirt worn by Jerry Seinfeld; it is a billowing and flowing affair, the sleeves slowly inflating like hot-air balloons before terminating in tight cuffs. It resembles the classic pirate's shirt (worn by Prince and other eighties stars) but without the frills at the front, and it recalls the shirt worn by the men of the Californian hippie and counter-culture folk in the late sixties, e.g., the men of Californian bands such as the Mamas and Papas.

 

Seinfeld, a comedy, prefers light to neutral colours, but most TV shows and movies of the nineties were dramas and inclined to the gothic and the Romantic. As such, fashionable women used makeup that made their faces look pale. In the time of the nineties, the makers of film and TV dramas wanted the dark as much as possible, and they filmed in shadow, the result being that the dramas looked as though they had been filmed in a cave or gothic mansion. In accordance with the dark and dingy atmosphere, actresses often were clothed to look frumpy and dowdy.

 

Why did artists make these choices? If we are to take up the method of the economist or the sociologist, we can trace the gloom or the optimism of a certain epoch back to that epoch's degree of economic expansion or contraction. Art that uses bright colours and tones matches a period of growth; art that uses dark colours and tones matches a period of recession. In other words, economics determines art, culture, life. But that model, which is a simple and reductionist one, does not fit the nineties. To ascertain this, let us make use of one measure that I have touched upon in previous articles: the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) divided by the price of the gold. Without going into detail, the DJIA is the most important stock market index of the 20th century, and to determine the Dow’s worth at a single point of time, we should use gold, which is the only true measure of an object's worth. If we assess how much the DJIA was worth in terms of gold throughout nineties, we will discover the following. In January 1990, the DJIA was worth 6.31 ounces of gold; in December 1999, the DJIA was worth an astounding 40.62 ounces. Never had the DJIA attained such a height and never since.

 

Some observers contend that the nineties ended not in December 1999 but in September 2001, the month of the 9/11 attack, because often the spirit of a decade will carry over a few months or even a few years into a following decade. For example, the argument could be made that the fifties ended, and the sixties began, at one crossroads: the month of JFK’s assassination.  

 

So, if we are to identify the end point of the nineties as being September 2001, what was the DJIA's worth in gold in that month? The answer is: 31.22 ounces.  Compared to today's, the value of the Dow then is extraordinary. I leave it to the reader to look up today's gold Dow for himself.

 

We should note that these valuations of the DJIA being worth ten, twenty, thirty, or forty ounces of gold reflect an estimate by investors of the future worth of America's capital stock. In their assessments, the markets are always looking ahead; they are not interested in the past; they are not even interested in the present; they are discounting to the present, that is, calculating the future worth of an asset and comparing it to the present worth. Accordingly, to judge by the absurdly high valuations made in the nineties, the future looked bright indeed.

 

So why then was the popular culture of America, and the Western world, so gloomy, weird, and gothic? Hazarding a guess, I surmise that the cultural arbiters of the nineties were reacting to the norms of the eighties; if we are to look back to the eighties, we remember that its colours were bright and pastel and that its spirit was relentlessly, even maniacally, optimistic. If you want an example of the eighties Zeitgeist, listen to one-hit wonder John Parr's St Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion). But the producers of culture in the nineties decided that as great as the decade of the eighties was, it had to be rejected and cast out.

 

This is the only explanation I can offer for the dark turn that the culture took. I remember reading a nineties music magazine and coming across an interview with the Jewish rock band Kiss; the lead singer Gene Simmons complained that the grunge bands took a too gloomy view of life. He agreed that yes, a band's first album could be expected to reflect gloomy tendencies, but after a band had gotten that first album out of the way, if a band experienced success, it should drop the affectations of doom and gloom. Simmons said, 'I don't understand these grunge bands: the economy is doing great, and they have all the p*ssy they want, so what is there to complain about?'.

 

VI.

 

I am not deprecating the pop culture of the nineties, because for the most part it sought to entertain, and that is laudable. When I am looking on YouTube at some of the best TV shows and popular songs from the decade, I feel, as many others do, exaltation, the cultural productions of the decade at their finest stand for pleasure, beauty, and life. The entertainment industry felt obliged to deliver something that was gratifying and pleasing, but that contradicts the ethic of the present age. Today's artists want to deliver something that is politically edifying, and the politics are always of the Left. And even when they are not being political, they want to deliver something that is not attractive but repulsive. Perhaps today's entertainers are motivated by the same desire as the practitioners of the Expressionist school of art a hundred years ago: both groups want to smear the world, tarnish it, make it hideous, and sap the will to live.

 

Having said that, with the passage of time come different views. In the 2000s, I thought that the reality show Jackass (2000-2007) was the most degenerate show on television. The show chronicled mad and self-destructive 'stunts', and the worst of these, in my view, was a dive by one of the Jackass 'performers' into a pool of sewage. When watching that episode, I thought to myself that America had reached the same level of depravity as Germany in the Weimar age. Twenty years on, I no longer feel the same response. The makers of Jackass wanted to shock, but today I can think of something worse than puerile shock effects, and that is the production of a piece of entertainment - whether it be a TV drama, a movie, a popular song, or whatever - that leaves us feeling flat and dull, demoralised, depressed.

 

When we are weighing up Jackass and other cultural confections of the 2000s, we must acknowledge the truth that in every epoch are to be found aspects of the good and the bad. For white men, especially Europeans, the worst decade of the 20th century was undoubtedly the 1940s. And even Americans, the winners of the war, spent time in misery after the war was over. The post-war gloominess gave birth to the film noir genre of American movies, a genre became famous all around the world, and copied, and finally, parodied. Looking back on the 1940s, I can say that I am glad that I did not live in it, and many of my contemporaries would agree. But can something good be said for the 1940s, especially the 1940s of the film-noir period? Yes, and that is this: the men and women dressed extremely well. Even at their lowest ebb, whites retained a sense of style. In the Anglosphere at least, that perhaps would have compensated for the post-war unemployment, inflation, rationing (which in the UK lasted for years after the war), recession, and so forth.

 

In summing up a particular epoch, we must acknowledge complexities, and again, that entails the acknowledgement of the existence of both the good and the evil. For now, when it comes to the 2000s, let us focus on the good.

 

As a starting point, look at men's fashion. A brief survey of a TV series such as Seinfeld reveals that there are two basic male body types, both of which were dressed in clothes that were in keeping with the spirit of the age. The tall, skinny, gangly Jerry Seinfeld body type opted for billowing shirts, tight pants, and belts with a large buckle; this fashion, as noted before, resembled the fashion of the 1960s; Jerry Seinfeld, when wearing his typical garb, looks like one of the frontmen of the Mamas and Papas. As a sort of contrast to Jerry, we are presented with the short to medium height male who is often overweight and who has a pugnacious temperament; think of the actor who plays Seinfeld's father. The type prefers mock 1950s clothing of a sort that is usually best suited for warm weather (Seinfeld's father lives in Florida).

 

All that disappeared on the 1st of January 2000. As soon as the 1990s finished, the style changed, and it is remarkable how quickly, judging by the TV shows and commercials that were broadcast in January 2000, the change took place.

 

It was as though a new edict came down as if from high, and that was this: you must, whether you be male or female, look good. When watching my favourite 2000s American TV dramas during lockdown, I was struck by how almost everything on the screen was chosen for its pleasantness and aesthetic appeal; every piece of decor, every couch, lampshade, bedspread, cushion, pot plant, was used in the same way that an Impressionist painter used colours on a canvas. The artistic choices blended in a harmonious whole, and the whole was pretty. And speaking of tones, the foremost of these were gold, bronze, and copper. The skilful use of these produced a pleasing and soothing effect that was to cross over from TV and into real life. In the cafés and bars that I frequented, one would see stained wooden floorboards and wall panels, purple or red painted walls, dimmed lights, and framed posters that were copies of posters from the Europe - usually France - of the 1920s. All of it conveyed stylishness, good taste, and evoked a distant and fondly remembered past. The same aesthetic impressed itself upon the interiors of upper-class houses, apartments, cafés, restaurants, bars that we saw on American TV. The stylistic choices sent a message understood by all, even if only subconsciously, and the message was this: it is permissible to relax, to let go, to enjoy yourself in pleasant surroundings.

 

Wearing nice clothes formed part of the new sensibility. What is notable is that men's fashion came to the forefront; we can speak of a new awareness of the value of men’s dressing well. The man's vintage tee made a comeback; manufacturers in the 2000s produced t-shirts that were in their design inspired by the t-shirts of the 1970s; these were conscious recreations the t-shirts that would have been worn at a Rolling Stones concert in 1973. The designs were of a cut that emphasised the good side of the male physique and made the wearer seem slim and healthy. Generally, the designs were flattering and could even transform a man; a good outfit would make a fat man appear thin and an old man appear young. For the hundred years prior, men's clothes had been dour and restrained, and perhaps that came about because of American influence - American men's fashion was influenced by America's Puritan and Yankee heritage - but now the stringency and restraint of the past was dispensed with; now the bright colours and pleasing designs of men's shirts allowed a man to preen himself like a peacock.

 

The new sensibility could be detected in the popularity of the reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003-2007). The premise of the show was that five homosexual hairdressers, fashion experts, interior decorators, et al., would call upon an unwitting man of normal (that is heterosexual) proclivities; they would then rebuild his life from scratch; they would give him a makeover and the interiors of his house a makeover as well. Usually after the makeover, the man's marriage would improve, or if he was single, his romantic prospects would improve, and this was because – and so the argument went - the makeover had given the man a new lease on life. One could dismiss it all at as homosexual propaganda, and so it was, but the intentions were benign; the show's producer averred that the heterosexual man following the advice of the Queer Eye gang would make him so attractive to women that he would need to 'beat them off with a stick'.

 

The show's underlying message, one that was never openly expressed, was a racialist one. It was this: white man, enjoy yourself, enjoy your wealth, enjoy your life, make use of your white privilege. I would watch the show every week with my housemate, and both of us would be impressed by the transformation of the straight guy by the end of the episode; but my housemate reflected that the good life depicted in the show lay outside the bounds of possibility for the both of us; after all, the recipients of the Queer Eye makeovers were comparatively wealthy and established; they were, and I quote my housemate, 'cashed up 30 year olds'.

 

Nowadays we can laugh at the quaintness of it all. But at the time, I took Queer Eye seriously. It served as a wakeup call for me and hundreds of thousands of other male viewers. For years, I had neglected my diet, my clothes, my hair, my skin, my home. The last of these, when I compared it to the post-makeover homes in Queer Eye, was dirty, messy, and ugly. I had let it go in much the same way that I had let my hair, clothes, and every other element of my physical existence go. Acknowledging my shortcomings, I resolved henceforth to turn over a new leaf. My friends, who at the time seemed far more sophisticated than me, perceived my desire for self-improvement, and they gave me advice. They could not recommend good choices on interior decorating, but they could steer me on the way towards good choices in clothes and diet. In retrospect, I was retracing the path of the men of previous epochs – of men at the time of the Renaissance, for instance, or at the time of the Roman Empire - who had made the conscious decision to live life and live it well.

 

But if we want an example of that good living, we need not go back as far as the Renaissance. As we can see from one of the best TV shows of the 2000s, Mad Men (2007-2015), American males in the 1960s paid an extraordinary amount of attention to their appearance; they went to the barber, had pedicures, and wore suits and casual clothes that were elegant and slim fitting. It was not until the 1970s that men began dressing like bums; then they let standards slip, and chaos reigned.

 

Contrasting against one another in the photo below are two sets of protesters; one group is protesting the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, and the other is protesting the Israeli-Palestinian War of 2024. When you look closely, the men in the former group wear smart casual clothes, and the trousers, jeans, jackets, blazers, shirts, give evidence of good taste. Particularly striking is the fact that in this group men all chose good footwear. As for the fashion choices of the other group of protestors, the less said, the better.

 

As for women's fashion in the 2000s, there is not much to say. Women, unlike men, have always bestowed a high value upon looking good; they have always paid scrupulous attention to clothes, hair and skin care, and what other women are wearing. Having said that, an examination of the magazines, TV shows, movies, of the 2000s will reveal that women did seem a little more well turned out in the 2000s than in the 1990s, and for one women's casual wear had much improved. But one ubiquitous article of women's clothing elicits controversy, and that is the halter top, which was to the 2000s what the mini skirt was to the 1960s. I call the halter top the Lindsay Lohan maternity dress, for it does look like a sort of maternity dress and it should be associated with 2000s fashion icons such as Lohan. On a well-proportioned and healthy woman, the halter top looked good; on an obese woman, it looked bad. And another significant fashion challenge to woman was presented by the popularity of low rise jeans. A slender woman with wide hips and a flat stomach would look good in them, but the wearing of them took work, because staying slim in the 21st century took work. Fortunately for men, men's clothes had an almost magical slimming effect: a vintage tee and a pair of close-fitting bootcut jeans would make a man look as skinny as a member of Led Zeppelin.

 

As to what put an end to 2000s stylishness, the answer is obvious: the financial crisis of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama. Spengler writes that in the history of the Western or Faustian Culture, the transition from one epoch to another always takes place with great drama. The 21st century, so far, demonstrates this. The nineties came to an end on September 11, 2001; the 2000s came to an end with the financial meltdown of late 2008 and early 2009; the 2010s came to an end with the onset of the Covidian monstrosity in March 2020.

 

But let us dig deeper. It is true that fashions, tastes, appetites, ways of doing things, pass, and pass with the shifting sands of time. Who, after all, remembers the Emo subculture of the 2000s?

Emoism flourished for a time and then disappeared, going the way of disco in the 1970s. By the 2010s, Emoism was usurped by Hipsterism. History, Spengler writes, is irrational, and none of its shifts come about as a product of design: its mutations are as random as the bubbles that form and burst in boiling water. But I think that the ceasing of the 2000s-era style and beauty occurred because of a conscious decision - by women. Simply put, looking like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Avril Lavigne, and Jennifer Love Hewitt every single day was asking too much. Women in the 2010s found it far easier to take on a new persona: the frumpy, overweight, tattooed, blue haired Social Justice Warrior female with the horn-rimmed glasses. And men, too, in the new decade took the less demanding route, and ceased shaving and waxing themselves; following the way of the Hipster, which is the way of a quasi-Beatnik, they grew more hirsute. Statistics show that sales of men's razor blades plunged in the 2010s.

 

VII.

 

I wrote before that the economist or sociologist believes that economics determines art, culture, life. We live in a time that pays too much attention to the economic and the monetary, and it is natural when we look back at the 2000s and see how well people lived - or appeared to live - that we will assume that all these sleek, gleaming, happy people must have lived in a time of great prosperity; we surmise that the presence of money entails the good life, and that the absence of money entails the bad.

 

This hypothesis was disproved by the 2000s. In the first half of the decade, US markets did well, much better than they do today; but in the second half, which was Bush 45's second term, markets fell and fell hard. In February 2005, the month after Bush's second inauguration, the Gold DJIA stood at a respectable 25.43 ounces; but by February 2009, it had fallen to 7.42 ounces, and it had further to fall - by August 2011, it had fallen to 6.36 ounces. It goes without saying that all the other markets around the world, including the Australian, followed the same trajectory. Worldwide, the gains that had accumulated since 1990 had been wiped out in a replay of the crash of 1929 and the crash of 1973. What made the 2000s crash unique was that markets descended to the bottom slowly. If we are to trace the descent of the gold DJIA, we see that it moves like a tobogganist riding slowly and gently downhill. And so, at the time, one could ignore the weakening until it became impossible to ignore.

 

While the commodities, finance, and real estate sectors boomed - as these sectors often do in a time of inflation and depreciating currencies - none of the other sectors did; the expansion benefited the few, not the many. And yet, with only a small outlay, a woman could dress like Lindsay Lohan or Hilary Duff, mimic their hairstyles, use their brands of wax and moisturiser. Likewise, a male could buy a decent wardrobe quite easily, lose weight, use skin cream, get a decent haircut... Nothing prevented him from vacuuming his apartment and investing in new couch cushions, lampshades, and bedspreads. The good life, the easy life, was within reach. After all, did men in the 2000s experience the same penury and hardships, the same scrimping, saving, and rationing, as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers in the 1930s and 1940s? No, they did not. Materially, they lived in better circumstances, and potentially, they could afford to try different ways of living. A man makes choices every day when he decides to shave himself and shine his shoes, and in the 2000s, he could decide to put some grease in his hair and pull on a pair of Robert Plant jeans and don a smart blazer. He need not do these things, but in the 2000s, he operated under a set of rules, a paradigm, that in effect forced him to do these things. The same pattern compelled TV producers; if they were to set out to write and shoot a drama, they should do their utmost to make the clothes, actors, sets, look beautiful and not plain and ugly.

 

In contrast, today's media and entertainment fails to do its job, and it no longer makes a product that is aesthetically pleasing; that so much we have established. What is surprising and alarming is that the media and entertainment complex no longer wants to do its job. In the old days, people became involved in entertainment and the arts because they wanted to make a living doing something that they loved, and they wanted to become part of an artistic tradition that they honoured and revered. As a youth, I wanted to work in movies or theatre or literature or comic books, but I lacked the talent, opportunity, and drive, and now I thank my lucky stars that I did. What intelligent person would want to work in today's Hollywood? Imagine the self-loathing of the 'creatives' who are forced to labour on Disney's Star Wars.

 

The SJWs who have infiltrated the media and entertainment complex have been accused of hating whites, hating the Western Culture, and so forth. But not everyone who works in the field is a seasoned political activist who is striving to achieve 'representation' for 'LGBTQ+ folks' and 'People of Colour' (POC), although it may seem that way. I think apathy more than anything else explains Western Man's turn away from beauty and style. And in a way, this is more concerning; for feelings of numbness and indifference are worse than feelings of hatred and Nietzschean ressentiment.

 

VIII.

 

At the risk of stretching a metaphor, we can outline a difference between the worldviews, Weltanschauungen, that are inclined like capitalist economies to either expansion or contraction. We see the division when we look at the 2000s and the 2010s and how people deported themselves. It goes without saying that not every young woman in the 2000s dressed like Lindsay Lohan and not every young woman in the 2010s dressed like a pink-haired, overweight, bespectacled SJW; but as it was in the days of the Roman Empire at its height, what matters when gauging the style, mores, ethos of a period is the overall standard. And so, when looking at representative samples, we can say that the fashion and aesthetics of the 2010s mark a step down. When comparing the 2000s to the 2010s, we conclude that in the one decade morale expanded, in the other, it contracted; in one it grew, the in the other it declined. It is no coincidence that the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon appeared when it did; America gave birth to it at the time of the weak economic recovery in the Obama years; and because of their limited economic prospects and their myopic world view, young Americans felt an instant attraction towards it.

 

One irony presented by the young's newfound affiliation with the Left is that Americans were more better off in 2011 than they were in 1981; but perhaps this is not an irony when we consider that in the early 1980s, America was situated on the upward curve of the slope of economic expansion, and in the early 2010s, on the downward. But individual choice does matter, and economics is not everything. Western Man chose to ditch metrosexualism for hipsterism; he chose to grow a beard, wear rimmed glasses, don a flannel lumberjack shirt, and allow his belly to bloat - perhaps all that craft beer was to blame - and become hairy.

 

The political controversies of the 2010s are still with us, the main difference being that they have changed their aspect; we see different emphases and weightings. I do not want to discuss these here at length, because that would detract from my purpose, but suffice to say that the two most controversial ideologies, Zionism and Russkiye Mir, both of which turn up in our news feeds now more than ever, do fit into the expansion versus contraction model.

 

What is interesting is that American conservatives tout both ideologies every day, and that both these ideologies run counter to the natural American conservative tendency towards growth, expansion, enterprise, the spirit of can-do, the American Way. Americans on the Right like these things, which is why they like leaders such as Reagan and Trump, leaders who are indefatigable optimists. So, it is strange that, when considering the ultimately self-destructive tendencies of Russkiye Mir, conservatives regarded Speaker Johnson's forcing through of the passage of funding for the Ukrainian war effort as the ultimate betrayal; and that they took a dim view of further funding. A Breitbart headline reads: 'Show me the money!!! - Never enough $$$ for 4-eva war - Zelensky reveals US and Ukraine 'working' on scheme for 10 years of military aid'. Of course, Putin's efforts to keep Russia’s war going '4-eva' are never disparaged.

 

 

And then we come to dear little Israel. American conservatives treated the pro-Palestinian protestor encampments at American universities as a national emergency; the colleges must be cleansed of this 'anti-Semitic' vermin; Jewish students must feel safe; the Western Journal thunders, 'Let Jews Carry Guns'; to paraphrase Samuel Roth, 'Jews must live'.

 

We must ask, how do the ideologies of Zionism and Russkiye Mir advance and improve life? Russia reduces Ukrainian towns to rubble and makes the land as desolate as the plains of Mordor. Ukrainians are not elevated thereby. As for Israel and Zionism, Americans - especially American boomers - like to pat themselves on the back for being on the 'right side of history': the 'Nazis' were 'evil' for 'gassing the Jews', ergo, the Americans who fought against them were 'good'. But it is possible that the WWII Holocaust story is false, and in any case, it does not help; it does not, to borrow from the jargon of economists, add value.

 

The American boomer conservative Ward Clark writes that the pro-Palestinian demonstrators are 'useful idiots who are protesting in favor of violent, misogynistic, racist Bronze-Age barbarians'. I chortled when I read this, and I asked to myself if Mr Clark had ever read the Bible, which is full of 'violent, misogynistic, racist Bronze-Age barbarians', the problem for the likes of Mr Clark being that the 'barbarians' in question are Jewish. Animal sacrifices, burnt offerings, sacrifices of human beings to Yahweh - which is what the Holocaust story is all about - are barbaric and atavistic. A butcher's manual, the Book of Leviticus instructs, in scrupulous and exacting detail, how to kill, prepare, and burn animals for sacrifice to Yahweh. One must ask, how does obeisance to strange, backward, and dark rituals advance the welfare of the American people? In the Jewish tradition, sacrifices of animals - and children - are made in exchange for tangible benefits. Jewry won the State of Israel in 1948 in exchange for the sacrifice to Yahweh of the six million; and what did Americans get? Did the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 boost American economic growth, did it assure Americans a higher standard of living...

 

But if we speak too long about Jewry, Israel, and Zionism, we run the risk of digressing. To close our discussion of the topic, let us look at some of the books of the Prophets - Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hosea - and mull over the threats that they contain; Yahweh, speaking through his mouthpieces the prophets, promises violence, desolation, famine, despair to both the Jewish people who have betrayed him; he even threatens to rape the Jewish women. In the last of books of the Old Testament, Yahweh wills the destruction of the twin kingdoms of Judah and Israel because he wants to punish the Jewish people; and the last books chronicle only Jewish defeat and failure.

 

Inspecting the final book of the Old Testament, the Book of Malachi, Steve Wells records the final utterance by Yahweh: 'The Old Testament ends fittingly with these words: "Lest I come and smite the earth with a curse"'. One cannot say that Judaism is an ideology of expansion; rather, it is an ideology of contraction. And prolonged exposure to it lowers a man's vital energies; the man who takes it up is turning away from the Life Force.

 

IX.

 

Throughout I have been using the language of Nietzsche and Shaw. Nietzschean and Shavian rhetoric broods and mediates upon the themes of life denial and world rejection; but perhaps this mode of thinking, which was most famous over a hundred years ago, fails to match the ethos of the modern age. A postmodernist would ask, what is life, what is the world? Perhaps these do not exist; instead, we only have 'codes', 'signs'.

 

Postmodernism here counts because one of the foremost of the postmodernists, Baudrillard, writes on the same subjects that I am discussing: movies, advertising, fashion, beauty, clothes, diet, fitness. He accords the same importance to these as I do; and these, according to Baudrillard, in the modern age have taken on a religious dimension.

 

In the consumer package, there is one object finer, more precious and more dazzling than any other--and even more laden with connotations than the automobile, in spite of the fact that that encapsulates them all. That object is the BODY. Its `rediscovery', in a spirit of physical and sexual liberation, after a millennial age of puritanism; its omnipresence (specifically the omnipresence of the female body, a fact we shall have to try to explain) in advertising, fashion and mass culture; the hygienic, dietetic, therapeutic cult which surrounds it, the obsession with youth, elegance, virility/femininity, treatments and regimes, and the sacrificial practices attaching to it all bear witness to the fact that the body has today become an object of salvation. It has literally taken over that moral and ideological function from the soul.

 

Unremitting propaganda reminds us that, in the words of the old hymn, we have only one body and it has to be saved. [Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970]

 

The above was written over fifty years ago but could have been written today. Baudrillard made a reputation for himself as being one of the worldliest and up to date of the French thinkers; after all, he was the only one to admit to watching television. His contemporaries, men such as Foucault and Derrida, gave the appearance of wanting to shut television and cars, aspects of the modern world, out. Baudrillard does not celebrate the phenomena of the modern world, and as we can infer from the tone of the above passage, he takes a dim view of them. But that view is belied by the passivity and acceptance that we detect between the lines; and these traits of Baudrillard’s make themselves felt more and more in the books written after Consumer Society. And indeed, what the devil is wrong with beautiful models and fast cars? In 1970, and even more so in 2024, are these not 'Life', 'The World', and is it not the case that the turning against these is the turning against 'Life', 'The World'...

 

The phenomena considered by Baudrillard are still with us, and we can still squeeze some enjoyment out of them, and so on that point I disagree with the pessimistic, life-denying American conservatives and white nationalists. But to extract the maximum value out of the modern world and all its despairs and joys, we must increasingly look towards the past, even towards a past that is quite recent, e.g., the past of twenty years ago, the past of the 2000s. That past shows us the way towards the Good Life.