With Nobody, Hollywood released a film in 2021 that doesn’t have an underlying social agenda.

The film was written by Derek Kolstad, who as the poster tells you at the top, was the writer of John Wick. It was directed by Ilya Naishuller. I saw that (very Russian-Jewish) director’s name and groaned a bit, but went ahead and watched the film. After watching it, I found on his Wikipedia that it was only his absent father that was Jewish.

Though the film definitely is not particularly Jewish, and you can see how hard it was for them to figure out where to put the requisite black actors, it is also not a Christian film. There are not really any clear themes in the film at all – it’s just a masculine violence fantasy.

The movie opens at the story’s end, showing the titular “Nobody,” Bob Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell, bloody and handcuffed, being interrogated by two federal agents. I didn’t read any spoilers before sitting down to watch it, but with the knowledge of “written by the writer of John Wick,” the entire plot of the film became obvious sixty seconds in. Hutch is some kind of retired former secret agent who has settled into a family life which he is bored by. If there is any cultural poison in the film, it is these opening minutes, before the action starts.

This notion of “people are bored by a normal life” is something that became a theme in the 60s. This was probably at least in some part because life had become more boring over the course of a generation, as the advances in technology had created gaps in the day that our ancestors did not have. That said, this idea that normal people are all sitting around hating their lives, feeling alienated from their families and work, is not good for society. If men really are sitting around “wishing for something more,” it is the result of media promoting the idea that they should be wishing for something more.

One point I have always tried to drive home is that there isn’t really anything wonderful or magical in life. I don’t mean that in a negative way, I simply mean that by the time you’re a late teenager, certainly by the time you’re 20, you should have knowledge of the full range of experience and emotion. There is no fantastic thing coming along. You just get up every day, you work, you take care of yourself, you socialize, you relax, you try to have some fun, you do what you have to do.

Films that present this “wanting something more out of life” dilemma are generally going to be harmful. However, this film arguably spins that trope, given that what the protagonist is longing for is so ridiculous. It could be seen as mocking the idea of men in their 30s and 40s longing for adventure, asking the viewer: “is this what you expect to happen?”

Hutch is seen as a timid dork by everyone in his life, including his boss and his wife and son, but he is secretly the world’s ultimate greatest badass. Every man watching it is thinking: “well, none of the people in my life know that I’m not secretly the world’s ultimate greatest badass – and I just might be.” However, when you walk away from the film, you think: “well, that was just ludicrous.” That could help someone realize that the entire concept of thinking there is something more to life than what you see is itself ludicrous. This is your life, it’s happening one minute at a time, there will be no soul-transforming romance, there will be no ecstatic religious event, you will not become the world’s ultimate greatest badass and kill hundreds of people in an hour and a half.

But it is indeed fun to think: “well, what if I did?” and it would surprise me if most men didn’t like this film, as silly as it is. Hutch gets robbed at home, and is humiliated by a woman with a gun. He eventually decides to go take revenge, after his daughter realizes the thieves took her kitty bracelet. He tracks down the thieves, as the viewer begins to realize the obvious premise that he is a retired secret badass. The thieves are poor Mexicans, and they have a crying baby, so he retrieves his watch and leaves. On his way home, spoiling for a fight, a group of inexplicably white ruffians board his bus and start harassing a woman. He white knights and manages to beat the hell out of an entire criminal gang.

The entire aesthetic of the film is perfect, but it shines during the violence. The action, while absurd, is well choreographed and intelligent. Though I had known he was the ultimate badass, I thought he would be using weapons rather than hand-to-hand combat. Bob Odenkirk getting into a hardcore melee with an entire crime gang is the most fun I’ve gotten out of any Hollywood production since I can’t even remember when.

In what must have been a plot hole, his wife patches him up after having been stabbed in the guts. That his wife would be able to patch up a serious knife wound with a first aid kit is not a plot hole, that is simply the film’s comic book-like mechanics. He is the world’s ultimate greatest badass, so knife wounds and broken bones are something he just shrugs off. But it wasn’t clear why his wife wouldn’t have more questions about what he’d been doing, after she’d seemed to have believed he was a twerp. He even says to her “just like old times, huh?”, but later in the film, she is shocked to find he’s a secret agent. There are plot problems like this throughout, which you really just have to ignore if you want to enjoy the film.

The fight on the bus triggers a series of farcical events. One of the thugs Hutch beat up was the brother of a Russian gangster, and the gangster vows revenge. When the gang shows up at Hutch’s house, he puts his family in a secret basement room, and gets in a shootout in his home. He is eventually taken down and thrown in a trunk, but is able to cause the car to crash and return to his family. He sends them on their way, and the rest of the film is nonstop action.

Odenkirk is always great, and his unexpected action hero perfectly fits the fantasy. The other high point is the Russian gang leader, played by Aleksei Serebryakov. Christopher Lloyd plays Hutch’s father, and RZA (because you have to have black people in all movies now!) inexplicably plays his brother.

Michael Ironsides actually pops up as Hutch’s father-in-law and boss.

Along with the cast, the music, cinematography and action scene choreography are all top notch. It’s almost shocking to see an action movie that isn’t nonstop jump cuts. The jump cuts hysteria that has overtaken the modern action film industry seems to be making up for the fact that they don’t have decent choreography, so they just chop it up, switching camera angles every 1.2 seconds to simulate real action. (I recently tried to watch Monster Hunter, and it was actually unwatchable, due to the jump cuts. Those filmmakers were also presumably trying to cover up the poor CGI. It made me feel like I was going to vomit.)

I didn’t catch a single piece of CGI in Nobody. I assume there probably was some, particularly during the car chase scene. But I went back and slowed the scene down, and couldn’t catch it. Most of the blood probably was also animated. I guess this is what people I respect mean when they say “there is a place for CGI.” Cars and brain bursts are both things that can be scanned and accurately portrayed using CGI, and it’s a lot different than making entire characters out of it.

Aside from some notable plot holes that you have to ignore, the script was solid, with a perfect narrative arc and good setups and payoffs (including Chekov’s actual gun).

Though Nobody isn’t based on a comic book, it was certainly inspired by comic books, and the film manages to do a much better job feeling like a comic book than any of the massive budget Marvel or DC films. The framing of the action scenes, and the incorporation of comic book violence mechanics without relying on CGI, give the sensation of a moving comic.

If you don’t like violence, you won’t like the film. It is graphically violent. It isn’t gory or gross violence, but it’s unapologetically hardcore.

For those who aren’t bothered by violence (the profanity offends me more, frankly), I can recommend the film. Again, it is a male fantasy, and it does play into the trope of “boring normal life,” but you may walk away from it with your fantasy fulfilled and also with an understanding of how trite it is to imagine that life is supposed to be like a fantasy.

I played Cyberpunk 2077 for six hours, and I do not plan to pick it up again, ever.

It turns out that the fear of a political agenda was misplaced, and the real fear should have been that the game would just be absolute garbage from top to bottom, which is what it is.

My first shock was just how unskilled I am at FPS games. I haven’t played one since Fallout: New Vegas, but I have played a realtime shooter in the form of Red Dead Redemption 2, and am relatively competent. It turns out I am not competent at the FPS mechanics of Cyberpunk, and playing it, I felt like an Asian attempting to drive a car. So everything I write about the game should be understood in that light. That is to say: the gameplay is probably good for people who enjoy FPS games, and that might be a big factor for people who are into this kind of game.

The Story is a Bloated Fiasco

I am an RPG player, and was interested in this game because it was advertised as an RPG. It is not an RPG. It is an exposition heavy open-world shooter game with vague “RPG elements.”

I would have felt comfortable bungling my way through the shooting scenes if I felt the story was worthwhile, but it simply is not worthwhile. The dialogue is almost like a satire of cliched 1990s action film dialogue, and the plot is overly ambitious, convoluted garbage, laced with hazy Antifa political messaging. The awkward, stilted dialogue actually works well with the barrage of bankrupt tropes that are strewn together to form this boring, confusing story. (Two tropes do not make a unique plot element, they make a double trope.) I would have loved to be surprised by a rogue AI conspiracy, frankly, and instead I got… evil corporations.

If you’d been sitting and watching this story as a film in the theater, you would get up and walk out, because it is simply not engaging on any level at all (other than visually, I guess, and there are issues with that I will touch on later).

“It’s the fucking corporations, man! Fucking shit! The corporations have the fucking technology man, and they’re doing the fucking money deal! He fucked us, man, he’s working for the fucking corporations again! They’ve got the fucking technology, man, the fucking corporations! We’re gonna have to fucking jack in, man! Fuck! Jack in to the fucking corporations, man! The fucking tech! They got the fucking tech and we’ve gotta fucking jack in!” 

I didn’t get deep into the game, but the prologue was enough to give me a very clear view of where they’re going with it. This is intended to be a hugely complex political drama. Based on what I’ve already seen, I can only imagine how bad it gets. It was obvious from the get go that the writers of this game don’t expect the average player to actually even follow the plot, and that is shameful. If you don’t care enough about your story to care if your audience understands it, then you shouldn’t be telling that story.

I always like to think of how I would fix something that I hate. If I’d been given this game and told to fix it, I would have massively scaled down the scope of the plot, making it a crime drama with western elements, allowing the setting to be the setting rather than having the setting moonlight as the core plot. I would have made Keanu the player character, on a mission to settle some personal score, rather than to fight the corporations. Storytelling on this massive scope is virtually always going to end up devolving into convoluted tropes, because very few writers have the ability to make these large story elements personal in a way that makes them meaningful to the reader/viewer/player. A large scale political drama ends up with narrative bloat that has to be bandaged together with deus ex machina papered over with melodrama (see: Game of Thrones final season).

A scaled down main plot would then have been beefed out with side quests and choice-based character development. As it stands now, it’s obvious to me that the RPG character development is going to be drastically limited by a commitment to a large cinematic plot.

Tedious, Mediocre and Ugly

The prologue was probably supposed to take 2 and a half hours. It took me about twice as long as it should have because of the difficulty I have with shooters and the fact that I couldn’t resist the urge to randomly open fire on all of the lesbians and black people in the game, which resulted in me continually having to restart from checkpoints. It felt like pulling teeth.

That is the other thing: this game is nothing but black people and lesbians. You don’t even see a white male, hardly ever. There are Japanese thrown in, inexplicably. Virtually everyone is ugly.

I should note that the satisfaction of shooting some lesbian is minimal, because for whatever reason, bullets rarely result in bullet holes, and instead, headshots more often than not result in “short circuit” electricity animations. You will not find in this game the satisfaction you get in RDR2 when you hold your revolver under some bitch’s chin and blow her brains out. I would say that “unsatisfying” describes virtually every aspect of Cyberpunk 2077.

The graphics themselves are pretty enough. This is the first AAA game I have played since RDR2, and I think that the graphics are improved from that game, though only slightly. The open world of Cyberpunk is surely impressive, and you really do feel like you’re living in this future world, as you run around on the dolled up and burned out streets, looking at the ugly cybernetically enhanced multicultural population and massive, ugly skyscrapers.

The question becomes: why would you want to be in this world? What you see in this game is the nightmare future that we in the right-wing are warning about. Why would someone want to spend their personal relaxation time going into this world? When I play fantasy or traditional science fiction games, I am entering a world that I am intrigued by, a world that I would want to visit. When I play Cyberpunk 2077, I’m entering a world that I fear that I’m going to be forced into before my life ends, a world that I never want to see and which I am fighting to prevent from becoming a reality. Even if the story was good and I enjoyed the gameplay, I would not want to play this game, because I don’t want to enter this world.

I am confused by what the actual thinking here was. I do not know if there are people who want to live in this world, or if it is being presented as a kind of horrorshow, on par with trudging through the nightmare visions of Dark Souls. The thing is, with Dark Souls, or Doom, or some other game where you trudge through a hellscape, it is a fantasy world, and you are a hero conquering it. In Cyberpunk, this hellscape feels all too close to reality, and instead of fighting to conquer it, your player character is an active participant in it. There is a thick nihilism that underscores the entire experience of the game.

There is a kind of core problem here, in that Cyberpunk is a uniquely challenging, politically-charged genre of fiction that is more about warning of a future hell, commenting on contemporary social and technological trends and speculating about their final form, than it is about having fun. Setting an adventure story in a cyberpunk world isn’t the straightforward proposition of an adventure in a fantasy realm, the wild west, outer space or a post-apocalyptic wasteland, as there is no clear path to redemption within the framework of the universe.

Cyberpunk is a uniquely challenging genre. For a game of this scale, that relies this much on cinematic narrative, there has to be some kind of underlying motivation to the action beyond plot. That is to say, you would need clear, meaningful themes that the player is able to relate to. Instead, they garbled up a bunch of genre tropes, mixed with some Antifa gibberish, and backed it with sex and violence and blinking lights. It creates an experience that simply feels wrong.

I think you’re going to have a lot of people disliking this game without being able to explain why they dislike it, simply saying that they find the experience of playing it unpleasant.

Maybe Someone Will Like It?

The art of the game is good, of course, but what computer generated art isn’t good these days? If you simply go click around on Deviantart, you’re going to find an endless well of cool concept art. There is nothing especially original about the aesthetics of Cyberpunk, and in fact, the retro aesthetics feel somewhat dated. That is hardly their fault, as the game was announced in 2012, but we’ve had a solid decade of being inundated with 80s nostalgia, and it just doesn’t feel compelling.

Regarding aesthetics, synthwave does not play heavily in the soundtrack, and they instead opted for a lot of rap music, which I found baffling.

Also with regards to aesthetics, certain mechanics of the game make you feel like you’re in an MK Ultra mind control experiment, which I found unpleasant. When your HP gets low, your vision starts glitching out, creating a seizure like experience. The psychedelic elements of the visuals are done poorly, and come across as repulsive.

There were not a lot of bugs, for day one of a game of this scope. There were regular instances of people talking and their lips not moving, and a few other graphical glitches and some quirky AI, but overall, they did release a more or less polished game, which is a rarity in current year.

If you enjoy shooting games with tedious and psychically draining bullet sponge mechanics (to the point where downed enemies regularly actually get back up), I feel you might enjoy the gameplay. Beyond the construction of the world, the gameplay is clearly what they put the most energy into (and again, I’m not the one to comment on that fairly, because I used to get headaches playing Goldeneye and haven’t taken up FPS since). I also should note that the melee combat, which I am a little bit more comfortable with in first person, feels weightless and button-mashy (but that could be tied to the fact that every character has 1000 HP, and it’s impossible to properly animate a humanoid character getting sliced with a katana 12 times before they go down).

After you make it through the laborious prologue, you will get to explore an open world that a whole lot of care went into building. The open world is bigger than that of Grand Theft Auto V, and it is much more detailed.

I’m sure I would find other things to like if I wasn’t so uninterested in the genre. Obviously, a game of this scope must have something worthwhile in it, somewhere. What I doubt, however, is that the game becomes more interesting. It is story-writing 101 to put your best foot forward in long-form writing, and the best foot of this writing team is a twisted gimp foot on an emaciated bum leg.

I do not recommend buying the game at full price, even if you are a fan of shooter games, and even if you can tolerate entering a hellscape of black people and lesbians, a portrayal of the hell that we are all fighting to prevent from becoming our reality.

We probably should have known better than to hope that a AAA game in 2020 would end up offering a fun experience.

In My View, You Should Play Something Else

The good news is, there are a whole lot of good games being released that are not AAA games. This was actually a fantastic year for games, in my opinion.

I would argue that Wasteland 3 is probably the best game ever made, and I love the Baldur’s Gate III early access. Those are both real RPGs, if any of you youngins want to get the classic experience in a modernized package. These two games are well written, and they both present worlds that I would want to live in. Yakuza 7 is a beautiful and unique RPG with endless exposition dumps that are actually engaging.

In terms of high action, Hades is a fantastic game, and a perfect example of properly implementing RPG elements into a combat-focused gameplay experience. Trials of Mana is a very fun time, despite slightly tedious combat.

There are all kinds of options for how you spend your video game time. I personally cannot imagine spending my video game time playing Cyberpunk 2077. My video game time is sacred, and I want it to relieve stress, not create more.

Rating: 

2/10

This is eerily familiar…

The danger with “retro remakes” these days is that developers often just apply a retro coat of paint over ill-fitting modern game design. This is why a lot of people panned Duke Nukem Forever, with its regenerating health, checkpoints and limited weapon slots.

In spite of this, a lot of people still crave these older franchises who date from the time before everything was pozzed to all hell. So they got churned out regularly, often not being very good.

But then Doom 2016 came along, and showed the world how it’s done. Fast combat, open large levels that demand exploration, no pointless story and dialogue, but executed with great production values and tight game feel. In other words, the spirit of the original with modern technology.

Overload is a remake of Descent very much in the same vein as Doom 2016. And that’s a very, very good thing.

Descent was freaking awesome.

Descent was a first person shooter that gave you full, 6-axis control over a ship as you navigate complex, maze-like levels and fight armies of robots coming at you from every direction. There was nothing quite like it these days – until Overload came along.

Made by a lot of the same people who developed the original Descent, Overload is a spiritual successor which aims to capture the same gameplay while updating the presentation to modern standards, and it mostly works very well.

If you’ve never played Descent, then you haven’t experienced anything quite like this.

The levels are labyrinthine and non-linear, consisting of branching paths, bigger rooms with multiple exits and hosts of secret passages leading to various pickups and upgrades. Exploring the levels is at least half of the gameplay, and while it’s very easy to get lost, the game provides two great tools to find your way around.

First is a very good automap system.

The automap seems to be a 1:1 representation of the level geometry – including secret areas. So a careful exploration of this screen will be immensely helpful in finding your way around and getting as many secrets as possible.

This was enough for me.

However, like the original Descent, Overload also provides a “guide” that can show you the way to your next objectives. This is accessible at the press of a button, and takes the form of a little holographic robot that flies out in front of you, patiently waiting for you and even coming back to fetch you if you fail to follow it.

So for those who don’t have the best sense of direction, using this feature could be a lifesaver. Especially since these levels are the most “3d” you’ve likely ever seen in a video game. Doors and passages can be found on the floors and ceilings as well as the walls. Often, you’ll have to completely change your orientation as you move from area to area to better navigate the new, complex geometries of each room.

I hope you don’t easily get queasy, because this is one disorienting game.

But actually navigating the levels is a pleasure, since the controls are smooth and responsive. I’ve played with a PS3 gamepad connected to my PC, and the default mappings were very workable. Mouse and keyboard controls are equally well implemented.

But getting used to constantly having 6 degrees of freedom does take a little while. And while the early levels are fairly forgiving, the game will quickly start expecting you to dodging incoming fire from multiple direction while weaving around the tight level geometry.

Yeah, the game is quite hard. Enemies pack quite a wallop – if you let a few robots concentrate their fire on you for just a few seconds, you’re a goner. Luckily, pretty much everything enemies throw at you can be dodged or otherwise avoided if you’re skilled enough. And when things start to click and you’re dancing around, dodging missiles and laser blasts by the skin of your teeth, it feels great.

The combat is very fast pace, as most enemies are not bullet sponges, and you always have more powerful weapons to deal with tougher enemies. So combat is mostly about eliminating enemies quickly while dodging incoming fire and navigating the environment.

On thing I’m not too fond of, however, is the occasional use of “jump scares.” Basically, you pick up an item, and a bunch of monsters spawn directly behind you and attack immediately. IMO, that’s just bullshit, I’m sorry. Luckily, it doesn’t happen too often.

But the overall gameplay shows clear inspiration from Doom 2016, right down to small but welcome touches, such as the slowdown effect when selecting weapons. You’re incentivized to explore levels with upgrade points scattered in various secret locations. Enemies drop health and ammo to force you to deal with enemies aggressively in order to stay in the game. The story is entirely optional and never gets in the way.

The game is brought to life with some sharp and pleasing visuals, which are definitely easy on the eyes. But you have to adjust your expectations – the levels are very simple in terms of details. Their mostly simple geometry is coupled with nice textures, but you don’t have a AAA level of detail and polish bringing these mines and space stations to life.

On the other hand, the combat effects and animations are definitely top tier. The weapons pack a great punch, and blowing up the enemy robots feels just as satisfying as it should.

You’ll also be delighted by the music, which is definitely a throwback to 90s synthwave tracks. Allister Mark Brimble is the composer, returning from the original Descent.

Oh, yeah. I’m ready to blast some robots now.

The sound effects for the enemy robots also deserve special mention. Instead of generic robotic sounds, they gave them these incredibly creepy monstrous roars, evoking goblins or ogres rather than mining machinery. Each enemy type has it’s own sounds, too, making it easy to recognize the opposition by sound alone.

POZ factor

So, the great question: how pozzed is it?

Thankfully, very little. But it’s my duty to inform you of every little bit I find. The story in the game takes a complete backseat, being relayed through scattered audio logs. The gist of it is that some scientist in charge of deep space mining colonies is trying to cut ties with the corporation which owns said colonies, so that he might use them for his own mysterious purposes.

You’re an agent of the corporation sent to save the survivors in each station and basically wreck everything in sight.

Frankly, the only annoying stuff I could find is that among the surviving “engineers” you have to rescue are some women and non-Whites.

They’re in cryogenic tubes. Also, you don’t actually have to rescue them, lol.

Similarly, you sometimes have panels on the walls listing employees, and those include women for whatever reason.

Yeah, I’m sure fat women will be lining up to go work in mines in the outer solar system.

But these are background elements you’re unlikely to even notice unless you’re paying close attention.

So I’ll give this one a POZ rating of 1/10.

Overall

If you’re a fan of tough, old-school shooting games with tight single-player campaigns, Overload will be a welcome change of pace from the endless slew of generic FPS games being released these days. The campaign should last you anywhere from 8 to 15 hours, and you can always attempt it on higher difficulty levels once you’re done.

The game also features a simple but enjoyable arcade mode, which puts you in small arenas flooded with wave after wave of enemies, and logs your high scores.

While there are some multiplayer deathmatch-type game modes, there’s unfortunately no cooperative gameplay. I haven’t played any multiplayer, and thus can’t comment on that aspect of the game, but this is definitely a single-player focused experience in any case.

For the current price of $30 on steam, it’s definitely worth checking out.

A Review of “Why the Germans? Why the Jews?” by Götz Aly

The culture of the Holocaust is destroying Germany. Endlessly reinforced over decades by the intellectual and media elite, the notion that Germans and their descendants are responsible for “the single most evil event in human history” has had such a demoralizing effect that millions fully support Angela Merkel’s current attempt to destroy the ethnic basis of their nation. The culture of the Holocaust has been used to devastating effect right throughout the West to stifle opposition to the Jewish diaspora strategies of mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism. “The Holocaust” is the absolute lynchpin of the White displacement agenda, with any hint of European racial or ethnic identification or solidarity being instantly linked with Auschwitz and its alleged horrors in the minds of millions (probably billions) of people.

The entire social and political order of the contemporary West — based as it is on spurious notions of racial equality and the alleged virtues of racial diversity and multiculturalism — has been erected on the moral foundations of the Holocaust. White people cannot be recognized as a group with interests because “never again.” Western nations have a moral obligation to accept unlimited non-White immigration from the Third World because “never again.” Europe must open its borders to hostile Islamic invaders because “never again.” Whites should meekly accept their deliberate displacement (and ultimate extinction) because “never again.”

Jewish historian Peter Novick has described how today’s culture of “the Holocaust” emerged as part of the collective Jewish response to the Eichmann trial in 1961–62, the Six-Day War in the Middle East in 1967, and, in particular, the Yom Kippur War in 1973. While the foundation was laid at Nuremberg in 1946, it was with these later events, and the anxieties they engendered among Jews throughout the world, that “there emerged in American culture a distinct thing called ‘the Holocaust’ — an event in its own right,” and with it a term that entered the English language as a description of all manner of horrors. From that time on, he notes, “the Holocaust” has become “ever more central in American public discourse — particularly, of course, among Jews, but also in the culture at large” and has since “attained transcendent status as the bearer of eternal truths or lessons that could be derived from contemplating it.”[i]

Novick acknowledges the primary reason for this state of affairs: that Jews, with their domination of academia and the media and entertainment industries, virtually dictate this “American” (and by extension “Western” culture) which has become so Holocaust-obsessed. He argues that the importance of the Holocaust is not a spontaneous phenomenon but stems from highly focused, well-funded efforts of Jewish organizations and individual Jews with access to the major media:

We are not just “the people of the book,” but the people of the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium. When a high level of concern with the Holocaust became widespread in American Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews play in American media and opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtually inevitable that it would spread throughout the culture at large. (Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Mariner Books, 1999), 12)

The Jewish director Jill Soloway observed that Jews in Hollywood are “recreating culture to defend ourselves post-Holocaust.” This ethnic “defense” has entailed the intensive promotion of racial diversity and mixing, the denigration of White people and their traditional culture, the hyper-sexualization of what now passes for Western culture, the glamorizing of sexual non-conformity and the breakdown of traditional gender roles — all alongside constant reminders of “the Holocaust” with its concomitant themes of noble Jewish victimhood and unsurpassed German (White, European) evil.

Since 1945, some 148 feature films have been made about “the Holocaust” — the majority after 1970. The Jewish intellectual Chaim Bermant observed that “the Jews that came to dominate Hollywood” between them “did more to determine American attitudes and tastes than the churches or even the schools.”[ii] The psychological effects of Hollywood’s Holocaust-obsession were clear by the 1990s when one survey found that 97 percent of Americans knew what “the Holocaust” was — substantially more than knew what “Pearl Harbor” related to, or that the United States has dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and far more than the 49 percent that knew that the Soviet Union had fought on the American side in World War Two.[iii]

Throughout the West proliferating “Holocaust” memorials and museums are lavishly funded by taxpayers, and study of “the Holocaust” in schools is mandated by law in many jurisdictions. As well as serving to morally disarm Whites concerned about their own immigrant-led displacement, the culture of “the Holocaust” is a key part of Jewish efforts to prevent intermarriage in the diaspora. Eric Goldstein, for instance, notes how “Jews discuss, read about, and memorialize the Holocaust with zeal as a means of keeping their sense of difference from non-Jews alive.”[iv]

“The Holocaust” has become, in the words of Nicholas Kollerstrom, “an ersatz substitute for genuine metaphysical knowledge,” with Auschwitz now serving as the spiritual center of a new religion and a place of awed pilgrimage for millions of penitent Europeans. The narrative has also unleashed an endless flow of money from Germany to Israel and to compensate more “Holocaust” survivors than there were ever Jews in countries under German control.[v]

Without the “Holocaust” narrative, and the veneer of moral rectitude it confers upon Jewish activism, it is doubtful the 1965 immigration laws in the United States would have passed. Likewise, the toppling of the White Australia policy just eight years later — a direct result of Jewish ethno-politics — would probably not have occurred without the moral leverage “the Holocaust” afforded Jewish activists and their non-Jewish collaborators. The leftwing Australian historian Professor Henry Reynolds has acknowledged the Jewish ethno-political (and Holocaust-centered) origins of the regnant belief in biological racial equality when he noted that: “My students often ask me how it was that people in the past held such objectionable views [about race]. They have no understanding of just how pervasive racial thought was a generation or two ago, how the Second World War and the Holocaust marked an intellectual watershed after which nothing would be the same again.”[vi]

Boasian anthropology and the “the Holocaust”  

While the Jewish critique of racialist thought, spearheaded by Franz Boas, preceded World War II  by several decades, it gained urgency following Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933. In his book Racism, posthumously published in 1938, the Jewish “sexologist” Magnus Hirschfeld set out to provide a refutation of the racial doctrines of the National Socialists. “If it were practicable,” he wrote, “we should certainly do well to eradicate the term ‘race’ as far as subdivisions of the human species are concerned.”[vii] During the war the writings of Boas, his students Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovits and others critical of the link between race, culture and ability began to reach a mass audience. Benedict’s Races and Racism, published in 1942, dismissed racial thought as “a travesty of scientific knowledge.”[viii] In the same year, the Jewish intellectual Ashley Montagu (born Israel Ehrenberg) published Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race which became a best seller.

These Jewish ethnic activists and their allies, with their pseudo-scientific theories, were only able to reach a mass audience through the eager assistance and promotion of Jewish influence in the press and publishing houses — not because of the intrinsic merits of their arguments. As a result of these efforts, the British historian David Cannadine has noted that: “By the end of the Second World War, the notion that race was the most significant form of collective human identity, consciousness, and ranking had been stripped of any serious claim to intellectual respectability.”[ix]

In 1949 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) convened a panel of “scientists,” chaired by Montagu, to “produce a definitive verdict on race.” One leftist historian has pointed out how the panel was comprised of “a team of ten scientists all of whom were recruited from the marginal group of anthropologists, sociologists and ethnographers who perceived the race concept primarily as a social construct.” He also notes that: “Most of these had at some point either been affiliated with the scientifically marginalized groups of cultural anthropologists that were mostly students of Franz Boas at Colombia University in New York.”[x]

After the panel’s first meeting at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, Montagu wrote a proposal for a final statement on race during one night at a nearby hotel, and over the following days the participants discussed “the race concept” in light of Montagu’s draft.[xi] Montagu claimed that “only if our deliberations had taken place at Auschwitz or Dachau could there have been a more fitting environment to impress upon the committee members the immense significance of their work.”[xii] At that time UNESCO House was the former headquarters of the German military during its occupation of France during World War II. Underpinning the words of the UNESCO declaration “was widespread revulsion at the Jewish Holocaust.”[xiii] Leftist academic Anthony Hazard notes that “a clear rejection of anti-Semitism seemed to underline the entire effort.”[xiv]

The Montagu-led UNESCO panel’s statement (replete with falsehoods and specious arguments) was issued in 1950. “Scientists,” it claimed, “have reached general agreement in recognizing that mankind is one: that all men belong to the same species, Homo sapiens.” Genes responsible for the “hereditary differences between men” were “always few when compared to the whole genetic constitution of man and the vast number of genes common to all human beings regardless of the populations to which they belong.” It therefore followed that “the likenesses among men are far greater than their differences.” The error here is assuming that small differences in the input to a system must yield small differences in the system’s output. On the contrary, it is often the case that small differences in the input result in large differences in the final outcome. For instance, it has often been pointed out that human beings and chimpanzees differ in less than two percent of their DNA; nevertheless, the difference in intelligence between the species is enormous. Many genetic diseases are caused by a single gene, and some of these are deadly.

The UNESCO panel’s statement proposed that it would be best “to drop the term ‘race’ altogether,” since “for all practical purposes, ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.” Montagu and his colleagues ended their “definitive statement on race” with a ringing endorsement of the idea of a common humanity: “Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood; for man is born with drives towards co-operation. … In this sense, every man is his brother’s keeper.” Here we find the invariable Jewish tendency to couch the pursuit of specific Jewish interests in a pretended universal benevolence.

UNESCO’s Montagu-drafted “definitive verdict on race,” was published with a press release with the headline: “No biological justification for race discrimination, say world scientists: Most authoritative statement on the subject.”[xv] The New York Times reported on the statement with a story whose headline proclaimed: “No Scientific Basis for Race Bias Found by World Panel of Experts.”[xvi] The UNESCO Statement on Race amounted to the foisting of a Jewish ethno-political agenda onto the global polity — with devastating consequences for the interests of Europeans.

With this new agenda now in place at the highest level, and with the demonization and marginalization of dissenters, it was almost inevitable in the decades following the defeat of Germany that the remaining policies constructed on the basis of racialist thought and identity would be dismantled. The 1950 statement on race (which contributed to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka) was described by one sympathetic commentator as “the triumph of Boasian anthropology on a world-historical scale.”[xvii]

Cannadine notes that, during the decades that followed, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand “abandoned their policies of racial discrimination, ended their restrictions on immigration … and embraced multiculturalism.” This misleadingly implies that these changes occurred as a result of a shift in popular sentiment, of people suddenly coming to their senses and “embracing” racial diversity. The reality in the U.S., and, as I explicated in my series of essays on Australia, was that the movement toward the liberalization of immigration policies in countries like Australia was a top-down, totally undemocratic movement pursued for specifically Jewish ends.

Götz Aly — Reinforcing the culture of “the Holocaust” in Germany

Roger Devlin has observed that “all of us in the West are supposed to be responsible for the ills of the rest of the world, but only Germans have had their identity entirely constructed on guilt for 70 years.” One of those who has worked hard to reinforce the culture of “the Holocaust” in Germany, and to entrench the climate of opinion that is leading the German people to destruction, is the University of Frankfurt historian Professor Götz Aly who has written a series of books on German “anti-Semitism,” the Third Reich and “the Holocaust.” Aly, who was involved with militant far left organizations in the sixties and seventies, is the descendent of a Turkish soldier who converted to Christianity in the seventeenth century. Despite his partial Turkish ancestry, Aly identifies as an ethnic German. He is, nevertheless, acutely critical of the German people and their history. Aly’s latest book (recently translated into English) is Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust, which is Aly’s attempt to explain “why German history culminated in genocide.”[xviii]

Unlike the bulk of establishment historians, such as the egregious Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Aly is at least willing to accept that the origins of post-Enlightenment German “anti-Semitism” can be traced to conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews — or rather, in his view, to the envy of average Germans at the rapid social and economic advancement of Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He regards attempts to account for the rise of National Socialism solely on the basis of political ideology as unsatisfactory, observing that “conservatives weren’t the only ones guided by hostility toward and even hatred of Jews. Reformers and pioneers of political liberty often were as well. We must look for explanations elsewhere.”[xix]

Despite these small concessions to reality, Aly remains firmly within the camp of intellectual apologists for Jews in proposing that “anti-Semitism” is a phenomenon that always has its wellspring in the psychopathology or delusions of non-Jews — in this case in the pathological jealousy of Germans. His exoneration of Jews from any role whatever in contributing to manifestations of “anti-Semitism” is hardly surprising given that Aly’s book has the imprimatur of the leading Jewish representatives of the Holocaust industry. The author, who is a past winner of a Jewish Book Award, notes, for example, how his research was “made a lot easier and a lot more pleasant by my helpful and welcoming colleagues at Yad Vashem” and that his work was underwritten by the Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim Stipend for Research on Racism, Anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.

From the standpoint of an unquestioning acceptance of the dogmatic Hollywood version of “the Holocaust,” Götz Aly asserts that: “What remains contentious are questions of its ultimate meaning and deeper causes,” and argues that “the answers will, no doubt, continue to be fragmentary. Nonetheless, historians have a duty to seek them.” So, according to the author, historians have a moral and intellectual duty to search for the ultimate meaning of “the Holocaust” (provided of course this fully exonerates Jews) but not a duty to determine the actual facts regarding the alleged event itself. So much for the once revered academic tradition of fearlessly seeking out the truth wherever it leads. In the subsequent parts of this review I critically analyze Aly’s “envy” theory of the German “anti-Semitism” which forms the basis of his much praised book.

Notes

[i] Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 144.

[ii] Chaim Bermant, Jews (London; Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1977), 91.

[iii] Novick, Holocaust, 232.

[iv] Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008), 211.

[v] Nicholas Kollerstrom, Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust, Myth & Reality (Uckfield: Castle Hill, 2014), 133.

[vi] Henry Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told? — A personal search for the truth about our history (Melbourne: Penguin, 2000), 248-249.

[vii] David Cannadine, The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 205.

[viii] Ibid., 210.

[ix] Ibid., 211.

[x] Poul Duedahl, “From racial strangers to ethnic minorities, On the socio-political impact of UNESCO, 1945-60.” Paper presented at 7th Annual International Conference on Politics and International Affairs in Athens, Greece, in 2009.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Anthony Q. Hazard, Postwar Anti-Racism: The United States, UNESCO, and “Race,”1945-1968 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 38.

[xiii] Cannadine, The Undivided Past, 212.

[xiv] Hazard, Postwar Anti-Racism, 39.

[xv] Duedahl, “From racial strangers.”

[xvi] Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 341.

[xvii] Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 207.

[xviii] Götz Aly, Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 2.

[xix] Ibid., 3.

[xx] Ibid., 1.

[xxi] Ibid., 9.

[xxii] Ibid.

[xxiii] Ibid., 110.

12 Years a Slave—a biopic about Solomon Northup, a black fiddler in New York who somehow wound up a slave in Louisiana from 1841 until the law rescued him in 1853—is the nearly universally acclaimed frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar.

Yet it’s built upon a fourth-rate screenplay that might have embarrassed Horatio Alger. Screenwriter John Ridley’s imitation Victorian dialogue is depressingly bad, reminiscent of the sub-Shakespearean lines John Wayne had to deliver as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror.

12 Years a Slave is hailed by critics as a long-awaited breakthrough that finally dares to mention the subject of slavery after decades of the entertainment industry being controlled by the South. Yet as cinema encyclopedist Leonard Maltin notes:

12 Years A Slave is a remake. What’s more, the original television film was directed by the celebrated Gordon Parks. Why no one seems to remember this is a mystery to me, yet all too typical of what I’ll call media amnesia. It first aired on PBS in 1984 as Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, reached a wider audience the following year when it was repeated as an installment of American Playhouse, and made its video debut under the title Half Slave, Half Free.

You can watch the 1984 version online for $2.99.

The remake has more whippings, though.

The message behind the ongoing enshrinement of the rather amateurish 12 Years a Slave is that the cultural whippings of white folk for the sins of their great-great-great-great-grandfathers will continue until morale improves.

Steve McQueen (an art-house filmmaker who is a black Brit of West Indian background) directs 12 Years a Slave in a sort of minor league Passion of the Christ manner. (Incidentally, it’s obnoxious for anybody involved with movies today to call himself “Steve McQueen” instead of, say, “Steven McQueen.” In contrast, there were two 20th-century writers named Thomas Wolfe, but the second had the good manners to call himself “Tom” to minimize confusion.)

Some of the appeal to critics is that Northern whites are shown as saints of racial sensitivity in the film’s preposterous first 20 minutes. 12 Years a Slave opens in 1841 with Solomon Northup (stolidly played by the Anglo-Nigerian actor Chiwetel Ejiofor) being effusively admired by his white neighbors in Saratoga, New York. Northup is a model of prosperous bourgeois respectability, always doffing his top hat to his white peers while out riding with his wife and children in an elegant carriage. (Watch 0:24 to 0:35 in the trailer.)

How could he afford that?

Well, actually, he didn’t and couldn’t.

A glance at Northup’s ghostwritten 1853 memoir makes clear that in 1841, rather than being a pillar of this Yankee community, he was an unemployed fiddler dragged down by his own “shiftlessness”:

Though always in comfortable circumstances, we had not prospered. The society and associations at that world-renowned watering place (Saratoga, the home of American horseracing), were not calculated to preserve the simple habits of industry and economy to which I had been accustomed, but, on the contrary, to substitute others in their stead, tending to shiftlessness and extravagance.

In McQueen’s often baffling movie, this upper-middle-class family man suddenly decides to run off to join the circus with two fast-talking white men without even leaving a note for his wife. While dining in an elegant Washington, DC restaurant with his new friends, he suddenly takes ill (perhaps from being slipped a Mickey Finn) and wakes up in chains.

Paradoxically, Northup’s life in slavery is better documented than his murky life in freedom. His poor family never reported or even guessed that he’d been kidnapped. They apparently assumed that vanishing was just the kind of thing he’d do.

On the other hand, property records show that Northup spent many years toiling on the ramshackle plantation of the notoriously cruel Edwin Epps (played by Michael Fassbender—as always, a compelling movie star). Epps was a manic master who forced his slaves to cavort until dawn whenever he was in a “dancing mood.” Today, he’d be diagnosed as bipolar.

Northup’s eventual liberation was well-reported in the press and the courts 160 years ago. When word of his kidnapping finally arrived home in 1853, top officials in both New York and Louisiana were dismayed by the trick played upon this freeborn citizen and worked together to quickly have him released.

(The assistance of pro-slavery politicians, such as Pierre Soulé, a US Senator from Louisiana, is a puzzle to the modern mind. But their reasoning was that slavery depended upon a punctilious regard for documented property rights. Thus, they were publicly outraged that a slave sale had been contracted without proper title.)

Northup then had prosecuted the slave dealer who had bought him, but the trial never resulted in a verdict.

Interestingly, the slaver defendant countercharged that Northup had conspired with his white cronies to defraud him of his purchase price by attempting to pull the old Skin Game con on him. One inspiration for the Oscar-winning screenplay for Django Unchained that Quentin Tarantino has lately acknowledged was the 1971 comedy Skin Game, starring James Garner and Louis Gossett, Jr. as traveling bunco artists in 1858. Their most profitable scam is for Garner to repeatedly sell Gossett into slavery and then help him escape.

Northup’s hometown newspaper, the Saratoga Press, surmised that Northup had been an accomplice in a scam gone awry:

…it is more than suspected that Sol Northup was an accomplice in the sale, calculating to slip away and share the spoils, but that the purchaser was too sharp for him, and instead of getting the cash, he got something else.

Indeed, at least one of the con men who sold Northup had previously engaged in the skin game with another black as bait.

But Northup denied at length in his memoir that he would lend himself to such a dangerous swindle.

Still, this theory that Northup was a man of raffish character rather than the tediously upright one depicted in 12 Years a Slave might explain another puzzling aspect of his tale: how little help he got from his fellow slaves.