Kevin MacDonald

Occidental Observer

November 9, 2014

Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice . . . are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. (Illuminations, Walter Benjamin 1968, 262)

I recently came across a very well-done video featuring Edmund Connelly’s TOO article “Reel Bad WASPs,” part of his excellent 8-part “Eye on Hollywood” series. I don’t know who produced the video, but it’s a great example of the effectiveness of this medium for getting out our ideas, with spot-on clips from the movies, and a calm, “just the facts” voice over.

It completely belies the constant refrain of the ADL that the Jews who dominate Hollywood just happen to be Jews — that their Jewish identity is completely irrelevant to American movies.

The video also discusses a footnote in Chapter 1 of The Culture of Critique where I called attention to the movie Addams Family Values in a footnote that was quoted also in Connelly’s article and appears in the video. I thought I would contextualize this footnote a bit. This is the original passage and the accompanying footnote:

Jews have also been at the forefront of the adversarial culture in the United States, England, and France since the mid-1960s, especially as defenders of the adversary culture in the media and the academic world world (Ginsberg 1993, 125ff; Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 66–67).[4] [4]. A recent, perhaps trivial, example of this type of intellectual ethnic warfare is the popular movie Addams Family Values (released in November 1993), produced by Scott Rudin, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and written by Paul Rudnick. The bad guys in the movie are virtually anyone with blond hair (the exception being an overweight child), and the good guys include two Jewish children wearing yarmulkes. (Indeed, having blond hair is viewed as a pathology, so that when the dark-haired Addams baby temporarily becomes blond, there is a family crisis.) The featured Jewish child has dark hair, wears glasses, and is physically frail and nonathletic. He often makes precociously intelligent comments, and he is severely punished by the blond-haired counselors for reading a highly intellectual book. The evil gentile children are the opposite: blond, athletic, and unintellectual. Together with other assorted dark-haired children from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and white gentile children rejected by their peers (for being overweight, etc.), the Jewish boy and the Addams family children lead a very violent movement that succeeds in destroying the blond enemy. The movie is a parable illustrating the general thrust of Jewish intellectual and political activity relating to immigration and multi-culturalism in Western societies (see Ch. 7). It is also consistent with the general thrust of Hollywood movies. Separation and Its Discontents (Ch. 2) reviews data indicating Jewish domination of the entertainment industry in the United States. Powers, Rothman and Rothman (1996, 207) characterize television as promoting liberal, cosmopolitan values, and Lichter, Lichter and Rothman (1994, 251) find that television portrays cultural pluralism in positive terms and as easily achieved apart from the activities of a few ignorant or bigoted miscreants.

As Edmund Connelly notes, despite what I wrote, movies like this are not trivial at all. But the book was about ethnic warfare in academia, not popular culture, and even though I knew it was an important part of the overall picture, I consciously de-emphasized it. After all, it was just one movie, not a general analysis, and my mindset at the time was that an example from popular culture would reflect negatively on a project that was mainly intended to describe the ethnic warfare that had taken place in the hallowed halls of ivy (since rectified by Edmund Connelly’s work and by a section of the Preface to the First Paperback edition of Culture of Critique, p. xlvi ff. [2002]).

But I must admit that the movie really angered me. At the time (1993), I was just beginning to be aware of the issues that eventually resulted in The Culture of Critique. What was so amazing was how explicit it was, not only in its depiction of bubbly, good-looking, happy, athletic, blond, intolerant WASPs, but in its stereotypical depiction of the Jewish child with a yarmulke as a leader of a coalition of non-Whites and Whites who were portrayed as rejected by the mainstream culture and therefore morally entitled to inflict extreme violence on the blond people. (The same contrasts are apparent in the “Nordics versus implicit Jews” theme of The Switch.”)

Twenty plus years later, it still rankles. The video does a great job of showing the torture and mayhem inflicted by the coalition of the disgruntled. The evil Whites are burned at a stake and roasted on a spit. Violence against Whites is perfectly legitimate. Hilarious!

But the amazing thing is that I saw the movie in the first weekend it was out in Orange County (CA), at that time almost all White. I can still recall looking down my row during the most violent scenes and seeing all those White faces roaring in laughter. They loved seeing White people being roasted on a spit by assorted non-Whites led by a Jewish child. But of course, they weren’t processing it that way. The message so obviously in the minds of those who made the movie was completely lost on them.

Nevertheless, Addams Family Values grossed considerably less than half the amount raked in by its predecessor, The Addams Family, despite much better reviews (!).

Typical is the review in the New York Times by Janet Maslin. She hinted at some of the torture and mayhem by calling its humor “delightfully arch and subversive” — the subversive message was just fine with her, hilarious even.

Now it could be that the making of this sequel was sheer drudgery for all concerned. But it doesn’t seem likely. There’s simply too much glee on the screen, thanks to a cast and visual conception that were perfect in the first place, and a screenplay by Paul Rudnick that specializes in delightfully arch, subversive humor. That the ghoulish Addamses somehow remain much sweeter than the rest of us is no small part of the joke.

So the Addams family is much sweeter than the rest of us despite the leading role of daughter Wednesday in carrying out the violence against the blond people — as “hell-bent on revenge.” With the hearty approval of her family.

Naturally Maslin’s description of the Thanksgiving pageant scene leaves out a description of the ethnic dimension of the conflict, apart from an invidious description of WASP culture as all about cardigans, pastel-colored clothes, and drinking highballs.

It also gives the Addamses a chance to sabotage the camp’s Thanksgiving pageant in memorably creative [i.e., gruesomely painful] ways. “Your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs!” Wednesday warns the Pilgrims, as she horrifies their pastel-clad parents while playing a Pocahontas hell-bent on revenge.

Revenge indeed. This is a Jewish revenge fantasy — a paradigm of the theme of Jews as a hostile elite. Connelly quotes David Gelernter’s essay on the hatred of the new elite for the people they rule. (Connelly, unlike Gelernter who was writing in Commentary, does mention the Jewish dimension of the new elite.)

“The old elite used to get on fairly well with the country it was set over. Members of the old social upper-crust elite were richer and better educated than the public at large, but approached life on basically the same terms.” The new, heavily Jewish elite is not only different from the non-Jewish masses, in Gelernter words, “it loathes the nation it rules.”

So here we have a group of Jews with access to the elite media and an audience of millions who nevertheless see themselves as outsiders and victims. A hostile elite that loathes the people they rule over. A very bad recipe for the future of White America.

Indeed, it is remarkable that the disgruntled group in Addams Family Values is pretty much the same as the non-White coalition centered in the Democratic Party (on average, around 80% of Jews and other non-Whites vote Democrat in recent presidential elections). The exceptions are that feminism is not emphasized (White women are burned at the stake and roasted over a spit along with White men), and there is no mention of homosexuals as a minority with a grudge. Nevertheless, it’s a coalition of the aggrieved — of non-Whites or children who feel rejected because they don’t fit into WASP culture (and despite the fact that similar biases are apparent in all cultures, and egregiously so in Israel and traditional Jewish culture).

The theme of revenge as motivating Jewish leftists appears in the chapter in Culture of Critique on Jewish leftists (and Sonnenfeld, Rudin, and Rudnick are certainly leftists with their intellectual roots in the Jewish left that came to dominance with the 1960s countercultural revolution):

This antipathy toward gentile-dominated society was often accompanied by a powerful desire to avenge the evils of the old social order. For many Jewish New Leftists “the revolution promises to avenge the sufferings and to right the wrongs which have, for so long, been inflicted on Jews with the permission or encouragement, or even at the command of, the authorities in prerevolutionary societies” (Cohen 1980, 208). Interviews with New Left Jewish radicals revealed that many had destructive fantasies in which the revolution would result in “humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors” (Cohen 1980, 208) combined with the belief in their own omnipotence and their ability to create a nonoppressive social order—findings that are reminiscent of the motivating role of revenge for anti-Semitism among the Jewish-dominated security forces in communist Poland discussed above. These findings are also entirely consistent with my experience among Jewish New Left activists at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s (see note 13). (here, p. 85 and p. 103)

“Humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors.” Such as burning blond people at the stake and roasting them on a spit.

Revenge is also a theme of Jewish hostility that culminated in the torture and mass murder of the early Soviet era, as recounted in Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century.

Indeed, one wonders what would motivate the Jewish commissars to revenge apart from motives related to their Jewish identity. Traditional hostility toward non-Jews and their culture forms a central theme in the writings of

Israel Shahak and many mainstream Jewish historians, including Slezkine … .[64] An important aspect of Slezkine’s general theoretical approach is that relationships between Mercurians and Apollonians involve mutual hostility, suspicion and contempt, and a sense of superiority (p. 20). These traditional attitudes were exacerbated by the increase in tensions between Jews and non-Jews beginning with the pogroms of 1881 and extending, with fits and starts, into the period of the Bolshevik Revolution. Slezkine’s argument that Jews were critically involved in destroying traditional Russian institutions, liquidating Russian nationalists, murdering the tsar and his family, dispossessing and murdering the kulaks, and destroying the Orthodox Church has been made by many other writers over the years, including Igor Shafarevich, a mathematician and member of the prestigious U. S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Shafarevich’s review of Jewish literary works during the Soviet and post-Soviet period agrees with Slezkine in showing Jewish hatred mixed with a powerful desire for revenge toward pre-revolutionary Russia and its culture.[65] But Shafarevich also suggests that the Jewish “Russophobia” that prompted the mass murder is not a unique phenomenon, but results from traditional Jewish hostility toward the non-Jewish

world, considered tref (unclean), and toward non-Jews themselves, considered sub-human and as worthy of destruction. (“Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the USSR,” p. 93-94)

Revenge is indeed a Jewish value, but only, as in Addams Family Values, when directed against non-Jews (see Shlomo Brody, “Aski the Rabbi: Is Revenge a Jewish Value?,” Jerusalem Post, Oct. 23, 2014) — yet another example of Judaism moral particularistism. So we may be assured that Rudnick et al. remain in the good graces of the Jewish community.

This is a horrifying vision of a future that could well come true when Whites lose political power along with their demographic eclipse as a result of the immigration onslaught — just as torture and mass murder occurred in the USSR with the cooperation of the Jewish elite. It’s a revolution not based on love of universal humanity, but of hatred for the traditional people and culture of the West.