by Josiah Nott

JEWS, AS A GROUP, oppose beauty. In the many modern cultural movements that have spread an all-pervasive decadence upon our Western lands this one truth is evident. (ILLUSTRATION: bust of Nathalie Osborn by Margaret French Cresson)

In the early nineteenth century this did not yet appear to be the case, and a composer like Felix Mendelssohn could write attractive (if not profound) music that was part of the mainstream of Western music at the time. (Though by the mid-nineteenth century Richard Wagner could already detect the pernicious influence of Jews on Western music, a position he set out in his book, Judaism in Music.) But by the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century the Jewish opposition to beauty, viz., opposition to all standards of beauty and to real manifestations of beauty, had begun in full force.[1]

[Footnote 1: I was inspired by Kevin Alfred Strom’s American Dissident Voices broadcast of October 2d, 2004 (“Beauty, Art, and Race”) to write this essay.]

‘Modern Art’ Destructive

Look at the ‘modern art,’ the paintings and the sculpture, that has been promoted by Jews for the last 100 years. Listen to the music of Jewish composers like Arnold Schoenberg, who almost single-handedly destroyed Western classical music in the early twentieth century. Consider the various intellectual and ‘cultural’ movements that were created and have been supported by Jews: every one of these movements has a negative, contrarian, reductionist, ‘subjectivist,’ or ‘relativist’ position on beauty, aesthetics, and standards of beauty.



Jewish intellectual movements of the past 150 years or so have attempted in various forms to undermine, subvert, invert, and ‘deconstruct’ objective Western standards of beauty. Witness Marxism’s attack on art as an instrument of class domination, Freud’s reduction of beauty to our lower ‘animal’ urges (“sublimation”), Boasian anthropology’s claim that beauty is ‘culturally relative,’ logical positivism’s claim that only facts can be objective (ergo, standards of beauty and values in general are subjective), post-modernism’s claim that beauty does not even exist or is a manifestation of ‘power’ (Foucault), and, of course, Jacques Derrida’s position that beauty, like all Western standards of value (and truth), needs to be ‘deconstructed.’ (I agree with writer Hugh Lincoln: Derrida’s philosophy is indeed “a metaphor for Jewish influence—a complex deconstruction of the Western canon.”) All of these movements are united in the view that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ which is to say that there are no objective standards of beauty, so that we cannot, for example, claim that Raphael’s School of Athens is objectively superior to—objectively higher than—a Black African mask, a primitive expression of an inferior mind that would give the average White child nightmares. Nor can we, according to Jewish intellectual and cultural movements, claim that White European facial features are objectively more beautiful, more refined, more evolved than Black African facial features. So, what is going on here? Why this Jewish opposition to beauty? I ask this not as a rhetorical question but as a serious subject for research. Obviously, I can only give a cursory outline of my position here.

Jewish Evolutionary Strategy

I think there are several reasons for Jewish opposition to standards of beauty; one I would trace directly to the Jewish (evolutionary) strategy: As opponents of their Gentile ‘host’ populations, Jews always oppose the civilization and culture of the Gentile population, which leads ineluctably to an opposition to civilization and culture as such. Perhaps Jewish domination would not be as intolerably bad if Jews had a high culture of their own, one which would have replaced Western culture when Jews took over in the West. Because I believe there is no culture higher (or even equivalent) to Western culture, this would of course be a step down, but at least it wouldn’t have to be a complete nosedive into the abyss of nihilism and decadence as it is in fact today: If Jews had a high culture that was the equivalent of say, Indian or Chinese culture, we could lament the passing of Western culture, but at least know that culture as such had survived.

But this is not the case. What Jews have replaced Western culture with is not culture at all; it is rather anti-culture. And, as I’m arguing, one reason for this replacement is that the Jews’ long-term opposition to Gentile culture bred in them a hatred of all culture as such. Nietzsche described this psychology better than I possibly could: In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche illustrates what happens when the man of ressentiment [2], of which Nietzsche claims the Jews as the ultimate example, manages to wrest power for himself. He will be as a destructive wind, his ressentiment blowing down every cultural height and creating a barren wasteland. He will invert the value system of the hated Gentile master and claim that Good is in fact Evil and that Bad is in fact Good. He will create an upside-down world of anti-culture in which ugliness is beauty and beauty is ugliness. Is this not what Jews have done to the West in the 20th Century?

[Footnote 2: A general feeling of resentment and sometimes hostility harbored by one individual or group against another, especially when chronic and with no means of forthright expression or relief. ]

Jews Unattractive

There are also, I believe, additional, yet related, reasons for the Jewish contempt for beauty. I think that Jews also oppose Western standards of beauty because Jews themselves are an unattractive and, on average, ugly people whose facial features are typically ill-proportioned, unrefined, and, in a word, harsh. Ugly people always resent beautiful people, a psychological trait that emerges early on in human development and would surely be confirmed by a simple survey of, say, 13-year-old girls. So, we’re back with the idea of ressentiment: I am arguing that one reason Jews have such hatred for Western standards of beauty is that they themselves do not meet those standards and, as we know, Jews will want to destroy any hierarchy that does not place Jews at the top.

What is interesting to note is that Jews have a unique disproportion between their high intelligence and their unattractive facial features. This is a fact that sets them apart from every other human group. For all other groups there is a direct, nearly exact, proportionality between group intelligence and the average level of facial feature refinement. Europeans have, on average, the most refined facial features of any human group and they have produced the highest level of civilization and culture attained by any human group. Black Africans, who have produced virtually no civilizational or cultural accomplishments, have the least refined, indeed, most simian, features of any human group. As I’ve written elsewhere, this relationship holds even within individual human races: among East Asian Orientals the most intellectually and culturally advanced group, the Japanese, also possess the most refined facial features. Let me quote Kevin Strom’s thoughts about race and facial features:

[T]here are a great many characters of beauty which apply to both sexes. In some cases, these marks of beauty are also marks of an advanced race, characteristics which signify the greatest possible difference from more primitive forms.

Looking at the profile of the face, we note the facial angle (the angle, relative to the horizon when a man is standing normally, of a line drawn from the greatest protuberance of the jaw to the most prominent part of the forehead). The average facial angle of the European race is the closest to vertical of any human race. We also see that non-human creatures have lower and lower facial angles as we make our way from the more advanced to the more primitive. Less-advanced and smaller-brained creatures (and races) have a lower, more sloping forehead (and hence less capacity in the frontal regions of the brain). More primitive races and creatures also tend to have larger teeth and larger jaws which jut forward, thus making this angle even closer to the horizontal.

The man or woman with a high or ‘noble’ forehead is better-looking to us than a man or woman with a steeply-sloping forehead, which we instinctively view as primitive and ugly, whether we use those words or not. The protruding jaw, so common in Africans and Australasians, or the underdeveloped chin and outsized nose common to the Semite, all give to the human profile a convexity and a snoutlike appearance, and hence are bars to beauty as we perceive it. We may not be conscious of the reason, but our instincts, our souls if you will, are telling us that the highly-evolved is beautiful and the primitive-looking is not.

As Strom correctly notes, typical Jewish facial features are unattractive and would seem to be indicative of a mind with lower intelligence. But this is not the case, at least not in terms of those types of intelligence that can as of now be objectively measured. (It can be argued that the Jewish mind, in its fanatical group loyalty, is in fact more primitive than the White European mind, and that the anti-intellectual dogmatism so characteristic of the Semitic mind, whether of its Jewish or Arab/Muslim variety, is an indication of the primitive, anti-rational mental constitution of all Semites. That should be a subject for further research.)

Unique Evolutionary Path

What is the reason for this apparent divergence? How could Jews display high intelligence and yet have unrefined and unattractive facial features? The answer of course is the unique Jewish path to high intelligence: the Jewish eugenics described by Kevin MacDonald in A People That Shall Dwell Alone. Among all other human groups intelligence and facial refinement advanced in tandem, one could even figuratively say, in close cooperation with each other. To put this in Darwinian terms, ‘natural selection’ and ‘sexual selection’ worked together to raise both the intelligence and average level of facial feature refinement of certain races and sub-races, and I would further hypothesize that natural selection was in fact the cause of sexual selection in the case of the more evolved races. (Darwin proposed the idea of ‘sexual selection’ in his book, The Descent of Man. This is also the book in which Darwin sets out his views on the differences among the human races.) Though I do not agree with J.P. Rushton’s conclusion that East Asians are superior to White Europeans, I nonetheless think Rushton’s ‘Life History Theory’ an excellent (and brilliant) theoretical model for understanding the development of human races. One could easily add the ‘sexual selection of facial feature refinement’ to this model.

But Jews did not achieve their high intelligence through the normal means by which other advanced races achieved theirs, most of which took place during pre-history; rather it is safe to conclude that many thousands of years ago Jews had the lower intelligence commensurate with their unrefined and harsh facial features, probably the same average level of intelligence as Arabs, which according to R. Lynn and T. Vanhanen is an IQ of 85, i.e., about mid-point between White Europeans and Black Africans. (Think about this average IQ of 85 and the lower level of empathy that accompanies it the next time you hear about some horrid atrocity committed in Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East.)

Because of Jewish eugenics this ‘natural’ Semitic level of intelligence has risen high indeed, but Jewish eugenics clearly did not have a similar effect on Jewish facial features. Perhaps there was not sufficient time for commensurate facial feature refinement to take place, to ‘catch up,’ so to speak, with Jewish intelligence; perhaps social conditions prevented it from happening. (Along these lines, there is obviously an immense difference between pre-civilizational life and social life in a civilization, and the different effects of each on the choice of a mate should be clear enough. Though powerful and intelligent Jews would have wanted attractive wives, perhaps social conditions—family ties, alliances, or other factors—did not always permit it.) I don’t claim to know the reason. But the fact of it is clear, I think. Whatever attractive Jews there are in the world, I conclude that they usually get their more refined facial features from that amount of European blood which they possess.

I realize that some of these thoughts are speculative in nature, but I hope they will contribute to an understanding of the Jewish opposition to beauty and standards of beauty that is so evident in what used to be the West.

Beauty and Order

Let me switch gears slightly by praising an article by John Tyndall from the magazine Spearhead that was reprinted recently on the National Vanguard Web site. [3]

[Footnote 3: “What We Think: About Music and Health,” Spearhead magazine, September 2004.]

I found Tyndall’s view similar to my own on the relationship—indeed, the near equivalence—between beauty and order, and thought it a breath of fresh air on the subject:

“The music of Mozart, perhaps more than that of any other leading composer, is the music of order. It induces order in the mind and an ordering of the emotions. By contrast, so much of what today passes for ‘pop’ music is the music of chaos. It has a fundamentally ‘disordering’ effect on the human brain—particularly among White, western peoples, to whom it is neither native nor natural.”

As much as I love the music of Mozart, I would have to say that if I had to choose one composer whose music represents order-as-such, it would be Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach’s music, especially as represented by his late masterworks, A Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue, show European creative powers at their zenith, and even more to the point, are supreme manifestations of order. That two fairly simple melodic subjects (the melody for A Musical Offering was actually composed by Prussia’s Frederick the Great, who was an accomplished flute player and patron of the arts) could be transformed into two of the supreme musical creations of Western artistic history truly boggles the mind. In each case, Bach takes the short melodic theme and develops it into a work of the utmost complexity and near-mathematical rigor. Above all, Bach’s music demonstrates that the creation of art is, quite simply, the creation of order.

For a more detailed development of this view of art, see Anthony Ludovici’s worthy book of 1911, Nietzsche and Art. [4] Ludovici argues that what the true artist despises above all is disorder and chaos, and that the true artist’s Will to Art consists primarily in his desire—his need—to replace disorder with order. Ludovici writes: “Stimulated by disorder, which he [the true artist] despises, he is driven to his work; spurred by the sight of anarchy. . . his will to power gives birth to culture and refinement. He gives of himself—his business is to make things reflect him. . . . Defining ugliness provisionally as disorder, it may have a great attraction for the artist, it may even be the artist’s sole attraction, and in converting it—the thing he despises most—into beauty, which we shall define provisionally as order, he reaches the zenith of his power.” (pg. 118 of the 1971 Haskell House reprint of Nietzsche and Art).

[Footnote 4: Now available in digital form at anthonymludovici.com.]

The Jewish subversion and destruction of the West has consisted precisely in the replacement of order by disorder—and needless to say, this applies to far more than just art. This is their greatest crime against us.

Complexity and Simplification

Let me conclude by mentioning one more thinker who considered the issue of order and disorder as they relate to civilization and culture, the nineteenth century Russian reactionary and philosopher of history Konstantin Leontiev. Leontiev sought a formula with which to understand the rise and fall of civilizations and he characterized the destruction of a society as analogous to the destruction of an organism, claiming that a period of “flowering complexity” is followed by a period of “secondary and confused simplification” in which the ordered complexity of an organism or a society and its culture are simplified and destroyed. Leontiev blamed the egalitarian process for the leveling and destruction of European culture and society. In his magnum opus, Byzantinism and Slavdom, Leontiev writes, “[I]f we take any developed thing. . . we shall see only one thing, namely, that certain phenomena precede the decomposition and the death of the [developed thing]. . . a simplification of the component parts, a diminution in the number of distinct parts, a weakening of the central unity and strength and at the same time a growing confusion. There is a process of gradual lowering, mixture and blending, preceding the disruption and death, and the transformation into something of a more general character lacking any inner necessity and life of its own.” Is this not an accurate characterization of what Jewish intellectual and political movements have done to the West, its people, its society, its culture, and its civilization?

Josiah Nott is an academic living in Pasadena, California.