A friend sent me the link to a long-winded essay on revolutionary art, the kind that Jews like to write.  My friend, a British Jew and “Holocaust Denier”, asked wistfully:

 

“Why is it that all the intelligent writing is now coming from the Right? What's happened to the Left?”

 

Good question.  Could it be that the Left is departing?

 

Below is an excerpt from this otherwise highbrow article written by the British Jazz musician, Gilad Atzmon who takes a juicy swipe at degenerate art he calls "shock art" as an expression of rebellion of the status quo.  I readily admit I found this essay – a veritable tsunami of words - far too difficult to absorb, but I picked out some nuggets for you:

 

Home Remedies for Hitler Hysteria
Prescribed by the New Right Avant-Garde

 

If the definition of irony is typically something like “that which goes against expectations,” then how could an Avant-Garde artist — one who is expected to test the boundaries of our expectations—ever satisfy popular, mainstream, garden-variety tastes in irony? At some point, the Avant-Garde artist will, according to his nature, go against the expected means by which the unexpected is supposed to be realized; he will offer us a new unexpectedness.

 

And a new unexpectedness is direly needed. For about a century now, ever since, say, Duchamp’s 1917 “Fountain”—a men’s urinal intended as a piece of ready-made statuary—so-called Avant-Garde artists have reveled in ironically overturning, at every turn, concepts of beauty, decency, and of art itself. Thus “shock art,” this militancy against the status quo in Western culture has paradoxically become the status quo and has rendered itself increasingly tame, passé, and hardly shocking at all. It is as the late Jonathan Bowden has said: “Revolutionary art becomes liberal wallpaper.” Thus whether it is Rick Gibson’s “Human Earrings” (earrings made from human fetuses), or a tin of “Artist’s Shit” by Piero Manzoni, or Tracy Emin’s “My Bed” (unmade with soiled sheets and menstrual-stained undies), or . . . well you get the idea. The point is that a little of this goes a long way.

 

Soon being “edgy” looses its edge as the masses become ever-more desensitized. Soon irony devours itself.

 

But just as the brain-scrambled masses were expecting the unexpected to remain forever thus predictable, safe for bourgeois consumption at the Tate Galleries or at MOMA, a New Right Avant-Garde has emerged to confound these long-established means of confounding expectations: Bowden, Charlie Krafft, Ramzpaul, Horus the Avenger. Each have opened up surprising new dimensions in irony itself, much to the confusion and dismay of the slow witted who still had their minds attuned to the old, tired, mainstream “Avant-Garde” and their truculent childish concept of “shock.”

 

For example, when news got out one year ago that Charlie Krafft, widely known as the artist behind the “Hitler Teapot,” happened to question the received history of “The Holocaust” and failed to prostrate himself sufficiently before the sacred number “6 Million,” the arts and cultural commentariat had ERROR blinking in their short-circuiting brains. They couldn’t process the fact that what they had thought to be mildly shocking and ironic was clearly—what precisely? (…)

 

Put simply, their thinking goes something like this: everybody knows that Hitler was pure evil, a demon, the worst person who has ever existed. Right? Thus any representation of the man that does not depict him as such—and especially one that depicts him, rather, as wholesome, or warm, or familiar, like a teapot—would have to have been done out of some kind of “simulated ignorance,” to contravene our expectations of the demonic, all to achieve a humorous or haunting effect.

 

But if an artist is a “Holocaust denier,” then he must not think, to begin with, that Hitler is the embodiment of evil or an imp of Satan. His work depicting Hitler in an unexpected, non-demonic light would not therefore be interpretable as ironic. Right?

 

Thus Krafft must really think that Hitler is . . . what?—a teapot?

 

Clearly the logic of this mainstream commentary does not get us very far before it begins to break down. To the extent that one might feel a need for explanations or interpretations of art, therefore, a new reading of these Nazified teapots and perfume bottles seems in order.

 

Here’s one: if Mr. Krafft is remotely sympathetic with White Nationalism, then the weight of emphasis and the true sense of irony subsists in his art only insofar as it contravenes, not the idea of Hitler-as-demon, but rather the overarching expectation that we must always demonize him.

 

We will return to this assertion. But before we proceed with where it leads, we must offer, as a necessary aside, some context. For there are other ironies lurking near-at-hand. (…)

 

Clearly Graves and her ilk thus only support “edgy” art so long as it cuts against and undermines religious “nuts” who want to impose their ideological hegemony on us all and keep us from, you know, asking too many questions.

 

But isn’t “to keep us from asking too many questions” precisely the first and central religious tenet of “The Holocaust?”

 

You know it is. Sanctified, in some European countries, by law.

 

And hasn’t “Hitler-as-pure-evil” and the number “6 Million” become the new global litmus of moral rectitude? Affirm them, you heathen, or burn in flames of guilt and “hate” and heresy!

 

Indeed, Holocaustianity is the West’s new big Manichean religion of good vs evil, of guilt and shame and original sin. It’s got the works! It has been created and promoted by Anglosphere elites into the dominant religio-ideological paradigm of the past half-century. Compared with the absurd sums of money and colossal power driving “The Holocaust” into our children’s hearts and minds in our schools, and into those of young adults in our universities, into our public conscious via Hollywood films, and into our government and foreign policy via aggressive lobbying groups, the Catholic Church and its dogma seem positively meek, limp, ineffectual, defeated. (…)

 

Graves et al. claim the Holocaust as undeniable history when it is convenient for them to do so. But then when it suits them, it becomes something other than history: a bludgeon, an indenture, a shibboleth.

 

Historians and the public at large must be allowed to arrive at more judicious, more nuanced interpretations about events of the past without fear of being subjected to, in the present, an onslaught of condemnation and demonization. This, or else you must cease to call those past events “history.” You cannot have it both ways.

 

The Holocaust is not history, not only because it did not happen they way you think it happened, but also because the moment history ceases to be contested or contestable, it becomes religion.

 

But the Holocaust is not history in another sense. It is “not history” when it is used ideologically, propagandistically. Hitler and The Holocaust since the ’70s have been taken up in Western media and governments in order to excuse and justify everything under the sun.

 

If you are a “Right-wing” neocon, you evoke Hitler and the Holocaust to rally support for an invasion of Iraq and, potentially, Iran. If you are a “Leftist” liberal, you evoke Hitler and the Holocaust to rally American opinion against Slobodan Milo?evi?, or stifle American dissent about Affirmative Action programs, or quash European dissent about the importation of drug-crazed Somali rape-squadrons into the quiet suburbs of Sweden.

 

Hitler and the Holocaust have become generic symbols of unredeemable evil, entities of demonic force. Hitler is no more a mere man, but a smoldering lump of brimstone. You saw his cameo at the end of Time Bandits: “It’s EVIL! Don’t touch it!”

 

And if you wish to label me a “Holocaust denier” and dismiss the idea that the event is more propaganda than history, then allow me to refer you to “mainstream” scholars who agree with me in this particular matter. In his The Epitome of Evil: Hitler in American Fiction, 1939–2002 [3], Professor Michael Butter catalogues numerous instances of Hitler’s depiction in modern American literature as a thing non-human, as a demonic, vile creature of radical evil, and the propagandistic implementations of such depictions.

 

For instance, Butter discusses at some length David Charnay’s 2002 novel Operation Lucifer. This is an “alternate history” that features a Führer who has managed to survive into the 21st century only to be captured and put on trial at Guantanamo Bay. Yet, despite this massive re-imagining, the view of Hitler as demonic, as “devil incarnate,” is not, cannot be revised. Indeed, it is precisely the connection between Hitler and irredeemable evil that gives the book its propagandistic logic. For Charnay is using the fear of Hitler-As-Evil to justify the war on terror, American military actions in the Middle East, and the existence of Guantanamo Bay itself.

 

Even the historian Peter Novick, hardly a “Holocaust denier,” still maintains that “The Holocaust” as it is now imagined in mainstream commentary is almost entirely a function of propagandistic exigencies. He calls it a “retrospective construction” that would be unrecognizable to Americans living in, say, the 1950s. At that time The Holocaust was far less prominent in our culture since it was the Soviets who were then the “new enemy.” Look up any history book at random from the first two decades after the war and you will scarcely find any reference to it at all. One book, for instance, chosen at random, The Soviet History of World War II: Myths, Memories, and Realities (1963), mentions the word “holocaust” only once, and not, in fact, in reference to the internment of Jews under Hitler.

 

Holocaustianity became increasingly important in the late ’60s as a consequence of Civil Rights era politicking, the need to “integrate” American schools, and the need to integrate nations into the European Union and import into it “vibrant” uneducated Third World immigrants.

 

(…) The propaganda surrounding Hitler has become more, not less, prevalent and virulent as the period in which he lived fades into the past. Western news media, entertainment media, governments, and social engineers all have found it convenient to have at-hand a scary sock-puppet, an “epitome of Evil” to frighten childlike hordes into submission at the box office and ballot box alike, especially now that the dead or dying gods and devils of pre-20th-century religions have become so ineffectual at eliciting our passions.

 

These propagandists, such as Ms. Graves, end up becoming inadvertent religious nuts, spreading the gospel of Hitler, proselytizing his cult, perpetuating his potency, not as an avatar of Vishnu as Savitri Devi imagined him, but as an inversion of whatever might happen to be their political objective at any given moment.

 

And it is this creation, through Hitler, of a binary inversion of the good, always to be reflexively unconditionally condemned, that we must condemn.  On principle.

 

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(For the entire essay, google Counter-Currents Publishing)