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Once in a while I run across art or an artist that makes me stop and go, Wow.
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Born in New York City in 1965, Sacha Newley first began to paint seriously at the age of 18.
After a period of study under classical realist painter, Lance Richlin,
during which he honed his life drawing skills and made numerous copies
from the Old Masters, notably Velasquez and Van Dyck, he broke away
from academic teaching to develop his own unique style....
The other day David blogged about recent children's television programming in "Palestine" which uses a Mickey Mouse lookalike to preach armed Islamic conquest of Jerusalem and annihilation of Jews:
Saraa: Sanabel, what will you do for the sake of the Al-Aqsa Mosque? How will you sacrifice your soul for the sake of Al-Aqsa? What will you do?
Sanabel: I will shoot.
Farfour (Mickey Mouse lookalike): Sanabel, what should we do if we want to liberate...
Sanabel: We want to fight.
Farfour: We got that. What else?
Saraa: We want to...
Sanabel: We will annihilate the Jews.
Saraa: We are defending Al-Aqsa with our souls and our blood, aren't we, Sanabel?
Sanabel: I will commit martyrdom.
Here's the video clip, #1442 in MEMRI's long, long series on hateful, inaccurate, and otherwise untrustworthy media coming out of the Middle East.
Pamela has more on terrorist Mickey here.
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When such uncompromising and unapologetic, anti-Zionist and antisemitic media gain currency -- and nearly always without a peep of protest from the professional litterateurs -- this is as good an occasion as any to post on the internet an opinion piece Jorge Luis Borges (left) wrote 70 years ago from the relatively calm cultural outpost of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Borges -- "who valued books and solitude above all things" (as opposed to, say, tenure or fame) -- took the time to put his foot down on a life and death cultural matter.
It would still be a few years before Borges, like the mother continent itself, would go completely blind. Still, David blogging now about "Mauschwitz" is like Borges writing then about "A Pedagogy of Hatred": it's not so much the blind leading the blind as a voice trying to speak to the deaf and dumb....
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"A Pedagogy of Hatred"
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Displays of hatred are even more obscene and denigrating than exhibitionism. I defy pornographers to show me a picture more vile than any of the twenty-two illustrations that comprise the children's book Trau keinem Fuchs auf greuner Hied und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid [Don't Trust Any Fox From a Heath or Any Jew on his Oath] whose fourth edition now infests Bavaria. It was first published a year ago, in 1936, and has already sold 51,000 copies. Its goal is to instill in the children of the Third Reich a distrust and animosity toward Jews. Verse (we know the mnemonic virtues of rhyme) and color engravings (we know how effective images are) collaborate in this veritable textbook of hatred.
Take any page, for example, from page 5. Here I find, not without justifiable bewilderment, this didactic poem -- "The German is a proud man who knows how to work and struggle. Jews detest him because he is so handsome and enterprising" -- followed by an equally informative and explicit quatrain: "Here's the Jew, recognizable to all, the biggest scoundrel in the whole kingdom. He thinks he's wonderful, and he's horrible." The engravings are more astute: the German is a Scandinavian, eighteen-year-old athlete, plainly portrayed as a worker; the Jew is a dark Turk, obese and middle-aged. Another sophistic feature is that the German is clean-shaven and the Jew, while bald, is very hairy. (It is well known that German Jews are Ashkenazim, copper-haired Slavs. In this book they are presented as dark half-breeds so that they'll appear to be the exact opposite of the blond beasts. Their attributes also include the permanent use of a fez, a rolled cigar, and ruby rings.
Another engraving shows a lecherous dwarf trying to seduce a young German lady with a necklace. In another, the father reprimands his daughter for accepting the gifts and promises of Solly Rosenfeld, who certainly will not make her his wife. Another depicts the foul body odor and shoddy negligence of Jewish butchers. (How could this be, with all the precautions they take to make meat kosher?) Another, the disadvantages of being swindled by a lawyer, who solicits from his clients a constant flow of flour, fresh eggs, and veal cutlets. After a year of this, the clients have lost their case but the Jewish lawyer "weighs two hundred and forty pounds." Yet another depicts the opportune expulsion of Jewish professors s a relief for the children. "We want a German teacher," shout the enthusiastic pupils, "a joyful teacher who knows how to play with us and maintain order and discipline. We want a German teacher who will teach us common sense." It is difficult not to share such aspiration.
What can one say about such a book? Personally I am outraged, less for Israel's sake than for Germany's, less for the offended community than for the offensive nation. I don't know if the world can do without German civilization, but I do know that its corruption by the teachings of hatred is a crime.
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["A Pedagogy of Hatred" was copied verbatim from Borges's Selected Non-Fictions (Eliot Weinberger, ed.), a collection which won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Suzanne Jill Levine translated this piece. The illustrations are copied from the link to Trau keinem Fuchs.]
Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look on the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline -- the noble life. Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us -- by obligations, not by rights.... It is annoying to see the degeneration suffered in ordinary speech by a word so inspiring as "nobility."
-- José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses
That's cojones: "Ortega" is the left one and "Gasset" is the right one.
This is not a military war only, it is even more a spiritual, intellectual, and political debate.
-- Bat Ye'or, author of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis
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This Sunday's French presidential election runoff between socialist Ségolène Royal and center-right Nicolas Sarkozy offers an opportunity to consider more closely the final candidates' stated principles in an election that will have ramifications not just for France but for all of Europe and the entire liberal West. Regardless of outgoing President Jacques Chirac's Just say NON! policy on American and Israeli military interventions against the Baath Party of Iraq, Hezbollah, potentially Iran, and most recently even the Taliban, France can no longer ignore its place on the frontline of Islam's jihad. Saturday's runoff is the république's referendum on just what political will it's going to muster (or not muster) in order to confront (or not confront) its failed immigration and integration policies and, as a consequence, demographic threats to its viability as a free Western nation. So with the American presidential campaign already shaping up as a referendum on the Bush Doctrine, France once more has the opportunity to offer the world some enlightenment.
Socialist Party standard-bearer Ségolène Royal invites special scrutiny. A colonial colonel's daughter who inherited a strict Catholic upbringing, she has bucked traditional family structures while pursuing an ascendant public career on the Left. Should she manage to capture the presidency (Sarkozy has long been the front-runner, though not by much), she would upset not just electoral expectations, but long-held calculations about how, exactly, a woman might carry 20th Century "progressivism" into the 21st Century. Beginning Sunday morning, Down with Maggie and Angela! Up with Ségo and Hillary! could become the rallying cry for a post-60s Left that would have come full circle by finally conquering the center. (The presidential victories of Bill Clinton, the first major-power head of state to have come of age during the 60s, were each delivered by a plurality.) Comparisons with Democratic presidential front-runner Rodham Clinton -- the Goldwater Girl turned Saul Alinksy student, Watergate lawyer, and longtime marital ally of this generation's most scandalous adulterer -- are not just inevitable but irresistible. Everything is possible! insists one French socialist pol (also a woman), in a not so mild reprise of May '68. But is it?
Given these stakes, what can and should be resisted is Ségo's 21st Century socialism. Since she circulates in a French political culture which has long accommodated socialist and even explicitly communist platforms, it should come as no surprise that this former protegée of François Mitterand sets hers forth unapologetically, even elegantly. A Ségo victory would only sweeten the temptation to go down a socialist path, one from which even some Democrats, seeing nothing but strange, Big Brother-like fruit in the prospect of a Rodham Clinton presidency, already recoil.
Yesterday I found a YouTube video of a portion of a telling speech Ségo delivered back in February in which she outlined her future vision while making tall claims for France's socialist legacy. When I next have some time, I will comb through it, connect more dots, and report back....
