Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Notes on VERTIGO(written by Alec Coppel & Samuel Taylor and directed by Alfred Hitchcock) as Discussed by Luke Ford and Kevin Michael Grace




Luke Ford and Kevin Michael Grace discuss VERTIGO, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. VERTIGO dethroned Orson Welles' CITIZEN KANE in the 2012 Sight & Sight poll the Best Movies of All Time. Unlike Welles' masterpiece that is brimming with life and has large cast of characters, VERTIGO is remarkably one of the loneliest movies ever made. Indeed, its appeal to cinephiles is that intense feeling of loneliness. The audience shares in the experience of CITIZEN KANE together. If anything, the most subjective eye in the film, that of the reporter on the trail of 'rosebud', is rendered almost invisible. What we see is a vast array of characters, big and small, reminiscing on the most public of endeavors: Business, Media, Arts, Politics. CITIZEN KANE is more about the seen than the seeing.
In contrast, the viewer is the main protagonist in VERTIGO(as in REAR WINDOW), and his gaze fixates on one thing: Madeleine as woman, ghost, resurrection, and myth. If 'rosebud' remains vague throughout CITIZEN KANE until the very end, we know what Scotty's(James Stewart) 'rosebud' or "Carlotta's Bouquet" is. Even though VERTIGO is an ensemble piece as romance-mystery, it is emotionally a one-man-show. It is about Scotty's fascination with Madeleine that turns into obsession and yearning. The somber tones, melancholic score, and portrait of privacy(so intense and oblivious to everything but its innermost desire) all conspire to make VERTIGO into a one-man-tragedy. Scotty becomes blind and deaf to everything but the siren and her song. One might see a parallel with Liv Ullmann's character in PERSONA who is also incapacitated and admitted to a clinic, but if her ailment remains enigmatic and opaque, there is clarity to Scotty's condition. He wants Madeleine. He has a powerful and all-encompassing longing for someone who can no longer exist in the world of the real.
In a way, Scotty's eagerness to cure Madeleine of her malady is psychological compensation for his inability to overcome his own. No amount of reason can undo his acrophobia, but maybe, reason can cure Madeleine of her irrational affliction with the supernatural. Yet, a part of him doesn't want to see Madeleine cured. Its her forlorn state that makes her even more beautiful and draws him closer to her. She's a damsel in distress, but in another sense, she's the queen of dreams. Its her 'possession' that adds tragic poetry to her physical beauty and charms.
For many years, VERTIGO was unavailable to moviegoers, but upon re-release, it has rapidly gained the status of Hitchcock's greatest work(among so many to choose from). It has also inspired or influenced many notable films: LA JETEE, THE LAST EMBRACE, L'APPARTEMENT, MULHOLLAND DR., A.I: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, INCEPTION, SHUTTER ISLAND to name a few.
Scotty represents the two sides of our psychology: Logical & Factual and Creative & Dreamy. Scotty's career as a hard-nosed detective tracking down criminal cases involved his logical and factual side. He lived in a world without ghosts, one where everything had a logical explanation, one where even love was a game between rational strategists. But the faculty of reason, however essential and useful, cannot 'create' or dream. In the end, it is the mist around the object than the object itself that makes us dream, inspiring us to create myths and fairy-tales. And it is upon his encounter with Madeleine that Scotty falls into a dream from which he can't wake(nor wants to). It is telling that, even after the facts are finally known about Madeleine/Judy in the last scene, he so easily falls into her embrace again as if to cling to the myth. Even if it can never be the same, he wants it to go on in another form. Dreams lead to madness but there lies the vision. It's like what William Hurt's character tells David in the final part of A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. If Scotty gradually goes from analyst & tracker to creator & maker(of dreams, albeit a forgery of Elster's sinister masterpiece), David(with the help of Gigolo Joe) uses his analytic skills to track down a dream, one that proves to be impossible as years pass.
As different as CITIZEN KANE and VERTIGO are, there is the theme of obsession at the core of both movies. Even though Kane, unlike Scotty, was a rich public figure(richer than all the Gavin Elsters of the world), he too ended up alone and lonely. And as his ultimate dreams -- becoming governor(then maybe president), being a champion of the People, and being loved -- failed to materialize, he withdrew into a dream of his own creation called Xanudu. With god-complex, he strove to create his own Edenic Ark separate from the fallen world that rejected him. And yet, even in that world, he lost all his friends and finally his wife. If any film incorporated the powerful themes of both CITIZEN KANE and VERTIGO, it'd be Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN A AMERICA where James Woods plays the Kane figure whereas Robert DeNiro the Scotty figure.

1. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=11m23s Kevin Michael Grace says Hitchcock blamed disappointing Box Office on James’ Stewart age but argues it made the character’s desperation all the more palpable. Akin to the elderly professor in BLUE ANGEL? Perhaps, the element of realization than desperation is more crucial as to why Stewart’s age made the story richer. Because the character of Scotty is ‘older’, he feels he’s seen it all, felt it all, been through it all; therefore, nothing can get to him or get under his skin. The passion in the movie takes on greater force precisely because it engulfs a man who seems immune to such emotions. Thus, there’s an element of surprise, as when the middle-aged professor comes upon the nymphet in LOLITA and becomes aroused with sensations novel to him despite his learning and worldliness. Kevin Michael Grace also says the movie is operatic, and it certainly has such moments, especially at the end. But most of the movie proceeds like a fugue, accented by moments that feel like tone poems.

2. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=12m40s Kevin Michael Grace says that a recurring theme in Hitchcock’s movies is the falsely accused or suspected ‘wrong man’ trying to prove his innocence. Hitchcock made a movie of that title, and oddly enough, it’s rather uncharacteristic of his works. Even though many of Hitchcock’s movies do involve the ‘wrong man’, there’s the sense that the real villain is acting out the subconscious desires of the hero, the ‘wrong man’ or ‘wronged man’. It's like what Lancelot says of himself and Guinevere in EXCALIBUR: "we are innocent...but not in our hearts." Consider STRANGERS ON A TRAIN where the hero didn’t murder his wife but almost wanted to strangle her himself. In the movie WRONG MAN, the wronged man is portrayed unambiguously as a good man wrongfully accused(almost scapegoated) by the system and the community. Perhaps, that particular movie was uncharacteristically moralistic(even a bit didactic) because it was based on a true story. But in many of Hitchcock’s movies, the villain acts out the subconscious desire of the hero. The hero has a superego firm enough to restrain his darker impulses. So, the villain, as his Id, steps in to do the job. And then, the hero and villain duke it out, with the good winning over the evil. But the perverse dynamics has the hero really battling himself as the villain's transgression eloquently represents the secret murmurs of the hero's heart. In a way, even as the villain harasses and torments the hero, he has made it doubly good for the latter. In killing the person that the hero really wants dead, the villain served as hero's emissary. And then, in being defeated by the hero, the latter can comfort himself that he’s always been on the side of the good when, in fact, his hidden soul is closer to the villain's than he would like to believe. Thanks to the villain in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, the hero no longer has to deal with his wicked wife and move onto a new lover. The reason why ROPE doesn’t work is Hitchcock chickened out and failed to present James Stewart’s character as a true nihilist. If the movie had been more courageous, the character should have felt the full force of realization that the boys were actually ‘more’ than him because whereas he could only expound on nihilism in theory, they actually carried it out. Instead, we have Stewart's character telling the boys that, gee whiz, he hadn't mean it; he was just joshing, that’s all. (Furthermore, the story would have been more effective if the killers had been presented as truly intelligent sickos than as morons who think they're smart but really aren't. Because they are presented as essentially shallow and stupid, the murder seems more the product of 'dangerous ideas' than dark souls despite Stewart's sermon at the end about how it was in the dark nature of the boys to have done what they did.) PSYCHO is creepier because there is a sense that the Good can easily slide into Bad. When the woman is on the dark road with the stolen money, her conscience is troubled by voices inside her head accusing her of being a wicked creature, but then, we see her eyes turn radiant like headlights and her lips flicker into a smile as she begins to enjoy the realization that, yes, she is a bad woman and is capable of anything. Her psyche begins to split, and for a moment, her stare anticipates the Norman Bates’ stare at the end of the movie. Of course, Bates is a far more seriously split personality. In a way, he is the villain but also the victim, a ‘wronged man’ to the extent that he sincerely believes he is victimized by the madness of his mother whom he feels obliged to protect as a good son. Not sure if Charles Laughton was channeling Hitchcock, but the ending scene with the watch in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER suggests that evil keeps on ticking on and on, even in the hearts of children despite receiving the love and warmth of good people, such as the grandmotherly figure.


3. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=15m22s Kevin Michael Grace says the ‘logic’ of VERTIGO is that of a dream, more precisely a ‘dream of eternal recurrence’, one where the afflicted seems incapable of escaping as every waking moment turns out to be the continuance of the dream. There is something about Scotty’s spellbound dilemma that is obsessively dreamlike. There is a scene in MULHOLLAND DR. where a man tells his friend about a dream at a diner, but it turns out he is in the dream he is talking about, and furthermore, we learn that he and his friend aren’t real but figments of dreams of another person who also happens to be a figment of another person’s dream. I don’t think Scotty’s dilemma is really of that nature, however. The guy who mentions his dream in the diner in MULHOLLAND DR. really doesn’t want to be part of that dream. If anything, he grows morbidly anxious when he begins to realize he’s in that dream again. In contrast to that normal-seeming person who just wants to get on with his life, the real problem with Diane Selwyn is not so much the recurring dream but the recurring reality. She can’t stand the reality and escapes into the dream over and over and over. It’s a dream-fantasy that she, consciously and subconsciously, steers in her preferred direction, but the reality keeps pulling her back to the dire facts of her life. Scotty has one thing in common with her in that what he fears most is not the dream, haunted as he is by it, but by the recurrence of reality. No matter how many times he wants to return to the dream, the fact is Madeleine is dead, and he wasn’t able to save her, no more than he was able to save the cop in the beginning of the story. Of course, it’s worse with Madeleine because he fell in woozy love with her. So, Scotty isn’t someone who’s trying to escape the dream and return to reality but someone who wants to take flight from reality and be with the dream. After Madeleine dies, he is committed to a mental clinic. From the outside, he seems miserable, and of course, he is mourning Madeleine’s death. But there is also a sense that he’s lost in a dream that he doesn’t want to let go. He doesn’t want to be healed because the cure would mean the rational realization that Madeleine is dead and gone forever, and there’s nothing he can do about it. His conscious mind knows this, but a part of his soul just can’t let go and remains with her in the world of dreams, just like Arthur regains contact with Merlin in the dream world in EXCALIBUR. What is the most traumatic moment in MOTHMAN PROPHECIES?

It’s when Laura Linney’s character reminds John Klein(Richard Gere) of the most basic, undeniable, and irreversible fact: His wife died two yrs ago. All these years, Klein knew this fact consciously, but his soul was never able to let it go. So, harrowing and frightening as the Mothman sightings are in the town of Point Pleasant, they offer the hope of contacting the Other World to Klein who is like Orpheus trying to retrieve Eurydice from the Underworld. Dreams can be scary, but they also allow fantasy, escape, and hope. In contrast, reality is final. As melancholic as Scotty’s dreams of Madeleine are, her ghostly presence inhabits that realm. But in the daylight world of reality, there is only the fact that she is gone forever. A story that is closer to the horror of the recurring dream is Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING, but even there, the character comes to eventually love the dream and fears returning to reality more than anything.

4. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=19m4s Kevin Michael Grace says the reason why Scotty didn’t shack up with Midge is she was never his kind of woman. He was for ‘icy blondes’, like Hitchcock himself. Also, Kevin Michael Grace says Scotty is a deeply romantic person whose hidden romanticism finally emerges in his fantasy of being a ‘powerful man’ who transforms Judy into ‘Madeleine’. But we learn from the conversation between Scotty and Midge that the reason why the two didn’t get married was Midge called it off. If she’d been willing, they might very well have married and settled down. Of course, he was never in great love with her, and the fact that she’d rejected marriage suggests she wasn’t all that crazy about him either(despite her very real feelings for him). They liked each other as friends, and also, they relished their independence more than anything. Both like to regard themselves as modern ‘ironic’ people who are above duty and romance. If they had gotten married, it would have been as friends, as a ‘modern’ couple. The fact that they still see each other and enjoy the other’s company suggest that they are ‘married’ in a way: A marriage of friendship. They are well-educated, smart, and worldly. There isn’t a topic or issue about which they can’t joke or have a good laugh. In a way, the lack of actual marriage between them keeps them ‘married’ as good friends. Real marriage would mean duty and obligations. But their casual ‘friend marriage’ means they can see each other whenever they like but also be alone when they wish to. Each maintains his or her freedom/independence despite their affectionate bond. So, it’d be wrong to say Scotty didn’t marry her because she wasn’t his type. In a way, she was too much his type, and vice versa, as both shared a similar kind of sensibility: Modern, sardonic, irreverent, libertine, and unbound. One gets the sense that they didn’t get married because they valued their friendship more than any sentimental notion of love. She speaks of sexuality as a kind of engineering, with her bra design utilizing the same laws of physics as a bridge. The irony is that the Madeleine’s husband, Gavin Elster, thinks much the same way, albeit for sinister purposes. (One wonders if the evil husband is really romantic or a cold cynical manipulator of romanticism as a sucker’s dream for others. As P. T. Barnum said, "there’s a sucker born every minute".) Anyway, Midge didn’t want to be legally & morally attached to any one person, so she rejected Scotty’s proposal of marriage long ago, and Scotty didn’t take it hard at all since he wasn’t obsessed with her. He probably thought it would have been nice to have a wife like Midge. Midge is the kind of woman with whom things are best kept dry. It is with Madeleine that Scotty takes the plunge and gets wet. In a way, VERTIGO is about 19th century Gothicism intruding into Modernism that thinks itself too smart for old themes and passions. It’s like the modern scientist-doctor who is upended by the magician in Ingmar Bergman’s THE FACE. In a way, both Scotty and Midge get a kind of comeuppance for their modernist conceit that they are above old-fashioned emotions. Scotty does fall for romance, and his mysterious wanderings does make Midge jealous. And when Scotty falls to despair and despondency as his soul spirals into the dream underworld of the dead, Midge also feels the pull. She thought she was above irrational emotions, but she is moved by Scotty’s passion for Madeleine; she is sad that no man could ever feel such feelings for her. Indeed, it is her sensing of Scotty's deepening emotions(for someone else) that brings out the deeper emotions(for Scotty) within herself. Scotty's apparent infatuation with someone else violated the unspoken contract between him and Midge: Their lasting friendship would be premised on either's refusal to commit to any one person or thing. They'd be like two birds free in the air but never settling down to nest. Midge dreads flying alone upon sensing Scotty's choice of a particular tree as his 'home'.

Also, I’m not sure Scotty was always a romantic person. Romanticism emerges from his growing passion for Madeleine, but I think Scotty’s romantic side was latent than hidden. It was there somewhere, but he didn’t know of it and never thought that side of him could ever take shape as it did. That is why he’s so helpless under its hypnotic spell. He was taken by surprise. And it’s very possible that the romantic side of him would never have emerged if not for the artful con pulled off by the sinister husband Gavin Elster. In getting to know Madeleine, it’s not as if Scotty finally found what he’d been looking for. He found what he didn’t know that he’d been looking for, and yet, having found her, she is ‘it’, she is The One, the person who matters more than anything in the world. Also, I’m not so sure that Scotty is into Icy Blondes per se(as Hitchcock was). Rather, it was how he got to know Madeleine, and she happened to be a blonde. Having fallen for her, he associates blondeness with Madeleine, and that’s why he insists that Judy be a blonde. I don’t think any other ‘icy blonde’ would have worked for Scotty. Indeed, Scotty picks Judy out when she is a brunette. Why? She has Madeleine’s face. So, it’s not just the hair color. It’s the face, it is what Madeline wore in dress and shoes, how her face was made up, and it’s how her hair was done. Every detail has to be right. Indeed, when Judy enters the room with blonde hair, Scotty still doesn't feel the magic. He finally feels it only when she does her hair in a particular way. Scotty wants Judy to be like Madeleine in every possible detail, and yet, it is when Judy goes the extra inch to be like Madeleine with the jewelry that the mist finally lifts and Scotty comes to see her(and ‘Madeleine’) with cold eyes.
By the way, I think the significance of Madeleine’s blonde hair owed to Carlotta’s dark hair. Carlotta’s dark ghostly presence has supposedly taken possession of Madeleine’s soul, and Scotty’s role is to bring her out into the light. Thus, blonde hair is less a sexual fetish than a key motif with symbolic value in the mythic puzzle. The myth of Madeleine isn’t possible without the darkness, and in that sense, in having fallen in love with blonde Madeleine, Scotty has also fallen in 'negative' love with brunette Carlotta. Indeed, one might argue that Scotty might have been less taken with Judy Barton if she’d been blonde when they crossed path. It was her brunette hair that reminded him of Carlotta's ghost, from which he was trying to save Madeleine. Thus, in turning brunette Judy to blonde Judy or New Madeleine, Scotty gets to relive the struggle once again, the one he lost.

5. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=22m38s Luke Ford argues that the problem with Scotty is that he rejected a perfectly good woman in Midge in favor of some unattainable fantasy in Madeleine. Luke Ford says he has had the same problems as Scotty in chasing after impossible women than settling down with a Nice Girl. Luke Ford says Midge is approachable whereas Madeleine is not. So, Scotty made a big boo boo. But again, it was Midge who broke off the engagement with Scotty, not vice versa. Also, both Midge and Madeleine are approachable and unapproachable in different ways. Midge is approachable as a friend, a conversationist, a wit. But she isn’t very approachable emotionally. She keeps a certain distance with irony and aloofness. Her independence and career are too important to her. As much as she likes Scotty, she wasn’t going to give up her ‘freedom’ for a life of marriage in which she might have had kids and been a homemaker. She wants to design sexy things for modern women. So, while Scotty can call her up any day and have a good talk with her, she keeps a certain wall around her.
Now, there’s a wall around Madeleine as well. First, she is of a rich family, a socialite. People of high status tend to move around in closed circles, the sort that excludes most people, such as Scotty. Also, Madeleine is high class. (Of course, the Madeleine that Scotty meets is a fake, a fool’s gold. But like the Shadow Warrior of Akira Kurosawa’s KAGEMUSHA, she was drilled to seem as real as possible, and Scotty sure fell for it. But then, he probably never met a socialite of such high standing before, so it’s all new to him. And so very flattering that such a high-class woman would allow a man like him into her life.) Precisely because of Madeleine’s superior status, Scotty is impressed with the opportunity of entering her exclusive world in both the social and personal sense. No matter how gorgeous a whore may be, she is a whore, someone who can be had for a price. In contrast, Madeleine is like a princess, and Scotty feels fortunate to be gradually sliding into her world(like Kubrick's characters relish entry into 'forbidden' domains). And despite her high class and reserved manners, there is something very vulnerable about her. As Kevin Michael Grace argues, vulnerability is appealing to men. Playing the white knight lends status to a man over a woman, however lowly his status and highborn hers. At the end of Akira Kurosawa’s HIDDEN FORTRESS, the two lowly commoners realize that they’d played a role in saving a high-born princess, and they feel a certain pride that can’t be measured in gold. Because Madeleine plays the damsel-in-distress, she becomes approachable to Scotty. She offers an emotional opening to him that was never there with Midge, a ‘strong’ and ‘independent’ woman.

6. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=28m1s Kevin Michael Grace says, "In terms of James Stewart’s guilt, the overwhelming presence of Catholic imagery in this film is not an accident. James Stewart has committed adultery or fornication but it’s involved in an adulterous affair with a married woman... that is one aspect of his guilt." I’m not sure what Kevin Michael Grace means by this. It’s my understanding that the affair between Scotty and Madeleine was NOT consummated in Act One. Now, one could argue there was an adultery-of-the-heart because Scotty fell in love with the woman he was hired to keep an eye on. And they did share kisses. He wasn’t supposed to do that, but then, Judy-as-Madeleine was hired to make him do just that. While Scotty fell madly in love with the fake Madeline, the evil husband felt no love for the real Madeleine, his wife who was slated for murder. Anyway, as the love was not consummated between Scotty and Madeleine, there was no great reason for Scotty to feel any guilt(in regard to Madeleine's husband). Also, even as Scotty fell in mad love for Madeleine, he was trying to the very end to break her out of the spell, thus loyally carrying out the husband’s request. He was still trying to play the 'detective'. If Scotty feels any guilt, it was his failure to stop Madeleine from her death. Despite his growing passion for Madeleine and their kisses, Scotty restrained himself from going further. He held his libido in check. But when Madeleine races up the tower, Scotty is unable to overcome his fear to run after her. His fear proved stronger than his love, and there lies his guilt. (It's like Winston Smith caved to fear over love in 1984 when he freaked out over the rats. And Peter denied Jesus three times out of fear. Fear is that powerful. It's like white men will do nothing to help a white woman being robbed or attacked by black thugs in a metro train or bus because their Fear of the Stronger Negro paralyzes them.) Scotty's love for Madeleine was the kind whereby a man would be willing to give up his own life to save the woman, but when push came to shove, his body was overcome with fear, indeed irrational fear of something harmless. (Thus, it was something stranger than mere cowardice, which is at least rational. Peter was not irrational in fearing the mob that wanted to tear followers of Jesus from limb to limb. And Winston Smith was not irrational to fear the hungry rats eager to gnaw at his face. In contrast, Scotty couldn't save the Great Love of His Life because of his irrational fear of the harmless.) He felt paralyzed, indeed far worse than Peter O’Toole in LORD JIM. Also, there is something especially embarrassing about phobias. They can incapacitate the biggest man before something that doesn’t even frighten a child. Take a phobia over mice. Most children have no problem looking at mice, but even a big strong man with such phobia will shriek and panic like a little girl. A harmless garter snake may do nothing to an old lady, but a man with phobia for snakes, no matter how big and strong he is, will scream or faint like the Cowardly Lion of THE WIZARD OF OZ. Thus, what Scotty feels is not merely guilt. It’s shame. Not only did he fail to prevent Madeleine from her apparent suicide but the reason was he was afraid of heights. The damsel in distress could run up those flight of stairs in a breeze, but a big tall San Francisco detective like him was frozen in abject fear as he barely inched up the stairs step by step. Imagine Dirty Harry who is tough enough to blow away a bunch of armed Negro robbers and international terrorists but shrieks like a girl and freaks out upon seeing a spider due to arachnophobia. Phobias are like passions. They follow their own associative logic that can’t be resolved rationally. A person suffering from phobia rationally knows he is afraid of something harmless or innocuous, but he still can’t overcome his irrational panic. But then, obsessive love has a similar kind of logic. Even as Scotty is a modern rational person who knows about human psychology and the basic bio-chemistry of attraction, his feelings for Madeleine go way beyond the rational and gain total power over him. Scotty is bigger and stronger than Midge, and he would have a physical advantage over her under most circumstances, but he turns into a little child in her arms when he is stricken with a bit of height.
Kevin Michael Grace says Scotty sets a goal for himself to cure his acrophobia little by little and eventually does(and at a ‘terrible cost’). I don’t see it this way. Initially, he appears to entertain the notion of how he could be cured incrementally. He tries this at Midge’s place with the step-ladder, but he fails miserably, and throughout the rest of the movie, we don’t see him bothering to cure himself of the condition. The extent of the height he can tolerate is the ups and downs of the streets of San Francisco. One suspects he would rather not cross the San Francisco bridge. If anything, we only see him below it as he saves Madeleine. However, the diving into the water is a kind of conquering of height but unawares to Scotty. For most of the movie, Scotty is too hung up on Madeleine to think about his acrophobia. He develops a kind of reality-phobia as the real world reminds him that Madeleine is gone forever. He wants to remain in his ghostly dream world. Even though he’s finally released from the clinic/ward, his condition hasn’t really changed. Also, the return to the tower at the end had little to do with curing acrophobia. It was about exposing the truth and forcing Judy-Madeleine into confession. If Scotty is cured, it is almost by accident. Indeed, he is surprised himself that his acrophobia is gone.

7. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=30m23s Luke Ford asks why Judy-Madeleine fell to her death at the end. Kevin Michael Grace says she mistook the nun for the Evil Husband, Gavin Elster. I don’t know about this. Her fright suggests she saw a ghost. Perhaps, in that charged moment, she thought she saw the ghost of Madeleine. VERTIGO is and isn’t a ghost story. There is a rational explanation for everything that happens in the story, but to the extent that human psyches often operate mythically based on obsessions, hopes, and fears, we do lead lives haunted by subjective forces of the mind. So, objectively speaking, it was a nun, but in the fever-dream mind of Judy who’d been through so much, the figure could have appeared a ghost. And in that sense, VERTIGO is a ghost story. Science of psychology promised a more clear and objective understanding of reality, but theories of the subconscious opened up a Pandora’s Box of phantoms and spirits. So, even though Scotty exposed the truth, the myth lived on. The myth of Madeleine being beckoned by Carlotta’s ghost was followed up by the myth of Judy being beckoned by Madeleine’s ghost. And in a way, Judy was herself a ghost. The person she role-played as Madeleine was killed. It began as a hire-for-money, but she really merged with the identity of Madeleine when it worked its magic on Scotty and he fell in love with her. No man had ever fallen in love like that with her-as-Judy. But a handsome man fell deeply in love with her-as-Madeleine. So, in a way, the mask became the face. And when real Madeleine was killed, a part of Judy died with her too. She became a walking dead, and this is why, a part of her wants to be 'resurrected' by Scotty back into Madeleine while another part of her resists this because she wants to be loved as what she really is, Judy Nobody from some small town. Ironically, the resurrection is also a kind of 'murder' because Judy must be buried alive under the ghostly reawakening of Madeleine.

8. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=31m12s Kevin Michael Grace says REAR WINDOW, VERTIGO, and MARNIE have in common the situation of a man trying to transform a woman to his ideal or vision, but this seems a stretch. In REAR WINDOW, Grace Kelly’s character may be nudged in that direction(mostly by her own volition though), but there is nothing obsessive about Stewart’s feelings for her. Indeed, unlike the characters of VERTIGO and MARNIE, Stewart in REAR WINDOW isn’t obsessed with anyone. His only obsession seems to be voyeurism and adventure. He’s a thrill-seeker than a romantic. As much as he feels affection for Grace Kelly’s character, he tries to push her away because domestication means he will have less chance to travel and be free. It’s like George Bailey wanted to see the world and build things before Mary snagged him to stay and be husband-father in Bedford Falls. In a way, the neighbor across the yard is like a dark version of what Stewart's character fears turning into. The man is trapped in a loveless marriage. His wife is an invalid, and he must take care of her, and that means hardly any freedom for himself. So, in a way, the murderer and Stewart’s character have one thing in common: The want of freedom and fear of woman as chain-and-ball around the man's ankle. If the husband has no freedom because he’s stuck in a loveless marriage, Stewart’s character has no freedom ironically because of his injury from excessive freedom & risk-taking. Both want to break free as soon as possible.
If Stewart’s characters in REAR WINDOW and VERTIGO have one thing in common, it is the element of shame in being so incapacitated. In REAR WINDOW, girly Grace Kelly can freely move about while Stewart is always stuck in his apartment because of his injury. (Likewise, Oliver Stone's 9/11 is mostly about heroes who aren't able to do anything and must be saved by others. They are more like Ron Kovic than Rambo.) In VERTIGO, Madeleine and Midge are 'manlier' than Scotty when it comes to handling height. The moment when Stewart feels the most shame in REAR WINDOW is when he feels utterly helpless to save Grace Kelly when she’s attacked by the murderer-husband. But it’s not just the broken leg. He doesn’t even shout across the yard to stop the attack even though Grace Kelly is screaming 'Jeff' over and over. He just squirms with fear and hopes the cops would arrive sooner. It’s as if he was so afraid of giving himself away to the murderer-husband that he reacts like a turtle withdrawing into its own shell.

Indeed, there’s something a bit phony about the guy because, for all his love of adventure, he is a viewer than a participant. After all, he is a photographer. He may wander into danger zones, but he is first and foremost the eye than hands and feet who gets involved in the action. Indeed, his injury resulted from the far more danger-filled actions of OTHERS at the center of the maelstrom. It’s like a photographer at a boxing match getting hurt from a fighter being knocked out of the ring. His danger is nothing like the danger faced by boxers inside the ring who get punched a hundred times.
As for MARNIE, I don’t think the main problem was Tippi Hedren. Besides, Kim Novak wasn’t much of an actress in most of her roles either, and VERTIGO was an exception in her career, as BLADE RUNNER was for Sean Young. And Grace Kelly was extremely narrow in range, really just a pretty face. Problem with MARNIE is it’s both too crazy and too neat. The premise is outlandish, and the resolution is overly sentimental and moralistic. Even after the facts are revealed by means of reason in VERTIGO and PSYCHO, an element of dark mystery remains. We feel that no amount of explanation can really explain the what and why, just like no single piece of the puzzle could explain Charles Foster Kane. But MARNIE ends on a note of Problem Solved, and that’s that. And it’s the silliest kind of Freudian hokum about repressed childhood memory. The clinical psychology of MARNIE, as with SPELLBOUND, is too simple-minded. It turns out Marnie’s sexual neurosis and criminality were rooted in an incident in childhood. Once that was cleared up, she can walk into the sunlight and lead a normal life. Another problem is Sean Connery’s character is presented too straight-and-narrow when he is as perverse and crazy as Marine in his own way. He is a contradiction of being both drawn to a wild woman and wanting to cure & domesticate her. He is too alpha, whereas what makes Stewart's characters more interesting(in Anthony Mann Westerns too) is the combination of alpha daring and beta vulnerability. I suppose Sean Connery's attitude is very English(though the movie is set in America. Funny that Hitchcock was an Englishman who settled in America whereas Kubrick was an American who settled in England). The white hunter who is drawn to adventure and the wild but collects specimens and trophies for zoos and museums. That said, there is a fascinating chemistry between Hedren and Connery in MARNIE, and there are many charged moments that make for greatness. And maybe the trailer for MARNIE is the funniest thing Hitchcock ever did.


9. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=39m28s Kevin Michael Grace offers several explanations of the scene at the McKittrick Hotel where Scotty observes who appears to be Madeleine in one of the windows. Kevin Michael Grace suggests this might be just a ‘plot hole’. Or maybe the Hotel Proprietor is in on the plot. Whatever the case, it could be Hitchcock was channeling a trick used by Henri-Louis Clouzot in LES DIABOLIQUES. The conspirators are playing mind-tricks on Scotty to further subvert his sense of reality. Hitchcock greatly admired LES DIABOLIQUES, and incidentally, VERTIGO was based on a French mystery novel, and some of the Gallic sensibility does come across.


10. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=45m Luke Ford reads from Roger Ebert’s essay that touches on the ‘moral paradox’ of VERTIGO. Of course, the biggest moral paradox is the Evil Husband Gavin Elster plays god, the creator. He taketh away, but he also gaveth. Without his artful con, Scotty never would have experienced the great love of his life. He never would have realized that there was a mytho-romantic side to him, a man of poetry than mere prosaic details of detective work. (It's like something about Julie Christie's character brings out the poet in the hard-nosed businessman in MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER. A man who never did anything except for money all his life puts his life on the line to prove his manhood to fulfill a romantic fantasy.)

And if Judy had never met Gavin, she would have been just some cheap floozy all her life. It was the con that transformed her into a tragic goddess. So, even though the Evil Husband Gavin Elster took everything from James Stewart, including his sanity, Scotty never felt more alive than when swirling in a dream world with Madeleine. And even though Madeleine’s death shattered his heart and mind, he’d never known or imagined such tragic beauty could exist or what it felt like. Gavin Elster, cynical murderer-bastard that he is, was the matchmaker in hell who made Scotty and Judy share a beautiful love as a glimpse of heaven. He was like a sinister version of Clarence in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE who messes with Bailey’s mind big time.

11. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=46m41s Kevin Michael Grace recounts the scene in which Midge’s parody-painting of Carlotta Valdez deeply upsets Scotty. He explains the moment as indicative of the madness of obsessive love, one of the most tell-tale signs being the loss of humor. According to Kevin Michael Grace, Midge was just being a good sport and funny girl, but Scotty, going a bit mad over Madeleine, simply couldn’t appreciate the joke. Kevin Michael Grace also says Scotty’s glum reaction is not unlike the mentality of PC Leftists who have lost all sense of humor in their crazed commitment to certain agendas and idols.
But I’m not so sure. Even though Midge presents the painting as a joke, what were her real motives? Wasn’t she trying to hide her jealousy with humor? Indeed, it’s odd that for such an independent and modern woman, she was stalking Scotty like Scotty was stalking Madeleine. So, despite her conceit of being a liberated woman, she did feel a bond with Scotty, and she felt jealous when she suspected he might be seriously besotted with someone else. Midge is afraid to face up to this old-fashioned ‘classic’ side of womanhood, and she resorts to cheap irony to share laughter with Scotty. But it’s not so much a joke for him as a joke on him. Also, she is mocking him and trying to return him to the fold as a fellow ironist and cynic, as if Scotty isn’t capable of any emotions beyond friendship and companionship. Because her relation with Scotty was premised on shared Modern Sensibility, she tries to draw him back to the game that keeps them as bosom-buddies. But Scotty has gone past that. For the first time in his life, he’s found real passion, and it means everything to him. It’s like the realization of the Sam Robards character in FANDANGO. He pretends he’s having fun and the time of his life partying and riding around with his friends when, in truth, what mattered most to him was marrying the girl he dearly loves. And Kevin Costner’s character is like Scotty and Midge rolled into one. The fact is he madly loved her too, but they fell apart. But he still loves her and is upset that his friend is about to marry her. So, when he discovers the marriage has been called off, he tries to convince himself and his friend that it’s all for the best, and that they should all go on some wild trip. But in fact, the friend realizes he made a huge mistake, and Kevin Costner understands too, which is why he hustles a small town community into putting on the wedding for his friend and the woman he still loves.

Likewise, there is another side of Midge that she hides from Scotty and even to herself. Despite her enjoyment of freedom and career, there is a side of her that is lonely and jealous. Even if Scotty and she didn’t get married, the understanding between them was that both were too hip for old-fashioned relationships. So, they’d be best-friends-forever. But then, Scotty really does fall in deep love with another. As much as Scotty and Midge savored each other’s company, they only wet their feet at most. With Madeleine, Scotty took the plunge. And his love for Madeleine is like Catholic Iconography. The non-believers just can’t understand. Someone like Jim Goad can’t understand why the Church and its rituals hold sacred meaning to Kevin Michael Grace. For Goad, the Church is something to be mocked and joked about. From his utterly rationalist point of view, this makes good sense as religion just seems like hocus pocus superstition. But for those who felt the grace of God and are enchanted by beauty of religious iconography and rituals, it’s no joking matter. In a way, PC people are both humorless and humor-excessive. They are utterly humorless about what is sacred to them, like Holy Homo and MLK as Negro god. But they feel nothing but laughing mockery for whatever or whomever they deem to be false, wicked, or evil. So, they are the ones who are likely to laugh and cheer upon watching certain monuments torn down or smashed. It’s like Spanish anarchists were full of laughter when they went about smashing Churches and burning spiritual material.

In a way, Midge was sharing a joke, but it was also an act of desecration. Of course, she didn’t know the full implication of what she was doing, especially as she had this fixed image of Scotty as a fellow ironist and cynic. She was trying to keep him framed in the role suitable for companionship with her. In a sense, she was trying to take possession of Scotty just like Gavin Elster was. She wagered on Scotty the ironist, whereas Gavin wagered on Scotty the latent romantic. And it turns out Gavin was closer to the truth. In some ways, he understood Scotty(or perhaps any man) better than Scotty understood himself. For most of his life, Scotty would have scoffed at the notion of him being a romantic and sincerely too. After all, his chosen profession was detective work, a field that makes people cynical about humanity’s endless depravities and deceptions. When Scotty meets Gavin, he seems utterly jaded, and upon hearing the ghostly tale of Carlotta, he’s about to burst into laughter. It’s like a man who believes he can’t be hypnotized who is hypnotized and doesn’t know he’s under hypnosis. All faith is like a kind of hypnosis, which is why non-religious people can't really understand religious people or any group under some kind of deep devotion to something. But the devotion could be to anything, like idols of pop culture, as with Beatlemania or Grateful Dead Phenom. For the uninitiated, it all seems like a delusion or mania. And yet, those who note this delusion in others may themselves be under their own delusions. It's like a religious person sees the ludicrousness of other religions but not of his own that seems holy and sacred. So, Midge doesn't quite understand the extent of her desecration of what has become iconographic to Scotty. But on a sly level, she was willfully mocking something dear to him out of jealousy she was too proud to admit to.

Finally, Midge’s reaction to Scotty’s disapproval and retreat from her apartment betrays her true feelings about Scotty and the whole situation. She seems very upset that Scotty took umbrage at her antic. If she’s really a light-hearted joker, she would have been unscathed from the situation, but she is visibly upset. She is ashamed that Scotty saw through her. Despite the cover of humor, she knows, Scotty knows, and we know that she was acting out of jealousy and was striking out at the object of Scotty’s devotion. Her joke was a pretense of not caring when, in fact, she cares very much. She is jealous of the fact that Scotty has feelings for another that goes deeper than anything that existed between them. At the end of CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, Prince Hal gains authority, responsibility, and meaning that rises above the funny business he used to enjoy with Falstaff. It’s about putting away childish things. Same with Becket who rises above serving as plaything for his friend the king. Friendship jealously guards against rival attachments to other people or institutions.

The tragedy in Scotty’s case, of course, is that his discovery of great love turned out to be the child-play of an evil son-of-a-bitch.
Kevin Michael Grace says that Scotty is the sort of man who was looking for The One, the one special kind of woman. But I don’t think so. Scotty wasn’t looking for anyone for most of his life. He seems to be the kind of guy who relished being free and independent. His life seems to have revolved around work and meeting up with friends and companions. He wasn’t bound to anything. Such a life could be lonely, but it was without duties and obligations. He could live the life of a true individualist. Scotty wasn’t searching for The One. It was thrust upon him, and he was mesmerized by a kind of beauty he’d never encountered before and was overwhelmed by emotions within him that he’d never imagined could arise.

12. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=56m30s Luke Ford says Scotty is the kind of man who chases after fantasies because he can’t deal with reality. He surmises that if Scotty hadn’t come upon Madeleine, he would have found someone/something else to be obsessed about. But this is wrong. There’s no indication that Scotty has been a habitual fantasist or an obsessive personality all his life. In a way, Gavin Elster chose him because he’s a ‘virgin’ when it comes to romantic obsessions. Ironically, Scotty’s sense of irony and cynicism is what makes him so ‘innocently’ vulnerable and partial to the trick. It’s like Jack Nicholson’s cocksure cynicism that blinds him to the utter depravity of power in L.A. in CHINATOWN. He’s so sure he knows everything that he fails to see there's even more to 'everything'.
It's as if Gavin Elster sensed that Scotty, being so sure of his skepticism honed on the job as detective, would be like a deer-in-the-headlight when Real Romanticism came rushing right at him. Someone who’d been through previous obsessions might be more self-aware when he falls into another obsession. In contrast, Scotty has no past references to draw from when he falls for Madeleine. He’d never known such emotions before. He’s an amateur, a green, in this field. Luke Ford is wrong to project himself onto Scotty. Ford seems quite self-aware precisely because he’s been through certain bouts of obsession with women and other things. So, even if he were to fall into another one, he’d have a good sense of what is happening to him yet again. He'd be partially immune to the obsessive bug. In contrast, Scotty finds himself in unfamiliar territory.
Scotty is not a serial fantasist. He’s been a factualist all his life, a man of law and law-enforcement, a man who has surely pored over countless stories of crimes, betrayals, deceptions, and etc. He is a veteran in the domain of facts. What he knows nothing about is the realm of myth and fantasy. And because he’s a novice in that field, Elster is able to draw him in slowly and surely. It sort of reminds me of why Stephen Glass was able to fool so many people at The New Republic. The magazine staff was pretty good with checking factual stories. What Glass did was sell outlandish fairy-tales, something for which the editorial staff was unfamiliar in dealing with.

Luke Ford also takes a self-help approach to Scotty’s dilemma, as if the character is a real-life person who could have avoided trouble had he been more self-aware, possibly with the aid of religion and advice columns. But really, purpose of VERTIGO is to explore and poeticize the mythology of love than to offer good advice. If Scotty had been more sensible, there would be no movie.

13. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=1h1m19s Kevin Michael Grace compares Luke Ford to the psychiatrist at the end of PSYCHO who sums up in neat clinical terms what’s really driving the madness behind Norman Bates. Kevin Michael Grace says Hitchcock was winking at the audience when trotting out such explanations because the mystery of evil could never be explained with a pat theory or two. That is true, but it’s also true that Hitchcock was often overly partial to certain psychological theories. There isn’t much winking in SPELLBOUND and MARNIE. Hitchcock really seems to endorse rather crackpot Freudian theories about repressed childhood memories. The resolutions are meant to be neat and final. In SPELLBOUND, it was the repressed memory of Gregory Peck’s character having accidentally killed his younger brother in childhood. In MARNIE, the anti-heroine’s troubles were rooted in the repressed childhood memory of having killed a man who attacked her mother who, it turns out, was a hooker. So, there was the richer and darker Hitchcock who suggested at the mystery of evil, and there was the amateur-psychologist Hitchcock who resolved conflicts with some fashionable theory about the subconscious. Hitchcock was both a nihilist and a moralist. There was an air of the English bourgeoisie about him all his life. He liked form and order, minutely detailing the production from A to Z before the shooting began. Also, there’s a positivist sense in many of his movies that invaluable methods can be drawn from science and medicine to aid in the solving of crime and madness. His films are on the side of civilization, fearful of the natural forces as in THE BIRDS. And yet, another side of Hitchcock felt civilization was a veneer, a veiled masquerade over true human nature that was animal. Myth and Art were spheres where civilization and animal nature could 'safely' create friction to produce the fever-dream. Civilization is like a cage, and we are all like caged birds. We need the cage, but it holds us back from so much truth about us. And yet, without the cage, we revert to animal drives and become beastly like crazy-ass Negroes. So, how do we maintain Order but also draw inspiration from the more vital and virile side of our nature? Through the power of Myths and Art.

The strange thing about VERTIGO is Scotty is both a guardian and trespasser. He takes on the job of guarding Madeleine from madness, chaos, and suicide. His role is to uncover the truth and restore Madeleine to the light. And yet, in his immersion in the passion, his own psyche is thrown into turmoil. Even as he tries desperately to make Madeleine come to the light, he moves into the darkness. This aspect of VERTIGO surely influenced the French romance THE APARTMENT, remade into WICKER PARK. In M. Night Shyamalan's SPLIT, the doctor(Betty Buckley) is also of a dual nature. On the one hand, she wants to cure the patient and draw him into the light, but on the other hand, she is so fascinated with her patient's condition that she comes to see him and others of his kind as near demigods deserving of special admiration. Unknowingly, she is drawn into the darkness.


Anyway, Hitchcock was winking and not winking in many of his movies. A part of him was rolling his eyes at pat theories of events, but there was another side of Hitchcock that was very much like a schoolmarm and instructor. In a way, Hitchcock’s movies draw their power from the tension among the moralism, modernism, and madness. Madness upon madness isn’t very interesting. It’s like black paint on black canvas. It’s the nihilist thread that weaves through the bourgeois moralist or rationalist fabric that gives Hitchcock’s movies the sense of the Serpent slithering in the Garden of Eden. This is why DePalma's movies, for all their debt to Hitchcock, don't really feel Hitchcockian. Hitchcock, like Luis Bunuel, needed the bourgeois world as contra-canvas for his dark fantasies. Indeed, the fantasies were dark precisely because because they were set against tradition, community, and/or rationality(science & medicine). Likewise, Bunuel's bad boy antics were effective only as long as there was the bourgeoisie to mock. The difference was, all said and done, Hitchcock sided with the bourgeoisie whereas Bunuel sided with the anarchy. Despite stylistic similarities, DePalma’s world is too sordid and fallen(indeed shamelessly so) to create the kind of tension between Order and Chaos that is so integral to the Dark Bourgeois gamesmanship of Hitchcock. Also, it’s difficult to sustain romanticism in a pornographic world.

14. https://youtu.be/met1c7anQ3E?t=1h5m6s Kevin Michael Grace says the movie ends with Scotty’s triumph albeit at a tremendous cost. By ‘triumph’, Kevin Michael Grace means Scotty’s solving of the mystery and his cure from acrophobia. But perhaps, ‘triumph’ is too strong a word. Indeed, one gets the sense that maybe Scotty should have ignored the necklace and pretended to carry on as usual. After all, his greatest triumph was the resurrection of Madeleine. By revisiting the tower and making Judy-Madeleine spill the beans, he lost what he’d created. But of course, once he found out about the necklace, he just couldn’t let it go. He had to find out, just like Noodles in ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA had to come face to face with the truth even at the loss of the myth that had lent tragic meaning to his life all these years. Granted, there is both an emotional push and pull — like the camera-work employed to approximate the sensation of vertigo — as Scotty gets closer to the truth. On the one hand, he wants to hear the truth from Judy’s lips. He wants her to vomit out every last bit. Yet, at the same time, he dreads hearing every word because it’s so horrible. He wants to hear, he doesn’t want to hear. He compels her to confess but is triggered into fury by every utterance. It’s like having a bullet or arrow removed from one’s wound. One wants it out but agonizes over the unbearable pain. But finally, all the truth is 'birthed' like a decayed stillborn baby, and Scotty processes all of it. He is finally cleared of the inner illusions that fueled his acrophobia. Still, the power of the myth is such that, even after the poison has been sucked out of him and Judy, he(and she) still can’t let it go. Even though the necklace was the key to solving the puzzle, he is touched by the fact that she was so sentimental about it. And they embrace once again, and maybe that might have been a kind of happy ending. Even after the myth has been shattered, they realize they found real love in each other, and so the myth can evolve into something new. But then Judy falls to her death, and Scotty has some serious explaining to do. He just barely got away with his Chappaquidick Moment the first time Madeleine died. The board none-too-surely accepted his version of events and declared him not responsible for the death. But how will he explain the second death, especially as the woman, Judy, has been made to look just like Madeleine? He has regained sense and sanity, but if he tells the truth of what happened and why he turned Judy into Madeleine II, the world will think him mad.

Sunday, July 29, 2018

Jews have often said "My Jewish Relatives Died in the Holocaust" — We must ask, "What Else Did Your Jewish Relatives Do?" — Let’s Consider the Historical Record

Margaret Hodge, the Vile Vicious Jewess: "My relatives were murdered in the gas chamber’: Jewish Labour MP defends calling Corbyn a ‘f***ing anti-Semite" 

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/07/28/labours-gas-chamber-blues-pink-berets-vs-fing-anti-semites/

The above is a very instructive article about the nature of Jewish Power, Duplicity, and Mendacity in the UK, but the article could apply to just about any nation in which Ashkenazi Jews have gained prominence. As a more self-aware Jew Yossi Sarid has said, “In these very moments, the protocols are being rewritten. Rich Jews are writing them in their own handwriting. They, in their wealth, are confirming with their own signatures what anti-Semites used to slander them with in days gone by: We, the elders of Zion, pull the strings of Congress, and the congressmen are nothing but marionettes who do our will. If they don’t understand our words, they’ll understand our threats. And if in the past, we ran the show from behind the scenes, now we’re doing it openly, from center stage. And if you forget our donations, the wellspring will run dry.” For much of my life, I thought ‘antisemitism’ was mostly a canard, and to be sure, there have been many anti-Jewish cranks and fantasists over the years. But upon observing Jewish Power in the here-and-now all around the world, I’ve been led to conclude that, all said and done, the ‘anti-Semites’ tended to be more right than wrong. They understood the character of Jewish Psychology and Culture and why Jews act the way they do. As these ethnic patterns have re-emerged over and over regardless of ideology — Jewish Leftists or Jewish Rights are equally subversive of the essential interests of non-Jewish populations — , critics and enemies of Jewish Power through the ages were more about facts than fantasy. And in a way, precisely because Jews have gained dominance in the US, the most powerful nation on Earth, and can’t restrain their chutzpah with too-much-money-and-power, more and more people everyday are waking up to the toxic impacts of Jewish arrogance, greed, venality, hatred, contempt, and supremacism. (That is precisely why Jews now HATE FREE SPEECH. Any honest discussion in an open forum will expose the ugly and pathological nature of Current Jewish Power. This is why Jews rig all search engines and platforms to favor Jew-concocted narratives. This is why Jews dumb-down and infantilize even elite culture because a thinking people who ask hard questions will come to see Jewish Power for what it is. Better for Jewish Power to turn Elites into Homo-Worshipers who stick with Jewish Power because it is seen as most homo-friendly.) It seems all the more perverse and weird because these Judeo-Nazis still(albeit increasingly comically) invoke the Shoah to cover up for their utter vileness. It’s like Madeleine Albright, the butcher of Iraq, giving us sermons about the dangers of ‘fascism’ taking over the US. These Jews got some nerves.


Anyway, one oft-repeated shtick pulled by Jews is to remind people that their RELATIVES died in the Shoah or were ‘Holocaust Survivors’, a term that has become nearly meaningless as it could apply to just about any Jew who lived in areas under German control during the war. When most people hear ‘Holocaust Survivor’, they think of people like in SCHINDLER’S LIST, men, women, and children who managed to make it out alive of Nazi Concentration Camps. But the term is so broadly defined that it could mean even Jews who lived with relative comfort in areas of German Occupation. While we can acknowledge that all Jews under German Occupation lived under severe duress and anxiety, it’s ridiculous to label as ‘Holocaust Survivor’ someone who was not even in the notorious Labor or Death Camps devised by the Nazis. In some nations, where the hunt for Jews was so extensive, such as in Poland and Hungary, one could argue that the entire Jewish population there were Holocaust Survivors. But the term becomes a stretch in nations where the great majority of Jews not only survived, not least because the local population resisted collaboration with the Germans. Even in Occupied France where Collaboration was commonplace, the fact is 75% of French Jews managed to survive the war.

Anyway, when Jews say "My relatives survived or died in the Holocaust", it gives a very skewed view of history. It implicitly surveys the world where Jews have been nothing but innocent victims of malevolent forces. It ignores context and other narratives. It’s like Japanese saying "My relatives survived Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Tokyo firebombing" while totally ignoring what their OTHER relatives may have done in China, Indonesia, and against the US naval fleet in Pearl Harbor. While many ‘innocent’ or ‘civilian’ Japanese were cruelly killed in WWII at the hands of the US Air Force, there was ANOTHER side to Japan’s role in the war. Japan was also an imperialist aggressor that visited unimaginable horrors upon China, Philippines, Indonesia, and etc. Also, Japan attacked the US first. So, while a Japanese wouldn’t be wrong to say that he or she knows relatives who were cruelly killed in the war, it’s also probably true that he or she has relatives who took part in the horrific Japanese Imperialist aggressions against other nations. He or she has relatives who were victims but also those who were villains(and in some cases, people can be villains and victims at the same time; surely Japanese colonists who were attacked by Chinese patriots were both villains[as imperialist migrants] and victims[of local acts of terror]).

While it may well be true that many Jews can claim to know relatives who were killed in the Holocaust or barely survived it, it’s no less true that many Jews have relatives who took part in some of the great crimes of the 20th century. When Jews say, "My relatives died in the Holocaust", we need to ask them, "What did your relatives do in Soviet Union? How many Christian Slavs did they kill? How many Christian Churches did they smash?" It’s now largely agreed that in the first two decades of Soviet Rule, close to 10 million people perished. Before Nazi Germany edged out the Soviet Union in industrial slaughter, the USSR was the international kingpin when it came to mass mayhem and destruction. And Jewish Bolsheviks played a huge role in the use of terror, slavery, and execution to bring about this so-called Workers’ Paradise. Many Jews took part in this State ruled by Fear and Terror. Many Jews were directly involved in the running of this state at the highest levels. But there were also many Jews in the West who indirectly aided the Soviet project, totally oblivious and indifferent to the death and destruction caused by Soviet Jews on the Slavic and other populations. Not only did millions die of starvation in Ukraine, but it’s estimated that a quarter of the population perished in Kazakhstan. And even for ones who didn’t die, there was the culture of tyranny and conformism, of total censorship and obedience, perhaps most powerfully satirized by George Orwell in 1984. If Soviet Jews in the USSR were controlling the media to spread propaganda to justify the Terror, Western Jews in the media did their best to deny that the Terror was even taking place. When millions of Slavic peasants were dying in the Great Famine, the great majority of Jews in the USSR and the West felt NOTHING. No pity, no heartache, no remorse. Indeed, Jews began to notice something wrong only with the Great Purge that targeted Soviet intellectuals and commissars. The Great Famine that killed millions had been about dirty goy peasants, so good riddance to them, thought the Jews. But the Great Purge targeted the class in which Jews were prominent. Even though the Great Purge, in killing around 450,000, was far less deadly than the Great Famine, it was the first time Jews began to wonder about the wisdom of the Soviet system. (But then, it’s always "Is it good for the Jews?" when it comes to Jewish ‘ethics’. We saw the same pattern in the US. For the longest time, Americans were led to believe that the Red Scare was the worst violation of civil liberties in the US when, in fact, it only led to the blacklisting of some Hollywood writers and folk singers for a few yrs. In contrast, the ‘internment’ of Japanese-in-America led to dispossession and relocation of over 100,000 people. So, why did the Jew-run media and academia care more about the victims of the Red Scare? It affected areas in which Jews were prominent.) As it turned out, the Great Purge didn’t end Jewish Power in the USSR. While Stalin removed most Jews from the highest echelons of power, many Jews(way disproportionate to their overall population) remained in the Soviet apparatus and continued to serve Stalin in his use of terror and mass executions to deal with ‘class enemies’.

At any rate, we need to stop playing the Jewish Game. When Jews bitch and whine ever so predictably, "My relatives blah blah blah...", we need to counter with the question, "What did your relatives do as commissars in the Soviet Union? What did your relatives do as Zionist Imperialists who wiped Palestine off the map?" And don’t let Jews bait you about ‘white racism’. Jews played a huge role in the Atlantic Slave Trade. And Jewish merchants sold guns to whites to kill Indians with on the Western frontier. So, if whites are guilty of American Slavery and American Genocide, so are the Jews. Also, so much of Western Imperialism was funded by Jewish bankers. And wherever whites conquered, Jews followed and profited. When the British Empire made inroads into China, the Jews were there to peddle opium to the Chinese. And in recent times, you bet that many relatives of Jews were involved in promoting Wars for Israel via the academia, media, Deep State, and finance. If you know a Jew, he will likely have Jewish relatives who took part in the Nakba pogroms, the Zionist occupation of West Bank, Neocon Wars for Israel(that killed close to a million people and reduced millions more to ‘refugee’ status), Jewish Rape of Russia in the 1990s that destroyed millions of lives, global White Slavery(in which Jews cajole mostly poor Slavic women into becoming sex slaves), Jewish control of Porn(where mostly white women are turned into ‘cumbuckets’ and sex meat for Negro men), and Cuck-castration of white men that has gelded white males into a bunch of wussy-pussified ‘white boys’ who suck up to Negroes who beat them up and hump their women. So, whenever some smarmy Jew bleats about "my relative blah blah Holocaust blah blah", you ask him about his OTHER relatives and what role they played in Soviet terror, Rape of Russia, Nakba pogroms, Opium trade, Slave trade, funding of imperialism, Wall Street mass theft, Las Vegas robbery, Opioid epidemic, pornification of society, cuck-castration of whites into wussy-boys who don’t even have the balls to stand up for their own people, land, and culture. According to Jews, whites own nothing that is their own. Everything white exists to serve Jews. So, if there is a white nation, the white people have no right to think, "We are white, this is our nation, this is our culture, and it belongs to us." No, they must think, "We whites have no culture and no identity. We exist to make Jews happy and must do anything to facilitate this... or else, we are Nazis or ‘anti-Semites’. And since we exist to serve the Other, the Jews, we must also put All the Others before our own interest. So, the UK is no longer the land of Britons, the real White Britons but must prioritize itself as a welcome mat for endless migration-invasions of Africans, Muslims, and Asians. Accordingly, white Britons exist only to make the rest of the world happy by welcoming them to take over white lands, white institutions, and even white women so that Negro men can colonize white wombs to create mulattos who identify as ‘black’ and accuse white people of ‘racism’. Yes, this is what the Relatives of Jews are up to.

So, next time you meet a Jew who whines about how his or her ‘relatives died in the Holocaust’, you ask him or her about what his or her OTHER relatives have done to the world. Here’s a sample of what the OTHER Jewish relatives have done:

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html

Of course, as Jewish ethno-monopoly controls the internet, if you search for Jewish malfeasance, you mostly get search results that lead to Jewish-owned media outlets bitching about how it is ‘antisemitic’ to connect the dots between Jewish Power and Jewish abuses, such as the Financial Crisis.

https://www.google.com/search?q=jews+and+wall+street+finanical+crisis&rlz=1C1AOHY_enUS768US768&oq=jews+and+wall+street+finanical+crisis&aqs=chrome..69i57.14211j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Having turned ‘antisemitism’ into a taboo word, Jews can deflect responsibility for anything they do just by invoking the magic term. So, if a bunch of Jews beat up a Palestinian child to death and if you report what you saw, you can are denounced as an ‘anti-Semite’ for having mouthed an ‘antisemitic’ stereotype of Jews as exploitative oppressors. The way ‘antisemitism’ is employed, it means any observation or view that is critical of Jewish power and its abuses. According to this logic, Jews have always been pure as snow and blameless, and that means every negative aspersion about Jews all through the ages was wrong, wrong, and wrong, merely paranoia cooked up by ‘rabid and virulent’ looneys. So, if Jews were always right and ‘anti-Semites’ were always wrong, then it means that if YOU notice something bad about Jews in the here-and-now, YOU too are an ‘anti-Semite’ who is perpetuating the old ‘canard’ about blameless and pure-as-snow Jews. Of course, the Jew-run media are more than happy to prop up the Jewish Myth of Jewish Nobility even as Jewish elites collude behind the scenes to rake in everything for their own Tribe.
Even when Jews rob the entire world and cause havoc for all of mankind, the Jew-run media will tell us that Jews are saving the World. What a truly vile and wretched people.
Finally, Jews need to stop bitching about how OTHER nations didn't do enough to save Jews from the Shoah. Jews need to be more self-aware and ask themselves why (1) Germans came to hate Jews so much and (2) why other nations didn't care much about Jews.
The answer is obvious. Jews built up a reputation over the ages of being a vile, nasty, and subversive people. If Jews hadn't been such rapacious financial exploiters(on the capitalist side), such ruthless radicals(on the socialist side), and such degenerates(on the cultural front), there never would have been much in the way of 'antisemitism'. Just because Jews suffered the horrible Shoah doesn't cleanse Jews of their foulness, just like the horrific nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki doesn't expunge Japanese of their crimes in WWII. After the war, Japanese came to realize that they'd done terrible things but also came to be terribly victimized. There was some balance in Japan's remembrance of the war. But Jews remember 20th century only as 'We pure-as-snow Jews wronged by the world'. Jews think they have some divine right to mess up any part of the world, and if the local population rise up against Jews, OTHER nations must offer Jews refuge so that Jews can start the foul pattern of subversion all over again.
Even when the Soviet Experiment went badly for Jews in the end, Jews lacked the self-awareness to admit that THEIR project had failed them(and led to deaths of millions of Slavs and others). Instead, the Jew-run media spun it into SAVE SOVIET JEWS as if the Jews were always the main victims of Soviet Communism. Such lack of self-awareness. A hideous people. And yet, they rule the US and the world.

Friday, July 27, 2018

Commentary on "The Sartrean Existentialism of JFK's 'We Choose to Go to the Moon'" -- Threat Posed by the Black De-Facement of the White


http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-sartrean-existentialism-of-jfks-we-choose-to-go-to-the-moon/

"Whatever happened to existentialism."

The term ‘existentialist’ is hardly heard anymore but we hear A LOT about how such-and-such is an ‘existential’ threat. Russia is an ‘existential’ threat. Iran is an ‘existential’ threat. Nationalism is an ‘existential’ threat. But mass invasion of Africans into EU and mass invasion by world into US are not ‘existential’ threats... so the GLOB tells us.

The real existential threats were best understood by Pierre Boulle and Jean Raspail than by heavy-duty French philosophers who obsessed over abstractions or committed themselves to ultimately bloody radical agendas.

PLANET OF THE APES and BRIDGE ON RIVER KWAI were about Role-Reversals, with the Other on top and with white man as the slave. And THE CAMP OF SAINTS warned of Cuck-extinction(or Cuckstinction or Cuxtinction) of the West by invasion of the Other. Amusing that writers of popular fiction were closer to the truth than abstract theorists and radical intellectuals.

I wonder why Jean Raspail made the invaders a bunch of Hindu Dotkins. Blacks are far more threatening because they take over the Face of the nation EVEN WITH VERY FEW NUMBERS.
Every society is made up mostly of faceless people, and only a few people with faces. Take any sports spectacle. All those fans have no faces. They are just the mass of people cheering, part of the wave. Most in coaching and management have no faces. All those millions upon millions watching the game on TV have no faces. Even most athletes haven’t much in the way of faces. For example, in most football teams, many players are hardly known by name or face. Many are backup players. It is the few STARS who get all the attention, glory, and love. Michael Jordan got 90% of the attention during the heyday of the Chicago bulls. In boxing, 0.1% of the boxers, the champs, get 99% of the attention. As Jordan Peterson said in his book, few in certain fields get most while rest get crumbs. Communism tried to counter this, but it led to a few getting all the political power. The chosen few become the heroic, representative, and idolized FACE of society or nation. If lots of Hindus enter France, at the very least they won’t threaten the FACE of France. Frenchmen can beat Hindus in sports, and I don’t think Hindus would dominate pop music either. So, French men would remain as the Face of French heroism, manhood, aura, and pride... as Sports and Pop Music idolatry mainly define the representative and emblematic Face of a people. People like the notion of Idols and Champions. Most Ancient Greeks did not look like the idealized figures depicted in Hellenic sculptures, but those iconic images were prized as the preferred Image of the Hellenes. In the Golden Age of Hollywood, women across America(who were, on average, homely) looked to few Hollywood stars as the Idols. Most women were faceless and looked to the Idols & Celebrities to represent the Faces of America. This is why Harry marrying a mulatto is threatening to the Politics of Face of Britain. Royalty is more than a family. It is the Face of Britain. The Royal Face is worth a million common faceless faces. The fact that Jews put a face on a victim of Shoah made a huge difference. Anne Frank gave face to the tragedy, just like the appeal of Christianity was it added a Face to God. In contrast, the victims of the Ukrainian famine are faceless and nameless. They're just a boring statistic even if people know millions died.

In contrast to non-African non-whites who settle in the West, just a handful of blacks can upset the Native White Face because blacks are so much better at sports and sassier in music. Just a few blacks in Canada led to its top runners being black, its top boxers being black, and etc. So, even though Canada has a relatively small black population, blacks have become the FACE of Canadian manhood, heroism, pride, and etc. Same in the UK, France, Holland, etc. And the fastest runner in Japan is now some half-black guy. So, in a nation where blacks are tiny in number, a black guy has become the FACE of Japanese sports. (And Mongols have become the FACE of sumo. Japanese are becoming faceless in their own nation despite Japan being 97% Japanese. Again, most people are faceless, and the Face of a Nation is defined by few idolatrous fields such as sports and pop culture. When not ceding to blacks and Mongols as the New Face of Japan -- even Miss Japan was a black woman born of black guy humping a yellow woman -- , Japanese hide behind anime and manga depiction of Japanese as fantasy-whites.) The black threat to the National Face seems to be the one crucial thing Raspail overlooked by making Hindus the main invaders in his novel. (Do other races join the invasion? I haven’t read the novel.) While Too Many Hindus can surely cause problems, they won’t rob the French of the National FACE. In contrast, Blacks will do just that, indeed with just a small number. This is why black invasion is most dangerous. Black invasion isn’t just a matter of Demographics but an act of De-Facement of the Nation. (Imagine if whites are faster and tougher than blacks. Suppose only a few whites can upset the Face of a Black Nation. Suppose white 'migrants' enter an African nation where they become 5% of the population while blacks remain the 95%. Suppose whites come to dominate sports and black cheerleaders dance for white hero-idols while black cucks or blucks admire white guys as the representative symbol of manhood in a nation that is 95% black. They even believe tons of black women should put out to superior white guys. How pathetic would that be?) Just a few blacks can mean blacks taking over the areas that are most representative of the National Face, National Pride, and National Manhood: Sports and Celebrity mainly in pop music. With even just a few blacks, the new National Heroes become the black runner, black boxer, black footballer, black rapper, and etc. As idolized 'heroes', their Faces are revered by the faceless masses. The native masses no longer revere a hero/face of their own kind. They worship the black as the New Hero, the New Face. And that means blackness is prized, and this paralyzes the Will to say NO to more invasion by blacks since blackness has become a sacred icon of national glory. Consider France. After those blacks brought home the World Cup, can the admiring French say NO to more African invasion? The FACE of France is now black, while the masses of whites are just faceless cuckois fans who cheer for blacks. If Blackness is the New Face of France, then saying No to More African Invasion would be an Affront to the New Face of France... which is black. So, France can't say to Invasions such as this:
https://youtu.be/Z51KRJcnSfM?t=6m48s
https://youtu.be/B8E7BBrWFDU?t=1m44s
(It’s getting to the point where white athletes increasingly cannot compete in a globalized sports world where superior black muscle is key to victory. So, not only the US but EU is becoming Afro-athleto-colonized. As for black Africa, they can’t win much globally because there is little in the way of infrastructure and funding for athletes. Africa has lots of raw talent but hardly any system of coaching, training, and funding. So, much of the talent goes unharnessed. But in the West, there is the combination of white-made-and-sustained infrastructure, management, & funding AND profusion of superior black talent. So, whites work and pay to maintain a complex system of sports facilities, media, and finance to promote and celebrate black athletic talent as the New Face of Afro-Aryan Manhood. White ants work to maintain a system to hail and honor the high-jumping black grasshoppers. Faceless whites as workers and fans sustain a system to give the Official Face to black stars. But if blacks keep invading Europe that becomes Afro-Colonized territorially and sexually, for how long will Europe be able to maintain the infrastructure and systems necessary for modern sports facilities and complexes? If Europe becomes too much like Africa, it will end up with African-level infrastructures, the kind too often found in Detroit and Lagos. Without white work and management cucking out to black sports glory, blacks can’t achieve much in sports. For blacks to succeed in NFL, NBA, & European soccer, those elaborate business enterprises must be run by people other than blacks.)

In the ILIAD, most of the characters are faceless. Only a handful of characters are given prominent faces and personalities. Achilles, Hector, and etc. And of course, the gods. The rest of the soldiers are rabble(just like we don't know 99.99% of people who fought in WWII and mainly focus on a handful of Faced commanders like Patton, Rommel, MacArthur, Yamamoto, and etc. The Alt Right may be 'based', but it's the blacks who are 'faced'.) So, most people don’t count in the national imagination. When Greeks heard Homer tell his tale, they didn’t hear details of EVERY Greek involved in the battle. The narrative centered around a handful of key figures. Same in Arthurian legends. Only a few characters represent the hopes and dreams of all.  Even in the vast and sprawling WAR AND PEACE by Lev Tolstoy, only a few characters stand out. So, it really matters WHO is the face of heroism. To the Greeks, Achilles was one of their own, just like Hector was one of the Trojans. But blacks have a way of taking away the FACE from whites. Even a few blacks will lead to Athleto-Colonization-and-domination of a nation, and this will lead to cuck mentality of faceless white minions all slobbering over the Black Other as the New National Hero. Because blacks have become the New Face of manhood in the West, even historical white heroes like Lancelot and Achilles are being retro-fitted as black by BBC(which, in meme-o-sphere, has come to stand for big black cock) and other Western media. Colonization isn’t just about the numbers but about the idols. Black presence smashes white idols of manhood in white nations and replace them with black idols. Only blacks can do this to whites because only blacks can out-perform whites in athletic prowess, vocal volume, dance, and dong-booty-shaking. Indeed, the Black Face is winning not because black facial features per se are more appealing. Even today, most women prefer white face over the black face.  But black muscle beats white muscle, black dong is bigger than the white dong, and black voice is more powerful than the white voice. MLK cult is built around the voice. So, black advantages in those areas have become associated with the black face. A France that is 20% white and 80% Hindu could still have a White Face as National Idol as the French could out-do the Hindus in sports and music. (Bollywood music has only camp value.) But a France that is 5% black can smash the White Face as the National Face and replace it with the Black Face. As white men cannot compete with black men in raw manhood, whites must seek total separation from blacks in order to preserve white manhood(so essential to white survival as women mate with men with manhood) and to Re-Face the West with whiteness. Re-Face-ment must be a key element in Pan-European Revival. Afro-imperialism must be stopped. Afro-colonization and Afro-imperialism work according to the same logic as Western Imperialism of old. In the past, the West's rationale and justification for invading and colonizing all the world were simply that the West was superior in industrial output, organization, management, military might, and etc. West was more powerful, therefore it had the 'right' to conquer and rule over inferior non-white powers. Based on raw meritocracy of power, this made sense. Power over the Cower. But the non-white world resisted and said non-whites should rule themselves even if they were in inferior in industry, military, and knowledge. They could restore national pride only by gaining independence from Western Superiority. So, meritocracy wasn't everything. In order for each people to have pride, they must choose their own kind as rulers, icons, and idols over those of the Other even if it is more powerful and accomplished. This didn't mean that one couldn't admire and learn from the talents and achievements of the Other. Still, the Other must be regarded as the Other than the New Ours.

Imagine a white society where immigration reduces whites to only 50% of the population. The newcomers are Mexicans, Asians, Muslims, Hindus, and etc but No Blacks. Demographically, whites will have lost a lot, but they still get to dominate as the National FACE because whites will continue to dominate the most symbolically rich areas of sports, music, and etc. (Now, some may argue that people are stupid to fixate so much on such things, but the fact is people do. It's a reality, not least because of the Western obsession with competition going back to Greeks who turned everything into an Olympics of sorts.) But suppose some blacks enter, and they make up only 5% of the population.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/sports/more-nigerian-americans-are-reaching-highest-levels-of-sports.html
But that small number will pose an essentialist threat to the White FACE as representative of National heroism and manhood. Races are different. If you invite a race that is tougher and stronger than you, then even a small number can demote and destroy your kind as the FACE of your nation. That essentialist threat eventually turns into an existential threat because white women will look to the Black Face as the New Idol of Western Manhood, and this will lead to ACOWW or the Afro-Colonization of White Wombs by Blacks. Imagine how many white European women those Africans on the French soccer team will hump in the coming months. Also, even non-athlete blacks will benefit from the trickle-down effect of Black De-Face-ment of White. As white women come to associate blackness as Western Manhood, they will go with ANY black guy as being a member of the People of Real Manhood. It's like when Obama won the presidency, Europeans were suddenly nice to All Americans in Europe as the 'people who voted for Obama'. Fringe benefits of Idol Politics or Idolitics.

So many Mexicans took over California but they remain faceless because they can't make it as athletes and rappers. Japan and Asia make so many electronic gadgets used all over the world, but Asians remain mostly faceless in the global use of those devices because Asians can't compete athletically, pop-musically, and sexually on the global scale. China held the Olympics, but most Chinese remained faceless while few black faces hogged all the limelight on the track fields. Because Asians can't win in real sports, they rely on the pop fantasy of Kung Fu masters in movies. (Asian women do have sexual value but only as me-so-horny objects to be taken by superior non-Asian men.) Asians make the smartphones but people around the world use them to send back and forth far more images and sounds of blacks who as seen as cool grass(hip)hoppers in contrast to diligent but boring yellow ants. Blackness is prized so prized globally as superior in the 'cool' areas that even Japan and rest of Asia are cucking out to blackness in imitation of the still dominant West.

Idol-Colonization or Idolonization is worth looking into. Globalism isn't about all the world sharing all their cultures, powers, and values equally. It is about Whatever is deemed the Best, Most Powerful, Most Popular, and/or Most Pleasurable dominating all the world as the Sole Superpower. So, the US military must rule all the world. Jewish finance must dominate all the money. Hollywood must dominate all cinemas. Rap and Twerking must be the music culture of all. US fast food must feed and fatten everyone. Homomania must be the new world religion. Globo-Homo America can meddle in all elections, but no one better mess with the US. Mandela must be the father of all peoples(but never mind Arafat) because Jewish Media as the Main Media(and Jews control Google, Facebook, and most platforms) say so. Black sports must take over all nations. There is a raw kind of meritocracy to this, but it means a few Winners dominating all the world as the Only People Deserving to Win.

Zionism vs Afrikanerism as Political Philosophy of Labor — How the Ideology of National Labor eventually trumps the Expediency of Global Labor — Mind and Body in Man and Nation

Politics of Labor will decide the future of nations.

What was the most crucial difference between Zionism and Afrikanerism?

Zionists debated early on whether the Jewish settlers should hire Arab workers or Jewish workers. Zionists came down on the side of Jews hiring Jews. Thus, the Jewish head would be wedded to the Jewish body. And as the theme of Zionism would be ethno-cultural, it would serve as the heart between the head and body of the Jewish nation. In the short-term, it would have been more profitable to use Arab labor. It would have been cheaper than Jewish labor. Also, whereas a Jewish boss would feel moral obligation to treat fellow Jews with some sense of justice, he might merely exploit Arab laborers as expendable than essential members of the Community. But if Zionism had opted for Jewish owners and Arab workers, it would have failed in the long run. As there are always more workers than owners, Arabs would have outnumbered the Jews, and Jewish dominance would have been difficult to maintain. So, even though Jewish owners hiring Jewish workers was economically more costly in the short-run, it was crucial in the long-run in the creation of a Jewish state where the Jewish mind was united with Jewish body. It became one organic unit and fought off all challenges. But, suppose Zionism had opted for Jewish owners hiring Arab Workers. When the Partition of 1948 was declared, would all those Arab employees of Jewish owners have sided with their Jewish bosses or with their Arab brethren? Most would have joined with Arab Brethren, and the Arabs would have won the war, and Jews would have been expelled from Palestine permanently. But because Zionist opted for Jewish owners and Jewish workers, when the crisis moment arrived, all Jews from top to bottom united as a single force and fought the Arabs and won... and were even able to grab most of Arab territory.

In contrast, let's look at the Politics of Labor of South Africa. Afrikaners were race-conscious, but they opted for economic expediency. They decided to hire lots of black workers to do much of the work. In the short-term, this was a terrific bargain. Blacks could be hired for cheap. They could be exploited because they weren't white. White owners and bosses felt some paternal feelings for black workers but not as much as if they'd been white. So, this was a great boost to the South African economy on farms and in the mines, not unlike the economic arrangement in Rhodesia where blacks worked for white owners. But in the long run, what happened in South Africa? These blacks increased in number, outbred whites, and more blacks moved to white areas from the hinterland and even from other African nations. This meant lots of cheap labor that whites could exploit, but it also meant whites being outnumbered by blacks by an ever-increasing margin. Unlike Israel that came to be about Jewish mind wedded to the Jewish body and united by Jewish heart, South Africa increasingly became a world of white mind wedded to the black body with heart of stone lodged between the two communities. Afrikanerism wasn't organic like Zionism. Zionism decided to see Labor as part of 'us' and 'ours'. Afrikanerism decided to see Labor as the Other.
Zionists had been tempted to go with Arab labor. After all, Western Jews honed their skills in white-collar professions and in ownership of property. They weren't really into manual labor. That was for the goyim. Granted, there were poor Jews in Eastern Europe at the time who did manual labor. And even in the West, there were plenty of poor Jews in the garment industries. Still, the Jewish ideal was to use one's brains, not to toil like a 'dummy'. Labor was looked down upon as stuff Dumb 'Polacks' did. Even Jewish communists wanted to be intellectuals or commissars representing laborers; they didn't want to become laborers themselves. Karl Marx never stepped inside a factory in his entire life. And yet, another side of Jewish culture had more respect for the common man, at least if he was Jewish. As Jewish culture wasn't about warriors, it didn't develop an aristocratic culture like the Europeans and Japanese. Among the goyim, the warrior caste became the noblemen, and their power and privilege rested on blood. So, the Western ideal came to be aristocratic-minded, like that of Sparta though not nearly as extreme. Aristocratism deemed that a certain caste was superior over all the rest, and they had the right to rule over others who had to do the heavy lifting as peons and peasants. In contrast, the Jewish Covenant was shared equally by all. Rich Jew, poor Jew, it didn't matter. So, at least within the Tribe, Jews could be more mindful of the humanist value of every Jew. After all, in the Jewish Lore, the kings came later, long after the emergence of the Jews as a people and culture. In contrast, many goy narratives begin with some great leader figure who conquers and rules. According to the Jewish Lore, Jews are a people with certain needs, and they reached a point where they needed a king. In contrast, the Goy Narrative is often about how some guy beat all the others and gained the right to rule, and therefore, it was the duty of everyone else to obey him and his descendants.

National Laborism believes Labor isn't just some economic entity or measure but part of what defines and defends a people, land, and culture. Zionism is National Laborism, and it may be the only nation that is ideologically formulated to be that way.
In its day, National Socialist Germany had a similar ideology. German workers weren't seen merely as economic units but as part of the national family. Labor was organic. It was the body wedded to the German mind and soul. Unfortunately, this ideal all went to hell when Germany decided to go imperialist and turned non-Germans into slaves, thus going from National Socialist ideal to Imperialist Exploitation expediency. And yet, Hitler understood the need for German owners and German workers to be united in the newly occupied lands. Hitler's vision of Russia wasn't for German owners to hire and rely on Slavic laborers. Initially, Germans would use Russians as slaves, but eventually they would be replaced with German workers as a strong German Empire could be assured only by unity of German minds and German bodies. But this was a grisly vision outside Germany because it entailed removal, even extermination, of entire populations. Hitler was right about the New World. North America(minus Mexico) was sounder than Latin America because North was mostly about white owners and white workers. There was organic racial unity of white mind and white body. In contrast, Latin America was about white minds ruling over brown bodies. Thus, there was no heart between mind and body in Latin America. In North America, there was a sense of heart between white mind and white body because it's tougher to exploit one's fellow tribal brethren than another people. It made labor more expensive but also more precious because it wasn't seen merely as economic value but as national-cultural asset. But Hitler was wrong to apply New World historical lessons to the Old World. While it's true that the Red Man lost out tragically to the White Man in North America, there weren't all that many Indian savages in North America. Also, primitive world was supplanted with a modern world as a result of White Conquest of the Americas. In contrast, German invasion of USSR was a war on 170 million people. Also, despite evils of communism and Slavic backwardness, Russia was still part of the great civilized world. Eradicating all of that to create Greater Germany was a mad vision. Though Zionist occupation of West Bank isn't nearly so spectacular, it could be the undoing of Israel if it's ever annexed as Israel will have to offer some form of citizenship to all those Palestinians who may tip the demographic balance of bigger Israel. But then, Jews could try to expel them, but that will stir up a giant international shi*-storm.

When the US was gloriously race-ist, it had a defacto if willy-nilly kind of National-Laborism. While immigration was key to the rapid expansion of the US in the 19th century and early 20th century, most of the newcomers were white and, in time, assimilated. People like the Joads in THE GRAPES OF WRATH mattered because it was deemed a moral necessity for white haves to have a heart for white have-nots. George Bailey doesn't bowl alone in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE because those white folks of Bedford Falls are his people. If they were a bunch of crazy Negroes, apathetic Mexicans, and angry Muslims, he would have left the town. Labor was seen as part of the National Family. New Deal addressed the issue of Labor and Laborers as fellow Americans.

In contrast, the white elites in Latin America always saw Labor as a huge threat. Latin whites were the mind, but the Laboring body was brown(or black). There was little heart between the two. In some ways, Latin white elites envied American white elites, and vice versa. Latin white elites thought American white elites had it better because they hired white workers. Latin America too tried to encourage more white immigration to stem the tide of Rise of Color. But most white Europeans wanted to move to US than to Latin America. Anyway, American white elites also envied Latin White elites. Because American white elites had to hire white workers(for the most part), they felt an obligation to pay them more and offer more benefits. After all, it wouldn't do for whites to mistreat whites. But in Latin America, white owner class could treat the brown workers like expendable peons desperate to work for few pesos. It's no wonder some American capitalists romanticized Latin America. It's like what Hyman Roth says about Cuba. Money goes further in Latin America where the owners don't have to treat the people as Workers with Identity and Rights. Workers are mere peons, and political 'leaders' are whores who can easily be bought. (Today's DC resembles Havana before the Revolution, and ironically enough, this makes Trump with his Deplorable rabble army seem like New Castro to the Deep State.) It's no wonder Buckleys and Bushes had romantic views of Latin America and Mexico. It's where the distinctions of race and class have been more clearly etched. Owners are up here, and workers are down there.
We tend to associate mono-racialism with conservatism, but there is something inherently socialist about mono-racialism even if the dominant economic system in such a society is capitalist. Under mono-racialism, everyone is seen as part of the national family, and so, there is a sense of obligation to each and every person who is seen as deserving of education, opportunity, job, and benefits. In contrast, Diversity means the owner class may well be racially and culturally different from the working classes. And that means the owners don't have to pay much attention to the Other, the lesser folks who do work that is deemed low and inferior. Though Diversity is often associated with liberalism and equality, its effect is often a form of conservative hierarchy like in caste-ridden India of old. Latin America was more diverse than the US and also more conservative and reactionary in just about every area. To this day, it's about white elites ruling over browns. Of course, the official rhetoric of Latin America is that everyone is nicely mixed and no one sees race, but that's just bogus fantasy to mask the fact of hierarchy and lack of communion between those on top and those on bottom.

East Asian nations like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have been about yellow minds and yellow bodies. And nationalism was the heart that glued yellow minds to yellow bodies. But the rise of elitism via near universal college enrollment and elevated expectations may lead to the demise of National Labor ideology in these nations. Today, most Japanese see non-white-collar jobs as 'dirty, demeaning, and dangerous.' Same in South Korea and Taiwan. Not only do many yellows prefer to commit suicide than take up 'dirty and demeaning' labor, they refuse to have children who might fail in school and end up doing 'dirty and demeaning' labor. Also, Asian women, nearly all college educated, only want to marry 'winners'. This means sudden drop in birth-rates, and it means low-level jobs must be filled by... someone, and so, even Japan is now taking in 500,000 foreigners to take up those jobs. And according to Peter Frost's research, South Korean labor will be 40% non-Korean in 25 yrs. Taiwan seems to be following similar trends. So, their economic ideology is closer to Afrikanerism than Zionism. In the short term, it will be profitable and convenient as poor laborers arrive from places like Philippines and Indonesia to fill up 'dirty and demeaning' jobs. But in time, those newcomers will take over the nation just like blacks took over South Africa. Another threat to East Asia is globalism. East Asian mentality is essentially TO SERVE. The samurai, also known as 'bushi', was about submission. 'Bushi' means To Serve. Even though samurai were the elite caste, they were all about serving the Lord. Without someone to serve, one was a ronin, a nothing. Among Chinese and Koreans, the ideal was to become a Confucian bureaucrat and serve the emperor or king. Thus, an individual has no value except in service to the highest power. In Akira Kurosawa's SEVEN SAMURAI and RED BEARD, samurai are initially reluctant to serve the 'common rabble' than some fancy lord. They are used to serving the High than the Low, just like the shoe-maker in HIGH AND LOW must really struggle with himself before coming to regard his chauffeur's kidnapped son as akin to his own. When the top power in Asia was national, most were happy to serve the local power. But now that globalism made the West the uppermost power, most Asian elites are servile to the Western globo-homo way. This is in contrast to Jews who have a sense of self-worth. The Covenant means that every Jew has a direct connection to God. So, even as Jews may work for or with other people, they don't believe they exist to SERVE others. If anything, the key is to make OTHERS serve them, the Chosen Individuals. Asians lack such mentality. Today, Asian elites believe they should serve the West, the toppermost power, and they think they, as 'fancy Asians', should be served by lower people such as 'jungle Asians'. This goes against the grain of Zionism and will be disaster in yrs to come. (There is also a matter of personality. Three groups -- Jews, blacks, and homos -- have big personalities that tend to be egocentric or vain and expect the world to serve them. In contrast, most other groups have either neutral or servile personalities. Jews think everyone should revolve around Jewish Genius, blacks think everyone should suck 'muh dick', and homos think everyone should kiss their behind. No wonder the Three have such out-sized roles in World Culture.)

At one point, whites were like 50% of the South African population. Had Afrikaners taken the Zionist route and decided upon white workers for white owners, South Africa might have become a White Israel. But whites thought short-term. And same could be said for California. When the Golden State had been gloriously race-ist, it came to its senses and excluded Chinese Invasion and Colonization. It didn't want to end up like Tibet or Xinjiang are ending up today. California Dream was a kind of White Israel on the West Coast. And it was a fantastic success story, in some ways the most spectacular tale of American can-do spirit. But at some point, white Californians got used to Too Much of a Good Thing. And they turned grasshopper and took things for granted, even leading to the rise of the California Teenager meme. So, Californian economic ideology went from quasi-Zionism to quasi-Afrikanerism: Whites were too good for certain jobs, and they were to be taken by all those lowly 'beaners'. But just as lowly blacks took over South Africa, these lowly 'beaners' came to demographically take over much of California. This is what happens when the mind and body are no longer one.

Though a collective of people is different from a single person, there are certain parallels that are instructive. Even if heads and bodies could be traded among peoples, a person functions best if his head is connected to his own body via his heart. "My mind, my heart, and my body." But suppose we do an experiment where one person's mind is connected to another person's body and both are pumped by heart of yet another. Would such a person feel as one? When men pretend to be 'women', what happens to their psychology?
In John Carpenter's THE THING, the extraterrestrial creature doesn't care about any of the bodies it takes over since it can move from body to body. It has no organic unity with any single body. It considers every body as expendable. As far as it's concerned, all bodies exist just so it could move from one to the other to spread more Thingish-ness. Now, imagine if your head was severed from your body and suppose your head could move around from place to place. Suppose, it could supplant the heads of other people and take over their bodies. Would you take good care of those bodies? Not likely. Why not? They are not your bodies. You're just a parasite that sees every body as a host. You'd use and abuse the body as long as possible and then move onto to new bodies to mess with. This is indeed how George Soros and Paul Singer operate. They are heads without bodies. They move from nation to nation and attach their heads to the nation as 'advisers' and then do everything to suck that nation dry and then move onto new national bodies. But would Paul Singer do such to his beloved Israel? No. When Singer's head connects with Israel's body, it feels like 'Home', like when ET saw Yoda on Halloween.
https://youtu.be/VrVEHszxL7E?t=2m12s
In the current West, the Jewish head/mind feels little connection to the white body. If anything, the Jewish mind fears rejection by the 'deplorable' white body that might call for the return of the proud white head, and so, the Jewish mind is hellbent on diversifying the body so that it won't be white anymore: White torso, Mexican liver, Asian lungs, African dong, Muslim hands, homo anus, and etc. These body parts will be too busy rejecting one another to come together to reject the Zardoz-like Jewish Head.
As for the former white mind that used to control the white body, it was decapitated long ago, and having no organic connection to the body, it dreams silly dreams of Homo and Tranny as the new god.

A sane and sound person's mind is connected to his body and soul. A sane and sound nation is essentially of one elite ruling over one people. While Israel has a sizable Arab population, it has been a Jewish majority nation led by Jewish elites for Jewish identity from Day One. Zionic beats Bionic. Organic beats artificial. And if Turkey remains viable to this day, it's because modern Turkey was founded as an organic nation of the Turks. Its biggest problem has been with Kurds, a people who insist they are not Turks, but fortunately for Turkey, Kurds are a minority like Arabs in Israel.

Now, it may be understandable why some elites want to boost Diversity and destroy organic nationalism. They feel burdened by having to lead and deal with their own people. It's like Moses had a fearsome task ahead of him because he was a Jew leading the Jews. Because they were his people, he couldn't just see them as chattel or the rabble or human trash(even though the mobs sometimes acted like that). He had to whip them into shape, inspire them, and secure their future in terms of land and survival. Such is a huge challenge and burden, and not all elites are up to it. They just want to make money, gain privilege, and live in the glam world.

American elites were more conscientious and mindful. Protestantism suppressed narcissism and vanity. In contrast, in the colorful Catholic Latin America, the elites were more shameless in lavishly furnishing themselves with the Good Life and style over substance. In a way, the rise of Marxism was like the Second Reformation in Latin America. A way of saying ENOUGH IS ENOUGH to all the Havana playboy lifestyle. Castro decided to play Moses by ruling Cuba as a nation where every worker would matter as part of the national family. Unfortunately, the fool chose Marxism than Neo-Fascism, the true way to bridge the mind and body. But in the end, the problem wasn't only bad choice of ideology but race. No matter how much Cuba's white elites tried, they couldn't represent whites, blacks, and mixed-race people in between the same way. A racially diverse nation has a hard time being organic. Ideology goes only so far in stitching the differences.

Anyway, Zionism or Afrikanierism when it comes to Labor? Should Labor be seen as part of National Family or Global Finance? When we compare the fate of Israel vs South Africa, I think the answer is clear. So, why do Jews push Afrikanerization of Labor for all nations EXCEPT Israel? Because smart(and devious) power wants to keep the secret formula for itself. Let the suckers fall for the hustle of short-term profits for long-term demise.