Forward from: Joel Davis (censored)
It's quite significant that so many of the great poets and authors of the early 20th Century - Yeats, Pound, Kipling, Lovecraft, Lewis, Eliot - were all racist antisemites.
The cultural trajectory of modernism was initially profoundly racialist. The effect of WWII upon Western culture cannot be understated - in its aftermath, the institutions which maintained Western 'high culture' were totally captured by its ideological meaning. Racialism was thus pushed out of refined, elite society and into the underground.
What was once a worldview cultivated and presided over by many of the great artists and intellectuals of its time became stripped of all its prior prestige, funding, institutional support or access to fame.
Western culture was racist as fuck when it was created by well educated, sophisticated White men who created art and literature for a well educated and sophisticated White social elite mutually free from the post-WWII ideological consensus. Racist in a sophisticated way. And that is the culture we would have inherited if the calamity of WWII and the ideological reconstruction of Western society and politics around the pathologisation of National Socialism didn't occur.
This is why I reject explanations of our mass racial and civilizational suicide upon "Modernity" or some even more primordial force. There was a racist modernism we could have had, and it would have been epic. And it still will be if we can somehow retrieve it from the furnace of the 20th Century's cruel twists of fate.
The cultural trajectory of modernism was initially profoundly racialist. The effect of WWII upon Western culture cannot be understated - in its aftermath, the institutions which maintained Western 'high culture' were totally captured by its ideological meaning. Racialism was thus pushed out of refined, elite society and into the underground.
What was once a worldview cultivated and presided over by many of the great artists and intellectuals of its time became stripped of all its prior prestige, funding, institutional support or access to fame.
Western culture was racist as fuck when it was created by well educated, sophisticated White men who created art and literature for a well educated and sophisticated White social elite mutually free from the post-WWII ideological consensus. Racist in a sophisticated way. And that is the culture we would have inherited if the calamity of WWII and the ideological reconstruction of Western society and politics around the pathologisation of National Socialism didn't occur.
This is why I reject explanations of our mass racial and civilizational suicide upon "Modernity" or some even more primordial force. There was a racist modernism we could have had, and it would have been epic. And it still will be if we can somehow retrieve it from the furnace of the 20th Century's cruel twists of fate.