Apartheid, in Perspective, 1

Posted on September 4, 2018 by leslie

CAPE TOWN/SOUTH AFRICA, 11JUN2009 – Jacob Zuma on a tour of Green Point Stadium as celebration of 365 days to kick-off held During the World Economic Forum on Africa 2009 in Cape Town, South Africa, June 11, 2009
Copyright World Economic Forum www.weforum.org / Christopher Olsen

Apartheid, in Perspective, 1

Essay in two parts, by Ilana Mercer

In a recent translation of Tacitus’ Annals, the question was raised as to whether “there were any ‘nations’ in antiquity other than the Jews.” Upon reflection, one suspects that the same question can be posed about the Afrikaners in the modern era.

In fact, in April of 2009, former South African President Jacob Zuma infuriated the “multicultural noise machine” by stating: “Of all the white groups that are in South Africa, it is only the Afrikaners that are truly South Africans in the true sense of the word. Up to this day, they [the Afrikaners] don’t carry two passports, they carry one. They are here to stay.”

Indeed, the Afrikaners fought Africa’s first anticolonial struggles, are native to the land and are not colonists in any normal sense. Yet the liberal world order has only ever singled out Afrikaners for having established apartheid, considered by the Anglo-American-European axis of interventionism to be “one of the world’s most retrogressive colonial systems.” Continue reading →

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Eisner’s Choice – Reform or Revolution?

Posted on August 31, 2018 by leslie

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

Eisner’s Choice – Reform or Revolution?

Kurt Eisner, a Modern Life, Albert Earle Gurganus, Camden House, 2018, HB, 576 pp., reviewed by LESLIE JONES

Kurt Eisner, a Modern Life, is a fitting title for this compelling biography of the campaigning journalist and critic. Eisner led the bloodless revolution in Bavaria in November 1918 that toppled the Wittelsbach dynasty, thereby “effectively ending both the Second German Empire and the First World War” (p. 2)*. According to the Marxist historian Arthur Rosenberg, Eisner’s objective as head of state of the Bavarian Republic, until his assassination on the 21st of February 1919, was “…the execution of a radical bourgeois revolution…to bring down the military power and dynasties, to secure immediate peace, and to enable an effective democracy…” (Rosenberg, cited p. 440). At least 100,000 mourners followed his funeral cortege.

As Thomas Mann prophetically commented in a diary entry dated November 8th 1918, “Both Munich and Bavaria governed by Jewish scribblers. How long will the city put up with that?” Eisner’s assassin, Lieutenant Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, considered himself “a loyal monarchist until death!… [and] a loyal Catholic”. “I hate Bolshevism!”, he proclaimed in his testament, “I hate the Jews!” Profound historical forces placed Eisner and Arco-Valley on collision course. Eisner, a secularised Jew and an incisive critic of Weltpolitik and of Prussian-Junker militarism, personified German modernity. His nemesis, conversely, personified monarchist Bavarian politics. He commanded the 5th company of Freikorps organizer Colonel Franz von Epp’s Bavarian King’s Own Regiment. Continue reading →

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Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre

Posted on August 29, 2018 by leslie

Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre

Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, Bayreuth Festival, Germany, Saturday 18th August 2018, directed by Frank Castorf, conducted by Plácido Domingo, reviewed by TONY COOPER

In the second part of Wagner’s Ring cycle, Die Walküre (in repertoire from 2013 to 2017 as part of the complete cycle to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner’s birth), Berlin-based, avant-garde theatre director Frank Castorf dumped the opera’s traditional romantic Rhineland setting for the rough-and-tumble world of oil prospecting, transporting the scenario to the city of Baku on the Caspian Sea in pre-Revolutionary Russia. ‘Black Gold’, a political tool like no other, became the treasured Nibelung hoard. Oil, of course, was a big influence on Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War, the era in which Castorf grew up and it remains high on the agenda in Putin’s Russia.

Wotan, played by Swedish bass-baritone John Lundgren, has travelled to the Baku oil-field to assume his new position as boss. Lundgren proved to be an excellent choice for the role delivering a strong and authoritative performance in an interesting and detailed production that employed and merged stagecraft and video work skilfully created by Andreas Deinert and Jens Crull. Continue reading →

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An Inspector Calls

Posted on August 28, 2018 by leslie

Prison Van Interior

An Inspector Calls  

by Bill Hartley

An inspection report into HM Prison Birmingham was released on August 16th. What the inspectors found made the front pages of several newspapers. It illustrates the short corporate memory of Prison Service Headquarters and a knack for getting into trouble that could have been avoided. They can’t say they weren’t warned either. The 2016 riot at the prison ought to have been an indicator of something being seriously wrong but afterwards attention seems to have wandered. A riot tends to leave a legacy of staff feeling demoralised and fearful. To put this right, strong and visible leadership is called for.

Whilst the privatisation or ‘market testing’ of prisons ended some time ago the legacy is still embedded in the system. Originally it tended to be obscure ‘training’ prisons or new builds that were that were contracted out to private security companies. The big Victorian local prisons which mostly lie in our larger cities were left alone. These jails carry out the core work of the Prison Service: holding remand prisoners, getting them to court and, post sentence, allocated on to a training prison. They are complex institutions which also have to live with significant overcrowding. Continue reading →

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Land “Reform” in South Africa

Posted on August 26, 2018 by leslie

Tucker Carlson by Gage Skidmore

Land “Reform” in South Africa

by Ilana Mercer

He who believes he has a right to another man’s property ought to produce proof that he is its rightful owner. “As the old legal adage goes, ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law,’ as it is the best evidence in our uncertain world of legitimate title. The burden of proof rests squarely with the person attempting to alter and abolish present property titles.” (From “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South-Africa”.)

It is to this potent principle that democratic rule in South Africa has taken an axe—or, rather, an assegai.

Here is how taking land legally currently works, in South Africa, a place that the US State Department has just lauded as “a strong democracy with resilient institutions…,” a country merely  “grappling with the difficult issue of land reform.” “Land reform,” of course, is a euphemism for land distribution in the Robert Mugabe mold.

The process currently in place typically begins with a “tribe” or group of individuals who band together to claim vast tracts of private property. If these loosely and conveniently conjoined groups know anything, it’s this: South Africa’s adapted, indigenized law allows coveted land, owned and occupied by another, to be obtained with relative ease. Continue reading →

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Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde

Posted on August 21, 2018 by leslie

Giovanni Piranesi, le Carceri d’Invenzione

Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde                         

Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Bayreuth Festival, Germany, directed by Katharina Wagner, conducted by Christian Thielemann, Thursday, 16 August 2018, reviewed by TONY COOPER

This production of Tristan und Isolde by Katharina Wagner first came to the stage in 2015, the 150th anniversary of its world première at Munich. It immediately found favour with the cognoscenti on the Green Hill.

Wagner himself rated Tristan as one of his ‘favourites’ and Katharina Wagner – artistic director of the Bayreuth Festival, daughter of Wolfgang Wagner and great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner – tapped into the opera’s emotional strength to deliver a powerful and compelling production that drifted at times away from its traditional staging, especially at the end.

In the highly-impressive first act, not just musically but also visually, Tristan and Isolde frantically search for each other with Kurwenal and Brangäne struggling to keep them apart. When they eventually meet it, proved a powerful and compelling scene. The lovers stare longingly at each other in total silence and they immediately discard the love potion that Brangäne had prepared for Isolde. Continue reading →

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The Professor versus the Philosopher

Posted on August 21, 2018 by leslie

George Parkin Grant

 The Professor versus the Philosopher

by Mark Wegierski

In recent years, the Canadian establishment media have relentlessly criticized George Parkin Grant (1918-1988), one of Canada’s pre-eminent thinkers. Some years ago, an editorial article in Saturday Night, at that time a leading magazine, decried the supposed prevalence of “the Creighton-Grant nationalist thesis.” Donald Creighton was Canada’s long-deceased, pre-eminent, conservative nationalist historian. In response to the publication of Grant’s Selected Letters, edited by William Christian, University of Toronto Press, 1996, the well-known literary figure, Robert Fulford, wrote a snide review “Re-evaluating praise for George Grant.” (The Globe and Mail, September 11, 1996), in which he expressed surprise at Grant’s religious beliefs. Thomas Hurka’s column of March 17, 1992, also in The Globe and Mail– entitled “Thomas Hurka laments George Grant’s ideas on the morality of technology”, was another pointed example of this harping against Grant. It seems to have become a Canadian “tradition” to deride Canada’s genuine achievers — from philosophers and literary critics, such as Northrop Frye, to business people and even pop-stars (such as Bryan Adams) – while elevating “politically-correct” mediocrities.

Professor Hurka’s by-line states that he “teaches philosophy at the University of Calgary specializing in ethics.” However, judging from his Grant piece, as well as his last column during this major stint at The Globe and Mail, “Thomas Hurka explains why academic writing is so boring and the musings of journalists are so shallow,” March 24, 1992, he seems unaware of certain developments in modern philosophy. Continue reading →

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The New Oxford Annotated Bible

Posted on August 20, 2018 by leslie

Arch of Titus Menorah

The New Oxford Annotated Bible

5thedition, Oxford University Press, fully revised and expanded, NRSV with Apocrypha. Pp. xxiii, 2416, ISBN: 978-0190276096. $95.00., reviewed by Darrell Sutton

When Early Modern English was becoming the vernacular speech, Edward VI (1537-1553) removed restrictions on the printing of the Bible. Mary Tudor (1516-1568) later reversed these changes. Once again, the Crown looked favorably on Catholicism. So Reformers went into exile, during which time a Church of England was formed in Geneva. There, the “Marian Exiles” agreed to undertake a new rendition of the scriptures. The Geneva Bible of 1560 was the fruit of their extensive labors. It was unique, seeing that it contained not only a new translation, but also over 300,000 annotations to the text. The exiles’ popular interpretations of the English text and alternate renderings of Hebrew and Greek terms opened the minds of citizens whose thoughts had been inured to established beliefs. Since that time, new interpretative ideas and arguments have been received; closed-mindedness has gone out of fashion.

From its inception in 1962, The Oxford Annotated Bible provided students of scripture with non-traditional insights into the contours of the development of the canon. The transformation of the New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB) is now complete. Originally edited by Herbert May and Bruce Metzger, cutting edge scholarship on the text and context of scripture was popularized. May was a distinguished Old Testament specialist; Metzger was a recognized doyen of New Testament textual criticism. May and Metzger found various facets of select biblical books dubious and legendary. They were broad-minded; but they still maintained sympathies toward the salvific work of Christ outlined in the New Testament. Scholarship advanced in profound ways through their researches. But in light of some of the notes now accepted in the Bible under review, both May and Metzger could be considered somewhat conformist. Continue reading →

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Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 2018

Posted on August 19, 2018 by leslie

Wahnfried, credit Wikipedia

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 2018

Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Bayreuth Festival Germany, Saturday 11th August 2018, directed by Barrie Kosky, conducted by Philippe Jordan,reviewed by TONY COOPER

An innovative, flamboyant and quirky director, Barrie Kosky (artistic director of Komische Oper Berlin) delivered a brilliant and entertaining production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, first seen at last year’s Bayreuth Festival.

Born in Melbourne in the late 1960s, the grandson of Jewish emigrants from Europe, his name in now indelibly linked to Bayreuth’s glorious history as he is the first Jewish director in its illustrious 142-year-old history. He is also the first person outside of the Wagner family to direct Meistersinger at Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus, built to stage Wagner’s mighty canon of Teutonic works, especially Der Ring des Nibelungen.

That constitutes a significant step by Katharina Wagner – artistic director of the Bayreuth Festival and daughter of Wolfgang Wagner and the great-grand daughter of Richard Wagner – in acknowledging Wagner’s anti-Semitic stance and his family’s later association with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Ditto, the revamped exhibition focusing on the Bayreuth Festival housed in the newly-restored Villa Wahnfried, complete with a new extension, where Wagner lived with his wife Cosima and their children from 1874 to 1882. A museum since 1976 (it reopened to the public just over three years ago) this is the first time that the era of the Third Reich has found a place in the exhibition. Continue reading →

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How the Left Stole Liberalism and Betrayed the West

Posted on August 19, 2018 by leslie

Ludwig von Moses

How the Left Stole Liberalism and Betrayed the West

by Ilana Mercer

Liberals have taken to promoting socialism, which is the state-sanctioned appropriation of private property. Or, communism. In communism’s parlance, this theft of a man’s life, labor and land is referred to as state-ownership of the means of production.

Liberals are less known for misappropriating intellectual concepts. But they do that, too. Take the term “liberal.” It once belonged to the good guys. But socialists, communists and Fabians stole it from us.

Having originally denoted the classical liberalism of the 18thand early 19th century, “liberal” used to be a beautiful word. However, to be a liberal now is to be a social democrat, a leftist, a BLM, antifa and MeToo movementarian; it’s to be Chris and Andrew Cuomo.

A French classical liberal, Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), explained what liberalism stood for:

Individuals must enjoy a boundless freedom in the use of their property and the exercise of their labor, as long as in disposing of their property or exercising their labor they do not harm others who have the same rights.

This is the opposite of communism aka socialism. Continue reading →

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